s
square. It symbolizes everything we stand for."

"Bravo! It's a slogan to win with. Square issues, square dealing,
square men! We'll placard every fence and barn door in the district.
A woodcut will cost next to nothing, and I'll run the posters off right
here on the premises."

The suggestion bruised Graves's sensibilities.

"Is that necessary?" he protested mildly. "I'd really prefer to leave
all that sort of vandalism to the other side; it's so philistine, you
know."

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

Volney Sprague's flaming posters in black and red menaced Shelby from
the selvage of the district to the threshold of his door. The State
Committee had despatched him on a brief stumping tour, embracing a
handful of canal counties, a section of the grape belt, and certain
strategic points in the Southern Tier, and he had kept in fairly
regular communication with Bowers; but while that leader's letters were
usually as terse and meaty as Caesar's campaign jottings in Gaul, they
somehow failed to impress the candidate with the actual condition of
his political fences. It was therefore with the shock of almost
complete surprise that he entered his proper bailiwick to find Bernard
Graves's opposition regarded seriously. Saloons, cigar stores, street
corners, the billiard room of the Tuscarora House, all his familiar
haunts, buzzed with the vote-getting possibilities of an independent
ticket in a community where regularity had become well-nigh a fetich.

Bowers was rudderless and irritable.

"I advised you to conciliate young Graves," he fretted. "And what
have you done? Stroked him the wrong way ever since. I hope it's a
lesson to you to keep politics and petticoats apart."

Shelby jeered at his inconsistency.

"You were good enough to suggest that I make up to the woman in the
case."

"Not in the thick of a campaign."

Shelby's optimism was not easily dashed and he laid an energetic
shoulder to the lagging wheel. His associate's rebound from depression
was less elastic, and the candidate's thoughts furrowed a channel they
had frequently taken of late. It was plain to him that the older man
was no longer equal to the requirements of his leadership. Sound in
judgment, shrewd in the reading of men, vigorous in action as he once
had been, and on occasion could be still, he was nevertheless of an
earlier and more leisured school of politics than the present lively
generation which knew not Joseph. The