“It’s just on that point that I want to put you right.  I know pretty well why you haven’t hankered to get into politics, Harlan.  You’ve heard some of the sneers, slurs, and the gossip.  You didn’t know much about it, but you sort of felt ashamed of me on account of politics.  Hold on!  I know.  It has been a kind of shame and pity mixed, like one feels for a drunkard in the family.  This caucus seemed to you like a spree—­and you got mixed into it, and you’re angry with me.  Listen:  there are people in this world who won’t allow that a man is honest in politics unless he goes about hunting for all the measures that might help him personally and kills ’em.  And the same yellow-skins that howl because he doesn’t do that would turn around and cuss him for seventeen kinds of a fool if he did, and ruined himself by doing it.  I haven’t stolen, boy.  I’ve given my time and my energies to developing this State.  I’ve seen it prosper and grow big.  And I’ve shared in the prosperity by seeing that my own interests got their rights along with the rest.  I’m where I can look back.  And I can’t see where the reputation of being a saint who cut off his own fingers for a sacrifice would help me get endorsers at the bank or find friends I could borrow money from.  Harlan, boy, I’m an old man.  I can’t live much longer.  A little reputation of some kind or another will live after me.  I want you to know the right of it.  And the only way for you to find out is to be what I have been.  Hearing about it won’t inform you.  I want you to meet the men and play the game.  I want you to realize that when I say I’ve done the best I could, I’m telling you the truth.  Harlan, stand up here with me.  Give me your hand.  Say that you’ll stand by the old man in this one thing—­the biggest he ever has asked of you.  It’s a matter between the Thorntons, boy!”

There had been an appeal in his voice that was near wistfulness.  And while he talked the wisdom that had come from the mouth of a child that evening threaded its own quaint appeal into the argument of the grandfather.  Resentment and obstinacy, if they be tempered with youth, cannot fight long against affection and the ties of blood.

Harlan took his grandfather’s hand.

“That’s my boy!” cried the Duke, heartily, and he slipped his arm about his grandson’s shoulders and patted him.

“It straightens things out a good deal,” observed Presson, with the practicality of the politician.  “Harlan, you’re going to find a winter at the State House worth while.  With your grandfather to set you going right and post you up, you ought to make good.”

“I’d like to have a little light on one point,” remarked the young man, curtly.  He felt again the irritating prick of resentment.  “What am I to be down to that legislature—­myself, or Thelismer Thornton’s grandson?”

“You can’t afford to throw good advice over your shoulder,” protested the chairman—­“not when it comes from a man that’s had fifty years of experience.”