University of Virginia Library

44. CHAPTER XLIV.
A CONGRESSIONAL AGENT.

Josie's perfidies and duplicities are so
numerous that one begins to wonder whether
she could help them; a medical observer
might easily conclude that they were connected
with her circulation, or in some other
way idiosyneratic and symptomatic; while
to the ordinary spectator they gradually become
characteristic, humorous, and almost
comic.

Scarcely had Drummond departed from
her, with the understanding that he was to
make terms for her with Mr. Pike, ere she
dispatched a messenger to the Lobbitt House
with a note for that eminent medium of private
legislation, requesting him to call upon
her at once “on strictly confidential business.”
Mr. Pike received the note as he was
taking his soup, and in ten minutes more he
was on his way to Mrs. Warden's house, having,
nevertheless, done full justice to what
he called his “feed.”

This fact gives one an idea of the rapid
deglutition and other business-like faculties
of the man. It also shows that he recognized
at once the name of Josephine Murray,
and held it in no small respect, according
to his method of respecting. For it must
be understood that, far from being an unemployed
soul sadly in need of a job, he was a
hardly worked, and indeed overworked one,
who had a great many irons in the fire, and
whose time was worth money. True, he never
seemed to do any thing but saunter about
the streets and into bar-rooms and through
the Capitol. But ever and anon, amidst this
apparent loafing, you might see that he had
some politician by the button-hole, and might
guess, if you were wise, that he was laying
pipe, or rolling logs, or pulling wires. What
must have been Josie's repute in the lobby,
when at her very first beck this gormandizer
of financial garbage flew to her as eagerly
as ever a turkey-buzzard flapped toward a
carcass!

She was indeed well known in the so-called
Third House. Often and often had Jacob
Pike talked over her case with Jack Hunt,
and Ananias Pullwool, and Darius Dorman,
and other equally abominable angels of this
nether region. They all thought her claim
a pretty one, and a dead sure thing to win
(“Considerin' the gal's good looks, you understand?”
emphasized Jack Hunt), if she
would only employ an agent, and the right
sort of an agent. Equally positive were
they that it would be beaten, and resolved
also to stir up an opposition which would
beat it, if she trusted for success to Congressmen
alone. If George W. Hollowbread,
or any other member, could put through a
job all by himself, what was to become of
“gentlemen brokers?”

“It would be a bad precedent,” asserted
Pike.

“It would be next door to unconstitutional,”
grinned Dorman.

“It would be the sort of thing for a President
to veto,” chuckled Jack Hunt.

“It would be a case for the Supreme
Court,” greasily smiled Ananias Pullwool.

But with the right man to care for it, they
admitted, the claim was a blazing good claim,
and might safely be backed to win, and ought
to win. Concerning the lovely claimant herself,
her supposed nature and imputed doings
—these brazen scoundrels discoursed with a
freedom which would have been distressing
even to so independent and audacious a flirt
as Josie. But just here their sabbatical conversation
becomes unendurable, and we must
not venture to report its graceless innuendoes
and assertions.

Our heroine had been curious to look upon
Mr. Pike, and disposed to receive him with
some reverence and even fear. When he
appeared before her, stiffly and awkwardly
bowing his way athwart the little Warden
parlor, she stared at him with surprise and
disappointment.

It did not seem possible to her that a creature
of such commonplace appearance and
expression could influence dignitaries, and
carry or defeat enactments. She forgot for
the moment what ordinary persons many of
our Congressmen are, and how eager they
are to be moved in the direction of money-making;
she forgot that she herself, a lady,
and well-educated and very clever, was putting
herself into the hands of this same unpolished
intriguer for the sake of pelf.

