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                     JUGGERNAUT

                  A Veiled Record


    BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON AND DOLORES MARBOURG


    NEW YORK
    FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT

    1891

    COPYRIGHT IN 1891, BY
    GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
           AND
      DOLORES MARBOURG

    _All Rights Reserved_


                    To Madame




JUGGERNAUT:

A VEILED RECORD.




I.


Edgar Braine was never so blithe in all his life as on the morning of
his suicide.

Years after, in the swirl and tumult of his extraordinary career, the
memory of that June morning, and of the mood in which he greeted it,
would rush upon him as a flood, and for the moment drown the eager
voices that besought his attention, distracting his mind for the
briefest fraction of an instant from the complex problems of affairs
with which he wrestled ceaselessly.

In the brief moment during which he allowed the vision of a dead past
thus to invade his mind, he would recall every detail of that morning
with photographic accuracy, and more than photographic vividness.

In such moments, he saw himself young, but with a mature man's ambition,
and more than the strength of a man, as he strode sturdily down the
streets of the little Western city, the June sunshine all about him in a
golden glory, while the sunshine within exceeded it a hundredfold.

His mood was exultant, and with reason. He had already conquered the
only obstacles that barred his way to success and power. He had
impressed himself upon the minds of men, in a small way as yet, to be
sure, but sufficiently to prove his capacity, and confirm his confidence
in his ability to conquer, whithersoever he might direct his march.

Life opened its best portals to him. He was poor, but strong and well
equipped. He had won possession of the tools with which to do his work;
and the conquest of the tools is the most difficult task set the man who
confronts life armed only with his own abilities. That accomplished, if
the man be worthy, the rest follows quite as a matter of course,--an
effect flowing from an efficient cause.

Edgar Braine had proved to himself that he possessed superior
capacities. He had long entertained that opinion of his endowment, but
his caution in self-estimate was so great that he had been slower than
any of his acquaintances to accept the fact as indisputably proved.

It had been proved, however, and that was cause enough for rejoicing, to
a mind which had tortured itself from boyhood with unutterable longings
for that power over men which superior intellect gives,--a mind that had
dreamed high dreams of the employment of such power for human progress.

His was not an ambition achieved. It was that immeasurably more joyous
thing, an ambition in sure process of achievement.

But this was not his only cause of joy. Love, as well as life, had
smiled upon him, and the woman who had subdued all that was noblest in
him to that which was still nobler in her, was presently to be his wife.

And so Edgar Braine's heart sang merrily within him as he strode through
the cottonwood-bordered streets toward his editorial work-shop.

He entered the composing-room in front, and greeted the foreman with
even more of cordiality than was his custom, though his custom was a
cordial one.

He tried not to observe that Mikey Hagin, the Spartan-souled apprentice
of the establishment, was complacently burning a hole in the palm of his
hand, in a heroic endeavor to hide the fact that he had been smoking a
cigarette in risk of that instant discharge which Braine had threatened
as the fore-ordained punishment of that crime, if he should ever catch
the precocious youth committing it again.

He saw the cigarette, of course,--it was his habit to see things,--and
the blue wreath floating upward from the hand in which a hasty attempt
had been made to conceal it, was perfectly apparent. But his humor was
much too joyous for him to enforce the penalty, though he had decreed it
with a fixed purpose to enforce it. Somehow the grief of Mrs. Hagin,
Mikey's mother and Braine's laundress, at the discharge of her not over
hopeful son, was much more vividly present to his imagination this
morning than when he had promulgated the decree. He was too happy a man
to be willing to make any human being needlessly unhappy.

And yet he was too strict a disciplinarian to overlook the offence
entirely. He turned to the boy and said:

"It is lucky for you that I didn't catch you smoking the cigarette you
have in your hand. As it seems to be smoking you instead, I don't so
much mind."

With this, as the lad threw the burning roll into a barrel of waste
paper--which he presently extinguished with a bucket of water--Braine
took the over-proofs from their hook, and passed on into the back room,
which served as the editorial office of the Thebes _Daily Enterprise_.

The four men sitting there presented but one bodily presence. They were:
the Local Editor, the River Editor, the Society Editor, and "Our
Reporter," and their name was Moses Harbell, or, if universal usage is
authority in nomenclature, "Mose" Harbell.

