A quarter of an hour slipped by; no Shelby. His cob fretted at the autumn flies and whinnied to be gone. A half-hour elapsed, unfruitful; an hour. Then did Queen Ruth, on whose imperious nod a little world had hung from babyhood, perceive the recreant come calmly down from his law office in company with some creature of relatively common clay, shake hands, chat further, shake hands again, take up his reins amid an interchange of badinage with the bystanders, and so, gossiping still, jog deliberately on—to her!

She spun on her heel as he turned in at the drive and rang for her maid.

"If Mr. Shelby should call," she directed, wrenching at her gloves, "say I'm not at home."

Shelby's occupations in the meantime had been absorbing. In the course of an earnest conference at the Tuscarora House the evening of the quarry accident, the Hon. Samuel Bowers had removed his cigar to let fall a sententious observation.

"As long as an all-wise Providence saw fit to dump that sand-bank on one of the Polacks," said he, "I call it a piece of downright Ross Shelby luck that it fell on Kiska."

"I should have worked as hard over a dago," rejoined Shelby; "or a dog either, I guess."

"M-yes; I reckon. But you're not complaining that it wasn't some dago who doesn't know a ballot from a bunch of garlic? No, I reckon not." His eyes twinkled, and Shelby flickered a responsive grin. "Note a rule for candidates: When about to effect the spectacular rescue of one of the toiling masses which are the bone and sinew of this fair land of ours, pick a man who holds a block of the foreign vote right in the pocket of his jeans."

It was perhaps appreciation of this aphorism's significance, perhaps sheer abundance of the milk of human kindness, perhaps a harmonious blending of both, which inspired Shelby's warm welcome to Kiska as he was about to leave his office to join Ruth Temple.

"You shouldn't have come out so soon, Kiska," he protested, urging the big Pole to a chair, and bringing him a glass of water. "Did you walk all the way from Little Poland to see me?"

"I valked," answered Kiska, simply, his face working. "I vould like to haf roon, Meester Shelby."

"Oh, I wouldn't run much just yet," laughed Shelby, kindly, trying to head off the man's expression of gratitude. "Have another drink? Perhaps you'd prefer some whiskey?"

Kiska declined, and harked back to his message.

"I vould like to haf roon to tank you, Meester Shelby. I got vife to tank you. I got mooch cheeldren to tank you. I no taalk good. Dat Eengleesh hard,—so? Eef I no taalk, I tink. I tink all day: Tank you, Meester Shelby, tank you, Meester Shelby."

"You speak English very well," said Shelby, patting him on the shoulder. "But you mustn't say any more about the matter."

He led him presently to talk of the quarry-workers and their families, their wages, their hours, their recreation, their parish church, their priest, their school; for Little Poland was sufficient unto itself; and Kiska saw that he questioned with sympathy and understanding, and was pleased. On the dial of his office clock Shelby noted the hour of his appointment come and go, and from his window he caught a fleeting glimpse of Ruth at hers. She wore his favorite hat, with a gleam of red, which became her dark hair so well, and he divined that she had put it on because of him. He longed to be out and away with her between the autumn hedgerows, but there sat Kiska, garrulous of Poland over seas and Little Poland by the quarries, and to Kiska the politician inclined a patient ear.

The Pole rose at last, after a delighted hour, and Shelby saw his eye light on a package of campaign lithographs of himself, which had come that morning from the printers.

"Want one?" he asked.

Kiska exploded in incoherent gratitude.

"Take several," said Shelby, snapping an elastic band around a sheaf of the pictures. "Give 'em to your friends to hang in their front windows. That's what we do with 'em in town, you know. It's American. You're all good Americans in Little Poland, aren't you?" A thought struck him, and from a roll of banknotes, destined for campaign uses, he extracted a ten-dollar bill. "I dare say Joe Hilliard will pay your doctor, Kiska," he went on, "but there'll be other things you'll want. Winter's coming; buy the yellow-haired kids some shoes; get the wife a warm dress. You can pay me when Poland gets its independence."

Kiska took the money. "I vould like to vork for you," he exclaimed.

"Would you?" laughed the politician. "I think perhaps you may some day."

The minor social conventions, which, after all, are possibly the major ones, were consistently ignored by Shelby.

"Not at home?" he repeated after Ruth's maid. "I guess you're mistaken. I saw Miss Temple at the window as I drove in the gate. Just look around a bit, and you'll find her."

He walked calmly past the bewildered girl to the drawing-room. In the centre of the apartment stood Ruth, her cheeks waving crimson, like a poppy field astir.

"Angry?" said the man.

Ruth waited till the open-mouthed maid had retreated down the hall.

"I'm furious," she answered, and looked the part.

"Think I'm a boor?"

She could not trust herself to reply. Had he dared smile then, she would have swept by him, but he was wholly grave.

"I'll tell you what you're thinking," he said quietly. "You are thinking that I have fallen short of your notion of me. You listened the other night at the court-house and thought kindly things. Then you were told by my enemies that I had used in part what was not my own. You were vexed, for it impeached your judgment of character. Then I failed of my appointment, and did you a more grievous wrong—I piqued your woman's vanity."

Ruth gasped.

"Your effrontery is—is fascinating."

Shelby's eyes hinted a smile. She had said what she thought.

"I shall not defend myself to you against the charges of the Whig," he went on. "I doubt even if I shall answer them publicly. Greater men than I have had their names blackened in a campaign, and deemed silence the wisest answer. People don't ascribe many virtues to the politician, but even he occasionally turns the other cheek. As for my tardiness to-day—well, I could have avoided it."

"You admit it?" blazed Ruth.

"Yes. I had my choice."

"And you chose—" The shabby figure she had seen descend from Shelby's office visualized itself sharply.

"Yes—poor devil—I chose Kiska."

Her mood veered, and she whirled impulsively toward him, all womanliness and contrition.

"Forgive me. How could I know? I thought—I thought—"

"That it was some heeler with a vote to sell?"

Her face betrayed her.

"Forgive me," she repeated. "You would have done wrong to turn him away because of me. I know of your noble deed—who does not? I am proud of you, and wished to tell you so. I wanted to see you for this—to praise your heroism. I've been your friend in that—that other thing. I could see how the crowd, the exhilaration, the sense of mastery, might lure one on. I looked at it dispassionately—with a friend's eyes. I was loyal till I thought you held my friendship lightly, and put politics before it. I own my mistake—my injustice."

Shelby had not dreamed of vindication so sweeping, and, with a word of modest disclaimer, led the talk to pacific commonplace. It was too late for the promised drive, and indeed neither of them thought of it again till the door had shut between them.

In leaving, the man's glance was arrested by an object on the piano.

"What is that called?" he asked abruptly.

"The cast? That is my Victory—the famous Victory of Samothrace, which suggested the poem everybody's reading. It's my despair. I've failed at drawing it for years. The original is in the Louvre, and towers gloriously over a staircase. I can shut my eyes and see it perfectly."

"Pretty old?" ventured Shelby.

"Oh, yes; it's an antique. See how ruffian Time has dealt with it."

The man walked slowly round the goddess, surveying her from every side.

"A day or two ago," he said simply, "I saw that image in a house, and, in my ignorance, thought a servant had broken it. I wondered why the people didn't pitch it out."

His tone went straight to her sympathy.

"Many are strangers in the kingdom of Art," she returned gently. "Most of us must come to it like little children."

Shelby was silent for a moment. Then he said:—

"In Bernard Graves's opinion I am aesthetically dead—I believe those were his words."

The girl started.

"I never repeated them," she protested.

"What," laughed Shelby, grimly, "has he told you that, too? He's evidently fond of the phrase. Perhaps he is right. Yet I hope not. I'd rather think I'm merely unborn. I am not a voluntary Ishmaelite. I simply haven't had the chance to learn."



CHAPTER IX

A fault recognized, it was Ruth's nature to be lavish of atonement, and by way of further expiation she consented a day or two later to make one of a driving party of Mrs. Hilliard's to hear Shelby speak in a village located "down north," as the local vernacular had it, near the shore of Lake Ontario. Ruth cared little for Mrs. Hilliard. She saw her through feminine eyes, and Mrs. Hilliard was not popular with women. But Shelby had privily told her of the project and begged her to accept.

"I had planned to rent the Tuscarora House tallyho and go with some eclat," the lady lamented at the eleventh hour, "but the way people have disappointed me is positively harrowing. There was Bernard Graves—I pinned my childlike faith on him; but he sent regrets. And Mr. and Mrs. Bowers. Wouldn't you think that they, of all people, would wish to go? But no; Mrs. Bowers said it did her rheumatic shoulder no good to traipse around nights,—that was her expression,—and Mr. Bowers actually told me that he was too busy organizing political meetings to want to attend them. Isn't he droll? Then Mr. Hewett had a sermon to prepare; and Dr. Crandall had a case of diphtheria to watch; and Volney Sprague—well, I really did not dare ask him, he was so horrid in his paper about Mr. Shelby's splendid speech. So one and all they began to make excuses, as the Bible says, till it has simmered down to you, dear Ruth, and Joe, and Mr. Shelby, and me."

"Oh," said Ruth, with misgiving.

