When the search proved fruitless, he had seen the bill pass the House by a safe majority, had followed it to the Senate, and in a cunningly worded amendment tacked on in the upper house had found what he was seeking.  Under the existing law foreign corporations were subject to State supervision, and were dealt with as presumably unfriendly aliens.  But the Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine fairly swept the interstate corporations, as such, out of existence, by making it obligatory upon them to acquire the standing of local corporations.  Charters were to be refiled with the secretary of State; resident directories and operating headquarters were to be established within the boundaries and jurisdiction of the State; in short, the State proposed, by the terms of the new law, to deal only with creatures of its own creation.

Kent saw, or thought he saw, the fine hand of the junto in all this.  It was a still hunt in which the longest way around was the shortest way home.  Like all new-country codes, the organic law of the State favored local corporations, and it might be argued that a bill placing the foreign companies on a purely local footing was an unmixed blessing to the aliens.  But on the other hand, an unprincipled executive might easily make the new law an engine of extortion.  To go no further into the matter than the required refiling of charters:  the State constitution gave the secretary of State quasi-judicial powers.  It was within his province to pass upon the applications for chartered rights, and to deny them if the question pro bono publico were involved.

Kent put two and two together, saw the wide door of exactions which might be opened, and passed the word of warning among his associates; after which he had watched the course of the amended House Bill Twenty-nine with interest sharp-set, planning meanwhile with Hildreth, the editor of the Daily Argus, an expose which should make plain the immense possibilities for corruption opened up by the proposed law; a journalistic salvo of publicity to be fired as a last resort.

The measure as amended had passed the Senate without debate, and had gone back to the House.  Here, after the second reading, and in the very hour when the Argus editorial was getting itself cast in the linotypes, there was a hitch.  The member from the Rio Blanco, favoring the measure in all its parts, and fearful only lest corporation gold might find a technical flaw in it, moved that it be referred to the committee on judiciary for a report on its constitutionality; and, accordingly, to the committee on judiciary it had gone.

Kent recalled the passing of the crisis, remembering how he had hastened to telephone the Argus editor to kill the expose at the last moment.  The incident was now a month in the past, and the committee had not yet reported; would never report, Kent imagined.  He knew the personnel of the committee on judiciary; knew that at least three members of it were down on the list, made up at the beginning of the session by his colleagues in the army of observation, as “approachables”.  Also, he knew by inference at least, that these three men had been approached, not without success, and that House Bill Twenty-nine, with its fee-gathering amendment, was safely shelved.