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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grafters, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Grafters
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2004 [EBook #11418]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GRAFTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Andrea Ball and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "DO YOU BEGIN TO SUSPECT THINGS?" SHE ASKED.]
+
+
+
+THE
+GRAFTERS
+
+BY
+FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY
+ARTHUR I. KELLER
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I  ASHES OF EMPIRE
+    II  A MAN OF THE PEOPLE
+   III  THE BOSTONIANS
+    IV  THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT
+     V  JOURNEYS END--
+    VI  OF THE MAKING OF LAWS
+   VII  THE SENTIMENTALISTS
+  VIII  THE HAYMAKERS
+    IX  THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT
+     X  WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY
+    XI  THE LAST DITCH
+   XII  THE MAN IN POSSESSION
+  XIII  THE WRECKERS
+   XIV  THE GERRYMANDER
+    XV  THE JUNKETERS
+   XVI  SHARPENING THE SWORD
+  XVII  THE CONSPIRATORS
+ XVIII  DOWN, BRUNO!
+   XIX  DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS
+    XX  THE WINNING LOSER
+   XXI  A WOMAN INTERVENES
+  XXII  A BORROWED CONSCIENCE
+ XXIII  THE INSURRECTIONARIES
+  XXIV  INTO THE PRIMITIVE
+   XXV  DEAD WATER AND QUICK
+  XXVI  ON THE HIGH PLAINS
+ XXVII  BY ORDER OF THE COURT
+XXVIII  THE NIGHT OF ALARMS
+  XXIX  THE RELENTLESS WHEELS
+   XXX  SUBHI SADIK
+
+
+TO MY GOOD FRIEND
+MR. EDWARD YOUNG CHAPIN
+
+
+THE GRAFTERS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+ASHES OF EMPIRE
+
+In point of age, Gaston the strenuous was still no more than a lusty
+infant among the cities of the brown plain when the boom broke and the
+junto was born, though its beginnings as a halt camp ran back to the days
+of the later Mormon migrations across the thirsty plain; to that day when
+the advanced guard of Zophar Smith's ox-train dug wells in the damp sands
+of Dry Creek and called them the Waters of Merom.
+
+Later, one Jethro Simsby, a Mormon deserter, set up his rod and staff on
+the banks of the creek, home-steaded a quarter-section of the sage-brush
+plain, and in due time came to be known as the Dry Creek cattle king. And
+the cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locating engineers of the Western
+Pacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water was scarce and
+hard to come by, drove their stakes along the north line of the
+quarter-section; and having named their last station Alphonse, christened
+this one Gaston.
+
+From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike-driving of the
+track-layers was a full decade. For hard times overtook the Western
+Pacific at Midland City, eighty miles to the eastward; while the State
+capital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had railroad outlets
+in plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer.
+
+But, with the breaking of the cloud of financial depression, the Western
+Pacific succeeded in placing its extension bonds, and a little later the
+earth began to fly on the grade of the new line to the west. Within a
+Sundayless month the electric lights of the night shift could be seen,
+and, when the wind was right, the shriek of the locomotive whistle could
+be heard at Dry Creek; and in this interval between dawn and daylight
+Jethro Simsby sold his quarter-section for the nominal sum of two thousand
+dollars, spot cash, to two men who buck-boarded in ahead of the
+track-layers.
+
+This purchase of the "J-lazy-S" ranch by Hawk and Guilford marked the
+modest beginning of Gaston the marvelous. By the time the temporary
+sidings were down and the tank well was dug in the damp sands, it was
+heralded far and wide that the Western Pacific would make the city on the
+banks of Dry Creek--a city consisting as yet only of the Simsby ranch
+shacks--its western terminus. Thereupon followed one of the senseless
+rushes that populate the waste places of the earth and give the
+professional city-builder his reason for being. In a fortnight after the
+driving of the silver spike the dusty plain was dotted with the
+black-roofed shelters of the Argonauts; and by the following spring the
+plow was furrowing the cattle ranges in ever-widening circles, and Gaston
+had voted a bond loan of three hundred thousand dollars to pave its
+streets.
+
+Then under the forced draft of skilful exploitation, three years of high
+pressure passed quickly; years named by the promoters the period of
+development. In the Year One the very heavens smiled and the rainfall
+broke the record of the oldest inhabitant. Thus the region round about
+lost the word "arid" as a qualifying adjective, and the picturesque
+fictions of the prospectus makers were miraculously justified. In Year Two
+there was less rain, but still an abundant crop; and Jethro Simsby,
+drifting in from some unnamed frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what he
+had missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of the
+Mid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five-storied, brick-and-terra-cotta
+structure standing precisely upon the site of the "J-lazy-S" branding
+corral.
+
+It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas for
+young men having penetrated to the provincial backgrounds of New
+Hampshire, that David Kent came.
+
+By virtue of his diploma, and three years of country practice in the New
+Hampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone and
+Chitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Building
+lettered "Attorney and Counselor at Law"; but up to the day in the latter
+part of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was best
+known as a reckless plunger in real estate--this, mind you, at a moment
+when every third man counted his gains in "front feet", and was shouting
+himself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales.
+
+When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it,
+though not altogether as far or as hard as many another. One of his
+professional hold-fasts--it was the one that afterward became the
+bread-tackle in the famine time--was his position as local attorney for
+the railway company. By reason of this he was among the first to have a
+hint of the impending cataclysm. The Western Pacific, after so long a
+pause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds and
+would presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-station
+quietude. Therefore and wherefore----
+
+Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy. He foresaw, not the
+pitiable bubble-burst which ensued, indeed, but the certain and inevitable
+end of the speculative era. Like every one else, he had bought chiefly
+with promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated a sum
+equal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.
+
+"How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the
+secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his
+hint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying
+contracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on the
+Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to
+"unload".
+
+As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.
+On the morning when the _Daily Clarion_ sounded the first note of public
+alarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, and
+transferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was done
+he locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced the
+account. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast for
+fortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony into
+cash--some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill of
+exchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier,
+there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, bought
+and paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience.
+
+Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastily
+filled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. When
+he reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and Texas
+Streets, he was the one hundred and twenty-seventh man in the queue, which
+extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street
+to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the _Clarion_ had done
+its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for
+quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with
+its acrid perfume--the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad.
+
+Major James Guilford, the president of the Apache National, was in the
+cage with the sweating paying tellers, and it was to him that Kent
+presented his check when his turn came.
+
+"What! You, too, Kent?" said the president, reproachfully. "I thought you
+had more backbone."
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"Gaston has absorbed nine-tenths of the money I brought here; I'll absorb
+the remaining tenth myself, if it's just the same to you, Major. Thank
+you." And the hundred and twenty-seventh man pocketed his salvage from the
+wreck and fought his way out through the jam at the doors. Two hours
+farther along in the forenoon the Apache National suspended payment, and
+the bank examiner was wired for.
+
+For suddenness and thoroughgoing completeness the Gaston bubble-bursting
+was a record-breaker. For a week and a day there was a frantic struggle
+for enlargement, and by the expiration of a fortnight the life was pretty
+well trampled out of the civic corpse and the stench began to arise.
+
+Flight upon any terms then became the order of the day, and if the place
+had been suddenly plague-smitten the panicky exodus could scarcely have
+been more headlong. None the less, in any such disorderly up-anchoring
+there are stragglers perforce: some left like stranded hulks by the ebbing
+tide; others riding by mooring chains which may be neither slipped nor
+capstaned. When all was over there were deserted streets and empty suburbs
+in ruthless profusion; but there was also a hungry minority of the crews
+of the stranded and anchored hulks left behind to live or die as they
+might, and presently to fall into cannibalism, preying one upon another
+between whiles, or waiting like their prototypes of the Spanish Main for
+the stray spoils of any luckless argosy that might drift within grappling
+distance.
+
+Kent stayed partly because a local attorney for the railroad was as
+necessary in Gaston the bereaved as in Gaston the strenuous; partly, also,
+because he was a student of his kind, and the broken city gave him
+laboratory opportunities for the study of human nature at its worst.
+
+He marked the raising of the black flag as the Gaston castaways, getting
+sorrily afloat one by one, cleared their decks for action. Some Bluebeard
+admiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent,
+standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk,
+the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks,
+sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent.
+
+Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the former
+mayor. For when the famine time was fully come, and there were no more
+argosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it was
+Jasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forth
+his new cast for fortune, and brought the junto, the child of sheer
+desperation fiercely at bay, into being.
+
+It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring,
+traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the Western
+Pacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dispiriting dinner
+in the deserted Mid-Continent café, and some plowing of the field of
+recollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took the
+deserted street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway station.
+
+"It was a decent thing for you to do--stopping over a train with me,
+Grantham," said the host, when the five squares intervening had been half
+measured. "I have had all kinds of a time out here in this God-forsaken
+desert, but never until to-day anything approaching a chummy hour with a
+man I know and care for."
+
+Kent had not spoken since they had felt their way out of the dark lower
+hall of the Farquhar Building. Up to this point the talk had been
+pointedly reminiscent; of the men of their university year, of mutual
+friends in the far-away "God's country" to the eastward, of the Gastonian
+epic, of all things save only two--the exile's cast for fortune in the
+untamed West, and one other.
+
+"That brings us a little nearer to the things that be--and to your
+prospects, David," said the guest. "How are you fixed here?"
+
+Kent shrugged.
+
+"Gaston is dead, as you see; too dead to bury."
+
+"Why don't you get out of it, then?"
+
+"I shall some day, perhaps. Up to date there has been no place to go to,
+and no good way to arrive. Like some thousands of others, I've made an ass
+of myself here, Loring."
+
+"By coming, you mean? Oh, I don't know about that. You have had some hard
+knocks, I take it, but if you are the same David Kent I used to know, they
+have made a bigger man of you."
+
+"Think so?"
+
+"I'd bet on it. We have had the Gaston epic done out for us in the
+newspapers. No man could live through such an experience as you must have
+had without growing a few inches. Hello! What's this?"
+
+A turned corner had brought them in front of a lighted building in Texas
+Street with a straggling crowd gathered about the porticoed entrance. As
+Loring spoke, there was a rattle of snare drums followed by the _dum-dum_
+of the bass, and a brass band ramped out the opening measures of a
+campaign march.
+
+"It is a rally," said Kent, when they had passed far enough beyond the
+zone of brass-throated clamorings to make the reply audible. "I told you
+that the Gaston wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes of
+a State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at the
+Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title rôle. And there is a fair
+measure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock together
+like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that the
+town hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed that
+and all other stages and is well on its way to the cemetery."
+
+"That is one way of putting it," Loring rejoined. "If things are as bad as
+that, it's time you were moving on, don't you think?"
+
+"I guess so," was the lack-luster response. "Only I don't know where to
+go, or what to do when I get there."
+
+They were crossing the open square in front of the wide-eaved passenger
+station. A thunderous tremolo, dominating the distant band music, thrilled
+on the still air, and the extended arm of the station semaphore with its
+two dangling lanterns wagged twice.
+
+"My train," said Loring, quickening his step.
+
+"No," Kent corrected. "It is a special from the west, bringing a Bucks
+crowd to the political rally. Number Three isn't due for fifteen minutes
+yet, and she is always late."
+
+They mounted the steps to the station platform in good time to meet the
+three-car special as it came clattering in over the switches, and
+presently found themselves in the thick of the crowd of debarking
+ralliers.
+
+It was a mixed masculine multitude, fairly typical of time, place and
+occasion; stalwart men of the soil for the greater part, bearded and
+bronzed and rough-clothed, with here and there a range-rider in
+picturesque leathern shaps, sagging pistols and wide-flapped sombrero.
+
+Loring stood aside and put up his eye-glasses. It was his first sight near
+at hand of the untrammeled West _in puris naturalibus_, and he was finding
+the spectacle both instructive and diverting. Looking to Kent for
+fellowship he saw that his companion was holding himself stiffly aloof;
+also, he remarked that none of the boisterous partizans flung a word of
+recognition in Kent's direction.
+
+"Don't you know any of them?" he asked.
+
+Kent's reply was lost in the deep-chested bull-bellow of a cattleman from
+the Rio Blanco.
+
+"Hold on a minute, boys, before you scatter! Line up here, and let's give
+three cheers and a tail-twister for next-Governor Bucks! Now,
+then--_everybody_! Hip, hip----"
+
+The ripping crash of the cheer jarred Loring's eye-glasses from their
+hold, and he replaced them with a smile. Four times the ear-splitting
+shout went up, and as the echoes of the "tiger" trailed off into silence
+the stentorian voice was lifted again.
+
+"Good enough! Now, then; three groans for the land syndicates, alien
+mortgagees, and the Western Pacific Railroad, by grabs! and to hell with
+'em!"
+
+The responsive clamor was a thing to be acutely remembered--sustained,
+long-drawn, vindictive; a nerve-wrenching pandemonium of groans, yelpings
+and cat-calls, in the midst of which the partizans shuffled into loose
+marching order and tramped away townward.
+
+"That answers your question, doesn't it?" said Kent, smiling sourly. "If
+not, I can set it out for you in words. The Western Pacific is the
+best-hated corporation this side of the Mississippi, and I am its local
+attorney."
+
+"I don't envy you," said Loring. "I had no idea the opposition
+crystallized itself in any such concrete ill will. You must have the whole
+weight of public sentiment against you in any railroad litigation."
+
+"I do," said Kent, simply. "If every complainant against us had the right
+to pack his own jury, we couldn't fare worse."
+
+"What is at the bottom of it? Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble by
+building on to the capital?"
+
+"Oh, no; it's much more personal to these shouters. As you may, or may
+not, know, our line--like every other western railroad with no
+competition--has for its motto, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
+and it bleeds the country accordingly. But we are forgetting your train.
+Shall we go and see how late it is?"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+A MAN OF THE PEOPLE
+
+Train Number Three, the Western Flyer, was late, as Kent had
+predicted--just how late the operator could not tell; and pending the
+chalking-up of its arriving time on the bulletin board, the two men sat on
+an empty baggage truck and smoked in companionable silence.
+
+While they waited, Loring's thoughts were busy with many things, friendly
+solicitude for the exile serving as the point of departure. He knew what a
+handfast friend might know: how Kent had finished his postgraduate course
+in the law and had succeeded to his father's small practice in the New
+Hampshire county town where he was born and bred. Also, he knew how Kent's
+friends, college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecated
+the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to
+spy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffy
+little law office which had been his father's, Kent had made a clean
+breast of it: there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed
+before Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with no
+notion for a change of environment; wherefore she had determined Kent's
+career and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of her
+own choosing.
+
+Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it was
+hopelessly off holding-ground. The young woman had laid the blame at the
+door of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault-finding
+and recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowing
+her dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer.
+
+Thereafter Kent had stagnated quietly, living with simple rigor the life
+he had marked out for himself; thankful at heart, Loring had suspected,
+for the timely intervention of the farmer's son, but holding himself well
+in hand against a repetition of the sentimental offense. All this until
+the opening of the summer hotel at the foot of Old Croydon, and the coming
+of Elinor Brentwood.
+
+No one knew just how much Miss Brentwood had to do with the long-delayed
+awakening of David Kent; but in Loring's forecastings she enjoyed the full
+benefit of the doubt. From tramping the hills alone, or whipping the
+streams for brook trout, David had taken to spending his afternoons with
+lover-like regularity at the Croydon Inn; and at the end of the season had
+electrified the sleepy home town by declaring his intention to go West and
+grow up with the country.
+
+In Loring's setting-forth of the awakening, the motive was not far to
+seek. Miss Brentwood was ambitious, and if her interest in Kent had been
+only casual she would not have been likely to point him to the wider
+battle-field. Again, apart from his modest patrimony, Kent had only his
+profession. The Brentwoods were not rich, as riches are measured in
+millions; but they lived in their own house in the Back Bay wilderness,
+moved in Boston's older substantial circle, and, in a world where success,
+economic or other, is in some sort the touchstone, were many social planes
+above a country lawyer.
+
+Loring knew Kent's fierce poverty-pride--none better. Hence, he was at no
+loss to account for the exile's flight afield, or for his unhopeful
+present attitude. Meaning to win trophies to lay at Miss Brentwood's feet,
+the present stage of the rough joust with Fortune found him unhorsed,
+unweaponed and rolling in the dust of the lists.
+
+Loring chewed his cigar reflectively, wishing his companion would open the
+way to free speech on the subject presumably nearest his heart. He had a
+word of comfort, negative comfort, to offer, but it might not be said
+until Kent should give him leave by taking the initiative. Kent broke
+silence at last, but the prompting was nothing more pertinent than the
+chalking-up of the delayed train's time.
+
+"An hour and twenty minutes: that means any time after nine o'clock. I'm
+honestly sorry for you, Grantham--sorry for any one that has to stay in
+this charnel-house of a town ten minutes after he's through. What will you
+do with yourself?"
+
+Loring got up, looked at his watch, and made a suggestion, hoping that
+Kent would fall in with it.
+
+"I don't know. Shall we go back to your rooms and sit a while?"
+
+The exile's eyes gloomed suddenly.
+
+"Not unless you insist on it. We should get back among the relics and I
+should bore you. I'm not the man you used to know, Grantham."
+
+"No?" said Loring. "I sha'n't be hypocritical enough to contradict you.
+Nevertheless, you are my host. It is for you to say what you will do with
+me until train time."
+
+"We can kill an hour at the rally, if you like. You have seen the street
+parade and heard the band play: it is only fair that you should see the
+menagerie on exhibition."
+
+Loring found his match-box and made a fresh light for his cigar.
+
+"It's pretty evident that you and 'next-Governor' Bucks are on opposite
+sides of the political fence," he observed.
+
+"We are. I should think a good bit less of myself than I do--and that's
+needless--if I trained in his company."
+
+"Yet you will give him a chance to make a partizan of me? Well, come
+along. Politics are not down on my western programme, but I'm here to see
+all the new things."
+
+The Gaston Opera House was a survival of the flush times, and barring a
+certain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect
+which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street
+and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic.
+The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent
+and his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer;
+but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats well
+around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from their
+nearest neighbors.
+
+Since the public side of American politics varies little with the
+variation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself at
+once in homely and remindful surroundings. There was the customary draping
+of flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of the
+background. In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat the
+local and visiting political lights; men of all trades, these, some of
+them a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwonted
+conspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air of
+strained attention to the speaker of the moment.
+
+Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audience, typical of all
+America--the thing most truly typical in a land where national types are
+sought for microscopically: wheel-horses who came at the party call; men
+who came in the temporary upblaze of enthusiastic patriotism, which is
+lighted with the opening of the campaign, and which goes out like a candle
+in a gust of wind the day after the election; men who came to applaud
+blindly, and a few who came to cavil and deride. Loring oriented himself
+in a leisurely eye-sweep, and so came by easy gradations to the speaker.
+
+Measured by the standard of fitness for his office of prolocutor the man
+standing beside the stage-properties speaker's desk was worthy a second
+glance. He was dark, undersized, trimly built; with a Vandyke beard
+clipped closely enough to show the lines of a bull-dog jaw, and eyes that
+had the gift, priceless to the public speaker, of seeming to hold every
+onlooking eye in the audience. Unlike his backers in the awkward
+semicircle, he wore a professional long coat; and the hands that marked
+his smoothly flowing sentences were slim and shapely.
+
+"Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent.
+
+"Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter--a
+charter member of the Gaston wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you into
+believing in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you in
+the back for a ten-dollar bill in the next," was the rejoinder.
+
+Loring nodded, and again became a listener. Hawk's speech was merely
+introductory, and it was nearing its peroration.
+
+"Fellow citizens, this occasion is as auspicious as it is significant.
+When the people rise in their might to say to tyranny in whatsoever form
+it oppresses them, 'Thus far and no farther shalt thou go,' the night is
+far spent and the light is breaking in the east.
+
+"Since the day when we first began to wrest with compelling hands the
+natural riches from the soil of this our adoptive State, political
+trickery in high places, backed by the puissant might of alien
+corporations, has ground us into the dust.
+
+"But now the time of our deliverance is at hand. Great movements give
+birth to great leaders; and in this, our holy crusade against oppression
+and tyranny, the crisis has bred the man. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the
+pleasure of presenting to you the speaker of the evening: our friend and
+fellow citizen the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks, by the grace of God, and
+your suffrages, the next governor of the State."
+
+In the storm of applause that burst upon the dramatic peroration of the
+ex-district attorney, a man rose from the center of the stage semicircle
+and lumbered heavily forward to the footlights. Loring's first emotion was
+of surprise, tempered with pity. The crisis-born leader, heralded by such
+a flourish of rhetorical trumpets, was a giant in size; but with his huge
+figure, unshapely and ill-clad, all promise of greatness seemed to pause.
+
+His face, broad-featured, colorless, and beardless as a boy's, was either
+a blank or an impenetrable mask. There was no convincement in the
+lack-luster gaze of the small, porcine eyes; no eloquence in the harsh,
+nasal tones of the untrained voice, or in the ponderous and awkward
+wavings of the beam-like arms. None the less, before he had uttered a
+dozen halting sentences he was carrying the audience with him step by
+step; moving the great concourse of listeners with his commonplace periods
+as a mellifluous Hawk could never hope to move it.
+
+Loring saw the miracle in the throes of its outworking; saw and felt it in
+his own proper person, and sought in vain to account for it. Was there
+some subtile magnetism in this great hulk of a man that made itself felt
+in spite of its hamperings? Or was it merely that the people, weary of
+empty rhetoric and unkept promises, were ripe to welcome and to follow any
+man whose apparent earnestness and sincerity atoned for all his lacks?
+
+Explain it as he might, Loring soon assured himself that the Honorable
+Jasper G. Bucks was laying hold of the sentiment of the audience as though
+it were a thing tangible to be grasped by the huge hands. Unlike Hawk,
+whose speech flamed easily into denunciation when it touched on the alien
+corporations, he counseled moderation and lawful reprisals. Land
+syndicates, railroads, foreign capital in whatever employment, were prime
+necessities in any new and growing commonwealth. The province of the
+people was not to wreck the ship, but to guide it. And the remedy for all
+ills lay in controlling legislation, faithfully and rigidly enforced.
+
+"My friends: I'm only a plain, hard-handed farmer, as those of you who are
+my fellow townsmen can testify. But I've seen what you've seen, and I've
+suffered what you've suffered. Year after year we send our representatives
+to the legislature, and what comes of it? Why, these corporations, looking
+only to their own interests, as they're in duty bound to do, buys 'em if
+they can. You can't blame 'em for that; it's business--their business. But
+it is our business, as citizens of this great commonwealth, to prevent it.
+We have good laws on our statute books, but we need more of 'em; laws for
+control, with plain, honest men at the capital, in the judiciary, in every
+root and branch of the executive, to enforce 'em. With such laws, and such
+men to see that they are executed, there wouldn't be any more extortion,
+any more raising of the rates of transportation on the produce of our
+ranches and farms merely because the eastern market for that particular
+product happened to jump a few cents on the dollar.
+
+"No, my friends; plain, hard-handed farmer though I be, I can see what
+will follow an honest election of the people, by the people, and for the
+people. The State can be--it ought to be--sovereign within its own
+boundaries. If we rise up as one man next Tuesday and put a ticket into
+the ballot-box that says we are going to make it so, and keep it so,
+you'll see a new commodity tariff put into effect on the Western Pacific
+Railroad the day after."
+
+The speaker paused, and into the little gap of silence barked a voice from
+the gallery.
+
+"That's what you say. But supposin' they don't do it?"
+
+Loring was gazing steadfastly at the blank, heavy face, so utterly devoid
+of the enthusiasm the man was evoking in others. For one flitting instant
+he thought he saw behind the mask. The immobile face, the awkward
+gestures, the slipshod English became suddenly transparent, revealing the
+real man; a man of titanic strength, of tremendous possibilities for good
+or evil. Loring put up his glasses and looked again; but the figure of the
+flash-light inner vision had vanished, and the speaker was answering his
+objector as calmly as though the house held only the single critic to be
+set right.
+
+"I'm always glad to hear a man speak right out in meeting," he said,
+dropping still deeper into the colloquialisms. "Supposing the corporations
+don't see the handwriting on the wall--won't see it, you say? Then, my
+friend, it will become the manifest duty of the legislature and the
+executive to make 'em see it: always lawfully, you understand; always with
+a just and equitable respect for the rights of property in which our free
+and glorious institutions are founded, but with level-handed justice, and
+without fear or favor."
+
+A thunderous uproar of applause clamored on the heels of the answer, and
+the Honorable Jasper mopped his face with a colored handkerchief and took
+a swallow of water from the glass on the desk.
+
+"Mind you, my friends, I'm not saying we are not going to find plenty of
+stumps and roots and a tough sod in this furrow we are going to plow. It's
+only the fool or the ignoramus who underrates the strength of his
+opponent. It is going to be just plain, honest justice and the will of the
+people against the money of the Harrimans and the Goulds and the
+Vanderbilts and all the rest of 'em. But the law is mighty, and it will
+prevail. Give us an honest legislature to make such laws, and an executive
+strong enough to enforce 'em, and the sovereign State will stand out
+glorious and triumphant as a monument against oppression.
+
+"When that time comes--and it's a-coming, my friends--the corporations and
+the syndicates will read the handwriting on the wall; don't you be afraid
+of that. If they should be a little grain thick-headed and sort o' blind
+at first, as old King Belshazzar was, it may be that the sovereign State
+will have to give 'em an object-lesson--lawfully, always lawfully, you
+understand. But when they see, through the medium of such an object-lesson
+or otherwise, as the case may be, that we mean business; when they see
+that we, the people of this great and growing commonwealth, mean to assert
+our rights to live and move and have our being, to have fair, even-handed
+justice meted out to ourselves, our wives and our little children, they'll
+come down and quit watering their stock with the sweat of our brows; and
+that hold-up motto of theirs, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
+will be no more known in Israel!"
+
+Again the clamor of applause rose like fine dust on the throng-heated air,
+and Kent looked at his watch.
+
+"It is time we were going," he said; adding: "I guess you have had enough
+of it, haven't you?"
+
+Loring was silent for the better part of the way back to the railway
+station. When he spoke it was in answer to a delayed question of Kent's.
+
+"What do I think of him? I don't know, David; and that's the plain truth.
+He is not the man he appears to be as he stands there haranguing that
+crowd. That is a pose, and an exceedingly skilful one. He is not
+altogether apparent to me; but he strikes me as being a man of immense
+possibilities--whether for good or evil, I can't say."
+
+"You needn't draw another breath of uncertainty on that score," was the
+curt rejoinder. "He is a demagogue, pure and unadulterated."
+
+Loring did not attempt to refute the charge.
+
+"Are he and his party likely to win?" he asked.
+
+"God knows," said Kent. "We have had so many lightning transformations in
+politics in the State that nothing is impossible."
+
+"I'd like to know," was Loring's comment. "It might make some difference
+to me, personally."
+
+"To you?" said Kent, inquiringly. "That reminds me: I haven't given you a
+chance to say ten words about yourself."
+
+"The chance hasn't been lacking. But my business out here is--well, it
+isn't exactly a Star Chamber matter, but I'm under promise in a way not to
+talk about it until I have had a conference with our people at the
+capital. I'll write you about it in a few days."
+
+They were ascending the steps at the end of the passenger platform again,
+and Loring broke away from the political and personal entanglement to give
+Kent one more opportunity to hear his word of negative comfort.
+
+"We dug up the field of recollection pretty thoroughly in our after-dinner
+séance in your rooms, David, but I noticed there was one corner of it you
+left undisturbed. Was there any good reason?"
+
+Kent made no show of misunderstanding.
+
+"There was the excellent reason which must have been apparent to you
+before you had been an hour in Gaston. I've made my shot, and missed."
+
+Loring entered the breach with his shield held well to the fore. He was
+the last man in the world to assault a friend's confidence recklessly.
+
+"I thought a good while ago, and I still think, that you are making a
+mountain out of a mole-hill, David. Elinor Brentwood is a true woman in
+every inch of her. She is as much above caring for false notions of caste
+as you ought to be."
+
+"I know her nobility: which is all the more reason why I shouldn't take
+advantage of it. We may scoff at the social inequalities as much as we
+please, but we can't laugh them out of court. As between a young woman who
+is an heiress in her own right, and a briefless lawyer, there are
+differences which a decent man is bound to efface. And I haven't been
+able."
+
+"Does Miss Brentwood know?"
+
+"She knows nothing at all. I was unwilling to entangle her, even with a
+confidence."
+
+"The more fool you," said Loring, bluntly. "You call yourself a lawyer,
+and you have not yet learned one of the first principles of common
+justice, which is that a woman has some rights which even a besotted lover
+is bound to respect. You made love to her that summer at Croydon; you
+needn't deny it. And at the end of things you walk off to make your
+fortune without committing yourself; without knowing, or apparently
+caring, what your stiff-necked poverty-pride may cost her in years of
+uncertainty. You deserve to lose her."
+
+Kent's smile was a fair measure of his unhopeful mood.
+
+"You can't well lose what you have never had. I'm not such an ass as to
+believe that she cared greatly."
+
+"How do you know? Not by anything you ever gave her a chance to say, I'll
+dare swear. I've a bit of qualified good news for you, but the spirit is
+moving me mightily to hold my tongue."
+
+"Tell me," said Kent, his indifference vanishing in the turning of a leaf.
+
+"Well, to begin with, Miss Brentwood is still unmarried, though the
+gossips say she doesn't lack plenty of eligible offers."
+
+"Half of that I knew; the other half I took for granted. Go on."
+
+"Her mother, under the advice of the chief of the clan Brentwood, has been
+making a lot of bad investments for herself and her two daughters: in
+other words, she has been making ducks and drakes of the Brentwood
+fortune."
+
+Kent was as deeply moved as if the loss had been his own, and said as
+much, craving more of the particulars.
+
+"I can't give them. But I may say that the blame lies at your door,
+David."
+
+"At my door? How do you arrive at that?"
+
+"By the shortest possible route. If you had done your duty by Elinor in
+the Croydon summer, Mrs. Brentwood would have had a bright young attorney
+for a son-in-law and adviser, and the bad investments would not have been
+made."
+
+Kent's laugh was entirely devoid of mirth.
+
+"Don't trample on a man when he's down. I was neither a prophet nor the
+son of a prophet. But how bad is the smash? Surely you know that?"
+
+"No, I don't. Bradford was telling me about it the day I left Boston. He
+gave me to understand that the principal family holding at present is in
+the stock of a certain western railway."
+
+"Did he happen to know the name of the stock?" asked Kent, moistening his
+lips.
+
+"He did. Fate flirts with you two in the usual fashion. Mrs. Brentwood's
+little fortune--and by consequence, Elinor's and Penelope's--is tied up in
+the stock of the company whose platform we are occupying at the present
+moment--the Western Pacific."
+
+Kent let slip a hard word directed at ill-advisers in general, and Loring
+took his cue from the malediction.
+
+"You swear pretty feelingly, David. Isn't our property as good a thing as
+we of the Boston end have been cracking it up to be?"
+
+"You know better about the financial part of it than I do. But--well, you
+are fresh from this anarchistic conclave at the Opera House. You can
+imagine what the stock of the Western Pacific, or of any other foreign
+corporation doing business in this State, will be worth in six months
+after Bucks and his crowd get into the saddle."
+
+"You speak as if the result of the election were a foregone conclusion. I
+hope it isn't. But we were talking more particularly of Miss Brentwood,
+and your personal responsibilities." The belated train was whistling for
+the lower yard, and Loring was determined to say all that was in his mind.
+
+"Yes; go on. I'm anxious to hear--more anxious than I seem to be,
+perhaps."
+
+"Well, she is coming West, after a bit. She, and her sister and the
+mother. Mrs. Brentwood's asthma is worse, and the wise men have ordered
+her to the interior. I thought you'd like to know."
+
+"Is she--are they coming this way?" asked Kent.
+
+The train was in, and the porter had fetched Loring's hand-bag from the
+check-stand. The guest paused with one foot on the step of the
+sleeping-car.
+
+"If I were you, David, I'd write and ask; I should, by Jove. It would be a
+tremendously cheeky thing to do, of course, having such a slight
+acquaintance with her as you have; but I'll be hanged if I shouldn't
+chance it. And in the mean time, if I don't go back East next week, you'll
+hear from me. When you do, or if you do, take a day off and run up to the
+capital. I shall need you. Good-by."
+
+Kent watched the train pull out; stood looking after it until the two red
+eyes of the rear signals had disappeared in the dusty darkness of the
+illimitable plain. Then he went to his rooms, to the one which was called
+by courtesy his office, and without allowing himself time for a nice
+balancing of the pros and cons, squared himself at the desk to write a
+letter.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THE BOSTONIANS
+
+It was precisely on the day set for the Brentwoods' westward flitting that
+the postman, making his morning round, delivered David Kent's asking at
+the house in the Back Bay sub-district. Elinor was busy packing for the
+migration, but she left Penelope and the maid to cope with the problem of
+compressing two trunkfuls into one while she read the letter, and she was
+reading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Ormsby's card came up.
+
+"You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do."
+
+"Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me."
+Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of her
+brow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the early
+morning caller.
+
+Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of athletic leisure, and inheritor
+of the Ormsby millions, was pacing back and forth before the handful of
+fire in the drawing-room grate when she entered.
+
+"You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protested
+reproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?"
+
+Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but
+just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.
+
+"How was I to know you didn't know?" she retorted. "It was in the
+_Transcript_."
+
+"Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to
+keep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper.
+Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a
+propeller blade on the _Amphitrite_ trying to get here in time."
+
+"I am so sorry--for the _Amphitrite_," she said. "But you are here, and in
+good season. Shall I call mother and Nell?"
+
+"No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your errands for you--take your
+tickets, and so on."
+
+"Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things.
+And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of
+this household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the family all over
+Europe?"
+
+"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for the
+capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German
+frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to
+help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?"
+
+"If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it."
+
+He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the
+clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward
+presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.
+
+"You are hard with me, Elinor--always flinty and adamantine, and that
+sort. Have you no soft side at all?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can't
+be an anachronism."
+
+"I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other things
+about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?"
+
+"I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of
+the house since father died."
+
+"I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put
+the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; to
+take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. When
+are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little
+worries, Elinor?"
+
+She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.
+
+"You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispassionately. "We
+were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar
+Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong
+enough to make it possible."
+
+He looked at her with narrowing eyes.
+
+"It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it
+is that I haven't been able to open."
+
+She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient.
+
+"If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also--to
+Abigail and the trunk-packing."
+
+He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful
+soul asserting itself boldly.
+
+"It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you."
+
+"To Abigail and the trunk-room?"
+
+"Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West--wherever it is you are going
+to hibernate."
+
+"No," she said decisively; "you must not."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"My saying so ought to be sufficient reason."
+
+"It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I
+tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid."
+
+"I am not," she denied.
+
+"Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you
+should continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I might
+over-persuade you."
+
+Her eyes--they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue
+tints in stressful moments--met his defiantly.
+
+"If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and
+Penelope will be delighted, I am sure."
+
+"And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'll
+be decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like."
+
+Again she made the little gesture of petulant impatience.
+
+"You are continually placing me in a false position. Can't you leave me
+out of it entirely?"
+
+It is one of the prime requisites of successful mastership to know when to
+press the point home, and when to recede gracefully. Ormsby abruptly shut
+the door upon sentiment and came down to things practical.
+
+"It is your every-day comfort that concerns me chiefly. I am going to take
+all three of you in charge, giving the dependable young person a
+well-earned holiday--a little journey in which she won't have to chaffer
+with the transit people. Have you chosen your route to the western
+somewhere?"
+
+Miss Brentwood had the fair, transparent skin that tells tales, and the
+blue-gray eyes were apt to confirm them. David Kent's letter was hidden in
+the folds of her loose-waisted morning gown, and she fancied it stirred
+like a thing alive to remind her of its message. Ormsby was looking past
+her to the old-fashioned ormolu clock on the high mantel, comparing the
+time with his watch, but he was not oblivious of the telltale flush.
+
+"There is nothing embarrassing about the choosing of a route, is there?"
+he queried.
+
+"Oh, no; being true Americans, we don't know one route from another in our
+own country," she confessed. "But at the western end of it we want to go
+over the Western Pacific."
+
+Ormsby knew the West by rail routes as one who travels much for
+time-killing purposes.
+
+"It's a rather roundabout cow-path," he objected. "The Overland Short Line
+is a good bit more direct; not to mention the service, which is a lot
+better."
+
+But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent's letter, and she
+would not withdraw it.
+
+"Probably you don't own any Western Pacific stock," she suggested. "We do;
+and we mean to be loyal to our salt."
+
+Ormsby laughed.
+
+"I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election of
+Governor Bucks. If I had any, I'd wire my broker to sell."
+
+"We are not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch of
+the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so
+conscienceless as you men."
+
+"Conscience," he repeated half absently; "is there any room for such an
+out-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists? But seriously; you ought
+to get rid of Western Pacific. There can be no possible question of
+conscience involved."
+
+"I don't agree with you," she retorted with prompt decision. "If we were
+to sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a bad
+investment. Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, we
+have no right to sell."
+
+He smiled leniently.
+
+"All of which goes to prove that you three lone women need a guardian. But
+I mustn't keep you any longer from Abigail and the trunks. What time shall
+I send the expediters after your luggage?"
+
+She told him, and went with him to the door.
+
+"Please don't think me ungrateful," she said, when she had thrown the
+night-latch for him. "I don't mean to be."
+
+"I don't think anything of you that I ought not to think: in that I am as
+conscientious as even you could wish. Good-by, until this evening. I'll
+meet you all at the station."
+
+As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself under
+fire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.
+
+Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had she
+forgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon. She was
+a thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness;
+a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had become
+panic-acidulous. And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction,
+it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also the
+passivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less assertive folk.
+
+Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but of
+her tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring's
+summing-up of Elinor's mother as a woman who had taken culture and the
+humanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her native
+hills takes polish--reluctantly, and without prejudice to its inner
+granular structure.
+
+"Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the way
+you do," was her comment when Elinor came back. "You are your father's
+daughters, both of you: there isn't a drop of the Grimkie blood in either
+of you, I do believe."
+
+Elinor was sufficiently her father's daughter to hold her peace under her
+mother's reproaches: also, there was enough of the Grimkie blood in her
+veins to stiffen her in opposition when the need arose. So she said
+nothing.
+
+"Since your Uncle Ichabod made such a desperate mess of that copper
+business in Montana, we have all been next door to poverty, and you know
+it," the mother went on, irritated by Elinor's silence. "I don't care so
+much for myself: your father and I began with nothing, and I can go back
+to nothing, if necessary. But you can't, and neither can Penelope; you'd
+both starve. I should like to know what Brookes Ormsby has done that you
+can't tolerate him."
+
+"It isn't anything he has done, or failed to do," said Elinor, wearily.
+"Please let's not go over it all again, mother."
+
+Mrs. Brentwood let that gun cool while she fired another.
+
+"I suppose he came to say good-by: what is he going to do with himself
+this winter?"
+
+The temptation to equivocate for pure perversity's sake was strong upon
+Elinor, and she yielded to it.
+
+"How should I know? He has the _Amphitrite_ and the Florida coast, hasn't
+he?"
+
+Mrs. Brentwood groaned.
+
+"To think of the way he squanders his money in sheer dissipation!" she
+exclaimed. "Of course, he will take an entire house-party with him, as
+usual, and the cost of that one cruise would set you up in housekeeping."
+
+Penelope laughed with a younger daughter's license. She was a statuesque
+young woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyes
+with an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose that
+was neither the Brentwood, which was severely classic, nor the Grimkie,
+which was pure Puritan renaissance.
+
+"Which is to intimate that he won't have money enough left to do it when
+he comes back," she commented. "I wish there were some way of making him
+believe he had to give me what remains of his income after he has spent
+all he can on the Florida cruise. I'd wear Worth gowns and be lapped in
+luxury for the next ten years at the very least."
+
+"He isn't going to Florida this winter," said Elinor, repenting her of the
+small quibble. "He is going West."
+
+Mrs. Brentwood looked up sharply.
+
+"With us?" she queried.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Penelope clasped her hands and tried to look soulful.
+
+"Oh, Ellie!" she said; "have you----"
+
+"No," Elinor retorted; "I have not."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT
+
+The westward journey began at the appointed hour in the evening with the
+resourceful Ormsby in command; and when the outsetting, in which she had
+to sustain only the part of an obedient automaton, was a fact
+accomplished, Elinor settled back into the pillowed corner of her
+sleeping-car section to enjoy the unwonted sensation of being the one
+cared for instead of the caretaker.
+
+She had traveled more or less with her mother and Penelope ever since her
+father's death, and was well used to taking the helm. Experience and the
+responsibilities had made her self-reliant, and her jesting boast that she
+was a dependable young woman was the simple truth. Yet to the most modern
+of girl bachelors there may come moments when the soul harks back to the
+eternal-womanly, and the desire to be petted and looked after and
+safe-conducted is stronger than the bachelor conventions.
+
+Two sections away the inevitable newly married pair posed unconsciously to
+point the moral for Miss Brentwood. She marked the eagerly anticipative
+solicitude of the boyish groom, contrasting it now and then with Ormsby's
+less obtrusive attentions. It was all very absurd and sentimental, she
+thought; and yet she was not without a curious heart-stirring of envy
+provoked by the self-satisfied complacency of the bride.
+
+What had that chit of a girl done to earn her immunity from
+self-defendings and the petty anxieties? Nothing, Elinor decided; at
+least, nothing more purposeful than the swimmer does when he lets himself
+drift with the current. None the less, the immunity was hers, undeniably,
+palpably. For the first time in her life Miss Brentwood found herself
+looking, with a little shudder of withdrawal and dismay, down the possible
+vista--possible to every unmarried woman of twenty-four--milestoned by
+unbroken years of spinsterhood and self-helpings.
+
+Was she strong enough to walk this hedged-up path alone?--single-hearted
+enough to go on holding out against her mother's urgings, against Ormsby's
+masterful wooing, against her own unconquerable longing for a sure
+anchorage in some safe haven of manful care and supervision; all this that
+she might continue to preserve her independence and live the life which,
+despite its drawbacks, was yet her own?
+
+There were times when she doubted her resolution; and this first night of
+the westward journey was one of them. She had thought at one time that she
+might be able to idealize David Kent, but he had gone his way to hew out
+his fortune, taking her upstirrings of his ambition in a purely literal
+and selfish sense, so far as she could determine. And now there was
+Brookes Ormsby. She could by no possibility idealize him. He was a fixed
+fact, stubbornly asserted. Yet he was a great-hearted gentleman, unspoiled
+by his millions, thoughtful always for her comfort, generous,
+self-effacing. Just now, for example, when he had done all, he had seemed
+to divine her wish to be alone and had betaken himself to the
+smoking-compartment.
+
+"I promised not to bore you," he had said, "and I sha'n't. Send the porter
+after me if there is anything I have forgotten to do."
+
+She took up the magazine he had left on the seat beside her and sought to
+put away the disquieting thoughts. But they refused to be dismissed; and
+now among them rose up another, dating back to that idealizing summer at
+the foot of Old Croydon, and having its genesis in a hard saying of her
+mother's.
+
+She closed her eyes, recalling the words and the occasion of them. "You
+are merely wasting time and sentiment on this young upstart of a country
+lawyer, Elinor. So long as you were content to make it a summer day's
+amusement, I had nothing to say; you are old enough and sensible enough to
+choose your own recreations. But in justice to yourself, no less than to
+him, you must let it end with our going home. You haven't money enough for
+two."
+
+Her eyes grew hot under the closed lids when she remembered. At the time
+the hard saying was evoked there was money enough for two, if David Kent
+would have shared it. But he had held his peace and gone away, and now
+there was not enough for two.
+
+Elinor faced her major weakness unflinchingly. She was not a slave to the
+luxuries--the luxuries of the very rich. On the contrary, she had tried to
+make herself believe that hardness was a part of her creed. But latterly,
+she had been made to see that there was a formidable array of things which
+she had been calling comforts: little luxuries which Brookes Ormsby's wife
+might reckon among the simplest necessities of the daily life, but which
+David Kent's wife might have to forego; nay, things which Elinor Brentwood
+might presently have to forego. For she compelled herself to front the
+fact of the diminished patrimony squarely. So long as the modest Western
+Pacific dividends were forthcoming, they could live comfortably and
+without pinching. But failing these----
+
+"No, I'm not great enough," she confessed, with a little shiver. "I should
+be utterly miserable. If I could afford to indulge in ideals it would be
+different; but I can't--not when one word of mine will build a barrier so
+high that all the soul-killing little skimpings can never climb over it.
+And besides, I owe something to mother and Nell."
+
+It was the final straw. When any weakness of the human heart can find a
+seeming virtue to go hand in hand with it, the battle is as good as lost;
+and at that moment Brookes Ormsby, placidly refilling his short pipe in
+the smoking-room of the Pullman, was by no means in the hopeless case he
+was sometimes tempted to fancy himself.
+
+As may be surmised, a diligent suitor, old enough to plan thoughtfully,
+and yet young enough to simulate the youthful ardor of a lover whose hair
+has not begun to thin at the temples, would lose no ground in a three
+days' journey and the opportunities it afforded.
+
+In Penelope's phrase, Elinor "suffered him", enjoying her freedom from
+care like a sleepy kitten; shutting the door on the past and keeping it
+shut until the night when their through sleeper was coupled to the Western
+Pacific Flyer at A.& T. Junction. But late that evening, when she was
+rummaging in her hand-bag for a handkerchief, she came upon David Kent's
+letter and read it again.
+
+"Loring tells me you are coming West," he wrote. "I assume there is at
+least one chance in three that you will pass through Gaston. If you do,
+and if the hour is not altogether impossible, I should like to meet your
+train. One thing among the many the past two years have denied me--the
+only thing I have cared much about, I think--is the sight of your face. I
+shall be very happy if you will let me look at you--just for the minute or
+two the train may stop."
+
+There was more of it; a good bit more: but it was all guarded commonplace,
+opening no window in the heart of the man David Kent. Yet even in the
+commonplace she found some faint interlinings of the change in him; not a
+mere metamorphosis of the outward man, as a new environment might make,
+but a radical change, deep and biting, like the action of a strong acid
+upon a fine-grained metal.
+
+She returned the letter to its envelope, and after looking up Gaston on
+the time-table fell into a heart-stirring reverie, with unseeing eyes
+fixed on the restful blackness of the night rushing rearward past the car
+windows.
+
+"He has forgotten," she said, with a little lip-curl of disappointment.
+"He thinks he ought to remember, and he is trying--trying because Grantham
+said something that made him think he ought to try. But it's no use. It
+was only a little summer idyl, and we have both outlived it."
+
+She was still gazing steadfastly upon the wall of outer darkness when the
+porter began to make down the berths and Penelope came over to sit in the
+opposite seat. A moment later the younger sister made a discovery, or
+thought she did.
+
+"Why, Elinor Brentwood!" she said. "I do believe you are crying!"
+
+Elinor's smile was serenity undisturbed.
+
+"What a vivid imagination you have, Nell, dear," she scoffed. Then she
+changed the subject arbitrarily: "Is mother quite comfortable? Did you
+have the porter put a screen in her window?--you know she always insists
+she can't breathe without it."
+
+Penelope evaded the queries and took her turn at subject-wrenching--an art
+in which she excelled.
+
+"We are on our own railroad now, aren't we?" she asked, with purposeful
+lack-interest. "And--let me see--isn't Mr. Kent at some little town we
+pass through?"
+
+"It is a city," said Elinor. "And the name is Gaston."
+
+"I remember now," Penelope rejoined. "I wonder if we shall see him?"
+
+"It is most unlikely. He does not know we are coming, and he wouldn't be
+looking for us."
+
+Penelope's fine eyes clouded. At times Elinor's thought-processes were as
+plain as print to the younger sister; at other times they were not.
+
+"I should think the least we could do would be to let him know," she
+ventured. "Does anybody know what time the train passes Gaston?"
+
+"At seven-fifteen to-morrow evening," was the unguarded reply; and
+Penelope drew her own conclusions from the ready answer and the folded
+time-table in Elinor's lap.
+
+"Well, why don't you send him a wire? I'm sure I should."
+
+"Why should I?" said Elinor, warily.
+
+"Oh, I don't know: any other young woman of his acquaintance would, I
+fancy. I have half a mind to do it myself. _I_ like him, if you don't care
+for him any more."
+
+Thus Penelope; and a little while afterward, finding herself in the
+library compartment with blanks and pen and ink convenient and nothing
+better to do, she impulsively made the threat good in a ten-word message
+to Kent.
+
+"If he should happen to drop in unexpectedly it will give Ellie the shock
+of her life," she mused; and the telegram was smuggled into the hands of
+the porter to be sent as occasion offered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those who knew Mr. Brookes Ormsby best were wont to say that the world of
+action, a world lusting avidly for resourceful men, had lost the chance of
+acquiring a promising leader when he was born heir to the Ormsby millions.
+Be that as it may, he made the most of such opportunities for the
+exercising of his gift as came to one for whom the long purse leveled most
+barriers; had been making the most of the present leaguer of a woman's
+heart--a citadel whose capitulation was not to be compassed by mere
+money-might, he would have said.
+
+Up to the final day of the long westward flight all things had gone well
+with him. True, Elinor had not thawed visibly, but she had been tolerant;
+Penelope had amused herself at no one's expense save her own--a boon for
+which Ormsby did not fail to be duly thankful; and Mrs. Brentwood had
+contributed her mite by keeping hands off.
+
+But at the dining-car luncheon on the last day's run, Penelope,
+languishing at a table for two with an unresponsive Ormsby for a
+vis-à-vis, made sly mention of the possible recrudescence of one David
+Kent at a place called Gaston: this merely to note the effect upon an
+unresponsive table-mate.
+
+In Penelope's observings there was no effect perceptible. Ormsby said
+"Ah?" and asked if she would have more of the salad. But later, in a
+contemplative half-hour with his pipe in the smoking-compartment, he let
+the scrap of information sink in and take root.
+
+Hitherto Kent had been little more than a name to him; a name he had never
+heard on Elinor's lips. But if love be blind in the teens and twenties, it
+is more than apt to have a keen gift of insight in the thirties and
+beyond. Hence, by the time Ormsby had come to the second filling of his
+pipe, he had pieced together bits of half-forgotten gossip about the
+Croydon summer, curious little reticences on Elinor's part, vague hints
+let fall by Mrs. Brentwood; enough to enable him to chart the rock on
+which his love-argosy was drifting, and to name it--David Kent.
+
+Now to a well-knit man of the world--who happens to be a heaven-born
+diplomatist into the bargain--to be forewarned is to be doubly armed. At
+the end of the half-hour of studious solitude in the smoking-room, Ormsby
+had pricked out his course on the chart to a boat's-length; had trimmed
+his sails to the minutest starting of a sheet. A glance at his watch and
+another at the time-table gave him the length of his respite. Six hours
+there were; and a dining-car dinner intervened. Those six hours, and the
+dinner, he decided, must win or lose the race.
+
+Picturing for ourselves, if we may, how nine men out of ten would have
+given place to panic-ardor, turning a possible victory into a hopeless
+rout, let us hold aloof and mark the generalship of the tenth, who chances
+to be the heaven-born.
+
+For five of the six precious hours Ormsby merely saw to it that Elinor was
+judiciously marooned. Then the dining-car was reopened and the evening
+meal was announced. Waiting until a sufficient number of passengers had
+gone forward to insure a crowded car, Ormsby let his party fall in with
+the tail of the procession, and the inevitable happened. Single seats only
+could be had, and Elinor was compelled to dine in solemn silence at a
+table with three strangers.
+
+Dinner over, there remained but twenty minutes of the respite; but the
+diplomatist kept his head, going back to the sleeping-car with his charges
+and dropping into the seat beside Elinor with the light of calm assurance
+in his eye.
+
+"You are quite comfortable?" he began. "Sha'n't I have the Presence in the
+buffet make you a cup of tea? That in the diner didn't deserve the name."
+
+She was regarding him with curious anger in the gray eyes, and her reply
+quite ignored the kindly offer of refreshment.
+
+"You are the pink of dragomans," she said. "Don't you want to go and
+smoke?"
+
+"To be entirely consistent, I suppose I ought to," he confessed, wondering
+if his throw had failed. "Do you want me to go?"
+
+"I have been alone all the afternoon: I can endure it a little while
+longer, I presume."
+
+Ormsby permitted himself a single heart-throb of exultation. He had
+deliberately gone about to break down her poise, her only barrier of
+defense, and it began to look as if he had succeeded.
+
+"I couldn't help it, you know," he said, catching his cue swiftly. "There
+are times when I'm obliged to keep away from you--times when every fiber
+of me rebels against the restraints of the false position you have thrust
+me into. When I'm taken that way I don't dare play with the fire."
+
+"I wish I could know how much you mean by that," she said musingly. Deep
+down in her heart she knew she was as far as ever from loving this man;
+but his love, or the insistent urging of it, was like a strong current
+drifting her whither she would not go.
+
+"I mean all that an honest man can mean," he rejoined. "I have fought like
+a soldier for standing-room in the place you have assigned me; I have
+tried sincerely--and stupidly, you will say--to be merely your friend,
+just the best friend you ever had. But it's no use. Coming or going, I
+shall always be your lover."
+
+"Please don't," she said, neither coldly nor warmly. "You are getting over
+into the domain of the very young people when you say things like that."
+
+It was an unpleasant thing to say, and he was not beyond wincing a little.
+None the less, he would not be turned aside.
+
+"You'll overlook it in me if I've pressed the thing too hard on the side
+of sentiment, won't you? Apart from the fact that I feel that way, I've
+been going on the supposition that you'd like it, if you could only make
+up your mind to like me."
+
+"I do like you," she admitted; "more than any one I have ever known, I
+think."
+
+The drumming wheels and a long-drawn trumpet blast from the locomotive
+made a shield of sound to isolate them. The elderly banker in the opposite
+section was nodding over his newspaper; and the newly married ones were
+oblivious, each to all else but the other. Mrs. Brentwood was apparently
+sleeping peacefully three seats away; and Penelope was invisible.
+
+"There was a time when I should have begged hard for something more,
+Elinor; but now I'm willing to take what I can get, and be thankful. Will
+you give me the right to make you as happy as I can on the unemotional
+basis?"
+
+She felt herself slipping.
+
+"If you could fully understand----"
+
+"I understand that you don't love me, in the novelist's sense of the word,
+and I am not asking more than you can give. But if you can give me the
+little now, and more when I have won it--don't curl your lip at me,
+please: I'm trying to put it as mildly as I can."
+
+She was looking at him level-eyed, and he could have sworn that she was
+never calmer or more self-possessed.
+
+"I don't know why you should want my promise--or any woman's--on such
+conditions," she said evenly.
+
+"But I do," he insisted.
+
+The lights of a town suburb were flitting past the windows, and the
+monotonous song of the tires was drowned in the shrill crescendo of the
+brakes. She turned from him suddenly and laid her cheek against the
+grateful cool of the window-pane. But when he took her hand she did not
+withdraw it.
+
+"Is it mine, Elinor?" he whispered. "You see, I'm not asking much."
+
+"Is it worth taking--by itself?"
+
+"You make me very happy," he said quietly; and just then the train stopped
+with a jerk, and a shuffling bustle of station-platform noises floated in
+through the open deck transoms of the car.
+
+As if the solution of continuity had been a call to arouse her, Elinor
+freed her hand with a swift little wrench and sat bolt upright in her
+corner.
+
+"This station--do you know the name of it?" she asked, fighting hard for
+the self-control that usually came so easily.
+
+Ormsby consulted his watch.
+
+"I am not quite sure. It ought to be----"
+
+He broke off when he saw that she was no longer listening to him. There
+was a stir in the forward vestibule, and the porter came in with a
+hand-bag. At his heels was a man in a rough-weather box-coat; a youngish
+man, clean-shaven and wind-tanned to a healthy bronze, with an eager face
+and alert eyes that made an instant inventory of the car and its
+complement of passengers. So much Ormsby saw. Then Penelope stood up in
+her place to greet the new-comer.
+
+"Why, Mr. Kent!" she exclaimed. "Are you really going on with us? How nice
+of you!"
+
+Elinor turned coolly upon her seat-mate, self-possession once more firmly
+seated in the saddle.
+
+"Did you know Mr. Kent was going to board the train here?" she asked
+abruptly.
+
+"Do you mean the gentleman Penelope has waylaid? I haven't the pleasure of
+his acquaintance. Will you introduce us?"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+JOURNEYS END--
+
+It had been a day of upsettings for David Kent, beginning with the late
+breakfast at which Neltje, the night watchman at the railway station, had
+brought him Penelope's telegram.
+
+At ten he had a case in court: Shotwell _vs_. Western Pacific Co., damages
+for stock-killing; for the plaintiff--Hawk; for the defendant--Kent. With
+the thought that he was presently going to see Elinor again, Kent went
+gaily to the battle legal, meaning to wring victory out of a jury drawn
+for the most part from the plaintiff's stock-raising neighbors. By dint of
+great perseverance he managed to prolong the fight until the middle of the
+afternoon, was worsted, as usual, and so far lost his temper as to get
+himself called down by the judge, MacFarlane.
+
+Whereupon he went back to the Farquhar Building and to his office and sat
+down at the type-writer to pound out a letter to the general counsel,
+resigning his sinecure. The Shotwell case was the third he had lost for
+the company in a single court term. Justice for the railroad company,
+under present agrarian conditions, was not to be had in the lower courts,
+and he was weary of fighting the losing battle. Therefore----
+
+In the midst of the type-rattling the boy that served the few occupied
+offices in the Farquhar Building had brought the afternoon mail. It
+included a letter from Loring, and there was another reversive upheaval
+for the exile. Loring's business at the capital was no longer a secret. He
+had been tendered the resident management of the Western Pacific, with
+headquarters on the ground, and had accepted. His letter was a brief note,
+asking Kent to report at once for legal duty in the larger field.
+
+"I am not fairly in the saddle yet, and shall not be for a week or so,"
+wrote the newly appointed manager. "But I find I am going to need a
+level-headed lawyer at my elbow from the jump--one who knows the State
+political ropes and isn't afraid of a scrap. Come in on Number Three
+to-day, if you can; if not, send a wire and say when I may look for you.
+Or, better still, wire anyway."
+
+David Kent struggled with his emotions until he had got his feet down to
+the solid earth again. Then he tore up the half-written resignation and
+began to smite things in order for the flight. Could he make Number Three?
+Since that was the train named in Penelope's message, nothing short of a
+catastrophe should prevent his making it.
+
+He did make it, with an hour to spare; an hour which he proceeded to turn
+into a time of sharp trial for the patient telegraph operator at the
+station, with his badgerings of the man for news of Number Three. The
+train reported--he took it as a special miracle wrought in his behalf that
+the Flyer was for this once abreast of her schedule--he fell to tramping
+up and down the long platform, deep in anticipative prefigurings. The
+mills of the years grind many grists besides the trickling stream of the
+hours: would he find Miss Brentwood as he had left her? Could he be sure
+of meeting her on the frank, friendly footing of the Croydon summer? He
+feared not; feared all things--lover-like.
+
+He hoped there would be no absence-reared barrier to be painfully leveled.
+A man among men, a leader in some sort, and in battle a soldier who could
+hew his way painstakingly, if not dramatically, to his end, David Kent was
+no carpet knight, and he knew his lack. Would Elinor make things easy for
+him, as she used to daily in the somewhat difficult social atmosphere of
+the exclusive summer hotel?
+
+Measuring it out in all its despairing length and breadth after the fact,
+he was deeply grateful to Penelope. Missing her ready help at the moment
+of cataclysms when he entered the sleeping-car, he might have betrayed
+himself. His first glance lighted on Elinor and Ormsby, and he needed no
+gloss on the love-text. He had delayed too long; had asked too much of the
+Fates, and Atropos, the scissors-bearing sister, had snipped his thread of
+hope.
+
+It is one of the consequences of civilization that we are denied the
+privilege of unmasking at the behest of the elemental emotions; that we
+are constrained to bleed decorously. Making shift to lean heavily on
+Penelope, Kent came through without doing or saying anything unseemly.
+Mrs. Brentwood, who had been sleeping with one eye open, and that eye upon
+Elinor and Ormsby, made sure that she had now no special reason to be
+ungracious to David Kent. For the others, Ormsby was good-naturedly suave;
+Elinor was by turns unwontedly kind and curiously silent; and
+Penelope--but, as we say, it was to Penelope that Kent owed most.
+
+So it came about that the outcome of the cataclysm was a thing which
+happens often enough in a conventionalized world. David Kent, with his
+tragedy fresh upon him, dropped informally into place as one of the party
+of five; and of all the others, Penelope alone suspected how hard he was
+hit. And when all was said; when the new _modus vivendi_ had been fairly
+established and the hour grew late, Kent went voluntarily with Ormsby to
+the smoking-compartment, "to play the string out decently," as he
+afterward confessed to Loring.
+
+"I see you know how to get the most comfort out of your tobacco," said the
+club-man, when they were companionably settled in the men's room and Kent
+produced his pipe and tobacco pouch. "I prefer the pipe myself, for a
+steady thing; but at this time of night a light Castilla fits me pretty
+well. Try one?" tendering his cigar-case.
+
+Fighting shrewdly against a natural prompting to regard Ormsby as an
+hereditary enemy, Kent forced himself to be neighborly.
+
+"I don't mind," he said, returning the pipe to its case. And when the
+Havanas were well alight, and the talk had circled down upon the political
+situation in the State, he was able to bear his part with a fair exterior,
+giving Ormsby an impressionistic outline of the late campaign and the
+conditions that had made the sweeping triumph of the People's Party
+possible.
+
+"We have been coming to it steadily through the last administration, and a
+part of the preceding one," he explained. "Last year the drought cut the
+cereals in half, and the country was too new to stand it without
+borrowing. There was little local capital, and the eastern article was
+hungry, taking all the interest the law allows, and as much more as it
+could get. This year the crop broke all records for abundance, but the
+price is down and the railroads, trying to recoup for two bad years, have
+stiffened the freight rates. The net result is our political overturn."
+
+"Then the railroads and the corporations are not primarily to blame?" said
+Ormsby.
+
+"Oh, no. Corporations here, as elsewhere, are looking out for the present
+dollar, but if the country were generally prosperous, the people would pay
+the tax carelessly, as they do in the older sections. With us it has been
+a sort of Donnybrook Fair: the agricultural voter has shillalahed the head
+he could reach most easily."
+
+The New Yorker nodded. His millions were solidly placed, and he took no
+more than a sportsman's interest in the fluctuations of the stock market.
+
+"Of course, there have been all sorts of rumors East: 'bull' prophecies
+that the triumph of the new party means an era of unexampled prosperity
+for the State--and by consequence for western stocks; 'bear' growlings
+that things are sure to go to the bow-wows under the Bucks régime. What do
+you think of it?"
+
+Kent blew a series of smoke rings and watched them rise to become a part
+of the stratified tobacco cloud overhead before replying.
+
+"I may as well confess that I am not entirely an unprejudiced observer,"
+he admitted. "For one thing, I am in the legal department of one of the
+best-hated of the railroads; and for another, Governor Bucks, Meigs, the
+attorney-general, and Hendricks, the new secretary of State, are men whom
+I know as, it is safe to say, the general public doesn't know them. If I
+could be sure that these three men are going to be able to control their
+own party majority in the Assembly, I should take the first train East and
+make my fortune selling tips in Wall Street."
+
+"You put it graphically. Then the Bucks idea is likely to prove a
+disturbing element on 'Change?"
+
+"It is; always providing it can dominate its own majority. But this is by
+no means certain. The political earthquake is essentially a popular
+protest against hard conditions brought about, as the voters seem to
+believe, by the oppressions of the alien corporations and extortionate
+railroad rates. Yet there are plenty of steady-going, conservative men in
+the movement; men who have no present idea of revolutionizing things.
+Marston, the lieutenant-governor, is one of that kind. It all depends on
+whether these men will allow themselves to be whipped into line by the
+leaders, who, as I am very well convinced, are a set of conscienceless
+demagogues, fighting solely for their own hand."
+
+Ormsby nodded again.
+
+"You are likely to have good hunting this winter, Mr. Kent. It hasn't
+begun yet, I take it?"
+
+"Oh, no; the Assembly does not convene for a fortnight, and nobody short
+of an inspired prophet can foretell what legislation will be sprung. But
+one thing is safe to count on: the leaders are out for spoils. They mean
+to rob somebody, and, if my guess is worth anything, they are sharp enough
+to try first to get their schemes legalized by having enabling laws passed
+by the Assembly."
+
+"Um," said the eastern man. Then he took the measure of his companion in a
+shrewd overlook. "You are the man on the ground, Mr. Kent, and I'll ask a
+straightforward question. If you had a friend owning stock in one of the
+involved railways, what would you advise?"
+
+Kent smiled.
+
+"We needn't make it a hypothetical case. If I had the right to advise Mrs.
+Brentwood and her daughters, I should counsel them to sit tight in the
+boat for the present."
+
+"Would you? But Western Pacific has gone off several points already."
+
+"I know it has; and unfortunately, Mrs. Brentwood bought in at the top of
+the market. That is why I counsel delay. If she sells now, she is sure to
+lose. If she holds on, there is an even chance for a spasmodic upward
+reaction before worse things happen."
+
+"Perhaps: you know more about the probabilities than I pretend to. But on
+the other hand, she may lose more if she holds on."
+
+Kent bit deep into his cigar.
+
+"We must see to it that she doesn't lose, Mr. Ormsby."
+
+The club-man laughed broadly.
+
+"Isn't that a good bit like saying that the shallop must see to it that
+the wind doesn't blow too hard for it?"
+
+"Possibly. But in the sorriest wreck there is usually some small chance
+for salvage. I understand Mrs. Brentwood's holding is not very large?"
+
+"A block of some three thousand shares, held jointly by her and her two
+daughters, I believe."
+
+"Exactly: not enough to excite anybody's cupidity; and yet enough to turn
+the scale if there should ever be a fight for a majority control."
+
+"There is no such fight in prospect, is there?"
+
+"No; not that I know of. But I was thinking of the possibilities. If a
+smash comes there will be a good deal of horse-swapping in the middle of
+the stream--buying up of depressed stocks by people who need the lines
+worse than the original owners do."
+
+"I see," said Ormsby. "Then you would counsel delay?"
