"Why don't you fire him from his position as police commissioner?" suggested Brennan.
The mayor stopped short on the invisible path he had been pacing back and forth across his office.
"Brennan," he said, "I thought you had more sense than to suggest a thing like that. What reason could I give for firing him?"
"Say it's for the good of the service, that's all."
"And give him a chance to wail that I fired him because I am afraid of him, that I did it in desperation to save myself. Why, it would give him 10,000 votes of sympathy. No, Brennan, I must get something real to show that Gibson and 'Gink' Cummings are partners."
He turned and walked to the window, placing his hands on both sides of it, and leaned forward, his arms supporting him as he looked down into the busy traffic on Broadway. It was a position similar to that he had taken when John first met him, when he vowed to expose Gibson's alliance with Cummings, but the shoulders drooped and the outlines of his figure, silhouetted against the light streaming in the window suggested great bodily and mental weariness.
"Is it possible that I'm to go down to defeat, to disgrace, to ignominy, at the hands of such a despicable rascal?" he said, without turning, as though he was speaking to himself. "Is this to be my reward—my end? Are the people of my city to be led like blind sheep into a carnage of crime and graft?"
Above the roar of the traffic in the street below the strident voice of a newsboy, shouting his immature conception of the most important news in the latest editions of the afternoon papers, came up to them.
"Gibson says de mayor's de bunk?" he shrieked. "Just out—pa—p—er!"
The voice from the street broke the tense silence that had followed the mayor's soliloquy. He turned from the window quickly and strode back to his desk and the suggestion of weariness dropped from him like a cloak and he emerged, alert, taut, energetic, in fighting trim.