“No; as soon as I opened it and saw the printed form, I took it for the usual notification, and put it aside to think of this election work. But it would seem as if the Faculty intended to out-herald the 'Herald.'”
“They are simply allowed to act first in order that the 'Herald,' a day later, may applaud them. It's all worked by Gulmore, and I tell you again, he's dangerous.”
“He may be; but I won't change for abuse, nor yet to keep my post. Let him do his worst. I've not attacked him hitherto for certain reasons of my own, nor do I mean to now. But he can't frighten me; he'll find that out.”
“Well, we'll see. But, at any rate, it was my duty to warn you. It would be different if I were rich, but, as it is, I can only give May a little, and--”
“My dear Hutchings, don't let us talk of that. In giving me May, you give me all I want.” The young man's tone was so conclusive that it closed the conversation.
Mr. Gulmore had not been trained for a political career. He had begun life as a clerk in a hardware store in his native town. But in his early manhood the Abolition agitation had moved him deeply--the colour of his skin, he felt, would never have made him accept slavery--and he became known as a man of extreme views. Before he was thirty he had managed to save some thousands of dollars. He married and emigrated to Columbus, Ohio, where he set up a business. It was there, in the stirring years before the war, that he first threw himself into politics; he laboured indefatigably as an Abolitionist without hope or desire of personal gain. But the work came to have a fascination for him, and he saw possibilities in it of pecuniary emolument such as the hardware business did not afford. When the war was over, and he found himself scarcely richer than he had been before it began, he sold his store and emigrated again--this time to Tecumseh, Nebraska, intending to make political organization the business of his life. He wanted “to grow up” with a town and become its master from the beginning. As the negroes constituted the most ignorant and most despised class, a little solicitation made him their leader. In the first election it was found that “Gulmore's negroes” voted to a man, and that he thereby controlled the Republican party. In the second year of his residence in Tecumseh he got the contract for lighting the town with gas. The contract was to run for twenty years, and was excessively liberal, for Mr. Gulmore had practically no competitor, no one who understood gas manufacture, and who had the money and pluck to embark in the enterprise. He quickly formed a syndicate, and fulfilled the conditions of the contract. The capital was fixed at two hundred thousand dollars, and the syndicate earned a profit of nearly forty per cent, in the first year. Ten years later a one hundred dollar share was worth a thousand. This first success was the foundation of Mr. Gulmore's fortune. The income derived from the gas-works enabled him to spend money on the organization of his party. The first manager of the works was rewarded with the position of Town Clerk--an appointment which ran for five years, but which under Mr. Gulmore's rule was practically permanent. His foremen became the most energetic of ward-chairmen. He was known to pay well, and to be a kind if strenuous master. What he had gained in ten years by the various contracts allotted to him or his nominees no one could guess; he was certainly very rich. From year to year, too, his control of the city government had grown more complete. There was now no place in the civil or judicial establishment of the city or county which did not depend on his will, and his influence throughout the State was enormous.