tions and only two. You take your
choice. If you side with the corporation, your success will be
instantaneous. You can rig out, and board at the Richwood, and be dined
out, and taken to see the town Saturday nights, and retire with a nice
little boost and a record to apologize for when you go back to Rock
River; that is, you can go in for all that there is in it, or you can
take your chances with the people."

"I will take the chances with the people."

"Well, now, hold on! Don't deceive yourself. The people are a mob yet.
They are fickle as the flames o' hell. They don't know what they do
want, but in the end the man that leads them and stands by them is sure
of success."

The daily walk down from the Capitol was very beautiful. As the sun
sank low it struck through the smoke of the city, and flooded the
rotunda of the building with a warm, red light, which lay along the
floor in great streams of gold, and warmed each pillar till it glowed
like burnished copper. At such moments the muddy streets, the poor
hovels, the ugly bricks, lost to sight beneath the majesty and mystery
of the sun-transfigured smoke and the purple deeps of the lower levels
(out of which the searching, pitiless light had gone), became a sombre
and engulfing flood of luminous darkness.

"Here, here!" Cargill said one day, when Bradley called his attention
to the view, "a man can swear and get drunk and be a politician; but
when he likes flowers or speaks of a sunset, his goose is cooked. It is
political death."

XXI.

BRADLEY AND CARGILL CALL ON IDA.

Bradley had come to like Cargill very much. He was very thoughtful in
his haphazard way, but not at all like Radbourn. Bradley compared every
man he met with Radbourn and Judge Brown, and every woman suffered
comparison with Ida Wilbur.

He went down to meet Cargill on the night of the promised call. He
found him seated on the small of his back, his hands in his pockets.
His absurd little hat (that seemed to partake of his every mood) was
rolled into a point in front, and pulled down aggressively over his
eyes. He was particularly violent, and paid no attention whatever to
Bradley.

"No, sir; I am not a prohibitionist. My position is just this: If we
vote prohibition in Iowa, the government has no business to license men
to sell contrary to our regulations."

"That's state's rights!" burst in the other man who was trembling with
rage and excitement.

Cargill slowly rose, transf