"Fools can always stir a row," declared His Excellency, with just as much emphasis. "Fools who are led by rascals! Rascals who would wreck an express train for the chance to pick pocketbooks off corpses! There's been that element behind every piece of political hellishness and every strike we've had in this country in the last two years since the Russian bear stood up and began to dance to that devil's tune! On the eve of the assembling of this legislature, Morrison, you're probably hearing the blacklegs in the other party howl 'state steal' again!"
"No, I haven't heard any such howl—not lately—not since the November election," said Morrison. "Why are they starting it now?"
"I don't know," retorted the Governor. But the mayor's stare was again wide-open and compelling, and His Excellency's gaze shifted to Mac Tavish and then jumped off that uncomfortable object and found refuge on the ceiling.
"The licked rebels know! They're the only ones who do know," asserted the
Senator.
Col. Crockett Shaw, practical politician, felt qualified to testify as an expert. "Those other fellows won't play the game according to the rules, Morrison! They sit in and draw cards and then beef about the deal and rip up the pasteboards and throw 'em on the floor and try to grab the pot. They won't play the game!"
"That's it exactly!" the Governor affirmed.
Senator Corson patted Morrison's arm. "Now that you're in politics for yourself, Stewart, you can see the point, can't you?"
"I don't think I'm in politics, sir," demurred the mayor, smiling ingenuously. "At any rate, there isn't much politics in me!"
"But the game must be played by the rules!" Senator Corson spoke with the finality of an oracle.
"If you don't think that way," persisted Governor North, nettled by Morrison's hesitancy in jumping into the ring with his own party, "what do you think?"