Part 17 (1/2)
CHAPTER XVI
Colonel Martin Culpepper was standing with, one foot on the window ledge in the office of Philemon R. Ward one bright spring morning watching the procession of humanity file into the post-office and out into the street upon the regular business of life. Mrs. Watts McHurdie, a bride of five years and obviously proud of it, hurried by, and Mrs. John Barclay drove down the street in her phaeton; Oscar Fernald, with a pencil behind his ear, came out of his office licking an envelope and loped into the post-office and out like a dog looking for his bone; and then a lank figure sauntered down the street, stopping here and there to talk with a pa.s.serby, stepping into a stairway to light a cigar, and betimes leaning languidly against an awning post in the sun and overhauling farmers pa.s.sing down Main Street in their wagons.
”He's certainly a gallus-looking slink,” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the colonel.
The general, writing at his desk, asked, ”Who?”
”Our old friend and comrade in arms, Lige Bemis.” At the blank look on the general's face the colonel shook his head wearily. ”Don't know what a gallus-looking slink is, do you? General, the more I live with you d.a.m.n Yankees and fight for your flag and die for your country, sir, the more astonished I am at your limited and provincial knowledge of the United States language. Here you are, a Harvard graduate, with the Harvard pickle dripping off your ears, confessing such ignorance of your mother-tongue. General, a gallus-looking slink is four hoss thieves, three revenue officers, a tin pedler, and a sheep-killing dog, all rolled into one man. And as I before remarked, our beloved comrade, Lige Bemis, is certainly a gallus-looking slink.”
”Far be it from me,” continued the colonel, ”residing as I may say in a rather open and somewhat exposed domicile--a gla.s.s house in fact--to throw stones at Elijah Westlake Bemis,--far be it.” The colonel patted himself heroically on the stomach and laughed.
”Doubtless, while I haven't been a professional horse thief, nor a cattle rustler, still, probably, if the truth was known, I've done a number of things equally distasteful--I was going to say obnoxious--in the sight of Mr. Bemis, so we'll let that pa.s.s.” The colonel stretched his suspenders out and let them flap against the plaits of his immaculate s.h.i.+rt. ”But I will say, General, that as I see it, it will be a heap handier for me to explain to St. Peter at the gate the things I've done than if he'd ask me about Lige's record.”
The general scratched along, without answering, and the colonel looked meditatively into the street; then he began to smile, and the smile glowed into a beam that bespread his countenance and sank into a mood that set his vest to shaking ”like a bowl full of jelly.” ”I was just thinking,” he said to n.o.body in particular, ”that if Lige was jumped out of his grave right quick by Gabriel and hauled up before St. Peter and asked to justify my record, he'd have some trouble too--considerable difficulty, I may say. I reckon it's all a matter of having to live with your sins till you get a good excuse thought up.”
The general pushed aside his work impatiently and tilted back in his chair. ”Come, Martin Culpepper, come, come! That won't do. You know better than that. What's the use of your pretending to be as bad as Lige Bemis? You know better and I know better and the whole town knows better. He's little, and he's mean, and snooping, and crooked as a dog's hind leg. Why, he was in here yesterday--actually in here to see me. Yes, sir--what do you think of that? Wants to be state senator.”
”So I hear,” smiled the colonel.
”Well,” continued the general, ”he came in here yesterday as pious as a deacon, and he said that his friends were insisting on his running because his enemies were bringing up that 'old trouble' on him. He calls his horse stealing and cattle rustling 'that old trouble.'
Honestly, Martin, you'd think he was being persecuted. It was all I could do to keep from sympathizing with him. He said he couldn't afford to retreat under fire, and then he told me how he had been trying to be a better man, and win the respect of the people--and I couldn't stand it any longer, and I rose up and shook my fist in his face and said: 'Lige Bemis, you disreputable, horse-stealing cow thief, what right have you to ask my help? What right have you got to run for state senator, anyway?' And, Martin, the brazen whelp reared back and looked me squarely in the eye and answered without blinking, 'Because, Phil Ward, I want the job.' What do you think of that for bra.s.s?”
The colonel slapped his campaign hat on his leg and laughed. There was always, even to the last, something feminine in Martin Culpepper's face when he laughed--a kind of alternating personality of the other s.e.x seemed to tiptoe up to his consciousness and peek out of his kind eyes. As he laughed with Ward the colonel spoke: ”Criminy, but that's like him. He's over there talking to Gabe Carnine on the corner now. I know what he's saying. He has only one speech, and he gets it off to all of us. He's got his cigar chawed down to a rag, stuck in one corner of his mouth, and he's saying, 'Gabe--this is the fight of my life. This is the last time I'm going to ask my friends for help.'
