Then the band began to play and all the tin whistles to
rejoice. Young and Windle had the grace to blow their
sirens, and across the excited darkness of the town came
the long familiar boom of the Murchison Stove Works.
Every Liberal in Elgin who had any means of making a
noise made it. From the window of the Association committee
room their young fellow-townsman thanked them for the
honour they had done him, while his mother sat in the
cab he had brought her down in and applauded vigorously
between tears, and his father took congratulations from
a hundred friendly hands. They all went home in a torchlight
procession, the band always playing, the tin whistles
always performing; and it was two in the morning before
the occasion could in any sense be said to be over.
Lights burned quite as late, however, in the Conservative
committee room, where matters were being arranged to bark
threateningly at the heels of victory next day. Victory
looked like something that might be made to turn and
parley. A majority of seventy was too small for finality.
Her attention was called without twenty-four hours' delay
to a paragraph in the Elgin Mercury, plainly authoritative,
to the effect that the election of Mr Murchison would be
immediately challenged, on the ground of the infringement
in the electoral district of Moneida of certain provisions
of the Ontario Elections Act with the knowledge and
consent of the candidate, whose claim to the contested
seat, it was confidently expected, would be rendered
within a very short time null and void.
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