"Go on," urged Garwood.

"Well," Rankin continued, with a reluctance, "I don't like to--but here

goes. We've got to have money--an' I thought--well, that you might jus'

go to old man Harkness an' make a little touch--fer a thousand, say--"

Garwood had already begun shaking his head vigorously.

"No, Jim, no," he said; "not for all the world. It's impossible; I

can't think of it. You can understand my position--I just can't do it,

that's all. We've got to find some other way."

"Well," said Rankin, flinging up his hands as if he were flinging up

the problem, "all right; you find the other way. I've been here rackin'

what few brains I've got fer a week, an' I can't think of any other

way. God knows I've spent all I've got as it is." He settled back in

his chair and plunged his hands deep in his empty pockets.

"Yes, I know, Jim, and I appreciate it--but--I'll tell you."

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

"No, I won't tell you either, but I think I can raise it--I'll see you

to-morrow morning. I think I know of a place."

"All right, Jerry," said Rankin, getting up; "I don't care where you

get it--jus' so's you get it. I only want to see you landed high an'

dry out of the wet, my boy, that's all." And he hit Garwood on the

shoulder.

"Here, let me hold it fer you," he said a minute later, when Garwood

had picked up his overcoat, heavy with its soaking in the rain.

Down in Chris Steisfloss's saloon as they stood at the bar, and just as

Garwood was ordering a drink, Rankin pushed him aside and said:

"No, you wait. Now Chris," he went on, addressing the stolid man in the

white apron, "you take a whisky glass an' fill it with beer, mostly

foam--same as all your beers--an' then put a spoonful o' that quinine

on the foam."

The man did as Rankin bade him, and when the white powder was floating

on the sparkling foam, Rankin gave it to Garwood and said:

"Now you swallow that, quick; you can't taste it. Then you can have

your whisky."

XVI

When Garwood turned into the gate of his home that night a weird

feeling of detachment came over him. As he looked around the familiar

yard every black bush, every tree tossing its thinned boughs hopelessly

in the wind that blew the rain in sheets against the front of the

house, seemed to belong to some past toward which he yearned, as an

exiled identity. Half way to the low stoop, the light in the sitting

room moved, the shadow of the drenched syringa bush under the window

wheeled across the yard, and then the light disappeared, leaving the

window black. He knew his mother had heard his step, for in another

moment the hall transom leaped bright, the door opened, a great golden

beam streamed out on the walk and he saw his mother's gaunt figure

standing in the doorway. She held the lamp over her head and bent

forward, shading her old eyes to peer out into the darkness, and in

another instant he was beside her, and she was slamming the door behind

him, shutting out the rain and the night.

"My, you're drenched to the skin, Jerome!" she exclaimed. "Run right up

and change your clothes!"

"Whew!" he said, "what a night!" He whisked out his handkerchief and

wiped his face, wet with the rain and moist with perspiration, for the

whisky and the rapid walk had heated him.

"And how hoarse you are!" the mother said, wheeling his big body about

and pushing him toward the stairs. "You've got your death of cold!

Haven't you been doing anything for it?"

"I took a little quinine and whisky a while ago."

"Yes, I smelt it on your breath, Jerome," his mother said rather

severely. She was "temperance," as she would have put it.

Garwood risked an uneasy laugh. He had never been able, grown man that

he was, to overcome what he considered a boyish fear of his mother's

knowing he drank.

"But don't stand there!" the mother said. "Go right upstairs and take

those wet duds off this minute! Have you had any supper?"

"No; is supper over?" he replied.

"Yes, I just got the table cleared and the dishes washed. But I'll get

you something, by the time you're into dry clothes."

"Oh, don't bother to get anything, mother," he said.

She gave the lamp to her son, and as he went up the stairs he heard her

raking up the coals in the kitchen stove.

"Mother!" he called, peremptorily. "Don't make any fire; just something

cold--that'll do for me."

"You go get your clothes off as I tell you!" his mother called in the

tone of command mothers love to use with children for whom they are

continually making sacrifices. When she had revived the dying fire,

she hastened upstairs and laid out clean under-garments for her son,

and dry hose, and then, forever busy, left him with an injunction "just

to dress comfortable and not fix up."

Garwood, warm, dry and refreshed, felt a glow of comfort as he went

downstairs in his slippers. His mother had the fire crackling, and the

tea-kettle rocking briskly on the stove, puffing its little spouts of

steam importantly. Beside it stood a pan, with water almost boiling,

and she had a skillet heating. She was in the dining-room; Garwood

could hear the clatter of plates, and when she came bustling with her

tireless, wiry energy out into the kitchen, he remained there, walking

up and down, gossiping with her in a way which, while she was always

undemonstrative, she entirely loved. As the fire grew hotter and the

kettle began to sing, the kitchen became warm and cozy, and the man and

the mother felt a confidential charm in their surroundings that they

never found so much anywhere as in the kitchen.

Garwood told his mother of his meetings during the week, of the meals

he had been compelled to endure at the little country hotels, of his

long rides by night. But he did not talk to her of Emily, and the old

woman warily avoided the girl's name and all topics that even by the

remotest association might suggest her. Mrs. Garwood was proud of

Emily, and while she gloried in that pride before the women of her

acquaintance she never let her son see it; she rather distrusted her

own footing in the presence of the girl or of her name. More than

all she longed that night to keep her son at home with her, and she

strained every nerve to do so.

The fragrance of the steaming coffee was filling the room. She put some

slices of bacon in the skillet to fry--broiling did not form any part

of her culinary accomplishments--and after she had dropped two eggs

into the tin pan where the water had long been bubbling, she commanded

him to hold his watch on them, as if they were about to run a race. She

cut the bread in great white slices; she opened a glass of her jelly,

a concession she seldom made before winter, and she even found for his

dessert the half of an apple pie. When she had poured her coffee off,

she whisked the supper on to the table; and before Garwood could stop

her she had run bareheaded out of the kitchen door and was grinding up

a pitcher of fresh water from the old chain-pump in the yard. He called

to her to let him get it, though he made no move to deter her, and as

she rinsed out the pitcher and whirled the rattling crank of the pump

again, she called out of the rainy darkness:

"Don't you come out here! You've got your slippers on."

He scolded her as she came stamping back into the kitchen, the rain

drops showing on her gray hair, but she stilled his scoldings by

reproaches of her own for standing in the open door on such a night and

with such a cold.

The son repaid his mother's efforts by declaring that he did not know

how hungry he was until he smelled her cooking again, and he made the

eyes that looked fondly across the table glisten with a brightness

that seldom glowed in their dim depths, by eating all the bacon she had

fried, and both the eggs, and then by sending her to cut more bread.

He urged her to share his meal, though he warned her that if she did

she would have to cook him more bacon and boil him another egg. She

refused, though she implored him to let her fry more bacon and boil the

other egg, but she did consent finally to drink a cup of coffee, in the

readiness American women always evince for their national beverage.

She said it did her good to see him eat. "Feed a cold and starve a

fever," she quoted. When he had eaten, he threatened to help her wash

the dishes, as he used to do when he was a boy, but she declined this

assistance also, saying she was going to leave them for the hired girl

to do up in the morning. She had fears of his escaping when he had

eaten, but he pacifically lighted a cigar and she allowed him to stroll

out of her sight into the sitting room.

Though she had said she was not going to wash the dishes he heard her

scrape the skillet and a moment later, knock the coffee pot on the sink

outside the kitchen door, and he called to upbraid her for breaking her

promise to him. Under his admonitions she hastened through her work,

and when she joined him in the sitting room she glanced at his feet,

as she entered, to reassure herself by finding him still in slippers.

He gave her a pang of fear by observing, in the moment when their

conversation lagged, that he supposed he ought to go over and see

Emily, but she said, appealing to his affection by speaking of herself

in the third person:

"Oh, stay with mother to-night; it's been so long since you were at

home."

She got out her sewing basket for her never idle hands and as Garwood

stretched himself in the wooden rocking-chair his father had loved, he

said:

"Oh, well, all right; she doesn't know I'm here anyhow."

Then she was content to sit and darn his socks and look at him in the

great silence of a mother's love.

They sat there for a long time. She did not know how to make

conversation, and, remembering the dislike for questions he had

inherited from his silent father, she feared to disturb him by asking

any. She was satisfied to have him with her.

Garwood remained silent until he had finished his cigar, disliking to

interrupt his own pleasure in it by opening the subject that then was

on his heart. But at length he began to talk to her about his campaign,

and it was a stimulant to her pride to hear his confidences. She was

more pleased than distressed when he spoke in a discouraged tone of

his prospects. She knew he was of a desponding temperament, another

heritage from his father, and it pleased her to try to cheer him.

"Oh, you'll be 'lected," she insisted. "Your mother's prayin', my son,

and she has faith in her prayers."

Garwood laughed, with a touch of the harsh skepticism she was always

combating in him.

"I'm afraid we need money just now, as much as prayers," he said.

"Money?" she asked, pausing in her darning, and looking up at him

inquiringly.

"Yes," he said. "There are legitimate expenses in a campaign you know,

that a candidate has to meet." And then he told her what the legitimate

expenses were.

"Some of the boys--Jim Rankin and some others--suggested that I ought

to go to Mr. Harkness," he said, when he had finished. He had adroitly

calculated the effect this suggestion would have upon her, and he was

certain of her reply.

"Go to Mr. Harkness, would they? Humph!" Her eyes blazed as she almost

snorted this. "I'd have them know if we are poor we're not goin' to be

beholden to the Harknesses in any such way as that!"

"That's just what I told them," said the son, quietly.

"An' you told 'em just right!" she added. She returned to her darning,

holding up the sock, stretched over her extended fingers, before the

lamp.

"But I don't know whom to go to," Garwood said presently, "and I've got

to go to somebody."

"Can't you possibly get along somehow?" she asked. "Tell 'em you just

ain't got any money to give 'em."

Garwood gave a contemptuous "Humph!" and then, made impatient by

her utter failure to comprehend the grim necessity of a candidate's

position with election but a week away, he said:

"Didn't I just say I'd got to have some?"

"Well, mother don't pretend to know about politics. Your pa never had

anything to do with 'em, you know." She hastened to say this in her

mild voice, to conciliate his petulance with her.

"Oh, I know, mother," he rejoined; "but it's a ground-hog case with me.

I've got to meet my assessments some way. It wouldn't be honourable not

to."

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

"I'll have to borrow of some one, I don't know who."

He slid farther down into his chair and crowded his hands into his

trousers' pockets, a physical posture at one with his mental attitude.

"I don't know what I'm going to do."

He was scowling, his face was long, and he said this with the deep tone

of a final and absolute despair.

"Some one will lend it to you," the mother said. "You mustn't get so

down-hearted."

"Well, I'd like to know who!" he said, casting a challenge at her from

his eyes.

"Why, some o' the banks--they loan money."

He laughed aloud, harshly, angrily.

"The banks!" he said, mocking her tone. "The banks! They'd be likely to

lend me any without security, wouldn't they?"

"Well, Jerome, don't get mad with mother," she said. "She'd help you if

she could."

He was silent; silent for a long time. She looked up at him now and

then, cautiously, but she understood his humor, and she thought by

the knitting of his brows that he was deep in thought. Out of his

cogitations he came after a time, and then to say, with a mild,

hesitating approach to their result:

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

"What's that?" she asked.

"I might borrow a little from the bank--and we give a mortgage on the

house."

His mother did not move. Her gray head was bent over her sewing. The

light of the lamp made her hair glisten; he heard the sound of her

thread as she pulled her darning-needle regularly out to arm's length.

Presently, as he ventured to look at her, he thought of how his father

had toiled to put this little roof over her head before the disease

which he knew was hastening his end should bear him away; he thought of

the comfort she had always taken, during the long years she had worked

to keep him in school, in the thought that whatever else came, she had

a home, an asylum for every stress and storm of life. She sewed on in

the silence, and he did not speak again, but waited for her. And after

awhile she spoke, without raising her head:

"You know, dear"--he could not remember when she had permitted herself

the tender word before--"what I promised your father before he went

away."

Garwood leaned toward her with his elbows on his knees.

"I know, mother," he said, "but this really isn't serious, not that

serious; it would be a small one, and I'm sure to be elected, and then

I'll have a good salary as congressman--five thousand a year--just

think! Why, it would only be for a couple of months; I'd get a

sixty-day loan. I could easily pay it off then; you'd never know the

difference." He smiled in his own hopefulness. "It seems a pity to lose

such a good chance as I've got now for a little thing like that."

She did not raise her eyes.

"But your father said, Jerome," she faltered, and then he saw a tear

fall on the pile of hose in her lap, and, strangely enough, in such a

moment, he saw a pair of their servant girl's stockings--he knew them

because their splendor of color told that they never belonged to his

mother. "And I," she went on, "I--promised."

"But, mother, just look here a minute--I wouldn't ask anything out of

the way of you, would I?"

"You've always been a good son to me, Jerome, and a good provider."

"Well, it isn't as if you were going to get a big sum on it, or as if

we had no chance of paying it off right away. It won't be breaking your

promise, don't you see?"

He went on with his smiling, specious reasoning, reassuring himself

every minute, and finally seeming to make an impression upon her, for

she said at last:

"Well, Jerome, you're a man now, and you know best about such things.

You'll have to take care of your old mother before long, anyway, till

she--"

She took off her spectacles and wiped away their moisture on the

stocking she was darning, and then she raised her eyes, their pale

depths dim with tears, and through them she smiled at him. He got up

and kissed her, and she held him to her, pressing his cheek close to

her withered one, patting his hands clumsily, awkwardly, for she had

never had time to cultivate the luxurious graces of affection.

She did not, however, give way long to her emotion. She urged him to

go to bed, because of his cold, and in the new burst of affection the

evening had developed in his heart, he obeyed. She tucked him in his

bed as if he had been a little boy again, and said good night.

He lay there a long time, warm, perspiring, comfortable, his election

as he felt at last assured. But he could not get to sleep. For from his

mother's room there came to him the sound of her quavering, aged voice,

in hoarse whispers, and he knew that she was kneeling by her bed,

praying.

XVII

Garwood found Rankin sitting in the lobby of the Cassell House, stiff

in the highly glossed linen his wife decreed for his Sunday wear, his

face cleanly shaved and showing its pink under the powder the barber

had left on it. He had had his hair cut, too, and his cropped curls,

because they had been combed by the barber, gave him the appearance

of having been trimmed and made over in another fashion. He had got

some of the ashes of his cigar on his waistcoat, as he lay deep in a

big chair with the Sunday papers piled in his lap, and when he noticed

Garwood, he also noticed the ashes, and in his haste to brush them off,

he could only wheeze out an inadequate greeting between the teeth that

clenched his cigar.

Garwood did not feel the satisfaction he had anticipated for that

moment, when he said:

"Well, Jim, you may rest easy, I can take care of that little matter we

were talking of last night."

Although Garwood spoke with a politician's generality, Rankin, before

he replied, glanced over his shoulders with a politician's wariness

which is like the wariness of a hunted savage.

"Well, that's all right then," Rankin answered, blinking his eyes

because the smoke from his cigar had persisted in creeping into them.

"Didn't have any trouble about it, did you?"

"No, none to speak of," said Garwood. He laughed, but it was a laugh

with more of rue than mirth in it. "It only means a little more debt,

that's all."

"Well," said Rankin, nipping the wet and ragged end of his cigar with

his teeth, "so long as you don't have to mortgage the roof over your

head you're all right."

The words of course struck a pain through Garwood's heart, but he gave

his laugh again as he answered:

"Well, I reckon it won't come to that."

"There's one thing I've al'ays done, Jerry," said Rankin, leaning over

in a more confidential attitude, "and that's this. I've al'ays drawed

the line at the little woman and the kids; I've al'ays said I'd never

compromise them or their future, and I say that so long's a man don't

do that, he's doin' all right."

For some reason that morning Rankin seemed to be in a soft and tender

mood, and showed a desire to talk of his home and its interests.

Perhaps it was because it was Sunday, and his wife had been dressing

him for the day with as much maternal solicitude as she had dressed

his children. Garwood would have preferred Rankin's harsher and more

careless note, and because it gave him a chance to get away, was glad

when he remembered that he had promised his mother to go to church with

her. He knew how gratifying this would be to her, for in her strict

Sabbatarianism she had disliked his going down town at all that day;

and then, too, he had felt that it would be a politic thing to do.

He went homeward, recalling, word by word, all of his conversation

with Rankin, feeling a little hurt at what seemed to him Rankin's

coldness, troubled with suspicions and misgivings that he ascribed to

the influence of Rankin's strange manner, and without the peace of mind

he thought he should feel, now that his election was assured.

He found his mother with her bonnet on, and her misshapen hands gloved

and folded, in anxious waiting.

"What time does church begin?" he asked.

"Half-past ten, the last bell rings," said Mrs. Garwood.

"My goodness!" her son exclaimed, as he hurriedly snapped his watch lid

shut, "I thought it was at eleven o'clock."

The old lady's face winced with a jealous resentment.

"You're thinkin' of the 'piscopalian church," she answered

significantly; "they always does things different."

They walked to church while the bells were ringing, the Presbyterian,

Methodist and Baptist churches tolling their bells one after another, a

note at a time, each tolerantly waiting its turn, though the different

keys in which their bells were pitched rang out in a sharp disharmony

their doctrinal distinctions. Far away over on the East Side, Garwood

heard the chimes of the Catholic church, holding aloof from all this

dissonance of the clamoring creeds, while the Episcopalians had no

bell in their church, disdaining with a fine superior quality of

respectability to enter into the brazen polemics.

