Krantz watched the reverend figure out of the smoking-room with his narrow eyes, and for a time sat as motionless as a dozing crocodile. Finally he roused and lounged toward the door, where he received a revelation. Bag in hand, the Boss, whom he imaged above stairs between sheets, was unostentatiously letting himself out into the night.
Shelby went directly to his berth on reaching the station, and while the car remained in the train shed, slept. The departure wakened him, and after useless striving he resigned himself to his insomnia, raised his window curtain, and lay watching the staid procession of Dutch-named towns picketting the river banks. A mimic tempest fretted the Tappan Sea, whose bravado dwindled to mere guerilla marauding in the Highlands, and vanished altogether where the Storm King held the pass and heralded the dawn. Presently the purple Catskills marched and countermarched into line with cloud banners streaming rose-red in the sunrise. Yesterday was blotted in to-day. The watcher also put yesterday away, dressed, and left his train all in a tranquillity which even the knowledge that a stateroom door neighboring his berth had just emitted the Boss could not have ruffled.
At his accustomed hour the governor entered the executive chamber. Like the steaming earth and the park elms without in their tender green, this stately room seemed swept by the breath of spring. The warm tones of the hangings, the Spanish leather, the lavish mahogany, glowed responsive to the fingering sunlight, and the painted simulacra of his predecessors looked down almost benignantly from their gilded frames. The little cell behind the wainscoting, into which the increasing complexity of affairs had forced the recent executives, claimed him during most of his working hours; but it was as rightful tenant of this vast chamber that he felt most the governor of New York. It epitomized for him not merely the commonwealth of the present, huge as it was, but the whole historic past since the September day when Hendrik Hudson's Half Moon dropped anchor down yonder in the stream. He felt himself no more the successor of these frock-coated moderns whose oil presentments covered panelling and frieze than of the periwigs who ruled before them. He was the heir of Stuyvesant, Dongan, and Lord Lovelace no less than of Cleveland, Van Buren, and John Jay. There had been sturdy souls among that company; men who had hoped mightily, striven mightily, sometimes achieved mightily. Some few had attained the presidency of the United States; some barely missed the prize; some pursued it to their bitter graves. Where would he rank? According to a newspaper he carried in his hand, it lay with him this day to determine. Yet for one so omniscient, the editor was chary of counsel.
Shelby went on to his little inner room and took up the day's routine with his secretary, who casually dropped the news that the Boss had that morning arrived in Albany and begun to receive the faithful at an early hour. Whether owing to this cause or not, Shelby's own quota of legislative callers was small. At ten o'clock he met briefly the delegates of a labor organization, who in an embarrassed fashion had much to say of plutocrats and trusts; and with their departure came a fluttering invasion from a young ladies' boarding-school, headed by a chaperone laboriously intent on improving the girlish mind. All requested autographs, which were readily supplied from the stock in hand, and a round half-dozen asked the private secretary in strictest confidence if the governor were a married man.
He had but just returned to his desk when an orderly handed him the card of the Boss.
"You'll see him here?" asked the man.
"No. In the executive chamber," answered Shelby.
The Boss stood beside the massive fireplace, gazing pensively up at a portrait of Washington.
"Ah, good morning, governor," he called, turning slowly. "I trust I'm well within the official hours."
"Quite."