"Yes, you're right," answered Frank. "We alternate between spasms of Virtue and comfortable inertias of Don't-care-a-Damn! That's San Francisco!"
"The Good Gray City," he added after a little silence. "We love it in spite of its faults and upheavals, don't we, Aleta?"
"Perhaps because of them." She squeezed his arm. For a time they walked on without speaking. "How is your settlement work progressing?" he asked at length.
But she did not answer, for a shrieking newsie thrust a paper in her hand. "Buy an extra, lady," he importuned her. "All about Morris Haas' suicide!"
She tossed him a coin and he rushed off, shrilling his tragic revelation. Huge black headlines announced that Heney's assailant had shot himself to death in his cell.
CHAPTER LXXXIX
DEFEAT OF THE PROSECUTION
While Heney lay upon the operating table of a San Francisco hospital, three prominent attorneys volunteered to take his place. They were Hiram Johnson, Matt I. Sullivan and J.J. Dwyer. Ruef's trial went on with renewed vigor three days after the attempted killing, though the defendant's attorneys exhausted every expedient for delay. It was a case so thorough and complete that nothing could save the prisoner. He was found guilty of bribing a Supervisor in the overhead trolley transaction and sentenced to serve fourteen years in San Quentin penitentiary.
Frank was in the court-room when Ruef's sentence was imposed. The Little Boss seemed oddly aged and nerveless; the old look of power was gone from his eyes. Frank recalled Ruef's plan of a political Utopia. The man had started with a golden dream, a genius for organization which might have achieved great things. But his lower self had conquered. He had sold his dream for gold. And retribution was upon him.