“It’s like waiting for a jury, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” said some one else, “but, thank God, this is a jury that can’t hang.”
“Maybe not,” said old General Williams, who had been in Congress for twenty years, representing a safe district that he considered his by divine right, “but it can stay out a long time. I remember, once—”
The danger of Williams’s reminiscence was averted by the click of the telegraph instrument. The operator seized his stylus and began to write rapidly. Warfield took the new bulletin from the telegrapher’s outstretched hand and studied it with knitted brows. He read it aloud finally, and then commented:
“If that gain keeps up in New York he’ll come down to Harlem bridge with less than seventy thousand. It’ll give us the state and the presidency.”
He laid his pencil down and lighted a cigar, but he did not relax his interest.
“Here’s something,” he said a moment later, spreading a piece of yellow flimsy over a white sheet, “here’s one from Springfield; says returns from thirty counties show net gains over two years ago of eleven per cent. Let’s see—‘In these counties,’ he read, ‘Chatham polls forty-three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. Norton, for state treasurer, carried the same counties two years ago by seventeen thousand two hundred and thirty-six.’”
The men in the room stirred with a pleasing excitement. Several of them began to talk again, but the colonel said rather peremptorily:
“Wait! Here’s some West Side news,”—Newman, who was standing for the Fourth Congressional District, arose as the chairman read:
“Three of the five wards comprising the Fourth Congressional District, the Eighth, the Ninth, and the Nineteenth, give Newman eleven thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight, Kenyon five thousand six hundred and forty-seven.”