CHAPTER VII

ORDERS FOR RADABAUGH

Wint had a talk with his father next morning; that is to say, the morning of the day Amos was to come home. He told the elder Chase that Amos was coming.

Chase nodded. “I heard so,” he agreed.

“I want you to understand my relations with him,” said Wint.

There was a time when the older man would have said that a son of his could have no relations with Amos Caretall. But Winthrop Chase, Senior, had been learning wisdom, and a certain tolerance. Also, he had no wish to lose Wint again. He told himself this was because Wint’s mother was growing old, would miss him.

“Well,” he said, “what are they?”

Wint had been dreading what his father would say; he had been afraid of anger, of abuse. He was immensely relieved at the older man’s tone.

“Simply this,” he said. “He put me where I am. That was tough on you; but I think it has been good for me. It’s a strange thing to have the feeling that you can give men orders which they must obey; and that you have a--a sort of control over them. Dad, do you realize that I have to send men to jail every little while? It’s a pretty serious thing to send a man to jail, when you know you ought to be in jail yourself, in a way. I’ve done some thinking about it; so you see, it’s been good for me. It never hurts a man to think.

“The whole thing is, Amos has done me a good turn, sir. I can’t help feeling grateful to him. Can’t help feeling he’s been a good friend to me. And--I want to be friends with him. And I want you to know there’s no disloyalty to you in this friendship.”

Chase considered for a little; then he said quietly: “You know, Amos played false with me. Deceived me--deliberately. And tricked me.”

“I know it,” said Wint. “It was politics; and in a way, it was dirty politics. But--he’s been square with me.”

“I’m not sure,” said Chase, “that the whole business has not turned out pretty well, for you. For your sake, I’m not sorry.” His voice stirred and quickened. “But by Heaven, Wint, Amos is no friend of mine! And some day I mean to break him.”

Wint said: “That’s all right. It’s a fair game between you. But I don’t want you to think I’m taking sides with him.”

“What are you going to do?” Chase asked.

“I thought of meeting his train,” Wint told him. “And--he asked me to have supper with them to-night, to talk things over. I thought I would.”

“Suppose I tell you not to?”

Wint said wistfully: “I hope you won’t, sir, because--I’m going to.”

Chase nodded. “I suppose so,” he agreed. “Well, Wint--you’re a grown man. I shall not try to treat you--like a boy. Not again. I’m leaving it to you, Wint.”

Wint said quickly: “I’m glad.” He got up and, without either’s suggestion, they shook hands, and looked into each other’s eyes for a moment.

“All right,” said Chase. “I’ll tell your mother not to expect you for supper.”

“Try to make her understand, will you?”

His father smiled. “Your mother doesn’t always understand,” he said. “But--she loves you, Wint.”

“I know....”

He hesitated, wondering whether he should tell his father about Hetty. She had been sullen, avoiding his eyes, when she served breakfast. His father, or his mother, had a right to know.

Yet Wint could not bring himself to tell them. There would be no charity in them for the girl. And Wint had an infinite deal of tolerance for her. Give her a chance. He would not tell them. Not yet, at least. It could wait for a while.

He was conscious of a need to tell some one. Not for the sake of betraying Hetty, but to find some balm for his own soul. That sense of responsibility persisted; he could not analyze it, but he could not shake it off. A strangely haunting feeling, this.... It troubled him acutely. His thoughts dwelt on it all that day.

There was a drunken man in the Mayor’s court that morning. An old man. Wint knew him. He was that man who had embraced Wint in the office of the Weaver House, on the morning after the election. The incident seemed to have happened infinitely long ago; yet it was horribly vivid in Wint’s memory still. The man had treated him like a boon companion, a good, understanding comrade. He had assumed a fellowship between them; the fellowship of drink. The shame of it was that his assumption had been justified....

The man reminded Wint of the incident, this day in court. He was miserably sober when they brought him in, miserably sober, and trembling to be drunk again. “Don’t be hard on a fellow, your Honor,” he pleaded with Wint. “You know how it is. You remember. That day; day after you was elected. You’re a good pal, Mayor, your Honor. Don’t go to be too hard on a man.”

He had been in court before; Wint had fined him, had sent him to jail. The futility of these measures came home crushingly to Wint just now. The man was not helped by them; he was as bad as ever. Worse, perhaps. A revolt against this whole system of punishment boiled up in Wint. He said, without considering:

“All right. Try to let it alone. Get out.”

Young Foster, the city solicitor, looked surprised and pained as though Wint had insulted him. Marshal Jim Radabaugh grinned good-naturedly. The man himself crowded up to Wint’s desk with his thanks, and poured them out, and at last whispered humbly:

“You haven’t got a dime to give a man, have you, Mayor, your Honor? I’m shaking for a drink. You know how that is. Just a dime, your Honor.”

