"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; hamstrung and hampered in every way by the power of unlimited money and Tammany pull, the Socialists might as well have tried to sweep back the sea with a broom as save this man from legal crucifixion. Worse still, they themselves, and the beaten strikers with whom they had been fraternizing, got a black eye in the affair; and many an editorial column, many a pulpit, unctuously discoursed thereon. Many an anti-Socialist thug and grafter, loud-mouthed and blatant, bellowed revamped platitudes of "immorality" and "breaking up the home," and the "nation of fatherless children," pointing at Gabriel Armstrong as a shining example of Socialist hypocrisy and filth. Press, law, church, capitalism itself nailed this man and the movement he stood for, to the cross. And the pimps and parasites of the private detective agency chuckled in their well-paid glee. The woman, Gabriel's betrayer, counted her "thirty pieces of silver" and laughed in the foul dark. The police cut a fine melon secretly handed them by Flint; and so, too, did the local papers and more than one local pulpit. So, in Gabriel's grief and woe and desolation, as he sat in his grim cell with aching head, bruised face and bleeding heart, with all his plans now broken, with the very soul within him dead--in this grief and anguish, I say, the foul harpy-brood of Capitalism revelled and rioted like maggots in carrion.