Tyre had seen better days. In the noble old time of stage coaches it had been a thriving, almost bustling place, with mills turning out wares celebrated through all the section, with a starch factory which literally gave the name of the town to its product as a standard of excellence, and with taverns which were rarely left with a vacant room more than a day at a time. In those days it had been a power in politics too. The old court-house which frowned now upon the village green, elbowing the more modern brick jail out of public sight, was supposed to have echoed in its time about the tallest eloquence that any court-house in the State had heard. From Tyre had come to Albany, and Washington as well, a whole cluster of strong, shrewd, stalwart-tongued politicians, who forced their way to speakerships, and judgeships, and even senatorships, like veritable sons of Anak. It was a Tyre man who had beaten Aaron Burr in such and such a memorable contest. It was another Tyre man who, by assuming lead of the distracted Bucktails at a certain crucial period, had defeated sundry machinations of the Clintonians, and sounded the death-knell of their hopes. There was a Tyre man in the Regency, of course, and he is popularly believed, at least in Jay County, to have held that storied syndicate up by the tail, so to speak, years after it would otherwise have collapsed. At every State Convention, in this fine old time, inferior politicians from other sections dissembled their appetites until Tyre had been fed to satiety. And in the sowing season of politics, when far-seeing candidates began arranging for a share in the autumn harvest of offices, no aspirant felt that his seed had a chance of sprouting until he had paid a pilgrimage to Tyre, and invoked the mercy, if he could not have the smiles, of the magnates there.
It was due doubtless to the traditions of these visits, when Judge Gould, the hero of the great Biggs murder case, would be at the Nedahma House, and Senator Yates, who unravelled and dragged to the pitiless light the masonic plot to blow up Mount Vernon, was to be found at the turnpike tavern, and both would keep pretty well in-doors toward evening because Colonel De Lancey, who had shot four men before Hamilton’s death discredited duelling, was in town on private business—it was no doubt due to these memories that Tyre kept up its political tastes and, in a faded way, its political prestige, long after its material importance and interest had vanished. The mills were remembered now only by the widened reaches in the stream where their dams had once been; the starch factory was a dismantled ruin, from which what woodwork the lightning had spared had long since been abstracted for fuel; one of the taverns was now a private dwelling, and the other two neither profited themselves nor pleased the wives of the village by their dependence upon local custom. But the men of Tyre were still intense politicians. Indeed their known virulence had given to their county sobriquet of Jayhawker an almost national fame. Nowhere else in the State, proportionately, were so many weekly partisan papers taken—not tame, dispassionate prints, but the fire-eaters of both party presses, with incessant harrowing accounts of peaceful and confiding negroes being massacred in the South, on the one side, answered regularly on the other by long imposing tables of the money stolen by notorious criminals in the public service. This was the meat Tyre fed on, and contending editors could not serve it out too rank or highly peppered for its taste.
The one excitement of Tyre too—far transcending the county fair, which had only interested them casually, and which they had seen moved over to Sidon, on the line of the newly-extended railroad, without a protest—was a political convention. There would be such a crowd about the Court House then as scarcely the spectacle of its being consumed by flames could draw at another time. The freeholders of Tyre paid much more than their fair share of county taxes; they knew it, and did not grumble at the injustice. In fact it rather pleased them than otherwise to see their town rated on the Supervisor’s assessment-rolls according to its ancient wealth; the amercement was a testimonial to their dignity. Upstart towns like Sidon might wrangle over a few hundred dollars, and cheapen their valuation in the public eye by unworthy tricks; Tyre would have none of such small doings; it would preserve a genteel exterior, even if it had to eat pork grease on its buckwheat cakes in domestic seclusion. But if there had been so much as a hint about holding a county convention anywhere else than in the Tyre Court House—then, to use Abe Beekman’s homely expression, you would have seen the fur fly! Other towns might indulge their modern and mercenary tastes in county fairs, railroads, gas, reservoirs and the like, to their hearts’ content, but they must keep their hands off political conventions. He would be a brazen Jayhawker indeed who should question Tyre’s monopoly of these!
So new generations of county politicians followed precedent without thought of murmuring, and accepted the discomforts of jolting in crowded democrat-wagons over the stony, bleak hills to Tyre, of eating cold, bad dinners in the smoke-dried, draughty barracks which had once been hotels, of drinking limed well-water with the unspeakable whiskey—as natural consequences of being interested in the public affairs of the nation. This resignation of other Jay County towns to the convention claims of Tyre swelled into a spirit of truculent defence every two years, when the question of a joint Congressional gathering for all three counties of the district came up. Precisely what would have happened if the bigger shires of Dearborn and Adams had combined in a refusal to come to Tyre, I am not bold enough to guess. The general feeling would probably have been that a crisis had arisen in which Jay County could do no less than dissolve her relations with the Federal Union.
Fortunately no such menace of secession and civil war was ever suffered to rise glowering on the horizon. Abe Beekman, the boss of Jay County, always managed to have Tyre designated by the District Committee, and the politicians from Dearborn and Adams amiably agreed to console themselves for the nuisances of the trip by getting as much fun out of it as was possible—which, reduced to details, meant bringing their own whiskey, sternly avoiding the dangerous local well-water, and throwing at each other during the dinner scramble such elements of the repast as failed to attract their metropolitan tastes. This procedure was not altogether to the liking of the Tyre landlords, who, however, compensated themselves for the diminution of the bar traffic and the havoc wrought in the dining room, by quadrupling their accustomed prices; and the invasion of boisterous aliens had its seamy side for the women of the place, who found it to the advantage of their dignity to stop indoors during the day which their husbands and fathers consecrated to the service of the Republic. But Tyre as a whole was proud and gratified.
On the morning when the adjourned District Convention was to reassemble, political interest throbbed with feverish quickness in all the pulses of Tyre.
The town could remember many a desperate and stirring combat on its well-worn battle-field, but never such a resolute, prolonged, and altogether delightful contest as this. The fight had its historic side, too. Every voter in Tyre could remember, or had been taught in all its details about, the famous struggle of the wet fall of ’34, when Hiram Chesney, the Warwick of Jay County then, locked horns with the elder Seth Fairchild of Dearborn, and, to pursue the local phraseology, they pawed up more earth in their fierce encounter than would dam the Nedahma creek. Poor Hiram had finally been worsted, falling ignobly on his native stamping ground, before the eyes of his own people. He had long since passed away, as Warwicks should when their king-making sinews have lost their strength. But another boss, perhaps in some ways a greater boss, had arisen in Jay County, in the person of Abram K. Beekman, and now, nearly half a century later, he was to try conclusions with a second Fairchild of Dearborn—a grandson of the hero of ’34. They had grappled once, a fortnight before, and had had to separate again, after an all-day tug, with a fall credited to neither. Now, in a few hours, they were to confront each other once more. What wonder that Tyre was excited!
The two gladiators had been the observed of all observers during the preliminary skirmish. Tyre was almost disposed to fancy the Dearborn man. In his portly, black-clad figure, his round, close-shaven, aquiline face, and his professional capacity for oratory, he had recalled pleasantly the days when the Jay County bar was famous. The local magnate, Beekman, was not a lawyer; he could not make a speech; he didn’t even look as if he could make a speech. He had none of the affable, taking ways which Albert Fairchild used to such purpose, but was brusque, self-contained, prone to be dogmatic when he was not taciturn. Thus the balance turned enough in Fairchild’s favor to about offset Beckman’s claims to local sympathy as a Jayhawker, and put Tyre people in excellent mental trim to enjoy all the points of the duel.
For in the minds of these practical politicians, it was a duel. There was a third candidate, named Ansdell, it was true, supported by nearly all the Adams delegation, but then he was a reformer, and had not even come to the Convention, and Tyre had no use for him. A county boss who had got a machine, and purposed doing certain definite things with it, either to build up himself or crush somebody else, was natural and comprehensible; but a man who set himself up as a candidate, without the backing of any recognized political forces, who came supported by delegates elected in a public and lawless manner without reference to the wishes of leaders, and who pretended that his sole mission in politics was to help purify it—who could make head or tail out of that?
Thus Tyreans talked with one another, as the village began to take on an air of liveliness after breakfast, and groups slowly formed on the sidewalks in front of the two hotels. There were many shades of diverging opinion as to the merits and the prospects of the approaching contest, but on one matter of belief there was a consensus of agreement. The fight lay between Beekman and Fairchild, and the third man—it was interesting to note that ignorance of his name was fashionable—wasn’t in the race. Steve Chesney, whose right to speak oracularly on politics was his sole inheritance from the departed Warwick, his father, summed up the situation very clearly from the standpoint of Tyre when he said, leaning comfortably against the post office hitching post, and pointing his arguments in the right places with accurate tobacco juice shots at a crack in the curb:
“The hull p’int’s this: Dearborn’s got seventeen votes, ain’t she?—solid for Fairchild. Then he’s got two ’n’ Adams, ain’t he?—makin’ nineteen ’n’ all. Th’ dude, he’s got what’s left of Adams, fifteen ’n’ all. Jay County’s only got ten votes, ain’t she? Very well, they’re solid for Abe. Now! Twenty-three’s a majority of the convention. Git twenty-three ’n’ that settles it. Th’ reformer, he needs eight votes. Kin he git ’em? Whair frum? Frum Dearborn? Not much! Frum Jay? Well, not this evening! Count him out then. Of th’ other two, Fairchild wants four votes, Abe needs thirteen. Thet looks kind o’ sickly for Abe, mebbe yeh think. But bear in mine thet th’ Adams men air pledged agin’ Fairchild by th’ same resolution which bines ’em to th’ other chap. Abe wasn’t a candidate then ’n’ he didn’t git barred out. But they made a dead set agin Fairchild all through Adams, on ’count of his funny work at th’ State Convention. So, Adams kin go to Abe, ’n’ she can’t go to Fairchild. I tell yeh, Jay can’t be beat, ef she’s only a mine to think so—thet is, of course, ef Dearborn fights fair. Ef she don’t, p’raps she may win to-day, but I tell yeh, in thet case ther won’t be enough left of her candidate come ’lection night to wad a hoss-pistol with.”
The Jay County delegates had begun to straggle into town, and percolate aimlessly through the throngs in and about the bar-rooms, listening to the discussions, and exchanging compliments and small talk with acquaintances. Pending the appearance of their leader there was nothing else for them to do. There was a rumor that Abe Beekman was in town, sending for men as he wanted to see them, one by one, but nobody professed to be in the secret of his hiding place, and nobody dreamed of attempting to find out what Abe wished to keep dark.
The Adams County men, delegates and others, came over the hill from the Spartacus station in a carryall, with four horses, and created a genuine sensation as they drew up with a great clatter and splashing of mud in front of the Nedahma House, and descended jauntily from the rear step to the curb-stone. The natives eyed them all with deep interest, for upon their action depended the issue of the day, but there was a special excitement in watching the nine delegates with stove-pipe hats and gloves, and tight rolled umbrellas, who came from Tecumseh itself. Tecumseh was the only city in the district, or the whole section, for that matter, and Jay County people timidly, wistfully dreamed of its gilded temptations, its wild revels of sumptuous gayety, its dazzling luxuriance of life, as shepherd boys on the plain of Dura might have dreamed of the mysteries and marvels of Babylon. It was something, at least, to touch elbows with men whose daily life was passed in Tecumseh.