+
+"I should; and I'll go a step farther. I am on the inside, in a way, and
+any hint I can give you for Miss--for Mrs. Brentwood's benefit shall be
+promptly forthcoming."
+
+"By Jove! that's decent," said Ormsby, heartily. "You are a friend worth
+having, Mr. Kent. But which 'inside' do you mean--the railroad or the
+political?"
+
+"Oh, the railroad, of course. And while I think of it, my office will be
+in the Quintard Building; and you--I suppose you will put up at the
+Wellington?"
+
+"For the present, we all shall. It is Mrs. Brentwood's notion to take a
+furnished house later on for herself and daughters, if she can find one.
+I'll keep in touch with you."
+
+"Do. It may come to a bit of quick wiring when our chance arrives. You
+know Loring--Grantham Loring?"
+
+"Passably well. I came across him one summer in the mountains of Peru,
+where he was managing a railroad. He is a mighty good sort. I had mountain
+fever, and he took me in and did for me."
+
+"He is with us now," said David Kent; "the newly appointed general manager
+of the Western Pacific."
+
+"Good!" said the club-man "I think a lot of him; he is an all-around
+dependable fellow, and plenty capable. I'm glad to know he has caught on
+higher up."
+
+The locomotive whistle was droning again, and a dodging procession of
+red-eyed switch-lights flicked past the windows. Kent stood up and flung
+away the stump of his cigar.
+
+"The capital," he announced. "I'll go back with you and help out with the
+shawl-strap things." And in the vestibule he added: "I spoke of Loring
+because he will be with us in anything we have to do in Mrs. Brentwood's
+behalf. Look him up when you have time--fourth floor of the Quintard."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+OF THE MAKING OF LAWS
+
+The session, the shortest in the history of the State, and thus far the
+least eventful, was nearing its close; and the alarmists who had
+prophesied evil and evil only of the "Populist" victory were fast losing
+credit with the men of their own camp and with the country at large.
+
+After the orthodox strife over the speakership of the House, and the
+equally orthodox wrangle over contested seats, the State Assembly had
+settled down to routine business, despatching it with such unheard-of
+celerity as to win columns of approval from the State press as a whole;
+though there were not wanting a few radical editors to raise the
+ante-election cry of reform, and to ask pointedly when it was to begin.
+
+Notwithstanding the lack of alarms, however, the six weeks had been a
+period of unceasing vigilance on the part of the interests which were
+supposed to be in jeopardy. Every alien corporation owning property and
+doing business in the State had its quota of watchful defenders on the
+ground; men who came and went, in the lobbies of the capitol, in the
+visitors' galleries, at the receptions; men who said little, but who saw
+and heard all things down to the small talk of the corridors and the
+clubs, and the gossip of the hotel rotundas.
+
+David Kent was of this silent army of observation, doing watch-dog duty
+for the Western Pacific; thankful enough, if the truth be told, to have a
+thing to do which kept him from dwelling overmuch upon the wreck of his
+hopes. But in the closing days of the session, when a despatchful
+Assembly, anxious to be quit of its task, had gone into night sittings,
+the anodyne drug of work began to lose its effect.
+
+The Brentwoods had taken furnished apartments in Tejon Avenue, two squares
+from the capitol, and Kent had called no oftener than good breeding
+prescribed. Yet their accessibility, and his unconquerable desire to sear
+his wound in the flame that had caused it, were constant temptations, and
+he was battling with them for the hundredth time on the Friday night when
+he sat in the House gallery listening to a perfunctory debate which
+concerned itself with a bill touching State water-ways.
+
+"Heavens! This thing is getting to be little short of deadly!" fumed
+Crenshawe, his right-hand neighbor, who was also a member of the corps of
+observation. "I'm going to the club for a game of pool. Won't you come
+along?"
+
+Kent nodded and left his seat with the bored one. But in the great rotunda
+he changed his mind.
+
+"You'll find plenty of better players than I am at the club," he said in
+extenuation. "I think I'll smoke a whiff or two here and go back. They
+can't hold on much longer for to-night."
+
+Five minutes later, when he had lighted a cigar and was glancing over the
+evening paper, two other members of the corporation committee of safety
+came down from the Senate gallery and stopped opposite Kent's pillar to
+struggle into their overcoats.
+
+"It's precisely as I wrote our people two weeks ago--timidity scare, pure
+and simple," one of them was saying. "I've a mind to start home to-morrow.
+There is nothing doing here, or going to be done."
+
+"No," said the other. "If it wasn't for House Bill Twenty-nine, I'd go
+to-night. They will adjourn to-morrow or Monday."
+
+"House Bill Twenty-nine is much too dead to bury," was the reassuring
+rejoinder. "The committee is ours, and the bill will not be heard of again
+at this session. If that is all you are holding on for----"
+
+They passed out of earshot, and Kent folded his newspaper absently. House
+Bill Twenty-nine had been the one measure touching the sensitive "vested
+interests"; the one measure for the suppression of which the corporations'
+lobby had felt called on to take steps. It was an omnibus bill put forth
+as a substitute for the existing law defining the status of foreign
+corporations. It had originated in the governor's office,--a fact which
+Kent had ferreted out within twenty-four hours of its first reading,--and
+for that reason he had procured a printed copy, searching it diligently
+for the hidden menace he was sure it embodied.
+
+When the search proved fruitless, he had seen the bill pass the House by a
+safe majority, had followed it to the Senate, and in a cunningly worded
+amendment tacked on in the upper house had found what he was seeking.
+Under the existing law foreign corporations were subject to State
+supervision, and were dealt with as presumably unfriendly aliens. But the
+Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine fairly swept the interstate
+corporations, as such, out of existence, by making it obligatory upon them
+to acquire the standing of local corporations. Charters were to be refiled
+with the secretary of State; resident directories and operating
+headquarters were to be established within the boundaries and jurisdiction
+of the State; in short, the State proposed, by the terms of the new law,
+to deal only with creatures of its own creation.
+
+Kent saw, or thought he saw, the fine hand of the junto in all this. It
+was a still hunt in which the longest way around was the shortest way
+home. Like all new-country codes, the organic law of the State favored
+local corporations, and it might be argued that a bill placing the foreign
+companies on a purely local footing was an unmixed blessing to the aliens.
+But on the other hand, an unprincipled executive might easily make the new
+law an engine of extortion. To go no further into the matter than the
+required refiling of charters: the State constitution gave the secretary
+of State quasi-judicial powers. It was within his province to pass upon
+the applications for chartered rights, and to deny them if the question
+_pro bono publico_ were involved.
+
+Kent put two and two together, saw the wide door of exactions which might
+be opened, and passed the word of warning among his associates; after
+which he had watched the course of the amended House Bill Twenty-nine with
+interest sharp-set, planning meanwhile with Hildreth, the editor of the
+_Daily Argus_, an exposé which should make plain the immense possibilities
+for corruption opened up by the proposed law; a journalistic salvo of
+publicity to be fired as a last resort.
+
+The measure as amended had passed the Senate without debate, and had gone
+back to the House. Here, after the second reading, and in the very hour
+when the _Argus_ editorial was getting itself cast in the linotypes, there
+was a hitch. The member from the Rio Blanco, favoring the measure in all
+its parts, and fearful only lest corporation gold might find a technical
+flaw in it, moved that it be referred to the committee on judiciary for a
+report on its constitutionality; and, accordingly, to the committee on
+judiciary it had gone.
+
+Kent recalled the passing of the crisis, remembering how he had hastened
+to telephone the _Argus_ editor to kill the exposé at the last moment. The
+incident was now a month in the past, and the committee had not yet
+reported; would never report, Kent imagined. He knew the personnel of the
+committee on judiciary; knew that at least three members of it were down
+on the list, made up at the beginning of the session by his colleagues in
+the army of observation, as "approachables". Also, he knew by inference at
+least, that these three men had been approached, not without success, and
+that House Bill Twenty-nine, with its fee-gathering amendment, was safely
+shelved.
+
+"It's an ill-smelling muck-heap!" he frowned, recalling the incidents of
+the crisis at the suggestion let fall by the two outgoing lobbyists. "And
+so much of this dog-watch as isn't sickeningly demoralizing is deadly
+dull, as Crenshawe puts it. If I had anywhere to go, I'd cut the galleries
+for to-night."
+
+He was returning the newspaper to his pocket when it occurred to him that
+his object in buying it had been to note the stock quotations; a daily
+duty which, for Elinor's sake, he had never omitted. Whereupon he reopened
+it and ran his eye down the lists. There was a decided upward tendency in
+westerns. Overland Short Line had gained two points; and Western
+Pacific----
+
+He held the paper under the nearest electric globe to make sure: Western
+Pacific, preferred, was quoted at fifty-eight and a half, which was one
+point and a half above the Brentwood purchase price.
+
+One minute later an excited life-saver was shut in the box of the public
+telephone, gritting his teeth at the inanity of the central operator who
+insisted on giving him "A-1224" instead of "A-1234," the Hotel Wellington.
+
+"No, no! Can't you understand? I want twelve-thirty-four; one, two,
+_three_, four; the Hotel Wellington."
+
+There was more skirling of bells, another nerve-trying wait, and at last
+the clerk of the hotel answered.
+
+"What name did you say? Oh, it's you, is it, Mr. Kent? Ormsby? Mr. Brookes
+Ormsby? No, he isn't here; he went out about two minutes ago. What's that
+you say? _Damn_? Well, I'm sorry, too. No message that I can take? All
+right. Good-by."
+
+This was the beginning. For the middle part Kent burst out of the
+telephone-box and took the nearest short-cut through the capitol grounds
+for the street-car corner. At a quarter of nine he was cross-questioning
+the clerk face to face in the lobby of the Wellington. There was little
+more to be learned about Ormsby. The club-man had left his key and gone
+out. He was in evening dress, and had taken a cab at the hotel entrance.
+
+Kent dashed across to his rooms and, in a feverish race against time, made
+himself fit to chase a man in evening dress. There was no car in sight
+when he came down, and he, too, took a cab with an explosive order to the
+driver: "124 Tejon Avenue, and be quick about it!"
+
+It was the housemaid that answered his ring at the door of the Brentwood
+apartment. She was a Swede, a recent importation; hence Kent learned
+nothing beyond the bare fact that the ladies had gone out. "With Mr.
+Ormsby?" he asked.
+
+"Yaas; Aye tank it vill pee dat yentlemans."
+
+The pursuer took the road again, rather unhopefully. There were a dozen
+places where Ormsby might have taken his charges. Among them there was the
+legislative reception at Portia Van Brock's. Kent flipped a figurative
+coin, and gave the order for Alameda Square. The reception was perhaps the
+least unlikely place of the dozen.
+
+He was no more than fashionably late at the Van Brock house, and
+fortunately he was able to reckon himself among the chosen few for whom
+Miss Portia's door swung on hospitable hinges at all hours. Loring had
+known her in Washington, and he had stood sponsor for Kent in the first
+week of the exile's residence at the capital. Thereafter she had taken
+Kent up on his own account, and by now he was deep in her debt. For one
+thing, she had set the fashion in the matter of legislative
+receptions--her detractors, knowing nothing whatever about it, hinted that
+she had been an amateur social lobbyist in Washington, playing the game
+for the pure zest of it--and at these functions Kent had learned many
+things pertinent to his purpose as watch-dog for the railroad company and
+legal adviser to his chief--things not named openly on the floor of the
+House or of the Senate chamber.
+
+There was a crush in the ample mansion in Alameda Square, as there always
+was at Miss Van Brock's "open evenings," and when Kent came down from the
+cloakroom he had to inch his way by littles through the crowded
+reception-parlors in the search for the Brentwood party. It was
+unsuccessful at first; but later, catching a glimpse of Elinor at the
+piano, and another of Penelope inducting an up-country legislator into the
+mysteries of social small-talk, he breathed freer. His haphazard guess had
+hit the mark, and the finding of Ormsby was now only a question of
+moments.
+
+It was Miss Van Brock herself who told him where to look for the
+club-man--though not at his first asking.
+
+"You did come, then," she said, giving him her hand with a frank little
+smile of welcome. "Some one said you were not going to be frivolous any
+more, and I wondered if you would take it out on me. Have you been at the
+night session?"
+
+"Yes; at what you and your frivolities have left of it. A good third of
+the Solons seem to be sitting in permanence in Alameda Square."
+
+"'Solons'," she repeated. "That recalls Editor Brownlo's little joke--only
+he didn't mean it. He wrote of them as 'Solons,' but the printer got it
+'solans'. The member from Caliente read the article and the word stuck in
+his mind. In an unhappy hour he asked Colonel Mack's boy--Harry, the
+irrepressible, you know--to look it up for him. Harry did it, and of
+course took the most public occasion he could find to hand in his answer.
+'It's geese, Mr. Hackett!' he announced triumphantly; and after we were
+all through laughing at him the member from the warm place turned it just
+as neatly as a veteran. 'Well, I'm Hackett,' he said."
+
+David Kent laughed, as he was in duty bound, but he still had Ormsby on
+his mind.
+
+"I see you have Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters here: can you tell me
+where I can find Mr. Brookes Ormsby?"
+
+"I suppose I could if I should try. But you mustn't hurry me. There is a
+vacant corner in that davenport beyond the piano: please put me there and
+fetch me an ice. I'll wait for you."
+
+He did as he was bidden, and when she was served he stood over her,
+wondering, as other men had wondered, what was the precise secret of her
+charm. Loring had told him Miss Van Brock's story. She was southern born,
+the only child of a somewhat ill-considered match between a young
+California lawyer, wire-pulling in the national capital in the interest of
+the Central Pacific Railroad, and a Virginia belle tasting the delights of
+her first winter in Washington.
+
+Later, the young lawyer's state, or his employers, had sent him to
+Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown
+up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of
+frank commercialism. Inheriting her mother's rare beauty of face and form,
+and uniting with it a sympathetic gift in grasp of detail, political and
+other, she soon became her father's confidante and loyal partizan, taking
+the place, as a daughter might, of the ambitious young wife and mother,
+who had set her heart on seeing the Van Brock name on the roll of the
+United States Senate.
+
+Rensselaer Van Brock had died before the senatorial dream could be
+realized, but not before he had made a sufficient number of lucky
+investments to leave his daughter the arbitress of her own future. What
+that future should be, not even Loring could guess. Since her father's
+death Miss Van Brock had been a citizen of the world. With a widowed aunt
+for the shadowiest of chaperons, she had drifted with the tide of
+inclination, coming finally to rest in the western capital for no better
+reason, perhaps, than that some portion of her interest-bearing securities
+were emblazoned with the great seal of this particular western State.
+
+Kent was thinking of Loring's recountal as he stood looking down on her.
+Other women were younger--and with features more conventionally beautiful;
+Kent could find a round dozen within easy eye-reach, to say nothing of the
+calm-eyed, queenly _improvisatrice_ at the piano--his constant standard of
+all womanly charm and grace. Unconsciously he fell to comparing the two,
+his hostess and his love, and was brought back to things present by a
+sharp reminder from Portia.
+
+"Stop looking at Miss Brentwood that way, Mr. David. She is not for you;
+and you are keeping me waiting."
+
+He smiled down on her.
+
+"It is the law of compensation. I fancy you have kept many a man
+waiting--and will keep many another."
+
+There was a little tang of bitterness in her laugh.
+
+"You remind me of the time when I went home from school--oh, years and
+years ago. Old Chloe--she was my black mammy, you know--had a grown
+daughter of her own, and her effort to dispose of her 'M'randy' was a
+standing joke in the family. In answer to my stereotyped question she
+stood back and folded her arms. 'Naw, honey; dat M'randy ain't ma'ied yit.
+She gwine be des lak you; look pretty, an' say, _Howdy! Misteh Jawnson_,
+an' go 'long by awn turrer side de road.'"
+
+"A very pretty little fable," said Kent. "And the moral?"
+
+"Is that I amuse myself with you--all of you; and in your turn you make
+use of me--or you think you do. Of what use can _I_ be to Mr. David Kent
+this evening?"
+
+"See how you misjudge me!" he protested. "My errand here to-night is
+purely charitable. Which brings me back to Ormsby: did you say you could
+tell me where to look for him?"
+
+"He is in the smoking-room with five or six other tobacco misanthropes.
+What do you want of him?"
+
+"I want to say two words in his ear; after which I shall vanish and make
+room for my betters."
+
+Miss Van Brock was gazing steadfastly at the impassioned face lighted by
+the piano candles.
+
+"Is it about Miss Brentwood?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"In a way--yes," he confessed.
+
+She rose and stood beside him--a bewitching figure of a woman who knew her
+part in the human comedy and played it well.
+
+"Is it wise, David?" she asked softly. "I am not denying the
+possibilities: you might come between them if you should try--I'm rather
+afraid you could. But you mustn't, you know; it's too late. You've marred
+her, between you; or rather that convention, which makes a woman deaf,
+blind and dumb until a man has fairly committed himself, has marred her.
+For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him: for his
+sake she could never be quite the same to you."
+
+He drew apart from her, frowning.
+
+"If I should say that I don't fully understand what you mean?" he
+rejoined.
+
+"I should retort by saying something extremely uncomplimentary about your
+lack of perspicacity," she cut in maliciously.
+
+"I beg pardon," he said, a little stiffly. "You are laboring under an
+entirely wrong impression. What I have to say to Mr. Brookes Ormsby does
+not remotely concern the matter you touch upon. It's an affair of the
+Stock Exchange."
+
+"As if I didn't know!" she countered. "You merely reminded me of the other
+thing. But if it is only a business secret you may as well tell me all
+about it at first hands. Some one is sure to tell me sooner or later."
+
+Now David Kent was growing impatient. Down in the inner depths of him he
+was persuaded that Ormsby might have difficulty in inducing Mrs. Brentwood
+to sell her Western Pacific stock even at an advance; might require time,
+at least. And time, with a Bucks majority tinkering with corporate rights
+in the Assembly, might well be precious.
+
+"Forgive me if I tell Ormsby first," he pleaded. "Afterward, if you care
+to know, you shall."
+
+Miss Van Brock let him go at that, but now the way to the smoking-den on
+the floor above was hedged up. He did battle with the polite requirements,
+as a man must; shaking hands or exchanging a word with one and another of
+the obstructors only as he had to. None the less, when he had finally
+wrought his way to the smoking-room Ormsby had eluded him again.
+
+He went back to the parlors, wondering how he had missed the club-man. In
+the middle room of the suite he found Portia chatting with Marston, the
+lieutenant-governor; and a young woman in the smartest of reception gowns
+had succeeded to Elinor's place at the piano.
+
+"You found him?" queried the hostess, excusing herself to the tall,
+saturnine man who had shared the honors at the head of the People's Party
+ticket with Jasper G. Bucks.
+
+"No," said Kent. "Have you seen him?"
+
+"Why, yes; they all came to take leave just a few moments after you left
+me. I thought of telling Mr. Ormsby you were looking for him, but you shut
+me off so snippily----"
+
+"Miss Van Brock! What have you done? I must go at once."
+
+"Really? I am complimented. But if you must, you must, I suppose. I had
+something to tell you--something of importance; but I can't remember what
+it was now. I never can remember things in the hurry of leave-takings."
+
+As we have intimated, Kent had hitherto found Miss Portia's confidences
+exceedingly helpful in a business way, and he hesitated. "Tell me," he
+begged.
+
+"No, I can't remember it: I doubt if I shall ever remember it unless you
+can remind me by telling me why you are so desperately anxious to find Mr.
+Ormsby."
+
+"I wonder if you hold everybody up like this," he laughed. "But I don't
+mind telling you. Western Pacific preferred has gone to fifty-eight and a
+half."
+
+"And Mr. Ormsby has some to sell? I wish I had. Do you know what I'd do?"
+She drew closer and laid a hand on his arm. "I'd sell--by wire--to-night;
+at least, I'd make sure that my telegram would be the first thing my
+broker would lay his hands on in the morning."
+
+"On general principles, I suppose: so should I, and for the same reason.
+But have I succeeded in reminding you of that thing you were going to tell
+me?"
+
+"Not wholly; only partly. You said this matter of Mr. Ormsby's concerned
+Miss Brentwood--in a way--didn't you?"
+
+"You will have your pound of flesh entire, won't you? The stock is hers,
+and her mother's and sister's. I want Ormsby to persuade them to sell.
+They'll listen to him. That is all; all the all."
+
+"Of course!" she said airily. "How simple of me not to have been able to
+add it up without your help. I saw the quotation in the evening paper; and
+I know, better, perhaps, than you do, the need for haste. Must you go
+now?" She had taken his arm and was edging him through the press in the
+parlors toward the entrance hall.
+
+"_You_ haven't paid me yet," he objected.
+
+"No; I'm trying to remember. Oh, yes; I have it now. Wasn't some one
+telling me that you are interested in House Bill Twenty-nine?"
+
+They had reached the dimly lighted front vestibule, and her hand was still
+on his arm.
+
+"I was interested in it," he admitted, correcting the present to the past
+tense.
+
+"But after it went to the House committee on judiciary you left it to more
+skilful, or perhaps we'd better say, to less scrupulous hands?"
+
+"I believe you are a witch. Is there anything you don't know?"
+
+"Plenty of things. For example, I don't know exactly how much it cost our
+good friends of the 'vested interests' to have that bill mislaid in the
+committee room. But I do know they made a very foolish bargain."
+
+"Beyond all doubt a most demoralizing bargain, which, to say the best of
+it, was only a choice between two evils. But why foolish?"
+
+"Because--well, because mislaid things have a way of turning up
+unexpectedly, you know, and--"
+
+He stopped her in a sudden gust of feverish excitement.
+
+"Tell me what you mean in one word, Miss Van Brock. Don't those fellows
+intend to stay bought?"
+
+She smiled pityingly.
+
+"You are very young, Mr. David--or very honest. Supposing those 'fellows',
+as you dub the honorable members of the committee on judiciary, had a
+little plan of their own; a plan suggested by the readiness of certain of
+their opponents to rush into print with statements which might derange
+things?"
+
+"I am supposing it with all my might."
+
+"That is right; we are only supposing, you must remember. We may suppose
+their idea was to let the excitement about the amended bill die down; to
+let people generally, and one fiercely honest young corporation attorney
+in particular, have time to forget that there was such a thing as House
+Bill Twenty-nine. And in such a suppositional case, how much they would be
+surprised, and how they would laugh in their sleeves, if some one came
+along and paid them handsomely for doing precisely what they meant to do."
+
+David Kent's smile was almost ferocious.
+
+"My argument is as good now as it was in the beginning: they have yet to
+reckon with the man who will dare to expose them."
+
+She turned from him and spoke to the footman at the door.
+
+"Thomas, fetch Mr. Kent's coat and hat from the dressing-room." And then
+to Kent, in the tone she might have used in telling him of the latest
+breeziness of the member from the Rio Blanco: "I remember now what it was
+that I wanted to tell you. While you have been trying to find Mr. Ormsby,
+the committee on judiciary has been reporting the long-lost House Bill
+Twenty-nine. If you hurry you may be in time to see it passed--it will
+doubtless go through without any tiresome debate. But you will hardly have
+time to obstruct it by arousing public sentiment through the newspapers."
+
+David Kent shook the light touch of her hand from his arm and set his
+teeth hard upon a word hot from the furnace of righteous indignation. For
+a moment he fully believed she was in league with the junto; that she had
+been purposely holding him in talk while the very seconds were priceless.
+
+She saw the scornful wrath in his eyes and turned it aside with a swift
+denial.
+
+"No, David; I didn't do that," she said, speaking to his inmost thought.
+"If there had been anything you could do--the smallest shadow of a chance
+for you--I should have sent you flying at the first word. But there
+wasn't; it was all too well arranged--"
+
+But he had snatched coat and hat from the waiting Thomas and was running
+like a madman for the nearest cab-stand.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+THE SENTIMENTALISTS
+
+Kent's time from Alameda Square to the capitol was the quickest a flogged
+cab-horse could make, but he might have spared the horse and saved the
+double fee. On the broad steps of the south portico he, uprushing three at
+a bound, met the advance guard of the gallery contingent, down-coming. The
+House had adjourned.
+
+"One minute, Harnwicke!" he gasped, falling upon the first member of the
+corporations' lobby he could identify in the throng. "What's been done?"
+
+"They've taken a fall out of us," was the brusk reply. "House Bill
+Twenty-nine was reported by the committee on judiciary and rushed through
+after you left. Somebody engineered it to the paring of a fingernail: bare
+quorum to act; members who might have filibustered weeded out, on one
+pretext or another, to a man; pages all excused, and nobody here with the
+privilege of the floor. It was as neat a piece of gag-work as I ever hope
+to see if I live to be a hundred."
+
+Kent faced about and joined the townward dispersal with his informant.
+
+"Well, I suppose that settles it definitely; at least, until we can test
+its constitutionality in the courts," he said.
+
+Harnwicke thought not, being of the opinion that the vested interests
+would never say die until they were quite dead. As assistant counsel for
+the Overland Short Line, he was in some sense the dean of the corps of
+observation, and could speak with authority.
+
+"There is one chance left for us this side of the courts," he went on;
+"and now I think of it, you are the man to say how much of a chance it is.
+The bill still lacks the governor's signature."
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"It is his own measure. I have proof positive that he and Meigs and
+Hendricks drafted it. And all this fine-haired engineering to-night was
+his, or Meigs'."
+
+"Of course; we all know that. But we don't know the particular object yet.
+Do they need the new law in their business as a source of revenue? Or do
+they want to be hired to kill it? In other words, does Bucks want a lump
+sum for a veto? You know the man better than any of us."
+
+"By Jove!" said Kent. "Do you mean to say you would buy the governor of a
+state?"
+
+Harnwicke turned a cold eye on his companion as they strode along. He was
+of the square-set, plain-spoken, aggressive type--a finished product of
+the modern school of business lawyers.
+
+"I don't understand that you are raising the question of ethics at this
+stage of the game, do I?" he remarked.
+
+Kent fired up a little.
+
+"And if I am?" he retorted.
+
+"I should say you had missed your calling. It is baldly a question of
+business--or rather of self-preservation. We needn't mince matters among
+ourselves. If Bucks is for sale, we buy him."
+
+Kent shrugged.
+
+"There isn't any doubt about his purchasability. But I confess I don't
+quite see how you will go about it."
+
+"Never mind that part of it; just leave the ways and means with those of
+us who have riper experience--and fewer hamperings, perhaps--than you
+have. Your share in it is to tell us how big a bid we must make. As I say,
+you know the man."
+
+David Kent was silent for the striding of half a square. The New England
+conscience dies hard, and while it lives it is given to drawing sharp
+lines on all the boundaries of culpability. Kent ended by taking the
+matter in debate violently out of the domain of ethics and standing it
+upon the ground of expediency.
+
+"It will cost too much. You would have to bid high--not to overcome his
+scruples, for he has none; but to satisfy his greed--which is abnormal.
+And, besides, he has his pose to defend. If he can see his way clear to a
+harvest of extortions under the law, he will probably turn you down--and
+will make it hot for you later on in the name of outraged virtue."
+
+Harnwicke's laugh was cynical.
+
+"He and his little clique don't own the earth in fee simple. Perhaps we
+shall be able to make them grasp that idea before we are through with
+them. We have had this fight on in other states. Would ten thousand be
+likely to satisfy him?"
+
+"No," said Kent. "If you add another cipher, it might."
+
+"A hundred thousand is a pot of money. I take it for granted the Western
+Pacific will stand its pro-rate?"
+
+The New England conscience bucked again, and Kent made his first open
+protest against the methods of the demoralizers.
+
+"I am not in a position to say: I should advise against it. Unofficially,
+I think I can speak for Loring and the Boston people. We are not more
+saintly than other folk, perhaps; and we are not in the railroad business
+for health or pleasure. But I fancy the Advisory Board would draw the line
+at bribing a governor--at any rate, I hope it would."
+
+"Rot!" said Harnwicke. And then: "You'll reap the benefits with other
+interstate interests; you'll have to come in."
+
+Kent hesitated, but not now on the ground of the principle to be defended.
+
+"That brings in a question which I am not competent to decide. Loring is
+your man. You will call a conference of the 'powers,' I take it?"
+
+"It is already called. I sent Atherton out to notify everybody as soon as
+the trap was sprung in the House. We meet in the ordinary at the Camelot.
+You'll be there?"
+
+"A little later--if Loring wants me. I have some telephoning to do before
+this thing gets on the wires."
+
+They parted at the entrance to the Camelot Club, and Kent went two squares
+farther on to the Wellington. Ormsby had not yet returned, and Kent went
+to the telephone and called up the Brentwood apartments. It was Penelope
+that answered.
+
+"Well, I think you owe it," she began, as soon as he had given his name.
+"What did I do at Miss Van Brock's to make you cut me dead?"
+
+"Why, nothing at all, I'm sure. I--I was looking for Mr. Ormsby, and----"
+
+"Not when I saw you," she broke in flippantly. "You were handing Miss
+Portia an ice. Are you still looking for Mr. Ormsby?"
+
+"I am--just that. Is he with you?"
+
+"No; he left here about twenty minutes ago. Is it anything serious?"
+
+"Serious enough to make me want to find him as soon as I can. Did he say
+he was coming down to the Wellington?"
+
+"Of course, he didn't," laughed Penelope. And then: "Whatever is the
+matter with you this evening, Mr. Kent?"
+
+"I guess I'm a little excited," said Kent. "Something has
+happened--something I can't talk about over the wires. It concerns you and
+your mother and sister. You'll know all about it as soon as I can find
+Ormsby and send him out to you."
+
+Penelope's "Oh!" was long-drawn and gasping.
+
+"Is any one dead?" she faltered.
+
+"No, no; it's nothing of that kind. I'll send Ormsby out, and he will tell
+you all about it."
+
+"Can't you come yourself?"
+
+"I may have to if I can't find Ormsby. Please don't let your mother go to
+bed until you have heard from one or the other of us. Did you get that?"
+
+"Ye-es; but I should like to know more--a great deal more."
+
+"I know; and I'd like to tell you. But I am using the public telephone
+here at the Wellington, and--Oh, damn!" Central had cut him out, and it
+was some minutes before the connection was switched in again. "Is that
+you, Miss Penelope? All right; I wasn't quite through. When Ormsby comes,
+you must do as he tells you to, and you and Miss Elinor must help him
+convince your mother. Do you understand?"
+
+"No, I don't understand anything. For goodness' sake, find Mr. Ormsby and
+make him run! This is perfectly dreadful!"
+
+"Isn't it? And I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."
+
+Kent hung up the receiver, and when he was asking a second time at the
+clerk's desk for the missing man, Ormsby came in to answer for himself.
+Whereupon the crisis was outlined to him in brief phrase, and he rose to
+the occasion, though not without a grimace.
+
+"I'm not sure just how well you know Mrs. Hepzibah Brentwood," he
+demurred; "but it will be quite like her to balk. Don't you think you'd
+better go along? You are the company's attorney, and your opinion ought to
+carry some weight."
+
+David Kent thought not; but a cautious diplomatist, having got the idea
+well into the back part of his head, was not to be denied.
+
+"Of course, you'll come. You are just the man I'll need to back me up. I
+shan't shirk; I'll take the mother into the library and break the ice,
+while you are squaring things with the young women. Penelope won't care
+the snap of her finger either way; but Elinor has some notion's that you
+are fitter to cope with than I am. After, if you can give me a lift with
+Mrs. Hepzibah, I'll call you in. Come on; it's getting pretty late to go
+visiting."
+
+Kent yielded reluctantly, and they took a car for the sake of speed. It
+was Penelope who opened the door for them at 124 Tejon Avenue; and Ormsby
+made it easy for his coadjutor, as he had promised.
+
+"I want to see your mother in the library for a few minutes," he began.
+"Will you arrange it, and take care of Mr. Kent until I come for him?"
+
+Penelope "arranged" it, not without another added pang of curiosity,
+whereupon David Kent found himself the rather embarrassed third of a
+silent trio gathered about the embers of the sitting-room fire.
+
+"Is it to be a Quaker meeting?" asked Penelope, sweetly, when the silence
+had grown awe-inspiring.
+
+Kent laughed for pure joy at the breaking of the spell.
+
+"One would think we had come to drag you all off to jail, Ormsby and I,"
+he said; and then he went on to explain. "It's about your Western Pacific
+stock, you know. To-day's quotations put it a point and a half above your
+purchase price, and we've come to persuade you to unload, _pronto_, as the
+member from the Rio Blanco would say."
+
+"Is that all?" said Penelope, stifling a yawn. "Then I'm not in it: I'm an
+infant." And she rose and went to the piano.
+
+"You haven't told us all of it: what has happened?" queried Elinor,
+speaking for the first time since her greeting of Kent.
+
+He briefed the story of House Bill Twenty-nine for her, pointing out the
+probabilities.
+
+"Of course, no one can tell what the precise effect will be," he
+qualified. "But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of
+dividends. Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable
+enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of
+those who administer it. In fact, I happen to know that it was designed
+and carried through for that very purpose."
+
+She smiled.
+
+"I have understood you were in the opposition. Are you speaking
+politically?"
+
+"I am stating the plain fact," said Kent, nettled a little by her
+coolness. "Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into
+office than we have here in this State at the present moment."
+
+He spoke warmly, and she liked him best when he put her on the footing of
+an equal antagonist.
+
+"I can't agree with your inference," she objected. "As a people we are
+neither obsequious nor stupid."
+
+"Perhaps not. But it is one of the failures of a popular government that
+an honest majority may be controlled and directed by a small minority of
+shrewd rascals. That is exactly what has happened in the passage of this
+bill. I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the
+faintest suspicion that it was a 'graft'."
+
+"If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true
+leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!" she said
+half-absently; and he started forward and said: "I beg pardon?"
+
+She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of
+disappointment in them.
+
+"I ought to beg yours. I'm afraid I was thinking aloud. But it is one of
+my dreams. If I were a man I should go into politics."
+
+"To purify them?"
+
+"To do my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and
+well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too.
+But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who
+_could_ and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it must be led."
+
+"There is no lack of leadership, such as it is," he hazarded.
+
+"No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind: men who will
+put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of
+justice and right-doing for its own sake. Are there any such men
+nowadays?"
+
+"I don't know," he rejoined gravely. "Sometimes I'm tempted to doubt it.
+It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part. The kind
+of man you have in mind isn't in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot."
+
+She contradicted him firmly.
+
+"No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn't shun it; he would take hold
+with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish
+temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following--be
+the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority."
+
+Kent shook his head slowly.
+
+"Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call
+patriotism."
+
+"I don't understand," she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to
+understand.
+
+"I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to
+have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of
+patriotism to make him do his best."
+
+"But that would be self-seeking again."
+
+"Not necessarily in the narrow sense. The old knightly chivalry was a
+beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would
+have been frankly brutal without it: yet it had its well-spring in what
+appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment."
+
+"And we are not sentimentalists?" she suggested.
+
+"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your
+ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly
+spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he
+will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a
+political constituency."
+
+She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the
+nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.
+
+Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was
+searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful.
+They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made
+sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As
+many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry
+there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling
+down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.
+
+Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field
+of the Lust of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash,
+it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she
+had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small
+field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his
+training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had
+been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is
+transmitted in terms of self-seeking.
+
+He turned upon her suddenly.
+
+"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"How absurd!"
+
+"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me
+out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."
+
+"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.
+
+"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a
+worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been
+trying to be a money-getter."
+
+"You can be something vastly better."
+
+"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."
+
+Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on
+his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now
+what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his
+way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call
+out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone,
+of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in
+keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire
+him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There
+would be time enough to drain it farther on.
+
+"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said,
+breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I----"
+
+She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of
+apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.
+
+"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother
+will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always
+do."
+
+David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive
+responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon
+summer for a background.
+
+It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many
+things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however
+bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this
+new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she
+was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism
+in them, as thus:
+
+"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over
+the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I
+recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things
+which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we
+were both very young that summer--years younger than we can ever be again.
+Don't you?"
+
+"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pass in which he would have
+agreed with her if she had asserted that black was white. It was not
+weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the
+word which would fit her changed mood.
+
+"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more
+charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on
+our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"
+
+"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the
+mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no
+good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her
+resentful.
+
+She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just.
+And you were not quite just, I think."
+
+"To you?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, no; to yourself."
+
+Portia Van Brock's accusation was hammering itself into his brain. _You
+have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all
+she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to
+you_. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most
+unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise
+him?
+
+The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a
+door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.
+
+"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he
+announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at
+once.
+
+"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the
+house and had turned their faces townward.
+
+"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank
+to sell her stock--won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now,
+when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted,
+mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I
+tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the
+jaw--intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people
+needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"
+
+Kent's laugh was mirthless.
+
+"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for
+the accusation.
+
+If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to
+steer clear of that shoal.
+
+"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with
+Elinor."
+
+"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother
+would have the casting vote."
+
+"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."
+
+"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now--as
+between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean--but there will
+probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go.
+We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."
+
+The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said:
+"Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't
+altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes
+to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the god in the car.
+Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss
+what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."
+
+David Kent stopped short and wheeled suddenly upon his companion.
+
+"Ormsby, that's a thing I've been afraid of, all along; and it's the one
+thing you must never do."
+
+"Why not?" demanded the straightforward Ormsby.
+
+Kent knew he was skating on the thinnest of ice, but his love for Elinor
+made him fearless of consequences.
+
+"If you don't know without being told, it proves that your money has
+spoiled you to that extent. It is because you have no right to entrap Miss
+Brentwood into an obligation that would make her your debtor for the very
+food she eats and the clothes she wears. You will say she need never know:
+be very sure she would find out, one way or another; and she would never
+forgive you."
+
+"Um," said Ormsby, turning visibly grim. "You are frank enough--to draw it
+mildly. Another man in my place might suggest that it isn't Mr. David
+Kent's affair."
+
+Kent turned about and caught step again.
+
+"I've said my say--all of it," he rejoined stolidly. "We've been decently
+modern up to now, and we won't go back to the elemental things so late in
+the day. All the same, you'll not take it amiss if I say that I know Miss
+Brentwood rather better than you do."
+
+Ormsby did not say whether he would or would not, and the talk went aside
+to less summary ways and means preservative of the Brentwood fortunes. But
+at the archway of the Camelot Club, where Kent paused, Ormsby went back to
+the debatable ground in an outspoken word.
+
+"I know pretty well now what there is between us, Kent, and we mustn't
+quarrel if we can help it," he said. "If you complain that I didn't give
+you a fair show, I'll retort that I didn't dare to. Are you satisfied?"
+
+"No," said David Kent; and with that they separated.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+THE HAYMAKERS
+
+By the terms of its dating clause the new trust and corporation law became
+effective at once, "the public welfare requiring it"; and though there was
+an immediate sympathetic decline in the securities involved, there was no
+panic, financial or industrial, to mark the change from the old to the
+new.
+
+Contrary to the expectations of the alarmists and the lawyers, and
+somewhat to the disappointment of the latter, the vested interests showed
+no disposition to test the constitutionality of the act in the courts. So
+far, indeed, from making difficulties, the various alien corporations
+affected by the new law wheeled promptly into line in compliance with its
+provisions, vying with one another in proving, or seeming to prove, the
+time-worn aphorism that capital can never afford to be otherwise than
+strictly law-abiding.
+
+In the reorganization of the Western Pacific, David Kent developed at once
+and heartily into that rare and much-sought-for quantity, a man for an
+emergency. Loring, also, was a busy man in this transition period, yet he
+found time to keep an appreciative eye on Kent, and, true to his implied
+promise, pushed him vigorously for the first place in the legal department
+of the localized company. Since the resident manager stood high in the
+Boston counsels of the company, the pushing was not without results; and
+while David Kent was still up to his eyes in the work of flogging the
+affairs of the newly named Trans-Western into conformity with the law, his
+appointment as general counsel came from the Advisory Board.
+
+At one time, when success in his chosen vocation meant more to him than he
+thought it could ever mean again, the promoted subordinate would have had
+an attack of jubilance little in keeping with the grave responsibilities
+of his office. As it fell out, he was too busy to celebrate, and too sore
+on the sentimental side to rejoice. Hence, his recognition of the
+promotion was merely a deeper plunge into the flood of legalities and the
+adding of two more stenographers to his office force.
+
+Now there is this to be said of such submersive battlings in a sea of
+work: while the fierce toil of the buffeting may be good for the swimmer's
+soul, it necessarily narrows his horizon, inasmuch as a man with his head
+in the sea-smother lacks the view-point of the captain who fights his ship
+from the conning tower.
+
+So it befell that while the newly appointed general counsel of the
+reorganized Western Pacific was bolting his meals and clipping the nights
+at both ends in a strenuous endeavor to clear the decks for a possible
+battle-royal at the capital, events of a minatory nature were shaping
+themselves elsewhere.
+
+To bring these events down to their focusing point in the period of
+transition, it is needful to go back a little; to a term of the circuit
+court held in the third year of Gaston the prosperous.
+
+Who Mrs. Melissa Varnum was; how she came to be traveling from Midland
+City to the end of the track on a scalper's ticket; and in what manner she
+was given her choice of paying fare to the conductor or leaving the train
+at Gaston--these are details with which we need not concern ourselves.
+Suffice it to say that Kent, then local attorney for the company, mastered
+them; and when Mrs. Varnum, through Hawk, her counsel, sued for five
+thousand dollars damages, he was able to get a continuance, knowing from
+long experience that the jury would certainly find for the plaintiff if
+the case were then allowed to go to trial.
+
+And at the succeeding term of court, which was the one that adjourned on
+the day of Kent's transfer to the capital, two of the company's witnesses
+had disappeared; and the one bit of company business Kent had been
+successful in doing that day was to postpone for a second time the coming
+to trial of the Varnum case.
+
+It was while Kent's head was deepest in the flood of reorganization that a
+letter came from one Blashfield Hunnicott, his successor in the local
+attorneyship at Gaston, asking for instructions in the Varnum matter.
+Judge MacFarlane's court would convene in a week. Was he, Hunnicott, to
+let the case come to trial? Or should he--the witnesses still being
+unproducible--move for a further continuance?
+
+Kent took his head out of the cross-seas long enough to answer. By all
+means Hunnicott was to obtain another continuance, if possible. And if,
+before the case were called, there should be any new developments, he was
+to wire at once to the general office, and further instructions would
+issue.
+
+It was about this time, or, to be strictly accurate, on the day preceding
+the convening of Judge MacFarlane's court in Gaston, that Governor Bucks
+took a short vacation--his first since the adjournment of the Assembly.
+
+One of the mysteries of this man--the only one for which his friends could
+not always account plausibly--was his habit of dropping out for a day or a
+week at irregular intervals, leaving no clue by which he could be traced.
+While he was merely a private citizen these disappearances figured in the
+local notes of the Gaston _Clarion_ as business trips, object and
+objective point unknown or at least unstated; but since his election the
+newspapers were usually more definite. On this occasion, the public was
+duly informed that "Governor Bucks, with one or two intimate friends, was
+taking a few days' recreation with rod and gun on the headwaters of Jump
+Creek"--a statement which the governor's private secretary stood ready to
+corroborate to all and sundry calling at the gubernatorial rooms on the
+second floor of the capitol.
+
+Now it chanced that, like all gossip, this statement was subject to
+correction as to details in favor of the exact fact. It is true that the
+governor, his gigantic figure clad in sportsmanlike brown duck, might have
+been seen boarding the train on the Monday evening; and in addition to the
+ample hand-bag there were rod and gun cases to bear out the newspaper
+notices. None the less, it was equally true that the keeper of the Gun
+Club shooting-box at the terminus of the Trans-Western's Jump Creek branch
+was not called upon to entertain so distinguished a guest as the State
+executive. Also, it might have been remarked that the governor traveled
+alone.
+
+Late that same night, Stephen Hawk was keeping a rather discomforting
+vigil with a visitor in the best suite of rooms the Mid-Continent Hotel in
+Gaston afforded. The guest of honor was a brother lawyer--though he might
+have refused to acknowledge the relationship with the ex-district
+attorney--a keen-eyed, business-like gentleman, whose name as an organizer
+of vast capitalistic ventures had traveled far, and whose present attitude
+was one of undisguised and angry contempt for Gaston and all things
+Gastonian.
+
+"How much longer have we to wait?" he demanded impatiently, when the hands
+of his watch pointed to the quarter-hour after ten. "You've made me travel
+two thousand miles to see this thing through: why didn't you make sure of
+having your man here?"
+
+Hawk wriggled uneasily in his chair. He was used to being bullied, not
+only by the good and great, but by the little and evil as well. Yet there
+was a rasp to the great man's impatience that irritated him.
+
+"I've been trying to tell you all the evening that I'm only the hired man
+in this business, Mr. Falkland. I can't compel the attendance of the other
+parties."
+
+"Well, it's damned badly managed, as far as we've gone," was the
+ungracious comment. "You say the judge refuses to confer with me?"
+
+"Ab-so-lutely."
+
+"And the train--the last train the other man can come on; is that in yet?"
+
+Hawk consulted his watch.
+
+"A good half-hour ago."
+
+"You had your clerk at the station to meet it?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"And he hasn't reported?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+Falkland took a cigar from his case, bit the end of it like a man with a
+grudge to satisfy, and began again.
+
+"There is a very unbusinesslike mystery about all this, Mr. Hawk, and I
+may as well tell you shortly that my time is too valuable to make me
+tolerant of half-confidences. Get to the bottom of it. Has your man
+weakened?"
+
+"No; he is not of the weakening kind. And, besides, the scheme is his own
+from start to finish, as you know."
+
+"Well, what is the matter, then?"
+
+Hawk rose.
+
+"If you will be patient a little while longer, I'll go to the wire and try
+to find out. I am as much in the dark as you are."
+
+This last was not strictly true. Hawk had a telegram in his pocket which
+was causing him more uneasiness than all the rasping criticisms of the New
+York attorney, and he was re-reading it by the light of the corridor
+bracket when a young man sprang from the ascending elevator and hurried to
+the door of the parlor suite. Hawk collared his Mercury before he could
+rap on the door.
+
+"Well?" he queried sharply.
+
+"It's just as you suspected--what Mr. Hendricks' telegram hinted at. I met
+him at the station and couldn't do a thing with him."
+
+"Where has he gone?"
+
+"To the same old place."
+
+"You followed him?"
+
+"Sure. That is what kept me so long."
+
+Hawk hung upon his decision for the barest fraction of a second. Then he
+gave his orders concisely.
+
+"Hunt up Doctor Macquoid and get him out to the club-house as quick as you
+can. Tell him to bring his hypodermic. I'll be there with all the help
+he'll need." And when the young man was gone, Hawk smote the air with a
+clenched fist and called down the Black Curse of Shielygh, or its modern
+equivalent, on all the fates subversive of well-laid plans.
+
+A quarter of an hour later, on the upper floor of the club-house at the
+Gentlemen's Driving Park, four men burst in upon a fifth, a huge figure in
+brown duck, crouching in a corner like a wild beast at bay. A bottle and a
+tumbler stood on the table under the hanging lamp; and with the crash of
+breaking glass which followed the mad-bull rush of the duck-clothed giant,
+the reek of French brandy filled the room.
+
+"Hold him still, if you can, and pull up that sleeve." It was Macquoid who
+spoke, and the three apparitors, breathing hard, sat upon the prostrate
+man and bared his arm for the physician. When the apomorphia began to do
+its work there was a struggle of another sort, out of which emerged a
+pallid and somewhat stricken reincarnation of the governor.
+
+"Falkland is waiting at the hotel, and he and MacFarlane can't get
+together," said Hawk, tersely, when the patient was fit to listen.
+"Otherwise we shouldn't have disturbed you. It's all day with the scheme
+if you can't show up."
+
+The governor groaned and passed his hand over his eyes.
+
+"Get me into my clothes--Johnson has the grip--and give me all the time
+you can," was the sullen rejoinder; and in due course the Honorable Jasper
+G. Bucks, clothed upon and in his right mind, was enabled to keep his
+appointment with the New York attorney at the Mid-Continent Hotel.
+
+But first came the whipping-in of MacFarlane. Bucks went alone to the
+judge's room on the floor above the parlor suite. It was now near
+midnight, but MacFarlane had not gone to bed. He was a spare man, with
+thin hair graying rapidly at the temples and a care-worn face; the face of
+a man whose tasks or responsibilities, or both, have overmatched him. He
+was walking the floor with his head down and his hands--thin, nerveless
+hands they were--tightly locked behind him, when the governor entered.
+
+For a large man the Honorable Jasper was usually able to handle his weight
+admirably; but now he clung to the door-knob until he could launch himself
+at a chair and be sure of hitting it.
+
+"What's this Hawk's telling me about you, MacFarlane?" he demanded,
+frowning portentously.
+
+"I don't know what he has told you. But it is too flagrant, Bucks; I can't
+do it, and that's all there is about it." The protest was feebly fierce,
+and there was the snarl of a baited animal in the tone.
+
+"It's too late to make difficulties now," was the harsh reply. "You've got
+to do it."
+
+"I tell you I can not, and I will not!"
+
+"A late attack of conscience, eh?" sneered the governor, who was sobering
+rapidly now. "Let me ask a question or two. How much was that security
+debt your son-in-law let you in for?"
+
+"It was ten thousand dollars. It is an honest debt, and I shall pay it."
+
+"But not out of the salary of a circuit judge," Bucks interposed. "Nor yet
+out of the fees you make your clerks divide with you. And that isn't all.
+Have you forgotten the gerrymander business? How would you like to see the
+true inwardness of that in the newspapers?"
+
+The judge shrank as if the huge gesturing hand had struck him.
+
+"You wouldn't dare," he began. "You were in that, too, deeper than----"
+
+Again the governor interrupted him.
+
+"Cut it out," he commanded. "I can reward, and I can punish. You are not
+going to do anything technically illegal; but, by the gods, you are going
+to walk the line laid down for you. If you don't, I shall give the
+documents in the gerrymander affair to the papers the day after you fail.
+Now we'll go and see Falkland."
+
+MacFarlane made one last protest.
+
+"For God's sake, Bucks! spare me that. It is nothing less than the foulest
+collusion between the judge, the counsel for the plaintiff--and the
+devil!"
+
+"Cut that out, too, and come along," said the governor, brutally; and by
+the steadying help of the chair, the door-post and the wall of the
+corridor, he led the way to the parlor suite on the floor below.
+
+The conference in Falkland's rooms was chiefly a monologue with the
+sharp-spoken New York lawyer in the speaking part. When it was concluded
+the judge took his leave abruptly, pleading the lateness of the hour and
+his duties for the morrow. When he was gone the New Yorker began again.
+
+"You won't want to be known in this, I take it," he said, nodding at the
+governor. "Mr. Hawk here will answer well enough for the legal part, but
+how about the business end of it. Have you got a man you can trust?"
+
+The governor's yellow eyebrows met in a meaning scowl.
+
+"I've got a man I can hang, which is more to the purpose. It's Major Jim
+Guilford. He lives here; want to meet him?"
+
+"God forbid!" said Falkland, fervently. He rose and whipped himself into
+his overcoat, turning to Hawk: "Have your young man get me a carriage, and
+see to it that my special is ready to pull east when I give the word, will
+you?"
+
+Hawk went obediently, and the New Yorker had his final word with the
+governor alone.
+
+"I think we understand each other perfectly," he said. "You are to have
+the patronage: we are to pay for all actual betterments for which vouchers
+can be shown at the close of the deal. All we ask is that the stock be
+depressed to the point agreed upon within the half-year."
+
+"It's going to be done," said the governor, trying as he could to keep the
+eye-image of his fellow conspirator from multiplying itself by two.
+
+"All right. Now as to the court affair. If it is managed exactly as I have
+outlined, there will be no trouble--and no recourse for the other fellows.
+When I say that, I'm leaving out your Supreme Court. Under certain
+conditions, if the defendant's hardship could be definitely shown, a writ
+of _certiorari_ and _supersedeas_ might issue. How about that?"
+
+The governor closed one eye slowly, the better to check the troublesome
+multiplying process.
+
+"The Supreme Court won't move in the matter. The ostensible reason will be
+that the court is now two years behind its docket."
+
+"And the real reason?"
+
+"Of the three justices, one of them was elected on our ticket; another is
+a personal friend of Judge MacFarlane. The goods will be delivered."
+
+"That's all, then; all but one word. Your judge is a weak brother.
+Notwithstanding all the pains I took to show him that his action would be
+technically unassailable, he was ready to fly the track at any moment.
+Have you got him safe?"
+
+Bucks held up one huge hand with the thumb and forefinger tightly pressed
+together.
+
+"I've got him right there," he said. "If you and Hawk have got your papers
+in good shape, the thing will go through like a hog under a barbed-wire
+fence."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT
+
+It was two weeks after the date of the governor's fishing trip, and by
+consequence Judge MacFarlane's court had been the even fortnight in
+session in Gaston, when Kent's attention was recalled to the forgotten
+Varnum case by another letter from the local attorney, Hunnicott.
+
+"Varnum _vs_. Western Pacific comes up Friday of this week, and they are
+going to press for trial this time, and no mistake," wrote the local
+representative. "Hawk has been chasing around getting affidavits; for what
+purpose I don't know, though Lesher tells me that one of them was sworn by
+Houligan, the sub-contractor who tried to fight the engineer's estimates
+on the Jump Creek work.
+
+"Also, there is a story going the rounds that the suit is to be made a
+blind for bigger game, though I guess this is all gossip, based on the
+fact that Mr. Semple Falkland's private car stopped over here two weeks
+ago, from three o'clock in the afternoon till midnight of the same day.
+Jason, of the _Clarion_, interviewed the New Yorker, and Falkland told him
+he had stopped over to look up the securities on a mortgage held by one of
+his New York clients."
+
+Kent read this unofficial letter thoughtfully, and later on took it in to
+the general manager.
+
+"Just to show you the kind of jackal we have to deal with in the smaller
+towns," he said, by way of explanation. "Here is a case that Stephen Hawk
+built up out of nothing a year ago. The woman was put off one of our
+trains because she was trying to travel on a scalper's ticket. She didn't
+care to fight about it; but when I had about persuaded her to compromise
+for ten dollars and a pass to her destination, Hawk got hold of her and
+induced her to sue for five thousand dollars."
+
+"Well?" said Loring.
+
+"We fought it, of course--in the only way it could be fought in the lower
+court. I got a continuance, and we choked it off in the same way at the
+succeeding term. The woman was tired out long ago, but Hawk will hang on
+till his teeth fall out."
+
+"Do you 'continue' again?" asked the general manager.
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"I so instructed Hunnicott. Luckily, two of our most important witnesses
+are missing. They have always been missing, in point of fact."
+
+Loring was glancing over the letter.
+
+"How about this affidavit business, and the Falkland stop-over?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I fancy that's gossip, pure and simple, as Hunnicott says. Hawk is
+sharp enough not to let us know if he were baiting a trap. And Falkland
+probably told the _Clarion_ man the simple truth."
+
+Loring nodded in his turn. Then he broke away from the subject abruptly.
+"Sit down," he said; and when Kent had found a chair: "I had a caller this
+morning--Senator Duvall."
+
+State Senator Duvall had been the father, or the ostensible father, of the
+Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine. He was known to the
+corporations' lobby as a legislator who would sign a railroad's
+death-warrant with one hand and take favors from it with the other; and
+Kent laughed.
+
+"How many did he demand passes for, this time? Or was it a special train
+he wanted?"
+
+"Neither the one nor the other, this morning, as it happened," said the
+general manager. "Not to put too fine an edge upon it, he had something to
+sell, and he wanted me to buy it."
+
+"What was it?" Kent asked quickly.
+
+Loring was rubbing his eye-glasses absently with the corner of his
+handkerchief.
+
+"I guess I made a mistake in not turning him over to you, David. He was
+too smooth for me. I couldn't find out just what it was he had for sale.
+He talked vaguely about an impending crisis and a man who had some
+information to dispose of; said the man had come to him because he was
+known to be a firm friend of the Trans-Western, and so on."
+
+Kent gave his opinion promptly.
+
+"It's a capitol-gang deal of some sort to hold us up; and Duvall is
+willing to sell out his fellow conspirators if the price is right."
+
+"Have you any notion of what it is?"
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"Not the slightest. The ways have been tallowed for us, thus far, and I
+don't fully understand it. I presented our charter for re-filing
+yesterday, and Hendricks passed it without a word. As I was coming out of
+the secretary's office I met Bucks. We were pretty nearly open enemies in
+the old days in Gaston, but he went out of his way to shake hands and to
+congratulate me on my appointment as general counsel."
+
+"That was warning in itself, wasn't it?"
+
+"I took it that way. But I can't fathom his drift; which is the more
+unaccountable since I have it on pretty good authority that the ring is
+cinching the other companies right and left. Some one was saying at the
+Camelot last night that the Overland's reorganization of its
+within-the-State lines was going to cost all kinds of money in excess of
+the legal fees."
+
+Loring's smile was a wordless sarcasm.
+
+"It's the reward of virtue," he said ironically. "We were not in the list
+of subscribers to the conditional fund for purchasing a certain veto which
+didn't materialize."
+
+"And for that very reason, if for no other, we may look out for squalls,"
+Kent asserted. "Jasper G. Bucks has a long memory; and just now the fates
+have given him an arm to match. I am fortifying everywhere I can, but if
+the junto has it in for us, we'll be made to sweat blood before we are
+through with it."
+
+"Which brings us back to Senator Duvall. Is it worth while trying to do
+anything with him?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I'm opposed to the method--the bargain and sale
+plan--and I know you are. Turn him over to me if he comes in again."
+
+When Kent had dictated a letter in answer to Hunnicott's, he dismissed the
+Varnum matter from his mind, having other and more important things to
+think of. So, on the Friday, when the case was reached on Judge
+MacFarlane's docket--but really, it is worth our while to be present in
+the Gaston court-room to see and hear what befalls.
+
+When the Varnum case was called, Hunnicott promptly moved for a third
+continuance, in accordance with his instructions. The judge heard his
+argument, the old and well-worn one of the absence of important witnesses,
+with perfect patience; and after listening to Hawk's protest, which was
+hardly more than mechanical, he granted the continuance.
+
+Then came the after-piece. Court adjourned, and immediately Hawk asked
+leave to present, "at chambers," an amended petition. Hunnicott was
+waylaid by a court officer as he was leaving the room; and a moment later,
+totally unprepared, he was in the judge's office, listening in some dazed
+fashion while Hawk went glibly through the formalities of presenting his
+petition.
+
+Not until the papers were served upon him as the company's attorney, and
+the judge was naming three o'clock of the following afternoon as the time
+which he would appoint for the preliminary hearing, did the local attorney
+come alive.
+
+"But, your Honor!--a delay of only twenty-four hours in which to prepare a
+rejoinder to this petition--to allegations of such astounding gravity?" he
+began, shocked into action by the very ungraspable magnitude of the thing.
+
+"What more could you ask, Mr. Hunnicott?" said the judge, mildly. "You
+have already had a full measure of delay on the original petition. Yet I
+am willing to extend the time if you can come to an agreement with Mr.
+Hawk, here."
+
+Hunnicott knew the hopelessness of that and did not make the attempt.
+Instead, he essayed a new line of objection.
+
+"The time would be long enough if Gaston were the headquarters of the
+company, your Honor. But in such a grave and important charge as this
+amended petition brings, our general counsel should appear in person,
+and----"
+
+"You are the company's attorney, Mr. Hunnicott," said the judge, dryly;
+"and you have hitherto been deemed competent to conduct the case in behalf
+of the defendant. I am unwilling to work a hardship to any one, but I can
+not entertain your protest. The preliminary hearing will be at three
+o'clock to-morrow."
+
+Hunnicott knew when he was definitely at the string's end; and when he was
+out of the judge's room and the Court House, he made a dash for his
+office, dry-lipped and panting. Ten minutes sufficed for the writing of a
+telegram to Kent, and he was half-way down to the station with it when it
+occurred to him that it would never do to trust the incendiary thing to
+the wires in plain English. There was a little-used cipher code in his
+desk provided for just such emergencies, and back he went to labor
+sweating over the task of securing secrecy at the expense of the precious
+minutes of time. Wherefore, it was about four o'clock when he handed the
+telegram to the station operator, and adjured him by all that was good and
+great not to delay its sending.
+
+It was just here he made his first and only slip, since he did not stay to
+see the thing done. It chanced that the regular day operator was off on
+leave of absence, and his substitute, a young man from the
+train-despatcher's office, was a person who considered the company wires
+an exclusive appanage of the train service department. At the moment of
+Hunnicott's assault he was taking an order for Number 17; and observing
+that the lawyer's cipher "rush" covered four closely written pages, he
+hung it upon the sending hook with a malediction on the legal department
+for burdening the wires with its mail correspondence, and so forgot it.
+
+It was nine o'clock when the night operator came on duty; and being a
+careful man, he not only looked first to his sending hook, but was
+thoughtful enough to run over the accumulation of messages waiting to be
+transmitted, to the end that he might give precedence to the most
+important. And when he came to Hunnicott's cipher with the
+thrice-underlined "RUSH" written across its face, and had marked the hour
+of its handing in, he had the good sense to hang up the entire wire
+business of the railroad until the thing was safely out of his office.
+
+It was half-past nine when the all-important cipher got itself written out
+in the headquarters office at the capital; and for two anxious hours the
+receiving operator tried by all means in his power to find the general
+counsel--tried and failed. For, to make the chain of mishaps complete in
+all its links, Kent and Loring were spending the evening at Miss Portia
+Van Brock's, having been bidden to meet a man they were both willing to
+cultivate--Oliver Marston, the lieutenant-governor. And for this cause it
+wanted but five minutes of midnight when Kent burst into Loring's bedroom
+on the third floor of the Clarendon, catastrophic news in hand.
+
+"For heaven's sake, read that!" he gasped; and Loring sat on the edge of
+the bed to do it.
+
+"So! they've sprung their mine at last: this is what Senator Duvall was
+trying to sell us," he said quietly, when he had mastered the purport of
+Hunnicott's war news.
+
+Kent had caught his second wind in the moment of respite, and was settling
+into the collar in a way to strain the working harness to the breaking
+point.
+
+"It's a put-up job from away back," he gritted. "If I'd had the sense of a
+pack-mule I should have been on the lookout for just such a trap as this.
+Look at the date of that message!"
+
+The general manager did look, and shook his head. "'Received, 3:45, P.M.;
+Forwarded, 9:17, P.M.' That will cost somebody his job. What do we do?"
+
+"We get busy at the drop of the hat. Luckily, we have the news, though
+I'll bet high it wasn't Hawk's fault that this message came through with
+no more than eight hours' delay. Get into your clothes, man! The minutes
+are precious, now!"
+
+Loring began to dress while Kent walked the floor in a hot fit of
+impatience.
+
+"The mastodonic cheek of the thing!" he kept repeating, until Loring
+pulled him down with another quiet remark.
+
+"Tell me what we have to do, David. I am a little lame in law matters."
+
+"Do? We have to appear in Judge MacFarlane's court to-morrow afternoon
+prepared to show that this thing is only a hold-up with a blank cartridge.
+Hawk meant to take a snap judgment. He counted on throwing the whole thing
+up against Hunnicott, knowing perfectly well that a little local attorney
+at a way-station couldn't begin to secure the necessary affidavits."
+
+Loring paused with one end of his collar flying loose.
+
+"Let me understand," he said. "Do we have to disprove these charges by
+affidavits?"
+
+"Certainly; that is the proper rejoinder--the only one, in fact," said
+Kent; then, as a great doubt laid hold of him and shook him: "You don't
+mean to say there is any doubt about our ability to do it?"
+
+"Oh, no; I suppose not, if it comes to a show-down. But I was thinking of
+your man Hunnicott. Doesn't it occur to you that he is in just about as
+good a fix to secure those affidavits in Gaston as we are here, David?"
+
+"Good Lord! Do you mean that we have to send to Boston for our
+ammunition?"
+
+"Haven't we? Don't you see how nicely the thing is timed? Ten days later
+our Trans-Western reorganization would be complete, and we could swear our
+own officers on the spot. These people know what they are about."
+
+Kent was walking the floor again, but now the strength of the man was
+coming uppermost.
+
+"Never mind: we'll wire Boston, and then we'll do what we can here. Could
+you get me to Gaston on a special engine in three hours?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then we have till eleven o'clock to-morrow to prepare. I'll be ready by
+that time."
+
+"David, you are a brick when it comes to the in-fighting," said the
+general manager; and then he finished buttoning his collar.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY
+
+At ten forty-eight on the Saturday morning Kent was standing with the
+general manager on the Union Station track platform beside the engine
+which was to make the flying run to Gaston.
+
+Nine hours of sharp work lay between the hurried conference in Loring's
+bedroom and the drive to the station at a quarter before eleven. Boston
+had been wired; divers and sundry friends of the railway company had been
+interviewed; some few affidavits had been secured; and now they were
+waiting to give Boston its last chance, with a clerk hanging over the
+operator in the station telegraph office to catch the first word of
+encouragement.
+
+"If the Advisory Board doesn't send us something pretty solid, I'm going
+into this thing lame," said Kent, dubiously. "Of course, what Boston can
+send us will be only corroborative; unfortunately we can't wire
+affidavits. But it will help. What we have secured here lacks directness."
+
+"Necessarily," said Loring. "But I'm banking on the Board. If we don't get
+the ammunition before you have to start, I can wire it to you at Gaston.
+That gives us three hours more to go and come on."
+
+"Yes; and if it comes to the worst--if the decision be unfavorable--it can
+only embarrass us temporarily. This is merely the preliminary hearing, and
+nothing permanent can be established until we have had a hearing on the
+merits, and we can go armed to that, at all events."
+
+The general manager was looking at his watch, and he shut the case with a
+snap.
+
+"Don't you let it come to that, as long as you have a leg to stand on,
+David," he said impressively. "An interregnum of ten days might make it
+exceedingly difficult for us to prove anything." Then, as the telegraph
+office watcher came to the door and shook his head as a sign that Boston
+was still silent: "Your time is up. Off with you, and don't let Oleson
+scare you when he gets 219 in motion. He is a good runner, and you have a
+clear track."
+
+Kent clambered to the footplate of the smart eight-wheeler.
+
+"Can you make it by two o'clock?" he asked, when the engineer, a
+big-boned, blue-eyed Norwegian, dropped the reversing lever into the
+corner for the start.
+
+"Ay tank maybe so, ain'd it? Yust you climb opp dat odder box, Mester
+Kent, and hol' you' hair on. Ve bane gone to maig dat time, als' ve preak
+somedings, _ja_!" and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to
+a quickstep of forty miles an hour.
