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I couldn’t help laughing. “Well, Joe,” I said, “that sounds as if you, at least, already took Hector at his own valuation.”

“In some things,” he answered, “I think I do. Don’t you take him for an ass, sir. Sometimes I believe he’s guided by a really superior intelligence–“

“Must be a sub-consciousness, then, Joe!”

“Exactly,” he said seriously. “He doesn’t make a single mistake. He’s trained his manner so that, while a very few people laugh at him, he does things that the town would resent in any one else. He doesn’t go round with the boys, and they look up to him for it. He isn’t pompous, but he’s acquired a kind of stateliness of manner that’s made Greenville call him ‘Mister Ransom’ instead of ‘Hec.’ You probably think that his request to the National Committee only shows he’s got all the nerve in the world; but I believe, on my soul, that if it had been granted he could have made good.”

“What did he want to run Passley Trimmer into his Pantheon for, to-day?” I asked.

Joe’s honest face looked a little dark at this. “It’s only another proof of the shrewdness that directs him, though it was, maybe, a little bit sickening. He talks gold and stars and eternal gods, about sweetness and light and pure politics and reform, but he wants Passley Trimmer’s machine to take him up. Passley Trimmer and his brother, Link, are a good-sized curse to this district, I expect you know, but Hector’s courting them. Link is the dirtiest we’ve ever had here, and he holds all the rottenest in this county solid for Passley. He’s overbearing; ugly, too; shot a nigger in the hip a year ago, and crippled him for life on account of a little back-talk, and got off scot-free. I had a row with him in a saloon last week; I was tight, I suppose, though there’s always been bad blood between us, anyway, drunk or sober, and I didn’t know much what happened, except that I refused to drink in his company and he cursed me out and I blacked an eye for him before they separated us. Well, sir, next day, here was Hector demanding that I go and apologize to Link. I said I’d as soon apologize to a rattlesnake, and Hector upbraided me in his rhetoric, but with a whole lot of real feeling, too. He was even pathetic about it: put it on the ground that I owed it to morality, by which he meant Hector. I was known to be his most intimate friend; I had done him an irrecoverable injury with the Trimmers, who would extend their retaliation and let him have a share of it, as my friend. He ended by declaring that he should withhold the light of his countenance from me until I had repaired the wrong done to his cause, and had apologized to Link!”

“Did you do it?”

The good fellow answered with his little chuckle: “Of course! Don’t you see that he gets everybody to do what he wants? It’s almost sheer will, and he’s a true cloud-compeller.”

I wanted to understand something else, and I didn’t know how much Mary could tell me; that is, I was sure that she would think that Miss Rainey was in love with Hector. Mary wouldn’t be able to see how any girl could help it.

“Joe,” I said, “does Hector seem much taken with this Miss Rainey?”

We had come to the gate, and Lane stopped to relight a cigar before he answered. He kept the match at the stub until it burned out, half hiding his face from me with his hands, shielding the flame from a breeze that wasn’t blowing.

“Yes,” he said finally, “as much as he could be with anybody–at least he wants her to be taken with him.”

“Do you think she is?”

He swung the gate open, and stood to let me pass in first. “She could be of great help to him. We’ve all got to help Hector.”