as to make a
campaign against "graft" and political corruption the following autumn.
This announcement and the call for a mass-meeting in Kingdon Hall was
received by the newspapers with a good-natured ridicule, and in
influential quarters it was generally hinted that this was Mr.
Blackwood's method of "getting square" for having been deprived of the
Boyne Street line. It was quite characteristic of Ralph Hambleton that he
should go, out of curiosity, to the gathering at Kingdon Hall, and drop
into my office the next morning.

"Well, Hughie, they're after you," he said with a grin.

"After me? Why not include yourself?"

He sat down and stretched his long legs and his long arms, and smiled as
he gaped.

"Oh, they'll never get me," he said. And I knew, as I gazed at him, that
they never would.

"What sort of things did they say?" I asked.

"Haven't you read the Pilot and the Mail and State?"

"I just glanced over them. Did they call names?"

"Call names! I should say they did. They got drunk on it, worked
themselves up like dervishes. They didn't cuss you personally,--that'll
come later, of course. Judd Jason got the heaviest shot, but they said he
couldn't exist a minute if it wasn't for the 'respectable'
crowd--capitalists, financiers, millionaires and their legal tools. Fact
is, they spoke a good deal of truth, first and last, in a fool kind of
way."

"Truth!" I exclaimed irritatedly.

Ralph laughed. He was evidently enjoying himself.

"Is any of it news to you, Hughie, old boy?"

"It's an outrage."

"I think it's funny," said Ralph. "We haven't had such a circus for
years. Never had. Of course I shouldn't like to see you go behind the
bars,--not that. But you fellows can't expect to go on forever skimming
off the cream without having somebody squeal sometime. You ought to be
reasonable."

"You've skimmed as much cream as anybody else."

"You've skimmed the cream, Hughie,--you and Dickinson and Scherer and
Grierson and the rest,--I've only filled my jug. Well, these fellows are
going to have a regular roof-raising campaign, take the lid off of
everything, dump out the red-light district some of our friends are so
fond of."

"Dump it where?" I asked curiously.

"Oh," answered Ralph, "they didn't say. Out into the country, anywhere."

"But that's damned foolishness," I declared.

"Didn't say it wasn't," Ralph admitted. "They talked a lot of that, too,
incidentally. They're going to close the sa