By telegraph, telephone, motor-car, and messenger, he had to be in perpetual touch with every election-precinct in the city and with every important Leaguer in every precinct. He had to answer hundreds of letters, see hundreds of callers, give out scores of interviews, compose and deliver from three to a dozen speeches a day to as many different sorts of audiences. There was nothing considered too small to merit his attention, nothing too large to be beyond his watchfulness. Once every day he was in each quarter of New York, and he was nowhere for more than half an hour at a time. Only his elaborately acquired calm and his inherited strength of constitution saved him from nervous breakdown. Except for them, his burning sincerity, his zeal, and the endless calls made upon these characteristics, would have driven him to a hospital. Even so, his body grew leaner and his face deeply lined. He was fighting with every ounce of muscle and every particle of brain. For now, as in every alley and at every turning, his political progress revealed some new though ever partial phase of the power he attacked, Luke saw all that he hated centered in one figure, originated by one mind. He individualized Evil. That entire meshwork of wrong which he was trying to tear into shreds, he traced directly to the plump, pale man in russet brown, the malignant thing with the hairy hands and beady eyes, the creature that he had once seen crouched at the end of a mahogany table in a Wall Street skyscraper, from the windows of which the maze of streets resembled the strands of a web with men and women struggling on them like entangled flies. Of all the fine and fatal threads that were snaring alike the helpless and the strong, what threads were not spun by _him_? Of all the corruption that was poisoning the country and infecting the ideals of the Republic, what was there that did not proceed from his fangs? Luke seemed to see it all now—was certain that he saw it—with awful clarity. The Rollins letters, the interview in Wall Street, the action of the banks, and Osserman’s hint from the City Chamberlain, the part played by the street-girl, the raid by the police, the talks with Stein and the daily partial liftings of the political curtain: these, reviewed in the lurid glow of the campaign, confirmed the accumulated gossip of years, corroborated every wild story that came to him on the teeming battlefield: of bribery and thieving, of perjury and murder, of all the crimes that men have known, each committed again and again and again—safely committed in the dark, cravenly done under the protection of bought-and-paid-for law. What mattered now this power’s culture? What mattered its benefactions, its colleges for the ignorant, its hospitals for the ill? As Luke saw them now, these were only dust for the eyes of the public, cheap peace-offerings for intricate wrongs. The good could be counted on the fingers of the hand, the evil was as the sands of the sea.