All the king's men

Chapter Two

The last time I saw Mason City I went up there in that big black Cadillac with the Boss and the gang, and we burned up that new concrete slab, and it was a long time ago–nearly three years, for it is now into 1939, but it seems like forever. But the first time I went up there it was a lot longer time ago, back in 1922, and I went there in my Model-T, hanging on to the steering post to stay in the saddle when I sideslipped in the gray dust, which plumed out behind for a mile and settled on the cotton leaves to make them gray too, or when I hit a section of gravel, holding my jaws clamped tight to keep the vibration from the washboard from chipping the enamel off my teeth. You'll have to say this for the Boss: when he got through you could drive out for a breath of air and still keep your bridgework in place. But you couldn't that first time I went to Mason City.

The managing editor of the _Chronicle__ called me in and said, "Jack, get in your car and go up to Mason City and see who the hell that fellow Stark is who thinks he is Jesus Christ scourging the money-changers out of that shinplaster courthouse up there."

"He married a school-teacher," I said.

"Well, it must have gone to his head," Jim Madison, who was managing editor of the _Chronicle__, said. "Does he think he is the first one ever popped a school-teacher?"

"The bond issue was for building a schoolhouse," I said, "and it looks like Lucy figures they might keep some of it for that purpose."

"Who the hell is Lucy?"

"Lucy is the school-teacher," I said.

"She won't be a school-teacher long," he said. "Not on the Mason County payroll if she keeps that up. Not if I know Mason County."

"Lucy don't favor drinking either," I said.

"Was it you or the other guy popped Lucy?" he demanded. "You know so much about Lucy."

"I just know what Willie told me."

"Who the hell is Willie?"

"Willie is the fellow with the Christmas tie," I said. "He is Cousin Willie from the country. He is Willie Stark, the teacher's pet, and I met him in the back room of Slade's place a couple of months ago and he told me Lucy didn't favor drinking. I'm just guessing about her not favoring stealing."

"She don't favor Willie being County Treasurer either," Jim Madison allowed, "if she is the one putting him up to what he is doing. Doesn't she know they run things up in Mason County?"

"They run 'em up there just like they run 'em down here," I said.

"Yeah," Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm's length and let it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep, Kelly-green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building. He watched it fall, and said again, "Yeah, but you leave down here and go on up there."

So I went up to Mason City in the Model-T, and kept my jaws clamped tight when I went over the washboard and hung to the steering post when I went over the sideslipping dust, and that was a very long time ago.

I got to Mason City early in the afternoon and went to the Mason City Café, Home-Cooked Meals for Ladies and Gents, facing the square, and sampled the mashed potatoes and fried ham and greens with pot-likker with one hand while with the other I competed with seven or eight flies for the possession of a piece of custard pie.

I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so I said howdy-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town like Mason City the bench in front of the harness shop is–or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down–the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the local undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But if you are sitting on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in late August with the old ones, it does not seem that anything will ever come, not even your funeral, and the sun beats down and the shadows don't move across the bright dust, which, if you stare at it long enough, seems to be full of glittering speck like quartz. The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your categories are altered. Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away. You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight _râle__ of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlight detachment and comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the toils of mortal compulsions. _I seen Sim Saunders done built him a new barn. __Then, _Yeah, some folks thinks they is made of money.__ And, _Yeah.__

So I sat there and waited. And one of them said it, and another one leaned and shifted the quid and answered, and the last one said, "Yeah." Then I waited again for a spell, for I knew my place in the picture, and then I said, "They tell me there's gonna be a new schoolhouse." Then I waited another spell while the words died away and it was as though I hadn't said anything. Then one of them let the ambeer drop to the dry ground, and touched the spot with the end of the hickory stick, and said, "Yeah, and steam heat, hear tell."

And Number Two: "Give them young 'uns pneumony, steam heat."

And Number Three: "Yeah."

And Number Four: "If'n they git hit built."

I looked across the square at the painted clock face on the courthouse tower, which was the clock the old ones kept time by, and waited. Then I said, "What's stopping 'em?"

And Number One: "Stark. Thet Stark."

And Number Two: "Yeah, thet Willie Starl."

And Number Three: "Too big fer his britches. Gits in the courthouse and gits his front feet in the through, and gits too big fer his britches."

And Number Four: Yeah."

I waited, then I said, "Wants 'em to take the low bid, they tell me."

And Number One: "Yeah, wants 'em to take the low bid and git a passel of niggers in here."

And Number Two: "To put white folks out of work. Builden hit."

And Number Three: "You want to work longside a nigger? And specially him a strange nigger? Builden schoolhouse or backhouse, how so be hit?

And Number Four: "And white folk needen work."

And Number One: "Yeah."

_Yeah, __I said to myself, _so that is the tale__, for Mason County is red-neck country and they don't like niggers, not strange niggers anyway, and they haven't got many of their own. "How much could they save," I asked, "taking the low bid?"

And Number One: Couldn't save enuff to pay fer bringen no passel of niggers in here."

"Putten white folks out of work," Number Two said.

I waited till it was decent, then I got up and said, "Got to be moving. Good afternoon, gentlemen."

One of the old ones looked up at me as though I had just come, and said, "What you work at, boy?"

"I don't," I said.

"Porely?" he asked.

"Not porely," I said. "It is just I lack ambition."

Which was God's truth, I reckoned, as I walked on down the street.

I reckoned, too, that I had killed enough time and I might as well go to the courthouse and get my story in the way I was supposed to get it. All this sitting around in front of harness shops was not the way any newspaperman would go about getting his story. There isn't ever anything you get that way which you can put into a newspaper. So I went on over to the courthouse.

Inside the courthouse, where the big hall was empty and shadowy and the black oily floor was worn down to humps and ridges under your feet and the air was dry and dusty so that you felt in the stillness that you were breathing in the air from all the talk, loud and little, there had been in there for seventy-five years–well, inside there, just off the hall I saw some men sitting in a room. Above the doorway there was a tin sign with the letters about faded off. But they still said _Sheriff__.

I went into the room where the three men were cocked back in split-bottom chairs and an electric fan set on top of the roll-top desk was burring away with little effect, and said howdy-do to the faces. The biggest face, which was round and red and had its feet cocked on the desk and its hands laid on its stomach, said howdy-do.

I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to him. He looked at the card for a minute, holding it off near arm's length as though he were afraid it would spit in his eye, the he turned it over and looked at the back side a minute till he was dead sure it was blank. Then he laid the hand with the card in it back down on his stomach, where it belonged, and looked at me. "You done come a piece," he said.

"That's right," I said.

"What you come fer?"

"To see what's going on about the schoolhouse," I said.

"You come a piece," he said, "to stick yore nose in somebody else's bizness."

"That's right," I agreed cheerfully, "but my boss on the paper can't see it that way."

"It ain't any of his bizness either."

"No," I said, "but what's the ruckus about, now I've come all that piece?"

"It ain't any of my bizness. I'm the Sheriff."

"Well, Sheriff," I said, "whose business it it?"

"Them as is tending to it. If folks would quit messen and let 'em"

"Who is _them?

__"Commissioners," the Sheriff said. "The County Commissioners, the voters of Mason County done elected to tend to their bizness and not take no butten-in from nobody."

"Yeah, sure–the Commissioners. But who are they?"

The Sheriff's little wise eyes blinked at me a couple of times, then he said, "The constable ought to lock you up fer vagruncy."

"Suits me," I said. "And the _Chronicle__ would send up another boy to cover my case, and when the constable pinched him the _Chronicle__ would send up another one to cover that case, and after a while you'd get us all locked up. But it might get in the papers."

The Sheriff just lay there, and out of his big round face his little eyes blinked. Maybe I hadn't said anything. Maybe I wasn't there.

"Who are the Commissioners?" I said. "Or maybe they are hiding out?"

"One of 'em is setten right there," the Sheriff said, and rolled his big round head on his shoulders to indicate one of the other fellows. When the head had fallen back into place, and his fingers had let go my card, which wafted down to the floor in the gentle breeze from the fan, the little eyes blinked again and he seemed to sink below the surface of the roiled waters. He had done his best, and now he had passed the ball.

"Are you a Commissioner?" I asked the fellow just indicated. He was just another fellow, made in God's image and wearing a white shirt with a ready-tied black bow tie and jean pants held up with web galluses. Town from the waist up, country from the waist down. Get both votes.

"Yeah," he said.

"He's the head man," another fellow said, reverently, a little old squirt of a fellow with a bald knotty old head and a face he himself couldn't recollect from one time he looked in the mirror to the next, the sort of a fellow who hangs around and sits in a chair when the big boys leave one vacant and tries to buy his way into the game with a remark like the one he had just made.

"You the Chairman?" I asked the other fellow.

"Yeah," he said.

"You mind telling me your name?"

It ain't no secret," he said. "It is Dolph Pillsbury."

"Glad to know you, Mr. Pillsbury," I said and held out my hand. Not getting up, he took it as though I had offered him the business end of a cottonmouth moccasin in shedding time.

"Mr. Pillsbury," I said, "you are in a position to know the situation in regard to the schoolhouse contract. No doubt you are interested in having the truth of that situation made public."

"There ain't any situation," Mr. Pillsbury said.

"Maybe there isn't any situation," I said, "but there's been a right smart racket."

"Ain't any situation. Board meets and takes a bid what's been offered. J. H. Moore's bid, the fellow's name."

"Was that fellow Moore's bid low?"

"Not egg-zackly."

"You mean it wasn't low?"

"Well–" Mr. Pillsbury said, and his face was shadowed by an expression which might have been caused by a gas pain, "well, if'n you want to put it that a-way."

"All right," I said, "let's put it that way."

"Now look a-here–" and the shadow passed from Mr. Pillsbury's face and he sat up in his chair as suddenly as though he had been stuck by a pin–"you talk like that, and ain't nuthen done but legal. Ain't nobody can tell the Board what bid to take. Anybody can come along and put in a little piss-ant bid, but the Board doan have to take it. Naw-sir-ee. The Board takes somebody kin do the work right."

"Who was it put the little piss-ant bid in?"

"Name of Jeffers," Mr. Pillsbury said peevishly, as at an unpleasant recollection.

"Jeffers Construction?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"What's wrong with Jeffers Construction?"

"The Board picks the fellow kin do the work right, and it ain't nobody's bizness."

I took out my pencil and a pad of paper, and wrote on it. Then I said to Mr. Pillsbury, "How's this?" And I began to read to him: "Mr. Dolph Pillsbury, Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners of Mason County, stated that the bid of J. H. Moore for the construction of the Mason County School was accepted, even though it was not the low bid, because the Board wanted somebody 'who could do the work right.' The low bid, which was submitted by the Jeffers Construction Company, was rejected, Mr. Pillsbury stated. Mr. Pillsbury started further–"

"Now look a-here–" Mr. Pillsbury was sitting very straight up as though it were not a pin this time but a hot tenpenny and in the brown–"now look a-here, I didn't state nuthen. You write it down and claim I stated it. Now you look a-here–"

The Sheriff heaved massively in the chair and fixed his gaze upon Mr. Pillsbury. "Dolph," he said, "tell the bugger to git out of here."

"I didn't state nuthen," Dolph said, "and you git out!"

"Sure," I said, and put the pad in my pocket, "but maybe you can kindly tell me where Mr. Stark is?"

"I knowed it," the Sheriff exploded and dropped his feet off the desk with a noise like a brick chimney, and heaved up in the chair and glared apoplectically at me. "That Stark, I knowed it was that Stark!"

"What's wrong with Stark?" I asked.

"Jesus Gawd!" roared the Sheriff, and his face went purple with congestion of language which couldn't get out.

"He's biggety, that's what he is," Mr. Dolph Pillsbury offered. "Gits in the courthouse and gits biggety, he–"

"He's a nigger-lover," the little old bald, knotty-headed fellow submitted.

"And him, him–" Mr. Pillsbury pointed at me with an air of revelation–"I bet he's a nigger-lover, comen up here and sahayen round, I bet he–"

"No sale," I said. "I like mine vanilla. But now you've raised the subject, what's nigger-loving got to do with it?"

"That's it!" Mr. Pillsbury exclaimed, like the man overboard seizing the plank. "That Jeffers Construction now, they–"

"You, Dolph," the Sheriff bellowed at him, "why don't you shut up and tell him to git out!"

"Git out," Mr. Pillsbury said to me, obediently but without great vigor.

"Sure," I replied and went out and walked down the hall.

_They ain't real__, I thought as I walked down the hall, _nary one__. But I knew they were. You come into a strange place, into a town like Mason City, and they don't seem real, but you know they are. You know the went wading in the creek when they were kids, and when they were bigger they used to go out about sunset and lean on the back fence and look across the country at the sky and not know what was happening inside them or whether they were happy or sad, and when they got grown they slept with their wives and tickled their babies to make them laugh and went to work in the morning and didn't know what they wanted but had their reasons for doing the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were. And then they will lie in bed some morning just before day and look up at the ceiling they can scarcely see because the lamp is shaded with a pinned-on newspaper and they don't recognize the faces around the bed any more because the room is full of smoke, or fog, and it makes their eyes burn and gests in the throat. Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don't seem real to you is that you aren't very real yourself.

But by the time I was standing in front of a door at one end of the cross hall and was looking up at another tin sign, and knew from it that I had arrived at the one-man leper colony of Mason City.

The leper was sitting in the room, not doing anything, all by himself. There wasn't anybody to sit and spit and jaw with him under his electric fan.

"Hello," I said, and he looked up at me as though I were a spook and the word I had used were in a foreign language. He didn't answer me right off, and I figured he was like one of those fellows who gets marooned on a desert island for twenty years and when the longboat is beached and the jolly tars leap out on the sand and ask him who the hell he is, he can't say a word because his tongue is so rusty.

Well, Willie wasn't that bad off, for he finally managed to say hello, and that he remembered me from our meeting in Slade's place a few months back, and to ask me what I wanted. I told him, and he grinned a grin more wistful than happy and asked me why I wanted to know.

"The editor told me to find out," I said, "and why he wants me to find out only God knows. Maybe it is because it is news."

That seemed to be enough to satisfy him. So I didn't tell him that beyond my boss the managing editor there was a great high world of reasons but to a fellow like me down in the ditch it was a world of flickering diaphanous spirit wings and faint angel voices I didn't always savvy and stellar influences.

"I reckon it is news," Willie allowed.

"What's been going on around here?"

"I don't mind telling you," he said. He began telling me and he finished telling me about eleven o'clock that night that Lucy Stark, after she had put the kid to bed, and me sitting with him in the parlor out at his pappy's place, where he had asked me to spend the night, and where he and Lucy ordinarily lived in the summer and where they were going to live that winter too instead of in a room in town because Lucy had just been fired from her teaching job for the coming year and there wasn't any reason to be in town and be spending good money for rent. And there was very likely to be another reason for there not being any reason to stay in town, for Willie was coming up for re-election and his chances looked about as good as the chances of a flea making a living of a carved marble lion on a monument. He had only got the job in the first place, he told me, because Dolph Pillsbury, the Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, was a sort of secondhand relative of old Mr. Stark, by marriage or something, and Pillsbury had had a falling-out with the other fellow who wanted to be Treasurer. Pillsbury about ran the county, he and the Sheriff, and he was sick of Willie. So Willie was on his way out, and Lucy was already out.

"And I don't care if I am," Lucy Stark said, sitting there in the parlor, sewing by the lamp on the table where the big Bible and the plush-bound album were. "I don't care a bit if they won't let me teach any more. I taught six years, counting that term I was out and having little Tommie, and nobody ever said I wasn't all right, but now they write me a letter and say there're complaints about my work and I don't show a spirit of co-operation."

She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl. When she leaned over, the light hit her hair to show up the auburn luster lurking in the brown which the operator of the recently established Mason City Beauty Shoppe hadn't been entirely able to burn out with the curling tongs when she gave the marcel treatment. It was too bad about Lucy's hair even if the luster was still there. She was still girlish then, about twenty-five but not looking it, with a nice little waist coming straight up out of the satisfactory and unmeager hips and a nice little pair of ankles crossed in front of the chair, and her face was girlish, with soft, soothing contours and large deep-brown eyes, the kind that makes you think of telling secrets in the gloaming over a garden gate when the lilacs are in bloom along the picket fence of the old homestead. But her hair was cut off at about neck level and marcelled the way they did it back then, which was a shame because the face she had was the kind that demanded to be framed by a wealth of long and lustrous-dusky tresses tangled on the snow-white pillow. She must have had plenty of hair, too, before the massacre.

"But I don't care," she said, and lifted her head out of the light. I don't want to teach in a schoolhouse they build just so somebody can steal some money. And Willie doesn't want to be Treasurer either, if he has to associate with those dishonest people."

"I'm going to run," Willie said glumly. "They can't keep me from running."

"You can give a lot more time to studying your law books," she said to him, "when you aren't in town all the time."

"I'm going to run," he repeated, and jerked his head with that sharp motion he had to get the lock of hair out of his eyes. "I'm going to run," he repeated again, as though he weren't talking to Lucy, or to me, but to the wide sweet air or God-Almighty, "if I don't get a single God-damned vote."

Well, he did run when the time came, and he got more than one vote, but not many more, and Mr. Dolph Pillsbury and his pals won that round. The fellow who was elected against Willie that fall didn't hang his hat up in the office before he had signed the check for the advance payment to J. H. Moore, and J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse. But that is getting ahead of the story.

The story, as Willie told it, was this: The Jeffers Construction Company had low bid at one hundred and forty-two thousand. But there were two more bids in between the Jeffers bid and the Moore bid, which was one hundred and sixty-five thousand and a lot of nickels and dimes. But when Willie kicked about the Moore business, Pillsbury started the nigger business. Jeffers was a big-time contractor, from the south of the state, and he used a lot of Negro bricklayers and plasterers and carpenters in some of his crews. Pillsbury started howling that Jeffers would bring in a lot of Negroes–and Mason County, as I said, is red-neck country–and worse, some of the Negroes would be getting better pay, being skilled laborers, than the men he would pick up around Manson City for some of the work. Pillsbury kept the pot boiling.

He kept it boiling so well that the public overlooked the fact that there were two bids in between Jeffers and Moore and the fact that Pillsbury had a brother-in-law who had a brickkiln in which Moore had an interest and that in the not distant past a lot of the bricks had been declared rotten by the building inspector on a state job and had been refused and there had been a lawsuit and that as sure as God made little green apples with worms in them, bricks from that same kiln would be used in the schoolhouse. The kiln owned by Moore and Pillsbury's brother-in-law used convict labor from the state pen and got it cheap, for the brother-in-law had some tie well up in the system. In fact, as I picked up later, the tie was so good that that building inspector who squawked about the bricks on the state job got thrown out, but I never knew whether he was honest or just ill-informed.

Willie didn't have any luck bucking Pillsbury and the Sheriff. There was an anti-Pillsbury faction, but it didn't amount to much, and Willie didn't add to its numbers. Willie went out and buttonholed folks on the street and tried to explain things to them. You could see Willie standing on a street corner, sweating through his seersucker suit, with his hair down in his eyes, holding an old envelope in one hand and a pencil in the other, working out figures to explain what he was squawking about, but folks don't listen to you when your voice is low and patient and you stop them in the hot sun and make them do arithmetic. Willie tried to get the _Mason County Messenger__ to print something, but they wouldn't. Then he wrote up a long statement of the case as he saw it about the bids, and tried to get the _Messenger__ to print it on handbills in their job printing shop, paid for, but they wouldn't do it. So Willie had to go to the city to get the work done. He came back with his handbills and hired a couple of kids to tote them from house to house in town. But the folks of one of the kids made him stop as soon as they found out, and when the other kid didn't stop, some big boys beat him up.

So Willie toted them around himself, over town, from house to house, carrying them in an old satchel, the kind school kids use, and knocked on the door and then tipped his hat when the lady of the house came. But most of the time she didn't come. There'd be a rustle of a window shade inside, but nobody would come. So Willie would stick a handbill under the door and go to the next place. When he had worked out Mason City, he went over to Tyree, the other town in the county, and passed out his bills the same way, and then he called on the crossroads settlements.

He didn't dent the constituency. The other fellow was elected. J. H. Moore built the schoolhouse, which began to need repairs before the paint was dry. Willie was out of a job. Pillsbury and his friends, no doubt, picked up some nice change as kickback from J. H. Moore, and forgot about the whole business. At least they forgot about it for about three years, when their bad luck started.

Meanwhile Willie was back on Pappy's farm, helping with the chores, and peddling a patent Fix-It Household Kit around the country to pick up a little change, working from door to door again, going from settlement to settlement in his old car, and stopping at the farmhouses in between, knocking on the door and tipping his hat and then showing the woman how to fix a pot. And at night he was plugging away at his books, getting ready for the bar examination. But before that came to pass Willie and Lucy and I sat there that night in the parlor, and Willie said: "They tried to run it over me. They just figured I'd do anything they told me, and they tried to run it over me like I was dirt."

And laying her sewing down in her lap, Lucy said, "Now, honey, you didn't want to be mixed up with them anyway. Not after you found out they were dishonest and crooked."

"They tried to run it over me," he repeated, sullenly, twisting his heavy body in the chair. "Like I was dirt."

"Willie," she said, leaning toward him a little, "they would have been crooks even if they didn't try to run it over you."

He wasn't paying her much mind.

"They'd be crooks, wouldn't they?" she asked in a tone which was a little bit like the patient, leading-them-on tone she must have used in the schoolroom. She kept watching his face, which seemed to be pulling back from her and from me and the room, as tough he weren't really hearing her voice but were listening to another voice, a signal maybe, outside the house, in the dark beyond the screen of the open window.

"Wouldn't they?" she asked him, pulling him back into the room, into the circle of soft light from the lamp on the table, where the big Bible and the plush-bound album lay. The bowl of the lamp was china and had a spray of violets painted on it.

"Wouldn't they?" she asked him, and before he answered I caught myself listening to the dry, compulsive, half-witted sound of the crickets were making out in the grass in the dark.

Then he said, "Yeah, yeah, they'd be crooks, all right," and heaved himself in the chair with the motion of one who is irritated a having a train of thought interrupted. Then he sank back into whatever he was brooding over.

Lucy looked at me with a confident birdlike lift of her head, as though she had proved something to me. The secondary glow of the light above the circle of light was on her face, and if I had wanted to I could have guessed that some of that glow was given off softly by her face as though the flesh had a delicate and unflagging and serene phosphorescence from its own inwardness.

Well, Lucy was a woman, and therefore she must have been wonderful in the way women are wonderful. She turned her face to me with that expression which seemed to say, "See, I told you, that's the way it is," and meanwhile Willie sat there. But his own face seemed to be pulling off again into the distance which was not distance but which was, shall I say, simply himself.

Lucy was sewing now, and talking to me while looking down at the cloth, and after a little Willie got up and started to walk up and down the room, with his forelock coming down over his eyes. He kept on pacing back and forth while Lucy and I talked.

It wasn't very soothing to have that going on across one end of the room.

Finally, Lucy looked up from her sewing, and said, "Honey–"

Willie stopped pacing and swung his head at her with the forelock down over his eyes to give him the look of a mean horse then he's cornered in the angle of the pasture fence with his head down a little and the mane shagged forward between the ears, and the eyes both wild and shrewd, watching you step up with the bridle, and getting ready to bolt.

"Sit down, honey," Lucy said, "you make me nervous. You're just like Tommie, you can't ever sit still." Then she laughed, and with a sort of shamefaced grin on his face he came over and sat down.

She was a fine woman, and he was lucky to have her.

But he was also lucky to have the Sheriff and Dolph Pillsbury, for they were doing him a favor and not knowing it. He didn't seem to know it either at the time, that they were his luck. But perhaps the essential part of him was knowing it all the time, only word hadn't quite got around to the other and accidental parts of him. Or it is possible that fellows like Willie Stark are born outside of luck, good or bad, and luck, which is what about makes you and me what we are, doesn't have anything to do with them, for they are what they are from the time they first kick in the womb until the end. And if this is the case, then their life history is a process of discovering that they really are, and not, as for you and me, sons of luck, a process of becoming what luck makes us. And if that is the case, then Lucy wasn't Willie's luck. Or his unluck either. She was part of the climate in which the process of discovering the real Willie was taking place.

But, speaking vulgarly, the Sheriff and Pillsbury were part of Willie's luck. I didn't know it that night in pappy's parlor, and I didn't know it when I got back to town and gave Jim Madison my tale. Well, Willie began to appear in the _Chronicle__ in the role of the boy upon the burning deck and the boy who put his finger in the dike and the boy who replies "I can" when Duty whispers low "Thou must." The _Chronicle__ was turning up more and more tales about finagling in county courthouses around the state. It pointed the finger of fine scorn and reprobation all over the map. Then I began to grasp the significance of what was going on in that world of reasons high above the desk of Jim Madison, and caught the glint of those diaphanous spirit wings and the fluting whispers of faint angel voices up there. In brief, this: The happy harmony in the state machine was a thing of the past, and the _Chronicle__ was lined up with the soreheads, and was hacking away at the county substructure of the machine. It was starting there, feeling its way, setting the stage and preparing the back-drop for the real show. It wasn't as hard as it might have been. Ordinarily the country boys in the county courthouses have plenty of savvy and know all the tricks and are plenty hard to pin anything on, but the machine had been operating so long now without serious opposition that ease had corrupted them. They just didn't bother to be careful. So the _Chronicle__ was making a good show.

But Mason County was Exhibit Number One. On account of Willie. He gave the touch of drama to the sordid tale. He became symbolically the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of honest men. And when Willie was licked at the polls of Mason County, the _Chronicle__ ran his picture, and under it the lines KEEPS HIS FAITH. And under that they printed the statement which Willie had given to me when I went back up to Mason City after the election and after Willie was out. The statement went like this: "Sure, they did it and it was a clean job which I admire. I am going back to Pappy's farmer and milk the cows and study some more law for it looks like I am going to need it. But I have kept my faith in the people of Mason County. Time will bring all things to light."

I had gone up there to see what he had to say, but didn't have to go out to the farm. I ran into Willie on the street. He had been building some fence and had busted his wire stretcher and had come in to town to get a new one. He was wearing and old black felt hat and overalls which hung down around his can as though he were little Droopy-Drawers smiling up from the play pen.

He went to the drugstore and had a coke. He stood in front of the soda fountain and I put may pad in front of Willie by his old hat and gave him a pencil. He licked the point and his eyes glazed as though he were getting ready to do sums on his slate, and then leaning up against the marble, with his overall drooping, he wrote out the statement in his big round, scrawly hand.

"How's Lucy making out?" I asked him.

"Fine," he said. "She likes it out there and she's company for Pappy. It suits her all right."

"That's fine," I said.

"It suits me, too," he said, not looking at me but across the fountain at his own face in the big mirror. "The way it is it all suits me just fine," he said, and looked at the face in the mirror, which was freckled and thin-skinned over the full flesh but under the saggy forelock was untroubled and pure like the face of a man who tops the last rise and looks down at the road running along and straight to the place where he is going.

As I said, if a man like Willie can be said to live in the world of luck, Dolph Pillsbury and the Sheriff were his luck. They ran it over Willie and got the new schoolhouse built by J. H. Moore. J. H. Moore used the brick out of the kiln owned by the distant relative of Pillsbury. It was just another big box of a schoolhouse with a fire escape at each end. The fire escapes weren't the kind which looks like a silo and which has corkscrew-shape chute inside for the kiddies to slide down. They were iron stairs attached to the outside of the building.

There wasn't any fire at the schoolhouse. There was just a fire drill.

About two years after the place was built, it happened. There was a fire drill, and all the kids on the top floors started to use the fire escapes. The first kids to start down on the fire escape at the west end were little kids and they couldn't get down the steps very fast. Right after them came a batch of big kids, seventh and eighth graders. Because the little kids held up the traffic, the fire escape and the iron platform at the top got packed with kids. Well, some of the brickwork gave and the bolts and bars holding the contraption to the wall pulled loose and the whole thing fell away, spraying kids in all directions.

Three kids were killed outright. They were the ones that hit the concrete walk. About a dozen were crippled up pretty seriously and several of those never were much good afterward.

It was a piece of luck for Willie.

Willie didn't try to cash in on the luck. He didn't have to try. People got the point. Willie went to the triple funeral the town had for the kids who got killed, and stood modestly in the background. But old Mr. Sandeen, who was the father of one of the dead kids, saw him back in the crowd and while the clods were still bouncing off the coffin lids Mr. Sandeen pushed back to him and grabbed him by the hand and lifted up one arm above his head and said, loud, "Oh, God, I am punish for accepting iniquity and voting against an honest man!"

It brought down the house. Some women began to cry. The other people began to come up and grab Willie by the hand. Pretty soon there was scarcely a dry eye in the crowd. Willie's weren't dry, either.

It was Willie's luck. But the best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

He had Mason County in the palm of his hand. And in the city his picture was in all the papers. But he didn't run for anything. He kept on working on his father's farm and studying his law books at night. The only thing he did about politics was to get out and make some speeches for a fellow who was running in the primary against the Congressman who had always been a pal of Pillsbury. Willie's speeches weren't any good, at least the one I heard wasn't any good. But they didn't have to be good. People didn't bother to listen to them. They just came to look at Willie and clap and then go vote against the Pillsbury man.

Then one day Willie woke up and found himself running for Governor. Or rather, he was running in the Democratic primary, which in our state is the same as running for governor.

Now it wasn't any particular achievement to be running in the primary. Anybody who can scrape together a few dollars for the qualifying fee can offer for election and have the pleasure of seeing his name printed on the ballot. But Willie's case was a little different.

There were then two major factions in the Democratic party in the state, the Joe Harrison outfit and the MacMurfee outfit. Harrison had been Governor some time back, and MacMurfee was in then and was going to try to hold the job. Harrison was a city man and practically all of his backing was city backing. MacMurfee wasn't exactly a hick, having been born and bred in Duboisville, which is a pretty fair-sized place, maybe ninety thousand, but he had a lot of country backing and small-town backing. He had played pretty smart with the cocklebur vote and mostly had it. It was due to be a close race. That situation was what got Willie into the show.

Somebody in the Harrison outfit got the idea, which God knows he didn't invent, of putting in a dummy who might split the MacMurfee vote. This has to be somebody who had a strong appeal in the country. So that was Willie, who could throw some weight up in the north end of the state. There wasn't any deal with Willie, it developed Some gentlemen form the city called on him up in Mason City, driving up there in a fine car and striped pants. One of them was Mr. Duffy, Tiny Duffy, who was a lot grander now that he had been back that day when he and Willie had first met in the back room of Slade's beer parlor. The gentlemen from the city persuaded Willie that he was the savior of the state. I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and cageyness, but hose things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear. Also there was the small matter of God. People said that God had taken a hand in the schoolhouse business. That God had stepped in on Willie's side. The Lord had justified him. Willie was not religious by any ordinary standards, but the schoolhouse business very probably gave him the notion–which was shared by a lot of to local citizenry–that he stood in a special relation to God. Destiny, or plain Luck. And it doesn't matter what you call it or if you go to church. And since the Lord moves in a mysterious way, it should not have surprised Willie that He was using some fat men in striped pants and a big car to work His will. The Lord was calling Willie, and Tiny Duffy was just an expensively dressed Western Union boy in a Cadillac instead of on a bicycle. So Willie signed the receipt.

Willie was ready to ride. He was a lawyer now. He had been for some little time, for after he ad lost out as County Treasurer, he had buckled down to his books pretty seriously, in what time he could spare from farming and peddling his Fix-It Household Kit. He had sat up there in his room late at night in summer, dog sleepy but grinding his eyes into the page, while the moths tapped and blurred at the window screen and tried to get onto the flame of the oil lamp which sizzled softly on his table. Or he had sat up there on winter night while the fire died out in the rusty-burner stove and the wind beat on the north side of the house, coming down a thousand miles through the night to shake the room where Willie sat hunched over the book. Long back, he had spent a year at the Baptist College over at Marston, in the next county, long back before he had met Lucy. The college wasn't much more than a glorified grade school, but there he had heard the big named written in the big books. He had left the college with the big names in his head, because he didn't have any money. Then the war had come and he had been in it, stuck off somewhere in Oklahoma in a camp, feeling cheated, somehow, and feeling that he had missed his chance. Then after the war there had been the working on his father's place and reading books at night, not law books, just what books he could get hold of. He wanted to know the history of the country. He had a college textbook, a big thick one. Years later, showing it to me, he prodded it with his finger, and said, "I durn near memorized every durn word in it. I could name you every name. I could name you every date." Then he prodded it again, this time contemptuously, and said, "And the fellow that wrote didn't know a God-damned thing. About how thing were. He didn't know a thing. I bet things were just like they are now. A lot of folks wrassling around." But there had been the great names, too. There had been a notebook, a big cloth-bound ledger, in which he wrote the fine sayings and the fine ideas he got out of the books. A long time later he showed me that, too, and as I thumbed idly through it, noticing the quotations from Emerson and Macaulay and Benjamin Franklin and Shakespeare copied out in a ragged boyish hand, he said with that same tone of amiable contempt, "Gee, back in those days I figured those fellows who wrote the books knew all there was. And I figured I was going to get me a chunk of it. Yeah, I figured I would sweat for me a chunk of it." He laughed. And added, "Yeah, I thought I was the nuts."

He had been going to get a chunk of all there was. But in the end it was a chunk of law. Lucy came into the picture, and then the kid Tom, and there was working, and later the courthouse, but in the end he got a chunk of law. An old lawyer over at Tyree helped him, lending him books and answering questions. There had been about three years of that. If he had just been trying to squeeze by the bar with as little as possible he could have done it a lot sooner, for back in those days, or now for that matter, it didn't take any master mind to pass the bar examination. "I sure was a fool," Willie said to me once, talking about those times, "I though you had really to learn all that stuff. I thought they meant for you to learn law. Hell, I got down to that bar examination and I looked at the questions and I nearly busted out laughing. Me sitting up there bearing down on those books, and then they gave me those little crappy questions. A corn-field nigger could have answered them if he's been able to spell. I ought to have looked twice at some of the lawyers I'd seen and I'd known a half-with could pass it. But, oh, no, I was hell-bent on learning me some law." The he laughed, stopped laughing, and said with a touch of the grimness which must have belong to the long night up there in his room when he bent over the trash-burner or heard the moths batting soft at the screen in the August dark: "Well, I learned me some law, I could wait." He could wait. He had read the books the old lawyer over at Tyree had, and then he bought new books, sending away for them with the money he grubbed out of the ground or got with his patented Fix-It Household Kit. The time came in the end, and he put on his good suit, blue serge and slick in the seat, and caught the train down to the city to take the examination. He had waited, and now he really knew what was in the books.

He was a lawyer now. He could hang the overalls on a nail and let them stiffen with the last sweat he had sweated in them. He could rent himself a room over the dry-goods store in Mason City and call it its office, and wait for somebody to come up the stairs where it was so dark you had to feel your way and where it smelled like the inside of an old trunk that's been in the attic twenty years. He was a lawyer now and it had taking him a long time. It had taken him a long time because he had had to be a lawyer on his terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had taken him too long. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.

But the wanting and the waiting were over now, and Willie had a haircut and a new hat and a new brief case with the copy of his speech in it (which he had written out in longhand and had said to Lucy with gestures, as tough he were getting ready for the high-school oratorical contest) and a lot of new friends, with drooping blue jowls or sharp pale noses, who slapped him on the back, and a campaign manager, Tiny Duffy, who would introduce him to you and say with a tin-glittering heartiness, "Meet Willie Stark, the next Governor of this state!" And Willie would put out his hand to you with the gravity of a bishop. For he never tumbled to a thing.

I used to wonder how he got that way. If he had been running for something back in Mason City he never in God's world would have been that way. He would have taken a perfectly realistic view of things and counted up his chances. Or if he had got into the gubernatorial primary on his own hook, he would have taken a realistic view. But this was different. He had been called. He had been touched. He had been summoned. And he was a little bit awestruck by the fact. It seemed incredible that he hadn't taken one look at Tiny Duffy and his friends and realized that things might not be absolutely on the level. But actually, as I figured it, it wasn't incredible. For the voice of Tiny Duffy summoning him was nothing but the echo of a certainty and a blind compulsion within him, the thing that had made him sit up in his room, night after night, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, to write the fine phrases and the fine ideas in the big ledger or to bend with a violent, almost physical intensity over the yellow page of an old law book. For him to deny the voice of Tiny Duffy would have been as difficult as for a saint to deny the voice that calls in the night.

He wasn't really in touch with the world. He was not only bemused by the voice he had heard. He was bemused by the very grandeur of the position to which he aspired. The blaze of light hitting him in the eyes blinded him. After all, he had just come out of the dark, the period when he grubbed on the farm all day and didn't see anybody but the family (and day after day he must have moved by them as though they weren't half-real) and sat at night in his room with the books and hurt inside with the effort and the groping and the wanting. So it isn't much wonder that the blaze of light blinded him.

He knew something about human nature, all right. He's sat around the county courthouse long enough to find out something. (True, he had got himself thrown out of the courthouse. But that wasn't ignorance of human nature. It was, perhaps, a knowledge not of human nature in general but of his own nature in particular, something deeper than the mere question of right and wrong. He became a martyr, not through ignorance, not only for the right but also for some knowledge of himself deeper than right or wrong.) He knew something about human nature, but something now came between him and that knowledge. In a way, he flattered human nature. He assumed that other people were as bemused by the grandeur and as blinded by the light of the post to which he aspired, and that they would only listen to argument and language that was grand and bright. So his speeches were cut to that measure. It was a weird mixture of facts and figures on one hand (his tax program, his road program) and of fine sentiments on the other hand (a faint echo, somewhat dulled by time, of the quotations copied out in the ragged, boyish hand in the big ledger).

Willie went around the country in a good secondhand automobile, which had been bought on the eighteen-payment plan, and saw his face on the posters nailed to telephone poles and corncribs and board fences. He'd got to town, and after he'd been to the post office to see if there was a letter from Lucy and after he had had a session with the local politicos and done some handshaking (he wasn't too hot at that, too much talk about principles and not enough about promises), he would hole up in a hotel room ($2.00 without bath) and work some more on his speech. He kept on polishing and revising the damned thing. He was hell-bent on making each one a second Gettysburg Address. And maybe after he had tinkered with it awhile, he would get up and start pacing in his room. He would pace and pace, and pretty soon he would start to say his speech. If you were in the next room, you could hear him pacing and speeching, and when he stopped pacing you knew he had stopped in front of the mirror to polish up a gesture.

And sometimes I'd be in the next room, for I was supposed to cover his campaign for the _Chronicle__. I'd be lying there in the hole in the middle of my bed where the spring had given down with the weight of wayfaring humanity, lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. I'd be lying there letting the smoke drift up out of my mouth and not feeling anything, just watching the smoke as though I didn't have any past or future, and suddenly Willie would start in the next room. Tramping and mumbling.

It would be a reproach, an affront, a cause for laughter and a thing for tears. Knowing what you knew, you would lie there listening to him getting ready to be Governor, and want to stuff the pillow slip in your mouth to stop the giggles. The poor half-witted bastard and his speech. But the voice would keep on going over there beyond the wall, and the feet would keep on tramping, back and forth like the feet of a heavy animal prowling and swinging back and forth with a heavy swaying of the head in a locked-up room, or a cage, hunting for the place to get out, not giving up and irreconcilably and savagely sure that there was going to be a loose board or bar or latch sometime, not now but sometime. And listening to it, you wouldn't be so sure for a minute the bar or board would hold. Or the feet would not stop and they were like a machine, which was not human or animal either, and were tramping on you like pestles or plungers in a big vat and you were the thing in the vat, the thing that just happened to be there. The plungers didn't care about its being you, or not being you, in the vat. But they would continue until there wasn't any you, and afterward for a long time until the machine wore out or somebody switched off the juice.

Then, because you wanted to lie down in the late afternoon on a strange bed in a shadowy room and watch the smoke drift up and not think about anything, what you've been or what you're going to be,, and because the feet, the beast, the plungers, the half-wit won't stop, you jerk yourself up and sit on the edge of the bed and feel like swearing. But you don't. For you are wondering, with the beginnings of pain and insufficiency, what it is inside that won't let the feet stop. Maybe he is a half-wit, maybe he won't be Governor, maybe nobody will listen to his speeches but Lucy, but the feet won't stop.

Nobody would listen to the speeches, including me. They were awful. They were full of facts and figures he had dug up about running the state. He would say, "Now, friends, if you bear patiently with me for a few minutes, I will give you the figures," and he would clear his throat and fumble with a sheet of paper and backbones would sag lower in the seats and folks would start cleaning their fingernails with their pocket knifes. If Willie had ever thought of talking to folks up on the platform just the way he could talk to you face when he got heated about something, leaning at you as if he meant every damned word he said and his eyes bugging out and shining, he might have swayed the constituency. But no, he was trying to live up to his notion of a high destiny.

It didn't matter so much as long as Willie was playing the local circuit. The carry-over of the schoolhouse episode was still strong enough to mean something. He was the fellow on the Lord's side and the Lord had given a sign. The Lord had knocked over the fire escape just to prove a point. But when Willie got down in the middle of the state he began to run into trouble. And when he hit a town of any size he found out that the folks didn't care much which side of a question was the Lord's side.

Willie knew what was happening, but he didn't know why. His face got a little thinner, and the thin skin seemed to draw back tighter over the flesh, but he didn't look worried. That was the funny part. If ever a man had a right to look worried, it was Willie. But he didn't. He just looked like a man in a kind of walking dream, and when he walked out on the platform before he began talking his face looked purified and lifted up and serene like the face of a man who has just pulled out of a hard sickness.

But he hadn't pulled out of the sickness he had. He had galloping political anemia.

He couldn't figure out what was wrong. He was like a man with a chill who simply reckons that the climate is changing all of a sudden, and wonders why everybody else isn't shivering too. Perhaps it was a desire for just a little human warmth that got him in the habit of dropping into my room late at night, after the speaking and the handshaking were over. He would sit for a spell, while I drank off my nightcap, and not talk much, but one time, at Morristown, where the occasion had sure-God been a black frost, he did, after sitting quiet, suddenly say, "How you think it's going, Jack?"

It was one of those embarrassing questions like "Do you think my wife is virtuous?" or "Did you know I am a Jew?" which are embarrassing, not because of anything you might say for an answer, the truth or a lie, but because the fellow asked the question at all. But I said to him, "Fine, I reckon it's going fine."

"You think so, for a fact?" he asked.

"Sure," I said.

He chewed that for about a minute and then swallowed it. Then he said, "They didn't seem to be paying attention much tonight. Not while I was trying to explain about my tax program."

"Maybe you try to tell 'em too much. It breaks down their brain cells."

"Looks like they'd want to hear about taxes, though," he said "You tell 'em too much. Just tell 'em you're gonna soak the fat boys, and forget the rest of the tax stuff."

"What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that–"

"Yeah," I said, "I heard the speech. But they don't give a damn about that. Hell, make 'em cry, or make 'em laugh, make 'em think you're their weak and erring pal, or make 'em think you're God-Almighty. Or make 'em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir 'em up, it doesn't matter how or why, and they'll love you and come back for more. Pinch 'em in the soft place. They aren't alive, most of 'em, and haven't been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won't set on their stomachs, and they don't believe in God, so it's up to you to give 'em something to stir 'em up and make 'em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That's what they come for. Tell 'em anything. But for Sweet Jesus' sake don't try to improve their minds."

I fell back exhausted, and Willie pondered that for a while. He just sat there, not moving and with his face quiet and pure, but you had the feeling that you listened close enough you would hear the feet tramping inside his head, that something was locked up in there and going back and forth. Then he said, soberly, "Yeah, I know that's what some folks say."

"You weren't born yesterday," I said, and was suddenly angry with him. "You weren't deaf and dumb all the time you had the job in the courthouse in Mason City. Even if you did get in because Pillsbury put you there."

He nodded. "Yeah," he said, "I heard that kind of talk."

"It gets around," I said. "It's not any secret."

Then he demanded, "Do you think it's true?"

"True?" I echoed, and almost asked myself the question before I said, "Hell, I don't know. But there's sure a lot of evidence."

He sat there one minute longer, then got up and said good night and went to his room. It wasn't long before I heard the pacing start. I got undressed and lay down. But the pacing kept on. Old Master Mind lay there and listened to the pacing in the next room and said, "The bastard is trying to think up a joke he can tell 'em at Skidmore tomorrow night and make 'em laugh."

Old Master Mind was right. The candidate did tell a joke at Skidmore. But it didn't make them laugh.

But it was at Skidmore that I was sitting in a booth in a Greek café after the speaking, having a cup of coffee to steady my nerves and hiding out from people and the cackle of voices and the smell of bodies and the way eyes look at you in a crowd, when in came Sadie Burke and gave the joint the once-over and caught sight of me and came back and sat down across from me in the booth.

Sadie was one of Willie's new friends, but I had known her from way back. She was an even better friend, rumor had it, of a certain Sen-Sen Puckett, who chew Sen-Sen to keep his breath sweet and was a fat boy, both physically and politically speaking, and had been (and probably still was) a friend of Joe Harrison. Sen-Sen, according to some guesses, was the fellow who originally had had the bright idea of using Willie as the dummy. Sadie was a lot too good for Sen-Sen, who wasn't, however, a bad looking fellow. Sadie herself wouldn't have been called good looking, certainly not by the juries who pick out girls to be Miss Oregon and Miss New Jersey. She was built very satisfactorily but you tended to forget that, because of the awful clothes she wore and the awkward, violent, snatching gestures she made. She had absolutely black hair, which she cut off at a crazy length and which went out in all directions in a wild, electric way. Her features were good, if you noticed them, which you were inclined not to do, because her face was pocked. But she did have wonderful eyes, deep-set and inky-velvety-black.

Sadie wasn't, however, too good for Sen-Sen because of her looks. She was too good for him because he was a heel. She had probably taken him up because he was good looking and then, again according to rumor, she had put him into political pay dirt. For Sadie was a very smart cooky. She had been around and she had learned a lot the very hard way.

She was in Skidmore with the Stark party that time because she was attached to the Stark headquarters troop (probably as a kind of spy for Sen-Sen) in some such ambiguous role as secretary. As a matter of fact, she was around a lot, and made a good many of the arrangements and tipped off Willie about local celebrities.

Well, now she came up to my booth in the Greek restaurant with that violent stride which was characteristic of her, and looked down at me, and demanded, "Can I sit with you?"

She sat down before I could reply.

"Or anything else," I replied gallantly, "stand, sit, or lie."

She inspected me critically out of her inky-velvety-black, deep-set eyes, which glittered in the marred face, and shook her head. "No thanks," she said, "I like mine with vitamins."

"You mean you don't think I'm handsome?" I demanded.

"I don't care about anybody being handsome," she said, "but I never did go for anybody that reminded me of a box of spilled spaghetti. All elbows and dry rattle."

"All right," I said. "I withdraw my proposal. With dignity. But tell me something, now that you mention vitamins. You figure your candidate Willie has any vitamins? For the constituency?"

"Oh, God," she whispered, and rolled her eyes to heaven.

"All right," I said. "When are you going to tell the boys back home it's no go?"

"What do you mean, no go? They're planning on a big barbecue and rally at Upton. Duffy told me so."

"Sadie," I said, "you know damned well they'd have to barbecue the great wooly mastodon and use ten-dollar bills instead of lettuce on the buns. Why don't you tell the big boys it's no go?"

"What put that in your head?"

"Listen, Sadie," I said, "we've been pals for a long time and you needn't lie to uncle. I don't put everything I know in the papers, but I know that Willie isn't in this race because you admire his oratory."

"Ain't it awful?" she demanded.

"I know it's a frame-up," I said. "Everybody knows but Willie."

"All right," she admitted.

"When are you going to tell the boys back home it's no go, that they are wasting dough? That Willie couldn't steal a vote from Abe Lincoln in the Cradle of the Confederacy?"

"I ought to done it long ago," she said.

"When are you going to?" I asked.

"Listen," she said, "I told them before this thing ever started it was no go. But they wouldn't listen to Sadie. Those fat-heads–" and she suddenly spewed out a mouthful of cigarette smoke over the rounded, too red, suddenly outcurling and gleaming underlip.

"Why don't you tell them it's no go and get the poor bastard out of his agony?"

"Let them spend their God-damned money," she said fretfully, twitching her head as though to get the cigarette smoke out of her eyes. "I wish they were spending a lot more, the fat-heads. I wish the poor bastard had had enough sense to make them grease him good to take the beating he's in for. Now all he'll get will be the ride. Might as well let him have that. Ignorance is bliss."

The waitress brought a cup of coffee, which Sadie must have ordered when she came in before she spotted me. She took a drag of the coffee, and then a deep drag of the cigarette.

"You know," she said, jabbing out the butt savagely in the cup and looking at it and not at me, "you know, even if somebody told him. Even if he found out he was a sucker, I believe he might keep right on."

"Yeah," I said, "making those speeches."

"God," she said, "aren't they awful?"

"Yeah."

"The sap," she said.

We walked back to the hotel, and I didn't see Sadie again, except once or twice to say howdy-do to, until Upton. Thinks hadn't improved any before Upton. I went back to town and left the candidate to his own devices for a week or so in between, but I heard the news. Then I got the train over to Upton the day before the barbecue.

Upton is way over in the western part of the state, the capital of the cocklebur vote which was suppose to come pelting out of the brush to the barbecue. And just a little way north of Upton there was the coal pocket, where a lot of folks lived in company shacks and prayed for a full week's work. It was a good location to get a sellout house for the barbecue. Thos folks in the shacks were in such a shape they'd be ready to walk fifteen miles for a bait of fresh. If they still had the strength, and it was free.

The local I rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawed across the cotton country. We'd stop on a siding for half an hour, waiting for something, and I watched the cotton rows converging into the simmering horizon, and a black stub of a burnt tree in the middle distance up out of the cotton rows. Then, late in the afternoon, the train headed into the cut-over pine and sagebrush. We would stop beside some yellow, boxlike station, with the unpainted houses dropped down beyond, and I could see up the alley behind the down-town and then, as the train pulled out again, across the back yards of houses surrounded by board or wire fences as though to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. The houses didn't look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned. Some washing would be hanging on a line, but the people would go off and leave that too. They wouldn't have time to snatch it off the line. It would be getting dark soon, and they'd better hurry.

But as the train pulls away, a woman comes to the back door of one of the houses–just the figure of a woman, for you cannot make out the face–and she has a pan in her hands and she flings the water out of the pan to make a sudden tattered flash of silver in the light. She goes back into the house. To what is in the house. The floor of the house is thin against the bare ground and the walls and the roof are thin against all of everything which is outside, but you cannot see through the walls to the secret to which the woman has gone in.

The train pulls away, faster now, and the woman is back there in the house, where she is going to say. She'll stat there. And all at once, you think that you are the one who is running away, and who had better run fast to whatever you are going because it will be dark soon. The train is going pretty fast now, but its effort seems to the through a stubborn cloying density of air as though an eel tried to swim in syrup, or the effort seems to be against an increasing and implacable magnetism of earth. You think that if the earth should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train would be jerked over and piled up and the engine would spew and gasp while somewhere a canted-up wheel would revolve once with a massive and dreamlike deliberation.

But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had not even looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too.

You bloody fool, do you think that you want to mild a cow?

You do not want to milk a cow.

Then you are at Upton.

In Upton I went to the hotel, totting my little bag and my typewriter through the gangs of people on the street, people who looked at me with the countryman's slow, full, curious lack of shame, and didn't make room for me to pass until I was charging them down, the way a cow won't get out of the way of your car in a lane until your radiator damned near bats her in the underslung slats. At the hotel I ate a sandwich and went up to my room, and got the fan turned on and a pitcher of ice water sent up and took off my shoes and shirt and propped myself in a chair with a book.

At ten-thirty there was a knock on the door. I yelled, and in came Willie.

"Where you been?" I asked him.

"Been here all afternoon," he said.

"Duffy been dragging you round to shake hands with all the leading citizens?"

"Yeah," he said, glumly.

The glumness in his voice made me look sharply at him. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't the boys around here talk nice to you?"

"Sure, they talk all right," he said. He came over and took a chair by the writing table. He poured some water into one of the glasses on the tray beside my bottle of red-eye, drank it, repeated, "Yeah, they talk all right."

I looked at him again. The face was thinner and the skin was pulled back tighter so that it looked almost transparent under the cluster of freckles. He sat there heavily, not paying any attention to me as though he were mumbling something over and over in his mind.

"What's eating you?" I asked.

For a moment he didn't act as if he had heard me, and when he did turn his head to me there seemed to be connection between the act and what I had said. The act seemed to come from what was going on inside his head and not because I had spoken.

"A man don't have to be Governor," he said.

"Huh?" I responded in my surprise, for that was the last thing I ever expected out of Willie by that time. The showing in the last town (where I hadn't been) must have been a real frost to wake him up.

"A man don't have to be Governor," he repeated, and as I looked at his face now I didn't see the thin-skinned, boyish face, but another face under it, as though the first face were a mask of glass and now I could through it to the other one. I looked at the second face and saw, all of a sudden, the heavyish lips laid together to remain you of masonry and the knot of muscle on each cheek back where the jawbone hinges on.

"Well," I replied belatedly, "the votes haven't been counted yet."

He mumbled over in his mind what he had been working on. Then he said, "I'm not denying I wanted it. I won't lie to you," he said, and leaned forward a little and looked at me as though he were trying to convince me of the thing which I was already surer of than I was of hands and feet. "I wanted it. I lay awake at night, just wanting it." He worked his big hands on his knees, making the knuckles crack. "Hell, a man can lie there and want something so bad and be so full of wanting it he just plain forgets what it is he wants. Just like when you are a boy and the sap first rises and you think you will go crazy some night wanting something and you want it so bad and get so near sick wanting it you near forget what it is. It's something inside you–" he leaned at me, with his eyes on my face, and grabbed the front of his sweat-streaked blue shirt to make me think he was going to snatch the buttons loose to show me something.

But he subsided back in the chair, letting his eyes leave me to look across the wall as though the wall weren't there, and said, "But wanting don't make a thing true. You don't have to live forever to figure that out."

That was so true I didn't reckon it was worthwhile even to agree with him.

He didn't seem to notice my silence, he was so wrapped up in his own. But after a minute he pulled out of it, stared at me, and said, "I could have made a good Governor. By God–" And he struck his knee with his fist–"by God, a lot better than those fellows. Look here–" and he leaned at me–"what this state needs is a new tax program. And the rate ought to be raised on the coal lands the state's got leased out. And there's not a decent road in the state once you get in the country. And I could save this state some money by merging some departments. And schools–look at me, I never had a decent day's schooling in my life, what I got I dug out, and there's no reason why this state–"

I had heard it all before. On the platform when he stood up there high and pure in the face and nobody gave a damn.

He must have noticed that I wasn't giving a damn. He shut up all of a sudden. He got up and walked across the floor, and back, his head thrust forward and the forelock falling over his brow. He stopped in front of me. "Those things need doing, don't they?" he demanded.

"Sure," I said, and it was no lie.

"But they won't listen to it," he said. "God damn those bastard," he said, "they come out to hear a speaking and then they won't listen to you. Not a word. They don't care. God damn 'em! They deserve to grabble in the dirt and get nothing for it but a dry gut-ruble. They won't listen."

"No," I agreed, "they won't."

"And I won't be Governor," he said, shortly. "And they'll deserve what they get." And added, "The bastards."

"Well, you want me to hold you hand about it? Suddenly, I was sore at him. Why did he come to me? What did he expect me to do? What made him think I wanted to hear about wt the state needed? Hell, I knew. Everybody knew. It wasn't any secret. What it needed was some decent government. But who the hell was going to give it? And who cared if nobody did or ever did? What did he come whining to me for about that? Or about how bleeding much he wanted to be Governor because he lay and thought about it in the night? All that was in me as I suddenly felt sore at him and asked him snottily if he expected me to hold his hand.

He was looking at me slowly, giving me the once-over, reading my face. But he didn't look sore. Which surprised me, for I had wanted to make him sore, sore enough to get out. But there wasn't even surprise in his look. "No, Jack," he finally said, shaking his head, "I wasn't asking for sympathy. Whatever happens I'm not asking you or anybody else for sympathy." He shook himself heavily, like a big dog coming out of the wet, or waking up. "No, by God," he said, and he wasn't really talking to me now, "I'm not asking anybody in the world for it, not now or ever."

That seemed to settle something. So he sat down again.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I got to think," he replied. "I don't know and I got to think. The bastards," he said, "if I could just make 'em listen."

It was just at that time Sadie came in. Or rather, she knocked at the door, and I yelled, and she came in.

"Hello," she said, gave a quick look at the scene, and started toward us. Her eye was on the bottle of red-eye on my table. "How about some refreshment?" she asked.

"All right," I replied, but apparently I didn't get the right amount of joviality into my tone. Or maybe she could tell something had been going on from the way the air smelled, and if anybody could do that it would be Sadie.

Anyway, she stopped in the middle of the floor and said, "What's up?"

I didn't answer right away, and she came across the writing table, moving quick and nervous, the way she always did, inside of a shapeless shoddy-blue summer suit that she must have got by walking into a secondhand store and shutting her eyes and pointing and saying, "I'll take that."

She reached down and took a cigarette out of my pack lying there and tapped it on the back of her knuckles and turned her hot lamps on me.

"Nothing," I said, "except Willie here is saying how he's not going to be Governor."

