“It’s a damned lie!” called a dozen voices.

“Nick Burr knows it.  Ask him!” answered Slate.

From a peaceable assemblage the convention had passed into pandemonium.  Two thousand throats made, in two thousand different keys, a single gigantic discord.  The pounding of the chairman was a faint accompaniment to the clamour.  In the first lull, a man’s voice with a dominant note was heard demanding recognition, and at the sight of his towering figure upon the platform there was a short silence.

“It’s Nick Burr!” called a man from Burr’s district.  “Let’s hear Nick Burr.”

There was a protest on the part of the Webb faction.  Burr and Webb were looked upon as rivals.  “He hates Webb like the devil!” cried a delegate, and “It’s pie for Burr!” sneered another.  But as he moved slightly forward and faced the chairman a sudden hush fell before him.

Among the men surrounding him his powerful figure towered like a giant’s.  His abundant red hair, waving thickly from his bulging forehead, redeemed by its single note of colour the rigidity of his features.  His eyes—­small, keen, deeply set beneath heavy brows—­flashed from a dull opacity to an alert animation.  But in the first and last view of his face it was the mouth that marked the man; the straight, thin lips would close or unclose at their own will, not at another’s—­the line of the mouth, like the line of the hard, square jaw, was the physical expression of his character.  He was called ugly, but it was at least the ugliness of individuality—­the ugliness of an unpolished force—­of a raw, yet disciplined energy.  Now, as he stood at his full height upon the stage, his personality was felt before his words were uttered.  He had but one attribute of recognised oratory—­a voice; and yet a voice so little vibrant as to seem almost without inflections.

It was resonant, far-reaching, incisive; but it rang abruptly and without mellowness.

“Mr. Chairman,” he began, and his words were heard from pit to gallery.  “It is perhaps unnecessary for me to state that I do not rise as an advocate of Mr. Webb.  I am neither his personal friend nor his political supporter, but in the year alluded to by the gentleman from Nottoway I was upon a committee appointed to investigate the charges which the gentleman from Nottoway has seen fit to revive.”  A silence had fallen in which a whisper might have been heard.  Every eye in the building was turned to where his outstanding mop of hair shone red against the smoke-stained wall.  “The charges were thoroughly investigated and emphatically withdrawn.  The gentleman from Nottoway has been misinformed or his memory has misled him—­since there was abundant evidence brought before the committee to prove the suspicions against Mr. Webb’s methods as a lobbyist to be absolutely without foundation.

“I have made this statement because I believe myself to be in a better position to disprove this old and forgotten charge than any man present.  As I am a recognised opponent of Mr. Webb’s political ambition my testimony to the integrity of his personal honour may be of additional value.”