“The registration-office will prove that I’m not.  Pass that word!”

“I’ll go back—­to the meeting.  It doesn’t seem to be much use in holding the meetings,” said the man.  “We hear one another talk—­we know we are talking the truth.  But nobody listens who can help us poor folks.  Well, I’ll admit that the politicians come in and listen and promise to help us and we give our votes; but that’s all:  they give nothing back to us.”

Farr broke out with a remark which seemed to have no bearing on what Citizen Drew was saying.

“He comes out at nine o’clock, eh?”

“Who?”

“The Honorable Archer Converse.  Leaves that clubhouse then, does he?”

“Regular to the tick of the clock.”

“Citizen Drew, hold your club in session until half past nine or a little later.  My experience with those meetings is that you always have troubles enough to keep you talking for at least two hours.”

Citizen Drew glanced at the face of Farr and then at the big door of the Mellicite Club.

“You don’t mean to say—­”

“I don’t say anything.  I seem to be in a queer state of mind to-night, Citizen Drew.”  Again there was an odd note of raillery in his voice.  “A lot of odd ideas keep coming to me.  Another one had just popped into my head.  That’s all!  Keep your boys at the hall.”

He swung off up the street.

He turned after a few steps and saw the elderly man standing where he had left him.  Drew was a rather pathetic figure there in the brilliantly lighted main thoroughfare, a poor, plain man from the Eleventh Ward of the tenement-houses—­this man who had been striving and struggling, reading and studying, endeavoring to find some way out for the poor people; some relief—­something that would help.  Farr knew what sort of men were waiting in the little hall.  He had attended their meetings.  It was the only resource they understood—­a public meeting.  They knew that the important folks up-town held public meetings of various sorts, and the poor folks had decided that there must be virtue in assemblages.  But nothing had seemed to come out of their efforts in the tenement districts.

Farr stepped back to where Citizen Drew stood.

“I think I will say something to you, after all.  Tell the boys in Union Hall to be patient and I’ll bring the Honorable Archer Converse around this evening.”

He smiled into the stare of blank amazement on the man’s face, flung up a hand to check the stammering questions, and went off up the street.

“A decent man’s conscience will make him keep a promise he has made to a child or to the simple or to the helpless,” Farr told himself.  “I have undertaken a big contract, I reckon, but now that I have put myself on record I’ve got to go ahead and deliver the goods.  At any rate, I feel on my mettle.”  Then he smiled at what seemed to be his sudden folly.  “I think I’ll have to lay it all to those nice old ladies who were foolish enough to put that knight-errant idea into my head,” he said.