"Wait and we shall see," said Jimmy Grayson, sweetly. "They were entitled to their opinion, and he would have heard their advice, but their manner was intolerable; they undertook to treat him as a child. They called him to a conference, and there they laid down the law to him as a school-master would order a sulking child to be good." "Did he take the bluff?" again shouted the big man in the crowd. "Wait and we shall see," repeated Jimmy Grayson, as sweetly as ever. "Well, this conference came to pass, and it lasted a long time, but only the committee talked; they gave the candidate scarcely a chance to say a word. They treated him with increasing arrogance. They said that if he declared himself upon this great issue they would bolt the party and let him go headlong to destruction." "The traitors!" shouted the big man in the audience. But the members of the committee, from some strange cause, seemed to be struck speechless. Their jaws fell, but the faces of them all were as red as fire. Sylvia leaned forward and clapped her gloved hands. "Blaisdell," whispered Hobart, "slip away and arrange at the telegraph-office; any of us will give you his report. I shall have at least five thousand words myself." Blaisdell slid noiselessly away. "The candidate endured it all, but only for the time," thundered Jimmy Grayson, and now his voice was swelling with passion, while his eyes fairly sparkled with heat and anger--"but only for the time. He had decided opinions upon this subject, as I have upon the question of tariff revision, and he intended to utter them as I intend to utter mine. They said--and they said it with intolerable condescension and patronage--that for the sake of his record he might make one little speech upon the subject before a few people out in what they called the desert, and he accepted the concession. But there was rage in his heart. He was willing to be beaten by the biggest majority ever given against a Presidential candidate before he would yield to such insolent dictation. Moreover, there was the question of his true opinion, which the people had a right to know, and he took his resolve. There was that little speech, and he remembered the telegraph wire, the thin line that binds the farthest little village to the great world, and I say he took his resolve." "He called the bluff!" shouted the big man in the audience, in a perfect roar of triumph, and Jimmy Grayson smiled sweetly.