“To have a talk with him and straighten things out, of course. You don’t want to lose any time rectifying the blunder you’ve made. Tell Jake that you’ve been thinking things over, and you’ve decided that you’d like one of those tickets, after all. If you can afford it, it would be a good scheme to take two, to help smooth things over, you know.” Owen Sheridan laughed heartily at this suggestion. “Say, if I could get the job of postmaster general to-morrow merely by buying one of those tickets, I wouldn’t buy one!” he declared resolutely. CHAPTER II. SUMMONED BY THE BOSS. Owen Sheridan’s comrades had not been guilty of exaggeration in warning the young man of the danger he ran in antagonizing Boss Coggswell. Great reforms have been effected in the United States postal service since the time when Sheridan entered the department, and politicians of Samuel J. Coggswell’s ilk are no longer able to terrorize and corrupt the employees by means of a “pull” at Washington. A certain famous post-office investigation resulted in the indictment of many big and little postal officials, and the laying bare of a startling system of fraud, corruption, and official misconduct; and made it, happily, a thing of the past; but before that big house-cleaning occurred, the power of the political boss was a thing to be feared by every carrier and clerk in the department. Owen was not greatly disturbed by the warnings. Young, optimistic, self-confident, he could scarcely bring himself to believe that the big career he had mapped out for himself in the department could be checked or affected merely by his refusal to buy a ticket to a political picnic. The idea appeared preposterous. He would succeed, he told himself confidently, in spite of the antagonism of Samuel J. Coggswell and his lieutenant, Jake Hines. He was painstaking, a hustler, and keen of mind; these qualities, he felt sure, were bound to win his promotion in time--even without any politician’s pull. “No, I’m not worrying much about Mr. Coggswell,” he said to himself, with a smile, as he stood at his “case” in the post office, sorting the mail for his delivery route, the morning after his encounter with Jake Hines. “But what is worrying me a lot more,” he went on, with a frown, “is this confounded---- By Jove! Here’s another one of ’em now!” The cause of his emotion was an envelope which had just turned up in the pile of mail he was sorting. For several minutes his long, nimble fingers had been going through the heap of letters with such speed and dexterity that it seemed impossible that he could be separating and arranging them in rotation, according to the house numbers on his delivery route. He seemed scarcely to glance at the addresses on the envelopes; it appeared to be a purely mechanical operation.