He went to the telegraph-office, wrote and filed his despatch, and then, lighting a cigar, strolled slowly through the streets. It was not eleven o'clock, but it seemed that everybody except himself was in bed and asleep. The lights in all the houses were out, and there was no sound whatever save that of the wind as it came in from the prairie and stirred the new foliage of the trees. "And this is our wicked America, for which my foreign friends used to offer me sincere condolences!" murmured Harley.
But he returned quickly to his own mental disturbance. He felt as he used to feel on the eve of a battle that all knew was coming off, there on the other side of the world. He was then with an army which he was not at all sure was in the right; but when he sat on a hill-top in the night, looking at the flickering lights of the enemy ahead, and knowing that the combat would be joined at dawn, he could not resist a feeling of comradeship with that army to which, for a time—and in a sense, perhaps, alien—he belonged. Those soldiers about him became friends, and the enemy out there was an enemy for him, too. It was the same now when he was to go on a long journey with Jimmy Grayson, who stood upon a platform of which he had many doubts.
He turned back to the hotel, and when he entered the lobby a swarm of men fell upon him and demanded the instant delivery of any news which he might have and they had not. They were correspondents who had come by every train that afternoon—Hobart, Churchill, Blaisdell, Lawson, and others, making more than a score—some representing journals that would support Grayson, and others journals that would call him names, many and bad.
"We hear that you have been to dinner with the candidate," said Churchill, the representative of the New York Monitor, a sneering sheet owned by one foreigner and edited by another, which kept its eye on Europe, and considered European opinion final, particularly in regard to American affairs; "so you can tell us if it is true that he picks his teeth at table with a fork."
"You are a good man for the Monitor, Churchill," said Harley, sharply. "Your humor is in perfect accord with the high taste displayed, and you show the same dignity and consideration in your references to political opponents."
"Oh, I see," said Churchill, sneering just as he had been taught to sneer by the Monitor. "He is the first guest to dine with the Presidential nominee, and he is overpowered by the honor."
"You shut up, Churchill!" said Hobart, another of the correspondents. "You sha'n't pick a quarrel with Harley, and you sha'n't be a mischief-maker here. There are enough of us to see that you don't."
Harley turned his back scornfully upon Churchill, who said nothing more, and began to tell his friends of Grayson.
"He is an orator," he said. "We know that by undoubted report, and his manner is simple and most agreeable. He has more of the quality called personal magnetism than any other man I ever saw."
"What of his ability?" asked Tremaine, the oldest of the correspondents.