The Railroader, with a dozen or more men—district leaders, ward captains and picked adherents of his own—sat about the big centre table of his study, an Arthur, somewhat changed in the modernizing and surrounded by equally altered Paladins. A telegraph operator sat at an instrument in a far corner of the room, jotting down and carrying to the table such few despatches as were at last beginning to trickle in. At Conover’s left a ticker purred forth infrequent lengths of message-laden tape. The table was littered with papers, yellow sheets of “flimsy,” bottles, glasses and open cigar boxes. The henchmen lounged about, drinking and smoking in nervous suspense, fighting over again the day’s battle, and hazarding innumerable diverse opinions on the bearing each new despatch would have on the general result. All were in a greater or less state of tension, and relieved it by frequent resource to the battalion of bottles that dotted the board. Conover, alone of them all, touched no liquor. Before him was a big cup of black coffee, which a noiseless-treading footman entered the room every few minutes to renew. “Ain’t that li’ble to keep you awake to-night, Boss?” asked Shevlin, as he watched the fourth cupful vanish at a swallow. “It don’t bother me any more,” returned Caleb, “I’m too used to it. But I can remember when a single cup of it at Sunday morning breakfast would make me so I couldn’t sleep a wink all church time. I’d toss from one end of my pew to the other the whole morning. I couldn’t seem to drowse no matter how long Father Healy’s sermon was. ’Nother county heard from?” as the operator laid a message before him. “Read it, Billy.” “Delayed in transmission,” spelled Shevlin. “Jericho County, with two precincts missing, gives Conover 7,239, Standish 4,895.” A yell went around the table. Bourke scribbled hurriedly on a pad, then announced: “That offsets the Standish lead in Haldane by 780. Two to one you’ve got Bowden, too.” A purr from the ticker, and Caleb caught up the tape. “This machine don’t agree with you,” he reported. “Bowden complete gives me 5,861 and Standish 6,312. That cuts us down a bit.” “Did you ever see such a rag-time ’lection!” growled Shevlin. “It’s like a seesaw board. One minute it’s you, and the next minute it ain’t. What’s the hay-eaters up-State thinkin’ about, anyhow? A year ago they’d no more ’a’ dared to——” “A year’s a long time, son, in a country that makes a hero to order one day and puts him into the discard the next.” “Oh, if you’d ’a’ only just let us work like we always have before! We’d ’a’ sent this Standish person screechin’ up a tree. He’d ’a’ thought a whale had bit him! But with all this amachoor line of drorin’-room stunts at the polls an’ givin’ him the chance to——” “That’s _my_ business,” replied Caleb. “Cut it out.”