rested to learn what is back of your note.
Horses?"

"No; not horses."

McQuade viewed the young man through half-closed eyes. The contractor
was a big hulk of a man, physically as strong as a bull, with reddish
hair, small twinkling eyes, a puffy nose mottled with veins, thin lips
shaded by a bristling red mustache, and a heavy jaw. The red fell of
hair on his hands reminded Warrington of a sow's back. Everything
about McQuade suggested strength and tensity of purpose. He had begun
work on a canal-boat. He had carried shovel and pick. From boss on a
railway section job he had become a brakeman. He took a turn at
lumbering, bought a tract of chestnuts and made a good penny in
railroad ties. He saved every dollar above his expenses. He bought a
small interest in a contracting firm, and presently he became its
head. There was ebb and tide to his fortunes but he hung on. A
lighting contract made him a rich man. Then he drifted into politics;
and now, at the age of fifty, he was a power in the state. The one
phase of sentiment in the man was the longing to possess all those
obstacles that had beset his path in the days of his struggles. He
bought the canal-boat and converted it into a house-boat; he broke the
man who had refused him a job at the start; he bought the block, the
sidewalk of which he had swept; every man who stood in his way he
removed this way or that. He was dishonest, but his dishonesty was of
a Napoleonic order. He was uneducated, but he possessed that exact
knowledge of mankind that makes leaders; and his shrewdness was the
result of caution and suspicion. But like all men of his breed, he
hated with peculiar venom the well-born; he loved to grapple with
them, to wrest their idleness from them, to compel them to work for a
living, to humiliate them. The fiber in McQuade was coarse; he
possessed neither generosity nor magnanimity; the very men who feared
him held him in secret contempt.

"No, Mr. Warrington, I haven't any horses for sale to-day," he began.
"Not very long ago you met Senator Henderson at your club. He offered
you the nomination for mayor this fall, and you accepted it."

Warrington could not repress a start of surprise. He had not quite
expected this. He was annoyed.

"That is true. What mystifies me," he supplemented, "is how this
knowledge came to your ears."

"I generally hear what's going on. My object in asking you to call is
to talk over the matter on a friendly basis."

"I