Part 15

She laughed when she saw it. "Why, I can't make out to see what I looked like then, Andie!"

"I know what you looked like. I've kissed the face away, dear, but I know. In nine years, Marie, I never shifted from one coat to another without shifting your photograph, too. If anything had happened to me, they would have found your photograph on me, with your address on the back. 'Then,' I used to say to myself, 'she'll know. And Greg won't mind my stealing it.'" He laid it face up between them on the table. "The miles you've travelled with me, dear heart, and never knew! Back in the days of the construction camp they used to find sketches of a girl's head in my note-books, a beautiful head badly done--drawn from that photograph. But after I met you----"

"And after you met me, Andie?"

"Then I needed no photograph, though look and look at it I surely did. Steamers in western seas, battle-ships in eastern waters, balustrades of palaces--wherever it might be I was whirling with this old earth around, I've had your face to look at. And when I couldn't see for the darkness--rolled up in my rubber poncho, in no more romantic a place than the muck of a swamp, I've looked up through the swaying branches--or in the lee of a windy hill, it might be, with no more to hinder than the clear air, I've looked up and marked your face in the swirling clouds: your nose, your chin, the lips so shyly smiling. And if through the clouds a pair of stars would break, I'd mark them for your shining eyes, Marie."

"Poetry again, Andie!" She was laughing, but also she was melting under his eyes.

"If that's poetry, then I'm losing respect for it. It's a weak thing, Marie, and----"

"Sh-h--if somebody should be walking on the beach!"

"Let them, sweetheart. It's a fine night for a walk. What harm is truth?"

"But I don't want all the world to hear, Andie. For my poor heart was aching, too, Andie, and now it wants it all to itself, Andie mine."

* * * * *

It was taps on the battle-fleet. Over the mellowing, detaining waters of the bay the long-drawn bugles echoed. Good night, good ni-i-ght, g-o-o-d-n-i-g-h-t--they said, and gently, softly, whisperingly died away.

"He's asleep at last." Welkie was standing in the door. "And I don't know but we'd all better be getting to sleep, too. For to-morrow morning, you know, we--Wha-at!"

His friend was standing before him. "Shunt care for the morrow, Greg. Greater things than have happened are happening around you. The dream of years has come to pass. And we--we, Greg----"

He looked to her, and tremulous, vivid, she came, and with her at his side he was himself again. "Marie is to take me for Sonnie-Boy's uncle, and, Greg, we want your blessing."

TIM RILEY'S TOUCH

"A man outside--says his name's Riley," announced the youth who guarded the outer door. "A big husky!" he added when he saw the chairman did not look pleased.

The state chairman nodded round the table. "This is that new man the senator's been talking about." From a neat pile of letters the chairman picked out one.

"Here is what he sent in the other day. From it you can obtain an idea of the calibre of the man. Listen: 'As you ask me what I think about the crowd up here, I'll say that I think they've had their own way so long they've got to where they figure they don't have to make good. They seem to think that to be in politics is to be trying to fool everybody. They would rather--the most of them--get ten votes by faking than a hundred by straightforward work. They don't seem to see that nowadays people know more about the inside of things than they used to--that they're doing more thinking for themselves in political matters.'

"And"--the chairman reinserted the letter in the neat pile--"there's more drool of the same kind. I don't believe he ever wrote that letter. As I understand it, he's a coal-heaving sort who ought to have gone into the prize-ring and not politics; but, whether he wrote it or not, we will have to humor him because of the senator, who is of course the boss"--he shot a glance round the table--"the boss now. We'll give this fellow a little rope. A couple of the boys up where he comes from tipped me off about him--and we'll let the senator see him for what he is. I've seen these wonders before."

"And I guess you don't have to see too much of a man to be able to size him up either!" This from a faithful one on the chairman's right.

The chairman's lips kneaded shut. "Well, in political life--I don't say this in a boasting spirit, you understand, gentlemen--if a man in my position can't size a man up fairly well at a glance he might as well get out. His letter alone would tell me that he knows it all, and the word I get from the county chairman up his way is that he is one of the turbulent, fighting kind. However, we'll have him in here and look him over. Show him in, George."

And Riley stepped into the room. From the moment of his entrance not a soul there had a doubt of the chairman's prejudgment; but, that his less acute associates might judge for themselves, the chairman allowed the man by his own words to portray himself, which, after all, was the most convincing proof of all. It was the senior senator's own way of doing it.

The new man--an agile, powerful figure--had bowed with a conventional show of pleasure to each in turn as he was introduced; but, that over with, he had faced squarely toward the chairman, waiting. And the chairman began:

"I take it, Mr. Riley, that you are not the kind of man who would stand up on a platform and dodge an argument with the most excitable of opponents?"

"Dodge? What from?"

"Not from the hoots and the jeers, or vegetables--or even the half-bricks--eh?"

Riley waved a contemptuous arm. "I'd rather see half bricks coming my way than be looking down on staring empty benches, or benches emptying swiftly when a man's at the height of his speech." Riley paused by way of emphasis. "It is to try a man's soul--a frosty greeting; but, a warm-blooded opposition--that's only to stir a man up."

The state chairman waited for the new man to leap into the air, knock his heels together and yell: