“I don’t think,” replied Clive, calmly, and receding not a step, “I don’t think you could be insulted, Mr. Gerrett. You are making rather a pitiable exhibition of yourself. Why not own up to it that you are acting under orders of the ‘Machine,’ whose tool you are? The ‘Machine’ which is so afraid of the truth that it takes pains to muzzle the press. The ‘Machine’ that is so well aware of its own rottenness, it dare not let the people whom it is defrauding hear the other side of the case. Why not admit you are bought?”
Gerrett was sputtering unintelligible wrath.
“Get out of my office!” he roared at last.
“Certainly,” assented Standish, “I’ve learned all I wanted to. You serve your masters well. I hope they pay you as adequately.”
He turned to the door. Before he reached it a thin youth with ink-smears on his fingers swung in.
“Hard luck!” exclaimed the newcomer. “That Standish meeting’s raised a lot of interest downtown. Pity we can’t run anything on it! It’d make a dandy first-page spread.”
“Shut up!” bellowed Gerrett. “You young——”
“Don’t scold him,” counselled Standish, walking out. “He didn’t make any break. We’re all three in the secret.”
The next few days witnessed practical repetitions of the foregoing experiences. In almost every town the local newspapers not only refused to report a line of Standish’s speeches, but would not accept his advertisements. Nor, in most places, could he find a job office willing to print handbills for him. His agent had nearly everywhere been able to engage a hall; but as no adequate preliminary notice of the meeting had been published, audiences were pitiably slim. In one or two towns, where the papers did not belong to the “Machine,” it was discovered that every hall, lodge-room or other available meeting-place had been engaged in advance by some mysterious competitor. Clive, at such settlements, was forced to speak in open air. Even then the police at one town dispersed the gathering under excuse of fearing a riot; at two others the mayor refused a license to hold an outdoor meeting, and at a fourth, a gang of toughs, at long range, pelted the audience with stones and elderly eggs, the police refusing to interfere.
At length Clive’s advance agent returned to the candidate in abject despair.