 Chapter 9. The Mariposa Bank Mystery Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very careful thought. It often involves serious consequences, and in some cases brings pain to others than oneself. I don't say that there is no justification for it. There often is. Anybody who's listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon the concertina, will admit that there are some lives which ought not to be continued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects. But to commit suicide on grounds of love is at the best of very dubious experiment. I know that in this I am expressing an opinion contrary to that of most true lovers, who embrace suicide on the slightest provocation as the only honourable termination of an existence that never ought to have begun. I quite admit that there is a glamour and a sensation about the thing which has its charm, and that there's nothing like it for causing a girl to realise the value of the heart that she has broken, and which breathes forgiveness upon her at the very moment when it held in its hand the half pint of prusic acid that was to terminate its beating forever. But apart from the general merits of the question, I suppose there were a few people outside of lovers who know what it is to commit suicide four times in five weeks. Yet this was what happened to Mr. Pupkin of the exchange bank of Mariposa. Ever since he had known Zena Pepperly, he had realised that his love for her was hopeless. She was too beautiful for him, and too good for him. Her father hated him, and her mother despised him. His salary was too small, and his own people were too rich. If you add to all that that he came up to the judge's house one night, and found a poet reciting verses to Zena, you will understand the suicide at once. It was one of those regular poets with a solemn jackass face, and lank-parted hair, and eyes like puddles of molasses. I don't know how he came there, up from the city probably, but there he was on the Pepperly's veranda that August evening. He was reciting poetry, either Tennyson's or Shelley's, or his own, you couldn't tell, and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped, and Nora Gallagher looking at the sky, and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity, and a little tubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling over sideways. In fact, there was a whole group of them. I don't know what it is about poets that draws women to them in this way, but everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the air with his hands, and recite verses in a deep, stupid voice, and all the women are crazy over him. Men despise him and would kick him off the veranda if they dared, but the women simply rave over him. So Popkin sat there in the gloom, and listened to this poet reciting browning, and he realized that everybody understood it but him. He could see Zena with her eyes fixed on the poet as if she were hanging onto every syllable she was she needed to, and he stood it just about fifteen minutes, and then slid off the side of the veranda, and disappeared without even saying good night. He walked straight down Onida Street, and along the main street, just as hard as he could go, there was only one purpose in his mind, suicide. He was heading straight for Jim Elliott's drugstore on the main corner, and his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform, and drink it, and die right there on the spot. As Popkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in his mind that he could picture it to the remotest detail. He could even see it all in type, in big headings in the newspapers of the following day, appalling suicide, Peter Popkin poisoned. He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of public inquiry, and that the question of Browning's poetry, and whether it is altogether fair to allow of its general circulation, would be fully ventilated in the newspapers. Thinking of that, Popkin came to the main corner. On a warm August evening, the drugstore of Mariposa, as you know, is all a blaze of lights. You can hear the hissing of the soda water fountain half a block away, and inside the store there are ever so many people. Boys and girls and old people, too. All drinking sarsaparilla and chocolate sundaes, and lemon sours, and foaming drinks that you take out of long straws. There's such a laughing and a talking as you never heard, and the girls are all in white and pink and Cambridge blue, and the soda fountain is of white marble with silver taps, and it hisses and sputters, and Jim Elliott and his assistant wear white coats with red geraniums in them, and it's just as gay as gay. The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if it can compare with the inside of Elliott's drugstore in Mariposa for real gaiety and joy of living. This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturday, and that meant early closing for all the hotels, except of course Smith's. So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drugstore drinking like fishes. It just shows the folly of local option and the temperance movement and all that. Why, if you shut the hotels, you simply drive the people to the soda fountains, and there's more drinking than ever. And not only of the men, too, but the girls and young boys and children. I've seen little things of eight and nine that had to be lifted up on the highstools at Elliott's drugstore, drinking great goblets of lemon soda enough to burst them, brought there by their own fathers. And why? Simply because the hotel bars were shut. What's the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely by cutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effects to drive them to taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and carocca cordial and things they wouldn't have touched before. So, in the long run, they drink more than ever. The point is that you can't prevent people having a good time no matter how hard you try. If they can't have it with lager beer and brandy, they'll have it with plain soda and lemon pop. And so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance people breaks down anyway. But I was only saying that Elliott's drugstore in Mariposa on a Saturday night is the gayest and brightest spot in the world. And just imagine what a fool of a place to commit suicide in. Just imagine going up to the soda water fountain and asking for five cents worth of chloroform and soda. Well, you simply can't. That's all. That's the way Pupkin found it. You see, as soon as he came in, somebody called out, hello, Pete. And one or two others called, hello, pup. And some said, how goes it? And others, how are you toughening it? And so on. Because, you see, they'd all been drinking more or less, and naturally they felt jolly and glad-hearted. So the upshot of it was that instead of taking chloroform, Pupkin stepped up to the counter of the fountain and he had a bromo seltzer with cherry soda. And after that he had one of those aerated seltzers and then a couple of lemon seltzers and a bromo fizzer. I don't know if you know the mental effect of a bromo seltzer, but it's a hard thing to commit suicide on. You can't. You feel so buoyant. Anyway, what with the fizzing of the seltzer and the lights and the girls, Pupkin began to feel so fine that he didn't care a cuss for all the browning in the world. And as for the poet, what a blazes with him. What's poetry anyway? Only rhymes. So, would you believe it, in about ten minutes, Peter Pupkin was off again and heading straight for the pepperleaf's house, poet or no poet. And what was more to the point, he carried with him three great bricks of Elliot's ice cream in green, pink and brown layers. He struck the veranda just at the moment when browning was getting too stale and dreary for words. His brain was all sizzling and jolly with the bromo seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks, and Zena ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with her to help fetch them, and they picked out the spoons together. They were so laughing and happy that it was just a marvel. Girls, you know, need no bromo seltzer. They're full of it all the time. And as for the poet, well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zena told him that the poet was married and that the tubby little woman with her head on sideways was his wife? So they had the ice cream and the poet ate it in buckets full. Poets always do. They need it. And after it the poet recited some stanzas of his own, and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man because it was dandy poetry the very best. That night Pupkin walked home on air and there was no thought of chloroform, and it turned out that he hadn't committed suicide, but like all lovers, he had commuted it. I don't need to describe in full the later suicides of Mr. Pupkin because they were all conducted on the same plan and rested on something the same reasons as above. Sometimes he would go down at night to the offices of the bank below his bedroom and bring up his bank revolver in order to make an end of himself with it. This too he could see headed up in the newspapers as brilliant boy banker blows out brains. But blowing out your brains is a noisy rackety performance, and Pupkin soon found that only special kinds of brains are suited for it. So he always sneaked back again later in the night and put the revolver in its place, deciding to drown himself instead. Yet every time that he walked down to the trestle bridge over the Ossah Whippy, he found it was quite unsuitable for drowning, too high, and the water too swift and black, and the rushes too gruesome, in fact not at all the kind of place for a drowning. Far better, he realized, to wait there on the railroad track and throw himself under the wheels of the express and be done with it. Yet, though Pupkin often waited in this way for the train, he was never able to pick out a pair of wheels that suited him. Anyhow, it's awfully hard to tell and express from a fast freight. I wouldn't mention these attempts at suicide if one of them hadn't finally culminated in making Peter Pupkin a hero, and solving for him the whole perplexed entanglement of his love affair with Zena Pepperley. Incidentally, it threw him into the very center of one of the most impenetrable bank mysteries that ever baffled the ingenuity of some of the finest legal talent that ever adorned one of the most enterprising communities in the country. It happened one night, as I say, that Pupkin decided to go down into the office of the bank and get his revolver and see if it would blow his brains out. It was the night of the fireman's ball, and Zena had danced four times with a visitor from the city, a man who was in the fourth year at the university and who knew everything. It was more than Peter Pupkin could bear. Mallory Tompkins was away that night, and when Pupkin came home he was all alone in the building, except for Gillis, the caretaker, who lived in the extension at the back. He sat in his room for hours, brooding. Two or three times he picked up a book, he remembered afterwards distinctly that it was Kant's critique of pure reason, and tried to read it, but it seemed meaningless and trivial. Then, with a sudden access of resolution, he started from his chair and made his way down the stairs and into