In January David took his seat in the House of Representatives, of which he was the youngest member. It was not intended by that august body that he should take any rôle but the one tacitly conceded to him of making silver-tongued oratory on the days when the public would crowd the galleries to hear an all-important measure, the “Griggs Bill,” discussed. The committee were to give him the facts and the general line of argument, and he was to dress it up in his fantastic way. They were entirely willing that he should have the applause from the public as well as the credit of the victory; all they cared for was the certainty of the passage of the bill.

David’s cool, lawyer-like mind saw through all these manipulations and machinations even if he were only a political tenderfoot. As other minor measures came up he voted for or against them as his better judgment dictated, but all his leisure hours were devoted to the investigation and study of the one big bill which was to be rushed through at the end of the session. He pored over the status of the law, found out the policies and opinions of other states on the subject, and listened attentively to all arguments, but he never took part in the discussions and he was very guarded in giving an expression of his views, an attitude which pleased the promoters of the bill until it began to occur to them that his caution came from penetration into their designs and, perhaps, from intent to thwart them.

“He has ketched on,” mournfully stated an old-timer from the third district. “I’m allers mistrustful of these young critters. They are sure to balk on the home stretch.”

“Well, one good thing,” grinned a city member, “it breaks their record, and they don’t get another entry.”

David had made a few short speeches on some of the bills, and those who had read in the papers of the wonderful powers of oratory of the young member from the eleventh flocked to hear him. They were disappointed. His speeches were brief, forceful, and logical, but entirely barren of rhetorical effect. The promoters of the Griggs Bill began to wonder, but concluded he was saving all his figures of speech to sugarcoat their obnoxious measure. It occurred to them, too, that if by chance he should oppose them his bare-handed way of dealing with subterfuges and his clear presentation of facts would work harm. They counted, however, on being able to convince him that his future status in the life political depended upon his coöperation with them in pushing this bill through.

Finally he was approached, and then the bomb was thrown. He quietly and emphatically told them he should fight the bill, single handed if necessary. Recriminations, arguments, threats, and inducements–all were of no avail.

“Let him hang himself if he wants to,” growled one of the committee. “He hasn’t influence enough to knock us out. We’ve got the majority.”

The measure was one that would radically affect the future interests of the state, and was being watched and studied by the people, who had not, as yet, however, realized its significance or its far-reaching power. The intent of the promoters of the Griggs Bill was to leave the people unenlightened until it should have become a law.

“Dunne won’t do us any harm,” argued the father of the bill on the eventful day. “He’s been saving all his skyrockets for this celebration. He’ll get lots of applause from the women folks,” looking up at the solidly packed gallery, “and his speech will be copied in all the papers, and that’ll be the reward he’s looking for.”

When David arose to speak against the Griggs Bill he didn’t look the youngster he had been pictured. His tall, lithe, compelling figure was drawn to its full height. His eyes darkened to intensity with the gravity of the task before him; the stern lines of his mouth bespoke a master of the situation and compelled confidence in his knowledge and ability.

The speech delivered in his masterful voice was not so much in opposition to the bill as it was an exposure of it. He bared it ruthlessly and thoroughly, but he didn’t use his youthful hypnotic periods of persuasive eloquence that had been wont to sway juries and to creep into campaign speeches. His wits had been sharpened in the last few months, and his keen-edged thrusts, hurled rapier-like, brought a wince to even the most hardened of veteran members. It was a complete enlightenment in plain words to a plain people–a concise and convincing protest.

When he finished there was a tempest of arguments from the other side, but there was not a point he had not foreseen, and as attack only brought out the iniquities of the measure, they let the bill come to ballot. The measure was defeated, and for days the papers were headlined with David Dunne’s name, and accounts of how the veterans had been routed by the “tenderfoot from the eleventh.”

After his dip into political excitement legal duties became a little irksome to David, especially after the wedding of Joe and Janey had taken place. In the fall occurred the death of the United States senator from the western district of the state. A special session of the legislature was to be convened for the purpose of pushing through an important measure, and the election of a successor to fill the vacancy would take place at the same time. The usual “certain rich man,” anxious for a career, aspired, and, as he was backed by the state machine as well as by the covert influence of two or three of the congressmen, his election seemed assured.

There was an opposing candidate, the choice of the people, however, who was gathering strength daily.

“We’ve got to head off this man Dunne some way,” said the manager of the “certain rich man.” “He can’t beat us, but with him out of the way it would be easy sailing, and all opposition would come over to us on the second ballot.”

“Isn’t there a way to win him over?” asked a congressman who was present.

The introducer of the memorable measure of the last session shook his head negatively.

“He can’t be persuaded, threatened, or bought.”

“Then let’s get him out of the way.”

“Kidnap him?”

“Decoy him gently from your path. The consul of a little seaport in South America has resigned, and at a word from me to Senator Hollis, who would pass it on to the President, this appointment could be given to your young bucker, and he’d be out of your way for at least three years.”

“That would be too good to be true, but he wouldn’t bite at such bait. His aspirations are all in a state line. He’s got the usual career mapped out,–state senator, secretary of state, governor–possibly President.”

“You can never tell,” replied the congressman sagaciously. “A presidential appointment, the alluring word ‘consul,’ a foreign residence, all sound very enticing and important to a young country man. The Dunne type likes to be the big frog in the puddle. This stripling you are all so afraid of hasn’t cut all his wisdom teeth yet. It’s worth a try. I’ll tackle him.”

The morning after this conversation, as David walked down to the Judge’s office he felt very lonely–a part of no plan. It was a mood that made him ripe for the purpose of the congressman whom he found awaiting him.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time, Mr. Dunne,” said the congressman obsequiously, after the Judge had introduced him. “We’ve heard a great deal about you down in Washington since your defeat of the Griggs Bill, and we are looking for great things from you. Of course, we have to keep our eye on what is going on back here.”

The Judge looked his surprise at this speech, and was still more mystified at receiving a knowing wink from David.

After some preliminary talk the congressman finally made known his errand, and tendered David the offer of a consulship in South America.

At this juncture the Judge was summoned to the telephone in another room. When he returned the congressman had taken his departure.

“Behold,” grinned David, “the future consul of–I really can’t pronounce it. I am going to look it up now in your atlas.”

“Where is Gilbert?” asked the Judge.

“Gone to wire Hilliard before I can change my mind. You see, it’s a scheme to get me out of the road and I–well I happen to be willing to get out of the road just now. I am not in a fighting mood.”

“Consular service,” remarked the Judge oracularly, “is generally considered a sort of clearing house for undesirable politicians. The consuls to those little ports are, as a rule, very poor.”

“Then a good consul like your junior partner will loom up among so many poor ones.”

Barnabas was inwardly disturbed by this move from David, but he philosophically argued that “the boy was young and ’t wouldn’t harm him to salt down awhile.”

“Dave,” he counseled in farewell, “I hope you’ll come to love some good gal. Every man orter hev a hearth of his own. This stretchin’ yer feet afore other folks’ firesides is unnateral and lonesome. Thar’s no place so snug and safe fer a man as his own home, with a good wife to keep it. But I want you tew make me a promise, Dave. When I see the time’s ripe fer pickin’ in politics, will you come back?”

“I will, Uncle Barnabas,” promised David solemnly.

The heartiest approval came from Joe.

“That’s right, Dave, see all you can of the world instead of settling down in a pasture lot at Lafferton.”

CHAPTER II

Gilbert, complacent and affable, returned to Washington accompanied by David. A month later the newly made consul sailed from New York for South America. He landed at a South American seaport that had a fine harbor snugly guarded by jutting cliffs skirting the base of a hill barren and severe in aspect.

As he walked down the narrow, foreign streets thronged with a strange people, and saw the structures with their meaningless signs, he began to feel a wave of homesickness. Then, looking up, he felt that little inner thrill that comes from seeing one’s flag in a foreign land.

“And that is why I am here,” he thought, “to keep that flag flying.”

He resolutely started out on the first day to keep the flag flying in the manner befitting the kind of a consul he meant to be. He maintained a strict watch over the commercial conditions, and his reports of consular news were promptly rendered in concise and instructive form. His native tact and inherent courtesy won him favor with the government, his hospitality and kindly intent conciliated the natives, and he was soon also accorded social privileges. He began to enjoy life. His duties were interesting, and his leisure was devoted to the pursuit of novel pleasures.

Fletcher Wilder, the son of the president of an American mining company, was down there ostensibly to look after his father’s interests, but in reality to take out pleasure parties in his trim little yacht, and David soon came to be the most welcome guest that set foot on its deck.

At the end of a year, when his duties had become a matter of routine and his life had lost the charm of novelty, David’s ambitions started from their slumbers, though not this time in a political way. Wilder had cruised away, and the young consul was conscious of a sense of aloneness. He spent his evenings on his spacious veranda, from where he could see the moonlight making a rippling road of silver across the black water. The sensuous beauty of the tropical nights brought him back to his early Land of Dreams, and the pastime that he had been forced to relinquish for action now appealed to him with overwhelming force and fascination. But the dreams were a man’s dreams, not the fleeting fancies of a boy. They continued to possess and absorb him until one night, when he was looking above the mountains at one lone star that shone brighter than the rest, he was moved for the first time to give material shape and form to his conceptions. The impulse led to execution.

