BOOK II

BY THE PEOPLE

I

The old court house in Grand Prairie, its mighty blocks of sandstone evenly browned by the justice and equity of the rain and wind, lifted its Doric columns in the sunshine of a June morning. Under the cornice of its pediment the sparrows were scuffling, and in the elms that grew about, clipping their boughs in a stately way to the breeze, blue jays were chattering, while the tame squirrels, the legal pets of the county supervisors, gamboled impudently on the grass and on the graveled walks. Around the four sides of the square the raw brick buildings stood baking in the sun, and at the long hitching racks, gnawed during years of cribbing, horses were stamping and switching at the flies. On any other Monday morning the racks would have been empty, but this day the court house's weather-beaten floors, fluttering with old notices of sheriff's sales, were swung wide, and through them sauntered lawyers and jurymen and those who could quit the pleasant benches in the yard outside for the mild excitement of the June term of the Circuit Court that day to be begun and holden.

As Jerome B. Garwood, walking with the easy and dignified tread that befits a congressman, came down Sangamon Avenue and saw once more the familiar square, he experienced a revulsion of sentiment, a sense almost of despair, to think that he was back again in the sleepy little prairie town. All the way from Washington he had looked forward to being at home again. He had thought how good it would be to see Emily once more, and the little six months old baby whose inspired messages of love had filled all her letters to him; he had thought he would enjoy the quiet of his old law office, and the shade and repose of the town, which, as visitors in Grand Prairie were told when they happened down in the winter or spring or fall or late summer, was always at its best in June. Something of this anticipation had been realized Saturday night when he had reached home and hugged the boy in his arms again, but the quiet of one Sunday, and, more especially, the dolor of one old-fashioned Sunday evening had dispelled all his pleasure, and this morning, when he turned into the ugly square, the whole of what life in Grand Prairie really was, seemed to rise before him and roll over him in a great wave of discontent.

He thought of the long, wide sweep of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the mighty dome of the Capitol at the end, he recalled the excitement and distinction of a morning session of the House when the members were all coming in, he could still feel in his ears the roar and tumult of the closing scenes of the long session, and he gave way to that childish method of self-torture in which he would continually remind himself of what he had been doing two weeks ago that day, or a week ago that day, or even at that hour four days ago. Before he could return to that life, a long hot summer in Grand Prairie was to be endured, but more than that, the agony of a campaign in the fall. The fear and apprehension this caused him, were heightened by the state of affairs in the district; for the first thing he had learned on reaching home was that his fences were in bad shape, and Jim Rankin, when Garwood had escaped the baby's fretful cries and gone forth to find his old manager, had confirmed the sad news. And as if this were not enough in itself, Rankin had allowed himself to be beaten for chairman of the county committee, and had lost control of the local organization! The county convention had been held, and a delegation to the congressional convention selected which not only was not instructed for him, but was probably hostile. He cursed Rankin for that. The thought of defeat was insupportable to him--to leave Washington now and come back to Grand Prairie to stay! The idea revolted him. He found some comfort in remembering that he still had the short session before him, though that would not begin until December, six months off. If worst came to worst, he might induce the president to take care of him in some appointive office. And then he laughed at himself and took a long, deep breath of the pure ozone from his native prairies, contaminated somewhat to be sure in passing over the dirty square, but still active enough to fill him with determination to win in the coming convention, and to be reëlected. He allowed himself one more sigh in thinking how pleasant to be a congressman if it were not for the agony of the swiftly recurring biennial election, and then straightened up, strode across the square, and took the old familiar walk to the court house door.

He was really a fine looking man, was Garwood, as he threw his shoulders back, and gave his head that old determined toss, finer looking then as a congressman than he had been as a mere candidate for Congress a year and a half before. Perhaps it was because he had grown stouter, perhaps it was the finer manner of a man of the world he had learned in Washington, perhaps it was his well-groomed appearance, for his long black coat had a gloss of richness rather than the shine of poverty, his trousers were creased and fitted neatly over his low shoes, his white waistcoat curved gracefully over the paunch of prosperousness, his shirt, as a student of clothes might have noticed, was made with the collar and cuffs attached--the easy way to be marked for a gentleman--while the wide Panama hat he wore had the distinguishing effect of having been bought somewhere else. But more than all, it was the atmosphere of official position which enveloped him--and of which he was thoroughly conscious--that spread a spell over the observer. No one would ever call him Jerry now, or ever again, unless, perhaps, in the heat of his campaign for reëlection. Of his face, it may be said that it was fuller and redder; the mouth, clean shaven, had taken on new lines, but they were hardly as pleasing as the old ones had been in the days before.

And so he made his dignified progress up to the court house. He had intended, on coming down, to go to his office where young Enright, lately admitted, was holding forth with a bright new sign under Garwood's old one, but it occurred to him that it would benefit him to reassert his relation to the bar of Polk County by appearing in court on term day, and sitting or standing about. Perhaps Judge Bickerstaff would invite him to sit beside him on the bench. He remembered that that was what the judge used to do whenever General Bancroft came home from Washington.

He had been bowing to acquaintances all the way down town with his old amiable smile, seeking to disarm it of a new quality of reservation that had lately entered into it, but now, in the cool dark tunnels they called corridors, he met men face to face, and all the way along, and even up the steep and winding stairs that curved after a colonial pattern to the upper story, he must pause to take their hands, and carefully, and distinctly, according to the training he had given his memory in this respect, call them by name; more often than not by their given names. When he left them, they felt a glow of pleasure, though they were all the while conscious that something was lacking in this apparent heartiness.

The court room itself was full. In the benches outside the bar sat the jurymen and the loafers who hoped to be jurymen, or, at least, talesmen. Within the bar, the lawyers were tilting back their chairs, chewing their cigars, keeping near the huge brown spittoons. On the bench, the judge, his spectacles on, sat with the docket open before him. The bailiff, whom Garwood in imitation of the courtly way old General Bancroft had brought with him from Virginia, by way of Shawneetown, always longed to address as "Mr. Tipstaff," but never dared do so, was just finishing crying his third "Oh, yes!" as he pronounced the proclamatory "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!" The lawyers noticed Garwood, and as the calling of the docket proceeded, got up to shake his hand, and to ask him about Washington and the great affairs of state, all of them displaying that professional relation to politics which lawyers cultivate and affect. Though most of them, be it said, seemed to confuse the good of their party with the good of the country. Those who belonged to the party then out of power, were treated as if they were aliens, with no possible right to an interest in what the people's servants were then doing at the nation's capital.

Garwood was surprised, but vastly pleased, when the judge called the title of a cause which in Garwood's ears had a familiar sound. And as he was adjusting this haunting recollection, the judge, looking over his glasses and keeping a forefinger on the docket, said:

"I believe you represent the plaintiff in that case, Mr. Garwood?"

Garwood arose, smiling.

"I was about to ask your Honor to pass that case temporarily, if the Court please."

"It will go to the heel of the docket then," said the court.

After that Garwood went up to the bench, and, stooping respectfully as he passed between it and the lawyers in front of it, he went around and shook the judge's hand. And then after they had whispered about each other's health a moment, the judge invited Garwood to sit beside him, which he did. He sat there while the docket was called, imagining how it would feel to be a judge, in order to compare the feeling with the feeling one has as a congressman. He half wished he were a judge instead of a congressman. He was certain he would rather be a federal judge than a congressman--that place was for life, with no elections to harass the incumbent. He began to speculate on the length of time the district judge for the Southern District of Illinois would probably live. He might get that place if he were reëlected and the judge should die.

"How is Judge Pickney's health now?" he asked of Judge Bickerstaff.

"Not well, I hear," whispered the court, "he's going away for the summer."

Only successful men could get that place--he must by all means be reëlected. As he sat there, idly speculating, all the happiness he had hoped to find as congressman clouded by the constant dread of defeat, he suddenly saw, at the rear of the court room, the red face of Jim Rankin. When Rankin caught the congressman's eye, he motioned with his curly head. Garwood thanked the judge, excused himself, came down from the bench, carefully bowed to those members of the bar he could catch in the sweep of his eye, and went out to join Rankin.

II

Rankin was plainly glad to see Garwood, and as they walked along looked at him with a sidelong glance of pride, as with some artistic sense of pleasure in his handiwork.

"It's good to have you back again," said the big Rankin, "let's go into Chris's an' have a little drink just for the sake of the good old times."

Garwood, who found the new times so much better than the old times, had not yielded much to the warmth of Rankin's good humor. He was displeased and sore. Rankin felt this, but he had been used to his moods of old, and he loved Garwood with such a frank, lasting affection, and his own heart was so whole, that he refused to think it anything but a mood that would pass. Garwood, though, consented to drink readily enough. Indeed he had been feeling ever since he came down that a drink would put him in better sorts. They went into Chris's place, and found it cool and pleasant after the hot sidewalk outside, though Garwood, mentally comparing it with Chamberlain's, felt again his twinge of homesickness for Washington. The bar at Chamberlain's, he remembered, did not smell of stale beer as this one did. Steisfloss himself was behind the long counter, and wiped his hands on his white apron before extending one of them to Garwood in welcome home.

"What's it going to be, gentleman?" he asked.

"I'll have a beer," said Rankin readily, mopping his hot brow with his big palm.

Garwood hesitated, as though to give the question some thought. Steisfloss and Rankin both looked at him while he was reaching his decision. At last he said, as thought he were conferring a favor:

"I believe you may make me a manhattan cocktail, Chris."

Steisfloss paused, but only for an instant, and then he said promptly:

"I'm sorry, Mr. Garwood, but I'm out o' manhattan."

Garwood glanced at him and smiled faintly. Steisfloss detected the smile, and Garwood instantly feared he had lost, not only a vote, but the influence of a saloon. Rankin sprang to the rescue of both.

"Aw, take a beer," he said.

"No," said Garwood. "I haven't been very well lately--I reckon you can give me some bourbon."

"That Washington living's too high fer you, eh?" said Rankin genially. But he saw that Garwood again was displeased and so hastened to mollify him, by adding:

"Oh well, you'll be all right. It's this hot weather. You'll be all right when you're rested out. You ought to go away somewhere and take a vacation."

"Yes," said Garwood, quickly assenting to the proposition, "Senator Ames wanted me to go with him to Rye Beach later on--reckon I'll have to."

They drank and left. They found Garwood's old offices deserted, for Enright had dutifully gone over to the court house in order to be seen among the other lawyers who really had business there, little enough though it was. And when they had tossed up the windows to let some air into the musty rooms, and Rankin had leaned dangerously out on the dusty window-ledge to lower the ragged awnings, they seated themselves as of old, in the worn chairs.

"Well now," Garwood said, in tones that were almost a command, "tell me about it. How in hell did it ever happen?"

Rankin shifted uneasily. He grew a shade redder.

"Well, to tell you the truth, Jer--" he was about to say "Jerry," but he found it hard now to call his congressman "Jerry," so he avoided names; "to tell you the truth," he repeated, "I never dreamed it of 'em. I never dreamed 'at there was an'thin' in the talk ag'inst you. I couldn't believe 'at any one could have it in fer you!" He looked up at Garwood with a trust and affection that were moving, though they did not move Garwood, who sat with his face averted, looking out of the window.

"But, you see," Rankin went on, "there was that row out at Ball's Corners, ol' man Barker was sore 'bout the post-office--"

"I never promised it to him!" Garwood interrupted.

"Well, he thought you did, leastways he said you did; an' then there was some farmers out in Briggs to'nship who claimed the seed you sent 'em wouldn't grow--"

Garwood looked at Rankin in stupefaction.

"An' then," Rankin went on, "they said you didn't answer the'r letters 'bout it when they wrote an' told you."

"Well, Crawford did, didn't he?" Garwood said. Crawford was his private secretary.

"Yes," answered Rankin, "but they said you didn't answer the'r letters personally. Does Crawford sign your name, or stamp it onto the letters?"

"The damn fools!" Garwood could only exclaim, helplessly.

"Well, you know ol' General Bancroft's strong holt al'ays was 'at he answered his constits' letters right away, an' in his own hand write. An'--oh, ther' 'as a lot o' little things like that."

"Was there any feeling over my vote on the armor-plate bill?" asked the congressman.

"Oh, some, that is, some talk about your sidin' in 'ith the corporations, but not a great deal, mostly just such little feelin's as a man al'ays encounters after he's been in office a little while. I didn't think it 'uld amount to much, but--"

"But it did," said Garwood, setting his lips.

"Yes, it did," acquiesced Rankin. "But Pusey was at the bottom of it all."

"Pusey?"

"Yes, Pusey. The truth is I underrated Pusey's stren'th--that's the whole of it."

They were silent a minute, and then Garwood said:

"Well?"

"Well," Rankin went on, "you see Pusey's been comin' up in the world this last year. After he got holt o' the _Citizen_, which no one thought he ever could do, he braced up consider'ble an' started in fer to edit a clean sheet--a reg'lar home an' fireside companion. You wouldn't know 'im now--new clothes, plug hat Sundays, an' he gets shaved."

"Shaved?"

"Yep, has a cup at the barber's with a quill pen painted onto it."

They marveled sufficiently, and Rankin resumed:

"He's al'ays had it in fer me you know, an' he's a pretty slick one, he is, if I must say so. He went to work quiet like, to beat me out--"

"And he did it!"

"Yes, sir, he done it."

Rankin sunk his hands in his trousers' pockets and slid his heels across the floor until his legs were stretched out before him. Then he stared abstractedly, thinking of his defeat.

"Well--I'll get through with it. I read in the papers 'at Congress 'uld adjourn the last o' May. I thought we'd ought to have an early convention. I wanted to fix it all up and have an instructed delegation waitin' fer you on your return, so I calls a meetin' o' the county committee, settin' it on Saturday the twenty-seventh. I felt pretty good over it, too, for I thought I'd took Pusey by surprise. He didn't say nothin' in the paper, but he ain't the feller to be caught nappin'--no sir, he ain't. I didn't give him credit fer it."

"Well, what did he do?"

"Do? Why, he didn't do a thing but--well, I'll tell it to you in its order. Everything seemed all right. We met at the Cassell House. There wasn't many there at first, not enough to make a quorum. Then in walks old Sol Badger, an' with him Lige Coons from Ball to'nship, an' then who should follow but Pusey himself! Well, I didn't think nothin' of it then, fer I s'posed Pusey had come in as a representative of the press, you know, and o' course, I didn't feel like sayin' an'thin'. Some o' our fellers hadn't got in yit, but when Es Miller arrived, up jumps Pusey an' he says, 'Well, we've got a quorum now, let's get down to business.' I looks at him a minute inquirin' like, an' he smiles back at me with that sof' grin o' his, like a cat, an' he says, 'I hold Mr. Golden's proxy.'"

"Proxies!" exclaimed Garwood, "so that was it!"

"Yes sir, ev'ry one o' them fellers had proxies, an'--well, you can easy see how it come out. When I see how it had been fixed, I changed my plans in a minute, an' wanted a late date fer the convention, but they proposed an early one, fer the thirtieth. An' on the test vote they beat us by just one. Well, Pusey had fixed it all up on the quiet. They sprung their early convention, an', though they hadn't any candidate, they beat the resolutions to instruct fer you, an' the delegation goes to the convention fer to support who it wants to."

"Whom will it support?"

"Well, Sprague, I reckon."

"I thought it looked like one of his tricks. Has Moultrie held her convention?"

"No, they hold it next Saturday."

Garwood was silent for a long time. He drew a large cigar from his pocket and lighted it, rolling out its thick, rich Havana smoke until it was half consumed before he spoke again:

"Well, you've played hell, haven't you, Jim?"

Rankin hung his head.

"I'm awful sorry. I haven't slep' a night thinkin' of it, but--I couldn't help it, Pusey done it, that's all."

"Pusey!" sneered Garwood, putting all his contempt for the man into his tone as he sniffed out his name. "Pusey! To think of Jim Rankin's letting Free Pusey lick him that easy!"

"Well, we've al'ays underrated Pusey, I've found that out."

"Yes, you've found it out--too late."

"Maybe. But he's slicker 'n I give him credit fer bein' an' I take off my hat to him, damn his dirty, lousy little soul!"

The two men sat after that, staring out the window, watching the lawyers coming out of the court house across the wide street, Garwood deep in gloom, wondering if he would have to resume that life with the rest of them. They looked so poor, their work so little and contemptible after all he had grown accustomed to in Washington. Rankin, however, could not long endure such a melancholy attitude and he roused his big body presently and said:

"But there's no use to get down in the mouth. I've won worse battles 'an this, an' so've you. An' we can win this. The delegation's uninstructed, an' I forced 'em to put some of our fellers on. It was the hottest convention I ever see. Wisht you'd been here."

"So do I," said Garwood bitterly, "so do I--instead I was staying on down in Washington looking after their interests while the dear people here at home were sharpening knives for me. How did you get any of my fellows on the delegation?" he suddenly broke off to demand.

"Well, I'll tell you. You see, I might 'ave had the nomination fer county treas'rer; they wanted me to take it, fer they feared to make too big a break in the party, but I made 'em let me name half o' the delegation instead."

"Half?"

"Yes, half--we split it up, though they got the odd man."

"You on?"

"Me? You bet I'm on, an' I'll be there, don't you forget that."

"You didn't want the treasurership?"

"Well, yes, I might 'ave wanted it, some--it 'uld be a good thing; come in mighty handy just now." And Rankin expressively rattled the keys in his empty pocket. "But I thought it 'uld look like treason to you, an' it would; though it wasn't no sacrifice, you havin' promised me the post-office. I knew I 'as sure o' that. When does Bartlett's term end?"

"In December," Garwood replied.

"Well, I can hold out till then, if the neighbors keeps on bringin' things in. You couldn't hurry it up, could you?"

"No, hardly," said Garwood. "But, tell me, what does Pusey expect to get out of this?"

"What does Pusey expect to get out of this? Why, not a thing--but the post-office, himself."

"Has Sprague promised it to him?"

"Yes, fer enough votes from Polk to nominate him."

"Umph humph," said Garwood, slowly, through his nose. "Umph humph."

"But if it's December the appointment's made, we can fool him there, we can fool him there," said Rankin, gleefully.

"Yes," said Garwood, though not heartily.

And then Rankin leaned over and laid a hand on Garwood's knee.

"But don't give up yet, old man," he said. "We can pull this game out o' the fire; you can get that nomination."

Garwood turned on him angrily.

"Yes, oh yes!" he sneered. "Pretty figure I'll cut going to a convention for renomination without my own county behind me!"

"Well, we can fix that."

"How? I'd like to know; how?"

"Why, Pusey's fellers is easy--you can get enough o' them."

"How?" Garwood spoke in the hollow sternness of despair.

"Buy 'em."

And then the congressman threw back his head and laughed.

"Buy 'em, indeed!" he laughed bitterly. "Buy 'em, indeed! Why, man, I haven't got through paying my debts from the last campaign!"

"Why, you get a sal'ry."

"Yes, but it costs to live in Washington--God, how it costs! And with a family here at home in the bargain!"

"Well--there's the old man."

"Oh, hell!" said Garwood, rising in total loss of patience, "I'm tired of hearing this everlasting twaddle about the old man! He's not rich, in the first place, and now that he's out of the bank he's poorer than ever. You people out here in the wilderness think because a man was once president of a little country bank, he's a millionaire. He hasn't anything any more."

"Tell me, how'd he come to be beat fer pres'dent o' the bank?" said Rankin, ignoring Garwood's ill humor in his zest to learn at last the inwardness of a story about which Grand Prairie had been speculating for six months.

"Oh, I'll tell you some other time, Jim," he answered. "I've got to go now."

He looked at his watch.

III

The year and a half that had gone since their brilliant wedding had passed more slowly for Emily than for Garwood. They had gone East on a wedding journey, for Jerome had been able, as the first perquisites of his new position, to get passes, a trick he had already learned in the Legislature, though there his "transportation" had been confined to the limits of Illinois. They had gone to New York and of course to Washington, where their interests now centered. There they made the conventional rounds, visiting the Capitol and the White House, the Treasury and the Patent Office, ascending the Washington Monument, going over to Arlington and down to Mt. Vernon, seeing all the sights. Emily thus gained a store of memories that served her well in the months that came after. She said she could the better imagine Jerome going the daily rounds of his important duties for having seen the places in which he would be, and Garwood himself found that it was well to have visited on his wedding trip all the points of interest about the city, else he never would have visited them at all. It mattered not, perhaps, that Emily's imaginings of her husband's goings and comings in Washington were far from the reality--they served her as well as any.

She had planned during the long year in which Garwood waited so impatiently for the sitting of Congress to go to Washington with him. They had talked of it all the winter and during the spring. When March came and with its fourth day brought the sense that he was now in reality a congressman, Garwood had felt an increase of importance with an increase of impatience. The coming of his first voucher soon after was a joy to them both, and the four hundred and sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents it called for seemed to link them more firmly to officialdom. But Garwood longed to be sitting in his seat in the House of Representatives; to hear his name in the roll-call; he felt that he would not realize it all until he had been there long enough to have grown familiar, and yet not so long as to begin to dread the end. And Emily felt that her joy would not be full until she had seen him there.

The whole time for her had held other duties, duties of a sacred preparation, when she sat long days in the sunlight, with her eyelids drooped over white garments in her lap. Garwood had never been so tender of her before, and he hung about in a solicitude that betrayed a man's love and a boy's awkwardness. With a woman's superior intuition she was the dominant one in those days, though the coming of the baby late in the fall left her helpless, and restored him suddenly to self-confidence. So, after all, when December came, with its long anticipated first Monday, Emily could not go to Washington with her husband and, bruised by the wrench of their first parting, she was left in the house with her father and her boy to face a long winter alone. All that winter she carefully read the accounts in the newspapers of the proceedings of Congress, and cast her eye each morning down the wide columns of the _Congressional Record_ seeking the magic name "Mr. Garwood."

It was only once or twice that she had the joy of finding Jerome's name, and then what he said seemed formal and distant, and did not have a personal appeal to her. For instance, late in the session, she read:

"Mr. Garwood addressed the Committee of the Whole."

And then in maddening parenthesis:

"(His remarks will appear later.)"

But when they did appear later, weeks later, on the very first page of the _Record_, with the words, "Speech of the Honorable Jerome B. Garwood," in black types at the head, they were long and full of statistics, not at all like the fiery speech he had made that last night of the campaign. She could find no mention of the speech in the daily newspapers, and she had her fears that Jerome was not being appreciated. He had made an effort at first to write to her daily, but soon there were lengthy intervals between the letters, and the letters themselves grew shorter, seeming to have been written late at night, when he was tired and sleepy. But they were always filled with admonitions for the boy, and Emily found joy in translating them into the baby tongue the child understood so well, as she could tell by the big blue eyes and the cooings of his drooling little lips.

In January, just as she was beginning to recover her strength, a new trial came upon her, the last she had ever anticipated. The directors of the bank held their annual meeting, and to the surprise of all Grand Prairie, her father was not reëlected president. It was a blow to him, though he was too proud to show it. Yet Emily could see the change it wrought in him. He seemed to age suddenly, and shrank from going out, spending most of his time in his library, where he pretended to be reading his books, though she often surprised him with his glasses between the leaves in the old familiar way, gazing out at nothing. He had made the fatal discovery that old age was upon him at last.

Dade had gone away with her mother in search of health at some new springs in Maine. After trying their waters for a while they suddenly departed for Europe, as Dade announced in an ecstatic letter. Now they were in Holland, and Dade wrote from Amsterdam of the quaintness of the place and of the picturesque sails of the boats on the little Amstel, comparing them for color to those one sees, or imagines, on the Adriatic.

And so Emily was left alone with her old father and infant child. She had looked forward ardently to the adjournment of Congress and Jerome's return. Now that he was come, she found that she was to see little of him. He must plunge into the campaign, he said.

On this Monday morning, he came in late for dinner, clapped his hands two or three times in the baby's face, laughed at the winking of the blue eyes, ate his dinner alone at a corner of the dining table, smoked a cigar, read the Chicago papers, threw them in a heap on the floor, and then stretched himself on the divan in a dark corner of the parlor and went to sleep.

IV

Emily put the child to bed and then went down into the library to join her father, who sat with his book in the mellow circle of the reading lamp. She entered the room softly from the habit that had grown upon her in the hours when the baby might be wakened, and she sank into a chair and folded her hands with a sigh. Her father slowly glanced at her tired, thin face, but did not move his head. He seemed to be reading on, but presently he said, still without moving:

"Tired?"

Emily lifted her head from the back of the chair on which she had been resting it, fastened a lock of her hair, smiled and said:

"Oh, no."

"You let that young John E., or whatever his name is, wear you out," her father insisted, taking his glasses from his nose and marking his place in his book after his old custom.

"Poor child!" the mother said. "He's not well. I dread the summer so."

"He seems fretful," said the father, with a shade of his original resentment lingering in his tone.

"Oh, it's not that, father," Emily replied. "He's so active and full of energy. Mother Garwood says Jerome was just so when he was a baby."

"Been over there?"

"Yes, I ran over to-day to ask her some things about baby. She knows all about them."

"Well, you ought to have a nurse," he said.

