Of Enoch’s speeches on that trip little need be said here.  Never before had he spoken with such fire and with such simple eloquence.  The group of speeches he made are familiar now to every schoolboy.  One cannot read them to-day without realizing that the Secretary was trying as never before to interpret for the public his own ideals of service to the common need.  He seemed to Abbott and to the newspaper men who for six weeks were so intimately associated with him to draw inspiration and information from the free air.  And there was to all of his speeches an almost wistful persuasiveness, as if, Abbott said, he picked one listener in each audience, each night, and sought anew to make him feel the insidious peril to the nation’s soul that lay in personal complacency and indifference to the nation’s spiritual welfare.  Only Jonas, struggling to induce the Secretary to take a decent amount of sleep, nodded wisely to himself.  He knew that Enoch made each speech to a lovely, tender face, that no man who saw ever forgot.

Little by little, the newspapers of the country began to take Enoch’s point of view.  They not only gave his speeches in full, but they commented on them editorially, at great length, and with the exception of the Brown papers, favorably.  By the time Enoch was on his way home, with but two weeks more of speech making before him, it looked as though the thought of war with Mexico had been definitely quashed.  And Enoch was tired to the very marrow of his bones.

But the Brown papers were not finished.  One evening, in Arizona, shortly after the train had pulled out of a station, Enoch asked for the newspapers that had been brought aboard from the desert city.  Charley Abbott, who had been with the newspaper men on the observation platform for an hour or so, answered the Secretary’s request with a curiously distraught manner.

“I—­that is—­Mr. Huntingdon, Jonas says you slept worse than ever last night.  Why not save the papers till morning and try to sleep now?”

Enoch looked at his secretary keenly.  “Picked up some Brown papers here, eh!  Nothing that bunch can say can hurt me, old man.”

“Don’t you ever think it!” exclaimed Charley vehemently.  “You might as well say you were immune to rattler bites, Mr. Huntingdon—­” here his voice broke.

“Look here, Abbott,” said Enoch, “if it’s bad, I’ve got to fight it, haven’t I?”

“But this sort of thing, a man—­” Charley suddenly steadied himself.  “Mr. Secretary, they’ve put some nasty personal lies about you in the paper.  The country at large and all of us who know you, scorn the lies as much as they do Brown.  In a day or so, it we ignore them, the stuff will have been forgotten.  I beg of you, don’t read any newspapers until I tell you all’s clear.”

Enoch smiled.  “Why, my dear old chap, I’ve weathered all sorts of mud slinging!”

“But never this particular brand,” insisted Charley.