Part 46 (1/2)

”Wait and we shall see,” repeated Jimmy Grayson, as sweetly as ever.

”Well, this conference came to pa.s.s, and it lasted a long time, but only the committee talked; they gave the candidate scarcely a chance to say a word. They treated him with increasing arrogance. They said that if he declared himself upon this great issue they would bolt the party and let him go headlong to destruction.”

”The traitors!” shouted the big man in the audience. But the members of the committee, from some strange cause, seemed to be struck speechless.

Their jaws fell, but the faces of them all were as red as fire. Sylvia leaned forward and clapped her gloved hands.

”Blaisdell,” whispered Hobart, ”slip away and arrange at the telegraph-office; any of us will give you his report. I shall have at least five thousand words myself.”

Blaisdell slid noiselessly away.

”The candidate endured it all, but only for the time,” thundered Jimmy Grayson, and now his voice was swelling with pa.s.sion, while his eyes fairly sparkled with heat and anger--”but only for the time. He had decided opinions upon this subject, as I have upon the question of tariff revision, and he intended to utter them as I intend to utter mine. They said--and they said it with intolerable condescension and patronage--that for the sake of his record he might make one little speech upon the subject before a few people out in what they called the desert, and he accepted the concession. But there was rage in his heart.

He was willing to be beaten by the biggest majority ever given against a Presidential candidate before he would yield to such insolent dictation.

Moreover, there was the question of his true opinion, which the people had a right to know, and he took his resolve. There was that little speech, and he remembered the telegraph wire, the thin line that binds the farthest little village to the great world, and I say he took his resolve.”

”He called the bluff!” shouted the big man in the audience, in a perfect roar of triumph, and Jimmy Grayson smiled sweetly.

Suddenly Mr. Goodnight, in all the might of his majesty and importance, rose up and stalked from the stage, and the eleven other members of the committee, headed by Mr. Crayon, followed him in an angry file, accompanied by the derisive shouts of the audience. They quickened their pace somewhat when they reached solid ground, but before they were within the sheltering confines of their private car, Jimmy Grayson was launched upon his great and thrilling tariff speech, in which he invested the driest subject in the world with an interest that absorbed the attention of ninety million people.

All day the wires eastward and westward sang with the burden of the great speech made in the tiny hamlet of Waterville, in the Wyoming mountains, and the next morning it occupied the front pages of ten thousand newspapers. It was absolutely clear and decisive. No one could doubt how the candidate stood. He was heart and soul for revision.

Sylvia threw her arms around his neck, and said, ”Uncle James, I was never prouder of you than I am at this moment.”

When they left Waterville the private car of the committee was still attached to their train, but there was no communication between it and the other cars. About the middle of the afternoon they reached a junction with another railroad line. There the private car was cut off and attached to a new engine. Then it sped eastward at the rate of fifty miles an hour.

Meanwhile the correspondents were holding a little conference of their own.

”They will bolt him sure,” said Hobart. ”Will it ruin Jimmy Grayson?”

”I believe not,” said Harley, who had been thinking much. ”Of course there will be a split, but such courage, and his way of meeting their attack, will appeal to the people; it will bring him thousands of new votes.”

”Whether it does or does not,” said Hobart, ”if I had been in his place I'd have done as he did.”

XXI

ALONE WITH NATURE

When the party returned to the train after Jimmy Grayson's thrilling defiance there was an air of relief, even joyousness, about them all. No more diplomacy, no more watching for blows in the dark, no more waiting, now they knew who their friends were, and they knew equally well their enemies. They could strike straight at Goodnight, Crayon, and all the others. Only in the heart of nearly every one of them there was still mourning for the lost leader, for ”King” Plummer, whom a gust of pa.s.sion had led astray.

”Well,” said Hobart, ”I thank G.o.d that the split has come at last. Even if we are beaten out of our boots, I've got that defiance to remember, and the picture of Jimmy Grayson refusing either to be browbeaten or cajoled, even though the price was the Presidency.”

”We know where we stand,” said Mr. Heathcote, ”and that at least is a gain.”

As for Sylvia, she was thrilling with pride. Her uncle's high heroism, his superb truthfulness appealed to every quality in her woman's soul, and with another impulse full as womanly she hated Goodnight, Crayon, and their a.s.sociates with all her heart; she believed them capable of any crime, personal as well as political. She felt so intensely upon the subject that she wanted to speak of it to somebody else, but Mr. and Mrs. Grayson had withdrawn to the drawing-room, and all the correspondents were deep in their work, as it would be necessary to send very long despatches to the great cities that day.

Harley wrote five or six thousand words full of fire and zeal. As usual, he wrote from the ”inside,” and his was not a bare record of facts; one reading it, though three thousand miles away, was upon the scene himself; everything pa.s.sed before him alive; he saw the heroic figure of the candidate thundering forth his denunciation; he knew all that it cost, the full penalty, and he shared the stern impulse which such a speaker in such a situation must feel; he, too, saw the astonishment on the faces of the committee, astonishment followed by fear and rage, and he shared also the n.o.ble thrill that must come to a man who had lost all save honor, but was proud in the losing. Harley was always a good writer, but now as he wrote he saw every word burning before him, so intense were his feelings, and even across the United States he communicated the same thrill to those who read.

His despatch brought from his abrupt editor the one word ”Splendid!” and it attracted marked attention not only wherever the _Gazette_ went, but where also went the numerous journals into which it was copied.

Everybody who read it said, ”What a magnificent figure Jimmy Grayson is!” and the impression was deepened and widened by other writers on the train who were inferior in powers only to Harley. In this his day of great disaster the candidate was to find that there were friends who were truly bound to him with ”hooks of steel.” Nor was he ungrateful.