When the tenderloin learned that Martin Druce had been released on a bond for thirty thousand dollars, the tenderloin laughed.

The laugh was low and cunning and there was more than the suggestion of a sneer in it. It rang from one end of the district to the other, convulsing dive-keepers who for days had been as funereal as undertakers. It sounded in dance halls and bagnios, in barrooms and gambling dens.

It eddied up into Chicago’s higher air and found an echo in clubs frequented by distinguished financier-politicians.

John Boland had won! The brain that had never failed had proved its resourcefulness once again in this hour of dire trouble. Druce was gone. He would never be heard of in Chicago again. It had cost thirty thousand dollars, but what was thirty thousand dollars? Mary Randall and her crusaders were crushed. Anson was dead. Druce was gone.

What mattered it now how much evidence Mary Randall had gathered in against the Cafe Sinister! There would be a period of quiet. The tenderloin would carefully observe all the proprieties. Then the case of the State against Martin Druce would be called and Druce would not respond to that summons. And so Mary Randall’s sensation would die an unnatural death—death from smothering, death from lack of expression. Afterward the tenderloin would resume its old operations. No wonder the tenderloin laughed!

John Boland felt none of this exultation when he returned to his office on the morning following Druce’s release. An indefinable oppression weighed him down. He had won, he knew—and yet the air about him seemed charged with prescience of evil. He tried to shake it off and could not. He was anxious, too, about Harry. Why, he asked himself, should he worry about an ungrateful son. John Boland did not know the answer, yet the answer was very plain. His son Harry was his own flesh and blood and no man can cut himself off from his own flesh and blood without feeling some sort of reaction.

John Boland, the man of brain and iron was only human after all. He loved his son.

He was in a state of gloomy meditation when he opened his desk and resumed his day’s work. The telephone bell jangled constantly. The councillors who had participated in the conference over Druce’s case which had resulted so happily were calling up to congratulate Boland on the success of his maneuver. Somehow these felicitations did not please him as his fellow advisers had expected.

His mood was gloomy. He could not shake it off. Constantly the same question returned to his mind he had won, yes, but what difference did it make? Was he any happier? Was the world any better? Boland had never been worried by questions of this sort before. He could not answer them.

He was still in this gray mood when the guardian of his door announced the arrival of Grogan. Michael Grogan was, perhaps, Boland’s most intimate friend. He had not taken Grogan into his confidence when he planned his coup to release Druce. He felt that Grogan would not be in sympathy with his campaign for destroying the work of the reformers. Still he was glad to see Grogan. After all he was a friend. And this morning John Boland, for the first time, perhaps, in his life, felt the need of a friend.

“John,” said Grogan taking a seat, “I see you’ve ‘sprung’ Druce?”

“Yes? Mike you’re an inveterate reader of the newspapers.”

“They’re yelling about it this morning.”

“Let them yell.”

“You did it?”

“Well Mike, I’m a modest man. I had something to do with it.”

“It’s a rotten business!”

“What!”

“I said it was a rotten business.”

“The commercial interests of the city demanded it. Do you think I will stand idly by and see a bunch of half-baked reformers shake down the business institutions of Chicago?”

“John, they are right.”

“O yes, I suppose if you take the mamby-pamby, hysterical, sentimental end of it, any campaign that hits at vice is right.”

“It was a great movement. Mary Randall is a fine girl. You’ll live to regret that you helped to thwart her.”

“Pshaw, what’s the matter with you, man? You’re blood seems to be turning to milk. The papers will howl for a few days and then they’ll forget it. We’ll invite them to. We’ll suggest that if they don’t forget it the interests we represent may feel called upon to cut down their advertising. They’ll forget it all right.”

“No, John,” Grogan spoke deliberately. “You can’t kill off a great and righteous movement by choking a few newspapers. The newspapers are powerful but their power has its limits. That girl has built a fire under this town that will rage in spite of you or me, or any one else. We can’t stop it.” Grogan rose. “That’s all,” he said, “I just dropped in to let you know how I feel about it. I thought I might be able to persuade you to get out of this fight. I guess, John, you’re incorrigible. Well, no hard feelings.”

