ebellion which was not mere vaporings of
the restless and resentful; organized revolt had appeared, marching in
grim silence, not revealing all its strength, and therefore all the more
ominous.

A military band brayed music unceasingly into the high arches of the
hall. The music served as obbligato for the mighty diapason of men's
voices; the thousands talked as they waited.

The broad platform of the stage was untenanted. The speakers, the
chairman, the clerks, the members of the state committee, did not
appear, though the hour named as the time of calling the meeting to
order arrived and passed.

In an anteroom, so far removed from the main hall that only the dull
rumble of voices and the shredded echoes of the blaring music reached
there, was assembled the state's oligarchy awaiting the pleasure of
Colonel Symonds Dodd.

He sat in a big chair, his squat figure crowding its confines.

The state committee and the rest of his entourage were gathered about
him.

There was a committeeman from every county in the state--the men who
formed the motive cogs of his machine.

One after the other they had reported to him.

And each time a man finished talking the colonel drove a solid fist down
on the arm of the chair and roared: "I say again I don't believe it's as
bad as you figure it. It can't be as bad. Do you tell me that this party
is going to be turned upside down by a kid-glove aristocrat who has
hardly stirred out of his office during this campaign?"

"He has had a chap to do his stirring for him," stated one of the group.

"A hobo, scum of the rough-scruff, hailing from nowhere! Shown up in our
newspapers as a ditch-digger--a fly-by-night--a nobody! I'm ashamed
of this state committee, coming here and telling me that he has been
allowed to influence anybody."

"Colonel Dodd, what I'm going to say to you may not sound like politics
as we usually talk it," declared a committeeman, a gray-haired and
spectacled person who had the grave mien of a student, "and it is not
admitted very often by regular politicians who run with the machine. But
we are up against something which has happened in this queer old world
of ours a good many times. We have had the best organization here in
this state that a machine ever put together. But in American politics
it's always just when the machine is running best that something
happens. Something is dropped into the gear, and it's usually done by
the last man you'd expect to d