After a moment she added, almost in a whisper:
"He's asked me--and I've refused to marry him."
"You--refused him?" The voice was incredulous. "Why, gal, everybody knows ye've always thought he was a piece of the moon."
"I still think so," she made gallant response. "But I wants ye to--jest trust me--an' not ask any more questions."
The father sat there stiffly gazing off to the far ridges, and his eyes were those of a man grief-stricken. Once or twice his raggedly bearded lips stirred in inarticulate movements, but finally he rose and laid a hand on her shoulder.
"Little gal," he said in a broken voice, "I reckon I've got ter suffer ye ter decide fer yoreself--hit's yore business most of all--but I don't never want him ter speak ter me ergin."
So Boone went out upon the hustings with none of the eager zest of his anticipations. That district was so solidly one-sided in political complexion that the November elections were nothing more than formalities, and the real conflict came to issue in the August primaries.
But with Boone's announcement as candidate for circuit clerk, old animosities that had lain long dormant stirred into restive mutterings. The personnel of the "high court" had been to a considerable extent dominated by the power of the Carrs and Blairs.
Now with the news that Boone Wellver, a young and "wishful" member of the Gregory house, meant to seek a place under the teetering clock tower of the court house, anxieties began to simmer. Into his candidacy the Carrs read an effort to enhance Gregory power--and they rose in resistance. Jim Blair, a cousin of Tom Carr, threw down his gauntlet of challenge and announced himself as a contestant, so that the race began to assume the old-time cleavage of the feud.
On muleback and on foot, Boone followed up many a narrowing creek bed to sources where dwelt the "branch-water folk." Here, in animal-like want and squalor, the crudest of all the uncouth race lived and begot offspring and died. Here where vacuous-eyed children of an inbred strain stared out from the doors of crumbling and windowless shacks, or fled from a strange face, he campaigned among the illiterate elders and oftentimes he sickened at what he saw.
Yet these people of yesterday were his people--and they offered him of their pitiful best even when their ignorance was so incredible that the name of the divinity was to them only "somethin' a feller cusses with"--and he felt that his campaign was prospering.