In a few days occurred the Citizens' convention. A formidable array of men was there; business and professional men, leaders in the city's activities. It was an array which might well set the forces that controlled the city government to worrying. Moreover, real enthusiasm ruled the assemblage, and when Colonel Westlake, in a fiery nominating speech, named Theodore Packard, one of the city's leading merchants, for the mayoralty, thunderous demonstrations attested the temper of the delegates. Under the aggressive leadership of Colonel Westlake, the Fusionists had taken time by the forelock and were first in the field with a strong ticket. Warm hopes were entertained for it this year. Republicans, who were greatly in the minority in the city, had taken the initiative in starting the Fusion movement, which was strengthened by the open avowal of some of the community's best known men, of Democratic allegiance, that they were done with Shaughnessy and his methods. The movement appeared to be gaining in force and bulk, like a snowball rolling down hill, as the hour approached for the Democratic convention, toward which all eyes were now turning. There were indications that the entrenched, corrupt forces which dominated the city were getting ready to invite their own destruction. Was it not Shaughnessy who held the whip hand, and was not Shaughnessy going crazy? Verily, it seemed so, and Shaughnessy, apparently drunk with the power invested in his acquired authority, seemed likely to exercise it to his own destruction. "The man is mad," remarked the leaders of the Citizens' movement, one to the other, and rubbed their hands. For Shaughnessy's candidate for the nomination, the man for whom, as he calmly stated, the convention would, at his word, vote as one man, was so notoriously inadequate, so miserably unfit, that the prospect of his nomination set a resentful growl to circulating even among many of the chosen delegates to the Democratic, otherwise the Shaughnessy, convention. Dare Shaughnessy, so cocksure of his evil hold upon the city, thrust such a candidate upon his party? Certain of Shaughnessy's supporters grumbled, while the leaders of the Citizens' movement ground their teeth and figuratively removed their coats. True to his promise to Shaughnessy, on the occasion of that worthy's call upon the owner of the Courier, Colonel Westlake's paper was firing hot shot at the local boss. The effrontery and callous indifference to all considerations, save his own sweet will, which Shaughnessy was displaying in his choice of a candidate for the mayoralty, was dished up daily, in attractive and toothsome guise, for the Courier's readers. Westlake was certainly pounding Shaughnessy.