Mr. Jacob Pike — or Jake Pike, as most
people called him—was a slender, bony man
of forty-five, with deep, furtive gray eyes, a
small, beetling forehead, a shortish nose, a
wide, straight mouth, a square chin, broad
cheek-bones, a dusky, mottled complexion,
and stiff black hair, thickly strewed with
gray. He was not coarsely vulgar in figure,
costume, or bearing, but he was universally
plebeian, commonplace, “ornary.” In his

expression there was some slyness, but also
much nervous energy. It showed no sense
of guilt or shame. Probably he did not look
upon himself as a scoundrel. What unthreatened
criminal ever does?

“Is this Mr. Pike?” asked Josie, not quite
certain that the right man had come, and
naturally anxious not to talk to the wrong
man.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, stiffly and shyly,
for he was somewhat afraid of ladies, or,
rather, afraid of exhibiting his own lack of
familiarity with the delicacies of etiquette.
“I got a letter from you.”

“Ah, yes!” she smiled. “Have the kindness
to sit down, Mr. Pike. I believe I mentioned
that it was on private business.”

“Strictly private, ma'am,” answered the
lobbyist, with an air of taking an oath.

His voice was unemotional, monotoned,
wooden; a perfectly suitable voice to his
wooden face and demeanor. His pronunciation
was uncultivated, but not strictly
boorish; it seemed rather to be marked by
some broad provincialism as vague as the
illimitable West; and, like every other of
his characteristics, it was thoroughly commonplace
and uninteresting. Josie's fear of
him was already gone; she had taken thus
promptly his limited measure of intellectual
force, and she believed that she could twist
him around her fingers.

“You are a—Congressional agent, I understand,”
she continued. “I wanted to see
you concerning a claim which I have before
Congress. Do you know any thing about
it?”

“Well, I have took a cussory view of it,” replied
Mr. Pike, whose grammar, though generally
human, sometimes dared a flight as
wild and free as that of the American eagle.

“Will you please to tell me what it
amounts to?” asked Josie.

“Well, barn and horse,” he replied, not
understanding her query, and thinking that
his knowledge of the matter was doubted.
“Paid once, in 1820, two thousand dollars.
New account presented on account of insufficient
payment, for a hundred thousand.”

“I mean, what do you think of the
chances?” interrupted Josie, not quite
pleased at hearing her impudence put so
frankly.

“Well, it's a good, merchantable claim,”
admitted Mr. Pike. “But what its chances
are depends on who runs it.”

“Well, I have sent for you to see if you
can run it.”

“Well, I think I can.”

Josie noticed this repetition of the word
“well,” and said to herself that she would
never open another sentence with it, so as
not to be like Mr. Pike.

“I wish it to be understood distinctly that
the fact of an arrangement between us is to
be kept secret,” she added, fearing the wrath
of Drummond and possibly the jealousy of
Hollowbread.

“Egsackly,” he promised, with remarkable
emphasis, as if he mispronounced the
word on purpose, by way of greater solemnity.
It is an odd fact, by-the-way, that
Josie believed him, although she constantly
broke her own pledges and promises.

“I think I may want you to help me,” she
said. “That is, if we can agree upon terms.”

“Well, I thought you would come to me
sooner or later,” smiled Mr. Pike, supposing
that she had found success with her present
backers impossible, and that he was sure of
the job. “In the end, people always learn
that the regolar way is the easiest and certainest
way.”

“But what are your terms?”

“Well, in such a case as this — a good,
merchantable case—fifty per cent.”

“That is very little,” stared Josie, wondering
if he really meant fifty cents, or what
small sum he did mean.

Although by this time respectably, or,
rather, disreputably, familiar with the trickeries
of the claim industry, she still retained
much lady-like ignorance concerning the
mysteries and phrases of ordinary business.

“Well, most people consider half about
right,” smirked Mr. Pike, not quite at his
ease just then, as thinking her ironical.

“Half!” exclaimed Josie, horrified and
alarmed. “Oh, not half!” she demurred,
timidly; then more boldly, “I couldn't think
of giving you half.”

“That is the regolation figger, Mrs. Murray.
Every body in my line does business
on those terms.”

“I needn't pay it, I know. I have powerful
friends, who tell me that my claim is
sure, and that I really don't need any further
assistance.”

“Congressmen, I suppose,” said Mr. Pike,
with a slight sneer. “Fellows that are
pecking round after something besides their
salary. What we call roosters.”

“Yes, Congressmen,” declared Josie, loftily,
somewhat huffed by this belittling of her
retainers.

“Well, you'd better not believe 'em,” continued
Mr. Pike, with excitement, like a man
in authority who hears of insubordination
among his subjects. “The smartest thing
you can do, Mrs. Murray, is not to believe
'em. If I was your oldest friend, if I was
your own brother, I'd give you that same
advice, nothing more and nothing less.”

“I don't know why they should deceive
me, or how they could deceive themselves,”
returned Josie, almost indignantly.

It did not please her at all that Mr. Jake
Pike should speak of her, even in the way
of supposition, as his sister. That specimen
of nature's gentleman meanwhile was not in
the least suspicious that he had given any
cause of offense.

“Well, they do deceive you,” insisted the
lobbyist, as fervent as any man could be in
the cause of truth and in the duty of warning
innocence. “They know better than to
talk such nonsense. One Congressman, or
six Congressmen, or twenty Congressmen, is
nothing against us Congressional brokers.
You can put your twenty men, say, to pulling
for your bill. Very good. It looks, on
a cussory view, like a chance. But then we
can put our fifty men, say, or our hundred
men, say, to pulling against it. Well, where's
your chance now?”

“Do you mean to say that you will oppose
me if I don't employ you?”

“Got to.”

“I think that is sheer plunder, Mr. Pike,”
declared Josie, with what she felt to be virtuous
indignation.

“It's all plunder, ma'am. But there an't
plunder enough for every body. If we let
other people plunder without our help, and,
so to speak, independently and irregularly,
perhaps there's nothing left for us and our
prodigies (protégés?). You see, that would
ruin business. A man might as well cut his
throat. But how much did you think of allowing,
Mrs. Murray?”

“Why, I thought of proposing—” hesitated
Josie. “No, I don't want to propose any
thing,” she added, afraid of mentioning any
sum, lest he should agree to it, and it should
afterward prove too liberal. “You must
tell me what your very lowest terms are.”

“I'd like to hear a proposition from your
side—just to get at your notion—just to find
a basis.”

“I would rather not furnish a basis, Mr.
Pike. You know all about this business.
You must speak first.”

“I don't know, but I might squeeze along
for thirty-three per cent.; that is, you understand,
one-third.”

“Oh! but even that is too much. Just
consider; it is my own claim. It is not your
money; it is mine.”

“It won't be yours if you don't get it.”

“And it won't any of it be yours if I employ
somebody else.”

Mr. Pike flinched in his secret heart, but
he kept up a bold countenance.

“Expenses are awful — scandalous,” he
said. “Let me tell you something about it,
Mrs. Murray. Only, remember that this is
confidential. I wouldn't say what I'm going
to say, if we wa'n't in the same boat. I
shall have to pay a lot full of members, and
they are extortionate as the—the dickens.
They ask higher and higher every year. It
costs tremendous to harness in enough of 'em
to pull through a bill of this size, or any
respectable bill. Why, our great national
highway had to spend half a million before
it got a charter; and what it paid out before
it was built there's no figuring nor calculation.
Members knew there was money in it,
and they would have it. I tell you, Mrs.
Murray, they are a crowd of extortioners,”
perorated Mr. Pike, with the sub-excitement
of an honest man who suffers by evil-doing,
but sees no refuge from it except in patience.

“But you must take less than one-third,”
pleaded Josie, indifferent to these moans of
virtuous anguish.

