The Pulaski citizen. [volume] (Pulaski, Tenn.) 1866-current, 1886-06-03
A DRUMMER'S STORY.

Fourteen years ago Trlmble and had
been college chums. and tonight, when
l was reviling the luck that had left me
showed in at miserable East Tennessee
station with pack full of our best goods
and an engagement 200 miles ahead,
had collided on the slippery platform
with another angry and belated psssen-
ger. "Excnse me-" in growing duet, a
lifting of Indifferent eyes, and we grasped
hands for the first time since our part
ing amid the excitement of college
| commencement.
And now, with a handful of others
who had abandoned the blocked train for
the comfort of d rousing log fire, and a
hot bite and sup, we sat talking of the
many things that crowd upon long parted
friends, bridging the past with the pres
ent. The present, in his case, representing
nothing more substantial than unsettled
old bachelorhood, while mine had a solid
showing of wife and babies, whose
pictures I exhibited with pardonable
pride. The past, in those exterior and
physical features which represent the
vicissitudes of fortune and circumstance
was hastily gone over and the discovery
made that by singular coincidence each
he had entered on leaving college and
wandered into the itinerancy of com
mercial travellers life Then we went
back to the old college days.
Trirnble's question evoked two images
one sun-crowned like a young god, the
embodiment of eager anticipation, the
other wrapped in darkness, the incar-
nation of remorse. l murmured, poor
Clemens Z"
Predicating an opinion on recollections
of certain boyish tendencies, and accept
ing my half unconscious exclamation as
a cue, Trimble answered himself /: "Gone
to the 'demnition bow vows has he
Had a stripe of the saint and a streak of
the devil in him. always said he
would be one or the other. Poor old
chap! Well, I'm sorry"
No." said 1, mot in the sense you
mean. He is rigidly honest, much re-
Spected, and as sober as a Quaker; fact
is, people think he is little off on that
subject, but he is man who has lost all
interest in life, and has buried himself
out of sight of the world, like hermit.
His farm is only ten miles from Belview,
one of the prettiest towns in Georgia,
and he has not been in for thirteen years
not since the trial"
TRIAL" exclaimed Trimble, "you don't
say it was anything as bad as that?"
Eyes, it was about as bad as it could
be, and has wrecked him. 1t struck him
in the weakest part-a part which under
other circumstances might have de-
veloped into his strongest and best-his
morbid shrinking from hurting ything
the utter absence in him of cruelty
bordering almost on effeminacy. 1t does
seem strange that what so strongly re-
sembled virtue should become the in
strument of his most exquisite torture"
"Well," said Trimble, filling in the
pause that followed this reflection,
though 1 do not know what has befallen
him, he was not the sort of fellow
should have thought would turn out a
crank"
%Guy de Maupassant says" rejoined: |
Into the solitude in which every soul |
dwells no other soul may penetrate
Who, then, may assert that he knows |
what impulses, dormant and active, re-
side in that unvisited temple? Yes, we
thought we knew all there was of |
Clemens. He seemed possessed OF an |
eminently social nature, seeking in all |
things sympathy and companionship; |
even study was irksome, you know, be-
cause it must needs be solitary. A
thorough good fellow, generous, high
spirited, full of fun, richly endowed with
talent; might have made himself any
thing he chose. He was, too, the most
magnetic man 1 ever knew. The very
professors, with whom he was perpetu-
ally in disgrace, loved him, and the girls
would have spoiled any other fellow with
their petting, but he took it as a matter
of course. Did it ever strike you, though,
that while he attracted he never led. He
seemed to lack some quality that makes
men leaders"
Eyes" assented Trimble; ego on. am
very much interested"
swell, he went home that summer,
you remember, intending to take course
of law at one of our universities, but the
term did not open until fall. The family
lived on the farm, and he went right
out there. He had lost his mother when
he was a little chap. There was a house
full of children, and they grew up as
they are pretty apt to do when nobody
in particular controls them. The oldest
girl mothered the whole lot, and was the
l ever knew, but she was, after all, only
a sister, and there was as many different
among them as there were
children.
"The farm was very fine one, and
the old farmhouse as hospitable and
pretty place to rusticate and have a
quiet season of rest in as you would wish
to see, but that was just where it did not
suit Jackie did not want quiet time.
Anita, dear little woman, would have
given her right hand to make her favor
lite brother happy, and, seeing his rest
Iessness, she thought things were not
nice enough at home to suit him, and
gave both hands and all her time to
working for him and waiting on him,
and left him hungry for company and
excitement. So Jack got to spending a
a good deal of time in town.
"Trimble, 1 expect you have knocked
around the world enough to know some
thing of the iniquity of small towns,
with a drinking saloon down every side
street and veritable gambling hell in
the back room of more than one of
them. In my opinion Jack Clemens
might have gone from the influence of a
good mother to the influence of good
wife, and have preserved through life the
dew of his youth To feel that his COM
ings and goings were the pendulous
regulating another heart and
life would have adjusted them to a per-
feet precision, but no such motive re-
strained or compelled him. So he gam
bled some and drank some.
''The choppy wave of gossip, which
tossed his wild doings up and about in
he village, did not extend even its out
srmost circle to the old farmhouse. If
Jack returned home after day or two
N town looking something the worse
ior his visit, poor Anita took more than
usual pains in preparing delicacies to
.empt his appetite, and insisted on his |
.aking three grains of quinine every I
morning to keep offsthe chils she was ]
'ure he was going to have in the fall, {