Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/186

158 shopkeepers by tickling their interests. Without his assistance they might as well have declared themselves beaten in advance.

Not at all scrupulous as to the means that he employed, his agents multiplied trips to saloons and visits from house to house. They had been instructed to see the thwarted shopkeepers and to promise them capital or customers. To the more stubborn they went as far as to give half of a banknote, the other half to be delivered to them on the night of the count, if the director of the Southern Cross won.

Other employes in his imposing campaign organization, as complicated and as numerous as a ministry, prepared marked ballots for voters of whom they were suspicious; still others were busy compiling statistics of his chances, in dividing the voters in "good," "bad" and "doubtful" classes. The forecasts gave at least a thousand votes in majority to Béjard. He continued, however, to buy as many as he could, spending the party's money freely, drawing even upon his private resources. He would have ruined himself in order to win.

His assistants worked upon the imagination of the peasants of the district, orthodox people like the nobility, and superstitious besides. Ignorant of history, these rural folk took the name of gueux in its literal sense. The least landholder, having been confirmed in his terrors by the talks of old folk on winter evenings, saw his holdings already pillaged, given over to the torch, and himself trampled down as by the Cossacks, and by anticipation, the soles of his feet began to burn. He would not vote for foot-broilers and incendiaries. In the villages Béjard's heelers gossiped quite naturally about Bergmans and his people, venting