revulsion swept over me in a rush of blood to my head, and I dropped
the revolver on the floor and threw myself on my bed.

By some miracle the cartridge had not exploded; but the nervous shock
of that instant when I felt the trigger yield and the muzzle rap
against my forehead with the impact of the hammer--that shock was
almost as great as a very bullet in the brain. I realized my folly, my
weakness; and I went back to my life with something of a man's
determination to crush the circumstances that had almost crushed me.

Why do I tell that? Because there are so many people in the world who
believe that poverty is not sensitive, that the ill-fed, overworked boy
of the slums is as callous as he seems dull. Because so many people
believe that the weak and desperate boy can never be anything but a
weak and vicious man. Because I came out of that morbid period of
adolescence with a sympathy for children that helped to make possible
one of the first courts established in America for the protection as
well as the correction of children. Because I was never afterward as
afraid of anything as of my own weakness, my own cowardice--so that
when the agents of the Beast in the courts and in politics threatened
me with all the abominations of their rage if I did not commit moral
suicide for _them_, my fear of yielding to them was so great that I
attacked them more desperately than ever.

It was about this time, too, that I first saw the teeth and the claws
of our metaphorical man-eater. That was during the conflict between
Governor Waite and the Fire and Police Board of Denver. He had the
appointment and removal of the members of this Board, under the law,
and when they refused to close the public gambling houses and otherwise
enforce the laws against vice in Denver, he read them out of office.
They refused to go, and defied him, with the police at their backs. He
threatened to call out the militia and drive them from the City Hall.
The whole town was in an uproar.

One night, in the previous summer, I had followed the excited crowds to
Coliseum Hall to hear the Governor speak, and I had seen him rise like
some old Hebrew prophet, with his long white beard and patriarchal head
of hair, and denounce iniquity and political injustice and the
oppressions of the predatory rich. He appealed to the Bible in a calm
prediction that, if the reign of lawlessness did not cease, in time to
come "blood would flow in the land even u