It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley"s dirty work in politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if they are good--for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his dead brother"s name on a law diploma and subst.i.tuted his own. Still, he practised on the law--as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy--and for twenty years carried an advertis.e.m.e.nt in Eastern farm journals proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections. He never took as a fee less than ninety-five per cent. of the amount he collected. That was the advantage which he had as a lawyer, which advantage inspired Colonel Alphabetical Morrison to proclaim that a lawyer"s diploma is nothing but a license to steal; upon hearing which Charley Hedrick sent back to the Colonel the retort that it would take two legal diplomas working day and night to keep up with the Colonel"s more or less honest endeavours.
Now Ab Handy was a lean coyote, who was forever licking his bruises, and some ten years later he tried to run for the school board solely to get the Colonel"s daughters dismissed as school-teachers. It was his boast that he never forgot a foe; and for twenty years after Hedrick saved Handy from going to jail for robbing a cattleman of a thousand dollars in "Red" Martin"s gambling-room, the only good thing the town knew of Handy was that he never forgot a friend.
During that twenty years whenever, to further his ends in a primary or in an election, Charley Hedrick needed the votes of the rough element that gathered about our little town, Abner Handy, card-sharper and jack-leg lawyer, would go forth into the byways and alleys and gather them in. For this service, when Hedrick carried the county--which was about four times out of five--Handy was rewarded by being put on the delegation to the State convention. Thus he made his beginning in State politics. The second time that he attended a State convention Handy swelled up in his Sunday clothes, and by reason of his slight acquaintance with the manipulators of State politics, began to patronise the other members of our delegation--good, honest men, whose contempt for him at home was unspeakable; but when they huddled like sheep in the strange crowd at the convention they often accepted Handy as a guide in important matters. In talking with the home delegation Handy very soon began speaking of the convention leaders familiarly as "Jim" and "d.i.c.k"
and "Tawm" and "Bill," and sometimes Handy brought one of these dignitaries to the rooms of our delegation and introduced him to our people with a grand flourish. Every time the legislature met, Ab Handy was a clerk in it, and, if he was a clerk of an important committee like the railroad committee or the committee on the calendar, he invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes and a railroad pa.s.s. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for six months afterward.
It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town concurred with Colonel Morrison--our only townsman who travelled widely in those days--when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair"s last call for the dining-car."
Her influence on Abner Handy and his life was such that it is necessary to record something of the kind of a woman she was before he met her. A woman of the right sort might have made a man of Handy, even that late in life. Strong, good women have made weak men fairly strong, but such women were never girls like Nora. She was a nice enough little girl until she became boy-struck--as our vernacular puts it. Her mother thought this development of the child was "so cute," and told callers about the boys who came to see Nora--before she was twelve. In those days, and in some old-fashioned families in our town, little girls were asked to run out to play when the neighbours had to be discussed. But Mrs. Sinclair claimed Nora was "neither sugar nor salt nor anybody"s honey," and everything was talked over before the child. We knew at the office from Colonel Morrison that his little girls did not play at the Sinclairs". Her mother put long dresses and picture hats upon her and pushed her out into society, and the whole town knew that Nora was a mature woman, in all her instincts, by the time she was sixteen. Her mother, moreover, was manifestly proud that the child wasn"t "one of those long-legged, gangling tom-boy girls, who seem so backward" and wear pigtails and chew slate pencils and dream.
The gilded youths who boarded at the Hotel Metropole began to notice her. That pleased her mother also, and she said to the mothers of other little girls of Nora"s age who were climbing fences and wiping dishes: "You know Nora is so popular with the gentlemen." When the girl was seventeen she was engaged. She kept a town fellow and had a college fellow. She acquired a "gentleman friend" in Kansas City who gave her expensive presents. These her mother took great joy in displaying, and never objected when he stayed after eleven o"clock; for she thought he was "such a good catch" and such a "swell young man." But Nora shooed him off the front porch in the summer following, because he objected to her having two or three other eleven o"clock fellows. She said he was "selfish, and would not let her have a good time." At nineteen she knew more about matters that were none of her business than most women know on their wedding day, and the boys said that she was soft. Every time that Nora left town she came back with two or three correspondents. She perfumed her stationery, used a seal, adopted all the latest frills, and learned to write an angular hand. At twenty she was going with the young married set, and was invited out to the afternoon card clubs. She was known as a dashing girl at this time, and travelling men in three States knew about her. Her mother used to send personal items to our office telling of their exalted business positions and announcing their visits to the Sinclair home. There was more or less talk about Nora in a quiet way, but her mother said that "it is because the other girls don"t know how to wear their clothes as well as Nora does," and that "when a girl has a fine figure--which few enough girls in this town have, Heaven knows--why, she is a fool if she doesn"t make the most of herself."
