During that twenty years whenever, to further his ends in a primary or in an election, Charley Hedrick needed the votes of the rough element that gathered about our little town, Abner Handy, card-sharper and jack-leg lawyer, would go forth into the byways and alleys and gather them in. For this service, when Hedrick carried the county--which was about four times out of five--Handy was rewarded by being put on the delegation to the State convention. Thus he made his beginning in State politics. The second time that he attended a State convention Handy swelled up in his Sunday clothes, and by reason of his slight acquaintance with the manipulators of State politics, began to patronise the other members of our delegation--good, honest men, whose contempt for him at home was unspeakable; but when they huddled like sheep in the strange crowd at the convention they often accepted Handy as a guide in important matters. In talking with the home delegation Handy very soon began speaking of the convention leaders familiarly as "Jim" and "Dick" and "Tawm" and "Bill," and sometimes Handy brought one of these dignitaries to the rooms of our delegation and introduced him to our people with a grand flourish. Every time the legislature met, Ab Handy was a clerk in it, and, if he was a clerk of an important committee like the railroad committee or the committee on the calendar, he invariably came home with a few hundred dollars, three suits of clothes and a railroad pass. No one but Charley Hedrick could live with him for six months afterward. It was when he returned from one of these profitable sessions that Abner Handy and Nora Sinclair were married. The affinity between them was this: his good clothes and proud manner caught her; and her social position caught him. Everyone in town knew, however, that Nora Sinclair had been too smart for Handy. She had him hooked through the gills before he knew that he was more than nibbling at the bait. The town concurred with Colonel Morrison--our only townsman who travelled widely in those days--when he put it succinctly: "Ab Handy is Nora Sinclair's last call for the dining-car."