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The Lash

by Olin L. Lyman · English · Gutenberg #38341 · 375,980 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lash

Author: Olin L. Lyman


        
Release date: December 19, 2011 [eBook #38341]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LASH ***




Produced by Roberta Staehlin, David Garcia and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









[Illustration: "_Haskins quizzically looked him over_"]




THE LASH

OLIN L. LYMAN

Author of "The Trail of the Grand Seigneur"

[Illustration]

    BOSTON
    RICHARD G. BADGER
    THE GORHAM PRESS
    1909


    Copyright 1909 by RICHARD G. BADGER
    _All Rights Reserved_
    Printed at The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.




TO C. E. A




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                  PAGE

        I A Star Chamber Session                9

       II An Arrival                           18

      III Micky                                29

       IV Fists and the Man                    36

        V The Ironworkers' Ball--and Maisie    47

       VI The Web                              61

      VII Loneliness                           67

     VIII An Evening Call                      77

       IX Not on the Programme                 87

        X The Little Red Devil                 99

       XI In the Morning                      106

      XII Why She Cried                       113

     XIII A Wager                             122

      XIV A Discredited Henchman              133

       XV Useful Information                  145

      XVI His Better Side                     155

     XVII The Coup in Sight                   165

    XVIII A Counter Move                      178

      XIX Suspense                            187

       XX Out of the Past                     195

      XXI The Lash                            204

     XXII The Story                           215

    XXIII Wanderlust                          224

     XXIV The Long Road                       234




THE LASH

CHAPTER I

A STAR CHAMBER SESSION


The speaker paused for a moment to pass his handkerchief over his
fevered brow. Up from the ugly, leering, little eyes swept the swabbing
linen, traversing the smooth top of the round head and disappearing
mysteriously at the rear. The reason for this was obvious. The teeth of
time take kindly to the hirsute and the speaker was very bald. Only a
narrow fringe of reddish hair divided the rear depression of his fevered
brow from the nape of his fat red neck.

A plump and hairy fist smote the table and the glasses jingled. "Don't
fool yourselves, you young fellows," advised the bald gentleman, in a
curious gusty voice. "I've been all through it, clean to the retired
list," with a wicked wink, "and I know, that's all. You've got to work
harder this year than you did the first; you've got to a point where
there ain't no layin' down for you if you want to keep on fodderin'.
'Cause why? 'Cause they're on, or think they are, and they're gettin'
uneasy. You think everything's lovely, do you? Well, take a little
advice from the old man that's now on the sideline, and aim to get busy
from now on."

He again swabbed his illimitable brow, peering cunningly at them with
wicked little eyes that gleamed unpleasantly on either side of a
bulbous, crimsoned nose, while he chewed complacently at a black cigar.
In common with the rest of the small company he was in his
shirt-sleeves, for it was very hot. A mere ghost of a breeze stole in
through the window screen, against which foiled moths, attracted by the
light within, bumped in vain. A white-aproned waiter, summoned by an
electric bell, entered, removed the empty glasses and received a fresh
order. With his departure the bald gentleman was again heard from.

"Well," he snorted aggressively, "what's eatin' you? Don't you believe
me?"

"Why," drawled a lank, middle-aged gentleman with a generally
unsophisticated look that increased the efficiency of his talents for
the peculiar use to which he devoted them; "I suppose it's safe to be on
the safe side, but there's no use in borrowin' trouble any more than you
have to. Everything looks smooth to me."

"Pals," remarked the bald gentleman impressively, "remember this. The
only way to stave off the foreclosure is to keep borrowin', and it's the
smoothest whisky that gives you the rockiest head the next morning.
'Cause why? 'Cause you get enthused and hit it up too hard. Now that's
where our danger flag's out. We've found this an easy town, we've worked
it for all it's worth, puttin' it in plain English; the reformers ain't
never woke up and you're takin' the attitude that they never will. Boys,
it's a mistake. They do, sometimes. You don't want to plan on no sleepy
campaign, if you'll take it from a sideliner that's 'retired' but
wishes you well."

"That's all very well, Alderman." said a plump, moon-faced fellow across
the table, "but we've had these scares before and they've been for
nothing. Two years ago Fusion thought it had us beat and we was afraid
it was going to turn the trick. Remember the vote? Why, we got the laugh
from our own men. We needn't have hustled ourselves. It was a dead
open-and-shut."

"It's because the town don't believe half it hears," interpolated the
lank gentleman. "I'll say this, that the old man--drink to him,
boys!--is the best organizer in this country today, and he leaves the
blindest trail. They can't bring anything home, not while we're in
control."

"That's what I'm tellin' you," remarked the bald one grimly. "You've got
to hang on to the control. Let it slip away from you while you're
nappin' and how long would it be before the town was next? What would
the hide of any man in this room be worth?" His voice had instinctively
lowered; his head was thrust forward, his little eyes were piercing. "I
tell you it always pays to keep busy all the time."

There was a moment's silence. The half dozen companions of the speaker
surveyed him minutely but with visible respect. After all, he could give
any and all of them pointers in the gentle art of grafting and they knew
it. Moreover, his words had at last struck home, had awakened them from
a false sense of security. Alderman Goldberg had been through the mill,
and had fed at the public crib at intervals no better judged than times
when he elected to remain in discreet retirement, in his cyclone cellar,
until ominous signs on the municipal weather horizon had disappeared.
So, because they knew that he spoke by the card, his companions now paid
him the tribute of uneasy silence.

The lanky individual, Dick Peterson by name, finally resumed the
conversation. "Well," said he, "this is only a preliminary to the main
event anyway. Wonder what's keepin' the old man? Here we've been waitin'
an hour. We'll see what he says. I haven't mentioned 'campaign' to him
myself."

"I know what he'll say," retorted Goldberg. "Just what I've been tellin'
you, to get busy. That's why he called you here tonight, to dig in the
spurs a little. The old man's no fool. Hark! I guess he's comin' now."

There was a soft tread outside, a door opened and a man entered the
room. Nodding slightly in response to their greeting, he seated himself
in a chair, at the head of the table, which had evidently been reserved
for him. Peterson pushed some cigars toward him, at the same time
thrusting an interrogative finger toward the electric bell. The newcomer
shook his head, and selecting one of the cigars, leaned back in his
chair as he leisurely lighted it.

John Shaughnessy was as unlike the cartooned type of political boss as
could be imagined. He looked decidedly ordinary, and might have been
taken for anything from a dejected clerk of middle age to an
unostentatious gambler. His garb was quiet; there was an utter absence
of vociferous jewelry. In person he was lank and slightly over middle
height. The face was singularly impassive; that of a gambler to whom
nothing apparently mattered. A hawk nose and small black moustache had
Shaughnessy, also a pair of heavy-lidded eyes.

These eyes, when they glanced casually at you, held a lustreless,
ennuied expression that impressed you, did you trouble to entertain any
impression at all, with a definite idea of somnolence in Shaughnessy. A
discouraged gambler, you might think casually, had you not the honor of
his acquaintance. But did you happen to kindle Shaughnessy's interest in
any way, lo! a startling change. The heavy lids contracted ever so
little about the black eyes, which shot forth gleams that revealed
Shaughnessy in a new and sinister light. They bared a sleepless
vigilance, an unpleasant concentration, which inspired the person
regarded with a nervousness that was justified. For when those eyes, but
a moment before lustreless and dead, lightened with that strange gleam,
the dispirited clerk or discouraged gambler vanished. In his stead,
regarding you with a cold, basilisk, snaky stare that pierced you
through and through, there was revealed--Shaughnessy.

It was his wonted mask of impassive features and lustreless eyes that
long caused Shaughnessy to be surprisingly and generally underestimated.
Men chose not to believe that one whose general appearance so lacked
significance was capable of the stealth and finesse in large, dark
matters that a portion of the press emphatically but rather gropingly
attributed to Shaughnessy. So it was Shaughnessy's good fortune, for his
nefarious ends, that most men refused to take him too seriously. The
majority chanced never to rouse his interest; hence, never saw the
optical gleam. For the minority who did, Shaughnessy was a man
transformed, invested with power, genuine and unmistakable.

Following the leader's entrance, the company waited silently for him to
speak. He favored them with a moment's reflective stare, puffing
billowing smoke clouds. Then he spoke, and his voice was as cold and
impersonal as his white face.

"I called you together, boys," said he, "because there's work ahead for
us." There was a significant nod from Goldberg. "It doesn't look bad at
a first glance," continued Shaughnessy, "but a look-in will show you
that it will pay to hump some. There's nothing open yet, but we've got
to face the hottest fight we have had. Well," with a grim smile, "we'll
do it and we'll win out. We've got to."

"Yes," remarked Peterson, with a deep sigh. "We've got to, all right,
governor."

"That's what I was tellin' 'em, Shaughnessy," put in Goldberg, rolling
his cigar to the lee corner of his mouth. "They wanted to give me the
laugh. Thought everything was lovely. They'll know when they've
sidestepped the shivers as often as we have. I tell you, the clearest
day is the one you want to have your umbrella ready for, and that's no
lie."

"No," assented Shaughnessy, "that's no lie. It's going to rain votes
this fall and we've got to get busy in mortgaging the majority of 'em.
If we don't, we get caught napping, that's all, and it's us to the
woods. I needn't tell you, of course, that as late as a year ago we
could have defied 'em to put the hooks on us, even if they'd got a
look-in at the polls. We had things tied up so they couldn't have
touched us; we could have stayed right on. But there've been some bad
mistakes made; some instructions exceeded and some things we couldn't
help, being forced into 'em. Truth is, boys, that if through any chance
we're done up in this coming election, we're caught right out in the
open with a wagonload of goods, and there's no time to hide 'em. That's
the situation we're facing and it's one that calls for cutting out sleep
till after election day."

"Well, we've done it before," remarked Willie Shute, the moon-faced
gentleman, as he pressed the button for another round of drinks. "What
the devil is sleep, anyway? Waste of time."

"It's a waste of time in politics," assented the leader, "unless you
want to wake up to find you've been buried alive with no air tube."
Willie Shute, following the laughter which greeted this grisly
pleasantry, was discovered looking about him with vague apprehension.

"Thought I heard someone snickerin'," he explained. "Before we did."

Peterson glanced significantly at Shute's whisky glass. "Preliminary to
the main event," he commented. "Saw off, or you'll be hearing bands of
music in the morning."

Shaughnessy leaned forward upon the table. "Well, let's get down to
business," he remarked. "Let's talk things over, look at all we've got
to buck against and plan to buck it in the good old way. Give us another
whack at this and in the next two years we'll be ready to retire with a
trail blinder than an eyeless fish in the Mammoth Cave. But it would be
all day with us to lose just now; we can't afford it. In some ways we're
better fixed for the fight than we've been before. We own one newspaper
body and soul, though we're not advertising it. We've practically
clinched another of 'em, there's a couple that don't count anyway, and
then, there's that damned Courier."

"What figure does it cut?" sneered Goldberg. "What do you care? You've
got good organs of your own."

"I'd give the lot of 'em, pro and con," responded Shaughnessy
reflectively, "if I could either switch that sheet onto my line or work
it for a neutral sidetrack. It's got more real, solid influence than the
lot of 'em put together. It's always been against me, more or less, said
I was 'some' back in the days when the other papers gave it the laugh.
Last election it let up a little. I was beginning to get in. Then old
Westlake bought up the controlling interest unexpectedly a while ago,
and they're getting ready to lam it to us this fall, boys, and don't you
forget it. We can't do anything with Westlake. You know I was trying,
through sources that ought to have been influential, to get in an
entering wedge by practically throwing the whole batch of city printing
at Westlake's head. Well, what do you think? Westlake was on all right
and it's a case of no compromise. Matter went to the business office and
was referred directly to him, as a matter of course. He sent back word
that the Courier was planning to print a great deal about the city
"gov." during the next few months that it wouldn't charge anything for."

"Well," inquired Goldberg, after a moment's silence, "what good is that
going to do him?"

"Nothing yet," replied Shaughnessy, the light of battle kindling in his
strange eyes. "He's got nothing that'll do us any real harm, and I think
we can see to it that there'll be no leaking on anything that will. It's
up to us just to pull down the blinds, and keep 'em pulled, and then let
Westlake howl about what he suspects; he won't know anything. We've got
respectable papers," with an ugly sneer, "controlled by respectable men
on our side, too. If Westlake or any man of Westlake's can dig up
anything after we've nailed it down, why, he's welcome to it. But now
let's get busy and talk things over."

A colloquy followed which would have electrified the citizens of this
community, could they have heard it. Ancient, mysterious skeletons were
exhumed in that talk, skeletons which had been in the flesh the source
of much speculation. There were recent dark issues, too, and there was a
murky present and a future that would be murkier, did things go well.
All told, an opportunity to listen to that conversation would have
benefited the adherents of municipal decency.

After two hours of reminiscence, of planning for the campaign and
speculating on the future, Shaughnessy rose with a yawn. "Get a good
night's sleep, boys," he suggested dryly, "and then don't sleep again
till the day after we do the old ladies at the polls." They laughed as
they followed him out of the private room and down stairs.

There was a slight stir in a corner of the room. It subsided as a waiter
entered to clear and tidy the table. With the receding steps of the
servitor down the stairs, from behind the sideboard in the corner softly
stepped a man. He looked cautiously about him, then, walking to the
window, he quietly withdrew the screen, and, gaining a convenient roof
outside, replaced the screen carefully. Upon the roof his stealthily
receding footsteps were audible.




CHAPTER II

AN ARRIVAL


"Ambition is an itch for something you haven't got and never expect to
get," remarked Peters, rapping his pipe bowl against the edge of the
desk and reaching for Mead's tobacco box. He owned none of his own and
the rest of the force formed a convenient and interminable tobacco trust
for him.

"You might add to that observation the clause 'but others have,' Pete,"
put in Charlie Kirk, while Mead resignedly watched Peters jamming an
unwieldy wad of the weed into the bowl with his thumb, to brazenly reach
for more the next instant. "Besides, that remark isn't original. It's
gone the rounds of the papers. I don't know where they pinched it, but
I'll bet it wasn't from you."

"Your observation does you credit, Sherlock," retorted Peters,
undisturbed. "If you would exercise a little of that faculty on the job,
maybe the old man would raise your attenuated wage."

The quiet voice of the city editor broke in upon the amiable colloquy.
"Here, Kirk," said he, "and you, Peters, I want you. Go and relieve
Smallwood and Lynn at that visiting convention and tell them to hurry
here with their stuff. They've been there since seven. I thought the
thing would be over by now."

Kirk and Peters left Mead's desk, where they had been loafing for a few
spare moments, and, slipping on their coats, walked to the elevator and
sank streetward. The city editor delved again into the debris on his
groaning desk. It was a rush night. The few men in the great room, for
most of the reporters were still out, were bent over portly pads or
pecked busily at typewriters.

Mead scrawled away at the lecture story to which he had been assigned
that evening. Warming to his work he rounded out many of the professor's
periods for him and added some good things of his own. Now and then he
read a paragraph with complacency and sifted in a few more adjectives.
He had heard the old fairy tale of speakers giving reporters credit for
improving their efforts. Moreover, he was but lately hatched from the
high school and was nearing the end of his probationary period upon
the Courier. As with the _debut_ of most of the boys, coherence was
smothered in verbiage. Mead's written words flowed on like rivers to the
sea. You who speak by the card will well remember the turbid freshets
you handed in, long ago, with a sort of awe to think you had penned
them. You looked for a little corresponding awe on the part of the city
editor. He merely grunted, and the next morning it was a wise father
that knew his brain-child. The anxious parent looked twice through the
pages, finally finding the changeling, dwarfed and subdued, in a modest
corner next the patent medicine "ads." Stripped of the gauzy gewgaws of
fancy with which you had complacently adorned it, it lay in its stark
cerements of staring simplicity, a hard, terse, graphic, uncompromising
fact. That salient bar, the editorial pencil, had dammed the winding,
sunlit stream at its very source, forcing it home by a short cut that
skipped much romantic scenery but saved time for the navigator. You read
the mangled remnant of that early flight and cursed the city editor's
lack of literary appreciation. Afterward, when the years had brought you
wisdom, you wondered why he had kept you at all. Yet you knew, after
all,--for the veterans were tyros once.

Mead toiled on, the mirage of an achieved literary gem on his mental
horizon. It was the same mirage, old yet ever young, that flashes in
transient glory and fades as often and as miserably before the wistful
eyes of the veteran in letters as with the tyro: the dream of an
unattainable ideal, which mocks and melts away, a phantom of the sands.

His task completed, Mead brought his masterpiece to the city editor's
desk. "The lecture, Mr. Harkins," said he, with a thrill of secret
pride. A sense of polished erudition welled strong within him. Harkins
might now see what the real thing in literary skill could do with the
most prosaic of assignments.

Harkins had cleared his desk pretty well in the past few minutes and his
assistants were busy in consequence. He slapped the masterpiece
irreverently on the desk. Like a withering blast his trained eyes swept
the first page, which was heavily laden with elaborate introduction.
There were a few fierce swoops of a blue pencil. Words fell in the ranks
like scattered skirmishers, then platoons of phrases were swept away.
The enfiladed page fell face down on the desk. Another, similarly
mangled, followed. Only a few gallant remnants of that imposing array
remained. It was the survival of the fittest, the obliteration of the
superfluous; but it was hard. Mead watched the sacrifice in slow,
gathering horror.

Harkins looked up. "Busy night!" said he abruptly but not unkindly.
"Anyway, this won't do. Cultivate the newspaper style. Get brevity,
terseness. Cut out excess baggage. Get the right word and fit it in
right. You're voluminous. Make it luminous."

Harkins resumed the massacre and Mead, poor innocent, walked
disconsolately to his desk to digest the bitter pill that must
invariably be administered to the newspaper novice. At Mead's age the
simultaneous discovery that there are things to learn and things to
unlearn is disconcerting. He sat discouraged, his pinions drooping, and
stared gloomily at some gyrating millers about the electric bulb over
his desk. Presently he tried to catch them, with a half-acknowledged
desire to pluck off their wings in a little game of "pass it on." But
they were elusive and evaded him.

Several men came in from assignments, and removing their coats, for a
hot wave was grilling the late days of June, set to work. Smallwood and
Lynn, back from the convention, left thick wads of copy on the city
editor's desk and went out for a late lunch. More reporters entered
hurriedly and fell to. The dramatic editor entered with deliberation, as
became the great, and leisurely set about the roasting of a "first
night." Copy boys scurried like scampering ants. The editors bent to
their tasks, the reporters' fingers rushed over the pads or jingled the
typewriter keys. Everybody hit up the pace but the dramatic critic. He
sat, pencil poised like a poniard, deliberating whether he should slay
the piece and principals by slow torture, like an Indian, or perform
the deed with one murderous lunge. The proprietors of this particular
theatre had fallen out with the business office of the Courier. They did
not advertise in the Courier now, so when the dramatic critic attended
their house he paid for his seat and charged it to expense account.
Naturally, what the Courier said about the attractions at that house,
during the season in question, was not what it would have said had the
brethren been dwelling together in amity.

This was a particularly auspicious occasion. The other houses had been
closed for several weeks, owing to the advent of warm weather. This
theatre had opened to accommodate a troupe which, in stage parlance, was
trying it on the dog before venturing to launch a new summer attraction
in the metropolis. After due reflection the Courier's dramatic critic
savagely gripped his pencil and proceeded to use it as a bowie in the
interest of the suffering dog.

There had been nothing more for Mead to do and he sat at his desk,
sucking disconsolately at a short pipe. It being a new accomplishment,
he found difficulty in keeping it lighted. He viewed the moths with
malice, their fluttering wings fanning his resentment. He was again
reaching cautiously for them when a voice sounded at his elbow; an odd
voice, unlike other voices.

"Say, kid," it inquired, "where's the head push?"

Mead turned, somewhat confused by the unexpected interruption. "Huh?" he
asked.

"Why, the main squeeze, the first fiddle!" was the impatient rejoinder.
Then, as an afterthought, "the city editor."

Mead indicated. "Over there," he said. "His name's Harkins." He turned
in his chair to watch the stranger, who shuffled over to Harkins' desk.

"Say, Mr. Harkins, I need a job. And that's no lie," was how he put it.

Harkins whirled in his chair. His keen glance swept the visitor from
head to foot. "No, I guess it isn't," was his quiet verdict. "You need a
lot of things, don't you?"

"You've hit it, sir," grinned the guest, "right behind the ear. But a
job will bring 'em and my face won't. It's been overworked lately, that
face, and I'm restin' it. I'd hock it, but it's all I've got, and
besides I guess I've got all it'll bring already."

"Shouldn't wonder," grinned Harkins in reply, surveying with growing
interest the traveller, for such his appearance bespoke him. "Did it
bring you here?"

"No, they didn't see it," laughed the stranger. "I came by freight from
Cleveland. It was a pork train--and I'm on it yet," with a sweeping
gesture that indicated the ensemble of his frayed and dusty habiliments.
"No low bridge for me that trip," he continued. "The brakemen rode on
top, but the bumpers were good enough for me. Ain't so risky."

Harkins quizzically looked him over. He was uniquely worth the trouble.
A battered cap, tipped rakishly over one ear, topped a mat of curly red
hair of the peculiar bricky hue that hisses a sibilant Celtic brogue in
whilom wind-stirrings. Beneath a broad forehead there danced and rioted
two Irish eyes, pale blue pools in an environing forest of freckles.
Nature had been generous with mouths when he transpired and had given
him enough for two. He had further distended it with much smiling. His
cheeks and chin were rough with a sandy stubble; not over-coarse, for
he was young. He was slender and of medium height. His garments, in an
advanced state of senility, exuded cinders at every pore. As for his
shoes, the poor devil was literally on his uppers.

