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"I knew it, but I wanted you on record as saying it. And above Murtha?" "Why, you know it is Dorgan," replied Dopey, "only, as I say, I can't prove that for you any better than you can." "He has already told about his associates and those he had working under him," explained Carton, turning to us. "Now Langhorne what do you know about him?"
If you want to know the truth, it's because you can make trouble, Carton, that's all. You can't convict him, in the end, because you can't. There's nothing 'on' him. But you can make trouble. We'll win out in the end, of course." "In other words, you think the Reform League has you beaten?" suggested Carton quietly. "No," ejaculated Murtha with an oath. "We don't know but maybe YOU have us beaten.
I called to mind the last time we had seen Murtha, in Carton's office as the bearer of an offer which had made Carton almost beside himself with anger at the thought of the insult that he would compromise with the organization. What a contrast, this, with the Murtha who, in turn, had been trembling with passion at Carton's refusal!
"Too late?" queried Kennedy sharply. "What do you mean?" The man answered promptly as if that were the quickest way to get back to his own errand. "Mr. Murtha escaped from his keepers this evening, just after dinner, and there is no trace of him." Murtha's escape from the sanitarium had again thrown our calculations into chaos.
I wondered whether anything like that might be found to be the fate of the once jovial and popular Murtha, when we found him. I almost forgot our mission in the horror of the place, for, nearby was an even more heartrending sight.
Down below, inside a doorway upon the other side of the street, Sergeant Murtha of the Detective Bureau waited for Doc Barrows to come out and be arrested again.
"I don't know what you're talking about," parried Trencher. "I tell you you've got me wrong. You can't frame me for something I didn't do. If somebody fixed Sonntag it wasn't me. I haven't seen him since yesterday. I'm giving it to you straight." "Oh well, we won't argue that now," said Murtha affably. In his manner was something suggestive of the cat that has caught the king of the rats.
Carton paused before the window and gazed out at the Bridge of Sighs that led from his building across to the city prison. "Why, if it was only that I could 'get' Murtha I'd be happy," he added, turning to us. Murtha, as I have said, was Boss Dorgan's right bower, a clever and unscrupulous politician and leader in a district where he succeeded somehow or other in absolutely crushing opposition.
"A clerk in the employ of the organization who is really a detective employed by the Reform League," groaned Carton, as he told us the story himself the next morning at his office, "has just given us the information that they have prepared a long and circumstantial story about me about my intimacy with Mrs. Ogleby and Murtha and some others.
"I don't know that the cases are parallel," returned Kennedy with an amused smile. Murtha kept his good nature admirably. "Then you would stick your foot out and perhaps lose the race yourself?" persisted Murtha. "I'll relieve Kennedy of answering that," interrupted Carton, "not because I don't think he can do it better than I can, perhaps, but because this is my fight my race."
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