yelled from the floor: "He's right! I'm for Alfreed!" and the cry was repeated in the hall.

At this the doctor frowned heavily on the audience. "Enough of this!" he barked. "You, my friend, have seen the menace of this wildman loose in our midst. I say to you: 'Hunt him down! Clark Stevens must be destroyed!'"

The abrupt switch in logic disturbed the crowd not at all. For a hundred years or more they had lain fallow, ready for the first demagogue who came along with a phony cause and a platform technique. In a tremendous burst of enthusiasm the doctor was cheered off the platform and carried through the streets in a spontaneous demonstration, and the cry of the first man to rise had been mutilated into "Right for Alfreed!" which rang all over the city by nightfall.

Deposited at his doorstep the doctor made a gracious speech, referring to the menace of Clark Stevens, and, passing a hand before his eyes, begged to be excused. Once in his apartment, Alfreed fell into a chair, astonished at himself. As he analyzed the matter there had been a psychological necessity to excuse his own mistake by violence misdirected, or not directed at all. But it was a good thing at any rate. Knowing in his heart of hearts that what he told himself was not true, he pledged himself to release what he already thought of as "his men" as soon as the menace of Stevens was eliminated. Then he went to bed. But all night there rang beneath his window the cry or challenge: "Right for Alfreed!"

When he woke, it was to find that his men had been working fast, ranging over the city, spreading the news to their friends--news of this wonderful Dr. Alfreed who had emerged from public obscurity to denounce the dangerous maniac who had been permitted to menace the city by the softlings in administrative control.

His door-signal flashed. "Come," he called luxuriously from his bed. "'Lo, Winters," he greeted an agitated colleague who strode into the room.

"Alfreed," snapped Winters, "how did you do it? And how are you going to stop them? It isn't healthy, this concentration on the death of one man."

"One ruthless, murdering maniac," said the doctor coldly. "Do you call unhealthy the operation that removes a cancer?" He sat up in bed and brought his fist down emphatically on his knee. "No! The day that Clark Stevens dies I shall rest from my labors, but until then it must and shall be my only thought--and not mine alone but all the people in the city. 

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