The High Hand
Summary
Molten slag once licked his boots, yet Jim Warren rose from the crucible’s roar to a swivel chair in the front office, lungs still flecked with soot and conscience still molten. In that perch above the furnaces he forges a grander alloy: political power, meant not for self but for the soot-faced legion below. He strides into the legislature as an independent blade, armed with documents slipped by Francques—Lewis’s own Judas—toppling the boss who once owned the state like a private club. Victory tastes of iron until he discovers that the woman who has haunted every clang of his ascent—Edna, childhood flame, now grown into Tillinghast’s poised daughter—is betrothed to the very man he has unseated. The engagement is a transaction: her hand for her father’s governorship. Warren’s two loves—Edna and integrity—converge into one perilous wager. Lewis retaliates with silk-gloved malice, showering the young reformer with tainted cash, stocks sealed in cream envelopes, bonds that whisper complicity. When the trap snaps, Warren unveils his masterstroke: every bribe catalogued, untouched, locked in the vault of the National Bank, a cathedral of evidence. The scandal detonates; headlines thunder; cells clang shut. In the aftershock Warren stands on a convention floor drowned in cheers, Edna at his side, exchanging the governorship’s patriarchal mantle for the intimacy of a partnership forged in white-hot truth.
Synopsis
Up through the din and murk of the steel works, up by brawn and brain until he took his place behind the superintendent's desk came Jim Warren, but his heart was still with the strugglers in the glare of the furnaces. Here he had time to think and here he conceived the "big idea." The "big idea" required an established political position and he started out to get it. Francques, the henchman of Lewis, the political boss, saw in the young reformer a tool through which he could treacherously ruin his superior. Warren was running for the legislature as well as Lewis, and fortified with incriminating evidence against his opponent supplied by Francques, Warren entered the field as an independent candidate and was elected. Lewis took his defeat calmly and made friendly overtures to the newly elected member. Through the influence of Lewis, Warren was invited to visit the speaker of the House, Mr. Tillinghast. Here he was introduced to the girl of his life; the girl he had first seen, as a curious child visitor at the steel works. Several other times fate brought them together. It had been a secret love and he was astounded when he learned from her own lips that she was engaged to marry Lewis. Lewis's wedding to Edna was to occur as soon as Tillinghast was elected governor of the state. Edna admired Lewis and thought she loved him until one day after a talk with Jim Warren she realized the sordid contrast to which she, her father, and Lewis were parties. She told her father that she would not marry Lewis and remained firm in her decision against every argument that her ambitious parent offered. From that moment Warren battled for two loves, the love of a woman and the love of truth. Lewis, behind a smiling face, plotted Warren's undoing. Bribes came from every source. Marked bills, stocks and bonds were lavished by the clique upon the supposed unsuspecting assemblyman. At last they thought the trap ready to spring. He was arrested. He trembled not but unafraid played the last card of his high hand. He calmly led his captors to the vaults of the National Bank and there neatly docketed each in its separate envelope under seal of the bank were the bribes untouched together with the names of the givers and evidence that sent many of them to prison cells. The newspapers went wild. Jim Warren played the game and he was the man of the hour. Weeks later when the state convention had just gone wild over the nomination of Warren for governor, he and Edna were talking. "I think," said Edna, "that as long as I can't be the daughter of the governor, that I will be far happier as the governor's wife."