She had the match lighted by the time I got the words out, but it never got to the cigarette. It stopped in mid-air.

"So you told him," she said, looking at me.

"The hell I did," I said. "I never tell anybody anything. I just listen."

She snapped the match out with a nasty snatch of her wrist and turned on Willie. "Who told you?" she demanded.

"Told me what?" Willie asked, looking up at her steady.

She saw that she had made her mistake. And it was not the kind of mistake for Sadie Burke to make. She had made her way in the world up from the shack in the mud flat by always finding out what you knew and never letting you know what she knew. Her style was not to lead with the chin but with a neat length of lead pipe after you had stepped off balance. But she had led with the chin this time. Somewhere way back inside of Sadie Burke there had been the idea that I was going to tell Willie. Or that somebody was going to tell Willie. Not that she, Sadie Burke, would tell Willie, but that Willie would be told and Sadie Burke wouldn't have to. Or nothing as specific as that. Just floating around in the deep dark the idea of Willie and the idea of the thing Willie didn't know, like two bits of drift sucked down in an eddy to the bottom of the river to revolve slowly and blindly there in the dark. But there, all the time.

So, out of an assumption she had made, without knowing it, or a wish or a fear she didn't know she had, she led with her chin. And standing there, rolling that unlighted cigarette in her strong fingers, she knew it. The nickel was in the slot, and looking at Willie you could see the wheels and the cogs and the cherries and the lemons begin to spin inside the machine.

"Told me what?" Willie said. Again.

"That you're not going to be Governor," she said, with a dash of easy levity, but she flashed me a look, the only S O S, I suppose, Sadie Burke ever sent out to anybody.

But it was her fudge and I let her cook it.

Willie kept on looking on her, waiting while she turned to one side and uncorked my bottle and poured herself out a steady-er. She took it, and without any ladylike cough.

"Told me what?" Willie said.

She didn't answer. She just looked at him.

And looking right back at her, he said, in a voice like death and taxes, "Told me what?"

"God damn you!" she blazed at him then, and the glass rattled on the tray as she set it down without looking. "You God-damned sap!"

"All right," Willie said in the same voice, boring in like a boxer when the other fellow begins to swing wild. "What was it?"

"All right," she said, "all right, you sap, you've been framed!"

He looked at her steady for thirty seconds, and there wasn't a sound but the sound of his breathing. I was listening to it.

Then he said, "Framed?"

"And how!" Sadie said, and leaned toward him with what seemed to be a vindictive and triumphant intensity glittering in her eyes and ringing in her voice. "Oh, you decoy, you wooden-headed decoy, you let 'em! Oh, yeah, you let 'em, because you thought you were the little white lamb of God–" and she paused to give him a couple of pitiful derisive _baa's__, twisting her mouth–"yeah, you thought you were the lamb of God, all right, but you know what you are?"

She waited as though for an answer, but he kept staring at her without a word.

"Well, you're the goat," she said. "You are the sacrificial goat. You are the ram in the bushes. You are a sap. For you let 'em. You didn't even get anything out of it. They'd have paid you to take the rap, but they didn't have to pay a sap like you. Oh, no, you were so full of yourself and hot air and how you are Jesus Christ, that all you wanted was a chance to stand on your hind legs and make a speech. My friends–" she twisted her mouth in a nasty, simpering mimicry–"my friends, what this state needs is a good five-cent cigar. Oh, my God!" And she laughed with a kind of wild, artificial laugh, suddenly cut short.

"Why?" he demanded, still staring steadily at her, breathing hard but not showing anything. "Why did they do it? To me?"

"Oh, my God!" she exclaimed and turned to me. "Listen to the sap. He wants to know why." Then she swung to him again, leaning closer, saying. "Listen, if you can get this through your thick head. They wanted you to split the MacMurfee vote. In the sticks. Do you get that or do you want a picture? Can you get that straight, you wooden-head?"

He looked at me, slow, wet his lips, then said, "Is it true?"

"He wants to know if it's true," Sadie announced prayerfully to the ceiling. "Oh, my God!"

"Is it true?" he asked me.

"That's what they tell me," I said.

Well, it hit him. There was no denying it. His face worked as though he might try to say something or might bust out crying. But he didn't do either one. He reached over to the table and picked up the bottle and poured out enough into a glass to floor the Irish and drank it off neat.

"Hey," I said, "take it easy, you aren't used to that stuff."

"He ain't used to a lot of things," Sadie said, shoving the bottle toward him on the tray. "He ain't used to the idea he's not going to be Governor. Are you, Willie?"

"Why can't you lay off?" I said to her.

But she didn't even notice me. She leaned toward Willie, and repeated, coaxingly this time, "Are you, Willie?

He reached for the bottle and did it again.

"Are you?" she demanded, not coaxing now.

"I was," he said, looking up to her, the blood up in his face now, the tousle of hair hanging, his breath coming heavy. "I was," he said, "before, but I'm not now."

"Not what?" she said.

"Not used to it."

"You better get used to it," she said, and laughed, and shoved the bottle in his direction.

He took it, poured, drank, set the glass down deliberately, and said: "I better not. I better not get used to it."

She laughed again, that wild artificial laugh, chopped off the laugh, and echoed, "He says he better not get used to it. Oh, my God!" Then she laughed again.

He sat there heavy in his chair, but not leaning back, the sweat beginning to pop out of his face and run down slow and shining over the flesh. He sat there, not noticing the sweat, not wiping it away, watching her laugh.

All at once he heaved up out of the chair. I thought he was going to jump at her. And she must have thought so too, for her laugh stopped. Right in the middle of the aria. But he didn't jump her. He wasn't even looking at her. He flung his glance wide around the room, and lifted his hands up in front of him, as though he were ready to grab something. "I'll kill 'em!" he said, "I'll kill 'em!"

"Sit down," she said, and leaned quickly toward him to give him a shove on the chest.

His pegs weren't too steady, and he went down. Right in the chair.

"I'll kill 'em," he said, sitting there, sweating.

"You won't do a God-damned thing," she announced. "You won't be Governor and you won't get paid for not being and you won't kill them or anybody else, and you know why?"

"I kill 'em," he said.

"I'll tell you why," she said, leaning. "It's because you're a sap. A triple-plated, spoon-fed, one-gallus sap, and you–"

I got up. "I don't care what kind of games you play," I said, "but I don't have to stay here and watch you."

She didn't even turn her head. I went to the door, and out, and the last I heard she was defining what kind of a sap he was. I figured that that might take anybody some time.

I took in a good deal of Upton that night. I saw the folks coming out of the last show at the Picture Palace, and I admired the cemetery gates and the schoolhouse by moonlight, and I leaned over the railing of the bridge over the creek and spit in the water. It took about two hours. Then I went back to the hotel.

When I opened the door of the room, Sadie was sitting in a chair by the writing table, smoking a cigarette. The air was thick enough to cut with a knife, and in the light of the lamp on the table the blue smoke drifted and swayed and curdled around her so that I got the impression I might have been looking at her sitting submerged in a tank full of soapy dishwater at the aquarium. The bottle on the table was empty.

For a second or two I thought that Willie had left. Then I saw the finished product.

It was lying on my bed.

I came in, and shut the door.

"Things seem to have quieted down," I remarked.

"Yeah."

I walked over to the bed and inspected the item. It was lying on his back' The coat was pushed up under the armpits, the hands were crossed piously on the bosom like the hands of a _gisant__ on a tomb in a cathedral, the shirt had pulled up some from its moorings under the belt and the two lowest buttons had come unbuttoned so that a triangular patch of slightly distended stomach was visible–white, with a few coarse dark hairs. The mouth was parted a little, and the lower lip vibrated with a delicate flabbiness at each measured expulsion of breath. All very pretty.

"He rared around some," Sadie said. "Telling me what he was going to do. Oh, he's gonna do big things. He's gonna be President. He's gonna kill people with his bare hands. Oh, my God!" She took a drag on her cigarette and spewed the smoke out and then fanned the backwash away from her face with a savage, slapping motion of her right hand. "But I quieted him down," she added, with an air of grim, suddenly spinsterish, satisfaction, the kind your great-aunt used to wear.

"Is he going to the barbecue?" I asked.

"How the hell do I know?" she snapped. "He wasn't screaming about any little detail like a barbecue. Oh, he's a big operator. But–" She paused, and did the drag and spew and fanning routine–"I quieted him."

"It looks like you slugged him," I observed.

"I didn't slug him," she said. "But I hit him where he lives. I finally got across to him the kind of sap he is. And that quieted him."

"He's quiet now, all right," I said, and walked over toward the table.

"He didn't get that quiet all of a sudden. But he got quiet enough to sit in a chair and hang on to the bottle for support and talk about how he'd have to break the news to some God-damned Lucy."

"That's his wife," I said.

"He talked like it was his mammy and would blow his nose for him. Then he said he was going right to his room and write her a letter. But," she said, and looked over at the bed, "he never made it. He made the middle of the floor, and then heaved for the bed."

She rose from the chair and went over to the bed and looked down at him.

"Does Duffy know?" I asked.

"I don't give a damn what Duffy knows," she said.

I went over to the bed, too. "I guess we'll have to leave him here," I said. "I'll go over to his room and sleep." I leaned over and hunted for his room key in the pockets. I found it. Then I took a toothbrush and some pajamas out of my bag.

She was still standing by the bed. She turned to me. "It looks like you might at least take the bastard's shoes off," she said.

I laid down my truck on the side of the bed, and did it. I picked up the pajamas and toothbrush and went over to the table to switch off the lamp. Sadie was still by the bed. "You better write that letter to that Mamma Lucy," she said, "and ask where to ship the remains."

As I laid my hand on the switch, I looked back at Sadie standing there looking down at the remains, with the left arm, the arm toward me, hanging straight down and a cigarette hanging out of the tip of two fingers and unreeling its spinner of smoke slowly upward, and with her head leaning forward a little while she expelled smoke meditatively over her again outthrust and gleaming lower lip.

There was Sadie, who had come a long way from the shanty in the mud flats. She had come a long way because she played to win and she didn't mean to win matches and she knew to win you have to lay your money on the right number and that if your number doesn't show there's a fellow standing right there with a little rake in your money and then it isn't yours anymore. She had been around a long time, talking to men and looking them straight in the eye like a man. Some of them liked her, and those that didn't like her listened when she talked, which wasn't too often, because there was reason to believe that when those big black eyes, which were black in a way which made it impossible for you to tell whether it was blackness of surface or blackness of depth, looked at the wheel before it began to move they could see the way the wheel would be after it had ceased to move and saw the little ball on the number. Some of them liked her a lot, like Sen-Sen. That had at one time been hard for me to get. I saw a package done up in the baggy tweed or droopy seersucker suit according to the solstice, and the pocked face with the heavy smear of lipstick and the black lamps in it and above it the mob of black hair which looked as though it had been hacked off at ear length with a meat cleaver.

Then one time, suddenly, I saw something else. You see a woman around for a long time and thing that she is ugly. You think she is nothing. Then, all of a sudden, you think how she is under that baggy tweed or droopy seersucker. All of a sudden, you see the face which is there under the pock-marked mask and is humble, pure, and trusting and is asking you to lift the mask. It must be like an old man looking at his wife and just for a second seeing the face he had seen thirty years before. Only in the case I am talking about it is not remembering a face which you have seen a long time back but discovering a face which you have never seen. It is future, not past. It is very unsettling. It was very unsettling, temporarily. I made my pass, and it didn't come to a thing.

She laughed in my face and said, "I've got my arrangements, and I stick to my arrangements as long as I've got my arrangements."

I didn't know what the arrangements were. That was before the day of Mr. Sen-Sen Puckett. That was before the day when she gave him the benefit of her gift for lying it on the right number.

Nothing of this passed through my mind as I put my hand on the switch of the lamp and looked back at Sadie Burke. But I tell it in order that it may be known who the Sadie Burke was who stood by the bed meditating on the carcass as I laid my hand on the switch and who had come the way she had come by not leading with her chin but who had led with her chin that night At least, that was the way I figured it.

I turned the switch, and she and I went out of the door, and said good night in the hall.

It must have been near nine the next morning when Sadie beat on my door and I came swimming and swaying up from the bottom of a muddy sleep, like a piece of sogged driftwood stirred up from the bottom of a pond. I made the door and stuck my head out.

"Listen," she said without ant build-up of civilities, "Duffy's going out to the fair grounds, and I'll ride with him. He's got a lot of big-shotting to do out there. He wanted to get the sap out pretty early, too, to mingle with the common herd, but I told him he wasn't feeling too good. That he'd be out a little later."

"O. K.," I said, "I'm not paid for it, but I'll try to deliver him."

"I don't care whether he ever gets there," she said. "It won't be skin off my nose."

"I'll try to get him there anyway."

"Suit yourself," she said, and walked off down the hall, twitching the seersucker.

I looked out the window and saw that it was going to be another day, and shaved, and dressed, and went down to get a cup of coffee. Then I went to my room, and knocked. There was some kind of a sound inside, like an oboe blatting once deep inside a barrel of feathers. So I went in. I had left the door unlocked the night before.

It was after ten by that time.

Willie was on the bed. In the same place, the coat still wadded up under his armpits, his hands still crossed on his chest, his face pale and pure. I went over to the bed. His head didn't turn, but his eyed swung toward me with a motion that made you think you could hear them creak in the sockets.

"Good morning," I said.

He opened his mouth a little way and his tongue crept out and explored the lips carefully, wetting them. Then he grinned weakly, as though he were experimenting to see if anything would crack. Nothing happened, so he whispered, "I reckon I was drunk last night?"

"That's the name it goes by," I said.

"It's the first time," he said. "I never got drunk before. I never even tasted it but once before."

"I know. Lucy doesn't favor drinking."

"I reckon she'll understand though when I tell her," he said. "She'll see how it was I came to do it." Then he sank into meditation.

"How do you feel?"

"I feel all right," he said, and pried himself up to a sitting position, swinging his feet to the floor. He sat there with his sock-feet on the floor, taking stock of the internal stresses and strains. "Yeah," he concluded, "I feel all right."

"Are you to the barbecue?"

He looked up at me with a laborious motion of the head and an expression of question on his face as tough I were the fellow who was supposed to answer. "What made you ask that?" he demanded.

"Well, a lot's been happening."

"Yeah," he said. "I'm going."

"Duffy and Sadie have already gone. Duffy wants you to come on out and mingle with the common herd."

"All right," he said. Then, with his eyed fixed on an imaginary spot on the floor about ten feet from his toes, he stuck his tongue out again and began to caress his lips. "I'm thirsty," he said.

