THERE WAS SOMEONE ELSE awake across town.
Mr. Sullen Waterford Price, Esquire, was working on his speech for the July Fourth festivities on the square. He stood in the center of his study and looked at his wife, Mrs. Price, who was perched quite delicately on the edge of their striped Victorian sofa, dabbing her nose with a pink-laced handkerchief and listening intently. Then he began to read.
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight as we celebrate our nation’s independence, I would like to speak to you about peace in our time, of war being outlawed, and the laying down of arms across the world. That would be appropriate on this fourth day of July, the birthday of this great country: to celebrate peace. But friends, there is evil brewing in the world and there is talk that it may soon reach our shores. Well, I stand before you to tell you that it’s already here . . .”
Mr. Price, Esquire, looked up at Mrs. Price at that point. She nodded, blinked her eyes, and dabbed some more at her nose.
After he finished and Mrs. Price went on to bed, he removed a piece of paper from a drawer in his walnut desk and started to do some figuring. First, he tallied the number of campaign posters he had delivered to businesses around town, then he ticked the number of businesses that were displaying his posters in their windows, and lastly—and most severely—he ticked those that weren’t.
George Robertson was gaining an edge with some in town, he feared. More of those blasted Robertson signs were cropping up in unexpected places. To shore up his win, his own campaign needed something more. Something that the citizens of Hagerstown couldn’t afford to vote against. Something that struck fear in their hearts.
Then he took hold of his Wahl Oxford fountain pen and, emboldened by immense patriotism and sense of duty, wrote down this name: “Hermann Baum.”