"Did I say Jim Rankin?" answered Pusey. "If I did, I meant Jim Rankin's men." "Oh," Garwood and Hale exclaimed together in a weak, unconvinced note. Garwood looked at Pusey more charitably, and Pusey returned the look by one of subtlest meaning. Thus they stood and gazed at each other for a whole minute, that seemed, in the stillness that dripped into the room, a whole age. It was, in the end, Hale who spoke. "We'll have to do something, turn some sort of a trick, and do it quick. Zeph Bailey ain't here for nothing!" Hale had drawn his watch from his pocket. "What time is it?" Garwood asked. Hale looked at his watch again. "Two-thirty," he replied. He had once been a railroader. "The bank closes at four," said Garwood. He began slowly and hesitatingly to button his waistcoat, and as though to occupy some irresolute moment that awaited the formation of big issues, he poured himself another drink, and gulped it, making a wry face. Another moment passed while the two men stood narrowly watching him. "The polls close at seven, don't they?" he asked. "Don't know but they do," replied Pusey. Then Garwood, with the firmness of a final decision, put his hat on his head. "You wait here," he said. Then he bolted from the room. X The old ramshackle hack that had made its stand in front of the Cassell House so long that it had acquired the status of a local institution, was tearing furiously out Sangamon Avenue. The appearance of this ancient vehicle outside its proper habitat, usually betokened some emergency; and when Emily, with an ear keen for omens that day, heard the rattle of its rheumatic joints far down the street, and when she saw it verify her impression of disaster by turning in at the carriage gate and rolling up under the dripping trees, she flew to the door with her face as white as if she had seen a messenger boy coming with a telegram. When she saw the door of the hack burst open before the hack itself could come to a stop, and Jerome imperil his bones by leaping out between its wheels, she was relieved to have him whole and sound before her eyes, for she had half expected to see his limp form borne in by careful attendants. Her fears were partly realized when she saw his gray face and the blue circles that lay under his eyes, and they were expressed in the breathless voice in which she exclaimed, as he leaped up the steps: "Jerome! What is it!" "Come in here--quick," he said. She followed him at speed, imploring him to confess that he was ill. He did not answer, but led the way in hot haste to the sitting room, and then across that to Emily's little writing desk, which stood open in the bay window. She watched him in wonderment as he fumbled in the breast of his coat and produced at last a paper, which, rustling forth, he spread before her on the desk. Then he seized a pen, plunged it in the ink, and pushing her into the chair he had dragged up to the desk, he said: "Here Em--sign this--quick!"