Then, gradually, Nora went to seed. She became a faded, hard-faced woman, and all the sisters in town warned their brothers against her.
She was invited out only when there was a crowd. She took up with the boys of the younger set, and the married women of her own age called her the kidnapper. She was a social joke. About once a year a strange man would show up in her parlour, and she kept up the illusion about being engaged. But in the office we shared the town"s knowledge that her harp was on the willows. She was ma.s.saging her face at twenty-six and her mother was sniffing at the town and saying that there were no social advantages to be had here. She and the girl went to the Lakes every summer, and Nora always came home declaring that she had had the time of her life, and that she met so many lovely gentlemen. But that was all there was to it, and in the end it was Abner Handy or no one.
After their wedding, Nora and Abner Handy set about the business of making politics pay. That is a difficult thing to do in a country town, where every voter is a watchdog of the county and city treasuries. Abner gave up his gambling, he and his wife joined all the lodges in town, and she dragged him into that coterie of people known as Society. She joined a woman"s club, and was always anxious to be appointed on the soliciting committee when the women had any public work to do; so when the library needed books, or the trash cans at the street corners needed paint, or the park trees needed tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, or the new hospital needed an additional bed, or the band needed new uniforms, Mrs. Handy might be seen on the streets with two or three women of a much better social status than she had, making it clear that she was a public-spirited woman and that she moved in the best circles. Whereupon Abner Handy got work in the court-house--as a deputy, or as a clerk, or as an under-sheriff, or as a juror--and when the legislature met he went to Topeka as a clerk.
No one knew how they lived, but they did live. Every two years they gave a series of parties, and the splendour of these festivals made the town exclaim in one voice: "Well, _how_ do they do it?" But Mrs. Handy, who was steaming the wrinkles out of her face, and a.s.suming more or less kittenish airs in her late thirties, never offered the town an explanation. "Hers not to answer why, hers not to make reply, hers but to do and dye" was the way Colonel Morrison put it the day after Mrs.
Handy swooped down into Main Street with a golden yellow finish on her hair. She walked serenely between Mrs. Frelinghuysen and Mrs. Priscilla Winthrop Conklin. They were begging for funds with which to furnish a rest room for farmers" wives. And when they bore down on our office, Colonel Morrison folded his papers in his bosom and pa.s.sed them on the threshold as one hurrying to a fire in the roof of his own house. It was interesting to observe, when the Federation Committee called on us that day, that Mrs. Handy did all the talking. She was as full of airs and graces as an actress, and ogled with her gla.s.sy eyes, and put on a sweet babyish innocence of the ways of business and of men--as though men were a race apart, greatly to be feared because they ate up little girls. But she got her dollar before she left the office, and George Kirwin, who happened to be in the front room at the time waiting for a proof, said he thought that the performance and the new hair were worth the price.
Five years pa.s.sed and in each year Mrs. Handy had found some artificial way of deluding herself that she was cheating time. Then Charley Hedrick, who needed a vote in the legislature, and was too busy to go there himself, nominated Abner Handy and elected him to a seat in the lower house. The thing that Hedrick needed was not important--merely the creation of a new judicial district which would remove an obnoxious district judge in an adjoining county from our district, and leave our county in a district by itself. Hedrick hated the judge, and Hedrick used Handy"s vote for trading purposes with other statesmen desiring similar small matters and got the district remade as he desired it.
When the Handys started to Topeka for the opening of the session, they began to inflame with importance as the train whistled for the junction east of town, and by the time they actually arrived at Topeka they were so highly swollen that they could not get into a boarding-house door, but went to the best hotel, and engaged rooms at seven dollars a day.