"You are dehydrated," I said. "The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good."

But he wasn't listening. He had pulled himself up and padded off into the bathroom.

I could hear the slosh of water and the gulping and inhaling. He must have been drinking out of the faucet. After about a minute that sound stopped. There wasn't any sound at all for a spell. Then there was a new one. Then the agony was over.

He appeared at the bathroom door, braced against the doorjamb, staring at me with a face of sad reproach bedewed with the glitter of cold water.

"You needn't look at me like that," I said, "the likker was all right."

"I puked," he said wistfully.

"Well, you didn't invent it. Besides, now you'll be able to eat a great big, hot, juicy, high-powered slab of barbecued hog meat."

He didn't seem to think that that was very funny. And neither did I. But he didn't seem to think it was especially unfunny, either. He just hung on the doorjamb looking at me like a deaf and dumb stranger. The he retired again into the bathroom.

"I'll order you a pot of coffee," I yelled in to him. "It'll fix you up."

But it didn't. He took it, but it didn't even take time to make itself at home.

Then he lay down for a while. I put a cold towel on his forehead and he closed his eyes. He laid his hands on his breast, and the freckles on his face looked like rust spots on polished alabaster.

About eleven-fifteen the desk called up to say that a car and two gentlemen were waiting to drive Mr. Stark to the fairgrounds. I put my hand over the receiver, and looked over at Willie. His eyes had come open and were fixed on the ceiling.

"What the hell do you want to go to that barbecue for?" I said. "I'm going to tell 'em to hist tail."

"I'm going to the barbecue," he announced from the spirit world, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling.

So I went down to the lobby to stall off two of the local semileading citizens who'd even agreed to ride in the gubernatorial hearse to get their names in the paper. I stalled them. I said Mr. Stark was slightly indisposed, and I would drive him out in about an hour.

At twelve o'clock I tried the coffee treatment again. It didn't work. Or rather, it worked wrong. Duffy called up from out of the fairgrounds and wanted to know what the hell. I told him he'd better go on and distribute the loaves and fishes and pray God for Willie to arrive by two o'clock.

"What's the matter?" demanded Duffy.

"Boy," I said, "the longer you don't know the happier you'll be," and hung up the phone.

Along toward one, after Willie had made another effort to recuperate with coffee and had failed, I said, "Look here, Willie, what you going out there for? Why don't you stay here? Send word you are sick and spare yourself some grief. Then, later on, if–"

"No," he said, and pushed himself up to a sitting position on the side of the bed. His face had a high a pure and transparent look like a martyr's face just before he steps into the flame.

"Well," I said, without enthusiasm, "if you are hell-bent, you got one more chance."

"More coffee? he asked.

"No," I said, and unstrapped my suitcase and got out the second bottle. I poured some in a tumbler and took it to him. "According to the old folks," I said, the best way is to put two shots of absinthe on a little cracked ice and float on a shot of rye. But we can't be fancy. Not with Prohibition."

He got it down. There was a harrowing moment, then I drew a sight of relief. In ten minutes I repeated the dose. Then I told him to get undressed while I ran a tub of cold water. While he was in the tub I called down for the desk to get us a car. Then I went to Willie's room to get some clean clothes and his other suit.

He managed to get dressed, taking time out now and then for me to give a treatment.

He got dressed and then sat on the edge of the bed wearing a big label marked, _Handle with Care–This End Up–Fragile__. But I got him down to the car.

Then I had to go back up and get a copy of his speech, which he'd left in his top bureau drawer. He might need it, he said after I got back. He might not be able to remember very well, and might have to read it.

"All about Peter Rabbit and Wallie Woodchuck," I said, but he wasn't attending.

He lay back and closed his eyes while the tumbril bumped over the gravel toward the fairgrounds.

I looked up the road and saw the flivvers and wagons and buggies ranked on the outskirts of a grove, and the fair buildings, and an American Flag draped around a staff against the blue sky. Then, Duffy was soothing the digestion of the multitude.

Willie put out his hand and laid it on the flask, "Gimme that thing," he said "Go easy," I said, "you aren't used to this stuff. You already–"

But he had it to his mouth by that time and the sound of it gargling down would have drowned the sound of my words even if I had kept on wasting them.

When he handed the thing back to me, there wasn't enough in it to make it worth my while putting it in my pocket. What collected in one corner when I tilted it wouldn't make even a drink for a high-school girl. "You sure you don't want to finish it?" I asked in mock politeness.

He shook his head in a dazed sort of way, said, "No, thanks," and then shivered like a man with a hard chill.

So I took what was left, and threw the empty pint bottle out of the window.

"Drive in as close as you can," I told the boy at the wheel.

He got pretty close, and I got out and gave Willie a hand, and paid the kid off. Then Willie and I drifted slowly over the brown and trodden grass toward a platform, while the crowd about us was as nothing and Willie's eyes were on far horizons and the band played "Casey Jones."

I left Willie in the lee of the platform, standing all alone in a space of brown grass in a strange country with a dream on his face and the sun beating down on him.

I found Duffy, and I said, "I'm ready to make delivery, but I want a receipt."

"What's the matter with him?" Duffy wanted to know. "The bastard doesn't drink. Is he drunk?"

"He never touches the stuff," I said. "It's just he's been on the road to Damascus and he saw a great light and he's got the blind staggers."

"What's the matter with him?"

"You ought to read the Good Book more," I told Duffy, and led him to the candidate. It was a touching reunion. So I melted into the throng.

There was quite a crowd, for the scent of burning meat on the air will do wonders. The folks were beginning to collect around in front of the platform, and climb up in the grandstand. The local band was standing over to one side of the platform, now working over "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here." On the platform were the two local boys who didn't have any political future, who had come to the hotel that morning, and another fellow who was by my guess a preacher to offer up a prayer, and Duffy. And there was Willie, sweating slow. Thy sat in a row of chairs across the back of the platform, in front of the bunting-draped backdrop, and behind a bunting-draped table on which was a big pitcher of water and a couple of glasses.

One of the local boys got up first and addressed his friend and neighbors and introduced the preacher who addressed God-Almighty with his gaunt rawboned face lifted up above the blue serge and his eyes squinched into the blazing light. Then the first local boy got up and worked around to introducing the second local boy. It looked for a while as though the second local boy was the boy with the button after all, for he was, apparently, built for endurance and not speed, but it turned out that he didn't really have the button any more than the first local boy or the preacher or God-Almighty. It just took him longer to admit that he didn't have it and to put the finger on Willie.

Then Willie stood up all alone by the table, saying, "My friends," and turning his alabaster face precariously from one side to the other, and fumbling in the right side pocket of his coat to fish out the speech.

While he was fumbling with the sheets, and looking down at them with a slightly bemused expression as though the stuff before him in a foreign language, somebody tugged at my sleeve. There was Sadie.

"How was it?" she asked.

"Take a look and guess," I replied.

She gave a good look up to the platform, and then asked, "How'd you do it?"

"Hair of the dog."

She looked up to the platform again. "Hair, hell," she said, "he must have swallowed the dog."

I inspected Willie, who stood up there sweating and swaying and speechless, under the hot sun.

"He's on the ropes," Sadie said "Hell, he's been on 'em all morning," I said, "and lucky to have 'em."

She was still looking at him. It was much the way she had looked at him the night before when he lay on the bed in my room, out cold, and she stood by the side of the bed. It wasn't pity and it wasn't contempt. It was an ambiguous, speculative look. Then she said, "Maybe he was born on 'em."

She said in a tone which seemed to imply that she had settled that subject. But she kept on looking up there at him in the same way.

The candidate could still stand, at least with a thigh propped against the table. He had called them his friends in two or three ways and had said he was glad to be there. Now he stood there clutching the manuscript in both hands, with his head lowered like a dehorned cow beset by a couple of fierce dogs in the barnyard, while the sun beat on him and the sweat dropped. Then he took a grip on himself, and lifted his head.

"I have a speech here," he said. "It is a speech about what this state needs. But there's no use telling you what this state needs. You are the state. You know what you need. Look at your pants. Have they got holes in the knees? Listen to your belly. Did it ever rumble for emptiness? Look at your crop. Did it ever rot in the field because the road was so bad you couldn't get it to market? Look at your kids. Are they growing up ignorant as you and dirt because there isn't any school for them?

Willie paused, and blinked around at he crowd. "No," he said, "I'm not going to read you any speech. You know what you need better'n I could tell you. But I'm going to tell you a story."

And he paused, steadied himself by the table, and took a deep breath while the sweat dripped.

I leaned toward Sadie. "What the hell's the bugger up to?" I asked "Shut up," she commanded, watching him.

He began again. "It's a funny story," he said. "Get ready to laugh. Get ready to bust your sides for it is sure a funny story. It's about a hick. It's about a red-neck, like you all, if you please. Yeah, like you. He grew up like any other mother's son on the dirt roads and gully washes of a north-state farm. He knew all about being a hick. He knew what it was to get up before day and get cow dung between his toes and feed and slop and milk before breakfast so he could set off by sunup to walk six miles to a one-room, slab-sided schoolhouse. He knew what it was to pay high taxes for that windy shack of a schoolhouse and those gully-washed red-clay roads to walk over–or to break his wagon axle or stringhalt his mules on.

"Oh, he knew what it was to be a hick, summer and winter. He figured if he wanted to do anything he had to do it himself. So he sat up nights and studied books and studied law so maybe he could do something about changing things. He didn't study that law in any man's school or college. He studied it nights after a hard day's work in the field. So he could change things some. For himself and for the folks like him. I am not lying to you. He didn't start out thinking about all the other hicks and how he was going to do wonderful thing for them. He started out thinking of number one, but something came to him on the way. How he could not do something for himself and not for other folks or for himself without the help of other folks. It was going to be all together or none. That came to him.

"And it came to him with the powerful force of God's own lightening on a tragic time back in his own home county two years ago when the first brick schoolhouse ever built in his county collapsed because it was built of politics-rotten brick, and it killed and mangled a dozen poor little scholars. Oh, you know that story. He had fought the politics back of building that schoolhouse of rotten brick but he lost and it fell. But it started him thinking. Next time would be different.

"People were his friends because he had fought that rotten brick. And some of the public leaders down in the city knew that and they rode up to his pappy's place in a big fine car and say how they wanted him to run for Governor.

I plucked Sadie's arm. "You think he's going to–"

"Shut up," she said savagely.

I looked toward Duffy up there on the platform back of Willie. Duffy's face was worried. It was red and round and sweating, and it was worried.

"Oh, they told him," Willie was saying, "and that hick swallowed it. He looked in his heart and thought he might try to changes things. In all humility he thought how he might try. He was just a human, country boy, who believed like we have always believed back here in the hills that even the plainest, poorest fellow can be Governor if his fellow citizens find he has got the stuff and the character for the job.

"Those fellows in the striped pants saw the hick and they took him in. They said how MacMurfee was a limber-back and a deadhead and how Joe Harrison was the tool of the city machine, and how they wanted that hick to step in and try to give some honest government. They told him that. But–" Willie stopped, and lifted his right hand clutching the manuscript to high heaven–"do you know who they were? They were Joe Harrison's hired hands and lickspittles and they wanted to get a hick to run to split MacMurfee's hick vote. Did I guess this? I did not. No, for I heard their sweet talk. And I wouldn't know the truth this minute if that woman right there–" and he pointed down to Sadie–"if that woman right there–"

I nudged Sadie and said, "Sister, you are out of a job."

"–if that fine woman right there hadn't been honest enough and decent enough to tell the foul truth which stinks in the nostrils of the Most High!"

Duffy was on his feet, edging uncertainly toward the front of the platform. He kept looking desperately toward the band as though he might signal them to burst into music and then at the crowd as though he were trying to think of something to say. Then he edged toward Willie and said something to him.

But the words, whatever they were, were scarcely out of his mouth before Willie had turned on him. "There!" Willie roared. "There!" And he waved his right hand, the hand clutching the manuscript of his speech. "There is the Judas Iscariot, the lickspittle, the nose-wiper!"

And Willie waved his right arm at Duffy, clutching the manuscript which he had not read. Duffy was trying to say something to him, but Willie wasn't hearing it, for he was waving the manuscript under Duffy's retreating nose and shouting, "Look at him! Look at him!"

Duffy, still retreating, looked toward the band and waved his arms at them and shouted, "Play, play! Play the 'Star-Spangled Banner'!"

But the band didn't play. And just then as Duffy turned back to Willie, Willie made a more than usually energetic pass of the fluttering manuscript under Duffy's nose and shouted, "Look at him, Joe Harrison's dummy!"

Duffy shouted, "It's a lie!" and stepped back from the accusing arm.

I don't know whether Willie meant to do it. But anyway, he did it. He didn't exactly shove Duffy off the platform. He just started Duffy doing a dance along the edge, a kind of delicate, feather-toed, bemused, slow-motion adagio accompanied by arms pinwheeling around a face which was like a surprised custard pie with a whole scooped in the middle of the meringue, and the hole was Duffy's mouth, but no sound came out of it. There wasn't a sound over that five-acre tract of sweating humanity. They just watched Duffy do his dance.

Then he danced right off the platform. He broke his fall and half lay, half sat, propped against the bottom of the platform with his mouth still open. No sound came out of it now, for there wasn't any breath to make a sound.

All of that, and me without a camera.

Willie hadn't even bothered to look over the edge. "Let the hog lie!" he shouted. "Let the hog lie, and listen to me, you hicks. Yeah, you're hicks, too, and they've fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me. For that's what they think we're for. To fool. Well, this time I'm going to fool somebody. I'm getting out of this race. You know why?"

He paused and wiped the sweat off his face with his left hand, a flat scouring motion.

"Not because my little feelings are hurt. They aren't hurt, I never felt better in my life, because now I know the truth. What I ought to know long back. Whatever a hick wants he's got to do for himself. Nobody in a fine automobile and sweet-talking is going to do it for him. When I come back to run for Governor again, I'm coming on my own and I'm coming for blood. But I'm getting out now.

"I'm resigning in favor of MacMurfee. By God, everything I've said about MacMurfee stands and I'll say it again, but I'm going to stump this state for him. Me and the other hicks, we are going to kill Joe Harrison so dead he'll never even run for dogcatcher in this state. Then we'll see what MacMurfee does. This is his last chance. The time has come. The truth is going to be told and I'm going to tell it. I'm going to tell it over this state from one end to the other if I have to ride the rods or steal me a mule to do it, and no man, Joe Harrison or any other man, can stop me. For I got me a gospel and I–"

I leaned to Sadie. "Listen," I said, "I've got to get on a telephone. I'm starting to town or the first telephone I hit. I got to telephone this in. You stay here and for God's sake remember what happens."

