The 13th District: A Story of a Candidate

The 13th District

A Story of a Candidate

_By_ Brand Whitlock

Indianapolis The Bowen-Merrill Company Publishers

Copyright 1902 The Bowen-Merrill Company

March

Press Of Braunworth & Co. Bookbinders And Printers Brooklyn, N. Y.

_To_ E. B. W.

Book I

Of The People

The 13th District

I

Just as the train with a salute of the engine's whistle careened into full view of the smoke-blackened shed that is known in Grand Prairie as the depot, the sound of cheering came to Garwood's ears. He was lounging in the smoking car, his long legs stretched to the seat before him, his face begrimed with soot and glistening with perspiration, his whole body heavy with fatigue. But the cheers, coming to him in a vast crescendo that even the noise of the car-wheels as they hammered the Wabash crossing could not drown, brought back to his eyes the excitement that had been burning in them for days; a smile soothed his tired visage, and instinctively he flexed in every fiber. For a moment he tried to hide the smile, but Rankin, who had so successfully managed his canvass for him, and executed that great manoeuver on the last day of the Clinton convention, which, after one thousand two hundred and nine ballots had nominated Garwood for Congress, heaved his bulk from the hot, cindery, plush cushion, slapped his candidate on the shoulder and said:

"There's nothing like it, is there?"

So Garwood let human feelings have their way and the smile fully illumined his haggard face. It was a strong face, clean-shaven after the old ideal of American statesmen, that grew darker and stronger in the shadow of the slouch hat which he now clapped upon his long black hair. Rankin had succeeded in raising himself to his feet, and stood upright in the aisle, shaking himself like a Newfoundland. He drew off the linen duster he wore, and draped it over his arm, then seizing his little traveling-bag, which in contrast to his huge body looked like a mere reticule, he waved it toward the station and said, as if he had just conjured the presence of the crowd:

"There they are, Jerry, there they are!"

Garwood had risen, and through the windows of the swaying coach he could see the faces of the crowd. The men on board the train, most of them members of the Polk County delegation which had stood by him with solid, unbroken ranks, had been yelling all the way from Clinton, and now, though it seemed impossible that they should have any voices left in their hoarse and swollen throats, they raised a shout that swelled above the cheers outside and pressing to the windows and the doors of the coaches, they challenged their neighbors with the exulting cry:

"What's the matter with Garwood?"

Outside there rose an answering roar:

"_He's_ all right!"

But the Polk County delegation, as if it demanded confirmation, yelled again:

"_Who's_ all right?"

And then the crowd rose to its tip-toes, and the answering cry was of such immense unanimity that it made the very platform shake:

"G-a-r-wood!"

The train had stopped, and Garwood was being hustled toward the door. Some impatient fellows from the platform outside who had mounted the steps of the car, now pressed in, and stretched their bodies incredible distances across the backs of seats to grasp Garwood's hand, to seize him by the coat, and to call in his face:

"Good boy, Jerry!"

"You're the stuff!"

He was oblivious of the progress he was making, if he was making any at all, and the conductor, although he had caught the contagious spirit of the triumphant Polk County delegation soon after the train left Clinton, and had shown Garwood the deference due to a successful candidate, began to be concerned for the time he was losing, and said with smiling indulgence:

"Gentlemen, gentlemen!"

Big Rankin then squeezed himself in front of Garwood, and waving his little bag dangerously before him, crushed his way out, drawing the others after him in his turbulent wake. Meanwhile the passengers in the train looked on with the good-humored toleration an American crowd always excites in those not participants in its moving enthusiasms, and mildly inquired what town that was.

When Garwood gained the platform of the car and the people at last caught sight of him, the cheering suddenly attained a new pitch of intensity, and a band, clustered near the rotting log where the hacks made their stand, spontaneously crashed into "Hail to the Chief!" The band played the piece in furious time, and the man who performed on the tuba seemed to have taken upon himself the responsibility of voicing the whole enthusiasm of Polk County; but to Garwood, to whom the strains came across that tossing mass of heads and hats and faces, the music was sweet. He felt himself suddenly choking; his eyes filled with tears. He could not have trusted himself to speak just then, though the cheers were being more and more punctuated by cries of "Speech! Speech!" Luckily, the man behind him, urged by the brakeman, for the conductor, watch in hand, was scowling, began to push, the crowd in front held out a hundred arms to seize him, and Garwood was swallowed up in that stifling press of men.

Somewhere in the depths of the multitude Garwood was conscious of meeting the mayor, who took his hand, when he could reclaim it from a score of other hands thrust forth all about him, and then in a zigzag path of glory, he was dragged through the throng, Rankin and the delegates following, moving like a current in the sea. Garwood laughed as he was pulled this way and that, and tried to answer each one of the thousand greetings poured in on him from every side. The perspiration streamed from his face. His waistcoat had been torn open and when some one saw this and shouted "Look out for your watch, Jerry!" the whole crowd laughed delightedly at the witticism, and Garwood himself laughed with them.

The crowd had been a first surprise to Garwood, the band had been another, now a third was added by the sight of an open carriage drawn by two white horses. He had not expected an ovation, which made it all the more grateful when it came, and as he was being helped into the carriage with a solicitude that was a new thing in men's treatment of him, he expressed something of this to Rankin. But Rankin, who had been in politics all his days and could view the varying moods of the populace with a politician's cynicism, replied:

"Well, if we'd been skinned, they wouldn't 'a' been here when you needed sympathy."

The truth flashed upon Garwood at once, and if it embittered for an instant his triumph when it was at its sweetest, it seemed to give him a better control, so that as he settled himself in the back seat of the carriage, with the mayor beside him, and Rankin filling the whole front seat, he rearranged his rumpled garments, readjusted his hat, and then looked calmly around on the crowd that swarmed up to the carriage wheels as if they had never seen him before. His face was calm and composed, almost stern. It was the face he hoped to leave to history.

As the band, to whom the leader had been distributing the precious leaves of its most classical number, was forming in the street, Garwood for the first time saw many carriages, filled with men and women who waved hats and fluttered handkerchiefs, now that they thought he could see and recognize them. Garwood smiled, though reservedly, and lifted his hat with a sudden consciousness that he, himself, at last, was the one who was lifting the hat from the open carriage in the street, and not some other man. He did not neglect to smile, nor to raise his hat gallantly to each carriage load as he swept his eye along the line of vehicles, but he was not thinking of their occupants, nor of himself, wholly. He was thinking of a certain surrey he knew well, from which a pair of eyes would smile as his did, perhaps be moistened by tears as his had been a few minutes before,--the eyes of one to whom all this would be as sweet as it was to him. But the surrey was not there. He was surprised, though in a way different from that in which the crowd and the band and the open carriage had surprised him. He was disappointed, and felt himself entitled to a little shade of resentment, to a little secret hurt at the heart. It was the hour in the afternoon when she would be driving down to the bank for her father. He could not see why she had not come. Perhaps she felt a delicacy about the publicity of it, though he did not see why she should.

But the band had swung into the middle of the street. The drum-major, in his hot bear-skin and tall leggings, was facing them with his baton held horizontally before him in his two hands. He blew the shrill whistle, clenched in his teeth, and then, wheeling, pointed up Kaskaskia Street and strode away for the public square. The leader trilled two little notes on his cornet, the snare drums rattled a long roll, and the band burst into "See, the Conquering Hero Comes!" The carriage moved, the crowd cheered again, and the little procession began his triumphal entry for him.

"Look mad, Jerry," advised Rankin, in humorous appreciation of the whole demonstration. The remark did not exactly please Garwood, and for an instant he did look mad, but he smiled again and composed his features to the dignity required of him in that hour. Some of the private carriages followed in his train and the crowd streamed along the sidewalks on each side of the street. A number of small boys trudged in the deep white dust, mingled with the band, or crowded after Garwood's carriage, breaking into a trot now and then in their determination to keep up with the procession. Two or three of them, in order to identify themselves more closely with the affair, laid their dirty little hands on the panels of the carriage. Garwood felt an inward resentment at this, and when Rankin lolled over in his seat and snatched the cap from the matted head of one of the boys, and the crowd on the sidewalk laughed uproariously, Garwood felt like rebuking him. He had a moral conviction that at least two other boys were swinging on the springs behind the carriage, and he would have liked to dislodge them, but he knew he dare not. In the last ten minutes imperial ambitions had stirred within him. He began already to dream of triumphal marches amid wider scenes, with troops or at least policemen lining the curb, and yet his politician's sense reminded him of the quickness with which American voters resent any little assumption of undemocratic airs, however much they may like it on a larger scale. And so when Rankin, to appease the frightened lad whose cap he had snatched, took the youngster by the collar and dragged him into the carriage, Garwood felt it would be better to laugh with him and with the crowd.

The procession turned into Main Street, and so on down to the square, with its old brown court house and its monument inscribed to the soldiers and sailors of Polk County, though Polk County had never had any sailors. The procession ended at the Cassell House, though why can hardly be told. Garwood did not live there, but all processions of that kind in Grand Prairie end at the Cassell House. The band stopped in front of the hotel, and the musicians seized off their caps, mopped their brows and looked around toward Rankin furtively, thinking of beer. But Rankin, again swinging his dangerous little bag, was making a way through the crowd toward the wide door. Garwood was almost lifted from his carriage, and felt himself helplessly swept into the hotel office on the great human breaker that rolled in that way. When his feet touched the floor again, the loud cry went up:

"Speech! Speech!"

Rankin turned toward him.

"You'll have to give it to 'em, Jerry, 'fore they'll let you go."

And he led the way up the stairs toward the parlor. Garwood went after him, with the mayor and a self-appointed committee following, and in another minute he had stepped out on the balcony, and bared his head to the breeze that was blowing warm off the prairie. As he stood there, erect and calm, with the little wind loosening the locks over his forehead, his lips compressed and white, his right hand in the breast of his coat, after the fashion of all our orators, many in the crowd for the first time were conscious of how like a congressman this young fellow really looked. They began to celebrate the discovery by another cheer, but Garwood drew his hand from the bosom of his coat and raised it toward them. Instantly a warning "Sh!" ran through the whole concourse, the few wagons rattling by halted suddenly, and a hush fell. Garwood's eye swept the old familiar square, his face flushed, his heart beat high, but outwardly he was calm, as he affected the impressive pause that adds so much to oratory. And then he began with studied simplicity.

"My friends," he said, in a voice that seemed low, but which carried in the evening air across the square, "and fellow citizens: I am profoundly touched by this welcome. Words are inadequate to express, fittingly, how much it means to me. For thirty years I have gone in and out among you, as a boy and as a man, and it has always seemed to me that the highest honor I could achieve in life would be found in your respect, your confidence, if possible, your love. Your wishes and your welfare have ever been my first and highest thought. I know not what responsibilities may await me in the future, but whether they be small and light or great and heavy, still my wish and purpose shall remain the same--to serve you, well and faithfully; whatever they may be, I know that nothing can ever bring to my heart the deep gratitude or fill me with the sweet satisfaction this magnificent welcome affords.

"You must not expect a speech from me this evening. At a later day and at some more convenient and appropriate season, I shall address you upon the issues of the approaching campaign, but I would not, even if I were physically able to do so, intrude partisan considerations upon you in this hour. But I can not let you go away without the assurance that I am deeply sensible of the great honor you do me. With a sincerity wholly unfeigned I thank you for it. May God bless you all, may you prosper in your basket and your store and--" the speaker's eye wandered far away to the ragged edges of the crowd--"thanking you again and again, I bid you good night."

A cheer promptly arose, and Garwood bowed himself backward through the window. Rankin, standing near him, laid his hand on the shoulder of the mayor.

"John," he said to that executive, "he'll do."

Then the hand-shaking and the congratulations began again. Garwood stood there, at times passing over his brow the handkerchief he held in his left hand, while he gave to the men who passed by him a right hand that was red and swollen and beginning to ache. And outside, the crowd, feeling, when its American passion for speech-making was satisfied, that it had had its due, went away, leaving the square deserted.

II

The mother of the new candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District expressed her pride in her son's achievement by cooking for him that night, with her own hands, a supper of the things he most liked to eat, and while the candidate consumed the supper with a gusto that breathed its ultimate sigh in the comfortable sense of repletion with which he pushed back his chair, his appreciation ended there, and half an hour later he left his mother to the usual loneliness of her widowed life. Sangamon Avenue, where the self-elected better element of Grand Prairie had gathered to enjoy the envy of the lower classes, stretched away under its graceful shade-trees in aristocratic leisure. The darkness of a summer evening rolled under the elms and oaks, and blurred the outlines of the tall chimneys and peaked roofs which a new architect coming from the East had lately given to the houses of the prosperous. Here and there a strip of cool and open lawn, each blade of its carefully mown blue-grass threading beads of dew, sparkled in the white light of the arc lamps that hung at the street crossings. On the wide verandas which were shrouded in the common darkness, white forms could be seen indistinctly, rocking back and forth, and the murmur of voices could be heard, in bland and desultory interchange of the banalities of village life. The avenue had been laid an inch deep in mud by the garden hose, which might have been seen in the last hours of the day, united in a common effort to subdue the dust that puffed in little white clouds as Grand Prairie's horses stumbled along. Now and then some surrey, the spokes of its wheels glistening in the electric light, went squeaking leisurely by as some family solemnly enjoyed its evening drive; now and then some young man, his cigarette glowing into a spark of life and then dying away, loitered down town. The only other life was represented by the myriads of insects feverishly rising and falling in clouds about the arc lamps, or some silent bat describing vast circles in the darkness, and at intervals swinging into the light on membranous wings to snatch her evening meal, bite by bite, from that mass of strenuous, purposeless animal life.

As he strolled, slowly, for he wished to preserve his collar intact until he should present himself immaculate before the woman of his love, Garwood felt some of the peace of the sleepy town fall upon him. He gave himself up to the sensuous effect of it, inhaling the odors of a summer night, and when he turned into the yard of the Harkness home his heart leaped. A filmy figure in white slowly floated, as it seemed to his romantic vision, out of the darkness that lay thick under the veranda. Half way down the walk, under the oaks, they met.

"Jerome! I'm so proud!"

The pride she had felt in him still glowed in her eyes as they sat there in the wicker chairs, but now when she heard him sigh, she bent toward him, and her voice filled with a woman's pity as she said:

"You're tired, aren't you--poor boy?"

"Yes, very tired," he assented, with a man's readiness to be coddled. "But then," he added, "it's rest just to be here."

He laid his hand on hers and she drew closer, looking eagerly into his face. She needed no light other than the glow of the summer night to make his features plain to her. She looked long at him, and then she withdrew her hand, and sat erect, smoothing her skirts with an affected primness and folding her hands in her lap.

"Now you must tell me all about it," she said. "The newspapers are so unsatisfactory, and you know I've only had the one little note you wrote me Wednesday night--when you thought you were beaten."

They laughed, now that they could do so with impunity, at the danger he had been in so short a time before.

