Colonel Phillips was a sincere, honest, candid, plain-spoken politician—for politician he was if he was anything, while yet so fearless of party whips and mandates that his name was synonymous with honesty and lofty civic purpose. So, feeling his own purposes ringing true to the declarations of his party's platform he did not deem it necessary to direct the distracted attention of the people to these prosy matters of statecraft when they were taking such a friendly interest in his headgear. If they were willing to blindly follow the hat, he knew in his honest heart that the man under it would carry that hat along paths of political righteousness.
He was indeed playing upon every chord of popular feeling and seeking the favour of every man with a ballot. He had always fought to win in every contest he had entered, from single-stick to war, and he made no exception of this race for the chieftaincy of the Republic. It was to be expected, therefore, that the large negro vote in pivotal States, as well as his natural love of justice and his admiration for a brave soldiery, would lead him to pay enthusiastic and deserved tribute to the negro troops who had served in the Venezuelan campaign. He paid these tributes religiously and brilliantly in every speech he made, but always in general and impersonal terms and without a hint of his own debt to a corporal of the 10th Cavalry. There was no need for such minutiæ of course, for that was a purely personal affair between him and an unknown negro who might be dead and buried for all he knew; while, besides, a recital of these unimportant details would necessitate a fruitless revision of other incidental ideas now pleasantly fixed in the public mind. He sometimes entertained his wife and daughters with the story of how a trooper of the 10th had saved his life, but never did he sound the personal note in public.
Colonel Phillips made votes with every speech and it looked as if he would win. He deserved to win, for he was honest, capable, clean. As election day drew near the opposing candidate received a confidential letter from his campaign manager in which that veteran politician said:
"I have lost and won many hats in my political career, but this is the first time I have ever been called upon to fight a hat—just a hat—to settle a Presidency. This is a hat campaign; and you have evidently made the mistake of going bareheaded all your life. You seem, too, to have limited yourself to a home-grown ancestry. The Colonel is simply wearing a hat and claiming kin with everything from a Plymouth Rock rooster to a palmetto-tree. The newspapers are getting on my nerves with their unending references to that campaign-hat and Phillips' ding-dong about the unity and virility of American blood and his mother's being a South Carolinian."
* * * * *
"The cards are running against us."
CHAPTER VII
Colonel Phillips' daughters were enjoying life to the full in their long summer outing on the St. Lawrence. The older, Elise, had just finished with the schools and was free from many of the restraints which the strict and old-fashioned ideas of her mother had put upon her during her girlhood, and was filled with a lively enjoyment of her first untrammelled association with the males of her kind. Helen was still a girl, and her mother yet threw about her all the guards and fences that properly hedge about the days of maidenhood. But this did not in the slightest check the flow of Helen's joy in life, for the matter of sex in her associates was not an element in her happiness. Boy or girl, it mattered not to her, if her fellow in the hour's sport was quick-witted, quick-moving and mischief-loving. The extent of her thoughts of love was that it and its victims were most excellent objects of banter and ridicule; and she found the incipient affair between Elise and Evans Rutledge a source of much fun.
"Are you a hero?" she once asked Mr. Rutledge solemnly.
"Not to my own knowledge," Rutledge answered. "Why?"