. Kill him! Brain him!"

A Voice from Behind. "Aw, stand up, Pinski. Don't be afraid." Pinski
(terrorized as the five hundred make a rush for the stage). "If the
people don't want me to do it, of course I won't do it. Why should I?
Ain't I their representative?"

A Voice. "Yes, when you think you're going to get the wadding kicked
out of you."

Another Voice. "You wouldn't be honest with your mother, you bastard.
You couldn't be!"

Pinski. "If one-half the voters should ask me not to do it I wouldn't
do it."

A Voice. "Well, we'll get the voters to ask you, all right. We'll get
nine-tenths of them to sign before to-morrow night."

An Irish-American (aged twenty-six; a gas collector; coming close to
Pinski). "If you don't vote right we'll hang you, and I'll be there to
help pull the rope myself."

One of Pinski's Lieutenants. "Say, who is that freshie? We want to lay
for him. One good kick in the right place will just about finish him."

The Gas Collector. "Not from you, you carrot-faced terrier. Come
outside and see." (Business of friends interfering).

The meeting becomes disorderly. Pinski is escorted out by
friends--completely surrounded--amid shrieks and hisses, cat-calls,
cries of "Boodler!" "Thief!" "Robber!"

There were many such little dramatic incidents after the ordinance had
been introduced.

Henceforth on the streets, in the wards and outlying sections, and
even, on occasion, in the business heart, behold the marching
clubs--those sinister, ephemeral organizations which on demand of the
mayor had cropped out into existence--great companies of the
unheralded, the dull, the undistinguished--clerks, working-men, small
business men, and minor scions of religion or morality; all tramping to
and fro of an evening, after working-hours, assembling in cheap halls
and party club-houses, and drilling themselves to what end? That they
might march to the city hall on the fateful Monday night when the
street-railway ordinances should be up for passage and demand of
unregenerate lawmakers that they do their duty. Cowperwood, coming
down to his office one morning on his own elevated lines, was the
observer of a button or badge worn upon the coat lapel of stolid,
inconsequential citizens who sat reading their papers, unconscious of
that presence which epitomized the terror and the power they all
feared. One of these badges had for its device a gallows with a free
noose suspended; another was bl