“It don’t bother me any more,” returned Caleb, “I’m too used to it. But I can remember when a single cup of it at Sunday morning breakfast would make me so I couldn’t sleep a wink all church time. I’d toss from one end of my pew to the other the whole morning. I couldn’t seem to drowse no matter how long Father Healy’s sermon was. ’Nother county heard from?” as the operator laid a message before him. “Read it, Billy.”
“Delayed in transmission,” spelled Shevlin. “Jericho County, with two precincts missing, gives Conover 7,239, Standish 4,895.”
A yell went around the table. Bourke scribbled hurriedly on a pad, then announced:
“That offsets the Standish lead in Haldane by 780. Two to one you’ve got Bowden, too.”
A purr from the ticker, and Caleb caught up the tape.
“This machine don’t agree with you,” he reported. “Bowden complete gives me 5,861 and Standish 6,312. That cuts us down a bit.”
“Did you ever see such a rag-time ’lection!” growled Shevlin. “It’s like a seesaw board. One minute it’s you, and the next minute it ain’t. What’s the hay-eaters up-State thinkin’ about, anyhow? A year ago they’d no more ’a’ dared to——”
“A year’s a long time, son, in a country that makes a hero to order one day and puts him into the discard the next.”
“Oh, if you’d ’a’ only just let us work like we always have before! We’d ’a’ sent this Standish person screechin’ up a tree. He’d ’a’ thought a whale had bit him! But with all this amachoor line of drorin’-room stunts at the polls an’ givin’ him the chance to——”
“That’s my business,” replied Caleb. “Cut it out.”