Free Evening of the Good Samaritan by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

mayor yourself, would you want my endorsement?”
    Winthrop shot out his lower lip, as much to discipline the lip itself as to hedge for time. “I’ll put it this way, Mike: a man can disown his son without offending nature, but neither you nor I would give two cents for the kid who spits in his old man’s eye. Would we?”
    Mike’s shoulders shook although not a sound of amusement came from him. “That reminds me of the Irishman getting off the boat.” And the old man told a story the merits of which Joe Miller himself would have likely doubted. But Winthrop was caught. He settled his eyes on Mike’s and put a grin on his mouth, but all the while his mind was searching the possibilities. To what extent Mike was committed to the incumbent mayor he did not know, but Mike himself was certainly in the saddle for the time being; his only trouble occurred when a mayor of the city got so strong a vote he could virtually take over the party from Mike, and this fellow in office had never been tried. It was a bad omen for him, surely, that the governor had cold-shouldered him so soon. In a way, of course, it might be Mike Shea and the city machine the governor was “nixing.” Oh, and did not Mike know that, the wily old fox!
    In almost the same voice he settled the Irishman in America, Mike asked, “Alex, what would you say to having a run yourself in the primary against the mayor?”
    For once he was silent, looking from Mike to the spoon he picked up and turned round in his fingers and then to Mike again.
    “It’s the greatest sport of them all,” Mike said, temptation in his voice. “It’s something every man in public service has the right to experience—the voice of the people crying out their approval.”
    Something in Mike’s fervor and choice of words had the opposite effect on Winthrop to that intended: there was something disturbing as well as exciting in the voice of the people; they could shout a man down as soon as up; they went through his life, turning it over page by page, and even the illiterate of them could read between its lines. Winthrop shook his head, and at the moment meant it.
    “I wouldn’t embarrass you with my endorsement,” Mike said. “After all, I’m expected to see which way the frog jumps before placing my money.”
    “It isn’t that, Mike.”
    Shea ignored the protest. “As a matter of fact, to make the run more exciting, I might put my tag on the mayor still. It would not be the first time I bet against myself.”
    Winthrop put his elbows on the table. “Mike … you want a winner, no matter where the bets are.”
    Mike wagged his head in affirmation. “My mother, God rest her, knew me no better. And that, Alex, is why I’d like to see you run—to try your strength. You may not win at all, you know. The people are notoriously ungrateful.” Mike could reverse himself with the ease of an eel. “You couldn’t just run on your record, fine as it is. You would have to present yourself and make a few promises. You cut a beautiful figure on the speaker’s platform—you know that, Alex? There’s the look of the boy about you—the All-American who grew up to be mayor of Traders City and God knows what next in this grand country of ours. You’re a young man, Alex.”
    “I’m not far from fifty.”
    “Fifty! Holy Mother of God! I swear to you, if I was fifty again, I’d run myself.” Shea talked a bit of the man who had died in office; he spoke devoutly, for great things had indeed been expected of the deceased. But in any case, Mike always spoke highly of the dead.
    Winthrop had surrendered entirely to thoughts of himself. There was no escaping the truth that he wanted elective office at this moment more than anything in life … more even, God forgive him, than the thing that might very well stand in his way: his relationship with Elizabeth Fitzgerald. He knew of no one who actually was aware of the relationship, but he was sure that a number of people suspected