The Henchman

Neither the public nor the honorable body to which it was directly addressed took the new governor's message stressing general retrenchment and the pruning of useless offices se...

By the night of the meeting it was clear that that bugaboo of politicians, a general apathy, had blanketed the candidate's own community. Shelby should have stirred local pride....

The scene so nearly paralleled that crucial moment in his own life, under Joe Hilliard's roof, that the quarry owner seemed fairly to twitch his sleeve. Then, as the dead man ha...

Yet when mischief speedily befell, it wore so curious a guise that Shelby missed its import and laughed it aside for a random fling of jocund Fate. It began with a publisher's a...

The Boss was an awesome figure to up-state politicians, and Shelby approached his place of business with a trepidation not wholly owing to his tangled fortunes. It was his first...

In leaving his party headquarters up-town two hours later, Shelby trod air. Accustomed to eschew a too nice scrutiny of means if the end seemed meet, he merged every doubt and q...

Had the protest against Knickerbocker arrogance languished at this pass, history would be the poorer, but Cora Shelby found it impossible to stop with this show of independence....

Shelby stretched himself awake and contentedly surveyed his bachelor bedroom in the Tuscarora House. He had boarded at this establishment upward of five years, and his chamber h...

"Practical politics is applied human nature. If a rule is sound in politics, it will work anywhere this side of the pearly gates. Graves may not care a tinker's dam for politics...

So Shelby came in triumph to his own people, the governor at his chariot wheel, and fought the last stubborn week of his campaign. His mail was now burdened with invitations to...

The Boss questioned the wisdom of the Tuscarora speech, and the fall widened the unacknowledged breach between him and the governor. The September primaries had assured the lead...

As a matter of fact, the independent candidate did give the shoulder-rubbing process a trial. Within the by no means contracted limits of Volney Sprague's paper-and-ink horizon...

There was more solid ground than mere confidence in his destiny behind Shelby's bold front. The earliest mail delivery had shed a glimmer of hope in the shape of a midnight note...

A fault recognized, it was Ruth's nature to be lavish of atonement, and by way of further expiation she consented a day or two later to make one of a driving party of Mrs. Hilli...

Shelby's forecast of the effect of the _Whig's_ exposure was brilliantly fulfilled. People did laugh over it and say that it was a good speech, whatever its source. In popular c...

Had the fantastic bolt of the Sprague clique been left to its own courses, Shelby would have borrowed no further trouble, but a fortuitous matter of radishes and ice-water sudde...

Shelby waked from a restless night to confront a restless day, in truth, an anxious week. Two things he set about instanter; he wrote a manly letter of apology to Ruth, and he r...

Shelby left off staring at his blotter for an instant, to fling him the information. William Irons rubbed one long leg against its fellow as he leaned to the telephone and rumin...

A few minutes before eleven o'clock Shelby and his wife got out of a carriage at a west-side ferry. With North's assurance that her husband was surely coming, Cora's thoughts tu...

Summer leaped a hotbed growth from spring, and Cora Shelby, tiring of golf, the country club, and Albany's now mild pastimes, took herself off for a round of fashionable resorts...

He, no less than Ruth, was free! There was no dissociating the two facts. They shouted their message together. He was rid of his incubus--why mince the word now!--rid of her gad...

"You had better walk to the hotel," Shelby suggested. With the darkening of the theatre for the second act he had piloted his companion to the street. "It's but a little way."

The scandal derived its impetus from the vulgar circumstance that the Hilliard washing went to line on Tuesday (Monday having dawned lowering and ended stormy), thereby exposing...

A pleasant local custom fell this night into abeyance. Years out of mind the adherents of the leading political parties had mingled sociably before a non-partisan bulletin board...

With the stable boy's assurance that within ten minutes his horse would stand at the curb, Shelby locked his door against surprise, and, with an eye on the Temple driveway, made...

"You're a spy," repeated Shelby, fingering his whip. "Come how or when, you're a spy. I know your back-door tactics. You sly into other men's private business, as you're trying...

The executive mansion was strewn with the wreckage of the inaugural reception. A musky odor blent of plant life and massed humanity hung thickly throughout the spacious rooms an...

Meanwhile the nominee's fortunes and traits of character underwent dissection in his own town at the first autumn assembly of the Culture Club which, as always, met with Mrs. Hi...

Thenceforth Cora Shelby's respect for the fearless strategist in Quality Row verged upon awe. If Mrs. Teunis Van Dam now deigned to assist at one of the weekly house-openings, t...

It was the custom of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boo...

"M-yes; it is a slow coach," Bowers admitted; "but it suits a lot of people. They respect it because it keeps the old name and jogs along in the old gait it had under Volney's f...

Midway in the following forenoon Shelby sat in his law office revising for the seventh time the last will and testament of the Widow Weatherwax. It was the seventh revision of h...

Volney Sprague's flaming posters in black and red menaced Shelby from the selvage of the district to the threshold of his door. The State Committee had despatched him on a brief...