Shelby stretched himself awake and contentedly surveyed his bachelor bedroom in the Tuscarora House. He had boarded at this establishment upward of five years, and his chamber had been decorated and, to a degree, furnished in accord with his notions of elegant comfort. The wall paper was a pattern which William Morris and his disciples would have writhed to behold,—a hideous terra-cotta ground overrun with meaningless scrolls and stiff garlands of roses of an unearthly pink. There were stuffy maroon lambrequins above the window casements, and two large blue vases, containing many-dyed plumes of pampas grass, flanked like rigid sentinels a pseudo-marble clock upon the truly marble mantelpiece which somehow suggested a mausoleum falling to decay; while the blue motive was further emphasized by a plush photograph album, with a little mirror let into its cover, standing in a metallic holder on the bureau, whose sombre walnut matched the bed and chairs. The pictures included a chromo, depicting an impossible castle set in an equally impossible landscape, a print or two of race horses, a lithograph of a poker game in supposably high life, and a photogravure of a painting familiar to the habitues of a great metropolitan hotel, popularly fancied in the country to be daring in the extreme. At first sight of the original, over the rim of a cocktail, Shelby had been fired with the resolve to own some sort of copy, and even now, after several years of possession, he esteemed it one of the world's masterpieces of pictorial art.
He dressed himself in the same content which had flushed his waking revery. The plaudits of last night's mass-meeting still rang harmoniously in his ears, and the praise of Ruth Temple and Mrs. Hilliard was sweeter in retrospect than it had been in reality. This happy serenity bore him company through the bare echoing corridors of the hotel to the office, to be heightened by the gratulations of the landlord and the help, who seemed to feel that a vicarious honor had been done the house, a most insinuating form of hero-worship which attained its climax in the homage of the true-penny who set forth his morning bitters on the bar.
Extended notices of the meeting had been telegraphed to the neighboring cities by local correspondents, and Shelby ran through the newspaper accounts in the cheerless dining room, which he thought to-day by no means comfortless. There was a flattering deference in the manner of the waitresses, and the lessening of their pert familiarity told him, more plainly perhaps than anything else, that he had become a personage. He failed to remind them that the oatmeal was burned, the rolls soggy, and the coffee reminiscent of chicory. He ate all that was set before him, and was still content. The hotel barber-shop seemed a blithe spot indeed, as he sat for his daily shave, and the admiring barber a prince of good fellows. Sweet also were the greetings of the market-place, as, cigar in mouth, he sauntered through Main Street to his law office. All his paths were pleasantness and peace.
The first discordant note was struck, oddly enough, by his faithful satellite, William Irons, who, at his employer's entrance, abruptly left off an attempt to coax his red shock into lovelocks, slid his pocket mirror under a heap of papers, and fell to hammering the typewriter with unnatural energy. Shelby accepted the subterfuge, and wished him a hearty good morning.
"Did you attend the rally, William?" he inquired, as he slit the envelopes of his morning's mail.
"Yep," said William Irons.
"Everybody seemed pleased?"
"Nope."
"No?" Shelby repeated, lifting his eyes. "And who was disgruntled?"
"The Widow Weatherwax."
"Ah! That's unfortunate," returned Shelby, blandly. "What is the widow's grievance?"
"She's put out because you told a story makin' light of drinkin' punch.She belongs to all the temp'rance societies doin' business, you know."
"No; I didn't know."
"And she says none of her church 'll vote for you after your countenancin' such a cryin' sin."
"Her list of cardinal sins is extensive."
"Yep," agreed William. "Won't even let me play my fiddle in the house.Says it's a vanity."
"I'd forgotten that you had gone to live with her."
"Do chores for my keep," explained the clerk. "Have codfish three times a day, Monday morning to Saturday night, and no warm victuals Sundays. Makes me keep my fiddle in the barn and play it behind the woodpile."
Shelby laughed, and sought to woo back his mood of charity toward all, but it was futile. The widow's mite of hostile criticism had leavened the whole lump with bitterness. Nevertheless, he bridled his tongue.
Work came hard for the moment, and his eyes strayed past his papers through an open window and spied Ruth Temple's slender shape in the lawn below. The dewy freshness of the morning seemed to touch her youth as it did the asters and belated hollyhocks of the quaint garden into which she passed as he watched. Then Bernard Graves suddenly cut into the picture, and drew a newspaper from his pocket, directing her attention to something which amused him. But Ruth did not laugh. Shelby clearly saw her color change.
A heavy step outside his door heralded the coming of the Hon. SenecaBowers. The county leader was in no mood for idle words, and looked asGrant may have looked when about to pass judgment on a disgracedsoldier.
"Seen theWhig?" he asked curtly, when William Irons had been despatched to the post-office.
"TheWhig! No, I don't take it."
"I'd advise you to subscribe."
Shelby's face sobered with a premonition of misfortune.
"What's to pay now?" he asked.
Bowers struck open a copy of Volney Sprague's newspaper, and with stubby rigid thumb guided the candidate's glance to an editorial.
"Read that, sir."
His tone was a new thing in their intercourse, but without remarkShelby read:—
"Before a crowded mass-meeting last evening, Calvin Ross Shelby, congressional candidate for the suffrages of an intelligent people, stultified alike his hearers and himself. We shall not dignify his specious appeal to local pride with the easy exposure of its fallacy; the victory were too cheap; but since he glibly sought to establish a parallel between his own questionable political methods and the legendary deeds of the founders of our community, we too will frame from his eloquence a parallel which we commend to the orator and to his electors. In the newspaper business we call it the deadly parallel.
"Do you realize what this "When you can enlarge talk about the dollar means, if your farm by changing the true? It means that all you figures in your deeds; when need do to increase the acreage your dairymaid can make more of your farm is to change butter and cheese by watering the figures in your title deeds; the milk; when you can have it means that your creameries more cloth by decreasing your will yield a better product if yardstick one-half; when you you water the milk; it means can sell more tons of merchandise that when the housewife shops by shortening your pound she will buy more linen, or one-half,—then, and not until gingham, or calico, if the then, can you increase the value merchant moves the brass tacks of your property or labor by of his counter yard measure decreasing your standard of nearer together." values."
CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,Faneuil Hall, Boston,September 10, 1878.
