of’em—an’what we want from them is just the same: all we can get for ourselves, a free grab with no holts barred, and to hell with the other fellow.”
“So whom are you going to vote for, Jim?” said Mr. Candler smiling.
“Who? Me?” said Mr. Flood with a coarse grin. “Why, hell, you ought to know that without asking. Me—I’m a Democrat, ain’t I?—don’t I publish a Democratic newspaper? I’m going to vote for Cox, of course.”
And, in the burst of laughter that followed, some one could be heard saying jestingly:
“And who’s going to win the Series, Jim? Some one told me you’re for Brooklyn!”
“Brooklyn!” Mr. Flood jeered wheezingly. “Brooklyn has just the same kind of chance Cox has—the chance a snowball has in hell! Brooklyn! They’re in just the same fix the Democrats are in—they’ve got nothing on the ball. When Speaker and that Cleveland gang get through with them, Brooklyn is going to look just like Cox the day after the election. Brooklyn,” he concluded with brutal conviction, “hasn’t got a chance.”
And again the debate between the men grew eager, animated and vociferous: they shouted, laughed, denied, debated, jeered good-naturedly, and the great train hurtled onward in the darkness, and the everlasting earth was still.
And other men, and other voices, words, and moments such as these would come, would pass, would vanish and would be forgotten in the huge record and abyss of time. And the great trains of America would hurtle on through darkness over the lonely, everlasting earth—the earth which only was eternal—and on which our fathers and our brothers had wandered, their lives so brief, so lonely, and so strange—into whose substance at length they all would be compacted. And the great trains would hurtle on for ever over the silent and eternal earth—fixed in that design of everlasting stillness and unceasing change. The trains would hurtle onward bearing other lives like these, all brought together for an instant between two points of time—and then all lost, all vanished, broken and forgotten. The trains would bear them onward to their million destinations—each to the fortune, fame, or happiness he wished, whatever it was that he was looking for—but whether any to a sure success, a certain purpose, or the thing he sought—what man could say? All that he knew was that these men, these words, this moment would vanish,
