Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/256

244 rise; they could hardly have anticipated the effect of the climate on their tender plant. It shot up like Jack's beanstalk.

boom and boom methods were under way and in full swing before even a ripple reached Arguello. People knew vaguely that there was something doing down South; but Arguello was cut off from easy communication, so that she did not at once feel the impulse of new movements. Her inhabitants did not travel much, except in the course of business; and those who did travel were not of the type to be interested in nor to catch new methods. It remained for Ephraim Spinner, the man of quick perceptions and quicksilver imagination, to see and bring back with him an idea. This idea he hastened to share with Boyd. "It is the waking up we've been waiting for!" cried Spinner. "And we can be in on the ground floor, if we want to be. It hasn't struck here, yet; but it is going to."

Boyd listened attentively; made no decisive comment, but took a trip south. Spinner offered to accompany him and show him the ropes, but he preferred to go alone. The morning after his arrival he breakfasted in good season, and sauntered down Spring Street to see what he could see.

He had not long to search. Down the street came a brass band dressed in gaudy gold and white uniforms, blaring stridently to the zenith. At its head strutted a drum major with tall bearskin shako, and whirling and throwing aloft a brass-headed baton that glittered in the sun. Behind it marched two men dressed as flunkeys in wine-coloured, brass-buttoned, stripe-waistcoated liveries, with white stockings. They bore an outspread banner of white bearing a legend in gold: