'Ye air a-thinkin', Amos Jeemes, ez 'twar we-uns ez cut Rick Tyler a-loose o' the sher'ff!' he exclaimed.
Amos, confronted with his own suspicion, listened with a guilty air.
'Ye air surely the b-b-b-biggest f-f-f-fool'—the words seemed very large with these additional consonants—'in the shadder o' the B-b-b-Big S-s-s-sm-Smoky M-m-Mountings!' Pete spread them out with all the magnifying facilities of his infirmity.
'Waal, then,' said Amos, crestfallen, 'who done it?'
'Why, P-Pa'son Kelsey, I reckon.'
XII.
That memorable arrest in the Big Smoky was the last official act of the sheriff, except the surrender of his books and papers and taking his successor's receipt for the prisoners in the county jail. The defeat had its odious aspects. The race had been amazingly unequal. Had the ground tottered beneath him, as he stood in the grass-fringed streets of Shaftesville, and heard the rumours of the returns from the civil districts, he could hardly have experienced a sensation of insecurity commensurate with this, for all his moral supports were threatened. His self-confidence, his arrogant affinity for authority, his pride, and his ambition keenly barbed the prescience of this abnormal flatness of failure. He was pierced by every careless glance; every casual word wounded him. He had a strange disturbing sense of a loss of identity. This anxious, browbeaten, humiliated creature—was this Micajah Green? He did not recognise himself; every throb within him had an alien impulse; he repudiated every cringing mental process. It was his first experience of the rigours of adversity; it did not quell him; he felt effaced.
He feebly sought to goad himself to answer the rough chaff of spurious sympathizers with his old bluff spirit; his retort was like the lisp of a child in defiance of the challenge of a bugle. He saw with faltering bewilderment how the interesting spectacle increased his audience; it resembled in some sort an experiment in vivisection, and where the writhings most suggested an appreciated anguish, each curious scientist most longed to thrust the scalpel.
The coroner held the election, as the sheriff himself was a candidate, and when the result became known the details excited increased comment. In the district of the county town he had a majority, but the unanimity against him in the outlying districts, especially in the Big Smoky and its wide-spread spurs and coves, was unprecedented in the annals of the county. He had hoped that the election of judge and attorney-general, taking place at the same time, might divert attention from the disastrous completeness of his failure. But their race involved no peculiar phase of popular interest, and the more important results were subordinated, so far as the county was concerned, to the spectacle of 'Cajah Green, 'flabbergasted an' flustrated like never war seen.'