"These fanatics say that if "But this is the first time I foreign nations don't want the ever heard a financial philosopher sort of money we choose to express his gratitude that we coin they can go without, and have a currency of such bad that we should be glad that repute that other nations will not they don't. We've some receive it; he is thankful that it other things that foreigners is not exportable. We have don't want. We've peaches a great many commodities in with the yellows, and weeviled such a condition that they are wheat, and rancid butter, and not exportable. Mouldy flour, ancient eggs, but I've yet to rusty wheat, rancid butter, meet a farmer who wants to damaged cotton, addled eggs, and corner the market. They spoiled goods generally are not remind me of a town that was exportable. But it never moved to build a gallows occurred to me to be thankful for because all its neighbors had this putrescence. It is related them. I don't need to add in a quaint German book of that it was not an American humor that the inhabitants of town. And one of the wise Schildeberg, finding that other city fathers was so carried away towns, with more public spirit by his patriotism that he tried than their own, had erected to make the council pass a gibbets within their precincts, resolution that the gallows be resolved that the town of reserved for that town's Schildeberg should also have a inhabitants exclusively." gallows; and one patriotic member of the town council offered a CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. resolution that the benefits of this gallows should be reserved exclusively for the inhabitants of Schildeberg."
JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,House of Representatives,June 15, 1870.
"If each grave had a voice "If each grave had a voice to tell us what its silent tenant to tell us what its silent tenant last saw and heard on earth, we last saw and heard on earth, we might stand, with uncovered might stand, with uncovered heads, and hear the whole story heads, and hear the whole story of the war. We should hear of the war. We should hear that one perished when the first that one perished when the first great drops of the crimson great drops of the crimson shower began to fall, when the shower began to fall, when the darkness of that first disaster at darkness of that first disaster at Manassas fell like an eclipse on Manassas fell like an eclipse on the nation; that another died the nation; that another died of disease while wearily waiting of disease while wearily waiting for winter to end; that this one for winter to end; that this one fell on the field, in sight of the fell on the field, in sight of the spires of Richmond, little dreaming spires of Richmond, little dreaming that the flag must be carried that the flag must be carried through three more years of through three more years of blood before it should be planted blood before it should be planted in that citadel of treason; and in that citadel of treason; and that one fell when the tide of that one fell when the tide of war had swept us back till the war had swept us back till the roar of rebel guns shook the roar of rebel guns shook the dome ofthecapitol, and dome ofyondercapitol, and re-echoed in the chambers of the re-echoed in the chambers of the Executive mansion. We should Executive mansion. We should hear mingled voices from the hear mingled voices from the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Chickahominy, and the James, Chickahominy, and the James, solemn voices from the Wilderness, solemn voices from the Wilderness, and triumphant shouts from and triumphant shouts from the Shenandoah, from Petersburg, the Shenandoah, from Petersburg, and the Five Forks, mingled and the Five Forks, mingled with the wild acclaim of with the wild acclaim of victory and the sweet chorus of victory and the sweet chorus of returning peace." returning peace."
CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,Arlington, Va.,May 30,1868.
"Of these three passages, rightly thought by Calvin Ross Shelby's audience the most telling of his speech, the first and second are unmistakably plagiarisms of ideas, while the third, differing from its original in but one telltale, damning word, is shameless, flat-footed theft. Either of the first two offences committed singly might be unconscious; conjoined they betray deliberation; united with the third they 'smell to heaven.' It is high time for the voters of this congressional district to ask themselves the question. Shall we vote for a thief?"
"Well, sir, well?" exploded Bowers at last.
Shelby tossed the paper aside with a laugh.
"It's well done."
"Well done!" Bowers dropped one of his infrequent oaths. "Have you nothing else to say?"
"Yes; it's true, more or less."
"You admit it?"
"Keep cool. It was this way: I was pressed for time when I prepared my speech,—you know that,—and it occurred to me to adapt one or two of Garfield's illustrations. I've studied him some, and he said many things that fit in nowadays as well as they ever did. Plenty of speakers quarry there I guess. I honestly meant to give him the credit of that soldier business in my peroration, but somehow the quotation marks were lost in the shuffle. There was but one chance in a thousand that anybody would notice."
"Somebody did," growled Bowers, and spat our his mangled cigar.
"Yes; I ran against a man with a memory."
"It wasn't on the square, Ross. It'll hurt you."
Shelby eyed him shrewdly.
"You read speeches in Washington that I wrote," he reminded.
"That's different. Lots of congressmen do that,—even senators.They're not posted on everything."
"No," Shelby agreed, with an irony too subtle for Bowers; "they certainly are not. However, there's no need to borrow trouble over this thing. People will laugh a little, say it was a good speech, wherever I got it, and vote the straight party ticket despite Bernard Graves."
"Graves," said Bowers. "What has he to do with it?"
"Everything; he's the little joker with the memory."
Bowers whistled.
"What is he after?"
Shelby jerked his head toward the Temple doorstep where Bernard still lingered.
"After her."
"Humor a silk stocking according to his crotchet, that's my maxim," submitted Bowers as they threshed the matter out in its latest aspect.
"I can't see its application to Graves. He's outside politics; hates the very name, they say."
"Practical politics is applied human nature. If a rule is sound in politics, it will work anywhere this side of the pearly gates. Graves may not care a tinker's dam for politics, but evidently he does get queasy when another man's ideas are misappropriated. Perhaps that's his crotchet. Writes himself, doesn't he?"
"Some rubbish or other," returned Shelby, contemptuously.
"That's where he is susceptible, to my thinking. I don't cotton to your woman theory. I say leave women out of politics. So conciliate him; humor his crotchet."
"I can't see why I should kotow to him, or what further harm he can do," said the candidate, but he deferred to Bowers's judgment. "I'll look him up this afternoon," he agreed; "though I've no stomach for the job. I never liked the cuss."
He abundantly appreciated this long-standing antipathy as he cast about for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible down the vista of a series of low-ceiled apartments, and Shelby saw that it was crammed with books. None of the many pictures could cope in dash and color with his own collection and, what seemed to him singular in a Protestant home, they were chiefly of the Madonna; all in all, a tame assortment beside his copy of the secular masterpiece in the great metropolitan hotel. Over one of the crowded bookcases was the cast of a winged woman. It was armless and headless, and Shelby wondered by what accident it had become so damaged, and why it was not banished to the attic.
The maid came presently to tell him that Mr. Bernard had gone for a walk to the golf links.
Shelby was relieved. He felt ill at ease in this queer drab dwelling, and doubtful of the course he ought to pursue with its tenant. It would be another matter altogether in the open air. Returning to his law office, he bade William Irons to telephone the Tuscarora House livery-stable to send around his horse and buggy.
