“Why, it’ll do him good!” Rankin declared, bringing his palm down on the knee of Joe Kerr, the secretary of the Polk County central committee. “Do him good, I tell you. It’s worth a thousand votes to us in Polk alone to have that little cur spring his blackmailin’ scheme at this stage o’ the campaign. It’s as good as a certificate of moral character from the county court.”
“Do you think it’s a blackmailin’ scheme?” asked Kerr.
“Think it!” cried Rankin, “why, damn it, man, I know it—didn’t you hear how Jerry threw him out of his office the day he tried to hold him up? Why, he’d ’a’ killed him if I hadn’t held him back. You’d ought to post up on the political history of your own times, Joe.”
The men who were perched on the arms and hanging over the backs of the car seats, pitching dangerously with the lurches the train gave in the agony of a bonded indebtedness that pointed to an early receivership, laughed above the groanings of the trucks beneath them. They had gathered there for the delight it always gave them to hear Jim Rankin talk, a delight that Rankin shared with them.
“Why didn’t you kill him, Jim?” one of them asked.
“Oh,” he said with an affectation of modesty as he dropped his eyes and with his hand made moral protest, “I wanted him to print his story first. I’ll have to kill him some day, but I reckon I won’t have time before election.”
While Rankin was extravagant in talk, he calculated pretty accurately the effect of his words, and never said many things, in a political way at least, that came back to plague him. His conception of Pusey’s motives was eagerly accepted by his own party men, and they went home with a new passion for work in the wards and townships.
Pusey meanwhile had been standing on street corners in Grand Prairie, swinging his cane, and glancing out with a shifty eye from under his yellow straw hat, but men avoided him or when they spoke to him, did so with a pleasantry that was wholly feigned and always overdone, because they feared to antagonize him. Rankin had not seen him since the publication of his screed, but one evening, going into the Cassell House, he saw the soiled little editor leaning against the counter of the cigar stand. The big man strode up to him, and his red face and neck grew redder, as he seized Pusey by the collar of his coat.
“You little snake!” Rankin cried, so that all the men in the lobby crowded eagerly forward in the pleasant excitement the prospect of a fight still stirs in the bosoms of men. “I’ve got a notion to pull your head off, and spat it up ag’inst that wall there!”
He gave the little man a shake that jolted his straw hat down to his eyes.