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By Root 1496 0

a million people on the grounds. Everybody knew that there weren’t that many people in the whole world, and they wondered if Willis had taken to strong drink, or perhaps even had become a dope fiend. Willis tried to convince them that there had been an enormous bird cage, covering over an acre, which contained exotic birds of all sizes and colors, but the people told one another that that one was for the birds, and they wondered why Willis was sawing off such whoppers. Willis’s business began to fall off; most people preferred patronizing one of the other general stores rather than listen to Willis tell tall tales about the St. Louis World’s Fair. Even after he shut up about the subject, weeks later, his business was still bad, and he had to lay off his clerk and brother, John.

Laid off, John had nothing better to do than take his children and go off to see for himself what the St. Louis World’s Fair looked like. He loaded his wife and eight kids into the wagon and drove off up to Springfield, and they took the train from there. They had never seen a train before. Newton County is the only one of Arkansas’ seventy-five counties in which not one mile of railroad track has ever been laid, which perhaps more than any other statistic gives a good idea of how isolated it has always been. At the sight of the train, the children’s jaws dropped open and remained that way for the rest of the trip, which became increasingly awe-inspiring.

The World’s Fair, sure enough, was everything and more that Willis had said it was. “Uncle Willis didn’t tell the half of it,” remarked one of the boys. But John Ingledew, whatever his shortcomings, was smart. “Now listen to me, younguns,” he told his children on the return trip home. “Don’t breathe a word about that place to nobody, or I’ll whop the whey outen ye.” They had to wait at Jasper for a few days, until the children could close their jaws, before they went on home to Stay More. Whenever anyone asked John about St. Louis, he would reply that it was just like Stay More, except there was more of it. Folks lived in the same kind of houses, he said, but they had a couple of extry general stores, and a bridge across their creek. John won the respect of the town for his truthfulness, whereas Willis was practically disgraced.

This did not exactly change the expression of doom that was a permanent fixture of John’s face, but it made him feel superior to his younger brother for the first time, and, feeling superior, he established Stay More’s first fraternal organization, Ingledewville Lodge, No. 642, of the Free and Accepted Masonic Order. He could not persuade his father to join, but he signed up all his brothers, plus several Plowrights, Swains, Goes, Dinsmores, Chisms, Duckworths and Whitters, twenty-eight of them in all. None of them protested that the lodge was called Ingledewville Lodge, because that was customary. Everything about Masonry was customary, and some of the customs went all the way back to the knights of the Dark Ages.

The main custom of Masonry is secrecy, and that was what they liked best about it. The trappings of Masonry might not have been worth much to them, but they were secret, and the secret knowledge of them placed a man above his neighbors. Only the best men of Stay More belonged to the Masons; that was why there were only twenty-eight of them. At first John didn’t even want to invite Willis to join, because Willis was so inferior to him, but they needed a large private room for their Lodge, and the only one available was the back room of Willis’s store, and also they needed a “tiler,” who is the officer standing outside the door during meetings to guard the secrecy of the meetings, so John appointed Willis as tiler. He appointed himself Worshipful Master. The other offices were by election: Denton Ingledew was Senior Warden, Monroe Ingledew was Junior Warden, Long Jack Stapleton was Chaplain, Jim Tom Duckworth was Senior Steward, and so on. There was an office for every man—for example, Deputy Junior Deacon and Adjunct Associate Deputy Junior Steward—and each