The 13th District

A Story of a Candidate

By

Brand Whitlock

Indianapolis
The Bowen-Merrill Company
Publishers

Copyright 1902
The Bowen-Merrill Company

March

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

To
E. B. W.

CONTENTS

BOOK I
OF THE PEOPLE

The 13th District

I

JUST as the train with a salute of the engine’s whistle careened into full view of the smoke-blackened shed that is known in Grand Prairie as the depot, the sound of cheering came to Garwood’s ears. He was lounging in the smoking car, his long legs stretched to the seat before him, his face begrimed with soot and glistening with perspiration, his whole body heavy with fatigue. But the cheers, coming to him in a vast crescendo that even the noise of the car-wheels as they hammered the Wabash crossing could not drown, brought back to his eyes the excitement that had been burning in them for days; a smile soothed his tired visage, and instinctively he flexed in every fiber. For a moment he tried to hide the smile, but Rankin, who had so successfully managed his canvass for him, and executed that great manœuver on the last day of the Clinton convention, which, after one thousand two hundred and nine ballots had nominated Garwood for Congress, heaved his bulk from the hot, cindery, plush cushion, slapped his candidate on the shoulder and said:

“There’s nothing like it, is there?”

So Garwood let human feelings have their way and the smile fully illumined his haggard face. It was a strong face, clean-shaven after the old ideal of American statesmen, that grew darker and stronger in the shadow of the slouch hat which he now clapped upon his long black hair. Rankin had succeeded in raising himself to his feet, and stood upright in the aisle, shaking himself like a Newfoundland. He drew off the linen duster he wore, and draped it over his arm, then seizing his little traveling-bag, which in contrast to his huge body looked like a mere reticule, he waved it toward the station and said, as if he had just conjured the presence of the crowd:

“There they are, Jerry, there they are!”

Garwood had risen, and through the windows of the swaying coach he could see the faces of the crowd. The men on board the train, most of them members of the Polk County delegation which had stood by him with solid, unbroken ranks, had been yelling all the way from Clinton, and now, though it seemed impossible that they should have any voices left in their hoarse and swollen throats, they raised a shout that swelled above the cheers outside and pressing to the windows and the doors of the coaches, they challenged their neighbors with the exulting cry:

“What’s the matter with Garwood?”

Outside there rose an answering roar:

“He’s all right!”

But the Polk County delegation, as if it demanded confirmation, yelled again:

“Who’s all right?”

And then the crowd rose to its tip-toes, and the answering cry was of such immense unanimity that it made the very platform shake:

“G-a-r-wood!”

The train had stopped, and Garwood was being hustled toward the door. Some impatient fellows from the platform outside who had mounted the steps of the car, now pressed in, and stretched their bodies incredible distances across the backs of seats to grasp Garwood’s hand, to seize him by the coat, and to call in his face:

“Good boy, Jerry!”

“You’re the stuff!”

He was oblivious of the progress he was making, if he was making any at all, and the conductor, although he had caught the contagious spirit of the triumphant Polk County delegation soon after the train left Clinton, and had shown Garwood the deference due to a successful candidate, began to be concerned for the time he was losing, and said with smiling indulgence:

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!”

Big Rankin then squeezed himself in front of Garwood, and waving his little bag dangerously before him, crushed his way out, drawing the others after him in his turbulent wake. Meanwhile the passengers in the train looked on with the good-humored toleration an American crowd always excites in those not participants in its moving enthusiasms, and mildly inquired what town that was.

When Garwood gained the platform of the car and the people at last caught sight of him, the cheering suddenly attained a new pitch of intensity, and a band, clustered near the rotting log where the hacks made their stand, spontaneously crashed into “Hail to the Chief!” The band played the piece in furious time, and the man who performed on the tuba seemed to have taken upon himself the responsibility of voicing the whole enthusiasm of Polk County; but to Garwood, to whom the strains came across that tossing mass of heads and hats and faces, the music was sweet. He felt himself suddenly choking; his eyes filled with tears. He could not have trusted himself to speak just then, though the cheers were being more and more punctuated by cries of “Speech! Speech!” Luckily, the man behind him, urged by the brakeman, for the conductor, watch in hand, was scowling, began to push, the crowd in front held out a hundred arms to seize him, and Garwood was swallowed up in that stifling press of men.

Somewhere in the depths of the multitude Garwood was conscious of meeting the mayor, who took his hand, when he could reclaim it from a score of other hands thrust forth all about him, and then in a zigzag path of glory, he was dragged through the throng, Rankin and the delegates following, moving like a current in the sea. Garwood laughed as he was pulled this way and that, and tried to answer each one of the thousand greetings poured in on him from every side. The perspiration streamed from his face. His waistcoat had been torn open and when some one saw this and shouted “Look out for your watch, Jerry!” the whole crowd laughed delightedly at the witticism, and Garwood himself laughed with them.

The crowd had been a first surprise to Garwood, the band had been another, now a third was added by the sight of an open carriage drawn by two white horses. He had not expected an ovation, which made it all the more grateful when it came, and as he was being helped into the carriage with a solicitude that was a new thing in men’s treatment of him, he expressed something of this to Rankin. But Rankin, who had been in politics all his days and could view the varying moods of the populace with a politician’s cynicism, replied:

“Well, if we’d been skinned, they wouldn’t ’a’ been here when you needed sympathy.”

The truth flashed upon Garwood at once, and if it embittered for an instant his triumph when it was at its sweetest, it seemed to give him a better control, so that as he settled himself in the back seat of the carriage, with the mayor beside him, and Rankin filling the whole front seat, he rearranged his rumpled garments, readjusted his hat, and then looked calmly around on the crowd that swarmed up to the carriage wheels as if they had never seen him before. His face was calm and composed, almost stern. It was the face he hoped to leave to history.

As the band, to whom the leader had been distributing the precious leaves of its most classical number, was forming in the street, Garwood for the first time saw many carriages, filled with men and women who waved hats and fluttered handkerchiefs, now that they thought he could see and recognize them. Garwood smiled, though reservedly, and lifted his hat with a sudden consciousness that he, himself, at last, was the one who was lifting the hat from the open carriage in the street, and not some other man. He did not neglect to smile, nor to raise his hat gallantly to each carriage load as he swept his eye along the line of vehicles, but he was not thinking of their occupants, nor of himself, wholly. He was thinking of a certain surrey he knew well, from which a pair of eyes would smile as his did, perhaps be moistened by tears as his had been a few minutes before,—the eyes of one to whom all this would be as sweet as it was to him. But the surrey was not there. He was surprised, though in a way different from that in which the crowd and the band and the open carriage had surprised him. He was disappointed, and felt himself entitled to a little shade of resentment, to a little secret hurt at the heart. It was the hour in the afternoon when she would be driving down to the bank for her father. He could not see why she had not come. Perhaps she felt a delicacy about the publicity of it, though he did not see why she should.

But the band had swung into the middle of the street. The drum-major, in his hot bear-skin and tall leggings, was facing them with his baton held horizontally before him in his two hands. He blew the shrill whistle, clenched in his teeth, and then, wheeling, pointed up Kaskaskia Street and strode away for the public square. The leader trilled two little notes on his cornet, the snare drums rattled a long roll, and the band burst into “See, the Conquering Hero Comes!” The carriage moved, the crowd cheered again, and the little procession began his triumphal entry for him.

“Look mad, Jerry,” advised Rankin, in humorous appreciation of the whole demonstration. The remark did not exactly please Garwood, and for an instant he did look mad, but he smiled again and composed his features to the dignity required of him in that hour. Some of the private carriages followed in his train and the crowd streamed along the sidewalks on each side of the street. A number of small boys trudged in the deep white dust, mingled with the band, or crowded after Garwood’s carriage, breaking into a trot now and then in their determination to keep up with the procession. Two or three of them, in order to identify themselves more closely with the affair, laid their dirty little hands on the panels of the carriage. Garwood felt an inward resentment at this, and when Rankin lolled over in his seat and snatched the cap from the matted head of one of the boys, and the crowd on the sidewalk laughed uproariously, Garwood felt like rebuking him. He had a moral conviction that at least two other boys were swinging on the springs behind the carriage, and he would have liked to dislodge them, but he knew he dare not. In the last ten minutes imperial ambitions had stirred within him. He began already to dream of triumphal marches amid wider scenes, with troops or at least policemen lining the curb, and yet his politician’s sense reminded him of the quickness with which American voters resent any little assumption of undemocratic airs, however much they may like it on a larger scale. And so when Rankin, to appease the frightened lad whose cap he had snatched, took the youngster by the collar and dragged him into the carriage, Garwood felt it would be better to laugh with him and with the crowd.

The procession turned into Main Street, and so on down to the square, with its old brown court house and its monument inscribed to the soldiers and sailors of Polk County, though Polk County had never had any sailors. The procession ended at the Cassell House, though why can hardly be told. Garwood did not live there, but all processions of that kind in Grand Prairie end at the Cassell House. The band stopped in front of the hotel, and the musicians seized off their caps, mopped their brows and looked around toward Rankin furtively, thinking of beer. But Rankin, again swinging his dangerous little bag, was making a way through the crowd toward the wide door. Garwood was almost lifted from his carriage, and felt himself helplessly swept into the hotel office on the great human breaker that rolled in that way. When his feet touched the floor again, the loud cry went up:

“Speech! Speech!”

Rankin turned toward him.

“You’ll have to give it to ’em, Jerry, ’fore they’ll let you go.”

And he led the way up the stairs toward the parlor. Garwood went after him, with the mayor and a self-appointed committee following, and in another minute he had stepped out on the balcony, and bared his head to the breeze that was blowing warm off the prairie. As he stood there, erect and calm, with the little wind loosening the locks over his forehead, his lips compressed and white, his right hand in the breast of his coat, after the fashion of all our orators, many in the crowd for the first time were conscious of how like a congressman this young fellow really looked. They began to celebrate the discovery by another cheer, but Garwood drew his hand from the bosom of his coat and raised it toward them. Instantly a warning “Sh!” ran through the whole concourse, the few wagons rattling by halted suddenly, and a hush fell. Garwood’s eye swept the old familiar square, his face flushed, his heart beat high, but outwardly he was calm, as he affected the impressive pause that adds so much to oratory. And then he began with studied simplicity.

“My friends,” he said, in a voice that seemed low, but which carried in the evening air across the square, “and fellow citizens: I am profoundly touched by this welcome. Words are inadequate to express, fittingly, how much it means to me. For thirty years I have gone in and out among you, as a boy and as a man, and it has always seemed to me that the highest honor I could achieve in life would be found in your respect, your confidence, if possible, your love. Your wishes and your welfare have ever been my first and highest thought. I know not what responsibilities may await me in the future, but whether they be small and light or great and heavy, still my wish and purpose shall remain the same—to serve you, well and faithfully; whatever they may be, I know that nothing can ever bring to my heart the deep gratitude or fill me with the sweet satisfaction this magnificent welcome affords.

“You must not expect a speech from me this evening. At a later day and at some more convenient and appropriate season, I shall address you upon the issues of the approaching campaign, but I would not, even if I were physically able to do so, intrude partisan considerations upon you in this hour. But I can not let you go away without the assurance that I am deeply sensible of the great honor you do me. With a sincerity wholly unfeigned I thank you for it. May God bless you all, may you prosper in your basket and your store and—” the speaker’s eye wandered far away to the ragged edges of the crowd—“thanking you again and again, I bid you good night.”

A cheer promptly arose, and Garwood bowed himself backward through the window. Rankin, standing near him, laid his hand on the shoulder of the mayor.

“John,” he said to that executive, “he’ll do.”

Then the hand-shaking and the congratulations began again. Garwood stood there, at times passing over his brow the handkerchief he held in his left hand, while he gave to the men who passed by him a right hand that was red and swollen and beginning to ache. And outside, the crowd, feeling, when its American passion for speech-making was satisfied, that it had had its due, went away, leaving the square deserted.

II

THE mother of the new candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District expressed her pride in her son’s achievement by cooking for him that night, with her own hands, a supper of the things he most liked to eat, and while the candidate consumed the supper with a gusto that breathed its ultimate sigh in the comfortable sense of repletion with which he pushed back his chair, his appreciation ended there, and half an hour later he left his mother to the usual loneliness of her widowed life. Sangamon Avenue, where the self-elected better element of Grand Prairie had gathered to enjoy the envy of the lower classes, stretched away under its graceful shade-trees in aristocratic leisure. The darkness of a summer evening rolled under the elms and oaks, and blurred the outlines of the tall chimneys and peaked roofs which a new architect coming from the East had lately given to the houses of the prosperous. Here and there a strip of cool and open lawn, each blade of its carefully mown blue-grass threading beads of dew, sparkled in the white light of the arc lamps that hung at the street crossings. On the wide verandas which were shrouded in the common darkness, white forms could be seen indistinctly, rocking back and forth, and the murmur of voices could be heard, in bland and desultory interchange of the banalities [Pg 19]of village life. The avenue had been laid an inch deep in mud by the garden hose, which might have been seen in the last hours of the day, united in a common effort to subdue the dust that puffed in little white clouds as Grand Prairie’s horses stumbled along. Now and then some surrey, the spokes of its wheels glistening in the electric light, went squeaking leisurely by as some family solemnly enjoyed its evening drive; now and then some young man, his cigarette glowing into a spark of life and then dying away, loitered down town. The only other life was represented by the myriads of insects feverishly rising and falling in clouds about the arc lamps, or some silent bat describing vast circles in the darkness, and at intervals swinging into the light on membranous wings to snatch her evening meal, bite by bite, from that mass of strenuous, purposeless animal life.

As he strolled, slowly, for he wished to preserve his collar intact until he should present himself immaculate before the woman of his love, Garwood felt some of the peace of the sleepy town fall upon him. He gave himself up to the sensuous effect of it, inhaling the odors of a summer night, and when he turned into the yard of the Harkness home his heart leaped. A filmy figure in white slowly floated, as it seemed to his romantic vision, out of the darkness that lay thick under the veranda. Half way down the walk, under the oaks, they met.

“Jerome! I’m so proud!”

The pride she had felt in him still glowed in her eyes as they sat there in the wicker chairs, but now when she heard him sigh, she bent toward him, and her voice filled with a woman’s pity as she said:

“You’re tired, aren’t you—poor boy?”

“Yes, very tired,” he assented, with a man’s readiness to be coddled. “But then,” he added, “it’s rest just to be here.”

He laid his hand on hers and she drew closer, looking eagerly into his face. She needed no light other than the glow of the summer night to make his features plain to her. She looked long at him, and then she withdrew her hand, and sat erect, smoothing her skirts with an affected primness and folding her hands in her lap.

“Now you must tell me all about it,” she said. “The newspapers are so unsatisfactory, and you know I’ve only had the one little note you wrote me Wednesday night—when you thought you were beaten.”

They laughed, now that they could do so with impunity, at the danger he had been in so short a time before.

“Well,” he began, “it was a close shave, after all. If it hadn’t been for Jim Rankin I’d have come home to-night beaten, and there wouldn’t have been any band or any carriage or any crowd to greet me—as Rankin reminded me this afternoon when I was near bursting at the reception I did get.” He laughed, but the laugh had a tinge of bitterness.

“I would have been there,” she said simply.

“If I’d been beaten?”

“Yes.”

“I missed you this afternoon,” he said. “I looked for you everywhere.”

“There were enough there, weren’t there?”

“No, not quite,” he said; “the crowd lacked one, just one.” He spoke with a little injury in his tone. And the girl, with her quick apperception of it, said:

“I wanted you all to myself, dear. I can give you part of the time to the public—but I can’t share you.” She said this in the pride of a new conception of Garwood that had just come to her—a conception of him as a public man, sacrificing himself for the people. Garwood himself instantly shared the conception.

“Isn’t that better?” she added.

For answer he took her hand again, pressing it in his big palm.

“And now tell me,” she said.

So he told her the story of the Clinton convention; how the delegations from the seven counties that comprised the Thirteenth Congressional District, his district, as he was already careful to speak of it, had gone there and stubbornly balloted for one, two, three days without a change or a break, until a thousand ballots had been cast, and men were worn and spent with the long-drawn agony of those tense hours in the stifling opera house. He felt a touch of the old fear that had come over him when he heard on Thursday night that Tazewell County would go to Sprague the next day, and it looked as if, the deadlock thus broken, Sprague would be chosen.

“You see,” he explained, “Sprague had his own county, Moultrie, and Logan, and if he got Tazewell it would mean thirty votes more—almost a cinch.”

The girl’s attention flagged in her effort to penetrate the mysteries of ballots and delegations.

“That was the night I wrote you,” he went on, and her interest brightened with her understanding. “I was mighty blue that night.”

He made a pause, for the pity of it.

“And that was the night, too, when Jim Rankin came to the front. I never knew him to rise to such heights of political ability before. I tell you, Emily, we must be good to Jim Rankin—he’s the best friend we’ve got. He went out after supper, and was out all the night. When he came in at four o’clock in the morning—I had just thrown myself on the bed in my clothes to snatch a wink of sleep—he came into our room and said, ‘Well, Jerry, my boy, we’ve got him skinned now—Piatt will go to you on the first ballot to-morrow, and McKimmon will swing Mason on the second—and that’ll settle it.’”

Garwood paused. She sat with her chin on her hand. The lace of her sleeve fell back, exposing her round forearm, white like marble in the moonlight that was spilling through the purple shadows of the trees and trickling on her dress. But a soberness had clouded her eyes.

“How do you suppose he did it, Jerome?” she asked presently.

“I don’t know,” Garwood answered, “and what’s more,” he added with a dry little laugh, “I don’t want to.”

The girl’s soberness deepened as the silence in which she received his last words lengthened. Garwood glanced at her in some concern, and then he hurried on.

“Well, it came out just as he said. The next morning Piatt County threw her vote to me on the first ballot, and by the time it got down to Tazewell it was all over with Sprague; his man Simp Lewis—you’ve heard me speak of him—moved to make it unanimous, and the noise began.”

He laughed again, this time in sheer joy as he lived those hours once more.

“It lasted all morning, when we weren’t making speeches telling how we loved each other, and the party, and the dear old flag; it lasted all the way over here on the train, until I got home and saw everybody but the one woman I’d done it all for.”

“But you saw me in the crowd while you were speaking from the hotel balcony, didn’t you?”

The scene in the square flashed back to him. The sea of faces turned up to his, the halting vehicles, the heads at windows, the raveling edges of the common crowd—he saw it all.

“I had never heard you make a speech before, you know,” she went on, “and I had always wished to—it was a splendid speech.”

“Yes,” he mused, and strangely for him, seemed not to have heard her praise, “yes, I saw you—I saw nothing but you. I thought of nothing but you!”

“Oh, Jerome,” she said, “I was happy and proud that minute to think——”

Suddenly he seized her, crushing her to him as if in some sudden access of fear.

“Dearest!” he said, “all this is nothing to me beside you and your love. Do you really love me so very much?”

“Oh, you know!” he heard her whisper.

“And will—always?”

“Always.”

“No matter what I did—or have done?”

“No matter,” she said; “you are—you. You are—mine.”

“Are you sure,” he persisted, somehow growing fierce, “sure—do you know what you are saying? No matter what I did, how unworthy I became, to what depths I sank”—even in that instant he was conscious of a dramatic quality in the situation, conscious of the eloquence, as it seemed to him, of his words—“to what depths of shame, of dishonor?”

“Why—Jerome!” the girl raised her face, half frightened, “what do you——”

“Tell me,” he demanded, and he fairly shook her, “how do you know?”

She raised her face, and he saw that it was moistened with tears. She withdrew from his embrace, and sat erect. He let his arms fall to his side. Then she took his face in her two hands, she looked into his eyes, and she gave a scornful little laugh.

“How do I know?” she said. “Ah, Jerome, because I know you; because I know that you could do nothing dishonorable!”

He hung his head, helpless, and the impulse to tell her passed with the moment that made it impossible.

Late in the evening, when he was going, as he stood below her on the steps of the veranda, she said to him:

“Jerome, do you know what Mr. Rankin did to get those delegations to—swing to you, did you say?”

“Why, no,” he laughed, “why?”

“You are sure there was no—no—money?” She said the word as if she were afraid of it.

“Money!” he exclaimed. “Money!” and he laughed the same laugh of protestation she had laughed a while before, though he laughed the big laugh of a man. “Why, my precious little girl, money would be the last thing in the world with me—I guess it always will be!” he observed in rueful parenthesis. “Don’t you believe me when I tell you that my law practice, and God knows it was small enough as it was, has gone to pieces in this campaign, that I’m insolvent, that I’m a pauper, that I’d have to be buried in the potter’s field if I were to die to-night?”

