In this manner, and all yelling like Comanche Indians, twice they made the circuit of the block.  All the guests in front of the big hotel were leaning out of the windows, when the police sergeant popped in sight with a squad of four men.  Field, who had been duly apprised of their approach, gave the signal, and the crowd, making good their retreat to Jones’s, abandoned Wickersham to his fate.  He was quickly, but roughly, disentangled from the intricacies of “’Possum Jim’s” rope-yarn harness.  The more he protested and expostulated, the more inexorable became the five big custodians of the outraged peace, until the last word of remonstrance and explanation died upon his well-nigh breathless lips.  Then he tried cajoling and “connudling” and those silent, persuasive arts so often efficacious in legislative lobbies; but there were too many witnesses to his crime, and bribes were not in order.

When at last Wickersham, from sheer despair and physical exhaustion, sank limp in the arms of his captors, the sergeant, on the pretext of seeking the aiders and abettors in the riot, half carried, half led the prisoner into Jones’s resort.

A quarter of an hour later the police squad made its exit by the back door, and less than an hour afterward Wickersham’s special was bearing him southward toward Texas.

But Field’s revenge was not fully sated yet.  He caused a $2 Pullman rate-bill, making a sixty per cent. reduction, to be prepared in the Tribune office, and secured its introduction in the legislature by the chairman of the House committee on railways.  The news was immediately flashed East, and Wickersham came posting back to Denver with the worst case of monopoly fright he had ever experienced.  The day after his arrival the Tribune had something to say in every department of his nefarious mission, and every reference to him bristled with biting irony and downright accusation.  Never was a “good fellow and a thoroughbred” so mercilessly scarified.

For the remaining six weeks of the session Wickersham did not leave Denver, nor did he dare look at the Tribune until after breakfast.  Every member of the legislature received a Pullman annual.  Champagne flowed, not by the bottle, but by the dray-load.  Wickersham begged for quarter, but his appeals fell like music on ears that heard but heeded not.  Nor did he find out that the whole affair was a put-up job until the bill was finally lost in the Senate committee.

One of the familiar stories of Field’s rollicking life in Denver was at the expense of Oscar Wilde, then on his widely advertised visit to America.  As the reader may remember, this was when the aesthetic craze and the burlesques inseparable from it were at their height.  Anticipating Wilde’s appearance in Denver by one day, and making shrewdly worded announcements through the Tribune in keeping with his project, Field secured the finest landau in town and was driven through the streets in a caricature verisimilitude of the poet of the sunflower and the flowing hair.