"If that gain keeps up in New York he'll come down to Harlem bridge with less than seventy thousand. It'll give us the state and the presidency."
He laid his pencil down and lighted a cigar, but he did not relax his interest.
"Here's something," he said a moment later, spreading a piece of yellow flimsy over a white sheet, "here's one from Springfield; says returns from thirty counties show net gains over two years ago of eleven per cent. Let's see--'In these counties,' he read, 'Chatham polls forty-three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. Norton, for state treasurer, carried the same counties two years ago by seventeen thousand two hundred and thirty-six.'"
The men in the room stirred with a pleasing excitement. Several of them began to talk again, but the colonel said rather peremptorily:
"Wait! Here's some West Side news,"--Newman, who was standing for the Fourth Congressional District, arose as the chairman read:
"Three of the five wards comprising the Fourth Congressional District, the Eighth, the Ninth, and the Nineteenth, give Newman eleven thousand nine hundred and thirty-eight, Kenyon five thousand six hundred and forty-seven."
Newman drew a long, full breath, and smiled complacently.
"How will the other wards go, John?" asked Parrish.
"Oh, they're all right. I carried the Eleventh by a hundred and fifty-six two years ago," said Newman, speaking with the accuracy with which a man remembers his own majorities, "and lost the Twelfth by sixteen ninety-four, but I can give him both of them and beat him out."
The operator was writing furiously now, and kept his left arm, with a despatch dangling in his fingers, almost continually stretched over the back of his chair toward Warfield. The colonel made his calculations rapidly.
"Here you are, General," he said to Williams after awhile, and the white-bearded old man took a despatch from him and carefully adjusted his glasses. Then he hitched his chair up to the table, cleared a place for his elbows, took some paper and began to make figures of his own.
"Gentlemen," he said presently, "I claim my election by a majority of four thousand votes."
"What was your majority two years ago?" asked Milton.
"Why, sir," said the old man, looking at Milton as if he were betraying a culpable ignorance, "three thousand two hundred and ninety-six. Don't you remember?"