But he was utterly hopeless. He said that nothing could save him.

A few days later a friend telephoned my office and told me that the French restaurants had paid $10,000 for protection, and that they would not lose their licenses. I rushed over to Marchand's.

Pierre was seated at a side table, his spectacles on his nose, contentedly reading his Chronicle and sipping black coffee, apparently at peace with the world. I said to him, "You look happy, Pierre!"

He replied: "Yes, Mr. Older. My troubles are over. You know, when you are seeck, send for the doctor. Well, and I send for the doctor-Dr. Ruef-and everything is all right."

This confirmed the information I had received over the telephone, and that afternoon the Bulletin printed the story with a flaring headline across the front page. My recollection is that all the other papers permitted me to have this scoop without protest, and made no effort to follow up the story in their own columns.

My old hope of basing some criminal charge against Ruef and Schmitz flamed again and I interested the foreman of the grand jury in it. He employed a well known lawyer and paid him a fee to look up the law and see if there was basis for criminal prosecution in the French restaurant story. The lawyer put in two weeks on the case, wrote a report and sent it in with a bill to the grand jury, advising that nothing could be done.

Meanwhile the Partridge campaign was being waged with great enthusiasm on my part. I did not for a moment believe that he could be defeated. I was so wrought up that I could not believe that labor would stand by men so discredited as Schmitz and Ruef, and it was far out of the range of my thought to imagine that any great number of the business men would vote for them.

Of course, McNab and Wheelan were deeply angered by the enforced nomination of Partridge and there were rumors that secretly they were working against him, but I had no evidence that they were. Certainly they did nothing for

him.

I made what I considered at the time a very strong and effective fight. Partridge campaigned the city, speaking in all the districts. The burden of all his talks was the shameless graft that was going on. The billboards were covered with his utterances, headed always with a big, attractive line, "Partridge Says- The Bulletin hammered ceaselessly at Schmitz.

Even on the day of election I could not be convinced that

Schmitz would win. Many people came to me and told me that they heard nothing but Schmitz sentiment, but I simply would not listen to them. It was impossible for me to realize it.

Even one who was deaf and dumb and blind should have known the truth, but I didn't. I went to my office on election night confident that we would win.

A

PLANNING THE GRAFT PROSECUTION

T SEVEN o'clock that night I sat in my office watching the news of our defeat flashing on the bulletin boards. Schmitz was elected.

It was incredible to me. I could not believe it, though I knew it was true. I could not believe that the people of San Francisco had again chosen the Schmitz-Ruef crowd to rule the city. But they had. The fight was over, and we were overwhelmingly defeated.

Crowds of Schmitz-Ruef enthusiasts were marching up and down the streets beneath the windows, yelling, half mad with excitement. Rockets were going up, whistles were shrieking. It seemed that all the powers of bedlam had broken loose.

Out in the local room the reporters were working at fever heat, checking up the returns and writing bulletins, in a confusion of noise and hurry and excitement. In the earlier part of the evening various men who had been in the fight dropped into my office to say a word or two: "Well, we're beaten." After a while they stopped coming.

Mrs. Older was with me, and Arthur McEwen, a well known writer, who had been helping make the fight on the Bulletin. We did not say much. We just sat there in despair. McEwen said he was through. He would not remain in the rotten town. He was going back to New York the next day. I could not do that. I had to stay.

About 10 o'clock the mob outside, going mad with victory, attacked our office and smashed the windows. They screamed and jeered, howling insults while the glass crashed. When Mrs. Older and I came out of the office we were assailed with yells and hooted all the way down Market street to the door of our hotel.

I went to bed feeling that the world, so far as we were concerned, was a hopeless place to live in. At a late hour I fell asleep, only to be awakened almost immediately by the shouts of bellboys in the corridors. They were calling that the Chronicle building was burning, that all the guests must rise and dress; the fire might extend to the Palace.

We hurriedly threw some thing into a dress suit case and rushed out into the hall. Others were doing the same. With other hastily dressed, excited, half delirious persons

we rushed to the Market street side of the hotel and watched the tower of the Chronicle building burn, a blaze of flames.

