The Scapegoat

It is an adventure book. Barley An hour ago, I'd had to sit at a meeting and take it on the chin from twenty of the town's leading lights who designated themselves The Committee for the Protection of Youth. The outfit was, of course, politically inspired. It had obviously been started by the Mayor and his gang as a means of torpedoing Jones, the publisher of my paper. Jones, you see, had become politically ambitious himself. Since I was the star on Jones' team, they piled on me. Some of the nicer things said about my articles were that they constituted filthy muckraking, were a pattern of irresponsible lies, and were designed principally to smear the incumbent politicos. The children of the town, they cried, were being sacrificed to ruthless ambition. It wouldn't have been so bad if Jones had stuck by me. But he cut and ran. Discretion, he had whispered to me from behind a pudgy hand, was the better part of valor. Then he told them he would discontinue the articles. Now I had first-hand proof of a particularly brutal bit of delinquency. A cruel assault on a poor, helpless old man! Furthermore, I was the hero of the incident!