.

"The name of Calvin Ross Shelby," he ended colorlessly, "spells
success."

"Screws it out as if it hurt him," whispered the Hon. Seneca Bowers to
the nominee. "I tell you, Ross, there's no argument like delegates."

Bowers was a thick-set man of the later sixties, with a certain surface
resemblance to General Grant of which he was vain. So far as he could
he underlined the likeness, affecting a close-trimmed beard, a campaign
hat, and the inevitable cigar; when the occasion promised publicity
sufficient to outweigh the physical discomfort he even rode on
horseback; and he was a notable figure on Decoration Day and at all
public ceremonies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Shelby was his
protege.

The present member of Congress from the Demijohn District, whose seat
Shelby coveted, may be most charitably described as a man of tactless
integrity. His course in Washington had been a thorn in the side of
the organization by whose sufferance he rose, with the upshot that the
Tartar neared the end of his stewardship backed by a faction rather
than a party. The faction clamored for his renomination and pushed
their spirited, if poorly generalled, fight to the floor of the
convention. In debate they were eloquent, in logic unanswerable; nor
did any one attempt to answer them. With the best of possible causes
they lacked but the best of possible worlds to insure success. The
whole story of their failure was packed into the Hon. Seneca Bowers's
succinct phrase, "There's no argument like delegates."

The vanquished clustered in a little group apart marked by a suggestion
of tense nerves, but the gathering was noticeably of a kind. Country
lawyers, bankers, merchants, stockmen, farmers, in its units, it was
sealed as a whole with the seal of New England which had sent forth
these men's grandfathers and great-grandfathers in their ox-carts to
people and leaven the West. The transplanted New Englandism had
sloughed certain traits of the pioneers who laid the axe to the forests
of the Genesee Country and the Holland Purchase. Only the older people
of the Demijohn District now computed their dealings in shillings;
mentioning one's conscience on week-days was an eccentricity; the
doctrine of Original Sin had lapsed from among burning topics of
conversation; family records were less and less scrupulously kept; and
the _Mayflower's_ claim to consideration as the Noah's Ark of the only
ancestors worth reckoning had ass