the office room of the bank, meaning to get a revolver and kill himself on the spot and let them find his body lying on the floor. It was then far on in the night, and the empty building of the bank was as still as death. Pupkin could hear the stairs creak under his feet, and as he went he thought he heard another sound like the opening or closing of a door, but it sounded not like the sharp ordinary noise of a closing door, but with a dull muffled noise as if someone had shut the iron door of a safe in a room under the ground. For a moment Pupkin stood and listened with his heart thumping against his ribs. Then he kicked his slippers from his feet, and without a sound stole into the office on the ground floor and took the revolver from his teller's desk. As he gripped it, he listened to the sounds on the back stairway and in the vaults below. I should explain that in the exchange bank of Mariposa the offices around the ground floor level with the street. Below this is another floor with low dark rooms paved with flagstones, with unused office desks and with piles of paper stored in boxes. On this floor are the vaults of the bank, and lying in them in the autumn, the grain season, there is anything from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in currency tied in bundles. There is no other light down there than the dim reflection from the lights out on the street that lies in patches on the stone floor. I think as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand in the office of the bank, he had forgotten all about the model and purpose of his first coming. He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and love affairs, and his whole mind was focused, sharp and alert, with the intensity of the nighttime on the sounds that he heard in the vault and on the back stairway of the bank. Straight away Pupkin knew what it meant as plainly as if it were written in print. He had forgotten, I say, about being a hero, and he only knew that there was sixty thousand dollars in the vault of the bank below, and that he was paid eight hundred dollars a year to look after it. As Peter Pupkin stood there, listening to the sounds in his stockinged feet, his face showed gray as ashes in the light that fell through the window from the street. His heart beat like a hammer against his ribs, but behind its beatings was the blood of four generations of loyalists, and the robber who would take that sixty thousand dollars from the Mariposa Bank must take it over the dead body of Peter Pupkin teller. Pupkin walked down the stairs to the lower room, the one below the ground with the bank vault in it, with as fine a step as any of his ancestors showed on parade. And if he had known it as he came down the stairway in the front of the vault room, there was a man crouched in the shadow of the passageway by the stairs at the back. This man, too, held a revolver in his hand, and criminal or not, his face was as resolute as Pupkin's own. As he heard the teller's step on the stair, he turned and waited in the shadow of the doorway without a sound. There is no need really to mention all these details. They're only of interest showing how sometimes a bank teller in a corded smoking jacket and stocking feet may be turned into such a hero as even the Mariposa girls might dream about. All of this must have happened at about three o'clock in the night. This much was established afterwards from the evidence of Gillis, the caretaker. When he first heard the sounds, he had looked at his watch and noticed that it was half past two. The watch he knew was three-quarters of an hour slow three days before and had been gaining since. The exact time at which Gillis heard footsteps in the bank and started downstairs, pistol in hand, became a nice point afterwards in the cross-examination. But one must not anticipate. Pupkin reached the iron door of the bank safe and knelt in front of it, feeling in the dark to find the fracture of the lock. As he knelt, he heard a sound behind him and swung round on his knees and saw the bank robber in the half-light of the passageway and the glitter of a pistol in his hand. The rest was over in an instant. Pupkin heard a voice that was his own, but that sounded strange and hollow, call out. Drop that or I'll fire. And then, just as he raised his revolver, there came a blinding flash of light before his eyes, and Peter, Pupkin, junior teller of the bank, fell forward on the floor and knew no more. At that point, of course, I ought to close down a chapter or volume, or at least strike the reader over the head with a sandbag to force him to stop and think. In common fairness, one ought to stop here and count a hundred, or get up and walk round a block, or at any rate, picture to oneself Peter Pupkin lying on the floor of the bank, motionless, his arms distended, the revolver still grasped in his hand. But I must go on. By half past seven on the following morning, it was known all over Mariposa that Peter Pupkin, the junior teller of the exchange, had been shot dead by a bank robber in the vault of the building. It was known also that Gillis, the caretaker, had been shot and killed at the foot of the stairs, and that the robber had made off with fifty thousand dollars in currency, that he had left a trail of blood on the sidewalk, and that the men were out tracking him with bloodhounds and the great swamps to the north of the town. This, I say, and it is important to note it, was what they knew at half past seven. Of course, as each hour went past, they learned more and more. At eight o'clock it was known that Pupkin was not dead, but dangerously wounded in the lungs. At eight thirty it was known that he was not shot in the lungs, but that the ball had traversed the pit of his stomach. At nine o'clock it was learned that the pit of Pupkin's stomach was all right, but that the bullet had struck his right ear and carried it away. Finally it was learned that his ear had not exactly been carried away, that is, not precisely removed by the bullet, but that it had grazed Pupkin's head in such a way that it had stunned him, and if it had been an inch or two more to the left it might have reached his brain. This, of course, was just as good as being killed from the point of view of public interest. Indeed, by nine o'clock Pupkin could be himself seen on the main street with a great bandage sideways on his head, pointing out the traces of the robber. Gillis, the caretaker too, it was known by eight, had not been killed. He had been shot through the brain, but whether the injury was serious or not was only a matter of conjecture. In fact, by ten o'clock it was understood that the bullet from the robber's second shot had grazed the side of the caretaker's head, but as far as could be known his brain was just as before. I should add that the first report about the blood stains and the swamp and the blood hounds turned out to be inaccurate. The stains may have been blood, but as they led to the cellarway of Netley's store they may also have been molasses, though it was argued to be sure that the robber might well have poured molasses over the blood stains from sheer cunning. It was remembered too that there were no blood hounds in Mariposa, although mind you there are any amount of dogs there. So you see that by ten o'clock in the morning the whole affair was settling into the impenetrable mystery which it ever since remained. Not that there wasn't evidence enough, there was Pupkin's own story and Gillis's story, and the stories of all the people who had heard the shots and seen the robber, some said the bunch of robbers, go running past, others said walking past, in the night. Apparently the robber ran up and down half the streets of Mariposa before he vanished, but the stories of Pupkin and Gillis were plain enough. Pupkin related that he heard sounds at the bank and came downstairs just in time to see the robber crouching in the passageway, and that the robber was a large hulking villainous looking man wearing a heavy coat. Gillis told exactly the same story, having heard the noises at the same time, except that he first described the robber as a small thin fellow, peculiarly villainous looking, however, even in the dark, wearing a short jacket. But on thinking it over Gillis realized that he'd been wrong about the size of the criminal, and that he was even bigger of anything than what Mr. Pupkin thought. Gillis had fired at the robber just at the same moment had Mr. Pupkin. Beyond that all was mystery, absolute, and impenetrable. By eleven o'clock the detectives had come up from the city under orders from the head of the bank. I wish you could have seen the two detectives as they moved to and fro in Mariposa, fine-looking, stern, impenetrable men that they were. They seemed to take in the whole town by instinct and so quietly. They found their way to Mr. Smith's hotel just as quietly as if it wasn't designed at all, and stood there at the bar, picking up scraps of conversation you know the way detectives do it. Occasionally they allowed one or two bystanders, confederates perhaps, to buy a drink for them, and you could see from the way they drank it that they were still listening for a clue. If there had been the faintest clue in Smith's hotel, or in the Mariposa house or in the Continental, those fellows would have been at it like a flash. To see them moving around the town that day, silent, massive, imperturbable, gave one a great idea of their strange, dangerous calling. They went about the town all day, and yet in such a quiet, peculiar way that you couldn't have realized that they were working at all. They ate their dinner together at Smith's cafe and took an hour and a half over to throw people off the scent. Then when they got them off it, they sat and talked with Josh Smith in the back bar to keep them off. Mr. Smith seemed to take to them right away. They were men of his own size, or near it. And anyway, hotel men and detectives have a general affinity in sharing the same impenetrable silence and in their confidential knowledge of the weaknesses of the public. Mr. Smith, too, was of great use to the detectives. Boy, as he said, I wouldn't ask too close as to what folks was out late at night, in this town it don't do. When those two great brains finally left for the city on the five-thirty, it was hard to realize that behind each grand, impassable face a perfect vortex of clues was seething. But if the detectives were heroes, what was pumpkin? Imagine him with his bandage on his head standing in front of the bank and talking of the midnight robbery with that peculiar false modesty that only heroes are entitled to use. I don't know whether you've ever been a hero, but for sheer exhilaration there's nothing like it. And for Mr. Pupkin, who had gone through life thinking himself no good, to be suddenly exalted into the class of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Maynard and the charge of the light brigade, oh, it was wonderful! Because Pupkin was a brave man now, and he knew it, and acquired with it all the brave man's modesty. In fact, I believe he was heard to say that he had only done his duty, and that what he did was what any other man would have done. Though, when somebody else said, that's so when you come to think of it, Pupkin turned on him that quiet look of the wounded hero, bitterer