"We can't afford it," the mother replied.

"Can't afford it! He gets enough!"

"I know it, but it's so expensive living, as Jerome must, at a hotel in Washington. And he's in debt, with another campaign coming on. That'll cost, you know."

The old man raised himself in his chair.

"It seems to me," he said, "that with five thousand a year, he might--"

The daughter also raised herself in her chair and her dull eyes caught back some of their old brightness.

"You know, father, that Jerome does the best he can--"

She stopped; and so did he. They had sounded that note several times of late. The truth was, that the presence of Garwood in the house was already beginning to have its effect on his father-in-law. When Garwood was in Washington Harkness felt a pride in him, but after he had been at home for awhile, his various characteristics one after another got on the old man's nerves, until he could scarcely treat him civilly. He detested Garwood's lazy habits, his lying abed in the mornings, his afternoon naps, though Harkness took naps himself, and he distrusted his long absences at night. More than all he inwardly raged at Garwood's extravagance, though he dared not complain of it, for Emily had been firm in her insistence that they pay for their board, knowing, as she did, her father's punctiliousness in matters of money, a disposition likely to be cultivated by those who have money enough to gratify it. Harkness would doubtless have preferred that the Garwoods keep house, as Jerome was always threatening to do, but he could not bear the thought of the loneliness Emily's absence would add to his idleness. Restrained therefore from complaining of Garwood, his discontent expressed itself in complaints of himself, and he shuffled about the house with a martyr's patient suffering written in his face, lowering himself carefully into his chair whenever he sat down, with a prolonged, senile "Ah-h-h-h" that heralded, as he meant it to do, the encroachments of age.

And then the baby worried him. They had given the boy his name, Ethan, but they prefixed it with the other name of John, which had belonged to Garwood's father. Garwood had mildly protested against the name of Ethan because he didn't care for biblical names, though Emily had insisted that Ethan was not a biblical name. The argument had been settled, at least to Garwood's satisfaction, for he claimed to have found the name in the Old Testament, but with a firmness for which Emily said the name itself stood, she insisted that the mere mention of it in Holy Writ did not constitute it a biblical name. But though young John Ethan kept his grandfather's name he never found a way to his grandfather's graces, at least he had not done so yet, and this only added another complication to the many in which Emily found her life enmeshed.

And so this evening Harkness took refuge in his senility and his troubles.

"Well," he ventured with a sigh that he knew was pathetic, "if I could only afford it I'd take you and the boy away for the summer, but I'm poor now and old."

"I couldn't leave Jerome just now, father, but this talk about your being poor and old is absurd, absurd--and I want you to quit it. Why don't you go away this summer? Go back to New Hampshire for a rest. It would do you a world of good, and you've always said you were going as soon as you could get away from the bank."

She checked herself, perceiving that she had hit on an unfortunate subject, but her father replied with a return of his old dry humor:

"Yes, the bank was the principal obstacle, and that's been removed now."

He set his lips bitterly, and picked up his book again. There was silence in the library, and Emily rested. Now and then her father glanced at her, but she did not move. She lay back in her chair, relaxed in every fiber. He stood her inaction as long as any man could, and then demanded:

"Why don't you do something? Ain't you going to read?"

She did rouse herself, obedient to his whims, but she made an excuse:

"I must go up and see how the baby's getting along."

"Coming down again?"

"No; leave the door open for Jerome when you come up, will you?"

And then he was left to the expectant silence that oppresses a household when it awaits the coming of one of its members before it can settle down for the night. It was after midnight when Garwood came. He threw the reeking end of his cigar into the yard and toiled up the stairs breathing heavily.

"Where have you been?" Emily asked when he entered their rooms.

"Down town; where'd you suppose?" he answered.

"Is there any news?"

"News? What of?"

"Why, of politics."

"Well, I've got a fight on my hands, that's the news." He spoke as if she were responsible for the fact, and she felt it.

"You know how interested the baby and I are, Jerome. We've been waiting here to hear."

He softened at the mention of his child, and bent over his cradle.

"Don't waken him," the mother said, as he put forth his big hand. And then she resumed her questioning.

"Did you see Mr. Rankin?"

"Yes."

"Well," she said hopefully, with the faith they had always held in Rankin, "he can bring it around all right, can't he?"

"He!" said Garwood. "He's a back number!"

She drew the story out of him, and when she had done so, she said:

"Well, you don't forget, Jerome, that you once said to me that we must be good to Jim Rankin."

He made no reply for a long time, and she followed him with eyes that looked large in her thin face. After awhile, he paused in trying to unbutton his collar, and turned his head around, his chin thrust pointedly out over his hands.

"If I were out of debt," he said, "I'd quit the whole business and open a law office in Chicago, and let politics alone."

It was a common threat with him when he was discouraged. And she had long since learned that the threat to leave politics was common to all politicians, just as the threat to leave the sea is common to all sailors, or the threat to leave newspaper work to all newspaper men. She felt herself the fascination of the life, and so knew the insincerity of the threat.

"Oh, you always say that when you're blue. Don't worry any more to-night."

V

The Freeman H. Pusey of his second campaign was after all the same Freeman H. Pusey Garwood had known in his first campaign. When Garwood entered the editorial room of the _Citizen_ that afternoon he expected, as the result of Rankin's description, to see a regenerated Pusey, but he found instead the same old character. The little editor sat at a common kitchen table worn brown and smooth by time and elbows and piled with papers that showed deep deposits of dust in their folds and wrinkles.

Those at the bottom of the pile were darkened and seared by age, the strata of later eras were in varying tones of yellow, while those atop, the latest exchanges, were fresh and white, though they showed great gaps where they had been mangled by the long, shiny scissors that lay at the editor's elbow. The scissors were the only thing about the establishment that shone, unless it were the cockroaches, which ran over everything, and mounted the old paste pot, to scramble as nimbly as sailors up the unkempt brush which held a dirty handle aloft for instant use. The shining cockroaches swarmed so thickly about the brush, pausing now and then to wave their inquisitive antennae, that Pusey, before he could prepare an editorial, had to put them to rout, and he did this with his scissors, thrusting at the merry insects with the point of them from time to time in a way that had become habitual.

The desk had other articles of furniture, an old cigar box half-full of tobacco, with an old corn-cob pipe sticking in it--the only thing there that the cockroaches avoided--and a copy hook, on which Pusey had just hung the sheets of a leaded editorial, to be set up as time-copy. Before him lay a pile of copy paper, and with these implements Freeman H. Pusey molded public opinion in Polk County.

The room was dark, for the windows were thick with dirt. From the room beyond came the slow, measured clank and jar of the old bed-press, then running off the afternoon edition, shaking the building with each revolution of its cylinder. And over all hung the smell of printer's ink, with its eternal fascination for him who has ever breathed it long.

The clothes that Pusey wore may or may not have once been new. Garwood would have been willing, out of court, and perhaps in court, had he been retained on that side of the case, to identify them as the ones Pusey had worn when last he saw him. Just now, however, the coat was off and hanging on the back of the chair with the same casual impermanent effect that characterized the old straw hat that sat back on Pusey's head showing the scant hair that straggled over his dirty scalp. The editor was in his shirt sleeves, the frayed wrist-bands of which were edged with black, and his feet for ease were encased in old carpet slippers.

His face, and his mouth, with the small mustache dyed black in that strange vanity which did not extend to the rest of his person, still had its moist appearance of olden times, and he smoked his cigar, blowing the clouds of smoke all about him. Having turned out as much time-copy as the waning energies of his mind could produce on such a hot afternoon he was now clipping paragraphs out of the exchanges to add to those which would keep the printers in work for the remaining hours of the day their union had decreed. He did his work with the leisurely air that settles on editors in the first few minutes that ensue after the paper has gone to press, pausing now and then to stick at a cockroach with his scissors. As Garwood entered, Pusey lifted his eyebrows, and bending his gaze over the rims of his spectacles tried to identify his caller through the gloom of his sanctum. When he saw who it was, he merely said:

"Sit down," and plunged the point of his scissors into another exchange.

Garwood had been considering this visit for a number of days. The disappointment of arriving home to find that his county had failed to endorse him, had been sinking more and more sorely into his soul. It had seemed to him that a renomination by acclamation was his by rights. Many of his colleagues had already received such endorsements, or vindications as they mostly called them, before they left Washington, and Garwood had helped them to celebrate these triumphs in various bar-rooms.

He had been irritated by the fact that he could not now spend his summer as befitted a congressman, and obtain the rest a congressman certainly requires after his onerous duties at Washington; that is, by taking a dignified walk down town in the morning, and a dignified nap in the afternoon. In the evenings he had pictured himself sitting on the veranda at home, as he now considered the Harkness residence, with his legs crossed and a cane between them, smoking a cigar, and enlightening his wife and father-in-law, while Grand Prairie rode by and said: "There's our congressman, he's home for the summer." But instead he had come home to find his own bailiwick invaded, his old friend Rankin defeated, and his old enemy, Pusey, prospering beyond all expectation, with a respectable newspaper in which he printed articles slyly reflecting upon Garwood, calling attention to the need of a new post-office in Grand Prairie; to the beauties of uninstructed delegations, whereby the people, for whom, in his renaissance, Pusey was more than ever solicitous, could at last achieve their rights; to the fate that pursued arrogant bosses like Jim Rankin, and so on.

But some of his old resolution had come back to Garwood even in his enervation. He determined to submit to defeat, if at all, only after a battle. He was sorry he had scolded Jim Rankin so. After all, though he was no longer chairman of the county committee and had been beaten in the county convention, Rankin was still chairman of the congressional committee, and still his friend. Rankin had only laughed at his reproaches, good natured as ever. It would not do to break with Rankin. And so, he had set out in the morning to see Rankin. He had not found him at any of his usual haunts, nor at the real estate and loan office where Rankin made pretense of doing some sort of insurance business, and going at last to Rankin's home he had been told by Mrs. Rankin that Jim had gone out of town, she did not know where. He would not be back for two or three days. Garwood's intention had been to call a conference of his closest friends in Grand Prairie, and outline some plan of action, though none had occurred to him as yet. But he determined to defer this until Rankin's return.

The notion of calling on Pusey had been a sudden inspiration, born of the necessity of doing something at once, for his inaction was becoming intolerable, especially with stories coming to him constantly of Sprague's work in other counties.

He sat down at Pusey's bidding, and taking off his Panama hat, began fanning himself.

"Hot, ain't it?" said Pusey, still clipping out his little paragraphs.

"Yes," said Garwood distantly. It was not the heat of the weather that then distressed him. Pusey kept his head turned away, so that Garwood had only the side of his face, and its wizened profile did not show the satisfaction that smiled in it. Pusey was willing to keep all to himself the enjoyment of having Garwood humble himself by calling upon him,--him, whom Garwood had once despised. Indeed, the satisfaction he felt was so lively that he was somewhat mollified in spirit and, had he known it, Garwood could hardly have done a wiser or more politic thing than to pay this visit to this same Pusey.

"Yes, it's hot," said Garwood, "though not so hot as it was in Washington. That's the hottest place in summer, you know, in the whole world."

"So I've heard," said Pusey, stooping to paste one of his little paragraphs on a sheet of copy paper. He showed, however, no inclination to turn the conversation from its perfunctory channel. Indeed, the conventionality of it rather suited his mood and gratified his pride, so that he was content to keep Garwood under his embarrassment as long as possible. But Garwood launched into his subject.

"I came over to see you, Mr. Pusey," he began, "and to have a little talk with you about--politics."

"Ah?" said Pusey, superciliously.

Garwood could have crushed him for his tone as Pusey would have crushed the cockroaches he could never hit, but he was better schooled to his part and he thought of the agonies of defeat. He needed every dollar of his salary now. So he went on:

"You are on the delegation, I believe?"

"I believe I am; yes," Pusey replied.

"Very well," said Garwood, unable to resist the impulse to assume his congressional manner, "very well. And I understand that you are opposed to my renomination."

"I haven't said so, have I?" said Pusey, turning his head for the first time and squinting at Garwood over his spectacles.

"I don't know."

The reply took Pusey by surprise, and he lost something of his position.

"Well, I haven't," he answered.

"But you opposed me in the convention."

"No, not quite that," Pusey answered.

"Well," and Garwood smiled his old consequential smile once more and gathered his power to put others ill at ease, "it amounted to that."

"No, you are a bit mistaken, Mr. Garwood," Pusey replied. "What I did was to oppose instructions. I believed, you know, in sending a delegation to the convention that shall be absolutely free and untrammeled, so that it might be, as I may say, instantly responsive to the will of the people. That is all."

"Oh, I see," said Garwood; "I see. But let me ask this--you _are_ opposed to my nomination, aren't you?"

Pusey was silent and did not answer for a long time. He cut out another paragraph and cocked his little head to one side, tilting the old straw hat ridiculously as he trimmed the edges of the slip with unusual and unnecessary care.

"No," he said at length, "I haven't said that, either."

"Well, then, to get at it in another way--you will pardon me, Mr. Pusey, for my persistent interrogation--let me ask you this: You are in favor of Mr. Sprague's nomination, are you not?"

"I haven't said that, either," Pusey promptly replied.

"Then, if I understand your position, you are free and untrammeled like the delegation. Is that right?"

"Exactly," said Pusey, laying down his scissors and his papers, folding his hands in his lap, and screwing about in his chair until for the first time he squarely faced Garwood, at whom he looked pertly, as little men can, through his spectacles, "exactly."

He snapped out the word as if he relished it.

"Well, then," said Garwood, hitching his chair closer as if instantly to seize his advantage, "that warrants me in asking you whether or not you can give me your support?"

Pusey lowered his eyes and turned his face away. He began plucking at the few withered hairs on his chin.

"What do you say?" Garwood pressed him.

"Well," Pusey hemmed, "I am hardly able to determine so important a matter as that instantly, Mr. Garwood. Complications might arise which would not render it expedient for me to--"

Garwood did not wait for Pusey to unwind one of the long sentences he loved so well, but broke in:

"See here, Pusey, let's be frank about this thing. You and I may not have been friends in the past, but--"

"I've always treated you fairly since I ran a party organ, haven't I?" Pusey interpolated.

"Yes, I think you have, Pusey, and I thank you for it. I've appreciated it. I was, in a way, glad to see you get hold of the _Citizen_, for I knew you could make a newspaper of it; you've got the ability." Pusey glowed, and Garwood continued:

"But I've come to see you in your capacity of delegate to a convention before which I am a candidate. I don't want to take up any more of your time than is necessary, but it has occurred to me that if we had a little confidential chat, we might understand each other better, that's all. I haven't come to beg any favors, or any thing of that sort, but merely to see where we stand, what we could expect of each other."

"Well, I'm glad you called, Mr. Garwood. I am of course honored"--the editor gave an absurd nod of his head in Garwood's direction by way of a bow.

"As I say," Garwood continued, warming, "I've come to see you as a citizen and as a delegate, and to ask you if you can conscientiously support me for renomination. There is no other candidate from this county, and it seems to me that as a matter of local pride you might prefer a man from your home to one from some other county."

"Well," Pusey answered, "there is of course that aspect of the case, Mr. Garwood. I do not say that I will not support you, neither do I say I will. I will say this, that if you are nominated I shall support you for election earnestly and heartily; I may be permitted to add, perhaps, effectively. But for the present I prefer not to commit myself. You understand my position, both as a citizen and as an editor. Of course conditions may arise under which I would give you my vote and my support."

"May I ask what those conditions are?" Garwood leaned over to ask.

"I do not say, mark me," Pusey replied in a corrective tone, "that the conditions exist now, but that they may arise."

"Could you indicate them?"

"I would prefer, Mr. Garwood, to let events take their own course and shape themselves. The convention has not been called yet, and is some weeks off; there will be ample time. I wish for the present to feel that I am free to pursue the course that seems wise to me--as a citizen and as an editor, you understand."

"Very well," said Garwood, "I am at least glad to know that you are uncommitted; I am also glad I called, and"--he arose--"I shall perhaps do myself the honor to call again." He bowed and left, and when he had gone, and the mockery was all over, Pusey took the pipe from the tobacco box, filled it, and lighted it from a gas jet he kept burning for that very purpose. He smoked in a way that evinced no enjoyment in tobacco whatever; he smoked in a dry, habitual way, as he talked, and ate, and wrote, but now he enjoyed his reflections, for Garwood, who once had spurned him, had called and humbled himself. Suddenly, however, an idea struck him, and hastily leaning over and hooking his toes in their carpet slippers behind the legs of his chair, he wrote feverishly for an instant. When he had done he read the item over, drew a line down through it, marked it "must," and hung it on his copy hook.

The item appeared the following evening in the _Citizen_. It was this:

"Hon. Jerome B. Garwood called upon us yesterday afternoon. The congressman is looking extremely well, despite his long and arduous duties in the Capital, and the severe heat that marks the recent season of the year at Washington. The congressman is home for the summer. Call again, Congressman."

The evening following the _Advertiser_, the organ of the opposition which, in Polk County at least, had never been called into responsibility, copied Pusey's personal item and made this comment:

"When the congressman calls again he will be wise to take the post-office with him, or something equally as substantial as that which he is said to have received over at Springfield in the long ago."

VI

It was summer, the full flushed summer of central Illinois and the corn stood tall on the Sangamon bottoms, flashing its heavy blades in the sun. Miles and miles it spread across Logan, and Polk, and on into Moultrie County, where the Kaskaskia flows widening down to join the Mississippi at a place where the Sucker state found the picturesque beginnings of its history. There were long, calm days of scorching heat, and other days, when the clouds closed over the plains, and the humid air was too heavy to breathe. But still the corn flourished, rustling in the warm winds that blow forever across the rolling prairies, and ripened fast against the time when it should be hauled to the distilleries along the placid Illinois or stored in long cribs to await the ever-expected rise in the grain market at Chicago. Viewed from some impossible altitude, the great, green corn fields were broken here and there by smaller fields of wheat, in which some venturesome farmer reaped a little crop hardly indigenous to that black soil, and to the eastward, over the broad pastures of virgin prairie, blocky cattle browsed and fattened at their leisure. The mud roads lay deep in powdered dust, the whole land droned in the full tide of warm summer life, and men everywhere were glad, like the insects that made the throbbing air vocal with their endless shrilling, like the cattle that huddled through the long afternoons in the shade of some wind-break of slender young trees, like the corn itself forever glinting in the sun.

Of all the thousands of people, happy as the summer in their toil, there was none who would have ascribed his happiness to the government under which he lived. Few of them, indeed, at that busy season took any interest in their government. Later on in the fall, when the summer was over and the fields but bare ground, spiked with short-pointed stalks, when the corn and the cattle had been shipped to Chicago; in the days when the darkness and the rain would come, they would think of government, perhaps become excited about it. But now, all over the Thirteenth Congressional District, a few men in each county seat were gratuitously attending to government for them, plotting and scheming to place certain names on the ballot, confident in the knowledge that in November the people would divide themselves arbitrarily into parties, and go through the empty formality of ratifying the selections that would result from all their manoeuvers and machinations. Thus the business of the people's government is carried on.

In Grand Prairie, Garwood, troubled and afraid, knew that in each of the seven counties that comprised his district there were little cliques of men to whom this business of carrying on the people's government was somehow, though no one could tell just how, entrusted. If he could get enough of these men to think, or at least to say that he should go back to Congress, they would choose certain of their followers as delegates, and these would name him. In all that great fertile land, in those seven counties, out of two hundred thousand people it was not even necessary that he secure the eighty-three who would make a majority of the delegates to the congressional convention; it was only necessary that he secure half a dozen men, for these half dozen would name the delegates who would express the wishes of those two hundred thousand people. And not only this, but this handful of men would thus choose the other officers of all those two hundred thousand individuals. They were men who did not especially have at heart the interests of the people, even of that portion of the people known as the "party" they represented. They had only their own interests at heart, and they conducted the people's government for what they might themselves get out of it in money and in power. Behind them, it is true, were oftentimes men who were either too respectable or too unpopular to engage in politics; men who controlled large affairs, but these also were interested in nothing but their own business and the making of money. The happiness of the people was not for them to consider; fortunately, that was left to the winds; to the rolling prairies; to the sight of the broad fields and the cattle huddling at noon-time in the shade; to the songs of birds, and insects, and children; to the sun and the glint of the sunlight on the corn. When the selection of candidates had been made, and the choice was between two men, Garwood knew that there were enough of those two hundred thousand ready to fight for the word by which his party was called to place the name of its candidate on the pay-roll of congressmen.

The few men who would thus tell the people whom to choose were subject to influences. The question was: what influence to employ in each particular instance. There was but one other consideration; these men were likely at times to lose their occult power, and to be superseded by other men; so that it was necessary to know just who was the man in each county then in control. For instance, in Polk County, Rankin had been this man, for so long a time in fact that his power had extended to other counties. But Rankin's power had been in part destroyed; there were now two men in Polk County to be considered--Rankin and Pusey. Unless one could get both, it was necessary to make a choice between them. But it was impossible to get both, and it was a delicate matter selecting one or the other.

Had Garwood been a man with a genius for details and organization, or even possessed of an untiring patience, he would have known just what men in each county were at any given time doing the governing for the people of that county. That would have required tact and perseverance; it would have entailed an endless amount of letter-writing and consulting, and this, amid all the fascinations of his new life at Washington, was irksome to him. He knew now too late, the right man in his own county. As to the other counties, he must still lean on Rankin and trust him. So the choice as between Pusey and Rankin seemed to be decided for him.

Rankin came back to Grand Prairie at the end of the week, and an announcement he then made was sufficient to excite all the men in the Thirteenth District who at that time were interested in government.

VII

Rankin's announcement was a simple one, and was made without flourish. It was merely that at a meeting of the congressional committee held the day before at Lincoln, a congressional convention had been called to assemble at Pekin, on Tuesday of the following week. The announcement was a surprise to none more than to Garwood himself. It reached him in the mysterious way that news spreads, on his way down town Monday morning, and, when it was mentioned to him he smiled blandly with his old cunning as if he had known it all along. He hastened to his office, and waited there half an hour before Rankin appeared, perspiring, florid and expanding with self-satisfaction.

"Well," he said, standing an instant in the doorway and fanning his streaming face with his hat, "think you'd lost me?"

Garwood, not having had time to estimate the political effect of the move Rankin had made, and somewhat annoyed with Rankin for not having told him of his intentions before executing them, took refuge in the congressional demeanor he had studied from numerous impressive models in the District of Columbia.

"I have been awaiting a conference with you," he said. He had also learned at Washington to call meetings where there was to be political scheming, "conferences."

"Well," said Rankin, dropping his wide hat to the floor, "I thought I'd see if it could be done first, and tell you afterwards."

"So I assumed."

Rankin glanced at Garwood somewhat uneasily. He did not like the new mood of Garwood.

"Oh, it's all right," he assured him, "wait till I tell you. I knew that Sprague and Pusey were at work, but they needed time. Our play was to force their hand at once. What we want is a speedy convention so--what?"

"I said I was not so sure of that," Garwood repeated.

"Well, I say yes," said Rankin. "Man alive! They'll skin us; give 'em time. Anyway Friday night I wired Sam McKimmon and Jim O'Malley and Joe Hale to meet me Saturday at Lincoln. I went over and there they were. I told 'em where we was at, an' what Sprague 'as doin'. They agreed 'ith me that we'd ought to get a move on, an' we decided quick--convention fer a week from to-morrow at Pekin--Joe insisted on that. I wired Heffron an' Schmidt an' Carman las' night. It's fixed now. What do you think of it?"

"Well, I don't know; if I had had--"

"Well, you'll say it's the thing when I show you this. Look'e here." He drew a crumpled telegram from his pocket, struck it open with the back of his fingers, and handed it to Garwood. "Look at that!"

Garwood read it. It was a telegram from George Schmidt, the committee-man from Moultrie County, voicing an indignant protest.

"It's all right, I reckon. Heh?" Rankin smiled triumphantly. "Maybe ol' Con hain't mad!"

For the first time Garwood was reassured. If Sprague was mad, it must be all right, proceeding on the common assumption that anything which harasses the enemy is a point gained.

"I don't know but you're right," he said, relentingly.

"Ain't I?" said Rankin, smiling more complacently and triumphantly than ever. "Reckon they won't ketch your Uncle James nappin' more'n onct, even if the weather is hot."

And as if he had just reminded himself of the heat he stripped off his coat, hung it over the back of his chair and pulled his shirt sleeves far up his hairy arms for greater comfort.

"Why did you select Pekin?" Garwood asked, presently.

"'Cause it's fartherest from Sullivan fer one thing, an' then Joe Hale wanted to get it fer his home town. He was a little skeery at first. I had to fix him--promised him you'd have him appointed postmaster. You'll have to do it." Garwood scowled the scowl that comes when the vexed question of patronage is mooted, but said:

"I'll take care of him."

"Yes," Rankin went on, "you'll have to. He says he can land a delegation from Tazewell all right. Their county convention's Thursday. There's thirty votes to start on. O'Malley says Logan's all right, too. They'll have a mass convention called fer Saturday. That'll be twenty-four more--fifty-four." Rankin leaned over to Garwood's desk and began to make figures on an old envelope. "Fifty-four," he repeated. "Mac thinks he can fetch up his county; that's eighteen more--seventy-two in all. With our twenty-two here that'll make--le's see, two'n' two's four--seven an' two's nine--ninety-four. An' you're nominated, ol' man."