“Don’t, don’t! Jerome, please,” she held her hand to his lips to hush him, “don’t talk of dying! I’m frightened to-night.” She shuddered once again into his arms.

“Frightened?” he scoffed. “What at?”

“Oh, I don’t know; it’s foolish. I guess it’s just because I’m so happy—and I’m afraid of too much happiness.”

He could only fold her closely in his arms again. He, too, was filled with a fear he dare not name.

It was late when Garwood walked homeward under the maples that poured their thick shadows along the sidewalks of Sangamon Avenue. The carriages which in the early evening had squeaked leisurely by in the sprinkled street had taken their occupants home. The houses of Grand Prairie’s aristocrats were closed for the night and loomed now dark and still. Here and there, on a dusky lawn, he could see some counterfeit fountain, improvised of the garden hose, left to run all night, tossing its sparkling drops into the mellow light of the moon. The only sounds beyond the tinkle of these fountains were the sounds of a wide summer night, the crickets, the katydids, far away the booming of bullfrogs, farther away still the baying of some lonesome dog. It was all peace without, the peace of brooding night; but within, fear lay cold and heavy on his heart; not alone the fear which, with its remorse and regret, he had felt keen as knives at his heart an hour before when the woman he loved lay passive in his arms, but a new fear, though born in the same brood. Under its stress, his imagination tortured him with scenes in the forthcoming campaign, black headlines in opposition newspapers, a voice bawling a question at him from the crowd he was addressing, until the cumulative force of their disclosures should drive him from the stump.

But presently he put forth his will. “Pshaw!” he said, almost aloud, “how foolish! I am young, I am strong, I have the love of the best woman on earth; she would not believe if they told her! I can win, and I will win!”

He laughed aloud, because the street was still, and the night was deep. He flung up his arms and spread them wide, taking a long, deep breath of the sweet air. “I will win, win it all—her and everything besides—Congress, Governor, the Senate—all!” He strode along erect and calm, full of a vast faith in his own lusty powers, full of the sublime confidence of youth.

III

EMILY HARKNESS might easily have been the leader of what the local newspapers, imitating those of Chicago, had recently begun to call the “Smart Set,” a position which would have entitled her to the distinction of being the most popular girl in town, but because she did not accept the position, she was perhaps the most unpopular girl in town. “Society,” in Grand Prairie, lacked too much in what is known as eligible young men, for while the town produced the normal quantity of that product, those who were strong and ambitious went away to Chicago or St. Louis where, in a day of economical tendencies that were fast making the small towns of a more prosperous past but a shaded and sleepy tradition, there were larger fields for their young efforts. Those that were left were employed in their fathers’ businesses, and some of them worked in the three banks of the town, but while these were able, out of their scant salaries, to arrange for a series of assembly balls in the dining-room of the Cassell House every winter, they found calls upon the girls, in whose parlors they would rock all the evening, chaffing each other with personalities, their nearest approach to the society life.

The social activities of the place were therefore left largely to the initiative of the elder women, who formed the usual number of clubs, held the usual number of meetings, and derived, possibly, the usual amount of benefit therefrom. These clubs were inaugurated under a serious pretense of feeding starved intellectualities, and were impregnated at the first with a strong literary flavor, but in the end they administered to a bodily rather than a mental hunger, and their profound programs degenerated into mere menus.

The men of Grand Prairie soon learned to identify the days on which the club meetings fell by the impaired appetites their wives showed at the supper table, and the louder tones in which they talked all the evening. Ultimately, when the euchre club had evolved into the higher stage of the whist club, the men became expert enough to tell, by the absence of the vocal phenomenon already noted, the days on which the card tournaments were held.

When Emily Harkness came home from the Eastern college where she had taken a bachelor’s degree, it was thought that she would be a decided acquisition to society, a fact that was duly exploited in the Grand Prairie newspapers. The young men of the town at once began to call, but when they found that she did not enter into the spirit of those little personalities which formed the sinew of what they called their conversation, and when they learned that she would not endure the familiarity that the other girls of the town indulged them in, they began one by one to fail in these well-meant attentions. Several of them, out of a devotion to the spirit of social duty, tried for a while to cultivate, or at the least to assume, a literary taste that would admit them to her confidence. But their reading had been limited to the Chicago Sunday newspapers, the works of the Duchess and to the most widely advertised novels of the swashbuckler school, and they could only stare vacantly when she soared into the rarer altitudes of the culture she had acquired at college, where she had had a course of Browning lectures and out of a superficial tutoring in art had espoused with enthusiasm the then prospering cause of Realism.

Failing in literature, a few of the more determined of these youths essayed music, but when she played for them Chopin’s nocturnes and asked if they liked Brahms, whose name they could never learn to pronounce, they gave her up, and fled with relief to the banjo, the mandolin, and the coon songs that echoed not inharmoniously on summer nights along the borders of Silver Lake, as they called the muddy pond where the aquatic needs of Grand Prairie society are appeased. Emily could not follow them thither, for she would not consent to buggy rides, even on moonlight nights. And so the young men of Grand Prairie voted her “stuck up,” and to themselves justified their verdict by the fact that she made them by some silent spiritual coercion call her Miss Harkness instead of Em, or Emily at least.

As for the clubs, she continued to attend them occasionally, for she was needed to prepare papers on literary topics for the federated meetings held monthly in the Presbyterian church. The matrons of the town would listen to her with the folds in their chins multiplying as their faces lengthened and their bodies yielded to the cushioned pews of the warm tabernacle, but however conscientiously they tried to follow her, their winks would develop into nods, and they would fail asleep. At the conclusion of her papers, of course, they gave Emily their gloved hands in congratulation, but the gulf between them yawned wider and wider, until Emily became a mere intellectual rather than a human personality.

Thus left to herself, Emily seemed to be doomed to a life in which she would never have opportunity for the development of her talents. She had brought away from college many exalted purposes, and she meant to keep these purposes high, but at times she despaired of ever having the chance to put her acquirements to what her father would have called practical use. She read much, for she had much leisure, and kept up at first a prodigious correspondence, but gradually those friendships which in the flush of exuberant youth had been destined for immortality, declined and faded as such things do fade in our lives, and soon ceased altogether. She had tried writing, and sent two or three manuscripts away to the magazines, but they were returned so promptly that her jocular father said the editors doubtless had an arrangement with the postmaster to return all such suspicious-looking parcels to the senders.

Then in that period which brought the customary desire to earn her own money, she proposed giving music lessons, but her father, in the social pride he possessed, without any social inclinations, at once vetoed the proposal.

