“Then I’ll admit I’ve picked the men in my mind.  One is Linton, that young lawyer that’s been taking the lead in the referendum and the direct primaries campaigns—­both of them devilish poor political policies; but that doesn’t prevent him from being the most eloquent young chap in the State.  And he’ll tole along the liberals.  We’ll need only one other—­that’s old Colonel Wadsworth.  You see the scheme of that combination, of course!  We don’t need any more.  The convention will be off its feet before the old Colonel gets half through his seconding speech.  Linton is a delegate, Luke, and I saw to it that the old Colonel was fixed out with a proxy after I got here.  Now, Harlan, you go out and hunt up those two gentlemen, and bring them here quietly.  They’re in the hotel.  Come to the private door, there.  You say you haven’t suggestions, Vard?”

“Not now,” said the General, not shifting his position.  “The time for my suggestions has not come yet.”

Harlan went out into the throng, searching, asking questions.  The first man of whom he made inquiry recognized him as Thelismer Thornton’s grandson, and invited him to the bar to have a drink.

“Busy?” he ejaculated when the young man declined.  “H—­l, there ain’t any one really busy here to-night, except Senator Pownal and Luke Presson.  They’re running the convention.  The delegates don’t have to do anything—­they are just here for a good time.  Come on!”

As Harlan walked away from him, he remembered what Chairman Presson had just delivered from his papers, and decided that truth often spoke from the depths of the wine-cup.

He did not find either of his men in the Hon. David Everett’s headquarters.  The rooms were packed.  Perspiring delegates were edging in and oozing out.  Everett was industriously shaking hands, his rubicund face sweat-streaked, his voice hoarse after his hours of constant chatter in that smoke-drenched atmosphere.  Harlan stood a moment, and looked at him with a sort of shamed pity.  The plot seemed unworthy, in spite of its object.  The sordid treachery of politics was turned up to him, all its seamy side displayed.

Two men crowded past him, talking low; but in that press their mouths were near his ear.  They were halted by the jam at the door.

“What did you stab him for—­how much?” asked one.

“Got ten,” said his companion—­“ten on account.  I get fifty for the caucus.”

“Too many machine Republicans in my town, and he knows it,” said the other.  “The best I could do was fool him out of twenty-five.  But that’s doing well—­in these times.  This Spinney stir has made it cost Everett more than it has cost any candidate for ten years.  I really didn’t have the heart to crowd him for any more.  He’s been jounced down good and hard as it is.”

Harlan took one more look at the unconscious and fatuous Everett, and went out of the room.  Twenty feet away, as he knew, sat his grandfather, ready and able to smash the candidate’s dreams and chances as a child bursts a soap-bubble.  And the man’s money—­thrown to the winds when a word might have held his hand and closed his pocket-book!  Harlan, grandson of Thelismer Thornton, tried to put the thing out of his mind.