CHAPTER I_The Henchman

Produced by Al Haines

THE HENCHMAN

MARK LEE LUTHER

AUTHOR OF "THE FAVOR OF PRINCES," "THE RECKONING," "THE LIVERY OF

HONOR," ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

1902

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

GEORGE RICE CARPENTER

OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Those familiar with the early history of Western New York will know the

"Tuscarora Stories" of this volume for twice-told tales which the

author has ventured to adapt from the suggestive "Pioneer History of

Orleans County," by Judge Arad Thomas.

BOOK I

The Henchman

CHAPTER I

It was the custom of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple

somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful

comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boot, France to a coffee-pot,

and the European domain of the Sultan to a ruffling turkey. In this

pleasant scheme the state of New York was made to figure as a couchant

lion, his massy head thrust high in the North Country, his forepaws

dabbled in the confluence of the Hudson and the Sound, his middle and

hinder parts stretched lazily westward to Lake Erie and the Niagara.

Roughly speaking, in this noble animal's rounding haunch, which Ontario

cools, lies the Demijohn Congressional District whose majority party

was now in convention assembled. In election returns and official

utterances generally the Demijohn District bore a number like every

district in the land, but the singular shape lent it by the last

gerrymander had settled its popular title till another political

overturn should distort its outline afresh.

The spokesman of the defeated faction had been recognized by the chair,

and was moving that the convention's choice of the gentleman from

Tuscarora County be declared unanimous. His manner was even more

perfunctory than his words.

"The name of Calvin Ross Shelby," he ended colorlessly, "spells

success."

"Screws it out as if it hurt him," whispered the Hon. Seneca Bowers to

the nominee. "I tell you, Ross, there's no argument like delegates."

Bowers was a thick-set man of the later sixties, with a certain surface

resemblance to General Grant of which he was vain. So far as he could

he underlined the likeness, affecting a close-trimmed beard, a campaign

hat, and the inevitable cigar; when the occasion promised publicity

sufficient to outweigh the physical discomfort he even rode on

horseback; and he was a notable figure on Decoration Day and at all

public ceremonies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Shelby was his

protege.

The present member of Congress from the Demijohn District, whose seat

Shelby coveted, may be most charitably described as a man of tactless

integrity. His course in Washington had been a thorn in the side of

the organization by whose sufferance he rose, with the upshot that the

Tartar neared the end of his stewardship backed by a faction rather

than a party. The faction clamored for his renomination and pushed

their spirited, if poorly generalled, fight to the floor of the

convention. In debate they were eloquent, in logic unanswerable; nor

did any one attempt to answer them. With the best of possible causes

they lacked but the best of possible worlds to insure success. The

whole story of their failure was packed into the Hon. Seneca Bowers's

succinct phrase, "There's no argument like delegates."

The vanquished clustered in a little group apart marked by a suggestion

of tense nerves, but the gathering was noticeably of a kind. Country

lawyers, bankers, merchants, stockmen, farmers, in its units, it was

sealed as a whole with the seal of New England which had sent forth

these men's grandfathers and great-grandfathers in their ox-carts to

people and leaven the West. The transplanted New Englandism had

sloughed certain traits of the pioneers who laid the axe to the forests

of the Genesee Country and the Holland Purchase. Only the older people

of the Demijohn District now computed their dealings in shillings;

mentioning one's conscience on week-days was an eccentricity; the

doctrine of Original Sin had lapsed from among burning topics of

conversation; family records were less and less scrupulously kept; and

the _Mayflower's_ claim to consideration as the Noah's Ark of the only

ancestors worth reckoning had assumed a mask of comedy. Yet, all said,

the Yankee blood cropped out in face and limb and speech--particularly

in speech; the folk of the Demijohn District did not employ the dialect

of Hosea Biglow, nor a variant of it, but the insistent drawling R to

be heard on every second lip was of no doubtful lineage.

The victor, who sat with folded arms as the perfunctory motion was

seconded and carried, was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.

Not a few there could recall his sturdy grandfather, a pioneer of

Massachusetts birth, and everybody remembered his spendthrift father

who had squandered the substance of three generations in drink. The

man's own story was an open page which needed no thumbing of the

Tuscarora County history to find. Born under the administration of

Buchanan, the lad's palm was callous with work by the surrender of Lee,

and it knew no softening till his seventeenth year; yet somehow he got

the marrow from the common schools, and in good time won a competitive

scholarship in a narrow little sectarian college which boastfully

called itself a university. Here he acquired two wholesome things: a

perception that the college is but the beginning of education, and a

lasting disgust with bigotry of every stripe. There followed some

years of school-mastering by day and law-book drudgery by night, whose

end was his admission to the bar and a partnership with the man sitting

by his side. Then politics drew him, and, step by step, through rough

and ready service at the polls, in town caucus, county convention, what

not, he secured his footing and finally a seat in the lower house of

the State Legislature. In politics a hobby is often a useful piece of

property, and Shelby, who had a hobby, rode it to success; it made him

a marked man in the first month of his term, it gave him a popular

title, it compelled his renomination and reflection. Nowadays chairmen

always introduced him as the "Champion of Canals," and even at this

moment the catchword with cries of "speech" greeted him from every

quarter of the dingy convention hall. He unfleshed his strong teeth in

a wide-mouthed smile, rose, squared his shoulders, and walked alertly

down an aisle to the platform. Brought thus into the open, under the

yellow glare of a gas-light chandelier, he showed for a simply clad,

businesslike person, with a well-set head and a shaven jaw, whose

firmness a cushion of superfluous flesh could not disguise.

"Thank you, boys," he said.

The offhand fashion of address provoked a fresh demonstration which the

nominee acknowledged with a good-humored nod. His eye sauntered over

the delegates, and with a shrewd twinkle halted on the dejected group

which had fought his nomination.

"This happy occasion reminds me of a Tuscarora County story," he began,

with a little drawl; "the story of Tired Tinkham's election as overseer

of highways at Noah's Basin--a pioneer classic which some of you have

doubtless heard. It happened in the early days of Noah's Basin, when

that interesting village contained perhaps a score less people than

walk its changeless streets to-day. Tired Tinkham was the local Rip

Van Winkle--the children's friend and labor's foe. No one could

whittle green willow whistles in the springtime like Tired Tinkham, or

fashion bows and arrows with such fascinating skill. Like Rip also he

drank whenever a drink was forthcoming, but unlike Rip he did not hunt.

Minks, coons, and squirrels were plentiful, with here and there a deer

or bear, but Tired Tinkham was too weary to hunt. He fished; fished

day in and day out in the canal basin, which gives the place its name;

fished till the packet captains came to know him and point him out as a

fixture in the scenery. But, lazy as he was, Tired Tinkham didn't

monopolize all the laziness in Noah's Basin. In one particular

laziness was epidemic, even among the otherwise industrious, and it

took the form of shirking the road tax. No roads were wretcheder than

theirs; nobody cared less than they. In his personal view of life

Tired Tinkham was a fit exponent of the local theory of public duty,

and some village humorist accordingly hit upon the idea of nominating

him for overseer of highways. Tired Tinkham looked more than commonly

fatigued at the suggestion, but did not put the crown away. His

election was unanimous. Then Noah's Basin woke up. The jubilee

bonfires were scarcely ashes before Tired Tinkham delivered at the

corner grocery what he called his inaugural address. 'I cal'late I

know why I wuz 'lected; he said. 'T' loaf 'n' let ye loaf. I cal'late

ye've mistook suthin'. Ye'll work.' And work Noah's Basin did as it

had never worked before."

Shelby noted that the anecdote won even a thin-lipped grin from the

hostile camp.

"The Tired Tinkhams aren't so rare in politics," he went on. "We

sometimes put them in the White House. Americans have a way of growing

up to their responsibilities, and perhaps even I shall prove another

sort of man than I've been ticketed." His tone quickened suddenly, and

his glance fastened on the defeated anew. "I should count this honor

less had it fallen as a ripe fruit falls, the prize of the first comer.

We've had our battle; we wear our scars; no battle worth the name is

without its scars; but I assume to speak for every man present when I

say that the blows we give and take do not rankle to the prejudice of

the common cause. Our quarrels are wholly in the family, where speech

is free, for it is a fundamental article of our party creed that the

will of the majority should prevail. The will of the majority made

plain, it is our healthy custom to strip off our coats, and go to work:

The party, not the individual, is of moment;--the historic party of our

fathers, the party of the living present, the party of the future whose

bounds no man may set."

As he dropped into his seat, Shelby added a foot-note.

"If that didn't jam their duty down those soreheads' throats," he told

Bowers, "I'll take another guess."

CHAPTER II

Meanwhile the nominee's fortunes and traits of character underwent

dissection in his own town at the first autumn assembly of the Culture

Club which, as always, met with Mrs. Hilliard. There were two profound

reasons for this constancy to Mrs. Hilliard,--her house boasted the

largest double parlors in New Babylon, and her husband had a billiard

table. The intimate association of billiards with the pursuit of

sweetness and light may at first seem grotesque, but Mrs. Hilliard

proved it to be not without warrant in sound philosophy; by her simple

formula billiards stood to culture as the Salvation Army to the

decorous body of the Church Militant, both alliances resting on the

basic truth that some souls will prick ears only to the beating of

tom-toms.

Theory aside, the fact was not to be blinked that she knew how to clash

cymbals to the unregenerate and drum up in the name of culture such a

varied company as no other woman could muster short of a silver

wedding. In the winning of the cultivated, Mrs. Hilliard took no

pride. They lent their countenance to any educational project, and she

owned to herself that given a like cause any capable woman with double

parlors could have them for the asking. It was rather in the hooking

of men of the stamp of the Hon. Seneca Bowers and her own husband that

she gloried, for in their candid souls they styled great Shakespeare

rot and voted Ibsen and Tolstoi sheer bedlamites at large. While mind

met mind below stairs these honest gentlemen contentedly knocked the

balls about the green, smoked hospitable Joe Hilliard's cigars, and

sampled the choicest liquors of his sideboard. By such diplomacy every

important walk in the town's life came to have its representative in

what in her heart of hearts Mrs. Hilliard called her salon.

The first autumn meeting should have gladdened the hostess. Her house

had never lighted to better advantage; everybody admired the new

decorations; she herself felt no impulse to quarrel either with nature

or her dressmaker; the programme had run with consummate

smoothness,--Volney Sprague, the editor of the _Tuscarora County Whig_,

reading a scholarly paper on Shakespeare's anachronisms, and his fast

friend Bernard Graves leading the discussion in his usual clever way;

furthermore, the ices which had been ordered for this very special

occasion had proved everything that ices should be. Yet Mrs. Hilliard

was dissatisfied.

"The club positively loses a vital something of its individuality when

Mr. Bowers and Mr. Shelby are absent," said she.

Mrs. Bowers, a large placid personage of indefinite waist-line,

remarked that nothing except politics could have dragged her husband

away.

"What a pity that the Hon. Seneca had to miss your anachronisms,

Volney," murmured Bernard Graves, who was a personable young gentleman

of thirty.

"And Shelby," queried the editor, "hasn't that choice spirit your pity

too?"

Mrs. Hilliard caught nothing of their sarcasm save Shelby's name.

"I miss his criticism," she declared. "It's so practical."

The editor fell to polishing his eye-glasses for lack of a reply.

"And so helpful," pursued the lady. "He has the faculty of ending a

tangled discussion with a word."

"The dear man usually changes the subject," muttered the editor

savagely under cover of an amiable platitude put forth by Mrs. Bowers.

"Or fogs it round with one of his Tuscarora yarns," dropped Graves.

The topic apparently knew no bottom for Mrs. Hilliard.

"How he will shine in Congress!" she went on. "Of course he'll get the

nomination?" She referred the query to Sprague.

"Probably." His reply was lukewarm.

"And isn't there news of the convention? You ought to know, who get

straight from the wires what ordinary mortals must wait to read. Has

he won?"

"There was nothing definite when I left the office. They hadn't begun

to ballot."

Mrs. Hilliard sensed an increasing dryness in the editor's manner.

"We're not talking literature, are we?" she laughed.

Bernard Graves considered the moment ripe for a paradox.

"The by-laws of the ideal literary club would forbid all literary

talk," he declared. "Then there would be nothing else."

"Cynic," rebuked the lady, threatening punishment with her fan. "We

shall talk politics if we choose."

Disseminating culture and an odor of patchouli she drifted down the

drawing-room to join another group, and the two men caught a fragment

of feminine comment from a divan hard by.

"Cora Hilliard is handsome," asserted a voice. "Look at those

shoulders."

"She manoeuvres to show them. Besides, she's too stout."

"What can you expect, my dear, after thirty-three years of idleness?"

"She's thirty-six," came the scrupulous correction.

"You don't mean it? And a blonde!"

"Oh, I know it's so. We were classmates in the seminary. Besides, her

Milicent is a year and two months older than my Georgie, who will be

thirteen in October, and when Milicent was born her mother was

twenty-two."

"She says she feels twenty-two now."

"Well, she looks--" the gossip languished to an indistinct murmur.

"More literary discussion," said Sprague.

"It's as literary as politics."

"You're capable of saying it's as interesting."

"Why not? It's very human."

"So is politics."

"We are drifting on the rocks of an argument. You and I can't agree

about politics, and we'd better stop trying. What absorbs you bores

me--this tiresome Shelby above all."

"Oh, surely you're not serious," protested Sprague, eagerly. "It isn't

possible that you care nothing whether Shelby or the honest man he's

scheming to supplant represents you in Washington."

"He attracts me neither as a man nor as a problem in ethics. But don't

be harsh with me. The fault is congenital, I'm sure. Every masculine

American is supposed to be interested in politics,--I wonder if the

Irish invented the notion,--but I can't conform; I don't know why."

"Gad," fumed the editor. "Your indifference is criminal."

"I like to hear you say 'gad,'" Graves observed. "You remind me of

Major Pendennis."

Sprague shrugged his thin shoulders impatiently.