It was in these changing, unquiet moods that she met Garwood. She had found that about the only practical outlet for the aspirations of women, in her time and country, was in the direction of charitable work. An unusually severe winter in Grand Prairie had made many opportunities for efforts of this nature, and she found a special pleasure in going about in the poorer quarter which lay beyond Railroad Avenue, hardly a block from the respectable homes of the well-to-do. The pleasure she derived from this new work was largely subjective; perhaps, as it is likely to do, it ministered to her spiritual vanity as much as to anything else. In the end, her emotional appreciation of the picturesque in poverty led her into indiscriminate giving. This new phase of her development did not increase her favor in the eyes of her neighbors. They resented her activity as foolish and meddlesome; the poor—to whom, in the delusion common to all the thoughtless rich, they gladly attributed unbounded good health—could get along all right, they said, if they would only work and save their money; or, as they preferred to express it, be industrious and frugal.

One of the families Emily visited had been frugal so long that it had lost the strength to be industrious. It was a German family that had come from the province of Pomerania, and the yellow hair of the mother framed a face that Emily loved to picture in its girlish prettiness among the fields of her native land and happier childhood. Her husband was a man with a delicious dialectal speech, and he could tell famous tales of his service in the German army. He had worked in the “Boakeye Bre’erie,” as he called the Buckeye Brewery, and for some reason that Emily never properly grasped had lost his job. When she discovered the family they were patiently living on the remnant of a side of pork the man had bought with his last money.

Emily had pictured herself meeting, in the course of her charitable work, some interesting young doctor, with a Van Dyck beard; but all the doctors in Grand Prairie, like most of the other workers in that depleted vineyard, were old men; she met instead, what is universal, a young lawyer.

Jake Reinhardt, who never had money to buy bread or meat, seemed always able to procure beer and tobacco, an incongruity Emily could not understand at first. She learned afterwards that Jake knew a saloon-keeper who had a mixture of kind-heartedness and long-headedness, the first of which led him to trust Reinhardt for the beer and tobacco, while the second justified the course because Reinhardt’s presence at his bar made one consumer more when a round of drinks was ordered for the house. Then, one day, suddenly, just as Emily thought she was getting the family on its feet, Reinhardt felled a man in the saloon with a blow of a billiard cue, and was thrown into jail on a charge of assault with intent to kill. His victim was lying in a precarious state; possibly he might die; Reinhardt might yet be held to answer to a charge of murder.

Emily found Mrs. Reinhardt with a face bloated by tears, staring in mute anguish at this new calamity she could not comprehend. As Emily’s first thought in the former difficulties had been a doctor, now her first thought was a lawyer; but it seemed that one had already appeared, and Mrs. Reinhardt in her broken speech extolled him as a ministering angel. It was plain that he had taken up the cause out of pity for Reinhardt’s defenseless condition, perhaps in a belief in his moral innocence, which the blundering police could not or would not admit. As the affair turned out, Emily’s sympathies proved to have been as fully justified as the young lawyer’s, and what she then observed of the practical administration of justice in criminal courts only confirmed many of the sociological heresies that then were sprouting in her mind, quite as much, indeed, to her own distress as to her father’s.

Emily gave Mrs. Reinhardt carte blanche in the matter of spending money to clear her husband, and even offered to pay the young lawyer’s fee. When he refused, the lofty heroism of his act, as she called it, opened the way for a sympathy between them, and by the time Garwood acquitted his client, he and Emily were friends.

Garwood’s social traditions were far removed from those of Emily; and it was only in Railroad Avenue, and never in Sangamon, that they could have met at all. Garwood had never gone into society in Grand Prairie; his mother was a Methodist, and to go into society it was necessary to be an Episcopalian, or at least a Presbyterian. He would have betrayed his training in any social emergency and he had to hide his ignorance of conventionalities behind a native diffidence, which in a young man of his solemnity happily passed for dignity.

But he came into Emily’s life at the very time when it was ready to receive impressions from a more masterful mind. In his young dream of a career, in that enthusiasm for humanity which springs in most men of the liberal professions with the shock of their first impact with a hard, material age, and develops until the age taints them with its sordidness, Garwood had enlisted in the world-old fight for equality and democracy. His first victory was for himself, and he was elected to the Legislature. Thereafter, he dreamed of becoming some day a great commoner, and so was in danger of turning out a demagogue.

While he had not read as widely as Emily he had thought a great deal more, and the two young persons were delighted as they discovered new points at which, to their own satisfaction, they supplemented each other perfectly. Emily found in Garwood the only worthy intellectuality that the youth of Grand Prairie offered, and though, after a certain intimacy had been established by his first few awkward calls, he showed as much contempt as ever for the more aristocratic environment of the girl, this only flattered her, and she noted with the feminine pride and pleasure in little conquests, that as he grew accustomed to the life his constraint gave way to a liking for its luxury.

She adopted him, with a young girl’s love of a protégé; gave him books to read and was pleased rather than displeased at the gossip their relations excited before that first winter ended and the spring took from them the excuse their charitable work had given for being much in each other’s society. Thereafter they frankly dispensed with this bond and substituted one of affection pure and simple. This propinquity naturally ended in love, and the club women of the town were doubtless justified in their new and keenly relished understanding that Emily had more than the mere patroness’s interest in the career of this young man. Most of them said she was demeaning herself, but that only added to their joy.

IV

RANKIN was not only chairman of the Polk County central committee, a position he had held for years, but he was also chairman of the congressional committee. It was, therefore, with an authority no one cared to question that, early in September, he engaged two rooms in the Lawrence Block for the county committee’s headquarters, though he preferred to pitch his own in Garwood’s law office, which was on the same floor. Then he swung a banner across the street and began to menace Garwood’s opponent with challenges for joint debates. To Grand Prairie this expressed the formal opening of the campaign, but Garwood already had been two weeks away from home, speaking twice daily in Piatt and DeWitt Counties, under the skies in the afternoon, under the stars by night, and had returned for a day before going down into Moultrie. The office had been crowded all day and it was late in the afternoon before he had a chance to write the letters that needed his attention. He had just dismissed, rather ungraciously, a delegation of negroes—for Rankin never had any patience with negro delegations—and had begun dictating to the typewriter, when another caller came demanding a personal interview.

The caller was a little man, who walked with stooped shoulders, swung a slender stick energetically as he advanced, and continued to twist it nervously when he had come. His head was but thinly covered with lank, moist hair, as was shown when he pushed back the sun-burned straw hat he wore. This moisture seemed to be general in his whole system. It was apparent in the perspiring hand he gave to Garwood; it affected the short mustache, dyed a dull, lifeless black, at which he scratched with a black-edged finger nail as he talked, when he was not plucking at the few hairs that strayed on his chin. This moisture showed again in his blue eyes, from which it had almost washed the color. After he had been shut in the room with Garwood for half an hour, the air was laden with alcoholic fumes, which, exuding from his whole body, may have accounted for his moist personality. While he talked he chewed and puffed a glossy yellow cigar.

