BOOK I

OF THE PEOPLE

The 13th District

I

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

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

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

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

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

"What's the matter with Garwood?"

Outside there rose an answering roar:

"_He's_ all right!"

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

"_Who's_ all right?"

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

"G-a-r-wood!"

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

"Good boy, Jerry!"

"You're the stuff!"

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

"Gentlemen, gentlemen!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Speech! Speech!"

Rankin turned toward him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

"Jerome! I'm so proud!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"If I'd been beaten?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

"Isn't that better?" she added.

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

"And now tell me," she said.

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

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

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

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

He made a pause, for the pity of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And will--always?"

"Always."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

"Well?" said Garwood, not too cordially.

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

"So I've heard," said Garwood.

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

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

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

Garwood grunted, and Pusey went on:

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

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

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

"What would it cost?" said Garwood.

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

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

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

"No, but I--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garwood glared at Pusey.

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

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

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

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

"The damned little blackmailing--"

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

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

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

"What'd he want?"

"Stuff."

"Of course--but what for?"

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

"Does he know anything?"

Garwood paused by the window, still breathing hard.

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

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

"Legislature?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily laughed a little.

"Won't you have some meetings indoors?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Who?" she asked, in alarm.

"Oh, that little Free Pusey."

"What has he done?"

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

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

Garwood felt the blood tinge his checks.

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

"W'y, why?"

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

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

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

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

They were silent then.

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

"Well, it costs, you know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Gentlemen, good morning."

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

"Is the colonel up yet?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again Garwood answered "Yes."

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

The colonel, too, said "Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

"The forty-fourth," corrected the colonel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pretty popular with the people, was he?"

"Very."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

"Three cheers for McBain!"

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

"This way, Mr. President!"

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

"Where's the colonel?"

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

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

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

"All right, Billy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did you see it yet, Jerry?"

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

"See what?" asked Garwood.

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

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

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

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

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

"Great," said Billy Feek.

"You bet," said Doris Fox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Jerry!"

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

"Jerry! Jerry!" he said.

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"About what--your need of exercise?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He wouldn't learn."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She went into the drawing-room.

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

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

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

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

Dade smiled the superior smile of the socially perfect.

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

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

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

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

X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jerome, what is a roorback?"

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

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

"And are lies necessary in politics?"

"Always, it seems," he said.

XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I presume not."

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

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

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

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

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

"The present incumbent? Of course."

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

"He is?"

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

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

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

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

"What plan do you propose?"

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

Judge Bromley was tapping his pencil lightly on the desk.

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

McFarlane hesitated.

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

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

"How much will all this cost?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yep."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McFarlane went down the stairs, chuckling.

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

XII

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

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

"All alone, as usual?" she said.

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

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

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

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

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

The old man made no reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old man smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused again impressively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The judge scowled.

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

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

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

"That can be arranged," said the judge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The damn fool!"

XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conrad Sprague had once been considered a clever man; when admitted to the bar he was one of those youths of whom it is said, "He has a bright future"; and, like many such, Sprague had mistaken the promise for the fulfilment, and had been content to use the superficial acquirements which had given him a place in the debating society of the Ohio college he had attended, before going out to Illinois to "locate," as the phrase was, without strengthening them by newer studies. While waiting for a law practice, he had gone into politics, originally for the purpose of securing an acquaintance that would help him in his profession, and ultimately, when his political duties interfered so constantly with his legal duties that he could not attend to such practice as came to him, as a means of livelihood in itself. Thus his law office became in time but a background for his career in politics. He had been successful at first; he had gone to the Legislature and once to Congress. Now, in his defeat, with only the remnant of his loosely organized following left to him, he was undergoing the spiritual fermentation which disappointment works in weak natures, and gave promise of souring altogether.

Sprague did not rise when Rankin entered, nor even remove his feet from his desk. But he did lay his paper in his long lap, then slowly taking the black-rimmed eye-glasses from his nose, and dangling them at the end of their tangled and knotted cord, he said:

"Howdy, Jim; where'd you come from?"

"Just landed in," replied Rankin, pulling up a cane-seated chair and dropping his heavy body into it.

"Come on business?"

"Yes, I did," said Rankin, rocking back and forth, "damned important business."

"That so?"

"Yes, that's so."

Sprague, moved by the snapping tone, twisted his body and looked squarely at Rankin. He made a movement of his legs as if he would take his feet down.

"Yes, that's it," Rankin went on, "and you're the man I come to see."

Sprague dropped his feet to the floor, swung his chair half around on one of its legs, and as it came down he brought it into a position directly facing Rankin. He looked at his caller almost angrily for an instant, but adopting the more peaceful tone in which he would have addressed a new client, he said:

"Well, what can I do for you?"

"I'll tell you," said Rankin, "since that's what I come fer. You can get out and do something to help land Garwood."

Sprague puckered his lips, turned his head away and whistled reflectively. The whistle was a series of low, tuneless notes, and was irritating to Rankin, who, though a fat man, developed nerves at times.

"Well, Jim," said Sprague at last, "you know that I haven't been taking any active interest in this campaign."

"No, that's just the trouble," said Rankin, "you haven't. But some o' your fellers has, an' I want you to call 'em off."

Sprague stopped whistling and looked at Rankin.

"Of course, Jim," he said, "what some of my friends may be doing I don't know. They seem to think, some of them, that they have cause for dissatisfaction in the way I was treated at the Clinton convention."

"Oh, come off, now," said Rankin. "You know that won't go 'ith me, Con. You know how much chance you ever had at the Clinton convention, and you know jus' what I told you there in the Gleason House that night before we met. So don't try to come any o' that old gag on me, 'cause I won't stand fer it."

"Well--" Sprague began, in a voice that indicated a want of conviction on his part, lifting his brows to add to the effect of the tone. He ended by spitting at his convenient cuspidor.

"But I don't care 'bout me," said Rankin; "go in an' abuse me all you want. Ther' ain't nobody'll believe you, anyhow. Everybody knows't I never broke a promise in my life, an' that I al'ays stood pat fer my friends--which you wasn't one o' them, so long's I can remember--but that don't cut any figur' here ner there."

"I always supposed we were friends, Jim," Sprague complained.

"Oh, that's all right--in politics, I mean. I hain't nothin' ag'in you pers'nally, course, but in politics we've al'ays been ag'in each other, an' ther' ain't no use tryin' to ignore that now. You've been sore ever since the convention, of course, an' I don't know's I blame you fer it, but we beat you fair an' square, an' I come over here to tell you that we expect you to get out an' support the ticket."

"Oh, you did, did you?" said Sprague, with half a smile.

"Yes, I did," said Rankin.

"Well," said Sprague, deliberately stopping to spit again, "I supposed that after the Clinton convention I might consider myself out of politics."

"Yes, you _might_," Rankin rejoined, "but the trouble is, you _don't_, an' your fellers right here in Moultrie County is out with the'r knives fer Jerry."

"Well, if they are," said Sprague, "I'm sure I didn't know it."

"Oh, hell, now, Con," expostulated Rankin, disgustedly, "don't fer God's sake use that 'ith me. Maybe it goes down to Washin'ton, I don' know, but it don't go here, not 'ith me, 't any rate. You know what they're doin', an' so do I. An' I'll just tell you this," Rankin leaned over and laid his hand on the edge of Sprague's desk, while Sprague eyed him with disfavour, "that if you expect to be in politics any more they've got to stop it, an' stop it now, an' if they don't----"

"Well, if they don't?" Sprague interrupted in an ugly, defiant note.

"If they don't, why, don't ever dare stick your head up out o' your crab-hole ag'in; an' what's more----"

"What's more?" repeated Sprague, nodding.

"This is a game two can play at. We've got a few knives over in Polk County, and, while they're a little rusty an' out o' use, they're long, an' they're deadly, an' we'll get 'em out at once an' run 'em into that brother-'n-law o' yourn about that fur----"

Rankin measured off the sickening distance on his left arm, with his right hand at the elbow.

"An' turn 'em round," and Rankin twisted his fist savagely. In illustrating the vengeful deed he had allowed some of his excitement to master him, and he rose now and stood hanging over Sprague with a menace in the droop of his shoulders and the stretch of his neck.

"Now you know the business that brought me here, Con Sprague," Rankin went on. "I come over to tell this to Wilson, but I thought it 'uld be fair to tell you first. I'm goin' over to tell him, an' then I'm goin' back home. Now, if your brother-'n-law wants to go to the Legislature, just you get out an' make a few speeches fer Garwood, an' declare y'urself, an' you an' him put y'ur fellers over here to work, an' you do it in two days. I'll watch you an' if you don't do it, I'll say 'plunk,'"--Rankin used the word which the Illinois politicians, doubtless in their distrust of anything British, have substituted for the Englishman's "plump"--"an' the boys'll plunk--an' fer the first time in our history we'll send a minority representative to Springfield, an' it won't be your brother-'n-law, either."

Sprague's face blackened. He knew that dangerous possibility in cumulative voting, but he said nothing.

"I don't ask you fer any answer," said Rankin. "But I've served notice on you. You can do just as you damn please."

And then Rankin went away. He made his call on Wilson, By night he was back in Grand Prairie.

XV

In the early twilight of a Saturday afternoon late in October Garwood walked up Kaskaskia Street from the station in a cold, sullen rain, conscious of but one sensation--he was glad that only one more week of the campaign remained. He walked with long, deliberate strides, indifferent to the rain, which had beaten down his wide hat brim and trickled off it, before and behind, in little streams. His face, under those drooping eaves, was long and serious; it brightened, automatically, only when he met some pedestrian to whom in his capacity as a candidate, he involuntarily spoke a greeting.

Garwood had come home in response to a telegram from Rankin, a telegram which had concentrated such an urgency into its economically chosen ten words that he had traveled many miles since daylight over country roads and by rail to reach Grand Prairie at night. Now, just as the twilight was darkening and the lights were beginning to show in the stores along Main Street, he turned into the Lawrence Block and climbed to his office. The office was dark; young Enright, who was reading law under him, had gone into the country to make one of the political speeches he was proud of having been asked to deliver that fall; the typewriter had closed her desk and gone, and her little clock was ticking lonesomely beside her little vase of flowers. But in his private room, Garwood found Rankin sitting with his feet on the window-sill looking abstractedly down into the street where the lights from the store-windows wriggled in many lines across the canal of mud.

Garwood took off his hat, lashed it back and forth to get the water off, and slapped it down on the top of his desk. And then he said, in a voice that was rough and hoarse:

"Well, what's the matter? Everything's gone to hell, I suppose--heh?"

"No, it's all right. I just want a talk with you," said Rankin. "Have a good meetin' last night?"

"Oh, first-rate; made a poor speech, though. Truth is, I'm about done up. Thank God it'll be over in another week, whichever way it goes. Don't know that I care"--his sentence was broken by a cough that shook him.

Rankin turned and tried to distinguish his features.

"Look'e here, Jerry," said the big fellow, "you've got a cold--you'll best go down and have Chris mix you a hot tod."

"Oh, I'm all right," said Garwood, scraping his throat. "Go on with your tale of woe."

"Well," began Rankin with evident reluctance, "I hate to tell you, but the truth is, we've got to have some money, an' I don't know where it's comin' from. I've spent all we had, an' more, too, an' I've held up everybody here in town till I've squeezed 'em dry. They don't like to give to us anyway; most of 'em has already contributed to the county fund, an' they think that's enough. I can't use all the county funds fer you; the candidates is kickin' already; they say I've been neglectin' 'em fer you, an' it won't do to git 'em sore on us--'taint hardly square nohow. Damned if I like it. We've got along so fur, but now we're up to the limit."

"Wouldn't the Hutchinsons give?"

"Well, they put all theirn in the county fund, so's to elect Sanford; they say anyhow a congressman can't help 'em; they're lookin' fer the treas'rer only--all they care fer is the bank."

"That's the way with those bankers," said Garwood. "Hogs, all of them. That's what we get for giving them Sanford. If we'd nominated a fellow of our own for treasurer we might have forced him to lay down on them."

"Yes, you're right, but that time's gone by now, no use cryin' over spilt milk. We've got to face the present. We owe a good many bills, some fer printin', an'--"

"Can't they wait till after election?"

"Oh, maybe they might, but I hate to ask 'em; it wouldn't help us any. The postage--well, I've paid all that out o' my own pocket."

"You know how I appreciate that, Jim, don't you?"

"Oh, that's all right," said Rankin, waving his gratitude aside. "Then there's the _Citizen_ an' some other papers over the district, they're beginning to clamor fer the'r money."

"It's a regular hold-up, isn't it?" said Garwood.

"That's what you've got to expect in politics," said Rankin. "But if that 'as all we might take care of it. The situation has taken a curious turn this last week."

"How's that?" asked Garwood, who had suffered from a candidate's myopia, and could not note the numerous turns a situation takes during a campaign.

"Well, it's this way. The committees is all kickin' because your assessments hasn't been paid. I've been tryin' to make a poor man's campaign fer you, an' I've succeeded pretty well so fur, if I do say it myself. But the boys needs money everywhere; they want to finish up the'r poll, and over in Moultrie, where we had to deal with the Sprague kickers, a little money has just _got_ to be used, that's all."

"I thought you'd fixed Sprague?"

"Well, I made him come down, o' course, but I wouldn't trust the dirty whelp out o' my sight on'y when I could see him, as the old widow woman said of her grandson, an' I think we ought to pay the assessment over there anyway."

"How much is it?" asked Garwood, with the pain an unrendered bill can give one.

"Two hundred," said Rankin. "The boys over there say--shall I tell you what they say?"

"Yes; go on, I can stand anything nowadays."

"Well, they say that now you're goin' to marry ol' man Harkness's daughter, you'd ought to get him to put up fer you."

Garwood, in his hoarse voice, swore an oath.

"Well, I'm just tellin' you what they say. They're sayin' that right here to home, an' they're sayin' it pretty much all over the district. They think Harkness is made o' money, an' that it 'uld be easy fer him to put up some."

"Have they ever known him to put up any for a campaign?" asked Garwood with a sardonic smile that Rankin could not see in the gloom.

"No, reckon not; but they look to you to loosen him up. But let me tell you," Rankin hastened on, as if he had pleasanter information, "you know Bromley, when he got good an' goin', let loose a lot of his money--just sowed it 'round freely fer two or three weeks, an' it kind o' made up fer the mistakes he was makin' on the stump. But now he's done just what I knowed he'd do--here with election a week off, he's got skeered an' froze up stiff an' cold, tighter'n a mill race in January--not a red cent 'ill he bleed now, an' the whole push is sore on 'im. But I knowed he'd do it, I knowed it, from the very first." Rankin chuckled at his own prophetic instinct. "So you see, we'd ought to take advantage of the situation. If I had a little money to use judiciously, I'd have 'em licked to a stand-still a week from to-night."

Rankin rubbed his palms in the enthusiasm he would have felt in such a triumphant finish to his campaign, while Garwood's heart beat a little higher as he thought of the security he would feel in the possession of a campaign fund. The little wave of excitement brought on a return of his cough.

"An' now, Jerry," Rankin resumed, "I'll tell you why I sent fer you." He drew his chair closer to Garwood, and laid his hand on Garwood's knee. "My God, man!" he exclaimed, suddenly. "You been sittin' here in clothes as wet as that?"

"Oh, go on," said Garwood. "Let's hear what you have to say. Don't mind me, I'm all right."

"Well, I'll make it short," said Rankin. "An' then we'll go down to Chris's. What I want to suggest is this--I hate to do it, but it's a groun'hog case, an' you an' me's ol' friends"--

"Go on," urged Garwood.

"Well," Rankin continued, with a reluctance, "I don't like to--but here goes. We've got to have money--an' I thought--well, that you might jus' go to old man Harkness an' make a little touch--fer a thousand, say--"

Garwood had already begun shaking his head vigorously.

"No, Jim, no," he said; "not for all the world. It's impossible; I can't think of it. You can understand my position--I just can't do it, that's all. We've got to find some other way."

"Well," said Rankin, flinging up his hands as if he were flinging up the problem, "all right; you find the other way. I've been here rackin' what few brains I've got fer a week, an' I can't think of any other way. God knows I've spent all I've got as it is." He settled back in his chair and plunged his hands deep in his empty pockets.

"Yes, I know, Jim, and I appreciate it--but--I'll tell you."

Garwood sat and thought intently an instant, knitting his strong brows.

"No, I won't tell you either, but I think I can raise it--I'll see you to-morrow morning. I think I know of a place."

"All right, Jerry," said Rankin, getting up; "I don't care where you get it--jus' so's you get it. I only want to see you landed high an' dry out of the wet, my boy, that's all." And he hit Garwood on the shoulder.

"Here, let me hold it fer you," he said a minute later, when Garwood had picked up his overcoat, heavy with its soaking in the rain.

Down in Chris Steisfloss's saloon as they stood at the bar, and just as Garwood was ordering a drink, Rankin pushed him aside and said:

"No, you wait. Now Chris," he went on, addressing the stolid man in the white apron, "you take a whisky glass an' fill it with beer, mostly foam--same as all your beers--an' then put a spoonful o' that quinine on the foam."

The man did as Rankin bade him, and when the white powder was floating on the sparkling foam, Rankin gave it to Garwood and said:

"Now you swallow that, quick; you can't taste it. Then you can have your whisky."

XVI

When Garwood turned into the gate of his home that night a weird feeling of detachment came over him. As he looked around the familiar yard every black bush, every tree tossing its thinned boughs hopelessly in the wind that blew the rain in sheets against the front of the house, seemed to belong to some past toward which he yearned, as an exiled identity. Half way to the low stoop, the light in the sitting room moved, the shadow of the drenched syringa bush under the window wheeled across the yard, and then the light disappeared, leaving the window black. He knew his mother had heard his step, for in another moment the hall transom leaped bright, the door opened, a great golden beam streamed out on the walk and he saw his mother's gaunt figure standing in the doorway. She held the lamp over her head and bent forward, shading her old eyes to peer out into the darkness, and in another instant he was beside her, and she was slamming the door behind him, shutting out the rain and the night.

"My, you're drenched to the skin, Jerome!" she exclaimed. "Run right up and change your clothes!"

"Whew!" he said, "what a night!" He whisked out his handkerchief and wiped his face, wet with the rain and moist with perspiration, for the whisky and the rapid walk had heated him.

"And how hoarse you are!" the mother said, wheeling his big body about and pushing him toward the stairs. "You've got your death of cold! Haven't you been doing anything for it?"

"I took a little quinine and whisky a while ago."

"Yes, I smelt it on your breath, Jerome," his mother said rather severely. She was "temperance," as she would have put it.

Garwood risked an uneasy laugh. He had never been able, grown man that he was, to overcome what he considered a boyish fear of his mother's knowing he drank.

"But don't stand there!" the mother said. "Go right upstairs and take those wet duds off this minute! Have you had any supper?"

"No; is supper over?" he replied.

"Yes, I just got the table cleared and the dishes washed. But I'll get you something, by the time you're into dry clothes."

"Oh, don't bother to get anything, mother," he said.

She gave the lamp to her son, and as he went up the stairs he heard her raking up the coals in the kitchen stove.

"Mother!" he called, peremptorily. "Don't make any fire; just something cold--that'll do for me."

"You go get your clothes off as I tell you!" his mother called in the tone of command mothers love to use with children for whom they are continually making sacrifices. When she had revived the dying fire, she hastened upstairs and laid out clean under-garments for her son, and dry hose, and then, forever busy, left him with an injunction "just to dress comfortable and not fix up."

Garwood, warm, dry and refreshed, felt a glow of comfort as he went downstairs in his slippers. His mother had the fire crackling, and the tea-kettle rocking briskly on the stove, puffing its little spouts of steam importantly. Beside it stood a pan, with water almost boiling, and she had a skillet heating. She was in the dining-room; Garwood could hear the clatter of plates, and when she came bustling with her tireless, wiry energy out into the kitchen, he remained there, walking up and down, gossiping with her in a way which, while she was always undemonstrative, she entirely loved. As the fire grew hotter and the kettle began to sing, the kitchen became warm and cozy, and the man and the mother felt a confidential charm in their surroundings that they never found so much anywhere as in the kitchen.

Garwood told his mother of his meetings during the week, of the meals he had been compelled to endure at the little country hotels, of his long rides by night. But he did not talk to her of Emily, and the old woman warily avoided the girl's name and all topics that even by the remotest association might suggest her. Mrs. Garwood was proud of Emily, and while she gloried in that pride before the women of her acquaintance she never let her son see it; she rather distrusted her own footing in the presence of the girl or of her name. More than all she longed that night to keep her son at home with her, and she strained every nerve to do so.

