The Plum Tree Part 12

"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 Washington. 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."

He tossed his handsome head and was about to launch into an angry defense of himself. But my manner checked him. He began to plead. "_You_ can stop it, Sayler. Everybody out there says you can. And, if I am reelected, I've got a good chance for the presidential nomination.

Should I get it and be elected, we could form a combination that would interest you, I think."

It was a beautiful irony that in his conceit he should give as his reason why I should help him the very reason why I was not sorry he was to be beaten. For, although he was not dangerous, still he was a rival public figure to Burbank in our state, and,--well, accidents sometimes happen, unless they're guarded against.

"What shall I do?" I asked him.

"Stop them from pa.s.sing any more black bills. Why, they've got half a dozen ready, some of them worse even than the two they pa.s.sed over Burbank's veto, a week ago."

"For instance?"

He cited three Power Trust bills.

"But why don't _you_ stop those three?" said I. "They're under the special patronage of Dominick. You have influence with him."

"Dominick!" he groaned. "Are you sure?" And when I nodded emphatically, he went on: "I'll do what I can, but--" He threw up his hands.

He was off for the West that night. When he returned, his face wore the look of doom. He had always posed for the benefit of the galleries, especially the women in the galleries. But now he became sloven in dress, often issued forth unshaven, and sat sprawled at his desk in the Senate, his chin on his shirt bosom, looking vague and starting when any one spoke to him.

Following my advice on the day when I sent him away happy, Burbank left the capital and the state just before the five worst bills left the committees. He was called to the bedside of his wife who, so all the newspapers announced, was at the point of death at Colorado Springs.

While he was there nursing her as she "hovered between life and death,"

the bills were jammed through the senate and the a.s.sembly.

He telegraphed the lieutenant governor not to sign them, as he was returning and wished to deal with them himself. He reached the capital on a Thursday morning, sent the bills back with a "ringing" veto message, and took the late afternoon train for Colorado Springs. It was as good a political "grand-stand play" as ever thrilled a people.

The legislature pa.s.sed the bills over his veto and adjourned that night.

Press and people, without regard to party lines, were loud in their execrations of the "abandoned and shameless wretches" who had "betrayed the state and had covered themselves with eternal infamy." I quote from an editorial in the newspaper that was regarded as my personal organ.

But there was only praise for Burbank; his enemies, and those who had doubted his independence and had suspected him of willingness to do anything to further his personal ambitions, admitted that he had shown "fearless courage, inflexible honesty, and the highest ideals of private sacrifice to public duty." And they eagerly exaggerated him, to make his white contrast more vividly with the black of the "satanic sp.a.w.n" in the legislature. His fame spread, carried far and wide by the sentimentality in that supposed struggle between heart and conscience, between love for the wife of his bosom and duty to the people.

Carlotta, who like most women took no interest in politics because it lacks "heart-interest," came to me with eyes swimming and cheeks aglow.

She had just been reading about Burbank's heroism.

"Isn't he splendid!" she cried. "I always told you he'd be President.

And you didn't believe me."

"Be patient with me, my dear," said I. "I am not a woman with seven-league boots of intuition. I'm only a heavy-footed man."

XIII

ROEBUCK & CO. Pa.s.s UNDER THE YOKE