usly at the suggestion, and expectorated his
scornful dissent.

"Not much!" he said. "But I'm going to see the man that carries him and
his Cabinet in his breeches-pocket--Senator Boompointer."

"Boompointer's a big man," continued his auditor doubtfully. "Do you
know him?"

"Know him?" Mr. Hooker laughed a bitter, sardonic laugh. "Well,
gentlemen, I ain't the kind o' man to go in for family influence; but,"
he added, with gloomy elevation, "considering he's an intimate relation
of mine, BY MARRIAGE, I should say I did."

Brant heard no more; the facing around of his old companion towards the
bar gave him that opportunity of escaping he had been waiting for. The
defection of Hooker and his peculiar inventions were too characteristic
of him to excite surprise, and, although they no longer awakened his
good-humored tolerance, they were powerless to affect him in his greater
trouble. Only one thing he learned--that Hooker knew nothing of his wife
being in camp as a spy--the incident would have been too tempting to
have escaped his dramatic embellishment. And the allusion to Senator
Boompointer, monstrous as it seemed in Hooker's mouth, gave him a grim
temptation. He had heard of Boompointer's wonderful power; he believed
that Susy would and could help him--Clarence--whether she did or did not
help Hooker. But the next moment he dismissed the idea, with a flushing
cheek. How low had he already sunk, even to think of it!

It had been once or twice in his mind to seek the President, and, under
a promise of secrecy, reveal a part of his story. He had heard many
anecdotes of his goodness of heart and generous tolerance of all things,
but with this was joined--so said contemporaneous history--a flippancy
of speech and a brutality of directness from which Clarence's
sensibility shrank. Would he see anything in his wife but a common spy
on his army; would he see anything in him but the weak victim, like many
others, of a scheming woman? Stories current in camp and Congress of the
way that this grim humorist had, with an apposite anecdote or a rugged
illustration, brushed away the most delicate sentiment or the subtlest
poetry, even as he had exposed the sham of Puritanic morality or of
Epicurean ethics. Brant had even solicited an audience, but had retired
awkwardly, and with his confidence unspoken, before the dark, humorous
eyes, that seemed almost too tolerant of his grievance. He had been
to levees, and his heart had sunk