ngressman Mallard was
safe. His buckler was the right of free speech; his sword, the
argument that he stood for peace through all the world, for
arbitration and disarmament among all the peoples of the world.

* * * * *

It was on the evening of a day in January of this present year that
young Drayton, Washington correspondent for the New York Epoch, sat
in the office of his bureau on the second floor of the Hibbett
Building, revising his account of a scene he had witnessed that
afternoon from the press gallery of the House. He had instructions
from his managing editor to cover the story at length. At ten o'clock
he had finished what would make two columns in type and was polishing
off his opening paragraphs before putting the manuscript on the wire
when the door of his room opened and a man came in--a shabby,
tremulous figure. The comer was Quinlan.

Quinlan was forty years old and looked fifty. Before whisky got him
Quinlan had been a great newspaper man. Now that his habits made it
impossible for him to hold a steady job he was become a sort of news
tipster. Occasionally also he did small lobbying of a sort; his
acquaintance with public men and his intimate knowledge of Washington
officialdom served him in both these precarious fields of endeavour.
The liquor he drank--whenever and wherever he could get it--had
bloated his face out of all wholesome contour and had given to his
stomach, a chronic distention, but had depleted his frame and shrunken
his limbs so that physically he was that common enough type of the
hopeless alcoholic--a meagre rack of a man burdened amidships by an
unhealthy and dropsical plumpness.

At times--when he was not completely sodden--when he had in him just
enough whisky, to stimulate his soaked brain, and yet not enough of it
to make him maudlin--he displayed flashes of a one-time brilliancy
which by contrast with his usual state made the ruinous thing he had
done to himself seem all the more pitiable.

Drayton of the Epoch was one of the newspaper men upon whom he
sponged. Always preserving the fiction, that he was borrowing because
of temporary necessity, he got small sums of money out of Drayton from
time to time, and, in exchange, gave the younger man bits of helpful
information. It was not so much news that he furnished Drayton as it
was insight into causes working behind political and diplomatic
events. He came in now without knocking and stood look