BOOK I OF THE PEOPLE (continued 2)

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

VIII

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

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

“Do you think it’s a blackmailin’ scheme?” asked Kerr.

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

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

“Why didn’t you kill him, Jim?” one of them asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“You just dare to print another line about us and you’ll settle with me, you hear? I’ll pull your head off—no, I’ll pinch it off, and—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“About what—your need of exercise?”

“Mon Dieu, no—about the terrible exposé of that interesting protégé of yours? On ne pourrait le croire—c’est affreux!”

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

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

“No, not to dances, Dade. He doesn’t dance.”

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

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

“He wouldn’t learn.”

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

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

“But won’t it injure his chawnces of election?”

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

“You don’t mean to tell me you think it true, Dade?”

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

“Emily Harkness, you’re in love with that man!”

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

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

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

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

“You’re the first I’ve told except papa,” said Emily.

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

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

“And—let’s plan it all out now, dyah. Will you have it at St. Louis, and Doctah Storey?—why—there—there now——”

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

“Mon Dieu, there comes that big De Freese girl. I’m going.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She went into the drawing-room.

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

“Did I understand you to say that Emil—that Miss Harkness was——”

“I’ll tell heh; she’ll come right down.”

“But you said Mister Harkness had left——”

Dade smiled the superior smile of the socially perfect.

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

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

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

“Le voilà!” said Dade, pointing tragically over the balusters, and then she went down the back stairs.

X

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

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

“Ah, Jerome—I knew it, I knew it!”

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

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

“Not for one little instant,” she whispered. “Oh, not for one little instant! I knew it couldn’t be!”

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

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

“Jerome, what is a roorback?”

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

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

“And are lies necessary in politics?”

“Always, it seems,” he said.

XI

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure, I know that, Judge,” said McFarlane, “but things is changed now—I tell you you’ve got more’n a fightin’ chance to win out.”

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

“W’y, sure, why wouldn’t it?” McFarlane urged. “We can make it.”

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

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

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

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

“You have no doubt, then, of its authenticity?”

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

“I presume not.”

“You ought to know as much about it as me, anyway, Judge. You’re a corp’ration lawyer—you’ve been to Springfield yourself, I reckon.”

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

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

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

“But that ain’t all, by a long shot. You know Sprague—Con Sprague?”

“The present incumbent? Of course.”

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

“He is?”

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

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

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

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

“What plan do you propose?”

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

Judge Bromley was tapping his pencil lightly on the desk.

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

McFarlane hesitated.

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

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

“How much will all this cost?”

“Oh, well, now, that’s a question. Course, the boys ain’t in politics fer the’r health, an’ the more money we have the more——”

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

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

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

“But how much, that’s the question?” demanded Bromley.

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

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

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

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

“Ethan Harkness? The banker over at Grand Prairie?”

“Yep.”

“Why should he provide means for Garwood’s campaign?”

“Oh, don’t ask me—that’s what the boys says. Seems to me, though, I heerd somethin’ about Jerry’s goin’ to marry his daughter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

McFarlane went down the stairs, chuckling.

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

XII

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

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

“All alone, as usual?” she said.

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

“Father,” she said, “I’ve something to tell you.”

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

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

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

The old man made no reply.

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

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

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

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

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

“But I won’t leave you, father, I won’t—I won’t! It’ll be just the same for us—tell me it will!”

The old man smiled.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “that part of it’ll be all right. But tell me—what’s the rush?”

“Why, father, there isn’t any rush—only, don’t you know how every one’s against him just now?”

“Humph!” he said, “not if the reports of his meetings is correct, they hain’t.”

“Well, I know; but they tell such stories about him, and this horrible roorback—isn’t that what they call it?”

“Depends on who you mean by they,” he answered.

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

“That’s like you, Em,” he said, smiling at her. “It’s like your mother, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“D’ye think Mother Garwood’ll like the board?” he asked.

“Father!” Emily protested, “you’d joke at a funeral!”

XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused again impressively.

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

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

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

“Me? I reckon I am,” he said.

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

“Reckon we can,” replied Funk, “if we can raise the price.”

The judge scowled.

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

“What would you suggest—an open-air meeting?”

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

“That can be arranged,” said the judge.

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

“Seems to me the op’ra house would be safer,” said McFarlane.

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

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

“Judge, how ’bout the funds? You know what we was sayin’ the other day.”

“Yes,” said Bromley, “I recall our conversation. I shall meet all legitimate expenses—ah—as they arrive.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Judge, why don’t you take the stump?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The damn fool!”

XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Howdy, Jim; where’d you come from?”

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

“Come on business?”

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

“That so?”

“Yes, that’s so.”

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

“Yes, that’s it,” Rankin went on, “and you’re the man I come to see.”

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

“Well, what can I do for you?”

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

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

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

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

Sprague stopped whistling and looked at Rankin.

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

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

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

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

“I always supposed we were friends, Jim,” Sprague complained.

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

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

“Yes, I did,” said Rankin.

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

“Yes, you might,” Rankin rejoined, “but the trouble is, you don’t, an’ your fellers right here in Moultrie County is out with the’r knives fer Jerry.”

“Well, if they are,” said Sprague, “I’m sure I didn’t know it.”

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

“Well, if they don’t?” Sprague interrupted in an ugly, defiant note.

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

“What’s more?” repeated Sprague, nodding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV

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

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

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

“Well, what’s the matter? Everything’s gone to hell, I suppose—heh?”

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

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

Rankin turned and tried to distinguish his features.

“Look’e here, Jerry,” said the big fellow, “you’ve got a cold—you’ll best go down and have Chris mix you a hot tod.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Garwood, scraping his throat. “Go on with your tale of woe.”

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

“Wouldn’t the Hutchinsons give?”

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

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

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

“Can’t they wait till after election?”

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

“You know how I appreciate that, Jim, don’t you?”

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

“It’s a regular hold-up, isn’t it?” said Garwood.

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

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

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

“I thought you’d fixed Sprague?”

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

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

“Two hundred,” said Rankin. “The boys over there say—shall I tell you what they say?”

“Yes; go on, I can stand anything nowadays.”

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

Garwood, in his hoarse voice, swore an oath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on,” urged Garwood.

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

Garwood had already begun shaking his head vigorously.

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

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

“Yes, I know, Jim, and I appreciate it—but—I’ll tell you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now you swallow that, quick; you can’t taste it. Then you can have your whisky.”

XVI

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

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

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

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

“I took a little quinine and whisky a while ago.”

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

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

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

“No; is supper over?” he replied.

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

“Oh, don’t bother to get anything, mother,” he said.

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

“Mother!” he called, peremptorily. “Don’t make any fire; just something cold—that’ll do for me.”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you come out here! You’ve got your slippers on.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, well, all right; she doesn’t know I’m here anyhow.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m afraid we need money just now, as much as prayers,” he said.

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

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

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

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

“That’s just what I told them,” said the son, quietly.

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

“But I don’t know whom to go to,” Garwood said presently, “and I’ve got to go to somebody.”

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

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

“Didn’t I just say I’d got to have some?”

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

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

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

“I’ll have to borrow of some one, I don’t know who.”

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

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

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

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

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

“Why, some o’ the banks—they loan money.”

He laughed aloud, harshly, angrily.

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

“Well, Jerome, don’t get mad with mother,” she said. “She’d help you if she could.”

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

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

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I might borrow a little from the bank—and we give a mortgage on the house.”

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

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

Garwood leaned toward her with his elbows on his knees.

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