“It is not his own election he’s working for,” said Winthrop.  He was conscious of an effort to assume a point of view both noble and magnanimous.

“He probably feels the `cause’ calls him.  But, good Heavens!”

“Look out!” shrieked Sam, “where you going?”

Winthrop swung the car back into the avenue.

“To think,” he cried, “that a man who could marry—­a girl, and then would ask her to wait two months.  Or, two days!  Two months lost out of his life, and she might die; he might lose her, she might change her mind.  Any number of men can be Lieutenant-Governors; only one man can be——­”

He broke off suddenly, coughed and fixed his eyes miserably on the road.  After a brief pause, Brother Sam covertly looked at him.  Could it be that “Billie” Winthrop, the man liked of all men, should love his sister, and—­that she should prefer Ernest Peabody?  He was deeply, loyally indignant.  He determined to demand of his sister an immediate and abject apology.

At eight o’clock on the morning of election day, Peabody, in the Scarlet Car, was on his way to vote.  He lived at Riverside Drive, and the polling-booth was only a few blocks distant.  During the rest of the day he intended to use the car to visit other election districts, and to keep him in touch with the Reformers at the Gilsey House.  Winthrop was acting as his chauffeur, and in the rear seat was Miss Forbes.  Peabody had asked her to accompany him to the polling-booth, because he thought women who believed in reform should show their interest in it in public, before all men.  Miss Forbes disagreed with him, chiefly because whenever she sat in a box at any of the public meetings the artists from the newspapers, instead of immortalizing the candidate, made pictures of her and her hat.  After she had seen her future lord and master cast his vote for reform and himself, she was to depart by train to Tarrytown.  The Forbes’s country place was there, and for election day her brother Sam had invited out some of his friends to play tennis.

As the car darted and dodged up Eighth Avenue, a man who had been hidden by the stairs to the Elevated, stepped in front of it.  It caught him, and hurled him, like a mail-bag tossed from a train, against one of the pillars that support the overhead tracks.  Winthrop gave a cry and fell upon the brakes.  The cry was as full of pain as though he himself had been mangled.  Miss Forbes saw only the man appear, and then disappear, but, Winthrop’s shout of warning, and the wrench as the brakes locked, told her what had happened.  She shut her eyes, and for an instant covered them with her hands.  On the front seat Peabody clutched helplessly at the cushions.  In horror his eyes were fastened on the motionless mass jammed against the pillar.  Winthrop scrambled over him, and ran to where the man lay.  So, apparently, did every other inhabitant of Eighth Avenue; but Winthrop was the first to reach him and kneeling in the car tracks, he tried to place the head and shoulders of the body against the iron pillar.  He had seen very few dead men; and to him, this weight in his arms, this bundle of limp flesh and muddy clothes, and the purple-bloated face with blood trickling down it, looked like a dead man.