The last bell had just stopped ringing, and its dying tones were still

vibrating through the building when they reached the Methodist church,

and were shown down the aisle to Mrs. Garwood's pew, although there

was a pretense of free pews in that church. Garwood could feel the

glances of the congregation upon him as he took his seat, and he liked

the little distinction, although he had grown used, in the last two

months, to being the central figure of public gatherings. He recalled

how carefully the Monday morning papers chronicled the church goings of

the presidential candidates with the fact that the preacher had added

something to his sermon that pledged a providential interest in the

success of the nominee who had distinguished that preacher's church

with his presence, and Garwood tried to conduct himself as a great man

should, or as he imagined he would appear when, a little later, he

should become a great man. He bent his head during the prayer, not so

low as his mother did, but at an angle that would express a dignified

unworthiness to join in public prayer, though giving the assurance at

the same time of his respect for it.

During the services, especially during the preaching, Garwood had

much time for thought and meditation. His meditations were idle and

incoherent, running on Emily, and the afternoon he would spend with

her; on his campaign and its impending close. Through them all ran

a certain minor chord of sadness and reproach, particularly when he

looked at his mother sitting there beside him, her eyes raised behind

their gold spectacles in the very acme of respectful attention as she

tried to pierce the meaning the preacher sought to crowd into his

sermon without making it too long to offend the Longworths, the rich

family of the congregation, who, striving to wear the impressive aspect

of prominence in the community, filled a whole pew. Garwood found his

thoughts hardly tolerable so long as he allowed them to rest in the

present. He could grasp at happiness and comfort only when they built

on the surer, brighter future which soon would open to him. He found it

hard, however, to keep them always building air castles; they persisted

in returning to the present, to Emily, to Rankin, to the campaign, to

the mortgage. He was depressed and longed for the services to end. They

seemed to stretch themselves out interminably, with prayers and hymns

and anthems, with announcements and collections, finally, after the

sermon, with the baptism of a crying child. He felt as when a little

boy he had squirmed during the long two hours, and as a boy was glad

when service was over--he was particularly glad that it had not proved

to be communion Sunday, for that would have made it necessary for him

once more to face a moral problem; to decide on a course of action; and

he was wearied with moral problems and decisions.

The heavy feeling that oppressed Garwood in church, the chill that

checked the felicity he felt himself now entitled to, remained with

him. At times he would forget and become happy, but as soon as he was

conscious that he was happy, he would remember that there was some

reason why he should not be happy, and then his memory would swiftly

bring back to him the thing he had done. By afternoon this constant

recurrence irritated him, and he half pitied himself, thinking it

unjust that he should be thus annoyed when he was so anxious to be

contented and at peace, especially after all the sacrifices he had made

to his mother's wishes during the last sixteen hours. And so when he

set out in the clear, shining afternoon to go to Emily, he resolved

to throw off this feeling; to cast it from him; to have done with it

for all time. Physically he expressed this resolve by the fling of his

head, and the way he set his shoulders back, holding them high with the

will to be all he wished to be.

The house-maid was out for her Sunday afternoon holiday, and Emily

herself swung back the door in answer to Garwood's ring. The girl

smiled radiantly when she saw him and, with a lover's pretense about

her spiritual prescience of all his movements, said she knew it was he

at the door. He told her that she had never looked so beautiful before,

and there was much of truth in this, for she wore, with an effect of

having shown it at church for the first time that morning, a new fall

suit, the skirt of which vouched for the jacket that had been laid

aside for the greater comfort of a blue silk bodice, which billowed

modestly at her young breast, giving her an air of slightness and

accentuating the delicacy of her whole person. Her eyes and cheeks were

bright with health and her lover's coming, so that her natural color,

which made the wearing of dark costumes an easy thing for her, was

thereby heightened.

In the moment they lingered in the hall, she laid her soft hands on his

shoulders, reaching up to him with a smile of propitiation to say:

"Dade's here."

She was pleased when he frowned his jealous disapproval.

"How long's she going to stay?" he said bluntly.

"Not long," she replied. "She won't stay when she knows you're here.

Why didn't you let me know you were coming?"

"I didn't know it myself," he said. "I came on a telegram from Rankin,

and I ought to go right out again, only--I had to stay and see you."

She purred an instant in the embrace into which he drew her and then

quickly hushed him by pointing toward the drawing-room.

Garwood had never known Dade Emerson, though he had heard of her

from Emily in those confidences with which they tried to atone for

the years that had passed before love came to them, by recounting in

detail, little by little, all their happenings and relations. Dade,

to be sure, had impulsively declared that she remembered Garwood as a

shock-headed boy whose short trousers came abjectly below his knees,

and had identified him to Emily as the youth who had thrown a stone

and hooted them as they were going homeward one day from the Misses

Lewis's school. Emily had gleefully told this to Garwood and though

he had recognized the picture's truth, he was ashamed of it, and had

denied it altogether.

When they entered the drawing-room, and Emily had presented Garwood,

there was an instant's constraint, born of Garwood's uneasiness in

women's society, an uneasiness he somehow contrived to make pass for a

Byronic contempt of it, to which also contributed Emily's solicitude

that her lover should meet the approval of her friend.

Dade sat listlessly twirling a ring on her strong, white finger, a

silver ring of curious, antique workmanship that helped the foreign

effect she sought in her personality, but when, through her lashes

she saw Emily gazing at Garwood with a sudden access of fondness, she

rather coldly said:

"You ah standing for the borough, I believe, ah you not, Mistah

Gahwood?"

"I'm running for Congress, if that's what you mean," replied Garwood

with an uncontrollable bluntness that he regretted.

"Oh, yes; that is what you call it, isn't it? How int'resting you must

find it!"

Garwood laughed in an effort to find ease.

"I find it pretty hard work," he sighed. Emily noted the sigh, and

pressed the hand she somehow found between them.

"He's all worn out, Dade," she explained, and the sense of possession

her tone implied put all three on an easier footing. "You don't know

how hard our political leaders have to work."

"To be elected?" asked Dade.

"Yes, to be elected," said Garwood, yielding himself to the pillows

that were piled near him. "And no sooner are we elected once than we

have to begin fixing up our fences for a second term."

"Fixing up yoah fences?" said Dade, wonderingly.

"It's a political phrase," explained Emily.

"You have so many of them," said Dade, "and they ah all so

unintelligible."

"They must strike a foreigner as peculiar," said Garwood. "I had never

thought of that before."

"But I'm not a fo'eigneh, you know," the girl protested.

"Well, you're pretty near it," said Emily. "She's lived abroad all her

life, you know--nearly," she explained aside to Garwood.

Garwood was pleased that the conversation had taken a turn which he

could follow. With strange women he found small talk impossible as all

men must who are not versed in the banalities of women's intercourse,

though they indulge themselves for hours in the trivialities of men's

gossip.

"I have never thought of it before," said Garwood, "but most of our

political phrases savor of our young agricultural life; perhaps I would

better say our pioneer life. There's 'log-rolling,' for instance, and

'stump speaking,' and--"

"And setting the prairies on fiah," Dade added. "I saw in the papah

the othah day that you weare doing that--on the stump, they said."

Garwood laughed again, naturally.

"That was one of Rankin's inspired tales, no doubt. Rather a mixture of

figures, too, setting the prairies on fire from the stump, don't you

think? And you probably saw as well, that some of the Indians over in

Moultrie have their knives out, and are after my scalp."

"That is more than agricultural, or pioneerish," said Emily; "that's

actually savage."

"It's quite deliciously American," said Miss Emerson.

"And one of the few things the papers say of me that are true!" sighed

Garwood.

"I'm not afraid of that," said Emily loyally; "isn't there just a

little truth in the story about your setting the prairies on fire?"

Garwood laughed, the superior laugh of a man alone with women. He liked

this political conversation which he could so easily dominate, quite as

much as he liked Emily's frank acquiescence before Miss Emerson in her

position as his affianced bride. It gave him such a sweet assurance of

security in one relation at least.

"Oh, I don't know," he said; "a candidate never does know any more

about his own campaign than a bridegroom does about the preparations

for his own wedding. To him it all seems to be going one way; he sees

nothing but friendly faces and hears nothing but friendly cheers,

and he goes to bed the night before election almost hoping that his

opponent may get a few votes just to console him, though he doesn't

see where the votes are to come from. The morning after he wakes up to

wonder where his own votes all went to. It's always a shock of surprise

to the defeated man." He paused to enjoy the effect of his little

speech upon the girls, and then resumed: "If you want to know how my

campaign is really coming on you'll have to ask Jim Rankin."

"Who is this Mistah Rankin?" asked Dade.