The fragrance of the steaming coffee was filling the room. She put some slices of bacon in the skillet to fry--broiling did not form any part of her culinary accomplishments--and after she had dropped two eggs into the tin pan where the water had long been bubbling, she commanded him to hold his watch on them, as if they were about to run a race. She cut the bread in great white slices; she opened a glass of her jelly, a concession she seldom made before winter, and she even found for his dessert the half of an apple pie. When she had poured her coffee off, she whisked the supper on to the table; and before Garwood could stop her she had run bareheaded out of the kitchen door and was grinding up a pitcher of fresh water from the old chain-pump in the yard. He called to her to let him get it, though he made no move to deter her, and as she rinsed out the pitcher and whirled the rattling crank of the pump again, she called out of the rainy darkness:

"Don't you come out here! You've got your slippers on."

He scolded her as she came stamping back into the kitchen, the rain drops showing on her gray hair, but she stilled his scoldings by reproaches of her own for standing in the open door on such a night and with such a cold.

The son repaid his mother's efforts by declaring that he did not know how hungry he was until he smelled her cooking again, and he made the eyes that looked fondly across the table glisten with a brightness that seldom glowed in their dim depths, by eating all the bacon she had fried, and both the eggs, and then by sending her to cut more bread. He urged her to share his meal, though he warned her that if she did she would have to cook him more bacon and boil him another egg. She refused, though she implored him to let her fry more bacon and boil the other egg, but she did consent finally to drink a cup of coffee, in the readiness American women always evince for their national beverage. She said it did her good to see him eat. "Feed a cold and starve a fever," she quoted. When he had eaten, he threatened to help her wash the dishes, as he used to do when he was a boy, but she declined this assistance also, saying she was going to leave them for the hired girl to do up in the morning. She had fears of his escaping when he had eaten, but he pacifically lighted a cigar and she allowed him to stroll out of her sight into the sitting room.

Though she had said she was not going to wash the dishes he heard her scrape the skillet and a moment later, knock the coffee pot on the sink outside the kitchen door, and he called to upbraid her for breaking her promise to him. Under his admonitions she hastened through her work, and when she joined him in the sitting room she glanced at his feet, as she entered, to reassure herself by finding him still in slippers. He gave her a pang of fear by observing, in the moment when their conversation lagged, that he supposed he ought to go over and see Emily, but she said, appealing to his affection by speaking of herself in the third person:

"Oh, stay with mother to-night; it's been so long since you were at home."

She got out her sewing basket for her never idle hands and as Garwood stretched himself in the wooden rocking-chair his father had loved, he said:

"Oh, well, all right; she doesn't know I'm here anyhow."

Then she was content to sit and darn his socks and look at him in the great silence of a mother's love.

They sat there for a long time. She did not know how to make conversation, and, remembering the dislike for questions he had inherited from his silent father, she feared to disturb him by asking any. She was satisfied to have him with her.

Garwood remained silent until he had finished his cigar, disliking to interrupt his own pleasure in it by opening the subject that then was on his heart. But at length he began to talk to her about his campaign, and it was a stimulant to her pride to hear his confidences. She was more pleased than distressed when he spoke in a discouraged tone of his prospects. She knew he was of a desponding temperament, another heritage from his father, and it pleased her to try to cheer him.

"Oh, you'll be 'lected," she insisted. "Your mother's prayin', my son, and she has faith in her prayers."

Garwood laughed, with a touch of the harsh skepticism she was always combating in him.

"I'm afraid we need money just now, as much as prayers," he said.

"Money?" she asked, pausing in her darning, and looking up at him inquiringly.

"Yes," he said. "There are legitimate expenses in a campaign you know, that a candidate has to meet." And then he told her what the legitimate expenses were.

"Some of the boys--Jim Rankin and some others--suggested that I ought to go to Mr. Harkness," he said, when he had finished. He had adroitly calculated the effect this suggestion would have upon her, and he was certain of her reply.

"Go to Mr. Harkness, would they? Humph!" Her eyes blazed as she almost snorted this. "I'd have them know if we are poor we're not goin' to be beholden to the Harknesses in any such way as that!"

"That's just what I told them," said the son, quietly.

"An' you told 'em just right!" she added. She returned to her darning, holding up the sock, stretched over her extended fingers, before the lamp.

"But I don't know whom to go to," Garwood said presently, "and I've got to go to somebody."

"Can't you possibly get along somehow?" she asked. "Tell 'em you just ain't got any money to give 'em."

Garwood gave a contemptuous "Humph!" and then, made impatient by her utter failure to comprehend the grim necessity of a candidate's position with election but a week away, he said:

"Didn't I just say I'd got to have some?"

"Well, mother don't pretend to know about politics. Your pa never had anything to do with 'em, you know." She hastened to say this in her mild voice, to conciliate his petulance with her.

"Oh, I know, mother," he rejoined; "but it's a ground-hog case with me. I've got to meet my assessments some way. It wouldn't be honourable not to."

He stretched out his long legs and gazed into the grate.

"I'll have to borrow of some one, I don't know who."

He slid farther down into his chair and crowded his hands into his trousers' pockets, a physical posture at one with his mental attitude.

"I don't know what I'm going to do."

He was scowling, his face was long, and he said this with the deep tone of a final and absolute despair.

"Some one will lend it to you," the mother said. "You mustn't get so down-hearted."

"Well, I'd like to know who!" he said, casting a challenge at her from his eyes.

"Why, some o' the banks--they loan money."

He laughed aloud, harshly, angrily.

"The banks!" he said, mocking her tone. "The banks! They'd be likely to lend me any without security, wouldn't they?"

"Well, Jerome, don't get mad with mother," she said. "She'd help you if she could."

He was silent; silent for a long time. She looked up at him now and then, cautiously, but she understood his humor, and she thought by the knitting of his brows that he was deep in thought. Out of his cogitations he came after a time, and then to say, with a mild, hesitating approach to their result:

"I can think of only one thing, mother, I might do."

"What's that?" she asked.

"I might borrow a little from the bank--and we give a mortgage on the house."

His mother did not move. Her gray head was bent over her sewing. The light of the lamp made her hair glisten; he heard the sound of her thread as she pulled her darning-needle regularly out to arm's length. Presently, as he ventured to look at her, he thought of how his father had toiled to put this little roof over her head before the disease which he knew was hastening his end should bear him away; he thought of the comfort she had always taken, during the long years she had worked to keep him in school, in the thought that whatever else came, she had a home, an asylum for every stress and storm of life. She sewed on in the silence, and he did not speak again, but waited for her. And after awhile she spoke, without raising her head:

"You know, dear"--he could not remember when she had permitted herself the tender word before--"what I promised your father before he went away."

Garwood leaned toward her with his elbows on his knees.

"I know, mother," he said, "but this really isn't serious, not that serious; it would be a small one, and I'm sure to be elected, and then I'll have a good salary as congressman--five thousand a year--just think! Why, it would only be for a couple of months; I'd get a sixty-day loan. I could easily pay it off then; you'd never know the difference." He smiled in his own hopefulness. "It seems a pity to lose such a good chance as I've got now for a little thing like that."

She did not raise her eyes.

"But your father said, Jerome," she faltered, and then he saw a tear fall on the pile of hose in her lap, and, strangely enough, in such a moment, he saw a pair of their servant girl's stockings--he knew them because their splendor of color told that they never belonged to his mother. "And I," she went on, "I--promised."

"But, mother, just look here a minute--I wouldn't ask anything out of the way of you, would I?"

"You've always been a good son to me, Jerome, and a good provider."

"Well, it isn't as if you were going to get a big sum on it, or as if we had no chance of paying it off right away. It won't be breaking your promise, don't you see?"

He went on with his smiling, specious reasoning, reassuring himself every minute, and finally seeming to make an impression upon her, for she said at last:

"Well, Jerome, you're a man now, and you know best about such things. You'll have to take care of your old mother before long, anyway, till she--"

She took off her spectacles and wiped away their moisture on the stocking she was darning, and then she raised her eyes, their pale depths dim with tears, and through them she smiled at him. He got up and kissed her, and she held him to her, pressing his cheek close to her withered one, patting his hands clumsily, awkwardly, for she had never had time to cultivate the luxurious graces of affection.

She did not, however, give way long to her emotion. She urged him to go to bed, because of his cold, and in the new burst of affection the evening had developed in his heart, he obeyed. She tucked him in his bed as if he had been a little boy again, and said good night.

He lay there a long time, warm, perspiring, comfortable, his election as he felt at last assured. But he could not get to sleep. For from his mother's room there came to him the sound of her quavering, aged voice, in hoarse whispers, and he knew that she was kneeling by her bed, praying.

XVII

Garwood found Rankin sitting in the lobby of the Cassell House, stiff in the highly glossed linen his wife decreed for his Sunday wear, his face cleanly shaved and showing its pink under the powder the barber had left on it. He had had his hair cut, too, and his cropped curls, because they had been combed by the barber, gave him the appearance of having been trimmed and made over in another fashion. He had got some of the ashes of his cigar on his waistcoat, as he lay deep in a big chair with the Sunday papers piled in his lap, and when he noticed Garwood, he also noticed the ashes, and in his haste to brush them off, he could only wheeze out an inadequate greeting between the teeth that clenched his cigar.

Garwood did not feel the satisfaction he had anticipated for that moment, when he said:

"Well, Jim, you may rest easy, I can take care of that little matter we were talking of last night."

Although Garwood spoke with a politician's generality, Rankin, before he replied, glanced over his shoulders with a politician's wariness which is like the wariness of a hunted savage.

"Well, that's all right then," Rankin answered, blinking his eyes because the smoke from his cigar had persisted in creeping into them. "Didn't have any trouble about it, did you?"

"No, none to speak of," said Garwood. He laughed, but it was a laugh with more of rue than mirth in it. "It only means a little more debt, that's all."

"Well," said Rankin, nipping the wet and ragged end of his cigar with his teeth, "so long as you don't have to mortgage the roof over your head you're all right."

The words of course struck a pain through Garwood's heart, but he gave his laugh again as he answered:

"Well, I reckon it won't come to that."

"There's one thing I've al'ays done, Jerry," said Rankin, leaning over in a more confidential attitude, "and that's this. I've al'ays drawed the line at the little woman and the kids; I've al'ays said I'd never compromise them or their future, and I say that so long's a man don't do that, he's doin' all right."

For some reason that morning Rankin seemed to be in a soft and tender mood, and showed a desire to talk of his home and its interests. Perhaps it was because it was Sunday, and his wife had been dressing him for the day with as much maternal solicitude as she had dressed his children. Garwood would have preferred Rankin's harsher and more careless note, and because it gave him a chance to get away, was glad when he remembered that he had promised his mother to go to church with her. He knew how gratifying this would be to her, for in her strict Sabbatarianism she had disliked his going down town at all that day; and then, too, he had felt that it would be a politic thing to do.

He went homeward, recalling, word by word, all of his conversation with Rankin, feeling a little hurt at what seemed to him Rankin's coldness, troubled with suspicions and misgivings that he ascribed to the influence of Rankin's strange manner, and without the peace of mind he thought he should feel, now that his election was assured.

He found his mother with her bonnet on, and her misshapen hands gloved and folded, in anxious waiting.

"What time does church begin?" he asked.

"Half-past ten, the last bell rings," said Mrs. Garwood.

"My goodness!" her son exclaimed, as he hurriedly snapped his watch lid shut, "I thought it was at eleven o'clock."

The old lady's face winced with a jealous resentment.

"You're thinkin' of the 'piscopalian church," she answered significantly; "they always does things different."

They walked to church while the bells were ringing, the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches tolling their bells one after another, a note at a time, each tolerantly waiting its turn, though the different keys in which their bells were pitched rang out in a sharp disharmony their doctrinal distinctions. Far away over on the East Side, Garwood heard the chimes of the Catholic church, holding aloof from all this dissonance of the clamoring creeds, while the Episcopalians had no bell in their church, disdaining with a fine superior quality of respectability to enter into the brazen polemics.

The last bell had just stopped ringing, and its dying tones were still vibrating through the building when they reached the Methodist church, and were shown down the aisle to Mrs. Garwood's pew, although there was a pretense of free pews in that church. Garwood could feel the glances of the congregation upon him as he took his seat, and he liked the little distinction, although he had grown used, in the last two months, to being the central figure of public gatherings. He recalled how carefully the Monday morning papers chronicled the church goings of the presidential candidates with the fact that the preacher had added something to his sermon that pledged a providential interest in the success of the nominee who had distinguished that preacher's church with his presence, and Garwood tried to conduct himself as a great man should, or as he imagined he would appear when, a little later, he should become a great man. He bent his head during the prayer, not so low as his mother did, but at an angle that would express a dignified unworthiness to join in public prayer, though giving the assurance at the same time of his respect for it.

During the services, especially during the preaching, Garwood had much time for thought and meditation. His meditations were idle and incoherent, running on Emily, and the afternoon he would spend with her; on his campaign and its impending close. Through them all ran a certain minor chord of sadness and reproach, particularly when he looked at his mother sitting there beside him, her eyes raised behind their gold spectacles in the very acme of respectful attention as she tried to pierce the meaning the preacher sought to crowd into his sermon without making it too long to offend the Longworths, the rich family of the congregation, who, striving to wear the impressive aspect of prominence in the community, filled a whole pew. Garwood found his thoughts hardly tolerable so long as he allowed them to rest in the present. He could grasp at happiness and comfort only when they built on the surer, brighter future which soon would open to him. He found it hard, however, to keep them always building air castles; they persisted in returning to the present, to Emily, to Rankin, to the campaign, to the mortgage. He was depressed and longed for the services to end. They seemed to stretch themselves out interminably, with prayers and hymns and anthems, with announcements and collections, finally, after the sermon, with the baptism of a crying child. He felt as when a little boy he had squirmed during the long two hours, and as a boy was glad when service was over--he was particularly glad that it had not proved to be communion Sunday, for that would have made it necessary for him once more to face a moral problem; to decide on a course of action; and he was wearied with moral problems and decisions.

The heavy feeling that oppressed Garwood in church, the chill that checked the felicity he felt himself now entitled to, remained with him. At times he would forget and become happy, but as soon as he was conscious that he was happy, he would remember that there was some reason why he should not be happy, and then his memory would swiftly bring back to him the thing he had done. By afternoon this constant recurrence irritated him, and he half pitied himself, thinking it unjust that he should be thus annoyed when he was so anxious to be contented and at peace, especially after all the sacrifices he had made to his mother's wishes during the last sixteen hours. And so when he set out in the clear, shining afternoon to go to Emily, he resolved to throw off this feeling; to cast it from him; to have done with it for all time. Physically he expressed this resolve by the fling of his head, and the way he set his shoulders back, holding them high with the will to be all he wished to be.

The house-maid was out for her Sunday afternoon holiday, and Emily herself swung back the door in answer to Garwood's ring. The girl smiled radiantly when she saw him and, with a lover's pretense about her spiritual prescience of all his movements, said she knew it was he at the door. He told her that she had never looked so beautiful before, and there was much of truth in this, for she wore, with an effect of having shown it at church for the first time that morning, a new fall suit, the skirt of which vouched for the jacket that had been laid aside for the greater comfort of a blue silk bodice, which billowed modestly at her young breast, giving her an air of slightness and accentuating the delicacy of her whole person. Her eyes and cheeks were bright with health and her lover's coming, so that her natural color, which made the wearing of dark costumes an easy thing for her, was thereby heightened.

In the moment they lingered in the hall, she laid her soft hands on his shoulders, reaching up to him with a smile of propitiation to say:

"Dade's here."

She was pleased when he frowned his jealous disapproval.

"How long's she going to stay?" he said bluntly.

"Not long," she replied. "She won't stay when she knows you're here. Why didn't you let me know you were coming?"

"I didn't know it myself," he said. "I came on a telegram from Rankin, and I ought to go right out again, only--I had to stay and see you."

She purred an instant in the embrace into which he drew her and then quickly hushed him by pointing toward the drawing-room.

Garwood had never known Dade Emerson, though he had heard of her from Emily in those confidences with which they tried to atone for the years that had passed before love came to them, by recounting in detail, little by little, all their happenings and relations. Dade, to be sure, had impulsively declared that she remembered Garwood as a shock-headed boy whose short trousers came abjectly below his knees, and had identified him to Emily as the youth who had thrown a stone and hooted them as they were going homeward one day from the Misses Lewis's school. Emily had gleefully told this to Garwood and though he had recognized the picture's truth, he was ashamed of it, and had denied it altogether.

When they entered the drawing-room, and Emily had presented Garwood, there was an instant's constraint, born of Garwood's uneasiness in women's society, an uneasiness he somehow contrived to make pass for a Byronic contempt of it, to which also contributed Emily's solicitude that her lover should meet the approval of her friend.

Dade sat listlessly twirling a ring on her strong, white finger, a silver ring of curious, antique workmanship that helped the foreign effect she sought in her personality, but when, through her lashes she saw Emily gazing at Garwood with a sudden access of fondness, she rather coldly said:

"You ah standing for the borough, I believe, ah you not, Mistah Gahwood?"

"I'm running for Congress, if that's what you mean," replied Garwood with an uncontrollable bluntness that he regretted.

"Oh, yes; that is what you call it, isn't it? How int'resting you must find it!"

Garwood laughed in an effort to find ease.

"I find it pretty hard work," he sighed. Emily noted the sigh, and pressed the hand she somehow found between them.

"He's all worn out, Dade," she explained, and the sense of possession her tone implied put all three on an easier footing. "You don't know how hard our political leaders have to work."

"To be elected?" asked Dade.

"Yes, to be elected," said Garwood, yielding himself to the pillows that were piled near him. "And no sooner are we elected once than we have to begin fixing up our fences for a second term."

"Fixing up yoah fences?" said Dade, wonderingly.

"It's a political phrase," explained Emily.

"You have so many of them," said Dade, "and they ah all so unintelligible."

"They must strike a foreigner as peculiar," said Garwood. "I had never thought of that before."

"But I'm not a fo'eigneh, you know," the girl protested.

"Well, you're pretty near it," said Emily. "She's lived abroad all her life, you know--nearly," she explained aside to Garwood.

Garwood was pleased that the conversation had taken a turn which he could follow. With strange women he found small talk impossible as all men must who are not versed in the banalities of women's intercourse, though they indulge themselves for hours in the trivialities of men's gossip.

"I have never thought of it before," said Garwood, "but most of our political phrases savor of our young agricultural life; perhaps I would better say our pioneer life. There's 'log-rolling,' for instance, and 'stump speaking,' and--"

"And setting the prairies on fiah," Dade added. "I saw in the papah the othah day that you weare doing that--on the stump, they said."

Garwood laughed again, naturally.

"That was one of Rankin's inspired tales, no doubt. Rather a mixture of figures, too, setting the prairies on fire from the stump, don't you think? And you probably saw as well, that some of the Indians over in Moultrie have their knives out, and are after my scalp."

"That is more than agricultural, or pioneerish," said Emily; "that's actually savage."

"It's quite deliciously American," said Miss Emerson.

"And one of the few things the papers say of me that are true!" sighed Garwood.

"I'm not afraid of that," said Emily loyally; "isn't there just a little truth in the story about your setting the prairies on fire?"

Garwood laughed, the superior laugh of a man alone with women. He liked this political conversation which he could so easily dominate, quite as much as he liked Emily's frank acquiescence before Miss Emerson in her position as his affianced bride. It gave him such a sweet assurance of security in one relation at least.

"Oh, I don't know," he said; "a candidate never does know any more about his own campaign than a bridegroom does about the preparations for his own wedding. To him it all seems to be going one way; he sees nothing but friendly faces and hears nothing but friendly cheers, and he goes to bed the night before election almost hoping that his opponent may get a few votes just to console him, though he doesn't see where the votes are to come from. The morning after he wakes up to wonder where his own votes all went to. It's always a shock of surprise to the defeated man." He paused to enjoy the effect of his little speech upon the girls, and then resumed: "If you want to know how my campaign is really coming on you'll have to ask Jim Rankin."

"Who is this Mistah Rankin?" asked Dade.

"Oh," said Emily, turning toward her companion with a superiority of her own, "you remember--I told you about him the other day. You really should see him, he's the funniest man and the most interesting. He is managing the campaign for Jerome. He just worships Jerome; I believe he'd die for you, don't you, Jerome?"

"I've heard him say he'd go through--ah--hell and high water for me," said Garwood with the keen enjoyment that comes from vicarious profanity quoted in a presence where, stripped of its quotation marks, it would be inadmissible.

The two girls exclaimed, though they enjoyed the risk of it, and sat while Garwood celebrated Rankin's virtues as a friend and as a politician. When he found room for more quotable profanity Emily laid her palm lightly over his mouth, and at this demonstration of affection Dade rose and said significantly:

"Well, I think it high time I was going and leaving you alone."

