Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
In the second section rode the Rev. Wickliffe and the Rev. Shine; they
were in a touring-car with its top flattened back. You might say they
composed the second section. Carriages and automobiles rolling along
immediately behind them bore the members of the official board of
Emmanuel Chapel in sets of fours, and the chief financial contributors
to the revival which this night would reach its climax. Flanking the
carriages and following after them marched the living garnerings of the
campaign--the converts to date, a veritable Gideon's Band of them, in
number amounting to a host, and all afoot as befitting the palmer and
the pilgrim. Established members of the congregation, in hired hacks, in
jitneys, in rented and privately owned equipages, and also afoot came
next.
Voluntarily aligned representatives of the colored population at large
formed the tail of the column. Of these last there surely were hundreds.
Hundreds more, in holiday dress now somewhat rumpled after a day of
pleasure-seeking and pleasure-finding, lined the sidewalks to see this
spectacle. Nowhere along the straightaway of the line of march did the
pavements lack for onlookers, but nearing the end of the route, and
especially where the wide vacant spaces of the Tennessee Street common
had been preempted by the festal enterprises of Director General AEsop
Loving and his confreres, the press became thicker and ever thicker.
Here the crowds overflowed upon the gravel roadway, narrowing the
thoroughfare to a lane through which the paraders barely might pass.
They did pass, though at a lessened pace, until their front ranks had
reached the approximate middle breadth of the old show-grounds, with the
tabernacle looming against the sunset's dying fires an eighth of a mile
on beyond.
It is necessary here and now that, taking our eyes from this scene, we
hark back to the Wednesday evening preceding. It will be recalled that
on this evening a certain motion was made and by acclamation adopted.
The maker of the motion, as we know, was Tecumseh Sherman Glass; its
beneficiary, as the reader shrewdly may have divined, was Cephus Fringe.
Beforehand perhaps the Professor had had vague misgivings as to the part
he was to play in the pageantry on the Eighth; perhaps in his mind he
had forecast the probability that he might suffer eclipse--a temporary
eclipse--but to an _artiste_ none the less distasteful--in the shadow of
the Sin Killer, for since the Sin Killer had originally promulgated the
idea of the procession it was only natural and only human that the Sin
Killer should devise to himself the outstanding place of honor in it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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