"Sit down," and plunged the point of his scissors into another exchange.
Garwood had been considering this visit for a number of days. The disappointment of arriving home to find that his county had failed to endorse him, had been sinking more and more sorely into his soul. It had seemed to him that a renomination by acclamation was his by rights. Many of his colleagues had already received such endorsements, or vindications as they mostly called them, before they left Washington, and Garwood had helped them to celebrate these triumphs in various bar-rooms.
He had been irritated by the fact that he could not now spend his summer as befitted a congressman, and obtain the rest a congressman certainly requires after his onerous duties at Washington; that is, by taking a dignified walk down town in the morning, and a dignified nap in the afternoon. In the evenings he had pictured himself sitting on the veranda at home, as he now considered the Harkness residence, with his legs crossed and a cane between them, smoking a cigar, and enlightening his wife and father-in-law, while Grand Prairie rode by and said: "There's our congressman, he's home for the summer." But instead he had come home to find his own bailiwick invaded, his old friend Rankin defeated, and his old enemy, Pusey, prospering beyond all expectation, with a respectable newspaper in which he printed articles slyly reflecting upon Garwood, calling attention to the need of a new post-office in Grand Prairie; to the beauties of uninstructed delegations, whereby the people, for whom, in his renaissance, Pusey was more than ever solicitous, could at last achieve their rights; to the fate that pursued arrogant bosses like Jim Rankin, and so on.
But some of his old resolution had come back to Garwood even in his enervation. He determined to submit to defeat, if at all, only after a battle. He was sorry he had scolded Jim Rankin so. After all, though he was no longer chairman of the county committee and had been beaten in the county convention, Rankin was still chairman of the congressional committee, and still his friend. Rankin had only laughed at his reproaches, good natured as ever. It would not do to break with Rankin. And so, he had set out in the morning to see Rankin. He had not found him at any of his usual haunts, nor at the real estate and loan office where Rankin made pretense of doing some sort of insurance business, and going at last to Rankin's home he had been told by Mrs. Rankin that Jim had gone out of town, she did not know where. He would not be back for two or three days. Garwood's intention had been to call a conference of his closest friends in Grand Prairie, and outline some plan of action, though none had occurred to him as yet. But he determined to defer this until Rankin's return.