“It’s the only reason they’ll ever get. I had fully made up my mind to vote no, up to the time my name was called. I don’t believe in this prohibition foolishness. But when my name was called, I said aye. It seemed someone actually whispered it to me, and I had to say it. My God, Carter! Do I look like a sentimental fool, to be influenced in such a matter by a passing whim?”

“Not sentimental anyhow, Ed,” Carter said sarcastically.

“Nor a fool either. Yet how do you account for it?”

Carter eyed him silently.

“And then on top of it all, what should happen but an unusually intelligent spectator, one of the plain people from whom I just parted out at the door, should catch up with me on my way over here and congratulate me on my vote! He almost made me feel as if I was one of the elect. I didn’t get his name or where he was from, but I wish you could have heard him, Carter. I was never so attracted by any casual stranger since I was born. What a fool I was not to find out who he was.”

“Don’t you know who your ‘casual stranger’ was, Ed?” Carter asked, in vain trying to conceal his excitement. “That was Jesus you were talking with.”

The member from Carter’s district had been pacing the office floor. He stopped abruptly and sharply faced Carter. “Nonsense.”

“I say it was. At least, he was the person everyone calls Jesus.”

“How do you know?”

“I met him several times in Raymond where he first appeared, and I’ve seen him several times in New York. I even took dinner there with him one night. Besides, he passed me after he left you.”

“Passed you?”

“Out there, man, on his way back to the Capitol.”

“And you say that was Jesus?”

“Or what everyone calls him,” said Carter with a peculiar smile.

The congressman stared at Carter. “Is it the twentieth century or something else?”

“It’s the twentieth century, all right,” retorted Carter roughly.

“I saw in the papers this morning the rumor that he was in Washington. But what will he do here?”

“There is no telling what he will do. In New York, he did a number of things they didn’t reckon on. They tell me there won’t be a bar in New York at the end of ten years and that the rule of Wall Street is broken. Congress will do well to ask what he will do with your distinguished body.”

“So Jesus is here, and I have talked with him,” the congressman muttered, as if dazed at the event. “It doesn’t seem possible, does it, Carter? I’d give a good deal to see him again. There was something wonderfully fascinating about him. Do you think he will begin his public work here soon?”