He reddened. "Newspaper scandal!" he blustered, but changed the subject as soon as he had shown me and re-shown himself that his motives were pure. I saw that Burbank's last winter was to be crucial. My clients were clamorous, and were hinting at all sorts of dire doings if they were not treated better. Roebuck was questioning, in the most malignantly friendly manner, "whether, after all, Harvey, the combine isn't a mistake, and the old way wasn't the best." On the other hand Burbank was becoming restless. He had so cleverly taken advantage of the chances to do popular things, which I had either made for him or pointed out to him, that he had become something of a national figure. When he got eighty-one votes for the presidential nomination in our party's national convention his brain was dizzied. Now he was in a tremor lest my clients should demand of him things that would diminish or destroy this sapling popularity which, in his dreams, he already saw grown into a mighty tree obscuring the national heavens. I gave many and many an hour to anxious thought and careful planning that summer and fall. It was only a few days before Doc Woodruff appeared at Fredonia with the winter's legislative program that I saw my way straight to what I hoped was broad day. The program he brought was so outrageous that it was funny. There was nothing in it for the Ramsay interests, but each of the other ten had apparently exhausted the ingenuity of its lawyers in concocting demands that would have wrecked for ever the party granting them. "Our friends are modest," said I. "They've gone clean crazy," replied Woodruff. "And if you could have heard them talk! It's impossible to make them see that anybody has any rights but themselves." "Well, let me have the details," said I. "Explain every item on this list; tell me just what it means, and just how the lawyers propose to disguise it so the people won't catch on." When he finished, I divided the demands into three classes,--the impossible, the possible, and the practicable. "Strike out all the impossible," I directed. "Cut down the possible to the ten that are least outrageous. Those ten and the practicable must be passed." He read off the ten which were beyond the limits of prudence, but not mob-and-hanging matters. "We can pass them, of course," was his comment. "We could pass a law ordering the state house burned, but--" "Precisely," said I. "I think the consequences will be interesting." I cross-marked the five worst of the ten possibilities. "Save those until the last weeks of the session."