"Why didn’t you telephone sooner?" Forbes demanded. "It’s awful! I sent for doctors and nurses. I’ve been trying everywhere to get you. There’s one man—I couldn’t find you anywhere—I don’t know——" Luke gritted his teeth. "Haven’t you ’phoned for more police?" he asked. "Of course I have; but the Commissioner said it wasn’t anything but a street-fight." "Then I’ll try the Mayor." "I have done that, Huber." "What did he say?" "He said—you would hardly believe it—he said that these matters were the Commissioner’s business." §7. Luke went himself to the Commissioner and the Mayor, and was given the answers that Forbes had been given. The Commissioner said that he had the reports of his patrolmen, and that these spoke of the matter as trivial when it happened and described it as now ended. In the Mayor’s office he was told: "I have to depend on the word of my Commissioner." Luke spent the remainder of the afternoon trying by long-distance telephone to reach the executive office at Albany. When he got an answer, it was from the Governor’s secretary, and was to the effect that he now expected: no troops could be called out for service in any county of the State until the local civil authorities asked for them. §8. That night, when there was a lull in the turmoil around the factory, Luke and Forbes sat late in the library of Forbes’s house, trying to devise some plan to save the situation. It was two o’clock in the morning when Luke walked into the darkened hall; but there Betty’s warm arms were around his neck, and Betty’s voice was whispering in his ear: "It will come out all right. I know it will come out all right, because _we’re_ right." He kissed her. "I hope I do better at this than I did in politics," he said. "I haven’t had time to tell you, but I lost there, dear." "No, you didn’t." He felt her hair brush his cheek as she shook her head in contradiction. "No, you didn’t. You had your choice between doing what was right and what was wrong. The only way to win was the way they thought was losing. But you did what was right—and so it was they that lost, and it was my brave man that won!" *CHAPTER XV* Something had gone wrong again with the head of that office in the Wall Street skyscraper where George Washington watched the stock-ticker and where the windows looked down on filmy streets full of figures bobbing like entangled flies: the plump man in brown, the man with the pointed teeth and the beady eyes, was once more absent. The slight cold that the doctors mentioned, the catarrhal affection, had returned; the mucous membranes of the throat were re-inflamed; the malady that no newspaper gave a name to renewed its war.