"You ought not to have come, Shirley. Perhaps you had better not stay."
Shirley looked narrowly at Challoner and at his wife. After a moment she
inquired:--
"Don't you want me to stay?"
"Yes, yes, of course we do," Miriam assured her, "but you don't want to
stay, do you?"
"Indeed I do," was the girl's quick answer.
"What good will it do," sighed Miriam; but, nevertheless, she found
herself clinging to the girl as she did in every crisis when Shirley
happened to be on hand.
"Do you suppose I'd miss being in at the death?" said Shirley after a
moment.
"At the death?"
"Yes, I could see him hanged, drawn and quartered!" she exclaimed, with
mock ferociousness.
Meanwhile, Mixley and McGrath were still holding their desultory
conversation upon the situation of the day.
"They said," Mixley remarked to the other, "that the chief was
politically dead after he had blackjacked the organisation; maybe he
was--maybe he is, but he fights all right."
"He certainly cleaned things up," admitted McGrath, feeling of his
biceps. "We helped him, eh?"
"He didn't do a thing to Cradlebaugh's," mused Mixley.
"Nor to the machine," smiled McGrath.
"Well, anyhow," said Mixley, "if he hasn't got the machine and the
brewers and the twenty-five-thousand-dollar assemblymen back of him,
he's got the people, all right. They know he's honest."
"Oh, yes, he's honest, and they know it," assented the other. "But hang
it! The people can't get him into the Senate. It takes more than the
people--it takes good money to do that. At least," he added
emphatically, "it always has, up to date."
Mixley shook his head.
"If he only had half a million behind him now...."
The other snorted.
"It's well he hasn't--well he never had. If he had half a million, he
wouldn't be running for United States Senator! Just like as not, he'd be
playin' golf or running a devil wagon."
"Gee, what a scorcher he'd be!"
"And he'd be so loaded with golf medals," added the other, "that he
couldn't walk."
"Well, it's a man's fight he's got on hand, now, and no mistake--and
with nothing but his honesty to back him."
The three visitors had been listeners to this conversation in silence;
but Shirley could contain herself no longer; and turning to her
companions, she said sneeringly:--
"Nothing but his honesty to back him! Why, lynching's too good for him!"
And as though her utterance of the phrase were the prosecutor's cue,
Murgatroyd sauntered into the room. He looked as fresh and unconcerned
as though he did not know that a bloodless battle was being fought for
him down at the State Capitol--a close battle, at that.