before, clouded, “but it’s in Decatur, and we’re in Springfield and
we’ve got to have it now, to-night, if it’s goin’ to do us any good.
What the devil did you want to deposit it in Gregory’s bank for?”
“Because,” replied Jennings, “Gregory’s rich, and a contributor, an’ he
can deliver Macon County, and we’ll want Macon County’s ten votes, if I
hain’t mistaken, one of these days. But never mind that now--it’s the
on’y thing we can do.”
Jennings looked at his watch. “It’s now twenty-five till nine. A train
goes out on the Wabash at nine-five. I’ll send Hennessey over on that
train with a note to Gregory, an’ a check. He can get twenty thousand,
an’ ketch a train back ’bout eleven-twenty, I think, anyway--that train
that gets here at twelve-forty. You can take the money, put it back in
the treasury, ’fore the governor seals ’er up, an’--”
Grigsby sprang toward Jennings and seized his hand.
“Hank, you’re the best friend I ever had,” he cried, and his eyes
glistened.
“Aw, don’t talk like that,” said Jennings awkwardly.
“But can we trust Hennessey?” said Grigsby, the next instant, his eyes
dilating, his hand suddenly dropping by his side.
“Hell, we’ve got to,” said Jennings. Then he strode across the room
and turned the old-fashioned brass bell-pull.
When a black boy grinned in the doorway, Jennings sent for Hennessey,
and soon, the old elevator having clambered to the parlor floor, there
was a knock. Jennings yelled “Come!” and in the doorway stood a young
Irishman, red-cheeked and with closely-cropped, silver-sprinkled black
hair. In the cities, the hair of the Irish-American--especially in
politics, and they are all in--turns gray early. Hennessey was strong
in the Thirteenth Ward of Chicago, hence his job in the office of
the secretary of state. Jennings had been writing while awaiting the
Irishman’s coming. Turning to him the secretary of state gave his
instructions, and he departed. As he closed the door Grigsby called:
“I’ll make it all right with you, Mike.”
Grigsby went to the window and pressed his face to one of the small
panes, placing his hands as blinds beside his eyes as a little child
does. The cold glass soothed his forehead deliciously. He saw Shorty,
who has driven “statesmen” on their mysterious nightly rounds for
generations, mount the box of his old hack and pull his reluctant
horses into the street. Then he turned to confront the three hours’
wait. He poked the smouldering fire of soft prairie coal, gave Jennings
a cigar, and was about to pull the old-fashioned brass bell crank that
more cheer might be added to the factitious comfort he sought to create
in the room, when Jennings, meditatively scratching his head, said:
“Bill, where’s them notes o’ yourn?”
“Why, in the treasury, I suppose.”
“Well, you’ll have to get some one who can open the vaults fer you
to-night.”
Grigsby’s brow darkened, and the small cheerfulness that had begun to
adumbrate itself in his face faded quite away.
“That’s so--I hadn’t thought of that.”
He pondered heavily and then said, the old note of fear in his tone:
“Has that vault a time lock?”
“I reckon.”
They were silent.
“Well,” said Grigsby presently, breaking the silence, “I’ll have to
get Mendenhall.” Mendenhall was the assistant state treasurer, and was
counted among the adherents of Grigsby.
“Better let me go,” said Jennings, taking up his coat and hat.
When he had gone Grigsby again paced the floor. Now he would pause at
the window and look down into Sixth Street, where the rain, falling
hopelessly and helplessly, was making pools in the depressions of the
cedar block pavement that glinted in the white glare of the arc light
spluttering before the hotel. Whenever the hoarse sounds of distant
locomotive whistles came to him out of the wet night, he jerked forth
his watch and sighed as he replaced it. Then he began to worry because
Jennings did not reappear. He wondered if Governor Chatham would
venture out in such a night to seal the treasury. He cursed Chatham,
who had made him, and finally Jennings, who had saved him. Altogether,
he passed a very bad two hours. And then Jennings returned. As the tall
Egyptian entered the room, Grigsby demanded:
“Where you been?”
“Over to the St. Nick--met up ’ith some o’ the boys, an’ set into a
little game fer a while.”
“See Mendenhall?”
“Yep--he’ll be ’long. Gosh! it’s a regular Shawneetown flood outside!”
And the man waved his big hat in a wide arc, the spray from it spitting
angrily as it sprinkled the fire in the grate.
“So it’s all right, is it?”
“Ump huh.”
“How about the time lock?”
“Oh, George says they don’t never use that--haven’t sence the day the
senate ’p’inted that committee to count the money in the treasury.
’Member? By gosh, didn’t pore ol’ Jim hustle to get a special train an’
haul that money down from Chicago, though?”
The secretary of state wagged his long head and chuckled.
“That thing lost him e’enamost fifty thousan’ in int’rust, he tol’ me
onct,” the secretary of state went on, “an’ he hain’t never been able
sinct to make ary long loan.”
Again he laughed, and, the spirit of reminiscence being upon him, he
went on: “One time ’fore the war, the legislature ’p’inted a countin’
committee, an’ ol’--oh, what’s ’is name?--you know--from Gallatin
County--he ’as treasur’ then, an’ the’ wasn’ more’n about fifty
thousan’ in the safe, but he ’as game, an’ when the committee ’peared
next mornin’, he says, ‘Cert’n’y, gentlemen,’ an’ handed ’em out about
ten thousan’ in them old green dollar bills, an’ says: ‘When yo’re done
countin’ o’ _them ’ere_, I’ll give you all some more.’ An’ in ’bout an
hour they reckoned they’d take _his_ figur’s--they’d have to do.”
Grigsby’s heart lightened, and he became almost gay, ordering much
drink. And for an hour the two men sat there, waiting and smoking, and
drinking whisky--Jennings bourbon and Grigsby rye--and were content.
Though every time the yowl of a locomotive was borne to him on the
cold, wet night, Grigsby jerked out his watch. And once he started at a
short knock on the door, but it was only Mendenhall.
After midnight Grigsby’s anxiety deepened, and he ceased to pay
attention to Jennings’ stories of politics down in “southern Eellinoy,”
stories about Don Morrison and John A. Logan. At twelve-forty he rose
and trod the floor, but Jennings’ long form was stretched out before
the fire, his whisky glass was at his elbow, and he said from time to
time:
“Oh, fer God’s sake, Bill, set down--they’ll be ’long all right.”
“Isn’t that the Wabash?” said Grigsby, cocking his head at the night
cry of a locomotive.
“I don’ know,” said Jennings, who was growing mellow, “on’y whistles
I could ever tell was them on the ol’ O. and M., ’ceptin’ o’ course,
the toot of the _Three States_, which is now at Cairo, ef she hain’t
stuck on a mud bank over on the Mizzouri shore some’er’s ’round Bird’s
Landin’.”
Grigsby looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of one, and just as he
dolefully announced the hour the door opened, and Hennessey entered,
carrying a leather traveling-bag. Grigsby leaped toward him, his
itching fingers outstretched to seize the valise.
“Is it all there?” he exclaimed.
“Take me for a thief?” replied Hennessey, swinging the bag behind him.
Hennessey proffered the bag to his master, but Jennings said:
“Wait a minute.” Then he ran his hand wrist-deep into his pocket and
drew out a paper, which he examined critically, squinting his eyes,
partly to protect them from the smoke that curled up from a big
domestic cigar, partly--as it seemed, to assist in the concentration of
his thoughts.
“Gineral,” he said--by some strange confusion of ideas, down in
Springfield they give the attorney-general a military title, which
custom that functionary fosters--“Gineral, will you give me your
signature to that, ’fore you start?”
Grigsby glowered at Jennings, read the paper, said somewhat petulantly,
“Oh, of course,” and hesitatingly signed it.
“Now, Hennessey,” said Jennings, carefully placing the paper in a long
pocket-book he drew from the region of his left hip.
Hennessey held the bag out toward the secretary of state.
“No,” said Jennings, who was pouring himself a drink, “give it to the
gineral.”
The attorney-general took the bag and opened it. Inside were four big
bundles of bank bills. He lifted them out. Each bundle was composed of
ten smaller packages, held by rubber bands, and each package was bound
with a pink paper strap neatly pinned and marked “five hundred.” He
counted and replaced the packages in the bag. Then taking his coat and
hat, he turned to Jennings and said:
“Well, let’s be gone.”
The secretary of state rolled his head toward the attorney-general,
waved his long arm and flapped his hand fin-like at him, and said:
“We’ll wait here, Mike and me. You won’t need us.”
The attorney-general scowled, and then went out, accompanied only by
the assistant state treasurer. Hurrying down Capitol Avenue, Grigsby
shivered, glancing up dark alleys.
