Several times in the past attempts had been made to wrest the district leadership from him, but in all those cases his opponents had been so weak, and their campaigns so poorly organized, that he had been able to defeat them without much effort. The Honorable Sugden Lawrence, he had reason to believe, would prove a much more formidable foeman. The ex-judge possessed a personality which made him an opponent to be feared even by so powerful a boss as Samuel J. Coggswell. Therefore the latter had spoken with the utmost sincerity when he told Jake Hines that he would miss him. He feared that in order to win, much dirty work would have to be done; and Boss Coggswell disliked dirty work--when he had to do it himself. It would have been so much pleasanter to have the indefatigable Jake on hand to take care of the hiring of “guerrillas,” the “fixing” of election inspectors, and various other details of a similarly sordid and disagreeable character which Jake had always taken care of so faithfully. Perhaps it is needless to say that the enforced absence of his trusty helper did not increase the boss’ good will toward the man who was directly responsible for that calamity. Coggswell promised himself grimly that if the primary election went his way Mr. Owen Sheridan’s chances of holding down his job as post-office inspector wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel. True, Sheridan was protected--to some extent, by the civil-service laws; but that fact did not worry Coggswell. He had his own little ways for overcoming such obstacles. It was not only a desire for vengeance which actuated him; fear and self-preservation were also his motives. He considered it positively dangerous to have Sheridan remain in the detective branch of the postal service, for there were certain transactions past, present, and contemplated, with which he was closely identified, which would not bear the scrutiny of a post-office inspector. He was afraid, however, to bring about the dismissal of the man before primary-election day; he knew that if he did so Judge Lawrence would not fail to make political capital out of the incident; so he decided to wait until the contest for the district leadership was over. In the meantime, for safety’s sake, he contrived to have Sheridan transferred from the New York district. This he could bring about without laying himself open to the charge of persecution. A little wire pulling at Washington, and, without Boss Coggswell’s name being mentioned in the matter at all, Owen received peremptory orders to report to the chief inspector of the San Francisco branch.