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CHAPTER XXIII
THE forthright removal of Peck Bradley from the scene of his cleverly planned but pernicious activities was considered an unqualified moral triumph in Irontown, and out of the sweet soil of the lynching flowered other blossoms of practical morality. For example, there was Caly Stegall, who advertised soft drinks and sold hard ones. It had been impossible to fix the misdemeanour of bootlegging upon Mr. Stegall, so many loopholes had the law, but about two weeks after Peck Bradley's sudden demise, a group of public-spirited citizens visited Stegall's home at midnight, rode him out of town on a rail and told him to stay out. He did, and that surely was another good riddance.
Then there were certain women in Irontown whose reputations were not the most honest, but every legal tribunal knows how difficult it is to prove such offences positively. These technicalities were cut short by a delegation of citizens waiting on the offenders. One Negro woman was stripped and horse-whipped as an example; the others fled; a commendable result.
Gambling places were raided, oddly enough by the very men who once had whiled away their time in them. In short, Irontown was in the midst of one of those acute moral reforms which sometimes seize upon a town, a county, a state, or even the great American nation as a whole; and it was working great observable good, as it often does.
As party to these reprisals Abner Teeftallow felt certain qualms in helping rid Irontown of bootleggers, gamblers, and women of ill repute, when he remembered that at irregular intervals he had gambled with Linters and had
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