As well as:
Meanwhile, from the other side, there was an uncertain, tentative approach to the problem:
This did not sit well with the new, duel-going public. There was another approach:
Since this too had little effect on the situation:
Unfortunately:
The candidate and his advisors, realizing there was no way out:
Borax and ten or twelve cigar-munching counselors locked themselves in a hotel room and considered the matter from all possible angles. By this time, of course, he and his staff only smoked cigars under conditions of the greatest privacy. In public, they ate mints.
They had been given the choice of weapons, and a hard choice it was. The Chicago Duel was dismissed as being essentially undignified and tending to blur the Presidential image. Borax’s assistant campaign manager, a brilliant Jewish Negro from the Spanish-speaking section of Los Angeles, suggested a format derived from the candidate’s fame as a forward-passing quarterback in college. He wanted foxholes dug some twenty-five yards apart and hand grenades lobbed back and forth until one or the other of the disputants had been satisfactorily exploded.
But everyone in that hotel room was aware that he sat under the august gaze of History, and History demanded the traditional alternatives—swords or pistols. They had to face the fact that Borax was skillful with neither, while his opponent had won tournaments with both. Pistols were finally chosen as adding the factors of great distance and uncertain atmospheric conditions to their side.
Pistols, then. And only one shot apiece for the maximum chance of survival. But the site?
Mibs had urged Weehawken Heights in New Jersey because of its historical associations. Grandstands, he pointed out, could easily be erected along the Palisades and substantial prices charged for admission. After advertising and promotion costs had been met, the purse could be used by both major parties to defray their campaign expenses.
Such considerations weighed heavily with Borax’s advisors. But the negative side of the historical association weighed even more heavily: it was in Weehawken that the young Alexander Hamilton had been cut down in the very flower of his political promise. Some secluded spot, possibly hallowed by a victory of the raw and inexperienced army of George Washington, would put the omens definitely on their side. The party treasurer, a New England real estate agent in private life, was assigned to the problem.
That left the strategy.
All night long, they debated a variety of ruses, from bribing or intimidating the duel’s presiding officials to having Borax fire a moment before the signal—the ethics of the act, it was pointed out, would be completely confused by subsequent charges and countercharges in the newspapers. They adjourned without having agreed on anything more hopeful than that Borax should train intensively under the pistol champion of the United States in the two days remaining and do his level best to achieve some degree of proficiency.
By the morning of the duel, the young candidate had become quite morose. He had been out on the pistol range continuously for almost forty-eight hours. He complained of a severe earache and announced bitterly that he had only the slightest improvement in his aim to show for it. All the way to the dueling grounds while his formally clad advisers wrangled and disputed, suggesting this method and that approach, he sat in silence, his head bowed unhappily upon his chest.
He must have been in a state of complete panic. Only so can we account for his decision to use a strategy which had not been first approved by his entire entourage—an unprecedented and most serious political irregularity.
Borax was no scholar, but he was moderately well-read in American history. He had even written a series of articles for a Florida newspaper under the generic title of When the Eagle Screamed, dealing with such great moments in the nation’s past as Robert E. Lee’s refusal to lead the Union armies, and the defeat of free silver and low tariffs by William McKinley. As the black limousine sped to the far-distant field of honor, he reviewed this compendium of wisdom and patriotic activity in search of an answer to his problem. He found it at last in the life story of Andrew Jackson.
Years before his elevation to high national office, the seventh President of the United States had been in a position similar to that in which Elvis P. Borax now found himself. Having been maneuvered into just such a duel with just such an opponent, and recognizing his own extreme nervousness, Jackson decided to let his enemy have the first shot. When, to everyone’s surprise, the man missed and it was Jackson’s turn to fire, he took his own sweet time about it. He leveled his pistol at his pale, perspiring antagonist, aiming carefully and exactly over the space of several dozen seconds. Then he fired and killed the man.
That was the ticket, Borax decided. Like Jackson, he’d let Mibs shoot first. Like Jackson, he would then slowly and inexorably—
Unfortunately for both history and Borax, the first shot was the only one fired. Mibs didn’t miss, although he complained later—perfectionist that he was—that defective sights on the antique dueling pistol had caused him to come in a good five inches below target.
The bullet went through the right cheek of the Congressman’s rigid, averted face and came out the left. It embedded itself in a sugar maple some fifteen feet away, from which it was later extracted and presented to the Smithsonian Institution. The tree, which became known as the Dueling Sugar Maple, was a major attraction for years and the center of a vast picnic grounds and motel complex. In the first decade of the next century, however, it was uprooted to make way for a through highway that connected Hoboken, New Jersey, with the new international airport at Bangor, Maine. Replanted with much ceremony in Washington, D.C., it succumbed in a few short months to heat prostration.
Borax was hurried to the field hospital nearby, set up for just such an emergency. As the doctors worked on him, his chief campaign manager, a politician far-famed for calmness and acumen under stress, came out of the tent and ordered an armed guard posted before it.
Since the bulletins released in the next few days about Borax’s condition were reassuring but cryptic, people did not know what to think. Only one thing was definite: he would live.
Many rumors circulated. They were subjected to careful analysis by outstanding Washington, Hollywood, and Broadway columnists. Had Mibs really used a dumdum bullet? Had it been tipped with a rare South American poison? Had the candidate’s mother actually traveled all the way to New York from her gracious home in Florida’s Okeechobee Swamp and hurled herself upon Old Shep in the editorial offices of the Hairy Chest, fingernails scratching and gouging, dental plates biting and tearing? Had there been a secret midnight ceremony in which ten regional leaders of Masculinism had formed a hollow square around Shepherd L. Mibs and watched Henry Dorselblad break Mibs’s sword and cigar across his knee, stamp Mibs’s derby flat, and solemnly tear Mibs’s codpiece from his loins?