Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Something swished through the air from behind Clive’s head. Page [137].

Caleb Conover, Railroader

By

ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE

Author of “Syria from the Saddle,” “Dr. Dale” (in collaboration with Marion Harland), “Columbia Stories,” Etc.

New York

CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Publishers

Copyright, 1907, by

ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE.

Entered at Stationers’ Hall.

All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

(Facsimile Page of Manuscript from CALEB CONOVER, Railroader)

CALEB CONOVER,

RAILROADER

CHAPTER I
CALEB CONOVER RECEIVES

“The poor man!” sighed Mrs. Greer. “He must think he’s a cemetery!”

The long line of carriages was passing solemnly through a mighty white marble arch, aglare with electric light, leading into the “show place” of Pompton Avenue.

Athwart the arch’s pallid face, in raised letters a full foot in length were the words:

“CALEB CONOVER, R.R., 1893.”

In the ghastly, garish illumination, above the slow-moving procession of sombre vehicles, the arch and its inscription gave gruesome excuse for Mrs. Greer’s comment. She herself thought the phrase rather apt, and stored it away for repetition.

Her husband, a downy little man, curled up miserably in the other corner of the brougham, read her thought, from long experience, and twisted forward into what he liked to think was a commanding attitude.

“Look here!” he protested. “You’ve got to stop that. It’s bad enough to have to come here at all, without your spoiling everything with one of those Bernard Shawisms of yours. Why, if it ever got back to Conover’s ears——”

“He’d withdraw his support? And then good-by to Congress for the unfortunate Talbot Firth Greer?”

“Just that. He’ll stand all sorts of criticism about his start in life. In fact, he revels in talking of his rise to anyone who’ll listen. But when it comes to guying anything in his present exalted——”

“What does the ‘R. R.’ at the end of his name over the gate stand for? I’ve seen the inscription often enough, but——”

“‘Railroader.’ He uses it as a sort of title. Life for him is one long railroad, and——”

“And now we’re to do him honor at the terminus?”

“If you like to put it that way. Perhaps ‘junction’ would hit it closer. It was awfully good of you, Grace, to come. I——”

“Of course it was. If I didn’t want a try at Washington I’d never have dared it. It will be in all the papers to-morrow. He’ll see to that. And then—I hate to think what everyone will say. I suppose we’re the first civilized people who ever passed under that atrocious hanging mortuary chapel, aren’t we?”

“Hardly as bad as that. If it’s any comfort to you, there are plenty more in the same box as ourselves, to-night.”

“But surely everybody in Granite can’t want to run for Congress?”

“No. But enough people have axes of their own to grind to make it worth their while to visit the Conover whetstone. When a man who can float companies at a word, boom or smash a dozen different stocks, swing the Legislature, make himself heard from here to Washington, and carries practically every newspaper in the Mountain State in his vest pocket; when——”

“When such a man whistles, there are some people who find it wise not to be deaf. But what on earth does he want us for?”

“The world-old ambition that had its rise when Cain and Abel began moving in separate sets. The longing to ‘butt in,’ as Caleb himself would probably call it. He has everything money and political power can give. And now he wants the only thing left—what he terms ‘social recognition.’”

“And we are to help——”

“No. We’re to let him think we help. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, assisted by a score of Conover’s own freight derricks, couldn’t hoist that cad into a decent crowd. He’s been at it ever since he got his first million and married poor little Letty Standish. She was the fool of her family, and a broken family at that. But still it was a family. Yet it didn’t land Caleb anywhere. Then, when that unlicked cub of a son of his grew up, he made another try. But you know how that turned out. Now that his daughter’s captured a more or less authentic prince, I suppose he thinks the time has come. Hence to-night’s——”

“What a blow to his hopes it must have been to have the girl marry in Paris instead of here at Granite! But I suppose the honeymoon in America and this evening’s reception are the next best thing. Are we never to get there?”

“Soon enough, I’m afraid. Conover boasts that he’s laid out his grounds so that the driveway is a measured half-mile. We’ll be there in another minute or so.”

Mrs. Greer laughed a little nervously.

“It’ll be something to remember anyway,” said she. “I suppose all sorts of horrible people will be there. I read a half-page account of it this morning in the Star, and it said that ‘while the proudest families of Granite would delight to do Mr. Conover honor, the humbler associates of political and business life would also be present.’ Did you ever hear anything more delicious? And in the Star, too!”

“His own paper. Why not? I suppose we’re the ‘proudest families’; and the ‘humbler associates’ are some of the choice retinue of heelers who do his dirty work. Lord! what a notice of it there’ll be in to-morrow’s papers! Washington will have to be very much worth while to make up for this. If only I——”

“Hush!” warned Mrs. Greer, as the carriage lurched to a halt, in the pack before a great porte-cochère. “We’re actually here at last. See! There goes Clive Standish up the steps with the Polissen girls and old Mr. Polissen. There are a few real human beings here, after all. Why do you suppose——?”

“H’m!” commented Greer, “Polissen’s ‘long’ on Interstate Canal, the route Conover’s C. G. & X. Road is threatening to put out of business. But why young Standish——”

“Why not? Letty Conover’s own nephew. Though I did hear he and the Conovers were scarcely on speaking terms. He——”

“I fancy that’s because Standish’s ‘Mayflower’ back is too stiff to bend at the crack of Caleb’s whip. He could have made a mighty good thing of his law business if Conover had backed him. But I understand he refuses to ally himself with his great relative-in-law, and prefers a good social position and a small law practice——”

“Rather than go to Congress?” finished his wife with such sweet innocence that Greer could only glare at her with flabby helplessness. Before he could think of an apt retort, the brougham was at the foot of the endless marble steps, and its late occupants were passing up a wide strip of velvet between rows of vividly liveried footmen.

Caleb Conover, Railroader, was standing just within the wide doorway of a drawing-room that seemed to stretch away into infinity. Behind rose an equally infinite vista of heads and shoulders. But the loudly blended murmur of many voices that is the first thing to strike the ear of arriving guests at such functions was conspicuously absent. The scarce-broken hush that spread through the chain of rooms seemed to bear out still further Mrs. Greer’s mortuary simile.

But the constraint in no way extended to the host himself. The strong, alert face, with its shrewd light eyes and humorous mouth, was wreathed in welcoming smiles that seemed to ripple in a series of waves from the close-cut reddish hair to the ponderous iron jaw. The thickset form of the Railroader, massive of shoulder and sturdily full of limb, was ever plunging forward to grip some favored newcomer by the hand, or darting to one side or the other as he whispered instructions to servant or relative.

“I congratulate you on your friend’s repose of manner!” whispered Mrs. Greer, as she and her husband awaited their turn. “He has all the calm self-assurance of a jumping jack.”

“But there are springs of chilled steel in the jumping jack,” whispered Greer. “He’s out of his element, and he knows it. But he isn’t so badly confused for all that. If you saw him at a convention or a board meeting, you wouldn’t know him for the same——”

“And there’s his poor little wife, looking as much like a rabbit as ever! She’s a cipher here; and even her husband’s figure in front of her doesn’t raise the cipher to the tenth power. I suppose that is the daughter, to Mrs. Conover’s left? The slender girl with the rust-colored hair and the brown eyes? She’s prettier and more of a thoroughbred in looks than I should have——”

“That’s not his daughter. That’s Miss Lanier, Conover’s secretary. His daughter is the——”

“His secretary? Why, is she receiving?”

“She is his secretary and everything else. She came here three years ago as Blanche’s governess. To give the poor girl a sort of winding-up polish before Caleb sent her to Europe. She made all sorts of a hit with Conover. Principally because she’s the only person on earth who isn’t afraid of him, so I hear. And now she is secretary, and major domo, and ‘right-hand man,’ and I don’t know what not else. Mrs. Conover’s only a ‘cipher,’ as you say, and Miss Alice Lanier—not Caleb—is the ‘figure’ in front of her. That’s the new-made princess, to the right. The tall one with the no-colored hair. I suppose that’s the Prince d’Antri beside her.”

“He’s too handsome to be a very real prince. What a face for a sculptor or——”

“Or a barber. A beard like that——”

A gorgeously apparelled couple just in front of the Greers, in the line, moved forward within the zone of Conover’s greeting. Caleb nodded patronizingly to the man, and more civilly to the woman.

“Mr. Conover,” the latter was murmuring in an anguish of respectful embarrassment, “’tis a great honor you do me and the man, askin’ us here to-night with all your stylish friends, an’——”

“Oh, there’s more than your husband and me, here, who’d get hungry by habit if they heard a noon whistle blow,” laughed Conover, as with a jerk of his red head and a word of pleasant welcome, he passed them on down the reception line. Then the Railroader’s light, deep-set eyes fell on Greer, and he stepped forward, both hands outstretched.

“Good evening, Greer!” he cried, and there was a subcurrent of latent power in his hearty voice. “Good evening! Pleased to see you in my house. Mrs. Greer, I presume? Most kind of you to come, ma’am. Proud to make your acquaintance. Letty!”—summoning with a jerk of the head an overdressed, frightened-looking little woman from the line behind him—“Letty, this is my very good friend, Mr. Talbot Firth Greer—Mrs. Conover—Mr. and Mrs. Greer. Mr. Greer is the next Congressman from the Eleventh District. (That’s a little prophecy, Mr. Greer. You can gamble on its coming true.) My daughter, Princess d’Antri—Mr. and Mrs. Greer. Prince Amadeo d’Antri. My secretary, Miss Anice Lanier—Mr. and Mrs.——”

A new batch of guests swarmed down the hall toward the host, and the ordeal was over. The Greers, swept on in the rush, did not hear Conover’s next greeting. This was rather a pity, since it differed materially from that lavished upon themselves.

Its recipient was a big young man, with a shock of light hair and quiet, dark eyes. He wore his clothes well, and looked out of place in his vulgar, garish surroundings. Caleb Conover, Railroader, eyed the newcomer all over with a cold, expressionless glance. A glance that no seer on earth could have read; the glance that had gained him more than one victory when wits and concealment of purpose were rife. Then he held out a grudging hand.

“Well, Mr. Clive Standish,” he observed, “it seems the lion and the lamb lie down together, after all—a considerable distance this side of the millennium. And the lamb inside, at that. To think of a clubman and a cotillon leader, and a first-families scion and a Civic Leaguer and all that sort of thing condescending to honor my poor shanty——”

“My aunt, Mrs. Conover, wrote, asking me especially to come, as a favor to her,” replied the younger man stiffly. “I thought——”

“And you were O. K. in thinking it. I know Letty wrote, because I dictated the letter. I wanted to count you in with the rest to-night, and I had a kind of bashful fear that your love for me, personally, might not be strong enough to fetch you. You’ve got too much sense to think the invite will score either way in our feelings to each other, or that I’m going back on what I said to you four years ago. Now that you’re here, chase in and enjoy yourself. This place is like heaven, to-night, in one way. You’ll see a whole lot of people here you never expected to, and you’ll miss more’n a few you thought would sure belong. Good-by. Don’t let me block your job of heavenly recognition.”

The wilful coarseness and brutality of the man came as no surprise to Standish. He had expected something of the sort, and had braced himself for it. To please his aunt, whom he sincerely pitied, he had entered the Conover house to-night for the first time since the Homeric quarrel, incident on his refusal to avail himself of Caleb’s prestige in his law work, and, incidentally to enroll himself as one of the Railroader’s numberless political vassals. That the roughness to which Conover had just subjected him was no more a part of the former’s real nature than had been the nervous effusiveness of his greeting to the Greers, Clive well knew. It had been intended to cover any embarrassing memories of a former and somewhat less strained acquaintanceship; and as such it—like most of Conover’s moves—had served its turn.

So, resisting his first impulse to depart as he had come, Standish moved on. The formal receiving phalanx was crumpling up. He paused for a moment’s talk with little Mrs. Conover, exchanged a civil word or two with his cousin Blanche and her prince, and then came to where Anice Lanier was trying to make conversation for several awed-looking, bediamonded persons who were evidently horribly ill at ease in their surroundings.

At sight of the girl, the formal lines about Clive’s mouth were broken by a smile of very genuine pleasure. A smile that gave a younger aspect to his grave face, and found ready answer in the brown eyes that met his.

“Haven’t you toiled at a forlorn hope long enough?” he asked, as the awed beings drifted away into the uncomfortable crowd, carrying their burden of jewels with them.

“A forlorn hope?” she queried, puzzled.

“You actually seemed to be trying to galvanize at least a segment of this portentous gathering into a semblance of life. Don’t do it. In the first place you can’t. Saloonkeepers and Pompton Avenue people won’t blend. In the second place, it isn’t expected of you. The papers to-morrow will record the right names just as jealously as if every one had had a good time. Suppose you concentrate all your efforts on me. Come! It will be a real work of charity. For Mr. Conover has just shown me how thoroughly I’m the prodigal. And he didn’t even hint at the whereabouts of a fatted calf. Please be merciful and make me have a good time. It’s months since I’ve seen you to talk to.”

“Then why don’t you come here oftener?” she asked, as they made their way through the press, and found an unoccupied alcove between two of the great rooms. “I’m sure Mrs. Conover——”

“My poor aunt? She’d be frightened to death that Conover and I would quarrel. No, no! To-night is an exception. The first and the last. I persuaded myself I came because of Aunt Letty’s note. But I really came for a chat with you.”

She looked at him, doubting how to accept this bald compliment. But his face was boyish in its sincerity.

“You and I used to be such good friends,” he went on, “and now we never see any more of each other. Why don’t we?”

“I think you know as well as I. You no longer come here—you have not come, I think, since a year before I arrived. And I go almost nowhere since——”

“Since you gave up all your old world and the people who cared for you and became a drudge in the Conover household? If you were to be found anywhere else, you would see so much of me that I’d bore you to extinction. But it would be even unpleasanter for you than for me if I were to call on you here. I miss our old-time talks more than I can say.”

“I miss them, too. Do you remember how we used to argue over politics, and how you always ended by telling me that there were two things no woman could understand, and that politics was one and finance the other?”

“And you would always make the same retort: That woman’s combined ignorance of politics and finance were pure knowledge as compared with the men’s ignorance of women. It wasn’t especially logical repartee, but it always served to shut me up.”

“I wish we had time for another political spat. Some day we must. You see, I’ve learned such a lot about politics—and finance, too—practical politics and finance—since I came here.”

“Decidedly ‘practical,’ I fancy, if Mr. Conover was your teacher. He doesn’t go in much for idealism.”

“And you?” asked Anice, ignoring the slur. “Are you still as rabid as ever in your ideas of reform? But, of course, you are. For I read only last week that you had been elected President of the Civic League. I want to congratulate you. It’s a splendid movement, even though Mr. Conover declares it’s hopeless.”

“Good citizenship is never quite hopeless, even in a boss-ridden community like Granite, and a boss-governed commonwealth like the Mountain State. The people will wake up some day.”

“Their snores sound very peaceful and regular just now,” remarked Anice, with a flippancy whereof she had the grace to be ashamed.

“Perhaps,” he smiled, “the sounds you and Conover mistake for snores may possibly be groans.”

“How delightfully dramatic! That would sound splendidly on the stump.”

“It may have a chance to.”

“What do you mean? Are you going to——”

“No. I am going to run for governor this fall.”

“WHAT?”

“Do you know,” observed Standish, “when you open your eyes that way you really look——”

“Never mind how I look! Tell me about——”

“My campaign? It is nothing yet. But the Civic League is planning one more effort to shake off Conover’s grip on the throat of the Mountain State—another good ‘stump’ line, by the way. And I have been asked to run for governor.”

“But——”

“Oh, yes, I know. Conover holds the Convention in the hollow of his hand. He owns the delegates and the newspapers and the Legislature as well as the railroads. And no sane man would dream of bucking such a combination. But maybe I’m not quite sane. For I’m going to try it. Now laugh all you like.”

“Laugh? I feel more like crying. It’s—it’s knightly and splendid of you, Clive! And—perhaps it may prove less crazy than you think.”

“You mean?”

“I mean nothing at all. I wish you luck, though. All the luck in the world. Tell me more.”

“There is no more. Besides, I’d rather talk about you. Tell me of your life here.”

“There’s nothing to tell. It’s work. Pleasant enough work, even though it’s hard. Everyone is nice to me. I——”

“That doesn’t explain your choosing such a career out of all that were open to you. Why did you take it?”

“I’ve often explained it to you, but you never seem to understand. When father died, he left me nothing. I had my living to make, and——”

“But surely there were a thousand easier, pleasanter ways of earning it than to kill yourself socially by becoming an employee in such a family as this. It can’t be congenial——”

The odd smile in her eyes checked him and gave him a vague sense of uneasiness.

“It is congenial,” said the girl after a pause. “I have my own suite of rooms, my own hours, my own way. I have a natural bent for finance, and business association with Mr. Conover is a real education. The salary is good. My word in all household matters is law. Mr. Conover knows I understand how things should be conducted, and he has grown to rely on me. I am more mistress here than most women in their own homes. Mrs. Conover is ill so much—and Blanche being away——”

“Anice,” he broke in, “I’ve known you since you first went into long dresses. And I know that the reasons you’ve just given are none of them the sort that appeal to a girl like you. To some women they might. But not to you. Why did you come here, and why do you stay? There is some reason you haven’t——”

“’Scuse me, Miss Lanier,” said a voice at the entrance of the alcove, “the Boss sent me to ask you would you come to the drorin’-room. He says the supper-room’s open, an’ he’d like you to soop’rintend things. I’ve been lookin’ everywhere for you. Gee, but goin’ through a bunch of cops in a pool-room raid is pie alongside of workin’ a way through this push.”

The speaker was a squat, swarthy little man on whom his ready-made evening clothes sat with the grace and comfort of a set of thumb screws. Clive recognized him with difficulty as the usually self-assured “Billy” Shevlin, Conover’s most trusted political henchman.

“Very well,” replied Anice Lanier, rising to obey the summons. She noted the dumb misery in Billy’s face, and paused to ask:

“Aren’t you having a good time, Mr. Shevlin?”

“A good time? Me? Oh, yes. Sure, I am. I only hope no one’ll mistake me in this open-face suit for a senator or a mattinay idol. That’s all that’s botherin’ me. I’ve been rubbin’ elbows with the Van Alstynes that own half of Pompton Av’no and live in Yoorup, and with Slat Kerrigan’s wife, who used to push coffee and sinkers at Kerry’s beanery. Oh, I’m in sassiety all right. An’ I feel like a pair of yeller shoes at a fun’ral.”

“Never mind!” laughed Anice. “The supper-room’s open, and you’ll enjoy that part of the evening, at any rate.”

“I will, eh? Not me, Miss! The Boss’s passed the word that the boys is to hold back, and kind of make a noise like innercent bystanders till the swell push is all fed. So it’s me for the merry outskirts while they’re gettin’ their money’s wort’.”

Clive Standish watched them thread their way through the crowd, until Anice’s dainty little head with its crown of shimmering bronze hair was lost to sight. Then he sat looking moodily out on the heterogeneous, ill-assorted company before him.

Now that he had talked with Anice he no longer regretted the impulse that had led him to accept Mrs. Conover’s invitation. The girl had always exerted a subtle charm, a nameless influence, over him. Years before, when he was struggling, penniless, to make a living in a city where his family name opened every door to him, yet where it was more of an impediment than otherwise in his task of bread winning; even then he had worked with a vague, half-formed hope of Anice Lanier sharing his final victory.

Then had come her own financial reverses, her father’s death, and her withdrawal from the world that had known them both. Since that time circumstances had checked their growing intimacy. It was pleasant to Standish to feel that that intimacy and understanding were now renewed almost just where they had left off. His battle for livelihood and success had beaten from him much of the buoyancy that had once been his charm. Anice seemed the one link connecting him with Youth—the link whereby he might one day win his way back to that dear lost country of his boyish hopes and dreams. It would be good to forget, with her, the dreary uphill struggle that was so bitter and youth-sapping when endured alone. Then he laughed grimly at his own silly fantasy, and came back to every-day self-control.

The rooms were clearing. Clive got to his feet and followed the general drift toward the enormous ball-room in the rear of the mansion that had for the occasion been converted into a banquet hall.

On the way he encountered a long, lean, pasty-faced young man who hailed him with a weary:

“Hello, Standish! Didn’t expect to see you here. Beastly bore, isn’t it? And the governor dragged me all the way from New York to show up at it.”

“You spend most of your time in New York nowadays, don’t you, Jerry?” said Clive.

“Say, old chap,” protested young Conover, “cut out the ‘Jerry,’ can’t you? My Christian name’s Gerald. ‘Jerry’ was all right enough when I was a kid in this one-horse provincial hole. But it would swamp a man of my standing in New York.”

Clive had a fair idea of the “standing” in question. A half-baked lad, turned out of Harvard after two years of futile loafing, sent on a trip around the world (that culminated in a delightfully misspent year in Paris), at last coming home with a well-grounded contempt for his native city, and turned loose at his own request on long-suffering New York, with more money than belonged to him and fewer brains than sufficed to keep it. This in a nutshell was the history—so far as the world at large knew—of Caleb Conover’s only son.

