So the novel pre-convention radio campaign opened and developed
presently a pitch of excitement seldom exceeded by a closely contested
Presidential election. Twice a week alternately the courtesy of the
capital city’s broadcasting station was extended to one of the
contestants, Hammond reading his speech from his bed in his little
farmhouse in the suburbs, Forsythe delivering his from the hotel suite
which he had taken as headquarters till after the State convention.
Harking back to the famous “Front Porch” campaigns of certain
Presidential candidates, this campaign of Hammond’s was facetiously
dubbed a “Bedside Campaign.” Forsythe made much of it in his glittering
speeches which continued to evade anything but generalities regarding
the State water power issue.
On the whole the two contestants continued to run neck and neck. They
continued to hold their original blocks of instructed or definitely
committed delegates, each falling some ten per cent short of the
required majority.
And the little block of uncommitted delegates from the rural districts
who held the balance of power, despite repeated rumors of a break after
each radio speech, remained uncommitted and stuck together.
There had been no personal mud slinging on either hand. They admired the
finished oratory of Forsythe. But equally they admired Hammond’s clear,
cold analysis of the power situation.
They were suspending judgment until the final summing up of
recommendations he promised to make when they assembled for the
convention.
So the time of the State convention arrived, and, as Boss Quaid had
feared, the fight was carried to its floor with the chance of victory
ready to fall either way according to the words a sick man might utter
into his telephone in the privacy of his bedroom.
For when the convention opened, Warren Hammond was really ill, broken
down by the strain of the campaign on top of the shock of his injuries.
With great effort he had finished dictating his final radio statement
which he hoped to read over the wire to the convention. Now there were
grave doubts whether he would be able to read it himself.
The morning of the convention dawned at last. Into the city’s convention
hall the delegates poured.
Quaid snorted at the spectacle.
“Don’t look much like the old-time batch of handmade ones,” the big
fellow mourned to Barney as they watched from the gallery.
“Nope,” his satellite admitted. “Especially with the skirts in on the
game. But the women ain’t nuthin’ to this Hammond. He’s a woman and a
devil and one of the Lord Almighty’s mysterious ways wrapped up in one
bundle. He’s been one trick ahead of us at every jump. That accident of
his was either plain dumb good luck or fixed by himself intentional. The
poor invalid stuff’s got the women going. The boys that are feeling him
out say even those in the neutral crowd are leanin’ his way. I’m afraid
he’s got us licked, chief.”
“You’ve said it, Barney--afraid I’m about through.”
An out-of-town man under the edge of the gallery hailed a local
acquaintance. “Hello, Dick! Is this the place where you held the ghost
dinner?”
Barney and his chief grinned at each other ruefully.
“They’ll always believe we fellows were blind and dumb that night,”
Barney replied.
“And I’ll always believe those radio people double crossed us somehow,”
Quaid added.
And the big fellow clung to that belief to his dying day.
A good sized knot of delegates came in, making the roof ring with cheers
for Forsythe. Another knot across the hall tried to drown them out with
counter cheers for Hammond.
“Hello, you bedroomers!” Shouted a Forsythe man above the din.
“Go on, you ghost walkers,” a man from the other ranks retorted.
And in Hammond’s sick room out in the little suburban farmhouse, the
invalid was listening to the tumult in the convention hall as it came to
him over his radio. A vigilant wife and nurse kept him constantly under
their eye, shutting off the blaring instrument whenever he showed signs
of getting nervous.
“Remember, Warren, if you overstrain your nerves, the doctor won’t let
you read your speech,” Mrs. Hammond warned him at intervals.
“I’ve got to read that speech if it kills me,” he told her. “If I don’t
know what’s going on beforehand I won’t be able to put the right spirit
in it.”
And he managed to grin at her cheerily, although it was an evident
effort.
In Forsythe’s headquarters at the hotel near the convention hall, the
other candidate was nervously rehearsing his speech in the intervals
when he was listening in on the radio. Little Jim Neenan was in constant
attendance upon him these days, acting as general handy man.
The crafty one had taken a room of his own down the corridor from
Forsythe’s suite where he could be on hand night and day to make himself
useful. He was charging nothing for these services, but he hadn’t
forgotten the main chance.
