Trades among the committees came obscurely to his ears; hints of jobs, getting each day more definite, reached him. Railway lobbyists swarmed about and began to lay their cajoling, persuasive hands upon members; and he could not laugh when the newspaper said, for a joke, that the absent-minded speaker called the House to order one morning by saying: "Agents of the K. C. & Q. will please be in order." It seemed too near the simple fact to be funny. The School Book Lobby, the University Lobby, the Armour Lobby, each had its turn with him, through its smooth, convincing agent.

He reached his lowest deep one night after a conversation with Lloyd Smith, an ex-clerk, and a couple of young fellows who called upon him at his room. Lloyd noticed his gloomy face, and asked what the trouble was. He told them frankly that he was disgusted.

"Oh, you'll get used to it!" the ex-clerk said. "When I first went into the House, I believed in honesty and sincerity, like yourself; but I came out of my term of office knowing the whole gang to be thieves. My experience taught me that legislators in America think it's a Christian virtue to break into the government treasury."

The others broke out laughing, believing him to be joking; but there was a ferocious look on his face, and Bradley felt that he might be mistaken, but he was not joking.

"They stole stationery, spittoons, waste baskets, by God! They stole everything that was loose, and at the end of the term, they seemed to be looking around unsatisfied, and I told 'em there was just one thing left—the gold leaf on the dome."

The others roared with laughter, and Bradley was forced to join in. But the face of the ex-clerk did not lose its dark intensity.

"Take salary grabbing. Why! they wanted me to certify to their demands for Sunday pay for themselves and their clerks, and I refused, and they were wild. I'm not an angel nor a Christian man, but I won't sign my name to a lie, and blamed if they didn't pass the order without my signature! Yes, sir; it's there on the record.

"Take nepotism. The members bring their wives and daughters down here, put them in as pages and clerks, or divide the proceeds when they have no relatives. Every device, every imaginable chicanery, every possible scheme to break into the State money box, is legitimate in their eyes, and worthy of being patented. Public money is fair game; and yet," he said, with a change of manner, "we have the fairest, purest and most honorable legislators, take it as a whole, that there is in the United States, because our State is rural, and we're comparatively free from liquor. Our legislature is a Sunday School, compared to the leprous rascals that swarm about the Capitol at Albany or Springfield."

"What is the cure?" asked Bradley, whose mind had been busy with the problem.

"God Almighty! there is no cure, except the abolition of government. Government means that kind of thing. Look at it! Here we enthrone the hungry, vicious, uneducated mob of incapables, and then wonder why they steal, and gorge and riot like satyrs. The wonder is they don't scrape the paint off the walls."

"Oh, you go too far; a legislator wouldn't steal a spittoon."

"No, but the fellow he recommends for clerkship does."

"My idea is that there are very few men who take money."

"I admit that, but they'll all trade their job for another job. Honesty is impossible. The Angel Gabriel would become a boodler under our system of government. The cure is to abolish government."

This conclusion, impotent to Bradley, was practically all the savage critic had to offer. Either go back to despotism or go ahead to no government at all.

After they went out, Bradley sat down and wrote a letter to Judge Brown, embodying the main part of this conversation: "It's enough to make a man curse his country and his God to see how things run," he said, at the end of writing out the ex-clerk's terrible indictment. "I feel that he is right. I'm ready to resign, and go home, and never go into politics again. The whole thing is rotten to the bottom."

But as the weeks wore on, he found that the indictment was only true of a certain minority, but it was terribly true of them; but down under the half-dozen corruptible agents, under the roar of their voices, there were many others speaking for truth and purity. The obscure mass meant to be just and honest. They were good fathers and brothers, and yet they were forced to bear the odium that fell on the whole legislature whenever the miscreant minority rolled in the mire and walked the public streets.

There was one count, however, that remained good against nearly all of the legislators: they seemed to lack conscience as regards public money. Bradley remembered that this dishonesty extended down to the matter of working on the roads in the country. He remembered that every man esteemed it a virtue to be lazy, and to do as little for a day's pay as possible, because it "came out of the town." He was forced to admit that this was the most characteristic American crime. To rob the commonwealth was a joke.

He ended by philosophizing upon it with the Judge, who came down in late February to attend the session during the great railway fight.

The Judge put his heels on the window sill, and folded his arms over the problem.

"Well, now, this thing must be looked at from another standpoint. The power of redress is with the voter. If the voter is a boodler, he will countenance boodling. Here is the mission of our party," he said, with the zeal of an old-fashioned Democrat, "to come in here and educate the common man to be an honest man. We have got a duty to perform. Now, we mustn't talk of resigning or going out of politics. We've got to stay right in the lump, and help leaven it. It will only make things worse if we leave it." The Judge had grown into the habit of speaking of Bradley as if he were a partner.

Bradley, going about with him on the street, suddenly discovered that the Judge's hat was just a shade too wide in the brim, and his coat a little bit frayed around the button-holes. He had never noticed before that the Judge was a little old-fashioned in his manners. No thought of being ashamed of him came into his mind, but it gave him a curious sensation when they entered a car together for the first time, and he discovered that the Judge was a type.

When Bradley made his great speech on the railroad question, arraigning monopoly, the Judge had a special arrangement with a stenographer. He was going to have that speech in pamphlet form to distribute, if it took a leg. He was already planning a congressional campaign.

Ida sat in the balcony on the day he spoke for woman's suffrage, and he could not resist the temptation of looking up there as he spoke. Everything combined to give great effect to his speech. It was late in the afternoon and the western sun thrust bars of light across the dim chamber which the fresh young voice of the speaker had hushed into silence. Ida had sent a bunch of flowers to his desk and upon that bouquet the intrusive sun-ray fell, like something wild that loved the rose, but as the speaker went on it clambered up his stalwart side and rested at last upon his head as though to crown him with victory.

But defeat came as usual. The legislators saw nothing in the sun-ray except a result of negligence on the part of the door-keeper. They all cheered the speech, but a majority tabled the matter as usual. The galleries cheered and the women swarmed about the young champion, Ida among them. Her hand-shake and smile was his greatest reward.

"Come and see me," she said. "I want to thank you."

The Judge was immensely proud of him. "A great speech, Brad; if I wasn't so old-fashioned and set—you'd have converted me. In private I admit all you say, but it ain't policy for me to advocate it just now."

"Policy! I'm sick of policy!" cried Bradley. "Let's try being right awhile."

The Judge changed the subject. He told the members at the boarding-house that it wouldn't hurt Bradley's chances. "People won't down a man on that point any more."

"Perhaps not in your county, but I don't want to experiment down in my county," said Major Root, of MacIntosh.

"I don't believe the people of Iowa will down any man for stating what he believes is right."

"Don't bet too high on that," said the Major in final reply.

The Judge dined with Bradley at the dining-room in the little cottage, and it gave Bradley great satisfaction to see that he used his fork more gracefully than the Supreme judge, who sat beside him, and better than the senator, who sat opposite. They had a most delightful time in talking over old legal friends, and the Judge was beaming as he came to pudding. He assured them all that the Honorable Talcott would be heard on the floor of Congress.

"We're the winning party now," he said. "We're the party of the future."

The others laughed good naturedly. "Don't be too certain of that." They all rose. "You surprised us sleeping on our arms," the general said, "but we're awake now, and we've got pickets out."

The Judge enjoyed his visit very much, and only once did he present himself to Bradley with a suspicious heaviness in his speech. He had reformed entirely since he had adopted a son, he explained to his old cronies.

On the day when the Judge was to return, as they walked down to the train together, he said, "Well, Brad, we'll go right into the congressional campaign."

"I don't believe we'd better do that, Judge."

"Why not?"

"Well, I could not be elected—that's one thing."

The Judge allowed an impressive silence to intervene.

"Why not? I tell you, young man, they're on the run. We can put you through. You've made a strong impression down here."

"I don't believe I want to be put through. I'm sick of it. I don't believe I'm a politician. I'm sick all through with the whole cursed business. I never'd be here only for you, pulling wires. I can't pull wires."

"You needn't pull wires. I'll do that. You talk, and that's what put you here, and it'll put you in Congress."

Bradley was in a bad mood.

"What's the good of my going there? I can't do anything. I've done nothing here."

"Yes, y' have. You've been right on the railroad question, on the oleo question, and the bank question. It's going to count. That speech of yours, yesterday, I'm going to send broadcast in Rock County. The district convention will meet in June early. Foster will pave the way for your nomination, by saying Rock County should have a congressman. We'll go into the convention with a clear two-thirds majority, and then declare your nomination unanimous. You see, your youth will be in your favor. Your election will follow, sure. The only fight will be in the convention."

"Looks like spring, to-day," Bradley said. It was his way of closing an argument.

"Well, good-by. You'll find the whole pot boiling when you come home," the Judge said, as the train started.

As February drew on and the snow fled, the earth-longing got hold upon Bradley. It was almost seed time, with its warm, mellow soil, its sweeping flights of prairie pigeons, its innumerable swarms of tiny clamorous sparrows, its whistling plovers, and its passing wild fowl. The thought came to him there, for the first time, that nature was not malignant nor hard; that life on a farm might be the most beautiful and joyous life in the world. The meaning of Ida's words at last took definite and individual shape in his mind. He had assimilated them now.

* * * * *

Bradley gave himself up to the Judge's plans. He went home in April with eagerness and with reluctance. He was eager to escape the smoke of the city and reluctant to leave behind him all chance to see Ida. This feeling of hungry disappointment dominated him during his day's ride. He had seen her but twice during his stay in Des Moines, and now—when would he see her again?

