rue prophet.

There was a long, uneasy pause.

"Hal," said Ellis hesitantly.

"Well?"

"I'm a fool."

The white weariness of Hal's face lit up with a smile. "Why, Mac--" he
began.

"A pin-head," persisted the other stubbornly. "A block of solid ivory
from the collar up. I'm--I'm _young_ in the head," he concluded, with
supreme effort of self-condemnation.

"It's all right," said his chief, perfectly knowing what Ellis meant.

"Have I said enough?"

"Plenty."

"You didn't put Veltman in your story?"

"No. What was the good?"

"That's right, too."

"Good-night, Mac, I'm for the hotel."

"Good-night, Hal. See you in the morning."

"Yes. I'll be around early."

Ellis's eyes followed his chief out through the door. He returned to his
desk and sat thinking. He saw, with pitiless clearness, the storm
gathering over the "Clarion": the outburst of public hostility, the
depletion of advertisers and subscribers, the official opposition
closing avenues of information, the disastrous probabilities of the
Pierce libel suits, now soon to be pushed; and his undaunted spirit of a
crusader rose and lusted for the battle.

"They may lick us," he said to his paste-pot, the recipient of many a
bitter confidence and thwarted hope in the past; "but we'll show 'em
what a real newspaper is, for once. And"--his eyes sought the door
through which Hal Surtaine had passed--"I've got this much out of it,
anyway: I've helped a boy make himself a Man."

Ten thousand extra copies sped from the new and wonder-working press of
the "Clarion" that night, to be absorbed, swallowed, engulfed by a
mazed populace. In all the city there was perhaps not a man, woman, or
child who, by the following evening, had not read or heard of the
"Clarion's" exposure of the epidemic--except one. Max Veltman lay,
senseless to all this, between stupor and a fevered delirium in which
the spirit of Milly Neal called on him for delayed vengeance.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE GOOD FIGHT

Earthquake or armed invasion could scarce have shocked staid Worthington
more profoundly than did the "Clarion's" exposure. Of the facts there
could be no reasonable doubt. The newspaper's figures were specific, and
its map of infection showed no locality exempt. The city had wakened
from an untroubled sleep to find itself poisoned.

As an immediate result of the journalistic tocsin, the forebodings of
Dr. Surtaine and his associates as to the effects of publicity b