For years “Bob” Ammon had been a familiar figure in the Wall Street district of New York.  Although the legal adviser of swindlers and confidence men, he was a type of American whose energies, if turned in a less dubious direction, might well have brought him honorable distinction.  Tall, strong as a bull, bluff, good-natured, reckless and of iron nerve, he would have given good account of himself as an Indian fighter or frontiersman.  His fine presence, his great vitality, his coarse humor, his confidence and bravado, had won for him many friends of a certain kind and engendered a feeling among the public that somehow, although the associate and adviser of criminals, he was outside the law, to the circumventing of which his energies were directed.  Unfortunately his experiences with the law had bred in him a contempt for it which ultimately caused his downfall.

“The reporters arc bothering you, are they?” he had said to Miller in his office.  “Hang them!  Send them to me.  I’ll talk to them!”

And talk to them he did.  He could talk a police inspector or a city magistrate into a state of vacuous credulity, and needless to say he was to his clients as a god knowing both good and evil, as well as how to eschew the one and avoid the other.  Miller hated, loathed and feared him, yet freely entrusted his liberty, and all he had risked his liberty to gain, to this strange and powerful personality which held him enthralled by the mere exercise of a physical superiority.

The “Franklin Syndicate” had collapsed amid the astonished outcries of its thousands of victims, on November 24th, 1899, when, under the advice and with the assistance of Ammon, its organizer, “520 per cent.  Miller,” had fled to Canada.  It was nearly four years later, in June, 1903, that Ammon, arraigned at the bar of justice as a criminal, heard Assistant District Attorney Nott call William F. Miller, convict, to the stand to testify against him.  A curious contrast they presented as they faced one another; the emaciated youth of twenty-five, the hand of Death already tightly fastened upon his meagre frame, coughing, hollow-cheeked, insignificant, flat-nosed, almost repulsive, who dragged himself to the witness chair, and the swaggering athlete who glared at him from the bar surrounded by his cordon of able counsel.  As Ammon fixed his penetrating gaze upon his former client, Miller turned pale and dropped his eyes.  Then the prosecutor, realizing the danger of letting the old hypnotic power return, even for an instant, quickly stepped between them.  Miller raised his eyes and smiled, and those who heard knew that this miserable creature had been through the fire and come forth to speak true things.