gloomy silence. The comment of his friends hurt him
more than his defeat. Their tone of pity cut him, and left him raw to
the gibes of his opponents. The fact that an honorable, honest man
could have enemies in his own party was borne in upon him with
merciless force. What had he done that men should yell in hell-like
ferocity of glee over his defeat?

This defeat cut closer into the Judge's life than anything that had
come to him since the death of his son. If Bradley had not been so
blind in his selfish suffering he would have seen how the Judge had
aged and saddened since the morning.

But the old man's vital nature would not rest under defeat. He almost
forced Bradley to issue a card to the public announcing his independent
candidacy for Congress. Bradley had no heart in it, however. The energy
of youth seemed gone out of him.

The Judge gathered his forces together for battle, but Bradley fled
away from Rock River to escape the comments of his friends as well as
his enemies. He was too raw to invite strokes of the lash. He dreaded
the meeting with his colleagues at Washington, but there was a little
more reserve in their comment and there were fewer who took a vital
interest in his affairs.

He met Radbourn a few days after his return.

"Well," Radbourn said, "I see by the papers that your defeat in the
convention was due to your advocacy of 'cranky notions.' I told you the
advocacy of heresies was dangerous; I have no comfort for you. You had
your choice before you. You can be a hypocrite and knuckle down to
every monopoly or special act, or you can be an individual and--go out
of office."

"I'll go out of office, I guess, whether I want to or not," was his
bitter reply. He suffered severely for a few days with the
commiseration of friends and the thinly-veiled ridicule of his
political enemies, but each man was too much occupied to hold Bradley's
defeat long in mind. He soon sank back into quiet, if not into repose.

As the hot weather came on, the city became almost as quiet as Rock
River itself. Save taking care of the few tourists who drifted through,
there was very little doing. The cars ground along ever more thinly
until they might be called occasional. The trees put forth their
abundance of leaf, and under them the city seemed to sleep. Congress
had settled down into a dull and drowsy succession of daily
adjournments and filibustering. The speaker ruled remorselessly,
"counting the hats in the cl