BOOK I

The 13th District

A Story of a Candidate

_By_

Brand Whitlock

Indianapolis

The Bowen-Merrill Company

Publishers

Copyright 1902

The Bowen-Merrill Company

March

PRESS OF

BRAUNWORTH & CO.

BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN,

N. Y.

_To_

E. B. W.

BOOK I

OF THE PEOPLE

The 13th District

I

Just as the train with a salute of the engine's whistle careened into

full view of the smoke-blackened shed that is known in Grand Prairie

as the depot, the sound of cheering came to Garwood's ears. He was

lounging in the smoking car, his long legs stretched to the seat before

him, his face begrimed with soot and glistening with perspiration,

his whole body heavy with fatigue. But the cheers, coming to him in a

vast crescendo that even the noise of the car-wheels as they hammered

the Wabash crossing could not drown, brought back to his eyes the

excitement that had been burning in them for days; a smile soothed his

tired visage, and instinctively he flexed in every fiber. For a moment

he tried to hide the smile, but Rankin, who had so successfully managed

his canvass for him, and executed that great manoeuver on the last day

of the Clinton convention, which, after one thousand two hundred and

nine ballots had nominated Garwood for Congress, heaved his bulk from

the hot, cindery, plush cushion, slapped his candidate on the shoulder

and said:

"There's nothing like it, is there?"

So Garwood let human feelings have their way and the smile fully

illumined his haggard face. It was a strong face, clean-shaven after

the old ideal of American statesmen, that grew darker and stronger in

the shadow of the slouch hat which he now clapped upon his long black

hair. Rankin had succeeded in raising himself to his feet, and stood

upright in the aisle, shaking himself like a Newfoundland. He drew off

the linen duster he wore, and draped it over his arm, then seizing his

little traveling-bag, which in contrast to his huge body looked like a

mere reticule, he waved it toward the station and said, as if he had

just conjured the presence of the crowd:

"There they are, Jerry, there they are!"

Garwood had risen, and through the windows of the swaying coach he

could see the faces of the crowd. The men on board the train, most of

them members of the Polk County delegation which had stood by him with

solid, unbroken ranks, had been yelling all the way from Clinton, and

now, though it seemed impossible that they should have any voices left

in their hoarse and swollen throats, they raised a shout that swelled

above the cheers outside and pressing to the windows and the doors of

the coaches, they challenged their neighbors with the exulting cry:

"What's the matter with Garwood?"

Outside there rose an answering roar:

"_He's_ all right!"

But the Polk County delegation, as if it demanded confirmation, yelled

again:

"_Who's_ all right?"

And then the crowd rose to its tip-toes, and the answering cry was of

such immense unanimity that it made the very platform shake:

"G-a-r-wood!"

The train had stopped, and Garwood was being hustled toward the door.

Some impatient fellows from the platform outside who had mounted the

steps of the car, now pressed in, and stretched their bodies incredible

distances across the backs of seats to grasp Garwood's hand, to seize

him by the coat, and to call in his face:

"Good boy, Jerry!"

"You're the stuff!"

He was oblivious of the progress he was making, if he was making any

at all, and the conductor, although he had caught the contagious

spirit of the triumphant Polk County delegation soon after the train

left Clinton, and had shown Garwood the deference due to a successful

candidate, began to be concerned for the time he was losing, and said

with smiling indulgence:

"Gentlemen, gentlemen!"

Big Rankin then squeezed himself in front of Garwood, and waving his

little bag dangerously before him, crushed his way out, drawing the

others after him in his turbulent wake. Meanwhile the passengers in

the train looked on with the good-humored toleration an American crowd

always excites in those not participants in its moving enthusiasms,

and mildly inquired what town that was.

When Garwood gained the platform of the car and the people at last

caught sight of him, the cheering suddenly attained a new pitch of

intensity, and a band, clustered near the rotting log where the hacks

made their stand, spontaneously crashed into "Hail to the Chief!" The

band played the piece in furious time, and the man who performed on the

tuba seemed to have taken upon himself the responsibility of voicing

the whole enthusiasm of Polk County; but to Garwood, to whom the

strains came across that tossing mass of heads and hats and faces, the

music was sweet. He felt himself suddenly choking; his eyes filled with

tears. He could not have trusted himself to speak just then, though

the cheers were being more and more punctuated by cries of "Speech!

Speech!" Luckily, the man behind him, urged by the brakeman, for the

conductor, watch in hand, was scowling, began to push, the crowd in

front held out a hundred arms to seize him, and Garwood was swallowed

up in that stifling press of men.

Somewhere in the depths of the multitude Garwood was conscious of

meeting the mayor, who took his hand, when he could reclaim it from

a score of other hands thrust forth all about him, and then in a

zigzag path of glory, he was dragged through the throng, Rankin and

the delegates following, moving like a current in the sea. Garwood

laughed as he was pulled this way and that, and tried to answer

each one of the thousand greetings poured in on him from every side.

The perspiration streamed from his face. His waistcoat had been torn

open and when some one saw this and shouted "Look out for your watch,

Jerry!" the whole crowd laughed delightedly at the witticism, and

Garwood himself laughed with them.

The crowd had been a first surprise to Garwood, the band had been

another, now a third was added by the sight of an open carriage drawn

by two white horses. He had not expected an ovation, which made it all

the more grateful when it came, and as he was being helped into the

carriage with a solicitude that was a new thing in men's treatment of

him, he expressed something of this to Rankin. But Rankin, who had

been in politics all his days and could view the varying moods of the

populace with a politician's cynicism, replied:

"Well, if we'd been skinned, they wouldn't 'a' been here when you

needed sympathy."

The truth flashed upon Garwood at once, and if it embittered for an

instant his triumph when it was at its sweetest, it seemed to give him

a better control, so that as he settled himself in the back seat of

the carriage, with the mayor beside him, and Rankin filling the whole

front seat, he rearranged his rumpled garments, readjusted his hat, and

then looked calmly around on the crowd that swarmed up to the carriage

wheels as if they had never seen him before. His face was calm and

composed, almost stern. It was the face he hoped to leave to history.

As the band, to whom the leader had been distributing the precious

leaves of its most classical number, was forming in the street, Garwood

for the first time saw many carriages, filled with men and women who

waved hats and fluttered handkerchiefs, now that they thought he could

see and recognize them. Garwood smiled, though reservedly, and lifted

his hat with a sudden consciousness that he, himself, at last, was

the one who was lifting the hat from the open carriage in the street,

and not some other man. He did not neglect to smile, nor to raise his

hat gallantly to each carriage load as he swept his eye along the

line of vehicles, but he was not thinking of their occupants, nor of

himself, wholly. He was thinking of a certain surrey he knew well,

from which a pair of eyes would smile as his did, perhaps be moistened

by tears as his had been a few minutes before,--the eyes of one to

whom all this would be as sweet as it was to him. But the surrey was

not there. He was surprised, though in a way different from that in

which the crowd and the band and the open carriage had surprised him.

He was disappointed, and felt himself entitled to a little shade of

resentment, to a little secret hurt at the heart. It was the hour

in the afternoon when she would be driving down to the bank for her

father. He could not see why she had not come. Perhaps she felt a

delicacy about the publicity of it, though he did not see why she

should.

But the band had swung into the middle of the street. The drum-major,

in his hot bear-skin and tall leggings, was facing them with his

baton held horizontally before him in his two hands. He blew the

shrill whistle, clenched in his teeth, and then, wheeling, pointed up

Kaskaskia Street and strode away for the public square. The leader

trilled two little notes on his cornet, the snare drums rattled a long

roll, and the band burst into "See, the Conquering Hero Comes!" The

carriage moved, the crowd cheered again, and the little procession

began his triumphal entry for him.

"Look mad, Jerry," advised Rankin, in humorous appreciation of the

whole demonstration. The remark did not exactly please Garwood, and

for an instant he did look mad, but he smiled again and composed his

features to the dignity required of him in that hour. Some of the

private carriages followed in his train and the crowd streamed along

the sidewalks on each side of the street. A number of small boys

trudged in the deep white dust, mingled with the band, or crowded

after Garwood's carriage, breaking into a trot now and then in their

determination to keep up with the procession. Two or three of them,

in order to identify themselves more closely with the affair, laid

their dirty little hands on the panels of the carriage. Garwood felt

an inward resentment at this, and when Rankin lolled over in his seat

and snatched the cap from the matted head of one of the boys, and the

crowd on the sidewalk laughed uproariously, Garwood felt like rebuking

him. He had a moral conviction that at least two other boys were

swinging on the springs behind the carriage, and he would have liked

to dislodge them, but he knew he dare not. In the last ten minutes

imperial ambitions had stirred within him. He began already to dream of

triumphal marches amid wider scenes, with troops or at least policemen

lining the curb, and yet his politician's sense reminded him of the

quickness with which American voters resent any little assumption of

undemocratic airs, however much they may like it on a larger scale.

And so when Rankin, to appease the frightened lad whose cap he had

snatched, took the youngster by the collar and dragged him into the

carriage, Garwood felt it would be better to laugh with him and with

the crowd.

The procession turned into Main Street, and so on down to the square,

with its old brown court house and its monument inscribed to the

soldiers and sailors of Polk County, though Polk County had never had

any sailors. The procession ended at the Cassell House, though why can

hardly be told. Garwood did not live there, but all processions of

that kind in Grand Prairie end at the Cassell House. The band stopped

in front of the hotel, and the musicians seized off their caps, mopped

their brows and looked around toward Rankin furtively, thinking of

beer. But Rankin, again swinging his dangerous little bag, was making a

way through the crowd toward the wide door. Garwood was almost lifted

from his carriage, and felt himself helplessly swept into the hotel

office on the great human breaker that rolled in that way. When his

feet touched the floor again, the loud cry went up:

"Speech! Speech!"

Rankin turned toward him.

"You'll have to give it to 'em, Jerry, 'fore they'll let you go."

And he led the way up the stairs toward the parlor. Garwood went after

him, with the mayor and a self-appointed committee following, and

in another minute he had stepped out on the balcony, and bared his

head to the breeze that was blowing warm off the prairie. As he stood

there, erect and calm, with the little wind loosening the locks over

his forehead, his lips compressed and white, his right hand in the

breast of his coat, after the fashion of all our orators, many in the

crowd for the first time were conscious of how like a congressman this

young fellow really looked. They began to celebrate the discovery by

another cheer, but Garwood drew his hand from the bosom of his coat

and raised it toward them. Instantly a warning "Sh!" ran through the

whole concourse, the few wagons rattling by halted suddenly, and a hush

fell. Garwood's eye swept the old familiar square, his face flushed,

his heart beat high, but outwardly he was calm, as he affected the

impressive pause that adds so much to oratory. And then he began with

studied simplicity.

"My friends," he said, in a voice that seemed low, but which carried

in the evening air across the square, "and fellow citizens: I am

profoundly touched by this welcome. Words are inadequate to express,

fittingly, how much it means to me. For thirty years I have gone in and

out among you, as a boy and as a man, and it has always seemed to me

that the highest honor I could achieve in life would be found in your

respect, your confidence, if possible, your love. Your wishes and your

welfare have ever been my first and highest thought. I know not what

responsibilities may await me in the future, but whether they be small

and light or great and heavy, still my wish and purpose shall remain

the same--to serve you, well and faithfully; whatever they may be, I

know that nothing can ever bring to my heart the deep gratitude or fill

me with the sweet satisfaction this magnificent welcome affords.

"You must not expect a speech from me this evening. At a later day and

at some more convenient and appropriate season, I shall address you

upon the issues of the approaching campaign, but I would not, even if I

were physically able to do so, intrude partisan considerations upon you

in this hour. But I can not let you go away without the assurance that

I am deeply sensible of the great honor you do me. With a sincerity

wholly unfeigned I thank you for it. May God bless you all, may you

prosper in your basket and your store and--" the speaker's eye wandered

far away to the ragged edges of the crowd--"thanking you again and

again, I bid you good night."

A cheer promptly arose, and Garwood bowed himself backward through the

window. Rankin, standing near him, laid his hand on the shoulder of

the mayor.

"John," he said to that executive, "he'll do."

Then the hand-shaking and the congratulations began again. Garwood

stood there, at times passing over his brow the handkerchief he held in

his left hand, while he gave to the men who passed by him a right hand

that was red and swollen and beginning to ache. And outside, the crowd,

feeling, when its American passion for speech-making was satisfied,

that it had had its due, went away, leaving the square deserted.

II

The mother of the new candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District

expressed her pride in her son's achievement by cooking for him that

night, with her own hands, a supper of the things he most liked to

eat, and while the candidate consumed the supper with a gusto that

breathed its ultimate sigh in the comfortable sense of repletion with

which he pushed back his chair, his appreciation ended there, and

half an hour later he left his mother to the usual loneliness of her

widowed life. Sangamon Avenue, where the self-elected better element

of Grand Prairie had gathered to enjoy the envy of the lower classes,

stretched away under its graceful shade-trees in aristocratic leisure.

The darkness of a summer evening rolled under the elms and oaks, and

blurred the outlines of the tall chimneys and peaked roofs which a new

architect coming from the East had lately given to the houses of the

prosperous. Here and there a strip of cool and open lawn, each blade of

its carefully mown blue-grass threading beads of dew, sparkled in the

white light of the arc lamps that hung at the street crossings. On the

wide verandas which were shrouded in the common darkness, white forms

could be seen indistinctly, rocking back and forth, and the murmur

of voices could be heard, in bland and desultory interchange of the

banalities of village life. The avenue had been laid an inch deep in

mud by the garden hose, which might have been seen in the last hours of

the day, united in a common effort to subdue the dust that puffed in

little white clouds as Grand Prairie's horses stumbled along. Now and

then some surrey, the spokes of its wheels glistening in the electric

light, went squeaking leisurely by as some family solemnly enjoyed its

evening drive; now and then some young man, his cigarette glowing into

a spark of life and then dying away, loitered down town. The only other

life was represented by the myriads of insects feverishly rising and

falling in clouds about the arc lamps, or some silent bat describing

vast circles in the darkness, and at intervals swinging into the light

on membranous wings to snatch her evening meal, bite by bite, from that

mass of strenuous, purposeless animal life.

As he strolled, slowly, for he wished to preserve his collar intact

until he should present himself immaculate before the woman of his

love, Garwood felt some of the peace of the sleepy town fall upon him.

He gave himself up to the sensuous effect of it, inhaling the odors of

a summer night, and when he turned into the yard of the Harkness home

his heart leaped. A filmy figure in white slowly floated, as it seemed

to his romantic vision, out of the darkness that lay thick under the

veranda. Half way down the walk, under the oaks, they met.

"Jerome! I'm so proud!"

The pride she had felt in him still glowed in her eyes as they sat

there in the wicker chairs, but now when she heard him sigh, she bent

toward him, and her voice filled with a woman's pity as she said:

"You're tired, aren't you--poor boy?"

"Yes, very tired," he assented, with a man's readiness to be coddled.

"But then," he added, "it's rest just to be here."

He laid his hand on hers and she drew closer, looking eagerly into his

face. She needed no light other than the glow of the summer night to

make his features plain to her. She looked long at him, and then she

withdrew her hand, and sat erect, smoothing her skirts with an affected

primness and folding her hands in her lap.

"Now you must tell me all about it," she said. "The newspapers are so

unsatisfactory, and you know I've only had the one little note you

wrote me Wednesday night--when you thought you were beaten."

They laughed, now that they could do so with impunity, at the danger he

had been in so short a time before.

"Well," he began, "it was a close shave, after all. If it hadn't been

for Jim Rankin I'd have come home to-night beaten, and there wouldn't

have been any band or any carriage or any crowd to greet me--as Rankin

reminded me this afternoon when I was near bursting at the reception I

did get." He laughed, but the laugh had a tinge of bitterness.

"I would have been there," she said simply.

"If I'd been beaten?"

"Yes."

"I missed you this afternoon," he said. "I looked for you everywhere."

"There were enough there, weren't there?"

"No, not quite," he said; "the crowd lacked one, just one." He spoke

with a little injury in his tone. And the girl, with her quick

apperception of it, said:

"I wanted you all to myself, dear. I can give you part of the time to

the public--but I can't share you." She said this in the pride of a new

conception of Garwood that had just come to her--a conception of him

as a public man, sacrificing himself for the people. Garwood himself

instantly shared the conception.

"Isn't that better?" she added.

For answer he took her hand again, pressing it in his big palm.

"And now tell me," she said.

So he told her the story of the Clinton convention; how the delegations

from the seven counties that comprised the Thirteenth Congressional

District, his district, as he was already careful to speak of it, had

gone there and stubbornly balloted for one, two, three days without a

change or a break, until a thousand ballots had been cast, and men were

worn and spent with the long-drawn agony of those tense hours in the

stifling opera house. He felt a touch of the old fear that had come

over him when he heard on Thursday night that Tazewell County would

go to Sprague the next day, and it looked as if, the deadlock thus

broken, Sprague would be chosen.