At the farm-house on the outskirts which served the golf devotees for a headquarters Shelby was told that Graves had gone yet farther, taking the direction of the Hilliard quarries—geologizing bent, the speaker thought. Unassociated with practical results, this had always presented itself to Shelby as a trivial pursuit akin to botany, embroidery, and other employments distinctly feminine. He forebore comment, however, and presently struck down a road which wound into a little suburb peopled by Polish quarry-workers. It was essentially an alien community in whose straggling streets and lanes one heard English but seldom. Tow-headed children, shy elves peeping from odd hiding-places, swarmed a half-dozen and upward to a house. Work was the key-note of Little Poland, as it was called. While the men toiled in the sandstone quarries the women did a man's stint in the fields of the outlying farms, and bore more children. Childbirth was a mere detail in these thick-waisted women's lives; some hours, a day perhaps, and they were stooping in the fields again. And the children early put shoulder to the wheel; those too small for the fields begged food in the streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party ticket with mechanical precision.
The politician approached the quarries with an interested eye. Among his many irons in the fire he had acquired part ownership in another quarry to the westward, like this bordering the towpath of the canal. Bowers held the controlling interest, though neither his name nor Shelby's figured prominently in its management. They called it the Eureka Sandstone Company.
Shelby tied his horse near the office, and, putting his head among the morning-glories curtaining an open window, stated his errand to Hilliard, whose vast bulk was humped ludicrously upon a high stool. The big fellow stopped thumbing his ledger, greeted him with a jovial shout, and directed him toward a stratum of rock which the workmen had recently unearthed.
"Look it over," he called after him. "It promises to pan out scrumptious. We struck A-1 rock seven feet below the surface."
"That discounts the Eureka," said Shelby. "We've never done better than twelve."
He picked his way through the yards, the hammers of the stone dressers clinking out a not unmusical chorus from every shed, and skirting the docks where the ponderous cranes swung the great slabs to the canal boats, scrambled down a rough roadway into the quarry proper amidst all the hurly-burly of the teamsters and the hoarse steam drills. The walls of sandstone rose sheer around him, sliced down by the blasts like sugar with a scoop. Some of the formation was not unlike sugar little refined; some, lighter, with streaks of grayish pink, like sides of bacon; and some, a rich deep brown which architects specified the country over, was said to have no equal the world around save only in Japan. In the newly uncovered tract Shelby spied Bernard Graves pecking about with a little hammer.
"Prospecting for gold?" he asked jocularly.
"No; fucoids."
"Eh?"
"Fossils, you know; a sort of seaweed. The only kind we can discover in this formation."
"My little freshwater college wasn't strong on the sciences," said Shelby, speculating whether this particular crotchet required humoring. As the young man's own interest in the topic seemed languid, he decided against this course and frankly told him that he wanted to talk with him. "Suppose we move away from the clatter of the drills," he suggested.
Graves assented, and they shifted from beneath the overhanging bank of sandy loam to the shade of an unused derrick.
"Smoke?" queried the politician, affably.
Graves declined a cigar, explaining, "I merely take a cigarette now and then, usually after dinner."
Shelby's contempt for cigarettes was boundless, but he dissembled his opinion, and lit the strongest cigar in his case.
"It's up to me, Bernard," he confessed with a laugh. "It's my move, and I'm right on the spot like a little man, though humble pie isn't my favorite tidbit by a large majority."
"Meaning what?" asked Graves, without animation.
Behind the candidate's urbane mask rioted a lust to mar and maim, but his political self explained blandly:—
"Meaning that your checkmate in this morning'sWhigwas well played."
"I didn't write that editorial."
"I know you didn't. It had the Volney Sprague earmarks. But you did what is more important,—you inspired it."
"Well?"
"Just this: in a general way I admit its justness, and come frankly to tell you so."
"Why should you trouble yourself?"
Shelby throttled his mounting ire.
"Because," he returned slowly, "I recognize your ability and want your support. If you mean to interest yourself in politics, I can be of service to you. I know, of course, you don't think politicians are necessarily scamps."
"I judge no class of men so summarily," Graves opened his mouth to protest. "That is too much like Burke's indictment against a whole people, you know."
The allusion was not familiar, but Shelby said, "Exactly," with labored calm. He fancied that he detected a note of condescension, and resented it passionately.
"The average politician isn't such a bad lot," he went on. "His methods don't always square with the Decalogue, but he means well, and in the long run does well. I don't say this to pat myself on the back. You know me. I'm a plain, practical man, and try to steer by common-sense. If I'm elected to Congress, I'll do my best to make the district proud of me, and I'll promise you personally, right here and now, that I will deliver no man's speeches but my own."
Graves wished that he would make an end of his excuses and go away. The whole episode bored him, and his mind wandered even while he listened. He was thinking that that muscular Pole directing the planting of a steam drill below the sand-bank a rather statuesque figure for these prosaic days. The man had jumped upon the tripod of the drill in ordering the work, and loomed large and competent. Graves thought him in feature not unlike his great compatriot John Sobieski, and tried to picture him in the Polish king's armor which he remembered to have seen in some European collection. Shelby's silence recalled him.
"Really, there's no necessity for you to explain or promise anything to me," he rejoined coldly. "I'm not in politics, and I don't care to be."
Shelby had reached his last ditch.
"You think you're too damned good for it," he broke out. "It's the lily-fingered people of your stripe who make reform a byword and a laughing-stock."
Graves's face flamed, and he shrank inwardly with a scholar's repugnance from the rencounter. Outwardly, however, he was truculent.
"Such bar-room personalities are characteristic of you," he retorted."Your place—"
But it was fated that Shelby should not learn his place. A sharp warning cry from a workman heralded the crumbling fall of a great section of the bank overhanging the drill which Graves had idly watched, and, as idly, watched still. A dreamer of habit, his will failed immediately to rally to the naked fact and its demands. It was unreal, a picture, a play, a poet's conception of chaos—that was it! The thing was Dantesque or Miltonic. The gaping rent, the jumbled rocks, the thick spurt of steam issuing from the buried drill, it was all tumultuous, primeval; and that grimy workman, heaving aside the dirt and scrambling to the air, was suggestive of Milton's earth-born "tawny lion, pawing to get free."
"Good God, man, wake up!" Shelby shook him roughly by the arm and dragged him toward the scene of the catastrophe. "There are men under that heap."
A little knot of Polish laborers forthwith congregated, ox-eyed and inert. Shelby tore a shovel from a paralyzed hand and began to dig, ripping out crisp oaths at their stupidity.
