At the desk in the rotunda below, the clerk gave him his mail, with some pleasantry about the great victory. Garwood stared at him blankly, with the dumb ache at his heart, with some resentment too, that the clerk should not have known what a dash of bitterness that cup of victory held for him. Mechanically he began to thumb his letters over as he stood there, and presently laid them aside that he might open several telegrams he found among them, with that sense of precedence which telegrams always take over every other missive. With the first one his eyes widened in astonishment, and then suddenly he was aware that Warfield was shaking his hand and saying:
"Well, old man, congratulations. It's all the sweeter now, isn't it? Why! You look surprised, what's the--"
"I never knew till just this minute, when I read Rankin's telegram. I just got up."
"I knew you'd pull through all the time," said Warfield, with as much truth as retroactive prophecy can ever hold. "I thought last night they were holding out down there, and that when the whole vote got in, you'd be found to have won out."
Garwood's soreness had gone, and he took a long breath as if to draw into his very being this glad new sense of victory. In an instant a new glory had been added to life. He took Warfield by the arm.
"Come on," he said, "let's get the evening papers, and then go and have a little drink."
They strolled toward the news stand, and Garwood's eye ran down the pages as he waited for his change.
"Why, I carried Bromley's home county! I thought I'd lose that anyway."
"Oh, the story helped out over there," said Warfield. "Bromley got the Sunday-school vote, and that drove the rest to you."
"My! Wasn't it a landslide though!" said Garwood. "Keep the change," he called to the young man behind the news stand. "Well, I was glad the party won even when I thought I had lost," he went on. "Look here!" Garwood was reading, as he walked, the paper he had opened wide. "Logan County gives me a majority of eighteen hundred; what do you think of that?"
"What will it be?" said Garwood, still devouring his papers.
"Nonsense!" said Garwood, crumpling the papers under his arm. "I want to drink Jim Rankin's health, bless his old heart! He gets the post-office, he does! Give us a bottle of champagne!"