One man
jumped up on his chair and tried to dominate the pandemonium, shouting
and waving his hands. The galleries went wild with noisy excitement.
Men threatened each other with violence on the floor of the House,
cursing and shaking their fists. Others rushed here and there trying
to find some trace of the Clerk. The Speaker, breathless from calling
for order and pounding with his gavel, had to sit down and let them
rage.
At last, from my place by the wall, on the outskirts of the hubbub, I
saw the Clerk dragged down the aisle by the collar, bleeding, with a
blackened eye, apparently half drunk and evidently frightened into an
abject terror. He had stolen a bill introduced by Senator Bucklin,
providing that cities could own their own water works and gas works;
but the Senator's wife had been watching him; she had followed him to
the basement and stopped him as he tried to escape to the street; and
it was the Senator now who had him by the neck.
They thrust him back into his chair, got the confusion quieted, and
with muttered threats of the penitentiary for him and everybody
concerned in the affair, they got back to business again with the
desperate haste of men working against time.
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