Boland laughed. “Have a drink as you go out. You need something to cheer you up.”

Grogan stopped. “Where’s Harry?” he asked suddenly.

Boland flushed and his brow darkened.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “He and I have had a misunderstanding. He insists on marrying this Welcome girl. I don’t know where he is and I don’t care.”

Grogan looked surprised. “John,” he said, “I’d feel sorry for you if I didn’t know you are lying. You do care. You can’t conceal it. You care now, and worse you’ll be caring more and more as time goes on. John, there are some things even you can’t do.”

“Well, Mike, what are they?”

“You can’t beat Nature and you can’t beat God. Good day.”

In vain Boland scoffed at Grogan’s sentimentalism. Again and again the words rose in his mind:

You can’t beat Nature and you can’t beat God.

The telephone rang. At the other end of the wire was that senator who had been at his conference. He asked Boland in a frightened voice if he had seen the papers, and then rang off.

Boland, alarmed, sent a boy in haste for the latest editions. The boy returned and spread them out on the desk before him.

Again the telephone rang. This time it was the clergyman who had participated in the conference.

“Do you know that Mary Randall is out in a statement that she knows full details of what she calls the plot that resulted in the liberation of Martin Druce?” he demanded. “She says she will give the whole thing to the newspapers later. They are calling it in the streets below my study window now. Can’t something be done to head off that statement?”

“What would you suggest? Why don’t you see some of the editors?” Boland returned.

“Oh, that’s impossible. My dear Boland, think of me. If my name should be published in this connection my reputation would be ruined.”

Boland laughed savagely into the telephone and hung up the receiver, only to lift it again and hear another appeal for help, this from the publisher. He also feared ruin.

Another call. The politician whose power in a great political party was a by-word was barking at the other end of the wire. He accused Boland of destroying him.

“You’ve destroyed us,” he yelped. “We’re ruined. You’ve blundered.”

Boland was beyond speech by this time. He seized his hat and rushed out into the street. Everywhere boys were shouting the extras. Several people who recognized him as he passed paused to look after him curiously. He walked directly to his club.

A few men gathered there reading newspapers paused to look after him curiously, bowed coldly and at once resumed reading. Others seemed to avoid him. Boland felt that the newspapers’ conspicuous comment on a certain financial magnate prominent in the electrical world in connection with the vice-scandal pointed at him too plainly for any one in Chicago to misunderstand.

He called his car and drove to his lonely home.

That night John Boland had a strange vision. He saw an eternity of pain and everlasting darkness. Through it the nightmare of his past life in strangely terrifying pictures passed before his mind.

Scenes of his boyhood, the panorama of his young manhood, pictures of his battle for success against overwhelming forces in the great city. These pictures returned again and again, vivid in their relief. He saw again the death of his wife and the spirit of darkness that had then come to walk beside him, taunting him that now he was of necessity a cold, calculating, lonely, indomitable man, not knowing how to give to his only son fatherly tenderness.

This phase passed. He seemed to enter into a larger world full of terrifying monsters, all of human form. One he recognized as Druce, another as Anson, a third as the senator whose seat he had helped to get. And with them came a host of smaller figures, some struggling for life, and being crushed down into oblivion under his inexorable progress, some fighting with one another lest they too be torn down and crushed before him.

There were piteous girl faces and worn kindly faces of women and men and these had gone down before the others because they had not the power of resistance needed in this battle. It was a great whirling nightmare of continuous struggle.

And always walking by his side and seeming to grow stronger and more terrible as he tore his path through every obstacle strode his guide, the spirit of darkness.

At last they were alone, he and the spirit. And the spirit turned upon him and clutched him by the throat. He struggled in that grasp just as others had struggled in his own grasp, tortured and futile. And again those words from Grogan:

“You can’t beat Nature and you can’t beat God!”

Sweat stood out on John Boland’s forehead.

He awoke with a mighty effort and sat upright. Around him was the emptiness and loneliness of the great bed-chamber. He saw with eyes wide open and brain alert a picture that looked like a reality and not a vision.

It was of a trembling man bent with age and loneliness.