Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/242

 At six o'clock no one had been there for an hour, save some sympathetic bell-boys and porters from down-stairs, and Carroll, of course—he came every half-hour from the convention, disheveled, bathed in perspiration, his eyes burning with excitement and suspense. Foerder would not allow him to see the colonel, who lay behind the white door, his eyes half closed, too weak any longer to whisper.

At seven o'clock the reporters came, and Doctor Foerder, as they put it, issued a bulletin.

"He's alive," the doctor said, "pulse 120 to 124, respiration 22 to 26, temperature 98. His remarkable nerve alone sustains him. He's making the most magnificent fight I ever saw in all my life—have you heard anything from the convention?"

"They're all over but the one in the First District," one of the reporters said, while they scribbled down the physician's figures. "It all depends now upon what that does. It's the worst fight ever known in Chicago. They say Warren has spent twenty-five thousand to-day."

"Does it look as if he could be elected there—in the First, you know?"

The reporters smiled and winked one at another.