The old man sprang to his feet, shivering as with the ague. He shook impotent, furious fists, his pale eyes glaring. "Damn you!" he cried, "I won't do it! Never! never! do you understand,--you--devil?" Shaughnessy's hand closed on an object on his desk. He rose, shaking a bundle of documents in his caller's face. "I understand," he muttered menacingly, "and--you understand. You understand that you will serve as the next mayor of this city--or you will serve time!" The old man fell into his chair and buried his face in his hands, while Shaughnessy smiled, his eyes alight with malice. CHAPTER VII LONELINESS A big figure arose from a desk at the opposite side of the room. Glenwood handed in a bulky wad of matter to be read and strolled over to O'Byrn's desk. Throwing himself into a convenient chair, he produced his cigar case. They lighted weeds and sat for a time in congenial if smoky silence. It was Micky's night off, but it was early. He was loitering about the office for a few moments before leaving to fulfill an engagement that had become usual. He now sat regarding Glenwood appreciatively. What a man he was, to be sure! He sat at indolent ease, his feet on Micky's desk, hands clasped behind his handsome blonde head, staring dreamily far beyond the littered room. He wore no coat. Micky marked the deep chest, the swell of the splendid muscles outlined beneath the folds of the soft outing shirt, the well set neck. There was the suggestion, none the less strong in repose, of mingled virility and grace. Strength of great scope was here, strength that had once against odds rescued him, O'Byrn, from an unpleasant predicament. How puny was he, O'Byrn, by contrast, physically--and morally. Ah, but that last thought stung! For here was a man who was thoroughly master of himself, without being a milksop. His was no pedestal. He was one of the boys, yet liberty did not spell license with him. There was for him no painful crawl up a slippery toboggan of renewed intentions, following a wild, shooting descent that had left him gasping and breathless at the bottom. Glenwood's was the absolutely perfect mechanism of the normal. Tough fibred, richly endowed in mental, moral and physical equipment from long generations of right livers, how different was his lot from O'Byrn's, cursed at the outset with a vicious appetite which had been fostered from the beginning by the man who had bequeathed it; hampered, too, with an indifferent physique that rendered the more hopeless the boy's struggles with his mastering vice. True, after all, mused Micky bitterly, that men are created equal in only limited senses.