The climax of the romance occurred a few days later.  Perhaps the reader will remember the intense excitement into which the city was thrown when Eliza Jane, a colored woman, was served with a subpoena.  The Rubber Tribe encamped on the spot.  With his own hands William Pry placed a board upon two beer kegs in the street opposite Eliza Jane’s residence.  He and Violet sat there for three days and nights.  Then it occurred to a detective to open the door and serve the subpoena.  He sent for a kinetoscope and did so.

Two souls with such congenial tastes could not long remain apart.  As a policeman drove them away with his night stick that evening they plighted their troth.  The seeds of love had been well sown, and had grown up, hardy and vigorous, into a—­let us call it a rubber plant.

The wedding of William Pry and Violet Seymour was set for June 10.  The Big Church in the Middle of the Block was banked high with flowers.  The populous tribe of Rubberers the world over is rampant over weddings.  They are the pessimists of the pews.  They are the guyers of the groom and the banterers of the bride.  They come to laugh at your marriage, and should you escape from Hymen’s tower on the back of death’s pale steed they will come to the funeral and sit in the same pew and cry over your luck.  Rubber will stretch.

The church was lighted.  A grosgrain carpet lay over the asphalt to the edge of the sidewalk.  Bridesmaids were patting one another’s sashes awry and speaking of the Bride’s freckles.  Coachmen tied white ribbons on their whips and bewailed the space of time between drinks.  The minister was musing over his possible fee, essaying conjecture whether it would suffice to purchase a new broadcloth suit for himself and a photograph of Laura Jane Libbey for his wife.  Yea, Cupid was in the air.

And outside the church, oh, my brothers, surged and heaved the rank and file of the tribe of Rubberers.  In two bodies they were, with the grosgrain carpet and cops with clubs between.  They crowded like cattle, they fought, they pressed and surged and swayed and trampled one another to see a bit of a girl in a white veil acquire license to go through a man’s pockets while he sleeps.

But the hour for the wedding came and went, and the bride and bridegroom came not.  And impatience gave way to alarm and alarm brought about search, and they were not found.  And then two big policemen took a hand and dragged out of the furious mob of onlookers a crushed and trampled thing, with a wedding ring in its vest pocket and a shredded and hysterical woman beating her way to the carpet’s edge, ragged, bruised and obstreperous.

William Pry and Violet Seymour, creatures of habit, had joined in the seething game of the spectators, unable to resist the overwhelming desire to gaze upon themselves entering, as bride and bridegroom, the rose-decked church.

Rubber will out.

IX