than words. And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the city reported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still. That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in inquiry. Technically it was summoned in inquest on the dead robber, though they hadn't found the body. And it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses and holding cross examinations. There's something in the cross examination of great criminal lawyers like Nivens of Mariposa, and in the counter examinations of presiding judges like Pepperley, that thrills you to the core with the astuteness of it. They had Henry Mullins, the manager, on the stand for an hour and a half, and the excitement was so breathless that you could have heard a pin drop. Nivens took him on first. What's your name, he said. Henry August Mullins. What position do you hold? I'm manager of the exchange bank. When were you born? December 30th, 1869. After that, Nivens stood looking quietly at Mullins. You could feel that he was thinking pretty deeply before he shot the next question at him. Where did you go to school? Mullins answered straight off. The high school down home. And Nivens thought again for a while and then asked, how many boys were at the school? About sixty. How many masters? About three. After that, Nivens paused a long while and seemed to be digesting the evidence, but at last an idea seemed to strike him and he said, I understand you were not on the bank premises last night. Where were you? Down the Lake Duck shooting. You should have seen the excitement in the court when Mullins said this. The judge leaned forward in his chair and broken it once. Did he get any Harry? He asked. Yes, Mullins said, about six. Where did you get them? What, in the wild rice marsh past the river? He don't say so. Did you get them on the sit or how? All of these questions were fired off at the witness from the court in a single breath. In fact, it was the knowledge that the first ducks of the season had been seen in the also whippy marsh that led to the termination of the proceedings before the afternoon was a quarter over. Mullins and George Duff and half the witnesses were off with shotguns as soon as the court was cleared. I may as well state at once that the full story of the robbery of the Bank of Mariposa never came to the light. A number of arrests, mostly of vagrants and suspicious characters, were made, but the guilt of the robbery was never brought home to them. One man was arrested twenty miles away at the other end of Missinaba County, who not only corresponded exactly with the description of the robber, but in addition to this had a wooden leg. Vagrants with one leg are always regarded with suspicion in places like Mariposa, and whenever a robbery or a murder happens, they're arrested in batches. It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank. Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more. The bank, no doubt for business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe were intact and that the robber had been foiled in his design. But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr. Pupkin. Good fortune, like bad, never comes in small installments. On that wonderful day every good thing happened to Peter Pupkin at once. The morning saw him a hero. At the sitting of the court, the judge publicly told him that his conduct was fit to rank among the annals of the pioneers of Tecumseh township and asked him to his house for supper. At five o'clock he received the telegram of promotion from the head office that raised his salary to a thousand dollars and made him not only a hero but a marriageable man. At six o'clock he started up to the judge's house with his resolution nerved to the momentous step of his life. His mind was made up. He would do a thing seldom, if ever done in Mariposa. He would propose to Zena Pepperley. In Mariposa this kind of step I say is seldom taken. The course of love runs on and on through all its stages of tennis playing and dancing and sleigh riding till by sheer notoriety of circumstance an understanding is reached. To propose straight out would be thought priggish and affected and is supposed to belong only to people in books. But Pupkin felt that what ordinary people dare not do heroes are allowed to attempt. He would propose to Zena and more than that he would tell her in a straight manly way that he was rich and take the consequences. And he did it. That night on the piazza where the hammock hangs in the shadow of the Virginia creeper he did it. By sheer good luck the judge had gone indoors to the library and by a piece of rare good fortune Mrs. Pepperley had gone indoors to the sewing room and by a happy trick of coincidence the servant was out and the dog was tied up. In fact no such chain of circumstances was ever offered in favor of mortal man before. What Zena said, beyond saying yes, I do not know. I am sure that when Pupkin told her of the money she bore up as bravely a so fine a girl as Zena would and when he spoke of diamonds she said she would wear them for his sake. They were saying these things and other things, ever so many other things, when there was such a roar and a clatter up onidus treat as you never heard and there came bounding up to the house one of the most marvelous limousine touring cars that ever drew up at the home of a judge on a modest salary of three thousand dollars. When it stopped there sprang from it an excited man in a long steel skin coat worn not for the luxury of it at all but from the sheer chilliness of the autumn evening and it was as of course you know Pupkin's father. He had seen the news of his son's death in the evening paper in the city. They drove the car through so the chauffeur said in two hours and a quarter and behind them there was to follow a special train load of detectives and emergency men but Pupkin senior had cancelled all that by telegram halfway up when he heard that Peter was still living. For a moment as his eye rested on young Pupkin you would almost have imagined had you not known that he came from the maritime provinces that there were tears in them and that he was about to hug his son to the heart. But if he didn't hug Peter to his heart he certainly did within a few moments clasp Zena to it in that fine fatherly way in which they clasp pretty girls in the maritime provinces. The strangest thing is that Pupkin senior seemed to understand the whole situation without any explanations at all. Judge Pepperly I think would have shaken both of Pupkin senior's arms off when he saw him and when you heard them call one another Ned and Philip made you feel that they were boys again attending classes together at the old law school in the city. If Pupkin thought that his father wouldn't make a hit in Mariposa it only showed his ignorance. Pupkin senior sat there on the judge's veranda smoking a corn cob pipe as if he'd never heard of Havana cigars in his life. In the three days that he spent in Mariposa that autumn he went in and out of Jeff Thorpe's barbershop and Elliot's drugstore, shot black ducks in the marsh, and played poker every evening at a hundred matches for a cent as if he'd never lived any other life in all his days. They had to send him telegrams enough to fill a satchel to make him come away. So Pupkin and Zena in due course of time were married and went to live in one of the enchanted houses on the hillside in the newer part of the town where you may find them to this day. You may see Pupkin there at any time cutting enchanted grass on a little lawn in as gaudy a blazer as ever, but if you step up to speak to him or walk with him into the enchanted house pray modulate your voice a little musical though it is for there is said to be an enchanted baby on the premises whose sleep must not lightly be disturbed. Chapter 10 The Great Election in Missinaba County Don't ask me what election it was, whether Dominion or Provincial or Imperial or Universal, for I scarcely know. It must of course have been going on in other parts of the country as well, but I saw it all from Missinaba County, which with the town of Mariposa, was of course the storm center and focus point of the whole turmoil. I only know that it was a huge election and that on it turned issues of the most tremendous importance, such as whether or not Mariposa should become part of the United States, and whether the flag that had waved over the schoolhouse at Tecumseh township for ten centuries should be trampled under the hoof of an alien invader, and whether Britons should be slaves, and whether Canadians should be Britons, and whether the farming class would prove themselves Canadians, and tremendous questions of that kind. And there was such a roar and a tumult to it, and such waving of flags and beating of drums and flaring of torchlights, that such parts of the election as may have been going on elsewhere than in Missinaba County, must have been quite unimportant, and didn't really matter. Now that it's all over, we can look back at it without heat or passion. We can see, it's plain enough now, that in the Great Election Canada saved the British Empire, and that Missinaba saved Canada, and that the vote of the third concession of Tecumseh township saved Missinaba County, and that those of us who carried the third concession, well, there is no need to push it further. We prefer to be modest about it. If we still speak of it, it is only quietly and simply, and not more than three or four times a day. But you can't understand the election at all, and the conventions and the campaigns and the nominations and the balloting, unless you first appreciate the peculiar complexion of politics in Mariposa. Let me begin at the beginning. Everybody in Mariposa is either a liberal or a conservative, or else is both. Some of the people are, or have been, liberals or conservatives all their lives, and are called died-in-the-wool grits, or old-time tories, and things of that sort. These people get from long training such swift penetrating insight into national issues, that they can decide the most complicated question in four seconds. In fact, just as soon as they grab the city papers out of the morning mail, they know the whole solution of any problem you can put to them. There are other people whose aim it is to be broad-minded and judicious, and who vote liberal or conservative according to their judgment of the questions of the day. If their judgment of these questions tells them that there is something in it for them in voting liberal, then they do it. But if not, they refuse to be the slaves of a party or the henchmen of any political leader. So that anybody looking for henches has got to keep away from them. But the one thing that nobody is allowed to do in Mariposa is to have no politics. Of course, there are always some people whose circumstances compel them to say that they have no politics, but that is easily understood. Take the case of Trelawney, the postmaster. Long ago he was a letter carrier under the old Mackenzie government, and later he was a letter sorter under the old MacDonald government, and after that a letter stamper under the old Tupper government, and so on. Trelawney always says that he has no politics, but the truth is that he has too many. So too with the clergy in Mariposa. They have no politics, absolutely