The returns--county, state and national--were received at the office of the Daily Evening News; by seven o'clock the place was packed. Candidates and prominent citizens were crowded inside the railing that marked off the business department and the editorial department; while outside the railing and stretching on outdoors, into the street, the male populace of the town herded together in an almost solid mass. Inside, the air was streaky with layers of tobacco smoke and rich with the various smells of a small printing shop on a damp night. Behind a glass partition, hallway back toward the end of the building, a small press was turning out the weekly edition, smacking its metal lips over the taste of the raw ink. Its rumbling clatter, with the slobbery sputter of the arclights in the ceiling overhead, made an accompaniment to the voices of the crowd. Election night was always the biggest night of the year in our town--bigger than Christmas Eve even. The returns at large came by telegraph, but the returns of the primaries were sent in from the various precincts of town and county by telephone; or, in cases where there was no telephone, they were brought in by hard-riding messengers. At intervals, from the telegraph office two doors away, a boy would dash out and worm his way in through the eager multitude that packed and overflowed the narrow sidewalk; and through a wicket he would fling crumpled yellow tissue sheets at the editor of the paper. Then the editor would read out: “Seventeen election districts in the Ninth Assembly District of New York City give Schwartz, for coroner--” “Ah, shuckin's! Fooled again!” “St. Louis--At this hour--nine-thirty--the Republicans concede that the entire Democratic state ticket has won by substantial majorities--” “Course it has! What did they expect Missouri to do?” “Buffalo--Doran--for mayor, has been elected. The rest of the reform ticket is----” “Oh, dad blame it! Henry, throw that stuff away and see if there ain't some way to get something definite from Lang's Store or Clark's River on the race for state senator!” “Yes, or for sheriff--that's the kind of thing we're all honin' to know.” The telephone bell rang. “Here you are, Mr. Tompkins--complete returns from Gum Spring Precinct.” “Now--quiet, boys, please, so we can all hear.” It was on this night that there befell the tragedy I made mention of in the first paragraph of this chapter. The old County Ring was smashing up. One by one the veterans were going under. A stripling youth not two years out of the law school had beaten old Captain Daniel Boone Calkins for representative; and old Captain Calkins had been representative so many years he thought the job belonged to him. Not much longer was the race for sheriff in doubt, or the race for state senator. Younger men snatched both jobs away from the old men who held them.