# A Princetonian/Chapter 1

A PRINCETONIAN.
CHAPTER I.
AN AMBITIOUS DEPUTY.
The combination store of Van Clees & Jackson looked out upon the huge, empty square. It had a high, false front, with very tall lettering upon it. This notified people who drove into the town of Oakland (by any one of the roads that wiggled out across the prairie) that Van Clees & Jackson sold everything and anything.
In front of the store on a tall pedestal was the only wooden Indian in town, and just inside the window was a handsome show-case filled with cigars in very gaudy boxes; next was a lamp with little alcohol tapers, and then came the soda-water fountain. But there was more. There were boots and shoes, and rolls of cloth ​and calico, and overalls, and jumpers, and cutlery. The back part of the long room was permeated with the smell of nails and ham; with the insistent sub-effluvia of oats, of tea, and of cinnamon. Rows of brilliantly wrapped canned vegetables lined the shelves, and beautiful advertising chromos were tacked up in conspicuous places. Anything that could possibly be wished for, could be bought, and anything not in sight, could be ordered,—from a Walter Wood reaper, to an Amoskeag fire engine.
It was a Monday morning, and it had been raining. If there was one dismal place to look out upon when it rained it was the town of Oakland. Through the obscuring drizzle, the wooden buildings that surrounded the square looked like huge freight cars, all ready at a signal to be pulled out in different directions. The residences of the townsfolk were not very much in evidence, but rambled off toward the railroad station a half mile or more away.
A big farm wagon towed by two plunging grays, their legs brown with mud, trundled and rumbled noisily through the heavy ruts and stopped at Van Clees & Jackson's platform. A young man in a yellow "slicker," with a ​beard growing up to his eyes, tied the reins to the seat and jumped out. After an admonitory curse at the tired horses, he flung open the door and stamped into the store.
He peered down the narrow room.
"Hello, Newt!" he shouted, leaning over the counter, and giving a fat, gray cat a poke with the butt of his whip, "Going to the dance this evening?"
This remark was not addressed to the cat, as might be supposed, but to a young man who sat at a desk with a tall wooden railing, reading a book by the light of a dimly burning lamp.
"Well, I don't know, Al," this young man answered, untangling his legs from the rungs of the high stool. "Mabel has kinder set her heart on going, so I suppose I'll turn up. Are the Dixon boys coming?"
"Harry calls off the figures, so he told me," said the first speaker, "and Dirk's goin' to play the fiddle. Let's have some pipe-fodder. I'm run out."
The clerk walked down behind the counter, but, before he reached up on the shelf, the two young men shook hands, without making any further remarks at all.
​When Al had pocketed the tobacco, which was tied up in a long, tight bag like a sausage, he slouched into a comfortable position and poked the gray cat again; this offended her dignity evidently, for she slid silently from the counter and dodged behind a flour barrel.
"The Eagle kinder complimented you on the way you took Bord McGovern last Wednesday," said Al, giving a glance out across the square at the only brick building in town (which happened to be the jail), "an' Sheriff Holly says you done a good piece of work too," he added.
"Oh, pshaw!" said the clerk, "It wasn't much. Bord didn't have anything against me. He came along as peaceably as a lamb."
"More like a bull with a ring in his nose, I reckon," said the other. "He'd swan he'd drill a hole through any one that tried to take him."
"Changed his mind, I guess," was the calm rejoinder. "How are things out your way?"
Al pushed himself to his feet and began buttoning his long, yellow coat.
"Oh, looking up a little," he answered; "going to dig a new well this spring."
​"That so? Don't forget to give us the order for the wind-mill," called the other.
"Bet your life I won't," said Al, from the threshold; then he slammed the door behind him, thumped into the spring seat, and cursed the horses into action.
Newton Wilberforce Hart, for that was the clerk's name in full, went back to the lamp (it was very dark in the store on rainy days) and opened his book. It was an old-fashioned volume and it gave forth the attractive, musty smell that the bookworm delights in. It was written by somebody (long since forgotten) on The Laws of Civil Government. The young man read a few lines, and then closed the book with a snap that sent some of the loose waybills flying off the desk lid on to the floor. He picked them carefully up, and, turning down the lamp, walked to the front of the store. Two months before he had been appointed deputy sheriff, and had signalized his appointment immediately by taking into custody Mr. Bord McGovern, who, after committing various offences great and small, had long defied the authorities along the Platte River; the gentleman's last little venture being the wounding of ​a United States Marshal, who objected to the manner in which Mr. McGovern dispensed bad corn whiskey at his State-line shanty.
