He snapped his bag shut on the new-found treasure and bade Dan good-bye without referring again to the proposed employment.

Dan knew, as he left the hotel, that if an answer had been imperatively demanded on the spot, he should have accepted Bassett’s proposition; but as he walked slowly away questions rose in his mind.  Bassett undoubtedly expected to reap some benefit from his services, and such services would not, of course, be in the line of the law.  They were much more likely to partake of the function of journalism, in obtaining publicity for such matters as Bassett wished to promulgate.  The proposed new office at the capital marked an advance of Bassett’s pickets.  He was abandoning old fortifications for newer and stronger ones, and Dan’s imagination kindled at the thought of serving this masterful general as aide-de-camp.

He took a long walk, thinking of Bassett’s offer and trying to view it from a philosophical angle.  The great leaders in American politics had come oftener than not from the country, he reflected.  Fraserville, in Dan’s cogitations, might, as Bassett’s star rose, prove to be another Springfield or Fremont or Canton, shrouding a planet destined to a brilliant course toward the zenith.  He did not doubt that Bassett’s plans were well-laid; the state senator was farseeing and shrewd, and by attaching himself to this man, whose prospects were so bright, he would shine in the reflected glory of his successes.  And the flattery of the offer was not in itself without its magic.

However, as the days passed Dan was glad that he had taken time for reflection.  He began to minimize the advantages of the proposed relationship, and to ponder the ways in which it would compel a certain self-effacement.  He had sufficient imagination to color the various scenes in which he saw himself Bassett’s “man.”  In moods of self-analysis he knew his nature to be sensitive, with an emotional side whose expressions now and then surprised him.  He rallied sharply at times from the skeptical attitude which he felt journalism was establishing in him, and assured himself that his old ideals were safe in the citadel his boyhood imagination had built for them.  Dan’s father was a veteran of the Civil War and he had been taught to believe that the Democratic Party had sought to destroy the Union and that the Republican Party alone had saved it.  Throughout his boyhood on the Harrison County farm, he had been conscious of the recrudescence of the wartime feeling in every political campaign.  His admiration for the heroes of the war was in no wise shaken at New Haven, but he first realized there that new issues demanded attention.  He grew impatient of all attempts to obscure these by harking back to questions that the war had finally determined, if it had served any purpose whatever.  He broke a lance frequently with the young men who turned over the books in Wright and Fitch’s office, most of whom were Republicans and devout believers that