* * * * *
The clock in the hall of the executive mansion had struck the half-hour
after midnight, and the governor was descending the stairs in a gray
bath-robe and slippers. The old house was dark and still. Even the
room occupied by Gilman, who should, at that hour, have been reading
the magazines in bed, showed no light. The governor, softly treading,
entered the library. The last embers of the fire were smouldering. The
governor lighted the lamp, and in the circle of soft light it spread on
the library table, he bent over a book, his glasses on his nose, their
cord hanging down into his lap. He turned the leaves of the book. It
was not _The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius_. It was the second volume
of _The Revised Statutes of Illinois_, a stupid work which many men
consult, laboriously, far into the night. He softly rustled over the
leaves until he found chapter one hundred and thirty. He ran his finger
down the pages till it stopped at section sixteen. And then he read
very slowly: “In case of the death of the treasurer, it shall be the
duty of the governor to take possession of the office of such treasurer
and cause the vaults thereof to be closed and securely locked, and so
remain until--” He read the words again, and again a third time, and
yet again.
He closed the book, put out the lamp and slowly felt his way back up
the stairs.
Ten minutes later he descended again, and groping in the hall, drew a
greatcoat over his broad shoulders, covered his head with the slouch
hat he wore when he went down into southern Illinois, and let himself
out of the wide front door. The asphalt driveway that flings its long
curve through the grounds of the gubernatorial residence from Fifth
Street to Fourth, gleamed like the surface of a river at night. The
rain no longer fell, but the trees dripped dismally. Across the low
night sky black clouds were flying. The governor walked down the
driveway to the big iron gates at Fourth Street, whose watered surface
as far as he could see, wavered under the electric lights at the
crossings. The governor turned at Jackson Street and walked down the
sleeping little avenue toward Second Street. Before a low brown house
trickling its eaves behind two sentinel cedars, he halted. He went up
the moist brick walk, and pulled the white bell-knob. The bell jangled
harshly upon the sleeping stillness. The jangling trembled away. He
rang again. There was a reluctant stir within and a voice, a scared
woman’s voice, said:
“Who’s there?”
“The governor,” he responded. “Is Mr. Mendenhall at home?”
The woman slid back bolts and opened the door circumspectly. She thrust
out a towsled head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl. The governor heard
a baby’s cry. The woman’s teeth chattered with nervousness and the cold.
“No, sir; he hasn’t got in yet.”
The governor thanked her and turned away. The woman opened the door
wide and watched him as he retreated down the moist brick walk. At the
street he paused. Then he turned on toward Second Street. The woman
closed the door, and her key grated in the lock.
The governor strode on into Second Street, past the residence of the
Bishop of Springfield, standing behind white pillars deep in its
naked grove, past St. Agatha’s Seminary sleeping in its gloom, until
he reached the state house. The brooding building loomed above him,
dark and dour, heaving its great gray dome into the grim night. Huge
granite pillars lifted themselves above him, he was lost in the shades
of the lofty portico. He unlocked and pushed open the heavy door. The
great marble corridors were dark and echoed to the touch of his heel
upon the stones. In the wide rotunda, under the enormous dome, thick
with billowing gloom, a janitor, the people’s solitary night watch,
slept profoundly in his chair, his mouth open, his white beard upon his
breast. His gossips had departed. Their deserted chairs stood aimlessly
about. He had finished the nightly recital of the strenuous part he
had borne in the great rebellion, and he slumbered, his snores echoing
in the monstrous inverted bowl above him. The governor ascended to
the floor above, and turned down the north corridor. A golden bar of
light was thrown across the marble floor. It streamed from the open
door of the state treasury. The governor quickened his steps. He heard
the lunge of huge bolts as they were tumbled home. He heard the dull
spin of a combination lock, and as he reached the treasury two men were
emerging from the dark vaults.
“Thank God, that’s--”
The sentence was lost in the mouth of the attorney-general of the state
of Illinois, who stood with dropping jaw staring at the governor. The
attorney-general stood motionless, and then plunged a hand with three
pieces of paper into an outer pocket of his overcoat. Mendenhall stood
behind him, a flame flashing over his face.
The governor was the first one to speak.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said.
The two men did not reply, and the governor spoke again.
“Under the law, gentlemen,” he said, “the duty devolves upon me of
closing and locking the treasury and temporarily assuming possession of
it.”
