to be a candidate for Speaker, was not enough.
After ten months of labor, Senator Hanway went over the result and could
read nothing therein save failure. And it was like an icicle through his
heart; for aside from what advantage the control of the House might give
his own ambitions, he knew beyond question that with the gavel in the
fingers of a professed partisan of Governor Obstinate, the latter thick,
yet fortunate, individual would occur as the next Presidential candidate
of his party so surely as the sun came up on a convention morning.

Senator Hanway was in this valley of gloom when he heard of Mr. Gwynn.
It was Mr. Harley, ever brisk in railway matters, who told him of that
gentleman as the Colossus of the Anaconda Airline.

"He holds no offices in the management of the company," explained Mr.
Harley, "but, being millions upon millions a majority shareholder his
least word is Anaconda Airline law."

Senator Hanway did not have to be told of the influence of railways in
the destinies of his country. He glanced up at a map on the wall; there
he could see the nation caught like some great clumsy fish in a very
seine of railways. He traced the black, thread-like flight, from
seaboard to seaboard, of the Anaconda Airline. Then he made a
calculation. The Anaconda Airline was the political backbone, first one
State and then another, of forty House members, twenty-three of whom
being of his own complexion of politics, would have a caucus vote. Of
the twenty-three, luck upon good luck! twenty belonged to Mr. Hawke. If
Senator Hanway might only get the Anaconda Airline to crack the thong of
its authority over these recalcitrants, they could be whipped into the
Frost traces. Not one would dare defy an Anaconda order; it would be
political hari-kari. At this point our wily Senator Hanway began laying
plans to bring Mr. Gwynn within his reach; it was in deference to those
plans that our solemn capitalist found himself upon Mrs. Hanway-Harley's
hospitable right hand on that evening of the dinner, with his severe
legs outstretched beneath the Harley mahogany.

"I will see you to-morrow--with your permission," observed Senator
Hanway, as he parted with Mr. Gwynn.

When Mr. Gwynn returned from Mrs. Hanway-Harley's he stood in the middle
of the floor, and told Richard, word for word, all that had taken place.
The latter young gentleman was in a prodigious good humor. For the first
time in his life he had done a day's work,