Went about town with his cigar pointing toward his hat-brim
Mrs. Handy threw herself into the work of the City Federation with passionate zeal. Also she kept up her lodge connections, and explained to the women, whom she considered of a higher social caste than the lodge women, that she was "doing it to help Mr. Handy." She did a little church work for the same reason, but her soul was in the Federation, for it insured her social status as neither lodge nor church could do. So she put herself under the protecting seal-lined wing of Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington who on account of her efforts to clean the streets we at the office had been taught by Colonel Morrison to know as the Joan of the trash-cans. And Miss Larrabee, our society reporter, told us that Mrs. Handy was the only woman in town who did not smile into her handkerchief when Mrs. Worthington, who had trained down to one hundred and ninety-seven pounds five and three-eighths ounces, gave her course of lectures on delsarte before the Federation.
It was Mrs. Handy who encouraged Mrs. Worthington to open her salon. But as there were lodge meetings the first three nights in the week, and prayer-meetings in the middle of the week, and as the choirs met for practice, and the whist clubs met for business the last of the week, the salon did not seem to take with the town, and so was discontinued. Then Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Handy sought other fields. And the first field they stumbled into was the court-house square. For fifty years the farmers near our town had been hitching at the racks provided by the county commissioners. But Mrs. Worthington decided that the time had come for a change and that the town was getting large enough to take down the hitching-racks. So, as chairman of the Municipal Improvement section of the City Federation, Mrs. Worthington began war on the hitching-racks. At the Federation meetings for three months there were reports from committees appointed to interview the councilmen; reports of committees to interview the county commissioners—who were obdurate; reports of committees to lease new ground for the hitching rack stands; reports of the legal committee; reports of the sanitary committee, and through it all Mrs. Worthington rose at every meeting and declared that the hitching racks must be destroyed. And as she was rated in Bradstreet's report at nearly half a million dollars, her words had much force.
The town was beginning to stir itself. The merchants were with the women—because the women bought the dry goods and groceries—and we forgot about the farmers. To all this milling among the people Handy was oblivious, for he was stepping like a hen in high oats, with his eyes on a seat in Congress. Matters of mere local importance did not concern him. The railroads were for him, and the stars in their courses seemed to him to be pointing his way to Washington. He knew of the hitching-rack trouble only when he had to go with Mrs. Handy to the dinners at the Worthington home given to the councilmen and their wives, who were lukewarm on the removal proposition.
In the spring before the election of 1902 Mrs. Worthington had a majority in the council, and one Saturday night the hitching-racks were taken down by the street commissioner. And within a week the town was on the verge of civil war, for the farmers of the county rose as one man and demanded the blood of the offenders. But Abner Handy knew nothing of the disturbance. The county attorney had the street commissioner and his men arrested for trespassing upon county property; farmers threatened to boycott the town. But Abner Handy's ear was attuned to higher things. Merchants who had signed the petition asking the council to remove the racks began to denounce the removal as an act of treason. But Abner Handy conferred with State leaders on great questions, and the city attorney, who was a candidate for county attorney that fall, did not dare to defend the street commissioner. The council got stubborn, and Colonel Morrison, before whom as justice of the peace the case was to be tried, fearing for the professional safety of his three daughters in the town schools and his four daughters in the county schools, took a trip to his wife's people, and told us he was enlisted there for "ninety days or during the war"; and still Abner Handy looked at the green hills afar.
We are generally accounted by ourselves a fearless newspaper; but here we admitted that the situation required discretion. So we straddled it. We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded that each side recognise the other's rights and made both sides angry, whereas General Durham, of the Statesman, made his first popular stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that the tariff on hides was a divine institution, and that humanity called upon us to hold the Philippines. Charley Hedrick knew better than anyone else in town what a tempest was rising. He might have warned Handy, but he did not; for Handy had reached a point in his career where he considered that a mere county boss was beneath his confidence. More than that, Hedrick had refused to indorse Handy's note at the bank. Handy needed money, and being a shorn lamb, the wind changed in his direction in this wise:
In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs. Worthington rose in her jet and passementerie and announced that our town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to assist the city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars. Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it. After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank the next morning at nine o'clock to cash it—and all the town saw that also.
Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the Statesman a most laudatory article about "our distinguished fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The Statesman contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure, for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels and rally round the standard of our noble leader in this great contest."
If Handy ever went to the city attorney's office to look after Mrs. Worthington's lawsuit, no one knew it. He smiled wisely when asked how the suit was progressing, and one day John Markley—who during the life of Ezra Worthington, hated him with a ten-horse-power hate and loaded it onto his widow's shoulders and the Worthington bank which she inherited—John Markley called Handy into the back room of the Markley Mortgage Company, and, when Handy passed the cashier's window going out, he cashed a check signed by John Markley for a thousand dollars on which was inscribed "for legal services in assisting the county attorney in the hitching rack case."
Handy had arrived at a point where he feared nothing. He seemed to believe that he lived a charmed life and never would get caught. He bought extra copies of the Statesman, which was booming him for Congress, and sent them over the Congressional District by the thousands. He went to Topeka in his high silk hat and his New York clothes, gave out interviews on the causes of the flurry in the money market, and, desiring further advertisement, gave a banquet for the newspaper men of the capital which cost him a hundred dollars. So he became a great man. At home he assumed a patronising air to the people about Charley Hedrick. And one night in Smith's cigar store, just to be talking, he said that he didn't get so much of Mrs. Worthington's money as people thought, for part of it had to go to "square old Charley Hedrick." Hedrick was John Markley's attorney, and he had taken an active part in helping the county attorney prosecute the street commissioners. Naturally Handy's remark stirred up the town. It was two weeks, however, in getting to Hedrick, and when it came the man turned black and seemed to be swallowing a pint of emotional language before he spoke. And there Abner Handy's doom was sealed; though Hedrick did not make the sentence public.
Now, it is well known in our county that the country people are slow to wrath. They were two months finding out beyond a question of doubt that Abner Handy had accepted Mrs. Worthington's money to act against them, but when they knew this there was no hope for Handy among them. They are a quiet people, and make no noise. For a month, only Charley Hedrick and the grocers and the hardware men, with whom the farmers trade, knew the truth about Handy's standing in the county. Hedrick bided his time. The Handy boom for Congress was rolling over the district, and the Statesman italics were becoming worn, and its exclamation points battered in the service, when one day Handy stalked up to Hedrick's office, imperiously beckoned Hedrick into the private room, and blurted out:
"Charley, I got to have some more money—need it in my business. Can't you touch old John Markley for me again—say for about five hundred on that hitching rack case? Sister Worthington is kind of wanting me to get action on her case."
Hedrick was dumb with rage, but Handy thought it was acquiescence. He went on:
"You just step down to the bank and say: 'John, I've noticed Ab Handy actin' kind of queer about that hitching rack case.' That's all you need say, and pretty soon I'll step in and say: 'John, I don't see how I can help doin' something for Aunt Julia Worthington.' And I believe I can tap him for five hundred more easy enough. I got an idea he is mightily in earnest about beating her in that suit."
When Hedrick got his breath, which was churning and wheezing in his throat, he cut Handy's sentence off with:
"You human razor-back shoat—you swill-barrel gladiator, why—why—I—I——" And Hedrick sparred for wind and went on before Handy realised the situation. "Ab Handy, I spat on the dust and breathed into the chaff that made you, and put you on the mud-sills of hell to dry, and I've got a right to turn you back into fertiliser, and I'm going to do it. Git out of here—git out of this office, or I——"
And the hulking form of Hedrick fell on the bag of shaking bones that was Handy and battered him through the latched door into the crowded outer office; and Handy picked himself up and ran like a wolf, turning at the door to show his teeth before he scampered through the hall and scurried down the stairs. As Hedrick came puffing out of the broken door his coat snagged on a splinter. He grinned as he unfastened himself:
"Well, the snail seems to be on the thorn; the lark certainly is on the wing.
