ly a sacredly high and serious
thing, which they took as they did their religion, with a solemn,
intolerant, Calvinistic sincerity. There was one thing, though, they all
shared in common. Whether a man's coat was of black alpaca or striped
flannel, the right-hand pocket sagged under the weight of unseen
ironmongery; or if the coat pocket didn't sag there was a bulging clump
back under the skirts on the right hip. For all the heat, hardly a man
there was in his shirtsleeves; and it would have been funny to watch how
carefully this man or that eased himself down into his seat, favoring
his flanks against the pressure of his hardware--that is to say, it
would have been funny if it all hadn't been so deadly earnest.

You could fairly smell trouble cooking in that hall. In any corner
almost there were the potential makings of half a dozen prominent
funerals. There was scarce a man, I judged, but nursed a private grudge
against some other man; and then besides these there was the big issue
itself, which had split the state apart lengthwise as a butcher's
cleaver splits a joint. Looking out over that convention, you could
read danger spelled out everywhere, in everything, as plain as print.

I was where I could read it with particular and uncomfortable
distinctness, too, for I had the second place at the table that had been
assigned to the Evening Press crew. There were four of us in
all--Devore, who had elected to be in direct charge of the detail; Ike
Webb, our star man, who was to handle the main story; I who was to write
the running account--and, fourthly and lastly, Major Putnam Stone. The
major hadn't been included in the assignment originally, but little
Pinky Gilfoil had turned up sick that morning, and the chief decided the
major should come along with us in Gilfoil's place. The chief had a
deluded notion that the major could circulate on a roving commission and
pick up spicy scraps of gossip. But here, for this once anyway, was a
convention wherein there were no spicy bits of gossip to be picked
up--curse words, yes, and cold-chilled fighting words, but not
gossip--everything focused and was summed up in the one main point:
Should the majority rule the machine or should the machine rule the
majority? So the major sat there at the far inside corner of the table
doing nothing at all--Devore saw to that--and was rather in the way. For
the time I forgot all about him.

The clash wasn't long in coming. It came on the fi