“Better write out a statement of the case. Good-night. Much obliged for your trouble.”
The jailor talked busily till they came to the outer door. Hennion broke away, and left him in the doorway smoking his short pipe.
He came presently to sit in the tall Champ-ney library, and heard Henry Champney speaking in that tone and accent which made an ordinary remark sound like one of the Ten Commandments. Camilla was silent.
“Do you then, ha! cross the Rubicon?” Champney asked.
“Wood's organisation, sir? Carroll and the city jailor both seem to think it a foregone conclusion. Sweeney thinks if one of his 'boys' had a crowbar, or chisel, or a pair of tongs, he'd return to the community; so he wants a new jail, thinking it might include a new salary.”
CHAPTER X—MACCLESFIELD'S BRIDGE
HENNION knew Wood's organisation intimately enough. He had been a part of it on the outside. Wood had been chairman of the “General Committee,” a body that had total charge of the party's municipal campaigns, including admission to caucuses, and local charge in its general campaigns. Local nominations were decided there. It was only less active between elections than during them. It had an inner ring which met by habit, socially, in Wood's office. Whatever was decided in Wood's office, it was understood, would pass the Committee, and whatever passed the Committee would pass the City Council, and be welcomed by a mayor who had been socially at the birth of the said measure. Port Argent was a ring-led city, but it claimed to have a better ring than ordinary. Probably it had. Probably this was due in the main to something peculiar in Wood.
Hennion's election to the chairmanship was followed by a meeting in his office that forced a sudden investment in chairs. It was Thursday. Carroll was there; Mayor Beckett, a neatly dressed man with a long neck and close-trimmed black beard, talkative, casuistical, a lawyer by profession; Ranald Cam, President of the Council, solid, grim, rugged, devoid of grammar, grown grey in the game of politics, and for some reason unmatched in his devotion to Wood's memory; John Murphy, saloon-keeper from East Argent, not now in any office, an over-barbered, plastered, and gummy-looking person, boisterous and genial; J. M. Tait, small, thin, dry, of bloodless complexion, sandy hair, and infrequent speech, a lawyer, supposed to represent corporate interests; Major Jay Tuttle, President of the School Board, white-moustached and pompous.