A pleasant local custom fell this night into abeyance. Years out of mind the adherents of the leading political parties had mingled sociably before a non-partisan bulletin board in the courthouse, much as hostile camps fraternize in the truce forerunning peace. But the old, simpler order of things had suffered more wrenches than one in this acrid congressional campaign, and the warring factions could unite only on the hibernian proposition that union was impossible. One party, therefore, made ready to gather in the accustomed place, the other in the Grand Opera House, while seceding remnants from both swelled the crowd in the street before the office of the Whig, which, with unlooked-for enterprise, had prepared to announce the returns by stereopticon.

At six o'clock Shelby broke his fast with a ravenous meal at the hotel, which Bowers shared, and three-quarters of an hour later the two men shouldered through the boisterous mob in the streets to Shelby's law office, where arrangements had been perfected to receive the returns by messenger and private wire. The Whig bulletin over the way had already massed a constituency extending to the Temple lawn, which, in default of definite news, it was edifying with views of foreign travel and cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne just arrived from the Tuscarora House.

Shelby was in rare fettle.

"William, thou abstemious youth," he addressed the clerk, "I am tempted to empty one of these cold bottles down your scandalized neck and pack you off with another for the Widow Weatherwax!"

He had the youth carry the wine to the rear room and set out glasses against the coming of his friends, drinking a bumper meanwhile to William's good health and the sentiment Confusion to Fusion. Never a solitary winebibber, and William remaining recalcitrant, he returned to the outer office and demanded "no heeltaps" of the operator and Bowers. This accomplished to his taste, he crammed a greenback into the dazed clerk's fingers and dismissed him for the night with the injunction to buy and blow the biggest tin horn in New Babylon.

His intimates now began to drift in, and the toast of Confusion to Fusion enjoyed a wide popularity, the telegraph operator and the county chairman being the only ones permitted to flag in the exacting ceremonies which the occasion required.

"I'll do my hurrahing when the returns are in," said Bowers, and stripping to his shirt sleeves he took his station under a drop-light and made ready to figure the local result.

But the local returns were tardy. It developed early that throughout the Demijohn split tickets had prevailed to an unprecedented extent. Heretofore reliable localities ran after strange socialistic and prohibition gods, to avoid voting for either of the leading candidates; while Graves and Shelby both gained support in quarters where it would have been sheer fatuity to hope. The hurrying news from the country at large shamed the dribble at the threshold. Texas and Vermont, those stock commonplaces of election night humor, went Democratic and Republican by the usual majorities, and all signs pointed to a sweeping victory for Shelby's party in state and Union. And still Tuscarora and the Demijohn aped the Sphinx.

Men elsewhere became curious. Bowers received and passed silently to Shelby demands for a forecast from other county chairmen in the district; from leaders prominent in the state; from great metropolitan newspapers which were tabulating the congressional elections of the nation and studying the complexion of the future House.

"Claim the district, of course," directed Shelby. "Say we're deliberate, but true blue."

The drumming humble-bee [Transcriber's note: bumble-bee?] voice of the crowd below the windows watching Volney Sprague's bulletin suddenly lifted in a lion roar. Elation in that quarter was ominous, and Shelby drew a curtain. It appeared that a minor revolt against the Boss in New York City, with which the Tuscarora independents had felt themselves peculiarly in sympathy, had made good its claim for recognition. Shelby turned from the window with a laugh.

"Merely a little extra diplomacy for Old Silky," he said. "Within a twelvemonth each reformer will have a foreign mission."

A tactless friend embraced the occasion to wonder where the Boss would banish Bernard Graves should he chance to win; but even idle speculation on such a possibility was so distasteful to the company that the blunderer only retrieved his mistake by toasting Confusion to Fusion anew.

The returns from the laggard Demijohn presently thickened, and Shelby left his seat to pace the floor, while Bowers, with an unlighted cigar between his teeth, and looking very like Grant indeed, figured, discarded, and figured again as successive reports modified his calculations.

"Never saw its equal—never!" he grunted. "Here's our own town hanging fire till almost the last like some jay village in the Adirondacks. We've always prided ourselves on being prompt." He caught a flying sheet from the operator and groaned: "We are the last! By the Great Horn Spoon!" For Shelby's ear alone he muttered: "The last, Ross; New Babylon's the last, and the die by which you lose or win. Figure it yourself."

Shelby ran through his senior's calculations and nodded without speech. No one spoke now. Not a wine-glass tinkled. The room sensed a crisis. By telephone, special messenger, and the instrument at the table the belated story of New Babylon's vote pieced itself together under Bowers's pencil. The candidate hovered above him, intent on every stroke.

"Good God!" he whispered suddenly; "it hangs on the Flats!"

"Yes; it's the last precinct. They sent word that the thick-skulled Poles and the rest had made an awful mess of the ballots. Tom"—to one of the onlookers—"'phone the Flats again."

But on the instant the Flats embodied itself in the doorway in the person of a breathless messenger. Bowers's trembling fingers fumbled the paper and cast it fluttering toward the floor, but Shelby fastened on it in mid-air, read it, crumpled it, mechanically made it smooth again, and laid it gently on his desk. There came a second roar from the street, a medley of cheers, groans, hisses, and the blare of horns. Shelby again drew a curtain. On the Whig's screen was displayed a huge rooster with the legend: IT'S GRAVES!

Shelby caught a murmuring from the group behind him: vapid expressions of regret, scorching condolence, pitying oaths; then the voice of a newcomer, a newspaper correspondent, asking Bowers if they conceded their defeat.

He spun about, crying,—

"We concede nothing."

The reporter said that the returns as received indicated a slight majority for the fusion candidate.

"We dispute the returns."

"But, Ross,—" Bowers put in.

"We dispute the returns. Should the official count be adverse, we shall dispute that. In view of the methods employed by the allies of the independents, it becomes nothing less than a public duty to carry the contest to the floor of the House of Representatives."

"It will be a House of your political friends," remarked the correspondent, impersonally. "Shall I then quote you as claiming your election?"

"Most emphatically, yes. Quote me as confident of a verdict approving my public course and rebuking the slanderous attack on my private character."

"What's the use?" protested Bowers, as the reporter hurried off in quest of Bernard Graves. "It's too late to bluff."

"Use," echoed Shelby. "I tell you, man, there's a blunder in the returns. Look, man, look!" snatching up the report from the Flats. "Isn't that arrant nonsense on the face of it? The Flats, mind you; our own little pocket borough of the Flats! Don't talk to me about the Poles muddling things; those inspectors of election can give them cards for stupidity and take every trick. Let me 'phone the Flats."

And he was right. The inspectors of the belated precinct, conscious of unwonted delay, nervous from long weighing of defective ballots, harassed by incessant demands for their report, had capped the climax of their offending by announcing the result as favorable to Graves. The mistake was discovered and rectified within fifteen minutes of its commission. Shelby had carried the precinct, and with it the election by something less than two hundred votes.

Giddy with the reaction, the Hon. Seneca Bowers gulped glass after glass of champagne, toasting Confusion to Fusion like the veriest roisterer.

"And we abused the Poles," he said in self-reproach. "Ross, it was the
Poles who saved the day."

Shelby was the one self-contained being in the room.

"Yes," he answered soberly, "it was the Poles."

With stern straightforwardness the Whig bulletin over the way had promptly set forth the corrected result, and the crowd, now swollen by more deserters from the tame gatherings in the little theatre and the court-house, was clamoring for a sight of the victor whom everybody knew was within hearing. Shelby's jubilant companions were puzzled at his reluctance to comply with the popular demand. He declined to show himself, however, till the arrival of a serenading brass band compelled an acknowledgment, when he stepped from a window to a little balcony and spoke a few grave words: he had never doubted their support, they had repaid his trust, he was grateful; as he had championed their lesser interests in the smaller field, so should he strive to further their greater concerns in the national lists to which he was to pass their chosen knight.

Within the law office preparations were rife for adjourning to the Tuscarora House as a less restricted arena for the celebration which the fitness of things demanded. Shelby begged them to go before him, promising to follow.

"I need a few minutes to myself, boys," he said. "It's been a strain, you know."

They caroused away. Bowers the most jocund bacchanal of all; the operator boxed over his instrument against harm and slipped out; and Shelby was left solitary with the litter and the lees. One by one he extinguished the lights, and in darkness, at length, halted at the window from which he had so often marked the goings and comings of Ruth Temple. The old house was brilliantly alight in its lower rooms; lit, he dared hope, in honor of his triumph and his anticipated return. He turned and left his office with elastic step.

Fumbling with the lock in the dim light of the hall, he was spied from below by a newsboy who came bounding up the stairs.

"Extry! Extry 'dition of th' Whig, Mr. Shelby," he called. "Read all about yer 'lection an' th' drowndin' accident!"

"Drowning accident!" Shelby started and seized a paper. "Who is drowned?"

The lad did not know. He had not read beyond the headline which seemed to promise salability. But in the obscurity of the landing Shelby came upon the particulars swiftly enough. Skimming the brief despatch, here a sentence, there a sentence seared itself into his memory.

"Missed his train at Centreport—conscientious citizen, valuing his vote—hired a naphtha launch—collision—hampered by clothing—leaves a sorrowing widow—"

"Th' extry 'dition is two cents," reminded the urchin.