CHAPTER XXIII.—THE CONVENTION: THE BOSS.
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.”