Rankin looked him straight in the eyes.
“No, Jerry,” he said, “it ain’t so much that. I want it, o’ course, you know how I need it, an’ I want it more’n ever jus’ now, but I ain’t worried so much about that. I’ve got your word, an’ I know you never went back on it yet, to a friend, though you know, Jerry, that if it ’uld help you any, you could have your promise back, an’ give the post-office where it ’uld do the mos’ good. You know all you’d have to do ’uld be to say the word, don’t you?”
Garwood smiled again and leaned forward in his chair and laid one of his white hands on Rankin’s fat knee.
“Why, my boy,” he said, “you’ve been giving yourself a great deal of unnecessary trouble. You know me, don’t you?”
“Why, sure,” assented Rankin.
“Well, you ought to,” added Garwood, still smiling blandly, and a slight reproach was in his tone. “You should have known, Jim, that I realized you had done all in your power. I never for an instant blamed you; believe me when I say that. It only occurred to me that I could handle the little affair over at Pekin better than you could. I knew that you could never come at Pusey; I knew that you two never could agree in a thousand years, so I just took hold of it myself—not with very much hope, I confess, but I thought it worth trying. And luckily it came about all right in the end.”
“It’s all right, it’s all right, Jerry,” Rankin protested, waving his hand assuringly toward Garwood. “I only wanted to know that you felt all right about it, that’s all.” His great red face smiled on Garwood like a forgiven boy’s. But suddenly it hardened again into the face of a man.
“You were right—I couldn’t ’a’ done nothin’ ’ith Pusey, damn him. My way’s different from yourn. Maybe yourn’s right. You believe in conciliatin’ ’em; I believe in killin’ ’em off. An’ your way won, that’s all. What ’id you have to promise him?”
Garwood was leaning back again, and had pressed the tips of his fingers together.
“Jim,” he said, beginning slowly, “I’ve learned a good deal about politics. I learned a good deal from you, and I picked up a good deal down at Washington during the session, and the chief thing I’ve learned is to go slow on promises. I told him, of course, that I’d take care of him. I told him that there was no use in our being enemies, none whatever; that we could just as well work together for the party’s good, and accomplish more that way than by keeping up a bitter factional war here in the county, because the first thing we knew we’d wake up some cold morning in November to find that the other fellows were all in and we were all out.”