“And yet you go on living here when you’d be safe enough anywhere else.”
“Yes, I go on living here. It’s a land where a man’s mind starves and where the great marching song of the world’s progress is silent—and yet——” Again he paused to draw in and exhale a cloud of pipe smoke. “Yet there’s something in the winds that blow here, in the air one breathes, that ‘is native to my blood.’ Elsewhere I should be miserable, sir, and my daughter——”
He came to an abrupt stop and Spurrier took him 82 up quickly. “She seems young and vital enough to crave all of life’s variety.”
“But she is contented, sir.” The elderly man spoke eagerly as though to convince himself and quiet troubling doubts. “She, too, would rather be here. We know this life and take it as we find it.”
Spurrier felt that the conversation was tending into channels too personal for the participation of a chance acquaintance, and he guided it to a less intimate subject.
“I understand, Mr. Cappeze, that in the campaign just ended, you stumped this district whole-heartedly in behalf of one of the candidates for the circuit judgeship.”
Again the hawk-keen blaze flared in the eyes of his host.
“You are mistaken, sir,” he declared with heated emphasis. “It was less for a candidate than against one that I worked. The man whom circumstances compelled me to support was a poor thing, but he was better than his adversary.”
“Was it party spirit that prompted you, then?” inquired the guest, feeling that politeness called for some show of interest.
“Sometimes I think,” said the lawyer with a grim smile, “that from some men God withholds the blessed power of riding life’s waves. All they can do is to buffet and fight and wear themselves out. Perhaps I’m that sort. The man who won—who succeeded himself on the bench—is an expedientist. So long as he presides, timid juries will return timid verdicts and the law will falter. I took the stump to brand him before the people as an apostate to his oath. I 83 knew he would win, but I meant to make him wear his trade-mark of cowardice along with his smirk of self-righteousness!”