“That’s the reason you’re making votes by it,” Gergue assured him. “And that’s the way politics goes. Take James T. Hollow now; he’s always trying to do what is right. He says so hisself. But it don’t get him anywhere; and I reckon that’s because he does what’s right because he thinks there’s votes in it. You go ahead and do it anyway. Maybe you do it because you think it’ll start a fight. Make some folks mad. And instead of that, they eat out o’ your hand.” Wint nodded. “Even Kite,” he said. “He made some fuss at first. But it looks as though he had decided to take it lying down.” Gergue shook his head. “Don’t you make any mistake about V. R. Kite,” he warned Wint. “He don’t like a fight, much. Getting too old. But he’ll fight when he’s got a gun in both hands. He’ll play poker when he holds four aces and the joker. V. R. will start something when he’s ready. I wasn’t talking about him.” “I’m ready when he is,” Wint declared. “He won’t be ready till he thinks you ain’t,” Gergue insisted. But Wint was in no mood to be depressed by a possibility of future trouble. In fact, he rather looked forward to this potential clash with V. R. Kite. It added to the zest of life. Old Mrs. Mueller, who ran the bakery, whispered to Wint when he stopped for a loaf of bread one night that he was a fine boy. “My Hans,” she said gratefully. “He is working now; and that he would never do when he could get his beer regular, every second day a case of it. And there is more money in the drawer all the time, too.” And Davy Morgan, the foreman of his father’s furnace, told Wint that save for one or two irreconcilables, the men at the furnace were with him. “And the men that kick the most, they are the ones who are the better off for it,” he explained, in the careful English of an old Welshman to whom the language must always be an acquired and unfamiliar instrument. “William Ryan has never been fit for work on Mondays until now.” Murchie, Attorney General of the state, who lived up the creek, and who had been a speaker at the elder Chase’s rallies in the last mayoral campaign, happened into town one day and told Wint he had heard of the matter at Columbus and that people were talking about him, Wint Chase, up there. “They knew old Kite, you see,” he told Wint. “He comes up there to lobby on every liquor bill; and they like to see him get a kick in the slats, as you might say. But you’ll have to look out for him.” “I’m going to,” Wint assured Murchie. “If you can down Kite, there’ll be a place for you at Columbus, some day,” Murchie predicted. “They don’t like Kite, up there.” Sam O’Brien, the fat restaurant man, stopped laughing long enough to tell Wint he was all right, had good stuff in him, was a comer. “The Greek next door,” he explained. “He thinks you’re a tin god. He runs the candy store, you know. Says there never was so much candy sold. He’ll vote for you, my boy. If he ever gets his papers. And learns to read. And if you live that long.”