Tyre had seen better days. In the noble old time of stage coaches it
had been a thriving, almost bustling place, with mills turning out
wares celebrated through all the section, with a starch factory which
literally gave the name of the town to its product as a standard of
excellence, and with taverns which were rarely left with a vacant room
more than a day at a time. In those days it had been a power in politics
too. The old court-house which frowned now upon the village green,
elbowing the more modern brick jail out of public sight, was supposed to
have echoed in its time about the tallest eloquence that any court-house
in the State had heard. From Tyre had come to Albany, and Washington as
well, a whole cluster of strong, shrewd, stalwart-tongued politicians,
who forced their way to speakerships, and judgeships, and even
senatorships, like veritable sons of Anak. It was a Tyre man who had
beaten Aaron Burr in such and such a memorable contest. It was another
Tyre man who, by assuming lead of the distracted Bucktails at a certain
crucial period, had defeated sundry machinations of the Clintonians,
and sounded the death-knell of their hopes. There was a Tyre man in
the Regency, of course, and he is popularly believed, at least in Jay
County, to have held that storied syndicate up by the tail, so to
speak, years after it would otherwise have collapsed. At every State
Convention, in this fine old time, inferior politicians from other
sections dissembled their appetites until Tyre had been fed to satiety.
And in the sowing season of politics, when far-seeing candidates began
arranging for a share in the autumn harvest of offices, no aspirant felt
that his seed had a chance of sprouting until he had paid a pilgrimage
to Tyre, and invoked the mercy, if he could not have the smiles, of the
magnates there.
It was due doubtless to the traditions of these visits, when Judge
Gould, the hero of the great Biggs murder case, would be at the Nedahma
House, and Senator Yates, who unravelled and dragged to the pitiless
light the masonic plot to blow up Mount Vernon, was to be found at the
turnpike tavern, and both would keep pretty well in-doors toward evening
because Colonel De Lancey, who had shot four men before Hamilton’s death
discredited duelling, was in town on private business--it was no doubt
due to these memories that Tyre kept up its political tastes and, in a
faded way, its political prestige, long after its material importance
and interest had vanished. The mills were remembered now only by the
widened reaches in the stream where their dams had once been; the starch
factory was a dismantled ruin, from which what woodwork the lightning
had spared had long since been abstracted for fuel; one of the
taverns was now a private dwelling, and the other two neither profited
themselves nor pleased the wives of the village by their dependence upon
local custom. But the men of Tyre were still intense politicians. Indeed
their known virulence had given to their county sobriquet of Jayhawker
an almost national fame. Nowhere else in the State, proportionately,
were so many weekly partisan papers taken--not tame, dispassionate
prints, but the fire-eaters of both party presses, with incessant
harrowing accounts of peaceful and confiding negroes being massacred
in the South, on the one side, answered regularly on the other by long
imposing tables of the money stolen by notorious criminals in the public
service. This was the meat Tyre fed on, and contending editors could not
serve it out too rank or highly peppered for its taste.
The one excitement of Tyre too--far transcending the county fair, which
had only interested them casually, and which they had seen moved over
to Sidon, on the line of the newly-extended railroad, without a
protest--was a political convention. There would be such a crowd about
the Court House then as scarcely the spectacle of its being consumed
by flames could draw at another time. The freeholders of Tyre paid much
more than their fair share of county taxes; they knew it, and did not
grumble at the injustice. In fact it rather pleased them than otherwise
to see their town rated on the Supervisor’s assessment-rolls according
to its ancient wealth; the amercement was a testimonial to their
dignity. Upstart towns like Sidon might wrangle over a few hundred
dollars, and cheapen their valuation in the public eye by unworthy
tricks; Tyre would have none of such small doings; it would preserve
a genteel exterior, even if it had to eat pork grease on its buckwheat
cakes in domestic seclusion. But if there had been so much as a hint
about holding a county convention anywhere else than in the Tyre Court
House--then, to use Abe Beekman’s homely expression, you would have seen
the fur fly! Other towns might indulge their modern and mercenary tastes
in county fairs, railroads, gas, reservoirs and the like, to their
hearts’ content, but they must keep their hands off political
conventions. He would be a brazen Jayhawker indeed who should question
Tyre’s monopoly of these!
So new generations of county politicians followed precedent without
thought of murmuring, and accepted the discomforts of jolting in crowded
democrat-wagons over the stony, bleak hills to Tyre, of eating cold,
bad dinners in the smoke-dried, draughty barracks which had once been
hotels, of drinking limed well-water with the unspeakable whiskey--as
natural consequences of being interested in the public affairs of the
nation. This resignation of other Jay County towns to the convention
claims of Tyre swelled into a spirit of truculent defence every two
years, when the question of a joint Congressional gathering for all
three counties of the district came up. Precisely what would have
happened if the bigger shires of Dearborn and Adams had combined in
a refusal to come to Tyre, I am not bold enough to guess. The general
feeling would probably have been that a crisis had arisen in which Jay
County could do no less than dissolve her relations with the Federal
Union.
Fortunately no such menace of secession and civil war was ever suffered
to rise glowering on the horizon. Abe Beekman, the boss of Jay County,
always managed to have Tyre designated by the District Committee,
and the politicians from Dearborn and Adams amiably agreed to console
themselves for the nuisances of the trip by getting as much fun out of
it as was possible--which, reduced to details, meant bringing their own
whiskey, sternly avoiding the dangerous local well-water, and throwing
at each other during the dinner scramble such elements of the repast
as failed to attract their metropolitan tastes. This procedure was
not altogether to the liking of the Tyre landlords, who, however,
compensated themselves for the diminution of the bar traffic and the
havoc wrought in the dining room, by quadrupling their accustomed
prices; and the invasion of boisterous aliens had its seamy side for the
women of the place, who found it to the advantage of their dignity to
stop indoors during the day which their husbands and fathers consecrated
to the service of the Republic. But Tyre as a whole was proud and
gratified.
On the morning when the adjourned District Convention was to reassemble,
political interest throbbed with feverish quickness in all the pulses of
Tyre.
The town could remember many a desperate and stirring combat on its
well-worn battle-field, but never such a resolute, prolonged, and
altogether delightful contest as this. The fight had its historic side,
too. Every voter in Tyre could remember, or had been taught in all its
details about, the famous struggle of the wet fall of ’34, when Hiram
Chesney, the Warwick of Jay County then, locked horns with the elder
Seth Fairchild of Dearborn, and, to pursue the local phraseology, they
pawed up more earth in their fierce encounter than would dam the Nedahma
creek. Poor Hiram had finally been worsted, falling ignobly on his
native stamping ground, before the eyes of his own people. He had long
since passed away, as Warwicks should when their king-making sinews have
lost their strength. But another boss, perhaps in some ways a greater
boss, had arisen in Jay County, in the person of Abram K. Beekman,
and now, nearly half a century later, he was to try conclusions with a
second Fairchild of Dearborn--a grandson of the hero of ’34. They had
grappled once, a fortnight before, and had had to separate again, after
an all-day tug, with a fall credited to neither. Now, in a few hours,
they were to confront each other once more. What wonder that Tyre was
excited!
The two gladiators had been the observed of all observers during the
preliminary skirmish. Tyre was almost disposed to fancy the Dearborn
man. In his portly, black-clad figure, his round, close-shaven, aquiline
face, and his professional capacity for oratory, he had recalled
pleasantly the days when the Jay County bar was famous. The local
magnate, Beekman, was not a lawyer; he could not make a speech; he
didn’t even look as if he could make a speech. He had none of the
affable, taking ways which Albert Fairchild used to such purpose,
but was brusque, self-contained, prone to be dogmatic when he was not
taciturn. Thus the balance turned enough in Fairchild’s favor to about
offset Beckman’s claims to local sympathy as a Jayhawker, and put Tyre
people in excellent mental trim to enjoy all the points of the duel.