“Remember you’re going to owe me a fat two grand in the course of the
next day or two,” he reminded his self-selected chief at frequent
intervals.
But Forsythe vouchsafed him nothing more by way of reply than a
sarcastic lifting of the eyebrows. At times Neenan studied him
reflectively, and worry lines appeared in the narrow brow. Then there
was a flash of dangerous light in the cold, close-set eyes.
The convention moved through two days of tense suspense and excitement.
During the routine business of organizing, whenever there was
opportunity for a test vote, the original line-up continued firm.
This was discernible on the second day also, in the cheering and
speeches accompanying the putting of Forsythe and Hammond in nomination
for Governor. The neutrals were still standing in a firm bloc, waiting
for Hammond’s statement.
Then, on the morning of the third day came the long awaited opportunity.
The session opened with a motion that the convention proceed to ballot
for Governor.
Before it was seconded, a Hammond adherent, as previously arranged with
the presiding officer, arose, and after a brief eulogy of the sick man
announced that he had just been informed by telephone that Mr. Hammond’s
doctor had given permission to the patient to read his address to the
convention over the radio that morning. He therefore moved that the
convention extend this courtesy to Mr. Hammond as one of the nominees.
The motion was carried unanimously, and the time for the address set at
ten thirty, one-half hour away. Then, in accordance also with agreement,
the same privilege was sought and obtained for Forsythe, and his time
set at twelve o’clock.
During the few minutes that remained before Hammond’s voice was due to
be heard over the wire, there was an atmosphere of electric suspense in
no wise mitigated by the blaring of the band which filled in the
interval. In the sick man’s bedroom miles away, the doctor had just
examined the patient and ordered every one else out of the room but
himself and the nurse in order that the invalid speaker might be as
little disturbed as possible.
Pale and trembling he sat propped up in the bed, his manuscript on a
tray before him, and the telephone transmitter on an extension bracket
at his lips. Downstairs his family and immediate friends were in front
of the radio which would hurl back to them the speech he was about to
send out.
In a voice deep and resonant in spite of his weakness he began his brief
statement. The listeners below and the great crowds in the convention
hall down in the city sat breathless.
After outlining his purposes toward the party in case he were selected,
he summarized his finding in the water power problem in words eloquent
for their simple clearness. Finally came the closing section in which he
was to give his long awaited policy.
His councilors listening downstairs, who had worked with him over the
manuscript, knew his suggestion for a long term nonpartisan commission
by heart.
But as he began this section they heard words strangely unfamiliar. They
stared at each other in amazement. Down in the convention hall it was as
though the assemblage had been struck by a bolt of lightning.
They heard Hammond, the supposed scientific progressive, deliberately
proposing as his conclusions that the State keep its hands off the water
power forever, and leave it in the grasp of the present private
corporations. As his words ceased, it was evident that in a few brief
sentences, Hammond had torn down all the esteem that he had built up,
and with it his hopes of the nomination.
There was a moment of silence in the great hall, and then pandemonium
broke loose. Boss Quaid and Barney Fogarty pounded each other on the
backs and shouted with glee. Hammond had gone further than Quaid in his
most arrogant moments had ever dared go.
“The guy’s gone crazy!” Barney roared.
“Barney, you’re right,” roared the big fellow.
In the Hammond farmhouse the doctor came out of the speaker’s room to
face a horrified group.
“Doctor--has it been too much for him? Is he delirious?” Mrs. Hammond
gasped.
“Oh, no; he’s all right. Seems to be a great relief to him to get it off
his mind,” the doctor reassured her.
“But, doctor, you heard what he said at the last!” Hammond’s partner
insisted. “Altogether different from what he’d planned.”
“Oh, I didn’t notice what he said,” the doctor told him calmly. “I was
busy counting his heart beats.”
V
A few minutes later, down in the city, little Jim Neenan drove hurriedly
up to the hotel where Forsythe had headquarters, leaped from his car and
made his way up to the Forsythe suite with all speed.