"Find shovels for these cattle," he commanded.
By signs Graves roused the unnerved men to action, but he could find no sort of tool for himself, and stood empty-handed apart, conscious of unfitness. The politician, burrowing like a woodchuck, showered him with red earth.
"English? Anybody speak English?" he panted without stopping. "How many are under here?"
One of the workmen understood, chattered excitedly with his fellows, and held up one soiled finger.
"Ein," he said. "Kiska, he vork here."
Shelby's shovel grated on the cylinder of the buried drill. From underneath its tripod protruded the booted leg of a man.
"Go easy, boys," he cautioned.
With his own hands he skilfully uncovered the victim's head and trunk. Graves saw that it was the giant of his day-dream. The man's rugged face was earth-stained and still; his great chest motionless. Shelby mastered the situation with a glance, thrust his hand into the coarse shirt, and felt for the heart.
"There's life in him," he announced. "Over with him into the shade." Between them all they bore him to a shelf of level rock. "Off with his shirt," said Shelby to his helper, and they two stripped the body to the waist. It was the torso of a gladiator. Shelby rolled the garment and thrust it underneath the bare back below the shoulders. "It's not high enough," he decided instantly. "Something else—a coat—anything."
Kiska's compatriots could not have complied had they understood, being coatless to a man. Bernard Graves took off a new golf coat which Shelby ruthlessly crumpled and stuffed into place. An instant later he was astride the Pole's hips, his hands grasping the powerful chest on either side. Bracing his elbows, Shelby bore his whole weight forward, counted three, sat back upon his knees, counted two, and so continued, down "one-two-three," up "one-two," with the quiet assurance of a surgeon.
The younger man watched his every movement with wondering respect. The operator interrupted his meditations.
"Get hold of his tongue with your handkerchief," he ordered. "That's right—hold it by the tip. On one side—on one side. Now take both his wrists and pin them above his head—so."
All the while the steady pressure and relaxation went on, compelling the lungs to their function. Presently came the faintest quiver of a nostril, and Shelby smiled.
"Kiska will do his own breathing pretty soon," he said. Presently he suggested: "Better fetch Hilliard now. And have him 'phone Doc Crandall to come to Kiska's house in Little Poland. I'll take Kiska home in my rig when his bellows gets well under way."
Graves did his errand, outlining the disaster and rescue as he hurried with the quarry owner to the scene. Joe Hilliard was divided between sympathy for Kiska, whom he declared was the pick of his men, and admiration for Shelby's presence of mind.
"He's got gumption, that man," he exclaimed, "gumption, simon-pure."
Graves's own impressions were mixed, and the stress of the accident passed, he resumed his ruined coat with a vague sense of personal slight. Something of this sort prompted him to say rather patronizingly to Shelby as they parted:—
"You made skilful use of that method of resuscitation. Where in the world did you pick it up?"
"Every schoolboy knows it," returned the politician, shortly; "or every schoolboy should."
Shelby's forecast of the effect of theWhig'sexposure was brilliantly fulfilled. People did laugh over it and say that it was a good speech, whatever its source. In popular conception literary theft is at worst a venial sin whose very iniquity is doubtful unless found out. The culprit's average fellow-townsman accepted the incident as fresh evidence of his acknowledged cleverness and promptly forgot it in the nine days' wonder over his exploit at the Hilliard quarries.
The town's attitude mirrored that of the congressional district and the state. Volney Sprague's editorial occasioned some little paragraphing here and there among up-state newspapers and by brief mention inAssociated Pressdespatches roused a metropolitan daily of opposite political faith to one of the satirical thrusts for which it was famous; whereupon one of its more serious contemporaries found a text for a thunderous jeremiad on the decay of political morality. Yet where one person read of Shelby's plagiarism, a score devoured the sensational accounts of his rescue of Kiska, while of those who read both, an illogical but human majority considered his atonement complete.
Sprague himself was disposed to gauge Shelby's vogue with the groundlings as greater than before, and lamented it to Bernard Graves, who fell wholly into his mood for once and deplored the fatuity of popular judgment with unlooked-for warmth.
His friend listened with unqualified approval.
"Thank Heaven, you're beginning to take an interest in politics!" he exclaimed.
The young man flushed.
"There are some things in this man's canvass one can't ignore," he carefully explained, and tried to think he meant plagiarism.
He had not discussed recent happenings with Ruth Temple. When he took her theWhigarticle the morning after the mass-meeting she had displayed a disconcerting willingness to cloud the vital fact and excuse Shelby. Indeed, he finally left with the disgusted conviction that she had pilloried not the sinner but himself,—a not uncommon outcome in a clash of wits between a woman and a man. After that, he told himself, she might form what fantastic opinion of this freebooter she chose without let or hindrance from him, and at the same time he resolved that she should see less of him. The latter resolution proved as flimsy as a New Year's vow, but while it needed less than a smile to whistle him back, the whole distasteful subject of Shelby became tacitly taboo.
As Ruth was a very woman, often saying less what she really thought than what she knew would stir dissent, her innermost opinions were less stable than he fancied. She had not had speech with Shelby since the mass-meeting, but he had found time that night to ask her to drive with him, and she anticipated the outing with a zest whose disproportion to its surface cause she did not analyze.
On the appointed afternoon she saw his horse and buggy brought from the Tuscarora House and hitched at the curb below his office, and as it lacked little of the hour set she thrust home the last hat-pin and stood jacketed and gloved by a window, waiting his coming. The hour struck and brought no Shelby, though punctuality was the first article of his creed. Out in the drowsy thoroughfare a sprinkling-cart jarred heavily past, spurting ineffectually at the yellow dust which rose perversely under its baptism and surged beneath the awnings of the shops. It was Saturday, universal shopping-day in the farmland, and a ramshackle line of rustic vehicles—buggies, democrats, sulkies, lumber wagons—with graceless plough horses slumbering in the thills, stretched in ragged alignment down the curb. Shelby's smart turnout seemed fairly urban by contrast, and Ruth saw that it met with the critical approval of the loungers.
A quarter of an hour slipped by; no Shelby. His cob fretted at the autumn flies and whinnied to be gone. A half-hour elapsed, unfruitful; an hour. Then did Queen Ruth, on whose imperious nod a little world had hung from babyhood, perceive the recreant come calmly down from his law office in company with some creature of relatively common clay, shake hands, chat further, shake hands again, take up his reins amid an interchange of badinage with the bystanders, and so, gossiping still, jog deliberately on—to her!
