The Henchman

The Henchman, by Mark Lee
Luther

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Title: The Henchman
Author: Mark Lee Luther
Release Date: August 31, 2006 [EBook #19148]
Language: English
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THE HENCHMAN
BY
MARK LEE LUTHER

AUTHOR OF "THE FAVOR OF PRINCES," "THE RECKONING,"
"THE LIVERY OF HONOR," ETC.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1902
All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1901,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

TO
GEORGE RICE CARPENTER
OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Those familiar with the early history of Western New York will know
the "Tuscarora Stories" of this volume for twice-told tales which the
author has ventured to adapt from the suggestive "Pioneer History of
Orleans County," by Judge Arad Thomas.

BOOK I

The Henchman
CHAPTER I
It was the custom of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple
somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful
comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boot, France to a coffee-pot,
and the European domain of the Sultan to a ruffling turkey. In this
pleasant scheme the state of New York was made to figure as a
couchant lion, his massy head thrust high in the North Country, his
forepaws dabbled in the confluence of the Hudson and the Sound, his
middle and hinder parts stretched lazily westward to Lake Erie and the
Niagara. Roughly speaking, in this noble animal's rounding haunch,
which Ontario cools, lies the Demijohn Congressional District whose
majority party was now in convention assembled. In election returns
and official utterances generally the Demijohn District bore a number
like every district in the land, but the singular shape lent it by the last
gerrymander had settled its popular title till another political overturn
should distort its outline afresh.
The spokesman of the defeated faction had been recognized by the
chair, and was moving that the convention's choice of the gentleman
from Tuscarora County be declared unanimous. His manner was even
more perfunctory than his words.
"The name of Calvin Ross Shelby," he ended colorlessly, "spells
success."
"Screws it out as if it hurt him," whispered the Hon. Seneca Bowers to
the nominee. "I tell you, Ross, there's no argument like delegates."
Bowers was a thick-set man of the later sixties, with a certain surface
resemblance to General Grant of which he was vain. So far as he could
he underlined the likeness, affecting a close-trimmed beard, a campaign
hat, and the inevitable cigar; when the occasion promised publicity
sufficient to outweigh the physical discomfort he even rode on
horseback; and he was a notable figure on Decoration Day and at all
public ceremonies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Shelby was his

protégé.
The present member of Congress from the Demijohn District, whose
seat Shelby coveted, may be most charitably described as a man of
tactless integrity. His course in Washington had been a thorn in the side
of the organization by whose sufferance he rose, with the upshot that
the Tartar neared the end of his stewardship backed by a faction rather
than a party. The faction clamored for his renomination and pushed
their spirited, if poorly generalled, fight to the floor of the convention.
In debate they were eloquent, in logic unanswerable; nor did any one
attempt to answer them. With the best of possible causes they lacked
but the best of possible worlds to insure success. The whole story of
their failure was packed into the Hon. Seneca Bowers's succinct phrase,
"There's no argument like delegates."
The vanquished clustered in a little group apart marked by a suggestion
of tense nerves, but the gathering was noticeably of a kind. Country
lawyers, bankers, merchants, stockmen, farmers, in its units, it was
sealed as a whole with the seal of New England which had sent forth
these men's grandfathers and great-grandfathers in their ox-carts to
people and leaven the West. The transplanted New Englandism had
sloughed certain traits of the pioneers who laid the axe to the forests of
the Genesee Country and the Holland Purchase. Only the older people
of the Demijohn District now computed their dealings in shillings;
mentioning one's conscience on week-days was an eccentricity; the
doctrine of Original Sin had lapsed from among burning topics of
conversation; family records were less and less scrupulously kept; and
the Mayflower's claim to consideration as the Noah's Ark of the only
ancestors worth reckoning had assumed