from this house on this franchise bill--I dare you to take it up in
this star-chamber session!”
Mr. Meredith’s hand swept a wide arc that included the whole house as
he flung his defiance, and then he stood glaring at them all. The eyes
that met Mr. Meredith’s eyes quailed; the house was still. No one rose,
no one replied to him.
Then after a long minute of this painful silence the speaker, lowering
his head until Jamie could not see his face, said in a low voice:
“Objections are heard.”
And so the franchise grab bill was not taken up that day after all.
The session was very short after that, and when the house adjourned Mr.
Meredith went down to the speaker’s dais. The speaker looked up as if
he thought Mr. Meredith was coming to speak to him, but Mr. Meredith
stopped at the steps, and taking Jamie’s little hand he pressed it in
his own big palm and said:
“Come with me.”
It was the proudest moment of Jamie’s life as he walked out of the
noisy chamber, through the crowd of angry, baffled members, past the
staring pages, by the wondering doorkeepers, and so on out into the
rotunda. They walked down the great white staircase, and as they were
passing around the polished brass railing of the balcony on the second
floor Mr. Meredith said, as if suddenly reminded of something:
“Beg your pardon, but what’s your name?”
“James Horn,” replied Jamie.
They kept on and Jamie wondered where they were going, until they
turned into the governor’s offices. Jamie’s heart leaped suddenly.
Surely this was a day of big surprises, thought he.
“Is the governor in?” Mr. Meredith asked of the governor’s private
secretary.
“Yes--just go right in, Mr. Meredith,” and in another instant Jamie
was standing beside Mr. Meredith in the presence of the governor.
The governor rose as they entered, and looked first at Mr. Meredith,
then lowered his kind blue eyes and fixed them on Jamie.
“Governor,” said Mr. Meredith, “I wish to present my little friend,
Master James Horn.”
The governor bowed, took Jamie’s hand in his own and said in his soft
voice:
“I’m very glad to meet you, Master Horn, I’m sure.”
Jamie felt himself tingle all through at the governor’s words.
“Master Horn, Governor,” continued Mr. Meredith, “is a page boy in
the house, and to-day, when we were all caught napping, he saved the
franchise bill from becoming a law.”
The governor, looking a question at Mr. Meredith, said:
“Ah?”
“Yes,” answered Mr. Meredith, and then, when the governor had motioned
them to take seats, and Jamie had worked and wiggled himself away back
into a deep leather chair, with his legs and feet sticking straight out
in front of him, Mr. Meredith told the governor the whole story. When
he had done, the governor rose and went over to where Jamie sat in the
big chair, his arms stretched along the chair’s arms.
Jamie would have wriggled out of the chair, but he had not time to
do so. And then, as he looked up into the grave, kind face, His
Excellency, speaking very seriously, said:
“My boy, you have done the people of Chicago and the people of Illinois
a great service--a service you will understand some day--and now, on
their behalf, I wish to thank you for it.”
MACOCHEE’S FIRST CAMPAIGN FUND
Squire Goddard had been renominated as mayor of Macochee for the fifth
time, and for three weeks had played his customary checker games
with the firemen in the town hall, serene in the conviction that he
could not fail of reëlection. Then suddenly he awakened to the fact
that he had been the victim of a gum-shoe campaign. Election was but
a week off, and something had to be done. So they raised a campaign
fund. Now, Macochee, in that day, had never had a campaign fund. The
state committee never put any money into Gordon County, even in a
presidential year. The Republicans didn’t have to, and the Democrats
knew better. The local candidates, of course, had little expenses
of their own--for cigars, for carriages when there were township
meetings out in the little red school-house, for printing the tickets
(in the days before we had the Australian ballot), and for Ganson’s
hack to use at the polls on election day, but they were stingy in
these things. Macochee and Gordon County always went right, anyhow.
Joe Boyle, Captain Bishop, Major Turner, old Bill Williams and John
Ernest had been parceling the fat offices in the court-house among
themselves ever since the war, and all a county convention ever had to
do was to renominate the old ticket, and it went through in November
without a scratch. Sometimes, because of curious constitutional
prejudices against a county treasurer succeeding himself, they had to
run Captain Bishop for county clerk, and let old Bill Williams have
the treasury, but it only meant, after all, changing the combination
a little, and beyond the trouble of moving some favorite old desk
chairs, which had molded themselves to rheumatic backs, from one side
of the court-house to the other, the ring remained undisturbed in that
ancient, life-giving pile. Of course they had to find a new candidate
for prosecuting attorney every six years, but, fortunately, the crop of
young lawyers is one that never fails, whatever party is in power down
in Washington.
And so, among a virgin electorate, the advent of a campaign fund was
an impressive event. The people felt that they had entered upon a new
era in their political life, just as they did when the council bought
the new fire apparatus and began to agitate the question of bonding
the town for water-works--a proposition, by the way, upon which the
leading citizens sat down quickly enough, because it meant taxes--while
the line of loafers leaning against the court-house fence increased,
waiting for the distribution. They had vague notions about a campaign
fund in Macochee. The amount was reputed to be five hundred dollars,
and, technically, it was in the custody of the court-house ring, but
as they had never had a campaign fund to disburse before, and could
not decide how to proceed, it was temporarily locked in the county
treasurer’s vault, where, not being interest on the public moneys,
it was comparatively safe. Meanwhile they were sticking closer than
brothers. They would not allow one of their number out of their sight.
They went to their meals in relays, and held night sessions in the
treasury, losing sleep and rest, so that all their latent diseases,
rheumatics, phthisis, lumbago, gravel, and so on, were aggravated. They
became cross, jealous and suspicious, full of envy, debate, deceit,
malignity; whisperers, back-biters, despiteful, proud, boasters,
inventors of evil things. They swore as they had not sworn since the
battle of Port Republic. They cursed each other, they cursed Horace
Goddard, and when these subjects failed, they cursed young Halliday.
Young Halliday was at the bottom of all the deviltry in Macochee. He
had not been out of Harvard a month before all the good people in the
town were wagging their heads sadly and saying: “Tsck! Tsck! Tsck!” He
parted his hair in the middle. He brought home a habit of dropping his
r’s, and of pronouncing his a’s with a broad accent, as, for instance,
when he said “rawther;” he smoked cigarettes, puffed a heavy brier
pipe, wore red neckties and knickerbockers, and he drank beer. And he
did something else, something that struck the moral fiber of the town
on the raw. He changed his politics and became a Democrat!
Being a Democrat in Macochee is like being a Republican in Alabama.
There are hardly enough Democrats in Macochee--outside of the fifth
ward, which is Irish--to hold primaries, and they always have mass
conventions to hide their political nakedness. Hank Defrees, the
only Democratic lawyer in Macochee, insisted that conventions were
necessary in order to keep up the party organization. He liked to go
over to Columbus every two years as delegate to the state convention.
It afforded him an outing and a chance at the whisky in the Neil
House. Besides, it is something to go to the state convention with the
solid vote of any county, even Gordon, in your vest pocket. The local
Democrats humored Hank. He had been their only available timber for
Common Pleas judge and prosecuting attorney, and he had been sacrificed
on the altar of his party times enough, surely, to entitle him to
whatever there was in sight.
But George Halliday had been reared a Republican. His father had been
an Abolitionist, the friend of Salmon P. Chase, and his home had been
known in its time as one of the stations of the underground railway. He
had voted for John C. Fremont, and he had voted a straight Republican
ticket ever since. George had responded to these home influences
sympathetically, and had given early promise of that vital interest in
politics for which Ohio mothers ardently look in their sons. His first
experience in politics was in 1876, when he took an active part in the
Hayes-Tilden campaign, crying after the little Catholic boys from the
parochial school, on his homeward way at evening:
“Fried rats and pickled cats,
Are good enough for Democrats.”
And once he marched with a party of his playmates in a torchlight
procession, under a transparency which announced exultantly:
“Hurrah for Hayes! He’s the man!
If we can’t vote, our daddies can!”
That was a fine campaign, extending far beyond autumn, and during
the long winter evenings he had been allowed to sit up, sometimes
until after nine o’clock, to hear his father read in the Cincinnati
_Gazette_, of the bloody deeds of the Ku-Klux Klan. The strange,
cabalistic words froze the very blood in his veins. At night he would
hear the drumming of horses’ hoofs, and see white-sheeted forms
galloping by in the gloom. Sometimes they halted and looked at him
through big black eyeholes.