+
+Kent's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture
+of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of
+the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph
+poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of
+now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted,
+passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same
+heart-beat. And for the central figure in the picture, the one constant
+quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct, the big,
+calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box, hurling his huge machine doggedly
+through space.
+
+At 12:45 they stopped for water at a solitary tank in the midst of the
+brown desert. Kent got down stiffly from his cramped seat on the fireman's
+box and wetted his parched lips at the nozzle of the tender hose.
+
+"Do we make it, Jarl?" he asked.
+
+The engineer wagged his head.
+
+"Ay tank so. Ve maig it all right iff dey haf bane got dose track clear."
+
+"There are other trains to meet?"
+
+"_Ja_; two bane comin' dis vay; ant Nummer Samteen ve pass opp by."
+
+Oleson dropped off to pour a little oil into the speed-woundings while the
+tank was filling; and presently the dizzying race began again. For a time
+all things were propitious. The two trains to be met were found snugly
+withdrawn on the sidings at Mavero and Agriculta, and the station
+semaphores beckoned the flying special past at full speed. Kent checked
+off the dodging mile-posts: the pace was bettering the fastest run ever
+made on the Prairie Division--which was saying a good deal.
+
+But at Juniberg, twenty-seven miles out of Gaston, there was a delay.
+Train Number 17, the east-bound time freight, had left Juniberg at one
+o'clock, having ample time to make Lesterville, the next station east,
+before the light engine could possibly overtake it. But Lesterville had
+not yet reported its arrival; for which cause the agent at Juniberg was
+constrained to put out his stop signal, and Kent's special came to a stand
+at the platform.
+
+Under the circumstances, there appeared to be nothing for it but to wait
+until the delayed Number 17 was heard from; and Kent's first care was to
+report to Loring, and to ask if there were anything from Boston.
+
+The reply was encouraging. A complete denial of everything, signed by the
+proper officials, had been received and repeated to Kent at Gaston--was
+there now awaiting him. Kent saw in anticipation the nicely calculated
+scheme of the junto crumbling into small dust in the precise moment of
+fruition, and had a sharp attack of ante-triumph which he had to walk off
+in turns up and down the long platform. But as the waiting grew longer,
+and the dragging minutes totaled the quarter-hour and then the half, he
+began to perspire again.
+
+Half-past two came and went, and still there was no hopeful word from
+Lesterville. Kent had speech with Oleson, watch in hand. Would the
+engineer take the risk of a rear-end collision on a general manager's
+order? Oleson would obey orders if the heavens fell; and Kent flew to the
+wire again. Hunnicott, at Gaston, was besought to gain time in the hearing
+by any and all means; and Loring was asked to authorize the risk of a
+rear-end smash-up. He did it promptly. The light engine was to go on until
+it should "pick up" the delayed train between stations.
+
+The Juniberg man gave Oleson his release and the order to proceed with due
+care while the sounder was still clicking a further communication from
+headquarters. Loring was providing for the last contingency by sending
+Kent the authority to requisition Number 17's engine for the completion of
+the run in case the track should be blocked, with the freight engine free
+beyond the obstruction.
+
+Having his shackles stricken off, the Norwegian proceeded "with due care,"
+which is to say that he sent the eight-wheeler darting down the line
+toward Lesterville at the rate of a mile a minute. The mystery of the
+delay was solved at a point half-way between the two stations. A broken
+flange had derailed three cars of the freight, and the block was
+impassable.
+
+Armed with the general manager's mandatory wire, Kent ran forward to the
+engine of the freight train and was shortly on his way again. But in the
+twenty-mile run to Gaston more time was lost by the lumbering freight
+locomotive, and it was twenty minutes past three o'clock when the county
+seat came in sight and Kent began to oscillate between two sharp-pointed
+horns of a cruel dilemma.
+
+By dropping off at the street-crossing nearest the Court House, he might
+still be in time to get a hearing with such documentary backing as he had
+been able to secure at the capital. By going on to the station he could
+pick up the Boston wire which, while it was not strictly evidence, might
+create a strong presumption in his favor; but in this case he would
+probably be too late to use it. So he counted the rail-lengths, watch in
+hand, with a curse to the count for his witlessness in failing to have
+Loring repeat the Boston message to him during the long wait at Juniberg;
+and when the time for the decision arrived he signaled the engineer to
+slow down, jumped from the step at the nearest crossing and hastened up
+the street toward the Court House.
+
+In the mean time, to go back a little, during this day of hurryings to and
+fro Blashfield Hunnicott had been having the exciting experiences of a
+decade crowded into a corresponding number of hours. Early in the morning
+he had begun besieging the headquarters wire office for news and
+instructions, and, owing to Kent's good intentions to be on the ground in
+person, had got little enough of either.
+
+At length, to his unspeakable relief, he had news of the coming special;
+and with the conviction that help was at hand he waited at the station
+with what coolness there was in him to meet his chief. But as the time for
+the hearing drew near he grew nervous again; and all the keen pains of
+utter helplessness returned with renewed acuteness when the operator, who
+had overheard the Juniberg-Lesterville wire talk, told him that the
+special was hung up at the former station.
+
+"O my good Lord!" he groaned. "I'm in for it with empty hands!" None the
+less, he ran to the baggage-room end of the building and, capturing an
+express wagon, had himself trundled out to the Court House.
+
+The judge was at his desk when Hunnicott entered, and Hawk was on hand,
+calmly reading the morning paper. The hands of the clock on the wall
+opposite the judge's desk pointed to five minutes of the hour, and for
+five minutes Hunnicott sat listening, hoping against hope that he should
+hear the rush and roar of the incoming special.
+
+Promptly on the stroke of three the judge tapped upon his desk with his
+pencil.
+
+"Now, gentlemen, proceed with your case; and I must ask you to be as brief
+as possible. I have an appointment at four which can not be postponed," he
+said quietly; and Hawk threw down his paper and began at once.
+
+Hunnicott heard his opponent's argument mechanically, having his ear
+attuned for whistle signals and wheel drummings. Hawk spoke rapidly and
+straight to his point, as befitted a man speaking to the facts and with no
+jury present to be swayed by oratorical effort. When he came to the
+summarizing of the allegations in the amended petition, he did it wholly
+without heat, piling up the accusations one upon another with the careful
+method of a bricklayer building a wall. The wall-building simile thrust
+itself upon Hunnicott with irresistible force as he listened. If the
+special engine should not dash up in time to batter down the wall----
+
+Hawk closed as dispassionately as he had begun, and the judge bowed
+gravely in Hunnicott's direction. The local attorney got upon his feet,
+and as he began to speak a telegram was handed in. It was Kent's wire from
+Juniberg, beseeching him to gain time at all hazards, and he settled
+himself to the task. For thirty dragging minutes he rang the changes on
+the various steps in the suit, knowing well that the fatal moment was
+approaching when--Kent still failing him--he would be compelled to submit
+his case without a scrap of an affidavit to support it.
+
+The moment came, and still there was no encouraging whistle shriek from
+the dun plain beyond the open windows. Hawk was visibly disgusted, and
+Judge MacFarlane was growing justly impatient. Hunnicott began again, and
+the judge reproved him mildly.
+
+"Much of what you are saying is entirely irrelevant, Mr. Hunnicott. This
+hearing is on the plaintiff's amended petition."
+
+No one knew better than the local attorney that he was wholly at the
+court's mercy; that he had been so from the moment the judge began to
+consider his purely formal defense, entirely unsupported by affidavits or
+evidence of any kind. None the less, he strung his denials out by every
+amplification he could devise, and, having fired his last shot, sat down
+in despairing breathlessness to hear the judge's summing-up and decision.
+
+Judge MacFarlane was mercifully brief. On the part of the plaintiff there
+was an amended petition fully fortified by uncontroverted affidavits. On
+the part of the defendant company there was nothing but a formal denial of
+the allegations. The duty of the court in the premises was clear. The
+prayer of the plaintiff was granted, the temporary relief asked for was
+given, and the order of the court would issue accordingly.
+
+The judge was rising when the still, hot air of the room began to vibrate
+with the tremulous thunder of the sound for which Hunnicott had been so
+long straining his ears. He was the first of the three to hear it, and he
+hurried out ahead of the others. At the foot of the stair he ran blindly
+against Kent, dusty, travel-worn and haggard.
+
+"You're too late!" he blurted out. "We're done up. Hawk's petition has
+been granted and the road is in the hands of a receiver."
+
+Kent dashed his fist upon the stair-rail.
+
+"Who is the man?" he demanded.
+
+"Major Jim Guilford," said Hunnicott. Then, as footfalls coming stairward
+were heard in the upper corridor, he locked arms with Kent, faced him
+about and thrust him out over the door-stone. "Let's get out of this. You
+look as if you might kill somebody."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+THE LAST DITCH
+
+It was a mark of the later and larger development of David Kent that he
+was able to keep his head in the moment of catastrophes. In boyhood his
+hair had been a brick-dust red, and having the temperament which belongs
+of right to the auburn-hued, his first impulse was to face about and make
+a personal matter of the legal robbery with Judge MacFarlane.
+
+Happily for all concerned, Hunnicott's better counsels prevailed, and when
+the anger fit passed Kent found himself growing cool and determined.
+Hunnicott was crestfallen and disposed to be apologetic; but Kent did him
+justice.
+
+"Don't blame yourself: there was nothing else you could have done. Have
+you a stenographer in your office?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A good one?"
+
+"It's young Perkins: you know him."
+
+"He'll do. 'Phone him to run down to the station and get what telegrams
+there are for me, and we'll talk as we go."
+
+Once free of the Court House, Kent began a rapid-fire of questions.
+
+"Where is Judge MacFarlane stopping?"
+
+"At the Mid-Continent."
+
+"Have you any idea when he intends leaving town?"
+
+"No; but he will probably take the first train. He never stays here an
+hour longer than he has to after adjournment."
+
+"That would be the Flyer east at six o'clock. Is he going east?"
+
+"Come to think of it, I believe he is. Somebody said he was going to Hot
+Springs. He's in miserable health."
+
+Kent saw more possibilities, and worse, and quickened his pace a little.
+
+"I hope your young man won't let the grass grow under his feet," he said.
+"The minutes between now and six o'clock are worth days to us."
+
+"What do we do?" asked Hunnicott, willing to take a little lesson in
+practice as he ran.
+
+"The affidavits I have brought with me and the telegrams which are waiting
+at the station must convince MacFarlane that he has made a mistake. We
+shall prepare a motion for the discharge of the receiver and for the
+vacation of the order appointing him, and ask the judge to set an early
+day for the hearing on the merits of the case. He can't refuse."
+
+Hunnicott shook his head.
+
+"It has been all cut and dried from 'way back," he objected. "They won't
+let you upset it at the last moment."
+
+"We'll give them a run for their money," said Kent. "A good bit of it
+depends upon Perkins' speed as a stenographer."
+
+As it befell, Perkins did not prove a disappointment, and by five o'clock
+Kent was in the lobby of the Mid-Continent, sending his card up to the
+judge's room. Word came back that the judge was in the café fortifying the
+inner man in preparation for his journey, and Kent did not stand upon
+ceremony. From the archway of the dining-room he marked down his man at a
+small table in the corner, and went to him at once, plunging promptly into
+the matter in hand.
+
+"The exigencies of the case must plead my excuse for intruding upon you
+here, Judge MacFarlane," he began courteously. "But I have been told that
+you were leaving town----"
+
+The judge waved him down with a deprecatory fork.
+
+"Court is adjourned, Mr. Kent, and I must decline to discuss the case _ex
+parte_. Why did you allow it to go by default?"
+
+"That is precisely what I am here to explain," said Kent, suavely. "The
+time allowed us was very short; and a series of accidents----"
+
+Again the judge interrupted.
+
+"A court can hardly take cognizance of accidents, Mr. Kent. Your local
+attorney was on the ground and he had the full benefit of the delay."
+
+"I know," was the patient rejoinder. "Technically, your order is
+unassailable. None the less, a great injustice has been done, as we are
+prepared to prove. I am not here to ask you to reopen the case at your
+dinner-table, but if you will glance over these papers I am sure you will
+set an early day for the hearing upon the merits."
+
+Judge MacFarlane forced a gray smile.
+
+"You vote yea and nay in the same breath, Mr. Kent. If I should examine
+your papers, I should be reopening the case at my dinner-table. You shall
+have your hearing in due course."
+
+"At chambers?" said Kent. "We shall be ready at any moment; we are ready
+now, in point of fact."
+
+"I can not say as to that. My health is very precarious, and I am under a
+physician's orders to take a complete rest for a time. I am sorry if the
+delay shall work a hardship to the company you represent; but under the
+circumstances, with not even an affidavit offered by your side, it is your
+misfortune. And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. It lacks but a
+few minutes of my train time."
+
+The hotel porter was droning out the call for the east-bound Flyer, and
+Kent effaced himself while Judge MacFarlane was paying his bill and making
+ready for his departure. But when the judge set out to walk to the
+station, Kent walked with him. There were five squares to be measured, and
+for five squares he hung at MacFarlane's elbow and the plea he made should
+have won him a hearing. Yet the judge remained impassible, and at the end
+of the argument turned him back in a word to his starting point.
+
+"I can not recall the order at this time, if I would, Mr. Kent; neither
+can I set a day for the hearing on the merits. What has been done was done
+in open court and in the presence of your attorney, who offered no
+evidence in contradiction of the allegations set forth in the plaintiff's
+amended petition, although they were supported by more than a dozen
+affidavits; and it can not be undone in the streets. Since you have not
+improved your opportunities, you must abide the consequences. The law can
+not be hurried."
+
+They had reached the station and the east-bound train was whistling for
+Gaston. Kent's patience was nearly gone, and the auburn-hued temperament
+was clamoring hotly for its innings.
+
+"This vacation of yours, Judge MacFarlane: how long is it likely to last?"
+he inquired, muzzling his wrath yet another moment.
+
+"I can not say; if I could I might be able to give you a more definite
+answer as to the hearing on the merits. But my health is very miserable,
+as I have said. If I am able to return shortly, I shall give you the
+hearing at chambers at an early date."
+
+"And if not?"
+
+"If not, I am afraid it will have to go over to the next term of court."
+
+"Six months," said Kent; and then his temper broke loose. "Judge
+MacFarlane, it is my opinion, speaking as man to man, that you are a
+scoundrel. I know what you have done, and why you have done it. Also, I
+know why you are running away, now that it is done. So help me God, I'll
+bring you to book for it if I have to make a lifetime job of it! It's all
+right for your political backers; they are thieves and bushwhackers, and
+they make no secret of it. But there is one thing worse than a trickster,
+and that is a trickster's tool!"
+
+For the moment while the train was hammering in over the switches they
+stood facing each other fiercely, all masks flung aside, each after his
+kind; the younger man flushed and battle-mad; the elder white, haggard,
+tremulous. Kent did not guess, then or ever, how near he came to death.
+Two years earlier a judge had been shot and maimed on a western circuit
+and since then, MacFarlane had taken a coward's precaution. Here was a man
+that knew, and while he lived the cup of trembling might never be put
+aside.
+
+It was the conductor's cry of "All aboard!" that broke the homicidal
+spell. Judge MacFarlane started guiltily, shook off the angry eye-grip of
+his accuser, and went to take his place in the Pullman. One minute later
+the east-bound train was threading its way out among the switches of the
+lower yard, and Kent had burst into the telegraph office to wire the
+volcanic news to his chief.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+THE MAN IN POSSESSION
+
+Appraised at its value in the current coin of street gossip, the legal
+seizure of the Trans-Western figured mainly as an example of the failure
+of modern business methods when applied to the concealment of a working
+corporation's true financial condition.
+
+This unsympathetic point of view was sufficiently defined in a bit of
+shop-talk between Harnwicke, the cold-blooded, and his traffic manager in
+the office of the Overland Short Line the morning after the newspaper
+announcement of the receivership.
+
+"I told you they were in deep water," said the lawyer, confidently. "They
+haven't been making any earnings--net earnings--since the Y.S.& F. cut
+into them at Rio Verde, and the dividends were only a bluff for
+stock-bracing purposes. I surmised that an empty treasury was what was the
+matter when they refused to join us in the veto affair."
+
+"That is one way of looking at it," said the traffic manager. "But some of
+the papers are claiming that it was a legal hold-up, pure and simple."
+
+"Nothing of the kind," retorted the lawyer, whose respect for the law was
+as great as his contempt for the makers of the laws. "Judge MacFarlane had
+no discretion in the matter. Hawk had a perfect right to file an amended
+petition, and the judge was obliged to act upon it. I'm not saying it
+wasn't a devilish sharp trick of Hawk's. It was. He saw a chance to smite
+them under the fifth rib, and he took it."
+
+"But how about his client: the woman who was put off the train? Is she any
+better off than she was before?"
+
+"Oh, she'll get her five thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take
+the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for
+the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness,
+and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I
+understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the
+receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to say for
+himself."
+
+This view of Harnwicke's, colored perhaps by the fact that the
+Trans-Western was a business competitor of the Short Line, was the
+generally accepted one in railroad and financial circles at the capital.
+Civilization apart, there is still a deal of the primitive in human
+nature, and wolves are not the only creatures that are prone to fall upon
+the disabled member of the pack and devour him.
+
+But in the State at large the press was discussing the event from a
+political point of view; one section, small but vehement, raising the cry
+of trickery and judicial corruption, and prophesying the withdrawal of all
+foreign capital from the State, while the other, large and complacent,
+pointed eloquently to the beneficent working of the law under which the
+cause of a poor woman, suing for her undoubted right, might be made the
+whip to flog corporate tyranny into instant subjection.
+
+As for the dispossessed stock-holders in the far-away East, they were slow
+to take the alarm, and still slower to get concerted action. Like many of
+the western roads, the Western Pacific had been capitalized largely by
+popular subscription; hence there was no single holder, or group of
+holders, of sufficient financial weight to enter the field against the
+spoilers.
+
+But when Loring and his associates had fairly got the wires hot with the
+tale of what had been done, and the much more alarming tale of what was
+likely to be done, the Boston inertness vanished. A pool of the stock was
+formed, with the members of the Advisory Board as a nucleus; money was
+subscribed, and no less a legal light than an ex-attorney-general of the
+state of Massachusetts was despatched to the seat of war to advise with
+the men on the ground. None the less, disaster out-travels the swiftest of
+"limited" trains. Before the heavily-feed consulting attorney had crossed
+the Hudson in his westward journey, Wall Street had taken notice, and
+there was a momentary splash in the troubled pool of the Stock Exchange
+and a vanishing circle of ripples to show where Western Pacific had gone
+down.
+
+In the meantime Major James Guilford, somewhile president of the Apache
+National Bank of Gaston, and antecedent to that the frowning autocrat of a
+twenty-five-mile logging road in the North Carolina mountains, had given
+bond in some sort and had taken possession of the company's property and
+of the offices in the Quintard Building.
+
+His first official act as receiver was to ask for the resignations of a
+dozen heads of departments, beginning with the general manager and pausing
+for the moment with the supervisor of track. That done, he filled the
+vacancies with political troughsmen; and with these as assistant
+decapitators the major passed rapidly down the line, striking off heads in
+daily batches until the over-flow of the Bucks political following was
+provided for on the railroad's pay-rolls to the wife's cousin's nephew.
+
+This was the work of the first few administrative days or weeks, and while
+it was going on, the business attitude of the road remained unchanged. But
+once seated firmly in the saddle, with his awkward squad well in hand, the
+major proceeded to throw a bomb of consternation into the camp of his
+competitors.
+
+Kent was dining with Ormsby in the grill-room of the Camelot Club when the
+waiter brought in the evening edition of the _Argus_, whose railroad
+reporter had heard the preliminary fizzing of the bomb fuse. The story was
+set out on the first page, first column, with appropriate headlines.
+
+  WAR TO THE KNIFE AND THE KNIFE
+  TO THE HILT!
+
+  TRANS-WESTERN CUTS COMMODITY RATE.
+
+  Great Excitement in Railroad Circles.
+  Receiver Guilford's Hold-up.
+
+Kent ran his eye rapidly down the column and passed the paper across to
+Ormsby.
+
+"I told you so," he said. "They didn't find the road insolvent, but they
+are going to make it so in the shortest possible order. A rate war will do
+it quicker than anything else on earth."
+
+Ormsby thrust out his jaw.
+
+"Have we got to stand by and see 'em do it?"
+
+"The man from Massachusetts says yes, and he knows, or thinks he does. He
+has been here two weeks now, and he has nosed out for himself all the
+dead-walls. We can't appeal, because there is no decision to appeal from.
+We can't take it out of the lower court until it is finished in the lower
+court. We can't enjoin an officer of the court; and there is no authority
+in the State that will set aside Judge MacFarlane's order when that order
+was made under technically legal conditions."
+
+"You could have told him all that in the first five minutes," said Ormsby.
+
+"I did tell him, and was mildly sat upon. To-day he came around and gave
+me back my opinion, clause for clause, as his own. But I have no kick
+coming. Somebody will have to be here to fight the battle to a finish when
+the judge returns, and our expert will advise the Bostonians to retain
+me."
+
+"Does he stay?" Ormsby asked.
+
+"Oh, no; he is going back with Loring to-night. Loring has an idea of his
+own which may or may not be worth the powder it will take to explode it.
+He is going to beseech the Boston people to enlarge the pool until it
+controls a safe majority of the stock."
+
+"What good will that do?"
+
+"None, directly. It's merely a safe preliminary to anything that may
+happen. I tell Loring he is like all the others: he knows when he has
+enough and is willing to stand from under. I'm the only fool in the lot."
+Ormsby's smile was heartening and good for sore nerves.
+
+"I like your pluck, Kent; I'll be hanged if I don't. And I'll back you to
+win, yet."
+
+Kent shook his head unhopefully.
+
+"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am fighting for the pure love of it, and
+not with any great hope of saving the stock-holders. These grafters have
+us by the nape of the neck. We can't make a move till MacFarlane comes
+back and gives us a hearing on the merits. That may not be till the next
+term of court. Meanwhile, the temporary receiver is to all intents and
+purposes a permanent receiver; and the interval would suffice to wreck a
+dozen railroads."
+
+"And still you won't give up?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I hope you won't have to. But to a man up a tree it looks very much like
+a dead cock in the pit. As I have said, if there is any backing to do, I'm
+with you, first, last, and all the time, merely from a sportsman's
+interest in the game. But is there any use in a little handful of us
+trying to buck up against a whole state government?"
+
+The coffee had been served, and Kent dropped a lump of sugar into his cup.
+
+"Ormsby, I'll never let go while I'm alive enough to fight," he said
+slowly. "One decent quality I have--and the only one, perhaps: I don't
+know when I'm beaten. And I'll down this crowd of political plunderers
+yet, if Bucks doesn't get me sand-bagged."
+
+His listener pushed back his chair.
+
+"If you stood to lose anything more than your job I could understand it,"
+he commented. "As it is, I can't. Any way you look at it, your stake in
+the game isn't worth the time and effort it will take to play the string
+out. And I happen to know you're ambitious to do things--things that
+count."
+
+"What is it you don't understand--the motive?"
+
+"That's it."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"You are not as astute as Miss Van Brock. She pointed it out to me last
+night--or thought she did--in two words."
+
+Ormsby's eyes darkened, and he did not affect to misunderstand.
+
+"It would be a grand-stand play," he said half-musingly, "if you should
+happen to worry it through, I mean. I believe Mrs. Hepzibah would be ready
+to fall on your neck and forgive you, and turn me down." Then,
+half-jestingly: "Kent, what will you take to drop this thing permanently
+and go away?"
+
+David Kent's smile showed his teeth.
+
+"The one thing you wouldn't be willing to give. You asked me once when we
+had fallen over the fence upon this forbidden ground if I were satisfied,
+and I told you I wasn't. Do we understand each other?"
+
+"I guess so," said Ormsby. "But--Say, Kent, I like you too well to see you
+go up against a stone fence blindfolded. I'm like Guilford: I am the man
+in possession. And possession is nine points of the law."
+
+Kent rose and took the proffered cigar from Ormsby's case.
+
+"It depends a good bit upon how the possession is gained--and
+held--doesn't it?" he rejoined coolly. "And your figure is unfortunate in
+its other half. I am going to beat Guilford."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+THE WRECKERS
+
+Just why Receiver Guilford, an officer of the court who was supposed to be
+nursing an insolvent railroad to the end that its creditors might not lose
+all, should begin by declaring war on the road's revenue, was a question
+which the managers of competing lines strove vainly to answer. But when,
+in defiance of all precedent, he made the cut rates effective to and from
+all local stations on the Trans-Western, giving the shippers at
+intermediate and non-competitive points the full benefit of the
+reductions, the railroad colony denounced him as a madman and gave him a
+month in which to find the bottom of a presumably empty treasury.
+
+But the event proved that the major's madness was not altogether without
+method. It is an axiom in the carrying trade that low rates make business;
+create it, so to speak, out of nothing. Given an abundant crop, low
+prices, and high freight rates in the great cereal belt, and, be the
+farmers never so poor, much of the grain will be stored and held against
+the chance of better conditions.
+
+So it came about that Major Guilford's relief measure was timed to a
+nicety, and the blanket cut in rates opened a veritable flood-gate for
+business in Trans-Western territory. From the day of its announcement the
+traffic of the road increased by leaps and bounds. Stored grain came out
+of its hiding places at every country cross-roads to beg for cars; stock
+feeders drove their market cattle unheard-of distances, across the tracks
+of competing lines, over and around obstacles of every sort, to pour them
+into the loading corrals of the Trans-Western.
+
+Nor was the traffic all outgoing. With the easing of the money burden, the
+merchants in the tributary towns began thriftily to take advantage of the
+low rates to renew their stocks; long-deferred visits and business trips
+suddenly became possible; and the saying that it was cheaper to travel
+than to stay at home gained instant and grateful currency.
+
+In a short time the rolling stock of the road was taxed to its utmost
+capacity, and the newly appointed purchasing agent was buying cars and
+locomotives right and left. Also, to keep pace with the ever-increasing
+procession of trains, a doubled construction force wrought night and day
+installing new side tracks and passing points.
+
+Under the fructifying influence of such a golden shower of prosperity,
+land values began to rise again, slowly at first, as buyers distrusted the
+continuance of the golden shower; more rapidly a little later, as the
+Guilford policy defined itself in terms of apparent permanence.
+
+Towns along the line--hamlets long since fallen into the way-station rut
+of desuetude--awoke with a start, bestirring themselves joyfully to meet
+the inspiriting conditions. At Midland City, Stephen Hawk, the new
+right-of-way agent, ventured to ask municipal help to construct a ten-mile
+branch to Lavabee: it was forthcoming promptly; and the mass meeting, at
+which the bond loan was anticipated by public subscription shouted itself
+hoarse in enthusiasm.
+
+At Gaston, where Hawk asked for a donation of land whereon the company
+might build the long-promised division repair-shops, people fought with
+one another to be first among the donors. And at Juniberg, where the
+company proposed to establish the first of a series of grain
+subtreasuries--warehouses in which the farmers of the surrounding country
+could store their products and borrow money on them from the railroad
+company at the rate of three per cent, per annum--at Juniberg enough money
+was subscribed to erect three such depots as the heaviest tributary crop
+could possibly fill.
+
+It was while the pendulum of prosperity was in full swing that David Kent
+took a day off from sweating over his problem of ousting the receiver and
+ran down to Gaston. Single-eyed as he was in the pursuit of justice, he
+was not unmindful of the six lots standing in his name in the Gaston
+suburb, and from all accounts the time was come to dispose of them.
+
+He made the journey in daylight, with his eyes wide open and the mental
+pencil busy at work noting the changes upon which the State press had been
+dilating daily, but which he was now seeing for the first time. They were
+incontestable--and wonderful. He admitted the fact without prejudice to a
+settled conviction that the sun-burst of prosperity was merely another
+brief period of bubble-blowing. Towns whose streets had been grass-grown
+since the day when each in turn had surrendered its right to be called the
+terminus of the westward-building railroad, were springing into new life.
+The song of the circular saw, the bee-boom of the planing-mill and the
+tapping of hammers were heard in the land, and the wayside hamlets were
+dotted with new roofs. And Gaston----
+
+But Gaston deserved a separate paragraph in the mental note-book, and Kent
+accorded it, marveling still more. It was as if the strenuous onrush of
+the climaxing Year Three had never been interrupted. The material for the
+new company shops was arriving by trainloads, and an army of men was at
+work clearing the grounds. On a siding near the station a huge grain
+elevator was rising. In the streets the hustling activity of the
+"terminus" period was once more in full swing; and at the Mid-Continent
+Kent had some little difficulty in securing a room.
+
+He was smoking his after-dinner cigar in the lobby of the hotel and trying
+as he might to orient himself when Blashfield Hunnicott drifted in. Kent
+gave the sometime local attorney a cigar, made room for him on the
+plush-covered settee, and proceeded to pump him dry of Gaston news. Summed
+up, the inquiries pointed themselves thus: was there any basis for the
+Gaston revival other than the lately changed attitude of the railroad? In
+other words, if the cut rates should be withdrawn and the railroad
+activities cease, would there not be a second and still more disastrous
+collapse of the Gaston bubble?
+
+Pressed hardly, Hunnicott admitted the probability; given another turn,
+the screw of inquiry squeezed out an admission of the fact, slurred over
+by the revivalist, that the railway company's treasury was really the
+alms-box into which all hands were dipping.
+
+"One more question and I'll let up on you," said Kent. "It used to be said
+of you in the flush times that you kept tab on the real estate transfers
+when everybody else was too busy to read the record. Do you still do it?"
+
+Hunnicott laughed uneasily.
+
+"Rather more than ever just now, as you'd imagine."
+
+"It is well. Now you know the members of the old gang, from his Excellency
+down. Tell me one thing: are they buying or selling?"
+
+Hunnicott sprang up and slapped his leg.
+
+"By Jupiter, Kent! They are selling--every last man of them!"
+
+"Precisely. And when they have sold all they have to sell?"
+
+"They'll turn us loose--drop us--quit booming the town, if your theory is
+the right one. But say, Kent, I can't believe it, you know. It's too big a
+thing to be credited to Jim Guilford and his handful of subs in the
+railroad office. Why, it's all along the line, everywhere."
+
+"I'm telling you that Guilford isn't the man. He is only a cog in the
+wheel. There is a bigger mind than his behind it."
+
+"I can't help it," Hunnicott protested. "I don't believe that any man or
+clique could bring this thing about unless we were really on the upturn."
+
+"Very good; believe what you please, but do as I tell you. Sell every foot
+of Gaston dirt that stands in your name; and while you are about it, sell
+those six lots for me in Subdivision Five. More than that, do it pretty
+soon."
+
+Hunnicott promised, in the brokerage affair, at least. Then he switched
+the talk to the receivership.
+
+"Still up in the air, are you, in the railroad grab case?"
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"No news of MacFarlane?"
+
+"Plenty of it. His health is still precarious, and will likely remain so
+until the spoilsmen have picked the skeleton clean."
+
+Hunnicott was silent for a full minute. Then he said:
+
+"Say, Kent, hasn't it occurred to you that they are rather putting meat on
+the bones instead of taking it off? Their bills for betterments must be
+out of sight."
+
+It had occurred to Kent, but he gave his own explanation of Major
+Guilford's policy in a terse sentence.
+
+"It is a part of the bluff; fattening the thing a little before they
+barbecue it."
+
+"I suppose so. It's a pity we don't live a little farther back in the
+history of the world: say at a time when we could hire MacFarlane's doctor
+to obliterate the judge, and no questions asked."
+
+Who can explain how it is that some jesting word, trivial and purposeless
+it may be, will fire a hidden train of thought which was waiting only for
+some chance spark? "Obliterate the judge," said Hunnicott in grim jest;
+and straightway Kent saw possibilities; saw a thing to be done, though not
+yet the manner of its doing.
+
+"If you'll excuse me," he said abruptly to his companion, "I believe I'll
+try to catch the Flyer back to the capital. I came down to see about
+selling those lots of mine, but if you will undertake it for me----"
+
+"Of course," said Hunnicott; "I'll be only too glad. You've ten minutes:
+can you make it?"
+
+Kent guessed so, and made the guess a certainty with two minutes to spare.
+The through sleeper was lightly loaded, and he picked out the most
+unneighbored section, of the twelve, being wishful only for undisturbed
+thinking ground. But before the train had swung past the suburb lights of
+Gaston, the smoker's unrest seized him and the thought-wheels demanded
+tobacco. Kent fought it as long as he could, making sure that the
+smoking-compartment liars' club would be in session; but when the demand
+became a nagging insistence, he found his pipe and tobacco and went to the
+men's room.
+
+The little den behind the drawing-room had but one occupant besides the
+rear-end brakeman---a tall, saturnine man in a gray grass-cloth duster who
+was smoking a Porto Rican stogie. Kent took a second look and held out his
+hand.
+
+"This is an unexpected pleasure, Judge Marston. I was counting on three
+hours of solitary confinement."
+
+The lieutenant-governor acknowledged the hand-clasp, nodded, and made room
+on the leather-covered divan for the new-comer. Hildreth, the editor of
+the _Argus_, put it aptly when he said that the grim-faced old cattle king
+had "blown" into politics. He was a compromise on the People's Party
+ticket; was no part of the Bucks programme, and had been made to feel it.
+Tradition had it that he had been a terror to the armed and organized
+cattle thieves of the early days; hence the brevet title of "Judge." But
+those that knew him best did not know that he had once been the brightest
+man upon the Supreme Bench of his native state: this before failing health
+had driven him into exile.
+
+As a mixer, the capital had long since voted Oliver Marston a conspicuous
+failure. A reticent, reserved man by temperament and habit, and with both
+temperament and habit confirmed by his long exile on the cattle ranges, he
+had grown rather less than more talkative after his latest plunge into
+public life; and even Miss Van Brock confessed that she found him
+impossible on the social side. None the less, Kent had felt drawn toward
+him from the first; partly because Marston was a good man in bad company,
+and partly because there was something remindful of the elder Kent in the
+strong face, the slow smile and the introspective eye of the old man from
+the hill country.
+
+For a time the talk was a desultory monologue, with Kent doing his best to
+keep it from dying outright. Later, when he was fairly driven in upon his
+reserves, he began to speak of himself, and of the hopeless fight for
+enlargement in the Trans-Western struggle. Marston lighted the
+match-devouring stogie for the twentieth time, squared himself on the end
+of the divan and listened attentively. At the end of the recounting he
+said:
+
+"It seems to be a failure of justice, Mr. Kent. Can you prove your
+postulate?"
+
+"I can. With fifteen minutes more on the day of the preliminary hearing I
+should have shown it to any one's satisfaction."
+
+Marston went into a brown study with his eyes fixed upon the
+stamped-leather devil in the panel at the opposite end of the compartment.
+When he spoke again, Kent wondered at the legal verbiage, and still more
+at the clear-cut, judicial opinion.
+
+"The facts in the case, as you state them, point to judicial connivance,
+and we should always be slow to charge that, Mr. Kent. Technically, the
+court was not at fault. Due notice was served on the company's attorney of
+record, and you admit, yourself, that the delay, short as it was, would
+have been sufficient if you had not been accidentally detained. And, since
+there were no contravening affidavits submitted, Judge MacFarlane was
+technically warranted in granting the prayer for a temporary receiver."
+
+"I'm not trying to refute that," said Kent. "But afterward, when I called
+upon the judge with the evidence in hand----"
+
+"He was under no absolute obligation to retry the case out of court, as
+you know, Mr. Kent. Neither was he obliged to give you an unofficial
+notice of the day upon which he would hear your motion for the discharge
+of the receiver and the vacation of his order appointing him."
+
+"Under no absolute legal obligation, perhaps," retorted Kent. "But the
+moral obligation--"
+
+"We are coming to that. I have been giving you what would probably be a
+minority opinion of an appellate court, if you could take an appeal. The
+majority opinion might take higher ground, pointing to the manifest
+injustice done to the defendant company by the shortness of the delay
+granted; by Judge MacFarlane's refusal to continue the hearing for one
+hour, though your attorney was present and pleading for the same; and
+lastly for the indefinite postponement of the hearing on the merits on
+insufficient grounds, since the judge was not at the time, and has not
+since been, too ill to attend to the routine duties of his office."
+
+Kent looked up quickly.
+
+"Judge Marston, do you know that last assertion to be true?" he demanded.
+
+The slow smile came and went in the introspective eyes of the older man.
+
+"I have been giving you the opinion of the higher court," he said, with
+his nearest approach to jocoseness. "It is based upon the supposition that
+your allegations would be supported by evidence."
+
+Kent smoked on in silence while the train measured the rail-lengths
+between two of the isolated prairie stations. When he spoke again there
+was honest deference in his manner.
+
+"Mr. Marston, you have a far better right to your courtesy title of
+'Judge' than that given by the Great American Title Company, Unlimited,"
+he said. "Will you advise me?"
+
+"As plain Oliver Marston, and a man old enough to be your father, yes.
+What have you been doing? Trying to oust the receiver, I suppose."
+
+"Yes; trying to find some technical flaw by which he could be ousted."
+
+"It can't be done. You must strike higher. Are you fully convinced of
+Judge MacFarlane's venality?"
+
+"As fully as I can be without having seen with my own eyes and heard with
+my own ears."
+
+Marston opened his watch and looked at it. Then he lighted another of the
+villainous little cigars.
+
+"We have an hour yet," he said. "You have been giving me the legal points
+in the case: now give me the inferences--all of them."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"I'm afraid I sha'n't be able to forget the lieutenant-governor. I shall
+have to call some pretty hard names."
+
+"Call them," said his companion, briefly; and Kent went deep into the
+details, beginning with the formation of the political gang in Gaston the
+dismantled.
+
+The listener in the gray dust-coat heard him through without comment. When
+Kent reached the end of the inferences, telling the truth without scruple
+and letting the charge of political and judicial corruption lie where it
+would, the engineer was whistling for the capital.
+
+"You have told me some things I knew, and some others that I only
+suspected," was all the answer he got until the train was slowing into the
+Union Station. Then as he flung away the stump of the little cigar the
+silent one added: "If I were in your place, Mr. Kent, I believe I should
+take a supplementary course of reading in the State law."
+
+"In what particular part of it?" said Kent, keen anxiety in every word.
+
+"In that part of the fundamental law which relates to the election of
+circuit judges, let us say. If I had your case to fight, I should try to
+obliterate Judge MacFarlane."
+
+Kent had but a moment in which to remark the curious coincidence in the
+use of precisely the same word by both Hunnicott and his present adviser.
+
+"But, my dear sir! we should gain nothing by MacFarlane's removal when his
+successor would be appointed by the executive!"
+
+Marston turned in the doorway of the smoking-compartment and laid a
+fatherly hand on the younger man's shoulder.
+
+"My boy, I didn't say 'remove'; I said 'obliterate'. Good night."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+THE GERRYMANDER
+
+With Judge Marston's hint partly to point the way, Kent was no long time
+in getting at work on the new lead.
+
+Having been at the time a practitioner in one of the counties affected, he
+knew the political deal by which MacFarlane had been elected. Briefly
+described, it was a swapping of horses in midstream. In the preliminary
+canvass it was discovered that in all probability Judge MacFarlane's
+district, as constituted, would not reelect him. But the adjoining
+district was strong enough to spare a county without loss to the party;
+and that county added to MacFarlane's voting strength would tip the scale
+in his favor. The Assembly was in session, and the remedy was applied in
+the shape of a bill readjusting the district lines to fit the political
+necessity.
+
+While this bill was still in the lower house an obstacle presented itself
+in the form of a vigorous protest from Judge Whitcomb, whose district was
+the one to suffer loss. The county in question was a prosperous one, and
+the court fees--which a compliant clerk might secretly divide with the
+judge appointing him--were large: wherefore Whitcomb threatened political
+reprisals if Kiowa County should be taken away from him. The outcome was a
+compromise. For elective purposes the two districts were gerrymandered as
+the bill proposed; but it was expressly provided that the transferred
+county should remain judicially in Whitcomb's district until the
+expiration of Whitcomb's term of office.
+
+Having refreshed his memory as to the facts, Kent spent a forenoon in the
+State library. He stayed on past the luncheon hour, feeding on a dry diet
+of Digests; and it was not until hunger began to sharpen his faculties
+that he thought of going back of the statutory law to the fountain-head in
+the constitution of the State. Here, after he had read carefully section
+by section almost through the entire instrument, his eye lighted upon a
+clause which gradually grew luminous as he read and re-read it.
+
+"That is what Marston meant; it must be what he meant," he mused; and
+returning the book to its niche in the alcove he sat down to put his face
+in his hands and sum up the status in logical sequence.
+
+The conclusion must have been convincing, since he presently sprang up and
+left the room quickly to have himself shot down the elevator shaft to the
+street level. The telegraph office in the capitol was closed, but there
+was another in the Hotel Brunswick, two squares distant, and thither he
+went.
+
+"Hold the pool in fighting trim at all hazards. Think I have found weak
+link in the chain," was his wire to Loring, at Boston; and having sent it,
+he went around to Cassatti's and astonished the waiter by ordering a
+hearty luncheon at half-past three o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+It was late in the evening before he left the tiny office on the fifth
+floor of the Quintard Building where one of his former stenographers had
+set up in business for herself. Since five o'clock the young woman had
+been steadily driving the type-writer to Kent's dictation. When the final
+sheet came out with a whirring rasp of the ratchet, he suddenly remembered
+that he had promised Miss Van Brock to dine with her. It was too late for
+the dinner, but not too late to go and apologize, and he did the thing
+that he could, stopping at his rooms on the way to dress while his
+cab-driver waited.
+
+He found Portia alone, for which he was glad; but her greeting was
+distinctly accusative.
+
+"If I should pretend to be deeply offended and tell Thomas to show you the
+door, what could you say for yourself?" she began, before he could say a
+word in exculpation.
+
+"I should say every sort of excuseful thing I could think of, knowing very
+well that the most ingenious lie would fall far short of atoning for the
+offense," he replied humbly.
+
+"Possibly it would be better to tell the truth--had you thought of that?"
+she suggested, quite without malice.
+
+"Yes, I had; and I shall, if you'll let me begin back a bit." He drew up a
+chair to face her and sat on the edge of it. "You know I told you I was
+going to Gaston to sell my six lots while Major Guilford's little boom is
+on?"
+
+"I'm trying to remember: go on."
+
+"Well, I went yesterday morning and returned late last night. Do you know,
+it's positively marvelous!"
+
+"Which--the six lots, the boom, or the celerity of your movements?" she
+asked, with a simulation of the deepest interest.
+
+"All three, if you please; but I meant the miraculous revival of things
+along the Trans-Western. But that is neither here nor there--"
+
+"I think it is very much here and there," she interrupted.
+
+"I see you don't want me to tell the truth--the whole truth; but I am
+determined. The first man I met after dinner was Hunnicott, and when I had
+made him my broker in the real estate affair we fell to talking about the
+railroad steal. Speaking of MacFarlane's continued absence, Hunnicott
+said, jokingly, that it was a pity we couldn't go back to the methods of a
+few hundred years ago and hire the Hot Springs doctor to 'obliterate' him.
+The word stuck in my mind, and I broke away and took the train chiefly to
+have a chance to think out the new line. In the smoking-room of the
+sleeper I found--whom, do you suppose?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know: Judge MacFarlane, perhaps, coming back to give you a
+chance to poison him at short range?"
+
+"No; it was Marston."
+
+"And he talked so long and so fast that you couldn't get here in time for
+dinner this evening? That would be the most picturesque of the little
+fictions you spoke of."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"For the first hour he wouldn't talk at all; just sat there wooden-faced,
+smoking vile little cigars that made me think I was getting hay-fever. But
+I wouldn't give up; and after I had worn out all the commonplaces I began
+on the Trans-Western muddle. At that he woke up all at once, and before I
+knew it he was giving me an expert legal opinion on the case; meaty and
+sound and judicial. Miss Van Brock, that man is a lawyer, and an
+exceedingly able one, at that."
+
+"Of course," she said coolly. "He was one of the justices of the Supreme
+Court of his own state at forty-two: that was before he had to come West
+for his health. I found that out a long time ago."
+
+"And you never told me!" said Kent, reproachfully. "Well, no matter; I
+found out for myself that he is a man to tie to. After we had canvassed
+the purely legal side of the affair, he wanted to know more, and I went in
+for the details, telling him all the inferences which involve Bucks,
+Meigs, Hendricks, MacFarlane and the lot of them."
+
+Miss Portia's eyes were flashing.
+
+"Good, good, good!" she said. "David, I'm proud of you. That took
+courage--heaps of it."
+
+"I did have to forget pretty hard that he was the lieutenant-governor and
+nominally one of the gang. But if he is not with us, neither is he against
+us. He took it all in quietly, and when I was through, he said: 'You have
+told me some things that I knew, and some others that I only suspected.'"
+
+"Was that all?" asked Miss Van Brock, eagerly.
+
+"No; I took a good long breath and asked his advice."
+
+"Did he give it?"
+
+"He did. He said in sober earnest just what Hunnicott had said in a joke:
+'If I had your case to fight, I should try to obliterate Judge
+MacFarlane.' I began to say that MacFarlane's removal wouldn't help us so
+long as Bucks has the appointing of his successor, and then he turned on
+me and hammered it in with a last word just as we were leaving the train:
+'I didn't say remove; I said obliterate.' I caught on, after so long a
+time, and I've been hard at work ever since."
+
+"You are obliterating me," said Miss Portia. "I haven't the slightest idea
+what it is all about."
+
+"It's easy from this on," said Kent, consolingly. "You know how MacFarlane
+secured his reelection?"
+
+"Everybody knows that."
+
+"Well, to cut a long story short, the gerrymander deal won't stand the
+light. The constitution says--"
+
+"Oh, please don't quote law books at me. Put it in English--woman-English,
+if you can."
+
+"I will. The special act of the Assembly is void; therefore there was no
+legal election, and, by consequence, there is no judge and no receiver."
+
+Miss Van Brock was silent for a reflective minute. Then she said:
+
+"On second thought, perhaps you would better tell me what the constitution
+says, Mr. David. Possibly I could grasp it."
+
+"It is in the section on elections. It says: 'All circuit or district
+judges, and all special judges, shall be elected by the qualified voters
+of the respective circuits or districts in which they are to hold their
+court.' Kiowa County was cut out of Judge Whitcomb's circuit and placed in
+Judge MacFarlane's for electoral purposes only. In all other respects it
+remains a part of Judge Whitcomb's circuit, and will so continue until
+Whitcomb's term expires. Without the vote of Kiowa, MacFarlane could not
+have been elected; with it he was illegally elected, or, to put it the
+other way about, he was not elected at all. Since he is not lawfully a
+judge, his acts are void, among them this appointment of Major Guilford as
+receiver for the Trans-Western."
+
+She was not as enthusiastic as he thought she ought to be. In the soil
+prepared for it by the political confidences of the winter there had grown
+up a many-branching tree of intimacy between these two; a frank, sexless
+friendship, as Kent would have described it, in which a man who was not
+very much given to free speech with any one unburdened himself, and the
+woman made him believe that her quick, apprehending sympathy was the one
+thing needful--as women have done since the world began.
+
+Since the looting of the railroad which had taken him out of the steadying
+grind of regular work, Kent had been the prey of mixed motives. From the
+first he had thrown himself heartily into the problem of retrieval, but
+the pugnacious professional ambition to break the power of the machine had
+divided time pretty equally with sentiment. Elinor had said little about
+the vise-nip of hardship which the stock-smashing would impose upon three
+unguardianed women; but Penelope had been less reticent. Wanting bare
+justice at the hands of the wreckers, Elinor would go to her wedding with
+Ormsby as the beggar maid went to King Cophetua; and all the loyalty of an
+unselfish love rose up in Kent to make the fight with the grafters a
+personal duel.
+
+At every step in the hitherto discouraging struggle Portia Van Brock had
+been his keen-sighted adviser, prompter, ally of proof. He told himself
+now and again in a flush of gratitude that he was coming to owe her more
+than he had ever owed any woman; that where other men, more--or
+less--fortunate, were not denied the joy of possession, he, the
+disappointed one, was finding a true and loyal comradeship next best, if
+not quite equal to the beatitudes of passion.
+
+In all of which David Kent was not entirely just to himself. However much
+he owed to Portia--and the debt was large--she was not his only creditor.
+Something he owed to the unsatisfied love; more, perhaps, to the good
+blood in his veins; but most of all to the battle itself. For out of the
+soul-harrowings of endeavor was emerging a better man, a stronger man,
+than any his friends had known. Brutal as their blind gropings were, the
+Flagellants of the Dark Ages plied their whips to some dim purpose.
+Natures there be that rise only to the occasion; and if there be no
+occasion, no floggings of adversity or bone-wrenchings upon the rack of
+things denied, there will be no awakening--no victory.
+
+David Kent was suffering in both kinds, and was the better man for it.
+From looking forward to success in the narrow field of professional
+advancement, or in the scarcely broader one of the righting of one woman's
+financial wrongs, he was coming now to crave it in the name of manhood; to
+burn with an eager desire to see justice done for its own sake.
+
+So, when he had come to Portia with the scheme of effacing Judge
+MacFarlane and his receiver at one shrewd blow, the first of the many
+plans which held out a fair promise of success as a reward for daring, he
+was disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm.
+
+"What is the matter with it?" he demanded, when he had given her five full
+minutes for reflection.
+
+"I don't know, David," she said gravely. "Have I ever thrown cold water on
+any of your schemes thus far?"
+
+"No, indeed. You have been the loyalest partizan a man ever had, I think;
+the only one I have to whom I can talk freely. And I have told you more
+than I have all the others put together."
+
+"I know you have. And it hurts me to pull back now when you want me to
+push. But I can't help it. Do you believe in a woman's intuition?"
+
+"I suppose I do: all men do, don't they?"
+
+She was tying little knots in the fringe of the table scarf, but the
+prophetess-eyes, as Penelope called them, were not following the deft
+intertwinings of the slender fingers.
+
+"You mean to set about 'obliterating' Judge MacFarlane forthwith?" she
+asked.
+
+"Assuredly. I have been whipping the thing into shape all afternoon: that
+is what kept me from dining with you."
+
+"It involves some kind of legal procedure?"
+
+"Yes; a rather complicated one."
+
+"Could you explain it so that I could understand it?"
+
+"I think so. In the first place the question is raised by means of an
+information or inquiry called a _quo warranto_. This is directed to the
+receiver, and is a demand to know by what authority he holds. Is it clear
+thus far?"
+
+"Pellucidly," she said.
+
+"In reply the receiver cites his authority, which is the order from Judge
+MacFarlane; and in our turn we proceed to show that the authority does not
+exist--that the judge's election was illegal and that therefore his acts
+are void. Do I make it plain?"
+
+"You make it seem as though it were impossible to fail. And yet I know you
+will fail."
+
+"How do you know it?"
+
+"Don't ask me; I couldn't begin to tell you that. But in some spiritual or
+mental looking-glass I can see you coming to me with the story of that
+failure--coming to ask my help."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"You don't need to be the prophetess Penelope says you are to foresee part
+of that. I always come to you with my woes."
+
+"Do you?--oftener than you go to Miss Brentwood?"
+
+This time his smile was a mere tightening of the lips.
+
+"You do love to grind me on that side, don't you?" he said. "I and my
+affairs are less than nothing to Miss Brentwood, and no one knows it any
+better than you do."
+
+"But you want to go to her," she persisted. "I am only the alternative."
+
+He looked her full in the eyes.
+
+"Miss Van Brock, what is it you want me to say? What can I say more than I
+said a moment ago--that you are the truest friend a man ever had?"
+
+The answering look out of the brown eyes was age-old in its infinite
+wisdom.
+
+"How little you men know when you think you know the most," she said
+half-musingly; then she broke off abruptly. "Let us talk about something
+else. If Major Guilford is wrecking the railroad, why is he spending so
+much money on improvements? Have you thought to ask yourself that
+question?"
+
+"A good many times," he admitted, following her promptly back to first
+principles.
+
+"And you have not found the answer?"
+
+"Not one that fully satisfies me--no."
+
+"I've found one."
+
+"Intuitively?" he smiled.
+
+"No; it's pure logic, this time. Do you remember showing me a letter that
+Mr. Hunnicott wrote you just before the explosion--a letter in which he
+repeated a bit of gossip about Mr. Semple Falkland and his mysterious
+visit to Gaston?"
+
+"Yes, I remember it."
+
+"Do you know who Mr. Falkland is?"
+
+"Who doesn't?" he queried. "He has half of Wall Street in his clientele."
+
+"Yes; but particularly he is the advisory counsel of the Plantagould
+System. Ever since you showed me that letter I have been trying to account
+for his presence in Gaston on the day before Judge MacFarlane's spring
+term of court. I should never have found out but for Mrs. Brentwood."
+
+"Mrs. Brentwood!"
+
+Miss Van Brock nodded.
+
+"Yes; the mother of my--of the young person for whom I am the alternative,
+is in a peck of trouble; I quote her _verbatim_. She and her two daughters
+hold some three thousand shares of Western Pacific stock. It was purchased
+at fifty-seven, and it is now down to twenty-one."
+
+"Twenty and a quarter to-day," Kent corrected.
+
+"Never mind the fractions. The mother of the incomparable--Penelope, has
+heard that I am a famous business woman; a worthy understudy for Mrs.
+Hetty Green; so she came to me for advice. She had a letter from a New
+York broker offering her a fraction more than the market price for her
+three thousand shares of Western Pacific."
+
+"Well?" said Kent.
+
+"Meaning what did I do? I did what you did not do--what you are not doing
+even now; I put two and two together in the twinkling of a bedstaff. Why
+should a New York broker be picking up outlying Western Pacific at a
+fraction more than the market when the stock is sinking every day? I was
+curious enough to pass the 'why' along to a friend of mine in Wall
+Street."
+
+"Of course he told you all about it," said Kent, incredulously.
+
+"He told me what I needed to know. The broker in question is a Plantagould
+man."
+
+"Still I fail to 'connect up,' as the linemen say."
+
+"Do you? Ah, David, David! will you leave it for a woman to point out what
+you should have suspected the moment you read that bit of gossip in Mr.
+Hunnicott's letter?"
+
+Her hand was on the arm of her chair. He covered it with his own.
+
+"I'll leave it for you, Portia. You are my good angel."
+
+She withdrew the hand quickly, but there was no more than playful
+resentment in her retort.
+
+"Shame on you!" she scoffed. "What would Miss Brentwood say?"
+
+"I wish you would leave her out of it," he frowned. "You are continually
+ignoring the fact that she has promised to be the wife of another man."
+
+"And has thereby freed you from all obligations of loyalty? Don't deceive
+yourself: women are not made that way. Doubtless she will go on and marry
+the other man in due season; but she will never forgive you if you smash
+her ideals. But we were talking about the things you ought to have
+guessed. Fetch me the atlas from the book-case--lower shelf; right-hand
+corner; that's it."
+
+He did it; and in further obedience opened the thin quarto at the map of
+the United States. There were heavy black lines, inked in with a pen,
+tracing out the various ramifications of a great railway system. The
+nucleus of the system lay in the middle West, but there was a growing
+network of the black lines reaching out toward the Pacific. And connecting
+the trans-Mississippi network with the western was a broad red line
+paralleling the Trans-Western Railway.
+
+She smiled at his sudden start of comprehension.
+
+"Do you begin to suspect things?" she asked.
+
+He nodded his head.
+
+"You ought to be a man. If you were, I should never give you a moment's
+peace until you consented to take a partnership with me. It's as plain as
+day, now."
+
+"Is it? Then I wish you would make it appear so to me. I am not half as
+subtile as you give me credit for being."
+
+"Yet you worked this out."
+
+"That was easy enough; after I had seen Mrs. Brentwood's letter, and yours
+from Mr. Hunnicott. The Plantagould people want your railroad, and the
+receivership is a part of a plan for acquiring it. But why is Major
+Guilford spending so much money for improvements?"
+
+"His reasons are not far to seek now that you have shown me where to look.
+His instructions are to run the stock down so that the Plantagould can buy
+it in. Cut rates and big expenditures will do that--have done it. On the
+other hand, it is doubtless a condition of the deal that the road shall be
+turned over whole as to its property values--there is to be no wrecking in
+the general acceptance of the word. The Plantagould doesn't want a picked
+skeleton."
+
+Miss Portia's eyes narrowed.
+
+"It's a skilful bit of engineering, isn't it?" she said. "You'd admire it
+as artistic work yourself if your point of view were not so hopelessly
+personal."
+
+"You don't know half the artistic skill of it yet," he went on. "Besides
+all these different ends that are being conserved, the gang is taking care
+of its surplus heelers on the pay-rolls of the company. More than that, it
+is making immense political capital for itself. Everybody knows what the
+policy of the road was under the old régime: 'All the tariff the traffic
+will stand.' But now a Bucks man has hold of it, and liberality is the
+word. Every man in Trans-Western territory is swearing by Bucks and
+Guilford. Ah, my dear friend, his Excellency the governor is a truly great
+man!"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I've been trying to impress you with that fact all along. The mistake you
+made was in not joining the People's Party early in the campaign, David."
+
+But Kent was following out his own line of thought and putting it in words
+as it came.
+
+"Think of the brain-work it took to bring all these things into line.
+There was no hitch, no slip, and nothing was overlooked. They picked their
+time, and it was a moment when we were absolutely helpless. I had filed
+our charter, but our local organization was still incomplete. They had
+their judge and the needful case in his court, pending and ready for use
+at the precise moment. They had Hawk on the ground, armed and equipped;
+and they knew that unless a miracle intervened they would have nobody but
+an unprepared local attorney to obstruct them."
+
+"Is that all?" she asked.
+
+"No. The finest bit of sculpture is on the capstone of the pyramid. Since
+we have had no hearing on the merits, Guilford is only a temporary
+receiver, subject to discharge if the allegations in Hawk's amended
+petition are not sustained. After the major has sufficiently smashed the
+stock, Judge MacFarlane will come back, the hearing on the merits will be
+given, we shall doubtless make our point, and the road will revert to the
+stock-holders. But by that time enough of the stock will have changed
+hands on the 'wreck' price to put the Plantagould people safely in the
+saddle, and the freeze-out will be a fact accomplished."
+
+Miss Van Brock drew a long breath that was more than half a sigh.
+
+"You spoke the simple truth, David, when you said that his Excellency is a
+great man. It seems utterly hopeless now that we have cleared up all the
+little mysteries."
+
+Kent rose to take his leave.
+
+"No; that is where they all go out and I stay in," he said cheerfully.
+"The shrewder he is, the more credit there will be in making him let go.
+And you mark my words: I am going to make him let go. Good night."
+
+She had gone with him to the door; was in the act of closing it behind
+him, when he turned back for a belated question.
+
+"By the way, what did you tell Mrs. Brentwood to do?"
+
+"I told her not to do anything until she had consulted you and Mr. Loring
+and Brookes Ormsby. Was that right?"
+
+"Quite right. If it comes up again, rub it in some more. We'll save her
+alive yet, if she will let us. Did you say I might come to dinner
+to-morrow evening? Thank you: you grow sweeter and more truly
+compassionate day by day. Good night again."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+THE JUNKETERS
+
+When Receiver Guilford took possession of the properties, appurtenances
+and appendages of the sequestered Trans-Western Railway, one of the
+luxuries to which he fell heir was private car "Naught-seven," a
+commodious hotel on wheels originally used as the directors' car of the
+Western Pacific, and later taken over by Loring to be put in commission as
+the general manager's special.
+
+In the hands of a friendly receiver this car became a boon to the capitol
+contingent; its observation platform served as a shifting rostrum from
+which a deep-chested executive or a mellifluous Hawk often addressed
+admiring crowds at way stations, and its dining saloon was the moving
+scene of many little relaxative feasts, at which _Veuve Cliquot_ flowed
+freely, priceless cigars were burned, and the members of the organization
+unbent, each after his kind.
+
+But to the men of the throttle and oil-can, car Naught-seven, in the gift
+of a hospitable receiver, shortly became a nightmare. Like most private
+cars, it was heavier than the heaviest Pullman; and the engineer who was
+constrained to haul it like a dragging anchor at the tail end of a fast
+train was prone to say words not to be found in any vocabulary known to
+respectable philologists.
+
+It was in the evening of a wind-blown day, a week after Kent's visit to
+Gaston, that Engineer "Red" Callahan, oiling around for the all-night run
+with the Flyer on the Western Division, heard above the din and clamor of
+Union Station noises the sullen thump betokening the addition of another
+car to his train.
+
+"Now fwhat the divvle will that be?" he rasped, pausing, torch in hand, to
+apostrophize his fireman.
+
+The answer came up out of the shadows to the rear on the lips of M'Tosh,
+the train-master.
+
+"You have the Naught-seven to-night, Callahan, and a pretty severe head
+wind. Can you make your time?"
+
+"Haven't thim bloody fools in the up-town office anything betther to do
+than to tie that sivinty-ton ball-an'-chain to my leg such a night as
+this?" This is not what Callahan said: it is merely a printable paraphrase
+of his rejoinder.
+
+M'Tosh shook his head. He was a hold-over from the Loring administration,
+not because his place was not worth taking, but because as yet no
+political heeler had turned up with the requisite technical ability to
+hold it.
+
+"I don't blame you for cussing it out," he said; and the saying of it was
+a mark of the relaxed discipline which was creeping into all branches of
+the service. "Mr. Loring's car is anybody's private wagon these days. Can
+you make your time with her?"
+
+"Not on yer life," Callahan growled. "Is it the owld potgutted thafe iv a
+rayceiver that's in her?"
+
+"Yes; with Governor Bucks and a party of his friends. I take it you ought
+to feel honored."
+
+"Do I?" snapped Callahan. "If I don't make thim junketers think they're in
+the scuff iv a cyclone whin I get thim on the crooks beyant Dolores ye can
+gimme time, Misther M'Tosh. Where do I get shut iv thim?"
+
+"At Agua Caliente. They are going to the hotel at Breezeland, I suppose.
+There is your signal to pull out."
+
+"I'll go whin I'm dommed good an' ready," said Callahan, jabbing the snout
+of his oiler into the link machinery. And again M'Tosh let the breach of
+discipline go without reproof.
+
+Breezeland Inn, the hotel at Agua Caliente, is a year-round resort for
+asthmatics and other health seekers, with a sanatorium annex which
+utilizes the waters of the warm springs for therapeutic purposes. But
+during the hot months the capital and the plains cities to the eastward
+send their quota of summer idlers and the house fills to its capacity.
+
+It was for this reason that Mr. Brookes Ormsby, looking for a comfortable
+resort to which he might take Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters for an
+outing, hit upon the expedient of going first in person to Breezeland,
+partly to make sure of accommodations, and partly to check up the
+attractions of the place against picturesque descriptions in the
+advertisements.
+
+When he turned out of his sleeper in the early morning at Agua Caliente
+station, car Naught-seven had been thrown in on a siding a little farther
+up the line, and Ormsby recognized the burly person of the governor and
+the florid face and pursy figure of the receiver, in the group of men
+crossing from the private car to the waiting Inn tally-ho. Being a
+seasoned traveler, the club-man lost no time in finding the station agent.
+
+"Isn't there some way you can get me up to the hotel before that crowd
+reaches?" he asked; adding: "I'll make it worth your while."
+
+The reply effaced the necessity for haste.
+
+"The Inn auto will be down in a few minutes, and you can go up in that.
+Naught-seven brought Governor Bucks and the receiver and their party, and
+they're going down to Megilp, the mining camp on the other side of the
+State line. They've chartered the tally-ho for the day."
+
+Ormsby waited, and a little later was whisked away to the hotel in the
+tonneau of the guests' automobile. Afterward came a day which was rather
+hard to get through. Breakfast, a leisurely weighing and measuring of the
+climatic, picturesque and health-mending conditions, and the writing of a
+letter or two helped him wear out the forenoon; but after luncheon the
+time dragged dispiteously, and he was glad enough when the auto-car came
+to take him to the station for the evening train.
+
+As it happened, there were no other passengers for the east-bound Flyer;
+and finding he still had some minutes to wait, Ormsby lounged into the
+telegraph office. Here the bonds of ennui were loosened by the gradual
+development of a little mystery. First the telephone bell rang smartly,
+and when the telegraph operator took down the ear-piece and said "Well?"
+in the imperious tone common to his kind, he evidently received a
+communication that shocked him.
+
+Ormsby overheard but a meager half of the wire conversation; and the
+excitement, whatever its nature, was at the other end of the line. None
+the less, the station agent's broken ejaculations were provocative of keen
+interest in a man who had been boring himself desperately for the better
+part of a day.
+
+"Caught him doing it, you say?... Great Scott!... Oh, I don't believe
+that, you know ... yes--uh-huh--I hear ... But who did the shooting?"
+Whether the information came or not, Ormsby did not know, for at this
+conjuncture the telegraph instruments on the table set up a furious
+chattering, and the railway man dropped the receiver and sprang to his
+key.
+
+This left the listener out of it completely, and Ormsby strolled out to
+the platform, wondering what had happened and where it had happened. He
+glanced up at the telephone wires: two of them ran up the graveled
+driveway toward Breezeland Inn; the poles of the other two sentineled the
+road to the west down which the tally-ho had driven in the early morning.
+
+In the reflective instant the telegraph operator dashed out of his
+bay-windowed retreat and ran up the track to the private car. In a few
+minutes he was back again, holding an excited conference with the
+chauffeur of the Inn automobile, who was waiting to see if the Flyer
+should bring him any fares for the hotel.
+
+Curiosity is said to be peculiarly a foible feminine. It is not, as every
+one knows. But of the major masculine allotment, Ormsby the masterful had
+rather less than his due share. He saw the chauffeur turn his car in the
+length of it and send it spinning down the road and across the line into
+the adjoining State; heard the mellow whistle of the incoming train, and
+saw the station man nervously setting his stop signal; all with no more
+than a mild desire to know the reason for so much excitement and haste--a
+desire which was content to wait on the explanation of events.
+
+The explanation, such as it was, did not linger. The heavy train thundered
+in from the west; stopped barely long enough to allow the single passenger
+to swing up the steps of the Pullman; and went on again to stop a second
+time with a jerk when it had passed the side-track switch.
