Page:Scribners Magazine volume 27.djvu/254

 The creeping moral paralysis, which had been atrophying his nature for a dozen years, began to manifest itself in various ways. When a circuit judge in Wharton's neighborhood, ambitious for promotion, appointed a receiver for a railroad in Wharton's State, Wharton managed to own profit-bearing stock in the concerns which furnished the receiver with supplies. When a railroad desired an extension of time for earning its land grant, Wharton's broker and the law department of the railroad had to discuss a great many things which came under the head of "that matter." It happened sometimes that Wharton's broker bought sugar felicitously, and sold silver with unusual luck. And the devil, whom Wharton had found in a mask, used to pull it aside frequently and wink gayly at the Senator, who would pat his rotund vest and smile, seemingly to himself but really at the Old Boy, and say to his private secretary, "Well, Bob, we seem to be able to keep the wolf from scratching all the varnish off the front door! Eh?"

For Wharton had become a financier, and was known in New York banking circles as "the business man of the senate." His introduction to the New Yorkers was brilliant, and admitted him to the inner circle of brigands at once. Wharton and a group of New York bankers got hold of a controlling interest in a Western railroad, the H. & 2 O's, when the stock was selling at 70. The H. & 2 O's ran, as Wharton succinctly put it, "from hell to breakfast, over two streaks of rust, through a four-acre mortgage." Senator Felt put $50,000 of his wife's money into the scheme on the advice of his bankers. Wharton organized a $100,000 pool among the stock-holders to keep the stock of the road at par, the pool agreeing to buy up all the stock on the market offered below par. Felt borrowed money of the pool to buy up several little blocks of stock that came floating his way, slightly below par. But Wharton sold to the pool through his broker at nearly par all of the stock which he had bought at 70. Then he faced Felt and the New Yorkers down with uproarious laughter, and asked them if they saw any hayseed in his hair. He thought the joke was too good to keep and told it after the eighth glass of raw whiskey at the senatorial poker parties which Senator Felt always avoided. Men of Wharton's stripe gazed at him with fond admiration, and he was revered as Captain Kidd was in his time for less profitable and more daring enterprises.

Nature began to brand Tom Wharton in the fifth year of his first senatorial term. Little hair-line wrinkles spread over his face, radiating from his eyes and mouth. His brow cracked in a hundred places. Under his eyes deep, lateral, fatty wrinkles gathered and insolence leered from behind the bloated lids. The skin of his neck began to hang loose. Nature was marking her danger-signals on his face to tell the world that Tom Wharton's soul was rotting out. He took heed of wherewithal he should be clothed, and his raiment, which once had been of coarse, gray Scotch cheviot, became broadcloth. He swathed himself in fancy vests, and the poker set said that the Thompson woman had persuaded him to get his high silk hat. For the Thompson woman was noted for her clothes, and when she walked down an aisle in the pension office, treading firmly on her heels and hiking her skirt up in the back, one could hear her silk petticoats rustle all over the room, and the girls who held their jobs on their merits pretended not to notice her. But whether or not the Thompson woman was the inspiration of Wharton's silk hat, he wore it only in the East. When he went home that year he donned some familiar togs and went under the old black felt that was well known to the people of his State.

During his first senatorial term Wharton mixed in a score of local fights in his State and built a State machine of iron. County officers were his assistant foremen in the political organization that he conducted as one would conduct a great factory, wherein no detail was too trivial for the owner's personal attention. When he helped his friends with money in a political transaction Senator Wharton took their notes, thus mixing business with politics and keeping his allies true—Congressman Wharton had never done this. When the machine sent him back to Washington without opposition to serve a second senatorial term, Tom Wharton was a power of the first class. Although the men in the