There was a little show of protest, but she went, Garwood standing in the middle of the room wondering if the proprieties demanded that he accompany Emily as she escorted Dade to the door; but he withdrew into the security of that dignity which stood him in such good stead in all social crises, and bowed as if the retiring girl were an audience or a jury. The two girls lingered in the hall longer than Garwood thought necessary, though he lost his objection in the satisfaction of the conviction that they were discussing him.

Garwood, of course, stayed to that unclassified meal which is served on Sunday evenings. The repast which Emily in the absence of the servants laid herself, was without formality, and the girl artfully contrived to hide from him the extra preparation that was represented by the bowl of salad she brought forth and set in the midst of the white linen and all the glitter of the table service. Garwood and Mr. Harkness talked of men's topics during the meal and Emily was silent with the silence of the woman in her serving, though her eyes gleamed at the comradeship she thought she recognized in the two men. She did not know how thoroughly the real thought of each man was with her, though Garwood from time to time reflected on the comparison that might be made between the plainness of his mother's table on Sunday evenings and the elegance of the one at which he now expanded himself.

It was late when he went home that night. As he left he told Emily, in their lengthened farewells, that it had been the happiest Sunday he had ever known.

XVIII

Everywhere the campaign was closing, as the newspapers said, in a blaze of glory.

From their headquarters in New York the managers of the two great parties were issuing their last impossible claims, their last careful instructions, their last solemn warnings. Partisan hatred raged in every hamlet in the land, and the whole nation was given over to the last passion of its quadrennial tragedy of personal ambitions.

Down in the Thirteenth Congressional District of Illinois, Garwood was making his final tour of the seven counties, speaking many times daily. He was disheveled and bedraggled, he went without shaving, without sleeping, much of the time without food. He had turned into a mere smiling automaton, that could drink, talk in a husky voice, and go on and on. Insensible to bodily fatigue and discomfort, his only physical sensation was a constant longing for tobacco, and he smoked all the time.

At home, Rankin had finished all his plans. He had completed a second poll, which he had had taken by school districts, and the thousand dollars Garwood had given him on the Monday morning before starting on his final campaigning tour he was hoarding for election day. His own confidence was such that, when Mr. Harkness, in the interest he could not conceal, one day asked about the outlook, he was able to say:

"We're all right if they don't buy us."

Rankin had determined that Garwood's campaign should close with a splendid spectacle of fire in his home town. He had roused the county committee to a frenzy of action, he had compelled the candidates on the county ticket to make one final contribution to the campaign fund, and as Garwood's share of the great meeting Rankin engaged a band, and kept this action so constantly before his fellow-committeemen that their own efforts seemed paltry and puny in comparison with his. When the last Sunday night came, and but one more day remained, he said to his sleepy wife as he came home far in the chill hours of the morning:

"Well, mamma, we've got 'em licked--but they don't know it."

Emily celebrated the evening of the meeting by asking Mrs. Garwood with Dade and her mother to supper, after which they were to be driven to the opera house early enough to obtain good seats for the speaking. Emily had hoped to have Garwood himself there, but at the last moment a telegram came from him at Mt. Pulaski saying that his train was late and he would have to go directly from the station to the opera house to be in time for his speech. Dade came and brought her mother's excuses, though not their querulousness, and by her affectations troubled Mrs. Garwood, already constrained by the embarrassment of a meal too elaborate for her comfort.

The supper was hardly over when the preliminary pounding of a bass drum came to their ears, and Emily and Dade fluttered out on the veranda as excitedly as the little boys who raced up and down the avenue shouting that the parade was coming, and saluting it with premature fanfaronades on their tin horns. Sangamon Avenue did not twinkle with Japanese lanterns this night as it had on the night of the Bromley meeting, for Garwood's social position was not that of Bromley's, and the rich therefore did not so readily identify themselves with his cause, but the boys were bipartisan and now and then the big flags that swung over the lawns all summer were illumined by the red fire which some youngster, unable to restrain his impatience, had set off. Occasionally a line of torches would undulate across the avenue several blocks away, and then the wild announcements of the boys would arouse even their waiting elders on the porches; but there were many of these false alarms, so many, that Dade declared that the parade was a failure and would not pass that way.

But at last it came. They heard the strains of a band swelling loud as some distant corner was turned, then, in the darkness of the November night, far away through the trees, they caught the lick of a torch's flame, then another and another, until they made a river of yellow fire that poured itself down the street from curb to curb, rising and falling as the marchers' feet kept time to the punctuated rolling of the drums. Along the sidewalks streamed a crowd of boys, and men like boys, the same that had trudged through the dust beside Garwood's carriage that hot day in August, the same that had flanked the Bromley parade a few weeks before.

The girls had been followed to the veranda by Mr. Harkness and Mrs. Garwood, and as the old man and the old woman pressed forward in an interest they disliked to own, the two girls clutching each other at last in a definite embrace teetered on the very edge of the steps, their teeth chattering with nervousness. Jasper had driven the carriage around and stood at the heads of the horses, who pricked their ears towards the oncoming mass of men and fire, and gazed at it with startled eyes, jerking their heads now and then and blowing through their soft sensitive nostrils.

The procession had drawn so near that it was possible to distinguish the details that made the mass, the four policemen, in double-breasted sack coats who had been announced as a platoon; the grand marshal of the parade, decked out bravely in rosettes and patriotic bunting, trying to sit his buggy-horse with the military seat; the flag bearer, with bent back, straining under his load; the faces of the marchers themselves red and unfamiliar in the glare that lit them up, like faces transfigured in the glamour that saves a tableau from contempt.

There were clubs from each ward, uniformed in the oil-cloth capes and caps of that day, with wide intervals between their sets of fours, and eked out by small boys in the rear ranks; there was a company of railroad men--at least their transparencies said they were railroad men--wearing overalls, and swinging lighted lanterns, and these were vouchsafed most patronizing applause from the lawns and verandas, as if they were nobly sacrificing themselves for the salvation of their nation. The lines were well formed, and marched with an effect of military precision, though the procession had to stop now and then to mark time and dress its intervals.

When the marching hosts saw the Harkness house all ablaze from top to bottom they recognized their candidate's relation to the first quality of the town by venting a sentimental cheer, waving their torches above their heads, and throwing the flames into the air. Then the grand marshal, holding on to pommel and cantle, twisted his huge haunches in the saddle, and shouted some mighty order, which, though wholly unintelligible to everybody, and to the marchers more than anybody, at once created a vast commotion down the fiery line. His hoarse words, or some hoarse words, were repeated, tossed as it were from one throat to another, the marshal's aides galloped wildly up and down until at last the torches began to dance in varying directions as the column executed some complex manoeuver that wrought a change in its formation. And then the marshal, in a way that no doubt reminded himself of a Napoleon, or a Grant, turned about in his saddle, squeezed his plodding horse's ribs with his spurless heels, and, under his slouch hat, glanced from left to right like Stonewall Jackson.

At the same moment a drum-major shrilled his whistle, and twirled his baton, a cornet trilled and the band began to play:

"When Johnny comes marching home again, Hurrah, hurrah!"

The two girls emotionally trod a dancing measure, and then, because of the smell of saltpeter, the snorts of horses, the shouts of men, the red and white ripple of the flags that went careering by in smoke and flame, some strange suggestion of the war our political contests typify, in spirit and symbol at least, was borne to them, until they felt what they conceived to be patriotic thrills coursing up and down their spines.

"Don't you love the dear old flag, after all, Dade?" cried Emily, above the noise. The girl pressed her companion's waist in response.

"Yes, but it's a rebel tune they're playing," said old Mrs. Garwood, dubiously wagging her head in its bonnet.

"Oh, we're all one now!" said Mr. Harkness, and then blew his nose in chagrin at this show of feeling.

They stood and shivered in the cold night air and watched the parade go by, read the transparencies with their boasting inscriptions, praised the various regalia of the marchers, kept time to the singing of the bugles and the going of the drums, and cheered when fifty men from Cotton Wood township, wearing coon-skin caps and followed by dogs, trotted by on their heavy plow horses. Finally a rabble of boys and negroes brought up the rear, snatching extinguished torches, half-burned roman candles or sticks of red fire to make a little celebration, and the parade had passed.

When Emily and her party reached the opera house, the sidewalk was cumbered with the loafers who always gathered there when the place of amusement was opened, and people were streaming up the wide stairway into the hall. Mr. Harkness led the women to seats toward the front of the house, where they joined the scattered folk already sitting there, fanning themselves in the air that was overheated by the blazing gas jets, talking, laughing, whiling away the long time they had to wait for their entertainment to begin. Up in the dim and dusty gallery boys were improving an opportunity of liberty by clattering over the wooden benches, calling to one another, whistling, dinning the night with the noises boys love.

The stage was furnished with a table, and on it were the white pitcher and the waiting glass from which orators quench their ever-raging thirst. The table's legs were hidden by a flag, in the folds of which was a picture of the candidate for president. The stage had been set with the theater's gray-walled drawing-room scene--the one with the frescoed curtains and tassels--and an effort had been made to warm the cold and cheerless setting of so many domestic comedies and kingly tragedies by a further use of flags and bunting and a few pictures. Among them was one of Garwood, which Emily recognized after study, and resented, because of the fierce cast in the eye, and the aged droop to the mouth. They left old Mrs. Garwood in the dark as to the identity of that portrait.

The stage was filled with wooden chairs, ashen-white in their unpainted newness. The vice-presidents, for whom these chairs were intended, had not arrived, but presently they began to tiptoe awkwardly across the stage, and then seat themselves, troubled about the disposition of their feet before the unaccustomed footlights. They coughed into their hands from time to time, and were obviously glad when some black-garbed companion came to share their misery and let them pretend the ease they sought by talking to him. The stage filled, and some began looking at their watches. At eight o'clock the hall was full; the meeting was certain to be a success anyway. Ten minutes more passed by. The committee arrived and seated itself on the stage. The Glee Club came and cleared its four throats. Outside the noise of the disbanding parade could be heard and then the rush of the marchers to get indoors. The band clambered up to the gallery, ousted a whole section to make a fitting place for itself down by the railing, then at half-past eight began to play a medley of national airs, and though the strains of America, Columbia, The Red, White and Blue, Dixie, Marching Through Georgia and Yankee Doodle filled the theater, the atmosphere was charged with the suspense of long waiting.

