Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/149

 was a prominent man in town who had publicly reviled him and criticized him and persecuted him, who had done that which cut him more deeply than all else, that is, he had impugned his motives and questioned his sincerity. In some human hunger for understanding, I suppose, Jones went to this man with his written statement of his position and asked him to read it, merely to read it. The fellow's answer was to snatch the paper from Jones's hand and tear it up in his face. It is easy to imagine what a man ordinarily would do in the face of such an amazing insult; surely, if ever, the time had come for the "shotgun and the club." Mayor Jones was large and powerful, he had been reared in the oil fields, where blows are quick as tempers; he was athletic, always in training, for he took constant physical exercise (one of the counts against him, indeed, was that he slept out of doors on the roof of his back porch, a bit of radicalism in those days, grown perfectly orthodox in these progressive times), and he was a Celt, naturally quick to resent insult, of a temperament prompt to take fire. But he turned away from the fellow, without a word.

He came to my office immediately afterward, and I saw that he was trying hard to master some unusual emotion. I shall never forget him as he sat there, telling me of his experience. After a little while his face broke into that beautiful smile of his, more beautiful than I had ever seen it, and he said:

"Well, I've won the greatest victory of my life; I have won at last a victory over myself, over my