CHAPTER X. YOUNG AMERICA IN POLITICS.

For a month Jack labored manfully to keep his pledge to eschew the society of boys, and a very miserable month it was. He at first determined to not even answer any boy who spoke to him, but this led to his being called "Proudy," and "Codfish," and "Bloated Aristocrat." All this was very galling to a youth who considered himself as pre-eminently a man of the people. Then, one day, as he was hoeing potatoes in the family garden, half a dozen boys leaned on the fence for an hour, and shouted themselves hoarse by exclaiming in concert, "Tombstone!" To hold one's tongue, as Jack did throughout the infliction, is to prove one's self a possessor of a high degree of self-control. When, however, the half dozen boys grew angry at their inability to elicit any response, and began to throw stones at the young gardener, Jack's endurance escaped him suddenly and he dashed at the fence, hoe in hand. All the boys fled except one who, being a rowdy, had hugged one of the palings in the affectionate manner peculiar to rowdies, and had unconsciously established an entangling alliance between the paling and a hole in his shirt. Him, Jack pounded over the head with the hoe handle until utter breathlessness compelled the operator to discontinue his labors; then Jack cut him loose with his pocket-knife and sent him away after an interchange of terrible threats had been effected. As the rowdy's skull had a roof of wondrous thickness, he sustained no injury in his mental parts, so he changed his base only to a point from which he could watch Jack's going in and coming out.

An hour later, as Jack was going to the store, with two empty jugs to be filled, respectively, with vinegar and molasses, the rowdy sprang at him from a sheltering fence corner. Jack shouted "Foul!" but the rowdy was not particular to regard the rules of the ring just then, so he stuck one dirty finger in Jack's mouth so as to obtain a secure grip, and then with amazing celerity, invested Jack with a bloody nose and a black eye. Jack was not going to abandon the family property, even in a fight, so he retained tight hold of the jugs, raised his hands alternately and smote his antagonist, first with one jug and then with the other. Then the rowdy made haste to cry "Foul!" but Jack, merely remarking, "What's sauce for the goose—" allowed the rowdy to complete the quotation for himself, striking him meanwhile wherever an unprotected point presented itself. A final blow in the pit of the stomach caused the rowdy to curl up on the lap of mother earth, and then Jack discovered, for the first time, that all that remained of the jugs were their respective handles, and that the rowdy was bleeding profusely in several places.

Jack had never before seen a more dangerous wound than a cut finger, and even of these he had seen but one at a time, so he greatly feared that the rowdy would bleed to death. What to do, he did not know; he recalled the little affair of Moses with the Egyptian taskmaster, and determined that flight was the dictate of prudence, but as for burying his victim in the sand, there was no sand nearer than the river bank, a mile away, and the dirt under the rowdy was a hard-beaten footpath. Away flew Jack toward home and into his father's office, where he exclaimed:

"Father, there's a rowdy dying out on the path to the store."

"Heaven be praised!" said the doctor; "that'll lessen the state prison expenses a few dollars."

"He's bleeding to death," explained Jack.

"Oh," said the doctor arising and snatching a case of instruments, "that's a different thing; it now becomes an opportunity for experimental surgery."

"It was I that killed him," continued Jack, in a very thin voice.

"Eh?" exclaimed the doctor, dropping his instruments. "Then you'd better get out as fast as you can, and not let me know where you are until you have to. Don't ever do it—I don't want even to see you again—I wash my hands of you forever."

"Father!" screamed Jack in utter agony, while gallows trees sprung up before his eyes in every direction, "let me tell you how it was." And Jack hastily detailed his experiences of the morning, concluding with:

"It was all because I was trying so hard to mind you, and not have anything to do with boys."

The doctor threw his arms around the youth, and exclaimed:

"You're a darling, noble, splendid boy, but there is no knowing how a jury may look at the case, when your previous reputation is considered. Get ready to hide."

