“This very night!” It is a wonder that the sparks did not fly, the Devil struck so hard on the hot iron. “To-night! Ye ken the election comes off next week.”
“To-night,” Saunders agreed.
Throughout that week the din of contending factions resounded beneath brazen harvest skies; for if there was a wink behind the clamor of any faction, it made no difference in the volume of its noise. Wherever two men foregathered, there the spirit of strife was in their midst; the burr of hot Scot's speech travelled like the murmur of robbed bees along the Side Lines, up the Concession roads, and even raised an echo in the hallowed seclusion of the minister's study. And harking back to certain eldership elections in which the breaking of heads had taken the place of “anointing with oil,” Elder McIntosh quietly evolved a plan whereby the turmoil should be left outside the kirk on election night.
But while it lasted no voice rang louder than that of Saunders McClellan's devil. Not a bit particular in choice of candidates, he roared against Dunlop, Duncan, or “Twenty-One” according to the company which Saunders kept. “Ye havna the ghaist of a show!” he assured Cap'en McKay, chief of the Dunlopers. “McCakeron drew three mair to him last night.” While to the elder he exclaimed the same day: “Yon crazy sailorman's got all the Duncanites o' the run. He has ye spanked, Elder. Scunner the deil!” So the Devil blew, hot and cold, with Saunders's mouth, until the very night before the election.
The morning of the election the sun heaved up on a brassy sky. It was intensely hot through the day, but towards evening gray clouds scudded out of the east, veiling the sun with their twisting masses; at twilight heavy rain-blots were splashing the dust. At eight o'clock, meeting-time, rain flew in glistening sheets against the kirk windows and forced its way under the floor. There was but a scant attendance—twoscore men, perhaps, and half a dozen women, who sat, in decent Scotch fashion, apart from the men—that is, apart from all but Joshua Timmins. Not having been raised in the decencies as observed in Zorra, he had drifted over to the woman's side and sat with Janet McCakeron and Jean McClellan, one on either side.
But if few in number, the gathering was decidedly formidable in appearance. As the rain had weeded out the feeble, infirm, and pacifically inclined, it was distinctly belligerent in character. Grim, dour, silent, it waited for the beginning of hostilities.
Nor did the service of praise which preceded the election induce a milder spirit. When the precentor led off, “Howl, ye Sinners, Howl! Let the Heathen Rage and Cry!” each man's look told that he knew well whom the psalmist was hitting at; and when the minister invoked the “blind, stubborn, and stony-hearted” to “depart from the midst,” one-half of his hearers looked their astonishment that the other half did not immediately step out in the rain. A heavy inspiration, a hard sigh, told that all were bracing for battle when the minister stepped down from the pulpit, and noting it, he congratulated himself on his precautions against disturbance.
“For greater convenience in voting,” he said, reaching paper slips and a box of pencils from behind the communion rail, “we will depart from the oral method and elect by written ballot.”
He had expected a protest against such a radical departure from ancestral precedent, but in some mysterious way the innovation seemed to jibe with the people's inclination.
“Saunders McClellan,” the minister went on, “will distribute and collect balloting-papers on the other aisle.”