"Amos, I've got you cornered if you consider the visible universe. She works like a watch; she's as predestined as a corn sheller. But let me tell you something--she isn't all visible. There's something back of matter--there's another side to the shield. I know mighty well there's a time when my medicine won't help sick folks--and yet they get well. I've seen a great love flame up in a man's heart or a woman's heart or a child's in a bed of torture, and when medicine wouldn't take hold I've seen love burn through the wall between the worlds, and I have seen help come just as sure as you see the Harvey Hook and Ladder Company coming rattling down Market Street! Funny old world--funny old world--seventy rides around the sun--and then the fireworks." After puffing away to revive his pipe he said: "I sort of got into this way of thinking recently going over this judgeship fight." He smoked meditatively then broke out, "Lord, Lord, what an iron-clad, hog-tight, rock-ribbed, copper-riveted material proposition it is that Tom is putting up. He's bound self-interest with self-interest everywhere. He and Joe Calvin have roped old man Sands in, and every material interest in this whole district is tied up in the Van Dorn candidacy. I'm a child in a cyclone in this fight. The self-interest of the county candidates, of all the deputies who hope two years from now to be county candidates, and all their friends, every straw boss at the shops, in the smelters, in the mines--and all the men who are near them and want to be straw bosses, every merchant who is caught in the old spider's web with a ninety-day note; every street-car conductor, every employee of the light company, every man at the waterworks plant, every man at the gas plant, the telephone linemen--every human being that dances in the great woof of this little spider's web feels the pull of devilish material power." Amos Adams threw back his grizzled head in a laugh that failed to vocalize. "Well, Jim, according to your account you're liable to get burned and singed and disfigured until you're as useless in politics as this old Amos Adams--the spook chaser!"