CHAPTER I

MULDOON

The sun woke Wint in the morning; and the awakening was cruel. Level, white-hot rays burned through his eyelids as though they would char to cinders his aching eyes. He threw his arm fretfully across his face to keep off the glare and lay quietly on the shabby bed, groping back into the night and into the hours of the preceding day in a terrible effort to remember.

There was no more drunkenness in him. The shock of what they had told him had banished that. He was sober. Too sober, in all conscience, for any peace of mind. It was his loneliness that was most torturing. If there had been some one near, some one else in the room, for whose benefit it was necessary to play a part, Wint would have stiffened his resolution and laughed at the situation. But he could not play a part that would deceive himself. Alone in the dingy bedroom in that disreputable place, he burned with shame and tortured pride.

He began to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. He never doubted that it was true the voters had elected him. There had been truth in Jack Routt’s eyes the night before, truth and a sort of triumph. Routt was a good fellow and a true friend; and he rejoiced, no doubt, that Wint had been so honored. Wint, thinking this, grimaced. He knew, without explanations, that his election was a joke; a colossal joke in the first place upon his father, and a grim jest at his own expense. He could imagine the cackling mirth of those who had engineered the thing; and this laughter that he seemed to hear lashed his ears.

He flung himself over on his face and buried his head in his arms and tried to think. He was full of rebellion. He would go away, leave this place, never return....

After a time, he lifted his head and moved his body and sat up on the bed, his feet on the floor. He sat up and looked about him and shuddered in a sick way.

The light of day made this room more hideous than it had been by lamplight. The shattered lamp lay in the grate, and there was a charred place on the floor near the hearth, where the oil had burned itself out, when Wint threw down the lamp the night before. Above the mantel hung the cracked mirror. In it from where he sat, Wint could see a distorted reflection of the ceiling of the room, and an angle of the wall. There had once been paper on this wall, and it had been cracked by the shrinking of the plaster, and picked away by casual fingers, and here and there it hung in short, ragged strips. The bare floor was unclean; the chair near the bed where Wint’s two shoes now reposed was decrepit and lacked paint. One door of the big wardrobe hung awkwardly from weakened hinges. It was a little ajar, and Wint could see a disorder of rubbish inside. On the floor near the chair lay his hat and coat and one sock, where he had dropped them when he had come here and stumbled drunkenly to bed.

He held his head in his hands, and his fingers clenched in his crisp hair.

For some time, his senses had been catching hints of life in the building below him. The smell of burning grease had come up the stairs from the kitchen; and the grumble of voices now and then upraised in protest or abuse had reached his ears. Once he heard, from a distance and muffled by intervening doors and walls, the clamor of quarreling dogs. But these things did not penetrate his consciousness until a new and louder disturbance broke out somewhere below.

A dog barked, snarling and angry; another yelped. The two joined their voices in an angry tumult of sound. Then a woman’s voice, the voice of Mrs. Moody, shouted abuse, and a door opened and cries and barks and snarls redoubled.

Wint lifted his head, in sudden recognition. He heard the thud of some missile that had missed its mark and clattered against the floor; and then he heard the scramble of hard-toed feet racing up the stairs, and the snuffing of eager nostrils. His eyes lighted softly; and he called: “Muldoon!”

There was a yelp of delight and a new scuffle of feet, and Muldoon plunged in through the open door and was all over Wint in a delirious joy at this reunion. The dog leaped up on Wint’s knees; it tried to climb on his shoulders; its tongue sought to caress his cheeks; it nipped his hands lovingly; and all the time it whined a low whine of happiness. Wint, cuffing the hard and eager head, smiled in spite of himself at the dog’s caresses; he smiled, and caught Muldoon by the ears and held him away and shook him affectionately.

“You, dog!” he scolded. “How did you come here? Eh, you?”

