Meanwhile, on March 10, 1913, reports of trouble between Governor Sulzer and Mr. Murphy had become public; when on this date Sulzer removed C. Gordon Reel as State Superintendent of Highways, it was reported in the newspapers that Murphy had asked Governor Sulzer to name James E. Gaffney, his partner in the contracting business, as Reel’s successor. On the next day, Mr. Murphy hotly denied that he had asked Gaffney’s appointment. From day to day further reports of estrangement were published. In a speech before the Democratic editors of the State, on March 25, Sulzer asserted: “No man, no party, no organization can make me a rubber stamp. I am the Governor. Let no man doubt that.” It appeared that Mr. Murphy had the idea that Sulzer was at heart a Progressive; it may be explained that the Progressive party had polled a large vote and was recognized as a powerful political factor. It was on the night of April 13, 1913, that Governor Sulzer, according to his interview published later in the New York _Evening Mail_, held his final interview with Mr. Murphy. “I asked him,” Mr. Sulzer said, “not to interfere with the trial of Stilwell in the Senate. I said, ‘What are you going to do about him?’ ‘Stand by him, of course,’ replied Mr. Murphy. ‘Stilwell will be acquitted. It will only be a three-day wonder. How do you expect a Senator to live on $1,500 a year? That is only chicken feed.’ … Before we parted that night, I warned Mr. Murphy that he would wreck the party and accomplish his own destruction if he persisted in shielding grafters and violating platform pledges. His angry retort was that I was an ingrate, and that he would disgrace and destroy me.” In fact, as Mr. Murphy predicted, Senator Stephen J. Stilwell was voted not guilty of official misconduct, by a vote of 28 to 21 in the Senate, after an investigation by the judiciary committee of charges of bribery made against him by George H. Kendall, president of the New York Bank Note Company. But subsequently Stilwell was indicted in New York County, convicted of bribery upon substantially the same evidence as that upon which a majority of his colleagues in the State Senate had acquitted him, and he was sentenced to a two-year term in prison. Replying later to Mr. Sulzer’s charges, Mr. Murphy definitely denied that he had ever recommended the appointment of James E. Gaffney as Highways Commissioner; that he ever mentioned Gaffney’s name to Governor Sulzer for any office; he emphatically denied that he ever made the threats that Sulzer attributed to him or that he ever sent for Mr. Sulzer to come and see him. Mr. Murphy asserted that he never saw Sulzer alone after he became Governor “because I knew he’d do just what he has done--perjure himself.”