“I must get it out of my system,” he explained half apologetically to himself as he began the writing of a novel. To this task, as to everything else he had undertaken, he brought the entire concentration of his mind and energy, until the book soon began to seem real to him–more real than anything he had done. As he was copying the last page for the last time, Fletcher sailed into the harbor for a week of farewell before returning to New York.

“What have you been doing for amusement these last six months, Dunne?” he asked as he dropped into David’s house.

“You’d never guess,” said David, “what your absence drove me to. I’ve written a book–a novel.”

“Let me take it back to the hotel with me to-night. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and it may–”

“If it serves as a soporific,” said David gravely, as he handed him the bulky package, “my labor will not have been in vain.”

The next morning Wilder came again into David’s office.

“I fear you didn’t sleep well, after all,” observed David, looking at his visitor’s heavy-lidded eyes.

“No, darn you, Dunne. I took up your manuscript and I never laid it down until the first streaks of dawn. Then when I went to bed I lay awake thinking it all over. Why, Dunne, it’s the best book I ever read!”

“I wish,” David replied with a whimsical smile, “that you were a publisher.”

“Speaking of publishers, that’s why I didn’t bring the manuscript back. I sail in a week, and I want you to let me take it to a publisher I know in New York. He will give it a prompt reading.”

“If it wouldn’t bother you too much, I wish you would. You see, it would take so long for it to come back here and be sent out again each time it is rejected.”

“Rejected!” scoffed Wilder. “You wait and see! Aren’t you going to dedicate it?”

David hesitated, his eyes stealing dreamily out across the bay to the horizon line.

“I wonder,” he said meditatively, “if the person to whom it is dedicated–every word of it–wouldn’t know without the inscription.”

“No,” objected Fletcher, “you should have it appear out of compliment.”

He smiled as he wrote on a piece of paper: “To T. L. P.”

“The initials of your sweetheart?” quizzed Fletcher.

“No; when I was a little chap I used to spin yarns. These are the initials of one who was my most absorbed listener.”

Wilder raised anchor and sailed back to the states. At the expiration of two months he wrote David that his book had been accepted. In time ten bound copies of his novel, his allotment from the publishers, brought him a thrill of indescribable pleasure. The next mail brought papers with glowing reviews and letters of commendation and congratulations. Next came a good-sized check, and the information that his book was a “best seller.”

The night that this information was received he went up to the top of the hill that jutted over the harbor and listened to the song of the waves. Two years in this land of liquid light–a land of burning days and silent, sapphired nights, a land of palms and olives–two years of quiet, dreamy bliss, an idle and unsubstantial time! How evanescent it seemed, by the light of the days at home, when something had always pressed him to action.

“Two years of drifting,” he thought. “It is time I, too, raised anchor and sailed home.”

The next mail brought a letter that made his heart beat faster than it had yet been able to do in this exotic, lazy land. It was a recall from Barnabas.

“Dear Dave:

“Nothing but a lazy life in a foreign land would have drove a man like you to write a book. The Jedge and M’ri are pleased, but I know you are cut out for something different. I want you to come home in time to run for legislature again. There’s goin’ to be something doin’. It is time for another senator, and who do you suppose is plugging for it, and opening hogsheads of money? Wilksley. I want for you to come back and head him off. If you’ve got one speck of your old spirit, and you care anything about your state, you’ll do it. I am still running politics for this county at the old stand. Your book has started folks to talking about you agen, so come home while the picking is good. You’ve dreamt long enough. It is time to get up. Don’t write no more books till you git too old to work.

“Yours if you come,
“B. B.”

The letter brought to David’s eyes something that no one in this balmy land had ever seen there. With the look of a fighter belted for battle he went to the telegraph office and cabled Barnabas, “Coming.”

CHAPTER III

On his return to Lafferton David was met at the train by the Judge, M’ri, and Barnabas.

“Your trunks air goin’ out to the farm, Dave, ain’t they?” asked Barnabas wistfully.

“Of course,” replied David, with an emphasis that brought a look of pleasure to the old man.

“Your telegram took a great load offen my mind,” he said, as they drove out to the farm. “Miss Rhody told me all along I need hev no fears fer you, that you weren’t no dawdler.”

“Good for Miss Rhody!” laughed David. “She shall have her reward. I brought her silk enough for two dresses at least.”

“David,” said M’ri suddenly at the dinner table, “do tell me for whose name those initials in the dedication to your book stand. Is it any one I know?”

“I hardly know the person myself,” was the smiling and evasive reply.

“A woman, David?”

“She figured largely in my fairy stories.”

“A nickname he had for Janey,” she thought with a sigh.

“Uncle Barnabas,” said David the next day, “before we settle down to things political tell me if you regret my South American experience.”

“Now that you’re back and gittin’ into harness, I’ll overlook anything. You’d earnt a breathing spell, and you look a hull lot older. Your book’s kep’ your name in the papers, tew, which helps.”

“I will show you something that proves the book did more than that,” said David, drawing his bank book from his pocket and passing it to the old man, who read it unbelievingly.

“Why, Dave, you’re rich!” he exclaimed.

“No; not rich. I shall always have to work for my living. So tell me the situation.”

This fully occupied the time it took to drive to town, for Cold Molasses, successor to Old Hundred, kept the pace his name indicated. The day was spent in meeting old friends, and then David settled down to business with his old-time energy. Once more he was nominated for the legislature and took up the work of campaigning for Stephen Hume, opponent to Wilksley. Hume was an ardent, honest, clean-handed politician without money, but he had for manager one Ethan Knowles, a cool-headed, tireless veteran of campaign battles, with David acting as assistant and speech maker.

David was elected, went to the capital, and was honored with the office of speaker by unanimous vote. He had his plans carefully drawn for the election of Hume, who came down on the regular train and established headquarters at one of the hotels, surrounded by a quiet and determined body of men.

Wilksley’s supporters, a rollicking lot, had come by special train and were quartered at a club, dispensing champagne and greenbacks promiscuously and freely. There was also a third candidate, whose backers were non-committal, giving no intimation as to where their strength would go in case their candidate did not come in as a dark horse.

When the night of the senatorial contest came the floor, galleries, and lobby of the House were crowded. The Judge, M’ri, and Joe were there, Janey remaining home with her father, who refused to join the party.

“Thar’ll be bigger doin’s fer me to see Dave officiate at,” he prophesied.

The quietly humorous young man wielding the gavel found it difficult to maintain quiet in the midst of such excitement, but he finally evolved order from chaos.

Wilksley was the first candidate nominated, a gentleman from the fourteenth delivering a bombastic oration in pompous periods, accompanied by lofty gestures. He was followed by an understudy, who made an ineffective effort to support his predecessor.

“A ricochet shot,” commented Joe. “Wait till Dave hits the bullseye.”

The supporting representatives of the dark horse made short, forceful speeches. Then followed a brief intermission, while David called a substitute pro tem to the speaker’s desk. He stepped to the platform to make the nominating speech for Hume, the speech for which every one was waiting. There was a hush of expectancy, and M’ri felt little shivers of excitement creeping down her spine as she looked up at David, dauntless, earnest, and compelling, as he towered above them all.

In its simplicity, its ring of truth, and its weight of conviction, his speech was a masterpiece.

“A young Patrick Henry!” murmured the Judge.

M’ri made no comment, for in that flight of a second that intervened between David’s speech and the roar of tumultuous applause, she had heard a voice, a young, exquisite voice, murmur with a little indrawn breath, “Oh, David!”

M’ri turned in surprise, and looked into the confused but smiling face of a lovely young girl, who said frankly and impulsively: “I don’t know who Mr. Hume may be, but I do hope he wins.”

M’ri smiled in sympathy, trying to place the resemblance. Then her gaze wandered to the man beside the young girl.

“You are Carey Winthrop!” she exclaimed.

The man turned, and leaned forward.

“Mrs. Thorne, this is indeed a pleasure,” he said, extending his hand.

Joe then swung his chair around into their vision.

“Oh, Joe!” cried the young girl ecstatically. “And where is Janey?”

The balloting was in progress, and there was opportunity for mutual recalling of old times. Then suddenly the sibilant sounds dropped to silence as the result was announced. Wilksley had the most votes, the dark horse the least; Hume enjoyed a happy medium, with fifteen more to his count than forecast by the man behind the button, as Joe designated Knowles.

In the rush of action from the delegates, reporters, clerks, and messengers, the place resembled a beehive. Then came another ballot taking. Hume had gained ten votes from the Wilksley men and fifteen from the dark horse, but still lacked the requisite number.

From the little retreat where Hume’s manager was ensconced, with his hand on the throttle, David emerged. He looked confident and determined.

The third ballot resulted in giving Hume the entire added strength of the dark horse, and enough votes to elect. A committee was thereupon appointed to bring the three candidates to the House. When they entered and were escorted to the platform they each made a speech, and then formed a reception line. David stood apart, talking to one of the members. He was beginning to feel the reaction from the long strain he had been under and wished to slip away from the crowd. Suddenly he heard some one say:

“Mr. Speaker, may I congratulate you?”