And Rankin, dropping his pencil, slapped Garwood on the knee, though an instant later he regretted having taken what once would not have been a liberty, for he had a sudden intuition that a new divinity now hedged his congressman. But he speedily covered his slight confusion by proceeding:

"An' now we've only got a week to get ready in, but a week's as good as a month. We must cinch the thing in Tazewell an' Logan an' Mason. That end o' the district's our's naturally. We'll give 'em Piatt an' DeWitt; an' Moultrie--course they've got that coopered up already."

Garwood placed the tips of his fingers together and knitted his brows in thought. Rankin dutifully awaited the result of his thinking.

"Don't you think," the congressman said presently, "that we could gain a few more votes here in Polk? Perhaps, with certain concessions, Pusey might--"

Rankin did not, however, dutifully await the full expression of the thought.

"Concessions hell!" he cried. "Concessions to that little whelp? Well, I should say not! We'll lick him, an' then ram it down his throat!"

Rankin breathed heavily as he exploded this imperfect figure.

"We want to clean that little mess up right now, onct an' fer all," he added, when he could get breath again. He was puffing in a fat, angry way. "No, sir, you'n I'll take a run down to Havana, find Zeph Bailey, an' see if we can't sew up them eighteen votes from Mason. Then we'll hike up to Pekin an' attend Joe Hale's convention. Then on Saturday we'll drop into Lincoln, an' you'll make 'em a speech. I'll also make a few well chosen remarks myself--at the other end o' the hall. We'll concentrate on them counties. Course, it won't do no harm to make a try in DeWitt an' Piatt, but I don't look fer much there. We only need eighty-three votes; we've got ninety-four in sight--ef none of 'em gets away."

Rankin had a faculty of reassuring himself, and the faculty was somehow stimulated after the first pangs of defeat had been soothed.

"How sure is Tazewell?" Garwood inquired, still with his finger tips together, his eyes half closed in cogitation.

"Well, now, Joe Hale hain't a goin' to let that post-office get away from him. You can count on them thirty sure. Jim thinks Logan's all right--they like you over there, you know, an' Mac says Mason'll be solid. But we'll have to watch that. We may lose out there, but I don't think so--aw, hell, no!" Rankin refused to credit his own fears. "We'll get 'em. Damn it, we must get 'em!"

He struck his own knee this time, and with his fist.

This hasty calling of the convention was like a bomb-shell in the camp of the Sprague following, to use one of the war-like expressions that are trite in our sanguinary partisan politics. Pusey admitted as much when he wrote daily editorials denouncing the committee and what he called the snap judgment it had taken. The announcement, too, was not received with much favor in the other counties, for the time in which to call their county conventions was short, and the politicians were put to much trouble to form the combinations on which their own interests depended. But the four men who had met at Lincoln were a majority of the committee, and their action was conclusive. The other members, those from DeWitt, Piatt and Moultrie Counties had, like the rest, been notified by telegraph, and even by mail, but Rankin had taken care to send their telegrams at a late hour, knowing that the telegraph offices in the little towns were not open at night. Their letters of course reached them the next day--too late for them to get to the meeting.

And so over the district, the preparations for the county conventions went forward. Rankin and Garwood made their trip, and made their speeches, and when they came home Rankin claimed solid delegations from Logan, Mason and Tazewell. The delegation from Tazewell was instructed for Garwood; those from Logan and Mason were not. Rankin also claimed votes in the DeWitt and Piatt delegations, and formulated such an elaborate equation that he was able to demonstrate to any one that Garwood would be nominated on the first ballot, and with votes to spare.

Pusey made no claims in his newspaper. He was ever shrewd enough and shifty enough not to do anything openly that could stultify him in the future, but Rankin said that telegrams were constantly passing between him and Sprague. Garwood did not have his interview with the little editor. He had thought of it, and had even broached the subject to Rankin again, but Rankin was implacable in his hatred and vigorously opposed any such movement. In the strenuous fight that was coming on, and even then begun, he displayed again all of his old commanding resolution, and Garwood fell under the spell of his strong will.

"They'll find Jim Rankin a pretty active corpse!" he was continually saying to Garwood.

So the week passed, the county conventions were all held, and then a silence brooded over the political camps in the district as the delegations, like the mobilized detachments of an army, waited for the time to come when they should move on Pekin and begin the great battle.

VIII

Emily's baby had had his morning bath, and after a long wrestle had at last fallen asleep, his little lips sucking automatically in his dreams, while her father, after a struggle almost as wearing, had been induced to go for a morning walk before the heat of what promised to be a sultry day should rise with the mounting sun. She had carried a tray with Jerome's breakfast up to him, and when he had eaten it he had rolled over and resumed his snoring, made more gross by the dissipations of his campaigning the night before; and now she drew a long sigh as she sank into her chair on the veranda to think that a few moments of rest might be hers at last. She rocked vigorously, as though the mere physical exercise might rest her fatigued limbs; the slow motion with which she lifted a stray lock from her brow and fastened it back in her hair told how weary she was. In her lap lay a letter which the postman had just handed her. It was a large, square envelope, of gray paper, the texture and tone of which would have told that it was foreign, even if the German stamp had not already put that fact in evidence. Emily had recognized the anglicized writing in which it was addressed as that of Dade; and the post-mark told that the travels of the Emersons had led them once more to Wiesbaden. Emily allowed the letter to lie a moment unopened in her lap, partly from inertia, more, perhaps, from a love of anticipating the pleasure its reading would give her. The breaks in the vast monotony of her life were so few that she disliked to have them too quickly over.

And then, she found a charm in the romantic spell anything that comes out of the Old World still weaves for us of the New. She loved to picture Dade, in some smart Parisian gown--the very thought of which brought back to her Dade's way of calling things, especially her own dresses, "_chic_"--escaping from her hypochondriacal mother, now with petulant disrespect, now with gushes of affection, to wander with some young man down wide avenues, shaded with lindens. Sometimes she pictured the young man in civilian dress, but this morning he wore the uniform of the German army. She could see Dade, trailing her brilliant parasol over her shoulder, looking up into his face, and speaking to him in her melodious French--no, she corrected her little drama, it would be this time in her rich German which she had affected to prefer to French. Some day, she was sure, these light and transient affairs would end seriously for Dade, so seriously that she would find herself enthroned over the stately household of some old German castle with a titled military husband. How many years would then elapse before Dade would be back in Grand Prairie, with the air of the _grande dame_, lifting her lorgnette in the foreign way that would come so naturally to her? Would she grow matronly and have some yellow-haired, outlandish son with her? Would--

She heard a noise upstairs, and turned her head slightly, growing rigid as she listened for the warning cry of the baby. She waited, but no further sound came, and she lay back to resume her dream. But it had been broken, the thought of the baby had brought her back across all the intervening seas, back to Grand Prairie and her daily duties there. She sighed, and languidly tore open the letter.

When Emily had read the first of the many pages that made up the letter she laid it down in her lap to grasp to the uttermost the striking import of its tidings and there spread over her tired face a new smile, born of the pleasure women find in that clairvoyance with which they like to think themselves gifted in affairs of the heart--Dade was engaged! Her morning dream of the moment before had been prophetic; it was coming true!

Dade wrote of him in her highest vein of ecstasy. He was not an officer, though he had been, but he was noble, and Emily gathered that he was in politics, though Dade did not put it that way. A Prussian he was, with the sounding name of Baron Wolf von Waldenburg. He was not rich, though he had some means, but what he lacked in the aristocracy of his money he made up by the aristocracy of his lineage--an old family, with a seat near Spandau, and a house in Berlin, where Dade and he would live. They would have to economize, Dade wrote, and try to get along somehow with few servants, not more than six. Their "_ménage_" would be humble, but Berlin was the _dearest_ place to live. The baron was in the government there, and of course they would have the _entrée_ to the court circle. Dear mamma would live with them. Dade appealed to Emily to know if it was not altogether too lovely, and as for the baron she was sure that Emily could not help loving him, he was the dearest little man that ever lived; so proud, so haughty, but with such distinguished manners.

"And isn't it funny," Dade raged on, "to think that we both should marry public men? I know Mr. Garwood would like him--they would admire each other's brains anyway. And you must come and visit us when we are at home in Berlin--doesn't it sound _fine_? Just think! While you are enjoying the gay life of your capital I shall be enjoying the gay life of mine! Don't you remember how we always used to say--"

The words somehow struck Emily's heart cold. "While you are enjoying the gay life of your capital--" It was not the expatriation which Dade so frankly confessed that struck her at first, though a sense of that came after her own personal pang had been absorbed in the habitual resignation with which she accepted the life that was so far from all her girlish dreams.

The letter became somewhat more coherent as it progressed. Dade explained that they had come to Wiesbaden, not this time for her mother's health so much as for her own. Her physicians had advised it; she was run down, and as she was to be married in the fall, the baron wished her to be in good health. They might run over to America before the wedding; she wasn't sure; it would all depend. And they had not decided yet where they would be married, certainly, however, not in Grand Prairie--there would be no place there for the baron to stay.

Emily finished the letter, and laid it in her lap with another sigh. She was all sighs this summer morning. And yet she could not, and would not, formulate to herself the reason why she sighed. She might with impunity have compared her own life with Dade's, for it was not the life that Dade was leading for which she sighed that summer. Once, perhaps, in looking from afar upon the society life of the cities as it was reflected in the newspapers, it had seemed to her that she might be happy there. She recalled having expressed something of this to a man from Chicago who had spent a day with her father. He was a lawyer, with a large practice, but one who nevertheless gave much of his fine talents to the poor, the forgotten, and the despised. For this he was called eccentric, sometimes crazy, often a socialist. She remembered him always as he sat in her father's library that evening after dinner--he had come down on some business relating to the bank, and had dined with her father. She remembered his strong face; a face wondrous in its sympathy, wondrous in its kindness, wondrous in its sadness. It seemed to reflect not only all the sorrow he had seen, but all the sorrow he had perceived in his deep, penetrating knowledge of life. She always pictured him as he sat in the library that evening. She had expressed, in her girlish way, something of her wish for a larger life, by which she then meant life in a larger place, and never could she forget the lift of his gentle eyes, or the smile that came to his weary visage as he said:

"Grand Prairie is as big as Chicago, and a country cross-roads as big as either."

She had pondered a long time on those words and it was long before she had won an inkling of their meaning. And then she had met Garwood, and it had seemed that at last she had found the way to life. She had felt that Jerome was designed for a big work in the world, and the hand of destiny had been plainly apparent when he was sent to Congress. She had dreamed of being by his side in Washington, a help and an inspiration in the mighty things he was to do. Now he had been one term in Congress, and all that his life held seemed to be an endless scheming and striving to remain there; the great work he was to do for others altogether lost sight of in the great struggle for mere existence in the place he had won. And for her there was the same old life at home, changed only by the addition of new cares, of new responsibilities, the conditions ever growing harder, her perplexities ever deepening.

But she put Dade's letter back in its square envelope, and went in. It was growing warm outdoors. Her father had come home tired from his walk; the baby had awakened cross with the heat; Jerome had got up and was calling her to serve him in his dressing, and to pack his valise for his trip to the Pekin convention.

IX

Garwood, with Rankin and his other more intimate supporters started for Pekin on Monday morning in order to be on the ground early. They found themselves none too soon, for the delegates had already begun to gather, and by night the old town was fully invested by politicians. They strolled in twos and threes under their serious hat brims, along the shaded streets where the wonted quiet of the town deepened to a repose in which they best could whisper their little schemes. They were to be found in noisy groups in the saloons and bar-rooms, but as the chiefs and leaders were at the hotel, there the interest centered. Many of the visitors, taking chairs from the office of the hotel, where the lights, burning under the low ceiling, made the heat unbearable, placed them along the curb, and then all through the summer evening, they tilted back and talked, their cigars glowing in the darkness, their laughter now and then breaking on the ears of the youths and maidens who strolled by. Upstairs in one of the rooms of the hotel, a poker game was in progress; in another, Garwood held a levee amid a thick cloud of cigar smoke, for which the open box of cigars on the table provided a constant fuel. Sprague also had his headquarters, and in another room the congressional committee was in session.

The room was strewn with paper and the ashes of cigars, and there was a holocaust of insects on the floor under the oil lamps, and though the morning was luminous and still when the meeting ended the tired and sleepy members were glad of the breath of its sweet air. The dawn had come long before. Now the sun was mounting in the east, flashing his heat in trembling rays down on the green corn fields. The sky was burnished clean of clouds, and glistened like metal. Far down in the west, where the mists had long since rolled away from the Illinois River, was a low lying hill of cloud, dazzling white and moveless, resting on the horizon. As the committee-men, spent with a night of wrangling, gazed up into that morning heaven they knew how hot the day would be, a day hot as no day other than a convention day ever is.

Rankin, as he stood on the hotel steps and gazed, removed his hat, and wiped his brow with a gesture of weariness unusual to him. The long strain of the battle would soon begin. Would it end as that other battle two years ago had ended? He had waited long for his reward, he must make one more winning fight to vindicate his right to it. It meant much to him--four years in the post-office at Grand Prairie--he could rest when he sat down in that envied chair. He would move the desk into the window on Main Street, and then all his friends, and, what was sweeter still, all his enemies could see him sitting there. With this dream his habitual cheerfulness came back to him, and he turned and went inside with a quicker step. There was still work for him to do. The committee was to meet again at half-past nine to complete the little details, and, besides, he must prepare a program to place in the hands of the temporary chairman; a program on which would be written just what motions were to be made, who was to move a committee on credentials and on permanent organization, and who were to be appointed on these committees, and then who was to nominate the permanent chairman, and so forth. Thus it is by such forethoughtful organization that one chases a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight. Rankin went to his room and with a window open to lure any breeze that might come with the morning, he wrote out his schedule of the people's wishes.

Garwood lay snoring in one of the two beds the room contained. He had remained in his headquarters until they had been emptied, then he had joined in a poker game; an hour before Rankin entered he had fallen heavily into bed.

There, in the morning, Rankin worked on while Garwood slept. He thought several times, scratching his head in dilemma, of awaking his leader, but he forbore and let him sleep. At last he finished, and then lay down himself, without undressing, to get what rest he could.

He slept lightly for a time, then awoke. The sun, already sickeningly hot, was pouring through the open window, he was bathed in perspiration, the heat was insufferable.

Garwood roused. While he was washing and shaving, he said:

"Will Bailey preside?"

"Yes--we put it through after a fight."

"He'll do."

"Yes," answered Rankin, spluttering in the water he lifted to his face in the bowl of his two palms, "he's got nerve."

He groped for a towel.

"Did you write the resolutions?" he asked Garwood.

"Not yet," said the congressman; "I must do that."

X

The convention was to meet at ten o'clock, but at that hour, while the hotel was left desolate, the Circuit Court room in the old brick court house where the convention was to sit, was still empty, and scarcely divested of any of its solemnity by the chairs that had been set in order for the accommodation of the representatives of the people who were to deliberate there. For half an hour the delegates had been gathering at the somber building, and now clustered in groups in the historic portico that had witnessed, so many years before, one of the great debates between Lincoln and Douglas. The delegates found the shade grateful, and leaned against the gray stone columns smoking the cigars which the candidates had supplied with such prodigal generosity. With them were many spectators and the curiosity of these was hardly larger than the curiosity of the delegates, who, though they had all the power in their hands, could only speculate, not as to what they would do with the power, but what would be done with it for them, and they awaited the coming of their leaders with a calm, almost amusing submission to their desires and designs.

The morning advanced, and with it the heat increased, until at length some of the delegates, on whom the deputed dignity of the people sat with such weight that they wished to feel some of its importance by taking their seats, entered the court room. There they resumed their curious speculations as to whether Garwood or Sprague would be nominated, awaiting the advent of some hand strong enough to gather them all together and mold them to its own purposes.

But at length and suddenly there was a noise and in through the doors poured the crowd that had remained outside, bringing with it a palpable breath of heat. In the center of the throng was Jim Rankin, his smiles scattered abroad for all. He worked his way with heavy shoulders into the court room, and with an authoritative stride swung down towards the judge's bench where the presiding officer of the convention was to wield his gavel.

On the wall the big clock bearing the advertisement of a local jeweler judicially ticked away three quarters of an hour before Rankin mounted the judge's bench. He had been sitting meantime, in the jury box, whispering to Judge Bailey as composedly as though the whole convention was not waiting for him to perform the last rite that would invoke its political life. He had even removed his coat, and sat in his rounded white shirt sleeves, with the self-possession of a judge himself, who knows that the session of court cannot begin until he wills it and that none dare show impatience lest he embarrass his cause. But now and then some delegate, showing no more respect for Rankin than the ordinary American freeman really feels for a judge, however much custom compels him to dissimulate in court, would cry: "Get a move on you, Jim," and at last Rankin arose, put on his coat, whispered a last word to Bailey, and mounted the raised platform where was ordinarily enthroned the impersonated authority of the statute in such case made and provided and the whole peace and dignity of the people of the state of Illinois.

Rankin's figure showed fine and burly, half of it towering above the judge's desk, as he looked over all the heads before him, where, somehow, he was determined to count eighty-three votes for Jerome B. Garwood. He stood there huge and powerful until something of his strength impressed the delegates before him, until he felt, as they themselves felt, a moral mastery over their minds. His dignity, showing in the broad reach of his heavy shoulders, shining from his sleepless eyes, had in it all of the accumulated fire of his anger at the opposition that had dared assail him, and he wished it to be felt. He singled out Pusey, bowed among the very men who knew Jim Rankin best, for the concentration of his gaze. Somewhere he had got a gavel, as it was supposed, though it was not a gavel, but a gager's flat mallet, or bung-starter, ironically symbolic of the real power that lay behind him, though no one there saw the irony. And with this in his fat and hairy fist he gave three heavy raps.

"The convention will be in order," he said. The simple words were the consummation of all the months of scheming and toiling that had gone before in that Thirteenth District, and the delegates insensibly braced under the idea.

"I ain't goin' to make any speech," he began, and then paused an instant before he added, with an intense significance, "at this stage of the proceedin's."

Some among the delegates caught the threat that lurked in the statement.

"But," Rankin went on, "the committee has chosen as temp'rary chairman o' this convention Judge Zephaniah P. Bailey of Mason County."

There was a hum of human interest in the crowd. But Rankin had not done. He still stood there, and the delegates cocked their ears to hear the rest. One or two leaders among the Sprague faction rose to their feet in readiness for parliamentary action.

"An' fer temp'rary sec'etary, Joseph Hale of Tazewell."

Instantly the Sprague leaders began to shout:

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!"

Their cries were reinforced by the shouts of half the delegates, the half, approximately, that were there to vote for Sprague. The Garwood men sat tight, with soft smiles of satisfaction.

One of Sprague's lieutenants, Randolph, began an impetuous speech, shaking his fist and a mass of disordered hair at Rankin. The chairman, however, mauled the desk with his gavel, and did not wait for quiet to say:

"I'll interduce to you your temp'rary chairman, Judge Zephaniah P. Bailey o' Mason County."

The man who, having awaited Rankin's announcement at the foot of the three steps that led to the rostrum, now took the gavel from him, was tall, and thin and spare. He had walked from the side to the center of his stage with splay-footed steps, and now he stood, bent awkwardly, almost helplessly, over the desk. He was dressed in gray, ill-fitting clothes, his ready-made coat hanging from his bony shoulders with that loose absence of identity which characterizes the garment fashioned for the type rather than for the individual. A standing collar, wide open in front, disclosed a protruding larynx; about the collar was knotted a stringy cravat of black. His hair was low parted on the left side, and hung in a great plume over the right temple. But the man showed in the face, a face smooth shaven, long and firm, with its heavy jaw, pointed chin, and level lips cut straight as the eyebrows that shadowed his eyes. And it was the eyes that marked and inspired the face. Small they were, and half closed, so that at first glance they seemed sleepy, yet when they opened they could flash sparks from a bright, determined mind. But always they showed uncommon shrewdness, and a knowledge of common people and common things, and now and then they twinkled with the keen, dry humor sleeping in the brain that lay behind them. It was beginning to be observed within the confines of his own county, Mason, that Zeph Bailey looked like Abraham Lincoln, a resemblance much prized and sometimes cultivated by the Illinois politician, with whom the physical resemblance too often suffices for the moral. Judge Bailey, however, was too independent to care to resemble any other man, even such a man as Lincoln. He had already had a term as county judge of Mason, had been a member of the lower House at Springfield, and was again a candidate for the Legislature, with ambitions, it was understood, to be Speaker. There was about this man, strange, silent, uncouth and awkward in appearance, that mysterious thing called personal magnetism, beloved of politicians, even beyond the boundaries of Illinois, above any resemblance to Lincoln, and this magnetism was shown the minute he appeared, for the delegates were silent; they raised their eyes to him, and the strange spell of his personality began to play upon them.

Rankin, who had instantly removed his coat on leaving the rostrum, and seated himself in the front row of delegates, though not yet with his fellows from Polk, turned to the man beside him and whispered, prophetically, reader of men that he was:

"You want to look out fer Zeph Bailey--he's a comin' man--smart 's a singed cat."

Rankin's comparison seemed to appeal to his neighbor, who did not know how commonly it was employed in Bailey's own home, and he nodded his instant appreciation.

"Looks like he had lumbago in the back," the man added. He was a DeWitt County delegate far removed from the limits to which Bailey's fame at that time had spread. And Rankin whispered back:

"Well, if he has, it must pain him considerable, fer his back bone runs clear down to his heels."

Bailey still stood there, bent painfully, and remained silent. The hand at the end of a thin wrist that had never known a linen cuff, held the gavel at an awkward angle, but an observer would have noticed that the handle was firm in his fist, and that when it fell, an instant later, it fell with sharp, stern blows, not upon its edge, but full upon its poll, sure sign that a strong man is in the chair.

"The convention--will be--in order."

He spoke in a sharp, penetrating voice, his words falling strangely into couplets, and then his thin lips closed firmly again. Hale had come forward and taken his seat at the old bow-legged table where the clerk of the court usually sat, and this act of his seemed to personalize the action of Rankin in seizing the whole temporary organization, and so maddened the Sprague men afresh. They had been willing to tolerate Bailey, partly because of his strange popularity, partly because of the recognized precedent that supported Rankin in naming the temporary chairman. There were precedents for such a selection of a temporary secretary, also, as there were precedents for almost everything in the Thirteenth District, but they had expected a test vote on the selection of that officer, and they felt strong then and willing that the issue be joined. When they saw how they had been balked, they were angry, and they vented that anger by shouting at Hale to come away, and now and then they turned their personalities upon Rankin, who only smiled, as if he beheld his work and found it very good.

Bailey cast his inscrutable little eye around the assemblage, and then rapped with his gavel. His thin lips moved, and men saw that he was going to speak. Those who knew him ceased to make noise, not liking to miss anything Zeph Bailey might say. In this desire, they pulled at their neighbors and said:

"Sh! sh! He's going to say something."

In the partial quiet they were thus enabled to produce, Bailey drawled:

"If the brethren--will be--seated--another opportunity--will be afforded them--to rise--for prayers--at a later stage--of the revival."

The tense quality of the situation was dissipated in a laugh, though all the possibilities hung undischarged, electrically, in the hot atmosphere. A moment longer Bailey waited and then he began his speech. While he spoke, he stood stooped over the desk, holding on to his gavel. He spoke all the way through in those sharp couplets of words, slowly wrought out. He bowed to custom only long enough to make the usual adjurations to the delegates to discharge their high duties faithfully, and he bestowed the customary partisan praise on the state administration and on the national administration. There was applause of course, which he endured calmly, bent over the desk, waiting for it to end. But when these formalities had been observed, he talked to them of common things, like the heat and the corn crop, and he made jokes about the distilleries that lined the Illinois River, and at his solemn sarcasms the crowd laughed.

Rankin was in high good humor. He had found a new man, and his beginning augured well for the success of the convention. When Judge Bailey stopped, there were cries of "Go on! go on!"

But the Singed Cat rapped instantly with his gavel and said:

"The convention--again--will be--in order."

And the speech was done.

"Gentlemen," he said, "what is--the further pleasure--of the convention?"

The judge uttered this formality with all parliamentary deference, and the twinkle deep hidden in his eyes showed that the irony of it was apparent to him, even if it was lost on the delegates.

The spell of his quaint oratory having been broken, instantly there was a shuffling of boots, and a dozen men sprang to their feet.

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!" they chorused.

But Bailey's eyes, having lost the twinkle they had had when he asked the pleasure of the convention, now sought the type-written program lying on the desk before him, that he might be sure of Rankin's pleasure. And then, his eyes traveling from one to another of the many flushed faces that opened upon him, their cold gleam unerringly rested upon James of the Polk County delegation, and Bailey said:

"The gentleman--from Polk."

"Mr. Chairman," said James, hurriedly, "I move that a committee on credentials of seven members, one from each county, be selected."

"How shall--the committee--be appointed?" inquired the chair. Rankin glared rebukingly at James, and arose to go to him. He detected the chance of blunder whereby all his plans might go wrong.

"By the chair," he growled at James.

"By the chair," James repeated.

"Second the motion!" all the Garwood men yelled.

Randolph was on his feet.

"Mr. Chairman!" he cried, "I move you, sir, as a substitute--"

Randolph was ever parliamentary, but Bailey rapped him to order with the gager's mallet as if he had been a mere disturbing child, and said:

"The gentleman--from Polk; seconded by the gentleman from Tazewell, moves--that a committee--on credentials--consisting--of one delegate--from each county--be appointed--by the chair. As many--as favour--the motion--will say--"

"Mr. Chairman!" Randolph was advancing toward the desk with uplifted arm, his face was very red and already streaming with perspiration. "Mr. Chairman!" he yelled. "It has always been the custom in this district for the delegates to retire by counties and to select their own members for each committee. I move you, sir, as a substitute--"

"The gentleman--from Moultrie," drawled Bailey, "is out--of order. Those of you--who favor--the motion--of the gentleman from Polk--will say--'Aye.'"

A mighty chorus of "Ayes!" swelled up from the mass of delegates.

"Those opposed--'No.'"

Another heavy, deep-throated volume of "Noes" burst forth. Instantly Bailey swung his heavy gavel to his ear, and he said, though still in that deliberate way of his:

"The ayes--_seem_--to have it, the ayes--have it, and the motion is adopted."

Then his gavel fell. And as the storm broke upon him, he stood with the weak stoop in his back, and looked down on the three score and more of angry men who were howling at him. His face never showed sign of emotion, but with his small eyes blinking slowly, his thin lips closed, he looked at them, and then began a slow, monotonous, persistent tap, tap, tap of the gavel.

"The convention--_again_--will be--in order," he drawled, tapping with his gavel all the while. "The convention--_again_--will be--in order."

At last the storm wore out, and Randolph, and two or three of his men gathered in a little knot. After they had held their disheveled heads together in counsel for awhile, Randolph raised his hand, and hushed his delegates, and said, when he had stilled the clamor:

"Let 'em alone. It'll come out all right. We've got the votes."

Bailey meanwhile had ceased to tap, and now stood leaning on the gavel. He began to speak again:

"The chair--appoints," he said, his eye leaving his program and seeking the men he designated as members of the committee, "Messrs. James of Polk, White of Logan, Kemper of Mason, Brown of Tazewell, Harrington of DeWitt, Parker of Moultrie, and Johnson of Piatt."

All save Harrington, Parker and Johnson were Garwood men. The program was then followed, in choosing by the same process, the committees on resolutions and on permanent organization. There too the Garwood men were given the majority, though Bailey ignored Rankin's program in one instance, and that was in naming Randolph for the committee on resolutions, but he did it in some half humorous notion of his own that Randolph could there gratify his love for words, and do little harm. The Garwood men were not particular about the resolutions, though Rankin gave to Ben Fuller, Polk County's representative on the committee, a copy of the platform Garwood had written out.

Noon had come, and was pouring its heat into the court room. The committees having been chosen, the convention could do nothing more until they reported. Bailey therefore said:

"What is--the _further_--pleasure--of the convention?"

And Rankin arose.

"Mr. Chairman," he said, "I move that we take a recess until two o'clock."

Bailey put the motion and of course it carried. And then he said:

"And the convention--stands adjourned--until two o'clock this afternoon--at which hour--the riot--will be--resumed."

His gavel fell.

As he was descending from the platform, Rankin rushed heavily toward him, and at the same instant, Randolph also started for him. Before Rankin could congratulate him, Randolph was talking.

"Look here, Zeph, and you, too, Jim," he began in that curious inofficial tone which men use when their relations become personal again, "we demand a vote on this permanent organization business. We ain't going to be shut out altogether."

"Don't like my presiding, eh?" asked Bailey.

"Oh, I'd like it all right if it was on my side," Randolph laughed, "but we demand a vote."

"Oh, you'll get a vote, Hal," Rankin remarked, "all the vote you want 'fore you're through--eh, Zeph?"

"I always aim to treat every one fairly," answered Bailey.

Randolph looked at him, "Aw, come off!" he said, helplessly.

XI

The convention assembled at two o'clock, though with the only conspicuous deliberation that our deliberative bodies display, it was half-past two before Judge Bailey brought it to order by a crack of his gavel. The sun had seemed to hang still on the meridian. The white cloud that had mounded itself on the horizon in the early morning had slowly and majestically inflated all the day, until it covered the whole of the western sky, where it flashed in the focalized rays of the sun. Far down at the base of the pile of cloud, an ominous blackness was spreading, so that the farmers of the various delegations, trudging along the sidewalks toward the court house, with their waistcoats unfastened and their coats on their arms, prophesied rain, and, drawn out of the differences of factional feeling into the brotherhood of husbandry, they welcomed it with reciprocal felicitations for the common good it would do their corn. When they reached the court house, the heat was stifling; the day seemed to stand still with the sun, and the air they breathed fairly scorched their nostrils.

The report of the committee on credentials was received; there were no contests. The report of the committee on resolutions was read, and the platform, in the wider partisanship that momentarily swallowed up factionalism, applauded. And then Jim Rankin read the report of the committee on permanent organization. The report recommended that the temporary organization be made permanent.

The sun and the day had seemed to stop, now time itself paused, for the moment had come. The fanning delegates stiffened in their hard chairs and became silent. The heavy air hung heavier still with suspense. The sun, flaming in through the tall western windows of the old court room, fell upon the worn boards of the floor till they smoked faintly and seemed likely to ignite under the pitiless fire.

Rankin stood in the very front, near the chairman's desk, his coat off, his hair curled close and shining with the perspiration that glistened on brow and face. He took his cigar from his lips and raised his big arm in its moist shirt sleeve, toward Bailey, who leaned wearily, almost sleepily, over the desk. Rankin's heavy voice broke the stillness.

"Mr. Chairman!" he said, "I move the adoption of the report."

Randolph meanwhile had arisen slowly, carefully, as if he feared any noise he made would mar the situation.

"The gentleman--from Polk," drawled Bailey, as if the whole thing wearied him, "seconded--by the gentleman--from--ah--Tazewell, moves the adoption--of the--report. Aire you ready--for the--"

"Mr. Chairman," said Randolph, heavily and deliberately, "Mr. Chairman," he repeated, knotting his brows under the mane that hung down to meet them.

"The gentleman--from Moultrie," sighed Bailey.

The delegates leaned forward, intent in their surprise that Bailey had even recognized the Sprague leader.

"Mr. Speaker," said Randolph, "I mean Mr. Chairman, I move you, sir, as a substitute for the report of the committee just presented, the following resolution, which I ask the clerk to read."

His use of the words "speaker" and "clerk" was to show the effect of legislative habit.

Bailey only leaned a little farther over his desk, and then drawled:

"The chair--will state--to the gentleman--from Moultrie that it is not now--in order----"

Two or three men behind Randolph rose halfway to their feet, protest written in their faces, but without turning his head, or taking his eyes from the chairman, Randolph fluttered his hand at them behind his back and they subsided. It was plain from his manner that this was a play for position so delicate, that they must not risk disturbing it by interrupting their leader. So Bailey continued: "For the gentleman--to present--such a resolution."

"But, Mr. Speaker," began Randolph.

"The chair--will add--for the information--of the gentleman--from Moultrie," Bailey continued, "that--the only thing--in order--at this time--would be--a minority report--and a motion--to substitute it, or, again, a motion--to lay the report--on the table."

"But, Mr. Chairman," once more began Randolph, stepping carefully into the aisle, "my resolution is in the very nature of a minority report. The chair will remember the ruling of Speaker Haines in the Thirty-fourth General Assembly--" He was taking higher ground by thus referring to mysteries known only to him and the chairman. But Bailey interrupted him.

"The chair--is acquainted--with the precedent--to which--the gentleman--refers, and is--of the opinion--that it does--not properly--apply--in this instance."

The delegates listened with rapt attention. It was not often that in their rude, free conventions they had such parliamentary fine play as this, and they forgot the heat and the contest to enjoy their own bewilderment at it. Rankin still stood and smoked in unconcern. He knew he could safely leave Randolph to Bailey.

"And therefore--the motion--of the gentleman--from Moultrie--is out--of order." As Bailey let his gavel fall, he jerked his head toward Rankin in signal, and then as the big man heaved himself near, he leaned over the desk to whisper to him. Bailey's very action in leaning over the desk, in removing his eyes from his adversary, in letting the convention for a moment slip his grasp, as it were, was audacious. Randolph, again repressing his followers by the flutter of his hand, smiled with satisfaction. He took a step farther down the aisle.

"Then, Mr. Chairman," he said, "I appeal from the decision of the chair."

And immediately his following, glad at last of a chance to do something to save the nation and the day, shouted:

"Second the motion!"

Bailey continued to whisper to Rankin a minute longer, then straightened himself, and looked over the convention. Rankin was examining the end of his cigar, and seemed intent on repairing it, for it had been smoking unevenly and threatening to come apart, as campaign cigars do.

"The gentleman--from Moultrie," drawled Bailey at last, "appeals--from the decision--of the chair, and the appeal--is seconded--by the gentleman--from--ah--was it Piatt?" The humorous twinkle leaped in Bailey's eye. Those of the delegates gifted with a sense of humor, remembering the roar of a moment before, laughed. Randolph, who had a career in politics before him, and hence was without that sense, was waiting in the aisle, taking himself seriously. That Bailey, as was plain by his manner, had not so taken him, was a source of chagrin to him and a wound to his pride, for he and Bailey had served together, he reflected, in the House! And then Bailey's awful deliberation maddened him.

"The question, therefore," Bailey resumed, "is, Shall the decision--of the chair--stand as the decision--of the convention?"

He paused and glanced over the assemblage, and Rankin, having gone back to his place in the Polk County delegation, was now standing with his arm outstretched toward the chair. Presently Bailey's eye roved to where Rankin stood, and Rankin said, in the low tones that betoken an understanding with the presiding officer:

"Mr. Chairman."

"The gentleman--from Polk."

"Mr. Chairman, I move to lay the appeal on the table."

"The gentleman--from Polk," said Bailey, "seconded--by the gentleman--from Mason--moves to lay--the appeal--on the table. Aire you ready--for the question? As many--as favor--the motion--will vote--'Aye'----"

A great volume of "Ayes" rolled from the throats of the Garwood delegates, while the Sprague delegates began to cry:

"Roll-call! Roll-call! Roll-call!"

Randolph had advanced down the aisle until he was opposite Rankin. His mane was tossing savagely, his face was aflame and as he shook his fist at Bailey his lips moved rapidly, though his hot words were lost in the general din. All the while Bailey calmly looked on, and kept up a careless tap, tap, tapping with his gavel. The spectators who had hung in the rear of the court room pressed forward among the delegates. Randolph approached to the very desk and shook his fist under Bailey's imperturbable, long nose.

"You promised us a roll-call, and you've got to be fair and give us a show! If you don't, damn you, I'll----"

Bailey hung far over the desk now and said in his drawl:

"Hal Randolph, you damned--little sucker--you, if you don't go--sit down--and behave yourself--I'll have--to lam--you one--with this mallet."

And then he calmly resumed his tapping. After awhile, his persistence won silence, and he slowly wriggled in his ill-fitting garments as if they were really as uncomfortable as they looked.

"The convention--again--will be--in order," he said.

Randolph assisted in quieting his band.

"If the convention--will permit--the chair--will explain--the parliamentary situation--in which--the convention--now finds itself."

He paused and silence hung again upon his words.

"The gentleman--from Polk--presented--a report--from the committee--on permanent organization--and moved--its adoption. The gentleman--from--ah--Moultrie--then offered--a resolution. That resolution--the chair--declared--to be--out of order. Thereupon the gentleman--from Moultrie--appealed--from the decision--of the chair. That appeal--the gentleman--from Polk--moved--to lay--upon the table. The question, therefore, recurs--upon the motion--of the gentleman--from Polk--to table--the appeal. Upon that question--the yeas and nays--or, rather, a roll-call--of the delegations--has been--demanded. Those of you--who favor--the motion--that is, those of you--who favor--tabling the appeal--and the adoption--of the report--of the committee on permanent organization--will vote--'Aye,' and those--opposed--will vote--'No'--upon the polling--of your respective--delegations, and the secretary--will call--the roll--of the counties."

The gavel fell, and Randolph turned, smiling complacently as one who had already won his fight.

"Vote No!" he called to simplify the issue for his men.

And Rankin shouted:

"Vote Aye, boys; vote Aye."

The delegations gathering in little groups were polled amid a hum of busy interest. Bailey had seated himself and looked with sleepy unconcern down on the mass of men, tearing up their little slips of paper and dropping them in the black slouch hats of southern Illinois. Once he moved, and beckoned to him a man from his own delegation, and cast his ballot with the Mason fellows. At last the hats were reposing between knees, the ballots were counted. Bailey slowly arose.

"Have you all voted?" he asked. The silence acquiesced.

"The secretary--will call--the roll--of the counties." And then intensity hung again in the air. Hale called off the names of the counties.

"DeWitt?"

"Eighteen votes No!"

"Logan?"

"Thirteen votes Aye, eleven votes No."

The Sprague men clapped their hands.

"Mason?"

"Eighteen votes _Aye!_!"

Randolph turned and knit his brows. Then he smiled again. He was keeping tab on his knee.

"Moultrie?"

"Fifteen--N-o-o!"

"Piatt?"

"Fifteen votes No!"

"Polk?"

The silence was absolute. Rankin and Pusey had been wrangling. Pusey announced the vote.

"Twenty-two Yeas and twenty-three Nays."

There was cheering from the Sprague men and the gavel cracked.

"Tazewell?"

"Thirty votes--_Aye!_" shouted Carlin, one of Joe Hale's men, drawing out the affirmative unctuously. He was thinking of Joe's job.

Then, while the convention awaited the result, Hale figured painfully. Rankin stepped up to help him. The Sprague men howled an objection and Randolph advanced to a place near the secretary. But Hale figured under the shelter of his palm. When he had done, he handed the slip up to the chairman. Bailey examined it attentively an instant, a long instant, then the convention grew impatient and cried:

"Give it to us! Give it to us!"

Bailey waited, again studying the slip. And at last, holding it in his fingers, he said:

"On this vote--the Yeas aire--eighty-three, and the Nays--aire eighty-two, and the motion--"

Randolph was standing in the aisle, his finger poised, his lips apart, his eyes blazing. His face glowed with a delight he could not conceal as he cried:

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman! A point of order!"

Bailey paused and looked at him inquiringly.

"Well," he said, wearily, "the gentleman--may state--his point of order."

Again the silence, again the interest in this fencing between the two parliamentarians.

"My point of order, Mr. Chairman, is this:" Randolph kept his forefinger in its parliamentary poise. "The delegation from Mason County cast eighteen votes in the affirmative."

Bailey nodded.

"And I believe, Mr. Chairman," Randolph went on, taking his time, that he might uncover his point slowly and thus make it the more effective in the end, "that the chair is a member of the Mason County delegation."

"The gentleman--is eminently--correct," said Bailey.

"Then, Mr. Chairman," said Randolph, raising his voice for his climax, "as the chair's delegation cast its full vote, the chair evidently voted on this proposition, and the chair is not entitled to a vote on an appeal from his own decision. With the vote the chair improperly cast eliminated, the result would be a tie, and therefore the motion would not prevail. Hence my point of order; which amounts to a challenge of the chair's vote."

The Sprague men began to laugh uproariously, and to applaud while Randolph stood in the aisle in his statesmanlike attitude, enjoying his triumph. And as their laugh began to subside Bailey's face wrinkled into a strange annoying smile. His little eyes twinkled.

"The gentleman--from Moultrie--is correct," he began. And there was a shout. He indulged it to the echo, and then went on: "But unfortunately--for the gentleman--from Moultrie, however fortunately--for the chair, this is not--a vote--on an appeal, but--on a motion--to lay--an appeal--on the table. The chair, if not misinformed, has the right--to vote--on all motions--to table;--and on this motion--the chair--votes 'Aye,' the motion prevails, and the appeal--is laid--on the table!"

He swung the gavel up and let it fall, and the Garwood men began to cheer. Randolph looked dazed, and was about to speak. But Bailey, striking order again with his gavel, went on:

"The question--now recurs--upon the motion--of the gentleman--from Polk--that the report--of the committee--be adopted. As many--as favor--the motion--will say--'Aye.'"

There was a mighty shout, "Aye!"

"As many--as are opposed--will vote--'No!'"

The Sprague men yelled "No!"--an equal volume.

"The ayes--seem--to have it," said Bailey, "the ayes--have it, and the motion--prevails."

The gavel fell. The Sprague men sat dumb.

"And the temporary--organization--therefore becomes--the permanent organization--of this convention," said Bailey, speaking as if he were merely resuming some sentence that all the confusion of balloting had interrupted, an interruption to him of no more importance than the pauses he made in his words. Thus the Garwood men secured the control of the convention and won the first round.

XII

The sun poured its rays now on a dead level through the unwashed glass of the western windows; the dust beaten out of the old floor by the stamping feet of Garwood's successful cohorts quivered in its beams. The storm, promised early in the afternoon, had inconsequently vanished after some unvindicated mutterings of its prophetic thunder, and left the town hotter than ever. The air was oppressed with heavy humidity, and the farmer delegates, dreaming vaguely of their corn, beheld it drying in the heat, rattling its yellow leaves. In the crowded court room the delegates languished in their shirt sleeves, the collars of those who still wore collars, wilted into moist and shapeless masses at their throats. The fight had beaten the life out of them, even those who were radiant in victory. Some one, a Sprague man, moved an adjournment. But Rankin frowned and shouted, "No, no," to his followers. He had just then an advantage he did not care to lose. And so, when the motion was put, the Singed Cat, glancing at the solemn judicial clock and seeing that two hours of the afternoon yet remained, declared it defeated, and then he drawled:

"Nominations--of candidates--for representative--in Congress--aire now--in order."

When he had said this, he seemed glad to sit down, though he alone of all the others was unperturbed by that awful heat, and wore his ill-fitting coat as though he would preserve the decorum of the occasion, as Napoleon, for example to his men, wore his uniform buttoned to the chin while he led them across the hot sands of Egypt.

The tired and exhausted delegates settled down gloomily to hear the nominating speeches. Some of them showed an intention of slipping out of the court room, lured by thought of the cooling drafts of beer in the saloons that presented their fronts eagerly to the very face of the temple of Tazewell County justice, but the bosses of either side, fearing some advantage might be taken of their absence, held them to their posts. And so they listened to the impassioned speech into which Randolph was able to work himself in placing in nomination the name of "that profound jurist, that able statesman, that honest man, Conrad Sprague!"

Then followed Dorsey, whom Rankin had chosen for the honor of naming his candidate. Every one knew of course whom Dorsey was presenting, and yet he treasured his name as a hidden surprise for his closing sentence; in which he epitomized him as "the tall Sycamore of the Sangamon, whose eloquence still reverberates in the halls of national legislation, whose fame is growing brighter and fairer as the days go by, in honoring whom the people of the Thirteenth District, representing as it does the pride and glory of central Illinois, are but honoring themselves--that champion of popular rights, that man of the common people, our present representative, the Honorable Jerome B. Garwood!"

There were speeches seconding these nominations, and applause following them, carefully apportioned by the supporters of each, and then when all had done, when every one thought the last word had been spoken, when the Singed Cat had arisen, leaned over the desk and inquired:

"Aire there--any other--or further--nominations?"

Grant Knowlton of Lincoln arose and said:

"Mr. Chairman."

Because it was unexpected, the common phrase fell upon their ears with a dramatic force. The delegates scraped about to face the new speaker.

"The gentleman--from Logan," said the Singed Cat.

"Mr. Chairman," Knowlton began, "and gentlemen of the convention: Old Logan brings you from her ripening corn fields, from her sun-kissed prairies, from her populous towns, the name of her favorite son. She comes, Mr. Chairman, bringing you a man who ranks foremost in the affections of the citizens of the thriving city which the great Emancipator himself laid off with his own chain and compass, that now repose as honored relics in his hallowed tomb in Springfield, the town to which he gave his own name, who has never sought the consideration of his neighbors but has always had it; who stands to-day among her leading men, who, in the great hour of national peril when the skies were dark, went forth to help strike the shackles from the bleeding limbs of four millions of human beings, who has since served his country equally as well if in an humbler capacity."

Knowlton poured forth his sentences so rapidly that the delegates scarce could follow them, and filled with curiosity as they were, they could not determine from his mixed relatives whether he was about to nominate Abraham Lincoln himself, or some man of a later, and if not an abler, at least a livelier generation. The young lawyer felt that he had at last his opportunity, and he was seizing it. He had cleared a space among the chairs about him, and in this he strode back and forth, waving his arms, and shaking his head so fiercely that his black locks flapped, and his face became a mere red blur. The young man had a deep resonant voice, and its tones vibrating to his own passion thrilled at last the hearts of the men who listened, a physical manifestation in which is to be found doubtless the success of much oratory. So he was kept on fire by cheers. But at last, the curiosity to know who was this new Richmond in the field, as Charlie Cowley called him in his despatches the next morning, this new Richmond who took them by such surprise and so thoroughly destroyed their calculations, grew beyond mastery, and the youth's periods were marred by cries of:

"Name him! Name him!"

The interruption did not fluster the young orator. Men all about him were straining to catch the first accents of the name of this dark horse from Logan County, farther away old men placed their hands behind their ears to aid their hearing, still farther off delegates leaned anxiously forward, with brows knit in a painful intensity. Young Knowlton took it all as a tribute to his oratory, and his really fine voice, a voice that would carry any man far in public speaking, rolled to the ceiling of the old court room. The Singed Cat alone remained impassive and cold. Rankin and Randolph stood and hung on his words, trouble written in their faces. But Knowlton was exhausting himself. His deep voice grew husky, the perspiration streamed from his face, his breath came in a vapor from his mouth, hot as the atmosphere was. At last it was plain that he had worn himself out.

"Shall I name him?" he gasped. "Shall I name this peerless son of old Logan, who in every hour of public need has been ready to answer the call of public duty? He is known to you all, he is known to every one in the seven counties that comprise this agricultural empire of the Thirteenth District. Aye, his fame has spread beyond her confines, it is written on the pages where are enrolled the glorious names of those who fought the nation's battles, it is emblazoned in the fair temple of civic triumph. We bring you a leader, Mr. Chairman, to harmonize all your differences, to cement the grand old party for another mighty onward march to victory, who will plant your flag as he has planted that proud emblem of a free people, the glorious stars and stripes, on the ramparts of the routed and flying enemy. Nominate him, gentlemen, and in the Ides of November, when the ballots come

"'down as still As snow-flakes fall upon the sod; But execute a freeman's will As lightning does the will of God,'

he will be found to have been elected."

And Knowlton sank into his chair, gasping for breath, his chest heaving with the violence of his exertion. The delegates looked at him and at one another a moment in surprise, and then they began to cry all at once:

"What's his name?"

"You didn't name him!"

"Give us his name!"

"Name him!"

Knowlton sprang to his feet; for an instant he stood and looked helplessly around. His face flamed a deeper crimson and he said in a hoarse, tired voice:

"Our candidate, gentlemen--his name is General William M. Barrett."

The anti-climax produced a laugh which relieved the tensity of the situation.

Knowlton sank into his chair again and was mopping his neck with his handkerchief. The members of his own delegation pressed about him in congratulation. Moist hands were thrust at him from all sides. Rankin himself strode back and offered his felicitations. Knowlton smiled, and shook his head in depreciation of his own effort. Some one thought to second the nomination of Barrett, and the Singed Cat arose.

"Aire there--any other--or further--nominations?" he asked. "If not--the nominations--aire now--closed. The delegates will prepare their ballots--and the secretary--will call--the roll--of the counties."

The interest tightened. Delegations assembled close to their leaders, and hats were passed for the ballots. The supreme moment had come.

Knowlton thought to create a sensation by his speech; he created a greater by his nomination. The Logan County delegation had been promised to Rankin by Jim O'Malley, but when at the county convention in Lincoln O'Malley had been unable to secure a Garwood indorsement, Rankin had feared the result there, and his fears had been confirmed when he could not induce the full delegation to cast its solid vote for his plan to make the temporary organization permanent. Their action in dividing on that question had placed their twenty-four votes in the doubtful column, and now that they had seen fit to spring a candidate at the last moment, they had injected an uncertain element into the calculations of both sides that perplexed the leaders. Rankin had hoped to hold his eighty-three votes together that afternoon and nominate Garwood on the first ballot. Now he saw that this would be impossible. A long, stubborn fight was before him, and he had a candidate, as he recognized himself, though by no means would he admit it, who would not gain in strength as the hours passed by. At that moment he felt that he was stronger than he ever would be again. That was why he had refused to let the convention adjourn.

