And then the congressman threw back his head and laughed.
"Buy 'em, indeed!" he laughed bitterly. "Buy 'em, indeed! Why, man, I haven't got through paying my debts from the last campaign!"
"Yes, but it costs to live in Washington--God, how it costs! And with a family here at home in the bargain!"
"Oh, hell!" said Garwood, rising in total loss of patience, "I'm tired of hearing this everlasting twaddle about the old man! He's not rich, in the first place, and now that he's out of the bank he's poorer than ever. You people out here in the wilderness think because a man was once president of a little country bank, he's a millionaire. He hasn't anything any more."
"Tell me, how'd he come to be beat fer pres'dent o' the bank?" said Rankin, ignoring Garwood's ill humor in his zest to learn at last the inwardness of a story about which Grand Prairie had been speculating for six months.
"Oh, I'll tell you some other time, Jim," he answered. "I've got to go now."
The year and a half that had gone since their brilliant wedding had passed more slowly for Emily than for Garwood. They had gone East on a wedding journey, for Jerome had been able, as the first perquisites of his new position, to get passes, a trick he had already learned in the Legislature, though there his "transportation" had been confined to the limits of Illinois. They had gone to New York and of course to Washington, where their interests now centered. There they made the conventional rounds, visiting the Capitol and the White House, the Treasury and the Patent Office, ascending the Washington Monument, going over to Arlington and down to Mt. Vernon, seeing all the sights. Emily thus gained a store of memories that served her well in the months that came after. She said she could the better imagine Jerome going the daily rounds of his important duties for having seen the places in which he would be, and Garwood himself found that it was well to have visited on his wedding trip all the points of interest about the city, else he never would have visited them at all. It mattered not, perhaps, that Emily's imaginings of her husband's goings and comings in Washington were far from the reality--they served her as well as any.