eat, and maybe a few stray five-dollar bills for the lads that drive
the wagons that haul the voters to the polls. I go home, and I says to
myself: 'I have that bailiwick to a man. No votes there against Jake.'
But the morning after election I see Jake didn't get but two votes in
the township. Very well. Now who did they vote against? Surely not
against the genial obliging rollicking Irish lad whose face I shave
every other morning. What could they possibly have against him?
No--they voted against that man Dolan, who got drunk, at the Fair and
throwed the gate receipts into the well, and tried to shoo the horses
off the track into the crowd at the home-stretch of the trotting race.
He's the man they plugged. And there's another one--him that
confesses to Father Van Sandt." Dolan shook his head sadly and sighed.
"He's a black-hearted wretch. If you want to see how a soul will look
in its underwear, get an Irishman to confess to a Dutchman." The chirp
of crickets arose in the silence, and after a time Dolan concluded,
"And now there abideth these three, me that I shave, me that they vote
against, and me that the Father knows; and the greatest of these is
charity--I dunno."

The soul beside him on the bridge came back from a lilac bower of
other years, with a girl's lips glowing upon his and the beat of a
girl's heart throbbing against his own. The soul was seared with
images that must never find spoken words, and it moved the lips to say
after exhaling a deep breath from its body, "Well, let's go home."
There, too, was a question of identity. Who was Robert Hendricks? Was
he the man chosen to lead his party organization because he was clean
above reproach and a man of ideals; was he the man who was trusted
with the money of the people of his town and county implicitly; or was
he the man who knew that on page 234 of the cash ledger for 1879 in
the county treasurer's office in the Garrison County court-house there
was a forgery in his own handwriting to cover nine thousand dollars of
his father's debt? Or was he the man who for seven years had crept
into a neighbour's garden on a certain night in April to smell the
lilac blossoms and always had found them gone, and had stood there
rigid, with upturned face and clenched fists, cursing a fellow-man? Or
was he the man who in the county convention of his party had risen
pale with anger, and had walked across the floor and roared his
denunciation of Elijah W. Bemis as a boodler