“Want me, Colonel?” he inquired blithely, when the door had closed behind him; and added obsequiously, when introduced to me, “Glad to meet you, Mr. Paret.  My regards to Mr. Watling, when you go back.

“Alf,” demanded the Colonel, “what do you know of this fellow Krebs?”

Mr. Young laughed.  Krebs was “nutty,” he declared—­that was all there was to it.

“Won’t he—­listen to reason?”

“It’s been tried, Colonel.  Say, he wouldn’t know a hundred-dollar bill if you showed him one.”

“What does he want?”

“Oh, something,—­that’s sure, they all want something.”  Mr. Young shrugged his shoulder expressively, and by a skillful manipulation of his lips shifted his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other without raising his hands.  “But it ain’t money.  I guess he’s got a notion that later on the labour unions’ll send him to the United States Senate some day.  He’s no slouch, either, when it comes to law.  I can tell you that.”

“No—­no flaw in his—­record?” Colonel Varney’s agate eyes sought those of Mr. Young, meaningly.

“That’s been tried, too,” declared the Galesburg attorney.  “Say, you can believe it or not, but we’ve never dug anything up so far.  He’s been too slick for us, I guess.”

“Well,” exclaimed the Colonel, at length, “let him squeal and be d—­d!  He can’t do any more than make a noise.  Only I hoped we’d be able to grease this thing along and slide it through the Senate this afternoon, before they got wind of it.”

“He’ll squeal, all right, until you smother him,” Mr. Young observed.

“We’ll smother him some day!” replied the Colonel, savagely.

Mr. Young laughed.

But as I made my way toward the State House I was conscious of a feeling of relief.  I had no sooner gained a front seat in the gallery of the House of Representatives when the members rose, the Senate marched gravely in, the Speaker stopped jesting with the Chaplain, and over the Chaplain’s face came suddenly an agonized expression.  Folding his hands across his stomach he began to call on God with terrific fervour, in an intense and resounding voice.  I was struck suddenly by the irony of it all.  Why have a legislature when Colonel Paul Varney was so efficient!  The legislature was a mere sop to democratic prejudice, to pray over it heightened the travesty.  Suppose there were a God after all? not necessarily the magnified monarch to whom these pseudo-democrats prayed, but an Intelligent Force that makes for righteousness.  How did He, or It, like to be trifled with in this way?  And, if He existed, would not His disgust be immeasurable as He contemplated that unctuous figure in the “Prince Albert” coat, who pretended to represent Him?