"Oh," said Emily, turning toward her companion with a superiority of

her own, "you remember--I told you about him the other day. You really

should see him, he's the funniest man and the most interesting. He is

managing the campaign for Jerome. He just worships Jerome; I believe

he'd die for you, don't you, Jerome?"

"I've heard him say he'd go through--ah--hell and high water for

me," said Garwood with the keen enjoyment that comes from vicarious

profanity quoted in a presence where, stripped of its quotation marks,

it would be inadmissible.

The two girls exclaimed, though they enjoyed the risk of it, and

sat while Garwood celebrated Rankin's virtues as a friend and as a

politician. When he found room for more quotable profanity Emily laid

her palm lightly over his mouth, and at this demonstration of affection

Dade rose and said significantly:

"Well, I think it high time I was going and leaving you alone."

There was a little show of protest, but she went, Garwood standing in

the middle of the room wondering if the proprieties demanded that he

accompany Emily as she escorted Dade to the door; but he withdrew into

the security of that dignity which stood him in such good stead in all

social crises, and bowed as if the retiring girl were an audience or a

jury. The two girls lingered in the hall longer than Garwood thought

necessary, though he lost his objection in the satisfaction of the

conviction that they were discussing him.

Garwood, of course, stayed to that unclassified meal which is served on

Sunday evenings. The repast which Emily in the absence of the servants

laid herself, was without formality, and the girl artfully contrived to

hide from him the extra preparation that was represented by the bowl

of salad she brought forth and set in the midst of the white linen

and all the glitter of the table service. Garwood and Mr. Harkness

talked of men's topics during the meal and Emily was silent with the

silence of the woman in her serving, though her eyes gleamed at the

comradeship she thought she recognized in the two men. She did not

know how thoroughly the real thought of each man was with her, though

Garwood from time to time reflected on the comparison that might be

made between the plainness of his mother's table on Sunday evenings and

the elegance of the one at which he now expanded himself.

It was late when he went home that night. As he left he told Emily, in

their lengthened farewells, that it had been the happiest Sunday he had

ever known.

XVIII

Everywhere the campaign was closing, as the newspapers said, in a blaze

of glory.

From their headquarters in New York the managers of the two great

parties were issuing their last impossible claims, their last careful

instructions, their last solemn warnings. Partisan hatred raged in

every hamlet in the land, and the whole nation was given over to the

last passion of its quadrennial tragedy of personal ambitions.

Down in the Thirteenth Congressional District of Illinois, Garwood was

making his final tour of the seven counties, speaking many times daily.

He was disheveled and bedraggled, he went without shaving, without

sleeping, much of the time without food. He had turned into a mere

smiling automaton, that could drink, talk in a husky voice, and go on

and on. Insensible to bodily fatigue and discomfort, his only physical

sensation was a constant longing for tobacco, and he smoked all the

time.

At home, Rankin had finished all his plans. He had completed a second

poll, which he had had taken by school districts, and the thousand

dollars Garwood had given him on the Monday morning before starting on

his final campaigning tour he was hoarding for election day. His own

confidence was such that, when Mr. Harkness, in the interest he could

not conceal, one day asked about the outlook, he was able to say:

"We're all right if they don't buy us."

Rankin had determined that Garwood's campaign should close with a

splendid spectacle of fire in his home town. He had roused the county

committee to a frenzy of action, he had compelled the candidates on the

county ticket to make one final contribution to the campaign fund, and

as Garwood's share of the great meeting Rankin engaged a band, and kept

this action so constantly before his fellow-committeemen that their own

efforts seemed paltry and puny in comparison with his. When the last

Sunday night came, and but one more day remained, he said to his sleepy

wife as he came home far in the chill hours of the morning:

"Well, mamma, we've got 'em licked--but they don't know it."

Emily celebrated the evening of the meeting by asking Mrs. Garwood with

Dade and her mother to supper, after which they were to be driven to

the opera house early enough to obtain good seats for the speaking.

Emily had hoped to have Garwood himself there, but at the last moment

a telegram came from him at Mt. Pulaski saying that his train was late

and he would have to go directly from the station to the opera house to

be in time for his speech. Dade came and brought her mother's excuses,

though not their querulousness, and by her affectations troubled

Mrs. Garwood, already constrained by the embarrassment of a meal too

elaborate for her comfort.

The supper was hardly over when the preliminary pounding of a bass drum

came to their ears, and Emily and Dade fluttered out on the veranda as

excitedly as the little boys who raced up and down the avenue shouting

that the parade was coming, and saluting it with premature fanfaronades

on their tin horns. Sangamon Avenue did not twinkle with Japanese

lanterns this night as it had on the night of the Bromley meeting,

for Garwood's social position was not that of Bromley's, and the rich

therefore did not so readily identify themselves with his cause, but

the boys were bipartisan and now and then the big flags that swung

over the lawns all summer were illumined by the red fire which some

youngster, unable to restrain his impatience, had set off. Occasionally

a line of torches would undulate across the avenue several blocks away,

and then the wild announcements of the boys would arouse even their

waiting elders on the porches; but there were many of these false

alarms, so many, that Dade declared that the parade was a failure and

would not pass that way.

But at last it came. They heard the strains of a band swelling loud as

some distant corner was turned, then, in the darkness of the November

night, far away through the trees, they caught the lick of a torch's

flame, then another and another, until they made a river of yellow

fire that poured itself down the street from curb to curb, rising and

falling as the marchers' feet kept time to the punctuated rolling of

the drums. Along the sidewalks streamed a crowd of boys, and men like

boys, the same that had trudged through the dust beside Garwood's

carriage that hot day in August, the same that had flanked the Bromley

parade a few weeks before.

The girls had been followed to the veranda by Mr. Harkness and Mrs.

Garwood, and as the old man and the old woman pressed forward in an

interest they disliked to own, the two girls clutching each other at

last in a definite embrace teetered on the very edge of the steps,

their teeth chattering with nervousness. Jasper had driven the carriage

around and stood at the heads of the horses, who pricked their ears

towards the oncoming mass of men and fire, and gazed at it with

startled eyes, jerking their heads now and then and blowing through

their soft sensitive nostrils.

The procession had drawn so near that it was possible to distinguish

the details that made the mass, the four policemen, in double-breasted

sack coats who had been announced as a platoon; the grand marshal of

the parade, decked out bravely in rosettes and patriotic bunting,

trying to sit his buggy-horse with the military seat; the flag bearer,

with bent back, straining under his load; the faces of the marchers

themselves red and unfamiliar in the glare that lit them up, like faces

transfigured in the glamour that saves a tableau from contempt.

There were clubs from each ward, uniformed in the oil-cloth capes and

caps of that day, with wide intervals between their sets of fours,

and eked out by small boys in the rear ranks; there was a company of

railroad men--at least their transparencies said they were railroad

men--wearing overalls, and swinging lighted lanterns, and these were

vouchsafed most patronizing applause from the lawns and verandas, as

if they were nobly sacrificing themselves for the salvation of their

nation. The lines were well formed, and marched with an effect of

military precision, though the procession had to stop now and then to

mark time and dress its intervals.

When the marching hosts saw the Harkness house all ablaze from top to

bottom they recognized their candidate's relation to the first quality

of the town by venting a sentimental cheer, waving their torches above

their heads, and throwing the flames into the air. Then the grand

marshal, holding on to pommel and cantle, twisted his huge haunches

in the saddle, and shouted some mighty order, which, though wholly

unintelligible to everybody, and to the marchers more than anybody, at

once created a vast commotion down the fiery line. His hoarse words, or

some hoarse words, were repeated, tossed as it were from one throat to

another, the marshal's aides galloped wildly up and down until at last

the torches began to dance in varying directions as the column executed

some complex manoeuver that wrought a change in its formation. And then

the marshal, in a way that no doubt reminded himself of a Napoleon, or

a Grant, turned about in his saddle, squeezed his plodding horse's ribs

with his spurless heels, and, under his slouch hat, glanced from left

to right like Stonewall Jackson.

At the same moment a drum-major shrilled his whistle, and twirled his

baton, a cornet trilled and the band began to play:

"When Johnny comes marching home again,

Hurrah, hurrah!"

The two girls emotionally trod a dancing measure, and then, because

of the smell of saltpeter, the snorts of horses, the shouts of men,

the red and white ripple of the flags that went careering by in smoke

and flame, some strange suggestion of the war our political contests

typify, in spirit and symbol at least, was borne to them, until they

felt what they conceived to be patriotic thrills coursing up and down

their spines.

"Don't you love the dear old flag, after all, Dade?" cried Emily, above

the noise. The girl pressed her companion's waist in response.

"Yes, but it's a rebel tune they're playing," said old Mrs. Garwood,

dubiously wagging her head in its bonnet.

"Oh, we're all one now!" said Mr. Harkness, and then blew his nose in

chagrin at this show of feeling.

