It was a mad, exciting race of sounds—a sort of handicap. The circular glow of the street-lamp became the social center of Benton. At last the mad race was ended. I think it was the cornet that won, with the clarinet a close second. The tuba, as I recollect it, complacently claimed third money, and the bass-drum finished last with a shameless, resolute boom!
A great hoarse cry went up—probably for the winning cornet; a big-lunged, generous, warrior cry that made you think of a cavalry charge in the face of bayonets. And the shirt-sleeved band swung off down the street in the direction of the little cottage where the Great Man lived. All Benton fell in behind—clerks and bar-keeps and sheepmen and cowboys tumbling into fours. Under the yellow flare of the kerosene torches they went down the street like a campaigning company in rout step, scattering din and dust.
Great, deep-chested, happy-looking, open air fellows, they were; big lovers, big haters, good laughers, eaters, drinkers—and every one of them potentially a fighting man.
And suddenly, as I watched them pass, something deep down in me cried out: "Great God! What a fighting force we can drum up out of the cactus and the sagebrush when the time comes!" And when I looked again, not one of the sun-bronzed faces was strange to me, but every one was the face of a brother. Choteau's Congressman was my Congressman! Benton's Great Man was my Great Man! I fell into line alongside a big bronco-buster with his high-heeled boots and his clanking spurs and his bandy-legged, firm-footed horseman's stride. Thirty yards farther on we were old comrades. That is the Western way.
Once again the little band struck up a march, which was very little more than a rhythmic snarling and booming of the drums, with now and then the shrill savage cry of the clarinet stabbing the general dim. Irresistibly the whole line swung into step.
What is it about the rhythmic stride of many men down a dusty road that grips you by the throat and makes your lungs feel like overcharged balloons? I felt something like the maddening, irritating tang of powder-smoke in my throat. Trumpet cries that I had never heard, yet somehow dimly remembered, wakened in the night about us—far and faint, but haughty with command. It took very little imagination for me to feel the whirlwind of battles I may never know, to hear the harsh metallic snarl of high-power bullets I may never face. For, marching there in the dusty, torch-painted night, with that ragged procession of Westerners, a deep sense of the essential comradeship of free men had come upon me; and I could think of these men in no other way than as potential fighting men—the stern hard stuff with which you build and keep your empires. What a row Napoleon could have kicked up with half a million of these sagebrush boys to fling foeward under his cannon-clouds!
We reached the cottage of the Great Man with the fresh laurels. He met us at the gate. He called us Jim and Bill and Frank and Kid something or other. We called him Charlie. And he wasn't the least bit stiff or proud, though we hadn't the least doubt that half of Washington was in tears at his departure for the West.
The sudden flare of a torch betrayed his moist eyes as he told us how he loved us. And I'm sure he meant it. He said, with that Western drawl of his: "Boys, while I was back there trying to do a little something for you in Congress, I heard a lot of swell bands; but I didn't hear any such music as this little old band of ours has made to-night!" The unintentional humor somehow didn't make you want to laugh at all.