“And you won’t work against me, Cap’n Townsend? I can’t tell you how sorry I am about--about this whole business.” “Never mind. You can tell it all at the rally. It ought to be interesting to hear and, if it is interesting enough, it may bring some votes into port that have been hanging in the wind. I can’t say for sure, but it may.... There! I can’t spare any more time just now.... Nabby!” raising his voice. “Nabby!” Mrs. Gifford appeared between the curtains. Her employer waved a hand toward his visitor. “Nabby,” he said, “just see that Mr. Mooney finds his way out to his buggy, will you.... Good-night, Mooney.” The honorable representative of an ungrateful constituency, thus unceremoniously dismissed, followed Mrs. Gifford to the dining room and from there to the side entrance to the mansion. Foster Townsend watched him go. Then he shrugged, sniffed disgustedly, and, pulling the soft hat down upon his forehead, strode through the hall, stopped to take an umbrella from the rack, and stepped out through the front door into the rainy blackness of the night. The few who met and recognized him as he tramped the muddy sidewalks bowed reverentially and then stopped to stare. For Captain Foster Townsend, greatest among Ostable County’s great men, to be walking on an evening such as this--walking, instead of riding in state behind his span of blacks--was an unheard-of departure from the ordinary. Why was he doing it? Where was he bound? What important happenings hung upon his footsteps? They could not guess, nor could their wives or sons and daughters when the story was told them. They were right, however, when they surmised that the magnate’s errand must be freighted with importance. It was--vastly important to him and no less so to the members of another household in the village of Harniss. CHAPTER II