“My time and my knowledge of the biz
are worth that,” insisted the broker. “Besides,
it an't an easy case — a horse and a
barn. There's no end to the horses in Congress
— Floridy horses and Kansas horses
(freedom-shrieking horses, I call them), and
Oregon horses and Southern horses—roadsters
and trotters and plowing creeturs and
thorough-breds—all sorts and denominations
of horses. All ages, too—some last war, and
some last but one, and some war before that
—and yours is one of the oldest. Well, I
wish it was any thing but a horse and a barn.
Couldn't you make it a yoke of oxen, now,
or a drove of sheep!” inquired Mr. Pike, very
gravely and seriously, although his suggestion
sounded to the inexperienced ear like
sarcasm.

“It is not a horse and a barn!” snapped
Josie, vexed at hearing her claim thus cheapened.
“There are ever so many horses in it.
You said a while ago that it was a very good
case; and it is a much better case than you
know of. A number of horses and an incomplete
payment on the barn, and a family-carriage,
and some cows, and lots of other
things!”

“Oh!—that so?” asked Mr. Pike, surprised
and struck with sudden respect, though he
could scarcely believe her. If she stated
facts, then the claim had been furbished up
wonderfully since he last looked into it, and
was in much better hands than he had supposed.
“Fresh evidence!” he immediately
added, with an air of knowingness which
would have been wicked if it had not been
so wooden and commonplace. “Well, I was
talking of the old case—the one that was
settled. If you've got up any thing fresh, it
might work easier.”

“Of course it will work. Several Congressmen
tell me so.”

“I dare say,” nodded Mr. Pike, obviously
not much impressed. “Of course they are
tollable judges of a claim. I was a Congressman
myself once; that's the way I started
in this line. But I wasn't so good a judge
of a claim then as I am now.”

“You a Congressman?” stared Josie, astonished
out of her civility. “From the
South?”

“No; not a carpet-bagger,” smiled Pike, a
little embarrassed by the depreciating query,
but not seriously annoyed. “From Kansas.
Yes, I've served my term, as the State-prison
birds say. They threw me off the track on
my second trip,” he added, his countenance
darkening suddenly as he remembered his

wrongs. “Then I was backed for a foreign
ministry, but somebody got me ruled out.
Oh, I have had my ups and downs, Mrs. Murray,
and my enemies. A man can't climb
the ladder, to any great altitude, without
exciting envy. Yes, I've had my enemies.
Well, I've mounted some of 'em, and I'll
mount more.”

Josie surveyed him with contemptuous
curiosity and wonder. There, in this lowly
lobbyist, was the wreck of a promising demagogue,
a man of blighted hopes and disappointed
ambition, a man who had had a rise,
a grandeur, and a decadence! And he complained
of fate; he thought himself the victim
of injustice; he grieved over the fact of
unappreciated merit; he feelingly bemoaned
his lost authority and dignity! Even to our
sadly wise heroine, who knew so much of
the corruption and degradation of Congress
it seemed amazing that such a thoroughly
narrow-minded, plebeian, and scampish intriguer
could consider himself fit to represent
the American people, or any inconsiderable
outlying portion of it.

But she bestowed no serious thought upon
this phenomenon, so worthy of our weightiest
and sorrowfullest reflections. She did
not stop to say, “This is the fruit that universal
suffrage bears when the industrious
and virtuous cease to care for politics.” She
hardly considered the public career of Mr.
Pike for an instant, or by more than a single
careless glance of her quick intellect—a
glance of amazement and of disdain. She was
young, a thoroughly womanish woman, and
had an axe to grind. This last circumstance
led her to utter a few words of sympathy,
very vague and by no means heartfelt, but
sufficient to touch the heart of our fallen
functionary and draw out his confidence.

“Yes, it is hard, Mrs. Murray,” he replied.
“It comes pretty rough on a man who has
worked his way up from the bottom, this being
hauled down by the heels does. I am a
self-made man. I began life as a teamster.
Many's the horse I've rubbed down and tackled
up. I rose by my own exertions, without
so much as the start of a common-school eddication,
to be a member of Congress. I think
I ought to have been left there and kept
there, if only to encourage self-made men.
And to be histed after all! It riles me to
think of it. It's enough to rile any body to
think of it.”

