"Why, Justus was the t'other feller. Wat an' the girl never let him have an inklin' of it. They just fooled him along, believin' she was goin' ter marry him. An' las' night when it was reported all over town that Wat was elected, an' Justus took time from electioneerin' fur his brother to breathe, they tolled him out to look at the comet, an' slipped off an' married."
The man of sentiment, with the election in his hand, sat looking loweringly about him. His satisfaction was wilted; his fat hung flabbily on his big bones; his small eyes were hard and cold.
"Waal," he said, rising at last, "these extry an' occasional opportunities like comets an' castin' votes oughter be took full advantage of—full advantage of; no doubt about that."
And thus it was that the casting vote tipped the scale in favor of the incumbent.
"He's ez hard-headed, an' _ty_rannical, an' _per_verse, an' cantankerous a critter ez ever lived, with no feelin's, nor softness, nor perliteness in him—but he's a square man. He'll do the fair thing—every time," the coroner said in explanation.
And so he braced himself for another term of official wrangling.
* * * * *
Poor Theodosia! She never forgot that return home, through all the dust of the drought and the glare of the midsummer sun. Even to herself her nature seemed too small for the magnitude of the various anguish which she was called upon to endure. The sharp alternations of certainty and doubt which she had undergone seemed slight, seemed naught, in comparison with the desolate finality of despair, the fang of hopeless regret, and the dread of the veiled future with which she had made no covenant of expectation or preparation, that preyed upon every plodding step as she went. Her anxiety as to the wisdom of her course was not assuaged by the aghast dismay of her mother's face, when she reached the little house overlooking the encircling mountains,—as still, as meditative, as majestically unmoved, as if no more troublous world existed,—and unfolded the story of her visit to Colbury. She felt for the first time in her life how Justus Hoxon's friend merited his confidence. Her mother had no reproaches, no sarcasms, no outbursts of grief. She addressed herself to the support and the comforting of her daughter, but with so evident a hopelessness and an expectation of bitter things to come that the girl burst out sobbing afresh.
"D' ye think Wat air so wuthless ez all that!"
The discipline of life began for her here. As the price of his political defeat, Walter had scant relish for the triumph he had scored in love. He was surly, taciturn, or else loud with reproaches and criminations, which grew more vehement and contumelious if she answered, seeking to exculpate or justify herself; and if she were silent, her submission seemed to exasperate him and to develop a crafty ingenuity in finding fault. He brooded grimly on his brother's probable exultation when he should return and hear the news of the casting vote. To fortify himself for the encounter he spent much time at the still, and his drunken, reasonless wrath was even more formidable to the object of his displeasure than his sober, surly resentment against her as the cause of all his disasters. But Justus did not come. Walter began to doubt if the news of the untoward result of the election, in which he had spent all his energies, had reached him. He also began to desire, contradictorily enough, that his brother should know it. For although Justus must needs recognize it as a mortal blow to his dearest foe, it had the capacity of doing much execution in its recoil. Justus had had the election so greatly at heart; he had struggled, and planned, and managed with such preternatural activity and tact and energy from the first, that it would smite him hard to know that it was all in vain. And then his vicarious ambitions, his pride, his pleasure, in the elevation of "Fambly"! Walter cast about futilely for an assurance that he might have the satisfaction of reducing all this. He knew that Justus, in his mistaken certainty of the result of the election, would not ask for information, and that he could not read the newspapers. A letter—even if there were any remote presumption as to his address—would lie indefinitely in the mail, and find its way at last to the Dead Letter Office.