Chairman Presson, more cheerful than he had been for weeks, came and crowded between them in a cosey, confidential manner.
"Say, the old fellow is getting smoothed down," he chuckled. "That address was milk for babes. He's got good sense. The thin edge of that plurality made him think twice. I reckon he's going to play a safe game after this. I don't know what he wanted to throw such a scare into us early in the game for! But as we get old we get cranky, I suppose. I may be that way myself when I grow older."
"Vard preached the theory to us for all it was worth," commented the Duke, "but I reckon he's up against the practice end of the proposition now—and he was a politician before he was a preacher."
"Hope he'll stay a politician after this. He got onto my nerves. It wasn't necessary to be so almighty emphatic about things going wrong in this State."
"Old Pinkney up our way is always careful to keep an eye out for the drovers," said the Duke. "When he sees one coming he hustles out into the pasture and shifts the poker off'n the breachy critter onto the best one in the bunch. And that's the way he unloads the breachy one. Vard has been wearing the poker the last few weeks, but I don't believe he intends to hook down any fences."
In the eyes of the politicians, therefore, Governor Waymouth had become safe and sane. They construed his earlier declarations as the ambitions of an old man dreaming a dream of perfection. The legislature swung into the routine of its first weeks in the usual fashion. The business consisted of the presentation of bills, acts, and resolves. The daily sessions lasted barely half an hour. The committee hearings had not begun, and the legislators found time hanging heavy on their hands.
Harlan Thornton continued to be a frequent caller at the Presson home. But he did not seem to find an opportunity for a tête-à-tête with Madeleine. She did not show constraint in his presence. She did not avoid him. She treated him with the same frank familiarity. But he did not find himself alone with her. He did not try to force such a situation, in spite of the provocation she had given him once. He was not yet sure that he could command the words that real love might demand for expression. That was his vague excuse to his own heart for delaying—for his heart insisted that he did love her. He had to admit to himself that this was not the headlong passion the poets described, but he consoled himself with the reflection that he was not a poet. So he made the most of her cordial acceptance of him as he was, and felt sure that Herbert Linton had won no more from her.
CHAPTER XXIV
A GOVERNOR AND A MAID
The Honorable Arba Spinney was in the lobby as usual that winter. The Duke's sarcastic prediction was fulfilled. He appeared promptly at the session's opening, and was the most insistent and persistent member of the "Third House," as the paid legislative agents were called. Most of the men who wormed their way here and there operated craftily and tried to be diplomatic. Spinney strove by effrontery. As usual, he made the country members his especial prey. The story of his knavery at the State Convention had been smothered in the interests of the party. He reappeared among men with as much assurance as ever. He even approached Harlan Thornton to solicit his support of one bill. It was a measure to grant State subsidy, through exemption of taxation, to assist a railroad to extend its lines into the timber-land country.