YES; if Henry could have known, events were be ginning already to take their revenge on Boland. At this moment Old Two Blades was walking to and fro in his private office, all but sweating blood. For these five nights he had hardly slept. He had aged and withered, yet the most that he suffered from was anxiety—fear. Nothing had happened; but something might; and all his life he had left little to the hazard. He had made sure of uneventuated things in a thousand ways—simple, little honorable ways, he would have said; ways quite natural with him—as he made sure of the loyalty of his associates by profiting them; as he made sure of the judgment of his fellow townsmen on election days and at chamber of commerce meetings; sure of courts and juries and legislature, by managing to make his causes in some sense and after some fashion their causes.
Put baldly, in its most ignoble light, as Senator Murphy had put it, this was mere back-scratching. John Boland had, in his generous, inoffensive, unobtrusive way, scratched the backs of jurors and legislators and even judges and they, respondent to one of the noblest impulses of human nature, had in turn scratched his back whenever they found it itching.
But now an appalling situation for John Boland had come to pass, All his fortune was in the balance, hinging upon the decision of nine men, of whose mental
