XV
IN the early twilight of a Saturday afternoon late in October Garwood walked up Kaskaskia Street from the station in a cold, sullen rain, conscious of but one sensation—he was glad that only one more week of the campaign remained. He walked with long, deliberate strides, indifferent to the rain, which had beaten down his wide hat brim and trickled off it, before and behind, in little streams. His face, under those drooping eaves, was long and serious; it brightened, automatically, only when he met some pedestrian to whom in his capacity as a candidate, he involuntarily spoke a greeting.
Garwood had come home in response to a telegram from Rankin, a telegram which had concentrated such an urgency into its economically chosen ten words that he had traveled many miles since daylight over country roads and by rail to reach Grand Prairie at night. Now, just as the twilight was darkening and the lights were beginning to show in the stores along Main Street, he turned into the Lawrence Block and climbed to his office. The office was dark; young Enright, who was reading law under him, had gone into the country to make one of the political speeches he was proud of having been asked to deliver that fall; the typewriter had closed her desk and gone, and her little clock was ticking lonesomely beside her little vase of flowers. But in his private room, Garwood found Rankin sitting with his feet on the window-sill looking abstractedly down into the street where the lights from the store-windows wriggled in many lines across the canal of mud.
Garwood took off his hat, lashed it back and forth to get the water off, and slapped it down on the top of his desk. And then he said, in a voice that was rough and hoarse:
“Well, what’s the matter? Everything’s gone to hell, I suppose—heh?”
“No, it’s all right. I just want a talk with you,” said Rankin. “Have a good meetin’ last night?”
“Oh, first-rate; made a poor speech, though. Truth is, I’m about done up. Thank God it’ll be over in another week, whichever way it goes. Don’t know that I care”—his sentence was broken by a cough that shook him.
Rankin turned and tried to distinguish his features.
“Look’e here, Jerry,” said the big fellow, “you’ve got a cold—you’ll best go down and have Chris mix you a hot tod.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Garwood, scraping his throat. “Go on with your tale of woe.”