Chapter 23

ELECTION NIGHT

At last came the great day which was to tell whether their efforts were a brilliant success or a dire failure--there was no middle ground--and the special train took them to the small city in which the candidate lived. All the correspondents were yet with him, as on the eventful night following the eventful day they must tell the world how Jimmy Grayson looked and what he said when the wires brought the news, good or bad. A few faithful political friends had been invited also to stay with him to the end, and they completed the group which would share the hospitality of the candidate, who must smile and be the good host while the nation was returning his sentence. Harley thought it a bitter ordeal, but it could not be helped.

After his recognition of the great fact that Sylvia and Harley loved each other and belonged to each other, "King" Plummer had gone to Idaho for a while, but he rejoined them on the homeward journey, and his spirits seemed fully recovered. He drifted easily in conversation about her into the old paternal relationship with Sylvia which became him so well, and he never again alluded to that vain dream of his that he might be something else. Moreover, after his temporary alienation he had become a more ardent Graysonite than ever, and would not hear of anything except his triumphant election, despite the immense power of the forces allied against him.

While they changed cars often in the West, the one that bore them to the candidate's town had been their home for several weeks, and even the engine was the same; thus the train attendants fell under the spell of Jimmy Grayson, and when he walked down their car-steps for the last time they came around him in their soiled working clothes and wished him success. It was scarcely dawn then, the east was not yet white, but Harley could see sincerity written all over their honest faces, and Jimmy Grayson, who had listened to ten thousand words of the same kind, some true and some false, was much moved.

"Sir," said the engineer, "at midnight, when the tale is told, I shall be three hundred miles from here, but if you are not the man, then it is a tale that I shall not care to hear."

"Friends," said Jimmy Grayson, gravely, "I am glad to have your good wishes; the good wish is the father of the good act, and whatever tale the coming night has to tell let us endure it without vaunting or complaint."

As Mr. Grayson and his friends walked away in the growing dawn, the railroad men raised a cheer. A little later Harley heard the puff, puff of a locomotive followed by the grinding of wheels, and the train which had been their home whirled away into that West where they had seen and done so many strange things. Harley tried to follow it awhile with his eyes, because this was like a parting with a human being, an old and faithful friend; he felt, too, that the most