dim hall, but it was not too dim to hide from Harley a singular
expression that passed over the face of the candidate. It was gone like
a flash, but it seemed to Harley to be a compound of anger and
anticipation. Wisely he kept silent, and Jimmy Grayson, stopping a
moment at his own door, said, in the grave but otherwise expressionless
tone that he had used throughout the discussion:
"Good-night, Harley; I don't think we shall forget this evening, shall
we?"
"No," replied Harley, and he tried to decipher a meaning in Jimmy
Grayson's tone, but he could not.
When Harley turned away, he found Hobart, Blaisdell, Churchill, and all
the other correspondents waiting for him at the end of the hall to get
the news of the conference.
"There is nothing, not a line," said Harley.
They looked at him incredulously.
"It is the truth, I assure you," continued Harley. "I am not sending a
word to my own paper. I am going straight to my bed."
"If you say so, Harley, I believe you," said Churchill. "Besides, it's
past one o'clock now, and that's past four o'clock in New York and past
three in Chicago; all the papers have gone to press, and we couldn't
send anything if we wanted to do so."
"There is nothing to tell you," said Harley, "except that Mr. Grayson
will allude to the tariff in his speech to-morrow, or, rather, this
morning, at Waterville. He has promised the committee not to do so
again--they were not very willing to grant him even so little--but it is
a sort of sop to Cerberus; later on, if any one twits him with avoiding
the revision, he can say, and say truthfully, that he has spoken on it."
"I see," said Churchill.
And before they could ask him anything more Harley had entered his own
room and was going to bed.
The morning dawned badly. The sun shone dimly through a mass of dirty
brown clouds, and the mountains were hidden in mist. A slow and
provoking cold rain was falling. It was also a start at the first
daylight, and, forced to rise too early from their beds, all were in a
bad humor. Even Sylvia was hid in a heavy cloak, and she did not smile.
Harley had told her that he could make nothing of the conference the
night before.
They reached Waterville an hour later, and they found it even smaller
and bleaker than they expected. Although the usual body of citizens was
on hand to meet them at the train, the attendance was less than at any
point hitherto. The shed under which Jimmy Grayson was to speak would
easily hold them.
But the members of the committee, when they came from their private car,
showed satisfaction. They had enjoyed a good breakfast, their _chef_, as
Harley could testify, was one of the best, and they were not averse to
hearing the candidate make his record good. Hence they were all
comfortably arranged on the platform in their usual solid semicircle
when Mr. Grayson appeared. The candidate himself was a bit later than
usual, but he gave them a cheerful good-morning when he appeared, and
then proceeded at once to the matter of the speech.
The audience, though small, greeted Mr. Grayson with the heartiest
applause, and he soon had them under his spell. He talked a while on the
customary issues, and then he said:
"Gentlemen, there is one question which seemed in previous campaigns to
be of paramount importance, but in this it has been suffered a long time
to rest. Lately, however, it has been rising into prominence again. In
the great centres of population to the eastward it has become a question
first in the minds of the people, and before the campaign closes it is
bound to become as momentous here."
Harley, in a seat at the corner of the stage, glanced at the committee,
and he noticed a slight shade of disapproval on all their faces. The
candidate was a little too strong in his preamble, but they smiled again
when they noticed his face which wore an expression so gentle and
innocent.
"It has been but recently that the matter came to my attention,"
continued the candidate, in an easy, conversational tone, "but in the
time since then I have been thinking about it a great deal. This
question I need scarcely tell you is the revision of the tariff, and I
am going to speak to you about it this morning."
There was a sudden cheer from the audience, and the people seemed to
draw closer around the speaker's stand. Their faces glowed with
interest. Sylvia sat up straight and her eyes sparkled. The committee
looked a warning at Jimmy Grayson, but he did not see it.
"This question has come up late," he said, "and perhaps it could have
been put aside. I have been told that it would be for the good of our
party, particularly in this campaign, to do so, and many have advised
me to keep silence, saying that I could consistently and honorably
follow such a course, as our platform does not declare itself on the
question; but there are some things that trouble me. This is an issue, I
feel sure, which must be threshed out sooner or later, and as it is now
so importantly before the country I think that I, as the standard-bearer
of our party, should have an opinion upon it."
