"Well, this--certainly--is refreshing!" expostulated Edgington, in apparent amazement. "When can anything be supposed to be settled, between gentlemen, if that isn't? Why, confound it, didn't we make up the complete slate, including control of the Common Council? And aren't we to have an exclusive franchise on all the streets, with your signature as mayor? Of course, you're joking now. Why, we're right on the eve of the caucuses, and with Conlon in line everything will go as it ought. I mean Barney Conlon, the labor leader. Since you've come back from this trip of yours, everything seems to be going in unexpected ways--and somehow you've given offense to Conlon. Do you know what it was?" "No," answered Amidon, with some heat. "I don't know what it was! I don't know Conlon, and I don't know anything about this business except this: that if you think I'm going to sneak into office for the purpose of stealing the streets of this town, you don't know Florian Amidon, that's all!" "Don't know what? Don't know whom?" "Don't know Flo--ah--me! Me!" "Then you won't see Barney Conlon?" "I won't foul my hands with the dirty mess! I won't----" "Dirty mess, indeed!" retorted Edgington, "when the best business men---- Oh, well, if that's the way you feel---- Why didn't you say so, instead of---- I think we'd best not discuss the thing any further, Mr. Brassfield; and returning to legal matters, where we are happily at one, let me remind you that you are to send Judge Blodgett up to see me regarding the Corkery case this afternoon. Good day, Mr. Brassfield!" Mr. Edgington went forth from Amidon's presence in a state of mind which can be appreciated by no one but some "good" citizen who has perfected all the preliminaries for securing a particularly fat financial prize by the cheap and simple device of a popular vote, and finds the man on whom he relies going off into a fanciful ism induced by some maggot of so-called conscientiousness. Any one ought to be able to see that there is nothing wrong in accepting gifts from those able to give: and who is more able than the public? Everybody would be better off for the arrangement contemplated, and no one the worse. So reasoned Mr. Edgington as he saw with chagrin the Bellevale franchise slipping away, and with it the core of their ambitious project of interurban lines connecting half a dozen cities. Bellevale, with its water-power, was the hub of it; and to lose here by such a sudden exhibition of so-called "civic patriotism"--Edgington knew the patter of these reformers--was disgusting, and all the more so from the fact that the one to blame was Brassfield, whose ethical attitude had always been so "safe and sane" in business matters.