As a matter of fact, the independent candidate did give the
shoulder-rubbing process a trial. Within the by no means contracted
limits of Volney Sprague's paper-and-ink horizon the flurry of the
attack on Shelby threw its ripples far, but Graves shortly damped the
editor's professional delight by the remark that he had been assured of
no man's vote because of it.
"There's the pity of our lack of time," frowned Sprague. "An
educational campaign can hardly be too long. Many a demagogue has
failed of election because we vote in November and not in dog-days."
"You'll have to admit that you've merely revamped old material. It's
no news that Shelby has packed caucuses, stolen speeches, blackmailed
corporations, jobbed canal contracts, and grovelled to the Boss."
"True," admitted Sprague, ruefully.
"We need the concrete to convince. Take this canal scandal: we've seen
contracts go to Shelby's adherents on unbalanced bids, and the Ditch
swarms with his useless inspectors at four dollars a day; but can you
bring wrong-doing home to him?"
"To prove the Champion of Canals' complicity--what a master stroke!"
The morning after he popped into the young man's study, to the lasting
detriment of a triolet.
"We can prove it," he exclaimed. "Gad! We can prove it!"
Graves regretfully dropped a blotter over his manuscript and advanced a
chair.
"I've suspected that there were men in this town who could lay Shelby
by the heels, were they to tell all they knew. The problem was to draw
them."
"You can't expect his understrappers to quarrel with their bread and
butter."
"No; that has been the stone of stumbling precisely, but we've got
around it. In this blessed case, Shelby himself did the quarrelling,
and thereby delivered himself into our hands."
Bernard Graves sat up.
"What have you found out?"
"I've found a man who seems to know of Shelby's crookedness, and is
willing to tell what he knows."
"Well?"
"Jap Hinchey."
Graves's face lengthened.
"That beast," said he.
"Did you expect a Sir Galahad for such a service?"
"What would the word of such a man avail?"
"As much as any informer's; it isn't a chivalrous office."
"Nor is ours in employing it, to my thinking; informer and reformer
sound perilously near alike. Still, as you delicately imply, we're not
Knights of the Round Table. What has the sot had to say to you?"
"Well, the fact is he hasn't told me anything specific," Sprague had to
admit. "The matter is still under negotiation, as one may say. Jasper
is coy."
"Oh!"
The lukewarm monosyllable voiced disillusionment. With a partial
return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly
told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was
trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, not to say
Micawberesque; and that his own wisdom in venturing for such a cause,
with such a pilot, on such uncharted seas, was questionable to a degree.
Sprague was not devoid of intuition.
"I'm not rainbow-hunting this time," he put in quickly. "The fellow
knows something interesting, and he's ready to out with it. He was
employed in the Eureka quarries during the canal improvement, and saw
things, he says, that we would like to hear."
"You talked with him?"
"Yes; he accosted me in a side street late last night."
"If he's anxious to inform and reform, why doesn't he? I don't like
the look of it. What does he want?"
"You."
"He wants me?"
"He said he would speak plainly with you."
Graves's revulsion was fairly physical.
"You manage it, Volney," he entreated. "You will know how."
Sprague shook his head.
"He was positive on that point. It must be you or nobody."
"I doubt if it's worth while."
The editor lost patience.
"It was you who reminded me that we lacked the concrete. Now I offer
it to you."
"But in such a shape!"
"Can you quibble over that--and in politics?"
"No one who knows Jap Hinchey's character would believe him under oath."
Sprague's reply was astute.
"I'm thinking of those who don't know him," said he. "The district is
wide."
"And an affidavit is an affidavit?" His smile was sardonic. "Very
well. I'll see him. What is Jap's At Home?"
"You will find him fishing on the dock behind his shanty, probably.
I'd follow this thing up promptly, Bernard."
"Yes," promised the candidate, listlessly. "I will."
Alone, he fingered his manuscript, read it drearily, and of a sudden
tore it into little bits, the mood which gendered it gone beyond
recall. The sordid necessity of seeing Hinchey taught him afresh the
folly of his dabbling in politics at all, and his whole being revolted
against the contact with humanity in the raw which even mugwumpery
seemed to entail. Left to himself, Sprague might have headed his own
John Brown raid into the established order of things; led it with
brilliancy perhaps, in any case with honest zeal. Yet the root of his
discontent struck rather deeper than Jasper Hinchey and the cold
waterish zone of reform; Ruth had her part in it. He somehow reasoned
that his course merited her approval and encouragement; it had met with
banter. So gyved, lagged the hope of the independents to his task.
Few towns, however small, lack their moral plague-spot, and Graves's
errand bent him toward New Babylon's, a web of alleys styled the Flats,
spun behind the business centre among the docks and rotting warehouses
of a vanished commerce. The Flats had its business too--groggeries and
a music hall where "sacred concerts" were given on Sunday nights and
men had been stabbed on pay-day; groggeries, the music hall--and worse.
The young man threaded gingerly into its dingy precincts, and by dint
of a handful of Italian, picked up in a Roman winter's sojourn to be
oddly practised on a local washerwoman sousing gay garments in the
amber fluid of the Erie Canal, he singled out the Hinchey hovel from
the squalid score it resembled. Before the sagging threshold tumbled a
many-complexioned brood of children,--they seemed a very dozen,--and in
the doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's
mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the
alley, suppressing such of his five senses as he could shift without,
and ascertained that the degenerate Jasper, true to prophecy, was
fishing from the dock in the rear.
"Good afternoon," said the caller, affably, he thought.
Jasper grunted without lifting his eyes from his float.
"What do you catch here?" pursued the candidate, beaming
good-fellowship.
The line suddenly drew taut, and a muddy fish whipped through the
sunshine within a scant inch of Graves's nose.
"Bullheads," answered the laconic Hinchey.
The visitor was disconcerted.
"You--er--eat them?" he remarked blankly, eyeing first the
beery-looking water and then the ugly fish.
"Naw," sneered Jap. "I'm foundin' 'n 'quarium." He tossed the
bullhead into a pail, and, spying a piccaninny scudding round a corner,
called: "Here, you chocolate drop, take this yer fish ter yer mammy.
Two mor,' 'n' I'll hev 'nuff fer supper. Set down," he added to his
guest.
"Thanks," said Bernard, hunting vainly for a clean spot on the
string-piece. He lit a cigarette as a sanitary precaution, and
bethought him to offer one to Hinchey.
"None o' them coffin-nails fer me," declined the Spartan. "I smokes
men's terbacker."
Graves gave him a cigar which he chanced to have about him.
"I don't seem to have a match left," he observed, fumbling in his
pockets.
Jasper Hinchey calmly relieved him of his cigarette, lit his cigar with
it, and restored the costly importation, malodorous of fish. At the
earliest opportunity Graves dropped it in the canal, a transaction duly
noted by Jap.
"I've been told you have something to say to me," the young man said
briskly, his social obligations seeming fully paid, and his eagerness
to be gone swamping diplomacy.
Jasper rebaited his hook, impaling the wriggling earthworm with a
solicitude worthy of comparison with Isaac Walton's refined martyrdom
of frogs.
"Yes," he drawled; "I kind o' 'magine I hev."
Bernard curbed his impatience while Jap spat with deadly aim at an
eddying chip.
"S'pose you know I've knocked round in pol'tics some?"
The young man said that he did. He thought "knocked" a felicitous
word. Jasper Hinchey's public services had been heavy-fisted, relating
chiefly to voting blocks of drunken Poles and Italians in warmly
contested town elections.
"I've helped 'lect mor'n one feller t' office in my day. Take Ross
Shelby now: both times he run fer th' 'Sembly I worked like a nailer.
'Cause why? He done right by me. Why I luved that cuss like--like--"
he hesitated for a simile--"like my own son," he added, with the
passing of one of his brood, and forthwith whacked the youngster for
overturning the bait can. "Jes' like my own son. An' so I should
still ef he hedn't done me dirt; ef he'd ben square. Now, you're
square."
"I try to be," returned Bernard, ravished by the tribute. "That's my
platform in this campaign, you know."
