“Oh, come on,” he urged again after a moment, “we’ll stop by the fence under that cherry-tree and nobody will see us.”

As he spoke he turned his horse toward the paling fence, while Molly hesitated, hung back, regretted bitterly that she had come, and then slowly followed.  In the cherry-tree, which was laden with red cherries a little over ripe, birds were quarrelling, and for a minute she could not separate the sound of Abel’s voice from the confusion around her.  Then his figure, standing under a stunted cedar on a small raised platform, which was used for school celebrations or out-of-door concerts, appeared to gather to itself all that was magnetic and alive in the atmosphere.  Of the whole crowd, including Gay, the speaker in his blue shirt, with his head thrown back enkindled from the fire of his enthusiasm, seemed the one masculine and dominating intelligence.  To Molly he represented neither orator nor reformer, but a compelling force which she felt rather than heard.  What he said she was hardly aware of—­for it was emotion not thought that he aroused in her.

“That’s good!” said Jonathan quietly at her side, and glancing at him she realized that Gay was regarding merely a picturesque embodiment of the economic upheaval of society.  Judging the scene from Gay’s standpoint, she saw that it was, after all, only the ordinary political gathering of a thinly settled community.  The words, she knew now, were familiar.  It was the personality of the speaker which charged them with freshness, with inspiration.  What was it but the old plea for social regeneration through political purity—­an appeal to put the dream of the idealist into the actual working of the State, since it is only through the brain of the dreamer that a fact may be born into the world.

“He can speak all right,” observed Gay carelessly, “there’s no doubt about that.”

“I’d like to go, if you don’t mind,” answered Molly, and turning she rode softly away from the picnic grounds through the scattered hamlet, too small to be called a village.  An old man, killing slugs in a potato field, stared after them with his long stemmed corn-cob pipe hanging loosely between his lips.  Then when they had disappeared, he shook his head twice very solemnly, spat on the ground, and went on patiently murdering slugs.

“’Tis that fly-up-the-creek miller as they’ve come arter,” he muttered.  “Things warn’t so in my day, so they oughtn’t to be so now.  I ain’t got no use for anything that ain’t never been befo’.”

And in different language, the same thought was stirring in Gay’s mind.  “It’s all stuff and nonsense, these hifaluting radical theories.  There’s never been a fairer distribution of property and there’s never going to be.”

They rode in silence under the flowering locust-trees in the single street, and then, crossing the grassy common, cantered between two ripening fields of oats, and turned into the leafy freshness of the Applegate road.  The sun was high, but the long, still shadows had begun to slant from the west, and the silence was brooding in a mellow light over the distance.