Scarborough laughed. "I haven't been digging a cyclone cellar. I've been trying to manufacture a cyclone."
There were thirty-three clear days before the meeting of the convention. He wasted not an hour of them on the manufacturing towns; he went to the country—to the farmers and the villagers, the men who lived each man in his own house, on his own soil from which he earned his own living. Up and down and across the state he went, speaking, organizing, planning, inspiring—he and the coterie of young men who looked up to him as their leader and followed him in this desperate assault as courageously as if victory were assured.
Not long before the convention he paused at ex-Judge Bowen's country place and spent two hours with him in his great, quiet, cool library.
"Isn't it inspiring," Scarborough said, "to see so many young men in arms for a principle?"
The old man slowly shook his magnificent white head and smiled at the young man. "Principles without leaders go begging," he replied. "Men rally to the standard only when the right voice calls. The right voice at the right time." He laid his hand on Scarborough's shoulder with affection and pride. "If the moment should come for you to think of it, do not forget that the leader is the principle, and that in this fight the leader is not I—but you."
XIX.
PAULINE GOES INTO POLITICS.
Larkin decided that the state convention should be held at Saint X because his machine was most perfect there. The National Woolens Company, the Consolidated Pipe and Wire Company and the Indiana Oil and Gas Corporation—the three principal political corporations in the state—had their main plants there and were in complete political control. While Larkin had no fear of the Scarborough movement, regarding it as a sentimental outburst in the rank and file of the party that would die away when its fomenter had been "read out of the party" at the convention by the regular organization, still he had been in the game too long to take unnecessary chances. He felt that it would be wise to have the delegates assemble where all the surroundings would be favorable and where his ablest and confidential men could do their work in peace and quiet.
The convention was to, meet on the last Thursday in September. On the preceding Monday morning, Culver—Dumont's small, thin, stealthy private secretary—arrived at Saint X and, after making an appointment with Merriweather for half-past twelve, went out to the Eyrie to go through a lot of accumulated domestic business with Mrs. Dumont. When she in a most formal and unencouraging manner invited him to stop there, he eagerly accepted. "Thank you so much," he said effusively. "To be perfectly frank, I've been tempted to invite myself. I have some valuables with me that I don't feel at all easy about. If I should be robbed, it would be a very serious matter. Would it be asking too much of you to ask you to put a package in your jewel safe?"