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hundred men and even though the town's population doubled and then
trebled, still George Brotherton was better than everything else that
the railroad brought. He found work in a pool and billiard hall; but
that was a pent-up Utica for him and his contracted powers sent him to
Daniel Sands for a loan of twenty-five dollars. The unruffled exterior,
the calm impudence with which the boy waived aside the banker's request
for a second name on George's note, and the boy's obvious eagerness to
be selling something, secured the money and established him in a cigar
store and news stand. Within a year the store became a social center
that rivaled Riley's saloon and being near the midst of things in
business, attracted people of a different sort from those who frequented
Casper Herdicker's debating school in the shoe shop. To the cigar stand
by day came Dr. Nesbit with his festive but guileful politics, Joe
Calvin, Amos Adams, stuttering Kyle Perry, deaf John Kollander,
occasionally Dick Bowman, Ahab Wright in his white necktie and formal
garden whiskers, Rev. John Dexter and Captain Morton; while by night the
little store was a forum for young Mortimer Sands, for Tom Van Dorn, for
Henry Fenn, for the clerks of Market Street and for such gay young
blades as were either unmarried or being married were brave enough to
break the apron string. For thirty years, nearly a generation, they have
been meeting there night after night and on rainy days, taking the world
apart and putting it together again to suit themselves. And though
strangers have come into the council at Brotherton's, Captain Morton
remains dean. And though the Captain does not know it, being corroded
with pride, there still clings about the place a tradition of the day
when Captain Morton rode his high wheeled bicycle, the first the town
ever had seen, in the procession to his wife's funeral. They say it was
the Captain's serene conviction that his agency for the
bicycle--exclusive for five counties--would make him rich, and that it
was no lack of love and respect for his wife but rather an artist's
pride in his work as the distributor of a long-felt want which perched
Ezra Morton on that high wheel in the funeral procession. For Mary Adams
who knew, who was with the stricken family when death came, who was in
the lonely house when the family came home from the cemetery, says that
Ezra's grief was real. Surely thirty years of singlehearted devotion to
the three motherl