"Where have you been?" Emily asked when he entered their rooms.
"Down town; where'd you suppose?" he answered.
"Well, I've got a fight on my hands, that's the news." He spoke as if she were responsible for the fact, and she felt it.
"You know how interested the baby and I are, Jerome. We've been waiting here to hear."
He softened at the mention of his child, and bent over his cradle.
"Don't waken him," the mother said, as he put forth his big hand. And then she resumed her questioning.
"Well," she said hopefully, with the faith they had always held in Rankin, "he can bring it around all right, can't he?"
"He!" said Garwood. "He's a back number!"
She drew the story out of him, and when she had done so, she said:
"Well, you don't forget, Jerome, that you once said to me that we must be good to Jim Rankin."
He made no reply for a long time, and she followed him with eyes that looked large in her thin face. After awhile, he paused in trying to unbutton his collar, and turned his head around, his chin thrust pointedly out over his hands.
"If I were out of debt," he said, "I'd quit the whole business and open a law office in Chicago, and let politics alone."
It was a common threat with him when he was discouraged. And she had long since learned that the threat to leave politics was common to all politicians, just as the threat to leave the sea is common to all sailors, or the threat to leave newspaper work to all newspaper men. She felt herself the fascination of the life, and so knew the insincerity of the threat.
"Oh, you always say that when you're blue. Don't worry any more to-night."
The Freeman H. Pusey of his second campaign was after all the same Freeman H. Pusey Garwood had known in his first campaign. When Garwood entered the editorial room of the _Citizen_ that afternoon he expected, as the result of Rankin's description, to see a regenerated Pusey, but he found instead the same old character. The little editor sat at a common kitchen table worn brown and smooth by time and elbows and piled with papers that showed deep deposits of dust in their folds and wrinkles.
Those at the bottom of the pile were darkened and seared by age, the strata of later eras were in varying tones of yellow, while those atop, the latest exchanges, were fresh and white, though they showed great gaps where they had been mangled by the long, shiny scissors that lay at the editor's elbow. The scissors were the only thing about the establishment that shone, unless it were the cockroaches, which ran over everything, and mounted the old paste pot, to scramble as nimbly as sailors up the unkempt brush which held a dirty handle aloft for instant use. The shining cockroaches swarmed so thickly about the brush, pausing now and then to wave their inquisitive antennae, that Pusey, before he could prepare an editorial, had to put them to rout, and he did this with his scissors, thrusting at the merry insects with the point of them from time to time in a way that had become habitual.