The assistant state treasurer drew a jingling bunch of keys from his pocket and locked the door. Grigsby’s eyes were fastened on the paper at the governor’s feet. His heart was swelling in his throat. His fingers were twitching, and he was sweating like a stoker. At Mendenhall’s approach the governor placed his foot upon the paper. When Mendenhall had done, the governor picked it up. He smoothed it out in his fingers, and slowly adjusted his glasses. By the dim light that always burns at night just outside the door of the state treasury he read it. Then he placed it in the pocket of his overcoat. He kept his hand upon it. The blue of Grigsby’s face deepened.
The three men went down the stairs, the governor standing aside at the top to let them precede him. They crossed the rotunda, past the slumbering janitor whose snores ascended and exploded in the rounded blackness of the hollow dome, down the east corridor and so out into the darkness. They walked together down the wide stone walk, the stone walk as wide as a street, that sweeps, with a strip of sward down its middle, across the state house lawns to Capitol Avenue. The governor did not turn up Second Street by the way he had come. He kept on with his two companions, and all three were silent. Not a word had any one of them spoken. They were drowned in thought. It matters not of what the assistant state treasurer was thinking. He held only an appointive office. He was a political villain, and had a collar on his neck. The attorney-general was thinking of days that were to come. The governor was thinking of days that were gone. Silent, thoughtful, thus they kept on up Capitol Avenue. When they approached the shades that gathered under the ugly iron bridge which spans the ragged street that leads to the capitol of Illinois, the Alton’s St. Louis Limited came plunging through the town, half an hour late. The three men halted. The great mysterious, vestibuled train, with its darkly curtained Pullmans, slid across the bridge. As they stood waiting for it to pass that they might go under, the governor withdrew his hand from his pocket, the paper still folded in it. He held the paper out toward Grigsby.
“William,” he said, “I think you dropped something.”
THE COLONEL’S LAST CAMPAIGN
ALL day long Colonel Talbott sat in his leather chair in the lobby of the Grand, twiddling his cane, smoking his cigar, and talking politics. Under the broad brim of his black slouch hat his hair fell in silver wisps almost to his shoulders, and the long mustache, drooping like a Georgian’s at the corners of his mouth, was as white as his hair, save at the spot where his cigar had tinged it yellow.
There was not a politician of either party between Dunleith and Cairo who was not proud to bend over the old fellow’s chair, take his thin hand and say: “Hello, Colonel, what’s new in politics?” The colonel had one invariable reply: “I’m out of politics, and don’t know anything. What do you hear?” Sometimes, if the passing politician happened to be of the old day, the colonel would take him by the arm, and they would saunter away to the bar. If the politician came from northern Illinois, the colonel would take rye; if from southern Illinois the colonel would take bourbon; such was his idea of etiquette. Though never would he take a drink before breakfast, for a drink before breakfast, he told Carroll, was a back log in the fire that would burn the live-long day.
Carroll was the staff of the colonel’s old age. The two would sit by the hour, while the old man talked of the Nineteenth Illinois Cavalry, of Lincoln and Douglas, of David Davis and Elijah Haines, of state and national conventions, in the days when he had made and unmade congressmen, governors and senators, ruling his party in the state, Carroll shrewdly thought, with a discipline as rigid as that with which he had welded the Nineteenth Illinois into a fighting regiment.
To those who knew the veteran’s history, his love for the boy was touching. The story is too long to tell now, but its essential motif must always be the ingratitude of Si Warren. The colonel had picked Warren up in the old Fifteenth District, sent him to Congress, and finally made a United States senator of him. Warren, developing quickly as a politician, had turned around, defeated the colonel for reëlection as chairman of the state executive committee, a position he had held for sixteen years, had frozen him out of the Arizona deal, and somehow caused the colonel’s only son to go wrong out there in Tucson. The boy’s mother had died; of a broken heart, they said. Since then a decade had passed, a decade which the colonel had spent in the grim lonesomeness of a crowded hotel. He never mentioned Warren’s name. If he heard it, he clenched his bony fists so tightly that the knuckles showed white. Once a year, perhaps, in the springtime, when the state central committee met, he got out his white waistcoat and was invited up to the ordinary to make a speech on the state of the party, and once a year, in the summertime, he attended a reunion of his regiment, now decimated to a squadron of tottering old men, whom the colonel called “boys.”
Spring came, rolling up from the muddy Ohio, showering its apple blossoms in the orchards of Egypt, sprinkling with purple flowers the prairies of central Illinois, and finally flooding with tardy sunshine the cold waters of Lake Michigan. It was the year the legislature that chose Warren’s successor in the senate was to be elected, and when the senator came home from Washington he found his fences in sad repair. The Silas Warren of the parlor suite in a Lake Front hotel was not the Si Warren whom Colonel Talbott had rescued from the dusty little law office down in Shelbyville fifteen years before. The clothes of that time were faded by the sun in which he loafed all day on the post-office corner, whereas the clothes of this spring morning bespoke a New York tailor and a valet.
The senator was not in a pleasant mood. There was opposition to his reëlection, and while his machine ignored it, and while George R. Baldwin, the lawyer who watched the interests of certain big corporations during the sessions of the legislature, said it was but a sporadic demonstration of soreheads, back-numbers and labor skates, it was spreading, as the picturesque politicians from the corn lands of central Illinois would say, like a prairie fire. Jacksonville, where the standard of revolt had first been raised, was in Morgan, the colonel’s home county, and so it came to pass that the defection was laid to the machinations of the colonel himself. And yet, as the politicians who were always dropping into Chicago to correct their reckonings, paused an instant by the leather chair, the old white head would slowly wag from side to side, and the old man would say: