Col. Crockett Shaw, practical politician, felt qualified to testify as an expert. "Those other fellows won't play the game according to the rules, Morrison! They sit in and draw cards and then beef about the deal and rip up the pasteboards and throw 'em on the floor and try to grab the pot. They won't play the game!" "That's it exactly!" the Governor affirmed. Senator Corson patted Morrison's arm. "Now that you're in politics for yourself, Stewart, you can see the point, can't you?" "I don't think I'm in politics, sir," demurred the mayor, smiling ingenuously. "At any rate, there isn't much politics in _me!_" "But the game must be played by the rules!" Senator Corson spoke with the finality of an oracle. "If you don't think that way," persisted Governor North, nettled by Morrison's hesitancy in jumping into the ring with his own party, "what _do_ you think?" "I wouldn't presume," drawled Stewart, "to offer political opinions to gentlemen of your experience. However, now that you ask me a blunt question, I'm going to reply just as bluntly--but as a business man! I believe that running the affairs of the people on the square is business--it ought to be made good business. Governor North, you're at the head of the biggest corporation in our state. That corporation is the state itself. And I don't believe the thing ought to be run as a game--naming the game politics." "That's the only way the thing can be run--and you've got to stand by your own party when it's running the state. You need a little lesson in politics, Morrison, and I'm going to show you--" The mayor of Marion raised a protesting hand. "I never could get head nor tail out of a political oration, sir. But I do understand facts and figures. Let's get at facts! Is this trouble you speak of as imminent--is it due to the question of letting certain members of the House and Senate take their seats to-morrow?" "I must go into that matter with you in detail!" "It has been gone into with detail in the newspapers till I'm sick of it, with all due respect to you, Governor North. It has been played back and forth like a game--and I don't understand games. There has been no more talk of trouble since you and your executive council let it be known that all the members were to walk into the State House and take their seats and settle among themselves their rights." "We never deliberately and decisively let that be known." "Then it has been guessed by your general attitude, sir. That's the common talk--and the common talk comes to me like it does to all others. That talk has smoothed things. Why not keep things smooth?" "Breaking election laws to keep sore-heads smooth? Is that your idea of politics?"