"I will not! Don't you have people at party headquarters monitoring
this stuff? Well, then. Somebody'll prepare an answer, if he needs
answering."

"I think he does. A lot of these dumbos'll hear that and believe it.
I'll talk to Frank. He'll know what to do."

Frank again. She frowned.

"Look, Senator; you think Frank Cardon's your friend, but I don't
trust him. I never could," she said. "I think he's utterly and
entirely unscrupulous. Amoral, I believe, is the word. Like a savage,
or a pirate, or one of the old-time Nazis or Communists."

"Oh, Claire!" her father protested. "Frank's in a tough business--you
have no idea the lengths competition goes to in the beer business--and
he's been in politics, and dealing with racketeers and labor unions,
all his life. But he's a good sound Illiterate--family Illiterate for
four generations, like ours--and I'd trust him with anything. You
heard this fellow Mongery--I always have to pause to keep from
calling him Mongrel--saying that I deserved the credit for pulling the
Radicals out of the mud and getting the party back on the tracks.
Well, I couldn't have begun to do it without Frank Cardon."

* * * * *

Frank Cardon stood on the sidewalk, looking approvingly into the window
of O'Reilly's Tavern, in which his display crew had already set up the
spread for the current week. On either side was a giant six-foot
replica, in black glass, of the Cardon bottle, in the conventional shape