Part 2

“Wasn’t I to get one grand if I arranged it so that Hammond would consent to a radio campaign?”

Forsythe was frankly puzzled for a moment, then saw a light.

“Look here, you young thug, do you mean you deliberately wrecked Hammond’s car? Suppose you’d killed him! Good Lord, did you think I meant anything like that? We talked about persuading.”

Neenan grinned.

“We’re practical politicians, ain’t we? There’s different kinds of persuadin’. Mind, I’m not confessin’ anything, but I leave it to your judgment if that looks just like an accident. There wasn’t a chance in the world of his being killed, with a guy hidden in the back of the car to stop him if he got to goin’ too fast with his wheel loosened up.

“Wasn’t it funny he wasn’t marred up, nothing wrong but a little tap on the head and a couple of broken legs that laid him up proper without any permanent hurt? He never guessed that he got that biff on the bean from a blackjack from behind him, and that his legs was broken nice and quiet by hand afterwards.”

“You cold-blooded devil!” Forsythe began, but checked himself on second thought. After all he couldn’t afford to antagonize this crafty little man.

“Look here,” he went on. “I haven’t got a thousand on hand just now, and I didn’t mean just that, but here’s a hundred cash on account, and I’ll make good on the two thousand all right if you can show you’ve put over my nomination without any more physical brutality and no danger of a comeback.”

There was a little argument over it, but in the end Neenan left with his hundred and a promise that he’d earn the big money yet

IV

So the novel pre-convention radio campaign opened and developed presently a pitch of excitement seldom exceeded by a closely contested Presidential election. Twice a week alternately the courtesy of the capital city’s broadcasting station was extended to one of the contestants, Hammond reading his speech from his bed in his little farmhouse in the suburbs, Forsythe delivering his from the hotel suite which he had taken as headquarters till after the State convention.

Harking back to the famous “Front Porch” campaigns of certain Presidential candidates, this campaign of Hammond’s was facetiously dubbed a “Bedside Campaign.” Forsythe made much of it in his glittering speeches which continued to evade anything but generalities regarding the State water power issue.

On the whole the two contestants continued to run neck and neck. They continued to hold their original blocks of instructed or definitely committed delegates, each falling some ten per cent short of the required majority.

And the little block of uncommitted delegates from the rural districts who held the balance of power, despite repeated rumors of a break after each radio speech, remained uncommitted and stuck together.

There had been no personal mud slinging on either hand. They admired the finished oratory of Forsythe. But equally they admired Hammond’s clear, cold analysis of the power situation.

They were suspending judgment until the final summing up of recommendations he promised to make when they assembled for the convention.

So the time of the State convention arrived, and, as Boss Quaid had feared, the fight was carried to its floor with the chance of victory ready to fall either way according to the words a sick man might utter into his telephone in the privacy of his bedroom.

For when the convention opened, Warren Hammond was really ill, broken down by the strain of the campaign on top of the shock of his injuries. With great effort he had finished dictating his final radio statement which he hoped to read over the wire to the convention. Now there were grave doubts whether he would be able to read it himself.

The morning of the convention dawned at last. Into the city’s convention hall the delegates poured.

Quaid snorted at the spectacle.

“Don’t look much like the old-time batch of handmade ones,” the big fellow mourned to Barney as they watched from the gallery.

“Nope,” his satellite admitted. “Especially with the skirts in on the game. But the women ain’t nuthin’ to this Hammond. He’s a woman and a devil and one of the Lord Almighty’s mysterious ways wrapped up in one bundle. He’s been one trick ahead of us at every jump. That accident of his was either plain dumb good luck or fixed by himself intentional. The poor invalid stuff’s got the women going. The boys that are feeling him out say even those in the neutral crowd are leanin’ his way. I’m afraid he’s got us licked, chief.”

“You’ve said it, Barney--afraid I’m about through.”

An out-of-town man under the edge of the gallery hailed a local acquaintance. “Hello, Dick! Is this the place where you held the ghost dinner?”

Barney and his chief grinned at each other ruefully.

“They’ll always believe we fellows were blind and dumb that night,” Barney replied.

“And I’ll always believe those radio people double crossed us somehow,” Quaid added.

And the big fellow clung to that belief to his dying day.

A good sized knot of delegates came in, making the roof ring with cheers for Forsythe. Another knot across the hall tried to drown them out with counter cheers for Hammond.

“Hello, you bedroomers!” Shouted a Forsythe man above the din.

“Go on, you ghost walkers,” a man from the other ranks retorted.

And in Hammond’s sick room out in the little suburban farmhouse, the invalid was listening to the tumult in the convention hall as it came to him over his radio. A vigilant wife and nurse kept him constantly under their eye, shutting off the blaring instrument whenever he showed signs of getting nervous.

“Remember, Warren, if you overstrain your nerves, the doctor won’t let you read your speech,” Mrs. Hammond warned him at intervals.

