“Mr. President, I ask leave to interrupt the reading of the bill to make an announcement.”

“There being no objection, the senator will make his announcement.”

Senators who had been smoking in the cloakroom, or talking to friends outside the railing, became attentive.  The senator from Fraser was little given to speech, and it might be that he meant at this time to indicate the attitude of the majority toward the appropriations asked by the governor.  In any event, it was always wise to listen to anything Morton Bassett had to say.

The senator was unusually deliberate.  Even when he had secured the undivided attention of the chamber he picked up the telegram and read it through again, as though to familiarize himself with its contents.

“Mr. President, I have just received the following message from a personal friend in Washington:  ’The Honorable Roger B. Ridgefield, United States Senator from Indiana, while on a hunting trip in Chesapeake Bay with a party of Baltimore friends, died suddenly this morning.  The death occurred at a point remote from the telegraph.  No particulars have yet been received at Washington.’  It is with profound sorrow, Mr. President, that I make this announcement.  Though Senator Ridgefield had long been my political antagonist, he had also been, for many years, a valued personal friend.  The Republican Party has lost one of its great leaders, and the State of Indiana a son to whom men of all parties have given their ungrudging admiration.  Mr. President, I move that the senate do now adjourn to meet at ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”

Even before the motion could be put, Bassett was passing about among the desks.  The men he spoke to nodded understandingly.  A mild, subdued excitement reigned in the chamber.  It flashed through the mind of every Democratic member that that death in the Chesapeake had brought a crisis in the war between Bassett and Thatcher.  In due course the assembly, convened in joint session, would mourn decorously the death of a statesman who had long and honorably represented the old Hoosier State in the greatest tribunal on earth; and his passing would be feelingly referred to in sonorous phrases as an untoward event, a deplorable and irreparable loss to the commonwealth.  To Republicans, however, it was a piece of stupendous ill-luck that the Senator should have indulged in the childish pastime of duck shooting at an inconvenient season when the Democratic majority in the general assembly would be able to elect a successor to complete his term of office.

When the gavel fell, adjourning the senate, gentlemen were already seeking in the Federal Constitution for the exact language of the section bearing upon this emergency.  If the Republican governor had not so gayly summoned the legislature he might have appointed a Senator of his own political faith to serve until the next regular session, following the elections a year hence.  It was ungenerous and disloyal of