XXI
RANKIN had been at home all day, helping his wife with the washing. The larder was growing lean in the Rankin home, though Rankin himself laughed with his usual optimism, and said that it would be all right again in a few days. The evening had come and he had gone out into the yard to do his chores. Though the air was cold he was in his shirt sleeves, and he went about his work singing loudly the staves of an old hymn:
“‘There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign;
In-fi-nite day—’”
“Jim!” his wife’s voice called from the back door.
“Yeoup!” he shouted back, and then sang on:
“‘—excludes the night,
An’ pleasures banish pain.
“‘There everlastin’ spring abides,’”
“Oh, Jim!”
“Yeoup!” he shouted, as the call came the second time. “Whatch y’ want?”
“Come here!”
“All right—
“‘An’ never-with’rin’ flowers;
Death, like a narrow sea, divides
This heavenly land from ours.’”
Rankin stooped in the anguish of a fat man, and gathered up an armful of the kindlings he had been splitting, and started toward the house. As he stamped up the steps into the kitchen, he sang on:
“‘Sweet fields beyond the—’
“Hello, kid,” he suddenly said, interrupting his own song, “where’d you come from?”
He stretched out his right arm and covering his little son’s head with his big palm he rolled it round and round on the boy’s shoulders as he passed. And then suddenly Rankin felt a strange unnatural chill in the atmosphere of his home. There was the supper table laid, the baby was already sitting up to it, pounding his tin waiter hungrily with his spoon, while his little sister tried to distract his attention from his own hunger by cutting antics on the dining-room floor.
The pleasant odor of fried potatoes filled the kitchen, the coffee steamed in the pot, its fragrant aroma had reached him even in the woodshed. It was the hour of all others in the day that he liked; he would take the tin pan presently out to the cistern pump and blow like a porpoise as he washed his face, then he would swing the pan at arm’s length, scattering the water afar, and come groping into the kitchen toward the long towel that hung in an endless belt on a roller behind the door. And then they would have supper, and he could joke his little wife and his little boy, and give the baby prohibited tid-bits from his plate.
He felt the change in the atmosphere again as he sat down to the supper table, and yet he did not reason about such things, or probe their causes deeply. He thought it was their poverty that was worrying his wife. That cloud sometimes darkened the home for them of late.
“Well, cheer up,” he said, as he sat down to the table, his coat still off; “we’re poor but honest parents. Remember, Mollie, what the good Book says: ‘I have never seen the righteous forsaken, ner his seed beggin’ bread.’ I can’t qualify under the first clause, but I can under the second. There never was a better man than your Grampa Rankin, Willie. How’d ye get along at school to-day?” he asked presently, still addressing the boy. “You want to get a hump on yourself; I’m goin’ to put you in Jerry Garwood’s office one o’ these days, an’ make a lawyer of you, ye know.”
But try as he would to rally them he failed, and he looked curiously at last from his son to his wife, and back again. Then it dawned upon him.
“Look’e here,” he said, placing his fists on the table, his knife sticking up from one, his fork from the other, “you two’s got some pleasant surprise fer papa; I can see it in your faces. Le’s see, is this my birthday? What kind of a game’re you an’ mama puttin’ up on the old man, anyhow?” He looked at his son.
“Jim,” said his wife, and her tone almost froze him. He looked at her motionless, his mouth and eyes open. “Jim,” she said, in a low voice, “the postmaster’s been appointed.”
He dropped his knife and fork, a sudden gleam came to his eyes, then the grin broke out all over his big face. He stretched out his hand to wool his boy’s head again, when his wife looked across the table at him and cried:
“Oh, Jim, no—don’t—you don’t understand. It’s not you—it’s Pusey.”
He stared at her in utter silence for a minute, his wife looking at him with tears in her eyes, and her son trying hard to swallow the lump that came into his throat when mother cried. The little girl looked up with big eyes; even the baby was still. At last Rankin spoke.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Willie heard it, down town, on his way home from school.”
“I don’t believe it,” he said doggedly.
“Oh, hones’, papa,” the boy protested, as if his veracity had been impugned, “cross my heart it’s true! It’s hangin’ up down town in front of the telegrapht office, an’ it’s in the paper, too. I heard ever’body talkin’ ’bout it, hope to die I did.”
Rankin stared at his son an instant, and then slowly turned his gaze on his wife. A look had come into his face which it grieved her to see, a look of utter, despairing anguish.
“Jim, you know you mistrusted something, you know you did. You’d never own up to it, but you know you did.”
Rankin’s lip quivered, and then, suddenly, he bent his elbows, put his arms on the table before him, and bowing his curly head upon their enormous muscles he burst into tears. His huge back heaved with his sobs, and his wife, hastening around to him, put her arms about his shoulders, laid her thin cheek to his curly hair, and then as her own tears rained fast, she said at last:
“Don’t, Jimmy, don’t; you’ll break my heart. I wouldn’t mind it—you can get somethin’ else.”
“Oh, ’tain’t that,” came his voice, “but I thought he was my friend, I thought he was my friend. I made that boy, an’ I was so proud of him. An’ now—an’ now—he’s thrown me down, he’s thrown me down!”
He ceased his sobbing and was still. His wife stood by him, patting him now on the back, now running her fingers through his curls. At last he raised himself, rubbed the tears from his eyes, and, pulling out his handkerchief, blew his nose with a mighty blast.
“Your supper’ll get cold. The old man’s a fool, hain’t he, Fannie?” He looked at his little daughter, and then in turn at them all, saw their tear-stained faces, and then he said:
“Well, I’m makin’ a pleasant home an’ fireside campaign fer ye here, hain’t I? But I don’t b’lieve it, that’s all, I don’t b’lieve Jerry Garwood ’uld throw me down, without some good reason. I won’t believe it yet. There’s some explanation.”
“Jim,” his wife smiled proudly at him, “they say you’re a hardened old politician, but you’ve got too soft a heart. Didn’t I tell you that somethin’ ’as up last summer when you got back from Pekin? Didn’t I tell you somethin’ ’as up when you told me Pusey had gone down to Washington? Didn’t I tell you you’ll better go or you’d get left?”
“Well, now, Mollie,” he began apologetically, “you know I didn’t have the price in the first place, an’ secon’ly, Jerry told me, told me, with his own lips, right down there in that old office o’ his’n, that it was—all—right, that I needn’t worry, that he’d promised it, an’ I’d get it. An’ what ’uld I want to run down to Washin’ton botherin’ him ’bout it any more fer? You know congressmen don’t want the’r constits trailin’ ’round after ’em down there.” He leaned back in his chair and spread his hands wide, as if to exculpate himself entirely.
“Well, you’ve been in politics long enough to know—” began his wife with a faint little sneer.
“Oh, course,” Rankin interrupted her, “if it ’ad been anybody else, I mightn’t ’a’ been so easy. I’d a camped on his trail till he done it, but Jerry—Jerry—I never thought it o’ him.” He shook his head sadly.
“Now, Jim, just look here a minute,” his wife returned. “You told me yourself that you noticed a change in him when he come home from Washington las’ summer. Now, didn’t you?”
“Well, maybe there was a little, but that ’as all right. I expected that, I expected that as he growed bigger an’ greater, an’ got in ’ith all them heavy timbers down to Washin’ton he’d naturally grow away from us some. I knowed he couldn’t al’ays have a big dub like me trailin’ along, but I thought he’d al’ays be my friend. I thought he’d keep his word.” His eyes widened as he lapsed into abstraction.
But presently he roused himself with a mighty shake, and reached across the table with his coffee-cup in his hand.
“Another cup, Mollie,” he said, “I don’t believe it,” he insisted, setting his jaw, “I won’t believe it. I’ll go down town to-night an’ find out about it.”
His wife shook her head with a little smile that told what an amiable hopelessness there was about him.
“And when you find out it’s true, what’ll you do then?” she asked, as she gave him back his cup.
“Well,” he said, sucking in his mustache, “I’ll live on here in Polk County, an’ we’ll continue to have three square meals per. But Jerry’ll have some explanation, you’ll see.”
“Yes, I don’t doubt that,” said Mrs. Rankin dryly.
The news of the illness of old Ethan Harkness—men had begun to call him old when he ceased to work—had been of interest to Grand Prairie, and the return of his daughter from Washington had added a zest to the interest, but it was all forgotten in the announcement that Pusey had been appointed postmaster.
It had been so generally recognized that Rankin was to have the appointment, that Grand Prairie had been denied its quadrennial sensation of a post-office fight, and the only feeling that the boys had been able to display was one of impatience to have Rankin, as a deserving and efficient party worker, displace the old postmaster the instant the new president was inaugurated. Garwood had explained time and again that the president was determined to permit all present office-holders to fill out their terms before appointing new ones, and he had strengthened his explanation by reminding them that the civil service rules were so strict that there was no prospect of dislodging the present incumbents of post-office places and putting new men in their stead.
Garwood of course sympathized with the boys; he didn’t believe in civil service reform himself; but preferred, he said, the good old Jacksonian doctrine of “to the victors belong the spoils,” but they must all see how powerless he was. Interest in the post-office situation accordingly had declined, and the subject was scarcely ever mentioned, except to illustrate, in curbstone arguments, the absurdities of civil service reform. But when the appointment was made public, and the boys realized that after all Rankin’s preëmption had not held valid, and that the field had been open all the time, they felt they had been the victims of a conspiracy, and had been cheated of one of the rights vested inalienably in the politician, if not in the people.
Pusey announced his own appointment in the Citizen, simply enough and modestly enough, and in the same issue he referred to the appointment of Joseph Hale as postmaster at Pekin. In another column there was a long leaded article headed “Special Washington Correspondence,” and signed with the editor’s initials, and it told of his trip to Washington, of his meeting with the great president, and of the excellent public services their own congressman, the Hon. Jerome B. Garwood, was performing. And then it went on with grave and learned dissertations on political subjects, uttered with as much authority as the Washington correspondents of the New York and Chicago newspapers assume when they sit down to write their daily misrepresentation of political life at Washington.
Pusey received his congratulations without a change of expression. He went tapping along the sidewalk with his little stick, plucking at the vagrant hairs on his chin and chewing the stogy he was smoking, as if nothing of moment had happened. If the fact that he had risen in Grand Prairie to a place of power and influence impressed Freeman H. Pusey, his wizened face never displayed it.