Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/144

 "Is—now—Honorable Bronson Meredith in?"

The clerk smiled and Jamie blushed, fearing the clerk was making fun of him. And his heart sank—he might have known Mr. Meredith was not in.

"Whom did you say?" asked the clerk.

"Honorable Bronson Meredith—the gentleman from Cook—"

The clerk was knitting his brows, though the wrinkles about his lips were twitching as if he found it hard to keep them from rippling out into smiles. Jamie thought the clerk was wonderfully stupid not to know such a great man as Mr. Meredith, and he added, in order to jog the man's memory a little:

"You know—the reformer."

The clerk straightened up, placed his hands on his hips, threw back his head and laughed. Jamie stared at him with wide eyes—he saw nothing to laugh at, especially when senate bill 578 was coming up. Presently the clerk took one of his hands from his side and dropped it on the big bell beside the register, and as it clanged out in the empty lobby, he shouted in his laughing voice:

"Front!"

A bell-boy in buttons slid to the desk just as a