“I’ve spoken to some of my friends,” Fogg went on, “and there will be a crowd up here to-night. I reckon you’d better rub up a little something in the way of a speech, Justin. And if you happen to hear a brass band filling the air with march music, don’t get scared and bolt like a stampeding broncho, for that will be the new band they’ve organized in town coming up to serenade you. You’re a public character now, and you’ve got to stand such things.” Fogg left Clayton’s with growing confidence. He believed that Justin would be pliable, if properly manipulated. “If I can only jolly him along here I can manage him when we get to Denver,” was his thought. Though Justin was strong enough now to take short rides about the valley, he did not visit the Davison ranch that day. Lucy was temporarily absent from home, he was glad to know. So he shut himself up at Clayton’s and tried to take stock of the situation. His thoughts were chaotic. The thing he would have chosen had come to him, but in a manner so strange that he could hardly be sure it was desirable. As he did not know what he ought to say to the people who would gather there that evening, he did not try to put together the few thoughts in the way of a speech which Fogg had suggested. For Paradise Valley that was a great gathering. At nightfall the new band came down from the town, braying its loudest. Horsemen, and men on foot and in carriages, seemed to spring out of the ground. They overflowed the little house, for Clayton’s hospitality urged them to make themselves at home anywhere, and they filled the yard, yelling lustily. Fogg set up some gasolene torches, and came out of the house, accompanying Justin. The noise, the cries for him to appear, the music of the band, the leaping call of aroused ambition, tingled Justin’s blood. He felt his soul swell, when he heard that roar. It was a feeling wholly new and he could not define it, but it caused him to lift his head and step with sure precision as he passed through the doorway with Fogg to the little piazza in front of the house. Before him some farmers, in whose midst he saw Sloan Jasper, were bellowing their delight. Farther out he saw Steve Harkness, by the light of the torch which flared red in his face. At Harkness’s side was Dicky Carroll; and both were yelling with wide-open mouths, and swinging their big hats, as they sat on their horses. Justin knew that he trembled, but it was not because he distrusted himself, or feared to face these people. As he came out upon the piazza, Fogg, the diplomat, took him affectionately by both hands, his fat face beaming with simulated joy, as he introduced to these people the newly-elected—their newly-elected—representative. Fogg’s remarks took the form of a wordy panegyric, whose chief note was that, as Justin had been elected by what seemed to be a spontaneous uprising of the whole people, he would go to Denver as the representative of the whole people, and not of any party or faction.