Part 8

“Jimmy Bagby,” reproved Judge Priest, “ain't you knowed Dab Prentiss long enough to know that you don't have to tell him whut kind of a speech he's to make? He's got all kinds of speeches in stock at all times. I'll confide this much to you though--it'll be the kind of a speech that he would 'specially prefer to make. Jest tell him I say be ready to speak out and utter a few burnin' words when the proper time comes, ef it does come, which I certainly hope and trust it may.”

Not greatly informed in his mind by this somewhat cryptic explanation, the Sergeant withdrew, and Judge Priest, getting up on his feet, actually began humming a little wordless, tuneless tune which was a favourite of his. However, a thought of the melancholy interview that he had just had with Major Guest must have recurred to him almost immediately, for when he appeared in the open a bit later on his return to the opera house his head was bent and his form was shrunken and his gait was slow. He seemed a man weighed down with vain repinings and vainer regrets.

It would appear that the secretary in the interim had completed his appointed task, for no sooner had the convention reassembled than the chairman mounted to the stage and took his place alongside a small table behind the footlights and announced that nominations would now be in order; which statement was a cue for Attorney-at-Law Augustus Tate, of the County of Emmett, to get gracefully upon his feet and toss back his imposing sable mane and address the assemblage.

Attorney Tate was an orator of parts, as he now proceeded to prove beyond the slightest peradventure of a doubt. He was known as the Black Eagle of Emmett, for it had been said of him that he had an eye like that noble bird, the eagle. He had a chin like one, too; but that, of course, had no bearing upon his talents as displayed upon the stump, on the platform and in the forum, and in truth only a few malicious detractors had ever felt called upon to direct attention to the fact. In flowing and sonorous periods he placed in nomination the name of the Honourable Horace K. Maydew, concluding in a burst of verbal pin wheels and metaphorical skyrockets, whereat there was a great display of enthusiasm from floor and balcony.

When quiet had been restored Judge Priest got slowly up from where he sat and took an action which was not entirely unexpected, inasmuch as rumours of it had been in active circulation for half an hour or more. In twenty words he withdrew the name of the Honourable J. C. C. Guest as a candidate before the convention.

Only a rustle of bodies succeeded this announcement--that and an exhalation of breath from a few delegations, which attained to the volume of a deep joint sigh.

The chairman glanced over the house with a brightening eye. It was almost time to begin the jubilation. As a matter of fact several ardent souls among the Maydewites could hardly hold themselves in until the few remaining formalities had been complied with. They poised themselves upon the edges of their chairs, with throats tuned to lead in the yelling.

“Are there any other nominations?” asked the chairman, turning this way and that. He asked it as a matter of form merely. “If not, the nominations will be closed and the secretary will--”

“Mister Cheerman, one minute, ef you please.”

The interrupting voice was the high-piped voice of Judge Priest, and the chairman straightened on his heels to find Judge Priest still upon his feet.

“The chair recognises Judge Priest again,” said the chairman blandly. He assumed the judge meant to accept his beating gracefully and, in the interest of party harmony, to move the nomination of Maydew by acclamation. On his part that would have been a fair enough presumption, but the first utterances that came now from the old judge jerked open the eyes and gaped the mouth of the presiding officer. However, he was not alone there; nearly everybody was stunned.

“It was my painful duty a minute ago to withdraw the candidate that I had been privileged to foller in this campaign,” said Judge Priest in his weedy notes. “It is now my pleasure to offer in his stead the name of another man as a suitable and a fittin' representative of this district in the National Halls of Congress.” He glanced about him as though enjoying the surprised hush that had fallen upon the place, and for just a fraction of a second his eyes focused upon the lone occupant of the right-hand stage box, almost above his head. Then he went on, deliberately prolonging his syllables:

“The man whom I would nominate has never so fur as I know been active in politics. So fur as I know he has never aspired to or sought fur public office at the hands of his feller-citizens; in fact, he does not now seek this office. In presentin' his name for your consideration I am doin' so solely upon my own responsibility and without consultin' any one on this earth.

