“J. B. Waters? He keeps a weather record, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. Has, for a good many years. We print his record every week. Perhaps you haven’t noticed it.”
Wint nodded. “Yes. I suppose every one likes to read about the weather. Even on a hot day.”
B. B. smiled. “That’s because every one likes to read about things they have experienced. You won’t find a big daily in the country without its paragraph or its temperature tables devoted to the weather, every day in the year. And a day like this is worth a front-page story any time.”
“You know what a day like this always makes me think of?” Wint asked; and B. B. looked interested. “A glass of beer,” said Wint. “Cool and brown, with beads on the outside of the glass.”
The editor smiled. “The beads on the outside of the glass won’t cool you off half as much as the beads on the outside of your head,” he said. “Did you ever stop to think of that?”
“Sweat, you mean?”
“Exactly. You know, when troops go into a hot country, they get flannel-covered canteens; and when they want to cool off the water in the canteens, they wet the flannel and let it dry. The evaporation of your own perspiration is the finest cooling agency in the world.”
“May be,” Wint agreed. “But it doesn’t stop your thirst.”
B. B. said good-naturedly: “A thirst is one of the handicaps of the smoker. I quit smoking a good many years ago. A non-smoker can satisfy his own thirst by swallowing his own spittle. I don’t suppose you ever thought of that?”
“Is that straight?”
“Yes, indeed.”
Wint asked amiably: “Mean to say you wouldn’t have to take a barrel of water to cross the Sahara.”
“Oh, when the bodily juices are exhausted, of course....”
Wint grinned. “I’ll stick to my beer.”
B. B. laughed and said: “I expect a good many Hardiston men are cussing you to-day because they can’t get beer.”
“I suppose so. I’ve a notion to cuss myself.” He added, a moment later: “You know, B. B., it’s surprising to me how little fuss has been made over that.”
“You mean—the—enforcing the law?”
“Yes. I looked for a row.”
“Oh, you’ll find most people are on your side. You know, most people are for the decent thing, in the long run. That’s what makes the world go around.”
“Think so?”
“Yes, indeed. If that weren’t so, where would be the virtue in democracy?”
“Well,” Wint said good-naturedly, “I’ve always had an idea that a democracy was a poor way to run things, anyway. About all you can say for it is that a man has a right to make a fool of himself.”
“Well, that’s about all you can say against slavery, isn’t it?”
Wint considered. “I don’t get you.”
“There were good men in the South before the war, owning slaves,” said B. B. “And the slaves were better off than their descendants are now. Materially; perhaps morally, too. But that doesn’t prove slavery was right.” He added: “The darkies had a right to make fools of themselves if they chose, you see. Their masters—even the good masters—prevented them.”
“I suppose that’s what a benevolent despot does?”
“Exactly.”
“If it wasn’t so hot, I’d give three cheers for democracy.” He considered thoughtfully, fanning himself with his hat. “But that’s what I’m doing, B. B. I’m refusing to let some that would like to, make fools of themselves with booze.”
B. B. shook his head. “Not at all. It’s not your doing. The people are doing it themselves. They voted dry; they elected you to enforce their vote. See the distinction?”
“Think I’ve done right, then?” Wint asked.
And B. B. said: “Yes, indeed.” Wint got a surprising amount of satisfaction out of that. Because, as has been said, he valued B. B.’s opinion.
So, on the whole, that month of July was a cheerful one for Wint. Things were going his way; the world was bright; the skies were sunny.
The first cloud upon them came on the second of August. It was a very little cloud; but it was a forerunner of bigger ones to come. Wint did not, in the beginning, appreciate its full significance. In fact, he was not sure it had any significance at all. It merely puzzled him.
His month’s statement from the bank came in. When it first came, he tossed the long envelope aside without opening it; and it was not till that night that he compared the bank statement with the balance in his check book.
He discovered, then, that there was a mistake somewhere. The bank credited him with more money than he should have had. He said to himself, good-naturedly, that he ought not to kick about that. Nevertheless, he ran through his canceled checks, comparing them with his stubs, to see where the difference lay.
He located the discrepancy almost at once; and when he discovered it, he sat back and considered its significance with a puzzled look in his eyes.
The trouble was that his check to Hetty, for her expenses in Columbus, had never been cashed; and Wint could not understand that at all.
THIS matter of the check that he had given Hetty stuck in Wint’s mind, disquieting him. This in spite of the fact that he tried to forget it, told himself it had no significance, that it meant nothing at all.
He gathered up the other canceled checks and put them back in the bank’s long, yellow envelope, and stuck the envelope in a drawer of his desk. Hetty had not yet cashed the check; that was all. She would cash it when she needed the money. He tried to believe this was the key to the puzzle.
But it was not a satisfactory key; and this was proved by the fact that his thoughts kept harking back to the matter during the next day or two. When he gave Hetty the check, he had expected her to cash it before she left town. In fact, his first thought had been to draw the money himself, and give it to her; but this had been slightly less convenient than to write the check. So he had written the check, and given it to her, and now Hetty had not cashed it.
It was characteristic of Wint that he saw no threat against himself in this circumstance. Wint was never of a suspicious turn of mind. He was loyal to his friends and to those who seemed to be his friends; he took them, and he took the world at large, at face value. So in this case, he was not uneasy on his own account, but on Hetty’s. For Hetty had needed this money; yet she had not cashed the check.
He knew she needed the money. Her wage from his mother left no great margin for saving, if a girl liked to spend money as well at Hetty did. She could not have saved more than a few dollars; twenty, or perhaps thirty.... Besides, she had told him she needed money. When he told her she had better go away, she had said: “A fat chance of that. Where wouldI get the money, anyway?” It was this that had led him to write a check for her.
She had needed the money; she had accepted it. That is to say, she had accepted the check, but had not cashed it. Not yet, at least. Why not? What was the explanation?
His uneasiness, all on Hetty’s account, began to take shape. He remembered the girl’s sullen hopelessness, her friendlessness. She had been ready to give up, to submit to whatever misfortunes might come upon her. There had always been a defiant, reckless, fatalistic streak in Hetty. And Wint, remembering, was afraid it had taken the ascendant in the girl. He was afraid.
He did not put into words, even in his thoughts, the truth of this fear. But he did write to a college classmate, who was working at the time on one of the Columbus papers, and asked him to try to locate Hetty at one of the hospitals. He told the circumstances. And two or three days later, the man wrote to say that there was no such person as Hetty in any hospital in Columbus under her own name; and that as far as he could learn, there was no one approximating her description.
When this letter came, it tended to clinch Wint’s fears. He was not yet convinced that Hetty had chosen to—do that which writes “Finis” as the bottom of life’s last page. But he was almost convinced, almost ready to believe.
It made Wint distinctly unhappy. He had an honest liking and respect for Hetty, an old friendship for the girl.
He did not tell either his father or mother of the matter of the check; nor did he tell them what he feared had come to pass. There was no need, he thought, of worrying them. There was nothing that could be done.
The long, lazy summer dragged slowly past, and nothing happened. Which is the way of Hardiston. That is to say, nothing happened that was in any way extraordinary. The Baptist Sunday school held its annual picnic in the G. A. R. grove, south of town; and every one went, Baptist or not, Sunday school scholar or not. Everybody went, and took his dinner. Fried chicken, and sandwiches, and deviled eggs, andbananas; and there were vast freezers of ice cream. And some played baseball, and some idled in the swings, and there were the sports that go with such an occasion. Cracker-eating, shoe-lacing, egg-and-spoon race, greased pole, and so on and so on, to the tune of a great deal of laughter and general good nature. And the Hardiston baseball team played a game every week, sometimes away from home, sometimes on the baseball field down by the creek, where the muddy waters over-flowed every spring. And Lint Blood, the hard-throwing left fielder who was fully as good as any big leaguer in the country, if he could only get his chance, had his regular season as hero of the town. And there were a few dances, where the men appeared in white trousers and soft shirts and took off their coats to dance; and there were hay rides, on moonlight nights; and Ed Skinner’s nine-year-old boy almost got drowned in the swimming hole at Smith’s Bridge; and Jim Radabaugh and two or three others went fishing down on Big Raccoon, thirty miles away; and the tennis court in Walter Roberts’s back yard was busy every fine afternoon; and Ringling Brothers and Buffalo Bill paid Hardiston their regular summer visits. It rained so hard, for three days before Ringling Brothers came, that the big show had to be canceled, which made it hard for every father in town. And Sam O’Brien’s brother caught a thirty-five-pound catfish in the river, and sent it up to Sam, who kept it alive in a tub in his restaurant for two days, and killed and fried it for his customers only when it began to pine away in captivity. And Ed Howe’s boy fell off a home-made acting bar and broke his arm; and the Welsh held their County Eisteddfod in a tent on the old fair grounds, and John Morgan won the first prize in the male solo competition. Hardiston boys thought that was rather a joke, because John was the only entry in this particular event; and they reminded him of this fact for a good many years to come, in their tormenting moments. And the hot days and the warm days and the wet days came and went, and the summer dragged away.