"I guess," said Harkins, not unkindly, "I guess, my boy, we're full."

"You're lucky," murmured the stranger, gray discouragement in his face.
"Wish I was. I'm a hollow tube just now."

He turned suddenly toward Harkins, despair in the eyes grown dark with
trouble, the light and the laughter fled.

"My God!" he gulped, "I haven't eaten a morsel for hours! I want to earn
my livin'! I know I look like a hobo,--I am one, I suppose,--but I'm a
workin' one. I'm a bum tramp reporter, it's true enough, you only have
to look at me. But try me, Mr. Harkins, just give me a chance to make
good, for I tell you I can get the news!"

Harkins involuntarily thrust his hand into his trousers pocket. A
gesture restrained him.

"Mr. Harkins," said the visitor, with an odd dignity, grotesque enough
in his shabby garb, "no hand-outs. When I can't earn what I eat, I'll
cut the game."

Harkins reflectively looked him over, now with a little concern. Pride
in such tatters, that would not accept alms, merited consideration.
Then, too, Dodds had just been dismissed and someone must replace him.
But the stranger! He was hardly an acceptable candidate. Still, there
was a frankness in the mottled face and twinkling eyes, an odd note in
the voice just tinged with an Anglicized brogue, that appealed to
Harkins. In the ensuing moment of hesitancy the question was decided
for him.

A telephone bell sounded at the city editor's elbow. He turned in his
chair, clapped the receiver to his ear, listened a moment, replied
briefly, hung up the receiver and turned to the stranger. Mead, the only
one of the force at liberty, had leaned forward in his chair as the city
editor answered the 'phone. Now he settled back again in deep disgust as
Harkins addressed the disreputable visitor.

"I'll try you," he said briefly. "Know the town at all?"

"No, but I can find it," was the reply.

"There's a big row on at the corner of Elm and Market streets," said
Harkins. "Beer and brickbats, tough locality. Rival nests of low
foreigners. You'll have to step lively, forms close early tonight. By
the way, take Mead with you and you take charge. It's a job if you win
out. If not, you can travel."

The stranger grabbed his hat and vanished, the resentful cub at his
heels. The city editor glanced at the big clock in the corner and
returned to his task. More men came in, including Kirk and Peters, the
convention having finally adjourned. The manuscripts multiplied on the
readers' desks. On all sides men were laboring furiously.

Three-quarters of an hour had elapsed when there was an upward whisk of
the elevator and into the big room hurried the seedy stranger. Mead, no
longer resentful, followed him. Indeed, there was something of homage in
Mead's tribute toward the other, the involuntary tribute that any honest
tyro must pay, in any trade, to the experienced hand who knows his
business. Mead was perspiring. So was the stranger, who had evidently
kept himself and his force moving. Straight to Mead's desk strode the
new arrival, tearing off his shabby coat as he went, Mead heeling. The
leader flung himself into Mead's chair, waving his hand toward the
vacant desk next to it, where the cub meekly seated himself and fell to
writing. He had been assigned to his part of the tale by the vagrant
journalist as the two were rushed back to the office in a cab from the
scene of the trouble.

The stranger drew from his vest pocket the stub of a soft-leaded pencil
about three inches long. The point was inserted for a thoughtful instant
in his mouth, then was slapped swiftly upon a pad. Sprawled forward,
with elbows on the desk, he wrapped his calves securely around the legs
of his chair. Thus he began the strewing of words upon the paper, in the
execrable handwriting and at the phenomenal speed which have become
traditions of that office, where each has remained unrivaled in the
paper's annals. Oblivious of his surroundings, he bent over his desk
like a jockey in the saddle, eyes glued on the pad whose leaves he was
covering at lightning speed. As he proceeded he tossed the finished
sheets carelessly aside without pausing. Mead, too, under the benign
influence of time-pressure, took a long stride forward in newspaper
requirements by forgetting to "pad" uselessly. Meanwhile the city
editor's assistants gathered up the finished sheets and carried them
away to be hastily edited and shot upward to the compositors.

It was, in reportorial parlance, "hot stuff." A man had been killed in
this battle of the slums and the criminal was somewhere in hiding. Many
men were injured, some seriously. Extra policemen had been summoned.
The detail had charged the mob with sanguinary results, both to the mob
and the bluecoats. As usual some non-combatants had suffered. There had
been a number of arrests. The patrol wagons had been busy, the gongs of
the hospital ambulances had sounded their warning as they dashed to the
relief of the injured. It was the big story of that issue, grim and
formidable, dwarfing even the stormy convention in its dramatic
features, which partook of the sombre dignity of the tragic under the
masterly treatment of the tattered scribe. It was, too, a chaotic story,
with a certain swirl, a swift rush of events that had piled one upon the
other with a cyclonic swiftness that must have staggered a neophyte and
taxed to the utmost the highest resources of brain and nerve, together
with the most feverish energy of the veteran.

In a full, rounded entirety, dwarfing the efforts of the rival morning
dailies,--though some of them had several experienced men on the
story,--the parish of the Courier read of the memorable riot in that
issue. It was actually impressive to watch the story pouring from the
point of that flying, disreputable pencil, flowing down the sheets in a
mad torrent, the scenes brought before the reader's eyes with an
irresistible force that made them visible in graphic word pictures, as
if actually photographed. The stub rushed on, weaving the main web of
the tale, while Mead's pencil picked up the loose ends in the form of
minor details. Harkins marveled as he watched the story's development.
Its size surpassed his expectations. Had he fully understood its scope,
several of his best men would have been taken summarily from their tasks
and sent post-haste to the scene. Not till this tattered knight of the
road returned, with the cub in tow, had Harkins known of the snowball's
growth. Yet here it was at last, the final sheet of what Harkins'
trained journalistic sense told him was a superb handling of an
unusually difficult assignment. He sent the last sheets upstairs and
turned to the stranger and his faithful cub, who were mopping fevered
faces.

"Great!" quoth Harkins, including the cub, who felt his oats in
consequence and began filling his pipe with due seriousness. "You will
do," added the editor, turning to the new man. "Come on tomorrow
afternoon."

The new man rose to leave but hesitated, crimsoning a little. Harkins
eyed him inquiringly. The stranger grinned rather ruefully.

"Object to my sleeping on this table?" he asked. "The rate is cheaper.
Besides, I'm hollower even than I was."

Harkins laughed, but it was a sympathetic laugh. "I had forgotten," said
he. "You'll find a bed softer than the table, I imagine, and there is a
filling restaurant in the next block." He proceeded to make an advance
on the new man's salary. The latter thanked him and was off.

The boys crowded around, curious and interested. "He's no Albert Edward
on wardrobe," commented the dramatic critic, "but he's a pippin just the
same. Who is he, Harkins?"

"Hang it!" replied Harkins dubiously, "I forgot to ask him. What's his
name, Mead?"

"Gee, I don't know," replied the cub, sucking contentedly at his pipe.
"He didn't give me any time to ask."




CHAPTER III

MICKY


Michael O'Byrn, picturesquely Irish, so his name appeared on the
payroll, but from the cases to the press room they called him Micky.
Mike would have been a misfit, for its tang suggests a burly,
bull-necked son of Erin with fists like hams and a brogue of gravy-like
thickness, a boisterous, beefy, big-hearted broth of a boy of blows and
budge. Micky had the Irish heart, but he was short on fists and beef and
possessed the mere ghost of a brogue. Besides, O'Byrn's pseudonym
suggests juvenility, and Micky's four and twenty years, with their
palpable vicissitudes, had not robbed him of that saving grace. Indeed,
on meeting him, light-hearted and laughter-loving as he was in youth,
your imagination would experience little effort in leaping a long leap
into futurity to behold him a generation on, white-polled and with the
olden freckles faded in his wrinkled face; still the laugh on his lips,
the light of quizzical humor in his blue eyes. Glad he would always be,
because there would always bubble in his heart the fountain of eternal
youth.

The newspaper spirit had its embodiment in Micky O'Byrn, the tattered
knight of the road whose first story electrified the city editor of the
Courier. The spirit shone out of the portals of the twinkling Irish
eyes, eternally questioning. It reconnoitred the field from the bridge
of the nose that twitched with eagerness at the scent of a story, as a
pointer snuffs grouse. Within the mouth, that was always distended with
an ingratiating smile, dwelt in amity those heavenly twins, guile and
blarney. They served as forceful means to the eternal end of
news-seeking, and they were backed by ramparts of cheerful impudence
that flanked the whole freckled face. The chin was round, but a bump
peered forth that bespoke tenacity. He ordinarily displayed a guileless
expression that hid an unfathomed depth of resource. Once on the trail,
he could never be turned away. When one route to information failed, he
had a dozen others in readiness, leading by devious paths to the desired
end.

O'Byrn's appearance, when he had selected and donned his new ready-made
suit, rakish derby and vociferating shirt, was decidedly tracky. This
transformation occurred soon after he joined the Courier's staff. The
suit was checked in a pattern which cried aloud to heaven, the new
crimson tie adding its insistent clamor. The derby was done off in a
delicate drab. As for shoes, he selected tan oxfords with red ties. The
ensemble, to use a word that found much favor with Micky, "jibed"
harmoniously with his thick fell of lurid hair and his staring freckles.
In dress, as in all else, Micky was a pronounced radical.

Micky entered upon his service for the Courier with a vim which
abundantly realized his promise to "make good" if given the chance. In
him energy was wedded with tenacity. He had an inexhaustible fund of
subtle resource, an ingratiating impudence. Altogether, he was well
adapted to his strenuous trade, the trade that sifts out so much of
chaff and leaves so little wheat--and finally withers the wheat till it
follows the chaff. Micky had a positive genius for coping with
obstacles. If he could not "sidestep" them he climbed over, crawled
under or wriggled through them. Harkins steered him up against nearly
everything in those first few days and he never fell down. Harkins began
to grow self-complacent regarding his discernment. He had discovered
this pearl, or to put it more literally, this speckled ruby of
journalism. As a matter of fact, the ruby had discovered himself, but
Harkins had helped. He was entitled to congratulate himself, for the new
arrival was amply demonstrating his services to be valuable.

Micky had been with the Courier a fortnight. The voice of his new
apparel had been heard on the land and also on the waters. For only the
previous day he had boarded a tug steaming out to the quarantine
station, casually absorbed a mine of information without the suicidal
flashing of a notebook and scooped the field with a harrowing chapter of
abuses by those in power. His prestige was increased. A little bird
slyly twittered in his ear that they had started him low in the wage
line. He would better strike for more while the iron was hot, for it was
like to cool quickly in this uncertain calling.

He pondered over the matter, his feet reposing on his desk, a red-eyed
cigar stub in the corner of his mouth. It was midnight. He had handed in
a warm political column, happened upon by accident that evening. He was
always stumbling upon such accidents, that spelled spice for the reader
in the morning.

Micky ceased ruminating, with a mental vow to strike 'em next day. He
rose, yawned, stretched himself and strolled over to the sporting
editor's desk. O'Byrn sank into an adjoining chair as his neighbor
administered the finishing touches to an intercollegiate field meet of
that afternoon.

"How 're ye, Fatty?" inquired Micky amiably, prodding his co-laborer in
the ample excuse for his nickname.

"Fine 'nd dandy, Irish," replied the rotund Stearns rather absently, as
he pensively rubbed his prodded abdomen. "Say, Irish," he burst out in
an odd breathless way--Fatty's fits were a joke in the office and
startling to newcomers--"good hammer throw, that. Fell short two feet,
though." He shoved a written sheet over to Micky.

Micky had jumped in his chair at the onslaught, spilling cigar ashes
over his noisy shirt bosom. "Short of what?" he demanded with sarcasm,
blowing the ashes into Stearns' rubicund face. "Fatty, have you got 'em
again?"

"Got nothin'," retorted Fatty, rubbing an ashy eye. "They'll never beat
it, never," he murmured, more to himself than to Micky, with a slow
shake of his fat head. "Not on your pajamas! They can't touch him."

"Cut it out, Fatty," exhorted Micky with concern. "Quit the pill cookin'
stunt or it'll land you in the dip-house for sure. Why, you spit when
you talk now! Of whom are you dreaming?"

Fatty came back to earth. "That's so, you weren't here then," he
vouchsafed pityingly.

"When?" retorted Micky pugnaciously. "When wasn't I here?"

"Three years ago," replied Stearns, the tremolo of a tender memory
throbbing in his tone.

"And if I wasn't here," demanded Micky, unmollified, "who was, you sofa
pillow?"

The sofa pillow, like most such, was good natured. He grinned
forgivingly at the freckled features opposite him.

"Dick Glenwood was!" he answered with firm finality. "Yes 'r! And when
he got through there was nothin' else. The rest of 'em were hangin' on
the clothes line. It was three years ago, Speckles, and I was helpin' do
the intercollegiate meet for the News. Cubbin' it then, you know. All
the colleges, Hale, Pittston and the rest were there. I knew Dick; best
man Hale ever had, bar none. Knew what was comin'. Came from the same
town as I did. Brought up together; he's licked me more than once," with
pardonable pride. "Came out just as I expected and he scooped
everything. It was his last appearance, graduation year, big rep. Had to
make good and he did, won everything in sight. That is, everything he
went into, and he was in everything worth while. Made some records that
stand today. And that hammer throw! Say," gurgled Fatty, his face
apoplectic, "that man Myers came the closest to it today of any meet
since then, and he's got two feet comin' to touch it!"

"Dick Glenwood," mused Dicky. "I've heard the name around the office."

"And why not?" exploded Stearns. His little eyes, lurking beneath folds
of fat, peeled like round agate marbles. "Why, man, don't you know?"

"Know what?" snapped O'Byrn, reaching for a convenient paper-weight.
"Now, Fatty!" poising the weapon.

"Know he works here, of course," replied Stearns, viewing the weight
apprehensively. "Say, Irish, don't talk to me! You'd better come out of
it yourself."

"Works here?" repeated Micky, putting down the weight. "I haven't seen
him."

"On his vacation," explained Fatty. "Expect him back tomorrow. My last
whack at this stunt."

"So he does sports," observed Micky, taking a fresh cigar from Stearns'
vest pocket. "I thought you did 'em right along."

"Me?" exploded Fatty, in incredulous oblivion of slaughtered grammar.
His fat face expressed ludicrous amaze at the impression. "Why, man,
he's the best sporting writer in town or anywhere else! I'm just
supplyin'. Ordinarily I do odds and ends. I've done everything but time.
Sometimes, when we're specially busy, I act as his assistant. He got me
my job here when the News fired me."

Fatty was nothing if not ingenuous. Micky did not try to hide his grin,
for it would make no difference with Fatty.

"Why, yes, I've read of that fellow," assented Micky, transferring a
generous portion of the contents of Stearns' match box to his own
pocket. "So he went into this rotten business, did he?"

"Why, yes, he's stuck on it," explained Fatty. "You see he's got money."

"Got money!" echoed Micky amazedly. "Gee whiz! then why--? Excuse me,
Fatty, I'm asleep at the switch for fair."

"I don't know," floundered Fatty helplessly, "but anyway, his father's
got money. But Dick likes this business just the same. Been at it since
he left college."

"Then it is because he's got money, or his father has," agreed Micky. "I
couldn't see it before, but you have made it very clear, Fatty. It's
because he's got money or his father has. How stupid of me to be wingin'
on that proposition! But if he didn't have money, or his father didn't,
and he was doing this for a living like the rest of us instead of for
the fun of it, he'd say to the devil with it, like the rest of us--and
probably keep right at it, like the rest of us." In which words Micky
gave utterance to a philosophic, universal truth.

The voice of the city editor broke in upon the conference. "Say,
Stearns," it called, "where's that meet?"

"Most done, Mr. Harkins," responded Fatty in a panic, diving into his
copy like a greased swimmer off the side of a yacht.

"O'Byrn," called Harkins. "Here's word of a row down at Goldberg's
saloon on Ash street, pretty serious. Thuggery. Slide down and get it
quietly. You know they don't like the looks of notebooks around there,"
with a grim laugh.

So Micky, whose memory was his notebook and a wonderfully accurate one
when caution and cunning were demanded, hurried to the elevator.




CHAPTER IV

FISTS AND THE MAN


Between Goldberg's and the polite in indulgence there was a great gulf
fixed. From the north side, with its glittering palaces of Bacchus
dispensing varied decoctions served by irreproachable chemists, you
travelled south through a scattered series of lessening liquid glories.
Finally you came to Goldberg's, where they took it straight in draughts
of cheap, blistering stuff which maddened and incited to crime.
Goldberg's was the dive of last resort for the submerged tenth. Its maw
gaped hungrily, gorging upon the dregs it gathered in. Finally, when the
victims were stripped of their miserable resources, they were spewed
forth, with brains inflamed with the liquid damnation purveyed there.
Ripe for any crime, they were foul fruit for the gaoler and a menace to
men.

Goldberg's existed by grace of the modern god of money. Goldberg was a
tool of the autocratic Shaughnessy, who contrived to head and manage a
corrupt city government. Goldberg captained his ward, which was one of
Shaughnessy's gilt-edged assets. The ward had become Shaughnessy's by
right of Goldberg's conquest. It was a ward of thugs and human jugs and
brutal, elementary mugs; all American sovereigns, equalized with
decency under the deathless document of American independence. Born
sovereigns, or having taken out papers, the adult males in this ward had
lined up one day, now far in the past. One hand of each proudly clutched
a ballot, the badge of his sovereignty. The other hand was greedily
extended for the accompanying cash. Into the grimy palms had dropped
more cash from Shaughnessy via Goldberg, than could be afforded by any
of their rivals. So the ballots poured into the boxes for Goldberg,
whose bull-faced lieutenants flanked the line to see that the bargain
was carried out. Goldberg was the choice of his people for alderman. He
was theirs, and through his rude genius, under Shaughnessy, it
transpired that they were his forever.

He did not sit with the council now. He had long since relinquished even
the higher posts of confidence with which Shaughnessy had honored him
after his aldermanic career. Truth to tell, Goldberg had become
sufficiently notorious to convince Shaughnessy that it would be politic
to remove him from under the direct glare of the public eye. He could
perform better service from the wings. So Goldberg had apparently
retired from all connection with the politics of the city and even his
own ward, though Shaughnessy and the retired gentleman could have told
better. They now picked their puppets to run, invariably routing the
forces of law and order on election day with the tremendous majorities
for license and disorder rolled up in their several wards. There was
subsequent increment, which someone got, gathered in shady subways of a
peculiar municipal government; presenting the situation which makes the
indifferent voter a byword and reproach in many cities of this broad
and extremely hospitable land. On these triumphal election nights, too,
joy overflowed at Goldberg's place,--albeit he was "no longer interested
in politics,"--and fell like strong dew upon the unjust. There were free
draughts of the cheap in beverages flowing fast into the faces of the
unlaved, unshaved crew. The godless exulted and Goldberg continued to
hold them for Shaughnessy in the hollow of his hand.

As Micky was whirled southward, in an open trolley car, he reflected
upon his dubious assignment. How should he conduct his campaign? It will
be readily gathered that newspaper men were not especially popular at
Goldberg's. Most of the representative city sheets, irrespective of
political leanings, had for years been flaying the fifth ward king,
seeking to uncrown him. Thus far it had been without avail. Not yet had
the decent element been able to throw off the thrall. This was because
they had been indulging in that practice which so universally blocks the
wheels of progress in most lines, the pastime of quarreling among
themselves in regard to the most desirable means to the end. So
Shaughnessy and Goldberg, their colleagues and all they represented and
misrepresented, were still in control, and buying larger burglar-proof
safes. The newspapers had kept the quarreling factions of the
perennially defeated party informed as to this growing prosperity, as
well as they were able to ascertain regarding it. Naturally the gang's
leaders and their mates resented this, for it favored the chances of the
opposing party's factions finally getting together and putting the whole
evil crew out of commission. When a man has begun to make easy money,
he mourns to break off the habit; nor does he view with pleasure
attempts to compel him to do so.

Micky hoped he could get his story quietly, for discovery of his errand
in that unfriendly atmosphere would probably mean failure and perhaps a
broken head. However, he hardly thought he would encounter anyone he
knew there, so would trust to luck.

Alighting from the car at the end of South Avenue, he made his way
through a tangle of dark, rank thoroughfares, which grew dingier and
more disreputable as he continued, till he came to the street, little
more than an alley, where Goldberg's flourished like a green bay
tree,--late in season, for the structure needed painting. Low and dingy,
squat and ugly, it crouched between a couple of cheap brick tenements
like a stolid, sullen beast of prey; its few small windows alight with a
dull red glow, like vengeful eyes. From within there came the discordant
brawling of a cracked phonograph. A couple of red-eyed human derelicts,
stupid with drink, lounged against the portal as Micky entered.

It was quiet enough now. There were no signs of a disturbance. Micky was
chagrined. He had hoped to arrive before the trouble, whatever it had
been, was over; if not in the thick of it, at least before the
participants had dispersed. He could then follow some of the interested
parties and secure the details, for he knew his game too well to have
meditated seriously the idea of making any pointed inquiries in the dive
itself. That would mean an instant awakening on the part of the
questioned to the fact that a newspaper man was present. If he
persisted, there might ensue rough treatment and a swift and painful
exodus. However, he found it as quiet as the grave. It was apt to be so
at Goldberg's after a rumpus. Micky shrewdly guessed that the end of the
trouble had been the signal for a general discretionary scattering.
There were present only the bartender and two men who stood against the
bar, their backs to him. Micky noticed with relief that Goldberg was not
present. It was as well, for Micky and he had met.

