Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) is joined Thursday by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) at a rally in Wichita. Roberts is in a tight race against independent Greg Orman. (Mark Reinstein/For The Washington Post)

The bus tour was supposed to last two days and cover 335 miles. It would be a desperate trip across the state’s midsection in which two out-of-state senators would try to sell Kansans on a politician who has represented Kansans since 1981.

The guest of honor rode the bus for only the first mile. That was all. That was enough. He was here.

“I have some prepared remarks, but I’m going to skip through them pretty quick so we can get to ‘The Man,’ ” said Sen. Pat Roberts (R) at a campaign rally here in downtown Wichita.

Finally, he got to the point: “The prairie fire from Texas, Ted Cruz!”

This was Roberts’s own event, a key piece of his last-minute effort to beat an independent challenger, win a fourth term and avoid being the Republican who fumbled the GOP’s hopes of winning the Senate. But on this day, Roberts’s role was essentially to introduce Cruz — and be grateful that the Texas Republican would ride the first mile on Roberts’s bus.

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“God bless the great state of Kansas!” Cruz shouted to big cheers. “And God bless my friend, Pat Roberts!” he said to lesser cheers.

Roberts, 78, is now in danger of doing the near-impossible: to lose, as a Republican incumbent, in a state that has been electing Republicans to the Senate since 1938. After surviving a primary against a hard-right challenger, Roberts now faces a challenge from independent candidate Greg Orman, who refuses to say which party he would align himself with in the Senate.

Democrats got their no-shot candidate to drop out so the anti-Roberts vote could unify behind Orman. Recent polls have shown both Orman and Roberts in the lead.

One powerful attack on Roberts is that he has let his ties to Kansas grow distant and loose. The senator makes his home in the Virginia suburbs, and his residence in Kansas is the spare bedroom of a campaign donor.

In response, Republicans have dispatched leaders from several of their party’s ideological tribes — everyone from former Senate majority leader Robert J. Dole (Kan.) to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Their task is to do a kind of unusual inside-out sales job. If Kansans don’t feel like they know Roberts anymore — well, these politicians sure know him. And they’re sure Kansans would like him.

On Thursday, in Wichita, there were two more character witnesses from Washington: Cruz and Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.). Their relative value was made clear by Roberts’s introduction.

Roberts, left, looks on as Cruz speaks in Wichita. (Mark Reinstein/For The Washington Post)

“We have a very special guest,” he told the crowd, “along with Tom Coburn.”

Before the event, a couple of dozen Orman and Roberts supporters battled passive-aggressively for the corner of Main and Murdock in downtown Wichita — trying to dominate the spot where Cruz would get off the bus.

“Try and out-wave their kids,” said Mary Ware of the group Women for Kansas, who was the de facto leader of the Orman forces.

The people on her side included a woman waving a sign reading, “Hey, Roberts, go back to Virginia!” She had come in from California. Some Orman supporters made no secret of their liberal leanings. When Roberts supporters chanted “Greg’s a Dem!” one Orman supporter responded “Yay!”

One Orman supporter pulled out a banjo and others began to play the tambourine and cowbell. “Hit the road, Pat” they sang, and TV cameras clustered. “Squeeze in! Go down” a Roberts staffer shouted, sending his people to wave Roberts signs in the middle of the shot.

Finally the bus arrived, and the three senators walked through a cordon made of Roberts signs. Coburn went first, praising Roberts for being like him: a strong fiscal conservative. Then Roberts spoke. He seemed frustrated by his own lack of power in Washington, even after so many years.

“I have fought [Senate Majority Leader Harry M.] Reid and [President] Obama. I really have,” he said, but lamented that Reid had blocked his proposed amendments to a recent farm bill.

Finally came Cruz, who praised Roberts for being like him: fighting Obama’s health-care law, opposing Obama’s immigration proposals and joining Cruz on the Senate floor during the Texas senator’s talking filibuster last year.

Cruz also praised Coburn, who stood on the opposite side of the stage. The two senators had differed mightily last year when Coburn objected to Cruz’s efforts to shut down the government in a hopeless attempt to end the health-care law.

But now the two men are in different places. Coburn is retiring and Cruz is a power broker, urging conservatives to move past a primary that featured tea partyer Milton Wolf and support Roberts.

He said that if Orman won, he would reveal his true colors as a Democrat. “If you’re frustrated with Washington, the answer is [not] to stay home and keep Harry Reid as majority leader.”

Then the speeches were over. Coburn slipped out the side. Roberts posed for a few photos. As he did, Ollie Angell of Wichita — a Wolf voter — was waiting for him. “If you’ll get his endorsement . . .” he told Roberts, meaning the primary opponent.

“Listen, we’re trying to do that,” Roberts told him, and moved on. As he did, another woman in the crowd turned to Angell and told him to wake up.

“We have to look at the big picture,” said Mary Kay Ricke, another anti-tax activist from Wichita. “You know, the stick in the wheel in Congress.” She meant that a Republican Senate would stop Obama like a stick in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

Roberts and Coburn got onto the bus and it drove off, but Cruz stayed and worked the room that Roberts had left. He posed for photos and shook hands. He gave a brief news conference. A reporter asked him whether Roberts agrees with him in opposing same-sex marriage.

“We can talk about all sorts of issues, but I can tell you . . .” Cruz said. Then he was back to Reid and Obama and his trust in the voters of Kansas. “I’ve got faith in Midwestern common sense,” Cruz finished, and then was hustled out a back door.

“That wasn’t an answer,” the reporter said as Cruz left. Outside, Cruz walked to a pickup truck and drove away. The next stop on Roberts’s bus tour was 140 miles away in Topeka. The Man wasn’t going.