Such of the younger Tyreans as had been introduced to these exalted creatures on their previous visit crowded around them now, to deferentially renew the acquaintance, and shine before their neighbors in its reflected light.
Then the news filtered through the groups round about that Ansdell himself had come up this time, and was the short, wiry little man with the drab overcoat and the sharp black eyes. This aroused a fleeting interest, and there was some standing on tip-toe to get a good view of him, but it could not last long, for Ansdell as a politician was not a tangible thing on which the tendrils of Tyre’s imagination could get a real grip.
It was of more importance to learn whether the views of the Adams delegates had undergone any change—whether a new light had dawned upon them in the interim. They submitted graciously to the preliminary test of drinks at the bar, and pretended with easy affability to remember distinctly the various Tyre men who came up and recalled their acquaintance of a fortnight ago, but they had nothing to say that was to the purpose. They were waiting; they would see what turned up; they would certainly vote for Ansdell on the first ballot; further than that they couldn’t say, but they saw no reason now why they shouldn’t keep on voting for him; still, perhaps something might happen—this and nothing more.
Meanwhile there was an uneasy whisper going the rounds to the effect that the two Adams men who had previously voted for Fairchild were now for Ansdell, having succumbed to local pressure during the fortnight. The story could not be verified, for the two gentlemen in question had secreted themselves upon their arrival, and the other Adams men only grinned bland mystery when interrogated on the subject. This worried the Tyre men a good deal more than they would have liked to admit, but there was a certain element of pleasure in it, too, for it added piquancy to the coming fight.
The wooden minute hand of the old clock on the court house cupola had laboriously twitched along to the zenith of the dial once more, marking ten o’clock; only half an hour remained now before the time for the Convention to reassemble, and the Dearborn delegates were still absent. People began to stroll toward the court house, and casually attach themselves to the outskirts of the cluster of saturnine, clean-shaven, thin-featured old villagers, in high black stocks and broad-brimmed soft hats, who stood on the steps, behind the fluted columns of the building’s ambitious Grecian front, and chewed tobacco voraciously while they set up the rival claims of Martin Van Buren and Francis Granger, or mumblingly wrangled over the life and works of De Witt Clinton. These old men, by reason of the antiquity and single-heartedness of their devotion to their country, had two inalienable and confirmed rights: to sit on the platform close by the speakers when the Declaration of Independence was read each Fourth of July and to have the first chance for seats when the doors were opened at a political Convention.
At last the eyes of those who had lingered about the Turnpike Tavern were gladdened by the sight of the Dearborn crowd, driving furiously up in three or four vehicles. Milton Squires was in the foremost wagon, and he was the first to alight.
He trembled and turned around swiftly as a man laid a hand on his shoulder.
“What d’yeh want?” he demanded, with nervous alertness.
The man whispered in his ear: “Abe Beekman is over in the back settin’ room at Blodgett’s, ’n’ he wants to see your man Fairchile right off.”
Milton had regained his composure. “So do I want to see him. Whair abaouts is he? I was to meet him here.”
“There ain’t been no sign of him here, this mornin’. Nobuddy ’n Tyre’s laid eyes on him, so far’s I kin fine aout.”
“Thet’s cur’ous,” said Milton reflectively. “He started to drive over early enough. We cum by train, expectin’ to fine him here. P’raps he’s seen Beekman by this time, on th’ quiet.”
“No, he ain’t!” The messenger’s tone was highly positive.
“Then mebbe I’d better go ’n’ see Beekman myself. Whair is Blodgett’s?”
The man led the way off the main street, to a big, clap-boarded, dingy white house, fronting nowhere in particular, and stopped at the gate.
“Ain’t you comin’ in?” Milton asked him.
“I dasen’t.”
There were two strange men in the low-ceilinged, grimly-furnished “settin’ room,” as Milton was ushered into the presence of the Boss, but at a gesture from this magnate they went out; the Boss surveyed the new comer without a word of greeting or comment.
Mr. Beekman was a tall, angular man, past the prime of life, as was shown by the gray in his thick hair, curling at the ends, and in the stiff, projecting ruff of beard under his chin. His face was thin, hungry, with a plaintive effect of deep lines, and his great blue-black eyes were often tearful, like a young robin’s, in their intent watchfulness. He was almost wholly Dutch in parentage—of that silent, persistent, quietly-masterful race which, despite all the odds, has still held more than its own in Stuyvesant’s State—and the descent showed itself in the dusky hue of his skin. He had never been a wealthy man, though he came of a family decently supplied with substance, and of long settlement in the county. He had climbed to his present eminence after a long career in local politics, by that process of exhaustion which we call the survival of the fittest. Having attained it, his rule was that of a just despot, rewarding and binding still more closely to him the faithful, remorselessly crushing all signs of rivalry, and putting the recalcitrant without pity to fire and sword. He had an almost supernatural faculty of organizing information, and getting at the motives of men. He sniffed treachery as a deer in the breeze sniffs the dog, and he had an oriental way of striking with cruel swiftness, before anybody but the guilty victim suspected offence. Withal, he was a kindly man to those who deserved well of him, an upright citizen according to his lights, and a profound believer in his party.
He sat now chewing an unlighted cigar, with his feet on the hearth of the stove, and contemplated Milton at his leisure. He did not like Milton at all, and one of his chief reasons for doubting the real ability of Albert Fairchild was his choice of such an agent and confidant. At last he said, curtly:
“It’s you, is it? I’ve got no business with you! Where’s Fairchild?”
