Hobart glanced up the car, and noticed that Harley was not within hearing. Then he replied, gravely:

"Churchill, I don't believe that Miss Morgan has broken her engagement with the 'King'--she'll marry him yet if he says so--but I do believe that she has some connection with this affair. What it is, I don't know, and I'm mighty glad that I don't have to speak of it in my despatches; it's too intangible."

But Churchill was not so scrupulous. Without giving any names, he wove into his four-thousand-word despatch a very beautiful and touching romance, in which Jimmy Grayson figured rather badly--in fact, somewhat as an evil genius--and the _Monitor_, dealing in the fine vein of irony which it considered its strongest card, wrote scornfully of a campaign into which personal issues were obtruding to such an extent that they were shattering it. The _Monitor_ still affected to see some good in Mr.

Grayson, but put the bad in such high relief that the good merely set it off, like those little patches that ladies wear on their faces. And the mystery of the Plummer bolt, involving a young and beautiful woman, just hinted at in the despatches, heightened the effect of the story. "King"

Plummer himself appeared to the reading public as a martyr, and even to many old partisans party rebellion seemed in this case honorable and heroic.

For a day or so Harley scarcely spoke to any one, and, as far as was possible within the limited confines of a train, he avoided Sylvia. He did not wish to see her, because he was strengthening himself to carry out a great resolution which he meant to take. In this crisis he turned to only one person, and that was Mr. Heathcote, who he felt would give him advice that was right and true.

When Harley told Mr. Heathcote of his purpose, the committeeman's face became grave, but he said, "It is the hard thing for you to do, although it is the best thing." An hour later, Harley sent to his editor in New York a despatch, asking to be recalled; he said there had arisen personal reasons which would make him valueless for the rest of the campaign, and he felt that the _Gazette_ would be the gainer if he were transferred to another field of activity.

Harley felt a deep pang, and he did not attempt to disguise it from himself, when he sent this telegram, but after it was gone his conscience came to his relief, although he still avoided the presence of Sylvia with great care. But the pang was repeated many times, as he sat silent among his companions and calculated how he could leave them that night and get a train for New York in the morning.

He was still sitting among them about the twilight hour when the conductor handed him a telegraphic despatch, and Harley knew that it was from his editor, who had a high appreciation of his merits, both personal and professional. The message was brief and pointed. It said: "Can't understand your request for a transfer. Your despatches from the campaign best work you have ever done; not only have all news, but write from the inside; you present the candidate as he is. Have telegraphed Mr. Grayson asking if there is any quarrel, and in reply he makes special request that you represent _Gazette_ with him to the end. Stay till you are sent for, and don't bother me again."

Harley read it over a second time. Despite himself he smiled, and he smiled because he felt a throb of pleasure. "Good old chief," he said, and he understood now that a refusal of his request was a hope that he had dared not utter to himself. But he knew that he should have taken the great risk.

He showed the despatch to Mr. Heathcote, and the committeeman was sincerely glad.

"Your editor has done his duty," he said.

Mr. Grayson did not allude to the subject, and Harley respected his silence, although devoutly grateful for the reply that he had made.

Other telegrams caused by the threatened revolt in the mountains were also pa.s.sing; some of them stopped at the house of Mr. Plummer, in Boise, and upon the trail of one of these telegrams, a forcible one, came a thin-faced and quiet but alert man, Mr. Henry Crayon, who in his way was a power in both the financial and political worlds. Mr. Crayon was perhaps the most trusted of the lieutenants of the Honorable Clinton Goodnight, and the two had held a long conference before his departure for the West, agreeing at the end of it that "it was time to make a move, and after that move to spring a live issue."

Mr. Crayon was fairly well informed of the causes that agitated the soul of "King" Plummer, and as he shot westward on a Limited Continental Express he considered the best way of approach, inclining as always to delicate but incisive methods. Long before he reached Boise his mind was well made up, and he felt content because he antic.i.p.ated no difficulty in handling the crude mountaineer, who was unused to the ways of diplomacy.

He found the "King" in Boise, still hot and sulky. Mr. Plummer had not heard anything in person from the Graysons, nor had he sent any message to them, and the mountains were full of talk about his bolt, which was now spoken of as an accepted fact.