This terrible depression and sharp pain wore away a little by the time he reached home, and the active campaign which followed helped him to bear it. He still wrote to her, and she replied without either encouragement and without explicit displeasure. The campaign was really the Judge's fight. Bradley was his field officer. Victory in the convention only foreshadowed the sweeping victory in October. He resigned as legislator, to become a congressman.



XXIII.

ON TO WASHINGTON.

In the west (as in rural America anywhere), the three types of great men in the peoples' eyes are the soldier, the politician and the minister. The whole people appear to revere the great soldier, the men admire the successful politician, and the women bow down before the noted preacher.

These classes of hero-worshipers melt into each other, of course, but broadly they may be said to separately exist. In colonial days the minister came first, the soldier second, the politician last. Since the revolution the soldier has been the first figure in the triumvirate, and in these later times the politician and his organ of voice the newspaper have placed the preacher last.

And there is something wholesome in such an atmosphere, the atmosphere of the West, at least by contrast. The worship of political success, low as it may seem, is less deplorable than the worship of wealth, which is already weakening the hold of the middle-class Eastern man upon the American idea. In the West mere wealth does not carry assurance of respect, much less can it demand subservience.

Bradley never dreamed of getting rich, but under Radbourn and the Judge he had developed a growing love for the orator's dominion. He hungered to lead men. Notwithstanding his fits of disgust and bitterness he loved to be a part of the political life of his time. It had a powerful fascination for him. The deference which his old friends and neighbors paid him as things due a rising young man, pleased him.

He looked now to Washington, and it fired his imagination to think of sitting in the hall where the mighty legislators of generations now dead had voiced their epoch-marking thoughts. It amazed the Judge to see how the wings of his young eagle expanded. The transformation from a farmer's hired man to a national representative appealed to him as characteristically American, and he urged Bradley to do his best.

The election which the young orator expected to be another moment of great interest really came as a matter-of-fact ending to a long and triumphant canvass. He had held victory in his hand until she was tamed. The election simply confirmed the universal prophecy. He was elected, and while the Democrats went wild with joy, Bradley slept quietly in his bed at home—while the brass band played itself quiescent under his window.

Now he fixed his eyes on Washington as an actuality. It was a long time before his term began, and at the advice of Judge Brown and others he packed his trunk in January to go on and look around a little in the usual way of new members. He went alone, the Judge couldn't spare the time.

The ride from Chicago to Washington was an epic to him. It was his next great departure, his entrance into another widening circle of thinking. He had never seen a mountain before; and the wild, plunging ride among the Alleghany Mountains was magnificent. He sat for hours at a time looking out of the window, while the train, drawn by its two tremendous engines, crawled toward the summit. He saw the river drop deeper and deeper, and get whiter and wilder; and then came the wooded level of the summit, and then began the descent.

While the reeling train alternately flung him to the window and against the seat, he gazed out at the wheeling peaks, the snow-laden pines, and the mighty gorges, through which the icy river ran, green as grass in its quiet eddies. On every side were wild hillsides meshed with fallen trees, and each new vista contained its distant peak. It was the realization of his imagination of the Alleghanies.

As the train swooped round its curves, dropping lower and lower, the valley broadened out, and the great mountains moved away into ampler distances. The river ran in a wide and sinuous band to the east and the south. He realized it to be the Potomac, whose very name is history. He began to look ahead to seeing Harper's Ferry, and in the nearing distance was Washington!

He had the Western man's intensity of feeling for Washington. To him it was the centre of American life, because he supposed the laws were made there. The Western man knows Boston as the centre of art, which he affects to despise, and New York appeals to him as the home of the millionaire, of the money-lender; but in Washington he recognizes the great nerve centre of national life. It is the political ganglion of the body politic. It appeals to the romantic in him as well. It is historical; it is the city that makes history.

Slowly the night fell. After leaving Harper's Ferry the outside world vanished, and when the brakeman called "Washington," it was nearly eight o'clock of a damp, chilly night. He was so eager to see the Capitol, which the kindly fat man behind him had assured him was but a few steps away from the station, that he took his valise in his hand, and started directly for the dome, which a darkey with a push-cart, pointed out to him with oppressive courtesy.

There was an all-pervasive, impalpable, blue-gray mist in the air, cold and translucent; and when he came to the foot of the grounds, and faced the western front of the Capitol building, he drew a deep breath of delight. It thrilled him. There it loomed in the misty, winter night, the mightiest building on the continent, blue-white, sharply outlined, massive as a mountain, yet seemingly as light as a winter cloud. Weighing myriads of tons, it seemed quite as insubstantial as the mist which transfigured it. Against the cold-white of its marble, and out of the gray-white enveloping mist, bloomed the warm light of lamps, like vast lilies with hearts of fire and halos of faint light.

He stood for a long time looking upon it, musing upon its historic associations. Around him he heard the grinding wheels, the click of the horses' hoofs upon the asphalt pavement, and heard the shouts of drivers. Somewhere near him water was falling with a musical sound in a subterranean sluiceway. At last he came to himself with a start, and found his arm aching with the fatigue of his heavy valise. He struck off down the avenue. It seemed to swarm with colored people. They were selling papers, calling with musical, bell-like voices—

"Evenin' Sty-ah!" "Evenin' Sty-ah!"

Horse cars tinkled along, and a peculiar form of elongated 'bus, with the word "Carette" painted upon it, rolled along noiselessly over the asphalt pavement. An old man in business dress, with rather aristocratic side-whiskers, came toward him, walking briskly through the crowd, an open hand-bag swung around his neck; and as he walked he chanted a peculiar cry—

"Doc-tor Ferguson's, selly-brated, double X, Philadelphia cough-drops, for coughs and colds, sore throat or hoarseness; five cents a package."

Innumerable signs invited him to "meals at 15 and 25 cts." "Rolls and French drip coffee, 10 cts." "Oysters in every style," etc.

The oyster saloons were, in general, very attractive to him, as a Western man, but specifically he did not like the looks of the places in which they were served. He came at last to a place which seemed clean and free from a bar, and ventured to call for a twenty-five cent stew.

After eating this, he again took his way to the street, and walked along, looking for a moderate-priced hotel. He did not think of going to a hotel that charged more than seventy-five cents for a room. He came at length to quite a decent-looking place, which advertised rooms for fifty cents and upwards. He registered under the clerk's calm misprision, and the brown and wonderfully freckled colored boy showed him to his room.

It was all quite familiar to him—this hotel to which a man of moderate means is forced to go in the city. The dingy walls and threadbare carpet got geometrically shabbier at each succeeding flight of stairs, until at length the boy ushered him into a little room at the head of the stairway. It was unwarmed and had no lock on the door; but the bed was clean, and, as he soon found, very comfortable.



XXIV.

RADBOURN SHOWS BRADLEY ABOUT THE CAPITAL.

He woke in the morning from his dreamless sleep with that peculiar familiar sensation of not knowing where he had lain down the night before. There was something boyish in the soundness of his sleep. He heard the newsboys calling outside, although it was apparently the early dawn. Their voices made him think of Des Moines, for the reason that Des Moines was the only city in which he had ever heard the newsboys cry. He sprang from his bed at the thought of Radbourn. He would hunt him up at once! He was surprised to find that it had snowed during the night, and everywhere the darkies were cleaning the walks.

Walking thus a perfect stranger in what seemed to him a great city he did not feel at all like a rising young man. In fact the farther he got from Rock River the smaller his importance grew, for he had the imagination that comprehends relative values.

On the street he passed a window where a big negro was cooking griddle-cakes, dressed in a snowy apron and a paper cap. He looked so clean and wholesome that Bradley decided upon getting his breakfast there, and going in, took his seat at one of the little tables. A colored boy came up briskly.

"I'd like some of those cakes," said Bradley, to whom all this was very new.

"Brown the wheats!" yelled the boy, and added in a low voice, "Buckwheat or batter?"

"Buckwheat, I guess."

"Make it bucks!" the boy yelled, by the way of correction, and asked again in a low voice, "Coffee?"

"If you please."

"One up light."

While Bradley was eating his cakes, which were excellent, others came in, and the waiters dashed to and fro, shouting their weird orders.

"Ham and, two up coff, a pair, boot-leg, white wings."

Bradley had a curiosity to see what this order would bring forth, and, watching carefully, found that it secured ham and eggs, two cups of coffee, a beefsteak, and an omelet. He was deeply interested in the discovery.

He recognized the most of the men around him as Western or Southern types. Many of them had chin whiskers and wore soft crush hats. The negroes interested and fascinated him: they were so grimly ugly of face, and yet apparently so good natured and light hearted.

On the street again he saw the same types of men. He wondered if they were not his colleagues. As for them, they probably took him for a Boston or New York man, with his full brown beard and clear complexion.

The negroes attracted his eyes constantly. They drifted along the street apparently aimlessly, many of them. Their faces were mostly smiling, but in a meaningless way, as if it were a habit. He soon found that they were swift to struggle for a chance to work. They asked to carry his valise, to black his boots; the newsboys ran by his side, in their eagerness to sell.

As he went along, he noticed the very large number of "Rooms to Let," and the equally large number of signs of "Meals, Fifteen and Twenty-five Cents." Evidently there would be no trouble in finding a place to board.

As he entered Radbourn's office, he saw a young lady seated at a desk, manipulating a typewriter. She had the ends of a forked rubber tube hung in her ears, and did not see Bradley. He observed that the tube connected with a sewing-machine-like table and a swiftly revolving little cylinder, which he recognized as a phonograph. At the window sat Radbourn, talking in a measured, monotonous voice into the mouthpiece of a large flexible tube, which connected with another phonograph. His back was toward Bradley, and he stood for some time looking at the curious scene and listening to Radbourn's talk.

"Congress brings to Washington a fulness of life which no one can understand who has not spent the summer here," Radbourn went on, in a slow, measured voice, his lips close to the bell-like opening of the tube. It had a ludicrous effect upon Bradley—like a person talking to himself.

"The city may be said to die, when Congress adjourns. Its life is political, and when its political motor ceases to move the city lies sprawled out like a dead thing. Its streets are painfully quiet. Its street cars shuttle to and fro under the burning sun, and its teamsters loaf about the corners drowsily. The store-keepers keep shop, of course, but they open lazily of a morning and close early at night. The whole city yawns and rests and longs for the coming of the autumn and Congress.

"It is amusing and amazing to see it begin to wake up at the beginning of the session. Then begins the scramble of the hotels and boarding-houses to secure members of Congress. Then begins"—

The girl suddenly saw Bradley standing there, and called out, "Some one to see you, Mr. Radbourn!"

Radbourn stopped the cylinder, and turned.

"Ah, how do you do," he said, as if greeting a stranger.

Bradley smiled in reply, knowing that Radbourn did not recognize him. "I'm very well. I don't suppose you remember me, but I'm Brad Talcott."

Radbourn rose with great cordiality. "Well, well, I'm glad to see you," he said, his sombre face relaxing in a smile, as he seized Bradley by the hand. "Sit down, sit down. I'm glad to see an old class-mate."

"Don't let me interrupt your work. I was interested in hearing you talk into that thing there."

"Oh, yes, I was just getting off my syndicate letter for this week. Sit down and talk; you don't interrupt me at all. Now tell me all about yourself. Of course I have heard of your success, State Legislature and Congress and all that, but I would like to have you tell me all about it."

"There aint very much to tell. I had very little to do with it," said Bradley.

They took seats near the window, looking out upon the square, and upon the vast, squat, Egyptian, tomb-like structure, that rose out of the centre of the smooth, snow-covered plat, across which the sun streamed with vivid white radiance.

There was a little pause after they sat down. Radbourn leaned his head on his arm, and studied Bradley earnestly. He seemed older and more bitter than Bradley expected to see him. He asked of the old friends in a slow way, as if one name called up another in a slowly moving chain of association. They talked on for an hour thus, sitting in the same position. At last Radbourn said—

"How far I've got from all those scenes and people! and yet the memory of that little old town and its people has a powerful fascination. I never'll go back, of course. To tell the truth, I am afraid to go back; it would drive me crazy. I am a city man naturally. I am gregarious. I like to be in the centre of things. It'll get hold of you, too. This city is full of ruined young men and women, who came here from the slow-moving life of inland towns and villages, and, after two or three years of a richer life, find it impossible to go back; and here they are, struggling along on forty-five cents a day at hash-houses, living in hall bedrooms, preferring to pick up such a living, at all kinds of jobs, than to go back home. I'd do it myself, if I were"—

He broke off suddenly, and looked at Bradley in a keen, steady way. "And so you're a congressman, Talcott? Well, I'm glad of your success, because it shows a man can succeed on the right lines—in a measure, at least."

"Well, I've tried to live up to most of your principles," smiled Bradley. "I've read all the things you've sent me."

"Well, you're the wildest and most dangerous lunatic that ever got into Congress," Radbourn said, gravely. "Do you expect to talk any of that stuff on the floor?"

"Well, I—I hoped to be able to say something before the session closes."

"If you do, it will be a miracle. The House is under the rule of a Republican Czar, and men with your ideas or any ideas are to be shut out remorselessly. Let me tell you something right here; it will save time and worry: You want to know the Speaker, cultivate him. He's the real power. That's the reason the speakership becomes such a terrible struggle. It decides the most tremendous question. In his hand is the appointing of committees, which should be chosen by the legislators themselves. The power of these committees is unlimited, you'll find. They can smother bills of the utmost importance. Theoretically they are the servants of the House. Actually they are its autocrats."

"I didn't realize that."

"I don't suppose it is realized by the people. This appointing of the committee is supposed to save time, and yet the speakership contest consumes weeks, sometimes months. It will grow in ferocity."

"Can't something be done?"

"Try and see," he said rising. "Well, suppose we got out and walk about a little. I infer you're on to see the town. Where are you stopping?"

Bradley named the hotel with a little reluctance. He knew how cheap it was; and since he had discovered that congressmen were at a premium in boarding-houses, he saw that he must get more sumptuous quarters than he had hitherto occupied. They went out into the open air together. The sun was very brilliant and warm. The eaves were running briskly. The sky was gentle, beautiful, and spring-like. The fact that he was in Washington came upon Bradley again, as he saw the soaring dome of the capitol at the head of the avenue.

"What you want to do is to get on good social terms with the so-called leaders," Radbourn was saying. "Recognition goes by favor on the floor of the House. We might go up to the capitol and look about," Radbourn suggested.

They walked up the steps leading to the west front of the building. Everywhere the untrodden snow lay white and level.

"This is the finest part of the whole thing," Radbourn remarked, as they reached the level of esplanade. "It has more beauty and simple majesty than the main building itself, or any structure in the city."

It was magnificent. Bradley turned and looked at it right and left with admiring eyes. It gleamed with snow, and all about was the sound of dripping water, and in the distance the roll of wheels and click of hoofs. The esplanade was a broad walk extending the entire width of the building, and conforming to it. It was bottomed with marble squares, and bordered with a splendid wall, breast-high on one side, and by the final terrace running to the basement wall on the other. Here and there along the wall gigantic brazen pots sat, filled with evergreens, whose color seemed to have gradually dropped down and entered into the marble beneath them. The bronze had stained with rich, dull green each pedestal and irregular sections of the marble wall itself.

Below them the city was outspread. Radbourn pointed out the Pension Office, the White House, the Treasury, and other principal buildings with a searching word upon their architecture. The monument, he evidently considered, required no comment.

As they entered the dome, they passed a group of men whose brisk, bluff talk and peculiar swagger indicated their character—legislators from small country towns.

"Some of your colleagues," Radbourn said, indicating them with his thumb. As they paused a moment in the centre of the dome, one of the group, a handsome fellow with a waxed mustache and hard, black eyes, gave a stretching gesture, and said, "I'm in the world now."

His words thrilled Bradley to the heart. He was in the world now. Des Moines and its capitol were dwarfed and overshadowed by this great national city, to which all roads ran like veins to a mighty heart. He lifted his shoulders in a deep breath. It was glorious to be a congressman, but still more glorious to be a citizen of the world.

They passed through the corridors in upon the house floor, which swarmed with legislators, lobbyists, pages, newspaper men and visitors. Radbourn led the way down to the open space before the speaker's desk, and together they turned and swept the semi-circular rows of seats.

"Everywhere the visitor abounds," said Radbourn. "Western and Southern men predominate. It's surprising what deep interest the negro takes in legislation," he went on, lifting his eyes to the gallery, which was black with their intent and solemn faces. "See this old fellow with his hat off as if he were in the midst of a temple," he said, nodding at a group before the speaker's desk.

Bradley looked at the poor, bent, meek, old man with a thrill of pity. He observed that many of the negroes were splashed with orange-colored clay.

Members began to take their seats and to call pages by clapping their hands. The cloak-rooms and barber-shop resounded with laughter. Newspaper men sauntered by, addressing Radbourn and asking for news. And here and there others, like Radbourn, were acting as guides to groups of visitors.

In the midst of the growing tumult a one-armed man entered the speaker's desk and called out in snappy tenor—

"Gentlemen, I am requested by the door-keeper to ask all persons not entitled to the floor to please retire."

Bradley started, but Radbourn said, "No hurry, you have fifteen minutes yet. As a member-elect you have the courtesy of the floor anyway. Do you want to meet anybody?"

"No, I guess not. I just want to look on for to-day."

"Well, we'll go up in the gallery."

Looking down upon the floor and its increasing swarm of individuals, Bradley got a complete sense of its vastness and its complexity and noise.

"It makes the Iowa legislature seem like a school-room," he said to Radbourn.

At precisely noon the gavel fell with a single sharp stroke, and the speaker called persuasively, "The house will please be in order." The members rose and stood reluctantly, some of them sharpening their pencils, others reading while the chaplin prayed sonorously with many oratorical cadences, taking in all the departments of government in the swing of his generous benediction.

Instantly at the word "Amen," like the popping of a cork, the tumult burst out again. Hands clapped, laughter flared out, desks were slammed, papers were rattled, feet pounded, and the brazen monotonous clanging voice of the clerk sounded above it all like some new steam calliope whose sounds were words.

"You see how much prayer means here," said Radbourn.

A good deal of the business which followed was similar in character to the proceedings at Des Moines. Resolutions were passed with two or three aye votes and no noes at all, while the rest of the members looked over the Record, read the morning papers, or wrote on busily. The speaker declared each motion carried with glib voice.

At last a special order brought up an unfinished debate upon some matter, and the five minute rule was enforced.

"You're in luck," said Radbourn. "The whole procession is going to pass before you."

