Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/250

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coldness in the eye of the sun this morning; a sinister sharpness in the bite of the air, nothing of which was so very strange since it was to be a sinister day. Mr. Boland was even now on his way to meet Scanlon and issue staff orders—orders with a sinister significance so far as Henry Harrington was concerned.

Down at the state capital, too, things were moving. Senator Madden and Charlie Clayton were getting the McKenzie's Tongue bill jumped forward for action tonight. And away off at the capital of the nation things were happening also, which had a significance for Henry.

For one thing, the great seal of the United States was about to go down upon a document of vast importance that had been moving through the routine of the bureau for weeks, slipping from desk to desk, from hand to hand, from eye to eye.

For another, an associate justice of the Supreme Court was busy correcting the typewritten pages of a decision which he had just been dictating, meticulously concerned that his meanings should be clear and his references exact. To be sure of this latter, he occasionally turned to bound volumes of typewritten testimony and to the lines of two maps, one old and faded, the other new and distinct.

There had been conference and debate already between the justices, goings over of briefs and studyings of the record. Gradually the briefs had been discarded and those eminent, shrewd, tenacious, legal minds contemplated only the record. Now Justice Bradshaw had written their opinion—their unanimous opinion. Within a few days the Court in bank would hand it down.

But a third arm of the government at Washington