May 28:—The Mayor is winning. Simply by giving everyone a ride who can possibly be persuaded to ride, he has outnumbered in one day, by actual count of temporary flyers, the active Boone constituency, and what is called: “The Moral Issue” has completely disappeared. But Boone turns today to a personal issue. He gives all possible attention through coffee-house henchmen, and openly, in _The Boone Ax_, to the discrediting of “Crawling Jim.” And true or false, the stories are whispered around the town about Jim that will spoil him as a political asset and ruin his glory as the punisher of “Beau Nash.” He has been guilty of certain cruelties to animals and children. It is whispered that the police have clearly established it. They are keeping the records. They are hoping they may some day have the freedom to act. And so Boone gets Jim “where he lives,” for rumor hurts Jim to the soul. Since he is himself a peddler of little scandals, it is his world. He is said to be a carrier of everything in the way of poisoned small-talk to that strange beauty, Mara, the daughter of Singapore. When the small talk turns against him, as he gathers it, he droops and mopes indeed for an hour or two. But he is still president of the Robin Redbreast Club and he takes his consolation this afternoon by extraordinary evolutions in the air, near where he killed Beau Nash. He goes through as many curves as a pigeon bred for flying tricks. And it is said on the street that the Robin Redbreast Club will keep him in office out of respect for his luck. He has always been a reckless but endlessly successful trick flyer. So by midnight Jim has won the cheap rumor battle in the coffee houses and Yellow Dance Halls and drug stores. And why not? Boone should be in better business. May 29:—The town wakes up this morning to find the Snobs asserting themselves again, though now it is the parents and grandparents that are more at fault, not the high school aviators. The families on the list Boone has published, along with their sympathizers, have in the night put gold-foil on conspicuous portions of the cupolas of their cottage roofs or the roofs of their club houses. May 30:—There is a scandal in the Microscope and Telescope Factory. Old Montague Rock is one of the chief men of the factory. Patricia Anthony, the Proud, is leading a strike against him because of a certain contract, which he long ago secured, for lenses which have been delivered for over a year in a steady stream to a firm on the western coast. It now transpires that these people were agents for the Singaporian Government and Patricia Anthony is morally certain, Singapore is using these lenses in the new mysterious war machine which is a step beyond the lens gun. The Singaporians are presumed to be laying up these machines already, for the day of Singaporian rebellion against the World Government.