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 labor than to erect them on McKenzie's Tongue; and you know it would take five years to get that Socatullo wilderness in shape to grow one mess of green corn. Henry, it's a job, a plain John Boland job. They railroaded it through the Senate before I was awake; but I'm going to beat that bill in the Assembly or my name's not Sarah Murphy. Henry, I want you to vote against it. I want you to speak against it."

Harrington was too polite to smile. "You'll have to show me!" he answered seriously.

Senator Murphy proceeded to show him. Opening up a Boston bag she produced documents, affidavits and reports, and volubly indicated their significance; then turned his attention to a roll of the House, opposite each name of which she had penciled an N or a Y.

Harrington's eye ran down the column. "Jerry Cunningham, there," he challenged. "If the deal's wrong, he'd nose it out and be against it."

"He would if he hadn't been reached," replied the lady, with a sarcastic wrinkling of her large nose. "Jerry had a mortgage due on his prune ranch the year that prunes went down with a crash; but the mortgage wasn't foreclosed. Some influence from Socatullo County came up and saved his neck with the money-lenders. Somebody scratched his back and now he's got to scratch theirs."

"Is that the way you interpret it?" smiled Henry.

"Same way with old man Hemmingford—only different," affirmed the lady with an emphatic nod. "He's been carrying a patch of fir timber down in his corner of the state till he couldn't carry it any longer. About the time Clayton was scurrying around for votes on this project, somebody bought a piece of Hemming-