The audience cheered again, and longer and louder than ever. Sylvia's
eyes not only sparkled, they flashed. Mr. Goodnight half rose in his
seat and said something in a loud whisper to the candidate, but Mr.
Grayson did not hear it and went on with his speech.
"It did not take me long to make up my mind," he continued. "I have
decided opinions upon the subject, and what they are I shall tell you
before I leave this stage; but first I want to tell you a story."
Mr. Grayson did not tell stories often; he did so only when they were
thoroughly relevant, and Hobart, Blaisdell, and the other correspondents
leaned forward with sudden interest. Sylvia's face glowed.
"I think I'll sharpen my lead-pencils," said Hobart.
"I would if I were you," said Harley.
"This story," continued the candidate, in an easy, confidential manner,
"is about a man who was in a position much like mine. He was the nominee
of his party for a most important office, and towards the close of his
campaign a great issue came up again, just as in my case. He did not
think that he ought to keep silent about it, but when he was thinking
over what he ought to say a committee of men, representing a minority in
his party, arrived from the great centres of population, industry, and
finance--he was then far away in a thinly settled and somewhat
isolated region."
Again the committee stirred, and they whispered loudly both to one
another and to Mr. Grayson, but he paid no heed to them and spoke on.
All the correspondents were writing rapidly, eagerly, and with rapt
attention, while Sylvia's eyes still sparkled and flashed.
"Well, the members of this committee and the man met," continued the
candidate, "and from the first they treated him as one who might have an
opinion of his own but who must not be allowed to express it. They were
not bad men, perhaps, but a long course of exclusive attention to their
own personal interests had, we will say, narrowed them. That personal
advantage was always dangling before them; they could see nothing else.
The sun rose and set in its interest, and such an affair as the
government of a mighty nation like the United States must be regulated
with sole regard to it. They thought they knew everything in the world
when they knew only one thing in it. Their ignorance was equalled only
by their presumption."
The rolling cheer came once more from the audience, but Harley saw that
the faces of the committee had turned red. They whispered no more, but
stared angrily and uneasily at Jimmy Grayson, who did not notice them.
"How glad I am that I sharpened all my lead-pencils!" said Hobart, in a
low tone to Harley.
But Harley never stopped writing.
"They did not even have the tact to treat this candidate with courtesy
and consideration," continued Mr. Grayson. "They lectured him on his
comparative youth and his ignorance of the world, when it was they who
were ignorant. They told him, without hesitation, regardless of his own
opinion and the fact that he was a free man among free men, that he must
not speak on this issue. They threatened him."
"Did he take the bluff?" shouted a big man in the audience.
"Wait and we shall see," said Jimmy Grayson, sweetly. "They were
entitled to their opinion, and he would have heard their advice, but
their manner was intolerable; they undertook to treat him as a child.
They called him to a conference, and there they laid down the law to him
as a school-master would order a sulking child to be good."
"Did he take the bluff?" again shouted the big man in the crowd.
"Wait and we shall see," repeated Jimmy Grayson, as sweetly as ever.
"Well, this conference came to pass, and it lasted a long time, but only
the committee talked; they gave the candidate scarcely a chance to say a
word. They treated him with increasing arrogance. They said that if he
declared himself upon this great issue they would bolt the party and let
him go headlong to destruction."
"The traitors!" shouted the big man in the audience. But the members of
the committee, from some strange cause, seemed to be struck speechless.
Their jaws fell, but the faces of them all were as red as fire. Sylvia
leaned forward and clapped her gloved hands.
"Blaisdell," whispered Hobart, "slip away and arrange at the
telegraph-office; any of us will give you his report. I shall have at
least five thousand words myself."
Blaisdell slid noiselessly away.