"All right," she said, not paying much mind to me.

"And nab Willie when it's over and bring him to town. It's a sure thing Duffy won't ask you to ride with him. You nab the sap, and–"

"Sap, hell," she said. And added, "You go on."

I went. I worked around the edge of the grandstand, through the crowd, with the sound of Willie's voice hammering on the eardrums and shaking dead leaves off the oak trees. As I rounded the end of the grandstand, I looked back and there was Willie flinging the sheets of his manuscript from him so the swirled about his feet and beating on his chest and shouting how the truth was there and didn't need writing down. There he was, with the papers about his feet and one arm up, the coat sleeve jammed elbow high, face red as a bruised beet and the sweat sluicing, hair over his forehead, eyes bugged out and shining, drunk as a hoot owl, and behind him the bunting, red-white-and-blue, and over him God's bright, brassy, incandescent sky.

I walked down the gravel road a piece and hitched a ride on a truck to town.

That night when all was still and the train bearing Duffy back to the city (to report, no doubt, to Joe Harrison) was puffing across the sage country under the stars and Willie had been in bed for hours sleeping off the fumes, I reached for the bottle on the writing table of my room at the hotel in Upton and said to Sadie, "How about a little more of the stuff that let the bars down and kicked the boards loose?"

"What?" she asked.

"You would not understand that to which I so grammatically refer," I said, and poured the drink for her.

"Oh, I forgot," she said, "you're the fellow who went to college."

Yes, I was the fellow who had gone so grammatically to college, where I had not learned, I decided, all there was to know.

Willie kept his word. He stumped the state for MacMurfee. He didn't ride the rods or buy him a mule or steal him one. But he drove the pants off his pretty good secondhand car over the washboard and through the hub-deep dust and got mired in the black gumbo when a rain came and sat in his car waiting for the span of mules to come and pull him out. He stood on schoolhouse steps, and on the top of boxes borrowed from the dry-goods stores, and talked. "Friends, red-necks, suckers, and fellow hicks," he would say, leaning forward, leaning at them, looking at them. And he would pause, letting the words sink in. And in the quiet the crowd would be restless and resentful under these words, the words they knew people called them but the words nobody ever got up and called them on their face. "Yeah," he would say, "yeah," and twist his mouth on the word, "that's what you are, and you needn't get mad at me for telling you. Well, get mad, but I'm telling you. That's what you are. And me–I'm one, too. Oh, I'm a red-neck, for the sun has beat down on me. Oh, I'm a sucker, for I fell for that sweet-talking fellow in the fine automobile. Oh, I took the sugar tit and hushed my crying. Oh, I'm a hick and I am the hick they were going to try to use and split the hick vote. But I'm standing here on my own hind legs, for even a dog can learn, and here I am on my own hind legs." And he would lean at them. And demand, "Are you, are you on your hind legs? Have you learned that much yet? You think you can learn that much?"

He told them things they didn't like. He called them the names they didn't like to be called, but always, almost always, the restlessness and resentment died and he leaned at them with his eyes bugging and his face glistening in the hot sunlight or the red light of a gasoline flare. They listened while he told them to stand on their own hind legs. Go and vote, he told them. Vote for MacMurfee this time, he told them, for he is all you have to vote for. But vote strong, strong enough to show what you can do. Vote him in and then if he doesn't deliver, nail up his side. "Yeah," he would say, leaning, "yeah, nail him up if he don't deliver. Hand me the hammer and I'll nail him." Vote, he told them. Put MacMurfee on the spot, he told them.

He leaned at them and said, "Listen to me, you hick. Listen here and lift up your eyes and looked on the God's blessed and unfly-blown truth. If you've got the brain of a sapsucker left and can recognize the truth when you see it. This is the truth: you are a hick and nobody ever helped a hick but the hick himself. Up there in town they won't help you. It is up to you and God, and God helps those who help themselves!"

He gave them that, and they stood there in front of him, with a thumb hooked on the overall strap, and the eyes under the pulled-down fat brim squinting at him as though he were something spied across a valley or cove, something they weren't quite easy in the mind about, too far away to make out good, or a sudden movement in the brush seen way off yonder across the valley or across the field and something might pop out of the brush, and under the eyes the jaw revolving worked the quid with a slow, punctilious, immitigable motion, like historical process. And Time is nothing to a hog, or to History, either. They watched him, and if you watched close you might be able to see something beginning to happen. They stand so quiet, they don't even shift from one foot to the other–they've got a talent for being quiet, you can see then stand on the street corner when they come to town, not moving or talking, or see one of them squatting on his heels by the road, just looking off where the road drops over the hill–and their squinched eyes don't flicker off the man up there in front of them. They've got a talent for being quiet. But sometimes the quietness stops. It snaps all of a sudden, like a piece of string pulled tight. One of them sit quiet on the bench, at the brush-arbor revival, listening, and all of a sudden he jumps up and lifts up his arms and yells, "Oh Jesus! I have seen His name!" One of them presses his finger on the trigger, and the sound of the gun surprises even him Willie is up there. In the sun, or in the red light of the gasoline flare. "You ask me what my program is. Here it is, you hicks. And don't you forget it. Nail 'em up! Nail up Joe Harrison. Nail up anybody who stands on your way. Nail up MacMurfee if he don't deliver. Nail anybody who stands on your way. You hand me the hammer and I'll do it with my own hand. Nail 'em up on the barn door! And don't fan away the bluebottles with any turkey wings!"

It was Willie, all right. It was the fellow with the same name.

MacMurfee was elected. Willie had something to do with it, for the biggest vote was polled in the sections Willie had worked that they had any record of. But all the time MacMurfee didn't quite know what to make of Willie. He shied off him at first, for Willie had said some pretty hard things about him, and then when it did look as though Willie would make an impression, he shilly-shallied. And in the end Willie got up on his hind legs and said how the MacMurfee people were offering to pay his expenses but he was on his own, he wasn't MacMurfee's man, even if he was saying to vote for MacMurfee. He was paying his way, he said, even if he had to put another mortgage on his pappy's farm and the last one it would hold. Yes, and if there was anybody who couldn't afford two dollars to pay his poll tax and came to him and said it straight out, he, Willie Stark, would pay the tax out of the money he had got by mortgaging his pappy's farm. That was how much he believed in what he was saying.

MacMurfee was in, and Willie went back to Mason City and practiced law. He must have dragged on for a year or so, handling chicken-stealing cases and stray-hog cases and cutting scrapes (which are part of the entertainment at Saturday-night square dances in Mason County). Then a gang of workmen got hurt when some of the rig collapsed on a bridge the state was building over the Ackamulgee River, and two or three got killed. A lot of the workmen were from Mason County and they got Willie for their lawyer. He got all over the papers for that. And he won the case. Then they struck oil just west of mason County over in Ackamulgee County, and in that section Willie got mixed up in the litigation between an oil company and some independent leaseholders. Willie's side won, and he saw folding money for the first time in his life. He saw quite a lot of it.

During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke.

Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had once been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered that there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country. Willie signed them on, all right, and as a result got quiet a few votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while, Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commissioner and, later Lieutenant Governor in Willie's last term. I used to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask the Boss, "What do you keep that lunk-head for?" Sometimes he would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, "Hell, somebody's got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike." But once he said: "I keep him because he reminds me of something."

"What?"

"Something I don't ever want to forget," he said.

"What's that?"

"That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don't aim to forget that."

So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.

But was that it? Or rather, was that all of it? I figured there was another reason. The Boss must have taken a kind pride in the fact that he could make Tiny Duffy a success, He had busted Tiny Duffy and then he had picked up the pieces and put him back together again as his own creation. He must have taken a lot of pleasure in looking at Tiny's glittering rig and diamond ring, and thinking that it was all hollow, that it was a sham, that if he should crook his little finger Tiny Duffy would disappear like a whiff of smoke. In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative, sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn't be anything but the whiff of smoke. In a way, Tiny's success was a final index of the Boss's own success.

But was that it? In the end, I decided that there was one more reason behind the other reasons. This: Tiny Duffy became, in a crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the contempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self because of a blind, in ward necessity. But I came to that conclusion only at the very end, a long time afterwards.

But now Willie had just become Governor and nobody knew what would come afterwards.

And meanwhile–while the campaign was on–I was out of a job.

My job had been political reporting for the _Chronicle__. I had a column, too. I was a pundit.

One day Jim Madison had me in to stand on the Kelly-green carpet which surrounded his desk like a pasture. "Jack," he said, "you know what the _Chronicle__ line is in this election."

"Sure," I replied, "it wants to elect Sam MacMurfee again because of his brilliant record as an administrator and his high integrity as a statesman."

He grinned a little sourly and said, "It wants to elect Sam MacMurfee."

"I'm sorry I forgot we were in the bosom of the family. I thought I was writing my column."

The grin went off his face. He played with a pencil on his desk. "It's about the column I wanted to see you," he said.

"O. K.," I replied.

"Can't you put some more steam in it? This is an election and not a meeting of the Epworth League."

"It is an election, all right."

"Can't you give it a little more?"

"When what you got to work with is Sam MacMurfee," I said, "you haven't even got a sow's ear to make a silk purse out of. I'm doing what I can."

He brooded over that for a minute. Then he began, "Now just because the Stark happens to be a friend of yours, you–"

"He's no friend of mine," I snapped. "I didn't even see him between last election and this one. Personally, I don't care who is ever Governor of this state or how big a son-of-a-bitch he is. But I am a hired hand, and I do my best to suppress in my column my burning conviction that Sam MacMurfee is one of the fanciest sons-of–"

"You know the _Chronicle__ line," Jim Madison said heavily and studied the spit-slick, chewed butt of his cigar.

It was a hot day, and the breeze from the electric fan was on Jim Madison and not on me, and there was a little thread of acid, yellow-feeling saliva down in my throat, the kind you get when your stomach is sour, and my head felt like a dried gourd with a couple of seeds rattling around in it. So I looked at Jim Madison, and said, "All right."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean in the way I said it," I said, and started for the door.

"Look here, Jack, I'm–" he began, and laid the cigar butt down on the ash tray.

"I know," I said, "you got a wife and kids and your boy's in Princeton."

I said that and kept on walking.

There was a water cooler outside the door, in the hall, and I stopped by it and took one of the little cone-shaped cups and drank about ten of them full of ice water to wash the yellow thing out of my throat. Then I stood there in the hall with my stomach full of the water like a cold bulb inside me.

I could sleep late, and then wake up and not move, just watching the hot, melted-butter-colored sunlight pour through the cracks in the shade, for my hotel was not the best in town and my room was not the best in the hotel. As my chest rose and fell with my breathing, the sheet would stick damply to my bare hide, for that is the way you sleep there in the summertime. I could hear the streetcars and the blatting of automobile horns off yonder, not too loud but variegated and unremitting, a kind of coarse, hoarse tweedy mixture of sounds to your nerve ends, and occasionally the clatter of dishes, for my room gave on the kitchen area. And now and then a nigger would sing a snatch down there.

I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want to run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don't want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don't want a card because you want a card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren't sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn't mean a thing. They all look alike.

So I could lie there, though I knew that I would get up after a spell–not deciding to get up but just all at once finding myself standing in the middle of the floor just as later on I would find myself, with a mild shock of recognition, taking coffee, changing a bill, handling a girl, drawing on a drink, floating in the water. Like an amnesia case playing solitaire in a hospital. I would get up and deal myself a hand, all right. Later on. But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

Lots of nights I would go the bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn't come yet. You look way up the track, but can't see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of you fidgeting, and listen. You can't hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which will come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, "Yassuh, little boss, yassuh."

You don't dream in that kind of sleep, but you are aware of it every minute you are asleep, as though were having a long dream of sleep itself, and in that sleep you were dreaming of sleep, sleeping and dreaming of sleep infinitely inward into the center.

That was the way it was for a while after I didn't have any job. It wasn't new. It had been like that before, twice before. I had even given a name to it–The Great Sleep. The time before I quit the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish my dissertation for the Ph. D. in American History. It was almost finished, and they said it was O. K. The sheets of typed-on paper were stacked up on the table by the typewriter. The boxes f cards were there. I would get up late in the morning and see them there, the top sheet of paper beginning to curl up around the paperweight. And I'd see them there when I came in after supper to go to bed. Finally, one morning I got up late and went out the door and didn't come back and left them there. And the other time the Great Sleep had come was the time before I walked out the apartment and Lois started to get the divorce.

But this time there wasn't any American History and there wasn't any Lois. But there was the Great Sleep.

When I did get up I just piddled around. I went to movies and hung around speak-easies and went swimming or went out to the country club and lay on the grass and watched a couple of hot bastards swing rackets at a little white ball that flashed in the sun. Or perhaps one of the players would be a girl and the short white skirt would swirl and whip about her brown thighs, and flash in the sun, too.

A few times I went to see Adam Stanton at his apartment, the fellow I had grown up with at Burden's Landing. He was a hot-shot surgeon now, with more folks screaming for him to cut on them than he had time to cut on, and a professor at the University Medical School, and busy grinding out the papers he published in the scientific journals or took off to read at meetings in New York and Baltimore and London. He wasn't married. He didn't have time, he said. He didn't have time for anything. But he'd take a little time to let me sit in a shabby overstuffed chair in his shabby apartment, where papers were stacked around and the colored girl had streaked the dust on the furniture. I used to wonder why he lived the way he did when he must have been having quite a handsome take, but I finally got it through my head that he didn't ask anything from a lot of the folks he cut on. He had the name of a softy in the trade. And after he got money, people took him for it if they had a story that would halfway wash. The only thing in his apartment that was worth a plugged nickel was the piano, and it was the best money could buy.

Most of the time when I was at Adam's apartment he would be at the piano. I have heard it said that he was pretty good, but I wouldn't know. But I didn't mind listening, not if the chair was good and comfortable. Adam must have heard me say one time or another that music didn't mean much to me, but I suppose that he'd forgotten it or couldn't believe that it was true for anybody. Anyway, he would turn his head at me and say, "This–now listen to this–my God, this now is sure a–" But his voice would trail off and the words which were going to tell what the thing sure and eternally was in its blessed truth would not ever get said. He would just leave the sentence hanging and twisting slowly in the air like a piece of frayed rope, and would look at me out of his clear, deep-set, ice-water-blue, abstract eyes–the kind of eyes and the kind of look your conscience has about three o'clock in the morning–and then, unlike your conscience, he would begin to smile, not much, just a sort of tentative, almost apologetic smile that took the curse off that straight mouth and square jaw, and seemed to say, "Hell, I can't help it if I look at you that way, buddy, it's just the way I look at things." Then the smile would be gone, and he would turn his face to the piano and set his hands to the keys.

