The "Franklin Syndicate" had collapsed amid the astonished outcries of
its thousands of victims, on November 24th, 1899, when, under the advice
and with the assistance of Ammon, its organizer, "520 per cent. Miller,"
had fled to Canada. It was nearly four years later, in June, 1903, that
Ammon, arraigned at the bar of justice as a criminal, heard Assistant
District Attorney Nott call William F. Miller, convict, to the stand to
testify against him. A curious contrast they presented as they faced one
another; the emaciated youth of twenty-five, the hand of Death already
tightly fastened upon his meagre frame, coughing, hollow-cheeked,
insignificant, flat-nosed, almost repulsive, who dragged himself to the
witness chair, and the swaggering athlete who glared at him from the bar
surrounded by his cordon of able counsel. As Ammon fixed his penetrating
gaze upon his former client, Miller turned pale and dropped his eyes.
Then the prosecutor, realizing the danger of letting the old hypnotic
power return, even for an instant, quickly stepped between them. Miller
raised his eyes and smiled, and those who heard knew that this miserable
creature had been through the fire and come forth to speak true things.

The trial of Ammon involved practically the reproving of the case
against Miller, for which the latter had been convicted and sentenced to
ten years in State's prison, whence he now issued like one from the tomb
to point the skeleton, incriminating finger at his betrayer. But the
case began by the convict-witness testifying that the whole business was
a miserable fraud from start to finish, carried on and guided by the
advice of the defendant. He told how he, a mere boy of twenty-one,
burdened with a sick wife and baby, unfitted by training or ability for
any sort of lucrative employment, a hanger-on of bucket shops and, in
his palmiest days, a speculator in tiny lots of feebly margined stocks,
finding himself without means of support, conceived the alluring idea of