“But what could you do with Congress?” persisted Samantha; “you, a stranger and alone?”

Jim Britt argued that one determined individual could do much; energy wisely employed would overcome mere numbers. He cited the ferocious instance of a dim relative of his own, a vivacious person yclept Turner, who because of injuries fancied or real, hung for years about the tribal flanks of the Comanches and potted their leading citizens. This the vigorous Turner kept up until he had corralled sixty Comanche top-nots; and the end was not yet when the Comanches themselves appealed to their agent for protection. They said they couldn’t assemble for a green corn dance, or about a regalement of baked dog, without the Winchester of the unauthorized Turner barking from some convenient hill; the squaws would then have nothing left but to wail the death song of some eminent spirit thus sifted from their midst. When they rode to the hill in hunt of Turner, he would be miles away on his pony, and adding to his safety with every jump. The Comanches were much disgusted, and demanded the agent’s interference.

Upon this mournful showing, Turner was brought in and told to desist; and as a full complement of threats, which included among their features a trial at Fort Smith and a gibbet, went with the request, Turner was in the end prevailed on to let his Winchester sleep in its rack, and thereafter the Comanches danced and devoured dog unscared. The sullen Turner said the Comanches had slain his parent long ago; the agent expressed regrets, but stuck for it that even with such an impetus a normal vengeance should have run itself out with the conquest of those sixty scalps.

Jim Britt told this story of Turner to Samantha; and then he argued that as the Comanches were made to feel a one-man power by the industrious Turner, so would he, Jim Britt, for all he stood alone, compel Congress to his demands. He would take that right of way across the Indian Territory from between their very teeth. He was an American citizen and Congress was his servant; in this wise spake Jim Britt.

“That’s all right,” argued the pessimistic Samantha; “that’s all right about your drunken Turner; but he had a Winchester. Now you ain’t goin’ to tackle Congress with no gun, Jim Britt.”

Despite the gloomy prophecies of Samantha, whom Jim Britt looked on as a kind of Cassandra without having heard of Cassandra, our would-be railroad builder wound up the threads and loose ends of his Last Chance businesses, and having, as he described it, “fixed things so they would run themselves for a month,” struck out for Washington. Jim Britt carried twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket, confidence in his heart, and Samantha’s forebode of darkling failure in his ears.

While no fop and never setting up to be the local Brummel, Jim Britt’s clothes theretofore had matched both his hour and environment, and held their decent own in the van of Last Chance fashion. But the farther Jim Britt penetrated to the eastward in his native land, the more his raiment seemed to fall behind the age; and at the last, when he was fairly within the gates of Washington, he began to feel exceeding wild and strange. Also, it affected him somewhat to discover himself almost alone as a tobacco chewer, and that a great art preserved in its fullness by Last Chance had fallen to decay along the Atlantic. These, however, were questions of minor moment, and save that his rococo garb drove the sensitive Jim Britt into cheap lodgings in Four-and-one-half Street, instead of one of the capital’s gilded hotels, they owned no effect.

This last is set forth in defence against an imputation of parsimony on the side of Jim Britt. He was one who spent his money like a king whenever and wherever his education or experience pointed the way. It was his clothes of a remote period to make him shy, else Jim Britt would have shrunk not from the Raleigh itself, but climbed and clambered and browsed among the timberline prices of its grill-room, as safe and satisfied as ever browsed mountain goat on the high levels of its upland home. Yea, forsooth! Jim Britt, like a sailor ashore, could spend his money with a free and happy hand.

Jim Britt, acting on a hint offered of his sensibilities, for a first step reclothed himself from a high-priced shop; following these improvements, save for the fact that he appalled the eye as a trifle gorgeous, he might not have disturbed the sacred taste of Connecticut Avenue itself. In short, in the matter of garb, Jim Britt, while audible, was down to date.

With the confidence born of his new clothes—for clothes in some respects may make the man—Jim Britt sate him down to study Congress. He deemed it a citadel to be stormed; not lacking in military genius he began to look it over for a weak point.

These adventures of Jim Britt now about a record, occurred, you should understand, almost a decade ago. In that day there should have been eighty-eight senators and three hundred and fifty-six representatives, albeit, by reason of death or failure to elect, a not-to-be-noticed handful of seats were vacant.