Sooner or later he would get enough of the music and would drop into one of the other shabby chairs. Or he might remember to get me a drink, or might even take one himself, paler than winter sunlight and about as strong. We'd sit there, not taking, sipping slow, his eyes burning cold and blue in his head, bluer because of the swarthiness of the skin, which was drawn back taut over the bones of the face. It was like when we used to go fishing, when we were kids, back at Burden's Landing. We used to sit in the boat, under the hot sun, hour after hour, and never a word. Or lie on the beach. Or go camping together and after supper lie by a little smudge fire for the mosquitoes, and never say a word.

Perhaps Adam didn't mind taking a little time out for me because I made him think back to Burden's Landing and the other days. Not that he talked about it. But once he did. He was sitting in the chair, looking down at the eyewash in the glass which his long, hard-looking, nervous fingers were slowly revolving. The he looked up at me, and said, "We used to have a pretty good time, didn't we? When we were kids."

"Yeah," I said.

"You and me and Anne," he said.

"Yeah," I said, and thought of Anne. Then I said, "Don't you have a good time now?"

He seemed to take the question under advisement for a half minute, as though I had asked him a real question, which maybe it was. Then he said, "Well, I don't suppose I ever thought about it." Then, "No, I don't suppose I ever thought about it."

"Don't you have a good time?" I asked. "And you a big-shot. Don't you have a good time being a big-shot?" I didn't let go. I knew it was a question you haven't got any right to ask anybody, not with the tone of voice I heard coming out of my mouth, but I couldn't let go. You grow up with somebody, and he is a success, a big-shot, and you're a failure, but he treats you just the way he always did and hasn't changed a bit. But that is what drives you to it, no matter what names you call yourself while you try to stick the knife in. There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It's a club, it's the old school, it's Skull and Bones, and there is no nasty supercilious twist to a mouth like the twist the drunk gets when he hangs over the bar beside the old pal who has turned out to be a big-shot and who hasn't changed a bit, or when the old pal takes him home to dinner and introduces him to the pretty little clear-eye woman and the healthy kids. There wasn't any pretty little woman in Adam's shabby apartment, but he was a big-shot, and I let him have it.

But it didn't register on him. He simply turned on me the candid, blue gaze, slightly shaded by thought now, and said, "It just isn't something I ever thought about." Then the smile did the trick to the mouth which under ordinary circumstances looked like a nice, clean, decisive surgical wound, well healed and no pucker.

So I tried to make what amends I could for being what I was, and pulled out the soft-and sweet stop, and said, "Yeah, we did have a good time when we were kids, you and Anne and me."

Yes, Adam Stanton, Anne Stanton, and Jack Burden, back in Burden's Landing, had a good time when they were children by the sea. A squall might, and did, pile in off the Gulf, and the sky blacked out with the rain and the palm trees heaved in distraction and then leaned steady with the vanes gleaming like wet tin in the last turgid, bilious, tattered light, but it didn't chill us or kill us in the kingdom by the sea, for we were safe inside a white house, their house or my house, and stood by the window to watch the surf pile up beyond the sea wall like whipped cream. And back in the room behind us would be Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden, or both, for they were friends, or Judge Irwin, for he was a friend, too, and there wasn't a wind that would ever have the nerve to bother Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden or Judge Irwin.

"You and Anne and me," Adam Stanton had said to me, and I had said it to him. So one morning, after I had managed to get out of bed, I called Anne up, and said, "I hadn't thought about you in a long time, but the other night I saw Adam and he said you and he and I used to have a good time when we were kids. So how about having dinner with me? Even if we are on crutches now." She said she would. She certainly wasn't on crutches, but we didn't have any fun.

She asked me what I was doing, and I told her, "Not a blessed thing. Just waiting for my cash to run out." She didn't tell me I ought to do something, and didn't look it. Which was something. So I asked her what she was doing, and she laughed and said, "Not a blessed thing." Which_ __I knew was a lie, for she was_ __always fooling around with orphans and half-wits and blind niggers, and not even getting paid for it. And looking at her you could know it was all a waste of something and the something wasn't money. So I said, "Well, I hope you're doing it in pleasant company."

"Not particularly," she said.

I looked at her close and saw what I knew I would see and what I had seen a good many times when she wasn't sitting across from me. I saw Anne Stanton, who was not exactly a beauty maybe but who was Anne Stanton. Anne Stanton: the brown-toned, golden-lighted face, not as dark as Adam's, with a hint of the positive structure beneath the skin, which was drawn over the bone with something, a suggestion, of the tension which was in Adam's face, as though the fabricator of the job hadn't wanted to waste any material in softness and slacknesses and had stylized the product pretty cleanly. The dark hair drawn smoothly, almost tautly, away from the accurate part. The blue eyes which looked at you like Adam's eyes, with the same directness, but in which the clear, abstract, ice-blue was replaced by a deeper, coiling, troubled blue. Sometimes, anyway. They looked alike, Adam and Anne. They might have been twins. They even had the same smile. But the mouth it came on was, in Anne's case, different. It didn't carry any suggestion of the nice, clean, decisive, well-healed surgical wound. The fabricator had, on this item, allowed himself the luxury of a little extra material. Not too much. But enough.

That was Anne Stanton, and I saw what I knew I would see.

She sat there before me, very erect, with her head held high and straight on the fine, round stalk of her neck above the small, squarish shoulders, and with her rather small but roundly modeled bare arms laid close to her sides in mathematical accuracy. And looking at her, I though how, below the level of the table, her small legs would be laid accurately together, thigh to thigh, knee to knee, ankle to ankle. There was, in fact, always something a little stylized about her–something of the effect one observes in certain Egyptian bas-reliefs and statuettes of princesses of a late period, forms in which grace and softness, without being the less grace or softness, are caught in mathematical formality. Anne Stanton always looked level at you, and you had the feeling that she was looking at something far away. She always held her head high, and you had the feeling that she was waiting for a voice which you wouldn't be able to hear. She always stood so trim and erect, and you had feeling that all her grace and softness was caught in the rigor of an idea which you could not define.

I said, "You planning on being an old maid?"

She laughed and said, "I'm not planning on anything. I quit making plans a long time back."

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can't figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won't ever know what it had been all about.

She must have felt the same way about it, for when, later, I asked her to dance again, she said that she didn't feel like it, she's rather talk. We talked, quiet a lot, but it was a little bit like the dancing. You can't keep on taking forever about what a hell of a good time you had when you were kids.

I took her to her apartment building, which was quite a few cuts above Adam's joint, for Governor Stanton hadn't died exactly a pauper, and left her in the lobby. She said good night, and, "Be a good boy, Jack."

"Will you have dinner with me again?" I asked her.

"Any time you want," she said, "any time in the world. You know that."

Yes, I knew it.

And she did have dinner with me again, several times. The last time she said: "I've seen your father."

"Yeah," I said in an unencouraging way.

"Don't be like that," she said "Like what?"

"Oh, you know what I mean," she said. "Don't you even want to know how he is?"

"I know how he is," I said. "He is sitting in that hole he lives in down there or he's helping round that mission with his bums, or writing those damn-fool little leaflet they pass out to you on the street, all about Mark 4:6, and Job 7:5, and his specs are down on the end of his nose and the dandruff is like a snowstorm in the Dakotas down on his black coat collar."

She didn't say anything for a minute, then said: "I saw him on the street and he didn't look well. He looked sick. I didn't recognize him at first."

"Trying to pass you some of that junk?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. He held out a piece of paper to me, and I was in a hurry, so I just automatically put out my hand for it. Then I realized he was staring right in my face. I didn't recognize him at first." She paused a little. "That was about two weeks back."

"I haven't seen him in nearly one year," I said.

"Oh, Jack," she said, "you oughtn't do that! You ought to see him."

"Look here, what can I say to him? And God knows, he hasn't got anything to tell me. Nobody made him live like that. Nobody made him walk out of his law office, either, and not even bother to shut the door behind him."

"But, Jack," she said, "you–"

"He's doing what he wants to do. And besides if he was fool enough to do what he did just because he couldn't get along with a woman–especially a woman like my mother. If he couldn't give her what she wanted, whatever the hell it was she wanted and he couldn't give her, then–"

"Don't talk like that," she said sharply.

"Look here," I said, "just because your old man was Governor once and died in a mahogany tester bed with a couple of high-priced doctors leaning over him and adding up the bill in their heads and because you think he was Jesus Christ in a black string tie, you needn't try to talk to me like an old woman. I'm not talking about your family. I'm talking about mine, and I can't help seeing the plain unvarnished truth. And if you–"

"Well, you don't have to talk to me about it," she said. "Or anybody."

"It's the truth."

"Oh, the truth," she exclaimed, and clenched her right hand on the tablecloth. "How do you know it's the truth? You don't know anything about it. You don't know what made them do what they did."

"I know the truth. I know what my mother is like. And you do, too. And I know my father was a fool to let her get him down."

"Don't be so bitter!" she said, and reached out to seize my forearm and set her sharp fingers in it, through the coat, and shake it a little.

"I'm no bitter. I don't give a damn what they did. Or do. Or why."

"Oh, Jack," she said, still clutching my forearm, but not hard now, "can't you love them a little, or forgive them, or just not think about them, or something? Something different from the way you are?"

"I could go for the rest of my life and not think about them," I said. Then I noticed that she was shaking her head ever so little from side to side, and that her eyes were as dark a blue as they ever got and too bright, and that she had drawn in the edge of her lower lip and had set her teeth to it. I reached my right hand over and took her hand off my left forearm and laid it down flat, palm down, on the tablecloth, and covered it with my hand. "I'm sorry," I said.

"You're not, Jack," she said, "you're not sorry. Not really. You aren't ever sorry about anything. Or glad, either. You're just–oh, I don't know what."

"I am sorry," I said.

"Oh, you just thing you are sorry. Or glad. You aren't really."

"If you think you are sorry, who in the hell can tell you that you aren't?" I demanded, for I was a brass-bound Idealist then, as I have started, and was not going to call for a plebiscite on whether I was sorry or not.

"That sounds all right," she said, "but it isn't. I don't know why–oh, yes, I do–if you've never been sorry or glad then you haven't got any way to know the next time whether you are or not."

"All right," I said, "but can I tell you this: something is happening inside me which I choose to call sorry?"

"You can say it, but you don't know." Then, snatching her hand from under my hand, "Oh, you start to feel sorry or glad or something but it just doesn't come to anything."

"You mean like a little green apple that's got a worm in it and falls off the tree before it ever gets ripe?"

She laughed, and answered, "Yes, like little green apples with worms in them."

"Well," I said, "Here's a little green apple with a worm in it: I'm sorry."

I was sorry, or what went for sorry in my lexicon. I was sorry that I had ruined the evening. But candor compelled me to admit that there hadn't been much of an evening to ruin.

I didn't ask her to go to dinner with me again, at least not that time while I was out of a job and doing the sleeping. I had hunted up Adam and heard him play the piano. And I had sat across the spaghetti and the Dado red and looked at Anne Stanton. And as a result of what Anne said to me, I had gone down to the slums and seen the old man, not the very tall man who had once been stocky but whose face now dropped in puffy gray folds beneath the gray hair, with the steel-rimmed spectacles hanging on the end of the nose, and whose shoulders, thin now and snowed with dandruff, sagged down as with the pull of the apparently disjunctive, careful belly which made the vest of his black suit pop up above the belt and the slack-hanging pants. And in every case I had found what I had known I was going to find, because they had happened and nothing was going to change what had happened. I had been sinking down in the sleep like a drowning man in water, and they had flashed across my eyes again the way people say the past flashes across the eyes of the drowning man.

Well, I could go back to sleep now. Till my cash ran out, anyway. I could be Rip Van Winkle. Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.

But I didn't get to do much sleeping. I got a job. Or rather, the job got me. The telephone got me out of bed one morning. It was Sadie Burke, who said, "Get down here to the Capitol at ten o'clock. The Boss wants to see you."

"The who?" I said.

"The Boss," she said, "Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don't you read the papers?"

"No, but somebody told me in the barbershop."

"It's true," she said, "and the Boss said for you to get down here at ten." And she hung up the phone.

Well, I said to myself, maybe things do change while you sleep. But I didn't believe it then, and didn't really believe it when I went into the big room with the black oak paneling and padded across the long red carpet under the eyes of all genuine oil paintings of all the bewhiskered old men toward the man who wasn't very old and wasn't bewhiskered and who sat behind a desk in front of the high windows and who got up as I approached. _Hell__, I thought, _it's just Willie__.

It was just Willie, even though he was wearing something different from the country blue serge he had had on back at Upton. But he just had the thing flung on him anyhow, with his tie loose and to one side and the collar unbuttoned. And his hair hung down over his forehead, the way it used to. I thought for a second that maybe the meaty lips were laid together firmer than they used to be, but before I could be sure, he was grinning and had come around to the front of the desk. So I thought again it was just Willie.

He put out his hand, and said, "Hello, Jack."

"Congratulations," I said.

"I hear they fired you."

"You heard wrong," I said. "I quit."

"You were smart," he said, "because when I get through with that outfit they wouldn't be able to pay you. They won't be able to pay the nigger washes the spittoons."

"That will suit me," I allowed.

"Want a job?" he asked.

"I'd consider a proposition."

"Three hundred a month," he said, "and traveling expenses. When you travel."

"Who do I work for? The state?

"Hell, no. Me."

"It looks like you'd be working for me," I said. "This Governorship doesn't pay but five thousand."

"All right," he said, and laughed, "I'll be working for you then."

Then I recollected how he'd done right well in his law practice.

"I'll give it a try," I said.

"Fine," he said. Then, "Lucy's wanting to see you. Come to dinner tomorrow night at the house."

"You mean the Mansion?"

"What the hell you think I mean? A tourist home? A boarding house? Sure, the Mansion."

Yes, the Mansion. He was going to treat me just like old times and take me home to dinner and introduce me to the pretty woman and the healthy kid.

"Boy," he was saying, "we sure do rattle around in that place, Lucy and Tom and me."

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked him.

"Eat," he said. "Come at six-thirty and eat hearty. Call up Lucy and tell her what you want to eat."

"I mean, what do I do for the job?"

"Hell, I don't know," he said. "Something will turn up."

He was right about that.