abruptly, “if they elect Aylett they’ll have to stuff the ballot-boxes. What’ll you do then?”

“Take the stuffing out of them, Judge,” Trench replied promptly and decisively.

The judge looked at him, a grim smile curling the corners of his large mouth. “They’ll tar and feather you,” he said.

Trench sat down and took up a calf-bound volume. “I’m enough of a Quaker still to speak out in meeting,” he observed.

“The only thing I know about Quakers makes ’em seem like Unitarians,” said the judge, “and a Unitarian is a kind of stylish Jew. What have you been doing with the backwoodsmen, Caleb? Mahan tells me they’re organized—” the judge smiled outright now—“I don’t believe it.”

Caleb Trench smiled too. “I don’t know much[28] about organizing, Judge,” he said simply. “When men come into my shop and ask questions I answer them; that’s all there is about it.”

[28]

“We’ll have to shut up that shop, I reckon,” the judge said, “but then you’ll open your darned law office and give ’em sedition by the brief instead of by the yard. I deserve hanging for letting you read law here. I’ve been a Democrat for seventy years, and you’re a black Republican.”

Trench closed the law book on his finger. “Judge,” he said slowly, “I’m a man of my own convictions. My father wouldn’t stand for anything I do, yet he was the best man I ever knew, and I’d like to be true to him. It isn’t in me to follow in the beaten track, that’s all.”

The judge twinkled. “You’re an iconoclast,” he said, “and so’s Sarah, yet women, as a rule, are safe conservatives. They’ll hang on to an old idea as close as a hen to a nest-egg. Perhaps I’m the same. Anyway I can’t stand for your ways; I wash my hands of it all. I wish they’d drop Yarnall; his nomination means blood on the face of the moon. There’s the feud with the Eatons, and I wouldn’t trust Jacob Eaton to forget it, not by a darned sight; he’s too pesky cold-blooded,—the kind of man that holds venom as long as a rattler.”

“Then, if you don’t like Yarnall, why not vote for Mahan?” Trench was beginning to enjoy himself. He leaned back in his chair with his head against a shelf of the bookcase, the light from the judge’s[29] lamp falling full on his remarkable face, clean-shaven like his host’s, on the strong line of the jaw, and on the mouth that had the faculty of 

 Prev. P 17/183 next