This man was Freeman H. Pusey, and he was publisher, editor, reporter, all in one, of the Grand Prairie Evening News. His journal was a small one of four pages, for the most part given over to boiler-plate matter, but it carried a column of “locals,” a portentous editorial page, and took on a happy, almost gala expression whenever it could exploit, under the heavy ragged type in which its headlines were set, some scandal that would shock Grand Prairie. In politics the News claimed to be independent, which meant that it leaned far to one side in one campaign, and as far to the other in the next; indeed, it sometimes held these two extreme positions in the same campaign, and found no difficulty in vindicating its policy.

“I came to see you, Mr. Garwood, in regard to a little political matter,” Pusey began.

“Well?” said Garwood, not too cordially.

“Of course you know that the News is the accepted organ of the people, that is, the great mass of the common people here in Grand Prairie and,—ah—I might say in Polk County.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Garwood.

“Thus far, you may have noticed, we have been neutral, that is, I should say, independent, as between you and Judge Bromley.”

Garwood was looking out of his window down into the court house square, where the winds played with the rubbish that always litters the streets of Grand Prairie. He made no reply, and Pusey eyed him out of his swimming little eyes.

“Yes,” continued Pusey, pinching his chin, “we have waited to see how events would shape themselves before—ah—”

Garwood grunted, and Pusey went on:

“Yes—ah—I had come to the conclusion that perhaps our best course would be to support you, inasmuch as you’re our fellow townsman—and it occurred to me that perhaps a write-up would do you some good, that is, with the great mass of the common people, the laboring people generally, you understand.”

“I should be obliged to you, of course,” said Garwood.

“H-m-m, yes,” answered Pusey, “I presume so. But—if I—that is, we, were to give you such a write-up and run your cut, you would, I presume, be ready to take twenty or thirty thousand copies for distribution?”

“What would it cost?” said Garwood.

“Well—at two cents a copy—you can—”

“I see,” said Garwood, “for your support you would expect about five hundred dollars.”

“I did not put it in that light,” said Pusey, spitting, and trying to assume a dignity.

“No, but I—”

“You can see, of course, Mr. Garwood—a man of your experience can readily see, that a paper like the News can hardly afford to give up its valuable space to that which is not strictly news matter without some hope of compensation.”

“I see,” said Garwood, “but to be frank with you, Pusey,” he turned and looked straight into the little man’s watery eyes, “I can’t afford it. This campaign, into which I sometimes wish I hadn’t gone, has proved expensive, and my practice has suffered, so that I need all the money at my command for more immediate and pressing expenses.”

“You do not consider this immediate and pressing then?” said Pusey.

“Well, not exactly,” Garwood replied. “Would you?”

Pusey was silent for a while. When he spoke he said:

“There are certain passages in your life, Mr. Garwood, which just now—”

Garwood glared at Pusey.

“So that’s the game, is it?” he said. His tone was low, for he was calculating carefully the part he had to play.

The little man was revolving his straw hat on the head of his stick, and he wore a grin about his moist mouth. Garwood had mastered his anger, but Pusey had to wait some time before he spoke. Presently he did so.

“I’ll tell you, Pusey,” he said, “you know Jim Rankin is running my campaign, and I have promised him not to take any steps without consulting him. We’ve had all sorts of callers here, white and black, cranks, mind readers, palmists, faith curists and men with votes in their vest pockets, and I’ve adopted the rule of turning over to him every one who comes. I’ll speak to him about your case, and you may call around to-morrow and see him.”

When Pusey had gone, Garwood burst upon Rankin, his face white with anger.

“The damned little blackmailing—”

“What’n hell’s the matter?” asked Rankin, letting his feet fall from the desk.

Garwood, digging his clenched fists into his trousers’ pockets, paced the floor, swearing angrily.

“Free Pusey’s been here,” he said.

“What’d he want?”

“Stuff.”

“Of course—but what for?”

“For keeping still, what’d you suppose?”

“Does he know anything?”

Garwood paused by the window, still breathing hard.

“Well,” he said presently, “he claims to.”

Rankin drew himself upright with the difficulty of a fat man, and leaned towards Garwood.

“Legislature?” he asked.

Garwood gave an impatient fling of his head. He turned then, drew a chair up to the desk, and sat down, facing Rankin. But Rankin spoke first.

“Some more of that newspaper rot ’bout the Ford bill?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” said Garwood wearily. “I reckon I’ll never hear the last of that.”

“Oh, well,” Rankin said, “to hell with it. Let him print it!”

“But damn it,” Garwood went on, “it’s serious with me—just now—at any rate.”

“Aw, cheer up,” said Rankin, “that won’t cut any figure with you—it won’t lose a vote.”

“No, but it may lose me something else—” Garwood spoke with a significance that Rankin could not instantly appreciate. “Of course,” Garwood continued “there was nothing in it, but then—you know, a woman—”

The big fellow vented a little whistle, and then kept his lips puckered up to aid his thought.

“What can we do?” said Garwood, who could not then, in such a mood, endure the delay of silence.

“Well,” said Rankin, “let me think, I can’t straighten it out all at once. It ’as al’ays hard fer me to mix politics and business, or politics and religion, or politics and—” He was a sentimental man who feared to show his sentiment, and he did not speak the tender word of many meanings. But under the influence of the twilight, perhaps because they could not see each other’s face, they talked confidentially, until the gloom of evening was expanding in the room. Then Rankin took out his watch and tried to read its dial.

“Gosh!” he exclaimed, “I must be gettin’ home—I’ll try to fix it up somehow, Jerry. Don’t worry—just leave it to me.”

“If you think we ought to do it, Jim,” Garwood said, “I might borrow the—”

“Not a red cent for that pirate!” exclaimed Rankin, smiting the desk with his fist. “We’ll need all the money we can get in the campaign. Besides, he ain’t honest enough to stay bought.”

Though Rankin had told him not to worry, Garwood was depressed and troubled, and longed for sympathy. In the evening, when he found time to go to Emily, Pusey was uppermost in his mind.

“You’re tired, of course,” said Emily, “and how hoarse.”

“It’s the speaking, I reckon,” said Garwood. “I campaigned all week with old General Stager; we spoke outdoors to acres of people. How those old-timers stand it I don’t know. They can blow like steam whistles day and night. When I left the old gentleman last night at Mt. Pulaski, he was as fresh as a daisy—said he liked a little taste of the stump now and then—but that, of course, it wasn’t anything to what it used to be.”

Emily laughed a little.

“Won’t you have some meetings indoors?”

“Oh, after while—but we have to get the crowds where we can find them, and the farmers are all at the county fairs nowadays. I’ll be glad when it’s over. The strain is pulling me down.”

“Aren’t you well?” she asked with a woman’s constant concern.

“Oh, yes, well enough; of course I have a cold all the time, a candidate has to have that, and a sore throat, but you have to smile, and look pleasant, and shake hands, and be careful what you say. I’d give anything to be a free man once more, to be able to talk without weighing every word, without having to watch it as if I were drawing an indictment. I’d give anything to indulge one good fit of anger.”

“Can’t you—just get mad at me?”

