Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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“Why didn’t you kill him, Jim?” one of them asked.

“Oh,” he said with an affectation of modesty as he dropped his eyes and with his hand made moral protest, “I wanted him to print his story first. I’ll have to kill him some day, but I reckon I won’t have time before election.”

While Rankin was extravagant in talk, he calculated pretty accurately the effect of his words, and never said many things, in a political way at least, that came back to plague him. His conception of Pusey’s motives was eagerly accepted by his own party men, and they went home with a new passion for work in the wards and townships.

Pusey meanwhile had been standing on street corners in Grand Prairie, swinging his cane, and glancing out with a shifty eye from under his yellow straw hat, but men avoided him or when they spoke to him, did so with a pleasantry that was wholly feigned and always overdone, because they feared to antagonize him. Rankin had not seen him since the publication of his screed, but one evening, going into the Cassell House, he saw the soiled little editor leaning against the counter of the cigar stand. The big man strode up to him, and his red face and neck grew redder, as he seized Pusey by the collar of his coat.