From time to time newspaper accounts of beaten cabmen, suppers that ended in police stations, and similar feats of youthful gayety and culture had floated to Granite. Yet Caleb Conover, otherwise so rigid in the matter of appearances, read such accounts with relish, and boasted loudly of the swath his son was cutting in Gotham society. For, on Gerald’s word, Conover was firmly assured that this was the true career of a young man of fashion. It represented all he had missed in his own poverty-fighting early manhood, and he rejoiced in his son’s good times.

Getting rid of Gerald as soon as he decently might, Standish made his way to the supper-room. At a hundred tables sat more or less bored guests. Waiters swirled wildly to and fro. In a balcony above blared an orchestra. At the doors and in a fringe about the edges of the room were grouped the Conover political and business hangers on. The place was hot to suffocation and heavy with the scent of flowers.

Suddenly, through the volume of looser sound, came a succession of sharp raps. The orchestra stopped short. The guests ceased speaking, and craned their necks.

At the far end of the room, under a gaudy floral piece, a man had risen to his feet.

“Speech!” yelled Shevlin, enthusiastically, from a doorway. Then, made aware of his breach of etiquette by a swift but awful glance from his chief, he wilted behind a palm.

But Shevlin had read the signs aright.

Caleb Conover, Railroader, was about to make a speech.

CHAPTER II
CALEB CONOVER MAKES A SPEECH

Conover had broken, that night, two rules that had for years formed inviolate tenets of his life creed. In the first place, he—whose battles had for the most part been won by the cold eye that told nothing, and by the colder brain that dictated the words of his every-day speech as calculatingly as a diplomat dictates a letter of state—he had forced himself to throw away his guard and to chatter and make himself agreeable like any bargain counter clerk. The effort had been irksome.

In the second, he had departed from his fixed habit of total abstinence. The love of strong drink ran high in his blood. Early in life he had decided that such indulgence would militate against success. So he had avoided even the mildest potations from thenceforward. To-night (his usually stolid nerves tense with the excitement of the grand cast he was making for “social recognition”) he had felt, as never before in campaign or in business climax, the need for stimulant to enable him to play his awkward rôle. Moreover—he had his son, Gerald’s, high authority for the statement—total abstinence was no longer in vogue among the elect.

As soon, therefore, as he had taken his seat in the supper-room he had braced himself by a glass of champagne. The unwonted beverage sent a delicious glow through him. His puzzled brain cleared, his last doubts of the entertainment’s success began to fade.

An obsequious waiter at his elbow hastened to refill the glass, and Conover, his eyes darting hither and thither among the guests to single out and dwell on the various faces he had so long and so vainly yearned to see in his house, absent-mindedly emptied it and another after it. He was talking assiduously to Mrs. Van Alstyne, whom at first he had found somewhat frigid and difficult; but who, he now discovered to his surprise, it was growing momentarily easier to entertain. He had had no idea of his own command of language.

Supper was still in its early stages when a fourth glass of heady vintage champagne followed the other three. From doorways and walls his political followers looked on with amaze. To them the sight of the Boss drinking was the eighth wonder of the world. They nudged each other and muttered awed comments out of the corners of their mouths.

But Caleb heeded this not at all. He was happy. Very happy. The party over which he had suffered such secret qualms and to secure the desired guests for which he had strained every atom of his vast political and business influence, was proving a marvellous success. At last he was in society. And he had thought the barriers of that Body so impassable! He was in society. At last. And talking with delightful, brilliant fluency with one of its acknowledged leaders. He had conquered.

The waiter filled his glass for the fifth time. After all, champagne had an effect whiskey could never equal. The fifth draught (for he allowed but one swallow to the goblet) seemed to inspire him even more than had its predecessors.

Then it was that fifty generations of Irishmen who, under the spell of liquor, acquired a flow of language not their own, clamored for voice in this their latest and greatest descendant. Now that he was in so foreign, brilliant a mood, what more apt than a graceful little speech of greeting to those his fellow-townsmen who had flocked thither to do him honor? The idea was sublime. Conover rose to his feet and rapped for silence. He would speak while the gift of eloquence was still strong upon him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” began Caleb, clearing his voice and looking down the great room across the concourse of wondering, amused, or expectant faces that gently swayed in a faint haze before his eyes, “I guess you all know, without my telling you, how glad I am to see you here to-night, and I want you should enjoy every minute of your evening. Some of you are old friends of mine. There’s more’n a few here to-night that remembers me when I was barefooted Cale Conover, without a dollar to my name nor any very hectic prospects of getting one.

“But there’s a lot more of you here that I hadn’t the honor of knowing then, nor for that matter of meeting at all till to-night. It’s to these, mostly, that I’m talking now. For I want ’em to know me better and like me better. Maybe if they hear more about me they will. That’s why I’m on my feet now.

“I b’lieve it isn’t customary to make a speech any more at parties. But you’ll have to forgive me. I’m not much onto the latest frills and fashions. But give me a chance, and I’ll learn as easy as a Chinaman. It came to me all of a sudden to say what I’ve got to say, right here and now, even if it’s at the expense of a little etiquette. I’ve asked you here to-night, mainly, of course, for the pleasure of entertaining you, and I hope you’re all having a real good time. But I had another reason, too.”

The men at the tables looked perplexed. Was this the Caleb Conover they had met and cringed to in the outer world, this garrulous, rambling man with the flushed face?

“You see, I’ve come to be a kind of a feature of this city of ours and of the State, too. I’m here to stay. And I want that my towns-folks and my fellow-residents of the Mountain State should know me. Many of ’em do. There’s a full half-million folks in this city and State that know all about Caleb Conover. They know he’s on the square, that he’ll look after their interests, that he’s a white man. They know he’s a man they can trust in their public life and welcome in their homes. And, as I said, there’s a lot of these people here to-night.

“But there’s a lot of other folks here who only know me by what slander and jokes they’ve picked up around town or in the out-of-State newspapers. It’s these latter folks I’m talking to now. I want them to know the real me; not the uneducated crook and illiterate feller my p’litical enemies have made me out. They can’t think I’m all bad, or they wouldn’t be my guests. Would they, now? And a little frankness ought to do the rest.

“Some people say I’ve risen from the gutter. Well, I’ve risen from it, haven’t I? A lot of men on Pompton Avenue and in the big clubs are just where they started when they were born. Not a step in advance of where their fathers left ’em. Swell chance they’d have had if their parents had started ’em in the gutter as mine did, wouldn’t they? Where’d they be now?

“What does the start amount to? The finish line’s where the score’s counted. Gutter or palace.

“‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ says a poet by the name of R. Burns. And he was right, even if he did waste his time on verse-stringing. Only it always seemed a pity to me those words wasn’t said by someone bigger’n a measly poet. Someone whose name carried weight, and whose words would be quoted more. Because then more folks might hear of it and believe it. I don’t suppose one person in fifty’s ever heard of this R. Burns person. (I never did, myself, till I bought a Famous Quotation book to use in one of my campaigns. That’s how I got familiar with the writings of R. Burns and Ibid and Byron and all those rhymer people.) Now, if some public character like Tom Platt, or Matt Quay, or someone else that everybody’s heard of, had said that quotation about a man being a man——”

Caleb paused to gather up the loose threads of his discourse. This caused him a moment of dull bewilderment, for he was not accustomed to digress, either in mind or talk, and the phenomenon puzzled him. He rallied and went on:

“But that isn’t the point. I was telling you about myself. I started in the gutter, just as the ‘knockers’ say I did. Or down by the freight yards, and that’s about the same thing. My mother took in washing—when she could get it. My father went to the penitentiary for freight-lifting when I was ten—he was a stevedore—and he died there. I was brought up on a street where the feller—man or boy—who couldn’t fight had to stay indoors. And indoors was one place I never stayed. I began as coal boy in the C. G. & X. elevators; then I got a job firing on a fast freight, and from that I took to braking on a local passenger run. Then I was yardmaster, and then in the sup’rintendent’s office, and then came the job of sup’rintendent and after that general manager, and I worked my way up till I ran the C. G. & X. road single-handed. Meantime I was looking after your city’s interests. Three times as Alderman and then once as Mayor, for the boys knew they could bank on me. I got hold of interests here and interests there. Cheap, run-down interests they were, for the most part, but I built ’em up. Take the C. G. & X., for instance. Biggest road in the State to-day. How’d it get so? I made it. It was all run down, and on its last legs when I took hold. I acquired it and——”

He paused once more, fighting back that queer tendency to let slip his grasp on his subject.

“I remember that C. G. & X. deal,” whispered Greer to his wife. “He juggled shares and pulled wires and spread calamity rumors till he was able to smash the stock down to a dollar-ten per. He scared out all the other big holders, gobbled their stock, reorganized, and reaped a clean five million on the deal.”

“Hush!” retorted Mrs. Greer. “This is too rich to miss. I must remember it all, to——”

“—So, you see,” Caleb was continuing, “I fought my way up. Every move was a fight, and every fight was a win. That’s my motto. Fight to win. An’ if you don’t win, let it be your executor, not you, that knows you lost. But the biggest fight of all was to come. I controlled the city. I helped control the State. I had all the money any man needed, and I was spending it right here in the town where it was earned. I was a successful man. But the man who’s satisfied with success would be satisfied with failure. And I wasn’t satisfied.

“There was still one thing I couldn’t get. I couldn’t get one set of people to recognize me when they met me in the street, to ask me to their houses, to come to my house. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know. Maybe they didn’t want to know. There’s a lot of things society folks don’t seem to want to know. And one of those things was me. I couldn’t win ’em over. I built this house. Cost $200,000 more’n any other house in town. If you doubt it, step down to the Building Commissioner’s and look over the specifications. Built it on the most fash’nable avenue, too. But still society wouldn’t say: ‘Pleased to know you!’ ‘Maybe it’s my lack of blue blood,’ thinks I. ‘Though my pile’s been made a good deal cleaner than many an aristocrat’s.’ I married a lady of the first families here”—a ripple of unintelligible surprise broke in on his ears, but quickly died. “What was the result? She was asked out and I wasn’t. But I kept on fighting. And at last I’m in the winning stride.

“I’m not a college man myself. All my education’s hand-made and since I was thirty. But I was bound my son should be one. And he is. He’s in society, too. The best New York affords, I’m told. My girl’s had advantages, too, and you see the result. Do unto others what you can’t do for yourself. That’s worth remembering sometimes. And now at last I get my comeback for all my outlay.

“To-night I guess I cover the final lap of the race. For the bluest blood of Granite is—are—is among my guests here, and I’m meeting ’em on equal terms. All this talk, maybe, isn’t what the etiquette books call ‘good form.’ But if you knew how many years I’ve worked for what I’ve won to-night, you’d sympathize with me for wanting to crow just a little.”

“Heavens!” murmured Mrs. Greer, “does the creature think anyone’s going to regard this as his ‘début’? And the awful part of it is, the whole speech will be in every paper to-morrow. Oh, if only the reporters will get our names wrong!”

“No fear of that,” answered Greer. “The typewritten list is probably being put in print even now. But what ails Conover?”

“So,” resumed Caleb, beaming about him, “I wanted the chance to let you all know me as I really am. Not what my enemies say about me. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be your friend and entertain you often? None in the least, you’ll all say. It seems a little thing, perhaps, to you who’ve been in the game always. But it’s meant a lot to me!”

He paused. There seemed nothing more to say, yet he longed to end with a climax. A glorious, dazzling inspiration came, and he hurried on:

“And now, in honor of this little meeting between friends, let me tell you all a secret. It won’t be a secret to-morrow, but you can always be able to say you were the first who was told. I have at last yielded to the earnest entreaties of my constituents and friends and party in general, and have consented to accept the nomination for Governor at the coming convention.”

From the proletariat fringing the walls and blocking the doorway arose an excited, exultant hum. Only the wild efforts of certain efficient, if unofficial, sergeants-at-arms prevented a mighty yell of applause. At the tables, however, the women looked bored or puzzled; while the men glanced at each other with the blank look of people who, out for a day’s jolly hunting, find themselves caught unexpectedly in a bear trap.

“Good Lord!” grunted Greer, “I hope our being here doesn’t commit any of us! To think of Conover, of all men, as governor! This’ll be a bombshell with a vengeance.”

“I have heretofore,” went on Caleb, after allowing the impression of his words to sink in, “refused all State offices. But now I feel it a social as well as a political duty that I owe. And I shall be grateful to you for your honest support.”

He had rehearsed this last sentence many times for campaign speeches. It seemed to him to have the true oratorical ring, and to be singularly appropriate. He prepared to sit down, then checked himself.

“Some men,” he added, as an afterthought, “are in politics for a ‘holy’ purpose. Some for what’s in it for them. I find the result’s usually pretty much the same in both cases. As governor I shall do my best for Granite and for the Mountain State. Thank you.”

Caleb bowed, reseated himself and swallowed another glass of champagne at a gulp. He was not ill pleased with himself. He had risen merely to thank his guests for their presence. Little by little he had drifted further than he had at first intended. Yet, he was glad he had yielded to this unprecedented, unaccustomed yearning to expand; to show himself at his best before these people with whom he now firmly believed himself on a footing of friendly equality. Yes, on the whole, he was convinced of his success.

He glanced about him. The buzz of talk had recommenced; it seemed to him more loudly, more interestedly, with less of constraint than before. Dozens of eyes were upon him, not with the bored coldness of the earlier evening, but with curiosity and open interest. He had put people at their ease. They were accepting him as one of themselves, and behaving as he had heard they did at other functions.

Caleb was glad.

Then his complacent glance fell on his wife. She was very red in the face, and was bending over her plate, eating fast.

“Proud of the old man, poor little thing!” mused Conover, a twinge of affection for his scared, invertebrate spouse sending a softer light into his strenuous, lean face. His gaze next travelled to Blanche, his daughter. She, too, was red of face, and was talking hard, as if against time. Somehow Caleb was less assured as to the cause of her flush. Perhaps in Europe such speeches were not customary. He could explain to her later.

