CHAPTER IV

A CLOUD ON THE MOON

Wint was rather pleased than otherwise to learn that Kite and others of his ilk had resumed their illicit traffic in Hardiston. It gave him something to do. He had none of the instincts of a political campaigner; he could not for the life of him have made a really rousing speech. And it was next to impossible for him to ask a man for his vote. The old pride, the stubborn pride that had done him so much harm, was still alive in Wint; and this pride made him uncomfortable when he found himself asking favors.

He hated campaigning. If there had been no opposition for him to fight, if the way had been made easy before him, it is not unlikely that he would have quit the race. But there was opposition, and strenuous opposition. Jack Routt had kept his word; he was making a real fight out of it. When he encountered Wint, he was friendly--profusely so--and affable enough; but when he was canvassing, he made no bones of attacking Wint unmercifully, striking below the belt or above it as the moment might inspire him. He had dragged up Wint’s old drunken record and aired it until people were beginning to ask themselves if there wasn’t something in what he said, after all.

Against this, up till the middle of October, Wint had made a very poor fight indeed. He would not denounce Routt as Routt denounced him. As a matter of fact, there was no particular charge he could bring against Routt. Jack was no hypocrite, at least; he took an honest and straightforward stand. The liquor issue, for example. He was a drinker, he believed in it. And he said so. At the same time, he added that Wint was a drinker, but pretended not to be. He said Wint was a hypocrite.

The viciousness of Routt’s campaign stunned Wint at first; he was half incredulous. The thing didn’t seem possible. When he was forced to understand that it was not only possible but true, he was left at a loss. It was in the midst of his floundering attempts to find some means to advocate his cause that he got through Ote Runns the first word that the lawbreakers were at work again.

He grasped at that as though it were an opportunity. He telephoned Jim Radabaugh that night; and he sent for Jim the first thing in the morning and asked the marshal what he had discovered. Radabaugh shifted the knob in his cheek, and spat, and said he had discovered nothing.

“Did you find Ote?” Wint asked.

“Sure. I just listened, and then went where he was. He was singing, some.”

“Question him?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What did he say? Where did he get it?”

“He wouldn’t say,” Radabaugh explained.

Wint nodded. “I suppose not. What then?”

“We-ell, I scouted around.”

“Find out anything?”

“Skinny Marsh had a skinful, too. And there was a drunk in the Weaver House when I drifted over there.”

“Is it Mrs. Moody that’s selling?”

Radabaugh shook his head. “I guess not.”

Wint banged his desk. “Damn it, Jim! Who is it, then?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Well, I want you to find out.”

Radabaugh spat and considered. “They’s one thing,” he suggested mildly. “You might not have thought of it.”

Wint grinned. “You talk like B. B. Beecham. What is it, Jim?”

“I mean to say,” said Radabaugh, “this didn’t just happen. What I mean is, it didn’t just happen to happen. It was meant.”

Wint studied him. “What’s in your mind?”

“They’d have held off till after election, maybe,” Jim suggested. “Looks to me like they’re starting this to hit the election somehow. I can’t say just how. Don’t know. But it looks to me it was meant.”

“You mean they’re trying to discredit me, say I don’t enforce the laws.”

“Maybe that. Maybe something else. Just struck me it was something.”

Wint got up abruptly. “I don’t give a hoot. This campaign business bores me, anyhow. But I’m not going to stand for this. You get busy, Jim. If you need help, say so. I’ll bring a man in from outside, if necessary. But I want to grab the man that’s selling. You understand?”

“It’s your funeral,” said Radabaugh cheerfully, shifting the bulge in his cheek. “I’ll do my do.”

“Go to it,” Wint told him. “I’m leaving it to you.”

* * * * *

But nothing happened. A week dragged past; a week in which it was reasonably clear that Wint was losing ground to Routt. Wint himself saw this as quickly as any man, and it troubled him. He asked Peter Gergue for advice--Amos was still out of town--and Peter told him to get up on his hind legs and rear and tear, but Wint shook his head. “I can’t do that. It isn’t in me. The whole thing makes me sick.”

“You’ve naturally got to do it,” Gergue assured him. “Routt’s telling ’em to vote for him; and he’s telling them the same thing, over and over, till they know their lesson like a parrot. That’s advertising, Wint. Keep a-telling them the same thing till they know what they’re to do. You got to. Might as well come to it first as last.”

“I can’t ask a man to vote for me.”

“Why not?”

Wint grinned, and flushed, and gave it up. And Gergue told him again that he would have to make a noise if he wanted to be heard in Hardiston; and he left Wint to think it over.

B. B. Beecham, a day or two later, gave Wint the same advice, but to more purpose. Wint had dropped in at the _Journal_ office casually enough, and talked with two or three others who were there before him, till they drifted away and left him with B. B. Wint asked:

“Well, how do things look to you, B. B.?”

B. B. looked doubtful. “You’re not making a very strong campaign,” he said.

Wint nodded. “I know it. It goes against the grain.”