"You see," he explained, "Sprague had his own county, Moultrie, and

Logan, and if he got Tazewell it would mean thirty votes more--almost a

cinch."

The girl's attention flagged in her effort to penetrate the mysteries

of ballots and delegations.

"That was the night I wrote you," he went on, and her interest

brightened with her understanding. "I was mighty blue that night."

He made a pause, for the pity of it.

"And that was the night, too, when Jim Rankin came to the front. I

never knew him to rise to such heights of political ability before. I

tell you, Emily, we must be good to Jim Rankin--he's the best friend

we've got. He went out after supper, and was out all the night. When he

came in at four o'clock in the morning--I had just thrown myself on the

bed in my clothes to snatch a wink of sleep--he came into our room and

said, 'Well, Jerry, my boy, we've got him skinned now--Piatt will go to

you on the first ballot to-morrow, and McKimmon will swing Mason on the

second--and that'll settle it.'"

Garwood paused. She sat with her chin on her hand. The lace of her

sleeve fell back, exposing her round forearm, white like marble in the

moonlight that was spilling through the purple shadows of the trees and

trickling on her dress. But a soberness had clouded her eyes.

"How do you suppose he did it, Jerome?" she asked presently.

"I don't know," Garwood answered, "and what's more," he added with a

dry little laugh, "I don't want to."

The girl's soberness deepened as the silence in which she received his

last words lengthened. Garwood glanced at her in some concern, and then

he hurried on.

"Well, it came out just as he said. The next morning Piatt County threw

her vote to me on the first ballot, and by the time it got down to

Tazewell it was all over with Sprague; his man Simp Lewis--you've heard

me speak of him--moved to make it unanimous, and the noise began."

He laughed again, this time in sheer joy as he lived those hours once

more.

"It lasted all morning, when we weren't making speeches telling how we

loved each other, and the party, and the dear old flag; it lasted all

the way over here on the train, until I got home and saw everybody but

the one woman I'd done it all for."

"But you saw me in the crowd while you were speaking from the hotel

balcony, didn't you?"

The scene in the square flashed back to him. The sea of faces turned up

to his, the halting vehicles, the heads at windows, the raveling edges

of the common crowd--he saw it all.

"I had never heard you make a speech before, you know," she went on,

"and I had always wished to--it was a splendid speech."

"Yes," he mused, and strangely for him, seemed not to have heard her

praise, "yes, I saw you--I saw nothing but you. I thought of nothing

but you!"

"Oh, Jerome," she said, "I was happy and proud that minute to think----"

Suddenly he seized her, crushing her to him as if in some sudden access

of fear.

"Dearest!" he said, "all this is nothing to me beside you and your

love. Do you really love me so very much?"

"Oh, you know!" he heard her whisper.

"And will--always?"

"Always."

"No matter what I did--or have done?"

"No matter," she said; "you are--you. You are--mine."

"Are you sure," he persisted, somehow growing fierce, "sure--do you

know what you are saying? No matter what I did, how unworthy I became,

to what depths I sank"--even in that instant he was conscious of a

dramatic quality in the situation, conscious of the eloquence, as it

seemed to him, of his words--"to what depths of shame, of dishonor?"

"Why--Jerome!" the girl raised her face, half frightened, "what do

you----"

"Tell me," he demanded, and he fairly shook her, "how do you know?"

She raised her face, and he saw that it was moistened with tears. She

withdrew from his embrace, and sat erect. He let his arms fall to his

side. Then she took his face in her two hands, she looked into his

eyes, and she gave a scornful little laugh.

"How do I know?" she said. "Ah, Jerome, because I know you; because I

know that you could do nothing dishonorable!"

He hung his head, helpless, and the impulse to tell her passed with the

moment that made it impossible.

Late in the evening, when he was going, as he stood below her on the

steps of the veranda, she said to him:

"Jerome, do you know what Mr. Rankin did to get those delegations

to--swing to you, did you say?"

"Why, no," he laughed, "why?"

"You are sure there was no--no--money?" She said the word as if she

were afraid of it.

"Money!" he exclaimed. "Money!" and he laughed the same laugh of

protestation she had laughed a while before, though he laughed the big

laugh of a man. "Why, my precious little girl, money would be the last

thing in the world with me--I guess it always will be!" he observed

in rueful parenthesis. "Don't you believe me when I tell you that my

law practice, and God knows it was small enough as it was, has gone to

pieces in this campaign, that I'm insolvent, that I'm a pauper, that

I'd have to be buried in the potter's field if I were to die to-night?"

"Don't, don't! Jerome, please," she held her hand to his lips to hush

him, "don't talk of dying! I'm frightened to-night." She shuddered

once again into his arms.

"Frightened?" he scoffed. "What at?"

"Oh, I don't know; it's foolish. I guess it's just because I'm so

happy--and I'm afraid of too much happiness."

He could only fold her closely in his arms again. He, too, was filled

with a fear he dare not name.

It was late when Garwood walked homeward under the maples that poured

their thick shadows along the sidewalks of Sangamon Avenue. The

carriages which in the early evening had squeaked leisurely by in the

sprinkled street had taken their occupants home. The houses of Grand

Prairie's aristocrats were closed for the night and loomed now dark and

still. Here and there, on a dusky lawn, he could see some counterfeit

fountain, improvised of the garden hose, left to run all night, tossing

its sparkling drops into the mellow light of the moon. The only sounds

beyond the tinkle of these fountains were the sounds of a wide summer

night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the booming of bullfrogs,

farther away still the baying of some lonesome dog. It was all peace

without, the peace of brooding night; but within, fear lay cold and

heavy on his heart; not alone the fear which, with its remorse and

regret, he had felt keen as knives at his heart an hour before when

the woman he loved lay passive in his arms, but a new fear, though

born in the same brood. Under its stress, his imagination tortured him

with scenes in the forthcoming campaign, black headlines in opposition

newspapers, a voice bawling a question at him from the crowd he was

addressing, until the cumulative force of their disclosures should

drive him from the stump.

But presently he put forth his will. "Pshaw!" he said, almost aloud,

"how foolish! I am young, I am strong, I have the love of the best

woman on earth; she would not believe if they told her! I can win, and

I will win!"

He laughed aloud, because the street was still, and the night was

deep. He flung up his arms and spread them wide, taking a long, deep

breath of the sweet air. "I will win, win it all--her and everything

besides--Congress, Governor, the Senate--all!" He strode along erect

and calm, full of a vast faith in his own lusty powers, full of the

sublime confidence of youth.

III

Emily Harkness might easily have been the leader of what the local

newspapers, imitating those of Chicago, had recently begun to call

the "Smart Set," a position which would have entitled her to the

distinction of being the most popular girl in town, but because she did

not accept the position, she was perhaps the most unpopular girl in

town. "Society," in Grand Prairie, lacked too much in what is known as

eligible young men, for while the town produced the normal quantity of

that product, those who were strong and ambitious went away to Chicago

or St. Louis where, in a day of economical tendencies that were fast

making the small towns of a more prosperous past but a shaded and

sleepy tradition, there were larger fields for their young efforts.

Those that were left were employed in their fathers' businesses, and

some of them worked in the three banks of the town, but while these

were able, out of their scant salaries, to arrange for a series of

assembly balls in the dining-room of the Cassell House every winter,

they found calls upon the girls, in whose parlors they would rock all

the evening, chaffing each other with personalities, their nearest

approach to the society life.

The social activities of the place were therefore left largely to

the initiative of the elder women, who formed the usual number of

clubs, held the usual number of meetings, and derived, possibly, the

usual amount of benefit therefrom. These clubs were inaugurated under

a serious pretense of feeding starved intellectualities, and were

impregnated at the first with a strong literary flavor, but in the end

they administered to a bodily rather than a mental hunger, and their

profound programs degenerated into mere menus.

The men of Grand Prairie soon learned to identify the days on which

the club meetings fell by the impaired appetites their wives showed at

the supper table, and the louder tones in which they talked all the

evening. Ultimately, when the euchre club had evolved into the higher

stage of the whist club, the men became expert enough to tell, by the

absence of the vocal phenomenon already noted, the days on which the

card tournaments were held.

When Emily Harkness came home from the Eastern college where she had

taken a bachelor's degree, it was thought that she would be a decided

acquisition to society, a fact that was duly exploited in the Grand

Prairie newspapers. The young men of the town at once began to call,

but when they found that she did not enter into the spirit of those

little personalities which formed the sinew of what they called their

conversation, and when they learned that she would not endure the

familiarity that the other girls of the town indulged them in, they

began one by one to fail in these well-meant attentions. Several of

them, out of a devotion to the spirit of social duty, tried for a while

to cultivate, or at the least to assume, a literary taste that would

admit them to her confidence. But their reading had been limited to

the Chicago Sunday newspapers, the works of the Duchess and to the

most widely advertised novels of the swashbuckler school, and they

could only stare vacantly when she soared into the rarer altitudes of

the culture she had acquired at college, where she had had a course of

Browning lectures and out of a superficial tutoring in art had espoused

with enthusiasm the then prospering cause of Realism.

Failing in literature, a few of the more determined of these youths

essayed music, but when she played for them Chopin's nocturnes and

asked if they liked Brahms, whose name they could never learn to

pronounce, they gave her up, and fled with relief to the banjo, the

mandolin, and the coon songs that echoed not inharmoniously on summer

nights along the borders of Silver Lake, as they called the muddy pond

where the aquatic needs of Grand Prairie society are appeased. Emily

could not follow them thither, for she would not consent to buggy

rides, even on moonlight nights. And so the young men of Grand Prairie

voted her "stuck up," and to themselves justified their verdict by the

fact that she made them by some silent spiritual coercion call her Miss

Harkness instead of Em, or Emily at least.

As for the clubs, she continued to attend them occasionally, for she

was needed to prepare papers on literary topics for the federated

meetings held monthly in the Presbyterian church. The matrons of the

town would listen to her with the folds in their chins multiplying

as their faces lengthened and their bodies yielded to the cushioned

pews of the warm tabernacle, but however conscientiously they tried to

follow her, their winks would develop into nods, and they would fail

asleep. At the conclusion of her papers, of course, they gave Emily

their gloved hands in congratulation, but the gulf between them yawned

wider and wider, until Emily became a mere intellectual rather than a

human personality.

Thus left to herself, Emily seemed to be doomed to a life in which

she would never have opportunity for the development of her talents.

She had brought away from college many exalted purposes, and she

meant to keep these purposes high, but at times she despaired of ever

having the chance to put her acquirements to what her father would

have called practical use. She read much, for she had much leisure,

and kept up at first a prodigious correspondence, but gradually those

friendships which in the flush of exuberant youth had been destined

for immortality, declined and faded as such things do fade in our

lives, and soon ceased altogether. She had tried writing, and sent two

or three manuscripts away to the magazines, but they were returned so

promptly that her jocular father said the editors doubtless had an

arrangement with the postmaster to return all such suspicious-looking

parcels to the senders.

Then in that period which brought the customary desire to earn her

own money, she proposed giving music lessons, but her father, in the

social pride he possessed, without any social inclinations, at once

vetoed the proposal.

It was in these changing, unquiet moods that she met Garwood. She had

found that about the only practical outlet for the aspirations of

women, in her time and country, was in the direction of charitable

work. An unusually severe winter in Grand Prairie had made many

opportunities for efforts of this nature, and she found a special

pleasure in going about in the poorer quarter which lay beyond Railroad

Avenue, hardly a block from the respectable homes of the well-to-do.

The pleasure she derived from this new work was largely subjective;

perhaps, as it is likely to do, it ministered to her spiritual vanity

as much as to anything else. In the end, her emotional appreciation of

the picturesque in poverty led her into indiscriminate giving. This new

phase of her development did not increase her favor in the eyes of her

neighbors. They resented her activity as foolish and meddlesome; the

poor--to whom, in the delusion common to all the thoughtless rich, they

gladly attributed unbounded good health--could get along all right,

they said, if they would only work and save their money; or, as they

preferred to express it, be industrious and frugal.

One of the families Emily visited had been frugal so long that it had

lost the strength to be industrious. It was a German family that had

come from the province of Pomerania, and the yellow hair of the mother

framed a face that Emily loved to picture in its girlish prettiness

among the fields of her native land and happier childhood. Her husband

was a man with a delicious dialectal speech, and he could tell famous

tales of his service in the German army. He had worked in the "Boakeye

Bre'erie," as he called the Buckeye Brewery, and for some reason that

Emily never properly grasped had lost his job. When she discovered the

family they were patiently living on the remnant of a side of pork the

man had bought with his last money.

Emily had pictured herself meeting, in the course of her charitable

work, some interesting young doctor, with a Van Dyck beard; but all

the doctors in Grand Prairie, like most of the other workers in that

depleted vineyard, were old men; she met instead, what is universal, a

young lawyer.

Jake Reinhardt, who never had money to buy bread or meat, seemed

always able to procure beer and tobacco, an incongruity Emily

could not understand at first. She learned afterwards that Jake

knew a saloon-keeper who had a mixture of kind-heartedness and

long-headedness, the first of which led him to trust Reinhardt for

the beer and tobacco, while the second justified the course because

Reinhardt's presence at his bar made one consumer more when a round

of drinks was ordered for the house. Then, one day, suddenly, just as

Emily thought she was getting the family on its feet, Reinhardt felled

a man in the saloon with a blow of a billiard cue, and was thrown into

jail on a charge of assault with intent to kill. His victim was lying

in a precarious state; possibly he might die; Reinhardt might yet be

held to answer to a charge of murder.

Emily found Mrs. Reinhardt with a face bloated by tears, staring

in mute anguish at this new calamity she could not comprehend. As

Emily's first thought in the former difficulties had been a doctor,

now her first thought was a lawyer; but it seemed that one had already

appeared, and Mrs. Reinhardt in her broken speech extolled him as a

ministering angel. It was plain that he had taken up the cause out of

pity for Reinhardt's defenseless condition, perhaps in a belief in his

moral innocence, which the blundering police could not or would not

admit. As the affair turned out, Emily's sympathies proved to have been

as fully justified as the young lawyer's, and what she then observed

of the practical administration of justice in criminal courts only

confirmed many of the sociological heresies that then were sprouting in

her mind, quite as much, indeed, to her own distress as to her father's.

Emily gave Mrs. Reinhardt _carte blanche_ in the matter of spending

money to clear her husband, and even offered to pay the young lawyer's

fee. When he refused, the lofty heroism of his act, as she called it,

opened the way for a sympathy between them, and by the time Garwood

acquitted his client, he and Emily were friends.

Garwood's social traditions were far removed from those of Emily; and

it was only in Railroad Avenue, and never in Sangamon, that they could

have met at all. Garwood had never gone into society in Grand Prairie;

his mother was a Methodist, and to go into society it was necessary to

be an Episcopalian, or at least a Presbyterian. He would have betrayed

his training in any social emergency and he had to hide his ignorance

of conventionalities behind a native diffidence, which in a young man

of his solemnity happily passed for dignity.

But he came into Emily's life at the very time when it was ready to

receive impressions from a more masterful mind. In his young dream of

a career, in that enthusiasm for humanity which springs in most men

of the liberal professions with the shock of their first impact with

a hard, material age, and develops until the age taints them with its

sordidness, Garwood had enlisted in the world-old fight for equality

and democracy. His first victory was for himself, and he was elected to

the Legislature. Thereafter, he dreamed of becoming some day a great

commoner, and so was in danger of turning out a demagogue.

While he had not read as widely as Emily he had thought a great deal

more, and the two young persons were delighted as they discovered new

points at which, to their own satisfaction, they supplemented each

other perfectly. Emily found in Garwood the only worthy intellectuality

that the youth of Grand Prairie offered, and though, after a certain

intimacy had been established by his first few awkward calls, he showed

as much contempt as ever for the more aristocratic environment of the

girl, this only flattered her, and she noted with the feminine pride

and pleasure in little conquests, that as he grew accustomed to the

life his constraint gave way to a liking for its luxury.

She adopted him, with a young girl's love of a protégé; gave him books

to read and was pleased rather than displeased at the gossip their

relations excited before that first winter ended and the spring took

from them the excuse their charitable work had given for being much

in each other's society. Thereafter they frankly dispensed with this

bond and substituted one of affection pure and simple. This propinquity

naturally ended in love, and the club women of the town were doubtless

justified in their new and keenly relished understanding that Emily had

more than the mere patroness's interest in the career of this young

man. Most of them said she was demeaning herself, but that only added

to their joy.