Anice Lanier, alone, met his eye with the frank, honest, unafraid look that was her birthright, and which made her the only living person he instinctively felt he could not bully. In her look he read, now, a mute question. He could not fathom the expression.

Caleb left his place and made his way among the tables to where she sat.

“How’d it go?” he asked. “It seemed to take ’em.”

“I think it did,” she replied, noting the flush on his cheek and the brightness of his gaze, and wondering thereat.

“Wasn’t too long to hold their interest?”

“No. They seemed interested.”

“You think so? Good! Do you know, if I’d had time to think, I’d rather have made fifty campaign speeches than that one. I’d have been rattled to death. But it was easier than any speech I ever made. Good climax, eh, that announcement?”

“How long ago did you make up your mind to run for Governor?”

“Think it’s queer that, as my secretary, you hadn’t heard of it? Well, I’ll tell you. I decided it just about seven minutes ago. It came to me like a flash, plumb in the middle of my speech. I figgered out all at once that if there was any flaw in my plans so far, the governorship was dead sure to cinch me in society. Folks’ll think twice before they turn up their noses at a governor. It came as an inspiration. A genuine hunch. I never have one of them but what it wins. Why, when——”

“But can you get the nomination?”

“Can I get it? Can I get it? Say, Miss Lanier, haven’t you learned yet that there isn’t a thing in the city of Granite or in the Mountain State that Caleb Conover, Railroader, can’t get if he wants it bad enough? To-night ought to have showed you that. Why, with the legislature and every newspaper, and the railroad system and every decent State job right here safe between my fingers, all I’ve got to do is to turn the wheel, and the little ball will drop into the governor’s chair all right, all right.”

The girl’s big brown eyes were vaguely troubled. The reserve habitual to her when in her employer’s society deepened. She thought of Clive Standish and his aspirations. What would become of the young lawyer’s already desperate hope, now that the Boss himself—and not some mere puppet of the latter’s—was to be his opponent?

“Say,” sighed Caleb Conover in perfect content, “this is the happiest night ever! I’ve got everything there is in life for a man. All the money I want, the running of the State, a place in society at last, a daughter that’s a princess, a boy that’s making his mark in the biggest city in America, and now—the governorship. Lord! but I’m a lucky man. And that speech—I didn’t think I had it in me. Of course, I know those snobs from the Pompton Avenue crowd were dragged here by the ears. I had to drag pretty hard, too, in most cases. But they’re here. And they listened to me. They had to. And they can’t ever look on me just as they did before.”

“No,” assented Anice, “they can’t.”

To her there was something impersonally pathetic in the way this usually keen, stern man had unbent and made himself ridiculous. She was the only person living in whose presence, as a rule, he expanded. She was used to the semi-occasional talkative, boastful moods of this Boss whom all the rest of the world deemed as sharp, and concise as a steel trap—and as deadly. Yet never had even she seen him like this before.

It was sad, she mused, that Samson, shorn of his locks of self-restraint and of his calculating coolness, should thus have made sport for the Philistines. That he had perhaps done so for a purpose—even though for once in his life it was a futile purpose—rendered his folly no less humiliating.

“Yes,” reiterated Conover, as he prepared to return to his own table. “It was an inspiration. And an ounce of inspiration discounts a half-ton of any other commodity that ever passed over the counter.”

“What was it like?” rhapsodized Billy Shevlin at 2 A.M., as he gazed loftily upon a semicircle of humbler querists in the back room of Kerrigan’s saloon. “It was like the King of England an’ one of them Fashion Joinals an’ a lake of $4-a-bottle suds, all mixed; with a Letter Carriers’ Ball on the side. And”—he added, in a glow of divine memories—“I was ace-high with the biggest of the push. If I hadn’t a’ been, would the Van Alstyne dame a’ stood for it so civil when I treads on the train of her Sunday regalia and rips about ten yards of the fancy tatting off’n it?”

“What was it like?” echoed Mrs. Greer to a query of one of her daughters who had sat up to await the parental home-coming. “It was something clear outside the scriptural prohibition of swearing. For it was like nothing in ‘the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.’”

“What was it like?” thought Clive Standish drowsily as he fell asleep. “A dozen people are certain to ask me that to-morrow. It—her—her eyes have that same old queer way—of making me feel as if—I were in church.”

CHAPTER III
CALEB CONOVER REGRETS

Caleb Conover, Railroader, was in a humor when all the household thought well to tread softly.

It was the morning after his “début.” He paced his study intermittently, stopping now and again at a window to watch laborers at work in the grounds below, dismantling the strings of Chinese lanterns, and carting away other litter of the festivities. A pile of newspapers filled one of the study chairs. On the front page of each local journal was blazoned a garish account of the Conover reception. Yet Caleb, eager as he had once been to read every word concerning the fête, had not so much as glanced at any of the papers. In fact, he seemed, in his weary pacing to and fro, to avoid the locality of the chair where they lay.

For an hour—in fact, ever since he had left his bedroom—he had paced thus. And none had dared disturb him. For the evil spirit was heavy upon Saul, and the javelin of wrath, at such times, was not prone to tarry in its flight.

Caleb’s black mood this morning came from within, not from objective causes. He was travelling through that deepest, most horrible of all the multi-graded Valleys of Humiliation—the Vale of Remembered Folly. Let a man recall a crime, and—especially if he be troubled at the time with indigestion—remorse of a smug if painful sort will be his portion. Let him recall a misfortune, and a wave of gentle, self-pitying grief will lave his heart, soothing the throb of an old sting into soft regret. But let him awake to the fact that he has made himself sublimely ridiculous—and that in the presence of the multitude—and his self-torture can be lashed to a pitch that shames the Inquisition’s most zealous efforts. Therein lies the True Valley of Humiliation, the ravine where no sunlight of redeeming circumstances shines, where no refreshing rill of excuse and palliation flows. And it was in this unrelieved, arid gorge of self-contempt that Caleb Conover now wallowed.

He had made a fool of himself. An arrant fool. He had drunk until he was drunken. And in that drunkenness he had spoken blatant words of idiocy. He had made himself ridiculous in the eyes of the very class he had sought to cultivate. His had not been the besottedness that babbles, sleeps and forgets. Even as his drink-inspired tongue had betrayed no thickness nor hiatus during his drivelling speech, so the steady brain had, on waking, remorselessly told him of his every word.

Thirty years before, in a drunken spree, he had been seized with a fervor of patriotism and had enlisted in the army. On coming to himself it had cost him nearly every dollar he possessed to get himself free. After a similar revel, a year later, he had stampeded a meeting of the local “machine” by making a tearful speech in favor of reform and purity in politics. The oration had cost him his immediate chances of political preferment. After that he had done away with this single weakness in his iron nature and had drunk no more. The sacrifice had been light for so strong a man, once he forced himself to make it.