The town gasped for two days and then began to laugh and wink. Two weeks after their arrival at the State capital, Abner Handy had been made chairman of the joint committee on the calendar, second member of the judiciary committee and member of the railroad committee, and Mrs. Handy had established credit at a Topeka dry-goods store and was going it blind. She gave her hair an extra dip, and used to come sailing down the corridors of the hotel in gorgeous silk house-gowns with ridiculous trains, and never appeared at breakfast without her diamonds. Before the session was well under way she had been to Kansas City to have her face enameled and had told the other "ladies of the hotel," as the wives of members of the legislature stopping at the hotel were called, that Topeka stores offered such a poor selection; she confided to them that Mr. Handy always wore silk nightshirts, and that she was unable to find anything in town that he would put on. She regarded herself as a charmer, and made great eyes at all the important lobbyists, to whom she put on her baby voice and manner and said that she thought politics were just simply awful, and added that if she were a man she would show them how honest a politician could be, but she wasn"t, and when Abner tried to explain it to her it made her head ache, and all she wanted him to do was to help his friends, and she would add coyly: "I"m going to see that he helps you--whatever he does."
Every bill that had a dollar in it was held at the bottom of the calendar until satisfactory arrangements were made with Abner Handy and his friends. When the legislative buccaneers under the black flag, sailed after an insurance company, their bill remained at the bottom of the calendar in one house or the other until Ab Handy had been seen, and no one could find out why. And so, in spite of our dislike of the man, our paper was forced to acknowledge that Handy was a house leader.
Although he had never had a dozen cases above the police court, he came back at the end of the session with the local attorneyship of two railroads, and was chairman of a house committee to investigate the taxes paid by the railroads in the various counties. This gave him a year"s work, so he rented an office in the Worthington block and hired a stenographer. Of course, we knew in town how Ab Handy had made his money. But he paid so many of his old debts, and dispensed so many favours with such a lordly hand, that it was hard to stir local sentiment against him. He donned the clothes of a "prominent citizen,"
and in discussing public affairs a.s.sumed an owlish manner that impressed his former a.s.sociates, and fooled stupid people, who began to believe that they had been harbouring a statesman unawares. But Charley Hedrick only grinned when men talked to him of the rise of Handy, and replied to the complaints of the scrupulous that Ab was no worse than he had always been, and if he was making it pay better, no one was poorer for his prosperity but Ab himself, and added: "Certainly he is a sincere spender." One day when Handy appeared on the street in a particularly fiery red necktie, Hedrick got him in a crowd, and began: "Just for a handful of silver he left us--just for a riband to stick in his coat."
And when the crowd laughed with the joker, Hedrick continued in his thick, gravy-coated voice: "Old Browning"s the boy. You fellows that want Shakespeare can have him; but Ab here knows that I take a little dash of Browning in mine. Since Ab"s got to be a statesman, he"s bought all of Webster"s works and is learning "em by heart. But"--and here Hedrick chuckled and shook his fat sides before letting out the joke which he enjoyed so much--"I says to Ab: as old Browning says, what does "the fine felicity and flower of wickedness" like you need with Webster; what you want to commit to memory is the penal statutes." And he threw back his head and gurgled down in his abdomen, while the crowd roared and Handy showed the wool in his teeth with a dog-like grin.
No other man in town would have dared that with Handy after he became a statesman; but we figured it out in the office that old Charley Hedrick was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his t.i.tle to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the King Cole about Hedrick--in that he was a merry old soul--he was always king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not ashamed of it.
He was the best lawyer in the State in those days, and one of the best in the West. Ten months in the year he paid no attention to politics, pendulating daily between his house and his office. Often, being preoccupied with his work, he would go the whole length of Main Street speaking to no one. When a tangled case was in his mind he would enter his office in the morning, roll up his desk top, and dig into his work without speaking to a soul until, about the middle of the morning, he would look up from his desk to say as though he had just left off speaking: "Jim, hand me that 32 Kansas report over there on the table."
When he worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with the litter he had made. At such times--and, indeed, all the time unless he was in what he called a "legal trance"--Hedrick was bubbling with good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and down the street like a fat ferret looking for votes. So when Abner Handy announced that he desired to go to the State Senate, to fill an unexpired term for two years, he had Hedrick behind him to give strength and respectability to his candidacy. Between the two Handy won. That was before the days of reform, when it was supposed to be considerable of a virtue for a man to stand by his friend; and, being a lawyer, Hedrick naturally had the lawyer"s view that no man is guilty until the jury is in, and its findings have been reviewed by the supreme court.
So Senator and Mrs. Senator Handy--as the town put it--went to Topeka as grandly as ever "Childe Roland to the dark tower came"--to use Hedrick"s language. "No one ever has been able to find out what Roland was up to when he went to the dark tower, but," continued Hedrick, "with Ab and his child-wonder it will be different. She isn"t taking all that special scenery along in her trunks for nothing. Ab has stumbled on to this great truth--that clothes may not make the man, but they make the crook!"
