l minutes the Senator and I felt for each other in the dark in
which we both straightway hid. He was the first to give up and reveal
himself in the open. "But I do not wish to waste your time and my own,
Mr. Sayler," he said; "I have come to see you about the threatened split
in the party. You are, perhaps, surprised that I should have come to
you, when you have been so many years out of politics, but I think you
will understand, as I explain myself. You know Mr. Roebuck?"

"I can't say that I _know_ him," I replied. "He is not an easy man to
know--indeed, who is?"

"A very able man; in some respects a great man," Dunkirk went on. "But,
like so many of our great men of business, he can not appreciate
politics,--the difficulties of the man in public life where persuasion
and compromise must be used, authority almost never. And, because I have
resisted some of his impossible demands, he has declared war on the
party. He has raised up in it a faction headed by your old enemy,
Dominick. I need not tell you what a brute, what a beast he is, the
representative of all that is abhorrent in politics."

"A faction headed by Dominick couldn't be very formidable," I suggested.

"But Dominick isn't the nominal leader," replied Dunkirk. "Roebuck is
far too shrewd for that. No, he has put forward as the decoy my
colleague, Croffut,--perhaps you know him? If so, I needn't tell you
what a vain, shallow, venal fellow he is, with his gift of gab that
fools the people."

"I know him," said I, in a tone which did not deny the accuracy of
Dunkirk's description.

"Their object," continued the Senator, "is to buy the control of the
party machinery away from those who now manage it in the interests of
conservatism and fair dealing. If they succeed, the only business
interest that will be considered in this state will be the Power Trust.
And we shall have Dominick, the ignorant brute, lashed on by Roebuck's
appetites, until the people will rise in fury and elect the
opposition,--and you know what _it_ is."

"What you say is most interesting," said I, "but I confess I haven't
imagination enough to conceive a condition of affairs in which anybody
with 'the price' couldn't get what he wanted by paying for it. Perhaps
the business interests would gain by a change,--the other crowd might be
less expensive. Certainly the demands of our party's machine have become
intolerable."

"It astonishes me, Mr. Sayler, to hear you say that,--you, who ha