Suddenly, while the band was playing, a wave of excitement swept over the audience; there was a commotion at the door, a shuffle of feet, a scraping of chairs. The vice-presidents craned their necks to peer over the black-coated shoulders in front of them, people ceased their fanning and twisted about in their seats to look, a rattle of clapping hands broke forth, a cheer arose, the floor began to tremble and vibrate beneath stamping feet, and then the building shook with heavy applause.

And all at once Emily saw Jim Rankin, rubicund, his curls sticking to his wet forehead, smiling always, leading the way up a side aisle, and behind him Garwood, his hat in his hand, his overcoat on his arm. She saw him run his free hand through his hair to loosen it, then shake it back with that royal toss of the head she knew so well, and stride on, his face white, his eyes dark, his mouth firmly closed on the level line of his lips.

The house rocked with the storm of cheers, with cries of his name, but he marched straight on, behind his smiling Rankin, who responded to the greetings of men who rose from chairs or pressed themselves flat against the walls to give room in the aisle. The little party disappeared behind the scenes, and the ovation lulled.

Emily felt her throat close and feared the tears that already moistened her eyes. She tried to compose her features, she crushed Dade's arm in her fingers, then she stole a glance at those about her. Everybody was looking at Garwood, everybody save one, her father; he was looking at her, while Mrs. Garwood, having found her handkerchief, held it in her work-worn hands just as it had come from the iron that afternoon, fresh and clean, keeping her eyes fixed on the stage, watching for her boy to appear again, while tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks.

And then Emily heard Dade whisper:

"Wondah why they didn't come in by the stage entrance?"

Rankin and Garwood had stepped on the stage, and the applause had broken forth again. Garwood had taken out a big white handkerchief and was wiping his brow. He was smiling now, and greeting the vice-presidents of the meeting, who stretched their bodies across their neighbors' knees to shake his hand. Rankin, too, was mopping his forehead, and he had his watch out. As soon as he saw that Garwood was seated, he stepped to the front of the stage, his red face round with smiles. Then suddenly his smile died, his face blanched, and he tapped the decorated table with the gavel that lay on it. He took a swallow of the water he supposed was in the glass, and at last his voice came:

"Friends an' fellow citizens," he said, though not many could hear him, "will you come to order, an' I now have the honor of interducin' to you Judge Bickerstaff, who will preside at this meetin' as permanent chairman."

Rankin retired amid a volley of hand-claps, which the rotund judge, advancing to the front of the stage, buttoning his frock coat about him, thought were meant for him. He bowed ponderously, and then, with one hand on the table beside him, began the platitudinous speech of the permanent chairman. The people bore with him in that divine patience to which the American public has schooled itself under this oft-recurring ordeal, and even gave him some perfunctory applause. But the quality of the applause was spontaneous only when he reached the place where he said:

"I now have the very great honor and the very great pleasure of introducing to you your next congressman, the Honorable Jerome B. Garwood." Jerry arose at the sound of his own name and, advancing to the front of the stage, stood there calm and composed until the applause died away; stood there calm and composed until the silence came and deepened. He looked over the whole audience, at the galleries even, and then his eye traveled unerringly to the spot where his own sat. He looked at his mother, gazing up at him through her dim spectacles, at Dade who smiled, at Mr. Harkness who was stern, at last at Emily. Their eyes met, and as Emily's fell she heard his voice in low, musical modulation:

"Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen."

And his last speech of the campaign began.

Whenever in Grand Prairie they discuss Jerry Garwood's oratory, they shake their heads and say that he made the speech of his life that last night before election.

XIX

It was election night in Chicago and already a great crowd thronged the Webster House, a crowd, as was perhaps fitting in a land where the avocation of every man is governing, composed wholly of men, although in one corner of the balcony that ran around the rotunda of the old hotel there were several women. The splendor that had been produced in their dress by the competition of a public dining-room, proclaimed them as regular boarders, and as an additional evidence of their lot in life, they had that air of detachment from their husbands which most hotel ladies soon or late come to wear. As they leaned over the balcony, their jewels and teeth and white hands flashed nervously, as if they shared the excitement of the crowd below. For them, as it might for any one, the great crowd possessed a never failing interest. Looking down they saw it continually in uneasy motion like a herd of milling cattle. Here and there were nucleated groups of men engaged in belated political argument or in hedging political bets, here and there some tired outcast glad of the temporary warmth and light, shivered in ragged summer garments that the long day's rain had drenched, here and there some messenger boy dodged along, here and there some reporter elbowed his way through the crowd, and here and there a wide track was marked by the more important progress of some politician. Over the head of the crowd hung a stratus of tobacco smoke, and all the while arose a multitudinous voice, laughing, swearing, cheering. Constantly arms were flung into the air, and sometimes a hat went spinning up to the dark skylight on which a November rain endlessly drummed.

Up the wide staircase and down the hall, carpeted with canvas ever since the campaign opened, men trailed their dripping umbrellas, passing in and out of the suite of parlors where the state central committee had its headquarters. The outer rooms were crowded with men, their garments steaming from the rain, their faces dripping with perspiration, their dirty fingers holding chewed cigars. Some of them were drunk and quarrelsome, and now and then the policeman who leaned against the doors spoke confidentially to these, deprecating the trouble he could so easily bring upon them. The desk of the secretary was closed and wore an air of having been closed finally. On the floor were piles of blank nominating petitions that never would be used, bundles of newspapers that never would be read, and heaps of campaign literature that never would be distributed. In a corner where three or four sample torches stood was a pile of lithographs, and from them the faces of candidates, as if they still posed before the people, looked out with the same solemn expressions they had worn for the campaign. Outside, from a wire that was stretched to the building on the opposite side of the street, the big campaign banner could be heard booming in the wind.

In the innermost of the committee's apartments only a few men had been admitted, men who that year, at least, were the managers of the party's policies in the state. In this room was Garwood. He had voted early that morning and had then taken a train for Chicago, in order to be in the very center of the night's excitement.

As he sat there in a deep leather chair he could hear the ring of cab-horses' hoofs on the glistening cobble stones of the street below; the shouts of election night, now and then the blare of a tin horn. From Washington Street, two blocks away, a cheer, mellowed pleasantly by the distance, came from the crowd before the newspaper offices, where the returns were being flashed upon screens, and from below always ascended that endless roar. From the entresol a deep voice was reading the bulletins to the multitude in the rotunda. Garwood caught snatches of what the voice was reading:

"Four hundred and twenty-nine precincts in Brooklyn and Kings County show net gains--"

Once he heard the inevitable news that Mississippi had gone overwhelmingly Democratic, and Vermont overwhelmingly Republican, and then the quadrennial laugh with which these foregone conclusions are received and the quadrennial cheers with which partisanship dutifully celebrates them. But, though he heard, he was scarcely conscious of it all; it sounded far away to him and strange. His thoughts lay too deep for these objective manifestations. The crisis of his life, he felt, had come. He was with men who like himself were candidates, or else the managers of candidates, and yet he felt that the result of the election meant more to him than it did to them.

He had risked all on this campaign; he had abandoned his practice, staked his reputation, spent all his money, gone in debt, all he was or had was involved--Emily with the rest. He felt that if he were defeated she would be lost to him. He looked at Colonel Warfield, the chairman of the state executive committee, sitting at the table in the center of the room, a pad of paper before him, idly turning a pencil over and over in his fingers as he considered the import of the latest returns. Garwood wondered if he were really as calm as he appeared. He looked at the others in the room, laughing and joking as they were--no, it could not matter to them as it did to him; they had position, money, influence; politics was to them a kind of recreation. They lolled in chairs, smoking at their ease, not caring to anticipate the strain of the long, uncertain hours of the night, but content to sit in silence with their heads thrown back, trying to blow rings of smoke to the ceiling. Once Parrish said:

"It's like waiting for a jury, ain't it?"

"Yes," said some one else, "but, thank God, this is a jury that can't hang."

"Maybe not," said old General Williams, who had been in Congress for twenty years, representing a safe district that he considered his by divine right, "but it can stay out a long time. I remember, once--"

The danger of Williams's reminiscence was averted by the click of the telegraph instrument. The operator seized his stylus and began to write rapidly. Warfield took the new bulletin from the telegrapher's outstretched hand and studied it with knitted brows. He read it aloud finally, and then commented:

"If that gain keeps up in New York he'll come down to Harlem bridge with less than seventy thousand. It'll give us the state and the presidency."

He laid his pencil down and lighted a cigar, but he did not relax his interest.

"Here's something," he said a moment later, spreading a piece of yellow flimsy over a white sheet, "here's one from Springfield; says returns from thirty counties show net gains over two years ago of eleven per cent. Let's see--'In these counties,' he read, 'Chatham polls forty-three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. Norton, for state treasurer, carried the same counties two years ago by seventeen thousand two hundred and thirty-six.'"

The men in the room stirred with a pleasing excitement. Several of them began to talk again, but the colonel said rather peremptorily:

"Wait! Here's some West Side news,"--Newman, who was standing for the Fourth Congressional District, arose as the chairman read:

"Three of the five wards comprising the Fourth Congressional District, the Eighth, the Ninth, and the Nineteenth, give Newman eleven thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight, Kenyon five thousand six hundred and forty-seven."

Newman drew a long, full breath, and smiled complacently.

"How will the other wards go, John?" asked Parrish.

"Oh, they're all right. I carried the Eleventh by a hundred and fifty-six two years ago," said Newman, speaking with the accuracy with which a man remembers his own majorities, "and lost the Twelfth by sixteen ninety-four, but I can give him both of them and beat him out."

Garwood envied him keenly.

The operator was writing furiously now, and kept his left arm, with a despatch dangling in his fingers, almost continually stretched over the back of his chair toward Warfield. The colonel made his calculations rapidly.

"Here you are, General," he said to Williams after awhile, and the white-bearded old man took a despatch from him and carefully adjusted his glasses. Then he hitched his chair up to the table, cleared a place for his elbows, took some paper and began to make figures of his own.

"Gentlemen," he said presently, "I claim my election by a majority of four thousand votes."

"What was your majority two years ago?" asked Milton.

"Why, sir," said the old man, looking at Milton as if he were betraying a culpable ignorance, "three thousand two hundred and ninety-six. Don't you remember?"

"Oh yes," lied Milton.

"Seems popular in his district, doesn't he?" whispered Garwood.

