Sunday evening saw a large congregation in the pews of the Rev. John
Dexter's church. In the front and middle portion of the church were the
dwellers on the Hill, those whose lines fell in pleasant places. They
were the "Haves" of the town,--conspicuous and highly respectable with
rustle of silks and flutter of ribbons.
And back of these sat a score of men and women from South Harvey, the
"Have-nots," the dwellers in the dreary valley. There was Denny Hogan,
late of the mines, but now of the smelter--with his curly hair plastered
over his forehead, and with his wife, she that was Violet Mauling
holding a two-year-old baby with sweaty, curly red hair to her breast
asleep; there was Ira Dooley, also late of the mines, but now proprietor
of a little game of chance over the Hot Dog Saloon; there was Pat
McCann, a pit boss and proud of it, with Mrs. McCann--looking her eyes
out at Mrs. Nesbit's hat. There was John Jones, in his Sunday best, and
Evan Hughes and Tom Williams, the wiry little Welsh miners who had faced
death with Grant Adams five years before. They were with him that night
at the church with all the pride in him that they could have if he were
one of the real nobility, instead of a labor agitator with a little more
than local reputation. And there were Dick and his boy Mugs and the
silent Mrs. Bowman and Bennie her youngest and Mary the next to the
youngest. And Mrs. Bowman in the South Harvey colony was a person of
consequence, for she nodded to the Nesbits and the Mortons and to Laura
and to Mrs. Calvin and to all the old settlers of Harvey--rather
conspicuously. She had the gratification of noting that South Harvey saw
the nobility nod back. With the South Harvey people came Amos Adams in
his rough gray clothes and rough gray beard. Jasper Adams, in the
highest possible collar, and in the gayest possible shell-pink necktie
and under the extremest clothes that it might be possible for the
superintendent of a Sunday School to wear, shared a hymnal, when the
congregation rose to sing, with the youngest Miss Morton. There were
those who thought the singing was merely a duet between young Mr. Adams
and the youngest Miss Morton--so much feeling did they put into the
music. Mr. Brotherton was so impressed, that he marked young Adams for a
tryout at the next funeral where there was a bass voice needed, making
the mental reservation that no one needed to look at the pimples of a
boy who could sing like that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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