Another shot was fired.  They hadn’t got him yet, or they wouldn’t be shooting.  He raised his voice in a great call.

“Cameron!  Here!  Cameron!”

He ran into a low fence then, and it threw him.  He had hardly got to his knees before the other running figure had hurled itself on him, and struck him with the butt of a revolver.  He dropped flat and lay still.

* * * * *

For weeks Woslosky had known of the growing strength of the Vigilance Committee, and that it was arming steadily.

It threatened absolutely the success of his plans.  Even the election of Akers and the changes he would make in the city police; even the ruse of other strikes and machine-made riotings to call away the state troops,—­none of these, or all of them, would be effectual against an organized body of citizens, duly called to the emergency.

And such an organization was already effected.  Within a week, when the first card reached his hands, it had grown to respectable proportions.  Woslosky went to Doyle, and they made their counter-moves quickly.  No more violence.  A seemingly real but deceptive orderliness.  They were dealing with inflammatory material, however, and now and then it got out of hand.  Unlike Doyle the calculating, who made each move slowly and watched its results with infinite zest, the Pole chafed under delay.

“We can’t hold them much longer,” he complained, bitterly.  “This thing of holding them off until after the election—­and until Akers takes office—­it’s got too many ifs in it.”

“It was haste lost Seattle,” said Doyle, as unmoved as Woslosky was excited.

Woslosky did not like Louis Akers.  What was more important, he distrusted him.  When he heard of his engagement to Lily Cardew he warned Doyle about him.

“He’s in this thing for what he can get out of it,” he said.  “He’ll go as far as he can, with safety, to be accepted by the Cardews.”

“Exactly,” was Doyle’s dry comment, “with safety, you said.  Well, he knows you and he knows me, and he’ll he straight because he’s afraid not to be.”

“When there’s a woman in it!” said the Pole, skeptically.

But Doyle only smiled.  He had known many women and loved none of them, and he was temperamentally unable to understand the type of man who saw the world through a woman’s eyes and in them.

So Woslosky was compelled to watch the growth of Willy Cameron’s organization, and to hold in check the violent passions he had himself roused, and to wait, gnawing his nails with inaction and his heart with rage.  But these certain things he discovered: 

That the organization’s growth was coincident with a new interest in local politics, as though some vital force had wakened the plain people to a sense of responsibility.

That a drug clerk named Cameron was the founder and moving spirit of the league, and that he was, using Hendricks’ candidacy as a means, rousing the city to a burning patriotic activity that Mr. Woslosky regarded as extremely pernicious.