both mere creatures, Hollow if anything the stronger of the two. And Amos Caretall towered head and shoulders above them both.

It was the Congressman who broke the silence. “All right,” he said. “Drop in any time--both of you.” And with his grip in one hand and Agnes on the other arm, he crossed the platform to the car.

Routt and Joan and Wint were there. He greeted them with comfortable affection, and surveyed them with keen and appraising eyes. “Climb in,” he invited. “Glad to see everybody.”

Agnes and Routt took the front seat again, and Joan sat between Wint and the Congressman behind. Just before the car started, Amos Caretall leaned across to ask Wint: “Well, young man--how’s your father?”

Wint’s eyes burned sulkily. “About as usual,” he said.

The engine roared, they turned up the street; and the Congressman turned to wave his hand to Gergue and Hollow on the platform.

CHAPTER III

WINT CHASE

Amos Caretall’s home was not a pretentious affair. He lived in a house that had not been built as other houses are; it had, like Topsy, “just growed.” It began as a one-story, four-room brick structure, and spread in wings and “ells” and upper stories until now it numbered ten rooms and was a thing fearful and wonderful to behold. In these ten rooms, Agnes and her father and old Maria Hale, the darky who cooked for them and looked after them, rattled around in a somewhat lonely fashion. For Mrs. Caretall was ten years dead, and the two Caretall boys had gone away to college and afterward had builded homes of their own in other regions.

Amos Caretall was not rich; but he was well off. He had made his money in coal, and when the visible supply of coal began to peter out, he had looked into politics, gone to the state legislature for two terms, and then to Congress. In Congress he had done well. The Hardiston district forgot, where he was concerned, the old rule that a Congressman shall have but two terms. They sent him back again and again. He was now in his fifth term, and his power at home and abroad was growing.

His most valuable quality was imagination. He was not an able man; he knew little about political economy, national finance, sociology, the science of government. He knew 

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