Mrs. Propbridge being an average woman did what the average woman, thus cruelly circumstanced and sorely frightened and half frantic and lacking advice from honest folk, would do. She paid and she paid and she kept on paying. First off, it appeared the paper had to be recompensed for its initial outlay and for various vaguely explained incidental expenses which it had incurred in connection with the affair. Then, through Townsend, the unknown principal demanded that a larger sum should be handed over as an evidence of good faith on her part before he would consider further negotiations. This, though, turned out to be only the beginning of the extortion processes. When, on this pretext and that, she had been mulcted of nearly fourteen thousand dollars, when her personal bank account had been exhausted, when most of her jewelry was secretly in pawn, when still she had not yet been given the telltale plates, but daily was being tortured by threats of exposure unless she surrendered yet more money, poor badgered beleaguered little Mrs. Propbridge, being an honest and a straightforward woman, took the course she should have taken at the outset. She went to her husband and she told him the truth. And he believed her. He did not stop with believing her; he bestirred himself. He had money; he had the strength and the authority which money gives. He had something else--he had that powerful, intangible thing which among police officials and in the inner politics of city governments is variously known as a pull and a drag. Straightway he invoked it. Of a sudden Chappy Marr was aware that he had made a grievous mistake. He had calculated to garner for himself a fat roll of the Propbridge currency; had counted upon enjoying a continuing source of income for so long as the wife continued to hand over hush money. Deduct the cuts which went to Zach Traynor, alias Townsend, for playing the part of the magazine editor, and to Cheesy Mike Zaugbaum, that camera wizard of newspaper staff work turned crook's helper--Zaugbaum it was who had worked the trick of the photographs--and still the major share of the spoils due him ought, first and last, to run into five gratifying figures. On this he confidently had figured. He had not reckoned into the equation the possibility of invoking against him the Propbridge pull backed by the full force of this double-fisted, vengeful millionaire's rage. Indeed he never supposed that there might be any such pull. And here, practically without warning, he found his influence arrayed against an infinitely stronger influence, so that his counted for considerably less than nothing at all.