Wint gave him a quarter, and Foster said: “Well, I’ll be damned!” The man went out, calling blessings on Wint’s head. Foster demanded: “What’s the idea, anyway, Wint? He’s a common souse.”

“I’m sick of sending him to jail,” said Wint hotly. “I’m not going to do it any more. What good does it do?”

“Keeps him sober, anyway. You as good as told him to go and get drunk again.”

“Well, let him,” said Wint. “What else is there for him to do?”

“Go to work.”

“He looks fit for work, doesn’t he?”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Yes,” said Wint, “whose fault is it? Whose fault that he is what he is? Whose fault that he can buy a drink in a dry town? Whose fault is it, Foster, anyway?”

Foster laughed. “Well, what’s the answer?”

Wint leaned back in his chair, eyes down, considering. He was thinking of Hetty; he could not help it. And the end of his thinking was this. He looked at Marshal Jim Radabaugh, and said evenly:

“Mister marshal, don’t arrest any more men in Hardiston for being drunk unless they--commit other crimes.” There was a bite in the last word.

But Jim Radabaugh only grinned and said: “All right, you’re boss.”

Foster started to protest. Wint asked: “Any more cases?”

“No. But damn it all, Wint! Listen--”

“I don’t want to listen,” Wint told him. “I’m through. Court’s adjourned. Don’t--”

“You’re turning the town over to the bums,” Foster protested.

“They can’t run it any worse,” said Wint, and took his hat and departed. Foster swore. Marshal Jim Radabaugh strolled up to the Bazaar to tell V. R. Kite this interesting news.

Wint met Amos at the train, and Amos shook him by the hand and looked him in the eye and nodded with good-natured approval. “Coming home for supper?” he asked.

“Surely. I wouldn’t miss Maria’s supper.”

“You might say you wouldn’t miss us, too,” Agnes reminded him, clinging to her father’s arm. “Mightn’t he, dad?”

“Say it, Wint,” Amos suggested. “Only way to have peace in the family.”

So they let Agnes have her way, and she made the most of it. Peter Gergue came for supper, too; and Agnes sat at one end of the table, presiding over the coffee urn with a pretty assumption of the rôle of matron. She did most of the talking. The men were too busy with Maria’s fried chicken. But afterward, when they were done, Amos and Peter and Wint went into the sitting room, and Agnes said she wasn’t going to sit and listen to them talk politics. She was going to the moving-picture show. Amos told her to run along. He and Peter shaved their plugs of tobacco, and crumbled the slices, and filled their pipes; and Wint grinned at the exactness with which Peter copied Amos’s procedure. He had filled his own pipe in more conventional fashion, from his pouch, and was smoking while they were still rubbing the sliced tobacco between their palms.

When the pipes were all going, Amos, as was his custom, sat in silence, waiting for some one else to speak first. Wint imitated him. And Gergue, who did not like silences, said at last:

“Well, Amos, you’re home.”

“Looks that way,” Amos agreed.

“Hardiston ain’t changed.”

“No, Hardiston don’t change.”

“Same old town.”

“Yeah, same old town.”

Silence settled down upon them again. Wint was thinking of Hetty. She had been in his mind all day; she and the miserable man who had faced him in the court that morning. They were somehow linked in his thoughts; linked in a fashion that accused him. Accused him, Wint Chase, of responsibility for them. He groped for understanding, trying to guess why this was so.

Amos, abruptly, looked at Peter Gergue. “Pete,” he said, “I want to talk to Wint.”

Peter got up instantly. “Why, sure, Amos,” he agreed. “I got to see some men, anyways.”

“Be in your office in the morning?” Amos asked.

“Guess likely.”

“I’ll drop in.”

Peter nodded, and Amos went with him to the door. When he came back, Wint was still sitting, nursing his pipe. Amos looked at him, sat down, looked at Wint again; and at last asked:

“We-ell, Wint, how’s tricks?”

Wint said, after a little consideration, that he guessed tricks were all right.

“Like being Mayor?”

“It’s--sobering,” Wint told him. “It’s a good deal of a job. For me.”

“Tell you,” said Amos. “Any job’s a good deal of a job; if a man takes it serious.”

Wint laughed. “Shouldn’t wonder if I took this too seriously,” he said.

“Can’t be done,” Amos reassured him. “Any man that has to look out for other men has a serious job.”

Wint said nothing to that. He was wondering if it were a part of his job to look out for Hetty, and that drunken man of the court.

“That’s what being Mayor amounts to,” Amos remarked. “Found it so, haven’t you?”

Wint stirred in his chair. “Amos,” he said, “a thing happened last night. I feel like telling you about it. Don’t need to ask you not to pass it on.”

Amos tilted his head on one side, squinting at Wint wisely. “That’s all right,” he said. “Tell on.”

