Though he often trembled, Wesley Dyker, perhaps because his records of any sort were as yet but brief, escaped with a fairly clean skin this Yahoo discharge, but the downpour continued all about him with tremendous vigor and at tremendous cost. The Republican leaders, fully expecting defeat, assessed their supporters just as heavily as if they were certain to triumph, spent much time and more money and no end of breath. The Reformers, under varying factional names, bewildered, sometimes advisedly, the independent voter by here joining one leading party, there endorsing another, and in a third place clamoring for a ballot so split and so subdivided that the average man could in no wise comprehend it when marked. The Socialists, to be sure, went along calmly enough, confessing their numerical weakness and securely seeing in the small increase of the present day the promise of the large majority of the distant morrow. But all the while the Democratic organization thundered an inch forward in the light and ran a mile forward in the darkness by precisely the same powers as were invoked, with so much smaller results, by the Republicans and the Reformers. Not that there was any reason to doubt the organization's victory. There was none. But every organization always insists that, no matter how easy the skirmish, its leaders must so manage that it comes out of the fray to all appearances stronger than it came out of the fray preceding. Each majority must be larger than the last, and so the lists are padded, and the repeaters imported, and the lodging-houses colonized, and the organization, like the frog in La Fontaine's fable, though with less reason, swells and swells against the hour when it shall finally burst. The saloons were crowded; it was freely predicted that, the season being prosperous, votes would go at no lower than two dollars, and, in some quarters and some instances, as high as five dollars apiece. There were some points, however, to which the tide of prosperity had not risen, and one of these was the high tenement of Katie Flanagan. The Irish girl returned there every night a little more discouraged than when she had left its precarious shelter in the morning, as doubtful as ever of Hermann's ability to support a wife, but more doubtful than ever of her own ability to help, should they marry, in the support of the home. At the shop, the work and the hours weighed more and more heavily upon her; they dragged at the heels of her mind when she endeavored to evade the insulting compliments of the callow youths and gray men that strolled by her counter, and they were impedimenta that made it daily more difficult to escape without offense the oily approaches of the dignified Mr. Porter. "Sometimes," she said one evening, as she and Carrie sat over their meager supper, "I begin wonderin' again whether it's worth while runnin' away."