f thinking. He was surprised, too, one day, when he was packing
his valise for a hurried start, to see all her letters reposing neatly
in one corner of the aforesaid valise. "Now, why have I done that?" he
asked; "why have I saved those letters? They take up valuable space; I
will destroy them." But when he closed the valise the undamaged letters
were still neatly reposing in their allotted corner.

Now the campaign in the East came to its end, and their special train
swung westward into the states supposed to be most doubtful--first
across the Mississippi, and then across the Missouri. The campaign
entered upon a new phase amid new conditions--in a new world, in
fact--and it required no intuition for Harley to feel that strange
events were approaching.

VII

HIS GREATEST SPEECH

It was the candidate's eighth speech that day, but Harley, who was in
analytical mood, could see no decrease either in his energy or
spontaneity of thought and expression. The words still came with the old
dash and the old power, and the audience always hung upon them, the
applause invariably rising like the rattle of rifle-fire. They had
started at daylight, hurrying across the monotonous Western plains, in a
dusty and uncomfortable car, stopping for a half-hour speech here, then
racing for another at a second little village, and then a third race and
a third speech, and so on. Nor was this the first day of such labors; it
had been so week after week, and always it lasted through the day and
far into the darkness, sometimes after midnight. But there was no sign
to tell of it on the face of the candidate, save a slight redness around
the edge of the eyelids, and a little hoarseness between the speeches
when he talked to his friends in an ordinary tone.

The village in which Grayson was speaking was a tiny place of twelve or
fifteen houses, all square, unadorned, and ugly, standing in the centre
of an illimitable prairie that rolled away on either side exactly like
the waves of the sea, and with the same monotony. It was a
weather-beaten gathering. The prairie winds are not good for the
complexion, and the cheeks of these people were brown, not red. On the
outskirts of the crowd, still sitting on their ponies, were cowboys, who
had ridden sixty miles across the Wyoming border to hear Grayson speak.
They were dressed exactly like the cowboys of the pictures that Harley
had seen in magazine stories of the Western plains. They wore the