Mountain Part 39

"I appreciate that, and I'll remember it."

The strike committee heard what had occurred within an hour, as far as Pelham's decision was concerned.

"Good boy!" said Spence. "Give 'em a run for their dirty money."

Serrano, an unofficial member of the group, broke in excitedly. "Why not run Judson as labor candidate for sheriff, and elect him? That's the best answer to make to the crooks! You'd run, wouldn't you?"

Pelham thought rapidly. It would at least give a wonderful chance for propaganda, even if they couldn't overcome the big odds against them. "I don't think we could win----"

"Win? We'd lick the lights out of 'em! Man, Adamsville's waking up! With the strike going on, you could beat out d.i.c.k Sumter hands down! Look how he's turned the sheriff's office over to the companies! Will you do it?"

There might be something in it; his heart expanded sharply from the excitement. He kept his voice level. "I'd be willing to, of course. What do you think of it, Ben?"

The cautious labor lawyer was not so enthusiastic. "You might do it, Judson. You'd have to have union labor entirely behind you----"

"We can make 'em endorse him!"

"Socialist and all?" quizzed Spence, smiling doubtfully.

"Sure! Think what it would mean to the strike, if we had the sheriff's office! We could enforce order then.... They'd have no chance to call out their bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned w.i.l.l.i.e.s."

"Well, it's a big chance."

The hearing at Jackson, the next week, was the cut-and-dried farce that Pratt Judson and Spence had predicted. The governor was friendly but firm. "It's my duty, Mr. Judson, as a servant of all the people, to remove you."

Jane, on fire with the idea of the campaign, caught his hand impulsively when he hurried back to tell her. "Don't mind it. We knew what they would do.... Now--show them!"

The thing moved slowly. There were countless obstacles. Pooley, Bowden, the regular machine, would not hear of it. An uproarious meeting of the Trade Council shoved through an endors.e.m.e.nt. The leaders changed their talk then, but Pelham felt their hidden antipathy working against him.

So far there had been no open announcement of the race, and it was now the last week of August.

"Ben Spence, you've got to put this thing over. Hire Arlington Hall--the socialist local will put up the money--and start it next Sunday afternoon."

"Hadn't we better wait until things are straightened out a bit----"

"We'll wait until election's over, then. We've waited three weeks now."

"All right. Dawson says he'll back you; he's worth a lot."

Then began first-hand knowledge of the detail of politics for Pelham.

Even before the announcement meeting, the socialist local, in its haphazard groping for democracy, selected a committee to steer the campaign. They met in Pelham's office the next night.

Pelham mused over their faces, as they blundered down to business.

Surely the most extraordinary group ever a.s.sembled to direct the political destinies of Adamsville! Serrano, a bricklayer, a loud voiced, commanding bulk of a man, who banged with the improvised gavel; Christopher Duckworth, pioneer in the Adamsville movement, an impecunious old architect who had had his name on the state ticket at every election for sixteen years; two machinists, fighting units of a fighting group, "Mule" Hinton and Henry Gup; the party's state secretary, Mrs. Ola Spigner, who had come up from her farm in Choctaw County, ever on hand for a fight; Phifer Craft, a failure as a commission merchant, and a deep theoretical student of Marx and Dietzgen; Abe Katz, spokesman of the tailors' union and the Arbeiter Ring; and his landlady, Mrs. Hernandez, invariable woman member on committees. They were not even leaders in their trades, except Serrano and perhaps Katz. Most were poor speakers or spoke not at all. But out of the ill-lit slums and lean cheap suburbs they had been flung together by a burning idealism for a greater world. They were the hands of a people's groping faith.

"I mofe we elect us a treasurer," said Abe Katz seriously. So began the business of the campaign.

Dawson, Ben Spence, even Bowden and the Bivens group dropped in at occasional meetings; but this faithful nucleus was always on hand, doing the real work. They mapped out the itinerary of speakers, got out the first literature, sent soliciting committees to the various unions for endors.e.m.e.nt and funds, in fact directed the whole campaign.

