Following two weeks of investigation, Jim Britt secured the introduction of his bill. This came off by asking; the representative from the Last Chance district performing in the one body, while one of the Kansas senators acted in the more venerable convention. Now when the bill was introduced, printed, and in the lap of the proper committee, Jim Britt went to work to secure the bill’s report. He might as well have stormed the skies to steal a star; he found himself as helpless as a fly in amber. About this hour in his destinies, Jim Britt made a radical and, as it turned, a decisive move. He had now grown used to Washington and Washington to him, and while folk still stared and many grinned, Jim Britt did not receive that ovation as he moved about which marked and made unhappy his earlier days in the town. Believing it necessary to his bill’s weal, Jim Britt began to haunt John Chamberlin’s house of call as then was, and to scrape acquaintance with statesmen who passed hours of ease and wine in its parlors. In the commencement of his Chamberlin experiences Jim Britt met much to affright him. A snowy-bearded senator from Nevada sat at a table. On seeing Jim Britt smile upon him in a friendly way--he was hoping to make the senator’s acquaintance--he of the snow-beard, apropos of nothing, suddenly thundered: “I have this day read John Sherman’s defence of the Crime of ’Seventy-Three. John Sherman contends that no crime was committed because no criminals were caught.” This outburst so dismayed Jim Britt that he sought a far corner and no more tempted the explosiveness of Snow-Beard. Again, Jim Britt would engage a venerable senator from Alabama in talk. He was instantly taken by the helpless button, and for a quintette of hours told of the national need of a Panama Canal, and given a list of what railroads in their venality set the flinty face of their opposition to its coming about. These things, the thunders of Snow-Beard and the exhaustive settings forth of the senator from the south, pierced Jim Britt; for he reflected that if the questions of silver and Panama could not be budged for their benefit by these gentlemen of beard and long experience and who dwelt well within the breastworks of legislation, then his bill for that small right of way, and none to aid it save himself in his poor obscurity, could hope for nothing except death and burial where it lay. There was a gentleman of Congress well known and loved as the Statesman from Tupelo. He was frequent and popular about Chamberlin’s. The Statesman from Tupelo was a humorist of celebration and one of the redeeming features of the House of Representatives. His eye fell upon the queer, ungainly form of Jim Britt, with hungry face, eyes keen but guileless, and nose of falcon curve.