CHAPTER V

ALLIANCE

Winthrop Chase, Senior, was thrown by his son’s election to the office he had counted as his own into a passion in which rage and humiliation were equally commingled.

He was a man fed fat with vanity. He took himself very seriously. He lived a decent and respectable life in the eyes of all men, and he felt himself justly entitled to the respect of all men. He had, before this, seen the smiles of those few who dared mock him; but he had believed them a small minority. When three quarters of the town united in the jest at his expense, he was outraged inexpressibly. And when the city papers took up the story and for a time the whole state tittered over it, Chase trembled and shuddered with his own agony.

His first reaction had been anger at his son; and when he heard Wint had been found, sodden and stupid, in that room at the Weaver House, he cast the boy out of his life, hiding his own honest grief and sorrow under a mantle of resentment and accusation. For he loved Wint, and had wished to be proud of him.

In the beginning, his chief resentment centered on Wint, and he had toward Amos Caretall only that anger which one feels toward a treacherously victorious opponent. But about the time Wint sent him that money order, and stood on his own feet before the world, Chase’s heart softened in spite of himself. He sought to make excuses for his son, and in this effort he found Caretall a convenient scapegoat. By degrees he convinced himself that Caretall had led Wint astray, playing on the boy’s vanity and pride; and after that came the half conviction that when Wint denied all knowledge of the coup, the boy had told the truth. Then all Chase’s anger centered on Amos; and as the first sting of his disgrace passed by, he began to look about him and seek to rebuild the shattered structure of his plans.

He had encountered Amos more than once upon the street since the election, though neither had carried their greetings further than a nod or word. But there came a day when Chase met the Congressman face to face in the Post Office at a moment when there were no others there; and when Chase nodded, Caretall stopped and tilted his head on one side and squinted in a friendly way at Chase.

“No hard feelings, is there, Senior?” he asked.

Chase looked at him, started to speak, flushed, checked himself; and at last said huskily: “Congressman, I want to talk with you.”

Caretall nodded. “That’s fair.”

“Where can we talk?”

Amos scratched his head. “Tell you,” he suggested. “I’ll go along up to Pete Gergue’s office. You go down t’ your place, ’nd then come in the back way. Guess we don’t want it known we’re gettin’ t’gether.”

“Very well,” Chase said stiffly. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

When he climbed the stairs, Amos had sent Gergue away and was sitting at the oilcloth-covered table, slowly whittling a charge for his pipe. He got up bulkily at Chase’s entrance, and motioned the other man to a chair across the table from his own. Chase sat down and Amos, lighting his pipe between his sentences, said slowly: “Chase....” a scratch of the match. “You don’t want to hold this against me.” A succession of deep puffs. “It’s politics. All in th’ game.” A puff. “You was getting too strong for me. I had t’ lick you.” Puff, puff, puff!

Chase struck his fist with quiet vehemence on the table. “It was a dirty trick, Amos.”

Amos shook his head, vastly pained. “Now, Senior,” he protested, “don’t go talking that way. ’Twas all in th’ game. All in the game.”

“It was a dirty trick,” Chase insisted. “You played on my good feelings; you pretended to agree to an alliance with me; you got me off my guard--”

Amos held up a heavy hand. “Wait a minute,” he protested. “Wait a minute, Senior. Let me get this here straight. You come to me with a prop’sition. Wanted to get together. Said you had me licked. I told you if you was elected Mayor, we’d hitch up. Ain’t that right now, Senior?”

Chase moved angrily. “Strictly true,” he confessed. “Strictly true. That’s why I call it tricky. You came to my own meeting and said you were going to vote for me.”

“Guess I said I was going to vote for a Chase, didn’t I? Guess I did. And that’s the way I voted.”

“The town thought you meant me.”

“Not long, they didn’t. Word went around what I meant, all in good time.”

Chase got to his feet, his head back, his face flushed. He leaned down to face Amos, and he slapped his right fist into his left palm. “I tell you it was a trick,” he insisted. “You know it. It was unworthy. And I give you due warning, Caretall--I’m out for your scalp now. I propose to get it. Take your measures accordingly.”

Amos puffed hard at his pipe. He, too, rose; he tilted his head thoughtfully on one side and squinted at Chase. “I don’t like t’ hear you talk that way, Senior,” he said slowly. “You come to me and talked to me till you rightly showed me we ought to get together. I’m ready--even if you did get--”

Chase flung up his hand. “Stop!” he cried. The self-control which he had imposed upon himself was gone. “Stop! Man, man! D’you think I’m one to lick the hand that stabs me? You lie to me, trick me, make a fool of me and a joke of me before the state; and to cap it all you steal my own son out of my house--”

“Heard you was the one to throw him out,” Amos interjected, but Chase went hotly on:

“You steal my own son, take him into your own home, turn him against me, persuade him to help destroy me....” His voice broke with his own rage and grief. “I tell you, Amos,” he said again, leaning steadily forward, “I’m going to get you. Fair warning. Take your measures accordingly.”

Amos looked out of the window; he puffed at his pipe; and at last he faced the other man again, and smiled. “Well, Senior,” he said slowly, “if the land lies so--thanks for the word. As for them measures--I’ll take them like you say.”

For a moment longer, the eyes of the two men held each other. Then Chase turned stiffly on his heel, and stalked to the door and went out.

As he disappeared, Amos called: “G’d day!” But Chase made no answer, and Amos, left alone, grinned slowly to himself and shook his head.

After that interview with Amos, Chase began to emerge from the turmoil of anger and shame in which he had been fighting since the election. His head cleared and his brain cooled, and he began to plan, with a certain newly acquired shrewdness, his next steps against Caretall. In many matters, heretofore, the elder Chase had been as simple as a boy. Now he was becoming crafty. In the past he had honestly believed that the life of self-conscious rectitude which he had led was of a sort to inspire respect and affection. Now he knew that he was wrong, knew that he must always have been disliked or despised by half the town. He had always been benignly courteous; and this courtesy, which was more than half condescension, had made more enemies than friends. He had played a straightforward game; and he had lost.

Like other men before him, in the determination to change his tactics, he went too far. He threw himself into the fight to injure Caretall with an utter disregard for the conventions he had once observed; he sought allies where he might find them; and for the first time in his life, he tried to put himself in another man’s place and guess what the other man would do.

The man into whose place he sought to put himself was Amos Caretall; and the result of his considerations of Amos’s possible future plans threw Chase into the arms of his ancient enemy, into the shrunken arms of V. R. Kite.

The feud between Kite and Chase had never been a concrete thing. It was based upon a thousand minor incidents, none of them important in itself. Kite, as the leader of the “wet” forces in the town, and as the proprietor of half the liquor-peddling establishments, was a man very quick to resent “dry” activities. Chase had always been actively “dry.” And Kite, curiously enough for one of his vocation, was a very thin-skinned man. He found offenses in words that were meant for kindness; he found a sneer in an honest smile.

It was a part of the manner of the elder Chase to smile and nod benevolently upon those whom he encountered. This was automatic with him; and he smiled at Kite with the rest. Kite, a man of fierce and violent temperament, knew that Chase had no kindly feeling toward him; and so he saw in these smiles only sneers. He had complained to Amos Caretall: “He’s always grinning at me,” when Amos asked why he hated Chase; and this was an old grievance with the liquor man.

Kite had been one of those who rejoiced most highly in Chase’s humiliation; and for a week or two after the election, he went out of his way to meet Chase upon the street. On such occasions, he paid back with interest those grins he had resented; he spoke to Chase with exaggerated courtesy and extreme solicitude. He inquired after the other’s health end spirits; he sympathized with Chase in his defeat.

These sports palled upon him only when he perceived the growing change in Chase. For Wint’s father was in many ways at this time like a child that has been punished for a fault it does not understand. The elder Chase was groping for friendliness; he sought it wherever it could be found; and he took some of Kite’s satiric inquiries in good faith and responded to them with such honest confidence that Kite was touched and faintly uneasy.