Mr. Crayon's first meeting with Mr. Plummer came about in quite an accidental and easy way--Mr. Crayon saw to that--and the Easterner was deferential, as became one who had so little experience of the West, who, in case he was presumptuous, was likely to be reminded that Idaho was nearly twenty times as large as Connecticut and twice as large as the state of New York itself. After making himself pleasant by humility and requests for advice, Mr. Crayon glided warily into the subject of politics. He disclosed to Mr. Plummer how much a powerful faction in the party was displeased with Mr. Grayson, and the equally important fact that this faction felt the necessity of speedy action of some kind.

They were at that moment in a secluded corner of the reading-room of the chief hotel in Boise, and Mr. Crayon had ordered a pleasant and powerful Western concoction which he and Mr. Plummer sipped as they talked. The "King's" face was red, partly with the sun and partly with the anger that still burned him. Mr. Crayon's words fell soothingly upon his ear--Mr. Crayon had a quiet, mellow voice--and his sense of injury at the hands of Jimmy Grayson deepened. What right had Jimmy Grayson or Jimmy Grayson's wife, which was the same thing, to interfere in his private affairs? And it was only a step from one's private life to one's public life. Wrong in one, wrong in the other. Mr. Crayon, watching him keenly though covertly, was pleased with the varying expressions that pa.s.sed over the unbearded portions of the "King's" face. He read there anger, jealousy, and revenge, and he said to himself that he would bend this man, big and strong as he was, to his will.

Mr. Crayon now grew bolder. He said that the minority within the party, which, for the present, he represented, was resolved to come to an issue with Mr. Grayson; the destinies of a great party, and possibly the country, could not be put in the hands of a man who had neither the proper dignity nor the proper sense of responsibility. Thus far he went, and then the wily Mr. Crayon stopped to notice the effect.

It seemed to him to be favorable, and Mr. Crayon was an acute man. The "King" drank a little of his liquor and nodded his head. Yes, he had been fooled in Jimmy Grayson, he had thought that he was as true as steel, but there was a flaw in the steel; Jimmy Grayson had done him a great injury, and he was not a man who turned one cheek when the other was smitten; he smote back with all his might, and his own hand was pretty heavy.

Mr. Crayon smiled--all things were certainly going well; he had caught Mr. Plummer at the right moment, and there was no doubt of the impression that he was making. Then he went a little further; he suggested that a certain important issue not hitherto discussed in the campaign was going to be brought up, even now they were proposing to present it in the West, and Mr. Grayson would have to declare himself either for or against it--there was no middle ground. Mr. Crayon again stopped and observed the "King" with the same covert but careful glance. The face of Mr. Plummer obviously bore the stamp of approval; moreover, he nodded, and, thus encouraged, Mr. Crayon went further and further, telling why the issue was so great, and why it must be presented to the public without delay.

Mr. Plummer asked him to name the issue, and when Mr. Crayon did so, without reserve, the "King's" face once more bore the stamp of approval, and he nodded his head again.

"If Mr. Grayson accepts the law as we lay it down," said Mr. Crayon, with satisfaction, "he places himself in our hands and we control him.

Our policies prevail, and, if he becomes President of the United States, we remain the power that rules him, and that, therefore, rules the country. If he resists us, well, that is the end of him!"

Mr. Crayon had lighted a cigar, and as he said "that is the end of him"

he flicked off the ash with a quick gesture that had in it the touch of finality.

Mr. Plummer said nothing, and Mr. Crayon was content; he could do enough talking for two.

"Mr. Goodnight and other of my a.s.sociates are coming West very soon," he continued. "The velvet glove will be taken off, and it is high time."

Then they went forth into the streets of Boise and they were seen walking together by many people, to which Mr. Crayon was not averse, and in an hour three or four local correspondents were sending eastward vivid despatches stating that Mr. Crayon, the representative of the conservative and dissatisfied minority in the party, was in Boise in close conference with "King" Plummer, the political ruler of the mountains. And the burden of all these despatches was fast-coming evil for Jimmy Grayson.

Nor was the candidate long in hearing of it. The very next day a Boise newspaper containing a full first-page account of it reached them, and was read aloud to the party by Mr. Heathcote. Mr. Grayson made no comment as it was being read, but Harley once saw his face darken and his lips close tightly together; this was the only sign that he gave, and it quickly pa.s.sed.

But the others were not so chary of words. The train was full of indignant comment, and the ears of "King" Plummer in the distance must have burned.

"I could not have believed it of him," said Mr. Heathcote. "It is untrue to the man's whole nature, even if he is swayed suddenly by some powerful emotion."

Hobart glanced at Sylvia, who had withdrawn to the far end of the car, where she was apparently gazing at the mountains that fled by, although she said not one word and her face was red. Nor did Harley join in the talk, but, taking advantage of the slight bustle caused by Mr. Grayson's retirement to the drawing-room, he took refuge in a day car to which their own coach was attached for the time. That evening, while the others were at dinner, he saw Sylvia alone.

"I ought to tell you," she said, "that I have asked to leave the train, but my aunt has refused to consent to it. She says she needs me, and as I cannot go now to my old home in Boise, it is better for me to stay with her. I have heard that you asked to be recalled to the East, and I honor you for it."

"Are you sorry that my request was refused?" asked Harley.

She did not falter, although the red in her cheeks flushed deeper.

"No, I am not sorry; I am glad," she replied. "Why should I tell an untruth about what is so great a matter to both of us? But it cannot change anything."

Harley felt that this was, indeed, a maid well worth winning, and his hope yet to find a way, which had been weakened somewhat lately, grew high again. That night wild resolves ran through his mind. He would sacrifice his pride, hitherto an unthinkable thing--he would see "King"

Plummer and tell him that Sylvia and he loved each other, that neither of them could possibly be happy unless they were wedded, then he would appeal to the older man's generosity; he would tell him how Sylvia loyally meant to keep her word and pay her debt of grat.i.tude with herself, then he would ask him to release her from the promise. But he gave up the idea as one that required too much; he could never humiliate himself so far, and even then it would be a humiliation without result.

If Harley had undertaken to carry out such a wild idea, he would have found it difficult, because no one in the party then knew where "King"

Plummer was; they were hearing of him all over the West, and the Denver, Salt Lake, and smaller newspapers were filled with accounts of his doings, all colored highly. His bolt, they said, was now an accomplished fact; he showed the deepest hostility to the candidate, and he was also in constant correspondence with a powerful and dissatisfied wing in the East.

Mr. Grayson never said a word, he never spoke of Mr. Plummer in any of his speeches, and Harley believed there was only sadness in his mind, not anger, whenever he thought of the "King."

But there could be no doubt of the effect of all these events upon the campaign; to the public Jimmy Grayson seemed as one lost in the wilderness, and only in the mountains, where the people were far from the great centres of information, did they yet cherish a hope of his election. Churchill wrote to the _Monitor_ that Jimmy Grayson himself had abandoned hope.

Ominous rumblings were coming from the East, too. Goodnight, Crayon, and their friends had found a pretext upon which to take drastic action, and they were about to take it.

XX

THE GREAT PHILIPSBURG CONFERENCE

If ever you go to Philipsburg, which is in Wyoming, not far from the Montana line, you will hear the people proclaim the greatness of the town in which they live. You expect this sort of thing in the Far West, and you are prepared for it, but you will be surprised at the nature of the Philipsburg boast. Its proud inhabitants will not tell you that it is bound to be the largest city between the Missouri and the coast, they will not a.s.sert that since the horizon touches the earth at an equal distance on all sides of the town, it is, therefore, the natural centre of the world; but they will tell you stories of the Great Philipsburg Conference, and some of them will not be far from the truth.

Philipsburg is but a hamlet, fed by an irrigation ditch that leads the life-giving waters down from a distant mountain, and it has neither the beauty of nature nor that given by the hand of man, but the people will point importantly to the square wooden hotel of only two stories, and tell you that there occurred the great crisis in the most famous and picturesque Presidential campaign ever waged in the United States; they will even lead you to the very room in which the big talk occurred, and say, in lowered voices, that the furniture is exactly the same, and arranged just as it was on that momentous night when the history of the world might have been changed. In this room the people of Philipsburg have a reverential air, and there is cause for it.

The affair did not begin at Philipsburg--it merely had its climax there--but far away on the dusty plains of eastern Washington, where the wheat grows so tall, and it bubbled and seethed as the candidate and his party travelled eastward, stopping and speaking many times by the way.

It was all about the tariff, a dry subject in itself, but, as tall oaks from little acorns grow, so a dry subject often can make interesting people do interesting things.

At the convention that nominated Mr. Grayson for the Presidency the subject of the tariff had been left somewhat vague in the platform, not from deliberate purpose, but merely through the drift of events; the question had not interested the people greatly in some time; other things connected with both the foreign and internal policy of the government, particularly the continued occupation of the Philippines and a projected new banking system, were more to the fore; but as the campaign proceeded certain events caused the tariff also to be brought into issue and to receive a large share of public attention.