"The candidate endured it all, but only for the time," thundered Jimmy Grayson, and now his voice was swelling with passion, while his eyes fairly sparkled with heat and anger—"but only for the time. He had decided opinions upon this subject, as I have upon the question of tariff revision, and he intended to utter them as I intend to utter mine. They said—and they said it with intolerable condescension and patronage—that for the sake of his record he might make one little speech upon the subject before a few people out in what they called the desert, and he accepted the concession. But there was rage in his heart. He was willing to be beaten by the biggest majority ever given against a Presidential candidate before he would yield to such insolent dictation. Moreover, there was the question of his true opinion, which the people had a right to know, and he took his resolve. There was that little speech, and he remembered the telegraph wire, the thin line that binds the farthest little village to the great world, and I say he took his resolve."
"He called the bluff!" shouted the big man in the audience, in a perfect roar of triumph, and Jimmy Grayson smiled sweetly.
Suddenly Mr. Goodnight, in all the might of his majesty and importance, rose up and stalked from the stage, and the eleven other members of the committee, headed by Mr. Crayon, followed him in an angry file, accompanied by the derisive shouts of the audience. They quickened their pace somewhat when they reached solid ground, but before they were within the sheltering confines of their private car, Jimmy Grayson was launched upon his great and thrilling tariff speech, in which he invested the driest subject in the world with an interest that absorbed the attention of ninety million people.
All day the wires eastward and westward sang with the burden of the great speech made in the tiny hamlet of Waterville, in the Wyoming mountains, and the next morning it occupied the front pages of ten thousand newspapers. It was absolutely clear and decisive. No one could doubt how the candidate stood. He was heart and soul for revision. Sylvia threw her arms around his neck, and said, "Uncle James, I was never prouder of you than I am at this moment."
When they left Waterville the private car of the committee was still attached to their train, but there was no communication between it and the other cars. About the middle of the afternoon they reached a junction with another railroad line. There the private car was cut off and attached to a new engine. Then it sped eastward at the rate of fifty miles an hour.
Meanwhile the correspondents were holding a little conference of their own.
"They will bolt him sure," said Hobart. "Will it ruin Jimmy Grayson?"
"I believe not," said Harley, who had been thinking much. "Of course there will be a split, but such courage, and his way of meeting their attack, will appeal to the people; it will bring him thousands of new votes."
"Whether it does or does not," said Hobart, "if I had been in his place I'd have done as he did."