Whether or not as the result of the article in Yardley’s, which had been read more or less widely in the city, the campaign of the Citizens Union gained ground, and people began to fill the little halls to hear Krebs, who was a candidate for district attorney.  Evidently he was entertaining and rousing them, for his reputation spread, and some of the larger halls were hired.  Dickinson and Gorse became alarmed, and one morning the banker turned up at the Club while I was eating my breakfast.

“Look here, Hugh,” he said, “we may as well face the fact that we’ve got a fight ahead of us,—­we’ll have to start some sort of a back-fire right away.”

“You think Greenhalge has a chance of being elected?” I asked.

“I’m not afraid of Greenhalge, but of this fellow Krebs.  We can’t afford to have him district attorney, to let a demagogue like him get a start.  The men the Republicans and Democrats have nominated are worse than useless.  Parks is no good, and neither is MacGuire.  If only we could have foreseen this thing we might have had better candidates put up—­but there’s no use crying over spilt milk.  You’ll have to go on the stump, Hugh—­that’s all there is to it.  You can answer him, and the newspapers will print your speeches in full.  Besides it will help you when it comes to the senatorship.”

The mood of extreme dejection that had followed the appearance of the article in Yardley’s did not last.  I had acquired aggressiveness:  an aggressiveness, however, differing in quality from the feeling I once would have had,—­for this arose from resentment, not from belief.  It was impossible to live in the atmosphere created by the men with whom I associated—­especially at such a time—­without imbibing something of the emotions animating them,—­even though I had been free from these emotions myself.  I, too, had begun to be filled with a desire for revenge; and when this desire was upon me I did not have in my mind a pack of reformers, or even the writer of the article in Yardley’s.  I thought of Hermann Krebs.  He was my persecutor; it seemed to me that he always had been....

“Well, I’ll make speeches if you like,” I said to Dickinson.

“I’m glad,” he replied.  “We’re all agreed, Gorse and the rest of us, that you ought to.  We’ve got to get some ginger into this fight, and a good deal more money, I’m afraid.  Jason sends word we’ll need more.  By the way, Hugh, I wish you’d drop around and talk to Jason and get his idea of how the land lies.”

I went, this time in the company of Judah B. Tallant.  Naturally we didn’t expect to see Mr. Jason perturbed, nor was he.  He seemed to be in an odd, rather exultant mood—­if he can be imagined as exultant.  We were not long in finding out what pleased him—­nothing less than the fact that Mr. Krebs had proposed him for mayor!

“D—­d if I wouldn’t make a good one, too,” he said.  “D—­d if I wouldn’t show ’em what a real mayor is!”