"Well," he began, "it was a close shave, after all. If it hadn't been for Jim Rankin I'd have come home to-night beaten, and there wouldn't have been any band or any carriage or any crowd to greet me--as Rankin reminded me this afternoon when I was near bursting at the reception I did get." He laughed, but the laugh had a tinge of bitterness.

"I would have been there," she said simply.

"If I'd been beaten?"

"Yes."

"I missed you this afternoon," he said. "I looked for you everywhere."

"There were enough there, weren't there?"

"No, not quite," he said; "the crowd lacked one, just one." He spoke with a little injury in his tone. And the girl, with her quick apperception of it, said:

"I wanted you all to myself, dear. I can give you part of the time to the public--but I can't share you." She said this in the pride of a new conception of Garwood that had just come to her--a conception of him as a public man, sacrificing himself for the people. Garwood himself instantly shared the conception.

"Isn't that better?" she added.

For answer he took her hand again, pressing it in his big palm.

"And now tell me," she said.

So he told her the story of the Clinton convention; how the delegations from the seven counties that comprised the Thirteenth Congressional District, his district, as he was already careful to speak of it, had gone there and stubbornly balloted for one, two, three days without a change or a break, until a thousand ballots had been cast, and men were worn and spent with the long-drawn agony of those tense hours in the stifling opera house. He felt a touch of the old fear that had come over him when he heard on Thursday night that Tazewell County would go to Sprague the next day, and it looked as if, the deadlock thus broken, Sprague would be chosen.

"You see," he explained, "Sprague had his own county, Moultrie, and Logan, and if he got Tazewell it would mean thirty votes more--almost a cinch."

The girl's attention flagged in her effort to penetrate the mysteries of ballots and delegations.

"That was the night I wrote you," he went on, and her interest brightened with her understanding. "I was mighty blue that night."

He made a pause, for the pity of it.

"And that was the night, too, when Jim Rankin came to the front. I never knew him to rise to such heights of political ability before. I tell you, Emily, we must be good to Jim Rankin--he's the best friend we've got. He went out after supper, and was out all the night. When he came in at four o'clock in the morning--I had just thrown myself on the bed in my clothes to snatch a wink of sleep--he came into our room and said, 'Well, Jerry, my boy, we've got him skinned now--Piatt will go to you on the first ballot to-morrow, and McKimmon will swing Mason on the second--and that'll settle it.'"

Garwood paused. She sat with her chin on her hand. The lace of her sleeve fell back, exposing her round forearm, white like marble in the moonlight that was spilling through the purple shadows of the trees and trickling on her dress. But a soberness had clouded her eyes.

"How do you suppose he did it, Jerome?" she asked presently.

"I don't know," Garwood answered, "and what's more," he added with a dry little laugh, "I don't want to."

The girl's soberness deepened as the silence in which she received his last words lengthened. Garwood glanced at her in some concern, and then he hurried on.

"Well, it came out just as he said. The next morning Piatt County threw her vote to me on the first ballot, and by the time it got down to Tazewell it was all over with Sprague; his man Simp Lewis--you've heard me speak of him--moved to make it unanimous, and the noise began."

He laughed again, this time in sheer joy as he lived those hours once more.

"It lasted all morning, when we weren't making speeches telling how we loved each other, and the party, and the dear old flag; it lasted all the way over here on the train, until I got home and saw everybody but the one woman I'd done it all for."

"But you saw me in the crowd while you were speaking from the hotel balcony, didn't you?"

The scene in the square flashed back to him. The sea of faces turned up to his, the halting vehicles, the heads at windows, the raveling edges of the common crowd--he saw it all.

"I had never heard you make a speech before, you know," she went on, "and I had always wished to--it was a splendid speech."

"Yes," he mused, and strangely for him, seemed not to have heard her praise, "yes, I saw you--I saw nothing but you. I thought of nothing but you!"

"Oh, Jerome," she said, "I was happy and proud that minute to think----"

Suddenly he seized her, crushing her to him as if in some sudden access of fear.

"Dearest!" he said, "all this is nothing to me beside you and your love. Do you really love me so very much?"

"Oh, you know!" he heard her whisper.

"And will--always?"

"Always."

"No matter what I did--or have done?"

"No matter," she said; "you are--you. You are--mine."

"Are you sure," he persisted, somehow growing fierce, "sure--do you know what you are saying? No matter what I did, how unworthy I became, to what depths I sank"--even in that instant he was conscious of a dramatic quality in the situation, conscious of the eloquence, as it seemed to him, of his words--"to what depths of shame, of dishonor?"

"Why--Jerome!" the girl raised her face, half frightened, "what do you----"

"Tell me," he demanded, and he fairly shook her, "how do you know?"

She raised her face, and he saw that it was moistened with tears. She withdrew from his embrace, and sat erect. He let his arms fall to his side. Then she took his face in her two hands, she looked into his eyes, and she gave a scornful little laugh.

"How do I know?" she said. "Ah, Jerome, because I know you; because I know that you could do nothing dishonorable!"

He hung his head, helpless, and the impulse to tell her passed with the moment that made it impossible.

Late in the evening, when he was going, as he stood below her on the steps of the veranda, she said to him:

"Jerome, do you know what Mr. Rankin did to get those delegations to--swing to you, did you say?"

"Why, no," he laughed, "why?"

"You are sure there was no--no--money?" She said the word as if she were afraid of it.

"Money!" he exclaimed. "Money!" and he laughed the same laugh of protestation she had laughed a while before, though he laughed the big laugh of a man. "Why, my precious little girl, money would be the last thing in the world with me--I guess it always will be!" he observed in rueful parenthesis. "Don't you believe me when I tell you that my law practice, and God knows it was small enough as it was, has gone to pieces in this campaign, that I'm insolvent, that I'm a pauper, that I'd have to be buried in the potter's field if I were to die to-night?"

"Don't, don't! Jerome, please," she held her hand to his lips to hush him, "don't talk of dying! I'm frightened to-night." She shuddered once again into his arms.

"Frightened?" he scoffed. "What at?"

"Oh, I don't know; it's foolish. I guess it's just because I'm so happy--and I'm afraid of too much happiness."

He could only fold her closely in his arms again. He, too, was filled with a fear he dare not name.

It was late when Garwood walked homeward under the maples that poured their thick shadows along the sidewalks of Sangamon Avenue. The carriages which in the early evening had squeaked leisurely by in the sprinkled street had taken their occupants home. The houses of Grand Prairie's aristocrats were closed for the night and loomed now dark and still. Here and there, on a dusky lawn, he could see some counterfeit fountain, improvised of the garden hose, left to run all night, tossing its sparkling drops into the mellow light of the moon. The only sounds beyond the tinkle of these fountains were the sounds of a wide summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the booming of bullfrogs, farther away still the baying of some lonesome dog. It was all peace without, the peace of brooding night; but within, fear lay cold and heavy on his heart; not alone the fear which, with its remorse and regret, he had felt keen as knives at his heart an hour before when the woman he loved lay passive in his arms, but a new fear, though born in the same brood. Under its stress, his imagination tortured him with scenes in the forthcoming campaign, black headlines in opposition newspapers, a voice bawling a question at him from the crowd he was addressing, until the cumulative force of their disclosures should drive him from the stump.

But presently he put forth his will. "Pshaw!" he said, almost aloud, "how foolish! I am young, I am strong, I have the love of the best woman on earth; she would not believe if they told her! I can win, and I will win!"

He laughed aloud, because the street was still, and the night was deep. He flung up his arms and spread them wide, taking a long, deep breath of the sweet air. "I will win, win it all--her and everything besides--Congress, Governor, the Senate--all!" He strode along erect and calm, full of a vast faith in his own lusty powers, full of the sublime confidence of youth.

III

Emily Harkness might easily have been the leader of what the local newspapers, imitating those of Chicago, had recently begun to call the "Smart Set," a position which would have entitled her to the distinction of being the most popular girl in town, but because she did not accept the position, she was perhaps the most unpopular girl in town. "Society," in Grand Prairie, lacked too much in what is known as eligible young men, for while the town produced the normal quantity of that product, those who were strong and ambitious went away to Chicago or St. Louis where, in a day of economical tendencies that were fast making the small towns of a more prosperous past but a shaded and sleepy tradition, there were larger fields for their young efforts. Those that were left were employed in their fathers' businesses, and some of them worked in the three banks of the town, but while these were able, out of their scant salaries, to arrange for a series of assembly balls in the dining-room of the Cassell House every winter, they found calls upon the girls, in whose parlors they would rock all the evening, chaffing each other with personalities, their nearest approach to the society life.

The social activities of the place were therefore left largely to the initiative of the elder women, who formed the usual number of clubs, held the usual number of meetings, and derived, possibly, the usual amount of benefit therefrom. These clubs were inaugurated under a serious pretense of feeding starved intellectualities, and were impregnated at the first with a strong literary flavor, but in the end they administered to a bodily rather than a mental hunger, and their profound programs degenerated into mere menus.

The men of Grand Prairie soon learned to identify the days on which the club meetings fell by the impaired appetites their wives showed at the supper table, and the louder tones in which they talked all the evening. Ultimately, when the euchre club had evolved into the higher stage of the whist club, the men became expert enough to tell, by the absence of the vocal phenomenon already noted, the days on which the card tournaments were held.

When Emily Harkness came home from the Eastern college where she had taken a bachelor's degree, it was thought that she would be a decided acquisition to society, a fact that was duly exploited in the Grand Prairie newspapers. The young men of the town at once began to call, but when they found that she did not enter into the spirit of those little personalities which formed the sinew of what they called their conversation, and when they learned that she would not endure the familiarity that the other girls of the town indulged them in, they began one by one to fail in these well-meant attentions. Several of them, out of a devotion to the spirit of social duty, tried for a while to cultivate, or at the least to assume, a literary taste that would admit them to her confidence. But their reading had been limited to the Chicago Sunday newspapers, the works of the Duchess and to the most widely advertised novels of the swashbuckler school, and they could only stare vacantly when she soared into the rarer altitudes of the culture she had acquired at college, where she had had a course of Browning lectures and out of a superficial tutoring in art had espoused with enthusiasm the then prospering cause of Realism.

Failing in literature, a few of the more determined of these youths essayed music, but when she played for them Chopin's nocturnes and asked if they liked Brahms, whose name they could never learn to pronounce, they gave her up, and fled with relief to the banjo, the mandolin, and the coon songs that echoed not inharmoniously on summer nights along the borders of Silver Lake, as they called the muddy pond where the aquatic needs of Grand Prairie society are appeased. Emily could not follow them thither, for she would not consent to buggy rides, even on moonlight nights. And so the young men of Grand Prairie voted her "stuck up," and to themselves justified their verdict by the fact that she made them by some silent spiritual coercion call her Miss Harkness instead of Em, or Emily at least.

As for the clubs, she continued to attend them occasionally, for she was needed to prepare papers on literary topics for the federated meetings held monthly in the Presbyterian church. The matrons of the town would listen to her with the folds in their chins multiplying as their faces lengthened and their bodies yielded to the cushioned pews of the warm tabernacle, but however conscientiously they tried to follow her, their winks would develop into nods, and they would fail asleep. At the conclusion of her papers, of course, they gave Emily their gloved hands in congratulation, but the gulf between them yawned wider and wider, until Emily became a mere intellectual rather than a human personality.

Thus left to herself, Emily seemed to be doomed to a life in which she would never have opportunity for the development of her talents. She had brought away from college many exalted purposes, and she meant to keep these purposes high, but at times she despaired of ever having the chance to put her acquirements to what her father would have called practical use. She read much, for she had much leisure, and kept up at first a prodigious correspondence, but gradually those friendships which in the flush of exuberant youth had been destined for immortality, declined and faded as such things do fade in our lives, and soon ceased altogether. She had tried writing, and sent two or three manuscripts away to the magazines, but they were returned so promptly that her jocular father said the editors doubtless had an arrangement with the postmaster to return all such suspicious-looking parcels to the senders.

Then in that period which brought the customary desire to earn her own money, she proposed giving music lessons, but her father, in the social pride he possessed, without any social inclinations, at once vetoed the proposal.

It was in these changing, unquiet moods that she met Garwood. She had found that about the only practical outlet for the aspirations of women, in her time and country, was in the direction of charitable work. An unusually severe winter in Grand Prairie had made many opportunities for efforts of this nature, and she found a special pleasure in going about in the poorer quarter which lay beyond Railroad Avenue, hardly a block from the respectable homes of the well-to-do. The pleasure she derived from this new work was largely subjective; perhaps, as it is likely to do, it ministered to her spiritual vanity as much as to anything else. In the end, her emotional appreciation of the picturesque in poverty led her into indiscriminate giving. This new phase of her development did not increase her favor in the eyes of her neighbors. They resented her activity as foolish and meddlesome; the poor--to whom, in the delusion common to all the thoughtless rich, they gladly attributed unbounded good health--could get along all right, they said, if they would only work and save their money; or, as they preferred to express it, be industrious and frugal.

One of the families Emily visited had been frugal so long that it had lost the strength to be industrious. It was a German family that had come from the province of Pomerania, and the yellow hair of the mother framed a face that Emily loved to picture in its girlish prettiness among the fields of her native land and happier childhood. Her husband was a man with a delicious dialectal speech, and he could tell famous tales of his service in the German army. He had worked in the "Boakeye Bre'erie," as he called the Buckeye Brewery, and for some reason that Emily never properly grasped had lost his job. When she discovered the family they were patiently living on the remnant of a side of pork the man had bought with his last money.

Emily had pictured herself meeting, in the course of her charitable work, some interesting young doctor, with a Van Dyck beard; but all the doctors in Grand Prairie, like most of the other workers in that depleted vineyard, were old men; she met instead, what is universal, a young lawyer.

Jake Reinhardt, who never had money to buy bread or meat, seemed always able to procure beer and tobacco, an incongruity Emily could not understand at first. She learned afterwards that Jake knew a saloon-keeper who had a mixture of kind-heartedness and long-headedness, the first of which led him to trust Reinhardt for the beer and tobacco, while the second justified the course because Reinhardt's presence at his bar made one consumer more when a round of drinks was ordered for the house. Then, one day, suddenly, just as Emily thought she was getting the family on its feet, Reinhardt felled a man in the saloon with a blow of a billiard cue, and was thrown into jail on a charge of assault with intent to kill. His victim was lying in a precarious state; possibly he might die; Reinhardt might yet be held to answer to a charge of murder.

Emily found Mrs. Reinhardt with a face bloated by tears, staring in mute anguish at this new calamity she could not comprehend. As Emily's first thought in the former difficulties had been a doctor, now her first thought was a lawyer; but it seemed that one had already appeared, and Mrs. Reinhardt in her broken speech extolled him as a ministering angel. It was plain that he had taken up the cause out of pity for Reinhardt's defenseless condition, perhaps in a belief in his moral innocence, which the blundering police could not or would not admit. As the affair turned out, Emily's sympathies proved to have been as fully justified as the young lawyer's, and what she then observed of the practical administration of justice in criminal courts only confirmed many of the sociological heresies that then were sprouting in her mind, quite as much, indeed, to her own distress as to her father's.