"Popular! No one can beat the old blatherskite. Wish he had to run in my district once!" Milton spoke out of the bitterness the fierce contests of a close district had worked in him. Just then a number of reporters, moving in a body like a committee, came to interview Colonel Warfield.

The colonel was thoughtful for a moment, and then, smiling, he said: "You probably know more than I about it, but you can say for me that at eleven o'clock"--he looked at his watch--"basing my calculations on incomplete returns from seventy-five counties in the state, I claim the election of Governor Chatham and the entire state ticket by thirty-three thousand majority."

"These others have scored already," said Anthony, the secretary of the committee, waving at General Williams, at Milton and at Newman the corn-cob pipe for which he was famous all over the state, "all except Garwood there; he'll be in after while."

Outside the noise was growing louder. They could hear cheering from the rotunda, and in the streets the crowds pouring out of the theater added to the din. The noise had a new quality of wildness in it that comes with the approach of midnight. Schreiber, who had been put on the state ticket for auditor because of his German name, had long ago claimed his own election by a safe majority, and had made many trips down to the bar. He was a fat man, plainly a connoisseur of Rhine wines; and you might almost have said he was humid, so moist was his rosy skin. He did not emit a German "Hoch!" as would have befitted his personality, but he continually boomed forth pleasantries, congratulating the other successful candidates. But from these general felicitations Garwood was excluded. For an hour his hopes had been sinking. Rankin had promised to telegraph as soon as he had anything definite, but no word had come from him. Though the returns from down the state were coming in rapidly those from his own district had been meager, and from what he already knew he was convinced that he was running behind the head of the ticket, both national and state. It seemed to be well established by midnight that his party had swept both the state and the nation, and he seemed to be the only one thus far left out. He pitied himself, he began to feel that the open triumph of the successful ones about him was indelicate and in bad taste; he felt that they should show him more consideration. But they seemed to have forgotten him in the realization of their own joy, and Garwood could only smile grimly at the irony of it all.

At midnight whistles blew all over the city, as if it were New Year's, and just then Larry O'Neil came in, crying:

"We've got 'em, Cook County's ours by fifty thousand. Beats hell, don't it?"

"How are they feeling down at the Grand?" asked Anthony. The headquarters of the other committee were at the Grand.

"Oh, they've shut up down there," said the man, "and gone home. They seen it 'as no use."

"Yes," said Warfield, laying down his pencil as if he had no further need for it, "it's a landslide."

At one o'clock the telegraph instrument ceased its chatter and the telegraph operator began to unroll his little package of lunch. As the odor of the buttered bread and the cold meat he spread on a clean sheet of paper before him became perceptible in the room, the men there felt for the first time that night the pangs of hunger, and Colonel Warfield said:

"What do you say to our going down to the café and having a bite to eat?"

Down in the café, the men grouped themselves about two tables which Warfield told the head waiter to place end to end, and the meal he ordered soon became a banquet. As they sat there talking in excited tones, laughing at old stories of by-gone campaigns, laughing even at the defeats of by-gone campaigns, as they could afford to now, many men passing through stopped to congratulate Warfield, to slap him on the shoulder, and call him "Good boy!" as if he had done it all. And as he thought of the four years of that influence at Springfield his position as the chairman who had directed the campaign would give him, his inscrutable smile expanded into one of great content. They were happy at that table, all of them looking forward to days of power, all save Garwood, who sat gloomy and silent, drinking more than he ate, and drinking more than he felt he ought. Once Warfield noticed his despondency, and whispered to him in his kind-hearted way:

"Don't give up, old man. You'll pull through. And if you don't, I'll see that you're taken care of."

The sympathy of the chairman's tone, more than the promise he made, touched Garwood, but down in his heart he felt a soreness. It was hard to see them all successful and be alone doomed to defeat. A place in the state administration, on some board, even on the board of railroad and warehouse commissioners, would hardly satisfy him now. He had longed to go to Congress, and then, the vindication he looked for meant more than all the rest. And Emily--he thought of her and could have wept. He felt himself more and more detached from the scene. The table, the mirrors, the lights of the café, the laughing men, the rushing waiters, the shuffle of the crowd in the lobby above, the cries in the street outside, the toots of tin horns, the companies of crazy men marching aimlessly around and around, howling the names of candidates, all sounded as remote and strange as if he had no more a part in it.

The night waned, the noise changed, but did not cease. It told of a decrease in the numbers in the lobby, but the sounds were wilder. Men were making a night of it. As in a dream Garwood heard some one say:

"There's a little woman down in Rock Island who'd like to hear from me. I must wire my wife."

And Garwood thought of a telegram he might have sent, had things gone differently. He thought of a girl down in Grand Prairie, but now--it was all so changed!

He stole away and sought his room. He went to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked down into Randolph Street. The rain had ceased, but still the big campaign banner flapped clumsily. The chill of dawn was in the air, a cold wind blew in from the lake. Across the way the court house and city hall loomed in the fog; in their shadow he saw the jaded horses at the cab stand drooping their noses to their crooked knees; the cable began to buzz in its slot; far over the gloomy roofs the sky was tinged with the pallor of coming day--then suddenly a long shaft of brilliant light striking across the sky startled him with a nameless terror. The shaft rose slowly until it pointed straight upward, then three times it swept a vast arc down to the eastern horizon. And Garwood remembered--it was the search-light which the _Courier_ had announced would signal the success of Garwood's party. He recalled the day at Lincoln. The great man and all the rest, as they went to bed in the dawn of that November morning, were safe in triumphant victory, while he alone--

He heard the heavy, mature voice of some early newsboy:

"Extry! Toimes, Tribune, Her'ld, an' Courier! 'Lection!"

XX

When Garwood awoke, he opened his eyes in darkness. The room was cold. He heard the harsh Nottingham curtains stirring in the breeze that came in at the windows, an autumnal breeze that had only the chill of autumn and none of the crispness and woodland odors that he would have found in it down in Grand Prairie. Instead, it was laden with the soot and dirt of the city, and it could not dissipate the heavy quality taken on by the air of a room that had long been slept in. He could hear the jolting of trucks on the cobble stones, the trudge and shuffle of thousands of feet on the sidewalk, the clank of the cable cars scraping around the loop, and, punctuating the roar of the city, the cries of the newsboys. Garwood slowly regathered his senses, and lay in the moment that comes before memory brings back individuality and life, trying to fathom a deep sense of something wrong. Then it all came back to him with a rush--the campaign, the election, the defeat. He rose and drew his watch from his waistcoat, lying on the floor. It was too dark to see its face. He switched on the electricity--the watch had stopped. Then he went to the window and looked down into the street. The lights were blazing, and thereby, and by the throngs hurrying along and by the crowded cars, he knew that it must be evening. How long he had slept he did not know. He could not remember how or when he had got to bed. His sleep had hardly refreshed him. It had been too deep, too heavy; he was feverish and his muscles were sore. But he dressed and went downstairs. Somehow, instinctively, without giving himself any reason he stopped at the headquarters of the state committee, but the rooms were dark, deserted. The dead odor of stale tobacco smoke hung heavy in the air.

At the desk in the rotunda below, the clerk gave him his mail, with some pleasantry about the great victory. Garwood stared at him blankly, with the dumb ache at his heart, with some resentment too, that the clerk should not have known what a dash of bitterness that cup of victory held for him. Mechanically he began to thumb his letters over as he stood there, and presently laid them aside that he might open several telegrams he found among them, with that sense of precedence which telegrams always take over every other missive. With the first one his eyes widened in astonishment, and then suddenly he was aware that Warfield was shaking his hand and saying:

"Well, old man, congratulations. It's all the sweeter now, isn't it? Why! You look surprised, what's the--"

Garwood looked up at Warfield and said:

"I never knew till just this minute, when I read Rankin's telegram. I just got up."

"I knew you'd pull through all the time," said Warfield, with as much truth as retroactive prophecy can ever hold. "I thought last night they were holding out down there, and that when the whole vote got in, you'd be found to have won out."

Garwood's soreness had gone, and he took a long breath as if to draw into his very being this glad new sense of victory. In an instant a new glory had been added to life. He took Warfield by the arm.

"Come on," he said, "let's get the evening papers, and then go and have a little drink."

They strolled toward the news stand, and Garwood's eye ran down the pages as he waited for his change.

"Why, I carried Bromley's home county! I thought I'd lose that anyway."

"Oh, the story helped out over there," said Warfield. "Bromley got the Sunday-school vote, and that drove the rest to you."

"My! Wasn't it a landslide though!" said Garwood. "Keep the change," he called to the young man behind the news stand. "Well, I was glad the party won even when I thought I had lost," he went on. "Look here!" Garwood was reading, as he walked, the paper he had opened wide. "Logan County gives me a majority of eighteen hundred; what do you think of that?"

They were at the bar by this time.

"What will it be?" said Garwood, still devouring his papers.

"Oh, a little bourbon," said Warfield.

"Nonsense!" said Garwood, crumpling the papers under his arm. "I want to drink Jim Rankin's health, bless his old heart! He gets the post-office, he does! Give us a bottle of champagne!"

"You haven't had your dinner yet, have you?" Warfield asked.

"No, nor my breakfast, either," laughed Garwood. But then Garwood was not as well informed as Warfield as to the relation in time of liquors to dinner. Warfield had been longer in politics.

XXI

Three weeks after election there fell a night when carriage lamps twinkled among the black tree-trunks in the yard of the Harkness home. The drivers of these vehicles in liveried coats of varied shades that had faded through all the tones of green and blue and brown and violet, with top hats that marked every style for two decades, lounged on their high seats flinging each other coarse jokes, and cracking their whips softly at the few brown leaves that clung so tenaciously to the oaken boughs above them.

Within the house, there was the white desolation of canvas-covered carpets, and the furniture had been pushed back against the wall in anticipation of a later crush of people whose bodies would supply a heat now sadly lacking in the rooms. Ethan Harkness sat in his library, uncomfortable in his evening clothes, eying dubiously and with occasional dark uprisings of rebellion, the white gloves his daughter had decreed that he should wear. The caterer, from Chicago, had driven him to bay, and now chased his shining black men through the old man's apartments as though he owned them. In the dining-room and hall, little tables were being laid, and little camp-chairs unfolded, for the destructive supper of salads and ices, which, having displaced the more substantial evening meal of the establishment, would not now be served until a late hour, when its inadequacy would be more noticeable. In the front hall, an orchestra had assembled. Now and then the strings of the instruments would twang in tuning. On all the chill atmosphere hung the funereal odor of cut flowers.

