"Paralysis involving the vocal
organs. He will never speak again."
And he didn't. He was buried in the Potter's Field the next week.
For once I was too late. The story of the last of my barons remains
untold until this hour.
And now that this chapter, somewhat against my planning, has become
wholly the police reporter's, I shall have to bring up my _cause
celebre_, though that came a long while after my getting into
Mulberry Street. I shall not have so good an opportunity again. It
was the occasion of the last of my many battles for the mastery;
but, more than that, it illustrates very well that which I have
been trying to describe as a reporter's public function. We had
been for months in dread of a cholera scourge that summer, when,
mousing about the Health Department one day, I picked up the weekly
analysis of the Croton water and noticed that there had been for
two weeks past "a trace of nitrites" in the water. I asked the
department chemist what it was. He gave an evasive answer, and my
curiosity was at once aroused. There must be no unknown or doubtful
ingredient in the water supply of a city of two million souls.
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