him to slip out of the corner into which they had driven him. Greatly
daring, he had the successful cavalryman's instinct of risking much to
gain much. A gambler, his enemies characterized him fitly enough. But it
was also true, as Mesa phrased it, that he gambled "with the lid off,"
playing for large stakes, neither asking nor giving quarter.

At the end of five years of desperate fighting, the freebooter was more
strongly entrenched than he had been at any previous time. The railroads,
pledged to give rebates to the Consolidated, had been forced by Ridgway,
under menace of adverse legislation from the men he controlled at the
State-house, to give him secretly a still better rate than the trust. He
owned the county courts, he was supported by the people, and had become a
political dictator, and the financial outlook for him grew brighter every
day.

Such were the conditions when Judge Purcell handed down his Never Say Die
decision. Within an hour Hobart was reading a telegram in cipher from the
Broadway headquarters. It announced the immediate departure for Mesa of
the great leader of the octopus. Simon Harley, the Napoleon of finance,
was coming out to attend personally to the destruction of the buccaneer
who had dared to fire on the trust flag.

Before night some one of his corps of spies in the employ of the enemy
carried the news to Waring Ridgway. He smiled grimly, his bluegray eyes
hardening to the temper of steel. Here at last was a foeman worthy of his
metal; one as lawless, unscrupulous, daring, and far-seeing as himself,
with a hundred times his resources.