The Great Accident

by Ben Ames Williams

“You steal my own son, take him into your own home, turn him against me, persuade him to help destroy me....” His voice broke with his own rage and grief. “I tell you, Amos,” he said again, leaning steadily forward, “I’m going to get you. Fair warning. Take your measures accordingly.”

Amos looked out of the window; he puffed at his pipe; and at last he faced the other man again, and smiled. “Well, Senior,” he said slowly, “if the land lies so—thanks for the word. As for them measures—I’ll take them like you say.”

For a moment longer, the eyes of the two men held each other. Then Chase turned stiffly on his heel, and stalked to the door and went out.

As he disappeared, Amos called: “G’d day!” But Chase made no answer, and Amos, left alone, grinned slowly to himself and shook his head.

After that interview with Amos, Chase began to emerge from the turmoil of anger and shame in which he had been fighting since the election. His head cleared and his brain cooled, and he began to plan, with a certain newly acquired shrewdness, his next steps against Caretall. In many matters, heretofore, the elder Chase had been as simple as a boy. Now he was becoming crafty. In the past he had honestly believed that the life of self-conscious rectitude which he had led was of a sort to inspire respect and affection. Now he knew that he was wrong, knew that he must always have been disliked or despised by half the town. He had always been benignly courteous; and this courtesy, which was more than half condescension, had made more enemies than friends. He had played a straightforward game; and he had lost.

Like other men before him, in the determination to change his tactics, he went too far. He threw himself into the fight to injure Caretall with an utter disregard for the conventions he had once observed; he sought allies where he might find them; and for the first time in his life, he tried to put himself in another man’s place and guess what the other man would do.

The man into whose place he sought to put himself was Amos Caretall; and the result of his considerations of Amos’s possible future plans threw Chase into the arms of his ancient enemy, into the shrunken arms of V. R. Kite.

The feud between Kite and Chase had never been a concrete thing. It was based upon a thousand minor incidents, none of them important in itself. Kite, as the leader of the “wet” forces in the town, and as the proprietor of half the liquor-peddling establishments, was a man very quick to resent “dry” activities. Chase had always been actively “dry.” And Kite, curiously enough for one of his vocation, was a very thin-skinned man. He found offenses in words that were meant for kindness; he found a sneer in an honest smile.

It was a part of the manner of the elder Chase to smile and nod benevolently upon those whom he encountered. This was automatic with him; and he smiled at Kite with the rest. Kite, a man of fierce and violent temperament, knew that Chase had no kindly feeling toward him; and so he saw in these smiles only sneers. He had complained to Amos Caretall: “He’s always grinning at me,” when Amos asked why he hated Chase; and this was an old grievance with the liquor man.

Kite had been one of those who rejoiced most highly in Chase’s humiliation; and for a week or two after the election, he went out of his way to meet Chase upon the street. On such occasions, he paid back with interest those grins he had resented; he spoke to Chase with exaggerated courtesy and extreme solicitude. He inquired after the other’s health end spirits; he sympathized with Chase in his defeat.