By an industrious perusal of the Congressional directory, wherein the skeleton of each House was laid out and told in all its divers committee small-bones, Jim Britt began to understand a few of the lions in his path. For his confusion he found that Congress was sub-divided into full sixty committees, beginning with such giant conventions as the Ways and Means, Appropriations, Military, Naval, Coinage, Weights and Measures, Banking and Currency, Indian, Public Lands, Postal, and Pensions, and dwindling down to ignoble riffraff—which owned each a chairman, a committee room, a full complement of clerks and messengers, and an existence, but never convened—like the Committee on Acoustics and Ventliation, and Alcoholic Liquor Traffic.

Jim Britt learned also of the Sergeants at Arms of Senate and House, and how these dignitaries controlled the money for those bodies and paid the members their salaries. Incidentally, and by way of gossip, he was told of that House Sergeant who had levanted with the riches entrusted to his hands, and left the broken membership, gnashing its teeth in poverty and impotent gloom, unable to draw pay.

Then, too, there was a Document Room where the bills and resolutions were kept when printed. Also, about each of the five doors of House and Senate, when those sacred gatherings were in session, there were situated a host of messengers, carried for twelve hundred dollars a year each on the Doorkeeper’s rolls. It was the duty and pleasure of these myrmidons to bring forth members into the corridors, to the end that they be refreshed with a word of counsel from constituents who had traveled thither for that purpose; and in the finish to lend said constituents money to return home.

Jim Britt, following these first connings of the directory, went personally to the capitol, and from the galleries, leaning his chin on the rail the while, gazed earnestly on greatness about the transaction of its fame. These studies and personally conducted tours, and those conversations to be their incident which came off between Jim Britt and chance-blown folk who fell across his pathway, enlarged Jim Britt’s store of information in sundry fashions. He discovered that full ten thousand bills and resolutions were introduced each Congress; that by virtue of a mere narrowness of time not more than five per cent, of this storm of business could be dealt with, the other ninety-five, whether for good or ill, being starved to death for lack of occasion. The days themselves were no longer than five working hours since Congress convened at noon.

The great radical difference between House and Senate loomed upon Jim Britt in a contrast of powers which abode with the presiding officers of those mills to grind new laws. The president of the Senate owned few or none. He might enforce Jefferson’s rules for debates and call a recalcitrant senator to order, a call to which the recalcitrant paid little heed beyond tart remarks on his part concerning his own high determinations to yield to no gavel tyranny, coupled with a forceful though conceited assurance flung to the Senate at large, that he, the recalcitrant, knew his rights (which he never did), and would uphold them (which he never failed to do.) The Senate president named no committees; owned no control over the order of business; indeed he was limited to a vote on ties, a warning that he would clear the galleries (which was never done) when the public therein roosting, applauded, and the right to prevent two senators from talking at one and the same time. These marked the utmost measure of his influence. Any senator could get the floor for any purpose, and talk on any subject from Prester John to Sheep in the Seventeenth Century, while his strength stood. Also, and much as dogs have kennels permitted them for their habitation, the presiding officer of the Senate—in other words, the Vice-President of the nation—was given a room, separate and secluded to himself, into which he might creep when chagrin for his own unimportance should overmaster him or otherwise his woes become greater than he might publicly bear.

The House Speaker was a vastly different cock, with a louder crow and longer spur. The Speaker was a king, indeed; and an absolute monarch or an autocrat or what you will that signifies one who may do as he chooses, exercise unbridled will, and generally sit beneath the broad shadows of the vine and the fig tree of his prerogatives with none to molest him or make him afraid. The Speaker was, so to phrase it, the entire House, the other three hundred and fifty-five members acting only when he consented or compelled them, and then usually by his suggestion and always under his thumb. No bill could be considered without the Speaker’s permission; and then for so long only as he should allow, and by what members he preferred. No man could speak to a measure wanting the gracious consent of this dignitary; and no word could be uttered—at least persisted in—To which he felt distaste. The Speaker, when lengths and breadths are measured, was greater than the Moscow Czar and showed him a handless infant by comparison.

