“How is Judge Pickney’s health now?” he asked of Judge Bickerstaff.
“Not well, I hear,” whispered the court, “he’s going away for the summer.”
Only successful men could get that place—he must by all means be reëlected. As he sat there, idly speculating, all the happiness he had hoped to find as congressman clouded by the constant dread of defeat, he suddenly saw, at the rear of the court room, the red face of Jim Rankin. When Rankin caught the congressman’s eye, he motioned with his curly head. Garwood thanked the judge, excused himself, came down from the bench, carefully bowed to those members of the bar he could catch in the sweep of his eye, and went out to join Rankin.
II
RANKIN was plainly glad to see Garwood, and as they walked along looked at him with a sidelong glance of pride, as with some artistic sense of pleasure in his handiwork.
“It’s good to have you back again,” said the big Rankin, “let’s go into Chris’s an’ have a little drink just for the sake of the good old times.”
Garwood, who found the new times so much better than the old times, had not yielded much to the warmth of Rankin’s good humor. He was displeased and sore. Rankin felt this, but he had been used to his moods of old, and he loved Garwood with such a frank, lasting affection, and his own heart was so whole, that he refused to think it anything but a mood that would pass. Garwood, though, consented to drink readily enough. Indeed he had been feeling ever since he came down that a drink would put him in better sorts. They went into Chris’s place, and found it cool and pleasant after the hot sidewalk outside, though Garwood, mentally comparing it with Chamberlain’s, felt again his twinge of homesickness for Washington. The bar at Chamberlain’s, he remembered, did not smell of stale beer as this one did. Steisfloss himself was behind the long counter, and wiped his hands on his white apron before extending one of them to Garwood in welcome home.
“What’s it going to be, gentleman?” he asked.
“I’ll have a beer,” said Rankin readily, mopping his hot brow with his big palm.