We've got a good man for governor right now; not any too broad maybe,
but good--church good. Nobody has ever said he'd take a bribe; but he
isn't heavy enough to sit on the lid and hold it down. Alec Gordon, the
man who is going to succeed him next fall, is all the different kinds of
things that the present governor isn't, so that is fixed."
"How 'fixed'?" queried the younger man, who, though he was not from
Missouri, was beginning to fear that he would constantly have to be
shown.
"In the same way that everything has to be fixed if we are going to get
results," was the calm reply. "After the governor, the man upon whom the
most depends is the attorney-general. The fellow who is in now,
Dortscher, is one of the candidates, but we've crossed his name off. The
next man we considered was Jim Rankin. In some ways he's fit; he's a
hard fighter, and the man doesn't live who can bluff him. But Jim's
poor, and he wants mighty bad to be rich, so I reckon that lets him
out."
All of this was directly subversive of Evan Blount's ideas touching the
manner in which the political affairs of a free country should be
conducted, but he was willing to hear more.
"Well?" he said.
"What we want this time is one of your hew-to-the-line fellows, son.
Reckon you'd like to try it?"
The young man who was less than a week away from the atmosphere of the
idealistic school and its theories was frankly aghast.
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