“I’ve made him promise to vote with us!”

“Incredible!  Abso—­”

“I’ve made him swear that he’ll work for us!”

“Pre — — — POSTEROUS!—­Utterly pre—­break a window, child, before I suffocate!”

“No matter, it’s true anyway.  Now we can march into Congress with drums beating and colors flying!”

“Well—­well—­well.  I’m sadly bewildered, sadly bewildered.  I can’t understand it at all—­the most extraordinary woman that ever—­it’s a great day, it’s a great day.  There—­there—­let me put my hand in benediction on this precious head.  Ah, my child, the poor negro will bless—­”

“Oh bother the poor negro, uncle!  Put it in your speech.  Good-night, good-bye—­we’ll marshal our forces and march with the dawn!”

Laura reflected a while, when she was alone, and then fell to laughing, peacefully.

“Everybody works for me,”—­so ran her thought.  “It was a good idea to make Buckstone lead Mr. Trollop on to get a great speech written for him; and it was a happy part of the same idea for me to copy the speech after Mr. Buckstone had written it, and then keep back a page.  Mr. B. was very complimentary to me when Trollop’s break-down in the House showed him the object of my mysterious scheme; I think he will say, still finer things when I tell him the triumph the sequel to it has gained for us.

“But what a coward the man was, to believe I would have exposed that page in the rotunda, and so exposed myself.  However, I don’t know—­I don’t know.  I will think a moment.  Suppose he voted no; suppose the bill failed; that is to suppose this stupendous game lost forever, that I have played so desperately for; suppose people came around pitying me—­odious!  And he could have saved me by his single voice.  Yes, I would have exposed him!  What would I care for the talk that that would have made about me when I was gone to Europe with Selby and all the world was busy with my history and my dishonor?  It would be almost happiness to spite somebody at such a time.”

CHAPTER XLIII.

The very next day, sure enough, the campaign opened.  In due course, the Speaker of the House reached that Order of Business which is termed “Notices of Bills,” and then the Hon. Mr. Buckstone rose in his place and gave notice of a bill “To Found and Incorporate the Knobs Industrial University,” and then sat down without saying anything further.  The busy gentlemen in the reporters’ gallery jotted a line in their note-books, ran to the telegraphic desk in a room which communicated with their own writing-parlor, and then hurried back to their places in the gallery; and by the time they had resumed their seats, the line which they had delivered to the operator had been read in telegraphic offices in towns and cities hundreds of miles away.  It was distinguished by frankness of language as well as by brevity: