Nor was there any security of concert. The bill might be fashionable, not to say popular, with one body, while the other turned rigid back upon it. It might live in the House to die in the Senate, or succeed in the Senate and perish in the House. There were no safety and little hope to be won in any corner, and the lone certainty to peer forth upon Jim Britt was that the chances stood immeasurably against him wherever he turned his eyes. The camel for the needle’s eye and the rich man into heaven, were easy and feasible when laid side by side with the Congressional outlook for his bill. While Jim Britt was now sensibly cast down and pressed upon by despair, within him the eagerness for triumph grew taller with each day. For one daunting matter, should he return empty of hand, Samantha would wear the fact fresh and new upon her tongue’s end to the last closing of his eyes. It would become a daily illustration--an hourly argument in her practiced mouth. There was one good to come to Jim Britt by his investigations and that was a good instruction. Like many another, Jim Britt, from the deceitful distance of Last Chance, had ever regarded both House and Senate as gigantic conspiracies. They were eaten of plot and permeated of intrigue; it was all chicane and surprise and sharp practice. Congress was a name for traps and gins and pits and snares and deadfalls. The word meant tunnels and trap-doors and vaults and dungeons and sinister black whatnot. Jim Britt never paused to consider wherefore Congress should, for ends either clean or foul, conceal within itself these midnight commodities of mask and dark-lantern, and go about its destiny a perennial Guy Fawkes, ready to explode a situation with a touch and blow itself and all concerned to far-spread flinders. Had he done so he might have dismissed these murky beliefs. It is, however, never too late to mend. It began now to dawn upon Jim Britt by the morning light of what he read and heard and witnessed, that both Houses in their plan and movement were as simple as a wire fence; no more recondite than is a pair of shears. They might be wrong, but they were not intricate; they might spoil a deal of cloth in their cutting, or grow dull of edge or loose of joint and so not cut at all, but they were not mysterious. Certainly, Congress was no more a conspiracy than is a flock of geese, and a brooding hen would be as guilty of a plot and as deep given to intrigue. Congress was a stone wall or a precipice or a bridgeless gulf or chloroform or what one would that was stupefying or difficult of passage to the border of the impossible, but there dwelt nothing occult or secret or unknowable in its bowels. These truths of simplicity Jim Britt began to learn and, while they did not cheer, at least they served to clear him up.