clipped closely enough to show the lines of a bull-dog jaw, and eyes that
had the gift, priceless to the public speaker, of seeming to hold every
onlooking eye in the audience. Unlike his backers in the awkward
semicircle, he wore a professional long coat; and the hands that marked
his smoothly flowing sentences were slim and shapely.

"Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent.

"Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter--a
charter member of the Gaston wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you into
believing in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you in
the back for a ten-dollar bill in the next," was the rejoinder.

Loring nodded, and again became a listener. Hawk's speech was merely
introductory, and it was nearing its peroration.

"Fellow citizens, this occasion is as auspicious as it is significant.
When the people rise in their might to say to tyranny in whatsoever form
it oppresses them, 'Thus far and no farther shalt thou go,' the night is
far spent and the light is breaking in the east.

"Since the day when we first began to wrest with compelling hands the
natural riches from the soil of this our adoptive State, political
trickery in high places, backed by the puissant might of alien
corporations, has ground us into the dust.

"But now the time of our deliverance is at hand. Great movements give
birth to great leaders; and in this, our holy crusade against oppression
and tyranny, the crisis has bred the man. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the
pleasure of presenting to you the speaker of the evening: our friend and