The House members liked him well, despite those verbal acridities which shaved the surface of debate as lawns are shaven by a scythe; but with the last word there existed no recognized House or party reason, whether of the past, the present or the future, why he should be made Speaker.

In the lay of House topography he was on the wrong side of the river from the Speakership, and to land him within stretch of the gavel required that Senator Hanway either ferry or pontoon him across.

This the latter gentleman set himself to accomplish by a series of intrigues and stratagems that would have brightened the fame of a Talleyrand.
The statesman opposed to Mr.Frost for the Speakership was a personage named Hawke.

He stood possessed of honesty, intelligence, and energy; also he had been for long the leader of his party in the House, and given his name to a tariff measure.

Without one gleam of humor, he was of a temper hot as that of any Hecla, and like his fellow volcano, being often in a state of eruption, he offered many reasons for being admired and none for being loved.
This should be a key to the man.
He had been a brave soldier during the Civil War, and when his men, most of whom were armed with shotguns--it being in the early hours of that strife and these men arming themselves--complained that their weapons were no match for the Enfields of the foe, rebuked them fiercely.
"General," said the spokesman of the soldiers; "these yere shotguns ain't no even break for them rifles the Yanks are shootin'!" "They are a match for them," retorted the furious Mr.Hawke, "if you will only go close enough." For all his soberness of humor and choleric upheavals, Mr.Hawke, because of his record as a House leader and a tariff maker--he had tinkered together that identical bill which, when Senator Hanway later revamped it in the Senate, produced the Obstinate One as a Governor--was the legitimate heir to the Speakership; and in the House, where tradition is something sacred and custom itself the strongest of arguments, his defeat for the place was thereby rendered well-nigh impossible.