So he told her the story of the Clinton convention; how the delegations from the seven counties that comprised the Thirteenth Congressional District, his district, as he was already careful to speak of it, had gone there and stubbornly balloted for one, two, three days without a change or a break, until a thousand ballots had been cast, and men were worn and spent with the long-drawn agony of those tense hours in the stifling opera house. He felt a touch of the old fear that had come over him when he heard on Thursday night that Tazewell County would go to Sprague the next day, and it looked as if, the deadlock thus broken, Sprague would be chosen. "You see," he explained, "Sprague had his own county, Moultrie, and Logan, and if he got Tazewell it would mean thirty votes more--almost a cinch." The girl's attention flagged in her effort to penetrate the mysteries of ballots and delegations. "That was the night I wrote you," he went on, and her interest brightened with her understanding. "I was mighty blue that night." He made a pause, for the pity of it. "And that was the night, too, when Jim Rankin came to the front. I never knew him to rise to such heights of political ability before. I tell you, Emily, we must be good to Jim Rankin--he's the best friend we've got. He went out after supper, and was out all the night. When he came in at four o'clock in the morning--I had just thrown myself on the bed in my clothes to snatch a wink of sleep--he came into our room and said, 'Well, Jerry, my boy, we've got him skinned now--Piatt will go to you on the first ballot to-morrow, and McKimmon will swing Mason on the second--and that'll settle it.'" Garwood paused. She sat with her chin on her hand. The lace of her sleeve fell back, exposing her round forearm, white like marble in the moonlight that was spilling through the purple shadows of the trees and trickling on her dress. But a soberness had clouded her eyes. "How do you suppose he did it, Jerome?" she asked presently. "I don't know," Garwood answered, "and what's more," he added with a dry little laugh, "I don't want to." The girl's soberness deepened as the silence in which she received his last words lengthened. Garwood glanced at her in some concern, and then he hurried on. "Well, it came out just as he said. The next morning Piatt County threw her vote to me on the first ballot, and by the time it got down to Tazewell it was all over with Sprague; his man Simp Lewis--you've heard me speak of him--moved to make it unanimous, and the noise began." He laughed again, this time in sheer joy as he lived those hours once more. "It lasted all morning, when we weren't making speeches telling how we loved each other, and the party, and the dear old flag; it lasted all the way over here on the train, until I got home and saw everybody but the one woman I'd done it all for." "But you saw me in the crowd while you were speaking from the hotel balcony, didn't you?"