+
+Ormsby put his head out of the window and saw that the private car was to
+be taken on; remarked also that the thing was done with the utmost
+celerity. Once out on the main line with car Naught-seven coupled in, the
+train was backed swiftly down to the station and the small mystery of
+hurryings was sufficiently solved. The governor and his party were
+returning, and they did not wish to miss connections.
+
+Ormsby had settled back into the corner of his section when he heard the
+spitting explosions of the automobile and the crash of hoofs and
+iron-tired wheels on the sharp gravel. He looked out again and was in time
+to see the finish of the race. Up the road from the westward came the
+six-horse tally-ho, the horses galloping in the traces and the automobile
+straining in the lead at the end of an improvised tow-line. In a twinkling
+the coach was abreast of the private car, the transfer of passengers was
+effected, and Ormsby was near enough at his onlooking window to remark
+several things: that there was pell-mell haste and suppressed excitement;
+that the governor was the coolest man in the group; and that the receiver
+had to be helped across from the coach to the car. Then the train moved
+out, gathering speed with each added wheel-turn.
+
+The onlooker leaned from his window to see what became of the tangle of
+horses and auto-car precipitated by the sudden stop of the tally-ho.
+Mirage effects are common on the western plains, and if Ormsby had not
+been familiar with them he might have marveled at the striking example
+afforded by the backward look. In the rapidly increasing perspective the
+six horses of the tally-ho were suddenly multiplied into a troop; and
+where the station agent had stood on the platform there seemed to be a
+dozen gesticulating figures fading into indistinctness, as the fast train
+swept on its way eastward.
+
+The club-man saw no more of the junketing party that night. Once when the
+train stopped to cut out the dining-car, and he had stepped down for a
+breath of fresh air on the station platform, he noticed that the private
+car was brilliantly lighted, and that the curtains and window shades were
+closely drawn. Also, he heard the popping of bottle corks and the clink of
+glass, betokening that the governor's party was still celebrating its
+successful race for the train. Singularly enough, Ormsby's reflections
+concerned themselves chiefly with the small dishonesty.
+
+"I suppose it all goes into the receiver's expense account and the
+railroad pays for it," he said to himself. "So and so much for an
+inspection trip to Megilp and return. I must tell Kent about it. It will
+put another shovelful of coal into his furnace--not that he is especially
+needing it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the moment of this saying--it was between ten and eleven o'clock at
+night--David Kent's wrath-fire was far from needing an additional stoking.
+Once more Miss Van Brock had given proof of her prophetic gift, and Kent
+had been moodily filling in the details of the picture drawn by her
+woman's intuition. He had gone late to the house in Alameda Square,
+knowing that Portia had dinner guests. And it was imperative that he
+should have her to himself.
+
+"You needn't tell me anything but the manner of its doing," she was
+saying. "I knew they would find a way to stop you--or make one. And you
+needn't be spiteful at me," she added, when Kent gripped the arms of his
+chair.
+
+"I don't mind your saying 'I told you so'," he fumed. "It's the fact that
+I didn't have sense enough to see what an easy game I was dealing them. It
+didn't take Meigs five minutes to shut me off."
+
+"Tell me about it," she said; and he did it crisply.
+
+"The _quo warranto_ inquiry is instituted in the name of the State; or
+rather the proceedings are brought by some person with the approval of the
+governor or the attorney-general, one or both. I took to-day for obtaining
+this approval because I knew Bucks was out of town and I thought I could
+bully Meigs."
+
+"And you couldn't?" she said.
+
+"Not in a thousand years. At first he said he would take the matter under
+advisement: I knew that meant a consultation with Bucks. Then I put the
+whip on; told him a few of the things I know, and let him imagine a lot
+more; but it was no good. He was as smooth as oil, admitting nothing,
+denying nothing. And what grinds me worst is that I let him put me in
+fault; gave him a chance to show conclusively how absurd it was for me to
+expect him to take up a question of such magnitude on the spur of the
+moment."
+
+"Of course," she said sympathetically. "I knew they would find a way. What
+are you doing?"
+
+Kent laughed in spite of his sore _amour-propre_.
+
+"At this present moment I am doing precisely what you said I should:
+unloading my woes upon you."
+
+"Oh, but I didn't say that. I said you would come to me for help. Have
+you?"
+
+"I'd say yes, if I didn't know so well just what I am up against."
+
+Miss Van Brock laughed unfeelingly.
+
+"Is it a man's weakness to fight better in the dark?"
+
+"It is a man's common sense to know when he is knocked out," he retorted.
+
+She held him with her eyes while she said:
+
+"Tell me what you want to accomplish, David; at the end of the ends, I
+mean. Is it only that you wish to save Miss Brentwood's little marriage
+portion?"
+
+He told the simple truth, as who could help, with Portia's eyes demanding
+it.
+
+"It was that at first; I'll admit it. But latterly--"
+
+"Latterly you have begun to think larger things?" She looked away from
+him, and her next word seemed to be part of an unspoken thought. "I have
+been wondering if you are great enough, David."
+
+He shook his head despondently.
+
+"Haven't I just been showing you that I am not?"
+
+"You have been showing me that you can not always out-plan, the other
+person. That is a lack, but it is not fatal. Are you great enough to run
+fast and far when it is a straight-away race depending only upon mere
+man-strength and indomitable determination?"
+
+Her words fired him curiously. He recalled the little thrill of
+inspiration which a somewhat similar appeal from Elinor had once given
+him, and tried to compare the two sensations. There was no comparison. The
+one was a call to moral victory; the other to material success. None the
+less, he decided that the present was the more potent spell, perhaps only
+because it was the present.
+
+"Try me," he said impulsively.
+
+"If I do ... David, no man can serve two masters--or two mistresses. If I
+do, will you agree to put the sentimental affair resolutely in the
+background?"
+
+He took his head in his hands and was a long minute making up his mind.
+But his refusal was blunt enough when it came.
+
+"No; at least, not until they are married."
+
+It would have taken a keener discernment than Kent's or any man's to have
+fathomed the prompting of her laugh.
+
+"I was only trying you," she said. "Perhaps, if you had said yes I should
+have deserted you and gone over to the other side."
+
+He got up and went to sit beside her on the pillowed divan.
+
+"Don't try me again, please--not that way. I am only a man."
+
+"I make no promises--not even good ones," she retorted. And then: "Would
+you like to have your _quo warranto_ blind alley turned into a
+thoroughfare?"
+
+"I believe you can do it if you try," he admitted, brightening a little.
+
+"Maybe I can; or rather maybe I can put you in the way of doing it. You
+say Mr. Meigs is obstinate, and the governor is likely to prove still more
+obstinate. Have you thought of any way of softening them?"
+
+"You know I haven't. It's a stark impossibility from my point of view."
+
+"Nothing is impossible; it is always a question of ways and means." Then,
+suddenly: "Have you been paying any attention to the development of the
+Belmount oil field?"
+
+"Enough to know that it is a big thing; the biggest since the Pennsylvania
+discoveries, according to all accounts."
+
+"And the people of the State are enthusiastic about it, thinking that now
+the long tyranny of the oil monopoly will be broken?"
+
+"That is the way most of the newspapers talk, and there seems to be some
+little ground for it, granting the powers of the new law."
+
+She laid the tips of her fingers on his arm and knotted the thread of
+suggestion in a single sentence.
+
+"In the present state of affairs--with the People's Party as yet on trial,
+and the public mind ready to take fire at the merest hint of a foreign
+capitalistic monopoly in the State--tell me what would happen to the man
+who would let the Universal Oil Company into the Belmount field in
+defiance of the new trust and corporation law?"
+
+"By Jove!" Kent exclaimed, sitting up as if the shapely hand had given him
+a buffet. "It would ruin him politically, world without end! Tell me; is
+Bucks going to do that?"
+
+She laughed softly.
+
+"That is for you to find out, Mr. David Kent; not by hearsay, but in good,
+solid terms of fact that will appeal to a level-headed, conservative
+newspaper editor like--well, like Mr. Hildreth, of the _Argus_, let us
+say. Are you big enough to do it?"
+
+"I am desperate enough to try," was the slow-spoken answer.
+
+"And when you have the weapon in your hands; when you have found the sword
+and sharpened it?"
+
+"Then I can go to his Excellency and tell him what will happen if he
+doesn't instruct his attorney-general in the _quo warranto_ affair."
+
+"That will probably suffice to save your railroad--and Miss Brentwood's
+marriage portion. But after, David; what will you do afterward?"
+
+"I'll go on fighting the devil with fire until I have burned him out. If
+this is to be a government of dictators, I can be one of them, too."
+
+She clapped her hands enthusiastically.
+
+"There spoke the man David Kent; the man I have been trying to discover
+deep down under the rubbish of ill-temper and hesitancy and--yes, I will
+say it--of sentiment. Have you learned your lesson, David mine?"
+
+It was a mark of another change in him that he rose and stood over her,
+and that his voice was cool and dispassionate when he said:
+
+"If I have, it is because I have you for an inspired text-book, Portia
+dear."
+
+And with that he took his leave.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+SHARPENING THE SWORD
+
+In the beginning of the new campaign of investigation David Kent wisely
+discounted the help of paid professional spies--or rather he deferred, it
+to a later stage--by taking counsel with Jeffrey Hildreth, night editor of
+the _Argus_. Here, if anywhere, practical help was to be had; and the
+tender of it was cheerfully hearty and enthusiastic.
+
+"Most assuredly you may depend on the _Argus_, horse, foot and artillery,"
+said the editor, when Kent had guardedly outlined some portion of his
+plan. "We are on your side of the fence, and have been ever since Bucks
+was sprung as a candidate on the convention. But you've no case. Of
+course, it's an open secret that the Universal people are trying to break
+through the fence of the new law and establish themselves in the Belmount
+field without losing their identity or any of their monopolistic
+privileges. And it is equally a matter of course to some of us that the
+Bucks ring will sell the State out if the price is right. But to implicate
+Bucks and the capitol gang in printable shape is quite another matter."
+
+"I know," Kent admitted. "But it isn't impossible; it has got to be
+possible."
+
+The night editor sat back in his chair and chewed his cigar reflectively.
+Suddenly he asked:
+
+"What's your object, Kent? It isn't purely _pro lono pullico_, I take it?"
+
+Kent could no longer say truthfully that it was, and he did not lie about
+it.
+
+"No, it's purely personal, I guess. I need to get a grip on Bucks and I
+mean to do it."
+
+Hildreth laughed.
+
+"And, having got it, you'll telephone me to let up--as you did in the
+House Bill Twenty-nine fiasco. Where do we come in?"
+
+"No; you shall come in on the ground floor this time; though I may ask you
+to hold your hand until I have used my leverage. And if you'll go into it
+to stay, you sha'n't be alone. Giving the _Argus_ precedence in any item
+of news, I'll engage to have every other opposition editor in the State
+ready to back you."
+
+"Gad! you're growing, Kent. Do you mean to down the Bucks crowd
+ded-definitely?" demanded the editor, who stammered a little under
+excitable provocation. "Bigger men than you have tried it--and failed."
+
+"But no one of them with half my obstinacy, Hildreth. It can be done, and
+I am going to do it."
+
+The night editor laughed again.
+
+"If you can show that gang up, Kent, nothing in this State will be too
+good for you."
+
+"I've got it to do," said Kent. "Afterward, perhaps I'll come around for
+some of the good things. I am not in this for health or pleasure. Can I
+count on you after the mud-slinging begins?"
+
+Hildreth reflected further, disregarding the foreman's reproachful calls
+for copy.
+
+"I'll go you," he said at last; "and I'll undertake to swing the chief
+into line. But I am going to disagree with you flat on the project of a
+sudden exposé. Right or wrong, Bucks has pup-popular sentiment on his
+side. Take the Trans-Western territory, for example: at the present
+speaking these grafters--or their man Guilford; it's all the same--own
+those people down there body and soul. You couldn't pry Bucks out of their
+affections with a crowbar--suddenly, I mean. We'll have to work up to it
+gradually; educate the people as we go along."
+
+"I concede that much," said Kent. "And you may as well begin on this same
+Trans-Western deal,"--wherewith he pieced together the inferences which
+pointed to the stock-smashing project behind the receivership.
+
+"Don't use too much of it," he added, in conclusion.
+
+"It is all inference and deduction as yet, as I say. But you will admit
+it's plausible."
+
+The editor was sitting far back in his chair again, chewing absently on
+the extinct cigar.
+
+"Kent, did you fuf-figure all that out by yourself?"
+
+"No," said Kent, briefly. "There is a keener mind than mine behind it--and
+behind this oil field business, as well."
+
+"I'd like to give that mind a stunt on the _Argus_," said the editor. "But
+about the Belmount mix-up: you will give us a stickful now and then as we
+go along, if you unearth anything that the public would like to read?"
+
+"Certainly; any and everything that won't tend to interfere with my little
+intermediate scheme. As I have intimated, I must bring Bucks to terms on
+my own account before I turn him over to you and the people of the State.
+But I mean to be in on that, too."
+
+Hildreth wagged his head dubiously.
+
+"I may be overcautious; and I don't want to seem to scare you out, Kent.
+You ought to know your man better than I do--better than any of us; but if
+I had your job, I believe I should want to travel with a body-guard. I do,
+for a fact."
+
+David Kent's laugh came easily. Fear, the fear of man, was not among his
+weaknesses.
+
+"I am taking all the chances," he said; and so the conference ended.
+
+Two days later the "educational" campaign was opened by an editorial in
+the _Argus_ setting forth some hitherto unpublished matter concerning the
+manner in which the Trans-Western had been placed in the hands of a
+receiver. In its next issue the paper named the receivership after its
+true author, showing by a list of the officials that the road under Major
+Guilford had been made a hospital for Bucks politicians, and hinting
+pointedly that it was to be wrecked for the benefit of a stock-jobbing
+syndicate of eastern capitalists.
+
+Having thus reawakened public interest in the Trans-Western affair,
+Hildreth sounded a new note of alarm pitched upon the efforts of the
+Universal Oil Company to establish itself in the Belmount oil region; a
+cry which was promptly taken up by other State editors. This editorial was
+followed closely by others in the same strain, and at the end of a
+fortnight Kent was fain to call a halt.
+
+"Not too fast, Hildreth," he cautioned, dropping into the editor's den
+late one night. "You are doing mighty good work, but you are making it
+infinitely harder for me--driving the game to deeper cover. One of my men
+had a clue: Bucks and Meigs were holding conferences with a man from the
+Belmount field whose record runs back to New York. But they have taken the
+alarm and thrown us off the track."
+
+"The secretary of State's office is the place you want to watch," said
+Hildreth. "New oil companies are incorporating every day. Pretty soon one
+of these will swallow up all the others: that one will be the Universal
+under another name, and in its application for a charter you'll find
+askings big enough to cover all the rights and privileges of the original
+monopoly."
+
+"That is a good idea," said Kent, who already had a clerk in the secretary
+of State's office in his pay. "But how are we coming on in the political
+field?"
+
+"We are doing business there, and you have the _Argus_ to thank for it.
+You--or your idea, I should say--has a respectable following all over the
+State now; as it didn't have until we began to leg for it."
+
+Again Kent acquiesced, making no mention of sundry journeys he had made
+for the sole purpose of enlisting other editors, or of the open house Miss
+Van Brock was keeping for out-of-town newspaper men visiting the capital.
+
+"Moreover, we've served your turn in the Trans-Western affair," Hildreth
+went on. "Public interest is on the _qui vive_ for new developments in
+that. By the way, has the capitol gang any notion of your part in all this
+upstirring?"
+
+Kent smiled and handed the editor an open letter. It was from Receiver
+Guilford. The post of general counsel for the Trans-Western was vacant,
+and the letter was a formal tender of the office to the "Hon. David Kent."
+
+"H'm," said the editor. "I don't understand that a little bit."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"If they could get you to accept a general agency in Central Africa or New
+Zealand, or some other antipodean place where you'd be safely out of the
+way, it would be evident enough. But here they are proposing to take you
+right into the heart of things."
+
+Kent got a match out of the editor's desk and relighted his cigar.
+
+"You've got brain-fag to-night, Hildreth. It's a bribe, pure and simple.
+They argue that it is merely a matter of dollars and cents to me, as it
+would be to one of them; and they propose to retain me just as they would
+any other attorney whose opposition they might want to get rid of. Don't
+you see?"
+
+"Sure. I was thinking up the wrong spout. Have you replied to the major?"
+
+"Yes. I told him that my present engagements preclude the possibility of
+considering his offer; much to my regret."
+
+"Did you say that? You're a cold-plucked one, Kent, and I'm coming to
+admire you. But now is the time for you to begin to look out. They have
+spotted you, and their attempt to buy you has failed. I don't know how
+deeply you have gone into Bucks' tinkering with the Universal people, but
+if you are in the way of getting the grip you spoke of--as this letter
+seems to indicate--you want to be careful."
+
+Kent promised and went his way. One of his saving graces was the ability
+to hold his tongue, even in a confidential talk with as good a friend as
+Hildreth. As for example: he had let the suggestion of watching the
+secretary of State's office come as a new thing from the editor, whereas
+in fact it was one of the earliest measures he had taken.
+
+And on that road he had traveled far, thanks to a keen wit, to Portia Van
+Brock's incessant promptings, and to the help of the leaky clerk in
+Hendricks' office; so far, indeed, that he had found the "stool pigeon"
+oil company, to which Hildreth's hint had pointed--a company composed,
+with a single exception, of men of "straw," the exception being the man
+Rumford, whose conferences with the governor and the attorney-general had
+aroused his suspicions.
+
+It was about this time that Hunnicott reported the sale of the Gaston lots
+at a rather fancy cash figure, and the money came in good play.
+
+"Two things remain to be proved," said Portia, in one of their many
+connings of the intricate course; "two things that must be proved before
+you can attack openly: that Rumford is really representing the Universal
+Oil Company; and that he is bribing the junto to let the Universal
+incorporate under the mask of his 'straw' company. Now is the time when
+you can not afford to be economical. Have you money?"
+
+Since it was the day after the Hunnicott remittance, Kent could answer yes
+with a good conscience.
+
+"Then spend it," she said; and he did spend it like a millionaire, lying
+awake nights to devise new ways of employing it.
+
+And for the abutments of the arch of proof the money-spending sufficed. By
+dint of a warm and somewhat costly wire investigation of Rumford's
+antecedents, Kent succeeded in placing the Belmount promoter
+unquestionably as one of the trusted lieutenants of the Universal; and the
+leaky clerk in the secretary of State's office gave the text of the
+application for the "straw" company charter, showing that the powers asked
+for were as despotic as the great monopoly could desire.
+
+But for the keystone of the arch, the criminal implication of the plotters
+themselves, he was indebted to a fit of ill-considered anger and to a
+chapter of accidents.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+THE CONSPIRATORS
+
+It was chiefly due to Portia's urgings that Kent took Ormsby into his
+confidence when the campaign was fairly opened. She put it diplomatically
+on the ground of charity to an exiled millionaire, temporarily out of a
+job; but her real reason went deeper. From its inception as a one-man
+fight against political chicanery in high places, the criticism of the
+Bucks formula was beginning to shape itself in a readjustment of party
+lines in the field of State politics; and Miss Van Brock, whose designs
+upon Kent's future ran far in advance of her admissions to him, was
+anxiously casting about for a managerial promoter.
+
+A little practice-play in municipal politics made the need apparent. It
+came in the midst of things, basing itself upon the year-gone triumph of
+agrarianism in the State. In the upheaval, the capital city had
+participated to the extent of electing a majority of the aldermen on the
+People's Party ticket; and before long it developed that a majority of
+this aldermanic majority could be counted among the spoilsmen--was in fact
+a creature of the larger ring.
+
+[Illustration: HE JAMMED THE FIRE END OF HIS CIGAR AMONG THE FINGERS OF
+THE GRASPING HAND.]
+
+Late in the summer an ordinance was proposed by the terms of which a
+single corporation was to be given a franchise granting a complete
+monopoly of the streets for gas and water mains and transit rights of way.
+Thereupon a bitter struggle ensued. Party lines were obliterated, and men
+who shunned the primaries and otherwise shirked their political duties
+raised the cry of corruption, and a Civic League was formed to fight the
+ring.
+
+Into this struggle, as giving him the chance to front the enemy in a fair
+field, David Kent flung himself with all the ardor of a born fighter. Mass
+meetings were held, with Kent as spokesman for the League, and the outcome
+was a decency triumph which brought Kent's name into grateful public
+prominence. Hildreth played an able second, and by the time the obnoxious
+ordinance had been safely tabled, Kent had a semi-political following
+which was all his own. Men who had hitherto known him only as a
+corporation lawyer began to prophesy large things of the fiery young
+advocate, whose arguments were as sound and convincing as his invective
+was keen and merciless.
+
+Figuratively speaking, Portia stood in the wings and applauded. Also, she
+saw that her protégé had reached the point where he needed grooming for
+whatever race lay before him. Hence her urgings, which made a triumvirate
+out of the council of two, with Brookes Ormsby as the third member.
+
+"You understand, I'm not interested a little bit in the merits of the
+case," said the newly elected chairman, in his first official interview
+with Miss Van Brock. "So far as the internal politics of this particularly
+wild and woolly State are concerned, I'm neither in them nor of them. But
+I am willing to do what I can for Kent."
+
+"Owing him a good turn?" said Portia, with malice aforethought.
+
+Ormsby's laugh was an Englishman's deep-chested haw-haw.
+
+"So he has been making you his confidante in that, too, has he?"
+
+"There was no confidence needed," she retorted. "I have eyes; and, to use
+one of your own pet phrases, I was not born yesterday. But let that go:
+you are willing to help us?"
+
+"I said I was willing to help Kent. If you bracket yourself with him, I am
+more than willing. But I am rather new to the game. You will have to tell
+me the moves."
+
+"We are only in the opening," she said, continuing the figure. "You will
+learn as you go along. By and by you will have to spend money; but just
+now the need is for a cool head to keep our young firebrand out of the
+personalities. Where is he to-night?"
+
+Ormsby's smile was a grin.
+
+"I left him at 124 Tejon Avenue half an hour ago. Do you think he is
+likely to get into trouble there?"
+
+On the porch of the Brentwood apartment house David Kent was answering
+that question measurably well for himself. With the striking of the City
+Hall clock at nine Mrs. Brentwood had complained of the glare of the
+electric crossing-lamp and had gone in, leaving the caller with Penelope
+in the hammock on one side of him and Elinor in a basket chair on the
+other.
+
+Their talk had been of the late municipal struggle, and of Kent's part in
+it; and, like Miss Van Brock, Penelope was applausive. But Elinor's
+congratulations were tempered with deprecation.
+
+"I am glad you won for the League, of course; everybody must be glad of
+that," she said. "But I hope the _Argus_ didn't report your speeches
+correctly. If it did, you have made a host of bitter enemies."
+
+"What does a man--a real man--care for that?" This from the depths of the
+hammock.
+
+"I, at least, can afford to be careless," said Kent. "I am not running for
+office, and I have nothing to lose, politically or otherwise."
+
+"Can any man say that truthfully?" Elinor queried.
+
+"I think I can. I have given no hostages to fortune."
+
+Penelope lifted the challenge promptly.
+
+"Lord Bacon said that, didn't he?--about men marrying. If he were alive
+now he wouldn't need to say it. Men don't have to be discouraged."
+
+"Don't they?" said Kent.
+
+"No, indeed; they are too utterly selfish for any matrimonial use, as it
+is. No, don't argue with me, please. I'm fixed--irrevocably fixed."
+
+Elinor overtook the runaway conversation and drove it back into the path
+of her own choosing.
+
+"But I do think you owe it to yourself to be more careful in your public
+utterances," she insisted. "If these men on the other side are only half
+as unprincipled as your accusations make them out to be, they would not
+stop short of personal violence."
+
+"I am not hunting clemency or personal immunity just now," laughed Kent.
+"On the contrary, I am only anxious to make the score as heavy as
+possible. And so far from keeping prudently in the background, I'll
+confess that I went into this franchise fight chiefly to let the capitol
+gang know who I am and where I stand."
+
+A sudden light came into Elinor's eyes and burned there steadily. She was
+of those who lay votive offerings upon the shrine of manly courage.
+
+"One part of me approves as much as another part disapproves," she said
+after a time. "I suppose it isn't possible to avoid making political
+enemies; but is it needful to turn them into personal enemies?"
+
+He looked at her curiously.
+
+"I am afraid I don't know any middle path, not being a politician," he
+objected. "And as for the enmity of these men, I shall count it an honor
+to win it. If I do not win it, I shall know I am not succeeding."
+
+Silence for another little space, which Miss Brentwood broke by saying:
+
+"Don't you want to smoke? You may."
+
+Kent felt in his pocket.
+
+"I have no cigar."
+
+She looked past him to the hammock. "Penelope!" she called softly; and
+when there was no response she went to spread the hammock rug over her
+sister.
+
+"You may smoke your pipe," she said; and when she had passed behind him to
+her chair she made another concession: "Let me fill it for you--you used
+to."
+
+He gave her the pipe and tobacco, and by a curious contradiction of terms
+began to wonder if he ought not to go. Notwithstanding his frank defiance
+of Brookes Ormsby, and his declaration of intention in the sentimental
+affair, he had his own notions about the sanctity of a betrothal. Mrs.
+Brentwood had vanished, and Penelope was asleep in the hammock. Could he
+trust himself to be decently loyal to Ormsby if he should stay? Nice
+questions of conscience had not been troubling him much of late; but this
+was new ground--or if not new, so old that it had the effect of being new.
+
+He let the question go unanswered--and stayed. But he was minded to fling
+the biggest barrier he could lay hands on in the way of possible
+disloyalty by saying good things of Ormsby.
+
+"I owe you much for my acquaintance with him," he said, when the subject
+was fairly introduced. "He has been all kinds of a good friend to me, and
+he promises to be more."
+
+"Isn't your debt to Penelope, rather than to me?" she returned.
+
+"No, I think not. You are responsible, in the broader sense, at all
+events. He did not come West for Penelope's sake." Then he took the
+plunge: "May I know when it is to be--or am I to wait for my bidding with
+the other and more formally invited guests?"
+
+She laughed, a low little laugh that somehow grated upon his nerves.
+
+"You shall know--when I know."
+
+"Forgive me," he said quickly. "But from something Ormsby said----"
+
+"He should not have spoken of it; I have given him no right," she said
+coldly.
+
+"You make me twice sorry: once if I am a trespasser, and again if I have
+unwittingly broken a confidence. But as a friend--a very old friend--I
+ventured----"
+
+She interrupted him again, but this time her laugh did not hurt him.
+
+"Yes; our friendship antedates Mr. Ormsby; it is old enough to excuse
+anything you said--or were going to say."
+
+"Thank you," he rejoined, and he meant it. "What I was going to say
+touches a matter which I believe you haven't confided to any one. May I
+talk business for a few minutes?"
+
+"If you will light your pipe and go on smoking. It makes me nervous to
+have people hang on the brink of things."
+
+He lighted the pipe, wondering what other thing he might do to allay her
+nervousness. None the less, he would not go back from his purpose, which
+was barrier-building.
+
+"I have thought, wholly without warrant, perhaps, that your loss in this
+railroad steal has had something to do with the postponement of your
+happiness--and Ormsby's. Has it?"
+
+"And if it should have?"
+
+"I merely wanted to say that we still have a fighting chance. But one of
+the hard and fast conditions is that every individual stockholder shall
+hang on to his or her holdings like grim death."
+
+She caught her breath with a little gasp.
+
+"The encouragement comes too late for us. We have parted with our stock."
+
+Kent turned cold and hot and cold again while she was saying it. Then the
+lawyer in him came uppermost.
+
+"Is it gone beyond recall? How much too late am I?" he demanded.
+
+"My mother wrote the letter to-day. She had an offer from some one in New
+York."
+
+Kent was on his feet instantly.
+
+"Has that letter been mailed? Because if it has, it must be stopped by
+wire!"
+
+Miss Brentwood rose.
+
+"It was on the hall table this afternoon; I'll go and see," and in a
+moment she returned with the letter in her hand.
+
+Kent took it from her as if it had been an edged weapon or a can of high
+explosives.
+
+"Heavens! what a turn you gave me!" he said, sitting down again. "Can I
+see your mother?"
+
+"I think she has gone to bed. What do you want to do?"
+
+"I want to tell her that she mustn't do any such suicidal thing as this."
+
+"You don't know my mother," was the calm reply. "Mr. Ormsby said
+everything he could think of."
+
+"Then we must take matters into our own hands. Will you help me?"
+
+"How?" she asked.
+
+"By keeping your own counsel and trusting me. Your mother supposes this
+letter has gone: it has gone--this way." He tore the sealed envelope
+across and across and dropped the pieces into his pocket. "Now we are
+safe--at least until the man at the other end writes again."
+
+It shocked her a little, and she did not promise to be a party to the
+subterfuge. But neither did she say she would not.
+
+"I am willing to believe that you have strong reasons for taking such
+strong measures," she said. "May I know them?"
+
+Kent's gift of reticence came to his rescue in time to prevent the
+introduction of another and rather uncertain factor into his complicated
+problem.
+
+"I can explain it more intelligibly a little later on; or if I don't,
+Ormsby will. In the mean time, you must take my word for it that we shall
+have our railroad back in due season."
+
+It is a question for the psychologists to answer if there be or be not
+crises in a man's life when the event, weighty or trivial, turns upon that
+thing which, for the want of a better name, is called a premonition.
+
+In the silence that followed his dismissal of the subject, Kent became
+aware of a vague prompting which was urging him to cut his visit short.
+There was no definable reason for his going. He had finally brought
+himself to the point of speaking openly to Elinor of her engagement, and
+they were, as he fondly believed, safely beyond the danger point in that
+field. Moreover, Penelope was stirring in her hammock and the perilous
+privacy was at an end. Nevertheless, he rose and said good-night, and was
+half-way to the next corner before he realized how inexcusably abrupt his
+leave-taking had been.
+
+When he did realize it, he was of two minds whether to go back or to let
+the apology excuse another call the following evening. Then the insistent
+prompting seized him again; and when next he came to a competent sense of
+things present he was standing opposite the capitol building, staring
+fixedly up at a pair of lighted windows in the second story.
+
+They were the windows of the governor's room; and David Kent's brain
+cleared suddenly. In the earliest beginnings of the determinate plan to
+wrest the Trans-Western out of the grasp of the junto he had known that it
+must come finally to some desperate duel with the master-spirit of the
+ringsters. Was Jasper Bucks behind those lighted windows--alone?
+
+Kent had not meant to make the open attack until he should have a weapon
+in his hands which would arm him to win. But now as he stood looking up at
+the heckoning windows a mad desire to have it out once for all with the
+robber-in-chief sent the blood tingling to his finger-tips. True, he had
+nothing as yet in the oil-field conspiracy that the newspapers or the
+public would accept as evidence of fraud and corruption. But on the other
+hand, Bucks was only a man, after all; a man with a bucaneer's record, and
+by consequence vulnerable beneath the brazen armor of assurance. If the
+attack were bold enough----
+
+Kent did not stop to argue it out. When a man's blood is up the odds
+against him shrink and become as naught. Two minutes later he was in the
+upper corridor of the capitol, striding swiftly to the door of the lighted
+room.
+
+Recalling it afterward he wondered if the occult prompting which had
+dragged him out of his chair on the Brentwcod porch saw to it that he
+walked upon the strip of matting in the tile-paved corridor and so made
+his approach noiseless. Also, if the same silent monitor bade him stop
+short of the governor's office: at the door, namely, of the public
+anteroom, which stood ajar?
+
+A low murmur of voices came from beyond, and for a moment he paused
+listening. Then he went boldly within, crossing the anteroom and standing
+fairly in the broad beam of light pouring through the open door of
+communication with the private office.
+
+Four men sat in low-toned conference around the governor's writing-table,
+and if any one of them had looked up the silent witness must have been
+discovered. Kent marked them down one by one: the governor; Hendricks, the
+secretary of State; Rumford, the oil man; and Senator Duvall. For five
+pregnant minutes he stood looking on, almost within arm's reach of the
+four; hearing distinctly what was said; seeing the papers which changed
+hands across the table. Then he turned and went away, noiselessly as he
+had come, the thick-piled carpet of the anteroom muffling his footfalls.
+
+It was midnight when he reached his quarters in the Clarendon and flung
+himself full length upon the bed, sodden with weariness. For two hours he
+had tramped the deserted streets, striving in sharp travail of soul to fit
+the invincible, chance-given weapon to his hand. When he came in the thing
+was done, and he slept the sleep of an outworn laborer.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+DOWN, BRUNO!
+
+For six days after the night of revelations Kent dived deep, personally
+and by paid proxy, in a sea of secrecy which, but for the five pregnant
+minutes in the doorway of the governor's office, might easily have proved
+fathomless.
+
+On the seventh day the conflagration broke out. The editor of the Belmount
+_Refiner_ was the first to smell smoke and to raise the cry of "Fire!" but
+by midnight the wires were humming with the news and the entire State was
+ablaze.
+
+The story as it appeared under the scare headlines the next morning was
+crisply told. An oil company had been formed with Senator Duvall at its
+head. After its incorporation it was ascertained that it not only held
+options on all the most valuable wells in the Belmount region, but that
+its charter gave it immunity from the law requiring all corporations to
+have their organizations, officers, and operating headquarters in the
+State. By the time the new company was three days old it had quietly taken
+up its options and was the single big fish in the pool by virtue of its
+having swallowed all the little ones.
+
+Then came the finishing stroke which had set the wires to humming. On the
+sixth day it was noised about that Senator Duvall had transferred his
+controlling interest to Rumford--otherwise to the Universal Oil Company;
+that he had served only as a figurehead in the transaction, using his
+standing, social and political, to secure the charter which had been
+denied Rumford and his associates.
+
+It had all been managed very skilfully; the capping of the wells by the
+Universal's agent, the practical sealing up of the entire district, being
+the first public intimation of the result of Duvall's treachery and the
+complete triumph of a foreign monopoly.
+
+The storm that swept the State when the facts came out was cyclonic, and
+it was reported, as it needed to be, that Senator Duvall had disappeared.
+Never in the history of the State had public feeling risen so high; and
+there were not lacking those who said that if Duvall showed himself his
+life would not be safe in the streets of the capital.
+
+It was after the _Argus_ had gone to press on the night of explosions that
+Editor Hildreth sought and found David Kent in his rooms at the Clarendon,
+and poured out the vials of his wrath.
+
+"Say, I'd like to know if you cue-call this giving me a fair show!" he
+demanded, flinging into Kent's sitting-room and dropping into a chair.
+"Did I, or did I not understand that I was to have the age on this oil
+business when there was anything fit to print?"
+
+Kent gave the night editor a cigar and was otherwise exasperatingly
+imperturbable.
+
+"Keep your clothes on, and don't accuse a man of disloyalty until you have
+all the documents in the case," he said. "I didn't know, until I saw your
+bulletin a few hours ago, that the thing had been pulled off. In fact,
+I've been too busy with other things to pay much attention to the Belmount
+end of it."
+
+"The ded-devil you have!" sputtered Hildreth, chewing savagely on the gift
+cigar. "I'd like to know what business you had to mix up in other things
+to the detriment of my news column. You were the one man who knew all
+about it; or at least you did a week or two ago."
+
+"Yes; but other and more important things have intervened. I have been
+desperately busy, as I say."
+
+"Well, you've lost your chance to get your grip on the capitol gang,
+anyway; that is one comfort," growled the editor, getting what consolation
+he could out of Kent's apparent failure. "They played it too fuf-fine for
+you."
+
+"Did they?" said Kent.
+
+"It looks pretty much that way, doesn't it? Duvall is the scapegoat, and
+the only one. About day after to-morrow Bucks' organ, the _Tribune_, will
+come out with an 'inspired' editorial whitewashing the entire capitol
+outfit. It will show how Rumford's application for the charter was
+refused, and how a truly good and beneficent state government has been
+hoodwinked and betrayed by one of its most trusted supporters."
+
+Kent threw off his street coat and went to get his dressing-gown from the
+wardrobe in the bedroom. When he came back he said: "Hildreth, you have
+taken me at my word thus far, and you haven't had occasion to call me
+either a knave or a fool. Do it a little longer and I'll put you in the
+way of touching off a set-piece of pyrotechnics that will double discount
+this mild little snap-cracker of the Belmount business."
+
+"Can't you do it now?"
+
+"No; the time isn't ripe yet. We must let the _Tribune's_ coat of
+whitewash dry in first."
+
+Hildreth wriggled in his chair.
+
+"Kent, if I thought it would do any good, I'd cuc-curse you out; I would
+for a fact. You are too blamed close-mouthed for any ordinary newspaper
+use."
+
+But Kent only laughed at him. Now that the strain was in some measure
+relaxed he could stand any amount of abuse from so good a friend as the
+night editor.
+
+"Turn on the hot water if you want to, and if it will relieve the
+pressure. I know about how you feel; and I'd be as sore as you are if I
+didn't know that I am going to make it up to you a little later on. But
+about this oil blaze and to-morrow's--or to-day's--issue of the _Argus_. I
+hope you haven't said too much."
+
+"I haven't sus-said anything. The stuff trickled in by Associated wire at
+the last minute, and we had to cut and slash for space and run it pretty
+much as it came--the bare story."
+
+"All right; that's better. Now suppose you hint darkly that only half of
+the truth has come out; that more--and more startling--developments may be
+safely predicted in the immediate hence. Hit it up hard toward the
+capitol, and don't be afraid of libeling anybody."
+
+Hildreth's eyes narrowed.
+
+"Say, Kent; you have grown a lot in these last few weeks: what is your
+diet?"
+
+"Hard work--and a determination to make my brag good."
+
+"To down the ring, you mean?"
+
+"Yes; to down the ring."
+
+"Are you any nearer to it than you were when you began?"
+
+"A good many parasangs."
+
+"By Jove! I more than half believe you've got hold of something
+ded-definite at last!"
+
+"I have, indeed. Hildreth, I have evidence--printable evidence--enough to
+dig a dozen political graves, one of them big enough to hold Jasper G.
+Bucks' six-feet-two."
+
+"Let me see it!" said the night editor, eagerly; but Kent laughed and
+pushed him toward the door.
+
+"Go home and go to bed. I wouldn't show it to you to-night if I had it
+here--as I have not. I don't go around with a stick of dynamite in my
+pocket."
+
+"Where is it?" Hildreth asked.
+
+"It is in a safety-deposit box in the vault of the Security Bank; where it
+is going to stay until I am ready to use it. Go home, I say, and let me go
+to bed. I'm ragged enough to sleep the clock around."
+
+In spite of his weariness, which was real enough, Kent was up betimes the
+next morning. He had a wire appointment with Blashfield Hunnicott and two
+others in Gaston, and he took an early train to keep it. The ex-local
+attorney met him at the station with a two-seated rig; and on the way to
+the western suburbs they picked up Frazee, the county assessor, and Orton,
+the appraiser of the Apache Building and Loan Association.
+
+"Hunnicott has told you what I am after," said Kent, when the surrey party
+was made up. "We all know the property well enough, but to have it all
+fair and above-board, we'll drive out and look it over, so that our
+knowledge may be said to be fully up to date."
+
+Twenty minutes afterward the quartet was locating the corners of a square
+in Gaston's remotest suburb; an "addition" whose only improvements were
+the weathered and rotting street and lot stakings on the bare, brown
+plain.
+
+"'Lots 1 to 56 in Block 10, Guilford & Hawk's Addition,'" said Kent,
+reading from a memorandum in his note-book. "It lies beautifully, doesn't
+it?"
+
+"Yes; for a chicken farm," chuckled the assessor.
+
+"Well, give me your candid opinion, you two: what is the property worth?"
+
+The Building and Loan man scratched his chin.
+
+"Say fifty dollars for the plot--if you'll fence it."
+
+"No, put it up. You are having a little boom here now: give it the top
+boom price, if you like."
+
+The two referees drew apart and laid their heads together.
+
+"As property is going here just now, fifty dollars for the inside lots,
+and one hundred dollars apiece for the corners; say three thousand for the
+plot. And that is just about three times as much as anybody but a
+land-crazy idiot would give for it." It was Frazee who announced the
+decision.
+
+"Thank you both until you are better paid. Now we'll go back to town and
+you can write me a joint letter stating the fact. If you think it will get
+you disliked here at home, make the figure higher; make it high enough so
+that all Gaston will be dead sure to approve."
+
+"You are going to print it?" asked the Building and Loan appraiser.
+
+"I may want to. You may shape it to that end."
+
+"I'll stand by my figures," said Frazee. "It will give me my little chance
+to get back at the governor. I had it assessed as unimproved suburban
+property at so much the lot, but he made a kick to the board of
+equalization and got it put in as unimproved farm land at fifty dollars an
+acre." Then, looking at his watch: "We'd better be getting back, if you
+have to catch the Accommodation. Won't you stay over and visit with us?"
+
+"I can't, this time; much obliged," said Kent; and they drove to the
+Building and Loan office where the joint letter of appraisal was written
+and signed.
+
+Kent caught his train with something to spare, and was back at the capital
+in good time to keep a dinner engagement at Miss Van Brock's. He had
+understood that Ormsby would be the only other guest. But Portia had a
+little surprise in store for him. Loring had dropped in, unannounced, from
+the East; and Portia, having first ascertained that Mrs. Brentwood's
+asthma was prohibitive of late dinings-out, had instructed Ormsby to bring
+Elinor and Penelope.
+
+Kent had been saving the results of his deep-sea divings in the oil-field
+investigation to spread them out before Miss Van Brock and Ormsby "in
+committee," but he put a padlock on his lips when he saw the others.
+
+Portia gave him Elinor to take out, and he would have rejoiced brazenly if
+the table talk, from the bouillon to the ices, had not been persistently
+general, turning most naturally upon the Universal Oil Company's
+successful _coup_ in the Belmount field. Kent kept out of it as much as he
+could, striving manfully to monopolize Elinor for his own especial behoof;
+but finally Portia laid her commands upon him.
+
+"You are not to be allowed to maroon yourself with Miss Brentwood any
+longer," she said dictatorially. "You know more about the unpublished part
+of this Belmount conspiracy than any one else excepting the conspirators
+themselves, and you are to tell us all about it."
+
+Kent looked up rather helplessly.
+
+"Really, I--I'm not sure that I know anything worth repeating at your
+dinner-table," he protested.
+
+But Miss Van Brock made a mock of his caution.
+
+"You needn't be afraid. I pledged everybody to secrecy before you came. It
+is understood that we are in 'executive session.' And if you don't know
+much, you may tell us what you know now more than you knew before you knew
+so little as you know now."
+
+"Hold on," said Kent; "will you please say that over again and say it
+slowly?"
+
+"Never mind," laughed Ormsby. "Miss Portia has a copyright on that. But
+before you begin, I'd like to know if the newspapers have it straight as
+far as they have gone into it?"
+
+"They have, all but one small detail. They are saying that Senator Duvall
+has left the city and the State."
+
+"Hasn't he?" Loring asked.
+
+"He hadn't yesterday."
+
+"My-oh!" said Portia. "They will mob him if he shows himself."
+
+Kent nodded assent.
+
+"He knows it: he is hiding out. But I found him."
+
+"Where?" from the three women in chorus.
+
+"In his own house, out in Pentland Place. The family has been away since
+April, and the place has been shut up. I took him the first meal he'd had
+in thirty-six hours."
+
+Portia clapped her hands. The butler came in with the coffee and she
+dismissed him and bade him shut the doors.
+
+"Now begin at the very tip end of the beginning," she commanded.
+
+Kent had a sharp little tussle with his inborn reticence, thrust it to the
+wall and told a plain tale.
+
+"It begins in a piece of reckless folly. Shortly after I left Mrs.
+Brentwood's last Thursday evening I had a curious experience. The shortest
+way down-town is diagonally through the capitol grounds, but some
+undefinable impulse led me to go around on the Capitol Avenue side. As I
+was passing the right wing of the building I saw lights in the governor's
+room, and in a sudden fit of desperation resolved to go up and have it out
+with Bucks. It was abnormally foolish, I'll confess. I had nothing
+definite to go on; but I--well, I was keyed up to just about the right
+pitch, and I thought I might bluff him."
+
+"Mercy me! You do need a guardian angel worse than anybody I know!" Portia
+cut in. "Do go on."
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"I had one that night; angel or demon, whichever you please. I was fairly
+dragged into doing what I did. When I reached the upper corridor the door
+of the public anteroom was ajar, and I heard voices. The outer room was
+not lighted, but the door between it and the governor's private office was
+open. I went in and stood in that open doorway for as much as five
+minutes, I think, and none of the four men sitting around the governor's
+writing-table saw me."
+
+He had his small audience well in hand by this time, and Ormsby's question
+was almost mechanical. "Who were the four?"
+
+"After the newspaper rapid-fire of this morning you might guess them all.
+They were his Excellency, Grafton Hendricks, Rumford, and Senator Duvall.
+They were in the act of closing the deal as I became an onlooker. Rumford
+had withdrawn his application for a charter, and another 'straw' company
+had been formed with Duvall at its head. I saw at once what I fancy Duvall
+never suspected; that he was going to be made the scapegoat for the ring.
+They all promised to stand by him--and you see how that promise has been
+kept."
+
+"Good heavens!" ejaculated Loring. "What a despicable lot of scoundrels!
+But the bribe: did you learn anything about that?"
+
+"I saw it," said Kent, impressively. "It was a slip of paper passed across
+the table by Rumford to Bucks, face down. Bucks glanced at it before he
+thrust it into his pocket, and I had my glimpse, too. It was a draft on a
+Chicago bank, but I could not read the figures, and I doubt if either of
+the other conspirators knew the amount. Then the governor tossed a folded
+paper over to the oil man, saying, 'There is your deed to the choicest
+piece of property in all Gaston, and you've got it dirt cheap.' I came
+away at that."
+
+Elinor's sigh was almost a sob; but Miss Van Brock's eyes were dancing.
+
+"Go on, go on," she exclaimed. "That is only the beginning."
+
+Kent's smile was of reminiscent weariness.
+
+"I found it so, I assure you. So far as any usable evidence was concerned,
+I was no better off than before; it was merely my assertion against their
+denial--one man against four. But I have had a full week, and it has not
+been wasted. I needn't bore you with the mechanical details. One of my men
+followed Bucks' messenger to Chicago--he wouldn't trust the banks here or
+the mails--and we know now, know it in black on white, with the proper
+affidavits, that the draft was for two hundred thousand dollars, payable
+to the order of Jasper G. Bucks. The ostensible consideration was the
+transfer from Bucks to Rumford of a piece of property in the outskirts of
+Gaston. I had this piece of land appraised for me to-day by two
+disinterested citizens of Gaston, and they valued it at a possible, but
+highly improbable, three thousand."
+
+"Oh, how clumsy!" said Portia, in fine scorn. "Does his Excellency imagine
+for a moment that any one would be deceived by such a primitive bit of
+dust-throwing?" and Ormsby also had something to say about the fatal
+mistakes of the shrewdest criminals.
+
+"It was not so bad," said Kent. "If it should ever be charged that he took
+money from Rumford, here is a plain business transaction to account for
+it. The deed, as recorded, has nothing to say of the enormous price paid.
+The phrasing is the common form used when the parties to the transfer do
+not wish to make the price public: 'For one dollar to me in hand paid, and
+other valuable considerations.' Luckily, we are able to establish
+conclusively what the 'other valuable considerations' were."
+
+"It seems to me that these documents arm and equip you for anything you
+want to do," said Loring, polishing his eye-glasses after his ingrained
+habit.
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"No; thus far the evidence is all circumstantial, or rather inferential.
+But I picked up the final link in the chain--the human link--yesterday.
+One of the detectives had been dogging Duvall. Two days ago the senator
+disappeared, unaccountably. I put two and two together, and late last
+evening took the liberty of breaking into his house."
+
+"Alone?" said Elinor, with the courage-worshiping light in the blue-gray
+eyes.
+
+"Yes; it didn't seem worth while to double the risk. I did it rather
+clumsily, I suppose, and my greeting was a shot fired at random in the
+darkness--the senator mistaking me for a burglar, as he afterward
+explained. There was no harm done, and the pistol welcome effectually
+broke the ice in what might otherwise have been a rather difficult
+interview. We had it out in an upper room, with the gas turned low and the
+window curtains drawn. To cut a long story short, I finally succeeded in
+making him understand what he was in for; that his confederates had used
+him and thrown him aside. Then I went out and brought him some supper."
+
+Ormsby smote softly upon the edge of the table with an extended
+forefinger.
+
+"Will he testify?" he asked.
+
+Kent's rejoinder was definitive.
+
+"He has put himself entirely in my hands. He is a ruined man, politically
+and socially, and he is desperate. While I couldn't make him give me any
+of the details in the Trans-Western affair, he made a clean breast of the
+oil field deal, and I have his statement locked up with the other papers
+in the Security vaults."
+
+It was Penelope who gave David Kent his due meed of praise.
+
+"I am neither a triumphant politician nor a successful detective, but I
+recognize both when they are pointed out to me," she said. "Mr. Kent, will
+you serve these gentlemen up hot for dinner, or cold for luncheon?"
+
+"Yes," Portia chimed in. "You have outrun your pace-setters, and I'm proud
+of you. Tell us what you mean to do next."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"You want to make me say some melodramatic thing about having the shackles
+forged and snapping them upon the gubernatorial wrists, don't you? It will
+be prosaic enough from this on. I fancy we shall have no difficulty now in
+convincing his Excellency of the justice of our proceedings to quash Judge
+MacFarlane and his receiver."
+
+"But how will you go about it? Surely you can not go personally and
+threaten the governor of the State!" this from Miss Brentwood.
+
+"Can't I?" said Kent. "Having the score written out and safely committed
+to memory, that will be quite the easiest number on the programme, I
+assure you."
+
+But Loring had something to say about the risk.
+
+"Thus far you have not considered your personal safety--haven't had to,
+perhaps. But you are coming to that now. You are dealing with a desperate
+man, David; with a gang of them, in fact."
+
+"That is so," said Ormsby. "And, as chairman of the executive committee, I
+shall have to take steps. We can't afford to bury you just yet, Kent."
+
+"I think you needn't select the pall-bearers yet a while," laughed the
+undaunted one; and then Miss Van Brock gave the signal and the "executive
+committee" adjourned to the drawing-room. Here the talk, already so deeply
+channeled in the groove political, ran easily to forecastings and
+predictions for another electoral year; and when Penelope began to yawn
+behind her fan, Ormsby took pity on her and the party broke up.
+
+It was at the moment of leave-taking that Elinor sought and found her
+chance to extract a promise from David Kent.
+
+"I must have a word with you before you do what you say you are going to
+do," she whispered hurriedly. "Will you come to see me?"
+
+"Certainly, if you wish it. But you mustn't let Loring's nervousness
+infect you. There is no danger."
+
+"There is a danger," she insisted, "a much greater danger than the one Mr.
+Loring fears. Come as soon as you can, won't you?"
+
+It was a new thing for her to plead with him, and he promised in an access
+of tumultuous hope reawakened by her changed attitude. But afterward, when
+he was walking down-town with Loring, the episode troubled him a little;
+would have troubled him more if he had not been so deeply interested in
+Loring's story of the campaign in the East.
+
+Taking it all in all, the ex-manager's report was encouraging. The New
+Englanders were by no means disposed to lie down in the harness, and since
+the Western Pacific proper was an interstate line, the Advisory Board had
+taken its grievance to Washington. Many of the small stockholders were
+standing firm, though there had been panicky defections in spite of all
+that could be done. Loring had no direct evidence to sustain the stock
+deal theory; but it was morally certain that the Plantagould brokers were
+picking up Western Pacific by littles wherever they could find it.
+
+"I am inclined to believe we haven't much time to lose," was Kent's
+comment. "Things will focus here long before Washington can get action.
+The other lines are bringing a tremendous pressure to bear on Guilford,
+whose cut rates are demoralizing business frightfully. The fictitious boom
+in Trans-Western traffic is about worked out; and for political reasons
+Bucks can't afford to have the road in the hands of his henchmen when the
+collapse comes. The major is bolstering things from week to week now until
+the Plantagould people get what they are after--a controlling majority of
+the stock--and then Judge MacFarlane will come back."
+
+They were within two squares of the Clarendon, and the cross-street was
+deserted save for a drunken cow-boy in shaps and sombrero staggering
+aimlessly around the corner.
+
+"That's curious," Loring remarked. "Don't you know, I saw that same
+fellow, or his double, lurching across the avenue as we came out of
+Alameda Square, and I wondered what he was doing out in that region."
+
+"It was his double, I guess," said Kent. "This one is many pegs too drunk
+to have covered the distance as fast as we have been walking."
+
+But drunk or sober, the cow-boy turned up again most unexpectedly; this
+time at the entrance of the alley half-way down the block. In passing he
+stumbled heavily against Kent; there was a thick-tongued oath, and Loring
+struck out smartly with his walking-stick. By consequence the man's pistol
+went off harmlessly in the air. The shot brought a policeman lumbering
+heavily up from the street beyond, and the skirling of relief whistles
+shrilled on the night. But the man with a pistol had twisted out of Kent's
+grasp and was gone in a flash.
+
+"By Jove!" said Loring, breathing hard; "he wasn't as drunk as he seemed
+to be!"
+
+Kent drew down his cuffs and shook himself straight in his coat.
+
+"No; he wasn't drunk at all; I guess he was the man you saw when we came
+out of the square." Then, as the policeman came up puffing: "Let me do the
+talking; the whisky theory will be good enough for the newspapers."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS
+
+"_Oof_! I feel as if I had been dipped in a warm bath of conspiracy and
+hung up to dry in the cold storage of nihilism! If you take me to any more
+meetings of your committee of safety, I shall be like the man without
+music in his soul--'fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.'"
+
+Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party. Elinor
+had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and
+Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.
+
+"I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab," said the
+club-man in self-defense. "And you mustn't treat it lightly, either. Ten
+prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip
+pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David."
+
+"We are not very likely to babble," retorted Penelope. "We are not so rich
+in intimates in this aboriginal desert." But Elinor spoke to the penal
+clause in his warning.
+
+"Then Mr. Kent's danger is more real than he admitted?" she said.
+
+"It's real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another
+man in his place. He is a curious combination, is David: keen and
+sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it
+comes to the in-fighting he hasn't sense enough to pound sand, as his New
+Hampshire neighbors would say."
+
+"I like that side of him best," Penelope averred. "Deliver me from a man
+of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his
+injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult. Mr. Loring tells a story
+of a transplanted Vermonter in South America. A hot-headed Peruvian called
+him a liar, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw! you can't prove it.'"
+
+"What a merciless generalizer you are!" said Ormsby, laughing. "The man
+who marries you will have his work cut out for him if he proposes to fill
+the requirements."
+
+"Won't he?" said Penelope. "I can fancy him sitting up nights to figure it
+all out."
+
+They had reached the Tejon Avenue apartment house, and to Elinor's "Won't
+you come in?" Ormsby said: "It's pretty late, but I'll smoke a cigar on
+the porch, if you'll let me."
+
+Penelope took the hammock, but she kept it only during the first inch of
+Ormsby's cigar. After her sister had gone in, Elinor went back to the
+lapsed topic.
+
+"I am rather concerned about Mr. Kent. You described him exactly;
+and--well, he is past the planning part and into the fighting part. Do you
+think he will take ordinary precautions?"
+
+"I hope so, I'm sure," rejoined the amateur chairman. "As his business
+manager I am responsible for him, after a fashion. I was glad to see
+Loring to-night--glad he has come back. Kent defers to him more than he
+does to any one else; and Loring is a solid, sober-minded sort."
+
+"Yes," she agreed; "I was glad, too."
+
+After that the talk languished, and the silence was broken only by the
+distant droning of an electric car, the fizz and click of the arc light
+over the roadway, and the occasional _dap_ of one the great beetles
+darting hither and thither in the glare.
+
+Ormsby was wondering if the time was come for the successful exploiting of
+an idea which had been growing on him steadily for weeks, not to say
+months.
+
+It was becoming more and more evident to him that he was not advancing in
+the sentimental siege beyond the first parallel thrown up so skilfully on
+the last night of the westward journey. It was not that Elinor was lacking
+in loyalty or in acquiescence; she scrupulously gave him both as an
+accepted suitor. But though he could not put his finger upon the precise
+thing said or done which marked the loosening of his hold, he knew he was
+receding rather than advancing.
+
+Now to a man of expedients the interposition of an obstacle suggests only
+ways and means for overcoming it. Ormsby had certain clear-cut convictions
+touching the subjugation of women, and as his stout heart gave him
+resolution he lived up to them. When he spoke again it was of the matter
+which concerned him most deeply; and his plea was a gentle repetition of
+many others in the same strain.
+
+"Elinor, I have waited patiently for a long time, and I'll go on doing it,
+if that is what will come the nearest to pleasing you. But it would be a
+prodigious comfort if I might be counting the days or the weeks. Are you
+still finding it impossible to set the limit?"
+
+She nodded slowly, and he took the next step like a man feeling his way in
+the dark.
+
+"That is as large an answer as you have ever given me, I think. Is there
+any speakable reason?"
+
+"You know the reason," she said, looking away from him.
+
+"I am not sure that I do. Is it because the moneygods have been
+unpropitious--because these robber barons have looted your railroad?"
+
+"No; that is only part of it--the smallest part."
+
+"I hoped so: if you have too little, I have a good bit too much. But that
+corners it in a way to make me sorry. I am not keeping my promise to win
+what you weren't able to give me at first."
+
+"Please don't put it that way. If there be any fault, it is mine. You have
+left nothing undone."
+
+The man of expedients ran over his cards reflectively and decided that the
+moment for playing his long suit was fully come.
+
+"Your goodness of heart excuses me where I am to blame," he qualified. "I
+am coming to believe that I have defeated my own cause."
+
+"By being too good to me?" she suggested.
+
+"No; by running where I should have been content to walk; by shackling you
+with a promise, and so in a certain sense becoming your jailer. That is
+putting it rather clumsily, but isn't it true?"
+
+"I had never thought of it in that light," she said unresponsively.
+
+"You wouldn't, naturally. But the fact remains. It has wrenched your point
+of view hopelessly aside, don't you think? I have seen it and felt it all
+along, but I haven't had the courage of my convictions."
+
+"In what way?" she asked.
+
+"In the only way the thing can be stood squarely upon its feet. It's
+hard--desperately hard; and hardest of all for a man of my peculiar build.
+I am no longer what you would call a young man, Elinor, and I have never
+learned to turn back and begin all over again with any show of heartiness.
+They used to say of me in the Yacht Club that if I gained a half-length in
+a race, I'd hold it if it took the sticks out of my boat."
+
+"I know," she assented absently.
+
+"Well, it's the same way now. But for your sake--or rather for the sake of
+my love--I am going to turn back for once. You are free again, Elinor. All
+I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road
+between here and Boston last fall."
+
+She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the
+opposite house, and he let her take her own time. When she spoke there was
+a thrill in her voice that he had never heard before.
+
+"I don't deserve it--so much consideration, I mean," she said; and he made
+haste to spare her.
+
+"Yes, you do; you deserve anything the best man in the world could do for
+you, and I'm a good bit short of that."
+
+"But if I don't want you to go back?"
+
+He had gained something--much more than he knew; and for a tremulous
+instant he was near to losing it again by a passionate retraction of all
+he had been saying. But the cool purpose came to his rescue in time.
+
+"I should still insist on doing it. You gave me what you could, but I want
+more, and I am willing to do what is necessary to win it."
+
+Again she said: "You are too good to me," and again he contradicted her.
+
+"No; it is hardly a question of goodness; indeed, I am not sure that it
+escapes being selfish. But I am very much in earnest, and I am going to
+prove it. Three years ago you met a man whom you thought you could
+love--don't interrupt me, please. He was like some other men we know: he
+didn't have the courage of his convictions, lacking the few dollars which
+might have made things more nearly equal. May I go on?"
+
+"I suppose you have earned the right to say what you please," was the
+impassive reply.
+
+It was the old struggle in which they were so evenly matched--of the woman
+to preserve her poise; of the man to break it down. Another lover might
+have given up in despair, but Ormsby's strength lay in holding on in the
+face of all discouragements.
+
+"I believe, as much as I believe anything in this world, that you were
+mistaken in regard to your feeling for the other man," he went on calmly.
+"But I want you to be sure of that for yourself, and you can't be sure
+unless you are free to choose between us."
+
+"Oh, don't!--you shouldn't say such things to me," she broke out; and then
+he knew he was gaining ground.
+
+"Yes, I must. We have been stumbling around in the dark all these months,
+and I mean to be the lantern-bearer for once in a way. You know, and I
+know, and Kent is coming to know. That man is going to be a success,
+Elinor: he has it in him, and he sha'n't lack the money-backing he may
+need. When he arrives----"
+
+She turned on him quickly, and the blue-gray eyes were suspiciously
+bright.
+
+"Please don't bury me alive," she begged.
+
+He saw what he had done; that the nicely calculated purpose had carried
+straight and true to its mark; and for a moment the mixed motives, which
+are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the
+sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast. But it was the better
+Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict.
+
+"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am neither better nor worse than other
+men, I fancy. My motives, such as they are, would probably turn out to be
+purely selfish in the last analysis. I am proceeding on the theory that
+constraint breeds the desire for the thing it forbids; therefore I remove
+it. Also, it is a part of that theory that the successful David Kent will
+not appeal to you as the unspoiled country lawyer did. No, I'm not going
+to spoil him; if I were, I shouldn't be telling you about it. But--may I
+be brutally frank?--the David Kent who will come successfully out of this
+political prize-fight will not be the man you have idealized."
+
+There was a muttering of thunder in the air, and the cool precursory
+breeze of a shower was sweeping through the tree-tops.
+
+"Shall we go into the house?" she asked; and he took it as his dismissal.
+
+"You may; I have kept you up long enough." And then, taking her hand: "Are
+we safely ashore on the new continent, Elinor? May I come and go as
+heretofore?"
+
+"You were always welcome, Brookes; you will be twice welcome, now."
+
+It was the first time she had ever called him by his Christian name and it
+went near to toppling down the carefully reared structure of
+self-restraint. But he made shift to shore the tottering walls with a
+playful retort.
+
+"If that is the case, I'll have to think up some more self-abnegations.
+Good night."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+THE WINNING LOSER
+
+Editor Hildreth's prophecy concerning the probable attitude of the
+administration newspapers in the discussion of the oil field affair waited
+but a day for its fulfilment. On the Friday morning there appeared in the
+_Capital Tribune_, the _Midland City Chronicle_, the _Range County
+Maverick_ and the _Agriculta Ruralist_ able editorials exonerating the
+People's Party, its policy and the executive, and heaping mountains of
+obloquy on the name of Duvall. These editorials were so similar in tone,
+tenor and texture, as pointedly to suggest a common model--a coincidence
+which was not allowed to pass unremarked by Hildreth and other molders of
+public opinion on the opposite side of the political fence.
+
+But Hildreth did not pause at generalities. Two days after the Universal's
+triumph in the Belmount field, the _Argus_ began to "hit it up" boldly
+toward the capitol, and two things came of it. The first was an attempt by
+some party or parties unknown to buy up a controlling interest in the
+_Argus_. The second was the waylaying of David Kent in the lobby of the
+Clarendon Hotel by no less a personage than the Honorable Melton Meigs,
+attorney-general of the State.
+
+In his first conversation with Ormsby, Kent had spoken of the three
+leading spirits of the junto as from personal knowledge; but of the three,
+Bucks, Hendricks and Meigs, the attorney-general was the least known to
+him. Prior to his nomination on the State ticket Meigs had been best known
+as the most astute criminal lawyer in the State, his astuteness lying not
+so much in his ability as a pleader as in a certain oratorical gift by
+which he was able to convince not only a jury but the public of the entire
+innocence of his client.
+
+He was a small man physically, with womanish hands and feet, and a
+beardless face of that prematurely aged cast which is oftenest seen in
+dwarfs and precocious infants; and his distinguishing characteristic, the
+one which stuck longest in the mind of a chance acquaintance or a casual
+observer, was a smile of the congealed sort which served to mask whatever
+emotion there might be behind it.
+
+Kent had seen little of Meigs since the latter had turned him down in the
+_quo warranto_ matter; and his guard went up quickly when the
+attorney-general accosted him in the lobby of the hotel and asked for a
+private interview.
+
+"I am very much occupied just now, Mr. Meigs," he demurred; "but if it is
+a matter of importance----"
+
+"It is; a matter of the greatest importance," was the smooth-toned reply.
+"I am sure you will not regret it if you will give me a few moments, Mr.
+Kent."
+
+Kent decided quickly. Being forewarned, there was nothing to fear.
+
+"We will go up to my rooms, if you please," he said, leading the way to
+the elevator; and no other word was spoken until they were behind closed
+doors on the fourth floor.
+
+"A prefatory remark may make my business with you seem a little less
+singular, Mr. Kent," Meigs began, when Kent had passed his cigar-case and
+the attorney-general had apologized for a weak digestive tract. "On wholly
+divergent lines and from wholly different motives we are both working
+toward the same end, I believe, and it has occurred to me that we might be
+of some assistance to each other."
+
+Kent's rejoinder was a mute signal to the effect that he was attending.
+
+"Some little time ago you came to me as the legal representative of the
+stock-holders of the Trans-Western Railway Company, and I did not find it
+possible at that time to meet your wishes in the matter of a _quo
+warranto_ information questioning Judge MacFarlane's election and status.
+You will admit, I presume, that your demand was a little peremptory?"
+
+"I admit nothing," said Kent, curtly. "But for the sake of expediting
+present matters----"
+
+"Precisely," was the smiling rejoinder. "You will note that I said 'at
+that time.' Later developments--more especially this charge made openly by
+the public press of juggling with foreign corporations--have led me to
+believe that as the public prosecutor I may have duties which transcend
+all other considerations--of loyalty to a party standard--of----"
+
+Kent took his turn at interrupting.
+
+"Mr. Meigs, there is nothing to be gained by indirection. May I ask you to
+come to the point?"
+
+"Briefly, then: the course pursued by Senator Duvall in the Belmount
+affair leaves an unproved charge against others; a charge which I am
+determined to sift to the bottom--you see, I am speaking quite frankly.
+That charge involves the reputation of men high in authority; but I shall
+be strong to do my sworn duty, Mr. Kent; I ask you to believe that."
+
+Kent nodded and waved him on.
+
+"You will readily understand the delicacy of the task, and how, in the
+nature of things, I am handicapped and hedged up on every side.
+Evidence--of a kind to enable me to assail a popular idol--is exceedingly
+difficult to procure."