“My present candidate is not an orator. He is not a mixer or an organiser. I am constrained to admit that, measured by the standards of commerce, he is not even a successful man. He is poor in this world's goods. He is leadin' at this moment a life of retirement upon a little barren hillside farm, where the gulleys furrow his tobacco patch and the sassafras sprouts are takin' his cornfield, and the shadder of a mortgage rests heavy upon his lonely roof tree.

“But he is an honest man and a God-fearin' man. Ez a soldier under the stars and bars he done his duty to the sorrowful end. Ez a citizen he has never wilfully harmed his feller-man. He never invaded the sanctity of any man's home, and he never brought sorrow to any hearthstone. Ef he has his faults--and who amongst us is without them?--he has been the sole sufferer by them. I believe it has been charged that he drank some, but I never seen him under the influence of licker, and I don't believe anybody else ever did either.

“I nominate------” His voice took on the shrillness of a fife and his right fist, pudgy and clenched, came up at arm's length above his head--“I nominate--and on that nomination, in accordance with a rule but newly framed by this body, I call here and now fur an alphabetical roll call of each and every delegate--I offer as a candidate fur Congress ag'inst the Honourable Horace K. Maydew the name of my friend, my neighbour and my former comrade, Lysandy John Curd, of the voting precinct of Lone Ellum and the County of Red Gravel.”

There was no applause. Not a ripple of approbation went up, nor a ripple of hostility either. But a gasp went up--a mighty gasp, deep and sincere and tremendously significant.

Of those upon the stage it was the chairman, I think, who got his wits back first. He was naturally quick-witted, else his sponsor would never have chosen him for chairman. In a mute plea for guidance he turned his head toward the wing of the stage where he knew that sponsor should be, and abruptly, at a distance from him to be measured by inches rather than by feet, his gaze encountered the hypnotising stare of Cap'n Buck Owings, who had magically materialised from nowhere in particular and was now at his elbow.

“Stay right where you are,” counselled Cap'n Buck in a half whisper. “We've had plenty of these here recesses--these proceedin's are goin' right on.”

Daunted and bewildered, the chairman hesitated, his gavel trembling in his temporarily palsied hand. In that same moment Sheriff Giles Birdsong had got upon the stage, too; only he deemed his proper place to be directly alongside the desk of the secretary, and into the startled ear of the secretary he now spoke.

“Start your roll call, buddy,” was what Mr. Birdsong said, saying it softly, in lullaby tones, yet imparting a profound meaning to his crooning and gentle accents. “And be shore to call off the names in alphabetical order--don't fur-git that part!”

Inward voices of prudence dictated the value of prompt obedience in the brain of that secretary. Quaveringly he called the first name on the list of the first county, and the county was Bland and the name was Homer H. Agnew.

Down in the Bland County delegation, seated directly in front of the stage, an old man stood up--the Rev. Homer H. Agnew, an itinerant Baptist preacher.

“My county convention,” he explained, “instructed us for Maydew. But under the law of this convention I vote now as an individual. As between the two candidates presented I can vote only one way. I vote for Curd.”

Having voted, he remained standing. There were no cheers and no hisses. Everybody waited. In a silence so heavy that it hurt, they waited. And the secretary was constrained to call the second name on the Bland County list: “Patrick J. Burke!”

Now Patrick J. Burke, as one might guess from his name, belonged to a race that has been called sentimental and emotional. Likewise he was a communicant of a faith which long ago set its face like a flint against the practice of divorce.

“I vote for Curd,” said Patrick J. Burke, and likewise he stood up, a belligerent, defiant, stumpy, red-haired man.

“Rufus Burnett!”

