XII
THE crowd of men that filled Chris Steisfloss’s saloon were not reckoning the time that night. They pressed, as many of them as could, against the bar, and those who were huddled behind this front rank stretched their arms between the brushing shoulders for the glasses that Chris himself and his bartender, both on duty, made haste to fill each time some voice shouted an order for drink. The long bar-room was stifling, and the gas jets flared sickly, uncertainly, in their efforts to keep alive in an atmosphere from which the oxygen was so quickly exhausted.
Above the tilted hats of the gathering a cloud of smoke drifted in thin, gray currents along the low ceiling, following the drafts that puffed aimlessly whenever the outer door opened, and let the cool night air rush in with its sane and sanitary freshness. Over all, as though a part of the low hanging cloud of smoke, as though an element of the feculent atmosphere, hung almost palpably the mass of oaths and epithets, disjointed words and empty phrases that were poured out in a mad débâcle by all those excited voices. To this were added the scrape and shuffle of boots, moving unsteadily on the floor, and the click of glasses as these men pledged anew a cause which by all the defiance of their angry tones was evidently lost.
In the midst of them all, with his broad back leaning against the rail that guarded the bar, was Garwood himself. His rumpled shirt was open at the throat, his cravat was gone, his soiled cuffs had come unlinked and he fittingly portrayed in his whole appearance the utter rout and demoralization which had that day overtaken his political faction. His eyes blazed now with the confused emotions that ran riot in his soul, and now they lost all their luster and seemed to be set in a filmy stare, until their swollen lids fell heavily over them, to be raised again only by an effort.
He had laid his hat down on the bar, where its brim, flattening to the walnut surface, was soaking up the liquor that had been spilled from an overturned glass. In a strange whim of his disordered mind he had commanded every one to let the hat lie where it was, and they had all obeyed, with the seriousness of drinking men. And there it reposed, all its grace and expression gone, strangely typifying the wreck of its wearer’s fortunes.
As Garwood stood there, his black hair matted to his brow, his cheeks and chin blue with a long day’s growth of the stubble of his beard, he suddenly flung over his shoulder a peremptory order to Steisfloss to fill the glasses again, and when the saloon-keeper pushed the tall bottle toward him, he turned half around and splashed a drink out of it with an unsteady hand. Then holding the little tumbler in a precarious grasp, he faced about again and with elbows resting on the bar behind him, he broke forth in a thick voice:
“Don’t you think I’m beaten! Don’t you think it, I tell you! I may be beaten now, you understand, but I’m not beaten! No, sir! I’ve only begun. I tell you, I’ve only begun. They can keep me off the delegation, what do I care? I’ll be at Springfield just the same. They can send that Singed Cat to Congress if they want to, what do I care? Jim Rankin—Jim Rankin—who’s he? I’ll lick ’em, I’ll lick ’em all, every one, yet. You’ll see, you wait and see. You hear me? You wait and see. I’ll lick ’em all, every one, yet. I’ll drive ’em out of the district. I’ll drive ’em out of the state, from the Wabash on the east to the Mississippi on the west, from Dunleith to Cairo. I’ll set the buffalo grass on fire and sweep the state clean of them. You will not find one of them o’er all the rolling prairies of Illinois.”
As he rolled out the word “Illinois,” in the tone the orators of that state use when they wish to show their state pride, he swung his arm in an all-embracing circle, and his auditors dodged the slopping whisky.
Then he stood and blinked at them.
“Why don’t you fellows drink?” he broke forth again. “What do you want to stand around that way for? What are you afraid of? Jim Rankin? Think I’m licked, do you? Think I’m dead politically, do you? Well, I’ll show ’em. I’ll show ’em all. Why don’t you drink, Pusey; why don’t you drink up? Think I ain’t got any money? Well, I’ll show you—Chris here knows me. I’ll show you—”
He fumbled in his pockets, produced a crumpled mass of green bills, and held them forth in his fist.
“I tell you there isn’t room for them and me on all the broad expanse of Illinois—”
Some one struck up a favorite song of the campaign platforms:
“Not without thy wondrous story,
Illinois, Illinois;
Shall be writ the nation’s glory,
Illinois, Illinois;
In the record of the years,
Abr’ham Lincoln’s name appears,
Grant and Logan—and our tears,
Illinois, Illinois.”
The crowd huddled more closely together, and with heavy voices joined in the song. Some of the men, with serio-comical expressions, essayed the tenor, others the bass, though the bass predominated, and they sang over and over the few words of the song they could remember.
During this maudlin exhibition, the door opened, and Rankin, with Bailey by his side, entered. Rankin was bespattered from hat to heel, even his face was freckled with the little spots where the viscous mud had dried. His huge body was flaccid with fatigue, and his appearance was enough to show how heavily he had toiled at the polls that day in his determination to defeat Garwood. Bailey showed no sign of the equally hard day he had spent. He walked with the same awkward, shambling gait, his little eyes looked out from their narrowed lids and roved about him with their customary cunning. He showed neither signs of exhaustion, though he always looked tired, nor of the elation that probably was in his breast at the great victory which that day had been his.
Rankin, when he saw the crowd with Garwood as its center, halted suddenly and jerked his hat down over his eyes. He drew Bailey hurriedly to the bar near the mirrored partition that screened the scene within from the street without, and made a sign to Steisfloss. The saloon-keeper, with an alert appreciation of the situation which his long experience with men in their cups had taught him, silently moved that way, and bent a listening ear toward the newcomers.
“Give us a little drink—an’ hurry. We’ll get out—don’t let him see,” said Rankin.
Steisfloss’s heavy German face showed none of the gratitude he felt, and quietly, almost surreptitiously, he set glasses and bottle before the successful candidate at that day’s primaries and the man who had brought his success to pass.
Before they could take their liquor, some one at the edge of the crowd near Rankin noticed him. Rankin’s quick eye detected the recognition, and he pulled the fellow toward him.
“Sh!” he whispered. “Don’t let him see us. I didn’t know he’s here, or we’d not come in. We’ll duck. How long’s he been in here?”
“Oh,” said the man, “ever since he got that last news from the First Ward.”
Rankin could not restrain the gleam of pleasure that shot from his eye at the memory of that triumph, but the gleam softened as he stole a look at Garwood, and then, at last, died quite away, and there came in its stead an expression of pain and pity.
“Poor Jerry!” he said, “I thought he’s a little off when he came—” he checked himself, and then—“when I saw him this afternoon,” he continued.
He looked at him for another moment, and then he said, angrily, to the man whom all the time he kept between him and the crowd:
“Why don’t some o’ you fellers get him out o’ here? What do you want to let him disgrace himself that-away fer?”
The man looked at Rankin and shrugged his shoulders to tell how helpless they all were.
“We’ve tried,” he said. He looked around toward Garwood, who, having concluded another speech, was tipping his glass into his mouth, his head toppling on his neck as he did so. The man turned back again to Rankin, still with that helpless look, but, suddenly, with a flash of the eye as if a new thought had just come to him, he said:
“You try, Jim; you could do it. He thinks more of you to-day than of all the rest put together.”
Rankin faced the bar and hastily swallowed his bourbon.
“No,” he said; “that’s past.”
And then he and Bailey slipped away.
“Poor Jerry!” sighed Rankin, as they went out the door.
But the Singed Cat, whose personality was destined so soon to become the passion of the cartoonists, turned and cast back at his defeated rival one of those glances from his unsearchable little eyes.