A day or two after we reached St.Louis,I was walking along Fourth Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me,then stopped,came back,inspected me narrowly,with a clouding brow,and finally said with deep asperity--'Look here,HAVE YOU GOT THAT DRINK YET?'
A maniac,I judged,at first.But all in a flash I recognized him.
I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me,and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how--'Been a little slow,but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it.Come in and help.'
He softened,and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable.
He said he had seen my name in the papers,and had put all his affairs aside and turned out,resolved to find me or die;and make me answer that question satisfactorily,or kill me;though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise.
This meeting brought back to me the St.Louis riots of about thirty years ago.I spent a week there,at that time,in a boarding-house,and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall.We saw some of the fightings and killings;and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met,upon call,to be armed and go forth against the rioters,under command of a military man.
We drilled till about ten o'clock at night;then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town,and were sweeping everything before them.Our column moved at once.
It was a very hot night,and my musket was very heavy.
We marched and marched;and the nearer we approached the seat of war,the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got.I was behind my friend;so,finally,I asked him to hold my musket while Idropped out and got a drink.Then I branched off and went home.
I was not feeling any solicitude about him of course,because I knew he was so well armed,now,that he could take care of himself without any trouble.If I had had any doubts about that,I would have borrowed another musket for him.
I left the city pretty early the next morning,and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St.Louis,and felt moved to seek me out,I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not.
I ought to have inquired,thirty years ago;I know that.
And I would have inquired,if I had had the muskets;but,in the circumstances,he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than I was.
One Monday,near the time of our visit to St.Louis,the 'Globe-Democrat'came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics,whereby it appeared that 119,448St.Louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before,and 23,102children attended Sunday-school.Thus 142,550persons,out of the city's total of 400,000population,respected the day religious-wise.I found these statistics,in a condensed form,in a telegram of the Associated Press,and preserved them.
They made it apparent that St.Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time.
But now that I canvass the figures narrowly,I suspect that the telegraph mutilated them.It cannot be that there are more than 150,000Catholics in the town;the other 250,000must be classified as Protestants.Out of these 250,000,according to this questionable telegram,only 26,362attended church and Sunday-school,while out of the 150,000Catholics,116,188went to church and Sunday-school.