Last night—secure in his impregnable self-trust—he had broken his inviolable rule. As a result he had become a laughing-stock for the people whose favor he so unspeakably desired to win. As to his own adherents, he gave their possible opinions not one thought. Whatever the Boss said “went” with them. Had he declared himself a candidate for holy orders, or blurted out the innermost secrets of the “machine,” they would probably have believed he was acting for the best. But those others——!

She was very pretty and dainty and young, in her simple white morning frock. Page [47].

And, over and above all, his declaration of candidacy for Governor——

A knock at the door of his study broke in on the audible groan of self-contempt this last and ever-recurrent thought wrung from his tight lips. Caleb stopped midway down the room, his short red hair bristling with fury at the interruption.

“What do you want?” he snarled.

The door opened and Anice Lanier came in. She was very pretty and dainty and young, in her simple white morning frock. She carried a set of tablets whereon it was her custom to transcribe notes of Caleb’s morning instructions for reference or for later amplification by his two stenographers.

“Well!” roared Conover, glowering across the room at her, “what in hell do you want?”

“To tender my resignation,” was the unruffled reply.

“Your what?” he gasped, stupidly.

“My resignation,” in the same level, impersonal tones. “To take effect at once. Good morning.”

She was half-way out of the room before her employer could hurry after and detain her.

“What’s—what’s the meaning of this?” asked Caleb, the brutal belligerency trailing out of his voice. Then, before she could answer, he added: “Because I spoke like that just now? Was that it? Because I said—And you’d throw over a good job just because of a few cranky words? Yes, I believe you would. You’d do it. It isn’t a bluff. Maybe that’s why you make such a hit with me, Miss Lanier. You’re not scared every time I open my mouth. And you stand up for yourself.”

He eyed her in a quizzically admiring fashion, as one might a beautiful but unclassified natural history specimen. She made no reply, but stood waiting in patience for him to move from between her and the door.

Caleb grinned.

“Want me to apologize, I s’pose?” he grumbled.

“A gentleman would not wait to ask.”

“Maybe you think a gentleman wouldn’t of said what I did, in the first place, eh?”

“Yes, I do think so. Don’t you?”

“Well, I’m sorry. Let it go at that. Now let’s get to work. Say”—as they moved across to their wonted places at the big centre table, “you oughtn’t to take offence at anything about me this morning. You must know how sore I am.”

“What’s the matter?”

“As if you didn’t know! You saw how many kinds of a wall-eyed fool I made of myself last night. Isn’t that enough to make a man sore? And to think of it being taken down by those newspaper idiots and printed all over the country!”

He gave the nearby chair a kick, avalanching the morning papers to the floor.

“Have you read those?” queried Anice.

“No. Why should I rub it in? I know what they——”

“Why not look at them before you lose your temper?”

Caleb snatched up the Star, foremost journal of Granite. He glanced down the last column of the front page, and over to the second.

“Here’s the story of the show just as we dictated it beforehand,” he commented. “List of guests—Where in thunder is that measly speech? Have they given it a column to itself? Oh—way down at the bottom. ‘In a singularly happy little informal address at the close of the evening Mr. Conover mentioned his forthcoming candidacy for governor.’ Is that all any of them have got about it?”

“They have your pledge to run for Governor blazoned over two columns of the front page of nearly all the papers. But nothing more about the speech itself.”

“But how——”

“I took the liberty of stopping the reporters before they left the house, and telling them it would be against your wish for any of your other remarks to be quoted.”

“You did that? Miss Lanier, you’re fine! You’ve saved me a guying in every out-of-State paper in the East. I want to show my appreciation——”

“If that means another offer to raise my salary, I am very much obliged. But, as I’ve told you several times before, I can’t accept it. Thank you just the same.”

“But why not? I can afford——”

“But I can’t. Don’t let’s talk of it, please.”

“And every other soul in my employ spraining his brain to plan for a raise! The man who understands women—if he’s ever born—won’t need to read his Bible, for there’ll be nothing that even the Almighty can teach him.”

“Shan’t we begin work? About this Fournier matter. He refuses to pay the $30,000, and we can’t even get him to admit he owes it. Shall I——”

“Write and tell him unless he pays that $41,596 within thirty days——”

“But it’s $30,000, not $41,000. He——”

“I know that. And he’ll write us so by return mail. That’ll give us the acknowledgment we want of the $30,000 debt. What next?”

“The Curtis-Bayne people of Hadley are falling behind on their contract with the C. G. & X.”

“I guess they are,” chuckled Caleb. “They’re beginning to see a great light, just as I figured out. Well, let ’em squirm a bit.”

“But the contract—you may remember Mr. Curtis asked to look at our copy of it when he was in Granite. He said he wanted to verify a clause he couldn’t quite recollect. You told me to send it to him, and I did.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, he never returned it. And this morning we get this letter from him: ‘In regard to your favor of the 9th inst., in which you speak of a contract, we beg to state you must have confused us with some other of your road’s customers. The Curtis-Bayne Company has no contract with the C. G. & X., and can find no record of one. If you have such a document kindly produce it.’”

“Well, well, well!” gurgled Caleb. “To think how that wicked old Curtis fox has imposed on my trust in human nature! He’s got us, eh?”

“It looks so, I’m afraid.”

“Looks so to him, too. It’ll keep on looking so till I shove him into court and make him swear on the witness stand that no contract ever existed. Then it’ll be time enough to produce the certified copy I had made just after I got his request to send the original to his hotel. Poor old Curtis! Please write him a very blustering, scared, appealing kind of letter. Next?”

“O’Flaherty’s sent another begging note, about that claim of his against the road. It begins: ‘Dear Mr. Conover: As you know, I’ve seen better days’——”

“Tell him I can’t be held accountable for the weather. And—say, Miss Lanier, let all the rest of this routine go over for to-day. I’ve a bigger game on, and I’ve got to hustle. That Governorship business——”

“Yes?”

“That was the foolest thing I ever did. It seemed to me at the minute a grand idea as a wind-up for my crazy speech. But I guess I’ll have to pay my way all right before I’m done with last evening. The free list’s suspended as far’s I’m concerned.”

“You mean there’s some doubt of your getting the nomination?” she asked, a sudden hope making her big eyes lustrous.

“Doubt? Doubt? Say, I thought you knew me better than that. Why, the nomination’s right in front of me on a silver salver and trimmed with blue ribbons. And the election, too, for that matter.”

“Then”—the hope dying—“why do you speak as you did just now?”

“It’s this way: I’ve held Granite and the Mountain State by the nape of the neck for ten years. I’m the Boss. And when I give the word folks come to heel. But all this time I’ve been standing in the background while I pulled the strings. It was safer that way and pleasanter. I’d a lot rather write the play than be just a paid actor in it. But now I’ve got to jump out of my corner in the wings and take the centre of the stage. There’s a lot more glory on the stage than in the wings, but there’s lots more bad eggs and decayed fruit drifting in that direction, too. If the audience don’t like the actor they hiss him. The man in the wings don’t get any of that. All he has to do is to call off that actor and put on another the crowd’ll like better, or maybe a new play if it comes to the worst.

