Part 5

“Well, he can come and identify it,” said Father Daugherty. He slowly wrapped the package up, and, unbuttoning his long, rusty coat a little way down from the throat, stuffed the money into an inner pocket. The deed seemed to madden Bretzenger, and he moved a step forward. The two others saw his motion. The priest did not move, but he turned a look on them, and raised his hand, and McQuirk quailed, a superstitious fear in his eyes. He stiffened his arm before Bretzenger, and stayed him. And then the priest stepped quietly to the safe, and pushed its door to with an arm that seemed too weak and frail to stir the heavy steel.

“It looks to me, Michael,” he was saying gently, as if addressing McQuirk alone, “like personal property, and, as I’m the administrator, I suppose I’ll have to take charge of it. If any beside our dead friend own it, let them come forward and prove their claim, and identify their property in open court.”

Father Daugherty reported the whole affair to the probate court, and the judge when the time for filing claims had elapsed, and he had waited for the particular claim he knew would not be presented, ordered a distribution of the property. Then Father Daugherty went to the flat to see Annie, bearing the bundle, the original bundle, the bundle that had bought the new gas franchise. Something of the dramatic quality in the situation had got into the old priest’s heart. He knew that Annie would appreciate it all so much better if she could see the fortune, and feel it, and he would let her do so for an instant before he put it away in the safety deposit vaults to await opportunity for its investment.

She looked at it long and long, lying there in the lap of her black gown. She could not grasp the amount, though the old priest, leaning forward, with the enthusiasm of a boy shining once more, after so many years, in his hollow eyes, said over and over:

“Look at it, my child! Feel it! It’s fifty thousand dollars! And it’s all yours!”

She patted it, tenderly and affectionately, with a soft and reminiscent caress, so that the priest knew that it was not for anything that package of money might hold for her in a material way, then or afterward, but rather for what it gave back for a moment to her desolated heart. And the priest was glad of that, and thereafter silent. He had had doubts. He would feel better when the money had passed out of his hands, and he sometimes questioned whether it would ever do good in any one’s hands. But he had a sense of humor, too, a grim sense in this instance, when he thought of certain political and financial circles, even if he did dust his thin hands carefully with his spotless handkerchief when he laid the money down.

Annie’s eyes had filled with the ready tears that welled to their sweeping, black lashes, and trembled there as she raised her eyes to him.

“Ah, Father,” she said, “he was so, _so_ good to me, always--and so kind! And see how thoughtful he was--to leave me all this! Oh, Jimmy, my poor Jimmy!”

And she rocked forward, like an old woman, and wept.

THE VINDICATION OF HENDERSON OF GREENE

Baldwin, the lobbyist, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and swaying with the train as it swung out on to the rocky ledge that paves the Valley of the Desplaines, contemplatively cut the end from a fresh cigar and said:

“But I’m not so sure, after all. My experience with the Bailey bill shook my faith in that proposition.”

The two other men in the salon looked up with startled eyes.

Baldwin had been driven over from his Michigan Avenue home and caught the Alton Limited when it made the station stop at Twenty-third Street, where he boarded the last of its curtained Pullmans. This coach was the political institution known to Illinois statesmanship as the Springfield sleeper, and Baldwin and his two companions, Jennings, the secretary of state, and Denny Healy, a canal commissioner, had the capsulated coziness of its smoking compartment all to themselves. Down by Dwight they had fallen into a desultory discussion of the old question as to whether or not every man has his price. The question could hardly interest these men long, for, after many years’ constant contemplation, under the gray dome of the state house, of the weaknesses of men, they had come to an acceptance of the doctrine now grown frank enough to have no lingering taint of cynicism. Jennings, indeed, had just dismissed the subject by declaring:

“All men aire fer sale, an’ most of ’em damn cheap.”

And so the subject might have lapsed had it not been for Baldwin’s heterodoxy. That George R. Baldwin of all men should doubt the first maxim of their profession was beyond comprehension. Though he played his part in life with a suite of law offices in a skyscraper as a background, his serious business was lobbying bills through the legislature. His friends, who were many, boasted that he always stood by them, right or wrong. Which he did, indeed, and as they were generally wrong, the value of such friendship, or his opinions on practical politics, could hardly be overestimated. The day had been a hot one in Chicago, but now a cold draft of smoky air was sucking in through the narrow window-screen, on which the cinders hailed as the Limited plunged southward.

