Then, as if at the touch of a single lever, the thirteen big city boxes unloosed their flood of figures. First ward, Sumter, a hundred lead; eleventh, Sumter three hundred ahead; ninth, Sumter, two hundred more; fifth, eight hundred and eighty to the good for Sumter—this was the Highlands ward; not one lone box tallying for Judson. Within twenty minutes, enough of the returns were in to convince Pelham that the citizens of Bragg County had spoken in their freeborn majesty, and had chosen Richard Sumter sheriff by a majority of almost two to one.
The morning papers gave the corrected figures—8,450 to 4,281. The corporations still held the court house.
"It's really a victory," Mrs. Spigner, the state secretary, repeated with cheerless optimism, as Pelham drove her to the early mail train for Choctaw County. "You raised a socialist vote of six hundred something like six hundred per cent. You impatient youngsters, who think one election has any importance! Remember, comrade, it's all a part of the class struggle!"
At the end of a day of fatiguing post mortems and loquacious consolations, of noisy assurances that he had won, punctuating his dismemberment of the decapitated headquarters, he sought his real inspiriter, Jane. The city lay under a shimmer of thin November sunshine, that woke to dusky gold the tawny leaves flickering, at the chilly breeze's lash, upon motionless black boughs—that revealed pitilessly the feathery plumes of golden rod reaching over the sidewalk from the vacant lot beyond Andersons', plumes the season's slow alchemy had transmuted to insubstantial silver fragility, sifting into the reddish mold at the fingering of the spurts of ground wind. Pelham would have preferred a drizzling, cloud-heavy night sky, in which the decrepit cheerfulness of the late landscape, and he himself, could have been decently shrouded in isolating obscurity.
Jane gave him both her hands as he mounted the last step, reading, in the drawn corners of his mouth, and the heaviness beneath his eyes, the half-raised signals of surrender.
There was a flavor of bitterness in his first words. "It was really a victory, after all——"
"You've heard that enough to-day, I know. Don't try to talk: here, these cushions——" slipping them easily under his head, as a firm hand upon his shoulder soothed his protest. "Let yourself relax, all over. There."
Her eyes meditated between one of the chairs and the end of the couch beside him. She sat upon the couch.
The drowsy stillness, the moment's remoteness from the iron affairs of the racking city, the soft rustle of her dress, the gentle eddies of air that seemed scented by her presence, lulled and comforted. He reached for her hand, and laid it against his cheek, where it loitered, a cool solace, a gradual masterer of his undirected fancies.
The hours sagged by. There was little talk; that could wait. Not of his willing his mind began to embroider the miserly store of caresses he had asked or received from Jane; one by one the feverish moments with the other girl, purged into a less bodily ecstasy, recurred to him, with his own love's face and form holding their rightful place in his arms—translated memories which in their turn were embellished by a drugged imagination into warmer visionings of mutual surrender. Attempts to re-channel his thinking were unsuccessful; at last he let the wanton heart have its way.