"A sort of survival of the fittest, don't you know, as somebody or other says. Was it Shakespeare? He really seems to have written all the clever things."

"No," Ruth replied with gravity; "it wasn't Shakespeare."

"Really? I thought it sounded Shakespearian. Well, as I was telling you, it has come to a jolly little company of four in my surrey, which, after all, is perhaps nicer than a dozen in a tallyho, though of course it won't impress the voters as much."

Ruth's eyebrows arched.

"Is that the object of our going?"

"What an idea, my dear!" Nevertheless, she colored. "We'll start early enough for a fish supper at the Lakeview Inn," she rattled on. "You know how good their fish suppers are. And perhaps we shall have time to stop at the camp-meeting of those ridiculous Free Methodists which is in full swing at the grove behind the hotel. Joe says that it will be the last night of the camp, and equal to Barnum's Three Rings and Mammoth Hippodrome. Doesn't that sound just like Joe? I'm sure we can manage to see something of it. Mr. Shelby's meeting won't begin till eight-thirty and Eden Centre can't be ten minutes' drive from the grove."

She sowed without conception of the harvest. The pleasuring so idly planned, the religionists whose vagaries provoked her laughter, were in time to bulk huge in a clairvoyant light of revelation.

It fell a ripe autumn day with the haze mantling the orchards like the purple of a plum, a day in whose magic atmosphere even common things wore an air of poetry. The very canal was transfigured.

"There is a bit of Holland," said Ruth, as they crossed the waterway on the ragged hem of the town. "If this were Europe and the courthouse over there could triple its age and take another name, this bridge would swarm with the 'personally conducted' admiring the view. I don't wonder that artists are beginning to paint the canal."

"They say a house-boat party came through last week," Mrs. Hilliard remarked.

"Tied their scow near my place," put in her husband. "Had the hold all rigged up with a piano and curtains and rugs. Harum-scarum looking lot of men and women you wouldn't trust to paint a barn. They overran the quarries and made pictures of the Polacks."

"Bernard Graves met them," Ruth added. "They told him that Little Poland was a second Barbizon for peasant models, with an 'Angelus' or a 'Man with the Hoe' around every corner."

Joe Hilliard guffawed.

"Guess they meant the woman with the hoe; she's the agriculturalist in the Polack matrimonial team."

Shelby was discreetly backward in these quicksands which the quarry owner did not fear to tread, but the canal stirred his imagination, too, and in a characteristic way.

"It takes seven figures to express last year's tonnage down the Ditch to tidewater," he told them; "stone, lumber, food. Why it dumped over three-quarters of a million tons of food alone into New York City's maw. Yet they say it's antiquated and can't compete with the railroads. What else has kept the railroads within bounds? Ask any Tuscarora shipper what happens yearly when navigation closes. Abandon it! We'll see. The canal counties swing a pretty vote in this state."

Hilliard laughed.

"Think you're addressing the Legislature, Ross?"

"I heard you address the Assembly once," Ruth said. "I was a Vassar girl then, visiting Albany friends. You spoke about the canals, and the other members stopped gossiping and writing letters to listen."

"The canal is a part of my religion," Shelby answered.

They crossed the ancient shore line of the lake, the Ridge, so-called,—successive highway of the Iroquois, the pioneer, the stage-coach, and the ubiquitous trolley,—and caught presently the distant shimmer of Ontario, sail-dotted, intensely blue. That first glimpse of the inland sea always stirred Ruth to the depths. It was not the romance of New France alone which it evoked—that picturesque procession of redmen, coureurs de bois, friars, Jesuits, soldiers of fortune, La Salle, Frontenac, the conquering English, the conqueror-conquering American—but the mystery of the vaster tidal sea toward which it drew, whose supremest witchery none may know save the yearning inland-born.

"Calm as a puddle to-day," said Joe. "You can almost hear the Canucks singing 'God Save the Queen.'"

Dusk had set in when they left the deserted piazzas of the summer hotel for the camp-meeting in the grove. The flare of torches wavered afar between the tree boles, and above the lapping of the waves walled a drear hymn.

Mrs. Hilliard skipped girlishly in the woodland path.

"They've begun, they've begun," she exulted. "We shall see the fun after all."

"It's too early for the meeting in the big tent," Shelby told Ruth; "but if you've never seen anything of the kind, the scene which goes before will be quite as curious."

Skirting a makeshift village of tiny tents and shanties they issued to a torch-lit clearing in the wood whose central object was the greater tent, which, frayed, weathered, and patched as it was, yet stood to these zealots of an iron creed as the chosen tabernacle of a very God. Its rough benches were empty now, but before its dingy portal swayed and groaned a rapt circle of men and women, hand in hand, in whose midst an old man with a prophet's head and a bigot's eye was gyrating like a dervish as he mouthed the hackneyed phrases of the sanctified. As the new-comers pressed among the bystanders hemming the inner circle of the faithful, the performer with a last frantic whirl dropped exhausted, and rolling down a slight declivity lay stark and deathlike at their feet, his white beard and hair strewn with russet leaves.

Ruth recoiled with a shudder. The swaying circle redoubled its incantations, and left him to his envied beatitude. Their indifference seemed inhuman to the girl, and she would have stooped to the prostrate figure but for Shelby's detaining hand.

"Merely the 'Power,' as they say," he whispered, adding cynically, "Epilepsy can be feigned, you know."

She desisted, and a new actor waltzed rhythmically into the glare of light. Her short rotund body writhing not unlike an Oriental dancer's, the Widow Weatherwax had assumed the centre of the ring. The sanctified were without sense of humor, but the unregenerate onlookers were not proof against the comic aspects of emotional religion, and from the dark outskirts rang a ribald laugh.

"Why doesn't that dreadful woman wear a corset?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard in a stage whisper of Ruth, whose face went suddenly aflame.

"The widow would make the fortune of any Midway, Ross," Joe Hilliard chuckled, digging Shelby in the ribs.

"Woe, woe, woe," chanted the widow, spurred to anathema by derision. "Woe upon scorners! Woe upon them that sit in the seats of scorners! 'Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.'"

Scripture-quoting was reckoned among the fine arts in the widow's circle, and an applauding chorus of Praise Gods and Amens greeted her dexterous use of the beloved weapon. She rounded the chain once more in her grotesque dance; then, suddenly spying the little group of her neighbors peering through the girdle of the sanctified, she halted, directly fronting them, and, singling out Mrs. Hilliard, who was conspicuous in a red tailor-made gown, she transfixed her with her beady eyes.

"Woe, woe, woe," she wailed again, rocking to and fro. "Woe upon Babylon! 'Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird!'"

The brethren thrilled at the well-understood allusion to the speaker's abiding-place, while the outsiders, scenting a veiled scurrility, craned to listen and to watch.

Secure of her audience, the widow paused as if waiting the descent of the prophetic afflatus. Then:—

"'And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire.'"

Ruth vacillated between fascination and disgust. The flickering torches, the soughing wind, the lapping waves, the old, old words, lent the denunciation a solemnity which transcended the bizarre mouthpiece. She shook off the impression, however, and asked Shelby to take her away.

"Yes; it's time to leave for the rally," he acquiesced. "I'll speak to the Hilliards."

As they turned, they saw that Mrs. Hilliard's eyes were riveted on the widow's in an hypnotic stare. In shrill singsong the woman was declaiming:—

"'So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations—'"

Whereupon Mrs. Hilliard suddenly stopped her ears and grovelled on her knees full in the light of the torches, her shoulders quivering with hysterical sobs. There was a ripple of sensation at the prominence of the convert, and triumphant peals of "Saved by His precious blood," "Saved by the Lamb," "Look to Him, sister, look to Him," and the like. Then big Joe Hilliard stolidly thrust himself into the ring, and, raising the stricken woman, bore her away into the outer darkness. Apart from the crowd, Hilliard shook his wife with rough kindness.

"Wake up, girl," he said. "Nightmare's over. I guess you need a dose of camomile."

In the inky outskirts she presently threw off the obvious marks of her hysteria, but by little signs another woman might read, Ruth saw hours afterward that the spell possessed her still. Its gloom seemed to overcast the entire evening. Either through insufficient advertising, or the crass stupidity of the enfranchised of Eden Centre, who thought less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene lamps and wilting humanity; and of this beggarly handful two-thirds were women. Shelby assumed a cheerful front, declaring that a small audience so assembled was deserving of his best, but hewing to this line was another matter. Womankind are proverbially indifferent to politics; and a stouter resolution than his would have flagged in the presence of that preoccupied feminine two-thirds, whose eyes were centred on Mrs. Hilliard's tailor-made gown and Ruth Temple's fall hat. Used as he was to easy victory, this first disappointment of his campaign seemed bodeful of evil days to come.



