Below on the main floor were more than two thousand delegates. Every town and city sent the full number accredited. After these men had been seated the men and women who thronged the corridors and stairways were allowed to enter and stand in the rear of the great hall. Strange stories, rumors, predictions, had been running from lip to lip all over the big commonwealth. It was reported that the throne of the tyrant was menaced at last by rebellion which was not mere vaporings of the restless and resentful; organized revolt had appeared, marching in grim silence, not revealing all its strength, and therefore all the more ominous. A military band brayed music unceasingly into the high arches of the hall. The music served as obbligato for the mighty diapason of men's voices; the thousands talked as they waited. The broad platform of the stage was untenanted. The speakers, the chairman, the clerks, the members of the state committee, did not appear, though the hour named as the time of calling the meeting to order arrived and passed. In an anteroom, so far removed from the main hall that only the dull rumble of voices and the shredded echoes of the blaring music reached there, was assembled the state's oligarchy awaiting the pleasure of Colonel Symonds Dodd. He sat in a big chair, his squat figure crowding its confines. The state committee and the rest of his entourage were gathered about him. There was a committeeman from every county in the state--the men who formed the motive cogs of his machine. One after the other they had reported to him. And each time a man finished talking the colonel drove a solid fist down on the arm of the chair and roared: “I say again I don't believe it's as bad as you figure it. It can't be as bad. Do you tell me that this party is going to be turned upside down by a kid-glove aristocrat who has hardly stirred out of his office during this campaign?” “He has had a chap to do his stirring for him,” stated one of the group. “A hobo, scum of the rough-scruff, hailing from nowhere! Shown up in our newspapers as a ditch-digger--a fly-by-night--a nobody! I'm ashamed of this state committee, coming here and telling me that he has been allowed to influence anybody.”