Chapter 5

"How do you do, Mr. Sayler?" said Woodruff.

"Glad to see you, Doctor Woodruff," I replied. "Then you knew me all the time? Why didn't you speak out? We might have had an hour's business talk in the train."

"If I'd shown myself as leaky as all that, I guess there'd have been no business to talk about," he replied. "Anyhow, I didn't know you till you took out your watch with the monogram on the back, just as we were pulling in. Then I remembered where I'd seen your face before. I was up at your state house the day that you threw old Dominick down. That's been a good many years ago."

That chance, easy, smoking-compartment meeting, at which each had studied the other dispassionately, was most fortunate for us both.

The relation that was to exist between us--more, much more, than that of mere employer and employé--made fidelity, personal fidelity, imperative; and accident had laid the foundation for the mutual attachment without which there is certain to be, sooner or later, suspicion on both sides, and cause for it.

The two hours and a half with Woodruff, at and after dinner, served to reinforce my first impression. I saw that he was a thorough man of the world, that he knew politics from end to end, and that he understood the main weaknesses of human nature and how to play upon them for the advantage of his employers and for his own huge amusement. He gave a small exhibition of that skill at the expense of Roebuck. He appreciated that Roebuck was one of those unconscious hypocrites who put conscience out of court in advance by assuming that whatever they wish to do is right or _they_ could not wish to do it. He led Roebuck on to show off this peculiarity of his,--a jumbling, often in the same breath, of the most sonorous piety and the most shameless business perfidy. All the time Woodruff's face was perfectly grave,--there are some men who refuse to waste any of their internal enjoyment in external show.

Before he left us I arranged to meet him the next morning for the settlement of the details of his employment. When Roebuck and I were alone, I said: "What do you know about him? Who is he?"

"He comes of a good family here in Chicago,--one of the best. Perhaps you recall the Bowker murder?"

"Vaguely," I answered.

"It was Woodruff who did it. We had a hard time getting him off. Bowker and Woodruff's younger brother were playing cards one day, and Bowker accused him of cheating. Young Woodruff drew,--perhaps they both drew at the same time. At any rate, Bowker shot first and killed his man,--he got off on the plea of self-defense. It was two years before Bowker and Doc met,--in the lobby of the Palmer House,--I happened to be there. I was talking to a friend when suddenly I felt as if something awful was about to happen. I started up, and saw Bowker just rising from a table at the far end of the room. I shan't ever forget his look,--like a bird charmed by a snake. His lips were ajar and wrinkled as if his blood had fled away inside of him, and his throat was expanding and contracting."

Roebuck wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. "It was Doc Woodruff walking slowly toward him, with a wicked smile on his face, and that scar--you noticed the scar?"

I nodded.

"Well, you can imagine how that scar stood out. He came slowly on, nobody able to move a muscle to stop him. When he was about ten feet from Bowker and as near me as you are now, Bowker gave a kind of shudder and scream of fright, drew his pistol, and fired. The bullet clipped Woodruff's ear. Quick as that--" Roebuck snapped his fingers--"Doc drew, and sent a bullet into his heart. He fell forward across the table and his pistol crashed on the marble floor. Doc looked at him, gave a cold sort of laugh, like a jeer and a curse, and walked out into the street. When he met a policeman he said, 'I've killed Dick Bowker. Here's my gun. Lock me up'--perfectly cool, just as he talked to us to-night."

"And you got him off?"

"Yes. I hated to do it, too, for Dick was one of my best friends. But Doc was too useful to us. In his line he's without an equal."

"How did he get that scar?" said I.

"Nobody knows. He left here when he was a boy,--to avoid being sent to the reformatory. When he turned up, after a dozen years, he said he had been a doctor, but didn't say where or how. And he had that scar. One day a man asked him how he got it. He picked up a bottle, and, with his pleasant laugh, broke it over the fellow's jaw. 'About like that,' said he. People don't ask him questions."

"He's my man," said I.

