“I’m ready when he is,” Wint declared.
“He won’t be ready till he thinks you ain’t,” Gergue insisted.
But Wint was in no mood to be depressed by a possibility of future trouble. In fact, he rather looked forward to this potential clash with V. R. Kite. It added to the zest of life.
Old Mrs. Mueller, who ran the bakery, whispered to Wint when he stopped for a loaf of bread one night that he was a fine boy. “My Hans,” she said gratefully. “He is working now; and that he would never do when he could get his beer regular, every second day a case of it. And there is more money in the drawer all the time, too.”
And Davy Morgan, the foreman of his father’s furnace, told Wint that save for one or two irreconcilables, the men at the furnace were with him. “And the men that kick the most, they are the ones who are the better off for it,” he explained, in the careful English of an old Welshman to whom the language must always be an acquired and unfamiliar instrument. “William Ryan has never been fit for work on Mondays until now.”
Murchie, Attorney General of the state, who lived up the creek, and who had been a speaker at the elder Chase’s rallies in the last mayoral campaign, happened into town one day and told Wint he had heard of the matter at Columbus and that people were talking about him, Wint Chase, up there. “They knew old Kite, you see,” he told Wint. “He comes up there to lobby on every liquor bill; and they like to see him get a kick in the slats, as you might say. But you’ll have to look out for him.”
“I’m going to,” Wint assured Murchie.
“If you can down Kite, there’ll be a place for you at Columbus, some day,” Murchie predicted. “They don’t like Kite, up there.”
Sam O’Brien, the fat restaurant man, stopped laughing long enough to tell Wint he was all right, had good stuff in him, was a comer. “The Greek next door,” he explained. “He thinks you’re a tin god. He runs the candy store, you know. Says there never was so much candy sold. He’ll vote for you, my boy. If he ever gets his papers. And learns to read. And if you live that long.”
Wint got most pleasure, perhaps, out of the attitude of B. B. Beecham. He had an honest respect for the editor’s opinion on most matters. Every one had. Beecham was habitually right. In his editorial capacity, he took no notice of what had come to pass in Hardiston. When the carnival men were arrested, he printed the fact without comment. “Michael Rand was fined for assault and improper language,” the Journal said. The other man for “illegal sales of liquor.” And the “permit of the carnival for the use of the streets was canceled.” Thus the news was recorded, and every man might draw his own deductions. B. B. was never one to force his opinions on any man, which may have been the reason why people went out of their way to discover them.