Radical Liberals-Reggie clapped his hands-in Cuba. The numbers meant hardly more than the blanks they replaced. He was glad to have them anyhow.
More numbers went up as the hour got later. Hardly any of them made the people who awaited them very happy. The Examiner leaned toward the Radical Liberals, and it soon became abundantly clear that, whatever else happened, Ainsworth Layne would not be the next president of the Confederate States.
That would have disappointed Reggie more had he thought going in that Layne enjoyed any great chance of winning. The Radical Liberals always did best on the fringes of the Confederacy; they were liable to win Sonora and Chihuahua, too, when results finally trickled out of the mountains and deserts of the far Southwest.
But the real battle would be decided between Texas and Virginia. Returns also came in slowly from the Confederate heartland. They hadn't seemed so slow during the last Congressional election, nor the one before that. Bartlett had been in no position to evaluate how fast the returns for the last presidential election came in, not in November 1915 he hadn't. Back in 1909, he hadn't cared; he hadn't been old enough to vote then.
'Hate to say it, but I'm pulling for Wade Hampton,' a man about his own age said not far away. 'I've voted Radical Liberal ever since I turned twenty-one, and I'd get into screaming fights with Whigs. But you look around at what the other choice is-' The fellow shivered melodramatically.
'I voted for Layne,' Reggie said. 'I'm not sorry I did, either. I'm just sorry more people didn't.'
Off in the distance, somebody shouted, 'Freedom!' But the Freedom Party muscle boys did not wade into the crowd outside the Examiner building. They would have paid for any attack they made; Reggie was sure he wasn't the only Radical Liberal packing a revolver in case of trouble from goons.
More and more numbers went up. By midnight or so, they started to blur for Reggie. Strong coffee at supper or not, he couldn't hold his eyes open any more. Things weren't decided, but he headed back toward his flat anyway. He was glad the election remained up in the air. Only when he'd got very close to home did he realize he should have been sorry Jake Featherston hadn't been knocked out five minutes after the polls closed.
Jake Featherston yawned so wide, his jaw cracked like a knuckle. He hadn't been so tired since the battles of the Great War. It was half past four Wednesday morning, and he'd been up since first light Tuesday. He'd voted early, posed for photographers outside the polling place, and then headed here to the Spottswood Hotel at the corner of Eighth and Main to see what he would see. He'd wanted the Ford Hotel, right across the street from Capitol Square, but the Whigs had booked it first.
He looked down at the glass of whiskey in his hand. Yawning again, he realized he might not have felt so battered if he hadn't kept that glass full through the night. He shrugged. Too late to worry about it now. He wasn't in the habit of looking back at things he'd done, anyway.
Somebody knocked on the door to his room. He opened it. As he'd expected, there stood Ferdinand Koenig, his backer when the Freedom Party was tiny and raw, his vice-presidential candidate now that the Party was a power in the land… but not quite enough of a power. Koenig held the latest batch of telegrams in his left hand. His face might have been a doctor's coming out of a sickroom just before the end.
'It's over, Jake,' he said-like Roger Kimball and only a handful of others, he talked straight no matter how bad the news was. 'Our goose is cooked. We won't win it this time.'
Featherston noticed he was still holding that whiskey. He gulped it down, then hurled the glass against the wall. Shards sprayed every which way, like fragments from a bursting shell. 'Son of a bitch,' he snarled. 'Son of a bitch! I really reckoned we might pull it off.'
'We scared 'em,' Koenig said. 'By God, we scared 'em. You Ye still outpolling Ainsworth Layne. We took Florida. We took Tennessee. We took Texas. We've got-'
'We've got nothing,' Jake said flatly. 'God damn it to fucking hell, we've got nothing. During the war, we killed a million Yankees. Didn't do us one damn bit of good. We lost. I didn't want to scare Wade Hampton the goddamn Fifth. I wanted to whip the Whigs out of office like the cur dogs they are.'
Koenig stared, then shook his head in rueful admiration. 'You never did aim to do anything by halves, did you?'