none. Yet Dean Drone, round election time, always announces, as his text, such a verse says, Lo, is there not one righteous man in Israel? Or what ho is it not time for a change? And that is a signal for all the liberal businessmen to get up and leave their pews. Similarly, over at the Presbyterian Church, the minister says that his sacred calling will not allow him to take part in politics, and that his sacred calling prevents him from breathing even a word of harshness against his fellow man. But that when it comes to the elevation of the ungodly into high places in the Commonwealth—this means, of course, the nomination of the conservative candidate—then he is not going to allow his sacred calling to prevent him from saying just what he thinks of it. And by that time, having pretty well cleared the Church of Conservatives, he proceeds to show from the scriptures that the ancient Hebrews were liberals to a man, except those who were drowned in the flood or who perished, more or less deservedly, in the desert. There are, I say, some people who are allowed to claim to have no politics, the office holders and the clergy and the school teachers and the hotel keepers. But beyond them, anybody in Mariposa who says that he has no politics is looked upon as crooked, and people wonder what it is that he is out after. In fact, the whole town and county is a hive of politics, and people who have only witnessed gatherings such as the House of Commons at Westminster and the Senate at Washington, and never seen a conservative convention at Tecumseh Corners or a liberal rally at the Concession Schoolhouse, don't know what politics means. So you may imagine the excitement in Mariposa when it became known that King George had dissolved the Parliament of Canada and had sent out a writ or command for Miss Annaba County to elect for him some other person than John Henry Bagshaw, because he no longer had confidence in him. The King, of course, is very well known, very favourably known in Mariposa. Everybody remembers how he visited the town on his great tour in Canada and stopped off at the Mariposa Station. Although he was only a prince at the time, there was quite a big crowd down at the depot, and everybody felt what a shame it was that the prince had no time to see more of Mariposa, because he would get such a false idea of it, seeing only the station and the lumber yards. Still, they all came to the station and all the liberals and conservatives mixed together perfectly freely, and stood side by side without any distinction, so that the prince should not observe any party differences among them. And he didn't. You could see that he didn't. They read to him an address all about the tranquility and loyalty of the empire, and they purposefully left out any reference to the trouble over the town wharf, or the big row there had been about the location of the new post office. There was a general decent feeling that it wouldn't be fair to disturb the prince with these things. Later on, as king, he would, of course, have to know all about them, but, meanwhile, it was better to leave him with the idea that his empire was tranquil. So they deliberately couched the address in terms that were just as reassuring as possible, and the prince was simply delighted with it. I am certain that he slipped pretty soundly after hearing that address. Why, you could see it taking effect even on his aids to camp and the people around him, so imagine how the prince must have felt. I think in Mariposa they understand kings perfectly. Every time that a king or a prince comes, they try to make him see the bright side of everything, and let him think that they're all united. Judge Pepperley walked up and down arm in arm with Dr. Gallagher, the worst grit in town, just to make the prince feel fine. So when they got the news that the king had lost confidence in John Henry Bagshaw, the sitting member, they never questioned it a bit. Lost confidence? All right, they'd elect him another right away. They'd elect him half a dozen if he needed them. They don't mind. They'd elect the whole town man after man rather than have the king worried about it. In any case, all the conservatives had been wondering for years how the king and the governor general and men like that had tolerated such a man as Bagshaw so long. Missinaba County, I say, is a regular hive of politics, and not the miserable, crooked, money-ridden politics of the cities, but the straight, real, old-fashioned thing that is an honor to the countryside. Any man who would offer to take a bribe or sell his convictions for money would be an object of scorn. I don't say they wouldn't take money. They would, of course. Why not? But if they did, they would take it in a straight, fearless way and say nothing about it. They might, it's only human, accept a job or a contract from the government. But if they did, rest assured it would be in a broad national spirit and not for the sake of the work itself. No, sir, not for a minute. Any man who wants to get the votes of the Missinaba farmers and the Mariposa businessmen has got to persuade them that he's the right man. If he can do that, if he can persuade any one of them that he is the right man and that all the rest know it, they'll vote for him. The division, I repeat, between the Liberals and the Conservatives is intense. You might live for a long while in the town, between elections, and never know it. It is only when you get to understand the people that you begin to see that there is a cross-division running through them that nothing can ever remove. You gradually become aware of fine, subtle distinctions that miss your observation at first. Outwardly, they are all friendly enough. For instance, Joe Milligan, the dentist, is a Conservative and has been for six years, and yet he shares the same boathouse with young Dr. Gallagher, who is a Liberal, and they even bought a motorboat between them. Pete Glover and Alf McNichol were in partnership in the hardware and paint store, though they belonged on different sides. But just as soon as elections drew near, the differences in politics became perfectly apparent. Liberals and Conservatives drew away from one another. Joe Milligan used the motorboat one Saturday and Dr. Gallagher the next, and Pete Glover sold hardware on one side of the store, and Alf McNichol sold paint on the other. You soon realized, too, that one of the newspapers was Conservative and the other was Liberal, and that there was a Liberal drugstore and a Conservative drugstore, and so on. Similarly, round election time, the Mariposa House was the Liberal Hotel and the Continental Conservative, though Mr. Smith's place, where they always put on a couple of extra bartenders, was what you might call independent Liberal-Conservative, with a dash of Imperialism thrown in. Mr. Gingham, the Undertaker, was, as a natural effect of his calling, an advanced Liberal, but at election time he always engaged a special assistant for embalming Conservative customers. So now I think you understand something of the general political surroundings of the great election in Missinaba County. John Henry Bagshaw was the sitting member, the Liberal member, for Missinaba County. The Liberals called him the Old War Horse, and the Old Battle Axe, and the Old Charger, and the Old Champion, and all sorts of things of that kind. The Conservatives called him the Old Jackass, and the Old Army Mule, and the Old Booze Fighter, and the Old Grafter, and the Old Scoundrel. John Henry Bagshaw was, I suppose, one of the greatest political forces in the world. He had flowing white hair crowned with a fedora hat, and a smooth statesman-like face, which it cost the country twenty-five cents a day to shave. All together the Dominion of Canada had spent over two thousand dollars in shaving that face during the twenty years that Bagshaw had represented Missinaba County, but the result had been well worth it. Bagshaw wore a long political overcoat that cost the country twenty cents a day to brush, and boots that cost the Dominion fifteen cents every morning to shine. But it was money well spent. Bagshaw of Mariposa was one of the most representative men of the age, and it's no wonder that he had been returned for the county for five elections running, leaving the Conservatives nowhere. Just think how representative he was! He owned two hundred acres out on the third concession, and kept two men working on it all the time to prove that he was a practical farmer. They sent in fat hogs to the Missinaba County Agricultural Exposition and the World's Fair every autumn, and Bagshaw himself stood beside the pigpins with all the judges, and wore a pair of corduroy breeches and chewed a straw all afternoon. After that, if any farmer thought that he was not properly represented in Parliament, it showed that he was an ass. Bagshaw owned half a share in the hairness business and a quarter share in the tannery, and that made him a business man. He paid for a pew in the Presbyterian Church and that represented religion in Parliament. He attended college for two sessions thirty years ago, and that represented education and kept him abreast with modern science, if not ahead of it. He kept a little account in one bank and a big account in the other, so that he was a rich man or a poor man at the same time. Add to that that John Henry Bagshaw was perhaps the finest orator in Mariposa. That, of course, is saying a great deal. There are speakers there, lots of them, that can talk two or three hours at a stretch, but the old war-horse could beat them all. They say that when John Henry Bagshaw got well-started, say, after a couple of hours of talk, he could speak as pericles, or demasthenes, or cicero never could have spoken. You could tell Bagshaw a hundred yards off as a member of the House of Commons. He wore a pepper and salt suit to show that he came from a rural constituency, and he wore a broad gold watch chain with dangling seals to show that he also represents a town. You could see from his quiet low collar and white tie that his electorate were a God-fearing, religious people, while the horseshoe pin that he wore showed that his electorate were not without sporting instincts, and knew a horse from a jackass. Most of the time John Henry Bagshaw had to be at Ottawa, though he preferred the quiet of his farm and always left it, as he said with a sigh. If he was not in Ottawa, he was in Washington, and of course at any time they might need him in London, so that it was no wonder that he could only be in Mariposa about two months of the year. That is why everybody knew, when Bagshaw got off the afternoon train one day early in the spring, that there must be something very important coming, and that the rumours about a new election must be perfectly true. Everything that he did showed this. He gave the baggage man twenty-five cents to take the check-off his trunk, the bus driver fifty cents to drive him up to the main street, and he went into Callaghan's tobacco store and bought two ten-cent cigars, and took them across the street and gave them to Mallory Tompkins of the Times-Herald as a present from the Prime Minister. All that afternoon Bagshaw went up and down the main street of Mariposa, and you could see, if you knew the signs of it, that there was politics in the air. He bought nails and putty