Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/216

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

arm, and they would saunter away to the bar. If the politician came from northern Illinois, the colonel would take rye; if from southern Illinois the colonel would take bourbon; such was his idea of etiquette. Though never would he take a drink before breakfast, for a drink before breakfast, he told Carroll, was a back log in the fire that would burn the live-*long day.

Carroll was the staff of the colonel's old age. The two would sit by the hour, while the old man talked of the Nineteenth Illinois Cavalry, of Lincoln and Douglas, of David Davis and Elijah Haines, of state and national conventions, in the days when he had made and unmade congressmen, governors and senators, ruling his party in the state, Carroll shrewdly thought, with a discipline as rigid as that with which he had welded the Nineteenth Illinois into a fighting regiment.

To those who knew the veteran's history, his love for the boy was touching. The story is too long to tell now, but its essential motif must always be the ingratitude of Si Warren. The colonel had picked Warren up in the old Fifteenth District, sent him to Congress, and finally made a United States sen-