DISTRICT-ATTORNEY WICKSON
to keep me from bothering the thieves, and so the thieves are going to 'get' me."
"Oh, come off," Arnett broke in. "Bradford isn't that bad."
"Surely not. I'm putting it very crudely, of course. I'm willing to believe that Bradford doesn't see it that way at all. He probably feels himself as much the victim of conditions as I do. He'll tell you that the thieves run the town—that he has to operate the street railway—and that he couldn't operate it unless he stood in with them. See? He'll tell you that the fault is with the citizens who won't be bothered with politics—who leave the thieves to take that trouble. But you'll notice that when I try to rouse those citizens to make them take an interest, I get notice from Bradford, through Bill Toole to McPhee Harris, that I can't be renominated."
The street was busy with trolley-cars, wagons, hurrying people, and the displays and activities of trade—the business of a life from which Arnett's mind was as much withdrawn as any artist's. Usually he walked through it unseeingly, hurrying to escape it. He looked at it now as the public life in which Wickson played a leading part, and blinked at it, feeling himself asked for advice about it, and bewildered to find that he could not see below its shifting surface. He shook his head.
"I don't know. I don't know what to make of it," he complained.
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