Garwood laughed fondly. “Well,” he went on, “it’s good to come here and relax and speak my mind. I did get mad to-day though, and threaten to throw a man out of my office window.” His thought would revert to that subject.

“Who?” she asked, in alarm.

“Oh, that little Free Pusey.”

“What has he done?”

“He wanted me to give him money for his support.”

“Well, I don’t blame you. I can understand your righteous indignation, Jerome.”

Garwood felt the blood tinge his checks.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Emily.”

“W’y, why?”

“Because you don’t know how sordid politics are—or is—which is it? I’d probably have given it to him, only I didn’t have it; the righteously indignant was the only attitude left.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk like that, Jerome. I don’t like to see you in that cynical mood. It wasn’t an attitude, it was your real nature speaking.”

“Well, a man must keep his real nature in subjection in politics.”

“Please don’t, Jerome; you mustn’t keep your real nature in subjection in politics. We need just such men as you in our public life.”

They were silent then.

“Jerome,” the girl said later, “do you really need money so badly?”

“Well, it costs, you know.”

“Why don’t you speak to father—I know he’d be glad to help you. He is very anxious to see you succeed, you know—or if you think that Mr. Pusey can harm you, why can’t you let father speak to him? Father once did him some favor—don’t you remember those sickening, fulsome articles he wrote?”

Garwood gasped at the thought of Emily’s father penetrating that situation.

“Never that!” he said, bringing his fist down on his knee. “Don’t you ever suggest such a thing, Emily, do you hear?” He turned and his eyes glowed as he looked at her. The girl laughed a little laugh of pride in him.

“I’m afraid, Jerome,” she began in a playful way, “that you don’t understand politics very well yourself.” And then she became serious, and sighed.

“But how noble you are! And how high minded! And how I love you for it!”

They sat there a long while after that, in the darkness. But they did not talk politics any more.

V

WHEN the Alton’s early train drew out of the Canal Street station that morning, the last coach had its curtains drawn, with a touch of royal mystery. Though its polished panels were grimed from a long journey, though its roof lay deep in cinders, and though its gilt lettering was tarnished, still, as it moved onward with heavy dignity, it was plainly no ordinary car, for it rolled majestically at the end of that long train like some ship, to which clung the sentimental interest of a stormy voyage. As it passed, yardmen in blue overalls straightened their backs painfully and scrutinized it with professional eye, sometimes they swung their caps; laborers, men and women, on their morning way to work, halted by the crossing-gates and united in a cheer, their futile little celebration being dissipated by the clamor of the alarm bells, as the train whirled by in its cloud of dust, and the gates lifted to let the flood-tide of city life set in again for the day’s work.

The fireman in the engine cab sat erect as he clanged his brass bell; the engineer, knitting his brow as he studied his watch, stretched his hand to the throttle with a touch as delicate as a telegrapher’s. Within the train, the division superintendent whispered to the conductor. Plainly, it was no ordinary car.

It was bearing a candidate for the presidency, on his way west, swinging around the circle, as our phrase has been ever since Andrew Johnson made the first presidential stumping tour.

His itinerary had been so arranged as to give him an hour in Lincoln that afternoon. General Stager was to be there also and to speak before the presidential candidate arrived. The old wheel-horse’s part was to hold the crowd, and he was well cast, for he could talk on indefinitely, and yet round off his speech with an eloquent peroration at any moment and seem never to suffer any ill effects, either as to himself or to his speech. Then in the evening Garwood was to speak. He had looked forward to the day with eagerness, anticipating fondly his meeting with the great man who, as General Stager would put it, was running for the highest office within the gift of the American people.

He had gone up to Chicago with Rankin the night before, and when the private car was switched over from the Pennsylvania in the morning, they boarded it with one or two members of the state executive committee, and the member of the national committee for Illinois.

The great man slept late, as great men may, yielding to the conceit that their labors are heavier than those of common men, and as Garwood and Rankin sat in the forward compartment and whispered to each other, Rankin noted his impression by saying:

“The old man takes it easy, don’t he?”

Something of this impatience was expressed by the cries of the crowd that gathered in the station at Joliet, after the train had rolled by the high stone walls of the penitentiary, and Garwood, growing more accustomed to his position, allowed himself to enjoy, as he saw men peering curiously in at him, the distinction a man feels in riding in a private car.

But the day was fully awake now, and the national excitement that for a week had found its dynamic center in that car, began to impress itself upon its occupants; the newspaper correspondents who traveled with the candidate began to make notes now and then after they had learned the name of the town they were passing; while jacketed darkies began to slip about in their morning work, and at last the candidate himself came into the salon, clean and fresh, blinking his eyes in the sun, as he smiled in a courtly way and said, as if they were members of his suite traveling with a king:

“Gentlemen, good morning.”

And then he looked about him as if he had lost something.

“Is the colonel up yet?” he asked.

His secretary at that instant appeared, pursued by a black porter whisking at his blue clothes with a long, thin broom.

“Ah,” he said, “there you are. Did you rest well?”

“Fairly,” said the colonel. “Papers come yet?”

Before the candidate could reply, the chairman of the state central committee had taken Garwood by the sleeve and drawn him up before the candidate.

“This is Mr. Garwood, our candidate for Congress in the Thirteenth District.”

“Ah, Mr. Garwood,” the great man said, “very glad to meet you, I’m sure. You had rather a spirited contest in your district, did you not?”

Garwood smiled at the memory of it. He was about to reply when the colonel, who had gone for the train boy, returned with a bundle of newspapers that smelt pleasantly of the printer’s ink, and gave them all, save the one he had opened for himself, to the candidate. The candidate took them in his delicate hands, lifted his glasses, opened one of the papers, and as he did so observed, his eyes running up and down the columns:

“Such contests are always healthful indications, I fancy.”

Garwood hemmed and murmured a disappointed “Yes.” The great man was slowly sinking into a wicker chair, and beginning to read the reports of the speeches he had delivered through Indiana and Ohio the day before.

The whole party had got newspapers of the news agent and had settled down to read them. The newspaper men had bought with as much avidity as the rest, and were trembling with the mingled pain and pleasure of reading their own stuff, as, with a contempt perhaps not all pretended, they called it.

The news that the candidate had risen spread through the train by some mysterious agency, and almost before he had finished his breakfast, men began to venture back that way to see him. He received them all with his weary smile, shook their hands, and thanked them for whatever it was he seemed to think or wished them to think they were doing for him. It was the better dressed of the passengers in the forward coaches that were bold enough to enter a private car at first, but as the habit grew common, men from the day coaches, and at last the farmers from the smoking car who had got on to ride short distances between stations, began to shamble back. One of them, with his clothes and hat and whiskers all sun-burned to a neutral shade of brown, stood in an awkward attitude before the candidate crushing his white slender hand in his own harsh palm, and pumped it up and down, stammering through his tobacco that he had been voting the straight ticket for fifty years, and when the great man said he hoped that he would live to vote it for fifty years more, the little knot of admiring men laughed with exuberant mirth at the joke.