She spun on her heel as he turned in at the drive and rang for her maid.
"If Mr. Shelby should call," she directed, wrenching at her gloves, "say I'm not at home."
Shelby's occupations in the meantime had been absorbing. In the course of an earnest conference at the Tuscarora House the evening of the quarry accident, the Hon. Samuel Bowers had removed his cigar to let fall a sententious observation.
"As long as an all-wise Providence saw fit to dump that sand-bank on one of the Polacks," said he, "I call it a piece of downright Ross Shelby luck that it fell on Kiska."
"I should have worked as hard over a dago," rejoined Shelby; "or a dog either, I guess."
"M-yes; I reckon. But you're not complaining that it wasn't some dago who doesn't know a ballot from a bunch of garlic? No, I reckon not." His eyes twinkled, and Shelby flickered a responsive grin. "Note a rule for candidates: When about to effect the spectacular rescue of one of the toiling masses which are the bone and sinew of this fair land of ours, pick a man who holds a block of the foreign vote right in the pocket of his jeans."
It was perhaps appreciation of this aphorism's significance, perhaps sheer abundance of the milk of human kindness, perhaps a harmonious blending of both, which inspired Shelby's warm welcome to Kiska as he was about to leave his office to join Ruth Temple.
"You shouldn't have come out so soon, Kiska," he protested, urging the big Pole to a chair, and bringing him a glass of water. "Did you walk all the way from Little Poland to see me?"
"I valked," answered Kiska, simply, his face working. "I vould like to haf roon, Meester Shelby."
"Oh, I wouldn't run much just yet," laughed Shelby, kindly, trying to head off the man's expression of gratitude. "Have another drink? Perhaps you'd prefer some whiskey?"
Kiska declined, and harked back to his message.
"I vould like to haf roon to tank you, Meester Shelby. I got vife to tank you. I got mooch cheeldren to tank you. I no taalk good. Dat Eengleesh hard,—so? Eef I no taalk, I tink. I tink all day: Tank you, Meester Shelby, tank you, Meester Shelby."
"You speak English very well," said Shelby, patting him on the shoulder. "But you mustn't say any more about the matter."
He led him presently to talk of the quarry-workers and their families, their wages, their hours, their recreation, their parish church, their priest, their school; for Little Poland was sufficient unto itself; and Kiska saw that he questioned with sympathy and understanding, and was pleased. On the dial of his office clock Shelby noted the hour of his appointment come and go, and from his window he caught a fleeting glimpse of Ruth at hers. She wore his favorite hat, with a gleam of red, which became her dark hair so well, and he divined that she had put it on because of him. He longed to be out and away with her between the autumn hedgerows, but there sat Kiska, garrulous of Poland over seas and Little Poland by the quarries, and to Kiska the politician inclined a patient ear.
The Pole rose at last, after a delighted hour, and Shelby saw his eye light on a package of campaign lithographs of himself, which had come that morning from the printers.
"Want one?" he asked.
Kiska exploded in incoherent gratitude.
"Take several," said Shelby, snapping an elastic band around a sheaf of the pictures. "Give 'em to your friends to hang in their front windows. That's what we do with 'em in town, you know. It's American. You're all good Americans in Little Poland, aren't you?" A thought struck him, and from a roll of banknotes, destined for campaign uses, he extracted a ten-dollar bill. "I dare say Joe Hilliard will pay your doctor, Kiska," he went on, "but there'll be other things you'll want. Winter's coming; buy the yellow-haired kids some shoes; get the wife a warm dress. You can pay me when Poland gets its independence."
Kiska took the money. "I vould like to vork for you," he exclaimed.
"Would you?" laughed the politician. "I think perhaps you may some day."
The minor social conventions, which, after all, are possibly the major ones, were consistently ignored by Shelby.
"Not at home?" he repeated after Ruth's maid. "I guess you're mistaken. I saw Miss Temple at the window as I drove in the gate. Just look around a bit, and you'll find her."
He walked calmly past the bewildered girl to the drawing-room. In the centre of the apartment stood Ruth, her cheeks waving crimson, like a poppy field astir.
"Angry?" said the man.
Ruth waited till the open-mouthed maid had retreated down the hall.
"I'm furious," she answered, and looked the part.
"Think I'm a boor?"
She could not trust herself to reply. Had he dared smile then, she would have swept by him, but he was wholly grave.
"I'll tell you what you're thinking," he said quietly. "You are thinking that I have fallen short of your notion of me. You listened the other night at the court-house and thought kindly things. Then you were told by my enemies that I had used in part what was not my own. You were vexed, for it impeached your judgment of character. Then I failed of my appointment, and did you a more grievous wrong—I piqued your woman's vanity."
Ruth gasped.
"Your effrontery is—is fascinating."
Shelby's eyes hinted a smile. She had said what she thought.
"I shall not defend myself to you against the charges of theWhig," he went on. "I doubt even if I shall answer them publicly. Greater men than I have had their names blackened in a campaign, and deemed silence the wisest answer. People don't ascribe many virtues to the politician, but even he occasionally turns the other cheek. As for my tardiness to-day—well, I could have avoided it."
"You admit it?" blazed Ruth.
"Yes. I had my choice."
"And you chose—" The shabby figure she had seen descend from Shelby's office visualized itself sharply.
"Yes—poor devil—I chose Kiska."
Her mood veered, and she whirled impulsively toward him, all womanliness and contrition.
"Forgive me. How could I know? I thought—I thought—"
"That it was some heeler with a vote to sell?"
Her face betrayed her.
"Forgive me," she repeated. "You would have done wrong to turn him away because of me. I know of your noble deed—who does not? I am proud of you, and wished to tell you so. I wanted to see you for this—to praise your heroism. I've been your friend in that—that other thing. I could see how the crowd, the exhilaration, the sense of mastery, might lure one on. I looked at it dispassionately—with a friend's eyes. I was loyal till I thought you held my friendship lightly, and put politics before it. I own my mistake—my injustice."
Shelby had not dreamed of vindication so sweeping, and, with a word of modest disclaimer, led the talk to pacific commonplace. It was too late for the promised drive, and indeed neither of them thought of it again till the door had shut between them.
In leaving, the man's glance was arrested by an object on the piano.
"What is that called?" he asked abruptly.
"The cast? That is my Victory—the famous Victory of Samothrace, which suggested the poem everybody's reading. It's my despair. I've failed at drawing it for years. The original is in the Louvre, and towers gloriously over a staircase. I can shut my eyes and see it perfectly."
