THE ADVENT OF THE MAJORITY
By Stella Wynne Herron
Colonel Scipio Breckenbridge stopped polishing the lighthouse lamp and stared out across Lone Palm Key to where the blazing yellow sand met the dark blue waters of the Gulf. Yes—there they were again, hobnobbing on the beach—the alien Higgins, his face a beef red from alcohol within and the tropic sun without, stretched prone, the breeze flapping his loose sailor’s pants around his skinny ankles—the Captain erecting a tarpaulin tent against the day of the great four-yearly event, the presidential election.
Yes, indeed. Make no mistake. Lone Palm Key is a part of the United States. This speck of an island that flips up out of the Gulf like the tip end of a fish’s tail is listed as the sixty-sixth precinct of Florida. For twenty years now the Colonel had religiously cast one vote for the Democratic candidate; the Captain, one for the Republican candidate. For twenty years—the Captain and the Colonel being the entire population—the sixty-sixth had split fifty-fifty—and for twenty years both had cherished the secret hope of one day carrying it.
Mr. Higgins had drifted into Lone Palm—literally—on a hatch top of the ill-fated Petrel two months before, and it was not long before his lamentable failing made itself manifest. Mr. Higgins was unhappy unless drunk. When his entertainment ceased, and it looked as if, through sheer thirst, he would have to consent to be taken to Key West with the Captain’s next cargo of sponges—non-human—he had discovered a cast-up keg of whiskey. Such an act of Providence almost restored his waning faith in God. But, alas! for an acrid week now the sacred fount had been dry. This time he would surely be frozen out—— But, now, here was the Captain encouragingly friendly, almost chummy, with him——
The Colonel strode across to the recumbent Higgins, and touched him with his foot.
“Higgins,” he asked, “do yo’ reckon to vote on Lone Palm this election?”
“I ’ave that intention,” replied Mr. Higgins gently.
“Are yo’—Republican or—Democrat?” The Colonel’s voice trembled in spite of himself.
“I ’aven’t decided—yet,” and Mr. Higgins let his gaze drift again skyward.
The Colonel met the Captain’s perfidious eyes across the prostrate form of the potential majority. In that silent glance there was a declaration of bloody war.
From that moment began the Golden Age on Lone Palm for Mr. Higgins. With flattering frequency he drank healths to the Grand Old Party, then to the party “that gave birth to Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, sah!”
But no maiden, pressed by two suitors, was ever more coy in avowing a choice than he.
A week before election the Captain’s and the Colonel’s liquor ran out. Mr. Higgins, to his horror, began to get sober. The day before election the Captain and his sloop disappeared. The Colonel did not wait to investigate. He also hoisted sail for Key West. That night both the Captain and the Colonel unloaded mysterious cargoes. At midnight, after wandering constantly between the Captain’s bungalow and the lighthouse, Mr. Higgins fell down in the sand, impartially between the two abodes. The Captain and the Colonel, in silence, removed the political enigma to his sail-cloth tent.
Mr. Higgins did not appear at the polls until nearly noon. It was evident that the combination of Jamaica rum and Kentucky mountain dew had made terrible ravages on a constitution even so immune to spirituous shocks as his.
“Drink’s the cause o’ this here country’s goin’ to the dorgs,” he remarked, through pallid, parched lips, as he entered the booth.
His ballot cast, he disappeared, still enwrapped in mystery and silence.
At exactly six o’clock the Colonel arose.
“The polls of the Sixty-sixth Precinct, Monroe County, State of Florida, are now closed. We will proceed to count votes, Captain Hartford!”
The Colonel thrust into the box a hand that shook in spite of him and drew out a ballot.
“One Republican!”
The Captain’s heart leaped.
“One Democratic!” announced the Colonel tremulously.
The Captain waited, staring at the floor. Finally he looked up. The Colonel was gazing as if hypnotized, his bulging eyes fastened on the ballot in his hand. At last the announcement came:
“The Prohibition Party—one vote!”
Two minutes later they found this pinned to Mr. Higgins’ empty tent:
“i don what i don bekaws of conshunce i suddently cam to fel the orful kurse of drink hav made free to borrow a sale bote will leve same at kee west”
The Colonel drew himself up in his Prince Albert.
“The Sixty-sixth has again split even, sah!” he announced.