Forsythe was closeted in his private office, going over for the last
time, the address that he was to deliver over the radio in a few
minutes, but Jim burst in on him unannounced.
“Now do you owe me the two grand?” he demanded triumphantly.
“I do not! What for? Get out of here. Can’t you see I’m busy!” Forsythe
snapped at him.
“What for?” Neenan snarled. “Why, for putting Hammond out of the
running! Didn’t you know I did it?”
Forsythe stared at him in contempt.
“You did it!” he sneered. “That’s a delightful bluff, but I’m too busy
to be amused. I don’t owe you two thousand dollars, and never will. Now
get out, I tell you.”
“But listen, I can prove--”
Neenan got no further. Forsythe stood over him menacingly.
“Another word from you and I’ll ring for a cop and have you arrested for
conspiracy. Remember I know who broke Hammond’s legs.”
Neenan stared back at him for a moment with eyes turned to steel
gimlets, white hot at the points. Then without a word he left the room
and the suite and hurried down the corridor to his own apartment.
A few minutes later the eloquent voice of Forsythe was being poured into
the convention hall. He was surpassing himself in his flights of
oratory.
He wound up, deprecating his opponent’s position on the water power
question, and pledging himself to continue a safe and sane policy of
watchful waiting until the time was ripe for the State to act.
Forsythe laid down his manuscript and turned to receive the plaudits of
the group around him.
“Stop! Just a moment, Mr. Forsythe!” came an unfamiliar voice of thunder
from the amplifier of the convention hall, and from the radio horn in
the Forsythe suite. “You have something to confess, Mr. Forsythe. Do it
now, before I’m compelled not only to confess it for you, but to make a
further statement that will make you a fugitive from justice.”
The booming voice ceased, and for a moment there was absolute silence.
Then another voice came from the radio. Forsythe started, and turned
deadly pale. He had not spoken a word, but the voice that he was hearing
was seemingly his own.
“I am afraid I will have to confess,” the voice was saying. “My
opponent, Mr. Hammond, has been the victim of a conspiracy. The closing
words of his speech which led you to condemn him just now were not his
own, but the artful interpolation of an impostor clever at disguising
his voice. If you will go to the woodland near the home of Mr. Hammond,
just outside the city, through which the telephone line passes that
brought his speech this morning from his bedroom to the broadcasting
station, you will find still dangling from one of the poles a wire which
the impostor had cut into the telephone line. It was a simple thing for
him to attach a telephone to the end of that wire and listen in while
Mr. Hammond read his speech. When my opponent reached his
long-waited-for conclusion regarding State water power, the impostor cut
him out of the line, and cleverly imitating Mr. Hammond’s voice, he
delivered the false statement which you heard with so much
consternation. What Mr. Hammond actually read, and you can prove it by
getting his manuscript, was in substance as follows:”
The simulated voice of Forsythe then gave a close approximation of what
Hammond had intended them to hear.
“That is all I have to say,” concluded the pseudo Forsythe.
The real Forsythe, still deathly pale, whirled away from the radio.
“That damned little rat of a Neenan! He double crossed me because I
wouldn’t bribe him! He played the same trick on me that he did on
Hammond. Down to his room quick!”
The group rushed pell-mell down the hall and burst into the room which
Neenan had occupied. But Mr. Neenan had gone, taking with him the sweet
flavor of his revenge.
Over the window sill dangled a wire attached to a telephone instrument.
It ran out along the ledge and connected with the special wire that had
been installed in Forsythe’s suite.
The crafty Neenan had lately feared that his service to Forsythe would
be repudiated, and had prepared the instrument of his revenge
beforehand.
And in the convention hall at this moment the uproar had subsided to the
point where one of Forsythe’s former adherents could make himself heard.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I move that we dispense with the roll call and
instruct the secretary of the convention to cast one ballot for Mr.
Warren Hammond as our candidate for Governor.”
It was seconded and carried without a dissenting voice.
A few minutes later a local man came across Boss Quaid as he was
slipping quietly out of a side entrance of the convention hall.
“Not leaving us, are you, chief?” the other asked.
“Yep,” he sighed. “Barney’s been intimating lately that I’m a has-been.
Barney’s right.”