them in his pocket; and he tapped those letters. This was unexpected, and the Senator exclaimed:
“But Tom McCarter says it won’t do.”
That settled it. Tom McCarter spoke for the trolley business.
Colby consented not to run; he told them it was all right. “But,” he said,“ I could be elected if I could have the support of my county.”
Major Lentz approved, as they went away, the obedience of his young protege. “That’s the way to talk,” he said. Colby was “mad”; he hated the fraud of it all. “Why didn’t they give their real reasons ? Why didn’t they say they feared that as Speaker I might not represent their trolleys?”
The next session was to be crucial. Colby made up his mind to be a free lance. The Speakership denied him, he would decline the leadership also. Without knowing what he meant to do, he was going to be free to act as he might find it right to act.
If Colby had begun his career at the bottom, in local politics, he would have known of two or three separate reform movements that had long been going on in his county, and he could have gone to these, combined and led them against the machine. He does lead them now, but he didn’t go to them; they came to him. One of these
