As I pored over the possibilities, I could discern no present argument in his favor. He himself might be morally sure of machine protection for those men of Barclay Street. But to the public he could offer no practical proof. Should he tell the ruin of young Van Flange, no one would pay peculiar heed. Such tales were of the frequent. Nor would the fate of young Van Flange, who had employed his name and his fortune solely as the bed-plates of an endless dissipation, evoke a sympathy. Indeed those who knew him best--those who had seen him then, and who saw him now at his Mulberry Traction desk, industrious, sober, respectable in a hall-bedroom way on his narrow nine hundred a year, did not scruple to declare that his so-called ruin was his regeneration, and that those card-criminals who took his money had but worked marvels for his good. No; I could not smell defeat in the contest coming down. I was safe for the next election; and the eyes of no politician, let me tell you, are strong enough to see further than the ballot just ahead. On these facts and their deductions, while I would have preferred peace between the Reverend Bronson and the machine, and might have conceded not a little to preserve it, I based no present fears of that earnest gentleman, nor of any fires of politics he might kindle. And I would have come through as I forejudged, had it not been for that element of the unlooked-for to enter into the best arranged equation, and which this time fought against me. There came marching down upon me a sudden procession of blood in a sort of red lockstep of death. In it was carried away that boy of my door, Melting Moses, and I may say that his going clouded my eye. Gothecore went also; but I felt no sorrow for the death of that ignobility in blue, since it was the rock of his murderous, coarse brutality on which I split. There was a third to die, an innocent and a stranger; however, I might better give the story of it by beginning with a different strand. In that day when the Reverend Bronson and Inspector McCue worked for the condemnation of those bandits of Barclay Street, there was one whom they proposed as a witness when a case should be called in court. This man had been a waiter in the restaurant which robbed young Van Flange, and in whose pillage Gothecore himself was said to have had his share. After Inspector McCue was put away in the Bronx, and the Reverend Bronson made to give up his direct war upon the dens, this would-be witness was arrested and cast into a cell of the station where Gothecore held sway. The Reverend Bronson declared that the arrested one had been seized by order of Gothecore, and for revenge. Gothecore, ignorant, cruel, rapacious, violent, and with never a glimmer of innate fineness to teach him those external decencies which go between man and man as courtesy, gave by his conduct a deal of plausibility to the charge.