The control shifted from the north side of the slew to the south side according to the weather; for you couldn't cross Vandemark's Folly in wet weather. Once what was called the Cow Vandemark crowd got control and kept it for years by calling the township meetings always on our own side of the slew; and then Foster Blake sneaked in a full attendance on us when we weren't looking by piling a couple of my haystacks in the trail to drive on, and it was five years before we got it back. But in the meantime we had voted taxes on them to build some schoolhouses and roads. That was local politics in Iowa when Ring was a pup.
But Governor Wade's party was not local politics, or so N.V. Creede tells me. He says that this was one of the moves by which the governor made Monterey County Republican. It had always been Democratic. The governor had always been a Democrat, and had named his township after Thomas H. Benton; but now he was the big gun of the new Republican Party in our neck of the woods, and he invited all the people who he thought would be good wheel-horses.
You will wonder how I came to be invited. Well, it was this way. I called on Judge Stone at the new court-house, the building of which created such a scandal. He was county treasurer. He had been elected the fall before. I wanted to see him about a cattle deal. He was talking with Henderson L. Burns when I went in.
"I don't see how I can go," said he. "I've got to watch the county's money. If there was a safe in this county-seat any stronger than a cheese box, I'd lock it up and go; but I guess my bondsmen are sitting up nights worrying about their responsibility now. I'll have to decline, I reckon."
"Oh, darn the money!" said Henderson L. "You can't be expected to set up with it like it had typhoid fever, can you? Take it with you, and put it in Wade's big safe."
"I might do that," said Judge Stone, "if I had a body-guard."
"I'd make a good guard," said Henderson L. "Let me take care of it."
"I'd have to win it back in a euchre game if I ever saw it again," said the judge. "I hate to miss that party. There'll be some medicine made there. I might go with a body-guard, eh?"
"So if the Bunker gang gets after you," suggested H. L., "there'd be somebody paid to take the load of buckshot. Well, here's Jake. He's our local desperado. Ask Dick McGill, eh, Jake? He dared the shotgun the night they run that claim-jumper off. I know a feller that was there, and seen it--when he wa'n't seared blind. Take Jake."