“You ought to have been promoted. Was it your war record that took you to Congress?”
“No, sir; it was brains—pure intellect—that did that. You know my district? Not a railroad in it. Not enough business to pay for the grease on the engines if there was a railroad. Of course, under such circumstances, the one thing all the people want worse than anything else is a railroad. People always want what they can’t get.”
“Of course.”
“So as soon as I was nominated I hired four hundred men, divided them into squads, fitted them out with rods and chains and theodolites and other surveying apparatus, and started them all over the district, pretending to run lines. A squad would burst into a man’s potato-patch and go to work. The owner would rush out and say, ‘What in thunder you fellows a-doin’ in that potato-patch?’ And they’d say, ‘We’re surveying the route for old Belcher’s railroad.’ Then the man would fly into the house and tell his wife that Belcher was going to run a railroad through his property, and they’d go wild with joy. Kill, I carried that district by fifteen hundred majority over a man who under other circumstances would have beaten me out of my boots.”
“That was genius, sir! nothing but pure genius.”
“I think so; genius for statesmanship; not such statesmanship as they have in the played-out despotisms of Europe, but the kind that is needed in a new country.”
“I say, Belcher, how would it do for you and me to go around and call on old Mrs. M’Duffy? I’ve a notion to go.”
“I’m willing. Maybe we can settle the case of that dilapidated Major.”
Mrs. M’Duffy was at home when the General and Mr. Smith called, and she received them with much cordiality.
The conversation naturally turned at an early moment to the subject of Smith’s claim.