any
Years go toppling in the Dust, and how it is her Turn to meditate
in the Still Watches._

The print danced before his outraged eyes; his chest heaved at the
revolting evidence of man's duplicity; and Charles Gardiner West laid
down his morning's _Post_ with a hand that shook.

_Meachy T. Bangor announces his candidacy for the nomination for Mayor,
subject to the Democratic primary._

For West had not a moment's uncertainty as to what this announcement
meant. Meachy T. Bangor spoke, nay invented, the language of the tribe.
He was elect of the elect; what the silent powers that were thought was
his thought; their ways were his ways, their people his people. When
Meachy T. Bangor announced that he was a candidate for the nomination
for Mayor, it meant that the all-powerful machine had already nominated
him for Mayor, and whom the organization nominated it elected. Meachy T.
Bangor! Plonny Neal's young, progressive candidate of the reformer type!

Bitterness flooded West's soul when he thought of Plonny. Had the boss
been grossly deceived or grossly deceiving? Could that honest and
affectionate eye, whose look of frank admiration had been almost
embarrassing, have covered base and deliberate treachery? Was it
possible that he, West, who had always been confident that he could see
as far into a millstone as another, had been a cheap trickster's easy
meat?

Day by day, since the appearance of the reformatory article, West had
waited for some sign of appreciation and understanding from those on the
inside. None had come. Not a soul except himself, and Plonny, had
appeared aware that he, by a masterly compromise, had averted disaster
from the party, and clearly revealed himself as the young man of
destiny. On the contrary, the House spokesmen, apparently utterly blind
to any impending crisis, had, in the closing hours of the session, voted
away some eighty thousand dollars of the hundred thousand rescued by
West from the reformatory, in a multiplication of offices which it was
difficult to regard as absolutely indispensable in a hard times year.
This action, tallying so closely with what his former assistant had
predicted, had bewildered and unsettled West; the continuing silence of
the leaders--"the other leaders," he had found himself saying--had led
him into anxious speculations; and now, in a staggering burst, the
disgraceful truth was revealed to him. They had used him, tricked and
used him like a smo