"You are dead straight, for a fact. And I think I have got just as good an opinion of myself as you have of yourself. You put me in the United States Senate with that tongue of yours--God, you can talk!--and I'll take the chances of even you getting me out. It will take more than eloquence to upset a great State machine, and before I get through I'll have the Democratic machine stronger than the Republican is to-day. You can't get anywhere in this country without the machine, and the man in control stays in control unless he falls down, and this I don't propose to do. I'll swap frankness and tell you right here that when I'm boss I may let you come to Congress as my colleague, but that you've got to do as I say when you get there. What do you say to that?" "I'll take all the chances. At least we understand each other. I work for you now, and I break the power of both you and your infernal machine when I am a citizen of the United States." "Shake," said Colton. And they shook. XXVI Isabel sat idly on the veranda of her old hotel as was her habit in the evening hour. There had been no heavy rains as yet to freshen the hills and swell the tides until the salt waters scalded the juices from the marsh grass, turning it from green to bronze and red; and the barometer was stationary. A cool wind came in from the sea with the flood, and Isabel enjoyed the beauty that was hers all the more luxuriously in her thick shawl of white wool. A great part of the valley north and south was within the range of her vision, and it was suffused with gold under a sky that looked like an inverted crucible pouring down its treasures in the prodigal fashion of the land. Facing her house and on the opposite side of the marsh, at its widest here, was a high wall of rock, from which the valley curved backward on either side, tapering to the great level in the north, but on the south halting abruptly before the mass of mountains following the coast line and topped by the angular shoulder of Tamalpais; coal black to-night against the intense gold of the West.