The President. Alfred Henry Lewis
put forth his last resource of strength—he who crushed horseshoes and twisted pokers! Like things of steel Richard's fingers closed grimly and invincibly upon those of Storri. The Russian strove to recover his hand; against the awful force that held him his boasted strength was as the strength of children.
Storri looked into Richard's eyes; they were less ferocious, but infinitely more relentless than his own. There was that, too, in the other's look which appalled the Tartar soul of Storri—something in the drawn brow, the eye like agate, the jaw as iron as the hand! And ever more and a little more that fearful grip came grinding. The onyx eyes glared in terror; the tortured forehead, white as paper, became spangled with drops of sweat.
There arose a smothered feline screech as from a tiger whose back is broken in a deadfall. Richard gave his wrist the shadow of a twist, and Storri fell on one knee. Then, as though it were some foul thing, Richard tossed aside Storri's hand, from the nails of which blood came oozing in black drops as large as grapes.
"What was it?" gasped Dorothy, who had stood throughout the duel like one planet-struck; "what was it you did?"
"Storri on his knee?" asked Richard with a kind of vicious sweetness. There was something arctic, something remorselessly glacial, in the man. It caught and held Dorothy, entrancing while it froze. "Storri on his knee?" repeated Richard, looking where his adversary was staining a handkerchief with Tartar blood. "It was nothing. It is a way in which Russians honor me—that is, Russians whom I do not like!"
CHAPTER II
HOW A PRESIDENT IS BRED
Mr. Patrick Henry Hanway, a Senator of the United States, had the countenance of a prelate and the conscience of a buccaneer. His grandfather—it was at this old gentleman, for lack of information, he was compelled to stop his ancestral count—was a farmer in his day. Also, personally, he had been the soul of ignorance and religion, and of a narrowness touching Scriptural things that oft got him into trouble.
Grandfather Hanway read his Bible and believed it. He held that the earth was flat; that it had four corners; and that the sun went around the earth. He replied to a neighbor who assured him that the earth revolved, by placing a pan of water on his gate-post. Not a drop was spilled, not a spoonful missing, in the morning. He showed this to the astronomical neighbor as refutatory of that theory of revolution.
"For," said Grandfather Hanway, with a logical directness which among the world's greatest has more than once found parallel, "if the y'earth had turned over in the night like you allow, that water would have done run out."
When the astronomical one undertook a counter argument, Grandfather Hanway fell upon him with the blind, unreasoning fury of a holy war and beat him beyond expression. After that Grandfather Hanway was left undisturbed in his beliefs and their demonstrations, and tilled his sour acres and begat a son.
The son, Hiram Hanway, was sly and lazy, and not wanting in a gift for making money that was rather the fruit of avarice than any general length and breadth and depth of native wit. Having occasion to visit, as a young man, the little humdrum capital of his State, he stayed there, and engaged in the trade of lobbyist before the name was coined. He, too, married, and had children—Patrick Henry Hanway and Barbara Hanway. These his offspring were given a peculiar albeit not always a sumptuous bringing up.
When Patrick Henry Hanway was about the age of Oliver Twist at the time Bill Sykes shoved him through the window, Hiram Hanway caused him to be appointed page in the State Senate. There, for eight years, he lived in the midst of all that treason and mendacity and cowardice and rapacity and dishonor which as raw materials are ground together to produce laws for a commonwealth. He learned early that the ten commandments have no bearing on politics and legislation, and was taught that part of valor which, basing itself on greed and cunning and fear, is called discretion, and consists in first running from an enemy and then hiding from pursuit. Altogether, those eight years might have been less pernicious in their influence had Patrick Henry Hanway passed them with the chain gang, and he emerged therefrom, to cast his first vote, treacherous and plausible and boneless and false—as voracious as a pike and as much without a principle.
Patrick Henry Hanway did not follow in the precise footsteps of his sire. He resolved to make his money by pulling and hauling at legislation; but the methods should be changed. He would improve upon his father, and instead of pulling and hauling from the lobby, he would pull and haul from within. The returns were surer; also it was easier to knead and mold and bake one's loaf of legislation as a member, with a seat in Senate or Assembly, than as some unassigned John Smith, who, with a handful of bribes and a heart full of cheap intrigue, must do his work from the corridor. A legislative seat was a two-edged sword to cut both ways. You could trade with it, using it as a bribe, bartering vote for vote; that was one edge. Or you could threaten with it, promising nay for nay, and thus compel some member to save your bill to save his own; that was the other edge. A mere bribe from the lobby owned but the one edge; it was like a cavalry saber; you might make the one slash at a required vote, with as many chances of missing as of cutting it down. Every argument, therefore, pointed to a seat; whereat Patrick Henry Hanway bent himself to its acquirement, and at the age of twenty-six he was sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution and told to vote in the Assembly. In that body he flourished for ten years, while his manhood mildewed and his pockets filled.
The native State of Patrick Henry Hanway was a moss-grown member of the republic and had been one of the original thirteen. It possessed with other impedimenta a moss-grown aristocracy that borrowed money, devoured canvasbacks, drank burgundy, wore spotless tow in summer, clung to the duello, and talked of days of greatness which had been before the war. It carried moss-grown laws upon its statute books which arranged for the capture of witches, the flogging of Quakers at a cart's tail, the boring of Presbyterian tongues with red-hot irons, and the punishment of masters who oppressed their hapless slaves with terrapin oftener than three times a week. However, these measures, excellent doubtless in their hour, together with the aristocracy referred to, had fallen to decay.
The moss-grown aristocracy were aware in a lifeless, lofty way of Patrick Henry Hanway, and tolerating while they despised him as one without an origin, permitted him his place in the legislature. Somebody must go, and why not Patrick Henry Hanway? They, the aristocracy, would there command his services in what legislation touching game, and oysterbeds, and the foreclosure of mortgages they required, and that was all their need. The supple Patrick Henry Hanway thanked the aristocracy for the honor, took the place, and carried out their wishes for patrolling oysterbeds, protecting canvasbacks, and preventing foreclosures.
While these conditions of mutual helpfulness subsisted, and Patrick Henry Hanway kept his hat off in the presence of his patrons, nothing could be finer than that peace which was. But time went on, and storms of change came brewing. Patrick Henry Hanway, expanding beyond the pent-up Utica of a State Capitol, decided upon a political migration to the Senate of the United States.
When this news was understood by men, the shocked aristocracy let their canvasbacks grow cold and their burgundy stand untasted. With horrified voice they commanded "No!" The United States Senate had been ever reserved for gentlemen, and Patrick Henry Hanway was a clod. The fiat went forth; Patrick Henry Hanway should not go to the Senate; a wide-eyed patrician wonder was abroad that he should have had the insolent temerity to harbor such a dream—he who was of the social reptilia and could not show an ancestor who had owned a slave!
This purple opposition did not surprise the astute Patrick Henry Hanway; it had been foreseen, and he met it with prompt money. He had made his alliances with divers railway corporations and other big companies, and set in to overturn that feudalism in politics which had theretofore been dominant. The aristocrats felt the attack upon their caste; they came forth for that issue and the war wagged.
But the war