When he entered the parlor, he found the politicians in a state of subdued excitement. Helen sat by the window, blushing, and talking eagerly to old Fisbee. One of the gentlemen from Gaines County was walking about the room exclaiming, “A glorious conception! A glorious conception!” addressing the bric-a-brac, apparently. (He thought the conception his own.) Mr. Martin was tugging at his beard and whispering to Landis and Homer, and the two Amo men were consulting in a corner, but as the judge came in, one of them turned and said loudly, “That's the man.”
“What man am I, Keating?” asked Briscoe, cheerily.
“We better explain, I guess,” answered the other; and turning to his compatriot: “You tell him, Boswell.”
“Well—it's this way—” said Boswell, and came at once to an awkward pause, turning aside sheepishly and unable to proceed.
“So that's the way of it, is it?” said the old gentleman.
Helen laughed cheerfully, and looked about her with a courageous and encouraging eye. “It is embarrassing,” she said. “Judge Briscoe, we are contemplating 'a piece of the blackest treachery and chicanery.' We are going to give Mr. Halloway the—the go-by!” The embarrassment fell away, and everybody began to talk at once.
“Hold on a minute,” said the judge; “let's get at it straight. What do you want with me?”
“I'll tell you,” volunteered Keating. “You see, the boys are getting in line again for this convention. They are the old file that used to rule the roost before the 'Herald' got too strong for them, and they rely on Mr. Harkless's being sick to beat Kedge Halloway with that Gaines County man, McCune. Now, none of us here want Rod McCune I guess. We had trouble enough once with him and his heelers, and now that Mr. Harkless is down, they've taken advantage of it to raise a revolution: Rod McCune for Congress! He's a dirty-hearted swindler—I hope Miss Sherwood will pardon the strong expression—and everybody thought the 'Herald' had driven him out of politics, though it never told how it did it; but he's up on top again. Now, the question is to beat him. We hold the committees, but the boys have been fighting the committees—call 'em the 'Harkless Ring,' and never understood that the 'Herald' would have turned us down in a second if it thought we weren't straight. Well, we saw a week ago that Kedge Halloway was going to lose to McCune; we figured it out pretty exactly, and there ain't a ray of hope for Kedge. We wrote to Mr. Harkless about it, and asked him to come down—if he'd been on the ground last Monday and had begun to work, I don't say but what his personal influence might have saved Halloway—but a friend of his, where he's staying, answered the letter: said Mr. Harkless was down with a relapse and was very fretful; and he'd taken the liberty of reading the letter and temporarily suppressing it under doctor's orders; they were afraid he'd come, sick as he was, from a sense of duty, and asked us to withdraw the letter, and referred us to Mr. Harkless's representative on the 'Herald.' So we applied here to Miss Sherwood, and that's why we had this meeting. Now, Halloway is honest—everybody knows that—and I don't say but what he's been the best available material Mr. Harkless had to send to Washington; but he ain't any too bright——”
Mr. Martin interrupted the speaker. “I reckon, maybe, you never heard that lecture of his on the Past, Present, and Future'?”
“Besides that,” Keating continued, “Halloway has had it long enough, and he's got enough glory out of it, and, except for getting beat by Rod McCune, I believe he'd almost as soon give it up. Well, we discussed all this and that, and couldn't come to any conclusion. We didn't want to keep on with a losing fight if there was any way to put up a winner, though of course we all recognized that Mr. Harkless would want us to support Kedge to the death, and that's what he'd do if he was on the ground. But Miss Sherwood mentioned that she'd had one note since his last illness began, and he'd entrusted her and her associates on the paper with the entire policy, and she would take the responsibility for anything we determined on. Mr. Smith said the only thing to do was to give up Halloway and get a man that could beat McCune; Kedge would recognize it himself, that that was the only thing to do, and he could retire gracefully. Miss Sherwood said she was still more or less a stranger, and asked what man we could find who was strong enough to do it by popularity alone and who was also a man we wanted; somebody that had worked a good deal, but had never had any office. It was to such a man she could promise the 'Herald's' support, as for a time the paper was being operated almost independently, it might be said, of Mr. Harkless. Well, I expect it came to all of us at the same time, but it was Mr. Bence here that said it first.”