Any of the comrades were willing to be broken in as chairmen of the meetings. The speaking at first fell heavily on Serrano, Duckworth, and Pelham himself; but gradually the liberal element of the city came into the fight. Dr. Gulley threw the support of his Free Congregation into the contest with the "County Ring," as represented by Sumter; near-radical lawyers, Will Tatum, Judge Deason, Harvey Cade, eager to oust the corporation toadies, were invaluable a.s.sistants; Lane Cullom's car was always at the call of the committee, and shared with Pelham's the duty of touring the rambling county roads to the further meetings.

The unique campaign drew crowds from the start. One night Pelham called for a show of hands of all the men present who were voters; the result was so astonis.h.i.+ng, that he repeated the lesson again and again. In West Adamsville, filled with itinerant furnace workers, not one man in fifteen was a voter. In the country districts, about one in ten; in the city, slightly less. With the aid of Ben Spence, he looked up the question, and thereafter added a vigorous attack on the election laws to his onslaughts on the company-owned sheriff's office.

"Do you know what your servants down in Jackson did in 1902, when they framed the new Const.i.tution? They told you it would take the vote from 'the n.i.g.g.e.rs'; it took the vote from you white men as well. In New York, in Illinois, in most of the northern and eastern states, from eighteen to twenty-two per cent of the population vote; in Western suffrage states, up to thirty-five per cent. And in the South? Georgia has something like five per cent, this state four, and Mississippi only three and a half per cent! Half of the men in this state are white; six out of every ten of these have been disfranchised by that Const.i.tution.

The c.u.mulative poll tax, which says you can't vote unless every poll tax since 1902 has been paid by the February before the election, the grandfather clause, giving votes to the southern slave-masters and not to the southern wage-slaves who make the state's wealth now, these have robbed you of your voice in the government. The southern laborer has been cla.s.sed with children, women, negroes, and idiots--will you stand for it?"

The campaign, thanks to the _Register's_ hearty support, began to alarm the politicians. Pat Donohoo, who controlled five saloons, and claimed to be able to deliver the Irish and Catholic vote, came in to see Pelham. "We know your father," he confided huskily. "Give me your word that you'll behave when you're elected, and I'll see that you get every Catholic and Irish vote in the county. We're out to teach d.i.c.k Sumter a lesson."

Pelham answered briskly. "Of course I'll behave. My platform says what I'll do, Donohoo. If your men want to vote for me, go to it. They'll get a square deal from me, I'll promise that."

"You see," he explained to the committee, "he's playing safe. No matter who's elected, he can claim the credit."

"Never trust them Catholics," said Mrs. Spigner, a devout propagandist for the _Menace_. "They're all Jesuits."

"He couldn't deliver anyhow," consoled Ben Spence.

The crafty lawyer made the labor support fairly solid, by promising liberal appointments to the State Federation crowd. Pelham did not know about this, and Spence did not imagine that the promises would have to be fulfilled.

For one of the meetings the candidate worked harder than usual. It had been old Duckworth's suggestion that a speaking be advertised for the corner across from the University Club, in the very heart of the "silk-stocking" district. The neighborhood was liberally posted, and the committee were on hand to cover the retreat of the speakers, if too much of a riot developed. To their surprise, the large crowd listened to Dr.

Gulley's fervent appeals, to the withering sarcasm of Harvey Cade, and to Judson's vitriolic attack on the leisure cla.s.s, with close and appreciative attention. One or two of the East Highlands boys hooted a few times, but a policeman routed them. The applause was as hearty here as at Hazelton or Irondale.

Pelham's opponent stirred himself tardily, and was careful not to answer the accurate broadside of charges flung at him by the deposed mining inspector. General attacks on socialism were much more popular than lame apologies for an unfair and one-sided administration; and the common charge that American socialism was pro-German was roared and ballyhooed by the political servants of the corporations, upon platforms opulently framed in bunting. Pelham laughed at this intense patriotism, suddenly discovered as an answer to the sheriff's anti-labor activities; but it made continual inroads upon his strength with the docile people. The tide wavered to and fro; the _Register_ claimed four days before election that Judson's chances were better than even; the alarmed opposing sheets insisted that there was only one man in the race, and that the iron city would never tolerate a man who openly advocated free love, kaiserism, and the despotism of the mob.

The closing rally of the Democrats came on Sat.u.r.day night, an old-fas.h.i.+oned whooping wind-up in the Lyric theater; Pelham covered five county meetings and two city ones during the same time. Monday night, while the opposing forces rested their public activities, occurred the Judson finale, at Main Park, in the rickety summer band-stand. The trampled green in the open heart of the city was black with intent and serious faces, whose throats cheered themselves hoa.r.s.e over the hoa.r.s.ened voice of their leader,--though his tones, roughened by night after night of straining open-air talking, could barely reach half of his crowd.

The final applause was given; the reporters rushed off with their copy; the squads of comrades and union men left with their wives and children for cheap scattered homes. Pelham took Jane back to the Andersons', to sit, glum and wholly exhausted, slumped against the back of the couch, until after two.

"Never mind, you dear old fighter," she insisted. "You've done more than anyone else could."

Tuesday, election day, was a hectic tumult of excitement for both sides.

Lane Cullom insisted on driving Pelham in his car, proud of the reflected light that went to the faithful aid of the candidate. The relief of shooting along chill stretches of November road from polling-place to polling-place was indescribable.

At five the polls closed. Pelham, after a lunch-stand supper, sat in his half-dismantled headquarters, his finger upon the pulse of the wires that led to every part of the county.

The returns began. One by one the faithful precincts lifted Judson to a good lead, and increased it. Hazelton, West Adamsville, distant Coalstock, the mining boxes, all went well, more than neutralizing the early farming returns, which were four to one for Sumter. And then the totals grew evener, and wavered now one way, now another. The vocal vote was Judson's; the silent, unchangeable Democratic ma.s.s began to lend its weight to the inc.u.mbent. There was still a fighting chance. Counting at the city boxes proceeded with sickening slowness.

The last of the county returns was wired from distant Chinaberry Junction: Judson led by fifty-two votes! If the city had broken even, he would have it!

The jubilant comrades and strikers conscripted sudden parades of celebration; the corporations were licked! It would paralyze the companies to have the law-enforcers, their oldtime bulwark, turned against them!

Then, as if at the touch of a single lever, the thirteen big city boxes unloosed their flood of figures. First ward, Sumter, a hundred lead; eleventh, Sumter three hundred ahead; ninth, Sumter, two hundred more; fifth, eight hundred and eighty to the good for Sumter--this was the Highlands ward; not one lone box tallying for Judson. Within twenty minutes, enough of the returns were in to convince Pelham that the citizens of Bragg County had spoken in their freeborn majesty, and had chosen Richard Sumter sheriff by a majority of almost two to one.

The morning papers gave the corrected figures--8,450 to 4,281. The corporations still held the court house.

"It's really a victory," Mrs. Spigner, the state secretary, repeated with cheerless optimism, as Pelham drove her to the early mail train for Choctaw County. "You raised a socialist vote of six hundred something like six hundred per cent. You impatient youngsters, who think one election has any importance! Remember, comrade, it's all a part of the cla.s.s struggle!"

At the end of a day of fatiguing post mortems and loquacious consolations, of noisy a.s.surances that he had won, punctuating his dismemberment of the decapitated headquarters, he sought his real inspiriter, Jane. The city lay under a s.h.i.+mmer of thin November suns.h.i.+ne, that woke to dusky gold the tawny leaves flickering, at the chilly breeze's lash, upon motionless black boughs--that revealed pitilessly the feathery plumes of golden rod reaching over the sidewalk from the vacant lot beyond Andersons', plumes the season's slow alchemy had trans.m.u.ted to insubstantial silver fragility, sifting into the reddish mold at the fingering of the spurts of ground wind. Pelham would have preferred a drizzling, cloud-heavy night sky, in which the decrepit cheerfulness of the late landscape, and he himself, could have been decently shrouded in isolating obscurity.

Jane gave him both her hands as he mounted the last step, reading, in the drawn corners of his mouth, and the heaviness beneath his eyes, the half-raised signals of surrender.