"I tell you it's a crime for you to sit by as unconcerned as a mud idol

while other men struggle for civic decency."

"Picturesque as usual," applauded the delinquent, unruffled; but he

added, more seriously: "It's natural that you should feel strongly

after your newspaper war on Shelby. Is he so sure of the nomination?"

"If he's not sure, there's no virtue in packed caucuses."

"There, that interests me," cried Graves, brightening. "I'd like to

see a caucus packed. The slang attracts me somehow. Is it very

shocking?"

Sprague laughed in spite of himself.

"In things political your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You

belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far

removed: he's politically immoral; you are politically unmoral."

"We'll go and talk to Ruth Temple," decided the younger man, his eye

lighting on the central figure of a group, chiefly masculine. "Who can

look at her and maintain that the higher education of women is a mere

factory for frumps?"

"Ruth has a quaint rareness all her own," Sprague answered, watching

the play of the girl's mobile face. "She had it as a mere tot. Is it

her mouth, her simple dress, her hair?--One can't say precisely what."

"Don't try. You're squinting at her like an entomologist over a

favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She

is decorative. She satisfies the optic nerve."

"Which is intimately allied with other nerves, my bachelor." He

counted the men around the sofa where the girl sat beside little

Milicent Hilliard, and announced, "Seven; it's Queen Ruth always."

"And, like a true monarch, bored to extinction by her courtiers.

Behold Dr. Crandall browbeating the Rev. Mr. Hewett like a hanging

judge. I'll warrant they're talking politics too. The atmosphere is

drenched with it."

Sprague bent his head to listen.

"Wrong," he chuckled slyly. "It's literature this time, or what passes

as such. They're threshing out the immortal ode on the 'Victory of

Samothrace.'"

Bernard Graves laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved

to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an

anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been

Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this

juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a

yellow paper.

"Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram--a telegram

from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think

of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news to us first

of all!" She searched vainly for her glasses--her big blue eyes were

astigmatic--and finally, with an impatient "You read it to them all,"

thrust the message into Volney Sprague's reluctant fingers.

He unfolded and read the paper, in lively quandary whether her choice

were as haphazard as it seemed:--

"Nominated on first ballot. Home ten-thirty. Coming directly to club.

It stands first.

"C. R. SHELBY."

"Isn't that simply dear of him?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard. "_We_ come

first. He remembers us in his hour of triumph. It shows the true

nature of the man."

"It does indeed," grumbled Sprague, shifting within pinching distance

of Bernard Graves, whom he had seen grinning in the background during

the reading. "It's a barefaced bid for votes."

Mrs. Hilliard's enthusiasm demanded a vent.

"He'll be here in five minutes," she exclaimed, peering at the hall

clock. "The message was delayed somehow, and his train is due now. We

must devise a reception. We owe it to him. He thought of us. We must

think of him. What shall we do? Think, think, you clever people!"

"That preposterous woman means to turn this into a ratification

meeting," groaned the editor under his breath. "I must get out."

His hostess was of another mind, however, and barred retreat when he

attempted to make his excuses.

"You shan't desert us," she declared roguishly. "You can't," she

immediately added, at the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel of the

drive. "He's here! The hall, the hall! Into the hall!" And into the

hall Mrs. Hilliard masterfully bundled the Culture Club of New Babylon,

grouping it theatrically around the newel-post and up the winding stair.

"Gad," muttered Sprague, struggling to efface himself, "knock me in the

head."

Bernard Graves gleefully struck an attitude behind a friendly palm, and

Mrs. Hilliard threw wide the door.

"Welcome to your own people," she cried, and Shelby, closely followed

by Bowers, crossed the threshold into the light. Then big Joe

Hilliard, whom the unwonted commotion had attracted from the billiard

room, led a boisterous cheer, which the candidate received with

modestly bowed head. He flushed, and wrestled with his diffidence like

a schoolboy, as the house grew still and they waited for him to speak.

"I--I don't claim the credit, friends," he stammered. "It's your

victory."

CHAPTER III

Midway in the following forenoon Shelby sat in his law office revising

for the seventh time the last will and testament of the Widow

Weatherwax. It was the seventh revision of her third last will and

testament, to speak by the card, for the widow had a bent for

will-making, which the lawyer had noticed was of periodic intensity.

Once, in a moment of drollery, he entered a jocose memorandum in the

"tickler," under the first week-day of several successive months:

"Revise Mrs. Weatherwax's will;" and such was his foresight that twice

only during that term did she frustrate his prophecy.

This day, as always, she attained the topmost step outside his office

door breathless, and, as always, Shelby gravely lent a hand to deposit

her plump little person in the softest of his old-fashioned office

chairs. The ceremony ended regularly with the panting announcement,

"The Lord has spared me for another month."

It was the man's custom at such times to allot equal praise to

Providence and the widow's marvellous vitality for this happy issue,

and to hazard a guess that she had thought of important changes for her

will. The widow would nod assent over a heaving bosom, and slowly fan

herself back to normal respiration. The relict of a leather-lunged

Free Methodist preacher, she affected a garb of ostentatious

simplicity. No godless pleats or tucks or gores or ruffles or sinful

abominations of braid defaced the chaste sobriety of her black gown;

buttons were tolerated merely as buttons, without vain thought of

ornament; and the strange little bonnet, which she perched above hair

whose natural coquetry of curl was austerely sleeked away, was of a

composition so harshly ugly that more worldly-minded women shuddered at

the sight. The worldly-minded, indeed, were prone to the criticism

that the material of Mrs. Weatherwax's garments was beyond cavil, but

this surely was her own concern. It were sheer impertinence to finger

the texture of a zealot's sackcloth.

Shelby busied himself with his papers, pending her recovery.

"Them stairs alluz give me sech a turn," she sighed, at length. She

enunciated her R's with the merciless fidelity of her section at its

worst, saying stair-urs and tur-urn.

"Too bad the town's boom stopped short of elevators," sympathized

Shelby.

"Shouldn't use 'em, anyway," returned the widow, firmly. "They give me

a wuss turn than the stairs."

"They're trying moving stairways in some places,--a French invention, I

believe."

"Shouldn't use them contrapshuns neither. The French are a godless

people, full of vanity and all uncleanness."

Shelby's imagination balked at suggesting another alternative, and he

held his peace. The visitor's jetty eyes forsook his face and pounced

upon the clerk, who, with tongue in cheek, was filling out narrow slips

of paper at a battered table clothed in a baize of a dye traditionally

held to have been green.

"How's your ma's lumbago, Willie Irons?" she demanded.

The youth stammered a husky reply, and blushed far into his

brick-colored hair. He was of an age when a babyish diminutive becomes

a thorn unspeakable. Mrs. Weatherwax glanced tranquilly past his

writhings to the ancient table.

"Ross," she asked, "wa'n't that your grandfather's?"

"Yes. He used it in his place of business."

"I call to mind seein' it in the old distillery when I was a girl,"

pursued the widow, who never called a spade an agricultural implement.

"Distillin's a wicked business."

"People thought differently about many things in my grandfather's day."

The widow sniffed. "Wrong's wrong. Is that Seneca Bowers's roll-top

desk?"

"It was Mr. Bowers's. I bought it when we dissolved partnership."

"Law books, too?"

"Yes."

"Threw in the pictur's, I s'pose?" indicating some dingy lithographs of

political worthies past and present.

"Yes," admitted Shelby with superhuman good nature; "they came to boot."

The widow sniffed again. "'Pears to me," said she, "you've got nothin'

new."

The man wheeled in his chair to a neighboring safe and took a

tape-bound document from a pigeon-hole.

"Shall we begin?" he asked.

"Yes--if you're so rushed," she returned, and composed her features to

fitting solemnity. As the lawyer slowly read the instrument, which he

could have rattled off from memory, Mrs. Weatherwax punctuated the

pious phrases of its exordium with approving wags. "'Frail and

transitory,'" she interpolated; "that's jest what life is. I might be

took any minute." At the reference to the payment of her lawful debts

she recovered her spirits sufficiently to put in that she did not owe a

"red cent," as everybody knew. Finally she called a halt. "Needn't go

any farther," she directed. "The first part's what I like to hear

best. Exceptin' one thing, all the rest about my green rep sofy

a-goin' to Cousin Phoebe, the pickle-caster to Brother Henry, the old

dishes what can't be sold to my beloved nephew, Jason Weatherwax, and

my best tablecloths and sheets and pillow-slips to his little Ann Eliza

when she gets a husband what's a good provider, is fixed jest as it hed

ought to be. What I want now is a postscript."

"Another codicil? Very well."

He made note of her wishes concerning a cherished feather bed which it

had struck her was too good for that "shiftless coot," Cousin Phoebe's

husband, to lie upon, and, bidding her bring her witnesses on the

morrow, bustled the will into his safe and fell upon his papers after

the manner of all lawyer kind since Chaucer's sergeant of the law who

"semed besier than he was."

The widow eyed his movements placidly.

"In a stew to hev me go?" she asked.

"Of course not," Shelby protested. "What put that in your head?"

"Your squirmin' round. Seein' I'm entirely welcome, I'll set a piece."

Shelby restrained the delight he said he felt and returned to his

papers under her relentless scrutiny.

"Telegraphs of congratulashun, I s'pose," the visitor presently

observed.

"Yes; my friends are rejoicing with me."

"Everybody tickled?"

"All but the common enemy, I trust."

"I ain't hed a chance to go about much and ask," said the widow, with a

preliminary sniff; "but I've met some as wa'n't tickled or enemies

neither."

"No? Well, after all, this isn't paradise, but New York politics."

"At Tompkins's--I alluz go to him for my Oolong--I heard that Doc

Crandall won't vote for you after your dead set at the place. He's one

of your party, isn't he?"

"Yes. The doctor is one of us. Good fellow, too."

"And at Brady's, where I get my corn meal, I heard somebody say you've

got the Irish down on you."

"Oh, I hope not," returned the candidate, cheerfully. "They're a most

respectable and industrious factor in our town's life. I like the

Irish."

"I s'pose."

He searched her face and concluded that her irony was unconscious; she

undeceived him.

"Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth now you're runnin' for office," she

said, laboring to her feet. "I'm s'prised you hevn't wings."

Shelby affected to relish the hoary jest, and escorted her gayly to the

door. "I'll look for you to-morrow," he assured her.

"Don't strain your eyes," said the widow.

The Hon. Seneca Bowers passed her on the stairs. Greeting the lawyer,

he seated himself behind the clerk's back, with a meaning slant of his

Grant-like head.

Shelby understood. "Leave those notices of trial for the present,

William," he ordered, "and get this stipulation signed. If the man

isn't in his office, try the county clerk's."

Bowers pulled with clock-work precision at his cigar, while the boy

uncoiled his long legs from his chair, and with furtive little pats at

his necktie and fiery shock, made ready to go out. Shelby stumbled

upon the waste-paper basket as the door slammed at his clerk's heels,

and with vicious satisfaction he kicked it to the room's far end.

The caller's eyes twinkled.

"The Widow Weatherwax been administering spiritual balm?" he asked.

"I could wring her neck," Shelby averred.

"Her will again?"

"Of course."

"You'll have it as long as you practise law. I did. It goes with the

office. Remunerative as ever?"

"Talk about 'benefit of clergy,'" exploded the younger man; "that

mediaeval bonanza isn't to be mentioned in the same week with the

ministerial half-rates, donations, and hold-ups we moderns put up with.

This pulpit pounder's shrew pays me no more than she pays the doctor,

the grocer, the butcher, and the rest. What a ukase I could issue if I

were Czar of these United States."

"Cousin Phoebe's 'sofy,' beloved Nephew Jason's unsalable dishes, and

Brother Henry's pickle-caster still extant?"

"Yes, yes," groaned Shelby.

"And little Ann Eliza's sheets and pillow-slips, I dare say. It's

astonishing how they endure."

"It's astonishing how I endure."

"You must--at any rate, till the Tuesday after the first Monday in

November. Did the pious gossip tell you any pleasant personal news?"

"She has heard talk that the Micks are sore and that Doc Crandall has

had an attack of virtue."

"You needn't lose sleep over the handful of Irish in our camp; they

know who butters their parsnips. And I'll take care of the doctor.

He's an innocuous mugwump. She didn't mention Volney Sprague?"

"Sprague," said Shelby, wearily; "what is that man up to now?"

Bowers rose, paced the room, and returned, big with news.

"The _Whig_ has bolted," he announced.

CHAPTER IV

Shelby's amaze spent its force in an oath. In a moment he asked,

calmly:--

"What does he say?"

"Not much; mainly that the manner of your nomination debars his

printing your name at the head of his editorial page."

"Endorses the rest of our party ticket, doesn't he?"

"Yes; it's a personal bolt."

Shelby ruminated earnestly.

"It's only a one-horse country daily," he declared finally. "The

_Whig_! You'd think Henry Clay still above ground."

"Strikes you that way, does it?" Bowers emitted with a cloud of smoke.

"Why, yes. You don't consider such a paper dangerous?"

"All newspapers are dangerous in politics; there's none too mean to

have its following. The _Whig_ has influence."

"It's a one-horse paper," reiterated Shelby.

"M-yes; it is a slow coach," Bowers admitted; "but it suits a lot of

people. They respect it because it keeps the old name and jogs along

in the old gait it had under Volney's father before him. It's been a

stanch party paper, too, and that without soliciting a dollar's worth

of public advertising or political pap of any description. The _Whig_

doesn't often kick over the traces. The Greeley campaign was its last

bolt."

"Well, the milk's spilt," said Shelby, with strenuous cheerfulness;

"we've one reason the more to make next week's ratification meeting a

rousing success. What did you think of our little welcome at the club

last night?"

Bowers grinned.

"Mrs. Hilliard managed it first-class," he said; "but I felt cheap when

we came in."

"So did I. The scheme seemed a good one when she suggested it, but

when it came right down to pulling it off I would have sold out for

thirty cents on the dollar. It takes lovely woman to do those things.

She has her uses in politics, eh?"

"M-yes," Bowers answered in half assent; "but she's an uncertain

quantity. Like grandsire's musket, she's as likely to kill behind as

before."

The vine-screened window in which they now talked overlooked the

neighboring Temple house, a dignified sentry at the point where the

leisured street forsook the chaffer of the town to climb amidst arching

elms and maples, above whose gaudy autumn masses rose the dome of the

courthouse and the spires of many churches. It was an old-fashioned

Georgian structure with white columns clear-cut against its weathered

brick; at either side of the low steps a great hydrangea, its glory

waning with the summer, lifted its showy clusters from an urn; while

walk and carriage drive alike sauntered to the street through hedgerows

of box. The mouth of the driveway at this moment gleamed white from

the kerchiefs of a knot of Polish children estray from the quarry

district, who, at a laughing nod from Ruth, swooped, a chattering

barbaric horde, on the fallen apples dotting a bit of sward with yellow

and red. Shelby smilingly watched the scramble to its speedy end, and

turned to the giver of the feast, who sat in a sheltered corner of her

veranda with a caller. The latter proved to be Bernard Graves, sunning

himself with a cat's content.

"Industrious young man," Shelby observed with the irony of whole-souled

dislike. "Inherits a comfortable property, goes to an expensive

college, dawdles through Europe, and then comes home to play carpet

knight and read poetry to girls. Why doesn't he go to work?"

Bowers made no reply to the gibe. He was watching Ruth. Presently in

his slow way he checked off her qualifications:--

"Handsome girl, good education, kind disposition, rich, no airs, and no

incumbrances, barring her companion, the old maid cousin, who could be

pensioned. Ross, she'd do you more good than a brace of married women."

Shelby threw off the laugh of a contented man.

"I'm not in the marrying class."

"Then you'd better enter." His hand on the door, Bowers asked, "Your

contribution for the county campaign fund ready?"

"Draw you a check any time," the candidate returned jauntily.

Nevertheless, when the county leader had gone Shelby gave a diligent

quarter-hour to his bankbook. By and by he took an opera glass from a

drawer and focussed it on the pair below. So his clerk came upon him,

compelling a ruse of adjusting the instrument.

"One lens has dust in it," he declared. Perceiving Bernard Graves pass

down the box-bordered path, he left his office for the day.

That evening Shelby took certain steps to prosper his coming rally at

the court-house, one of which was duly noted by Mrs. Seneca Bowers. It

was this lady's habit in summer evenings to discuss the doings of her

immediate neighbors from her piazza, but now that the nights were cool

she had shifted to the bay window of a room styled by courtesy the

library from a small bookcase filled with Patent Office Reports and

similar offerings of a beneficent government. This station embraced a

wide prospect of shady street flanked by pleasantly sloping lawns and

dwellings of various architectural pretence. Most proximate and most

interesting to Mrs. Bowers was the Hilliard house, and while she rocked

placidly over her darning, she contrived to hold this gingerbread

edifice in a scrutiny which permitted the escape of no slightest

movement of chick or child. She saw the newsboy leave the evening city

papers; Milicent Hilliard dance down the leaf-strewn walk to a last

half-hour's play; a white-capped maid sheet the geranium beds against

possible frost; and, finally, the householder himself emerge and light

a cigar whose ruddy tip winked for a second in the thickening dusk.

Listing from side to side, big Joe Hilliard tramped heavily down and

away to his nightly haunt in the billiard room of the Tuscarora House.

As the quarry owner's great bulk vanished Shelby entered the scene,

briskly crosscut the Hilliard lawn, and bounded up the steps just

quitted by the substantial Joe.

"There; he's done it again!" exclaimed Mrs. Bowers.

"Who has done what?" grunted her husband, from the lounge. He was

coatless and shoeless, and had spread a newspaper over his bald spot to

the annoyance of a few superannuated yet active flies.

"Ross Shelby. He's gone to Cora Hilliard's again!"

"Well, let him," said Bowers, from beneath the news of the day. "It's

a free country."

Mrs. Bowers smoothed a mended sock and rolled it into a neat ball with

its fellow by aid of an arc light which sizzled into sudden brilliance

among the maples.

"'Tisn't his going that's such a scandal," she discriminated. "All the

men run there. It's the way he goes. This is the ninth time I've

known him to wait till Joe Hilliard had left the house."

"Looks as if he didn't dote on Joe's society," chuckled Bowers. "I

can't say that I do myself."

"It's a scandal," repeated Mrs. Bowers, firmly. Her husband remaining

indifferent, she assumed her wifely prerogative to pass rigorous

judgment upon his conscience. "And it's your plain duty, Seneca

Bowers, to speak to him."

The old man flung off his newspaper with a snort.

"What call have I to set up as a censor of public morals?" he demanded

testily. "I'm not Shelby's guardian. He's of age. He's cut his eye

teeth. Talk sense, Eliza."

Mrs. Bowers essayed a flank attack.

"You're the Tuscarora boss, aren't you?"

"Yes, I'm county leader."

"What you say goes?"

"I suppose so."

She pushed her Socratic pitfall a step farther.

"When you say run so-and-so, he runs, doesn't he?"

Bowers permitted himself a dry smile in the dark.

"Most generally."

"Then you're responsible," she argued triumphantly. "You got Ross

Shelby into politics; you've run him for this and that; he's your

charge."

The Hon. Seneca Bowers turned his disgusted face to the wall.

"So you've the Sunday-school idea of politics," he threw over his

shoulder with heavy sarcasm. "I'm to teach a Bible class and pass out

dinkey little reward-of-merit cards to the prize pupils! Bah!"

His wife presently fetched her outdoor wraps and adjusted them before a

mirror in the dimly lit hall.

"I'm going to take a tumbler of jelly to poor lonely Mrs. Weatherwax,"

she announced from the door.

Bowers roused suddenly.

"I hope, Eliza, you don't intend raking them over the coals with her,"

he protested, rummaging for his slippers; but his consort was beyond

hail.

A literal transcript of the talk in progress over the way would have

confounded the evil thinking; to illustrate the blameless text with an

equally faithful record of Shelby's actions might salt the narrative.

He had a lawyer's perception of the values of words as words, and

through extended practice with Mrs. Hilliard excelled in that deft

juggling of pregnant trifles without which Platonic friendships must

die of inanition. He now thanked the lady for her successful coup at

the club without specifically naming it--to hint at prearrangement were

too fatuous; and Mrs. Hilliard admired his tact. Parenthetically she

reflected that Joe had no tact. Without specifically naming it, Shelby

contrived to suggest that she could do him yet greater service by

shepherding society at his ratification meeting.

"To be significant, that sort of thing should be broadly

representative," said he.

His words were impersonal, but there was no misreading his look.

Mrs. Hilliard offered her aid with equal thrift of speech and

prodigality of glance. She rejoiced in transparent subtleties. Joe

was never subtle.

"But I've no right to ask it of you--I don't ask it," Shelby deprecated

with his lips.

"You have every right, dear friend," she reassured. "Friend! We are

more than friends, you and I. We are spiritually akin. We fairly

speak without words."

"Exactly." His business despatched, Shelby prepared to go. "My time

isn't my own now," he explained. "It belongs to the party."

"Selfish party," she pouted. "I hate it."

CHAPTER V

By the night of the meeting it was clear that that bugaboo of

politicians, a general apathy, had blanketed the candidate's own

community. Shelby should have stirred local pride. Not for years, in

fact not since Bowers himself sat in Congress, had the nomination come

to Tuscarora County out of the several counties which the Demijohn

District comprised. Nor had the interval since the convention been a

time for folding of hands. Mrs. Hilliard rounded her social circle,

rallying the members of the Culture Club to stand by their own, and

appealing to such outside its membership as seemed desirable on the

ground of local pride. Shelby became all things to all men. To the

club people he was the Club Candidate; to the unclubbed townsfolk he

was New Babylon's Candidate; while among the quarry workers and other

socially impossible flotsam and jetsam of the voting public other

agencies than Mrs. Hilliard's heralded him as the People's Candidate.

Yet the fog of apathy refused to lift.

There can naturally be little of the herdlike crushing at the doors of

a political gathering in the country which marks the urban rally. The

rural citizen has elbow-room to take his politics sedately and order

his going with temperate pulse and judicial mind. Of such mettle

normally were the New Babylonians who took their leisured way beneath

the fluted columns of the court-house into Shelby's rally; but this

audience felt itself more than normally temperate and judicial.

Despite Mrs. Hilliard, despite the Hon. Seneca Bowers, despite Shelby's

own striving, it had come less to encourage than to try and weigh.

The high places were immutably fixed. The bench of the courtroom,

surmounted by a pitcher of ice-water and adorned by crayon portraits of

New Babylonians learned in the law, of course stood consecrate to the

speakers. The arm-chairs within the railed precinct set apart for

members of the bar were by unwritten canon the peculiar haunt of

citizens of light and leading, while the jury-box and its neighboring

benches by custom immemorial bloomed with the pick of feminine good

society. It was a privilege of the socially elect to enter such

meetings at the court-house by way of the court's own staircase behind

the bench, and so came Bernard Graves. Spying a vacant seat beside

Ruth Temple, the young man slipped into it as unobtrusively as Mrs.

Hilliard's acute sense of her responsibility as society's chief whip

would permit.

"The club has responded nobly," she confided in a stage whisper across

the intervening millinery. "That eccentric Volney Sprague is

positively the only recreant. And isn't the audience representative?"

She beamed impartially round upon the just and the unjust through her

jewelled lorgnon. Mrs. Hilliard rejoiced in her lorgnon. It

compensated fully for her defect of vision, and lent her a distinction

which she felt to be wholly cosmopolitan. She aspired to be

cosmopolitan.

The New Babylon Brass Band fell lustily upon a popular two-step at this

moment, and an usher thrust a bundle of campaign leaflets into Graves's

hands. One of these pamphlets contained a half-tone portrait of

Shelby, with an account of his career and a few phrases from the more

noteworthy of his public addresses. Graves gave these latter a caustic

scrutiny, and read aloud one of the italicized quotations.

"'It has been said, that Egypt is the gift of the Nile; Tuscarora

County is no less the gift of the Erie Canal!' Now what can you say of

a man who couples those two ideas with a sober face? He is

aesthetically dead."

"At least, he's enthusiastic," smiled Ruth, "which is refreshing

nowadays. The canal is his master hobby, the poetry of his prosaic

existence. Mr. Shelby is nothing if not practical."

"Offensively practical."

"Practicality achieves."

Graves thought he detected an implication levelled at himself, and

laughingly accused her.

Ruth made no denial.

"The world weighs achievement," she returned, "not barren cleverness."

Outwardly serene, the young man was inwardly ruffled. It was no new

thing for her to reproach him with napkined talents, and he was wont to

count it as an earnest of her liking. The novelty of this situation

lay in her presenting Shelby as a pattern of fruitfulness, and it irked

him. The agile leap of the brass band from the half-finished two-step

to "Hail to the Chief," suddenly put this out of mind, and he watched

the speakers of the evening file up the judge's staircase to the

rostrum. With the subsidence of the musicians the Hon. Seneca Bowers

aligned himself with the water-pitcher.

"How much he looks like Grant!" exclaimed Mrs. Hilliard, with

originality.

With soldierly calm Bowers waited for the applause to cease, and

submitted a slated list of officers for the meeting. It was

straightway manifest that he had made good his promise to take care of

Dr. Crandall. Speech-making was the breath of the worthy, if pompous,

physician's nostrils, and Bowers had shrewdly judged that to offer him

the chairmanship would clinch his wavering allegiance. The crowd which

always relished his grandiloquence, voted him into office with a shout,

and cheered his soaring periods to their peroration. A quartet of

young voters now proceeded in catchy doggerel to laud the virtues of

the party and the commanding genius of its candidates, thereby giving

the blown doctor a much-needed respite. He came up in good form

presently, winged another flight with Shelby's name as its climax, and

while Mrs. Hilliard split a new pair of gloves in ineffectual applause,

the candidate rose and faced his well-wishers and his foes.

"Mr. Chairman," he began, "men and women."

Bernard Graves was surprised into approval of his unexpected good

taste, never dreaming that a chance remark of Ruth's had moved Shelby

to discard the more hackneyed form of address. Before ever he

presented himself as a candidate for public office, Shelby had been

rated in the note-book of the Secretary of the State Committee as an

effective speaker on "canals, local issues, and currency," with the

further information that he was "strong in rural neighborhoods." This

entry foreshadowed the development of an art which he had since rounded

to high facility. He was considered a spellbinder of uncommon power.

"There are some among you who think harsh things of the way by which

the honor of a congressional nomination has come to the community we

love," he went on boldly. "I ask all such--my honest critics, I make

no doubt--and I ask my avowed supporters to listen to a story. It's an

old story, nearly as old as New Babylon itself, and many of you must

have heard it from the honored lips of the Tuscarora pioneers whose

deeds it chronicles. It is a story of our town in that rough-hewn past

before railroads were dreamed of, before 'Clinton's Ditch' had touched

our wilderness with its mighty wand and made it blossom like the rose.

We owe a vast debt to De Witt Clinton," he digressed to add. "He was

our Moses, and I can never think upon his great achievement without a

thrill of gratitude. I confess to a mania for the Erie Canal."

A man in the body of the audience whom Graves recognized as a canal

bank watch whose appointment Shelby had brought about, called for

three-times-three, but Shelby interfered, saying, "I'd rather you'd

listen than cheer."

"I speak," he continued, "of New Babylon before the coming of the canal

put an end to the log cabins, the spinning-wheels, the ox-sleds, the

corduroy roads, the miasmatic swamps, the wolves, the bears, the fever,

the ague, the blue pill, and all the rude makeshifts and backwoods'

evils which to your forefathers and mine were stern reality. These

were the days when men wore their coat collars high in the back and

small clothes were lengthening into trousers; when veterans of the

Revolution still walked the land hale and strong, and the second war

with the mother country was an uncicatrized memory. In short, I mean

New Babylon of the critical hour when the Legislature wisely saw fit to

erect Tuscarora County, and appointed a commission to choose a

county-seat. 'Then was the tug-of-war.' New Babylon coveted the

award, pined for it, panted for it as the hart for the water brooks.

But so did Etruria, our strapping rival."

A ripple of appreciation of his version of the familiar legend ran from

jury-box to door, and Shelby, a psychologist, like every real orator,

perceived it with stirring pulse. The instrument he knew best lay

attuned to his hand.

"How little could we boast," he said, adroitly identifying his

listeners with the past. "The surveyors assured us that the canal was

pointed our way, though no one was sanguine of its speedy coming. We

did occupy the geographical centre of the new county, and with that

ends the tale of our pretensions."

"We had Penelope Chubb!"

The suggestion came from an old man in one of the arm-chairs

immediately below.

Interruptions never disconcerted Shelby.

"I forgot Penelope Chubb," he admitted smilingly. "Yes, we had her,

the best dress-maker in Tuscarora, whom even Etruria was keen to

employ. But you wouldn't have had us offer Penelope Chubb to the

commissioners as an inducement," he added, and won a laugh for his

readiness. "It was far different with Etruria. It lay on the great

Ridge Road, and the stages from the East tooled and trumpeted straight

through its long main street. It had stores and shops and factories,

it had a grist-mill, a distillery, a tavern--"

"Two taverns," corrected the hoary critic below.

"Two taverns, a bona fide doctor, a licensed preacher, the only

academy, the only meeting-house, the only printing-press, and the only

newspaper within the county limits. The Etrurians were so cock-sure of

victory that they raised the price of village lots. Yet we presumed to

hope. Great emergencies focus on individuals; so with ours. New

Babylon found its saviour in Israel Booth."

Booth's name was the signal for an outburst. The older generation held

him in equal reverence with the fathers of the republic.

"It was Israel Booth who saw that our one hope lay in a natural

resource, and set himself to conjure one from Red Jacket Creek. Genius

has seldom worked with less promising material. Red Jacket Creek isn't

an imposing stream to-day as it skirts our town,--I am told few of the

historic streams are imposing,--and there was hardly more of it then.

It yielded adequate power to run the sawmills only during the spring

freshets when the swamps overflowed, and it was our ill luck that the

legislative commission decided to visit Tuscarora in dog-days while

Etruria's stage line was doing a land-office business and our poor

little resource was wasted to a long-drawn-out puddle choked with

cat-tails and lily-pads. But what dismayed other men seemed to spur

Israel Booth, and one night, a bare fortnight before the commissioners'

coming, his great conception saw its birth. Before he slept he took

counsel with the leading settlers."

Shelby broke off to address one of his audience.

"Your father was in the secret, Mr. Hewett," he said; "and yours, Dr.

Crandall--and my grandfather, and many another upright citizen."

The gentlemen singled out for reflected fame stirred consciously in the

effort to appear unconscious.

"Now Red Jacket Creek woke from its summer sleep. The spiders in the

mill yards were dispossessed; lumber that had been hauled away was

replaced and piled conspicuously; the dams and flumes were repaired,

and the water-gates were shut; the backwater began to flood the ponds

and agitate the colony of frogs; prominent men were heard to pray for

rain, and Israel Booth was seen carrying water by night from his well

to the raceway; New Babylon was big with mystery. You all know the

sequel. You know how the commissioners came to us hungry from Etruria;

how Booth and his helpers met them in Sunday butternut and shirt frills

without spot; how we flattered our visitors' distinguished yet entirely

human stomachs with the toothsome dishes of our grandmothers; how we

cracked dusty bottles of Madeira brought years before from New England;

and how we brewed a waggish punch from the output of our rival's own

distillery. You know how they were driven presently about our cleanly

streets, every dooryard raked spick and span against their coming, and

were brought at last to the mills. You know how the Red Jacket, pent

to bursting from a providential thunder-storm of the night, blustered

down through the race with the pride of a Danube; how the saws sang,

the logs rolled, the teamsters shouted, and the commissioners admired.

You know, too, that the guests left before the waters abated or the

punch-bowl knew drought; and that by the same token we won our fight.

Does any of you in his inmost heart censure the pioneers for their

stratagem? I think not. They worked with what tools lay to their

hands, and the profit is their children's and their children's

children's."

He wisely left it to his listeners to point the parallel, and turned to

discuss the larger issues of the campaign. His canvass chanced among

one of the several battles waged over the national currency, a thorny

topic at best, but Shelby threw a life into the juiceless principles of

his theme which roused the dullest. At the last, referring to the

hardships a depreciated currency might entail on the nation's

pensioners, he turned to the Hon. Seneca Bowers as if his Grant-like

figure typified the great war's heroism, and delivered an impassioned

eulogy upon the soldier dead. It was naturally, convincingly done, and

the audience was loath to find it his peroration.

There was no doubt of his sweeping triumph. With its formal close the

meeting transformed itself spontaneously into a reception, and, under

the spell of his eloquence still, men prophesied that his brilliant

career would halt not short of the governorship. Mrs. Hilliard would

be satisfied with nothing less than the presidency.

"The world his oyster," said Bernard Graves. He had pocketed a sheaf

of stenographic notes, with which he had busied himself during the

latter part of Shelby's speech, and mounted a bench with Ruth, the

better to watch the crowd surge round the foot of the platform. "Shall

we go now?" he asked at length.

Ruth turned from the scene with shining eyes.

"I promised I would tell him what I thought," she answered.

"You promised Shelby!"

"He called the other day--after you had gone. He talks well of

politics. I was interested."

Bernard Graves swallowed something unpalatable.

"And the speech?" he said. "What do you think?"

"That it was remarkable--even brilliant, as they're saying."

"Great is buncombe."

"Don't," she begged. "Why spoil it for me? If nothing more, it proves

him a born orator, who can do what he will with men. I believe in him."

Shelby approached them presently, with the melting of the throng, and

Graves had to listen to an antiphony of praise, sung by Ruth and Mrs.

Hilliard. In a lull he asked Shelby if he admired the oratorical

methods of General Garfield.

"Eh!" said Shelby, abruptly.

"Your manner suggests his at times."

"Yes--oh, yes. I see. Powerful speaker, Garfield. No bad model, you

know."

"Yes, I know," Graves answered.

Shelby turned again to the circle of women, and Graves left the

building. A few minutes later he entered the _Whig_ office and made

his way to Sprague's cluttered sanctum.

"Volney," he announced, as the editor peered genially from underneath

the green drop-light, "I want to browse in your file of the

Congressional Record. And you've Garfield's Works down here, too,

haven't you?"

CHAPTER VI

Shelby stretched himself awake and contentedly surveyed his bachelor

bedroom in the Tuscarora House. He had boarded at this establishment

upward of five years, and his chamber had been decorated and, to a

degree, furnished in accord with his notions of elegant comfort. The

wall paper was a pattern which William Morris and his disciples would

have writhed to behold,--a hideous terra-cotta ground overrun with

meaningless scrolls and stiff garlands of roses of an unearthly pink.

There were stuffy maroon lambrequins above the window casements, and

two large blue vases, containing many-dyed plumes of pampas grass,

flanked like rigid sentinels a pseudo-marble clock upon the truly

marble mantelpiece which somehow suggested a mausoleum falling to

decay; while the blue motive was further emphasized by a plush

photograph album, with a little mirror let into its cover, standing in

a metallic holder on the bureau, whose sombre walnut matched the bed

and chairs. The pictures included a chromo, depicting an impossible

castle set in an equally impossible landscape, a print or two of race

horses, a lithograph of a poker game in supposably high life, and a

photogravure of a painting familiar to the habitues of a great

metropolitan hotel, popularly fancied in the country to be daring in

the extreme. At first sight of the original, over the rim of a

cocktail, Shelby had been fired with the resolve to own some sort of

copy, and even now, after several years of possession, he esteemed it

one of the world's masterpieces of pictorial art.

He dressed himself in the same content which had flushed his waking

revery. The plaudits of last night's mass-meeting still rang

harmoniously in his ears, and the praise of Ruth Temple and Mrs.

Hilliard was sweeter in retrospect than it had been in reality. This

happy serenity bore him company through the bare echoing corridors of

the hotel to the office, to be heightened by the gratulations of the

landlord and the help, who seemed to feel that a vicarious honor had

been done the house, a most insinuating form of hero-worship which

attained its climax in the homage of the true-penny who set forth his

morning bitters on the bar.

Extended notices of the meeting had been telegraphed to the neighboring

cities by local correspondents, and Shelby ran through the newspaper

accounts in the cheerless dining room, which he thought to-day by no

means comfortless. There was a flattering deference in the manner of

the waitresses, and the lessening of their pert familiarity told him,

more plainly perhaps than anything else, that he had become a

personage. He failed to remind them that the oatmeal was burned, the

rolls soggy, and the coffee reminiscent of chicory. He ate all that

was set before him, and was still content. The hotel barber-shop

seemed a blithe spot indeed, as he sat for his daily shave, and the

admiring barber a prince of good fellows. Sweet also were the

greetings of the market-place, as, cigar in mouth, he sauntered through

Main Street to his law office. All his paths were pleasantness and

peace.

The first discordant note was struck, oddly enough, by his faithful

satellite, William Irons, who, at his employer's entrance, abruptly

left off an attempt to coax his red shock into lovelocks, slid his

pocket mirror under a heap of papers, and fell to hammering the

typewriter with unnatural energy. Shelby accepted the subterfuge, and

wished him a hearty good morning.

"Did you attend the rally, William?" he inquired, as he slit the

envelopes of his morning's mail.

"Yep," said William Irons.

"Everybody seemed pleased?"

"Nope."

"No?" Shelby repeated, lifting his eyes. "And who was disgruntled?"

"The Widow Weatherwax."

"Ah! That's unfortunate," returned Shelby, blandly. "What is the

widow's grievance?"

"She's put out because you told a story makin' light of drinkin' punch.

She belongs to all the temp'rance societies doin' business, you know."

"No; I didn't know."

"And she says none of her church 'll vote for you after your

countenancin' such a cryin' sin."

"Her list of cardinal sins is extensive."

"Yep," agreed William. "Won't even let me play my fiddle in the house.

Says it's a vanity."

"I'd forgotten that you had gone to live with her."

"Do chores for my keep," explained the clerk. "Have codfish three

times a day, Monday morning to Saturday night, and no warm victuals

Sundays. Makes me keep my fiddle in the barn and play it behind the

woodpile."

Shelby laughed, and sought to woo back his mood of charity toward all,

but it was futile. The widow's mite of hostile criticism had leavened

the whole lump with bitterness. Nevertheless, he bridled his tongue.

Work came hard for the moment, and his eyes strayed past his papers

through an open window and spied Ruth Temple's slender shape in the

lawn below. The dewy freshness of the morning seemed to touch her

youth as it did the asters and belated hollyhocks of the quaint garden

into which she passed as he watched. Then Bernard Graves suddenly cut

into the picture, and drew a newspaper from his pocket, directing her

attention to something which amused him. But Ruth did not laugh.

Shelby clearly saw her color change.

A heavy step outside his door heralded the coming of the Hon. Seneca

Bowers. The county leader was in no mood for idle words, and looked as

Grant may have looked when about to pass judgment on a disgraced

soldier.

"Seen the _Whig_?" he asked curtly, when William Irons had been

despatched to the post-office.

"The _Whig_! No, I don't take it."

"I'd advise you to subscribe."

Shelby's face sobered with a premonition of misfortune.

"What's to pay now?" he asked.

Bowers struck open a copy of Volney Sprague's newspaper, and with

stubby rigid thumb guided the candidate's glance to an editorial.

"Read that, sir."

His tone was a new thing in their intercourse, but without remark

Shelby read:--

"AN ELOQUENT THIEF"

"Before a crowded mass-meeting last evening, Calvin Ross Shelby,

congressional candidate for the suffrages of an intelligent people,

stultified alike his hearers and himself. We shall not dignify his

specious appeal to local pride with the easy exposure of its fallacy;

the victory were too cheap; but since he glibly sought to establish a

parallel between his own questionable political methods and the

legendary deeds of the founders of our community, we too will frame

from his eloquence a parallel which we commend to the orator and to his

electors. In the newspaper business we call it the deadly parallel.

"Do you realize what this "When you can enlarge

talk about the dollar means, if your farm by changing the

true? It means that all you figures in your deeds; when

need do to increase the acreage your dairymaid can make more

of your farm is to change butter and cheese by watering

the figures in your title deeds; the milk; when you can have

it means that your creameries more cloth by decreasing your

will yield a better product if yardstick one-half; when you

you water the milk; it means can sell more tons of merchandise

that when the housewife shops by shortening your pound

she will buy more linen, or one-half,--then, and not until

gingham, or calico, if the then, can you increase the value

merchant moves the brass tacks of your property or labor by

of his counter yard measure decreasing your standard of

nearer together." values."

CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,

Faneuil Hall, Boston,

September 10, 1878.

"These fanatics say that if "But this is the first time I

foreign nations don't want the ever heard a financial philosopher

sort of money we choose to express his gratitude that we

coin they can go without, and have a currency of such bad

that we should be glad that repute that other nations will not

they don't. We've some receive it; he is thankful that it

other things that foreigners is not exportable. We have

don't want. We've peaches a great many commodities in

with the yellows, and weeviled such a condition that they are

wheat, and rancid butter, and not exportable. Mouldy flour,

ancient eggs, but I've yet to rusty wheat, rancid butter,

meet a farmer who wants to damaged cotton, addled eggs, and

corner the market. They spoiled goods generally are not

remind me of a town that was exportable. But it never

moved to build a gallows occurred to me to be thankful for

because all its neighbors had this putrescence. It is related

them. I don't need to add in a quaint German book of

that it was not an American humor that the inhabitants of

town. And one of the wise Schildeberg, finding that other

city fathers was so carried away towns, with more public spirit

by his patriotism that he tried than their own, had erected

to make the council pass a gibbets within their precincts,

resolution that the gallows be resolved that the town of

reserved for that town's Schildeberg should also have a

inhabitants exclusively." gallows; and one patriotic member

of the town council offered a

CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. resolution that the benefits of

this gallows should be reserved

exclusively for the inhabitants

of Schildeberg."

JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,

House of Representatives,

June 15, 1870.

"If each grave had a voice "If each grave had a voice

to tell us what its silent tenant to tell us what its silent tenant

last saw and heard on earth, we last saw and heard on earth, we

might stand, with uncovered might stand, with uncovered

heads, and hear the whole story heads, and hear the whole story

of the war. We should hear of the war. We should hear

that one perished when the first that one perished when the first

great drops of the crimson great drops of the crimson

shower began to fall, when the shower began to fall, when the

darkness of that first disaster at darkness of that first disaster at

Manassas fell like an eclipse on Manassas fell like an eclipse on

the nation; that another died the nation; that another died

of disease while wearily waiting of disease while wearily waiting

for winter to end; that this one for winter to end; that this one

fell on the field, in sight of the fell on the field, in sight of the

spires of Richmond, little dreaming spires of Richmond, little dreaming

that the flag must be carried that the flag must be carried

through three more years of through three more years of

blood before it should be planted blood before it should be planted

in that citadel of treason; and in that citadel of treason; and

that one fell when the tide of that one fell when the tide of

war had swept us back till the war had swept us back till the

roar of rebel guns shook the roar of rebel guns shook the

dome of _the_ capitol, and dome of _yonder_ capitol, and

re-echoed in the chambers of the re-echoed in the chambers of the

Executive mansion. We should Executive mansion. We should

hear mingled voices from the hear mingled voices from the

Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the

Chickahominy, and the James, Chickahominy, and the James,

solemn voices from the Wilderness, solemn voices from the Wilderness,

and triumphant shouts from and triumphant shouts from

the Shenandoah, from Petersburg, the Shenandoah, from Petersburg,

and the Five Forks, mingled and the Five Forks, mingled

with the wild acclaim of with the wild acclaim of

victory and the sweet chorus of victory and the sweet chorus of

returning peace." returning peace."

CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,

Arlington, Va.,

May 30,1868.

"Of these three passages, rightly thought by Calvin Ross Shelby's

audience the most telling of his speech, the first and second are

unmistakably plagiarisms of ideas, while the third, differing from its

original in but one telltale, damning word, is shameless, flat-footed

theft. Either of the first two offences committed singly might be

unconscious; conjoined they betray deliberation; united with the third

they 'smell to heaven.' It is high time for the voters of this

congressional district to ask themselves the question. Shall we vote

for a thief?"

"Well, sir, well?" exploded Bowers at last.

Shelby tossed the paper aside with a laugh.

"It's well done."

"Well done!" Bowers dropped one of his infrequent oaths. "Have you

nothing else to say?"

"Yes; it's true, more or less."

"You admit it?"

"Keep cool. It was this way: I was pressed for time when I prepared my

speech,--you know that,--and it occurred to me to adapt one or two of

Garfield's illustrations. I've studied him some, and he said many

things that fit in nowadays as well as they ever did. Plenty of

speakers quarry there I guess. I honestly meant to give him the credit

of that soldier business in my peroration, but somehow the quotation

marks were lost in the shuffle. There was but one chance in a thousand

that anybody would notice."

"Somebody did," growled Bowers, and spat our his mangled cigar.

"Yes; I ran against a man with a memory."

"It wasn't on the square, Ross. It'll hurt you."

Shelby eyed him shrewdly.

"You read speeches in Washington that I wrote," he reminded.

"That's different. Lots of congressmen do that,--even senators.

They're not posted on everything."

"No," Shelby agreed, with an irony too subtle for Bowers; "they

certainly are not. However, there's no need to borrow trouble over

this thing. People will laugh a little, say it was a good speech,

wherever I got it, and vote the straight party ticket despite Bernard

Graves."

"Graves," said Bowers. "What has he to do with it?"

"Everything; he's the little joker with the memory."

Bowers whistled.

"What is he after?"

Shelby jerked his head toward the Temple doorstep where Bernard still

lingered.

"After her."

CHAPTER VII

"Humor a silk stocking according to his crotchet, that's my maxim,"

submitted Bowers as they threshed the matter out in its latest aspect.

"I can't see its application to Graves. He's outside politics; hates

the very name, they say."

"Practical politics is applied human nature. If a rule is sound in

politics, it will work anywhere this side of the pearly gates. Graves

may not care a tinker's dam for politics, but evidently he does get

queasy when another man's ideas are misappropriated. Perhaps that's

his crotchet. Writes himself, doesn't he?"

"Some rubbish or other," returned Shelby, contemptuously.

"That's where he is susceptible, to my thinking. I don't cotton to

your woman theory. I say leave women out of politics. So conciliate

him; humor his crotchet."

"I can't see why I should kotow to him, or what further harm he can

do," said the candidate, but he deferred to Bowers's judgment. "I'll

look him up this afternoon," he agreed; "though I've no stomach for the

job. I never liked the cuss."

He abundantly appreciated this long-standing antipathy as he cast about

for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the

house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the

waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its

appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been

inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible

down the vista of a series of low-ceiled apartments, and Shelby saw

that it was crammed with books. None of the many pictures could cope

in dash and color with his own collection and, what seemed to him

singular in a Protestant home, they were chiefly of the Madonna; all in

all, a tame assortment beside his copy of the secular masterpiece in

the great metropolitan hotel. Over one of the crowded bookcases was

the cast of a winged woman. It was armless and headless, and Shelby

wondered by what accident it had become so damaged, and why it was not

banished to the attic.

The maid came presently to tell him that Mr. Bernard had gone for a

walk to the golf links.

Shelby was relieved. He felt ill at ease in this queer drab dwelling,

and doubtful of the course he ought to pursue with its tenant. It

would be another matter altogether in the open air. Returning to his

law office, he bade William Irons to telephone the Tuscarora House

livery-stable to send around his horse and buggy.

At the farm-house on the outskirts which served the golf devotees for a

headquarters Shelby was told that Graves had gone yet farther, taking

the direction of the Hilliard quarries--geologizing bent, the speaker

thought. Unassociated with practical results, this had always

presented itself to Shelby as a trivial pursuit akin to botany,

embroidery, and other employments distinctly feminine. He forebore

comment, however, and presently struck down a road which wound into a

little suburb peopled by Polish quarry-workers. It was essentially an

alien community in whose straggling streets and lanes one heard English

but seldom. Tow-headed children, shy elves peeping from odd

hiding-places, swarmed a half-dozen and upward to a house. Work was

the key-note of Little Poland, as it was called. While the men toiled

in the sandstone quarries the women did a man's stint in the fields of

the outlying farms, and bore more children. Childbirth was a mere

detail in these thick-waisted women's lives; some hours, a day perhaps,

and they were stooping in the fields again. And the children early put

shoulder to the wheel; those too small for the fields begged food in

the streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe

Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent

feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party

ticket with mechanical precision.

The politician approached the quarries with an interested eye. Among

his many irons in the fire he had acquired part ownership in another

quarry to the westward, like this bordering the towpath of the canal.

Bowers held the controlling interest, though neither his name nor

Shelby's figured prominently in its management. They called it the

Eureka Sandstone Company.

Shelby tied his horse near the office, and, putting his head among the

morning-glories curtaining an open window, stated his errand to

Hilliard, whose vast bulk was humped ludicrously upon a high stool.

The big fellow stopped thumbing his ledger, greeted him with a jovial

shout, and directed him toward a stratum of rock which the workmen had

recently unearthed.

"Look it over," he called after him. "It promises to pan out

scrumptious. We struck A-1 rock seven feet below the surface."

"That discounts the Eureka," said Shelby. "We've never done better

than twelve."

He picked his way through the yards, the hammers of the stone dressers

clinking out a not unmusical chorus from every shed, and skirting the

docks where the ponderous cranes swung the great slabs to the canal

boats, scrambled down a rough roadway into the quarry proper amidst all

the hurly-burly of the teamsters and the hoarse steam drills. The

walls of sandstone rose sheer around him, sliced down by the blasts

like sugar with a scoop. Some of the formation was not unlike sugar

little refined; some, lighter, with streaks of grayish pink, like sides

of bacon; and some, a rich deep brown which architects specified the

country over, was said to have no equal the world around save only in

Japan. In the newly uncovered tract Shelby spied Bernard Graves

pecking about with a little hammer.

"Prospecting for gold?" he asked jocularly.

"No; fucoids."

"Eh?"

"Fossils, you know; a sort of seaweed. The only kind we can discover

in this formation."

"My little freshwater college wasn't strong on the sciences," said

Shelby, speculating whether this particular crotchet required humoring.

As the young man's own interest in the topic seemed languid, he decided

against this course and frankly told him that he wanted to talk with

him. "Suppose we move away from the clatter of the drills," he

suggested.

Graves assented, and they shifted from beneath the overhanging bank of

sandy loam to the shade of an unused derrick.

"Smoke?" queried the politician, affably.

Graves declined a cigar, explaining, "I merely take a cigarette now and

then, usually after dinner."

Shelby's contempt for cigarettes was boundless, but he dissembled his

opinion, and lit the strongest cigar in his case.

"It's up to me, Bernard," he confessed with a laugh. "It's my move,

and I'm right on the spot like a little man, though humble pie isn't my

favorite tidbit by a large majority."

"Meaning what?" asked Graves, without animation.

Behind the candidate's urbane mask rioted a lust to mar and maim, but

his political self explained blandly:--

"Meaning that your checkmate in this morning's _Whig_ was well played."

"I didn't write that editorial."

"I know you didn't. It had the Volney Sprague earmarks. But you did

what is more important,--you inspired it."

"Well?"

"Just this: in a general way I admit its justness, and come frankly to

tell you so."

"Why should you trouble yourself?"

Shelby throttled his mounting ire.

"Because," he returned slowly, "I recognize your ability and want your

support. If you mean to interest yourself in politics, I can be of

service to you. I know, of course, you don't think politicians are

necessarily scamps."

"I judge no class of men so summarily," Graves opened his mouth to

protest. "That is too much like Burke's indictment against a whole

people, you know."

The allusion was not familiar, but Shelby said, "Exactly," with labored

calm. He fancied that he detected a note of condescension, and

resented it passionately.

"The average politician isn't such a bad lot," he went on. "His

methods don't always square with the Decalogue, but he means well, and

in the long run does well. I don't say this to pat myself on the back.

You know me. I'm a plain, practical man, and try to steer by

common-sense. If I'm elected to Congress, I'll do my best to make the

district proud of me, and I'll promise you personally, right here and

now, that I will deliver no man's speeches but my own."

Graves wished that he would make an end of his excuses and go away.

The whole episode bored him, and his mind wandered even while he

listened. He was thinking that that muscular Pole directing the

planting of a steam drill below the sand-bank a rather statuesque

figure for these prosaic days. The man had jumped upon the tripod of

the drill in ordering the work, and loomed large and competent. Graves

thought him in feature not unlike his great compatriot John Sobieski,

and tried to picture him in the Polish king's armor which he remembered

to have seen in some European collection. Shelby's silence recalled

him.

"Really, there's no necessity for you to explain or promise anything to

me," he rejoined coldly. "I'm not in politics, and I don't care to be."

Shelby had reached his last ditch.

"You think you're too damned good for it," he broke out. "It's the

lily-fingered people of your stripe who make reform a byword and a

laughing-stock."

Graves's face flamed, and he shrank inwardly with a scholar's

repugnance from the rencounter. Outwardly, however, he was truculent.

"Such bar-room personalities are characteristic of you," he retorted.

"Your place--"

But it was fated that Shelby should not learn his place. A sharp

warning cry from a workman heralded the crumbling fall of a great

section of the bank overhanging the drill which Graves had idly

watched, and, as idly, watched still. A dreamer of habit, his will

failed immediately to rally to the naked fact and its demands. It was

unreal, a picture, a play, a poet's conception of chaos--that was it!

The thing was Dantesque or Miltonic. The gaping rent, the jumbled

rocks, the thick spurt of steam issuing from the buried drill, it was

all tumultuous, primeval; and that grimy workman, heaving aside the

dirt and scrambling to the air, was suggestive of Milton's earth-born

"tawny lion, pawing to get free."

"Good God, man, wake up!" Shelby shook him roughly by the arm and

dragged him toward the scene of the catastrophe. "There are men under

that heap."

A little knot of Polish laborers forthwith congregated, ox-eyed and

inert. Shelby tore a shovel from a paralyzed hand and began to dig,

ripping out crisp oaths at their stupidity.

"Find shovels for these cattle," he commanded.

By signs Graves roused the unnerved men to action, but he could find no

sort of tool for himself, and stood empty-handed apart, conscious of

unfitness. The politician, burrowing like a woodchuck, showered him

with red earth.

"English? Anybody speak English?" he panted without stopping. "How

many are under here?"

One of the workmen understood, chattered excitedly with his fellows,

and held up one soiled finger.

"Ein," he said. "Kiska, he vork here."

Shelby's shovel grated on the cylinder of the buried drill. From

underneath its tripod protruded the booted leg of a man.

"Go easy, boys," he cautioned.

With his own hands he skilfully uncovered the victim's head and trunk.

Graves saw that it was the giant of his day-dream. The man's rugged

face was earth-stained and still; his great chest motionless. Shelby

mastered the situation with a glance, thrust his hand into the coarse

shirt, and felt for the heart.

"There's life in him," he announced. "Over with him into the shade."

Between them all they bore him to a shelf of level rock. "Off with his

shirt," said Shelby to his helper, and they two stripped the body to

the waist. It was the torso of a gladiator. Shelby rolled the garment

and thrust it underneath the bare back below the shoulders. "It's not

high enough," he decided instantly. "Something else--a coat--anything."

