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THE convention was to meet at ten o’clock, but at that hour, while the hotel was left desolate, the Circuit Court room in the old brick court house where the convention was to sit, was still empty, and scarcely divested of any of its solemnity by the chairs that had been set in order for the accommodation of the representatives of the people who were to deliberate there. For half an hour the delegates had been gathering at the somber building, and now clustered in groups in the historic portico that had witnessed, so many years before, one of the great debates between Lincoln and Douglas. The delegates found the shade grateful, and leaned against the gray stone columns smoking the cigars which the candidates had supplied with such prodigal generosity. With them were many spectators and the curiosity of these was hardly larger than the curiosity of the delegates, who, though they had all the power in their hands, could only speculate, not as to what they would do with the power, but what would be done with it for them, and they awaited the coming of their leaders with a calm, almost amusing submission to their desires and designs.
The morning advanced, and with it the heat increased, until at length some of the delegates, on whom the deputed dignity of the people sat with such weight that they wished to feel some of its importance by taking their seats, entered the court room. There they resumed their curious speculations as to whether Garwood or Sprague would be nominated, awaiting the advent of some hand strong enough to gather them all together and mold them to its own purposes.
But at length and suddenly there was a noise and in through the doors poured the crowd that had remained outside, bringing with it a palpable breath of heat. In the center of the throng was Jim Rankin, his smiles scattered abroad for all. He worked his way with heavy shoulders into the court room, and with an authoritative stride swung down towards the judge’s bench where the presiding officer of the convention was to wield his gavel.
On the wall the big clock bearing the advertisement of a local jeweler judicially ticked away three quarters of an hour before Rankin mounted the judge’s bench. He had been sitting meantime, in the jury box, whispering to Judge Bailey as composedly as though the whole convention was not waiting for him to perform the last rite that would invoke its political life. He had even removed his coat, and sat in his rounded white shirt sleeves, with the self-possession of a judge himself, who knows that the session of court cannot begin until he wills it and that none dare show impatience lest he embarrass his cause. But now and then some delegate, showing no more respect for Rankin than the ordinary American freeman really feels for a judge, however much custom compels him to dissimulate in court, would cry: “Get a move on you, Jim,” and at last Rankin arose, put on his coat, whispered a last word to Bailey, and mounted the raised platform where was ordinarily enthroned the impersonated authority of the statute in such case made and provided and the whole peace and dignity of the people of the state of Illinois.
Rankin’s figure showed fine and burly, half of it towering above the judge’s desk, as he looked over all the heads before him, where, somehow, he was determined to count eighty-three votes for Jerome B. Garwood. He stood there huge and powerful until something of his strength impressed the delegates before him, until he felt, as they themselves felt, a moral mastery over their minds. His dignity, showing in the broad reach of his heavy shoulders, shining from his sleepless eyes, had in it all of the accumulated fire of his anger at the opposition that had dared assail him, and he wished it to be felt. He singled out Pusey, bowed among the very men who knew Jim Rankin best, for the concentration of his gaze. Somewhere he had got a gavel, as it was supposed, though it was not a gavel, but a gager’s flat mallet, or bung-starter, ironically symbolic of the real power that lay behind him, though no one there saw the irony. And with this in his fat and hairy fist he gave three heavy raps.
“The convention will be in order,” he said. The simple words were the consummation of all the months of scheming and toiling that had gone before in that Thirteenth District, and the delegates insensibly braced under the idea.
“I ain’t goin’ to make any speech,” he began, and then paused an instant before he added, with an intense significance, “at this stage of the proceedin’s.”
Some among the delegates caught the threat that lurked in the statement.