testily:
"'Y gory, Amos--that thing will get you yet--what say?" he asked,
turning for confirmation to the Doctor.
Amos Adams smiled gently at the Captain, but addressed the Doctor
eagerly, as one more capable of understanding matters occult: "And I'll
tell you another thing--Mr. Left is coming regularly now."
"Mr. Left?" sniffed the Captain.
"Yes," explained the editor carefully, "I was telling the Doctor last
week that if I go into a dark room and blindfold myself and put a pencil
in my left hand, a control who calls himself Mr. Left comes and writes
messages from the Other Side."
"Any more sense to 'em than your crazy planchette?" scoffed Captain
Morton.
The editor closed his eyes in triumph. "Read our editorial this week on
President Cleveland and the Money Power?" he asked. The Captain nodded.
"Mr. Left got it without the scratch of a 't' or the dot of an 'i' from
Samuel J. Tilden." He opened his eyes to catch the astonishment of the
listeners.
"Humph!" snorted the Doctor in his high, thin voice, "Old Tilden seems
to have got terribly chummy with Karl Marx in the last two years."
"Well, I didn't write it, and Mary says it's not even like my handwrite.
And that reminds me, Doctor, I got to get her prescription filled again.
That tonic you give her seems to be kind of wearing off. The baby you
know--" he stopped a moment vaguely. "Someway she doesn't seem strong."
Only the Doctor caught Grant's troubled look.
The Doctor snapped his watch, and looked at Brotherton. The Doctor was
not the man to loaf long of an autumn evening before any election, and
he turned to Amos and said: "All right, Amos--we'll fix up something for
Mary a little later. Now, George--get out that Fourth Ward voters' list
and let's get to work!"
The group turned to the opening door and saw Henry Fenn, resplendent in
a high silk hat and a conspicuously Sunday best suit, which advertised
his condition, standing in the open door. "Good evening, gentlemen," he
said slowly.
A look of common recognition of Fenn's case passed around the group in
the corner. Fenn saw the look as he came in. He was walking painfully
straight. "I may," he said, lapsing into the poetry that came welling
from his memory and marked him for a drunken fool, "I may," opening his
ardent eyes and glancing affectionately about, "have been toying with
'lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon' and my feet may be 'uncertain, coy
and hard to please,'" he grinned with
|