Spring came, rolling up from the muddy Ohio, showering its apple blossoms in the orchards of Egypt, sprinkling with purple flowers the prairies of central Illinois, and finally flooding with tardy sunshine the cold waters of Lake Michigan. It was the year the legislature that chose Warren’s successor in the senate was to be elected, and when the senator came home from Washington he found his fences in sad repair. The Silas Warren of the parlor suite in a Lake Front hotel was not the Si Warren whom Colonel Talbott had rescued from the dusty little law office down in Shelbyville fifteen years before. The clothes of that time were faded by the sun in which he loafed all day on the post-office corner, whereas the clothes of this spring morning bespoke a New York tailor and a valet. The senator was not in a pleasant mood. There was opposition to his reëlection, and while his machine ignored it, and while George R. Baldwin, the lawyer who watched the interests of certain big corporations during the sessions of the legislature, said it was but a sporadic demonstration of soreheads, back-numbers and labor skates, it was spreading, as the picturesque politicians from the corn lands of central Illinois would say, like a prairie fire. Jacksonville, where the standard of revolt had first been raised, was in Morgan, the colonel’s home county, and so it came to pass that the defection was laid to the machinations of the colonel himself. And yet, as the politicians who were always dropping into Chicago to correct their reckonings, paused an instant by the leather chair, the old white head would slowly wag from side to side, and the old man would say: “No, I’m out of politics.” If Carroll had not conceived the idea of running for office, perhaps the colonel would have remained out of politics, but the boy, after a week of dreaming, dramatized himself as making a speech in the state senate chamber at Springfield. The colonel, as a man’s duty is, advised him to keep out of politics, and yet within an hour after Carroll shyly confessed his ambition, the fever awoke in the old fellow’s bones, his eyes flamed with the old fire, and he admitted that the experience might help a boy who was struggling in a pitiless city for a law practice. Within a week the colonel had introduced Carroll to Superintendent of Street and Alley Cleaning Patrick F. Gibbons, who promised to be with him, and had taken him to the city hall for an audience with the mayor. After that the newspapers said that John D. Carroll had been slated for the senatorial nomination in the First District. When Warren learned of the colonel’s new interest in the campaign, he cunningly decided to utilize it by throwing his strength to Carroll in the First, provided the colonel would withdraw his opposition. He prided himself on being a man who harbored no resentments. So he sent Dan Ford, his private secretary, to open negotiations for peace.