There is one worth-while matter to be the offspring of defeat. A beaten man may tell the names of his friends. On the day after I scored a victory, my ante-rooms had been thronged. Following that disaster to the machine, just chronicled, I sat as much alone as though Fourteenth Street were the center of a pathless waste. However, I was not to be wholly deserted. It was in the first shadows of the evening, when a soiled bit of paper doing crumpled duty as a card was brought me. I glanced at it indifferently. I had nothing to give; why should anyone seek me? There was no name, but my interest flared up at this line of identification: “The Man of the Knife!” CHAPTER XXIII--THE WEDDING OF BLOSSOM GRAY, weather-worn, beaten of years, there in the door was my Sicilian! I observed, as he took a seat, how he limped, with one leg drawn and distorted. I had him in and gave him a chair. My Sicilian and I sat looking one upon the other. It was well-nigh the full quarter of a century since I'd clapped eyes on him. And to me the thing marvelous was that I did not hate him. What a procession of disasters, and he to be its origin, was represented in that little weazened man, with his dark skin, monkey-face, and eyes to shine like beads! That heart-breaking trial for murder; the death of Apple Cheek; Blossom and the mark of the rope;--all from him! He was the reef upon which my life had been cast away! These thoughts ran in my head like a mill-race; and yet, I felt only a friendly warmth as though he were some good poor friend of long ago. My Sicilian's story was soon told. He had fallen into the hold of a vessel and broken his leg. It was mended in so bad a fashion that he must now be tied to the shore with it and never sail again. Could I find him work?--something, even a little, by which he might have food and shelter? He put this in a manner indescribably plaintive. Then I took a thought full of the whimsical. I would see how far a beaten Chief of Tammany Hall might command. There were countless small berths about the public offices and courts, where a man might take a meager salary, perhaps five hundred dollars a year, for a no greater service than throwing up a window or arranging the papers on a desk. These were within the appointment of what judges or officers prevailed in the departments or courtrooms to which they belonged. I would offer my Sicilian for one. And I had a plan. I knew what should be the fate of the fallen. I had met defeat; also, personally, I had been the target of every flinging slander which the enemy might invent. It was a time when men would fear my friendship as much as on another day they had feared my power. I was an Ishmael of politics. The timid and the time-serving would shrink away from me.