Yet when mischief speedily befell, it wore so curious a guise that Shelby missed its import and laughed it aside for a random fling of jocund Fate. It began with a publisher's announcement of a volume containing the collected poems of the author of the admired, imitated, parodied, and derided ode on the "Victory of Samothrace," anonymous no longer, but the avowed offspring of Bernard Graves. Dazed, incredulous, and slow to do him honor, the prophet's own country advanced a theory of mistaken identity. But reluctant New Babylon had soon to recognize the young man's vogue. Through its supposed advocacy of woman suffrage the poem had all but founded a cult, and the disclosure of its true author, after months of guesswork and silly-season gush, bounced and ricochetted among the newspapers with astonishing ado. With the Whig in the forefront the local press began to echo the gossiping paragraphs and character sketches which, true, half true, and of whole cloth, padded the lean columns of a mediocre literary season, and New Babylon had faith. The last doubting Thomas yielded when it became necessary to convey the celebrity's mail to his home in a special bag; not even the ensuing plague of special correspondents, biographical dictionary solicitors, photographers, and worshipping pilgrims so stirred the local imagination; this surely was fame!

To Ruth Temple, who by some sorcery guessed his secret before its public revelation, Graves went with his laurels thick upon him.

"How does it feel to be a celebrity?" he said, meeting her volley of questions collectively. "Much like a breakfast cereal, a patent medicine, or a soap. Byron said that the first thing which sounded like fame to him was the tidings that he was read on the banks of the Ohio. It's different nowadays. The first taste usually comes from seeing your name placarded on a dead wall between some equally distinguished rolled oats and a new five-cent cigar. Personally I think I first saw the 'gypsy' face to face when the Hon. Seneca Bowers told me that save 'Betsey and I Are Out' he had read no poem but mine in twenty years. That was my 'Ohio,' though of course Mrs. Hilliard's request for an author's reading at the Culture Club was an annunciation in itself. Am I becoming fabulously rich from my royalties? Alas! no; I must buy too many presentation copies for people who fancy that I obtain gratis really more than I know what to do with. Shall I write for the stage? I could as easily write a cook book. Do I give my autograph? Always, if a stamped envelope is enclosed. One of our hardest-working presidents daily set apart a time for autographs; why then should a popular writer pretend that it bores him? He is secretly tickled, and probably collects autographs himself."

Ruth laughed, but denied that he had exhausted her questions.

"Why did you withhold your name from your masterpiece?" she asked.

"Partly because it was my masterpiece,—it would be false modesty to deny that I know it,—and I had some notion of digging a pit for the critics. But the main reason was to confound my Uncle Peter."

"I didn't know you had an uncle."

"I haven't in the flesh. 'Uncle Peter' is generic—a polite lumping together of my chronic fault-finders within the family and without. You know him. Both masculine and feminine, he's eternally an old woman. Everybody knows Uncle Peter, the first to censure and the last to praise. Now, as I've been his especial tidbit and awful example for years, I had to school myself to the thought of snatching the daily morsel of gossip from his mouth. The murder out, Uncle Peter's grief is pitiful. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth is a prophecy of evil unfulfilled! It's not that he considers I've gone to work, incorrigible vagabond that I am; it's the fact that my intolerable idling has produced money which sets his teeth on edge—money, the golden calf of Uncle Peter's narrow idolatrous soul."

Ruth had no liking for his moments of acid mockery.

"Don't let Uncle Peter overshadow your friends," she warned.

"I'll not," promised the man. "And you—by what witchery of friendship did you find me out?" He shifted his seat, seeking her eyes. "Ruth, was it love?"

She did not answer immediately.

"Be my wife, Ruth," he said.

"It was not love," she replied simply.

It was one of the oddities of his temperament that at this moment he saw himself objectively. What a subdued neutral tinted thing was life! By all the canons of romance it was now his cue for perfervid speech.

"What then?" he asked quietly.

"Liking—a real liking."

"Will it grow warmer?"

"I cannot tell."

"I will teach you to love me," he declared, his artistic self nudging him meanwhile that he had dropped into the worn formula of the ages.

Ruth did not deny him the attempt, and he undertook a lesson on the spot, pointing out that they saw life through similar eyes; that art, music, literature spoke with a common voice; that if true marriage were perfect companionship, the auguries were not uncertain in their happy omen; so on till he wearied her with argument.

"All those things refine love," she put in at last, a little wistfully; "they are not its essence. A man may be a barbarian and yet lovable."

He desisted at that, and presently went away. Out of doors her words clothed themselves with a personal application. Shelby—lovable barbarian!—was entering the gate.

Of what immediately followed neither man retained a clear recollection. It was a clash of temperaments hopelessly at odds, in which the spoken word weighed little beside the mute antipathy jaundicing the mind. Yet the word played no small part in the sequel. Graves assured Shelby that he should spare no effort to compass his defeat; while Shelby in his turn suggested that the zest of the campaign would be doubled if Graves were only his ridiculous opponent.

Puzzling how the quarrel could have begun and hurried to its climax so swiftly, Bernard Graves swung up the street heedless of his steps. Then the bland colonial facade of the public library confronted him like a smirking face and, as his vagrant fancy trifled with the conceit, its lips opened to emit two chattering girls.

"I was the tenth on the waiting-list," said one.

He saw that she spoke of his own volume which she held in a triumphant embrace with a box of caramels, and was filled with a nauseated disgust for his handiwork. Retracing his steps he climbed to the Whig office, and finding Sprague at his desk, he swept a pile of exchanges from a chair and drew it to the editor's elbow.