Emily gave Mrs. Reinhardt _carte blanche_ in the matter of spending money to clear her husband, and even offered to pay the young lawyer's fee. When he refused, the lofty heroism of his act, as she called it, opened the way for a sympathy between them, and by the time Garwood acquitted his client, he and Emily were friends.

Garwood's social traditions were far removed from those of Emily; and it was only in Railroad Avenue, and never in Sangamon, that they could have met at all. Garwood had never gone into society in Grand Prairie; his mother was a Methodist, and to go into society it was necessary to be an Episcopalian, or at least a Presbyterian. He would have betrayed his training in any social emergency and he had to hide his ignorance of conventionalities behind a native diffidence, which in a young man of his solemnity happily passed for dignity.

But he came into Emily's life at the very time when it was ready to receive impressions from a more masterful mind. In his young dream of a career, in that enthusiasm for humanity which springs in most men of the liberal professions with the shock of their first impact with a hard, material age, and develops until the age taints them with its sordidness, Garwood had enlisted in the world-old fight for equality and democracy. His first victory was for himself, and he was elected to the Legislature. Thereafter, he dreamed of becoming some day a great commoner, and so was in danger of turning out a demagogue.

While he had not read as widely as Emily he had thought a great deal more, and the two young persons were delighted as they discovered new points at which, to their own satisfaction, they supplemented each other perfectly. Emily found in Garwood the only worthy intellectuality that the youth of Grand Prairie offered, and though, after a certain intimacy had been established by his first few awkward calls, he showed as much contempt as ever for the more aristocratic environment of the girl, this only flattered her, and she noted with the feminine pride and pleasure in little conquests, that as he grew accustomed to the life his constraint gave way to a liking for its luxury.

She adopted him, with a young girl's love of a protégé; gave him books to read and was pleased rather than displeased at the gossip their relations excited before that first winter ended and the spring took from them the excuse their charitable work had given for being much in each other's society. Thereafter they frankly dispensed with this bond and substituted one of affection pure and simple. This propinquity naturally ended in love, and the club women of the town were doubtless justified in their new and keenly relished understanding that Emily had more than the mere patroness's interest in the career of this young man. Most of them said she was demeaning herself, but that only added to their joy.

IV

Rankin was not only chairman of the Polk County central committee, a position he had held for years, but he was also chairman of the congressional committee. It was, therefore, with an authority no one cared to question that, early in September, he engaged two rooms in the Lawrence Block for the county committee's headquarters, though he preferred to pitch his own in Garwood's law office, which was on the same floor. Then he swung a banner across the street and began to menace Garwood's opponent with challenges for joint debates. To Grand Prairie this expressed the formal opening of the campaign, but Garwood already had been two weeks away from home, speaking twice daily in Piatt and DeWitt Counties, under the skies in the afternoon, under the stars by night, and had returned for a day before going down into Moultrie. The office had been crowded all day and it was late in the afternoon before he had a chance to write the letters that needed his attention. He had just dismissed, rather ungraciously, a delegation of negroes--for Rankin never had any patience with negro delegations--and had begun dictating to the typewriter, when another caller came demanding a personal interview.

The caller was a little man, who walked with stooped shoulders, swung a slender stick energetically as he advanced, and continued to twist it nervously when he had come. His head was but thinly covered with lank, moist hair, as was shown when he pushed back the sun-burned straw hat he wore. This moisture seemed to be general in his whole system. It was apparent in the perspiring hand he gave to Garwood; it affected the short mustache, dyed a dull, lifeless black, at which he scratched with a black-edged finger nail as he talked, when he was not plucking at the few hairs that strayed on his chin. This moisture showed again in his blue eyes, from which it had almost washed the color. After he had been shut in the room with Garwood for half an hour, the air was laden with alcoholic fumes, which, exuding from his whole body, may have accounted for his moist personality. While he talked he chewed and puffed a glossy yellow cigar.

This man was Freeman H. Pusey, and he was publisher, editor, reporter, all in one, of the Grand Prairie _Evening News_. His journal was a small one of four pages, for the most part given over to boiler-plate matter, but it carried a column of "locals," a portentous editorial page, and took on a happy, almost gala expression whenever it could exploit, under the heavy ragged type in which its headlines were set, some scandal that would shock Grand Prairie. In politics the _News_ claimed to be independent, which meant that it leaned far to one side in one campaign, and as far to the other in the next; indeed, it sometimes held these two extreme positions in the same campaign, and found no difficulty in vindicating its policy.

"I came to see you, Mr. Garwood, in regard to a little political matter," Pusey began.

"Well?" said Garwood, not too cordially.

"Of course you know that the _News_ is the accepted organ of the people, that is, the great mass of the common people here in Grand Prairie and,--ah--I might say in Polk County."

"So I've heard," said Garwood.

"Thus far, you may have noticed, we have been neutral, that is, I should say, independent, as between you and Judge Bromley."

Garwood was looking out of his window down into the court house square, where the winds played with the rubbish that always litters the streets of Grand Prairie. He made no reply, and Pusey eyed him out of his swimming little eyes.

"Yes," continued Pusey, pinching his chin, "we have waited to see how events would shape themselves before--ah--"

Garwood grunted, and Pusey went on:

"Yes--ah--I had come to the conclusion that perhaps our best course would be to support you, inasmuch as you're our fellow townsman--and it occurred to me that perhaps a write-up would do you some good, that is, with the great mass of the common people, the laboring people generally, you understand."

"I should be obliged to you, of course," said Garwood.

"H-m-m, yes," answered Pusey, "I presume so. But--if I--that is, we, were to give you such a write-up and run your cut, you would, I presume, be ready to take twenty or thirty thousand copies for distribution?"

"What would it cost?" said Garwood.

"Well--at two cents a copy--you can--"

"I see," said Garwood, "for your support you would expect about five hundred dollars."

"I did not put it in that light," said Pusey, spitting, and trying to assume a dignity.

"No, but I--"

"You can see, of course, Mr. Garwood--a man of your experience can readily see, that a paper like the _News_ can hardly afford to give up its valuable space to that which is not strictly news matter without some hope of compensation."

"I see," said Garwood, "but to be frank with you, Pusey," he turned and looked straight into the little man's watery eyes, "I can't afford it. This campaign, into which I sometimes wish I hadn't gone, has proved expensive, and my practice has suffered, so that I need all the money at my command for more immediate and pressing expenses."

"You do not consider this immediate and pressing then?" said Pusey.

"Well, not exactly," Garwood replied. "Would you?"

Pusey was silent for a while. When he spoke he said:

"There are certain passages in your life, Mr. Garwood, which just now--"

Garwood glared at Pusey.

"So that's the game, is it?" he said. His tone was low, for he was calculating carefully the part he had to play.

The little man was revolving his straw hat on the head of his stick, and he wore a grin about his moist mouth. Garwood had mastered his anger, but Pusey had to wait some time before he spoke. Presently he did so.

"I'll tell you, Pusey," he said, "you know Jim Rankin is running my campaign, and I have promised him not to take any steps without consulting him. We've had all sorts of callers here, white and black, cranks, mind readers, palmists, faith curists and men with votes in their vest pockets, and I've adopted the rule of turning over to him every one who comes. I'll speak to him about your case, and you may call around to-morrow and see him."

When Pusey had gone, Garwood burst upon Rankin, his face white with anger.

"The damned little blackmailing--"

"What'n hell's the matter?" asked Rankin, letting his feet fall from the desk.

Garwood, digging his clenched fists into his trousers' pockets, paced the floor, swearing angrily.

"Free Pusey's been here," he said.

"What'd he want?"

"Stuff."

"Of course--but what for?"

"For keeping still, what'd you suppose?"

"Does he know anything?"

Garwood paused by the window, still breathing hard.

"Well," he said presently, "he claims to."

Rankin drew himself upright with the difficulty of a fat man, and leaned towards Garwood.

"Legislature?" he asked.

Garwood gave an impatient fling of his head. He turned then, drew a chair up to the desk, and sat down, facing Rankin. But Rankin spoke first.

"Some more of that newspaper rot 'bout the Ford bill?"

"Oh, I suppose so," said Garwood wearily. "I reckon I'll never hear the last of that."

"Oh, well," Rankin said, "to hell with it. Let him print it!"

"But damn it," Garwood went on, "it's serious with me--just now--at any rate."

"Aw, cheer up," said Rankin, "that won't cut any figure with you--it won't lose a vote."

"No, but it may lose me something else--" Garwood spoke with a significance that Rankin could not instantly appreciate. "Of course," Garwood continued "there was nothing in it, but then--you know, a woman--"

The big fellow vented a little whistle, and then kept his lips puckered up to aid his thought.

"What can we do?" said Garwood, who could not then, in such a mood, endure the delay of silence.

"Well," said Rankin, "let me think, I can't straighten it out all at once. It 'as al'ays hard fer me to mix politics and business, or politics and religion, or politics and--" He was a sentimental man who feared to show his sentiment, and he did not speak the tender word of many meanings. But under the influence of the twilight, perhaps because they could not see each other's face, they talked confidentially, until the gloom of evening was expanding in the room. Then Rankin took out his watch and tried to read its dial.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed, "I must be gettin' home--I'll try to fix it up somehow, Jerry. Don't worry--just leave it to me."

"If you think we ought to do it, Jim," Garwood said, "I might borrow the--"

"Not a red cent for that pirate!" exclaimed Rankin, smiting the desk with his fist. "We'll need all the money we can get in the campaign. Besides, he ain't honest enough to stay bought."

Though Rankin had told him not to worry, Garwood was depressed and troubled, and longed for sympathy. In the evening, when he found time to go to Emily, Pusey was uppermost in his mind.

"You're tired, of course," said Emily, "and how hoarse."

"It's the speaking, I reckon," said Garwood. "I campaigned all week with old General Stager; we spoke outdoors to acres of people. How those old-timers stand it I don't know. They can blow like steam whistles day and night. When I left the old gentleman last night at Mt. Pulaski, he was as fresh as a daisy--said he liked a little taste of the stump now and then--but that, of course, it wasn't anything to what it used to be."

Emily laughed a little.

"Won't you have some meetings indoors?"

"Oh, after while--but we have to get the crowds where we can find them, and the farmers are all at the county fairs nowadays. I'll be glad when it's over. The strain is pulling me down."

"Aren't you well?" she asked with a woman's constant concern.

"Oh, yes, well enough; of course I have a cold all the time, a candidate has to have that, and a sore throat, but you have to smile, and look pleasant, and shake hands, and be careful what you say. I'd give anything to be a free man once more, to be able to talk without weighing every word, without having to watch it as if I were drawing an indictment. I'd give anything to indulge one good fit of anger."

"Can't you--just get mad at me?"

Garwood laughed fondly. "Well," he went on, "it's good to come here and relax and speak my mind. I did get mad to-day though, and threaten to throw a man out of my office window." His thought would revert to that subject.

"Who?" she asked, in alarm.

"Oh, that little Free Pusey."

"What has he done?"

"He wanted me to give him money for his support."

"Well, I don't blame you. I can understand your righteous indignation, Jerome."

Garwood felt the blood tinge his checks.

"I wish you wouldn't talk that way, Emily."

"W'y, why?"

"Because you don't know how sordid politics are--or is--which is it? I'd probably have given it to him, only I didn't have it; the righteously indignant was the only attitude left."

"I don't like to hear you talk like that, Jerome. I don't like to see you in that cynical mood. It wasn't an attitude, it was your real nature speaking."

"Well, a man must keep his real nature in subjection in politics."

"Please don't, Jerome; you mustn't keep your real nature in subjection in politics. We need just such men as you in our public life."

They were silent then.

"Jerome," the girl said later, "do you really need money so badly?"

"Well, it costs, you know."

"Why don't you speak to father--I know he'd be glad to help you. He is very anxious to see you succeed, you know--or if you think that Mr. Pusey can harm you, why can't you let father speak to him? Father once did him some favor--don't you remember those sickening, fulsome articles he wrote?"

Garwood gasped at the thought of Emily's father penetrating that situation.

"Never that!" he said, bringing his fist down on his knee. "Don't you ever suggest such a thing, Emily, do you hear?" He turned and his eyes glowed as he looked at her. The girl laughed a little laugh of pride in him.

"I'm afraid, Jerome," she began in a playful way, "that you don't understand politics very well yourself." And then she became serious, and sighed.

"But how noble you are! And how high minded! And how I love you for it!"

They sat there a long while after that, in the darkness. But they did not talk politics any more.

V

When the Alton's early train drew out of the Canal Street station that morning, the last coach had its curtains drawn, with a touch of royal mystery. Though its polished panels were grimed from a long journey, though its roof lay deep in cinders, and though its gilt lettering was tarnished, still, as it moved onward with heavy dignity, it was plainly no ordinary car, for it rolled majestically at the end of that long train like some ship, to which clung the sentimental interest of a stormy voyage. As it passed, yardmen in blue overalls straightened their backs painfully and scrutinized it with professional eye, sometimes they swung their caps; laborers, men and women, on their morning way to work, halted by the crossing-gates and united in a cheer, their futile little celebration being dissipated by the clamor of the alarm bells, as the train whirled by in its cloud of dust, and the gates lifted to let the flood-tide of city life set in again for the day's work.

The fireman in the engine cab sat erect as he clanged his brass bell; the engineer, knitting his brow as he studied his watch, stretched his hand to the throttle with a touch as delicate as a telegrapher's. Within the train, the division superintendent whispered to the conductor. Plainly, it was no ordinary car.

It was bearing a candidate for the presidency, on his way west, swinging around the circle, as our phrase has been ever since Andrew Johnson made the first presidential stumping tour.

His itinerary had been so arranged as to give him an hour in Lincoln that afternoon. General Stager was to be there also and to speak before the presidential candidate arrived. The old wheel-horse's part was to hold the crowd, and he was well cast, for he could talk on indefinitely, and yet round off his speech with an eloquent peroration at any moment and seem never to suffer any ill effects, either as to himself or to his speech. Then in the evening Garwood was to speak. He had looked forward to the day with eagerness, anticipating fondly his meeting with the great man who, as General Stager would put it, was running for the highest office within the gift of the American people.

He had gone up to Chicago with Rankin the night before, and when the private car was switched over from the Pennsylvania in the morning, they boarded it with one or two members of the state executive committee, and the member of the national committee for Illinois.

The great man slept late, as great men may, yielding to the conceit that their labors are heavier than those of common men, and as Garwood and Rankin sat in the forward compartment and whispered to each other, Rankin noted his impression by saying:

"The old man takes it easy, don't he?"

Something of this impatience was expressed by the cries of the crowd that gathered in the station at Joliet, after the train had rolled by the high stone walls of the penitentiary, and Garwood, growing more accustomed to his position, allowed himself to enjoy, as he saw men peering curiously in at him, the distinction a man feels in riding in a private car.

