“Oh, don’t say that,” cried McCray. “All but that last--all but that last.” “Why not that?” “Because it’s too late. Oh, Holman, it’s too late--too late! If it were only yesterday! But now--it’s too late!” And McCray bent forward, bowed in pain, and wept. Holman waited until the boy’s grief subsided, and then, by degrees, he got the story. To McCray it was an irreclaimable and tragic wreck of life. But to Holman, in the broader vision his own sins had made possible, and in some of his judgments of men, perhaps too broad--if, indeed, that may be--the case was not at all hopeless. He had not, it is true, been prepared for a revelation so complete and damaging, but it presented to him no irrevocable aspect. McCray, with the proclivity of youth to fixed and fated facts, saw the thing consummated and complete, the contract wholly executed; but Holman did not regard it as even executory, and he cited for McCray the old adage about the bad bargain. “We’ll just give the stuff back to Baldwin.” “Before?” “No,” said Holman stoutly, “afterward. After the vote; we’ll have that satisfaction. Keep him on the hooks.” “Well,” said McCray. “But here, you take it. It--burns--” He gave to Holman a roll of bills, and sighed in relief. “You have saved me,” he said; “you have saved my soul.” “Oh, to hell with your soul!” Holman said, with more orthodoxy than he was accustomed to evince. He was not sufficiently accustomed to the highly moral to relish its too bald expression; perhaps his experience had been of one other as yet unrecognized benefit--it had made him wholesomely afraid of cant, and whatever good his spiritual adventure of that day had done, or was to do him, he was in little danger of becoming a Pharisee. * * * * * Greggerson, the clerk of the house, in shirt-sleeves, a handkerchief stuffed into his collar, had himself taken the reading-desk that night. Above him the speaker, bent forward, watched the proceedings like some bird of prey, smiting his desk sharply with his gavel now and then, or pointing it fiercely at some one. Above the speaker, in placid folds, was the flag, and from their large canvases on either side of the house, Lincoln and Douglas surveyed the scene from the calm altitude of their secure place in American statesmanship.