"It is already turned out," asserted the young man, not affecting to misunderstand. "We neither buy votes nor spend illegitimate money in this campaign."
The stout assertion was good as far as it went; the new division counsel made it and believed it. But on his way to the governor's mansion, a little later, he could not help wondering if he had been altogether candid in making it. The offices in the up-town sky-scraper were not exclusively a railroad social centre where the disinterested voter could come and have the facts ladled out to him without fear or favor on the part of the ladler. They had come to be also a rallying-point for a heterogeneous crowd of ward-workers, wire-pullers, and small politicians, most of whom were anxious to be employed or retained as henchmen. Some of these "stretcher men," as Blount contemptuously called them, had been employed in past campaigns; others were still the beneficiaries of the railroad, holding pay-roll places which Blount acutely suspected were chiefly sinecures.
Latterly, this contingent of strikers and heelers had been greatly augmented, and it was beginning to make its demands more emphatic. A dozen times a day Blount had the worn phrase, "nothing for nothing," dinned into his ears, and he was beginning to harbor a suspicion that his office had been made a dumping-ground for all the other departments.
Seeing Gantry at madam the governor's lady's reception, Blount took an early opportunity of cornering the traffic manager in one of the otherwise deserted smoking-dens, and when he had made sure there were no eavesdroppers plunged at once into the middle of things.
"See here, Dick," he began, "you fellows downtown are making my office a cesspool, and I won't stand for it. Garrigan, that saloon-keeper in the second ward, came up to-day to ask for a free ticket to Worthington and return; and when I pinned him down he admitted that you'd sent him to me."
"I did," said Gantry, grinning. "Why otherwise have we got a post-graduate, double-certificated political manager, I'd like to know?"
Blount dropped into a chair and felt in his pockets for his cigar-case.
"I guess we may as well fight this thing to a finish right here and now, Dick," he said coolly. "I'm not chief vote buyer for the Transcontinental Company—I'm not any kind of a vote buyer."
"Who said you were?" retorted the traffic manager.