“Reckon not,” Garwood replied. “I’m going over to Pekin in the morning.” He looked at his watch. “Well!” he exclaimed, “it’s nearly supper time, and I haven’t given a thought to what I’m going to say to-night. Will you come have a little drink before supper?”
The boys grinned again, saying they didn’t care if they did, and followed Garwood towards the dingy bar-room, making old jokes about drinking, in the manner of the small town, the citizens of which, because of their stricter moral environment, or perhaps of more officious neighbors, can never indulge in tippling with the freedom of city-bred fellows. Garwood could not escape without a joke at his expense, attempted by some one of the party whose appreciation of hospitality was not refined, and though it made him shudder he had to join in the laugh it provoked. But when he could get away from them at last, he went to the room he had taken, and there, seated on the edge of the bed, he opened the paper and held it in the window to catch the fading light. It had been issued at noon that day, and given an added importance by the word “Extra!” printed in black and urgent type at the head of its page. But below, Garwood read another word, a word that needed no bold type to make it black—“Boodler!”—and then—his own name.
Pusey had adroitly chosen that day as the one most likely to aid the effect of his sensation, and the opposing committee had gladly undertaken to circulate hundreds of copies at the Lincoln rally. The article was obviously done by Pusey himself, and he had taken a keen delight in the work. He had written it in the strain of one who performs a painful public duty, the strain in which a judge, gladdened more and more by his own utterance, sentences a convicted criminal, though without the apology a judge always makes to the subject of his discourse, in carefully differentiating his official duty from his individual inclination.
Garwood forced himself remorselessly to read it through, to the very end, and then abstractedly, sitting there in the fading light that straggled in from the dirty street outside, he picked the paper into little pieces, and sprinkled them on the floor. The letters of the headline were printed on his mind, and as he sat there in the darkness and viewed the litter he had made, seeing it all as the ruin of his life and hopes, he flung his great body headlong on the bed and buried his face in his hands.
Half an hour later Rankin thrust his head in at the door and called into the darkness that filled the room:
“Oh, Jerry!”
He haltingly entered, piercing the gloom, and dimly outlining the long form of his candidate stretched on the frail bed.
“Jerry! Jerry!” he said.
Garwood’s form was tall when it stood erect in the daylight, it was immense when it lay prone in the dark. There was something in the sight to strike a kind of superstitious terror to the heart, and Rankin’s elemental nature sensed something of this, but when Garwood heaved and gave a very human grunt, Rankin cried in an approach to anger:
“Aw, git up out o’ that! Don’t you hear the band tunin’ up outside?”