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 had said, didn't cut much ice; he had some labor leaders with him, and would get a bunch of delegates from his own ward, but that was about all. In fact, said Baldwin, concluding his judicial summing up, Conway could win out, hands down, if it were not for his recent quarrel with Malachi Nolan. Underwood remembered that during all this frankness he had reflectively drawn rude little geometrical figures on an envelope and had been somehow afraid to look up at Baldwin, for the noted lobbyist had sat there transfixing him with an eye that could read the mind of a man when it was impinged on politics—that is, practical politics—as easily as it could a poker hand across a table stacked with blue chips.

He knew Baldwin had come with some practical proposition, and when the lobbyist suggested that he was too respectable, and would run better in some residence district, that the boys looked upon him as a reformer, and that the silk stockings were not practical enough to help him, Underwood had felt that at last it was coming. It was simple enough. Baldwin had been talking that very morning about Underwood's candidature to Mr. Weed of the Metropolitan Motor System, and to Mr. Peabody,