“I know; I know it doesn’t.... But, Ben, things haven’t been going as smooth with him lately. Seems almost as if he started to slide down hill away back last summer and has kept sliding. First, there was that accident to Mr. Covell and all the talk it stirred up.”
“I know, but he didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“It was around him and those in his house that the talk settled. There was something about that accident that has never been cleared up. Bob Griffin was mixed up in it and the next thing we knew he had run away with Esther. We all know what a blow that was to Captain Foster. He won’t talk about it, of course, but it was a terrible setback for him. And now, if this should be true—well, I know what will be said. People will say pride always goes before a fall; that is what they will say.”
Her husband snorted. “Say!” he repeated. “They will say enough. Dear, dear! I hope this won’t mean that Foster is going to be too hard hit, in a money way. Once—a good while ago, it was, the time when the news came that Cook had been granted his appeal to the Supreme Court—he said to me then: ‘Well, Ben,’ he says, ‘I’ve bet all but my Sunday shirt on this particular horse. Looks now as if I might have a chance to bet that.’ It was more than he ever said before or since, but it set me wondering. Tut, tut, tut!” gloomily. “If he should be hard hit and have to really come down in the world there will be a lot of mean little mud frogs hopping out of their holes to croak at him, won’t there. He hits right and left when he’s mad and he has left a good many sore heads up and down Ostable County. This will be their chance—if it is true.”
The evening papers confirmed the tidings brought by the telegram. Elisha Cook had won his suit and the amount of damages granted him was large indeed. Foster Townsend was a wealthy man, how wealthy no one knew save himself, but even a millionaire would find it hard to pay such a sum. The “mud frogs” emerged from their holes and croaked and the summary of their croakings was to the effect that chickens had come home to roost. “He’s been stampin’ all hands under foot for twenty years, now he’s stamped on, himself. Let’s see how he likes it.” The croakers foresaw ruin, utter and complete. Even the great man’s staunchest followers, members of what the hitherto crushed minority had referred to as “the Townsend gang,” were stunned to silence by the newspaper details of the Cook triumph. In Denboro, a certain section of it, there was rejoicing. “This neighborhood is on the map again,” crowed the Denborites. “We shan’t have to crawl on our knees through Harniss when we want our rights, in politics or anything else. It’s our turn now.”
From Provincetown to Wapatomac there was chatter of this kind. In political circles certain heads were raised and hopes, hitherto moribund, began to revive. The county boss had been beaten. His infallibility was a thing of the past. If beaten in one way, why not in others? The Honorable Mooney, now a Representative of his state in the halls of Congress at Washington, began to hear from other galled jades who, like himself, had winced beneath the Townsend whip.
And, at the end of the week, while the excitement was still boiling, the big mogul returned to his native town. Varunas and the span were at the station to meet him. Mr. Gifford’s was a broken spirit now. At first defiant and scornful, scoffing at the rumors of his employer’s defeat, as those rumors changed to certainties his attitude changed with them. Still outwardly lofty and calm, he met every taunt with sniffs of contemptuous pity. “It don’t mean nothin’,” he asserted. “You fellers are hollerin’ your heads off, but wait till the old man gets through with this business. Them Supreme Courters are goin’ to lose their jobs, some of ’em. Ye-ah, all right, you wait and see. There’s a law against bribery and corruption, ain’t there? The President of the United States ain’t had his say about this case yet. You hold on. You’ll be meek enough by and by. Huh!”
This to the world at large. But, at home, with his wife, it was different. Nabby was as downcast as he.
“I declare if I believed in spirits and warnin’s and them kind of things,” she sighed, “I’d have been more prepared for it. It started by his lettin’ that Bob Griffin into this house. I ought to have seen that there was a ‘sign’ in that. First a Cook begins to come here; then he gets poor Mr. Covell kicked out of the way by a horse; then he runs off with Esther. And now this! What does the Good Book say? ‘The way of the transgressor is hard,’ that’s what it says.”
Varunas pooh-poohed. “What’s that got to do with it?” he demanded. “Cap’n Foster never transgressed nothin’. ’Twas Griffin that was the transgressor and his way is pretty soft, if you ask me. The good book says lots of things. It says somethin’ about heavin’ bread on the waters, if I recollect right. If you’d done that with this saleratus biscuit I’m tryin’ to eat just now ’twould have sunk, I’ll bet.”