In September, Joan suggested a picnic at Gallop Caves, a dozen miles from Hardiston; and Wint liked the idea, so they discussed who should go, and how, and in due time the affairtook place. Joan and Agnes and two or three other girls made the domestic arrangements, with Wint and Dick Hoover and Jack Routt and one or two besides to look after the financial end, and the transportation. In the old days, they would have hired one of the big barges from the livery stable, with a long seat running the length of each side; and they would have crowded into that and ridden the dozen jolting miles, with a good deal of singing and laughing and talking as they went; but there were automobiles in Hardiston now, and no one thought of the barge.
They started early; that is to say, at eight o’clock in the morning, or thereabouts. There were three automobiles full of them, with hampers and boxes and freezers full of things to eat in every car. And they made the trip at a breakneck and break-axle speed over the rough road, and came to the Caves by nine, and unloaded the edibles and got buckets of water from the well behind the house at the entrance to the Caves. The farmer who lived in this house had an eye to business; and a year or two before he had put up a pavilion in the grove by the Caves, and had begun to charge admission. Besides the pavilion, there were swings, and there was a seesaw; and there were always the Caves themselves, and the winding, clear-watered little stream that came down over the rocks in a feathery cascade and wound away among the trees.
This day, they danced a little, in the pavilion—Joan had brought a graphophone—and when it grew too warm to dance, some of them went to climb about on the cool, wet rocks of the Caves; and some took off shoes and stockings, or shoes and socks as the case might be, and waded in the brook; and some sprawled on the sand at the base of the rocky wall and called doodle bugs. A pleasant, idle sport. The doodle bug is more scientifically known as an ant lion. He digs himself a hole in the sand like an inverted cone, and hides himself in the loose sand at the bottom of the hole. The theory of the thing is that an ant tumbles in, slides down the sloping sides, and falls a prey to the ingenious monster at the bottom. To call a doodle bug, you simply chant over and over:
“Doodle up, doodle up, doodle up....”
And at the same time, you stir the sand on the sides of the trap with a twig. Either the song or the sliding sand causes the bug to emerge from his ambush at the bottom of the pit, when you may see him for an instant; a misshapen, powerful little thing. If you happen to be an ant, he looks to you as formidable as a behemoth, bursting out of the sand and tumbling it from his shoulders as a mammoth bursts out of the primeval forest. If you happen to be a human, you laugh at his awkward movements, and find another pit, and call another doodle bug.
Routt and Agnes, Wint and Joan, all four together, investigated doodle bugs this day. They had a good-natured time of it till Jack Routt caught an ant and dropped it into one of the pits to see the monster at the bottom in action. The sight of the ant’s swift end was not pleasant to Joan; and she looked at Routt in a critical way. He and Agnes seemed to think it rather a joke on the ant. Wint and Joan moved away and left them there and went clambering up among the rocks, and picked wintergreen and chewed it, and came out at last on the upper level, on top of the Caves. They looked down from there and shouted to the others below. And when they tired of that, they sat down and talked to each other for a while. That was one pursuit they never tired of.
Wint had been meaning to ask Joan something. It concerned that letter which he had received the day after his election as Mayor. The letter had been anonymous; a friendly, loyal, sympathetic little note. He had torn it up angrily, as soon as he read it, because he was in no mood for good advice that day, and the letter had given good advice. He could remember, even now, snatches of it. He had wondered who wrote it; and this wonder had revived, during the last few days, and he had considered the matter, and asked a question or two.
Now he asked Joan whether she had written it; and Joan hesitated, and flushed a little, and then said, looking at him bravely: “Yes, I wrote it, Wint.”
He said in an embarrassed way: “But that was when you had told me you would have no more to do with me.”
She nodded.
“I tore it up,” he said.
“I thought you would.” She smiled a little. “But I hoped you—would remember it, too.”
“I do,” Wint told her. “You said I had ‘the finest chance a man ever had to retrieve his mistakes,’ and you told me to buckle down.”
“Yes, I remember,” she agreed.
Wint looked at her, and his heart was pounding softly. “You said there were some who would watch me—lovingly,” he reminded her.
For a minute she did not speak; then she nodded her head slowly; and she said: “Yes.” Her eyes met his honestly.
Wint had been very sure, before he asked her, that she had written the letter; he had meant to remind her of this word, and if she confessed it, to go on. But now that he had come thus far, he found that he could go no farther. It was not that she forbade him; not that there was any prohibition in her eyes. It was something within himself that restrained him. Something that held his tongue, bade him not risk his fortune—lest, perchance, he lose it.
Any one but a blind man would have seen there was no danger of his losing it; but Wint, in this matter, was blind—for the immemorial reason. So all the courage that had brought him thus far deserted him, and he only said:
“Oh!”
