Part 12 (1/2)

”I don't know _what_ to think, Sayler,” he cried, ”I don't _know_ what to think! The demands of these corporations have been growing, growing, growing! And now--You have seen the calendar?”

”Yes,” said I. ”Some of the bills are pretty stiff, aren't they? But the boys tell me they're for our best friends, and that they're all necessary.”

”No doubt, no doubt,” he replied, ”but it will be impossible to reconcile the people.” Suddenly he turned on me, his eyes full of fear and suspicion. ”Have _you_ laid a plot to ruin me, Sayler? It certainly looks that way. Have you a secret ambition for the presidency--”

”Don't talk rubbish, James,” I interrupted. Those few meaningless votes in the national convention had addled his common sense. ”Sit down,--calm yourself,--tell me all about it.”

He seated himself and ran his fingers up and down his temples and through his wet hair that was being so rapidly thinned and whitened by the struggles and anxieties of his ambition. ”My G.o.d!” he cried out, ”how I am punished! When I started in my public career, I looked forward and saw just this time,--when I should be the helpless tool in the hands of the power I sold myself to. Governor!” He almost shouted the word, rising and pacing the floor again. ”Governor!”--and he laughed in wild derision.

I watched him, fascinated. I, too, at the outset of my career, had looked forward, and had seen the same peril, but I had avoided it.

Wretched figure that he was!--what more wretched, more pitiable than a man groveling and moaning in the mire of his own self-contempt?

”Governor!” I said to myself, as I saw awful thoughts flitting like demons of despair across his face. And I shuddered, and pitied, and rejoiced,--shuddered at the narrowness of my own escape; pitied the man who seemed myself as I might have been; and rejoiced that I had had my mother with me and in me to impel me into another course.

”Come, come, Burbank,” said I, ”you're not yourself; you've lost sleep--”

”Sleep!” he interrupted, ”I have not closed my eyes since I read those cursed bills.”

”Tell me what you want done,” was my suggestion. ”I'll help in any way I can,--any way that's practicable.”

”Oh, I understand your position, Sayler,” he answered, when he had got control of himself again, ”but I see plainly that the time has come when the power that rules me,--that rules us both,--has decided to use me to my own destruction. If I refuse to do these things, it will destroy me,--and a hundred are eager to come forward and take my place. If I do these things, the people will destroy me,--and neither is that of the smallest importance to our master.”

His phrases, ”the power that rules us both,” and ”our master,” jarred on me. So far as he knew, indeed, so far as ”our master” knew, were not he and I in the same cla.s.s? But that was no time for personal vanity. All I said was: ”The bills must go through. This is one of those crises that test a man's loyalty to the party.”

”For the good of the party!” he muttered with a bitter sneer. ”Crime upon crime--yes, crime, I say--that the party may keep the favor of the powers! And to what end? to what good? Why, that the party may continue in control and so may be of further use to its rulers.” He rested his elbows on the table and held his face between his hands. He looked terribly old, and weary beyond the power ever to be rested again. ”I stand with the party,--what am I without it?” he went on in a dull voice. ”The people may forget, but, if I offend the master,--he never forgives or forgets. I'll sign the bills, Sayler,--_if_ they come to me as party measures.”

Burbank had responded to the test.

A baser man would have acted as scores of governors, mayors, and judges have acted in the same situation--would have accepted popular ruin and would have compelled the powers to make him rich in compensation. A braver man would have defied it and the powers, would have appealed to the people--with one chance of winning out against ten thousand chances of being disbelieved and laughed at as a ”man who thinks he's too good for his party.” Burbank was neither too base nor too brave; clearly, I a.s.sured myself, he is the man I want. I felt that I might safely relieve his mind, so far as I could do so without letting him too far into my secret plans.

I had not spent five minutes in explanation before he was up, his face radiant, and both hands stretched out to me.

”Forgive me, Harvey!” he cried. ”I shall never distrust you again. I put my future in your hands.”

XII

BURBANK FIRES THE POPULAR HEART

That was, indeed, a wild winter at the state capital,--a ”carnival of corruption,” the newspapers of other states called it. One of the first of the ”black bills” to go through was a disguised street railway grab, out of which Senator Croffut got a handsome ”counsel fee” of fifty-odd thousand dollars. But as the rout went on, ever more audaciously and recklessly, he became uneasy. In mid-February he was urging me to go West and try to do something to ”curb those infernal grabbers.” I refused to interfere. He went himself, and Woodruff reported to me that he was running round the state house and the hotels like a crazy man; for when he got into the thick of it, he realized that it was much worse than it seemed from Was.h.i.+ngton. In a few days he was back and at me again.

”It's very strange,” said he suspiciously. ”The boys say they're getting nothing out of it. They declare they're simply obeying orders.”

”Whose orders?” I asked.

”I don't know,” he answered, his eyes sharply upon me. ”But I do know that, unless something is done, I'll not be returned to the Senate.

We'll lose the legislature, sure, next fall.”

”It does look that way,” I said with a touch of melancholy. ”That street railway grab was the beginning of our rake's progress. We've been going it, h.e.l.l bent, ever since.”