"God's in his heaven.
All's right with the world!"
And he batted his eyes at the group of loafing local statesmen in his office as he viewed the wreckage, and went to the telephone and ordered a carpenter, without wasting any words on the crowd.
We decided long ago that the source of Hedrick's power in politics was what we called his "do it now" policy. All politicians have schemes. Hedrick puts his through before he talks about them. If he has an idea that satisfies his judgment, he makes it a reality in the quickest possible time. That is why the fellows around town who hate Hedrick call him the rattlesnake, and those who admire him call him the Wrath of God. When he put up the telephone receiver he reached for his hat and bolted from the office under a full head of steam. He went directly to John Markley's back office, got the check that Markley had given to Handy, dictated a letter in the anteroom of Markley's office to a Kansas City plate-maker, inclosed fifty dollars as he passed the draft counter, and, as he swung by the post-office he mailed the Handy check with instructions to have ten photographic half-tone cuts made of the check and mailed back to Hedrick in four days.
Then he went to Mrs. Worthington, told her his story, as a lawyer puts his case before a jury—had her raging at Ab Handy—and got an order on the bank for the check she had given to Handy. This also he sent to the plate-maker, and in an hour was back at his desk dictating a half-page advertisement to go into every Republican weekly newspaper in the district. He sent that advertisement out with the half-tone cuts Monday morning, and it appeared all over the district that week. The advertisement was signed by Hedrick, and began:
"Browning has a poem made after visiting a dead house, and in it he describes the corpse of a suicide, and says 'one clear, nice, cool squirt of water o'er the bust,' is the 'right thing to extinguish lust.' And I desire this advertisement to be 'one clear, nice, cool squirt of water' over the political remains of Honourable Abner Handy, to extinguish if possible his fatal lust for crooked money." After this followed the story of Handy's perfidy in the hitching rack case, a petition in disbarment proceedings, and the copy of the warrant for his arrest charged with a felony in the case sworn to by Hedrick himself. But the effective thing was the pictures, showing both sides of the two checks, each carefully inscribed by the two makers "for legal services in the hitching rack case," and each check indorsed by Handy in his big, brazen signature.
Hedrick saw to it also that, on the day the country papers printed his advertisement, the Kansas City and Topeka papers printed the whole story, including the casting out of Handy from Hedrick's office. It did Handy little good to go to Topeka in his flashy clothes and give out a festive interview asking his friends to suspend judgment, and saying that he would try his case in the courts and not in the newspapers. It was contended by the newspapers that if Handy had an honest defence, it would lose no weight in court by being printed in the newspapers; and his enemies in the Congressional fight pushed the charges against Handy so relentlessly that the public faith in him melted like an April snow, and when the delegates to the Congressional convention were named, our own county instructed its delegates against Handy. The farmers opposed him for taking the case against them, and the town scorned him for his perfidy. No one who was not paid for it would peddle his tickets at the primaries, so Handy, with his money all spent, went home on the night of the local primaries a whipped dog. They said around town that all the whipped dog got at home was a tin can; for it is certain that at daylight Handy was down on Main Street viciously drunk, flourishing a revolver with which he said he was going to kill Charley Hedrick and then himself. They took the pistol from him, and then he wept and said he was going to jump in the river, but no one followed him when he started toward the bridge, and he fell asleep in the shade of the piers, where he was found during the morning, washed up and sent home sober.
One of the curious revelations of society's partnership in crime was the way the grocers and butchers who despised Ab Handy's method, but shared his gains when he succeeded, stopped giving him credit when he failed. At the end of the first year after the primary wherein he was defeated, the Handys could not get a dime's worth of beefsteak without the dime. And dimes were scarce. By that time Handy was wearing his flashy New York clothes for every day—frayed and spotted and rusty. His temperament changed with his clothes, from the oily optimism of success to the sodden pessimism of utter failure; which inspired Colonel Morrison, returning after the hitching rack case had been settled in favour of the town, to remark, speaking of Handy, that "an optimist is a man who isn't caught, and is cheering to keep up his courage, and a pessimist is one who has been caught and thinks it will be but a question of time until his neighbours are found out too."
Mrs. Worthington, who was a necessary witness in the disbarment proceedings and the criminal proceedings against Handy, always went to Europe when the cases were called; so rather than put a woman in jail for contempt of court, the court dismissed the proceedings against Handy and he was not allowed to be even a martyr. One morning about a year and a half after Handy's defeat, when Hedrick opened his office door, he found Handy there with his fingers clutching the chair arms and his eyes fixed on the floor. The man was breathing audibly, and seemed to be struggling with a great passion. Hedrick and Handy had not spoken since they came through the panels of the door together, but Hedrick went to the miserable creature, touched him gently on the shoulder, and motioned him into the private office. There, with his eyes still on the floor, Handy told Hedrick that the end of the rope had been reached.
"I had to come down without any breakfast this morning—because—they—they ain't anything in the house for her to fix. And there ain't any show for dinner. Next week, Red Martin has promised me some money he's goin' to get from Jim Huddleson; but they ain't a soul in town but you I can come to now"; and Handy raised his eyes from the floor in canine self-pity as he whined—"and she's making life a hell for me!" When Hedrick opened his desk and got out his check-book, he smiled as he fancied he could detect about Handy's body the faint resemblance of a wagging tail. He made the check for fifty dollars and gave it to Handy saying, "Oh, well, Ab—we'll let bygones be bygones."
Handy snapped at it and in an instant was gone.
That afternoon Hedrick met Handy sailing down Main Street in his old manner. His head was erect, his eyes were sparkling, his big, rough, statesman's voice was bellowing abroad, and his thumbs were in the armholes of his vest. He walked straight to Hedrick and led him by the coat lapel into a dark stairway. There was an air of deep mystery about Handy and when he put his arm on Hedrick to whisper in his ear, Hedrick, smelling the statesman's breath heavy with whiskey and onions and cloves and cardamon seeds and pungent gum, heard this:
"Say, Charley, I'm fooling 'em—I've got 'em all fooled. They think I'm poor. They think I ain't got any money. But old Ab's too smart for them. I've got lots of money—all I want—all anyone could want—wealth beyond the dreams of avar—of av—avar—avar'ce, as John Ingalls used to say. Just look at this!" And with that Handy pulled from his inside coat pocket a roll of one and two-dollar bills, that seemed to Hedrick to represent fifty dollars less the price of about ten drinks. "Look a-here," continued Handy, "ol' Ab's got 'em all fooled. Don't you say anything about it; but ol' Ab's goin' to make his mark." And he shook Hedrick's hand and took him down to the street, and shook it again and again before prancing grandly down the sidewalk.
For three years Mrs. Handy's boarding-house has been one of the most exclusive in our town. They say that she pays Mr. Handy for mowing the lawn and helping about the rough work in the kitchen, and that he sleeps in the barn and pays her for such meals as he eats. Sometimes a new boarder makes the mistake of paying the board money to Handy, and he appears on Main Street ostentatiously jingling his silver and toward evening has ideas about the railroad situation. On election days and when there is a primary Handy drives a carriage and gathers up his cronies in the fifth ward, who, like him, are not so much in evidence as they were ten years ago.
It was only last week that Hedrick was in our office telling us of Handy's "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." He paused when he had finished the story, cocked his head on one side, and squinted at the ceiling as he said:
"For three long, weary, fruitless years I've searched the drug-stores of this town for the brand of liquor Ab had that day. I believe if I had two drinks of that I could write better poetry than old Browning himself."
Whereupon Hedrick shook himself out of the office in a gentle wheesy laugh.