bed,
copper-riveted material proposition it is that Tom is putting up. He's
bound self-interest with self-interest everywhere. He and Joe Calvin
have roped old man Sands in, and every material interest in this whole
district is tied up in the Van Dorn candidacy. I'm a child in a cyclone
in this fight. The self-interest of the county candidates, of all the
deputies who hope two years from now to be county candidates, and all
their friends, every straw boss at the shops, in the smelters, in the
mines--and all the men who are near them and want to be straw bosses,
every merchant who is caught in the old spider's web with a ninety-day
note; every street-car conductor, every employee of the light company,
every man at the waterworks plant, every man at the gas plant, the
telephone linemen--every human being that dances in the great woof of
this little spider's web feels the pull of devilish material power."

Amos Adams threw back his grizzled head in a laugh that failed to
vocalize. "Well, Jim, according to your account you're liable to get
burned and singed and disfigured until you're as useless in politics as
this old Amos Adams--the spook chaser!"

There was no bitterness in Amos Adams's voice. "It's all right, Jim--I
have no complaint to make against life. Forty years ago Dan Sands got
the first girl I ever loved. I went to war; he paid his bounty and
married the girl. That was a long time ago. I often think of the
girl--it's no lack of faith to Mary. And I have the memory of the
war--of that Day at Peach Tree Creek with all the wonderful exulting joy
of that charge and what God gave me to do. This button," he put his
thumb under the Loyal Legion emblem in his warped coat lapel, "this
button is more fragrant than any flower on earth to my heart. Dan Sands
has had five wives; he missed the hardship of the war. He has a son by
her. Jim," said Amos Adams as he opened his eyes, "if you knew how it
has cut into my heart year by year to see the beautiful soul that Hester
Haley gave to Morty decay under the blight of his father--but you
can't." He sighed. "Yet there is still her soul in him--gentle, kind,
trying to do the right thing--but tied and hobbled by life with his
father. Grant may be wrong, Doctor," cried the father, raising his hand
excitedly, "he may be crazy, and I know they laugh at him up town
here--for a fool and the son of a fool; he certainly doesn't know how he
is going to do all the things he dreams of doing