re
sought for microscopically: wheel-horses who came at the party call; men
who came in the temporary upblaze of enthusiastic patriotism, which is
lighted with the opening of the campaign, and which goes out like a candle
in a gust of wind the day after the election; men who came to applaud
blindly, and a few who came to cavil and deride. Loring oriented himself
in a leisurely eye-sweep, and so came by easy gradations to the speaker.

Measured by the standard of fitness for his office of prolocutor the man
standing beside the stage-properties speaker's desk was worthy a second
glance. He was dark, undersized, trimly built; with a Vandyke beard
clipped closely enough to show the lines of a bull-dog jaw, and eyes that
had the gift, priceless to the public speaker, of seeming to hold every
onlooking eye in the audience. Unlike his backers in the awkward
semicircle, he wore a professional long coat; and the hands that marked
his smoothly flowing sentences were slim and shapely.

"Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent.

"Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter--a
charter member of the Gaston wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you into
believing in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you in
the back for a ten-dollar bill in the next," was the rejoinder.

Loring nodded, and again became a listener. Hawk's speech was merely
introductory, and it was nearing its peroration.

"Fellow citizens, this occasion is as auspicious as it is significant.
When the people rise in their might to say to tyranny in whatsoever form
it oppresses them, 'Thus far and no farther shalt thou go,' the night is
far spent and the light is breaking in the east.

"Since the day when we first began to wrest with compelling hands the
natural riches from the soil of this our adoptive State, political
trickery in high places, backed by the puissant might of alien
corporations, has ground us into the dust.

"But now the time of our deliverance is at hand. Great movements give
birth to great leaders; and in this, our holy crusade against oppression
and tyranny, the crisis has bred the man. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the
pleasure of presenting to you the speaker of the evening: our friend and
fellow citizen the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks, by the grace of God, and
your suffrages, the next governor of the State."

In the storm of applause that burst upon the dramatic peroration of the
ex-district attor