Josie made believe that she was moved,
but of course she could not care one straw
for Jake Pike, a man obviously unfit for
love-making.

In reality, her sole reflection was that,
since he had been “histed” once, he must be
a pretty light weight, and might be “histed”
again, if she should give her mind to it.

“If I were you, I should never forget nor
forgive,” she said, with a most pitying face,
and a heart as hard as a pebble. “But, to
return to our business: I will give you one-tenth.”

It was now the lobbyist's turn to stare
with surprise and dismay.

“One-tenth!” he exclaimed. “It couldn't
be done, ma'am, for twice that. Just think
of the outlays. Why, besides members,
there's other brokers that I shall have to
quiet off with something, and the newspaper
chaps, and more outsiders than I can tell
of. I'll be—bothered if I don't believe the
Congressional chaplain will come in for his
share some of these days, or threaten to pray
a fellow's claims out of winder. Oh yes,
members, newspaper-men, moneyed men, no
end of men! Dave Shorthand will want his
fee, and old Allchin, the House banker, will
want his, and so on.”

“Mr. Shorthand can have five dollars,” said
Josie, well remembering that historian of the
Appleyard fight, and how easily he had been
silenced. “As for Mr. Allchin, you may tell
him from me that I will invest through his
bank.”

“You know all these fellows,” smiled Pike,
lifting his heavy and meaningless eyebrows.
“You know the ropes.”

“I do,” said Josie, meaning to impress him
and daunt him. “I know all about special
legislation.”

Mr. Pike smiled again. The subject was an
agreeable one to this ignorant, small-headed,
conscienceless, scheming creature. It was
his specialty, and it had become his hobby,
and he liked to talk about it. Although he
called lobbying plunder, and looked upon
those features of it which diminished his
profits as extortion, still he held it in respect
and almost in veneration.

From his point of view, it was a kind of
public life; it was more completely “inside
politics” than even electioneering or legislation;
it was, as he believed, the very germ
and main-spring of statesmanship. A leading
lobbyist knew exactly how the world is
governed, and for what purpose it is governed.

We have now laid our disrespectful, but
surely not sacrilegious, hands upon the key
of Mr. Pike's contemptible character. He
was a born intriguer, a man who instinctively
loved devious and plotting ways, a man
given to trickery, and worshipful of it. This
is why he had originally crawled and wriggled
into politics; this is why, when laid on
the political shelf, he had dropped into lobbying.

Although many people supposed that his
ruling passion was covetousness, the belief
was an error. He seemed slaveringly greedy
for money; but that was because it helped
to success in chicanery, and was the signature
and crown of success; because, when
he had picked a fellow-creature's pockets,
he could triumph over him, and could hire
him to pick other pockets. His real, or at

least his main, purpose in life was to outgeneral
people, to get the better of them, to “euchre”
them.

It might be supposed that it was avarice
which had brought him so hurriedly to Josie
at her first signal. But, while a desire
for pelf had influenced him somewhat, his
chief motives had been an honest love of
jobbery and a noble desire to be the “boss”
of the lobby. He wanted to keep this famous
claimant from falling into the hands
of Pullwool, Dorman, and Jack Hunt, and to
“run” her himself. He would be a greater
man in their estimation and in his own if he
could obtain the guardianship of the Murray
case. He was willing to do the job cheap,
willing to sacrifice something on it, if he
might thereby secure it.

He had already figured his profits down
to the lowest percentage which he thought
he could accept without injuring his reputation
and diminishing his self-respect. He
had decided, in fact, to accept Josie's offer,
humiliating as it was to a man of his position
and aspirations.

Meanwhile, feeling resignedly sure of the
case at such a moderate figure, he found it
pleasant to dally a moment over the charms
of his specialty, and to express his crude, dull
ideas concerning its marvels and mysteries.