CHAPTER X

Yet when mischief speedily befell, it wore so curious a guise that Shelby missed its import and laughed it aside for a random fling of jocund Fate. It began with a publisher's announcement of a volume containing the collected poems of the author of the admired, imitated, parodied, and derided ode on the "Victory of Samothrace," anonymous no longer, but the avowed offspring of Bernard Graves. Dazed, incredulous, and slow to do him honor, the prophet's own country advanced a theory of mistaken identity. But reluctant New Babylon had soon to recognize the young man's vogue. Through its supposed advocacy of woman suffrage the poem had all but founded a cult, and the disclosure of its true author, after months of guesswork and silly-season gush, bounced and ricochetted among the newspapers with astonishing ado. With the Whig in the forefront the local press began to echo the gossiping paragraphs and character sketches which, true, half true, and of whole cloth, padded the lean columns of a mediocre literary season, and New Babylon had faith. The last doubting Thomas yielded when it became necessary to convey the celebrity's mail to his home in a special bag; not even the ensuing plague of special correspondents, biographical dictionary solicitors, photographers, and worshipping pilgrims so stirred the local imagination; this surely was fame!

To Ruth Temple, who by some sorcery guessed his secret before its public revelation, Graves went with his laurels thick upon him.

"How does it feel to be a celebrity?" he said, meeting her volley of questions collectively. "Much like a breakfast cereal, a patent medicine, or a soap. Byron said that the first thing which sounded like fame to him was the tidings that he was read on the banks of the Ohio. It's different nowadays. The first taste usually comes from seeing your name placarded on a dead wall between some equally distinguished rolled oats and a new five-cent cigar. Personally I think I first saw the 'gypsy' face to face when the Hon. Seneca Bowers told me that save 'Betsey and I Are Out' he had read no poem but mine in twenty years. That was my 'Ohio,' though of course Mrs. Hilliard's request for an author's reading at the Culture Club was an annunciation in itself. Am I becoming fabulously rich from my royalties? Alas! no; I must buy too many presentation copies for people who fancy that I obtain gratis really more than I know what to do with. Shall I write for the stage? I could as easily write a cook book. Do I give my autograph? Always, if a stamped envelope is enclosed. One of our hardest-working presidents daily set apart a time for autographs; why then should a popular writer pretend that it bores him? He is secretly tickled, and probably collects autographs himself."

Ruth laughed, but denied that he had exhausted her questions.

"Why did you withhold your name from your masterpiece?" she asked.

"Partly because it was my masterpiece,—it would be false modesty to deny that I know it,—and I had some notion of digging a pit for the critics. But the main reason was to confound my Uncle Peter."

"I didn't know you had an uncle."

"I haven't in the flesh. 'Uncle Peter' is generic—a polite lumping together of my chronic fault-finders within the family and without. You know him. Both masculine and feminine, he's eternally an old woman. Everybody knows Uncle Peter, the first to censure and the last to praise. Now, as I've been his especial tidbit and awful example for years, I had to school myself to the thought of snatching the daily morsel of gossip from his mouth. The murder out, Uncle Peter's grief is pitiful. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth is a prophecy of evil unfulfilled! It's not that he considers I've gone to work, incorrigible vagabond that I am; it's the fact that my intolerable idling has produced money which sets his teeth on edge—money, the golden calf of Uncle Peter's narrow idolatrous soul."

Ruth had no liking for his moments of acid mockery.

"Don't let Uncle Peter overshadow your friends," she warned.

"I'll not," promised the man. "And you—by what witchery of friendship did you find me out?" He shifted his seat, seeking her eyes. "Ruth, was it love?"

She did not answer immediately.

"Be my wife, Ruth," he said.

"It was not love," she replied simply.

It was one of the oddities of his temperament that at this moment he saw himself objectively. What a subdued neutral tinted thing was life! By all the canons of romance it was now his cue for perfervid speech.

"What then?" he asked quietly.

"Liking—a real liking."

"Will it grow warmer?"

"I cannot tell."

"I will teach you to love me," he declared, his artistic self nudging him meanwhile that he had dropped into the worn formula of the ages.

Ruth did not deny him the attempt, and he undertook a lesson on the spot, pointing out that they saw life through similar eyes; that art, music, literature spoke with a common voice; that if true marriage were perfect companionship, the auguries were not uncertain in their happy omen; so on till he wearied her with argument.

"All those things refine love," she put in at last, a little wistfully; "they are not its essence. A man may be a barbarian and yet lovable."

He desisted at that, and presently went away. Out of doors her words clothed themselves with a personal application. Shelby—lovable barbarian!—was entering the gate.

Of what immediately followed neither man retained a clear recollection. It was a clash of temperaments hopelessly at odds, in which the spoken word weighed little beside the mute antipathy jaundicing the mind. Yet the word played no small part in the sequel. Graves assured Shelby that he should spare no effort to compass his defeat; while Shelby in his turn suggested that the zest of the campaign would be doubled if Graves were only his ridiculous opponent.

Puzzling how the quarrel could have begun and hurried to its climax so swiftly, Bernard Graves swung up the street heedless of his steps. Then the bland colonial facade of the public library confronted him like a smirking face and, as his vagrant fancy trifled with the conceit, its lips opened to emit two chattering girls.

"I was the tenth on the waiting-list," said one.

He saw that she spoke of his own volume which she held in a triumphant embrace with a box of caramels, and was filled with a nauseated disgust for his handiwork. Retracing his steps he climbed to the Whig office, and finding Sprague at his desk, he swept a pile of exchanges from a chair and drew it to the editor's elbow.

"Volney," he asked, "does this talk of an independent movement against Ross Shelby amount to anything?"

Sprague's eye lit.

"It's gathering headway every minute," he declared. "We require just one thing—a candidate of prominence and backbone."

Graves reached past the paste-pot to capture a fugitive match.

"What do you say to me?"

"What do I say!" Unwinding his long legs from his chair rounds the editor dealt his friend a clap between the shoulders which sent his cigarette spinning to the floor. "I say you're a trump."

Sprague had not a little in common with the type in the political cosmos which is contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of the Whig, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star," whose practical application led him over highways which knew not macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's proposal, nor did it astonish him. From his office window he had chanced to overlook the stormy meeting of the suitors, but he gave Graves no hint.

"With any other candidate I can think of," he declared, "this movement would merely signify the protest of a self-respecting minority; with you, the author of the famous Samothrace ode,—gad! I think it augurs victory by a handsome majority."

Graves colored.

"I had forgotten the ode," he confessed. "Couldn't we eliminate that from the campaign?"

"Eliminate it! Why, boy, it's half your platform."

"Is it?" said the novice, drearily. "Oh, very well. I thought I should like to run on the moral issue. Shelby is corrupt, and the other party is certain to name some creature who would out-Shelby Shelby if he got the chance. That seems to me issue enough for a third candidate without dragging in my verses. I'm sick of them."

"Do you find your royalties a nuisance?"

"Don't be banal, Volney. You understand me. I don't want to be the one-sided artist merely; I want to do things as well as write about them, and I want the provinces separate."

Sprague laughed paternally.

"If I'm not to be banal, neither must you be impracticable. It's the ode that makes you available and enables you to do things, and there can be no question of dividing your personality as King Louis something-or-other tried to do. You have placed yourself in my hands. Very good. I assure you that I can nominate you. You should therefore defer to my judgment. You owe me that."

"Of course."

"Yes; well, then. Congressman Graves that is to be, here is the situation in a nutshell: In Tuscarora Shelby has gained ground because of the Kiska affair. Little Poland has his lithograph in every window. Elsewhere in the Demijohn I've reason to know that he's in exceedingly bad odor, and that a third ticket would draw no end of support from thinking voters who like Shelby little, but the other party less. At present, you see, it's frying-pan or fire for them." The editor paused to charge a discolored corn-cob pipe. "Now your coming changes all that," he continued, tilting back in the wreathing smoke. "I tell you it warms my heart to think of you opposing Shelby; it's a draught of Falernian, no less. It's logically, it's romantically, fitting that you who unmasked his plagiarism should battle with him at the polls. Moreover, your discovery puts such a feather in your cap at the outset. You've proved your political acuteness; you've won your spurs. It's town talk that the credit is yours,—I acknowledge it whenever asked,—and now that you are to enter the field, I'll blazon it to the four winds."

"If the world takes it as placidly as New Babylon, it will do us little good."

"Ah, but the world isn't so stupid," retorted Sprague, beginning to rummage his chaotic desk. "There, sir," he went on, dragging a bundle of newspaper clippings to the surface, "there is the world's opinion of the exposure. Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Troy—you'll find the comments of every important city in the state voiced by reputable journals; New York—why, New York gave it three editorials, not one of them less than two sticks. No utterance of the Whig ever attracted such attention. I tell you, man, that, your poem aside, your advent in politics with this thing to your credit makes you a figure of state importance; with the ode—gad, sir, your canvass is of national concern."

"It sounds like a dream of Colonel Mulberry Sellers's," laughed Graves, but he warmed to the editor's mood. "You're sure I can have the nomination? We're flying in the face of the Boss and all his works."

Sprague flung out his thin hands impatiently.

"I have told you that it rests with me."

The tyro dropped an acute, if indiscreet, observation.

"It seems to me," said he, "that you are something of a boss yourself."

"Every cause must have a leader. I have been the consistent head and front of the protest against Shelbyism, and the independent movement is of my creating. Why shouldn't I name the candidate?"

Bernard Graves retreated hastily from this ticklish corner, and put forward a vague supposition that there would have to be "caucuses, conventions, and things."

"Independent nominations are made by certificate."

