THE August sun was ripening the corn, and in some of the more fertile fields the slender stalks already nodded their young plumes in the mid-summer heat that quivered over the prairies. It was too much to expect of politicians that they work in such weather, and they were loath to begin the campaign, yet it was necessary to make the first lazy preparations for the heavy work that would be upon them when the frost should begin to hint of coming fall.
Garwood was understood to be resting at home, and it was rumored that he would go away for a while and recuperate in the East, where, as it appears to men in the West, there is rest for the weary. He had in reality the natural reluctance to beginning a long contemplated and difficult task that the lesser politicians felt, though he had so much more at stake than they. Yet he would not have liked the boys to be as apathetic as he, and in a dim recognition of this fact he bestirred himself one day and went down to see Pusey. Thereupon Pusey began to write in his paper of the dangers of apathy and over-confidence, rallying the party by sternly telling it that the mere fact of its dominance in the Thirteenth District did not justify its lay members in staying at home and trusting to others to pull it through. This effort satisfied Garwood for a time, and he loafed on through August and then said to Rankin:
“Oh, wait till the middle of September, and then give them six weeks of a rattling fire all along the line.”
“Yes,” said Rankin, “we don’t want to tap our enthusi’sm too soon, an’ have it give out on us the way ol’ Bromley’s bar’l did. Gosh! Didn’t he freeze up them last two weeks, though!”
They laughed at the pleasing memories of it.
“Damned if I didn’t like that campaign,” Rankin went on. “Never enjoyed one more’n my life, though I’ve had some hot ones in my time. That story, now, that Pusey printed ’bout you—’member how skeered we was? An’ you ’member them things o’ Bromley’s—what was they?—kind o’ night shirts, now—heh?—oh, yes! Well, sir, you’d ought to heerd the kids I’d planted in the gallery that night when Bromley come on to the stage.” And Rankin reared back, and roared and slapped his thigh. “By the way, what’s come o’ Bromley? I never hear o’ him any more, do you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Garwood, with his large air of a knowledge of affairs, and then, too, with the pride of a man who doesn’t wish his opponent belittled, especially after he has defeated that opponent. “I hear of him frequently. He’s general counsel for his road now, and lives in Chicago.”
“Oh, yes, believe I did hear somethin’ o’ that,” said Rankin, nodding his head. “He went up there same’s all the rest o’ the judges from the country does. They get elected to the County Court down here, which gives them the title o’ judge, then when they come off, an’ have to go to work again, they go up to Chicago an’ practise on the title. After they’ve been there ’bout two years people begin to b’lieve they ’as judges o’ the Supreme Court.” Rankin paused in his philosophizing, and then resumed, quite seriously: “Don’t know but what Bromley give you a better run at that than this here young Wetherby ’ill do.”
“Do you know him?”
“Oh, I’ve seen him onct or twict over’t Sullivan. He’s just a young lawyer, an’ he knows ’at if the’ ’as any chanct o’ his winnin’ he’d never been nominated.”