and bet on the
horses. It was even said that he had procured a jockey to throw a stake
race. He announced that he had finally quit school, which he argued was
a waste of time, as he intended to practice law and enter politics.

He was the owner of a fine saddle mare and a gelding that could trot a
mile on the smooth turnpike to a light side-bar buggy in 2:45. Either
riding the one or driving the other he attended all the farm auctions;
nor did he ever miss a county court day or jury trial at either Richmond
or Lancaster. At these trials he first sat back of the railing; then,
making friends with the sheriff, the clerk and the younger lawyers, he
sat within the reservation for members of the bar. The sheriff and clerk
had each offered to appoint him a deputy, but these honors he declined
with thanks. When he was twenty-one he was more than six feet tall,
weighed a hundred and seventy and, as the sheriff said, was the
hustlingest politician in the county. He had been voting for several
years.

Though his folks were Republicans, and had been since the Civil War, he
deemed it a political mistake to vote that ticket in a Democratic
county. At an early age he began voting and working in the Democratic
primaries and soon acquired considerable influence with farm laborers
and tenant-farmers, the men who usually do the voting in country
primaries.

One summer morning (he was not yet twenty-four) he told his father he
was going to put one over on old man Chenault and beat him for the
Legislature. Colonel Chenault was a native of the county; he had been a
lieutenant in the Confederate army, was a rich farmer and, it was
generally supposed, would have no opposition for re-election.

Caleb began riding over the county, telling the tenant-farmers and
laborers that they should send from a farming community a representative
who was a laboring man like themselves, instead of a land-grabbing
"Colonel," a man who thought himself better than anybody else. "Has
Colonel Chenault or his wife or his daughters ever been in your house?
You see them often at the house on the hill. Did he ever speak to or
shake hands with you? Yes, when he was a candidate for the Legislature;
then he wipes his hand on the seat of his pants."

"That's right; I never thought about that; but who'll we run?"

"You run."

"Oh, I ain't got no education much; I've got to harvest this crop."

"Well, we'll find somebody, even if I have to run to beat the damn
ar