“I’m too squeamish to take help from Kite,” said Wint. “That’s flat, dad. Put it out of your head.”
Mrs. Chase was still doing her own work. She called them to supper, just then; and while they ate, she told them how tired she was. “I declare,” she said, “I wish Hetty would come back here. I saw her, uptown, yesterday; and I asked her to. But she wouldn’t. Said she had a better job. I told Mrs. Hullis last night that the girl—”
“Hetty never cooked a better supper than this,” her husband told her; and the little woman smiled happily, and bridled like a girl, and said:
“Now, Winthrop, you’re always telling me things like that, when you know they’re not true. I’m just a—”
Wint laughed: “Quit apologizing for yourself, mother. It’s a darned bad habit. Tell people you’re a wonder, and they’ll believe you. I’ve found that out. That’s the way I’m going to be re-elected.”
“You can tell them that, but you have to back it up,” his father reminded him. “Brag’s not so bad, if there’s something to base it on.”
“Well, isn’t there?” Wint asked quietly; and his father’s eyes lighted, and he cried:
“Yes, son, by Heaven, there is!”
Wint made no move, during the next day or two; but he laid his plans. He intended to do a great many things in the last week before election. He would concentrate his effort in those last days, so that the effect should not have time to disappear. He talked with Dick Hoover, and Dick’s father; he talked with others. And he was surprised to find that such loyal supporters of Amos as Sam O’Brien and Ed Howe and even James T. Hollow were inclined to support him. Support him in spite of Amos. Sam told him as much.
He met Sam at the moving-picture show that night; that is to say, he met Sam just outside. And Sam and Hetty Morfee were together. That surprised Wint; he had not even known that they were friends. But it was obvious that they were very good friends indeed. When he stopped to speak to them, Hetty looked at him with an appealing defiance. He wondered if Sam knew. He did not think it would matter. Sam was the sort who could, if he chose, forgive.