They stood and shivered in the cold night air and watched the parade

go by, read the transparencies with their boasting inscriptions,

praised the various regalia of the marchers, kept time to the singing

of the bugles and the going of the drums, and cheered when fifty men

from Cotton Wood township, wearing coon-skin caps and followed by

dogs, trotted by on their heavy plow horses. Finally a rabble of

boys and negroes brought up the rear, snatching extinguished torches,

half-burned roman candles or sticks of red fire to make a little

celebration, and the parade had passed.

When Emily and her party reached the opera house, the sidewalk was

cumbered with the loafers who always gathered there when the place of

amusement was opened, and people were streaming up the wide stairway

into the hall. Mr. Harkness led the women to seats toward the front of

the house, where they joined the scattered folk already sitting there,

fanning themselves in the air that was overheated by the blazing gas

jets, talking, laughing, whiling away the long time they had to wait

for their entertainment to begin. Up in the dim and dusty gallery boys

were improving an opportunity of liberty by clattering over the wooden

benches, calling to one another, whistling, dinning the night with the

noises boys love.

The stage was furnished with a table, and on it were the white pitcher

and the waiting glass from which orators quench their ever-raging

thirst. The table's legs were hidden by a flag, in the folds of which

was a picture of the candidate for president. The stage had been set

with the theater's gray-walled drawing-room scene--the one with the

frescoed curtains and tassels--and an effort had been made to warm the

cold and cheerless setting of so many domestic comedies and kingly

tragedies by a further use of flags and bunting and a few pictures.

Among them was one of Garwood, which Emily recognized after study, and

resented, because of the fierce cast in the eye, and the aged droop to

the mouth. They left old Mrs. Garwood in the dark as to the identity of

that portrait.

The stage was filled with wooden chairs, ashen-white in their unpainted

newness. The vice-presidents, for whom these chairs were intended, had

not arrived, but presently they began to tiptoe awkwardly across the

stage, and then seat themselves, troubled about the disposition of

their feet before the unaccustomed footlights. They coughed into their

hands from time to time, and were obviously glad when some black-garbed

companion came to share their misery and let them pretend the ease they

sought by talking to him. The stage filled, and some began looking

at their watches. At eight o'clock the hall was full; the meeting

was certain to be a success anyway. Ten minutes more passed by. The

committee arrived and seated itself on the stage. The Glee Club came

and cleared its four throats. Outside the noise of the disbanding

parade could be heard and then the rush of the marchers to get indoors.

The band clambered up to the gallery, ousted a whole section to make a

fitting place for itself down by the railing, then at half-past eight

began to play a medley of national airs, and though the strains of

America, Columbia, The Red, White and Blue, Dixie, Marching Through

Georgia and Yankee Doodle filled the theater, the atmosphere was

charged with the suspense of long waiting.

Suddenly, while the band was playing, a wave of excitement swept over

the audience; there was a commotion at the door, a shuffle of feet,

a scraping of chairs. The vice-presidents craned their necks to peer

over the black-coated shoulders in front of them, people ceased their

fanning and twisted about in their seats to look, a rattle of clapping

hands broke forth, a cheer arose, the floor began to tremble and

vibrate beneath stamping feet, and then the building shook with heavy

applause.

And all at once Emily saw Jim Rankin, rubicund, his curls sticking to

his wet forehead, smiling always, leading the way up a side aisle, and

behind him Garwood, his hat in his hand, his overcoat on his arm. She

saw him run his free hand through his hair to loosen it, then shake it

back with that royal toss of the head she knew so well, and stride on,

his face white, his eyes dark, his mouth firmly closed on the level

line of his lips.

The house rocked with the storm of cheers, with cries of his name,

but he marched straight on, behind his smiling Rankin, who responded

to the greetings of men who rose from chairs or pressed themselves

flat against the walls to give room in the aisle. The little party

disappeared behind the scenes, and the ovation lulled.

Emily felt her throat close and feared the tears that already moistened

her eyes. She tried to compose her features, she crushed Dade's arm in

her fingers, then she stole a glance at those about her. Everybody was

looking at Garwood, everybody save one, her father; he was looking at

her, while Mrs. Garwood, having found her handkerchief, held it in her

work-worn hands just as it had come from the iron that afternoon, fresh

and clean, keeping her eyes fixed on the stage, watching for her boy to

appear again, while tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks.

And then Emily heard Dade whisper:

"Wondah why they didn't come in by the stage entrance?"

Rankin and Garwood had stepped on the stage, and the applause had

broken forth again. Garwood had taken out a big white handkerchief

and was wiping his brow. He was smiling now, and greeting the

vice-presidents of the meeting, who stretched their bodies across

their neighbors' knees to shake his hand. Rankin, too, was mopping his

forehead, and he had his watch out. As soon as he saw that Garwood was

seated, he stepped to the front of the stage, his red face round with

smiles. Then suddenly his smile died, his face blanched, and he tapped

the decorated table with the gavel that lay on it. He took a swallow of

the water he supposed was in the glass, and at last his voice came:

"Friends an' fellow citizens," he said, though not many could hear him,

"will you come to order, an' I now have the honor of interducin' to

you Judge Bickerstaff, who will preside at this meetin' as permanent

chairman."

Rankin retired amid a volley of hand-claps, which the rotund judge,

advancing to the front of the stage, buttoning his frock coat about

him, thought were meant for him. He bowed ponderously, and then, with

one hand on the table beside him, began the platitudinous speech of the

permanent chairman. The people bore with him in that divine patience to

which the American public has schooled itself under this oft-recurring

ordeal, and even gave him some perfunctory applause. But the quality of

the applause was spontaneous only when he reached the place where he

said:

"I now have the very great honor and the very great pleasure of

introducing to you your next congressman, the Honorable Jerome B.

Garwood." Jerry arose at the sound of his own name and, advancing

to the front of the stage, stood there calm and composed until the

applause died away; stood there calm and composed until the silence

came and deepened. He looked over the whole audience, at the galleries

even, and then his eye traveled unerringly to the spot where his

own sat. He looked at his mother, gazing up at him through her dim

spectacles, at Dade who smiled, at Mr. Harkness who was stern, at last

at Emily. Their eyes met, and as Emily's fell she heard his voice in

low, musical modulation:

"Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen."

And his last speech of the campaign began.

Whenever in Grand Prairie they discuss Jerry Garwood's oratory, they

shake their heads and say that he made the speech of his life that last

night before election.

XIX

It was election night in Chicago and already a great crowd thronged

the Webster House, a crowd, as was perhaps fitting in a land where the

avocation of every man is governing, composed wholly of men, although

in one corner of the balcony that ran around the rotunda of the old

hotel there were several women. The splendor that had been produced

in their dress by the competition of a public dining-room, proclaimed

them as regular boarders, and as an additional evidence of their lot

in life, they had that air of detachment from their husbands which

most hotel ladies soon or late come to wear. As they leaned over the

balcony, their jewels and teeth and white hands flashed nervously,

as if they shared the excitement of the crowd below. For them, as it

might for any one, the great crowd possessed a never failing interest.

Looking down they saw it continually in uneasy motion like a herd of

milling cattle. Here and there were nucleated groups of men engaged in

belated political argument or in hedging political bets, here and there

some tired outcast glad of the temporary warmth and light, shivered in

ragged summer garments that the long day's rain had drenched, here and

there some messenger boy dodged along, here and there some reporter

elbowed his way through the crowd, and here and there a wide track was

marked by the more important progress of some politician. Over the head

of the crowd hung a stratus of tobacco smoke, and all the while arose a

multitudinous voice, laughing, swearing, cheering. Constantly arms were

flung into the air, and sometimes a hat went spinning up to the dark

skylight on which a November rain endlessly drummed.

Up the wide staircase and down the hall, carpeted with canvas ever

since the campaign opened, men trailed their dripping umbrellas,

passing in and out of the suite of parlors where the state central

committee had its headquarters. The outer rooms were crowded with

men, their garments steaming from the rain, their faces dripping with

perspiration, their dirty fingers holding chewed cigars. Some of them

were drunk and quarrelsome, and now and then the policeman who leaned

against the doors spoke confidentially to these, deprecating the

trouble he could so easily bring upon them. The desk of the secretary

was closed and wore an air of having been closed finally. On the floor

were piles of blank nominating petitions that never would be used,

bundles of newspapers that never would be read, and heaps of campaign

literature that never would be distributed. In a corner where three

or four sample torches stood was a pile of lithographs, and from them

the faces of candidates, as if they still posed before the people,

looked out with the same solemn expressions they had worn for the

campaign. Outside, from a wire that was stretched to the building on

the opposite side of the street, the big campaign banner could be heard

booming in the wind.

In the innermost of the committee's apartments only a few men had been

admitted, men who that year, at least, were the managers of the party's

policies in the state. In this room was Garwood. He had voted early

that morning and had then taken a train for Chicago, in order to be in

the very center of the night's excitement.