Still the men did not reply. The tissues of Grigsby’s face had become
flaccid, and a greenish shade had overspread them. His eyes had
contracted to sharp points under angry brows. The governor scrutinized
the two men closely, as he advanced, and said, speaking in a calm tone:
“And so, if you gentlemen have concluded your business”--he paused--“I
shall proceed to the execution of that duty.”
“I am,” he added, a moment afterward, “perhaps fortunate in finding you
here, Mr. Mendenhall. You may be able to assist me.”
He drew toward them, and they stood aside. He entered the vaults where
a gas-jet glimmered, its light glinting on the nickel-plated knobs
of the great steel doors. He tried the doors. They were locked. He
remained an instant in thought, and then took from his pocket a stick
of red sealing-wax. He hesitated another instant.
“No,” he said, “the great seal could not be utilized.”
The great seal of state of the state of Illinois, though it has a
political history, is, nevertheless, physically, but a huge overgrown
seal such as notaries public use in their little businesses.
And in Illinois the governor has no privy seal as he has in some
commonwealths. The governor warmed the sealing-wax in the gas-jet that
blazed beside him in the vault. When it began to melt he dribbled and
daubed its softened substance, drop by drop, on the combination of the
huge safe, as a girl would seal a letter. When he had quite covered
the lock with the molten wax, he sealed it with the seal ring he wore
on his left hand, a ring which bore the coat-of-arms of a colonial
governor. The midnight secret of those two men, whatever it might be,
was either safe with them or more safely still, sealed with other
secrets behind those massive doors. And then he turned the gas down
until only a tiny star blinked in the vault, and came out, and swung
together the big steel gates that clanked like prison bars, their locks
snapping automatically.
He returned to the outer door of the department and placed his hand
upon the knob.
“Gentlemen,” he said ceremoniously, “I await your pleasure.”
He bent his gaze full upon William Grigsby, and that little man,
throwing back his head with something like defiance, strode on his
short legs out of the high-ceiled room, and Mendenhall followed him,
but meekly. As they filed past, Grigsby, with face upturned, a face
that now in anger had taken on the blue tinge of butchered beef, drew
his hands from his overcoat pocket and clasped them behind his back.
The governor bowed as the little man and Mendenhall swept out before
him. And then he drew the big walnut door to.
Standing out in the corridor Grigsby waited, and as he stood and
waited, he fumbled in the outer pocket of his overcoat. Suddenly he
drew forth his hand. His face had turned white, the white of a fish’s
belly.
As the governor drew the big walnut door to, and as it swung behind
him, it pushed before it, scraping with the peevish voice of a ratchet
along the matted floor, a piece of crumpled paper. Grigsby, who had
turned toward Mendenhall with a look of death’s despair, saw it, and
started, a faint ray of hope beaming in his eye. But the paper lay
under the governor’s feet.
The governor closed the doors.
“You may lock them, Mr. Mendenhall,” he said.
The assistant state treasurer drew a jingling bunch of keys from
his pocket and locked the door. Grigsby’s eyes were fastened on the
paper at the governor’s feet. His heart was swelling in his throat.
His fingers were twitching, and he was sweating like a stoker. At
Mendenhall’s approach the governor placed his foot upon the paper. When
Mendenhall had done, the governor picked it up. He smoothed it out in
his fingers, and slowly adjusted his glasses. By the dim light that
always burns at night just outside the door of the state treasury he
read it. Then he placed it in the pocket of his overcoat. He kept his
hand upon it. The blue of Grigsby’s face deepened.
The three men went down the stairs, the governor standing aside at
the top to let them precede him. They crossed the rotunda, past the
slumbering janitor whose snores ascended and exploded in the rounded
blackness of the hollow dome, down the east corridor and so out into
the darkness. They walked together down the wide stone walk, the stone
walk as wide as a street, that sweeps, with a strip of sward down its
middle, across the state house lawns to Capitol Avenue. The governor
did not turn up Second Street by the way he had come. He kept on with
his two companions, and all three were silent. Not a word had any one
of them spoken. They were drowned in thought. It matters not of what
the assistant state treasurer was thinking. He held only an appointive
office. He was a political villain, and had a collar on his neck. The
attorney-general was thinking of days that were to come. The governor
was thinking of days that were gone. Silent, thoughtful, thus they kept
on up Capitol Avenue. When they approached the shades that gathered
under the ugly iron bridge which spans the ragged street that leads to
the capitol of Illinois, the Alton’s St. Louis Limited came plunging
through the town, half an hour late. The three men halted. The great
mysterious, vestibuled train, with its darkly curtained Pullmans, slid
across the bridge. As they stood waiting for it to pass that they might
go under, the governor withdrew his hand from his pocket, the paper
still folded in it. He held the paper out toward Grigsby.
“William,” he said, “I think you dropped something.”
THE COLONEL’S LAST CAMPAIGN
All day long Colonel Talbott sat in his leather chair in the lobby of
the Grand, twiddling his cane, smoking his cigar, and talking politics.
Under the broad brim of his black slouch hat his hair fell in silver
wisps almost to his shoulders, and the long mustache, drooping like a
Georgian’s at the corners of his mouth, was as white as his hair, save
at the spot where his cigar had tinged it yellow.
There was not a politician of either party between Dunleith and Cairo
who was not proud to bend over the old fellow’s chair, take his thin
hand and say: “Hello, Colonel, what’s new in politics?” The colonel had
one invariable reply: “I’m out of politics, and don’t know anything.
What do you hear?” Sometimes, if the passing politician happened to be
of the old day, the colonel would take him by the arm, and they would
saunter away to the bar. If the politician came from northern Illinois,
the colonel would take rye; if from southern Illinois the colonel would
take bourbon; such was his idea of etiquette. Though never would he
take a drink before breakfast, for a drink before breakfast, he told
Carroll, was a back log in the fire that would burn the live-long day.
Carroll was the staff of the colonel’s old age. The two would sit by
the hour, while the old man talked of the Nineteenth Illinois Cavalry,
of Lincoln and Douglas, of David Davis and Elijah Haines, of state
and national conventions, in the days when he had made and unmade
congressmen, governors and senators, ruling his party in the state,
Carroll shrewdly thought, with a discipline as rigid as that with which
he had welded the Nineteenth Illinois into a fighting regiment.
To those who knew the veteran’s history, his love for the boy was
touching. The story is too long to tell now, but its essential motif
must always be the ingratitude of Si Warren. The colonel had picked
Warren up in the old Fifteenth District, sent him to Congress, and
finally made a United States senator of him. Warren, developing
quickly as a politician, had turned around, defeated the colonel for
reëlection as chairman of the state executive committee, a position he
had held for sixteen years, had frozen him out of the Arizona deal, and
somehow caused the colonel’s only son to go wrong out there in Tucson.
The boy’s mother had died; of a broken heart, they said. Since then a
decade had passed, a decade which the colonel had spent in the grim
lonesomeness of a crowded hotel. He never mentioned Warren’s name. If
he heard it, he clenched his bony fists so tightly that the knuckles
showed white. Once a year, perhaps, in the springtime, when the state
central committee met, he got out his white waistcoat and was invited
up to the ordinary to make a speech on the state of the party, and once
a year, in the summertime, he attended a reunion of his regiment, now
decimated to a squadron of tottering old men, whom the colonel called
“boys.”
Spring came, rolling up from the muddy Ohio, showering its apple
blossoms in the orchards of Egypt, sprinkling with purple flowers the
prairies of central Illinois, and finally flooding with tardy sunshine
the cold waters of Lake Michigan. It was the year the legislature
that chose Warren’s successor in the senate was to be elected, and
when the senator came home from Washington he found his fences in sad
repair. The Silas Warren of the parlor suite in a Lake Front hotel
was not the Si Warren whom Colonel Talbott had rescued from the dusty
little law office down in Shelbyville fifteen years before. The clothes
of that time were faded by the sun in which he loafed all day on the
post-office corner, whereas the clothes of this spring morning bespoke
a New York tailor and a valet.
The senator was not in a pleasant mood. There was opposition to
his reëlection, and while his machine ignored it, and while George
R. Baldwin, the lawyer who watched the interests of certain big
corporations during the sessions of the legislature, said it was but
a sporadic demonstration of soreheads, back-numbers and labor skates,
it was spreading, as the picturesque politicians from the corn lands
of central Illinois would say, like a prairie fire. Jacksonville,
where the standard of revolt had first been raised, was in Morgan,
the colonel’s home county, and so it came to pass that the defection
was laid to the machinations of the colonel himself. And yet, as the
politicians who were always dropping into Chicago to correct their
reckonings, paused an instant by the leather chair, the old white head
would slowly wag from side to side, and the old man would say:
“No, I’m out of politics.”