"Whata you say?" Angel kept his hold upon his friend, but the reference to their recent occupation brought a glint of anger into his own eyes.
By way of beginning his reply, Hermann smilingly returned the knife to its owner, who seized it with a growl of malice.
"Neffer mind vhat I say den," he answered. "Vhat I say now is 'Goot-nighd.' You two get oud."
He raised his thick arm to point to the door, but in the manner of its raising there was another significance. For a moment Angel and Mirka met hotly his steady gaze. Then the bar-keeper raised carelessly his other hand: it held a stout bung-starter.
The two men, with a common impulse, turned and silently left the place.
Hermann was not afraid of them. He knew that his threat of betrayal had been idle, for the excellent reason that there was no quarter in which betrayal would be effective, and he told himself that, as soon as their anger and their drunkenness had in some measure subsided, the plotters would recognize this. So he whistled complacently as he polished the bright surface of the bar and did not hesitate, when he began at last to wash and put away the glasses, to turn his back to the swinging door of the saloon. The campaign was not one that was considered important and, personally, he cared but little about it or what enmities it might awaken.
The campaigners cared, however, a great deal. There was in no sane mind any question of the result, but so mighty is custom that there were few sane minds that did not publicly pretend to be in doubt upon the issue.
For many days previously, any outsider, reading the newspapers or attending the mass-meetings in Cooper Union and Carnegie Hall, would have supposed that a prodigious battle was waging and that the result would be, until the last shot, in doubt. There were terrible scareheads, brutal cartoons, and extra editions. As the real problem was whether one organization of needy men should remain in control, or whether another should replace it, there were few matters of policy to be discussed; and so the speechmaking and the printing resolved themselves into personal investigations, and attacks upon character. Private defectives were hired, records searched, neighbors questioned, old enemies sought out, and family feuds revived. Desks were broken open, letters bought, anonymous communications mailed, boyhood indiscretions unearthed, and women and men hired to wheedle, to commit perjury, to entrap. Whatever was discovered, forged, stolen, manufactured—whatever truth or falsehood could be seized by whatever means—was blazoned in the papers, shrieked by the newsboys, bawled from the cart-tails at the corners under the campaign banners, in the light of the torches and before the cheering crowds. It would all be over in a very short while; in a very short while there would pass one another, with pleasant smiles, in court, at church, and along Broadway, the distinguished gentlemen that were now, before big audiences, calling one another adulterers and thieves; but it is customary for distinguished gentlemen so to call one another during a manly campaign in this successful democracy of ours, and it seems to be an engrossing occupation while the chance endures.
Though he often trembled, Wesley Dyker, perhaps because his records of any sort were as yet but brief, escaped with a fairly clean skin this Yahoo discharge, but the downpour continued all about him with tremendous vigor and at tremendous cost. The Republican leaders, fully expecting defeat, assessed their supporters just as heavily as if they were certain to triumph, spent much time and more money and no end of breath. The Reformers, under varying factional names, bewildered, sometimes advisedly, the independent voter by here joining one leading party, there endorsing another, and in a third place clamoring for a ballot so split and so subdivided that the average man could in no wise comprehend it when marked. The Socialists, to be sure, went along calmly enough, confessing their numerical weakness and securely seeing in the small increase of the present day the promise of the large majority of the distant morrow. But all the while the Democratic organization thundered an inch forward in the light and ran a mile forward in the darkness by precisely the same powers as were invoked, with so much smaller results, by the Republicans and the Reformers.
Not that there was any reason to doubt the organization's victory. There was none. But every organization always insists that, no matter how easy the skirmish, its leaders must so manage that it comes out of the fray to all appearances stronger than it came out of the fray preceding. Each majority must be larger than the last, and so the lists are padded, and the repeaters imported, and the lodging-houses colonized, and the organization, like the frog in La Fontaine's fable, though with less reason, swells and swells against the hour when it shall finally burst. The saloons were crowded; it was freely predicted that, the season being prosperous, votes would go at no lower than two dollars, and, in some quarters and some instances, as high as five dollars apiece.