"In the evenings we walked about in the plaza and listened to the band
playing and mingled with the populace at its distressing and obnoxious
pleasures. There were thirteen vehicles belonging to the upper classes,
mostly rockaways and old-style barouches, such as the mayor rides in at
the unveiling of the new poorhouse at Milledgeville, Alabama. Round and
round the desiccated fountain in the middle of the plaza they drove,
and lifted their high silk hats to their friends. The common people
walked around in barefooted bunches, puffing stogies that a Pittsburg
millionaire wouldn't have chewed for a dry smoke on Ladies' Day at his
club. And the grandest figure in the whole turnout was Barney O'Connor.
Six foot two he stood in his Fifth Avenue clothes, with his eagle eye
and his black moustache that tickled his ears. He was a born dictator
and czar and hero and harrier of the human race. It looked to me that
all eyes were turned upon O'Connor, and that every woman there loved
him, and every man feared him. Once or twice I looked at him and thought
of funnier things that had happened than his winning out in his game;
and I began to feel like a Hidalgo de Officio de Grafto de South America
myself. And then I would come down again to solid bottom and let my
imagination gloat, as usual, upon the twenty-one American dollars due me
on Saturday night.
"'Take note,' says O'Connor to me as thus we walked, 'of the mass of the
people. Observe their oppressed and melancholy air. Can ye not see that
they are ripe for revolt? Do ye not perceive that they are disaffected?'
"'I do not,' says I. 'Nor disinfected either. I'm beginning to
understand these people. When they look unhappy they're enjoying
themselves. When they feel unhappy they go to sleep. They're not the
kind of people to take an interest in revolutions.'
"'They'll flock to our standard,' says O'Connor. 'Three thousand men
in this town alone will spring to arms when the signal is given. I am
assured of that. But everything is in secret. There is no chance for us
to fail.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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