Some Yellow Dance Hall people charge that Drug Store Smith, Coffee Kusuko, and Slick Slack Kopensky pocketed the campaign fund of the dug-up gold, to bury it in their own pits. The “dead game sports” of the city roar themselves purple about a “tyrannical minority” and “horrible puritanism” despite the heaviest majority against them that the laughing city ever polled on any issue. They try to spread the wild rumor that “tobacco and coffee will go next and then the theatre.” CHAPTER XIII HOW BLUE-FACED SURTO HURDENBURG IS LYNCHED. HOW THE TOWN SWEEPS ON INTO THE GLORIES OF SUMMER AND JUNE BRIDES AND THE GORGEOUSNESS OF THE TOWERS FROM NIGHTFALL TILL MIDNIGHT. HOW MY LOVE AND I ARE AGAIN ENSNARED BY DEVIL’S GOLD. June 20, 2018:—Last night was presumably the time of the final closing of the halls, at precisely five minutes of twelve. So at five minutes of eight or thereabouts, one of the younger members of the Montague Rock family brings, with great secrecy and under special devices of disguise, a treasury of wine from beneath some cellar of his clan and distributes it to a carefully censored company in the Yellow Hall of the Mythical Velaska. The world begins to burn for those here assembled for their farewell dance. It so happens that Hurdenburg, intoxicated from the mere drink of victory, hears the noise as he passes. He mounts the stairs. He breaks past a guard who has himself had enough drink to make him too easy. But the remainder of the company have had enough to make them too stern and at the very sight of the “puritan” Hurdenburg, they turn to beasts. They have been saying, moreover, that they were going to hang the whole Board of Education and “every other damned hypocrite in town.” They have been denouncing, with some shrieks, “the millions of rank hypocrites” with which America is beset, hypocrites who banish the gold and the alcohol to the cellars and will not permit people to be “honest millionaires” and “honest drunkards” when they please. “What the town really needs,” they have been saying,—and Crawling Jim, slayer of Beau Nash, has been saying it the loudest,—is a vigilance committee. What the “holy city of Springfield needs is a committee to hang with ropes all people who attempt to regulate the religion or the habits of their neighbors.” By religion, Jim probably means the Singaporian religion but does not stress that point.