“The dynasty of the house of Thornton must end to-day!” boomed Niles, in his best orotund.

Thornton found eyes in the crowd that blinked appreciation.  Quizzical wrinkles deepened in his broad face.  He plucked a cigar from his waistcoat-pocket and held it down toward Mr. Niles.

“No, sir!” roared that irreconcilable.  “I ain’t holding out my porringer to Power—­never again!”

“Power,” repulsed, lighted the cigar from the one he was smoking, and snapped the butt at the sheep.

“I’m a lover of good oratory, Ivus,” he said, placidly, “and I know you’ve come here loaded.  Fire!” He clasped his upcocked knee with his big hands, fingers interlaced, and leaned back.

The crowd exchanged elbow-thrusts and winks.  But the ripple of laughter behind did not take the edge off Mr. Niles’s earnestness.

“Honorable Thornton, I do not mind your sneers and slurs.  When I see my duty I go for it.  I’m here before you to-day as Protest walking erect, man-fashion, on two legs, and with a visible emblem that talks plainer than words can talk.  The people need visible emblems to remind them.  Like I’m leading this sheep, so you have been leading the voters of this legislative district.  The ring has been in here”—­Mr. Niles savagely pinched the cartilage of his nose—­“and you have held the end of the cord.  That’s the way you’ve been led, you people!” The orator whirled and included his concourse of listeners as objects of arraignment.  “Here’s the picture of you as voters right before your eyes.  Do you propose to be sheep any longer?” He put his hat on his head, and shook a hairy fist at the Duke of Fort Canibas.  “This ain’t a dynasty, and you can’t make it into one.  I call on you to take note of the signs and act accordingly; for the people are awake and arming for the fray.  And when the people are once awake they can’t any more be bamboozled by a political despot than the war eagle, screaming across the blue dome of the everlasting heavens, will turn tail when he hears the twittering of a pewee!” Mr. Niles closed, as he always closed a speech, with the metaphor that had given him his sobriquet.

“That is real oratory, Ivus,” stated Mr. Thornton, serenely; “I know it is, because a man who is listening to real oratory never understands what the orator is driving at.”

The Hon. Thelismer Thornton usually spoke with a slow, dry, half-quizzical drawl.  That drawl was effective now.  He came down from his chair, carefully stepping on the roots, and loomed above Mr. Niles, amiable, tolerant, serene.  His wrinkled crash suit, in whose ample folds his mighty frame bulked, contrasted oddly with the dusty, rusty black in which Mr. Niles defied the heat of the summer day.

“Now I am down where I can talk business, Ivus.  What’s the matter with you?”

“Look into the depths of your own soul, if you’ve got the moral eyesight to look through mud,” declaimed Mr. Niles, refusing to descend from polemics to plain business, “and you’ll see what is the matter.  You have made yourself the voice by which this district has spoken in the halls of state for fifty years, and that voice is not the voice of the people!” He stood on tiptoe and roared the charge.