"Then it's all right," he exclaimed breathlessly. "The coroner's my frien', ef I ain't got another in the worl'. Old Beckett will stan' by me, sure!"
As the coroner held the election, the sheriff himself being a candidate, it was his duty to give the casting vote. This prolongation of the jeopardy of the result heightened the popular interest, the more as the officer did not immediately decide upon his action in the matter.
"I want a leetle time ter think it over—a leetle time fur the casting vote," he said, as he gnawed at a plug of tobacco, then crossed his ponderous legs while he leaned back in a splint-bottomed chair in the register's office.
He was a tall, portly man, with a large, round imperious face, thatched heavily with iron-gray hair. He wore no beard, and was dressed in brown jeans, which imparted a certain sallowness to his dark complexion. He had small gray eyes, at once shrewd and good-natured, but his manner was bluff, imperative, and all the judiciary of the State could hardly have compassed an expression of a greater sense of importance.
He was observed with much interest by a number of men who lounged about the room. A tense sub-current of curiosity underlay the suspense natural to the occasion, for it was well known to the gossips about the court-house that he and the sheriff had not been on the best of terms; when their official functions had happened to bring them into contact they had clashed smartly, and the county rang with their feuds. His course was obvious to all—his hesitation only an affectation, lest a too vehement animosity be imputed to him.
"Poor Quigley's cake is dough," observed one of the incumbent's friends in an undertone, standing with his hands in his pockets, and gazing through the long dark vista of the hall out of the door into the sunlight's glow, as it fell upon the few houses and the great stretch of arable land beyond. A horizontal shadow of a cloud lay at its extremity, as definite as a material barrier, and far above it rose tiers of green and bronze hills like a moulding to the base of the lapis-lazuli-tinted mountains.
"This never happened in this county before," said the register, glancing up from a big book in which he was copying the doings of "the party of the first part" and "the party of the second part"—the familiar spirits of his den.
"Why, no!" exclaimed the coroner, with a pleased laugh. "To me the castin' vote is ez phee-nomenal an' ez astonishin' ez the comet." He chuckled—the fat man's unctuous laugh. "Something like the comet, too: it has its place in the legal firmament, but 't ain't often necessary to use it."
"That war a toler'ble funny tale 'bout the comet they air a-tellin' roun' town," observed a young countryman pausing in front of the two, his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his red head, a wide grin of enjoyment on his freckled face,—"about the feller that hed his sweetheart a-courtin' out hyar in the yard last night, an' tuk ter lookin' at the comet through the spy-glass, an' whilst he war busy a-star-gazin' the comet, another feller stepped up with the Squair, an' married his gal—ha! ha! ha!"
Beckett looked up interested. Incongruously enough a vein of romance ran through the massive strata of conceit, and intolerance, and vainglory, and pertinacity, and pugnacity that made up the very definite structure of his nature. He dearly loved a lover. He was as sentimental as a girl of eighteen, and he melted instantly into suavest amenities at the first intimation of a love-story in abeyance.