“They ain’t no votes in that.”

The two considered this truism for a time in thoughtful silence. In this interval, Gergue produced and filled and lighted a pipe in a manner painfully like that of Amos. Every detail--pipe, plug, knife, priming--was the same. Amos watched him with interest, and when Gergue had finished with the rites, Amos asked:

“How big a margin has Chase got?”

Gergue opened his hands as though baring every secret.

“Well,” he said, “Jim’ll get two votes. Yours and mine. He won’t vote for himself. Says it ain’t right. So I don’t know where we can count on anything else.” He hesitated, then: “You know, this Chase has got a holt on Hardiston.”

“How?”

“Every way. Four-five hundred men working for him, one way or another. The drys are all with him. The money is all with him. And the Democrats are all with him.”

Amos pondered. “I hadn’t no notion Chase was such a popular man,” he said.

Gergue shook his head. “He ain’t. They’d all like to see him licked, just to see his swelling go down some. But--a man can’t vote for Hollow.”

Amos puffed hard. “You know, Peter, I’ve a mind to vote for Chase myself.”

Gergue was startled; but after a minute he grinned. “Whatever you say goes for me, Amos.”

“Chase is a good man, a big man, a public-spirited man. You know, Peter, if he was elected Mayor, things being as they is, he’d stand right in line for Congress next fall. I don’t know as I’d even run against him, Pete.”

Gergue leaned forward and clapped his knee and chuckled. Something pleased him. Amos watched him with an expression of comical bewilderment, until Gergue caught his eye and sobered abruptly. Then Amos asked, most casually:

“How’s young Wint, Peter?”

Gergue looked sharply at the Congressman. “The boy? We-ell--he’s over twenty-one.”

“Er--is he?”

Amos squinted at the ceiling. “Seems to me he is. He was three years ahead of Agnes in school and high school, and she is twenty now. He must be twenty-two or three.”

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