As he sat there in a deep leather chair he could hear the ring of

cab-horses' hoofs on the glistening cobble stones of the street below;

the shouts of election night, now and then the blare of a tin horn.

From Washington Street, two blocks away, a cheer, mellowed pleasantly

by the distance, came from the crowd before the newspaper offices,

where the returns were being flashed upon screens, and from below

always ascended that endless roar. From the entresol a deep voice was

reading the bulletins to the multitude in the rotunda. Garwood caught

snatches of what the voice was reading:

"Four hundred and twenty-nine precincts in Brooklyn and Kings County

show net gains--"

Once he heard the inevitable news that Mississippi had gone

overwhelmingly Democratic, and Vermont overwhelmingly Republican, and

then the quadrennial laugh with which these foregone conclusions are

received and the quadrennial cheers with which partisanship dutifully

celebrates them. But, though he heard, he was scarcely conscious of it

all; it sounded far away to him and strange. His thoughts lay too deep

for these objective manifestations. The crisis of his life, he felt,

had come. He was with men who like himself were candidates, or else the

managers of candidates, and yet he felt that the result of the election

meant more to him than it did to them.

He had risked all on this campaign; he had abandoned his practice,

staked his reputation, spent all his money, gone in debt, all he was or

had was involved--Emily with the rest. He felt that if he were defeated

she would be lost to him. He looked at Colonel Warfield, the chairman

of the state executive committee, sitting at the table in the center

of the room, a pad of paper before him, idly turning a pencil over and

over in his fingers as he considered the import of the latest returns.

Garwood wondered if he were really as calm as he appeared. He looked

at the others in the room, laughing and joking as they were--no, it

could not matter to them as it did to him; they had position, money,

influence; politics was to them a kind of recreation. They lolled in

chairs, smoking at their ease, not caring to anticipate the strain of

the long, uncertain hours of the night, but content to sit in silence

with their heads thrown back, trying to blow rings of smoke to the

ceiling. Once Parrish said:

"It's like waiting for a jury, ain't it?"

"Yes," said some one else, "but, thank God, this is a jury that can't

hang."

"Maybe not," said old General Williams, who had been in Congress for

twenty years, representing a safe district that he considered his by

divine right, "but it can stay out a long time. I remember, once--"

The danger of Williams's reminiscence was averted by the click of the

telegraph instrument. The operator seized his stylus and began to

write rapidly. Warfield took the new bulletin from the telegrapher's

outstretched hand and studied it with knitted brows. He read it aloud

finally, and then commented:

"If that gain keeps up in New York he'll come down to Harlem bridge

with less than seventy thousand. It'll give us the state and the

presidency."

He laid his pencil down and lighted a cigar, but he did not relax his

interest.

"Here's something," he said a moment later, spreading a piece of

yellow flimsy over a white sheet, "here's one from Springfield; says

returns from thirty counties show net gains over two years ago of

eleven per cent. Let's see--'In these counties,' he read, 'Chatham

polls forty-three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. Norton, for

state treasurer, carried the same counties two years ago by seventeen

thousand two hundred and thirty-six.'"

The men in the room stirred with a pleasing excitement. Several of them

began to talk again, but the colonel said rather peremptorily:

"Wait! Here's some West Side news,"--Newman, who was standing for the

Fourth Congressional District, arose as the chairman read:

"Three of the five wards comprising the Fourth Congressional District,

the Eighth, the Ninth, and the Nineteenth, give Newman eleven thousand

nine hundred and thirty-eight, Kenyon five thousand six hundred and

forty-seven."

Newman drew a long, full breath, and smiled complacently.

"How will the other wards go, John?" asked Parrish.

"Oh, they're all right. I carried the Eleventh by a hundred and

fifty-six two years ago," said Newman, speaking with the accuracy with

which a man remembers his own majorities, "and lost the Twelfth by

sixteen ninety-four, but I can give him both of them and beat him out."

Garwood envied him keenly.

The operator was writing furiously now, and kept his left arm, with a

despatch dangling in his fingers, almost continually stretched over the

back of his chair toward Warfield. The colonel made his calculations

rapidly.

"Here you are, General," he said to Williams after awhile, and the

white-bearded old man took a despatch from him and carefully adjusted

his glasses. Then he hitched his chair up to the table, cleared a place

for his elbows, took some paper and began to make figures of his own.

"Gentlemen," he said presently, "I claim my election by a majority of

four thousand votes."

"What was your majority two years ago?" asked Milton.

"Why, sir," said the old man, looking at Milton as if he were betraying

a culpable ignorance, "three thousand two hundred and ninety-six.

Don't you remember?"

"Oh yes," lied Milton.

"Seems popular in his district, doesn't he?" whispered Garwood.

"Popular! No one can beat the old blatherskite. Wish he had to run

in my district once!" Milton spoke out of the bitterness the fierce

contests of a close district had worked in him. Just then a number of

reporters, moving in a body like a committee, came to interview Colonel

Warfield.

The colonel was thoughtful for a moment, and then, smiling, he said:

"You probably know more than I about it, but you can say for me that

at eleven o'clock"--he looked at his watch--"basing my calculations

on incomplete returns from seventy-five counties in the state, I

claim the election of Governor Chatham and the entire state ticket by

thirty-three thousand majority."

"These others have scored already," said Anthony, the secretary of the

committee, waving at General Williams, at Milton and at Newman the

corn-cob pipe for which he was famous all over the state, "all except

Garwood there; he'll be in after while."

Outside the noise was growing louder. They could hear cheering from the

rotunda, and in the streets the crowds pouring out of the theater added

to the din. The noise had a new quality of wildness in it that comes

with the approach of midnight. Schreiber, who had been put on the state

ticket for auditor because of his German name, had long ago claimed

his own election by a safe majority, and had made many trips down to

the bar. He was a fat man, plainly a connoisseur of Rhine wines; and

you might almost have said he was humid, so moist was his rosy skin. He

did not emit a German "Hoch!" as would have befitted his personality,

but he continually boomed forth pleasantries, congratulating the other

successful candidates. But from these general felicitations Garwood was

excluded. For an hour his hopes had been sinking. Rankin had promised

to telegraph as soon as he had anything definite, but no word had

come from him. Though the returns from down the state were coming in

rapidly those from his own district had been meager, and from what he

already knew he was convinced that he was running behind the head of

the ticket, both national and state. It seemed to be well established

by midnight that his party had swept both the state and the nation, and

he seemed to be the only one thus far left out. He pitied himself, he

began to feel that the open triumph of the successful ones about him

was indelicate and in bad taste; he felt that they should show him more

consideration. But they seemed to have forgotten him in the realization

of their own joy, and Garwood could only smile grimly at the irony of

it all.

At midnight whistles blew all over the city, as if it were New Year's,

and just then Larry O'Neil came in, crying:

"We've got 'em, Cook County's ours by fifty thousand. Beats hell, don't

it?"

"How are they feeling down at the Grand?" asked Anthony. The

headquarters of the other committee were at the Grand.

"Oh, they've shut up down there," said the man, "and gone home. They

seen it 'as no use."

"Yes," said Warfield, laying down his pencil as if he had no further

need for it, "it's a landslide."

At one o'clock the telegraph instrument ceased its chatter and the

telegraph operator began to unroll his little package of lunch. As the

odor of the buttered bread and the cold meat he spread on a clean sheet

of paper before him became perceptible in the room, the men there felt

for the first time that night the pangs of hunger, and Colonel Warfield

said:

"What do you say to our going down to the café and having a bite to

eat?"

Down in the café, the men grouped themselves about two tables which

Warfield told the head waiter to place end to end, and the meal he

ordered soon became a banquet. As they sat there talking in excited

tones, laughing at old stories of by-gone campaigns, laughing even at

the defeats of by-gone campaigns, as they could afford to now, many

men passing through stopped to congratulate Warfield, to slap him on

the shoulder, and call him "Good boy!" as if he had done it all. And

as he thought of the four years of that influence at Springfield his

position as the chairman who had directed the campaign would give him,

his inscrutable smile expanded into one of great content. They were

happy at that table, all of them looking forward to days of power, all

save Garwood, who sat gloomy and silent, drinking more than he ate,

and drinking more than he felt he ought. Once Warfield noticed his

despondency, and whispered to him in his kind-hearted way:

"Don't give up, old man. You'll pull through. And if you don't, I'll

see that you're taken care of."

The sympathy of the chairman's tone, more than the promise he made,

touched Garwood, but down in his heart he felt a soreness. It was hard

to see them all successful and be alone doomed to defeat. A place in

the state administration, on some board, even on the board of railroad

and warehouse commissioners, would hardly satisfy him now. He had

longed to go to Congress, and then, the vindication he looked for meant

more than all the rest. And Emily--he thought of her and could have

wept. He felt himself more and more detached from the scene. The table,

the mirrors, the lights of the café, the laughing men, the rushing

waiters, the shuffle of the crowd in the lobby above, the cries in the

street outside, the toots of tin horns, the companies of crazy men

marching aimlessly around and around, howling the names of candidates,

all sounded as remote and strange as if he had no more a part in it.

The night waned, the noise changed, but did not cease. It told of a

decrease in the numbers in the lobby, but the sounds were wilder. Men

were making a night of it. As in a dream Garwood heard some one say:

"There's a little woman down in Rock Island who'd like to hear from

me. I must wire my wife."

And Garwood thought of a telegram he might have sent, had things gone

differently. He thought of a girl down in Grand Prairie, but now--it

was all so changed!

He stole away and sought his room. He went to the window, pulled back

the curtain and looked down into Randolph Street. The rain had ceased,

but still the big campaign banner flapped clumsily. The chill of dawn

was in the air, a cold wind blew in from the lake. Across the way the

court house and city hall loomed in the fog; in their shadow he saw the

jaded horses at the cab stand drooping their noses to their crooked

knees; the cable began to buzz in its slot; far over the gloomy roofs

the sky was tinged with the pallor of coming day--then suddenly a long

shaft of brilliant light striking across the sky startled him with

a nameless terror. The shaft rose slowly until it pointed straight

upward, then three times it swept a vast arc down to the eastern

horizon. And Garwood remembered--it was the search-light which the

_Courier_ had announced would signal the success of Garwood's party.

He recalled the day at Lincoln. The great man and all the rest, as

they went to bed in the dawn of that November morning, were safe in

triumphant victory, while he alone--

He heard the heavy, mature voice of some early newsboy:

"Extry! Toimes, Tribune, Her'ld, an' Courier! 'Lection!"

XX

When Garwood awoke, he opened his eyes in darkness. The room was cold.

He heard the harsh Nottingham curtains stirring in the breeze that came

in at the windows, an autumnal breeze that had only the chill of autumn

and none of the crispness and woodland odors that he would have found

in it down in Grand Prairie. Instead, it was laden with the soot and

dirt of the city, and it could not dissipate the heavy quality taken

on by the air of a room that had long been slept in. He could hear

the jolting of trucks on the cobble stones, the trudge and shuffle of

thousands of feet on the sidewalk, the clank of the cable cars scraping

around the loop, and, punctuating the roar of the city, the cries of

the newsboys. Garwood slowly regathered his senses, and lay in the

moment that comes before memory brings back individuality and life,

trying to fathom a deep sense of something wrong. Then it all came back

to him with a rush--the campaign, the election, the defeat. He rose and

drew his watch from his waistcoat, lying on the floor. It was too dark

to see its face. He switched on the electricity--the watch had stopped.

Then he went to the window and looked down into the street. The lights

were blazing, and thereby, and by the throngs hurrying along and by the

crowded cars, he knew that it must be evening. How long he had slept

he did not know. He could not remember how or when he had got to bed.

His sleep had hardly refreshed him. It had been too deep, too heavy;

he was feverish and his muscles were sore. But he dressed and went

downstairs. Somehow, instinctively, without giving himself any reason

he stopped at the headquarters of the state committee, but the rooms

were dark, deserted. The dead odor of stale tobacco smoke hung heavy in

the air.

At the desk in the rotunda below, the clerk gave him his mail, with

some pleasantry about the great victory. Garwood stared at him blankly,

with the dumb ache at his heart, with some resentment too, that the

clerk should not have known what a dash of bitterness that cup of

victory held for him. Mechanically he began to thumb his letters over

as he stood there, and presently laid them aside that he might open

several telegrams he found among them, with that sense of precedence

which telegrams always take over every other missive. With the first

one his eyes widened in astonishment, and then suddenly he was aware

that Warfield was shaking his hand and saying:

"Well, old man, congratulations. It's all the sweeter now, isn't it?

Why! You look surprised, what's the--"

Garwood looked up at Warfield and said:

"I never knew till just this minute, when I read Rankin's telegram. I

just got up."

"I knew you'd pull through all the time," said Warfield, with as much

truth as retroactive prophecy can ever hold. "I thought last night

they were holding out down there, and that when the whole vote got in,

you'd be found to have won out."

Garwood's soreness had gone, and he took a long breath as if to draw

into his very being this glad new sense of victory. In an instant a new

glory had been added to life. He took Warfield by the arm.

"Come on," he said, "let's get the evening papers, and then go and have

a little drink."

They strolled toward the news stand, and Garwood's eye ran down the

pages as he waited for his change.

"Why, I carried Bromley's home county! I thought I'd lose that anyway."

"Oh, the story helped out over there," said Warfield. "Bromley got the

Sunday-school vote, and that drove the rest to you."

"My! Wasn't it a landslide though!" said Garwood. "Keep the change," he

called to the young man behind the news stand. "Well, I was glad the

party won even when I thought I had lost," he went on. "Look here!"

Garwood was reading, as he walked, the paper he had opened wide. "Logan

County gives me a majority of eighteen hundred; what do you think of

that?"

They were at the bar by this time.

"What will it be?" said Garwood, still devouring his papers.

"Oh, a little bourbon," said Warfield.

"Nonsense!" said Garwood, crumpling the papers under his arm. "I

want to drink Jim Rankin's health, bless his old heart! He gets the

post-office, he does! Give us a bottle of champagne!"

"You haven't had your dinner yet, have you?" Warfield asked.

"No, nor my breakfast, either," laughed Garwood. But then Garwood was

not as well informed as Warfield as to the relation in time of liquors

to dinner. Warfield had been longer in politics.

XXI

Three weeks after election there fell a night when carriage lamps

twinkled among the black tree-trunks in the yard of the Harkness home.

The drivers of these vehicles in liveried coats of varied shades that

had faded through all the tones of green and blue and brown and violet,

with top hats that marked every style for two decades, lounged on their

high seats flinging each other coarse jokes, and cracking their whips

softly at the few brown leaves that clung so tenaciously to the oaken

boughs above them.

Within the house, there was the white desolation of canvas-covered

carpets, and the furniture had been pushed back against the wall in

anticipation of a later crush of people whose bodies would supply

a heat now sadly lacking in the rooms. Ethan Harkness sat in his

library, uncomfortable in his evening clothes, eying dubiously and with

occasional dark uprisings of rebellion, the white gloves his daughter

had decreed that he should wear. The caterer, from Chicago, had driven

him to bay, and now chased his shining black men through the old man's

apartments as though he owned them. In the dining-room and hall, little

tables were being laid, and little camp-chairs unfolded, for the

destructive supper of salads and ices, which, having displaced the more

substantial evening meal of the establishment, would not now be served

until a late hour, when its inadequacy would be more noticeable. In the

front hall, an orchestra had assembled. Now and then the strings of the

instruments would twang in tuning. On all the chill atmosphere hung the

funereal odor of cut flowers.

Upstairs, in her own room, Emily stood before a long pier glass arrayed

finally in the white bridal gown on which the feminine interest of that

house and town had centered for many days. Before her a dressmaker,

enacting for this evening the rôle of maid, squatted on her heels, her

mouth full of pins; behind her, another dressmaker enacting a similar

rôle was carefully, almost reverently, unfolding the long tulle veil;

about her were clustered the bridesmaids, all robed in their new

gowns. They had been chattering and laughing, but now, in the supreme

moment, a silence had fallen--they stood with clasped hands and held

their breath. In the center of the room, Dade Emerson stood in her

superior office of maid of honor, her head sidewise inclined, her eyes

half closed that through the haze of their long black lashes she might

estimate with more artistic vision the whole bridal effect. Presently

she nodded to the dressmaker, and the patient woman, her own pinched

bosom under its black alpaca bodice thrilling strangely with the

emotions of a moment that had been denied her, lifted the veil on her

extended fingers, and proceeded to the coronation. She piled the white

cloud upon the brown coils of Emily's hair; she deftly coaxed it into a

shimmering cataract down the silken train of the gown, and then took a

step backward, while all the women there raised their clasped hands to

their chins in an ecstatic, unisonant sigh.

Emily turned her eyes, brilliant with the excitement of this night,

toward Dade, who still stood with her head critically poised. Dade

nodded.

"_C'est bien_," she said.

The spell was broken, the chattering began again, and the girls swarmed

about for gloves and bouquets, at last seating themselves impatiently

to let the maids fasten their furred opera boots.

Emily still stood before the long pier glass, looking at her bridal

reflection.

"Are you all fixed?" said Dade, "with

"'Something old and something new,

Something borrowed and something blue?'"

The bridesmaids looked up with lips apart, awaiting the answer to this

all-important question.

"My handkerchief is old," said Emily, holding in her fingers a bit

of point lace that had been her mother's, "and--let's see--well, I'm

pretty much all new to-night." She glanced down at her gown. "Something

borrowed--I have nothing borrowed." She looked up soberly, her eyes

wide.

