oy well enough, went up and congratulated him on
the new political alliance. In the confusion, Winifred Willowby slipped
out of the room and no one noticed his absence.

But some one did notice the sideboard and started to sample the bottles.
Soon everyone was drinking a little. But the Old Man did not drink. He
just sat there, moodily chewing his cigar and wondering how much of the
fifty million he could keep for his share.

Nobody saw the first rat. It dropped from behind the picture and ran
under a chair. The next rat did the same. Perhaps fifty rats were in the
room before their presence was noticed. By that time they were coming
faster, by the dozen, by the hundred. That was different. One rat in a
large room meant nothing. A hundred, five hundred in the same room could
mean almost anything.

And now they were literally pouring out from back of the picture. A
cursing man pulled it to the floor and there was a large hole in the
wall, two feet in diameter, and out of that hole the rats were pouring,
big brown, hungry rats, dropping to the floor and starting to hunt for
food. The puzzled men jumped up on top the chairs; the rats stood on
their hind legs and looked at the large chunks of food with black beady,
binoculars. The Old Man just sat there, chewing his cigar and cursing.
He knew what it all meant seconds before anyone else.

A number of the most fearful men made a dash for the elevator. They were
driven back by a torrent of rats climbing up the elevator shaft. Then
_fear came--and panic_. With gun and heel, and broken chairs for clubs,
they started in to kill rats, and for every one they killed, a hundred
fastened to them with chisel teeth. To make it worse, the lights went
out, and they were there in the dark, with mutilation as a beginning and
death as an ending, and still the rats poured into the room, up the
elevator shaft and out of the hole in the wall.

* * * * *

The Old Man walked across the room, kicking the struggling bodies of his
followers out of his pathway. Rats ran up his legs and tried to bite his
hands, his face; he swept them off him as a tiger would wipe ants off
his fur; at last he came to the window. There was the city of New York
in front of him, the city of a million twinkling lights, the tomb of a
billion dead hopes; the Morgue of a Nation, covered by laughing, painted
faces. He raised the sash and sat on the sill.

"Damn Willowby!" he said. "What