Her husband snorted. “Say!” he repeated. “They will say enough. Dear, dear! I hope this won’t mean that Foster is going to be too hard hit, in a money way. Once--a good while ago, it was, the time when the news came that Cook had been granted his appeal to the Supreme Court--he said to me then: ‘Well, Ben,’ he says, ‘I’ve bet all but my Sunday shirt on this particular horse. Looks now as if I might have a chance to bet that.’ It was more than he ever said before or since, but it set me wondering. Tut, tut, tut!” gloomily. “If he should be hard hit and have to really come down in the world there will be a lot of mean little mud frogs hopping out of their holes to croak at him, won’t there. He hits right and left when he’s mad and he has left a good many sore heads up and down Ostable County. This will be their chance--if it is true.” The evening papers confirmed the tidings brought by the telegram. Elisha Cook had won his suit and the amount of damages granted him was large indeed. Foster Townsend was a wealthy man, how wealthy no one knew save himself, but even a millionaire would find it hard to pay such a sum. The “mud frogs” emerged from their holes and croaked and the summary of their croakings was to the effect that chickens had come home to roost. “He’s been stampin’ all hands under foot for twenty years, now he’s stamped on, himself. Let’s see how he likes it.” The croakers foresaw ruin, utter and complete. Even the great man’s staunchest followers, members of what the hitherto crushed minority had referred to as “the Townsend gang,” were stunned to silence by the newspaper details of the Cook triumph. In Denboro, a certain section of it, there was rejoicing. “This neighborhood is on the map again,” crowed the Denborites. “We shan’t have to crawl on our knees through Harniss when we want our rights, in politics or anything else. It’s our turn now.” From Provincetown to Wapatomac there was chatter of this kind. In political circles certain heads were raised and hopes, hitherto moribund, began to revive. The county boss had been beaten. His infallibility was a thing of the past. If beaten in one way, why not in others? The Honorable Mooney, now a Representative of his state in the halls of Congress at Washington, began to hear from other galled jades who, like himself, had winced beneath the Townsend whip.