and innuendoes, too
well veiled, but no names mentioned. The specific act of graft was not
brought to the surface. It was as if the writer had a "spread" of
some vaguely uncertain rumor, and yet there was not doubt that Colonel
Guthrie and Mayor Stitz and the fire-extinguishers were meant. The
attorney could see that, and he had an idea that the writer had meant
to tell more than he really did tell. The veiled allusions were so
thoroughly veiled in words that they were buried as if under mountains
of veils. Each slight hint was swamped in morasses of quotations and
fine flourishes, overgrown and hidden by tropical verbiage, and covered
up by philosophical and political phrases until nothing of the hint
could be seen. As he read on the attorney could see Doc Weaver talking,
as plainly as if he stood before him; he could see him at his desk in
a frenzy of composition, and he recognized the apt quotations from
Shakespeare that were Doc's specialty. Doc Weaver had written it.

The attorney laid the paper down and studied the matter. How could Doc
have learned of the affair? Skinner, angry as he had been at having to
buy the four fire-extinguishers, would never have dared to wreck the
party he had helped to create. The Colonel would have been no such fool.
Stitz? He would hardly accuse himself. Who then?

One passage set the attorney thinking again as he re-read the article.
"'Thinks are seldom what they seem,' as the poet says, which is as true
as that 'Honesty is the best policy.' And as Shakespeare says, 'To
what base ends,' for all this disreputable graft centers around certain
brilliant objects that are not what the guilty bribers and bribees
suppose them to be. While we shudder with horror at the temerity of the
sinners we shake with laughter as we think of their faces as they will
be when they realize that they are mortals to whom the immortal bard
refers when he enunciates the truth, 'What fools these mortals be!'"

"Certain brilliant objects" could mean nothing but the lung-testers.
Eliph' Hewlitt had that secret, and Eliph' Hewlitt boarded with Doc
Weaver. The attorney felt a sudden rush of anger. It was to this
intermeddling book agent, then, that he owed the premature explosion of
the mine that was to have blown the Citizens' Party to fragments, and to
have landed the fragments in the basket held ready by Attorney Toole?

The distribution of that week's TIMES acted like a tonic on the town
streets. New life fo