Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/349

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UPBUILDERS

to any office he might choose to run for next time, if the Senator would work in good faith for the initiative and referendum. Ogle knew this because he was one of the "Pops" U'Ren had asked to join in his bargain. And Ogle had been thinking it over ever since, and now, out there in the mud and sleet of that country road, he asked U'Ren what the fight was to cost him, U'Ren.

U'Ren understood, and he answered, "I am going to get the initiative and referendum in Oregon," he said, "if it costs me my soul. I'll do nothing selfish, dishonest, or dishonourable, but I'll trade off parties, offices, bills—anything for that."

Ogle objected. "Good things are not worth that price," he said.

They were both thinking of Brownell, of course, and U'Ren said he had to deal with the men in office. "We can't choose our human instruments," he argued, "and we can't change political methods till we have passed some legal tools to do it with." And he recalled a story Ogle had told him once of a cattleman who discharged a cowboy because he returned from a search for some cattle with an explanation of his failure to find them. "I want my cattle, not your excuses," the cattleman said, and "that," said U'Ren, "is