Thus was the stage set, for the next session of the honorable court.  Thus were the wires pulled.  Thus, the prison doors were swung wide open, and, above all, the honor and the reputation of a man swept to the garbage-heaps of life.

True, at the morrow’s great mass-meeting, there were destined to be protests and calls for investigation.  The Socialist press was destined to take it up, defend him and demand the truth.  But, swamped by a perfectly overwhelming capitalist press, not only naturally hostile but in this case already heavily subsidized; shattered by the close-knit, circumstantial evidence; hamstrung and hampered in every way by the power of unlimited money and Tammany pull, the Socialists might as well have tried to sweep back the sea with a broom as save this man from legal crucifixion.  Worse still, they themselves, and the beaten strikers with whom they had been fraternizing, got a black eye in the affair; and many an editorial column, many a pulpit, unctuously discoursed thereon.  Many an anti-Socialist thug and grafter, loud-mouthed and blatant, bellowed revamped platitudes of “immorality” and “breaking up the home,” and the “nation of fatherless children,” pointing at Gabriel Armstrong as a shining example of Socialist hypocrisy and filth.

Press, law, church, capitalism itself nailed this man and the movement he stood for, to the cross.  And the pimps and parasites of the private detective agency chuckled in their well-paid glee.  The woman, Gabriel’s betrayer, counted her “thirty pieces of silver” and laughed in the foul dark.  The police cut a fine melon secretly handed them by Flint; and so, too, did the local papers and more than one local pulpit.

So, in Gabriel’s grief and woe and desolation, as he sat in his grim cell with aching head, bruised face and bleeding heart, with all his plans now broken, with the very soul within him dead—­in this grief and anguish, I say, the foul harpy-brood of Capitalism revelled and rioted like maggots in carrion.

None more viciously than old Flint, himself.  None with more brutal joy, more savage satisfaction.  One of the culminant moments of his life, he felt, was on the evening after the dastardly plot had been carried to its putrid conclusion.

Opening the Rochester “News-Intelligencer” which Slade had sent him, his glittering eyes seemed to sparkle joy as a blue-penciled column met his gaze.

Eagerly he read it all, every word, and weighed it, and re-read it, as men do when news is dear to their souls.  Already, through the New York papers he had got the essentials of the affair.  Already, by long distance ’phone he had received the outlines of the news from Slade, as well as a code telegram of more than 500 words, giving him additional details.  But this paper especially pleased him.  The other Rochester sheets, which Slade would send as fast as they appeared, he already was looking forward to, with keenest pleasure.