“No, Major,” she said as the girls rose with Mrs. Buchanan after the last toast had been drunk, “toast my wit, toast my courage, toast my loyalty, but my beauty—­ah, aren’t women learning not to use it as an asset?”

As she spoke she stretched out one white hand and bare rounded arm to him in entreaty.  Phoebe was more lovely than she knew as she flung her challenge into the camp of her friends and they all felt the call in her dauntless dawn-gray eyes.  Her unconsciousness amounted to a positive audacity.

“Phoebe,” answered the major as he rose and stood beside her chair, “all those things stir at times our cosmic consciousness, but beauty is the bouquet to the woman-wine—­and you can’t help it!”

“How do you old fellows down at the bivouac really feel about this conduit business, Major,” said Tom Cantrell as he moved his chair close around by the major’s after the last swish and rustle had left the men alone in the dining-room for a few moments.  “Just a question starts father fire-eating, so I thought I would ask you to put me next.  It’s up in the city council.”

“Tom,” answered the major as he blew a ring of smoke between himself and the shrewd eyes, “what on earth have a lot of broken-down old Confederate soldiers got to do with the management of the affairs of the city?  You young men are to attend to that—­give us a seat in the sun and our pipes—­of peace.”

“Oh, hang, Major!  Look at the way you old fellows swung that gas contract in the council.  You ‘sit in the sun’ all right but they all know that the bivouac pulls the plurality vote in this city when it chooses—­and they jump when you speak.  What are you going to do about this conduit?”

“Is it pressing?  Not much being said about it.”

“That’s it—­they want to make it a sneak in.  Mayor Potts is pushing hard and we know he’s just the judge’s catspaw.  Judge Taylor owns the city council since that last election and I believe he has bought the board of public works outright.  The conduit is just a whisky ring scheme to hand out jobs before the judge’s election.  They have got to keep the criminal court fixed, Major, for this town is running wide open day and night—­with prohibition voted six months ago.  They’ve got to keep Taylor on the bench.  What do you say?”

“Well,” answered the major, beetling his brows over his keen eyes, “I suppose there is no doubt that Taylor is machine-made.  He’s the real blind tiger, and Potts is his striped kitten.  I understand he ‘lost’ four-fifths of the ‘open’ indictments that the grand jury ‘found’ on their last sitting.  The whisky men are going to sell as long as the criminal court protects them, of course.  Let’s let them cut that conduit deeper into the public mind before they begin on the streets.”

“I’m looking for a nasty show-down for this town before long, Major, if there are men enough in it to call the machine.”

“Tom,” answered the major as he blew a last ring from his cigar, “a town is in a rotten fix when the criminal court is a mockery.  Let’s go interrupt the women’s dimity talk.”