“Don't you like it?”
“Hit looks like circus day—I got the headache already.”
A telegram was brought in.
“Been seein' a lot about you in the papers,” said the judge, and the Pope waved wearily to a pile of dailies. There were columns about him in those papers—about his meteoric rise: how he started a poor boy in the mountains, studied by candle-light, taught school in the hills: how a vision of their future came to him even that early and how he clung to that vision all his life, turning, twisting for option money on coal lands, making a little sale now and then, but always options and more options and sales and more sales, until now the poor mountain boy was a king among the coal barons of the land.
“Judge,” said the Pope, “the votin's started down home.”
“How's it goin'?”
“Easy.”
“Been spendin' any money?”
“Not a cent.”
“Ole Bill Maddox is.”