"You can't do that, Judy. Westover's friends down there'll attend to that. I'll have twenty or twenty-five signatures to the paper, and I'll have five or six hundred printed, so as to post one on every gate post and every tree that anybody's likely to look at. How many do you want, for use in the mountains?"
"None at all! Not one!" answered Judy, emphatically. "They won't be needed up here, 'cause I'm a takin' care o' the mounting vote, an' I ain't a sayin' nothin'. Let 'em keep a guessin' 'bout how the mountings is a goin' till they hears the answer to the riddle when the polls is closed. You see ef they find out the mountings is agin 'em they'll try to do somethin' up here, an' ef they's uncertain they won't care to stir up things. But besides all that, there's the drymatic climax to think of. Tom Hardaway tole me all about that wunst, so I know what a drymatic climax is, an' I mean to have one this time, jest for the sake o' that banty rooster, William Wilberforce Webb, who'll find all his tail feathers pulled out by the roots when the 'lection's over."
It will perhaps be inferred from Judy's utterances that her hatreds were implacable as her likings were limitless. For explanation it is only necessary to remember that Judy Peters was an entirely natural person, unaffected by any of the agencies of civilization. To her, in sentiment and emotion, compromises were as impossible as concessions; qualifications as unthinkable as cowardice itself—and there was no cowardice in Judy. Toward those whose conduct had aroused neither animosity nor affection in her soul, she was always fair with a frankness that had no hypocrisy and no reserve in it; toward those whom she cherished as friends her loyalty was of a sort that knew no bounds and asked no questions; toward those whom she recognized as her enemies, and still more toward those who were the enemies of her friends, she cherished a malevolence that knew no mercy and that stopped at nothing in the accomplishment of its malignant purposes.
Such was Judy—a typical representative of the human animal in his untamed and natural state.
"Then they's another thing, Carley, an' it's fust an' foremost in my thinkin'."
"What is it, Judy?"
"Well, it's this aways. You see you an' me's a workin' an' a plannin' to bring Westover round all right again. Now the 'lection '11 do a mighty sight that way, but 'twon't do it all. What Boyd needs is a good, hard fight, an' that's what you an' me's got to give him. He ain't to know nothin' 'bout the way the 'lection's a goin' when he hears of his enomination. He ain't to know as how Judy Peters had anything to do with it. He's jest to be told as how a lot o' you stuck-ups has enominated him, and how nobody knows where he's a been, an' how they's a sayin' an' a insinuatin' all sorts o' things, an' specially that he's afeard to face his constituents. That'll stir up all the fightin' blood they is in him, an' they's apt to be a lot o' that sort o' blood in a Westover. It'll set him hot when he gits down your way, an' from then tell the 'lection's over he'll fight like a catamount when a dozen hounds gits him cornered. That's what he needs, an' when the thing's over, an' he fin's himself 'lected by a large majority, an' sees that water-soaked piece o' cheap soap that calls hisself William Wilberforce Webb a slinkin' off into his hole like a drownded rat, he won't git to thinkin' agin' that folks is down on him."
Judy's metaphors were a trifle mixed perhaps, but her rhetoric had behind it an intensity and a sincerity of purpose that left her auditor in no doubt as to her meaning.
"Judy, you're a brick!" exclaimed Carley Farnsworth rising and grasping her hand. "You've got blood in your veins, and sand in your gizzard, and a headpiece on your shoulders. I'm with you, all over and clear through. I'm going back down the mountain to-morrow morning. I'll get the nomination papers out, and I'll speak three times a day for Westover. I never made a speech in my life, but I can do it now, and all between the speeches I'll talk. The words'll flow out of me like water through a mill-tail. And one thing more, Judy; I'm a little fellow, as you know. I don't weigh a hundred and ten pounds, I'm only five feet three in my shoes, but I can pull a trigger. I'll see to it that nobody says anything shameful about Boyd Westover without being called to an interview with me at ten paces."
So was the compact made. Judy went inside and brewed a bowl of hot apple toddy which she insisted that Carley should share with her "jes' to bind the bargain," she said, and Carley, unused as he was to such indulgence, took the risk of a next morning's headache by drinking fair with her.