“I’ve got to read that speech if it kills me,” he told her. “If I don’t know what’s going on beforehand I won’t be able to put the right spirit in it.”

And he managed to grin at her cheerily, although it was an evident effort.

In Forsythe’s headquarters at the hotel near the convention hall, the other candidate was nervously rehearsing his speech in the intervals when he was listening in on the radio. Little Jim Neenan was in constant attendance upon him these days, acting as general handy man.

The crafty one had taken a room of his own down the corridor from Forsythe’s suite where he could be on hand night and day to make himself useful. He was charging nothing for these services, but he hadn’t forgotten the main chance.

“Remember you’re going to owe me a fat two grand in the course of the next day or two,” he reminded his self-selected chief at frequent intervals.

But Forsythe vouchsafed him nothing more by way of reply than a sarcastic lifting of the eyebrows. At times Neenan studied him reflectively, and worry lines appeared in the narrow brow. Then there was a flash of dangerous light in the cold, close-set eyes.

The convention moved through two days of tense suspense and excitement. During the routine business of organizing, whenever there was opportunity for a test vote, the original line-up continued firm.

This was discernible on the second day also, in the cheering and speeches accompanying the putting of Forsythe and Hammond in nomination for Governor. The neutrals were still standing in a firm bloc, waiting for Hammond’s statement.

Then, on the morning of the third day came the long awaited opportunity. The session opened with a motion that the convention proceed to ballot for Governor.

Before it was seconded, a Hammond adherent, as previously arranged with the presiding officer, arose, and after a brief eulogy of the sick man announced that he had just been informed by telephone that Mr. Hammond’s doctor had given permission to the patient to read his address to the convention over the radio that morning. He therefore moved that the convention extend this courtesy to Mr. Hammond as one of the nominees.

The motion was carried unanimously, and the time for the address set at ten thirty, one-half hour away. Then, in accordance also with agreement, the same privilege was sought and obtained for Forsythe, and his time set at twelve o’clock.

During the few minutes that remained before Hammond’s voice was due to be heard over the wire, there was an atmosphere of electric suspense in no wise mitigated by the blaring of the band which filled in the interval. In the sick man’s bedroom miles away, the doctor had just examined the patient and ordered every one else out of the room but himself and the nurse in order that the invalid speaker might be as little disturbed as possible.

Pale and trembling he sat propped up in the bed, his manuscript on a tray before him, and the telephone transmitter on an extension bracket at his lips. Downstairs his family and immediate friends were in front of the radio which would hurl back to them the speech he was about to send out.

In a voice deep and resonant in spite of his weakness he began his brief statement. The listeners below and the great crowds in the convention hall down in the city sat breathless.

After outlining his purposes toward the party in case he were selected, he summarized his finding in the water power problem in words eloquent for their simple clearness. Finally came the closing section in which he was to give his long awaited policy.

His councilors listening downstairs, who had worked with him over the manuscript, knew his suggestion for a long term nonpartisan commission by heart.

But as he began this section they heard words strangely unfamiliar. They stared at each other in amazement. Down in the convention hall it was as though the assemblage had been struck by a bolt of lightning.

They heard Hammond, the supposed scientific progressive, deliberately proposing as his conclusions that the State keep its hands off the water power forever, and leave it in the grasp of the present private corporations. As his words ceased, it was evident that in a few brief sentences, Hammond had torn down all the esteem that he had built up, and with it his hopes of the nomination.

There was a moment of silence in the great hall, and then pandemonium broke loose. Boss Quaid and Barney Fogarty pounded each other on the backs and shouted with glee. Hammond had gone further than Quaid in his most arrogant moments had ever dared go.

“The guy’s gone crazy!” Barney roared.

“Barney, you’re right,” roared the big fellow.

In the Hammond farmhouse the doctor came out of the speaker’s room to face a horrified group.

“Doctor--has it been too much for him? Is he delirious?” Mrs. Hammond gasped.

“Oh, no; he’s all right. Seems to be a great relief to him to get it off his mind,” the doctor reassured her.

“But, doctor, you heard what he said at the last!” Hammond’s partner insisted. “Altogether different from what he’d planned.”

“Oh, I didn’t notice what he said,” the doctor told him calmly. “I was busy counting his heart beats.”

V

A few minutes later, down in the city, little Jim Neenan drove hurriedly up to the hotel where Forsythe had headquarters, leaped from his car and made his way up to the Forsythe suite with all speed.

Forsythe was closeted in his private office, going over for the last time, the address that he was to deliver over the radio in a few minutes, but Jim burst in on him unannounced.

“Now do you owe me the two grand?” he demanded triumphantly.

“I do not! What for? Get out of here. Can’t you see I’m busy!” Forsythe snapped at him.

“What for?” Neenan snarled. “Why, for putting Hammond out of the running! Didn’t you know I did it?”

Forsythe stared at him in contempt.

