"Stickin' to you like pitch in a spruce crack, as usual. It's the outsiders from the other sections in the district. They hadn't known what a caucus was till them ramrodders got after 'em."
"Can't they be handled now that they're in here?"
"Have been lied to already too skilful and thorough. Me and Whisperin' Urban and a few others of the boys blew the haydust out of their ears, and tried to inject the usual--but they can't hold any more. They've got to be unloaded first--and there ain't time to do it."
"And you're pretty sure they can swing the organization when the caucus is called?" demanded the Duke.
"Two to one--and our men ain't got a smell on that check-list they've doctored. Why, they've even got _me_ marked 'Socialist.' You can imagine what they've done to the rest of the boys. It's one o'clock now." (He had looked at four watches, one after the other, a part of his dickerer's stock-in-trade.) "In an hour and fifteen minutes they'll be organized and votin' by check-list. I ain't a man to give up easy, Squire, but I swear it looks as though they had us headed so far on the homestretch that we ain't near enough to trip 'em or bust a sulky wheel on 'em."
"You've got more than an hour's leeway." It was a soft lisp of sound that startled the group. The man had come by devious ways through the gullies of the Thornton field, around the corner of "The Barracks," and upon the porch. Those who knew him declared that "Whispering Urban" Cobb never walked by the straight way when there was a crooked one by which he could dodge around.
"No, they can't get a-goin' at no two o'clock," he assured them. A drooping gray mustache curtained his mouth, drooping gray eyebrows shaded his eyes, and he crowded very close to them and whispered, "I've stole the call for the caucus, and they'll hunt for it about half an hour, and then they'll have to round the committee up and get 'em to sign another, and have constables swear that the other call was posted--and, well, they won't get going much before four."
"I took it on myself to do it. I reckoned you might need the extra time, seein' that they was tryin' to spring a trap on you."
He took the cigar that the Duke offered him in lieu of praise.