The Cost Part 23

"He don't want to get it for him," replied Burd.i.c.k. "His real man's Judge Graney."

Scarborough stopped fanning himself with his wide-brimmed straw. Judge Graney was the most adroit and dangerous of John Dumont's tools. He had given invaluable aid from the bench at several of the National Woolens Company's most critical moments. Yet he had retained and increased his popularity and his reputation by deciding against his secret master with a brave show of virtue when he knew the higher courts must reverse him. For several years Scarborough had been looking forward to the inevitable open conflict between the forces of honesty in his party and the forces of the machine as ruled by the half-dozen big corporations who also ruled the machine of the opposition party. He had known that the contest must come, and that he must take part in it; and he had been getting ready. But he had not wished to give battle until he was strong enough to give a battle which, even if he lost it, would not strengthen the hold of the corruptionists.

After he rejected Larkin's dazzling offers, conditioned upon his aloofness rather than frank subservience, he had thought the whole situation over, and, as he hinted to Pauline, had realized how apparently hopeless a fight against the machine would be just then, with the people prosperous and therefore quiescent. And he had decided to stand aside for the time. He now saw that reluctance to attack Dumont had been at least a factor in this decision; and he also saw that he could not delay, as he had hoped. There was no escape--either he must let his work of years be undermined and destroyed or he must give battle with all his strength and skill. He remembered what Pauline had said: "You can't lose!"

"No, one can't lose in this sort of fight," he thought. "Either WE win or there'll be no victory." He sprang from the fence to the ground.

"Let's go to the house," he said to Burd.i.c.k.

"What you going to do?" asked Burd.i.c.k, as they walked toward the gate, where his horse and buggy were hitched.

"Fight, of course," said Scarborough. "Fight Larkin and his gang in the open. I'll get ex-Governor Bowen to let us use his name and canva.s.s the state for him."

Burd.i.c.k shook his head sadly.

"It ain't politics," he said. "You'll split the party; then the party'll turn and split you." And later, as they were separating, Scarborough to drive to Saint X, Burd.i.c.k to go back to Marshaltown, he said: "I'll help all I can in a quiet way. But--I hope you've got your cyclone cellar dug."

Scarborough laughed. "I haven't been digging a cyclone cellar. I've been trying to manufacture a cyclone."

There were thirty-three clear days before the meeting of the convention. He wasted not an hour of them on the manufacturing towns; he went to the country--to the farmers and the villagers, the men who lived each man in his own house, on his own soil from which he earned his own living. Up and down and across the state he went, speaking, organizing, planning, inspiring--he and the coterie of young men who looked up to him as their leader and followed him in this desperate a.s.sault as courageously as if victory were a.s.sured.

Not long before the convention he paused at ex-Judge Bowen's country place and spent two hours with him in his great, quiet, cool library.

"Isn't it inspiring," Scarborough said, "to see so many young men in arms for a principle?"

The old man slowly shook his magnificent white head and smiled at the young man. "Principles without leaders go begging," he replied. "Men rally to the standard only when the right voice calls. The right voice at the right time." He laid his hand on Scarborough's shoulder with affection and pride. "If the moment should come for you to think of it, do not forget that the leader is the principle, and that in this fight the leader is not I--but you."

XIX.

PAULINE GOES INTO POLITICS.

Larkin decided that the state convention should be held at Saint X because his machine was most perfect there. The National Woolens Company, the Consolidated Pipe and Wire Company and the Indiana Oil and Gas Corporation--the three princ.i.p.al political corporations in the state--had their main plants there and were in complete political control. While Larkin had no fear of the Scarborough movement, regarding it as a sentimental outburst in the rank and file of the party that would die away when its fomenter had been "read out of the party" at the convention by the regular organization, still he had been in the game too long to take unnecessary chances. He felt that it would be wise to have the delegates a.s.semble where all the surroundings would be favorable and where his ablest and confidential men could do their work in peace and quiet.

The convention was to, meet on the last Thursday in September. On the preceding Monday morning, Culver--Dumont's small, thin, stealthy private secretary--arrived at Saint X and, after making an appointment with Merriweather for half-past twelve, went out to the Eyrie to go through a lot of acc.u.mulated domestic business with Mrs. Dumont. When she in a most formal and unencouraging manner invited him to stop there, he eagerly accepted. "Thank you so much," he said effusively.

"To be perfectly frank, I've been tempted to invite myself. I have some valuables with me that I don't feel at all easy about. If I should be robbed, it would be a very serious matter. Would it be asking too much of you to ask you to put a package in your jewel safe?"

"I'll be glad to do it for you," replied Pauline. "There's plenty of room--the safe's almost empty and it's ridiculously large."

"My package isn't small," said Culver. "And on my mind it weighs tons." He reached into his large bag--at sight of it Pauline had wondered why he had brought such a bag up from the hotel when his papers for her inspection were so few. He lifted out an oblong, bulky package.

"If you'll just touch that b.u.t.ton," said she, "James will come and show you how to get to the safe."

Culver hesitated nervously. Finally he said: "I'm making a nuisance of myself, Mrs. Dumont, but would you mind going to the safe with me?

I'd much rather none of the servants knew about this."

Pauline smiled and bade him follow her. They went to her private sitting-room and she showed him the safe, in a small closet built into the lower part of the book-case. "You have the combination?" asked Culver, as he put the package away.

"I see that you don't lock this door often."

"How fortunate you spoke of it!" said she.

"The combination is on a bit of paper in one of the little drawers."

Culver found it in the first drawer he opened, and handed it to her without looking at it.

"You mustn't let me know it," said he. "I'll just fix the time lock so that it won't interfere." And when he had done so, he closed the safe.

As he left, he said, "I shall only bother you to let me sleep in the house. I'll be very busy all day each day I'm here." When she thought he had gone he returned to add: "Perhaps I'd better explain to you that there's forty-five thousand dollars in cash in the package. That's why I was so anxious for no one to know."

"I'll say nothing about it," Pauline a.s.sured him.

Larkin came down from Indianapolis the next day and registered at the Palace Hotel. As soon as he could escape from the politicians and newspaper correspondents in the hotel office, he went by a devious route to a room on the floor below his own and, knocking, was admitted to Culver and Merriweather. He nodded to Dumont's political agent, then said to Culver: "You've got the dough?"

"Yes," Culver answered, in his best imitation of the tone of the man of large affairs. "In twenties, fifties and hundreds."

"I hope, mighty few hundreds," said Larkin. "The boys are kind o' shy about changing hundred-dollar bills. It seems to attract attention to them." He had large, dreamy, almost sentimental, brown eyes that absurdly misrepresented his character, or, at least, his dominant characteristics. His long, slightly bent nose and sharp chin and thin, tight mouth were more truthful.

"How do things look, Joe?" asked Merriweather.

"Yes, Mr. Dumont asked me to telegraph him after I'd talked with you,"

said Culver. "Has Scarborough made much headway?"

"I must say, he's raised a darn sight more h.e.l.l than I thought he would," Larkin answered.

"The people seem to be in a nasty mood about corruption. Darn their fool souls, as if they wouldn't be in the rottenest kind of a fix, with no property and no jobs, if we didn't keep the ignorant vote under control and head off such firebrands as this fellow Scarborough."

"Got any figgers?" demanded Merriweather, who had listened to this tirade with an expression suggesting cynicism. He thought, and he knew Joe Larkin thought, politics a mere game of chance--you won or you didn't win; and principles and oratory and likes and dislikes and resentments were so much "hot air." If the "oil can" had been with Scarborough, Merriweather would have served him as cheerfully and as loyally as--well, as would Joe Larkin in those circ.u.mstances.

Larkin wrenched a big bunch of letters and papers from the sagged inside pocket of his slouchy sack coat; after some fumbling and sorting, he paused upon the back of a dirty envelope.

"Here's how the convention stands, to a man," he said. "Sure, two hundred and sixty-seven-by 'sure' I mean the fellows we own outright.

Safe, two hundred and forty-five-by 'safe' I mean those that'll stand by the organization, thick and thin. Insurgents, two hundred and ninety-five--those are the chaps that've gone clean crazy with Scarborough. Doubtful, three hundred and eighty-six-some of 'em can be bought; most of 'em are waiting to see which way the cat jumps, so as to jump with her."

"Then we've got five hundred and twelve, and it takes five hundred and ninety-seven to elect," said Merriweather, the instant the last word was out of Larkin's mouth. Merriweather was a mite of a man, could hardly have weighed more than a hundred pounds, had a bulging forehead, was bald and gray at the temples, eyes brown as walnut juice and quick and keen as a rat-terrier's. His expression was the gambler's--calm, watchful, indifferent, pallid, as from years of nights under the gas-light in close, hot rooms, with the cards sliding from the faro box hour after hour.

"Eighty-five short--that's right," a.s.sented Larkin. Then, with a look at Culver: "And some of 'em'll come mighty high."

"Where are you going to do business with them?" inquired Merriweather.

"Here?"

"Right here in this room, where I've done it many's the time before,"

replied Larkin. "To-morrow night Conkey Sedgwick and my boy Tom'll begin steerin' 'em in one at a time about eight o'clock."

"Then I'll turn the money over to you at seven to-morrow night," said Culver. "I've got it in a safe place."

"Not one of the banks, I hope," said Merriweather.

"We noted your suggestions on that point, and on all the others,"

Culver answered with gracious condescension. "That's why I brought cash in small denominations and didn't go near anybody with it."