ange bedfellowship of politics. Yonder in a
corner sat with fidgeting restiveness a young man whose eyes, despite
his obvious youth, were mature in guile and pouched with that pasty
ugliness with which unwholesome night life trade-marks its own.

He was one of that crew imported from elsewhere to register, re-register
and vanish, but he had lingered, and now a grievance had sent him
skulking to the enemy's camp with vengeance in his heart. In an interval
of political inaction he had picked a pocket and had been locked up by a
"harness bull" who had never liked him and who chose to disregard his
present and special prerogative. In court he had been dismissed with an
admonition, it is true, but his dignity was affronted. This morning he
sat in the anteroom of Morgan Wallifarro, ready, in the inelegant but
candid parlance of his ilk, to "spit up his guts."

Not far from him sat a woman whose profession was one of the most
ancient and least revered. The vivid colouring of her lips and cheeks
shone out through thickly laid powder in ghastly simulation of a coarse
beauty long fled. "I lodged a good half-dozen of those beer-drinking
loafers, though they roistered and drove away my respectable trade--and
then the cops had the nerve to raid me," she inwardly lamented. Now she,
too, sat among the informers.

Morgan had complained that reformers always failed through their dreamy
impracticability. Now he was being as practical as the foes he sought to
overthrow. From the dribble of small leaks come the breaks that wreck
dams, and Morgan was neglecting none of them.

To Boone, whom he no longer quarantined behind a manner of aloofness, he
had confided, "We have no illusions about the courts. Their judgments
will bear the label of party, not justice; but when they turn us down I
mean to make them do it in the face of a record that will damn them
before the public."

So, together with gentlemen like General Prince and ministers of the
Gospel bearing sworn narratives of police browbeating, came the backwash
of the discontented riffraff: deserters who were willing to disclose
their secrets to appease their various resentments.

Boone, who had played simple and direct politics in the backwoods, found
himself in the midst of a more intricate version of the game--and into
it he had thrown all the weight of his energies--until this morning.

Now, as he sat gazing out over roofs and chimney-pots, a messenger boy,
impatient of anteroo