“You did it!” he sneered. “That’s a delightful bluff, but I’m too busy to be amused. I don’t owe you two thousand dollars, and never will. Now get out, I tell you.”

“But listen, I can prove--”

Neenan got no further. Forsythe stood over him menacingly.

“Another word from you and I’ll ring for a cop and have you arrested for conspiracy. Remember I know who broke Hammond’s legs.”

Neenan stared back at him for a moment with eyes turned to steel gimlets, white hot at the points. Then without a word he left the room and the suite and hurried down the corridor to his own apartment.

A few minutes later the eloquent voice of Forsythe was being poured into the convention hall. He was surpassing himself in his flights of oratory.

He wound up, deprecating his opponent’s position on the water power question, and pledging himself to continue a safe and sane policy of watchful waiting until the time was ripe for the State to act.

Forsythe laid down his manuscript and turned to receive the plaudits of the group around him.

“Stop! Just a moment, Mr. Forsythe!” came an unfamiliar voice of thunder from the amplifier of the convention hall, and from the radio horn in the Forsythe suite. “You have something to confess, Mr. Forsythe. Do it now, before I’m compelled not only to confess it for you, but to make a further statement that will make you a fugitive from justice.”

The booming voice ceased, and for a moment there was absolute silence.

Then another voice came from the radio. Forsythe started, and turned deadly pale. He had not spoken a word, but the voice that he was hearing was seemingly his own.

“I am afraid I will have to confess,” the voice was saying. “My opponent, Mr. Hammond, has been the victim of a conspiracy. The closing words of his speech which led you to condemn him just now were not his own, but the artful interpolation of an impostor clever at disguising his voice. If you will go to the woodland near the home of Mr. Hammond, just outside the city, through which the telephone line passes that brought his speech this morning from his bedroom to the broadcasting station, you will find still dangling from one of the poles a wire which the impostor had cut into the telephone line. It was a simple thing for him to attach a telephone to the end of that wire and listen in while Mr. Hammond read his speech. When my opponent reached his long-waited-for conclusion regarding State water power, the impostor cut him out of the line, and cleverly imitating Mr. Hammond’s voice, he delivered the false statement which you heard with so much consternation. What Mr. Hammond actually read, and you can prove it by getting his manuscript, was in substance as follows:”

The simulated voice of Forsythe then gave a close approximation of what Hammond had intended them to hear.

“That is all I have to say,” concluded the pseudo Forsythe.

The real Forsythe, still deathly pale, whirled away from the radio.

“That damned little rat of a Neenan! He double crossed me because I wouldn’t bribe him! He played the same trick on me that he did on Hammond. Down to his room quick!”

The group rushed pell-mell down the hall and burst into the room which Neenan had occupied. But Mr. Neenan had gone, taking with him the sweet flavor of his revenge.

Over the window sill dangled a wire attached to a telephone instrument. It ran out along the ledge and connected with the special wire that had been installed in Forsythe’s suite.

The crafty Neenan had lately feared that his service to Forsythe would be repudiated, and had prepared the instrument of his revenge beforehand.

And in the convention hall at this moment the uproar had subsided to the point where one of Forsythe’s former adherents could make himself heard.

“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I move that we dispense with the roll call and instruct the secretary of the convention to cast one ballot for Mr. Warren Hammond as our candidate for Governor.”

It was seconded and carried without a dissenting voice.

A few minutes later a local man came across Boss Quaid as he was slipping quietly out of a side entrance of the convention hall.

“Not leaving us, are you, chief?” the other asked.

“Yep,” he sighed. “Barney’s been intimating lately that I’m a has-been. Barney’s right.”

VI

A week after Warren Hammond had taken the oath of office as Governor of the State, he dropped a line to one Joseph Morris, a radio announcer employed by the local broadcasting station, suggesting to Mr. Morris that it might be to his advantage to call and see him.

“Mr. Morris,” the new Governor began when the young man appeared, “I feel that I owe you an apology and a reward as well, in case anything in the line of jobs that I have to dispose of would appeal to you. I’ve looked you up, and the only thing I find against you is that on a certain evening when you were acting as announcer at our party’s keynote pre-convention dinner, you took a chance and went home early, thereby making me Governor of the State.”

He paused and chuckled at Morris’s utter bewilderment.

“Well, it’s the answer to the ghost story that’s been puzzling a lot of people since last spring--how I was able to get a speech of mine from that dinner when I apparently wasn’t there. It’s so darn simple!

“When I left the table licked that night and went out the side door, I almost ran into your little sound-proof announcer’s booth with its handy little microphone all ready for use, and its handy little switch to cut off the microphone out on the table so that I was able to stay right there and substitute my speech for Mr. Jim Neenan’s horseplay, switching back to catch his applause and give it to my radio audience as my own. At that I guess I owe Jim something, too. But if there is anything I can do for you, let me know.”

THE END

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the October 1923 issue of McClure’s Magazine.]