Jamie read the newspapers now and then. He always turned first to the base-ball news—the season was just opening—and then to the legislative news, although he never read that as carefully as he did the base-ball news. Often he saw Mr. Meredith’s name in the types—the papers said he was making a gallant fight against the franchise grab. Jamie hoped with all his soul that Mr. Meredith would win in that fight; not, of course, that he cared about the franchise grab—he had, like many older persons, very hazy ideas about that—but he always wished to see Mr. Meredith win.
The spring had come, and as the legislature usually ends early in June, and the work was piling up, the house was meeting at nine o’clock in the morning. The house adjourned every Friday at noon, in order that the members might go home over Sunday, and it didn’t meet again until Monday afternoon at five o’clock, and then only for a few minutes. The members who had gone home did not get back until Tuesday morning, and there were never many there Monday afternoon, not even a quorum, and it was always understood that nothing was to be done at that session. The chaplain prayed, the journal of Friday’s session was read and approved, and the house adjourned until Tuesday morning.
But one Monday afternoon when Jamie reached the hall of the house he was surprised to find a big body of members there—almost all the Chicago members except Mr. Meredith. Those rich gentlemen were there, too, sitting on the speaker’s red lounge. Jamie looked for Mr. Meredith—he was not there. He thought instantly of senate bill 578—something was up! They were going to try to pass senate bill 578—that was why the gentlemen were there on the speaker’s red lounge; that was why the Chicago members had come down to Springfield on the Monday afternoon train instead of waiting for the Monday night train. Jamie was worried.
It was a balmy spring day with a sky blue and tender, and a soft wind that wafted strange sweet country smells about, smells that filled Jamie with dreamy longings and a kind of pleasant sadness. The speaker gently tapped with his gavel; the good old chaplain rose and spread out his white hands.
“O Lord,” he prayed, “we thank Thee that the winter is past, that the rain is over and gone, that the flowers appear upon the earth, that the time of the singing of birds is come.”
The words stole sweetly in upon Jamie’s soul. He sat on the steps, looking out of the open windows at the tender young leaves of the maple trees—it was just the way he used to look out of the open windows in school before vacation came, when he thought of the swimming-hole out at Sycamore and of going barefooted. It was all so calm and peaceful. But with the chaplain’s “Amen!” the speaker’s gavel cracked and the buzzing noise peculiar to the house began again. And Jamie awoke from his reveries with a start. He had heavier things to think of now; he was almost a man; he was in the legislature. Senate bill 578 was on its third reading, the gang was present, and Mr. Meredith had not come. Jamie was troubled, and sighed. He must attend to his duties—he must do something.
Jamie looked over all the faces before him; nowhere could he find one man he could trust as a friend of Mr. Meredith.
He glanced at the door with a lingering hope that Mr. Meredith would appear, but of course he did not come. Then Jamie slowly hitched down the speaker’s stairs, a step at a time, and, reaching the floor, slipped over by the reporters’ boxes—empty that afternoon, for the correspondents, like the legislators, never returned until Tuesday morning—and thence into the side aisle, under the gallery, and to the cloak-room. There he got his cap, looked longingly at Mr. Meredith’s hook, empty now, with no satin-lined overcoat for him to nestle lovingly against for a blissful second, and then he went out into the hall under the huge dome. No one, of course, observed a mere page boy, but Jamie felt, as he clicked his hurrying little heels across the marble floors, that something was about to poke him in his cold, unprotected back—the fear of a rear attack that boyhood inherits from its far-distant savage ancestry. Jamie didn’t take the elevator, or the grand staircase, but reached the main floor by leaping two steps at a time down a narrow side stairway, unused and dark.
Then he flew out of the east entrance, ran down the wide walk and on up Capitol Avenue for four long blocks—ran as fast as he could pump his little short legs to the hotel where he knew Mr. Meredith lived when he was at the capital. But Jamie had no hope of finding him there that afternoon. He went to the hotel simply because he did not know where else to go—that was all. Rushing into the hotel and up to the clerk’s desk, he put his chin over its edge and, as the clerk leaned down with his face almost in Jamie’s face, the boy panted:
“Is—now—Honorable Bronson Meredith in?”