Newman drew a long, full breath, and smiled complacently.
“How will the other wards go, John?” asked Parrish.
“Oh, they’re all right. I carried the Eleventh by a hundred and fifty-six two years ago,” said Newman, speaking with the accuracy with which a man remembers his own majorities, “and lost the Twelfth by sixteen ninety-four, but I can give him both of them and beat him out.”
Garwood envied him keenly.
The operator was writing furiously now, and kept his left arm, with a despatch dangling in his fingers, almost continually stretched over the back of his chair toward Warfield. The colonel made his calculations rapidly.
“Here you are, General,” he said to Williams after awhile, and the white-bearded old man took a despatch from him and carefully adjusted his glasses. Then he hitched his chair up to the table, cleared a place for his elbows, took some paper and began to make figures of his own.
“Gentlemen,” he said presently, “I claim my election by a majority of four thousand votes.”
“What was your majority two years ago?” asked Milton.
“Why, sir,” said the old man, looking at Milton as if he were betraying a culpable ignorance, “three thousand two hundred and ninety-six. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh yes,” lied Milton.