at every step
drop that story into the public ear as corn is dropped into the furrow.
It tossed him back again, to think how his adversaries in the political
game, where cunning was always trumps, would light down on that story
like crows behind the plough. He mixed his metaphors by habit; the
people loved them mixed. Another maxim, his own invention, was, Take
care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself. The
---- it will! You've got to take _at least_ as much care of reputation.
But here both were concerned. He could not, for the sake either of his
character _or_ his reputation, let himself be made a fool of by any one,
however small, anywhere. He had got to recover a personal importance
solemnly pilfered from him by a half-grown Shanghai still in his
pin-feathers. Against Hayle's girl he was excusably helpless, but him he
had got to get the upper hand of and get it quick. Memphis in the
morning! More passengers to be dropped there and the whole town's
attention to be attracted by the burial of the bishop. Good Lord! That
"verbatim report for the newspapers"! And of all papers the Memphis
papers! _Avalanche_--_Appeal_--it was all one, he happening to be at the
moment equally at odds with both. It, the "report," would not take a
defensive attitude. Poker-face was too sharp for that. It would take the
offensive from the start and it would take the start. Gentlemen of the
jury, in a war of words there's just one word better than the last, and
that's the first! And moreover! the brief "report's" main theme would
not be he, the senator, nor his vanished committee of seven. No, sir-ee,
it would be the cholera, and he would be dished up in a purely casual
way; as the French say "on, pass on."

He rubbed his head and sat up. There was a chance that he might find
Hugh awake and on duty. If so his cast-iron lordship might yet be
browbeaten, or wheedled, into inaction. Or if sleeping he might yet be
circumvented. Was he worth circumventing? How absurdly troubles magnify
on a waking pillow. Despise your enemy and sleep! Well--hardly. Let
_him_ do that, especially when _you can't_.

He threw off the light cover, rose, and dressed. He began to see a way
to win. He would countermine. He would raise a counter-issue--"Harriet."
Loitering by the twins' door he listened and rightly judged they were
asleep, Lucian being so feeble and Julian so full. The office was open
but empty. Its clock read two. The card-tabl