“No,” says Mis’ Sykes, serene, “the people as a whole never do see sense. It’s always a few that has to do the seeing.” “I know,” says Mis’ Toplady, “I know. But what I think is this: _Which few?_” “Why, them that best supports the party measures,” says Mis’ Sykes, superior. But Mis’ Toplady, she shook her head. “It don’t follow out,” she says, firm. “Legs ain’t the only things they is to a chair.” Nor, as us ladies saw it, the polls ain’t all there is to election day. And we done what we could, steadfast and quick and together, up to the very night before the day that was the day. On election-day morning, I woke up before daylight and tried to tell if the sun was going to shine. The sky wasn’t up there yet--nothing was but the airful of dark. But acrost the street I see a light in a kitchen--it was at the station agent’s that had come home to the hot breakfast his wife had been up getting for him. One of ’em come out to the well for a bucket of water, and the pulleys squeaked, and somebody’s dog woke up and barked. Back on the trail road somebody’s baby was crying. Down acrost the draw the way-freight whistled and come rumbling in. And there was Friendship Village, laying still, being a town in the dark with nobody looking, just like it was being one all day long, with people looking on but never sensing what they saw. It seemed, though, as if they must get it through their heads that day that the town was being a town right before their face and eyes--having a kind of a performance to do, like digestion, or thinking, or working; and having something anxious and fluttered inside of it, waiting to know what was going to become of it. I could almost sense this at six o’clock, when Mis’ Toplady and I hurried down to the market square. Yes, sir, six o’clock in the morning it was. We had engineered it that the flight of the flying-machine should be at seven o’clock, so’s everybody could have a chance to see it on their way to work, and so’s they should be at the market-square doings before they went to the polls. The sun _was_ shining like mad, and the place looked all expectant and with that ready-to-nod look that anything got ready beforehand will always put on. Only this seemed sort of a special nod. We’d had a few board seats put up, and a platform that ’most everybody had the idea the airship was going up from. The machine itself was over in the corner of the square near the wood-yard under a wagon-shed they’d made over for it. And to a stand near the platform the Friendship Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality had advertised to serve hot coffee and hot griddle-cakes and sausages. And we begun on the coffee and the sausages long enough ahead so’s by the time folks was in the high midst of arriving, the place smelled like a kitchen with savory things a-doing on the cook-stove.