“Ham,” said Austen, “are you sure you have the names and addresses of those twenty prominent citizens right, so that any voter may go out and find ’em?”

“What are you kidding about, Aust?” retorted Mr. Tooting, biting back the smile again.  “Say, you never get down to business with me.  You don’t blame Crewe for comin’ out, do you?”

“I don’t see how Mr. Crewe could have resisted such an overwhelming demand,” said Austen.  “He couldn’t shirk such a duty.  He says so himself, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, go on!” exclaimed Mr. Tooting, who was not able to repress a grin.

“The letter of the twenty must have been a great surprise to Mr. Crewe.  He says he was astonished.  Did the whole delegation go up to Leith, or only a committee?”

Mr. Tooting’s grin had by this time spread all over his face—­a flood beyond his control.

“Well, there’s no use puffin’ it on with you, Aust.  That was done pretty slick, that twenty-prominent-citizen business, if I do say it myself.  But you don’t know that feller Crewe—­he’s a full-size cyclone when he gets started, and nothin’ but a range of mountains could stop him.”

“It must be fairly exciting to—­ride him, Ham.”

“Say, but it just is.  Kind of breathless, though.  He ain’t very well known around the State, and he was bound to run—­and I just couldn’t let him come out without any clothes on.”

“I quite appreciate your delicacy, Ham.”

Mr. Tooting’s face took on once more a sheepish look, which changed almost immediately to one of disquietude.

“Say, I’ll come back again some day and kid with you.  I’ve got to go, Aust—­that’s straight.  This is my busy day.”

“Wouldn’t you gain some time if you left by the window?” Austen asked.

At this suggestion Mr. Tooting’s expressive countenance showed genuine alarm.

“Say, you ain’t going to put up any Wild West tricks on me, are you?  I heard you nearly flung Tom Gaylord out of the one in the other room.”

“If this were a less civilized place, Ham, I’d initiate you into what is known as the bullet dance.  As it is, I have a great mind to speed you on your way by assisting you downstairs.”

Mr. Hamilton Tooting became ashy pale.

“I haven’t done anything to you, Aust.  Say—­you didn’t—?” He did not finish.

Terrified by something in Austen’s eye, which may or may not have been there at the time of the Blodgett incident, Mr. Tooting fled without completing his inquiry.  And, his imagination being great, he reproduced for himself such a vivid sensation of a bullet-hole in his spine that he missed his footing near the bottom, and measured his length in the entry.  Such are the humiliating experiences which sometimes befall the Talleyrands—­but rarely creep into their biographies.

Austen, from the top of the stairway, saw this catastrophe, but did not smile.  He turned on his heel, and made his way slowly around the corner of the passage into the other part of the building, and paused at the open doorway of the Honourable Hilary’s outer office.  By the street windows sat the Honourable Brush Bascom, sphinx-like, absorbing wisdom and clouds of cigar smoke which emanated from the Honourable Nat Billings.