A victorious skyrocket had been shot up into the sky, and descending on the Chronicle tower had set it on fire. But against the blackness and excitement of that night it seemed like the breaking loose of unearthly fiends, as though the powers of darkness had clutched the city and were destroying it, as though the end of the world was upon us. Overwrought as I was from the long fight and our defeat, nothing was too wild for me to imagine.

When, after some weeks, my mind returned sanely to the fight that I had lost, I reasoned this way about it: The people of San Francisco did not believe me. They thought I had some ulterior political motive in fighting Ruef and Schmitz so desperately. There was only one way in which they could be convinced that I was telling the truth. I must prove my charges in court.

I recalled a speech Francis J. Heney had made one night during the election, in the Mechanics Pavilion. He had said: "If the people of San Francisco ever want me to come back here and put Abe Ruef in the penitentiary, I'll come."

My mind dwelt on that. I thought, "If I could only get Heney- He was at that time a conspicuous prosecutor of land frauds in Oregon, and had acquired considerable national reputation in this work. If only I could get himThere was the French restaurant case. Something could surely be done with that.

In my mad desire to get Schmitz and Ruef I conceived the idea of going to Washington and asking Heney to come to San Francisco to start a case in the courts. I knew, of course, that he was working for President Roosevelt at that time in the Oregon land fraud cases, but my own obsession was so great that I believed I could convince Roosevelt that the graft in San Francisco was far more important than the land fraud cases in Oregon.

At any rate, I told Mrs. Older and Crothers that I was going. They both said, of course, that it was a crazy thing for me to do, but I was much disturbed and excited, and the trip would perhaps be good for me. They both believed that my plan was an idle dream, that nothing could come from it. But I would rest and become calm, maybe, and the journey could do no harm.

So without letting anyone know, other than Crothers and Mrs. Older and Eustace Cullinan, who at that time was editorial writer on the Bulletin, I departed for Washington.

By appointment I met Heney at luncheon at the Willard Hotel, and told him my mission. I also told him that I thought I had one definite case that he could make good on

in the courts-the French restaurant case. Heney said that he would be glad to come, but that he would want William J. Burns, who was working with him as a detective in the land fraud cases. They were both employed by the government. He asked me to meet Burns in his rooms that afternoon. I did so, and we had a long talk. Burns was eager to come and so was Heney, but Heney said: "We'll need some money."

I said: "How much?"

He thought about a hundred thousand dollars would be as little as we could afford to begin work with. In my desperate frame of mind I said: "Well, I'll take care of that. I'll arrange it."

The following morning I saw President Roosevelt, who said that he was in sympathy with what I was trying to do and would do all in his power to help, but that he could not see his way clear to release Heney and Burns. Perhaps, he said, something could be done later.

With these half-satisfying assurances I returned to San Francisco.

When I had so rashly promised to raise a hundred thousand dollars I had in mind James D. Phelan and Rudolph Spreckels. I came back, revolving all the way across the continent the probabilities of being able to get such a sum from them for this purpose.

Immediately upon my return I had a visitor who gave me the first ray of hope that had shone for me since the election. This visitor was Langdon, the newly elected district attorney.

The Ruef ticket had been made up rather loosely, with a number of men more or less connected with labor as supervisors, and Langdon for district attorney. Langdon up to that time had been superintendent of schools.

His opponent was Henry Brandenstein, one of the strongent figures, from our point of view, in San Francisco. He had rendered excellent service as a supervisor, and as chairman of the finance committee, and had stood for all the reform measures we were interested in. Under the old system of voting, I think undoubtedly he would have defeated Langdon. But, for the first time, in this election voting machines were used, and no one understood them very well. In order to scratch a ticket one had to understand these machines better than most voters could understand them, so, rather than not vote for Schmitz, the voter banged one key and voted the whole ticket in. This was the reason for Langdon's election.

I had not thought much about Langdon, assuming, in