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"You should have heard him when old Sir John Macdonald gerrymandered the electoral districts and gave votes to the Moneida Indians. The way he put it, the Tories in the congregation couldn't say a word, but it was a treat for his fellow Grits." Finlay smiled gravely. "Political convictions are a man's birthright," he said. "Any man or any minister is a poor creature without them.
And in Moneida, upon polling-days, he still, as Alec said, "made trouble." Perhaps it would be more to the fact to say that he presented the elements of which trouble is made. Civilization had given him a vote, not with his coat and trousers, but shortly after; and he had not yet learned to keep it anywhere but in his pocket, whence the transfer was easy, and could be made in different ways.
They were all of that opinion, all the fine foretellers of the profit Lorne should draw from his spirited and conspicuous success; they stood about in knots discussing it; to some extent it eclipsed the main interest and issue of the day, at that moment driving out, free and disconsolate, between the snake fences of the South Riding to Moneida Reservation.
When he told Mr Farquharson that he could bring Moneida with him to a Liberal victory, he thought and spoke of the farmers of the township not of his wards of the Reserve. Yet as the day approached these would infallibly become voters in his eyes, to swell or to diminish the sum of Moneida's loyalty to the Empire. They remembered all this in the committee room of his old party.
It was the Express that managed, while elaborately abstaining from improper comment upon a matter sub judice, to feed and support the general conviction of young Ormiston's innocence, and thereby win for itself, though a "Grit" paper, wide reading in that hotbed of Toryism, Moneida Reservation, while the Conservative Mercury, with its reckless sympathy for an old party name, made itself criminally liable by reviewing cases of hard dealing by the bank among the farmers, and only escaped prosecution by the amplest retraction and the most contrite apology.
"That's the name," remarked Advena, "that he probably votes under." "Well," said Mrs Murchison, "it was very kind of Squire Ormiston to give Lorne his support, but it seems to me that as far as Moneida is concerned he would have done better alone." "No, I guess he wouldn't, Mother," said Alec. "Moneida came right round with the Squire, outside the Reserve.
They were likely, the friends of Mr Winter thought, to know now that they were voting on a different side. This was the secret of Mr Winter's friends' unusual diligence on voting-day in Moneida. The mere indication of a wish on the part of the superintendent would constitute undue influence in the eye of the law.
"They don't dress up like they used to, and I guess they send the papooses to kindergarten now; but you'll find plenty of them lying around any time there's nothing to do but vote and get drunk." Allowing for the natural exaggeration of partisanship, the facts about the remaining red man of Moneida were much as Alec described them.
Bingham put it darkly when he said he had quite as much hay on his fork as he cared to tackle already, implying that the defence of indiscretions in Moneida was quite an unnecessary addition.
"It's an old U. E. Loyalist family," remarked Advena. "Mr Ormiston has one or two rather interesting Revolutionary trophies at his house out there." "None the worse for that. None the worse for that," said Dr Drummond. "Old Ormiston's father," contributed the editor of the Express, "had a Crown grant of the whole of Moneida Reservation at one time.
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