That did not seem to Joan to call for any answer, so she said nothing; and after a moment Wint got hurriedly to his feet and exclaimed:
“Well, I’m getting hungry. Better be getting back, hadn’t we?”
Joan looked, perhaps, a little disappointed. But she said she guessed so; and they made their way down to join the others.
After every one had eaten till there was no more eat inthem, there was a general tendency to take things easy. The dishes had to be washed in the brook; and the girls undertook to do that. Dick Hoover found some horseshoes, and started a game of quoits. Wint would have taken a hand; but Jack Routt drew him aside and said:
“I’d like a little talk with you, Wint. Mind?”
Wint was surprised; but he didn’t say so. “All right,” he agreed. “Shoot.”
Routt offered him a cigar, and Wint took it, and they walked slowly away from the others, back toward the Caves. Routt came to the point without preliminaries. “It’s like this, Wint,” he said frankly. “A good many people have been telling me I ought to get into politics.”
Wint had ears to hear; and he had heard something of this. But he pretended ignorance, and only said: “I thought you were in politics. Thought you were linked up with Amos.”
“I have been, in the past,” Routt agreed. “But the trouble with that is, if you tie up with a big man, you get only what he chooses to give you. I’ve been advised to strike out for myself.”
Wint said: “I think that’s good advice. It ought to help your law practice, too.”
“Matter of fact,” said Routt. “They’re telling me I ought to run against you.”
“Against me?” Wint seemed only mildly interested. “For Mayor?”
“Yes. On the wet issue. You know my ideas on that. I’m not on your side of the fence there at all.”
“Well, I don’t find fault with any man’s ideas, Jack.”
“The trouble is this,” Routt explained. “You and I are pretty good friends. Always have been. I don’t want to start anything that will spoil that friendship.”
Wint laughed and said: “Good Lord, Jack; I guess there’s no fear of that.”
“By God, I knew you’d say so!” Routt exclaimed. “Just the same. I was leary. You know what kind of a fellow I am. When I go into a thing, I go in with both feet. If I run against you, Wint, I’ll give you a fight.”
“Go to it. We’ll show Hardiston some action.”
“I’ll lam it into you, Wint.”
“Well, I can give as good as you send,” Wint promised cheerfully.
“The only thing is,” Routt explained, “I just want an understanding with you first; that is, I want you to know there’s nothing personal in anything I may say. It’s politics, Wint; and if I go in, it will be hot politics. If you’ll promise to take it as that and nothing else.”
Wint said easily: “I don’t suppose you can tell Hardiston anything about me that it doesn’t already know.”
Routt grasped his hand. “Attaboy, Wint,” he exclaimed. “You’re a good sport. By God, I believe I’ll go into it!”
“Come ahead. It’s no private fight,” Wint assured him.
“The only thing is, I wanted to know first. I want you to know I’m on the level with you personally.”
“Well, I should say I know that, Jack.”
Routt thrust out his hand. “Shake on it, Wint.”
Wint laughed. “You’re dramatic enough.” But he shook hands.
They rejoined the others after a while, and Wint was glad of it. He had hidden his feelings from Routt; but as a matter of fact he was a good deal surprised and chagrined at Jack’s news. He had heard rumors; but he had not believed Routt would come out against him. It was a thing he, Wint, would not have done.... It smacked, he felt, of disloyalty to a friend. He had even, for a moment, a thought of withdrawing and leaving the field free to Routt. But he put it away. After all, he was first in the fight; it was Routt who had brought about this situation, not he. He could not well avoid the issue.
Nevertheless, he was troubled. The world that had seemed so bright and fair a month ago had a less cheerful aspect now. His fears for Hetty, his anxiety over her, were always with him, faintly oppressive. Now Routt’s desertion, his projected opposition. Try as he would to shake it off, Wint could not rid himself of the feeling that there were rough places on the road that lay ahead.
His anxiety over Hetty was relieved—though only to take a new turn—in the last week of September. For Hetty came back to Hardiston.
Wint met her on the street one day. He was immensely surprised; and he was immensely pleased to see her, safe and sound. He cried: “Why, Hetty, where did you come from?”
She looked around furtively, as though she would have avoided him if it had been possible to do so. “Didn’t you expect me to come back?” she asked sullenly.
“Of course. But.... How are you? All right? Where have you been?”
“Summering in New England,” she said ironically. “Where’d you think?”
“Mother’s been wondering when you’d come back. She needs you.”
“She’ll have to go on needing me.”
“Aren’t you—”
“I’ve got a job in the shoe factory.”
Wint said: “Oh!” He was disturbed and uncertain, puzzled by Hetty’s attitude. He asked: “Is the.... Did you....”
“The baby?” said Hetty listlessly. “Oh, he died.” There was dead agony in her tone, so that Wint ached for her.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
“That’s all right. I can stand it.”
He asked: “Did you need any money? The check I gave you never came through the bank.”
“I lost it,” she said.
“Why, you must have had trouble. You didn’t have enough.”
“I went in as a charity-ward patient.”
“Columbus?”
“No. Cincinnati. I didn’t want any one knowing.”
Wint smiled in a friendly way and said: “I was worried about you.”
Hetty laughed. “You’d better worry about yourself. Do you know people are looking at you, while you’re talking to me? It won’t help you any to be seen with me.”
Wint said “Pshaw! You’re morbid, Hetty.”
“Besides,” she told him. “I’ve got to look out. Mind my p’s and q’s. If I want to hold my job.”
Wint flushed uncomfortably. “Why.... All right,” he said. “But if there’s ever anything....”
“Oh, I’ll let you know,” Hetty said impatiently, and turned away.
He had been afraid that she had killed herself; that her body was dead. He was afraid now, as he watched her move down the street, that something more important was dead in the girl.
It was at this moment that he realized for the first time that a man had been responsible for what had come to Hetty. He wondered who the man was; and he thought it would be satisfying to say a word or two to the fellow.
JACK ROUTT was as good as his word to Wint. Early in October, he announced his candidacy for Mayor; and he proceeded to push it.
In their talk at the Caves, he had warned Wint what to expect. But in spite of that warning, Wint had looked for no more than a polite and friendly rivalry, a congenial conflict, a good-natured tussle between friends.
He was to find that Routt had meant exactly what he said; that Routt as a political opponent and Routt as a friend were two very different personalities. On the heels of his open announcement that he was a candidate, Jack began a canvass of the town, and a direct and virulent assault upon Wint.
Wint heard what Routt was doing first through his father. The elder Chase came home to supper one evening in a fuming rage; and he said while they were eating:
“Wint, this Routt is a fine friend of yours!”
Wint looked at his father in some surprise. “Why, Jack’s all right,” he declared.
“All right?” Chase demanded. “Do you know what he’s doing?”
“I know he’s out for Mayor. That’s all right. I’ve no string on the job. I want to be re-elected, just as a sort of a—testimonial that I’ve made good. And I intend to be re-elected. But at the same time, any one has a right to run against me.”
“Nobody denies that,” his father exclaimed. “But no one has a right to hark back a year for mud to throw at you.”
Wint said: “Pshaw, there’s always mud-throwing in politics.”
Chase challenged: “Do you mean to say you think Routt has a right to do as he is doing?”
“Well, just what is he doing?” Wint asked good-naturedly.
“What is he doing? He’s saying you’re a common drunkard; that you always have been; that you are still, in secret.”
Wint flushed with slow anger. “Well,” he said, “if any one believes that, they’re welcome to.”
“But damn it, son, you’re not!” Chase exclaimed; and there was such a fierce rush of pride in his father’s voice that Wint was startled, and he was suddenly very happy about nothing; and he said:
“I’m glad you know it, anyway, dad.”
“Damn it!” Chase repeated. “Don’t you suppose I can see? Don’t you suppose I have a right to be proud of my own son, when he does something to be proud of? Your mother and I have.... Well, Wint, we’re—we’re a good deal happier than we were a year ago.”
Wint said gently: “I’m only sorry I didn’t make you happy a year ago.”
“That’s all right,” his father declared. “You were a headstrong youngster; and I didn’t know how to control you. An unruly colt takes careful handling. I’m not a—tactful man. But I’ll be damned if I can see how you can take this from the man you call your friend.”
Wint smiled slowly, and he said: “That’s three times in two minutes you’ve said ‘damn,’ dad. Cut it out. Don’t get profane in your excitement. Routt’s all right, really. Don’t swear at him.”
“Do you realize that he’s saying you’re drinking as regularly as ever, while you pretend to keep this a dry town?”
“Well, no one will believe him.”
“You can find men to believe anything; and there are plenty in Hardiston that want to believe anything against you.”
“Let them,” said Wint confidently. “There are plenty who will stand back of me.”
“But what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m not going to call names,” Wint told him cheerfully. “I’ll fight it out quietly and decently; and I’ll win. That’s what I mean to do.”
“You act as though you had expected this.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Jack came to me and told me, before he told any one else, that he was going to run. And he warned me he was going to make it a real fight.”
“A real fight? This is assassination!”
Wint laughed. “You’re taking it too hard. I know it’s just because you’re—proud of me. Are you going to back me in this?”
Chase frowned. “As a matter of fact, Wint, I’m in a hard position. I want to back you—of course. But I can’t stomach Caretall. If you weren’t tied up with him.”
“He’s been a pretty good friend to me. Can’t you take him on that ground?”
“If I tied up with him, I’d be called a bootlicker, and justly. After what he did to me, I can’t cater to him and keep my self-respect.”
“Pshaw, dad! The world has a short memory. That’s all forgotten.”
“I’ve not forgotten.”
“Every one else has.”
“I’m not talking about every one else. I’m talking about my own self-respect.”
They had finished supper; and they got up and went into the other room. Mrs. Chase—she was doing her own work since Hetty had left her—began to clear away the dishes. In the sitting room, Wint said: “I’ve been counting on you, dad.”
Chase said: “I’ll do what I can—quietly. But I can not come out in the open and side with Amos. If he’d turn against you....”
Wint laughed. “I might kick up a row with him.”
“You’ll never regret breaking with Caretall. He’s a crooked politician of the worst type, without honor. A traitor to his own friends. He’ll be a traitor to you when it pleases him.”
His son said quickly: “Don’t. Please don’t talk against him to me. Let’s just not talk about him. After all, he’s been square to me.”
Chase flung up his hand. “All right. But how about Routt? Are you going to sit still and take the mud he’s throwing?”
“Jack will be too busy to throw mud, pretty soon,” Wint promised cheerfully. “Mud is trimmings. I’ll bring him down to brass tacks.”
“You ought to shut his lying—”
“Come, dad, don’t take it so seriously.”
“Well, then, you take it more seriously.”
Wint laughed. “All right. You wait and see.”
Nevertheless, he could not deny to himself that Routt’s move troubled him. Not for its effect on his candidacy, but for the light in which it showed Routt himself. For all his loyalty, Wint thought it was unworthy. Thought Routt was hurting himself and sullying himself. He met Jack uptown that night, and told him so in a friendly way. “Do as you like,” he said. “But I think it hurts you more than it does me,” he suggested.
Routt laughed, and asked: “It’s not getting under your skin, is it? I told you I’d give you a run.”
“Pshaw, no. Say anything you like about me. But it doesn’t get you any votes.”
“You’ll know better than that on the eighth of November,” Jack told him; and Wint smiled and let it go at that. After all, it was Routt’s own concern.
But if Wint took Routt’s tactics equably, Hardiston did not. Hardiston folk love politics. The great American game is the breath in their nostrils. They have an expert’s appreciation of the tactical value of this move and that; and they are keen spectators at such a battle as Routt and Wint were staging.
Wint would have liked to consult with Amos at this time; but it happened that Amos was out of town. He had gone to Columbus for a day or two. In lieu of Amos, Wint went to Peter Gergue, and asked Gergue how things looked to him. Gergue fumbled in his back hair in the thoughtful way he had and said he guessed Routt was making a lively fight of it, anyway.
“Do you think he’s making votes?” Wint asked.
“We-ell,” said Peter, “you can’t always tell what folks will do. I’d say he’s persuading every enemy you’ve got to vote against you.”
Wint said: “They would, anyway.”
“Sure.”
“The question is, is he persuading any of my friends?”
“I’d say not.”
“Then I don’t need to worry.”
Gergue spat at the curb. “Can’t say. You see, Wint, there’s about sixty per cent. of this town—or any town—that’s neither enemy nor friend. Just neutral. Them’s the votes you got to get.”
“I don’t believe Routt will get many of those votes by lies.”
“Not if they’re knowed to be lies.”
“Every one knows they are lies.”
“It’s a funny thing,” Gergue ruminated. “But lots of folks take a kind of pleasure out of believing lies about other folks.”
Wint shook his head. “I don’t believe Routt is accomplishing a thing.”
“We-ell,” said Gergue, “matter of fact, I’m thinking you may be right. Thing is, he’s laying a foundation, like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s laying the tracks. He’s doing a lot of talk that won’t be believed much now; but he might bring on something later along that would make folks say: ‘Well, maybe that other was true, too.’”
“What can he bring?” Wint challenged.
“Has he got anything on you?”
“Every one knows all there is to know about me, I suppose.”
Gergue scratched his head. “We-ell, I dunno,” he said. “Anyway, that’s what I was kind of thinking.”
Wint met V. R. Kite one day, and the little man spoke to him so affably that Wint asked: “Well, how are things, Mr. Kite?”
“Excellent. First class, young man.”
“I suppose you’ll vote for me for Mayor?” Wint asked, grinning good-naturedly; and Kite chuckled and said he guessed not.
“Routt’s more my style,” he said.
“Don’t waste your vote on a loser,” Wint told him; but Kitesaid Routt might be a loser and might not. He left Wint with an unpleasant feeling that there had been a secretly triumphant note in the little old buzzard’s voice.
Jim Radabaugh met James T. Hollow at the Post Office one morning, and said cheerfully: “Well, James T., how’s it happen you’re not out for Mayor again?”
“I try to do what is right,” Hollow said earnestly. “But I really don’t know what to do, Mr. Marshal. I have thought of coming out, but Congressman Caretall gives me very little encouragement.”
“Don’t encourage you, eh?”
“No. In fact, I might say he discouraged—”
“Well, now,” said Radabaugh, “maybe you’d best just lie low.”
Hollow looked doubtful and said he didn’t know.
Thus all Hardiston talked, each man after his fashion. Ed Skinner of theSunmaintained a strict neutrality. He was closely allied with Wint’s father; and the elder Chase held his hand. B. B. Beecham seldom let theJournaltake an active part in local politics, except on broad party lines. And Wint—since he had the patronage of Amos Caretall—was of the same party as Routt, who had been Amos’s ally. He carried the announcement cards of both men and let it go at that. But he went so far as to say to Wint, and to those who dropped in at theJournaloffice, that Routt’s methods were not likely to be profitable. “It never pays to open up old sores,” he said. “And it’s never a good plan to say anything that will unjustly hurt another man’s feelings. He may be in a position to resent it, some day.”
Sam O’Brien, the restaurant man, told Wint that Routt would never get his vote. “I like nerve,” he said, “and you’ve got it. You’ve made me laugh sometimes, Wint. Lord, I’ve thought you’d be the death of me. But you’ve took your nerve in your hands. You’ve got me, boy. More power to your elbow.”
The first two weeks of October slid swiftly by. Wint heard Routt was planning for a rally or two; and he began to make his own arrangements to a similar end. But in mid-October, word came to him which put the mayoralty race out of his mind.
The word came through Ote Runns, that hopeless drunkard whose cheerful services were in such demand by Hardiston housewives at rug-beating time. Wint met Ote one evening, on his way home, and Ote was bibulously cheerful. He greeted Wint hilariously; and told him in triumphant tones that Hardiston was itself again.
Wint, with a suspicion of what was coming, asked Ote what he meant; and Ote chortled:
“’S a good ol’ town. Good ol’ wet town! Plenny o’ booze now.”
Wint asked Ote where he got it, but the man put his finger to his nose and shook his head. Wint left him and went on his way.
When he got home, he telephoned Radabaugh. “They’re selling again, Jim,” he said.
The marshal asked: “Who?”
“Don’t know,” said Wint. “I met Ote Runns with a load aboard. I want you to get after them right away.”
“I’m started, now,” said Jim Radabaugh. “I’m on my way.”
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 theJournaloffice casually enough, and talked with two or three otherswho 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 theJournalwould 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 appearin 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. Hehad 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 seehim 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. Shehad 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.
CONGRESSMAN Amos Caretall staged, next morning in the Post Office, one of those dramatic incidents which had checkered his career and done a good deal to make him what he was. These scenes were meat and drink to Amos. He liked to hark back to them and chuckle at the memory. In Washington, last winter, for example, he had told over and over the story of his speech at the rally of Winthrop Chase, Senior; his pledge to vote for a Chase, and the sequel to that pledge. The thing appealed to his sense of humor.
This morning he met Wint in the Post Office and snubbed him. And within half an hour all Hardiston knew about it, and was talking about it. The way of the thing was this.
Wint had met Jack Routt on the way uptown; and they came up Broad Street together, and down Main to the Post Office. Wint was thoughtful and a little silent; Routt expansively amiable in the fashion that had become habitual with him since the campaign opened. He asked Wint, jocularly, whether he was downhearted, and Wint said he was not. Routt told him he would be. “You’ll be ready to quit before I’m through with you, old man,” he warned Wint. “You’ll be ready to crawl into your hole. Oh, I’m laying for you.”
“Go ahead,” Wint told him quietly.
“All your ads in the papers won’t do you a bit of good, either. That’s good money wasted. You have to get out and talk to the voters, Wint. Take a tip from me. It’s the word of mouth that does the trick.”
Wint said if this were so Routt would surely come out on top. “You’ve used word of mouth pretty freely,” he remarked.
“Getting into the quick, am I?” Routt chuckled.
“Why, no. I just commented on the fact that....”
Routt asked solicitously: “Look here. You’re not sore, are you? You know, the understanding was that this was to be a real fight.”
“Of course,” Wint agreed. “And I’m not sore. Go as far as you like.”
A moment later, Routt said: “I heard Amos was going to throw you down. Anything in that? If he does, you haven’t got a chance.”
“Nothing in it,” Wint told him. “I had a talk with Amos last night.”
Routt laughed and said Amos’s promises didn’t amount to anything. “Is he backing you; or is he holding off?” he asked. “I haven’t heard that he’s doing much.”
“You’ll hear in due time,” Wint told him.
He thought, afterward, that it was a curious coincidence that Routt should have said this about Amos on this particular morning. It was almost as though Routt had really had some foreknowledge. But at the time, the question made no great impression on him.
When they turned into the Post Office, the mail had not yet been distributed, and the windows were closed. There were perhaps a dozen men there, waiting before their boxes, talking, smoking, spitting on the floor. Routt and Wint took their places among these men; and Routt stuck near Wint. There was some good-natured chaffing. And after a little, Amos and Peter Gergue came in together. Every one had a word for Amos. It was a minute or two after he came in the door before he worked back through the groups to where Routt and Wint stood. He looked at the two, head on one side, and Wint said:
“Good morning, Amos.”
Amos squinted a little; then, without replying to Wint, he turned to Jack Routt, at Wint’s side, and thrust out his hand. “Morning, Routt.”
He and Routt shook hands, and Wint went a little white with surprise, still not fully understanding. Routt said cheerfully:
“Back in time to see the election, Amos.”
Amos nodded cordially. “And back in time to shake hands with the next Mayor, Routt,” he said. “You’re making a first-rate campaign. If you need any help—”
Routt took it all as a matter of course. Wint had stepped back a little; he was leaning his shoulders against the wall, and it seemed to him the world was swimming. “I’ll surely call on you,” Routt said.
Amos turned toward his mail box and unlocked it. Gergue shook Routt by the hand. “Morning, Mister Mayor,” he said; and then, casually, to the other: “H’lo, Wint.”
Every one had seen; no one had a word to say. The windows opened as sign that the mail was all distributed. Every one bustled forward to open their boxes; and they went out, ripping open letters and papers, talking in low voices, glancing sidewise at Wint. Routt had gone out with Amos and Peter. Wint pulled himself together, got his mail, and went out into the street by himself. Hardiston seemed like a new town; it was changed, terribly changed, by a word or two from Amos.
Every one seemed to know what had happened, almost as soon as it had happened. The people who spoke to him on his way to Hoover’s office—he was planning a day with the law books—seemed to Wint to be grinning maliciously. He was still dazed, unable to think clearly. When he was settled in the back room with the leather-bound books, Wint tried to put his mind on them; but he could not. He was groping for understanding. He felt as a child feels, when it has received a blow it cannot understand. He was incredulous. The thing could not have happened; but it had happened. The ground was cut from under his feet. Cut from under his feet. He was lost, helpless. He had been supported for so long by Amos; he had felt the Congressman’s substantial strength upholding him for so many months that it had come to seem to him as an inevitable feature of his very life. He did not see how he could go on without it.
Yet in the end he had to believe, had to accept the new condition. He remembered Amos’s attitude, the night before. Amos had suggested his withdrawing from the fight; theCongressman had almost asked him to withdraw. He had refused; now Amos would force him. Would beat him to his knees. At least, Amos would try to do that. A slow anger began to grow in Wint; a slow determination not to be beaten. Or if he was to be beaten, he would not be beaten without a fight. In simple words, Wint got mad; and he always fought best when he was mad. His resolution hardened; a certain fire of inspiration came to light within him. He began to make plans to meet this new contingency. He would go to the people of Hardiston with the facts. Appeal to them. Prove to them that he deserved their good will; and that he deserved their votes. An hour after the scene in the Post Office, Wint was more determined to win than he had ever been before. Even Amos was not invincible. The man could be beaten. Not only in this fight, but in others. Wint began to cast forward into the future, and plan what he would do.
Dick Hoover came in, after a while, and gripped him by the shoulder. “I say,” he exclaimed excitedly, “they tell me Amos has thrown you down. Is it true?”
Wint nodded. “Yes,” he said crisply.
Hoover swore. “The dirty, double-crossing hound. What are you going to do?”
“Lick him,” Wint replied.
Hoover looked doubtful. “Lick him? You can’t, Wint.”
Wint said nothing.
“Can you?” Dick Hoover asked.
“I’m going to,” said Wint.
Hoover banged his fist on the book that lay open before Wint. “By God, you’ll find some that are willing to help!”
“I know it,” Wint agreed.
“My father and I.... Whatever we can do.”
“Thanks!”
“Get after him, Wint,” Hoover urged. “Show him up. No one has ever gone after Caretall the right way. Start something. The people are always looking for fun, for a change. By God, I believe you can do it!”