en. "Who knows but what you may
prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn't you let me swat him
just once? I'd like to have had a hand in it."

"I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the
erring soul.

"No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak." Martin shook his head
lugubriously. "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain. The young man
cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful
newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great."

With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear
that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still
clutched.

In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about
himself that was new to him. "We are the sworn enemies of society," he
found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. "No, we are not
anarchists but socialists." When the reporter pointed out to him that
there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had
shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as
bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were
described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery
gleams in his blood-shot eyes.

He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall
Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the
minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most
revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor
little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head
tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from
twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon.

The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out
Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash
Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front. That
gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had
no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience
with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as
a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to
him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband,
had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of
the family and repudiated him. "He tried to sp