Muldoon wriggled in a desperate effort to explain; and then he stiffened in Wint’s arms, and turned toward the door with hackles rising. Wint looked that way and saw Mrs. Moody, panting with the zeal of her pursuit. The virago came in; she bore a stick of firewood in one harsh hand; she made for Muldoon, and her old lips dripped blistering abuse.

Wint drew Muldoon close in his arms and held up a protesting hand. “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” he warned her. “What’s the matter?”

She smiled mirthlessly, brandishing her billet and reaching for Muldoon’s scruff. “I’m a-goin’ to whale that pup, deary,” she told Wint. “He’s been around here all morning.”

Wint hugged Muldoon closer. “Of course,” he said, “he knew I was here.”

She looked puzzled. “He ain’t your’n, is he?”

“Sure,” Wint told her. “He’s some dog, too.”

The woman’s anger vanished. “Well, say now, if I’d a knowed that....” She laughed, her desolately beautiful false teeth glistening between her wrinkled lips. “He’s drove my dog crazy. He come around here before day, and Jim heard him and tried to get out. Woke me up. I drove this one away; but he came back. Jim got out once, and they had it till I broke ’em up. And then a minute ago, Jim got out again, and when I went after ’em with this stove wood, that’n of your’n slipped by me and in and up th’ stairs.”

Wint rubbed Muldoon’s head proudly. “He must have tracked me, found me out somehow,” he explained. “I left him locked up. Hope he didn’t hurt your....”

“Oh, Jim c’n take care of hisself. If he can’t, he’ll have t’ look out.” She looked around the room curiously. “You had callers last night. D’ye remember?”

Wint nodded, bending over the dog. “Yes--I remember.”

The woman studied him. “Thought mebbe you was too far gone to know anythin’....” She waited for Wint to speak; but Wint volunteered nothing, so she remarked: “I see th’ lamp got broke.”

“I’ll pay for it,” Wint told her. She nodded.

“That’s all right. All in the bill. You must’ve been tickled to hear about bein’ elected.”

Wint said nothing. The woman laughed harshly. “Never had a Mayor of Hardiston in my hotel before. Had some sheriffs, and a marshal now ’nd then. But no Mayor!” She shook with mirth at the thought. “I d’clare, I’ll have t’ raise my rates.”

Wint looked at her steadily, with expressionless eyes. He was fighting to hide the humiliation which was stinging him; and he succeeded. His silence at last frightened the woman; she backed toward the door, babbling broken sentences. Only when she was in the hall, with an avenue of flight open to her, did she recover herself. “But I s’pose you’ll forgit old friends, now that you’re Mayor, deary,” she told him.

Wint smiled bleakly. “Don’t count on it,” he said.

She seemed uncertain whether to take this as a threat or reassurance. “I was always a good friend to you,” she reminded him.

He nodded. “Yes--you’ve been consistent, at least.”

She wagged her old head, comforted and grinning. “I guess you won’t forgit,” she told herself. And after a moment: “Will you be wanting some breakfast?”

Wint stroked the ears of Muldoon. “No,” he said. “No.” And he added thoughtfully: “Thank you very much.”

“That’s all right, deary,” she assured him, and so turned at last and went haltingly down the stairs.

When the woman was gone, Wint sat very still for a space, staring at the empty doorway, thinking. Muldoon was on his lap, and Wint forgot the dog, although his hand still played automatically with Muldoon’s ears. The dog was for a time content with this, moving its head now and then under Wint’s hand to get full value from his caresses; but by and by it became conscious of his abstraction, and looked up into his face, and wriggled, and at last muzzled a cold nose under his chin and nudged upward against Wint’s jaw until Wint emerged from his absorption and laughed and caught Muldoon’s head in his hands and shook it. “There, boy,” he whispered. “D’you think I’d forgotten you? No fear, Muldoon.”

Having aroused his master, Muldoon in his turn decided to feign abstraction. He lay down, ostentatiously, across Wint’s knees, and he pillowed his muzzle on his forepaws and lay there with eyes rolling up in spite of himself to watch Wint’s face. Wint cupped the dog’s lower jaw in his right hand and shook it gently. “What are they saying about me uptown, Muldoon?” he asked.