IV

Rankin was not only chairman of the Polk County central committee,

a position he had held for years, but he was also chairman of the

congressional committee. It was, therefore, with an authority no one

cared to question that, early in September, he engaged two rooms in

the Lawrence Block for the county committee's headquarters, though

he preferred to pitch his own in Garwood's law office, which was on

the same floor. Then he swung a banner across the street and began to

menace Garwood's opponent with challenges for joint debates. To Grand

Prairie this expressed the formal opening of the campaign, but Garwood

already had been two weeks away from home, speaking twice daily in

Piatt and DeWitt Counties, under the skies in the afternoon, under

the stars by night, and had returned for a day before going down into

Moultrie. The office had been crowded all day and it was late in the

afternoon before he had a chance to write the letters that needed his

attention. He had just dismissed, rather ungraciously, a delegation of

negroes--for Rankin never had any patience with negro delegations--and

had begun dictating to the typewriter, when another caller came

demanding a personal interview.

The caller was a little man, who walked with stooped shoulders, swung

a slender stick energetically as he advanced, and continued to twist it

nervously when he had come. His head was but thinly covered with lank,

moist hair, as was shown when he pushed back the sun-burned straw hat

he wore. This moisture seemed to be general in his whole system. It was

apparent in the perspiring hand he gave to Garwood; it affected the

short mustache, dyed a dull, lifeless black, at which he scratched with

a black-edged finger nail as he talked, when he was not plucking at the

few hairs that strayed on his chin. This moisture showed again in his

blue eyes, from which it had almost washed the color. After he had been

shut in the room with Garwood for half an hour, the air was laden with

alcoholic fumes, which, exuding from his whole body, may have accounted

for his moist personality. While he talked he chewed and puffed a

glossy yellow cigar.

This man was Freeman H. Pusey, and he was publisher, editor, reporter,

all in one, of the Grand Prairie _Evening News_. His journal was a

small one of four pages, for the most part given over to boiler-plate

matter, but it carried a column of "locals," a portentous editorial

page, and took on a happy, almost gala expression whenever it could

exploit, under the heavy ragged type in which its headlines were set,

some scandal that would shock Grand Prairie. In politics the _News_

claimed to be independent, which meant that it leaned far to one side

in one campaign, and as far to the other in the next; indeed, it

sometimes held these two extreme positions in the same campaign, and

found no difficulty in vindicating its policy.

"I came to see you, Mr. Garwood, in regard to a little political

matter," Pusey began.

"Well?" said Garwood, not too cordially.

"Of course you know that the _News_ is the accepted organ of the

people, that is, the great mass of the common people here in Grand

Prairie and,--ah--I might say in Polk County."

"So I've heard," said Garwood.

"Thus far, you may have noticed, we have been neutral, that is, I

should say, independent, as between you and Judge Bromley."

Garwood was looking out of his window down into the court house square,

where the winds played with the rubbish that always litters the streets

of Grand Prairie. He made no reply, and Pusey eyed him out of his

swimming little eyes.

"Yes," continued Pusey, pinching his chin, "we have waited to see how

events would shape themselves before--ah--"

Garwood grunted, and Pusey went on:

"Yes--ah--I had come to the conclusion that perhaps our best course

would be to support you, inasmuch as you're our fellow townsman--and

it occurred to me that perhaps a write-up would do you some good, that

is, with the great mass of the common people, the laboring people

generally, you understand."

"I should be obliged to you, of course," said Garwood.

"H-m-m, yes," answered Pusey, "I presume so. But--if I--that is,

we, were to give you such a write-up and run your cut, you would,

I presume, be ready to take twenty or thirty thousand copies for

distribution?"

"What would it cost?" said Garwood.

"Well--at two cents a copy--you can--"

"I see," said Garwood, "for your support you would expect about five

hundred dollars."

"I did not put it in that light," said Pusey, spitting, and trying to

assume a dignity.

"No, but I--"

"You can see, of course, Mr. Garwood--a man of your experience can

readily see, that a paper like the _News_ can hardly afford to give up

its valuable space to that which is not strictly news matter without

some hope of compensation."

"I see," said Garwood, "but to be frank with you, Pusey," he turned and

looked straight into the little man's watery eyes, "I can't afford it.

This campaign, into which I sometimes wish I hadn't gone, has proved

expensive, and my practice has suffered, so that I need all the money

at my command for more immediate and pressing expenses."

"You do not consider this immediate and pressing then?" said Pusey.

"Well, not exactly," Garwood replied. "Would you?"

Pusey was silent for a while. When he spoke he said:

"There are certain passages in your life, Mr. Garwood, which just now--"

Garwood glared at Pusey.

"So that's the game, is it?" he said. His tone was low, for he was

calculating carefully the part he had to play.

The little man was revolving his straw hat on the head of his stick,

and he wore a grin about his moist mouth. Garwood had mastered his

anger, but Pusey had to wait some time before he spoke. Presently he

did so.

"I'll tell you, Pusey," he said, "you know Jim Rankin is running

my campaign, and I have promised him not to take any steps without

consulting him. We've had all sorts of callers here, white and black,

cranks, mind readers, palmists, faith curists and men with votes in

their vest pockets, and I've adopted the rule of turning over to him

every one who comes. I'll speak to him about your case, and you may

call around to-morrow and see him."

When Pusey had gone, Garwood burst upon Rankin, his face white with

anger.

"The damned little blackmailing--"

"What'n hell's the matter?" asked Rankin, letting his feet fall from

the desk.

Garwood, digging his clenched fists into his trousers' pockets, paced

the floor, swearing angrily.

"Free Pusey's been here," he said.

"What'd he want?"

"Stuff."

"Of course--but what for?"

"For keeping still, what'd you suppose?"

"Does he know anything?"

Garwood paused by the window, still breathing hard.

"Well," he said presently, "he claims to."

Rankin drew himself upright with the difficulty of a fat man, and

leaned towards Garwood.

"Legislature?" he asked.

Garwood gave an impatient fling of his head. He turned then, drew a

chair up to the desk, and sat down, facing Rankin. But Rankin spoke

first.

"Some more of that newspaper rot 'bout the Ford bill?"

"Oh, I suppose so," said Garwood wearily. "I reckon I'll never hear the

last of that."

"Oh, well," Rankin said, "to hell with it. Let him print it!"

"But damn it," Garwood went on, "it's serious with me--just now--at any

rate."

"Aw, cheer up," said Rankin, "that won't cut any figure with you--it

won't lose a vote."

"No, but it may lose me something else--" Garwood spoke with a

significance that Rankin could not instantly appreciate. "Of course,"

Garwood continued "there was nothing in it, but then--you know, a

woman--"

The big fellow vented a little whistle, and then kept his lips puckered

up to aid his thought.

"What can we do?" said Garwood, who could not then, in such a mood,

endure the delay of silence.

"Well," said Rankin, "let me think, I can't straighten it out all

at once. It 'as al'ays hard fer me to mix politics and business, or

politics and religion, or politics and--" He was a sentimental man who

feared to show his sentiment, and he did not speak the tender word of

many meanings. But under the influence of the twilight, perhaps because

they could not see each other's face, they talked confidentially, until

the gloom of evening was expanding in the room. Then Rankin took out

his watch and tried to read its dial.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed, "I must be gettin' home--I'll try to fix it up

somehow, Jerry. Don't worry--just leave it to me."

"If you think we ought to do it, Jim," Garwood said, "I might borrow

the--"

"Not a red cent for that pirate!" exclaimed Rankin, smiting the desk

with his fist. "We'll need all the money we can get in the campaign.

Besides, he ain't honest enough to stay bought."

Though Rankin had told him not to worry, Garwood was depressed and

troubled, and longed for sympathy. In the evening, when he found time

to go to Emily, Pusey was uppermost in his mind.

"You're tired, of course," said Emily, "and how hoarse."

"It's the speaking, I reckon," said Garwood. "I campaigned all week

with old General Stager; we spoke outdoors to acres of people. How

those old-timers stand it I don't know. They can blow like steam

whistles day and night. When I left the old gentleman last night at Mt.

Pulaski, he was as fresh as a daisy--said he liked a little taste of

the stump now and then--but that, of course, it wasn't anything to what

it used to be."

Emily laughed a little.

"Won't you have some meetings indoors?"

"Oh, after while--but we have to get the crowds where we can find them,

and the farmers are all at the county fairs nowadays. I'll be glad when

it's over. The strain is pulling me down."

"Aren't you well?" she asked with a woman's constant concern.

"Oh, yes, well enough; of course I have a cold all the time, a

candidate has to have that, and a sore throat, but you have to smile,

and look pleasant, and shake hands, and be careful what you say. I'd

give anything to be a free man once more, to be able to talk without

weighing every word, without having to watch it as if I were drawing an

indictment. I'd give anything to indulge one good fit of anger."

"Can't you--just get mad at me?"

Garwood laughed fondly. "Well," he went on, "it's good to come here and

relax and speak my mind. I did get mad to-day though, and threaten to

throw a man out of my office window." His thought would revert to that

subject.

"Who?" she asked, in alarm.

"Oh, that little Free Pusey."

"What has he done?"

"He wanted me to give him money for his support."

"Well, I don't blame you. I can understand your righteous indignation,

Jerome."

Garwood felt the blood tinge his checks.

"I wish you wouldn't talk that way, Emily."

"W'y, why?"

"Because you don't know how sordid politics are--or is--which is

it? I'd probably have given it to him, only I didn't have it; the

righteously indignant was the only attitude left."

"I don't like to hear you talk like that, Jerome. I don't like to see

you in that cynical mood. It wasn't an attitude, it was your real

nature speaking."

"Well, a man must keep his real nature in subjection in politics."

"Please don't, Jerome; you mustn't keep your real nature in subjection

in politics. We need just such men as you in our public life."

They were silent then.

"Jerome," the girl said later, "do you really need money so badly?"

"Well, it costs, you know."

"Why don't you speak to father--I know he'd be glad to help you. He

is very anxious to see you succeed, you know--or if you think that

Mr. Pusey can harm you, why can't you let father speak to him? Father

once did him some favor--don't you remember those sickening, fulsome

articles he wrote?"

Garwood gasped at the thought of Emily's father penetrating that

situation.

"Never that!" he said, bringing his fist down on his knee. "Don't you

ever suggest such a thing, Emily, do you hear?" He turned and his eyes

glowed as he looked at her. The girl laughed a little laugh of pride in

him.

"I'm afraid, Jerome," she began in a playful way, "that you don't

understand politics very well yourself." And then she became serious,

and sighed.

"But how noble you are! And how high minded! And how I love you for it!"

They sat there a long while after that, in the darkness. But they did

not talk politics any more.

V

When the Alton's early train drew out of the Canal Street station that

morning, the last coach had its curtains drawn, with a touch of royal

mystery. Though its polished panels were grimed from a long journey,

though its roof lay deep in cinders, and though its gilt lettering

was tarnished, still, as it moved onward with heavy dignity, it was

plainly no ordinary car, for it rolled majestically at the end of that

long train like some ship, to which clung the sentimental interest of

a stormy voyage. As it passed, yardmen in blue overalls straightened

their backs painfully and scrutinized it with professional eye,

sometimes they swung their caps; laborers, men and women, on their

morning way to work, halted by the crossing-gates and united in a

cheer, their futile little celebration being dissipated by the clamor

of the alarm bells, as the train whirled by in its cloud of dust, and

the gates lifted to let the flood-tide of city life set in again for

the day's work.

The fireman in the engine cab sat erect as he clanged his brass bell;

the engineer, knitting his brow as he studied his watch, stretched

his hand to the throttle with a touch as delicate as a telegrapher's.

Within the train, the division superintendent whispered to the

conductor. Plainly, it was no ordinary car.

It was bearing a candidate for the presidency, on his way west,

swinging around the circle, as our phrase has been ever since Andrew

Johnson made the first presidential stumping tour.

His itinerary had been so arranged as to give him an hour in Lincoln

that afternoon. General Stager was to be there also and to speak

before the presidential candidate arrived. The old wheel-horse's part

was to hold the crowd, and he was well cast, for he could talk on

indefinitely, and yet round off his speech with an eloquent peroration

at any moment and seem never to suffer any ill effects, either as to

himself or to his speech. Then in the evening Garwood was to speak. He

had looked forward to the day with eagerness, anticipating fondly his

meeting with the great man who, as General Stager would put it, was

running for the highest office within the gift of the American people.

He had gone up to Chicago with Rankin the night before, and when the

private car was switched over from the Pennsylvania in the morning,

they boarded it with one or two members of the state executive

committee, and the member of the national committee for Illinois.

The great man slept late, as great men may, yielding to the conceit

that their labors are heavier than those of common men, and as Garwood

and Rankin sat in the forward compartment and whispered to each other,

Rankin noted his impression by saying:

"The old man takes it easy, don't he?"

Something of this impatience was expressed by the cries of the crowd

that gathered in the station at Joliet, after the train had rolled by

the high stone walls of the penitentiary, and Garwood, growing more

accustomed to his position, allowed himself to enjoy, as he saw men

peering curiously in at him, the distinction a man feels in riding in a

private car.

But the day was fully awake now, and the national excitement that for a

week had found its dynamic center in that car, began to impress itself

upon its occupants; the newspaper correspondents who traveled with the

candidate began to make notes now and then after they had learned the

name of the town they were passing; while jacketed darkies began to

slip about in their morning work, and at last the candidate himself

came into the salon, clean and fresh, blinking his eyes in the sun, as

he smiled in a courtly way and said, as if they were members of his

suite traveling with a king:

"Gentlemen, good morning."

And then he looked about him as if he had lost something.

"Is the colonel up yet?" he asked.

His secretary at that instant appeared, pursued by a black porter

whisking at his blue clothes with a long, thin broom.

"Ah," he said, "there you are. Did you rest well?"

"Fairly," said the colonel. "Papers come yet?"

Before the candidate could reply, the chairman of the state central

committee had taken Garwood by the sleeve and drawn him up before the

candidate.

"This is Mr. Garwood, our candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth

District."

"Ah, Mr. Garwood," the great man said, "very glad to meet you, I'm

sure. You had rather a spirited contest in your district, did you not?"

Garwood smiled at the memory of it. He was about to reply when the

colonel, who had gone for the train boy, returned with a bundle of

newspapers that smelt pleasantly of the printer's ink, and gave them

all, save the one he had opened for himself, to the candidate. The

candidate took them in his delicate hands, lifted his glasses, opened

one of the papers, and as he did so observed, his eyes running up and

down the columns:

"Such contests are always healthful indications, I fancy."

Garwood hemmed and murmured a disappointed "Yes." The great man was

slowly sinking into a wicker chair, and beginning to read the reports

of the speeches he had delivered through Indiana and Ohio the day

before.

The whole party had got newspapers of the news agent and had settled

down to read them. The newspaper men had bought with as much avidity

as the rest, and were trembling with the mingled pain and pleasure of

reading their own stuff, as, with a contempt perhaps not all pretended,

they called it.

The news that the candidate had risen spread through the train by some

mysterious agency, and almost before he had finished his breakfast,

men began to venture back that way to see him. He received them all

with his weary smile, shook their hands, and thanked them for whatever

it was he seemed to think or wished them to think they were doing for

him. It was the better dressed of the passengers in the forward coaches

that were bold enough to enter a private car at first, but as the

habit grew common, men from the day coaches, and at last the farmers

from the smoking car who had got on to ride short distances between

stations, began to shamble back. One of them, with his clothes and hat

and whiskers all sun-burned to a neutral shade of brown, stood in an

awkward attitude before the candidate crushing his white slender hand

in his own harsh palm, and pumped it up and down, stammering through

his tobacco that he had been voting the straight ticket for fifty

years, and when the great man said he hoped that he would live to vote

it for fifty years more, the little knot of admiring men laughed with

exuberant mirth at the joke.

As the news that the candidate had risen spread through the train,

so it sped onward before the train, and now as they reached and

impatiently halted at little towns along the road, people were gathered

at the stations, stretching their necks, and hastily glancing at all

the windows of the train to catch a glimpse of the man who might soon

be their president.

At each stop the candidate stepped out upon the platform, his

stenographer following him with a note book, spoke a few words of

greeting, and dropped a politic remark that had the epigrammatic ring

of a political axiom.

Garwood was disappointed in not being called on to speak himself, and

he had been disappointed, too, in not having the conversation with

his great leader he had anticipated. He was beginning to realize the

relativity of things, whereby a candidate for Congress is only great

when he is drinking with a candidate for supervisor at some country

bar, but when he is riding in a private car with a candidate for

president he is small indeed, so small that he is not noticed in the

press despatches, as Garwood was to learn when he faithfully read all

the city papers the next day.

But down below Bloomington the great man gladdened him by taking a seat

beside him, and beginning to ask questions, which is sometimes the mark

of a great man.

"Let me see, you reside in Grand Prairie, do you not, Mr. Garwood? What

is the condition of our party over there just now?"

Garwood told him it was very good; he thought there was much enthusiasm.

The great man said that he had discovered such conditions to be

generally indicated.

"It will be only necessary to crystallize that enthusiasm in the ballot

box," he continued, with his Latin derivatives, "for us to win a

splendid victory. Your organization is satisfactory, is it?"

Again Garwood answered "Yes."

"Very good," the great man said. "How large a town is Lincoln--we stop

there this afternoon, do we not, Colonel?"

The colonel, too, said "Yes."

"Agricultural community principally, I suppose? Are the farmers fairly

prosperous in the county?"

"Oh, yes," said Garwood, "they've had good crops this year."

"Let me see, General Bancroft used to represent your district in

Congress, did he not?"

"Yes, sir--some years ago. He's dead now, you know."

"Yes, I remember--I must--let me see--I was in the forty-third Congress

with him, was I not, Colonel?"

"The forty-fourth," corrected the colonel.

"To be sure, the forty-fourth. He was a very fine man. I formed a very

high opinion of him."

"Yes, he was a fine man," said Garwood. "I read law in his office."

"Did you, indeed? He was a very good lawyer, as I recall him. We sat on

the judiciary committee together. Did he have a good practice?"

"Oh, yes, the best at the Grand Prairie bar. He was the best jury

lawyer we ever had there."

"Yes, he was a good speaker. Was the breach in the party created by his

peculiarly strong character healed at his death?"

"Well, it's pretty much healed now; for a long time it bothered us, but

we never hear of it any more."

"Pretty popular with the people, was he?"

"Very."

"I would presume so." The great man closed his eyes as if shutting in

some impression.

"Yes," Garwood went on, "the bare mention of his name will set them

wild even now."

"Ah, indeed," said the candidate. "He raised a regiment about there,

did he not?"

"Yes--the old ninety-third--the Bloody Ninety-third they called it. A

number of his old soldiers will be at your meeting this afternoon."

The candidate reflected that most communities like to think that their

regiments have been known as "the Bloody," but he did not say so to

Garwood.

The train sped on, then Garwood heard it stop, heard the cheers and

cries of the crowds outside, heard the rich voice of the candidate

speaking, heard the restless bell as the train moved on again with

quickly accelerated speed, while the little station and the crowd and

the two shining tracks dissolved into one disappearing point of the

perspective far behind. The cheers faded away, and he tried to imagine

the sensation of the man for whom all this outcry was being made. The

great man seemed to take it coolly enough. Either such things had grown

common to him, or he had trained himself by a long course of public

life to appear as if they had, for when he was not making speeches

on the rear platform, or shaking hands with little delegations that

boarded the train to go to the Lincoln meeting, he was resting in his

stateroom. He was not well, Garwood heard the colonel explain to some

one, and had to conserve his energies, though like some athlete in

training he seemed able to rest and sleep between his exertions.

Rankin had wearied of the formalities of the private car and, as the

train began to fill with familiar forms, men with whom he had battled

in conventions for years, he had fled to the easier society and the

denser atmosphere of the smoking car, greeting countless friends from

all over the district, and doing the campaign work Garwood felt he

should be doing himself. But the magnetism of his great leader, the joy

of being in a presence all men were courting in those days, perhaps,

too, a desire to feel to the utmost the distinction of riding in a

private car, kept him there.

The train had reached Atlanta Hill, and now its noise subsided. The

engine no longer vomited black masses of smoke, but seemed to hold its

breath as, with wheels that spun so swiftly they seemed motionless,

it coasted silently and swiftly down that steep grade. The spires and

roofs of little Lawndale showed an instant above the trees, and then

out on the level again the train sped on toward Lincoln.

Garwood arose and got the overcoat he carried to draw on after each

speech, for its moral impressiveness as much as to keep him from

catching cold, and as the engine began to puff heavily, and the train

rolled into Lincoln, Rankin appeared, hot and perspiring.

"Come on," he said to Garwood, "we're there. The boys have all been

askin' fer you!"

"Have they?" asked Garwood, half guiltily. "What did you tell them?"

"I told 'em you was back here closeted with the old man; that he

wouldn't let you out of his sight, that's what I told 'em."

They heard the strains of a marching band, and then a cheer arose.

VI

The crowd began its cheering as the engine slid on past the

weather-beaten station and stopped, puffing importantly as if it knew

how big a load it had hauled. And then the candidate appeared, and

midway in a cheer the crowd ceased, stricken into silence by the sight

of him. He stood for an instant, pale and distinguished, a smile on

his cleanly chiseled face, an impersonal smile, almost the smile of a

child, as if he were unaccustomed to all about him, crowd, committees,

even the steps of the railway carriage, for three men helped him down

these as if he could not know how such things were done and might

injure himself. Looking carefully to his right and to his left, still

with that impersonal smile on his face, the candidate set his patent

leather boots to the splintered platform, and then sighing "Ah!" looked

around over the crowd.

It was all confusion where they stood, but Rankin was already beside

the candidate, calling him "Mr. President" as he introduced to him

promiscuously men who had pressed forward grinning in a not altogether

hopeless embarrassment. All this time the chairman of the Logan County

committee was fluttering about, striving to recall the orderly scheme

of arrangement he had devised for the occasion. He had written it

all out on a slip of paper the night before, having the carriages

numbered, and, in a bracket set against each number, the names of those

who were to ride in that carriage, just as he had seen the thing done

at a funeral. But now he found that he had left his slip of paper at

home, and he found that he had forgotten the arrangement as well, just

as a man in the cold hour of delivery forgets a speech he has written

out and burdened his memory with. As the chairman turned this way and

that, several of his townsmen noticing the indecision and perplexity

written on his face, with the pitiless American sense of humor,

mockingly proposed:

"Three cheers for McBain!"

As the crowd gave the cheers, the chairman became redder than ever and

entreated the driver of the first carriage to come closer. The driver

drew his horses, whose tails he had been crimping for two weeks, nearer

the curb, and then the chairman turned toward the candidate and said:

"This way, Mr. President!"

The candidate had been standing there smiling and giving both his hands

to men and women and children that closed upon him, and as the chairman

looked toward him he saw Garwood standing by his side. The chairman had

forgotten Garwood. In fact he had not expected him until evening, and

he had no place for him in his scheme. Rankin saw McBain's predicament

and promptly assuming an official relation to the affair, gently urged

their presidential candidate toward the waiting carriage. Before the

candidate would move, however, he looked about and said:

"Where's the colonel?"

Then the small man in the modish blue clothes appeared from behind him,

and the candidate sighed as if in relief. They all helped him into the

carriage, and he smiled his gratitude. The colonel climbed into the

front seat facing his chief. Then another traveling companion of the

candidate, a man who was slated for a cabinet position, followed him.

Garwood seemed about to withdraw and had raised his hand to lift his

hat, when Rankin said:

"Get right in, Mr. Garwood, there's plenty of room!"

Garwood felt called upon to demur, knowing that no place had been

reserved for him, but Rankin began to shove from behind, and Garwood

found himself sitting in the same carriage with the presidential

candidate. The chairman, who had expected to ride with the great guest

himself, scanned the line of carriages drawn up for the others in the

party, and then slamming the door shut on them, said to the driver:

"All right, Billy."

The drums rolled again, and the band began to play. The captains of the

marching clubs shouted their military orders, and the carriage moved.

The crowd cheered, and the candidate turning, became suddenly grave.

His pale face flushed slightly as with an easy, distinguished air he

lifted his high hat.

Garwood saw that Rankin had secured a seat in one of the carriages

farther back in the line, and that half a dozen newspaper men, whom the

local chairman had failed to take into account, were standing, with

bored, insouciant expressions, waiting to be assigned to vehicles,

realizing that the affair depended, for all beyond a mere local

success, upon their presence. At the last minute they were crowded into

a hack in which some of the local leaders of the party had hoped to

display their importance before their neighbors. The slight seemed a

little thing at the time, but it eventually created a factional fight

in that county. The local chairman himself was compelled to mount

beside the driver of one of the vehicles.

Amid a crash of brass, the throb of drums, and a great roar from human

throats the procession wound up the crowded street. All the way the

sidewalks were lined with people, and all the way the candidate lifted

his high hat with that distinguished gesture.

The whole county had come in from the country, and farmers' muddy

wagons were hitched to every rack, their owners clinging to the

bridles of horses that reared and plunged as the bands went by. One

township had sent a club of mounted farmers, who wore big hats and rode

horses on whose hides were imprinted the marks of harness, and whose

caparisons were of all descriptions from the yellow pelts of sheep to

Mexican saddles, denoting a terrible scouring of the township before

daylight that morning. These men were stern and fierce and formed a

sort of rude cavalry escort for the great man whom they cheered so

hoarsely. The procession did not go directly to the court house, for

that was only two blocks away, but made a slow and jolting progress

along those streets that were decorated for the occasion. There were

flags and bunting everywhere and numerous pictures of the candidate

himself, of varying degrees of likeness to him, and pictures, too,

of his "running mate," the candidate for vice-president, who at that

minute was enjoying a similar ovation in some far off Eastern village.

Some of the householders, galled by the bitterness of partisanship,

flaunted in their windows pictures of the candidate's rival, but the

great man lifted his hat and bowed to them, clustered in silence before

their residences, as impartially as he did to those of his own party.

In the last two blocks before the procession reached the court house

square they could hear a man speaking, and Garwood knew that the voice

was the voice of General Stager. The old court house standing in its

ancient dignity in a park of oak trees, lifting its plastered columns

with a suggestion of the calm of classic beauty, broke on their sight,

and the music of the bands, as they brayed into the square, filled the

whole area with their triumphant strains and cheer on cheer leaped

toward them. The music and the cheers drowned the voice of General

Stager, and his audience suddenly left him and surged toward the

approaching procession. The cheering was continuous, the candidate's

white head was bare most of the time, and when the carriage stopped

and he was assisted up the steps into the speaker's stand, the bands

exultantly played "Union Forever, Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah!" the horns

fairly singing the words of the song.

General Stager, red and drenched with perspiration, advanced to shake

the hand of the presidential candidate, and the spectacle set the

crowd yelling again. The candidate began his speech immediately.

It was the same speech he had delivered all along his itinerary,

though his allusions to the splendid agricultural community in which

he found himself, the good crops that had been yielded to the hand

of the husbandman, gave a fictitious local color, and his touching

reference to his old friend, General Bancroft, by whose side he had

sat at Washington through so many stirring years fraught with deeds

and occasions of such vast import to the national life, and his

glowing tribute to the Bloody Ninety-third, brought the applause

rolling up to him in great waves. He spoke for nearly an hour,

standing at the railing with the big flag hanging down before him and

a big, white water pitcher standing close beside; behind him were the

vice-presidents sitting with studied gravity; near by, the reporters

writing hurriedly; before him and around him, under the green and

motionless trees, a vast multitude, heads many of them bared, faces

upturned, with brows knit to aid in concentration, jaws working as they

chewed on their eternal tobacco.

Out at the edges of the crowd, a continual movement shifted the

masses and groups of men, along the curb were lines of wagons, with

horses stamping and switching their tails, across the street on the

three-storied brick blocks, the flutter of flags and bunting. The old

court house, frowning somehow with the majesty of the law, formed a

stately, solemn background for it all; overhead was the sky, piling

rapidly now with clouds. The whole square gave an effect of strange

stillness, even with the voice of the speaker ringing through it;

the crowd was silent, treasuring his words for future repetition,

treasuring perhaps the sight of him, the sensation of being in his

actual presence, for the tale of future years.

But suddenly, in a second, when the crowd was held in the magic spell

of his oratory, when men were least thinking of such a thing, he ceased

to talk, the speech was over, the event was closed, and the great man,

not pausing even long enough to let the vice-presidents of the meeting

shake hands with him, or to hear the Lincoln Glee Club sing a campaign

song, looked about for the colonel, climbed out of the stand into

his carriage and was whirled away, lifting his hat, still with that

distinguished air, amid cheers that would not let the campaign song

begin, and with little boys swarming like outrunners at his glistening

wheels.

When the meeting was over, Garwood went to the hotel to wait for

Rankin, who had a mysterious, but always purposeful way of disappearing

at times of such political excitement as had been rocking Lincoln all

that day. Garwood had long since learned, when Rankin thus went under

the political waters, to await calmly his reappearance at the surface,

and so he wrote Rankin's name and his own name on the blotted register

of the hotel, and asked for a room. He had scarcely laid down the

corroded pen the landlord found in a drawer, when a voice beside him

said:

"Did you see it yet, Jerry?"

Garwood turned to look in the grinning face of Julius Vogt, who had

come over with the Grand Prairie "excursion" that morning.

"See what?" asked Garwood.

"Why," said Vogt, drawing something from his pocket, "Pusey's article

about you--there," and he opened the copy of the _News_ and gave it to

Garwood.

"Oh!" said Garwood, "_that!_--I saw part of it." And he smiled on Vogt,

whom he felt like striking.

"Well," said Vogt, still grinning, though his grin was losing

something, "I jus' thought, maybe,--"

"Thanks," said Garwood. Several others of the Grand Prairie boys, as

any one, considering them in their political capacity, would have

called them, had drawn near, attracted by their candidate for Congress,

whose wide hat rode above all the heads in the crowd. Doubtless they

expected Garwood to open the paper, but he was too good a politician

for that. As he stood there he idly picked at the ragged edges of the

sheets, and when he spoke seemed to have forgotten it, for he said:

"Well, how'd you like the speech?"

"Great," said Billy Feek.

"You bet," said Doris Fox.

"Didn't he lam into 'em?" said Burr Rippleman.

Still their eyes were on the paper which Garwood seemed to be in danger

of picking to pieces.

"Yes, it was as fine an effort as I ever heard under such

circumstances," said Garwood. "He's a great campaigner." He carelessly

thrust the paper into the side pocket of the black alpaca coat he wore.

The boys were sober faced again.

"Goin' back with us to-night, Jerry?" said Elam Kirk. "We're goin' to

hold the train till after your speech."

"Reckon not," Garwood replied. "I'm going over to Pekin in the

morning." He looked at his watch. "Well!" he exclaimed, "it's nearly

supper time, and I haven't given a thought to what I'm going to say

to-night. Will you come have a little drink before supper?"

The boys grinned again, saying they didn't care if they did, and

followed Garwood towards the dingy bar-room, making old jokes about

drinking, in the manner of the small town, the citizens of which,

because of their stricter moral environment, or perhaps of more

officious neighbors, can never indulge in tippling with the freedom

of city-bred fellows. Garwood could not escape without a joke at his

expense, attempted by some one of the party whose appreciation of

hospitality was not refined, and though it made him shudder he had to

join in the laugh it provoked. But when he could get away from them at

last, he went to the room he had taken, and there, seated on the edge

of the bed, he opened the paper and held it in the window to catch the

fading light. It had been issued at noon that day, and given an added

importance by the word "Extra!" printed in black and urgent type at the

head of its page. But below, Garwood read another word, a word that

needed no bold type to make it black--"Boodler!"--and then--his own

name.

Pusey had adroitly chosen that day as the one most likely to aid

the effect of his sensation, and the opposing committee had gladly

undertaken to circulate hundreds of copies at the Lincoln rally.

The article was obviously done by Pusey himself, and he had taken a

keen delight in the work. He had written it in the strain of one who

performs a painful public duty, the strain in which a judge, gladdened

more and more by his own utterance, sentences a convicted criminal,

though without the apology a judge always makes to the subject of his

discourse, in carefully differentiating his official duty from his

individual inclination.

Garwood forced himself remorselessly to read it through, to the very

end, and then abstractedly, sitting there in the fading light that

straggled in from the dirty street outside, he picked the paper into

little pieces, and sprinkled them on the floor. The letters of the

headline were printed on his mind, and as he sat there in the darkness

and viewed the litter he had made, seeing it all as the ruin of his

life and hopes, he flung his great body headlong on the bed and buried

his face in his hands.

Half an hour later Rankin thrust his head in at the door and called

into the darkness that filled the room:

"Oh, Jerry!"

He haltingly entered, piercing the gloom, and dimly outlining the long

form of his candidate stretched on the frail bed.

"Jerry! Jerry!" he said.

Garwood's form was tall when it stood erect in the daylight, it was

immense when it lay prone in the dark. There was something in the sight

to strike a kind of superstitious terror to the heart, and Rankin's

elemental nature sensed something of this, but when Garwood heaved and

gave a very human grunt, Rankin cried in an approach to anger:

"Aw, git up out o' that! Don't you hear the band tunin' up outside?"

The crowd in town had been gradually decreasing all through the waning

afternoon; the multitude that had come to hear a candidate for the

presidency would not stay to listen to a candidate for Congress. With

the falling of the night there had been a gathering of gray clouds,

and at the threatening of a storm the crowd thinned more and more.

Gradually the weary ones withdrew, the howls of tipsy countrymen on the

sides of the square subsided, the rural cavalry galloped out of town

with parting yells for their candidate, the square in the falling rain

glistened under the electric light that bathed the ancient pediment

of the court house with a modern radiance. At nine o'clock Garwood

finished his speech, ceremoniously thanking and bidding good night

a little mass of men who huddled with loyal partisanship around the

band-stand, with a few extinguished torches reeking under his nose,

with the running colors of the flags and bunting staining the pine

boards on which he rested his hands, and with a few boys chasing each

other with sharp cries about the edges of the gathering.

VII