“I guess the Dominion knows it, too,” said Mr Williams.  “When Great Britain is quite sure she’s ready to do business on preference lines it’s the Liberal party on this side she’ll have to talk to.  No use showing ourselves too anxious, you know.  Besides, it might do harm over there.  We’re all right; we’re on record.  Wallingham knows as well as we do the lines we’re open on—­he’s heard them from Canadian Liberals more than once.  When they get good and ready they can let us know.”

“Jolly them up with it at your meetings by all means,” advised Bingham, “but use it as a kind of superfluous taffy; don’t make it your main lay-out.”

The Reform Association of South Fox had no more energetic officer than Bingham, though as he sat on the edge of the editorial table chewing portions of the margin of that afternoon’s Express, and drawling out maxims to the Liberal candidate, you might not have thought so.  He was explaining that he had been in this business for years, and had never had a job that gave him so much trouble.

“We’ll win out,” he said, “but the canvass isn’t any Christmas joy—­not this time.  There’s Jim Whelan,” he told them.  “We all know what Jim is—­a Tory from way back, where they make ’em so they last, and a soaker from way back, too; one day on his job and two days sleepin’ off his whiskey.  Now we don’t need Jim Whelan’s vote, never did need it, but the boys have generally been able to see that one of those two days was election day.  There’s no necessity for Jim’s putting in his paper—­a character like that—­no necessity at all—­he’d much better be comfortable in bed.  This time, I’m darned if the old boozer hasn’t sworn off!  Tells the boys he’s on to their game, and there’s no liquor in this town that’s good enough to get him to lose his vote—­wouldn’t get drunk on champagne.  He’s held out for ten days already, and it looks like Winter’d take his cross all right on Thursday.”

“I guess I’d let him have it, Bingham,” said Lorne Murchison with a kind of tolerant deprecation, void of offence, the only manner in which he knew how to convey disapproval to the older man.  “The boys in your division are a pretty tough lot, anyhow.  We don’t want the other side getting hold of any monkey tricks.”

“It’s necessary to win this election, young man,” said Bingham, “lawfully.  You won’t have any trouble with my bunch.”

It was not, as will be imagined, the first discussion, so late in the day, of the value of the preference trade argument to the Liberal campaign.  They had all realized, after the first few weeks, that their young candidate was a trifle overbitten with it, though remonstrance had been a good deal curbed by Murchison’s treatment of it.  When he had brought it forward at the late fall fairs and in the lonely country schoolhouses, his talk had been so trenchant, so vivid and pictorial, that the gathered farmers listened with open mouths, like children, pathetically used with life, to a grown-up fairy tale.