As the news that the candidate had risen spread through the train, so it sped onward before the train, and now as they reached and impatiently halted at little towns along the road, people were gathered at the stations, stretching their necks, and hastily glancing at all the windows of the train to catch a glimpse of the man who might soon be their president.

At each stop the candidate stepped out upon the platform, his stenographer following him with a note book, spoke a few words of greeting, and dropped a politic remark that had the epigrammatic ring of a political axiom.

Garwood was disappointed in not being called on to speak himself, and he had been disappointed, too, in not having the conversation with his great leader he had anticipated. He was beginning to realize the relativity of things, whereby a candidate for Congress is only great when he is drinking with a candidate for supervisor at some country bar, but when he is riding in a private car with a candidate for president he is small indeed, so small that he is not noticed in the press despatches, as Garwood was to learn when he faithfully read all the city papers the next day.

But down below Bloomington the great man gladdened him by taking a seat beside him, and beginning to ask questions, which is sometimes the mark of a great man.

“Let me see, you reside in Grand Prairie, do you not, Mr. Garwood? What is the condition of our party over there just now?”

Garwood told him it was very good; he thought there was much enthusiasm.

The great man said that he had discovered such conditions to be generally indicated.

“It will be only necessary to crystallize that enthusiasm in the ballot box,” he continued, with his Latin derivatives, “for us to win a splendid victory. Your organization is satisfactory, is it?”

Again Garwood answered “Yes.”

“Very good,” the great man said. “How large a town is Lincoln—we stop there this afternoon, do we not, Colonel?”

The colonel, too, said “Yes.”

“Agricultural community principally, I suppose? Are the farmers fairly prosperous in the county?”

“Oh, yes,” said Garwood, “they’ve had good crops this year.”

“Let me see, General Bancroft used to represent your district in Congress, did he not?”

“Yes, sir—some years ago. He’s dead now, you know.”

“Yes, I remember—I must—let me see—I was in the forty-third Congress with him, was I not, Colonel?”

“The forty-fourth,” corrected the colonel.

“To be sure, the forty-fourth. He was a very fine man. I formed a very high opinion of him.”

“Yes, he was a fine man,” said Garwood. “I read law in his office.”

“Did you, indeed? He was a very good lawyer, as I recall him. We sat on the judiciary committee together. Did he have a good practice?”

“Oh, yes, the best at the Grand Prairie bar. He was the best jury lawyer we ever had there.”

“Yes, he was a good speaker. Was the breach in the party created by his peculiarly strong character healed at his death?”

“Well, it’s pretty much healed now; for a long time it bothered us, but we never hear of it any more.”

“Pretty popular with the people, was he?”

“Very.”

“I would presume so.” The great man closed his eyes as if shutting in some impression.

“Yes,” Garwood went on, “the bare mention of his name will set them wild even now.”

“Ah, indeed,” said the candidate. “He raised a regiment about there, did he not?”

“Yes—the old ninety-third—the Bloody Ninety-third they called it. A number of his old soldiers will be at your meeting this afternoon.”

The candidate reflected that most communities like to think that their regiments have been known as “the Bloody,” but he did not say so to Garwood.

The train sped on, then Garwood heard it stop, heard the cheers and cries of the crowds outside, heard the rich voice of the candidate speaking, heard the restless bell as the train moved on again with quickly accelerated speed, while the little station and the crowd and the two shining tracks dissolved into one disappearing point of the perspective far behind. The cheers faded away, and he tried to imagine the sensation of the man for whom all this outcry was being made. The great man seemed to take it coolly enough. Either such things had grown common to him, or he had trained himself by a long course of public life to appear as if they had, for when he was not making speeches on the rear platform, or shaking hands with little delegations that boarded the train to go to the Lincoln meeting, he was resting in his stateroom. He was not well, Garwood heard the colonel explain to some one, and had to conserve his energies, though like some athlete in training he seemed able to rest and sleep between his exertions.

Rankin had wearied of the formalities of the private car and, as the train began to fill with familiar forms, men with whom he had battled in conventions for years, he had fled to the easier society and the denser atmosphere of the smoking car, greeting countless friends from all over the district, and doing the campaign work Garwood felt he should be doing himself. But the magnetism of his great leader, the joy of being in a presence all men were courting in those days, perhaps, too, a desire to feel to the utmost the distinction of riding in a private car, kept him there.

The train had reached Atlanta Hill, and now its noise subsided. The engine no longer vomited black masses of smoke, but seemed to hold its breath as, with wheels that spun so swiftly they seemed motionless, it coasted silently and swiftly down that steep grade. The spires and roofs of little Lawndale showed an instant above the trees, and then out on the level again the train sped on toward Lincoln.

Garwood arose and got the overcoat he carried to draw on after each speech, for its moral impressiveness as much as to keep him from catching cold, and as the engine began to puff heavily, and the train rolled into Lincoln, Rankin appeared, hot and perspiring.

“Come on,” he said to Garwood, “we’re there. The boys have all been askin’ fer you!”

“Have they?” asked Garwood, half guiltily. “What did you tell them?”

“I told ’em you was back here closeted with the old man; that he wouldn’t let you out of his sight, that’s what I told ’em.”

They heard the strains of a marching band, and then a cheer arose.

VI

THE crowd began its cheering as the engine slid on past the weather-beaten station and stopped, puffing importantly as if it knew how big a load it had hauled. And then the candidate appeared, and midway in a cheer the crowd ceased, stricken into silence by the sight of him. He stood for an instant, pale and distinguished, a smile on his cleanly chiseled face, an impersonal smile, almost the smile of a child, as if he were unaccustomed to all about him, crowd, committees, even the steps of the railway carriage, for three men helped him down these as if he could not know how such things were done and might injure himself. Looking carefully to his right and to his left, still with that impersonal smile on his face, the candidate set his patent leather boots to the splintered platform, and then sighing “Ah!” looked around over the crowd.

It was all confusion where they stood, but Rankin was already beside the candidate, calling him “Mr. President” as he introduced to him promiscuously men who had pressed forward grinning in a not altogether hopeless embarrassment. All this time the chairman of the Logan County committee was fluttering about, striving to recall the orderly scheme of arrangement he had devised for the occasion. He had written it all out on a slip of paper the night before, having the carriages numbered, and, in a bracket set against each number, the names of those who were to ride in that carriage, just as he had seen the thing done at a funeral. But now he found that he had left his slip of paper at home, and he found that he had forgotten the arrangement as well, just as a man in the cold hour of delivery forgets a speech he has written out and burdened his memory with. As the chairman turned this way and that, several of his townsmen noticing the indecision and perplexity written on his face, with the pitiless American sense of humor, mockingly proposed:

“Three cheers for McBain!”

As the crowd gave the cheers, the chairman became redder than ever and entreated the driver of the first carriage to come closer. The driver drew his horses, whose tails he had been crimping for two weeks, nearer the curb, and then the chairman turned toward the candidate and said: