CHAPTER XXXVII
THE CALL
In the big living-room, now flooded with the mountain sunshine that streamed in through the open door, Richard Brent leaned to knock the ashes from his pipe against the end of the hewn bench on which he sat. Then he looked up at Sevier standing in front of the empty fire-place.
"Well," he asked, "what do you think of it? How's that for a chance, eh?"
Sevier nodded. One hand was tugging at his dark beard, the other was clasping and unclasping nervously behind him. "The new organisation can't win, of course," he answered quietly. "Politically speaking it's too young, and it lacks leaders. But it can make a strong showing, I should think."
Brent laughed as he explored his capacious tobacco-pouch. "Especially if the platform is built wide enough." He pointed to a newspaper he had brought with him, that lay beside him. "That editorial of mine hits the nail squarely on the head. There is one issue and only one which will draw in all the elements opposed to the party that now rules—that is the liquor issue. That must go in!"
A quick gleam crossed Harry's face. None but he knew what liquor had done for him, no eye but his might see the pitiful trail it had dragged across his burnished life!
Brent laughed again. "It's strange that they don't see it!" he said. "Can't they deduce anything. Look at the growth of similar movements in other states. Do they really believe that any genuine good-government party can sit in the same saddle with John Barleycorn? That's why the thing has always failed in the past—compromise, temporise, fusion. Fiddlesticks! why can't they take the bull by the horns? They would, too, if there was some one who would crystallise the thing in their minds." He shot a keen side-glance at Harry. "When you made that Civic Club speech last year," he said shrewdly, "I picked you for the Peter the Hermit of the new Gospel. And then, confound it! you bury yourself in the wilds up here, while every one thinks you've gone abroad, and I have to pack my rheumatic bones twenty miles on an infernal burro, to dig you out of your shell!"
Harry's eyes had been absently fixed on the spread-out newspaper. Something in the other's words, in his manner, caught him. A colour came to his cheeks. "Dig me out of my shell?" he repeated. "What do you mean by that?"