XIX
DAVID SENT OUT AGAINST GOLIATH
I was almost master of myself again when, a week later, I got aboard the car in which Carlotta and I were taking our friends to look on at the opposition's convention at St. Louis.
When we arrived, I went at once to confer with Merriweather in a room at the Southern Hotel which no one knew he had. "Simpson has under, rather than over, five hundred delegates," was his first item of good news. "It takes six hundred and fifty to nominate. As his sort of boom always musters its greatest strength on the first ballot, I'm putting my money two to one against him."
"And Scarborough?" I asked, wondering at my indifference to this foreshadowing of triumph.
"My men talk him to every incoming delegation. It's well known that he don't want the nomination and has forbidden his friends to vote for him and has pledged them to work against him. Then, too, the bosses and the boys don't like him—to put it mildly. But I think we're making every one feel he's the only man they can put up, with a chance to beat Burbank."
"THAT," I REPLIED TO MRS. SANDYS, "IS SENATOR SCARBOROUGH OF INDIANA" p. 226