Kiska's compatriots could not have complied had they understood, being

coatless to a man. Bernard Graves took off a new golf coat which

Shelby ruthlessly crumpled and stuffed into place. An instant later he

was astride the Pole's hips, his hands grasping the powerful chest on

either side. Bracing his elbows, Shelby bore his whole weight forward,

counted three, sat back upon his knees, counted two, and so continued,

down "one-two-three," up "one-two," with the quiet assurance of a

surgeon.

The younger man watched his every movement with wondering respect. The

operator interrupted his meditations.

"Get hold of his tongue with your handkerchief," he ordered. "That's

right--hold it by the tip. On one side--on one side. Now take both

his wrists and pin them above his head--so."

All the while the steady pressure and relaxation went on, compelling

the lungs to their function. Presently came the faintest quiver of a

nostril, and Shelby smiled.

"Kiska will do his own breathing pretty soon," he said. Presently he

suggested: "Better fetch Hilliard now. And have him 'phone Doc

Crandall to come to Kiska's house in Little Poland. I'll take Kiska

home in my rig when his bellows gets well under way."

Graves did his errand, outlining the disaster and rescue as he hurried

with the quarry owner to the scene. Joe Hilliard was divided between

sympathy for Kiska, whom he declared was the pick of his men, and

admiration for Shelby's presence of mind.

"He's got gumption, that man," he exclaimed, "gumption, simon-pure."

Graves's own impressions were mixed, and the stress of the accident

passed, he resumed his ruined coat with a vague sense of personal

slight. Something of this sort prompted him to say rather

patronizingly to Shelby as they parted:--

"You made skilful use of that method of resuscitation. Where in the

world did you pick it up?"

"Every schoolboy knows it," returned the politician, shortly; "or every

schoolboy should."

CHAPTER VIII

Shelby's forecast of the effect of the _Whig's_ exposure was

brilliantly fulfilled. People did laugh over it and say that it was a

good speech, whatever its source. In popular conception literary theft

is at worst a venial sin whose very iniquity is doubtful unless found

out. The culprit's average fellow-townsman accepted the incident as

fresh evidence of his acknowledged cleverness and promptly forgot it in

the nine days' wonder over his exploit at the Hilliard quarries.

The town's attitude mirrored that of the congressional district and the

state. Volney Sprague's editorial occasioned some little paragraphing

here and there among up-state newspapers and by brief mention in

_Associated Press_ despatches roused a metropolitan daily of opposite

political faith to one of the satirical thrusts for which it was

famous; whereupon one of its more serious contemporaries found a text

for a thunderous jeremiad on the decay of political morality. Yet

where one person read of Shelby's plagiarism, a score devoured the

sensational accounts of his rescue of Kiska, while of those who read

both, an illogical but human majority considered his atonement complete.

Sprague himself was disposed to gauge Shelby's vogue with the

groundlings as greater than before, and lamented it to Bernard Graves,

who fell wholly into his mood for once and deplored the fatuity of

popular judgment with unlooked-for warmth.

His friend listened with unqualified approval.

"Thank Heaven, you're beginning to take an interest in politics!" he

exclaimed.

The young man flushed.

"There are some things in this man's canvass one can't ignore," he

carefully explained, and tried to think he meant plagiarism.

He had not discussed recent happenings with Ruth Temple. When he took

her the _Whig_ article the morning after the mass-meeting she had

displayed a disconcerting willingness to cloud the vital fact and

excuse Shelby. Indeed, he finally left with the disgusted conviction

that she had pilloried not the sinner but himself,--a not uncommon

outcome in a clash of wits between a woman and a man. After that, he

told himself, she might form what fantastic opinion of this freebooter

she chose without let or hindrance from him, and at the same time he

resolved that she should see less of him. The latter resolution proved

as flimsy as a New Year's vow, but while it needed less than a smile to

whistle him back, the whole distasteful subject of Shelby became

tacitly taboo.

As Ruth was a very woman, often saying less what she really thought

than what she knew would stir dissent, her innermost opinions were less

stable than he fancied. She had not had speech with Shelby since the

mass-meeting, but he had found time that night to ask her to drive with

him, and she anticipated the outing with a zest whose disproportion to

its surface cause she did not analyze.

On the appointed afternoon she saw his horse and buggy brought from the

Tuscarora House and hitched at the curb below his office, and as it

lacked little of the hour set she thrust home the last hat-pin and

stood jacketed and gloved by a window, waiting his coming. The hour

struck and brought no Shelby, though punctuality was the first article

of his creed. Out in the drowsy thoroughfare a sprinkling-cart jarred

heavily past, spurting ineffectually at the yellow dust which rose

perversely under its baptism and surged beneath the awnings of the

shops. It was Saturday, universal shopping-day in the farmland, and a

ramshackle line of rustic vehicles--buggies, democrats, sulkies, lumber

wagons--with graceless plough horses slumbering in the thills,

stretched in ragged alignment down the curb. Shelby's smart turnout

seemed fairly urban by contrast, and Ruth saw that it met with the

critical approval of the loungers.

A quarter of an hour slipped by; no Shelby. His cob fretted at the

autumn flies and whinnied to be gone. A half-hour elapsed, unfruitful;

an hour. Then did Queen Ruth, on whose imperious nod a little world

had hung from babyhood, perceive the recreant come calmly down from his

law office in company with some creature of relatively common clay,

shake hands, chat further, shake hands again, take up his reins amid an

interchange of badinage with the bystanders, and so, gossiping still,

jog deliberately on--to her!

She spun on her heel as he turned in at the drive and rang for her maid.

"If Mr. Shelby should call," she directed, wrenching at her gloves,

"say I'm not at home."

Shelby's occupations in the meantime had been absorbing. In the course

of an earnest conference at the Tuscarora House the evening of the

quarry accident, the Hon. Samuel Bowers had removed his cigar to let

fall a sententious observation.

"As long as an all-wise Providence saw fit to dump that sand-bank on

one of the Polacks," said he, "I call it a piece of downright Ross

Shelby luck that it fell on Kiska."

"I should have worked as hard over a dago," rejoined Shelby; "or a dog

either, I guess."

"M-yes; I reckon. But you're not complaining that it wasn't some dago

who doesn't know a ballot from a bunch of garlic? No, I reckon not."

His eyes twinkled, and Shelby flickered a responsive grin. "Note a

rule for candidates: When about to effect the spectacular rescue of one

of the toiling masses which are the bone and sinew of this fair land of

ours, pick a man who holds a block of the foreign vote right in the

pocket of his jeans."

It was perhaps appreciation of this aphorism's significance, perhaps

sheer abundance of the milk of human kindness, perhaps a harmonious

blending of both, which inspired Shelby's warm welcome to Kiska as he

was about to leave his office to join Ruth Temple.

"You shouldn't have come out so soon, Kiska," he protested, urging the

big Pole to a chair, and bringing him a glass of water. "Did you walk

all the way from Little Poland to see me?"

"I valked," answered Kiska, simply, his face working. "I vould like to

haf roon, Meester Shelby."

"Oh, I wouldn't run much just yet," laughed Shelby, kindly, trying to

head off the man's expression of gratitude. "Have another drink?

Perhaps you'd prefer some whiskey?"

Kiska declined, and harked back to his message.

"I vould like to haf roon to tank you, Meester Shelby. I got vife to

tank you. I got mooch cheeldren to tank you. I no taalk good. Dat

Eengleesh hard,--so? Eef I no taalk, I tink. I tink all day: Tank

you, Meester Shelby, tank you, Meester Shelby."

"You speak English very well," said Shelby, patting him on the

shoulder. "But you mustn't say any more about the matter."

He led him presently to talk of the quarry-workers and their families,

their wages, their hours, their recreation, their parish church, their

priest, their school; for Little Poland was sufficient unto itself; and

Kiska saw that he questioned with sympathy and understanding, and was

pleased. On the dial of his office clock Shelby noted the hour of his

appointment come and go, and from his window he caught a fleeting

glimpse of Ruth at hers. She wore his favorite hat, with a gleam of

red, which became her dark hair so well, and he divined that she had

put it on because of him. He longed to be out and away with her

between the autumn hedgerows, but there sat Kiska, garrulous of Poland

over seas and Little Poland by the quarries, and to Kiska the

politician inclined a patient ear.

The Pole rose at last, after a delighted hour, and Shelby saw his eye

light on a package of campaign lithographs of himself, which had come

that morning from the printers.

"Want one?" he asked.

Kiska exploded in incoherent gratitude.

"Take several," said Shelby, snapping an elastic band around a sheaf of

the pictures. "Give 'em to your friends to hang in their front

windows. That's what we do with 'em in town, you know. It's American.

You're all good Americans in Little Poland, aren't you?" A thought

struck him, and from a roll of banknotes, destined for campaign uses,

he extracted a ten-dollar bill. "I dare say Joe Hilliard will pay your

doctor, Kiska," he went on, "but there'll be other things you'll want.

Winter's coming; buy the yellow-haired kids some shoes; get the wife a

warm dress. You can pay me when Poland gets its independence."

Kiska took the money. "I vould like to vork for you," he exclaimed.

"Would you?" laughed the politician. "I think perhaps you may some

day."

The minor social conventions, which, after all, are possibly the major

ones, were consistently ignored by Shelby.

"Not at home?" he repeated after Ruth's maid. "I guess you're

mistaken. I saw Miss Temple at the window as I drove in the gate.

Just look around a bit, and you'll find her."

He walked calmly past the bewildered girl to the drawing-room. In the

centre of the apartment stood Ruth, her cheeks waving crimson, like a

poppy field astir.

"Angry?" said the man.

Ruth waited till the open-mouthed maid had retreated down the hall.

"I'm furious," she answered, and looked the part.

"Think I'm a boor?"

She could not trust herself to reply. Had he dared smile then, she

would have swept by him, but he was wholly grave.

"I'll tell you what you're thinking," he said quietly. "You are

thinking that I have fallen short of your notion of me. You listened

the other night at the court-house and thought kindly things. Then you

were told by my enemies that I had used in part what was not my own.

You were vexed, for it impeached your judgment of character. Then I

failed of my appointment, and did you a more grievous wrong--I piqued

your woman's vanity."

Ruth gasped.

"Your effrontery is--is fascinating."

Shelby's eyes hinted a smile. She had said what she thought.

"I shall not defend myself to you against the charges of the _Whig_,"

he went on. "I doubt even if I shall answer them publicly. Greater

men than I have had their names blackened in a campaign, and deemed

silence the wisest answer. People don't ascribe many virtues to the

politician, but even he occasionally turns the other cheek. As for my

tardiness to-day--well, I could have avoided it."

"You admit it?" blazed Ruth.

"Yes. I had my choice."

"And you chose--" The shabby figure she had seen descend from Shelby's

office visualized itself sharply.

"Yes--poor devil--I chose Kiska."

Her mood veered, and she whirled impulsively toward him, all

womanliness and contrition.

"Forgive me. How could I know? I thought--I thought--"

"That it was some heeler with a vote to sell?"

Her face betrayed her.

"Forgive me," she repeated. "You would have done wrong to turn him

away because of me. I know of your noble deed--who does not? I am

proud of you, and wished to tell you so. I wanted to see you for

this--to praise your heroism. I've been your friend in that--that

other thing. I could see how the crowd, the exhilaration, the sense of

mastery, might lure one on. I looked at it dispassionately--with a

friend's eyes. I was loyal till I thought you held my friendship

lightly, and put politics before it. I own my mistake--my injustice."

Shelby had not dreamed of vindication so sweeping, and, with a word of

modest disclaimer, led the talk to pacific commonplace. It was too

late for the promised drive, and indeed neither of them thought of it

again till the door had shut between them.

In leaving, the man's glance was arrested by an object on the piano.

"What is that called?" he asked abruptly.

"The cast? That is my Victory--the famous Victory of Samothrace, which

suggested the poem everybody's reading. It's my despair. I've failed

at drawing it for years. The original is in the Louvre, and towers

gloriously over a staircase. I can shut my eyes and see it perfectly."

"Pretty old?" ventured Shelby.

"Oh, yes; it's an antique. See how ruffian Time has dealt with it."

The man walked slowly round the goddess, surveying her from every side.

"A day or two ago," he said simply, "I saw that image in a house, and,

in my ignorance, thought a servant had broken it. I wondered why the

people didn't pitch it out."

His tone went straight to her sympathy.

"Many are strangers in the kingdom of Art," she returned gently. "Most

of us must come to it like little children."

Shelby was silent for a moment. Then he said:--

"In Bernard Graves's opinion I am aesthetically dead--I believe those

were his words."

The girl started.

"I never repeated them," she protested.

"What," laughed Shelby, grimly, "has he told you that, too? He's

evidently fond of the phrase. Perhaps he is right. Yet I hope not.

I'd rather think I'm merely unborn. I am not a voluntary Ishmaelite.

I simply haven't had the chance to learn."

CHAPTER IX

A fault recognized, it was Ruth's nature to be lavish of atonement, and

by way of further expiation she consented a day or two later to make

one of a driving party of Mrs. Hilliard's to hear Shelby speak in a

village located "down north," as the local vernacular had it, near the

shore of Lake Ontario. Ruth cared little for Mrs. Hilliard. She saw

her through feminine eyes, and Mrs. Hilliard was not popular with

women. But Shelby had privily told her of the project and begged her

to accept.

"I had planned to rent the Tuscarora House tallyho and go with some

eclat," the lady lamented at the eleventh hour, "but the way people

have disappointed me is positively harrowing. There was Bernard

Graves--I pinned my childlike faith on him; but he sent regrets. And

Mr. and Mrs. Bowers. Wouldn't you think that they, of all people,

would wish to go? But no; Mrs. Bowers said it did her rheumatic

shoulder no good to traipse around nights,--that was her

expression,--and Mr. Bowers actually told me that he was too busy

organizing political meetings to want to attend them. Isn't he droll?

Then Mr. Hewett had a sermon to prepare; and Dr. Crandall had a case of

diphtheria to watch; and Volney Sprague--well, I really did not dare

ask him, he was so horrid in his paper about Mr. Shelby's splendid

speech. So one and all they began to make excuses, as the Bible says,

till it has simmered down to you, dear Ruth, and Joe, and Mr. Shelby,

and me."

"Oh," said Ruth, with misgiving.

"A sort of survival of the fittest, don't you know, as somebody or

other says. Was it Shakespeare? He really seems to have written all

the clever things."

"No," Ruth replied with gravity; "it wasn't Shakespeare."

"Really? I thought it sounded Shakespearian. Well, as I was telling

you, it has come to a jolly little company of four in my surrey, which,

after all, is perhaps nicer than a dozen in a tallyho, though of course

it won't impress the voters as much."

Ruth's eyebrows arched.

"Is that the object of our going?"

"What an idea, my dear!" Nevertheless, she colored. "We'll start

early enough for a fish supper at the Lakeview Inn," she rattled on.

"You know how good their fish suppers are. And perhaps we shall have

time to stop at the camp-meeting of those ridiculous Free Methodists

which is in full swing at the grove behind the hotel. Joe says that it

will be the last night of the camp, and equal to Barnum's Three Rings

and Mammoth Hippodrome. Doesn't that sound just like Joe? I'm sure we

can manage to see something of it. Mr. Shelby's meeting won't begin

till eight-thirty and Eden Centre can't be ten minutes' drive from the

grove."

She sowed without conception of the harvest. The pleasuring so idly

planned, the religionists whose vagaries provoked her laughter, were in

time to bulk huge in a clairvoyant light of revelation.

It fell a ripe autumn day with the haze mantling the orchards like the

purple of a plum, a day in whose magic atmosphere even common things

wore an air of poetry. The very canal was transfigured.

"There is a bit of Holland," said Ruth, as they crossed the waterway on

the ragged hem of the town. "If this were Europe and the courthouse

over there could triple its age and take another name, this bridge

would swarm with the 'personally conducted' admiring the view. I don't

wonder that artists are beginning to paint the canal."

"They say a house-boat party came through last week," Mrs. Hilliard

remarked.

"Tied their scow near my place," put in her husband. "Had the hold all

rigged up with a piano and curtains and rugs. Harum-scarum looking lot

of men and women you wouldn't trust to paint a barn. They overran the

quarries and made pictures of the Polacks."

"Bernard Graves met them," Ruth added. "They told him that Little

Poland was a second Barbizon for peasant models, with an 'Angelus' or a

'Man with the Hoe' around every corner."

Joe Hilliard guffawed.

"Guess they meant the woman with the hoe; she's the agriculturalist in

the Polack matrimonial team."

Shelby was discreetly backward in these quicksands which the quarry

owner did not fear to tread, but the canal stirred his imagination,

too, and in a characteristic way.

"It takes seven figures to express last year's tonnage down the Ditch

to tidewater," he told them; "stone, lumber, food. Why it dumped over

three-quarters of a million tons of food alone into New York City's

maw. Yet they say it's antiquated and can't compete with the

railroads. What else has kept the railroads within bounds? Ask any

Tuscarora shipper what happens yearly when navigation closes. Abandon

it! We'll see. The canal counties swing a pretty vote in this state."

Hilliard laughed.

"Think you're addressing the Legislature, Ross?"

"I heard you address the Assembly once," Ruth said. "I was a Vassar

girl then, visiting Albany friends. You spoke about the canals, and

the other members stopped gossiping and writing letters to listen."

"The canal is a part of my religion," Shelby answered.

They crossed the ancient shore line of the lake, the Ridge,

so-called,--successive highway of the Iroquois, the pioneer, the

stage-coach, and the ubiquitous trolley,--and caught presently the

distant shimmer of Ontario, sail-dotted, intensely blue. That first

glimpse of the inland sea always stirred Ruth to the depths. It was

not the romance of New France alone which it evoked--that picturesque

procession of redmen, _coureurs de bois_, friars, Jesuits, soldiers of

fortune, La Salle, Frontenac, the conquering English, the

conqueror-conquering American--but the mystery of the vaster tidal sea

toward which it drew, whose supremest witchery none may know save the

yearning inland-born.

"Calm as a puddle to-day," said Joe. "You can almost hear the Canucks

singing 'God Save the Queen.'"

Dusk had set in when they left the deserted piazzas of the summer hotel

for the camp-meeting in the grove. The flare of torches wavered afar

between the tree boles, and above the lapping of the waves walled a

drear hymn.

Mrs. Hilliard skipped girlishly in the woodland path.

"They've begun, they've begun," she exulted. "We shall see the fun

after all."

"It's too early for the meeting in the big tent," Shelby told Ruth;

"but if you've never seen anything of the kind, the scene which goes

before will be quite as curious."

Skirting a makeshift village of tiny tents and shanties they issued to

a torch-lit clearing in the wood whose central object was the greater

tent, which, frayed, weathered, and patched as it was, yet stood to

these zealots of an iron creed as the chosen tabernacle of a very God.

Its rough benches were empty now, but before its dingy portal swayed

and groaned a rapt circle of men and women, hand in hand, in whose

midst an old man with a prophet's head and a bigot's eye was gyrating

like a dervish as he mouthed the hackneyed phrases of the sanctified.

As the new-comers pressed among the bystanders hemming the inner circle

of the faithful, the performer with a last frantic whirl dropped

exhausted, and rolling down a slight declivity lay stark and deathlike

at their feet, his white beard and hair strewn with russet leaves.

Ruth recoiled with a shudder. The swaying circle redoubled its

incantations, and left him to his envied beatitude. Their indifference

seemed inhuman to the girl, and she would have stooped to the prostrate

figure but for Shelby's detaining hand.

"Merely the 'Power,' as they say," he whispered, adding cynically,

"Epilepsy can be feigned, you know."

She desisted, and a new actor waltzed rhythmically into the glare of

light. Her short rotund body writhing not unlike an Oriental dancer's,

the Widow Weatherwax had assumed the centre of the ring. The

sanctified were without sense of humor, but the unregenerate onlookers

were not proof against the comic aspects of emotional religion, and

from the dark outskirts rang a ribald laugh.

"Why doesn't that dreadful woman wear a corset?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard

in a stage whisper of Ruth, whose face went suddenly aflame.

"The widow would make the fortune of any Midway, Ross," Joe Hilliard

chuckled, digging Shelby in the ribs.

"Woe, woe, woe," chanted the widow, spurred to anathema by derision.

"Woe upon scorners! Woe upon them that sit in the seats of scorners!

'Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in

yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.'"

Scripture-quoting was reckoned among the fine arts in the widow's

circle, and an applauding chorus of Praise Gods and Amens greeted her

dexterous use of the beloved weapon. She rounded the chain once more

in her grotesque dance; then, suddenly spying the little group of her

neighbors peering through the girdle of the sanctified, she halted,

directly fronting them, and, singling out Mrs. Hilliard, who was

conspicuous in a red tailor-made gown, she transfixed her with her

beady eyes.

"Woe, woe, woe," she wailed again, rocking to and fro. "Woe upon

Babylon! 'Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the

habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of

every unclean and hateful bird!'"

The brethren thrilled at the well-understood allusion to the speaker's

abiding-place, while the outsiders, scenting a veiled scurrility,

craned to listen and to watch.

Secure of her audience, the widow paused as if waiting the descent of

the prophetic afflatus. Then:--

"'And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my

people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not

of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath

remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and

double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she

hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself,

and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she

saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no

sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and

mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire.'"

Ruth vacillated between fascination and disgust. The flickering

torches, the soughing wind, the lapping waves, the old, old words, lent

the denunciation a solemnity which transcended the bizarre mouthpiece.

She shook off the impression, however, and asked Shelby to take her

away.

"Yes; it's time to leave for the rally," he acquiesced. "I'll speak to

the Hilliards."

As they turned, they saw that Mrs. Hilliard's eyes were riveted on the

widow's in an hypnotic stare. In shrill singsong the woman was

declaiming:--

"'So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a

woman sit upon a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy, having

seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and

scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls,

having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations--'"

Whereupon Mrs. Hilliard suddenly stopped her ears and grovelled on her

knees full in the light of the torches, her shoulders quivering with

hysterical sobs. There was a ripple of sensation at the prominence of

the convert, and triumphant peals of "Saved by His precious blood,"

"Saved by the Lamb," "Look to Him, sister, look to Him," and the like.

Then big Joe Hilliard stolidly thrust himself into the ring, and,

raising the stricken woman, bore her away into the outer darkness.

Apart from the crowd, Hilliard shook his wife with rough kindness.

"Wake up, girl," he said. "Nightmare's over. I guess you need a dose

of camomile."

In the inky outskirts she presently threw off the obvious marks of her

hysteria, but by little signs another woman might read, Ruth saw hours

afterward that the spell possessed her still. Its gloom seemed to

overcast the entire evening. Either through insufficient advertising,

or the crass stupidity of the enfranchised of Eden Centre, who thought

less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their

souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had

gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene

lamps and wilting humanity; and of this beggarly handful two-thirds

were women. Shelby assumed a cheerful front, declaring that a small

audience so assembled was deserving of his best, but hewing to this

line was another matter. Womankind are proverbially indifferent to

politics; and a stouter resolution than his would have flagged in the

presence of that preoccupied feminine two-thirds, whose eyes were

centred on Mrs. Hilliard's tailor-made gown and Ruth Temple's fall hat.

Used as he was to easy victory, this first disappointment of his

campaign seemed bodeful of evil days to come.

CHAPTER X

Yet when mischief speedily befell, it wore so curious a guise that

Shelby missed its import and laughed it aside for a random fling of

jocund Fate. It began with a publisher's announcement of a volume

containing the collected poems of the author of the admired, imitated,

parodied, and derided ode on the "Victory of Samothrace," anonymous no

longer, but the avowed offspring of Bernard Graves. Dazed,

incredulous, and slow to do him honor, the prophet's own country

advanced a theory of mistaken identity. But reluctant New Babylon had

soon to recognize the young man's vogue. Through its supposed advocacy

of woman suffrage the poem had all but founded a cult, and the

disclosure of its true author, after months of guesswork and

silly-season gush, bounced and ricochetted among the newspapers with

astonishing ado. With the _Whig_ in the forefront the local press

began to echo the gossiping paragraphs and character sketches which,

true, half true, and of whole cloth, padded the lean columns of a

mediocre literary season, and New Babylon had faith. The last doubting

Thomas yielded when it became necessary to convey the celebrity's mail

to his home in a special bag; not even the ensuing plague of special

correspondents, biographical dictionary solicitors, photographers, and

worshipping pilgrims so stirred the local imagination; this surely was

fame!

To Ruth Temple, who by some sorcery guessed his secret before its

public revelation, Graves went with his laurels thick upon him.

"How does it feel to be a celebrity?" he said, meeting her volley of

questions collectively. "Much like a breakfast cereal, a patent

medicine, or a soap. Byron said that the first thing which sounded

like fame to him was the tidings that he was read on the banks of the

Ohio. It's different nowadays. The first taste usually comes from

seeing your name placarded on a dead wall between some equally

distinguished rolled oats and a new five-cent cigar. Personally I

think I first saw the 'gypsy' face to face when the Hon. Seneca Bowers

told me that save 'Betsey and I Are Out' he had read no poem but mine

in twenty years. That was my 'Ohio,' though of course Mrs. Hilliard's

request for an author's reading at the Culture Club was an annunciation

in itself. Am I becoming fabulously rich from my royalties? Alas! no;

I must buy too many presentation copies for people who fancy that I

obtain gratis really more than I know what to do with. Shall I write

for the stage? I could as easily write a cook book. Do I give my

autograph? Always, if a stamped envelope is enclosed. One of our

hardest-working presidents daily set apart a time for autographs; why

then should a popular writer pretend that it bores him? He is secretly

tickled, and probably collects autographs himself."

Ruth laughed, but denied that he had exhausted her questions.

"Why did you withhold your name from your masterpiece?" she asked.

"Partly because it was my masterpiece,--it would be false modesty to

deny that I know it,--and I had some notion of digging a pit for the

critics. But the main reason was to confound my Uncle Peter."

"I didn't know you had an uncle."

"I haven't in the flesh. 'Uncle Peter' is generic--a polite lumping

together of my chronic fault-finders within the family and without.

You know him. Both masculine and feminine, he's eternally an old

woman. Everybody knows Uncle Peter, the first to censure and the last

to praise. Now, as I've been his especial tidbit and awful example for

years, I had to school myself to the thought of snatching the daily

morsel of gossip from his mouth. The murder out, Uncle Peter's grief

is pitiful. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth is a prophecy of

evil unfulfilled! It's not that he considers I've gone to work,

incorrigible vagabond that I am; it's the fact that my intolerable

idling has produced money which sets his teeth on edge--money, the

golden calf of Uncle Peter's narrow idolatrous soul."

Ruth had no liking for his moments of acid mockery.

"Don't let Uncle Peter overshadow your friends," she warned.

"I'll not," promised the man. "And you--by what witchery of friendship

did you find me out?" He shifted his seat, seeking her eyes. "Ruth,

was it love?"

She did not answer immediately.

"Be my wife, Ruth," he said.

"It was not love," she replied simply.

It was one of the oddities of his temperament that at this moment he

saw himself objectively. What a subdued neutral tinted thing was life!

By all the canons of romance it was now his cue for perfervid speech.

"What then?" he asked quietly.

"Liking--a real liking."

"Will it grow warmer?"

"I cannot tell."

"I will teach you to love me," he declared, his artistic self nudging

him meanwhile that he had dropped into the worn formula of the ages.

Ruth did not deny him the attempt, and he undertook a lesson on the

spot, pointing out that they saw life through similar eyes; that art,

music, literature spoke with a common voice; that if true marriage were

perfect companionship, the auguries were not uncertain in their happy

omen; so on till he wearied her with argument.

"All those things refine love," she put in at last, a little wistfully;

"they are not its essence. A man may be a barbarian and yet lovable."

He desisted at that, and presently went away. Out of doors her words

clothed themselves with a personal application. Shelby--lovable

barbarian!--was entering the gate.

Of what immediately followed neither man retained a clear recollection.

It was a clash of temperaments hopelessly at odds, in which the spoken

word weighed little beside the mute antipathy jaundicing the mind. Yet

the word played no small part in the sequel. Graves assured Shelby

that he should spare no effort to compass his defeat; while Shelby in

his turn suggested that the zest of the campaign would be doubled if

Graves were only his ridiculous opponent.

Puzzling how the quarrel could have begun and hurried to its climax so

swiftly, Bernard Graves swung up the street heedless of his steps.

Then the bland colonial facade of the public library confronted him

like a smirking face and, as his vagrant fancy trifled with the

conceit, its lips opened to emit two chattering girls.

"I was the tenth on the waiting-list," said one.

He saw that she spoke of his own volume which she held in a triumphant

embrace with a box of caramels, and was filled with a nauseated disgust

for his handiwork. Retracing his steps he climbed to the _Whig_

office, and finding Sprague at his desk, he swept a pile of exchanges

from a chair and drew it to the editor's elbow.

"Volney," he asked, "does this talk of an independent movement against

Ross Shelby amount to anything?"

Sprague's eye lit.

"It's gathering headway every minute," he declared. "We require just

one thing--a candidate of prominence and backbone."

Graves reached past the paste-pot to capture a fugitive match.

"What do you say to me?"

"What do I say!" Unwinding his long legs from his chair rounds the

editor dealt his friend a clap between the shoulders which sent his

cigarette spinning to the floor. "I say you're a trump."

Sprague had not a little in common with the type in the political

cosmos which is contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England

stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration

than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences

for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended

transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political

recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and

Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had

to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man

he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of

the _Whig_, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star,"

whose practical application led him over highways which knew not

macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's

proposal, nor did it astonish him. From his office window he had

chanced to overlook the stormy meeting of the suitors, but he gave

Graves no hint.

"With any other candidate I can think of," he declared, "this movement

would merely signify the protest of a self-respecting minority; with

you, the author of the famous Samothrace ode,--gad! I think it augurs

victory by a handsome majority."

Graves colored.

"I had forgotten the ode," he confessed. "Couldn't we eliminate that

from the campaign?"

"Eliminate it! Why, boy, it's half your platform."

"Is it?" said the novice, drearily. "Oh, very well. I thought I

should like to run on the moral issue. Shelby is corrupt, and the

other party is certain to name some creature who would out-Shelby

Shelby if he got the chance. That seems to me issue enough for a third

candidate without dragging in my verses. I'm sick of them."

"Do you find your royalties a nuisance?"

"Don't be banal, Volney. You understand me. I don't want to be the

one-sided artist merely; I want to do things as well as write about

them, and I want the provinces separate."

Sprague laughed paternally.

"If I'm not to be banal, neither must you be impracticable. It's the

ode that makes you available and enables you to do things, and there

can be no question of dividing your personality as King Louis

something-or-other tried to do. You have placed yourself in my hands.

Very good. I assure you that I can nominate you. You should therefore

defer to my judgment. You owe me that."

"Of course."

"Yes; well, then. Congressman Graves that is to be, here is the

situation in a nutshell: In Tuscarora Shelby has gained ground because

of the Kiska affair. Little Poland has his lithograph in every window.

Elsewhere in the Demijohn I've reason to know that he's in exceedingly

bad odor, and that a third ticket would draw no end of support from

thinking voters who like Shelby little, but the other party less. At

present, you see, it's frying-pan or fire for them." The editor paused

to charge a discolored corn-cob pipe. "Now your coming changes all

that," he continued, tilting back in the wreathing smoke. "I tell you

it warms my heart to think of you opposing Shelby; it's a draught of

Falernian, no less. It's logically, it's romantically, fitting that

you who unmasked his plagiarism should battle with him at the polls.

Moreover, your discovery puts such a feather in your cap at the outset.

You've proved your political acuteness; you've won your spurs. It's

town talk that the credit is yours,--I acknowledge it whenever

asked,--and now that you are to enter the field, I'll blazon it to the

four winds."

"If the world takes it as placidly as New Babylon, it will do us little

good."

"Ah, but the world isn't so stupid," retorted Sprague, beginning to

rummage his chaotic desk. "There, sir," he went on, dragging a bundle

of newspaper clippings to the surface, "there is the world's opinion of

the exposure. Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, Utica, Syracuse,

Troy--you'll find the comments of every important city in the state

voiced by reputable journals; New York--why, New York gave it three

editorials, not one of them less than two sticks. No utterance of the

_Whig_ ever attracted such attention. I tell you, man, that, your poem

aside, your advent in politics with this thing to your credit makes you

a figure of state importance; with the ode--gad, sir, your canvass is

of national concern."

"It sounds like a dream of Colonel Mulberry Sellers's," laughed Graves,

but he warmed to the editor's mood. "You're sure I can have the

nomination? We're flying in the face of the Boss and all his works."

Sprague flung out his thin hands impatiently.

"I have told you that it rests with me."

The tyro dropped an acute, if indiscreet, observation.

"It seems to me," said he, "that you are something of a boss yourself."

"Every cause must have a leader. I have been the consistent head and

front of the protest against Shelbyism, and the independent movement is

of my creating. Why shouldn't I name the candidate?"

Bernard Graves retreated hastily from this ticklish corner, and put

forward a vague supposition that there would have to be "caucuses,

conventions, and things."

"Independent nominations are made by certificate."

"Oh," said the young man, meekly, "I see;" which was disingenuous. He

silently debated whether this meant a species of letter of

recommendation, but was shy of asking.

Sprague mercifully enlightened him.

"I've the law right here," he went on, tapping a calf-bound manual

which Graves eyed with profound respect. "An independent nomination

for Congress requires at least a thousand signers who must be electors

of the district. We've ample time; it's a good three weeks before we

need file our certificate with the Secretary of State, and a fortnight

would answer to secure the minimum. But we'll not content ourselves

with the minimum; the greater our list of signers, the stronger our

argument in the campaign. Voters are gregarious, you know."

"I've noticed the importance of bell-wethers," Graves remarked dryly.

"Oh, but don't asperse the intelligence of the flock," deprecated the

reformer quickly. "I've been thought to idealize The People; perhaps I

do, but it is good for a man to keep sweet his faith in humanity.

There's a saying of Emerson's that fits the case if I could remember

it." He scoured his memory absently for an interval. "Well, no

matter. It occurs to me that we'll need an emblem for our ticket. The

law requires us to select some device. The eagles, ballot-boxes,

roosters, stars, and the like have all been preempted, and aren't

strikingly significant anyhow. We want something telling--a graphic

symbol of our aim. You are a man of imagination; what is your notion?"

The man of imagination considered, and the editor's excess of nervous

force spent itself in idle forays about his desk, one of which brought

forth a foot-rule; whirling in the eager fingers, it proved an

inspiration.

"Why not--" Graves began; "no, not that--a square, a carpenter's

square. It symbolizes everything we stand for."

"Bravo! It's a slogan to win with. Square issues, square dealing,

square men! We'll placard every fence and barn door in the district.

A woodcut will cost next to nothing, and I'll run the posters off right

here on the premises."

The suggestion bruised Graves's sensibilities.

"Is that necessary?" he protested mildly. "I'd really prefer to leave

all that sort of vandalism to the other side; it's so philistine, you

know."

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

Volney Sprague's flaming posters in black and red menaced Shelby from

the selvage of the district to the threshold of his door. The State

Committee had despatched him on a brief stumping tour, embracing a

handful of canal counties, a section of the grape belt, and certain

strategic points in the Southern Tier, and he had kept in fairly

regular communication with Bowers; but while that leader's letters were

usually as terse and meaty as Caesar's campaign jottings in Gaul, they

somehow failed to impress the candidate with the actual condition of

his political fences. It was therefore with the shock of almost

complete surprise that he entered his proper bailiwick to find Bernard

Graves's opposition regarded seriously. Saloons, cigar stores, street

corners, the billiard room of the Tuscarora House, all his familiar

haunts, buzzed with the vote-getting possibilities of an independent

ticket in a community where regularity had become well-nigh a fetich.

Bowers was rudderless and irritable.

"I advised you to conciliate young Graves," he fretted. "And what

have you done? Stroked him the wrong way ever since. I hope it's a

lesson to you to keep politics and petticoats apart."

Shelby jeered at his inconsistency.

"You were good enough to suggest that I make up to the woman in the

case."

"Not in the thick of a campaign."

Shelby's optimism was not easily dashed and he laid an energetic

shoulder to the lagging wheel. His associate's rebound from depression

was less elastic, and the candidate's thoughts furrowed a channel they

had frequently taken of late. It was plain to him that the older man

was no longer equal to the requirements of his leadership. Sound in

judgment, shrewd in the reading of men, vigorous in action as he once

had been, and on occasion could be still, he was nevertheless of an

earlier and more leisured school of politics than the present lively

generation which knew not Joseph. They knew other things--the

youngsters--strange methods of the city ward; and the philosophic

observers, who on all sides think they descry evidence of the

corruption of the country by the city, would have glibly explained to

the Hon. Seneca Bowers the causes of his inefficiency. He had come to

rely more and more on his sprightly deputy, till now, virtual county

leader and his party's candidate, Shelby, double-weighted, prepared to

wage the battle of his life.

The demands upon his time were incessant. He would rise in his

unlovely room at the Tuscarora House, leaden from insufficient sleep,

to be buttonholed before he breakfasted--sometimes, even before he

dressed; this man must be placated, that threatened, the other

convinced by reason; another must be visited in sickness, another found

work, for yet another must gratuitous lawyering be done--all this with

jovial front and a camel's capacity for drink. This was his

domesticity, amidst which must be sandwiched conferences and

journeyings in Tuscarora County and the other counties of his district,

and speeches on behalf of the party outside the Demijohn, entailed by

too successful stumping in the past. Capping all was the perverse

closet-reformer, Sprague, and his figurehead, Graves.

Shelby was a believer in short campaigns, and the time left the

independents for attack was brief. They retrieved the handicap by

added vigor, and subjected his every public act to merciless scrutiny.

Sprague formulated the case against him in an early issue of the

_Whig_:--

"We are asked," he wrote, "to publish our specific reasons for

rejecting this candidate. We gladly comply. The counts of his

indictment are many; we select five:--

"We refuse to support a candidate of any party whatsoever whose

nomination issues from dishonest primaries. It is notorious that the

caucuses preliminary to this man's nomination were packed. Can you

gainsay it, Mr. Shelby?

"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination never so spotless,

who degrades himself and the office to which he aspires by the theft of

another's intellectual property. Can you deny your plagiarism, Mr.

Shelby?

"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination irreproachable,

his sense of mine and thine otherwise undulled, whose legislative

record is tainted by traffickings peculiar to the Black Horse

Cavalry--wanton blackmailers of corporate rights. It is of common

knowledge that this man introduced in the last session a bill aimed at

the legitimate profits of a great surface railway system, which he

withdrew for no reason of public record. Can you make affidavit that

the subsequent sale of a block of that same railway's stock by your

business associate was without relevance, Mr. Shelby?

"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination unimpeachable, his

intellectual honesty unchallenged, his legislative record without

stain, who, posing as the champion of our canals, nevertheless lends

himself, through connivance at fraudulent contracts and the appointment

of needless officials, to the squandering of the moneys set apart for

their use. We invite you to disprove your complicity in the wasting of

the state's millions, Mr. Shelby.

"We refuse, lastly, to support a candidate, be his nomination as

unsullied as his personal integrity, and his legislative career as free

from 'strikes' as his advocacy of our pirate-infested waterways is

disinterested, who is yet so slavishly the henchman of his party

machine that no measure it may propose is too unsavory to enlist his

Dugald Dalgetty loyalty. By your closed lips you countenance the

land-jobbing steal which your great state Boss failed by the merest

fluke to saddle upon the River and Harbor Bill passed by the last

Congress, and purposes to press anew;--dare you vote against your

owner, Mr. Shelby?"

To all of which, reiterated and emphasized in pamphlet, broadside,

poster, and stump speech, Shelby said publicly never a word, professing

himself a believer in the policy of dignified silence. He touched the

matter after an impersonal fashion with Bowers, however, as they read

the onslaught.

"Give me the liquor habit, the tobacco habit, the opium habit, singly

or all together," said he, "but preserve me from the vice of rhetoric."

Bowers had not this fine detachment.

"I don't wish to nose into your private concerns, Ross," he began, with

visible embarrassment, "but this third count implicates me. I'd like

to ask whether that stock I sold for you in Wall Street last winter was

yours by--by--"

"By bona fide purchase?" whipped in Shelby. "Yes, sir; out and out.

Do you think me as big a fool as this dream-chaser pretends I am?"

"No, no."

"Nobody should know better than you why that bill was introduced. You

brought it to me from the Boss. Those railway people forgot that their

party can't run campaigns on wind, and in his own way he jogged their

memory. I saw that. As for the stock--your skirts are clear. You

merely sold in a rising market what I bought in a falling one. If my

position gave me a speculative advantage, it's my own business--nobody

else's--not even the Hon. Seneca Bowers's."

The county leader's working features did not resemble General Grant's.

In that unhappy moment he experienced the pangs of unhonored parenthood.

Presently he put out his hand.

"I'm sorry I offended you, Ross. I supposed myself too seasoned a

campaigner to mind mud-slinging."

Shelby laughed apologies away and they parted friends. On the

threshold it occurred to Bowers to ask:--

"Who is this Dalgetty fellow Sprague mentions? I never heard of him in

politics."

"Nor I. Some ward heeler he thinks I resemble, I guess."

"He'd have made his point stronger by taking somebody that the plain

people know. That's something mugwumps never learn."

"And there's another thing they don't grasp," Shelby added. "One

personal talk with the average voter will outweigh enough high-toned

editorials to sink a ship. When the reformer begins to rub shoulders

in all sorts of places with all sorts of men his halo won't be so

luminous; perhaps he won't call himself a reformer at all--just

politician, perhaps; but he'll saw wood."