"Roorback!" Bowers caught at the straw. "We can make a sweeping denial, then?"

"Whole hog or none." He smiled sarcastically into the face which had so suddenly gone bright. "The truth has been so far outstripped that you can't see it with a telescope. Get handbills printed denying the story, denounce it as a partisan trick, and sign the statement yourself as chairman of the County Committee. Have them distributed all over town, and station men—men, mind you, not boys—with a supply just outside electioneering limits at each polling place. If the yarn spreads elsewhere in the district, wire our people to take similar measures."

"Ross!" Bowers called him back. "I don't need to tell you how glad I am. I never believed it of you."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," laughed Shelby; "but I'd rather you'd hurry the handbills."

He had a more urgent reason yet, for wishing Bowers to take himself off. A block or two up the street, where the trees began to interlace their denuded branches and the court-house common sparkled with frosty rime, he had seen the Widow Weatherwax accost Ruth Temple. The girl had stopped when addressed, but almost immediately walked on, as if to escape the little busybody who, nothing daunted, trotted at elbow for a rod or more. Then Ruth came down the slope alone, and was intercepted by Shelby at her gate.

"I must speak with you," he said abruptly. "My good name is being dragged in the dirt, and I must assure you—"

"No, no," Ruth interposed.

"I tell you I must. You have heard this calumny. I saw her stop you—the woman who is peddling it from door to door. I must speak—it's no time for mincing words—speak to you personally—Bowers will answer to my constituency—speak to you personally, I say, appeal to you to believe in me. You don't know what your belief in me has been—my inspiration, my safeguard. Don't take it away—it's vital; don't deprive me of all this on hearsay. Say you'll not. Give me a sign—"

"Go win in spite of it." In a single wave of generous impulse she had spoken, put out her hand, and slipped past him, flushing, through the gate.

"I can't fail now," he exulted, detaining her an instant. "And victory means so much. It means—listen: I'll tell you a thing I've breathed to no one else; success to-day means the governorship two years hence! It's been fairly promised me—the governorship! That's the great stake—part of it, rather; you're the rest; you who believe in me and bid me win. I've not changed my mind since the day we rode together. I told you to think over what I said, and I've given you time. I meant then to come to you on the night of my election—a victor—and so I shall. I couldn't know that I should have the executive mansion to offer you, but it's none too good. I'll come! I'll come!"



CHAPTER XIII

There was more solid ground than mere confidence in his destiny behind Shelby's bold front. The earliest mail delivery had shed a glimmer of hope in the shape of a midnight note from Mrs. Hilliard. He did not require her reminder that the voting strength of Little Poland was no longer to be counted in his column—he had thought and fought that out in the small hours; but he did need and pounced upon the statement that Little Poland's master would be out of town the greater part of election day. The scrawl ended with an appointment for a clandestine meeting at eleven o'clock, toward which he now bent his steps on leaving Ruth.

Mrs. Hilliard had named a cemetery on the immediate outskirts as the rendezvous—a choice on whose evil omen Shelby wasted no thought. In the heyday of their flirtation he and Mrs. Hilliard had made frequent use of it as a Platonic trysting-place, and he climbed the silent paths toward the summit of the mount, as it was styled in that level land, with no sentiment save approval of her wisdom in seizing upon the one spot in all New Babylon whose privacy was certain.

Mrs. Hilliard, shivering in the lee of a pretentious granite shaft which bore her family name, was more susceptible.

"Bleak—desolate," she chattered. "What an end for our Fools' Paradise. But where else could we escape their prying eyes?"

"You've heard what they're saying?"

She nodded listlessly.

"Who has not heard?" As they huddled in the shelter of the monument she brooded over the plain below wherein the canal, livid, yet unfrozen still, half girdled the town in a serpentine fold. Each chimney curled a light spiral into the nipping air. "Under every one a wagging tongue," she said. "It's known to every soul except one."

"You mean he's still in the dark?"

"He can't know yet. He took an early train to Centreport. It's some quarry business that could not wait. I remembered it last night—after—after you had gone; so I wrote. It was past two o'clock before I dared steal out to post the letter."

Shelby shrugged into the collar of his ulster.

"I don't deserve all this," he muttered.

"Don't say that. You've done things, too. You've stood for—things; something to pin faith to. You are—"

"I'm your good friend—remember that."

"Friend!"

He drew her farther into shelter, and tucked her furs about her throat.

"Now concentrate your mind," he enjoined, "and tell me exactly the lay of the land. Did he communicate with the foreman at the quarry before he left?"

"Yes. I overheard him telephone Kiska before breakfast. He said he'd return at half-past three. There's no train to-day from Centreport till then."

"And there is no other till the polls close. He said nothing, then, about voting the hands before afternoon?"

"They're at work this morning."

"On election day! You're sure?"

"They're working half a day on full day's pay. Joe's hurrying some contract through. I don't understand it very well, but the stone has to be shipped before the canal freezes on account of—something—freight rates—"

"Never mind that. What did he say to Kiska about voting—that the men should be ready at such and such a time?"

"No, no; I know about that. Before anything happened it was arranged that the men should vote about four o'clock. He merely told Kiska he'd return at three-thirty."

"Good, good!" exclaimed Shelby, making ready for action. "Every naturalized mother's son in Little Poland shall vote for me before the train can even whistle. Now, you go home, Cora," he charged, "and drink something hot against this graveyard chill. Keep a stiff upper lip—that's my creed. Everything blows over in time. The scandal is so tall that it will topple of itself. Nobody will believe it after election."

"But Joe? Think of him when he learns what they're saying, and that you've outwitted him."

Shelby grinned.

"That's the situation's one humorous phase," said he. "The two things will neutralize one another's effect,—like Kilkenny cats, you know. He'll not dare raise a row about the votes for fear of lending color to the scandal."

But Mrs. Hilliard, whose sense of humor was sluggish this morning, rejoined bitterly;—

"The row will fall to me."

"He needn't know your part in this—the matter of the votes; and as for the other thing—well, after all, he is your husband, hard and fast, and you'd best try and patch things up."

She straightened, flashing him a stony look, and he braced himself for a hurricane; but to his equal discomfiture she went down beside the shaft in a passionate fit of weeping.

"I should be under here," she sobbed; "I should be under here."

Shelby, tingling to be gone, shifted from foot to foot, and offered some blundering solace which she put away.

"You've ceased to care," she accused.

He protested, adding indiscreetly that she had done too much for him for that.

"You've filled the place he should have filled!"

Shelby was silent, goaded to torture by the lapse of precious minutes.

"There's only blackness ahead!"

"Don't take the dark view," entreated Shelby, groping desperately for a bright one. "The man can't live always—so much older than you—and then—your life's your own—"

The bowed figure shuddered.

"It's a dreadful thing to do—but I've thought that, too. I can't help it. You—you are the real one—the real one—" She waited.

"Yes." It was screwed from him.

"The real one—and if—I know I don't need your promise—but if—"

"Yes, yes; of course if—"

Neither of them would name the contingency. Shelby contrived a leave-taking, and bounded down the terraced slopes. It was quite noon when he reached the Tuscarora House, but without a thought of food, he got his horse and buggy from the livery, speeding the harnessing with his own hands, and whipped away for Little Poland.

On reaching the Hilliard quarries he confronted unexpected obstacles. The men had quitted work and scattered to their homes, and Kiska was to be discovered neither in nor around the little office. However, the Polish lad in temporary charge, Kiska's own son, was not slow to recognize the original of the campaign lithograph which in his home enjoyed honors second only to a highly-colored Madonna, and went flying in search of his father. Shelby took instant advantage of his absence to telephone Bowers, whom he luckily located at his midday meal. He learned that the handbills had been sown broadcast with encouraging effect, and that the general opinion of the voting public leaned toward unbelief. Shelby told his whereabouts, and requested the prompt services of Jasper Hinchey and three or four kindred spirits, ringing off after certain mysterious, though concise, directions regarding a concert hall in the Flats, which he meant shortly to utilize.

He had barely hung up the receiver when a telegraph messenger from town brought a despatch for Kiska. Shelby's breath shortened at sight of the yellow envelope, but he mustered a specious unconcern, telling the boy that the foreman's return, though certain, was not within immediate prospect, and volunteered to receipt for the message himself—an offer readily embraced by the lad, who, without a glance, pocketed the book in which Shelby scrawled Kiska's own name, and fared away with a head aflame from the bonfires of the coming night.

The envelope was loosely gummed, and gave under gentle persuasion. Shelby threw a glance from either window of the narrow room, and drew the paper from its cover. It was from Hilliard at Centreport, and announced that he had missed his train. The reader's delight was qualified by the succeeding statement that he should come by the canal, and that the men were to be in readiness.

"He's hired a launch or tug," commented Shelby. "Horses aren't to be had to-day for rubies or fine gold."

He replaced the message, sealed the envelope, and flung it on the table, catching sight of Kiska, as he did so, striding along the canal bank toward the office. The big Pole burst into the room a moment later, his simple face aglow at the meeting, and sputtered broken excuses for keeping his preserver waiting. Shelby shook both his grimy hands, and smilingly supposed that Kiska had made up his mind how he should vote. Kiska's English was uncertain, but there was no misreading his gesticulation.

"And Little Poland?" insinuated the candidate, blandly.

"Leetle Poland ees ein beeg vote," Kiska eagerly assured him; "joost ein beeg vote for Meester Shelby. Whan you save me, Meester Heelyard he say eef anybody no want to vote for you, he can joost valk aus de qvarry."

"Very kind of him," said Shelby. "Now, since you all know your own minds, I'd take it as a favor if you would get to the polls at the earliest possible moment. The voting promises to be heavy toward the close, and I don't care to have my friends inconvenienced. By the way, Kiska," he broke off carelessly "there's a telegram for you over there. It came not ten minutes ago."

By dint of facial contortion Kiska puzzled out the meaning, and handed the message to Shelby, who gave it grave perusal.

"Ah," said he. "You see he's anxious about it, too. If there was any way of reaching him by wire, we could relieve his mind; as there is not, the wise course is to go ahead. His coming by boat is uncertain. It will be a nice little surprise for him to find that you've got the votes all in."

So it seemed to Kiska, and the business of rallying Little Poland to its civic duties was instantly got under way. Here, too, were obstacles. Having been told to present themselves at a later hour, the villagers were in all states of unreadiness; but by impressing this helper and that, doing the work of three men himself, and with the reenforcement of Jap Hinchey and his co-workers, whom Bowers hurried to the scene in a hired carriage whose bravery of varnish made mock of their rags, Kiska at last collected his compatriots. The rented vehicle was urged back at a gallop to Bowers and continued public usefulness, and the whole body of enfranchised Poles, under the escort of Kiska, Jap Hinchey, and his fellows, trudged off in groups of five and ten to New Babylon.

Little Poland lay within the same voting precinct as the Flats, and when Shelby had assured himself that the straggling column was finally in motion, he rode on in advance toward this quarter and the concert hall to which he had made mysterious reference in his telephoned directions to the Hon. Seneca Bowers. From the elevation of a canal bridge he searched the waterway for a sign of Hilliard's coming, pondering anxiously whether a pillar of smoke at the horizon's rim were his herald; but a glance at his watch reassured. The train which Hilliard had missed was barely due, and to cover the distance by boat meant an additional hour at least. Employing a street urchin to lead his horse to its stable, he struck out on foot for the Flats.

At the tawdry concert hall everything was as it should be, and in the brief interval before the arrival of the Poles he received inspiriting news from one of his workers. Money was flowing, buckets of it, but beyond doubt they held the longer purse. Their policy of offering high prices to the floaters at the outset had drained the disciples of the late Chuck O'Rourke before twelve o'clock, and patriots were now to be had at bargain rates. Some few conscientious souls who could not see their way to a Shelby vote had been induced to stay away from the polls altogether; and at least a dozen irreconcilables had been laid by the heels with bad whiskey before they had done protesting that not all the powers of darkness could deter them from casting an unsullied ballot under the emblem of the Square.

The Poles came hulking in, Shelby himself keeping tally at the door, and when Kiska had urged the last loiterer over the threshold, the key was turned. Drinks were sparingly circulated, and Kiska harangued the crowd briefly in Polish, hammering in Shelby's instructions for their conduct in the voting booths, and impressing them with the fact that good cheer in plenty would await them here on their return. Under the efficient supervision of Jasper Hinchey and his lieutenants they were now guided to the polling-place in squads of three or four, returning presently to unlimited refreshment and a surreptitious two-dollar bill—shining examples and incentives to such as had not yet voted to speed their going.

Yet with all their willingness, the affair consumed time, and twice Shelby went into the dusty wings of the stage to a window overlooking the canal, and strained to detect the panting of a laboring launch or tug. But the last quarryman voted, the polls closed, darkness fell, and Joe Hilliard was not yet come.



CHAPTER XIV

A pleasant local custom fell this night into abeyance. Years out of mind the adherents of the leading political parties had mingled sociably before a non-partisan bulletin board in the courthouse, much as hostile camps fraternize in the truce forerunning peace. But the old, simpler order of things had suffered more wrenches than one in this acrid congressional campaign, and the warring factions could unite only on the hibernian proposition that union was impossible. One party, therefore, made ready to gather in the accustomed place, the other in the Grand Opera House, while seceding remnants from both swelled the crowd in the street before the office of the Whig, which, with unlooked-for enterprise, had prepared to announce the returns by stereopticon.

At six o'clock Shelby broke his fast with a ravenous meal at the hotel, which Bowers shared, and three-quarters of an hour later the two men shouldered through the boisterous mob in the streets to Shelby's law office, where arrangements had been perfected to receive the returns by messenger and private wire. The Whig bulletin over the way had already massed a constituency extending to the Temple lawn, which, in default of definite news, it was edifying with views of foreign travel and cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne just arrived from the Tuscarora House.

Shelby was in rare fettle.

"William, thou abstemious youth," he addressed the clerk, "I am tempted to empty one of these cold bottles down your scandalized neck and pack you off with another for the Widow Weatherwax!"

He had the youth carry the wine to the rear room and set out glasses against the coming of his friends, drinking a bumper meanwhile to William's good health and the sentiment Confusion to Fusion. Never a solitary winebibber, and William remaining recalcitrant, he returned to the outer office and demanded "no heeltaps" of the operator and Bowers. This accomplished to his taste, he crammed a greenback into the dazed clerk's fingers and dismissed him for the night with the injunction to buy and blow the biggest tin horn in New Babylon.

His intimates now began to drift in, and the toast of Confusion to Fusion enjoyed a wide popularity, the telegraph operator and the county chairman being the only ones permitted to flag in the exacting ceremonies which the occasion required.

"I'll do my hurrahing when the returns are in," said Bowers, and stripping to his shirt sleeves he took his station under a drop-light and made ready to figure the local result.

But the local returns were tardy. It developed early that throughout the Demijohn split tickets had prevailed to an unprecedented extent. Heretofore reliable localities ran after strange socialistic and prohibition gods, to avoid voting for either of the leading candidates; while Graves and Shelby both gained support in quarters where it would have been sheer fatuity to hope. The hurrying news from the country at large shamed the dribble at the threshold. Texas and Vermont, those stock commonplaces of election night humor, went Democratic and Republican by the usual majorities, and all signs pointed to a sweeping victory for Shelby's party in state and Union. And still Tuscarora and the Demijohn aped the Sphinx.

Men elsewhere became curious. Bowers received and passed silently to Shelby demands for a forecast from other county chairmen in the district; from leaders prominent in the state; from great metropolitan newspapers which were tabulating the congressional elections of the nation and studying the complexion of the future House.

"Claim the district, of course," directed Shelby. "Say we're deliberate, but true blue."

The drumming humble-bee [Transcriber's note: bumble-bee?] voice of the crowd below the windows watching Volney Sprague's bulletin suddenly lifted in a lion roar. Elation in that quarter was ominous, and Shelby drew a curtain. It appeared that a minor revolt against the Boss in New York City, with which the Tuscarora independents had felt themselves peculiarly in sympathy, had made good its claim for recognition. Shelby turned from the window with a laugh.

"Merely a little extra diplomacy for Old Silky," he said. "Within a twelvemonth each reformer will have a foreign mission."

A tactless friend embraced the occasion to wonder where the Boss would banish Bernard Graves should he chance to win; but even idle speculation on such a possibility was so distasteful to the company that the blunderer only retrieved his mistake by toasting Confusion to Fusion anew.

The returns from the laggard Demijohn presently thickened, and Shelby left his seat to pace the floor, while Bowers, with an unlighted cigar between his teeth, and looking very like Grant indeed, figured, discarded, and figured again as successive reports modified his calculations.

"Never saw its equal—never!" he grunted. "Here's our own town hanging fire till almost the last like some jay village in the Adirondacks. We've always prided ourselves on being prompt." He caught a flying sheet from the operator and groaned: "We are the last! By the Great Horn Spoon!" For Shelby's ear alone he muttered: "The last, Ross; New Babylon's the last, and the die by which you lose or win. Figure it yourself."

Shelby ran through his senior's calculations and nodded without speech. No one spoke now. Not a wine-glass tinkled. The room sensed a crisis. By telephone, special messenger, and the instrument at the table the belated story of New Babylon's vote pieced itself together under Bowers's pencil. The candidate hovered above him, intent on every stroke.

"Good God!" he whispered suddenly; "it hangs on the Flats!"

"Yes; it's the last precinct. They sent word that the thick-skulled Poles and the rest had made an awful mess of the ballots. Tom"—to one of the onlookers—"'phone the Flats again."

But on the instant the Flats embodied itself in the doorway in the person of a breathless messenger. Bowers's trembling fingers fumbled the paper and cast it fluttering toward the floor, but Shelby fastened on it in mid-air, read it, crumpled it, mechanically made it smooth again, and laid it gently on his desk. There came a second roar from the street, a medley of cheers, groans, hisses, and the blare of horns. Shelby again drew a curtain. On the Whig's screen was displayed a huge rooster with the legend: IT'S GRAVES!

Shelby caught a murmuring from the group behind him: vapid expressions of regret, scorching condolence, pitying oaths; then the voice of a newcomer, a newspaper correspondent, asking Bowers if they conceded their defeat.

He spun about, crying,—

"We concede nothing."

The reporter said that the returns as received indicated a slight majority for the fusion candidate.

"We dispute the returns."

"But, Ross,—" Bowers put in.

"We dispute the returns. Should the official count be adverse, we shall dispute that. In view of the methods employed by the allies of the independents, it becomes nothing less than a public duty to carry the contest to the floor of the House of Representatives."

"It will be a House of your political friends," remarked the correspondent, impersonally. "Shall I then quote you as claiming your election?"

"Most emphatically, yes. Quote me as confident of a verdict approving my public course and rebuking the slanderous attack on my private character."

"What's the use?" protested Bowers, as the reporter hurried off in quest of Bernard Graves. "It's too late to bluff."

"Use," echoed Shelby. "I tell you, man, there's a blunder in the returns. Look, man, look!" snatching up the report from the Flats. "Isn't that arrant nonsense on the face of it? The Flats, mind you; our own little pocket borough of the Flats! Don't talk to me about the Poles muddling things; those inspectors of election can give them cards for stupidity and take every trick. Let me 'phone the Flats."

And he was right. The inspectors of the belated precinct, conscious of unwonted delay, nervous from long weighing of defective ballots, harassed by incessant demands for their report, had capped the climax of their offending by announcing the result as favorable to Graves. The mistake was discovered and rectified within fifteen minutes of its commission. Shelby had carried the precinct, and with it the election by something less than two hundred votes.

Giddy with the reaction, the Hon. Seneca Bowers gulped glass after glass of champagne, toasting Confusion to Fusion like the veriest roisterer.

"And we abused the Poles," he said in self-reproach. "Ross, it was the Poles who saved the day."

Shelby was the one self-contained being in the room.

"Yes," he answered soberly, "it was the Poles."

With stern straightforwardness the Whig bulletin over the way had promptly set forth the corrected result, and the crowd, now swollen by more deserters from the tame gatherings in the little theatre and the court-house, was clamoring for a sight of the victor whom everybody knew was within hearing. Shelby's jubilant companions were puzzled at his reluctance to comply with the popular demand. He declined to show himself, however, till the arrival of a serenading brass band compelled an acknowledgment, when he stepped from a window to a little balcony and spoke a few grave words: he had never doubted their support, they had repaid his trust, he was grateful; as he had championed their lesser interests in the smaller field, so should he strive to further their greater concerns in the national lists to which he was to pass their chosen knight.

Within the law office preparations were rife for adjourning to the Tuscarora House as a less restricted arena for the celebration which the fitness of things demanded. Shelby begged them to go before him, promising to follow.

"I need a few minutes to myself, boys," he said. "It's been a strain, you know."

They caroused away. Bowers the most jocund bacchanal of all; the operator boxed over his instrument against harm and slipped out; and Shelby was left solitary with the litter and the lees. One by one he extinguished the lights, and in darkness, at length, halted at the window from which he had so often marked the goings and comings of Ruth Temple. The old house was brilliantly alight in its lower rooms; lit, he dared hope, in honor of his triumph and his anticipated return. He turned and left his office with elastic step.

Fumbling with the lock in the dim light of the hall, he was spied from below by a newsboy who came bounding up the stairs.

"Extry! Extry 'dition of th' Whig, Mr. Shelby," he called. "Read all about yer 'lection an' th' drowndin' accident!"

"Drowning accident!" Shelby started and seized a paper. "Who is drowned?"

The lad did not know. He had not read beyond the headline which seemed to promise salability. But in the obscurity of the landing Shelby came upon the particulars swiftly enough. Skimming the brief despatch, here a sentence, there a sentence seared itself into his memory.

"Missed his train at Centreport—conscientious citizen, valuing his vote—hired a naphtha launch—collision—hampered by clothing—leaves a sorrowing widow—"

"Th' extry 'dition is two cents," reminded the urchin.



BOOK III



CHAPTER I

The executive mansion was strewn with the wreckage of the inaugural reception. A musky odor blent of plant life and massed humanity hung thickly throughout the spacious rooms and corridors; the bower of palms and flowery brightness at the foot of the great staircase, which had fended the orchestra, and incidentally barred an intrusive if sovereign people from the private apartments, was jostled and awry, its blossoms half despoiled; here lay a trampled glove, there a shining shred of braid, beyond an embarrassed cigar stump—dumb emblems of social Albany, gold-laced officialdom, and the unaristocratic unofficial ruck, whose mingled tide had beat upon the new governor's threshold in the late hours of the afternoon. A clock somewhere about the scene of devastation chimed midnight, and a man with attractive black eyes, who had been monopolizing his hostess upward of two hours, outstaying all other guests save one, now took his belated leave.

"Yes; I prophesy a brilliant season, Mrs. Shelby," he said. "With a woman of your talents in this house, Albany must at last awake."

Cora Shelby returned to one of the smaller reception rooms, where an open fire wrought changing shadows in the face of the Hon. Seneca Bowers.

"I think ex-Senator Ludlow is perfectly fascinating," she exclaimed. "Have you known him long?"

"All of ten years," returned Bowers, with a little tightening of the lips. "Most everybody in politics knows Handsome Ludlow."

"Ah, he is handsome. And so polished, too."

Bowers found the topic difficult, and changed it.

"What's your opinion of Ross's inauguration?" he asked. "I call it an A-1 success."

"It would have been a success," discriminated Cora, "a pronounced success, if Ross had approached it with a tithe of the spirit I urged. But no; simplicity, simplicity! You would have thought the affair a transfer of Methodist parsons. No military escort to the capitol, no decorations in the Assembly Chamber to speak of, no music, no anything that the occasion demanded."

"Fuss and feathers never did appeal to Ross," said the guest. "Besides, I guess he thought the last administration had splurged enough for two."

"Their fine plumage covered as slovenly housekeeping as I ever saw," interjected Mrs. Shelby, momentarily diverted from her husband's shortcomings. "I wish you might have seen what I have seen in out-of-the-way corners of this establishment. What the servants did for their wages I can't conceive. But, after all, those people had the right idea of upholding the dignity of the position. The ex-governor didn't decline an escort to the capitol when he took office. That puts me out of patience with Ross every time I think of it. Then, to cap the climax, he didn't even take a carriage; he walked!"

"Walked down with me," Bowers chuckled.

"And, by Jove, nobody knew him. One of the orderlies wanted to keep him out of the executive chamber."

Cora shuddered, and the old man bestirred his wits to soothe her outraged sensibilities.

"You must remember that he made his run on an economy platform," he reminded. "He believed it, too, every word. After all, you can't say that you've not had things your own way here at the mansion."

"It's a mercy I did. He would have had the house reception and the staff dinner equally prim if I hadn't put my foot down. I said no; be as puritanic as you please at the capitol, but the executive mansion concerns me; I'm governor here."

"Tolerably big commonwealth, too," commented Bowers, dryly. "Somehow it puts me in mind of what I thought palaces were like when I was a boy."

"Oh, yes; it's well enough, though the decorations aren't to my taste; but the location is very unfashionable—orphan asylums, hovels, saloons, and all that under one's very nose."

"I hadn't noticed the saloons."

"Well, there's a saloon at any rate. I saw it to-day from one of the south windows. The state was stupidly short-sighted to buy a house in this quarter. The executive mansion ought to stand in Quality Row."

"What's that?" asked Bowers.

"Not much to look at—just a block or two of houses near the capitol, not one of which could have cost more than my own place in New Babylon, for all that famous people have lived in them; but it's the cream of Albany."

"Everything else is skim milk, I suppose?"

Mrs. Shelby eluded the classification.

"Nearly all that's socially significant is grouped thereabouts," she pursued; "the cathedral, the Beverwyck Club, Canon North, and Mrs. Teunis Van Dam. The canon and Mrs. Van Dam are the keys to the social citadel, I assure you. Probably you noticed them on the platform at the Inauguration. Then, she helped me receive this afternoon, thanks to a bit of diplomacy."

Bowers absorbed these esoteric deliverances in meekness.

"It takes a woman to bottom such things," he said admiringly. "I guess you'll pass."

Cora herself harbored no doubts, but she disclaimed a single-handed victory.

"I shouldn't know all these things yet if it were not for the governor's military secretary, Colonel Schuyler Smith. Do you know him?"

"I'm not sure that I can place the colonel," ruminated Bowers. "Is he that blond young dandy whose sword got tangled in his legs?"

"Yes, poor dear! He's not used to wearing it yet. But he's a treasure. He's Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's grandson, you know, and like her is descended from all those delightful old Dutchmen who make such enviable ancestors, and have stained glass windows in the cathedral. He knows who is who, I assure you. Ex-Senator Ludlow does too, for that matter; though he doesn't care for Mrs. Van Dam's circle. He thinks it too stately and old regime. He goes with the younger set—Mrs. Tommy Kidder's—and he says Mrs. Tommy is quite my own style."

The governor entered the room in the midst of these matters and listened soberly. Shelby had taken on more years than his congressional service spanned. His dark hair had grayed at the temples; his old puffiness of jowl and dewlap had vanished; and the strong bone framework of his head showed for what it truly was. Tuscarora ancients, who remembered the pioneer, said that Shelby favored his grandfather.

Bowers turned to him with a laugh.

"It's a mighty good thing you've got a skilled pilot in these waters," he said.

"Yes, Cora knows her way around," returned her husband. "I dare say the world's a brighter place for this varnish, though I've noticed that when you scrape through it people average much alike. It's meant more to me to-day to have you here, old friend, than the notables. You gave me my start." He hesitated, glanced at his wife, and added: "But they were all welcome. Cora has come into her kingdom, and I wouldn't abate a single courtier."

"I've waited for my kingdom," she declared; "waited for it in sackcloth and ashes. You can't call Washington anything else for a congressman's wife. Her husband may get glory; she gets snubs. Now my turn has come, and I've plans galore. Milicent's debut is one of them. I'll bring her out with a ball when she has had enough of her finishing school. Ex-Senator Ludlow thinks it an inspiration."

The men exchanged a look.

"Handsome Ludlow isn't an ideal adviser for young girls," dropped Shelby, quietly.

"He's a victim of gossip; he told me so. You and I know too well what that means to countenance it. Besides, you're going to appoint him commissioner of something or other—I read it in yesterday's papers; but that's politics, I suppose."

Shelby gloomed in his corner, but made no answer.

Bowers essayed a diversion.

"I saw Bernard Graves's wife in the assembly chamber this morning," he remarked. "Seems to me she's looking rather peaked since her marriage."

"Ruth Graves here!" exclaimed Cora.

"I saw her too," said Shelby. "She congratulated me later in the executive chamber. She has been living in New York this winter. Graves is still lecturing around the country, telling how he wrote his poem and what it's all about."

"I presume she couldn't resist coming up to see how we would behave," Cora reflected, aloud.

"She is visiting Mrs. Van Dam," added the governor.

"Of all people!" Mrs. Shelby's wonder was unrestrained. "I do remember, though," she continued presently, "that she made friends here when she was in Vassar College. It's plain enough why Mrs. Van Dam has taken her up again. She wants to know all about us."

It was an easy step now to the conclusion that perhaps such an old friend really merited an invitation to the executive mansion.

The governor brushed his forehead with a weary gesture, drew a chair to Bowers's side, and unfolded a bundle of manuscript.

"I know it's late," he said apologetically, "but there's a bit of my message I'd like to read to you. There'll be no time in the morning if you're still bent on taking the early train to Tuscarora. I'd like your opinion whether it's what the plain people want."

Mrs. Shelby found the reading unspeakably juiceless and went yawning to bed. Nor did the governor detain Bowers long. A servant entering presently discovered Shelby before the grate alone.

"Don't wait up for me," he directed kindly. "I'll see to this fire, and remember not to blow out the gas."

The relic of the old regime restrained his surprise at these democratic doings, smiled decorously, and withdrew. Jocosity slipped out at his dignified heels. The man before the fire drank deep in self-communion, and his face was grave. For the first time that crowded day he could look his future in the face. Yet, evoked by a woman's handclasp in the long line which had filed by him as he stood in the executive chamber surrounded by his glittering staff, it was the past which most absorbed him. It struck him as a wanton caprice of fate that they should have been flung together that day. Ruth, whom he had promised a share in these honors; Ruth, whom he had boasted that he would return and claim; Ruth, whom he had put away because he must, because of a loftier standard which—grimmest irony of all!—she herself had unwittingly set up. He wondered—as he had wondered often in the years which had witnessed her marriage, his own, and his rise to power—whether she had waited that night; whether she had cared as he, apart from the red passion of the struggle, could perceive that he had cared.

A vagrant memory of the morning's inauguration intruded. The moment of his oath had been a time of solemn consecration for him, a laying on of hands unseen; the shades of his greatest predecessors stood round about; the genius of the state was in presence. Then came Cora and kissed him. Emotional souls in the gallery applauded the act, but the husband divined its prompting egoism and was cold.



CHAPTER II

Neither the public nor the honorable body to which it was directly addressed took the new governor's message stressing general retrenchment and the pruning of useless offices seriously. Nothing in the recent course of the party wooed faith in its promises to purge and live cleanly, and the accident of a huge majority in the late elections, owing to national issues, had set not a few mouths watering for fruits of victory which had lately dangled out of reach. The machine was perfected to its utmost, and the young year was held to signalize the full flowering of the Boss's topping supremacy. The great man was now master of the county committees of the metropolis and the greater cities; of the State Committee; of the Legislature, of the lieutenant-governor, and apparently of Shelby. The cartoons depicted the chief executive as a craven monarch yielding his sceptre to the leering power behind the throne; as a marionette twitched by obvious wires; as a muzzled dog, ticketed with the Boss's name.

Whereupon Shelby, in a quiet way, did an audacious thing. By an odd chance the first enactment of the Legislature which reached his desk affected Tuscarora County. It was a general measure concerning marsh lands, philanthropically worded and fathered by an assemblyman from an eastern county; but its special purpose, as Shelby fathomed, was to give certain Tuscarora people a selfish advantage in a locality as familiar to him as his hand. The Swamp, as Tuscarora called it, embodied his boyhood notion of primeval nature, the one spot untamed amidst tilled and retilled commonplaceness, the last fastness and abiding-place of the unknown. Rude corduroy roads threaded the wilderness in parts, and from this Red-Sea sort of passage the lad had peered and questioned in delicious fear. Even now the man had but to shut his eyes to recall it with the senses of the boy. Cowslip, wood violet, and Jack-in-the-pulpit bloomed again, the scent of mint was in his nostrils, fairy lakes lured amidst the ferns, and the way wound through lofty halls whose wonderful pillars set foot in emerald pools and sprang in vaulting hung high with wild grape. Once in those tender years he had skirted the spot by night when owls hooted, unnatural frogs boomed, will-o'-the-wisp stalked abroad, and Old Mystery held carnival; that breathless experience almost outdid the delights by day. All this issued from the phraseology of a bill—this, and something more. He held the measure a day or two and invited its sponsors, ostensible and real, to a conference. They were trained legislators, with whom he had served and fraternized, and in this matter furthered the interests of men in his native county who had backed him from the beginning of his career.

"Gentlemen," he said, regarding them quizzically, "this bill reminds me of a Tuscarora story." They laughed at the familiar beginning, and the governor laughed with them. "It's about a man who ran a grist-mill on a creek fed by a certain swamp, which I guess you know about. He was easy-going, the water was often too low for grinding, and the little mill had business for six, since there wasn't a rival within thirty miles. The pioneers came prepared to camp when they brought grist, and I suppose loafed around pitching quoits and cursing the mill trust by whatever name they called a monopoly then. One day along came a cute boy astride a mule with two bags of grain. He sized up the crowd ahead of him as he carried in his grist, and decided that if he waited his turn the country would grow up without him. The miller happened to be tinkering his water-wheel, so the boy got his bags into a dark corner unobserved, and with a handful of mill dust gave his work the finishing touch of ripe old age. I dare say you think he took the man in, but he didn't. 'Bub,' said the miller, 'I used to do that trick myself.'"

Shelby's old associates in log-rolling took the unmasking good-naturedly, but declined the amendment he suggested. He dismissed them with charming civility, jotted a laconic memorandum that the bill meditated a raid on public property for private gain, and with the calm of a gardener lopping a weed, withheld his signature.

It were hard to say whose smart was shrewder, the spoilsmen's who mourned the backsliding of a pal, or the professional reformers' who chewed the galling fact that not one of the elect, but a practical politician, had done this creditable thing. Both joined forces to fling clods. In the greater world, however, Shelby's simple act won swift approval. In the cartoonists' fancy the wires of the puppet-show had gone awry, the dog bit the heel at which it slunk, the usurper's knuckles were rapped by the sceptre he would have seized. The press teemed with anecdotes and personal gossip of the governor. Everything he did or said became of interest: his dress, his habits of work, his Tuscarora stories, his domestic life. An admirer on Long Island who bred bulldogs sent him a white pup trained to answer to the name of "Veto." Triplets in the valley of the Susquehanna were christened "Calvin," "Ross," and "Shelby," respectively.

During this time no word passed between Shelby and the Boss. The leader had not witnessed the inaugural ceremonies. Indeed, he had not attended the inauguration of a governor since his party regained control of the state. He and the governor-elect had lunched together frequently, however, and in concord discussed the forthcoming message and the party policy of the incoming Legislature. With two years of common work and intimacy behind them, they felt slight need of explanations. The machine as it stood was of their joint perfecting. Accordingly, the Boss viewed the cartoons with his habitual serenity, noted that a fund of good will was accruing to the party through the personal popularity of the new executive, and smilingly assured the reporters, who scented a quarrel, that Shelby was the right man in the right place. He found no thorn in a special message reminding the fortnight-old Legislature that, with the chief financial measures yet untouched, the bills already introduced called for the outlay of millions; nor did the speedy pruning of several sinecures, one of which was held by that tried veteran, Jacob Krantz, dash his cheery confidence. Krantz and the ousted were quietly found corporate business openings of glittering promise, and the campaign slogans were proved no mere catch-vote generalities.

Meanwhile the ancient city of Albany privily assorted its impressions of Shelby's wife, and awaited the dictum of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam. Although it was by deeds, rather than speech, that she made her judgments public, Mrs. Van Dam among her intimates did not deny herself the luxury of a stout opinion vigorously expressed.

"Mrs. Shelby's a fool," asserted the old lady in her positive way to Canon North, "but, after all, one of our own church people and the governor's wife."

"Either claim is weighty," smiled North; "tenderness for the family skeleton, respect for the state. United they're irresistible." For a social autocrat the canon took his position simply. Indeed he would have been rather astonished to learn that he was anything of the kind. "But the governor—he's genuine," he continued musingly; "I'm drawn to the man. He seems to me a power to be reckoned with—presidential timber, perhaps. Of course all our governors are heirs apparent by virtue of their office; but unlike so many of them, he isn't of a stature to be dwarfed by the suggestion. I think him rather Lincolnesque in a way, though I don't press the comparison. Perhaps it's merely his smile—have you noticed it?—the 'sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men' that Amiel tells us is the badge of the misunderstood."

"Pshaw!" returned Mrs. Van Dam. "I've known two or three great men who wore sad smiles. When a disordered liver wasn't at the bottom of it 'twas the wife."

North gave over the argument.

"Nobody would impeach Shelby's liver," he laughed. "He's as robust as a patent medicine witness after taking."

"Oh, I don't accuse Mrs. Shelby," rejoined Mrs. Van Dam, quickly. "The governor's smile isn't the issue. One and one don't make one in the state of matrimony any more than elsewhere on the globe, and whether he and his wife agree or disagree doesn't interest me in the slightest. What does concern me is the important fact that the mistress of the executive mansion of the great state of New York appears not to know certain things she ought, chief among them the true character of ex-Senator Ludlow."

"I'm afraid it's true," owned the canon.

"Before Ruth Graves left I suggested that she intercede. She has tact, knows the Shelbys well, and had received an invitation to visit them. But she declined visit, intercession, and all. I'm sorry. Somebody must speak to Mrs. Shelby, and an old acquaintance could carry off such a mission with better grace."

"Why didn't Graves come on with his wife?" inquired the canon, irrelevantly.

"Don't mention the simpleton! I've no patience with him—or with Ruth for marrying him. We never can see the reason for other people's marriages, but that one above all others was incomprehensible. If ever a woman needed to marry a dynamo to bring out her best it was Ruth Temple. And she married Bernard Graves—a man who has degenerated into a poseur before women's clubs. Marriages made in heaven indeed! Give me Darwin and natural selection."

"You really have something of the kind," laughed North. "She was a free agent, his plumage evidently attracted in the old, old way, and so she made her choice."

"Fiddlesticks! Don't tell me that she made a fool of herself of her own free will. That man isn't capable of stirring the emotions of a poster girl with orange skin and purple hair, let alone a flesh and blood woman. Something outside herself—don't laugh; I'm a woman and I know—somebody, not Graves himself, bred that folly. If she were another sort of nature, I'd say she married for spite; but she—"

"For respite, perhaps—respite from herself. I've known cases. But we're far afield from the Shelbys. Shall I approach the governor?"

"No," said Mrs. Van Dam, with decision. "The wife is the one to see, if I know anything of women, and this is a woman's task; I, clearly, am the instrument, and shall not shirk."

"You would have made an eminent surgeon," remarked North, with his slow smile.

The unflinching Good Samaritan selected an hour two days later when the governor's wife was likely to be alone, and sent up her card. Not a few women had sighed for a sight of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's calling card, and sighed in vain; but Cora Shelby, who had heard of these yearnings, thanked her God that she was not as other women are, and glanced at the pasteboard with indifference.

"Yes; I suppose I'm at home," she said languidly, posturing for the maid, and for a full half-hour left the august visitor waiting below stairs while she turned the pages of a novel.

The influence of Mrs. Tommy Kidder had determined this petty course. This sprightly young person, being herself a real social force, shared little of the awe in which Mrs. Teunis Van Dam was held by most of her townsfolk and by all newcomers, and Cora, with her own ideas of the part which she, as the governor's wife, should play, had taken Mrs. Tommy's frothy nonsense at rather more than its surface value. She was more than ever alive to Mrs. Van Dam's importance—her grandson, the military secretary, was an ever present reminder; but she cherished a quickened sense of her own importance, too, and was vigilantly alert to withstand any sign or symptom of what Mrs. Tommy called "Knickerbocker domination."

Her first shaft, however, fell wide of the mark. Mrs. Van Dam serenely assumed that her tardy hostess meant to pay her the compliment of a more elaborate toilet, and employed the interval in an interested survey of the changes wrought in the reception room's arrangement by its new mistress. So absorbing did she find this occupation, that she utterly missed the glacial temperature of Cora's greeting.

"I must congratulate you on resurrecting that bit of mahogany," declared the old lady, indicating a table. "I've missed that piece for three administrations. Wherever did you find it?"

"Really, I can't remember," fibbed Cora, resolving straightway to banish it.

The military secretary had suggested its restoration, and she jumped to the conclusion that he had been inspired by his grandmother.

"It's a real link with the past," added Mrs. Van Dam, with a far-away look in her eyes. "I can recall it as long ago as Governor Tilden's time."

The great Mrs. Van Dam's cordiality thawed Cora in spite of herself, and she was well in the way of unconditional surrender to her charm when the caller cut straight into the pith of her errand.

"Without beating about the bush, my dear," she began, "I'm here on a meddlesome business which you mustn't take amiss. As an old woman who has seen something of the world in general, and much of this queer little Albany corner of it in particular, you must permit me to tell you that you have been too generously lenient with a person who has forfeited the right to darken decent people's doors. I mean ex-Senator Ludlow; and I presume I needn't specify his misdeeds."

"No. You need not," rejoined Cora, stiffening. "I'm not interested in scandal."

Mrs. Teunis Van Dam straightened rigidly in her chair.

"I fear that, after all, I must particularize," she replied. "Obviously you can't know the truth of things."

"I know that his wife divorced him, and I have heard a dozen or more malicious tales about his present life. I doubt if you can add to the collection."

"You put me in a false position."

"And you reflect on mine in assuming to dictate whom I shall receive. This house belongs to the state. Every citizen is welcome."

Mrs. Van Dam had gathered her furs and risen, but at this she paused.

"There," she exclaimed, with a little laugh, "what women we are! I've been talking of one thing, you of another. You have the right view of your official obligations precisely. Of course the man is free to come to your public receptions. The state can't establish a moral quarantine, more's the pity."

"Ex-Senator Ludlow is free to come to my house at all times," cut in Cora, with a brilliant crimson dot in either cheek. "I do not sit in pharisaical judgment on the unfortunate. I've had his story as well as that of you who are against him. I believe him a misjudged man who deserves a courageous friend."

"Oh, if it is a question of friendship—" and Mrs. Van Dam terminated sentence and interview with a shrug.

Yet Cora had not seen the last of her visitor's stately back before she repented her open championship of Handsome Ludlow. Knickerbocker domination, not conviction, had forced her hand. Since she had hung her banner on the walls, however, she resolved to stand fast, and the following Sunday morning issued an unmistakable declaration of war. On her way to service she saw Ludlow crossing the park before the capitol, and stopped her carriage.

"'Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember'd,'" quoted the man, his handsome, impudent eyes on hers.

"I propose that you'll do that for yourself," Cora retorted archly. "Get in."

She had intended going to the cathedral, but withal sudden resolve she ordered the carriage driven to an older church just at hand, which time out of mind had made special provision for the head of the state, down whose central aisle she marshalled Ludlow, and installed him in the governor's pew.



CHAPTER III

Had the protest against Knickerbocker arrogance languished at this pass, history would be the poorer, but Cora Shelby found it impossible to stop with this show of independence. Her ambition was whetted for an exercise of actual power, and the outcome was the famous battle of Beverwyck, whose story still lacks its balladist.

Early in her survey of Albany society, Cora had met with the Beverwyck Club.

"It is the local academy of immortals," instructed the military secretary. "Its judgments may not be infallible, but they're beyond appeal. It is the pink of exclusiveness; it worships etiquette above all other gods; and its receptions to incoming governors demand the reddest lettering in the calendar."

When Shelby's turn for this signal honor drew near, and the military secretary, to whom Fortune, not content with sending him into the world a grandson of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, had added membership in the Beverwyck Club, approached him to discuss preliminaries, the governor cheerfully referred him to his wife in whose social knowingness he placed an abounding trust. Of Albany other than as a legislative workshop he knew next to nothing. His social progress in the salad days of his first term in the Assembly had begun in a saloon behind the capitol much frequented by departmental clerks, whence through hotel corridor intercourse he evolved by his second session to a grillroom, patronized by public servants of higher cast who gave stag dinners and occasional theatre parties, which called for evening dress. Up to this period Shelby had never found evening clothes essential to his happiness. His little sectarian college had rather frowned on such garments, and he, too, for a time had vaguely considered them un-American. Yet, taught by the grillroom, he assumed this livery, wore off its shyness, and grew to like it for the best it signified. Here evolution paused. Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, Canon North, and the Beverwyck Club, so far as they stood for anything, peopled a frigid zone of inconsequence which he had no wish to penetrate. Washington, influence in his party, and intimacy with its leaders sophisticated him before his return; behind every mask he now discerned a human being; and no social ordeal terrified. Nevertheless, something of his old-time diffidence toward the unknown country beyond the grillroom lingered, and it made for peace that his wife seemed so competent to guide.

On the score of her competency, Cora entertained no misgivings, and the day following Handsome Ludlow's public elevation to sanctity she met the club's representatives, the military secretary, and an august judge of the Court of Appeals, with a self-possession she felt would grace the daughter of a belted earl. The judge, after some ponderous compliments, told her that the committee in charge, having assured itself through the secretary that the governor and herself had no conflicting engagement, had agreed upon a near date for the reception, which he named. Cora promptly decided that in not consulting her the military secretary had been wanting in respect, and to punish him invented a previous engagement out of hand. Withered by his senior's Jove-like frown, the young man apologized in hot-skinned contrition for his ignorance of the unknowable.

"It's barely possible I didn't mention it," dropped Cora, scrupulously fair.

This gracious intercession for the culprit had no weight with the judge, who continued to regard the secretary with severity, and left him wholly out of the discussion of a date which should meet her wishes. This matter settled without further affront to her dignity, the judge expanded under her flattering attention, and gossiped of the reception itself.

"Between ourselves," he confessed, "the invitation list is bothering us unconscionably. You see, it has expanded beyond our space. At the last governor's reception the club-house was invaded by a mob—a mob, madame,—there is no other expression,—-which I need not add is out of keeping with our traditions. But how draw the line without offence?"

With the dregs of her wrath against Mrs. Van Dam stirred afresh by the disciplining of the grandson, Cora perceived and seized the opportunity for a swingeing blow.

"There's an absurdly simple remedy," she returned thoughtfully; "but of course it would hardly become me to offer suggestions."

"My dear madame," the judge protested, "it would be an act of charity."

After a politic interval of coaxing, Cora explained:—

"The reception is meant to be official in spirit, isn't it? Then why not make it so in fact? Limit your invitations to the official circle. If all the townspeople unconnected with the government are excluded, no one need take offence."

A few days afterward the invitations went forth, restricted according to Cora's plan, and the heart-burnings which were kindled scorched the club's self-esteem like nothing in its staid career. But while others merely bewailed the amazing fact of their exclusion, Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, with characteristic energy, determined to probe the indignity to its author, and summoned her grandson to an absorbing interview.

"Schuyler Livingston Smith," she inquired, "what is Mrs. Tommy Kidder's relation to public affairs that she should receive an invitation to the Beverwyck Club?"

The secretary named an insignificant board of which Mr. Kidder was a member. His grandmother rapidly instanced a dozen other names, and repeated her question. In most cases the young man had to confess his ignorance of their claims.

"So," she commented in the end; "so. And I, whose people have helped govern this community since there was a colony to govern, am beyond the pale! But who was Peter Stuyvesant beside Mrs. Tommy Kidder's husband? Nobody. Who was Abraham de Peyster? who was Gerardus Beekman? who was Rip Van Dam? And the Schuylers, Livingstons, and Van Rensselaers? All nobodies. My dear child, what lunatic in the Beverwyck Club suggested this official classification, which even the Archangel Michael could not carry out?"

Her grandson, with no friendly recollections, named the judge.

"The silly old man!" exclaimed Mrs. Van Dam. "And who inspired him?"

He cheerfully told her, with the added detail that Mrs. Shelby and the judge had subsequently gone over the invitation list together. She was silent for a time, and then dismissed him. Alone with her thoughts, she elaborated a countermine, whose energy was specially directed against the Beverwyck Club, though she had no objection to hoisting the governor's wife in the explosion, albeit she refused to consider her the real antagonist. The true offender was the exclusive organization which had prostituted itself to such ignoble influence.

Within an hour of her grandson's departure Mrs. Teunis Van Dam despatched an invitation of her own. The Beverwyck Club reception was scheduled to run its formal course from nine to eleven o'clock; Mrs. Van Dam asked the governor and his lady to dine with her on the same evening at the hour of eight.

All hinged now on the personal equation of Cora Shelby, whose vagaries the old lady owned herself quite unable to forecast. Nor in this respect was Cora herself a much wiser prophet. Her first instinct, mixed with wonder, was to decline, and she held to this opinion the better part of an hour. Yet before the impulse could stiffen into resolution, it met the neutralizing influence of the old town, which, partly through the military secretary, partly through the scoffing Ludlow, she had unwittingly assimilated. By these teachings she had learned the flattering, almost royal, significance of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's dinner invitations. She was seized afresh by a curiosity to observe how they did things in Quality Row, and became of two minds forthwith. Appointed for the same evening as the club reception, the dinner had, moreover, the look of a peace overture, a concession to her power, even an admission of defeat, which was soothing. She could hardly present the matter to Shelby in this light, as she had withheld all mention of the Ludlow business from his ear; but with a generosity which astonished herself, she dwelt on Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's undoubted prestige, and ended by advising acceptance.

Shelby, preoccupied with an appeal for the pardon of a consumptive forger, mechanically agreed.

"Sooner or later we'd have had to endure both functions," he said. "It is time saved to pack them into one evening."

Cora bridled. It was a prodigious affair for her that he took so indifferently.

"Time, time," she reprimanded; "the state doesn't expect its governor to grub like a clerk."

Shelby promised to mend his ways; but the dinner and reception occupied his thoughts so little that he worked beyond his usual hour at the capitol on the afternoon of the appointed day, and, coming tardy home, was late in dressing and late in setting forth. Cora was indignant to the boiling-point. She meant to be behind-hand at the reception, as a display of what she deemed good form; but a dinner was a dinner, as her husband, in the privacy of the carriage, was taught past all forgetting. Yet his fault lost its gravity before Mrs. Van Dam's welcome.

"If you're really late, I'm delighted," she returned to Cora's embarrassed excuses; "for you see, I've just found that I must apologize for a delay myself. What a boon servants run by clockwork would be! But it won't be very long."

It was long, though neither of the guests suspected it. Shelby was diverted by Mrs. Van Dam's unimagined vivacity; while his wife had no immediate room for any impression save satisfaction that this autocrat, who held that punctuality should be the politeness of democracy no less than princes, had been caught napping. It was clear that she meant to bury the hatchet, and Cora, with her own point carried, saw no reason why she should not add a shovelful of symbolic earth herself. Thus, beginning with a trickle, the flow of her good humor presently broadened to the width of the sluice-gate, as she entered upon an absorbing scrutiny of the quaint old house which by tradition had served one of the earlier governors. It was a rambling structure of unexpected turns and endless alcoves stored with curios, art treasures, and trophies of travel.

Perceiving their interest in their surroundings, Mrs. Van Dam gladly played the cicerone.

"That chair and desk came from the Senate Chamber of the old State House," she said, following Shelby's eyes. "They were used by my grandfather, and I luckily got them at the demolition. His wooden inkstand and pounce-box are there too. That Stuart over the mantelpiece is his portrait."

"I've heard of him," answered Shelby, warmly. "He upheld De Witt Clinton's hands in the fight for the canal."

She left him momentarily to give Cora the history of a faded Flemish tapestry that lay in a cabinet, and then included them both in the romantic tale of a Murillo, unearthed in a Mexican pawnshop, which she assumed would interest so steadfast a champion of art as the governor had shown himself in his congressional career. Cora basked in the exquisite flattery of being treated as a person of greater cultivation than she was, and strained on tiptoe to merit her reputation. Had her mind been free to register its ordinary impressions, two things might have struck her as singular; the absence of other guests, and, stranger still, in a temple of punctuality, the lack of clocks.

The same happy atmosphere enveloped the dinner itself, whose perfection of service and cookery betrayed no hint of delay. Mrs. Shelby found her views of life and the sphere of woman sought for and appreciated, and the governor was enticed into political by-paths illustrated by Tuscarora stories told in his happiest vein. He was frankly charmed. Many women had attracted him in many ways, ranging from the earthy fascination of the sometime Mrs. Hilliard to that commingling of girlish impulse, mature good sense, and an indefinite something else in Ruth which swayed him still; but none of them had met him on quite the serene plane of this delightful old woman of the world. By her birthright she seemed to bridge the present and the past, and under her spell the quaint-gabled Albany of another century rose again. Once more Arcadian youth picnicked in the "bush" and coasted down Pinkster Hill past the squat Dutch church; the Tontine Coffee House sprang from dust, and through its doors walked Hamilton and Burr, Jerome Bonaparte, and a comic-pathetic emigre marquis, who in poverty awaited the greater Bonaparte's downfall, cherishing his order of Saint Louis and powdering his poll with Indian meal; the Livingstons and Clintons divided the land between them; Van Buren and the Regency came to power.

There was more of this when the dinner had ended, and they lingered in the library over their coffee and Mrs. Van Dam's priceless collection of relics of the time of the royal province and the yet earlier New Netherland.

"A plague on the reception!" exclaimed the governor in the carriage, when the good nights had finally been said. "I could have talked with her till morning."

There was a lively stir and bustle about the entrance of the Beverwyck Club as they approached, which Cora took to be that of late-comers like themselves. She would have preferred that she be conspicuously the last,—the climax. Seen nearer, the flurry was peculiar. If the idea were not preposterous, she could believe that people were actually leaving the club—leaving before they met the governor in whose honor they assembled—leaving before she came!

"Your watch, Ross, your watch," she exclaimed suddenly.

"I did not wear it."

She bethought her of a recently acquired carriage clock whose face the lights of a passing trolley made plain. She looked, gasped, and looked again in horrid fascination. The punctilious Beverwyck Club had decreed that its reception should end at eleven, and the decrees of the Beverwyck Club were rigidly enforced. The carriage clock pointed its inexorable hands to a quarter past.



CHAPTER IV

Thenceforth Cora Shelby's respect for the fearless strategist in Quality Row verged upon awe. If Mrs. Teunis Van Dam now deigned to assist at one of the weekly house-openings, the occasion savored of an aroma which the united patronage of Mrs. Tommy Kidder and the ladies of the lieutenant-governor, the secretary of state, the controller, the treasurer, and the entire bench of the Court of Appeals could not exhale. Cora made sure of her good offices for the legislative reception weeks in advance, and in all matters, save only Handsome Ludlow, deferred anxiously to the great exemplar's code.

No one who thought twice about Mrs. Van Dam escaped the reflection that she was a descendant, and Cora with her mind running continually on this shoot of a peculiarly sightly family tree, was as fired by this truism of natural law as if it had lain all the centuries awaiting her discovery. Those delightful magicians of figures, who as easy as asking prove William the Conqueror the mathematical begetter of us all, had hitherto contented her; but such sweets cloyed before Mrs. Van Dam's august line of Dutch and English forebears, who had considerately made history and bequeathed portraits and plate. But the path of Japhet in search of a father was primrose beside the American's in search of an ancestor, and Cora's researches were long barren of result. The labyrinth of Brown, her maiden name, she speedily forsook, though at the outset it seemed to run promisingly to knighthood, literature, and art; Huggins, her mother's name, was impossible, and Hilliard, more sounding, clearly out of the question; while the Shelbys, to whom she turned in last resort, seemed hopelessly commonplace. Ross's father, to her own knowledge, had done little but drink; and the grandfather, though of sterner stuff, as became a pioneer, was handicapped by his unlucky distillery. The governor's own notions about his family were the vaguest. Like many Americans, he had the impression that its beginnings traced to two brothers who immigrated to this country prior to the Revolution in which they served.

"The Revolution seems to be the Norman Conquest of American genealogy," he remarked in the course of his wife's cross-examination.

"But don't you know their names, or what they did in the war?" she queried anxiously.

Shelby shook his head.

"Perhaps they were teamsters," he laughed.

Cora was too pained to jest. Mrs. Van Dam was a "daughter" of this and that society by virtue of descent from generals.

For a time the chase now circled teasingly round a southern branch whose achievements were notable, but the unconcern of the distiller with regard to vital statistics balked a happy union of North and South, and goaded Cora to that last desperate ditch of the ancestor-hunter—a blind leap over seas. In the fortunate isles where choice forefathers flourish thick as buttercups, Cora made her foray with hunger's lawless haste, enlisted the aid of an indigent person skilled in blazonry, and in good season brought her spoils to the governor.

"I've had bother enough getting this," she said, exhibiting a coat of arms; "but I must say it's far prettier than the one we saw in Mrs. Van Dam's library."

"Runs mainly to red, doesn't it?" Shelby ventured, gravely considering the work.

"That's gules," explained Cora, learnedly; "the color of the field. Books of heraldry describe the arms as: 'Gules, two boars' heads displayed in chief and a mullet in base, sable; crest, a dexter arm, embowed, grasping a cimeter—'"

"I took that for a crumb-scraper," put in the governor, jocularly.

"The motto," went on Cora, soberly, "is, 'I achieve.' I think the purple of the mantling highly effective—purpure, that's called—which, taken with the red and black, would give a most romantic light to our hall in New Babylon if we put a window at the turn of the stair. Tomorrow morning I shall order a die made for my stationery."

"So this is ours," said Shelby. "Did the original owner acquire it in the Holy Wars, or was he a rich brewer who endowed a hospital?"

Cora reddened.

"He was Owen Shelby, a Welsh soldier of the Commonwealth."

"A near relation of mine?"

"You are undoubtedly his descendant. Of course I can't supply every trifling link—your people were so careless of their records; but there is no question in my mind that you are entitled to his arms, and you ought to be grateful to me for my pains."

"I am, I am," protested Shelby, with a chuckle. "But before the engraver begins work on the crumb-scraper and the prize pigs let me suggest that you add a detail which has been overlooked. I mean a bar sinister."

"Ross!"

He slipped his arm round her waist with a laugh.

"One of the state library people said that you were trailing the foreign Shelbys, and I glanced at your references. The fact I remember best is that Owen Shelby, late of Cromwell's Ironsides, died a bachelor."

She flung from him in stormy anger.

"I've twice been fool enough," she flashed, "to marry a man unable to appreciate me."

He winced. The reproach, more wanton than any she had ever framed, lashed him on the raw. The manner of his succession to Joe Hilliard's shoes had fostered an almost morbid solicitude for her well being which had not seldom over-topped his better judgment. If he had failed of his duty, it was not for lack of striving.

"I've tried, Cora," he answered bitterly.

Neither broached a formal reconciliation—such crude devices fell into disuse early in their marriage; but the man gave her social hours he could ill afford in the press of the closing session, and presently a tremendous event from the outside patched, if it could not heal, the breach. This was nothing less than the launching of Shelby's presidential boom.

Three factors contributed to this movement: the return of prosperity, the governor's personality, and the Boss. Shelby won his election in a midnight of universal hard times; his inauguration saw the dawn; the legislative session closed amidst a sunrise of splendid promise. By the deathless fallacy which credits or blames the ruling powers for everything, natural or supernatural, Shelby's party reaped abundantly where it had sown with niggard hand. The governor's personal deserts were more solid, the public recognizing his retarding ratchet as the cause of the machine's continence and the lowered tax-rate. Apparently the Legislature bore him no ill will for his curbing hand. A quiet word had issued from the Boss that the governor's vetoes must stand, and Shelby's one pet measure, the appointment of a commission to deal with the improvement of the canals, had passed both Houses by a vote which was almost non-partisan. A spontaneous demand seemed to well from the people that this faithful steward be sent higher.

But Shelby knew something of the rearing of that tenderest of plants in the political garden—the spontaneous demand. In the voice of the people he had so often read the will of the Boss. The inspired laudations of country editors, the resulting echoes in the city press, the interviews with the knowing ones who withheld their names, the genuine momentum lent by the easily impressed—all the covert workings of spontaneity were known to him from the days of apprenticeship at the Boss's feet. The method was transparent, the motive only was hazy; yet he divined the motive itself with sufficient accuracy. The Boss thought he knew too much. It is well to make your own governor, but to make him too well is ill. It was this one's drawback that he had passed the No Admittance sign of the workshop and got the trade secrets of the boss business at his finger ends. The pupil smiled sometimes when he recalled the first great rencounter with the master. The birch and frown no longer terrified. Evidently the Boss knew this, and failing the birch, dangled a prize.

What Shelby did not divine was the incentive force of pique. While the leader gave his smiling interviews to the reporters on the subject of the governor's vetoes, he had too often had to dissemble that his earliest information came from them. He did not resent the vetoes, if they made party capital; nor did he resent Shelby's popularity, for he liked him. The bitterness of the cup was that the ingrate took no pains to inquire whether he cared or not. It is true that in large questions Shelby had uniformly sought his counsel, and the session had been fairly prolific in legislation redounding to the party credit; but the governor's independence in the lesser matters attainted his loyalty. What the one man considered upholding the dignity of his office, the other interpreted as leze-majesty.

Shelby's attitude toward the presidential chit-chat was frankly human. Too modest to measure himself beside the greater successors of Washington, he yet knew himself to be as well equipped as many who had held the office; and, without troubling his sleep, determined that should the boss-made boom attain genuine popularity, it might drift where it would without hindrance from him. Precisely this occurred. The governor's practicality smoothed the way to his indorsement by men whose foremost interest was business rather than politics, and a banquet given him late in April by a great commercial organization of New York, which approved his policy of letting the city mind its own affairs, set him definitely in the race.

Throned in a gallery above the diners; courted by heroines of by-gone horse shows, the hem of whose garments she had never dreamed to touch; with the White House looming mistily through the sheen of silver and crystal and napery under tinted lights, Cora viewed the taking spectacle as a personal apotheosis. A silly periodical for "ladies" had recently printed an article about her which ascribed Shelby's making to herself, and she, in this rosy hour believing, looked upon her handiwork, and saw that it was tolerably good. Statesmen, diplomats, captains of industry, the smiling Boss—a very parliament of brains—did the governor honor, and the most famous after-dinner speaker in the land proclaimed him New York's favorite son.

To most of his listeners Shelby's reply seemed admirable. A morning paper called it "a little classic of straightforwardness"; but his king-maker aloft thought his bearing too simple by far. If he listened to her, he would tip his presidential lightning-rod more showily.



CHAPTER V

Summer leaped a hotbed growth from spring, and Cora Shelby, tiring of golf, the country club, and Albany's now mild pastimes, took herself off for a round of fashionable resorts with Mrs. Tommy Kidder. The governor had other occupations. So far as a man could do such a thing, he put his presidential chances out of mind and bent his energies upon a study of the canal problem, whose solving he was ambitious to make the monument of his administration. As a legislator he had been recognized as an authority upon this his hobby; but the knowledge of the assemblyman was shallow beside that of the governor, who asked no fairer laurel than to link his name with the regenerated Erie Canal as the second Clinton had associated his name with its beginnings.

Throughout the languid heated term whose official calm only the occasional request of a fellow governor for requisition papers disturbed, Shelby plodded over the bewildered mass of estimates, maps, and mazy statistics which his special committee was accumulating. A more brilliant man doubtless would have left much of this arid drudgery to subordinates, contenting himself with the sum of things, without a close scrutiny of detail; but this was never Shelby's way. When he mastered a subject it was his blood and bones, and his passion for the Ditch transmuted its story, howsoever told, into stuff that splendid dreams are made on and modern empires built.

Those arduous months were the happiest he had known. He toiled mightily, but he wrought at a labor of love, while his leisure hours fostered friendships as novel as they were attractive. Cora Shelby's campaign of the watering-places had not embraced Milicent, and the girl returned from school in June to find her mother already gone. She dutifully made known her arrival in Albany, and in time deciphered from a patchouli-scented scrawl postmarked "Bar Harbor" that Albany was an excellent spot for her to remain.

"She says that summer hotels are no places for young girls," Milicent told her stepfather. "Why then does mamma care about them?"

The governor was nonplussed: but he quietly set himself to make Albany tolerable for this astonishing young person, yet scant of seventeen, who had suddenly flowered into the outward semblance of a woman. He devised excursions on the river and pilgrimages to historic spots about the city and the countryside, acquiring strange antiquarian lore of the Schuyler house, the Van Rensselaer mansion, and the Vanderheyden Palace, and, more curious still, a perception of his deep capacity for affection. This child of the Hilliards' better selves, with her father's frankness, her mother's earlier beauty, and with a winsomeness all her own, awoke his slumbering instinct of fatherhood.

The wholesome new relation quickened his insight amazingly. He divined that however much the girl might care for these wayside rambles with him, her youth must still crave youth, and in this strait he turned to Mrs. Van Dam, who forthwith became Milicent's captive, too, and a fairy godmother into the bargain. So Shelby came much to frequent a vine-screened upper veranda off Mrs. Van Dam's library, where she was fond of serving coffee after dinner, and one could dip down over the red roofs and tree-tops to the stripling Hudson changing its coat of many colors in the sunset. As this corner was a haunt of Canon North's, also, it fell out that a friendship sprang up between the men which strengthened into intimacy. Shelby had never dreamed of making friends with a clergyman. The sectarian college had put him out of joint with priestery. But North was in a class by himself. He had no sacerdotal air or jargon—that negative virtue was his earliest passport; and he was from crown to sole a robust manly man. The governor took to dropping into the canon's book-lined study near the cathedral after office hours, and North would come to the executive mansion and smoke half the night away; for the canon was a judge of tobacco no less than men. Not once in their intercourse did he mention church-going or creeds; he did not "talk religion." Yet, whatever the canon's religion was, Shelby was aware that he lived it. The air was full of little stories of his helpfulness of the sort people told of a man North once alluded to as "Saint" Phillips Brooks.

Milicent went to the Catskills late in August as the guest of a school friend, and after a day or two of novel loneliness, the governor decided to carry out a recently formed plan for supplementing the work of his committee with a personal inspection of a part of the canal system. As it seemed to him that he could get at the best results by quiet means, his journey was presented to the press in the light of a business trip to his old home. For forty-eight hours his leisurely progress with his private secretary escaped remark. Then the newspapers upset his apple-cart. Shelby had become too interesting a figure for the role of Haroun-al-Raschid, and the paragraphers rang astonishing changes on his adventures at the few points where he had succeeded in making observations unrecognized. What he saw thereafter was accompanied by the click of cameras and the fatuity of local bigwigs brimming with eagerness to tie their fortunes to the car of the coming man.

At New Babylon, where he became the guest of the Hon. Seneca Bowers, the minute espionage upon his doings ceased, and Shelby felt less a personage than at any time since his inauguration. The town was proud of him, but too faithful to its ancestral reserve to tell him so. People who had called him "Ross" all his days addressed him in this fashion still; and the Widow Weatherwax calmly imposed an audience in the matter of her last will and testament, which the new-fledged lawyer, William Irons, had bungled, and spiced the renewal of their relations with her old-time candor and a full chronicle of the past, present, and probable scandal of the county. In little ways, however, the governor perceived what close-mouthed Tuscarora really felt. They had hung a crayon portrait of him in the court-house, and the Pioneer Association, which was about to hold its annual picnic beside Ontario, asked him to deliver the address.

Shelby accepted the invitation, and, saturated as he was with the homespun history of his county, excelled himself. But he did something more than retell a familiar tale. A product of this life, he nevertheless saw it from the outside and in its wide relations, and the canal-begotten civilization, which was his immediate theme, led irresistibly to the vast economic problem that lay near his heart, and to a suddenly formulated plan for its solution. By one of those inspirations of the moment which public speakers know, yet dare not count upon, the vexing details of his summer's drudgery shifted and rearranged themselves into a coherent pattern and policy whose fulfilment should place the historic waterway, not merely abreast of the age, but bulwarked for the future. It was a significant utterance which carried far. Shelby could give no copies of his speech to the press, since the speech had largely shaped itself in the making; but the correspondents who covered what had promised to be a purely bucolic assignment, were not slow in seeing their error and retrieving it. What the Tuscarora pioneers and their descendants heard, the whole state read; and the discerning perceived that, wherever the party, the party machine, or the party boss might stand, the governor had scaled the high plateau of statesmanship, where public opinion is less catered to than led.

Late in the afternoon Shelby shook the last brown hand in the serpentine line of country people which coiled in and out the stuffy parlor of the Lakeview Inn, and cutting loose from the reception committee under cover of a headache, slipped away into the trees. The fringe of the wood was defaced with the litter of picnickers, and smelt of lunch; the din of the agents for new-fangled reapers and ploughs, whose gaudy paint was doubly garish against the sober background, had routed the squirrels and birds; but the remoter paths held only silent lovers, and the camp-ground, where the Widow Weatherwax had mouthed and played the prophet, stripped of its tents, its zealots, its wavering torchlights, was full of wholesome sunlight and forest peace.

The spot stirred ghosts, and the governor turned to the murmuring shore with its gentle mimicry of ocean. Half sheltered by a clump of sumach sat a woman upon a bit of driftwood and flung pebbles in the lake. He stared, and then went slowly down to her.

"Ruth," he said, "you here!"

"Your Excellency startled me."

Her banter puzzled him, but the handclasp was warm.

"Forget my office," he petitioned.

"After your tremendous speech to-day? You were his Excellency the governor of New York with that, and I was properly impressed. It struck me that you would make a benevolent czar."

"Are you mocking me?"

"God forbid, your Excellency!"

"I'd rather be plain Shelby," he said, studying her profile. "I'm glad you heard me—glad that you liked it. It was sincere, and you value sincerity. But I had no notion that you were listening. I supposed you somewhere with the fashionables."

"I reached home yesterday, and came at once to my lake cottage. I heard that you were to speak, and braved the picnic to hear you. I trust you appreciate the sacrifice."

"And—your husband? Is he here too?"

Ruth flung a pebble.

"I believe he's addressing a woman suffrage convention in Chicago to-day." She gave him a lazy glance. "And Mrs. Shelby—is she here?"

"She's in Saratoga, I believe."

"Belief again? We really ought to read the papers."

He tried to search her face, but the pebble-throwing prevented. The Widow Weatherwax had expatiated on the topic of Mrs. Bernard Graves's unhappiness, with tedious variations on the saw about marrying in haste to repent at leisure. He wondered—he scarce knew what. She drew him with all the old attraction, but an elusive something had vanished. He guessed that it was the essence of youth, though the form lingered.

"Are you happy, Ruth?" he asked abruptly.

She looked him in the eyes, and laughed.

"That reminds me of your unofficial self," she said. "You never could invent small talk for the feminine mind."

"You were never the kind of woman who wanted it."

"I better appreciate its uses nowadays. It conceals either the absence or presence of thought. Bless me! there's an epigram. But I'm afraid it's merely an echo of Voltaire."

He was not listening. A midsummer madness rioted in his brain.

"But are you happy?"

"Small talk, small talk," she insisted. "See how that yacht's sails take the sun. Isn't the water a splendid sapphire? Do you like to fish? Do you prefer Tennyson or Browning? Meredith or Hardy? Isn't it warm? Isn't it cool?"

"But are you?"

She rose and faced him with strange eyes.

"What do you want?"

"Want," he repeated mechanically, rising too.

"Why have you come here in your pomp of governorship and promise of greater things to harass me?"

"Harass you, Ruth! If you knew—"

"Know? I know too much. I'm unlearning things now. That's the key to happiness—forgetting. And here come you, as you used to come, an untamed, masterful force—that's what you are, a force!—and instead of forgetting you ask me to remember. What is it you're really seeking in this probing of my happiness? What must you be told?"

"Nothing." With the revelation of the flaw in her armor he conquered self. "I know—God help me!—I know."



CHAPTER VI

The Boss questioned the wisdom of the Tuscarora speech, and the fall widened the unacknowledged breach between him and the governor. The September primaries had assured the leader a firmer control of the state convention than he had ever exercised, and it was well understood to be his, and his alone, made to his order, and the docile register of his will. That this victory clinched his ownership of the delegation to the national convention of next year was self-evident; and that a presidential candidate with New York's backing would attract allies from several eastern and at least two southern boss-ruled states, was well warranted by the tale of the great politician's excursions into national affairs in the recent past. By implication of the April banquet the leader's personal choice, Shelby, had therefore no trivial chance of capturing the nomination; and in the Boss's opinion the favored pawn owed a decent deference to the master chess-player. So Shelby thought, too; but they split over definition of terms in the same old way.

"You juggled millions like a Napoleon of Finance," complained the Boss at a breakfast for two shortly after the state convention. "Is that the kind of talk for people just recovering from hard times?"

His tone chafed the governor.

"It's the kind of talk for a proper handling of the canal problem," he retorted crisply. "The canal has been the prey of peanut politics too long."

"The speech was ill-advised—ill-advised," persisted the Boss, irritably. "You should have consulted somebody."

Shelby provoked him with a smile.

"That was my idea, precisely," he returned. "I thought I'd consult the people."

A difference springing from the November elections strained their relations farther, and goaded Shelby's patience to its utmost reach. Although they favored the organization as a whole, the elections wrought certain damaging changes in detail, one of which involved the fortunes of Handsome Ludlow. Early in his term the governor had appointed the man to a temporary commission, at the urgent plea of the Boss, who painted the ex-senator in the light of a faithful soldier haply fallen outside the breastworks by reason of the ingratitude of a fickle city constituency. Ludlow had regularly drawn a salary, which his subordinates earned, and divided his abundant leisure between the diversions peculiar to Mrs. Tommy Kidder's coterie and schemes for the recovery of his senatorial seat. In the latter business he met with a defeat more telling than he had yet experienced. But Ludlow was an office-seeker of resource. Through a channel which he did not disclose, he got wind of a judgeship whose forthcoming vacancy was known to the governor and those in his confidence, and promptly undertook a still-hunt for the place. Presently his name came to Shelby with the strong recommendation of the Boss.