Greater heat than that of these blazing days could not have kept one of the sages from attending the conclave now.For the battle was on in Canaan: and here, upon the National House corner, under the shadow of the west wall, it waxed even keener.Perhaps we may find full justification for calling what was happening a battle in so far as we restrict the figure to apply to this one spot; else where, in the Canaan of the Tocsin, the conflict was too one-sided.The Tocsin had indeed tried the case of Happy Fear in advance, had convicted and condemned, and every day grew more bitter.
Nor was the urgent vigor of its attack without effect.Sleepy as Main Street seemed in the heat, the town was incensed and roused to a tensity of feeling it had not known since the civil war, when, on occasion, it had set out to hang half a dozen "Knights of the Golden Circle." Joe had been hissed on the street many times since the inimical clerk had whistled at him.Probably demonstrations of that sort would have continued had he remained in Canaan; but for almost a month he had been absent and his office closed, its threshold gray with dust.There were people who believed that he had run away again, this time never to return; among those who held to this opinion being Mrs.Louden and her sister, Joe's step-aunt.Upon only one point was everybody agreed: that twelve men could not be found in the county who could be so far persuaded and befuddled by Louden that they would dare to allow Happy Fear to escape.The women of Canaan, incensed by the terrible circumstance of the case, as the Tocsin colored it--a man shot down in the act of begging his enemy's forgiveness--clamored as loudly as the men: there was only the difference that the latter vociferated for the hanging of Happy; their good ladies used the word "punishment."And yet, while the place rang with condemnation of the little man in the jail and his attorney, there were voices, here and there, uplifted on the other side.People existed, it astonishingly appeared, who LIKED Happy Fear.These were for the greater part obscure and even darkling in their lives, yet quite demonstrably human beings, able to smile, suffer, leap, run, and to entertain fancies;even to have, according to their degree, a certain rudimentary sense of right and wrong, in spite of which they strongly favored the prisoner's acquittal.