General Robert Bruce Lignum, a perfectly innocent and well-meaning victim, was decisively beaten in his race for the United States senatorship. Mr. Blake saw to that personally--Mr. John W. Blake, who figured that in some way he had been double-crossed and who, having in silence nursed his grudge to keep it warm, presently took his revenge upon Foxman's employer, since he saw no way, in view of everything, of hurting Foxman without further exposing himself. Also, to save himself and his associates from the possibility of travelling to state's prison, Mr. Blake found it incumbent upon him to use some small part of his tainted fortune in corrupting a district attorney, who up until then had been an honourable man with a future before him of honourable preferment in the public service. So, though there were indictments in response to public clamour, there were no prosecutions, and the guilty ones went unwhipped of justice. And after a while, when the popular indignation engendered by _The Clarion's_ disclosure had entirely abated, and the story was an old story, and the law's convenient delays had been sufficiently invoked, and a considerable assortment of greedy palms at Albany and elsewhere had been crossed with dirty dollars, the East Side merger, in a different form and with a different set of dummy directors behind it, was successfully put through, substantially as per former programme. But by that time the original holders of Pearl Street trolley stocks had all been frozen out and had nothing to show for their pains and their money, except heart pangs and an empty bag to hold. Bogardus, the lobbyist, and old Pratt, the class leader, and Lawyer Murtha, the two-faced--not one of whom, judged by the common standards of honest folk, had been actuated by clean motives--enjoyed their little laugh at Blake's passing discomfiture, but afterward, as I recall, they patched up their quarrels with him and each, in his own special field of endeavour, basked once more in the golden sunshine of their patron's favour, waxing fat on the crumbs which dropped from the greater man's table. Hemburg's reward for striving, however feebly, to cure himself of the curse of liquor was that promptly he lost his place on _The Clarion's_ staff--Mr. Foxman personally attended to that detail--and because of his habits could not get a job on any other paper and became a borrower of quarters along Park Row.