With that he was off for the docks again, leaving me neither to hear nor to think of him thereafter for a stirring handful of years. It occurred to me as strange, even in a day when I gave less time to thought than I do now, that my first impulse as an alderman should be one of revenge. There was that police captain, who, in the long ago, offered insult to Anne, when she came to beg for my liberty. “Better get back to your window,” said he, “or all the men will have left the street!” The memory of that evil gibe had never ceased to burn me with the hot anger of a coal of fire, and now I resolved for his destruction. When I told Big Kennedy, he turned the idea on his wheel of thought for full two minutes. “It's your right,” said he at last. “You've got the ax; you're entitled to his head. But say! pick him up on proper charges; get him dead to rights! That aint hard, d'ye see, for he's as crooked as a dog's hind leg. To throw him for some trick he's really turned will bunco these reform guys into thinkin' that we're on th' level.” The enterprise offered no complexities. A man paid that captain money to save from suppression a resort of flagrant immorality. The bribery was laid bare; he was overtaken in this plain corruption; and next, my combinations being perfect, I broke him as I might break a stick across my knee. He came to me in private the following day. “What have I done?” said he. “Can I square it?” “Never!” I retorted; “there's some things one can't square.” Then I told him of Anne, and his insult. “That's enough,” he replied, tossing his hand resignedly. “I can take my medicine when it's come my turn.” For all that captain's stoicism, despair rang in his tones, and as he left me, the look in his eye was one to warm the cockles of my heart and feed my soul with comfort. “Speakin' for myself,” said Big Kennedy, in the course of comment, “I don't go much on revenge. Still when it costs nothin', I s'ppose you might as well take it in. Besides, it shows folks that there's a dead-line in th' game. The wise ones will figger that this captain held out on us, or handed us th' worst of it on th' quiet. The example of him gettin' done up will make others run true.” Several years slipped by wherein as alderman I took my part in the town's affairs. I was never a talking member, and gained no glory for my eloquence. But what I lacked of rhetoric, I made up in stubborn loyalty to Tammany, and I never failed to dispose of my vote according to its mandates.