Moreover,
it takes time to engender confidence in a postman when
he is drawn from your midst, and when you know perfectly
well that he would otherwise be driving the mere
watering-cart, or delivering the mere ice, as he was last
year.
"Looks like it," responded Mr Winter, cheerfully. "The
boys have been round as usual. I told them they'd better
try another shop this time, but they seemed to think the
old reliable was good enough to go on with."
This exchange, to anyone in Elgin, would have been patently
simple. On that day there was only one serious topic in
Elgin, and there could have been only one reference to
business for Walter Winter. The Dominion had come up the
day before with the announcement that Mr Robert Farquharson
who, for an aggregate of eleven years, had represented
the Liberals of South Fox in the Canadian House of Commons,
had been compelled under medical advice to withdraw from
public life. The news was unexpected, and there was rather
a feeling among Mr Farquharson's local support in Elgin
that it shouldn't have come from Toronto. It will be
gathered that Horace Williams, as he himself acknowledged,
was wild. The general feeling, and to some extent Mr
Williams's, was appeased by the further information that
Mr Farquharson had been obliged to go to Toronto to see
a specialist, whose report he had naturally enough taken
to party headquarters, whence the Dominion would get it,
as Mr Williams said, by telephone or any quicker way
there was.
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