"Good night, Minerva!" he murmured, kissing her hand.
"Good night, Bob, and remember you can go ahead. Prim will not be in your way."
"I'll wait, thank you; I'm young; I can afford to take my time gathering county laurels for my brow. And no decent man could oppose Prim without getting smeared with political slime. Sticks, too!"
CHAPTER III
One very hot morning early in July Mike Prim came up the staircase of the National Bank Building. He stood for a moment in the hall, breathing heavily from the exertion of bearing his great weight up the steps. He took off his straw hat and mopped his red face. Then he glared at the door of Judge Regis's office.
"That's the long-legged old devil's horse who's put the women up to all this damnation!" he growled as he entered his own office and closed the door.
He took off his coat, then his collar and tie, flung them with his hat on a chair, and sat down to his desk. Then he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. He placed his elbows on the desk and his enormous folded chin in his two hands. So he sat, a monstrous figure, with his great paunch filling his white shirt like a concealed balloon, with his hideously hairy arms naked halfway, and his thick hands purple beneath the weight of his amorphously fat face, his little reptilian eyes staring at the opposite wall.
He was at his wits' end. He was not making good at his business, and he knew it. What was worse, everybody else knew it. He had had few callers of late. Campaign collections had dwindled to almost nothing. They were getting bold in their refusals to contribute at all. "Why didn't he do something?" "What were they paying him for if it was not to do something?" "Was he going to let a set of fanatical women down him and take things in their own hands?" These were some of the questions they asked him which he could not answer satisfactorily. In vain he advised patience, and even more vainly he vowed he could and would stop the women's damphulishness at the proper time. They did not believe him; they pointed out that business had already stopped. From being the one who threatened, he had become the one who cajoled, while every man who came in offered him veiled threats instead of dollars.
He was furious, and he was obliged to conceal his fury. He hated these rebellious men even more than he hated the upstart women. He was determined, if the opportunity offered, to be revenged upon them for their insolence. But how? This was the matter he revolved in his snake-licking mind as he stared at the wall, and he was in a hurry to reach a solution of his difficulty. Stark Coleman had called him before he was out of bed that morning to say that there had been a citizens' meeting the night before, and that he, Coleman, would be up to see him at ten o'clock. In the first place, why had he not been notified of the citizens' meeting. He usually presided on these occasions when the tutelary deities of Jordantown gathered in Coleman's office, or more frequently in his own office, to discuss the ways and means by which the principles of the Democratic party could be made to contribute most liberally to the liberty of man, especially in Jordantown. In the second place, the tone of Coleman's voice was cool, offensively so. He detected a note of command in it. Suppose Coleman should be coming up to inform him of certain changes in the policy which would govern the manifestations of the democratic principle? In short, suppose he was about to be dismissed from his office? True, it was an office without a name, but it had been a lucrative position.