"Yes; jes' so. An' I rather 'magine I'll vote yer way."
"Thank you."
"Pro-vi-ded," Jasper added, "pro-vi-ded we c'n 'range things."
"Arrange things?"
Jasper's eyes wandered musingly over his interlocutor's face.
"'Range things, I sez, an' I sez it again."
He abandoned something of his drawl. "I 'magine I c'd tell sumpin ef I
tuk a notion."
Graves brooked his tone with difficulty.
"I shouldn't be here if I didn't think so too," he answered coolly.
"Jes' so," agreed Jasper, absorbed in a sinker. "I c'd tell sumpin
erbout a party thet I 'magine you'd cock yer ear t' hear."
"Shelby?"
"I 'magine I didn't jes' quite say. No, I 'magine not."
"If you will exercise your imagination less, Mr. Hinchey, and say
plainly what you have to say, I shall be obliged," retorted Bernard,
exasperated by his shiftiness.
Jasper was unmoved.
"Easy t' see _you_ ain't ben in pol'tics long. Wall, whut I've got t'
say is this: I used t' work fer this party off 'n' on,--this party
whose name I ain't a-mentionin'. He wuz in pol'tics too. Likewise run
a quarry an' s'm'other things t' num'rous t' mention. 'Twas in the
quarry I worked, mostly erbout 'lection time. Cur'ous, ain't it, whut
good pay a feller'll git fer light work erbout 'lection time? Wall,
this year I ain't hed proper treatment. This party 'lows money is
tight, an' he's filled his quarry up with dagoes, damned dagoes." He
paused to scowl over the shanties of his immediate neighbors and at the
industrious washerwoman up the dock. "Wouldn't it make you sick th'
way furrin labor's a-crowdin' out th' true 'Merican? I jes' despise
dagoes."
Graves was too disgusted to reply. He recollected having heard a negro
speak contemptuously of Jews, but this case seemed yet more extreme.
"Wall," pursued the true American, "I wuz with this party a spell when
th' state tuk a notion t' sink a few s'perfluous millyuns in this ole
ditch."
The listener became all attention.
"Queer doin's I seen long erbout then. Contractors is a scand'lous
lot. Many's the load o' dirt I seen hauled out thet easy, whut th'
state paid fer ez blasted rock. My, yes. But my party wuzn't workin'
at contractin'; he wuz workin' at contractors, an' he knew 'em, lock,
stock, and bar'l. He jes' owned th' whole blim pack. Thet's where his
rake-off come in. 'Twant all dirt them daisies tuk out. There wuz as
fustclass sandstun ez my party ever shipped f'm his quarry, an' f'm his
quarry docks it went."
"You mean that this man connived with the contractors to misappropriate
state property?"
"I 'magine I do."
"And your party is Shelby?"
"Never said no sech thing."
"It's what you imply clearly enough. Now, if you wish to help us, as
you told Mr. Sprague, you must say precisely who and what you mean, and
swear to it before Mr. Sprague, who is a notary public."
Jasper straightened.
"Fer nothin'?" His tone was inimitable.
Bernard Graves looked him coldly in the eye.
"We're not bribing people."
The loafer raised his hulking body and leered over him; the young man
got upon his feet, half expecting assault.
"Anything we can do for you in a legitimate way, we will do," he added
steadily.
"I want t' know."
"You can find me at Mr. Sprague's office any morning between ten and
twelve."
Jasper Hinchey surveyed him with scorn as he turned to go. Fumbling in
his rags, he extracted a greasy card.
"P'r'aps you'd buy a twenty-five cent ticket fer th' Jolly Rovers'
picnic," he insinuated. "Mebbe it's not too stiff fer yer purse. They
say ez how 'tis well lined, Mr. Graves."
"Do you know that the Penal Code makes soliciting a candidate to buy
tickets a misdemeanor?"
Hinchey smirked.
"A party whut I know buys 'em without askin'," said he.
Jasper Hinchey did not call at the _Whig_ office any morning between
ten o'clock and twelve. It developed that he was engaged in some not
too arduous labor at the quarries of the Eureka Sandstone Company.