torious Bill
No. 709. It was well known in certain circles--the editorial went on to
say--that this legislation had been drawn by Theodore Watling in the
interests of the Boyne Iron Works, etc., etc. Hugh Paret had learned at
the feet of an able master. This first sight of my name thus
opprobriously flung to the multitude gave me an unpleasant shock. I had
seen Mr. Scherer attacked, Mr. Gorse attacked, and Mr. Watling: I had all
along realized, vaguely, that my turn would come, and I thought myself to
have acquired a compensating philosophy. I threw the sheet into the waste
basket, presently picked it out again and reread the sentence containing
my name. Well, there were certain penalties that every career must pay. I
had become, at last, a marked man, and I recognized the fact that this
assault would be the forerunner of many.

I tried to derive some comfort and amusement from the thought of certain
operations of mine that Mr. Lawler had not discovered, that would have
been matters of peculiar interest to his innocent public: certain
extra-legal operations at the time when the Bovine corporation was being
formed, for instance. And how they would have licked their chops had they
learned of that manoeuvre by which I had managed to have one of Mr.
Scherer's subsidiary companies in another state, with property and assets
amounting to more than twenty millions, reorganized under the laws of New
Jersey, and the pending case thus transferred to the Federal court, where
we won hands down! This Galligan affair was nothing to that.
Nevertheless, it was annoying. As I sat in the street car on my way
homeward, a man beside me was reading the Pilot. I had a queer sensation
as he turned the page, and scanned the editorial; and I could not help
wondering what he and the thousands like him thought of me; what he would
say if I introduced myself and asked his opinion. Perhaps he did not
think at all: undoubtedly he, and the public at large, were used to Mr.
Lawler's daily display of "injustices." Nevertheless, like slow acid,
they must be eating into the public consciousness. It was an
outrage--this freedom of the press.

With renewed exasperation I thought of Krebs, of his disturbing and
almost uncanny faculty of following me up. Why couldn't he have remained
in Elkington? Why did he have to follow me here, to make capital out of a
case that might never have been heard of except for him?... I was still
in this disagreeable frame of m