Scornfully the woman Gabriel had befriended in her seeming misery, spat at him as he lay there stunned and scarcely breathing on the dirty floor.

“And just pipe this, will you, too?” she exulted, holding up the five-dollar bill he had given her.  “And this?” She exhibited his name and address, written on a card.  “In his own writing, boys.  As evidence to hold him on a white slave charge, is this some evidence or isn’t it?”

“Oh, we’ll hold him, all right!” growled the other detective, whose right arm dangled limp, where the chair had struck him.  “The ——­ ——­ of a ——!  He’ll go up for a finif, a five-spot, or I’m a liar!  And once we get him behind bars, good-night!”

He deliberately drew back his heavy boot and kicked Gabriel full in the face.

“You ——­ ——!” he cursed.  “Try to bean me, will you?  Damn you!  You’ve made your last soap-box spiel!”

“Come on, now, boys, out with him, an’ no more rag-chewin’!” the policeman exclaimed.  “Git him in the wagon, an’ away, before a gang piles in here!  You, Caffery, take his feet.  I’ll manage his head.  Jesus, but he’s some big guy, though, the ——­ ——­ of a ——!”

Together, the battered policeman and the detective who still had some strength left in him, raised Gabriel’s limp body and carried it from the room.  The woman, meanwhile, stood there inhaling cigarette-smoke and laughing viciously to herself.

“You easy mutt!” she exclaimed.  “Dead baby, room-rent due, wanted to get home to sister—­and you fell for that old gag with whiskers on it!  You’re some wise guy all right, all right, I don’t think.  Well, as a stall it was a beaut.  And I must say I never screamed better in all my life.  And that wallop I handed out, was a peach.  If I don’t pull down five hundred for this night’s work—­”

“Shut up, you ——!” snarled Caffery, as he turned into the stairway.  “Keep that lip o’ yours quiet, will you, or—­”

The woman stared at him a moment, then laughed insolently and snapped her smoke-yellowed fingers at him in defiance.

“Mind you show up in court, in the mornin’!” panted the officer, staggering downstairs under the weight of Gabriel’s huge shoulders.

“Better arrest her now,” suggested Caffery, “an’ hold her.”

“You will, like Hell!” retorted the woman.

“Shhh!  In one door an’ out the other,” the second detective whispered in her ear, as she stood there in the doorway.  “I’ll see to it you get fifty extra for that!”

“Oh, if that’s the game, fine business!” she smiled.  “Go to it—­I’m your huckleberry!”

Thus it befell that, while a large and growing crowd observed, under the arc-light on the corner—­a crowd where no fewer than six reporters, all duly tipped off in advance, were taking notes—­Gabriel Armstrong, the Socialist speaker and leader, was bundled, unconscious, into a patrol wagon of the City of Rochester; and with him, a drunken-acting harlot, babbling charges of white-slave extortion and violence against him; and with them both, several witnesses, who would have sworn that Heaven was Hell, for five dollars cash in hand.