'Why do you think we are where we're at?' Jake returned. 'Anybody who settles for what he reckons is good enough deserves whatever happens to him. I want the whole damn shootin' match. Now I have to wait till 1927 to try again. That's a goddamn long time. What the hell's going to happen to the country from now till then? Christ, we aren't going to hell in a hand-basket, we're already there.'
'You can come down off the stump for a few minutes, anyway,' Ferdinand Koenig said. 'The election's over, even if the reporters are waiting downstairs to hear what you've got to say.'
'Goddamn vultures,' Featherston muttered. The election's over meant nothing to him. His life was a seamless whole; he could not have told anyone, himself included, where Jake Featherston the man stopped and Jake Featherston the Freedom Party leader began. He wished he had another glass to shatter. 'All right, I'll go down. Maybe they'll all be passed out drunk by then, and I won't have to make a speech after all.'
Koenig was still trying to look on the bright side of things: 'We picked up four, maybe five seats in Congress, not counting the Redemption League. Florida gave us a Senator; looks like we'll pick up the governor's spot in Tennessee, and maybe in Mississippi, too.'
'That's all fine and dandy, but it's not enough, either.' Even now, worn and half drunk and sorely disappointed, Jake knew he'd be happier in a few days. The Freedom Party had done very well. It just hadn't done well enough to suit him. He'd have to start building on what it had done, and to start looking ahead to see what it could do for 1923. He made a fist and slammed it into his own thigh several times. The pain was oddly welcome. 'The reporters are waiting, eh? Let's go, by Jesus. Let's see how they like it.'
Now his running mate looked faintly-no, more than faintly- alarmed. 'If you want to get a couple hours' sleep, Jake, those bastards won't care one way or the other. Maybe you should grab the chance to freshen up a touch,' Koenig said.
'Hell with it,' Featherston replied. 'Might as well get it over with.' He headed for the stairway. Had Koenig not jumped aside, Jake would have pushed him out of the way.
Down in the lobby of the Spottswood, the victory celebration for which the Freedom Party had hoped was a shambles now. A few young men in white shirts and butternut trousers remained on their feet and alert. They'd been detailed to keep order, and keep order they would. The task was easier than Jake had thought it would be when he assigned it. Six more years of waiting. The thought was as bitter as yielding to the damnyankees had been.
More Freedom Party men sprawled snoring on couches and chairs and on the floor, too, some with whiskey bottles close at hand, others simply exhausted. A lot of reporters, by the look of things, were already gone. Watching the Freedom Party lose an election so many thought it might win had been story enough for them. But half a dozen fellows in cheap but snappy suits converged on Jake when he showed himself.
'Do you have a statement, Mr. Featherston?' they cried, as if with a single voice.
'Damn straight I have a statement,' Featherston answered.
'Jake-' began Ferdinand Koenig, who had followed him downstairs.
'Don't you worry, Ferd. I'll be fine,' Jake said over his shoulder. He turned back to the reporters. 'Reckon you boys are waiting for me to say something sweet like how, even though I wish I was the one who'd gotten elected, I'm sure Wade Hampton V will make a fine president and I wish him all the best. That about right? Did I leave anything out?'
A couple of the reporters grinned at him. 'Don't reckon so, Sarge,' one of them said. 'That's what we hear from the Radical Liberals every six years.'
'To hell with the Radical Liberals,' Featherston said. 'And to hell with Wade Hampton V, too.' The reporters scribbled. Jake warmed to his theme, despite Koenig's dark mutterings in the background: 'To hell with Wade Hampton V, and to hell with the Whig Party. They led us off a cliff in 1914, they don't have the slightest scent of a notion of how to turn things around, and now they've got six more years to prove they don't know what the devil they're doing.'
'If they're such a pack of bums, why'd you lose the election?' a reporter called.
'Don't you think you ought to ask, 'How'd you do so well the first time you tried to run anybody for president?' ' Jake returned. No matter how he felt in private, in public he put the best face on things he could. 'Christ, boys, in 1915 there was no Freedom Party. We didn't elect anybody to Congress till two years ago. And now, our first time out of the gate, we get more votes than the Radical Liberals, and they've been around forever. And what do you ask? 'Why'd you lose?' ' He shook his head. 'We'll be back. As long as Hampton and the Whigs leave us any kind of