General, I've heard that now, off and on, first and last, from old Lige at every city, state, county, and lodge election since the war closed, and I can see how Gabe is twisting and wiggling trying to get away from it. He's heard it too. Now Lige is saying: 'Gabe, I ain't going to lie to you; you know me, and you know I've made mistakes--but they were errors of judgment, and I want to get a chance to live 'em down. I want to show the young men of this state that Lige Bemis of the Red Legs is a man--even if he was wild as a young fellow; it'll prove that a man can rise.' Poor old Gabe--Lige has got him by the coat front, now. That's the third degree. When he gets him by the neck and begins to whisper, he's giving him the work in the uniform rank. He's saying: 'Gabe, I've got to have you with me.
I can't win without you, and I would rather lose than win with you against me. You stand for all that's upright in this county, and if you'll come to my aid, I can win.' Here, General--look--Lige's got him by the neck and the hand. Now for the pa.s.sword right from the grand lodge, 'Gabe, you'd make a fine state treasurer--I can land it for you. Make me state senator, and with my state acquaintance, added to the prestige of this office, I can make a deal that will land you.'
Oh, I know his whole speech,” laughed the colonel. ”Bob Hendricks is to be secretary of state, John Barclay is to be governor, Oscar Fernald is to be state auditor, and the boys say that Lycurgus Mason has the refusal of warden of the Penitentiary.” The colonel chuckled as he added: ”So far as the boys have been able to learn, Lige still has United States senator, president, and five places in the cabinet to go on, but Minneola towns.h.i.+p returns ain't all in yet, and they may change the result. By the way, General, what did you get?”
The general flushed and replied, ”Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Mart--he did promise me to vote for the dram-shop law.”
And in the convention that summer Lige Bemis strode with his ragged cigar sticking from the corner of his mouth, with his black eyes blazing, and his shock of black hair on end, begging, bulldozing, and buying delegates to vote for him. He had the river wards behind him to a man, and he had the upland towns.h.i.+ps where the farmers needed a second name on their notes at the bank; and in the gentleman's ward--the silk-stocking ward--he had Gabriel Carnine, chairman of the first ward delegation, casting the solid vote of that ward for Bemis ballot after ballot. And when Bemis got Minneola towns.h.i.+p for fifty dollars,--and everybody in the convention knew it,--he was declared the nominee of the party with a whoop.
But behind Bemis was the sinister figure of young John Barclay working for his Elevator Company. He needed Bemis in politics, and Bemis needed Barclay in business. And there the alliance between Barclay and Bemis was cemented, to last for a quarter of a century. Barclay and Bemis went into the campaign together and asked the people to rally to the support of the party that had put down the rebellion, that had freed four million slaves, and had put the names of Lincoln and of Grant and Garfield as stars in the world's firmament of heroes. And the people of Garrison County responded, and State Senator Elijah Westlake Bemis did for Barclay in the legislature the things that Barclay would have preferred not to do for himself, and the Golden Belt Elevator Company throve and waxed fat. And Lige Bemis, its attorney, put himself in the way of becoming a ”general counsel,” with his name on an opaque gla.s.s door. For as Barclay rose in the world, he found the need of Bemis more and more pressing every year. In politics the favours a man does for others are his capital, and Barclay's deposit grew large. He was forever helping some one. His standing with the powers in the state was good. He was a local railroad attorney, and knew the men who had pa.s.ses to give, and who were responsible for the direction which legislation took during the session. Barclay saw that they put Bemis on the judiciary committee, and by manipulating the judiciary committee he controlled a dozen votes through Bemis. He changed a railroad a.s.sessment law, secured the pa.s.sage of a law permitting his Elevator Company to cheat the farmers by falsely grading their wheat, and prevented the pa.s.sage of half a dozen laws restricting the powers of railroads. So at the close of the legislative session his name appeared under a wood-cut picture in the _Commonwealth_ newspaper, and in the article thereunto appended Barclay was referred to as one of the ”money kings of our young state.” That summer he turned his wheat into his elevator early and at a low price, and borrowed money on it, and bought five new elevators and strained his credit to the limit, and before the fall closed he had ten more, and controlled the wheat in twenty counties. Strangers riding through the state on the Corn Belt Railroad saw the words, ”The Golden Belt Elevator Company” on elevators all along the line. But few people knew then that the ”Company” had become a partners.h.i.+p between John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge and less than half a dozen railroad men, with Barclay owning seventy-five per cent of the partners.h.i.+p and with State Senator Bemis the attorney for the company.
That year the railroad officials who were making money out of the Golden Belt Elevator Company were obliging, and Barclay made a contract with them to s.h.i.+p all grain from the Golden Belt Company's elevators in cars equipped with the Barclay Economy Rubber Strip, and he sold these strips to the railroads for four dollars apiece and put them on at the elevators. He s.h.i.+pped ten thousand cars that year, and Lycurgus Mason hired two men to help him in the strip factory. And John Barclay, in addition to the regular rebate, made forty thousand dollars that he did not have to divide. The next year he leased three large mills and took over a score of elevators and paid Lycurgus twenty dollars a week, and Lycurgus deposited money in the bank in his own name for the first time in his life.
As the century clanged noisily into its busy eighties, Adrian P.
Brownwell creaked stiffly into his forties. And while all the world about him was growing rich,--or thought it was, which is the same thing,--Brownwell seemed to be struggling to keep barely even with the score of life. The _Banner_ of course ran as a daily, but it was a miserable, half-starved little sheet, badly printed, and edited, as the printers used to say, with a pitchfork. It looked s.h.i.+ftless and dirty-faced long before Brownwell began to look seedy. Editor Brownwell was forever going on excursions--editorial excursions, land-buyers' excursions, corn trains, fruit trains, trade trains, political junkets, tours of inspection of new towns and new fields, and for consideration he was forever writing grandiloquent accounts of his adventures home to the _Banner_. But from the very first he ostentatiously left Molly, his wife, at home. ”The place for a woman,”
said Brownwell to the a.s.sembled company on the Barclay veranda one evening, when Jane had asked him why he did not take Molly to the opening of the new hotel at Garden City, ”the place for woman is in the sacred precincts of home, 'far from the madding crowd's ign.o.ble throng.' The madame and I,” with a flourish of his cane, ”came to that agreement early, eh, my dear, eh?” he asked, poking her masterfully with his cane. And Molly Brownwell, wistful-eyed and fading, smiled and a.s.sented, and the incident pa.s.sed as dozens of other incidents pa.s.sed in the Ridge, which made the women wish they had Adrian Brownwell, to handle for just one day. But the angels in that department of heaven where the marriages are made are exceedingly careful not to give to that particular kind of women the Adrian Brownwell kind of men, so the experiment which every one on earth for thousands of years has longed to witness, still remains a theory, and Adrian Brownwell traipsed up and down the earth, in his lavender gloves, his long coat and mouse-coloured trousers, his high hat, with his twirling cane, and the everlasting red carnation in his b.u.t.tonhole. His absence made it necessary for Molly Brownwell to leave the sacred precincts of the home many and many a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, to go over the books at the _Banner_ office, make out bills, take them out, and collect the money due upon them and pay off the printers who got out the paper. But Adrian Brownwell ostentatiously ignored such services and kept up the fiction about the sacred precincts, and often wrote scorching editorials about the ”encroachment of women” and grew indignant editorially at the growth of sentiment for woman's suffrage.
On one occasion he left on the copy-hook a fervid appeal for women to repulse the commercialism which ”was sullying the fair rose of womanhood,” and taking ”from woman the rare perfume of her chiefest charm,” and then he went away on a ten days' journey, and the foreman of the _Banner_ had to ask Mrs. Brownwell to collect enough money from the sheriff and a delinquent livery-stable keeper to pay the freight charges on the paper stock needed for that week's issue of the paper.
The town came to know these things, and so when Brownwell, who, since his marriage, had taken up his abode at the Culpeppers', hinted at his ”extravagant family,” the town refused to take him seriously. And the strutting, pompous little man, who referred grandly to ”my wife,” and then to ”the madame,” and finally to ”my landlady,” in a rather elaborate attempt at jocularity, laughed alone at his merriment along this line, and never knew that no one cared for his humour.
So in his early forties Editor Brownwell dried up and grew yellow and began to dye his mustaches and his eyebrows, and to devote much time to considering his own importance. ”Throw it out,” said Brownwell to the foreman, ”not a line of it shall go!” He had just come home from a trip and had happened to glance over the proof of the article describing the laying of the corner-stone of Ward University.
”But that's the only thing that happened in town this week, and Mrs.
Brownwell wrote it herself.”
”Cut it out, I say,” insisted Brownwell, and then threw back his shoulders and marched to his desk, snapping his eyes, and demonstrating to the printers that he was a man of consequence. ”I'll teach 'em,” he roared. ”I'll teach 'em to make up their committees and leave me out.”