as, after nodding curtly to his lawyer, he turned to be led away by the
court attendant. The fortune snatched from his client had procured for
him the most adroit of counsel, the most exhaustive of trials. He knew
that nothing had been left undone to enable him to evade the
consequences of his crime, and he was cynically content.

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.