"Pretty old?" ventured Shelby.
"Oh, yes; it's an antique. See how ruffian Time has dealt with it."
The man walked slowly round the goddess, surveying her from every side.
"A day or two ago," he said simply, "I saw that image in a house, and, in my ignorance, thought a servant had broken it. I wondered why the people didn't pitch it out."
His tone went straight to her sympathy.
"Many are strangers in the kingdom of Art," she returned gently. "Most of us must come to it like little children."
Shelby was silent for a moment. Then he said:—
"In Bernard Graves's opinion I am aesthetically dead—I believe those were his words."
The girl started.
"I never repeated them," she protested.
"What," laughed Shelby, grimly, "has he told you that, too? He'sevidently fond of the phrase. Perhaps he is right. Yet I hope not.I'd rather think I'm merely unborn. I am not a voluntary Ishmaelite.I simply haven't had the chance to learn."
A fault recognized, it was Ruth's nature to be lavish of atonement, and by way of further expiation she consented a day or two later to make one of a driving party of Mrs. Hilliard's to hear Shelby speak in a village located "down north," as the local vernacular had it, near the shore of Lake Ontario. Ruth cared little for Mrs. Hilliard. She saw her through feminine eyes, and Mrs. Hilliard was not popular with women. But Shelby had privily told her of the project and begged her to accept.
"I had planned to rent the Tuscarora House tallyho and go with some éclat," the lady lamented at the eleventh hour, "but the way people have disappointed me is positively harrowing. There was Bernard Graves—I pinned my childlike faith on him; but he sent regrets. And Mr. and Mrs. Bowers. Wouldn't you think that they, of all people, would wish to go? But no; Mrs. Bowers said it did her rheumatic shoulder no good to traipse around nights,—that was her expression,—and Mr. Bowers actually told me that he was too busy organizing political meetings to want to attend them. Isn't he droll? Then Mr. Hewett had a sermon to prepare; and Dr. Crandall had a case of diphtheria to watch; and Volney Sprague—well, I really did not dare ask him, he was so horrid in his paper about Mr. Shelby's splendid speech. So one and all they began to make excuses, as the Bible says, till it has simmered down to you, dear Ruth, and Joe, and Mr. Shelby, and me."
"Oh," said Ruth, with misgiving.
"A sort of survival of the fittest, don't you know, as somebody or other says. Was it Shakespeare? He really seems to have written all the clever things."
"No," Ruth replied with gravity; "it wasn't Shakespeare."
"Really? I thought it sounded Shakespearian. Well, as I was telling you, it has come to a jolly little company of four in my surrey, which, after all, is perhaps nicer than a dozen in a tallyho, though of course it won't impress the voters as much."
Ruth's eyebrows arched.
"Is that the object of our going?"
"What an idea, my dear!" Nevertheless, she colored. "We'll start early enough for a fish supper at the Lakeview Inn," she rattled on. "You know how good their fish suppers are. And perhaps we shall have time to stop at the camp-meeting of those ridiculous Free Methodists which is in full swing at the grove behind the hotel. Joe says that it will be the last night of the camp, and equal to Barnum's Three Rings and Mammoth Hippodrome. Doesn't that sound just like Joe? I'm sure we can manage to see something of it. Mr. Shelby's meeting won't begin till eight-thirty and Eden Centre can't be ten minutes' drive from the grove."
She sowed without conception of the harvest. The pleasuring so idly planned, the religionists whose vagaries provoked her laughter, were in time to bulk huge in a clairvoyant light of revelation.
It fell a ripe autumn day with the haze mantling the orchards like the purple of a plum, a day in whose magic atmosphere even common things wore an air of poetry. The very canal was transfigured.
"There is a bit of Holland," said Ruth, as they crossed the waterway on the ragged hem of the town. "If this were Europe and the courthouse over there could triple its age and take another name, this bridge would swarm with the 'personally conducted' admiring the view. I don't wonder that artists are beginning to paint the canal."
"They say a house-boat party came through last week," Mrs. Hilliard remarked.
"Tied their scow near my place," put in her husband. "Had the hold all rigged up with a piano and curtains and rugs. Harum-scarum looking lot of men and women you wouldn't trust to paint a barn. They overran the quarries and made pictures of the Polacks."
"Bernard Graves met them," Ruth added. "They told him that LittlePoland was a second Barbizon for peasant models, with an 'Angelus' or a'Man with the Hoe' around every corner."
Joe Hilliard guffawed.
"Guess they meant the woman with the hoe; she's the agriculturalist in the Polack matrimonial team."
Shelby was discreetly backward in these quicksands which the quarry owner did not fear to tread, but the canal stirred his imagination, too, and in a characteristic way.
"It takes seven figures to express last year's tonnage down the Ditch to tidewater," he told them; "stone, lumber, food. Why it dumped over three-quarters of a million tons of food alone into New York City's maw. Yet they say it's antiquated and can't compete with the railroads. What else has kept the railroads within bounds? Ask any Tuscarora shipper what happens yearly when navigation closes. Abandon it! We'll see. The canal counties swing a pretty vote in this state."
Hilliard laughed.
"Think you're addressing the Legislature, Ross?"
"I heard you address the Assembly once," Ruth said. "I was a Vassar girl then, visiting Albany friends. You spoke about the canals, and the other members stopped gossiping and writing letters to listen."
"The canal is a part of my religion," Shelby answered.
They crossed the ancient shore line of the lake, the Ridge, so-called,—successive highway of the Iroquois, the pioneer, the stage-coach, and the ubiquitous trolley,—and caught presently the distant shimmer of Ontario, sail-dotted, intensely blue. That first glimpse of the inland sea always stirred Ruth to the depths. It was not the romance of New France alone which it evoked—that picturesque procession of redmen,coureurs de bois, friars, Jesuits, soldiers of fortune, La Salle, Frontenac, the conquering English, the conqueror-conquering American—but the mystery of the vaster tidal sea toward which it drew, whose supremest witchery none may know save the yearning inland-born.
"Calm as a puddle to-day," said Joe. "You can almost hear the Canucks singing 'God Save the Queen.'"
Dusk had set in when they left the deserted piazzas of the summer hotel for the camp-meeting in the grove. The flare of torches wavered afar between the tree boles, and above the lapping of the waves walled a drear hymn.
Mrs. Hilliard skipped girlishly in the woodland path.
"They've begun, they've begun," she exulted. "We shall see the fun after all."
