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“Hector’s done well,” I said.

“Oh, Lord, yes!” Joe answered. “He always will. He’s going ‘way up in the world.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because he’s so sure of it. It only needs a little luck to make him a great man. In fact, he already is a great man.”

“You mean you think he has a great mind?”

“Why, no, sir; but I think he has a purpose so big and so set, that it might be called great, and it will make him great.”

“What purpose?”

Joe answered quietly but very slowly, pulling at his cigar after each syllable: “Hec–tor–J. Ran–som!”

“I declare,” I put in, “I thought you were his friend!”

“So I am,” the young fellow returned. “Friend, admirer, and doer-in-ordinary to Hector J. Ransom, that’s my quality. I’ve done errands and odd jobs for him all my life. Most people who meet him do; though it might be hard to say why. I haven’t hitched my wagon to a star; nobody’ll get to do that, because this star isn’t going to take anything to the zenith but itself.”

“Going to the zenith, is he?”

“Surely.”

“You mean,” said I, “that he’s going to make a fine lawyer?”

“Oh, no, I think not. He might have been called one in the last generation, but, as I understand it, nowadays a lawyer has to work out business propositions more than oratory.”

“And you think Hector has only his oratory?”

“I think that’s his vehicle; it’s his racing sulky and he’ll drive it pretty hard. We’re good friends, but if you want me to be frank, I should say that he’d drive on over my dead body if it lay in the road to where he was going.” Lane rolled over in the grass with a little chuckle. “Of course,” he went on, “I talk about him this way because I know what you’ve done for him and I’d like to help you to be sure that he’s going to be a success. He’ll do you credit!”

“What are you going to do, yourself, Joe?” I asked.

“Me?” He sat up, looking surprised. “Why, didn’t you know? I didn’t get my degree. They threw me out at the eleventh hour for getting too publicly tight–celebrating Hector’s winning the works of Lord Byron, the prize in the senior debate! I’ll never be a credit to anybody; and as for what I’m going to do–go back to Greenville and loaf in Tim’s pool-room, I suppose, and watch Hector’s balloon.”

However, Hector’s balloon seemed uninclined to soar, at the set-off–though Hector didn’t. The next summer began a presidential campaign, and Hector, knowing that I was chairman of my county committee, and strangely overestimating my importance, came up to see me: he asked me to use my influence with the National Committee to have him sent to make speeches in one of the doubtful States; he thought he could carry it for us. I explained that I had no wires leading up so far as the National Committee. There were other things I might have explained, but it didn’t seem much use. Hector would have thought I wanted to “keep him down.”

He thought so anyway, because, after a crestfallen moment, he began to look at me in his fierce eye-to-eye way with what seemed to me a dark suspicion. He came and struck my desk with his clinched fist (he was always strong on that), and exclaimed:

“Then by the eternal gods, if my own flesh and blood won’t help me, I’ll go to Chicago myself, lay my credentials before the committee, unaided, and wring from them–“

“Hold on, Hector,” I said. “Why didn’t you say you had credentials? What are they?”

“What are they?” he answered in a rising voice. “You ask me what are my credentials? The credentials of my patriotism, my poverty, and my pride! You ask me for my credentials? The credentials of youth!” (He hit the desk every few words.) “The credentials of enthusiasm! The credentials of strength! You ask for my credentials? The credentials of red blood, of red corpuscles, of young manhood, ripest in the glorious young West! The credentials of vitality! Of virile–“