ings by the correspondents whose good graces he seduously
[Transcriber's note: sedulously?] cultivated, the deference of his
Excellency and his chameleon staff, all told him that the glory of what
the party organs courteously styled the "governor's brilliant dash" was
his and not the governor's.

"What we didn't count on," observed Handsome Ludlow, with a touch of
envy, "was campaigning with a whirlwind."

CHAPTER XI

So Shelby came in triumph to his own people, the governor at his
chariot wheel, and fought the last stubborn week of his campaign. His
mail was now burdened with invitations to speak, but he made few
speeches.

"The voter a speech will influence has made up his mind," he said to
Bowers. "The heart-to-heart talk is the trump card of the eleventh
hour."

To play this card required a prodigious amount of travelling about the
district; and between these activities and the speaking engagements he
was in promise bound to fulfil, Shelby saw little or nothing of New
Babylon till midnight of Saturday, which was the virtual end of the
canvass. Seen again, as he viewed it now, the town would look raw and
provincial despite patriotic throes of self-deception. On moonlit
nights the New Babylon Electric Light and Power Company hoarded its
energies, and an inky pall accordingly lay over the muddy streets which
the pale melon rind in the clouded zenith did nothing to dissipate.
The contrast between this niggardliness and the midnight brilliance of
up-town Broadway was inevitable, and the jolting Tuscarora House free
'bus came readily into unflattering comparison with a certain
rubber-tired hansom cab. Naturally midnight, a jaded body, and the
Tuscarora House free 'bus might well jaundice any scene; but the
returning native recognized these as accidents merely in the phenomenon
of his changed vision.

The hotel bar-room was boisterous with the usual Saturday night
gathering of the set which in its innocence supposed itself fast, and
the maturer poker crowd, Shelby's own cronies, was in protracted
session elsewhere in the building; but he managed to evade them all and
lock himself in his ugly room. For some sophisticated weeks he had
suspected the household gods here assembled to have feet of clay. Now
he knew it; but with the feeling that the place was a temporary husk at
best, he avoided a too particular inventory of the pseudo-marble clock,
the vases of pampas grass, the album, and the garish picture