The handling of the epidemic news, Hal left to his colleagues, devoting his own pen to a vigorous defense of the “Clarion’s” position and assertion of its policy, in the editorial columns.  Concealment and suppression, he pointed out, had been the chief factor in the disastrous spread of the contagion.  Early recognition of the danger and a frank fighting policy would have saved most of the sacrificed lives.  The blame lay, not with those who had disclosed the peril, but with those who had fostered it by secrecy; probing deeper into it, with those who had blocked such reform of housing and sanitation as would have checked a filth disease like typhus.  In time this would be indicated more specifically.  Tenements which netted twelve per cent to their owners and bred plagues, the “Clarion” observed editorially, were good private but poor public investments.  Whereupon a number of highly regarded Christian citizens began to refer to the editor as an anarchist.

The “Clarion” principle of ascertaining “the facts behind the news” had led naturally to an inquiry into ownership of the Rookeries.  Wayne had this specifically in charge and reported sensational results from the first.

“It’ll be a corking follow-up feature,” he said.  “Later we can hitch it up to the Housing Reform Bill.”

“Make a fifth page full spread of it for Monday.”

“With pictures of the owners,” suggested Wayne.

“Why not this way?  Make a triple lay-out for each one.  First, a picture of the tenement with the number of deaths and cases underneath.  Then the half-tone of the owner.  And, beyond, the picture of the house he lives in.  That’ll give contrast.”

“Good!” said Wayne.  “Fine and yellow.”

By Sunday, four days after the opening story, all the material for the second big spread was ready except for one complication.  Some involution of trusteeship in the case of two freeholds in Sadler’s Shacks, at the heart of the Rookeries, had delayed access to the records.  These two were Number 3 and Number 9 Sperry Street, the latter dubbed “the Pest-Egg” by the “Clarion,” as being the tenement in which the pestilence was supposed to have originated.  These two last clues, Wayne was sure, would be run down before evening.  Already the net of publicity had dragged in, among other owners of the dangerous property, a high city official, an important merchant, a lady much given to blatant platform philanthropies, and the Reverend Dr. Wales’s fashionable church.  It was, indeed, a noble company of which the “Clarion” proposed to make martyrs on the morrow.

One man quite unconnected with any twelve per cent ownership, however, had sworn within his ravaged soul that there should be no morrow’s “Clarion.”  Max Veltman, four days previously, had crawled home to his apartment after a visit to the drug store where he had purchased certain acids.  With these he worked cunningly and with complete absorption in his pursuit, neither stirring out of his own place nor communicating with any fellow being.  Consequently he knew nothing of the sensation which had convulsed Worthington, nor of the “Clarion’s” change of policy.  To his inflamed mind the Surtaine organ was a noxious thing, and Harrington Surtaine the guilty partner in the profits of Milly’s death who had rejected the one chance to make amends.