Bence could have been a good deal longer in saying what he had to say,
and a thousand times more oratorical. Nevertheless, there was not a man or
woman present who did not declare that it was the greatest speech ever
heard in Plattville; and they really thought so--to such lengths are
loyalty and friendship sometimes carried in Carlow and Amo and Gaines.
He looked down upon the attentive, earnest faces and into the kindly eyes
of the Hoosier country people, and, as he spoke, the thought kept
recurring to him that this was the place he had dreaded to come back to;
that these were the people he had wished to leave--these, who gave him
everything they had to give--and this made it difficult to keep his tones
steady and his throat clear.
Helen stood so far from the steps (nor could she be induced to penetrate
further, though they would have made way for her) that only fragments
reached her, but what she heard she remembered:
"I have come home . . . Ordinarily a man needs to fall sick by the wayside
or to be set upon by thieves, in order to realize that nine-tenths of the
world is Samaritan, and the other tenth only too busy or too ignorant to
be. Down here he realizes it with no necessity of illness or wounds to
bring it out; and if he does get hurt, you send him to Congress. . . .
There will'be no other in Washington so proud of what he stands for as I
shall be.
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