I did not answer,—how could I explain? Never forget her! On the contrary, I knew that I must forget, and that I must work and grow and so heal the wound and cover its scar. I lost not a day in beginning.
To those few succeeding months I owe the power I have had all these years to concentrate my mind upon whatever I will to think about; for in those months I fought the fight I dared not lose—fought it and won. Let those who have never loved talk of remembering the dead.
I turned away from her grave with the resolve that my first act of power would be to stamp out Dominick. But for him she would not have gone for many a year. It was his persecutions that involved us in the miseries which wasted her and made her fall a victim to the mortal disease. It was his malignity that poisoned her last years, which, but for him, would have been happy.
As my plans for ousting Dunkirk took shape, I saw clearly that, if he were to be overthrown at once, I must use part of the existing control of the machine of the party,—it would take several years, at least three, to build up an entirely new control. To work quickly, I must use Croffut, Dunkirk's colleague in the Senate. And Croffut was the creature of Dominick.
Early in September Woodruff came to me, at Fredonia, his manner jubilant. "I can get Dominick," he exclaimed. "He is furious against Dunkirk because he's just discovered that Dunkirk cheated him out of a hundred thousand dollars on that perpetual street railway franchise, last winter."
"But we don't want Dominick," said I.
My face must have reflected my mind, for Woodruff merely replied, "Oh, very well. Of course that alters the case."
"We must get Croffut without him," I went on.
Woodruff shook his head. "Can't get him," he said. "Dominick controls the two southern ranges of counties. He finances his own machine from what he collects from vice and crime in those cities. He gives that branch of the plum tree to the boys. He keeps the bigger one, the corporations, for himself."