In the Arena | Page 2

I guess I've been what you might call kind of an assistant boss pretty
much all my life; at least, ever since I could vote; and I was something
of a ward-heeler even before that. I don't suppose there's any way a
man of my disposition could have put in his time to less advantage and
greater cost to himself. I've never got a thing by it, all these years, not a
job, not a penny--nothing but injury to my business and trouble with
my wife. She begins going for me, first of every campaign.
Yet I just can't seem to keep out of it. It takes a hold on a man that I
never could get away from; and when I reach my second childhood and
the boys have turned me out, I reckon I'll potter along trying to look
knowing and secretive, like the rest of the has-beens, letting on as if I
still had a place inside. Lord, if I'd put in the energy at my business that
I've frittered away on small politics! But what's the use thinking about
it?
Plenty of men go to pot horse-racing and stock gambling; and I guess
this has just been my way of working off some of my nature in another
fashion. There's a good many like me, too; not out for office or
contracts, nor anything that you can put your finger on in
particular--nothing except the game. Of course, it's a pleasure, knowing
you've got more influence than some, but I believe the most you ever
get out of it is in being able to help your friends, to get a man you like a
job, or a good contract, something he wants, when he needs it.
I tell you _then's_ when you feel satisfied, and your time don't seem to
have been so much thrown away. You go and buy a higher-priced cigar
than you can afford, and sit and smoke it with your feet out in the
sunshine on your porch railing, and watch your neighbour's children
playing in their yard; and they look mighty nice to you; and you feel
kind, and as if everybody else was.
But that wasn't the way I felt when I helped to hand over to a reformer

the nomination for mayor; then it was just selfish desperation and
nothing else. We had to do it. You see, it was this way: the other side
had had the city for four terms, and, naturally, they'd earned the name
of being rotten by that time. Big Lafe Gorgett was their best. "Boss
Gorgett," of course our papers called him when they went for him,
which was all the time; and pretty considerable of a man he was, too.
Most people that knew him liked Lafe. I did. But he got a bad name, as
they say, by the end of his fourth term as Mayor--and who wouldn't? Of
course, the cry went up all round that he and his crowd were making a
fat thing out of it, which wasn't so much the case as that Lafe had got to
depending on humouring the gamblers and the brewers for campaign
funds and so forth. In fact, he had the reputation of running a disorderly
town, and the truth is, it was too wide open.
But we hadn't been much better when we'd had it, before Lafe beat us
and got in; and everybody remembered that. The "respectable element"
wouldn't come over to us strong enough for anybody we could pick of
our own crowd; and so, after trying it on four times, we started in to
play it another way, and nominated Farwell Knowles, who was already
running on an independent ticket, got out by the reform and purity
people. That is: we made him a fusion candidate, hoping to find some
way to control him later. We'd never have done it if we hadn't thought
it was our only hope. Gorgett was too strong, and he handled the
darkeys better than any man I ever knew. He had an organization for it
which we couldn't break; and the coloured voters really held the
balance of power with us, you know, as they do so many other places
near the same size, They were getting pretty well on to it, too, and cost
more every election. Our best chance seemed to be in so satisfying the
"law-and-order" people that they'd do something to counterbalance this
vote--which they never did.
Well, sir, it was a mighty curious campaign. There never really was a
day when we could tell where we stood, for certain. As anybody knows,
the "better element" can't be depended on. There's too many of 'em
forget to vote, and if the weather isn't just right they won't go to