University of Virginia Library

15. TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.

Wherein the old Governor squares himself for harsh words about the honor of legislators and draws a distinction illustrated by an experience that once "cut close to the bone" and left a scar.

Brokenstraw Ranch, —, 19—.

Dear Ned: —

I'm a little surprised that you should hark back to one of my old letters and confess that you have kept a sore feeling simmering away under your wishbone all these weeks. I thought you knew me better than that, Ned.

And so you resent my statement that I'd rather have a son of mine caught stealing scab sheep than see him elected to a legislature? Well, perhaps that was putting it strong. In fact, I'll admit that I did bear down hard on a whole lot of good men when I bunched the entire legislative field in that sort of an omnibus knock.

Only the young reformer, in the first intoxication of his own eloquence, is entitled to the lofty privilege of lumping humanity into two classes and then taking his place with the sheep while he makes moral faces at the goats. As I never traded much in reform stock of the professional sort, I'll not begin at this late day to pick up their tricks or preach their sermons. I stand corrected for too broad a conclusion and failing to draw the distinction that excepts a respectable number of square and honest lawmakers from the moral bats who somehow manage to sneak in under every statehouse dome and give a bad name to the legislative schools in which such men as Jefferson, Clay and Lincoln had their schooling for a bigger field.

But you can't understand how the word "legislature" riles me without knowing of one or two experiences that burned themselves into my recollection when I first went down to the assembly with the notion that I was honored by a trusting constituency and was going to work with a bunch of picked men for the best interests of the old state. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and look back upon one or two of those legislative scenes until my eyes swim and my teeth grit!

I've never yet put into cold words the one experience that cut me closest, but I guess it's time I did, for you can't get my viewpoint on this legislative business without it. And there's no use claiming that there was any novelty in what I went through, for the same sort of a proceeding had been repeated, with variations, under the shade of every statehouse in the land. But to the story:

You were at home that session holding down the sheriff's office, but you will remember that the corporations made the great fight that winter to break down the bars on the franchise question. It was war to the hilt, and the Philippine "water cure" was a mild and Christian method compared with the tactics which the corporations put into play from the time the speaker took his chair and named the committees.

Three schoolboys couldn't have made up to each other quicker than Big Ed Hammer and Gentleman Joe Tolliver and I got together. Ed was a veteran—as sound and square as a marble obelisk; Joe, like myself, was in his maiden term. The minute I caught the sparkle in the tail of Joe's eye I knew he was my sort, and Big Ed seemed to feel the same way, And, besides, a mutual friend had told Ed: "You take these two youngsters under your wing, give 'em as good a show as you can, and see that they don't get into mischief."

Joe had the winsomeness of a modest and tactful woman, with a clear and nimble mind, that marked him as a thoroughbred. Every quality he showed was of a sort to mark him as a gentleman and draw me closer to him. It didn't take me long to learn that time isn't the main factor in forming a friendship; that you can get nearer to a man in meeting him every day for three months and fighting battles shoulder to shoulder with him than you could in fifteen years of casual contact under commonplace circumstances, and that strong attachments, like fierce enmities, are things of swift growth in the strain and stress of legislative life.

From the start Ed, Joe, and I acted together, had adjoining rooms, and were as thick as three peas in a pod. In fact, the boys soon began to call us the Three Brothers. We didn't object to being bunched in this way and accepted the title without protest. But the most comfortable and important basis of our little three cornered brotherhood was the fact that we seemed to size up the right and wrong of things in about the same way. And it doesn't take a guide post or a special spiritual adviser to point a man to the right road in lawmaking any more than in plain business of any sort. All he has to do is to settle it with himself, right at the start, that he is going to be absolutely square, without any ifs or ands, and then stick to this through thick and thin. But if he doesn't draw the reins tight at the start and if he allows that he will treat every proposition that comes up individually he can depend upon it that he's likely to do a lot of sidestepping before he is through with the game.

We talked all this over one night together in Ed's room, and he laid down the law in this way: "When a fellow makes it up with himself that he's going to stick to the straight track from one end to the other without asking his conscience for any special orders to side track or lay over he'll pull through all right. That's the schedule I've always traveled on, boys, and I'm mighty glad to find that you're inclined to run on the same orders."

Big Ed was the head and front of the opposition to the franchise forces, and, although we were only cubs, Joe and I were commonly regarded as his first lieutenants, in a way. Day and night we worked together, sifting out the sheep from the goats and building up an organization that would stick together to the last ditch. It was harder work than holding a plow on a New Hampshire hillside, but Big Ed was heart and soul in the fight and threw his whole being into it. Every night we got together and counted noses. Sometimes this was a mighty solemn proceeding, because now and then the enemy snatched a man from our forces.

But occasionally there was a season of rejoicing in our camp when we were able to snatch a brand from the burning by convincing a weak-kneed fence straddler that he couldn't afford to trifle with temptation or do anything short of enlisting with the boodle fighters.

All through these ups and downs Ed, Joe, and I stood together like the three legs of a tripod, without a shadow of difference coming between us.

The first of the two big boodle bills was close up to a third reading as I entered the house one morning to begin the day's struggle with more courage than I had been able to scrape up since the long battle began. Joe's seat was almost across the aisle from my own, and as I turned to speak to him I saw a sight that made my eyes start and my flesh creep.

There was Joe—but of all the draggled, besotted, and filthy specimens of drunken humanity that I ever beheld he was the worst. I felt as if I had been hit between the eyes with a sledge. For a few minutes I couldn't have told, to save me, the name of any man sitting five feet in front of us. Just as I began to recover my senses a little from the shock Big Ed came in, took one look at the Little Brother, as we sometimes called Joe, and winced as if he had been stabbed.

Of course, we had him taken out and carried to his room, but from that minute he slunk away from us whenever he could get a chance. Our little brotherhood was broken, and he avoided us as consistently as he had formerly stood by us.

Although Ed and I put in as much time trying to get Joe sobered up as we did in carrying on the fight against the corporation bills in the house, he did not see a single rational hour.

It was as idle to attempt to reason with Joe in his transformed and besotted state as to argue with a crazy Indian. He was seldom in his seat in the house and spent most of his time in the "Black Lodge," the center of the spider web which the agents of the franchise interests threw out in every direction to catch their victim.

One day while Joe was over there at the Black Lodge, in the keeping of the men who had been told off in the start to run Joe down, and, as the leader of the gang put it, "break his back," a young woman with big, sad eyes called to see me. I knew who she was the minute her card was sent up, for Joe had told me all about her and intimated that they expected to be married shortly after the session was over.

In a low but shaking voice she told me how, five years before, Joe had suddenly put an end to a career of dissipation, settled down to hard work, and after a year of steady pulling in the harness had proposed to her. Not a hitch in their happiness had occurred until the morning when I found Joe transformed into a sot. In answer to a few questions she confirmed my suspicion that the boodle hounds had hunted back along Joe's trail until they found his besetting weakness, and had then deliberately started out to "land" him with drink.

Well, after that every time I came back to the city the white face of that young woman was waiting for me behind the iron fence in the big passenger station. But there was little hope to give her as she lifted her pitifully appealing eyes to me and put the question: "Is the Little Brother any better?" However, the girl's grit never failed her and she hung on like grim death.

The night before the first franchise bill was to be put to Final vote I came across Joe sitting sullenly in a lonesome corner of the hotel corridor, his gaze fixed gloomily on a figure in the mosaic flooring. There was just a suggestion of his old self in his eyes as he glanced up at me and silently took the hand which I held out to him.

For a few minutes we sat in silence. Then I drew my chair closer to him and said:

"Joe, have I ever tried to control you in anything down here?"

"No," he answered slowly.

"Have I always left everything to your own manhood?"

"Yes."

"Well, I just want to ask you if you're going to stand square for the right thing on roll call tomorrow?"

His hands gripped the arms of his chair, his bleared face grew ashen, and he drew his breath in with a gasp. For some minutes he stared at the floor. Then, in the voice that a man uses in crying out to the man within himself, he said:

"Let me go! Let me go! I've got to tell 'em; but I'll do it. I'll come back. You stay right here."

He jumped to his feet and made a dash to the door, where a cab was waiting for him. Of course, I knew that he was bound for the Black Lodge, and I knew if he ever pulled himself loose from the spiders down there it would be nothing short of a miracle.

But in less than a half hour he was back again, with something like a flicker of his old smile on his face as he said:

"I did it. I told 'em. I'm with you, brother."

And he was as good as his word. When the vote came he was with us, and we knocked out the boodle bill.

That act, however, was the last convulsion of his expiring manhood. From that time he was hopelessly with the enemy body and soul, and voted with them on the second franchise bill, against which Big Ed led the forces of decency.

There isn't much to tell beyond this. Joe dropped down and down until he couldn't get to his seat in the house. That ended his usefulness to the boodle gang, and they kicked him out as they would a sick dog. Ed, the girl, and I nursed him until he could be taken home.

A week or two finished him, and then we all went down to put him away. At that funeral, as I looked from his broken old mother and his wasted sweetheart to a little group of members who had helped to "break his back and throw him off the water wagon," the devious ways of modern lawmaking looked pesky mean and hateful to me, I can tell you! And I've seen enough of the same sort of wrecks since to prove that Joe's experience wasn't an exception to the rule. There are hundreds of other cases like his.

And the memory of those that have come across my own path always stirs up my bile until I find myself saying hard things, as I did in that old letter about legislators in general. But, once for all, let me say that there are hundreds of good men making state laws in this country, and that I take off my hat to every one of them who is on the square and doesn't sidestep from the strait and narrow path.

Yours ever, William Bradley.