Wint’s eyes burned sulkily. “About as usual,” he said. The engine roared, they turned up the street; and the Congressman turned to wave his hand to Gergue and Hollow on the platform. CHAPTER III WINT CHASE Amos Caretall’s home was not a pretentious affair. He lived in a house that had not been built as other houses are; it had, like Topsy, “just growed.” It began as a one-story, four-room brick structure, and spread in wings and “ells” and upper stories until now it numbered ten rooms and was a thing fearful and wonderful to behold. In these ten rooms, Agnes and her father and old Maria Hale, the darky who cooked for them and looked after them, rattled around in a somewhat lonely fashion. For Mrs. Caretall was ten years dead, and the two Caretall boys had gone away to college and afterward had builded homes of their own in other regions. Amos Caretall was not rich; but he was well off. He had made his money in coal, and when the visible supply of coal began to peter out, he had looked into politics, gone to the state legislature for two terms, and then to Congress. In Congress he had done well. The Hardiston district forgot, where he was concerned, the old rule that a Congressman shall have but two terms. They sent him back again and again. He was now in his fifth term, and his power at home and abroad was growing. His most valuable quality was imagination. He was not an able man; he knew little about political economy, national finance, sociology, the science of government. He knew little and cared less. For by virtue of a keen imagination, he was able to construct in his own mind hypothetical situations, and then hire experts to meet them for him. Peter Gergue was one of these experts. Gergue’s field was human nature and Hardiston County. He knew every one in the county, and he had an uncanny faculty for predicting how a man would react to given circumstances. This faculty extended to men in the mass, and enabled him to predict the political effect of a given course of action with surprising accuracy. Amos Caretall had learned to take Gergue’s advice blindly. His home-coming at this time, for example, was in response to Gergue’s message of a week previous. That message had been brief. “If Chase is elected Mayor, he’ll beat you for the House next year,” Gergue had written. Caretall wired: “I’m coming home.” And he came. But there was no trace of concern in his amiable countenance as they rode to his home now. He joked Joan Arnold into gayety, laughed Wint Chase out of his sulkiness, and pinched his daughter’s cheek until she threatened to ditch the car if he kept it up. Thus, when they stopped before the house, every one was in good humor.