"Pusey?" she repeated, in surprise. But Garwood made no answer. He was thinking of the old days when he was always met by Rankin, and usually by half a dozen of Rankin's followers gathered together to give _éclat_ to the congressman's home-coming. But now there was no one to meet him but Emily. He insisted upon a carriage to be driven home in, saying the ride from Olney in the common coach had nearly killed him, and when, above the rattle of the old hack's windows, Emily said: "I'm so glad to have you home again," her last words somehow expressed the whole situation against which his nature was in revolt, and he cried out: "Yes, home again! Nice time to be called away from Washington! What are they all trying to do here now, do you know?" "They seem," Emily replied, "to be trying to defeat you for a third term." "Well, I sometimes wish they'd succeed," said Garwood; "sometimes I get sick of this whole business of politics, and wish----" Emily was sitting upright, her face turned away from him in her disappointment. "So do I," she acquiesced, in a low voice. "Well," Garwood growled, as if she and not he himself had suggested the very disaster which of all others he most feared, "they won't beat me this time, I'll tell 'em that. I reckon Jim Rankin's at the bottom of it all." VIII The curtains were drawn at the windows of Garwood's law office that night, but the thin lip of light that outlined the casement told to belated men in Grand Prairie that a conference was going on within. The primaries were but two days off, and a vague uncertain quality in the rays that straggled into the gloom and lightened the rusty gilt letters of Garwood's sign, creaking as it had done for so many years in the wind, might have hinted to the imaginative something of the straits in which the little council gathered within found itself. Had such a one been acquainted with politics in that prairie district, and had seen Jim Rankin pass by at midnight under the trees that swayed the thick black shadows of their foliage dizzily to and fro on the wide stone sidewalk, and noted the curious smile that glimmered an instant on Rankin's face, when from force of old habit he raised an upward glance, he would have concluded that serious obstacles beset the way of Jerome B. Garwood in that career to which as a man of destiny he had believed himself ordained, and from which the inconstant and ever-changing circle of his friends had expected so much. Garwood had come home to find his political condition desperate. He himself, out of the anger that showed black in his face during those hot and trying days, described the situation as a revolt and, had he been possessed of the power, would gladly have punished the rebels by such stern repressive measures as autocratic governments employ in the terror their inherent weakness inspires.