It was due doubtless to the traditions of these visits, when Judge Gould, the hero of the great Biggs murder case, would be at the Nedahma House, and Senator Yates, who unravelled and dragged to the pitiless light the masonic plot to blow up Mount Vernon, was to be found at the turnpike tavern, and both would keep pretty well in-doors toward evening because Colonel De Lancey, who had shot four men before Hamilton’s death discredited duelling, was in town on private business—it was no doubt due to these memories that Tyre kept up its political tastes and, in a faded way, its political prestige, long after its material importance and interest had vanished. The mills were remembered now only by the widened reaches in the stream where their dams had once been; the starch factory was a dismantled ruin, from which what woodwork the lightning had spared had long since been abstracted for fuel; one of the taverns was now a private dwelling, and the other two neither profited themselves nor pleased the wives of the village by their dependence upon local custom. But the men of Tyre were still intense politicians. Indeed their known virulence had given to their county sobriquet of Jayhawker an almost national fame. Nowhere else in the State, proportionately, were so many weekly partisan papers taken—not tame, dispassionate prints, but the fire-eaters of both party presses, with incessant harrowing accounts of peaceful and confiding negroes being massacred in the South, on the one side, answered regularly on the other by long imposing tables of the money stolen by notorious criminals in the public service. This was the meat Tyre fed on, and contending editors could not serve it out too rank or highly peppered for its taste.
The one excitement of Tyre too—far transcending the county fair, which had only interested them casually, and which they had seen moved over to Sidon, on the line of the newly-extended railroad, without a protest—was a political convention. There would be such a crowd about the Court House then as scarcely the spectacle of its being consumed by flames could draw at another time. The freeholders of Tyre paid much more than their fair share of county taxes; they knew it, and did not grumble at the injustice. In fact it rather pleased them than otherwise to see their town rated on the Supervisor’s assessment-rolls according to its ancient wealth; the amercement was a testimonial to their dignity. Upstart towns like Sidon might wrangle over a few hundred dollars, and cheapen their valuation in the public eye by unworthy tricks; Tyre would have none of such small doings; it would preserve a genteel exterior, even if it had to eat pork grease on its buckwheat cakes in domestic seclusion. But if there had been so much as a hint about holding a county convention anywhere else than in the Tyre Court House—then, to use Abe Beekman’s homely expression, you would have seen the fur fly! Other towns might indulge their modern and mercenary tastes in county fairs, railroads, gas, reservoirs and the like, to their hearts’ content, but they must keep their hands off political conventions. He would be a brazen Jayhawker indeed who should question Tyre’s monopoly of these!
So new generations of county politicians followed precedent without thought of murmuring, and accepted the discomforts of jolting in crowded democrat-wagons over the stony, bleak hills to Tyre, of eating cold, bad dinners in the smoke-dried, draughty barracks which had once been hotels, of drinking limed well-water with the unspeakable whiskey—as natural consequences of being interested in the public affairs of the nation. This resignation of other Jay County towns to the convention claims of Tyre swelled into a spirit of truculent defence every two years, when the question of a joint Congressional gathering for all three counties of the district came up. Precisely what would have happened if the bigger shires of Dearborn and Adams had combined in a refusal to come to Tyre, I am not bold enough to guess. The general feeling would probably have been that a crisis had arisen in which Jay County could do no less than dissolve her relations with the Federal Union.
Fortunately no such menace of secession and civil war was ever suffered to rise glowering on the horizon. Abe Beekman, the boss of Jay County, always managed to have Tyre designated by the District Committee, and the politicians from Dearborn and Adams amiably agreed to console themselves for the nuisances of the trip by getting as much fun out of it as was possible—which, reduced to details, meant bringing their own whiskey, sternly avoiding the dangerous local well-water, and throwing at each other during the dinner scramble such elements of the repast as failed to attract their metropolitan tastes. This procedure was not altogether to the liking of the Tyre landlords, who, however, compensated themselves for the diminution of the bar traffic and the havoc wrought in the dining room, by quadrupling their accustomed prices; and the invasion of boisterous aliens had its seamy side for the women of the place, who found it to the advantage of their dignity to stop indoors during the day which their husbands and fathers consecrated to the service of the Republic. But Tyre as a whole was proud and gratified.
On the morning when the adjourned District Convention was to reassemble, political interest throbbed with feverish quickness in all the pulses of Tyre.