This was the first convention Rufus Burnett had ever attended in an official capacity. In order that she might see how well he acquitted himself, he had brought his wife with him and put her in the balcony. We may figure Mrs. Burnett as a strong-minded lady, for before he answered to his name Mr. Burnett, as though seeking higher guidance, cocked a pestered eye aloft to where the lady sat, and she, saying nothing, merely pointed a finger toward the spot where old Judge Priest was stationed. Rufus knew.

“Curd,” he said clearly and distinctly. Somebody yelled then, and other voices took up the yell.

There were eleven names on the Bland County list. The secretary had reached the eighth and had heard eight voices speak the same word, when an interruption occurred--perhaps I should say two interruptions occurred.

The Black Eagle of Emmett darted out from the wings, bounded over the footlights and split a path for himself to the seat of Judge Priest. For once he forgot to be oratorical. “We'll quit, Judge,” he panted, “we're ready to quit. Maydew will withdraw--I've just come from him. He can't stand for this to go on; he'll withdraw if you'll take Curd's name down too. Any compromise candidate will do. Only, for heaven's sake, withdraw Curd before this goes any farther!”

“All right, son,” said Judge Priest, raising his voice to be heard, for by now the secretary had called the ninth name and the cheering was increasing in volume; “that suits me first rate. But you withdraw your man first, and then I'll tell you who the nominee of this here convention is goin' to be.”

Turning, he put a hand upon Sergeant Bagby's arm and shook him until the sergeant broke a whoop in two and hearkened.

“Jimmy,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle, “step down the aisle, will you, and tell Dabney Prentiss to uncork himse'f and git his speech of acceptance all ready. He don't know it yit, but he's goin' to move up to Washington, D. C., after the next general election.”

Just as the sergeant started on his mission the other interruption occurred. A lady fainted. She was conspicuously established in the stage box on the right-hand side, and under the circumstances and with so many harshly appraisive eyes fixed upon her there was really nothing else for her to do, as a lady, except faint. She slipped out of her chair and fell backward upon the floor. It must have been a genuine faint, for certainly no person who was even partly conscious, let alone a tenderly nurtured lady, could have endured to lie flat upon the hard planks, as this lady did, with all those big, knobby jet buttons grinding right into her spine.

Although I may have wandered far from the main path and taken the patient reader into devious byways, I feel I have accomplished what I set out to do in the beginning: I have explained how Dabney Prentiss came to be our representative in the Lower House of the National Congress. The task is done, yet I feel that I should not conclude the chapter until I have repeated a short passage of words between Sergeant Jimmy Bagby and that delegate from Mims County who was a distant kinsman of Major Guest. It happened just after the convention, having finished its work, had adjourned, and while the delegates and the spectators were emerging from the Marshallville opera house.

All jubilant and excited now, the Mims County man came charging up and slapped Sergeant Bagby upon the shoulder.

“Well, suh.” he clarioned, “the old Jedge did come back, didn't he?”

“Buddy,” said Sergeant Bagby, “you was wrong before and you're wrong ag'in. He didn't have to come back, because he ain't never been gone nowheres.”

IV. A CHAPTER FROM THE LIFE OF AN ANT

SOMEONE said once--the rest of us subsequently repeating it on occasion--that this world is but an ant hill, populated by many millions of ants, which run about aimlessly or aimfully as the case may be. All of which is true enough. Seek you out some lofty eminence, such as the top floor of a skyscraper or the top of a hill, and from it, looking down, consider a crowded city street at noon time or a county fairground on the day of the grand balloon ascension. Inevitably the simile will recur to the contemplative mind.

The trouble, though, with the original coiner of the comparison was that he did not go far enough. He should have said the world was populated by ants--and by anteaters. For so surely as we find ants, there, too, do we find the anteaters. You behold the ants bustling about, making themselves leaner trying to make them-selves fatter; terrifically busied with their small affairs; hiving up sustenance against the hard winter; gnawing, digging and delving; climbing, crawling, building and breeding--in short, deporting themselves with that energy, that restless industry which so stirred the admiration of the Prophet of old that, on his heavenward pilgrimage, he tarried long enough to tell the sluggard--name of the sluggard not given in the chronicles--to go to the ant and consider of her.