General Barrett, whom the Logan County delegation had thus brought out, was, while not all perhaps that Knowlton had described him, nevertheless Lincoln's leading man. He was popular in his own community, he had amassed, if not strictly in his practice of the law, yet in the opportunities that practice opened to him, a comfortable competency. He had gone to Lincoln in an early day; he had led a regiment to the Civil War, and had come out of the army with a clean if not a brilliant record, and in the general distribution of brevets immediately following the close of the mighty conflict he had shared to the extent of an honorary brigadier-generalship. He had then gone home to resume his quiet life, and by carefully pursuing a middle course in all things, and avoiding the making of enemies, he had gradually built up a reputation for honesty and integrity that made him an ideal figure of the colorless, eminently respectable, safe and conservative citizen. He had been a strict, though not an aggressive party man, and whenever Logan County wished a name to juggle with in conventions, they chose the name of General William M. Barrett, knowing that he would not object, and so long as he was not nominated, that no one else could object. He had never been elected to an office of profit, and he had never been an avowed candidate for any, though he had served on the school board and on all the public committees, in addition to being invited to deliver orations on Decoration Day, yet he was ever in a calm and receptive mood, and while Logan County delegations had never gone so far as to nominate him for anything, he seemed never to doubt the sincerity of their support. But there comes a time in the career of the men whose names are continually before conventions when the lightning strikes them, and both Rankin and Randolph saw that the present hour was charged with just such a possibility.

The delegates had voted and now sat awaiting the delivery of the first ballot. Hale began to call the roll of the counties.

"DeWitt?" Hale called.

"Eighteen votes for Conrad Sprague."

"Logan?"

O'Malley was up.

"Mr. Chairman," he said, "on behalf of the solid delegation from Logan County I cast twenty-four votes for General William M. Barrett." O'Malley winked at Rankin as he sat down.

"Mason?"

"Mr. Chairman," cried McKimmon, emulative of O'Malley, "on behalf of the solid delegation from Mason County I have the honor to cast her eighteen votes for our present able congressman, Honorable Jerome B. Garwood!"

And Rankin started a cheer.

"Moultrie?"

Randolph was standing prominently in the middle aisle, or what had been an aisle early in the day.

"Mr. Chairman," he said, in heavy tones, "Moultrie County gives her fifteen votes to our _next_ congressman, Honorable Conrad Sprague."

And then the Sprague delegations cheered.

"Piatt?" the roll-call proceeded.

"Sprague fifteen votes!"

"Polk?"

Rankin had taken a seat, and sat with his fat elbows on his fat knees. He had been keeping the count in his mind, as Randolph had been keeping it on a scrap of paper. He knew what he had, and he knew that when Sprague received the twenty-three votes Pusey would deliver to him, Sprague would be in the lead. Pusey had passed his old straw hat for the ballots, and it had ground Rankin to have to drop his own vote in it, held as it was by the man who now usurped the place in the Polk County delegation he had held for so many years. Pusey arose, and his thin voice piped:

"Mr. Chairman, Polk County casts twenty-two votes for Garwood, and twenty-three for Barrett." Rankin looked up. Randolph, who had been preparing to order a volley of cheers for his candidate, stood stricken dumb. The vote came as a surprise to everybody, but more than all to the Logan County men. They were nonplussed. They had nominated Barrett with a little more, perhaps, than their usual sincerity, but they had merely gone to him temporarily in order to put themselves in a controlling position between the other two candidates. Pusey, who had been counted for Sprague by all, now held the balance of power. Hale looked up as if there had been some mistake. At last Rankin, smiling sardonically, and, as it were, to himself, arose and lumbered into the aisle near Randolph. As he steered past the Sprague leader, still dumbfounded, he said, with no attempt to conceal his words:

"I told you, Hal, you couldn't depend on the little cuss."

The Singed Cat smote his gavel down.

"The convention--will be--in order. Let--the roll-call--proceed."

"Tazewell?"

"Thirty votes for Garwood."

And then while Hale was footing his three little columns, conversation hummed again among the delegates.

Pusey sat quietly tracing his mysterious figures on the floor with the point of his little stick.

Rankin had paused by Hale's table where Cowley sat. Rankin smiled down on the correspondent.

"Case o' buy, heh?" he said. "What?"

Cowley shrugged his shoulders expressively, like a foreigner.

"What?" Rankin repeated, his teeth showing in a broad significant grin.

Hale had written the result on a slip of paper and passed it up to Bailey. The Singed Cat took it, and studied it.

"On this ballot," he began presently, "there have--been cast--one hundred and sixty-five votes; necessary--to a choice, eighty-three. Of these Mr. Garwood--has--received--seventy, Mr. Sprague--forty-eight, and General Barrett forty-seven. No candidate--having received--the necessary number--of votes, there has been--no nomination--and you will, therefore--prepare your votes--for another ballot."

"Mr. Chairman," Rankin said, with a promptness that recognized the change in the situation.

"The gentleman--from Polk."

"Mr. Chairman, I move that the convention do now adjourn until to-morrow morning at nine o'clock."

The motion prevailed. The sun was a red ball, hanging low beyond the river. It seemed that the hour was the hottest of the afternoon. Pusey was sitting there moving his wrinkled jaws and puckered lips over his tobacco, as inscrutably as the Singed Cat himself might have done, had he chewed tobacco. It would take a night to find the bearings that had been lost that afternoon.

XIII

General Barrett, hearing from Pekin that his county's delegation had taken pardonable liberties with his name at the convention, arrived on an evening train, and though his quiescent absence would have suited his supporters better, they welcomed him at the old station with as much enthusiasm as they could generate on so short a notice. The general drove to the hotel in a carriage, and when he entered the office bowed seriously, playing well the part of the distinguished and respectable leader whom the voice of the people had summoned. To Cowley, who interviewed him when his headquarters had been opened, he said solemnly that he was in the hands of his friends, that he considered this a fair field and an open contest, and esteemed his own opportunities to be as favorable as those of either of the other distinguished and able candidates.

All through the hot night the rooms of the three candidates blazed. Delegates hung about them as the nocturnal bugs wheeling in on heavy wing from the darkness outside fluttered around the coal oil lights, though not all of them stuck as closely to the flame that had brought them thither as did those hapless insects whose tragic fate matted their wings at last to the oily glass bowls of the lamps. The general remained in his room, democratically, where all could see him and grasp his hand, and doubtless derived as much satisfaction from these little levees as if he were holding larger and more significant ones. Both Sprague and Garwood had other rooms opening off those where the public were invited to gather and participate freely in the distribution of campaign cigars that stood in boxes on the center tables.

Garwood sat on the tumbled bed in his inner room, pale and haggard. A cigar fumed constantly in his teeth. A tray of whisky glasses lay on the table. With Garwood were Rankin and Bailey. They had gone over the situation again and again. Delegate after delegate had been led in to interview the congressman, every argument, every persuasion, every threat that the three men could devise had been used. But they made no appreciable headway. They had seventy votes and they felt that they could hold them, for Rankin vouched for the twenty-two men from Polk, the Singed Cat was calmly certain of his eighteen votes from Mason, and Hale scouted the idea of any one of the thirty Tazewell fellows failing. The remaining voles were so evenly divided between Garwood's opponents that each would hesitate to go to the other. Any coalition with the Sprague men was impossible; they were as determined as Garwood's own. They must look for strength to the Barrett following. They considered Pusey, and the twenty-three votes he controlled.

"Can't you see him, Jim?" Garwood suggested to Rankin.

The big man spat and shook his head.

"It 'uld do no good fer me to see him. I'd hate to speak to the little cur, anyway."

"Well, look here, Jim, you mustn't let any personal feeling stand in the way of our success," Garwood snarled. He was growing peevish from the heat, the strain, the anxiety. Rankin laughed, as if at the whim of a child.

"Don't worry 'bout me, Jerry," he said. He had dropped back into his own old way of calling Garwood by his familiar name since the contest for renomination had brought the congressman down to the hard earth again. "I'll play my end of the game. Let Zeph here see him."

They considered in turn the twenty-four men from Logan County. O'Malley was sent for, and came, half fearfully, reporting that his hands were tied by the exigencies of affairs in his own county. He was half afraid to be seen at Garwood's headquarters, lest suspicion stab him, though a combination by which Garwood, when he knew his own chances were gone, would throw his strength to Barrett was the one practical thing to do.

With such manoeuvering the night wore away. Garwood could reach no agreement with the Barrett men. Bailey saw Pusey, but the little editor was wily, he was playing some strange game of his own, and he sent word that if Garwood wished to see him, to come himself. What his game was none of them could find out; they did not think him at all sincere in his support of Barrett, and hourly feared that he might draw Barrett's forces into the Sprague column. Meanwhile, Pusey's political attitude was that of one who had simply taken refuge in the peaceful eddy that swam in the wake of Barrett's utter respectability and availability, until some definite turn should be taken by the current. Towards morning some of the tired delegates declared truces, and arranged poker games. Their clicking chips could be heard on all that second floor of the hotel. And some of them went out under the purple sky of a summer night, a sky studded with brilliant stars. Leo was low in the west, the moon swam in a sea of silver along the horizon. They heard the calming voice of insects, they felt the breeze of the night on their brows.

The morning came, with its brazen sky. Once more the white clouds mounted in the west as if trying again for rain, and the day wore on like the one before, without change. The sun blazed on high, seeming to shrink in its own fierce dazzling concentration as it flashed its rays into that hot court room where the convention sat and balloted, one ballot after another, until a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, had been taken, until the floor was strewn with paper and discolored by tobacco, the air heavy with smoke, the feculence of all their breathing, the acrid smell of perspiration. The sky darkened, and those tired men sighed for rain. The thunder rolled down the valley of the Illinois, and then ceased. The sky cleared, and the heat increased. And all the while the ballots which Hale announced were the same:

Garwood Sprague Barrett DeWitt 18 Logan 24 Mason 18 Moultrie 15 Piatt 15 Polk 22 23 Tazewell 30 -- -- -- Totals 70 48 47

XIV

Thursday came and another day with its oppressive heat and even more oppressive suspense wore away; and still another came and wore away like the one before it. The week was marching by, and the delegates were no nearer a choice than when they first began. The convention had taken twelve hundred and sixty ballots; more than had been taken at the Clinton convention two years before. Still the ballot was unchanged, Garwood seventy, Sprague forty-eight, Barrett forty-seven.

Evening came, and the delegates, drawn and spent, refused to hold a night session. They trudged back to the hotel, and resumed the tiresome rounds of the headquarters, the fruitless conferences, the profitless scheming. They gathered in groups in the hotel office, filling the air with their cigar smoke. The noise of conversation ascended to the floors above, but it no longer was lightened by laughter; now it had a harsh, angry note of contest. Surely the strain could not last much longer. It must end as must the insatiable heat.

Up in Garwood's room they had tried all their arts again, and again they had all proved unsuccessful. They had approached Pusey, and he had shuffled away with his impenetrable air, they had sounded the Logan County delegation, but found that the whim which had led it to bring out Barrett had now developed, under the pressure of the long unbroken deadlock, into an unaccountable opposition to Garwood, that had in it all the bitterness of a personal aversion. The Sprague men, of course, were utterly out of the question, and the only consolation they had was that Garwood was still in the lead, and that his delegates, upon being canvassed once more, declared that they would "go down into the last ditch with Jerry." To Garwood it seemed that they were in the last ditch then. Each new step in the hall seemed to him the coming of the news that Sprague and Barrett had coalesced. He felt the need of instant action.

The strain was telling even on Rankin, but he was never idle. Most of the men in Garwood's rooms had visibly relaxed, and some one, feeling no doubt that they were about to settle down to one of those long deadlocks that last for weeks, had suggested a game of poker, and had asked Rankin to join in it.

"No," he said, "I've got my work to do. I must see some fellers to-night. You boys play, though," he added in his kindly way. "The judge here'll play with you. You play, don't you, Zeph?"

"Well," the Singed Cat drawled, "I'm better'n a--green hand."

And so they got out the chips. It all irritated Garwood beyond endurance. He slung on his coat savagely, and seized his hat. For them to sit calmly down to play cards while he was in that clutch of circumstance, was more than he could bear.

"I'm going out awhile," he flung at them.

"That's right, Jerry," said Rankin, "that's the thing for you to do. The exercise'll do you good. I'm goin' to see O'Malley after while--I'll look after things. Stay long's you want."

And Garwood left, swearing. Down the hallway he heard the click of the chips of other games; at Barrett's room he had a glimpse of the old man sitting in all his dignity with some of the boys from Logan County leaning over him. Sprague's door, too, was open; he caught the laughter within, and as he passed, he suddenly beheld O'Malley and Knowlton talking with Randolph. The scene was etched on his mind, the three men standing there in the bright light, the hats of O'Malley and Knowlton thrown back, Randolph bareheaded, his coat and waistcoat off, his long cravat unknotted, and dangling over his soiled bosom. As he passed he heard Knowlton say:

"All right then, Hal."

Garwood hastened on. Hot as the little old hotel was, he broke into a cold sweat. The very thing he had feared was coming to pass! And they were so open about it, too!

His first thought was to turn back and rouse Rankin, but a strange childish fear of Randolph seized him, a morbid dread of being seen by any of his opponents just then, and he kept on.

When he reached the head of the stairs, Garwood saw Pusey shambling across the office, tapping his little cane on the floor, as a blind man might, though he did it meditatively, as if he were striking at the crawling flies instead of the cockroaches from which he was separated. Garwood stiffened at the sight of this old enemy. His breath came fast, his cold sweat was succeeded by a flush of heat, and then:

"Oh, Pusey!" he called.

The editor turned. His quick eye caught the congressman on the stairs.

"Heh?" he said.

Garwood descended, with dignity now, for he was emerging into public view again. The editor drew slowly toward the staircase. They met.

"I'm going for a little walk--thought maybe the night air might refresh me. Care to go along?"

"Don't care if I do," said Pusey.

The office was deserted by all save the landlord who snoozed behind his counter, the insects that buzzed around the lamps, and the flies that walked like somnambulists across the ceiling, and on the walls. The two men sauntered carelessly toward the side door.

Once outside Garwood sniffed in eagerly the night air that bathed his brow.

"Isn't it a bit cooler?" he said.

"Don't know but it is," acquiesced Pusey. "Heat don't bother me much, though."

The sky was black overhead, not a star was to be seen. In the west, now and then, a glare of heat lightning trembled over all the sky, photographing for them instantly the strange roofs, the strange chimneys, the black outline of strange trees, beginning to lurch slowly like elephants, in the little wind that stirred.

"I believe there's a breeze," Garwood said. He was still sniffing the night air like an animal. "Rain, too, in that air, eh?"

Pusey tapped along on the old brick sidewalk with his little stick and said nothing.

"Have a cigar?" said Garwood presently.

"Don't care if I do," said Pusey, throwing away the one he was smoking. They paused, a match scratched on a heel threw the ruddier lightning of its own tiny flame upon their faces and then their cigars glowed in the darkness, and left behind them a fragrance that no other cigar in Pekin could exhale, nor any perhaps, outside a certain cigar store in Pennsylvania Avenue, where Garwood owed a bill.

"Let's go toward the river, Pusey," said Garwood. "I fancy it'll be cooler there."

"Don't care if I do," said Pusey.

* * * * *

The storm had come at last; the long heat was broken. Overhead the thunder pealed up and down its whole wide diapason, booming now and then with new explosions, then rolling away in awful melody into some distant quarter of the broken heavens. The lightning crackled in long streams of fire that zigzagged down the black sky, reaching from heaven to earth, and in its after-glare the clouds that flew so low showed their gray scud. The rain fell with a dead incessant drumming on the earth, warm as new milk, and all green things stirred rapturously as they drank it in.

Down on the banks of the Illinois River Garwood stood and looked on the dark waters. In the constant play of the lightning he saw the trees on the other shore bending their round heads to the wind; he could see even their green leaves distinct in the dazzling white light. He saw once some warm, earthly gleam shining in some window he would never know. He caught now and then the outline of some house-boat, rude dwelling of the river-people, stirring uneasily at its moorings. Once he saw the wild sails of one of the wind mills erected by the German settlers of that region, brought with them, as it were, from their home far across the seas, and once again in a glare more lasting and vivid than any other, he saw a telegraph pole lifting itself for an instant to his vision, spreading its arms, and it reminded him of a cross on a hill, some new Golgotha. He closed his eyes and looked that way no more.

Behind him a crazy street that scrambled up from the water's edge led back to the heart of the town. The small houses showed cheerful lights, now and then a laugh was borne to him from some person humanly glad of the relief the rain had brought. Then, in a fresh illumination, he saw the court house where the fates were playing with him. The storm raged, the lightning raced in sheets of flame along the river, and though the winds lashed the rain up and down its bosom like a broom, the drops fell so heavily that the surface of the waters was smooth and placid as on a summer afternoon, only dimpled with the infinite drops. The congressman stood in the lush wet grass, the water running off his broad hat in little rivulets, but he soaked himself to the skin, and drank in the rain, like all other life about him. He stood there long, as though defying the storm. He folded his arms in tragic attitudes. His thoughts flashed here and there over his whole life, illuminating for him scenes that stood vivid in memory just as the lightning showed him the court house, the trees across the river, the shanty boat, the wind mill, the Golgotha of the telegraph pole. He thought of his first convention, of the day he waited in the Harkness drawing-room and saw old Jasper working in the yard; of that election night in Chicago, of his place in the House at Washington; he thought of Rankin, of his mother, of Emily, of his boy--ah, the boy!

The lightning glared. His eye caught the telegraph pole again, he saw the cross, leaning at an awful angle on the hill; he shuddered and pulled down the brim of his hat and went away.

When he entered the hotel, the new life brought by the rain was apparent in the new energy displayed by the politicians. They had gathered indoors. Garwood heard them joking, he heard them laughing. There was industry everywhere. The headquarters were full. In his own room, the poker game was in progress. The chips clicked merrily. Even Rankin had succumbed and sat at the table, a pile of the red and blue disks before him. His coat and waistcoat and collar, even his shoes, were off; his suspenders hung at his hips, his great body was all relaxed. The windows were open, the dirty curtains streamed on the wind that blew in, and the floor was wet where the rain had sprinkled it unrestrained. Rankin was laughing, joying in the rain.

"Ain't it great?" he said in his bass voice. And he shook himself to relish the sensation of coolness after all the week of insufferable heat.

The Singed Cat sat on a hard, rigid chair, his coat still on, impervious as ever to the little discomforts of life.

"This game," he drawled, raising an eye to Garwood, "seems to be--for the purpose--of determining--whether--these fellows--get my money--or I get their--I O U's."

And the room rang loudly with the laughter.

Garwood stood, dripping with water, and looked at them in wonderment.

"Heat spell's broken," Rankin said presently. "Wisht the deadlock was. Maybe, though, the rain 'ill fetch us luck. What d'ye think, Jerry?"

Garwood looked at him as if he did not know what the man had said.

XV

The storm ceased just before daybreak and the light that slowly spread over the prairie to the eastward suffused a new world. The water dripped musically from the trees, the robins sang, the frogs croaked comfortably along the wet banks of the river, and the morning poured down its green valley an air that sparkled like champagne. The convention met again at nine o'clock, but it seemed another convention. The delegates arrived early, and they, too, seemed to have been made over like the world, for they entered, even the eldest of them, with a new spring in their steps, and it was to be noticed that they had been shaved and wore clean linen.

The court room had been swept of all its litter, and the floor was still damp with the fancy scrolls the janitor had written with water from his sprinkling-can, as if it had been some new kind of fountain pen. The chairs were set in a fine amphitheater, so orderly that the delegates sat down in them carefully, as if, possessed by a new sense of harmony, they feared to destroy the pleasing arrangement of things. Even the cigars they puffed, sending their white smoke gracefully up into the lively air, had gained a fragrance. The delegates had forgotten the animosities of the past few days, and they joked each other as they met again on the old brotherly footing.

Rankin was there with an enormous fresh collar lying down about his neck. He had left off his waistcoat, and the white shirt his wife had packed in his little traveling-bag when he started from home was now at last donned in obedience to her parting mandate, and unhidden as it was, gave to the world a broad and convincing proof of his domestic discipline. Randolph, too, was immaculate, while young Knowlton was almost senatorial in freshly brushed black clothes and linen that had the metallic gloss of the laundry machine on it.

"Well, Jim," Randolph called across the room, "going to withdraw your candidate this morning, ain't you?"

"No, I'm goin' to withdraw yourn."

"What do you say to withdrawing them all and uniting on you? You'd make a noble congressman."

"You bet I would," Rankin responded, "but I couldn't afford to give the job all my time fer the money the's in it."

"Of course not," Randolph flung back at him, "but you might sublet it to me."

"Well, I might git you a job shovelin' wind off the Capitol, only I reckon you wouldn't da'st leave that lucrative law practice o' yourn, heh?"

The delegates around laughed at the old, old jokes with which they chaffed each other.

"What do you say to unitin' on Grant here? That speech o' his t'other day 'uld tease the whole surplus out o' the treasury."

Knowlton blushed. Perhaps his heart swelled for a second at the mere thought, for, like all young lawyers, he had his ambitions, with the dome of the Capitol at Washington in the perspective of his dreams.

But the Singed Cat was leaning over the judge's desk again and his little eyes, out of his thin serious face, swept the circle of chairs before him. His gavel fell.

"The convention--will be--in order," he said in his penetrating voice. And then he paused and looked solemnly about. "The chair--desires to remind--the convention--" he continued, and the delegates looked up in alarm, "that the administration--at Washington--has redeemed--its promise--of prosperity--to the farmer--by sending--the former--and latter rain--upon the earth--in due season, which shows--what the party--can do--in the way--of keeping promises--when it gets--its hand in."

The convention laughed. Men were one with all nature in being glad that morning. Then the chairman continued gravely as before:

"Proceeding upon--the regular order--another ballot--for nomination--of a representative--in Congress--will be taken. Gentlemen--will prepare--their ballots, and the secretary--will call--the roll."

And Hale, for the twelve hundred and sixty-first time, began his monotonous repetition.

"DeWitt?"

"Sprague, eighteen."

The chairmen long ago had ceased to poll their delegations or to make the formal announcements they had found so pleasant when they first began. They had long been answering the roll-call in a fixed perfunctory manner, as a bailiff opens court by a formula that has grown meaningless, and will know no change as long as institutions last.

"Logan?"

"Twenty-four for Barrett."

"Mason?"

"Garwood, eighteen."

Some of the delegates had strolled to the open windows and stood leaning idly on the sills, looking out on the wonderful morning.

"Moultrie?"

"Fifteen, Sprague."

"Piatt?"

"Sprague, fifteen."

"Polk?"

Pusey arose.

"Mr. Chairman," he said in his weak voice. Delegates near him looked up, Randolph crouched like a lynx, then rose on bent knees, with an alert inquiry in his eyes.

"On behalf of the delegation from Polk County," Pusey continued, "I cast the solid forty-five votes for Jerome B. Garwood."

Hale, leaning listlessly on an elbow, his head in his hand, gazing away like an abstracted schoolboy through the open windows as if the woods and fields beckoned him from irksome routine tasks, had been calling the roll from memory, and keeping no tally, for he knew the formula perfectly by this time. But he looked up, startled. Rankin tilted back in his chair, let it come down suddenly, its legs striking the floor with a bang; his jaw fell. Knowlton sprang to his feet, his face written all over with surprise, and Randolph, his eyes ablaze, quickly straightening his legs and raising himself on his toes broke the startled stillness by crying excitedly:

"Mr. Chairman!"

There was a scraping of chairs, a hum of voices, that ascended immediately to a roar, and then a score of men began to shout crazily:

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!"

Pusey had seated himself, he was as indifferent as ever. And Rankin could only stare at him in stupefaction.

The Singed Cat alone was unmoved by the startling climax to all those withering days of heat and suspense. He hammered the desk with his gavel and said:

"The convention--again--will be--in order. Let the roll-call proceed."

And Hale called loudly amid the din that would not subside:

"Tazewell?"

The chairman of that delegation shouted:

"Thirty votes for Garwood!"

The staid old court room with all its traditions of the dignity of judicial proceedings was in an uproar. The whole convention was on its feet, everybody was calling: "Mr. Chairman." From without, men to whom had been borne by some occult transmission of intelligence the news of that, the final moment, crowded breathlessly into the room. The belief that the morning was cool had been a delusion. Now that the peace induced by universal harmony had been marred, men began to perspire, to grow red in the face; the atmosphere in an instant had become stifling. The Garwood men had begun to cheer. The Sprague men and perhaps the little group of Barrett's supporters, foiled in whatever their original purpose had been, realized that they were defeated, and they raged impotently. Hale was hurriedly casting up his easy sum, and when he handed the slip to Bailey his heart leaped with the thought that at last the Pekin post-office was his.

The Singed Cat deliberately studied his figures, and his deliberation, with the power of the definite announcement that was pending, compelled a sudden quiet his gavel had theretofore been unable to invoke. And at last, in the suspense which was all fictitious, the product of the Anglo-Saxon mania for legal forms, he said:

"Upon this ballot. General William M. Barrett--has received--twenty-four votes," it was seen that he was reversing the order for its effect, "Conrad Sprague--forty-eight, and Jerome B. Garwood--ninety-three. Mr. Garwood--having received--the necessary number--and a majority--of all--the votes--cast--is therefore--declared--to be--the nominee--of the convention--for Representative--in Congress--for the Thirteenth District--of Illinois--for the term--beginning--the fourth day--of March--ensuing."

The strain was over, the long pent-up emotions of the seventy men who had stood solidly for Jerry Garwood, and now had won victory at last, broke forth, and they flung their hats into the air, tore off their coats to wave aloft, brandished chairs, and pounded one another on the back, yelling all the time. The followers of Sprague yelled no less excitedly, though their rage was that of defeat. Randolph strode to where Hale was sitting, his mouth stretched wide in a demented yell, and pounded the table with his fist, crying unceasingly:

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!"

The Singed Cat stood leaning as he had leaned for days, with his eyes upon the desk he had scarred with his gavel. For ten minutes, and it seemed an hour, the men howled, until exhausted by the exertion and the excitement, their voices failed, and they collapsed into their chairs. But Randolph, in the approximate order which the exhaustion brought about, continued to cry, until at last the Singed Cat's voice pierced to all the corners of the court house.

"The convention--will be--in order! The convention--has not--yet adjourned. There is--still--work--to be done."

But Randolph continued to cry.

"Gentlemen--will resume--their seats," Bailey said, "before--they can--be recognized."

Randolph hesitated, though still he cried:

"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!"

But Bailey's eye forced him backward to his place, and when he had retreated to the midst of the Moultrie County delegation the chairman said:

"The gentleman--from Moultrie."

"Mr. Chairman," Randolph said, and the convention, supposing he was about to observe custom and move to make the nomination unanimous, listened. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "I challenge the vote of the Polk County delegation."

"The gentleman--from Moultrie--is out--of order," the Singed Cat promptly ruled. "None--but a member--of the Polk County delegation--can challenge--its vote."

The Sprague men seemed about to gather themselves for another noisy protest, but interest had suddenly veered to the Logan County delegation. There a consultation was in progress, hurried and eager, and out of it Knowlton arose, and his splendid bass voice boomed:

"Mr. Chairman!"

"The gentleman--from Logan."

"Mr. Chairman, I move you, sir, that the nomination of Jerome B. Garwood be made unanimous."

He had seized the only little chance that remained of identifying his delegation with the success of the nominee. The band wagon had taken them by surprise and rolled by too swiftly for them to climb in.

"The gentleman--from--Logan--moves--to make--the nomination--of the Honorable--Jerome B. Garwood--for candidate--for the office--of Representative--in Congress--unanimous," said the Singed Cat, yielding not a word of all his formula. "Those in favor--will say--'Aye.'"

The motion carried, of course, though not without a great shout of "Noes" from the little band of Sprague men, who had gathered about their leader, looking defiance out of their defeat. The Garwood men had wrung the moist hand of Pusey, but it was Rankin whom they selected for the center of their celebration. As they crowded about him, they pommeled him, pulled him, screamed in his ears; they would have liked to toss him to their shoulders, but he was too big to be moved. He could only sit in the midst of all their clamor, and stare in wonder and amaze at Pusey. He, to whom all the credit for the victory was ascribed could not understand it, that was all. But presently when he heard his name mentioned officially, he stirred. Knowlton had moved that a committee be appointed to wait on Garwood and inform him of his nomination, and what Rankin heard was the voice of Bailey saying:

"And the chair--appoints--as members--of the committee--Messrs. Knowlton of Logan--Randolph of Moultrie--and Rankin of Polk."

The committee found their nominee in his room at the hotel. He was sitting calmly by his open window looking into the green boughs of the elm trees that grew along that side of the old hostelry. An open book lay on his knee, and having calmly called "Come in!" in answer to the knock at the door, he looked up as they entered, as if they had interrupted the meditations of a statesman.

"Ah, gentlemen," he said, rising.

He laid his book aside and stepped softly toward them. Rankin saw at once the change that was on him. His hair was combed, his face shaven, his long coat brushed, and he had donned a fresh white waistcoat. As Rankin noted these details, a pain pinched his heart, for he deduced from them that there was no surprise in store for Garwood. Ordinarily he would have been the first to speak, he would have rushed forward, and seized the hand of his candidate, and exulted in his frank and open way, but now the words he had were checked on his lips, and he remained dumb, growing formal as the sensitive will. Thus it was left for Knowlton, for Randolph had no stomach for the job, to say, as he held forth his hand:

"Mr. Garwood, let me be the first to congratulate you on your nomination."

Garwood smiled, and took Knowlton's hand.

"Gentlemen, I thank you," he said. He gave his hand to Randolph, and last of all to Rankin.

"Ah, Jim, old fellow," he said.

But he did not meet Rankin's eye.

"The convention is waiting for you, Mr. Garwood," said Knowlton, and the nominee answered:

"Ah, indeed? I shall be glad to accompany you."

The citizens at the door of the court room for whom a representative in Congress had just been chosen, parted to let them pass, but they did not cheer. They accepted their character of mere spectators, and seemed to feel that they had no right to disturb the proceedings by any demonstration of their own. But the slight commotion they made had its effect within, and the waiting delegates turned their heads to catch a glimpse of their coming congressman. He walked down the aisle on the right arm of Knowlton; Randolph and Rankin came marching behind. The Garwood men began to clap their hands, they stamped their feet, and at last they lifted up a shout, and so, marching erect among them, his face white, his brows intent and his fixed eyes brilliant with excitement, Garwood walked the short way to the front. The Singed Cat met him at the steps of the rostrum, and having taken his hand, raised him to the judge's place, and said:

"Gentlemen of the convention, I have the honor--to present to you--your nominee--and next congressman--the Honorable--Jerome B. Garwood."

Bailey faded into the judge's chair, and Garwood, slowly buttoning his coat, stood and looked over the body of delegates. He began to bow. It was Hale now who led the applause, not Rankin, and he kept them at it by sheer force of the persistence with which he clapped his own hands, not giving in until he felt that the enthusiasm did justice to the candidate, to his victory, and to the occasion. The Sprague men sat silent, no sound came from their quarter.

Garwood bowed in his stateliest way to the Singed Cat as he said: "Mr. Chairman," and he bowed again to his audience as he added, "and gentlemen of the convention." And then he made his speech.

He would not detain them long at that time, he said, as if, at some future day, they might expect to be held indefinitely. But he detained them long enough to assure them how impossible it was for him to find words in which to express his thanks for the confidence they had reposed in him, and his warm appreciation of the honor they had conferred upon him. He referred to his past services in their behalf, and in behalf of the party, and he put the responsibility for his success upon them by saying that future victories could only come through their united efforts, as if he were making a sacrifice for their sake in consenting to be their candidate at all.

He spoke with the customary assumption that his nomination had come entirely unsought, but he made them feel his devotion by the willingness with which he assured them he would bear their banner that fall, and he graciously promised to give his entire time from then until November to the election of the whole ticket. Then in briefly reviewing the services and the sacrifices of the late Congress, he repeated, though with a fine extemporaneous effect, the best sentences of his speech at Washington, and quoted readily for them the most impressive statistics of imports and exports, which they did not at all understand, and as if these figures had fully vindicated the wisdom of their party's policy on the tariff question, he predicted that the scepter of commercial empire was even then passing into the hands of the United States.

He did not forget the old soldiers, nor their pensions, neither did he neglect to pay most generous tributes to the distinguished gentlemen whose names had been mentioned in connection with the high office to which he had been nominated. He seemed almost to regret that they had not been chosen in his place, such were their superior merits and nobler virtues. And thus by an easy oratorical circuit, he came around to where he had begun, and thanking his fellow countrymen again, bowed and smiled, and turned to receive the congratulatory hand of the Singed Cat.

When the applause which Hale had loyally started had ended, there were cries for Sprague, but as Sprague was not there, an awkward pause was prevented by a prompt change in the burden of the cry, which now became a demand for Barrett. From some immediate vantage point the general was conjured forth, and made his speech, thanking his friends, congratulating his opponents, and extolling the party they unitedly represented, as if he were as well satisfied with defeat as he would have been with victory. He smiled complacently behind his white beard, and he left the rostrum with his dignity and respectability unimpaired.

And the convention was over.

XVI

Saturday evening Emily had a telegram from Garwood announcing his nomination. The message might have come to her Saturday noon, but Garwood had found the delegates for the most part in mood for celebration, while he himself in the reaction of his spirit, was not disinclined that way. He held a levee in his rooms reveling in felicitations and when this was done, he suddenly thought of the Sprague men, smarting under defeat. They must not be allowed to depart for home nursing their sores, and Garwood made it a point to see them, or to have Rankin see them, and check in its incipiency a contagion that might plague him in the fall. So it was evening before he thought to wire his wife, and it was late in the night before he took the train for Lincoln, where he was to change cars for home, leaving the little old German town to settle to its normal quiet for Sunday morning.

Emily, with the knowledge of politics that politicians' wives acquire, had watched from day to day the development of the contest at Pekin. Jerome had not written at all, but Emily chose to consider his failure as an exercise of one of the privileges of matrimony to which lovers look forward as they labor over their love letters. But she added a second reason which betrayed the specious quality of the first, when she explained to her father that in these days of newspapers, letter writing had become a lost art, belonging to a lavender scented past like the embroidery of tapestries. She told her baby, as she rolled his round little body in her lap, that she was jealous of politics, and promised him that when the convention was over, his father would be--and here she gasped and dropped the pretense that the child could understand. She could not bear to voice, even to herself, the feeling that her husband was any less the lover that he once had been. She realized to the utmost his position, she had felt it in little sacrifices she had been compelled to make, and she knew of his utter dependence on reëlection. Here, too, was another fact that she could hardly face squarely and honestly. She clung to her old ideal of her husband as a statesman no less ardently than she clung to her old ideal of him as a lover, and she disliked to feel that he was in Congress merely as a means of livelihood. A vague discontent floated nebulously within her, but with all the adroitness of her mind she would not allow it to concrete.

"When he comes home!" she cooed to the baby, "when he comes home!"

By Saturday, the strain upon her nerves had increased, like all anxieties, in a ratio equal to the square of the distance from its moving cause. All day long she waited for news, hoping for the best, but fortifying herself by trying to believe that if the worst came, it might in the end be beneficial, because it must in time, at least, force them to some more secure temporal foundation, where they could not be disturbed by every whim of politics. She remembered that Jerome had often reminded her, though that was in moments of security and elation, that all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Her father himself suffered a sympathetic suspense and in the afternoon he journeyed down town to see if he could learn anything of what was going on at Pekin. Late in the day the _Citizen_ hung out a bulletin saying that Garwood had been nominated on the twelve hundred and sixty-first ballot, and he hastened home, with the importance of an idle old man, longing to be the first to announce to Emily the news. But she waved her telegram gaily at him from the veranda as he hurried up the walk, and cried:

"He's won, father! He's won! He's just been nominated!"

The old man, cheated of a herald's distinction, could not resist the impulse to say:

"Why, he was nominated this morning!"

She felt a pang at these tidings of her husband's tardiness, but she put that away in the habit she had acquired, and said:

"Oh, I know--but these telegraph companies are so slow!"

She was happy all that evening, though she denied that her own relief as to their position had aught to do with that happiness.

"He will be much more useful this term than he was before," she told her father at supper. "Jerome always said, you know, that it took one term for a congressman to learn the ropes at Washington."

Garwood reached home Sunday morning, and when he saw Emily waiting in the doorway something like pity for her smote him, and out of the flush of his new success he yearned toward her, so that, there in the old darkened hallway where the tender scene had been enacted so many times in other days, he folded her in his arms, and kissed her lips and her brow and her hair, and called her once more "Sweetheart." And the happy little woman purred in his embrace, and as she hid her face against his breast, she said:

"My Jerome--my big Jerome!"

And it was all as it had been two years before. Only now, lifting her eyes to his, her face reddened with a blush as she said:

"You must come up and tell baby--he is dying to hear all about it."

Emily vowed to Garwood that now the convention was over he must take a rest, and he was content for days to loll at home. He slept late in the morning and she bore his breakfast to him with his mail, or he stretched himself on the divan in the parlor in the afternoon while she read the newspapers to him until he would sink into slumber with the assurance that the room would be darkened and the house hushed until he chose to wake.

Pusey had nailed the party banner to his masthead as it were, and Emily read to Garwood with a laugh that could not conceal her pride the big types at the head of his editorial page:

"For Congress, Jerome B. Garwood."

There day after day it remained, and she read it over and over, finding a certain joy in it. Pusey had printed a long editorial announcing his determination to support Garwood, and explaining with the conviction of the editorial page--where the argument is all one way, with no chance for rejoinder--his own action in voting for the candidate he had originally opposed.

"He isn't really consistent, is he, Jerome?" Emily said after she had read the editorial aloud to her husband.

"Oh, well," he laughed, knocking the ashes from the cigarette he was smoking, in a security he could find nowhere else in Grand Prairie, for he did not wish the town to know that he smoked cigarettes, "you know what Emerson says: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'"

"Yes, I remember," the wife replied. "We used to read Emerson, didn't we?" Her words breathed regret. "We never read any more. We seem to have no time for anything but newspapers." And she looked askance at the disordered pile of them on the floor, and out of a sense of guilt reduced them to smaller compass.

"I wonder how Mr. Rankin did it?" she mused a moment after.

"Did what?"

"Why, induced Mr. Pusey to vote for you."

"Rankin?" said Garwood.

"Why, yes. He did, didn't he? I thought he did everything for you."

Garwood sneered.

"Rankin did nothing!" he said, "Rankin's what the boys in Chicago call a selling plater."

"Why, I thought he did everything!" Emily repeated. "Who did then?"

"I reckon I had as much as anybody to do with it."

"You?"

"Yes. Why not?"

"But how?"

"Oh--I took him for a walk one night--the night it stormed. Did it storm here?"

"Oh, fearfully; in the early morning--awfully! But tell me--how did _you_ do it?"

Garwood laughed.

"Oh, I just talked to him."

"Did you persuade him--convince him?"

"Evidently."

Emily was silent for a moment, and her brows were knit.

"I hope--" she began, but checked herself. "I've often thought," she said, beginning over, "that we ought to have Mr. Rankin and his poor little wife here to dinner. I feel guilty about them. You--we--will be good to them, won't we?"

Garwood laughed again.

"You needn't worry about Jim Rankin," he said, "though I don't know that I owe him much after his letting the delegation here in Polk get away from me. I had a hard time licking it back into line."

It was several days after that Cowley published an article in the Chicago _Courier_ which told of the tremendous promises that had been made at Pekin in exchange for votes. He said that Garwood had shown himself a clever politician, for he had not only been able to hold up most of the appointments in his district until after his second nomination, but he had had the help of the administration's influence at Pekin. Cowley then proceeded to schedule the distribution of patronage that would be made; Hale for the post-office at Pekin, Bailey for Speaker of the House, and Rankin, of course, for the post-office at Grand Prairie. He could not dispose of Pusey as definitely, but it was not to be supposed that Pusey had gone to Garwood and saved him from political oblivion for nothing at all.

Emily read the article aloud to Jerome. He knew by her silence when she had finished that questions were forming in her mind. She set her lips and began shaking her head, until she produced a low "No, I don't like that."

"That New England conscience of yours troubling you again?" asked Garwood.

"I wish we had more New England conscience in our politics!" she replied with a wife's severity.

"We've got enough of New England in our politics now!" Garwood said, with a flare of the western animosity to New England's long domination of public affairs.

"Well," she persisted, and he saw that her lips were growing rigid, "I think we need conscience in our politics, whether it's New England or not."

Garwood laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. "I'm afraid it wouldn't win. A conscience, Emily, is about as great an impediment to a practical politician in these days as it is to a successful lawyer."

"Don't be cynical, Jerome," she pleaded. And she thought again.

"Did you promise Hale the post-office for getting you those Tazewell County votes?"

"Of course I did," said Garwood, "what of it?"

"I don't like it," said Emily.

"You don't?"

"No, dear, I don't."

"What would you have me do? Give it to some fellow over there who was against me?"

"N-n-n-no," she said, "but--"

"But what?" he went on. "You liked it when I told you I was going to--take care of Rankin, didn't you?"

"That's different," she said.

"Oh, a woman's logic!" he laughed.

"You don't believe in buying votes, do you, Jerome?" she asked, with her lips still tense so that they showed a little line of white at the edges of their red.

"No."

"But you do believe in buying them with offices. What's the post-office at Pekin worth?"

"Oh, eighteen hundred, I reckon."

"Eighteen hundred--for four years; let's see--four eights--thirty-two; hum-m-m, four ones--three--seven; seven--thousand, isn't it?"

"Well, you're not very good at figures, but you've nearly hit it--within two hundred."

"I never could multiply in my mind," Emily confessed. "But you wouldn't think it right to give a man seven thousand dollars in money for a delegation from the county, would you?"

"No," Garwood answered, "that's too high. You're getting into senatorial figures now." He laughed again.

"Do be serious, Jerome. I don't see the difference myself."

"No, a woman couldn't--women never could understand politics, anyhow."

"Well, I understand this--that I have learned a good deal about politics, and my ideas have been changed. I used to think that in this country the people arose and elected their best man to represent them, but it seems that the representative elects himself, and then the people--"

"Don't you think the people out here elected their best man when I went in?" Garwood asked, with an honest laugh in his eyes.

She bent over impulsively and kissed him.

"Yes, I do," she said, "but I'm speaking generally now."

"No, you're not," Garwood insisted, "women can't speak generally. It's always a personal, concrete question with them."

"Well, you know, Jerome, I've had my ideals--in politics, too, since you interested me in politics."

"You weren't interested in politics, you were interested in one politician, and that politician was--me."

"Well, you--you were my ideal, and I thought of you as I thought of Patrick Henry, in the old Virginia House of Burgesses, and--"

"Oh, you haven't thought deeply enough, my dear. Patrick had his own troubles, believe me, though they didn't get into history. Did you ever stop to inquire how Patrick got to the House of Burgesses? It was easy enough to make speeches after he was there--that was the easiest part of it--but the getting there, it wasn't all plain sailing then. First he had the devil's own time getting on the delegation himself, then after he'd made himself solid, by supporting other men awhile, he had another time rounding up delegations that would support _him_, and there was many a man in Virginia that day, whose name is lost in darkness, who was ag'in him, and many another who went out and saw the boys and set up the pins and got the right ones on the delegation, who was thinking of some fat job in that same House of Burgesses. And take any other of the white statuesque figures of those heroic times--"

"Oh, no, Jerome, don't--you're too much of an iconoclast. Leave me my ideals. There's the baby!"

She arose at the premonitory whimper that a mother's ear detected.

XVII

Rankin returned to Grand Prairie, from the convention, in a state of mental numbness. The thing he had gone to Pekin to do had been done, and yet he did not know how it had been done. Every one greeted him as the author of Garwood's fortunes; his latest with the rest, and he was forced to accept congratulations to which he did not feel himself entitled. As the days went by and he saw Garwood's name at the head of Pusey's editorial column, and read Pusey's articles favoring Garwood's election, he was more than ever at a loss to account for the anomalous situation in which he found himself. Sometimes he had his doubts, for he was old enough in political ways to have acquired the politician's distrust, and what with the whisperings of friends and the articles he had read in other newspapers he suffered a torment of suspicions which were the more agonizing because of the wrong he subconsciously felt they did Garwood. At last he went to him.

With the small energy the morning could revive in him, Rankin mounted the stairs to Garwood's office. Garwood was opening a congressman's mail, always large, and he looked up from his pile of letters and greeted Rankin with a--

"Well, Jim?"

Rankin, as he sat down, was sensible of the change that had come over their relations, and he grieved for the old days when he had been able to enter this office with so much more assurance. But he was not the man to dally long in sentimentalities, and he said, when he had settled into the chair and mopped his brow:

"Jerry, I've come to have it out."

Garwood unfolded the letter he had just taken from its envelope. His face reddened as he bent over to read it, and he did not turn around.

"Have what out, Jim?" he asked, quietly.

"Why," Rankin went on, "this misunderstanding."

"What misunderstanding? I don't know what you mean. Explain yourself." Garwood kept on tearing open his letters.

"Oh, well," Rankin continued, "you know it hain't all like it used to be, that's all. I don't know how to say it--I just feel it, but it's there, an', damn it, I don't like it."

Rankin paused, and then when Garwood did not reply, he went on:

"I reckon it's 'cause o' my fallin' down in the county convention here 't home, an' that's all right; I don't blame you fer feelin' sore. Course, it come out all right over at Pekin--I don't know how it was done, an' I don't know as I want to know--I know I didn't have nothin' to do 'ith it, an' I don't claim none o' the credit, ner want it. I 'as glad you won out, glad as you was. I'd 'a' give my right arm clean up to the shoulder to've brought it 'bout fer you myself. I didn't do nothin', I know. I felt kind o' paralyzed all the time over there, after losin' the delegation here, an' I seemed to myself jus' to be standin' roun' like any other dub that 'as on the outside. I didn't feel _in_ it, somehow, an' I don't feel in it now, that's what's the matter. I've al'ays been with you, Jerry, an' you know it, an' I'm with you now, but they're tellin' strange stories 'roun', an' I don't like 'em, an'--I jus' want to know where I stand 'ith you, that's all."

Garwood wheeled about in his swivel chair. He looked at Rankin a moment and then he smiled. And when he had smiled, he leaned comfortably back in his chair and placed the tips of his fingers together over his white waistcoat, and then he spoke at last, in his softest voice:

"What is it, Jim, that worries you--the post-office?"

Rankin looked him straight in the eyes.

"No, Jerry," he said, "it ain't so much that. I want it, o' course, you know how I need it, an' I want it more'n ever jus' now, but I ain't worried so much about that. I've got your word, an' I know you never went back on it yet, to a friend, though you know, Jerry, that if it 'uld help you any, you could have your promise back, an' give the post-office where it 'uld do the mos' good. You know all you'd have to do 'uld be to say the word, don't you?"

Garwood smiled again and leaned forward in his chair and laid one of his white hands on Rankin's fat knee.

"Why, my boy," he said, "you've been giving yourself a great deal of unnecessary trouble. You know me, don't you?"

"Why, sure," assented Rankin.

"Well, you ought to," added Garwood, still smiling blandly, and a slight reproach was in his tone. "You should have known, Jim, that I realized you had done all in your power. I never for an instant blamed you; believe me when I say that. It only occurred to me that I could handle the little affair over at Pekin better than you could. I knew that you could never come at Pusey; I knew that you two never could agree in a thousand years, so I just took hold of it myself--not with very much hope, I confess, but I thought it worth trying. And luckily it came about all right in the end."

"It's all right, it's all right, Jerry," Rankin protested, waving his hand assuringly toward Garwood. "I only wanted to know that you felt all right about it, that's all." His great red face smiled on Garwood like a forgiven boy's. But suddenly it hardened again into the face of a man.

"You were right--I couldn't 'a' done nothin' 'ith Pusey, damn him. My way's different from yourn. Maybe yourn's right. You believe in conciliatin' 'em; I believe in killin' 'em off. An' your way won, that's all. What 'id you have to promise him?"

Garwood was leaning back again, and had pressed the tips of his fingers together.

"Jim," he said, beginning slowly, "I've learned a good deal about politics. I learned a good deal from you, and I picked up a good deal down at Washington during the session, and the chief thing I've learned is to go slow on promises. I told him, of course, that I'd take care of him. I told him that there was no use in our being enemies, none whatever; that we could just as well work together for the party's good, and accomplish more that way than by keeping up a bitter factional war here in the county, because the first thing we knew we'd wake up some cold morning in November to find that the other fellows were all in and we were all out."

Rankin's gaze was fixed afar. His brows had knitted themselves into a scowl.

"You had to tell him that, did you?"

"I did tell him that, yes. Why?"

"Well--I don't jus' like this thing o' gettin' thick 'ith him, so sudden, that's all. Who's goin' to run the campaign fer you this time?"

"Why, who would run it but you?"

"Me?" said Rankin, smiling again all over. "You want me? An' what's Pusey goin' to have to do?"

"Oh, we'll let him print editorials," laughed Garwood.

"That's all right," said Rankin, "jus' so's I don't have to see him, that's all."

Garwood scrutinized Rankin closely an instant, and once more he leaned over in his persuasive way and laid his hand on Rankin's knee.

"Look here, Jim," he said, "I want you and Pusey to be friends."

Rankin shrank from the thought.

"Yes, you must--now listen to me--I demand it. I want no mistakes made. I want you all to work harmoniously this fall, and a little ill-feeling right here in our camp may beat us. We've got a fight on our hands; I'm half afraid of those Sprague fellows. They'll have their knives out, and we've got to hold together; above all we've got to keep Pusey in line, for the Sprague fellows here don't feel any too good about his having come over to me, and Pusey has a following. More than that, he's got a newspaper, and he can make it tell. We've got to keep in with him, and I want you to patch up a truce with him. You must, do you hear?" Garwood gave Rankin's knee a shake. "Do you hear?"

"Well, if you say so, Jerry," he consented presently, "it'll have to be. Whatever you say goes, o' course, but the truce'll be a damned sight more out'ard than in'ard 'ith me, I tell you that."

"No, you mustn't feel that way, Jim; you mustn't."

"Well, my God, Jerry!" Rankin exclaimed, "it 'as fer your sake that I got to hatin' him like I do, though I never did like the little whelp. Gosh! It did gall me to have to sit in a convention beside him an' hear him announce the vote fer Polk County! I never thought I'd live to see the day when little Free Pusey could get on a Polk delegation, I didn't!"

And he shook his head as one who bewails the evil times on which he has fallen.

"Well, for my sake, then, make up with him. I don't cherish any ill-will towards him, Jim." Garwood said this with a swelling air of magnanimity as if he had attained to heights of charity known only to the early Christian martyrs.

"You never was a good hater, Jerry," said Rankin, as though it were a virtue to be as consistent and steadfast in hatreds as in friendships.

XVIII

The August sun was ripening the corn, and in some of the more fertile fields the slender stalks already nodded their young plumes in the mid-summer heat that quivered over the prairies. It was too much to expect of politicians that they work in such weather, and they were loath to begin the campaign, yet it was necessary to make the first lazy preparations for the heavy work that would be upon them when the frost should begin to hint of coming fall.

Garwood was understood to be resting at home, and it was rumored that he would go away for a while and recuperate in the East, where, as it appears to men in the West, there is rest for the weary. He had in reality the natural reluctance to beginning a long contemplated and difficult task that the lesser politicians felt, though he had so much more at stake than they. Yet he would not have liked the boys to be as apathetic as he, and in a dim recognition of this fact he bestirred himself one day and went down to see Pusey. Thereupon Pusey began to write in his paper of the dangers of apathy and over-confidence, rallying the party by sternly telling it that the mere fact of its dominance in the Thirteenth District did not justify its lay members in staying at home and trusting to others to pull it through. This effort satisfied Garwood for a time, and he loafed on through August and then said to Rankin:

"Oh, wait till the middle of September, and then give them six weeks of a rattling fire all along the line."

"Yes," said Rankin, "we don't want to tap our enthusi'sm too soon, an' have it give out on us the way ol' Bromley's bar'l did. Gosh! Didn't he freeze up them last two weeks, though!"

They laughed at the pleasing memories of it.

"Damned if I didn't like that campaign," Rankin went on. "Never enjoyed one more'n my life, though I've had some hot ones in my time. That story, now, that Pusey printed 'bout you--'member how skeered we was? An' you 'member them things o' Bromley's--what was they?--kind o' night shirts, now--heh?--oh, yes! Well, sir, you'd ought to heerd the kids I'd planted in the gallery that night when Bromley come on to the stage." And Rankin reared back, and roared and slapped his thigh. "By the way, what's come o' Bromley? I never hear o' him any more, do you?"

"Oh, yes," said Garwood, with his large air of a knowledge of affairs, and then, too, with the pride of a man who doesn't wish his opponent belittled, especially after he has defeated that opponent. "I hear of him frequently. He's general counsel for his road now, and lives in Chicago."

"Oh, yes, believe I did hear somethin' o' that," said Rankin, nodding his head. "He went up there same's all the rest o' the judges from the country does. They get elected to the County Court down here, which gives them the title o' judge, then when they come off, an' have to go to work again, they go up to Chicago an' practise on the title. After they've been there 'bout two years people begin to b'lieve they 'as judges o' the _Supreme_ Court." Rankin paused in his philosophizing, and then resumed, quite seriously: "Don't know but what Bromley give you a better run at that than this here young Wetherby 'ill do."

"Do you know him?"

"Oh, I've seen him onct or twict over't Sullivan. He's just a young lawyer, an' he knows 'at if the' 'as any chanct o' his winnin' he'd never been nominated."

September came, but the weather remained as hot as ever. Rankin declared that the mere prospect of cool weather held out by the almanac made him feel better, though he believed that the almanac ought to be revised, for he was certain the seasons were changing in Illinois. As a boy he had always gone skating on Thanksgiving, he said, but now the cold weather never came until after New Year's. And he remembered, too, that the girls always wore white dresses and gave a May-pole dance on the first day of May. "But nowadays," he explained, "they'll have to hop roun' in Galway overcoats if they wanted to celebrate that day, an' as fer summer--well, it keeps hotter'n the hinges o' hell right up to November, But politics is politics, an' I must be gettin' a move on me."

Rankin roused at last, and called a meeting of the congressional committee. The members, newly chosen at the Pekin convention, came to Grand Prairie and met in the office of the county treasurer, and there, under the blazing gas jets and with the blinds closed, they began to organize Garwood's campaign.

Rankin and Pusey had long ago shaken hands, Garwood standing by with the beatific glow of the peacemaker, though all the while the look in Rankin's eyes was hard as ever, and Pusey's smirk was unchanged. Pusey attended the meeting of the congressional committee, even if he was not a member, and the others were pleasantly stimulated by the prospect of a disagreement between him and Rankin. But the editor maintained a perfect silence the whole evening, never vouchsafing one suggestion, but acquiescing in all that was done, if not by voting, which would have been impertinent, at least by respectfully nodding his head.

And if, later, when the county central committee, of which Pusey was now the chairman, met, Rankin did not return his call, as it were, by reciprocally attending the meeting, he at least found business that took him out of town, over to Mason County, and thereby deprived the alert editor of the _Advertiser_ of the ground work of a story that would have served him for every dull hour of an unusually dull campaign. It was perhaps well for Garwood, considering the strained relations between his two chief supporters, that this was a dull campaign. He found it much less trying than the first. There was not so much for him to do, and what there was he could enjoy in a more leisurely manner. It was the off year, in which the people, unable to work themselves up to the pitch of excitement required of them in presidential years, leave politics to the politicians even more than they ordinarily do. The stripling from Moultrie County who was running against Garwood seemed far beneath his notice, except when he chose in his speeches to patronize him. His own acquaintance had grown wider, there were many to welcome him everywhere he went, and they liked the distinction of knowing their congressman and of calling him "Jerry." Garwood loved to bask in their smiles, to revel in the sensation of personal popularity, and it became more and more easy to convince himself that he was a genuine man of the people. There was another new feature in this campaign that he enjoyed. He was enabled in his speeches to speak familiarly of Washington, of things that were done and said in the House, and to relate personal anecdotes of noted men, to whom it was apparent he could talk in a free colloquial way, that were almost as delightful to his auditors as to himself.

"I suppose, now that it is all over," he would say, "that I betray no confidence in telling you that one afternoon when I had gone over to the White House and was waiting there in the ante-chamber to see our great president, that he spied me among the others--Senator Ames was there with me--and, coming over to where we stood, said: 'Jerry, you're just the fellow I wanted to see--'"

It was not necessary that year for him to defend his own record. He could submerge his political individuality into that of the responsible administration and make his speeches, like all the other speeches delivered that fall, or any fall, by men striving to retain seats in Congress, mere efforts to explain why Congress had not done what the platform of two years before promised it would do.

As a congressman, too, he could enjoy the importance of giving his time to the state committee, and of delivering speeches in other districts in Illinois, and once he even went beyond the borders of his own state, and journeyed over into Ohio, where he spoke in the Dayton District for his friend Whiteside, who sat beside him in the House. This experience he relished more than all the others, for the Dayton people, not sure of his exact position among public men, determined to make no mistake, and so accorded him all the honors a prophet may expect away from his own country.

On election night he found that he had been reëlected, though the returns from Moultrie County showed a falling off in his majority, as did those from his own county. But then, as Rankin said in congratulating Emily, after they had sat up until midnight in Harkness's parlors receiving the returns:

"A reduced majority draws the salary just as well as any."

XIX

Garwood led the way through the smoke and clangor of the B. & O. station, followed by his little family, Emily hurrying anxiously along, holding her skirts in one hand, her bag and umbrella in the other, and the nurse bearing the sleeping John Ethan in the rear. A fog was rolling up from the Potomac and settling thick over the city. The air, heavy as it was, was grateful to Emily, after her long night's nausea from the sickening curves, and she was glad that it was moist, for the dampness bathed her face and cooled her brow. Like all comers to Washington, she had no sooner set her foot to the pavement than she lifted her eyes to behold the Capitol, which symbols the might and majesty of the Republic to the stranger, who, when he once beholds it, ceases to be a stranger, and feels at home, for this city belongs to the nation and each citizen in it has an immediate revelation of his citizenship and of his common ownership in the things that make it interesting and great. Emily remembered the Capitol as she had seen it first, on the most memorable morning of their wedding trip, lifting its dome into the blue of an autumn sky, and in the gladness of those nuptial days, she had pleased her own fancy and delighted Jerome by fashioning an analogy between its coved apex and the life they were destined to lead under its shadow--rounded, symmetrical and complete.

But on this December morning, the fog obscured the Capitol, and though Emily's eye ranged everywhere, she could not find it. Jerome had nodded to one of the hackmen who thrust their whips at him in menacing invitation, and as he turned to assist Emily, he knew what she was looking for. So with the pleased superiority of one who has grown familiar with noted sights, Garwood pierced the gloom, and then, like a sailor sighting land, he pointed and said:

"There; there it is. See it?"

His little wife bent her head and her brows, while the cabman waited with a sneer, and at last she smiled and sighed an "Ah!" of recognition. For she had descried the massive dome, floating majestically in the gray mists as if it had detached itself from its base and had become a ghost of the fog, of a color and of an immensity with it. As she tried to trace its vague colossal proportions, it seemed to mount higher and higher on the heavy clouds, and there it hung and brooded over the capital of the nation, over the nation itself, and over its destiny. It soared far above the passions and partisanship of the little men who swarmed through its great porticos and in its huge rotunda, and it lifted her soul to lofty conceptions, so that she forgot all else and stood there with her foot on the step of the carriage, while the others, the misanthropic coachman, the hungry and accustomed husband, the heavy-eyed nurse, and the slumbering babe, waited.

"Well!" said Garwood at last, and she caught her breath and recalled herself to the earth with a sigh.

As they rolled over the asphalt streets, she pressed her face to the rattling panes of the carriage window, but she could find the great dome no more; it had floated away and vanished like a vision out of sight.

Emily saw the Capitol at other times. She saw it close at hand, on her way with Garwood across the park that spread its plots between the Capitol and the rising walls of the new congressional library, as she paused to rest a moment near the statue of Washington boxed up for the winter, and looked up, up, up the pillared front of the building to the dome shining in the afternoon sun. She saw it on dark nights, when its rows of little windows blinked out of the black wall of night; she saw it rising calm, pale and majestic in the luminous light of the moon; but it was not in any of these moods that she could remember it thereafter, nor as she had seen it for the first time on her wedding journey, but forevermore it appeared as she had seen it that morning, when her eyes pierced through the mists and caught that one glimpse of its mighty image, a gray specter of the life she once had pictured to herself.

They drove to the hotel where Garwood had lived during his first session, and where he still owed a bill, and took the rooms he had arranged for.

In the flush of his reëlection he had insisted upon his wife's going to Washington with him for the short session, and without much difficulty she had induced her father to consent to her departure. He had said he could get along without her during the three months the session would last, though the lengthened tone in which he drawled out the names of the three months, December, January and February, told of a prospect before him as long and dark as the winter itself. She had silenced the qualms she had felt by wringing from him half a promise to come on to Washington himself in February; he might, she insisted, anticipate the spring that way. And when her duty to her father seemed drawing her away from her resolution, she dwelt inwardly on her duty to her husband. She had thought through the long hours of wakeful nights of her separations from him; she had counted with a gasp of sudden fright the days into which those separations lengthened, and she had resolved that nevermore in the future would she let him be so long away without her. She had buttressed her soul in that regard on certain sage words of her Mother Garwood, who had shaken her head and said:

"It ain't good, it ain't good, Em'ly, fer young husban's to be away too much from their wives. It never was intended; no, it never was intended," she repeated, shaking her head with the satisfaction she found in her knowledge of the will of God in His personal dealings with His creatures on this earth, and her words had impressed Emily as if they were indeed a revelation.

During their first few days in Washington, it rained continually, and she stayed indoors, save for a trip down the street as far as the Treasury building, around which she walked in a little spirit of adventure, taking her eyes from its portico long enough to gaze down the wide sweep of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the Capitol rising at its end. And then she hurried back to the baby.

Garwood was too much occupied with what he called duties connected with the opening of Congress to be much with her. On the day the Congress convened he took her with him and left her in the gallery to look down on the assembling members, and she found her keenest interest in following him about as he moved to his seat, and in watching the members pause to shake his hand and to smile, and to join their laugh with his, so that she knew they were congratulating each other upon reëlection.

Garwood otherwise was most of the time out of her sight. She had observed in him a new interest in life the moment his feet touched the stones of Washington. He went about with a quick, elastic step, he was full of enthusiasm and laughter, and if he kept her waiting for him long at meal time, he returned to her with ample apologies and in a state of excitement that made him solicitously merry during the meal. At dinner he usually called for a bottle of wine, and, as his eyes fastened themselves upon the glass into which the wine bubbled as the negro tilted the bottle he had bound in a napkin, he said to her:

"Ah! This is life once more!"

And as she looked at him inquiringly, he said:

"After all, it's worth all a fellow has to go through out in that beastly mud hole to be back here where one can really live."

It was in one of these moods that he consented to make the trip over to Arlington, and Emily, who had already matured a feminine plot of reviving, thereby, some of the emotions of their wedding journey, felt a new resilience in her spirits that verified at last all the hopes she had held out to her heart for this sojourn in the Capital with her husband.

It was a warm afternoon, and the sun shone down with a cruel suggestion of spring--cruel, because one must instantly remember that it was only December, and that the winter lay all before. They took their luncheon that day in the Senate restaurant and Emily assured Jerome that she had never enjoyed any luncheon so much in her life. She was tempted in the spirit of holiday that was upon them, to drink some of the wine Jerome said they must have to make the repast perfect, but her conscience, or her sense of responsibility as the keeper of Jerome's conscience, would not let her. As they sat there over their oysters, Emily was happier than she had been for months, and she looked proudly across the table at Jerome and compared him to the distinguished men he was constantly pointing out--senators with whose names she had long been familiar, whose faces she had so often seen in the newspapers. There was a species of reassurance in her immediate observation that they were, after all, very human men, who, despite the partisan bitterness they could not conceal behind the euphemisms senatorial courtesy moved them to employ in their contributions to the _Congressional Record_, nevertheless foregathered companionably, Republicans and Democrats, and even Populists, and joked and laughed like common brotherly men. The little bell that was always jingling them away to roll-calls up in the Senate chamber, snatching them, as it were, from their lobsters and salads, or, in the cases of the older and hence more dyspeptic statesmen, their bread and milk, just as they were being served, filled that little room in the basement with a fine excitement, which reflected its warmth in her glowing cheeks, and sent its exhilaration coursing through her veins as happily as if she had consented to drink the wine Jerome still urged upon her.

As she looked at all those great men, and looked at Jerome, thinking how much more handsome he was than they, she projected her thought to the time when he would be a senator from Illinois and they would appear together in the Senate restaurant, in their turn to be pointed out. The pleasing sense of distinction was already with her, because of the company they were in, though Emily had speedily learned that most congressmen in Washington go about unnoticed, and that not all of the senators are known by sight.

"Not until the cartoonists take them up," Jerome had explained to her.

"You'll go splendidly in a cartoon!" she said, enthusiastically.

"Would I?" he rejoined. "Well, that's hardly a compliment. You know, the cartoons are all hateful, outrageously hateful--at least, the good ones. Those that praise are always absurd and flat."

As they were finishing their luncheon, three men came in and took a table across the room. When Garwood saw them he bowed, and some signal evidently passed between them, for Garwood excused himself for an instant from his wife, and went over to join them, leaning over their table to whisper for a moment. When he came back he said:

"Em, I'm awfully sorry, but I find I shall be detained here at the Capitol for about half an hour. We have a meeting of a subcommittee I'm on. I'm awfully sorry," he added as he saw her face fall, "but if you can go back to the hotel--I'll put you on the car--I'll join you there at two."

He led her down the hall past the Senate post-office, then out to New Jersey Avenue, where he put her on the car that took her back to the lonesome little hotel.

It was long past midnight when he rejoined her there.

XX

Emily sat at her window, across which the rain slanted dismally into the street below. Jerome lay in bed sleeping still, though it was now nearly noon. He slept hard after his labors on the subcommittee, and she had sent the nurse with the baby to patrol the long hallway, in order that the child might not awaken his father, and she had gone about herself noiselessly, to the same end. She had tried to read, but could not. She had fancied a long letter to Dade Emerson, describing her Washington trip, but the enthusiasm she had imagined for this letter, the first in a long while in which she had anything to relate that would compare with the letters Dade was able to write, colored as they were with the picturesqueness of Old World travel, could not that morning ring true.

She had thought the day before, when they were in such gala mood, that the old lover-like intimacy was growing upon them again, and she had told herself that a winter thus together in Washington would once more intertwine their lives into one harmonious and beautiful fabric; that all their dreams would come true. She had carefully scanned all the senators and public men she had seen, intent upon knowing them, at least by sight, and she had resolved, too, that she would study the details of public questions more deeply that she might be of real help to her husband, as he grew in statecraft.

But--she had felt her heart turn cold and dead within her as she recognized, in her curiously intricate train of morbid thought that these very resolves proved the existence of conditions she had refused to acknowledge, and now she sat before the window, her little chin on her hand, looking vacantly out. Over the way a Catholic church, built of stone, held one of its oaken doors ajar. She saw a woman, evidently a poor woman, for she wore a shawl over her head, enter the church. Somehow the sight added to her despondency.

She was roused by a knock on the door. A bell-boy stood there with a tray. She took the cards, and read the names of Joseph Hale, and Freeman H. Pusey. Hale had written his name upon the blank card supplied by the hotel; Pusey's was a sample of his own job work and proclaimed him as editor and proprietor of the Grand Prairie _Citizen_, Daily and Weekly. She thrilled a little at the thought that she was in the presence of the reality of a delegation of constituents calling upon their congressman; and then a great flood of homesickness rolled over her, a homesickness that was the more acute because these men were not known to her, and could only suggest home, not realize it for her here so far away from that home.

She told the boy to show the gentlemen to the parlor, and to say that Mr. Garwood would be down presently.

When she awakened her husband, as she thought the importance of the visit justified her in doing, he roused and writhed his big arms over his curly head.

"Who are they?" he yawned.

She read the names.

"Oh, let 'em wait," he said, then he rolled heavily over, stretched, and went to sleep again. She went down to the parlor herself to meet the two men.

"I'm Mrs. Garwood," she said, "and I'm glad to see any one from home. Mr. Garwood was detained very late last night by an important committee meeting and is still sleeping. Can you come back later, or will you wait? I do not like to rouse him just now--he is quite worn out," she added, selecting for them the alternative she preferred. They adopted her selection and said they could come back in the afternoon.

"We can go out and see the town a little," said Hale. "We've never been in Washington before, ma'am. Great place, ain't it? Do you think we could see the president? I'd like to see how he looks in his place. I helped put him there."

Hale spoke with the glow of personal pride, and with the sense of personal ownership the American feels in the ruler he has helped to raise to power, and is just as ready to pull down if he doesn't do all things to suit him.

Pusey and Hale were back again before Garwood had finished the coffee and roll which he had ordered sent to his room.

"Sit down, boys," he said, speaking with his mouth full of the roll, "I'll be at your service presently. What have you been doing to kill the time? Seeing the sights?"

"Well, we went up to look at the president," said Hale, for Pusey was looking out of the window with his usual lack of interest, until a belated fly crawled torpidly over the cold pane, and then he tapped at it with his little stick.

"See him?" asked Garwood.

"No, couldn't get near him. Guess he's got the swelled head, hain't he?"

Garwood laughed.

"Oh, well, you know he's busy. Possibly he was at a cabinet meeting. Let's see, is this Friday? I'll fix it for you though. I'll take you over to see him before you go back. When'd you get in?"

"Just got here this morning," said Hale. "I come to talk over with you that little matter about--" He looked all around the room as if spies were concealed somewhere, "about the post-office at Pekin--you know."

"Oh, yes!" said Garwood, with unusual cheerfulness for a congressman when a post-office is mentioned, "I'll take care of that, Joe."

Garwood got up, with a wrench of pain.

"God," he exclaimed, "I feel old this morning."

"Ain't you well?" asked Hale, solicitously.

"Oh, just a touch of rheumatism, I reckon--head aches, too, like the devil. Wait till I kiss the baby good by and I'll be with you."

He went into the adjoining room.

"Fond of his family, ain't he?" said Hale, approvingly.

"I believe I've heard as much intimated," answered Pusey.

Garwood returned with his overcoat and hat and gloves, and they went out. He spent the day with them, tramping about through the rain, and at night took them to the theater, one of the sacrifices a congressman must make when his constituents come to Washington.

When he returned to the hotel at midnight, and went up to his rooms, he found his wife sitting before a fire she had had laid in the grate. She was dressed and her little traveling-bag stood on the marble-top center table, with her hat and veil and rolled-up gloves beside it.

"Why!" he said, in surprise, "what's the matter?"

She turned and lifted to him a face that was stained with tears. Then she rose, holding out her arms towards him.

"Oh, Jerome!" she said. "I'm--going home!"

"Why--Em--dearie! What's the matter! Tell me, what's the matter?" He had gone close to her and taken her in his arms, and he made his question the demand of a man who does not like to deal with tears:

"What's the matter, I say, tell me!"

A tone of terror had got into his voice.

"Look!" She drew a telegram from the bosom of her dress, and held it toward him. When he took it, she hid her face on his breast and shook with great sobs.

He took the telegram with his free hand, flirted it open and read:

"Your father ill. You had better come home at once. Dr. G. S. Larkin."

"Doctor G. S. Larkin!" Garwood said, repeating the signature, "that's like him, to sign it Doctor."

"Oh, but Jerome," his wife cried, "that's of no importance--how he signs it--now." And she wept afresh, as if he had added an affront to her misery.

"Well, there, dear, don't cry. It's all right. Must you go, think?" He released her and she sank into the chair again.

"Oh, yes," she moaned, drooping toward the fire, "I must go at once. Oh, you were so long in coming! I needed you so, and wanted you so! I ought to have gone on that train to-night." She shook her head slowly from side to side. "Poor, lonely old man!"

The words half enraged Garwood, but he kept silent. He did not know what else to do--only to wait.

"Where's baby?" he asked presently.

"He's sleeping," she said, "in there." She waved her hand wearily toward the door. "He's all ready--we're _all_ all ready. When can we go?"

"Well, you can't leave now until to-morrow," he said, trying to be tender with her. "Hadn't you better get to bed and get some rest?"

"Oh--no--no," she moaned. "I couldn't sleep."

"But, dear, you'll need your strength, you must try; think of baby."

"Poor little fellow!" she said, as though he had been deserted. She clasped her knee in her hands and rocked back and forth. Garwood was silent, looking at her helplessly.

She grew calmer after awhile, and said:

"My poor little visit was doomed from the first; I knew it, Jerome."

"Oh, now, don't look at it that way," said Garwood, in a big round voice. "You'll soon be back, father'll be better; he's all right. You can bring him back with you, and we'll have a good time here all together."

She shook her head hopelessly.

"You go telegraph, Jerome; tell them when I'm coming."

Garwood was glad to escape to the office and the bar.

XXI

Rankin had been at home all day, helping his wife with the washing. The larder was growing lean in the Rankin home, though Rankin himself laughed with his usual optimism, and said that it would be all right again in a few days. The evening had come and he had gone out into the yard to do his chores. Though the air was cold he was in his shirt sleeves, and he went about his work singing loudly the staves of an old hymn:

"'There is a land of pure delight, Where saints immortal reign; In-fi-nite day--'"

"Jim!" his wife's voice called from the back door.

"Yeoup!" he shouted back, and then sang on:

"'--excludes the night, An' pleasures banish pain.

"'There everlastin' spring abides,'"

"Oh, Jim!"

"Yeoup!" he shouted, as the call came the second time. "Whatch y' want?"

"Come here!"

"All right--

"'An' never-with'rin' flowers; Death, like a narrow sea, divides This heavenly land from ours.'"

Rankin stooped in the anguish of a fat man, and gathered up an armful of the kindlings he had been splitting, and started toward the house. As he stamped up the steps into the kitchen, he sang on:

"'Sweet fields beyond the--'

"Hello, kid," he suddenly said, interrupting his own song, "where'd you come from?"

He stretched out his right arm and covering his little son's head with his big palm he rolled it round and round on the boy's shoulders as he passed. And then suddenly Rankin felt a strange unnatural chill in the atmosphere of his home. There was the supper table laid, the baby was already sitting up to it, pounding his tin waiter hungrily with his spoon, while his little sister tried to distract his attention from his own hunger by cutting antics on the dining-room floor.

The pleasant odor of fried potatoes filled the kitchen, the coffee steamed in the pot, its fragrant aroma had reached him even in the woodshed. It was the hour of all others in the day that he liked; he would take the tin pan presently out to the cistern pump and blow like a porpoise as he washed his face, then he would swing the pan at arm's length, scattering the water afar, and come groping into the kitchen toward the long towel that hung in an endless belt on a roller behind the door. And then they would have supper, and he could joke his little wife and his little boy, and give the baby prohibited tid-bits from his plate.

