Rankin, when he saw the crowd with Garwood as its center, halted suddenly and jerked his hat down over his eyes. He drew Bailey hurriedly to the bar near the mirrored partition that screened the scene within from the street without, and made a sign to Steisfloss. The saloon-keeper, with an alert appreciation of the situation which his long experience with men in their cups had taught him, silently moved that way, and bent a listening ear toward the newcomers. "Give us a little drink--an' hurry. We'll get out--don't let him see," said Rankin. Steisfloss's heavy German face showed none of the gratitude he felt, and quietly, almost surreptitiously, he set glasses and bottle before the successful candidate at that day's primaries and the man who had brought his success to pass. Before they could take their liquor, some one at the edge of the crowd near Rankin noticed him. Rankin's quick eye detected the recognition, and he pulled the fellow toward him. "Sh!" he whispered. "Don't let him see us. I didn't know he's here, or we'd not come in. We'll duck. How long's he been in here?" "Oh," said the man, "ever since he got that last news from the First Ward." Rankin could not restrain the gleam of pleasure that shot from his eye at the memory of that triumph, but the gleam softened as he stole a look at Garwood, and then, at last, died quite away, and there came in its stead an expression of pain and pity. "Poor Jerry!" he said, "I thought he's a little off when he came--" he checked himself, and then--"when I saw him this afternoon," he continued. He looked at him for another moment, and then he said, angrily, to the man whom all the time he kept between him and the crowd: "Why don't some o' you fellers get him out o' here? What do you want to let him disgrace himself that-away fer?" The man looked at Rankin and shrugged his shoulders to tell how helpless they all were. "We've tried," he said. He looked around toward Garwood, who, having concluded another speech, was tipping his glass into his mouth, his head toppling on his neck as he did so. The man turned back again to Rankin, still with that helpless look, but, suddenly, with a flash of the eye as if a new thought had just come to him, he said: "You try, Jim; you could do it. He thinks more of you to-day than of all the rest put together." Rankin faced the bar and hastily swallowed his bourbon. "No," he said; "that's past." And then he and Bailey slipped away. "Poor Jerry!" sighed Rankin, as they went out the door. But the Singed Cat, whose personality was destined so soon to become the passion of the cartoonists, turned and cast back at his defeated rival one of those glances from his unsearchable little eyes. XIII