, yes?"

"Rather," said the editor, "and Guthrie, too, making him pay that
graft."

"Sure!" grinned the cobbler. "I got goot grafts. Apples, and potatoes,
and celery, and peas, and chickens! Five grafts for one such little
ordinances. Grafts is a good business, but now is all over. I quit me
that boss-grafter job. I like me not such kloppings on the head. Next
comes such riots, and revolutionings. I quit first." He sewed steadily
for a while then prepared another thread, waxing it, and twisting the
bristle on either end.

"That fire-extinguishers joke," he said, as he ran the ball of wax up
and down the thread; "that was a good one, yes? On Skinner. That makes
me a revenge on Skinner for such a klop on the head, yes?"

He adjusted the shoe on his knee, and began to sew again.

"Yes," he said, "I am glad I make that joke on Skinner. What was it?"

"Come now!" said T. J. "Don't pretend such innocence, Stitz. Don't try
to fool ME. You knew all the time that those fire-extinguishers were
nothing but lung-testers." The mayor looked puzzled, and properly,
for he had never heard of lung-testers. "To test lungs," explained the
editor. "To show how many pounds a man can blow; how much wind his lungs
will hold; a sort of game, like pitching horseshoes. They are not worth
anything to Skinner. He paid his money for them for nothing. He will
have to buy four genuine fire-extinguishers now. That was what made him
mad at you."

When the editor left Stitz's car he had learned all the mayor could
tell him, including the undoubted fact that the mayor considered graft
a quite legitimate operation, and this particular case a good joke on
Skinner and Colonel Guthrie, and that the mayor himself, thinking the
joke too good to keep, had told Doc Weaver. The editor easily guessed
that Doc had investigated the rest of the affair, and had seen the
fire-extinguishers and known them to be not what they seemed. He hurried
back to his office to set in type what he had learned.

But others were abroad, too. Attorney Toole, watching the editor, had
seen him enter the cobbler-car and leave it again, and he easily guessed
the object of the editor's visit. He, too, went to see Stitz, and had a
long and confidential talk with him, first frightening him until he was
in a collapse, and then offering him immunity and safety, and at length
leaving him in a perspiration of gratitude. He held up to him a vision
of the penitentiary as the reward of graft