Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/217

 *ator of him. Warren, developing quickly as a politician, had turned around, defeated the colonel for reëlection as chairman of the state executive committee, a position he had held for sixteen years, had frozen him out of the Arizona deal, and somehow caused the colonel's only son to go wrong out there in Tucson. The boy's mother had died; of a broken heart, they said. Since then a decade had passed, a decade which the colonel had spent in the grim lonesomeness of a crowded hotel. He never mentioned Warren's name. If he heard it, he clenched his bony fists so tightly that the knuckles showed white. Once a year, perhaps, in the springtime, when the state central committee met, he got out his white waist-*coat and was invited up to the ordinary to make a speech on the state of the party, and once a year, in the summertime, he attended a reunion of his regiment, now decimated to a squadron of tottering old men, whom the colonel called "boys."

Spring came, rolling up from the muddy Ohio, showering its apple blossoms in the orchards of Egypt, sprinkling with purple flowers the prairies of central Illinois, and finally flooding with tardy sunshine the cold waters of Lake Michigan. It was