Bronx fought Croton incessantly but neither gained a victory. Wily old Aaron Burr stole a march on both with his Manhattan Company and sneaking a bank in under the charter of a waterworks sank a well and purveyed liquid putridity at a high price. It was a great relief to RoBards when the Crotonians gained the upper hand in 1833, for it left his Bronx to purl along in leafy solitudes undammed. But it took two years to bring the project to a vote and then the majority was only seventeen thousand Ayes to six thousand Nos. Just after the skyrockets of the Fourth of July died down, the engineers went out into Westchester to plant their stakes, outlining the new lake that the dam would form, and the pathway of the aqueduct from the Croton to the Harlem. This row of posts billowing up hill and down alongside the Hudson stretched like a vast serpent across the homes and farms and the sacred graveyards of villages and towns and old families. It was the signal for a new war. The owners of the land fell into two classes: those who would not let the water pass through their demesnes at any price, and those who sought to rob the city by unwarranted demands. The farmers seemed to RoBards to comport themselves with dignity and love of their own soil, though Chalender denounced them for outrageous selfishness in preferring the integrity of their estates to the health of a vast metropolis. But RoBards saw through Chalender’s lofty patriotism. Chalender could not unload his own land upon the city unless the whole scheme were established, and Chalender’s price was scandalously high. The stakes were not yet nearly aligned when an almost unequaled frost turned the buxom hills to granite overnight. It seemed that the havoc which this high emprise was to forestall had been purposely held in leash by the ironic fiends until the procrastinating city had drawn this parallel of stakes, this cartoon of an aqueduct. For almost immediately the cataclysm broke. The idleness enforced upon the engineers by the evil weather drove most of them back to town, Harry Chalender among them. And now he dragged Patty into that vortex of dissipation for which the city was notorious. Dancing, drinking, theatre-going, riotous sleigh-rides, immodest costumes, and dinners of wild revel gave the moralists reason to prophesy that God would send upon the wicked capital fire from the skies—as indeed He did in terrible measure. Harry Chalender began to follow Patty about and to encounter her with a regularity that ceased to resemble coincidence. There was gossip. One of the slimy scandal-mongering newspapers well-named _The Hawk and Buzzard_ printed a blind paragraph in which RoBards recognized his own case.