THE GRAFTERS UNIT. OF CALIF. LIBRARY. LOS ANGELES "DO YOU BEGIN TO SUSPECT THINGS?" SHE ASKED THE GRAFTERS BY FRANCIS LYNDE AUTHOR or " EMPIBK BUILDBBS " ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR I. KELLER NEW YORK A. WESSELS COMPANY 1907 COPYRIGHT 1904 THE BOBBS-MERBILL COMPANY APRIL PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y. CONTENTS CHAPTER I ASHES OF EMPIRE II A MAN OF THE PEOPLE III THE BOSTONIANS IV THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT V JOURNEYS END VI OF THE MAKING OF LAWS VII THE SENTIMENTALISTS VIII THE HAYMAKERS IX THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT X WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY XI THE LAST DITCH XII THE MAN IN POSSESSIOK XIII THE WRECKERS XIV THE GERRYMANDER XV THE JUNKETERS XVI SHARPENING THE SWORD XVII THE CONSPIRATORS XVIII DOWN, BRUNO! XIX DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS XX THE WINNING LOSER XXI A WOMAN INTERVENES XXII A BORROWED CONSCIENCE XXIII THE INSURRECTIONARIKS XXIV INTO THE PRIMITIVE XXV DEAD WATER AND QUICK XXVI ON THE HIGH PLAINS XXVII BY ORDER OF THE COURT XXVIII THE NIGHT OF ALARMS XXIX THE RELENTLESS WHEELS XXX SUBHI SADIK PAGE 1 14 32 43 58 69 89 108 121 133 143 150 159 173 192 207 216 229 248 257 269 274 283 296 308 325 342 356 372 387 2130881 TO MY GOOD FRIEND MR. EDWARD YOUNG CHAPIN THE GRAFTERS ASHES OF EMPIEE In point of age, Gaston the strenuous was still no more than a lusty infant among the cities of the brown plain when the boom broke and the junto was born, though its beginnings as a halt camp ran back to the days of the later Mormon migrations across the thirsty plain; to that day when the advanced guard of Zophar Smith's ox-train dug wells in the damp sands of Dry Creek and called them the Waters of Merom. Later, one Jethro Simsby, a Mormon deserter, set up his rod and staff on the banks of the creek, homesteaded a quarter-section of the sage-brush plain, and in due time came to be known as the Dry Creek cattle king. And the cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locating engineers of the Western Pacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water was scarce and hard to (1) 2 THE GBAFTERS come by, drove their stakes along the north line of the quarter-section; and having named their last station Alphonse, christened this one Gaston. From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike- driving of the track-layers was a full decade. For hard times overtook the Western Pacific at Midland City, eighty miles to the eastward; while the State capital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had rail- road outlets in plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer. But, with the breaking of the cloud of financial de- pression, the Western Pacific succeeded in placing its extension bonds, and a little later the earth began to fly on the grade of the new line to the west. Within a Sundayless month the electric lights of the night shift could be seen, and, when the wind was right, the shriek of the locomotive whistle could be heard at Dry Creek ; and in this interval between dawn and daylight Jethro Simsby sold his quarter-section for the nominal sum of two thousand dollars, spot cash, to two men who buck- boarded in ahead of the track-layers. This purchase of the "J-lazy-S" ranch by Hawk and Guilford marked the modest beginning of Gaston the marvelous. By the time the temporary sidings were down and the tank well was dug in the damp sands, it was heralded far and wide that the Western Pacific would make the city on the banks of Dry Creek a city ASHES' OF EMPIRE 3 consisting as yet only of the Simsby ranch shacks its western terminus. Thereupon followed one of the sense- less rushes that populate the waste places of the earth and give the professional city-builder his reason for being. In a fortnight after the driving of the silver spike the dusty plain was dotted with the black-roofed shelters of the Argonauts; and by the following spring the plow was furrowing the cattle ranges in ever-widen- ing circles, and Gaston had voted a bond loan of three hundred thousand dollars to pave its streets. Then under the forced draft of skilful exploitation, three years of high pressure passed quickly; years named by the promoters the period of development. In the Year One the very heavens smiled and the rainfall broke the record of the oldest inhabitant. Thus the region round about lost the word "arid" as a qualifying adjective, and the picturesque fictions of the prospectus makers were miraculously justified. In Year Two there was less rain, but still an abundant crop; and Jethro Simsby, drifting in from some un- named frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what he had missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of the Mid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five- storied, brick-and-terra-cotta structure standing pre- cisely upon the site of the "J-lazy-S'" branding corral. It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas for young men having pene- 4 THE GRAFTERS trated to the provincial backgrounds of New Hamp- shire, that David Kent came. By virtue of his diploma, and three years of coun- try practice in the New Hampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone and Chitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Building lettered "Attorney and Counselor at Law"; but up to the day in the latter part of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was best known as a reckless plunger in real estate this, mind you, at a moment when every third man counted his gains in "front feet", and was shouting himself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales. When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it, though not altogether as far or as hard as many another. One of his professional hold-fasts it was the one that afterward became the bread-tackle in the famine time was his position as lo- cal attorney for the railway company. By reason of this he was among the first to have a hint of the impend- ing cataclysm. The Western Pacific, after so long a pause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds and would presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-station quietude. There- fore and wherefore Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy. He foresaw, not the pitiable bubble-burst which en- ASHES' OF EMPIEE 5 sued, indeed, but the certain and inevitable end of the speculative era. Like every one else, he had bought chiefly with promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated a sum equal .to a frugal New Hampshire competence. "How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his hint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying contracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on the Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to "unload". As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat. On the morning when the Daily Clarion sounded the first note of public alarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, and transferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was done he locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced the account. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast for fortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony into cash some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill of exchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier, there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, bought and paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience. 6 THE GKAFTEKS Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastily filled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. When he reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and Texas Streets, he was the one hundred and twenty- seventh man in the queue, which extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the Clarion had done its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with its acrid perfume the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad. Major James Guilford, the president of the Apache National, was in the cage with the sweating paying tellers, and it was to him that Kent presented his check when his turn came. "What! You, too, Kent?" said the president, re- proachfully. "I thought you had more backbone." Kent shook his head. "Gaston has absorbed nine-tenths of the money I brought here; I'll absorb the remaining tenth myself, if it's just the same to you, Major. Thank you." And the hundred and twenty-seventh man pocketed his sal- vage from the wreck and fought his way out through the jam at the doors. Two hours farther along in the ASHES OF EMPIRE ? forenoon the Apache National suspended payment, and the bank examiner was wired for. For suddenness and thoroughgoing completeness the Gaston bubble-bursting was a record-breaker. For & week and a day there was a frantic struggle for enlarge- ment, and by the expiration of a fortnight the life was pretty well trampled out of the civic corpse and the stench began to arise. Flight upon any terms then became the order of the day, and if the place had been suddenly plague-smitten the panicky exodus could scarcely have been more head- long. None the less, in any such disorderly up-anchor- ing there are stragglers perforce : some left like strand- ed hulks by the ebbing tide; others riding by mooring chains which may be neither slipped nor ,capstaned. When all was over there were deserted streets and empty suburbs in ruthless profusion; but there was also a hungry minority of the crews of the stranded and an- chored hulks left behind to live or die as they might, and presently to fall into cannibalism, preying one upon another between whiles, or waiting like their prototypes of the Spanish Main for the stray spoils of any luckless argosy that might drift within grappling distance. Kent stayed partly because a local attorney for the railroad was as necessary in Gaston the bereaved as in Gaston. the strenuous; partly, also, because he was a 8 THE GKAFTEKS student of his kind, and the broken city gave him labor- atory opportunities for the study of human nature at its worst. He marked the raising of the black flag as the Gaston castaways, getting sorrily afloat one by one, cleared their decks for action. Some Bluebeard admiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent, standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk, the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks, sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent. Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the fprmer mayor. For when the famine time was fully come, and there were no more argosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it was Jasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forth his new cast for for- tune, and brought the junto, the child of sheer despera- tion fiercely at bay, into being. It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring, traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the Western Pacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dis- piriting dinner in the deserted Mid-Continent cafe, and some plowing of the field of recollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took the deserted ASHES' OF EMPIRE 9 street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway sta- tion. "It was a decent thing for you to do stopping over a train with me, Grantham," said the host, when the five squares intervening had been half measured. "I have had all kinds of a time out here in this God-for- saken desert, but never until to-day anything approach- ing a chummy hour with a man I know and care for." Kent had not spoken since they had felt their way out of the dark lower hall of the Farquhar Building. Up to this point the talk had been pointedly reminis- cent; of the men of their university year, of mutual friends in the far-away "God's country" to the east- ward, of the Gastonian epic, of all things save only two the exile's cast for fortune in the untamed West, and one other. "That brings us a little nearer to the things that be and to your prospects, David," said the guest. "How are you fixed here ?" Kent shrugged. "Gaston is dead, as you see; too dead to bury." "Why don't you get out of it, then?" "I shall some day, perhaps. Up to date there has been no place to go to, and no good way to arrive. Like some thousands of others, I've made an ass of myself here, Loring." 10 THE GRAFTERS "By coining, you mean? Oh, I don't know about that. You have had some hard knocks, I take it, but if you are the same David Kent I used to know, they have made a bigger man of you." "Think so?" "I'd bet on it. We have had the Gaston epic done out for us in the newspapers. No man could live through such an experience as you must have had with- out growing a few inches. Hello ! What's this ?" A turned corner had brought them in front of a lighted building in Texas Street with a straggling crowd gathered about the porticoed entrance. As Lor- ing spoke, there was a rattle of snare drums followed by the dum-dum of the bass, and a brass band ramped out the opening measures of a campaign march. "It is a rally," said Kent, when they had passed far enough beyond the zone of brass-throated clamorings to make the reply audible. "I told you that the Gaston wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes of a State election, and there is to be a political speech- making at tKe Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title role. And there is a fair measure of the dead- ness of the town! When you see people flock together like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that the town hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed that and all other stages and is well on its way to the cemetery." ASHES' OF EMPIEE 11 "That is one way of putting it," Loring rejoined. "If things are as bad as that, it's time you were moving on, don't you think ?" "I guess so," was the lack-luster response. "Only I don't know where to go, or what to do when I get there." They were crossing the open square in front of the wide-eaved passenger station. A thunderous tremolo, dominating the distant band music, thrilled on the still air, and the extended arm of the station semaphore with its two dangling lanterns wagged twice. "My train," said Loring, quickening his step. "No," Kent corrected. "It is a special from the west, bringing a Bucks crowd to the political rally. Number Three isn't due for fifteen minutes yet, and she is always late." They mounted the steps to the station platform in good time to meet the three-car special as it came clattering in over the switches, and presently found themselves in the thick of the crowd of debarking ralli- ers. It was a mixed masculine multitude, fairly typical of time, place and occasion; stalwart men of the soil for the greater part, bearded and bronzed and rough- clothed, with here and there a range-rider in pictur- esque leathern shaps, sagging pistols and wide-flapped sombrero. 12 THE GEAFTEES Loring stood aside and put up his eye-glasses. It was his first sight near at hand of the untrammeled West in puris naturalibus, and he was finding the spectacle both instructive and diverting. Looking to Kent for fellowship he saw that his companion was holding him- self stiffly aloof; also, he remarked that none of the boisterous partizans flung a word of recognition in Kent's direction. "Don't you know any of them?" he asked. Kent's reply was lost in the deep-chested bull-bellow of a cattleman from the Eio Blanoo. "Hold on a minute, boys, before you scatter! Line up here, and let's give three cheers and a tail-twister for next-Governor Bucks! Now, then everybody! Hip, hip" The ripping crash of the cheer jarred Loring's eye- glasses from their hold, and he replaced them with a smile. Four times the ear-splitting shout went up, and as the echoes of the "tiger" trailed off into silence the stentorian voice was lifted again. "Good enough! Now, then; three groans for the land syndicates, alien mortgagees, and the Western Pa- cific Eailroad, by grabs ! and to hell with 'em !" The responsive clamor was a thing to be acutely re- membered sustained, long-drawn, vindictive; a nerve- wrenching pandemonium of groans, yelpings and cat- ASHES' OF EMPIKE 13 calls, in the midst of which the partizans shuffled into loose marching order and tramped away townward. "That answers your question, doesn't it?" said Kent, smiling sourly. "If not, I can set it. out for you in words. The Western Pacific is the best-hated corpora- tion this side of the Mississippi, and I am its local at- torney." "I don't envy you," said Loring. "I had no idea the opposition crystallized itself in any such concrete ill will. You must have the whole weight of public senti- ment against you in any railroad litigation." "I do," said Kent, simply. "If every complainant against us had the right to pack his own jury, we couldn't fare worse." "What is at the bottom of it ? Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble by building on to the capital?" "Oh, no; it's much more personal to these shouters. As you may, or may not, know, our line like every other western railroad with no competition has for its motto, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand/ and it bleeds the country accordingly. But we are forgetting your train. Shall we go and see how late it is ?" II A MAN OF THE PEOPLE Train Number Three, the Western Flyer, was late, as Kent had predicted just how late the operator could not tell; and pending the chalking-up of its ar- riving time on the bulletin board, the two men sat on an empty baggage tru.ck and smoked in companionable silence. While they waited, Loring's thoughts were busy with many things, friendly solicitude for the exile serving as the point of departure. He knew what a handfast friend might know: how Kent had finished his post- graduate course in the law and had succeeded to his father's small practice in the New Hampshire county town where he was born and bred. Also, he knew how Kent's friends, college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecated the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to spy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffy little law office which had been his father's, Kent A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 15 had made a clean breast of it : there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed before Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with no notion for a change of environment; wherefore she had de- termined Kent's career and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of her own choosing. Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it was hopelessly off holding-ground. The young woman had laid the blame at the door of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault- finding and recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowing her dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer. Thereafter Kent had stagnated quietly, living with simple rigor the life he had marked out for himself; thankful at heart, Loring had suspected, for the timely intervention of the farmer's son, but holding himself well in hand against a repetition of the sentimental of- fense. All this until the opening of the summer hotel at the foot of Old Croydon, and the coming of Elinor Brentwood. No one knew just how much Miss Brentwood had to do with the long-delayed awakening of David Kent; but in Loring's forecastings she enjoyed the full benefit of the doubt. From tramping the hills alone, or whip- ping the streams for brook trout, David had taken to spending his afternoons with lover-like regularity at 16 THE GRAFTERS the Croydon Inn; and at the end of the season had electrified the sleepy home town by declaring his in- tention to go West and grow up with the country. In Loring's setting-forth of the awakening, the mo- tive was not far to seek. Miss Brentwood was ambi- tious, and if her interest in Kent had been only casual she would not have been likely to point him to the wider battle-field. Again, apart from his modest patri- mony, Kent had only his profession. The Brentwoods were not rich, as riches are measured in millions; but they lived in their own house in the Back Bay wilder- ness, moved in Boston's older substantial circle, and, in a world where success, economic or other, is in some sort the touchstone, were many social planes above a country lawyer. Loring knew Kent's fierce poverty-pride none bet- ter. Hence, he was at no loss to account for the exile's flight afield, or for his unhopeful present attitude. Meaning to win trophies to lay at Miss Brentwood's feet, the present stage of the rough joust with Fortune found him unhorsed, unweaponed and rolling in the dust of the lists. Loring chewed his cigar reflectively, wishing his com- panion would open the way to free speech on the sub- ject presumably nearest his heart. He had a word of comfort, negative comfort, to offer, but it might not be said until Kent should give him leave by taking the A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 17 initiative. Kent broke silence at last, but the promp- ting was nothing more pertinent than the chalking-up of the delayed train's time. "An hour and twenty minutes : that means any time after nine o'clock. I'm honestly sorry for you, Gran- tham sorry for any one that has to stay in this charnel- house of a town ten minutes after he's through. What will you do with yourself ?" Loring got up, looked at his watch, and made a sug- gestion, hoping that Kent would fall in with it. "I don't know. Shall we go back to your rooms and sit a while?" The exile's eyes gloomed suddenly. "Not unless you insist on it. We should get back among the relics and I should bore you. I'm not the man you used to know, Grantham." "No ?" said Loring. "I sha'n't be hypocritical enough to contradict you. Nevertheless, you are my host. It is for you to say what you will do with me until train time." "We can kill an hour at the rally, if you like. You have seen the street parade and heard the band play: it is only fair that you should see the menagerie on ex- hibition." Loring found his match-box and made a fresh light for his cigar. "It's pretty evident that you and 'next-Governor' 18 THE GEAFTEES Bucks are on opposite sides of the political fence," he observed. "We are. I should think a good bit less of myself than I do and that's needless if I trained in his company." "Yet you will give him a chance to make a partizan of me ? Well, come along. Politics are not down on my western programme, but I'm here to see all the new things." The Gaston Opera House was a survival of the flush times, and barring a certain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic. The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent and his guest edged tKeir way through the standing committee in the foyer ; but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in find- ing two seats well around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from their nearest neighbors. Since the public side of American politics varies little with the variation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself at once in homely and remindful surroundings. There was the customary draping of flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of the background. In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat the local and visiting A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 19 political lights; men of all trades, these, some of them a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwonted eonspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air of strained attention to the speaker of the moment. Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audi- ence, typical of all America the thing most truly typi- cal in a land where national types are sought for mi- croscopically : wheel-horses who came at the party call ; men who came in the temporary upblaze of enthusiastic patriotism, which is lighted with the opening of the cam- paign, and which goes out like a candle in a gust of wind the day after the election; men who came to ap- plaud blindly, and a few who came to cavil and deride. Loring oriented himself in a leisurely eye-sweep, and so came by easy gradations to the speaker. Measured by the standard of fitness for his office of prolocutor the man standing beside the stage-properties speaker's desk was worthy a second glance. He was dark, undersized, trimly built; with a Vandyke beard clipped closely enough to show the lines of a bull-dog jaw, and eyes that had the gift, priceless to the public speaker, of seeming to hold every onlooking eye in the audience. Unlike his backers in the awkward semi- circle, he wore a professional long coat; and the hands that marked his smoothly flowing sentences were slim and shapely. 20 THE GRAFTERS "Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent. "Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter a charter member of the Gas- ton wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you into believing in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you in the back for a ten-dollar bill in the next/' was the rejoinder. Loring nodded, and again became a listener. Hawk's speech was merely introductory, and it was nearing its peroration. "Fellow citizens, this occasion is as auspicious as it is significant. When the people rise in their might to say to tyranny in whatsoever form it oppresses them, 'Thus far and no farther shalt thou go/ the night is far spent and the light is breaking in the east. "Since the day when we first began to wrest with com- pelling hands the natural riches from the soil of this our adoptive State, political trickery in high places, backed by the puissant might of alien corporations, has ground us into the dust. "But now the time of our deliverance is at hand. Great movements give birth to great leaders; and in this, our holy crusade against oppression and tyranny, the crisis has bred the man. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure of presenting to you the speaker of the evening: our friend and fellow citizen the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks, by the grace of A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 21 God, and your suffrages, the next governor of the State." In the storm of applause that burst upon the dra- matic peroration of the ex-district attorney, a man rose from the center of the stage semicircle and lum- bered heavily forward to the footlights. Loring's first emotion was of surprise, tempered with pity. The crisis-born leader, heralded by such a flourish of rhetor- ical trumpets, was a giant in size; but with his huge figure, unshapely and ill-clad, all promise of greatness seemed to pause. His face, broad-featured, colorless, and beardless as a boy's, was either a blank or an impenetrable mask. There was no convincement in the lack-luster gaze of the small, porcine eyes; no eloquence in the harsh, nasal tones of the untrained voice, or in the ponderous and awkward wavings of the beam-like arms. None the less, before he had uttered a dozen halting sen- tences he was carrying the audience with him step by step; moving the great concourse of listeners with his commonplace periods as a mellifluous Hawk could never hope to move it. Loring saw the miracle in the throes of its outwork- ing; saw and felt it in his own proper person, and sought in vain to account for it. Was there some sub- tile magnetism in this great hulk of a man that made itself felt in spite of its hamperings ? Or was it merely 22 THE GRAFTERS that the people, weary of empty rhetoric and unkept promises, were ripe to welcome and to follow any man whose apparent earnestness and sincerity atoned for all his lacks ? Explain it as he might, Loring soon assured himself that the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks was laying hold of the sentiment of the audience as though it were a thing tangible to be grasped by the huge hands. Unlike Hawk, whose speech flamed easily into denunciation when it touched on the alien corporations, he coun- seled moderation and lawful reprisals. Land syndi- cates, railroads, foreign capital in whatever employment, were prime necessities in any new and growing com- monwealth. The province of the people was not to wreck the ship, but to guide it. And the remedy for all ills lay in controlling legislation, faithfully and rigidly enforced. "My friends : I'm only a plain, hard-handed farmer, as those of you who are my fellow townsmen can testify. But I've seen what you've seen, and I've suffered what you've suffered. Year after year we send our repre- sentatives to the legislature, and what comes of it? Why, these corporations, looking only to their own in- terests, as they're in duty bound to do, buys 'em if they can. You can't blame 'em for that ; it's business their business. But it is our business, as citizens of this great commonwealth, to prevent it. We have good laws A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 23 i on our statute books, but we need more of 'em; laws for control, with plain, honest men at the capital, in the judiciary, in every root and branch of the executive, to enforce 'em. With such laws, and such men to see that they are executed, there wouldn't be any more ex- tortion, any more raising of the rates of transportation on the produce of our ranches and farms merely be- cause the eastern market for that particular product happened to jump a few cents on the dollar. "No, my friends; plain, hard-handed farmer though I be, I can see what will follow an honest election of the people, by the people, and for the people. The State can be it ought to be sovereign within its own boundaries. If we rise up as one man next Tuesday and put a ticket into the ballot-box that says we are going to make it so, and keep it so, you'll see a new commodity tariff put into effect on the Western Pacific Eailroad the day after." The speaker paused, and into the little gap of silence barked a voice from the gallery. "That's what you say. But supposin' they don't do it?" Loring was gazing steadfastly at the blank, heavy face, so utterly devoid of the enthusiasm the man was evoking in others. For one flitting instant he thought he saw behind the mask. The immobile face, the awk- ward gestures, the slipshod English became suddenly 24 THE GEAFTEES transparent, revealing the real man; a man of titanic strength, of tremendous possibilities for good or evil. Loring put up his glasses and looked again; but the figure of the flash-light inner vision had vanished, and the speaker was answering his objector as calmly as though the house held only the single critic to be set right. "I'm always glad to hear a man speak right out in meeting," he said, dropping still deeper into the col- loquialisms. "Supposing the corporations don't see the handwriting on the wall won't see it, you say? Then, my friend, it will become the manifest duty of the legislature and the executive fo make 'em see it: always lawfully, you understand; always with a just and equitable respect for the rights of property in which our free and glorious institutions are founded, but with level-handed justice, and without fear or favor." A thunderous uproar of applause clamored on the heels of the answer, and the Honorable Jasper mopped his face with a colored handkerchief and took a swallow of water from the glass on the desk. "Mind you, my friends, I'm not saying we are not going to find plenty of stumps and roots and a tough sod in this furrow we are going to plow. It's only the fool or the ignoramus who underrates the strength of his opponent. It is going to be just plain, honest justice and the will of the people against the money of the A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 25 Harrimans and the Goulds and the Vanderbilts and all the rest of 'em. But the law is mighty, and it will pre- vail. Give us an honest legislature to make such laws, and an executive strong enough to enforce 'em, and the sovereign State will stand out glorious and triumph- ant as a monument against oppression. ''When that time comes and ifs a-coming, my friends the corporations and the syndicates will read the handwriting on the wall; don't you be afraid of that. If they should be a little grain thick-headed and sort o' blind at first, as old King Belshazzar was, it may be that the sovereign State will have to give 'em an object-lesson lawfully, always lawfully, you under- stand. But when they see, through the medium of such an object-lesson or otherwise, as the case may be, that we mean business; when they see that we, the people of this great and growing commonwealth, mean to assert our rights to live and move and have our be- ing, to have fair, even-handed justice meted out to ourselves, our wives and our little children, they'll come down and quit watering their stock with the sweat of our brows; and that hold-up motto of theirs, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,' will be no more known in Israel!" Again the clamor of applause rose like fine dust on the throng-heated air, and Kent looked at his watch. 26 THE GRAFTERS "It is time we were going," he said; adding: "I guess you have had enough of it, haven't you ?" Lorihg was silent for the better part of the way back to the railway station. When he spoke it was in an- swer to a delayed question of Kent's. "What do I think of him? I don't know, David; and that's the plain truth. He is not the man he ap- pears to be as he stands there haranguing that crowd. That is a pose, and an exceedingly skilful one. He is not altogether apparent to me ; but he strikes me as be- ing a man of immense possibilities whether for good or evil, I can't say." "You needn't draw another breath of uncertainty on that score," was the curt rejoinder. "He is a dema- gogue, pure and unadulterated." Loring did not attempt to refute the charge. "Are he and his party likely to win?" he asked. "God knows," said Kent. "We have had so many lightning transformations in politics in the State that nothing is impossible." "I'd like to know," was Loring's comment. "It might make some difference to me, personally." "To you?" said Kent, inquiringly. "That reminds me: I haven't given you a chance to say ten words about yourself." "The chance hasn't been lacking. But my business out here is well, it isn't exactly a Star Chamber mat- A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 27 ter, but I'm under promise in a way not to talk about it until I have had a conference with our people at the capital. I'll write you about it in a few days." They were ascending the steps at. the end of the passenger platform again, and Lorimg broke away from the political and personal entanglement to give Kent one more opportunity to hear his word of negative com- fort. "We dug up the field of recollection pretty thoroughly in our after-dinner seance in your rooms, David, but I noticed there was one corner of it you left undisturbed. Was there any good reason?" Kent made no show of misunderstanding. "There was the excellent reason which must have been apparent to you before you had been an hour in Gaston. I've made my shot, and missed." Loring entered the breach with his shield held well to the fore. He was the last man in the world to as- sault a friend's confidence recklessly. "I thought a good while ago, and I still think, that you are making a mountain out of a mole-hill, David. Elinor Brentwood is a true woman in every inch of her. She is as much above caring for false notions of caste as you ought to be." "I know her nobility: which is all the more reason why I shouldn't take advantage of it. We may scoff at the social inequalities as much as we please, but we can't 28 THE GRAFTERS laugh them out of court. As between a young woman who is an heiress in her own right, and a briefless law- yer, there are differences which a decent man is bound to efface. And I haven't been able." "Does Miss Brentwood know?" "She knows nothing at all. I was unwilling to en- tangle her, even with a confidence." "The more fool you," said Loring, bluntly. "You call yourself a lawyer, and you have not yet learned one of the first principles of common justice, which is that a woman has some rights which even a besotted lover is bound to respect. You made love to her that summer at Croydon; you needn't deny it. And at the end of things you walk off to make your fortune without com- mitting yourself; without knowing, or apparently car- ing, what your stiff-necked poverty-pride may cost her in years of uncertainty. You deserve to lose her." Kent's smile was a fair measure of his unhopeful mood. "You can't well lose what you have never had. I'm not such an ass as to believe that she cared greatly." "How do you know ? Not by anything you ever gave her a chance to say, I'll dare swear. I've a bit of qual- ified good news for you, but the spirit is moving me mightily to hold my tongue." "Tell me," said Kent, his indifference vanishing in the turning of a leaf. A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 29 "Well, to begin with, Miss Brentwood is still unmar- ried, though the gossips say she doesn't lack plenty of eligible offers/' "Half of that I knew; the other half I took for granted. Go on." "Her mother, under the advice of the chief of the clan Brentwood, has been making a lot of bad invest- ments for herself and her two daughters: in other words, she has been making ducks and drakes of the Brentwood fortune." ^ Kent was as deeply moved as if the loss had been his own, and said as much, craving more of the particulars. "I can't give them. But I may say that the blame lies at your door, David." "At my door ? How do you arrive at that ?" "By the shortest possible route. If you had done your duty by Elinor in the Croydon summer, Mrs. Brentwood would have had a bright young attorney for a son-in-law and adviser, and the bad investments would not have been made." Kent's laugh was entirely devoid of mirth. "Don't trample on a man when he's down. I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. But how bad is the smash ? Surely you know that ?" "No, I don't. Bradford was telling me about it the day I left Boston. He gave me to understand that the 30 THE GRAFTERS principal family holding at present is in the stock of a certain western railway." "Did he happen to know the name of the stock?" asked Kent, moistening his lips. "He did. Fate flirts with you two in the usual fashion. Mrs. Brentwood's little fortune and by con- sequence, Elinor's and Penelope's is tied up in the stock of the company whose platform we are occupy- ing at the present moment the Western Pacific." Kent let slip/ a hard word directed at ill-advisers in general, and Loring took his cue from the malediction. "You swear pretty feelingly, David. Isn't our prop- erty as good a thing as we of the Boston end have been cracking it up to be ?" "You know better about the financial part of it than I do. But well, you are fresh from this anarchistic conclave at the Opera House. You can imagine what the stock of the Western Pacific, or of any other foreign corporation doing business in this State, will be worth in six months after Bucks and his crowd get into the saddle." "You speak as if the result of the election were a foregone conclusion. I hope it isn't. But we were talking more particularly of Miss Brentwood, and your personal responsibilities." The belated train was whis- tling for the lower yard, and Loring was determined to say all that was in his mind. A MAN OF THE PEOPLE 31 "Yes; go on. I'm anxious to hear more anxious than I seem to be, perhaps." "Well, she is coming West, after a bit. She, and her sister and the mother. Mrs. Brentwood's asthma is worse, and the wise men have ordered her to the in- terior. I thought you'd like to know." "Is she are they coming this way ?" asked Kent. The train was in, and the porter had fetched Loring's hand-bag from the check-stand. The guest paused with one foot on the step of the sleeping-car. "If I were you, David, I'd write and ask; I should, by Jove. It would be a tremendously cheeky thing to do, of course, having such a slight acquaintance with her as you have; but I'll be hanged if I shouldn't chance it. And in the mean time, if I don't go back East next week, you'll hear from me. When you do, or if you do, take a day off and run up to the capital. I shall need you. Good-by." Kent watched the train pull out ; stood looking after it until the two red eyes of the rear signals had disap- peared in the dusty darkness of the illimitable plain. Then he went to his rooms, to the one which was called by courtesy his office, and without allowing himself time for a nice balancing of the pros and cons, squared himself at the desk to write a letter. Ill THE BOSTONIANS It was precisely on the day set for the Brentwoods' westward flitting that the postman, making his morn- ing round, delivered David Kent's asking at the house in the Back Bay sub-district. Elinor was busy packing for the migration, but she left Penelope and the maid to cope with the problem of compressing two trunkfuls into one while she read the letter, and she was reading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Orms- by's card came up. "You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do." "Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me." Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of her brow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the early morning caller. Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of ath- letic leisure, and inheritor of the Ormsby millions, was (32) THE BOSTONIANS 33 pacing back and forth before the handful of fire in the drawing-room grate when she entered. "You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protested reproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?" Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing. "How was I to know you didn't know ?" she retorted. "It was in the Transcript" "Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to keep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper. Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a propeller blade on the Amphitrite trying to get here in time." "I am so sorry for the Amphitrite" she said. "But you are here, and in good season. Shall I call mother and Nell?" "No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your er- rands for you take your tickets, and so on." "Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things. And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of this household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the fam- ily all over Europe?" "James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. 34 THE GKAFTEKS "And as for the capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?" "If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it." He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility. "You are hard with me, Elinor always flinty and adamantine, and that sort. Have you no soft side at all?" She laughed. "The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she ? One can't be an anachronism." "I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make my- self believe other things about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?" "I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of the house since father died." "I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them ; to take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. THE BOSTONTAISrS 35 When are you going to give me the right to come be- tween you and all the little worries, Elinor ?" She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience. "You. are forgetting your promise/' she said quite dispassionately. "We were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong enough to make it possible." He looked at her with narrowing eyes. "It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it is that I haven't been able to open." She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient. "If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also to Abigail and the trunk-packing." He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful soul asserting itself boldly. "It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you." "To Abigail and the trunk-room ?" "Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West wher- ever it is you are going to hibernate." "No," she said decisively; "you must not." "Why?" 36 THE GRAFTERS "My saying so ought to be sufficient reason." "It isn't/' he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid." "I am not," she denied. "Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you should continue to make me un- happy, and you are afraid I might over-persuade you." Her eyes they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue tints in stressful moments met his defiantly. "If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and Penelope will be delighted, I am sure." "And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'll be decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like." Again she made the little gesture of petulant im- patience.