Micky walked slowly to the end of the big low-ceilinged room and seated
himself at a small beer-splashed table. He chafed inwardly. What had
happened? Had the police arrived and gone, if indeed they knew anything
about it? Or, worse luck, had some man from a rival paper anticipated
him?

These disturbing reflections came simultaneously with O'Byrn's seating
himself. As he did so, a step sounded behind him and a form sank into a
chair at his left, facing his own table.

Micky's heart bounded. Luck was with him after all. "How 're ye, Slade?"
he sang out, with cordiality tempered with a sly wink. "I just got in
from the Speedway track. Just enough left to save hitting the ties
home." Micky's horsy clothes bore out the bluff.

Nick Slade was no fool. He caught the situation at a glance. Micky had
rendered him a service only a week before, the little Irishman's blarney
rescuing him from a prospective entanglement with the talons of a
policeman. Slade was a shred of a fellow, with a lean dark face and
black eyes that were as impersonal as a Chinaman's, as they gazed into
Micky's warning blue ones.

"To the bad, eh?" he rejoined, with a dry grin in the direction of the
men at the other end of the room, whom he was facing while Micky's back
was toward them. "If you'd cut out layin' your own coin, and stick to
business in tippin' off the guys who can afford to lose it, you'd be
better off. I told you not to go up against that bum line of
selling-platers."

"Well, I've got enough left to have a drink on it anyway," replied
Micky, with reckless prodigality, rapping on the table for the
bartender. "Lap up with me. Say what."

"Spivins water," answered Slade, his synonym for whisky. Micky ordered
ale, for ordinarily he avoided the little red devil. When he did not,
the little red devil played ducks and drakes with him and his prospects.

When the bartender had set down the glasses and gone, Micky said
quietly, "Slade, you know why I'm here. Do you know that story?"

"Sure," said Slade, "but you don't want to ask for it here."

"I know it," acquiesced Micky, producing cigars. "That's the reason I
just rang the bluff of a cheap sport. I know I'm one anyway, but I don't
want 'em to tumble to the fact that I write when I'm not sportin'."

"Sure not," agreed Slade. "If they did, Irish, someone would get hurt,
and it wouldn't be the sidewalk. Mulligan, the bartender, is soitinly a
baby bouncer."

"Well now, Nick," said Micky, "I want that story, and I want it right.
It's gettin' early. Now you do a heart-to-heart Uncle Tom and Little Eva
talk with me about the races, and by and by I'll go away. You're not in
it, you know; I flash no paper and mum's the word. I just keep it in my
nut, understand? Now spill it out."

So Nick spilled it out and Micky absorbed his facts, sans comment;
mentally registering the full details of a story that proved interesting
the next day, well besprinkled with gore and full of the zest which made
life worth living in the realm that was Goldberg's. Micky gave a subdued
grunt of satisfaction as it was finished, his restored complacency being
heightened by Nick's assurance that so far he was the sole reporter on
the scene. Harkins' tip must have been a private one. Micky gloated over
the prospective beat.

He had it all now, and time was forging pressward. He shoved what cigars
he had with him toward Nick, with an eloquent look of gratitude, and
rose, moving nonchalantly toward the door, Slade following.

All had been well, but one of the imbibing pair fronting the bar chanced
to turn, eyeing Micky squarely. He was a gent of agility. With a couple
of bounds he sentineled the doorway, barring the intended exodus.
Wrathful fire gleamed in his bleared eyes; the stubble of his crimsoned
face seemed not unlike the rising hackles of an enraged dog.

"Speedway track, eh?" he roared. "Busted sport, eh? You little baboon,
youse will be busted afore youse gets out o' here, an' dat ain't no lie
neither! Mulligan, d'ye know who dis is?"

"Naw!" replied Mulligan, the laconic, thrusting out an angled chin and
screwing his vicious little eyes into gimlet points. "Who t' 'ell?"

"He's dat new Irish Courier pup!" bellowed the obstacle, "de speckled
sneak wot done my game for me last week. I told youse about it."

"Youse did, Cullinan," admitted the bartender and deliberately rolled up
his shirt sleeves. Cullinan's companion, too, had slouched up and
scowlingly flanked his irate pard at guard. Mulligan thoughtfully
emerged from behind the bar. In the sinister situation, the forcible
tribute that Cullinan had just paid O'Byrn upon his professional ability
failed wholly to arouse a gentle glow of satisfaction in Micky's
disturbed breast. The recognition between him and Cullinan, general
blackleg, had been mutual.

There was an instant's silence. Mulligan broke it with salvos of
scientific and finished profanity.

"Yer here for a story," he concluded, "a hot one. An' ye've got it. But
how de 'ell--" with puzzled head scratchings. His venomous little eyes
fell upon the instinctively shrinking Slade. They flamed luridly.

"Youse little yellow leper!" he growled. "It's youse dat coughed it up!"
He lunged at Slade.

Now between the two guards at the open door there was a thin gap to
liberty. Thin it was, but enough for Slade, who had worldly matters yet
to put in order. He ducked Mulligan's hungry hands, and with a swift
spring of a body whose attenuated bulk was a decided advantage in this
time of stress, he shot like a meteor between the disconcerted guards
and landed in a heap upon the sidewalk outside. Bounding to his feet
like a rubber ball, he darted up the alley. The furious guards,
overturned by the sudden onslaught, scrambled up.

"Follow him, Dinneen!" shouted Mulligan, and Cullinan's partner obeyed,
the room echoing with his curses as he rushed out.

As Slade achieved his liberty, Micky had tried to follow suit. He had
nearly reached the door when the brawny hand of Mulligan shot out and
connected with his collar. There was a backward jerk and the choking
journalist landed in the middle of the room, falling over a table amid
jangling beer glasses. Picking himself up rather dazedly he grinned
amiably into the two scowling faces opposite him. His left hand was cut
slightly by a broken glass. He drew out his handkerchief, stanching the
flow of blood.

"Do you mugs provide free ambulance service for your customers," he
inquired airily, "or is that extra?"

"Shut your face!" remarked Mulligan savagely. "Now ye've got that story
all right, which ain't none of yer business nor yer cursed paper's,
neither. Youse done up a pal o' mine here good and proper last week 'nd
we bote otter lick de stuffin' outer you. But I bets as you didn't come
here of yer own accord, an' I tells ye wot we'll do. You tell de man wot
sent yer dat dere wasn't nuttin' doin', an' you couldn't cop nuttin',
an' we lets you go. Eider dat or--" and his swollen fist fanned the
acrid air an inch from Micky's nose.

Micky's keen Irish eyes weighed the ruffianly odds. A weaker spirit
would have temporized or lied. However, Micky was a man. His answer left
nothing to be arbitrated. It was a mere suggestion, but it held
finality.

"You go to hell!" he said. The next instant his eyes, strangely
distended, saw curious vivid, whirling flashes of crimson and orange and
violet. His tongue, curled fantastically, writhed outward like an ant
eater's. His slender hands tore futilely at brutal, strangling fists
clenched upon his throat. He was simultaneously sensible of dull
thudding blows about the lower part of his body, judging hazily but
quite correctly that Cullinan was kicking him. For a moment so, while
the vivid colors faded and resolved themselves gradually into jetty
black, and consciousness waned. Then he heard dimly a rush of feet, felt
a swift relief as the stifling hands were torn from his throat. Gasping,
he rolled weakly to one side while the shadows slowly lifted from his
protruding eyes. They saw what brought Micky staggering to his feet with
trembling interest.

For the tables were turned, not by a relieving cordon of policemen, but
by one man with vengeance in his hands. A splendid young figure, over
six feet tall, he was in the center of the room, dealing it. A swift
vision of yellow tousled hair, gleaming blue eyes and grim square jaw,
flashed before Micky's bewildered sight. A distinct appreciation welled
within him of the power behind a blow which at that instant knocked Mr.
Cullinan into a corner, where he lay and shuddered. The newcomer now
faced Mr. Mulligan, who, with malice burrowing in his gimlet eyes, at
once fell into approved position. The rescuer laughed a great mellow,
resounding laugh full into Mr. Mulligan's unlovely face. Then, dropping
suddenly, he charged into the bartender in bruising gridiron style, a
brawny shoulder heaving that gentleman in a disorganized heap near his
annihilated partner.

The athlete straightened with another booming laugh. "Come on, kid," he
shouted, "it'll be warm here in a minute." He dragged the still dazed
Micky out of the door. Up to the corner they ran to a cab in waiting.
They sprang in. "Courier office!" directed the stranger, then drew out
his watch.

"You'll have plenty of time for your story," he observed. "I know
Goldberg's, so when I happened around the office just now and Fatty told
me, among other things, what was up, I didn't know as it would do any
harm to drive over, seeing I'd nothing else to do. Makes a fellow feel
restless to get out of the grind for a couple of weeks. You get rusty
for exercise." He laughed again.

Micky remembered his talk with Stearns. "You must be--" he ventured.

"Dick Glenwood," returned the other, as they shook hands. "And you, I
think I know you. Fatty told me, all in three minutes. You know he
generally does."




CHAPTER V

THE IRONWORKERS' BALL--AND MAISIE


"You fool!" remarked former Alderman Goldberg to his man, Mulligan, when
he learned a little later that night of the spirited occurrence in his
bar room. "You fool! Don't you know no better than to put it onto a
newspaper guy? Don't you know he can make all kinds of trouble for us if
he wants to? Don't you know nothin'? Just because he did up a pal of
yours,--and God knows he had it comin' to him!--is that any reason
you've got to pitch into the bloke and set a lot of bees stingin' us?
You're a bright one, ain't you? You're a rotten stiff!" fulminated
Goldberg, while his assistant scowled and said nothing. "I'll tell you
one thing," concluded Goldberg, "if they make any trouble for me out of
your fool break, you get the run, see?"

But no trouble ensued and Mulligan remained. Micky, having come out
ahead, laughed at his rough treatment as a part of a good joke, being no
whiner. There was no disposition at the Courier office to cause Goldberg
any more trouble than it was hoped was due him after the next election,
along with his mates. All the Courier's hopes were centered on that
pleasing goal.

Micky's night off, a little later in the week, fell uneventfully, and it
was with distinct boredom that he tried to kill time. He was invariably
uneasy at these brief intervals of respite from the grind, and it might
be said that he enjoyed himself in discontent. It was with a generally
ennuied air that he sauntered at midnight into a night lunch room much
frequented by the Courier staff and encountered Dick there, whom he
greeted with enthusiasm. It happened that Dick was through especially
early that evening.

An odd friendship had arisen between these two, so dissimilar and yet so
like in the welding quality of good fellowship and thorough bohemianism.
It was this restless spirit, the arch-enemy of commercial routine, that
had drawn Dick into journalism after leaving college. The step was a
disappointment to his father, who had hoped that Dick would elect to
enter the parent's office and learn the business from the ground up. He
did not oppose Dick's inclinations, however, thinking that a little
experience would weary him of his idea. Thus far, however, there seemed
little likelihood that Dick would leave the fascinating grind for the
more substantial though more prosaic office desk. He had taken naturally
to journalism, was a ready and pleasing writer, and he liked it.

It was the same restless spirit, too, linked with an inborn, luring love
of roving and shift of scene, that fired O'Byrn. A happy vagabond, his
eyes were filled ever with the charm of new scenes that all too soon
grew old. Always were fair mirages to glow on his horizon, bringing him
hurrying on--to find them faded. Dream-houses, built on barren sands,
dissolving in mists of tears as the years spell the bitter, brutal thing
that we call wisdom! Always for him, strange little Irishman, the luring
whisper from afar and the mad dash thither, to find as before only
chill mists and brooding shadows; and so on, over the wastes, to silence
and the end.

"What have you done with yourself?" inquired Dick, as the two settled
themselves comfortably before their sandwiches and coffee. "Find
anything worth while?"

"Oh, early in the evenin' I dropped into Ryan's roof garden," replied
Micky. "The first stunt wasn't so bad; then they rang in one of those
cockney carolers from dear ol' Lunnon. He got off a yowl about--

    "'Wipe no more, my lidy,
    Oh, wipe no more to die--'

and I got out. Suggested a scullery strike and business, and it was my
night off.

"Blew along and met a bunch of the boys at the Gold Coin. They had
started in early and were left-handed in both feet and hangin' onto the
bar like a freighter in a recedin' tide. They tried to annex me, but I
faded away. I'm through. The budge-mixer's the natural enemy of the
profesh. He gets your money and you get next, but it's never till the
next morning. I knew a district attorney once, up north, who had been
prosecutin' a gang of cheap thieves from a bum district of the county.
He was gettin' off his final spiel, and it was a beaut'. 'Gentlemen of
the jury,' he yells, 'they don't raise anything on the Pine Plains but
hell and huckleberries!' and it was no lie.

"Now on whisky the product's even more limited. You just raise hell. No
more for me, I'm stickin' to suds. It's popular, the red-eye, but it
doesn't last and then it does. There's nothing in it but a pneumatic
head and a nimbus of cracked ice in the mornin'. Your Uncle Mike--Why,
hello, Fatty!"

Fatty Stearns had ambled in and stood regarding them with a tender
smile. Glenwood pulled him into a chair and invited him to order what he
wanted. Stearns was soon busy.

"Just ran out for lunch," came from him in muffled tones. "I'm up to my
neck in that golf game you didn't have time to do," he told Glenwood
with a reproachful glance. "It's got me wingin'."

There were strange gurglings from Micky, grown suddenly wild-eyed.
"Fatty, Fatty!" he moaned. "Did you say 'game?'"

"Sure he did!" answered Dick truculently. "What's the matter with it,
you little ape? I play it."

Micky dissolved in simulated sobs. "He plays it!" he groaned. "Oh, why
was he ever born, Eliza? Better never have been born than born a slave!"

"We will listen, Micky," remarked Dick deliberately, "to any objections
you have to the greatest, most healthful--"

"Oh, fudge!" interrupted Micky. "I was there once and it's a wonder I
didn't turn out a lush for life. Honest, I'd done everything in my time,
but that assignment got me wingin'. I get cross-eyed yet every time I
think about it and I talk really maudlin. I can't tell what I say those
times but the boys say it's fierce. Say I murmur fool talk about putting
it onto the green and bawling on the bunkers. I don't know. I guess I
got it all in my head that time, but somehow I never could make it jibe.

"You see it was when I was on the Signal in Gulf City. Old man sent for
me one day and says, 'There's a three-day golf meet starts tomorrow
morning and it's up to you.'

"Now ordinarily I'm the last to buck at any assignment, but I'd seen a
fellow dislocate his jaw once on some of the vocabulary of that game, so
I sparred for wind.

"'I don't know anything about it,' says I.

"'Neither does anyone else,' says he.

"'Do the players?' I asks him.

"'Damfino!' he came back at me. 'Ask 'em. That's what you're for.'

"So behold your Uncle Mike, Dick, about nine the next morning looping
the links. I had done a fuss stunt and was got up regardless. Had one of
those long cutaways that dallied with my ankles; they hadn't gone out in
Gulf City. I saw a bunch of busy boys humped up around a dinky flag and
started for 'em to ask 'em about it. One of 'em, I judged, was gettin'
ready to whale a toad or somethin' with an umbrella handle. He'd hocked
his hat and hadn't kept much more than his shirt on anyway; barrin' a
pair of pants that had got elephant-tiss-siss-siss, or whatever you call
it, and looked like they came off the pile way back in the happy
hitherto. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and his arms were the color
of sun-cured tobacco, or the mud pies that sister used to bake. Oh, he
was a beam-baked child of nature all right. Well, he sees me comin'
toward him, and straightens up and gives me the cold storage stare.

"'Here, you!' he yells, 'I can't drive over you!'

"'No, you bet you can't!' I yells back. 'Ain't it scandalous you can't?
Why can't you? Did you hock the horse along with the hat? Here, go buy
yourself a new one of both!' and I tosses him a dime.

"They didn't say anything but it grew kind o' chilly, so I turns up my
coat collar and wanders along and by and by I came to the club house.

"It was gorgeous enough around there, looked like the short end at the
surrender of Yorktown. My fuss stunt looked like mourning in that color
scheme. I drifted around, feelin' lonesome and like a drab tassel on a
red fringe. It was a new one on me, but by and by I got a look-in on the
pools. They had a set of cards tacked on the board.

"There was a big geezer in a sunrise coat goin' by just then. I annexed
him. 'What's those?' I asked him, pointin' to the cards.

"'Why, the scores, of course,' says he, tryin' to jerk away.

"'Well, how many times do they score before they start?' I asks, hangin'
on. And honestly, Dick, I didn't know. I was one up in the air with the
parachute busted, and it certainly looked slow to me.

"He broke away, wouldn't answer me at all. It was no way to treat a
lonesome tassel. He deserved to be censured for turning me adrift.

"Well, after awhile I struck a pretty decent guy, if he did wear a horse
blanket for a vest. He said he'd help me out, that the scorers were
busy. I suppose they were flaggin' the bad actors.

"This accommodatin' chap began to go over the cards with me. I got along
all right for a while till I got to an X mark. 'What's this?' I asked
him.

"'Oh,' says he, 'that's because he struck his caddy.'

"'For how much?' I asks. 'Besides, I supposed the caddies were the ones
to strike. They need the money. What races has this bloke been playin'
lately? Must have bet on some brute that ran like cold molasses.'

"'You don't understand,' says he. 'He struck his caddy with the ball. It
knocks him out.'

"'I should think it would,' says I, running my finger down the list.
'Here's a fellow with two X's. That's two down, ain't it? I should think
a ten-strike would make a caddy feel sore for fair.'

"'It makes a player use language when he does that,' says the
accommodatin' chap, starin' at the board and lookin' reminiscent.

"'Does the caddy contribute?' I asked him.

"He didn't pay any attention to that, but kept on lookin' dreamy-eyed.
But I wanted to find out about things, so I kept at him.

"'Say,' I says, 'I notice every once in a while one of those guys yells
'Fore!' That means he's just hit the caddy four times, doesn't it? The
caddy gets all that's comin' to him, doesn't he?'

"And with that he came to and gave me a sad look-over. Then he faded
away and I floated around lonesome again, lookin' for some one to put me
wise. After a while I heard a couple of swell dames talkin'.

"'Theah,' one of 'em says, 'my deah, see those two young men? They ah
the Sherrod twins. I declaiah, they ah so much alike that I cawn't tell
one from the othah. One of them's an expert golfah, but I declaiah, I
cawn't tell which one he is. I cawn't guess why he isn't playing today.
The othah one doesn't play at all.'

"I took a look, and sure enough, they were as near alike as campaign
promises. My move was cut out for me all right and I made a stab at it.
I steered up against one of 'em and buttonholed him.

"'Say,' says I, 'are you you or your brother?'

"He looked kind of wild for a minute, but steadied. 'Why, I guess I'm
me,' he says, as if he wasn't sure of it.

"'Well, you're the man I'm lookin' for,' says I. 'The other one doesn't
play.' Sure enough, he was the right one. He was all right, barrin' the
mashie microbe, and he started in to put me next. It would have been all
hunk, only he was the soul of hospitality and I always hate to say no.
Besides, I wanted to forget it.

"It was highballs till sunset and then I went away after sticking out
both fins for farewell shakes with him both, for he looked like both him
and his twin to me. It must have been a mistake, for I have a hazy
recollection that the one who didn't play left early. Anyway, my friend
might have been a sextette or a full chorus choir, for they all looked
alike to me about that time. I got down town, thinkin' about writin' my
story every now and then, and I fell in with a gang.

"The last I remember of that story I was in the backroom of a saloon
tryin' to write it. I was writin' about two words to a page about then,
though once in a while I would make an extra brace and get in three. It
was 'steen down and a bluff to play with me and I was foozled for fair.
My stuff wouldn't make sense. It just gibbered. I don't know just when I
called it off, but I think it was just after I had scrawled a screed to
the effect that 'Willie Van Hackensack, instead of approaching the tea
as he should, had bunked hazardous highballs till he was batty in his
loft.' It was no lie, either, only it didn't belong in the story.

"That story never got to the Signal, Fatty, and I didn't either. It got
lost somewhere and so did I. I came out of it about a week later, with
Gulf City 'way back beyant the blue and me sitting by the old familiar
track, waiting for a freight.

"No golf in mine, Dick, it holed me for fair. It's an excuse, that's
all. When you aren't out huntin' low balls you're inside huntin'
highballs. After a while you can't tell a mashie from a ball bat. I
don't know what a mashie is, but I do know what a highball bat is. It's
generally a job, unless you break it off in the middle. Do you follow
me, Fatty? If you do, I'm sorry for you."

It was with a windy sigh and a look of added dejection that Fatty
Stearns rose to return to the office and finish his account of the golf
tourney. "Just forget what Micky told you," called Dick after him, "or
you'll get all mixed up and get the run in the morning." Then he
surveyed Micky with that smile, so exasperating in golfers, the smile of
forgiving pity for the man outside.

"Of course, you never played, Micky," he remarked. "If you ever had--"

"Forget it, Dick," said Micky briskly. "I want to. Say, do you dance?"

"Why, I don't know," answered Dick doubtfully, taken aback by the swift
change of subject. "Ask some of my partners. I'm in doubt myself and
aching to know."

"And they know and are aching," grinned Micky. "Well, we'll try you out.
Come on," he added, rising, "let's go over to the Ironworkers' ball.
They'll be going for an hour yet." They left the cafe, and after a
little bolted up the wide stairway of a big brick block. Encountering a
stalwart young fellow behind a ticket table on a landing, Dick's hand
sought his pocket. Micky restrained him, and nodding to the sentry, who
knew him, they passed up to the final landing, where a burst of music
saluted them. A number of couples were "cooling off" there. Dick peered
curiously inside. "How do they dance in such a crush?" he inquired.

"Why, when these husky guys are dancin' with 'em," explained Micky,
"their feet don't touch the floor at all, and the men don't count."

Indeed, the brawny cavaliers were well nigh making Micky's comment good.
The prompter, a big red-faced fellow with a bull's voice, just then
roared, "Swing your partners!" It was the relished order, for every
ironworker there had from earliest dancing days devoted himself without
mercy to the mastery of the art of swinging. At the welcome call, each
swain, an arm encircling his partner's waist gently but firmly, placed
one calloused paw against the lady's back, just below the shoulder
blades, while her palm sought his arm. His other hand sought her free
one and extended it out sideways and a little upward. This served a
double purpose, sufficing to fend off danger from colliding circlers and
to add impetus to the ensuing maelstrom. Then, while the fiddlers bent
to their work, there whizzed a general centrifugal whirl, with a soft
scuff of pivoting feet and the swish of agitated lingerie. That it was
as delightful as dizzying was evidenced by the appreciative comments of
the breathless fair, as the spinning knights halted them, preparatory
to starting the next figure.

"I'm a thirty-third on that," announced Micky complacently. "Can you do
it, Dick?"

Dick was dubious. "Well, probably they'll have a waltz or two-step
next," proceeded Micky reassuringly. "They sandwich in round ones after
every square deal lately. Gettin' what Bill Nye called ray-sher-shay.
Come on, here's one I know. I'll put you next for the next." He dragged
Dick over to a big blonde and left them introduced and waiting for a
two-step.

The quadrille ended and Micky watched the dancers scrambling for seats,
of which there were an insufficiency. The overflow billowed out upon the
landing, laughing and demanding room at the open windows. Micky, from
the doorway, beheld with sudden interest a vision seated across the
hall. He grasped an acquaintance by the arm.

"Say, Lacy," he demanded impetuously, "if you know that, knock me down
to it, will you?"

So Micky was conveyed across the room and formally knocked down to Miss
Maisie Muldoon. The end was well worth his enterprise. Small and
prettily formed, with eyes of truest Irish blue, the loveliest shade of
brown hair extant and a complexion of milk and roses, she was charming.
She was simply gowned in duck skirt and an airy confection of diaphanous
white waist, which revealed tantalizing glimpses of sweet white neck and
arms. Micky mentally registered her "a dream."

"Will you dance?" he asked, crowding into a seat beside her.

"Oh, I don't know, Mr.--er--O'Byrn," she answered. "My card seems to be
full already. I might give you an extra, if they have one," with a
mischievous glance.

"You might scratch half a dozen of those names," suggested Micky easily,
"and substitute mine. It looks prettier."

"I believe you're a newspaper man, aren't you?" freezingly. "Seems to me
I've heard so."

"How do you like 'em?" he demanded, his impudent eyes twinkling.

"If you're any sample, they seem to have a crust," witheringly.

"So does any good thing," he chuckled. "Don't you like pie?"

She laughed in spite of herself. "Say," she acknowledged, turning her
charming face toward his freckled one with decided interest, "you ain't
so worse! I almost wish I had a dance for you."

"Maybe one of 'em will die," said Micky hopefully. "If I can be of any
help--"

"The music's starting," she interrupted. "It's a two-step and I've got
it with Billy Ryan. He's rotten on that. Are you?"

"I'm probably the ripest peach of a two-stepper," averred Micky, "that
ever triangled down a floor. I'm a pippin. Where is your gazabe?"

"I don't know," she replied, looking about frowningly. "Maybe he won't
come." Micky waxed complacent at the discreet hope lingering in her
tone.

The dance was well under way. Dick shuffled past, the big blonde in his
arms. He seemed enjoying himself. Micky grew impatient.

"Went out for another drink, I guess," remarked Miss Maisie
disgustedly, in another moment. "Come on, I sha'n't wait for him," and
she rose.

"Went a block for a beer with a Manhattan right inside," murmured Micky,
as they prepared to start. "Oh, you g'wan!" she laughed, and they swung
into the revolving circle.

Micky's boast of terpsichorean ability made good, (he had picked up the
art long before, as readily as he did everything else,) he was rewarded
with two more regulars and an extra before the affair ended. One of the
regulars was originally scheduled with the recreant Ryan, who appeared
for it in due course and retired congealed, with a black look at the
grinning O'Byrn. The other regular had originally been Miss Muldoon's
cousin's. She transferred it airily, but the cousin bore it with the
equanimity of a mere relative.

"I suppose you've got company home?" inquired Micky, with a certain
mournful hesitation, as they were finishing the last dance.

"Not yet," she answered demurely. "That is," with a flash of blue eyes,
"Mr. Ryan brought me but he sha'n't take me back. He's too thirsty. That
first dance you got was the second he'd missed with me."

"Forget him!" breathed Micky ecstatically. "I'm in luck." He invariably
took things for granted.

"But," she recollected, chilling somewhat, "I haven't accepted your
escort yet, Mr.--er--O'Byrn. I never met you till tonight."

"O, happy night!" he retorted, with the impudence that time would never
wither nor custom stale. "Aren't you glad you came?"

She laughed again, a girlish, joyous laugh that warmed the heart in the
hearing. "I'm it," she averred. "You are certainly the limit. But you
aren't in such luck as you think. It's a long way home."

"Never too long with you for a pacemaker," he assured her. "And luck--I
know the varieties. I've had all kinds." So, as the last waltz ceased
and the dancers prepared for departure, he hastened to the door, where
Dick was waiting for him, and dismissed that gentleman. Glenwood raised
his eyebrows comprehensively and departed alone.

The way was short to Mulberry Avenue, all too short for Micky, and as
for the lady--well, it would have seemed longer had the discredited Ryan
been in her company. There was the first faint hint of dawn in the
shrouded sky as Micky left the girl at her door and turned away, with
her gracious permission to call on his next night off. So Micky turned
to retrace the way now suddenly grown long; agitated stirrings in his
warm Irish heart that he could not have explained, those first faint
harbingers that come to us all, poor children of fleeting youth, and are
stilled ere we can understand.

Ah, youth! with its thrilled pulses and fragrant, unspoiled heart, its
mysteries divine--and the arid waste beyond, when dreams are done! It's
a long way home, indeed!




CHAPTER VI

THE WEB


A wholesale liquor establishment supplied a portion of Shaughnessy's
income. Time was, some years before, when it had demanded all of its
proprietor's time and undeniable talents, but now a gradually increasing
if reprehensible sphere of usefulness had made it a side-issue. However,
it continued to yield its owner a satisfying revenue and the wicked
prospered, after the fashion of this good old world.

The fourth ward, contiguous to Goldberg's, while free and easy enough,
in very truth, was respectable in comparison with the notorious fifth.
It was in this fourth ward, in the quietest district, that Shaughnessy's
wholesale house was located. It was in the dingy office of this old
brick building that the dark schemes were matured which, with the aid of
the worst elements in the city, dominated its affairs. Here Shaughnessy
reigned supreme, an unobtrusive king.

Shaughnessy sat at his desk one warm evening holding converse with his
two faithful satellites, Abe Goldberg and Dick Peterson. The office was
carefully closed to chance encroachment and the men talked in subdued
tones. As usual, the cabal's plans had been carefully discussed, then
the conversation shifted to a minor matter. It was the offense of which
Nick Slade had been guilty, in aiding the journalistic enemy by telling
O'Byrn of the row at Goldberg's saloon. Slade, by the way, was a heeler
under the direct charge of Peterson, and he had done work which had
commended him to that astute though apparently unsophisticated worthy.

"He ought to get the run," Goldberg growled. "What use is a man to us
that don't stand by the gang? Of course, that row wasn't exactly mixed
up with our doings, but a lot of our men was mixed up in it, and it
ain't the kind of advertising that's goin' to do us any good. Then this
Slade goes and tips off the whole business. He ought to be kicked out."

"Hold on, Goldberg," said Peterson. "I know all about the deal. I've
talked with Slade. Now you know Slade is shady with the police. Of
course, there are others, but they've got it in for Slade for more than
one reason and he ain't important enough to be immune. As luck would
have it, they were going to nab him the other night for a piece of
light-fingered work that he didn't happen to be concerned with. This
Courier chap, who seems to be a corker anyway, had picked up
acquaintance with Slade in some way, and, more than that, he happened to
know the right party the police were after and he got Slade off. Well,
what could Slade do when the fellow asked for the tip at your place? Of
course, he could have turned him down flat, but that wouldn't have been
natural, would it?"

Before Goldberg could reply, Shaughnessy's cold voice cut in. "Is he
worth while?" he asked of Peterson.

"He's O. K.," replied that worthy, with conviction. "One of the best--"

Shaughnessy turned to Goldberg. "Then forget it," he said dryly. "Keep
on using him, if he's any good. He's hardly worth firing. Exercise your
firing privilege for the officers' quarters; you need the men in the
ranks."

With which characteristic bit of philosophy, Shaughnessy stretched his
arms and yawned. The others rose, the conference having been closed, and
lighting fresh cigars, left the office. Shaughnessy was left alone. He
leaned back lazily in his office chair, his thin hands clasped behind
his head, his expressionless eyes watching the smoke that curled upward
leisurely from the tip of his cigar. His white face would hold no more
of immobility when he should lie dead. Under the gaslight he reclined at
ease, staring upward. In the eyes, the queer, black, heavy-lidded eyes,
there was a momentary lack alike of definite scrutiny or the soft,
impalpable veil that is drawn by transitory dreams of better things.
Rather were they like a sluggish serpent's; lustreless, foreboding,
unwinking and infinitely, sleeplessly sinister. They stared with a
reptilian fixedness, seeing nothing. Thus for a space, and then they
lighted with a gleam of strange malevolence, as the thin, grim lips of
Shaughnessy relaxed under the small black moustache in a smile that was
not good to see. Some secret reflection had evidently pleased the boss.

He suddenly leaned forward in his chair and turned to his desk,
extracting some papers which he surveyed with quiet satisfaction and
replaced. As he did so he started violently, then sank back in his
chair, his face drawn lugubriously with sudden pain; the natural pallor
giving place to a ghastly gray. His hands were clasped at his left side
and he gasped for breath. In a moment the paroxysm passed, and
Shaughnessy sat limp in his chair with sprawling legs and nerveless
hands, his head bent forward. Presently he sought his handkerchief with
shaking fingers and wiped the cold beads of perspiration from his
forehead. Then he rose slowly, and with trembling knees tottered to a
small cupboard and produced a flask and glass. Pouring out a stiff
draught of brandy, he swallowed it at a gulp, replaced the bottle and
glass and walked back to his chair. His eyes, again inscrutable, sought
the clock; his face, once more an impassive mask, was turned toward the
door. Shaughnessy was game.

A moment more and there was the sound of footsteps outside, then a
cautious tapping summoned at the door. Shaughnessy stepped forward and
released the spring lock which had confined it, standing aside to allow
his visitor's entrance, then snapped the door shut. Placing a chair
conveniently, he motioned his caller into it and resumed his own seat.

The caller sat regarding Shaughnessy with an odd nervousness. He was
plainly ill at ease. An old man he was, with gray hair and beard and
faded blue eyes, whose wonted amiability was just now shadowed by an
unmistakable expression of helplessness. A pair of gold-bowed eyeglasses
dangled at the end of a silken cord looped about his collar; the cut and
texture of his black garb indicated prosperity as well as solid
respectability. The impression was heightened by the old-fashioned high
collar and the white lawn tie. The thin white hands, on which the blue
veins showed prominently, nervously fumbled a black slouch hat.
Shaughnessy's eyes rested an instant upon the headgear.

"You ordinarily wear a silk hat, don't you, Judge?" he asked. "What's
the matter? Isn't this part of the town good enough for it, or does this
one help to shade your eyes from the light?" The visitor winced and the
boss smiled cruelly.

"One has to be careful,--" began the old man, and hesitated.

"Sure," acquiesced the leader, grimly. "A good many eyes would open to
see you in here with me. And I suppose you left your carriage a few
blocks back and walked? Your discretion does you credit. Well, you can
afford to come here better than you can afford to have me go to your
house, which I should have done if you had not wisely concluded to
accept my polite invitation to call. Some of your holy neighbors would
have been surprised, wouldn't they? Well, Judge, saving your venerable
presence, they generally have to come to me,--because I know things."

The spare form fidgeted, the faded blue eyes sought waveringly
Shaughnessy's black ones that were now quickened with a baleful fire.
"What do you want?" asked the visitor. "I am an old man,--I was through
long since--"

Shaughnessy bent forward. "No, you are not through," he said with a
softness that was metallic. "You are not through while you live and I
need you. Understand that! You served me on the bench; you shall serve
me now! Else--" He paused significantly while his companion's face
whitened. "Now listen. I am coming to be known; you are not. You are
respectable!" with an ugly sneer. "Now this is the programme, and it'll
feaze the yelping fools that are after me, just as it'll feaze you, my
dear friend, in a minute. The Democratic convention will be held just
before the 'Cits' hold theirs. The 'Cits' are inconveniently in earnest
this year and they're talking of putting up a man who'll cause us
trouble. Now there'll be a dummy candidate, a machine man, in the
Democratic convention, who'll be mine. Well, he'll be knocked out;
decency will give the old Democracy heart disease by swooping down on
her out of a clear sky; there'll be an honored name proposed that'll
sweep the convention off its feet, and that honored name, my dear Judge,
will be your own!"

The old man sprang to his feet, shivering as with the ague. He shook
impotent, furious fists, his pale eyes glaring. "Damn you!" he cried, "I
won't do it! Never! never! do you understand,--you--devil?"

Shaughnessy's hand closed on an object on his desk. He rose, shaking a
bundle of documents in his caller's face. "I understand," he muttered
menacingly, "and--you understand. You understand that you will serve as
the next mayor of this city--or you will serve time!"

The old man fell into his chair and buried his face in his hands, while
Shaughnessy smiled, his eyes alight with malice.




CHAPTER VII

LONELINESS


A big figure arose from a desk at the opposite side of the room.
Glenwood handed in a bulky wad of matter to be read and strolled over to
O'Byrn's desk. Throwing himself into a convenient chair, he produced his
cigar case. They lighted weeds and sat for a time in congenial if smoky
silence.

It was Micky's night off, but it was early. He was loitering about the
office for a few moments before leaving to fulfill an engagement that
had become usual. He now sat regarding Glenwood appreciatively. What a
man he was, to be sure! He sat at indolent ease, his feet on Micky's
desk, hands clasped behind his handsome blonde head, staring dreamily
far beyond the littered room. He wore no coat. Micky marked the deep
chest, the swell of the splendid muscles outlined beneath the folds of
the soft outing shirt, the well set neck. There was the suggestion, none
the less strong in repose, of mingled virility and grace. Strength of
great scope was here, strength that had once against odds rescued him,
O'Byrn, from an unpleasant predicament.

How puny was he, O'Byrn, by contrast, physically--and morally. Ah, but
that last thought stung! For here was a man who was thoroughly master of
himself, without being a milksop. His was no pedestal. He was one of
the boys, yet liberty did not spell license with him. There was for him
no painful crawl up a slippery toboggan of renewed intentions, following
a wild, shooting descent that had left him gasping and breathless at the
bottom. Glenwood's was the absolutely perfect mechanism of the normal.
Tough fibred, richly endowed in mental, moral and physical equipment
from long generations of right livers, how different was his lot from
O'Byrn's, cursed at the outset with a vicious appetite which had been
fostered from the beginning by the man who had bequeathed it; hampered,
too, with an indifferent physique that rendered the more hopeless the
boy's struggles with his mastering vice. True, after all, mused Micky
bitterly, that men are created equal in only limited senses.

He rose abruptly and walked to the window, staring out into the soft
night, for the ebon had settled down. Close by loomed the shadowy bulk
of the city hall, dwarfing the stark ambitious blocks that were its
lesser neighbors. Under the luminous moon glittered an adjacent church
spire; stars peppered the curtained sky. Far down, amid the glare of
myriad electric lights, there arose the faint roll of carriage wheels,
drowned the next moment in the rumble of passing street cars. Within
there sounded the sharp click of typewriters; in a sudden lull there was
audible the ticking of a telegraph key at the end of the room. A man
entered hastily, seated himself before a desk and began to write like
mad. Another young fellow, after a few brief words from the city editor,
seized his hat and hurried on a mission. The room was unwontedly busy
for so early an hour. Copy boys scurried, telephone bells rang, editors
summoned and reporters scuttled. Always there poured into the great
room, in strange and turbulent contrast to the wideflung peace of dead
white moon and watching stars in the black night sky outside, the
unresting flood, the formidable torrent of life and death and the joys
and ills that lurk between, called News.

Micky stared out of the window, oblivious to the whirl within. It would
have distracted a novice. To the veteran it meant only the inevitable
environment of effort. Many such find it difficult to write in the midst
of quietude. Of such was Micky, and so it was that, with no scribbling
to do, he could lose himself in vague, sad contemplation of moon and
stars and black night sky, with the roar of the flood no louder in his
unheeding ears than the ripple of a little river through June meadows.
It was with a start that he was recalled to earth with a violent slap
upon his thin shoulder. He turned, eyes still wool-gathering, to
confront Dick.

"What's the dream?" demanded that worthy, smiling down at him. "Isn't
this something new?"

"Why," answered Micky, a little confusedly, "I was thinking. Yes," with
a laugh but with sober eyes, "it's something new, Dick, I guess. It
would be better if it were oftener," a little wistfully.

Dick, staring out of the window, readily fell in with his mood.
"Thinking? Yes, it's a good thing,--sometimes. But you don't have much
time for it in this business."

"No," rejoined Micky thoughtfully. "You need to put in all your hustling
on the job, and it don't give you time for a heavy load under your
roof." He glanced at the clock. "Well, I must be going. Didn't know it
was so late. Gimme a cigar."

Dick produced one and Micky proceeded to light up. Dick surveyed the
other's unwonted immaculateness with an air of understanding. "Give her
my regards," he said.

"Her?" repeated Micky, in simulated amazement. "Nit; you're off. I'm
going to cut coupons tonight; they're accumulating on me." He vanished
with a grin and Dick sauntered back to his desk.

Micky descended in the elevator and stepped forth into the cool night
air. He stood for a moment in indecision, debating whether he should
take a car. Too fine a night to ride, he decided, and started down the
street at a brisk pace. Presently leaving the crowded thoroughfare for a
quieter side street, he proceeded southward. After a half an hour's walk
he turned a final corner and was on Mulberry Avenue. Down the street he
went to a modest little dwelling, with a light shining from the shaded
parlor windows. He ascended the steps and rang the bell. The door
opened. Micky stepped inside and they entered the tiny parlor.

The door communicating with the sitting room opened ever so cautiously.
A freckled, inquisitive face appeared unobtrusively in the gap, but
Maisie saw it. "Terence!" she exclaimed, and the face disappeared.
Maisie slammed the door shut with asperity, then, taking a seat near it,
turned her pretty face toward her caller. "You're late, Micky," said she
reprovingly. Micky was progressive. It had not taken him long to induce
her to address him by his Christian name.

"Yes," admitted Micky. "I didn't know it was so late. I forgot to wind
my watch, anyway. What time is it?" He moved toward her, his timepiece
in his hand. It was an old silver hunting-case affair. In fumbling with
the spring to open it, the rear cover opened, disclosing the faded
picture of a woman. Micky held it out to the girl.

"My mother," he said simply. "She died when I was little." Maisie looked
at the sweet face and patient eyes a moment, then her look sought
Micky's face. It held an unwonted gravity, the blue eyes were a little
misty. He leaned over her, his gaze bent upon the dial of her smart
little watch.

"Eight forty-five, eh?" he exclaimed. "Whew! it is late." He set his
watch and then began winding it. "That case is loose, I must get it
fixed," he pursued. He glanced again at the girl's timepiece, then
whimsically shook his own. "Not much like yours, is it?" he said, with a
sorry smile. "Poor little turnip! But it'll be buried with me, Maisie,
I'll never have another. I don't want another. You see,--she gave it to
me."

He sank into a chair, his face in the shadow. "I can see it now," he
pursued in a low voice, "just as if it was yesterday. How tickled I was!
and so was she, to see me so. There were just us two, and now--I'm
alone. Oh! it's years ago, but it's one of those things that'll hurt
every time I remember it--now she's gone--will hurt till I go, too! Of
course it didn't cost her much, poor little woman. It couldn't; she
didn't have it. How she managed to save the few poor dollars for it, God
knows; I can't figure it. But she did, and one day when I got in from
selling my papers, she met me and gave it to me. And I was only a kid,
Maisie, and I up and bellered like a calf, with my arms around
her,--and she cried, too; and it wasn't very long,--" his voice broke
for a moment,--"it wasn't very long after that,--it was dark and cold I
remember, and snowflakes in the air,--and I was crying and trying to
pull away from them while they were leading me away--from--her grave."

It was very still. The girl averted her eyes; they were full of tears.
O'Byrn sat in the shadow, his head bent. In a moment he resumed.