But the day was fully awake now, and the national excitement that for a week had found its dynamic center in that car, began to impress itself upon its occupants; the newspaper correspondents who traveled with the candidate began to make notes now and then after they had learned the name of the town they were passing; while jacketed darkies began to slip about in their morning work, and at last the candidate himself came into the salon, clean and fresh, blinking his eyes in the sun, as he smiled in a courtly way and said, as if they were members of his suite traveling with a king:

"Gentlemen, good morning."

And then he looked about him as if he had lost something.

"Is the colonel up yet?" he asked.

His secretary at that instant appeared, pursued by a black porter whisking at his blue clothes with a long, thin broom.

"Ah," he said, "there you are. Did you rest well?"

"Fairly," said the colonel. "Papers come yet?"

Before the candidate could reply, the chairman of the state central committee had taken Garwood by the sleeve and drawn him up before the candidate.

"This is Mr. Garwood, our candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District."

"Ah, Mr. Garwood," the great man said, "very glad to meet you, I'm sure. You had rather a spirited contest in your district, did you not?"

Garwood smiled at the memory of it. He was about to reply when the colonel, who had gone for the train boy, returned with a bundle of newspapers that smelt pleasantly of the printer's ink, and gave them all, save the one he had opened for himself, to the candidate. The candidate took them in his delicate hands, lifted his glasses, opened one of the papers, and as he did so observed, his eyes running up and down the columns:

"Such contests are always healthful indications, I fancy."

Garwood hemmed and murmured a disappointed "Yes." The great man was slowly sinking into a wicker chair, and beginning to read the reports of the speeches he had delivered through Indiana and Ohio the day before.

The whole party had got newspapers of the news agent and had settled down to read them. The newspaper men had bought with as much avidity as the rest, and were trembling with the mingled pain and pleasure of reading their own stuff, as, with a contempt perhaps not all pretended, they called it.

The news that the candidate had risen spread through the train by some mysterious agency, and almost before he had finished his breakfast, men began to venture back that way to see him. He received them all with his weary smile, shook their hands, and thanked them for whatever it was he seemed to think or wished them to think they were doing for him. It was the better dressed of the passengers in the forward coaches that were bold enough to enter a private car at first, but as the habit grew common, men from the day coaches, and at last the farmers from the smoking car who had got on to ride short distances between stations, began to shamble back. One of them, with his clothes and hat and whiskers all sun-burned to a neutral shade of brown, stood in an awkward attitude before the candidate crushing his white slender hand in his own harsh palm, and pumped it up and down, stammering through his tobacco that he had been voting the straight ticket for fifty years, and when the great man said he hoped that he would live to vote it for fifty years more, the little knot of admiring men laughed with exuberant mirth at the joke.

As the news that the candidate had risen spread through the train, so it sped onward before the train, and now as they reached and impatiently halted at little towns along the road, people were gathered at the stations, stretching their necks, and hastily glancing at all the windows of the train to catch a glimpse of the man who might soon be their president.

At each stop the candidate stepped out upon the platform, his stenographer following him with a note book, spoke a few words of greeting, and dropped a politic remark that had the epigrammatic ring of a political axiom.

Garwood was disappointed in not being called on to speak himself, and he had been disappointed, too, in not having the conversation with his great leader he had anticipated. He was beginning to realize the relativity of things, whereby a candidate for Congress is only great when he is drinking with a candidate for supervisor at some country bar, but when he is riding in a private car with a candidate for president he is small indeed, so small that he is not noticed in the press despatches, as Garwood was to learn when he faithfully read all the city papers the next day.

But down below Bloomington the great man gladdened him by taking a seat beside him, and beginning to ask questions, which is sometimes the mark of a great man.

"Let me see, you reside in Grand Prairie, do you not, Mr. Garwood? What is the condition of our party over there just now?"

Garwood told him it was very good; he thought there was much enthusiasm.

The great man said that he had discovered such conditions to be generally indicated.

"It will be only necessary to crystallize that enthusiasm in the ballot box," he continued, with his Latin derivatives, "for us to win a splendid victory. Your organization is satisfactory, is it?"

Again Garwood answered "Yes."

"Very good," the great man said. "How large a town is Lincoln--we stop there this afternoon, do we not, Colonel?"

The colonel, too, said "Yes."

"Agricultural community principally, I suppose? Are the farmers fairly prosperous in the county?"

"Oh, yes," said Garwood, "they've had good crops this year."

"Let me see, General Bancroft used to represent your district in Congress, did he not?"

"Yes, sir--some years ago. He's dead now, you know."

"Yes, I remember--I must--let me see--I was in the forty-third Congress with him, was I not, Colonel?"

"The forty-fourth," corrected the colonel.

"To be sure, the forty-fourth. He was a very fine man. I formed a very high opinion of him."

"Yes, he was a fine man," said Garwood. "I read law in his office."

"Did you, indeed? He was a very good lawyer, as I recall him. We sat on the judiciary committee together. Did he have a good practice?"

"Oh, yes, the best at the Grand Prairie bar. He was the best jury lawyer we ever had there."

"Yes, he was a good speaker. Was the breach in the party created by his peculiarly strong character healed at his death?"

"Well, it's pretty much healed now; for a long time it bothered us, but we never hear of it any more."

"Pretty popular with the people, was he?"

"Very."

"I would presume so." The great man closed his eyes as if shutting in some impression.

"Yes," Garwood went on, "the bare mention of his name will set them wild even now."

"Ah, indeed," said the candidate. "He raised a regiment about there, did he not?"

"Yes--the old ninety-third--the Bloody Ninety-third they called it. A number of his old soldiers will be at your meeting this afternoon."

The candidate reflected that most communities like to think that their regiments have been known as "the Bloody," but he did not say so to Garwood.

The train sped on, then Garwood heard it stop, heard the cheers and cries of the crowds outside, heard the rich voice of the candidate speaking, heard the restless bell as the train moved on again with quickly accelerated speed, while the little station and the crowd and the two shining tracks dissolved into one disappearing point of the perspective far behind. The cheers faded away, and he tried to imagine the sensation of the man for whom all this outcry was being made. The great man seemed to take it coolly enough. Either such things had grown common to him, or he had trained himself by a long course of public life to appear as if they had, for when he was not making speeches on the rear platform, or shaking hands with little delegations that boarded the train to go to the Lincoln meeting, he was resting in his stateroom. He was not well, Garwood heard the colonel explain to some one, and had to conserve his energies, though like some athlete in training he seemed able to rest and sleep between his exertions.

Rankin had wearied of the formalities of the private car and, as the train began to fill with familiar forms, men with whom he had battled in conventions for years, he had fled to the easier society and the denser atmosphere of the smoking car, greeting countless friends from all over the district, and doing the campaign work Garwood felt he should be doing himself. But the magnetism of his great leader, the joy of being in a presence all men were courting in those days, perhaps, too, a desire to feel to the utmost the distinction of riding in a private car, kept him there.

The train had reached Atlanta Hill, and now its noise subsided. The engine no longer vomited black masses of smoke, but seemed to hold its breath as, with wheels that spun so swiftly they seemed motionless, it coasted silently and swiftly down that steep grade. The spires and roofs of little Lawndale showed an instant above the trees, and then out on the level again the train sped on toward Lincoln.

Garwood arose and got the overcoat he carried to draw on after each speech, for its moral impressiveness as much as to keep him from catching cold, and as the engine began to puff heavily, and the train rolled into Lincoln, Rankin appeared, hot and perspiring.

"Come on," he said to Garwood, "we're there. The boys have all been askin' fer you!"

"Have they?" asked Garwood, half guiltily. "What did you tell them?"

"I told 'em you was back here closeted with the old man; that he wouldn't let you out of his sight, that's what I told 'em."

They heard the strains of a marching band, and then a cheer arose.

VI

The crowd began its cheering as the engine slid on past the weather-beaten station and stopped, puffing importantly as if it knew how big a load it had hauled. And then the candidate appeared, and midway in a cheer the crowd ceased, stricken into silence by the sight of him. He stood for an instant, pale and distinguished, a smile on his cleanly chiseled face, an impersonal smile, almost the smile of a child, as if he were unaccustomed to all about him, crowd, committees, even the steps of the railway carriage, for three men helped him down these as if he could not know how such things were done and might injure himself. Looking carefully to his right and to his left, still with that impersonal smile on his face, the candidate set his patent leather boots to the splintered platform, and then sighing "Ah!" looked around over the crowd.

It was all confusion where they stood, but Rankin was already beside the candidate, calling him "Mr. President" as he introduced to him promiscuously men who had pressed forward grinning in a not altogether hopeless embarrassment. All this time the chairman of the Logan County committee was fluttering about, striving to recall the orderly scheme of arrangement he had devised for the occasion. He had written it all out on a slip of paper the night before, having the carriages numbered, and, in a bracket set against each number, the names of those who were to ride in that carriage, just as he had seen the thing done at a funeral. But now he found that he had left his slip of paper at home, and he found that he had forgotten the arrangement as well, just as a man in the cold hour of delivery forgets a speech he has written out and burdened his memory with. As the chairman turned this way and that, several of his townsmen noticing the indecision and perplexity written on his face, with the pitiless American sense of humor, mockingly proposed:

"Three cheers for McBain!"

As the crowd gave the cheers, the chairman became redder than ever and entreated the driver of the first carriage to come closer. The driver drew his horses, whose tails he had been crimping for two weeks, nearer the curb, and then the chairman turned toward the candidate and said:

"This way, Mr. President!"

The candidate had been standing there smiling and giving both his hands to men and women and children that closed upon him, and as the chairman looked toward him he saw Garwood standing by his side. The chairman had forgotten Garwood. In fact he had not expected him until evening, and he had no place for him in his scheme. Rankin saw McBain's predicament and promptly assuming an official relation to the affair, gently urged their presidential candidate toward the waiting carriage. Before the candidate would move, however, he looked about and said:

"Where's the colonel?"

Then the small man in the modish blue clothes appeared from behind him, and the candidate sighed as if in relief. They all helped him into the carriage, and he smiled his gratitude. The colonel climbed into the front seat facing his chief. Then another traveling companion of the candidate, a man who was slated for a cabinet position, followed him. Garwood seemed about to withdraw and had raised his hand to lift his hat, when Rankin said:

"Get right in, Mr. Garwood, there's plenty of room!"

Garwood felt called upon to demur, knowing that no place had been reserved for him, but Rankin began to shove from behind, and Garwood found himself sitting in the same carriage with the presidential candidate. The chairman, who had expected to ride with the great guest himself, scanned the line of carriages drawn up for the others in the party, and then slamming the door shut on them, said to the driver:

"All right, Billy."

The drums rolled again, and the band began to play. The captains of the marching clubs shouted their military orders, and the carriage moved. The crowd cheered, and the candidate turning, became suddenly grave. His pale face flushed slightly as with an easy, distinguished air he lifted his high hat.

Garwood saw that Rankin had secured a seat in one of the carriages farther back in the line, and that half a dozen newspaper men, whom the local chairman had failed to take into account, were standing, with bored, insouciant expressions, waiting to be assigned to vehicles, realizing that the affair depended, for all beyond a mere local success, upon their presence. At the last minute they were crowded into a hack in which some of the local leaders of the party had hoped to display their importance before their neighbors. The slight seemed a little thing at the time, but it eventually created a factional fight in that county. The local chairman himself was compelled to mount beside the driver of one of the vehicles.

Amid a crash of brass, the throb of drums, and a great roar from human throats the procession wound up the crowded street. All the way the sidewalks were lined with people, and all the way the candidate lifted his high hat with that distinguished gesture.

The whole county had come in from the country, and farmers' muddy wagons were hitched to every rack, their owners clinging to the bridles of horses that reared and plunged as the bands went by. One township had sent a club of mounted farmers, who wore big hats and rode horses on whose hides were imprinted the marks of harness, and whose caparisons were of all descriptions from the yellow pelts of sheep to Mexican saddles, denoting a terrible scouring of the township before daylight that morning. These men were stern and fierce and formed a sort of rude cavalry escort for the great man whom they cheered so hoarsely. The procession did not go directly to the court house, for that was only two blocks away, but made a slow and jolting progress along those streets that were decorated for the occasion. There were flags and bunting everywhere and numerous pictures of the candidate himself, of varying degrees of likeness to him, and pictures, too, of his "running mate," the candidate for vice-president, who at that minute was enjoying a similar ovation in some far off Eastern village. Some of the householders, galled by the bitterness of partisanship, flaunted in their windows pictures of the candidate's rival, but the great man lifted his hat and bowed to them, clustered in silence before their residences, as impartially as he did to those of his own party.

In the last two blocks before the procession reached the court house square they could hear a man speaking, and Garwood knew that the voice was the voice of General Stager. The old court house standing in its ancient dignity in a park of oak trees, lifting its plastered columns with a suggestion of the calm of classic beauty, broke on their sight, and the music of the bands, as they brayed into the square, filled the whole area with their triumphant strains and cheer on cheer leaped toward them. The music and the cheers drowned the voice of General Stager, and his audience suddenly left him and surged toward the approaching procession. The cheering was continuous, the candidate's white head was bare most of the time, and when the carriage stopped and he was assisted up the steps into the speaker's stand, the bands exultantly played "Union Forever, Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah!" the horns fairly singing the words of the song.

General Stager, red and drenched with perspiration, advanced to shake the hand of the presidential candidate, and the spectacle set the crowd yelling again. The candidate began his speech immediately. It was the same speech he had delivered all along his itinerary, though his allusions to the splendid agricultural community in which he found himself, the good crops that had been yielded to the hand of the husbandman, gave a fictitious local color, and his touching reference to his old friend, General Bancroft, by whose side he had sat at Washington through so many stirring years fraught with deeds and occasions of such vast import to the national life, and his glowing tribute to the Bloody Ninety-third, brought the applause rolling up to him in great waves. He spoke for nearly an hour, standing at the railing with the big flag hanging down before him and a big, white water pitcher standing close beside; behind him were the vice-presidents sitting with studied gravity; near by, the reporters writing hurriedly; before him and around him, under the green and motionless trees, a vast multitude, heads many of them bared, faces upturned, with brows knit to aid in concentration, jaws working as they chewed on their eternal tobacco.

Out at the edges of the crowd, a continual movement shifted the masses and groups of men, along the curb were lines of wagons, with horses stamping and switching their tails, across the street on the three-storied brick blocks, the flutter of flags and bunting. The old court house, frowning somehow with the majesty of the law, formed a stately, solemn background for it all; overhead was the sky, piling rapidly now with clouds. The whole square gave an effect of strange stillness, even with the voice of the speaker ringing through it; the crowd was silent, treasuring his words for future repetition, treasuring perhaps the sight of him, the sensation of being in his actual presence, for the tale of future years.

But suddenly, in a second, when the crowd was held in the magic spell of his oratory, when men were least thinking of such a thing, he ceased to talk, the speech was over, the event was closed, and the great man, not pausing even long enough to let the vice-presidents of the meeting shake hands with him, or to hear the Lincoln Glee Club sing a campaign song, looked about for the colonel, climbed out of the stand into his carriage and was whirled away, lifting his hat, still with that distinguished air, amid cheers that would not let the campaign song begin, and with little boys swarming like outrunners at his glistening wheels.

When the meeting was over, Garwood went to the hotel to wait for Rankin, who had a mysterious, but always purposeful way of disappearing at times of such political excitement as had been rocking Lincoln all that day. Garwood had long since learned, when Rankin thus went under the political waters, to await calmly his reappearance at the surface, and so he wrote Rankin's name and his own name on the blotted register of the hotel, and asked for a room. He had scarcely laid down the corroded pen the landlord found in a drawer, when a voice beside him said:

"Did you see it yet, Jerry?"

Garwood turned to look in the grinning face of Julius Vogt, who had come over with the Grand Prairie "excursion" that morning.

"See what?" asked Garwood.

"Why," said Vogt, drawing something from his pocket, "Pusey's article about you--there," and he opened the copy of the _News_ and gave it to Garwood.

"Oh!" said Garwood, "_that!_--I saw part of it." And he smiled on Vogt, whom he felt like striking.

"Well," said Vogt, still grinning, though his grin was losing something, "I jus' thought, maybe,--"

"Thanks," said Garwood. Several others of the Grand Prairie boys, as any one, considering them in their political capacity, would have called them, had drawn near, attracted by their candidate for Congress, whose wide hat rode above all the heads in the crowd. Doubtless they expected Garwood to open the paper, but he was too good a politician for that. As he stood there he idly picked at the ragged edges of the sheets, and when he spoke seemed to have forgotten it, for he said:

"Well, how'd you like the speech?"

"Great," said Billy Feek.

"You bet," said Doris Fox.

"Didn't he lam into 'em?" said Burr Rippleman.

Still their eyes were on the paper which Garwood seemed to be in danger of picking to pieces.

"Yes, it was as fine an effort as I ever heard under such circumstances," said Garwood. "He's a great campaigner." He carelessly thrust the paper into the side pocket of the black alpaca coat he wore. The boys were sober faced again.

"Goin' back with us to-night, Jerry?" said Elam Kirk. "We're goin' to hold the train till after your speech."

"Reckon not," Garwood replied. "I'm going over to Pekin in the morning." He looked at his watch. "Well!" he exclaimed, "it's nearly supper time, and I haven't given a thought to what I'm going to say to-night. Will you come have a little drink before supper?"

The boys grinned again, saying they didn't care if they did, and followed Garwood towards the dingy bar-room, making old jokes about drinking, in the manner of the small town, the citizens of which, because of their stricter moral environment, or perhaps of more officious neighbors, can never indulge in tippling with the freedom of city-bred fellows. Garwood could not escape without a joke at his expense, attempted by some one of the party whose appreciation of hospitality was not refined, and though it made him shudder he had to join in the laugh it provoked. But when he could get away from them at last, he went to the room he had taken, and there, seated on the edge of the bed, he opened the paper and held it in the window to catch the fading light. It had been issued at noon that day, and given an added importance by the word "Extra!" printed in black and urgent type at the head of its page. But below, Garwood read another word, a word that needed no bold type to make it black--"Boodler!"--and then--his own name.

Pusey had adroitly chosen that day as the one most likely to aid the effect of his sensation, and the opposing committee had gladly undertaken to circulate hundreds of copies at the Lincoln rally. The article was obviously done by Pusey himself, and he had taken a keen delight in the work. He had written it in the strain of one who performs a painful public duty, the strain in which a judge, gladdened more and more by his own utterance, sentences a convicted criminal, though without the apology a judge always makes to the subject of his discourse, in carefully differentiating his official duty from his individual inclination.

Garwood forced himself remorselessly to read it through, to the very end, and then abstractedly, sitting there in the fading light that straggled in from the dirty street outside, he picked the paper into little pieces, and sprinkled them on the floor. The letters of the headline were printed on his mind, and as he sat there in the darkness and viewed the litter he had made, seeing it all as the ruin of his life and hopes, he flung his great body headlong on the bed and buried his face in his hands.

Half an hour later Rankin thrust his head in at the door and called into the darkness that filled the room:

"Oh, Jerry!"

He haltingly entered, piercing the gloom, and dimly outlining the long form of his candidate stretched on the frail bed.

"Jerry! Jerry!" he said.

Garwood's form was tall when it stood erect in the daylight, it was immense when it lay prone in the dark. There was something in the sight to strike a kind of superstitious terror to the heart, and Rankin's elemental nature sensed something of this, but when Garwood heaved and gave a very human grunt, Rankin cried in an approach to anger:

"Aw, git up out o' that! Don't you hear the band tunin' up outside?"

The crowd in town had been gradually decreasing all through the waning afternoon; the multitude that had come to hear a candidate for the presidency would not stay to listen to a candidate for Congress. With the falling of the night there had been a gathering of gray clouds, and at the threatening of a storm the crowd thinned more and more. Gradually the weary ones withdrew, the howls of tipsy countrymen on the sides of the square subsided, the rural cavalry galloped out of town with parting yells for their candidate, the square in the falling rain glistened under the electric light that bathed the ancient pediment of the court house with a modern radiance. At nine o'clock Garwood finished his speech, ceremoniously thanking and bidding good night a little mass of men who huddled with loyal partisanship around the band-stand, with a few extinguished torches reeking under his nose, with the running colors of the flags and bunting staining the pine boards on which he rested his hands, and with a few boys chasing each other with sharp cries about the edges of the gathering.

VII

Ethan Harkness, having finished his labors, such as the labors of a bank president are, sat at his old walnut desk in the window of the First National Bank waiting for Emily to come and drive him home. The old man had set his desk in order, with his big gold pen laid in the rack of his ink stand, his blotters held down by a paper weight, and a leaf of his calendar torn off, ready for the next day's business. The desk was in such order as would have made the work-table of a professional man unfamiliar to him, but, as he waited, Ethan Harkness rearranged it again and again, absent-mindedly, changing the position of the blotters, wiping his pen once more on his gray hair. Then he drew out his gold watch, adjusted his spectacles, took an observation of the time, and looked with an air of incredibility into the street. Any break in the routine of his life was a pain to Ethan Harkness, and it was with a resignation to this pain that he called:

"Morton, bring me the paper! I might as well read it if I've got to wait."

The old teller, a white haired, servile man with the stoop of a clerk in his shoulders, and the disindividualized stare of a clerk in his submissive eyes, came shuffling in with the paper he himself had been reading. Harkness took it reluctantly. His life was as methodical as his calendar, and if he read the evening paper before supper he would have nothing to do after, for he could not go to bed till nine o'clock. If he did, he awoke too soon in the morning and then he would reach the bank before the mail had been delivered. Thus it will be imagined how serious would be the train of consequences set in motion by one irregularity in his day.

But he took the paper. It was the _News_, and his eye lighted at once on the article that Pusey had written about Garwood. As he read it a great rage gathered in his breast, a rage compounded of many emotions, which gradually took form, first as a hatred of Garwood for his misdeeds, then of Pusey for laying them bare. Ethan Harkness was not a man of broad sympathies. What love he had was bestowed on Emily; he had lavished it there ever since his wife had died. He gave so much to her that he had none left for others, and he stood in the community as a hard, just man who had built up his fortune by long years of labor and self-denial that made him impatient of the frailties which his fellows in the little community, in common with their brothers in the wider world, found it so hard to govern and restrain.

He sat there mute and implacable, with his fist, still big from the farm work it had done in early life, clenched upon the _News_, while Morton clanked the bars of the vault in fastening the place of treasure for the night, and slipped here and there behind his wire cage, pretending little duties to keep him from facing his employer when in such a mood.

It was after five o'clock when the surrey lurched into the filthy gutter, and when Harkness saw that Emily was not in it, he felt his rage with Garwood increase for depriving him thus of the pleasant hour to which he looked forward all the afternoon. He rode home in silence behind old Jasper who tried in his companionable way, by making his characteristic observations on men and things, to draw his master out of his moody preoccupation.

Harkness found his daughter at the supper table, and when he saw her, he at once yearned toward her with a great wish to give her such comfort as a mother would have supplied; but with something of his own stern nature, she held herself spiritually aloof; and he ate his cold meat, his fried potatoes, his peaches and cream and drank his tea without a word from her, beyond some allusions to the heat of the sultry day, the prospect of rain, and the need of it at his farm lying at the edge of town. Her face was white, but her eyes were not red or swollen, and she gave him no sign whether or not she knew of the blow that had been struck at the man she loved. He thought several times of telling her, or asking her about it, but he was always half afraid of her, and had submitted to her rule all the years when no one else was strong enough to rule him.

When supper was done, she disappeared, and as he strained his ears from his library where he was reading all alone, he heard her close a door upstairs and lock it. Later, when he went up in his stocking-feet, having left his boots downstairs in the habit he had brought out of the poverty of his boyhood into the comfort of his age, he paused a moment by her door, and raised his hand as if to knock; but he could not figure it out, he said to himself, and so changed his mind and went to bed, leaving it all to time.

When Emily went to her room, she sat at her dressing-table a moment looking at her own reflection, until her features became so strange that a fear of insanity haunted her, and then she half undressed and lay down upon her bed. She told herself that she could not sleep that night, and yet, after her first burst of tears she fell into the sound and natural slumber of grief-stricken youth with its vague apologetic hope that the whitened hair will show in the morning.

Far in the night she awoke with a strange ignorance of time and place. She shivered with the chill of the night air. Rain was falling and she heard the lace curtains at the windows scraping in the wind against the heavy leaves of a fern she was nurturing, and with a woman's intuitive dread of the damage rain may do when windows are open, she arose to close them. The cool air swept in upon her, driving the fine mist of the rain, but she let it spray a moment upon her face, upon her breast, before she pulled her window down. Outside the yard lay in blackness, and she looked down on it long enough to distinguish all its familiar objects, each bush and shrub and tree; she saw the lawn mower stranded by the walk and she thought how her father would scold old Jasper in the morning; and then she thought it strange and unreal that she could think of such irrelevant things at such a time. Yet every material thing was aggressively normal; the electric light swinging and creaking at the corner of Ohio Street with the rain slanting across the ovoid of light that clung around it showed that; everything the same--yet all changed with her.

She turned from her window. The darkness indoors was kind, it seemed to hide the wound that had been dealt her, and she hastily undressed and got to bed, curling up like a little child. Then she lay and tried to think, until her head ached. She had been thinking thus ever since the cruel moment that afternoon when she had picked up the _News_ on the veranda.

Her heart had been light that day. She had thought of Jerome as he traveled in his private car with a coming president. She had gone with him to Lincoln, and seen him riding through the crowded streets; had beheld him in the flare of torches, his face alight with the inspiration of an orator, his eyes fine and sparkling, as she had so often seen them blazing with another passion; had heard his ringing voice, and the cheers of the frantic people, massed in that remembered square. And so in the afternoon she became impatient for the cry the boy gave when he tossed the local papers on the floor of the veranda. She had swooped down on them before the boy had turned his little back and mounted his wheel. And the thing that first struck her eye had smitten her heart still--the headlines bearing Garwood's name. She had caught at the newel post in the wide hall to keep from falling.

It had not then occurred to her to doubt the truth of the tale Pusey had told. She had not yet progressed in politics or in life far enough to learn to take with the necessary grain of salt everything a newspaper prints. The very fact that a statement was in type impressed her as abundant proof of its truth, as it does children, young and old, a fact which has prolonged the life of many fables for centuries and will make others immortal. It seemed to her simply an inexorable thing and she turned this way and that in a vain effort to adjust the heavy load so that it might more easily be borne. But when she found it becoming intolerable, she began to seek some way of escaping it. In that hour of the night she first doubted its truth; her heart leaped, she gave a half-smothered laugh. Then she willed that it be not true, she determined that it must not be true, and with a child-like trust in His omnipotence, she prayed to God to make it untrue. And so she fell asleep at last.

All these hours of the night, in a far humbler street of the town, in a small frame house where nothing could be heard but the ticking of an old brown Seth Thomas clock, a woman lay sleeping. Her scant, white hair was parted on her wrinkled brow, her long hands, hardened by the years of work, were folded on her breast, and her face, dark and seamed as it was, wore a peaceful smile, for she had fallen asleep thinking of her boy, laughing at his traducers, and praying, pronouncing the words in earnest whispers that could have been heard far back in the kitchen which she had set in such shining order, that her boy's enemies might be forgiven, because they knew not what they did.

VIII

When Rankin came home from the Lincoln mass meeting, he seemed to have reached that stage in the evolution of his campaign when it was necessary to put forth mighty claims of victory. He declared that he had never had any doubt of ultimate success at the polls, though he admitted, with a vast wave of his arms to embody the whole magnanimity of his concession, that he had felt somewhat disturbed by that apathy which was the result of over-confidence. But the meeting at Lincoln, he said, had completely dispelled these fears. He said that the meeting at Lincoln had been a great outpouring of the common people, and that they had gone home so deeply enthusiastic, after the sight of their great leader, that it was now only a question of majorities. And as for Garwood, why, he had never been so proud of the boy in his life. The visit of the presidential candidate would increase the normal majority of twenty-two hundred in the Thirteenth District to three thousand, but Garwood was bound to run at least five hundred ahead of the ticket. Rankin had published these views extensively as he sat in the smoking car of the excursion train that jolted over from Lincoln the night of the big meeting. The Grand Prairie boys had been disturbed by the story printed in the _News_ but Rankin laughed at their fears, just as he had laughed at Garwood.

"Why, it'll do him good!" Rankin declared, bringing his palm down on the knee of Joe Kerr, the secretary of the Polk County central committee. "Do him good, I tell you. It's worth a thousand votes to us in Polk alone to have that little cur spring his blackmailin' scheme at this stage o' the campaign. It's as good as a certificate of moral character from the county court."

"Do you think it's a blackmailin' scheme?" asked Kerr.

"Think it!" cried Rankin, "why, damn it, man, I know it--didn't you hear how Jerry threw him out of his office the day he tried to hold him up? Why, he'd 'a' killed him if I hadn't held him back. You'd ought to post up on the political history of your own times, Joe."

The men who were perched on the arms and hanging over the backs of the car seats, pitching dangerously with the lurches the train gave in the agony of a bonded indebtedness that pointed to an early receivership, laughed above the groanings of the trucks beneath them. They had gathered there for the delight it always gave them to hear Jim Rankin talk, a delight that Rankin shared with them.

"Why didn't you kill him, Jim?" one of them asked.

"Oh," he said with an affectation of modesty as he dropped his eyes and with his hand made moral protest, "I wanted him to print his story first. I'll have to kill him some day, but I reckon I won't have time before election."

While Rankin was extravagant in talk, he calculated pretty accurately the effect of his words, and never said many things, in a political way at least, that came back to plague him. His conception of Pusey's motives was eagerly accepted by his own party men, and they went home with a new passion for work in the wards and townships.