"Volney," he asked, "does this talk of an independent movement against
Ross Shelby amount to anything?"

Sprague's eye lit.

"It's gathering headway every minute," he declared. "We require just one thing—a candidate of prominence and backbone."

Graves reached past the paste-pot to capture a fugitive match.

"What do you say to me?"

"What do I say!" Unwinding his long legs from his chair rounds the editor dealt his friend a clap between the shoulders which sent his cigarette spinning to the floor. "I say you're a trump."

Sprague had not a little in common with the type in the political cosmos which is contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of the Whig, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star," whose practical application led him over highways which knew not macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's proposal, nor did it astonish him. From his office window he had chanced to overlook the stormy meeting of the suitors, but he gave Graves no hint.

"With any other candidate I can think of," he declared, "this movement would merely signify the protest of a self-respecting minority; with you, the author of the famous Samothrace ode,—gad! I think it augurs victory by a handsome majority."

Graves colored.

"I had forgotten the ode," he confessed. "Couldn't we eliminate that from the campaign?"

"Eliminate it! Why, boy, it's half your platform."

"Is it?" said the novice, drearily. "Oh, very well. I thought I should like to run on the moral issue. Shelby is corrupt, and the other party is certain to name some creature who would out-Shelby Shelby if he got the chance. That seems to me issue enough for a third candidate without dragging in my verses. I'm sick of them."

"Do you find your royalties a nuisance?"

"Don't be banal, Volney. You understand me. I don't want to be the one-sided artist merely; I want to do things as well as write about them, and I want the provinces separate."

Sprague laughed paternally.

"If I'm not to be banal, neither must you be impracticable. It's the ode that makes you available and enables you to do things, and there can be no question of dividing your personality as King Louis something-or-other tried to do. You have placed yourself in my hands. Very good. I assure you that I can nominate you. You should therefore defer to my judgment. You owe me that."

"Of course."

"Yes; well, then. Congressman Graves that is to be, here is the situation in a nutshell: In Tuscarora Shelby has gained ground because of the Kiska affair. Little Poland has his lithograph in every window. Elsewhere in the Demijohn I've reason to know that he's in exceedingly bad odor, and that a third ticket would draw no end of support from thinking voters who like Shelby little, but the other party less. At present, you see, it's frying-pan or fire for them." The editor paused to charge a discolored corn-cob pipe. "Now your coming changes all that," he continued, tilting back in the wreathing smoke. "I tell you it warms my heart to think of you opposing Shelby; it's a draught of Falernian, no less. It's logically, it's romantically, fitting that you who unmasked his plagiarism should battle with him at the polls. Moreover, your discovery puts such a feather in your cap at the outset. You've proved your political acuteness; you've won your spurs. It's town talk that the credit is yours,—I acknowledge it whenever asked,—and now that you are to enter the field, I'll blazon it to the four winds."

"If the world takes it as placidly as New Babylon, it will do us little good."

"Ah, but the world isn't so stupid," retorted Sprague, beginning to rummage his chaotic desk. "There, sir," he went on, dragging a bundle of newspaper clippings to the surface, "there is the world's opinion of the exposure. Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Troy—you'll find the comments of every important city in the state voiced by reputable journals; New York—why, New York gave it three editorials, not one of them less than two sticks. No utterance of the Whig ever attracted such attention. I tell you, man, that, your poem aside, your advent in politics with this thing to your credit makes you a figure of state importance; with the ode—gad, sir, your canvass is of national concern."

"It sounds like a dream of Colonel Mulberry Sellers's," laughed Graves, but he warmed to the editor's mood. "You're sure I can have the nomination? We're flying in the face of the Boss and all his works."

Sprague flung out his thin hands impatiently.

"I have told you that it rests with me."

The tyro dropped an acute, if indiscreet, observation.

"It seems to me," said he, "that you are something of a boss yourself."

"Every cause must have a leader. I have been the consistent head and front of the protest against Shelbyism, and the independent movement is of my creating. Why shouldn't I name the candidate?"

Bernard Graves retreated hastily from this ticklish corner, and put forward a vague supposition that there would have to be "caucuses, conventions, and things."

"Independent nominations are made by certificate."

"Oh," said the young man, meekly, "I see;" which was disingenuous. He silently debated whether this meant a species of letter of recommendation, but was shy of asking.

Sprague mercifully enlightened him.

"I've the law right here," he went on, tapping a calf-bound manual which Graves eyed with profound respect. "An independent nomination for Congress requires at least a thousand signers who must be electors of the district. We've ample time; it's a good three weeks before we need file our certificate with the Secretary of State, and a fortnight would answer to secure the minimum. But we'll not content ourselves with the minimum; the greater our list of signers, the stronger our argument in the campaign. Voters are gregarious, you know."

"I've noticed the importance of bell-wethers," Graves remarked dryly.

"Oh, but don't asperse the intelligence of the flock," deprecated the reformer quickly. "I've been thought to idealize The People; perhaps I do, but it is good for a man to keep sweet his faith in humanity. There's a saying of Emerson's that fits the case if I could remember it." He scoured his memory absently for an interval. "Well, no matter. It occurs to me that we'll need an emblem for our ticket. The law requires us to select some device. The eagles, ballot-boxes, roosters, stars, and the like have all been preempted, and aren't strikingly significant anyhow. We want something telling—a graphic symbol of our aim. You are a man of imagination; what is your notion?"

The man of imagination considered, and the editor's excess of nervous force spent itself in idle forays about his desk, one of which brought forth a foot-rule; whirling in the eager fingers, it proved an inspiration.

"Why not—" Graves began; "no, not that—a square, a carpenter'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."