That member upon whom Senator Hanway settled for Speaker owned the
biting name of Frost; it was an instance, however, when there was
nothing in a name. Mr. Frost was a round, genial personage and only
biting with occasional sarcasms; then, it is true, his sentences cut
like a rawhide. He was big, breezy, careless, quick, and coming of an
aquatic ancestry, oceanic in his sort; even his walk reminded one of a
ground swell. And yet he was defective as a candidate. The House members
liked him well, despite those verbal acridities which shaved the surface
of debate as lawns are shaven by a scythe; but with the last word there
existed no recognized House or party reason, whether of the past, the
present or the future, why he should be made Speaker. In the lay of
House topography he was on the wrong side of the river from the
Speakership, and to land him within stretch of the gavel required that
Senator Hanway either ferry or pontoon him across. This the latter
gentleman set himself to accomplish by a series of intrigues and
stratagems that would have brightened the fame of a Talleyrand.

The statesman opposed to Mr. Frost for the Speakership was a personage
named Hawke. He stood possessed of honesty, intelligence, and energy;
also he had been for long the leader of his party in the House, and
given his name to a tariff measure. Without one gleam of humor, he was
of a temper hot as that of any Hecla, and like his fellow volcano, being
often in a state of eruption, he offered many reasons for being admired
and none for being loved.

This should be a key to the man.

He had been a brave soldier during the Civil War, and when his men, most
of whom were armed with shotguns--it being in the early hours of that
strife and these men arming themselves--complained that their weapons
were no match for the Enfields of the foe, rebuked them fiercely.

"General," said the spokesman of the soldiers; "these yere shotguns
ain't no even break for them rifles the Yanks are shootin'!"

"They are a match for them," retorted the furious Mr. Hawke, "if you
will only go close enough."

For all his soberness of humor and choleric upheavals, Mr. Hawke,
because of his record as a House leader and a tariff maker--he had
tinkered together that identical bill which, when Senator Hanway later
revamped it in the Senate, produced the Obstinate One as a Governor--was
the legitimate heir to the Speakership; and in the House, where
tradition is somethi