"Then you'd better enter." His hand on the door, Bowers asked, "Your contribution for the county campaign fund ready?"
"Draw you a check any time," the candidate returned jauntily.
Nevertheless, when the county leader had gone Shelby gave a diligent quarter-hour to his bankbook. By and by he took an opera glass from a drawer and focussed it on the pair below. So his clerk came upon him, compelling a ruse of adjusting the instrument.
"One lens has dust in it," he declared. Perceiving Bernard Graves pass down the box-bordered path, he left his office for the day.
That evening Shelby took certain steps to prosper his coming rally at the court-house, one of which was duly noted by Mrs. Seneca Bowers. It was this lady's habit in summer evenings to discuss the doings of her immediate neighbors from her piazza, but now that the nights were cool she had shifted to the bay window of a room styled by courtesy the library from a small bookcase filled with Patent Office Reports and similar offerings of a beneficent government. This station embraced a wide prospect of shady street flanked by pleasantly sloping lawns and dwellings of various architectural pretence. Most proximate and most interesting to Mrs. Bowers was the Hilliard house, and while she rocked placidly over her darning, she contrived to hold this gingerbread edifice in a scrutiny which permitted the escape of no slightest movement of chick or child. She saw the newsboy leave the evening city papers; Milicent Hilliard dance down the leaf-strewn walk to a last half-hour's play; a white-capped maid sheet the geranium beds against possible frost; and, finally, the householder himself emerge and light a cigar whose ruddy tip winked for a second in the thickening dusk. Listing from side to side, big Joe Hilliard tramped heavily down and away to his nightly haunt in the billiard room of the Tuscarora House. As the quarry owner's great bulk vanished Shelby entered the scene, briskly crosscut the Hilliard lawn, and bounded up the steps just quitted by the substantial Joe.
"There; he's done it again!" exclaimed Mrs. Bowers.
"Who has done what?" grunted her husband, from the lounge. He was coatless and shoeless, and had spread a newspaper over his bald spot to the annoyance of a few superannuated yet active flies.
"Ross Shelby. He's gone to Cora Hilliard's again!"
"Well, let him," said Bowers, from beneath the news of the day. "It's a free country."
Mrs. Bowers smoothed a mended sock and rolled it into a neat ball with its fellow by aid of an arc light which sizzled into sudden brilliance among the maples.