“Course, we’ll make a fight for it. You’ve got some friends left in Tazewell, and so have I, and if we’re licked, we’ll die with our boots on, that’s all there is to that.”
“He has his own county, of course. And you say he has men at work up in DeWitt. Now, if he gets Tazewell and Polk—well——” Garwood flung out his hands hopelessly, as if to surrender. “Great guns, what’s the use?”
“And Sprague’ll throw Moultrie to him—that’s fixed. Sprague knows he can’t get it; he’s just been acting as a stalking horse for Bailey,” said Kellogg, anxious to bear his part in this conference, even if he could bring nothing cheerful to it.
“How did he ever get on the blind side of Sprague?” queried Garwood, peevishly.
“Oh, legislature,” said Kellogg, proud to be able to show his knowledge of affairs in the state house at Springfield; “he put some of Sprague’s fellows—Simp Lewis and some more of ’em—on the pay roll, and took care of brother-in-law Wilson when he made up the committees.”
“H-m-m-m,” Garwood mused, “Mason and Moultrie, and DeWitt—if he gets Tazewell or Polk now—I don’t know what you gentlemen think about it, but it looks to me as if he had us pretty nearly skinned.”
What they thought of it was not apparent, for none of them spoke, and silence settled over the little room, where Garwood’s ambitions were trembling in the fateful balance. At last Pusey spoke:
“He hasn’t got Polk yet.”
Something of the determination which the little man had put into his tone affected the others, and they looked up with new smiles. A reaction set in and Garwood glanced at Pusey gratefully.
“Yes,” he said, trying to resume his congressional dignity, with a smile that was intended to take from it its suggestion of distance, “you remember what the devil said: