The men who had been called by
the draft into the great National Army were all home again, having
got no nearer to the battle front than an embarkation camp in New
Jersey,--and so this tall, slender young fellow from the East was
an object not only of curiosity but of envy.
The Misses Dowd laid themselves out to make him comfortable,--as
well as prominent. They gave him a corner room on the upper floor
of Dowd's Tavern, dispossessing a tenant of twelve years' standing,--a
photographer named Hatch, whose ability to keep from living too far
in arrears depended on his luck in inveigling certain sentimental
customers into taking "crayon portraits" of deceased loved ones,
satisfaction guaranteed, frames extra. Two windows, looking out
over the roof of the long front porch, gave him an unobstructed
view of Main Street, including such edifices as the postoffice,
the log-hut library, the ancient watering trough, the drug store,
and the steeple of the Presbyterian Church rising proudly above
the roofs of the houses in between.
Main Street ran almost parallel with the river. With commendable
forethought, the first settlers had built their houses and stores
some little distance back from the stream along the summit of a
wooded ridge perhaps forty feet above the river at its midsummer
low-water level. The tremendous, devastating floods that came annually
with the breaking up of winter failed to reach the houses,--although
in 1883,--according to the records,--the water came up to within a
foot of Joe Roush's blacksmith shop, situated at that time halfway
down the slope, compelling the smith to think seriously of "moving
up a couple of hops," a precaution that was rendered unnecessary
by a subsequent midsummer bolt of lightning that destroyed not
only the forge but shocked Joe so severely that he "saw green"
for a matter of six weeks and finally resulted in his falling off
the dock into deep water in the middle of what was intended to be
a protracted spree brought on by the discovery that his insurance
policy did not cover "loss by lightning.
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