Mose was a bushy-haired man of fifty, who had been Local Editor, River
Editor, Society Editor, and "Our Reporter" on the newspapers of small
river towns from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary.

He had never once dared aspire to a more independent position as his own
master. Perhaps the fact that he had imprudently married early, and now
had a family consisting of a mother, a mother-in-law, an imbecile
sister, a shrewish wife, nine children in various stages of progress
toward grown-up-hood, and four dogs of no recognized breed, had dampened
the ardor of his ambition, and inclined him to the conservative view
that to draw a salary from somebody else, even though it be not a
munificent one, is on the whole safer for a prudent family man, than to
take ambitious risks on his own account.

Mose was known all up and down the river by his first name in its
abbreviated form, and by no other on any occasion. He was never spoken
of in print without the adjective prefix "genial," and he never omitted
to call anybody "genial" whom he had occasion to mention in his own
paragraphs, from the morose curmudgeon who invited everybody in town to
his parties except Mose himself, to the most ill-natured mud clerk who
stood in the rain on the levee at midnight to check freight received by
the steamboat that employed him in that capacity, at nothing a month and
his board.

Life had dealt rather hardly with Mose, but it had not succeeded in
curdling any of the milk of human kindness mingled with his blood.

His notion of newspaper editing, apart from calling everybody "genial,"
was to mention everybody on every possible occasion, to praise everybody
without regard to the possibility or impossibility of the occasion, and
to chronicle the personal happenings of the town after the following
fashion:

     "Ned Heffron, the genial ticket dispenser of the Central Railroad,
     borrowed a boiled shirt yesterday, got his boots blacked on tick,
     and started on a free pass to Johnsonboro, there to wed the
     acknowledged belle of that young and thriving city, Miss Blankety
     Blank, who will henceforth be a chief ornament to the society of
     Thebes."

Mose was a thorn in the flesh of his young chief, who was a very earnest
person, possessed of a conviction that a newspaper owes some sort of
duty to the public, and that its province is to discriminate somewhat in
the bestowal of praise and blame. But Mose was necessary to the Thebes
_Daily Enterprise_. Braine could not afford to dispense with his
"geniality" as a part of the newspaper's equipment; for Mose knew
everybody within the _Daily Enterprise's_ bailiwick and everybody knew
Mose. Everybody made haste to tell Mose all the news there might be;
and, although there was not much of importance in what he gathered,
still it was news, and the news seemed to Braine a necessary part of a
newspaper. Thus it happened that Mose went on calling everybody "genial"
in the news department, even when his chief was excoriating the same
persons in the editorial columns for conduct wholly inconsistent with
Mose's imputation of unbounded geniality.

On this particular morning, however,--the morning of Edgar Braine's
suicide--even Mose's presence, recalling, as it always did, his
exasperating methods, could not ruffle the young man's exultant
spirits. He was so exuberantly happy that he omitted to remonstrate with
Mose about anything, and that tireless manufacturer of praise, observing
the omission, immediately wrote and sent to the composing-room an
elephantinely playful paragraph in which he said:

     "Our genial chief was so much pleased this morning over the
     impression made yesterday by his apparently severe, but really
     good-natured leader on the recent defalcation of our genial city
     clerk, Charley Hymes, that he took the local to his arms and stood
     treat to a number-one mackerel, and the ever appreciative local
     picked the bones of the aforesaid saline preserved denizen of the
     deep, in the bosom of his family at dinner to-day."

That was Mose Harbell's idea of humor. It was not Braine's idea of humor
at all, and so Mose was greeted with the harshest reproof he had ever
received in his life when he next met his chief. He accepted it
"genially."

Having sent out the offending paragraph, Mose went out himself to gather
river news, and such gossip as he might, concerning the genial folk of
Thebes.

Then Abner Hildreth entered the office, and for two hours was closeted
with Braine.

Then Braine committed suicide.

Then he wrote his own obituary, to be printed in that evening's
_Enterprise_.

Then he went supperless to his room over a store, where he paced the
floor till dawn.

Then began the man's extraordinary career.




II.


When Braine returned to his bare little room after his suicide, he was
in a strange, paradoxical mood. His thought was intensely introspective,
and yet, with a whimsical perversity, his mind seemed specially alert to
external objects, and full of fantastic imaginings concerning them.

The bareness of the room impressed him, and he likened it to a cell in
some prison.

