u say to him, 'Take this money and do the work, but do it on the
quiet. That's the condition. If you can't keep our secret, we'll have
you fired and get some man that can.' The Mayor will chuck him if the
committee says so. But it won't be necessary, if I've got Merritt sized
up. He wants to get into this fight so bad that he'll agree to almost
anything. His assistants we can square.

"So much for the official end of it. But what about the run of the
medical profession? If they go around diagnosing typhus, the news'll
spread almost as fast as through the papers. So here's how we'll fix
them. Recommend the City Council to pass an ordinance making it a
misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, and revocation of license
to practice, for a physician to make a diagnosis of any case as a
pestilential disease. The Council will do it on the committee's say-so."

"Whew!" whistled the old charlatan. "That's going pretty strong, Bel.
The doctors won't stand for that."

"Believe me, they will. It's been tried and it worked fine, on the
Coast, when they had the plague there. That's where I got the notion:
but the revocation of the license is my own scheme. That'll scare 'em
out of their wits. You'll find they don't dare peep about typhus.
Especially as there aren't a dozen doctors in town that ever saw a case
of it."

"That's so," agreed his principal. "I guess you're right after all,
Bel."

"Sure, am I! You say you've got the newspapers fixed."

"Sewed up tight."

"Keno! Our programme's complete. You and Mr. Pierce and the Mayor see
Merritt and get him. Call the meeting for next week. Make some
good-natured, diplomatic feller chairman. Send out the call to about
three hundred of your solidest men. Then we'll elect you permanent
chairman, you can pick your Emergency Committee, put the resolution
about pest-diagnosis up to the City Council--and there you are. My job's
done. I shall _not_ be among those present."

"Done, and mighty well done, Bel. You'll be going back to Washington?"

"No, I guess I better stick around for a while--in case. Besides, I want
a little rest."

Like so many persons of the artistic temperament, Certina Charley was
subject to periods of relaxation. With him these assumed the phase of
strong drink, evenly and rather thickly spread over several days. On the
afternoon before the carefully planned meeting, ten days after Norman
Hale was taken to the hospital, the diplomat of quackery, his shoulde