go headlong to destruction."

"The traitors!" shouted the big man in the audience. But the members of
the committee, from some strange cause, seemed to be struck speechless.
Their jaws fell, but the faces of them all were as red as fire. Sylvia
leaned forward and clapped her gloved hands.

"Blaisdell," whispered Hobart, "slip away and arrange at the
telegraph-office; any of us will give you his report. I shall have at
least five thousand words myself."

Blaisdell slid noiselessly away.

"The candidate endured it all, but only for the time," thundered Jimmy
Grayson, and now his voice was swelling with passion, while his eyes
fairly sparkled with heat and anger--"but only for the time. He had
decided opinions upon this subject, as I have upon the question of
tariff revision, and he intended to utter them as I intend to utter
mine. They said--and they said it with intolerable condescension and
patronage--that for the sake of his record he might make one little
speech upon the subject before a few people out in what they called the
desert, and he accepted the concession. But there was rage in his heart.
He was willing to be beaten by the biggest majority ever given against a
Presidential candidate before he would yield to such insolent dictation.
Moreover, there was the question of his true opinion, which the people
had a right to know, and he took his resolve. There was that little
speech, and he remembered the telegraph wire, the thin line that binds
the farthest little village to the great world, and I say he took his
resolve."

"He called the bluff!" shouted the big man in the audience, in a perfect
roar of triumph, and Jimmy Grayson smiled sweetly.

Suddenly Mr. Goodnight, in all the might of his majesty and importance,
rose up and stalked from the stage, and the eleven other members of the
committee, headed by Mr. Crayon, followed him in an angry file,
accompanied by the derisive shouts of the audience. They quickened their
pace somewhat when they reached solid ground, but before they were
within the sheltering confines of their private car, Jimmy Grayson was
launched upon his great and thrilling tariff speech, in which he
invested the driest subject in the world with an interest that absorbed
the attention of ninety million people.

All day the wires eastward and westward sang with the burden of the
great speech made in the tiny hamlet of Waterville, in the Wyoming
mountains, and the next morning it occupied