Jack hurried up to his room for what seemed to him necessities, but he had time to reflect upon his varied experiences to do right, with their lamentable results, and to wonder if it were not really true, as was implied by some novels he had been unfortunate enough to read, that fate occasionally forbade some people to do right successfully. Of one thing he was very sure; come what would, he never could ask nice little Mattie Baker to become the wife of a murderer. Then he tiptoed feebly, after one or two ineffectual efforts, to his father's room, which overlooked the scene of the battle; it might be that the doctor had reached the wounded boy in time to staunch the flow of blood before it was eternally too late. From the window, Jack, with great astonishment and not entirely without disgust, beheld the rowdy sauntering away with his hands in his pockets, while beside him walked the doctor, violently shaking his fist and head at the beaten man, and filling the air with threats which a breeze wafted back to Jack.

The surprise was too much for Jack's nerves; he dropped upon his father's bed and doubted whether he ever would regain his breath again; then he bemoaned the loss of the vagabond life which had been just within his grasp, and which is the ideal of every boy at a certain period of his life. From this he was recovered by the thought that, after all, nice little Mattie Barker was not to be entirely a memory of the past. His eye and nose finally obtruded themselves upon his attention, and very unsightly objects they were in a mirror; he hoped nice little Mattie Barker would not see him until his face regained its natural appearance; and he would certainly take care never to have himself so disfigured again.

Then his father returned, hastily searched the house for Jack, caught him in his arms, and actually cried over him, upon which the boy felt himself a hero indeed. But when his father assured him that his latest exploit would have a wonderful effect in keeping boys away from him, Jack did not seem so elated as the doctor would have had him; he looked so solemn that the doctor asked what the matter was, and Jack burst out crying, and answered:

"I'm so dreadfully lonely all the time."

The doctor started to ask if either he or his wife were not always at home, but recalling the drift of a previous conversation on the same topic, he grew suddenly very cool and undemonstrative and removed himself, whereupon Jack, who read the human face as correctly as boys usually do, waxed angry, and lost sight of all his principles, as every one does in anger, and determined that if he could not have fun with the boys he would have it without them, and have all he wanted, too.

He did not lose much time in discovering a way of amusing himself. August had worked through into September, and though the public was to have no opportunity of disarranging national affairs at the ballot-box that autumn, a gubernatorial campaign had opened most vigorously in the State of which Doveton considered itself the mainstay. The rival candidates were Baggs and Puttytop, and though both were men of fair intellect and reputation, as politicians go, and the adult mind could find but little reason to distinguish between them, the boys of Doveton, who never for a moment doubted that they were in perfect sympathy with the inner sense of statesmanship, and knew the constitutional rights and special needs of Doveton beside, were, to a man, for Baggs. Jack had gained this precious bit of information from Matt, so he promptly ranged himself, mentally, with his natural allies, and sought for means to discourage the Puttytop adherents, who stupidly saw not though they had eyes, and heard not though they had ears.

Just then an announcement was made that the famous General Twitchwire, who was stumping the state for Puttytop, would address the sovereign voters of Doveton in the main room of the county court house, on the evening of the second Wednesday in September, the regular fall session of the county court having begun on the morning of the same day, and the town being full of countrymen who had legal grievances of their own, or of some one else, to look to.

Now the county court house was a new building which the demon of improvement had lately caused to be erected, and as the appropriations had been exhausted in the manner not unknown to political managers elsewhere, the main room was the only one which had been completed. Pipes had been laid for gas, one of them terminating in the ceiling in the centre of the room, but for evening meetings it was, at present, necessary to light lamps or candles. So, early in the afternoon preceding the Puttytop meeting, Jack secreted himself in an upper room of the court house, with a monkey-wrench, a gunmaker's saw, and a yard of rubber tubing in his shirt bosom. He dragged a step ladder down into the main room, and standing upon this he wrenched from its place the cap upon the pipe from which the central chandelier was one day to hang. Then he returned to the room above, sawed in two the pipe which was to feed the chandelier, stretched an end of his rubber tube over the lower portion of severed pipe, and yelled through it to test the apparatus. He heard his cry repeated in the lower room so distinctly that his only fear was that somebody outside might hear it. Then he sat upon the floor, munched crackers, wished that he had a drink of water, and waited.

Evening came at last, and from the edges of the window casings, Jack saw the adherents of Puttytop coming from various directions. From the neighborhood of the hotel came the noise of the Doveton Brass Band playing "Hail to the Chief;" this indicated that the famous General Twitchwire was to be escorted in style to the court house, and Jack lamented that he could not be outside, behind some good board fence, to throw stones at the band, but he recalled the line,
"They also serve who stand and wait,"

from the Sixth Reader, and was nobly sustained thereby. Then the sound of the music came nearer, the band playing
"The Campbells are coming,"

and then Jack saw a transparency, and yet another, and it required every word of his comforting line to support him in his privation. A tremendous hubbub in the room below came up through the gas pipe and rubber tube, and Jack applied his ear to the latter to hear what General Twitchwire might endeavor to delude his hearers into believing.

The address began on time, and General Twitchwire had just informed his audience that if through supineness and lack of concerted action the gubernatorial chair became occupied, he would not say filled, by a person with the deficient mental acumen and erroneous views which characterized the person who was the standard-bearer of the party opposed to good government, the consequence could not fail to be most disastrous—when a distant yet loud voice was heard to exclaim,—

"You don't say!"

The speaker glared angrily about, and the chairman of the meeting, who had taken the precaution to arrange that admission should be only by tickets of a peculiar color, wondered whether counterfeit tickets had been imposed upon the doorkeeper. The general resumed the thread of his discourse, and had just pronounced a glowing eulogium upon Puttytop, when a voice exclaimed:

"Hang Puttytop! Give us a man!"

Then the sheriff and two constables, all of whom were Puttytop men, began suspiciously to scan the audience. But not a Baggs adherent could they see, except Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel, to whom it was well known that a frequenter of Gripp's rum-shop had sold a ticket for ten cents, the inducement offered being that the meeting would close with a lottery, in which every ticket holder would be entitled to a prize of some sort. But Nuderkopf, judging by his snores, was slumbering soundly; besides, the disturbing voice used a better English accent than Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel could ever be suspected of acquiring.

Several other remarks of the speaker were greeted with derisive yells through Jack's speaking tube, and the famous General Twitchwire took occasion to remark, with a great display of offended dignity, that if the authorities could not suppress such disturbers it was pretty certain that the party in Doveton was upon its last legs.

"Gott macht es!" (God grant!) shouted Jack down the pipe.

This seemed to offer a clue to the offender. The language was certainly Nuderkopf Trinkelspiel's, and he was positively the only Baggs man present, so the sheriff and the two constables dashed at him and rudely aroused him. It was the only evening meeting, except some of a religious character, which Nuderkopf had attended during his residence in Doveton; he had frequently to be aroused in church; he was very religious and musically inclined; the force of association caused him to imagine he was in church; the silence to indicate a temporary and dangerous stagnation of religious service, so he cleared his throat and successfully launched the first line of a devotional song before he opened his eyes, when a rude hand was clapped over his mouth and another was applied with great force to the side of his head, and then he was pulled at and dragged, and finally lifted over the back of his seat, which happened to be the last bench of the jury box, and was dropped out of the window, landing on the sidewalk three feet below, in a state of confusion which bordered upon imbecility.

This was too much for such of Nuderkopf's religious associates as were there present, even although they were Puttytop men, so they arose to points of order, several of them speaking at a time, and they were rebuked by the chair, and hooted at by the rowdies, who always infested political meetings; and one excitable German cast an opprobrious epithet at a conspicuous rowdy, and the rowdy retorted by snatching a transparency from a bearer and throwing it lancewise at the German, and the cloth caught fire, and a general yell ensued, and everybody looked out for number one, with the result of making number two of everybody else, and the famous General Twitchwire stepped suddenly to a window and jumped out, and the sheriff and the two constables bawled "order" until they were themselves their only auditors, and a body of quiet but observant Baggs men in the window of a house directly opposite, agreed with each other that the Puttytop ticket didn't seem to be looking up so very much, after all.