"The candidate endured it all, but only for the time," thundered Jimmy
Grayson, and now his voice was swelling with passion, while his eyes
fairly sparkled with heat and anger--"but only for the time. He had
decided opinions upon this subject, as I have upon the question of
tariff revision, and he intended to utter them as I intend to utter
mine. They said--and they said it with intolerable condescension and
patronage--that for the sake of his record he might make one little
speech upon the subject before a few people out in what they called the
desert, and he accepted the concession. But there was rage in his heart.
He was willing to be beaten by the biggest majority ever given against a
Presidential candidate before he would yield to such insolent dictation.
Moreover, there was the question of his true opinion, which the people
had a right to know, and he took his resolve. There was that little
speech, and he remembered the telegraph wire, the thin line that binds
the farthest little village to the great world, and I say he took his
resolve."
"He called the bluff!" shouted the big man in the audience, in a perfect
roar of triumph, and Jimmy Grayson smiled sweetly.
Suddenly Mr. Goodnight, in all the might of his majesty and importance,
rose up and stalked from the stage, and the eleven other members of the
committee, headed by Mr. Crayon, followed him in an angry file,
accompanied by the derisive shouts of the audience. They quickened their
pace somewhat when they reached solid ground, but before they were
within the sheltering confines of their private car, Jimmy Grayson was
launched upon his great and thrilling tariff speech, in which he
invested the driest subject in the world with an interest that absorbed
the attention of ninety million people.
All day the wires eastward and westward sang with the burden of the
great speech made in the tiny hamlet of Waterville, in the Wyoming
mountains, and the next morning it occupied the front pages of ten
thousand newspapers. It was absolutely clear and decisive. No one could
doubt how the candidate stood. He was heart and soul for revision.
Sylvia threw her arms around his neck, and said, "Uncle James, I was
never prouder of you than I am at this moment."
When they left Waterville the private car of the committee was still
attached to their train, but there was no communication between it and
the other cars. About the middle of the afternoon they reached a
junction with another railroad line. There the private car was cut off
and attached to a new engine. Then it sped eastward at the rate of fifty
miles an hour.
Meanwhile the correspondents were holding a little conference of their
own.
"They will bolt him sure," said Hobart. "Will it ruin Jimmy Grayson?"
"I believe not," said Harley, who had been thinking much. "Of course
there will be a split, but such courage, and his way of meeting their
attack, will appeal to the people; it will bring him thousands of new
votes."
"Whether it does or does not," said Hobart, "if I had been in his place
I'd have done as he did."
XXI
ALONE WITH NATURE
When the party returned to the train after Jimmy Grayson's thrilling
defiance there was an air of relief, even joyousness, about them all. No
more diplomacy, no more watching for blows in the dark, no more waiting,
now they knew who their friends were, and they knew equally well their
enemies. They could strike straight at Goodnight, Crayon, and all the
others. Only in the heart of nearly every one of them there was still
mourning for the lost leader, for "King" Plummer, whom a gust of passion
had led astray.
"Well," said Hobart, "I thank God that the split has come at last. Even
if we are beaten out of our boots, I've got that defiance to remember,
and the picture of Jimmy Grayson refusing either to be browbeaten or
cajoled, even though the price was the Presidency."
"We know where we stand," said Mr. Heathcote, "and that at least is a
gain."
As for Sylvia, she was thrilling with pride. Her uncle's high heroism,
his superb truthfulness appealed to every quality in her woman's soul,
and with another impulse full as womanly she hated Goodnight, Crayon,
and their associates with all her heart; she believed them capable of
any crime, personal as well as political. She felt so intensely upon
the subject that she wanted to speak of it to somebody else, but Mr. and
Mrs. Grayson had withdrawn to the drawing-room, and all the
correspondents were deep in their work, as it would be necessary to send
very long despatches to the great cities that day.
Harley wrote five or six thousand words full of fire and zeal. As usual,
he wrote from the "inside," and his was not a bare record of facts; one
reading it, though three thousand miles away, was upon the scene
himself; everything passed before him alive; he saw the heroic figure of
the candidate thundering forth his denunciation; he knew all that it
cost, the full penalty, and he shared the stern impulse which such a
speaker in such a situation must feel; he, too, saw the astonishment on
the faces of the committee, astonishment followed by fear and rage, and
he shared also the noble thrill that must come to a man who had lost all
save honor, but was proud in the losing. Harley was always a good
writer, but now as he wrote he saw every word burning before him, so
intense were his feelings, and even across the United States he
communicated the same thrill to those who read.
