“Gentlemen, inasmuch as Mr. Hammond had to catch a train and could not make a long speech, I’ve been asked to go on with it.”
Thereupon the vaudeville artist launched into a parody of a political speech that in a few minutes had restored the crowd to hilarious good humor. At length the orchestra struck up “Home, Sweet Home,” and the crowd filed out, most of them convinced that the whole episode had been a bit of horseplay staged to give a light touch to a successful occasion.
II.
Boss Quaid was chuckling contentedly as he entered his limousine with Forsythe, Barney Fogarty, and Jim Neenan. He had expressed his satisfaction and his gratitude to the manipulators by giving the dignitaries the slip, with the exception of Forsythe, and inviting the trio to supper at his favorite roadhouse where neither henchmen nor reporters would search him out.
“Now we’re all set,” Barney assured Forsythe as they rolled away. “There were three or four possible bad eggs there tonight, Hammond among ’em. Hammond was the only one that hatched, and we squashed him before he got out of the shell, laughed him to death.”
“Barney’s right,” Quaid agreed.
But for once Barney was wrong. How amazingly, mysteriously wrong, he learned two and a half hours later, when the party stopped at an all-night news-stand on the way home and bought copies of the Press and the Sentinel, the capital city’s two morning papers.
MARTIN W. HAMMOND
THROWS HAT IN RING
This was the flaring headline that smote his eyes from one front page, at the top of the dinner story.
HAMMOND FLOUTS FORSYTHE,
DECLARES HIMSELF CANDIDATE