"Something blue?" one of the girls asked, though the first question had

not been disposed of.

"Yes, if you'd bean me, running all that blue baby-ribbon in her

chemise, you'd think so," said Dade.

The bride blushed.

"But something borrowed," one of the others insisted.

"Yes, something borrowed," assented Emily. "What can I borrow, I

wonder?" She looked about helplessly.

"Oh say, girls!" one of the bridesmaids exclaimed, "she must have

a coin in her slipper!" And the whole bevy chorused its happy

acquiescence. Emily, with the sudden air of a queen, unaccustomed to

waiting on herself, commanded Dade:

"Look in that box on my dressing-table."

Dade picked her way through the disorder of the room to the little

dressing-table, with its candles lighted, adding their heat to the

room. She looked, and found nothing. Then she flew from the room,

crossed the hall, and returning, gave Emily a silver dime.

"I'll lend it to you," she said, "it'll be something borrowed, too."

It was all arranged. The bride glanced again in her mirror, turned

about, inspected her train, preened herself like some white bird, ready

for final flight. The old maid scanned the bride's face critically. It

was radiant, but--

"I'm red as a beet!" Emily pouted.

"It's hot as pepper in here anyway," one of the bridesmaids panted.

The old maid took a powder puff and touched the bride's face, touched

the cheeks, and at last the forehead, where tiny drops of perspiration

sparkled.

"There now," she said, with her last dab.

Emily turned to her with a final glance of questioning. The old

dressmaker's eye lighted at the sight of the young girl in her bridal

dress. She took a step toward her, her thin, withered lips trembling.

"May I--kiss you?" she asked, timidly.

And then, carefully, reverently, as she had crowned her with the veil,

she approached, and kissed her. The eyes of the bridesmaids, in the

emotion that weddings excite in girls, became moist with tears.

There were, of course, further feminine delays, but at last, gathering

their rustling skirts about their ankles, the bride and her retinue

made a dazzling white procession down the staircase.

Her father awaited her. The caterer and his black men, the cook and old

Jasper, the men of the orchestra, all had gathered in the parlor to see

her. Emily paused at the foot of the stairs, blocking the procession

that was but half descended. She looked at her father with smiling

eyes. The old man glanced at her a moment, and then solemnly drew near.

When he had taken her fresh and radiant face between the hands that

were still ungloved, he kissed her, and then turned suddenly and went

back to his library scrubbing his face with his handkerchief. So the

sadness that weddings inspire, possibly because the estate of matrimony

is entered into by all lightly and with merry confidence in a future

that shall be miraculously exempt from the griefs and woes of life,

fell upon the little company.

Meanwhile all the closed carriages the livery-stables of Grand Prairie

could muster were rolling along Sangamon Avenue, stretching frostily

white under a November moon. Their rendezvous was St. James Church,

over the stony tower of which some native ivy had kindly grown to

give the English effect so much desired. An awning was stretched from

the curb to the Gothic doorway, and about it were already gathered

ragged children and truant servant girls, willing to shiver in the

night air for a mere glimpse of the bride, and perhaps of the groom,

who, so short a time before acclaimed as the popular champion of equal

rights, was now to be identified with that fashionable exclusiveness

which is separated by satin ribbons and striped awnings from the mass

of mankind. Inside, the church lights were blazing; at the door, two

policemen, in new white cotton gloves, stood guard.

Garwood, dressed for the first time in his life in evening clothes, was

restlessly pacing the musty sacristy of the church. With him were Dr.

Abercrombie, the rector of the parish, in his white surplice and stole,

and Colonel Warfield, his best man. Garwood had found difficulty in

selecting a man for this affair. When, in discussing the plans for the

wedding, he had learned from Emily that it devolved upon him to choose

not only a best man but groomsmen and ushers, he had found, in casting

over his acquaintances, that he had none who were intimate enough and

at the same time fashionable enough to fill these social offices.

But he had thought of Colonel Warfield, and as he considered how

peculiarly fitting it was that a man of Colonel Warfield's social and

political position in the state should attend him at a wedding which

would attract the attention his was sure to attract, he assumed an

intimacy that did not exist, and boldly invited the colonel to serve

him in this delicate capacity. He could not, for public reasons, have

made a better selection. The old bachelor, with as many social as

political campaigns to his credit, was too polite to decline, and so

came down to Grand Prairie, giving, by his position, a new importance

to Garwood in the eyes of the politicians of Illinois, and by his white

hair and military bearing, a distinction to the wedding that made it

complete.

As they paced the floor of the sacristy on this evening, awaiting the

signal of the bridal party's coming, the colonel chatted at his ease

with the rector, while Garwood paused now and then to look through the

peep hole that long ago had been whittled in the panel of the door

that opened into the church. He could see, as in a haze, the flowers

and faces and fluttering fans of society. He could detect, here and

there, one of the numerous politicians he had invited in order to make

his list of guests equal to the one Emily had written out. Far down at

the front he could see Jim Rankin, scorning evening dress, with his

little wife beside him in a hat she had retrimmed that very evening,

and finally, within the space marked by the bows of white ribbon for

the family, he saw his mother, in the new black silk gown he had

bought for her when he found his credit immeasurably strengthened by

his success in politics and love. She was fanning herself complacently,

yet through big spectacles that fortunately lent benignity to an

otherwise disapproving gaze, looking with an eye he knew was hostile

at the trappings of this high church. And yet her face was not without

its trace of pride that she was the mother of a son who could lead out

of this stronghold of fashion and exclusiveness one of its reigning

peeresses.

The organist had been improvising, while the people gathered. Now that

they were all there and a hush disturbed only by the rustle of fans

had fallen upon the sanctuary, his improvisations were subjected to

a keener criticism, and his inspiration failed him, so that his work

lagged and degenerated into minor chords. The hour for the wedding had

passed, and those who had been reviving the gossip that Emily had made

Garwood's election a condition precedent to her marrying him, began to

discuss with keen excitement the possibility of his or her failing at

the last minute.

The gossip had entered grooves that led to certain passages in

Garwood's early life, when some electrical contrivance buzzed. The

music ceased, a hush fell within the church. The priest and Colonel

Warfield straightened up and took their places as if for a procession.

Garwood saw the ushers, chosen by Emily from the number of young men

who once had so ineffectually called upon her, pace slowly down the

aisles, unrolling white satin ribbons along the backs of the pews.

Then the rector entered the church, and Garwood found himself with

Colonel Warfield by his side, standing before that flowered and fanning

multitude.

The organ had begun the strains of the bridal chorus from Lohengrin,

women were twisting their heads, and far down the aisle he saw Dade

with her huge bouquet of chrysanthemums moving with stately, measured

tread toward the altar. And behind her, he saw Mr. Harkness, looking

older than he had ever known him, and on his arm, her eyes downcast

behind her veil, was Emily, kicking her silken white bridal gown with

her little satin-slippered toes. When she saw him a light that made his

heart leap came into her eyes, and he became suddenly, dramatically

bold, so that he left the colonel and strode forward to meet her. He

led her to the altar, and the priest began his solemn words. Garwood

stood there, conscious of the beautiful woman beside him, her hand in

his, conscious of Warfield picking the ring with experienced fingers

from the palm of his gloved hand, conscious of Dade near by holding

Emily's bouquet, conscious of the priest's flowing surplice before him,

of the flowers and palms around him, of the crowd behind fanning the

perfume of toilets into the heated air.

Then he was kneeling stiffly upon a satin pillow, the soles of his

new shoes showing to the congregation, the organ was softly playing,

giving a theatrical effect to the impressively modulated words of the

clergyman, and then they were on their feet again; Dade had parted

Emily's veil, and he saw her looking up at him, her pale face aglow,

in her deep eyes a light that showed the influence of sacerdotal rite.

Then as it was borne upon his soul that she was his, wholly his at

last, with the male's joy of absolute possession, he set his lips upon

hers and kissed her before them all.

The organ swelled into the wedding march that has become a tradition,

and he was striding down the aisle with Emily on his arm. He saw his

mother's tears, he saw Rankin, the big fellow furtively knuckling his

eyes, and then winking drolly at him, he saw Mr. Harkness, who, he

suddenly remembered, was now his father-in-law, pale and stern. And so

they left the church and passed out under the canopy to the waiting

carriage.

Garwood, like a king come from his crowning, felt a kindness for all

the world, even for the poor folk gathered on the sidewalk striving for

a glimpse of the bride's gown. He felt his heart leap toward them, so

that like a king, he longed to fling a golden largess to them.

The carriage door slammed. Josh Bowers, from the livery-stable that had

provided the carriages, shouted some big order to the driver, and they

whirled away. Once more he saw the gleam in Emily's eyes, liquid in the

cold light that found its way from the moonlit night into the carriage,

and, regardless of her dress, though he thought of it, he crushed her

in his arms, and said:

"At last--my wife!"