“I’ll think it over, Chase,” the Congressman repeated. He was ushering the other toward the door, helping him into his coat, opening the door. “Wait till after election, Chase,” he said then deferentially. “If you’re elected Mayor of Hardiston--I don’t see but what we’ll have to team up together.” Chase grasped the Congressman’s hand again. “That’s a bargain, Amos.” “A bargain,” Amos echoed. Then: “Good night, Chase.” The door closed; and Amos, after a minute, began to chuckle slowly under his breath. CHAPTER VII V. R. KITE Victor Rutherford Kite was a man about half the size of his name. Specifically, he was five feet and two inches tall with his shoes on and his pompadour ruffed up. A saving sense of the fitness of things had led him to abandon the long roll of names bestowed upon him by his parents in favor of the shorter and more fitting initials. As V. R. Kite, he had lived in Hardiston for twenty odd years; and most Hardiston people had forgotten what his given names actually were. He was about sixty years old; and he looked it. His eyes were small, and they were washy blue. The eyelids fell about them in thousands of tiny folds and wrinkles, so that the eyes themselves were almost hidden. His eyebrows and his hair and his hints of side whiskers were gray. These side whiskers were really not whiskers at all; they were merely a faint downward growth of the hair before his ears; and they lay on his dry cheeks like the stroke of a brush. His skin was parched dry; it was so dry that it had a powdery look. He walked with a dignified little swing of his short legs, and held his head poised upon his thin neck in a self-contained way that indefinably suggested a turkey. This man was a member of the session of his church; he was the proprietor and manager of a store that would have been a five-and-ten cent emporium in a larger town than Hardiston; and he was the acknowledged leader of the “wet” forces in Hardiston. He himself had come to the town in the beginning to run a saloon; but after a few years, he submerged his own personality in this venture and opened the little store, leaving a lieutenant to manage the saloon which he still owned. Thereafter, he acquired other establishments of a like nature, until he attained the dignity of a vested interest. When county option came, he suffered in proportion. But though town and county voted “dry,” there were any number of Hardiston folk who still liked a drink now and then; and the city--for the town of Hardiston was legally a city--took judicial cognizance of the will of its citizens to this extent: the prohibition law was not strictly enforced. The official interpretation of it was: “It’s against the law to sell liquor if you get caught.” V. R. Kite thought this was reasonable enough, and took care not to get caught.