As the debate went on he pointed out the great men whose names suggested history to Bradley and whose actual presence amazed him. There was Amos B. Tripp, whom Radbourn said resembled "a Chinese god"—immense, featureless, bald, with a pout on his face like an enormous baby. The "watch dog of the house," Major Hendricks, was tall, thin, with the voice and manner of an old woman. His eyes were invisible, and his chin-beard wagged up and down as he shouted in high tenor his inevitable objection.

An old man with abundant hair, blue-white under the perpendicular light, arose at the back part of the room, making a fine picture outlined against the deep red screen. His manner was courtly, his ruddy face pleasing, his voice musical and impassioned.

"He's the dress parade orator of the house," observed Radbourn.

"I like him," said Bradley, leaning forward to absorb the speaker's torrent of impassioned utterance. When he sat down the members applauded.

Most of the orators conformed to types familiar to Bradley. There was the legal type, monotonously emphatic, with extended forefinger, which pointed, threatened and delineated. His speaking wore on the ear like a saw-filing. Then there was the political speaker, the stump orator, who was full of well-worn phrases, who could not mention the price of wool or the number of cotton bales without using the ferocious throaty-snarl of a beast of prey.

He was followed by the clerical type, a speaker who used the most mournful cadences in correcting the gentleman on his left as to the number of cotton bales. His voice and manner formed a distinct reflection of the mournful preacher, and the tune of his high voice had the power of calling up the exact phraseology of sermons—"Repent, my lost brother, ere it be too late," "Prepare for the last great day, my brother," while he actually asserted the number of cotton bales had been grossly over-stated by the gentleman from Alabama.

On going down the stairs, Radbourn called his attention to the paintings, hanging here and there, which he called "hideous daubs" with the reckless presumption of a born realist to whom allegory was a personal affront. Radbourn showed him about the city as much as he could spare time to do, and when he released him, Bradley went back to the capitol, which exercised the profoundest fascination upon him.

He had not the courage to go back to the private gallery into which Radbourn had penetrated, but went into the common gallery, which was full of negroes, unweariedly listening to the dry and almost unintelligible speeches below.

He sat there the whole afternoon and went back to his hotel meek and very tired.

Radbourn introduced him to a few of the members the next day. It was evident that nobody cared very much whether he had been elected or not. Each man had his own affairs to look after, and greeted him with a flabby hand-shake and looked at him with cold and wandering eyes. It was all very depressing.

He grew nervous over the expenses which he was incurring, although he constantly referred himself back to the fact that he was a Congressman, at a salary of six thousand dollars. His economy was too deeply ingrained to be easily wiped out. He seldom got into a street-car that he did not hold a mental debate with himself to justify the extravagance.

He went about a good deal during the next two or three days, but he continued at the cheap hotel, where he was obliged to keep his overcoat on in order to write a letter or read a newspaper. He went twice to the theatre. He bought a dollar seat the first time, which worried him all through the play, and he did penance the following evening by walking the twenty blocks (both ways), and by taking a fifty-cent seat. He figured it a clear saving of sixty cents. He really enjoyed the play more than he would have done in a dollar seat and consoled himself with the reflection that no one knew he was a Congressman, anyway.

* * * * *

He told Radbourn at the station that he had enjoyed every moment of his stay. As the train drew out he looked back upon the city, and the great dome its centre, with a deep feeling of admiration, almost love. It had seized upon him mightily. He had only to shut his eyes to see again that majestic pile with its vast rotundas, its bewildering corridors and its tumultuous representative hall. Life there would be worth while. He began to calculate how long it would be before he should return. It seemed a long while to wait.



XXV.

IDA COMES INTO HIS LIFE AGAIN.

After his return home he accepted every invitation to speak, because that relieved the tedium of his life in Rock River. He took an active part in the fall campaign in county politics, and he delivered the Fourth of July address at the celebration at Rock River amid the usual blare of bands and bray of fakirs and ice-cream vendors, while the small boys fired off crackers in perfect oblivion of anybody but themselves.

It was magnificent to occupy a covered carriage in the parade and to sit on the platform as the centre of interest, and to rise amid cheers, to address the citizens of the United States, to point to cloud-capped towering peaks, to plant the stars and stripes upon battlements of ancient wrong, and other equally patriotic things.

No occasion was complete now without him. The strawberry festival that secured his presence felicitated itself upon the fact and always insisted on "just a few words, Mr. Congressman."

The summer passed rather better than he had anticipated. About a month before his return to Washington he received a letter from Ida asking him to be present at a suffrage meeting in Des Moines, and he accepted the invitation with great pleasure. He had been wondering how he could see her again without making the journey for that purpose, which he could not bring himself to do.

It was a soft, hazy October day and the ride to Des Moines was very beautiful. The landscape seemed to be in drowse, half-sleeping and half-waking. The jays flew from amber and orange-colored coverts of maples and oaks across the blue haze of the open, and quails piped from the hazel-thickets. Crows flapped lazily across the fields where the ploughmen were at work. The threshing machines hummed and clattered with a lower, quieter note, and as Bradley looked upon it all, the wonder of his release from the toil of reaping and threshing and ploughing came upon him again.

Ida was glad to see him. She gave him her hand in a frank, strong clasp.

"You'll stay to tea with us, of course," she said. "There is no one here but mother and I, and we can talk things all over. This is my mother," she said, presenting an elderly lady with a broad, placid face. She said nothing whatever during his stay, but listened to all that was said with unchanging gravity. It was plain she worshipped her daughter, and never questioned what she said.

They sat down at the table.

"Mr. Talcott, this is Christine," said Ida, introducing a comely Norwegian girl who came in with the tea. "Christine takes care of mother while I'm away."

"Ay tank sometime she take care of me," Christine smilingly replied.

Avoiding family matters, Ida talked on general subjects while the rest listened. She over-estimated Bradley's education, his reading, but he was profoundly thankful for it. He had never heard such talk. It was literature to him. She spoke with such fine deliberation and such choice of words. He felt its grace and power without understanding it. It seemed to him wonderful.

"I should like to be a novelist," she said. "I'd like to treat of this woman's movement."

"Why can't you do it?" he asked.

"I lack the time, the freedom from other interests. But if I could be a novelist, it would be a novelist of life."

He never remembered all that she said, but she made an impression that was almost despair upon him by her incidental mention of books that he had never read, and of authors of whom he had never even heard.

They walked to the church together along the side-walks littered with fallen leaves, and when they entered the side door she began to introduce him to the ladies who swarmed about her the moment they caught sight of her. Bradley felt embarrassed by their multiple presence, but was proud to be introduced by Ida. They moved to the platform. He had never spoken at such a meeting before and he was nervous. He spoke first and spoke well, but he would have done better with Ida's face before him. When she spoke he sat looking up at the beautiful head and feeling rather than seeing the splendid lines of her broad, powerful and unconfined waist. The perfume of her dress and its soft rustle as she moved to and fro before him made him forget her words.

Cargill came up to the platform after the speaking and said jocosely, "Well, Legislator, you're getting ahead. You're laying a foundation for post-mortem fame, anyway. I hear you've been on to Congress."

"Yes, I went on and stayed a few days."

"How'd you like it?"

"How do you do, Mr. Cargill," said Ida at his elbow. "Aren't you out of place here?"

"Not more than usual," replied Cargill. "I'm always out of place."

"Do you know Mr. Birdsell?" she asked, presenting a powerful young man with a singularly handsome face. He had clear brown eyes and a big, graceful mustache. For just a moment as he stood beside Ida, Bradley shivered with a sudden suspicion that they were lovers.

"Mr. Birdsell happens to be on from Muscatene," Ida explained, "and happened in to see a suffrage meeting. He's trying to reconcile himself to the idea of woman's emancipation."

"He'll find a sympathizer in me," put in Cargill.

Bradley studied Birdsell with round-eyed steady stare. He was a superb type of man. It gave Bradley a feeling of awkwardness to stand beside him and a consciousness of stupidity to listen to their banter, but Ida dismissed Cargill and Birdsell summarily and walked home with Bradley. He was not keenly perceptive enough to see that Ida put Birdsell off with a brusqueness that argued a perfect understanding.

They walked home by the risen moon side by side. He had not the courage to take her arm and she did not offer it. He referred again to Washington and she asked him to remember the women in his legislation.

"I don't know what I'm going to do next, but I must reach the farmer's wives again as I did in the days of the grange. I feel for them. They are to-day the most terrible proofs of man's inhumanity. My heart aches for them. There is a new farmer's movement struggling forward, the Alliance. I'm thinking of going into that as a lecturer. Do you know anything about it?"

"No, not much."

They had reached the gate, and they stood there like lovers in the cold, clear moonlight just an instant, but in that lingering action of the woman there was something tender which Bradley seized upon. He asked again—

"You'll let me write to you again, won't you?"

"Certainly. I shall follow your career with the deepest interest. I wish you'd think of this alliance movement and advise me what to do. Good-by." She extended her hand.

"Good-by," he said, and his voice choked. When he turned and walked away Washington was very far away indeed and political honors cheap as dust.



XXVI.

CONGRESSIONAL LIFE.

He found Washington less lonely for him on his return. There were many new members, and they sought each other socially and soon managed to have a good deal of talk among themselves, notwithstanding the studied slights of the old members. One member, Clancy, who grew profane at times, said, "These old seeds think they're hell's captains, but I guess we can live if they don't shake hands."

Most of the members were married and lived with their families in rented houses, but others, who were too poor to bring their families or who were bachelors like Bradley, lived in boarding houses. Bradley secured a room and board in a house near the capitol, because he seemed to be nearer the centre of things when he could look out upon the dome.