The editor was surprised. “Is that so? Just how do you mean?”

“Oh, I hate to ask a man to vote for me. I hate to ask favors.”

B. B. smiled. “Who are you going to vote for, on the eighth?”

“Why, Routt, of course. I can’t vote for myself.”

The editor looked blandly interested, and commented: “Well, if that’s the case, of course you can’t ask any one else to vote for you?”

“Why not?” Wint was puzzled.

“You know yourself better than they do. If you can’t vote for yourself--”

“Oh, it isn’t.... Why, you naturally vote for the other fellow?”

“This isn’t a class election at college, you know,” B. B. reminded him. “It’s more serious. Not play. You want to remember that. But if you don’t think enough of yourself to vote for yourself....”

Wint laughed. “All right,” he said. “I’ll vote for myself. You’ve persuaded me.”

B. B. nodded. “Who do you think will make the best mayor; you, or Routt?” he asked.

“I don’t....” Wint flushed. “Why, I....”

“Routt?”

“No, by God!” Wint exclaimed angrily. “I’ve done a good job; and I’ll do another. He’d open the town up. Let things go.”

“Do you want to be Mayor? For your own sake?”

“Why, yes.”

“Like the job so well?”

“No, not particularly. But I want--well, it would show that people think I’ve made good.”

“If you’re going to make a better Mayor than Routt, your election is best for the town, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then it’s best for every man in Hardiston, isn’t it?”

“In a way.”

B. B. tilted back in his chair and lifted his hand in a gesture of confirmation. “That’s what I was getting at. The fact of the matter is, when you ask a man to vote for you, you’re not asking him to do you a favor. You’re asking him to do himself a favor. I don’t suppose you ever thought of that.”

Wint grinned. “Well, no.”

“It’s true?”

“I guess it is.”

B. B. leaned forward. “Then go out and say so. Start something. Keep telling them to elect you; tell them louder and longer and oftener than Routt does, and they will.”

This was so like what Gergue had said that Wint told B. B. so; and the editor nodded and said Gergue was a wise man. “But I can’t do it,” Wint protested. “I don’t know how. I’ll never make a speaker.”

B. B. considered that for a while: and then he said: “You know, printed advertising was invented by the first tongue-tied man.”

“I don’t get it,” Wint confessed.

“He had something to sell, but he couldn’t tell people about it, so he put an ad in the papers; and after that, every one got the habit.”

“You mean I ought to advertise?”

B. B. said that was exactly what he meant. And Wint was interested; he asked some questions. He had heard of advertising rates as things of astounding proportions; and so he was surprised to find that a full-page advertisement in the _Journal_ would only cost him ten dollars. He laughed and said he could stand half a dozen of those. B. B. told him to put an advertisement in each Hardiston paper, and let them appear in every issue till the election. “Say the same thing, over and over, in different ways,” he advised. “Try it. You’ll be surprised.”

In the end, Wint decided to do just this. B. B. helped him write the advertisements. In them, Wint recited what he had done and what he meant to do, but briefly. In each full, black-lettered page, the burden of his song was just three words, repeated over and over:

“Vote for Chase; vote for Chase; vote for Chase.”

* * * * *

Amos came home toward the end of October; and when Wint heard he was in town, he telephoned and made arrangements to see him at his home that night. When he got there, Amos was upstairs. He called to Wint to go into the sitting room and wait, and Wint went in there and sat down. After a moment, Agnes came in to restore a book to its place on the shelves, and Wint got up and stood, talking with her. He thought she seemed uneasy, on edge. Her eyes went now and then through the open door toward the stairs down which Amos would come. She fumbled with her hair, and a lock became disarranged and fell down beside her face.

She said, abruptly, that there was something in her shoe; and she held to his arm with one hand, and stood on one foot, and pulled off her slipper and shook it, upside down. Then she seemed to lose her balance and toppled toward Wint; and he caught her in his arms. She straightened up and pushed him away with what seemed to him unnecessary force; and then turned and went swiftly out into the hall without a word. He looked after her, and saw Amos, halfway down the stairs, watching them with a curiously grave countenance; and Wint, for no reason in the world, was confused, and felt his face burning. He looked down and saw Agnes’s slipper on the floor, where she had dropped it; and he slid it out of sight under the bookcase before Amos came into the room. He was sorry as soon as he had done this; but Agnes had somehow contrived to make him feel guilty. He could hardly face Amos when the Congressman came into the room. He had a miserable feeling that everything was going wrong; all the trifles in the world seemed conspiring to harass him.

But Amos seemed to have seen nothing. He was perfectly amiable, bade Wint sit down, filled his black pipe, squinted at Wint with his head on one side and asked how things were going.

Wint said they were going badly; and Amos smiled.

“Why, now, that’s too bad,” he declared.

“I wasn’t made for a campaigner,” Wint said. “I’ll never be able to make a speech.”

“You write a good ad,” Amos told him; and Wint asked:

“You’ve read them?”

“I guess everybody’s read them.”

“Are they all right?”

“First rate. They’ll do.”

Wint said impatiently: “I’m sick of the whole thing.”

Amos studied him. “Routt getting under your skin?”

“No. He’s playing it pretty strong, though.”

“I’ll say he is.”

“Of course, it’s just politics. He and I are as friendly as ever.”

“Oh, sure,” Amos agreed indolently. “He told you so, didn’t he?”

“Yes. He came to me, in the beginning.”

“I heard so.”

“I don’t know how to answer him--the line he’s taking,” Wint explained. “That’s all.”

“Don’t have to answer him, do you? Don’t have to answer a lie.”

Wint laughed uneasily. “Just the same, he’s stirring people up.”

“I never heard of anybody being permanently hurt by a lie but the liar,” said Amos.

Wint leaned forward. “I tell you, Amos, I want to be elected. I’ve gone into this; and I want to win. Routt and I are friendly enough; but he started this fight, and I want to beat him. I want to beat him to a whisper. I’d like to see him skunked. I don’t care if he doesn’t get two votes in Hardiston. That’s the way I feel.” His fierce enthusiasm dropped away from him; he said hopelessly: “But I’m darned if I know how to manage it.”

Amos nodded slowly. “Sick of it, eh?”

“Yes.”

The Congressman puffed for a while in silence, thinking; and Wint waited for the other man to speak. At last Amos looked at him and asked curiously: “Wint, you dead set on being Mayor?”

Something in his tone put Wint on guard. “Dead set? Why?” he asked.

Amos lifted a hand. “Why, just this,” he explained. “I’ve been talking around, here and there. Far as I hear, they’ve heard about you in Columbus. The way it strikes me, right now, if you was to run for the House, say, you could get it; and you’d have a good start up there. That’s all.”

Wint laughed uneasily. “That can come later. Maybe.”

“Thing is,” said Amos, “if you was to get licked for Mayor, it’d hurt you.”

“I’m not going to get licked,” Wint exclaimed. “I’m going to win.”

“Well--maybe,” Amos agreed. “Only I just want you to know that if you’d rather try for something else, I’d back you to the limit.”

“You mean after election? Next year?”

“I couldn’t do much if you was licked.”

Wint leaned toward him. “Just what do you mean?”

“Just what I say.”

“Are you asking me to withdraw?” Wint asked. His heart was in his mouth. “I know you and Routt have always worked together. Do you want me to get out and let him have it?”

“I’m not asking you to do a thing. I’m offering you a good excuse to--maybe--dodge a licking.”

“I’m not going to get licked,” Wint insisted. “And if there’s a licking waiting for me--by God, I won’t dodge!”

Amos looked at him curiously. “Well, that’s all right. I just put the thing up to you.”

“But I owe you enough,” said Wint, “so that if you asked me to quit--I’d do it.”

“I’m not asking you.”

“Then,” Wint declared, “I stick; and I win.”

Amos moved a little in his chair; and he sighed. “Well,” he drawled, “I’m watching you.”

* * * * *

Wint left Amos, a little later; and he walked home with a weight on his shoulders. He had counted on the Congressman; but--this was half-hearted support at best that Amos was offering. Wint was puzzled, he could not understand; and he was depressed, and worried, and unhappy. He had an impulse to get out, throw the whole matter to one side, forget it all; but on the heels of the thought, his jaw hardened and he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No; I’ll stick it out to the end.”

He would have been more concerned, and he would have been thoroughly angry, if he could have heard Agnes Caretall talk to Amos when he had left. She came in to retrieve her lost slipper; and she was fuming indignantly. Old Maria Hale, setting the table for breakfast as she always did, the last thing at night, overheard a word or two of their talk. She heard Agnes exclaim:

“I don’t see how you can be so calm, just because you elected him. But that doesn’t give him any right to think he can do a thing like that with me.”

And she heard Amos’s slow, even voice reply:

“No; it doesn’t give him any right.”

“I should think you could say something,” Agnes cried. “Your own daughter!”

Maria heard Amos say something about “fooling.” And Agnes retorted:

“It wasn’t fooling! It was--plain insulting!”

“Well, we can’t let him do that,” Amos agreed drawlingly. Then Maria departed to the kitchen and heard no more. She had paid no particular attention. The old darky lived in a world of her own. A quiet world. A world that was not far from coming to its end. She was very old.

After Agnes left him and went upstairs Amos sat for a long time, very still, before the fire. His eyes were weary, and his calm face was troubled.

Once he lifted his glance from the fire and saw a picture of Agnes on the mantel; and he got up and took it in his big hands. It had been taken two or three years ago; and it was very beautiful. A gay, happy face; the face of a child without cares. A good face, Amos thought. An honest one.

He compared it in his thoughts with Agnes as she was now; and the trouble in his countenance deepened. After a little, he said to himself as he had said once before: “I wish her mother hadn’t ’ve died.”

He put the picture slowly back on the mantel, and sat down and once more became motionless, staring into the fire. To one watching him it would have seemed in that moment that Amos, too, was very old.