but Kittrell saw that it had the
thing his work now lacked, the vital, primal thing--sincerity, belief,
love. The spark was there, and Kittrell knew how Hardy would nurse that
spark and fan it, and keep it alive and burning until it should
eventually blaze up in a fine white flame. And Kittrell realized, as the
days went by, that Banks' work was telling, and that his own was
failing. He had, from the first missed the atmosphere of the _Post_,
missed the _camaraderie_ of the congenial spirits there, animated by a
common purpose, inspired and led by Hardy, whom they all loved--loved as
he himself once loved him, loved as he loved him still--and dared not
look him in the face when they met!

He found the atmosphere of the _Telegraph_ alien and distasteful. There
all was different; the men had little joy in their work, little interest
in it, save perhaps the newspaper man's inborn love of a good story or a
beat. They were all cynical, without loyalty or faith; they secretly
made fun of the _Telegraph_, of its editors and owners; they had no
belief in its cause; and its pretensions to respectability, its parade
of virtue, excited only their derision. And slowly it began to dawn on
Kittrell that the great moral law worked always and everywhere, even on
newspapers, and that there was reflected inevitably and logically in the
work of the men on that staff the hatred, the lack of principle, the
bigotry and intolerance of its proprietors; and this same lack of
principle tainted and made meretricious his own work, and enervated the
editorials so that the _Telegraph_, no matter how carefully edited or
how dignified in typographical appearance, was, nevertheless, without
real influence in the community.

Meanwhile Clayton was gaining ground. It was less than two weeks before
election. The campaign waxed more and more bitter, and as the forces
opposed to him foresaw defeat, they became ugly in spirit, and
desperate. The _Telegraph_ took on a tone more menacing and brutal, and
Kittrell knew that the crisis had come. The might of the powers massed
against Clayton appalled Kittrell; they thundered at him through many
brazen mouths, but Clayton held on his high way unperturbed. He was
speaking by day and night to thousands. Such meetings he had never had
before. Kittrell had visions of him before those immense audiences in
halls, in tents, in the raw open air of that rude March weather, making
his appeals to the heart of the great mass