Truman Baird settled the case and, after these letters had been appraised by the corporation’s attorney, he succeeded in extorting the sum of eight hundred dollars from the railway as recompense to the widow for the loss of her husband’s services.  I considered that the company would have given up at least five hundred more to avoid being sued for the death of a man who had been able to evoke those letters; but I did not say so, for the case was Truman’s and eight hundred dollars were many.  Westley Keyts thought they were, indeed, a great many, and outrageously excessive as a cold money valuation of Potts.  “She only got eight hundred dollars, but there’s them that thinks she skinned the company at that!” said Westley.

But there was no disposition to begrudge the widow a single dollar of this modest sum.  A jury of Little Arcadians would have multiplied it tenfold without a blush; for, while that little hoard endured, any citizen, however public spirited, could flavor with a certain grace his refusal to subscribe for a book.

To Solon Denney the thing came as a deep and divine relief.  In the satisfaction induced by it, he penned an obituary of Potts in which he employed the phrase “grim messenger of death” very cleverly indeed.  For matters had been going from bad to worse.  Murmurs at the demands of Mrs. Potts—­likened by Asa Bundy to a daughter of the horse leech—­had become passionately loud as our masses toiled expensively up that Potts-defined path of enlightenment.  The old sneer at Solon’s Boss-ship was again to be observed on every hand, that attitude of doubting ridicule, half-playful, half-contemptuous, which your public man finds more dangerous to his influence than downright hostility would be.

But the murmurs were again stilled, and Solon might breathe the peace of a golden age when as yet no Potts, male or female, had come unto us.

It was not felt at all that Solon’s genius for the discretion of public affairs had availed him in this latest crisis.  But the benefit was substantial, none the less, and the columns of the Argus were again buoyant as of yore.  It was at this time, I remember, that the Argus first spoke of our town as “a gem at beauty’s throat,” and, touching the rare enterprise of our citizens, declared that, “If you put a Slocum County man astride a streak of lightning, he’d call for a pair of spurs.”

For myself, I frankly mourned Potts.  For I saw now that he had been truly and finely of that Greek spirit—­one accepting gifts from the gods with a joyous young faith in their continuance.  I felt that he had divined more of the lesson of Greek art than his one-time love could write down in papers unending.  I should not have wished him back in Little Arcady, but I did breathe a prayer that he might in some early Greek elysium be indeed “Potts forever.”  Might it not be?  Had not that other paper on “the message of Emerson” hinted of “compensation” in a jargon that sounded authoritative?