and glass in the hardware store, and harness in the harness shop, and drugs in the drugstore, and toys in the toy shop, and all the things like that that are needed for a big campaign. Then, when he had done all this, he went over with McGinnis, the Liberal Organizer, and Mallory Tompkins, the Times-Herald man, and Gingham, the great independent Liberal undertaker, to the back parlor in the Mariposa house. You could tell from the way John Henry Bagshaw closed the door before he sat down that he was in a pretty serious frame of mind. Gentlemen, he said, the election is a certainty. We're going to have a big fight on our hands, and we've got to get ready for it. Is it going to be on the tariff? Asked Tompkins. Yes, gentlemen, I'm afraid it is. The whole thing is going to turn on the tariff question. I wish it were otherwise. I think it madness, but they're bent on it, and we gotta fight it on that line. Why they can't fight it merely on the question of graft, continue the old war horse, rising from his seat and walking up and down? Heaven only knows. I warned them. I appealed to them. I said, fight the thing on graft, and we can win easily. Take this constituency. Why not have fought the thing out on whether I spent too much money on the town war for the post office? What better issues could a man want? Let them claim that I'm crooked, and let me claim that I'm not. Surely that was good enough without dragging in the tariff. But now, gentlemen, tell me about things in the constituency. Is there any talk yet of who is to run? Mallory Tompkins lighted up the second of his prime minister's cigars, and then answered for the group. Everybody says that Edward Drone is going to run. Ah! said the old war horse, and there was joy upon his face. Is he? At last! That's good, that's good. Now what platform will he run on? Independent. Excellent! said Mr. Bagshaw. Independent. That's fine. On a program of what? Just simple honesty and public morality. Come now! said the member. That's splendid. That will help enormously. Honesty and public morality? The very thing. If Drone runs and makes a good showing, we win for a certainty. Tompkins, you must lose no time over this. Can't you manage to get some articles in the other papers hinting that at the last election we bribed all the voters in the county, and that we gave out enough contracts to simply pervert the whole constituency? Imply that we poured the public money into this county in buckets fulls, and that we are bound to do it again. Let Drone have plenty of material of this sort, and he'll draw off every honest unbiased vote in the Conservative Party. My only fear is, continue the old war horse, losing some of his animation, that Drone won't run after all. He said it so often before it never has. He hasn't got the money. But we must see to that. Gingham, you know his brother well. You must work it so that we pay Drone's deposit and his campaign expenses. But how light Drone it is to come out at this time. It was indeed very like Edward Drone to attempt so misguided a thing as to come out an independent candidate in Missinaba County on a platform of public honesty. It was just the sort of thing that anyone in Mariposa would expect from him. Edward Drone was the rural dean's younger brother, young Mr. Drone, they used to call him, years ago, to distinguish him from the rector. He was a somewhat weaker copy of his elder brother, with a simple, inefficient face and kind blue eyes. Edward Drone was, and always had been, a failure. In training he had been, once upon a time, an engineer, and built dams that broke and bridges that fell down, and wharves that floated away in the spring floods. He had been a manufacturer and failed, had been a contractor and failed, and now lived a meager life as a sort of surveyor or land expert on goodness knows what. In his political ideas Edward Drone was, and as everybody in Mariposa knew, always had been crazy. He used to come up to the autumn exercises at the high school and make speeches about the ancient Romans and Titus Manlius and Quintus Curtius at the same time when John Henry Bagshaw used to make a speech about the Maple Leafs and asked for an extra half holiday. Drone used to tell the boys about the lessons to be learned from the lives of the truly great, and Bagshaw used to talk to them about the lessons learned from the lives of the extremely rich. Drone used to say that his heart filled whenever he thought of the splendid patriotism of the ancient Romans, and Bagshaw said that whenever he looked out over this wide dominion his heart overflowed. Even the youngest boy in the school could tell that Drone was foolish, not even the school teachers would have voted for him. What about the conservatives, asked Bagshaw presently, is there any talk yet as to who they'll bring out? Gingham and Mallory Tompkins looked at one another. They were almost afraid to speak. Hadn't you heard? said Gingham. They've got their man already. Who is it? said Bagshaw quickly. They're going to put up Josh Smith. Great Heaven! said Bagshaw, jumping to his feet. Smith, the hotelkeeper. Yes, sir, said Mr. Gingham, that's the man. Do you remember in history how Napoleon turned pale when he heard that the Duke of Wellington was to lead the Allies in Belgium? Do you remember how, when the Mostocles heard that Aristogaitan was to lead the Spartans, he jumped into the sea? Possibly you don't, but it may help you to form some idea of what John Henry Bagshaw felt when he heard that the conservatives had selected Josh Smith, proprietor of Smith's Hotel. You remember Smith? You've seen him there on the steps of his hotel, two hundred and eighty pounds in his stocking feet. You've seen him selling liquor after hours through sheer public spirit, and you recall how he saved the lives of hundreds of people on the day when the steamers sank, and how he saved the town from being destroyed the night when the Church of England Church burned down. You know that hotel of his, too, halfway down the street, Smith's Northern Health Resort, though already they were beginning to call it Smith's British Arms. So you can imagine that Bagshaw came as near to turning pale as a man in federal politics can. I never knew Smith was a conservative, he said faintly. He always subscribed to our fund. He is now, said Mr. Gingham ominously. He says the idea of this reciprocity business cuts him to the heart. The infernal liar, said Mr. Bagshaw. There was silence for a few moments. Then Bagshaw spoke again. Will Smith have anything else in his platform besides the trade question? Yes, said Mr. Gingham gloomily. He will. What is it? Temperance and total prohibition. John Henry Bagshaw sank back in his chair as if struck with a club. There let me leave him for a chapter. CHAPTER XI. The candidacy of Mr. Smith. Boys, said Mr. Smith to the two hostlers, stepping out onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Hoist that there British Jack over the place and hoist her up good. Then he stood and watched the flag fluttering in the wind. Billy, he said to the desk clerk, get a couple more and put him up on the roof of the calf behind the hotel. Wire down to the city and get a quotation on a hundred of them. Take them signs American drinks out of the bar. Put up new ones with British beer at all hours. Clear out the rye whisky and order in Scotch and Irish, and then go up to the printing office and get me them placards. Then another thought struck Mr. Smith. Say, Billy, he said, wire to the city for fifty pictures of King George. Get him good and get him coloured. It don't matter what they cost. All right, sir, said Billy. And Billy, called Mr. Smith, as still another thought struck him. Indeed the moment Mr. Smith got into politics you could see these thoughts strike him like waves. Get fifty pictures of his father, old King Albert. All right, sir. And say, I tell you, while you're at it, get some of the old Queen, Victorina, if you can, get him in mourning, with a harp and one of them lions and a three-pointed prong. It was on the mourning after the Conservative Convention. Josh Smith had been chosen the candidate. And now the whole town was covered with flags and placards, and there were bands in the streets every evening, and noise and music and excitement that went on for mourning till night. Election times are exciting enough, even in the city. But there the excitement dies down in business hours. In Mariposa there aren't any business hours, and the excitement goes on all the time. Mr. Smith had carried the Convention before him. There had been a feeble attempt to put up Nivens, but everybody knew that he was a lawyer and a college man, and wouldn't have a chance by a man with a broader outlook like Josh Smith. So the result was that Smith was the candidate, and there were placards out all over the town, with Smith and British allegiance in big letters, and people were wearing badges with Mr. Smith's face on one side and King George's on the other, and the fruit store next to the hotel had been cleaned out and turned into committee rooms with a gang of workers smoking cigars in it all day and half the night. There were other placards too, with Bagshaw and Liberty, Bagshaw and Prosperity, vote for the old Missinaba standard bearer, and Uptown beside the Mariposa house, there were the Bagshaw committee rooms with a huge white streamer across the street, and with a gang of Bagshaw workers smoking their heads off. But Mr. Smith had an estimate made which showed that nearly two cigars to one were smoked in his committee rooms as compared with the Liberals. It was the first time in five elections that the Conservatives had been able to make such a showing as that. One might mention too that there were drone placards out, five or six of them, little things about the size of a pocket handkerchief, with a statement that Mr. Edward Drone solicits the votes of the electors of Missinaba County, but you would never notice them, and when Drone tried to put up a streamer across the main street with Drone and honesty, the wind carried it away into the lake. The fight was really between Smith and Bagshaw, and everybody knew it from the start. I wish that I were able to narrate all the phases and the turns of the great contest from the opening of the campaign till the final polling day, but it would take volumes. First of all, of course, the trade question was hotly discussed in the newspapers of Mariposa, and the news packet and the Times Herald literally bristled with statistics. Then came interviews with the candidates and the expression of their convictions in regard to tariff questions. Mr. Smith, said the reporter of the Mariposa news packet, we'd like to get your views of the effect of the proposed reduction of the differential duties. By gosh, Pete, said Mr. Smith, you can search me, have a cigar. What do you think, Mr. Smith, would be the result of lowering the Advilorum British preference and admitting American goods at a reciprocal rate? It's a corker, ain't it? answered Mr. Smith. What'll you take? Lager or domestic? And in that short dialogue Mr. Smith showed that he had instantaneously grasped the whole method of dealing with the press. The interview in the paper next day said that Mr. Smith, while unwilling to state positively that the principle of tariff discrimination was at variance