The town could remember many a desperate and stirring combat on its well-worn battle-field, but never such a resolute, prolonged, and altogether delightful contest as this. The fight had its historic side, too. Every voter in Tyre could remember, or had been taught in all its details about, the famous struggle of the wet fall of ’34, when Hiram Chesney, the Warwick of Jay County then, locked horns with the elder Seth Fairchild of Dearborn, and, to pursue the local phraseology, they pawed up more earth in their fierce encounter than would dam the Nedahma creek. Poor Hiram had finally been worsted, falling ignobly on his native stamping ground, before the eyes of his own people. He had long since passed away, as Warwicks should when their king-making sinews have lost their strength. But another boss, perhaps in some ways a greater boss, had arisen in Jay County, in the person of Abram K. Beekman, and now, nearly half a century later, he was to try conclusions with a second Fairchild of Dearborn—a grandson of the hero of ’34. They had grappled once, a fortnight before, and had had to separate again, after an all-day tug, with a fall credited to neither. Now, in a few hours, they were to confront each other once more. What wonder that Tyre was excited!
The two gladiators had been the observed of all observers during the preliminary skirmish. Tyre was almost disposed to fancy the Dearborn man. In his portly, black-clad figure, his round, close-shaven, aquiline face, and his professional capacity for oratory, he had recalled pleasantly the days when the Jay County bar was famous. The local magnate, Beekman, was not a lawyer; he could not make a speech; he didn’t even look as if he could make a speech. He had none of the affable, taking ways which Albert Fairchild used to such purpose, but was brusque, self-contained, prone to be dogmatic when he was not taciturn. Thus the balance turned enough in Fairchild’s favor to about offset Beckman’s claims to local sympathy as a Jayhawker, and put Tyre people in excellent mental trim to enjoy all the points of the duel.
For in the minds of these practical politicians, it was a duel. There was a third candidate, named Ansdell, it was true, supported by nearly all the Adams delegation, but then he was a reformer, and had not even come to the Convention, and Tyre had no use for him. A county boss who had got a machine, and purposed doing certain definite things with it, either to build up himself or crush somebody else, was natural and comprehensible; but a man who set himself up as a candidate, without the backing of any recognized political forces, who came supported by delegates elected in a public and lawless manner without reference to the wishes of leaders, and who pretended that his sole mission in politics was to help purify it—who could make head or tail out of that?
Thus Tyreans talked with one another, as the village began to take on an air of liveliness after breakfast, and groups slowly formed on the sidewalks in front of the two hotels. There were many shades of diverging opinion as to the merits and the prospects of the approaching contest, but on one matter of belief there was a consensus of agreement. The fight lay between Beekman and Fairchild, and the third man—it was interesting to note that ignorance of his name was fashionable—wasn’t in the race. Steve Chesney, whose right to speak oracularly on politics was his sole inheritance from the departed Warwick, his father, summed up the situation very clearly from the standpoint of Tyre when he said, leaning comfortably against the post office hitching post, and pointing his arguments in the right places with accurate tobacco juice shots at a crack in the curb:
“The hull p’int’s this: Dearborn’s got seventeen votes, ain’t she?—solid for Fairchild. Then he’s got two ’n’ Adams, ain’t he?—makin’ nineteen ’n’ all. Th’ dude, he’s got what’s left of Adams, fifteen ’n’ all. Jay County’s only got ten votes, ain’t she? Very well, they’re solid for Abe. Now! Twenty-three’s a majority of the convention. Git twenty-three ’n’ that settles it. Th’ reformer, he needs eight votes. Kin he git ’em? Whair frum? Frum Dearborn? Not much! Frum Jay? Well, not this evening! Count him out then. Of th’ other two, Fairchild wants four votes, Abe needs thirteen. Thet looks kind o’ sickly for Abe, mebbe yeh think. But bear in mine thet th’ Adams men air pledged agin’ Fairchild by th’ same resolution which bines ’em to th’ other chap. Abe wasn’t a candidate then ’n’ he didn’t git barred out. But they made a dead set agin Fairchild all through Adams, on ’count of his funny work at th’ State Convention. So, Adams kin go to Abe, ’n’ she can’t go to Fairchild. I tell yeh, Jay can’t be beat, ef she’s only a mine to think so—thet is, of course, ef Dearborn fights fair. Ef she don’t, p’raps she may win to-day, but I tell yeh, in thet case ther won’t be enough left of her candidate come ’lection night to wad a hoss-pistol with.”