"Never mind," he said to himself, "I may have to sleep in a cell some
time, and the habit of living here will come handy."

Then, with a little laugh, in which there was no trace of amusement, he
stood before his desk, and added:

"But I believe they don't put strips of worn out carpet by the prison
beds; and I never heard of a cell having a desk in it surmounted by
empty collar-boxes for pigeon holes. Let me see--six times five are
thirty. What an extravagant fellow I have been, to use up thirty boxes
of paper collars in a year! Ten in a box, that's three hundred--almost
one a day! I might have done with half the number by turning them, as I
had to do at college before paper collars came in. Psha!" and he seemed
to spurn the trivial reverie from him as a larger recollection surged up
in his mind, and he began to pace the little room again with the
purposeless tramp of a caged wild beast, whose memory of the forest is
only a pained consciousness that it is his no more.

The June twilight faded into darkness, and the evening gave place to
midnight, but the ghost-walk went ceaselessly on.

In those hours of agonizing thought, the young man--to be young no more
henceforth--recalled every detail of his life with a vividness which
tortured him. He was engaged, unwillingly, in obedience to a resistless
impulse, in searching out the roots of his own character, and finding
out what forces had made him such as he knew himself to be.

In the process he learned, for the first time, precisely what sort of
man he really was. He saw his own soul undressed, and contemplated its
nakedness. One's soul is an unusual thing to see _en deshabille_, and
not always a pleasing one.

He remembered a letter his mother had written him at college--that
mother of half Scotch descent, and touched with Scottish second-sight,
who had silently studied his character from infancy, and learned to
comprehend it not without fear. He could repeat the letter word for
word. It had given him his first hint that he had a character, and a
duty to do with respect to it. He had cherished the missive for years,
and had read it a thousand times for admonition. Alas! how poor a thing
is admonition after all!

"There is one danger point in your character, my son"--he recalled the
very look of the cramped words on the page of blue-ruled letter
paper--"where I have kept watch since you lay in my arms as a baby, and
where you must keep watch hereafter. You have high aims and strong
convictions, and you mean to do right. You will never be led astray by
others--you are too obstinate for that. If you ever go astray, you must
take all the blame on your own head.

"You are generous, and I never knew you to do a meanly selfish thing in
your life. And yet your point of danger is selfishness of a kind. I have
observed you from infancy, and this is what I have seen. Your desire to
accomplish your purposes is too strong. You are not held back by any
difficulty. You make any sacrifice in pursuit of your ends. You use any
means you can find to carry your plans through, and you are quick at
finding means, or making them when you want them.

"I was proud of the pluck you showed in doing almost a slave's work for
two years, because you had made up your mind to go through college. But
I shuddered at the thought of what such determination might lead to.

"Oh! my son, you will succeed in life. I have no fear of that. But how?
Beware the time when your purpose is strong, your desire to succeed
great, _and the only means at command are dishonest and degrading_. That
time will come to you, be sure. When it comes you must make a hard
choice--harder for you than for another. You will then sacrifice a
purpose that it will seem like death to surrender--or you will commit
moral suicide! I shall not live to see you so tried; but if I see you
practise giving up a little and trying to keep guard at this weak place,
I may learn before I die to think of that hour of your trial without the
foreboding it gives me now."

That letter was the last his mother ever sent him. It had been a
consolation to him that before death summoned her, she had at least
read his reply, assuring her of his determination to maintain his
integrity in all circumstances.

"You say truly," he wrote, "that I never surrender a purpose or fail to
carry it out. Reflect, mother dear, that the strongest purpose I ever
had is this--to preserve my character. I will not fail to find means for
that when the time comes, as I never fail to accomplish objects of less
moment."

"The prophecy of the dear old mother is fulfilled," he muttered, while
his nails buried themselves in his unconscious palms. "The time she
foresaw has come, and I have committed suicide. Thank God the mother did
not live to see! Thank God her vision was no clearer! She had hope for
me at least. She did not _know_."




III.


As he called up pictures there in the dark, Edgar Braine saw himself a
little country boy in Southern Indiana, growing strong in the sweet,
wholesome air of the river and the hills, and torturing his young mind
with questions to which he could not comprehend the answers.

At first his questioning had to do with nature, whose wonders lay around
him. He wanted to know of the river. Whence it came, and how; he asked
Wherefore, of the hills; he made friends of all growing things, and
companions of those that had conscious life.

