Just then an announcement was made that the famous General Twitchwire, who was stumping the state for Puttytop, would address the sovereign voters of Doveton in the main room of the county court house, on the evening of the second Wednesday in September, the regular fall session of the county court having begun on the morning of the same day, and the town being full of countrymen who had legal grievances of their own, or of some one else, to look to.
Now the county court house was a new building which the demon of improvement had lately caused to be erected, and as the appropriations had been exhausted in the manner not unknown to political managers elsewhere, the main room was the only one which had been completed. Pipes had been laid for gas, one of them terminating in the ceiling in the centre of the room, but for evening meetings it was, at present, necessary to light lamps or candles. So, early in the afternoon preceding the Puttytop meeting, Jack secreted himself in an upper room of the court house, with a monkey-wrench, a gunmaker's saw, and a yard of rubber tubing in his shirt bosom. He dragged a step ladder down into the main room, and standing upon this he wrenched from its place the cap upon the pipe from which the central chandelier was one day to hang. Then he returned to the room above, sawed in two the pipe which was to feed the chandelier, stretched an end of his rubber tube over the lower portion of severed pipe, and yelled through it to test the apparatus. He heard his cry repeated in the lower room so distinctly that his only fear was that somebody outside might hear it. Then he sat upon the floor, munched crackers, wished that he had a drink of water, and waited.
Evening came at last, and from the edges of the window casings, Jack saw the adherents of Puttytop coming from various directions. From the neighborhood of the hotel came the noise of the Doveton Brass Band playing "Hail to the Chief;" this indicated that the famous General Twitchwire was to be escorted in style to the court house, and Jack lamented that he could not be outside, behind some good board fence, to throw stones at the band, but he recalled the line,
"They also serve who stand and wait,"
from the Sixth Reader, and was nobly sustained thereby. Then the sound of the music came nearer, the band playing
"The Campbells are coming,"
and then Jack saw a transparency, and yet another, and it required every word of his comforting line to support him in his privation. A tremendous hubbub in the room below came up through the gas pipe and rubber tube, and Jack applied his ear to the latter to hear what General Twitchwire might endeavor to delude his hearers into believing.
The address began on time, and General Twitchwire had just informed his audience that if through supineness and lack of concerted action the gubernatorial chair became occupied, he would not say filled, by a person with the deficient mental acumen and erroneous views which characterized the person who was the standard-bearer of the party opposed to good government, the consequence could not fail to be most disastrous—when a distant yet loud voice was heard to exclaim,—
"You don't say!"
The speaker glared angrily about, and the chairman of the meeting, who had taken the precaution to arrange that admission should be only by tickets of a peculiar color, wondered whether counterfeit tickets had been imposed upon the doorkeeper. The general resumed the thread of his discourse, and had just pronounced a glowing eulogium upon Puttytop, when a voice exclaimed: