The town clerk, a thin, hump-shouldered little man, stood beside a rickety table on the platform, his huge cane poised ready to pound for order, and waiting with manifest impatience for the band to finish. He began to whack the table the moment the echoes of the music died away, and while the voters were shuffling to their places on the settees read the warrant for the meeting in a shrill voice.
Hiram Look had planned to win the first move that day and elect a moderator from his own faction. The keynote of his canvass had been “Give some one else a show!” His whole campaign had been an attempt to stir factional feeling in town.
“It’s a mighty dead-and-alive place that let’s one clique run it year after year and lead you all by the nose,” he had stormily argued. “You might’s well have an emp’ror for life and be done with it.”
He had promptly won the element that is always jealous of those in authority, almost as promptly enrolled the unstable element that is ready to follow new gods when a band leads the procession, and after a little effort had succeeded in convincing many voters, who had never stopped to think of the matter before, that they were being cheated of their rights of representation in town affairs. He had talked to them until they were bitter with his own bitterness. But he did not let drop one word of the sensation that he planned to precipitate.
The moment the clerk stopped reading “Wolf” Doughty was on his feet with a fiery harangue that wound up in denunciation of the men who had bossed the town so long. He declared that it was time for a new deal, and nominated Deacon Burgess as moderator. The band attempted to play when he finished, but the little clerk rapped it into silence, though he split his table in doing so. The name of Deacon Burgess was uproariously seconded by Hiram’s claque.
But Squire Phin had been prepared for just such an outbreak. He arose and said that he would assume that Mr. Doughty’s remarks had reference to him, who had served the town as moderator for so many years. He reminded the voters that he had acted in the capacity because he had annually been requested to preside by the unanimous voice of the voters. He had always felt that others should share in this honour, he said, and this year he should do what he had before intended to do—refuse the use of his name.
There was so much of gentle rebuke in his tone, and in his air such quiet dignity, that Doughty’s flaming speech became a piece of insolence that the voters were manifestly anxious to repudiate.
At this psychological moment, foreseen by the Squire’s sagacity, one of his lieutenants nominated the teacher of the high school at the upper village, and the natural, sudden impulse of the meeting did the rest.
Deacon Burgess was snowed under.
Hiram Look, in the midst of his adherents, fully understood all the guile under this apparently innocent manoeuvre, and twisted his trailing moustache and glared at his brother with malice.