“But here I’m to take the stage and get the limelight and the newspaper roasts—outside the State—and not an actor can I shunt it off on. That’s why I’ve never took public office since I was Mayor. And then it was only a stepping-stone to the Leadership. Now I’ve got to leave the background and pose in the Capitol. There’s nothing in it for me, except a better social position. That’s a lot, I know. But I’m not so sure that even such a raise is worth the price.”

“Then why not withdraw?”

“Not me! Withdraw, and be laughed at by my own crowd as well as the society click? It’d smash me forever. It’s human nature to love a criminal and to hate a four-flusher. And cold feet ain’t good for the circulation of the body politic. It’s apt to end by freezing its possessor out. No, sir! I’m in it, and I got to swim strong. The nomination and the election’s easy enough. But just a ‘won handily’ won’t fill the bill. I’ve got to sweep the State with the all-firedest landslide ever slidden since U. S. Grant ran around the track twice before Horace Greeley got on speaking terms with his own stride. It’s got to be a case of ‘the all-popular Governor Conover.’ I’ve got to go in on the shoulders of that rampant steed they call ‘The Hoorah!’ That’ll settle forever any doubts of my fitness, and it’ll stop all laughs at what I said last night. When a man’s the people’s unanimous choice, the few stray knocks that happen at intervals do him more good than harm. But if it was just touch-and-go, everybody’d be screeching about fraud and boss rule winning over honest effort. These Civic Leaguers are too noisy, as it is. I’ve got to start in right away.”

“Any orders?”

“Yes. When you go down stairs, please send for Shevlin and Bourke and Raynor and the rest on this list, and telephone the editors I’d like to see ’em this afternoon. I’ll have the ball rolling by night. Say, Miss Lanier, the campaign’ll mean extra work for you. I want to make it worth your while. Come now, don’t be silly. Let me make your salary——”

“I beg you won’t speak of that any more. I cannot accept a raise of salary from you.”

“But why not? You earn more and——”

“I earn all I get. And, as I’ve told you before, my reasons for accepting no larger stipend than you offered publicly for a governess for Blanche three years ago, are my own. I consider them good. I am glad to get the money I do. I believe I more than earn it. But I can accept no more, and I can take no presents nor favors of any sort from you. I can’t explain to you my reasons. But I believe they are good.”

“But it’s so absurd! I——”

“Have you ever found me shirking my work or disloyal in any way to your interests, on account of the smallness of my salary? I have handled business and political secrets of yours that would have involved millions in loss to you if I had betrayed you. I have been loyal to those interests. I have done your work satisfactorily. I could have done no more on three times my pay. There let the matter rest, please.”

“Just as you like!” grumbled Conover. “Lord! how the crowd’d stare if it heard Caleb Conover teasing anyone to take more of his money!”

“Money won’t buy everything.”

“No? Well, it gives a pretty big assortment to choose from. And——”

The door was flung unceremoniously open, and Gerald slouched in, his pasty face unwontedly sallow from last night’s potations. For, with a few of the mushroom crop of the jeunesse dorée of Granite, he had prolonged the supper-room revels after the departure of the other guests.

“Hello, Dad!” he observed. “Thought I’d find you alone.”

Caleb, his initial ill-temper softened by his talk with Anice, greeted his favorite child with a friendly nod.

“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll be at leisure in a few moments. And, say, throw that measly blend of burnt paper and Egyptian sweepings out of the window. Why a grown man can’t smoke man’s-sized tobacco is more’n I can see.”

The lad, with sulky obedience, tossed away the cigarette and came back to the table.

“Hear the news?” he asked. “It seems you’ve got a rival for the nomination.”

“Hey?”

“Grandin was telling me about it last night. His father’s one of the big guns in the Civic League, you know. It seems the League’s planning to spring Clive Standish on the convention.”

“Clive Standish? That kid? For governor? Lord!”

“Good joke, isn’t it? I——”

“Joke? No!” shouted Caleb. “It’s just the thing I wouldn’t have had happen for a fortune. He’s poor, but he belongs to the oldest family in the State, and his blood so blue you could use it to starch clothes with. Just the sort of a visionary young fool a lot of cranks will gather around. He’ll yell so loud about the ‘people’s sacred rights’ and ‘ring rule’ and all that rot, that they’ll hear him clear over in the other States. And when they do, the out-of-State papers will all get to hammering me again. And the very crowd I’m trying to score with, by running for Governor, will vote for him to a man. He’s one of them.”

“So you think he has a chance of winning?” asked Anice.

“Not a ghost of a chance. He’ll die in the convention—if he ever reaches that far. But it will stir up just the opposition I’ve been telling you I was afraid of. Well, if it meant work before, it means a twenty-five-hour-a-day hustle now. I wish you’d telephone Shevlin and the others, please, Miss Lanier. Tell ’em to be here in an hour.”

As the girl left the room, Caleb swung about to face his son. The glow of coming battle was in his face.

“Now’s your chance, Jerry!” he began, hot with an enthusiasm that failed to find the faintest reflection in the sallow countenance before him. “Now’s your chance to get back at the old man for a few of the things he’s done for you.”

“I—I don’t catch your meaning,” muttered Gerald, uncomfortably.

“You’ve got a sort of pull with a certain set of young addlepates here, because you live in New York and get your name in the papers, and because you’ve a dollar allowance to every penny of theirs: I want you to use that pull. I want you should jump right in and begin working for me. Why, you ought to round up a hundred votes in the Pompton Club alone, to say nothing of the youngsters on the fringe outside, who’ll be tickled to death at having a feller of your means and position notice ’em. Yes, you can be a whole lot of help to me this next few weeks. Take off your coat and wade in! And when we win——”

“Hold on a moment, Dad!” interrupted Gerald, whose lengthening face had passed unnoted by the excited elder man. “Hold on, please. You mean you want me to work for you in the campaign for Governor?”

“Jerry, you’ll get almost human one of these days if you let your intelligence take flights like that. Yes, I——”

“Because,” pursued Gerald, who was far too accustomed to this form of sarcasm from his father to allow it to ruffle him, “because I can’t.”

“You—you—what?” grunted Caleb, incredulously.

“I can’t stay here in Granite all that time. I—I must get back to New York this week. I’ve important business there.”

“Well, I’ll be—” gasped Conover, finding his voice at last, and with it the grim satire he loved to lavish on this son, so unlike himself. “Business, eh? ‘Important business!’ Some restaurant waiter you’ve got an appointment to thrash at 2.45 A.M. on Tuesday, or a hotel window you’ve made a date to drive through in a hansom? From all I’ve read or heard of your life there, those were the two most important pieces of business you ever transacted in New York. And it was my money paid the fines both times. No, no, Sonny, your ‘important business’ will keep, I guess, till after November. Anyhow, in the meantime you’ll stay right here and help Papa. See? Otherwise you’ll go to New York on foot, and have the pleasure of living on what the three-ball specialists will give you for your hardware. No work, no pennies, Jerry. Understand that? Now go and think it over. Papa’s too busy to play with little boys to-day.”

To Caleb’s secret delight he saw he had at last roused a spark of spirit in the lad.

“My business in New York,” retorted Gerald hotly, “is not with waiters or hotels. It is with my wife.”

Caleb sat down very hard.