Chapter 43 - Page 2

borrow a buggy and a fast colt from old Mulvey,
and driving off with her at a two-forty gait while Millard and the
others took their dust in the crawling stage.

No one in Apex knew where young Moffatt had come from, and he offered
no information on the subject. He simply appeared one day behind the
counter in Luckaback's Dollar Shoe-store, drifted thence to the office
of Semple and Binch, the coal-merchants, reappeared as the stenographer
of the Police Court, and finally edged his way into the power-house of
the Apex Water-Works. He boarded with old Mrs. Flynn, down in North
Fifth Street, on the edge of the red-light slum, he never went to church
or attended lectures, or showed any desire to improve or refine himself;
but he managed to get himself invited to all the picnics and lodge
sociables, and at a supper of the Phi Upsilon Society, to which he had
contrived to affiliate himself, he made the best speech that had been
heard there since young Jim Rolliver's first flights. The brothers of
Undine's friends all pronounced him "great," though he had fits of
uncouthness that made the young women slower in admitting him to favour.
But at the Mulvey's Grove picnic he suddenly seemed to dominate them
all, and Undine, as she drove away with him, tasted the public triumph
which was necessary to her personal enjoyment.

After that he became a leading figure in the youthful world of Apex, and
no one was surprised when the Sons of Jonadab, (the local Temperance
Society) invited him to deliver their Fourth of July oration. The
ceremony took place, as usual, in the Baptist church, and Undine, all
in white, with a red rose in her breast, sat just beneath the platform,
with Indiana jealously glaring at her from a less privileged seat, and
poor Millard's long neck craning over the row of prominent citizens
behind the orator.

Elmer Moffatt had been magnificent, rolling out his alternating effects
of humour and pathos, stirring his audience by moving references to the
Blue and the Gray, convulsing them by a new version of Washington and
the Cherry Tree (in which the infant patriot was depicted as having
cut down the tree to check the deleterious spread of cherry bounce),
dazzling them by his erudite allusions and apt quotations (he confessed
to Undine that he had sat up half the night over Bartlett), and winding
up with a peroration that drew tears from the Grand Army pensioners in
the front row and caused the minister's wife to say that many a sermon
from that platform had been less uplifting.

An ice-cream supper always followed the "exercises," and as repairs were
being made in the church basement, which was the usual scene of the
festivity, the minister had offered the use of his