Harley was thoroughly miserable. He could guess—no, he did not guess, he knew the cause of "King" Plummer's bolt, and he knew, too, that if it were not for himself it would never have occurred; he had wrecked all the future of others, nor in making such a wreck had he secured his own happiness, provided even that he was selfish enough to be happy when others were ruined.
Sylvia, too, was sunk in the depths. She did not have to be told that her aunt had written to Mr. Plummer; she guessed that Mr. Plummer had received some warning, some message, it did not matter from whom, nothing else could cause him to burst forth with such violence, and the very nature of the case forbade her from speaking; she could only keep silent, knowing that significant talk was going on all around her, and pass sleepless nights and troubled days.
The situation brought a thrill of satisfaction and interest to one man on the train, and he was Churchill. The cumulative effect of "King" Plummer's bolt might force Jimmy Grayson off the track, and it was not yet too late to put up another candidate. Such a thing had never been done, but that was no reason why it could not succeed, and he telegraphed Mr. Goodnight that Mr. Grayson was very despondent, and that those about him knew he did not have a ghost of a chance.
Churchill guessed close to the cause of the Plummer bolt, but he was not sure, and for that and other reasons he at once sought an interview with the nominee.
Mr. Grayson was courteous, and seemingly not as despondent as Churchill had described him. He said that he could not speak of Mr. Plummer's defection, because he had no official knowledge of the fact; it was merely report, and hence he could not comment on what was not proved. Mr. Churchill, he knew, would readily recognize the unfitness of such a thing, nor could he tell what he should do in supposititious cases, because, even if the latter came true, circumstances might give them another appearance.
Churchill skirmished as delicately as he could about the subject of Sylvia and the surmise that she was the key to the situation, which, if true, would make one of the greatest stories told in a newspaper; but here the candidate was impervious. Not only was he impervious, but he seemed to be densely ignorant; all the hints of Churchill glided off him like arrows from a steel breast-plate, all the most delicate and skilful art of the interviewer failed. So far as concerned the subject of politics, Sylvia was unknown to Mr. Grayson. Baffled upon this interesting point, Churchill retired to write his interview; but as he rested his pad upon the car-seat and sharpened his pencil he flung out a feeler or two.
"I say, Hobart," he said to the mystery man, who sat just in front of him, "I think there's something at the bottom of this Plummer revolt that we haven't probed. Now, isn't it the truth that Miss Morgan has thrown him over, and that he is taking his revenge on her uncle?"
Hobart glanced up the car, and noticed that Harley was not within hearing. Then he replied, gravely:
"Churchill, I don't believe that Miss Morgan has broken her engagement with the 'King'—she'll marry him yet if he says so—but I do believe that she has some connection with this affair. What it is, I don't know, and I'm mighty glad that I don't have to speak of it in my despatches; it's too intangible."
But Churchill was not so scrupulous. Without giving any names, he wove into his four-thousand-word despatch a very beautiful and touching romance, in which Jimmy Grayson figured rather badly—in fact, somewhat as an evil genius—and the Monitor, dealing in the fine vein of irony which it considered its strongest card, wrote scornfully of a campaign into which personal issues were obtruding to such an extent that they were shattering it. The Monitor still affected to see some good in Mr. Grayson, but put the bad in such high relief that the good merely set it off, like those little patches that ladies wear on their faces. And the mystery of the Plummer bolt, involving a young and beautiful woman, just hinted at in the despatches, heightened the effect of the story. "King" Plummer himself appeared to the reading public as a martyr, and even to many old partisans party rebellion seemed in this case honorable and heroic.