"Oh," said the young man, meekly, "I see;" which was disingenuous. He silently debated whether this meant a species of letter of recommendation, but was shy of asking.

Sprague mercifully enlightened him.

"I've the law right here," he went on, tapping a calf-bound manual which Graves eyed with profound respect. "An independent nomination for Congress requires at least a thousand signers who must be electors of the district. We've ample time; it's a good three weeks before we need file our certificate with the Secretary of State, and a fortnight would answer to secure the minimum. But we'll not content ourselves with the minimum; the greater our list of signers, the stronger our argument in the campaign. Voters are gregarious, you know."

"I've noticed the importance of bell-wethers," Graves remarked dryly.

"Oh, but don't asperse the intelligence of the flock," deprecated the reformer quickly. "I've been thought to idealize The People; perhaps I do, but it is good for a man to keep sweet his faith in humanity. There's a saying of Emerson's that fits the case if I could remember it." He scoured his memory absently for an interval. "Well, no matter. It occurs to me that we'll need an emblem for our ticket. The law requires us to select some device. The eagles, ballot-boxes, roosters, stars, and the like have all been preempted, and aren't strikingly significant anyhow. We want something telling—a graphic symbol of our aim. You are a man of imagination; what is your notion?"

The man of imagination considered, and the editor's excess of nervous force spent itself in idle forays about his desk, one of which brought forth a foot-rule; whirling in the eager fingers, it proved an inspiration.

"Why not—" Graves began; "no, not that—a square, a carpenter's square. It symbolizes everything we stand for."

"Bravo! It's a slogan to win with. Square issues, square dealing, square men! We'll placard every fence and barn door in the district. A woodcut will cost next to nothing, and I'll run the posters off right here on the premises."

The suggestion bruised Graves's sensibilities.

"Is that necessary?" he protested mildly. "I'd really prefer to leave all that sort of vandalism to the other side; it's so philistine, you know."



BOOK II

CHAPTER I

Volney Sprague's flaming posters in black and red menaced Shelby from the selvage of the district to the threshold of his door. The State Committee had despatched him on a brief stumping tour, embracing a handful of canal counties, a section of the grape belt, and certain strategic points in the Southern Tier, and he had kept in fairly regular communication with Bowers; but while that leader's letters were usually as terse and meaty as Caesar's campaign jottings in Gaul, they somehow failed to impress the candidate with the actual condition of his political fences. It was therefore with the shock of almost complete surprise that he entered his proper bailiwick to find Bernard Graves's opposition regarded seriously. Saloons, cigar stores, street corners, the billiard room of the Tuscarora House, all his familiar haunts, buzzed with the vote-getting possibilities of an independent ticket in a community where regularity had become well-nigh a fetich.

Bowers was rudderless and irritable.

"I advised you to conciliate young Graves," he fretted. "And what have you done? Stroked him the wrong way ever since. I hope it's a lesson to you to keep politics and petticoats apart."

Shelby jeered at his inconsistency.

"You were good enough to suggest that I make up to the woman in the case."

"Not in the thick of a campaign."

Shelby's optimism was not easily dashed and he laid an energetic shoulder to the lagging wheel. His associate's rebound from depression was less elastic, and the candidate's thoughts furrowed a channel they had frequently taken of late. It was plain to him that the older man was no longer equal to the requirements of his leadership. Sound in judgment, shrewd in the reading of men, vigorous in action as he once had been, and on occasion could be still, he was nevertheless of an earlier and more leisured school of politics than the present lively generation which knew not Joseph. They knew other things—the youngsters—strange methods of the city ward; and the philosophic observers, who on all sides think they descry evidence of the corruption of the country by the city, would have glibly explained to the Hon. Seneca Bowers the causes of his inefficiency. He had come to rely more and more on his sprightly deputy, till now, virtual county leader and his party's candidate, Shelby, double-weighted, prepared to wage the battle of his life.

The demands upon his time were incessant. He would rise in his unlovely room at the Tuscarora House, leaden from insufficient sleep, to be buttonholed before he breakfasted—sometimes, even before he dressed; this man must be placated, that threatened, the other convinced by reason; another must be visited in sickness, another found work, for yet another must gratuitous lawyering be done—all this with jovial front and a camel's capacity for drink. This was his domesticity, amidst which must be sandwiched conferences and journeyings in Tuscarora County and the other counties of his district, and speeches on behalf of the party outside the Demijohn, entailed by too successful stumping in the past. Capping all was the perverse closet-reformer, Sprague, and his figurehead, Graves.

Shelby was a believer in short campaigns, and the time left the independents for attack was brief. They retrieved the handicap by added vigor, and subjected his every public act to merciless scrutiny. Sprague formulated the case against him in an early issue of the Whig:—

"We are asked," he wrote, "to publish our specific reasons for rejecting this candidate. We gladly comply. The counts of his indictment are many; we select five:—

"We refuse to support a candidate of any party whatsoever whose nomination issues from dishonest primaries. It is notorious that the caucuses preliminary to this man's nomination were packed. Can you gainsay it, Mr. Shelby?

"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination never so spotless, who degrades himself and the office to which he aspires by the theft of another's intellectual property. Can you deny your plagiarism, Mr. Shelby?

"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination irreproachable, his sense of mine and thine otherwise undulled, whose legislative record is tainted by traffickings peculiar to the Black Horse Cavalry—wanton blackmailers of corporate rights. It is of common knowledge that this man introduced in the last session a bill aimed at the legitimate profits of a great surface railway system, which he withdrew for no reason of public record. Can you make affidavit that the subsequent sale of a block of that same railway's stock by your business associate was without relevance, Mr. Shelby?

"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination unimpeachable, his intellectual honesty unchallenged, his legislative record without stain, who, posing as the champion of our canals, nevertheless lends himself, through connivance at fraudulent contracts and the appointment of needless officials, to the squandering of the moneys set apart for their use. We invite you to disprove your complicity in the wasting of the state's millions, Mr. Shelby.

"We refuse, lastly, to support a candidate, be his nomination as unsullied as his personal integrity, and his legislative career as free from 'strikes' as his advocacy of our pirate-infested waterways is disinterested, who is yet so slavishly the henchman of his party machine that no measure it may propose is too unsavory to enlist his Dugald Dalgetty loyalty. By your closed lips you countenance the land-jobbing steal which your great state Boss failed by the merest fluke to saddle upon the River and Harbor Bill passed by the last Congress, and purposes to press anew;—dare you vote against your owner, Mr. Shelby?"

To all of which, reiterated and emphasized in pamphlet, broadside, poster, and stump speech, Shelby said publicly never a word, professing himself a believer in the policy of dignified silence. He touched the matter after an impersonal fashion with Bowers, however, as they read the onslaught.

"Give me the liquor habit, the tobacco habit, the opium habit, singly or all together," said he, "but preserve me from the vice of rhetoric."

Bowers had not this fine detachment.

"I don't wish to nose into your private concerns, Ross," he began, with visible embarrassment, "but this third count implicates me. I'd like to ask whether that stock I sold for you in Wall Street last winter was yours by—by—"

"By bona fide purchase?" whipped in Shelby. "Yes, sir; out and out. Do you think me as big a fool as this dream-chaser pretends I am?"

"No, no."

"Nobody should know better than you why that bill was introduced. You brought it to me from the Boss. Those railway people forgot that their party can't run campaigns on wind, and in his own way he jogged their memory. I saw that. As for the stock—your skirts are clear. You merely sold in a rising market what I bought in a falling one. If my position gave me a speculative advantage, it's my own business—nobody else's—not even the Hon. Seneca Bowers's."

The county leader's working features did not resemble General Grant's. In that unhappy moment he experienced the pangs of unhonored parenthood.

Presently he put out his hand.

"I'm sorry I offended you, Ross. I supposed myself too seasoned a campaigner to mind mud-slinging."

Shelby laughed apologies away and they parted friends. On the threshold it occurred to Bowers to ask:—

"Who is this Dalgetty fellow Sprague mentions? I never heard of him in politics."

"Nor I. Some ward heeler he thinks I resemble, I guess."

"He'd have made his point stronger by taking somebody that the plain people know. That's something mugwumps never learn."

"And there's another thing they don't grasp," Shelby added. "One personal talk with the average voter will outweigh enough high-toned editorials to sink a ship. When the reformer begins to rub shoulders in all sorts of places with all sorts of men his halo won't be so luminous; perhaps he won't call himself a reformer at all—just politician, perhaps; but he'll saw wood."



CHAPTER II

As a matter of fact, the independent candidate did give the shoulder-rubbing process a trial. Within the by no means contracted limits of Volney Sprague's paper-and-ink horizon the flurry of the attack on Shelby threw its ripples far, but Graves shortly damped the editor's professional delight by the remark that he had been assured of no man's vote because of it.

"There's the pity of our lack of time," frowned Sprague. "An educational campaign can hardly be too long. Many a demagogue has failed of election because we vote in November and not in dog-days."

"You'll have to admit that you've merely revamped old material. It's no news that Shelby has packed caucuses, stolen speeches, blackmailed corporations, jobbed canal contracts, and grovelled to the Boss."

"True," admitted Sprague, ruefully.

"We need the concrete to convince. Take this canal scandal: we've seen contracts go to Shelby's adherents on unbalanced bids, and the Ditch swarms with his useless inspectors at four dollars a day; but can you bring wrong-doing home to him?"

"To prove the Champion of Canals' complicity—what a master stroke!"

The morning after he popped into the young man's study, to the lasting detriment of a triolet.

"We can prove it," he exclaimed. "Gad! We can prove it!"

Graves regretfully dropped a blotter over his manuscript and advanced a chair.

"I've suspected that there were men in this town who could lay Shelby by the heels, were they to tell all they knew. The problem was to draw them."

"You can't expect his understrappers to quarrel with their bread and butter."

"No; that has been the stone of stumbling precisely, but we've got around it. In this blessed case, Shelby himself did the quarrelling, and thereby delivered himself into our hands."

Bernard Graves sat up.

"What have you found out?"

"I've found a man who seems to know of Shelby's crookedness, and is willing to tell what he knows."

"Well?"

"Jap Hinchey."

Graves's face lengthened.

"That beast," said he.

"Did you expect a Sir Galahad for such a service?"

"What would the word of such a man avail?"

"As much as any informer's; it isn't a chivalrous office."

"Nor is ours in employing it, to my thinking; informer and reformer sound perilously near alike. Still, as you delicately imply, we're not Knights of the Round Table. What has the sot had to say to you?"

"Well, the fact is he hasn't told me anything specific," Sprague had to admit. "The matter is still under negotiation, as one may say. Jasper is coy."

"Oh!"

The lukewarm monosyllable voiced disillusionment. With a partial return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, not to say Micawberesque; and that his own wisdom in venturing for such a cause, with such a pilot, on such uncharted seas, was questionable to a degree.

Sprague was not devoid of intuition.

"I'm not rainbow-hunting this time," he put in quickly. "The fellow knows something interesting, and he's ready to out with it. He was employed in the Eureka quarries during the canal improvement, and saw things, he says, that we would like to hear."

"You talked with him?"

"Yes; he accosted me in a side street late last night."

"If he's anxious to inform and reform, why doesn't he? I don't like the look of it. What does he want?"

"You."

"He wants me?"

"He said he would speak plainly with you."

Graves's revulsion was fairly physical.

"You manage it, Volney," he entreated. "You will know how."

Sprague shook his head.

"He was positive on that point. It must be you or nobody."

"I doubt if it's worth while."

The editor lost patience.

"It was you who reminded me that we lacked the concrete. Now I offer it to you."

"But in such a shape!"

"Can you quibble over that—and in politics?"

"No one who knows Jap Hinchey's character would believe him under oath."

Sprague's reply was astute.

"I'm thinking of those who don't know him," said he. "The district is wide."

"And an affidavit is an affidavit?" His smile was sardonic. "Very well. I'll see him. What is Jap's At Home?"

"You will find him fishing on the dock behind his shanty, probably. I'd follow this thing up promptly, Bernard."

"Yes," promised the candidate, listlessly. "I will."

Alone, he fingered his manuscript, read it drearily, and of a sudden tore it into little bits, the mood which gendered it gone beyond recall. The sordid necessity of seeing Hinchey taught him afresh the folly of his dabbling in politics at all, and his whole being revolted against the contact with humanity in the raw which even mugwumpery seemed to entail. Left to himself, Sprague might have headed his own John Brown raid into the established order of things; led it with brilliancy perhaps, in any case with honest zeal. Yet the root of his discontent struck rather deeper than Jasper Hinchey and the cold waterish zone of reform; Ruth had her part in it. He somehow reasoned that his course merited her approval and encouragement; it had met with banter. So gyved, lagged the hope of the independents to his task.

Few towns, however small, lack their moral plague-spot, and Graves's errand bent him toward New Babylon's, a web of alleys styled the Flats, spun behind the business centre among the docks and rotting warehouses of a vanished commerce. The Flats had its business too—groggeries and a music hall where "sacred concerts" were given on Sunday nights and men had been stabbed on pay-day; groggeries, the music hall—and worse. The young man threaded gingerly into its dingy precincts, and by dint of a handful of Italian, picked up in a Roman winter's sojourn to be oddly practised on a local washerwoman sousing gay garments in the amber fluid of the Erie Canal, he singled out the Hinchey hovel from the squalid score it resembled. Before the sagging threshold tumbled a many-complexioned brood of children,—they seemed a very dozen,—and in the doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the alley, suppressing such of his five senses as he could shift without, and ascertained that the degenerate Jasper, true to prophecy, was fishing from the dock in the rear.

"Good afternoon," said the caller, affably, he thought.

Jasper grunted without lifting his eyes from his float.

"What do you catch here?" pursued the candidate, beaming good-fellowship.

The line suddenly drew taut, and a muddy fish whipped through the sunshine within a scant inch of Graves's nose.

"Bullheads," answered the laconic Hinchey.

The visitor was disconcerted.

"You—er—eat them?" he remarked blankly, eyeing first the beery-looking water and then the ugly fish.

"Naw," sneered Jap. "I'm foundin' 'n 'quarium." He tossed the bullhead into a pail, and, spying a piccaninny scudding round a corner, called: "Here, you chocolate drop, take this yer fish ter yer mammy. Two mor,' 'n' I'll hev 'nuff fer supper. Set down," he added to his guest.

"Thanks," said Bernard, hunting vainly for a clean spot on the string-piece. He lit a cigarette as a sanitary precaution, and bethought him to offer one to Hinchey.

"None o' them coffin-nails fer me," declined the Spartan. "I smokes men's terbacker."

Graves gave him a cigar which he chanced to have about him.

"I don't seem to have a match left," he observed, fumbling in his pockets.

Jasper Hinchey calmly relieved him of his cigarette, lit his cigar with it, and restored the costly importation, malodorous of fish. At the earliest opportunity Graves dropped it in the canal, a transaction duly noted by Jap.

"I've been told you have something to say to me," the young man said briskly, his social obligations seeming fully paid, and his eagerness to be gone swamping diplomacy.

Jasper rebaited his hook, impaling the wriggling earthworm with a solicitude worthy of comparison with Isaac Walton's refined martyrdom of frogs.

"Yes," he drawled; "I kind o' 'magine I hev."

Bernard curbed his impatience while Jap spat with deadly aim at an eddying chip.

"S'pose you know I've knocked round in pol'tics some?"

The young man said that he did. He thought "knocked" a felicitous word. Jasper Hinchey's public services had been heavy-fisted, relating chiefly to voting blocks of drunken Poles and Italians in warmly contested town elections.

"I've helped 'lect mor'n one feller t' office in my day. Take Ross Shelby now: both times he run fer th' 'Sembly I worked like a nailer. 'Cause why? He done right by me. Why I luved that cuss like—like—" he hesitated for a simile—"like my own son," he added, with the passing of one of his brood, and forthwith whacked the youngster for overturning the bait can. "Jes' like my own son. An' so I should still ef he hedn't done me dirt; ef he'd ben square. Now, you're square."

"I try to be," returned Bernard, ravished by the tribute. "That's my platform in this campaign, you know."

"Yes; jes' so. An' I rather 'magine I'll vote yer way."

"Thank you."

"Pro-vi-ded," Jasper added, "pro-vi-ded we c'n 'range things."

"Arrange things?"

Jasper's eyes wandered musingly over his interlocutor's face.

"'Range things, I sez, an' I sez it again."

He abandoned something of his drawl. "I 'magine I c'd tell sumpin ef I tuk a notion."

Graves brooked his tone with difficulty.

"I shouldn't be here if I didn't think so too," he answered coolly.

"Jes' so," agreed Jasper, absorbed in a sinker. "I c'd tell sumpin erbout a party thet I 'magine you'd cock yer ear t' hear."

"Shelby?"

"I 'magine I didn't jes' quite say. No, I 'magine not."

"If you will exercise your imagination less, Mr. Hinchey, and say plainly what you have to say, I shall be obliged," retorted Bernard, exasperated by his shiftiness.

Jasper was unmoved.

"Easy t' see you ain't ben in pol'tics long. Wall, whut I've got t' say is this: I used t' work fer this party off 'n' on,—this party whose name I ain't a-mentionin'. He wuz in pol'tics too. Likewise run a quarry an' s'm'other things t' num'rous t' mention. 'Twas in the quarry I worked, mostly erbout 'lection time. Cur'ous, ain't it, whut good pay a feller'll git fer light work erbout 'lection time? Wall, this year I ain't hed proper treatment. This party 'lows money is tight, an' he's filled his quarry up with dagoes, damned dagoes." He paused to scowl over the shanties of his immediate neighbors and at the industrious washerwoman up the dock. "Wouldn't it make you sick th' way furrin labor's a-crowdin' out th' true 'Merican? I jes' despise dagoes."

Graves was too disgusted to reply. He recollected having heard a negro speak contemptuously of Jews, but this case seemed yet more extreme.

"Wall," pursued the true American, "I wuz with this party a spell when th' state tuk a notion t' sink a few s'perfluous millyuns in this ole ditch."

The listener became all attention.

"Queer doin's I seen long erbout then. Contractors is a scand'lous lot. Many's the load o' dirt I seen hauled out thet easy, whut th' state paid fer ez blasted rock. My, yes. But my party wuzn't workin' at contractin'; he wuz workin' at contractors, an' he knew 'em, lock, stock, and bar'l. He jes' owned th' whole blim pack. Thet's where his rake-off come in. 'Twant all dirt them daisies tuk out. There wuz as fustclass sandstun ez my party ever shipped f'm his quarry, an' f'm his quarry docks it went."

"You mean that this man connived with the contractors to misappropriate state property?"

"I 'magine I do."

"And your party is Shelby?"

"Never said no sech thing."

"It's what you imply clearly enough. Now, if you wish to help us, as you told Mr. Sprague, you must say precisely who and what you mean, and swear to it before Mr. Sprague, who is a notary public."

Jasper straightened.

"Fer nothin'?" His tone was inimitable.

Bernard Graves looked him coldly in the eye.

"We're not bribing people."

The loafer raised his hulking body and leered over him; the young man got upon his feet, half expecting assault.

"Anything we can do for you in a legitimate way, we will do," he added steadily.

"I want t' know."

"You can find me at Mr. Sprague's office any morning between ten and twelve."

Jasper Hinchey surveyed him with scorn as he turned to go. Fumbling in his rags, he extracted a greasy card.

"P'r'aps you'd buy a twenty-five cent ticket fer th' Jolly Rovers' picnic," he insinuated. "Mebbe it's not too stiff fer yer purse. They say ez how 'tis well lined, Mr. Graves."

"Do you know that the Penal Code makes soliciting a candidate to buy tickets a misdemeanor?"

Hinchey smirked.

"A party whut I know buys 'em without askin'," said he.

Jasper Hinchey did not call at the Whig office any morning between ten o'clock and twelve. It developed that he was engaged in some not too arduous labor at the quarries of the Eureka Sandstone Company.



CHAPTER III

Had the fantastic bolt of the Sprague clique been left to its own courses, Shelby would have borrowed no further trouble, but a fortuitous matter of radishes and ice-water suddenly put the quarrel on an altogether different level. About the hour when Bernard Graves hobnobbed with Jasper Hinchey, the third factor in the Demijohn District's political muddle sat down to dinner in a neighboring city. "Chuck" O'Rourke was fond of his dinner. A childhood of squalid poverty had taught him the joy of a square meal. The story of the years linking the famished boy to the pudgy red-faced man of the restaurant is unessential,—an everyday story, sordid, and barren of romance. The present knew him for a prosperous contractor and politician whose most conspicuous public service had been the adroit fashioning of Tuscarora County's minority party into a compact organization, to which the majority party found it expedient to cast an occasional sop of patronage. He had lived and thrived in an atmosphere of deals. Only within the fortnight had he aspired to hold office, since his party had for years lacked the fighting chance which the revolt against Shelby created. Tempted at last, he abruptly resolved to enter the congressional race himself, and this same day had effected the last dicker with other county leaders which would insure his naming in to-morrow's convention.

The day had gone unwontedly sultry, with a sudden flushing of autumn with dog-day heat, and his active morning had been fraught with physical discomfort. He had consumed quantities of beer and whiskey in his rounds, and had looked upon the wine when it was red. His heavy fall suit was a weariness, and as he entered the restaurant he loosed his checked waistcoat, unveiling a row of diamond shirt studs which galvanized the languid waiters to buoyant life. He was escorted with pomp and circumstance to a seat in the shadiest window, swept by the torrid breath of an electric fan.

O'Rourke gulped a glassful of ice-water as he studied the menu card, and motioned for more. Two other glassfuls went the way of the first, and the negro refilled the carafe. The man pulled angrily at his limp collar and discussed his order. Vacillating for a time between broiled lobster and porterhouse steak with mushrooms, he cut the matter short by taking both, and buttressed the main structure of the meal with side dishes of banana fritters and griddle-cakes. He decided that peach short-cake and tutti-frutti ice cream would stop the gap for desert [Transcriber's note: dessert?], and expressed a preference for "fizz" as he scanned the wine list. With a happy afterthought he recalled the fleeting waiter and ordered him to fetch a cocktail as an appetizer.

The ice-water carafe was within easy reach, and, pending the coming of the cocktail, it lowered steadily. Hard by, also, stood a dish of radishes, out of season, but succulent. He cleared the dish, and meditated assault on its fellow at the table adjoining. However, the brave advance of the lobster, the porterhouse, and the champagne bucket diverted him, and he tucked a napkin under his flabby chin with a genial smile. Then the smile shrivelled; waiters, porterhouse, lobster, champagne, winked out in utter blackness, and Chuck O'Rourke slid heavily to the floor.

The dead man's associates met the emergency with a sharp move. The following morning Shelby caught a persistent rumor that the convention, wanting its slated candidate, proposed to indorse the candidacy of Bernard Graves; which same thing, after a moving tribute to the fallen leader, the convention with cheerful promptness did.

The Hon. Seneca Bowers was unnerved. He had had to cope with no such outrageous problem in the whole of his honorable career, and in a state of mind bordering panic he packed his grip and posted to New York for a conference with the Boss, leaving Shelby to temporize as best he might. Nor was Shelby inactive. The O'Rourke crowd had been placated in small matters times out of mind, and he went about the present task in the usual way, directing one of his people to inquire what they wanted. These hitherto insatiate gentlemen replied that they wanted nothing, adding pleasantly that they were well content with what they had. The possibility of a victory in a gerrymandered district, however won, was without price. Shelby appreciated their point of view and addressed himself to measures more feasible. If he could not shake their allegiance to Graves, he might succeed in preventing Graves from taking up with them, and the agencies for influencing public opinion which he could control began accordingly to ridicule the idea of a reform candidate's accepting such an indorsement.

Graves refused to be drawn, and for forty-eight hours held his peace with the aplomb of a veteran. Then Bowers came back.

"Has he accepted?" The words were out before he could take Shelby's hand.

"Not yet."

"Thank heaven. Tell me what you've done."

Shelby recapitulated.

"That's right," approved his senior. "There's nothing more to be done with Chuck O'Rourke's bandits just now. Graves is the man to consider. Is he still mum?"

"As a cigar sign. How does the Boss take it?"

"Urbanely, as always. He's silkier every time I see him." Bowers's memory lingered upon the soft-spoken interview with the great state leader.

"Well?" Shelby jogged him crisply.

"He knows all about Graves—as he knows about everybody. Says he has met the scholar in politics before. Do you remember how he took care of that kid-gloved aggregation which tried to run him out of business a year or so ago? He dumped this distinguished kicker into the cabinet, had another made a plenipotentiary, foisted off number three into some windy commission on the other side of the planet, and so on down the list. They said it seemed to be in the air that harmony should prevail."

Shelby laughed.

"The Boss is the smoothest made," he owned. "What does he advise in this case?"

Bowers leaned forward importantly.

"What do you think the young man would say to an author's job—some French or Italian consulate?"

"I'll tell you what I say: if the Boss advised that, he's growing senile."

"I didn't say he advised it. He merely suggested that literary people bit at that kind of bait. As a matter of fact, he didn't advise anything. He said if we couldn't fix things with the O'Rourke crowd, that the situation would have to develop a bit."

"Queer sort of talk," Shelby commented. "I wonder what he wants?" He puzzled over it a moment. "Well, whatever develops, don't talk consulate to Bernard Graves. The Boss is a pastmaster at side-tracking soreheads, but there's a point involved in this case that he doesn't grasp. Disappointed lovers are probably out of his line."

Bowers shifted his cigar to reply, but thought better of it. His hold on the wheel was weakening, and he remarked to his wife that night that this should be his last active campaign. Shelby entertained a similar opinion.

When the two men met on the morrow the situation had indeed developed. Persuaded against his own judgment by Volney Sprague, Bernard Graves had consented to assume the mantle of Chuck O'Rourke, deceased. To the repressed amusement of his new allies, he stipulated that the employment of questionable methods should be left to the common foe, and that they must accept him absolutely unpledged.

Shelby ran a gauntlet of chaff to his law office that afternoon, and found Bowers awaiting him in bilious mood. He was hazing the rooms with gusts of tobacco smoke, a sign of nervousness in so deliberate a smoker. They nodded curtly without words, and Shelby ran perfunctorily through his mail. Presently he raised his eyes and met Bowers's gloomy scrutiny lowering through the fog.

"You look like a hired mourner," he remarked, swirling the smoke.

"I feel like a real one."

"Well, don't wear your weeds so conspicuously. The enemy will imagine they have us scared."

Bowers swore listlessly.

"They have."

"Don't include me. I've a little sand left, I hope."

"It's the most serious fight we've ever had in the district. It's so unexpected. And I can't see how we are to blame. The organization backed your nomination cordially. We couldn't foresee that Volney Sprague would make trouble, any more than we could know that O'Rourke would gorge himself to apoplexy. And who, for the love of heaven, would have thought Bernard Graves would step into Chuck O'Rourke's shoes! I've been in politics for thirty years, Ross, with my fair share of good luck and bad, but I've never been up against the equal of this. It's—it's—" He broke off in despair of adequate characterization.

"Brace up, brace up. You need a brandy and soda."

"I've had two."

"Then take a glass of milk," rallied Shelby; "paregoric, boneset tea, anything. I'm ashamed of you."

Bowers smiled wanly.

"You're a younger man, Ross. You can rebound. I can't any more. I'm too old. I—I've lost confidence in myself."

"I haven't lost confidence in myself," ejaculated Shelby. "No such alliance of thugs and goody-goods shall down me. I'm in this game to stay and to win."

His stout words in some degree bolstered the discouraged veteran, and they turned presently to a discussion of ways and means. The outlook was not cheering. The fusion of the opposition had fallen at a time when the funds collected to meet the exigencies of an ordinary campaign had been mainly expended.

"The State Committee must help," declared Shelby. "There's no valid reason why they shouldn't. The corporations have given them everything they asked this year."

"I sounded the Boss. He was not encouraging."

"Damn him," said Shelby, "what does he want?" That question would recur.

"We have raised everything locally that our people will stand, and you may say that of the Demijohn generally. If there's more to be got, it must come from those most concerned."

"You mean me, I suppose?"

"It's your political future that's at stake."

Shelby drummed his desk. By and by, taking his check-book, he began to run through the stubs, jotting figures on a pad.

"I've spent three thousand dollars already," he said at last. "Three thousand legitimate dollars. I've never footed it up before, and it's rather staggering. Of course, the big items—the assessments of the local committee and the other county committees—I had kept in mind. What I have not realized was the constant drain of small amounts for this and that,—printing, lithographs, bands, flag-raisings, you know what. And treats—why, I spent over seventy-five dollars in bar money alone the day of the Pioneers' picnic, while the County Fair meant the price of a good horse. It's a good thing for me that the torchlight idiocy has gone out. Still, the 'Shelby Base-ball Club' is as big a nuisance. Three thousand legitimate dollars," he repeated. "We now come to the illegitimate."

The older man winced. Shelby was too frank for him at times. While he recognized that vote-buying was of occasion necessary for party success, he made it his boast between his conscience and himself that he had never directly taken part in it. So now he hemmed, and merely said:—

"We're fighting a mercenary foe."

Shelby bent for an instant to his figures. Then, with offhand abruptness:—

"There's something I never told you. When I went into this campaign I mortgaged my real estate holdings here in town. I tell you now because I must negotiate a loan on my share in the Eureka, and of course you are the man to approach."

Bowers started.

"Is it that bad, Ross?"

"Yes; it's that bad. Money's the argument now."

"Suppose—suppose you lose?"

Shelby considered the possibility.

"Then I'm ruined. But I shan't lose. I shall win."

There was less buoyancy when Bowers had left; more studying of the check-book, much reflection and calculation. Money, money, money; the thought hounded him.

Down in the Temple carriage drive the worried man could see a boy holding a mettlesome saddle horse, caparisoned for a woman's use. In fair weather it stood there at this hour every day. To-day it was suggestive. Shelby sprang to his telephone.



CHAPTER IV

With the stable boy's assurance that within ten minutes his horse would stand at the curb, Shelby locked his door against surprise, and, with an eye on the Temple driveway, made a rapid change to his riding clothes, which he was accustomed to keep by him for emergencies. As he finished, Ruth, lissome in her black habit, cantered daintily out with a laughing nod to Volney Sprague, who was watching her from the Whig office over the way. His clerk was absent serving papers in Etruria, and, hanging a mendacious "Back-in-1-Hour" sign on his outer door, Shelby leaped down the stair.

In the public eye he grew more sedate, and trotted soberly out of the business district in a direction contrary to that taken by his neighbor. Then, of a sudden, he shamed John Gilpin with a right-about, and, circling by side streets and quiet lanes the course he had just covered, galloped countryward in pursuit. The manoeuvre was not new to him. He had employed it on occasion to hoodwink Mrs. Grundy for Mrs. Hilliard's sake, scrupulously meeting and leaving the lady outside the corporation limits, a ruse which deceived nobody save the deceivers. Nor was it effective now. Ruth passed Mrs. Bowers's argus-eyed bay window, as did Shelby, and Mrs. Grundy had her speculative pickings of the event.

Ruth spied pursuit where the turnpike elbowed sharply from the outskirts. For a demure girl her smile was mischievous. Walking her wiry little pony till the footfalls of Shelby's chestnut cob beat the 'pike a scant hundred yards behind, she flicked her animal ever so lightly with her riding crop. The man saw a puff of dust, a twinkle of little hoofs, and a lithe figure outlined for an instant against the autumn sky as it sped over a hill and far away. The cob labored to the crest and pondered his defeat. A half-mile down the unkempt old toll road, where the goldenrod dropped stately bows to the purple aster, and Bouncing Bet viewed their livelong philandering with scorn, was the impertinent runt—walking! Down thundered the cob. No evasion now. Two hundred yards, one fifty, one hundred yards, seventy-five, sixty, even fifty—and again the pursued was spirited away in a cloud.

Shelby bore it thrice, and raised his voice. Ruth's surprise was a delightful thing to see.

"I've tried these three miles to overtake you," he scolded. "You must have heard me."

Ruth surveyed the smoking cob.

"We did hear a noise. My pony is so restive."

"The little beast looks as demure as yourself. I believe you knew it was I."

Ruth's glance swept a neighboring field.

"Have you ever associated cabbages with beauty?" she asked. "Just look at that reach of blue-green."

Shelby admired obediently. Then, the occasion seeming to demand a certain finesse, he said:—

"There's a man out this way I must look up—a kind of farmer, drover, and jockey rolled in one. He influences a bunch of votes. It's very pleasant to find you riding the same way. I'm glad we met—that is—if you—"

Her smile stopped his limping improvisation in mid-career.

"You needn't invent anything more," she said. "You're not good at it."

"There really is such a man," he defended, with a contented laugh; "but he can wait. I'd like to be quit of the political grind for a while. May I rest?"

"Yes; you may come," Ruth decided.

His appeal struck a womanly chord.

October was spendthrift of its pigments. Every isolated copse was a mimic forest fire, each bivouacked corn-field a russet foil, the air a heady wine. Shelby thrilled with dumb pastorals and a vague longing to do and speak in keeping with the spirit of the scene. A tuft of oxeye daisies in the shelter of a ruinous worm fence attracted him, and he reined the cob from the highway to fetch them. To his bewilderment Ruth's face shadowed at the gift.

"Poor things—what made you?" she lamented. "I've watched them there for a fortnight. What clumsy florist could have grouped them with the tall grasses so exquisitely, and set the little red vine clambering over all in the fence corner, so satiny and lichen-gray?"

Shelby was mystified.

"I thought that they would look smart in your belt—that all women wanted to pick flowers when they saw them—" he stammered. "I'm afraid I know little of women's ways."

Her laugh was a caress.

"Don't put my rudeness upon the sex," she said. "It's because I dabble in paints and things that I thought of these flowers first as a picture. But I assure you I'm just as much given to plundering them to set off my hair and dress as any daughter of Eve," wherewith she placed his offering, as he would have it, in her belt. He seemed to her always a kind of shorn Samson when afield from politics, and now, as she had often done, she drew him to speak of what he knew best.

"I used to think you cared little about such things," he told her presently. "The average woman doesn't care greatly. If she had the ballot, she'd probably vote for the handsomest man—if the candidate was a man."

"I'm afraid I should," owned Ruth. "For instance, I never could vote for a candidate with mutton-chop whiskers. And fancy having to decide between two women!"

"Vote-buying would have a scope which staggers the imagination."

The comment set her thoughts running on the accusations of corruption which were bandied from lip to lip during this campaign.

"Are many votes really bought?" she asked.

"Yes, many," Shelby answered frankly. "I shouldn't care to have you quote me, but I'll admit that I've sometimes bought them myself."

She was dumfounded at his candor, and half regretted it.

"Is it—is it quite necessary?"

"I think it is—sometimes. And so it will be till the reformers show the practical politician a better system, or human nature changes its spots. Indiana was bought for Lincoln in '64. It would take an unpractical man, even an unpatriotic man, to deny that the crisis did not justify the step."

"Every candidate is not a Lincoln."

"Nor every year a '64. Timid people compound with their conscience by calling that Indiana affair a war measure. But we're talking of our own state, whose political name has justly or unjustly become a hissing among the nations. I don't deny there's some reason for it. We are big, with big opportunities for corruption, and the tradition of sharp practice is of long standing. We bribed, intimidated, and filibustered in swaddling clothes, and stole a governorship as early as 1791. The tricks of to-day have all gone stale with handling, for the patriots we honor were politicians too."

"That is a novel point of view for me," Ruth admitted. "It's so easy to think the old time the best time." This was the pleader of the court-house rally, and she forgot the gaucheries and limitations of a moment since.

"All in all, the Catilines meet their Ciceros," said Shelby; "the Tildens undo the Tweeds. General Jackson once said he was not a politician, but if he were, he should be a New York politician. You see the state is an eternal riddle—'pivotal,' as the saying goes—the mother of parties, the devotee of none; and there lies half its fascination for the politician—I might say for the statesman. What passes for mere politics here might well figure as statesmanship elsewhere. We don't call our commonwealth the Empire State for naught; its interests are indeed imperial, and it is no mean office to shape its destinies. It is the man in politics who does this, whether you will or no. A free government requires parties, parties require politicians—in last analysis the mouthpiece of the sovereign people. I dare say you're wondering what all these generalities have to do with vote-buying in Tuscarora. I'll tell you. It's true that not every candidate is a Lincoln, that not a few men are personally unworthy of the offices they hold or seek; but this also is true, that many an unworthy man is worthy of election, even by bribery,—I say it deliberately,—because of his party's sake, for that party's success may signify the country's salvation. You have, of course, heard sad things said of me. You will hear more, and I shall not run around among my friends to deny them. Worthy or unworthy, I merge my personality in that of my party, in whose ultimate patriotism I have enduring faith."

Ruth was no logician.

"I don't believe you unworthy," she said.

"That's better than a hundred votes," laughed the man, vastly pleased. "Let me promise you something. If I'm elected to Congress, I will do and say everything a new member can to wipe out the tariff on objects of art."

It was her turn for mystification; if he had his shallows, he also had his depths.

Shelby did not ask if she were pleased; he saw it.

"You wouldn't have thought it of a practical politician—one of the 'aesthetically dead,'" he smiled. "Yet it is the politician you should seek to interest in these things. He'll see their value if he's taught. You opened my eyes—did it in a social way, which is the best way. It's through his social side, be it in barroom or drawing-room, that the politician is most easily reached, for he's a human being. Reformers don't see that; they aim at the intellect direct. You didn't dream, in talking about art to me now and then, that you were doing a possible public service. That's the key-note of woman's best influence in politics, I've come to believe—unconscious argument, not speechmaking. You have influenced me more than I can tell. I've grown. You have broadened my horizon. Will you make it broader? I ask you to marry me."

It was a little moment before she took his meaning, so much did his blunt proposal seem a part of the staccato chat of politics from which it issued.

"I cannot," she said at last.

"Why?"

It seemed ridiculous to speak of the affections to this businesslike creature who apparently counted them not worth mentioning; so she answered that they were unsuited to one another.

Shelby shook his head emphatically.

"I can't agree with you. Are you engaged to marry any one else?"

Ruth colored under his cross-examination, but replied that she was not.

"We'll let the question lie fallow for a time," Shelby arranged. "Think it over impartially."

She tried to bid him put the thing wholly out of mind, but he adjourned discussion as summarily as he might a committee meeting, and spoke of other topics.

It was sundown when they neared the town, returning by way of Little Poland and the successive quarries bordering the canal. Shelby dropped a careless glance at the docks and yards of his own company, now quiet with the day's work done. Then he looked again. Outlined against the sky a man climbed to the tow-path and walked away. Shelby recognized Bernard Graves.

"Ride on slowly," he directed. "I'll join you in a minute. There's something needs looking after in the Eureka."



CHAPTER V

The intruder wheeled at the hoof-beats and waited. Purpling with rage, Shelby thrust the cob's nozzle fairly in Graves's face.

"You're a damned spy," he taunted.

Graves went pale, but his jaw set.

"You know better, Shelby," he answered, without passion. "I am here openly. I came before the quarry shut down for the night, as your men will tell you."

"You're a spy," repeated Shelby, fingering his whip. "Come how or when, you're a spy. I know your back-door tactics. You sly into other men's private business, as you're trying to sly into politics."

"I care nothing for any private business of yours which doesn't besmirch your public character."

"Besmirch!" Shelby pounced upon the word. "I know your kidney—you pure souls who shirk jury duty and whine down taxes."

Graves backed from the nervous whip.

"I want no words with you," he said.

"I dare say; but you'll have them." He reined the cob to block Graves's further retreat, forcing him well upon the string-piece of the dock. "You're here to smell out canal scandals," he charged. "You want to know what became of the marketable stone that was taken from the canal prism. You'll get your wish right here and now. I took that stone, my pattern of civic virtue; sold it, my pink of reformers. You needn't have screwed Jap Hinchey for that knowledge. I would have told you the truth any time, and much good may it do you. Are you ass enough to believe that the contractors went outside their specifications to dispose of the spoils banks to my company? They had their warrant from Albany in black and white. Every act was within the law."

"The more shame upon Albany and the law; it is the letter of the law which shelters you."

Shelby rasped a laugh.

"I know something of the spirit of laws."

"I doubt not. You've helped make enough disreputable legislation to qualify an expert."

"What right has a dilettante like you to sit in judgment?" he demanded, the other's barb rankling none the less that he had invited it. "You have no notion of just political expediency; no notion even of politics with which you meddle. Politics isn't book knowledge; it's flesh and blood fact. Party fealty means nothing to you. You've not voted a straight ticket twice in your life."

"I know where that shoe pinches," retorted Graves. "You mean I've consistently neglected to vote for you. Somehow I never could swallow your assumption of divine right to hold office all the time."

Shelby's fingers knotted round his whip-handle.

"I'd like to trounce you," he menaced. "It's a hiding you need."

"For presuming to run against you? Let me make it plain that I'm not to be intimidated by you or any of your creatures."

"I'd like to trounce you," repeated Shelby, hoarsely, beside himself with the gadfly inquisition of the past few days. "I'm sick of your pharisaical ways. I bottom your lofty motives well enough. Jealousy goaded you into politics. You're a reformer because the heiress wanted none of you. If Ruth Temple—"

Graves wrenched the whip from Shelby's grasp, and struck with all his might. The warded blow spent itself on the pommel of the saddle.

"Stung, eh?" Shelby leaped from his stirrups and closed with him. The cob took fright at the reeling men and pounded off up the tow-path toward the town.

Then another horse loomed of a sudden from out the dusk, and Ruth herself rode straight upon them, enforcing a separation.

"How dare you drag my name into a low political quarrel—either of you?" No one answered her. "Give me the whip." Shelby, who had regained it, obeyed without a word. Ruth flung it far into the canal. "Now if you will be brutes, use brutes' weapons." Wherewith she turned an indignant back and galloped an exit from the scene as spirited as her entrance.

"You knew she was there," accused Graves.

"I left her in the road, damn you. I couldn't know she had seen."

Standing on the dock's sheer edge, they glowered into one another's eyes through the fading twilight, the great steam cranes behind flinging out giant arms over the stone heaps, the black water below glancing with fitful gleams of steel and copper from the sunset's last saffron afterglow. The yellow headlight of a low-lying grain boat stole nearer, unheeded till the straining mules toiled by.

"I don't know what keeps me from—"

Shelby's lips were tardy of framing what his heart lusted.

"Fear, perhaps."

"If you think that, then—"

A rain of oaths from the driver warned them too late of the trailing tow-line. They tripped together, and in an embrace of self-preservation together fell into the cool still waters which ever draw unruffled, though their banks smoulder with passion and political intrigue from the Niagara to the Hudson.

Shelby rose first, half-strangled, and laid hold upon the wall. Still cursing fluently, the driver pulled him to the string-piece, and both men peered out over the watery blackness, now cut with a widening shaft of light from the boat's lantern. Graves seemed to have vanished utterly, and Shelby made the banks echo with his name, but the canal returned no answer. The man was now as ready to save as a moment since he had been ready to destroy, but before he could slip again into the water, the boat glided past, discovering Graves in dim silhouette against the gray timbers, swimming at ease.

With a parting curse, indicative of relief, the driver set off down the tow-path after his mules, while Shelby waited on the brink till the boat went by, intending aid if the swimmer's strength should fail. But Graves was of no mind to cause him the lifting of a finger, and to the watcher's bewilderment cut directly behind the great rudder into the swirling wake, headed for the heel-path, which he attained with a dozen vigorous strokes, and clambering the sloping embankment, disappeared in a clump of willows.

The autumn frosts nip Tuscarora betimes, but Shelby sat staring in his sodden clothes, till he fathomed his rival's motive, and chattered forth a laugh. Then he hurried across the dock to the little tin-roofed office of the Eureka. He was without a key, but he rummaged a pick from one of the neighboring sheds, forced the staple of the padlock, and, popping into the oven warmth of the cabin, mended the fire in the tiny sheet-iron stove. His first precaution was to drain his pocket flask, which had somehow come through unscathed, and, as he peeled away his clinging garments in the flickering light, he telephoned the Tuscarora House for a change of clothing. In the reflective half-hour before the coming of the messenger he felt a genuine regret that Graves had gone his own way. The affair had dropped already into humorous perspective, and it seemed to him that, had they stood side by side in this cabin, every barrier must have fallen and the outcome been wholly good.

Nature's reaction from the too tense hours of that crowded day was at its utmost swing as he gained his hotel room and smoothed the roughness of his quarry toilet. The familiar chamber revolted him; its warring colors jarred; the nymphs of his favorite picture were devoid of blandishment. Nor did his cronies of below stairs attract, and the liquor he had taken left him no appetite for solid food. He craved nothing so much as rest and human sympathy.

Mrs. Hilliard was at home.

"You never fail when I need you," she said, as Shelby couched his jaded body in the cosy library before an open fire. "Joe is always out, of course. I don't mind that—now. Milicent too is gone to-night,—a children's party. I've been lonely—depressed. Since you came—ah, well, see for yourself what I am."