omen flocked to a state convention. By
rights there should have been ladies in the boxes and in the balcony.
Now there wasn't a woman in sight anywhere, only men, row after row of
them. And there wasn't any cheering, or mighty little of it. When I tell
you the band played Dixie all the way through with only a stray whoop
now and then, you will understand better the temper of that crowd.

The situation, you see, was like this: One side had carried the mountain
end of the state; the other had carried the lowlands. One side had swept
the city; that meant a solid block of more than a hundred delegates. The
other side had won the small towns and the inland counties. So it stood
lowlander against highlander, city man against country man, and the
bitter waters of those ancient feuds have their wellsprings back a
thousand years in history, they tell me. One side led slenderly on
instructed vote. The other side had enough contesting delegations on
hand to upset the result if these contestants or any considerable
proportion of them should be recognized in the preliminary organization.

One side held a majority of the delegates who sat upon the floor; the
other side had packed the balcony and the aisles and the corners with
its armed partizans. One side was in the saddle and determined; the
other afoot and grimly desperate. And it was our side, as I shall call
it, meaning by that the state-house ring, that for the moment had the
whiphand; and it was the other side, led in person by State Senator
Stickney, god of the new machine, that stood ready to wade hip deep
through trouble to unhorse us.

Just below me, stretching across the hall from side to side in favored
front places, sat the city delegates--Stickney men all of them. And as
my eye swept the curved double row of faces it seemed to me I saw there
every man in town with a reputation as a gun-fighter or a knife-fighter
or a fist-fighter; and every one of them wore, pinning his delegate's
badge to his breast, a Stickney button that was round and bright red,
like a clot of blood on his shirt front.

They made a contrast, these half-moon lines of blocky men, to the lank,
slouch-hatted, low-collared country delegates--farmers, school
teachers, country doctors and country lawyers--who filled the seats
behind them and on beyond them. To the one group politics was a business
in which there was money to be made and excitement to be had; to the
other group it was a passion, veritab