"Look mad, Jerry," advised Rankin, in humorous appreciation of the whole demonstration. The remark did not exactly please Garwood, and for an instant he did look mad, but he smiled again and composed his features to the dignity required of him in that hour. Some of the private carriages followed in his train and the crowd streamed along the sidewalks on each side of the street. A number of small boys trudged in the deep white dust, mingled with the band, or crowded after Garwood's carriage, breaking into a trot now and then in their determination to keep up with the procession. Two or three of them, in order to identify themselves more closely with the affair, laid their dirty little hands on the panels of the carriage. Garwood felt an inward resentment at this, and when Rankin lolled over in his seat and snatched the cap from the matted head of one of the boys, and the crowd on the sidewalk laughed uproariously, Garwood felt like rebuking him. He had a moral conviction that at least two other boys were swinging on the springs behind the carriage, and he would have liked to dislodge them, but he knew he dare not. In the last ten minutes imperial ambitions had stirred within him. He began already to dream of triumphal marches amid wider scenes, with troops or at least policemen lining the curb, and yet his politician's sense reminded him of the quickness with which American voters resent any little assumption of undemocratic airs, however much they may like it on a larger scale. And so when Rankin, to appease the frightened lad whose cap he had snatched, took the youngster by the collar and dragged him into the carriage, Garwood felt it would be better to laugh with him and with the crowd. The procession turned into Main Street, and so on down to the square, with its old brown court house and its monument inscribed to the soldiers and sailors of Polk County, though Polk County had never had any sailors. The procession ended at the Cassell House, though why can hardly be told. Garwood did not live there, but all processions of that kind in Grand Prairie end at the Cassell House. The band stopped in front of the hotel, and the musicians seized off their caps, mopped their brows and looked around toward Rankin furtively, thinking of beer. But Rankin, again swinging his dangerous little bag, was making a way through the crowd toward the wide door. Garwood was almost lifted from his carriage, and felt himself helplessly swept into the hotel office on the great human breaker that rolled in that way. When his feet touched the floor again, the loud cry went up: "Speech! Speech!" Rankin turned toward him. "You'll have to give it to 'em, Jerry, 'fore they'll let you go."