BOOK II BY THE PEOPLE

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garwood arose, smiling.

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

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

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

“How is Judge Pickney’s health now?” he asked of Judge Bickerstaff.

“Not well, I hear,” whispered the court, “he’s going away for the summer.”

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

II

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

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

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

“What’s it going to be, gentleman?” he asked.

“I’ll have a beer,” said Rankin readily, mopping his hot brow with his big palm.

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

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

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

“I’m sorry, Mr. Garwood, but I’m out o’ manhattan.”

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

“Aw, take a beer,” he said.

“No,” said Garwood. “I haven’t been very well lately—I reckon you can give me some bourbon.”

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

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

“Yes,” said Garwood, quickly assenting to the proposition, “Senator Ames wanted me to go with him to Rye Beach later on—reckon I’ll have to.”

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

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

Rankin shifted uneasily. He grew a shade redder.

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

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

“I never promised it to him!” Garwood interrupted.

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

Garwood looked at Rankin in stupefaction.

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

“Well, Crawford did, didn’t he?” Garwood said. Crawford was his private secretary.

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

“The damn fools!” Garwood could only exclaim, helplessly.

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

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

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

“But it did,” said Garwood, setting his lips.

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

“Pusey?”

“Yes, Pusey. The truth is I underrated Pusey’s stren’th—that’s the whole of it.”

They were silent a minute, and then Garwood said:

“Well?”

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

“Shaved?”

“Yep, has a cup at the barber’s with a quill pen painted onto it.”

They marveled sufficiently, and Rankin resumed:

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

“And he did it!”

“Yes, sir, he done it.”

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

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

“Well, what did he do?”

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

“Proxies!” exclaimed Garwood, “so that was it!”

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

“Whom will it support?”

“Well, Sprague, I reckon.”

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

“No, they hold it next Saturday.”

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

“Well, you’ve played hell, haven’t you, Jim?”

Rankin hung his head.

“I’m awful sorry. I haven’t slep’ a night thinkin’ of it, but—I couldn’t help it, Pusey done it, that’s all.”

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

“Well, we’ve al’ays underrated Pusey, I’ve found that out.”

“Yes, you’ve found it out—too late.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Half?”

“Yes, half—we split it up, though they got the odd man.”

“You on?”

“Me? You bet I’m on, an’ I’ll be there, don’t you forget that.”

“You didn’t want the treasurership?”

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

“In December,” Garwood replied.

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

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

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

“Has Sprague promised it to him?”

“Yes, fer enough votes from Polk to nominate him.”

“Umph humph,” said Garwood, slowly, through his nose. “Umph humph.”

“But if it’s December the appointment’s made, we can fool him there, we can fool him there,” said Rankin, gleefully.

“Yes,” said Garwood, though not heartily.

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

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

Garwood turned on him angrily.

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

“Well, we can fix that.”

“How? I’d like to know; how?”

“Why, Pusey’s fellers is easy—you can get enough o’ them.”

“How?” Garwood spoke in the hollow sternness of despair.

“Buy ’em.”

And then the congressman threw back his head and laughed.

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

“Why, you get a sal’ry.”

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

“Well—there’s the old man.”

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

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

“Oh, I’ll tell you some other time, Jim,” he answered. “I’ve got to go now.”

He looked at his watch.

III

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Garwood addressed the Committee of the Whole.”

And then in maddening parenthesis:

“(His remarks will appear later.)”

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

“Tired?”

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

“Oh, no.”

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

“Poor child!” the mother said. “He’s not well. I dread the summer so.”

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

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

“Been over there?”

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

“Well, you ought to have a nurse,” he said.

“We can’t afford it,” the mother replied.

“Can’t afford it! He gets enough!”

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

The old man raised himself in his chair.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that with five thousand a year, he might—”

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

“You know, father, that Jerome does the best he can—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, the bank was the principal obstacle, and that’s been removed now.”

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

“Why don’t you do something? Ain’t you going to read?”

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

“I must go up and see how the baby’s getting along.”

“Coming down again?”

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

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

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

“Down town; where’d you suppose?” he answered.

“Is there any news?”

“News? What of?”

“Why, of politics.”

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

“You know how interested the baby and I are, Jerome. We’ve been waiting here to hear.”

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

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

“Did you see Mr. Rankin?”

“Yes.”

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

“He!” said Garwood. “He’s a back number!”

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

“Well, you don’t forget, Jerome, that you once said to me that we must be good to Jim Rankin.”

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

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

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

“Oh, you always say that when you’re blue. Don’t worry any more to-night.”

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hot, ain’t it?” said Pusey, still clipping out his little paragraphs.

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

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

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

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

“Ah?” said Pusey, superciliously.

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

“You are on the delegation, I believe?”

“I believe I am; yes,” Pusey replied.

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

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

“I don’t know.”

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

“Well, I haven’t,” he answered.

“But you opposed me in the convention.”

“No, not quite that,” Pusey answered.

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

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

“Oh, I see,” said Garwood; “I see. But let me ask this—you are opposed to my nomination, aren’t you?”

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

“No,” he said at length, “I haven’t said that, either.”

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

“I haven’t said that, either,” Pusey promptly replied.

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

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

He snapped out the word as if he relished it.

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

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

“What do you say?” Garwood pressed him.

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

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

“See here, Pusey, let’s be frank about this thing. You and I may not have been friends in the past, but—”

“I’ve always treated you fairly since I ran a party organ, haven’t I?” Pusey interpolated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Could you indicate them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

“So I assumed.”

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

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

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

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

“Well, I don’t know; if I had had—”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know but you’re right,” he said, relentingly.

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

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

“Why did you select Pekin?” Garwood asked, presently.

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

“I’ll take care of him.”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you think,” the congressman said presently, “that we could gain a few more votes here in Polk? Perhaps, with certain concessions, Pusey might—”

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

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

Rankin breathed heavily as he exploded this imperfect figure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’ll find Jim Rankin a pretty active corpse!” he was continually saying to Garwood.

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will Bailey preside?”

“Yes—we put it through after a fight.”

“He’ll do.”

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

He groped for a towel.

“Did you write the resolutions?” he asked Garwood.

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

X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An’ fer temp’rary sec’etary, Joseph Hale of Tazewell.”

Instantly the Sprague leaders began to shout:

“Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!”

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

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

“I’ll interduce to you your temp’rary chairman, Judge Zephaniah P. Bailey o’ Mason County.”

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