When RoBards, after his three days’ campaign with the Fire Kings, got home at length, he learned that Patty had returned to her father’s house. She left him a note, explaining that her father was almost out of his mind. Hurrying to Park Place, RoBards found that old Jessamine was indeed maniac with the sudden change in his fortunes. His very prudence had mocked him. He had been a man who combined rigid economy with daring experiment. He had pushed agents into China and chartered ships to bring home his wares. Caution had made him build his warehouse expensively of fireproof materials. He had been extravagant in nothing so much as in the equipment against flames and in the amount of insurance he carried. Yet fate had made a fool of him. Officials of the city had authorized officers of the navy to set off kegs of powder in his temple and scatter his wealth to the winds. And the flames had turned aside from the building in front of his! That had been surrendered to the fire, yet it stood now unharmed, mocking the obscene garbage of the Jessamine Company. And he could collect no fire insurance for his unburned ruins, despite the premiums he had squandered. He was too sick with disgust to attend the mass meeting of citizens called by the mayor, and stirred to courage by James Gore King. His name was left off the Dudley Selden committee of one hundred and twenty-five important men. The city voted a loan of six million dollars to the insurance companies for cash payments, but he received never a cent. He could not even accept a dole from the moneys subscribed by sympathetic Boston, Philadelphia, and other towns. His very home was no longer his own; creditors who had been proud to honor his notes were now wolves at his door. In his frenzy he cast all the blame on RoBards, and roared that his own son-in-law had led the vandals into his warehouse. Such excuses as RoBards could improvise were but turpentine to his flaming wrath. When RoBards offered the old man the shelter of his home in St. John’s Park, Jessamine was a very Lear of white-haired ire. But he accepted the proffer of Tuliptree Farm, because it would take him far from the scene of his downfall; it would afford him a wintry asylum where he could gnaw on his own bitterness. Before he set forth into the snowy hills of Westchester, he made one stern demand upon RoBards: “You call yourself a lawyer. Well, prove it, sir, by suing this diabolic city for its wanton destruction of my property!” To appease him RoBards consented to undertake the case. He entered suit against the mayor and the aldermen in the Superior Court for two hundred thousand dollars. CHAPTER X Both fire and water conspired to embitter RoBards against New York, for both had laid personal hands upon his home and his career, invaded his very soul.