The Henchman | Page 5

for woman suffrage. At this
juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a
yellow paper.
"Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram--a telegram
from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think
of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news to us first
of all!" She searched vainly for her glasses--her big blue eyes were
astigmatic--and finally, with an impatient "You read it to them all,"
thrust the message into Volney Sprague's reluctant fingers.
He unfolded and read the paper, in lively quandary whether her choice
were as haphazard as it seemed:--
"Nominated on first ballot. Home ten-thirty. Coming directly to club. It
stands first.

"C. R. SHELBY."
"Isn't that simply dear of him?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard. "We come
first. He remembers us in his hour of triumph. It shows the true nature
of the man."
"It does indeed," grumbled Sprague, shifting within pinching distance
of Bernard Graves, whom he had seen grinning in the background
during the reading. "It's a barefaced bid for votes."
Mrs. Hilliard's enthusiasm demanded a vent.
"He'll be here in five minutes," she exclaimed, peering at the hall clock.
"The message was delayed somehow, and his train is due now. We
must devise a reception. We owe it to him. He thought of us. We must
think of him. What shall we do? Think, think, you clever people!"
"That preposterous woman means to turn this into a ratification
meeting," groaned the editor under his breath. "I must get out."
His hostess was of another mind, however, and barred retreat when he
attempted to make his excuses.
"You shan't desert us," she declared roguishly. "You can't," she
immediately added, at the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel of the
drive. "He's here! The hall, the hall! Into the hall!" And into the hall
Mrs. Hilliard masterfully bundled the Culture Club of New Babylon,
grouping it theatrically around the newel-post and up the winding stair.
"Gad," muttered Sprague, struggling to efface himself, "knock me in
the head."
Bernard Graves gleefully struck an attitude behind a friendly palm, and
Mrs. Hilliard threw wide the door.
"Welcome to your own people," she cried, and Shelby, closely
followed by Bowers, crossed the threshold into the light. Then big Joe
Hilliard, whom the unwonted commotion had attracted from the billiard

room, led a boisterous cheer, which the candidate received with
modestly bowed head. He flushed, and wrestled with his diffidence like
a schoolboy, as the house grew still and they waited for him to speak.
"I--I don't claim the credit, friends," he stammered. "It's your victory."
CHAPTER III
Midway in the following forenoon Shelby sat in his law office revising
for the seventh time the last will and testament of the Widow
Weatherwax. It was the seventh revision of her third last will and
testament, to speak by the card, for the widow had a bent for
will-making, which the lawyer had noticed was of periodic intensity.
Once, in a moment of drollery, he entered a jocose memorandum in the
"tickler," under the first week-day of several successive months:
"Revise Mrs. Weatherwax's will;" and such was his foresight that twice
only during that term did she frustrate his prophecy.
This day, as always, she attained the topmost step outside his office
door breathless, and, as always, Shelby gravely lent a hand to deposit
her plump little person in the softest of his old-fashioned office chairs.
The ceremony ended regularly with the panting announcement, "The
Lord has spared me for another month."
It was the man's custom at such times to allot equal praise to
Providence and the widow's marvellous vitality for this happy issue,
and to hazard a guess that she had thought of important changes for her
will. The widow would nod assent over a heaving bosom, and slowly
fan herself back to normal respiration. The relict of a leather-lunged
Free Methodist preacher, she affected a garb of ostentatious simplicity.
No godless pleats or tucks or gores or ruffles or sinful abominations of
braid defaced the chaste sobriety of her black gown; buttons were
tolerated merely as buttons, without vain thought of ornament; and the
strange little bonnet, which she perched above hair whose natural
coquetry of curl was austerely sleeked away, was of a composition so
harshly ugly that more worldly-minded women shuddered at the sight.
The worldly-minded, indeed, were prone to the criticism that the

material of Mrs. Weatherwax's garments was beyond cavil, but this
surely was her own concern. It were sheer impertinence to finger the
texture of a zealot's sackcloth.
Shelby busied himself with his papers, pending her recovery.
"Them stairs alluz give me sech a turn," she sighed, at length. She
enunciated her R's with the merciless fidelity of her section at its worst,
saying stair-urs