It surprised him to learn how humbly most of the congressmen lived. They were quite ordinary humans in all ways. Of course some of the senators of great wealth lived in fine houses, but they were the exception, and the poorer members did not conceal their suspicion of these great men.

"It aint a question of how much a man's got," Clancy of Iowa said, "but how he got it. I've simmered the thing down to this: Living in a hash-house aint a guarantee of honesty any more than living in a four-story brown-stone is a sure sign of robbery, but it's a tolerably safe inference."

These rich senators and representatives, owners of vast coal tracts, or iron mines, or factories, rode up to the capitol with glittering turn-outs, their horses' clanking bits and jingling chains, warning pedestrians like Clancy and Talcott, to get out of the way. For the first time in his life Bradley met great wealth with all of its power. It shocked him and made him bitter.

He took little interest in the organizing of the house. His experience in Des Moines taught him to sit quietly outside the governing circle. He accepted a place on one of the minor committees and waited to see what would develop.

His life was very quiet. Nothing was done before the holidays but organize, and he found a great deal of time to study. Radbourn came back during the early weeks of the session and resumed his work.

Clancy went to the theatre very often and attended all manner of shows, especially all that were free or that came to him as a courtesy.

"I've lived where I couldn't get these things," he said, "and I propose to improve each shining hour."

Attending Congress was quite like attending the legislature. Every morning the members went up to the great building, which they soon came to ignore, except as a place to do business in. They trooped there quite like boys going to school. It was the state legislature aggrandized—noisier, more tumultuous and confusing.

In a little while, Bradley ceased to notice the difference in gilding and jim-crackery between the senate and representative ends of the corridors. He no longer noticed the distances, the pictures, or the statues in the vaulted dome, but passed through the vast rotundas with no thought of them. The magnificence of it all grew common with familiarity.

The vast mass, and roar, and motion of the hall itself soon ceased to confuse or abase him. In proportion to membership, he doubted whether there were more able men there than in the State legislature. They were more acute politicians; they were wilier, and talked in larger terms, manipulating states instead of counties—that was all. The routine of the day was of the same general character, and gave him no trouble.

Some of the more famous of the leaders he absolutely loathed—great, bloated, swaggering, unscrupulous, treacherous tricksters. "I'll lend you my support," they said, as if it were something that could be loaned like a horse. He often talked them over with Radbourn, whose experience in and about Congress as a newspaper correspondent had given him an intimate knowledge of men, and had rendered him contemptuous, if not rebellious.

"The men counted party leaders are manipulators, as a matter of fact. They subordinate everything to party success. We've got to have another great political revolution to—to de-centralize and de-machinize the whole of our political method. Our system will break of its own weight; it can't go on. It is supposed to be popular, when in fact, it is getting farther and farther away from the people every year. Just see the departments. Do you know anything about them?"

"No, I don't," Bradley admitted.

"You're like all the rest. Every year the army of useless clerks increases; every year the numbers of useless buildings increases. The whole thing is appalling, and yet the people are getting apparently more helpless to reform it. Laws pile upon laws, when the real reform is to abolish laws. Wipe out grants and special privileges. We ought to be legislating toward equality of opportunity in the world, and here we go with McKinley bills, and the devil knows what else. By the way, to change the subject, what has become of Milton Jennings? He started out to be a great Republican politician."

"Well, he lives there yet; he's still in politics, but doesn't seem to get higher than a county office."

"He was a brilliant fellow, but he started in on the wrong side; there is no hope for him on that side in the West."

"He's married, lives just opposite the Seminary, seems to be reasonably contented."

Radbourn turned suddenly. "You are not married?"

Bradley colored. "No, I'm not."

Radbourn mused a little. "Seems to me, I remember some talk about your marrying that little—Russell girl?"

"Well, I didn't." Bradley had just a moment's temptation to tell Radbourn his whole secret, but he gave it up as preposterous.

* * * * *

Legislation was incredibly slow.

"Beats the devil how little we fellows amount to here," Clancy said one night after they had been sitting all day in their seats, while Brown of Georgia, Dixon of Maine, and others of their like had wasted hour after hour in all sorts of tedious discussions upon mere technicalities. "We can't even vote, by thunder! I'm going to make a great break one of these days and make a motion to adjourn."

Bradley laughed dutifully, for this was the ancient joke.

"It's an outrage," Clancy fumed. The speaker had refused to recognize him and he was furious. "The speaker's got everything in his hands. Say, do you know that it's all made up the day before who's goin' to be recognized?"

"Yes, I found that out some time ago," said Bradley quietly.

"Well, I feel like making a great big kick."

"It wouldn't do any good."

"Yes, it would, it would relieve my feelings. It's a pretty how de do, to send a man here to represent his constituents and then put the whole power of the house into the hands of the speaker and the committee on rules."

Bradley's seat came between two of the old members, Samuels of Mississippi and Col. Maxwell of South Carolina, and they were constantly talking across Bradley's back or before his face, ignoring him completely. It wore on him so that he fell into the habit of sitting over beside the profane Clancy in Bidwell's seat. Bidwell occupied the leather-covered lounge behind the screen so industriously that no one else felt privileged to throw himself down there.

The drinking disgusted Bradley, and the obscene talk which he heard in snatches as he went past sickened him. The same sort of attitude toward the female clerks was expressed by a certain class of the legislators. He began to wonder if he were not abnormal in some way by reason of his repugnance to all this desolating derision of really holy things. He found that while he had less religion than these men, they had infinitely less reverence for the things which he considered sacred.

Some of the better class of members invited him to their houses and he went occasionally, and if he found them uncongenial he never went again. He could not make calls out of duty. It seemed to him that they took very little interest in the higher side of politics and some of them he found were unaware of any higher side of life.

He could not help noticing that Washington was a city full of beautiful girls. His idolatry of Miss Wilbur could not prevent him from admiring them as they streamed along the walk to church. He sometimes looked wistfully at this flood of sunny laughing life that moved by him so near and yet so completely out of his reach. He knew at such times that he had missed something sweet out of his own lonely life.

But these moments were few. He realized that there was no place in the social life of the city for him, and the librarian knew him better than the butlers in the houses of rich senators. He attended one or two public receptions and was thoroughly disgusted with the crush, and felt the essential vulgarity of the whole thing.

His life at the capital was not entirely that of the politician. He had in him capabilities for appreciating art and literature, which most of his colleagues had not. He studied upon economic problems, rather than upon partisan politics, and tried to grasp the meaning of social change and social condition, and to comprehend economic causes and tendencies. He spent many hours upon problems which were unconsciously unfitting him for partisan success.

His life was very full and happy, save for the dull hunger at his heart whenever he thought of Ida. He wrote to her still, but her replies still kept their calm, impersonal tone. One night, when he returned from the capitol, he found a letter from her enclosing some clippings.

"I have joined the Farmers' Alliance," she wrote. "I begin to believe that another great wave of thought is about to sweep over the farmers. The spirit of the grange did not die. It has passed on into this new organization. The difference is going to be that this new alliance of the farmers will be deeper in thought and broader in sympathy. I never believed the grange a failure. It taught people by its failure. I'm going to Kansas to speak for them there. The alliance is very strong there. This order will become political. Its leaders are very enthusiastic."

She passed on to write of other things, but Bradley was deeply affected by this news. He had heard of the alliance obscurely, but had felt that it was only an attempt to revive the old grange movement, and that it could not succeed. But her letter set him thinking.

He wrote away on a speech till nine o'clock, and then went out for his usual walk about the capitol and its grounds, which had never lost their charm, as the city itself had. He had grown into the habit of going out whenever he wished to escape the paltry decoration, the hot colors, the vitiated air, of his boarding-place and the importunities of his fellow-boarders. He went out whenever he wanted to think great and refreshing thoughts, or whenever he felt the need of beauty or the presence of life.



XXVII.

BRADLEY'S LONG-CHERISHED HOPE VANISHES.

It had been snowing all the afternoon, and the shrubbery hung heavy and silent with heaped, clinging, feathery snow, dazzling white by contrast with the dark sustaining branches, and the yellow lamps flamed warmly amid the all-surrounding steely blue and glistening white. The damp pavements, where the snow had melted, were banded with gold and crimson from the reflected light of the lamps and the warning glare of car and carriage lights.

As Bradley breathed the pure air and walked soundlessly along the narrow paths and looked across the unflecked, untrodden snow up to the vast and silent dome, he shuddered in wordless delight. He hungered to share it with Ida. It was like fairy-land—so far removed from daylight reality; and yet the sound of sleigh-bells, the occasional shouts of coasters, and the laughter of girls added a familiar human quality to it all, and added an ache to the mysterious shuddering delight of it all. It was so evanescent; it would decay so quickly. The wind, the morning sun, would destroy it.

He walked up to the lonely esplanade, and saw the city's lights shine below him like rubies and amethysts, and saw far beyond the snow-heaped highlands, above which Jupiter hung poised, serene and lone, the king of the western sky.

How far away all this seemed from the brazen declamation, the monotonous reiterations of the reading-clerk, and from the sharp clank of the speaker's gavel! His ear wearied, his heart sick of the whole life of the farcical legislature, with its flood of corrupt bills, got back serenity and youth and repose in the presence of the snows, the silences, and the stars.

Again the impulse seized him to write to Ida and show her his whole soul; to dare and end once for all his ache of suspense. He went back to his room, and seized pen and paper. Everything he wrote seemed too formal or too presumptuous. At last he finished a short letter—

Dear Miss Wilbur:—

I do not know how to begin to say what I want to say. I am afraid of losing you out of my life by not writing, and I'm afraid if I write, I will lose you. It is impossible for me to say what you've done for me. I never would have been anything more than a poor farmer, only for you. I don't want to apologize to you for telling you how much you are to me. I want to appeal to you to give me a chance to work for you; that's all. I want you to give me some hope, if you can.

I know I am asking a great deal even in that. I realize how unreasonable it is. You've only seen me a few times; and yet I'm not going to apologize for it. I must have it over with; I can't go on in this way. Won't you write to me and tell me that I can look forward to the future with hope? Yours sincerely,

BRADLEY TALCOTT.

For the next ten days he was of little service to his country except the day he made his speech on the tariff question. It was his first set speech, and he had twenty minutes yielded to him by the gentleman from Missouri, who had charge of the bill. He had the close attention of the House, not only for his thoughts, which were fresh and direct, but also for the natural manner in which he spoke. He had lost a good deal of his "oratory," but had gained a powerful, flexible and colloquial style which made most of the orators around him seem absurd. The fine shadings of emotion and of thought in his voice struck upon the ear wearied with rancous yells and monotonous brazen declamations, with a cool and restful effect. At the close, the members crowded about to congratulate him upon his efforts, and for the moment he felt quite satisfied with himself.

It gave him a shock to see Ida's fateful letter lying upon the hat-rack in his boarding-house, where it had been pawed over by the whole household. He hastened to his room, and dropped into a chair with that familiar terrible numbness in his limbs, and with his heart beating so hard it shortened his breathing. He was like a man breathless with running. When his eyes fell on the writing, his hands ceased to shake, and his quick breathing fell away into a long, shuddering inspiration. He read the first page twice without moving a muscle. Then he turned the page, and finished it. It was not long, and it was very direct.

Dear Mr. Talcott:—

Your letter has moved me deeply, very deeply. I would have prevented its being written if I could. It is the greatest tribute—save one—that has ever come to me; and yet I wish I had not read it. I'm not free to make you any promise. I'm not free to correspond with you any more—now. I've been trying to find a way to tell you so indirectly, but your letter makes it necessary for me to do so directly.

The rest of the letter was an attempt to soften the blow, but it fell upon him very hard.

The possibility which he had always feared had become a fact, the hope which he had kept in the obscure processes of his thought and which had filled a vital place in his action, dropped out and left him purposeless. This hope of somehow, someway having her near to him had been the mainspring of his action and it could not be withdrawn without leaving him disabled.

He returned to the letter again, and again studying each word, each mark. He saw in it her acceptance of some other—probably Birdsell.

Then he saw that she had withdrawn the privilege—the blessed privilege—of writing to her. She was determined to go out of his life completely. At times as he imagined this strongly, his throat swelled till he could hardly breathe. He would have cried if nature had not denied him that relief.

He saw how baseless his hope had been, and he exonerated her from all blame. She had been kind and helpful till he spoiled it all by a fool's presumption. He had always exaggerated her social position and her attainments, but in the depths of his self-abasement and despair every kindness she had done him and every letter she had written took on a new significance. On every one he saw her warnings. Every meeting he had ever had with her he now went over and over with the strange pleasure one takes in bruising an aching limb.

She had never been other than reserved, impersonal in his presence. She had shown him again and again that her intimate life was not for him to know. He remembered now the peculiar look of perfect understanding which flashed between Birdsell and Ida, which troubled him at the time, but which his cursed egotism had brushed away as of no significance.

His speech lay there on the table, it was waste paper now. He had no one left to address it to. His utter loneliness came back to him. His mind went back over the line of his life till it came again into the little opening in the Wisconsin woods where the pines wept or snarled ceaselessly—till his mother died in the moan and the snarl and shadow of them. His heart went out to her as never before since Ida came into his life.

The gloom and reticence of those dark-green forests had wrought him into the reticent, serious man he was. He was not gloomy naturally, he was strong and hopeful, but this was one of those moments which appall a man, even a young man—or more properly, especially a young man.

He did not go down to dinner, but sat in his room till late; then when hunger compelled, he went out to a vast cafe, where he could be more alone. It seemed that night as if all incentive to live were gone; but he went to the session next day in a mechanical sort of a way, and each day thereafter in the same way, though he took no interest in the proceedings.

Clancy had his suspicions and had to verify them.

"Talcott, you're off y'r feed. Girl gone back on yeh?"

Bradley refused to reply and Clancy took delight in spreading the story among his gang. They respected Bradley's physique too much to push him unduly, however.

Nature slowly reasserted itself, and as the weeks went by he regained his interest in the work; but the sparkle, the allurement of life, was gone, and he went about with more of the purely mechanical in his actions.

He read now every available bit of news relating to the farmers' rising in the West, in the hope that Ida's work would be mentioned in it. The papers were getting savage in their attack upon the movement in Kansas. It was said to mean repudiation; that it was a movement of the shiftless and unscrupulous citizens which destroyed the credit of the State and disturbed social conditions wantonly. The West seemed on the point of upheaval, and Kansas seemed to be the centre of the feeling of unrest.



XXVIII.

SPRING CONVENTIONS.

The session wore along monotonously—at least to those who like Bradley took no interest in the bitter partisan wrangling—and suddenly it came upon him that spring was near. There came a couple of sunny days after three days of warm rain and the grass grew suddenly green. A robin hunting worms on the lawn laughed out audaciously one morning as Bradley went across the path. There seemed to be a mysterious awakening thrill in every plant and animal. The distant hills grew soft in outline.

A few days and the Spirea Japonica flamed out in yellow, the quince in the hedges showed its rose-colored tips of bursting blooms and on the red buds grew wonderful garnet-colored fists soon to open into beautiful palms of flowers. The gardeners got out with rakes and wheel-barrows and lazily plodded to and fro upon the beautiful seamless green of the lawns, or spaded about the flowers beds in the countless little parks of the city.

A few days later and the old white mule and darkey driver came out upon the springing grass with the purring mower, and it made Bradley's blood leap with recollections of the haying field. The air began to grow sweet with the odor of flowers. The sky took on a warm look. The building took on a deeper blue in its shadows and the north windows became violet at noon. Bradley longed for the country, but the orange-colored mud of the suburbs kept him confined to the sidewalks.

On Easter Sunday the girls came out in their delicious dresses, looking dainty and sweet as the lilies each church displayed. New hats, new grasses and springing plants announced that spring had come. The "leaves of absence" indicated spring in the House.

As June came on, the question of re-election began to trouble some of the members. They began to get "leave of absence on important business," and to go home to fix up their political fences. There was no sign of adjournment. It was the policy of the Republicans to keep the Democrats out of the field.

The profane Clancy was one of the first to go. He came to Bradley one day, "Say, Talcott, I wish you'd ask for indefinite leave for me, my fences are in a hell of a fix and besides I want to see my wife. I'm no earthly use here—though you needn't state that in your request."

"What'll I say?"

"Oh, important business—or sickness—the baby's cutting a tooth—just as you like. It all goes."

"I guess I'll try important business. The other is too much worn."

"All right. It does beat hell the amount of sickness there is on pension bill nights and on convention week."

Clancy was a type of legislator whose idea of legislation was to have a good time and look out for re-election. Bradley, however, did not worry particularly about his re-election until he received a letter from the Judge asking him to come home and attend the convention.

"It's just as well to be on the ground," the Judge wrote; "there is a good deal of opposition developing in the north-west part of the district. Larson wants the nomination for the Legislature, and he is trying to swing the Scandinavians for Fishbein. They are making a good deal of your attitude on the pension bill, and that interview on the oleo business where you go back on your legislative vote is being circulated to do you harm."

This letter alarmed Bradley, and at once showed him what a fight the Judge was making. Suddenly he woke to the fact that defeat would be unwelcome. Congress had come at last to have a subtle fascination, and he loved the city and its noble buildings, its theatres, and its libraries. Since that fatal letter from Ida he had been forced to go more often to the theatres and concerts. They seemed now like necessities to him, and the thought of going back to private life was not at all pleasant. He therefore got leave of absence, and took the train for Rock River.

He did not see so much of the outside world on this return trip. His trouble came back upon him, mixed, too, with something sweet which lay in the fact of a return to the West. He caught a thrill of this as the train dipped and swung round a peak on the west slope of the Alleghanies, and for a single instant the sea of sun-illumined swells and peaks of foliage broke upon the eyes and then was lost, and the train dropped down into the rising darkness of the valley.

It came to him again the next afternoon as he rode away over the wide, low swells of the prairies between Chicago and the Mississippi. It was a beautiful showery June day. A day of alternate warm rain and brilliant sunshine, and the rushing engine plunged into trailing clouds of rain only to burst forth into sunshine again with exultant shrieks of untamed energy, and listening to it one might have fancied it a living thing with capability to snuff the glorious west wind, and eyes to reflect the cool green swells of pasture.

It was a magnificent thing to step off the Chicago sleeper into the broad morning at Rock River. Soaring streamers of red and flame-color arched the eastern sky like the dome of a mighty pagoda. Birds were singing in the cool, sweet hush; roosters were crowing; the air was full of the scent of fresh leaves and succulent, springing grain. Bradley abandoned himself to the spring, and his walk up the quiet street was a keen delight. The town seemed wofully small and shabby and lifeless; but it had trees and birds and earth-smell to compensate for other things.

There was no one at the station to receive him, not even a 'bus. The station agent said:

"Guess the Judge didn't know you was comin' or he'd been down here with a band-wagon."

Mrs. Brown was in the kitchen bent above a pan of sizzling meat. A Norwegian girl with vivid blue eyes and pink and white complexion was setting the table with great precision. She smiled broadly as Bradley put his finger to his lips and crept toward Mrs. Brown, who gave a great start as she felt the clasp of his arm.

"Gracious sakes alive! Bradley Talcott!"

"Did I scare yeh?" he inquired, smiling. "Where's the Judge?"

She looked at him fondly as he held her a moment in his arms.

"He's out by the well—I think he's at work at something, for I've heard him swearing and groaning out there."

Bradley found the Judge weeding a bed of onions. He had a couple of folded newspapers under his knees and was in his shirt-sleeves. He looked like a felon condemned for life to hard manual labor.

"Judge, how are you?" called Bradley.

The Judge looked up with a scowling brow. "Hello, Brad." He wiped his hand on his thigh and rose with a groan to shake hands. "I'm slavin' again. Mrs. Brown insists on my working on the garden. How's Congress?"

"Piratical as ever. Nothing doing that ought to be done. How's everything here?"

The Judge put on his coat; "I guess I'll quit for this time," he said, referring to the onions. "Let's wash up for breakfast."

They washed at the kitchen sink as usual. Mrs. Brown watched Bradley with maternal pleasure as he hung his coat on a nail and went about in his shirt-sleeves scrubbing his face and combing his hair.

"It's good to see you around again, Bradley."

"Well, it seems good to me. Seems like old times to sit down here to your cooking with the kitchen door open and the chickens singing."

"We're all right in this county," said the Judge, referring back to politics; "but as I wrote you, it aint all clear sailing. We've got work to do. I've called the Convention at Cedarville, in order to keep some useful people in the field. We'll take dinner with old Jake Schlimgen—he's a power with the Germans."

Bradley avoided political talk as much as possible, but when on the street there seemed nothing else to talk about. Councill and Ridings assured him he was all right in the eastern part of the county, and under their flattery he grew quite cheerful. Their simple, honest admiration did him good.

On the day named, Bradley and the Judge drove off up the road in a one-horse buggy. The Judge talked spasmodically; Bradley was silent, looking about him with half-shut eyes. The wheat had clothed the brown fields; crows were flying through the soft mist that dimmed the light of the sun, but did not intercept its heat. Each hill and tree glimmered across the waves of warm air, and seemed to pulse as if alive. Blackbirds and robins and sparrows everywhere gave voice to the ecstasy which the men felt, but could not express.

The Judge roused up, slapping the horse with the reins. "It's going to be a fight; but Fishbein will be left on the first ballot by twenty-five votes."

Cedarville was wide-awake—feverishly so. The street was lined with knots of gesticulating politicians. As he alighted Bradley's friends swarmed about him with "three cheers for the Hon. Brad Talcott." He shook hands all round with unfeigned pleasure.

"Hurrah, boys, let's all go over to the Palace Hotel and have some dinner," said the Judge at last.

The rest whooped with delight. "That's the cooky, Judge."

They swarmed in upon Jake like the locusts into Egypt. They washed (some of them) in the wash-room, out of tin basins, laughing and talking in hearty clamor over the water and the comb. Others flung their nondescript wind-worn hats upon the floor, brushed their hair with their fingers and went into the dining-room as if going into a farm-kitchen in threshing time.

The girls were in a flutter of haste, and giggled and bumped against each other trying to serve the dinner to order—

"Quick as the Lord'll let yeh."

Bradley's constituents were mostly farmers, clean-eyed and hearty. They all felt sure of success and jeered the opposition good-naturedly.

* * * * *

When the Judge and Bradley rode home that night, they were silent for another cause. They had been defeated on the tenth ballot, and bitter things had been said by both sides.

It was again beautiful around them, but they did not notice it. The low sun flung its level red rays of light across the flaming green of the springing grain, and lighted every western window-pane into burning squares of crimson. The train carrying the successful Waterville crowd passed them, and they waved their hats in return to their opponents' salute.

The Judge was as badly defeated as Bradley. He took it very hard. It seemed to give the lie to all his prophecies of Democratic progress. It seemed to him a defeat of Jeffersonian principle. He consoled himself by saying—

"Those fellows don't represent the people. The thing to do is to bolt the convention"; and then he went on planning an independent campaign.

Bradley maintained gloomy silence. The comment of his friends hurt him more than his defeat. Their tone of pity cut him, and left him raw to the gibes of his opponents. The fact that an honorable, honest man could have enemies in his own party was borne in upon him with merciless force. What had he done that men should yell in hell-like ferocity of glee over his defeat?

This defeat cut closer into the Judge's life than anything that had come to him since the death of his son. If Bradley had not been so blind in his selfish suffering he would have seen how the Judge had aged and saddened since the morning.

But the old man's vital nature would not rest under defeat. He almost forced Bradley to issue a card to the public announcing his independent candidacy for Congress. Bradley had no heart in it, however. The energy of youth seemed gone out of him.

The Judge gathered his forces together for battle, but Bradley fled away from Rock River to escape the comments of his friends as well as his enemies. He was too raw to invite strokes of the lash. He dreaded the meeting with his colleagues at Washington, but there was a little more reserve in their comment and there were fewer who took a vital interest in his affairs.

He met Radbourn a few days after his return.

"Well," Radbourn said, "I see by the papers that your defeat in the convention was due to your advocacy of 'cranky notions.' I told you the advocacy of heresies was dangerous; I have no comfort for you. You had your choice before you. You can be a hypocrite and knuckle down to every monopoly or special act, or you can be an individual and—go out of office."

"I'll go out of office, I guess, whether I want to or not," was his bitter reply. He suffered severely for a few days with the commiseration of friends and the thinly-veiled ridicule of his political enemies, but each man was too much occupied to hold Bradley's defeat long in mind. He soon sank back into quiet, if not into repose.

As the hot weather came on, the city became almost as quiet as Rock River itself. Save taking care of the few tourists who drifted through, there was very little doing. The cars ground along ever more thinly until they might be called occasional. The trees put forth their abundance of leaf, and under them the city seemed to sleep. Congress had settled down into a dull and drowsy succession of daily adjournments and filibustering. The speaker ruled remorselessly, "counting the hats in the cloak-room to make up his quorum," his critics said.

Nothing was doing, but vast accumulations of appropriations were piling up, waiting the hurried action of the last few days of the session. The senators dawdled in and out dressed in the thinnest clothing; the House looked sparse and ineffectual.

Bradley grew depressed, and at last he became positively ill. He was depressed by the incessant relentless attacks made upon him through the Waterville Patriot, and by his apparently hopeless outlook. The Patriot published some of his radical utterances much garbled, of course, and called him "an anarchist and a socialist, a fit leader for the repudiating gang of alleged farmers in Kansas."

Radbourn became alarmed for him, and advised him to get indefinite leave of absence and go home. "Go back into the haying-field; that's what you need; they won't miss you here. Go home and go out of politics, and stay out till the revolution comes; then go out and chalk death on your enemies' door."

The advice to go home was so obviously sound that Bradley took it at once. It seemed as if the atmosphere of the city would destroy him. As a matter of fact it was inactivity that was killing him. He found it so hard to exercise—except by walking, and that did not rest his over-active mind.



XXIX.

BRADLEY DISCOURAGED.

The Judge and Mrs. Brown were alarmed at the change in him. He was gloomy and pale, but he protested he was all right.

"I'm going out on the farm. I believe it'll do me good to go out and help Councill put up his hay. It seems to me if I could get physically tired and wolfishly hungry again it would do me good."

The Judge drove him out to Councill's one afternoon. Everybody they met seemed delighted to see him. Mrs. Councill came out to the horse-block, her bare arm held up to shield her eyes.

"Well, Brad Talcott, how are you—anyway? you're jest in time to help me pick berries."

Bradley sprang out and shook hands with hearty force. "Give us your dish."

"H'yare!" yelled Councill from the load of hay he was driving in, "I can use you out here."

"Oh, you go long," replied Mrs. Councill. "He's got better company and a better job."

Out in the berry patch he talked over the neighborhood affairs and picked berries and killed mosquitoes, while the wind wandered by with rustling steps on the lombardy poplar leaves. The locusts sang and the grasshoppers snapped their shining wings. It was a blessed relief to his troubled older self, for he slipped back into the more tranquil life of his boyhood.

At supper he sat at the table with the men, whose wet shirts showed how fierce the work of pitching the hay had been.

"Be ye out f'r play or work, Brad?" asked Councill.

"Work. Need a hand?"

"They's plenty to do—but I'm afraid you can't take a hand's place, for a while."

"Try me and see."

They were all curious to hear of Washington, but he was more inclined to talk of the crops and the cattle.

He went to sleep that night in the bare garret with the men, and woke the next morning at sun-rise at sound of Councill's voice calling him, just as he used to do when he was a hired man.

"Hello, Brad! Roll out!"

He went down to breakfast, sloshed his face at the cistern pump and was ready to eat when the men came in.

"We live jest the same as ever, Brad," said Mrs. Councill, "you'll haf to put up with it jest as if y' wa'n't a Congressman."

"I guess he can stand a few days what we stand all the while," Councill interjected.

There was a good deal of banter during the meal about "downing" the Congressman.

Bradley's physical pride was roused and he took his place in the field determined to show them their mistake. Night came bringing weariness that was exhaustion, and next morning he was too lame to lift a fork. It emphasized the unnatural inactivity into which he had fallen.

