“Put on plenty this year, Sol,” called one of the men. “It’ll be needed to sop up the blood.”
The soil of the town-house yard, soggy from the March rains, began to thaw as the sun grew higher and warmer. In increasing numbers waggons gullied and rutted it. Mud dripped from the wheels and was splattered on the backs of the voters. Men arrived in pairs or in fours, in narrow buggies or in double-seated waggons, whose bodies bumped upon the axles as the wheels slumped into the highway honey-pots. The seiners from the Cove road, whose horses were their dories, clubbed together and came in hay-racks. To the front rail of one of these a joker had fastened a sprit-sail, and the lead horse had a pennant floating from a little staff set into his bridle.
Before nine o’clock the yard was well filled with men, most of them assembled in knots that constantly changed personnel as voters trudged through the sticky ooze from one to the other, shouting jovial greetings or mumbling certain confidences in undertone. The town clerk, the selectmen and a constable or two had gone into the town house, trailing mud upon Solomon Norton’s fresh sawdust; but the main body of the voters remained outside. The assemblage wore a general air of expectancy.
But the citizens of Palermo were certainly not expecting one spectacle that day.
When the Willard family carriage scraped its muddy wheels against the platform in front of the town house Squire Phineas Look was the first to lift the flap and step out. He gave his hand to Judge Collamore Willard, whose thin leg trembled as he put out his foot to grope for the platform.
The space before the door was thronged with men, and the Squire, who held the old town treasurer’s arm, waited for them to open a passage.
There was a certain grave dignity on the Squire’s face that morning that the men of Palermo had not been accustomed to see there before. Their old, free-and-easy greeting seemed out of place now. It was not because they were astonished at beholding him in company with Judge Willard. Nor was it the presence of the Judge that restrained them. Somehow, Phin Look was different, and they instinctively realised it. His isolation during the past few months while he had been engrossed in his work, the knowledge that the outside world had begun to give him honour and money, accounted for a part of the respect that Squire Phin suddenly detected in the eyes of his townsmen, but there was something in his bearing more potent still—the intangible aura of the man who had suddenly come to full knowledge of himself and his abilities.
That intangible something had been in his face, in the poise of his body, in the straightening of his shoulders and the lift of his chin ever since he had walked out of the parlour of the Willard house. It is not surprising that the assembled voters of Palermo did not understand it, because Squire Phin did not wholly understand it himself. He passed among them with quiet greetings that made those upon whom they fell grow warm with pleasure and pride. Selfaggrandisement can bestow no such favours. The people of Palermo, unconsciously almost, had suddenly elevated their best citizen to the height his merit but not his modesty claimed. And through that subtle attribute that attaches to such elevations they were correspondingly proud of him.
The voters closed in behind the two and followed them into the town house, mumbling surmises to account for this astonishing situation.
“Politics makes strange bedfellers, so they say,” observed Deacon Burgess, squinting at the Squire and the feeble old man whom he was leading, “but if them two there don’t have nightmares and git to kickin’ each other it will be somethin’ to be talked about in words that ain’t laid down in the dictionary.”