"I dare say you're correct," said Wesley Dyker. With a single blow of the whip, the master had demonstrated his mastery.
O'Malley smoked a while longer in silence.
"Now then," he at last pursued, "about this magistracy. You think the boys'll stand for you?"
"I think they will," Wesley replied, with humble mien, but rising assurance. "And I think it ought to make the ticket look better to the uptown people to have—if you will pardon my saying so—my sort of name on it."
O'Malley grunted.
"Don't you worry about the looks of the ticket, or the value of your sort of a name," he said. "The kid-glove game is played out; it's only the monkey who's always hopping about on his family-tree."
Dyker's courage ebbed again, but he knew that to stand upon his dignity was to be overthrown.
"At all events," he persisted, "I am pretty well known hereabouts by this time, and I think honestly that I am pretty well liked."
O'Malley nodded. He knew more about that than Dyker knew. Dyker had, with more or less direct assistance from O'Malley's own headquarters, already won some prominence for himself, and had been of some use to the organization, in that sort of legal-practice which is a highly specialized branch of the profession on the lower East Side. The purpose of that branch is simply the protection of the criminal, especially the criminal engaged in the procuring or confining of slave-girls, but its methods, far from being unusual, are merely a daring extension of the methods that, within the last decade, have increased in popularity among the seemingly more respectable practitioners. Evidence is manufactured or destroyed, according to immediate needs; favorable witnesses are taught favorable testimony; postponements are secured until a politically indebted judge is on the bench. There follows a formal bellowing against what are called invasions of inalienable personal rights, and then there comes a matter-of-course acquittal. With Dyker's ability in this sort of work O'Malley was thoroughly familiar; for this man's party-services he was sufficiently grateful, and with the chance of the lawyer's rise to a popularity that would be of still further help he was well satisfied.
"If you'd be elected," he at length reflectively remarked, "you'd have a mighty responsible position, Dyker."