It would have pleased most men, or women, for that matter, who studied character, to look at Messrs. Van Clees and Jackson's chief clerk. He had a great pair of shoulders, and a broad, flat back; his face was not handsome, but his eyes were well set in his head; his thick hair rose straight from his forehead and waved slightly at the top, much in the manner that we see affected in portraits of the early part of the century. His face was smooth-shaven, which was out of the usual run in a place where the barber always complimented the young men on their mustaches, but it had the blue-black appearance of a heavy growth of beard. Mr. Hart's mouth was straight and very strong; he stood a shade over six feet in his boots, and the scales in the back of the store had shown his weight to be one hundred and eighty pounds with his coat off. He was twenty-three years old.
A year before, when he had been teaching the school at the Junction, he had first made a name for himself by bumping two of the ​scholars' heads together, and compelling the largest, a husky youth of nineteen, to write, "I will be a good boy," twenty times on the black-board. As the failure of the Junction school had been attributed to the muscular resistance made by this youth and his companions to the introduction of knowledge thereabouts, the committee had upheld Mr. Hart, and, strange to say, the unruly scholars had become his friends and admirers. It was one of these who was going to call off the figures at the coming dance.
As he stood looking into the rain, the deputy sheriff was thinking things over. He realized the difficulties which confronted him; it was his ambition to become a member of, the bar of the State of Nebraska, but the obstacles that arose before his vision were great and many; the necessity of knowledge never appeared so strong as it had in the last few weeks.
Suddenly there was a clattering on the rickety stairway that led down from the second floor. Hart recognized the footsteps, and sang out, "Hullo!" without turning to see who it was.
The Van Clees lived up above, and Hart's courtship of the buxom daughter of the senior ​member had been conducted at first by conversations up the stairway, but, after the capture of Bord McGovern, Mabel's heart had softened, and Van Clees, greatly delighted, had accepted his clerk as his future son-in-law. It was father Van Clees himself who was coming down the stairway. Odd to remark, Mr. Hart called his employer by a nick-name.
"I say, Van," he said, "we'll have to get a boom on this town somehow. Did you ever see anything so dead as that?"
He nodded his head toward the square, where two or three spectral-looking horses, tied to a well-gnawed hitching post, were the only living things in sight.
"There was a man here last week going to put in a lumber yard," said Mr. Van Clees, yawning, and taking a position by his clerk's side. "Look here, Newt, how would you like to go to Omaha to-morrow, and buy a bill of goods? I think we could do better than ordering by mail. Look at them cheeses last week."
"Why, certainly, I will go," said Hart, turning. "There are some things I would like to get there too." He had in his mind a ring among the other things.
​"Newt! Oh, Newt!" came a voice down the stairway.
Mr. Van Clees jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
"She's kinder anxious about the dance to-night; wants to know what to wear."
Hart moved quickly back to the stairs, and, after some conversation in a low voice, trotted up to the second story. The older man smiled contentedly. It would be a relief to him to have his daughter married. To tell the truth, she had a will of her own, and had displayed a partiality for somehow getting into conversation with the drummers, and Mr. Van Clees distrusted the travelling fraternity, having an opinion of his own concerning their habits and their general ideas about young women. With the aid of the village dressmaker and the fashion papers, Miss Van Clees had long been renowned as the best-dressed girl in town. But the father hoped that the cares of matrimony would tone her down as a mere matter of economy.
It might be well to say that "Jackson," whose name appeared upon the advertisements of the store, was a silent partner who lived some thirty miles away at Plattemouth, whence ​he shipped cattle and hogs to the hungry East. The prospective father-in-law was wording in his mind a letter to his partner, telling him the news of Mabel's engagement, when a woman with a wet shawl around her head, and a basket upon her arm, entered the store.
Mr. Van Clees dropped his cogitations to sell her a side of bacon.