Chapter XXX
THE LAST OF BUCK FOLEY
The letter which Foley read, while the union looked on, hardly breathing, was as follows:
All is over. The District Attorney will be told to-night you held them up, forcing them to give you the amount you received. They have all the evidence; you have none. Their hands are clean. Against you it is a perfect case of extortion.
Though the note was unsigned, Foley knew instantly from whom it came. The contractors, then, were going to try to clear themselves, and he was to be made the scapegoat. He was to be arrested; perhaps at once. Foley had thought over his situation before, its possibilities and its dangers. His mind worked quickly now. If he came to trial, they had the witnesses as the note said—and he had none. As they would be able to make it out, it would be a plain case of extortion against him. He could not escape conviction, and conviction meant years in Sing Sing. Truly, all was over. He saw his only chance in an instant—to escape.
The reading of the note, and this train of thought, used less than a minute. Foley crushed the sheet of paper and envelope into a ball and thrust them into a trousers pocket, and looked up with the determination to try his only chance. His eyes fell upon what in the tense absorption of the minute he had almost forgotten—fifteen hundred men staring at him with fixed waiting faces, and one man staring at him with clenched fists in vengeful readiness.
At sight of Tom his decision to escape was swept out of him by an overmastering fury. He rushed toward Tom through the alleyway the men had automatically opened at Tom's command. But Petersen stepped quickly out, a couple of paces ahead of Tom, to meet him.
"Out o' the way, youse!" he snarled.