“You for one,” sounded a sneering voice from the dressing-room doorway behind them, “you for one, friend Bourke, were starving on the street when I took you in and fed you and got your kids out of the Protectory and gave you a job.”
At the first word the mumbled assent to Staatz’s and Bourke’s opinion, that had welled up in a dozen throats, died into sacred silence.
“You for another, ’Dolphe Staatz,” went on Caleb, still standing on the threshold and viewing the group of malcontents with a cold disgust. “You were on the road to the ‘pen’ for knowing too much about that ‘queer paper’ joint on Willow Street, when I got the indictment quashed and squared things with the district attorney and put you on your feet.
“Caine,” turning to the Star’s editor, “I think I heard you agreeing among the rest, didn’t I, hey? Diff’r’t sound from the kind you made when you come to me twelve years ago and cried and said the Star was all in, and would I save you from going bankrupt by taking it over? And there’s plenty more of you here with the same sort of story to tell.”
He strode forward and was among them, forcing one after another to meet his eye, dominating by his very presence the men who had sought to dethrone him. In his hour of stress all the old power, the splendid rulership of men, surged back upon the Railroader. He stood a king amid awestruck serfs, a stern schoolmaster among a naughty band of scared children.
“Some one spoke about being tired of wearing my collar,” he said. “Is there a man here who put on that collar against his will, or a man who didn’t beg for it? Is there a man who hasn’t profited by it? A man who hasn’t risen as I have risen and benefited when I benefited? Don’t stand there, mumchance, like a lot of dago section-hands! You were ready enough to speak before I came in. Why aren’t you, now? Is it because you’re so sorry for this poor, broken old man, who talks too much and ain’t fit to run the Machine any longer, eh? Spit it out, Staatz! If you’re qualifying for my shoes you got to learn to look less like a whipped puppy when you’re spoke to. Stand up and state your grievance like a man, you Dutch crook that I lifted out of jail! You, too, Bourke! Where’s your tongue? And all the rest of you that was on the point of choosing a new Leader.”
No one answered. The Boss’s instinct power rather than his mere words held them sulky and dumb. Over each was creeping the old subservience to the peerless will that had so long shaped the Mountain State’s destinies and theirs.
“I talk too much, eh?” mocked Conover. “Well, to prove that’s so, I’m going to give you curs a little Sunday-school talk right now. You say I cut out the old methods, this campaign. I did. And why did I do it? Because if these reformers had thought they were licked unfair there’s so many of ’em they’d ’a’ carried the case to every court in the land, and ’a’ drawed the whole country’s op’ra-glasses onto this p’ticular Machine, and started another such wave as swamped Dick Croker and Tammany in ’94. And then where’d the Machine and you fellers have been? There’s got to be reform in a State just so often, just like there’s got to be croup in a nursery. Every other State’s had it. And each time they’ve fished up something queer about their local Machine, and that same Machine’s never been so strong again. Well, the Mountain State’s turn for reform was overdue. It had to come. And this was the time. I thought maybe I could beat ’em on their own ground. If I had, that’d ’a’ ended reform here, forever and amen. Even if I was beat I knew the people would get so sick of one term of reform, they’d come screeching to us to take ’em back. And then’s the time my kid-glove stunts of this campaign would shine out fine against a rotten reform administration. The Machine would escape any investigation of the kind that follers a crooked campaign, and we’d simply be begged to take everything in sight for the rest of our lives. Maybe you think a chance of one term out of office was too much to pay for such a future cinch?”
The speech—reasons and all—was improvised as he spoke. And again it was the Boss’s manner and his brutal magnetism rather than his words that carried conviction.
“Because I didn’t print this all out in big letters and simple words that you dolts could understand,” resumed Caleb, “you forget the holes I’ve got you and the party out of in the past, and go grouching about my ‘breaking up.’ Maybe my brain is softening a bit, just to keep company with the ninnies I travel with. But it’s still a brain. And that’s more’n anyone else here can boast of having. Now, I’ve showed you how the land lays. Which of you would ’a’ carried the Machine over it any safer, and how would he’d ’a’ done it? You, for instance, Staatz?”