"God knows it is cheap. If it wasn't 'tisn't the likes o' me could afford to be handing it out to you to-night, and no charge for admission at the door."
"Say, Buck, his ten minutes'll be used up before ever he gets started!" came a voice from midway of the hall.
"True for you, boy. And so I'll be introducing myself. My history is short. Riley is my name, Timothy Joseph Riley—baptized by Father Kiley, in the parish of Ballymallow—and I'm a Republican."
"And there's what we'd like to have you tell us, Misther Riley—how came you to be a Republican?"
"Yes, you blarneyin' turncoat—how came ye?"
A man in the front row stood up to say that last, a rugged-looking man, who looked as if he would like mighty well to jump up on the stage and haul Tim down off it. Toward him Tim stepped, leaning over the edge of the stage so that the belligerent one would not miss a syllable.
"I'll tell how I came to be a Republican. When I landed in this country and before I was fairly out of Castle Garden some thief of a pickpocket or worse stole the few little dollars I had to keep me until I could get a job. I was a seventeen-year-old boy, and that shy I couldn't beg. For two days not a morsel of food went into my mouth. And there I was, jumping sideways with the hunger, when a man comes along and saw me and brought me into a grand restaurant, 'And how'll I ever pay you?' I asks when I'd eaten my fill. He was a butcherman, with a white smock on him. And he laughs and says: 'You can't now; but by and by, when you get a vote, be sure and vote the Republican ticket.' And I says: 'Why the Republican ticket?' And he says: 'Oh, just by way o' variety—just to show that you people don't all go one way.'
"And"—Tim straightened up—"I took his hand, and 'Sir, I will!' I said. He was joking, maybe; but I wasn't. And I did vote the Republican ticket; and I'm still voting the Republican ticket. And I'm saying to you all to-night—the one Republican among five hundred of ye—that I'm not apologizing to any man in this hall or any other hall for it. And I'm saying to you"—in the face of the inquiring man in the front row, in the face of Buck Malone, in the face of the whole hall, Tim clinched his fist—"I'm saying that the man of Irish blood who ever forgets the promise that he's made to the one that befriended him—I say to ye all, and I don't care whether ye like it or not—his blood's been crossed somewhere; he's no Irish in him! No—nor fit to be called a man at all!"
Tim stepped back to pour out a glass of water; a form rose up midway of the hall, and a voice roared out:
"Say, you Riley man, your politics are the divil's own, but you're Irish all right. Go on!"