“Suppose ye do. Suppose I don' know. Maybe he was born to be king over me. Maybe he wasn't. But I know he was a mastherful man, an' he's dyin' here, an' me blood's sour an' me bones sad wid thinkin' of it. Don' throuble me, Simmy.” Harding leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, where the lamp made a nebulous circle of light. “Why, that's so,” he said at last, in conclusion of some unmentioned train of thought. “Why, I got a pup at home, and his affection ain't measured by the bones he's had, nor the licks he's had, not either of 'em.” Kelly was deep in a reverie. “Nor it ain't measured by my virtues. Look here, now; I don' see what his measure is.” “Hey?” Kelly roused himself. “Oh, I was just thinking.” Harding thought he had known other men who had had in some degree a magnetic power that seemed to consist in mere stormy energy of initiative. They were like strong drink to weaker men. It was more physical than mental. Conlon was to Kelly a stimulant, then an appetite. And Conlon was a bad lot. Fellows that had heeled for him were mostly either wrecked or dead now. Why, there was a chap named Patterson that used to be decent till he struck Conlon, when he went pretty low; and Nora Reimer drowned herself on account of Patterson, when he got himself shot in a row at some shanty up the railroad. The last had seemed a good enough riddance. But Nora went off her head and jumped in the new reservoir. Harding remembered it the more from being one of the Water Company. They had had to empty the reservoir, which was expensive. And there were others. A black, blustering sort of beast, Conlon. He had more steam than was natural. Harding wondered vaguely at Kelly, who was spelling out the doctor's directions from a piece of paper. “A powdher an' five dhrops from the short bottle. 'Tis no tin-course dinner wid the champagne an' entries he's givin' Conlon the night. Hey? A powdher an' five dhrops from the short bottle.” Harding's mind wandered on among memories of the little city below, an intricate, irregular history, full of incidents, stories that were never finished or dribbled off anywhere, black spots that he knew of in white lives, white spots in dark lives. He did not happen to know any white spots on Conlon. “Course if a man ain't in politics for his health he ain't in it for the health of the community, either, and that's all right. And if he opens the morning by clumping Mrs. Conlon on the head, why, she clumps him back more or less, and that's all right.” Then, if he went down-town and lied here and there ingeniously in the way of business, and came home at night pretty drunk, but no more than was popular with his constituency, why, Conlon's life was some cluttered, but never dull. Still, Harding's own ways being quieter and less cluttered, he felt that if Conlon were going off naturally now, it was not, on the whole, a bad idea. It would conduce to quietness. It would perhaps be a pity if anything interfered.