The crowd huddled more closely together, and with heavy voices joined in the song. Some of the men, with serio-comical expressions, essayed the tenor, others the bass, though the bass predominated, and they sang over and over the few words of the song they could remember.
During this maudlin exhibition, the door opened, and Rankin, with Bailey by his side, entered. Rankin was bespattered from hat to heel, even his face was freckled with the little spots where the viscous mud had dried. His huge body was flaccid with fatigue, and his appearance was enough to show how heavily he had toiled at the polls that day in his determination to defeat Garwood. Bailey showed no sign of the equally hard day he had spent. He walked with the same awkward, shambling gait, his little eyes looked out from their narrowed lids and roved about him with their customary cunning. He showed neither signs of exhaustion, though he always looked tired, nor of the elation that probably was in his breast at the great victory which that day had been his.
Rankin, when he saw the crowd with Garwood as its center, halted suddenly and jerked his hat down over his eyes. He drew Bailey hurriedly to the bar near the mirrored partition that screened the scene within from the street without, and made a sign to Steisfloss. The saloon-keeper, with an alert appreciation of the situation which his long experience with men in their cups had taught him, silently moved that way, and bent a listening ear toward the newcomers.
“Give us a little drink—an’ hurry. We’ll get out—don’t let him see,” said Rankin.
Steisfloss’s heavy German face showed none of the gratitude he felt, and quietly, almost surreptitiously, he set glasses and bottle before the successful candidate at that day’s primaries and the man who had brought his success to pass.
Before they could take their liquor, some one at the edge of the crowd near Rankin noticed him. Rankin’s quick eye detected the recognition, and he pulled the fellow toward him.
“Sh!” he whispered. “Don’t let him see us. I didn’t know he’s here, or we’d not come in. We’ll duck. How long’s he been in here?”
“Oh,” said the man, “ever since he got that last news from the First Ward.”
Rankin could not restrain the gleam of pleasure that shot from his eye at the memory of that triumph, but the gleam softened as he stole a look at Garwood, and then, at last, died quite away, and there came in its stead an expression of pain and pity.
“Poor Jerry!” he said, “I thought he’s a little off when he came—” he checked himself, and then—“when I saw him this afternoon,” he continued.