Pusey meanwhile had been standing on street corners in Grand Prairie, swinging his cane, and glancing out with a shifty eye from under his yellow straw hat, but men avoided him or when they spoke to him, did so with a pleasantry that was wholly feigned and always overdone, because they feared to antagonize him. Rankin had not seen him since the publication of his screed, but one evening, going into the Cassell House, he saw the soiled little editor leaning against the counter of the cigar stand. The big man strode up to him, and his red face and neck grew redder, as he seized Pusey by the collar of his coat.

"You little snake!" Rankin cried, so that all the men in the lobby crowded eagerly forward in the pleasant excitement the prospect of a fight still stirs in the bosoms of men. "I've got a notion to pull your head off, and spat it up ag'inst that wall there!"

He gave the little man a shake that jolted his straw hat down to his eyes.

"You just dare to print another line about us and you'll settle with _me_, you hear? I'll pull your head off--no, I'll _pinch_ it off, and--"

Rankin, failing of words to express his contempt, let go Pusey's coat and filliped directly under his nose as if he were shooting a marble. Pusey glared at him, with hatred in his eyes.

"Don't hurt him, Jim," one of the men in the crowd pleaded. They all laughed, and Pusey's eye grew greener.

"Well, I won't kill you this evenin'," relented Rankin, throwing to the floor the cigar he had half smoked, "I wouldn't want to embarrass the devil at a busy time like this."

The Chicago papers had not covered the Garwood story, as the newspaper phrase is, though the Grand Prairie correspondents had gladly wired it to them. But the _Advertiser_ as well as one or two other newspapers in the Thirteenth District, which were opposed politically to Garwood, had not been able to resist the temptation to have a fling at him on its account, though with cautious reservations born more of a financial than a moral solvency.

The _Evening News_ with all the undiminished relish Pusey could find in any morsel of scandal, had continued to display its story day after day with what it boasted were additional details, but on the day following the incident in the Cassell House, Pusey left off abusing Garwood to abuse Rankin, and smarting under Rankin's public humiliation of him, injected into his attack all the venom of his little nature. He kept, however, out of Rankin's way, and all the while the big fellow as he read the articles chuckled until his fat sides shook.

Jim Rankin was the most popular man in Grand Prairie; men loved to boast for him that he had more friends than any three men in Polk County, and the sympathy that came for Garwood out of a natural reaction from so much abuse, was increased to sworn fealty when Rankin was made the target for Pusey's poisoned shafts. When the story first appeared the men of Grand Prairie had gossiped about it with the smiling toleration men have for such things, but now it was a common thing to hear them declare that they would vote for Garwood just to show Free Pusey that his opinions did not go for much in that community.

Emily Harkness did not leave the house for days. She felt that she could not bear to go down town, where every one would see her; and there was nowhere else to go, save out into the country, and there no one who lives in the country ever thinks of going unless he has to go.

She had entrenched herself behind the idea that the story was untrue, and she daily fortified this position as her only possible defense from despair, seeking escape from her reflections when they became too aggressive by adding to her interest in Garwood's campaign. She knew how much his election meant to him in every way, and though she preferred to dissociate herself from the idea of its effect on her own destiny, she quickly went to the politician's standpoint of viewing it now as a necessary vindication, as if its result by the divine force of a popular majority could disprove the assertions of Garwood's little enemy.

Emily read all the papers breathlessly dreading a repetition of the story, but her heart grew lighter as she found no further reference to it. She had ordered the boy to stop delivering the _News_, and she enjoyed a woman's sense of revenge in this action, believing that it would in some way cripple Pusey's fortunes. She resolved, too, that her friends should cease to take the sheet, but she could not bring herself to make the first active step in this crusade.

Meanwhile, she had watched for an indignant denial from Garwood himself, and she thought it strange that none appeared. But finally, striving to recall all she knew of men's strange notions of honor, and slowly marking out a course proper for one in Garwood's situation to pursue, she came to the belief that he was right in not dignifying the attack by his notice. She derived a deeper satisfaction when the thought burst upon her one day, making her clasp her hands and lift them to her chin with a gasp of joy such as she had not known for days, that the same high notion had kept him from writing to her, though her conception of a lover's duty in correspondence was the common one, that is, that he should write, if only a line, every day. But Garwood was busy, she knew, with his speaking engagements in Tazewell and Mason Counties, and she tried faithfully to follow him on the little itinerary he had drawn up for her, awaiting his coming home in the calm faith that he would set it all aright.

IX

The strong-limbed girl who went striding up the walk to the Harkness's porch was the only intimate of her own sex that Emily had retained; perhaps she retained her because Dade Emerson was away from Grand Prairie so much that custom could not stale this friendship. The girls had been reared side by side, they had gone to the same school and, later, for a while, to the same college; and they had glowed over those secret passions of their young girlhood, just as they had wept when their lengthened petticoats compelled them to give up paper dolls.

Dade Emerson, however, had never shared Emily's love of study; she conformed more readily to the athletic type at that time coming into vogue. In the second year of Dade's college course, old Mr. Emerson died, and his widow, under the self-deluding plea that her grief could find solace only in other climes, resolved to spend in traveling the money with which her husband's death had dowered her. Dade Emerson entered upon the hotel life of the wanderer with an enthusiasm her black gowns could hardly conceal. They tried the south for her mother's asthma, and the north for her hay-fever; they journeyed to California for the good the climate was sure to do her lungs, and they crossed the Atlantic to take the baths at Wiesbaden for her rheumatism.

While her mother devoted herself to a querulous celebration of her complaints, Dade led what is known as the active outdoor life. She learned to row, and to swim; she won a medal by her tennis playing, and she developed a romping health that showed in the sparkle of her dark eye, in the flush of her brown cheek, in the swing of her full arm or the beautiful play of the muscles in her strong shoulders as she strode in her free and graceful way along the street or across the room. She climbed Mont Blanc; she wished to try the Matterhorn, but the grave secretary of the Alpine Club denied her permission when she dragged her breathless mother one summer up to Zermatt to try for this distinction.

In the summer under notice, her mother had declared that she must see Grand Prairie once more before she died, and they had come home, and thrown open the old house for its first occupancy in two years. When the Emersons arrived at Grand Prairie, Dade had embraced Emily fervidly, and the two girls had vowed that their old intimacy must immediately be reëstablished on its ancient footing. With her objective interest in life, Dade had no difficulty in giving her demeanor towards Emily the spontaneity it is sometimes necessary to feign towards the friends of a by-gone day and stage of development; and so she swung into the wide hall, and fairly grappled Emily, who had come to meet her.

"I've bean just dying to see you, dyah," she said, in the new accent she had acquired while in Europe, which was half Eastern, half English.

She kissed Emily, and flung herself into a chair in the parlor whither Emily was already pointing the way. Her fresh, wholesome personality, her summer garments, the very atmosphere of strength and health she breathed were welcome stimulants to Emily.

"It's downright hot, I say," Dade continued, wriggling until her skirts fluffed out all over the front of her chair, and showed the plaid hose above the low, broad-heeled shoes she wore. She glanced around to see if the windows were open.

"Beastly!" she ejaculated. And she took a handkerchief and polished her face until its clean tanned skin shone.

"I say," she went on, tossing her handkerchief into her lap, "I didn't sleep a wink thinking about you lahst night. I had to run ovah to see you about it directly I could leave poor mamma. Isn't it too--"

"It's awfully good of you to come, dear," Emily got in. "I've been intending to have you over to take dinner and spend the day. But now that you are back for good--"

"Back for good!" said Dade, "_Mais non_, not a bit of it. Mamma says she cawn't enduah this climate, and who could? We're off directly we can decide wheah to go. She wants to go up into the White Mountains, but I've just got to go some place wheah they have golf links, don't you know? The truth is, Em, its impossible in this stupid, provincial old hole--I'll be every bit as fat as mamma if I stay hyah a minute longah--"

"You miss your exercise?" said Emily, lolling back on the cushions of her divan in an indolence of manner that told how remote exercise was from her wish at that moment.

"Don't speak the word!" cried Dade, pushing out one of her strong hands repellently. "I positively cawn't find a thing to do. I tried for a cross-country walk yesterday, and got chased by a stupid fahmah, and nearly hooked by a cow--to say nothing of this rich Illinois mud. Mamma owns a few hundred acres of it, _Dieu merci_, so we don't have to live hyah on it, though if the--what do you say?--_les paysans_--keep on crying for a decrease in rent I fawncy you'll see me back hyah actually digging in it."

The picture of the Emerson's tenants which Dade drew struck a pang in Emily's sociological conscience. She pitied the girl more for her inability to estimate the evils of a system which left her free to wander over the earth seeking that exercise which her clamoring muscles demanded, while those upon whose labors she lived had to exercise more than their overwrought muscles required than she did for the remote prospect of her being doomed to labor on the corn lands of Polk County.

"I'd go down to Zimmerman's saloon and bowl, if it wouldn't shock you all to death. But tell me, how do you feel about it?"

"About what--your need of exercise?"

"_Mon Dieu_, no--about the terrible _exposé_ of that interesting protégé of yours? _On ne pourrait le croire--c'est affreux!_"

"Well, no," Emily said, with a woeful laugh, "if I understand your French."

"What!" exclaimed the girl. "I thought you were so deeply interested in him. Haven't you worked hard to give him some sort of social form, getting him to dawnces and all that sort of thing?"

"No, not to dances, Dade. He doesn't dance."

"Oh, to be suah. I heahd that--and I heahd--" she gave a ringing laugh--"I heahd that he was downright jealous when you went to visit Sallie Van Stohn in St. Louis and dawnced with all those men theah. And I didn't blame him--those St. Louis men are raeally lovely dawncers, bettah than the Chicago men--they have the _mesure_ but not the _grâce_--though the St. Louis men are nothing at all to the German officers we met at Berlin. Why, my dyah, those fellows can waltz across a ball room with a glass of wine on each hand--raeally!" She stretched out her well-turned arms and held their pink palms up, to picture the corseted terpsichorean. "But why didn't you teach him to dawnce?"

Emily did not conceal with her little laugh the blush that came at this reminder of her attempts to overcome Garwood's pride, which had rebelled at the indignity of displaying his lack of grace in efforts at the waltz or the easier two-step.

"He wouldn't learn."

"How stupid! But that's nothing now to this othah thing. Had you evah dreamed of such a thing? I thought from what you wrote me that he was the soul of honah."

"So he is!" declared Emily, lifting eyes that blazed a defiance.

"But won't it injure his chawnces of election?"

"No!" Emily fairly cried in her determined opposition to the thought, "no, it won't." She sat upright on the divan, and leaned toward her friend with a little gasp.

"You don't mean to tell me you think it true, Dade?"

Dade ceased to rock. She looked at Emily with her black eyes sparkling through their long lashes, and then she squeezed her wrists between her knees and said:

"Emily Harkness, you're in love with that man!"

Emily's gaze fell. She thrust out her lower lip a little, and gave an almost imperceptible toss to her brown head. She stroked a silken pillow at her side. Dade's eyes continued to sparkle at her through their long lashes, and she felt the conviction of their gaze.

"Well," she said at last, gently, "I am going to marry him."

Dade continued to gaze a moment longer, and then she swooped over to the divan. She hugged Emily in her strong young arms, almost squeezing the breath from the girl's body.

"Bless you, I knew it!" And then she kissed her, but suddenly held her away at arm's length as if she were a child, and said with the note of reproach that her claim as a life-long intimate gave her voice: "But why didn't you tell me?"

"You're the first I've told except papa," said Emily.

"_C'est vrai?_" said Dade, her jealousy appeased. "Then it's all right, dyah--and it's splendid, I think. He's a typical American, you know, and the very man you ought to marry. Mamma's been afraid I'd marry one of those foreignehs, and so have I--but it's splendid. And I tell you--" she settled herself for confidences--"I'll come back from anywheah to the wedding, to be your maid of honah--just as we used to plan--don't you know? Oh, I am so glad, and I think it's noble in you; it's just like you. It'll elect him, too, if you announce it right away. I say, I'll give a luncheon for you, and we can announce it then--no, that wouldn't be correct, would it? We'd have to have the luncheon hyah--but it'll elect him. It would in England, where the women go in for politics more than you do, _n'est ce pas_?"

She always spoke of her own land from the detached standpoint a long residence abroad, and sometimes a short one, gives to expatriates.

"And--let's plan it all out now, dyah. Will you have it at St. Louis, and Doctah Storey?--why--there--there now----"

Emily had pillowed her head on Dade's full bosom, and her long-restrained tears had flooded forth. The larger girl, with the motherly instinct that comes with brimming health, wrapped her friend in her arms, and soothed her, though disengaging one hand now and then to wipe the perspiration that bedewed her own brow. The two girls sat there in silence, rocking back and forth among the pillows in the darkened parlor, until Dade suddenly broke the spell by sitting bolt upright and exclaiming:

"_Mon Dieu_, there comes that big De Freese girl. I'm going."

And she rose to effect her incontinent desertion at once. Turning in from the street, a large, tranquil blonde, gowned and gloved and bearing a chiffon parasol to keep the sun from her milky complexion, was calmly and coolly crossing the yard.

"She's got call in her eye!" exclaimed Dade. And then she hurried on, before she fled, to say all she had left unsaid:

"I'll be ovah this aftahnoon, and we'll plan it all out--and I'm going to make mamma spend next wintah in Washington. It'll help some of her diseases--what's the climate of Washington good for, do you know?"

But Emily had risen to glance out the window, and then, with her hands to her face, had fled from the room. Dade heard the patter of her feet on the stairs as she gathered up her skirts and soared aloft. And then in her surprise she looked out the window again and saw a tall man, with a broad black hat slouched over his eyes, taking long steps across the lawn. He seemed boorishly to be set on beating the mild blonde to the door.

The two callers gained the veranda at the same moment, before the bell could be rung to summon the maid. As she left the parlor Dade snatched her hat from her head and sent it sailing across to the divan, and then, at the door, she smiled and said:

"Good mohning, Miss de Freese. Miss Hawkness? No, she's ill, and isn't visible this mohning. I'm staying with heh. She'll be downright sorry--and Mr. Hawkness, sir," she turned to Garwood, "left wohd to have you wait. He'll be hyah directly. Just step into the drawing-room please," she smiled, but with a little scowl, at the obtuse politician, who seemed disposed to dispute with her, though under the influence of her eyes, he obeyed, and when he had passed in, she continued:

"It's too bad, Miss de Freese, raeally--and you've had such a walk this wahm mohning. Oh, nothing serious at all, just one of heh headaches, you know; I'll tell heh--she'll be awfully disappointed."

She went into the drawing-room.

"Pahdon, sir," she said, "I left my hat." And she crossed to the divan.

"Did I understand you to say that Emil--that Miss Harkness was----"

"I'll tell heh; she'll come right down."

"But you said Mister Harkness had left----"

Dade smiled the superior smile of the socially perfect.

"You possibly misundahstood me, sir; I said Miss Harkness would be down."

She bowed herself out of the room, leaving Garwood with one more perplexity added to those that were already accumulating too rapidly for him.

Dade went up the staircase and to Emily's room. The girl was standing by her door, her hands clasped and raised in expectation to her freshly powdered face.

"_Le voilà!_" said Dade, pointing tragically over the balusters, and then she went down the back stairs.

X

Garwood, as he sat in the cool drawing-room that morning, rehearsed again, and, as he suddenly remembered, for the last time, the scene he was about to enact with Emily. He had thought the matter all out, and with his quick perception of the theatrical quality of any situation, he had prepared for it just as he would for a public speech or, when he had the time, for an argument before a jury. As he sat this morning, taking his eye for a moment from the hall door to glance through the open window into the yard, he beheld old Jasper raking the lawn, heard him talking to himself in an expostulatory tone, and knew that the old man was just putting the finishing touches to some imaginary opponent he had vanquished in an argument. And Garwood smiled, and felt a sympathy with the old fellow; he, too, was given to the practice of talking to himself; if the speeches he delivered when walking home at night could only be reproduced on the stump, he would have no fears whatever of the result.

As he looked out the window he became telepathically aware of a presence, and turned to behold Emily standing in the wide door that led into the hall, parting the heavy curtains with trembling hands. He sprang to his feet and took a step towards her. She advanced to meet him, she stretched out her hands, she took him by the arms; she turned him half around that the light might fall full in his face, and then she let her eyes melt into his. And before he could move, or say one word of all he had intended to say, her face gladdened like the sky at dawn, and she smiled and said:

"Ah, Jerome--I knew it, I knew it!"

And then she hid herself against his breast, and he put his arms about her.

"Did you ever believe it for one little instant?" he whispered, bending over her, after he had drunk to the uttermost the ecstasy and the anguish of that moment.

"Not for one little instant," she whispered. "Oh, not for one little instant! I knew it couldn't be!"

And Garwood, looking over the masses of her hair, again saw old Jasper working away in the yard. He was singing now, and Garwood knew that ever after in his memory the aged negro would live in association with that scene.

When they were sitting on the divan, side by side, and the morning was gone, Emily asked him, out of the half-affected simplicity Garwood loved to have her adopt, as most men do, because of the tribute to their superior intelligence it implies:

"Jerome, what is a roorback?"

He was silent for a moment, and then he said:

"A roorback, dear, is a lie told because of the necessities of politics."

"And are lies necessary in politics?"

"Always, it seems," he said.

XI

A man whose figure had taken on the full contour of a prosperous maturity sat at his desk, reflectively drawing little geometrical designs on a pad of paper. The abundance of his prosperousness was indicated in every appointment of his law offices no less than in his own person, for they reflected the modern metropolitan style of Chicago rather than the fashion of an older day in central Illinois, where a bare floor, a flat table, and a rough set of bookshelves bearing up Blackstone and Kent, Chitty and Starkie, and the Illinois digests and reports, were considered sufficient furnishing. His silvery hair was cropped close with a half bang over his clear forehead, and his gray beard was as carefully trimmed as his hair; in the lapel of the gray coat that set his shoulders off stoutly, was a red carnation. He wore a fresh carnation every day; where he got them was ever a mystery to the people of Clinton.

Judge Bromley had resigned from the bench of the Circuit Court to become the general attorney of a railroad than ran up out of Egypt to tap the central portion of Illinois, and he was the local attorney for a number of other roads. His railroads would have been pleased to have him in Congress, no doubt, though they would have preferred to have him on the bench of the United States Court. And it was with this prospect in veiled view that he had consented to run for Congress in a district where the normal majority was greatly against him, knowing that his sacrifices would commend him to the administration at Washington in case the national ticket of his party was successful.

Another man sat with Bromley in his private office that October morning. He sat tentatively, if not timidly, on the edge of his chair, for the conversation had not reached such a stage of confidential warmth on the lawyer's part as warranted the man in lounging at more familiar ease in its leather depths.

The man was McFarlane, and he was the chairman of the congressional committee of the party that had nominated Bromley to stand in the Thirteenth against Garwood.

"I have already sent my checks to the chairman of each county committee in payment of my assessments, Mr. McFarlane," the lawyer said at length.

"Sure, I know that, Judge," said McFarlane, "but things is changed now--I tell you you've got more'n a fightin' chance to win out."

"You think this story of Mr. Garwood's irregularities--his alleged irregularities," he corrected himself with a lawyer's absurd habit of care in his words, "will seriously impair his prospects, then?"

"W'y, sure, why wouldn't it?" McFarlane urged. "We can make it."

"Ah, make it," observed Bromley. "But how, if you will oblige me? You must pardon my lack of knowledge of the--ah--technique of politics, Mr. McFarlane."

"Oh, that's all right, Judge," McFarlane hastened to say, with a reassuring generosity of soul. "How'll we make it? Why, use it--that's how; we'll make Jerry defend his record in the House. We'll get the people to see it--that's how."

"But will the people believe it? They are slow, you know, to believe these stories of boodling, as I believe it is called. The newspapers have a good deal to say of it from time to time, but I doubt if the people take it much more seriously than the rest of the current and conventional jokes of the press. Do you think they'll believe it? That question occurs to me as material at this point of our----"

"Believe it! Do you think these farmers around here'd refuse to believe anything when you tell 'em the corporations is behind it? Don't you think they won't believe it!"

"You have no doubt, then, of its authenticity?"

"Oh, course, I don't say as to that. Jerry's a good fellow, all right enough. I ain't sayin', between ourselves, what he done at Springfield--it's none o' my business, you know."

"I presume not."

"You ought to know as much about it as me, anyway, Judge. You're a corp'ration lawyer--you've been to Springfield yourself, I reckon."

The lawyer winced, and the natural ruddiness of his healthy skin showed under his white beard a deeper hue.

"I have only been there to appear in the Supreme or the Appellate Court, Mr. McFarlane; I have no concern with any legislative lobbying my clients may do, if they do any."

"Oh, sure--'scuse me, Judge--that's done by the Chicago lawyers, of course; I didn't stop to think." McFarlane had almost settled himself in his chair, but at this _contretemps_ he leaned forward again, and then, wishing to give the action the effect of interest rather than of embarrassment, he hastened on:

"But that ain't all, by a long shot. You know Sprague--Con Sprague?"

"The present incumbent? Of course."

"Well, you know, Jerry beat him for renomination, or Jim Rankin did it fer 'im. Garwood had promised Sprague to hold the Polk County delegation fer 'im, he says, and, well, Rankin turned a trick at the Clinton convention that euchred Sprague out of the nomination. Course, Jim turned round and tried to square it by throwin' the legislative nomination to Sprague's brother-in-law, Hank Wilson; but still, Sprague's sore."

"He is?"

"You bet he is. He hasn't lifted a finger in the whole campaign, an' I heerd last night from Al Granger, who's over from Sullivan, that his fellows over there are openly knifing Garwood, and that gives us a chance to carry Moultrie. Well," McFarlane paused to swallow, "we can carry DeWitt here--it's your home county--and the majority against us is less than a hundred; we have a good chance in Piatt, an' they're shaky about Logan, particularly down in Millwood to'nship. Garwood had a meetin' there the other day which was a frost--a change of a hundred an' fifty votes, an' you've got 'em. Why, I tell you, man, it's the chance of your life. You can win out."

McFarlane spoke with the enthusiasm of that confidence into which a politician can work himself when he begins to juggle the handy figures of old election returns, and some of his warmth was communicated to the candidate, who felt his blood tingle, and his heart rise in anticipation. He had never allowed himself to think of the possibility of his election, until that moment; but that moment was the fatal one that comes to every candidate, at a certain stage in his campaign, when he begins to indulge in dreams of victory. And yet Bromley was a wary man and he shrank again, in his habit of judicial deliberation.

"You speak encouragingly, Mr. McFarlane," he said, "but I do not quite share your confidence. I am not the man to indulge in illusions. You realize, of course, that I took the nomination at some sacrifice, merely for the sake of the party. I had no thought of being elected with the district organized as it is under the present apportionment act."

"Yes, I know, they carved the district out for Sprague in their last gerrymander, an' then Sprague got thrown down fer the nomination--that's why he's so sore."

"What plan do you propose?"

"Well," said McFarlane, "just what I told you. We ought to poll every county in the district, make a separate an' distinct poll fer ourselves, independent of the county committees, and then--get out the vote. It'll take money, of course."

Judge Bromley was tapping his pencil lightly on the desk.

"Do you think I should make a personal canvass of the district?"

McFarlane hesitated.

"Well," he said, "that might be a good thing a little later." He looked at the judge's clothes, made by a Chicago tailor, as he supposed, though they were made by a New York tailor, at his red carnation, at his rimless _pince-nez_, and thought of his campaigning in the rural districts.

"But my idee fer the present 'uld be a still hunt. We can work up to the brass band and the red fire gradually, and wind up in a blaze o' glory, after we get 'em on the run. See?"

"How much will all this cost?"

"Oh, well, now, that's a question. Course, the boys ain't in politics fer the'r health, an' the more money we have the more----"

Bromley, at this bald suggestion of a raid on his pocket-book, flushed, this time angrily. He dropped his pencil and tightened his fist, laying the thick of it heavily on the edge of his desk. Then he wheeled around, and said, his eyes contracting behind his rimless aristocratic glasses:

"Look here, McFarlane, this must be a plain business proposition. I have no barrel, as you call it,"--though McFarlane had said nothing about a barrel--"and I've already given all I can afford to the campaign. I would be willing, perhaps, as a further sacrifice to the party and my principles, to increase my contribution, but I'd want to know just what was done with it; I'd want every bill audited by a responsible committee; I'd want it all used properly and effectively; in other words, I'd expect results--do you understand?"

"Oh, course, Judge, just as you say. It's your campaign, you know. I'm only showin' you where you can win out, that's all. If you don't care nothin' about goin' to Congress--why, all right. It needn't cost much."

"But _how_ much, that's the question?" demanded Bromley.

"Oh, well, three or four thousand, perhaps; maybe five. Hell! I can't tell exactly. It's no cinch, the amount ain't. A couple o' thousand 'uld do fer a starter, till we could tell how she developed."

Bromley received McFarlane's estimate in silence, and looked somewhere out of his window for support. McFarlane sat and eyed him keenly.

"Has Garwood any means?" the lawyer asked presently, and then immediately answered his own question by observing: "I suppose not, though; his practice, as I suppose he calls it, is confined to the personal injury business." The judge said this with a corporation lawyer's contempt for one who has no money and whose practice is confined to the speculative side of personal injury cases.

"No, Jerry's poor," said McFarlane. "But I hear it rumored that old Ethan Harkness's puttin' up some fer 'im."

"Ethan Harkness? The banker over at Grand Prairie?"

"Yep."

"Why should he provide means for Garwood's campaign?"

"Oh, don't ask me--that's what the boys says. Seems to me, though, I heerd somethin' about Jerry's goin' to marry his daughter."

"H-m-m-m!" the judge said, and then he was silent for a while.

"Somebody would have to put up fer 'im," McFarlane continued. "I hear he hain't paid none o' his campaign assessments yet, an' that hain't helpin' him none. That'll be another thing in your favor, too, Judge--unless old Harkness does hear an' heed the Mac'donian cry."

"I hardly can imagine Ethan Harkness giving away money for any purpose, much less a purpose of that sort," said the judge, with the first twinkle in his eye that had sparkled behind his lenses since McFarlane had mentioned money. "And I don't place much credence in that story about Garwood's wedding Miss Harkness. The Harknesses are really a very good family, as I remember to have heard Mrs. Bromley say."

McFarlane did not care to venture on the unsafe ground of society, and so was silent. The judge, too, was silent. He was pondering.

"Well, Mr. McFarlane," he said at length, "I'll consider your suggestion carefully, and you may call to-morrow morning, if you will be so good, when I shall have a conclusion ready for you."

The judge looked at McFarlane with the glance that terminates the interviews of a busy man, especially a man busy in corporation interests, where the personal equation may be largely ignored, and waited for McFarlane to leave.

McFarlane went down the stairs, chuckling.

"He took the bit all right," he said to the man who was waiting for him. "Let's go have a nice little drink."

XII

Ethan Harkness was sitting in his library, as the architect who had remodeled his old house had named the pleasant apartment that opened off the living-room. Here, out of deference to the idea, Emily had her books, as well as the few her father read, disposed upon low shelves; and here the old man passed his hours at home, because, as he loved to say, in his whimsical pretense that he was in the way, he would bother no one. His habit was to sit here every evening and smoke his cigar over his newspaper. Perhaps he would read some book Emily had urged upon him, though he never liked the books she recommended. Once in every year he read Scott's novels through, at least he was one of those persons of whom that highly colored tale is told. Emily, in her new appreciation of the realistic, had joined in the cultured revolt against the romantic school, and would not own to the least respect for Scott. Once in a while, when her father, in his devices to induce her to read the Wizard, would complain of his eyes hurting him, and ask her to read Rob Roy to him, she would do so until he nodded, and then when he had gone to bed, would take the book to her room and read until the house was still and cold with the silence and chill of midnight, so that she was afraid to move. But such occasions she declared to be literary debauches, and would tell her father at breakfast that she was ashamed of herself.

He was sitting thus one evening, under the lamp, its soft mellow light falling on his silver hair; his glasses far down upon his high-bridged nose, his book held up before them. He breathed heavily as he read, and Emily, pausing an instant in the doorway, gazed upon him, thinking, with a love that to her had a touch of pathos, of all his kindly ways.

"All alone, as usual?" she said.

The old man took off his glasses slowly, closed his book upon them to mark his place, and then looked gravely up, waiting for her to speak.

"Father," she said, "I've something to tell you."

The tone was one to alarm the old man, and he sighed. He had reached the time of life when he dreaded change, and her tone had the note of change in it.

She sat down in a little rocking-chair before him, knitting her fingers together, her white hands lying in her lap. Her eyes were fixed upon a ring that sparkled on her finger--a ring that Garwood had bought, on credit, at Maxwell the jeweler's, that morning. Harkness waited for her to speak with the same gravity with which he had waited for Garwood to speak an evening long ago, when the voting man had ventured in upon him, trying to assume a dignity the beating of his heart threatened, just as the beating of the old man's heart now threatened the gravity he had assumed. Though there was a difference; the old man was aware that it was not well for him that his heart should beat as it was beating in that moment.

"Father," the girl said, twirling the ring on her finger, the light from the lamp flashing a dozen spectra from the facets of the diamond, "Jerome and I are going to be married."

The old man made no reply.

"Soon," she added, thinking he had not caught the full significance of her words.

"Soon," he said, in hollow repetition. But he did not turn his head or move.

He had expected it some day, he had even wished it, for in his old-fashioned conservatism he did not like to think of Emily as an old maid, but he had hoped that it would be a day long in coming.

Emily raised her eyes and looked at him. His hair seemed whiter, his face suddenly older, he appeared so lonely. As she looked a tear oozed from his eye and slid down his cheek and beard. And then she leaned forward, folded her arms on his knees, pillowed her head upon them, and wept.