Smoke and dirt had long since begrimed the dark and sweaty face of Jennings, who, with waistcoat opened in the comfort dear to the Egyptian, was sprawling his shanks on the cushion opposite him, while Healy, doomed by corpulence to an attitude more erect, sitting with his chubby knees far apart, as the fat will, his paunch resting on the edge of the seat he filled, now and then brushed a fat palm over his red scalp and sighed, as he puffed his domestic cigar. But Baldwin sat and smiled, showing his excellent teeth beneath his reddish mustache, and visibly expanded. They could hear, as an undertone to their talking, the dull roll of the Pullman’s paper wheels, and now and then they were interrupted by the whistle’s long and lonesome note at a country road-crossing. Out through the double windows, against which Healy sometimes pressed his forehead because the glass cooled it, the dark fields wheeled past in an endless belt of blackness, save where an occasional bunch of sparks from the engine burrowed under the right-of-way fence, and then, in the momentary glow of light, they could catch sight of a tossing plume of corn, which told them they were out on the prairies of central Illinois.

When the train paused for the Big Four crossing at Gardner, they heard in the sudden flood of silence the snoring of a sensible fare-paying passenger who had gone to bed. The strident noise of the crickets and the frogs outside was noted only as an effect of the silence. The three men had no thought of retiring until they reached Pontiac at two o’clock, for the lives they led were such that they could not sleep until that hour, and then not very well.

Baldwin had lighted his imported cigar, the superior aroma of which, perceptible even in an atmosphere choked with coal gases and the fumes of the domestic cigars Jennings and Healy were smoking, indicated faintly the height of cultivation to which he had brought his appetites, when Jennings, flecking his ashes on the floor of the salon just as he would have done on his own parlor carpet, said:

“Well, go on with the story.”

Baldwin settled his chin over the blue cravat with the white polka dots that was knotted over the immaculate collar--a collar, incredulous men from southern Illinois were sometimes told, that was actually made on the shirt--drew his creased trousers a little farther above the tops of his patent leather boots, and began:

“One session there was an old man named Henderson in the house, who had come up from Greene County; Henderson of Greene, everybody called him, to distinguish him from Tom Henderson, of Effingham. He was a queer figure, was Henderson of Greene, tall and gaunt, with a stoop in his shoulders. He always wore a hickory shirt, opened at a red and wrinkled throat, and his hair was just a stubble bleached by harvest suns. The old man was a riddle to everybody in Springfield that winter. He was always in his seat, even on Monday evenings, when no one else was there. He voted always with his party, and he voted consistently as well, like a good country member, against all the Chicago legislation. But he was a silent man, who stood apart from his fellows, looking with eyes that peered from under his shaggy, sunburned brows with an expression no one could fathom. He never made a speech, he never introduced a bill, he never offered a resolution, he never even presented a petition, and when the speaker made his committee assignments, he placed the old man on the committees on History, Geology and Science, and on Civil Service Reform, and he did not even look disappointed.”

The two politicians chuckled.

“As for me,” continued Baldwin, “I never spoke to him, and never knew any one who did. The speaker himself only addressed him--and then as the gentleman from Greene--when they were verifying roll-calls. No one ever knew where he boarded. The herd book gave him a paragraph, saying that he had been born in Indiana along in ’37, and moved to this state sometime in the fifties. Left an orphan early, with no education, he had been a day laborer all his life, working at anything he could get, mostly on farms. He never had held office before, and none knew how he broke into the legislature--the tidal wave, I suppose. Every one knew he never would come back again.

“Well, we got down to the last night of the session. The hands of the clock had been turned back in that vain old attempt to stay the remorseless hours, but its pale and impassive face was impotent as a gravestone to stay dissolution and oblivion. I know men who would have spent a fortune to give that legislature one day more of life, but it was sweeping on to its midnight death. Somehow, whenever I think of the legislature, I think of _that_ legislature, and whenever my mind conceives the state house it isn’t pictured to me as standing there on the hill, stately in the sunshine, but as it appeared that night as I walked over from the Leland, with the clouds flying low over its dome. The lower floors were dark and still as sepulchres, and the messenger boys who came over from the Western Union, now and then, reminded me of ghosts as they went by, their heels dragging on the marble floors of the corridor. A light was burning in the governor’s office, though the old man himself, I knew, was over at the mansion, pacing the floor of the library and cursing with classic curses. We were going to try that night to pass the Bailey bill over his veto.

“But the third floor blazed with electric lights, and the big dome was full of noisy echoes. The senate kept its coat on--you know how they mimic decorum over there--but the house was in its shirt-sleeves, huddled like a pack of wolves around the speaker’s dais, with faces ripe with whisky, shaking its fists under the umbrella of cigar smoke. Every fellow was trying to get his bill passed in the last hour of the session--you know what it is, Hank?”

“Oah, yes,” replied Jennings, “but ’tain’t nothin’ to what ’t used to be under the ol’ constitution. We’d stack a pile o’ them ’ere private acts up on the clerk’s desk, an’ pass ’em all t’ oncet ’ith a whoop. Them ’as the days--but that ’as ’fore your time.”

“Those must have been good old days,” assented the lobbyist, “for the gang.”

