Emily was sitting upright, her face turned away from him in her disappointment.
“So do I,” she acquiesced, in a low voice.
“Well,” Garwood growled, as if she and not he himself had suggested the very disaster which of all others he most feared, “they won’t beat me this time, I’ll tell ’em that. I reckon Jim Rankin’s at the bottom of it all.”
VIII
THE curtains were drawn at the windows of Garwood’s law office that night, but the thin lip of light that outlined the casement told to belated men in Grand Prairie that a conference was going on within. The primaries were but two days off, and a vague uncertain quality in the rays that straggled into the gloom and lightened the rusty gilt letters of Garwood’s sign, creaking as it had done for so many years in the wind, might have hinted to the imaginative something of the straits in which the little council gathered within found itself.
Had such a one been acquainted with politics in that prairie district, and had seen Jim Rankin pass by at midnight under the trees that swayed the thick black shadows of their foliage dizzily to and fro on the wide stone sidewalk, and noted the curious smile that glimmered an instant on Rankin’s face, when from force of old habit he raised an upward glance, he would have concluded that serious obstacles beset the way of Jerome B. Garwood in that career to which as a man of destiny he had believed himself ordained, and from which the inconstant and ever-changing circle of his friends had expected so much.
Garwood had come home to find his political condition desperate. He himself, out of the anger that showed black in his face during those hot and trying days, described the situation as a revolt and, had he been possessed of the power, would gladly have punished the rebels by such stern repressive measures as autocratic governments employ in the terror their inherent weakness inspires.
Amid the spring delights of Washington public life he had become swollen with new ambitions. He not only wished to be renominated for Congress, but he wished also to be placed at the head of the Polk County delegation to the state convention called to meet in Springfield early in June; and beyond this, he had the higher wish to be sent as delegate to the national convention at Chicago. He would have preferred, of course, to be named as one of the Big Four delegates at large from Illinois, and when his imagination had been more warmly stimulated by Colonel Bird’s mint juleps, he had dramatized himself as electrifying the national convention by some fine extemporaneous flight of oratory, in which he should soar in an instant to the pinnacle of a national fame, and from that rare altitude behold new and illimitable possibilities of political future. It was, therefore, with a shock of disappointment to which he had not the power to reconcile himself that he had obeyed Pusey’s urgent telegram and had come home to find his very political existence at stake.
Sprague, reviled and reproached as a perennial candidate by those in the district who were themselves perennial candidates, was once more in the field seeking congressional honors. His county, Moultrie, had held its convention, and once more instructed its fifteen delegates for him. Over in Logan, General Barrett, having had a glimpse of the promised land at the Pekin convention, had so far departed from the reserve and dignity of his eminent respectability as to have himself declared a candidate, and he had been indorsed by his county. These candidatures did not seriously alarm Garwood, but a new complication had been suddenly added to the situation of such grave portent that he had summoned about him those who, having received government offices of varying degrees of importance, still felt themselves bound to his support.