He glanced up at a map on the wall; there he could see the nation caught like some great clumsy fish in a very seine of railways.

He traced the black, thread-like flight, from seaboard to seaboard, of the Anaconda Airline.

Then he made a calculation.

The Anaconda Airline was the political backbone, first one State and then another, of forty House members, twenty-three of whom being of his own complexion of politics, would have a caucus vote.

Of the twenty-three, luck upon good luck! twenty belonged to Mr.Hawke.