l had some
strength left in him, raised Gabriel's limp body and carried it from the
room. The woman, meanwhile, stood there inhaling cigarette-smoke and
laughing viciously to herself.

"You easy mutt!" she exclaimed. "Dead baby, room-rent due, wanted to get
home to sister--and you fell for that old gag with whiskers on it!
You're some wise guy all right, all right, I don't think. Well, as a
stall it was a beaut. And I must say I never screamed better in all my
life. And that wallop I handed out, was a peach. If I don't pull down
five hundred for this night's work--"

"Shut up, you ----!" snarled Caffery, as he turned into the stairway.
"Keep that lip o' yours quiet, will you, or--"

The woman stared at him a moment, then laughed insolently and snapped
her smoke-yellowed fingers at him in defiance.

"Mind you show up in court, in the mornin'!" panted the officer,
staggering downstairs under the weight of Gabriel's huge shoulders.

"Better arrest her now," suggested Caffery, "an' hold her."

"You will, like Hell!" retorted the woman.

"Shhh! In one door an' out the other," the second detective whispered in
her ear, as she stood there in the doorway. "I'll see to it you get
fifty extra for _that_!"

"Oh, if that's the game, fine business!" she smiled. "Go to it--I'm your
huckleberry!"

Thus it befell that, while a large and growing crowd observed, under the
arc-light on the corner--a crowd where no fewer than six reporters, all
duly tipped off in advance, were taking notes--Gabriel Armstrong, the
Socialist speaker and leader, was bundled, unconscious, into a patrol
wagon of the City of Rochester; and with him, a drunken-acting harlot,
babbling charges of white-slave extortion and violence against him; and
with them both, several witnesses, who would have sworn that Heaven was
Hell, for five dollars cash in hand.

Thus was the stage set, for the next session of the honorable court.
Thus were the wires pulled. Thus, the prison doors were swung wide open,
and, above all, the honor and the reputation of a man swept to the
garbage-heaps of life.

True, at the morrow's great mass-meeting, there were destined to be
protests and calls for investigation. The Socialist press was destined
to take it up, defend him and demand the truth. But, swamped by a
perfectly overwhelming capitalist press, not only naturally hostile but
in this case already heavily subsidized; shattered by the close-knit,
circumstantial evidence; ha