“Tell us what it is, Jerome!”

“The Bottoms ... you know how rotten it is down there ... nigger whorehouses ... every other house a bootlegger’s joint ... blind pigs ... blind tigers, for the students....

“We might show up the whole affair....

“—­how the city administration thrives on the violation of the law from that quarter ... how the present administration depends on crime and the whiskey elements to keep it in power by their vote....

“That would be starting something!”

“I should say it would!” shouted Jack Travers, ablaze with enthusiasm.

“Then we might extend operations,” continued the masterful, incisive Jerome, “and show up how all the drug stores are selling whiskey by the gallon, for ‘medicinal’ purposes, abusing the privilege of the law.”

“But how is all this to be done?”

“Through the Laurelian?”

“No ...  I have a better plan than that ... we might be able to persuade ‘Senator’ Blair and old Sickert, joint editors of the Laurel Globe, to let the Scoop Club run their paper for a day—­just as a college stunt!”

“They’d never stand for it!” I averred, innocently.

“Of course they wouldn’t—­if we let them in on what we were up to!—­for they are staunch supporters of the present administration—­but they won’t smell a rat till the edition is off the press ... and then it will be too late to stop it!”

“In other words,” laughed Travers, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke from his nose, “they’ll think they’re turning over their paper, The Globe, to a bunch of boys to have some harmless fun ... a few sophomoric jokes on the professors, and so forth....

“And they’ll wake up, to find we’ve slipped a real man-size sheet over on them, for the first time in local history!”

“It’ll raise hell’s all I’ve got to say!” sagely commented the prematurely bald “Colonel,” his eyes glinting merrily.

“It’ll be lots of fun,” remarked Travers, characteristically, “and I’m for it, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“That’s not the reason I’m for it; I’m for it for two reasons,” reinforced Jerome Miller magisterially, “first, because it will put the Scoop Club on the map as something more than a mere college boys’ organisation; secondly, because it will lead to civic betterment, if only temporary—­a shaking up where this old burg needs a shaking up ... right at the court house and in the police station....

“But, make no mistake about it,—­it’s going to kick up a big dust!

“Also, remember, no one is going to stand by us ... even the Civic Betterment League, headed by Professor Langworth—­your friend, Johnnie—­will be angry with us—­say our methods are too sensational.

“And the university authorities will say we shouldn’t have done it because it will give the school a black eye ... it will be Ibsen’s Enemy of Society all over again!...”