Standish’s contesting delegates from the other six counties sat sullen and grim in the gallery. Fraudulent Conover delegates, who had usurped the formers’ places by the various ruses so successfully put into action at the caucuses, held the credentials and occupied the seats belonging by rights to the Leaguers on the floor of the Convention Hall. There the Machine delegates smilingly sat and awaited the moment when they should name their Boss as candidate for Governor. From the seats of the usurpers there went up a merry howl of derision as Standish’s two little blocks of delegates from Matawan and Wills marched in and took their places well down in front, where they formed a pitifully small oasis among the Conover delegates from Bowden, Carney, Haldane, Jericho, Sparta and Pompton counties. There was no cheering by the Standish delegates on the floor of the convention. Nine out of ten knew that it was practically a hopeless fight into which they were about to plunge, and they knew, too, that not one of them would have been given his rightful place as a delegate, had it not been that even Conover feared to outrage sentiment in those ever-turbulent rural counties, as he had done in the larger and more “loyal” sections of the State. Karl Ansel, with an inscrutable grin on his long, leathery face, might have sat for a picture of a typical poker player, as he slipped into his place at the head of the Wills County delegation. If the shadow of defeat was in his heart, it did not rest upon his lignum vitæ features. What mattered it that his every opponent was smugly aware that the League’s cards were deuces? It was Karl’s business to wear the look of a man secure behind a pat flush. And he wore it. But at heart he was sore distressed for the hopes of the brave lad he had learned to like so well. And, as he watched the swelling ranks of Conover delegates, his sorrow hardened into white-hot wrath. Standish was nowhere in sight. Following the ordinary laws of campaign etiquette, he did not show himself before the delegates in advance of the nomination; but, like Conover, sat in temporary headquarters behind the stage. About him were a little knot of Civic Leaguers, some of them men who had run the risk of personal violence in the campaign in their fight to obtain a square deal for the young reformer against the Juggernaut onrush of the Machine. One and all they were Job’s comforters, for they knew it would take a miracle now to snatch the nomination from the Railroader’s grip.