+
+"It is," said Kent, grimly.
+
+"Exactly. But in revolving the matter in my own mind, I thought of you.
+You are known at the capitol, Mr. Kent, and I may say throughout the
+State, as the uncompromising antagonist of the State administration. I
+have asked myself this: Is it possible that a cool-headed, resolute
+attorney like Mr. David Kent would move so far and so determinedly in this
+matter of antagonism without substantially paving the ground under his
+feet with evidence as he went along?"
+
+Kent admitted that it was possible, but highly improbable.
+
+"So I decided," was the smile-tempered rejoinder. "In that case it only
+remains for me to remind you of your public duty, Mr. Kent; to ask you in
+the name of justice and of the people of the State, to place your
+information in the hands of the public prosecutor."
+
+Kent's face betrayed nothing more than his appreciation of the confidence
+reposed in him by the man whose high sense of official honor was making
+him turn traitor to the party leader who had dragged him through a
+successful election.
+
+"I have what evidence I need, Mr. Meigs," he declared. "But if I make no
+secret of this, neither do I conceal the fact that the motive _pro bono
+publico_ has had little to do with its accumulating. I want justice first
+for what might be called a purely private end, and I mean to have it."
+
+"Pre-cisely," smiled the attorney-general. "And now we are beginning to
+see our way a little clearer. It is not too late for us to move in the
+_quo warranto_ proceedings. If you will call at my office I shall be glad
+to reopen the matter with you."
+
+"And the price?" said Kent, shortly.
+
+"Oh, my dear sir! must we put it upon the ground of a _quid pro quo_?
+Rather let us say that we shall help each other. You are in a position to
+assist me very materially: I may be in a position to serve your turn. Come
+to my office to-morrow morning prepared to do your duty as an honest,
+loyal citizen, and you will find me quite willing to meet you half-way."
+
+Kent rose and opened his watch.
+
+"Mr. Meigs, I have given you your opportunity, and you have seemed to give
+me mine," he said coolly. "Will you pardon me if I say that I can paddle
+my own canoe--if I ask you to assure his Excellency that one more device
+of his to escape punishment has been tried and found wanting?"
+
+For a flitting moment the cast-iron smile faded from the impassive face of
+the attorney-general and an unrelenting devil came to peer out of the
+colorless eyes. Then Meigs rose cat-like and laid his hand on the
+door-knob.
+
+"Do I understand that you refuse to move in a matter which should be the
+first duty of a good citizen, Mr. Kent?" he asked purringly.
+
+"I certainly do refuse to fall into any such clumsy trap as you have been
+trying to bait for me, Mr. Meigs," said David Kent, dropping back into his
+former curtness.
+
+The door opened slowly under the impulse of the slender womanish hand.
+
+"You have a task of some magnitude before you, Mr. Kent. You can scarcely
+hope to accomplish it alone."
+
+"Meaning that you would like to know if the fight will go on if I should
+chance to meet another drunken cow-boy with a better aim? It will."
+
+The door closed softly behind the retreating figure of the
+attorney-general, and Kent released the spring of the night-latch. Then he
+went to the dropped portière at the farther end of the room, drew it aside
+and looked in on a man who was writing at a table pushed out between the
+windows.
+
+"You heard him, Loring?" he asked.
+
+The ex-manager nodded.
+
+"They are hard pressed," he said. Then, looking up quickly: "You could
+name your price if you wanted to close out the stock of goods in hand,
+David."
+
+"I shall name it when the time comes. Are you ready to go over to the
+_Argus_ office with me? I want to have a three-cornered talk with
+Hildreth."
+
+"In a minute. I'll join you in the lobby if you don't want to wait."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in the afternoon of the same day that Kent found a note in his
+key-box at the Clarendon asking him to call up 124 Tejon Avenue by
+telephone. He did it at once, and Penelope answered. The key-box note had
+been placed at Elinor's request, and she, Miss Penelope, could not say
+what was wanted; neither could she say definitely when her sister would be
+in. Elinor had gone out an hour earlier with Mr. Ormsby and Miss Van Brock
+in Mr. Ormsby's motor-car. When was he, David Kent, coming up? Did he know
+they were talking of spending the remainder of the summer at Breezeland
+Inn? And where was Mr. Loring all this time?
+
+Kent made fitting answers to all these queries, hung up the ear-piece and
+went away moodily reflective. He was due at a meeting of the executive
+committee of the Civic League, but he let the public business wait while
+he speculated upon the probable object of Elinor's telephoning him.
+
+Now there is no field in which the inconsistency of human nature is so
+persistent as in that which is bounded by the sentimentally narrowed
+horizon of a man in love. With Ormsby at the nodus of his point of view,
+David Kent made no secret of his open rivalry of the millionaire,
+declaring his intention boldly and taking no shame therefor. But when he
+faced about toward Elinor he found himself growing hotly jealous for her
+good faith; careful and fearful lest she should say or do something not
+strictly in accordance with the letter and spirit of her obligations as
+Ormsby's _fiancée_.
+
+For example: at the "conspiracy dinner," as Loring dubbed it, Ormsby being
+present to fight for his own hand, Kent, as we have seen, had boldly
+monopolized Miss Brentwood, and would have committed himself still more
+pointedly had the occasion favored him. None the less, when Elinor had
+begged him privately to see her before moving in the attack on the junto,
+he had almost resented the implied establishing of confidential relations
+with her lover's open rival.
+
+For this cause he had been postponing the promised visit, and thereby
+postponing the taking of the final step in the campaign of intimidation.
+The unexplained telephone call decided him, however. He would go and see
+Elinor and have the ordeal over with.
+
+But as a preliminary he dined that evening with Ormsby at the Camelot
+Club, and over the coffee had it out with him.
+
+"I am going out to see Miss Brentwood to-night," he announced abruptly.
+"Have you any objection?"
+
+The millionaire gave him the shrewdest of over-looks, ending with a
+deep-rumbling laugh.
+
+"Kent, you are the queerest lot I have ever discovered, and that is saying
+a good bit. Why, in the name of all the proprieties, should I object?"
+
+"Your right is unchallenged," Kent admitted.
+
+"Is it? Better ask Miss Brentwood about that. She might say it isn't."
+
+"I don't understand," said Kent, dry-tongued.
+
+"Don't you? Perhaps I'd better explain: she might find it a little
+difficult. You have been laboring under the impression that we are
+engaged, haven't you?"
+
+"Laboring under the--why, good heavens, man! it's in everybody's mouth!"
+
+"Curious, isn't it, how such things get about," commented the player of
+long suits. "How do you suppose they get started?"
+
+"I don't suppose anything about it, so far as we two are concerned; I have
+your own word for it. You said you were the man in possession."
+
+Ormsby laughed again.
+
+"You are something of a bluffer yourself, David. Did you let my little
+stagger scare you out?"
+
+David Kent pushed his chair back from the table and nailed Ormsby with a
+look that would have made a younger man betray himself.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that there is no engagement between you and Miss
+Brentwood?"
+
+"Just that." Ormsby put all the nonchalance he could muster into the
+laconic reply, but he was anticipating the sequent demand which came like
+a shot out of a gun.
+
+"And there never has been?"
+
+Ormsby grinned.
+
+"When you are digging a well and have found your stream of water, it's
+folly to go deeper, David. Can't you let 'good enough' alone?"
+
+Kent turned it over in his mind, frowning thoughtfully into his
+coffee-cup. When he spoke it was out of the mid-heart of manliness.
+
+"I wish you would tell me one thing, Ormsby. Am I responsible for--for the
+present state of affairs?"
+
+Ormsby stretched the truth a little; partly for Elinor's sake; more,
+perhaps, for Kent's.
+
+"You have done nothing that an honorable rival--and incidentally a good
+friend of mine--might not do. Therefore you are not responsible."
+
+"That is putting it very diplomatically," Kent mused. "I am afraid it does
+not exonerate me wholly."
+
+"Yes, it does. But it doesn't put me out of the running, you understand.
+I'm 'forninst' you yet; rather more stubbornly than before, I fancy."
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"That, of course; I should think less of you if you were not. And you
+shall have as fair a show as you are giving me--which is saying a lot.
+Shall we go and smoke?"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+A WOMAN INTERVENES
+
+It was still early in the evening when Kent mounted the steps of the
+Brentwood apartment house. Mother and daughters were all on the porch, but
+it was Mrs. Brentwood who welcomed him.
+
+"We were just wondering if you would imagine the message which Elinor was
+going to send, and didn't, and come out to see what was wanted," she said.
+"I am in need of a little legal advice. Will you give me a few minutes in
+the library?"
+
+Kent went with her obediently, but not without wondering why she had sent
+for him, of all the retainable lawyers in the capital. And the wonder
+became amazement when she opened her confidence. She had received two
+letters from a New York broker who offered to buy her railroad stock at a
+little more than the market price. To the second letter she had replied,
+asking a price ten points higher than the market. At this the broker had
+apparently dropped the attempted negotiation, since there had been no more
+letters. What would Mr. Kent advise her to do--write again?
+
+Kent smiled inwardly at the good lady's definition of "legal advice," but
+he rose promptly to the occasion. If he were in Mrs. Brentwood's place, he
+would not write again; nor would he pay any attention whatever to any
+similar proposals from any source. Had there been any others?
+
+Mrs. Brentwood confessed that there had been; that a firm of Boston
+brokers had also written her. Did Mr. Kent know the meaning of all this
+anxiety to buy in Western Pacific when the stock was going down day by
+day?
+
+Kent took time for reflection before he answered. It was exceedingly
+difficult to eliminate the personal factor in the equation. If all went
+well, if by due process of law the Trans-Western should be rescued out of
+the hands of the wreckers, the property would be a long time recovering
+from the wounds inflicted by the cut rates and the Guilford bad
+management. In consequence, any advance in the market value of the stock
+must be slow and uncertain under the skilfullest handling. But, while it
+might be advisable for Mrs. Brentwood to take what she could get, the
+transfer of the three thousand shares at the critical moment might be the
+death blow to all his hopes in the fight for retrieval.
+
+Happily, he hit upon the expedient of shifting the responsibility for the
+decision to other shoulders.
+
+"I scarcely feel competent to advise you in a matter which is personal
+rather than legal," he said at length. "Have you talked it over with Mr.
+Ormsby?"
+
+Mrs. Brentwood's reply was openly contemptuous.
+
+"Brookes Ormsby doesn't know anything about dollars. You have to express
+it in millions before he can grasp it. He says for me not to sell at any
+price."
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"I shouldn't put it quite so strongly. At the same time, I am not the
+person to advise you."
+
+The shrewd eyes looked up at him quickly.
+
+"Would you mind telling me why, Mr. Kent?"
+
+"Not in the least. I am an interested party. For weeks Mr. Loring and I
+have been striving by all means to prevent transfers of the stock from the
+hands of the original holders. I don't want to advise you to your hurt;
+but to tell you to sell might be to undo all that has been done."
+
+"Then you are still hoping to get the railroad out of Major Guilford's
+hands?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And in that case the price of the stock will go up again?"
+
+"That is just the difficulty. It may be a long time recovering."
+
+"Do you think the sale of my three thousand shares would make any
+difference?" she asked.
+
+"There is reason to fear that it would make all the difference."
+
+She was silent for a time, and when she spoke again Kent realized that he
+was coming to know an entirely unsuspected side of Elinor's mother.
+
+"It makes it pretty hard for me," she said slowly. "This little drib of
+railroad stock is all that my girls have left out of what their father
+willed them. I want to save it if I can."
+
+"So do I," said David Kent, frankly; "and for the same reason."
+
+Mrs. Brentwood confined herself to a dry "Why?"
+
+"Because I have loved your elder daughter well and truly ever since that
+summer at the foot of Old Croydon, Mrs. Brentwood, and her happiness and
+well-being concern me very nearly."
+
+"You are pretty plain-spoken, Mr. Kent. I suppose you know Elinor is to be
+married to Brookes Ormsby?" Mrs. Brentwood was quite herself again.
+
+Kent dexterously equivocated.
+
+"I know they have been engaged for some time," he said; but the small
+quibble availed him nothing.
+
+"Which one of them was it told you it was broken off?" she inquired.
+
+He smiled in spite of the increasing gravity of the situation.
+
+"You may be sure it was not Miss Elinor."
+
+"Humph!" said Mrs. Brentwood. "She didn't tell me, either. 'Twas Brookes
+Ormsby, and he said he wanted to begin all over again, or something of
+that sort. He is nothing but a foolish boy, for all his hair is getting
+thin."
+
+"He is a very honorable man," said Kent.
+
+"Because he is giving you another chance? I don't mind telling you plainly
+that it won't do any good, Mr. Kent."
+
+"Why?" he asked in his turn.
+
+"For several reasons: one is that Elinor will never marry without my
+consent; another is that she can't afford to marry a poor man."
+
+Kent rose.
+
+"I am glad to know how you feel about it, Mrs. Brentwood: nevertheless, I
+shall ask you to give your consent some day, God willing."
+
+He expected an outburst of some sort, and was telling himself that he had
+fairly provoked it, when she cut the ground from beneath his feet.
+
+"Don't you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent," she
+said, not unsympathetically. "She's in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she
+knows it now, if she didn't before." And it was with this arrow rankling
+in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the
+porch.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+A BORROWED CONSCIENCE
+
+The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a
+health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the
+corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the
+vine-covered trellis.
+
+Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music--Penelope's
+music--and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving
+Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them.
+
+It was Elinor's chance for free speech with Kent--the opportunity she had
+craved. But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had
+departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place. Under other
+conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would
+have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with
+Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arrow was still rankling. None the less,
+he was the first to break away from the commonplaces.
+
+"What is the matter with us this evening?" he queried. "We have been
+sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and
+Loring side-tracked us. I haven't been doing anything I am ashamed of;
+have you?"
+
+"Yes," she confessed, looking away from him.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is
+good reason to believe he didn't want to come."
+
+"What makes you think he didn't want to come?"
+
+"Why--I don't know; did he?" She had turned upon him swiftly with an
+outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings
+in time past--the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and
+instant and sympathetic apprehension.
+
+"You have never yet asked anything of him that he wasn't glad enough to
+give," he rejoined, keeping up the third person figurative.
+
+"Is that saying very much--or very little?"
+
+"Very little, indeed. But it is only your askings that have been
+lacking--not his good will."
+
+"That was said like the David Kent I used to know. Are you really quite
+the same?"
+
+"I hope not," he protested gravely. "People used to say of me that I
+matured late, and year by year as I look back I can see that it was a true
+saying. I have done some desperately boyish things since I was a man
+grown; things that make me tingle when I recall them."
+
+"Like wasting a whole summer exploring Mount Croydon with a--a somebody
+who did not mature late?"
+
+"No; I wasn't counting that among my lapses. An older man than I ever hope
+to be might find excuses for the Croydon summer. I meant in other ways.
+For one thing, I have craved success as I think few men have ever craved
+it; and yet my plowings in that field have been ill-timed and boyish to a
+degree."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I don't know how you measure success; it is a word of so many, many
+meanings. But I think you are your own severest critic."
+
+"That may be; but the fact remains. It is only within the past few months
+that I have begun to get a true inkling of things; to know, for example,
+that opportunities are things to be compelled--not waited for."
+
+She was looking away from him again.
+
+"I am not sure that I like you better for your having discovered yourself.
+I liked the other David Kent."
+
+He smiled rather joylessly.
+
+"Somebody has said that for every new point of view gained we have to
+sacrifice all the treasures of the old. I am sorry if I am disappointing
+you."
+
+"I don't know that you are. And yet, when you were sitting at Miss Van
+Brock's table the other evening telling us about your experience with the
+politicians, I kept saying to myself that I didn't know you--that I had
+never known you."
+
+"I wish I knew just how to take that," he said dubiously.
+
+"I wish I knew how to make you understand," she returned; and then: "I
+could have made the other David Kent understand."
+
+"You are in duty bound to try to make this one understand, don't you
+think? You spoke of a danger which was not the violent kind, such as
+Loring fears. What is it?"
+
+"You have had two whole days," she rejoined. "Haven't you discovered it?"
+
+"I haven't found anything to fear but failure," was his reply.
+
+"That is it; you have given it a name--its only true name--failure."
+
+"But I am not going to fail."
+
+"You mean you are going to take our railroad away from these men who have
+stolen it?"
+
+"That is what I mean."
+
+"And you will do it by threatening to expose them?"
+
+"I shall tell Governor Bucks what I know about the oil field deal,
+assuring him that I shall publish the facts if he doesn't let the law take
+its course in ousting Judge MacFarlane and the receiver."
+
+She rose and stood before him, leaning against one of the vine-clad porch
+pillars with her hands behind her.
+
+"David Kent, are there any circumstances in which you would accept a
+bribe?"
+
+He answered her in all seriousness.
+
+"They say every man has his price: mine is higher than any bid they have
+yet made--or can make, I hope."
+
+"Why don't you let _them_ bribe _you_?" she asked coolly. "Is it because
+it is inexpedient--because there is more 'success' the other way?"
+
+He tried to emulate her coolness and made a failure of it.
+
+"Have I ever done anything to make you think I had thrown common honesty
+and self-respect overboard?" he demanded.
+
+Her answer was another question, sharp-edged and well thrust home.
+
+"Is it any worse to take a bribe than it is to give one? You have just
+admitted that you are going to buy the governor's neutrality, you know."
+
+"I don't see it in that light at all."
+
+"The other David Kent would have seen it. He would have said: These men
+are public criminals. If I can not bring them to justice, I can at least
+expose them to the scorn of all good men. Therefore I have no right to
+bargain with them."
+
+Kent was silent for a long time. When he spoke it was to say:
+
+"Why have you done this, Elinor?"
+
+"Because I had to, David. Could I do less?"
+
+"I suppose not. It's in the blood--in your blood and mine. Other folk call
+it the Puritan virus of over-righteousness, and scoff at it. I don't know:
+sometimes I think they have the best of the argument."
+
+"I can't believe you are quite sincere when you say that," she asserted.
+
+"Yes, I am. One can not compromise with conscience; that says itself. But
+I have come to believe latterly that one's conscience may be morbidly
+acute, or even diseased. I'll admit I've been taking treatment."
+
+"That sounds very dreadful," she rejoined.
+
+"It does, doesn't it? Yet it had to be done. As I intimated a few minutes
+ago, my life has hitherto been a sort of unostentatious failure. I used to
+think it was because I was outclassed: I know now it has been because I
+wouldn't do as other men do. It has been a rather heart-breaking
+process--to sort out the scruples, admitting the just and overriding the
+others--but I have been given to see that it is the price of success."
+
+"I want you to succeed," she said.
+
+"Pardon me; I don't think you do. You have reopened the door to doubt, and
+if I admit the doubt I shall fail."
+
+The sonata Penelope was playing was approaching its finale, and Elinor was
+suddenly shaken with a trembling fit of fear--the fear of consequences
+which might involve this man's entire future. She knew Kent was leaning on
+her, and she saw herself as one who has ruthlessly thrust an iron bar
+among the wheels of a delicate mechanism. Who was she to be his
+conscience-keeper--to stand in the way and bid him go back? Were her own
+motives always so exalted? Had she not once deliberately debated this same
+question of expediency, to the utter abasement of her own ideals?
+
+Penelope had left the piano, and Loring was looking at his watch. Kent saw
+them through the open window and got upon his feet.
+
+"Grantham is saying he had no idea it was so late," he hazarded. "If I
+thank you for what you have said I am afraid it must be as the patient
+thanks the surgeon for the knife-stroke which leaves him a cripple for
+life."
+
+It was the one word needed to break her resolution.
+
+"Oh, forget it; please forget it!" she said. "I had no right.... You are
+doing a man's work in the world, and it must be done in a man's way. If I
+can not help, you must not let me hinder. If you let anything I have said
+discourage you, I shall never cease regretting it."
+
+His smile was a mere indrawing of the lips.
+
+"Having opened the door, you would try to shut it again, would you? How
+like a woman! But I am afraid it can't be done. I had been trying to keep
+away from that point of view.... There is much to be said on both sides.
+There was a time when I wouldn't have gone into such a thing as this fight
+with the junto; but being in, I should have seen it through regardless of
+the public welfare--ignoring that side of it. I can't do it now; you have
+shown me that I can't."
+
+"But I don't want to be a stumbling-block," she insisted. "Won't you
+believe that I wanted to help?"
+
+"I believe that your motive was all it should be; yes. But the result is
+the same."
+
+Loring and Penelope were coming out, and the end of their privacy was at
+hand.
+
+"What will you do?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know: nothing that I had meant to do. It was a false start and I
+am back under the wire again."
+
+"But you must not turn back unless you are fully convinced of the wrong of
+going on," she protested.
+
+"Didn't you mean to convince me?"
+
+"No--yes--I don't know. I--it seems very clear to me; but I want it to
+seem clear to you. Doesn't your conscience tell you that you ought to turn
+back?"
+
+"No," he said shortly; but he immediately qualified the denial. "You may
+be right: I am afraid you are right. But I shall have to fight it out for
+myself. There are many things to consider. If I hold my hand, these
+bucaneers will triumph over the stockholders, and a host of innocent
+people will suffer loss." Then, seeing the quick-springing tears in her
+eyes: "But you mustn't be sorry for having done what you had to do; you
+have nothing to reproach yourself for."
+
+"Oh, but I have!" she said; and so they parted.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+THE INSURRECTIONARIES
+
+When the Receiver Guilfords, great and small, set their official
+guillotines at work lopping off department heads, they commonly ignore a
+consequence overlooked by many; namely, the possible effect of such
+wholesale changes in leadership upon the rank and file.
+
+The American railroad in its unconsolidated stage is a modern feudalism.
+Its suzerains are the president and board of directors; its clan chiefs
+are the men who have built it and fought for its footing in the sharply
+contested field of competition. To these leaders the rank and file is
+loyal, as loyalty is accorded to the men who build and do, rather than to
+their successors who inherit and tear down. Add to this the supplanting of
+competent executive officers by a staff of political trenchermen, ignorant
+alike of the science of railroading, and the equally important sub-science
+of industrial manhandling, and you have the kindling for the fire of
+insurrection which had been slowly smoldering in the Trans-Western service
+since the day when Major Guilford had issued his general order Number One.
+
+At first the fire had burned fitfully, eating its way into the small
+economies; as when the section hands pelt stray dogs with new spikes from
+the stock keg, and careless freight crews seed down the right of way with
+cast-off links and pins; when engineers pour oil where it should be
+dropped, and firemen feed the stack instead of the steam-dome.
+
+But later, when the incompetence of the new officials became the mocking
+gibe of the service, and the cut-rate avalanche of traffic had doubled all
+men's tasks, the flames rose higher, and out of the smoke of them loomed
+the shape of the dread demon of demoralization.
+
+First it was Hank Brodrick, who misread his orders and piled two freights
+in a mountain of wreckage in the deep cut between Long Pine and Argenta.
+Next it was an overworked night man who lost his head and cranked a switch
+over in front of the west-bound Flyer, laying the 1020 on her side in the
+ditch, with the postal and the baggage-car neatly telescoped on top to
+hold her down.
+
+Two days later it was Patsy Callahan; and though he escaped with his life
+and his job, it was a close call. He was chasing a time freight with the
+fast mail, and the freight was taking the siding at Delhi to let him pass.
+One of the red tail-lights of the freight had gone out, and Callahan
+mistook the other for the target lamp of the second switch. He had time to
+yell at his fireman, to fling himself upon the throttle-bar and to set the
+airbrake before he began to turn Irish handsprings down the embankment;
+but the wrecking crew camped two whole days at Delhi gathering up the
+debris.
+
+It was well on in the summer, when the two divisions, east and west, were
+strewn with wreckage and the pit tracks in the shops and shop yard were
+filled to overflowing with crippled engines, that the insurrectionaries
+began to gather in their respective labor groups to discuss the growing
+hazards of railroading on the Trans-Western.
+
+The outcome was a protest from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers,
+addressed to the receiver in the name of the organization, setting forth
+in plain terms the grievance of the members, and charging it bluntly to
+bad management. This was followed immediately by similar complaints from
+the trainmen, the telegraphers, and the firemen; all praying for relief
+from the incubus of incompetent leadership. Not to be behind these, came
+the Amalgamated Machinists, demanding an increase of pay for night work
+and overtime; and last, but not least, an intimation went forth from the
+Federative Council of all these labor unions hinting at possible political
+consequences and the alienation of the labor vote if the abuses were not
+corrected.
+
+"What d'ye calc'late the major will do about it?" said Brodrick, in the
+roundhouse conclave held daily by the trainmen who were hung up or off
+duty. "Will he listen to reason and give us a sure-enough railroad man or
+two at the top?"
+
+"Not in _ein_ t'ousand year," quoth "Dutch" Tischer, Callahan's alternate
+on the fast mail. "Haf you not de _Arkoos_ been reading? It is bolotics
+from der beginning to der ent; mit der governor _vorwärts_."
+
+"Then I am tellin' you-all right now there's goin' to be a heap o'
+trouble," drawled "Pike County" Griggs, the oldest engineer on the line.
+"The shopmen are b'ilin'; and if the major puts on that blanket cut in
+wages he's talkin' about----"
+
+"'If'," broke in Callahan, with fine scorn. "'Tis slaping on yer injuries
+ye are, Misther Griggs. The notice is out; 'twas posted in the shops this
+day."
+
+"Then that settles it," said Griggs, gloomily. "When does it take hold?"
+
+"The first day av the month to come. An' they're telling me it catches
+everybody, down to the missinger b'ys in the of'ces."
+
+Griggs got upon his feet, yawning and stretching before he dropped back
+into his corner of the wooden settle.
+
+"You lissen at me: if that's the fact, I'm tellin' you-all that every
+wheel on this blame', hoodooed railroad is goin' to stop turnin' at twelve
+o'clock on the night before that notice takes hold."
+
+An oil-begrimed wiper crawled from under the 1031, spat at the dope-bucket
+and flung his bunch of waste therein.
+
+"Gur-r-r! Let 'em stop," he rasped. "The dope's bad, and the waste's bad;
+and the old man has cut out the 'lectrics and put us back on _them_,"
+kicking a small jacket lamp to the bottom of an empty stall. "Give 's a
+chaw o' yer smokin' plug, Mr. Callahan," and he held out his hand.
+
+Callahan emptied the hot ashes from his black pipe into the open palm.
+
+"'Tis what ye get f'r yer impidunce, an' f'r layin' tongue to ould man
+Durgan, ye scut. 'Tis none av his doin's--the dhirty oil an' the chape
+waste an' the jacket lamps. It's ay-conomy, me son; an' the other name f'r
+that is a rayceiver."
+
+"Is Durgan with us?" asked Brodrick.
+
+"He's wit' himself, as a master-mechanic shu'd be," said Callahan. "So's
+M'Tosh. But nayther wan n'r t'other av thim'll take a thrain out whin the
+strike's on. They're both Loring min."
+
+At the mention of Loring's name Griggs looked up from the stick he was
+whittling.
+
+"No prospects o' the Boston folks getting the road back again, I reckon,"
+he remarked tentatively.
+
+"You should read dose _Arkoos_ newsbapers: den you should know somet'ings
+alretty, ain'd it?" said Tischer.
+
+Brodrick laughed.
+
+"If you see it in the papers, it's so," he quoted. "What the _Argus_
+doesn't say would make a 'nough sight bigger book than what it does. But
+I've been kind o' watchin' that man Kent. He's been hot after the major,
+right from the jump. You rec'lect what he said in them Civic League talks
+o' his: said these politicians had stole the road, hide, hair an' horns."
+
+"I'm onto him," said Callahan. "'Tis a bird he is. Oleson was telling me.
+The Scandehoovian was thryin' to get him down to Gaston the day they
+ray-ceivered us. Jarl says he wint a mile a minut', an' the little man
+never turned a hair."
+
+"Is he here yet; or did he go back to God's country?" asked Engineer
+Scott, leaning from the cab window of the 1031.
+
+"He's here; and so is Mr. Loring. They're stopping at the Clarendon," said
+Brodrick.
+
+"Then they haven't quit," drawled Griggs; adding: "I wonder if they have a
+ghost of a show against the politicals?"
+
+"Has annybody been to see 'em?" asked Callahan.
+
+"There's a notion for you, Scott," said Brodrick. Scott was the presiding
+officer in the B. of L.E. local. "Get up a committee from the Federative
+to go and ask Mr. Loring if there's any use in our tryin' to hold on."
+
+The wiper was killing time at a window which commanded a view of the upper
+yards, with the Union Passenger Station at the end of the three-mile
+vista. Being a late comer in the field, the Trans-Western had scanty track
+rights in the upper yard; its local headquarters were in the shops suburb,
+where the two division main lines proper began and ended, diverging, the
+one to the eastward and the other to the west.
+
+"Holy smut!" said the wiper. "See Dicky Dixon comin' out with the Flyer!
+How's that for ten miles an hour in the city limits?"
+
+It was a foot-note commentary on the way the service was going to pieces.
+Halkett, the "political" general superintendent, had called Dixon on the
+carpet for not making time with his train. "If you're afraid to run, say
+so, and we'll get a man that isn't," Halkett had said; and here was Dixon
+coming down a borrowed track in a busy yard at the speed which presupposes
+a ninety-pound rail and nothing in the way.
+
+The conclave had gathered at the wiper's window.
+
+"The dum fool!" said Brodrick. "If anything gets in front of him----"
+
+There was a suburb street-crossing three hundred yards townward from the
+"yard limits" telegraph office, which stood in the angle formed by the
+diverging tracks of the two divisions. Beyond the yard the street became a
+country road, well traveled as the principal southern inlet to the city.
+When Dixon was within two train-lengths of the crossing, a farm wagon
+appeared, driven between the cut freight trains on the sidings directly in
+the path of the Flyer. The men at the roundhouse window heard the crash of
+the splintering wagon above the roar of the train; and the wiper on the
+window seat yelped like a kicked dog and went sickly green under his mask
+of grime.
+
+"There it is again," said Scott, when Dixon had brought his train to a
+stand two hundred yards beyond the "limits" office where he should have
+stopped for orders. "We're all hoodooed, the last one of us. I'll get that
+committee together this afternoon and go and buzz Mr. Loring."
+
+Now it fell out that these things happened on a day when the tide of
+retrieval was at its lowest ebb; the day, namely, in which Kent had told
+Loring that he was undecided as to his moral right to use the evidence
+against Bucks as a lever to pry the Trans-Western out of the grip of the
+junto. It befell, also, that it was the day chosen by two other men, not
+members of the labor unions, in which to call upon the ex-manager; and
+Loring found M'Tosh, the train-master, and Durgan, the master-mechanic,
+waiting for him in the hotel corridor when he came in from a late luncheon
+at the Camelot Club.
+
+"Can you give us a few minutes, Mr. Loring?" asked M'Tosh, when Loring had
+shaken hands with them, not as subordinates.
+
+"Surely. My time is not very valuable, just at present. Come in, and I'll
+see if Mr. Kent has left me any cigars."
+
+"Humph!" said Durgan, when the ex-manager had gone into Kent's room to
+rummage for the smoke offering. "And they give us the major in the place
+of such a man as that!" with a jerk of his thumb toward the door of the
+bedroom.
+
+"Come off!" warned M'Tosh; "he'll hear you." And when Loring came back
+with the cigars there was dry humor in his eye.
+
+"You mustn't let your loyalty to the old guard get you into trouble with
+the receiver," he cautioned; and they both smiled.
+
+"The trouble hasn't waited for our bringing," said M'Tosh. "That is why we
+are here. Durgan has soured on his job, and I'm more than sick of mine.
+It's hell, Mr. Loring. I have been at it twenty years, and I never saw
+such crazy railroading in any one of them."
+
+"Bad management, you mean?"
+
+"Bad management at the top, and rotten demoralization at the bottom as a
+natural consequence. We can't be sure of getting a train out of the yards
+without accident. Dixon is as careful a man as ever stepped on an engine,
+and he smashed a farmer's wagon and killed the farmer this morning within
+two train-lengths of the shop junction."
+
+"Drunk?" inquired the ex-manager.
+
+"Never a drop; Dixon's a Prohibitionist, dyed in the wool. But just before
+he took his train, Halkett had him in the sweat-box, jacking him up for
+not making his time. He came out red in the face, jumped on his engine,
+and yanked the Flyer down the yards forty miles an hour."
+
+"And what is your trouble, Durgan?" asked Loring.
+
+"Another side of the same thing. I wrote Major Guilford yesterday, telling
+him that six pit gangs, all the roundhouse 'emergencies' and two outdoor
+repair squads couldn't begin to keep the cripples moving; and within a
+week every one of the labor unions has kicked through its grievance
+committee. His reply is an order announcing a blanket cut in wages, to go
+into effect the first of the month. That means a strike and a general
+tie-up."
+
+Loring shook his head regretfully.
+
+"It hurts me," he admitted. "We had the best-handled piece of railroad in
+the West, and I give the credit to the men that did the handling. And to
+have it wrecked by a gang of incompetent salary-grabbers----"
+
+The two left-overs nodded.
+
+"That's just it, Mr. Loring," said M'Tosh. "And we're here to ask you if
+it's worth while for us to stick to the wreck any longer. Are you folks
+doing anything?"
+
+"We have been trying all legal means to break the grip of the
+combination--yes."
+
+"And what are the prospects?" It was the master-mechanic who wanted to
+know.
+
+"They are not very bright at present, I must confess. We have the entire
+political ring to fight, and the odds are overwhelming."
+
+"You say you've been trying legal means'," M'Tosh put in. "Can't we down
+them some other way? I believe you could safely count on the help of every
+man in the service, barring the politicals."
+
+Loring smiled.
+
+"I don't say we should scruple to use force if there were any way to apply
+it. But the way doesn't offer."
+
+"I didn't know," said the train-master, rising to close the interview.
+"But if the time ever comes, all you or Mr. Kent will have to do will be
+to pass the word. Maybe you can think of some way to use the strike. It
+hasn't been declared yet, but you can bet on it to a dead moral
+certainty."
+
+It was late in the afternoon of the same day that the Federative Council
+sent its committee, chairmaned by Engineer Scott, to interview the
+ex-general manager at his rooms in the Clarendon. Scott acted as
+spokesman, stating the case with admirable brevity and conciseness, and
+asking the same question as that propounded by the train-master, to wit,
+if there were any prospect of a return of the road to its former
+management.
+
+Loring spoke more hopefully to the committee than he had to Durgan and
+M'Tosh. There had been a little more time for reflection, and there was
+the heartening which comes upon the heels of unsolicited help-tenderings,
+however futile. So he told the men that the stockholders were moving
+heaven and earth in the effort to recover their property; that until the
+road should be actually sold under an order from the court, there was
+always room for hope. The committee might rest assured that no stone would
+be left unturned; also that the good will of the rank and file would not
+be forgotten in the day of restitution, if that day should ever dawn.
+
+When Loring was through, Engineer Scott did a thing no union man had ever
+done before: he asked an ex-general manager's advice touching the
+advisability of a strike.
+
+"I can't say as to that," was the prompt reply. "You know your own
+business best--what it will cost, and what it may accomplish. But I've
+been on the other side often enough to be able to tell you why most
+strikes fail, if you care to know."
+
+A broad grin ran the gamut of the committee.
+
+"Tell us what to do, and we'll do it; Mr. Loring," said Scott, briefly.
+
+"First, then, have a definite object and one that will stand the test of
+public opinion; in this case we'll say it is the maintenance of the
+present wage-scale and the removal of incompetent officers and men.
+Secondly, make your protest absolutely unanimous to a man. Thirdly, don't
+give the major time to fortify: keep your own counsels, and don't send in
+your ultimatum until the final moment. And, lastly, shun violence as you
+would a temptation of the devil."
+
+"Yon's a man," said Angus Duncan, the member from the Amalgamated
+Machinists, when the committee was filing out through the hotel corridor.
+
+"Now you're shouting!" said Engineer Scott. "And you might say a man and a
+brother."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+INTO THE PRIMITIVE
+
+Tested upon purely diplomatic principles, Miss Van Brock's temper was
+little less than angelic, exhibiting itself under provocation only in
+guarded pin-pricks of sarcasm, or in small sharp-clawed kitten-buffetings
+of repartee. But she was at no pains to conceal her scornful
+disappointment when David Kent made known his doubts concerning his moral
+right to use the weapon he had so skilfully forged.
+
+He delayed the inevitable confession to Portia until he had told Loring;
+and in making it he did not tell Miss Van Brock to whom he owed the sudden
+change in the point of view. But Portia would have greatly discredited her
+gift of insight if she had not instantly reduced the problem to its lowest
+terms.
+
+"You have been asking Miss Brentwood to lend you her conscience, and she
+has done it," was the form in which she stated the fact. And when Kent did
+not deny it: "You lack at least one quality of greatness, David; you sway
+too easily."
+
+"No, I don't!" he protested. "I am as obstinate as a mule. Ask Ormsby, or
+Loring. But the logic of the thing is blankly unanswerable. I can either
+get down to the dirty level of these highbinders--fight the devil with a
+brand taken out of his own fire; or----"
+
+"Or what?" she asked.
+
+"Or think up some other scheme; some plan which doesn't involve a
+surrender on my part of common decency and self-respect."
+
+"Yes?" she retorted. "I suppose you have the other plan all wrought out
+and ready to drop into place?"
+
+"No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly.
+
+"But at least you have some notion of what it is going to be?"
+
+"No."
+
+She was pacing back and forth in front of his chair in a way that was
+almost man-like; but her contemptuous impatience made her dangerously
+beautiful. Suddenly she stopped and turned upon him, and there were sharp
+claws in the kitten-buffetings.
+
+"Do you know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate to
+throw away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in this
+railroad affair, we haven't been idle--your newspaper and political
+friends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and we
+have been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give you
+anything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspire
+to. Have you known this?"
+
+"I have guessed it," he said quite humbly.
+
+"Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: you
+were to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle--show them up--and
+climb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shaken
+them. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And now
+you turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!"
+
+There was more of a like quality--a good bit more; some of it regretful;
+all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and
+Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed
+vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to
+begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the
+tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable
+twirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible to
+his friends and innocuous to his enemies.
+
+On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brock
+to ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a rather
+anxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmatively
+by the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ran
+to the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following a
+boyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken his
+problem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him plodding
+wearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from much
+tramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out to
+some despairing conclusion.
+
+The City Hall clock was upon the stroke of three when the inbound
+trolley-car landed him in front of the Clarendon. It was a measure of his
+purposeful abstraction that he went on around the corner to the Security
+Bank, dusty and unpresentable as he was, and transferred the packet of
+incriminating affidavits from the safety deposit box to his pocket before
+going to his rooms in the hotel.
+
+This paper weapon was the centering point of the struggle which had now
+lasted for nearly a fortnight. So long as the weapon was his to use or to
+cast away, the outcome of the moral conflict hung in the balance. But now
+he was emerging from the night wanderings among the tombs of the
+undecided.
+
+"I can't give it up; there is too much at stake," he muttered, as he
+trudged heavily back to the hotel. And before he went above stairs he
+asked the young woman at the house telephone exchange to ascertain if
+Governor Bucks were in his office at the capitol, and if so, if he were
+likely to remain there for an hour.
+
+When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on the
+writing-table and went to freshen himself with a bath. That which lay
+before him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity. In
+other times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tub
+and the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to the
+bottle.
+
+He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying where
+he had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card. Kent
+read the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines about
+his mouth. There are times when a man's fate rushes to meet him, and he
+had fallen upon one of them.
+
+"Show him up," was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevator
+cage clacked again, Kent was waiting.
+
+His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a little
+breathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator. Kent
+admitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in a
+chair and begged a light for his cigar. In the match-passing he gathered
+his spent breath and declared his errand.
+
+"I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent,"
+he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it
+in stolid silence.
+
+"Possibly: that is for you to say," was the unencouraging reply.
+
+Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyond
+it into the bedroom.
+
+"We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of," said Kent,
+in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed his
+chair.
+
+"I came up to see what you want--what you will take to quit," he
+announced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over his
+knee. "That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, and
+we can dispense with the preliminaries, I take it."
+
+"I told your attorney-general some time ago what I wanted, and he did not
+see fit to grant it," Kent responded. "I am not sure that I want anything
+now--anything you can have to offer." This was not at all what he had
+intended to say; but the presence of the adversary was breeding a stubborn
+antagonism that was more potent on the moral side than all the prickings
+of conscience.
+
+The yellow-lidded eyes of the governor began to close down, and the look
+came into them which had been there when he had denied a pardon to a widow
+pleading for the life of her convicted son.
+
+"I had hoped you were in the market," he demurred. "It would be better for
+all concerned if you had something to sell, with a price attached. I know
+what you have been doing, and what you think you have got hold of. It's a
+tissue of mistakes and falsehoods and back-bitings from beginning to end,
+but it may serve your purpose with the newspapers. I want to buy that
+package of stuff you've got stowed away in the Security vaults."
+
+The governor's chair was on one side of the writing-table, and Kent's was
+on the other. In plain sight between the two men lay the packet Bucks was
+willing to bargain for. It was inclosed in a box envelope, bearing the
+imprint of the Security Bank. Kent was looking steadily away from the
+table when he said:
+
+"What if I say it isn't for sale?"
+
+"Don't you think it had better be?"
+
+"I don't know. I hadn't thought much about the advisable phase of it."
+
+"Well, the time has come when you've got it to do," was the low-toned
+threat.
+
+"But not as a matter of compulsion," said Kent, coolly enough. "What is
+your bid?"
+
+Bucks made it promptly.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars: and you promise to leave the State and stay away
+for one year from the first Tuesday in November next."
+
+"That is, until after the next State election." Kent blew a whiff of smoke
+to the ceiling and shook his head slowly. "It is not enough."
+
+The governor uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way, and said:
+
+"I'll make it twenty thousand and two years."
+
+"Or thirty thousand and three years," Kent suggested amiably. "Or suppose
+we come at once to the end of that string and say one hundred thousand and
+ten years. That would still leave you a fair price for your block of
+suburban property in Guilford and Hawk's addition to the city of Gaston,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+The governor set his massive jaw with a sharp little click of the teeth.
+
+"You are joking on the edge of your grave, my young friend. I taught you
+in Gaston that you were not big enough to fight me: do you think you are
+big enough now?"
+
+"I don't think; I know," said Kent, incisively. "And since you have
+referred to the Gaston days: let me ask if I ever gave you any reason to
+believe that I could be scared out?"
+
+"Keep to the point," retorted Bucks, harshly. "This State isn't broad
+enough to hold you and me on opposite sides of the fence. I could make it
+too hot to hold you without mixing up in it myself, but I choose to fight
+my own battles. Will you take twenty thousand dollars spot cash, and
+MacFarlane's job as circuit judge when I'm through with him? Yes or no."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then what will you take?"
+
+"Without committing myself in any sense, I might say that you are getting
+off too cheaply on your most liberal proposition. You and your friends
+have looted a seventy-million-dollar railroad, and----"
+
+"You might have stood in on that if you had taken Guilford's offer," was
+the brusk rejoinder. "There was more than a corporation lawyer's salary in
+sight, if you'd had sense enough to see it."
+
+"Possibly. But I stayed out--and I am still out."
+
+"Do you want to get in? Is that your price?"
+
+"I intend to get in--though not, perhaps, in the way you have in mind. Are
+you ready to recall Judge MacFarlane with instructions to give us our
+hearing on the merits?"
+
+The governor's face was wooden when he said:
+
+"Is that all you want? I understand MacFarlane is returning, and you will
+doubtless have your hearing in due season."
+
+"Not unless you authorize it," Kent objected.
+
+"And if I do? If I say that I have already done so, will you come in and
+lay down your arms?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I'm through. Give me your key and write me an order on the Security
+Bank for those papers you are holding."
+
+"No," said Kent, again.
+
+"I say _yes_!" came the explosive reassertion; and Kent found himself
+looking down the bright barrel of a pistol thrust into his face across the
+table.
+
+For a man who had been oftenest an onlooker on the football half of life,
+Kent was measurably quick and resourceful. In one motion he clamped the
+weapon and turned it aside; in another he jammed the fire end of his cigar
+among the fingers of the grasping hand. The governor jerked free with an
+oath, pain-extorted; and Kent dropped the captured weapon into the table
+drawer. It was all done in two breaths, and when it was over, Kent flung
+away the broken cigar and lighted a fresh one.
+
+"That was a very primitive expedient, your Excellency, to say the best of
+it," he remarked. "Have you nothing better to offer?"
+
+The reply was a wild-beast growl, and taking it for a negative, Kent went
+on.
+
+"Then perhaps you will listen to my proposal. The papers you are so
+anxious about are here,"--tapping the envelope on the table. "No, don't
+try to snatch them; you wouldn't get out of here alive with them, lacking
+my leave. Such of them as relate to your complicity in the Universal Oil
+deal are yours--on one condition; that your health fails and you get
+yourself ordered out of the State for the remainder of your term."
+
+"No!" thundered the governor.
+
+"Very well; you may stay and take a course of home treatment, if you
+prefer. It's optional."
+
+"By God! I don't know what keeps me from throttling you with my hands!"
+Bucks got upon his feet, and Kent rose, also, slipping the box envelope
+into his pocket and laying a precautionary hand on the drawer-pull.
+
+The governor turned away and walked to the window, nursing his burned
+fingers. When he faced about it was to return to the charge.
+
+"Kent, what is it you want? Say it in two words."
+
+"Candidly, I didn't know, until a few minutes ago, Governor. It began with
+a determination to break your grip on my railroad, I believe."
+
+"You can have your railroad, if you can get it--and be damned to it, and
+to you, too!"
+
+"I said it began that way. My sole idea in gathering up this evidence
+against you and your accomplices was to whittle out a club that would make
+you let go of the Trans-Western. For two weeks I have been debating with
+myself as to whether I should buy you or break you; and half an hour
+before you came, I went to the bank and took these papers out, meaning to
+go and hunt you up."
+
+"Well?" said the governor, and the word bared his teeth because his lips
+were dry.
+
+"I thought I knew, in the old Gaston days, how many different kinds of a
+scoundrel you could be, but you've succeeded in showing me some new
+variations in the last few minutes. It's a thousand pities that the people
+of a great State should be at the mercy of such a gang of pirates as you
+and Hendricks and Meigs and MacFarlane, and----"
+
+"Break it off!" said Bucks.
+
+"I'm through. I was merely going to add' that I have concluded not to buy
+you."
+
+"Then it's to be war to the knife, is it?"
+
+"That is about the size of it," said Kent; and the governor found his hat.
+
+"I'll trouble you to return my property," he growled, pointing to the
+table drawer.
+
+"Certainly." Kent broke the revolver over the blotting pad, swept the
+ejected cartridges into the open drawer, and passed the empty weapon to
+its owner.
+
+When the door closed behind the outgoing visitor the victor in the small
+passage at arms began to walk the floor; but at four o'clock, which was
+Hildreth's hour for coming down-town, he put on his hat and went to climb
+the three flights of stairs to the editor's den in the _Argus_ building.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+DEAD WATER AND QUICK
+
+The cubby-hole in which Hildreth earned his bread by the sweat of his
+brain was dark even at midday; and during working hours the editor sat
+under a funnel-shaped reflector in a conic shower-bath of electric light
+which flooded man and desk and left the corners of the room in a penumbra
+of grateful twilight.
+
+Kent sat just outside of the cone of radiance, watching Hildreth's face as
+the editor read stolidly through the contents of the box envelope. It was
+an instructive study in thought dynamics. There was a gleam of battle
+satisfaction in the editorial eye when Hildreth faced the last sheet down
+upon the accumulation of evidence, saying:
+
+"You didn't overstate the fact in your brag about the political graves.
+Only this isn't a spade; it's a steam shovel. Do I understand you are
+giving me this stuff to use as I please?"
+
+"Just that," said Kent.
+
+"And you have made it serve your turn, too?"
+
+"No." Kent's voice was sharp and crisp.
+
+"Isn't that what you got it for?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then why don't you use it?"
+
+"That was what Bucks wanted to know a little while ago when he came to my
+rooms to try to buy me off. I don't think I succeeded in making him
+understand why I couldn't traffic with it; and possibly you wouldn't
+understand."
+
+"I guess I do. It's public property, and you couldn't divert it into
+private channels. Is that the way it struck you?"
+
+"It is the way it struck a friend of mine whose sense of ultimate right
+and wrong hasn't lost its fine edge in the world-mill. I did not want to
+do it."
+
+"Naturally," said the editor. "Giving it up means the loss of all you have
+been working for in the railroad game. I wish I could use it, just as it
+stands."
+
+"Can't you?"
+
+"I am afraid not--effectively. It would make an issue in a campaign; or,
+sprung on the eve of an election, it might down the ring conclusively. I
+think it would. But this is the off year, and the people won't rise to a
+political issue--couldn't make themselves felt if they should."
+
+"I don't agree with you. You have your case all made out, with the
+evidence in sound legal form. What is to prevent your trying it?"
+
+"The one thing that you ought to be lawyer enough to see at a glance.
+There is no court to try it in. With the Assembly in session we might do
+something: as it is, we can only yap at the heels of the ringsters, and
+our yapping won't help you in the railroad fight. What do you hear from
+Boston?"
+
+"Nothing new. The stock is still flat on the market, with the
+stock-holders' pool holding a bare majority, and the Plantagould brokers
+buying in driblets wherever they can find a small holder who is willing to
+let go. It is only a question of time; and a very short time at that."
+
+The editor wagged his head in sympathy.
+
+"I wish I could help you, David. You've done a big thing for me--for the
+_Argus_; and all I have to hand you in return is a death sentence.
+MacFarlane is back."
+
+"Here? In town?"
+
+"Yes. And that isn't the worst of it. The governor sent for him."
+
+"Have you any idea what is in the wind?" asked Kent, dry-lipped.
+
+"I am afraid I have. My young men have been nosing around in the
+Trans-Western affair, and several things have developed. Matters are
+approaching a crisis. The cut-rate boom is about to collapse, and there is
+trouble brewing in the labor organizations. If Bucks doesn't get his
+henchmen out of it pretty soon, they will be involved in the smash--which
+will be bad for them and for him, politically."
+
+"I developed most of that a good while ago," Kent cut in.
+
+"Yes; I know. But there is more to follow. The stock-smashing plan was all
+right, but it is proving too slow. Now they are going to do something
+else."
+
+"Can you give it a name?" asked Kent, nerving himself.
+
+"I can. But first tell me one thing: as matters stand, could Guilford
+dispose of the road--sell it or lease it?"
+
+"No; he would first have to be made permanent receiver and be given
+authority by the court."
+
+"Ah! that explains Judge MacFarlane's return. Now what I am going to tell
+you is the deadest of secrets. It came to me from one of the Overland
+officials, and I'm not supposed to gossip. Did you know the Overland Short
+Line had passed under Plantagould domination?"
+
+"I know they elected a Plantagould directory at the annual meeting."
+
+"Exactly. Well, Guilford is going to lease the Trans-Western to its
+competitor for a term of ninety-nine years. That's your death sentence."
+
+Kent sprang to his feet, and what he said is unrecordable. He was not a
+profane man, but the sanguine temperament would assert itself explosively
+in moments of sudden stress.
+
+"When is this thing to be done?" he demanded, when the temperamental gods
+were appeased a little.
+
+Hildreth shrugged.
+
+"I have told you all I could, and rather more than I had any right to.
+Open the door behind you, won't you? The air is positively sulphurous."
+
+Kent opened the door, entirely missing the point of the sarcasm in his
+heat.
+
+"But you must have some idea," he insisted.
+
+"I haven't; any more than the general one that they won't let the grass
+grow under their feet."
+
+"No. God blast the whole--I wish I could swear in Sanscrit. The
+mother-tongue doesn't begin to do justice to it. Now I know what Bucks
+meant when he told me to take my railroad, _if I could get it_. He had the
+whole thing coopered up in a barrel at that minute."
+
+"I take it you have no alternative to this," said the editor, tapping the
+pile of affidavits.
+
+"Not a cursed shred of an idea! And, Hildreth--" he broke off short
+because once again the subject suddenly grew too large for coherent
+speech.
+
+Hildreth disentangled himself from the legs of his chair and stood up to
+put his hands on Kent's shoulders.
+
+"You are up against it hard, David," he said; and he repeated: "I'd give
+all my old shoes to be able to help you out."
+
+"I know it," said Kent; and then he turned abruptly and went away.
+
+Between nine and ten o'clock the same evening Kent was walking the floor
+of his room, trying vainly to persuade himself that virtue was its own
+reward, and wondering if a small dose of chloral hydrate would be
+defensible under the cruel necessity for sleep. He had about decided in
+favor of the drug when a tap at the door announced the coming of a
+bell-boy with a note. It was a message from Portia.
+
+"If you have thrown away your chance definitely, and are willing to take a
+still more desperate one, come to see me," she wrote; and he went
+mechanically, as a drowning man catches at a straw, knowing it will not
+save him.
+
+The house in Alameda Square was dark when he went up the walk; and while
+he was feeling for the bell-push his summoner called to him out of the
+electric stencilings of leaf shadows under the broad veranda.
+
+"It is too fine a night to stay indoors," she said. "Come and sit in the
+hammock while I scold you as you deserve." And when he had taken the
+hammock: "Now give an account of yourself. Where have you been for the
+past age or two?"
+
+"Wallowing around in the lower depths of the place that Dante visited," he
+admitted.
+
+"Don't you think you deserve a manhandling?"
+
+"I suppose so; and if you have it in mind, I shall probably get it. But I
+may say I'm not especially anxious for a tongue-lashing to-night."
+
+"Poor boy!" she murmured, in mock sympathy. "Does it hurt to be truly
+good?"
+
+"Try it some time when you have a little leisure, and see for yourself,"
+he retorted.
+
+She laughed.
+
+"No; I'll leave that for the Miss Brentwoods. By the way, did you go to
+tell the household good-by? Penelope was wondering audibly what had become
+of you."
+
+"I didn't know they were gone. I have been nowhere since the night you
+drove me out with contumely and opprobrium."
+
+She laughed again.
+
+"You must have dived deep. They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost your
+ghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop. But it
+isn't wonderful that you haven't missed Mr. Ormsby. Having elected Miss
+Brentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further use for the
+P.S.M."
+
+"And you have no further use for me, apparently," he complained. "Did you
+send for me so that you might abuse me in the second edition?"
+
+"No; I wanted to give you a bit of news, and to repeat an old question of
+mine. Do you know what they are going to do next with your railroad?"
+
+"Yes; Hildreth told me this afternoon."
+
+"Well, what are _you_ going to do?"
+
+"Nothing. There is nothing to be done. They have held to the form of legal
+procedure thus far, but they won't do it any more. They will take
+MacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanent
+receiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot. I
+sha'n't be in it."
+
+"Probably not; certainly not if you don't try to get in it. And that
+brings me back to the old question. Are you big enough, David?"
+
+"If you think I haven't been big enough to live up to my opportunities
+thus far, I'm afraid I may disappoint you again," he said doubtfully.
+
+"You have disappointed me," she admitted. "That is why I am asking: I'd
+like to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going to
+trip us again."
+
+"Portia, if I thought you really meant that ... A conscienceless man is
+bad enough, God knows; but a conscienceless woman----"
+
+Her laugh was a decorous little shriek.
+
+"David, you are _not_ big; you are narrow, narrow, _narrow_! Is there then
+no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of
+birth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Is
+it an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal or
+mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan's?"
+
+"You may call it all the hard names you can lay tongue to," he allowed.
+"I'm not getting much comfort out of it, and I rather enjoy hearing it
+abused. But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance. Do you
+know what I did this afternoon?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"I don't know why you shouldn't: you know everything that happens. But
+I'll tell you. I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish and
+back again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and at
+the wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, having
+it in mind to go and give his Excellency a bad quarter of an hour."
+
+"But you didn't do it?"
+
+"No, he saved me the trouble. While I was getting ready to go and hunt
+him, his card came up. We had it out in my rooms."
+
+"I'm listening," she said; and he rehearsed the-facts for her, concealing
+nothing.
+
+"What a curious thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made an
+end. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not
+clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can't
+help admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and the
+courage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting
+scruples of yours go. You have made it perfectly plain that if a thief
+should steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you'd
+compromise with him to get it back. But suppose you should catch him at
+it: would you feel compelled to call a policeman--or would you----"
+
+He anticipated her.
+
+"You are doing me an injustice on the other side, now. I'll fight as
+furiously as you like. All I ask is to be given a weapon that won't bloody
+my hands."
+
+"Good!" she said approvingly. "I think I have found the weapon, but it's
+desperate, desperate! And O David! you've got to have a cool head and a
+steady hand when you use it. If you haven't, it will kill everybody within
+the swing of it--everybody but the man you are trying to reach."
+
+"Draw it and let me feel its edge," he said shortly.
+
+Her chair was close beside the low-swung hammock. She bent to his ear and
+whispered a single sentence. For a minute or two he sat motionless,
+weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftly
+multiplying difficulties and hazards.
+
+"You call it desperate," he said at length; "if there is a bigger word in
+the language, you ought to find it and use it. The risk is that of a
+forlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent--or at
+least ignorant--accomplices I'll have to enlist."
+
+She nodded.
+
+"That is true. But how much is your railroad worth?"
+
+"It is bonded for fifty millions first, and twenty millions second
+mortgage."
+
+"Well, seventy millions are worth fighting for: worth a very considerable
+risk, I should say."
+
+"Yes." And after another thoughtful interval: "How did you come to think
+of it?"
+
+"It grew out of a bit of talk with the man who will have to put the apex
+on our pyramid after we have done our part."
+
+"Will he stand by us? If he doesn't, we shall all be no better than dead
+men the morning after the fact."
+
+She clasped her hands tightly over her knee, and said:
+
+"That is one of the chances we must take, David; one of the many. But it
+is the last of the bridges to be crossed, and there are lots of them in
+between. Are the details possible? That was the part I couldn't go into by
+myself."
+
+He took other minutes for reflection.
+
+"I can't tell," he said doubtfully. "If I could only know how much time we
+have."
+
+Her eyes grew luminous.
+
+"David, what would you do without me?" she asked. "To-morrow night, in
+Stephen Hawk's office in Gaston, you will lose your railroad. MacFarlane
+is there, or if he isn't, he'll be there in the morning. Bucks, Guilford
+and Hawk will go down from here to-morrow evening; and the Overland people
+are to come up from Midland City to meet them."
+
+There was awe undisguised in the look he gave her, and it had crept into
+his voice when he said:
+
+"Portia, are you really a flesh-and-blood woman?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"Meaning that your ancestors would have burned me for a witch? Perhaps
+they would: I think quite likely they burned women who made better
+martyrs. But I didn't have to call in Flibbertigibbet. The programme is a
+carefully guarded secret, to be sure; but it is known--it had to be
+known--to a number of people outside of our friends the enemy. You've
+heard the story of the inventor and his secret, haven't you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, the man had invented something, and he told the secret of it to his
+son. After a little the son wanted to tell it to a friend. The old man
+said, 'Hold on; I know it--that's one'--holding up one finger--'you know
+it--that's eleven'--holding up another finger beside the first; 'and now
+if you tell this other fellow, that'll be one hundred and eleven'--holding
+up three fingers. That is the case with this programme. One of the one
+hundred and eleven--he is a person high up in the management of the
+Overland Short Line--dropped a few words in my hearing and I picked them
+up. That's all."
+
+"It is fearfully short--the time, I mean," he said after another pause.
+"We can't count on any help from any one in authority. Guilford's broom
+has swept the high-salaried official corners clean. But the wage-people
+are mutinous and ripe for anything. I'll go and find out where we stand."
+And he groped on the floor of the veranda for his hat.
+
+"No, wait a minute," she interposed. "We are not quite ready to adjourn
+yet. There remains a little matter of compensation--your compensation--to
+be considered. You are still on the company's payrolls?"
+
+"In a way, yes; as its legal representative on the ground."
+
+"That won't do. If you carry this thing through successfully it must be on
+your own account, and not as the company's paid servant. You must resign
+and make terms with Boston beforehand; and that, too, without telling
+Boston what you propose to do."
+
+He haggled a little at that.
+
+"The company is entitled to my services," he asserted.
+
+"It is entitled to what it pays for--your legal services. But this is
+entirely different. You will be acting upon your own initiative, and
+you'll have to spend money like water at your own risk. You must be free
+to deal with Boston as an outsider."
+
+"But I have no money to spend," he objected.
+
+Again the brown eyes grew luminous; and again she said:
+
+"What would you do without me? Happily, my information came early enough
+to enable me to get a letter to Mr. Ormsby. He answered promptly by wire
+this morning. Here is his telegram."
+
+She had been winding a tightly folded slip of paper around her fingers,
+and she smoothed it out and gave it to him. He held it in a patch of the
+electric light between the dancing leaf shadows and read:
+
+"Plot Number Two approved. Have wired one hundred thousand to Kent's order
+Security Bank. Have him draw as he needs."
+
+"So now you see," she went on, "you have the sinews of war. But you must
+regard it as an advance and name your fee to the Boston folk so you can
+pay it back."
+
+He protested again, rather weakly.
+
+"It looks like extortion; like another graft," he said; and now she lost
+patience with him.
+
+"Of all the Puritan fanatics!" she cried. "If it were a simple commercial
+transaction by which you would save your clients a round seventy million
+dollars, which would otherwise be lost, would you scruple to take a
+proportionate fee?"
+
+"No; certainly not."
+
+"Well, then; you go and tell Mr. Loring to wire his Advisory Board, and to
+do it to-night."
+
+"But I'll have to name a figure," said Kent.
+
+"Of course," she replied.
+
+Kent thought about it for a long minute. Then he said: "I wonder if ten
+thousand dollars, and expenses, would paralyze them?"
+
+Miss Van Brock's comment was a little shriek of derision.
+
+"I knew you'd make difficulties when it came to the paying part of it, and
+since I didn't know, myself, I wired Mr. Ormsby again. Here is what he
+says," and she untwisted a second telegram and read it to him.
+
+"'Fee should not be less than five per cent. of bonded indebtedness;
+four-fifths in stock at par; one-fifth cash; no cure, no pay.'"
+
+"Three million five hundred thousand dollars!" gasped Kent.
+
+"It's only nominally that much," she laughed. "The stock part of it is
+merely your guaranty of good faith: it is worth next to nothing now, and
+it will be many a long day before it goes to par, even if you are
+successful in saving its life. So your magnificent fee shrinks to seven
+hundred thousand dollars, less your expenses."
+
+"But heavens and earth! that's awful!" said Kent.
+
+"Not when you consider it as a surgeon's risk. You happen to be the one
+man who has the idea, and if it isn't carried out, the patient is going to
+die to-morrow night, permanently. You are the specialist in this case, and
+specialists come high. Now you may go and attend to the preliminary
+details, if you like."
+
+He found his hat and stood up. She stood with him; but when he took her
+hand she made him sit down again.
+
+"You have at least three degrees of fever!" she exclaimed; "or is it only
+the three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar shock? What have you been
+doing to yourself?"
+
+"Nothing, I assure you. I haven't been sleeping very well for a few
+nights. But that is only natural."
+
+"And I said you must have a cool head! Will you do exactly as I tell you
+to?"
+
+"If you don't make it too hard."
+
+"Take the car down-town--don't walk--and after you have made Mr. Loring
+send his message to Boston, you go straight to Doctor Biddle. Tell him
+what is the matter with you, and that you need to sleep the clock around."
+
+"But the time!" he protested. "I shall need every hour between now and
+to-morrow night!"
+
+"One clear-headed hour is worth a dozen muddled ones. You do as I say."
+
+"I hate drugs," he said, rising again.
+
+"So do I; but there is a time for everything under the sun. It is a crying
+necessity that you go into this fight perfectly fit and with all your wits
+about you. If you don't, somebody--several somebodies--will land in the
+penitentiary. Will you mind me?"
+
+"Yes," he promised; and this time he got away.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+ON THE HIGH PLAINS
+
+Much to Elinor's relief, and quite as much, perhaps, to Penelope's, Mrs.
+Brentwood tired of Breezeland Inn in less than a fortnight and began to
+talk of returning to the apartment house in the capital.
+
+Pressed to give a reason for her dissatisfaction, the younger sister might
+have been at a loss to account for it in words; but Elinor's desire to cut
+the outing short was based upon pride and militant shame. After many
+trap-settings she had succeeded in making her mother confess that the stay
+at Breezeland was at Ormsby's expense; and not all of Mrs. Brentwood's
+petulant justifyings could remove the sting of the nettle of obligation.
+
+"There is no reason in the world why you should make so much of it: I am
+your mother, and I ought to know," was Mrs. Brentwood's dictum. "You
+wouldn't have any scruples if we were his guests on the _Amphitrite_ or in
+his country house on Long Island."
+
+"That would be different," Elinor contended. "We are not his guests here;
+we are his pensioners."
+
+"Nonsense!" frowned the mother. "Isn't it beginning to occur to you that
+beggars shouldn't be choosers? And, besides, so far as you are concerned,
+you are only anticipating a little."
+
+It was an exceedingly injudicious, not to say brutal way of putting it;
+and the blue-gray eyes flashed fire.
+
+"Can't you see that you are daily making a marriage between us more and
+more impossible?" was the bitter rejoinder. Elinor's _métier_ was cool
+composure under fire, but she was not always able to compass it.
+
+Mrs. Brentwood fanned herself vigorously. She had been aching to have it
+out with this self-willed young woman who was playing fast and loose with
+attainable millions, and the hour had struck.
+
+"What made you break it off with Brookes Ormsby?" she snapped; adding: "I
+don't wonder you were ashamed to tell me about it."
+
+"I did not break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her
+self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place
+to the cool gray blankness which she cultivated.
+
+"That is what Brookes told me, but I didn't believe him," said the mother.
+"It's all wrong, anyway, and I more than half believe David Kent is at the
+bottom of it."
+
+Elinor left her chair and went to the window, which looked down on the
+sanatorium, the ornate parterre, and the crescent driveway. These family
+bickerings were very trying to her, and the longing to escape them was
+sometimes strong enough to override cool reason and her innate sense of
+the fitness of things.
+
+In her moments of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged
+struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and
+more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood. With the
+unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and
+unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals.
+This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it,
+hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were
+tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely
+tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon
+summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock
+was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten how to
+cry.