"I've knocked around from pillar to post since then, Maisie, from one
end of the land to the other. I've lived high and low, from glad rags to
just plain rags. I could always get a job--and I could always lose it.
Oh, yes, I might as well be frank," with a bitter laugh. "It's whisky--a
heritage. Not all the time--fits that I can't help--every now and
then--like bad dreams, only worse--they're real! It's at those times
that the old feeling grips me, too,--to keep movin'. Why, I usually wake
up where everything's strange--and I have to ask 'em where I am. I've
been on the road to something worth while so often--and always kicked it
over. And it cropped out in me so young! You'd be surprised--"

"Oh, don't!" she cried. He stared at her mutely. "What makes you say
such horrible things about yourself?" she pursued passionately, a quiver
in her voice. "Do you want me to believe--"

"The truth," he interrupted, gently. "Only the truth. Of course, I
haven't known you long, but it seems like all my life. I'd feel like a
yellow dog, somehow, if I shouldn't tell you. But then, we won't say
anything more about it. I'm not to blame, exactly; it was a present.
We'll go back, there isn't much to tell. It's always been the newspaper
business with me. Odds and ends at first, then they found I could write,
and I've been at it ever since. I wasn't much on education, but I've
picked up quite a lot, and I've seen the country. Oh, I've had my
dreams. Maybe I could do something sometime--if--" He broke off
abruptly.

She sprang up, coming quickly to him. Her little hand sought his arm.
"Micky," she breathed softly, with shining eyes, "do it! You can; it's
in you; if you will only leave off--and you can--you must! Think of her,
Micky,--she cried over you--perhaps she's crying yet! Make her smile,
instead! Oh, what makes me talk to you like this, only knowing you a few
weeks? What right--"

He caught her hand as she moved slowly away and drew her back. "What
right?" he echoed warmly. "The best in the world! It does me good!
You're a true friend, you are, and you can see what a mess I've made of
my life and how I could do better if I would--or could, for you don't
know what I have to fight against, Maisie." He drew a chair for her
close to his own. "But then, I'm young yet," he pursued, with a rather
sorry smile. "Time yet, perhaps, for dreams. Dreams!" he repeated, with
a queer, half-shamed look, "how the fellows at the office would laugh to
hear me say that! They'd say I'd gone bug-house."

"Dreams?" she repeated softly, a divine smile in her wistful eyes, "why,
Micky, we're all dreamers. Between here and the store--the store and
here, day after day, don't you suppose they help me; the dreams? Doesn't
it help your work--your old humdrum work, whatever it is, without any
beginning or ending--doesn't it help to mix a little dreaming with it?
Of course, it doesn't really help me--I'm a poor, silly little
thing--but it can help you, Micky--it can help you!"

"'Poor, silly little thing!'" he repeated after her, his eyes
moistening. "Don't, Maisie, it makes me feel like a fool! Why, I'm not
fit to speak to you, girl! The life I've lived--Oh, the road is where I
belong, after all! And the dreams--why, they're just dreams, that's all.
I'd only have to try to realize them to prove it--and I'm afraid. Yes,
when I haven't been drunk, I've been afraid."

She winced at the word, while he, unheeding, stared gloomily at the
carpet. "What--" she began hesitantly, and stopped. He looked up,
comprehending.

"To write," he said simply. "To write instead of scribble. Oh, I can see
things--and I can feel 'em. Seems to me that I could do it--but it looms
up so that I don't dare try. And sometimes I get into the proper mood,
and get squared away--and then--" He broke off with a despairing
gesture.

"I don't know much about those things, of course," she said, "but I like
to read what I can, and it seems to me that feelin' like you do about
it--I mean it's lookin' so big to you--that you ought to be all the more
able to do it."

He stared at her. This subtle viewpoint had never struck him before. "By
George, it takes a girl, after all, to hit the nail square," he told
her. "I never thought of it. But say,--why--it's encouraging, it is!"

"Sure it is." She smiled at him. "You want to get busy."

He stared wide-eyed in sudden reverie, his eyes wistful, his freckled
face softened with something that contrasted oddly enough with his
ordinary reckless, devil-may-care attitude toward the world. His better
side was uppermost; somehow this girl could always summon it. But now,
as she watched him mutely, a swift shadow darkened his face.

"Yes," he told her, "perhaps I ought to be encouraged by the way I feel
about it, and get busy. I could if I was built right, but I'm not,
Maisie. I can't get settled and I haven't any balance wheel. It's 'off
again, on again, gone again' with me. I can't get fairly into a place
before the old itch to keep moving bothers me, and with the other, the
combination keeps me shifting. Why, I seem to be a whole bunch of
fellows mixed up in a free-for-all, sometimes," he added, with a forlorn
smile. "Other fellows can get down to a steady grind and climb; I can't.
God knows I want to, sometimes." He gave her a queer look; she did not
seem to notice.

"And then," he pursued, "I've never had a home, you know, not since the
poor little mother died. Of course, that wasn't much of a home to look
at, but she was there, and I've never had one since. Oh, it's been so
lonesome sometimes; you don't know. It's the man who goes jumping over
the world alone, here today and there tomorrow, that knows what
lonesomeness is. It's that, I tell you, that's raised the devil with me.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if it had been with me like
it is with others I'd have been different. I've known fellows inclined
the same way as I am, but they settled down and got homes, and now--why,
they've got me beat out of sight."

"Well," she queried eagerly, "why don't you--" and stopped suddenly, her
cheeks crimsoning, for Micky's disturbed face had with her unthinking
words grown suddenly tense with purpose. A flash of realization had
revealed to him his great need, the influence to anchor him and hold him
fast against the restless, turbid tide that sought to sweep him away.
Why, he needed--her! On the word of this slip of a girl hung his
opportunity for a new and better world; a world for two, two who might
work, one for the other,--and climb; a world in which dreams might come
true. In a moment it would have all been poured forth in broken,
incoherent phrase, the sum of Micky's illumining dream and his desire.
But the girl, with the unerring instinct of her sex, divined the
situation and in quick alarm frustrated O'Byrn's intention, though very
gently.

"Well," she said, smiling at him brightly, "we've had a good talk,
haven't we? I'm glad you told me about--everything. I know you'll win,
it's in you. And now--I know you won't mind--but it's gettin' late, and
I have to get up early, you know."

So Micky, effectually forestalled, went away with settled gloom
shadowing his freckled face. For a long time after he had gone the girl
sat by the window, the light turned low; young eyes staring sombrely out
upon the darkened street; young, fearful soul oppressed by the soft
encroaching shadow of the divinest of life's mysteries.




CHAPTER VIII

AN EVENING CALL


It was early in the evening and some of the Courier's reportorial staff
were in the office, waiting for late assignments. As often happened when
a few moments of leisure allowed, there was an animated group in the
corner, with O'Byrn occupying the center. The political situation was
beginning to grow warmer, so it naturally followed that Shaughnessy was
the subject of conversation.

Micky had just been indulging in what Dick Glenwood called one of his
"bursts of indiscriminate philosophy." "This game of politics," he
declared, "is getting to be a science in solitaire. It's up to you to
play it alone and use the rest of 'em for pawns, if you want to win out.
Now, look at Shaughnessy. He fools his bowers, right and left. He
annexes the whole graft. His gang of four-flushers think it's a divvy,
but the boss has the wad and they're gettin' one-half of one per cent
handouts. What a graft it is! I read in a paper the other day of a sign
in front of an eat-joint in a Western boom town. It read:

    MEALS, 25 CENTS.
    SQUARE MEALS, 50 CENTS.
    GORGE, 75 CENTS.

But Shaughnessy's doin' a lot better than that. He's gettin' gorged
without payin' for it."

"Where did he hail from?" asked Peters. "Isn't indigenous, is he?"

"Please remember, Pete," remarked Dick, in a pained tone, "that kind of
vocabulary is barred outside your copy writing, and even then must never
be used unless you've lost your book of synonyms. You positively must
never throw verbal lugs into us like that. As for Shaughnessy, he isn't
whatever you call it. He came here from the devil knows where a dozen
years ago and annexed Goldberg, the gentleman that's so popular with
Micky. Mr. Shaughnessy had enjoyed a good ward training somewhere and
was quick to catch onto the possibilities of that section of the town.
His connection with politics has always been of the quietest nature, but
he's popularly supposed to rule the roost. They say, too, he's long on
aspirations and hopes humbly for the ultimate possession of the state."

"Newspapers are dead against him," observed Mead; "at least, all that
count."

"Two of 'em weren't till lately," responded Dick dryly. "He had 'em
bought, body and soul, till they had a row with him on a question of
patronage and did a chameleon change for political virtue. He's got his
own Messenger--good name for that organ. He's the owner of that sheet,
though he doesn't figure in the firm name. There's the Courier, of
course, and our rival over the way must have fought him from the first,
but the good in this city mostly died young, I guess."

"'Tisn't that," put in Micky, from the midst of a placid cloud of cigar
smoke. "There's enough of the decent element in this place to shelve
Shaughnessy, if you could rouse it. But it's doing a Rip Van Winkle
that it's going to take a big gob of dynamite to jar it out of. Some day
that will happen, and the decent element will be on top for a year or
two. Then it will fall asleep at the switch and do another century,
while the gang rings in again. Oh, it'll happen, for a little while, the
reform stunt. It always does. But it won't last long, and then it's the
gang that we have always with us. Boss rule? It's explained easily
enough. Your decent element is troubled with trances; the gang's got
insomnia."

"So you think Shaughnessy'll get what's coming to him some day?" mused
Dick. "Where's your dynamite?"

"Right here!" asserted O'Byrn, bracing in his chair and vigorously
banging his desk. "Here or in some other good newspaper office in this
town. Do you know the reason of Shaughnessy's success here? It's because
he never shows his hand. He's a gilt-edged daisy, that fellow. If he had
been doing his business in the open they'd have had him behind bars long
ago. But he's doing his directing from the wings. You and I know that if
we pick out a reputable man, hap-hazard, from the decent element we've
been speaking of, and begin talking to him of Shaughnessy, he'll laugh
and chase up the street, saying that the papers have Shaughnessy on the
brain. It's a fact that a lot of people don't look on that Irish
scoundrel as anything more than a cheap ward boss, with little influence
in the city at large. There's reason enough for the view. The newspapers
have poured out columns of abuse of Shaughnessy in the past few years,
but sum it all up and it's composed wholly of vague generalities.
They've never brought anything home to him that was worth the bringing,
never a thing that would jug him for a minute. The average voter here
holds him too cheap. That fact, coupled with the natural majority he
controls, always tips his scales right. Tell your voter-at-large that it
was Shaughnessy who engineered the queer, rotten deals that have figured
in this town--yes, and the legislature,--deals whose parentage they
can't trace, and the voter would give you the laugh."

"He'd have a right to," commented Kirk. "Go slow, Micky. Shaughnessy's a
good organizer, and maybe he's put some cheap ones through, but he's
limited."

"So is the flyer," retorted Micky, "but it'll jerk you along some. Don't
you foolish yourself about that mick, Andy. He's a deep one. He's got a
side to him that's working overtime. It's an underground system, and any
lucky guy in this business that tumbles into it will see things that'll
fill his paper next day with facts, not surmises, facts that'll set 'em
all gapin'. That's the dynamite that'll explode some day and it'll blow
Shaughnessy into stripes and behind the bars. Of course, there'll be a
new boss after a while, but it won't be Shaughnessy."

The city editor summoned them just then and the conference was abruptly
terminated. Soon afterward Micky and Dick descended together in the
elevator and walked up the avenue toward the point where their paths
separated. They were still talking of Shaughnessy.

"He's an odd genius," Dick was saying, "and I think you have sized him
up about right. I've studied him more or less, and I gave him credit
from the first of having a lot more under his hat than a good many think
he has. He strikes me as a sort of a cross between a hyena and a
bulldog. From his start here he's never let go--and there's the stench
about him of a political charnel house. After he got his start,
everything that would be likely to hamper him went by the board. You
know he runs a wholesale liquor house. It used to be a little saloon
when he first struck here, and they tell me he used to drink up most of
his stock himself. Very secretive fellow, nobody knew anything about
him. Then, all of a sudden, he got started on his career. Alderman at
first, I believe, but wasn't in public life long, didn't need to be.
He's a wonder. They tell me that from the time of his first canvass for
office he cut out the booze and doesn't touch it at all. Wiped out his
own handicap. Well, you see what he's done; he's well fixed. They all
know it's there, but they can't prove where he got it. And say, speak of
the devil--there he is now."

Shaughnessy passed them, with a slight nod of recognition to Glenwood.
His face gleamed ghastly under the flood of electric light, there were
blue shadows under his black eyes. While he walked briskly enough, his
face, in addition to its usual lack of animation, held utter weariness.

"Looks bad, doesn't he?" remarked Dick, as they separated on the corner.
"Something must be the matter with him. Looks to be all in."

"No," grinned Micky; "it just makes him thin every campaign figuring to
keep his job." Then he added unsmilingly, "He makes me feel as tired as
he looks, Dick. I don't know what it is, but there's something about
that geezer that makes a fellow feel like crape on the knob."

A little later, seated in the library of his handsome residence on
Morley Street, Colonel John Westlake heard his door bell ringing and was
manifestly apprehensive. The closed oak desk in the corner, the sight of
the Colonel stretched contentedly in his easy chair, a fragrant cigar
between his lips and a favorite book in his hand, indicated a quiet,
enjoyable evening which the gentleman regretted to have disturbed. So it
was with suppressed irritation that the Colonel looked up, warned by the
rustle of feminine skirts, to find the maid standing in the doorway.

"A gentleman to see you, sir," said she. "He didn't give any card. He
said to tell you that Mr. Shaughnessy wanted to see you a minute."

The Colonel's smile was grimly questioning, while he reflectively
stroked his sandy beard, which was faintly streaked with gray. Then he
cogitated for a moment, while he abandoned his whiskers for a small,
round bald spot on his crown, which he thoughtfully rubbed. "Well," said
he finally, "show him in, Mary."

Left to himself the Colonel took a couple of long thoughtful puffs at
his cigar, while he chuckled audibly. The look of irritation had
vanished; it had given place to one of piqued and peppery curiosity.

The look with which Colonel Westlake greeted his visitor, as the boss
entered the library, was one of eager aggressiveness. The Colonel was a
fighter and a gallant one; he itched for any fray that would allow him
to glory in honorable combat, for it was always honorable on his side.
His eyes were blue and stormy, but they always looked straight at you
and the fire of awakened antagonism in them had often caused the
dishonorable to quail. But at this particular moment, the black,
sinister eyes of Shaughnessy, the unbidden, sullenly impassive as an
Indian's, stared straight into the sharp, challenging ones of the
Colonel without a sign of wavering, and the even, expressionless voice
of Shaughnessy anticipated any words of dubious welcome the Colonel
might have spoken.

"You need not ask regarding the occasion for the honor of my visit,
Colonel," he said, as his host rose, "for I know well enough that you do
not regard it as an honor." He smiled sardonically.

The Colonel smiled also, quite broadly. This was not so bad. "You are
quite right, Mr. Shaughnessy," he acknowledged. "I know you well enough
to know that you're here on business. Well, take a chair and state it."
There was an underlying something in the Colonel's tone, a peremptory
note that spelled, "Be brief as possible and get out."

It failed to disturb the nonchalance of Shaughnessy. He leisurely seated
himself in a chair opposite that of the Colonel, the large oak table
being between them. Then, with half-closed eyes dreamily searching the
ceiling, he proceeded to apparently forget his host's presence in a
sudden fit of abstraction which was, under the circumstances, superb.

The Colonel waited a moment, his choler rising perceptibly. "Well, sir?"
he finally queried, and there was menace in his tone.

Shaughnessy lazily lowered his eyes till they rested level with those of
his host. The Colonel thought instinctively, as he gazed into them, of
the fixed beady stare of a serpent.

"You are at present the principal owner of the Courier, having purchased
the controlling interest early the past summer, aren't you, Colonel?"
asked Shaughnessy.

"Most certainly. What of it?"

"You are not at present in favor of taking a contract for any or all of
the official city printing?" pursued Shaughnessy.

"What do you mean?" demanded the Colonel, his gorge rising. "You have
had my answer--"

"Wait a moment," interrupted the boss, raising a deprecating thin hand.
"Let's get at this logically. Keep cool, Colonel. And now, another
thing. Do I understand that you intend to pound what you are pleased to
call my machine during the present campaign?"

The Colonel's eyes lighted up with the battle fire, but his voice was
mellow with an ominous softness as he answered, "Pound you? As hard as
God will let me, my dear sir. Yes, you bet your life!"

"Well, now, let's see about that," pursued Shaughnessy, his voice as
soft and menacing as the other's. "I'm told by a friend of mine,
Colonel, that you're a heavy holder of this Consolidated Gas that is
arousing so much speculation just now." His voice had grown insolent.
His face remained impassive, but his eyes, beginning to burn with evil
exultation, searched the Colonel's own.

For his part, the host leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and
stared straight across at Shaughnessy. "Well," he inquired, still
softly, "what if I am, eh?"

"Well, if you are," retorted Shaughnessy, also leaning forward, his lips
set cruelly under his small black moustache, "if you are--not to please
me, for I'm getting out of the small share I've had in local politics,
but for your own good--don't you think you'd better reconsider that city
printing matter?"

"And if I should," suggested the Colonel, his tone even quieter, "why,
you'd expect the Courier--of course--"

Shaughnessy leaned back with a cynical, assured smile. His tone was now
arrogant. "The Courier," he sneered, "why, of course, the Courier will
get in line."

Colonel Westlake looked away for a moment. "Yes, the Courier will get in
line," he murmured. He slowly removed his still lighted cigar from his
mouth and placed it carefully on the corner of the table. Shaughnessy
silently exulted with evil eyes, which then again indifferently,
dreamily, sought the ceiling.

"The Courier will get in line!" There was a difference in the tone, a
ringing note which in a flash recalled Shaughnessy's wandering gaze. He
found the Colonel standing opposite him, his hands grasping the edge of
the table, his face crimson with rage. "You hound!" growled the Colonel,
"you crawling snake! I've drawn you out; I only wish it was far enough
for me to get my heel on you. But I'll do it yet. The Courier will get
in line, you leper, don't you doubt it, but it will be to crush you and
your dirty brood, for the forces of decency are going to stamp you out
this November as sure as there's a God in heaven! We've got to dig to do
it, thanks to your devilish ingenuity, but it'll be done. The Citizens'
Fusion ticket, with an honest man at the head, is going through, and
your ward heeler list will be wiped out at the polls, mark me. We're
going to clean this cesspool, but we'll drown you in it first! And now
let me tell you just how much of a cursed fool you made of yourself just
now in trying to intimidate me. Your solicitous friend didn't pry long
enough, it seems. I was the holder of a big block of Consolidated Gas
for just three days, solely through the blunder of an agent. It's an
infamous thing, which nobody should know better than yourself, and if
your sneaking lieutenant had been worth his salt, he'd have found that
I haven't had a dollar in that highway robbery combine for four months;
that I was not personally responsible for being in it in the first
place, and that I was at pains to get out of it at the expense of a
personal loss the moment I learned of it. Moreover, I suspect that it
was a cunning plan made months ago to compromise me in the belief that
the love of revenue would keep me in it and allow interests of which you
well know, you scoundrel, to get control of me. It's worked with others,
but I'm not built that way. You've shown your hand for nothing, and if
your heeler had been possessed of a penny's worth of brains, he'd have
found out about things and saved you unnecessary trouble. Let me assure
you that the Courier will put in double time to smash you, Shaughnessy,
and now I will ask you to leave before you are put out."

The Colonel ceased, his hands trembling with rage, his blazing eyes
fixed on Shaughnessy, who had sat with averted face and without a word
during Westlake's fiery denunciation. Now he rose, ever so leisurely,
and turned slowly, facing the owner of the Courier. The white face was
unruffled by any trace of emotion, the black, sinister eyes stared
unwaveringly as a reptile's into the Colonel's fiery blue ones.
Shaughnessy fumbled in an upper pocket of his vest.

"Pardon, Colonel, have you a match?" he inquired. His voice had all the
serenity of a mild June day. The dazed Westlake mechanically produced
one. Shaughnessy lazily lighted a cigar and sauntered out.




CHAPTER IX

NOT ON THE PROGRAMME


In a few days occurred the Citizens' convention. A formidable array of
men was there; business and professional men, leaders in the city's
activities. It was an array which might well set the forces that
controlled the city government to worrying. Moreover, real enthusiasm
ruled the assemblage, and when Colonel Westlake, in a fiery nominating
speech, named Theodore Packard, one of the city's leading merchants, for
the mayoralty, thunderous demonstrations attested the temper of the
delegates.

Under the aggressive leadership of Colonel Westlake, the Fusionists had
taken time by the forelock and were first in the field with a strong
ticket. Warm hopes were entertained for it this year. Republicans, who
were greatly in the minority in the city, had taken the initiative in
starting the Fusion movement, which was strengthened by the open avowal
of some of the community's best known men, of Democratic allegiance,
that they were done with Shaughnessy and his methods. The movement
appeared to be gaining in force and bulk, like a snowball rolling down
hill, as the hour approached for the Democratic convention, toward which
all eyes were now turning.

There were indications that the entrenched, corrupt forces which
dominated the city were getting ready to invite their own destruction.
Was it not Shaughnessy who held the whip hand, and was not Shaughnessy
going crazy? Verily, it seemed so, and Shaughnessy, apparently drunk
with the power invested in his acquired authority, seemed likely to
exercise it to his own destruction. "The man is mad," remarked the
leaders of the Citizens' movement, one to the other, and rubbed their
hands. For Shaughnessy's candidate for the nomination, the man for whom,
as he calmly stated, the convention would, at his word, vote as one man,
was so notoriously inadequate, so miserably unfit, that the prospect of
his nomination set a resentful growl to circulating even among many of
the chosen delegates to the Democratic, otherwise the Shaughnessy,
convention. Dare Shaughnessy, so cocksure of his evil hold upon the
city, thrust such a candidate upon his party? Certain of Shaughnessy's
supporters grumbled, while the leaders of the Citizens' movement ground
their teeth and figuratively removed their coats.

True to his promise to Shaughnessy, on the occasion of that worthy's
call upon the owner of the Courier, Colonel Westlake's paper was firing
hot shot at the local boss. The effrontery and callous indifference to
all considerations, save his own sweet will, which Shaughnessy was
displaying in his choice of a candidate for the mayoralty, was dished up
daily, in attractive and toothsome guise, for the Courier's readers.
Westlake was certainly pounding Shaughnessy.

Meanwhile, strange whispers began circulating around the town, things
that savored of disloyalty to Shaughnessy. The unpopularity of the
candidate, whose fortunes he had espoused, was evidently breeding a
revolt among Shaughnessy's followers, of which he seemed strangely
oblivious. At all events, he was wholly indifferent to it. To add
seriousness to the situation, some of the boss' most trusted lieutenants
had been heard to utter words that sounded strangely from the lips of
faithful followers. These little seeds of dissension were sown
cautiously, but they fell where they seemed sure to bring forth the
fruit of contention. When ex-Alderman Goldberg, supposed to be retired
from politics, the lanky Dick Peterson, and the moon-faced Willie Shute,
men known to have been for years identified with Shaughnessy's
interests, began treacherously knifing him, the Fusionists pricked up
their ears and polished their eyeglasses. Might there not be a
disastrous factional Democratic fight?

The day before the convention occurred there was a tense, growing
expectancy through the city, a vague, intangible premonition of an
unguessed something on the morrow. What is was to be nobody knew, but
that there was a rift in the Shaughnessy lute,--or "loot," as one
Fusionist wag expressed it,--was now plainly apparent to all parties.
The existence of a plot against him was recognized, yet Shaughnessy made
no sign. His insolent programme was known; he proposed on the morrow to
thrust his preposterously unfit candidate for the mayoralty, together
with a few other objectionable nominees for divers offices, down the
throat of the convention. The programme of the opposition was not known,
but Goldberg, Peterson and Shute, with others whose fidelity to the
interests of the boss had hitherto been unquestioned, had been busy.
They had toward the end thrown off the pretense of secrecy and had
declared the boss' programme to be suicidal to the chances of Democratic
success. The array of malcontents grew larger and more formidable. It
was increased by the well circulated report that Goldberg had tried to
remonstrate with the boss and been freezingly turned down.

"The delegates won't stand for it, Shaughnessy," Goldberg had said.
"It's out of all reason."

The sneer in Shaughnessy's reply had inflamed an army of hitherto
faithful adherents against him. "The delegates will do as I dictate," he
had said. "This convention, let me tell you, will name my ticket, and
the kickers will be kicked out of the party."

Surely Shaughnessy was going mad. "I understand he said lately that he
didn't intend to figure in local politics much longer," said Colonel
Westlake one day to the Fusionist candidate for the mayoralty, Theodore
Packard, though without apprising him of the circumstances under which
the boss made that statement. "Well, do you know, I begin to believe
this dissension in their ranks has been brewing for some time. 'When
thieves fall out,' you know. I think he foresaw this scrap and is
risking the issue on a last desperate game, which he is growing rather
afraid of losing."

"Yes, but why is he espousing such a notorious ticket?" inquired
Packard. "It seems to me that he is beaten in advance, with a handicap
like that, and ought to have sense enough to know it."

"He probably had his programme laid out months ago," replied the
Colonel, "when he felt more secure than he does now. His opponents are
cunning. They played foxy Judas till the last moment, and then they
began to knife him. It's a slick game. He can't back down now, he's got
to stand by his guns. To knuckle would be a confession of weakness, and
that would be fatal. It looks to me as if he had a Waterloo coming in
his own camp. They've got something up their sleeve, depend upon it. I
wish I knew what it was."

Decidedly, the ordinary expressionless face of Shaughnessy, could he
have heard this conversation, would have been worth seeing.

The momentous autumn day, peaceful and delightful, was in strong
contrast to the turbulent scene within the hall, just before the
Democratic convention was called to order. The galleries were packed
with a nervous crowd, ripe for anticipated excitement. That something
big, not on the card, was about to happen, everyone was confident. And
once and again the eyes of the massed, fitful throng of spectators
searched out Shaughnessy, standing unobtrusively in a corner of the
great hall, always surrounded by excited, gesticulating delegates.
Shaughnessy was evidently saying little and his dead black eyes and
ghastly face expressed less. Yet the thousands of eyes turned hungrily
to him again and again, for the impression had gone forth that in some
way the mute, mysterious boss was to be offered as a sacrifice, to the
ends of treacherous associates, on the altar of his own unscrupulous
ambition.

Micky O'Byrn, of the Courier, detailed to do the descriptive touches of
the convention, viewed Shaughnessy curiously from his position at the
rear of the hall. "He looks like his own funeral," thought Micky, "but
then, that's chronic with him." His gaze wandered interestedly over the
mass of excited delegates swarming about the floor; his ears sought
instinctively to gather something definite from the swelling babel of
speech. Suddenly a low-toned voice sounded at his elbow in a
communication evidently intended for a single ear, and that not Micky's.
O'Byrn's rapid sidelong glance verified his supposition. It was
Goldberg, speaking softly to a delegate.

"Tom Grady, he'll do the trick," said Goldberg, and the two moved away.
Micky whistled softly. "Good move!" he remarked quietly to himself.
"He'll take 'em by storm." For it was evident that it was Tom Grady, the
city's youngest and most fiery Democratic orator, who was to nominate
the opponent to Shaughnessy's man. But who was this opponent? Micky
wrinkled his brows, and, like the crowd in the galleries and many of the
delegates themselves, fell to speculating, for the extraordinary thing
about the situation was that while everybody was sure an opponent would
be produced, nobody knew who he would be.

But now the convention was rapped to order, and delegates and audience
alike fell into uneasy silence. The roll was called, the credentials
were handed in, and in due time the temporary chairman retired in favor
of the permanent incumbent. His selection had been railroaded through
before it dawned upon the gathering that he was one of Shaughnessy's
strongest adherents. So the boss had scored one. Dave Mulhill could be
relied upon to look after him.

With the chair's call for nominations the excitement increased. It had
rather been expected that, at this critical point of his political
fortunes, Shaughnessy would decide to speak for himself, though he had
never done so. He did not, however, and his man, Dennis Burns, was
placed in nomination by Charles Heferman, a young lawyer who had of late
dulled a formerly bright reputation by known dealings with the gang that
ruled the city. Heferman's effort was able, though no enthusiasm was
evident. No one could have grown enthusiastic over Shaughnessy's
candidate.

Heferman finished and sat down, amid a ripple of perfunctory applause
that boded ill for the boss' prospects. At that moment Micky O'Byrn
chanced to be looking across the hall straight at Shaughnessy. The
sinister face was unmoved, but the black eyes, momentarily alight with
unwonted fire, were fixed intently at a point about midway of the hall.
In that instant Micky's keen vision beheld something that acted upon his
intelligence like a galvanic battery, swiftly launching his wits upon
previously unguessed channels of absorbing and profitable speculation.

"Next in order, nominations of President of the Council," announced Dave
Mulhill from the chair, even before the faint applause which had greeted
Heferman's speech had died away. The chairman's words produced an angry
hubbub, and his evident reluctance to recognize a gentleman who was on
his feet, demanding attention, had the effect of fanning the latent
antagonism against the machine to a brighter blaze. Not until sundry
groans and cries of "Gag!" and "Fair play!" were heard did Chairman
Mulhill deign to recognize Hon. Thomas Grady, now known to all as the
spokesman of the opposition.

Intense silence prevailed as Mr. Grady, recognized already as one of
the leaders of the legislature, was reluctantly accorded the privilege
of the floor. A silver tongue he had indeed, and a voice like the
mellow, dulcet notes of an organ. Over six feet in height and with the
bulk and carriage of a Viking, his handsome face flushed and his blue
eyes alight with battle, he was a figure to command admiration. Added to
these a splendid gift of oratory, the whole produced a combination of
magnetic charm which they used to say was fairly hypnotizing to an
audience.

The howl of delight with which the assemblage received the ironical
acknowledgment of the speaker to the chairman, for the privilege of the
floor, indicated its temper toward Shaughnessy. The words of the orator
flowed on, gathering fire as he warmed to the subject of the hopes and
prospects of the city Democracy. He warned them that it was a critical
moment, that the Fusionists had nominated a strong ticket. "It is one
that we must reckon with," he declared. "You and I, secure in the
knowledge of the good our party has done our beloved municipality, will
utterly disclaim the necessity for this absurdly mistaken movement on
the part of our friends, the visionary enemy. But even if that enemy be
composed of so many wild-eyed Don Quixotes, mounted on their hobbies and
fighting windmills, yet, friends, the issue, however ridiculous, is
here." He turned and looked straight at Shaughnessy. "Gentlemen, it is
as yet unmet. This is not a moment for any false and perhaps fatal step.
We owe it to ourselves to meet the enemy with a front that shall be
utterly unassailable to his assaults."

Pausing imperturbably till the resultant applause had died away, the
orator proceeded, in glowing periods, to discourse of the sovereignty of
the people, of their right to choose their leaders, of the moment which
had now arrived to reaffirm their convictions and pursue the highest of
party ideals. While the address continued some clever, covert digs at
Shaughnessy, the speaker, after the manner of his suave tribe, avoided
the quagmires of ugly suspicions and half-guessed corruption that had
characterized his party's administration of affairs during recent years.
With consummate tact he rather confined himself to broad generalities
that fired the blood of his auditors and did not remind them of things
that would chill enthusiasm. Mr. Grady urged them only to take the right
step in time, to meet strength with strength,--this with another
challenging look at Shaughnessy,--to enter the battle equipped for
victory rather than defeat.

Now he was approaching the end of his discourse and had not named his
candidate. They had hung upon every word, had drunk in the golden
sentences that thrilled, that satisfied, yet did not reveal the name of
the mysterious champion whose candidacy the orator was advocating. As he
swung into his peroration, the piqued curiosity of the people had become
almost pain. They were ripe for a shrieking chaos of enthusiasm, and he
knew it. So, with gathered forces, with flashing eyes and voice that
rang like a trumpet, he figuratively fired the powder train.

"And now," he cried, "you are awaiting the announcement of the man whose
name among men is one to conjure with; the man, strong, able and of good
repute, the man who is no man's man--" with a defiant gesture toward
Shaughnessy that awakened tremendous enthusiasm,--"the man whose
nomination here today means victory. Gentlemen, it is with pleasure that
I nominate for the mayoralty of this city a man known to you all for
years, for years the trusted, honored servant of our people; a man of
achievement, of renown, of probity, of independence, of superb ability;
a man who, under God, will rule for righteousness' sake and wear no
man's collar; in a word, that distinguished jurist and gentleman, Judge
Rufus Atwell Boynton!"

A roar like many waters followed, a roar like thunderous, storm-driven
breakers upon a lonely beach, a roar of exultation. Lulling for a
moment, the deafening din broke out afresh, again and again, as if it
would never cease. Men cheered till they could no longer cheer, but
squawked like chickens; standing with empurpled faces, brandishing their
arms, cackling strangely, with ludicrous effort and with distended,
bloodshot eyes. The gavel fell in vain; only a cannonade could have been
heard in that babel of sound. As soon as the noise abated, through sheer
force of physical exhaustion, a vote was railroaded through, the hostile
chairman being helpless before the fierce faces and voices of this mob,
for such it had become under the electrifying lash of Grady's words.
Judge Boynton was nominated by an overwhelming majority, even drawing
from the forces pledged to the fortunes of the Shaughnessy candidate.
The tumult broke out again.

It was suddenly stilled. O'Byrn, from his chair near the rear, saw a
thin white hand raised deprecatingly, marked a sardonic white face and
inscrutable eyes, whose owner silently demanded attention. It was
yielded with a promptness that was uncanny. Then Shaughnessy, erect in
the midst of his ward delegation, spoke. His thin voice with a cold,
underlying sneer, cut the air like a knife, penetrating to every corner
of the hall.

"The majority rules," said Shaughnessy. "It is customary, in similar
case, to move a unanimous nomination. I so move." The deposed boss sat
down. The resultant applause was rather faint. Shaughnessy had somehow
chilled the enthusiasm.

To Micky O'Byrn, sitting with knitted brows as the other nominations,
involving a complete demolition of the Shaughnessy ticket, were hurried
through, there was food for much serious thought and conjecturing. He
noted the new candidate as he was brought before the convention and
introduced, amid great enthusiasm, by Hon. Thomas Grady. He was older
than Micky had imagined and he seemed wearied, almost ill. Still,
reflected O'Byrn,--as he listened to the candidate's short speech of
appreciation and of assurances for the future, in the event of
election,--it seemed strange that the Judge should not display more
enthusiasm over an honor which had come to him so signally. Then he fell
again to pondering, striving to put two and two together.

That the outcome seriously threatened the Fusionist movement was
undeniable. In fact, that ticket was as good as defeated already, for it
was robbed of an issue. Judge Boynton was a strong candidate, every whit
as strong as Theodore Packard and in similar ways. Incredible as it
might seem, Shaughnessy had been humiliated, practically kicked out by
his party. But how had it happened? Micky frowned. "There's a nigger
somewhere," he reflected, "if the coon could only be found."

At the close of the convention Micky was walking thoughtfully down the
street toward the office. It was then dusk and the lamps were being
lighted. Someone joined Micky and quietly fell into pace with him.
O'Byrn glanced up. It was Slade.

"Funny thing that, over at the convention," remarked Micky. "I should
have thought Shaughnessy was solid."

"Yes," answered Slade, placidly. "I should have naturally thought he
was."

"Were you there?"

"You bet."

"Then tell me whether Shaughnessy gave Tom Grady the wink to spiel this
afternoon," pursued Micky, "or is it my eyes?"

Slade looked at him keenly, then laughed quietly. "I'm sayin'
nothing--yet," said he, "but your eyes seem O. K. to me."




CHAPTER X

THE LITTLE RED DEVIL


Harkins looked up from his loaded desk, glancing at the clock. It was
after ten. The city editor frowned heavily and called to Fatty, who was
just passing him on his way out.

"Stearns," he inquired, "have you seen O'Byrn? He has not reported, nor
did he ask off for this evening."

"Perhaps he's sick, sir," nervously volunteered Fatty, who knew better
but did not intend to give his co-worker away. "Seems to me he looked
kind o' peaked yesterday."

"He could easily have sent word," doubtfully rejoined Harkins. "However,
you might inquire and let me know. Or, if you see him, send him in
here," and he turned to his desk.

Fatty went out. "Send him in here!" he chuckled grimly. "If he's stayed
with that bunch he was with at six o'clock, Harkins would pass him on to
the gold cure."

All the staff, save Harkins, knew it by this time. Micky, after a season
of well doing that was protracted for him, had broken out again in one
of his periodical sprees. It was not of the innocuous variety of
indulgence that affords satiety in a single evening, leaving the victim
remorseful and fortified against another lapse for an indefinite time.
Of such are the fortunate, who are immune from the wiles of a sleepless,
diabolical appetite. With Micky it was different. To resist a craving
which never really slumbered meant real effort and unceasing vigilance.
To succumb meant usually an unrecking debauch of days, while the little
red devil worked its sweet will with him, to finally leave him spent and
shaken, a temporary sodden wreck. This was the grim enemy, coupled with
an unreasoning love of roving, that had made him, rarely talented as he
was, a shifting vagrant of the news. It had landed him, ragged and
unkempt, at the door of the Courier office. Now it bade fair to cast him
forth again, shipwrecked at this most prosperous point of his fortunes,
to try once more a dreary, uncertain future, with the gibing ghosts of
lost opportunities ever at his elbow; with the maddening memory of a
forfeited love, the truest he would ever know, mocking him.

Fatty did not inquire for Micky at his lodgings, nor did he attempt to
find him and give him Harkins' message. He omitted the first because he
was well aware that Micky would not be found there for some time, the
second because he did not care to meet O'Byrn and his crew, for fear
that he would be drawn into the maelstrom. He knew Micky's insistence
and Fatty was cautious. Thirdly, he felt assured that Harkins would be
advised of the cause of Micky's absence in due time, and Stearns had no
desire to figure as a bird of ill omen. So he went about his tasks and
discreetly dodged places that might perchance hold the uproarious O'Byrn
and his riotous cronies.

Fortune was against Stearns, however, for it led him, in quest of an
elusive item, into the rotunda of the Palace hotel. He met his man
there, hastily secured his story, and started out. The entrance to the
wine room was at one side. There was the sound of revelry within.

As Stearns was about to pass out, the swinging doors of the wine room
were flung open and there appeared, flushed and disheveled, the riotous
O'Byrn. At sight of Fatty, who gasped and made a wild bolt to escape,
Micky emitted a whoop of triumph and swooped down upon him. He captured
him handily and despite his desperate struggles propelled him in
headlong fashion into the wine room, for the Irishman was as wiry as he
was slender. Stearns found himself in the center of a bibulous throng
which included newspaper men, speedy young sports and a few odd bits of
_debris_, picked up on the rising flood. They crowded about Fatty, some
clamoring for introductions, some making facetious comment on the manner
of his entrance, still others rendering him tribute in dubious song. For
a moment the din was indescribable, while the "chemist" made ineffectual
appeals for order. Then Micky managed to make himself heard above the
babel in a demand for quiet.

"Fatness," said he, with a wave of his hand, "these are the Indians.
Indians, this are Fatty. Fatty, the Indians are drunk. Indians, Fatty
ain't drunk now but he must be made so. Does it go?" A chorus of
affirmative yells made answer.

"Now, Fatty," continued O'Byrn earnestly, "in meeting this little wish
of ours for your subsequent comfort, be a gentleman. Don't show a
grasping spirit, like the two meanest men on record. Never heard of 'em?
Well, one of 'em was asked by a friend to have a drink. Asked what he'd
take he waited till the buyer had ordered a whisky and then says, 'Gimme
two beers,' so as to get his ten cents' worth. Other one of 'em was
worse 'n that. Friend asked him what he'd have, an' says he, 'If you
don't mind, I'd rather have the money.' No, Indians, Fatty ain't like
that. Ask him what he'll have, and the modesty of his demands would put
those graspin' dubs to shame."

"Gee, Micky," gurgled Stearns, trying to squirm away, "I ain't got time,
honest I ain't. I've got an assignment."

The crowd closed in, holding him securely. Micky mused with corrugated
brow. Thus far the only evidences of his indulgence were an unusual
sparkle of the eye, a crimsoned countenance and a bewildering flow of
language.

"'Assignment,'" cogitated Micky, "what does that mean? Where have I
heard that word? Let me forget before I remember already. Let us drink
to forget. Vat iss, Fatty?"

Fatty gulped despairingly. There was no hope. "Birch beer," he murmured
resignedly. There sounded a universal groan.

"Birch beer!" echoed O'Byrn, in a positive squeal. "I wonder if the
mixer hasn't got some Mellin's food? Siphon some milk into him; do, the
sweet thing! No, I'll tell you what you'll drink, Fatty. It'll be a
Mamie Taylor, with me!"

There was unanimous approval registered in a strident roar. Despite
Stearns' protest the "chemist" was urged to mix him a Mamie, Fatty
finally becoming silenced in meek submission. Resolving to "shake the
bunch" at the first favorable moment, he gazed doubtfully at the
seductive mixture in his glass. Micky held up his Mamie and
soliloquized.

"This Mamie is a jade," he remarked, with an air of finality that
effectually settled the matter. "She's that smooth and insinuating, so
agreeable, that it seems as if you could drink her all night, so you
generally do. Plain whisky's more honest. It's got that old, shivery
yah-yah taste to it that keeps warnin' you all the time to sidetrack, so
you're apt to do it before you get telescoped by the D T's. But these
blamed fancy flips are what play the devil with a fellow. They're
come-ons, clear from champagne to ginger ale splits. They taste so
pretty that the next is a necessity, and after that, in the pleasant
salve to the palate, you lose count. Take Mamie here. She's the worst in
the push. You can gauge your capacity in any other line except on her.
She figures her own capacity and the figures always lie, as you realize
next morning. Much is a sufficiency, always. More is a superfluperosity.

"In this connection, Mamie reminds me of a story of an old man up north
who had slipped from grace for some years and never thought any more of
the religious teachings of childhood till trouble switched in, though
that's common enough. But along came a famine time and everyone was
livin' on short commons. The old man was urged to make a family prayer
for some of the necessities. He wasn't used to it and shied
considerable, but it was need that egged him on. Well, he got started O.
K. with 'O Lord, send us a bar'l o' pork. Send us a bar'l o' sugar. Send
us a bar'l o'--o'--pepper--Oh, hell! that's too much pepper!' was the
way he rang off.

"Now that's what I'll be sayin' about Mamie, too much of her, when I
come to, but such is her infernal fascination that--" He broke off with
a wild clutch at Fatty's receding coat tail. Stearns had seized the
favorable moment to escape. He got out before Micky could catch him. As
O'Byrn was about to shoot through the door in pursuit of him, it swung
inward and a familiar figure confronted the little Irishman.

"Well, Micky," remarked Dick dryly, "don't you think you've had enough?
Better come along."

For answer O'Byrn tried to drag Dick to the bar. "Come on, old man," he
shouted. "Get in! There's Mamies to burn."

Dick had heard of his co-worker's outbreak and hurried from the office
in quest of him, chancing to learn where he was. Micky had talked with
him previously, regarding his weakness, and Dick knew what its
uninterrupted continuance would mean.

"Come home, Micky," he urged, "before you get maudlin. Bunk in and get a
good night's rest and you'll be all right for work tomorrow." He led
Micky insistently out of the wine room, unmindful of the protests of
O'Byrn's companions. They passed through the office to the street.

Micky had been quiet for a moment but now his libations reasserted their
influence. He struggled with Dick, voicing sundry curses.

"What d' ye mean?" he demanded. "Let me go, I'm going back. Mind your
own business, can't you?"

"Shut up!" growled Dick fiercely. "Can't you see people are looking at
us? Close your face and come along like a gentleman, for, I tell you,
you're going home!"

Then something happened. Before Micky's haggard eyes appeared mistily,
taking swift and tangible substance, a girl's face, young and lovely,
just now convulsed with horror. Then it was gone, leaving a leaden
weight in Micky's breast, while the vapors rose sluggishly from his
benumbed brain. Reason, shrinking and ashamed, looked out from his hot
eyes. He braced defiantly though hopelessly.

"It's all right, Dick, I'll go home," he said in a strange low tone and
they walked in silence down the street.




CHAPTER XI

IN THE MORNING


Micky awoke late that morning with a persistent, painful throbbing in
his head, fevered eyes and a parched throat. The symptoms held an arid
familiarity which was swiftly allied with self contempt, as sleep
yielded full place to awakened consciousness. For O'Byrn would never be
calloused. As he once expressed it, his career was best epitomized in
Ade's graphic epigram, "Life is a series of relapses and recoveries."
The inherent manliness would always wage war against the little red
devil that sought malevolently to wither it. It would be a pitifully
checkered fight, but whatever the issue,--even should the world, which
never understands, write him down a wreck at the end,--a few who knew
him best, and understood, would know that Micky tried. Who will
question, in a world where so many drift, that in the simple will to try
lies victory?

Micky lay quiet for some moments after awaking, palms pressed to his
burning temples, swollen eyes gazing sombrely up at the ceiling of his
small, plainly furnished room. The hot sun poured in at the window,
before which the shade had not been drawn. The boy, for he was scarcely
more, wandered in dreary retrospect through a world of gray memories.
How gray, how bleak, to be sure! At the very outset the recollection of
a childhood saddened by the frequent sight of a woman in tears; a woman
with a pale, worn face and eyes that held the inexpressible pathos of a
forlorn hope deferred, his mother. His father, did the world still hold
him? O'Byrn told himself fiercely that it could not be, that earth must
long since have wearied of such an excrescence and cast it forth to
annihilation.

To the woman with the pale, worn face and tired eyes, the woman who was
now at rest, he owed his upbringing. From the time that he could not
remember, when she and her baby were deserted by the husband and father,
till the hour when she lay wasted in her final illness, she had toiled
for the boy, to give him clothes, sustenance, schooling. Micky
remembered with a dull ache at his heart how in the supreme hour the
poor tired eyes had watched in vain for one who came not, how the wan
lips had in delirium whispered a dishonored name. Then the end, and the
ensuing picture of a little newsvender, led sobbing from the new-filled
grave of the truest friend he would ever know.

And this other, the being who had left a frail weakling to bear the
brunt alone, for what must the son thank him? For the inherited fiend's
appetite that marred him, no more. The son well knew that the craving
was the intensified replica of the father's crowning vice. He had
learned, moreover, that the parent had deemed it a witty thing to ply
the son with toddy while in his cradle. The son took to it with an
avidity of grave presage, but which delighted the tippling parent. This
was the heritage from his father, a heritage that held in fee wastes of
black bog and hungry mire, with death squatting grimly in the midst.
Ah, what a goodly patrimony he had left, this absent one; what wealth
indeed!

The boy in the bed winced as beneath the impact of a blow. He struck
clenched hands together fiercely. "Oh, God!" he breathed, the tone
combining the bitter venom of a curse with the agonized entreaty of a
prayer.

A moment more he lay in silence, vague eyes fixed on a gray and
resurrected past. He stirred uneasily. "Ah, well, this won't do!" he
muttered, and flinging off the coverings he rolled off upon the floor.
The sunlight dazzled his eyes and he blinked like a bat as he drew the
shade. He swayed unsteadily for a moment, wincing as a sharp pain
stabbed his throbbing head, dying in needle-like prickings just behind
the eyes. With a discouraged groan he made his way to the wash stand,
and emptying the pitcher into the bowl, plunged his fevered head into
the refreshing contents and held it there. It was very pleasant, the
coolness, and a brisk rubbing with a crash towel added decidedly to the
relief. Dressing with shaking fingers, he was finally ready and left the
house, blinking swollen eyes owlishly in the clear sunlight. He stopped
at a restaurant just long enough to swallow a cupful of black coffee in
order to neutralize a bevy of differing tastes that tenanted his mouth,
vying in stale mustiness. Again he sought the open air, wandering
aimlessly.

Clearly the coffee was not enough, for his head throbbed worse than
before. Involuntarily he steadied it with one hand, to keep it on, while
he put into Kelly's drug store for a bromo. Kelly's was popular with the
boys. It was open nights and they could buy whisky in the back room,
after all the other places were closed, and secure bromo over the soda
water fountain in the morning.

Micky absorbed his bromo in a gloomy, introspective mood. The bracer, as
it is generally understood, he was minded this morning to avoid as if it
had been a pestilence. He was wont to say that a bracer was to him but a
limited stop-over, that he would be sure to be traveling again before
noon. He had travelled far enough this trip, far enough to menace a
future, which had never seemed so bright. Disquieting recollections
gnawed at Micky's mind. A girl's face, eloquent with horror and disgust,
seen as through a mist in the lighted street, confronted his shamed,
wakened consciousness, while he writhed inwardly. And, too, his post
with the Courier? Had he lost it? How much latitude would they extend to
drunkards?

A drunkard! He shuddered at the repellent thought, yet what else was he?
What else any man who allowed the infernal appetite to lure him from
duty to be performed? Not once but many times had he, O'Byrn, fallen by
this standard. Repeatedly had he been cast off, with the goal of
reputation and success in sight, because of the little red devil, who
journeyed with him the broad land over, making its hateful presence
known at riotous intervals that resulted in swift changes and shifts of
scene for the little Irishman. If, indeed, he had not lost his post with
the Courier, it was due to the fortunate interruption of a spree that
might otherwise have lasted a week. O'Byrn's soul went out in gratitude
to Dick. Even though it should prove that he had lost both his place and
his lady, it was a melancholy pleasure to Micky to have sobered so soon.
He thought with deep self-disgust of prior orgies; of wild days and
wilder nights, piling deliriously upon each other while sleep was
unknown, a stranger to be banished; when all things loomed distorted,
unreal, through a red haze. So it would go until, with abused nature
exhausted, he would sink into a sodden stupor. From this he would
finally emerge a shaking wreck, with the blackest of memories and
usually with the blankest of futures, for his job usually went with his
spree. The latter was always of inconvenient length for the demands of a
newspaper office.

Something of these horrors he had communicated to Dick some time before.
"This thing has played the devil with me, Dick," he had said. "I want
excitement. Drinking is a means to the end. Then, first I know, it's an
end to my means. That and my infernal itch for shifting have made me a
scoffing and a byword. If I could get chained down, and lost my thirst,
I might make good. I've come near it a lot of times and then the cussed
coupling would break and I'd go slidin' down the grade again. Then it
would be the bumpers out. I guess it'll be that way till I'm backed onto
the siding for good. But I'm headed right now, and, if you ever catch me
toyin' with the lush, I want you to joyously jack my jeans clear to my
lodgings. Knock me down, pick me up and knock me down again."

"That's all very well, Micky," Dick had replied with a remonstrating
bellow of a laugh, "but I'm not enough of a pharisee for that, you know,
for I'm no total abstainer myself."

"Yes, but you're about two-thirds of a one," replied the other. "You
don't know what an appetite means. You drink, when you drink at all,
for good fellowship, because someone asks you to. Left to yourself,
you'd never think of it. If you ever take too much, it means you're on
the water wagon for a number of months, because you dread the feeling of
the morning after. You're one of those lucky devils that can monkey with
the stuff for a lifetime and never acquire the faintest vestige of a
thirst. Now as for me, I can't coquette with it. I have to walk sideways
past a saloon with my face turned the other way, across the street to
the undertaker's. I've simply got to let it alone. Why? Because a lot of
hard jolts have taught me that it's a lot stronger than I am unless it's
held down with both hands. Sometimes I can take a glass and let it
alone, but oftener the first glass is only a drop in the bucket that
starts a demand to annex the whole well. Then there's a roaring Rip Van
Winkle that I come out of a week or two later to find my job miles
behind and me countin' ties and waitin' for a freight. That's the worst
of it, Dick," with a red flush of shame. "It's thinkin' that you're just
as liable to fall asleep at the switch, when you're on duty. Now that's
what I'm carrying over the country with me. That's what I'm fightin'.
First one on top, then the other. But whichever way, Dick, it's hell!"

There had ensued a silence, broken by Dick's voice, unwontedly sober.

"The gold cure, Micky, did you ever try it?"

"No!" with vigor, "and I never will! If I can't stand I'll go down, but
it'll be alone. If I can't weather it without that, why then me to the
dip-house, that's all. No artificial vacations in mine!"

Which, if perhaps wrong-headed, at least bespoke a plenitude of grit.

Dick had remembered Micky's request to deliver him, if need be, from the
fascinations of the grape, and had complied with it in spirit, if not in
letter, the night previous. O'Byrn had been firmly torn from the
bibulous bevy with which he had started that afternoon and been escorted
home. And though the prospect was dismal enough to the boy who stood,
hands in pockets, on the curb, staring moodily at the asphalt, he was
glad that Dick had looked him up. It might have been worse.

How bad was it, anyway? Micky drew a long breath, squared his shoulders
and started for the office.




CHAPTER XII

WHY SHE CRIED


Mickey was not dismissed, though the city editor had a heart to heart
talk with him. "We are not exactly sticklers for total abstinence here,
O'Byrn," he said. "I am free to confess that I am ineligible to
membership in the I. O. G. T. myself. But one thing the Courier does
insist upon, which is that a man's indulgence must not be allowed to
interfere with his work. I had important assignments for you last night
and had to place them in other hands. Besides, we were short of men.
When I accidentally learned, near press-time, of the real reason for
your non-appearance, I was minded to let you go. But from what I learn I
gather that it is something of a disease in your case. Cure yourself, my
boy, for you're a good man and I've decided to give you another chance."

Micky stood quietly, his freckled face a queer study of mingled relief
and misery. "It's more than I deserve, Mr. Harkins," he replied. "I'm a
pup when I start drinkin'. You're right, it's a disease with me. I won't
promise that it's a final attack, for I don't know, but I will promise,"
with meaning, "that you'll never have to jack me up for it again. If I
can't hold on, why I'll quietly let go." He walked out.

Micky worked feverishly for a couple of days after that, his heart full
of misgiving. His place was assured, true enough, but there was another
matter, even more vital, which was rife with uncertainty. A girl's face,
eloquent of horror and dismay, swam mistily before his eyes, as in the
lighted street in front of the hotel when he was struggling with
Glenwood. He closed his eyes with a shiver, but still saw the face,
known for whose it was. Would she ever receive him, even nod to him
again? Never, probably, and why should she? This was a new attitude for
the ordinarily rollicking, independent O'Byrn. It remains for the lover
to sound the nethermost depths of humility.

He watched his mail those two days with apprehensive eyes, fearing to
receive a note which should administer his _coup de grace_. None came,
and, as a natural sequence, his suspense increased. It is the axe
suspended that the fowl fears; with its fall subsequent proceedings fail
to interest the bird.

Finally there arrived O'Byrn's night off. It could be employed but in
one way; he must become definitely acquainted with his fate. Behold him,
with set teeth and an air of impending martyrdom, at the Muldoons' door
at eight of the evening. It was a Friday evening, but Micky was
desperate. He breathed hard for a moment, wavered, then rang the bell
heroically. There was a soft stir inside, the door opened. It was dark
in the hall. Micky leaned forward.

"Is that you, Maisie?" he breathed. "I--"

"Naw," piped a childish treble, "it ain't Maisie. It's her brudder,
Terence."

"Sure," murmured Micky confusedly. "Would've known from your general
cut, Terence, but I can't see you. Where's the folks?"

"All out, Mister Micky," rejoined the youngster, thrusting his tousled
head out of the doorway to inspect the visitor. "Ain't no one to home
but me."

"Where's Maisie?" Micky demanded in a tone which indicated that Terence
would fill no particular gap as far as he was concerned.

"Out to a dance," grinned Terence. "Gone with Billy Ryan." Micky's brow
darkened, while Terence's grin grew wider. Billy Ryan! The cavalier who
left a Manhattan to go out for beers! Micky's mind swiftly reverted to
the Ironworkers' ball, to which Ryan had brought the lady and from which
O'Byrn had escorted her home. And now--in a brief second Micky gathered
some luminous ideas in evolution. He pulled himself together.

"Say, Terence," he murmured, with a cajoling wink, "take this and don't
speak of my havin' called, see?" Terence nodded solemnly and closed the
door, richer by a quarter. Micky strode savagely away, rich in a fund of
swift-risen jealousy and in an empty, aimless night off.

"Ryan!" he ruminated with a groan. "I could stand for most anyone else.
But a soak like him! Blast it! Can't a girl get next to anything
nowadays but what drinks?"

And indeed, in these degenerate days, with teetotalers well nigh outside
her ken, many a maiden has had often ample occasion to ask herself that
question.

The pot having apostrophized the kettle, Micky felt easier, though the
thought of Ryan was productive of inward profanity through all of that
singularly tedious and empty evening.

There ensued a miserable week for Micky, though it was a fortunate one
for the Courier. Misery produces a wide diversity of results, depending
upon the makeup of the afflicted subject. The one it can render
absolutely useless to the needs of the workaday grind. The other,
beneath its bitter lash, becomes a human dynamo, plunging into the
nepenthe of toil. Of such was Micky, and a nervously brilliant week was
credited to him in consequence.

But though the course was eminently more beneficial to him and his
endangered journalistic prospects than bootless brooding would have
been, it was a sorry week for him. Moreover, it was an interminably long
one. He would not have believed that such a week, filled with a restless
whirl of work, could have passed so slowly. Conflicting emotions
disquieted him, played pranks with an appetite for meals ordinarily as
reliably fixed as sea tides, filled his days with a wan restlessness and
troubled his sleep. For Micky, though the soft impeachment would have
probably won from him a picturesque denial, was in love, and misery is a
privilege of lovers.

He watched the mails and the postman. The latter never stopped and Micky
anathematized him in his heart, also a privilege of lovers whenever
thorns and nettles spring up in Arcady. It is curious, this universal
mental arraignment of the postman for the non-delivery of matter never
sent. Why, in all reason, should he be forced to figure as a buffer? Yet
he is, and the rancor against him felt by the disappointed is all the
more bitter because of the absolute necessity for its repression. One
would acquire only merited ridicule and punishment for thrashing the
postman, though one would often like to. One may only glare, and, if the
postman notices it, he doesn't mind. He has grown cynical in service. So
to revert, as the days passed so also did the postman; and Micky, while
feeling quite murderous, simply glared.

Why didn't she write, and again, why should she? Micky writhed upon the
twin horns of his dilemma. If she wrote, what in reason could she write
except a definite sentence of banishment? If she did not write, what
could the implied message naturally mean but the same? Oh, of course, he
was out of it anyway. But in that case, what of Ryan? Was it possible
that Ryan was considered preferable to him? When that query introduced
itself Micky usually swore. Altogether it was a hard week.

On one thing, however, he was determined. The matter should be settled,
once for all, on his next night off. Perhaps Terence had been indiscreet
and revealed the secret of his previous fruitless call. Maisie might
expect him on the following Friday night and be away. Well, he would fix
that. So he arranged for Thursday night. A little cunning might insure
at least an audience.

Behold him, then, on the fateful evening at the Muldoons' door,
heroically despairing. A soft glow shone through the curtained parlor
windows. Within he heard the soft chords of her little organ. She might
have company, Ryan perhaps. O'Byrn clenched his teeth and rang the bell.

The organ was suddenly silent. To the boy waiting outside, the
succeeding moment of suspense was filled with a tumult of loud heart
beats, with strange throbbings at the temples. Then the door slowly
opened. "Who is there?" asked a voice.

He stepped inside without a word, laying his hat on the hall table.
Forbiddingly silent, she gazed an instant into his face, glacial blue
eyes searching his own hungry ones, her face so cold as to cause him an
inward shiver. Then without speaking, she entered the little parlor, he
following.

They sat far apart. Her manner increased the gap immeasurably. Micky
felt dimly that speech would partake of the nature of transmission over
a long-distance telephone to the Klondike. However, he cleared his
throat with some diffidence. It was something of an odd sensation for
him.

"You were playin'," he ventured.

"Yes," somewhat pointedly. "I was."

"Well," he continued, "don't let me interrupt you. I like music."

"Oh, do you?" indifferently. "Sorry, but the pieces I was playin' are
new ones. I don't know 'em well enough to play 'em before company."

"So?" he continued, calmly ignoring the reiterated hint. "Well, try some
of the old ones. They're good enough for me." He watched her face
eagerly.

It did not relax. "I think I've forgotten the old ones, Mr. O'Byrn," she
said slowly.

"But I haven't," somewhat wistfully. "And it was not so long ago."

"Not so long ago!" her blue eyes brightening. "Mr. O'Byrn, it was longer
ago than you seem to think."

"Yes, I guess it was," dejectedly. "It's a long way from 'Micky' to
'Mister' after all."

The girl's lip curled. "It's your own fault." she retorted. Then with a
sudden burst of hurt resentment, "I couldn't believe it at first," with
an involuntary little shiver, "when I saw you that night. My brother was
pretty mad, I can tell you, said I ought to shake you. Such a sight!"

"So your brother was with you," exclaimed Micky, half to himself. One
maddening surmise had been set at rest. The thought of Ryan had haunted
him of late.

"Yes, who did you think it was? Couldn't you see him?" with sarcasm.

"I'm afraid I couldn't," with a humility strange in him, "but I could
see you, Maisie, and it sobered me."

"High time!" she flashed. "But then," with an impatient gesture, "It
ain't pleasant to talk about, so cut it out. What did you come here for,
anyway?"

He straightened. "To apologize, Maisie, that's all," he said simply.
"Just that and to ask for another chance. I sha'n't whine or excuse
myself. Only this. They gave me another chance at the office. Do I get
one here?"

She tapped the carpet with an impatient foot. Her eyes were downcast,
her cheeks flushed. Micky watched her wistfully. Suddenly she stole a
swift glance at him, her blue eyes brimming with tears.

"Oh," she burst out, a pitiful break in her voice, "if I hadn't seen
you--that way. It nearly killed me. And every time I've thought of you
since--I've seen you--like that! Oh, Micky--" Her voice was lost in
sobs, stifled in her handkerchief.

He sprang from his chair, kneeling at her side, stroking her hair with
trembling fingers, pouring out his soul in broken, incoherent words.

"I'm a beast, Maisie, a beast! Don't cry so--dear. It's always been so,
it's what's done for me all my life. My mother's dead, thank God! She
died before she knew. But my father," striking his clenched hand on the
arm of her chair, "he's got it to answer for, wherever he is, living or
dead! He was a devil, Maisie, and he made me one. He fed me the stuff
when I was a baby and I took to it like milk; it was his cursed blood in
me, I suppose. It's driven me from pillar to post, from a job to the
gutter, time and again. It's been up one minute and down the next with
me. Oh, I'm not fit to touch you, Maisie, I'm a dog to ask it, but I
tell you that, if I play out the game alone, this thing will drive me to
hell! Would you--stand by me, help me? It's always been stronger than I
am, perhaps it always will be, but Maisie, I think I can beat it out,
can be a man--with you!"

It was out at last, the sum of his passionate longing, poured out
despairingly in a flood of wild unrecking words; without forethought,
wrung from him by the sudden yearning born of the sight of the girl in
tears. Now that it was over he remained silent a moment, still torn by
his emotion and by hers. Then, slowly and fearfully, his stinging eyes
sought her face. It was buried in her little hands. Tears trickled
through her clasped fingers.

He rose heavily to his feet. What madness had possessed him, what
presumption! He had asked her to marry--a drunkard. He laughed with
bitter brevity. The sound brought the sight of a startled face with
tear-wet eyes.

"Overlook it, Maisie," he asked desolately, as he turned away, "and
good-by. I don't know how I came to do it--but you cried."

He was half way to the hall. There was a soft step behind him, a light
touch upon his arm. He turned swiftly, the ghost of a wan hope in his
haggard eyes.

"Ah, Micky," she whispered, with a smile whose tender memory would live
for him in endless summer through autumn's falling leaves till winter's
winding sheets,--"don't you--don't you know--why--I cried?"




CHAPTER XIII

A WAGER


Micky told Dick about it one evening, for his heart was full. His
engagement was a serious thing to him, and something like fear mingled
with his hope of the future. He was deeply sensible of his past
mistakes, but he knew himself too well to look to the coming days with
unshrinking confidence. He hoped, very humbly; that was all.

Dick was sympathetic, he understood. His was one of those rare natures
that invite, comprehend and respect confidences. "You know my record,
Dick," Micky had said. "There isn't much in it of a domestic tinge. But
just the same, when I happen to get a night off and sit in the little
parlor with her, it seems--" with a queer little break in his
voice,--"why Dick, it seems as if I had at last--got home!"

And Dick had wrung Micky's hand until it ached, and assured him in his
deep bass voice, eloquent with fervent earnestness, that he was all
right, and poor Micky had begun to hope that, after a long and checkered
season, he was.

The city was now fully roused to the contest that was being waged for
its control between the Fusionists and Democrats, and, as a natural
sequence, they were busy in the newspaper offices. One thing was quite
evident, however, which was that the unexpected _coup_ made by the
opponents of Shaughnessy, at the Democratic convention, had rendered the
chances of the Fusionist ticket dubious, to say the least. In fact, the
Fusionists had been robbed, to a large extent, of their thunder. The
spectacular repudiation of Shaughnessy by his own convention, the
nomination of a man for the mayoralty against whom no word of civil or
political taint had ever been breathed, had greatly lessened the
Fusionists' chances of success. Where they had expected to be able to
deal mighty blows, by pointing to the shameless effrontery of
Shaughnessy in forcing a malodorous city ticket through his convention,
they were now compelled to take another tack. The situation had been
made the subject of an earnest conference between Colonel Westlake and
the men controlling other pro-Fusionist newspapers directly after the
Democratic convention and its surprising results.

So, in the assaults which the opposing newspapers, led by the Courier,
were making upon the Democracy there was no hint of detraction of the
Judge. How could there be? They contented themselves with the assumption
that the respected and able jurist had been imposed upon. To be sure,
Shaughnessy, having become notorious, had been sacrificed by his keen
associates in their own interest. Should they be successful at the
polls, the argument was made that Judge Boynton and some of his well
meaning associates upon the ticket, despite their good intentions, would
be powerless to cleanse the Augean stables because they would be
prevented from so doing by forces within their own party. Fusion would
furnish a new broom, guaranteed to sweep clean.

This was strong and logical reasoning, but there were signs that it was
ineffective. There was a strong retort to be made, which was that the
purifying movement in the Democracy had come from within. The leaders
named were above suspicion; some of them were recognized bitter enemies
of Shaughnessy. Men of influence who had joined the Fusionists, though
Democrats, openly returned, holding that the necessity for Fusion no
longer existed. As the Democrats had a natural ascendency in the city,
the outlook for Fusion was on the whole growing rather depressing.

Following his humiliation in the convention, Shaughnessy had left the
city for several days. Upon returning, he apparently took up the life of
a recluse. He confined himself strictly to the affairs of his wholesale
house, dividing his time equally between the office and his lodgings. He
was no longer at headquarters, where the sight of him was once so
familiar; he had apparently dropped all interest in politics, though
nobody dared to ask him anything about it. When Shaughnessy first struck
the town, said the old stagers, he was quite decently approachable, but
he had ceased so to be for years past. It was noted, however, by some
who chanced to meet him upon the street and glanced curiously at him,
that he was ghastlier than ever, with sunken cheeks and dull eyes. He
looked ill.

But there was one who had not ceased to regard Mr. Shaughnessy with
suspicion, a suspicion that grew day by day, and that was Micky O'Byrn.
When Shaughnessy left town after his rout, O'Byrn muttered, "Up to more
deviltry. Wonder what it is now?" When he returned, and quietly forsook
his old political haunts, Micky's sandy eyebrows were skeptically
elevated and he murmured, "Underground! He'll come up somewhere." For
Micky relied upon the evidence of his keen Irish eyes. Whether the act
was committed through arrangement or involuntarily, Shaughnessy had
winked. O'Byrn reasoned that winks by a man of Shaughnessy's calibre
were not wasted. Curious that a "slick duck" like Grady, as Micky
characterized that smooth orator, had required a wink. Perhaps he
hadn't, perhaps Shaughnessy had simply grown over-anxious during the
short interval between the speeches. Well, if Shaughnessy had grown
unwittingly careless, that was his look-out, his and O'Byrn's. O'Byrn
was looking out. He had said nothing and he was devoutly hopeful that he
would have a chance to saw wood.

He was at Maisie's one evening, one of his customary "off-nights." These
nights were coming to him of late as oases in the deserts of weeks. They
had chatted, talked seriously of their plans, sung together to Maisie's
accompaniment on the little organ, and now Micky regretfully rose, with
a glance at his watch. "Well, girl," said he, "I've got to slide. It's
gettin' late. Your pa'll be assistin' me."

She watched him with wistful blue eyes, loth that he leave, though she
knew the hour beckoned his departure. He stood near the big lamp with
its red shade, his queer features being mellowed, so to speak, in the
ruddy glow. He grinned benignly at her as he reached for his coat.
Anticipating him, she helped him into it.

"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed rebelliously, "isn't it the worst ever, this
newspaper business! And a morning paper at that, with your hours turned
wrong side out and a night off only once in an age! Micky, dear, why
don't you get into something civilized?"

"You know, Maisie, the Constitution says all men were created equal," he
observed soberly.

"Sure it does, but what's that got to do with it? What are you up to
now?"

"Why, nothin'," he replied, an impish twinkle in his eye, "only it
depends. One man may be as good as another, but it's up to him to prove
it. A bunch of Socialist Democrats, in a town I was in once, put up a
hostler for city judge against a couple of old lawyers on the regular
tickets. Said a hostler was as good as a lawyer in this free country.
True enough, in a limited sense. I know a lot of hostlers that are
better hostlers than a lot of lawyers that are lawyers. I suppose you
follow me? But, all the same, these fellows were lame in their argument
for this reason. Their hostler candidate might have had horse sense to
burn, but he hadn't read law. There's a lot of difference between horse
sense and the law, Maisie. They finally took the hostler off and put a
cobbler on, who came in last. Now don't strike me, Maisie, that last was
accidental. Really, I didn't intend it."

"I should hope not!" with sincerity. "But I don't see what all this
rigmarole has to do with what we are saying, or were. Have you lost your
mind?"

"If ever I did, the finder would return it," he retorted whimsically.
"It would make him dizzy. But to return to cases, what I said has got
everything to do with what we said. Can't see it? Well, men may be
created equal but most of 'em never learn arithmetic. The fellow who
does has got 'em stopped. He keeps on addin', while they--oh, they're
just multiplyin' every minute. They're all around you, I'm one of 'em
myself. The mathematical sharp, who made a specialty on finance and
knows the idiosyncrasies of a dollar better than a mother knows her
child, keeps on subtractin' the other fellows from their money. When it
comes to the division, why they're all workin' for him. That's
Rockefeller, and by the same token, that's me. We're the limit on the
extremes. He's got everything and I'm livin' on the rest. I've got
nothin' and he's got it. See?

"There's a happy medium, but it doesn't help the majority much, for most
of us are on pay rolls. For instance, one man owns the Courier and the
rest of us are working for him. If I changed to something else, I'd
still be workin' for someone. Why? Because the only line in arithmetic
in which I could make good was a sequence of ciphers with no bigger
figure before it. You catch the point, don't you? It's due to the
mercenary age. Nominally I'm free and equal. Actually I'm about a
'steenth of one per cent. See? But what's the dif'? What you need in
this dizzy old world is philosophy. I've got it to burn, but Standard
Oil can't scorch it. Here's a motto for you, Maisie, and you can paste
it in that funny new jigger you call a hat. It'll keep you smilin' on
wash day, and that's a test for a woman. It's just this: take it as it
comes, and, if it doesn't come, don't take it."

He was gone, this queer little man-gamin of vagrant moods, shifting as
the winds, yet for the most bubbling with reckless cheeriness. Humor was
the predominant note of his being. Its broad grace mellowed him; would
keep him sound and sweet at heart, whatever the sum of the coming years.
Did the winds blow fair or ill, he had within him the essence of logical
living; a whimsical sense of proportion that enabled him to view himself
impartially with all others, one of myriad puppets in the show. A
success or a failure he might become, as the world judges, but until the
end he would be too large for that littleness which is too often a
hallmark of success, the littleness of petty vanity. So, with this
greatest gift the Creator can give one of his children, the humorous
sense of proportion that can make if need be a joke of futility, Micky
would go on to the end, to success or failure; alike with heart
uncankered and a laugh on his lips. There would never transpire a
misanthropic Micky.

For a long time after O'Byrn's departure, Maisie sat still in the Morris
chair, a pensive look on her pretty face, with vague eyes bent dreamily
on the flaming wood in the tiny fireplace; for the nights had grown
chill with the first presage of winter and the fenders glowed with warm
hospitality on company nights. The busy flames licked the blackened
slabs; hurrying over the charred, desolate spaces; leaping in triumph as
a conquered fragment fell, under the espionage of a shower of
scintillant sparks. The tongues of flame, with redoubled energy, again
lapped the wood, eating into its vitals, withering its fibres with fiery
breath, crumbling it piecemeal in a crematory of elemental ashes. At
last, always working upward, the flames burst exultantly from scorched
fissures in the topmost slab and curled in weird shapes above it; shapes
that now approached a certain sane coherence; that again were
indeterminate and distorted, vaguely writhing in a dim haze, like one's
future. Finally the fire, spending its force, dulled and died, the ruddy
flames slowly paling like the fading roses of a summer sunset. Then
there was the black, desolate end; all light extinguished save for the
baleful, red-eyed glare of a few scattered embers, dying on the hearth.
Maisie sat erect with a sudden start, stealing an apprehensive glance at
the clock. With a long sigh and a little shiver, she rose slowly,
extinguished the low-turned lamp and departed for bed.

Meanwhile, Micky, a red-eyed cigar in a corner of his mouth, had walked
leisurely and thoughtfully toward the city. His hands thrust deep in his
overcoat pockets, he strode unheedingly on, lost in a wistful reverie.
What a flower was this little girl of his, to be sure! And he--what had
he done to deserve her? A little self-examination is good for a man,
especially if it be followed by a little proper self-disgust. O'Byrn
walked on in singularly chastened mood. The past? Ah, it was done; why
waste time in regrets when one is young? The present was of sunshine in
a blue sky; the future--

O'Byrn's shoulders rose in a little, involuntary, uneasy shrug. He
turned a corner just then and looked up. The next instant he had retired
unobtrusively into a dark hallway, where he stood, staring across the
street.

O'Byrn could scarcely have explained his definite impulse for doing
this. It was simply the half-unconscious manifestation of the news
instinct. Without any needed pause for reasoning, Micky's news faculty
had connected two apparently irrelevant facts as significantly allied
with each other, prompting him to remain in the hope of securing
something worth while. The wholesale liquor establishment of Shaughnessy
stood just across the street. The curtains of the office were drawn,
but O'Byrn saw the reflection of a light behind them. Furthermore, the
sound which had brought Micky to a realization of his surroundings, a
moment before, was that of a carriage, which had been halted a little
way up the dark street, the corner of which O'Byrn had just turned. So
O'Byrn stood in the shadow, watching Shaughnessy's office.

He had not long to wait. A few moments and he beheld the corner of one
of the office window shades drawn slightly to one side. Somebody was
evidently looking out. Nobody was in sight, for the street was a quiet
one and was deserted at that hour. The next moment the door was opened
cautiously and a man emerged. Crossing the street swiftly he passed by
O'Byrn so closely that the reporter could have touched him, and turned
the corner. Then was soon audible the sound of receding wheels.

O'Byrn whistled softly as he resumed his walk toward the city. The light
of the aroused news instinct was in his eyes. Here was something
tangible, bearing out surmises that had seemed wild to himself. What
need had Judge Boynton, the esteemed Democratic candidate for mayor, to
be secretly in the office of the deposed boss, Shaughnessy? Deposed,
indeed! Micky laughed softly, then clenched his hands.

"Oh, if I can only get onto it!" he breathed savagely. "Whew! Lord!
Lord! What a story!"

Had Micky chanced to look around at that moment he might have seen a man
following him, who, had O'Byrn known it, could have given him some
interesting and definite pointers on that desired story. The man had
emerged from around the corner of Shaughnessy's building a moment after
Judge Boynton left and Micky had started down the street. Gaining the
opposite side of the thoroughfare, the fellow, who had evidently been
eavesdropping, followed O'Byrn, keeping some distance in the rear, until
a point was reached where Micky turned to go toward the Courier office.
The other man kept straight on.

A little later, as he had figured upon doing, Micky met some of the boys
in a lunch room which they were wont to visit at that hour. Dick was
there, and Mead and Fatty Stearns. The latter was talking.

"Gee!" exclaimed Fatty, breathlessly, while the expletive blew a
formidable charge of bread crumbs toward the shrinking company, "but
there'll be doin's this election! There'll be doin's! Watcha think,
Micky?"

"I think you need an interpreter, Fatty, when you try to talk with your
mouth full," replied O'Byrn. "Don't talk, Fatty. You sound like a dog
that's trying to breathe in July; you do, really. One of those
expectorating dogs."

"Gee! What's those?" demanded Fatty, helplessly. "Spitz!" replied Micky,
and dodged a crust launched by the justly indignant Glenwood.

"Cheese it, fellows," put in Mead. "About this election. Fusion's got no
chance now. Judge Boynton'll win in a walk."

"For how much?" in a flash. O'Byrn's hand was in his pocket.

"Well," remarked Mead, reflectively, "I'm not exactly lined with dough,
but I'll put an X on it. Have to stipulate that it's a futurity, though;
for, needless to say, I haven't as much as that in my clothes three
days after pay day."

"Neither have I," laughed O'Byrn. "This diggin' down was a bluff. But
I'll see your ten all right. This bum line of witnesses will take
notice. Loser touches someone to pay the winner. All fine 'nd dandy."

Mead acquiesced, albeit with an implied something of uncertainty in his
demeanor. The rotund Stearns voiced it in nervous words.

"Gee! Mead," he exclaimed, "you're a chump to bet your stuff on another
fellow's game."

"Go die somewhere, Fatty," suggested Micky. "There's no game yet, but,"
with a queer grin at Mead, "there's going to be before this thing's
over. Want to renig, Mead? Can if you want to."

"No!" indignantly rejoined Mead. "I'll see it through. If you really
have something in your Irish sleeve, O'Byrn, I'll bet it's worth the
money."

"Nothin' yet," murmured Micky, as they prepared to depart, "but I tell
you, boys, that sleeve's a Christmas stockin' just now, and I'm gettin'
eye-strain watchin' for Santa Claus."




CHAPTER XIV

A DISCREDITED HENCHMAN


Micky strolled into the Courier's local room one evening, and, after
hanging up his overcoat and hat, removed also his under coat and
unbuttoned his vest. He then leisurely detached his cuffs and rolled up
his shirt sleeves, to get arm-room, as he used to term it. Then, having
indulged a taste for preliminaries which he was fond of observing,
whenever he had the time, he sailed in. A half hour later he had
finished his task and turned in the copy. There was a temporary lull,
and O'Byrn leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his red
head, and dreamily watched the rings of smoke wreathing upward from the
tip of his cigar.

"Wherever did you get a gash like that?" inquired a voice behind him,
and Micky felt a finger touch his wrist. Mead, who also chanced to be
disengaged at the moment, took an adjacent chair and stretched himself
out comfortably for a chat.

Micky lazily extended his right arm and bestowed a curious glance upon a
long, livid scar, just above the wrist. "Oh, that?" he answered. "That
was an accident. Got it when I was too young to remember. Beastly night,
eh?"

"Yes, trying to blow up a nasty rain, I guess. Where've you been
tonight?"

"Oh, out in society," grinned Micky. "Harkins sent me to do that Van
Courts' recep' 'nd ball. Careless servants, though. I was glad to get
away alive."

"Why?"

"Well, I was discreetly in the background, of course, and was edging
across to get a better view when I fell over a pile of things on the
floor that they'd failed to brush up. Hostess gave 'em the glacial eye."

"I should think she would," warmly commented Mead. "What was the stuff?"

"Why, a bunch of ultras had just been standing there," demurely
explained O'Byrn, "and I fell over the dropped r's, that's all."

Mead viewed him darkly. "You ought to be killed," he remarked. "Such
cheap and unseemly levity is unworthy of one who is pursuing this
honorable, elevating, expanding career of journalism." This with an
oratorical flourish.

A shadow of seriousness crept into O'Byrn's twinkling eyes. "Of course
you're in fun, in a way," he told Mead, "but, just the same, you're
inclined to take your 'mission' seriously. My boy, you're due to shed a
raft of illusions. You'll find this 'career,' as you call it, is a good
deal like a hobby horse. Pleasant motion, but doesn't land you anywhere.
There's nothin' to it. I heard you talking the other day about 'the
great equipment it gives a fellow for a start in life.' That's all right
if taken in time, like the measles, but let me tell you something. You
stick at this, and stick and stick, and by the time you're ready for
that start, you'll be backin' up.

"You were a cub a while ago, Mead, and you made good. Naturally you
feel good about that, for a lot of 'em don't. Well, you needn't feel
good. You've got the germ, and it's fatal. You're to be pitied, for
you're thoroughly _en rapport_ with the job."

O'Byrn had warmed to his subject; his cigar stub described wild
flourishes. "I knew a young fellow once, in the middle west, who went
into the reporting line. Brighter'n a dollar and full of ambition and
the opportunity hop. Tried hard, but hadn't the nose, couldn't make good
nohow. Old man called him up on the carpet one day. Old man went it for
a while and then the gosling got a chance for a squawk.

"'Why,' says he in an injured way, 'I cover my assignments.'

"'Oh, yes,' snaps the old man,--and he was one of the best in the
business,--'you're all right on the stereotype, tellin' the people what
they already know about. Any lunkhead can report a baby show. The
mothers are there to tell him about it. But that's only half the game.
The other and the hardest half is in diggin' out and tellin' 'em what
they don't know about. That's what you're for and it's where you fall
down.'

"Well, the old man fired him. He was lucky. He's gettin' the salary of
three of us now and he's gettin' it out of straight life. Manages a
district. The old man who fired him died a while ago. Next time my
friend passed through that town he stopped off, just to shed some tears
of gratitude on the old man's grave.

"Oh, you grin now, Mead, and you're thinkin' to yourself 'Old Carrots,
the senile cynic.' But just you stick at it, and fail to sidestep the
Juggernaut, and in years to come you'll remember the words your Uncle
Mike is now addressin' to you and you'll feel the same sentiment the
old farmer from up north wrote on the back of a check.

"Never heard of it? Well, it's true. Old fellow was from Clayville
Corners. Got a check one day for something. Never saw anything like that
before; always took his money straight. Someone told him to take it into
town and get it cashed at the bank. So he blows in and shoves the slip
in front of the cashier. Cashier says, 'You'll have to indorse this.'
Old man was rather rattled but stayed game. Took it over to the desk and
scribbled on the back this sentiment:

    "'i hartily Indors this Chek.'

"That'll be you, Mead, in the coming days. You'll think what Micky told
you and you'll heartily indorse. But it won't be checks. The only checks
you get in this cussed business are over-draws."

"Nice, roseate view you take of your calling," sarcastically remarked
Mead. "Why in thunder don't you get out of it?"

Micky's grin was illuminating and forgiving. "Because I can't do
anything else," he admitted frankly. "But you can. Why don't you? Try
politics. It's the graft these days. Then bimeby you can retire, like
Shaughnessy, and will never have to work anybody any more. But just you
stick at this newspaper stunt, and after a while you find, to your
surprise, that 'the zest and thrill of news gettin' which is the fillip
of the reporter's jaded life' is gettin' a dull edge. Of course, you're
older than you used to be, and that explains most things, includin' the
multiplyin' of troubles that come to you while you wait. The chiefest
one is in your speed. It's O. K. when you're young and your blood is
boundin'. You feel like that brute owned by the enthusiastic French
Canadian. He was workin' a horse trade, and says: 'Dat hoss, she trot
half-past two. He no trot half-past two, I give you to it!'

"Now, the trouble with the vet reporter is that by the time he gets to
an age that is considered the prime of life in any other line, why, he
can't half trot past anybody, and he gets scratched. And I think that
will hold you for a while, Mead. Think it over."

O'Byrn yawned, glanced at the clock, and rose. "Well," said he, airily,
"I'm off, don't you know, to see if I can find something to make me
forget that society shindy. Oh, ya-a-s! Bubbles! you rude fellah; there
now, Bubbles! Go 'way, Mead. You're not so bad, you know, but you don't
belong. Tra, la! old chap, be good. What a pity you have to work for a
living!" With which parting arrant nonsense O'Byrn considerately took
himself off.

Arrived at the street, Micky's jovial grin faded and he walked along
with a serious air that had been far more frequent with him of late.
There was a sober-sided Micky that few of his mates knew. Often now,
when the little Irishman was alone, the reckless light would fade in the
blue eyes, leaving them unwontedly serious; the jovial grin would quit
the freckled face, to be replaced by that pensive shadow that tells of
wistful, wondering speculation regarding the veiled mystery of futurity.
Such the spell of introspection that is cast when love comes to one,
leading to grave heart-searchings, to the tentative facing of one's
soul. There is as much of shadow as of sunlight in the path of true
love, but there is substance in the shadow.

Micky was walking swiftly along, oblivious to his animated
surroundings, when a touch upon an elbow arrested his attention. He
glanced up, somewhat bewildered, and stopped. One of Maisie's brothers,
Tom, was facing him.

"Hello, O'Byrn," abruptly remarked Muldoon. "Saw you passing me, lookin'
dreamy-eyed, so I stopped you. Thought you might want to know. Maisie's
sick."

"Sick!" echoed Micky, a scared look in his face. "Why, what--"

"Oh, don't worry like that." reassuringly. "We called in the doctor; he
says there's no danger. She'll be all right."

"Yes," Micky returned anxiously, "but what's the matter, man? Why, she
was all right Friday evening. I was there."

"Yes," returned her brother, "it came on real sudden. It's that fever
that's going around; she came down last night. But she's got it mild, so
don't you worry. It's too late now, she's asleep, but run in tomorrow
for a minute sometime, can't you? It'll do her good. And don'

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