nd sheep into a carnage of crime
and graft?"

Above the roar of the traffic in the street below the strident voice of
a newsboy, shouting his immature conception of the most important news
in the latest editions of the afternoon papers, came up to them.

"Gibson says de mayor's de bunk?" he shrieked. "Just out--pa--p--er!"

The voice from the street broke the tense silence that had followed the
mayor's soliloquy. He turned from the window quickly and strode back to
his desk and the suggestion of weariness dropped from him like a cloak
and he emerged, alert, taut, energetic, in fighting trim.

"This won't do," he snapped, "this standing around and feeling sorry for
myself. If I'm going down to defeat I'm going down fighting and when the
day comes that the people discover what a hypocrite and crook this man
Gibson is, they'll remember, at least, that I fought him to the last.

"And I'm not licked yet, not by a damn sight. I'm going to plug right
along and before another month passes I'm going to show this crook up if
it's the last thing I do on earth."

"That's more like it," approved Brennan. "I've been in a few forlorn
hope fights before and have seen the impossible happen, in fact, helped
it happen."

"I'm depending on you more than anyone else," said the mayor. Turning to
John he added: "And you, too, Gallant."

"The fault of crooks--and we're dealing with crooks--is that they can't
think straight, all the time," said Brennan. "They always make a slip,
some time. I've never known it to fail. No matter how smart a crook is,
he always makes one mistake. He can't help it. It's because he's a crook
and can't think straight. It's up to us to see that we don't overlook
the mistake that Gibson and the 'Gink' will make."

"Let's hope they make it soon enough," said the mayor. "The primary is
only five weeks away and if Gibson is to be exposed it must be within
the next four weeks at the latest."

"I don't agree with you fully in that," said Brennan. "It might be a
good idea, if we get what we're looking for, to hold off until a few
days before the election so that Gibson won't have enough time to reach
the entire city with the story he'll frame up to come back with."

"We won't worry about that until we find enough to blast Gibson and
Cummings once and for all," the mayor said. "I have men working night
and day trying to link the two together. I have tried fairly and
honestly to discover where Gibson obtained the