He and his colleagues made New York sweat for its victory. Already the original estimate of the cost of the aqueduct was nearly doubled and three and a half millions added to the amount to be raised. The city was held in check for two years, and in those two years prosperity was lost—the lawless prosperity that had hoisted even bread beyond the reach of the poor and sent them into such a rage that they attacked warehouses where flour was stored, and flinging the barrels to the street, covered the pavements with wheaten snow. Suddenly the banks began to topple, as a house of cards blown upon. A ripple went along the line of banks and every one of them went down. With them went other businesses in an avalanche. Prices shot from the peak to the abyss in a day. The fall of New York was but the opening crash. The whole proud nation fell in the dust, and the hardest times ever known in the New World made the very name of the year 1837 a byword of disaster. The favorite policy of the day was repudiation. Beggars, bankers, merchants, cities, states, blandly canceled their debts by denying them. “Now,” RoBards announced to his clients, “Now we’ve got the old wolf by the throat. His teeth and claws are falling out and he’ll have to let go of us as he is letting go of everything else.” But this was not to be. The great aqueduct that was to rival the works of Rome offered the despondent town a vision and a pride it needed and would not relinquish. It seemed all the more splendid to defy the hardship of the times and rear an edifice that would defy time. If the city were to be buried in poverty, it would at least have left a monument above its head. Even RoBards could not resist the fire of this resolve. After all he was an American, and New York was the American metropolis. And, besides, he was a lawyer and he loved an opponent who knew how to fight and had the guts to fight hard. And so the embattled farmers of Westchester knuckled to the inevitable, and the construction of the aqueduct began in the very hour of the general disaster. The legislature at Albany had all along been coerced by the members from New York City. It had made no difficulty about granting a right of way across the lands of the State Prison. Through this unhappy territory went the Sing Sing Kill, and the kidnapped Croton River must be conveyed across that brook on a great stone bridge, with an arch of eighty-foot span, and twenty-five-foot rise with stout abutments of stone. In the allotments of the first thirteen sections of construction, Harry Chalender secured the Sing Sing field. RoBards would have been glad to see him inside the walls of the penitentiary, or in one of the chained gangs that constructed roads thereabout. But Patty was afraid that some of the desperate convicts might attack him, and she was as anxious for him as if he had gone to war. CHAPTER XI