he were saying to himself: "What! That
d---- little devil! I'll bet he heard me!" But he did not speak. And
neither did I. He went off about whatever business he had in hand, and
I caught up my hat and hastened to Gardener to tell him what I had
heard.

When the House met again, in committee of the whole, the Speaker, of
course, was not in the Chair, and Gardener found him in the lobby.
Gardener had agreed with me to say nothing of the telephone
conversation but he threatened Smith that unless our jury bill was
"reported out" by the Judiciary Committee and allowed to come to a
vote, he would oppose every House bill in the Senate and talk the
session to death. Smith fumed and blustered, but Gardener, with the
blood in his face, out-blustered and out-fumed him. The Speaker, later
in the day, vented some of his spleen by publicly threatening to eject
me from the floor of the House as a lobbyist. But he had to allow the
bill to come up, and it was finally passed, with very little
opposition--for reasons which I was afterward to understand.

It had yet to be signed by the Speaker; and it had to be signed before
the close of the session or it could not become a law. I heard rumours
that some anti-corporation bills were going to be "lost" by the Chief
Clerk, so that they might not be signed; and I kept my eye on him. He
was a fat-faced, stupid-looking, flabby creature--by name D. H.
Dickason--who did not appear capable of doing anything very daring. I
saw the chairman of the Enrolling Committee place our bill on
Dickason's desk, among those waiting for the Speaker's signature;
and--while the House was busy--I withdrew it from the pile and placed
it to one side, conspicuously, so that I could see it from a distance.

When the time came for signing--sure enough! the Clerk was missing, and
some bills were missing with him. The House was crowded--floor and
galleries--and the whole place went into an uproar at once. Nobody
seemed to know which bills were gone; every member who had an
anti-corporation bill thought it was his that had been stolen; and they
all together broke out into denunciations of the Speaker, the Clerk,
and everybody else whom they thought concerned in the outrage. One man
jumped up on his chair and tried to dominate the pandemonium, shouting
and waving his hands. The galleries went wild with noisy excitement.
Men threatened each other with violence on the floor of the House,
cursing and shakin