the last session in the interest of the
Power Trust. It contained seventy-eight items, thirty-four of them
passed. I handed it to him.

"Yes,--a few things," he admitted, "but all trifles!"

"That little amendment to the Waterways law must alone have netted you
three or four millions already."

"Nothing like that. Nothing like that."

"I can organize a company within twenty-four hours that will pay you
four millions in cash for the right, and stock besides."

He did not take up my offer.

"You have already had thirteen matters attended to this winter," I
pursued. "The one that can't be done--Really, Mr. Roebuck, the whole
state knows that the trustees of the Waukeegan Christian University are
your dummies. It would be insanity for the party to turn over a hundred
thousand acres of valuable public land gratis to them, so that they can
presently sell it to you for a song."

He reddened. "Newspaper scandal!" he blustered, but changed the subject
as soon as he had shown me and re-shown himself that his motives were
pure.

I saw that Burbank's last winter was to be crucial. My clients were
clamorous, and were hinting at all sorts of dire doings if they were not
treated better. Roebuck was questioning, in the most malignantly
friendly manner, "whether, after all, Harvey, the combine isn't a
mistake, and the old way wasn't the best." On the other hand Burbank was
becoming restless. He had so cleverly taken advantage of the chances to
do popular things, which I had either made for him or pointed out to
him, that he had become something of a national figure. When he got
eighty-one votes for the presidential nomination in our party's national
convention his brain was dizzied. Now he was in a tremor lest my clients
should demand of him things that would diminish or destroy this sapling
popularity which, in his dreams, he already saw grown into a mighty tree
obscuring the national heavens.

I gave many and many an hour to anxious thought and careful planning
that summer and fall. It was only a few days before Doc Woodruff
appeared at Fredonia with the winter's legislative program that I saw my
way straight to what I hoped was broad day. The program he brought was
so outrageous that it was funny. There was nothing in it for the Ramsay
interests, but each of the other ten had apparently exhausted the
ingenuity of its lawyers in concocting demands that would have wrecked
for ever the party granting them.

"Our friends are