HUGH TAKES THE STUMP
They found Scot still defying the predictions of the doctors by hanging on to the thread of life that tied him to this world. He was asleep when the travellers arrived. Within a few minutes Hugh was in the saddle again and on the way to meet Byers and his prisoner. Before morning they had Dutch behind bars in the Carson jail.
When Hugh tiptoed in to see Scot a second time, the wounded man smiled at him reproachfully. The Colonel’s hand slid weakly along the bedspread to meet his brother’s brown palm.
“Glad you’re back safe,” he said in a low voice.
“We brought Dutch along,” Hugh said by way of explaining his absence.
A faint flash of amusement lit the drawn face. “Buck much, did he?”
“Oh, he reckoned he wouldn’t come along. Then he reckoned he would.”
Scot asked a question: “What have you been parboiling your face for?”
“Got caught in a mine fire. How are you feelin’, Scot?”
“Fine and dandy,” murmured the older brother indomitably. “Mollie’s spoiling me. Everybody’s mighty good. When I don’t feel so trifling I’ll say thank you proper.”
Mollie kissed him and said gently, “Now, you’ve talked enough.”
Business, much neglected of late, called Hugh to Virginia City. Every two or three days he ran down to Carson for a few hours. The doctors became more hopeful. The great vitality of their patient was beginning to triumph over the shock his system had endured.
Meanwhile, Scot’s political campaign had died down. If the Dodsons had been willing to let it alone, Ralph would probably have been nominated without opposition. But this was just what they could not do. They knew themselves that they had played a poor part in the contest with the McClintocks, and they were afraid that Nevada’s private judgment would be the same.
Sinister whispers passed from mouth to mouth. They found a discreet echo in the newspapers friendly to the Dodson candidacy. Scot McClintock had broken up the home of Robert Dodson. He belonged to Nevada’s past and not her present. The disgraceful affair at Carson showed him to be a desperate man, in the same class as the men Hopkins and Dutch. This was hinted in veiled language and not openly charged by the press.
It was at the Maison Borget, as good a French restaurant as could be found between New York and San Francisco, that Hugh first learned of these rumours. He had been too busy to read any newspaper except a local one.
Senator Stewart, seated alone at a small side table, called to him. The young man took the place opposite him.
“How’s the Colonel?” asked the senator.
“He’s not out of danger, but we think he’s gaining.”
“Fine. Glad to hear it. What about his campaign?”
“It seems to have dropped by the wayside, Senator.”
The big man stroked his long yellow beard. “Pity. I’d like to see him win. With these stories going around——”
“What stories?”
The senator told him. He ended with a startling question.
“Why don’t you take the stump and answer the lies, Hugh?”
“Me? I’m no orator.”
“None needed. You can talk straight, can’t you? Call a lie a lie?”
“I reckon. But it’s a game I don’t savvy, Senator. If I was going gunnin’ for statesmen I’d never snap a cap at Hugh McClintock.”
“Just hit out hard from the shoulder. Talk right out for Scot as though you were with two or three friends. Carry the war into the enemy’s camp. Show how they’ve stacked the cards against your brother.”
McClintock’s eyes blazed. “I’ll do it, Senator. I’ll give Scot a run for his white alley yet.”
He did. To every camp and town in the state he fared forth and told the story. He told it at mine shafts, in saloons, around hotel stoves, and in public meetings called for that purpose. Much to his surprise he developed a capacity for public speaking. His strength lay in the direct, forceful simplicity of what he said. He was so manifestly a sincere and honest champion that men accepted at face value what he said.
At one town Captain Palmer, who had organized the Aurora vigilance committee, introduced him in characteristic fashion.
“You see the big head on his broad shoulders. It’s up to you to decide whether there’s anything in it,” he said bluntly.
Hugh plunged straight at his subject.
“I’m here to speak for a man who lies at Carson wounded by three bullets from the revolvers of two murderers. I’m here to answer the whispers set going by the men who profit most by that attempted assassination, men who would never have the courage to say any of these things face to face with Colonel McClintock.”
He reviewed his brother’s life and tried to interpret it.
“They say he was a gambler. So he was, at a time when nine tenths of the men in this state gambled hard and often. But they can’t say he wasn’t a straight gambler. There never was a crooked hair in the head of Scot McClintock. Everybody knows that.”
Without gloves he took up the charge that Scot had broken up Robert Dodson’s home. He showed that Dodson was a drunken ne’er-do-well who had smothered his own baby and had afterwards been rescued from a mob of lynchers by McClintock, that he was a wife beater and a loafer who by chance had later stumbled into a fortune, a man always without honour or principle.
“It was this same man who rode out of Carson at breakneck speed fifteen minutes after my brother had been shot down from behind, rode with the red-handed murderer Sam Dutch. It was this same man and his brother Ralph Dodson who tried to keep me and my friends from bringing Dutch back to Carson as a prisoner.
“From the beginning of this campaign they have smeared mud on the reputation of Scot. Even now, when he lies at the point of death at the hands of their hired killers, they go about hissing poisonous lies. The record of Scot McClintock is an open book. You know all his faults. They are exposed frankly to all men’s eyes. If he was wild, at least his wildness was never secret. It was a part of his gay and open-hearted youth.”
Hugh passed to his later years, to his brilliant career as a soldier, and to his public services as a citizen since the close of the war. He named Scot’s qualifications for the office he sought and concluded with an appeal for justice in the form of a vindication.
Nevada was young. It understood men like the McClintocks and it liked them. Ralph Dodson was of a type it neither knew nor wanted to know. The verdict was unmistakable. The political bosses gave way to the public demand, and Scot McClintock was nominated on the first ballot by a large majority.
Hugh took the Carson stage to carry his brother the news.