As a half-glove of velvet for his iron hand, and to mask and soften his pure autocracy—which if seen naked might shock the spirit of Americanism—there existed a Rules Committee. This subbody, whereof the Speaker was chief, carried, besides himself, but two members; and these he personally selected, as indeed he did the entire membership of every committee on the House muster-rolls. This Rules Committee, with the Speaker in absolute sway, acted with reference to the House at large as do the Board of Judges for a racecourse. It declared each day what bills should be taken up, limited debate, and to pursue the Track simile to a last word, called on this race or cleared the course of that race, and fairly speaking dry-nursed the House throughout its travels, romps and lessons.

Jim Britt discovered that in all, counting Speaker, Rules Committee, and a dozen chairmen of the great committees, there existed no more than fifteen folk who might by any stretch of veracity be said to have a least of voice in the transaction of House business. In the gagged and bound cases of the other three hundred and forty-one, and for what public good or ill to flow from them, their constituents would have fared as well had they, instead of electing these representatives, confined themselves to writing the government a letter setting forth their wants.

In reference to his own bill, Jim Britt convinced himself of two imposing truths. Anybody would and could introduce it in either House or Senate or in both at once; then, when thus introduced and it had taken the routine course to the proper committee, the situation would ask the fervent agreement of a majority in each body, to say nothing of the Speaker’s consent—a consent as hard to gain as a girl’s—to bring it up for passage.

Nor was there any security of concert. The bill might be fashionable, not to say popular, with one body, while the other turned rigid back upon it. It might live in the House to die in the Senate, or succeed in the Senate and perish in the House. There were no safety and little hope to be won in any corner, and the lone certainty to peer forth upon Jim Britt was that the chances stood immeasurably against him wherever he turned his eyes. The camel for the needle’s eye and the rich man into heaven, were easy and feasible when laid side by side with the Congressional outlook for his bill.

While Jim Britt was now sensibly cast down and pressed upon by despair, within him the eagerness for triumph grew taller with each day. For one daunting matter, should he return empty of hand, Samantha would wear the fact fresh and new upon her tongue’s end to the last closing of his eyes. It would become a daily illustration—an hourly argument in her practiced mouth.

There was one good to come to Jim Britt by his investigations and that was a good instruction. Like many another, Jim Britt, from the deceitful distance of Last Chance, had ever regarded both House and Senate as gigantic conspiracies. They were eaten of plot and permeated of intrigue; it was all chicane and surprise and sharp practice. Congress was a name for traps and gins and pits and snares and deadfalls. The word meant tunnels and trap-doors and vaults and dungeons and sinister black whatnot. Jim Britt never paused to consider wherefore Congress should, for ends either clean or foul, conceal within itself these midnight commodities of mask and dark-lantern, and go about its destiny a perennial Guy Fawkes, ready to explode a situation with a touch and blow itself and all concerned to far-spread flinders. Had he done so he might have dismissed these murky beliefs.

It is, however, never too late to mend. It began now to dawn upon Jim Britt by the morning light of what he read and heard and witnessed, that both Houses in their plan and movement were as simple as a wire fence; no more recondite than is a pair of shears. They might be wrong, but they were not intricate; they might spoil a deal of cloth in their cutting, or grow dull of edge or loose of joint and so not cut at all, but they were not mysterious. Certainly, Congress was no more a conspiracy than is a flock of geese, and a brooding hen would be as guilty of a plot and as deep given to intrigue. Congress was a stone wall or a precipice or a bridgeless gulf or chloroform or what one would that was stupefying or difficult of passage to the border of the impossible, but there dwelt nothing occult or secret or unknowable in its bowels. These truths of simplicity Jim Britt began to learn and, while they did not cheer, at least they served to clear him up.

Following two weeks of investigation, Jim Britt secured the introduction of his bill. This came off by asking; the representative from the Last Chance district performing in the one body, while one of the Kansas senators acted in the more venerable convention.

Now when the bill was introduced, printed, and in the lap of the proper committee, Jim Britt went to work to secure the bill’s report. He might as well have stormed the skies to steal a star; he found himself as helpless as a fly in amber.

