This case, crammed through the calendar, ahead of a large jam of other business, proved how well unlimited funds can grease the wheels of Law.  It proved, also, that in the face of infinitely-subsidized witnesses, lawyers, judge and jurymen, black becomes white, and a good deed is written down a crime.

Catherine, working incognito, co-operated with the Socialist defense, and did all that could be humanely done to have the truth made known, to overset the mass of perjury and fraud enmeshing Gabriel, and to force his acquittal.

As easily might she have bidden the sea rise from its bed and flood the dry and arid wastes of old Sahara.  Her voice and that of the Socialists, their lawyers and their press, sounded in vain.  A solid battery of capitalist papers, legal lights, private detectives and other means—­particularly including the majority of the priests and clergy—­swamped the man and damned him and doomed him from the first word of the trial.

Money flowed in floods.  Perjury overran the banks of the River of Corruption.  Herzog branded the man a thief and fire-eater.  Dope-fiends and harlots from the Red-Light district, “madames” and pimps and hangers-on, swore to the white-slave activities of this man, who never yet in all his four and twenty years had so much as entered a brothel.

Forged papers fixed past crimes and sentences on him.  By innuendo and direct statement, dynamitings, arsons, violence and rioting in many strikes were laid at his door.  His Socialist activities were dragged in the slime of every gutter; and his Party made to suffer for evil deeds existing only in the foul imagination of the prosecuting attorneys.  The finest “kept” brains in the legal profession conducted the case from start to finish; and not a juryman was drawn on the panel who was not, from the first, sworn to convict, and bought and paid for in hard cash.

After three days—­days in which Gabriel plumbed the bitterest depths of Hell and drank full draughts of gall and wormwood—­the verdict came.  Came, and was flashed from sea to sea by an exulting press; and preached on, and editorialized on, and gloated over by Flint and Waldron and many, many others of that ilk—­while Catherine wept tears that seemed to drain her very heart of its last drops of blood.

At last she knew the meaning of the Class Struggle and her terrible father’s part in it all.  At last she understood what Gabriel had so long understood and now was paying for—­the fact that Hell hath no fury like Capitalism when endangered or opposed.

The Price!  Gabriel now must pay it, to the full.  For that foul verdict, bought with gold wrung from the very blood and marrow of countless toilers, opened the way to the sentence which Judge Harpies regretted only that he could not make more severe—­the sentence which the detectives and the prison authorities, well “fixed,” counted on making a death-sentence, too.

“Gabriel Armstrong, stand up!”