"True," admitted Sprague, ruefully.
"We need the concrete to convince. Take this canal scandal: we've seen contracts go to Shelby's adherents on unbalanced bids, and the Ditch swarms with his useless inspectors at four dollars a day; but can you bring wrong-doing home to him?"
"To prove the Champion of Canals' complicity—what a master stroke!"
The morning after he popped into the young man's study, to the lasting detriment of a triolet.
"We can prove it," he exclaimed. "Gad! We can prove it!"
Graves regretfully dropped a blotter over his manuscript and advanced a chair.
"I've suspected that there were men in this town who could lay Shelby by the heels, were they to tell all they knew. The problem was to draw them."
"You can't expect his understrappers to quarrel with their bread and butter."
"No; that has been the stone of stumbling precisely, but we've got around it. In this blessed case, Shelby himself did the quarrelling, and thereby delivered himself into our hands."
Bernard Graves sat up.