Handy--as the town put it--went to Topeka as
grandly as ever "Childe Roland to the dark tower came"--to use Hedrick's
language. "No one ever has been able to find out what Roland was up to
when he went to the dark tower, but," continued Hedrick, "with Ab and
his child-wonder it will be different. She isn't taking all that special
scenery along in her trunks for nothing. Ab has stumbled on to this
great truth--that clothes may not make the man, but they make the
crook!"

Handy drew a dark brow when he became a Senator, and made a point of
trying to look ominous. He carried his chin tilted up at an angle of
forty-five degrees, and spoke of the most obvious things with an air of
mystery. He never admitted anything; his closest approach to committing
himself on even so apparent a proposition as the sunrise, was that it
had risen "ostensibly"; he became known to the reporters as "Old
Ostensible."

It was his habit to tiptoe around the Senate chamber whispering to other
Senators, and then having sat down to rise suddenly as though some great
impulse had come to him and hurry into the cloakroom. He inherited the
chairmanship of the railroad committee, and all employees came to him
for their railroad passes; so he was the god of the blue-bottle flies of
politics that feed on legislatures, and buzz pompously about the capitol
doing nothing, at three dollars a day. In that session Handy was for the
"peepul." He patronised the State Shippers' Association, and told their
committee that he would give them a better railroad bill than they were
asking. His practice was to commit to memory a bill that he was about to
introduce and then go into his committee-room, when it was full of
loafers, and pretend to dictate it offhand to the stenographer, section
by section without pausing. It was an impressive performance, and gained
Handy the reputation of being brainy. But we at home who knew Handy
were not impressed; and, in our office, we knew that he was the same Ab
Handy who once did business with a marked deck; who cheated widows and
orphans; who sold bogus bonds; who got on two sides of lawsuits, and
whose note was never good at any bank unless backed by blackmail.

When the session closed Abner Handy came home, a statesman with views on
the tariff, and ostentatiously displayed his thousand-dollar bills. The
Handys spent the summer in Atlantic City, and Abner came home wearing
New York clothes of an exaggerated type, and though he ne