Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audience, typical of all America—­the thing most truly typical in a land where national types are 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 attorney, a man rose from the center of the stage semicircle and lumbered heavily forward to the footlights.  Loring’s first emotion was of surprise, tempered with pity.  The crisis-born leader, heralded by such a flourish of rhetorical trumpets, was a giant in size; but with his huge figure, unshapely and ill-clad, all promise of greatness seemed to pause.