“You just dare to print another line about us and you’ll settle with me, you hear? I’ll pull your head off—no, I’ll pinch it off, and—”
Rankin, failing of words to express his contempt, let go Pusey’s coat and filliped directly under his nose as if he were shooting a marble. Pusey glared at him, with hatred in his eyes.
“Don’t hurt him, Jim,” one of the men in the crowd pleaded. They all laughed, and Pusey’s eye grew greener.
“Well, I won’t kill you this evenin’,” relented Rankin, throwing to the floor the cigar he had half smoked, “I wouldn’t want to embarrass the devil at a busy time like this.”
The Chicago papers had not covered the Garwood story, as the newspaper phrase is, though the Grand Prairie correspondents had gladly wired it to them. But the Advertiser as well as one or two other newspapers in the Thirteenth District, which were opposed politically to Garwood, had not been able to resist the temptation to have a fling at him on its account, though with cautious reservations born more of a financial than a moral solvency.
The Evening News with all the undiminished relish Pusey could find in any morsel of scandal, had continued to display its story day after day with what it boasted were additional details, but on the day following the incident in the Cassell House, Pusey left off abusing Garwood to abuse Rankin, and smarting under Rankin’s public humiliation of him, injected into his attack all the venom of his little nature. He kept, however, out of Rankin’s way, and all the while the big fellow as he read the articles chuckled until his fat sides shook.
Jim Rankin was the most popular man in Grand Prairie; men loved to boast for him that he had more friends than any three men in Polk County, and the sympathy that came for Garwood out of a natural reaction from so much abuse, was increased to sworn fealty when Rankin was made the target for Pusey’s poisoned shafts. When the story first appeared the men of Grand Prairie had gossiped about it with the smiling toleration men have for such things, but now it was a common thing to hear them declare that they would vote for Garwood just to show Free Pusey that his opinions did not go for much in that community.
Emily Harkness did not leave the house for days. She felt that she could not bear to go down town, where every one would see her; and there was nowhere else to go, save out into the country, and there no one who lives in the country ever thinks of going unless he has to go.
She had entrenched herself behind the idea that the story was untrue, and she daily fortified this position as her only possible defense from despair, seeking escape from her reflections when they became too aggressive by adding to her interest in Garwood’s campaign. She knew how much his election meant to him in every way, and though she preferred to dissociate herself from the idea of its effect on her own destiny, she quickly went to the politician’s standpoint of viewing it now as a necessary vindication, as if its result by the divine force of a popular majority could disprove the assertions of Garwood’s little enemy.
Emily read all the papers breathlessly dreading a repetition of the story, but her heart grew lighter as she found no further reference to it. She had ordered the boy to stop delivering the News, and she enjoyed a woman’s sense of revenge in this action, believing that it would in some way cripple Pusey’s fortunes. She resolved, too, that her friends should cease to take the sheet, but she could not bring herself to make the first active step in this crusade.