The anteater for the moment may not actually be in sight, but be assured he is waiting. He is waiting around the corner until the ant has propagated in numbers amounting to an excess; or, in other words, until the class that is born every second, singly--and sometimes as twins--has grown plentiful enough to furnish a feasting. Forth he comes then, gobbling up Brer Ant, along with his fullness and his richness, his heirs and his assigns, his substance and his stock in trade.

To make the illustration concrete, we might say that were there no ants there would be no Wall Street; and by the same token were there no anteaters there would be no Wall Street either. Without anteaters the ants would multiply and replenish the earth beyond computation. Without ants the anteaters would have to live upon each other--which would be bad for them but better for the rest of creation. War is the greatest of the anteaters--it feeds upon the bodies of the ants. Kings upon their thrones, devisers of false doctrines, crooked politicians, grafters, con men, card sharks, thimbleriggers--all these are anteaters battening on the substance of simple-hearted, earnest-minded ants. The ant believes what you tell him; the greedsome anteater thrives upon this credulity. Roughly, then, for purposes of classification, one may divide the world at large into two groups--in this larger group here the ants, in that smaller group there the anteaters.

So much, for purposes of argument, being conceded, we may safely figure Emanuel Moon as belonging in the category of the ants, pure and simple--reasonably pure and undeniably simple. However, at the time whereof I write I doubt whether it had ever occurred to anyone to liken him to an ant. His mother had called him Mannie, his employers called him plain Moon, and to practically everybody else he was just little Mr. Moon, who worked in the Commonwealth Bank. He had started there, in the bank, as office boy; by dint of years of untiring fidelity to the interests of that institution he had worked up to the place of assistant cashier, salary seventy-five dollars a month. Privately he nursed an ambition to become, in time, cashier, with a cashier's full powers. It might be added that in this desire he stood practically alone.

Emanuel Moon was a little man, rising of thirty-five, who believed that the Whale swallowed Jonah, that if you swore a certain form of oath you were certain of hell-fire, and that Mr. Hiram Blair, president of the Commonwealth Bank, hung the Big Dipper. If the Bible had put it the other way round he would have believed as sincerely that it was Jonah who swallowed the Whale. He had a wistful, bashful little smile, an air of being perpetually busy, and a round, mild eye the colour of a boiled oyster. He also had a most gentle manner and the long, prehensile upper lip that is found only in the South American tapir and the confirmed clarinet player. Emanuel Moon had one besetting sin, and only one--he just would play the clarinet.

On an average of three nights a week he withdrew himself from the company assembled about the base-burner stove in the parlour if it were winter, or upon the front porch of Mrs. Teenie Morrill's boarding house if it were seasonable weather, and went up to his room on the third floor and played the clarinet. Some said he played it and some that he merely played at it. He knew Annie Laurie off by heart and for a term of years had been satisfied in that knowledge. Now he was learning another air--The Last Rose of Summer.

He prosecuted his musical education on what he called his off evenings. Wednesday night he went to prayer meeting and Sunday night to the regular church service. Tuesday night he always spent at his lodge; and perhaps once in a fortnight he called upon Miss Katie Rouser, who taught in the High School and for whom he was believed to entertain sentiments that did him credit, even though he had never found words in which to voice them.

At the lodge he served on the committees which did the hard work; that, as a general proposition, meant also the thankless work. If things went well someone else took the credit; if they went ill Emanuel and his colabourers shared the blame. The conditions had always been so--when he was a small boy and when he was a youth, growing up. In his adolescence, if there was a picnic in contemplation or a straw ride or a barm dance, Mannie had been graciously permitted by common consent of all concerned to arrange with the livery-stable man for the teams, to hire the coloured string band, to bargain with the owner of the picnic grounds or the barn, to see to ice for the ice-water barrel and lemons for the lemonade bucket.

While he thus busied himself the other youths made dates for the occasion with all the desirable girls. Hence it was that on the festal date Emanuel went partnerless to the party; and this was just as well, too, seeing that right up until the time of starting he would be completely occupied with last-moment details, and, after that, what with apologising for any slipups that might have occurred, and being scolded and ordered about on errands and called upon to explain this or that, would have small time to play the squire to any young person of the opposite sex, even had there been one convenient.

It was so at the bank, where he did more work than anybody and got less pay than anybody. It was so, as I have just stated, at the lodge. In a word, Emanuel had no faculty as an executive, but an enormous capacity for executing. The earth is full of him. Whereever five or more are gathered together there is present at least one of the Emanuel Moons of this world.

It had been a hot, long summer, even for a climate where the summers are always long and nearly always hot; and at the fag end of it Emanuel inclined strongly toward a desire for a short rest. Diffidently he managed to voice his mood and his need to Mr. Blair. That worthy gentleman had but just returned home, a giant refreshed, after a month spent in the North Carolina mountains. He felt so fit, so fine, so robust, he took it as a personal grievance that any about him should not likewise be feeling fit. He cut Emanuel off pretty short. Vacations, he intimated, were for those whose years and whose services in behalf of humanity entitled them to vacations; young men who expected to get along in business had best rid their thoughts of all such pampered hankerings.

Emanuel took the rebuke in good grace, as was his way; but that evening at the supper table he created some excitement among his fellow boarders by quietly and unostentatiously fainting, face forward, into a saucer of pear preserves that was mostly juice. He was removed to his room and put to bed, and attended by Doctor Lake. The next morning he was not able to go to the bank. On being apprised of the situation Mr. Blair very thoughtfully abated of his previous resolution and sent Emanuel word that he might have a week or even ten days off--at his own expense--wherein to recuperate.

Some thirty-six hours later, therefore, Emanuel might have been found on board the fast train bound for Louisville, looking a trifle pulled down and shaky, but filled with a great yearning. In Louisville, at a certain establishment doing a large mail-order business, was to be had for thirty-eight dollars, list price, fifteen and five off for cash, a clarinet that was to his present infirm and leaky clarinet as minted gold is to pot metal.

To be sure, this delectable instrument might be purchased, sight unseen, but with privilege of examination, through the handy medium of the parcel post; the house handling it was in all respects reliable and lived up to the printed promise of the catalogue, but to Emanuel half the pride and pleasure of becoming its proprietor lay in going into the place and asking to see such and such a clarinet, and fingering it and testing its tone, and finally putting down the money and carrying it off with him under his arm. He meant, first of all, to buy his new clarinet; for the rest his plans were hazy. He might stay on in Louisville a few days or he might go elsewhere. He might even return home and spend the remainder of his vacation perfecting himself in his still faulty rendition of The Last Rose of Summer.

For an hour or so after boarding the train he viewed the passing scenery as it revealed itself through the day-coach window and speculated regarding the personalities of his fellow passengers. After that hour or so he began to nod. Presently he slumbered, with his head bobbing against the seat-back and one arm dangling in the aisle. A sense of being touched half roused him; a moment later he opened his eyes with the feeling that he had lost his hat or was about to lose it. Alongside him stood a well-dressed man of, say, thirty-eight or forty, who regarded him cordially and who held between the long, slender fingers of his right hand a little rectangle of blue cardboard, having punch marks in it.

“Excuse me, friend,” said this man, “but didn't this fall out of your hat? I picked it up here on the floor alongside you.”

“I reckon maybe it did,” said Emanuel, removing his hat and noticing that the customary decoration conferred by the conductor was absent from its band. “I'm certainly much obliged to you, sir.”

“Don't mention it,” said the stranger. “Bet-ter stick it in good and tight this time. They might try to collect a second fare from you if you couldn't show your credentials. Remember, don't you, the story about the calf that ate up his express tag and what the old nigger man said about it?”