There was something in Beekman’s eager, searching way of looking at a man with those big bright eyes of his which, coupled with the question, embarrassed Milton, and he fumbled with his hat as he repeated the explanation he had given to the messenger. He was annoyed with himself for being thus disturbed.
The Boss looked his visitor out of countenance once more. Then he said: “Sit daown! Well, what is it to be?”
‘Milton grinned, and leaned forward familiarly in his chair.
“I sh’d ruther think that was fur you to say.”
“Oh, you think so, do yeh? You imagine you’ve got me on the hip, ay?”
“Well, p’raps we’re no jedge, but it sorts o’ looks that way, now, don’t it?” Milton tipped back his chair, satisfiedly, and put one of his big feet up on the hearth, to dispute possession with the Boss.
Beekman reflected for a minute: then he began, after glancing at the clock:
“There’s no time to waste. I might as well talk up ’n’ daown with yeh. Your man Fairchild makes me tired. Ef he’d set his heart on goin’ to Congress, why on airth didn’t he come to me in the first place, ’n’ say so? It could ’a’ been arranged, easy’s slidin’ off a log. But no, instid of that, he must go ’n’ work up th’ thing his own way, ’n’ then come ’n’ buck agin me in my own caounty, ’n’ obleege me to fight back. D’yeh call that sense? He’s smart enough in his way, I grant yeh. He’s fixed up a putty fair sort o’ organisation in Dearborn, although it can’t last long, simply because it’s all built up on money, ’n’ I don’t go a cent on that kind of organising. Still it’s good enough in its way. But, he made his mistake in lettin’ the idea run away with him that he could skeer me into a conniption fit with his musharoon organisation. He didn’t knaow me. He never took the trouble to find aout abaout me. He jest took it fur granted that I’d crawl daown aout o’ my tree, like Davy Crockett’s coon, as soon’s he pinted his gun at me. Well, I didn’t come worth a cent. Then, when he faound aout that he’d struck a snag, ’n’ that Dearborn County wasn’t the hull deestrick, he turns raoun’ ’n’ aouts with his wallet, ’n’ tries to hire me to come daown. Fur that’s what you was here for last week, ’n’ you knaow it’s well’s I do.”
Milton tried to get in some words here, of dissent or explanation, but the Boss would not hear them.
“Lem me go on; ’s no use your lyin’. That was Fairchild’s second mistake. He thought politics was all money. Ef I was poorer than Job’s turkey, he couldn’t buy me to so much as wink an eye fur him. I’m not in politics fur what I kin make aout of it. I’m in because I like it; because it’s meat ’n’ drink to me; because I git solid, substantial comfort aout of it. Ther’s satisfaction in carryin’ yer eend; there’s pretty nigh as much in daownin’ them that’s agin yeh. Jest naow I’m a thinkin’ a good deal what fun it ’d be to let the floor aout from under your man altogether, ’n’ nominate this feller from Tecumsy.”
“But,” broke in Milton, “you’re a candidate yer-self, ’n’——”
“Wait till I’m threw, will yeh? I said, I’m leanin’ a good deal jest naow to’rd this man from Tecumsy. I c’d beat him easy ’nough at the polls, ef he turned cranky, but I daoubt ef it ’d be wuth while. I ain’t seen him yet, but I’m told he’s here, ’n’ ef I like his looks durn me ef I ain’t a mine to nominate him. He can’t do no harm, even ef he tries. These reform spurts don’t winter well. They never last till spring. The boys lose their breath for a few months. But then they git daown to work agin, and baounce the reformers to the back seats where they belong. But it ’d be one thing to elect a high-toned, kid-gloved, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-maouth kind o’ man like what’s-his-name, ’n’ a hoss o’ quite another color to ’lect Fairchild. He’d make me trouble from the word ‘go!’ Understan’, I ain’t afraid of his meddlin’ with me here in Jay caounty; not a bit of it. But he’d use his position to cripple me in the deestrick. The present Congressman tried that on— ’n’ you ain’t so much as heerd his name mentioned fur a re-nomination. But it was bother ’nough to squelch him. I ain’t goin’ to hev it to do all over agin.”
“Right you air, tew!” Milton responded.
The Boss held up his hand to forbid further interruption, while he looked curiously at his visitor, as if puzzled by his acquiescence. He went on:
“Ef you was a man of any readin’ you’d hev heerd of a custom among Europe-ian kentries, when one whips another, of makin’ the under dog in the fight pull aout his front teeth, like. The beaten kentry has to tear daown its forts, ’n’ blow up its men-o’-war, ’n’ so on, jest as a guarantee not to make any more trouble. Well, ef I’d concluded to hev any dealin’s at all with Fairchild, that’s what I’d hev done with him. I’d ’a’ made him turn over the appintment of all Dearborn’s men on the deestrick Committee; ’n’ I’d ’a had a written agreement that half the Postmasters in Adams ’n’ Dearborn, as well as all in Jay, should be o’ my namin’. My wife’s brother should hev hed the Thessaly post office, tew, right under Fairchild’s nose, so’s to keep an eye on him. It’s the duty of every man to purvide for his own fam’ly.”
“Nothin’ small about you! You only wanted the hull airth!” chuckled Milton, ingratiatingly.
“No, it was Fairchild who wanted the airth ’n’ thought he’d got it, ’n’ while he was deliberatin’ whether he’d have it braowned on both sides or not, lo ’n’ behold I went in ’n’ took it away from him slick ’n’ clean.”
The Boss rose as he was speaking, reached for his overcoat and put it on. “Time’s up!” he said, sententiously.
Milton had risen too, and placed himself between Beekman and the door. “There’s seven minutes yit,” he said eagerly, “I’ve got something yeh can’t afford to miss. Don’t you want th’ nomination yer-self?”
“No. What good’d Washington be to me? New York State’s big enough for me. If yeh don’t understand that I put my name before the Convention jest to hold my caounty together, ’n’ block Dearborn, yer a dummed sight bigger fool than even I took yeh to be.”
“But s’pose Dearborn’s votes cud be thrown to you! They’d nominate yeh! What’d thet be wuth to yeh?”
“What ’d it be wuth?” mused the Boss, looking intently at Milton.
“Yes! in ready money, here! naow!”
The Boss took up his hat, meditatively, and gazed at his companion again. “Did you knaow th’ man that brought yeh here?” he asked.
“Yes—’twas Jim Bunner, wa’nt it?”
“That man ’d wade threw fire ’n’ water fer me. Yeh couldn’t tempt him with a hundred thaousan’ dollars to so much as say an evil word abaout me, let alone injure me. Yit he’s desprit poor, ’n’ th’ unly thing I ever did fer him in my life, excep’ givin’ him a day’s work naow ’n’ then, was to help him bury his child decently, ten years ago. But I know my men! Here Fairchild has took you off a dunghill, where all yer hull humly, sore-eyed, misrubble fam’ly belong, ’n’ made a man of yeh, trusted his affairs to yeh, clothed yeh, fed yeh, yes, ’n’ let yeh fatten yerself on the profits of his farm—and naow yeh turn ’raound ’n’ offer to sell him aout. By gum! I was right. Fairchild hain’t got no sense! ’N’ you, yeh skunk, git aout! Don’t yeh walk on the same side of the street with me, or I’ll swat the hull top of yer head off!”
“We’ll nominate Ansdell ’fore you git a chance!” snarled Milton.
The Convention met, depressed by the evident feeling of disappointment among the spectators, who swarmed on all the high, pewlike seats back of the bar railing, while the delegates sat in rows of chairs inside the space reserved in term time for the lawyers. There was ground enough for this disappointment. Fairchild had not come, and the prospects of a good speech, or even a bitter personal contest, were fading away. No one had an explanation for his absence. The Dearborn delegates were more in the dark than outsiders even, for they had been told to meet him in Tyre, before the Convention, and that he would breakfast at the Turnpike Tavern. Milton reassured them for a time by enlarging upon the bad condition of the roads, but even he ended as they took their seats, by professing some fear of an accident. “However, I’ll cast th’ solid vaote, th’ same as before, I suppose?” he said, and the bondsmen nodded assent.
The proceedings opened tamely. The Chairman was a professor from the Tecumseh Academy; the other counties each had a secretary. Two written announcements were handed up to be read, one that Milton Squires was authorized to cast seventeen votes for Dearborn County, the other naming a man to perform a similar function for the ten votes of Jay. There was to be no break yet awhile, apparently, in the two machine counties. But—what would Adams do?
As this question flashed through the minds of the assemblage, one of the Adams delegates rose, walked to the bench, gave a paper to the presiding officer, and then joined the little throng of spectators to one side. Did this mean that he left the Convention? What did it mean? Experienced observers began to feel that something startling was coming.
The paper being read, turned out to be an announcement that Abram K. Beekman had been substituted in the Adams County delegation for the delegate who had just vacated his seat, and as the words died away the Boss himself pushed his way down the aisle, threw his long leg over the bar-rail, and took his seat. The master of Jay County getting substituted for Adams County—here was a mystery! Did it portend that Adams had been won for Beekman’s candidature? Yes, it must mean that—and Tyre’s heart leapt for joy. Or no—it couldn’t mean that. The Boss would hardly thrust himself forward in that brash way if he were sure of winning—and Tyre’s heart sank again, sadly.
The Chairman announced that balloting would be resumed; that the counties would be called in alphabetical order, and that, in the case of Adams County, which did not signify a desire to vote as a unit, the names of the delegates would also be called in that order. Before the words were fairly out of his mouth a hundred shrewd brains had discovered that this meant Beekman’s being the first name called. But what was his game?
So perplexed were the men of Tyre with this problem that they almost forgot to cheer when their man rose to his feet, in response to his name. It was rarely that one saw Abe Beekman in Conventions; he preferred to run them from the outside; and no one in the hall had ever heard him make a speech. Imagine how they listened now!
He spoke with an almost boyish nervousness, resting his hands on the table before him, and clinging, as it were, with his eyes to the Chairman for support. What he said was brief, to the point, and worth repeating here:
“I got substituted, ez p’raps some of yeh hev guessed, because I wanted a word at the very start. I hev my reasons. I ain’t a’ goin’ to mention no names—” he darted a swift, significant glance over toward the Dearborn County men, singling out Milton for a second, then reverting his troubled gaze to the Chairman—“but I kin feel it in my bones that things ain’t on the square here. Ther’s a nigger in the fence. Mebbe it’s no business of mine to yank him aout, but it’s only fair to my caounty that we shouldn’t let anybody git ahead of us in doin’ what we want to dew. It’s trew that D. comes ahead o’ J. in the alph’bet, but”—and there was a momentary relaxation of his eager, sombre face as he enunciated this undoubted fact—“its jest as trew that A. comes in front o’ D. Ef any set o’ men—mind, I mention no names, but—ef any set o’ delegates come here with the idee o’ sellin’ their man aout, or o’ makin’ a combination which’ll put them solid with the next Congressman, and leave Jay aout in the cold, perhaps ’fore I’m threw they’ll see thet they bit off more’n their jaws could wag.