He improved physically and by the end of the week was able to pitch hay with the rest. The Judge drove up for him on Saturday afternoon, and found him pitching hay upon the stack behind the wind-break, wet with sweat and covered with timothy bloom. Councill was stacking.

"Hello, Congressman," called the Judge.

"Get off, 'n take right hold, Judge," said Councill. "A Judge aint no better'n a Congressman, not a darn bit."

"I'll take a hand at the table," the Judge replied.

"I've had about enough of it," Bradley said to him privately while Councill was putting his team in the barn. "I'm better, but it begins to seem like a waste of time."

They drove home that night through the still, warm, star-lit air, like father and son in slow talk of the future.

The Judge told of the plan for the fall campaign, to which Bradley listened silently.

"We'll win yet if you only keep your grit."

He planned also a broadening out of their law business. A new block had just been built and they were to take two adjoining rooms.

"You need a library of your own and a chance to work where you won't be disturbed. I'll do the consulting business and leave you the business in court." For a time Bradley was interested and occupied in moving into the new office and in getting in some new books and arranging the shelves.

But the narrowness, the quiet, the mental stagnation of the life of Rock River settled down on him at last. There were days when he walked the floor of the office, wild with dismay over his prospect. How could he settle down again to this life of the country lawyer? The honors and ease that accompanied his office, the larger horizon of Washington, had ruined him for life in Rock River. Love might have enabled him to bear it, but he had given up the thought of marriage and he longed for the larger life he had left.

There was a sorrowful scene when the Judge read for the first time Bradley's letter of withdrawal from the canvass. The Judge was deeply hurt because he had not been consulted, and was depressed by Bradley's despair. He tried to reason with him, but Bradley was in no mood to reason.

"I'm out of it, Judge; it's of no use to go on; I'm beaten; that's all there is about it; we'd only get a minority vote, and show how weak we are; I'm a failure as a politician, and every other way. I give it up."

The Judge sat staring at him without words to express his terrible disappointment and alarm, for the condition into which his lieutenant had sunk alarmed him and he communicated his fear to Mrs. Brown.

They discussed the matter that night in bed. Bradley heard their voices still mumbling on when he sank to sleep.

"You don't suppose, Mrs. Brown," the Judge said a little timidly, "it can't be possible it's a woman"—

"If it had been, Mr. Brown, he would have told me," she said convincingly. "It's just the heat, and then his defeat has told on him more than you admit."

"If I felt sure of that, Mrs. Brown," the Judge said in answer, "but I don't. All ambition seems to have gone out of him. I hate to acknowledge myself mistaken in the man. I've believed in Brad. I am alarmed about him. He isn't right; I've a good mind to send him down to St. Louis and Kansas City on some collection cases."

"I think he'd better do that, Mr. Brown, if he will go."

"Oh, he'll go; he wants to get away from the campaign; it seems to wear upon him some way; he avoids everybody, and won't speak of it at all if he can help it."

Bradley was very glad to accept the offer, and made himself ready to go with more of his old-time interest than he had shown since his sickness. The Judge brightened up also, and said to him, as he was about to step into the train: "Now, Brad, don't hurry back; take your time, and enjoy yourself. Go around by Chicago, if you feel like it."

After the train pulled out, and they were riding home, the Judge said to his wife: "Mrs. Brown, you must take good care of me now. I want to live to see a party grow up to the level of that young man's ideas. This firm is crippled, but it is not in the hands of a receiver, Mrs. Brown."

"I'll be the receiver," Mrs. Brown said.

The Judge shifted the lines into his left hand.

The horse fell into a walk. "Mrs. Brown, if this weren't a public road, I'd be tempted to put my strong right arm around you and give you a squeeze."

"I don't see any one looking," she said, and her eyes took on a pathetic suggestion of the roguishness her face must have worn in girlhood.

He put his arm about her, and gave her a great hug. After that she laid her head against his shoulder, and cried a little; the Judge sighed.

"Well, we'll have to get reconciled to being alone, I suppose; we can't expect to keep him always. I think it's a woman, Mrs. Brown."



XXX.

THE GREAT ROUND UP.

During his stay in St. Louis Bradley found the papers filled with the Alliance movement in Kansas, and looked for Ida's name each morning. She was in the western part of the State, but moving eastward; and when a few days later he saw her announced in the Kansas City morning papers to speak at the great "round up" at Chiquita, he packed his valise on the sudden impulse, and started on the next train, determined to hear her speak once more at least.

It was just noon when he alighted from the train at Chiquita. The day was dry, hazy, resplendent October. The wind was strong but amiable, and was full of the smell of corn and of that warm, pungent, smoky odor which forms the Indian summer atmosphere of the West. The wind rushed up the broad street past him, carrying the dust and leaves in its powerful clutches, and laying strong hands upon his broad back. The sky was absolutely without speck, but a pale mist seemed to dim the radiance of the sun, and lent a milky white tone to the blue of the sky.

As he moved slowly off up the street, he studied the town and the people from the standpoint his life in the East had given him. Everywhere was an air of security. Men moved slower. Their faces were less anxious and more placid; they had leisure to talk as they met at the shop door. The boss seemed farther away. But all this security did not conceal the poverty which he now saw everywhere. The houses were mainly low, unpainted buildings, containing only three or four cramped rooms. They were a little smarter in appearance than the country type, but not much more commodious.

"I wonder if you are one of the speakers here to-day," said a voice behind him.

Bradley turned, and saw a small man with a stubby mustache, under whose derby hat-rim a pair of round black eyes shone with a keen glitter.

"No, sir, I'm not."

"Beg pardon, no harm done. Saw you get off with your valise; knew you weren't a native by the cut o' y'r jib. Excuse me, I hope?"

"Certainly; I'm just on to see some friends here."

"Precisely; I'm up from Kansas City to see the big 'round up,' as they call it. Here's my card. I represent what our Alliance friends call the 'plutocratic press.'" His card stated that his name was Mr. Davis, and that he represented the Chronicle. "I'm afraid the parade must be over by this time, but I missed my train. Perhaps we had better step along a little."

They had reached the main street, a broad avenue which ran north and south across a gentle swell in the prairie. There were a great many people on the sidewalks, and teams were moving in various directions slowly and in apparent confusion.

"Let's go over here to the Commercial House; that's the headquarters of all the brethren," said Davis.

They went across the street to the Commercial House, which they found full of men in groups, talking very earnestly, but quietly. Most of them were farmer-like looking figures, big and brown, and dressed in worn, faded clothing, but here and there a young man stood, wearing a broad white hat, and with a gay handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck. On all sides could be heard the slightly-drawling speech of the Kansan.

They went up to a little balcony which projected over the walk. Four or five other young fellows were already seated there. Some of them were magnificent-looking fellows, keen, wholesome, and picturesque in their dress.

"Excuse me now, gentlemen," said Davis, whipping out his note-book. "I'm a reporter, and here they come!"

Up the broad street, under that soaring sky, from their homes upon a magnificently fertile soil, came the long procession of revolting farmers. There were no bands to lead them; no fluttering of gay flags; no cheers from the bystanders. They rode in grim silence for the most part, as if at a funeral of their dead hopes—as if their mere presence were a protest.

Everywhere the same color predominated—a russet brown. Their faces were bronzed and thin. Their beards were long and faded, and tangled like autumn corn silk. Their gaunt, gnarled, and knotted hands held the reins over their equally sad and sober teams. The women looked worn and thin, and sat bent forward over the children in their laps. The dust had settled upon their ill-fitting dresses. There were no smart carriages, no touch of gay paint, no glittering new harnesses; the whole procession was keyed down among the most desolate and sorrowful grays, browns, and drabs.

Slowly they moved past. In some of the wagons, banners, rudely painted on cotton cloth, uttered the farmers' protest in words.

"Good God!" said Davis, as he dashed away at his writing. "Did you ever see such a funeral in your life? See that banner!"

DOWN WITH MONOPOLIES.

"All right, down with them; you're the doctor," muttered Davis as he wrote.

FREE TRADE, FREE LAND, MONEY AT COST, TRANSPORTATION AT COST.

"Now you are shouting, brother."

EQUAL RIGHTS TO ALL IS AS DEAR TO THE HEART OF THE FARMER AS IT WAS IN THE DAYS OF OUR FOREFATHERS.

"Well, now, sure you mean that—that's all. Stop talking, and act."

Bradley remained perfectly silent through it all. As these farmers passed before his eyes, there came into his mind vast conceptions which thrilled him till he shuddered—a realization that here was an army of veterans, men grown old in the ferocious struggle against injustice and the apparent niggardliness of nature,—a grim and terrible battle-line. It was made up, throughout its entire length, of old or middle-aged men and women with stooping shoulders, and eyes dim with toil and suffering. There was nothing of lovely girlhood or elastic, smiling boyhood; not a touch of color or grace in the long line of march. It was sombre, silent, ominous, and resolute.

It appeared to him the most pathetic, tragic, and desperate revolt against oppression and wrong ever made by the American farmer. It was the Grange movement broadened, deepened, and made more desperate and wide-reaching by changing conditions.

At Davis' suggestion they went off down the street, joining the crowd on the sidewalk, which was streaming away towards the fair grounds. A roasted ox was to be served there, and speeches were to follow. The road kept on to the south, down over the gentle slope, and turned aside under the jack-oaks, and led through a wooden gate into an enclosure which was used for the county fair. Down under the great shed by the side of the race-track the people swarmed in thousands.