The A B C of Politics
The first fact that came as a jolt to Heney was the report that he and the other delegates elected to the Democratic convention were expected to vote for Al Bernard for county treasurer. Ben Heney, a Republican, held the office and Frank knew how his brother had worked for the county. It wouldn't have been easy to find a better man for the job, but Al Bernard—the fellow Frank had driven out of Ben's store at Fort Apache! He hurried off to tell the leaders about Bernard.
His story made no impression and Heney tried a threat. He declared that if they offered Bernard to the convention, he, Heney, would denounce him from the floor. That would hurt the party, they said, and when that seemed to make no difference to Heney, they, in their turn, tried a threat. They said Heney would hurt himself. They explained how. Since they, the leaders of the dominant party, represented the solid interests of the county, they could throw business to him or keep it away; since they made and controlled the judges and the courts, they could dispense success or failure to a young lawyer; and since they owned the organization, they held the key to public honors and offices. Here is where most young men give up the fight. Here is where Heney began his. For Bernard was named before the convention, and Heney did stand up and tell all about him; and, what was more, he declared that if Bernard was nominated he would take the stump against him.
Bernard was nominated, and Heney began to campaign against him publicly and privately. But Heney had to drop the Bernard fight. He found that he was making votes for Bernard. Astonished, he asked why. He asked honest men who, he heard, had said that they had meant to vote for Ben Heney till Frank began to "throw mud." These men, his friends, explained that it was against the rules of the game for a Democrat to oppose a Democrat, also they didn't like to see private affairs dragged into politics.
"Even when the private affairs go to show that a candidate for treasurer can't be trusted?" Heney asked.
"Yes, even then," his friends answered.
For Ben's sake Frank was silent, and Ben beat Bernard by 47 votes!
First Glimpse of the System
Frank laughed, but he drew a conclusion: the leaders of his party were largely saloon men, gamblers and lawyers who represented such men, so he saw that Vice ruled his party. And he said so—out loud. He told the gamblers and saloon keepers. Standing at their bars and drinking with them, he would say, with his cackling laugh and steady eye, that while he had nothing against them or their business, he was opposed to their running politics. And he declared that he was going to fight until he had driven them out of power in Tucson.
If he had spoken as a "purist," his declaration of war would have been ridiculous, for the spirit of the territory was against "closed towns." But he didn't propose to shut up the saloons. He drank himself. He didn't gamble; he had stopped that when he left Idaho, but only because it was "folly," and it never occurred to him to use the law to compel others to stop just because he had. So with drinking. He dropped that about this time, but only because it was hurting him. And this discovery was the second jolt that came to him in this propitious period.
He bore a grudge against Calvert Wilson, the son of General Thomas F. Wilson. He wanted to "lick" the son and, quite as a separate proposition, he wanted to defeat the appointment, broached just then, of the father to be a judge in the territory. He thought these two purposes could be satisfied together by getting up some interviews against the old general. For, he reasoned, the son, having been something of a boxer at Harvard, would take notice of an attack on his father. Heney had a reporter sent out to get interviews with the leading lawyers of the town. They were all opposed to General Wilson, but, characteristically enough, refused to be quoted. Their moral cowardice disgusted Heney, so he went to them, drew them out, and, without their permission, wrote what they said, and added a statement of his own, the strongest of all. The publication of this broadside ended the hopes of General Wilson.
And, sure enough, it set the son in motion. A day or two later some friends of Heney told him in the Court House that Calvert Wilson was looking for him. Heney laughed.