These were the Ku-Klux, and he was afraid, until the evening his father
came home radiant, sat down to the supper table with a smile that gave
a fine cheer to the room and said:
“Well, we got Hayes in.”
Later, when he was in the high school, he became a member of the Blaine
and Logan marching club, wore a red oilcloth cape and carried a torch.
As he trudged along Macochee’s streets, strangely unfamiliar in the
darkness, breathing the smoke of the flaring torches, intoxicated by
the tired throbbing of the bass drum, he would shout in unison with the
hoarse voices of excited men:
“Blaine--Blaine,
James--G.--Blaine!”
Then the procession, debouching into the Square, was swallowed up by
the crowd; nothing remained of it but extinguished reeking torches
scattered here and there among the thousands of restless heads. George
wriggled his way up to the festooned band stand, he saw the pale
speakers and the countless vice-presidents--his father was one of the
vice-presidents--and he listened to the inspiring song of the Glee Club:
“Dinna ye hear the slogan,
Jimmy Blaine and Johnny Logan?
The plumed knight and warrior bold
Are bound to gain the day.
The golden gates are creaking
While the Yankee boys are speaking,
And the Johnnies are retreating,
For we’re bound to gain the day.”
His eyes had been blurred by the tears, his heart had ached with the
secret pain of patriotism. He had registered sweet vows; he never could
forget--and yet, now, just as his education was complete and he was
ready to enter upon his career, just as the new sign of the new firm of
Halliday and Halliday, attorneys-at-law, was swinging at the foot of
the stairs in the People’s National Bank block, he had turned Democrat.
It was a sore subject at home. He and his father no longer discussed
the tariff question. Mrs. Halliday said it made her nervous, as it
might anybody.
That winter Halliday did nothing more serious than to attend a
Catholic fair in Father Hennessey’s church, and make a speech awarding
the prize some one had won in the raffle. But in the spring, Hank
Defrees, loafing around among the boys, told them the thing to do was
to nominate George for mayor on the Democratic ticket, and it was done.
When old Horace Goddard heard of the nomination, he chuckled until
his great belly shook, and actually invited Captain Bishop and the
rest of the boys, who had gathered at the post-office to wait for the
seven o’clock mail, around to Cramer’s drug store to have a drink. The
cronies all laughed as they drank--though they said, with soberness,
that they felt sorry for old Judge Halliday himself.
It was a cruel thing to do, and it was young Halliday’s idea alone. He
was a youth with aspirations, and he saw in the nomination something
more than the mere compliment Hank Defrees had intended. Therefore
Squire Goddard’s checker game was interrupted by a black-coated
delegation of Protestant clergymen. It was a Monday morning, and they
must have come straight from preachers’ meeting with their impudent
questions. They wanted to know whether or not it was true that the
liquor laws had not been enforced, and how he stood on the saloon
question generally. The old squire puffed profusely and made promises.
The next day a committee of saloon-keepers was called. The old man blew
out his varicose cheeks and sputtered:
“I’ve ran for mayor o’ this ’ere town now goin’ on five times, and I’m
dog _damned_ if I ever heerd such a lot o’ fool questions before!”
The next day it was rumored that Father Hennessey had told his
parishioners that Squire Goddard could not be trusted. Then the storm
broke. The W. C. T. U. held a mass meeting and issued an appeal to
save the boys. That night husbands were put on the rack of domestic
inquisition. They had it pointed out to them that there was a drunkard
in every fifth family--statistics proved it--and parents didn’t want
their boys exposed any longer to such temptations. No one knew where
the statistical lightning was going to strike.
“Suppose you want to intrust the regulation of the rum power to the
Democrats, do you?” sneered the husbands, with ironical grunts, thereby
moving the previous question and closing the debate. Nevertheless,
after that the mayor was kept busy explaining, which is the direst
necessity that can befall a candidate. He encountered Halliday in the
Square one day, and blazed forth:
“You’re gittin’ too smart ’round this town all to onct, young feller.
You know more’n your pap a’ready, an’ if he can’t l’arn ye no respec’
fer yer elders, I will.” He shook a palsied fist at the youth, as he
added, in a tone almost pitiable: “An’ I’ll tell him jest what you
done, too.”