The dog moved its head, then fell into a motionless pose again. Wint bent over it, whispering, half to Muldoon and half to himself. “Laughing, of course,” he said softly. “Laughing! The joke of years!” He smiled grimly. “Tough on dad. He’d set his heart on this Mayor business.”

He looked across to the window, and his eyes hardened. “They meant it as much as a joke on me as on father,” he reminded himself, and his eyes burned. He wondered how the plan had been carried through. Caretall and Gergue must have had their hand in it; they had probably united with V. R. Kite. It would be reasonably easy, he knew. His father had had no real popularity. Winthrop Chase, Senior, was not a likable man. He was not a vote getter. There was a self-conscious condescension about his good-fellowship.

Wint had never paid any great attention to local politics. He wondered idly what a Mayor had to do. He tried to remember some of the things Mayors had done in the past; and he found his only knowledge of the subject concerned with a Hallowe’en prank as a result of which he and two others had been haled before the Mayor’s court and badly frightened.

“He must do something besides that,” he assured himself. “But Lord--I couldn’t even do that.”

What was he to do? That was the thing he had to decide, and he must decide at once. What could he do? Was there any way by which he could nullify the election; resign; abdicate; get himself impeached? He thought of these projects wistfully. They took no concrete form in his mind. He knew nothing of the machinery of local government, knew nothing of the avenues of escape which might be open to him.

He only knew that he would not be made thus the butt of the town’s mirth. His face flushed at the thought; and he got up abruptly and walked to the window, Muldoon pacing at his side and looking up wistfully at his master. He would not do it. They should have their trouble for their pains. They were fools. Impudent fools....

One thing he could do; one thing at least. He could go away. Hide. If he were not here, they could not force him to serve. So much was sure. He would go away....

This decision, Wint told himself, had cleared the air. He tried to believe that it solved all his perplexities; and he bent over Muldoon and cuffed the dog and romped with it across the room, to Muldoon’s delirious delight. Then he began to whistle to himself, and so looked about and sat down on the bed, and drew on the sock which still lay on the floor. He had difficulty in fastening the sock supporter about his leg. The leg of the trousers obstructed him. He fussed over the thing until he was fuming again, and his face flushed with stooping. But at last the trick was done, and he took his shoes from the chair and put them on. He found that one of the laces was broken, no doubt by his drunken fingers when he had unlaced the shoes before removing them. This discovery whetted his resentment and disgust. He knotted the lace and hid the knot under an eyelet of the shoe, where it pressed on his instep and irked him. He kicked the shoe on the floor until it gave him some measure of comfort.

His hat and coat were on the floor. He put them on, brushing the dust from the coat with his hands, and afterwards with a flicker of his handkerchief. Then he crossed reluctantly to the speckled mirror and looked into it.

He saw that his face was dirty, and his collar soiled and crushed. He took the collar off and turned it inside out and replaced it, and it gave him some faint satisfaction to see the improvement thus effected in his appearance. But he was still ghastly. There was no water in the room; and he knew that the bathroom at the end of this upper hall was not made for cleanliness, so he wet his handkerchief with his tongue and scrubbed his face clean with that. The result had a forced and unnatural look, but he was constrained to be content.

He started slowly for the door, but his feet lagged. It was hard for him to make up his mind to face the world again. He thought, uneasily, of remaining here through the day and catching a night freight out of town; and he turned irresolutely back toward the bed, but Muldoon, at his knee, barked softly in remonstrance, and Wint bent and patted the dog’s head and said softly: “Right you are, pup. We’re not afraid of them. But Heaven help the man that laughs, Muldoon!”

The dog wagged its whole body, and barked again, as though in approval; and Wint smiled faintly and went again toward the door. He looked down and saw that his trousers were wrinkled, and he smoothed and tugged at them in an effort to give them some appearance of respectability. When he had done his best for them, he went toward the door again, and this time he did not stop. He went out into the hall, and to the stair head, and so down into the office of the hotel.

