e door of the
tannery house, as usual, only it was remarked by astute observers and
Jake Wheeler that certain statesmen did not come who had been in the
habit of coming formerly. In short, those who made it a custom to observe
such matters felt vaguely a disturbance of some kind. The organs of the
people felt it, and became more guarded in their statements. What no one
knew, except Jake and a few in high places, was that a war of no mean
magnitude was impending.

There were three men in the State--and perhaps only three--who realized
from the first that all former political combats would pale in comparison
to this one to come. Similar wars had already started in other states,
and when at length they were fought out another twist had been given to
the tail of a long-suffering Constitution; political history in the
United States had to be written from an entirely new and unforeseen
standpoint, and the unsuspecting people had changed masters.

This was to be a war of extermination of one side or the other. No
quarter would be given or asked, and every weapon hitherto known to
politics would be used. Of the three men who realized this, and all that
would happen if one side or the other were victorious, one was Alexander
Duncan, another Isaac D. Worthington, and the third was Jethro Bass.

Jethro would never have been capable of being master of the state had he
not foreseen the time when the railroads, tired of paying tribute, would
turn and try to exterminate the boss. The really astonishing thing about
Jethro's foresight (known to few only) was that he perceived clearly that
the time would come when the railroads and other aggregations of capital
would exterminate the boss, or at least subserviate him. This alone, the
writer thinks, gives him some right to greatness. And Jethro Bass made up
his mind that the victory of the railroads, in his state at least, should
not come in his day. He would hold and keep what he had fought all his
life to gain.

Jethro knew, when Jake Wheeler failed to bring him a message back from
Clovelly, that the war had begun, and that Isaac D. Worthington,
commander of the railroad forces in the field, had captured his pawn, the
hill-Rajah. By getting through to Harwich, the Truro had made a sad
muddle in railroad affairs. It was now a connecting link; and its
president, the first citizen of Brampton, a man of no small importance in
the state. This fact was not lost upon Jethro, who perceived cl