“It's a curious business, this special legislation,
isn't it?” he remarked, meditatively.
“It's as full of holes, and under-ground passages,
and places to catch your feet in, as a
pararie-dog village. I've seen more than
one old political wheel-horse go all a-wallow
into it, and never come out again on
the right side of an election. On a cussory
view, and without considering the campaigning
expenses of a public man, one
can't help wondering how members dare
travel such a road. Some of them do try
to ride clear of it for a while. And some
bolt right there, the first smell they get of
it. It's really curious.”

“As long as they can do it, they can be
made to do it,” said Josie, who had thoroughly
studied the question of temptation.

“That's so,” nodded Mr. Pike, with great
emphasis and approval, evidently much
struck with her intelligence and her knowledge
of his low world. “That's the whole
secret. You never can stop jobbery in our
Congress until you stop special legislation
altogether. Well, Mrs. Murray, I have such
a respect for you that I will do for you what
I wouldn't do for any other person I know of.
I'll take your offer—ten thousand dollars.”

Josie immediately repented of having
promised so much, and said to herself that
he was undoubtedly cheating her, and that
perhaps she would not pay him at all in the
end.

“But no advances, Mr. Pike,” she replied.
“You must take your own risk—though, by-the-way,
there isn't any risk.”

“All right, ma'am. No vote, no pay. I
want nothing more than a written agreement
and something in the way of long paper.”

“No! You must trust to my honor.”

“But the check will be deposited, you understand,
with some impartial third party. I
am only to have it when the bill is passed.”

“You must trust to my honor,” insisted
Josie. “I trust to yours.”

“Then I bolt,” said Pike, rising, with a
look of anger, for he had an unhappy temper,
a sad drawback often to his success in
fraudfulness. “And if I do bolt, I shall work
against you.”

“If you do, I will work against you,” declared
Josie, with a sublime inspiration of
impudence. “I will fight every bill of yours
that I can hear of.”

The lobbyist grinned, but it was with a
perplexed air. He knew what handsome
and clever women could do in Washington;
and this one was very beautiful, and, as he
judged, uncommonly intelligent. He feared
that she might indeed be a formidable
foe; and it was not his interest to raise up
any enemy unnecessarily.

“Well, if you have conscientious scruples
against signing long paper, I give in,” he
smiled, covering his retreat with a heavy
joke. “I s'pose I must take your word for
the payment.”

“Certainly you must. The idea of treating
a lady otherwise!” returned Josie, pursuing
him closely, and making mince-meat
of him. “And now I will tell you how I
want you to manage this business.”

Mr. Pike inclined himself to listen in respectful
silence. This pretty and adroit
young woman had, after a sharp struggle,
got the upper hand of him, or, as he afterward
expressed it, had got him in harness.

The truth is that, outside of the trick of
making gross offers of money to needy or
greedy souls of a coarse texture, he was a
man of exceedingly limited intellectual resources,
as well as an uneducated boor.

“I want you to be very, very discreet,”
she continued. “Don't tell Mr. Hollowbread,
nor Mr. Drummond, nor any body,
that I have engaged you. Don't go to the
committees, not even to ask which one has
got my papers. When you want to know
where they are, I will inform you. They
are now in the Spoliations; but they may
go to the War or the Judiciary. When they
do change, I will let you know. My Congressmen
will push the bill through the
committees, and make all the speeches necessary.
What I want of you is to get up
the votes.”

“Egsackly, ma'am,” bowed Mr. Pike, completely
subdued, and anxious to make this
great woman his friend. “Just my idea.
You shall have the votes, Mrs. Murray.”

From pure instinct, or by mere inveterate

habit of flirtation, she shed one of her finest
smiles over this vulgar minion. But he had
no notion of coquetry, and he merely responded
by a wink, thereupon taking his
departure.

“Hech!” exclaimed Josie, with a little
splutter of disgust. “I think even Mr.
Drummond might have picked out somebody
not quite so low. However, perhaps
the lower the better, considering the people
to be dealt with.”