The old man placed his hand upon her coils of hair, patting them softly. But he was silent. The mood passed, the old man possessed himself, laid his book on the table, and sighed with relief, as if at the end of some painful scene. He grew restless, but the girl held him; drew closer, embraced him passionately at the last, and cried:

"But I won't leave you, father, I won't--I won't! It'll be just the same for us--tell me it will!"

The old man smiled.

"Oh, yes," he said, "that part of it'll be all right. But tell me--what's the rush?"

"Why, father, there isn't any rush--only, don't you know how every one's against him just now?"

"Humph!" he said, "not if the reports of his meetings is correct, they hain't."

"Well, I know; but they tell such stories about him, and this horrible roorback--isn't that what they call it?"

"Depends on who you mean by they," he answered.

"Well, you know," she said, in the assumption that avoided explanations, "I want to show them that I believe in him, anyway."

"That's like you, Em," he said, smiling at her. "It's like your mother, too."

She was touched by this. He seldom spoke of her mother. And she drew nearer to him, and ran her fingers fondly through his white hair.

"Have you been thinking of her?" she asked, with a tender reverence.

"Some--to-night," he said. "She stuck up for me once." And then he was silent again.

The girl, with the impatience of youth, tried to coax him away from his sad humor, and assumed a happy tone, though she blinked to keep back her tears.

"Oh, it won't be for a long time, really, father--not till fall, not till after election, anyway. And it shan't make any difference, shall it? No, we'll all be so happy together. You and Jerome can play cards in the evening--and it'll be ever so much livelier in this big, empty old house."

The old man conceived the picture she imagined for him, but one of his grotesque humors came upon him.

"D'ye think Mother Garwood'll like the board?" he asked.

"Father!" Emily protested, "you'd joke at a funeral!"

XIII

The seven members of the congressional committee, assembled in Judge Bromley's office, sat in a circle around the wall, beneath the pictures of Chief-justice Marshall, of Daniel Webster, and of Blackstone, reflecting in their faces, with a studied effort that pained them, the seriousness of those jurists. They sat in silence, looking now and then one at another, or most of all at McFarlane, the chairman, who by virtue of his office sat nearest the roll-top desk of the judge, and, out of a disposition to show the ease of his footing with the candidate, carelessly swung back and forth the revolving bookcase, which creaked under its load of the Illinois Reports and Kinney's Digest.

The members of the committee were smoking cigars from a box the judge had provided, a box of five-cent domestic cigars, which fouled the atmosphere of the private office with their thick white smoke. The smoke from the Havana cigar the judge himself was smoking, wriggled upward in a blue wraith from the white hand that held it, and the judge only raised the cigar to his lips often enough to keep it alight, and as if to aid his mental processes. These processes were doubtless profound, for he bent his head, and wrinkled his brow, and looked intently at the silver-mounted furnishings of his desk. He had already sat there what seemed to the waiting politicians a long time, and had not moved. But at last he dropped the eraser with which he had been playing while he thought, and, lightly touching the revolving bookcase, for its swing and creak made him nervous, he gave a judicial cough.

"I have asked you to meet here, gentlemen," he began, half turning in his swivel chair, "to discuss some features of my campaign. You, all of you, no doubt, were apprised, at the convention of our party, of the reluctance I felt in accepting the nomination; you, all of you, are aware, at what personal sacrifice I consented to allow my name to be used, so that it is unnecessary for me to discuss this feature of the case at this time."

The judge said this impressively, with his brows lowered, as if he were charging a jury.

"Up to this time, it has not seemed to me advisable to make an active personal canvass, and as you know, I have not done so, preferring to leave to you the execution of such plans as might suggest themselves to the consideration of your--ah--excellent committee. But recently, events have developed that induce me to alter any resolutions I may have formed to continue in such a course. You, all of you, are acquainted with these events, much better acquainted, I may say, than I, so that I need not touch upon them in detail. Within the last two or three weeks, I have noticed that a strong undercurrent of public opinion has set in toward our ticket." The judge illustrated the undercurrent by moving his hand gracefully along at a horizontal plane above the floor. "If I understand the temper of our people, and the prevailing signs of the times, they are ready for a change in the guidance of their affairs--to be brief, I think that we have an excellent chance to win."

"You bet we have, Judge," broke in Hadley, from Tazewell.

The judge raised his head and looked his surprise at Hadley, as if to resent the interruption, and the members of the committee turned and looked at Hadley severely. Murch, who sat next Hadley, drove an elbow into the man's ribs, and Hadley's bronzed face became a deeper shade.

"As I observed," said Bromley, anxious that his observation be not lost, "I think we have an excellent chance of winning, better than we have had in any congressional campaign within my memory."

The judge paused here to let the conviction that his own personality had produced this unusual political condition sink into the minds of his auditors. And then he resumed.

"If you have followed me thus far, gentlemen, you will be prepared for the announcement I am about to make."

He paused again impressively.

"I have determined, gentlemen, to enter upon the prosecution of a vigorous personal campaign. In short, I shall take the stump."

He stopped, and looked around him. The committee-men, not expecting him to leave off in his address so soon, were not prepared for its end, and so had to bestir themselves and simulate a proper appreciation of the effect of his announcement. McFarlane murmured some sort of approval, and his words were repeated around the circle. Judge Bromley leaned back in his chair, with his elbow on his desk.

"I shall take the stump," he repeated, showing his love for the phrase, which he had been accustomed to see in newspapers all his days when the doings of eminent politicians were chronicled, "and have determined to open my campaign in Mr.--ah--Garwood's own county, in his own town, Grand Prairie. I believe you are the committee-man for Polk County, Mr. Funk, are you not?" He turned to a lank man leaning his long body forward, his sharp elbows on his knees, who now looked up languidly.

"Me? I reckon I am," he said.

"Very well," the judge continued, "can we arrange for a meeting in your county?"

"Reckon we can," replied Funk, "if we can raise the price."

The judge scowled.

"We shall, of course, provide for that," he said. At the words Funk straightened up, and a revival of interest was apparent in the other members of the group.

"What would you suggest--an open-air meeting?"

"Don't know as I would," said Funk. "Open-air meetin's is dangerous--mightn't be enough turn out to fill all outdoors. Course, we might have a torch-light percession, to draw a crowd--if we had the torches and a band."

"That can be arranged," said the judge.

"Might have the meetin' in the op'ra house," Funk went on. "What d'ye think, Neal?" He deferred to McFarlane.

"Seems to me the op'ra house would be safer," said McFarlane.

"That, of course, is a matter to be considered," said Bromley. "But at any rate, I wish to have meetings announced in all the counties."

The silence which had oppressed the members of the committee having been broken by the words of Funk and McFarlane, the conversation became general, and grew in interest until McFarlane voiced the burden that lay at the bottom of all their hearts by saying:

"Judge, how 'bout the funds? You know what we was sayin' the other day."

"Yes," said Bromley, "I recall our conversation. I shall meet all legitimate expenses--ah--as they arrive."

There was an instant depreciation of interest, and when the men filed down the stairs half an hour later, McFarlane again voiced the burden of their hearts by saying:

"He's goin' to hold onto his pile, boys. All bills to be paid on vouchers signed by the auditor and presented to the treasurer."

McFarlane liked to recall to his friends his six months in the State House, and spoke at times in the language of the bills he had enrolled and engrossed so often during that experience.

"Well, a lawyer that tries his own case has a fool for a client," said Mason, "and it's that-away 'ith a candidate that manages his own campaign."

Bromley had been led to his resolution to take the stump by two incidents. One, the first, occurred at Chicago. He had gone there to attend a banquet of the State Bar Association, and had made a speech. Though he had been accustomed to the court room all his life, and had spoken much to juries, and oftener to courts, he was deliberative and judicial, rather than epideictic, and had acquired the dry, sophistical manner of speaking which comes to those happy and distinguished lawyers whose causes are heard with more sympathy by the solemn judges of the courts of appeal, than by the juries in the _nisi prius_ courts, and he had shrunk from popular oratory.

But at the bar banquet, having drunk wine, he spoke at length, and as he progressed so loved the sound of his own voice, that when he sat down he found himself for the first time in his life in an oratorical perspiration. And then, before the flush of his intellectual activity had left him, ideas more brilliant than those he had had while on his feet came to him in such profusion that he had longed to repeat his effort. He felt that he could do so much better, though he felt that he had done well, for the long board, sweeping away with its glistening glass, and surrounded by so many ruddy men in brave shirt-fronts, had run round with applause. To crown his triumph the man next to him had said:

"Judge, why don't you take the stump?"

The words had coursed gladly through his veins like the wine he had drunk. He felt that he had found himself at last.

The sense of triumph had not altogether left him by the next morning, and as he sat at his late breakfast at his hotel, seeking an account of the banquet in the _Courier_, his name had suddenly leaped to his eyes out of all the thousands of words packed on the page, and he read with a gasp a despatch from Springfield, which reviewed political conditions in the state.

The paragraph devoted to the Thirteenth Congressional District said, among other things:

"Judge Bromley thus far has not taken the stump, and the impression is general that he is conscious of his own limitations as an orator. In the Supreme Court, arguing a case for some of his wealthy clients, he is perfectly at home, but he is not the kind of man that takes on the stump before a promiscuous crowd. Realizing this, the astute managers of his campaign have kept the judge at home and are making a still hunt. Meanwhile, young Jerry Garwood, who has oratorical powers of a high order, and who has unsuccessfully tried to draw Bromley into a joint debate, is speaking nightly to big audiences all over the District."

The judge grew angry as he read this, and he made his resolve in that hour. A few days later, when the excitement of his success at the bar banquet had left him, and he imagined himself speaking to jostling thousands before him, under the flare and swirl of torches' yellow flames, he would turn cold with fear. But he was a determined man, and he could not resist the pleasing sound of the words that announced his intention to take the stump. Proclamation was duly made, after what he politely called his conference with the committee, that he would open his speaking tour in Grand Prairie, with some more phrases, equally pleasing to him, about "throwing down the gauntlet," and "carrying the war into the enemy's country."

Over in Grand Prairie, Jim Rankin read the announcement with glee; out on Sangamon Avenue, Emily Harkness read it, and clenched her little fists, saying to herself that it was an impertinence in Bromley to come into Jerome's own town; in a little hotel over in Monticello, Garwood read it with concern, wondering what it could mean, while away over in the Galesburg District, on a train that was rolling out of Monmouth, Charley Cowley, the _Courier's_ political correspondent, who had written the paragraph in his Springfield despatch at Rankin's request, showed his teeth in that odd smile of his. And up in Chicago, in the breakfast room of the Grand Hotel, the chairman of the state committee of the party Judge Bromley represented, read it and swore to himself:

"The damn fool!"

XIV

In the calm October days that followed, mysterious and subtle forces were at work all over the Thirteenth District. The green trees of the windbreaks changed to red and gold, the brown fields were tented with tepees of yellow corn; in and out among the stubble, and along the sides of the black roads, still dry and velvety from the summer's warmth, brown prairie-chickens rustled covertly, and over all, over the fields, the woods, the roads and the scattered towns, the blue sky bent with a haze that had melancholy reminiscences of the lost spring, and the benediction of peaceful autumn.

Emily, sitting in the sunlight that streamed through the tall bay windows of her room, stitched away on her white wedding garments, dreaming in her smiles of the new life that was just opening to her, picturing Garwood, a great, strong man, fighting the battles of his country, just as his old mother, sitting with her knitting by her low window, wrinkling her brow as she lifted her eyes now and then over her spectacles to gaze on her withering flower-beds in the little yard, pictured him as a little boy, playing on the floor, charming her with his precocious speeches.

Amid all this beauty and mystery, men were fighting one another, bribing, deceiving and coercing one another, in order that the offices of the republic might be taken from one set of men and turned over to another set of men. This condition prevailed over all the land. Everywhere men left work to talk and shout of this great battle, all of them pretending, of course, that they did this for the good of those whom they were vilifying and hating and accusing; claiming that the country would be lost unless their own side won. For instance, Judge Bromley had laid aside his dignity and was traveling all over the counties that made up the Thirteenth Congressional District of Illinois, urging people to vote for him because Garwood, as he charged, while a member of the Legislature, had accepted a bribe. The judge did not know whether this was true or not, but he used all the powers he had cultivated in his four years in college, his three years in the law school, his lifetime at the bar and on the bench, to make people believe it was so; and he gave, though not so freely, of the money he had made by these same talents of persuasion and dissimulation, to organize clubs that would bind men to believe it.

At the same time Garwood was going up and down, urging people to vote for him because his opponent was the paid attorney of the same corporation which Bromley said had given the bribe; and using all his talents to make people believe him instead of Bromley. Much of this was said under the guise of discussing the tariff question; as to whether the people could be made the happier by taxing one another much or little; though neither side could have had the happiness of the people at heart, for, in all the national turmoil, both sides were doing all they could to defeat and humiliate those who differed from them in opinion on little details of government.

Meanwhile a change as subtle and as mysterious as that of autumn was going on in the feelings of men over the outcome of this great conflict. In the Thirteenth District, from believing that Garwood would be elected, they began to believe that he would be defeated. No one could explain or analyze this change of sentiment, but his opponents were gladdened by it, and his adherents saddened by it; many of them wavered in their belief in him and in their adherence to him, being drawn by a desire to be on the winning side.

Rankin was one of the first to perceive this change. His political sensibilities were acute from long training, he could estimate public sentiment accurately, and early in the campaign he had warned Garwood that before election the day would come when they would feel that they were losing ground; he had hoped that it would come early in the campaign, but now that it had come, with but three weeks in which to overcome its effects, Rankin carefully kept the fact from Garwood. The letters that he wrote him, the telegrams he sent him, the advice he gave when Garwood came home for Sunday, tired and worn from his nerve-exhausting labors, were all to give him better heart to continue the struggle. Garwood himself, speaking nightly to crowds that cheered him, living and moving in an atmosphere of constant adulation and applause, fortunately could not recognize the condition that alarmed Rankin. It seemed to him, just as it seems to every candidate, that all the people were for him, because he never met any who were against him.

Bromley had opened his campaign in Grand Prairie with a meeting which, by its size, alarmed Rankin more than he would admit. He had his fun out of it, of course, saying that Bromley, like all the rich, would do better to let his money talk for him, and assuring Bromley's party workers that the opening of his fountains of eloquence meant the closing of his barrel. He made the discovery, too, that the judge, while on his campaign tour, slept in silken pajamas, and he made much of this in appeals to the prejudices of the farmers, knowing how this symbol of the luxury of Bromley's life would affect them. Rankin dubbed him "Pajamas" Bromley, and the stigma stuck, and yet he was too wise to believe that he could overcome the effect of Bromley's money by mere words and names. This was why he made the trip over to Sullivan to see Sprague.

He found Sprague sitting in his law office, reading a newspaper in the idleness of a country lawyer, a cuspidor placed conveniently near. Sprague was a large man, with a tousled mass of gray hair, and a short, shaggy beard burnished by the red of its youth, though it was now lightened by gray. He wore, after the older professional ideal, a long, black frock coat, though that he did not go thoroughly into the details of sa