About this hour in his destinies, Jim Britt made a radical and, as it turned, a decisive move. He had now grown used to Washington and Washington to him, and while folk still stared and many grinned, Jim Britt did not receive that ovation as he moved about which marked and made unhappy his earlier days in the town. Believing it necessary to his bill’s weal, Jim Britt began to haunt John Chamberlin’s house of call as then was, and to scrape acquaintance with statesmen who passed hours of ease and wine in its parlors.

In the commencement of his Chamberlin experiences Jim Britt met much to affright him. A snowy-bearded senator from Nevada sat at a table. On seeing Jim Britt smile upon him in a friendly way—he was hoping to make the senator’s acquaintance—he of the snow-beard, apropos of nothing, suddenly thundered:

“I have this day read John Sherman’s defence of the Crime of ’Seventy-Three. John Sherman contends that no crime was committed because no criminals were caught.”

This outburst so dismayed Jim Britt that he sought a far corner and no more tempted the explosiveness of Snow-Beard.

Again, Jim Britt would engage a venerable senator from Alabama in talk. He was instantly taken by the helpless button, and for a quintette of hours told of the national need of a Panama Canal, and given a list of what railroads in their venality set the flinty face of their opposition to its coming about.

These things, the thunders of Snow-Beard and the exhaustive settings forth of the senator from the south, pierced Jim Britt; for he reflected that if the questions of silver and Panama could not be budged for their benefit by these gentlemen of beard and long experience and who dwelt well within the breastworks of legislation, then his bill for that small right of way, and none to aid it save himself in his poor obscurity, could hope for nothing except death and burial where it lay.

There was a gentleman of Congress well known and loved as the Statesman from Tupelo. He was frequent and popular about Chamberlin’s. The Statesman from Tupelo was a humorist of celebration and one of the redeeming features of the House of Representatives. His eye fell upon the queer, ungainly form of Jim Britt, with hungry face, eyes keen but guileless, and nose of falcon curve.

The Statesman from Tupelo beheld in Jim Britt with his Gothic simplicity a self-offered prey to the spear of every joker. The Statesman from Tupelo, with a specious suavity of accent and a blandness irresistible, drew forth Jim Britt in converse. The latter, flustered, flattered, went to extremes of confidence and laid frankly bare his railroad hopes and fears which were now all fears.

The Statesman from Tupelo listened with decorous albeit sympathetic gravity. When Jim Britt was done he spoke:

“As you say,” observed the Statesman from Tupelo, “your one chance is to get acquainted with a majority of both Houses and interest them personally in your bill.”

“But how might a party do that soonest?” asked Jim Britt. “I don’t want to camp yere for the balance of my days. Besides, thar’s Samantha.”

“Certainly, there’s Samantha,” assented the Statesman from Tupelo. Then following a pause:

“I suppose the readiest method would be to give a dinner. Could you undertake that?”

“Why, I reckon I could.”

The dinner project obtained kindly foothold in the breast of Jim Britt; he had read of such banquet deeds as a boy when the papers told the splendors of Sam Ward and the Lucullian day of the old Pacific Mail. Jim Britt had had no experience of Chamberlin prices, since his purchases at that hotel had gone no farther a-field than a now-and-then cigar. He had for most part subsisted at those cheap restaurants which—for that there be many threadbare folk, spent with their vigils about Congress, hoping for their denied rights—are singularly abundant in Washington. These modest places of regale would give no good notion of Chamberlin’s, but quite the contrary. Wherefore, Jim Britt, quick with railway ardor and to get back to the far-away Samantha, took the urgent initiative, and said he would order the dinner for what night the Statesman from Tupelo deemed best, if only that potent spirit would agree to gather in the guests.

“We will have the dinner, then,” said He of Tupelo, “on next Saturday. You can tell Chamberlin; and I’ll see to the guests.”

“How many?” said Chamberlin’s steward, when he received the orders of Jim Britt.

The coming railway magnate looked at the Statesman from Tupelo.

“Say fifty,” remarked the Statesman from Tupelo.

Jim Britt was delighted. He would have liked sixty guests better, or if one might, one hundred; but fifty was a fair start. There could come other dinners, for the future holds a deal of room. In time Jim Britt might dine a full moiety of Congress. The dinner was fixed; the menu left to the steward’s ingenuity and taste; and now when the situation was thus relaid, and Saturday distant but two days, Jim Britt himself called for an apartment at Chamberlin’s, sent for his one trunk, and established himself on the scene of coming dinner action to have instant advantage of whatever offered that might be twisted to affect his lead-mine road.

The long tables for Jim Britt’s dinner were spread in a dining room upstairs. There were fifty covers, and room for twenty more should twenty come. The apartment itself was a jungle of tropical plants, and the ground plan of the feast laid on a scale of bill-threatening magnificence.

This was but right. For when the steward would have consulted the exultant Jim Britt whose florid imaginings had quite carried him off his feet, that gentleman said simply:

“Make the play with the bridle off! Don’t pinch down for a chip.”

Thereupon the steward cast aside restraint and wandered forth upon that dinner with a heart care-free and unrestrained. He would make of it a moment of terrapin and canvas-back and burgundy which time should date from and folk remember for long to the Chamberlin praise.

Saturday arrived, and throughout the afternoon Jim Britt, by grace of the good steward, who had a pride of his work and loved applause, teetered in and out of the dining room and with dancing eye and mouth ajar gave rein to admiration. It would be a mighty dinner; it would land his bill in his successful hands, and make, besides, a story to amaze the folk of Last Chance to a standstill. These be not our words; rather they flowed as the advance jubilations of Jim Britt.

There was one thought to bear upon Jim Britt to bashful disadvantage. The prospect of entertaining fifty statesmen shook his confidence and took his breath. To repair these disasters he called privily from time to time for whiskey.

It was not over-long before he talked thickly his encomiums to the steward. On his last visit to survey that fairyland of a dining room, Jim Britt counted covers laid for several hundred guests; what was still more wondrous, he believed they would come and the prospect rejoiced him. There were as many lights, too, in the chandeliers as stars of a still winter’s night, while the apartment seemed as large as a ten-acre lot and waved a broad forest of foliage.

That he might be certainly present on the arrival of the first guest—for Jim Britt knew and felt his duties as a host—Jim Britt lay down upon a lounge which, to one side, was deeply, sweetly bowered beneath the overhanging palms. Then Jim Britt went earnestly to sleep and was no more to be aroused than a dead man.

The Statesman from Tupelo appeared; by twos and threes and tens, gathered the guests; Jim Britt slept on the sleep of innocence without a dream. A steering committee named to that purpose on the spot by the Statesman from Tupelo, sought to recover Jim Britt to a knowledge of his fortunate honors. Full sixty guests were there, and it was but right that he be granted the pleasure, not to say the glory, of their acquaintance.

It was of no avail; Jim Britt would not be withdrawn from slumbers deep as death. The steering committee suspended its labors of restoration. As said the chairman in making his report, which, with a wine glass in his hand, he subsequently did between soup and fish:

“Our most cunning efforts were fruitless. We even threw water on him, but it was like throwing water on a drowned rat.”

Thus did his slumbers defend themselves, and Jim Britt snore unchecked.

But the dinner was not to flag. The Statesman from Tupelo took the head of the table and the chairman of the steering committee the foot, the repast proceeded while wine and humor flowed.

It was a dream of a dinner, a most desirable dinner, a dinner that should stand for years an honor to Jim Britt of Last Chance. It raged from eight till three. Corks and jokes were popping while laughter walked abroad; speeches were made and songs were sung. Through it all, the serene founder of the feast slept on, and albeit eloquence took up his name and twined about it flowery compliment, he knew it not. Tranquilly on his lounge he abode in dear oblivion.

Things mundane end and so did Jim Britt’s dinner. There struck an hour when the last song was sung, the last jest was made, and the last guest departed away. The Statesman from Tupelo superintended the transportation of Jim Britt to his room, and having made him safe, He of Tupelo went also out into the morning, and that famous banquet was of the perfumed past.

It dawned Wednesday before the Statesman from Tupelo called again at Chamberlin’s to ask for the excellent Jim Britt. The Statesman from Tupelo explained wherefore he was thus laggard.

“I thought,” he said to Chamberlin, “that our friend would need Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to straighten up his head.”

“The man’s gone,” said Chamberlin; “he departed Monday morning.”

“And whither?”

“Home to Last Chance.”

“What did he go home for?”

“That dinner broke him, I guess. It cost about eighteen hundred dollars, and he only had a little over a hundred when the bill was paid.”

The Statesman from Tupelo mused, while clouds of regret began to gather on his brow. His conscience had him by the collar; his conscience was avenging that bankruptcy of Jim Britt.

The Statesman from Tupelo received Jim Britt’s address from the hands of Chamberlin’s clerk. The next day the Statesman from Tupelo wrote Jim Britt a letter. It ran thus:

Chamberlin’s Hotel.

My Dear Sir:—

Don’t come back. Write me in full the exact story of what you want and why you want it. I’ve got a copy of your bill from the Document Room, and so soon as I hear from you, shall urge the business before the proper committee.

When Jim Britt’s reply came to hand, the Statesman from Tupelo—whom nobody could resist—prevailed on the committee to report the bill. Then he got the Speaker, who while iron with others was as wax in the hands of the Statesman from Tupelo, to recognize him to bring up the bill. The House, equally under his spell, gave the Statesman from Tupelo its unanimous consent, and the bill was carried in the blink of a moment to its third reading and put upon its passage. Then the Statesman from Tupelo made a speech; he said it was a confession.

The Statesman from Tupelo talked for fifteen minutes while the House howled. He told the destruction of Jim Britt. He painted the dinner and pointed to those members of the House who attended; he reminded them of the desolation which their appetites had worked. He said the House was disgraced in the downfall of Jim Britt, and admitted that he and his fellow diners were culpable to a last extreme. But there was a way to repair all. The bill must be passed, the stain on the House must be washed away, Jim Britt must stand again on his fiscal feet, and then he, the Statesman from Tupelo, and his fellow conspirators, might once more look mankind in the eye.

There be those who will do for laughter what they would not do for right. The House passed Jim Britt’s bill unanimously.

The Statesman from Tupelo carried it to the Senate. He explained the painful situation and described the remedy. Would the Senate unbend from its stern dignity as the greatest deliberative body of any clime or age, and come to the rescue of the Statesman from Tupelo and the House of Representatives now wallowing in infamy?

The Senate would; by virtue of a kink in Senate rules which permitted the feat, the Jim Britt Bill was instantly and unanimously adopted without the intervention of a committee, the ordering a reference or a roll-call. The Statesman from Tupelo thanked the Senate and withdrew, pretending emotion.

There was one more journey to make, one more power to consult, and the mighty work would be accomplished. The President must sign the bill. The Statesman from Tupelo walked in on that tremendous officer of state and told him the tale of injury done Jim Britt. The Statesman from Tupelo, by way of metaphor, called himself and his fellow sinners, cannibals, and showed how they had eaten Jim Britt. Then he reminded the President how he had once before gone to the rescue of cannibals in the case of Queen Lil. Would he now come to the relief of the Statesman from Tupelo and his fellow Anthropophagi of the House?

The President was overcome with the word and the idea; he scribbled his name in cramped copperplate, and the deed was done. The Jim Britt Bill was a law, and Jim Britt saved from the life-long taunts of Samantha, the retentive. The road from Last Chance to the lead mine was built, and on hearing of its completion the Statesman from Tupelo wrote for an annual pass.

“Then it was luck after all,” said the Red

Nosed Gentleman, “rather than management to save the day for your Jim Britt.”

“Entirely so,” conceded the Jolly Doctor.

“There’s a mighty deal in luck,” observed the Red Nosed Gentleman, sagely. “Certainly, it’s the major part in gambling, and I think, too, luck is a decisive element in every victory or defeat a man experiences.”

“And, now,” observed the Sour Gentleman, “now that you mention gambling, suppose you redeem your promise and give us the story of ‘How to Tell the Last Four.’ The phrase is dark to me and has no meaning, but I inferred from what you were saying when you used it, that you alluded to some game of chance. Assuredly, I crave pardon if I be in error,” and now the Sour Gentleman bowed with vast politeness.

“You are not in error,” returned the Red Nosed Gentleman, “and I did refer to gambling. Casino, however, when played by Casino Joe was no game of chance, but of science; his secret, he said in explanation, lay in ‘How to Tell the Last Four.’”