Each change was received with a roar by the opposing factions—­while the clerks stumbled on, making alteration upon alteration.  On the floor and the stage the chairmen thickened in the fight.  Ben Galt had sprung suddenly into life as Burr’s manager, and in the aisle Tom Bassett, in his shirt sleeves, with a tally sheet in his hand, was inciting his battalion to victory.  About him the Webb men were summing up the votes needed to bring in their leader.  The noise had a dull, baying sound, as if the general voice were growing hoarse.  The odour of good and bad tobacco was dense and stifling.  In the midst of the clamour a drunken man rose to move that the convention consider the subject in prayer.

Upon the reading of the second ballot the confusion deepened.  The name of Crutchfield went down, and Burr and Webb ran hotly neck to neck.  Then the Crutchfield party, which had held bravely together, began to go over, and, as each change was made, a shout went up from the successful force.  Hall and Galt had established themselves on opposite sides of the stage and were working with drawn breath.  Galt, with a cigar in his mouth and a fan in his hand, was the only cool man in the house.  He had caught the wave of popular enthusiasm before it had had time to break, and he was giving it no ground upon which to settle.  Tom Bassett in the centre aisle was cheering on his workers.  He was superb, but the Webb men were not behind him; it was still neck to neck.  Then, at last, with the third ballot, Burr led off, and the voting was over.

There was a call upon the name of the successful candidate, but before he stood up the Honourable Cumberland Crutchfield rose to eulogise the wisdom of the convention in nominating the man he had tried to defeat.  The Caesar of Democracy was beaming, despite his disappointment—­a persistent beam of the flesh.

“Gentlemen, you have made your decision, and it is for me to bow to its wisdom.  In the Honourable Nick Burr your choice has fallen upon the man who will most incite to ardour each individual voter.  His record is a glorious one,”—­for an instant he wavered; then his imagination took a blinded leap.  “He was born a Democrat, he lives a Democrat, he will die a Democrat.  In the life of his revered and lamented father, the late Alexander P. Burr, he has a shining example of unshaken conviction and unswerving loyalty to principle.  Gentlemen, you have chosen well, and I pledge myself to uphold your nominee and to be the foremost bearer of your banner when it waves in next November from the line of Tennessee to the Atlantic Ocean.”

He sat down amid ecstatic cheers and Nicholas Burr came forward.

His face was grave, but there was the light of enthusiasm in his eyes and his head was uplifted.

“There’s a man who has capitalised his conscience,” sneered a Webb follower with a smile.

Across the hall Ben Galt was lighting a cigar, the tattered remains of his fan at his feet.  “There’s a statesman that came a century too late,” he remarked to Tom Bassett.  “He’s a leader, pure and simple, but he’s out of place in an age when every man’s his own patriot.”