with sound fiscal science, was firmly of opinion that any reciprocal interchange of tariff preferences with the United States must invariably lead to a serious per capita reduction of the national industry. Mr. Smith, said the Chairman of a delegation of the manufacturers of Mariposa, what do you propose to do in regard to the tariff if you're elected? Boys, answered Mr. Smith, I'll put her up so darned high they won't ever get her down again. Mr. Smith, said the Chairman of another delegation, I'm an old free trader. Put it there, said Mr. Smith, so am I, there ain't nothing like it. What do you think about Imperial defense? asked another questioner. Which, said Mr. Smith, Imperial defense? Of what? Of everything. Who says it, said Mr. Smith? Everybody is talking of it. What do the conservative boys in Ottawa think about it, answered Mr. Smith? They're all for it. Well, I'm for it too, said Mr. Smith. These little conversations represented only the first stage, the argumentative stage of the Great Contest. It was during this period, for example, that the Mariposa news packet absolutely proved that the price of hogs in Mariposa was decimal six higher than the price of oranges in Southern California and that the average decennial import of eggs into Missinaba County had increased four decimal six, eight, two in the last fifteen years, more than the import of lemons in New Orleans. Figures of this kind made people think, most certainly. After all this came the organizing stage and after that the big public meetings and the rallies. Perhaps you have never seen a county being organized. It is a wonderful sight. First of all the bagshaw men drove through crosswise and top buggies and then drove through it again lengthwise. Whenever they met a farmer they went in and ate a meal with him and after the meal they took him out to the buggy and gave him a drink. After that the man's vote was absolutely solid until it was tampered with by feeding a conservative. In fact the only way to show a farmer that you were in earnest is to go in and eat a meal with him. If you won't eat it he won't vote for you. That is the recognized political test. But of course just as soon as the bagshaw men had begun to get the farming vote solidified the Smith buggies came driving through in the other direction eating meals and distributing cigars and turning all the farmers back into conservatives. Here and there you might see Edward Drone, the independent candidate wandering around from farm to farm in the dust of the political buggies. To each of the farmers he explained that he pledged himself to give no bribes, to spend no money and to offer no jobs and each one of them gripped him warmly by the hand and showed him the way to the next farm. After the organization of the county there came the period of the public meetings and the rallies and the joint debates between the candidates and their supporters. I suppose there was no place in the whole dominion where the trade question, the reciprocity question, was threshed out quite so thoroughly and in quite such a national patriotic spirit as in Mariposa. For a month at least people talked of nothing else. A man would stop another in the street and tell him that he had read last night that the average price of an egg in New York was decimal ought one more than the price of an egg in Mariposa and the other man would stop the first one later in the day and tell him that the average price of a hog in Idaho was .6 of a cent per pound less or more he couldn't remember which for the moment than the average price of beef in Mariposa. People lived on figures of this sort and the man who could remember most of them stood out as a born leader. But of course it was at the public meetings that these things were most fully discussed. It would take volumes to do full justice to all the meetings that they held in Missinaba County. But here and there single speeches stood out as masterpieces of convincing oratory. Take for example the speech of John Henry Bagshaw at the Tecumseh Corner's schoolhouse. The Mariposa Times Herald said next day that speech would go down in history and so it will. Ever so far down. Anyone who has heard Bagshaw knows what an impressive speaker he is and on this night when he spoke with the quiet dignity of a man old in years and anxious only to serve his country he almost surpassed himself. Near the end of his speech somebody dropped a pin and the noise it made in falling fairly rattled the windows. I'm an old man now gentlemen, Bagshaw said, and the time must soon come when I must not only leave politics but must take my way towards that goal from which no traveller returns. There was a deep hush when Bagshaw said this. It was understood to imply that he thought of going to the United States. Yes gentlemen, I am an old man and I wish when my time comes to go to depart leaving as little animosity behind me as possible. But before I do go I want it pretty clearly understood that there are more darn scoundrels in the Conservative Party than not to be tolerated in any decent community. I bear, he continued, malice towards none and I wish to speak with gentleness to all. But what I will say is that how any set of rational responsible men could nominate such a skunk as the Conservative candidate passes the bounds of my comprehension. Gentlemen, in the present campaign there is no room for vindictive abuse. Let us rise to a higher level than that. They tell me that my opponent, Smith, is a common saloon keeper. Let it pass. They tell me that he has stood convicted of horse stealing, that he is a notable perjurer, that he is known as the blackest-hearted liar in Miss Annaba County. Let us not speak of it. Let no whisper of it pass our lips. No gentlemen, continued Bagshaw, pausing to take a drink of water. Let us rather consider this question on the high plane of national welfare. Let us not think of our own particular interests, but let us consider the good of the country at large. And to do this, let me present to you some facts in regard to the price of barley in Tecumseh Township. Then, amid a deep stillness, Bagshaw read off the list of prices of sixteen kinds of grain in sixteen different places during sixteen years. But let me turn, Bagshaw went on to another phase of the national subject, and view for a moment the price of March Hay in Miss Annaba County. When Bagshaw sat down that night it was felt that a liberal vote in Tecumseh Township was a foregone conclusion. But here they hadn't reckoned on the political genius of Mr. Smith. When he heard next day of the meeting, he summoned some of his leading speakers to him, and he said, Boys, they're beating us on them statistics, Oren aren't good enough. Then he turned to Nivens, and he said, What was them figures you had here the other night? Nivens took out a paper and began reading. Stop, said Mr. Smith, what was that figure for bacon? Fourteen million dollars, said Nivens. Not enough, said Mr. Smith. Make it twenty. They'll stand for it then, farmers. Nivens changed it. And what was that for hay? Two dollars a ton. Shove it up to four, said Mr. Smith, and I tell you, he added, If any of them farmers says the figures ain't correct, tell them to go to Washington and see for themselves. Say that if any man wants the proof of your figures, let him go over to England and ask. Tell him to go straight to London and see it all for himself in the books. After this there was no more trouble over statistics. I must say that though it is a wonderfully convicting thing to hear trade figures of this kind properly handled, perhaps the best man on this sort of thing in the campaign was Mullins, the banker. A man of his profession simply has to have figures of trade and population and money at his fingers ends, and the effect of it in public speaking is wonderful. No doubt you have listened to speakers of this kind, but I question whether you have ever heard anything more typical of the sort of effect that I allude to than Mullins's speech at the big rally at the fourth concession. Mullins himself, of course, knows the figures so well that he never bothers to write them into notes, and the effect is very striking. Now, gentlemen, he said very earnestly, how many of you know just to what extent the exports of this country have increased in the last ten years? How many could tell what percent of increase there has been in one decade of our national importation? Then Mullins paused and looked round. Not a man knew it. I don't recall, he said, exactly the precise amount myself. Not at this moment, but it must be simply tremendous. Or take the question of population, Mullins went on, warming up again as a born statistician always does at the proximity of figures. How many of you know, how many of you can state, what has been the decennial percentage increase in our leading cities? There he paused, and would you believe it, not a man could state it. I don't recall the exact figures, said Mullins, but I have them at home, and they are positively colossal. But in just one phase of the public speaking, the candidacy of Mr. Smith received a serious setback. It had been arranged that Mr. Smith should run on a platform of total prohibition, but they soon found that it was a mistake. They had imported a special speaker from the city, a grave man with a white tie, who put his whole heart into the work, and would take nothing for it except his expenses and a sum of money for each speech. But beyond the money, I say, he would take nothing. He spoke one night at the Tecumseh Corner's social hall at the same time when the liberal meeting was going on at the Tecumseh Corner's schoolhouse. Gentlemen, he said, as he paused halfway in his speech, while we are gathered here in earnest discussion, do you know what is happening over at the meeting place of our opponents? Do you know that seventeen bottles of rye whiskey were sent out from the town this afternoon to that innocent and unsuspecting schoolhouse? Seventeen bottles of whiskey, hidden in between the blackboard in the wall, and every single man that attends that meeting, mark my words, every single man, will drink his fill of the abominable stuff at the expense of the liberal candidate. Just as soon as the speaker said this, you could see the Smith men at the meeting look at one another in injured surprise, and before the speech was half over the hall was practically emptied. After that the total prohibition plank was changed, and the committee substituted a declaration in favor of such a form of restrictive license as should promote temperance, while encouraging the manufacture of spiritus liquors, and by a severe regulation of the liquor traffic, should place intoxicants only in the hands of those fitted to use them. Finally there came the great day itself, the election day that brought, as everybody knows, the crowning triumph of Mr. Smith's career. There is no need to speak of it at any length, because it has become a matter of history. In any case, everybody who has ever seen Mariposa knows just what election day is like. The shops, of course, are, as a matter of custom, all closed, and the bar rooms are all closed by law so that you have to go in by the back way. All the people are in their best clothes, and at first they walk up and down the street in a solemn way, just as they do on the twelfth of