ing trickle down his face. He
was beaten.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE FORCES THAT CONQUER

When the tenderloin learned that Martin Druce had been released on a bond
for thirty thousand dollars, the tenderloin laughed.

The laugh was low and cunning and there was more than the suggestion of a
sneer in it. It rang from one end of the district to the other,
convulsing dive-keepers who for days had been as funereal as undertakers.
It sounded in dance halls and bagnios, in barrooms and gambling dens.

It eddied up into Chicago's higher air and found an echo in clubs
frequented by distinguished financier-politicians.

John Boland had won! The brain that had never failed had proved its
resourcefulness once again in this hour of dire trouble. Druce was gone.
He would never be heard of in Chicago again. It had cost thirty thousand
dollars, but what was thirty thousand dollars? Mary Randall and her
crusaders were crushed. Anson was dead. Druce was gone.

What mattered it now how much evidence Mary Randall had gathered in
against the Cafe Sinister! There would be a period of quiet. The
tenderloin would carefully observe all the proprieties. Then the case of
the State against Martin Druce would be called and Druce would not
respond to that summons. And so Mary Randall's sensation would die an
unnatural death--death from smothering, death from lack of expression.
Afterward the tenderloin would resume its old operations. No wonder the
tenderloin laughed!

John Boland felt none of this exultation when he returned to his office
on the morning following Druce's release. An indefinable oppression
weighed him down. He had won, he knew--and yet the air about him seemed
charged with prescience of evil. He tried to shake it off and could not.
He was anxious, too, about Harry. Why, he asked himself, should he worry
about an ungrateful son. John Boland did not know the answer, yet the
answer was very plain. His son Harry was his own flesh and blood and no
man can cut himself off from his own flesh and blood without feeling some
sort of reaction.

John Boland, the man of brain and iron was only human after all. He loved
his son.

He was in a state of gloomy meditation when he opened his desk and
resumed his day's work. The telephone bell jangled constantly. The
councillors who had participated in the conference over Druce's case
which had resulted so happily were calling up to c