VII

BYGONES

A telegram had been thrust under my door--"I must see you. Don't fail to stop off here on your way back. Answer. Carlotta."

Again she was at the station in her phaeton. Her first look, long before I was near enough for speech, showed me how her mood had changed; but she waited until we were clear of the town. "Forgive me," she then said in the abrupt, direct manner which was the expression of her greatest charm, her absolute honesty. "I've got the meanest temper in the world, but it don't last, and as soon as you were gone I was ashamed of myself."

"I don't understand why you are making these apologies," said I, "and I don't understand why you were angry."

"That's what it means to be a man," she replied. "Your letter about your mother made me furious. You hadn't ever urged me to hurry up the wedding on your own account. And your letter made me feel as if, while you personally didn't care whether we ever married or not, still for your mother's sake you were willing to--to sacrifice yourself."

"Let me see my letter," said I.

"I tore it into a thousand pieces," said she. "But I don't mean that you really wrote just that. You didn't. But you made me jealous of your mother, and my temper got hold of me, and then I read the meanest kind of things into and under and all round every word. And--I'm sorry."

I could find nothing to say. I saw my freedom slipping from me. I watched it, sick at heart; yet, on the other hand, I neither tried nor wished to detain it, though I could easily have made a renewal of our engagement impossible. I have no explanation for this conflict of emotions and motives.

"Don't make it so hard for me," she went on. "I never before in my life told anybody I was sorry for anything, and I thought I never would. But I _am_ sorry, and--we'll have the wedding the first day of August."

Still I found nothing to say. It was so painfully obvious that, true to her training, she had not given and was not giving a thought to the state of my mind and feelings. What _she_ wished, that she would do--the rest did not interest her.

"Are you satisfied, my lord?" she demanded. "Have I humbled myself sufficiently?"

"You haven't humbled yourself at all," said I. "You have only humbled me."

She did not pause on my remark long enough to see what it meant. "Now that it's all settled," she said gaily, "I don't mind telling you that I began to make my preparations to be married on the first of August--when, do you think?"

"When?" I said.

"The very day I got your nasty letter, putting me second to your mother." And she laughed, and was still laughing, when she added: "So, you see, I was determined to marry you."

"I do," said I dryly. "I suppose I ought to feel flattered."

"No, you oughtn't," she retorted. "I simply made up my mind to marry you. And I'd do it, no matter what it cost. I get _that_ from father. But I've got mother's disposition, too--and that makes me far too good for such a cold, unsentimental, ambitious person as you."

"Don't you think you're rather rash to confess so frankly--when I could still escape?"

"Not at all," was her confident answer. "I know you, and so I know nothing could make you break your word."

"There's some truth in that,"--and I hope that I do not deceive myself in thinking I was honest there. "More truth, perhaps, than you guess."

She looked shrewdly at me--and friendlily. "Don't be too sure I haven't guessed," said she. "Nobody's ever so blind as he lets others think. It's funny, isn't it? There are things in your mind that you'd never tell me, and things in my mind that I'd never tell you. And each of us guesses most of them, without ever letting on." She laughed queerly, and struck the horse smartly so that he leaped into a gait at which conversation was impossible.

When we resumed, the subject was the details of our wedding.

At home again, I found my mother too ill to leave her bed. She had been ill before,--many times when she wouldn't confess it, several times when she was forced to admit it, but never before so ill that she could not dress and come down stairs. "I shall be up to-morrow," she assured me, and I almost believed her. She drew a letter from under her pillow. "This came while you were away," she went on. "I kept it here, because--" a look of shame flitted across her face, and then her eyes were steady and proud again,--"why should I be ashamed of it? I had the impulse to destroy the letter, and I'm not sure but that I'm failing in my duty."

I took it,--yes, it was from Boston, from Betty. I opened it and fortunately had nerved myself against showing myself to my mother. There was neither beginning nor end, just a single sentence:

"From the bottom of my broken heart I am thankful that I have been spared the horror of discovering I had bound myself for life to a coward."