Then came his father's death to turn his mind into new and darker
chambers of inquiry, and for a time he brooded, disposed, in loyalty to
that wisdom which age assumes, to accept the conventional dogmas given
to him by the ignorance about him, as explanations of the mysteries, but
unable to conceal their absurdity from a mind whose instinct it was to
stand face to face with Doubt and to compel Truth to lift her mask of
seeming.

The loneliness of his life was good for him for a time. It taught him to
find a sufficient companionship in his own mind--a lesson which all of
us need, but few learn. But the time came when his wise mother saw the
necessity of a change, and, scant as her resources were, she took him to
the little city of Jefferson, where the schools were good and
companionship was to be found.

The city was at that time a beautiful corpse. It had just died, and had
not yet become conscious of the fact. Ten or fifteen years before, a
railroad running from the State capital had made its terminus at
Jefferson, making the river town the one outlet of the interior. A great
tide of travel passed through the place, and a large trade centred
there. But the course of railroad development which gave the city life,
destroyed it later. Other railroads were built through the interior to
other river outlets, and Cincinnati and Louisville took to themselves
what had been Jefferson's prosperity.

And so when Edgar Braine first knew the town, it had lost its hold upon
life, though it had not yet found out what had happened to it. The great
rows of warehouses along the levee, with the legends "Forwarding and
Commission," "Groceries at Wholesale Only," "Flour, Grain and
Provisions," "Carriage Repository," and all the rest of it, staringly
inscribed upon their outer walls, were empty now, and closed. In West
Street, two only of the once great wholesale houses maintained a show of
life. In one, an old man sat alone all day, and contemplated three bags
of coffee and two chests of tea, for which no customer made inquiry. In
the other there remained unsold half a ton of iron bars, and a few kegs
of nails, to justify the assertion of the signboard that the proprietors
were dealers in "Iron and Nails." The two partners who owned the place
appeared there every morning, as regularly as when their sales were
reckoned in six figures. They were always scrupulously neat, always
courteously polite to each other, and always as cheerful and contented a
pair of business partners as one need desire to see. Why not, seeing
that they both liked the game of checkers, and had nothing to do but sit
in the doorway and play from the beginning to the end of "business
hours" every day?

But the town did not realize its condition yet. Weyer & McKee were
putting up a new and imposing building for the better accommodation of
their wholesale grocery business, inattentive to the fact that their
wholesale grocery business had ceased to be. Polleys & Butler were still
issuing their _Market Bulletin_ for the information of their
"customers," not having yet realized that their customers had
permanently transferred their custom to Cincinnati. In this interesting
little sheet they had not yet begun to discuss "The Present Depression
in Trade--Its Cause and Cure." That came a little later.

The city was very well satisfied with itself. It had water-works and
gas, broad streets, and comfortable houses in such abundance that every
family might have had two for the asking. The people did not greatly
mind their loss of prosperity. Those who did mind had already gone away;
those who remained had succeeded, during the days of activity, in
getting out of other people enough to live on comfortably, and were
content to enjoy leisure and occupy themselves with church work and the
like for the rest of their lives.

The boy did not discover that anything was amiss with Jefferson until
two or three years after his arrival there. Having seen no other city he
did not observe that there was anything peculiar in the condition of
this one, until he saw a "to let" notice on the gorgeously decorated
front of Fred Dubachs' "Paintery" and learned that Fred was about to
remove to Keokuk. Fred was a notably expert painter, and the front of
his shop had always a strong fascination for Edgar. Fred had lavished
his best skill and industry upon its ornamentation during the two or
three years since he had ceased to have any painting to do for others.
Now he had given up and was going away.

The thing set the boy thinking. He reflected that it would be a sad
waste of time and labor for Fred to paint any more signs for a town
which already had some thousands no longer serving any useful purpose.
As he followed out this suggestion it dawned upon him that perhaps
Jefferson was a city in decay, and when he had questioned the matter a
little further, the evidence all about him left no room for doubt.

Then he went home and said to his mother: "I will not live in Jefferson
after I finish at Hanover. This town is done for. I must have
opportunities, and there will never be any here."

But Jefferson's condition had been educating him all the time, and
shaping his character in ways which affected all his future. He saw this
clearly now as he paced his room in Thebes that night after the suicide,
and recalled it all.

Among his schoolmates in Jefferson there were some, the sons of vulgar
people who had grown rich in the rapid rise of the town. These were
mainly stupid and arrogant, and their insolence was unceasing. At first
it had stung the sensitive boy to that kind of protest which involves
blows and bloody noses.

He was lithe of limb and strong, and he usually managed to get a
sufficient revenge in that way to satisfy him. But something occurred at
last to spoil the enjoyment he got out of pommelling the young bullies,
and to show him that, with all his strength and agility, he was meeting
his adversaries on unequal terms. He accidentally saw his mother toiling
late at night over the clothes in which he had that day fought Cale
Dodge to a finish. Cale, he knew, would simply put on a new suit next
day.

"I will have no more fights of that kind," he said to himself. Then,
after a period of silent thought, he said aloud:

"I have better weapons. I will show them in class who is master."

From that hour the inattention to books which had given his mother some
uneasiness, ceased. He mastered every lesson days before it was assigned
to him, and when an opportunity offered he submitted himself to
examinations in advance, and passed into the higher grades of the high
school, leaving his adversaries behind.

In this process he acquired two unquenchable thirsts--the one for
knowledge, the other for power. He searched the town library for books
that might supplement the meagre instruction of the schools. In his
search for knowledge he found culture. General literature opened its
treasures to him, and he read everything, from Shakespeare to Burke's
Works, that the library could supply.

But while all this went on, his delight in his superiority to the youths
who had been insolent to him, and were so still, crystallized more and
more into a great longing for power, and a relentless determination to
achieve it. Cost what it might he must be great, and look down upon
these his foes. His ambition became a passion, wild and unruly, but he
resolutely curbed it as one controls a spirited horse, and for the same
reason. He did not mean to let the ambition run away with his life and
wreck it before the destination was reached.

In the little college ten miles away, when at last he entered there, he
was said to have no ambition, because he lightly put aside the petty
prizes and honors for which others struggled so eagerly. His mates did
not dream how ambitious he was. He was thinking of larger things. There
was a scholarship to be won, and he took that, because it would spare
him his tuition fees; but for the class and society "honors" he cared
not at all.

He made his own all of value that the college libraries held and when
the senior examinations were over he was without a rival near him on
that record of achievement which determines who shall be valedictorian.
But he placed no value on the empty honor so coveted by others. A month
remained before Commencement, and he had no mind to lose a month. He
said to the President:

"I am going away to-morrow. If you choose to give me my degree please
take care of the diploma for me, if it is not too much trouble. Perhaps
I shall send for it some day."

"But you are surely not going to leave before Commencement?"

"Why not? I have got all I can out of college. I can't afford to waste a
month for nothing."

"But you are first-honor-man, Braine!"

"Yes, so I hear. Give that to some one who cares for it. I don't."

The next morning Edgar Braine quitted the village on foot, and without
returning to Jefferson, passed out of the little world of youth into
the great world of manhood. His equipment consisted of his character,
his education, and fifty dollars.

He thought the character a good one then. He revised his opinion as he
paced the little room in Thebes, and remembered.




IV.


The youth's sole thought when he walked out into the world was to find
opportunities--for exactly what, he neither knew nor greatly cared. He
knew himself possessed of power, and he sought a chance to make it felt.
He was ambitious beyond measure, but he believed his ambition to be
safely under a curb bit. He would achieve great things, but their
greatness should minister to the good of his fellow men.

His selfishness was of that kind which looks for its best satisfaction
in self-sacrifice. He would spend himself in the service of mankind, and
take his reward in seeing the results of his labor. He had been bred to
high conceptions of human conduct, and had filled his mind with exalted
principles.

It was for the exercise of powers thus directed that he sought
opportunities. He would know what to do with them, he was very sure,
when they came. He selected Thebes as the scene of his first endeavors
because it presented the completest possible contrast to Jefferson. As
Jefferson was a city that had ceased to thrive, so Thebes was one that
was just about to begin to thrive, as its citizens took pains to notify
the rest of the world. Braine wanted to help it thrive, and share its
thrift.

