His vote cast in opposition to the will of the majority meant nothing; his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf any longerhe had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his every word. Day by day he grew stronger and day by day the sinister elements behind him grew bolder, echoing his challenges against the Government and against the war. With practically every newspaper in America, big and little, fighting him; with every influential magazine fighting him; with the leaders of the Administration fighting himhe nevertheless loomed on the national sky line as a great sinister figure of defiance and rebellion.
Deft word chandlers of the magazines and the daily press coined terms of opprobrium for him. He was the King of Copperheads, the Junior Benedict Arnold, the Modern Judas, the Second Aaron Burr; these things and a hundred others they called him; and he laughed at hard names and in reply coined singularly apt and cruel synonyms for the more conspicuous of his critics. The oldest active editor in the countryand the most famouscalled upon the body of which he was a member to impeach him for acts of disloyalty, tending to give aid and comfort to the common enemy. The great president of a great university suggested as a proper remedy for what seemed to ail this man Mallard that he be shot against a brick wall some fine morning at sunrise. At a monstrous mass meeting held in the chief city of Mallard's home state, a mass meeting presided over by the governor of that state, resolutions were unanimously adopted calling upon him to resign his commission as a representative. His answer to all three was a speech which, as translated, was shortly thereafter printed in pamphlet form by the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger and circulated among the German soldiers at the Front.
For you see Congressman Mallard felt safe, and Congressman Mallard was safe. His buckler was the right of free speech; his sword, the argument that he stood for peace through all the world, for arbitration and disarmament among all the peoples of the world.
It was on the evening of a day in January of this present year that young Drayton, Washington correspondent for the New York Epoch, sat in the office of his bureau on the second floor of the Hibbett Building, revising his account of a scene he had witnessed that afternoon from the press gallery of the House. He had instructions from his managing editor to cover the story at length. At ten o'clock he had finished what would make two columns in type and was polishing off his opening paragraphs before putting the manuscript on the wire when the door of his room opened and a man came ina shabby, tremulous figure. The comer was Quinlan.
Quinlan was forty years old and looked fifty. Before whisky got him Quinlan had been a great newspaper man. Now that his habits made it impossible for him to hold a steady job he was become a sort of news tipster. Occasionally also he did small lobbying of a sort; his acquaintance with public men and his intimate knowledge of Washington officialdom served him in both these precarious fields of endeavour. The liquor he drankwhenever and wherever he could get ithad bloated his face out of all wholesome contour and had given to his stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the hopeless alcoholica meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by an unhealthy and dropsical plumpness.
At timeswhen he was not completely soddenwhen he had in him just enough whisky, to stimulate his soaked brain, and yet not enough of it to make him maudlinhe displayed flashes of a one-time brilliancy which by contrast with his usual state made the ruinous thing he had done to himself seem all the more pitiable.
Drayton of the Epoch was one of the newspaper men upon whom he sponged. Always preserving the fiction, that he was borrowing because of temporary necessity, he got small sums of money out of Drayton from time to time, and, in exchange, gave the younger man bits of helpful information. It was not so much news that he furnished Drayton as it was insight into causes working behind political and diplomatic events. He came in now without knocking and stood looking at Drayton with an ingratiating flicker in his dulled eyes.
"Hello, Quinlan!" said Drayton. "What's on your mind to-night?"
"Nothing, until you get done there," said Quinlan, letting himself flop down into a chair across the desk from Drayton. "Go ahead and get through. I've got nowhere to come but in, and nowhere to go but out."
"I'm just putting the final touches on my story of Congressman Mallard's speech," said Drayton. "Want to read my introduction?"
Privately Drayton was rather pleased with the job and craved approval for his craftsmanship from a man who still knew good writing when he saw it, even though he cold no longer write it.