He moved again toward the door, opened it, paused again, and turned full to face Carmel. Then he made a statement sharply detached from the context, and astonishing not so much for the fact it stated as because of the man who stated it, his possible reasons for making the statement, and the abruptness of the change of subject matter. “Sheriff Churchill has disappeared,” he said. Having made the statement, he shut the door after him and walked rapidly up the street. CHAPTER III Carmel more than half expected Abner Fownes to appear in the office, but he did not appear. Indeed, it was some days before she caught so much as a casual glimpse of him on the street. But she was gathering information about him and about the town of Gibeon and the county of which it was the center. Being young, with enthusiasm and ideals, and a belief in the general virtue of the human race, she was not pleased. She set about it to study Gibeon as she would have studied some new language, commencing with elementals, learning a few nouns and verbs and the local rules of the grammar of life. She felt she must know Gibeon as she knew the palm of her hand, if she were to coax the _Free Press_ out of the slough into which it had slipped. But it was not easy to know Gibeon, for Gibeon did not know itself. Like so many of our American villages, it was not introspective--even at election time. The tariff and the wool schedule and Wall Street received from it more attention than did keeping its own doorstep clean. It was used to its condition, and viewed it as normal. There were moments of excited interest and hot-blooded talk. Always there was an undercurrent of rumor; but it seemed to Carmel the town felt a certain pride in the iniquity of its politics. A frightful inertia resides in the mass of mankind, and because of this inertia tsars and princes and nobilities and Tammany Societies and bosses and lobbies and pork barrels and the supreme tyranny of war have existed since men first invented organization.... Sometimes it seems the world’s supply of energy is cornered by the ill-disposed. Rotten governments and administrations are tolerated by the people because they save the people the trouble of establishing and conducting something better. In a few days Carmel perceived a great deal that was going on in Gibeon, and understood a little of it, and, seeing and understanding as she did, an ambition was born in her, the ambition to wake up Gibeon. This ambition she expressed to Tubal, who listened and waggled his head. “One time,” he said, “I worked fer a reform newspaper--till it went into bankruptcy.” “But look--” “I been lookin’ a sight longer ’n’ you have, Lady.” At first he had called her Lady as a dignified and polite form of greeting. After that it became a sort of title of affection, which spread from Tubal to Gibeon. “I been lookin’ and seein’, and what I see is that they’s jest one thing folks is real int’rested in, and that’s earnin’ a livin’.”