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Having sided with Charles Jackson, Smith next formed an alliance that to Morse seemed unimaginable. He teamed up with their mutual enemy, Henry O’Reilly. The terms of the arrangement are unclear, partly owing to Smith’s always slippery language and nearly indecipherable handwriting—“foggy hieroglyphics,” Morse called them. Smith apparently conveyed to O’Reilly the right to use Morse’s telegraph on certain routes that had been granted to himself under the 1847 separation agreement. In exchange, O’Reilly would give Smith one-quarter of all the stock of these lines. O’Reilly would also have the advantage of the ex-congressman’s Washington contacts to advance his ballyhooed project of a lightning connection to California.

To Morse, Smith’s sadomasochistic partnership in Morse telegraphy with the despised O’Reilly proved him to be more viper than human being, “the double refined and concentrated essence of rascality.” Having long balked at Kendall’s insistence that they sue Smith, he at last gave in. He applied for an injunction to stop Smith from transacting any further business under their five-year-old separation agreement and from conveying any more rights to his patent. Smith said he welcomed the fray: “Very well—let litigation be the order of our lives.”

Morse v. Smith was heard in a superior court of New York City. Morse toiled twelve to fourteen hours a day for three days writing his affidavit. His lawyers argued that in the Boston trial against Hugh Downing, Smith had deliberately failed to make out a bona fide case, having on the contrary threatened to “blow Morse’s patents sky high.” Morse called the court’s attention to a “singular fact”: every prosecution instituted by himself in defense of his patent had succeeded, “whilst in every instance in which the said Smith has attempted to vindicate my patents by a judicial determination, he has in every instance been unsuccessful.” He brought other charges of fraud as well, among them that during their 1838 trip abroad, Smith did not fulfill and never intended to honor his contractual obligation to seek foreign patents.

Morse suffered a humiliating defeat. The judge refused to grant the injunction, ruling that Morse failed to show that Smith had any intention of defrauding him: “there is no such clear proof of any of the acts of omissions alleged with the motives imputed.” He also declined to rule on Smith’s behavior abroad, deeming it immaterial to the present case. Morse felt miserably deflated by the result, and by Smith’s glorying in it: “F. O. J. crows at the top of his voice.” He learned that Smith went on a spree with a crony, who was seen on Broadway drunk, “boisterously huzzaing for F. O. J. and cursing me and my telegraph.”

In reality, Smith had not much to crow over. Back home in Maine he was battling the boards of directors of a gas company and two railroads in which he was heavily invested. The local press portrayed him as money-mad, acting from “the lowest cupidity and lust for gain.” He had also gotten up a navigation company that launched an eighty-five-foot steamboat to ply the Androscoggin River, whose shoals proved so dangerous that the boat had to be taken out of service and left to decay. His domestic life was in no better shape. While married he had carried on a ten-year-long affair with a Boston divorcée; their two illegitimate sons closely resembled him. When his wife died he left his mistress and married someone else—“for my happiness,” he explained. Remarried, he soon began chasing still other women.

Looking into the future, Morse saw himself hideously coupled with Smith forever, “bound for life to a corrupted corpse.” With thousands of dollars spent to no purpose on litigation, and with his telegraph stock not paying dividends, he worried that he might have to sell Locust Grove and resettle in a humbler home, “suited to my change of circumstances. It will indeed be like cutting off a right hand.” And how would he make a living? Having been a painter, a university