“I reckon! A feller could ’a’ done business in them days! Ol’ John M.’d better left the ol’ constitution alone--it ’as good enough. But there ’as a passion fer change right after the war.”

The lobbyist politely nodded concurrence in this view and continued:

“Some of the members clambered on to their desks, filling the air with oaths, ink bottles, and hurtling books with rattling leaves. Sometimes an iron weight sheathed in paper whizzed by on a vindictive mission, and one man made an Egyptian nigger-killer with rubber bands. Some even hurled their copies of the revised statutes--it was the first use they had ever found for them. Once in a while some one would toss a batch of printed bills to the ceiling, where they set the glass prisms of the chandeliers jingling, and then fell like autumn leaves, a shower of dead pledges and withered hopes. And out of all the hubbub rose a steady roar--”

“Like at a lynchin’ bee,” assisted Jennings.

“Exactly,” assented Baldwin, who had never seen a lynching. “There were drunken howls and vacuous laughs, and yet we could hear through it all the hoarse voice of the clerk, his throat so heated that you could see the vapor of his breath, as you can an orator’s, or a wood-chopper’s in winter, rapidly intoning senate bills on third reading. The pages were growing heedless and impertinent. The newspaper correspondents, their despatches on the wires, puffed their cigarettes in professional unconcern, and awaited happenings worthy of late bulletins. The older members, who had been through the mill many times before, lounged low in their seats. One could see, above their desks, only their heads and heels. The speaker, old ’Zeke himself, was in the chair, suave as ever, but growing caustic. He had splintered his sounding-board early in the evening, and had taken to tapping perfunctorily his walnut desk with his little inadequate gavel. And yet he and the older members and the newspaper men would cast occasionally an anxious glance at the clock, and an expectant one at the big doors.

“As I sat there on the old, red lounge under the speaker’s flag-draped canopy, I noticed Henderson of Greene, standing away back under the galleries on the Democratic side, eying the proceedings with the same mysterious stare that had never left him since he had been sworn in. As I have said, I had never spoken to the fellow, but I had always felt a pity for him--he impressed me as a man who had been stunned by repeated raps of bad luck. Along toward the end of the session he had brought his wife up from Greene County to the capital. She had that tired look that country women have. Her face was seamed, her cheeks hollow; her back was bent in a bow, and she walked hurriedly, anxiously along in her flapping skirts beside her tall and somber husband. She had never been away from home before, and the boys had many a laugh over her wonder at the trolley-cars purring along under the maple trees, and her fear of the elevators in the state house--though, for my part, I could see nothing ludicrous in it all. She stayed three or four days and they went everywhere, out to Oak Ridge to see Lincoln’s tomb, over to Eighth Street to visit his old homestead, up to the Geological Museum where the moth-eaten stuffed animals are, and out to Camp Lincoln. They took many trolley rides, and even climbed to the top of the state house dome, whence, they say, you can see Rochester and the prairies for thirty miles around. He brought her over to the house one or two mornings, but not on to the floor as other members did their over-dressed wives; he sent her up to the gallery, where she sat peering down over the railing at the gang--and her husband, who took no part in all that was going on.

“The old woman’s interest in all these new things that had come into her starved life, her ill-concealed pride in her husband’s membership in such a distinguished body of law-givers, were touching to me, and as I looked at him that last night of the session, and thought of her, the wish to do something to lighten their lives came into my heart, but just then, suddenly, old ’Zeke started from his chair, grasped his gavel firmly, and leaned expectantly over his desk. At the same instant the older members dragged their feet down from their desks and sat bolt upright. The newspaper men flung away their cigarettes and adjusted their eye-glasses. The assistant clerk, who had been reading, looked up from the bill then under what I suppose they would have called consideration, and hurriedly gave his place at the reading-desk to the clerk of the house. I knew what was coming. I knew that the Bailey bill was on its way over from the senate. And I heard Bill Hill call:

“‘Mistah Speakah.’

“At the sound of that voice the uproar in the chamber ceased. It became so still that the silence tingled like a numbness through the body; stiller than it had been any time since nine o’clock that morning, when they had paused for the chaplain to say his prayer. The gang turned around and stood motionless, panting, in its shirt-sleeves, as though a flashlight photograph were to be taken. Half-way down the aisle stood Hill. You know how he would look at such a time, in his long black coat, his wide white shirt bosom with the big diamond, his rolling collar and black string tie, and his long black hair falling to his shoulders. You know how he would love such a moment--and it was his last chance that session. He stood there quietly a whole minute, and then putting a foot forward, said in his great bass voice:

“‘Mistah Speakah.’

“Old ’Zeke rose and said:

“‘Mister Doorkeeper.’

“‘A message from the senate, by its secretary.’