Defeat might have killed the old man, and the campaign was beginning
to tell on him. But when they raised the fund, it was as a hot and
sweetened toddy to warm the cockles of his heart. While he had no
adequate concept of it, and while the manner of its working was a
mystery to him, he did not doubt its efficacy. He felt safe. Also, as
the subject of the only campaign fund Gordon County had ever known,
he felt a supreme importance, which swelled out his chest and filled
him with a ripe content. He even found himself taking the opposition
with some zest, now that it was certain to be non-effective. Three
days more, thought the squire, and it would be all over. He imagined
some sort of civic triumph for himself. He dreamed of a serenade
by the Macochee Silver Cornet Band, in the evening, under the shade
of the pine trees about his home. He dramatized himself as bowing
and smiling on the front porch. He would go out just as he was, in
his shirt-sleeves and slippers, his silver-bowed spectacles on his
nose, and the Cincinnati paper in his hand. It would be thus more
spontaneous, more democratic. Mandy would stand behind him, holding
the lamp high. The front picket fence would be black with people. He
wondered if there would be enough of the campaign fund left to provide
the cake she must offer the band boys, and whether a part of its office
was to meet such contingencies. So the old squire sat in his old chair,
the split bottom of which had been worn shiny years ago, and smoked his
old pipe, with sharp, dry puffs of contentment.
The squire looked forward to disbursing the fund himself, but the
court-house ring still clung to it in indecision. Friday morning,
when they met, election was but three days off, and the ring agreed
that they must get down to business. Major Turner said, with profound
wisdom, that money could be used to best advantage in the saloons.
Charley Bassett--he was prosecuting attorney then--asked, with a
lawyer’s passion for fine distinctions, in what sense the major
employed the word “used.” Before the major could reply--he had knit his
brows and was whittling a fresh chew from his plug, to irrigate his
thought--old Bill Williams said:
“No, that won’t do; we must use it to get out the vote.”
“Well,” said Bassett, who always annoyed the old fellows with his young
haggling, “how’ll you get out the vote?”
The auditor, with an effort at something definite, said:
“Why, we must have organization--that’s what wins in elections
these days.” He shook his head, in a keen triumph, for the phrase
pleased him, as phrases do please politicians. He began to conceive
himself--gladly, as a great political leader, as an organizer of
victory. “Organization, that’s the word,” he persisted, and then,
growing bolder, he brought his fist down on his fat knee, and plunged
on heedlessly into detail.
“You just give me that fund,” he said, “and I’ll--I’ll show you,” he
brought up lamely.
“Well, tell us how you’d spend it,” insisted Bassett. “What’d you buy
first? Remember, election’s only next Tuesday.”
“Why, why,” hesitated Williams, “I’d spend it gittin’ out the vote.
I’d git kerriages, and have signs painted to hang on the horses,
readin’,” and he lined the imaginary letters on the rough palm of his
left hand with the gnarled forefinger of his right, “‘Republican City
Committee--Vote for Goddard.’”
The old squire, tickled with the sound of the last legend, broke in
with:
“You’ve got the idee, Billy.”
“Course,” said Williams, expanding more and more, “I seen ’em that
way when I was in Columbus onct, on ’lection day. Get about five good
two-horse kerriages--”
But the captious Bassett, remembering that old Bill’s son-in-law, Hi
Wellman, kept the livery stable, interrupted him by saying:
“Oh, that wouldn’t cost more’n twenty dollars, and, anyway, we can use
our own buggies, same as we’ve always done.”
Captain Bishop, who had been carefully combing his whiskers with his
fingers, then advanced his scheme.
“Seems to me,” he said, “that we’d ought to have a campaign committee,
with a treasur’ and a finance committee, and let the treasur’ pay out
only on warrants drawed by the finance committee--then there’d be no
question.”
“No, there’d be no question,” said Bassett cynically, “there’d be no
question. And the finance committee could draw warrants for their own
arrest, while they’re about it.”
The ring gasped, and though the captain tried to say something about
business methods, they were all silent for a long time, chewing their
tobacco gravely and thoughtfully, until the squire nervously ventured
to ask:
“But what do you think we’d best spend it fer?”
“Votes,” said Bassett laconically.
“That’s surely what we want,” said Judge Ernest, speaking for the first
time. The old men in the circle wheeled toward the probate judge. They
had not been surprised at what Bassett said, for he never attended
service, and was reputed to be a free-thinker, but Judge Ernest was a
pillar in the church.