The permission relieved Wint immensely; he felt as though he had been loosed from bondage. He told, in a swift rush of words, the story of Hetty. How she had come home last night. He went on, told about the man in court that day. He told Amos what had happened, what he had done, the order he had given Radabaugh.

Amos looked at him curiously. “Told Jim that, did you?”

“Yes.”

“What did Foster say?”

Wint grinned. “Said he’d be damned.”

“I reckon not,” Amos decided, after a moment’s thought. “He won’t be. He’s all right.”

“He thought I was foolish. I suppose I was.”

Amos said slowly: “Depends on why you did it, Wint. Depends on what was in your mind.”

That set Wint thinking again, trying to decide just what had been in his mind. Amos smoked steadily, not looking at Wint at all. At last he said again:

“Yes, sir, Wint. Depends what was in your mind.”

Wint assented thoughtfully. “I suppose so,” he said.

Amos tried waiting in silence for him to go on; but Wint was busy thinking; he beat Amos at his own game without knowing it. He drove Caretall to ask:

“What was in your mind, Wint?”

The boy groped for words; he flushed uneasily, as though afraid of being laughed at. “Well,” he said, “I had a fool sort of a feeling that I was to blame.”

Amos nodded slowly. “Well,” he said, “that’s what I meant--in a way--when I said you had a job that meant taking care of folks. Hetty, and that old rip--they’re folks, like any one else, like as not.”

“Yes, they are,” Wint agreed.

“Taking care of them; that’s your job, Wint. Maybe that just means fining them, and sending them to jail.”

“I tell you I won’t do that again,” Wint exclaimed. “I told you the order I gave Jim Radabaugh.”

“We-ell,” said Amos slowly. “That’s all right. Far as it goes. Might go farther.”

“Farther? How?” Wint demanded. “What can I do?”

“I hadn’t anything pa’ticular in mind,” Amos said carelessly. “Hadn’t a thing in mind.” He looked at Wint sidewise. Wint’s face was white with the intensity of his thought. Amos said slowly: “Looks like a shame to have drunk folks around in as pretty a town as Hardiston.”

“A shame?” Wint cried. “It’s damnable.”

“Guess most folks don’t like it,” Amos reminded him. “Town voted dry. Guess that shows most folks wanted it to be dry, don’t it?”

“I suppose it does,” Wint agreed. Amos looked at him; and Wint moved abruptly in his chair, and his eyes began to flame. The puzzle cleared; he began to understand. He began to understand himself, his own thoughts, his feeling that he was to blame for--Hetty. He began to understand, and his lips set. He said, half aloud: “By God, it means a fight! A hell of a fight in Hardiston.”

“Fight?” Amos asked casually, as though he were thinking of something else. “I like a fight, I’d like to see a good one.” And he added, after a moment: “I might take a hand; if it weren’t a private fight, or something.”

Wint sat forward in his chair, looked around the room. “Where’s the telephone?” he asked.

“Telephone?” said Amos. “Why, in the hall.”

Wint got up and went swiftly out into the hall. Amos listened; and he smiled, with a twinkling anticipation in his eyes. He heard Wint ask the operator to locate Jim Radabaugh and get him on the ’phone. Then Wint came back and stood in the doorway, waiting while she signaled for the marshal with the red light that was set on a pole in the heart of the town. Amos did not turn around to look at Wint. Wint did not move.

After a while, the ’phone rang twice. “That’s us,” said Amos, still without turning. “Our ring is two.”

Wint went to the ’phone. Radabaugh, at the other end, said: “This is the marshal. Who’s talking?”

“Wint. Mayor Chase.”

“Oh! All right, Mister Mayor. What’s on your mind?”

Wint said evenly: “I’ve instructions for you. If you are willing to carry them out, all right. If not, resign, and I’ll fill your place to-morrow.”

“You’re the boss,” said Radabaugh amiably. “I do what you say.”

“Either do what I say or resign,” said Wint again. “I want you to get busy and break up the liquor business in Hardiston.”

There was a long silence, and Wint heard the marshal whistle softly under his breath. Then Radabaugh asked:

“In earnest?”

“Absolutely. I want the town cleaned up. I want it bone dry. Will you take the job? Or quit?”

“Why,” said Radabaugh, “I’ll just naturally take the job. I’ve been a-wishing I had something to do.”

Wint spoke a word or two more, hung up, and came back to Amos. He sat down without speaking. After a little, Amos asked, looking at Wint sidewise:

“Going through with it?”

“Yes,” said Wint. There was more resolution in the simple word than there would have been in lengthier protestations.

“We-ell, all I can say,” Amos drawled, “is that this here is going to make an awful difference to V. R. Kite.”

It did: a difference to Kite, and to Wint’s father, and to Jack Routt; and a difference to Wint himself. A difference to Hardiston, too.

When Wint went home, at ten o’clock, the word was already humming around the town.

END OF BOOK THREE