"Шервуд Андерсен. Белый бедняк (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

closely by the merchants. She was suspected of carrying away small articles
that could be slipped into the pockets of her dress. One afternoon in
Toddmore's grocery, when she thought no one was looking, she took a half
dozen eggs out of a basket and looking quickly around to be sure she was
unobserved, put them into her dress pocket. Harry Toddmore, the grocer's
son who had seen the theft, said nothing, but went unobserved out at the
back door. He got three or four clerks from other stores and they waited
for Jane Orange at a corner. When she came along they hurried out and Harry
Toddmore fell against her. Throwing out his hand he struck the pocket
containing the eggs a quick, sharp blow. Jane Orange turned and hurried
away toward home, but as she half ran through Main Street clerks and
merchants came out of the stores, and from the assembled crowd a voice
called attention to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs having
run down the inside of her dress and over her stockings began to make a
stream on the sidewalk. A pack of town dogs excited by the shouts of the
crowd ran at her heels, barking and sniffing at the yellow stream that
dripped from her shoes.

An old man with a long white beard came to Bidwell to live. He had been a
carpet-bag Governor of a southern state in the reconstruction days after
the Civil War and had made money. He bought a house on Turner's Pike close
beside the river and spent his days puttering about in a small garden. In
the evening he came across the bridge into Main Street and went to loaf in
Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked with great frankness and candor of his
life in the South during the terrible time when the country was trying to
emerge from the black gloom of defeat, and brought to the Bidwell men a new
point of view on their old enemies, the "Rebs."

The old man--the name by which he had introduced himself in Bidwell was
that of Judge Horace Hanby--believed in the manliness and honesty of
purpose of the men he had for a time governed and who had fought a long
grim war with the North, with the New Englanders and sons of New Englanders
from the West and Northwest. "They're all right," he said with a grin. "I
cheated them and made some money, but I liked them. Once a crowd of them
came to my house and threatened to kill me and I told them that I did not
blame them very much, so they let me alone." The judge, an ex-politician
from the city of New York who had been involved in some affair that made it
uncomfortable for him to return to live in that city, grew prophetic and
philosophic after he came to live in Bidwell. In spite of the doubt every
one felt concerning his past, he was something of a scholar and a reader of
books, and won respect by his apparent wisdom. "Well, there's going to be a
new war here," he said. "It won't be like the Civil War, just shooting off
guns and killing peoples' bodies. At first it's going to be a war between
individuals to see to what class a man must belong; then it is going to be
a long, silent war between classes, between those who have and those who
can't get. It'll be the worst war of all."

The talk of Judge Hanby, carried along and elaborated almost every evening
before a silent, attentive group in the drug store, began to have an
influence on the minds of Bidwell young men. At his suggestion several