"Hobart, what a nuisance you are!" replied Harley; "you are always
prowling around in search of useless facts. Now, I don't want to hear
anything about bloodshed and massacre, when Belleville is the picture of
neatness and comfort that it is to-day. Look at that little opera-house
over there! You couldn't find anything handsomer in a city of fifty
thousand in the East."

"Harley," said Hobart, with emphasis, "I wouldn't have your lack of
curiosity for anything in the world," and he wandered away in disgust to
pour his ancient history into the ears of a more willing listener.

At twilight they ate an admirable dinner, and then Harley, Hobart, who
had returned from his explorations, Blaisdell, and two or three others,
after their custom, filled in the interval between supper and the
speeches with a stroll through the village, Mr. Plummer going along as a
sort of mentor. The keeper of the hotel informed them that many of the
Indians already were in town and were "tanking up." Harley found this to
be true, and the red men failed to arouse in him either respect or
admiration. If they had ever had any nobility of the wilderness, it was
gone now, and they seemed to him a sodden, depressed, and repellent
race. A half-dozen or so, in various stages of drunkenness, through
whiskey surreptitiously obtained, increased the feeling of aversion.

In the dusk they stumbled over a figure lying squarely across the path,
and Harley drew back with a word of disgust. An old Indian, dilapidated
and in the last stages of intoxication, was stretched out on his face. A
local resident named Walker, who had joined them, laughed.

"That," said he, "is a chief, a great man, or at least he was once. It's
old Flying Cloud--poetical name, though he don't look poetical now by a
long shot. Here, get out of this; you're blocking up the road!"

With true Western directness he administered a kick to the prostrate
form, but the old chief, buried in a sodden dream, only stirred and
muttered; then the resident opened up a battery of kicks, and presently
the Indian rose to his feet and slunk off, muttering, in the darkness.

"They're no good at all," said Walker. "Only a lot of sots, whenever
they get the chance."

But Harley was thinking of the contrast between what he had just seen
and what he had imagined might be the freedom and nobility of the
wilderness.

It was a beautiful autumn night, and the candidate spoke in the open, in
the village squa