CHAPTER XIII
"Now that you've got it, Jap," asked Tom Granger, "what are you going to do with it?" Jap looked silently from the door.
"He put in about eight hours of thinking about that himself," Bill averred. "News is that ten saloons are loaded on freight cars, waiting word from Jap."
"You'll have to strike a happy medium," suggested Tom. "I know that you are the boy to deliver the goods."
"Ellis wasn't against saloons," commented Bill, "so Jap won't have that to chew over. Ellis wasn't either for or against 'em."
"No," Tom said seriously, "Ellis was dead set against hypocrisy. He hated a liar and a grafter worse than a murderer. He knew that the way to make people want a thing was to tell 'em they couldn't have it."
Jap's face was grave. A panorama of wretched pictures moved slowly before his wandering gaze, pictures that began and ended in Mike's place, in the half-forgotten village of Happy Hollow. He aroused himself with a start.
"I'm going to put it up to the new Board to allow as many saloons as want to, to come in," he said shortly.
Tom Granger let go a shrill whistle.
"At the license asked," continued Jap calmly. "The license will be three thousand dollars a year, and strict enforcement of all laws. At the first break, the lid will fall."
"Jumping cats!" howled Tom. "Where will you get the saloon that'll pay that?"
Jap smiled wearily. "I am not hunting a saloon for Bloomtown," he said, and turned toward the door in time to bump into Isabel Granger, her arms full of bundles. She blushed and dimpled prettily.
"I am looking for my papa," she cried, pinching Tom's cheek with her one free hand. "I want you to carry these packages for me."
"Run along, pet. I'm busy."
"You look it," she reproved. "I simply can't carry all these things. My arm is almost broken now, and the dressmaker has to have them."
"Jap will tote them for you," chuckled Tom, watching the blood rush over Jap's sensitive face. To his surprise, Jap took the bundles and walked out with Isabel. He looked after them approvingly.
"Now there goes the likeliest boy in the state," he declared. "It's plumb funny the way he's got of getting right next to your marrow bones. I wish I had a boy like him."
"No great matter," drawled Bill, with tantalizing indefiniteness.
Tom looked up at him quizzically, as he picked absently at the pile of exchanges. Something in the young man's tone piqued him.
"If Jap wasn't so all-fired conscientious," Bill blurted, "you'd have a son, in quick order."
"Lord!" exploded Tom. "Dunderhead that I am!" He slapped his thigh, and a great, joyous laugh set his shoulders to heaving. "Bill, you're a genius for spying out mysteries. How did you get on to it?"
"Mysteries!" shouted Bill. "Why, everybody in Bloomtown, including Isabel, knows that Jap is fairly sapheaded about her."
"Well, what's hampering him?" inquired Tom. "Why don't he confide in me?"
"Confide your hat!" remarked Bill crisply. "Isabel will die of old age before Jap asks her. You see, he is such a durn fool that he thinks he isn't good enough for her. When the Lord made Jap Herron He made a man, I tell you!"
"Who said He didn't?" stormed Tom. "I can't know what is in the boy's mind, can I? What do you want me to do, kidnap him and get his consent? Bill, you're a fool. You needn't tell me that Jap Herron is such a mealy-mouth."
"All I know is that he won't ask Isabel," Bill said gloomily. "I'd like to get married myself, but as long as Jap stays single, I stick too." And thinking of Rosy's blue eyes, he sighed heavily.
"It beats me, the way young folks do. It was different when I went courting," Tom muttered, turning to go.
At the door he met Kelly Jones, who had come in to inquire what Jap intended to do about the "licker" business. He was too busy with his fall plowing to be running over to Barton for his jug of good cheer, and he didn't like the brand he could get at Bingham's drug store, on Doc Connor's prescription. While he was still holding forth, Jap came in, with half-a-dozen constituents, all busy with the same problem. Bill took up his notebook and wandered out. At Blanke's drug store he met Isabel. She motioned for him to come back in the store.
"What do you want to know, Iz?" he asked with the familiarity born of long years of propinquity. "Reckon you want to ask what everybody else wants to know—when is Jap going to get a saloon?"
"You are too smart, Bill Bowers," she retorted, with annoyance. She had had a subject of more personal nature on the tip of her tongue. "I think that Jap will be able to answer his own questions without any help from you."
"It is to be hoped that he will make a better stagger at answering than he does at asking," remarked Bill shortly.
"Now, Bill Bowers, just what do you mean?" she demanded, her black eyes flashing angrily.
"What's the use?" said Bill, in disgust. "Rosy says that she's going to Kansas this fall, and I just will have to let her go because I can't ask her to stay."
"Pity about you," she snapped. "Thought you said Jap couldn't ask."
"I did," assented Bill, "for if he had gumption enough to get married, or even go courting, I might get by. But as long as he sticks alone I'm going to stick, too."
Isabel's face flamed. She stooped to pick up a hit of paper.
"What do you want to tell me about it for?" she complained. "My goodness, I'm not to blame."
"You are," stormed Bill. "Jap knows that he is not your equal, and he never will marry."
"Who said that Jap Herron was not more than the equal of any man on earth?" she blazed. "If Jap will ask me, I'll marry him to-morrow."
She whirled away in her wrath, and ran into the arms of Jap Herron, standing half paralyzed with the wonder of it. Bill, who had been watching the unconscious Jap approaching for several minutes, discreetly withdrew.
"Gee!" he said, "but they ought not to be kissing in such a public place."
There were a dozen customers in the store, but neither Jap nor Isabel knew it. And it is to the credit of Bloomtown that they all looked the other way, as they hurriedly transacted their business and departed. Blanke declared afterward that he filled fifteen prescriptions with epsom salts in his abstraction, and accidentally cured Doc Horton's best paying patient. Moss, the paper hanger, went out with his rolls of paper, and hung the border on the walls, instead of the siding. The mistakes reported were legion; but the town was all courting Isabel with Jap, at heart.
Bill rambled into the bank and suggested that Tom go over to Blanke's and lead Jap and Isabel out, as Blanke might want to close the store. Half an hour later Tom came from the drug store, with an arm locked with each of the glowing pair. Straight across Main street they marched, and down the shady walk that flanked the little park until they were opposite the front gate of the Granger home. Then they went in to break the news to Isabel's invalid mother.
Flossy heard about it, almost before Jap had awakened to his own joy, and he never knew of the hour she spent in passionate grief. In some vague way it seemed to tear open the old wound. Without knowing why, she resented the fact that Isabel's brunette beauty had won Jap. She told herself that it was not a fitting match for him. Flossy, in her maternal soul, had looked to heights undreamed of by the retiring boy. She had planned a future for him that would be sadly hampered by marriage with a village belle. But only smiles met him when he brought Isabel to her, his plain features glorified by joy in her possession.
Somehow the story of Jap Herron, the youthful Mayor of Bloomtown, his advent in its environs, and the story of his romance with the banker's daughter, crept into the country press, was carried over into the city papers and flung broadcast, so that friend and foe might seek him out. One dreary fall day, when the rain was beating sullenly down on the sodden leaves, a haggard, dirty woman straggled into the office.
"I'm lookin' for Jasper Herron," she mumbled. "They told me I'd find him in here."
Jap looked at her in horror. His heart sank.
"I am his poor old mother, that he run away from and left to starve," she said viciously.
And Jap, just on the threshold of his greatest happiness, was turned aside by this grizzly, drunken phantom from the past.