He felt the change in the atmosphere again as he sat down to the supper table, and yet he did not reason about such things, or probe their causes deeply. He thought it was their poverty that was worrying his wife. That cloud sometimes darkened the home for them of late.

"Well, cheer up," he said, as he sat down to the table, his coat still off; "we're poor but honest parents. Remember, Mollie, what the good Book says: 'I have never seen the righteous forsaken, ner his seed beggin' bread.' I can't qualify under the first clause, but I can under the second. There never was a better man than your Grampa Rankin, Willie. How'd ye get along at school to-day?" he asked presently, still addressing the boy. "You want to get a hump on yourself; I'm goin' to put you in Jerry Garwood's office one o' these days, an' make a lawyer of you, ye know."

But try as he would to rally them he failed, and he looked curiously at last from his son to his wife, and back again. Then it dawned upon him.

"Look'e here," he said, placing his fists on the table, his knife sticking up from one, his fork from the other, "you two's got some pleasant surprise fer papa; I can see it in your faces. Le's see, is this my birthday? What kind of a game're you an' mama puttin' up on the old man, anyhow?" He looked at his son.

"Jim," said his wife, and her tone almost froze him. He looked at her motionless, his mouth and eyes open. "Jim," she said, in a low voice, "the postmaster's been appointed."

He dropped his knife and fork, a sudden gleam came to his eyes, then the grin broke out all over his big face. He stretched out his hand to wool his boy's head again, when his wife looked across the table at him and cried:

"Oh, Jim, no--don't--you don't understand. It's not you--it's Pusey."

He stared at her in utter silence for a minute, his wife looking at him with tears in her eyes, and her son trying hard to swallow the lump that came into his throat when mother cried. The little girl looked up with big eyes; even the baby was still. At last Rankin spoke.

"How do you know?" he asked.

"Willie heard it, down town, on his way home from school."

"I don't believe it," he said doggedly.

"Oh, hones', papa," the boy protested, as if his veracity had been impugned, "cross my heart it's true! It's hangin' up down town in front of the telegrapht office, an' it's in the paper, too. I heard _ever'body_ talkin' 'bout it, hope to die I did."

Rankin stared at his son an instant, and then slowly turned his gaze on his wife. A look had come into his face which it grieved her to see, a look of utter, despairing anguish.

"Jim, you know you mistrusted something, you know you did. You'd never own up to it, but you know you did."

Rankin's lip quivered, and then, suddenly, he bent his elbows, put his arms on the table before him, and bowing his curly head upon their enormous muscles he burst into tears. His huge back heaved with his sobs, and his wife, hastening around to him, put her arms about his shoulders, laid her thin cheek to his curly hair, and then as her own tears rained fast, she said at last:

"Don't, Jimmy, don't; you'll break my heart. I wouldn't mind it--you can get somethin' else."

"Oh, 'tain't that," came his voice, "but I thought he was my friend, I thought he was my friend. I made that boy, an' I was so proud of him. An' now--an' now--he's thrown me down, he's thrown me down!"

He ceased his sobbing and was still. His wife stood by him, patting him now on the back, now running her fingers through his curls. At last he raised himself, rubbed the tears from his eyes, and, pulling out his handkerchief, blew his nose with a mighty blast.

"Your supper'll get cold. The old man's a fool, hain't he, Fannie?" He looked at his little daughter, and then in turn at them all, saw their tear-stained faces, and then he said:

"Well, I'm makin' a pleasant home an' fireside campaign fer ye here, hain't I? But I don't b'lieve it, that's all, I don't b'lieve Jerry Garwood 'uld throw me down, without some good reason. I won't believe it yet. There's some explanation."

"Jim," his wife smiled proudly at him, "they say you're a hardened old politician, but you've got too soft a heart. Didn't I tell you that somethin' 'as up last summer when you got back from Pekin? Didn't I tell you somethin' 'as up when you told me Pusey had gone down to Washington? Didn't I tell you you'll better go or you'd get left?"

"Well, now, Mollie," he began apologetically, "you know I didn't have the price in the first place, an' secon'ly, Jerry told me, _told_ me, with his own lips, right down there in that old office o' his'n, that it was--all--right, that I needn't worry, that he'd promised it, an' I'd get it. An' what 'uld I want to run down to Washin'ton botherin' him 'bout it any more fer? You know congressmen don't want the'r constits trailin' 'round after 'em down there." He leaned back in his chair and spread his hands wide, as if to exculpate himself entirely.

"Well, you've been in politics long enough to know--" began his wife with a faint little sneer.

"Oh, course," Rankin interrupted her, "if it 'ad been anybody else, I mightn't 'a' been so easy. I'd a camped on his trail till he done it, but Jerry--Jerry--I never thought it o' him." He shook his head sadly.

"Now, Jim, just look here a minute," his wife returned. "You told me yourself that you noticed a change in him when he come home from Washington las' summer. Now, didn't you?"

"Well, maybe there was a little, but that 'as all right. I expected that, I expected that as he growed bigger an' greater, an' got in 'ith all them heavy timbers down to Washin'ton he'd naturally grow away from us some. I knowed he couldn't al'ays have a big dub like me trailin' along, but I thought he'd al'ays be my friend. I thought he'd keep his word." His eyes widened as he lapsed into abstraction.

But presently he roused himself with a mighty shake, and reached across the table with his coffee-cup in his hand.

"Another cup, Mollie," he said, "I don't believe it," he insisted, setting his jaw, "I won't believe it. I'll go down town to-night an' find out about it."

His wife shook her head with a little smile that told what an amiable hopelessness there was about him.

"And when you find out it's true, what'll you do then?" she asked, as she gave him back his cup.

"Well," he said, sucking in his mustache, "I'll live on here in Polk County, an' we'll continue to have three square meals _per_. But Jerry'll have some explanation, you'll see."

"Yes, I don't doubt that," said Mrs. Rankin dryly.

* * * * *

The news of the illness of old Ethan Harkness--men had begun to call him old when he ceased to work--had been of interest to Grand Prairie, and the return of his daughter from Washington had added a zest to the interest, but it was all forgotten in the announcement that Pusey had been appointed postmaster.

It had been so generally recognized that Rankin was to have the appointment, that Grand Prairie had been denied its quadrennial sensation of a post-office fight, and the only feeling that the boys had been able to display was one of impatience to have Rankin, as a deserving and efficient party worker, displace the old postmaster the instant the new president was inaugurated. Garwood had explained time and again that the president was determined to permit all present office-holders to fill out their terms before appointing new ones, and he had strengthened his explanation by reminding them that the civil service rules were so strict that there was no prospect of dislodging the present incumbents of post-office places and putting new men in their stead.

Garwood of course sympathized with the boys; he didn't believe in civil service reform himself; but preferred, he said, the good old Jacksonian doctrine of "to the victors belong the spoils," but they must all see how powerless he was. Interest in the post-office situation accordingly had declined, and the subject was scarcely ever mentioned, except to illustrate, in curbstone arguments, the absurdities of civil service reform. But when the appointment was made public, and the boys realized that after all Rankin's preëmption had not held valid, and that the field had been open all the time, they felt they had been the victims of a conspiracy, and had been cheated of one of the rights vested inalienably in the politician, if not in the people.

Pusey announced his own appointment in the _Citizen_, simply enough and modestly enough, and in the same issue he referred to the appointment of Joseph Hale as postmaster at Pekin. In another column there was a long leaded article headed "Special Washington Correspondence," and signed with the editor's initials, and it told of his trip to Washington, of his meeting with the great president, and of the excellent public services their own congressman, the Hon. Jerome B. Garwood, was performing. And then it went on with grave and learned dissertations on political subjects, uttered with as much authority as the Washington correspondents of the New York and Chicago newspapers assume when they sit down to write their daily misrepresentation of political life at Washington.

Pusey received his congratulations without a change of expression. He went tapping along the sidewalk with his little stick, plucking at the vagrant hairs on his chin and chewing the stogy he was smoking, as if nothing of moment had happened. If the fact that he had risen in Grand Prairie to a place of power and influence impressed Freeman H. Pusey, his wizened face never displayed it.

XXII

When Emily got out of the frowzy day coach in which she had made the last stage of her long journey from Washington and glanced along the station platform, a sense of her loneliness, made more acute because the ugly scene was otherwise homelike and familiar, rolled over her. She had wired Doctor Larkin from Olney, where she had left the St. Louis sleeper, but no one was there to meet her, not even old Jasper. She gasped at this last of all the evil portents of the twenty-four hours that had dragged by like so many weeks since she bade Jerome good by in Washington--her father must be worse, they could not leave him.

The night was cold, with a dampness that pierced her marrow, after the foul atmosphere of the overheated car. It had been snowing; some of the heavy saturated flakes lay in patches, but now a fine mist was falling, and the greasy boards of the station platform shone in all the reflected lights of the tired and panting train. With the weary nurse and the healthy baby that slept through all these trials in which it was not as yet his lot to share, she clambered into the old hack that always stood there, and there was something of a welcome in the face of the driver as he held the door a moment to inquire:

"To Mr. Harkness's, ma'am?"

He slammed the door and they rattled away. She was glad that he had spoken of her father as one still alive, and all the way home, as they went lurching and splashing through the December mud that mired the streets, she built her hopes upon this little omen.

The old house was dark, and the trees in the yard stirred mournfully in the winds that were creeping up from the west. One dim light shone normally in the hall, but another, unusual and sinister, shone in the room above--her father's room. The window was closed--she was glad of that. Both of the lights were so dim that they seemed only to point the gloom that had settled stilly on the whole place.

The doctor, coming forward with the soft tread and monitory finger of the sick room, met her in the hall. She rushed to him, and seized his hand.

"He's alive?"

The doctor smiled with professional reassurance.

"Yes, he's better this evening. I've told him you were coming."

Tears came into her eyes and moistened the veil she hurriedly unwound. She tore off her wraps, and laid her hat on the hall tree. She rubbed her palms briskly together, pressed her fingers to her hair and her temples, and then:

"I'll go to him at once."

She started for the stairs, but paused there, leaning wearily on the baluster.

"What is it, Doctor, tell me?"

"Well," the medical man said, "a general collapse. He was out Wednesday, and it rained, and he caught cold. Thursday he developed a bad attack of the grippe--and his heart action is weak, you know. He would not give up."

"No, that was like him," said Emily, as people always say of their loved ones at such a time, in the effort to recognize their strong qualities ere it be too late.

"He would not give up until Friday, but I made him go to bed then. The next day I feared his lungs were involved--he did not wish me to send for you."

Emily was blinking back her tears.

"But I thought it best. He will improve now, I am confident, and if we can control the pulmonary difficulty, I am sure of it."

She had turned and hastily gathering her skirts, ran up the stairs. She hesitated a moment in the doorway of his room, and by the dim light of the tiny star of gas saw the outlines of the form under the white counterpane. She fluttered across to the bed, and sank softly beside him. She laid her hand on his hot dry brow.

"Father--I've come."

The old man stirred and tried to turn his head.

"I'm glad," he said. "It was a long ways."

"I'm going to nurse you, and make you well," she said with a cheer in her voice of which her heart was void.

The doctor pleaded for a trained nurse, but Emily, with the old-fashioned prejudice of women, indignantly refused, as though the mere idea involved some reflection upon her own powers, and her own constancy. For a week she watched by his side, and waited on him, taking his temperature hourly, and keeping a clinical chart like those she had seen in the hospitals, in the old days of her charities, determined that the lack of a trained nurse should not be felt. And then the congestion in his lungs passed, he breathed easily once more, his fever broke, and he lay, weak and faint, but smiling at her.

XXIII

Harkness gained steadily for a week, and then he began to grow restless and intractable. His whims and exactions exhausted Emily's strength, and when he could think of nothing else for her to do, he at last demanded that she read to him, and she had to settle to this labor, though her spirits wholly lacked that sense of leisure and repose so necessary to the enjoyment of such a task. He chose his old favorite, Scott, and for hours each afternoon, until the early twilight gathered in the room, she read to him from the novels he had loved so long. It was a test of her devotion, for she had long since outgrown Scott, as she had been fond of declaring, but he would not hear to Howells, nor Meredith, nor Hardy, nor any of the moderns.

One afternoon the doctor entered the room in the midst of the reading. He heard Emily's low, placid voice as he noiselessly approached the room upstairs where his patient lay:

"'At length the Norman received a blow which, though its force was partly parried by his shield, for otherwise nevermore would De Bracy have again moved limb, descended yet with such violence on his crest that he measured his length on the paved floor.'"

Emily closed the book upon her finger as he entered and stood just inside the door with the smell of the cold air and his own cigar upon him, but her father reared himself on his elbow, and, shaking his tousled gray head, said:

"We're just storming a castle, Doc. You sit down and wait, and then I'll attend to you."

The doctor smiled.

"I guess you're getting along all right without me any more," he said. And Emily took up her tale:

"'"Yield thee, De Bracy," said the Black Champion, stooping over him, and holding against the bars of his helmet the fatal poniard--'"

He was bolstered up in a big chair by the time Christmas drew on, and Emily was bustling happily about the house hanging wreaths of holly in the windows, and striving to draw out of all the uncertainties of the time a spirit of holiday warmth and cheer. She wrote Jerome all the details of the little celebration she was planning, and warned him to be home in time to hang up the baby's stocking for Christmas. By way of further inducement she said she had many things to tell him, though they could hardly have piqued his curiosity, for she straightway proceeded to relate them. She had had, for instance, a long letter from Dade, announcing dramatically that she and her mother were coming home. They were tired of Europe, and her engagement with the German baron was broken. She felt, after all, so she wrote, that she would rather marry an American--as if marriage were the whole duty of woman.

The ugly stories about Pusey's appointment as postmaster, and of the dire results to follow, had reached Emily, penetrating even to that shaded sick room, but of these she did not write. She had too many perplexities already, and with a power she could command in certain mental crises she put this subject aside, awaiting Jerome's coming and his explanation, and resolutely setting her heart toward the happier aspect of things she was always seeing in the future.

Congress adjourned for the holidays on Wednesday, but it was not until the following Monday that Garwood reached Grand Prairie. Emily had expected him Friday; the Chicago congressmen, as she had read in the newspapers of that city, had reached home on that day, been duly interviewed, and allowed to lapse into their customary obscurity, but Jerome delayed and no word came. When he did drive up to the house Monday evening, tired and worn with traveling, he explained that a conference had detained him. Emily did not display her usual interest in politics by pressing for details of the conference. There were things, she was slowly learning, that it were better to let pass.

She had kept his supper warm for him, and as soon as he had cleansed himself of the stains of travel, and had a look at the baby sleeping rosily in his crib, she had it laid in the dining-room. She sat across the table from him with the coffee urn before her.

"How's father?" he asked.

"He's better--but weak. He must not go out this winter. His heart's affected," she whispered, turning about with the soft-voiced mystery of a secret. "He mustn't know it. He's in low spirits, and the doctor says I'll have to stay more closely with him and watch him." Her voice fell as she repeated this judgment.

"Hm-m-m," Garwood mused. He stirred the sugar into his coffee, and then, as if seeking livelier topics, he said:

"So Dade's coming home, is she?"

"Yes; isn't it too bad about her engagement?"

"No, I think not--those foreigners are mostly a bad lot."

"She says she'll have to marry an American."

"Does she have to get married?"

Emily smiled faintly.

"She seems to think so."

"Mother well?" Garwood asked.

"Yes--you must go right over and see her."

"I'm pretty tired to-night."

"Yes, I know, Jerome, but it wouldn't do. You must go right away when you have done your supper."

Having thus disposed of all the necessary topics, Garwood rather hesitatingly approached the subject that lay on the hearts of both.

"How does the post-office appointment seem to strike them?"

He kept his eyes downward on the cigarette he was pinching.

"I don't hear much about it," Emily answered. And she colored. "You read the papers, of course."

"Of course," he answered, "but you can't tell anything from them. What did you think of it?"

"I was surprised."

"Surprised?"

"Yes."

"What at?"

"At you."

"Me?"

"Yes."

A heavy silence fell, and Emily sat there, her eyes on the silver sugar bowl she slowly fitted to a design in the tablecloth. Her lips, though, were set, and Garwood, stealing a glance at them, moved uneasily. Here was the first of his constituents he must reckon with.

"Well, Pusey'll make a good postmaster," he ventured at last, seeing that she was not likely to speak.

"Doubtless," she replied. "I hardly thought, though, that political appointments were a question of fitness nowadays."

"I thought you were a civil service reformer," Garwood answered, trying to laugh. But her lips remained obdurately tight, and he saw what her conscience would hold him to.

"I had supposed Mr. Rankin was to be appointed postmaster."

Garwood did not reply at once.

"Rankin seems to have become quite a protégé of yours," he ventured at last.

"I used to feel," she promptly replied, "that we were in some sort protégés of _his_."

Garwood could not contain himself longer.

"Well, I'm getting tired of having people talk as if Jim Rankin owned me! I'll show 'em!" he ended stubbornly.

"But, Jerome," she said, raising her eyes at last, and fixing them on his, "you promised him--didn't you?"

He wadded his napkin and flung it petulantly on the table.

"There it goes!" he said, as he scraped back his chair. "I supposed some such story would get out."

"But, didn't you?" she persisted.

Under her insistence he arose from the table irascibly. He stood looking at her while a hard smile rose to his lips.

"You're deeply concerned for Rankin, aren't you?"

"Jerome," she said quietly, looking at him with wide, unwinking eyes, "it is not Mr. Rankin I am concerned for--not for him half so much as for you."

He was led into sarcasm for a moment.

"You are quite solicitous--" he began, and then evidently thinking better of it, he tried to laugh her out of her seriousness.

"It's no use, Em," he said patronizingly, as he lighted his cigarette, "you women can never understand politics."

"We understand honor, though," she said, "although men, in their personal way of allotting the attributes to the sexes, say we don't."

He gave her a reproachful look, and left.

When he had gone, she went to her own room. Her heart was beating wildly. "I never spoke so to him before," she wailed in her heart. "I never spoke so to him before!" And then she flung herself full length across her bed, and burst into the tears that had long been flooding her heart to the very brim.

XXIV

Garwood came out the little door in the oaken partition that walled the private office of the postmaster at Grand Prairie, buttoned his long overcoat carefully about him, and drew on his gloves. He had been basking for half an hour in the loyal gratitude of the newly successful office-seeker, fur he had just left Pusey sitting rather uncomfortably at the well-ordered desk to which he had succeeded, whereon there were as yet no dirty paste pot, no enormous scissors, and no cockroaches fleeing from the wrath to come.

What qualms Emily had raised in Garwood's breast the night before had been wholly soothed by the adroit little editor who now was become the artful little postmaster, and in the outlining of Pusey's convincing plans for a strong and resistless machine, not only in Polk County, but in the entire district, Garwood felt the sweetness of a new security steal over him. He passed down by the long rows of lock-boxes, their little red numbers showing smartly on their little brass doors, and turned toward the wall to avoid the crowd that pressed up to the stamp window to have their Christmas packages weighed and mailed. Suddenly he saw Rankin.

The big fellow was coming on breathing heavily, with his overcoat flapping wide and his hands thrust deep in its outer pockets. His slouch hat was back on his brow, which was beaded with perspiration, and the drizzle of the holiday rain clung to his ruddy mustache. Garwood's heart leaped into his throat when he saw him and he felt his lips draw tense with nervousness, but he made one mighty effort, and had himself under control before Rankin raised his eyes to recognize him. In an instant they were face to face. Garwood smiled and held out his hand.

"Jim, my boy," he cried cheerily, "how are you? I'm glad to--"

Rankin halted, his hands still plunged deep in the pockets of his overcoat. His face grew redder, if possible, while Garwood's became very white. Rankin looked Garwood all over, from his carefully dented hat to his boots, still showing the shine he had had put on them at the Cassell House, though their soles were now caked with the rich Illinois mud the farmers had dragged into town on their wagon wheels. He looked him all over carefully, and then, with a contemptuous little laugh:

"Well--I'll--be--damned!" he said slowly.

Garwood withdrew the hand he had outstretched and held there so awkwardly, but he fancied there might be hope for him in Rankin's words, which would have served him as well to express his abundant good nature in other exigencies, as they did to show his anger and surprise in this.

"Well, I'll be damned!" he repeated, "I didn't s'pose you'd have the nerve!"

Garwood flushed. The shuffle of feet on the tiled floor had died into an attentive stillness. He knew that the throng was looking on absorbed in this most interesting meeting that all the possibilities of chance could have brought about in Grand Prairie that day. Garwood flushed and longed to escape.

"Come on," he began, in a confidential tone, "over to my office. I was just going to hunt you up. I wanted to have a talk with you."

"No, you wasn't, either," Rankin exploded, "you damned liar you, you wasn't goin' to hunt me up; you know it, an' I know it. You 'as afraid to see me, you big stiff, an' you haven't got an'thin' to say to me either. I've had enough o' your _talk_ now, an' I don't want no more of it. What talkin' 's done hereafter, _I'll_ do myself, an' I'll begin it right now, an' right here--this place's good as any."

Garwood had drawn himself erect, and was struggling with his congressional dignity.

"Let me pass, sir!" he said, as sternly as he could.

Rankin drew a hand from his coat pocket, and stretched it toward Garwood. The congressman threw up his forearm as if to ward a blow, but Rankin caught him by the collar of his coat. He smiled pityingly.

"Oh, don't git skeered," he said, "I hain't goin' to hurt you."

"Remove your hand from me instantly, sir!" said Garwood, white with rage.

But Rankin held him fast in his big grip, and slowly backed him to the wall, and held him there, his head against the colored lithograph of soldiers decked in gala dress uniforms, hung there to lure honest country lads to the recruiting office over at Springfield and so into the regular army.

"Now, you listen at _me_!" said Rankin. "You're a liar an' you're a coward; you're a low-down, contemptible houn', you're a damned sight worser'n Pusey settin' in there; I just tell you this to let you know what I think o' you. An' now I want to serve notice on you, here'n now, publicly, that Jim Rankin's goin' to go right on livin' in this man's town, that he's goin' to figur' some in politics, that he's ag'in you, an' that you'd best get all you can out o' this term in Congress, fer I give you fair warnin' that you're servin' your last term. I'm ag'in you, an' I'm agoin' to camp down on your trail from this on, an' if you have the gall to show your face fer renomination ag'in, I'll make it my business to git you--an' I'll _git_ you!"

Rankin was breathing hard.

"Now, you can go, damn you," he said, and he released his hold on Garwood.

The congressman stood, his eyes glaring impotent rage out of a blank white face. They stood thus for a full minute, and then Garwood, readjusting his overcoat with a shrug of his shoulders, turned to walk away. The throng that had pressed closely about them silently parted to make a way for him, and he passed out of their midst. Rankin stood and gazed after him. He stood and gazed, and the people standing by in painful silence watched with him the figure of Garwood, rapidly making for the door, held as erectly and as dignifiedly as he could, for the man had need of all his dignity then. Rankin watched him out of sight. Then he turned. The crowd had found tongue, and a hum of voices arose. Several tried to speak to him.

"Served him just right," some one began, sympathetically.

"You go to hell," said Rankin, brushing the startled man aside. And then he went away, forgetting to post the Christmas letter his wife had intrusted to him.

Out in the drizzling holiday streets, Garwood hurried along, sick with the humiliation of the scene, but as he thought of it, his old habit of self-pity reasserted itself, and with this ruse he tried to lure back some of his old self-respect. So well did he succeed that when he reached home he was red with wrath and muttering. Emily, from her window, saw him coming, and hastened to meet him at the door.

"Why, Jerome, what is the matter?" she cried, when she saw his face.

He flung off his overcoat and hurled his hat at the rack.

"Well, I've seen your friend, Jim Rankin."

"Jim Rankin?" she exclaimed. "What in the world has happened?"

"I never was so mortified in my life! I never endured such insolence, such ignominy, such abuse!"

"Why--tell me--dear, where was it?"

"In the post-office, in the most public place in town, before a crowd of people--Ach!" He shook his head in disgust and wrath.

"Why, what did he say--tell me!" Emily almost screamed.

"I met him accidentally, I greeted him, I told him I wished to see him, to talk to him. I was going to take care of him--I had it all arranged to fix the whole damned business--"

"Jerome!"

He had never sworn in her presence before.

"But he wouldn't listen," he rushed on. "He poured out upon me a perfect torrent of profanity and obscenity; it was disgusting, humiliating; I should have struck him down!"

"But you didn't?" she asked, and her tone made her question half a plea. She bent toward him and laid her hands on his shoulders.

"No--I walked away."

"That was right," she smiled, "that was the dignified way."

She looked at him in her sympathy. She had all the morning regretted her words of the evening before, though they had not recurred to them at all in the time intervening. And she was glad of some excuse for ridding her breast of the conviction out of which those words had been spoken.

"I haven't any sympathy for him at all!" she exclaimed. "I did think--but this shows me how wrong I was, how I misjudged you. Can you forgive me, dear?"

She held her face close to his, and he stooped and kissed her.