assed out. So that was to what her womanish mining for the vein
of the ideal heroism had led. She had been politely shown out. It was
as Wayland had said: there was no middle course; and it was also as the
Senator had said, it must be fought out, and the bullets were to be
ballots.

The Senator slammed his door shut and snapped the yale lock. Then he
noticed the rose she had left, and tossed it in the spittoon.

"Thank God," he ejaculated fervently as he sank back in the swing
chair, "_Thank God women are not in politics. There is always
something to be thankful for_."

Then, an idea seemed to strike him. He rang the telephone with fury,
and it didn't improve his temper to hear the saucy little central
informing her elbow mate that "that ol' fellah wuz burnin' the wire up
alive."

"Is that 'The Herald'? Brydges there? That you, Brydges? Listen, the
night you were up on the Ridge, have you any perfect proof that Wayland
didn't go down when you were asleep? Eh? You turned in at ten; and
you found him still stamping about at twelve? Is that it? What? No?
Don't be a damphool, _cut that out_. Of course, he didn't go down to
the Ranch House. Cut that whole scandal thing out. There's nothing in
it; but I think we can locate our missing knight errant. Understand?
He's got to be smashed? What? _You had printed the scandal story
before you ever came in to me at all_? Dictated it right in to the
typo machines? In the 'Independent'? Oh, well, I'm glad it didn't go
in the 'City Herald'? But it did go in; one evening paper?" Then the
wrath of the strong man broke bounds. If he had been a stage villain
the curtain drop would have fallen on a red faced gentleman pounding
the desk, tearing at the telephone, hurling his chair about the office
and generally, as the saucy little central remarked, "eating the wire
up alive."

When Brydges' chief indulged in explosives that necessitated the repair
of furniture the next day, the handy man always stood strictly and
silently at attention. He knew the meaning of the stage thunder: it
was the trick of the Indian medicine man, who fires guns to bring down
rain. Bat knew that the fulminations were of a piece with all the
other orders to do and not to do, an effort to get results while
diverting the thunderbolt from the rain maker's head; for by one of
those strange contingencies that Shakespeare defines as an opportunity
of evil, when the handy man had gone to th