The shot went straight to the center of the target. But----There lay my mother--did _she_ not have the right to determine my destiny--she who had given me my life and her own? I tore up Betty's letter, and I looked at mother and said, "There's nothing in that to make me waver--or regret." It was the only lie I ever told her. I told it well, thank God, for she was convinced, and the look in her face repaid me a thousandfold. It repays me once more as I write.

Carlotta and I were married at her bedside, and she lived only until the next day but one. When the doctor told me of the long concealed mortal disease that was the cause of her going, he ended with: "And, Mr. Sayler, it passes belief that she managed to keep alive for five years. I can't understand it." But _I_ understood. She simply refused to go until she felt that her mission was accomplished.

"We must never forget her," said Carlotta, trying to console me by grieving with me.

I did not answer,--how could I explain? Never forget her! On the contrary, I knew that I must forget, and that I must work and grow and so heal the wound and cover its scar. I lost not a day in beginning.

To those few succeeding months I owe the power I have had all these years to concentrate my mind upon whatever I will to think about; for in those months I fought the fight I dared not lose--fought it and won. Let those who have never loved talk of remembering the dead.

* * * * *

I turned away from her grave with the resolve that my first act of power would be to stamp out Dominick. But for him she would not have gone for many a year. It was his persecutions that involved us in the miseries which wasted her and made her fall a victim to the mortal disease. It was his malignity that poisoned her last years, which, but for him, would have been happy.

As my plans for ousting Dunkirk took shape, I saw clearly that, if he were to be overthrown at once, I must use part of the existing control of the machine of the party,--it would take several years, at least three, to build up an entirely new control. To work quickly, I must use Croffut, Dunkirk's colleague in the Senate. And Croffut was the creature of Dominick.

Early in September Woodruff came to me, at Fredonia, his manner jubilant. "I can get Dominick," he exclaimed. "He is furious against Dunkirk because he's just discovered that Dunkirk cheated him out of a hundred thousand dollars on that perpetual street railway franchise, last winter."

"But we don't want Dominick," said I.

My face must have reflected my mind, for Woodruff merely replied, "Oh, very well. Of course that alters the case."

"We must get Croffut without him," I went on.

Woodruff shook his head. "Can't get him," he said. "Dominick controls the two southern ranges of counties. He finances his own machine from what he collects from vice and crime in those cities. He gives that branch of the plum tree to the boys. He keeps the bigger one, the corporations, for himself."

"He can be destroyed," said I, waving aside these significant reminders.

"Yes, in five years or so of hard work. Meanwhile, Dunkirk will run things at the capital to suit himself. Anyhow, you're taking on a good deal more than's necessary--starting with two big fights, one of 'em against a man you ought to use to do up the other. It's like breaking your own sword at the beginning of the duel."

"Go back to the capital," said I, after a moment's thought; "I'll telegraph you up there what to do."

It was my first test--my first chance to show whether I had learned at the savage school at which I had been a pupil. Scores, hundreds of men, can plan, and plan wisely,--at almost any cross-roads' general store you hear in the conversation round the stove as good plans as ever moved the world to admiration. But execution,--there's the rub! And the first essential of an executive is freedom from partialities and hatreds,--not to say, "Do I like him? Do I hate him? Was he my enemy a year or a week or a moment ago?" but only to ask oneself the one question, "Can he be useful to me _now_?"

"I will use Dominick to destroy Dunkirk, and then I will destroy him," I said to myself. But that did not satisfy me. I saw that I was temporizing with the weakness that has wrecked more careers than misjudgment. I felt that I must decide then and there whether or not I would eliminate personal hatred from my life. After a long and bitter struggle, I did decide once and for all.