"It's too early for the meeting in the big tent," Shelby told Ruth; "but if you've never seen anything of the kind, the scene which goes before will be quite as curious."
Skirting a makeshift village of tiny tents and shanties they issued to a torch-lit clearing in the wood whose central object was the greater tent, which, frayed, weathered, and patched as it was, yet stood to these zealots of an iron creed as the chosen tabernacle of a very God. Its rough benches were empty now, but before its dingy portal swayed and groaned a rapt circle of men and women, hand in hand, in whose midst an old man with a prophet's head and a bigot's eye was gyrating like a dervish as he mouthed the hackneyed phrases of the sanctified. As the new-comers pressed among the bystanders hemming the inner circle of the faithful, the performer with a last frantic whirl dropped exhausted, and rolling down a slight declivity lay stark and deathlike at their feet, his white beard and hair strewn with russet leaves.
Ruth recoiled with a shudder. The swaying circle redoubled its incantations, and left him to his envied beatitude. Their indifference seemed inhuman to the girl, and she would have stooped to the prostrate figure but for Shelby's detaining hand.
"Merely the 'Power,' as they say," he whispered, adding cynically,"Epilepsy can be feigned, you know."
She desisted, and a new actor waltzed rhythmically into the glare of light. Her short rotund body writhing not unlike an Oriental dancer's, the Widow Weatherwax had assumed the centre of the ring. The sanctified were without sense of humor, but the unregenerate onlookers were not proof against the comic aspects of emotional religion, and from the dark outskirts rang a ribald laugh.
"Why doesn't that dreadful woman wear a corset?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard in a stage whisper of Ruth, whose face went suddenly aflame.
"The widow would make the fortune of any Midway, Ross," Joe Hilliard chuckled, digging Shelby in the ribs.
"Woe, woe, woe," chanted the widow, spurred to anathema by derision."Woe upon scorners! Woe upon them that sit in the seats of scorners!'Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go inyourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.'"
Scripture-quoting was reckoned among the fine arts in the widow's circle, and an applauding chorus of Praise Gods and Amens greeted her dexterous use of the beloved weapon. She rounded the chain once more in her grotesque dance; then, suddenly spying the little group of her neighbors peering through the girdle of the sanctified, she halted, directly fronting them, and, singling out Mrs. Hilliard, who was conspicuous in a red tailor-made gown, she transfixed her with her beady eyes.
"Woe, woe, woe," she wailed again, rocking to and fro. "Woe upon Babylon! 'Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird!'"
The brethren thrilled at the well-understood allusion to the speaker's abiding-place, while the outsiders, scenting a veiled scurrility, craned to listen and to watch.
Secure of her audience, the widow paused as if waiting the descent of the prophetic afflatus. Then:—
"'And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire.'"
Ruth vacillated between fascination and disgust. The flickering torches, the soughing wind, the lapping waves, the old, old words, lent the denunciation a solemnity which transcended the bizarre mouthpiece. She shook off the impression, however, and asked Shelby to take her away.
"Yes; it's time to leave for the rally," he acquiesced. "I'll speak to the Hilliards."
As they turned, they saw that Mrs. Hilliard's eyes were riveted on the widow's in an hypnotic stare. In shrill singsong the woman was declaiming:—
"'So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations—'"
Whereupon Mrs. Hilliard suddenly stopped her ears and grovelled on her knees full in the light of the torches, her shoulders quivering with hysterical sobs. There was a ripple of sensation at the prominence of the convert, and triumphant peals of "Saved by His precious blood," "Saved by the Lamb," "Look to Him, sister, look to Him," and the like. Then big Joe Hilliard stolidly thrust himself into the ring, and, raising the stricken woman, bore her away into the outer darkness. Apart from the crowd, Hilliard shook his wife with rough kindness.
"Wake up, girl," he said. "Nightmare's over. I guess you need a dose of camomile."
In the inky outskirts she presently threw off the obvious marks of her hysteria, but by little signs another woman might read, Ruth saw hours afterward that the spell possessed her still. Its gloom seemed to overcast the entire evening. Either through insufficient advertising, or the crass stupidity of the enfranchised of Eden Centre, who thought less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene lamps and wilting humanity; and of this beggarly handful two-thirds were women. Shelby assumed a cheerful front, declaring that a small audience so assembled was deserving of his best, but hewing to this line was another matter. Womankind are proverbially indifferent to politics; and a stouter resolution than his would have flagged in the presence of that preoccupied feminine two-thirds, whose eyes were centred on Mrs. Hilliard's tailor-made gown and Ruth Temple's fall hat. Used as he was to easy victory, this first disappointment of his campaign seemed bodeful of evil days to come.
Yet when mischief speedily befell, it wore so curious a guise that Shelby missed its import and laughed it aside for a random fling of jocund Fate. It began with a publisher's announcement of a volume containing the collected poems of the author of the admired, imitated, parodied, and derided ode on the "Victory of Samothrace," anonymous no longer, but the avowed offspring of Bernard Graves. Dazed, incredulous, and slow to do him honor, the prophet's own country advanced a theory of mistaken identity. But reluctant New Babylon had soon to recognize the young man's vogue. Through its supposed advocacy of woman suffrage the poem had all but founded a cult, and the disclosure of its true author, after months of guesswork and silly-season gush, bounced and ricochetted among the newspapers with astonishing ado. With theWhigin the forefront the local press began to echo the gossiping paragraphs and character sketches which, true, half true, and of whole cloth, padded the lean columns of a mediocre literary season, and New Babylon had faith. The last doubting Thomas yielded when it became necessary to convey the celebrity's mail to his home in a special bag; not even the ensuing plague of special correspondents, biographical dictionary solicitors, photographers, and worshipping pilgrims so stirred the local imagination; this surely was fame!
To Ruth Temple, who by some sorcery guessed his secret before its public revelation, Graves went with his laurels thick upon him.
"How does it feel to be a celebrity?" he said, meeting her volley of questions collectively. "Much like a breakfast cereal, a patent medicine, or a soap. Byron said that the first thing which sounded like fame to him was the tidings that he was read on the banks of the Ohio. It's different nowadays. The first taste usually comes from seeing your name placarded on a dead wall between some equally distinguished rolled oats and a new five-cent cigar. Personally I think I first saw the 'gypsy' face to face when the Hon. Seneca Bowers told me that save 'Betsey and I Are Out' he had read no poem but mine in twenty years. That was my 'Ohio,' though of course Mrs. Hilliard's request for an author's reading at the Culture Club was an annunciation in itself. Am I becoming fabulously rich from my royalties? Alas! no; I must buy too many presentation copies for people who fancy that I obtain gratis really more than I know what to do with. Shall I write for the stage? I could as easily write a cook book. Do I give my autograph? Always, if a stamped envelope is enclosed. One of our hardest-working presidents daily set apart a time for autographs; why then should a popular writer pretend that it bores him? He is secretly tickled, and probably collects autographs himself."
