ty of scoundrels.

Burbank sat motionless and with closed eyes, for a long time. I watched
the people in the throng of carriages--hundreds of faces all turned
toward him, all showing that mingled admiration, envy and awe which
humanity gives its exalted great. "The President! The President!" I
heard every few yards in excited undertones. And hats were lifting, and
once a crowd of enthusiastic partizans raised a cheer.

"The President!" I thought, with mournful irony. And I glanced at him.

Suddenly he was transformed by an expression the most frightful I have
ever seen. It was the look of a despairing, weak, vicious thing,
cornered, giving battle for its life--like a fox at bay before a pack of
huge dogs. It was not Burbank--no, _he_ was wholly unlike that. It was
Burbank's ambition, interrupted at its meal by the relentless,
sure-aiming hunter, Fate.

"For God's sake, Burbank!" I exclaimed. "All these people are watching
us."

"To hell with them!" he ground out. "I tell you, Sayler, I _will_ be
nominated! And elected too, by God! I will not be thrown aside like an
emptied orange-skin. I will show them that I am President."

Those words, said by some men, in some tones, would have thrilled me.
Said by him and in that tone and with that look, they made me shudder
and shrink. Neither of us spoke again. When he dropped me at my hotel we
touched hands and smiled formally for appearances before the gaping,
peeping, peering crowd. And as he drove away, how they cheered him--the
man risen high above eighty millions, alone on the mountain-peak, in the
glorious sunshine of success. The President!

The next seven months were months of turmoil in the party and in the
country--a turmoil of which I was a silent spectator, conspicuous by my
silence. Burbank, the deepest passions of his nature rampant, had burst
through the meshes of partizanship and the meshes of social and personal
intimacies in which he, as a "good party man" and as the father of
children with social aspirations and as the worshiper of wealth and
respectability, was entangled and bound down; with the desperate courage
that comes from fear of destruction, he was trying to save himself.

But his only available instruments were all either Goodrich men or other
kinds of machine-men; they owed nothing to him, they had nothing to fear
from him--a falling king is a fallen king. Every project he devised for
striking down his traitor friends and making himself popul