g
points to make, slow trains to side-track, fool operators to hold down;
all on the dizzy edge of a strike that is making every man on the line
lose his balance. But you go ahead with your newspaper business. I'll do
what a man can here. And if you come across that right-of-way agent, I
wish you'd make it a case of assault and battery and get him locked up.
I'm leery about him."

Kent went his way dubiously reflective. In the moment of triumph, when
Durgan had announced the success of the bold change in the programme, he
had made light of Hawk's escape. But now he saw possibilities. True, the
junto was leaderless for the moment, and Bucks had no very able
lieutenants. But Hawk would give the alarm; and there was the rank and
file of the machine to reckon with. And for weapons, the ring controlled
the police power of the State and of the city. Let the word be passed that
the employees of the Trans-Western were kidnapping their receiver and the
governor, and many things might happen before "Red" Callahan should finish
his long race to the westward.

Thinking of these things, David Kent walked up-town when he might have
taken a car. When the toxin of panic is in the air there is no antidote
like vigorous action.

Passing the Western Union central office, he stopped to send Ormsby a
second telegram, reporting progress and asking him to be present in person
at the denouement to put the facts on the wire at the earliest possible
instant of time. "Everything depends upon this," he added, when he had
made the message otherwise emphatic. "If we miss the morning papers, we
are done."

While he was pocketing his change at the receiving clerk's pigeon-hole, a
cab rattled up with a horse at a gallop, and Stephen Hawk sprang out. Kent
saw him through the plate-glass front and turned quickly to the public
writing-desk, hoping to be overlooked. He was. For once in a way the
ex-district attorney was too nearly rattled to be fully alert to his
surroundings. There were others at the standing desk; and Hawk wrote his
message, after two or three false starts, almost at Kent's elbow.

Kent heard the chink of coin and the low-spoken urgings for haste at the
receiving clerk's window; but he forbore to move until the cab had rattled
away. Then he gathered up the spoiled blanks left behind by Hawk and
smoothed them out. Two of them bore nothing but the date line, made
illegible, it would seem, by the writer's haste and nervousness. But at