“How do you figure this?” asked Mr. Wright of his fellow committeemen when the Updegraffe delegation had departed. “Is it a deadfall?”
“Strange as it may sound,” responded Mr. Short, “considerin’ what liars that outfit is, I’m obliged to admit that for once they’re on the squar’.”
Mr. Kelly coincided with Mr. Short, and it was finally agreed that the proffer of the Updegraffe contingent should be accepted.
“We’re with you,” said Mr. Short when Mr. Webster and the others returned, “but not on selfish grounds. We base our action on the bluff that the peace of Dodge requires protection, an’ that the office of sheriff, now vacant, should be promptly filled.”
“Then the election is settled,” said Mr. Webster, who was a practical man, “for eight o’clock in the evenin’, one week from to-day, to be pulled off in the Plaza?”
“That’s the caper,” retorted Mr. Short, and the commissions adjourned.
The canvass went forward in lively vein, albeit, as Mr. Webster had complained, there was a notable falling away in the local appetite for rum. Plainly, Dodge had turned wary in a day that wore a six-shooter, and under circumstances which tested the tempers of men. Evidently, it had determined that while this election crisis lasted, its hand should remain steady and its head cool.
It was five days before the one appointed for, as Mr. Webster called it, “a count of noses” in the Plaza. The friends of Mr. Masterson developed an irritating fact. There were, man added to man, four hundred and twelve votes in Dodge; of these a careful canvass betrayed two hundred and twelve as being for Mr. Updegraffe—a round majority of twelve.
This disquieting popular condition was chiefly the work of Bear Creek Johnson. The malign influence of that disreputable person controlled full forty votes, being the baser spirits; and these now threatened the defeat of Mr. Masterson.
Cimarron Bill, when he grasped the truth, was for cleansing Dodge of Bear Creek with a Colt’s-45. These sanitary steps, however, were forbidden by Mr. Masterson; at that the worthy Cimarron tendered a compromise. He would agree to do no more than mildly wing the offensive Bear Creek.