A few days after Chase’s talk with Amos, he sought out Kite in the little Bazaar which the latter conducted. It was an institution like a five and ten cent store, and did a flourishing business. Next door to it was a restaurant, also owned by Kite, and reached by a communicating passage. In a room behind this restaurant, knowing ones might be served with anything in reason. But Kite went there only for his meals, and most of the hours of business found him at his desk in the rear of the Bazaar.

Chase frankly sought him there. He drew a chair up to face the wrinkled little man; and Kite was surprised, and cocked his head on his thin neck and tugged at his drooping side whiskers until he looked more like a doubtful turkey than ever. “Howdo, Chase?” he said.

Chase nodded. “Kite,” he began frankly, “I want to talk to you.”

Kite tried to grin derisively; he tried to reawaken the old enmity in his breast. But there was something appealing about Chase, and so he said nothing, only waited.

“Kite,” said Chase, “Amos Caretall played a good trick on me.”

Kite looked startled; then he grinned. “Yes, Chase, he did that,” he said.

“You helped him.”

Kite frankly admitted it.

“You helped him,” said Chase, “because you thought with Wint in as Mayor, the town would stay as wet as you want it.”

Kite hesitated, then he nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, that’s so, Chase. What about it?”

Chase leaned back. “Amos made a fool of you,” he said. “He’s going to turn this town dry, with the man you helped elect.”

Kite flushed; he leaned toward Chase with narrowed eyes peering out from an ambush of wrinkles; and then suddenly he threw back his head with his long, turkey neck rising raw and red from his collar, and he laughed cacklingly, so that customers in the front of his store looked that way to share the joke. Chase frowned angrily. “Well?” he snapped, “what’s funny about that?”

Kite dropped a dry old hand on Chase’s arm. “Oh, Chase,” he choked through his mirth, “the notion of Wint making this town dry....”

Chase flushed. He started to speak. Kite interrupted: “Now don’t get mad. Course, he’s your son, but he does like his drop now and then, Chase.”

“I tell you, Amos is planning to do it.”

There was something so deadly sure in Chase’s tone that Kite sobered and looked toward him. “Say, what makes you say that?” he demanded. “How do you know?”

“Amos has sense. He sees this question is the big one in this state. He’s out for Congress again. He’s not going to have it thrown at him that his man let this town soak itself illegally.”

For the first time, Kite began to look worried. “Amos wouldn’t do that. He told me--”

“Told you? He told me many things, too. But none of them were true.”

Kite, suddenly, burst into flame like an oily rag. He threw up a clenched fist. “By God, Chase, he don’t dare try it!”

“Dare? He’ll dare anything.”

Kite stammered with the heat of his own anger. “He don’t dare!” he insisted. “Why, Chase--if he tries that--I’ll--I’ll--” With no sense that his words had been said before, he exclaimed: “I won’t live in the town, Chase. I’ll get out! I’ll shoot him! Or myself.”

Chase leaned forward. “I tell you, he’s aiming to do it,” he said steadily. “So sit down.”

Kite gripped his arm. “Chase, you got to drill some sense into that son of yours. You got to tell him--”

“He’s not my son now; he’s Amos’s. Living with Amos, doing what Amos says. Don’t forget that.”

There was a bitterness in Chase’s voice which silenced Kite for a moment. Then the little man touched Chase on the arm. “See here,” he said softly, “you don’t like Amos any better’n I do.”

Chase smiled mirthlessly. “I’m out for his hide,” he declared.

Kite nodded, chuckling grimly. “He thinks he’s a big man,” he said. “He thinks he can run over us, play with us, use us and then give us the brad. But I tell you right now, Chase....” He lifted his open hand as one who takes an oath. “I tell you right now, Chase, if he tries that little trick--you and me’ll get together, and we’ll hang his old hide in the sun to dry.”

“He’ll try it,” said Chase steadily.

Kite stuck out his hand. “Then we’ll skin him.”

“That’s a bargain,” Chase declared, and gripped the other’s dry and skinny fingers.

It was in this fashion that these two enemies joined hands against the common foe.