City and town life -- Fiction; Love stories; Middle West -- Fiction; Political fiction
B. B. said that was exactly what he meant. And Wint was interested; he
asked some questions. He had heard of advertising rates as things of
astounding proportions; and so he was surprised to find that a full-page
advertisement in the _Journal_ would only cost him ten dollars. He
laughed and said he could stand half a dozen of those. B. B. told him to
put an advertisement in each Hardiston paper, and let them appear in
every issue till the election. “Say the same thing, over and over, in
different ways,” he advised. “Try it. You’ll be surprised.”
In the end, Wint decided to do just this. B. B. helped him write the
advertisements. In them, Wint recited what he had done and what he meant
to do, but briefly. In each full, black-lettered page, the burden of his
song was just three words, repeated over and over:
“Vote for Chase; vote for Chase; vote for Chase.”
* * * * *
Amos came home toward the end of October; and when Wint heard he was in
town, he telephoned and made arrangements to see him at his home that
night. When he got there, Amos was upstairs. He called to Wint to go
into the sitting room and wait, and Wint went in there and sat down.
After a moment, Agnes came in to restore a book to its place on the
shelves, and Wint got up and stood, talking with her. He thought she
seemed uneasy, on edge. Her eyes went now and then through the open door
toward the stairs down which Amos would come. She fumbled with her hair,
and a lock became disarranged and fell down beside her face.
She said, abruptly, that there was something in her shoe; and she held
to his arm with one hand, and stood on one foot, and pulled off her
slipper and shook it, upside down. Then she seemed to lose her balance
and toppled toward Wint; and he caught her in his arms. She straightened
up and pushed him away with what seemed to him unnecessary force; and
then turned and went swiftly out into the hall without a word. He looked
after her, and saw Amos, halfway down the stairs, watching them with a
curiously grave countenance; and Wint, for no reason in the world, was
confused, and felt his face burning. He looked down and saw Agnes’s
slipper on the floor, where she had dropped it; and he slid it out of
sight under the bookcase before Amos came into the room. He was sorry as
soon as he had done this; but Agnes had somehow contrived to make him
feel guilty. He could hardly face Amos when the Congressman came into
the room. He had a miserable feeling that everything was going wrong;
all the trifles in the world seemed conspiring to harass him.
But Amos seemed to have seen nothing. He was perfectly amiable, bade
Wint sit down, filled his black pipe, squinted at Wint with his head on
one side and asked how things were going.
Wint said they were going badly; and Amos smiled.
“Why, now, that’s too bad,” he declared.
“I wasn’t made for a campaigner,” Wint said. “I’ll never be able to make
a speech.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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