Like the bedroom, the office of the Weaver House suffered by daylight. Even the dingy and unwashed window panes could not keep out the pitiless sun; and the room’s ugliness was exposed in hideous nakedness.

The room, save for the fact that the sun instead of a lamp lighted it, was as it had been the night before. The smoky lamp, still standing on the table, gave forth a smell of dirty oil which filled the place and fought with the reek of bad tobacco and the pungent smell of alcohol. Doors and windows were tight shut. At their corner of the table, above their checkerboard, still leaned the two old men. It was as though they had not stirred, the long night through. As Wint came down the stairs, a game ended, and their cackling voices broke into the familiar argument, while their stained old fingers swiftly rearranged the pieces for a new beginning. Then one moved a piece, and both fell silent, and the new game began.

Mrs. Moody sat at her place behind what had been the bar. The only change in the room since the night before was that instead of the reading boy, a man sat by the table. This man was unshaven, trembling, shrunken within his rumpled and baggy garments. His eyes were open, and his head wagged from side to side as he sat, and his lips moved in an interminable, mumbling argument with some one invisible.

Jim, the dog that was just a dog, was not to be seen.

Wint, with Muldoon at his heels, came down the stairs and stopped in front of the bar and nodded to Mrs. Moody. He reached into his pocket, and the old woman got up briskly and grinned at him, the enamel of her teeth a blinding white flash in her wrinkled old face. Her eyes puckered when she grinned; and she laid her hands, palms down, upon the bar.

“Going away, deary?” she asked.

Wint nodded. “What do I owe you?”

“Sorry I ain’t got a bite to offer ye,” she apologized. Then, with a sly glance at the men across the room. “Less’n you wanted to come out by the kitchen in back. A little drop....”

Wint shook his head. “Not to-day. How much?”

She told him and he selected a bill and gave it to her. She took it, and tucked up her apron and delved into the pocket of her loose skirt and produced a dirty, cloth bag. This bag was tied with a string at the top; and she untied the string, and rummaged inside, and found his change, and gave it to him. He took it from her; and as he did so, he turned at a shuffling step and saw the drunken man at his elbow.

This man peered at him; and Wint moved a little away from him. The man followed a lurching step, and grinned placatingly, and mumbled: “Wint Chase, ain’t it?”

Wint nodded. “Yes.” He tried to pass the man and get to the door; but the man thrust out a shaking hand.

“Shake!” he invited thickly. “Wanna shake hands with new Mayor. Voted f’r you, voted f’r you three times.”

Mrs. Moody was leaning across the bar and watching and grinning. Wint hesitated, and then he took the man’s hand and shook it, and tried to release it; but the man clung to it, and lunged closer, and put his other hand on Wint’s shoulder. His weight fell against Wint’s chest.

“New Mayor,” he repeated uncertainly. “Good, nice new Mayor.” He chuckled loosely and wiped his wet mouth with the back of his hand and gripped Wint’s shoulder again, and regarded Wint seriously, studying him. “Good little man,” he applauded. “Make dam’ good Mayor f’r this little town.”

He rocked on his feet, and Wint tried to put the man away without offending him, but the man staggered and clasped his arms around Wint’s neck and giggled weakly on Wint’s breast.

“This’ll be a nice, wet li’l town now, eh, boy!” he exulted. “Eh, boy? Nice, wet li’l town....”

Wint, with a sudden revulsion that sickened him and stiffened his angry pride, thrust the man away and stepped quickly out into the street. He felt Muldoon brush against his legs, and he looked down at the dog and set his jaw.

“You, dog,” he whispered. “They’ve tried one joke too many. Eh, pup? We’ll stay and turn the joke on them, Muldoon. What say?”

Muldoon whined approvingly, fidgeting on eager feet; and Wint bent and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, you,” he said softly. “Come on. Let’s go home.”