And it was just at this juncture, with one hour of 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 sub-committee 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, "wire 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 hull town 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 Newspacket with the telegraphic despatch 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 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 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 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 that 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.Ginghams 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 Pythias (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, and 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 Ispoke of above, for it turned out that they were all Conservatives.
Then there were the speeches.Judge Pepperleigh 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 that 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.
