“Take the stuffing out of them, Judge,� Trench replied promptly and decisively.
The judge looked at him, a grim smile curling the corners of his large mouth. “They’ll tar and feather you,� he said.
Trench sat down and took up a calf-bound volume. “I’m enough of a Quaker still to speak out in meeting,� he observed.
“The only thing I know about Quakers makes ’em seem like Unitarians,� said the judge, “and a Unitarian is a kind of stylish Jew. What have you been doing with the backwoodsmen, Caleb? Mahan tells me they’re organized—� the judge smiled outright now—“I don’t believe it.�
Caleb Trench smiled too. “I don’t know much about organizing, Judge,� he said simply. “When men come into my shop and ask questions I answer them; that’s all there is about it.�
“We’ll have to shut up that shop, I reckon,� the judge said, “but then you’ll open your darned law office and give ’em sedition by the brief instead of by the yard. I deserve hanging for letting you read law here. I’ve been a Democrat for seventy years, and you’re a black Republican.�
Trench closed the law book on his finger. “Judge,� he said slowly, “I’m a man of my own convictions. My father wouldn’t stand for anything I do, yet he was the best man I ever knew, and I’d like to be true to him. It isn’t in me to follow in the beaten track, that’s all.�
The judge twinkled. “You’re an iconoclast,� he said, “and so’s Sarah, yet women, as a rule, are safe conservatives. They’ll hang on to an old idea as close as a hen to a nest-egg. Perhaps I’m the same. Anyway I can’t stand for your ways; I wash my hands of it all. I wish they’d drop Yarnall; his nomination means blood on the face of the moon. There’s the feud with the Eatons, and I wouldn’t trust Jacob Eaton to forget it, not by a darned sight; he’s too pesky cold-blooded,—the kind of man that holds venom as long as a rattler.�
“Then, if you don’t like Yarnall, why not vote for Mahan?� Trench was beginning to enjoy himself. He leaned back in his chair with his head against a shelf of the bookcase, the light from the judge’s lamp falling full on his remarkable face, clean-shaven like his host’s, on the strong line of the jaw, and on the mouth that had the faculty of locking itself in granite lines.
“Because, damn it, I’m a Democrat!� said the old man angrily.