Sons and Fathers. Edwards Harry Stillwell

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      "I will determine for myself!" he said, "the victory shall rest in me!"

      Then came the speech of the campaign at the court house. The relations of Col. Montjoy, his family friends, people connected with him in the remotest degree by marriage, army friends, members of the bar, merchants, warehousemen and farmers generally, and a large sprinkling of personal and political enemies of Swearingen made up the vast crowd.

      In the rear of the hall, a smile upon his face, was Amos Royson. And yet the secret glee in his heart, the knowledge that he, one man in all that throng, by a single sentence could check the splendid demonstration and sweep the field, was clouded. It came to him that no other member of the Montjoy clan was a traitor. Nowhere is the family tie so strong as in the south, and only the power of his ambition could have held him aloof. Swearingen had several times represented the district in Congress; it was his turn when the leader moved on. This had been understood for years by the political public. In the meantime he had been state's attorney and there were a senatorship, a judgeship and possibly the governorship to be grasped. He could not be expected to sacrifice his career upon the altar of kinship remote. Indeed, was it not the duty of Montjoy to stand aside for the sake of a younger man? Was it not true that a large force in his nomination had been the belief that Swearingen's right-hand man would probably be silenced thereby? It had been a conspiracy.