mpest was rising. He might have warned
Handy, but he did not; for Handy had reached a point in his career where
he considered that a mere county boss was beneath his confidence. More
than that, Hedrick had refused to indorse Handy's note at the bank.
Handy needed money, and being a shorn lamb, the wind changed in his
direction in this wise:

In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening
reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them
sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs.
Worthington rose in her jet and passementerie and announced that our
town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether
we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said
that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would
be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the
court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real
consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was
going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her
campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to assist the
city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would
herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars.
Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one
another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put
on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the
midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it.
After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his
leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank
the next morning at nine o'clock to cash it--and all the town saw that
also.

Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the
_Statesman_ a most laudatory article about "our distinguished
fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour
to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The
_Statesman_ contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the
defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and
protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The
General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure,
for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels
and rally round the standard of our no