The sandy one looked bewildered. “Mr. Engelhardt,” he emphasized, “the chairman of the State committee. I mean that Mr. Engelhardt,” and he paused to give Walter a chance to whoop for joy. Walter not whooping, he trotted along glibly: “The convention which is to nominate the candidate for governor is on the eighteenth, and Mr. Engelhardt decided yesterday that it would be best that you should be there. You know, of course, Judge, that you are likely to be nominated?”
“Huh!” remarked Walter again, making awful faces, biting his cigar.
“Yes, sir.” Mr. Spafford answered that sound with firm politeness. “Mr. Engelhardt thinks it best.” And that to Mr. Spafford seemed to be final. “To-day is the 14th. If you take the train with me from the club to-morrow night at eight, leaving from Quebec the next morning, we will reach headquarters on the 17th, the day before the convention. Mr. Engelhardt and I planned it out,” and he smiled that split-rock smile again.
For the third time Walter got off that insulting “Huh!” And then in a flash there spread over his face a thick layer of a peculiar sirupy smile, which I knew to mean an attack of pig-headedness.
“I’m afraid I shall not be able to join you on the journey, Mr. Spafford,” he cooed.
Mr. Spafford looked flabbergasted. He simply didn’t know the repartee. That anybody should disobey Mr. Engelhardt seemed one form of insanity. But here was a human being playing fast and loose with the nomination for governor—that was a form even more awful. His pale eyes popped till you could have knocked them off with a stick.
“Are you ill, sir?” he exploded finally.
“Oh, no—not ill, Mr. Spafford,” Walter answered gently. “But I’m going fishing.”
The cigar which Walter had fed him dropped splib on the floor, and the lower half of his mouth nearly joined it. “Fishing!” he gasped. “Fishing! But—but,” hope dawned. Maybe Walter was absent-minded or deaf or something—he surely hadn’t understood. “Judge Morgan,” he began in a first-reader effect, “it—is—the—nomination—for—Governor.” He got into capitals at that point. “Mr. Engelhardt—the Chairman—of—the—State—”
Walter headed him off. “I know—I grasp,” he interrupted softly. “I would like to be nominated for governor very much, but there’s a big trout, Mr. Spafford—are you a fisherman, Mr. Spafford?” he interrupted himself in dulcet tones.