“Mr. Cheerman, I don’t want to go to Congress. I never ’v’ hed the least hankerin’ after it. This State of aours is good enough for me. I wouldn’t feel like myself ef I had to stan’ ’raoun’ ’n’ see chaps from Rhode Island or Floridy puttin’ on airs, and pretendin’ to cut as big a swath as New York did. I’m too much of a State man fer thet. I’d be itchin’ to jump on ’em all the while. So I want to say that I withdraw my name——”
The Hon. Elhanan Pratt rose here, his weazen little figure coming up with a spring like a jack-in-the-box, and squeaked out sharply: “I rise to a point of order. The Abram K. Beekman whose name is before this Convention is a Jay County man, nominated by Jay County, and voted for alone by Jay County. No Adams County man”—there was an elaborate sarcasm in the tone—“has any right to withdraw that name.”
“The point of order is well taken,” said the Chair.
“Well, in thet case I won’t ask to withdraw my name,” responded Beekman. “But I don’t think it’ll make much differ’nce. A wink is as good as a nod to a bline man. P’raps you kin git an idee by this time haow the Jay caounty cat’s goin’ to jump; p’raps you can’t. I’m-goin’ to vaote fer Mr. Richard Ansdell, ’n’ I wan’ to say——”
He was interrupted here by a stout, sharp burst of hand-clapping from the Adams delegates, and the few Adams men in the audience. The Tyre crowd were taken aback for an instant, and sat bewildered; then the fact that their man had played his game, and was acting as if he had won, inspired them to join tumultuously in the applause, though they were in total darkness as to the nature of the stakes played for.
The Boss went on: “I wan’ to say that I’ve never laid eyes on him but once, ’n’ never spoke a word with him in my life. But I ain’t lived all this while ’thaout learnin’ to read somethin’ of a man’s natur’ in his face. I believe he’s honest and straight-aout; I don’t believe there’s a crookid hair in his head. P’raps he’s got some naotions that we’d look on as finnickin’ up here in Jay, but I ain’t afeard o’ them. It’s better to hev a man standin’ so upright thet he bends back’rd, then to hev—— to hev—— the fact is, Mr. Cheerman, I think I’ve said ’baout enough. Th’ other candidate hain’t showed up today! P’raps it’s jest as well fur him that he hain’t. I guess he’ll consider that he’s got abaout threw with deestrick politics—but I don’t want to appear to be rubbin’ it in. The lawyers hev a Latin sayin’ abaout speakin’ nothin’ but good o’ the dead——”
Beekman stopped short. The Chairman had risen to his feet. Half the delegates had followed his example, and were gazing intently at one of the tall, small-paned windows on the right side of the room. The three reporters who were sitting in the clerk’s desk had begun climbing over the rails and weaving their way between the chairs toward this same window. A hum of rising murmurs was running through the audience. Beekman, finding suddenly that he had no auditors, and disconcerted at the interruption, looked about the room for a moment, in search of an explanation. Then he followed the direction of the faces, and saw his retainer, Jim Bunner, clambering in under the lifted sash, and making strenuous, almost frantic, efforts meanwhile to attract his attention.
The man was breathless with excitement. He had climbed to the window from the roof of a low adjoining shed, and he could be heard now, as he found a footing on the back of a bench, in panting explanation of his conduct: “I hed to come this way! It’d ’a taken me tew long to’ve got threw the crowd at th’ door. I’ve got news for th’ Boss that won’t keep a second!”
He had pushed his way roughly through the throng now, brushing the reporters aside with especial impatience, and stood whispering, gasping his tidings in Beekman’s ear. The assemblage, silent now as the midnight watch, read in the deepening shadows and shocked severity of the Boss’s face that something far out of the ordinary had happened. Beekman appeared to be asking some questions, and pondering the whispered answers with increasing emotion.
The waiting hundreds, all on their feet now, watched him in a tremor of expectation.
At last he spoke, in a low, changed, yet extremely distinct voice:
“Mr. Cheerman, when I spoke abaout sayin’ nothin’ but good o’ th’ dead, I spoke unbeknaown to myself like a prophet. My friend here brings some awful news. Mr. Fairchild o’ Dearborn has jest been faound, stark ’n’ cold, crunched under his hosses ’n’ carriage, at the bottom of Tallman’s ravine!”
WHEN Seth awoke next morning, the position of the shadow cast by the thick green-paper curtain which covered the upper half of his window, told his practised faculties that it was very late, and impelled him to get out of bed, before he began at all to remember the several momentous events of the previous evening. As he dressed he strove to get these arranged in their proper order in his mind. Curiously enough there were certain inchoate recollections of feminine screams, of bursts of hysterical sobbing, of low but rough and strange male voices, doleful and haunting, which confusedly struggled for place in his sleepy thoughts, and seemed now to be a part of the evening’s occurrences, now to belong to this present morning, and to have come to him while he was nearing the end of his sleep.
As he passed his Aunt Sabrina’s door on his way to the stairs, he heard from within this same sound of suppressed weeping. This much at least of the unlocated recollections must have belonged to the first stages of his waking. “Another quarrel with Isabel!” he thought, as he descended the stairs. “Why is it that women must always be rowing it with each other!” Then his own dispute with Albert came fresh and overpowering in distinctness of impression across his mind, and the grounds of his grievance against the temper of the other sex faded away.
The living-room was vacant—the breakfast table still standing in the disorder of a meal just finished, and the shades down as though the day had not yet begun, although the clock showed it to be past ten. One of the folding doors of the parlor was open and he heard Isabel’s voice—it struck him as being strangely altered toward harshness of fibre—calling him to enter.
She stood, as he remembered her once before, in front of the piano. In the dusk of the drawn curtains—how gloomy and distrait everything about the house was this morning!—her figure was not very clearly visible, but her face was so pale that it seemed to be independent of any light. Her eyes had the effect of slight distention, and, in the shadow, were singularly dark of tint. They were gazing at him with a strange, intent, troubled look, and the expression of the pallid face went with this to disturb him vaguely. He said to himself, in the moment of waiting for her to speak, that he must keep his troth with Annie resolutely in mind, and, if needs be, not shrink from avowing and standing by it.
Isabel did not offer him her hand, or tender him any greeting whatever; only looked him through and through with that searching, unaccustomed gaze.
“I wouldn’t let them call you,” she said at last, speaking slowly, as if with an effort to both form these words, and repress others. “I knew that you needed the sleep.”
“I am sorry if I put anybody out by my laziness. But it is such a relief to be able to sleep like that once in a while, instead of having to get down to the office by eight.”
“I heard you go out last night. I heard you come in this morning. But not another soul in the house suspects that you were out; not one!”
The tone was unmistakably solemn, and weighted with deep feeling of some sort. Seth uneasily felt that a scene was impending, though he could not foresee its form. He felt, too, that the part he must play in it would of necessity be an awkward one.
“Yes,” he answered, “the night seemed too fine to stay in doors. Besides, I was nervous, and it did me good to walk it off. You can’t imagine how light-hearted I was when I returned, or—for that matter—how heavy-hearted when I went out.”
“Seth!”
The word came forth like the red flash from clouds which can no longer retain their pent-up, warring, swelling forces—an interjection of passion, of dread, of infinite troubling, of doubt wreathed in struggle with pain. She swayed slightly toward him, her hands clasped and stretched down and forward with a gesture of excessive perturbation, her great eyes lustrous with the excitement of this battle of emotions. Seth fancied that the dominant meaning of the look was reproach. He could not in the least see his way through the dilemma, or even understand it. He could only say to himself that the enchantment was ended, and that, come what might, he would not forget Annie.
The woman glided a step nearer to him. She put one hand to her brow with a sudden movement, and rested the other upon the piano, as if all at once conscious of needing support. With a painful little laugh, hysterically incongruous, she said:
“I am almost beside myself, am I not? I can not speak to you, it seems! And yet there is so much to say—or no! isn’t silence better still?” Her voice trembled as she went on: “For what could we say? How meaningless all our words would be in the face of—— of——-.”
She swept both hands to her eyes, with an impetuous gesture. Her form seemed to totter for a moment, so that Seth instinctively moved toward her. Then with a wild outburst of sobs she threw herself upon his breast, convulsed with incessant paroxysms of passionate weeping.
They stood thus together for some minutes. The young man, moved to great tenderness by her evident suffering, the cause of which he vaguely referred to the previous evening’s events, put his arm about her, whispered gently to her to be comforted, and stroked her hair with a soft, caressing touch. His hand touched her cheek, and she shuddered at the contact; then swiftly took the hand in hers, and raised it to her lips, murmuring between the sobs:
“Ungrateful! was it not done for me? Ah, dear, I shall not shudder again.”
She kissed the hand repeatedly, and pressed it to her bosom, as she spoke. She was still trembling like a leaf in his arms.
What could it all mean? he asked himself—and found no answer.
“We must be brave, dear,” she whispered now. “We must be on our guard every instant! Oh—h! they shall tear my heart out before they learn anything—so much as a syllable! We must keep our nerves.” She looked up into his astonished face, with almost a smile in her effort to strengthen his courage. “We will be brave, won’t we, mine? The test will come soon now. Perhaps in an hour they will bring—it!”
The trembling seized her frame, and shook it with cruel force. She buried her face in his breast with along, low cry of anguish, and sobbed there piteously, clinging to his hand still. Once she bent as if to kiss it again, but stopped, then turned her head aside, groaning “Oh how terrible! how terrible!”
The mystification now demanded light of some sort.
“What is it that is so terrible, my poor girl?” he asked. “What are they going to bring in an hour? Tell me, Isabel—my sweet sister—what does it all mean?”
She looked up into his face, with flickering suggestions of a mechanical smile at the comers of her pale lips, and with soft reproach in her eyes:
“Are you going to pretend to me, too, dear one? As if it were not all here in my heart—all, all! Ah, they shan’t get it! They shan’t get the shadow of a hint. You were home here all the while! You were asleep, sound asleep! If it be necessary, I could swear that I knew you were asleep, that—but no, there might be suspicion then. That we mustn’t have! Don’t fear for me, dear one! I shall be so discreet, so circumspect, watching, weighing every word! But oh—h—shall we dream of it? What if we should, and should cry out in our sleep—Oh-h, my God! my God!”
She sank again, convulsively clutching his hand, and quivering with feverish sobs upon his breast.
“Upon my soul, I don’t in the least know what you are talking about, Isabel! Do try and be calm, and tell me what it is!”
“He asks me!” she cried, with the same jarring, painful half-laugh he had heard before.
He held her from him, so that he might look into her face.
“Come, come! You are acting like a tragedy-queen on the stage. Do be sensible, and tell me what the matter is. You make me out of patience with you!”
He spoke in the vexed tone of a man needlessly perplexed with foolish mysteries. To her strained senses the simple expression of impatience was cruel mockery. She drew herself still further back from him, and dropped his hand. She was able to speak collectedly now:
“It is you who are the actor. You persist in playing the part—to me!”
“Still in riddles! What part, Isabel?”
“You will have me tell you? You want to hear the thing—in words?”
“Yes, by all means.”
She had never once taken her frightened, fascinated gaze from his face. “You insist on hearing from my lips that while you were out last night your brother was murdered——”
“What!”
“Murdered not four miles from here, as he was driving on the road, and his body thrown down into a ravine. Some boys found it. Fortunately, everybody thinks it was an accident. The men who brought the news thought so.”
She had spoken the words coldly, as if they were commonplaces and had been learnt by rote; but all the passion of her being was flaming in her eyes, which transfixed him with their stare.
“Mur-dered!” the young man stammered, feeling his senses reeling. “Albert murdered! Oh-h this must be nonsense! It is too terrible to think of even! You are out of your mind, Isabel!”
Her lips quivered: “It would be no wonder if I were, after this!”
The darkened rooms, the sobbing of his Aunt upstairs, the sounds of anguish that he knew now had partially awakened him, the crazed demeanor of Isabel—all these rose around him, like a black fog, to choke and confound his mind. Her fixed gaze burned him.
“Tell me what you know!” he cried, wildly.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to tell me what you know?” The chilling tone of the words startled him, as might a sudden contact of warm flesh with ice, before his bewildered brain had grasped their meaning. Then, like the crimson, all-pervading outburst of a conflagration, the thing dawned upon him, and his thoughts seemed blood-red in its hideous light. He pushed her from him fiercely, returning her piteous look of fright with a glare, and biting his tongue for words that should be great enough to fairly overwhelm her. As she cowered, he strode toward her: “You thought I did it!” he shouted at her.
Her only answer was to bury her face in her hands, and sink weakly at his knees.
He stood relentlessly glowering down upon her. The bitter, brutal words that might be heaped upon her, nay, that ought to be, crowded upon his tongue. It was too great a task to restrain them, to keep silence.
“You thought I did it,” he repeated. “And you didn’t object—you didn’t shrink from me! Why, I remember—my God!—you kissed my hand! You said: ‘it was done for me! ’ Oh-h!”
The woman at his feet, her face hidden, had been sobbing violently. She lifted her eyes now, and strove appealingly to conquer him with their power. She rose, unaided, to her feet, and confronted him. Terror and tenderness visibly struggled for the mastery of her facial expression, as for the mood behind it.
“Don’t, Seth, don’t! Can’t you see how I am suffering? Have you no pity? How can you have the heart to speak to me like this?”
“You talk about pity—about hearts!”
“How long ago was it that they were on your tongue—that you had your arms stretched open for me?”
“Don’t recall it!”
“If I were to die this day, this hour, it would be the one thing I should want to remember, the one thing of my life that I should hug to my heart. What is changed since then? A man dead?—a man dies every minute of the day somewhere in the world! Suppose I was wrong! Suppose it was an accident—yes, we’ll say it was! Don’t you see—how little that is, how unimportant, compared with—with——”
She finished the sentence by a faltering step toward him, her arms outstretched, her lips parted, her form offering itself for his embrace with a sinuous seduction of moving outlines.
The old witchery flamed up for a second in his pulses; then it was emberless ashes.
Without a word he turned and left her.
Aunt Sabrina opened the door of her room in response to his strenuous rapping, and wiped her tear-stained face with the end of her shoulder-shawl as her nephew entered. At his behest, she told all the tidings that had come to the farm. Its master had been found at the bottom of Tallman’s ravine, by some boys who had climbed down to see if the beech-nuts were turning. The whole equipage had pitched off the narrow road which crossed the gulf at this point, high above. The buggy was smashed. One of the horses was dead; the other had two of its legs broken. Half hidden under the carriage and one of the beasts was Albert, quite lifeless and cold. The men who brought the news believed every bone in his body must have been broken.
As she concluded the bare recital of facts, the poor old maid began her sobbing afresh.
“I might uv knaowd it’d ’a’ come to this,” she groaned; “‘pride goeth before a fall,’ ez Solomon says. I hed my heart tew much sot on his goin’ to Congress; I was exaltin’ my horn tew high. I was settin’ by the window, that very minute, watchin’ Sarah Andrews go by perked up in their democrat wagon, with her injy shawl ’n all her fine feathers on, ’n’ never so much’s turnin’ her head this way, ’n’ I was sayin’ to myself, ‘M’ lady, you’ll come daown a peg ’r two off ’n your high hoss when Albert goes to Congress’—’n’ there the men was comin’ in the gate, thet identical minute, with the news. I tell you!” she roused herself into indignant declamation here, “men like Zeke Tallman ought to be hung, who ’re tew shiftless or penurious to fix up their fences on pieces o’ raoad like thet, sao’s to keep folks from drivin’ off in the dark, ’n’ killin’ themselves! That’s what they ought!”
“But it wasn’t dark, Aunt Sabrina,” said Seth; “the moon was so bright all last night, you could have seen to read by it.”
The old lady was too occupied with her own thoughts to even think of inquiring as to her nephew’s source of information. She only rocked to and fro, desolately, and said, as if talking to herself:
“Sao much the wuss, Seth. It was to be! Nothin’ could a’ stopped it. Thet old witch, M’tildy Warren, is right. There’s a cuss on aour fam’ly. Here, almost inside tew years, Sissly’s gone, ’n’ Lemuel’s gone, ’n’ naow its poor Albert! ’N’ he was gittin’ so like his grandfather, the Senator, tew, gittin’ to look like him, ’n’ ack like him; I kin remember my father——”
Seth had left the room, with soft footsteps. He would go at once to the scene of his brother’s death.
At the outside door, as he opened it, he stood face to face with Annie. She gave him her hand silently. Her face was paler than he had ever seen it before, and she looked on the ground, after the first little start of surprise at the meeting, instead of into his face.
“You have heard?” he whispered.
“Yes. Isn’t it awful?”
“Will you go upstairs and see Aunt Sabrina? She is in her room. I think the sight of you would do her good.”
“Yes. What a terrible shock it must be to her. And——?”
“The widow? You’ll find her in the parlor. Strange enough, she was weeping her eyes out when I last saw her.” He could not keep the bitterness out of his tone.
“Poor woman!” was all that Annie could find it in her heart to murmur, as Seth passed her on his gloomy errand, and she entered the house of mourning.