“‘A message from the senate by its secretary,’ repeated ’Zeke, and then Bill had to give way to Sam Pollard, who stepped forth and said:

“‘Mr. Speaker, I am directed to inform the house that the senate has passed senate bill No. 106’--I never shall forget the number of that bill, after all the sleepless nights it caused me, and the anxious mornings scanning the calendar to see if its black figures were there--‘Senate bill No. 106. A bill for an act to amend an act entitled: An Act concerning the exercise of the right of eminent domain, notwithstanding the objections of the governor’--you know the lingo.

“Then, as the speaker said, ‘The clerk will read the message,’ Hen Harvey, who was clerk of the house, stretched his arm over the narrow desk and took the file from the page. The old man was mad when he wrote that veto message, and he gave both houses the devil. I never knew the legislature to get such an unmerciful lamming in my life; it was outrageous, for it was a good bill, and--”

“Ought ter pass,” interjected Jennings, repeating the trite phrase sententiously.

“But nobody heard it, for when Hen began to read, the gang took a deep breath and began to howl. From both sides of the chamber broke forth a clamor of ‘Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker,’ until in the din even these words were lost, and there was just that long, heavy roar. The boys came over from the senate, for they had done their duty and had done it nobly, in the face of a great storm of criticism, combined with the abuse of the Chicago papers, and they wanted to help lift in the house. And with them came the crowd of reformers from the Municipal League, and stood about with George Herrick, the old man’s private secretary. The reformers, as George pointed out members here and there, and whispered in their ears, supposed that they were doing great things in the fight against the bill, but that was only another time when they deluded their precious selves. They did their reforming chiefly at banquets, but George and the old man knew a thing or two about politics themselves, and George, standing back by the Democratic cloak-room, smoking his little cigarettes, was directing that fight with the party lash in his hand, and some of the best men on the floor of the house to do his bidding. He was the only private secretary I ever knew who could set an army in the field.

“But through it all old ’Zeke stood there, game as ever, with a hard, cold smile on his face, and you could hear the sharp, monotonous rap of his gavel, rap, rap, rap, neither fast nor slow. The tumult did not die during the reading of that scathing message, and when Hen’s ruined voice ceased, and he rolled the message up again and thrust it in his desk, ’Zeke smashed his gavel down and I heard him say:

“‘Will the house be in order?’

“And it was in order, for ’Zeke knew how to compel order in that bear-pit when he wanted to, and he never raised his voice to do it either, only his eye, and the gavel. And so, when they were quiet, he said: ‘The question is: Shall the house concur with the senate in the passage of senate bill No. 106, notwithstanding the objections of the governor?’

“The house tried to break away from him again, but he held it in his gavel fist, drawing the curb tight, and turned to recognize old Long John Riley, who was standing like a tall tree beside his desk, with his hand upraised.

“‘The gentleman from Cook!’

“‘Mr. Speaker,’ said Riley, ‘I move the previous question.’

“There was another roar, but ’Zeke’s gavel fell, and his eyes blazed black again, and he said:

“‘The gentleman from Cook moves the previous question, and the question is: Shall the main question be now put? Those in favor of this question will say aye’--there was a roar of ayes--‘and those opposed will say no.’ There was a heavier roar of noes, and then came the old cry: ‘Ayes and noes, ayes and noes, Mr. Speaker, ayes and noes, damn you, don’t you dare to shut off debate!’ But ’Zeke only smiled and his gavel cracked--and they were still. Then in the stillness he said:

“‘Gentlemen are as familiar with the rules as is the chair. They are well aware that the chair is powerless to order a roll-call after a _viva voce_ vote, unless he is in doubt as to the result, the demand for the yeas and nays not having been preferred before the question had been put to the house. In this instance’--and the splendid old fellow swung his gavel to his ear, and the smile flickered out of his face--‘in this instance the chair is not in doubt. The ayes seem to have it, the ayes have it, and the main question is ordered.’ The hammer fell like a bolt, and then calmly leaning on it, his eye traveled around over the turbulent mob, until it lit on George Herrick and his little band of dazed reformers--and I knew he was thinking of the old man over in the mansion whom he hated with an Indian’s hate--and as he looked George in the eye, the cold smile came back, and he said:

“‘The question is: Shall the house concur with the senate in the passage of senate bill No. 106, notwithstanding the objections of the governor. Upon this question those in favor of the bill will vote aye, and those opposed will vote no, when their names are called, and the clerk will call the roll.’ The gavel fell, and the speaker, holding it where it had fallen, leaned half his length over his desk and motioned to Hen Harvey. Hen had taken off his coat and vest and collar--he would call _that_ roll himself--and as he unbuttoned his cuffs, inclining his head toward the speaker, ’Zeke yelled in his ear:

“‘Now, Hen, damn it, call that roll to beat all hell.’