“What is my name?”
“Your name is Tabor, ma’am. Keep the name. It is yours by right.”
“I will. It is mine till I die. It was good enough for me to take. It is good enough for me to keep. Judge, I ought to thank you for what you have done, but I cannot. I am not thankful. But it was the only thing left for me to do. Judge, I wish you would put in the record, ‘Not willingly asked for.’”
Augusta rose and began to sniffle in a horrible manner, making a spectacle of herself. Before she reached the door, she broke down in tears and sobbed, “Oh, God, not willingly, not willingly!”
I was not there but many people ran to tell me about it, particularly Bill Bush, who dramatized his sympathy very heavily.
“Well,” I said, not feeling in the least sorry for Augusta, “If she really did feel that way, why did she go home to Maine and stay so long that autumn before I met Tabor? That was when she lost him. He had a chance then to find out there were plenty of other women in the world, and what’s more important, with better dispositions and nicer looks. Either she should never have left him or else she should have been twice as sweet when she got back.”
Reluctantly, Bill agreed with me—he had to admit the truth.
But the newspapers were different. They printed scathing editorials about the whole affair, and intimated that Tabor would be forever damned politically.
They weren’t entirely right, but they nearly were. The contest in the legislature was long and bitter. The balloting went on and on and no one could break the deadlock between Pitkin and Tabor. All of a sudden the Pitkin men switched to Bowen, a third candidate, a wealthy mining man from the southern part of the state whom no one had taken seriously up to that time. Out of a clear sky he got the six-year term.
As a sop to Tabor, he was unanimously offered the thirty days remaining of Teller’s term. Tabor was always a good sport. He accepted the offer with extraordinary grace under the circumstances, congratulated his rival, and prepared to leave immediately. That was January 27, 1883, and by February 3, he was being sworn in at Washington. I have never seen anyone so delighted and happy as Tabor was, leaving Denver. He was fifty-two years old but you would have thought he was twelve and had been given his first pony. I, too, was joyful and expectant.