The salary attached to the treasurership was not large but it was enough, or would have been if Marty had not gambled. One good black winter suit and one good black summer suit will last many years in Riverbank, and Marty always seemed properly dressed in black. He was slender and what we called “natty.” His hair was as black as night. During his second term he began to show the effects of his nights. His face became paler than it should have been, and some mornings he was so tremulous he took a glass of whisky to steady his hands. With all this he was immensely popular, and when the chances of the campaign in which he was finally beaten were discussed Mart Ware was the one man no one believed could be beaten. He lost by twenty votes. As David walked down the hill toward Main Street and Seth Hardcome's shoe store he thought of these things. Mart Ware was one man, if there were any, who had been thrown out of office through David's part in the campaign. To that extent he was specifically responsible; in the broader sense that he was his “brother's keeper” it was his duty to do all he could to save any man or woman in such trouble as Marty was in. A year or two earlier Seth Hardcome, his tough old body beginning to feel the draughts and changes of temperature of his long, narrow store, had had Belden, the contractor, partition off an office across the rear, and here David found the old man. He was standing at his tall desk, making out half-yearly bills against the coming of the first of January, and he pushed his spectacles up into his hair and turned to David with the air of a busy man interrupted. “Well, dominie!” David put his hand on the back of one of the chairs near the little stove that heated the office. “Can you sit down for a minute or two!” he asked. “Have you time to talk facts and figures; to give me a business man's good advice!” “Why, yes,” said Hardcome; “I guess you ain't going to try to sell me any stocks and bonds, eh! I guess you're one man I don't have to be afraid of that with. Facts and figures, eh! Fire away!” David seated himself and put one knee over the other. The warmth of the stove was grateful after the chill air outside, and he rubbed his palms back and forth against each other. “Do you know--or, if you don't know exactly, can you guess fairly dose to it--what the campaign we had last month cost our crowd!” David asked. “County or city!” asked Hardcome. “I guess there wasn't much spent outside the city.” “I was thinking of the city,” said David. “Well, we _raised_ pretty close to four thousand dollars,” said Hardcome, “and we _spent_ more than that. We _spent_ more than four thousand dollars. Halls, fireworks, speakers, printing--costs a lot of money! I guess the other fellows spent three times that, so we can't complain. I hear the liquor makers poured a lot of money into Riverbank, and I guess it's so. Wouldn't surprise me at all if they spent ten or twelve thousand.”