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 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

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.

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