Ruth laughed, but denied that he had exhausted her questions.
"Why did you withhold your name from your masterpiece?" she asked.
"Partly because it was my masterpiece,—it would be false modesty to deny that I know it,—and I had some notion of digging a pit for the critics. But the main reason was to confound my Uncle Peter."
"I didn't know you had an uncle."
"I haven't in the flesh. 'Uncle Peter' is generic—a polite lumping together of my chronic fault-finders within the family and without. You know him. Both masculine and feminine, he's eternally an old woman. Everybody knows Uncle Peter, the first to censure and the last to praise. Now, as I've been his especial tidbit and awful example for years, I had to school myself to the thought of snatching the daily morsel of gossip from his mouth. The murder out, Uncle Peter's grief is pitiful. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth is a prophecy of evil unfulfilled! It's not that he considers I've gone to work, incorrigible vagabond that I am; it's the fact that my intolerable idling has produced money which sets his teeth on edge—money, the golden calf of Uncle Peter's narrow idolatrous soul."
Ruth had no liking for his moments of acid mockery.
"Don't let Uncle Peter overshadow your friends," she warned.
"I'll not," promised the man. "And you—by what witchery of friendship did you find me out?" He shifted his seat, seeking her eyes. "Ruth, was it love?"
She did not answer immediately.
"Be my wife, Ruth," he said.
"It was not love," she replied simply.
It was one of the oddities of his temperament that at this moment he saw himself objectively. What a subdued neutral tinted thing was life! By all the canons of romance it was now his cue for perfervid speech.
"What then?" he asked quietly.
"Liking—a real liking."
"Will it grow warmer?"
"I cannot tell."
"I will teach you to love me," he declared, his artistic self nudging him meanwhile that he had dropped into the worn formula of the ages.
Ruth did not deny him the attempt, and he undertook a lesson on the spot, pointing out that they saw life through similar eyes; that art, music, literature spoke with a common voice; that if true marriage were perfect companionship, the auguries were not uncertain in their happy omen; so on till he wearied her with argument.
"All those things refine love," she put in at last, a little wistfully; "they are not its essence. A man may be a barbarian and yet lovable."
He desisted at that, and presently went away. Out of doors her words clothed themselves with a personal application. Shelby—lovable barbarian!—was entering the gate.
Of what immediately followed neither man retained a clear recollection. It was a clash of temperaments hopelessly at odds, in which the spoken word weighed little beside the mute antipathy jaundicing the mind. Yet the word played no small part in the sequel. Graves assured Shelby that he should spare no effort to compass his defeat; while Shelby in his turn suggested that the zest of the campaign would be doubled if Graves were only his ridiculous opponent.
Puzzling how the quarrel could have begun and hurried to its climax so swiftly, Bernard Graves swung up the street heedless of his steps. Then the bland colonial facade of the public library confronted him like a smirking face and, as his vagrant fancy trifled with the conceit, its lips opened to emit two chattering girls.
"I was the tenth on the waiting-list," said one.
He saw that she spoke of his own volume which she held in a triumphant embrace with a box of caramels, and was filled with a nauseated disgust for his handiwork. Retracing his steps he climbed to theWhigoffice, and finding Sprague at his desk, he swept a pile of exchanges from a chair and drew it to the editor's elbow.
"Volney," he asked, "does this talk of an independent movement againstRoss Shelby amount to anything?"
Sprague's eye lit.
"It's gathering headway every minute," he declared. "We require just one thing—a candidate of prominence and backbone."
Graves reached past the paste-pot to capture a fugitive match.
"What do you say to me?"
"What do I say!" Unwinding his long legs from his chair rounds the editor dealt his friend a clap between the shoulders which sent his cigarette spinning to the floor. "I say you're a trump."
Sprague had not a little in common with the type in the political cosmos which is contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of theWhig, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star," whose practical application led him over highways which knew not macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's proposal, nor did it astonish him. From his office window he had chanced to overlook the stormy meeting of the suitors, but he gave Graves no hint.
"With any other candidate I can think of," he declared, "this movement would merely signify the protest of a self-respecting minority; with you, the author of the famous Samothrace ode,—gad! I think it augurs victory by a handsome majority."
Graves colored.
"I had forgotten the ode," he confessed. "Couldn't we eliminate that from the campaign?"
"Eliminate it! Why, boy, it's half your platform."
"Is it?" said the novice, drearily. "Oh, very well. I thought I should like to run on the moral issue. Shelby is corrupt, and the other party is certain to name some creature who would out-Shelby Shelby if he got the chance. That seems to me issue enough for a third candidate without dragging in my verses. I'm sick of them."
"Do you find your royalties a nuisance?"
"Don't be banal, Volney. You understand me. I don't want to be the one-sided artist merely; I want to do things as well as write about them, and I want the provinces separate."
Sprague laughed paternally.
"If I'm not to be banal, neither must you be impracticable. It's the ode that makes you available and enables you to do things, and there can be no question of dividing your personality as King Louis something-or-other tried to do. You have placed yourself in my hands. Very good. I assure you that I can nominate you. You should therefore defer to my judgment. You owe me that."
"Of course."
"Yes; well, then. Congressman Graves that is to be, here is the situation in a nutshell: In Tuscarora Shelby has gained ground because of the Kiska affair. Little Poland has his lithograph in every window. Elsewhere in the Demijohn I've reason to know that he's in exceedingly bad odor, and that a third ticket would draw no end of support from thinking voters who like Shelby little, but the other party less. At present, you see, it's frying-pan or fire for them." The editor paused to charge a discolored corn-cob pipe. "Now your coming changes all that," he continued, tilting back in the wreathing smoke. "I tell you it warms my heart to think of you opposing Shelby; it's a draught of Falernian, no less. It's logically, it's romantically, fitting that you who unmasked his plagiarism should battle with him at the polls. Moreover, your discovery puts such a feather in your cap at the outset. You've proved your political acuteness; you've won your spurs. It's town talk that the credit is yours,—I acknowledge it whenever asked,—and now that you are to enter the field, I'll blazon it to the four winds."