"And your people are saying I am for you," I retorted.
"But surely you are not against me and for Schoolcraft? What has he done for you?"
"And what have you done for me?" I replied,—a mere interrogation, without any feeling in it. "Tell me. I try to pay my debts."
His eyes shifted. "Nothing, Sayler, nothing," he said. "I didn't mean to insinuate that you owed me anything. Still, I thought—you wouldn't have been state chairman, except—"
As he halted, I said, "Except that you needed me. And you will recall that I took it only on condition that I should be free."
"Then you are opposed to me," he said. "Nobody can be on the fence in this fight."
"I do not think you can be elected," I replied.
As he sat silent, the puffs under his eyes swelled into bags and the pallor of his skin changed to the gray which makes the face look as if a haze or a cloud lay upon it. I pitied him so profoundly that, had I ventured to speak, I should have uttered impulsive generosities that would have cost me dear. How rarely are our impulses of generosity anything but impulses to folly, injustice, and wrong!
"We shall see," was all he said, and he rose and shambled away.
They told me he made a pitiful sight, wheedling and whining among the legislators. But he degraded himself to some purpose. He succeeded in rallying round him enough members to deadlock the party caucus for a month,—members from the purely rural districts, where the sentiment of loyalty is strongest, where his piety and unselfish devotion to the party were believed in, and his significance as a "statesman." I let this deadlock continue—forty-one for Dunkirk, forty-one for Schoolcraft—until I felt that the party throughout the state was heartily sick of the struggle. Then Woodruff bought, at twelve thousand dollars apiece, two Dunkirk men to vote to transfer the contest to the floor of a joint session of the two houses.