"Shucks! That's no way to act," he declared. "I can't help how I look any more than he can. I reckon that either of us, or at least it goes as far as I'm concerned, would change his looks if he could. If I had my way I'd be as pretty as a cinema star and twice as soulful. Anyhow, I'd look as different from that Judge as I possibly could. His face and disposition would raise storm waves on a lake if it were filled with glue. And he'd better look out! If he thinks he can run around this end of my territory knocking me everywhere he goes I'll give him something to talk about. I tried to be a good fellow with him, and—well!—I'm just as sore as he is!"
The manager shook his head solemnly and rubbed his chin as if recalling really unpleasant recollections.
"Don't blame you," he sympathized. "He's a pompous buck, all right. He's out to get the Republican nomination for the governorship. Papers all mention him regularly now. And the nomination in this state's just about as good as the election. That's a cinch. He's a standpatter of the gilt-edged variety. The only issue on which he hasn't shot his mouth off is on votes for women. Nobody quite knows how he stands on that issue, because he keeps dumb as an oyster on that point. But—I'm telling you all this so you can see that in a way it's unlucky you look so much alike."
"Good Lord!" declared Jimmy. "He ought to be mighty thankful he does look like me. I'm a help, not a hindrance, to his campaign, if he had sense enough to know it. Besides, as far as I can reason, politics isn't of much more importance to the average individual than a rather pleasant and easy dose of medicine he has to take about once every four years and from which he never expects any benefit."
"Not so in this state," asserted the manager. "If you think there's no interest in politics here, you'll find out differently before you make your territory. Politics? It's all anyone will think of or talk about for the next six weeks!"
"Politics may come and go, but chocolate runs forever!" declared Jim with a wag of his finger, and then as the door blew open letting in a draft of cold air, "Say, looks blizzardish, doesn't it?"
"If we don't get four feet of snow within the next two days we'll be lucky," grumbled the manager. "Last winter at this time half the railways were blocked, and for eighteen hours the mails couldn't get through."
"Cheerful, merry cuss you are!" retorted Jimmy. "You certainly do fill everyone you meet chuck full of hope and bright thoughts. Just the same, I don't care to be snow bound here. But I think neither snow nor politics will bother me at all."
All of which proved him a bad prophet, as he learned within the next forty-eight hours; for both snow and politics did enter into his affairs, first because it snowed as if intent on smothering the earth, and second, because every woman with whom he dealt insisted on bringing up the subject of national suffrage for women, even the discussion of chocolates being for the time relegated to a secondary place.
"I traveled through the middle west after a drought; was on the coast when they fought free silver; was in the northwest when it campaigned for the referendum; in Wisconsin when they fought cigarettes and in Maine when the original thirsty population tried to upset the prohibition law; but of all places I've been in, and all campaigns I've been through the outskirts of, this woman's vote thing here has the rest looking friendly, peaceful and uninteresting!" he said to himself after the second day. "I suppose women go to the polls in Heaven, and according to reports it's a pretty well run sort of place, so maybe it'd work down here."