His despatch brought from his abrupt editor the one word "Splendid!" and
it attracted marked attention not only wherever the _Gazette_ went, but
where also went the numerous journals into which it was copied.
Everybody who read it said, "What a magnificent figure Jimmy Grayson
is!" and the impression was deepened and widened by other writers on the
train who were inferior in powers only to Harley. In this his day of
great disaster the candidate was to find that there were friends who
were truly bound to him with "hooks of steel." Nor was he ungrateful.
The moisture rose in his eyes when he first heard of their accounts,
and in privacy he confided to his wife that he did not know how to thank
them.
"If I were you I should not say anything," she advised. "They will like
it better if you don't."
And he did not.
Now the campaign took on a new phase. Even in the beginning it had
differed from any other ever waged in America, and since the Philipsburg
conference that difference, already great, increased. It was permeated
throughout by the personal element, party platforms sank into the
background, and in the foreground stood the titanic figure of Jimmy
Grayson fighting single-handed against a host of foes.
His hero appealed more powerfully than ever to Harley; every sympathy
within him was aroused by this lone figure who stood like Horatius at
the bridge--the old simile was always coming to him--and under its
influence his despatches took on a vivid coloring and a keen, searching
quality that thrilled all who read. And many other newspapers gave the
same lifelike impression.
The figure of the candidate, although he was admittedly a beaten man,
loomed larger than ever to the whole country, and his enemies, although
counting already the fruits of victory, began to feel a certain awe of
him. They showed an anxiety to keep away from him, even in what they
considered his dying moments, and no speaker dared to meet him on the
platform, despite the recollections of his defeat at Egmont. The
opposition often alluded to this "defeat," and sought to make great
capital of it, but the sensation that it had created at first faded. It
was surrounded by too many brilliant triumphs; people would say that on
the day of his defeat he was ill, like Napoleon at Leipsic; that he was
giving daily proofs that he was without a match in the world, and one
such little incident did not count.
The split in the party was made complete. Mr. Goodnight, Mr. Crayon, and
eighteen of their associates, all men of wealth and influence, came out
in a formal signed statement published first in the _Monitor_, stating
their position in calmness and moderation and in measured language. They
said that they had tried to support Mr. Grayson; they had given him
every chance; they had always been ready with advice; they had sought to
instil in him a full sense of his responsibility, and to impart to his
mind the breadth and solidity so necessary in a Presidential nominee;
they were strong in party loyalty, and they hesitated long before taking
such a momentous step; but they knew that in every great crisis brave
men who would not hesitate at great risk to lead must be found;
therefore they stepped into the breach. Reluctantly and with much grief
they announced that they could not support Mr. Grayson. He was a menace
to the country, and they felt that they must remove this danger; hence
they would support the other side, and they advised all the solid worth
of the country, those who cared for the national honor, to do likewise.
The _Monitor_ commented editorially in its finest vein upon this tribute
to conscience. It was glad to know that there were yet brave and honest
men; it was never worth while to despair of the republic so long as such
lofty and heroic citizens as Mr. Goodnight and Mr. Crayon were
vouchsafed to it. The American people were frivolous and superficial,
but there was a saving remnant, men who might almost compare with the
great statesmen of Europe, and in every emergency, every crisis, it was
they who would make enormous sacrifice of private interest and save the
state.
Churchill followed the lead, and in a long despatch made a ferocious
attack upon Jimmy Grayson, the man. Then, with a concealed sense of
importance, he waited until the paper arrived, and when the two hours
that he thought necessary to make the impression deep had passed he went
in to Mr. Grayson and announced with an air of great dignity that he was
prepared to leave the train; he felt that as a keen and remorseless
critic his presence would put a severe constraint upon the candidate;
there was nothing personal in his course, and he did not wish to prevent
anybody from doing his best; he was aware that he must be regarded with
the greatest hostility and apprehension, and therefore he would retire,
seeking his news either by going before or by following.
"Why, Mr. Churchill!" exclaimed the candidate, in surprise, "we do not
dream of letting you go. You have been so long with us that your place
could not be filled. I cannot consent to such a thing! You must stay
with us to the end!"
Churchill felt that his shot had missed again, but he said:
"I spoke out of consideration. I thought that my continued presence here
might have a somewhat disconcerting effect upon you."
"Not at all! Not at all!" replied the candidate, courageously. "It's a
blow, but we prefer to bear it rather than lose you. Ah, here is my
niece, Sylvia; perhaps she can persuade you. Sylvia, Mr. Churchill
speaks of leaving us; he thinks that he ought to do so because he is a
critic of us. Sylvia, I leave him in your hands, and I want you to
persuade him that it is only his exaggerated sense of honor."
Sylvia was not averse to the task. She was wholly feminine, and hence
there was in her a trace of cajolery which she now used. She told
Churchill that her uncle and all his friends felt the truth and edge of
his criticisms, but they felt, too, that although he was in the
opposition now, they might, nevertheless, profit by them. And there was
the influence of his personal presence on the train--his gravity of
manner and his weighed and measured speech were a useful antidote to the
flippancy and levity of his associates.
Sylvia said these things rather by indirection than by plain words, and
under the influence of such soothing speech Churchill gradually melted
and became forgiving; he would stay, but it was partly for the sake of
Miss Morgan that he stayed, and later in the day he confided to Mr.
Heathcote that he was surprised at the way Sylvia was coming out; she
really had strong and attractive qualities; if she were to marry a man
of refinement and knowledge of the world who would exercise a
stimulating and also a corrective influence upon her, she might become a
very fine woman. Mr. Heathcote bowed assent, but looked away from
Churchill and out of the window. Churchill's opinion of Mr. Heathcote
also improved.
There was yet one element in the situation that was not clarified. Mr.
Plummer not only failed to appear upon the scene, but did not
communicate in any manner with either the Graysons or Sylvia. They heard
of him as floating about the Northwest and full of hot talk, but no one
could put his hand upon him, and they were puzzled, because they had
expected decisive, straight-from-the-shoulder action from the "King."
In this week Harley saw Sylvia almost every hour in the day, but never
once did he speak of the subject that was nearest both their hearts.
Sometimes he thought that it would have been better had the Graysons
granted her request to go, because he could see that she was suffering
from a constant nervous strain, and that her gayety with the group was
often forced.
They came at last to Grafton, a village in the corner of North Dakota,
where a sweep of low mountains opens out for a space and forms a wide
valley. In that hollow lies Grafton, and to Harley it looked warm and
inviting. The candidate was to speak here, and as Harley ascertained in
advance that Mr. Grayson did not intend to say anything new, merely
repeating a speech of the day before, he did not consider it necessary
to be present; instead, he chose to take a walk through the town and its
outskirts for the sake of fresh air, exercise, and some solitary musing.
The autumn was far advanced in that Northern latitude, but the chill of
winter had not yet come. The wide sky of glittering blue hung high, and
in the thin air the mountain-peaks that stood far away came near; the
wooden houses of the new town were gilded and softened by the yellow
sunshine.
Harley saw the usual audience--the ranchmen, the sheep-herders, the
miners, and the railroad-men--all flocking towards the stand where the
candidate would speak, and exchanging jocose or admiring comment,
because this was to them both a holiday and a ceremony.
Only a minute or two sufficed to carry him to the outskirts of the
little town, and he would have paid no further attention to the crowd,
but he thought he saw on its fringe a broad, powerful back that he knew.
When he undertook to take the second look and make sure the back was
gone, and Harley went on, telling himself, as one is apt to do, that it
was only his fancy. The echo of cheering came to his ears, and he knew
that the candidate, as usual, held the audience in his grasp. Presently
the echo died, and those that followed it did not come to him, as he had
left the town behind; although from the low crest of a swell he could
see the heads of the people surrounding Jimmy Grayson, and by the way
they bobbed back and forth he knew that the enthusiasm was boiling.