“Well, they've licked us this time!” said Dabney Prentiss, who afterward went to Congress from the district and made a brilliant record there. Dabney Prentiss had been the younger element's candidate for circuit-court judge against old Judge Priest. “They've licked us and the Lord only knows how they did it. Here we thought we had 'em out-organized, outgeneraled and outnumbered. All they did was to go out in the back districts and beat the bushes, and out crawled a lot of old men that everybody else thought were dead twenty years ago. I think they must hide under logs in the woods and only come out to vote. But, fellows”--he was addressing some of his companions in disappointment--“but, fellows, we can afford to wait and they can't. The day is going to come when it'll take something more than shaking an empty sleeve or waving a crippled old leg to carry an election in this county. Young men keep growing up all the time, but all that old men can do is to die off. Four years from now we'll win sure!” The four years went by, creakingly slow of passage to some and rolling fast to others; and in the summer of the fourth year another campaign started up and grew hot and hotter to match the weather, which was blazing hot. The August drought came, an arid and a blistering visitation. Except at dusk and at dawn the birds quit singing and hung about in the thick treetops, silent and nervous, with their bills agape and their throat feathers panting up and down. The roasting ears burned to death on the stalk and the wide fodder blades slowly cooked from sappy greenness to a brittle dead brown. The clods in the cornrows wore dry as powder and gave no nourishment for growing, ripening things. The dust powdered the blackberry vines until they lost their original color altogether, and at the roadside the medicinal mullein drooped its wilted long leaves, like lolling tongues that were all furred and roiled, as though the mullein suffered from the very fevers that its steeped juices are presumed to cure. At its full the moon shone hot and red, with two rings round it; and the two rings always used to mean water in our country--two rings for drinking water at the hotel, and for rainwater two rings round the moon--but week after week no rain fell and the face of the earth just seemed to dry up and blow away. Yet the campaign neither lost its edge nor abated any of its fervor by reason of the weather. Politics was the chief diversion and the main excitement in our county in those days--and still is.