"Why, Jake," he said, "I never would say anything to take the shine off the greatest thing ever done in these parts. I've got it all written up, and I'm sending a copy of it to the Chicago Tribune. It's an epic of prairie life. Read it, and if you don't want it printed, why, it's me for the swine; for it's already gone to Chicago."
Of course it seemed all right to me, but I was afraid of it, and was thinking of pounding him up right then, when in came Elder Thorndyke to put in the paper something about his next Sunday's services, and McGill asked him to read the story and act as umpire. And after he had gone over it, he grasped my hand and said that Virginia and I had not told them half of the strange story of our living through the blizzard out on the prairie, and that it was a great drama of resolution, resource and bravery on my part, and seemed almost like a miracle.
"Will this hurt Virginia's feelings if it is printed?" I asked.
"No, no," he said. "It will make her fiancé a hero. It will tickle her," said he, "half to death."
Then I told Dick he might go on with it if he would leave it just as it was. The joke was on him, after all, for there was nothing in it about my fight with Buck Gowdy, or of my robbing him of the team and sleigh and harness and robes and Nick, the little dog.
The third thing that N.V. thought might have sent me down through the greased tin horn of politics, which has ruined more good men than any other form of gambling, was my management of the business of getting the township set off, against the opposition of the whole Monterey Centre Ring. But he did not know of that day in Dubuque, and of my smuggling of Mrs. Bliven into Iowa, as I have told it in this history. It hurt Bliven politically, but he kept on boosting me, and it was his electioneering, that I knew nothing about, that elected me justice of the peace; and it was Mrs. Bliven's urging that caused me to qualify by being sworn in--though I couldn't see what she meant by her interest.
6
On my next birthday, the twenty-seventh of July, however, something happened that after a few months of figuring made me think that they knew what they were about all the time; for on that day they (the Blivens) got up a surprise party on us, and came in such rigs as they had (there were more light rigs than at the Governor Wade reception, a fact of historical interest as showing progress); though Virginia did not seem to be much surprised. In the course of the evening Doc Bliven started in making fun of me as a justice of the peace.
"I helped a little to elect you, Jake," said he, "but I'll bet you couldn't make out a mittimus if you had to send a criminal to jail to-night."