Williams leaned closer to him, lowered his flame-thatched head and then looking to the right and left whispered, “Listen here, do you know where Beard is?”
“No,” answered Bonds, starting and looking around to see if anyone was listening. “Where is he?”
“Well, I got a letter from him the other day. He’s down there in Richmond doing research work for the Anglo-Saxon Association under that Dr. Buggerie.”
“Do they know who he is?”
“Of course they don’t. He’s been white quite a while now, you know, and of course they’d never connect him with the Dr. Shakespeare A. Beard who used to be one of their most outspoken enemies.”
“Well, what about it?” persisted Bonds, eagerly. “Do you think he might know something on the Democrats that might help?”
“He might. We could try him out anyway. If he knows anything he’ll spill it because he hates that crowd.”
“How will you get in touch with him quickly? Write to him?”
“Certainly not,” growled Williams. “I’ll get expenses from Gay for the trip. He’ll fall for anything now.”
He rose and made for the elevator. Five minutes later he was standing before his boss, the National Chairman, a worried, gray little man with an aldermanic paunch and a convict’s mouth.
“What is it, Williams?” snapped the Chairman.
“I’d like to get expenses to Richmond,” said Williams. “I have a friend down there in Snobbcraft’s office and he might have some dope we can use to our advantage.”
“Scandal?” asked Mr. Gay, brightening.
“Well, I don’t know right now, of course, but this fellow is a very shrewd observer and in six months’ time he ought to have grabbed something that’ll help us out of this jam.”
“Is he a Republican or a Democrat?”
“Neither. He’s a highly trained and competent social student. You couldn’t expect him to be either,” Williams observed. “But I happen to know that he hasn’t got any money to speak of, so for a consideration I’m sure he’ll spill everything he knows, if anything.”
“Well, its a gamble,” said Gay, doubtfully, “but any port in a storm.”
Williams left Washington immediately for Richmond. That night he sat in a cramped little room of the former champion of the darker races.
“What are you doing down there, Beard?” asked Williams, referring to the headquarters of the Anglo-Saxon Association.
“Oh, I’m getting, or helping to get, that data of Buggerie’s into shape.”
“What data? You told me you were doing research work. Now you say you’re arranging data. Have they finished collecting it?”
“Yes, we finished that job some time ago. Now we’re trying to get the material in shape for easy digestion.”
“What do you mean: easy digestion?” queried Williams. “What are you fellows trying to find out and why must it be so easily digested. You fellows usually try to make your stuff unintelligible to the herd.”
“This is different,” said Beard, lowering his voice to almost a whisper. “We’re under a pledge of secrecy. We have been investigating the family trees of the nation and so far, believe me, we certainly have uncovered astounding facts. When I’m finally discharged, which will probably be after election, I’m going to peddle some of that information. Snobbcraft and even Buggerie are not aware of the inflammatory character of the facts we’ve assembled.” He narrowed his foxy eyes greedily.
“Is it because they’ve been planning to release some of it that they want it in easily digestible form, as you say?” pressed Williams.
“That’s it exactly,” declared Beard, stroking his now clean-shaven face. “I overheard Buggerie and Snobbcraft chuckling about it only a day or two ago.”
“Well, there must be a whole lot of it,” insinuated Williams, “if they’ve had all of you fellows working for six months. Where all did you work?”
“Oh, all over. North as well as South. We’ve got a whole basement vault full of index cards.”
“I guess they’re keeping close watch over it, aren’t they?” asked Williams.
“Sure. It would take an army to get in that vault.”
“Well, I guess they don’t want anything to happen to the stuff before they spring it,” observed the man from Republican headquarters.
Soon afterward Williams left Dr. Beard, took a stroll around the Anglo-Saxon Association’s stately headquarters building, noted the half-dozen tough looking guards about it and then caught the last train for the capital city. The next morning he had a long talk with Gorman Gay.
“It’s okeh, Jo,” he whispered to Bonds, later, as he passed his desk.
XI
“What’s the matter with you, Matt?” asked Bunny one morning about a month before election. “Ain’t everything going okeh? You look as if we’d lost the election and failed to elect that brilliant intellectual, Henry Givens, President of the United States.”
“Well, we might just as well lose it as far as I’m concerned,” said Matthew, “if I don’t find a way out of this jam I’m in.”
“What jam?”
“Well, Helen got in the family way last winter again. I sent her to Palm Beach and the other resorts, thinking the travel and exercise might bring on another miscarriage.”
“Did it?”
“Not a chance in the world. Then, to make matters worse, she miscalculates. At first she thought she would be confined in December; now she tells me she’s only got about three weeks to go.”
“Say not so!”
“I’m preaching gospel.”
“Well, hush my mouth! Waddya gonna do? You can’t send her to one o’ Crookman’s hospitals, it would be too dangerous right now.”
“That’s just it. You see, I figured she wouldn’t be ready until about a month after election when everything had calmed down, and I could send her then.”
“Would she have gone?”
“She couldn’t afford not to with her old man the President of the United States.”
“Well, whaddya gonna do, Big Boy? Think fast! Think fast! Them three weeks will get away from here in no time.”
“Don’t I know it?”
“What about an abortion?” suggested Bunny, hopefully.
“Nothing doing. First place, she’s too frail, and second place she’s got some fool idea about that being a sin.”
“About the only thing
