“I’m going to make a speech,” he announced with the broad smile that showed a flash of white teeth. “I reckon it’ll be the first I ever made here, and I promise it will be the last, boys. But I won’t keep you long, either. You all know how things have been going; how men have been moving in and out and buying men here like as if they were cattle on the hoof. You’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it. But we didn’t have the nerve to say it should stop. One man did. He’s the biggest man in this big State to-day, and it ain’t been five minutes since I heard you hollar your lungs out cursing him. You know who I mean—Sam Yesler.” He waited till the renewed storm of cheers and hisses had died away. “It don’t do him any harm for you to hollar at him, boys—not a mite. I want to say to you that he’s a man. He saw our old friends falling by the wayside and some of you poor weaklings selling yourselves for dollars. Because he is an honest, game man, he set out to straighten things up. I want to tell you that my hat’s off to Sam Yesler. “But that ain’t what I rose for. I’m going to name for the United States senate a clean man, one who doesn’t wear either the Harley or the Ridgway brand. He’s as straight as a string, not a crooked hair in his head, and every manjack of you knows it. I’m going to name a man”—he stopped an instant to smile genially around upon the circle of uplifted faces—“who isn’t any friend of either one faction or another, a man who has just had independence enough to quit a big job because it wasn’t on the square. That man’s name is Lyndon Hobart. If you want to do yourselves proud, gentlemen, you’ll certainly elect him.” If it was a sensation he had wanted to create, he had it. The Warner forces were taken with dumb surprise. But many of them were already swiftly thinking it would be the best way out of a bad business. He would be conservative, as fair to the Consolidated as to the enemy. More, just now his election would appeal to the angry mob howling outside the building, for they could ask nothing more than the election of the man who had resigned rather than order the attack on the Taurus, which had resulted in the death of some of their number. Hoyle, of the Democrats, seconded the nomination, as also did Eaton, in a speech wherein he defended the course of Ridgway and withdrew his name. Within a few minutes of the time that Eaton sat down, the roll had been called and Hobart elected by a vote of seventy-three to twenty-four, the others refusing to cast a ballot. The two young women, sitting together in the front row of the gallery, were glowing with triumphant happiness. Virginia was still clapping her hands when a voice behind her suggested that the circumstances did not warrant her being so happy over the result. She turned, to see Waring Ridgway smiling down at her. “But I can’t help being pleased. Wasn’t Mr. Yesler magnificent?” “Sam was all right, though he might have eased up a bit when he pitched into me.”