Handy drew a dark brow when he became a Senator, and made a point of trying to look ominous. He carried his chin tilted up at an angle of forty-five degrees, and spoke of the most obvious things with an air of mystery. He never admitted anything; his closest approach to committing himself on even so apparent a proposition as the sunrise, was that it had risen "ostensibly"; he became known to the reporters as "Old Ostensible."
It was his habit to tiptoe around the Senate chamber whispering to other Senators, and then having sat down to rise suddenly as though some great impulse had come to him and hurry into the cloakroom. He inherited the chairmanship of the railroad committee, and all employees came to him for their railroad pa.s.ses; so he was the G.o.d of the blue-bottle flies of politics that feed on legislatures, and buzz pompously about the capitol doing nothing, at three dollars a day. In that session Handy was for the "peepul." He patronised the State Shippers" a.s.sociation, and told their committee that he would give them a better railroad bill than they were asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab Handy who once did business with a marked deck; who cheated widows and orphans; who sold bogus bonds; who got on two sides of lawsuits, and whose note was never good at any bank unless backed by blackmail.
When the session closed Abner Handy came home, a statesman with views on the tariff, and ostentatiously displayed his thousand-dollar bills. The Handys spent the summer in Atlantic City, and Abner came home wearing New York clothes of an exaggerated type, and though he never showed it in our town, they used to say that he put on a high hat when the train whistled for Topeka. Also we heard that the first time Mrs. Handy appeared at the political hotel in her New York regalia, adorned with spangles and beads and cords and ta.s.sels, the "ladies of the hotel" said that she was "fixed up like a Christmas tree"--a remark that we in the office coupled with Colonel Morrison"s reflection when he spoke of Ab"s "ill.u.s.trated vests." At the meeting of the State Federation of Woman"s Clubs, Mrs. Handy first flourished her lorgnette, and came home with her wedding ring made over on a pattern after the prevailing style.
About this time she made her famous remark to "Aunt" Martha Merrifield that she didn"t think it proper for a woman to go through her husband"s money with too sensitive a nose; she said that men must work and women must weep, and that she for one would not make the work of her husband any harder by criticising it with her silly morals.
As for Abner Handy, it would have made little difference to him then whether she or anyone else had tried to check his career; for he was cultivating a loud tone of voice and a regal sweep to his arms. He always signed himself on hotel registers Senator Handy, and the help about the Topeka hotels began to mark him for their hate, for he was insolent to those whom he regarded as his inferiors. But Colonel Morrison used to say that he wore his vest-b.u.t.tons off crawling to those in authority. He took little notice of the town. He referred to us as "his people" in a fine feudal way, and went about town with his cigar pointing toward his hat brim and his eyes fixed on something in the next block. He became the attorney for a number of crooked promotion schemes, and the diamond rings on his wife"s fingers crowded the second joint. He had telegraph and express franks, railway and Pullman pa.s.ses in such quant.i.ties that it made his coat pocket bulge to carry them. Often he would spread out these evidences of his shame on his office table, to awe the local politicians, and in so far as they could influence the town opinion, they promulgated the idea that if Ab Handy was a scoundrel--and of course he was--he was a smart scoundrel. So he came to think this himself.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Went about town with his cigar pointing toward his hat-brim]
Mrs. Handy threw herself into the work of the City Federation with pa.s.sionate zeal. Also she kept up her lodge connections, and explained to the women, whom she considered of a higher social caste than the lodge women, that she was "doing it to help Mr. Handy." She did a little church work for the same reason, but her soul was in the Federation, for it insured her social status as neither lodge nor church could do. So she put herself under the protecting seal-lined wing of Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington who on account of her efforts to clean the streets we at the office had been taught by Colonel Morrison to know as the Joan of the trash-cans. And Miss Larrabee, our society reporter, told us that Mrs. Handy was the only woman in town who did not smile into her handkerchief when Mrs. Worthington, who had trained down to one hundred and ninety-seven pounds five and three-eighths ounces, gave her course of lectures on delsarte before the Federation.