The bread-and-butter problem gave him no trouble. Thebes had plenty of
work to do in getting ready to prosper, and Braine was prepared to do
any work. The shrewd speculators who were engineering the town's scheme
of greatness, were quick enough to discover the youth's capacities, as
the race-course speculator is to see the fine points of a horse. In
whatever fell to him to do he acquitted himself so well that faith in
"young Braine" soon gave place to respectful admiration, and Mose
Harbell wrote numberless paragraphs in the Thebes _Daily Enterprise_
concerning "our genial and gifted young townsman, Edgar Braine," in
which, for reasons that Mose could not have explained, there was notably
less of the "genial" insolence of familiarity than was common in Mose's
literary productions. When some one mentioned this in Mose's presence,
his reply was:

"Well, somehow Braine isn't the sort of fellow you feel like slapping on
the back."

It was Abner Hildreth who first drew Braine into relations with the
_Enterprise_.

There was "one of Thebes's oldest and most genial citizens"--Jack
Summers by name--who, in addition to a mercantile business, carried on a
bank of the kind that opens in the evening by preference, while Abner
Hildreth, in all his career as a banker, had preferred daylight hours
for business.

Jack Summers corrupted the youth of the town, and when one promising
young clerk in the Express office was caught opening money packages, his
fall was clearly enough traced to his losses in Summers's establishment.

Hildreth, as a banker and business man, objected to gambling--of that
kind. He saw how surely it must undermine the other kind by destroying
the trustworthiness of clerks and cashiers. He deprecated it, also, as a
thing imperilling the young prosperity of Thebes, in which his
investments, as merchant, banker, hotel proprietor, mill owner and the
like, were greater than those of any other ten men combined, while even
with the other ten he was a silent partner so far as their ventures
seemed to him sound.

"The town mustn't get a hard name," he said; "Jack Summers must shut up
his gambling shop, or get out of Thebes."

Then he sent for Edgar Braine.

"That young fellow," he reflected, "knows how to write with vim, force,
pathos, and energy"--a favorite phrase with Hildreth--"and he has sand
in him too. He can skin Summers, and rub _aqua fortis_ into the raw, and
he ain't afraid to do it."

This latter point Hildreth knew to be important. Jack Summers was a
reckless person of whom most men in Thebes were inclined to be somewhat
in awe. He had lived in the place when the only law there was the will
of the boldest, enforced with a pistol, and he had not yet reconciled
himself to milder methods.

"I want you to score Jack Summers in the _Enterprise_, Edgar." It was
Hildreth's habit to go straight to the marrow of his undertakings. "I
want you to drive him out of town, or compel him to shut up his den. He
is ruining all the boys, and giving the town a bad name."

"But will Podauger let me?" asked Braine.

"Podauger" was the sobriquet by which old Janus Leftwitch--"Editor and
Proprietor of the Thebes _Daily Enterprise_"--had come to be known, by
reason of the ponderous unreadableness of his disquisitions.

"Podauger be--blessed! (I never swear, Braine.) I _own_ Podauger. I can
shut up his office to-day if I want to, and assign him a room in the
poorhouse. He will print what I tell him to, and Mose Harbell will keep
quiet too, when I tell him not to call Jack Summers 'our genial fellow
citizen' again. The only question is, will you write the articles?"

"I will, on one condition."

"I didn't think you would be afraid."

"I'm not."

"What is the condition then?"

"That I am to be let alone. I won't begin a thing of that kind, and have
it hushed up. It must go clear through if I undertake it."

"That's right. I knew you had sand. You may go ahead, and you shan't be
stopped by anybody--unless Summers prepares your corpse for the coroner.
Have you thought of that?"

"I am not afraid. The cause is a good one. That's all I ask."

"Very well. Now these articles must be editorials. They'll have more
weight that way. Salivate the rascal every day, and I'll back you up.
You'd better go armed, though, in case Summers suspects who it is."

"I will take care of that. The first article shall be ready in an
hour."

And it was. Braine was too fresh from college not to begin it with an
allusion to Roman history, but the people of Thebes were not
sufficiently familiar with the classics to resent a reference of the
kind. Besides, the allusion was an apt one. It was a reference to the
Roman method of dealing with persons who made themselves enemies of the
State, and it named Jack Summers as one who bore precisely that relation
to Thebes.

There was something like an earthquake in the town that night. Never
before had the _Enterprise_ been known to say a harsh thing or a
vigorous one. Podauger was never harsh in utterance, lest he offend a
subscriber or advertiser; he was never vigorous, because he did not know
how to be so. The terror of Jack Summers's displeasure was something
that nobody in Thebes had ever before ventured to brave, and what with
surprise, apprehension, and a looking-for