“Why, John,” said Major Turner, “you don’t mean to say you’d buy votes?”
“Didn’t say I would, did I?” snapped the old man, wriggling uneasily in
his Delaware chair. “I meant that the money ought to be used so as to
produce votes.”
“Exactly,” assented Bassett.
“And if it don’t do that,” the judge went on, “why we’d ought to give
it back to them as contributed.” The judge offered this solution with a
new hope dawning in his heart, for he had mourned over the ten dollars
he had invested in the fund. A murmur of approval ran around the ring,
and the old squire, fearing the dissolution of the fund, was the only
one in the room whose face did not glow.
“I’ll tell you, boys,” said Joe Bogle, “we might whack her up among the
crowd and everybody do the best they can with their share.”
“That’s what I call a grand su’gestion,” said Judge Ernest, shaking his
head approvingly.
But Bassett shook his head the other way. “No,” he said, “that won’t
do, we want some system in this thing. It ought to be changed into
dollar bills and then given to the central committeemen to use in
their wards election day. Of course we won’t need so much in the strong
Republican wards--we’ll put it out in Lighttown and down in Gooseville
among the niggers, and some of it across the tracks among the boys in
the shops--that’s where it’ll tell.”
But the ring stubbornly opposed the idea of letting that pile of money
go out of its hands. They put only young men on the city committee, and
the honor and importance were enough for them. They would be wanting
office next.
The old squire voiced the protest.
“’Pears to me,” he whined, “that as I’m runnin’, I’d ought to have a
leetle of it fer my own expenses on ’lection day. I’ve been givin’ of
my services to the party now fer nigh on to twenty year, not countin’
my term in the army, and it’s expensive, ’specially with that young
Halliday carryin’ on the way he is--”
“No one never made up a fund for none of us, Hod Goddard,” chorused the
old fellows.
“Yes, and there’s others on the ticket besides you,” interrupted
Bassett. “Let each candidate spend his own money if he wants to. You
hain’t paid your assessment yet, anyhow.”
“But I’m the head o’ the ticket,” stammered the squire, his red face
deepening to purple.
The booming of the town clock in the court-house tower startled the
ring, and the county officials glanced at their big silver watches.
They were already half an hour late for their dinners.
“And my wife told me to fetch home some meat,” said Bassett, forgetting
all else as he seized his hat.
And so the conference broke up. Saturday night came, they had no
solution, and, like those that do business in great waters, were at
their wits’ end.
Sunday morning a report spread through the town that caused the ring
to take heart of grace. It was a report of serious defections in
Halliday’s ranks. Jerry Sullivan, Scotty Gordon, old man Garwood, Rice
Murrell and even Hank Defrees had been going about town all Saturday
afternoon and evening, and everywhere they went they told people it
was no use--Halliday couldn’t be elected. He might have been two
weeks ago, if he had acted differently, but now--they shook their
heads. They couldn’t stand for him any more--he needn’t look to them
for support--he hadn’t treated them right--they had been fools to
expect anything from such a dude. Five hundred dollars, they said,
judiciously used, would settle his hash. They wished they had the
management of it, they would revenge themselves for his slights and
insults. And these were representative men, even if their portraits had
not been made in half-tone for the _History of Gordon County_.
Jerry Sullivan lived on the hill behind the priest’s house, and was
the “darlint” of all the old women in Lighttown. He was a lad of power
in the Fifth Ward. Scotty Gordon lived across the tracks in the Second
Ward and worked in the shops. Old man Garwood lived just at the edge of
town, on the Blue Jacket road, in the Fourth Ward, and Rice Murrell,
the Reverend Rice Murrell, the pastor of the A. M. E. church--who had
turned Democrat when they took the janitorship of the court-house away
from him--could do more with the colored voters down in Gooseville than
any man, save Judge Halliday, and he was out of politics. Hank Defrees,
of course, who still shivered under the fringe of a ragged garment
of respectability by clinging to a heavily mortgaged home far out on
Scioto Street, where the better element of the town began to thin out
into social mediocrity, stood for the aristocratic Third Ward, with its
normal Republican majority of two hundred and eleven. The Democrats had
never been able to make up a ward delegation in the Third, and Defrees
for years and years had sat in all city and county conventions very
much at large.