old you to
your promise," she gurgled, in a throaty, coaxing way. A few days
later he encountered her at lunch-time in his hall, where she had been
literally lying in wait for him in order to repeat her invitation.
Then he came.

The hold-over employees who worked about the City Hall in connection
with the mayor's office were hereafter instructed to note as witnesses
the times of arrival and departure of Mrs. Brandon and Mr. Sluss. A
note that he wrote to Mrs. Brandon was carefully treasured, and
sufficient evidence as to their presence at hotels and restaurants was
garnered to make out a damaging case. The whole affair took about four
months; then Mrs. Brandon suddenly received an offer to return to
Washington, and decided to depart. The letters that followed her were a
part of the data that was finally assembled in Mr. Stimson's office to
be used against Mr. Sluss in case he became too obstreperous in his
opposition to Cowperwood.

In the mean time the organization which Mr. Gilgan had planned with Mr.
Tiernan, Mr. Kerrigan, and Mr. Edstrom was encountering what might be
called rough sledding. It was discovered that, owing to the
temperaments of some of the new aldermen, and to the self-righteous
attitude of their political sponsors, no franchises of any kind were to
be passed unless they had the moral approval of such men as Hand,
Sluss, and the other reformers; above all, no money of any kind was to
be paid to anybody for anything.

"Whaddye think of those damn four-flushers and come-ons, anyhow?"
inquired Mr. Kerrigan of Mr. Tiernan, shortly subsequent to a
conference with Gilgan, from which Tiernan had been unavoidably absent.
"They've got an ordinance drawn up covering the whole city in an
elevated-road scheme, and there ain't anything in it for anybody. Say,
whaddye think they think we are, anyhow? Hey?"

Mr. Tiernan himself, after his own conference with Edstrom, had been
busy getting the lay of the land, as he termed it; and his
investigations led him to believe that a certain alderman by the name
of Klemm, a clever and very respectable German-American from the North
Side, was to be the leader of the Republicans in council, and that he
and some ten or twelve others were determined, because of moral
principles alone, that only honest measures should be passed. It was
staggering.

At this news Mr. Kerrigan, who had been calculating on a number of
thousands of dollars for his vote on various occasio