It was Mrs. Handy who encouraged Mrs. Worthington to open her salon. But as there were lodge meetings the first three nights in the week, and prayer-meetings in the middle of the week, and as the choirs met for practice, and the whist clubs met for business the last of the week, the salon did not seem to take with the town, and so was discontinued. Then Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Handy sought other fields. And the first field they stumbled into was the court-house square. For fifty years the farmers near our town had been hitching at the racks provided by the county commissioners. But Mrs. Worthington decided that the time had come for a change and that the town was getting large enough to take down the hitching-racks. So, as chairman of the Munic.i.p.al Improvement section of the City Federation, Mrs. Worthington began war on the hitching-racks. At the Federation meetings for three months there were reports from committees appointed to interview the councilmen; reports of committees to interview the county commissioners--who were obdurate; reports of committees to lease new ground for the hitching rack stands; reports of the legal committee; reports of the sanitary committee, and through it all Mrs. Worthington rose at every meeting and declared that the hitching racks must be destroyed. And as she was rated in Bradstreet"s report at nearly half a million dollars, her words had much force.
The town was beginning to stir itself. The merchants were with the women--because the women bought the dry goods and groceries--and we forgot about the farmers. To all this milling among the people Handy was oblivious, for he was stepping like a hen in high oats, with his eyes on a seat in Congress. Matters of mere local importance did not concern him. The railroads were for him, and the stars in their courses seemed to him to be pointing his way to Washington. He knew of the hitching-rack trouble only when he had to go with Mrs. Handy to the dinners at the Worthington home given to the councilmen and their wives, who were lukewarm on the removal proposition.
In the spring before the election of 1902 Mrs. Worthington had a majority in the council, and one Sat.u.r.day night the hitching-racks were taken down by the street commissioner. And within a week the town was on the verge of civil war, for the farmers of the county rose as one man and demanded the blood of the offenders. But Abner Handy knew nothing of the disturbance. The county attorney had the street commissioner and his men arrested for trespa.s.sing upon county property; farmers threatened to boycott the town. But Abner Handy"s ear was attuned to higher things.
Merchants who had signed the pet.i.tion asking the council to remove the racks began to denounce the removal as an act of treason. But Abner Handy conferred with State leaders on great questions, and the city attorney, who was a candidate for county attorney that fall, did not dare to defend the street commissioner. The council got stubborn, and Colonel Morrison, before whom as justice of the peace the case was to be tried, fearing for the professional safety of his three daughters in the town schools and his four daughters in the county schools, took a trip to his wife"s people, and told us he was enlisted there for "ninety days or during the war"; and still Abner Handy looked at the green hills afar.
We are generally accounted by ourselves a fearless newspaper; but here we admitted that the situation required discretion. So we straddled it.
We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded that each side recognise the other"s rights and made both sides angry, whereas General Durham, of the _Statesman_, made his first popular stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that the tariff on hides was a divine inst.i.tution, and that humanity called upon us to hold the Philippines. Charley Hedrick knew better than anyone else in town what a tempest was rising. He might have warned Handy, but he did not; for Handy had reached a point in his career where he considered that a mere county boss was beneath his confidence. More than that, Hedrick had refused to indorse Handy"s note at the bank.
Handy needed money, and being a shorn lamb, the wind changed in his direction in this wise:
In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs.
Worthington rose in her jet and pa.s.s.e.m.e.nterie and announced that our town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to a.s.sist the city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars.
Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it.
After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank the next morning at nine o"clock to cash it--and all the town saw that also.
Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the _Statesman_ a most laudatory article about "our distinguished fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The _Statesman_ contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure, for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels and rally round the standard of our n.o.ble leader in this great contest."
If Handy ever went to the city attorney"s office to look after Mrs.
Worthington"s lawsuit, no one knew it. He smiled wisely when asked how the suit was progressing, and one day John Markley--who during the life of Ezra Worthington, hated him with a ten-horse-power hate and loaded it onto his widow"s shoulders and the Worthington bank which she inherited--John Markley called Handy into the back room of the Markley Mortgage Company, and, when Handy pa.s.sed the cashier"s window going out, he cashed a check signed by John Markley for a thousand dollars on which was inscribed "for legal services in a.s.sisting the county attorney in the hitching rack case."