July and on St. Patrick's Day, before the fun begins. Everybody keeps looking in at the different polling places to see if anybody else has voted yet, because, of course, nobody cares to vote first, for fear of being fooled, after all, and voting on the wrong side. Most of all did the supporters of Mr. Smith, acting under his instructions, hang back from the poll in the early hours. To Mr. Smith's mind, voting was to be conducted on the same plan as bear shooting. Hold back your votes, boys, he said, and don't be too eager. Wait till she begins to warm up and then let them have it good and hard. In each of the polling places in Mariposa there is a returning officer, and with him are two scrutineers, and the electors, I say, peep in and out like mice looking into a trap. But if once the scrutineers get a man well into the polling booth, they push him in behind a little curtain and make him vote. The voting, of course, is by secret ballot, so that no one except the scrutineers and the returning officer, and the two or three people who may be around the poll, can possibly tell how a man has voted. That's how it comes about, that the first results are often so contradictory and conflicting. Sometimes the poll is badly arranged, and the scrutineers are unable to see properly just how the ballots are being marked, and they count up the liberals and conservatives in different ways. Often, too, a voter makes his mark so hurriedly and carelessly that they have to pick it out of the ballot box and look at it to see what it is. I suppose that may have been why it was that in Mariposa the results came out at first in such a conflicting way. Perhaps that was how it was that the first reports showed that Edward Drone, the independent candidate, was certain to win. You should have seen how the excitement grew upon the streets when the news was circulated. In the big rallies and meetings of the liberals and conservatives everybody had pretty well forgotten all about Drone, and when news got round at about four o'clock that the Drone vote was carrying the poll, the people were simply astounded. Not that they were not pleased, on the contrary, they were delighted. Everybody came up to Drone and shook hands and congratulated him and told him that they had known all along what the country wanted was a straight, honest, non-partisan representation. The conservatives said openly that they were sick of party, utterly done with it, and the liberals said that they hated it. Already three or four of them had taken Drone aside and explained what was needed in the town was a straight, clean, non-partisan post office built on a piece of ground of a strictly non-partisan character and constructed under contracts that were not tainted and smirched with party affiliations. Two or three men were willing to show to Drone just where a piece of ground of this character could be bought. They told him, too, that in the matter of the post-mastership itself they had nothing against Trelawney, the present postmaster, in any personal sense, and would say nothing against him except merely that he was utterly and hopelessly unfit for his job and that if Drone believed, as he said he did, in a purified civil service, he ought to begin by purifying Trelawney. Already Edward Drone was beginning to feel something of what it meant to hold office, and there was creeping into his manner the quiet self-importance, which is the first sign of conscious power. In fact, in that brief half-hour of office, Drone had a chance to see something of what it meant. Henry McGinnis came to him and asked straight out for a job as a federal census-taker on the ground that he was hard up and had been crippled with rheumatism all winter. Nelson Williamson asked for the post of Warfmaster on the plea that he had been laid up with Schiattica all winter and was absolutely fit for nothing. Erasmus Archer asked him if he could get his boy Pete into one of the departments at Ottawa, and made a strong case of it by explaining that he had tried his cussetus to get Pete a job anywhere else, and it was simply impossible. Not that Pete wasn't a willing boy, but he was slow, even his father admitted it, slow as the devil blasted him, and with no head for figures, and unfortunately he'd never had the schooling to bring him on. But if Drone could get him in at Ottawa, his father truly believed it would be the very place for him. Surely in the Indian department, or in the astronomical branch, or in the new Canadian Navy, there must be any amount of opening for a boy like this? And to all these requests Drone found himself explaining that he would take the matter under his very earnest consideration, and that they must remember that he had to consult his colleagues, and not merely followed the dictates of his own wishes. In fact, if he had ever in his life any envy of cabinet ministers, he lost it in this hour. But Drone's hour was short. Even before the poll had closed in Mariposa, the news came sweeping in, true or false, that Bagshaw was carrying the county. The second concession had gone for Bagshaw in a regular landslide, six votes to only two for Smith, and all down the township line road, where the hay farms are, Bagshaw was said to be carrying all before him. Just as soon as that news went round the town, they launched the Mariposa Band of the Knights of Pythias. Every man in it is a liberal, down the main street with big red banners in front of it with the motto, Bagshot Forever in Letters of Foot High. Such rejoicing and enthusiasm began to set in as you never saw. Everybody crowded round Bagshaw in the steps of the Mariposa House, and shook his hand, and said that they were proud to see the day, and that the liberal party was the glory of the Dominion, and that as for this idea of nonpartisan politics, the very thought of it made him sick. Right away in the committee rooms they began to organize the demonstration for the evening with lantern slides and speeches, and they arranged for a huge bouquet to be presented to Bagshaw on the platform by four little girls, all liberals, all dressed in white. And it was just at this juncture, with one hour voting left, that Mr. Smith emerged from his committee rooms and turned his voters on the town, much as the Duke of Wellington sent the whole line to the charge at Waterloo. From every committee room and subcommittee room they poured out in flocks with blue badges fluttering on their coats. Get at it, boys, said Mr. Smith. Vote and keep on voting till they make you quit. Then he turned to his campaign assistant. Billy, he said, wired down to the city that I'm elected by an overwhelming majority and tell them to wire it right back. Send word by telephone to all the polling places in the county that the Hulltown has gone solid conservative and tell them to send the same news back here. Get carpenters and tell them to run up a platform in front of the hotel, tell them to take the bar door, clean off its hinges, and be all ready the minute the poll quits. It was that last hour that did it. Just as soon as the big posters went up in the windows of the Mariposa news packet with the telegraphic dispatch that Josh Smith was reported in the city to be elected, and was followed by the messages from all over the county, the voters hesitated no longer. They had waited most of them all through the day, not wanting to make any error in their vote. But when they saw the Smith men crowding into the polls and heard the news from the outside, they went in solid in one great stampede, and by the time the poll was declared closed at five o'clock, there was no shadow of doubt that the county was saved and that Josh Smith was elected for Missinaba. I wish you could have witnessed the scene in Mariposa that evening. It would have done your heart good. Such joy, such public rejoicing as you never saw. It turned out that there wasn't really a liberal in the whole town and that there never really had been. They were all conservatives and had been for years and years. Men who had voted, with pain and sorrow in their hearts, for the liberal party for twenty years, came out that evening and owned up straight that they were conservatives. They said that they could stand the strain no longer and simply had to confess. Whatever the sacrifice might mean, they were prepared to make it. Even Mr. Golgotha Gingham, the undertaker, came out and admitted in working for John Henry Bagshaw, he'd been going straight against his conscience. He said that right from the first he had had his misgivings. He said it had haunted him. Often at night, when he would be working away quietly, one of these sudden misgivings would overcome him so that he could hardly go on with his embalming. Why, it appeared that on the very first day when reciprocity was proposed, he had come home and said to Mrs. Gingham that he thought it simply meant selling out the country. And the strange thing was that ever so many others had just the same misgivings. Trelawney admitted that he had said to Mrs. Trelawney that it was madness, and Jeff Thorpe, the barber, had, he admitted, gone home to his dinner the first day reciprocity was talked of, and said to Mrs. Thorpe that it would simply kill business in the country, and introduce a cheap, shoddy, American form of haircut that would render true loyalty impossible. To think that Mrs. Gingham and Mrs. Trelawney and Mrs. Thorpe had known all this for six months and kept quiet about it. Yet I think there were a good many Mrs. Gingham's in the country. It is merely another proof that no woman is fit for politics. The demonstration that night in Mariposa will never be forgotten. The excitement in the streets, the torchlights, the music of the band of the Knights of Pithias, an organization which is conservative in all but name, and above all the speeches and the patriotism. They had put up a big platform in front of the hotel, and on it were Mr. Smith and his chief workers, but behind them was a perfect forest of flags. They presented a huge bouquet of flowers to Mr. Smith, handed to him by four little girls in white, the same four that I spoke of above, for it turned out they were all conservatives. Then there were the speeches. Judge Pepperley spoke and said that there was no need to dwell on the victory that they had achieved, because it was history. There was no occasion to speak of what part he himself had played within the limits of his official position, because what he had done was henceforth a matter of history. And Nivens, the lawyer, said that he would only say just a few words, because anything that he might have done was now history. Later generations, he said, might read it, but it was not for him to speak of it, because it belonged now to the history of the country. And after them, others spoke in the same strain and all refused absolutely to dwell on the subject, for more than half an hour, on the ground that anything they might have done was better left for future generations to investigate. And no doubt this was very true, as to some things, anyway. Mr. Smith, of course, said nothing. He didn't have to, not for four years, and he knew it. CHAPTER XII. LONVOY, THE TRAIN TO MARIPOSA. It leaves the city every day about five o'clock in the evening, the train for Mariposa. Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the little town, or did, long years ago. Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you might have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not home. Of course you couldn't call it home now. Home means that big red sandstone house of yours in the costlier part of the city. Home means, in a way, this mausoleum club where you sometimes talk with me of the times you had as a boy in Mariposa. But, of course, home would hardly be the word you would apply to the little town, unless, perhaps, late at night, when you'd been sitting, reading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one. Naturally, you don't know of the Mariposa train now. Years ago, when you first came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew of it well enough, only too well. The price of a ticket counted in those days, and though you knew of the train you couldn't take it. But sometimes, from sheer homesickness, you used to wander down to the station on a Friday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa people getting on the train, and wish that you could go. Why, you knew that train at one time better, I suppose, than any other single thing in the city, and loved it, too, for the little town in the sunshine that it ran to. Do you remember how, when you first began to make money, you used to plan that, as soon as you were rich, really rich, you'd go back home again to the little town and build a great big house with a fine veranda, no stint about it, the best that money could buy, plain lumber, every square foot of it, and a fine picket fence in front of it? It was to be one of the grandest and finest houses that thought could conceive, much finer in true reality than the vast palace of sandstone with the portcochere and the sweeping conservatories that you afterwards built in the costlier part of the city. But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way to it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this mausoleum club in the city. Would you believe it, that practically every one of them came from Mariposa once upon a time, and that there isn't one of them that doesn't sometimes dream in the dull quiet of the long evening here in the club, that some day he will go back and see the place? They all do, only they're half ashamed to own it. Ask your neighbor there at the next table whether that partridge that they sometimes serve to you here can be compared for a moment to the birds that he and you, or he and someone else, used to shoot his boys in the spruce thickets along the lake. Ask him if he ever tasted duck that could for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice marsh along the Ossa Whippy. And as for fish and fishing, no, don't ask him about that, for if he ever starts telling you of the chub they used to catch below the mill-dam and the green bass that used to lie in the water shadow of the rocks beside the Indians Island, not even the long, dull evening in this club would be long enough for the telling of it. But no wonder they don't know about the five o'clock train for Mariposa. Very few people know about it. Hundreds of them know that there is a train that goes out at five o'clock, but they mistake it. Ever so many of them think it's just a suburban train. Lots of people that take it every day think it's only the train to the golf grounds, but the joke is that after it passes out of the city and the suburbs and the golf grounds, it turns itself, little by little, into the Mariposa train, thundering and pounding towards the north with hemlock sparks pouring out into the darkness from the funnel of it. Of course, you can't tell it just at first. All those people that are crowding into it with golf clubs and wearing knickerbockers and flat caps would deceive anybody. That crowd of suburban people going home on commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles—those are, of course, not Mariposa people. But look round a little bit and you'll find them easily enough. Here and there in the crowd, those people with the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet look odd in some way—the women with the peculiar hats and the—what do you say, last year's fashions? Ah, yes. Of course. That must be it. Anyway, those are the Mariposa people all right enough. That man with the two-dollar Panama and the glaring spectacles is one of the greatest judges that ever adorned the bench of Missinaba County. That clerical gentleman with the wide black hat, who is explaining to the man with him the marvelous mechanism of the new airbreak, one of the most conspicuous illustrations of the divine structure of the physical universe—surely you've seen him before—Mariposa people. Oh yes, there are any number of them on the train every day. But of course you hardly recognize them while the train is still passing through the suburbs and the golf district and the outlying parts of the city. But wait a little, and you will see that when the city is well behind you, bit by bit the train changes its character. The electric locomotive that took you through the city tunnels is off now, and the old wood engine is hitched on in its place. I suppose very probably you haven't seen one of these wood engines since you were a boy forty years ago—the old engine, with a wide top like a hat on its funnel, and with sparks enough to light up a suit for damages once and every mile. Do you see, too, that the trim little cars that came out of the city on the Electric Suburban Express are being discarded now at the weigh stations, one by one, and in their place is the old, familiar car with the stuffed cushions and red plush—how gorgeous it once seemed—and with a box stove set up in one end of it. The stove is burning furiously at its sticks this autumn evening, for the air sets in chill as you get clear away from the city, and are rising up to the higher ground of the country of the pines and the lakes. Look from the window as you go. The city is far behind now, and right and left of you there are trim farms with elms and maples near them, and with tall windmills beside the barns that you can still see in the gathering dusk. There is a dull red light from the windows of the farmstead. It must be comfortable there, after the roar and clatter of the city, and only think of the still quiet of it. As you sit back, half-dreaming in the car, you keep wondering why it is that you never came up before in all these years. Ever so many times you planned that, just as soon as the rush and strain of business eased up a little, you would take the train and go back to the little town to see what it was like now, and if things had changed much since your day. But each time when your holidays came, somehow you changed your mind and went down to Narragansett or Naga-Huckett or Naga- something and left over the visit to Mariposa for another time. It is almost night now. You can still see the trees and the fences in the farmsteads, but they are fading fast in the twilight. They have lengthened out the train by this time with a string of flat cars and freight cars between where we are sitting in the engine. But at every crossway we can hear the long muffled roar of the whistle, dying to a melancholy wail that echoes into the woods. The woods, I say, for the farms are thinning out and the track plunges here and there into great stretches of bush, tall tamarack and red scrub willow, and with a tangled undergrowth of bush that has defied for two generations all attempts to clear it into the form of fields. Why, look, that great space that seems to open out in the half-dark of the falling evening. Why, surely, yes, Lake Ossawipi, the big lake as they used to call it, from which the river runs down to the smaller lake, Lake Wisinati, where the town of Mariposa has lain waiting for you there for thirty years. This is Lake Ossawipi, surely enough. You would know it anywhere by the broad, still black water with hardly a ripple and with the grip of the coming frost already on it. Such a great sheet of blackness it looks as the train thunders along the side, swinging out the curve of the embankment at bright-neck speed as it rounds the corner of the lake. How fast the train goes this autumn night. You have traveled, I know you have, in the Empire State Express, and in the new Limited and the Maritime Express that holds the record of six hundred whirling miles from Paris to Marseille. But what are they to this, this mad career, this bright-neck speed, this thundering roar of the Mariposa local driving hard to its home? Don't tell me that the speed is only twenty-five miles an hour. I don't care what it is. I tell you, and you can prove it for yourself, if you will, that that train, if mingled flat cars and coaches that goes tearing into the night, its engine whistles shrieking out its warning into the silent woods and echoing over the dull, still lake, is the fastest train in the whole world. Yes, and the best, too, the most comfortable, the most reliable, the most luxurious, and the speediest train that ever turned a wheel. And the most genial, the most sociable, too. See how the passengers all turn and talk to one another now, as they get nearer and nearer to the little town. That dull reserve that seemed to hold the passengers in the electric suburban has clean vanished and gone. They are talking, listen, of the harvest, and the late election, and of how the local member is mentioned for the Cabinet and all the old familiar topics of the sort. Already the conductor has changed his glazed hat for an ordinary round Christy, and you can hear the passengers calling him and the breaksmen, Bill and Sam, as if they were all one family. What is it now, nine-thirty? Ah, then we must be nearing the town. This big bush that we are passing through. You remember it, surely, as the great swamp just this side of the bridge over the Ossa Whippy. There is the bridge itself, and the long roar of the train as it rushes sounding over the trestle work that rise above the marsh. Hear the clatter as we pass the semaphores and switchlights. We must be close in now. What? It feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after all these years? It must indeed. No, don't bother to look at the reflection of her face in the window-pane shadowed by the night outside. Nobody could tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in these long years of money getting in the city. Perhaps if you had come back now and again, just at odd times it wouldn't have been so. There, you hear it? The long whistle of the locomotive. One, two, three. You feel the sharp slackening of the train as it swings around the curve of the last embankment that brings it to the Mariposa Station. See, too, as we round the curve, the row of the flashing lights, the bright windows of the depot. How vivid and plain it all is. Just as it used to be thirty years ago. There is the string of the hotel buses drawn up already for the train, and as the train rounds in and stops, hissing and panting at the platform, you can hear above all other sounds the cry of the breaksmen and the porters, Mariposa, Mariposa. And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears, and we are sitting here again in the leather chairs of the mausoleum club, talking of the little town in the sunshine that, once, we knew. End of Chapter 12 End of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock