The Naulahka | Page 7

from that Arabian Nights section, don't
they?'
'Well, you are not to come,' she said definitively. 'You must keep away.
Remember that.'
Tarvin got up suddenly. 'Oh, good-night! Good-night!' he cried.
He shook himself together impatiently, and waved her from him with a
parting gesture of rejection and cancellation. She followed him into the
passage, where he was gloomily taking his hat from its wonted peg; but
he would not even let her help him on with his coat.
No man can successfully conduct a love-affair and a political canvass at
the same time. It was perhaps the perception of this fact that had led
Sheriff to bend an approving eye on the attentions which his opponent
in the coming election had lately been paying. his daughter. Tarvin had
always been interested in Kate, but not so consecutively and intensely.
Sheriff was stumping the district and was seldom at home, but in his
irregular appearances at Topaz he smiled stolidly on his rival's
occupation. In looking forward to an easy victory over him in the joint
debate at Ca–on City, however, he had perhaps relied too much on the
younger man's absorption. Tarvin's consciousness that he had not been
playing his party fair had lately chafed against his pride of success. The
result was irritation, and Kate's prophecies and insinuations were
pepper on an open wound.
The Ca–on City meeting was set down for the night following the
conversation just recorded, and Tarvin set foot on the shaky dry goods
box platform at the roller skating rink that night, with a raging young
intention to make it understood that he was still here--if he was in love.
Sheriff had the opening, and Tarvin sat in the background dangling a
long, restless leg from one knee. The patchily illumined huddle of
auditors below him looked up at a nervous, bony, loosehung man, with
a kind, clever, aggressive eye, and a masterful chin. His nose was

prominent, and he had the furrowed forehead and the hair thinned about
the temples which come to young men in the West. The alert, acute
glance which went roving about the hall, measuring the audience to
which he was to speak, had the look of sufficiency to the next need,
whatever it might be, which, perhaps, more than anything else,
commends men to other men beyond the Mississippi. He was dressed
in the short sack-coat, which is good enough for most Western public
functions; but he had left at Topaz the flannel of everyday wear, and
was clad in the white linen of civilisation.
He was wondering, as he listened to Sheriff, how a father could have
the heart to get off false views on silver and the tariff to this crowd,
while his daughter was hatching that ghastly business at home. The true
views were so much mixed up in his own mind with Kate, that when he
himself rose at last to answer Sheriff, he found it hard not to ask how
the deuce a man expected an intelligent mass meeting to accept the
political economy he was trying to apply to the government of a State,
when he couldn't so much as run his own family? Why in the world
didn't he stop his daughter from making such a hash of her life?--that
was what he wanted to know. What were fathers for? He reserved these
apt remarks, and launched instead upon a flood of figures, facts, and
arguments.
Tarvin had precisely the gift by which the stump orator coils himself
into the heart of the stump auditor: he upbraided, he arraigned; he
pleaded, insisted, denounced; he raised his lean, long arms, and called
the gods and the statistics and the Republican party to witness, and,
when he could make a point that way, he did not scorn to tell a story.
'Why,' he would cry defiantly, in that colloquial shout which the
political orator uses for his anecdotes, 'that is like a man I used to know
back in Wisconsin, who----' It wasn't very much like the man in
Wisconsin; and Tarvin had never been in Wisconsin, and didn't know
the man; but it was a good story, and when the crowd howled with
delight Sheriff gathered himself together a little and tried to smile, and
that was what Tarvin wanted.
There were dissentient voices, and the jointness of the debate was

sometimes not confined to the platform; but the deep, relishing groans
which would often follow applause or laughter, acted as a spur to
Tarvin, who had joined the janitor of the rink that afternoon in mixing
the dusky brew on the table before him, and who really did not need a
spur. Under the inspiration of the mixture in, the pitcher, the passionate
resolve in his heart, and the groans and hisses,