"Never saw its equal—never!" he grunted. "Here's our own town hanging fire till almost the last like some jay village in the Adirondacks. We've always prided ourselves on being prompt." He caught a flying sheet from the operator and groaned: "We are the last! By the Great Horn Spoon!" For Shelby's ear alone he muttered: "The last, Ross; New Babylon's the last, and the die by which you lose or win. Figure it yourself."
Shelby ran through his senior's calculations and nodded without speech. No one spoke now. Not a wine-glass tinkled. The room sensed a crisis. By telephone, special messenger, and the instrument at the table the belated story of New Babylon's vote pieced itself together under Bowers's pencil. The candidate hovered above him, intent on every stroke.
"Good God!" he whispered suddenly; "it hangs on the Flats!"
"Yes; it's the last precinct. They sent word that the thick-skulled Poles and the rest had made an awful mess of the ballots. Tom"—to one of the onlookers—"'phone the Flats again."
But on the instant the Flats embodied itself in the doorway in the person of a breathless messenger. Bowers's trembling fingers fumbled the paper and cast it fluttering toward the floor, but Shelby fastened on it in mid-air, read it, crumpled it, mechanically made it smooth again, and laid it gently on his desk. There came a second roar from the street, a medley of cheers, groans, hisses, and the blare of horns. Shelby again drew a curtain. On the Whig's screen was displayed a huge rooster with the legend: IT'S GRAVES!
Shelby caught a murmuring from the group behind him: vapid expressions of regret, scorching condolence, pitying oaths; then the voice of a newcomer, a newspaper correspondent, asking Bowers if they conceded their defeat.
He spun about, crying,—
"We concede nothing."
The reporter said that the returns as received indicated a slight majority for the fusion candidate.
"We dispute the returns."