Handy had arrived at a point where he feared nothing. He seemed to believe that he lived a charmed life and never would get caught. He bought extra copies of the _Statesman_, which was booming him for Congress, and sent them over the Congressional District by the thousands. He went to Topeka in his high silk hat and his New York clothes, gave out interviews on the causes of the flurry in the money market, and, desiring further advertis.e.m.e.nt, gave a banquet for the newspaper men of the capital which cost him a hundred dollars. So he became a great man. At home he a.s.sumed a patronising air to the people about Charley Hedrick. And one night in Smith"s cigar store, just to be talking, he said that he didn"t get so much of Mrs. Worthington"s money as people thought, for part of it had to go to "square old Charley Hedrick." Hedrick was John Markley"s attorney, and he had taken an active part in helping the county attorney prosecute the street commissioners. Naturally Handy"s remark stirred up the town. It was two weeks, however, in getting to Hedrick, and when it came the man turned black and seemed to be swallowing a pint of emotional language before he spoke. And there Abner Handy"s doom was sealed; though Hedrick did not make the sentence public.
Now, it is well known in our county that the country people are slow to wrath. They were two months finding out beyond a question of doubt that Abner Handy had accepted Mrs. Worthington"s money to act against them, but when they knew this there was no hope for Handy among them. They are a quiet people, and make no noise. For a month, only Charley Hedrick and the grocers and the hardware men, with whom the farmers trade, knew the truth about Handy"s standing in the county. Hedrick bided his time. The Handy boom for Congress was rolling over the district, and the _Statesman_ italics were becoming worn, and its exclamation points battered in the service, when one day Handy stalked up to Hedrick"s office, imperiously beckoned Hedrick into the private room, and blurted out:
"Charley, I got to have some more money--need it in my business. Can"t you touch old John Markley for me again--say for about five hundred on that hitching rack case? Sister Worthington is kind of wanting me to get action on her case."
Hedrick was dumb with rage, but Handy thought it was acquiescence. He went on:
"You just step down to the bank and say: "John, I"ve noticed Ab Handy actin" kind of queer about that hitching rack case." That"s all you need say, and pretty soon I"ll step in and say: "John, I don"t see how I can help doin" something for Aunt Julia Worthington." And I believe I can tap him for five hundred more easy enough. I got an idea he is mightily in earnest about beating her in that suit."
When Hedrick got his breath, which was churning and wheezing in his throat, he cut Handy"s sentence off with:
"You human razor-back shoat--you swill-barrel gladiator, why--why--I--I----" And Hedrick sparred for wind and went on before Handy realised the situation. "Ab Handy, I spat on the dust and breathed into the chaff that made you, and put you on the mud-sills of h.e.l.l to dry, and I"ve got a right to turn you back into fertiliser, and I"m going to do it. Git out of here--git out of this office, or I----"
And the hulking form of Hedrick fell on the bag of shaking bones that was Handy and battered him through the latched door into the crowded outer office; and Handy picked himself up and ran like a wolf, turning at the door to show his teeth before he scampered through the hall and scurried down the stairs. As Hedrick came puffing out of the broken door his coat snagged on a splinter. He grinned as he unfastened himself:
"Well, the snail seems to be on the thorn; the lark certainly is on the wing.
"_G.o.d"s in his heaven.
All"s right with the world!_"
And he batted his eyes at the group of loafing local statesmen in his office as he viewed the wreckage, and went to the telephone and ordered a carpenter, without wasting any words on the crowd.
We decided long ago that the source of Hedrick"s power in politics was what we called his "do it now" policy. All politicians have schemes.
Hedrick puts his through before he talks about them. If he has an idea that satisfies his judgment, he makes it a reality in the quickest possible time. That is why the fellows around town who hate Hedrick call him the rattlesnake, and those who admire him call him the Wrath of G.o.d. When he put up the telephone receiver he reached for his hat and bolted from the office under a full head of steam. He went directly to John Markley"s back office, got the check that Markley had given to Handy, dictated a letter in the anteroom of Markley"s office to a Kansas City plate-maker, inclosed fifty dollars as he pa.s.sed the draft counter, and, as he swung by the post-office he mailed the Handy check with instructions to have ten photographic half-tone cuts made of the check and mailed back to Hedrick in four days.
Then he went to Mrs. Worthington, told her his story, as a lawyer puts his case before a jury--had her raging at Ab Handy--and got an order on the bank for the check she had given to Handy. This also he sent to the plate-maker, and in an hour was back at his desk dictating a half-page advertis.e.m.e.nt to go into every Republican weekly newspaper in the district. He sent that advertis.e.m.e.nt out with the half-tone cuts Monday morning, and it appeared all over the district that week. The advertis.e.m.e.nt was signed by Hedrick, and began: