In the second section rode the Rev. Wickliffe and the Rev. Shine; they were in a touring-car with its top flattened back. You might say they composed the second section. Carriages and automobiles rolling along immediately behind them bore the members of the official board of Emmanuel Chapel in sets of fours, and the chief financial contributors to the revival which this night would reach its climax. Flanking the carriages and following after them marched the living garnerings of the campaign--the converts to date, a veritable Gideon's Band of them, in number amounting to a host, and all afoot as befitting the palmer and the pilgrim. Established members of the congregation, in hired hacks, in jitneys, in rented and privately owned equipages, and also afoot came next.
Voluntarily aligned representatives of the colored population at large formed the tail of the column. Of these last there surely were hundreds. Hundreds more, in holiday dress now somewhat rumpled after a day of pleasure-seeking and pleasure-finding, lined the sidewalks to see this spectacle. Nowhere along the straightaway of the line of march did the pavements lack for onlookers, but nearing the end of the route, and especially where the wide vacant spaces of the Tennessee Street common had been preëmpted by the festal enterprises of Director General Æsop Loving and his confrères, the press became thicker and ever thicker. Here the crowds overflowed upon the gravel roadway, narrowing the thoroughfare to a lane through which the paraders barely might pass. They did pass, though at a lessened pace, until their front ranks had reached the approximate middle breadth of the old show-grounds, with the tabernacle looming against the sunset's dying fires an eighth of a mile on beyond.
It is necessary here and now that, taking our eyes from this scene, we hark back to the Wednesday evening preceding. It will be recalled that on this evening a certain motion was made and by acclamation adopted. The maker of the motion, as we know, was Tecumseh Sherman Glass; its beneficiary, as the reader shrewdly may have divined, was Cephus Fringe. Beforehand perhaps the Professor had had vague misgivings as to the part he was to play in the pageantry on the Eighth; perhaps in his mind he had forecast the probability that he might suffer eclipse--a temporary eclipse--but to an _artiste_ none the less distasteful--in the shadow of the Sin Killer, for since the Sin Killer had originally promulgated the idea of the procession it was only natural and only human that the Sin Killer should devise to himself the outstanding place of honor in it.