I telegraphed Woodruff to go ahead. When I went back to Pulaski to settle my affairs there, Dominick came to see me. Not that he dreamed of the existence of my combine or of my connection with the new political deal, but simply because I had married into the Ramsay family and was therefore now in the Olympus of corporate power before which he was on his knees,--for a price, like a wise devotee, untroubled by any such qualmishness as self-respect. I was ready for him. I put out my hand.

"I'm glad you're willing to let bygones be bygones, Mr. Sayler," said he, so moved that the tears stood in his eyes.

Then it flashed on me that, after all, he was only a big brute, driven blindly by his appetites. How silly to plot revenges upon the creatures of circumstance--how like a child beating the chair it happens to strike against! Hatreds and revenges are for the small mind with small matters to occupy it. Of the stones I have quarried to build my career, not one has been, or could have been, spared to waste as a missile.

I went down to the Cedar Grove cemetery, where my mother lay beside my father. My two sisters who died before I was born were at their feet; her parents and his on either side. And I said to her, "Mother, I am going to climb up to a place where I can use my life as you would have me use it. To rise in such a world as this I shall have to do many things you would not approve. I shall do them. But when I reach the height, I shall justify myself and you. I know how many have started with the same pledge and have been so defiled by what they had to handle that when they arrived they were past cleansing; and they neither kept nor cared to keep their pledge. But I, mother, shall not break this pledge to you."

VIII

A CALL FROM "THE PARTY"

About a month after the Chicago and Fredonia bill was smothered in committee there appeared upon the threshold of my office, in the administration building of the Ramsay Company, a man whom at first glance you might have taken for an exhorter or a collector for some pious enterprise. But if you had made a study of faces, your second glance would have cut through that gloze of oily, apologetic appeal. Behind a thin screen of short gray beard lay a heavy loose mouth, cruel and strong; above it, a great beak and a pair of pale green eyes, intensely alive. They were in startling contrast to the apparent decrepitude of the stooped shambling body, far too small for its covering of decent but somewhat rusty black.

"Senator Dunkirk," said I, rising and advancing to greet the justly feared leader of my party. I knew there was an intimate connection between this visit and the death of his pet project. I thought it safe to assume that he had somehow stumbled upon Woodruff's tunnelings, and with that well-trained nose of his had smelled out their origin. But I need not have disquieted myself; I did not then know how softly Woodruff moved, sending no warnings ahead, and leaving no trail behind.

For several minutes the Senator and I felt for each other in the dark in which we both straightway hid. He was the first to give up and reveal himself in the open. "But I do not wish to waste your time and my own, Mr. Sayler," he said; "I have come to see you about the threatened split in the party. You are, perhaps, surprised that I should have come to you, when you have been so many years out of politics, but I think you will understand, as I explain myself. You know Mr. Roebuck?"

"I can't say that I _know_ him," I replied. "He is not an easy man to know--indeed, who is?"

"A very able man; in some respects a great man," Dunkirk went on. "But, like so many of our great men of business, he can not appreciate politics,--the difficulties of the man in public life where persuasion and compromise must be used, authority almost never. And, because I have resisted some of his impossible demands, he has declared war on the party. He has raised up in it a faction headed by your old enemy, Dominick. I need not tell you what a brute, what a beast he is, the representative of all that is abhorrent in politics."

"A faction headed by Dominick couldn't be very formidable," I suggested.

"But Dominick isn't the nominal leader," replied Dunkirk. "Roebuck is far too shrewd for that. No, he has put forward as the decoy my colleague, Croffut,--perhaps you know him? If so, I needn't tell you what a vain, shallow, venal fellow he is, with his gift of gab that fools the people."

"I know him," said I, in a tone which did not deny the accuracy of Dunkirk's description.

"Their object," continued the Senator, "is to buy the control of the party machinery away from those who now manage it in the interests of conservatism and fair dealing. If they succeed, the only business interest that will be considered in this state will be the Power Trust. And we shall have Dominick, the ignorant brute, lashed on by Roebuck's appetites, until the people will rise in fury and elect the opposition,--and you know what _it_ is."

"What you say is most interesting," said I, "but I confess I haven't imagination enough to conceive a condition of affairs in which anybody with 'the price' couldn't get what he wanted by paying for it. Perhaps the business interests would gain by a change,--the other crowd might be less expensive. Certainly the demands of our party's machine have become intolerable."

"It astonishes me, Mr. Sayler, to hear you say that,--you, who have been in politics," he protested, taken aback by my hardly disguised attack upon him,--for he was in reality "party" and "machine." "Surely, you understand the situation. We must have money to maintain our organization, and to run our campaign. Our workers can't live on air; and, to speak of only one other factor, there are thousands and thousands of our voters, honest fellows, too, who must be paid to come to the polls. They wouldn't vote against us for any sum; but, unless we pay them for the day lost in the fields, they stay at home. Now, where does our money come from? The big corporations are the only source,--who else could or would give largely enough? And it is necessary and just that they should be repaid. But they are no longer content with moderate and prudent rewards for their patriotism. They make bigger and bigger, and more and more unreasonable, demands on us, and so undermine our popularity,--for the people can't be blinded wholly to what's going on. And thus, year by year, it takes more and more money to keep us in control."

"You seem to have forgotten my point," said I, smiling. "Why should _you_ be kept in control? If you go out, the others come in. They bluster and threaten, in order to get themselves in; but, once they're elected, they discover that it wasn't the people's woes they were shouting about, but their own. And soon they are docile 'conservatives' lapping away at the trough, with nothing dangerous in them but their appetites."

"Precisely,--their appetites," said he.

"A starved man has to practise eating a long, long time before he can equal the performances of a trained glutton," I suggested.

His facial response to my good-humored raillery was feeble indeed. And it soon died in a look of depression that made him seem even older and more decrepit than was his wont. "The same story, wherever I go," said he sadly. "The business interests refuse to see their peril. And when I, in my zeal, persist, they,--several of them, Sayler, have grinned at me and reminded me that the legislature to be elected next fall will choose my successor! As if my own selfish interests were all I have in mind! I am old and feeble, on the verge of the grave. Do you think, Mr. Sayler, that I would continue in public life if it were not for what I conceive to be my duty to my party? I have toiled too long for it--"

"Your record speaks for itself, Senator," I put in, politely but pointedly.

"You are very discouraging, Sayler," he said forlornly. "But I refuse to be discouraged. The party needs you, and I have come to do my duty, and I won't leave without doing it."

"I have nothing to do with the company's political contributions," said I. "You will have to see Mr. Ramsay, as usual."

He waved his hand. "Let me explain, please. Roover is about to resign,--as you probably know, he's been chairman of the party's state committee for seventeen years. I've come to ask you to take his place."

It was impossible wholly to hide my amazement, my stupefaction. Had he had the shadowiest suspicion of my plans, of the true inwardness of the Croffut-Dominick movement, he would as readily have offered me his own head. In fact, he was offering me his own head; for, with the money and the other resources at my command, I needed only this place of official executive of the party to make me master. And here he was, giving me the place, under the delusion that he could use me as he had been using Roover.

He must have misread my expression, for he went on: "Don't refuse on impulse, Sayler. I and the others will do everything to make your duties as light as possible."

"I should not be content to be a mere figure-head, as Roover has been," I warned him. He had come, in his desperation, to try to get the man who combined the advantages of being, as he supposed, Dominick's enemy and a member of one of the state's financially influential families. He had come to cozen me into letting him use me in return for a mockery of an honor. And I was simply tumbling him, or, rather, permitting him to tumble himself, into the pit he had dug for me. Still, I felt that I owed it to my self-respect to give him a chance. "If I take the place, I shall fill it _to the best of my ability_."

"Certainly, certainly,--we want your ability." Behind his bland, cordial mask I saw the spider eyes gleaming and the spider claws twitching as he felt his net quiver under hovering wings. "We want you--we need you, Sayler. We expect you to do your best."