“No! Not a word did I say. All those things is years past and I have never spoken with you regarding them until to-day. But now, Adolph, I must say I am ashamed for you that you should pick on that poor Leopold Meyer, who was blind like a barn-door. I am ashamed for you that you should boost up that cousin of yours from Cincinnati and his bum lines. If I should get more ashamed for you than what already I now am, there is no telling what I should do. Adolph, you will please be so good as to remember that all persons that work in this here Oak Hall Clothing Emporium are for Tobe Houser for State Senator and no one else, whatsoever. Otherwise, pretty soon, I am afraid there will be some new faces selling garments around here. Do I make myself plain? I do!
“My brother—the junior partner here”—he dwelt heavily upon the word junior, making of it a most disqualifying adjective—“he also thinks in this matter the same way as I do. If you don't believe me, ask him for yourself. There he stands like a dumb engraved image—ask him.”
And Mr. Ike, making craven surrender, raised both hands in token of his capitulation and weakly murmured, “Yes.”
The third of the joint debates, which, as it turned out, was to be the last one of the series, began according to schedule and announcement at the boat store corner in the presence of an assemblage mustering up in the hundreds. In fact the Daily Evening News reporter, in the introductory paragraph of his account, referred to it, I believe, as “a sea of upturned faces.” Mr. Montjoy led off first. He had his say, for the better part of an hour, speaking with much fluency from a small board platform that was built up against the side of the old boat store and occasionally, with a fretful shake of his head, raising his voice so it might be heard above the rumbling objurgations of the first mate of the Cumberland Queen who, thirty yards down the old gravel levee, was urging his black rousters to greater speed as they rolled the last of a consignment of tobacco hogsheads across the lower wharf boat and aboard the Queen's boiler deck. Mr. Montjoy concluded with a neat verbal flourish and sat down, mopping his moistened brow with a square of fine cambric. Mr. Montjoy never permitted him-self to sweat and in public, at least, he perspired but seldom; but there were times when he did diffuse a perceptible glow.
His rival arose to answer him. He started off—Houser did—by stating that he was not running on his family record for this office. He was running on his own record, such as it was. Briefly, but vigorously, he defended his uncle; a thing he had done before. Continuing, he would say Mr. Montjoy had accused him of being young. He wished to plead guilty to that charge. If it were a defect, to be counted against him, time would probably cure him of it and he thought the Senate Chamber at Frankfort, this state, provided a very suitable spot for the aging process. (Laughter and applause.) He had a rather whimsical drawl and a straightforward, commonplace manner of delivery.
He continued, and I quote:
“Some of you may have heard somewhere—casually—that my opponent had a grandfather. Stories to that general effect have been in circulation for quite some little time in this vicinity. I gather from various avenues of information that my opponent is not exactly ashamed of his grandfather. I don't blame him for that. A person without many prospects so far as the future is concerned is not to be blamed for dwelling rather heavily upon the past. But, fellow citizens, doesn't it strike you that in this campaign we are having altogether too much grandfather and not enough grandson? (Renewed laughter from the Houser adherents and Mr. Montjoy's face turning a violent red.) It strikes me that the stock is sort of petering out. It strikes me that the whale has bred a minnow.
“And so, in light of these things, I want to make this proposition here and now: I want every man in this county whose grandfather owned eighty slaves and four thousand acres of bottom lands to vote for Mr. Montjoy. And all I ask for myself is that every man whose grandfather didn't own eighty slaves and four thousand acres, should cast his vote for me.” (A voice, “My grandpop never owned nary nigger, Toby,—I reckin you git my vote without a struggle, boy.”)
Along this strain Mr. Houser continued some minutes. It was a line he had not taken in either of his previous arguments with his opponent. He branched away from it to tell what he meant to do for the people of the district in the event of his nomination and election but presently he came back again to the other theme, while Judge Priest grinned up at him from his place in the edge of the crowd and Mr. Montjoy fidgeted and fumed and wriggled as though the chair upon which he sat had been the top of a moderately hot stove. From these and from yet other signs it might have been noted that Mr. Montjoy, under the nagging semihumorous goadings of young Houser, was rapidly losing his temper, which, by our awkward Anglo-Saxon mode of speech, is but another way of saying he was not losing his temper at all but, instead, finding out that he had one.