Last Chance was a hamlet in southeastern Kansas. Last Chance, though
fervid, was not large. Indeed, a cowboy in a spirit of insult born of
a bicker with the town marshal had said he could throw the loop of
his lariat about Last Chance and drag it from the map with his pony.
However, this was hyperbole.
Jim Britt was not the least conspicuous among the men of Last Chance.
Withal, Jim Britt was much diffused throughout the commerce of that
village and claimed interests in a dozen local establishments, from
a lumber yard to a hotel. Spare of frame, and of an anxious predatory
nose, was Jim Britt; and his gray eyes ever roving for a next
investment; and the more novel the enterprise, the more leniently did
Jim Britt regard it. The new had for him a fascination, since he was in
way and heart an Alexander and hungered covetously for further worlds to
conquer. Thus it befell that Jim Britt came naturally to his desire to
build a railway when the exigencies of his affairs opened gate to the
suggestion.
Jim Britt became the proprietor of a lead mine--or was it zinc?--in
southeastern Missouri, and no mighty distance from his own abode of Last
Chance. The mine was somewhat thrust upon Jim Britt by Fate, since
he accepted it for a bad debt. It was “lead mine or nothing,” and Jim
Britt, whose instincts, like Nature, abhorred a vacuum, took the mine.
It was a good mine, but a drawback lurked in the location; it lay over
the Ozark Hills and far away from any nearest whistle of a railroad.
This isolation taught Jim Britt the thought of connecting his mine by
rail with Last Chance; the latter was an easiest nearest point, and the
route offered a most accommodating grade. A straight line, or as the
crow is said to fly but doesn’t, would make the length of the proposed
improvement fifty miles. When done, it would serve not only Jim Britt’s
mine, but admirably as a feeder for the Fort Scot and Gulf; and Jim
Britt foresaw riches in that. Altogether, the notion was none such
desperate scheme.
There was a side serious, however, which must be considered. The line
would cross the extreme northeast angle of the Indian Territory, or as
it is styled in those far regions, the “Nation,” and for this invasion
of redskin holdings the consent of the general government, through its
Congress assembled, must be secured.
Jim Britt; far from being depressed, said he would go to Washington and
get it; he rather reveled in the notion. Samantha, his wife, shook her
head doubtfully.
“Jim Britt,” said Samantha, severely, “you ain’t been east since Mr.
Lincoln was shot. You know no more of Washington than a wolf. I’d give
that railroad up; and especially, I’d keep away from Congress. Don’t
try to braid that mule’s tail”--Samantha was lapsing into the metaphor
common of Last Chance--“don’t try to braid that mule’s tail. It’ll kick
you plumb out o’ the stall.”
But Jim Britt was firm; the mule simile in no sort abated him.
[Illustration: 0199]
“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.’”