Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

So we were wondering just what axe Lieutenant de Spain would use to chop the corners off Jefferson and make it fit him. One day he found it. The city electrician (the one who kept the town’s generators and dynamos and transformers working) was a genius. One afternoon in 1904 he drove out of his backyard into the street in the first automobile we had ever seen, made by hand completely, engine and all, from magneto coil to radius rod, and drove into the Square at the moment when Colonel Sartoris the banker’s surrey and blooded matched team were crossing it on the way home. Although Colonel Sartoris and his driver were not hurt and the horses when caught had no scratch on them and the electrician offered to repair the surrey (it was said he even offered to put a gasoline engine in it this time), Colonel Sartoris appeared in person before the next meeting of the board of aldermen, who passed an edict that no gasoline-propelled vehicle should ever operate on the streets of Jefferson.

That was De Spain’s chance. It was more than just his. It was the opportunity which that whole contemporary generation of young people had been waiting for, not just in Jefferson but everywhere, who had seen in that stinking noisy little homemade self-propelled buggy which Mr Buffaloe (the electrician) had made out of odds and ends in his back yard in his spare time, not just a phenomenon but an augury, a promise of the destiny which would belong to the United States. He—De Spain—didn’t even need to campaign for mayor: all he needed was to announce. And the old dug-in city fathers saw that too, which was why they spooked to the desperate expedient of creating or exhuming or repeating (whichever it was) the story of the Cuban dice game and the sergeant’s axe. And De Spain settled that once and for all not even as a politician; Caesar himself couldn’t have done it any neater.

It was one morning at mail-time. Mayor Adams and his youngest son Theron who was not as old as De Spain and not even very much bigger either, mainly just taller, were coming out of the post office when De Spain met them. That is, he was already standing there with a good crowd watching, his fìnger already touching the scar when Mr Adams saw him. “Good morning, Mister Mayor,” he said. “What’s this I hear about a dice game with an axe in it?”

“That’s what the voters of the city of Jefferson would like to ask you, sir,” Mr Adams said. “If you know of any proof to the contrary nearer than Cuba, I would advise you to produce it.”

“I know a quicker way than that,” De Spain said. “Your Honor’s a little too old for it, but Theron there’s a good-sized boy now. Let him and me step over to McCaslin’s hardware store and get a couple of axes and find out right now if you are right.”

“Aw now, Lieutenant,” Theron said.

“That’s all right,” De Spain said. “I’ll pay for both of them.”

“Gentlemen,” Theron said. And that was all of that. In June De Spain was elected mayor. It was a landslide because more than just he had won, been elected. The new age had entered Jefferson; he was merely its champion, the Godfrey de Bouillon, theTancred, the Jefferson Richard Lion-heart of the twentieth century.