Davy, though latterly he had grown so much older and graver that no one now thought of him as Davy, contrived to muster a smile of amusement. "You oughtn't to let them deceive you with that silly talk, Miss Gordon. The losers always indulge in it. Your good sense must tell you how foolish it is. The police are on guard, and the courts of justice are open."
"Yes—the police are on guard—to protect fraud and to drive us away from the polls. And the courts are open—but not for us."
David was gentle with her. "I know how sincere you are, Selma," said he. "No doubt you believe those things. Perhaps Dorn believes them, also—from repeating them so often. But all the same I'm sorry to hear you say them."
He tried to look at her. He found that his eyes were more comfortable when his glance was elsewhere.
"This has been a sad campaign to me," he went on. "I did not appreciate before what demagogery meant—how dangerous it is—how wicked, how criminally wicked it is for men to stir up the lower classes against the educated leadership of the community."
Selma laughed contemptuously. "What nonsense, David Hull—and from YOU!" she cried. "By educated leadership do you mean the traction and gas and water and coal and iron and produce thieves? Or do you mean the officials and the judges who protect them and license them to rob?" Her eyes flashed. "At this very moment, in our town, those thieves and their agents, the police and the courts, are committing the most frightful crime known to a free people. Yet the masses are submitting peaceably. How long the upper class has to indulge in violence, and how savagely cruel it has to be, before the people even murmur. But I didn't come here to remind you of what you already know. I came to ask you, as a man whom I have respected, to assert his manhood—if there is any of it left after this campaign of falsehood and shifting."
"Selma!" he protested energetically, but still avoiding her eyes.
"Those wretches are stealing that election for you, David Hull. Are you going to stand for it? Or, will you go into town and force Kelly to stop?"
"If anything wrong is being done by Kelly," said David, "it must be for Sawyer."
Selma rose. "At our consultation," said she quietly and even with no suggestion of repressed emotion, "they debated coming to you and laying the facts before you. They decided against it. They were right; I was wrong. I pity you, David Hull. Good-by."