Fighting shrewdly against a natural prompting to regard Ormsby as an hereditary enemy, Kent forced himself to be neighborly.

“I don’t mind,” he said, returning the pipe to its case.  And when the Havanas were well alight, and the talk had circled down upon the political situation in the State, he was able to bear his part with a fair exterior, giving Ormsby an impressionistic outline of the late campaign and the conditions that had made the sweeping triumph of the People’s Party possible.

“We have been coming to it steadily through the last administration, and a part of the preceding one,” he explained.  “Last year the drought cut the cereals in half, and the country was too new to stand it without borrowing.  There was little local capital, and the eastern article was hungry, taking all the interest the law allows, and as much more as it could get.  This year the crop broke all records for abundance, but the price is down and the railroads, trying to recoup for two bad years, have stiffened the freight rates.  The net result is our political overturn.”

“Then the railroads and the corporations are not primarily to blame?” said Ormsby.

“Oh, no.  Corporations here, as elsewhere, are looking out for the present dollar, but if the country were generally prosperous, the people would pay the tax carelessly, as they do in the older sections.  With us it has been a sort of Donnybrook Fair:  the agricultural voter has shillalahed the head he could reach most easily.”

The New Yorker nodded.  His millions were solidly placed, and he took no more than a sportsman’s interest in the fluctuations of the stock market.

“Of course, there have been all sorts of rumors East:  ‘bull’ prophecies that the triumph of the new party means an era of unexampled prosperity for the State—­and by consequence for western stocks; ‘bear’ growlings that things are sure to go to the bow-wows under the Bucks regime.  What do you think of it?”

Kent blew a series of smoke rings and watched them rise to become a part of the stratified tobacco cloud overhead before replying.

“I may as well confess that I am not entirely an unprejudiced observer,” he admitted.  “For one thing, I am in the legal department of one of the best-hated of the railroads; and for another, Governor Bucks, Meigs, the attorney-general, and Hendricks, the new secretary of State, are men whom I know as, it is safe to say, the general public doesn’t know them.  If I could be sure that these three men are going to be able to control their own party majority in the Assembly, I should take the first train East and make my fortune selling tips in Wall Street.”

“You put it graphically.  Then the Bucks idea is likely to prove a disturbing element on ’Change?”