I have written Wally. He will tell you more about me, and about the change in my views and ambitions, which has taken place. Do not think harshly of me, father, and I will try to forgive you for the burden I now know you have laid upon the aching shoulders of this sad, old world.
And now, good-bye. Though you have lost a daughter, you may still rejoice to know that that daughter has found peace and joy and vast outlets for the energies of her whole heart and soul and being, in working for Socialism, the noblest ideal ever conceived by the mind of man.
Farewell, father; and think sometimes, not too unkindly, of
Your
Kate.
One week after these letters were mailed, "Tiger" Waldron, fanning the fires of the old man's terrible rage, had decided Flint to disinherit Catherine and to name him, Waldron, as his executor. Gabriel's fervent wish that she might be penniless, was granted.
On the very day this business was put through, practically delivering the Flint interests into Waldron's hands in the case of the old man's death, a verdict was reached in Gabriel's case, at Rochester.
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.