CHAPTER XXIV
Slowly and grudgingly Tom sheathed his weapon. He knew that to fire on an unarmed man in the tensely overwrought gathering would mean wholesale blood-letting. Black looks told of a tempest brewing; so, with a surly nod, he stepped back and helped Jim Blair to his place again. Blair, dust covered and bruised, with a dribble of blood still trickling from his mashed lip, made an effort to complete his speech which ended in anticlimax. To Boone he said nothing more, and to the interrupted subject he gave no further mention.
That episode had rather strengthened than hurt Wellver's prospects, and he would have gone away somewhat appeased of temper had he not met Cyrus Spradling face-to-face in the court house yard, and halted, with a mistaken impulse of courtesy, to speak to him.
But the old friend, who had become the new enemy, looked him balefully in the eye and to the words of civil greeting gave back a bitter response: "I don't want ye ter speak ter me—never ergin," he declared. "But I'm glad I met up with ye this oncet, though. I promised ye my vote one day—an' I'm not a man thet breaks a pledge. I kain't vote fer ye, now, with a clean conscience, though, and I wants ye ter give me back thet promise."
Boone knew without delusion that this public repudiation of him by the neighbour who had expected to be his father-in-law had sealed his doom. He knew that all men would reason, as he had done, that Cyrus would give no corroboration to belittling gossip concerning his daughter, unless the wound were deep beyond healing and the resentment righteous beyond concealment.
"Of course," responded the young candidate gravely, "I give back your promise. I don't want any vote that isn't a willing one." But he mounted his horse with a sickened heart, and it was no surprise to him, when the results of the primaries were tallied, to find that he was not only a beaten man but so badly beaten that, as one commiserating friend mournfully observed to him, "Ye mout jest as well hev run on ther demmycrat ticket."
Boone went back to McCalloway's house that afternoon and sat uncomforted for hours before the dead hearth.
His eyes went to the closet wherein was locked the sword which Victor McCalloway had entrusted to his keeping, but he did not take it out. In the black dejection of his mood he seemed to himself to have no business with a blade that gallant hands had wielded. He could see only that he had messed things and proven recreant to the strong faith of a chivalrous gentleman and the love of two girls.
On the mantle-shelf was a small bust of Napoleon Bonaparte in marble—the trifle that Anne had brought across the "ocean-sea" to be an altar-effigy in his conquest of life! Boone looked at it, and laughed bitterly.
"That's my pattern—Napoleon!" he said, under his breath. "I'm a right fine and handsome imitation of him. The first fight I get into is my Waterloo!"