Then came the draft and Leander was drafted.  He said very little about it, but his father said a great deal.  The boy should not go; the affair was an outrage.  Leander wasn’t strong, anyway; besides, wasn’t he his father’s principal support?  He couldn’t be spared, that’s all there was about it, and he shouldn’t be.  There was going to be an Exemption Board, wasn’t there?  All right—­just wait until he, Phineas, went before that board.  He hadn’t been in politics all these years for nothin’.  Sam Hunniwell hadn’t got all the pull there was in the county.

And then Captain Sam was appointed a member of that very board.  He had dropped in at the windmill shop the very evening when he decided to accept and told Jed Winslow all about it.  There never were two people more unlike than Sam Hunniwell and Jed Winslow, but they had been fast friends since boyhood.  Jed knew that Phineas Babbitt had been on a trip to Boston and, therefore, had not heard of the captain’s appointment.  Now, according to Gabriel Bearse, he had returned and had heard of it, and according to Bearse’s excited statement he had “gone on” about it.

“Leander’s been drafted,” repeated Gabe.  “And that was bad enough for Phineas, he bein’ down on the war, anyhow.  But he’s been cal’latin’, I cal’late, to use his political pull to get Leander exempted off.  Nine boards out of ten, if they’d had a man from Orham on ’em, would have gone by what that man said in a case like Leander’s.  And Phineas, he was movin’ heavens and earth to get one of his friends put on as the right Orham man.  And now—­now, by godfreys domino, they’ve put on the one man that Phin can’t influence, that hates Phin worse than a cat hates a swim.  Oh, you ought to heard Phineas go on when I told him.  He’d just got off the train, as you might say, so nobody’d had a chance to tell him.  I was the fust one, you see.  So—­”

“Was Leander there?”

“No, he wan’t.  There wan’t nobody in the store but Susie Ellis, that keeps the books there now, and Abner Burgess’s boy, that runs errands and waits on folks when everybody else is busy.  That was a funny thing, too—­that about Leander’s not bein’ there.  Susie said she hadn’t seen him since just after breakfast time, half past seven o’clock or so, and when she telephoned the Babbitt house it turned out he hadn’t been there, neither.  Had his breakfast and went out, he did, and that’s all his step-ma knew about him.  But Phineas, he. . . .  Eh?  Ain’t that the bell?  Customer, I presume likely.  Want me to go see who ’tis, Shavin’s—­Jed, I mean?”

CHAPTER II