Upstairs, in her own room, Emily stood before a long pier glass arrayed finally in the white bridal gown on which the feminine interest of that house and town had centered for many days. Before her a dressmaker, enacting for this evening the rôle of maid, squatted on her heels, her mouth full of pins; behind her, another dressmaker enacting a similar rôle was carefully, almost reverently, unfolding the long tulle veil; about her were clustered the bridesmaids, all robed in their new gowns. They had been chattering and laughing, but now, in the supreme moment, a silence had fallen--they stood with clasped hands and held their breath. In the center of the room, Dade Emerson stood in her superior office of maid of honor, her head sidewise inclined, her eyes half closed that through the haze of their long black lashes she might estimate with more artistic vision the whole bridal effect. Presently she nodded to the dressmaker, and the patient woman, her own pinched bosom under its black alpaca bodice thrilling strangely with the emotions of a moment that had been denied her, lifted the veil on her extended fingers, and proceeded to the coronation. She piled the white cloud upon the brown coils of Emily's hair; she deftly coaxed it into a shimmering cataract down the silken train of the gown, and then took a step backward, while all the women there raised their clasped hands to their chins in an ecstatic, unisonant sigh.

Emily turned her eyes, brilliant with the excitement of this night, toward Dade, who still stood with her head critically poised. Dade nodded.

"_C'est bien_," she said.

The spell was broken, the chattering began again, and the girls swarmed about for gloves and bouquets, at last seating themselves impatiently to let the maids fasten their furred opera boots.

Emily still stood before the long pier glass, looking at her bridal reflection.

"Are you all fixed?" said Dade, "with

"'Something old and something new, Something borrowed and something blue?'"

The bridesmaids looked up with lips apart, awaiting the answer to this all-important question.

"My handkerchief is old," said Emily, holding in her fingers a bit of point lace that had been her mother's, "and--let's see--well, I'm pretty much all new to-night." She glanced down at her gown. "Something borrowed--I have nothing borrowed." She looked up soberly, her eyes wide.

"Something blue?" one of the girls asked, though the first question had not been disposed of.

"Yes, if you'd bean me, running all that blue baby-ribbon in her chemise, you'd think so," said Dade.

The bride blushed.

"But something borrowed," one of the others insisted.

"Yes, something borrowed," assented Emily. "What can I borrow, I wonder?" She looked about helplessly.

"Oh say, girls!" one of the bridesmaids exclaimed, "she must have a coin in her slipper!" And the whole bevy chorused its happy acquiescence. Emily, with the sudden air of a queen, unaccustomed to waiting on herself, commanded Dade:

"Look in that box on my dressing-table."

Dade picked her way through the disorder of the room to the little dressing-table, with its candles lighted, adding their heat to the room. She looked, and found nothing. Then she flew from the room, crossed the hall, and returning, gave Emily a silver dime.

"I'll lend it to you," she said, "it'll be something borrowed, too."

It was all arranged. The bride glanced again in her mirror, turned about, inspected her train, preened herself like some white bird, ready for final flight. The old maid scanned the bride's face critically. It was radiant, but--

"I'm red as a beet!" Emily pouted.

"It's hot as pepper in here anyway," one of the bridesmaids panted.

The old maid took a powder puff and touched the bride's face, touched the cheeks, and at last the forehead, where tiny drops of perspiration sparkled.

"There now," she said, with her last dab.

Emily turned to her with a final glance of questioning. The old dressmaker's eye lighted at the sight of the young girl in her bridal dress. She took a step toward her, her thin, withered lips trembling. "May I--kiss you?" she asked, timidly.

And then, carefully, reverently, as she had crowned her with the veil, she approached, and kissed her. The eyes of the bridesmaids, in the emotion that weddings excite in girls, became moist with tears.

There were, of course, further feminine delays, but at last, gathering their rustling skirts about their ankles, the bride and her retinue made a dazzling white procession down the staircase.

Her father awaited her. The caterer and his black men, the cook and old Jasper, the men of the orchestra, all had gathered in the parlor to see her. Emily paused at the foot of the stairs, blocking the procession that was but half descended. She looked at her father with smiling eyes. The old man glanced at her a moment, and then solemnly drew near. When he had taken her fresh and radiant face between the hands that were still ungloved, he kissed her, and then turned suddenly and went back to his library scrubbing his face with his handkerchief. So the sadness that weddings inspire, possibly because the estate of matrimony is entered into by all lightly and with merry confidence in a future that shall be miraculously exempt from the griefs and woes of life, fell upon the little company.

Meanwhile all the closed carriages the livery-stables of Grand Prairie could muster were rolling along Sangamon Avenue, stretching frostily white under a November moon. Their rendezvous was St. James Church, over the stony tower of which some native ivy had kindly grown to give the English effect so much desired. An awning was stretched from the curb to the Gothic doorway, and about it were already gathered ragged children and truant servant girls, willing to shiver in the night air for a mere glimpse of the bride, and perhaps of the groom, who, so short a time before acclaimed as the popular champion of equal rights, was now to be identified with that fashionable exclusiveness which is separated by satin ribbons and striped awnings from the mass of mankind. Inside, the church lights were blazing; at the door, two policemen, in new white cotton gloves, stood guard.

Garwood, dressed for the first time in his life in evening clothes, was restlessly pacing the musty sacristy of the church. With him were Dr. Abercrombie, the rector of the parish, in his white surplice and stole, and Colonel Warfield, his best man. Garwood had found difficulty in selecting a man for this affair. When, in discussing the plans for the wedding, he had learned from Emily that it devolved upon him to choose not only a best man but groomsmen and ushers, he had found, in casting over his acquaintances, that he had none who were intimate enough and at the same time fashionable enough to fill these social offices.

But he had thought of Colonel Warfield, and as he considered how peculiarly fitting it was that a man of Colonel Warfield's social and political position in the state should attend him at a wedding which would attract the attention his was sure to attract, he assumed an intimacy that did not exist, and boldly invited the colonel to serve him in this delicate capacity. He could not, for public reasons, have made a better selection. The old bachelor, with as many social as political campaigns to his credit, was too polite to decline, and so came down to Grand Prairie, giving, by his position, a new importance to Garwood in the eyes of the politicians of Illinois, and by his white hair and military bearing, a distinction to the wedding that made it complete.

As they paced the floor of the sacristy on this evening, awaiting the signal of the bridal party's coming, the colonel chatted at his ease with the rector, while Garwood paused now and then to look through the peep hole that long ago had been whittled in the panel of the door that opened into the church. He could see, as in a haze, the flowers and faces and fluttering fans of society. He could detect, here and there, one of the numerous politicians he had invited in order to make his list of guests equal to the one Emily had written out. Far down at the front he could see Jim Rankin, scorning evening dress, with his little wife beside him in a hat she had retrimmed that very evening, and finally, within the space marked by the bows of white ribbon for the family, he saw his mother, in the new black silk gown he had bought for her when he found his credit immeasurably strengthened by his success in politics and love. She was fanning herself complacently, yet through big spectacles that fortunately lent benignity to an otherwise disapproving gaze, looking with an eye he knew was hostile at the trappings of this high church. And yet her face was not without its trace of pride that she was the mother of a son who could lead out of this stronghold of fashion and exclusiveness one of its reigning peeresses.

The organist had been improvising, while the people gathered. Now that they were all there and a hush disturbed only by the rustle of fans had fallen upon the sanctuary, his improvisations were subjected to a keener criticism, and his inspiration failed him, so that his work lagged and degenerated into minor chords. The hour for the wedding had passed, and those who had been reviving the gossip that Emily had made Garwood's election a condition precedent to her marrying him, began to discuss with keen excitement the possibility of his or her failing at the last minute.

The gossip had entered grooves that led to certain passages in Garwood's early life, when some electrical contrivance buzzed. The music ceased, a hush fell within the church. The priest and Colonel Warfield straightened up and took their places as if for a procession. Garwood saw the ushers, chosen by Emily from the number of young men who once had so ineffectually called upon her, pace slowly down the aisles, unrolling white satin ribbons along the backs of the pews. Then the rector entered the church, and Garwood found himself with Colonel Warfield by his side, standing before that flowered and fanning multitude.

The organ had begun the strains of the bridal chorus from Lohengrin, women were twisting their heads, and far down the aisle he saw Dade with her huge bouquet of chrysanthemums moving with stately, measured tread toward the altar. And behind her, he saw Mr. Harkness, looking older than he had ever known him, and on his arm, her eyes downcast behind her veil, was Emily, kicking her silken white bridal gown with her little satin-slippered toes. When she saw him a light that made his heart leap came into her eyes, and he became suddenly, dramatically bold, so that he left the colonel and strode forward to meet her. He led her to the altar, and the priest began his solemn words. Garwood stood there, conscious of the beautiful woman beside him, her hand in his, conscious of Warfield picking the ring with experienced fingers from the palm of his gloved hand, conscious of Dade near by holding Emily's bouquet, conscious of the priest's flowing surplice before him, of the flowers and palms around him, of the crowd behind fanning the perfume of toilets into the heated air.

Then he was kneeling stiffly upon a satin pillow, the soles of his new shoes showing to the congregation, the organ was softly playing, giving a theatrical effect to the impressively modulated words of the clergyman, and then they were on their feet again; Dade had parted Emily's veil, and he saw her looking up at him, her pale face aglow, in her deep eyes a light that showed the influence of sacerdotal rite. Then as it was borne upon his soul that she was his, wholly his at last, with the male's joy of absolute possession, he set his lips upon hers and kissed her before them all.

The organ swelled into the wedding march that has become a tradition, and he was striding down the aisle with Emily on his arm. He saw his mother's tears, he saw Rankin, the big fellow furtively knuckling his eyes, and then winking drolly at him, he saw Mr. Harkness, who, he suddenly remembered, was now his father-in-law, pale and stern. And so they left the church and passed out under the canopy to the waiting carriage.

Garwood, like a king come from his crowning, felt a kindness for all the world, even for the poor folk gathered on the sidewalk striving for a glimpse of the bride's gown. He felt his heart leap toward them, so that like a king, he longed to fling a golden largess to them.

The carriage door slammed. Josh Bowers, from the livery-stable that had provided the carriages, shouted some big order to the driver, and they whirled away. Once more he saw the gleam in Emily's eyes, liquid in the cold light that found its way from the moonlit night into the carriage, and, regardless of her dress, though he thought of it, he crushed her in his arms, and said:

"At last--my wife!"