Between Mr Murchison and the milkman that morning, Mrs Murchison felt almost too much tried by the superior capacity for reticence.
It was seven in the evening before the ballot-boxes were all in the hands of the sheriff, and nine before that officer found it necessary to let the town know that it had piled up a majority of three hundred for Walter Winter. He was not a supporter of Walter Winter, and he preferred to wait until the returns began to come in from Clayfield and the townships, in the hope that they would make the serious difference that was required of them. The results were flashed one after the other to the total from the windows of the Express and the Mercury upon the cheering crowd that gathered in Market Square. There were moments of wild elation, moments of deep suspense upon both sides, but when the final addition and subtraction was made the enthusiastic voters of South Fox, including Jim Whelan, who had neglected no further opportunity, read, with yells and groans, hurrahs and catcalls, that they had elected Mr Lorne Murchison to the Dominion House of Commons by a majority of seventy.
Then the band began to play and all the tin whistles to rejoice. Young and Windle had the grace to blow their sirens, and across the excited darkness of the town came the long familiar boom of the Murchison Stove Works. Every Liberal in Elgin who had any means of making a noise made it. From the window of the Association committee room their young fellow-townsman thanked them for the honour they had done him, while his mother sat in the cab he had brought her down in and applauded vigorously between tears, and his father took congratulations from a hundred friendly hands. They all went home in a torchlight procession, the band always playing, the tin whistles always performing; and it was two in the morning before the occasion could in any sense be said to be over.
Lights burned quite as late, however, in the Conservative committee room, where matters were being arranged to bark threateningly at the heels of victory next day. Victory looked like something that might be made to turn and parley. A majority of seventy was too small for finality. Her attention was called without twenty-four hours’ delay to a paragraph in the Elgin Mercury, plainly authoritative, to the effect that the election of Mr Murchison would be immediately challenged, on the ground of the infringement in the electoral district of Moneida of certain provisions of the Ontario Elections Act with the knowledge and consent of the candidate, whose claim to the contested seat, it was confidently expected, would be rendered within a very short time null and void.
CHAPTER XXXI
“You can never trust an Indian,” said Mrs Murchison at the anxious family council. “Well do I remember them when you were a little thing, Advena, hanging round the town on a market-day; and the squaws coming to the back door with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But it was on the squaws we depended in those days, or go without raspberry preserves for the winter. Slovenly-looking things they were with their three or four coloured petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for dirt—! But I thought they were all gone long ago.”
“There are enough of them left to make trouble all right,” said Alec. “They don’t dress up like they used to, and I guess they send the papooses to kindergarten now; but you’ll find plenty of them lying around any time there’s nothing to do but vote and get drunk.”
Allowing for the natural exaggeration of partisanship, the facts about the remaining red man of Moneida were much as Alec described them. On market-days he slid easily, unless you looked twice, into what the Express continues to call the farming community. Invariably, if you did look twice, you would note that his stiff felt hat was an inch taller in the crown than those worn generally by the farming community, the pathetic assertion, perhaps, of an old sovereignty; invariably, too his coat and trousers betrayed a form within, which, in the effort at adaptation, had become high-shouldered and lank of leg. And the brown skin was there to be noticed, though you might pass it by, and the high cheek-bones and the liquidly muddy eye. He had taken on the signs of civilization at the level which he occupied; the farming community had lent him its look of shrewdness in small bargains and its rakish sophistication in garments, nor could you always assume with certainty, except at Fox County fairs and elections, that he was intoxicated. So much Government had done for him in Fox County, where the “Reservation,” nursing the dying fragment of his race, testified that there is such a thing as political compunction. Out in the wide spaces of the West he still protects his savagery; they know an Indian there today as far as they can see him, without a second glance.
And in Moneida, upon polling-days, he still, as Alec said, “made trouble.” Perhaps it would be more to the fact to say that he presented the elements of which trouble is made. Civilization had given him a vote, not with his coat and trousers, but shortly after; and he had not yet learned to keep it anywhere but in his pocket, whence the transfer was easy, and could be made in different ways. The law contemplated only one, the straight drop into the ballot-box; but the “boys” had other views. The law represented one level of political sentiment, the boys represented another; both parties represented the law, both parties were represented by the boys; and on the occasion of the South Fox election the boys had been active in Moneida. There are, as we know, two kinds of activity on these occasions, one being set to observe the other; and Walter Winter’s boys, while presumably neglecting no legitimate opportunity of their own, claimed to have been highly successful in detecting the methods of the other side.