bing his ledger, greeted him with a jovial
shout, and directed him toward a stratum of rock which the workmen had
recently unearthed.

"Look it over," he called after him. "It promises to pan out
scrumptious. We struck A-1 rock seven feet below the surface."

"That discounts the Eureka," said Shelby. "We've never done better
than twelve."

He picked his way through the yards, the hammers of the stone dressers
clinking out a not unmusical chorus from every shed, and skirting the
docks where the ponderous cranes swung the great slabs to the canal
boats, scrambled down a rough roadway into the quarry proper amidst all
the hurly-burly of the teamsters and the hoarse steam drills. The
walls of sandstone rose sheer around him, sliced down by the blasts
like sugar with a scoop. Some of the formation was not unlike sugar
little refined; some, lighter, with streaks of grayish pink, like sides
of bacon; and some, a rich deep brown which architects specified the
country over, was said to have no equal the world around save only in
Japan. In the newly uncovered tract Shelby spied Bernard Graves
pecking about with a little hammer.

"Prospecting for gold?" he asked jocularly.

"No; fucoids."

"Eh?"

"Fossils, you know; a sort of seaweed. The only kind we can discover
in this formation."

"My little freshwater college wasn't strong on the sciences," said
Shelby, speculating whether this particular crotchet required humoring.
As the young man's own interest in the topic seemed languid, he decided
against this course and frankly told him that he wanted to talk with
him. "Suppose we move away from the clatter of the drills," he
suggested.

Graves assented, and they shifted from beneath the overhanging bank of
sandy loam to the shade of an unused derrick.

"Smoke?" queried the politician, affably.

Graves declined a cigar, explaining, "I merely take a cigarette now and
then, usually after dinner."

Shelby's contempt for cigarettes was boundless, but he dissembled his
opinion, and lit the strongest cigar in his case.

"It's up to me, Bernard," he confessed with a laugh. "It's my move,
and I'm right on the spot like a little man, though humble pie isn't my
favorite tidbit by a large majority."

"Meaning what?" asked Graves, without animation.

Behind the candidate's urbane mask rioted a lust to mar and maim, but
his political self explained blandly:--

"Meaning that your checkmate in this morning's _Whig_ was