For in the minds of these practical politicians, it _was_ a duel. There
was a third candidate, named Ansdell, it was true, supported by nearly
all the Adams delegation, but then he was a reformer, and had not even
come to the Convention, and Tyre had no use for him. A county boss who
had got a machine, and purposed doing certain definite things with
it, either to build up himself or crush somebody else, was natural and
comprehensible; but a man who set himself up as a candidate, without
the backing of any recognized political forces, who came supported by
delegates elected in a public and lawless manner without reference
to the wishes of leaders, and who pretended that his sole mission in
politics was to help purify it--who _could_ make head or tail out of
that?
Thus Tyreans talked with one another, as the village began to take on
an air of liveliness after breakfast, and groups slowly formed on
the sidewalks in front of the two hotels. There were many shades of
diverging opinion as to the merits and the prospects of the approaching
contest, but on one matter of belief there was a consensus of agreement.
The fight lay between Beekman and Fairchild, and the third man--it was
interesting to note that ignorance of his name was fashionable--wasn’t
in the race. Steve Chesney, whose right to speak oracularly on politics
was his sole inheritance from the departed Warwick, his father, summed
up the situation very clearly from the standpoint of Tyre when he said,
leaning comfortably against the post office hitching post, and pointing
his arguments in the right places with accurate tobacco juice shots at a
crack in the curb:
“The hull p’int’s this: Dearborn’s got seventeen votes, ain’t
she?--solid for Fairchild. Then he’s got two ’n’ Adams, ain’t
he?--makin’ nineteen ’n’ all. Th’ dude, he’s got what’s left of Adams,
fifteen ’n’ all. Jay County’s only got ten votes, ain’t she? Very
well, they’re solid for Abe. _Now!_ Twenty-three’s a majority of the
convention. Git twenty-three ’n’ that settles it. Th’ reformer, he
needs eight votes. Kin he git ’em? Whair frum? Frum Dearborn? Not
much! Frum Jay? Well, not _this_ evening! Count him out then. Of th’
other two, Fairchild wants four votes, Abe needs thirteen. Thet looks
kind o’ sickly for Abe, mebbe yeh think. But bear in mine thet th’ Adams
men air pledged agin’ Fairchild by th’ same resolution which bines
’em to th’ other chap. Abe wasn’t a candidate then ’n’ he didn’t git
barred out. But they made a dead set agin Fairchild all through Adams,
on ’count of his funny work at th’ State Convention. _So_, Adams kin
go to Abe, ’n’ she can’t go to Fairchild. I tell yeh, Jay can’t be
beat, ef she’s only a mine to think so--thet is, of course, ef Dearborn
fights fair. Ef she don’t, p’raps she may win to-day, but I tell yeh,
in thet case ther won’t be enough left of her candidate come ’lection
night to wad a hoss-pistol with.”
The Jay County delegates had begun to straggle into town, and percolate
aimlessly through the throngs in and about the bar-rooms, listening
to the discussions, and exchanging compliments and small talk with
acquaintances. Pending the appearance of their leader there was nothing
else for them to do. There was a rumor that Abe Beekman was in town,
sending for men as he wanted to see them, one by one, but nobody
professed to be in the secret of his hiding place, and nobody dreamed of
attempting to find out what Abe wished to keep dark.
The Adams County men, delegates and others, came over the hill from the
Spartacus station in a carryall, with four horses, and created a genuine
sensation as they drew up with a great clatter and splashing of mud in
front of the Nedahma House, and descended jauntily from the rear step to
the curb-stone. The natives eyed them all with deep interest, for upon
their action depended the issue of the day, but there was a special
excitement in watching the nine delegates with stove-pipe hats and
gloves, and tight rolled umbrellas, who came from Tecumseh itself.
Tecumseh was the only city in the district, or the whole section, for
that matter, and Jay County people timidly, wistfully dreamed of its
gilded temptations, its wild revels of sumptuous gayety, its dazzling
luxuriance of life, as shepherd boys on the plain of Dura might have
dreamed of the mysteries and marvels of Babylon. It was something, at
least, to touch elbows with men whose daily life was passed in Tecumseh.
Such of the younger Tyreans as had been introduced to these exalted
creatures on their previous visit crowded around them now, to
deferentially renew the acquaintance, and shine before their neighbors
in its reflected light.
Then the news filtered through the groups round about that Ansdell
himself had come up this time, and was the short, wiry little man with
the drab overcoat and the sharp black eyes. This aroused a fleeting
interest, and there was some standing on tip-toe to get a good view of
him, but it could not last long, for Ansdell as a politician was not a
tangible thing on which the tendrils of Tyre’s imagination could get a
real grip.
It was of more importance to learn whether the views of the Adams
delegates had undergone any change--whether a new light had dawned upon
them in the interim. They submitted graciously to the preliminary test
of drinks at the bar, and pretended with easy affability to remember
distinctly the various Tyre men who came up and recalled their
acquaintance of a fortnight ago, but they had nothing to say that was
to the purpose. They were waiting; they would see what turned up; they
would certainly vote for Ansdell on the first ballot; further than that
they couldn’t say, but they saw no reason now why they shouldn’t keep on
voting for him; still, perhaps something might happen--this and nothing
more.
Meanwhile there was an uneasy whisper going the rounds to the effect
that the two Adams men who had previously voted for Fairchild were now
for Ansdell, having succumbed to local pressure during the fortnight.
The story could not be verified, for the two gentlemen in question had
secreted themselves upon their arrival, and the other Adams men only
grinned bland mystery when interrogated on the subject. This worried the
Tyre men a good deal more than they would have liked to admit, but there
was a certain element of pleasure in it, too, for it added piquancy to
the coming fight.
The wooden minute hand of the old clock on the court house cupola had
laboriously twitched along to the zenith of the dial once more, marking
ten o’clock; only half an hour remained now before the time for the
Convention to reassemble, and the Dearborn delegates were still absent.
People began to stroll toward the court house, and casually attach
themselves to the outskirts of the cluster of saturnine, clean-shaven,
thin-featured old villagers, in high black stocks and broad-brimmed
soft hats, who stood on the steps, behind the fluted columns of the
building’s ambitious Grecian front, and chewed tobacco voraciously while
they set up the rival claims of Martin Van Buren and Francis Granger,
or mumblingly wrangled over the life and works of De Witt Clinton. These
old men, by reason of the antiquity and single-heartedness of their
devotion to their country, had two inalienable and confirmed rights:
to sit on the platform close by the speakers when the Declaration of
Independence was read each Fourth of July and to have the first chance
for seats when the doors were opened at a political Convention.
At last the eyes of those who had lingered about the Turnpike Tavern
were gladdened by the sight of the Dearborn crowd, driving furiously up
in three or four vehicles. Milton Squires was in the foremost wagon, and
he was the first to alight.
He trembled and turned around swiftly as a man laid a hand on his
shoulder.
“What d’yeh want?” he demanded, with nervous alertness.
The man whispered in his ear: “Abe Beekman is over in the back settin’
room at Blodgett’s, ’n’ he wants to see your man Fairchile right off.”
Milton had regained his composure. “So do I want to see him. Whair
abaouts is he? I was to meet him here.”
“There ain’t been no sign of him here, this mornin’. Nobuddy ’n Tyre’s
laid eyes on him, so far’s I kin fine aout.”
“Thet’s cur’ous,” said Milton reflectively. “He started to drive over
early enough. We cum by train, expectin’ to fine him here. P’raps he’s
seen Beekman by this time, on th’ quiet.”
“No, he ain’t!” The messenger’s tone was highly positive.
“Then mebbe I’d better go ’n’ see Beekman myself. Whair is
Blodgett’s?”
The man led the way off the main street, to a big, clap-boarded, dingy
white house, fronting nowhere in particular, and stopped at the gate.
“Ain’t you comin’ in?” Milton asked him.
“I dasen’t.”