+
+But into the turmoil of thoughts half indignant, half self-compassionate,
+came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial. She saw, as with a
+sudden gift of retrospection, her mother's long battle with inadequacy,
+and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought
+unselfishly, since she knew her mother's declaration that she could
+contentedly "go back to nothing" was no mere petulant boast. It was for
+her daughters that she had grown thin and haggard and irritable under the
+persistent reverses of fortune; it was for them that she was sinking the
+Grimkie independence in the match-making mother.
+
+The tears in Elinor's eyes were not altogether of self-pity when she put
+her back to the window. Ormsby was coming up the curved driveway in his
+automobile, and she had seen him but dimly through the rising mist of
+emotion.
+
+"Have you set your heart upon this thing, mother?--but I know you have.
+And I--I have tried as I could to be just and reasonable; to you and
+Penelope, and to Brookes Ormsby. He is nobleness itself: it is a shame to
+give him the shadow when he so richly deserves the substance."
+
+She spoke rapidly, almost incoherently; and the mother-love in the woman
+who was careful and troubled about the things that perish put the
+match-maker to the wall. It was almost terrifying to see Elinor, the
+strong-hearted, the self-contained, breaking down like other mothers'
+daughters. So it was the mother who held out her arms, and the daughter
+ran to go down on her knees at the chair-side, burying her face in the lap
+of comforting.
+
+"There, there, Ellie, child; don't cry. It's terrible to hear you sob like
+that," she protested, her own voice shaking in sympathy. "I have been
+thinking only of you and your future, and fearing weakly that you couldn't
+bear the hard things. But we'll bear them together--we three; and I'll
+never say another word about Brookes Ormsby and what might have been."
+
+"O mother! you are making it harder than ever, now," was the tearful
+rejoinder. "I--there is no reason why I should be so obstinate. I haven't
+even the one poor excuse you are making for me down deep in your heart."
+
+"David Kent?" said the mother.
+
+The bowed head nodded a wordless assent.
+
+"I sha'n't say that I haven't suspected him all along, dear. I am afraid I
+have. I have nothing against him. But he is a poor man, Elinor; and we are
+poor, too. You'd be miserably unhappy."
+
+"If he stays poor, it is I who am to blame,"--this most contritely. "He
+had a future before him: the open door was his winning in the railroad
+fight, and I closed it against him."
+
+"You?" said the mother, astonished.
+
+"Yes. I told him he couldn't go on in the way he meant to. I made it a
+matter of conscience; and he--he has turned back when he might have fought
+it out and made a name for himself, and saved us all. And it was such a
+hair-splitting thing! All the world would have applauded him if he had
+gone on; and there was only one woman in all the world to pry into the
+secret places of his soul and stir up the sleeping doubt!"
+
+Now, if all the thrifty, gear-getting "faculty" of the dead and gone
+Grimkies had become thin and diluted and inefficient in this Mrs.
+Hepzibah, last of the name, the strong wine and iron of the blood of
+uprightness had come down to her unstrained.
+
+"Tell me all about it, daughter," she adjured; and when the tale was told,
+she patted the bowed head tenderly and spoke the words of healing.
+
+"You did altogether right, Ellie, dear; I--I am proud of you, daughter.
+And if, as you say, you were the only one to do it, that doesn't matter;
+it was all the more necessary. Are you sure he gave it up?"
+
+Elinor rose and stood with clasped hands beside her mother's chair; a very
+pitiful and stricken half-sister of the self-reliant, dependable young
+woman who had boasted herself the head of the household.
+
+"I have no means of knowing what he has done," she said slowly. "But I
+know the man. He has turned back."
+
+There was a tap at the door and a servant was come to say that Mr. Brookes
+Ormsby was waiting with his auto-car. Was Miss Brentwood nearly ready?
+
+Elinor said, "In a minute," and when the door closed, she made a
+confidante of her mother for the first time since her childhood days.
+
+"I know what you have suspected ever since that summer in New Hampshire,
+and it is true," she confessed. "I do love him--as much as I dare to
+without knowing whether he cares for me. Must I--may I--say yes to Brookes
+Ormsby without telling him the whole truth?"
+
+"Oh, my dear! You couldn't do that!" was the quick reply.
+
+"You mean that I am not strong enough? But I am; and Mr. Ormsby is manly
+enough and generous enough to meet me half-way. Is there any other honest
+thing to do, mother?"
+
+Mrs. Hepzibah shook her head deliberately and determinedly, though she
+knew she was shaking the Ormsby millions into the abyss of the
+unattainable.
+
+"No; it is his just due. But I can't help being sorry for him, Ellie. What
+will you do if he says it doesn't make any difference?"
+
+The blue-gray eyes were downcast.
+
+"I don't know. Having asked so much, and accepted so much from him--it
+shall be as he says, mother."
+
+
+The afternoon had been all that a summer afternoon on the brown highlands
+can be, and the powerful touring car had swept them from mile to mile over
+the dun hills like an earth-skimming dragon whose wing-beat was the
+muffled, explosive thud of the motor.
+
+Through most of the miles Elinor had given herself up to silent enjoyment
+of the rapture of swift motion, and Ormsby had respected her mood, as he
+always did. But when they were on the high hills beyond the mining-camp of
+Megilp, and he had thrown the engines out of gear to brake the car gently
+down the long inclines, there was room for speech.
+
+"This is our last spin together on the high plains, I suppose," he said.
+"Your mother has fixed upon to-morrow for our return to town, hasn't she?"
+
+Elinor confirmed it half-absently. She had been keyed up to face the
+inevitable in this drive with Ormsby, and she was afraid now that he was
+going to break her resolution by a dip into the commonplaces.
+
+"Are you glad or sorry?" he asked.
+
+Her reply was evasive.
+
+"I have enjoyed the thin, clean air and the freedom of the wide horizons.
+Who could help it?"
+
+"But you have not been entirely happy?"
+
+It was on her lips to say some conventional thing about the constant
+jarring note in all human happiness, but she changed it to a simple "No."
+
+"May I try if I can give the reason?"
+
+She made a reluctant little gesture of assent; some such signal of
+acquiescence as Marie Antoinette may have given the waiting headsman.
+
+"You have been afraid every day lest I should begin a second time to press
+you for an answer, haven't you?"
+
+She could not thrust and parry with him. They were past all that.
+
+"Yes," she admitted briefly.
+
+"You break my heart, Elinor," he said, after a long pause. "But"--with a
+sudden tightening of the lips--"I'm not going to break yours."
+
+She understood him, and her eyes filled quickly with the swift shock of
+gratitude.
+
+"If you had made a study of womankind through ten lifetimes instead of a
+part of one, you could not know when and how to strike truer and deeper,"
+she said; and then, softly: "Why can't you make me love you, Brookes?"
+
+He took his foot from the brake-pedal, and for ten seconds the released
+car shot down the slope unhindered. Then he checked the speed and answered
+her.
+
+"A little while ago I should have said I didn't know; but now I do know.
+It is because you love David Kent: you loved him before I had my chance."
+
+She did not deny the principal fact, but she gave him his opportunity to
+set it aside if he could--and would.
+
+"Call it foolish, romantic sentiment, if you like. Is there no way to
+shame me out of it?"
+
+He shook his head slowly.
+
+"You don't mean that."
+
+"But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of
+it."
+
+His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind.
+
+"I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your
+true happiness than I do, or ever shall. And it will be a mighty thankless
+service that that 'some one' will render you."
+
+"But I ought to be whipped and sent to bed," she protested, almost
+tearfully. "Do you know what I have done?--how I have----"
+
+She could not quite put it in words, even for him, and he helped her
+generously, as before.
+
+"I know what Kent hasn't done; which is more to the point. But he will do
+it fast enough if you will give him half a chance."
+
+"No," she said definitively.
+
+"I say yes. One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you
+any time since last autumn: that is a sort of finical loyalty to me. I saw
+how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston--I'm asking
+you to believe that I didn't know it beforeand I saw then that my only
+hope was to make a handfast friend of him. And I did it."
+
+"I believe you can do anything you try to do," she said warmly.
+
+This time his smile was a mere grimace.
+
+"You will have to make one exception, after this; and so shall I. And
+since it is the first of any consequence in all my mounting years, it
+grinds. I can't throw another man out of the window and take his place."
+
+"If you were anything but what you are, you would have thrown him out of
+the window another way," she rejoined.
+
+"That would have been a dago's trick; not a white man's," he asserted. "I
+suppose I might have got in his way and played the dog in the manger
+generally, and you would have stuck to your word and married me, but I am
+not looking for that kind of a winning. I don't mind confessing that I
+played my last card when I released you from your engagement. I said to
+myself: If that doesn't break down the barriers, nothing will."
+
+She looked up quickly.
+
+"You will never know how near it came to doing it, Brookes."
+
+"But it didn't quite?"
+
+"No, it didn't quite."
+
+The brother-smile came again.
+
+"Let's paste that leaf down and turn the other; the one that has David
+Kent's name written, at the top. He is going to succeed all around,
+Elinor; and I am going to help him--for his sake, as well as yours."
+
+"No," she dissented. "He is going to fail; and I am to blame for it."
+
+He looked at her sidewise.
+
+"So you were at the bottom of that, were you? I thought as much, and tried
+to make him admit it, but he wouldn't. What was your reason?"
+
+"I gave it to him: I can't give it to you."
+
+"I guess not," he laughed. "I wasn't born on the right side of the
+Berkshire Hills to appreciate it. But really, you mustn't interfere. As I
+say, we are going to make something of David; and a little conscience--of
+the right old Pilgrim Fathers' brand--goes a long way in politics."
+
+"But you promised me you were not going to spoil him--only it doesn't
+matter; you can't."
+
+Ormsby chuckled openly, and when she questioned "What?" he said:
+
+"I was just wondering what you would say if you knew what he is into now;
+if you could guess, for instance, that his backers have put up a cool
+hundred thousand to be used as he sees fit?"
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed; and there was dismay and sharp disappointment in her
+voice. "You don't mean that he is going to bribe these men?"
+
+"No," he said, relenting. "As a matter of fact, I don't know precisely
+what he is doing with the money, but I guess it is finding its way into
+legitimate channels. I'll make him give me an itemized expense account for
+your benefit when it's all over, if you like."
+
+"It would be kinder to tell me more about it now," she pleaded.
+
+"No; I'll let him have that pleasure, after the fact--if we can get him
+pardoned out before you go back East."
+
+She was silent so long that he stole another sidewise look between his
+snubbings of the brake-pedal. Her face was white and still, like the face
+of one suddenly frost-smitten, and he was instantly self-reproachful.
+
+"Don't look that way," he begged. "It hurts me; makes me feel how heavy my
+hand is when I'm doing my best to make it light. He is trying a rather
+desperate experiment, to be sure, but he is in no immediate personal
+danger. I believe it or I shouldn't be here; I should be with him."
+
+She asked no more questions, being unwilling to tempt him to break
+confidence with Kent. But she was thinking of all the desperate things a
+determined man with temperamental unbalancings might do when the touring
+car rolled noiselessly down the final hill into the single street of
+Megilp.
+
+There was but one vehicle in the street at the moment; a freighter's
+ore-wagon drawn by a team of mules, meekest and most shambling-prosaic of
+their tribe. The motor-car was running on the spent velocity of the
+descent, and Ormsby thought to edge past without stopping. But at the
+critical instant the mules gave way to terror, snatched the heavy wagon
+into the opposite plank walk, and tried to climb a near-by telephone pole.
+Ormsby put his foot on the brake and something snapped under the car.
+
+"What was that?" Elinor asked; and Ormsby got down to investigate.
+
+"It is our brake connection," he announced, after a brief inspection. "And
+we are five good miles from Hudgins and his repair kit."
+
+A ring of town idlers was beginning to form about them. An automobile was
+still enough of a rarity in the mining-camp to draw a crowd.
+
+"Busted?" inquired one of the onlookers.
+
+Ormsby nodded, and asked if there were a machinist in the camp.
+
+"Yep," said the spokesman; "up at the Blue Jay mine."
+
+"Somebody go after him," suggested Ormsby, flipping a coin; and a boy
+started on a run.
+
+The waiting was a little awkward. The ringing idlers were good-natured but
+curious. Ormsby stood by and answered questions multiform, diverting
+curiosity from the lady to the machine. Presently the spokesman said:
+
+"Is this here the steam-buggy that helped a crowd of you fellers to get
+away from Jud Byers and his posse one day a spell back?"
+
+"No," said Ormsby. Then he remembered the evening of small surprises--the
+racing tally-ho with the Inn auto-car to help; and, more pointedly now,
+the singular mirage effect in the lengthening perspective as the
+east-bound train shot away from Agua Caliente.
+
+"What was the trouble that day?" he asked, putting in a question on his
+side.
+
+"A little ruction up at the Twin Sisters. There was a furss, an' a gun
+went off, accidintally on purpose killin' Jim Harkins," was the reply.
+
+The machinist was come from the Blue Jay, and Ormsby helped Elinor out of
+her seat while the repairs were making. The town office of the Blue Jay
+was just across the street, and he took her there and begged house-room
+and a chair for her, making an excuse that he must go and see to the
+brake-mending.
+
+But once outside he promptly stultified himself, letting the repairs take
+care of themselves while he went in search of one Jud Byers. The deputy
+sheriff was not hard to find. Normally and in private life he was the
+weigher for the Blue Jay; and Ormsby was directed to the scale shanty
+which served as the weigher's office.
+
+The interview was brief and conclusive; was little more than a rapid fire
+of question and answer; and for the greater part the sheriff's
+affirmatives were heartily eager. Yes, certainly; if the thing could be
+brought to pass, he, Byers, would surely do his part. All he asked was an
+hour or two in which to prepare.
+
+"You shall have all the time there is," was the reply. "Have you a Western
+Union wire here?"
+
+"No; nothing but the railroad office."
+
+"That won't do; they'd stop the message. How about the Inn?"
+
+"Breezeland has a Western Union all right; wire your notice there, and
+I'll fix to have it 'phoned over. I don't believe it can be worked,
+though," added the deputy, doubtfully.
+
+"We can't tell till we try," said Ormsby; and he hurried back to his car
+to egg on the machinist with golden promises contingent upon haste.
+
+Miss Brentwood found her companion singularly silent on the five-mile race
+to Breezeland; but the lightning speed at which he drove the car put
+conversation out of the question. At the hotel he saw her into the lift
+with decent deliberation; but the moment she was off his hands he fairly
+ran to the telegrapher's alcove in the main hall.
+
+"Have you a Western Union wire to the capital direct?" he inquired.
+
+The young man snapped his key and said he had.
+
+"It has no connection with the Trans-Western railroad offices?"
+
+"None whatever."
+
+Ormsby dashed off a brief message to Kent, giving three or four addresses
+at which he might be found.
+
+"Send that, and have them try the Union Station train platform first.
+Don't let them spare expense at the other end, and if you can bring proof
+of delivery to Room 261 within half an hour, it means a month's pay to
+you, individually. Can you do it?"
+
+But the operator was already claiming the wire, writing "deth," "deth,"
+"deth," as rapidly as his fingers could shake off the dots and dashes.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+BY ORDER OF THE COURT
+
+Between the hours of eight-thirty and ten P.M. the Union Passenger Station
+at the capital presents a moving and spirited spectacle. Within the hour
+and a half, four through and three local trains are due to leave, and the
+space within the iron grille that fences off the track platforms from the
+public part of the station is filled with hurrying throngs of
+train-takers.
+
+Down at the outer end of the train-shed the stuttering pop-valves of the
+locomotives, the thunderous trundling of the heavy baggage trucks, and the
+shrill, monotonous chant of the express messengers checking in their
+cargoes, lift a din harmonious to the seasoned traveler; a medley softened
+and distance-diminished for those that crowd upon the gate-keepers at the
+iron grille.
+
+It was the evening of the last day in the month; the day when the
+Federative Council of Railway Workers had sent its ultimatum to Receiver
+Guilford. The reduction in wages was to go into effect at midnight: if, by
+midnight, the order had not been rescinded, and the way opened for a joint
+conference touching the removal of certain obnoxious officials, a general
+strike and tie-up would be ordered. Trains in transit carrying passengers
+or United States mail would be run to their respective destinations;
+trains carrying perishable freight would be run to division stations: with
+these exceptions all labor would cease promptly on the stroke of twelve.
+
+Such was the text of the ultimatum, a certified copy of which Engineer
+Scott had delivered in person into the hands of the receiver at noon.
+
+It was now eight forty-five P.M. The east-bound night express was ready
+for the run to A. & T. Junction; the fast mail, one hour and thirty-five
+minutes late from the east, was backing in on track nine to take on the
+city mail. On track eight, pulled down so that the smoke from the engine
+should not foul the air of the train-shed, the receiver's private car,
+with the 1010 for motive power and "Red" Callahan in the cab, had been
+waiting since seven o'clock for the order to run special to Gaston. And as
+yet the headquarters office had made no sign; sent no word of reply to the
+strike notice.
+
+Griggs was on for the night run eastward with the express; and "Dutch"
+Tischer had found himself slated to take the fast mail west. The change of
+engines on the mail had been effected at the shops; and when Tischer
+backed his train in on track nine his berth was beside the 1010. Callahan
+swung down from his cab and climbed quickly to that of the mail engine.
+
+"Annything new at the shops, Dutchy?" he inquired.
+
+"I was not somet'ings gehearing, _nein_. You was dot _Arkoos_ newsbaper
+dis evening _schen_? He says nodings too, alretty, about dot strike."
+
+"Divil a worrd. Ye might think Scotty'd handed the major a bit av blank
+paper f'r all the notice he's taking. More thin that, he's lavin' town,
+wid me to pull him. The Naught-seven's to run special to Gaston--bad cess
+to ut!"
+
+"Vell, I can'd hellup id," said the phlegmatic Bavarian. "I haf the mail
+and egspress got, and I go mit dem t'rough to Pighorn. You haf der brivate
+car got, and you go mit dem t'rough to Gaston. Den ve qvits, ain'd it?"
+
+Callahan nodded and dropped to the platform. But before he could mount to
+the foot-board of the 1010, M'Tosh collared him.
+
+"Patsy, I have your orders, at last. Your passengers will be down in a few
+minutes, and you are to pull out ahead of the express."
+
+"Is it to Gaston I'm goin', Misther M'Tosh?"
+
+The fireman was standing by with the oil can and torch, ready to
+Callahan's hand, and the train-master drew the engineer aside.
+
+"Shovel needn't hear," he said in explanation. And then: "Are you willing
+to stand with us, Patsy? You've had time enough to think it over."
+
+Callahan stood with his arms folded and his cap drawn down over his eyes.
+
+"'Tis not f'r meself I'm thinkin', Misther M'Tosh, as ye well know. But
+I'm a widdy man; an' there's the bit colleen in the convint."
+
+"She'll be well cared for, whatever happens to you," was the quick reply.
+
+"Thin I'm yer man," said Callahan; and when the train-master was gone, he
+ordered Shovel to oil around while he did two or three things which, to an
+initiated onlooker, might have seemed fairly inexplicable. First he
+disconnected the air-hose between the car and the engine, tying the ends
+up with a stout cord so that the connection would not seem to be broken.
+Next he crawled under the Naught-seven and deliberately bled the air-tank,
+setting the cock open a mere hair's-breadth so that it would leak slowly
+but surely until the pressure was entirely gone.
+
+Then he got a hammer and sledge out of the engine tool-box, and after
+hooking up the safety-chain couplings between the private car and the
+1010, he crippled the points of the hooks with the hammer so that they
+could not be disengaged without the use of force and the proper tools.
+
+"There ye are, ye ould divil's band-wagon," he said, apostrophizing the
+private car when his work was done. "Ye'll ride this night where Patsy
+Callahan dhrives, an' be dommed to ye."
+
+Meanwhile the train-master had reached the iron grille at the other end of
+the long track platform. At a small wicket used by the station employees
+and trainmen, Kent was waiting for him.
+
+"Is it all right, M'Tosh? Will he do it?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"Yes, Patsy's game for it; I knew he would be. He'd put his neck in a rope
+to spite the major. But it's a crazy thing, Mr. Kent."
+
+"I know it; but if it will give me twenty-four hours--"
+
+"It won't. They can't get home on our line because we'll be tied up. But
+they can get the Naught-seven put on the Overland's Limited at A. & T.
+Junction, and that will put them back here before you've had time to turn
+around twice. Have they come down yet?"
+
+"No," said Kent; and just then he saw Loring coming in from the street
+entrance and went to meet him.
+
+"I have the final word from Boston," said the ex-manager, when he had
+walked Kent out of earshot of the train-takers. "Your terms are
+accepted--with all sorts of safeguards thrown about the 'no cure, no pay'
+proviso; also with a distinct repudiation of you and your scheme if there
+is anything unlawful afoot. Do you still think it best to keep me in the
+dark as to what you are doing?"
+
+"Yes; there are enough of us involved, as it stands. You couldn't help;
+and you might hinder. Besides, if the mine should happen to explode in our
+direction it'll be a comfort to have a foot-loose friend or two on the
+outside to pick up the pieces of us."
+
+Loring was polishing his eye-glasses with uncommon vigor.
+
+"I wish you'd drop it, David, if it isn't too late. I can't help feeling
+as if I had prodded you into it, whatever it is."
+
+Kent linked arms with him and led him back to the street entrance.
+
+"Go away, Grantham, and don't come back again," he commanded. "Then you
+can swear truthfully that you didn't know anything about it. It is too
+late to interfere, and you are not responsible for me. Go up to see
+Portia; she'll keep you interested while you wait."
+
+When Loring was gone, Kent went back to the wicket in the grille; but
+M'Tosh, who was always a busy man at train-time, had disappeared again.
+
+It was a standing mystery to the train-master, and to the rank and file,
+why Receiver Guilford had elected to ignore the fact that he was within
+three hours of a strike which promised to include at least four-fifths of
+his operatives; had taken no steps for defense, and had not confided, as
+it appeared, in the members of his own official staff.
+
+But Kent was at no loss to account for the official silence. If the secret
+could be kept for a few hours longer, the junto would unload the
+Trans-Western, strike, tie-up and general demoralization, upon an
+unsuspecting Overland management.
+
+None the less, there were other things unexplainable even to Kent; for
+one, this night flitting to Gaston to put the finishing touch on an
+edifice of fraud which had been builded shamelessly in the light of day.
+
+Kent had not the key to unlock this door of mystery; but here the master
+spirit of the junto was doing, not what he would, but what he could. The
+negotiations for the lease had consumed much time at a crisis when time
+was precious. Judge MacFarlane had to be recalled and once more bullied
+into subjection; and Falkland, acting for the Plantagould interest, had
+insisted upon some formal compliance with the letter of the law.
+
+Bucks had striven masterfully to drive and not be driven; but the delays
+were inexorable, and the impending strike threatened to turn the orderly
+charge into a rout. The governor had postponed the _coup_ from day to day,
+waiting upon the leisurely movements of Falkland; and at the end of the
+ends there remained but three hours of the final day of grace when the
+telegram came from Falkland with the welcome news that the Overland
+officials were on their way from Midland City to keep the appointment in
+Gaston.
+
+Of all this Kent knew nothing, and was anxious in just proportion as the
+minutes elapsed and the time for the departure of the east-bound express
+drew near. For the success of the desperate venture turned upon this: that
+the receiver's special must leave ahead of the passenger train. With the
+express blocking the way the difficulties became insurmountable.
+
+Kent was still standing at the trainmen's wicket when Callahan sent the
+private car gently up to the trackhead of track eight. M'Tosh had been
+telephoning again, and the receiver and his party were on the way to the
+station.
+
+"I was afraid you'd have to let the express go first," said Kent, when the
+train-master came his way again. "How much time have we?"
+
+"Five minutes more; and they are on the way down--there they come."
+
+Kent looked and saw a group of six men making for the nearest exit in the
+grille. Then he smote his fist into his palm.
+
+"Damn!" he muttered; "they've got the vice-president of the Overland with
+them! That's bad."
+
+"It's bad for Mr. Callafield," growled M'Tosh. "We're in too deep now to
+back down on his account."
+
+Kent moved nearer and stood in the shadow of the gate-keeper's box,
+leaving M'Tosh, who was on the track platform, free to show himself. From
+his new point of espial Kent checked off the members of the party. When
+Major Guilford left it to come back for a word with M'Tosh, there were
+five others: the governor, his private secretary, Hawk, Halkett, the
+general superintendent, and the Overland's vice-president.
+
+"All ready, M'Tosh?" said the receiver.
+
+"Ready and waiting, Major," was the bland reply.
+
+"Who is our engineer?"
+
+"Patrick Callahan."
+
+"That wild Irishman? The governor says he'd as soon ride behind the
+devil."
+
+"Callahan will get you there," said the train-master, with deliberate
+emphasis. Then he asked a question of his own. "Is Mr. Callafield going
+with you?"
+
+"No. He came down to see us off. How is the fast mail to-night?"
+
+"She's just in--an hour and thirty-five minutes late."
+
+The major swore pathetically. He was of the generation of railway
+officials, happily fast passing, which cursed and swore itself into
+authority.
+
+"That's another five hundred dollars' forfeit to the Post-office
+Department! Who's taking it west?"
+
+"Tischer."
+
+"Give him orders to cut out all the stops. If he is more than fifty-five
+minutes late at Bighorn, he can come in and get his time."
+
+Tischer had just got the word to go, and was pulling out on the yard main
+line.
+
+"I'll catch him with the wire at yard limits," said M'Tosh. Then: "Would
+you mind hurrying your people a little, Major? The express is due to
+leave."
+
+Guilford was a heavy man for his weight, and he waddled back to the
+others, waving his arms as a signal for them to board the car.
+
+Kent saw the vice-president of the Overland Short Line shake hands with
+Bucks and take his leave, and was so intent upon watching the tableau of
+departure that he failed to notice the small boy in Western Union blue who
+was trying to thrust a telegram, damp from the copying rolls, into his
+hand.
+
+"It's a rush, sir," said the boy, panting from his quick dash across the
+track platforms.
+
+It was Ormsby's message from Breezeland; and while Kent was trying to
+grasp the tremendous import of it, M'Tosh was giving Callahan the signal
+to go. Kent sprang past the gate-keeper and gave the square of damp paper
+to the train-master.
+
+"My God! read that!" he gasped, with a dry sob of excitement. "It was our
+chance--one chance in a million--and we've lost it!"
+
+M'Tosh was a man for a crisis. The red tail-lights of the private-car
+special were yet within a sprinter's dash of the trackhead, but the
+train-master lost no time chasing a ten-wheel flyer with "Red" Callahan at
+the throttle.
+
+"Up to my office!" he shouted; and ten seconds later Kent was leaning
+breathless over the desk in the despatcher's room while M'Tosh called
+Durgan over the yard limits telephone.
+
+"Is that you, Durgan?" he asked, when the reply came. Then: "Drop the
+board on the mail, quick! and send somebody to tell Tischer to side-track,
+leaving the main line Western Division clear. Got that?"
+
+The answer was evidently prompt and satisfactory, since he began again
+almost in the same breath.
+
+"Now go out yourself and flag Callahan before he reaches the limits. Tell
+him the time-card's changed and he is to run _west_ with the special to
+Megilp as first section of the mail--no stops, or Tischer will run him
+down. Leg it! He's half-way down the yard, now!"
+
+The train-master dropped the ear-piece of the telephone and crossed
+quickly to the despatcher's table.
+
+"Orders for the Western Division, Donohue," he said curtly, "and don't let
+the grass grow. 'Receiver's car, Callahan, engineer, runs to Megilp as
+first section of fast mail. Fast mail, Hunt, conductor; Tischer, engineer;
+runs to the end of the division without stop, making up all time
+possible.' Add to that last, 'By order of the receiver.'"
+
+The orders were sent as swiftly as the despatcher could rattle them off on
+his key; and then followed an interval of waiting more terrible than a
+battle. Kent tried to speak, but his lips were parched and his tongue was
+like a dry stick between his teeth. What was doing in the lower yard?
+Would Durgan fail at the pinch and mismanage it so as to give the alarm?
+The minutes dragged leaden-winged, and even the sounders on the
+despatcher's table were silent.
+
+Suddenly the clicking began again. The operator at "yard limits" was
+sending the O.K. to the two train orders. So far, so good. Now if Callahan
+could get safely out on the Western Division...
+
+But there was a hitch in the lower yard. Durgan had obeyed his orders
+promptly and precisely, and had succeeded in stopping Callahan at the
+street-crossing where Engineer Dixon had killed the farmer. Durgan climbed
+to the cab of the 1010, and the changed plan was explained in a dozen
+words. But now came the crux.
+
+"If I stand here till you'd be bringin' me my orders, I'll have the whole
+kit av thim buzzin' round to know fwhat's the matther," said Callahan; but
+there was no other thing to do, and Durgan hurried back to the telegraph
+office to play the messenger.
+
+He was too long about it. Before he got back, Halkett was under the cab
+window of the 1010, demanding to know--with many objurgations--why
+Callahan had stopped in the middle of the yards.
+
+"Get a move on you!" he shouted. "The express is right behind us, and
+it'll run us down, you damned bog-trotter!"
+
+Callahan's gauntleted hand shot up to the throttle-bar.
+
+"I'm l'avin', Misther Halkett," he said mildly. "Will yez go back to the
+car, or ride wit' me?"
+
+The general superintendent took no chance of catching the Naught-seven's
+hand-rails in the darkness, and he whipped up into the cab at the first
+sharp cough of the exhaust.
+
+"I'll go back when you stop for your orders," he said; but a shadowy
+figure had leaped upon the engine-step a scant half-second behind him, and
+Callahan was stuffing the crumpled copy of the order into the sweat-band
+of his cap. The next instant the big 1010 leaped forward like a blooded
+horse under an unmerited cut of the whip, slid past the yard limits
+telegraph office and shot out upon the main line of the Western Division.
+
+"Sit down, Misther Halkett, an' make yerself aisy!" yelled Callahan across
+the cab. "'Tis small use Jimmy Shovel'll have for his box this night."
+
+"Shut off, you Irish madman!" was the shouted command. "Don't you see
+you're on the wrong division?"
+
+Callahan gave the throttle-bar another outward hitch, tipped his seat and
+took a hammer from the tool-box.
+
+"I know where I'm goin', an' that's more thin you know, ye blandhanderin'
+divil! Up on that box wit' you, an' kape out av Jimmy Shovel's road, or
+I'll be the death av yez! Climb, now!"
+
+It was at this moment that the tense strain of suspense was broken in the
+despatcher's room on the second floor of the Union Station. The telephone
+skirled joyously, and the train-master snatched up the ear-piece.
+
+"What does he say?" asked Kent.
+
+"It's all right. He says Callahan is out on the Western Division, with
+Tischer chasing him according to programme. Halkett's in the cab of the
+1010 with Patsy, and--hold on--By George! he says one of them jumped the
+car as it was passing the limits station!"
+
+"Which one was it?" asked Kent; and he had to wait till the reply came
+from Durgan.
+
+"It was Hawk, the right-of-way man. He broke and ran for the nearest
+electric-car line the minute he hit the ground, Durgan says. Does he
+count?"
+
+"No," said Kent; but it is always a mistake to under-rate an enemy's
+caliber--even that of his small arms.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+THE NIGHT OF ALARMS
+
+If Editor Hildreth had said nothing in his evening edition about the
+impending strike on the Trans-Western, it was not because public interest
+was waning. For a fortnight the newspapers in the territory tributary to
+the road had been full of strike talk, and Hildreth had said his say,
+deprecating the threatened appeal to force as fearlessly as he condemned
+the mismanagement which was provoking it.
+
+But it was Kent who was responsible for the dearth of news on the eve of
+the event. Early in the morning of the last day of the month he had sought
+out the editor and begged him to close the columns of the _Evening Argus_
+to strike news, no matter what should come in during the course of the
+day.
+
+"I can't go into the reasons as deeply now as I hope to a little later,"
+he had said, his secretive habit holding good to the final fathom of the
+slipping hawser of events. "But you must bear with me once more, and
+whatever you hear between now and the time you go to press, don't comment
+on it. I have one more chance to win out, and it hangs in a balance that a
+feather's weight might tip the wrong way. I'll be with you between ten and
+twelve to-night, and you can safely save two columns of the morning paper
+for the sensation I'm going to give you."
+
+It was in fulfilment of this promise that Kent bestirred himself after he
+had sent a wire to Ormsby, and M'Tosh had settled down to the task of
+smoothing Callahan's way westward over a division already twitching in the
+preliminary rigor of the strike convulsion.
+
+"I am going to set the fuse for the newspaper explosion," he said to his
+ally. "Barring accidents, there is no reason why we shouldn't begin to
+figure definitely upon the result, is there?"
+
+M'Tosh was leaning over Despatcher Donohue's shoulder. He had slipped
+Donohue's fingers aside from the key to cut in with a peremptory "G.S."
+order suspending, in favor of the fast mail, the rule which requires a
+station operator to drop his board on a following section that is less
+than ten minutes behind its file-leader.
+
+"The fun is beginning," said the train-master. "Tischer has his tip from
+Durgan to keep Callahan's tail-lights in sight. With the mail treading on
+their heels the gentlemen in the Naught-seven will be chary about pulling
+Patsy down too suddenly in mid career. They have just passed Morning Dew,
+and the operator reports Tischer for disregarding his slow signal."
+
+"Can't you fix that?" asked Kent.
+
+"Oh, yes; that is one of the things I can fix. But there are going to be
+plenty of others."
+
+"Still we must take something for granted, Mr. M'Tosh. What I have to do
+up-town won't wait until Callahan has finished his run. I thought the main
+difficulty was safely overcome."
+
+"Umph!" said the train-master; "the troubles are barely getting themselves
+born. You must remember that we swapped horses at the last minute. We were
+ready for the race to the east. Everybody on the Prairie Division had been
+notified that a special was to go through to-night without stop from
+Lesterville to A. & T. Junction."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Now we have it all to straighten out by wire on another division; meeting
+points to make, slow trains to side-track, fool operators to hold down;
+all on the dizzy edge of a strike that is making every man on the line
+lose his balance. But you go ahead with your newspaper business. I'll do
+what a man can here. And if you come across that right-of-way agent, I
+wish you'd make it a case of assault and battery and get him locked up.
+I'm leery about him."
+
+Kent went his way dubiously reflective. In the moment of triumph, when
+Durgan had announced the success of the bold change in the programme, he
+had made light of Hawk's escape. But now he saw possibilities. True, the
+junto was leaderless for the moment, and Bucks had no very able
+lieutenants. But Hawk would give the alarm; and there was the rank and
+file of the machine to reckon with. And for weapons, the ring controlled
+the police power of the State and of the city. Let the word be passed that
+the employees of the Trans-Western were kidnapping their receiver and the
+governor, and many things might happen before "Red" Callahan should finish
+his long race to the westward.
+
+Thinking of these things, David Kent walked up-town when he might have
+taken a car. When the toxin of panic is in the air there is no antidote
+like vigorous action.
+
+Passing the Western Union central office, he stopped to send Ormsby a
+second telegram, reporting progress and asking him to be present in person
+at the dénouement to put the facts on the wire at the earliest possible
+instant of time. "Everything depends upon this," he added, when he had
+made the message otherwise emphatic. "If we miss the morning papers, we
+are done."
+
+While he was pocketing his change at the receiving clerk's pigeon-hole, a
+cab rattled up with a horse at a gallop, and Stephen Hawk sprang out. Kent
+saw him through the plate-glass front and turned quickly to the public
+writing-desk, hoping to be overlooked. He was. For once in a way the
+ex-district attorney was too nearly rattled to be fully alert to his
+surroundings. There were others at the standing desk; and Hawk wrote his
+message, after two or three false starts, almost at Kent's elbow.
+
+Kent heard the chink of coin and the low-spoken urgings for haste at the
+receiving clerk's window; but he forbore to move until the cab had rattled
+away. Then he gathered up the spoiled blanks left behind by Hawk and
+smoothed them out. Two of them bore nothing but the date line, made
+illegible, it would seem, by the writer's haste and nervousness. But at
+the third attempt Hawk had got as far as the address: "To All
+Trans-Western agents on Western Division."
+
+Kent stepped quickly to the receiver's window. The only expedient he could
+think of was open to reproach, but it was no time to be over-scrupulous.
+
+"Pardon me," he began, "but didn't the gentleman who was just here forget
+to sign his message?"
+
+The little hook caught its minnow. The receiving clerk was folding Hawk's
+message to place it in the leather carrier of the pneumatic tube, but he
+opened and examined it.
+
+"No," he said; "it's signed all right: 'J.B. Halkett, G.S.'"
+
+"Ah!" said Kent. "That's a little odd. Mr. Halkett is out of town, and
+this gentleman, Mr. Hawk, is not in his department. I believe I should
+investigate a little before sending that, if I were you."
+
+Having thus sown the small seed of suspicion, which, by the by, fell on
+barren soil, Kent lost no time in calling up M'Tosh over the nearest
+telephone.
+
+"Do our agents on the Western Division handle Western Union business?" he
+asked.
+
+The reply came promptly.
+
+"Yes; locally. The W-U. has an independent line to Breezeland Inn and
+points beyond."
+
+"Well, our right-of-way man has just sent a telegram to all agents,
+signing Halkett's name. I don't know what he said in it, but you can
+figure that out for yourself."
+
+"You bet I can!" was the emphatic rejoinder. And then: "Where are you
+now?"
+
+"I'm at the Clarendon public 'phone, but I am going over to the _Argus_
+office. I'll let you know when I leave there. Good-by."
+
+When Kent reached the night editor's den on the third floor of the _Argus_
+building he found Hildreth immersed chin-deep in a sea of work. But he
+quickly extricated himself and cleared a chair for his visitor.
+
+"Praise be!" he ejaculated. "I was beginning to get anxious. Large things
+are happening, and you didn't turn up. I've had Manville wiring all over
+town for you."
+
+"What are some of the large things?" asked Kent, lighting his first cigar
+since dinner.
+
+"Well, for one: do you know that your people are on the verge of the
+much-talked-of strike?"
+
+"Yes; I knew it this morning. That was what I wanted you to suppress in
+the evening edition."
+
+"I suppressed it all right; I didn't know it--day and date, I mean. They
+kept it beautifully quiet. But that isn't all. Something is happening at
+the capitol. I was over at the club a little while ago, and Hendricks was
+there. Somebody sent in a note, and he positively ran to get out. When I
+came back, I sent Rogers over to Cassatti's to see if he could find you.
+There was a junto dinner confab on; Meigs, Senator Crowley, three or four
+of the ring aldermen and half a dozen wa-ward politicians. Rogers has a
+nose for news, and when he had 'phoned me you weren't there, he hung
+around on the edges."
+
+"Good men you have, Hildreth. What did the unimpeachable Rogers see?"
+
+"He saw on a large scale just what I had seen on a small one: somebody
+pup-passed a note in, and when it had gone the round of the dinner-table
+those fellows tumbled over each other trying to get away."
+
+"Is that all?" Kent inquired.
+
+"No. Apart from his nose, Rogers is gifted with horse sense. When the
+dinner crowd boarded an up-town car, our man paid fare to the same
+conductor. He wired me from the Hotel Brunswick a few minutes ago. There
+is some sort of a caucus going on in Hendricks' office in the capitol, and
+mum-messengers are flying in all directions."
+
+"And you wanted me to come and tell you all the whys and wherefores?" Kent
+suggested.
+
+"I told the chief I'd bet a bub-blind horse to a broken-down mule you
+could do it if anybody could."
+
+"All right; listen: something worse than an hour ago the governor, his
+private secretary, Guilford, Hawk and Halkett started out on a special
+train to go to Gaston."
+
+"What for?" interrupted the editor.
+
+"To meet Judge MacFarlane, Mr. Semple Falkland, and the Overland
+officials. You can guess what was to be done?"
+
+"Sure. Your railroad was to be sold out, lock, stock and barrel; or leased
+to the Overland for ninety-nine years--which amounts to the same thing."
+
+"Precisely. Well, by some unaccountable mishap the receiver's special was
+switched over to the Western Division at yard limits, and the engineer
+seems to think he has orders to proceed westward. At all events, that is
+what he is doing. And the funny part of it is that he can't stop to find
+out his blunder. The fast mail is right behind him, with the receiver's
+order to smash anything that gets in its way; so you see--"
+
+"That will do," said the night editor. "We don't print fairy stories in
+the _Argus_."
+
+"None the less, you are going to print this one to-morrow morning, just as
+I'm telling it to you," Kent asserted confidently. "And when you get the
+epilogue you will say that it makes my little preface wearisome by
+contrast."
+
+The light was slowly dawning in the editorial mind.
+
+"My heaven!" he exclaimed. "Kent, you're good for twenty years, at the
+very lul-least!"
+
+"Am I? It occurs to me that the prosecuting attorney in the case will have
+a hard time proving anything. Doesn't it look that way to you? At the
+worst, it is only an unhappy misunderstanding of orders. And if the end
+should happen to justify the means----"
+
+Hildreth shook his head gravely.
+
+"You don't understand, David. If you could be sure of a fair-minded judge
+and an unbiased jury--you and those who are implicated with you: but
+you'll get neither in this machine-ridden State."
+
+"We are going to have both, after you have filled your two columns--by the
+way, you are still saving those two columns for me, aren't you?--in
+to-morrow morning's _Argus_. Or rather, I'm hoping there will be no need
+for either judge or jury."
+
+The night editor shook his head again, and once more he said, "My heaven!"
+adding: "What could you possibly hope to accomplish? You'll get the
+receiver and his big boss out of the State for a few minutes, or possibly
+for a few hours, if your strike makes them hunt up another railroad to
+return on. But what will it amount to? Getting rid of the receiver doesn't
+annul the decree of the court."
+
+Kent fell back on his secretive habit yet once again.
+
+"I don't care to anticipate the climax, Hildreth. By one o'clock one of
+two things will have happened: you'll get a wire that will make your back
+hair sit up, or I'll get one that will make me wish I'd never been born.
+Let it rest at that for the present; you have work enough on hand to fill
+up the interval, and if you haven't, you can distribute those affidavits I
+gave you among the compositors and get them into type. I want to see them
+in the paper to-morrow morning, along with the other news."
+
+"Oh, we can't do that, David! The time isn't ripe. You know what I told
+you about----"
+
+"If the time doesn't ripen to-night, Hildreth, it never will. Do as I tell
+you, and get that stuff into type. Do more; write the hottest editorial
+you can think of, demanding to know if it isn't time for the people to
+rise and clean out this stable once for all."
+
+"By Jove! David, I've half a mum-mind to do it. If you'd only unbutton
+yourself a little, and let me see what my backing is going to be----"
+
+"All in good season," laughed Kent. "Your business for the present moment
+is to write; I'm going down to the Union Station."
+
+"What for?" demanded the editor.
+
+"To see if our crazy engineer is still mistaking his orders properly."
+
+"Hold on a minute. How did the enemy get wind of your plot so quickly? You
+can tell me that, can't you?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I told you Hawk was one of the party in the private car. He fell
+off at the yard limits station and came back to town."
+
+The night editor stood up and confronted his visitor.
+
+"David, you are either the coolest plunger that ever drew breath--or the
+bub-biggest fool. I wouldn't be standing in your shoes to-night for two
+such railroads as the T-W."
+
+Kent laughed again and opened the door.
+
+"I suppose not. But you know there is no accounting for the difference in
+tastes. I feel as if I had never really lived before this night; the only
+thing that troubles me is the fear that somebody or something will get in
+the way of my demented engineer."
+
+He went out into the hall, but as Hildreth was closing the door he turned
+back.
+
+"There is one other thing that I meant to say: when you get your two
+columns of sensation, you've got to be decent and share with the
+Associated Press."
+
+"I'm dud-dashed if I do!" said Hildreth, fiercely.
+
+"Oh, yes, you will; just the bare facts, you know. You'll have all the
+exciting details for an 'exclusive,' to say nothing of the batch of
+affidavits in the oil scandal. And it is of the last importance to me that
+the facts shall be known to-morrow morning wherever the Associated has a
+wire."
+
+"Go away!" said the editor, "and dud-don't come back here till you can
+uncork yourself like a man and a Cuc-Christian! Go off, I say!"
+
+It wanted but a few minutes of eleven when Kent mounted the stair to the
+despatcher's room in the Union Station. He found M'Tosh sitting at
+Donohue's elbow, and the sounders on the glass-topped table were crackling
+like overladen wires in an electric storm.
+
+"Strike talk," said the train-master. "Every man on both divisions wants
+to know what's doing. Got your newspaper string tied up all right?"
+
+Kent made a sign of assent.
+
+"We are waiting for Mr. Patrick Callahan. Any news from him?"
+
+"Plenty of it. Patsy would have a story to tell, all right, if he could
+stop to put it on the wires. Durgan ought to have caught that blamed
+right-of-way man and chloroformed him."
+
+"I found him messing, as I 'phoned you. Anything come of it?"
+
+"Nothing fatal, I guess, since Patsy is still humping along. But Hawk's
+next biff was more to the purpose. He came down here with Halkett's chief
+clerk, whom he had hauled out of bed, and two policemen. The plan was to
+fire Donohue and me, and put Bicknell in charge. It might have worked if
+Bicknell'd had the sand. But he weakened at the last minute; admitted that
+he wasn't big enough to handle the despatcher's trick. The way Hawk cursed
+him out was a caution to sinners."
+
+"When was this?" Kent asked.
+
+"Just a few minutes ago. Hawk went off ripping; swore he would find
+somebody who wasn't afraid to take the wires. And, between us three, I'm
+scared stiff for fear he will."
+
+"Can it be done?"
+
+"Dead easy, if he knows how to go about it--and Bicknell will tell him.
+The Overland people don't love us any too well, and if they did, the lease
+deal would make them side with Guilford and the governor. If Hawk asks
+them to lend him a train despatcher for a few minutes, they'll do it."
+
+"But the union?" Kent objected.
+
+"They have three or four non-union men."
+
+"Still, Hawk has no right to discharge you."
+
+"Bicknell has. He is Halkett's representative, and----"
+
+The door opened suddenly and Hawk danced in, followed by a man bareheaded
+and in his shirt-sleeves, the superintendent's chief clerk, and the two
+officers.
+
+"Now, then, we'll trouble you and your man to get out of here, Mr.
+M'Tosh," said the captain of the junto forces, vindictively.
+
+But the train-master was of those who die hard. He protested vigorously,
+addressing himself to Bicknell and ignoring the ex-district attorney as if
+he were not. He, McTosh, was willing to surrender the office on an
+official order in writing over the chief clerk's signature. But did
+Bicknell fully understand what it might mean in loss of life and property
+to put a new man on the wires at a moment's notice?
+
+Bicknell would have weakened again, but Hawk was not to be frustrated a
+second time.
+
+"Don't you see he is only sparring to gain time?" he snapped at Bicknell.
+Then to M'Tosh: "Get out of here, and do it quick! And you can go, too,"
+wheeling suddenly upon Kent.
+
+Donohue had taken no part in the conflict of authority. But now he threw
+down his pen and clicked his key to cut in with the "G.S.," which claims
+the wire instantly. Then distinctly, and a word at a time so that the
+slowest operator on the line could get it, he spelled out the message:
+"All Agents: Stop and hold all trains except first and second fast mail,
+west-bound. M'Tosh fired, and office in hands of police----"
+
+"Stop him!" cried the shirt-sleeved man. "He's giving it away on the
+wire!"
+
+But Donohue had signed his name and was putting on his coat.
+
+"You're welcome to what you can find," he said, scowling at the
+interloper. "If you kill anybody now, it'll be your own fault."
+
+"Arrest that man!" said Hawk to his policemen; but Kent interposed.
+
+"If you do, the force will be two men shy to-morrow. The Civic League
+isn't dead yet." And he took down the numbers of the two officers.
+
+There were no arrests made, and when the ousted three were clear of the
+room and the building, Kent asked an anxious question.
+
+"How near can they come to smashing us, M'Tosh?"
+
+"That depends on Callahan's nerve. The night operators at Donerail,
+Schofield and Agua Caliente are all Guilford appointees, and when the new
+man explains the situation to them, they'll do what they are told to do.
+But I'm thinking Patsy won't pull up for anything milder than a spiked
+switch."
+
+"Well, they might throw a switch on him. I wonder somebody hasn't done it
+before this."
+
+The train-master shook his head.
+
+"If Tischer is keeping close up behind, that would jeopardize more lives
+than Callahan's. But there is another thing that doesn't depend on
+nerve--Patsy's or anybody's."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"Water. The run is one hundred and eighty miles. The 1010's tank is good
+for one hundred with a train, or a possible hundred and sixty, light.
+There is about one chance in a thousand that Callahan's crown-sheet won't
+get red-hot and crumple up on him in the last twenty miles. Let's take a
+car and go down to yard limits. We can sit in the office and hear what
+goes over the wires, even if we can't get a finger in to help Patsy out of
+his troubles."
+
+They boarded a Twentieth Avenue car accordingly, but when they reached the
+end of the line, which was just across the tracks from the junction in the
+lower yards, they found the yard limits office and the shops surrounded by
+a cordon of militia.
+
+"By George!" said M'Tosh. "They got quick action, didn't they? I suppose
+it's on the ground of the strike and possible violence."
+
+Kent spun on his heel, heading for the electric car they had just left.
+
+"Back to town," he said; "unless you two want to jump the midnight
+Overland as it goes out and get away while you can. If Callahan fails----"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+THE RELENTLESS WHEELS
+
+But Engineer Callahan had no notion of failing. When he had drawn the
+hammer on his superior officer, advising discretion and a seat on Jimmy
+Shovel's box, the 1010 was racking out over the switches in the Western
+Division yards. Three minutes later the electric beam of Tischer's
+following headlight sought and found the first section on the long tangent
+leading up to the high plains, and the race was in full swing.
+
+At Morning Dew, the first night telegraph station out of the capital, the
+two sections were no more than a scant quarter of a mile apart; and the
+operator tried to flag the second section down, as reported. This did not
+happen again until several stations had been passed, and Callahan set his
+jaw and gave the 1010 more throttle. But at Lossing, a town of some size,
+the board was down and a man ran out at the crossing, swinging a red
+light.
+
+Callahan looked well to the switches, with the steam shut off and his hand
+dropping instinctively to the air; and the superintendent shrank into his
+corner and gripped the window ledge when the special roared past the
+warning signals and on through the town beyond. He had maintained a dazed
+silence since the episode of the flourished hammer, but now he was moved
+to yell across the cab.
+
+"I suppose you know what you're in for, if you live to get out of this!
+It's twenty years, in this State, to pass a danger signal!" This is not
+all that the superintendent said: there were forewords and interjections,
+emphatic but unprintable.
+
+Callahan's reply was another flourish of the hammer, and a sudden
+outpulling of the throttle-bar; and the superintendent subsided again.
+
+But enforced silence and the grindstone of conscious helplessness will
+sharpen the dullest wit. The swerving lurch of the 1010 around the next
+curve set Halkett clutching for hand-holds, and the injector lever fell
+within his grasp. What he did not know about the working parts of a modern
+locomotive was very considerable; but he did know that an injector, half
+opened, will waste water as fast as an inch pipe will discharge it. And
+without water the Irishman would have to stop.
+
+Callahan heard the chuckling of the wasting boiler feed before he had gone
+a mile beyond the curve. It was a discovery to excuse bad language, but
+his protest was lamb-like.
+
+"No more av that, if ye plaze, Misther Halkett, or me an' Jimmy Shovel'll
+have to--Ah! would yez, now?"
+
+Before his promotion to the superintendency Halkett had been a ward boss
+in the metropolis of the State. Thinking he saw his chance, he took it,
+and the blow knocked Callahan silly for the moment. Afterward there was a
+small free-for-all buffeting match in the narrow cab in which the fireman
+took a hand, and during which the racing 1010 was suffered to find her way
+alone. When it was over, Callahan spat out a broken tooth and gave his
+orders concisely.
+
+"Up wid him over the coal, an' we'll put him back in the car where he
+belongs. Now, thin!"
+
+Halkett had to go, and he went, not altogether unwillingly. And when it
+came to jumping across from the rear of the tender to the forward
+vestibule of the Naught-seven, or being chucked across, he jumped.
+
+Now it so chanced that the governor and his first lieutenant in the great
+railway steal had weighty matters to discuss, and they had not missed the
+superintendent or the lawyer, supposing them to be still out on the rear
+platform enjoying the scenery. Wherefore Halkett's sudden appearance,
+mauled, begrimed and breathless from his late tussle with the two
+enginemen, was the first intimation of wrong-going that had penetrated to
+the inner sanctum of the private car.
+
+"What's that you say, Mr. Halkett?--on the Western Division? Whereabouts?"
+demanded the governor.
+
+"Between Lossing and Skipjack siding--if we haven't passed the siding in
+the last two or three minutes. I've been too busy to notice," was the
+reply.
+
+"And you say you were on the engine? Why the devil didn't you call your
+man down?"
+
+"I knocked him down," gritted the superintendent, savagely, "and I'd have
+beat his face in for him if there hadn't been two of them. It's a plot of
+some kind, and Callahan knows what he is about. He had me held up with a
+hammer till just a few minutes ago, and he's running past stop-signals and
+over red lights like a madman!"
+
+Bucks and Guilford exchanged convictions by the road of the eye, and the
+governor said:
+
+"This is pretty serious, Major. Have you anything to suggest?" And without
+waiting for a reply he turned upon Halkett: "Where is Mr. Hawk?"
+
+"I don't know. I supposed he was in here with you. Or maybe he's out on
+the rear platform."
+
+The three of them went to the rear, passing the private secretary
+comfortably asleep in his wicker chair. When they stepped out upon the
+recessed observation platform they found it empty.
+
+"He must have suspected something and dropped off in the yard or at the
+shops," said Halkett. And at the saying of it he shrank back involuntarily
+and added: "Ah! Look at that, will you?"
+
+The car had just thundered past another station, and Callahan had underrun
+one more stop-signal at full speed. At the same instant Tischer's
+headlight swung into view, half blinding them with its glare.
+
+"What is that following us?" asked Bucks.
+
+"It's the fast mail," said Halkett.
+
+Guilford turned livid and caught at the hand-rail.
+
+"S-s-say--are you sure of that?" he gasped.
+
+"Of course: it was an hour and thirty-five minutes late, and we are on its
+time."
+
+"Then we can't stop unless somebody throws us on a siding!" quavered the
+receiver, who had a small spirit in a large body. "I told M'Tosh to give
+the mail orders to make up her lost time or I'd fire the engineer--told
+him to cut out all the stops this side of Agua Caliente!"
+
+"That's what you get for your infernal meddling!" snapped Halkett. In
+catastrophic moments many barriers go down; deference to superior officers
+among the earliest.
+
+But the master spirit of the junto was still cool and collected.
+
+"This is no time to quarrel," he said. "The thing to be done is to stop
+this train without getting ourselves ripped open by that fellow behind the
+headlight yonder. The stop-signals prove that Hawk and the others are
+doing their best, but we must do ours. What do you say, Halkett?"
+
+"There is only one thing," replied the superintendent; "we've got to make
+the Irishman run ahead fast enough and far enough to give us room to stop
+or take a siding."
+
+The governor planned it in a few curt sentences. Was there a weapon to be
+had? Danforth, the private secretary, roused from his nap in the wicker
+chair, was able to produce a serviceable revolver. Two minutes later, the
+sleep still tingling in his nerves to augment another tingling less
+pleasurable, the secretary had spanned the terrible gap separating the car
+from the engine and was making his way over the coal, fluttering his
+handkerchief in token of his peaceful intentions.
+
+He was charged with a message to Callahan, mandatory in its first form,
+and bribe-promising in its second; and he was covered from the forward
+vestibule of the private car by the revolver in the hands of a resolute
+and determined state executive.
+
+"One of them's comin' ahead over the coal," warned James Shovel; and
+Callahan found his hammer.
+
+"Run ahead an' take a siding, is ut?" he shouted, glaring down on the
+messenger. "I have me ordhers fr'm betther men than thim that sint you. Go
+back an' tell thim so."
+
+"You'll be paid if you do, and you'll be shot if you don't," yelled the
+secretary, persuasively.
+
+"Tell the boss he can't shoot two av us to wanst; an' the wan that's
+left'll slap on the air," was Callahan's answer; and he slacked off a
+little to bring the following train within easy striking distance.
+
+Danforth went painfully and carefully back with this defiance, and while
+he was bridging the nerve-trying gap, another station with the stop-board
+down and red lights frantically swinging was passed with a roar and a
+whistle shriek.
+
+"Fwhat are they doing now?" called Callahan to his fireman.
+
+"They've gone inside again," was the reply.
+
+"Go back an' thry the tank," was the command; and Jimmy Shovel climbed
+over the coal and let himself down feet foremost into the manhole. When he
+slid back to the footplate his legs were wet to the mid shin.
+
+"It's only up to there," he reported, measuring with his hand.
+
+Callahan looked at his watch. There was yet a full hour's run ahead of
+him, and there was no more than a scant foot of water in the tank with
+which to make it.
+
+Thereafter he forgot the Naught-seven, and whatever menace it held for
+him, and was concerned chiefly with the thing mechanical. Would the water
+last him through? He had once made one hundred and seventy miles on a
+special run with the 1010 without refilling his tank; but that was with
+the light engine alone. Now he had the private car behind him, and it
+seemed at times to pull with all the drag of a heavy train.
+
+But one expedient remained, and that carried with it the risk of his life.
+An engine, not overburdened, uses less water proportionately to miles run
+as the speed is increased. He could outpace the safe-guarding mail, save
+water--and take the chance of being shot in the back from the forward
+vestibule of the Naught-seven when he had gained lead enough to make a
+main-line stop safe for the men behind him.
+
+Callahan thought once of the child mothered by the Sisters of Loretto in
+the convent at the capital, shut his eyes to that and to all things
+extraneous, and sent the 1010 about her business. At the first reversed
+curve he hung out of his window for a backward look. Tischer's headlight
+had disappeared and his protection was gone.
+
+On the rear platform of the private car four men watched the threatening
+second section fade into the night.
+
+"Our man has thought better of it," said the governor, marking the
+increased speed and the disappearance of the menacing headlight.
+
+Guilford's sigh of relief was almost a groan.
+
+"My God!" he said; "it makes me cold to think what might happen if he
+should pull us over into the other State!"
+
+But Halkett was still smarting from the indignities put upon him, and his
+comment was a vindictive threat.
+
+"I'll send that damned Irishman over the road for this, if it is the last
+thing I ever do!" he declared; and he confirmed it with an oath.
+
+But Callahan was getting his punishment as he went along. He had scarcely
+settled the 1010 into her gait for the final run against the failing water
+supply when another station came in sight. It was a small cattle town, and
+in addition to the swinging red lights and a huge bonfire to illuminate
+the yards, the obstructionists had torn down the loading corral and were
+piling the lumber on the track.
+
+Once again Callahan's nerve flickered, and he shut off the steam. But
+before it was too late he reflected that the barrier was meant only to
+scare him into stopping. One minute later the air was full of flying
+splinters, and that danger was passed. But one of the broken planks came
+through the cab window, missing the engineer by no more than a
+hand's-breadth. And the shower of splinters, sucked in by the whirl of the
+train, broke glass in the private car and sprinkled the quartet on the
+platform with split kindling and wreckage.
+
+"What was that?" gasped the receiver.
+
+Halkett pointed to the bonfire, receding like a fading star in the
+rearward distance.
+
+"Our friends are beginning to throw stones, since clods won't stop him."
+he said.
+
+Bucks shook his head.
+
+"If that is the case, we'll have to be doing something on our own account.
+The next obstruction may derail us."
+
+Halkett stepped into the car and pulled the cord of the automatic air.
+
+"No good," he muttered. "The Irishman bled our tank before he started.
+Help me set the hand brakes, a couple of you."
+
+Danforth and the governor took hold of the brake wheel with him, and for a
+minute or two the terrible speed slackened a little. Then some part of the
+disused hand-gear gave way under the three-man strain and that hope was
+gone.
+
+"There's one thing left," said the superintendent, indomitable to the
+last. "We'll uncouple and let him drop us behind."
+
+The space in the forward vestibule was narrow and cramped, and with the
+strain of the dragging car to make the pin stick, it took two of them
+lying flat, waiting for the back-surging moment and wiggling it for slack,
+to pull it. The coupling dropped out of the hook and the engine shot ahead
+to the length of the safety-chains; thus far, but no farther.
+
+Halkett stood up.
+
+"It's up to you, Danforth," he said, raising his voice to be heard above
+the pounding roar of the wheels. "You're the youngest and lightest: get
+down on the 1010's brake-beam and unhook those chains."
+
+The secretary looked once into the trap with the dodging jaws and the
+backward-flying bottom and declined the honor.
+
+"I can't get down there," he cried. "And I shouldn't know what to do if I
+could."
+
+Once more the superintendent exhibited his nerve. He had nothing at stake
+save a desire to defeat Callahan; but he had the persistent courage of the
+bull-terrier. With Bucks and the secretary to steady him he lowered
+himself in the gap till he could stand upon the brake-beam of the 1010's
+tender and grope with one free hand for the hook of the nearest
+safety-chain. Death nipped at him every time the engine gave or took up
+the slack of the loose coupling, but he dodged and hung on until he had
+satisfied himself.
+
+"It's no good," he announced, when they had dragged him by main strength
+back to a footing in the narrow vestibule. "The hooks are bent into the
+links. We're due to go wherever that damned Irishman is taking us."
+
+Shovel was firing, and the trailing smoke and cinders quickly made the
+forward vestibule untenable. When they were driven in, Bucks and the
+receiver went through to the rear platform, where they were presently
+joined by Halkett and Danforth.
+
+"I've been trying the air again," said the superintendent, "but it's no
+go. What's next?"
+
+The governor gave the word.
+
+"Wait," he said; and the four of them clung to the hand-rails, swaying and
+bending to the bounding lurches of the flying car.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mile after mile reels from beneath the relentless wheels, and still the
+speed increases. Station Donerail is passed, and now the pace is so
+furious that the watchers on the railed platform can not make out the
+signals in the volleying wake of dust. Station Schofield is passed, and
+again the signals, if any there be, are swiftly drowned in the gray
+dust-smother. From Schofield to Agua Caliente is but a scant ten miles;
+and as the flying train rushes on toward the State boundary, two faces in
+the quartet of watchers show tense and drawn under the yellow light of the
+Pintsch platform lamp.
+
+The governor swings himself unsteadily to the right-hand railing and the
+long look ahead brings the twinkling arc-star of the tower light on
+Breezeland Inn into view. He turns to Guilford, who has fallen limp into
+one of the platform chairs.
+
+"In five minutes more we shall pass Agua Caliente," he says. "Will you
+kill the Irishman, or shall I?" Guilford's lips move, but there is no
+audible reply; and Bucks takes Danforth's weapon and passes quickly and
+alone to the forward vestibule.
+
+The station of Agua Caliente swings into the field of 1010's electric
+headlight. Callahan's tank has been bone dry for twenty minutes, and he is
+watching the glass water-gage where the water shows now only when the
+engine lurches heavily to the left. He knows that the crown-sheet of the
+fire-box is bare, and that any moment it may give down and the end will
+come. Yet his gauntleted hand never falls from the throttle-bar to the
+air-cock, and his eyes never leave the bubble appearing and disappearing
+at longer intervals in the heel of the water-glass.
+
+Shovel has stopped firing, and is hanging out of his window for the
+straining look ahead. Suddenly he drops to the footplate to grip
+Callahan's arm.
+
+"See!" he says. "They have set the switch to throw us in on the siding!"
+In one motion the flutter of the exhaust ceases, and the huge ten-wheeler
+buckles to the sudden setting of the brakes. The man standing in the
+forward vestibule of the Naught-seven lowers his weapon. Apparently it is
+not going to be necessary to kill the engineer, after all.
+
+But Callahan's nerve has failed him only for the moment. There is one
+chance in ten thousand that the circumambulating side track is empty; one
+and one only, and no way to make sure of it. Beyond the station, as
+Callahan well knows, the siding comes again into the main line, and the
+switch is a straight-rail "safety." Once again the thought of his
+motherless child flickers into the engineer's brain; then he releases the
+air and throws his weight backward upon the throttle-bar. Two gasps and a
+heart-beat decide it; and before the man in the vestibule can level his
+weapon and fire, the one-car train has shot around the station, heaving
+and lurching over the uneven rails of the siding, and grinding shrilly
+over the points of the safety switch to race on the down grade to Megilp.
+
+At the mining-camp the station is in darkness save for the goggle eyes of
+an automobile drawn up beside the platform, and deep silence reigns but
+for the muffled, irregular thud of the auto-car's motor. But the beam of
+the 1010's headlight shows the small station building massed by men, a
+score of them poising for a spring to the platforms of the private car
+when the slackening speed shall permit. A bullet tears into the woodwork
+at Callahan's elbow, and another breaks the glass of the window beside
+him, but he makes the stop as steadily as if death were not snapping at
+him from behind and roaring in his ears from the belly of the burned
+engine.
+
+"Be doomping yer fire lively, now, Jimmy, b'y," he says, dropping from his
+box to help. And while they wrestle with the dumping-bar, these two, the
+poising figures have swarmed upon the Naught-seven, and a voice is lifted
+above the Babel of others in sharp protest.
+
+"Put away that rope, boys! There's law here, and by God, we're going to
+maintain it!"
+
+At this a man pushes his way out of the thick of the crowd and climbs to a
+seat beside the chauffeur in the waiting automobile.
+
+"They've got him," he says shortly. "To the hotel for all you're worth,
+Hudgins; our part is to get this on the wires before one o'clock. Full
+speed; and never mind the ruts."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+SUBHI SADIK
+
+The dawn of a new day was graying over the capital city, and the newsboys
+were crying lustily in the streets, when David Kent felt his way up the
+dark staircases of the Kittleton Building to knock at the door of Judge
+Oliver Marston's rooms on the top floor. He was the bearer of tidings, and
+he made no more than a formal excuse for the unseemly hour when the door
+was opened by the lieutenant-governor.
+
+"I am sorry to disturb you, Judge Marston," he began, when he had the
+closed door at his back and was facing the tall thin figure in flannel
+dressing gown and slippers, "but I imagine I'm only a few minutes ahead of
+the crowd. Have you heard the news of the night?"
+
+The judge pressed the button of the drop-light and waved his visitor to a
+chair.
+
+"I have heard nothing, Mr. Kent. Have a cigar?"--passing the box of
+unutterable stogies.
+
+"Thank you; not before breakfast," was the hasty reply. Then, without
+another word of preface: "Judge Marston, for the time being you are the
+governor of the State, and I have come to----"
+
+"One moment," interrupted his listener. "There are some stories that read
+better for a foreword, however brief. What has happened?"
+
+"This: last night it was the purpose of Governor Bucks and Receiver
+Guilford to go to Gaston by special train. In some manner, which has not
+yet been fully explained, there was a confusion of orders. Instead of
+proceeding eastward, the special was switched to the tracks of the Western
+Division; was made the first section of the fast mail, which had orders to
+run through without stop. You can imagine the result."
+
+Marston got upon his feet slowly and began pacing the length of the long
+room. Kent waited, and the shrill cries of the newsboys floated up and in
+through the open windows. When the judge finally came back to his chair
+the saturnine face was gray and haggard.
+
+"I hope it was an accident that can be clearly proved," he said; and a
+moment later: "You spoke of Bucks and Guilford; were there others in the
+private car?"
+
+"Two others; Halkett, and the governor's private secretary."
+
+"And were they all killed?"
+
+A great light broke in upon Kent when he saw how Marston had
+misapprehended. Also, he saw how much it would simplify matters if he
+should be happy enough to catch the ball in the reactionary rebound.
+
+"They are all alive and uninjured, to the best of my knowledge and belief;
+though I understand that one of them narrowly escaped lynching at the
+hands of an excited mob."
+
+The long lean figure erected itself in the chair, and the weight of years
+seemed to slip from its shoulders.
+
+"But I understood you to say that the duties of the executive had devolved
+upon me, Mr. Kent. You also said I could imagine the result of this
+singular mistaking of train-orders, and I fancied I could. What was the
+result?"
+
+"A conclusion not quite as sanguinary as that you had in mind, though it
+is likely to prove serious enough for one member of the party in the
+private car. The special train was chased all the way across the State by
+the fast mail. It finally outran the pursuing section and was stopped at
+Megilp. A sheriff's posse was in waiting, and an arrest was made."
+
+"Go on," said the lieutenant-governor.
+
+"I must first go back a little. Some weeks ago there was a shooting affray
+in the mining-camp, arising out of a dispute over a 'salted' mine, and a
+man was killed. The murderer escaped across the State line. Since the
+authorities of the State in which the crime was committed had every reason
+to believe that a governor's requisition for this particular criminal
+would not be honored, two courses were open to them: to publish the facts
+and let the moral sentiment of the neighboring commonwealth punish the
+criminal as it could, or would; or, suppressing the facts, to bide their
+chance of catching their man beyond the boundaries of the State which gave
+him an asylum. They chose the latter."
+
+A second time Marston left his chair and began to pace the floor. After a
+little he paused to say:
+
+"This murderer is James Guilford, I take it; and the governor--"
+
+"No," said Kent, gravely. "The murderer is--Jasper G. Bucks." He handed
+the judge a copy of the _Argus_. "You will find it all in the press
+despatches; all I have told you, and a great deal more."
+
+The lieutenant-governor read the newspaper story as he walked, lighting
+the electric chandelier to enable him to do so. When it was finished he
+sat down again.
+
+"What a hideous cesspool it is!" was his comment. "But we shall clean it,
+Mr. Kent; we shall clean it if it shall leave the People's Party without a
+vote in the State. Now what can I do for you? You didn't come here at this
+hour in the morning merely to bring me the news."
+
+"No, I didn't, Judge Marston. I want my railroad."
+
+"You shall have it," was the prompt response. "What have you done since
+our last discussion of the subject?"
+
+"I tried to 'obliterate' Judge MacFarlane, as you suggested. But I failed
+in the first step. Bucks and Meigs refused to approve the _quo warranto_."
+
+The judge knitted his brows thoughtfully.
+
+"That way is open to you now; but it is long and devious, and delays are
+always dangerous. You spoke of the receivership as being part of a plan by
+which your road was to be turned over to an eastern monopoly. How nearly
+has that plan succeeded?"
+
+Kent hesitated, not because he was afraid to trust the man Oliver Marston,
+but because there were some things which the governor of the State might
+feel called upon to investigate if the knowledge of them were thrust upon
+him. But in the end he took counsel of utter frankness.
+
+"So nearly that if Bucks and the receiver had reached Gaston last night,
+our road would now be in the hands of the Plantagoulds under a
+ninety-nine-year lease."
+
+The merest ghost of a smile flitted over the lieutenant-governor's face
+when he said, with his nearest approach to sarcasm:
+
+"How extremely opportune the confusion of train-orders becomes as we go
+along! But answer one more question if you please--it will not involve
+these singularly heedless railway employees of yours: is Judge MacFarlane
+in Gaston now?"
+
+"He is. He was to have met the others on the arrival of the special
+train."
+
+There were footsteps on the stair and in the corridor, and Marston rose.
+
+"Our privacy is about to be invaded, Mr. Kent. This is a miserable
+business; miserable for everybody, but most of all for the deceived and
+hoodwinked people of an unhappy State. God knows, I did not seek this
+office; but since it has fallen on me, I shall do my duty as I see it, and
+my hand shall be heaviest upon that man who makes a mockery of the justice
+he is sworn to administer. Come to the capitol a little later in the day,
+prepared to go at once to Gaston. I think I can promise you your hearing
+on the merits without further delay."
+
+"Thank you," said Kent, simply, grasping the hand of leave-taking. Then he
+tried to find other and larger words. "I wish I could do something to show
+my appreciation of your--"
+
+But the lieutenant-governor was pushing him toward the door.
+
+"You have done something, Mr. Kent, and you can do more. Head those people
+off at the door and say that for the present I refuse positively to be
+seen or interviewed. They will find me at the capitol during office
+hours."
+
+It was seven o'clock in the evening of the fiercest working day Kent had
+ever fought through when the special train--his own private special, sent
+to Gaston and brought back again over the strike-paralyzed road by the
+express permission and command of the strikers themselves--set him down in
+the Union Station at the capital.
+
+Looking back to the gray of the morning when he had shaken hands with
+Governor Marston at the door of the room on the top floor of the Kittleton
+Building, the crowding events made the interval seem more like a week; and
+now the events themselves were beginning to take on dream-like
+incongruities in the haze of utter weariness.
+
+"_Evening Argus_! all about the p'liminary trial of Governor Bucks.
+_Argus_, sir?" piped a small boy at the station exit; but Kent shook his
+head, found a cab and had himself conveyed quickly through streets still
+rife with excitement to the Clarendon Hotel.
+
+In the lobby was the same bee-buzzing crowd with which he had been
+contending all day, and he edged his way through it to the elevator,
+praying that he might go unrecognized--as he did. Once safe in his rooms
+he sent for Loring, stretching himself on the bed in a very ecstasy of
+relaxation until the ex-manager came up. Then he emptied his mind as an
+overladen ass spills its panniers.
+
+"I'm done, Grantham," he said; "and that is more different kinds of truth
+than you have heard in a week. Go and reorganize your management, and
+M'Tosh is the man to put in Halkett's place. The strike will be declared
+off at the mere mention of your name and his. That's all. Now go away and
+let me sleep."
+
+"Oh, hold on!" was the good-natured protest; "I'm not more curious than I
+have to be, but I'd like to know how it was done."
+
+"I don't know, myself; and that's the plain fact. But I suspect Marston
+fell upon Judge MacFarlane: gave him a wire hint of what was due to arrive
+if he didn't give us a clean bill of health. I had my preliminary
+interview with the governor at daybreak this morning; and I was with him
+again between nine and ten. He went over the original papers with me, and
+about all he said was, 'Be in Gaston by two o'clock this afternoon, and
+MacFarlane will give you the hearing in chambers.' I went on my knees to
+the Federative Council to get a train."
+
+"You shouldn't have had any trouble there."
+
+"I didn't have, after the men understood what was in the wind. Jarl Oleson
+took me down and brought me back. The council did it handsomely, dipping
+into its treasury and paying the mileage on a Pullman car."
+
+"And MacFarlane reversed his own order?"
+
+"Without a question. It was the merest formality. Jennison, Hawk's former
+law partner, stood for the other side; but he made no argument."
+
+"Good!" said Loring. "That will do for the day's work. But now I'd like to
+know how last night's job was managed."
+
+"I'm afraid you want to know more than is good for you. What do the papers
+say? I haven't looked at one all day."
+
+"They say there was a misunderstanding of orders. That will answer for the
+public, perhaps, but it won't do for me."
+
+"I guess it will have to do for you, too, Grantham," said Kent, yawning
+shamelessly. "Five men, besides myself--six of us in all--know the true
+inwardness of last night's round-up. There will never be a seventh."
+
+Loring's eye-glasses fell from his nose, and he was smiling shrewdly when
+he replaced them.
+
+"There is one small consequence that doesn't please you, I'm sure. You'll
+have to bury the hatchet with MacFarlane."
+
+"Shall I?" flashed Kent, sitting up as if he had been struck with a whip.
+"Let me tell you: Marston is going to call an extra session of the
+Assembly. There is a death vacancy in this district, and I shall be a
+candidate in the special election. If there is no other way to get at
+MacFarlane, he shall be impeached!"
+
+"H'm: so you're going into politics?"
+
+"You've said it," said Kent, subsiding among the pillows. "Now will you
+go?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took the general manager a wakeful twenty-four hours to untangle the
+industrial snarl which was the receiver's legacy to his successor; and
+David Kent slept through the major part of that interval, rising only in
+time to dress for dinner on the day following the retrieval of the
+Trans-Western.
+
+In the grill-room of the Camelot he came face to face with Ormsby, and
+learned, something to his astonishment, that the Breezeland party had
+returned to the capital on the first train in from the west.
+
+"I thought you were going to stay a month or more," he said, with his eyes
+cast down.
+
+"So did I," said Ormsby. "But Mrs. Brentwood cut it short. She's a town
+person, and so is Penelope." And it was not until the soup plates had been
+removed that he added a question. "Are you going out to see them this
+evening, David? You have my royal permission."
+
+"No"--bluntly.
+
+"Isn't it up to you to go and give them a chance to jolly you a little? I
+think they are all aching to do it. Mrs. Hepzibah has seen the rising
+stock quotations, and she thinks you are It."
+
+"No; I can't go there any more," said Kent, and his voice was gruffer than
+he meant it to be.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"There were good reasons before: there are better ones now."
+
+"A seven-hundred-thousand-dollar difference?" suggested Ormsby, who had
+had speech with Loring.
+
+Kent flushed a dull red.
+
+"I sha'n't strike you, Ormsby, no matter what you say," he said doggedly.
+
+"Humph! There is one difference between you and Rabbi Balaam's burro,
+David: it could talk sense, and you can't," was the offensive rejoinder.
+
+Kent changed the subject abruptly.
+
+"Say, Ormsby; I'm going into a political office-hunt. There is a death
+vacancy in the House, and I mean to have the nomination and election. I
+don't need money now, but I do need a friend. Are you with me?"
+
+"Oh, sure. Miss Van Brock will answer for that."
+
+"But I don't want you to do it on her account; I want you to do it for
+me."
+
+"It's all one," said the club-man.
+
+Kent looked up quickly.
+
+"You are right; that is the truest word you've said to-night," and he went
+away, leaving the dessert untouched.
+
+The evening was still young when Kent reached the house in Alameda Square.
+Within the week the weather had changed, and the first chill of the
+approaching autumn was in the air. The great square house was lighted and
+warmed, and the homelikeness of the place appealed to him as it never had
+before. To her other gifts, which were many and diverse, Miss Van Brock
+added that of home-making; and the aftermath of battle is apt to be an
+acute longing for peace and quiet, for domesticity and creature comforts.
+
+He had not seen Portia since the night when she had armed him for the
+final struggle with the enemy; he told himself that he should not see her
+again until the battle was fought and won. But in no part of the struggle
+had he been suffered to lose sight of his obligation to her. He had seen
+the chain lengthen link by link, and now the time was come for the welding
+of it into a shackle to bind. He did not try to deceive himself, nor did
+he allow the glamour of false sentiment to blind him. With an undying love
+for Elinor Brentwood in his heart, he knew well what was before him. None
+the less, Portia should have her just due.
+
+She was waiting for him when he entered the comfortable library.
+
+"I knew you would come to-night," she said cheerfully. "I gave you a day
+to drive the nail--and, O David! you have driven it well!--another day to
+clinch it, and a third to recover from the effects. Have you fully
+recovered?"
+
+"I hope so. I took the day for it, at all events," he laughed. "I am just
+out of bed, as you might say."
+
+"I can imagine how it took it out of you," she assented. "Not so much the
+work, but the anxiety. Night before last, after Mr. Loring went away, I
+sat it out with the telephone, nagging poor Mr. Hildreth for news until I
+know he wanted to murder me."
+
+"How much did you get of it?" he asked.
+
+"He told me all he dared--or perhaps it was all he knew--and it made me
+feel miserably helpless. The little I could get from the _Argus_ office
+was enough to prove that all your plans had been changed at the last
+moment."
+
+"They were," he admitted; and he began at the beginning and filled in the
+details for her.
+
+She heard him through without comment other than a kindling of the brown
+eyes at the climaxes of daring; but at the end she gave him praise
+unstinted.
+
+"You have played the man, David, as I knew you would if you could be once
+fully aroused. I've had faith in you from the very first."
+
+"It has been more than faith, Portia," he asserted soberly. "You have
+taken me up and carried me when I could neither run nor walk. Do you
+suppose I am so besotted as not to realize that you have been the head,
+while I have been only the hand?"
+
+"Nonsense!" she said lightly. "You are in the dumps of the reaction now.
+You mustn't say things that you will be sorry for, later on."
+
+"I am going to say one thing, nevertheless; and will remain for you to
+make it a thing hard to be remembered, or the other kind. Will you take
+what there is of me and make what you can of it?"
+
+She laughed in his face.
+
+"No, my dear David; no, no, no." And after a little pause: "How
+deliciously transparent you are, to be sure!"
+
+He would have been less than a man if his self-love had not been touched
+in its most sensitive part.
+
+"I am glad if it amuses you," he frowned. "Only I meant it in all
+seriousness."
+
+"No, you didn't; you only thought you did," she contradicted, and the
+brown eyes were still laughing at him. "Let me tell you what you did mean.
+You are pleased to think that I have helped you--that an obligation has
+been incurred; and you meant to pay your debt like a man and a gentleman
+in the only coin a woman is supposed to recognize."
+
+"But if I should say that you are misinterpreting the motive?" he
+suggested.
+
+"It would make your nice little speech a perjury instead of a simple
+untruth, and I should say no, again, on other, and perhaps better,
+grounds."
+
+"Name them," he said shortly.
+
+"I will, David, though I am neither a stick nor a stone to do it without
+wincing. You love another woman with all your heart and soul, and you know
+it."
+
+"Well? You see I am neither admitting nor denying."
+
+"As if you needed to!" she scoffed. "But don't interrupt me, please. You
+said I might take what there is of you and make what I can of it: I might
+make you anything and everything in the world, David, except that which a
+woman craves most in a husband--a lover."
+
+His eyes grew dark.
+
+"I wish I knew how much that word means to you, Portia."
+
+"It means just as much to me as it does to every woman who has ever drawn
+the breath of life in a passionate world, David. But that isn't all.
+Leaving Miss Brentwood entirely out of the question, you'd be miserably
+unhappy."
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"Because I shouldn't be able to realize a single one of your ideals. I
+know what they are--what you will expect in a wife. I could make you a
+rich man, a successful man, as the world measures success, and perhaps I
+could even give you love: after the first flush of youth is past, the
+heavenly-affinity sentiment loses its hold and a woman comes to know that
+if she cares to try hard enough she can love any man who will be
+thoughtful and gentle, and whose habits of life are not hopelessly at war
+with her own. But that kind of love doesn't breed love. Your vanity would
+pique itself for a little while, and then you would know the curse of
+unsought love and murder me in your heart a thousand times a day. No,
+David, I have read you to little purpose if these are the things you will
+ask of the woman who takes your name and becomes the mother of your
+children." She had risen and was standing beside his chair, with her hand
+lightly touching his shoulder. "Will you go now? There are others coming,
+and--"
+
+He made his adieux gravely and went away half dazed and a prey to many
+emotions, but strangely light-hearted withal: and as once before, he
+walked when he might have ridden. But the mixed-emotion mood was not
+immortal. At the Clarendon he found a committee of Civic Leaguers waiting
+to ask him if he would stand as a "Good Government" candidate in the
+special election to fill the House vacancy in the capital district; and in
+the discussion of ways and means, and the setting of political pins which
+followed there was little food for sentiment.
+
+It was three weeks and more after Governor Marston's call summoning the
+Assembly for an investigative session. Kent had fought his way
+triumphantly through the special election to a seat in the House, aided
+and abetted manfully by Ormsby, Hildreth, and the entire Trans-Western
+influence and vote. And now men were beginning to say that without the
+tireless blows of the keen-witted, sharp-tongued young corporation lawyer,
+the junto might still have reasserted itself.
+
+But the House committee, of which Kent was the youngest member and the
+chairman, had proved incorruptible, and the day of the Gaston wolf-pack
+was over. Hendricks resigned, to escape a worse thing; Meigs came over to
+the majority with a show of heartiness that made Kent doubly watchful of
+him; heads fell to the right and left, until at the last there was left
+only one member of the original cabal to reckon with; the judicial tool of
+the capitol ring.
+
+Kent had hesitated when MacFarlane's name came up; and the judge never
+knew that he owed his escape from the inquisitorial House committee, and
+his permission to resign on the plea of broken health, to a young woman
+whom he had never seen.
+
+It was Elinor Brentwood who was his intercessor; and the occasion was the
+last day of the third week of the extra session--a Saturday afternoon and
+a legislative recess when Kent had borrowed Ormsby's auto-car, and had
+driven Elinor and Penelope out to Pentland Place to look at a house he was
+thinking of buying. For with means to indulge it, Kent's Gaston-bred mania
+for plunging in real estate had returned upon him with all the acuteness
+of a half-satisfied passion.
+
+They had gone all over the house and grounds with the caretaker, and when
+there was nothing more to see, Penelope had prevailed on the woman to open
+the Venetians in the music-room. There was a grand piano in the place of
+honor, presided over by a mechanical piano-player; and Penelope went into
+ecstasies of mockery.
+
+"Wait till I can find the music scrolls, and I'll hypnotize you," she said
+gleefully; and Kent and Elinor beat a hasty retreat to the wide entrance
+hall.
+
+"I don't quite understand it," was Elinor's comment, when they had put
+distance between themselves and Penelope's joyous grinding-out of a Wagner
+scroll. "It looks as if the owners had just walked out at a moment's
+notice."
+
+"They did," said Kent. "They went to Europe, I believe. And by the way; I
+think I have a souvenir here somewhere. Will you go up to the first
+landing of the stair and point your finger at that window?"
+
+She did it, wondering; and when he had the line of direction he knelt in
+the cushioned window-seat and began to probe with the blade of his
+pen-knife in a small round hole in the woodwork.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, coming down to stand beside him.
+
+"This." He had cut out a flattened bullet and was holding it up for her to
+see. "It was meant for me, and I've always had an idea that I heard it
+strike the woodwork."
+
+"For you? Were you ever here when the house was occupied?"
+
+"Yes, once; it is the Senator Duvall place. This is the window where I
+broke in."
+
+She nodded intelligence.
+
+"I know now why you are going to buy it. The senator is another of those
+whom you haven't forgiven."
+
+His laugh was a ready denial.
+
+"I have nothing against Duvall. He was one of Bucks' dupes, and he is
+paying the price. The property is to be sold at a forced sale, and it is a
+good investment."
+
+"Is that all it means to you? It is too fine to be hawked about as a thing
+to make money with. It's a splendidly ideal home--leaving out that thing
+that Penelope is quarreling with." And she made a feint of stopping her
+ears.
+
+He laughed again.
+
+"Ormsby says I ought to buy it, and marry and settle down."
+
+She took him seriously.
+
+"You don't need it. Miss Van Brock has a very lovely home of her own," she
+said soberly.
+
+It was at his tongue's end to tell the woman he loved how the woman he did
+not love had refused him, but he saved himself on the brink and said:
+
+"Why Miss Van Brock?"
+
+"Because she is vindictive, too, and----"
+
+"But I am not vindictive."
+
+"Yes, you are. Do you know anything about Judge MacFarlane's family
+affairs?"
+
+"A little. He has three daughters; one of them rather unhappily married, I
+believe."
+
+"Have you considered the cost to these three women if you make their
+father's name a byword in the city where they were born?"
+
+"He should have considered it," was the unmoved reply.
+
+"David!" she said; and he looked up quickly.
+
+"You want me to let him resign? It would be compounding a felony. He is a
+Judge, and he was bribed."
+
+She sat down beside him in the cushioned window seat and began to plead
+with him.
+
+"You must let him go," she insisted. "It is entirely in your hands as
+chairman of the House committee; the governor, himself, told me so. I know
+all you say about him is true; but he is old and wretched, with only a
+little while to live, at best."
+
+There was a curious little smile curling his lip when he answered her.
+
+"He has chosen a good advocate. It is quite like a man of his stamp to try
+to reach me through you."
+
+"David!" she said again. Then: "I really shouldn't know him if I were to
+see him."
+
+"Then why----" he began; but there was a love-light in the blue-gray eyes
+to set his heart afire. "You are doing this for me?" he said, trembling on
+the verge of things unutterable.
+
+"Yes. You don't know how it hurts me to see you growing hard and merciless
+as you climb higher and higher in the path you have marked out for
+yourself."
+
+"The path you have marked out for me," he corrected. "Do you remember our
+little talk over the embers of the fire in your sitting-room at home? I
+knew then that I had lost the love I might have won; but the desire to be
+the kind of leader you were describing was born in me at that moment. I
+haven't always been true to the ideal. I couldn't be, lacking the right to
+wear your colors on my heart----"
+
+"Don't!" she said. "I haven't been true to my ideals. I--I sold them,
+David!"
+
+She was in his arms when she said it, and the bachelor maid was quite lost
+in the woman.
+
+"I'll never believe that," he said loyally. "But if you did, we'll buy
+them back--together."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Penelope was good to them. It was a full half-hour before she professed
+herself satisfied with the mechanical piano-toy; and when she was through,
+she helped the woman caretaker to shut the Venetians with clangings that
+would have warned the most oblivious pair of lovers.
+
+And afterward, when they were free of the house, she ran ahead to the
+waiting auto-car, leaving Kent and Elinor to follow at a snail's pace down
+the leaf-covered walk to the gate. There was a cedar hedge to mark the
+sidewalk boundary, and while it still screened them Kent bent quickly to
+the upturned face of happiness.
+
+"One more," he pleaded; and when he had it: "Do you know now, dearest, why
+I brought you here to-day?"
+
+She nodded joyously.
+
+"It is the sweetest old place. And, David, dear; we'll bring our
+ideals--all of them; and it shall be your haven when the storms beat."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grafters, by Francis Lynde
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Grafters by Francis Lynde</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grafters, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Grafters
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2004 [EBook #11418]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GRAFTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Andrea Ball and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="image-1"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="images/001.jpg" width="225" height="304"
+  alt="'DO YOU BEGIN TO SUSPECT THINGS?' SHE ASKED."></p>
+<h5>"DO YOU BEGIN TO SUSPECT THINGS?" SHE ASKED.</h5>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>
+THE
+GRAFTERS
+</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>
+BY<br />
+FRANCIS LYNDE
+</h2>
+<br />
+
+<h3>
+ILLUSTRATED BY<br />
+ARTHUR I. KELLER
+</h3>
+<br />
+
+<h4>
+TO MY GOOD FRIEND<br />
+MR. EDWARD YOUNG CHAPIN
+</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<ol class="olroman">
+<li><a href="#CH1">ASHES OF EMPIRE</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH2">A MAN OF THE PEOPLE</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH3">THE BOSTONIANS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH4">THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH5">JOURNEYS END&mdash;</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH6">OF THE MAKING OF LAWS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH7">THE SENTIMENTALISTS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH8">THE HAYMAKERS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH9">THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH10">WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH11">THE LAST DITCH</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH12">THE MAN IN POSSESSION</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH13">THE WRECKERS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH14">THE GERRYMANDER</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH15">THE JUNKETERS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH16">SHARPENING THE SWORD</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH17">THE CONSPIRATORS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH18">DOWN, BRUNO!</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH19">DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH20">THE WINNING LOSER</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH21">A WOMAN INTERVENES</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH22">A BORROWED CONSCIENCE</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH23">THE INSURRECTIONARIES</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH24">INTO THE PRIMITIVE</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH25">DEAD WATER AND QUICK</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH26">ON THE HIGH PLAINS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH27">BY ORDER OF THE COURT</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH28">THE NIGHT OF ALARMS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH29">THE RELENTLESS WHEELS</a><br /><br />
+<li><a href="#CH30">SUBHI SADIK</a>
+</ol>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#image-1">
+"DO YOU BEGIN TO SUSPECT THINGS?" SHE ASKED.
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#image-2">
+HE JAMMED THE FIRE END OF HIS CIGAR<br />
+AMONG THE FINGERS OF THE GRASPING HAND.
+</a></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>THE GRAFTERS</h2>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH1"></a>
+<h2>I</h2>
+<h3>ASHES OF EMPIRE</h3>
+<p>In point of age, Gaston the strenuous was still no more than a lusty
+infant among the cities of the brown plain when the boom broke and the
+junto was born, though its beginnings as a halt camp ran back to the days
+of the later Mormon migrations across the thirsty plain; to that day when
+the advanced guard of Zophar Smith's ox-train dug wells in the damp sands
+of Dry Creek and called them the Waters of Merom.</p>
+
+<p>Later, one Jethro Simsby, a Mormon deserter, set up his rod and staff on
+the banks of the creek, home-steaded a quarter-section of the sage-brush
+plain, and in due time came to be known as the Dry Creek cattle king. And
+the cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locating engineers of the Western
+Pacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water was scarce and
+hard to come by, drove their stakes along the north line of the
+quarter-section; and having named their last station Alphonse, christened
+this one Gaston.</p>
+
+<p>From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike-driving of the
+track-layers was a full decade. For hard times overtook the Western
+Pacific at Midland City, eighty miles to the eastward; while the State
+capital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had railroad outlets
+in plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer.</p>
+
+<p>But, with the breaking of the cloud of financial depression, the Western
+Pacific succeeded in placing its extension bonds, and a little later the
+earth began to fly on the grade of the new line to the west. Within a
+Sundayless month the electric lights of the night shift could be seen,
+and, when the wind was right, the shriek of the locomotive whistle could
+be heard at Dry Creek; and in this interval between dawn and daylight
+Jethro Simsby sold his quarter-section for the nominal sum of two thousand
+dollars, spot cash, to two men who buck-boarded in ahead of the
+track-layers.</p>
+
+<p>This purchase of the "J-lazy-S" ranch by Hawk and Guilford marked the
+modest beginning of Gaston the marvelous. By the time the temporary
+sidings were down and the tank well was dug in the damp sands, it was
+heralded far and wide that the Western Pacific would make the city on the
+banks of Dry Creek&mdash;a city consisting as yet only of the Simsby ranch
+shacks&mdash;its western terminus. Thereupon followed one of the senseless
+rushes that populate the waste places of the earth and give the
+professional city-builder his reason for being. In a fortnight after the
+driving of the silver spike the dusty plain was dotted with the
+black-roofed shelters of the Argonauts; and by the following spring the
+plow was furrowing the cattle ranges in ever-widening circles, and Gaston
+had voted a bond loan of three hundred thousand dollars to pave its
+streets.</p>
+
+<p>Then under the forced draft of skilful exploitation, three years of high
+pressure passed quickly; years named by the promoters the period of
+development. In the Year One the very heavens smiled and the rainfall
+broke the record of the oldest inhabitant. Thus the region round about
+lost the word "arid" as a qualifying adjective, and the picturesque
+fictions of the prospectus makers were miraculously justified. In Year Two
+there was less rain, but still an abundant crop; and Jethro Simsby,
+drifting in from some unnamed frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what he
+had missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of the
+Mid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five-storied, brick-and-terra-cotta
+structure standing precisely upon the site of the "J-lazy-S" branding
+corral.</p>
+
+<p>It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas for
+young men having penetrated to the provincial backgrounds of New
+Hampshire, that David Kent came.</p>
+
+<p>By virtue of his diploma, and three years of country practice in the New
+Hampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone and
+Chitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Building
+lettered "Attorney and Counselor at Law"; but up to the day in the latter
+part of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was best
+known as a reckless plunger in real estate&mdash;this, mind you, at a moment
+when every third man counted his gains in "front feet", and was shouting
+himself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales.</p>
+
+<p>When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it,
+though not altogether as far or as hard as many another. One of his
+professional hold-fasts&mdash;it was the one that afterward became the
+bread-tackle in the famine time&mdash;was his position as local attorney for
+the railway company. By reason of this he was among the first to have a
+hint of the impending cataclysm. The Western Pacific, after so long a
+pause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds and
+would presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-station
+quietude. Therefore and wherefore&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy. He foresaw, not the
+pitiable bubble-burst which ensued, indeed, but the certain and
+inevitable end of the speculative era. Like every one else, he had bought
+chiefly with promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated
+a sum equal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.</p>
+
+<p>"How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the
+secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his
+hint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying
+contracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on the
+Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to
+"unload".</p>
+
+<p>As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.
+On the morning when the <i>Daily Clarion</i> sounded the first note of public
+alarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, and
+transferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was done
+he locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced the
+account. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast for
+fortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony into
+cash&mdash;some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill of
+exchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier,
+there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, bought
+and paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience.</p>
+
+<p>Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastily
+filled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. When
+he reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and Texas
+Streets, he was the one hundred and twenty-seventh man in the queue, which
+extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street
+to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the <i>Clarion</i> had done
+its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for
+quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with
+its acrid perfume&mdash;the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad.</p>
+
+<p>Major James Guilford, the president of the Apache National, was in the
+cage with the sweating paying tellers, and it was to him that Kent
+presented his check when his turn came.</p>
+
+<p>"What! You, too, Kent?" said the president, reproachfully. "I thought you
+had more backbone."</p>
+
+<p>Kent shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaston has absorbed nine-tenths of the money I brought here; I'll absorb
+the remaining tenth myself, if it's just the same to you, Major. Thank
+you." And the hundred and twenty-seventh man pocketed his salvage from the
+wreck and fought his way out through the jam at the doors. Two hours
+farther along in the forenoon the Apache National suspended payment, and
+the bank examiner was wired for.</p>
+
+<p>For suddenness and thoroughgoing completeness the Gaston bubble-bursting
+was a record-breaker. For a week and a day there was a frantic struggle
+for enlargement, and by the expiration of a fortnight the life was pretty
+well trampled out of the civic corpse and the stench began to arise.</p>
+
+<p>Flight upon any terms then became the order of the day, and if the place
+had been suddenly plague-smitten the panicky exodus could scarcely have
+been more headlong. None the less, in any such disorderly up-anchoring
+there are stragglers perforce: some left like stranded hulks by the ebbing
+tide; others riding by mooring chains which may be neither slipped nor
+capstaned. When all was over there were deserted streets and empty suburbs
+in ruthless profusion; but there was also a hungry minority of the crews
+of the stranded and anchored hulks left behind to live or die as they
+might, and presently to fall into cannibalism, preying one upon another
+between whiles, or waiting like their prototypes of the Spanish Main for
+the stray spoils of any luckless argosy that might drift within grappling
+distance.</p>
+
+<p>Kent stayed partly because a local attorney for the railroad was as
+necessary in Gaston the bereaved as in Gaston the strenuous; partly, also,
+because he was a student of his kind, and the broken city gave him
+laboratory opportunities for the study of human nature at its worst.</p>
+
+<p>He marked the raising of the black flag as the Gaston castaways, getting
+sorrily afloat one by one, cleared their decks for action. Some Bluebeard
+admiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent,
+standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk,
+the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks,
+sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the former
+mayor. For when the famine time was fully come, and there were no more
+argosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it was
+Jasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forth
+his new cast for fortune, and brought the junto, the child of sheer
+desperation fiercely at bay, into being.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring,
+traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the Western
+Pacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dispiriting dinner
+in the deserted Mid-Continent café, and some plowing of the field of
+recollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took the
+deserted street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway station.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a decent thing for you to do&mdash;stopping over a train with me,
+Grantham," said the host, when the five squares intervening had been half
+measured. "I have had all kinds of a time out here in this God-forsaken
+desert, but never until to-day anything approaching a chummy hour with a
+man I know and care for."</p>
+
+<p>Kent had not spoken since they had felt their way out of the dark lower
+hall of the Farquhar Building. Up to this point the talk had been
+pointedly reminiscent; of the men of their university year, of mutual
+friends in the far-away "God's country" to the eastward, of the Gastonian
+epic, of all things save only two&mdash;the exile's cast for fortune in the
+untamed West, and one other.</p>
+
+<p>"That brings us a little nearer to the things that be&mdash;and to your
+prospects, David," said the guest. "How are you fixed here?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>"Gaston is dead, as you see; too dead to bury."</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you get out of it, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall some day, perhaps. Up to date there has been no place to go to,
+and no good way to arrive. Like some thousands of others, I've made an ass
+of myself here, Loring."</p>
+
+<p>"By coming, you mean? Oh, I don't know about that. You have had some hard
+knocks, I take it, but if you are the same David Kent I used to know, they
+have made a bigger man of you."</p>
+
+<p>"Think so?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd bet on it. We have had the Gaston epic done out for us in the
+newspapers. No man could live through such an experience as you must have
+had without growing a few inches. Hello! What's this?"</p>
+
+<p>A turned corner had brought them in front of a lighted building in Texas
+Street with a straggling crowd gathered about the porticoed entrance. As
+Loring spoke, there was a rattle of snare drums followed by the <i>dum-dum</i>
+of the bass, and a brass band ramped out the opening measures of a
+campaign march.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a rally," said Kent, when they had passed far enough beyond the
+zone of brass-throated clamorings to make the reply audible. "I told you
+that the Gaston wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes of
+a State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at the
+Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title rôle. And there is a fair
+measure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock together
+like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that the
+town hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed that
+and all other stages and is well on its way to the cemetery."</p>
+
+<p>"That is one way of putting it," Loring rejoined. "If things are as bad
+as that, it's time you were moving on, don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess so," was the lack-luster response. "Only I don't know where to
+go, or what to do when I get there."</p>
+
+<p>They were crossing the open square in front of the wide-eaved passenger
+station. A thunderous tremolo, dominating the distant band music, thrilled
+on the still air, and the extended arm of the station semaphore with its
+two dangling lanterns wagged twice.</p>
+
+<p>"My train," said Loring, quickening his step.</p>
+
+<p>"No," Kent corrected. "It is a special from the west, bringing a Bucks
+crowd to the political rally. Number Three isn't due for fifteen minutes
+yet, and she is always late."</p>
+
+<p>They mounted the steps to the station platform in good time to meet the
+three-car special as it came clattering in over the switches, and
+presently found themselves in the thick of the crowd of debarking
+ralliers.</p>
+
+<p>It was a mixed masculine multitude, fairly typical of time, place and
+occasion; stalwart men of the soil for the greater part, bearded and
+bronzed and rough-clothed, with here and there a range-rider in
+picturesque leathern shaps, sagging pistols and wide-flapped sombrero.</p>
+
+<p>Loring stood aside and put up his eye-glasses. It was his first sight
+near at hand of the untrammeled West <i>in puris naturalibus</i>, and he was
+finding the spectacle both instructive and diverting. Looking to Kent for
+fellowship he saw that his companion was holding himself stiffly aloof;
+also, he remarked that none of the boisterous partizans flung a word of
+recognition in Kent's direction.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know any of them?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Kent's reply was lost in the deep-chested bull-bellow of a cattleman from
+the Rio Blanco.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on a minute, boys, before you scatter! Line up here, and let's give
+three cheers and a tail-twister for next-Governor Bucks! Now,
+then&mdash;<i>everybody</i>! Hip, hip&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The ripping crash of the cheer jarred Loring's eye-glasses from their
+hold, and he replaced them with a smile. Four times the ear-splitting
+shout went up, and as the echoes of the "tiger" trailed off into silence
+the stentorian voice was lifted again.</p>
+
+<p>"Good enough! Now, then; three groans for the land syndicates, alien
+mortgagees, and the Western Pacific Railroad, by grabs! and to hell with
+'em!"</p>
+
+<p>The responsive clamor was a thing to be acutely remembered&mdash;sustained,
+long-drawn, vindictive; a nerve-wrenching pandemonium of groans, yelpings
+and cat-calls, in the midst of which the partizans shuffled into loose
+marching order and tramped away townward.</p>
+
+<p>"That answers your question, doesn't it?" said Kent, smiling sourly. "If
+not, I can set it out for you in words. The Western Pacific is the
+best-hated corporation this side of the Mississippi, and I am its local
+attorney."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't envy you," said Loring. "I had no idea the opposition
+crystallized itself in any such concrete ill will. You must have the whole
+weight of public sentiment against you in any railroad litigation."</p>
+
+<p>"I do," said Kent, simply. "If every complainant against us had the right
+to pack his own jury, we couldn't fare worse."</p>
+
+<p>"What is at the bottom of it? Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble by
+building on to the capital?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; it's much more personal to these shouters. As you may, or may
+not, know, our line&mdash;like every other western railroad with no
+competition&mdash;has for its motto, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
+and it bleeds the country accordingly. But we are forgetting your train.
+Shall we go and see how late it is?"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH2"></a>
+<h2>II</h2>
+<h3>A MAN OF THE PEOPLE</h3>
+
+<p>Train Number Three, the Western Flyer, was late, as Kent had
+predicted&mdash;just how late the operator could not tell; and pending the
+chalking-up of its arriving time on the bulletin board, the two men sat on
+an empty baggage truck and smoked in companionable silence.</p>
+
+<p>While they waited, Loring's thoughts were busy with many things, friendly
+solicitude for the exile serving as the point of departure. He knew what a
+handfast friend might know: how Kent had finished his postgraduate course
+in the law and had succeeded to his father's small practice in the New
+Hampshire county town where he was born and bred. Also, he knew how Kent's
+friends, college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecated
+the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to
+spy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffy
+little law office which had been his father's, Kent had made a clean
+breast of it: there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed
+before Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with no
+notion for a change of environment; wherefore she had determined Kent's
+career and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of her
+own choosing.</p>
+
+<p>Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it was
+hopelessly off holding-ground. The young woman had laid the blame at the
+door of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault-finding
+and recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowing
+her dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter Kent had stagnated quietly, living with simple rigor the life
+he had marked out for himself; thankful at heart, Loring had suspected,
+for the timely intervention of the farmer's son, but holding himself well
+in hand against a repetition of the sentimental offense. All this until
+the opening of the summer hotel at the foot of Old Croydon, and the coming
+of Elinor Brentwood.</p>
+
+<p>No one knew just how much Miss Brentwood had to do with the long-delayed
+awakening of David Kent; but in Loring's forecastings she enjoyed the full
+benefit of the doubt. From tramping the hills alone, or whipping the
+streams for brook trout, David had taken to spending his afternoons with
+lover-like regularity at the Croydon Inn; and at the end of the season
+had electrified the sleepy home town by declaring his intention to go West
+and grow up with the country.</p>
+
+<p>In Loring's setting-forth of the awakening, the motive was not far to
+seek. Miss Brentwood was ambitious, and if her interest in Kent had been
+only casual she would not have been likely to point him to the wider
+battle-field. Again, apart from his modest patrimony, Kent had only his
+profession. The Brentwoods were not rich, as riches are measured in
+millions; but they lived in their own house in the Back Bay wilderness,
+moved in Boston's older substantial circle, and, in a world where success,
+economic or other, is in some sort the touchstone, were many social planes
+above a country lawyer.</p>
+
+<p>Loring knew Kent's fierce poverty-pride&mdash;none better. Hence, he was at no
+loss to account for the exile's flight afield, or for his unhopeful
+present attitude. Meaning to win trophies to lay at Miss Brentwood's feet,
+the present stage of the rough joust with Fortune found him unhorsed,
+unweaponed and rolling in the dust of the lists.</p>
+
+<p>Loring chewed his cigar reflectively, wishing his companion would open the
+way to free speech on the subject presumably nearest his heart. He had a
+word of comfort, negative comfort, to offer, but it might not be said
+until Kent should give him leave by taking the initiative. Kent broke
+silence at last, but the prompting was nothing more pertinent than the
+chalking-up of the delayed train's time.</p>
+
+<p>"An hour and twenty minutes: that means any time after nine o'clock. I'm
+honestly sorry for you, Grantham&mdash;sorry for any one that has to stay in
+this charnel-house of a town ten minutes after he's through. What will you
+do with yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>Loring got up, looked at his watch, and made a suggestion, hoping that
+Kent would fall in with it.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Shall we go back to your rooms and sit a while?"</p>
+
+<p>The exile's eyes gloomed suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Not unless you insist on it. We should get back among the relics and I
+should bore you. I'm not the man you used to know, Grantham."</p>
+
+<p>"No?" said Loring. "I sha'n't be hypocritical enough to contradict you.
+Nevertheless, you are my host. It is for you to say what you will do with
+me until train time."</p>
+
+<p>"We can kill an hour at the rally, if you like. You have seen the street
+parade and heard the band play: it is only fair that you should see the
+menagerie on exhibition."</p>
+
+<p>Loring found his match-box and made a fresh light for his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"It's pretty evident that you and 'next-Governor' Bucks are on opposite
+sides of the political fence," he observed.</p>
+
+<p>"We are. I should think a good bit less of myself than I do&mdash;and that's
+needless&mdash;if I trained in his company."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you will give him a chance to make a partizan of me? Well, come
+along. Politics are not down on my western programme, but I'm here to see
+all the new things."</p>
+
+<p>The Gaston Opera House was a survival of the flush times, and barring a
+certain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect
+which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street
+and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic.
+The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent
+and his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer;
+but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats well
+around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from their
+nearest neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>Since the public side of American politics varies little with the
+variation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself at
+once in homely and remindful surroundings. There was the customary draping
+of flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of the
+background. In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat the
+local and visiting political lights; men of all trades, these, some of
+them a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwonted
+conspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air of
+strained attention to the speaker of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audience, typical of all
+America&mdash;the thing most truly typical in a land where national types are
+sought for microscopically: wheel-horses who came at the party call; men
+who came in the temporary upblaze of enthusiastic patriotism, which is
+lighted with the opening of the campaign, and which goes out like a candle
+in a gust of wind the day after the election; men who came to applaud
+blindly, and a few who came to cavil and deride. Loring oriented himself
+in a leisurely eye-sweep, and so came by easy gradations to the speaker.</p>
+
+<p>Measured by the standard of fitness for his office of prolocutor the man
+standing beside the stage-properties speaker's desk was worthy a second
+glance. He was dark, undersized, trimly built; with a Vandyke beard
+clipped closely enough to show the lines of a bull-dog jaw, and eyes that
+had the gift, priceless to the public speaker, of seeming to hold every
+onlooking eye in the audience. Unlike his backers in the awkward
+semicircle, he wore a professional long coat; and the hands that marked
+his smoothly flowing sentences were slim and shapely.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter&mdash;a
+charter member of the Gaston wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you into
+believing in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you in
+the back for a ten-dollar bill in the next," was the rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>Loring nodded, and again became a listener. Hawk's speech was merely
+introductory, and it was nearing its peroration.</p>
+
+<p>"Fellow citizens, this occasion is as auspicious as it is significant.
+When the people rise in their might to say to tyranny in whatsoever form
+it oppresses them, 'Thus far and no farther shalt thou go,' the night is
+far spent and the light is breaking in the east.</p>
+
+<p>"Since the day when we first began to wrest with compelling hands the
+natural riches from the soil of this our adoptive State, political
+trickery in high places, backed by the puissant might of alien
+corporations, has ground us into the dust.</p>
+
+<p>"But now the time of our deliverance is at hand. Great movements give
+birth to great leaders; and in this, our holy crusade against oppression
+and tyranny, the crisis has bred the man. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the
+pleasure of presenting to you the speaker of the evening: our friend and
+fellow citizen the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks, by the grace of God, and
+your suffrages, the next governor of the State."</p>
+
+<p>In the storm of applause that burst upon the dramatic peroration of the
+ex-district attorney, a man rose from the center of the stage semicircle
+and lumbered heavily forward to the footlights. Loring's first emotion was
+of surprise, tempered with pity. The crisis-born leader, heralded by such
+a flourish of rhetorical trumpets, was a giant in size; but with his huge
+figure, unshapely and ill-clad, all promise of greatness seemed to pause.</p>
+
+<p>His face, broad-featured, colorless, and beardless as a boy's, was either
+a blank or an impenetrable mask. There was no convincement in the
+lack-luster gaze of the small, porcine eyes; no eloquence in the harsh,
+nasal tones of the untrained voice, or in the ponderous and awkward
+wavings of the beam-like arms. None the less, before he had uttered a
+dozen halting sentences he was carrying the audience with him step by
+step; moving the great concourse of listeners with his commonplace periods
+as a mellifluous Hawk could never hope to move it.</p>
+
+<p>Loring saw the miracle in the throes of its outworking; saw and felt it in
+his own proper person, and sought in vain to account for it. Was there
+some subtile magnetism in this great hulk of a man that made itself felt
+in spite of its hamperings? Or was it merely that the people, weary of
+empty rhetoric and unkept promises, were ripe to welcome and to follow any
+man whose apparent earnestness and sincerity atoned for all his lacks?</p>
+
+<p>Explain it as he might, Loring soon assured himself that the Honorable
+Jasper G. Bucks was laying hold of the sentiment of the audience as though
+it were a thing tangible to be grasped by the huge hands. Unlike Hawk,
+whose speech flamed easily into denunciation when it touched on the alien
+corporations, he counseled moderation and lawful reprisals. Land
+syndicates, railroads, foreign capital in whatever employment, were prime
+necessities in any new and growing commonwealth. The province of the
+people was not to wreck the ship, but to guide it. And the remedy for all
+ills lay in controlling legislation, faithfully and rigidly enforced.</p>
+
+<p>"My friends: I'm only a plain, hard-handed farmer, as those of you who are
+my fellow townsmen can testify. But I've seen what you've seen, and I've
+suffered what you've suffered. Year after year we send our representatives
+to the legislature, and what comes of it? Why, these corporations, looking
+only to their own interests, as they're in duty bound to do, buys 'em if
+they can. You can't blame 'em for that; it's business&mdash;their business. But
+it is our business, as citizens of this great commonwealth, to prevent it.
+We have good laws on our statute books, but we need more of 'em; laws for
+control, with plain, honest men at the capital, in the judiciary, in every
+root and branch of the executive, to enforce 'em. With such laws, and such
+men to see that they are executed, there wouldn't be any more extortion,
+any more raising of the rates of transportation on the produce of our
+ranches and farms merely because the eastern market for that particular
+product happened to jump a few cents on the dollar.</p>
+
+<p>"No, my friends; plain, hard-handed farmer though I be, I can see what
+will follow an honest election of the people, by the people, and for the
+people. The State can be&mdash;it ought to be&mdash;sovereign within its own
+boundaries. If we rise up as one man next Tuesday and put a ticket into
+the ballot-box that says we are going to make it so, and keep it so,
+you'll see a new commodity tariff put into effect on the Western Pacific
+Railroad the day after."</p>
+
+<p>The speaker paused, and into the little gap of silence barked a voice from
+the gallery.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what you say. But supposin' they don't do it?"</p>
+
+<p>Loring was gazing steadfastly at the blank, heavy face, so utterly devoid
+of the enthusiasm the man was evoking in others. For one flitting instant
+he thought he saw behind the mask. The immobile face, the awkward
+gestures, the slipshod English became suddenly transparent, revealing the
+real man; a man of titanic strength, of tremendous possibilities for good
+or evil. Loring put up his glasses and looked again; but the figure of the
+flash-light inner vision had vanished, and the speaker was answering his
+objector as calmly as though the house held only the single critic to be
+set right.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm always glad to hear a man speak right out in meeting," he said,
+dropping still deeper into the colloquialisms. "Supposing the corporations
+don't see the handwriting on the wall&mdash;won't see it, you say? Then, my
+friend, it will become the manifest duty of the legislature and the
+executive to make 'em see it: always lawfully, you understand; always with
+a just and equitable respect for the rights of property in which our free
+and glorious institutions are founded, but with level-handed justice, and
+without fear or favor."</p>
+
+<p>A thunderous uproar of applause clamored on the heels of the answer, and
+the Honorable Jasper mopped his face with a colored handkerchief and took
+a swallow of water from the glass on the desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Mind you, my friends, I'm not saying we are not going to find plenty of
+stumps and roots and a tough sod in this furrow we are going to plow. It's
+only the fool or the ignoramus who underrates the strength of his
+opponent. It is going to be just plain, honest justice and the will of the
+people against the money of the Harrimans and the Goulds and the
+Vanderbilts and all the rest of 'em. But the law is mighty, and it will
+prevail. Give us an honest legislature to make such laws, and an executive
+strong enough to enforce 'em, and the sovereign State will stand out
+glorious and triumphant as a monument against oppression.</p>
+
+<p>"When that time comes&mdash;and it's a-coming, my friends&mdash;the corporations and
+the syndicates will read the handwriting on the wall; don't you be afraid
+of that. If they should be a little grain thick-headed and sort o' blind
+at first, as old King Belshazzar was, it may be that the sovereign State
+will have to give 'em an object-lesson&mdash;lawfully, always lawfully, you
+understand. But when they see, through the medium of such an object-lesson
+or otherwise, as the case may be, that we mean business; when they see
+that we, the people of this great and growing commonwealth, mean to assert
+our rights to live and move and have our being, to have fair, even-handed
+justice meted out to ourselves, our wives and our little children, they'll
+come down and quit watering their stock with the sweat of our brows; and
+that hold-up motto of theirs, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
+will be no more known in Israel!"</p>
+
+<p>Again the clamor of applause rose like fine dust on the throng-heated air,
+and Kent looked at his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"It is time we were going," he said; adding: "I guess you have had enough
+of it, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Loring was silent for the better part of the way back to the railway
+station. When he spoke it was in answer to a delayed question of Kent's.</p>
+
+<p>"What do I think of him? I don't know, David; and that's the plain truth.
+He is not the man he appears to be as he stands there haranguing that
+crowd. That is a pose, and an exceedingly skilful one. He is not
+altogether apparent to me; but he strikes me as being a man of immense
+possibilities&mdash;whether for good or evil, I can't say."</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't draw another breath of uncertainty on that score," was the
+curt rejoinder. "He is a demagogue, pure and unadulterated."</p>
+
+<p>Loring did not attempt to refute the charge.</p>
+
+<p>"Are he and his party likely to win?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"God knows," said Kent. "We have had so many lightning transformations in
+politics in the State that nothing is impossible."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to know," was Loring's comment. "It might make some difference
+to me, personally."</p>
+
+<p>"To you?" said Kent, inquiringly. "That reminds me: I haven't given you a
+chance to say ten words about yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"The chance hasn't been lacking. But my business out here is&mdash;well, it
+isn't exactly a Star Chamber matter, but I'm under promise in a way not
+to talk about it until I have had a conference with our people at the
+capital. I'll write you about it in a few days."</p>
+
+<p>They were ascending the steps at the end of the passenger platform again,
+and Loring broke away from the political and personal entanglement to give
+Kent one more opportunity to hear his word of negative comfort.</p>
+
+<p>"We dug up the field of recollection pretty thoroughly in our after-dinner
+séance in your rooms, David, but I noticed there was one corner of it you
+left undisturbed. Was there any good reason?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent made no show of misunderstanding.</p>
+
+<p>"There was the excellent reason which must have been apparent to you
+before you had been an hour in Gaston. I've made my shot, and missed."</p>
+
+<p>Loring entered the breach with his shield held well to the fore. He was
+the last man in the world to assault a friend's confidence recklessly.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought a good while ago, and I still think, that you are making a
+mountain out of a mole-hill, David. Elinor Brentwood is a true woman in
+every inch of her. She is as much above caring for false notions of caste
+as you ought to be."</p>
+
+<p>"I know her nobility: which is all the more reason why I shouldn't take
+advantage of it. We may scoff at the social inequalities as much as we
+please, but we can't laugh them out of court. As between a young woman
+who is an heiress in her own right, and a briefless lawyer, there are
+differences which a decent man is bound to efface. And I haven't been
+able."</p>
+
+<p>"Does Miss Brentwood know?"</p>
+
+<p>"She knows nothing at all. I was unwilling to entangle her, even with a
+confidence."</p>
+
+<p>"The more fool you," said Loring, bluntly. "You call yourself a lawyer,
+and you have not yet learned one of the first principles of common
+justice, which is that a woman has some rights which even a besotted lover
+is bound to respect. You made love to her that summer at Croydon; you
+needn't deny it. And at the end of things you walk off to make your
+fortune without committing yourself; without knowing, or apparently
+caring, what your stiff-necked poverty-pride may cost her in years of
+uncertainty. You deserve to lose her."</p>
+
+<p>Kent's smile was a fair measure of his unhopeful mood.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't well lose what you have never had. I'm not such an ass as to
+believe that she cared greatly."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know? Not by anything you ever gave her a chance to say, I'll
+dare swear. I've a bit of qualified good news for you, but the spirit is
+moving me mightily to hold my tongue."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," said Kent, his indifference vanishing in the turning of a leaf.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to begin with, Miss Brentwood is still unmarried, though the
+gossips say she doesn't lack plenty of eligible offers."</p>
+
+<p>"Half of that I knew; the other half I took for granted. Go on."</p>
+
+<p>"Her mother, under the advice of the chief of the clan Brentwood, has been
+making a lot of bad investments for herself and her two daughters: in
+other words, she has been making ducks and drakes of the Brentwood
+fortune."</p>
+
+<p>Kent was as deeply moved as if the loss had been his own, and said as
+much, craving more of the particulars.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't give them. But I may say that the blame lies at your door,
+David."</p>
+
+<p>"At my door? How do you arrive at that?"</p>
+
+<p>"By the shortest possible route. If you had done your duty by Elinor in
+the Croydon summer, Mrs. Brentwood would have had a bright young attorney
+for a son-in-law and adviser, and the bad investments would not have been
+made."</p>
+
+<p>Kent's laugh was entirely devoid of mirth.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't trample on a man when he's down. I was neither a prophet nor the
+son of a prophet. But how bad is the smash? Surely you know that?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't. Bradford was telling me about it the day I left Boston. He
+gave me to understand that the principal family holding at present is in
+the stock of a certain western railway."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he happen to know the name of the stock?" asked Kent, moistening his
+lips.</p>
+
+<p>"He did. Fate flirts with you two in the usual fashion. Mrs. Brentwood's
+little fortune&mdash;and by consequence, Elinor's and Penelope's&mdash;is tied up in
+the stock of the company whose platform we are occupying at the present
+moment&mdash;the Western Pacific."</p>
+
+<p>Kent let slip a hard word directed at ill-advisers in general, and Loring
+took his cue from the malediction.</p>
+
+<p>"You swear pretty feelingly, David. Isn't our property as good a thing as
+we of the Boston end have been cracking it up to be?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know better about the financial part of it than I do. But&mdash;well, you
+are fresh from this anarchistic conclave at the Opera House. You can
+imagine what the stock of the Western Pacific, or of any other foreign
+corporation doing business in this State, will be worth in six months
+after Bucks and his crowd get into the saddle."</p>
+
+<p>"You speak as if the result of the election were a foregone conclusion. I
+hope it isn't. But we were talking more particularly of Miss Brentwood,
+and your personal responsibilities." The belated train was whistling for
+the lower yard, and Loring was determined to say all that was in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; go on. I'm anxious to hear&mdash;more anxious than I seem to be,
+perhaps."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she is coming West, after a bit. She, and her sister and the
+mother. Mrs. Brentwood's asthma is worse, and the wise men have ordered
+her to the interior. I thought you'd like to know."</p>
+
+<p>"Is she&mdash;are they coming this way?" asked Kent.</p>
+
+<p>The train was in, and the porter had fetched Loring's hand-bag from the
+check-stand. The guest paused with one foot on the step of the
+sleeping-car.</p>
+
+<p>"If I were you, David, I'd write and ask; I should, by Jove. It would be a
+tremendously cheeky thing to do, of course, having such a slight
+acquaintance with her as you have; but I'll be hanged if I shouldn't
+chance it. And in the mean time, if I don't go back East next week, you'll
+hear from me. When you do, or if you do, take a day off and run up to the
+capital. I shall need you. Good-by."</p>
+
+<p>Kent watched the train pull out; stood looking after it until the two red
+eyes of the rear signals had disappeared in the dusty darkness of the
+illimitable plain. Then he went to his rooms, to the one which was called
+by courtesy his office, and without allowing himself time for a nice
+balancing of the pros and cons, squared himself at the desk to write a
+letter.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH3"></a>
+<h2>III</h2>
+<h3>THE BOSTONIANS</h3>
+
+<p>It was precisely on the day set for the Brentwoods' westward flitting that
+the postman, making his morning round, delivered David Kent's asking at
+the house in the Back Bay sub-district. Elinor was busy packing for the
+migration, but she left Penelope and the maid to cope with the problem of
+compressing two trunkfuls into one while she read the letter, and she was
+reading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Ormsby's card came up.</p>
+
+<p>"You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do."</p>
+
+<p>"Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me."
+Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of her
+brow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the early
+morning caller.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of athletic leisure, and inheritor
+of the Ormsby millions, was pacing back and forth before the handful of
+fire in the drawing-room grate when she entered.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protested
+reproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?"</p>
+
+<p>Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but
+just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.</p>
+
+<p>"How was I to know you didn't know?" she retorted. "It was in the
+<i>Transcript</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to
+keep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper.
+Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a
+propeller blade on the <i>Amphitrite</i> trying to get here in time."</p>
+
+<p>"I am so sorry&mdash;for the <i>Amphitrite</i>," she said. "But you are here, and in
+good season. Shall I call mother and Nell?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your errands for you&mdash;take your
+tickets, and so on."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things.
+And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of
+this household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the family all over
+Europe?"</p>
+
+<p>"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for the
+capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German
+frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to
+help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it."</p>
+
+<p>He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the
+clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward
+presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.</p>
+
+<p>"You are hard with me, Elinor&mdash;always flinty and adamantine, and that
+sort. Have you no soft side at all?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can't
+be an anachronism."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other things
+about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of
+the house since father died."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put
+the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; to
+take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. When
+are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little
+worries, Elinor?"</p>
+
+<p>She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispassionately. "We
+were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar
+Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong
+enough to make it possible."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her with narrowing eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it
+is that I haven't been able to open."</p>
+
+<p>She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient.</p>
+
+<p>"If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also&mdash;to
+Abigail and the trunk-packing."</p>
+
+<p>He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful
+soul asserting itself boldly.</p>
+
+<p>"It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you."</p>
+
+<p>"To Abigail and the trunk-room?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West&mdash;wherever it is you are going
+to hibernate."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said decisively; "you must not."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"My saying so ought to be sufficient reason."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I
+tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not," she denied.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you
+should continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I might
+over-persuade you."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes&mdash;they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue
+tints in stressful moments&mdash;met his defiantly.</p>
+
+<p>"If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and
+Penelope will be delighted, I am sure."</p>
+
+<p>"And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'll
+be decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like."</p>
+
+<p>Again she made the little gesture of petulant impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"You are continually placing me in a false position. Can't you leave me
+out of it entirely?"</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the prime requisites of successful mastership to know when to
+press the point home, and when to recede gracefully. Ormsby abruptly shut
+the door upon sentiment and came down to things practical.</p>
+
+<p>"It is your every-day comfort that concerns me chiefly. I am going to
+take all three of you in charge, giving the dependable young person a
+well-earned holiday&mdash;a little journey in which she won't have to chaffer
+with the transit people. Have you chosen your route to the western
+somewhere?"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brentwood had the fair, transparent skin that tells tales, and the
+blue-gray eyes were apt to confirm them. David Kent's letter was hidden in
+the folds of her loose-waisted morning gown, and she fancied it stirred
+like a thing alive to remind her of its message. Ormsby was looking past
+her to the old-fashioned ormolu clock on the high mantel, comparing the
+time with his watch, but he was not oblivious of the telltale flush.</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing embarrassing about the choosing of a route, is there?"
+he queried.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; being true Americans, we don't know one route from another in our
+own country," she confessed. "But at the western end of it we want to go
+over the Western Pacific."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby knew the West by rail routes as one who travels much for
+time-killing purposes.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a rather roundabout cow-path," he objected. "The Overland Short Line
+is a good bit more direct; not to mention the service, which is a lot
+better."</p>
+
+<p>But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent's letter, and she
+would not withdraw it.</p>
+
+<p>"Probably you don't own any Western Pacific stock," she suggested. "We
+do; and we mean to be loyal to our salt."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election of
+Governor Bucks. If I had any, I'd wire my broker to sell."</p>
+
+<p>"We are not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch of
+the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so
+conscienceless as you men."</p>
+
+<p>"Conscience," he repeated half absently; "is there any room for such an
+out-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists? But seriously; you ought
+to get rid of Western Pacific. There can be no possible question of
+conscience involved."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't agree with you," she retorted with prompt decision. "If we were
+to sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a bad
+investment. Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, we
+have no right to sell."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled leniently.</p>
+
+<p>"All of which goes to prove that you three lone women need a guardian. But
+I mustn't keep you any longer from Abigail and the trunks. What time shall
+I send the expediters after your luggage?"</p>
+
+<p>She told him, and went with him to the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't think me ungrateful," she said, when she had thrown the
+night-latch for him. "I don't mean to be."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think anything of you that I ought not to think: in that I am as
+conscientious as even you could wish. Good-by, until this evening. I'll
+meet you all at the station."</p>
+
+<p>As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself under
+fire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had she
+forgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon. She was
+a thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness;
+a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had become
+panic-acidulous. And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction,
+it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also the
+passivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less assertive folk.</p>
+
+<p>Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but of
+her tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring's
+summing-up of Elinor's mother as a woman who had taken culture and the
+humanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her
+native hills takes polish&mdash;reluctantly, and without prejudice to its inner
+granular structure.</p>
+
+<p>"Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the way
+you do," was her comment when Elinor came back. "You are your father's
+daughters, both of you: there isn't a drop of the Grimkie blood in either
+of you, I do believe."</p>
+
+<p>Elinor was sufficiently her father's daughter to hold her peace under her
+mother's reproaches: also, there was enough of the Grimkie blood in her
+veins to stiffen her in opposition when the need arose. So she said
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Since your Uncle Ichabod made such a desperate mess of that copper
+business in Montana, we have all been next door to poverty, and you know
+it," the mother went on, irritated by Elinor's silence. "I don't care so
+much for myself: your father and I began with nothing, and I can go back
+to nothing, if necessary. But you can't, and neither can Penelope; you'd
+both starve. I should like to know what Brookes Ormsby has done that you
+can't tolerate him."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't anything he has done, or failed to do," said Elinor, wearily.
+"Please let's not go over it all again, mother."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood let that gun cool while she fired another.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose he came to say good-by: what is he going to do with himself
+this winter?"</p>
+
+<p>The temptation to equivocate for pure perversity's sake was strong upon
+Elinor, and she yielded to it.</p>
+
+<p>"How should I know? He has the <i>Amphitrite</i> and the Florida coast, hasn't
+he?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood groaned.</p>
+
+<p>"To think of the way he squanders his money in sheer dissipation!" she
+exclaimed. "Of course, he will take an entire house-party with him, as
+usual, and the cost of that one cruise would set you up in housekeeping."</p>
+
+<p>Penelope laughed with a younger daughter's license. She was a statuesque
+young woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyes
+with an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose that
+was neither the Brentwood, which was severely classic, nor the Grimkie,
+which was pure Puritan renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>"Which is to intimate that he won't have money enough left to do it when
+he comes back," she commented. "I wish there were some way of making him
+believe he had to give me what remains of his income after he has spent
+all he can on the Florida cruise. I'd wear Worth gowns and be lapped in
+luxury for the next ten years at the very least."</p>
+
+<p>"He isn't going to Florida this winter," said Elinor, repenting her of the
+small quibble. "He is going West."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood looked up sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"With us?" she queried.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>Penelope clasped her hands and tried to look soulful.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Ellie!" she said; "have you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No," Elinor retorted; "I have not."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH4"></a>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+<h3>THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT</h3>
+
+<p>The westward journey began at the appointed hour in the evening with the
+resourceful Ormsby in command; and when the outsetting, in which she had
+to sustain only the part of an obedient automaton, was a fact
+accomplished, Elinor settled back into the pillowed corner of her
+sleeping-car section to enjoy the unwonted sensation of being the one
+cared for instead of the caretaker.</p>
+
+<p>She had traveled more or less with her mother and Penelope ever since her
+father's death, and was well used to taking the helm. Experience and the
+responsibilities had made her self-reliant, and her jesting boast that she
+was a dependable young woman was the simple truth. Yet to the most modern
+of girl bachelors there may come moments when the soul harks back to the
+eternal-womanly, and the desire to be petted and looked after and
+safe-conducted is stronger than the bachelor conventions.</p>
+
+<p>Two sections away the inevitable newly married pair posed unconsciously
+to point the moral for Miss Brentwood. She marked the eagerly anticipative
+solicitude of the boyish groom, contrasting it now and then with Ormsby's
+less obtrusive attentions. It was all very absurd and sentimental, she
+thought; and yet she was not without a curious heart-stirring of envy
+provoked by the self-satisfied complacency of the bride.</p>
+
+<p>What had that chit of a girl done to earn her immunity from
+self-defendings and the petty anxieties? Nothing, Elinor decided; at
+least, nothing more purposeful than the swimmer does when he lets himself
+drift with the current. None the less, the immunity was hers, undeniably,
+palpably. For the first time in her life Miss Brentwood found herself
+looking, with a little shudder of withdrawal and dismay, down the possible
+vista&mdash;possible to every unmarried woman of twenty-four&mdash;milestoned by
+unbroken years of spinsterhood and self-helpings.</p>
+
+<p>Was she strong enough to walk this hedged-up path alone?&mdash;single-hearted
+enough to go on holding out against her mother's urgings, against Ormsby's
+masterful wooing, against her own unconquerable longing for a sure
+anchorage in some safe haven of manful care and supervision; all this that
+she might continue to preserve her independence and live the life which,
+despite its drawbacks, was yet her own?</p>
+
+<p>There were times when she doubted her resolution; and this first night of
+the westward journey was one of them. She had thought at one time that she
+might be able to idealize David Kent, but he had gone his way to hew out
+his fortune, taking her upstirrings of his ambition in a purely literal
+and selfish sense, so far as she could determine. And now there was
+Brookes Ormsby. She could by no possibility idealize him. He was a fixed
+fact, stubbornly asserted. Yet he was a great-hearted gentleman, unspoiled
+by his millions, thoughtful always for her comfort, generous,
+self-effacing. Just now, for example, when he had done all, he had seemed
+to divine her wish to be alone and had betaken himself to the
+smoking-compartment.</p>
+
+<p>"I promised not to bore you," he had said, "and I sha'n't. Send the porter
+after me if there is anything I have forgotten to do."</p>
+
+<p>She took up the magazine he had left on the seat beside her and sought to
+put away the disquieting thoughts. But they refused to be dismissed; and
+now among them rose up another, dating back to that idealizing summer at
+the foot of Old Croydon, and having its genesis in a hard saying of her
+mother's.</p>
+
+<p>She closed her eyes, recalling the words and the occasion of them. "You
+are merely wasting time and sentiment on this young upstart of a country
+lawyer, Elinor. So long as you were content to make it a summer day's
+amusement, I had nothing to say; you are old enough and sensible enough to
+choose your own recreations. But in justice to yourself, no less than to
+him, you must let it end with our going home. You haven't money enough for
+two."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes grew hot under the closed lids when she remembered. At the time
+the hard saying was evoked there was money enough for two, if David Kent
+would have shared it. But he had held his peace and gone away, and now
+there was not enough for two.</p>
+
+<p>Elinor faced her major weakness unflinchingly. She was not a slave to the
+luxuries&mdash;the luxuries of the very rich. On the contrary, she had tried to
+make herself believe that hardness was a part of her creed. But latterly,
+she had been made to see that there was a formidable array of things which
+she had been calling comforts: little luxuries which Brookes Ormsby's wife
+might reckon among the simplest necessities of the daily life, but which
+David Kent's wife might have to forego; nay, things which Elinor Brentwood
+might presently have to forego. For she compelled herself to front the
+fact of the diminished patrimony squarely. So long as the modest Western
+Pacific dividends were forthcoming, they could live comfortably and
+without pinching. But failing these&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'm not great enough," she confessed, with a little shiver. "I should
+be utterly miserable. If I could afford to indulge in ideals it would be
+different; but I can't&mdash;not when one word of mine will build a barrier so
+high that all the soul-killing little skimpings can never climb over it.
+And besides, I owe something to mother and Nell."</p>
+
+<p>It was the final straw. When any weakness of the human heart can find a
+seeming virtue to go hand in hand with it, the battle is as good as lost;
+and at that moment Brookes Ormsby, placidly refilling his short pipe in
+the smoking-room of the Pullman, was by no means in the hopeless case he
+was sometimes tempted to fancy himself.</p>
+
+<p>As may be surmised, a diligent suitor, old enough to plan thoughtfully,
+and yet young enough to simulate the youthful ardor of a lover whose hair
+has not begun to thin at the temples, would lose no ground in a three
+days' journey and the opportunities it afforded.</p>
+
+<p>In Penelope's phrase, Elinor "suffered him", enjoying her freedom from
+care like a sleepy kitten; shutting the door on the past and keeping it
+shut until the night when their through sleeper was coupled to the Western
+Pacific Flyer at A.&amp; T. Junction. But late that evening, when she was
+rummaging in her hand-bag for a handkerchief, she came upon David Kent's
+letter and read it again.</p>
+
+<p>"Loring tells me you are coming West," he wrote. "I assume there is at
+least one chance in three that you will pass through Gaston. If you do,
+and if the hour is not altogether impossible, I should like to meet your
+train. One thing among the many the past two years have denied me&mdash;the
+only thing I have cared much about, I think&mdash;is the sight of your face. I
+shall be very happy if you will let me look at you&mdash;just for the minute or
+two the train may stop."</p>
+
+<p>There was more of it; a good bit more: but it was all guarded commonplace,
+opening no window in the heart of the man David Kent. Yet even in the
+commonplace she found some faint interlinings of the change in him; not a
+mere metamorphosis of the outward man, as a new environment might make,
+but a radical change, deep and biting, like the action of a strong acid
+upon a fine-grained metal.</p>
+
+<p>She returned the letter to its envelope, and after looking up Gaston on
+the time-table fell into a heart-stirring reverie, with unseeing eyes
+fixed on the restful blackness of the night rushing rearward past the car
+windows.</p>
+
+<p>"He has forgotten," she said, with a little lip-curl of disappointment.
+"He thinks he ought to remember, and he is trying&mdash;trying because Grantham
+said something that made him think he ought to try. But it's no use. It
+was only a little summer idyl, and we have both outlived it."</p>
+
+<p>She was still gazing steadfastly upon the wall of outer darkness when the
+porter began to make down the berths and Penelope came over to sit in the
+opposite seat. A moment later the younger sister made a discovery, or
+thought she did.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Elinor Brentwood!" she said. "I do believe you are crying!"</p>
+
+<p>Elinor's smile was serenity undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p>"What a vivid imagination you have, Nell, dear," she scoffed. Then she
+changed the subject arbitrarily: "Is mother quite comfortable? Did you
+have the porter put a screen in her window?&mdash;you know she always insists
+she can't breathe without it."</p>
+
+<p>Penelope evaded the queries and took her turn at subject-wrenching&mdash;an art
+in which she excelled.</p>
+
+<p>"We are on our own railroad now, aren't we?" she asked, with purposeful
+lack-interest. "And&mdash;let me see&mdash;isn't Mr. Kent at some little town we
+pass through?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is a city," said Elinor. "And the name is Gaston."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember now," Penelope rejoined. "I wonder if we shall see him?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is most unlikely. He does not know we are coming, and he wouldn't be
+looking for us."</p>
+
+<p>Penelope's fine eyes clouded. At times Elinor's thought-processes were as
+plain as print to the younger sister; at other times they were not.</p>
+
+<p>"I should think the least we could do would be to let him know," she
+ventured. "Does anybody know what time the train passes Gaston?"</p>
+
+<p>"At seven-fifteen to-morrow evening," was the unguarded reply; and
+Penelope drew her own conclusions from the ready answer and the folded
+time-table in Elinor's lap.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why don't you send him a wire? I'm sure I should."</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I?" said Elinor, warily.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know: any other young woman of his acquaintance would, I
+fancy. I have half a mind to do it myself. <i>I</i> like him, if you don't care
+for him any more."</p>
+
+<p>Thus Penelope; and a little while afterward, finding herself in the
+library compartment with blanks and pen and ink convenient and nothing
+better to do, she impulsively made the threat good in a ten-word message
+to Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"If he should happen to drop in unexpectedly it will give Ellie the shock
+of her life," she mused; and the telegram was smuggled into the hands of
+the porter to be sent as occasion offered.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Those who knew Mr. Brookes Ormsby best were wont to say that the world of
+action, a world lusting avidly for resourceful men, had lost the chance of
+acquiring a promising leader when he was born heir to the Ormsby millions.
+Be that as it may, he made the most of such opportunities for the
+exercising of his gift as came to one for whom the long purse leveled most
+barriers; had been making the most of the present leaguer of a woman's
+heart&mdash;a citadel whose capitulation was not to be compassed by mere
+money-might, he would have said.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the final day of the long westward flight all things had gone well
+with him. True, Elinor had not thawed visibly, but she had been tolerant;
+Penelope had amused herself at no one's expense save her own&mdash;a boon for
+which Ormsby did not fail to be duly thankful; and Mrs. Brentwood had
+contributed her mite by keeping hands off.</p>
+
+<p>But at the dining-car luncheon on the last day's run, Penelope,
+languishing at a table for two with an unresponsive Ormsby for a
+vis-à-vis, made sly mention of the possible recrudescence of one David
+Kent at a place called Gaston: this merely to note the effect upon an
+unresponsive table-mate.</p>
+
+<p>In Penelope's observings there was no effect perceptible. Ormsby said
+"Ah?" and asked if she would have more of the salad. But later, in a
+contemplative half-hour with his pipe in the smoking-compartment, he let
+the scrap of information sink in and take root.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto Kent had been little more than a name to him; a name he had never
+heard on Elinor's lips. But if love be blind in the teens and twenties, it
+is more than apt to have a keen gift of insight in the thirties and
+beyond. Hence, by the time Ormsby had come to the second filling of his
+pipe, he had pieced together bits of half-forgotten gossip about the
+Croydon summer, curious little reticences on Elinor's part, vague hints
+let fall by Mrs. Brentwood; enough to enable him to chart the rock on
+which his love-argosy was drifting, and to name it&mdash;David Kent.</p>
+
+<p>Now to a well-knit man of the world&mdash;who happens to be a heaven-born
+diplomatist into the bargain&mdash;to be forewarned is to be doubly armed. At
+the end of the half-hour of studious solitude in the smoking-room, Ormsby
+had pricked out his course on the chart to a boat's-length; had trimmed
+his sails to the minutest starting of a sheet. A glance at his watch and
+another at the time-table gave him the length of his respite. Six hours
+there were; and a dining-car dinner intervened. Those six hours, and the
+dinner, he decided, must win or lose the race.</p>
+
+<p>Picturing for ourselves, if we may, how nine men out of ten would have
+given place to panic-ardor, turning a possible victory into a hopeless
+rout, let us hold aloof and mark the generalship of the tenth, who
+chances to be the heaven-born.</p>
+
+<p>For five of the six precious hours Ormsby merely saw to it that Elinor was
+judiciously marooned. Then the dining-car was reopened and the evening
+meal was announced. Waiting until a sufficient number of passengers had
+gone forward to insure a crowded car, Ormsby let his party fall in with
+the tail of the procession, and the inevitable happened. Single seats only
+could be had, and Elinor was compelled to dine in solemn silence at a
+table with three strangers.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner over, there remained but twenty minutes of the respite; but the
+diplomatist kept his head, going back to the sleeping-car with his charges
+and dropping into the seat beside Elinor with the light of calm assurance
+in his eye.</p>
+
+<p>"You are quite comfortable?" he began. "Sha'n't I have the Presence in the
+buffet make you a cup of tea? That in the diner didn't deserve the name."</p>
+
+<p>She was regarding him with curious anger in the gray eyes, and her reply
+quite ignored the kindly offer of refreshment.</p>
+
+<p>"You are the pink of dragomans," she said. "Don't you want to go and
+smoke?"</p>
+
+<p>"To be entirely consistent, I suppose I ought to," he confessed, wondering
+if his throw had failed. "Do you want me to go?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have been alone all the afternoon: I can endure it a little while
+longer, I presume."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby permitted himself a single heart-throb of exultation. He had
+deliberately gone about to break down her poise, her only barrier of
+defense, and it began to look as if he had succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't help it, you know," he said, catching his cue swiftly. "There
+are times when I'm obliged to keep away from you&mdash;times when every fiber
+of me rebels against the restraints of the false position you have thrust
+me into. When I'm taken that way I don't dare play with the fire."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could know how much you mean by that," she said musingly. Deep
+down in her heart she knew she was as far as ever from loving this man;
+but his love, or the insistent urging of it, was like a strong current
+drifting her whither she would not go.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean all that an honest man can mean," he rejoined. "I have fought like
+a soldier for standing-room in the place you have assigned me; I have
+tried sincerely&mdash;and stupidly, you will say&mdash;to be merely your friend,
+just the best friend you ever had. But it's no use. Coming or going, I
+shall always be your lover."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't," she said, neither coldly nor warmly. "You are getting over
+into the domain of the very young people when you say things like that."</p>
+
+<p>It was an unpleasant thing to say, and he was not beyond wincing a
+little. None the less, he would not be turned aside.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll overlook it in me if I've pressed the thing too hard on the side
+of sentiment, won't you? Apart from the fact that I feel that way, I've
+been going on the supposition that you'd like it, if you could only make
+up your mind to like me."</p>
+
+<p>"I do like you," she admitted; "more than any one I have ever known, I
+think."</p>
+
+<p>The drumming wheels and a long-drawn trumpet blast from the locomotive
+made a shield of sound to isolate them. The elderly banker in the opposite
+section was nodding over his newspaper; and the newly married ones were
+oblivious, each to all else but the other. Mrs. Brentwood was apparently
+sleeping peacefully three seats away; and Penelope was invisible.</p>
+
+<p>"There was a time when I should have begged hard for something more,
+Elinor; but now I'm willing to take what I can get, and be thankful. Will
+you give me the right to make you as happy as I can on the unemotional
+basis?"</p>
+
+<p>She felt herself slipping.</p>
+
+<p>"If you could fully understand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I understand that you don't love me, in the novelist's sense of the word,
+and I am not asking more than you can give. But if you can give me the
+little now, and more when I have won it&mdash;don't curl your lip at me,
+please: I'm trying to put it as mildly as I can."</p>
+
+<p>She was looking at him level-eyed, and he could have sworn that she was
+never calmer or more self-possessed.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know why you should want my promise&mdash;or any woman's&mdash;on such
+conditions," she said evenly.</p>
+
+<p>"But I do," he insisted.</p>
+
+<p>The lights of a town suburb were flitting past the windows, and the
+monotonous song of the tires was drowned in the shrill crescendo of the
+brakes. She turned from him suddenly and laid her cheek against the
+grateful cool of the window-pane. But when he took her hand she did not
+withdraw it.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it mine, Elinor?" he whispered. "You see, I'm not asking much."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it worth taking&mdash;by itself?"</p>
+
+<p>"You make me very happy," he said quietly; and just then the train stopped
+with a jerk, and a shuffling bustle of station-platform noises floated in
+through the open deck transoms of the car.</p>
+
+<p>As if the solution of continuity had been a call to arouse her, Elinor
+freed her hand with a swift little wrench and sat bolt upright in her
+corner.</p>
+
+<p>"This station&mdash;do you know the name of it?" she asked, fighting hard for
+the self-control that usually came so easily.</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby consulted his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not quite sure. It ought to be&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He broke off when he saw that she was no longer listening to him. There
+was a stir in the forward vestibule, and the porter came in with a
+hand-bag. At his heels was a man in a rough-weather box-coat; a youngish
+man, clean-shaven and wind-tanned to a healthy bronze, with an eager face
+and alert eyes that made an instant inventory of the car and its
+complement of passengers. So much Ormsby saw. Then Penelope stood up in
+her place to greet the new-comer.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Mr. Kent!" she exclaimed. "Are you really going on with us? How nice
+of you!"</p>
+
+<p>Elinor turned coolly upon her seat-mate, self-possession once more firmly
+seated in the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you know Mr. Kent was going to board the train here?" she asked
+abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean the gentleman Penelope has waylaid? I haven't the pleasure of
+his acquaintance. Will you introduce us?"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH5"></a>
+<h2>V</h2>
+<h3>JOURNEYS END&mdash;</h3>
+
+<p>It had been a day of upsettings for David Kent, beginning with the late
+breakfast at which Neltje, the night watchman at the railway station, had
+brought him Penelope's telegram.</p>
+
+<p>At ten he had a case in court: Shotwell <i>vs</i>. Western Pacific Co., damages
+for stock-killing; for the plaintiff&mdash;Hawk; for the defendant&mdash;Kent. With
+the thought that he was presently going to see Elinor again, Kent went
+gaily to the battle legal, meaning to wring victory out of a jury drawn
+for the most part from the plaintiff's stock-raising neighbors. By dint of
+great perseverance he managed to prolong the fight until the middle of the
+afternoon, was worsted, as usual, and so far lost his temper as to get
+himself called down by the judge, MacFarlane.</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon he went back to the Farquhar Building and to his office and sat
+down at the type-writer to pound out a letter to the general counsel,
+resigning his sinecure. The Shotwell case was the third he had lost for
+the company in a single court term. Justice for the railroad company,
+under present agrarian conditions, was not to be had in the lower courts,
+and he was weary of fighting the losing battle. Therefore&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of the type-rattling the boy that served the few occupied
+offices in the Farquhar Building had brought the afternoon mail. It
+included a letter from Loring, and there was another reversive upheaval
+for the exile. Loring's business at the capital was no longer a secret. He
+had been tendered the resident management of the Western Pacific, with
+headquarters on the ground, and had accepted. His letter was a brief note,
+asking Kent to report at once for legal duty in the larger field.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not fairly in the saddle yet, and shall not be for a week or so,"
+wrote the newly appointed manager. "But I find I am going to need a
+level-headed lawyer at my elbow from the jump&mdash;one who knows the State
+political ropes and isn't afraid of a scrap. Come in on Number Three
+to-day, if you can; if not, send a wire and say when I may look for you.
+Or, better still, wire anyway."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent struggled with his emotions until he had got his feet down to
+the solid earth again. Then he tore up the half-written resignation and
+began to smite things in order for the flight. Could he make Number
+Three? Since that was the train named in Penelope's message, nothing short
+of a catastrophe should prevent his making it.</p>
+
+<p>He did make it, with an hour to spare; an hour which he proceeded to turn
+into a time of sharp trial for the patient telegraph operator at the
+station, with his badgerings of the man for news of Number Three. The
+train reported&mdash;he took it as a special miracle wrought in his behalf that
+the Flyer was for this once abreast of her schedule&mdash;he fell to tramping
+up and down the long platform, deep in anticipative prefigurings. The
+mills of the years grind many grists besides the trickling stream of the
+hours: would he find Miss Brentwood as he had left her? Could he be sure
+of meeting her on the frank, friendly footing of the Croydon summer? He
+feared not; feared all things&mdash;lover-like.</p>
+
+<p>He hoped there would be no absence-reared barrier to be painfully leveled.
+A man among men, a leader in some sort, and in battle a soldier who could
+hew his way painstakingly, if not dramatically, to his end, David Kent was
+no carpet knight, and he knew his lack. Would Elinor make things easy for
+him, as she used to daily in the somewhat difficult social atmosphere of
+the exclusive summer hotel?</p>
+
+<p>Measuring it out in all its despairing length and breadth after the fact,
+he was deeply grateful to Penelope. Missing her ready help at the moment
+of cataclysms when he entered the sleeping-car, he might have betrayed
+himself. His first glance lighted on Elinor and Ormsby, and he needed no
+gloss on the love-text. He had delayed too long; had asked too much of the
+Fates, and Atropos, the scissors-bearing sister, had snipped his thread of
+hope.</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the consequences of civilization that we are denied the
+privilege of unmasking at the behest of the elemental emotions; that we
+are constrained to bleed decorously. Making shift to lean heavily on
+Penelope, Kent came through without doing or saying anything unseemly.
+Mrs. Brentwood, who had been sleeping with one eye open, and that eye upon
+Elinor and Ormsby, made sure that she had now no special reason to be
+ungracious to David Kent. For the others, Ormsby was good-naturedly suave;
+Elinor was by turns unwontedly kind and curiously silent; and
+Penelope&mdash;but, as we say, it was to Penelope that Kent owed most.</p>
+
+<p>So it came about that the outcome of the cataclysm was a thing which
+happens often enough in a conventionalized world. David Kent, with his
+tragedy fresh upon him, dropped informally into place as one of the party
+of five; and of all the others, Penelope alone suspected how hard he was
+hit. And when all was said; when the new <i>modus vivendi</i> had been fairly
+established and the hour grew late, Kent went voluntarily with Ormsby to
+the smoking-compartment, "to play the string out decently," as he
+afterward confessed to Loring.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you know how to get the most comfort out of your tobacco," said the
+club-man, when they were companionably settled in the men's room and Kent
+produced his pipe and tobacco pouch. "I prefer the pipe myself, for a
+steady thing; but at this time of night a light Castilla fits me pretty
+well. Try one?" tendering his cigar-case.</p>
+
+<p>Fighting shrewdly against a natural prompting to regard Ormsby as an
+hereditary enemy, Kent forced himself to be neighborly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mind," he said, returning the pipe to its case. And when the
+Havanas were well alight, and the talk had circled down upon the political
+situation in the State, he was able to bear his part with a fair exterior,
+giving Ormsby an impressionistic outline of the late campaign and the
+conditions that had made the sweeping triumph of the People's Party
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>"We have been coming to it steadily through the last administration, and a
+part of the preceding one," he explained. "Last year the drought cut the
+cereals in half, and the country was too new to stand it without
+borrowing. There was little local capital, and the eastern article was
+hungry, taking all the interest the law allows, and as much more as it
+could get. This year the crop broke all records for abundance, but the
+price is down and the railroads, trying to recoup for two bad years, have
+stiffened the freight rates. The net result is our political overturn."</p>
+
+<p>"Then the railroads and the corporations are not primarily to blame?" said
+Ormsby.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no. Corporations here, as elsewhere, are looking out for the present
+dollar, but if the country were generally prosperous, the people would pay
+the tax carelessly, as they do in the older sections. With us it has been
+a sort of Donnybrook Fair: the agricultural voter has shillalahed the head
+he could reach most easily."</p>
+
+<p>The New Yorker nodded. His millions were solidly placed, and he took no
+more than a sportsman's interest in the fluctuations of the stock market.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, there have been all sorts of rumors East: 'bull' prophecies
+that the triumph of the new party means an era of unexampled prosperity
+for the State&mdash;and by consequence for western stocks; 'bear' growlings
+that things are sure to go to the bow-wows under the Bucks régime. What do
+you think of it?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent blew a series of smoke rings and watched them rise to become a part
+of the stratified tobacco cloud overhead before replying.</p>
+
+<p>"I may as well confess that I am not entirely an unprejudiced observer,"
+he admitted. "For one thing, I am in the legal department of one of the
+best-hated of the railroads; and for another, Governor Bucks, Meigs, the
+attorney-general, and Hendricks, the new secretary of State, are men whom
+I know as, it is safe to say, the general public doesn't know them. If I
+could be sure that these three men are going to be able to control their
+own party majority in the Assembly, I should take the first train East and
+make my fortune selling tips in Wall Street."</p>
+
+<p>"You put it graphically. Then the Bucks idea is likely to prove a
+disturbing element on 'Change?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is; always providing it can dominate its own majority. But this is by
+no means certain. The political earthquake is essentially a popular
+protest against hard conditions brought about, as the voters seem to
+believe, by the oppressions of the alien corporations and extortionate
+railroad rates. Yet there are plenty of steady-going, conservative men in
+the movement; men who have no present idea of revolutionizing things.
+Marston, the lieutenant-governor, is one of that kind. It all depends on
+whether these men will allow themselves to be whipped into line by the
+leaders, who, as I am very well convinced, are a set of conscienceless
+demagogues, fighting solely for their own hand."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby nodded again.</p>
+
+<p>"You are likely to have good hunting this winter, Mr. Kent. It hasn't
+begun yet, I take it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; the Assembly does not convene for a fortnight, and nobody short
+of an inspired prophet can foretell what legislation will be sprung. But
+one thing is safe to count on: the leaders are out for spoils. They mean
+to rob somebody, and, if my guess is worth anything, they are sharp enough
+to try first to get their schemes legalized by having enabling laws passed
+by the Assembly."</p>
+
+<p>"Um," said the eastern man. Then he took the measure of his companion in a
+shrewd overlook. "You are the man on the ground, Mr. Kent, and I'll ask a
+straightforward question. If you had a friend owning stock in one of the
+involved railways, what would you advise?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"We needn't make it a hypothetical case. If I had the right to advise Mrs.
+Brentwood and her daughters, I should counsel them to sit tight in the
+boat for the present."</p>
+
+<p>"Would you? But Western Pacific has gone off several points already."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it has; and unfortunately, Mrs. Brentwood bought in at the top of
+the market. That is why I counsel delay. If she sells now, she is sure to
+lose. If she holds on, there is an even chance for a spasmodic upward
+reaction before worse things happen."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps: you know more about the probabilities than I pretend to. But on
+the other hand, she may lose more if she holds on."</p>
+
+<p>Kent bit deep into his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"We must see to it that she doesn't lose, Mr. Ormsby."</p>
+
+<p>The club-man laughed broadly.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't that a good bit like saying that the shallop must see to it that
+the wind doesn't blow too hard for it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly. But in the sorriest wreck there is usually some small chance
+for salvage. I understand Mrs. Brentwood's holding is not very large?"</p>
+
+<p>"A block of some three thousand shares, held jointly by her and her two
+daughters, I believe."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly: not enough to excite anybody's cupidity; and yet enough to turn
+the scale if there should ever be a fight for a majority control."</p>
+
+<p>"There is no such fight in prospect, is there?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; not that I know of. But I was thinking of the possibilities. If a
+smash comes there will be a good deal of horse-swapping in the middle of
+the stream&mdash;buying up of depressed stocks by people who need the lines
+worse than the original owners do."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Ormsby. "Then you would counsel delay?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should; and I'll go a step farther. I am on the inside, in a way, and
+any hint I can give you for Miss&mdash;for Mrs. Brentwood's benefit shall be
+promptly forthcoming."</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! that's decent," said Ormsby, heartily. "You are a friend worth
+having, Mr. Kent. But which 'inside' do you mean&mdash;the railroad or the
+political?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, the railroad, of course. And while I think of it, my office will be
+in the Quintard Building; and you&mdash;I suppose you will put up at the
+Wellington?"</p>
+
+<p>"For the present, we all shall. It is Mrs. Brentwood's notion to take a
+furnished house later on for herself and daughters, if she can find one.
+I'll keep in touch with you."</p>
+
+<p>"Do. It may come to a bit of quick wiring when our chance arrives. You
+know Loring&mdash;Grantham Loring?"</p>
+
+<p>"Passably well. I came across him one summer in the mountains of Peru,
+where he was managing a railroad. He is a mighty good sort. I had mountain
+fever, and he took me in and did for me."</p>
+
+<p>"He is with us now," said David Kent; "the newly appointed general manager
+of the Western Pacific."</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" said the club-man "I think a lot of him; he is an all-around
+dependable fellow, and plenty capable. I'm glad to know he has caught on
+higher up."</p>
+
+<p>The locomotive whistle was droning again, and a dodging procession of
+red-eyed switch-lights flicked past the windows. Kent stood up and flung
+away the stump of his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"The capital," he announced. "I'll go back with you and help out with the
+shawl-strap things." And in the vestibule he added: "I spoke of Loring
+because he will be with us in anything we have to do in Mrs. Brentwood's
+behalf. Look him up when you have time&mdash;fourth floor of the Quintard."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH6"></a>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+<h3>OF THE MAKING OF LAWS</h3>
+
+<p>The session, the shortest in the history of the State, and thus far the
+least eventful, was nearing its close; and the alarmists who had
+prophesied evil and evil only of the "Populist" victory were fast losing
+credit with the men of their own camp and with the country at large.</p>
+
+<p>After the orthodox strife over the speakership of the House, and the
+equally orthodox wrangle over contested seats, the State Assembly had
+settled down to routine business, despatching it with such unheard-of
+celerity as to win columns of approval from the State press as a whole;
+though there were not wanting a few radical editors to raise the
+ante-election cry of reform, and to ask pointedly when it was to begin.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the lack of alarms, however, the six weeks had been a
+period of unceasing vigilance on the part of the interests which were
+supposed to be in jeopardy. Every alien corporation owning property and
+doing business in the State had its quota of watchful defenders on the
+ground; men who came and went, in the lobbies of the capitol, in the
+visitors' galleries, at the receptions; men who said little, but who saw
+and heard all things down to the small talk of the corridors and the
+clubs, and the gossip of the hotel rotundas.</p>
+
+<p>David Kent was of this silent army of observation, doing watch-dog duty
+for the Western Pacific; thankful enough, if the truth be told, to have a
+thing to do which kept him from dwelling overmuch upon the wreck of his
+hopes. But in the closing days of the session, when a despatchful
+Assembly, anxious to be quit of its task, had gone into night sittings,
+the anodyne drug of work began to lose its effect.</p>
+
+<p>The Brentwoods had taken furnished apartments in Tejon Avenue, two squares
+from the capitol, and Kent had called no oftener than good breeding
+prescribed. Yet their accessibility, and his unconquerable desire to sear
+his wound in the flame that had caused it, were constant temptations, and
+he was battling with them for the hundredth time on the Friday night when
+he sat in the House gallery listening to a perfunctory debate which
+concerned itself with a bill touching State water-ways.</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens! This thing is getting to be little short of deadly!" fumed
+Crenshawe, his right-hand neighbor, who was also a member of the corps of
+observation. "I'm going to the club for a game of pool. Won't you come
+along?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent nodded and left his seat with the bored one. But in the great rotunda
+he changed his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll find plenty of better players than I am at the club," he said in
+extenuation. "I think I'll smoke a whiff or two here and go back. They
+can't hold on much longer for to-night."</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes later, when he had lighted a cigar and was glancing over the
+evening paper, two other members of the corporation committee of safety
+came down from the Senate gallery and stopped opposite Kent's pillar to
+struggle into their overcoats.</p>
+
+<p>"It's precisely as I wrote our people two weeks ago&mdash;timidity scare, pure
+and simple," one of them was saying. "I've a mind to start home to-morrow.
+There is nothing doing here, or going to be done."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said the other. "If it wasn't for House Bill Twenty-nine, I'd go
+to-night. They will adjourn to-morrow or Monday."</p>
+
+<p>"House Bill Twenty-nine is much too dead to bury," was the reassuring
+rejoinder. "The committee is ours, and the bill will not be heard of again
+at this session. If that is all you are holding on for&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>They passed out of earshot, and Kent folded his newspaper absently. House
+Bill Twenty-nine had been the one measure touching the sensitive "vested
+interests"; the one measure for the suppression of which the
+corporations' lobby had felt called on to take steps. It was an omnibus
+bill put forth as a substitute for the existing law defining the status of
+foreign corporations. It had originated in the governor's office,&mdash;a fact
+which Kent had ferreted out within twenty-four hours of its first
+reading,&mdash;and for that reason he had procured a printed copy, searching it
+diligently for the hidden menace he was sure it embodied.</p>
+
+<p>When the search proved fruitless, he had seen the bill pass the House by a
+safe majority, had followed it to the Senate, and in a cunningly worded
+amendment tacked on in the upper house had found what he was seeking.
+Under the existing law foreign corporations were subject to State
+supervision, and were dealt with as presumably unfriendly aliens. But the
+Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine fairly swept the interstate
+corporations, as such, out of existence, by making it obligatory upon them
+to acquire the standing of local corporations. Charters were to be refiled
+with the secretary of State; resident directories and operating
+headquarters were to be established within the boundaries and jurisdiction
+of the State; in short, the State proposed, by the terms of the new law,
+to deal only with creatures of its own creation.</p>
+
+<p>Kent saw, or thought he saw, the fine hand of the junto in all this. It
+was a still hunt in which the longest way around was the shortest way
+home. Like all new-country codes, the organic law of the State favored
+local corporations, and it might be argued that a bill placing the foreign
+companies on a purely local footing was an unmixed blessing to the aliens.
+But on the other hand, an unprincipled executive might easily make the new
+law an engine of extortion. To go no further into the matter than the
+required refiling of charters: the State constitution gave the secretary
+of State quasi-judicial powers. It was within his province to pass upon
+the applications for chartered rights, and to deny them if the question
+<i>pro bono publico</i> were involved.</p>
+
+<p>Kent put two and two together, saw the wide door of exactions which might
+be opened, and passed the word of warning among his associates; after
+which he had watched the course of the amended House Bill Twenty-nine with
+interest sharp-set, planning meanwhile with Hildreth, the editor of the
+<i>Daily Argus</i>, an exposé which should make plain the immense possibilities
+for corruption opened up by the proposed law; a journalistic salvo of
+publicity to be fired as a last resort.</p>
+
+<p>The measure as amended had passed the Senate without debate, and had gone
+back to the House. Here, after the second reading, and in the very hour
+when the <i>Argus</i> editorial was getting itself cast in the linotypes, there
+was a hitch. The member from the Rio Blanco, favoring the measure in all
+its parts, and fearful only lest corporation gold might find a technical
+flaw in it, moved that it be referred to the committee on judiciary for a
+report on its constitutionality; and, accordingly, to the committee on
+judiciary it had gone.</p>
+
+<p>Kent recalled the passing of the crisis, remembering how he had hastened
+to telephone the <i>Argus</i> editor to kill the exposé at the last moment. The
+incident was now a month in the past, and the committee had not yet
+reported; would never report, Kent imagined. He knew the personnel of the
+committee on judiciary; knew that at least three members of it were down
+on the list, made up at the beginning of the session by his colleagues in
+the army of observation, as "approachables". Also, he knew by inference at
+least, that these three men had been approached, not without success, and
+that House Bill Twenty-nine, with its fee-gathering amendment, was safely
+shelved.</p>
+
+<p>"It's an ill-smelling muck-heap!" he frowned, recalling the incidents of
+the crisis at the suggestion let fall by the two outgoing lobbyists. "And
+so much of this dog-watch as isn't sickeningly demoralizing is deadly
+dull, as Crenshawe puts it. If I had anywhere to go, I'd cut the galleries
+for to-night."</p>
+
+<p>He was returning the newspaper to his pocket when it occurred to him that
+his object in buying it had been to note the stock quotations; a daily
+duty which, for Elinor's sake, he had never omitted. Whereupon he
+reopened it and ran his eye down the lists. There was a decided upward
+tendency in westerns. Overland Short Line had gained two points; and
+Western Pacific&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He held the paper under the nearest electric globe to make sure: Western
+Pacific, preferred, was quoted at fifty-eight and a half, which was one
+point and a half above the Brentwood purchase price.</p>
+
+<p>One minute later an excited life-saver was shut in the box of the public
+telephone, gritting his teeth at the inanity of the central operator who
+insisted on giving him "A-1224" instead of "A-1234," the Hotel Wellington.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no! Can't you understand? I want twelve-thirty-four; one, two,
+<i>three</i>, four; the Hotel Wellington."</p>
+
+<p>There was more skirling of bells, another nerve-trying wait, and at last
+the clerk of the hotel answered.</p>
+
+<p>"What name did you say? Oh, it's you, is it, Mr. Kent? Ormsby? Mr. Brookes
+Ormsby? No, he isn't here; he went out about two minutes ago. What's that
+you say? <i>Damn</i>? Well, I'm sorry, too. No message that I can take? All
+right. Good-by."</p>
+
+<p>This was the beginning. For the middle part Kent burst out of the
+telephone-box and took the nearest short-cut through the capitol grounds
+for the street-car corner. At a quarter of nine he was cross-questioning
+the clerk face to face in the lobby of the Wellington. There was little
+more to be learned about Ormsby. The club-man had left his key and gone
+out. He was in evening dress, and had taken a cab at the hotel entrance.</p>
+
+<p>Kent dashed across to his rooms and, in a feverish race against time, made
+himself fit to chase a man in evening dress. There was no car in sight
+when he came down, and he, too, took a cab with an explosive order to the
+driver: "124 Tejon Avenue, and be quick about it!"</p>
+
+<p>It was the housemaid that answered his ring at the door of the Brentwood
+apartment. She was a Swede, a recent importation; hence Kent learned
+nothing beyond the bare fact that the ladies had gone out. "With Mr.
+Ormsby?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yaas; Aye tank it vill pee dat yentlemans."</p>
+
+<p>The pursuer took the road again, rather unhopefully. There were a dozen
+places where Ormsby might have taken his charges. Among them there was the
+legislative reception at Portia Van Brock's. Kent flipped a figurative
+coin, and gave the order for Alameda Square. The reception was perhaps the
+least unlikely place of the dozen.</p>
+
+<p>He was no more than fashionably late at the Van Brock house, and
+fortunately he was able to reckon himself among the chosen few for whom
+Miss Portia's door swung on hospitable hinges at all hours. Loring had
+known her in Washington, and he had stood sponsor for Kent in the first
+week of the exile's residence at the capital. Thereafter she had taken
+Kent up on his own account, and by now he was deep in her debt. For one
+thing, she had set the fashion in the matter of legislative
+receptions&mdash;her detractors, knowing nothing whatever about it, hinted that
+she had been an amateur social lobbyist in Washington, playing the game
+for the pure zest of it&mdash;and at these functions Kent had learned many
+things pertinent to his purpose as watch-dog for the railroad company and
+legal adviser to his chief&mdash;things not named openly on the floor of the
+House or of the Senate chamber.</p>
+
+<p>There was a crush in the ample mansion in Alameda Square, as there always
+was at Miss Van Brock's "open evenings," and when Kent came down from the
+cloakroom he had to inch his way by littles through the crowded
+reception-parlors in the search for the Brentwood party. It was
+unsuccessful at first; but later, catching a glimpse of Elinor at the
+piano, and another of Penelope inducting an up-country legislator into the
+mysteries of social small-talk, he breathed freer. His haphazard guess had
+hit the mark, and the finding of Ormsby was now only a question of
+moments.</p>
+
+<p>It was Miss Van Brock herself who told him where to look for the
+club-man&mdash;though not at his first asking.</p>
+
+<p>"You did come, then," she said, giving him her hand with a frank little
+smile of welcome. "Some one said you were not going to be frivolous any
+more, and I wondered if you would take it out on me. Have you been at the
+night session?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; at what you and your frivolities have left of it. A good third of
+the Solons seem to be sitting in permanence in Alameda Square."</p>
+
+<p>"'Solons'," she repeated. "That recalls Editor Brownlo's little joke&mdash;only
+he didn't mean it. He wrote of them as 'Solons,' but the printer got it
+'solans'. The member from Caliente read the article and the word stuck in
+his mind. In an unhappy hour he asked Colonel Mack's boy&mdash;Harry, the
+irrepressible, you know&mdash;to look it up for him. Harry did it, and of
+course took the most public occasion he could find to hand in his answer.
+'It's geese, Mr. Hackett!' he announced triumphantly; and after we were
+all through laughing at him the member from the warm place turned it just
+as neatly as a veteran. 'Well, I'm Hackett,' he said."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent laughed, as he was in duty bound, but he still had Ormsby on
+his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you have Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters here: can you tell me
+where I can find Mr. Brookes Ormsby?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I could if I should try. But you mustn't hurry me. There is a
+vacant corner in that davenport beyond the piano: please put me there and
+fetch me an ice. I'll wait for you."</p>
+
+<p>He did as he was bidden, and when she was served he stood over her,
+wondering, as other men had wondered, what was the precise secret of her
+charm. Loring had told him Miss Van Brock's story. She was southern born,
+the only child of a somewhat ill-considered match between a young
+California lawyer, wire-pulling in the national capital in the interest of
+the Central Pacific Railroad, and a Virginia belle tasting the delights of
+her first winter in Washington.</p>
+
+<p>Later, the young lawyer's state, or his employers, had sent him to
+Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown
+up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of
+frank commercialism. Inheriting her mother's rare beauty of face and form,
+and uniting with it a sympathetic gift in grasp of detail, political and
+other, she soon became her father's confidante and loyal partizan, taking
+the place, as a daughter might, of the ambitious young wife and mother,
+who had set her heart on seeing the Van Brock name on the roll of the
+United States Senate.</p>
+
+<p>Rensselaer Van Brock had died before the senatorial dream could be
+realized, but not before he had made a sufficient number of lucky
+investments to leave his daughter the arbitress of her own future. What
+that future should be, not even Loring could guess. Since her father's
+death Miss Van Brock had been a citizen of the world. With a widowed aunt
+for the shadowiest of chaperons, she had drifted with the tide of
+inclination, coming finally to rest in the western capital for no better
+reason, perhaps, than that some portion of her interest-bearing securities
+were emblazoned with the great seal of this particular western State.</p>
+
+<p>Kent was thinking of Loring's recountal as he stood looking down on her.
+Other women were younger&mdash;and with features more conventionally beautiful;
+Kent could find a round dozen within easy eye-reach, to say nothing of the
+calm-eyed, queenly <i>improvisatrice</i> at the piano&mdash;his constant standard of
+all womanly charm and grace. Unconsciously he fell to comparing the two,
+his hostess and his love, and was brought back to things present by a
+sharp reminder from Portia.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop looking at Miss Brentwood that way, Mr. David. She is not for you;
+and you are keeping me waiting."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled down on her.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the law of compensation. I fancy you have kept many a man
+waiting&mdash;and will keep many another."</p>
+
+<p>There was a little tang of bitterness in her laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"You remind me of the time when I went home from school&mdash;oh, years and
+years ago. Old Chloe&mdash;she was my black mammy, you know&mdash;had a grown
+daughter of her own, and her effort to dispose of her 'M'randy' was a
+standing joke in the family. In answer to my stereotyped question she
+stood back and folded her arms. 'Naw, honey; dat M'randy ain't ma'ied yit.
+She gwine be des lak you; look pretty, an' say, <i>Howdy! Misteh Jawnson</i>,
+an' go 'long by awn turrer side de road.'"</p>
+
+<p>"A very pretty little fable," said Kent. "And the moral?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is that I amuse myself with you&mdash;all of you; and in your turn you make
+use of me&mdash;or you think you do. Of what use can <i>I</i> be to Mr. David Kent
+this evening?"</p>
+
+<p>"See how you misjudge me!" he protested. "My errand here to-night is
+purely charitable. Which brings me back to Ormsby: did you say you could
+tell me where to look for him?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is in the smoking-room with five or six other tobacco misanthropes.
+What do you want of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to say two words in his ear; after which I shall vanish and make
+room for my betters."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Van Brock was gazing steadfastly at the impassioned face lighted by
+the piano candles.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it about Miss Brentwood?" she asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"In a way&mdash;yes," he confessed.</p>
+
+<p>She rose and stood beside him&mdash;a bewitching figure of a woman who knew her
+part in the human comedy and played it well.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it wise, David?" she asked softly. "I am not denying the
+possibilities: you might come between them if you should try&mdash;I'm rather
+afraid you could. But you mustn't, you know; it's too late. You've marred
+her, between you; or rather that convention, which makes a woman deaf,
+blind and dumb until a man has fairly committed himself, has marred her.
+For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him: for his
+sake she could never be quite the same to you."</p>
+
+<p>He drew apart from her, frowning.</p>
+
+<p>"If I should say that I don't fully understand what you mean?" he
+rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"I should retort by saying something extremely uncomplimentary about your
+lack of perspicacity," she cut in maliciously.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg pardon," he said, a little stiffly. "You are laboring under an
+entirely wrong impression. What I have to say to Mr. Brookes Ormsby does
+not remotely concern the matter you touch upon. It's an affair of the
+Stock Exchange."</p>
+
+<p>"As if I didn't know!" she countered. "You merely reminded me of the other
+thing. But if it is only a business secret you may as well tell me all
+about it at first hands. Some one is sure to tell me sooner or later."</p>
+
+<p>Now David Kent was growing impatient. Down in the inner depths of him he
+was persuaded that Ormsby might have difficulty in inducing Mrs.
+Brentwood to sell her Western Pacific stock even at an advance; might
+require time, at least. And time, with a Bucks majority tinkering with
+corporate rights in the Assembly, might well be precious.</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me if I tell Ormsby first," he pleaded. "Afterward, if you care
+to know, you shall."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Van Brock let him go at that, but now the way to the smoking-den on
+the floor above was hedged up. He did battle with the polite requirements,
+as a man must; shaking hands or exchanging a word with one and another of
+the obstructors only as he had to. None the less, when he had finally
+wrought his way to the smoking-room Ormsby had eluded him again.</p>
+
+<p>He went back to the parlors, wondering how he had missed the club-man. In
+the middle room of the suite he found Portia chatting with Marston, the
+lieutenant-governor; and a young woman in the smartest of reception gowns
+had succeeded to Elinor's place at the piano.</p>
+
+<p>"You found him?" queried the hostess, excusing herself to the tall,
+saturnine man who had shared the honors at the head of the People's Party
+ticket with Jasper G. Bucks.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kent. "Have you seen him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes; they all came to take leave just a few moments after you left
+me. I thought of telling Mr. Ormsby you were looking for him, but you shut
+me off so snippily&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Van Brock! What have you done? I must go at once."</p>
+
+<p>"Really? I am complimented. But if you must, you must, I suppose. I had
+something to tell you&mdash;something of importance; but I can't remember what
+it was now. I never can remember things in the hurry of leave-takings."</p>
+
+<p>As we have intimated, Kent had hitherto found Miss Portia's confidences
+exceedingly helpful in a business way, and he hesitated. "Tell me," he
+begged.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I can't remember it: I doubt if I shall ever remember it unless you
+can remind me by telling me why you are so desperately anxious to find Mr.
+Ormsby."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder if you hold everybody up like this," he laughed. "But I don't
+mind telling you. Western Pacific preferred has gone to fifty-eight and a
+half."</p>
+
+<p>"And Mr. Ormsby has some to sell? I wish I had. Do you know what I'd do?"
+She drew closer and laid a hand on his arm. "I'd sell&mdash;by wire&mdash;to-night;
+at least, I'd make sure that my telegram would be the first thing my
+broker would lay his hands on in the morning."</p>
+
+<p>"On general principles, I suppose: so should I, and for the same reason.
+But have I succeeded in reminding you of that thing you were going to tell
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not wholly; only partly. You said this matter of Mr. Ormsby's concerned
+Miss Brentwood&mdash;in a way&mdash;didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You will have your pound of flesh entire, won't you? The stock is hers,
+and her mother's and sister's. I want Ormsby to persuade them to sell.
+They'll listen to him. That is all; all the all."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course!" she said airily. "How simple of me not to have been able to
+add it up without your help. I saw the quotation in the evening paper; and
+I know, better, perhaps, than you do, the need for haste. Must you go
+now?" She had taken his arm and was edging him through the press in the
+parlors toward the entrance hall.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> haven't paid me yet," he objected.</p>
+
+<p>"No; I'm trying to remember. Oh, yes; I have it now. Wasn't some one
+telling me that you are interested in House Bill Twenty-nine?"</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the dimly lighted front vestibule, and her hand was still
+on his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"I was interested in it," he admitted, correcting the present to the past
+tense.</p>
+
+<p>"But after it went to the House committee on judiciary you left it to more
+skilful, or perhaps we'd better say, to less scrupulous hands?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you are a witch. Is there anything you don't know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Plenty of things. For example, I don't know exactly how much it cost our
+good friends of the 'vested interests' to have that bill mislaid in the
+committee room. But I do know they made a very foolish bargain."</p>
+
+<p>"Beyond all doubt a most demoralizing bargain, which, to say the best of
+it, was only a choice between two evils. But why foolish?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because&mdash;well, because mislaid things have a way of turning up
+unexpectedly, you know, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped her in a sudden gust of feverish excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me what you mean in one word, Miss Van Brock. Don't those fellows
+intend to stay bought?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled pityingly.</p>
+
+<p>"You are very young, Mr. David&mdash;or very honest. Supposing those 'fellows',
+as you dub the honorable members of the committee on judiciary, had a
+little plan of their own; a plan suggested by the readiness of certain of
+their opponents to rush into print with statements which might derange
+things?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am supposing it with all my might."</p>
+
+<p>"That is right; we are only supposing, you must remember. We may suppose
+their idea was to let the excitement about the amended bill die down; to
+let people generally, and one fiercely honest young corporation attorney
+in particular, have time to forget that there was such a thing as House
+Bill Twenty-nine. And in such a suppositional case, how much they would be
+surprised, and how they would laugh in their sleeves, if some one came
+along and paid them handsomely for doing precisely what they meant to do."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent's smile was almost ferocious.</p>
+
+<p>"My argument is as good now as it was in the beginning: they have yet to
+reckon with the man who will dare to expose them."</p>
+
+<p>She turned from him and spoke to the footman at the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Thomas, fetch Mr. Kent's coat and hat from the dressing-room." And then
+to Kent, in the tone she might have used in telling him of the latest
+breeziness of the member from the Rio Blanco: "I remember now what it was
+that I wanted to tell you. While you have been trying to find Mr. Ormsby,
+the committee on judiciary has been reporting the long-lost House Bill
+Twenty-nine. If you hurry you may be in time to see it passed&mdash;it will
+doubtless go through without any tiresome debate. But you will hardly have
+time to obstruct it by arousing public sentiment through the newspapers."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent shook the light touch of her hand from his arm and set his
+teeth hard upon a word hot from the furnace of righteous indignation. For
+a moment he fully believed she was in league with the junto; that she had
+been purposely holding him in talk while the very seconds were priceless.</p>
+
+<p>She saw the scornful wrath in his eyes and turned it aside with a swift
+denial.</p>
+
+<p>"No, David; I didn't do that," she said, speaking to his inmost thought.
+"If there had been anything you could do&mdash;the smallest shadow of a chance
+for you&mdash;I should have sent you flying at the first word. But there
+wasn't; it was all too well arranged&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But he had snatched coat and hat from the waiting Thomas and was running
+like a madman for the nearest cab-stand.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH7"></a>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+<h3>THE SENTIMENTALISTS</h3>
+
+<p>Kent's time from Alameda Square to the capitol was the quickest a flogged
+cab-horse could make, but he might have spared the horse and saved the
+double fee. On the broad steps of the south portico he, uprushing three at
+a bound, met the advance guard of the gallery contingent, down-coming. The
+House had adjourned.</p>
+
+<p>"One minute, Harnwicke!" he gasped, falling upon the first member of the
+corporations' lobby he could identify in the throng. "What's been done?"</p>
+
+<p>"They've taken a fall out of us," was the brusk reply. "House Bill
+Twenty-nine was reported by the committee on judiciary and rushed through
+after you left. Somebody engineered it to the paring of a fingernail: bare
+quorum to act; members who might have filibustered weeded out, on one
+pretext or another, to a man; pages all excused, and nobody here with the
+privilege of the floor. It was as neat a piece of gag-work as I ever hope
+to see if I live to be a hundred."</p>
+
+<p>Kent faced about and joined the townward dispersal with his informant.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I suppose that settles it definitely; at least, until we can test
+its constitutionality in the courts," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Harnwicke thought not, being of the opinion that the vested interests
+would never say die until they were quite dead. As assistant counsel for
+the Overland Short Line, he was in some sense the dean of the corps of
+observation, and could speak with authority.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one chance left for us this side of the courts," he went on;
+"and now I think of it, you are the man to say how much of a chance it is.
+The bill still lacks the governor's signature."</p>
+
+<p>Kent shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"It is his own measure. I have proof positive that he and Meigs and
+Hendricks drafted it. And all this fine-haired engineering to-night was
+his, or Meigs'."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course; we all know that. But we don't know the particular object yet.
+Do they need the new law in their business as a source of revenue? Or do
+they want to be hired to kill it? In other words, does Bucks want a lump
+sum for a veto? You know the man better than any of us."</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove!" said Kent. "Do you mean to say you would buy the governor of a
+state?"</p>
+
+<p>Harnwicke turned a cold eye on his companion as they strode along. He was
+of the square-set, plain-spoken, aggressive type&mdash;a finished product of
+the modern school of business lawyers.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand that you are raising the question of ethics at this
+stage of the game, do I?" he remarked.</p>
+
+<p>Kent fired up a little.</p>
+
+<p>"And if I am?" he retorted.</p>
+
+<p>"I should say you had missed your calling. It is baldly a question of
+business&mdash;or rather of self-preservation. We needn't mince matters among
+ourselves. If Bucks is for sale, we buy him."</p>
+
+<p>Kent shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't any doubt about his purchasability. But I confess I don't
+quite see how you will go about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind that part of it; just leave the ways and means with those of
+us who have riper experience&mdash;and fewer hamperings, perhaps&mdash;than you
+have. Your share in it is to tell us how big a bid we must make. As I say,
+you know the man."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent was silent for the striding of half a square. The New England
+conscience dies hard, and while it lives it is given to drawing sharp
+lines on all the boundaries of culpability. Kent ended by taking the
+matter in debate violently out of the domain of ethics and standing it
+upon the ground of expediency.</p>
+
+<p>"It will cost too much. You would have to bid high&mdash;not to overcome his
+scruples, for he has none; but to satisfy his greed&mdash;which is abnormal.
+And, besides, he has his pose to defend. If he can see his way clear to a
+harvest of extortions under the law, he will probably turn you down&mdash;and
+will make it hot for you later on in the name of outraged virtue."</p>
+
+<p>Harnwicke's laugh was cynical.</p>
+
+<p>"He and his little clique don't own the earth in fee simple. Perhaps we
+shall be able to make them grasp that idea before we are through with
+them. We have had this fight on in other states. Would ten thousand be
+likely to satisfy him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kent. "If you add another cipher, it might."</p>
+
+<p>"A hundred thousand is a pot of money. I take it for granted the Western
+Pacific will stand its pro-rate?"</p>
+
+<p>The New England conscience bucked again, and Kent made his first open
+protest against the methods of the demoralizers.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not in a position to say: I should advise against it. Unofficially,
+I think I can speak for Loring and the Boston people. We are not more
+saintly than other folk, perhaps; and we are not in the railroad business
+for health or pleasure. But I fancy the Advisory Board would draw the line
+at bribing a governor&mdash;at any rate, I hope it would."</p>
+
+<p>"Rot!" said Harnwicke. And then: "You'll reap the benefits with other
+interstate interests; you'll have to come in."</p>
+
+<p>Kent hesitated, but not now on the ground of the principle to be defended.</p>
+
+<p>"That brings in a question which I am not competent to decide. Loring is
+your man. You will call a conference of the 'powers,' I take it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is already called. I sent Atherton out to notify everybody as soon as
+the trap was sprung in the House. We meet in the ordinary at the Camelot.
+You'll be there?"</p>
+
+<p>"A little later&mdash;if Loring wants me. I have some telephoning to do before
+this thing gets on the wires."</p>
+
+<p>They parted at the entrance to the Camelot Club, and Kent went two squares
+farther on to the Wellington. Ormsby had not yet returned, and Kent went
+to the telephone and called up the Brentwood apartments. It was Penelope
+that answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I think you owe it," she began, as soon as he had given his name.
+"What did I do at Miss Van Brock's to make you cut me dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, nothing at all, I'm sure. I&mdash;I was looking for Mr. Ormsby, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Not when I saw you," she broke in flippantly. "You were handing Miss
+Portia an ice. Are you still looking for Mr. Ormsby?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am&mdash;just that. Is he with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; he left here about twenty minutes ago. Is it anything serious?"</p>
+
+<p>"Serious enough to make me want to find him as soon as I can. Did he say
+he was coming down to the Wellington?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, he didn't," laughed Penelope. And then: "Whatever is the
+matter with you this evening, Mr. Kent?"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'm a little excited," said Kent. "Something has
+happened&mdash;something I can't talk about over the wires. It concerns you and
+your mother and sister. You'll know all about it as soon as I can find
+Ormsby and send him out to you."</p>
+
+<p>Penelope's "Oh!" was long-drawn and gasping.</p>
+
+<p>"Is any one dead?" she faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no; it's nothing of that kind. I'll send Ormsby out, and he will tell
+you all about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you come yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"I may have to if I can't find Ormsby. Please don't let your mother go to
+bed until you have heard from one or the other of us. Did you get that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ye-es; but I should like to know more&mdash;a great deal more."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; and I'd like to tell you. But I am using the public telephone
+here at the Wellington, and&mdash;Oh, damn!" Central had cut him out, and it
+was some minutes before the connection was switched in again. "Is that
+you, Miss Penelope? All right; I wasn't quite through. When Ormsby comes,
+you must do as he tells you to, and you and Miss Elinor must help him
+convince your mother. Do you understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't understand anything. For goodness' sake, find Mr. Ormsby and
+make him run! This is perfectly dreadful!"</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it? And I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."</p>
+
+<p>Kent hung up the receiver, and when he was asking a second time at the
+clerk's desk for the missing man, Ormsby came in to answer for himself.
+Whereupon the crisis was outlined to him in brief phrase, and he rose to
+the occasion, though not without a grimace.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not sure just how well you know Mrs. Hepzibah Brentwood," he
+demurred; "but it will be quite like her to balk. Don't you think you'd
+better go along? You are the company's attorney, and your opinion ought to
+carry some weight."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent thought not; but a cautious diplomatist, having got the idea
+well into the back part of his head, was not to be denied.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, you'll come. You are just the man I'll need to back me up. I
+shan't shirk; I'll take the mother into the library and break the ice,
+while you are squaring things with the young women. Penelope won't care
+the snap of her finger either way; but Elinor has some notion's that you
+are fitter to cope with than I am. After, if you can give me a lift with
+Mrs. Hepzibah, I'll call you in. Come on; it's getting pretty late to go
+visiting."</p>
+
+<p>Kent yielded reluctantly, and they took a car for the sake of speed. It
+was Penelope who opened the door for them at 124 Tejon Avenue; and Ormsby
+made it easy for his coadjutor, as he had promised.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to see your mother in the library for a few minutes," he began.
+"Will you arrange it, and take care of Mr. Kent until I come for him?"</p>
+
+<p>Penelope "arranged" it, not without another added pang of curiosity,
+whereupon David Kent found himself the rather embarrassed third of a
+silent trio gathered about the embers of the sitting-room fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it to be a Quaker meeting?" asked Penelope, sweetly, when the silence
+had grown awe-inspiring.</p>
+
+<p>Kent laughed for pure joy at the breaking of the spell.</p>
+
+<p>"One would think we had come to drag you all off to jail, Ormsby and I,"
+he said; and then he went on to explain. "It's about your Western Pacific
+stock, you know. To-day's quotations put it a point and a half above your
+purchase price, and we've come to persuade you to unload, <i>pronto</i>, as the
+member from the Rio Blanco would say."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?" said Penelope, stifling a yawn. "Then I'm not in it: I'm
+an infant." And she rose and went to the piano.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't told us all of it: what has happened?" queried Elinor,
+speaking for the first time since her greeting of Kent.</p>
+
+<p>He briefed the story of House Bill Twenty-nine for her, pointing out the
+probabilities.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, no one can tell what the precise effect will be," he
+qualified. "But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of
+dividends. Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable
+enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of
+those who administer it. In fact, I happen to know that it was designed
+and carried through for that very purpose."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"I have understood you were in the opposition. Are you speaking
+politically?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am stating the plain fact," said Kent, nettled a little by her
+coolness. "Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into
+office than we have here in this State at the present moment."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke warmly, and she liked him best when he put her on the footing of
+an equal antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't agree with your inference," she objected. "As a people we are
+neither obsequious nor stupid."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps not. But it is one of the failures of a popular government that
+an honest majority may be controlled and directed by a small minority of
+shrewd rascals. That is exactly what has happened in the passage of this
+bill. I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the
+faintest suspicion that it was a 'graft'."</p>
+
+<p>"If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true
+leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!" she said
+half-absently; and he started forward and said: "I beg pardon?"</p>
+
+<p>She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of
+disappointment in them.</p>
+
+<p>"I ought to beg yours. I'm afraid I was thinking aloud. But it is one of
+my dreams. If I were a man I should go into politics."</p>
+
+<p>"To purify them?"</p>
+
+<p>"To do my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and
+well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too.
+But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who
+<i>could</i> and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it must be led."</p>
+
+<p>"There is no lack of leadership, such as it is," he hazarded.</p>
+
+<p>"No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind: men who will
+put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of
+justice and right-doing for its own sake. Are there any such men
+nowadays?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," he rejoined gravely. "Sometimes I'm tempted to doubt it.
+It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part. The kind
+of man you have in mind isn't in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot."</p>
+
+<p>She contradicted him firmly.</p>
+
+<p>"No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn't shun it; he would take hold
+with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish
+temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following&mdash;be
+the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority."</p>
+
+<p>Kent shook his head slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call
+patriotism."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand," she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to
+have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of
+patriotism to make him do his best."</p>
+
+<p>"But that would be self-seeking again."</p>
+
+<p>"Not necessarily in the narrow sense. The old knightly chivalry was a
+beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would
+have been frankly brutal without it: yet it had its well-spring in what
+appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment."</p>
+
+<p>"And we are not sentimentalists?" she suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your
+ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly
+spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he
+will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a
+political constituency."</p>
+
+<p>She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the
+nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.</p>
+
+<p>Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was
+searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful.
+They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made
+sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As
+many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry
+there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling
+down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field
+of the Lust of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash,
+it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she
+had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small
+field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his
+training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had
+been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is
+transmitted in terms of self-seeking.</p>
+
+<p>He turned upon her suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"How absurd!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me
+out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."</p>
+
+<p>"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a
+worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been
+trying to be a money-getter."</p>
+
+<p>"You can be something vastly better."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."</p>
+
+<p>Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on
+his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now
+what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his
+way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call
+out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone,
+of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in
+keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire
+him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There
+would be time enough to drain it farther on.</p>
+
+<p>"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said,
+breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of
+apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother
+will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always
+do."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive
+responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon
+summer for a background.</p>
+
+<p>It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many
+things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however
+bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this
+new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she
+was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism
+in them, as thus:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over
+the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I
+recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things
+which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we
+were both very young that summer&mdash;years younger than we can ever be again.
+Don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pass in which he would have
+agreed with her if she had asserted that black was white. It was not
+weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the
+word which would fit her changed mood.</p>
+
+<p>"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more
+charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on
+our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the
+mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no
+good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her
+resentful.</p>
+
+<p>She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just.
+And you were not quite just, I think."</p>
+
+<p>"To you?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; to yourself."</p>
+
+<p>Portia Van Brock's accusation was hammering itself into his brain. <i>You
+have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all
+she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to
+you</i>. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most
+unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise
+him?</p>
+
+<p>The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a
+door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.</p>
+
+<p>"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he
+announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at
+once.</p>
+
+<p>"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the
+house and had turned their faces townward.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank
+to sell her stock&mdash;won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now,
+when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted,
+mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I
+tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the
+jaw&mdash;intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people
+needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"</p>
+
+<p>Kent's laugh was mirthless.</p>
+
+<p>"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for
+the accusation.</p>
+
+<p>If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to
+steer clear of that shoal.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with
+Elinor."</p>
+
+<p>"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother
+would have the casting vote."</p>
+
+<p>"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."</p>
+
+<p>"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now&mdash;as
+between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean&mdash;but there will
+probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go.
+We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."</p>
+
+<p>The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said:
+"Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't
+altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes
+to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the god in the car.
+Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss
+what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent stopped short and wheeled suddenly upon his companion.</p>
+
+<p>"Ormsby, that's a thing I've been afraid of, all along; and it's the one
+thing you must never do."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" demanded the straightforward Ormsby.</p>
+
+<p>Kent knew he was skating on the thinnest of ice, but his love for Elinor
+made him fearless of consequences.</p>
+
+<p>"If you don't know without being told, it proves that your money has
+spoiled you to that extent. It is because you have no right to entrap Miss
+Brentwood into an obligation that would make her your debtor for the very
+food she eats and the clothes she wears. You will say she need never know:
+be very sure she would find out, one way or another; and she would never
+forgive you."</p>
+
+<p>"Um," said Ormsby, turning visibly grim. "You are frank enough&mdash;to draw it
+mildly. Another man in my place might suggest that it isn't Mr. David
+Kent's affair."</p>
+
+<p>Kent turned about and caught step again.</p>
+
+<p>"I've said my say&mdash;all of it," he rejoined stolidly. "We've been decently
+modern up to now, and we won't go back to the elemental things so late in
+the day. All the same, you'll not take it amiss if I say that I know Miss
+Brentwood rather better than you do."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby did not say whether he would or would not, and the talk went aside
+to less summary ways and means preservative of the Brentwood fortunes. But
+at the archway of the Camelot Club, where Kent paused, Ormsby went back to
+the debatable ground in an outspoken word.</p>
+
+<p>"I know pretty well now what there is between us, Kent, and we mustn't
+quarrel if we can help it," he said. "If you complain that I didn't give
+you a fair show, I'll retort that I didn't dare to. Are you satisfied?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said David Kent; and with that they separated.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH8"></a>
+<h2>VIII</h2>
+<h3>THE HAYMAKERS</h3>
+
+<p>By the terms of its dating clause the new trust and corporation law became
+effective at once, "the public welfare requiring it"; and though there was
+an immediate sympathetic decline in the securities involved, there was no
+panic, financial or industrial, to mark the change from the old to the
+new.</p>
+
+<p>Contrary to the expectations of the alarmists and the lawyers, and
+somewhat to the disappointment of the latter, the vested interests showed
+no disposition to test the constitutionality of the act in the courts. So
+far, indeed, from making difficulties, the various alien corporations
+affected by the new law wheeled promptly into line in compliance with its
+provisions, vying with one another in proving, or seeming to prove, the
+time-worn aphorism that capital can never afford to be otherwise than
+strictly law-abiding.</p>
+
+<p>In the reorganization of the Western Pacific, David Kent developed at once
+and heartily into that rare and much-sought-for quantity, a man for an
+emergency. Loring, also, was a busy man in this transition period, yet he
+found time to keep an appreciative eye on Kent, and, true to his implied
+promise, pushed him vigorously for the first place in the legal department
+of the localized company. Since the resident manager stood high in the
+Boston counsels of the company, the pushing was not without results; and
+while David Kent was still up to his eyes in the work of flogging the
+affairs of the newly named Trans-Western into conformity with the law, his
+appointment as general counsel came from the Advisory Board.</p>
+
+<p>At one time, when success in his chosen vocation meant more to him than he
+thought it could ever mean again, the promoted subordinate would have had
+an attack of jubilance little in keeping with the grave responsibilities
+of his office. As it fell out, he was too busy to celebrate, and too sore
+on the sentimental side to rejoice. Hence, his recognition of the
+promotion was merely a deeper plunge into the flood of legalities and the
+adding of two more stenographers to his office force.</p>
+
+<p>Now there is this to be said of such submersive battlings in a sea of
+work: while the fierce toil of the buffeting may be good for the swimmer's
+soul, it necessarily narrows his horizon, inasmuch as a man with his head
+in the sea-smother lacks the view-point of the captain who fights his ship
+from the conning tower.</p>
+
+<p>So it befell that while the newly appointed general counsel of the
+reorganized Western Pacific was bolting his meals and clipping the nights
+at both ends in a strenuous endeavor to clear the decks for a possible
+battle-royal at the capital, events of a minatory nature were shaping
+themselves elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>To bring these events down to their focusing point in the period of
+transition, it is needful to go back a little; to a term of the circuit
+court held in the third year of Gaston the prosperous.</p>
+
+<p>Who Mrs. Melissa Varnum was; how she came to be traveling from Midland
+City to the end of the track on a scalper's ticket; and in what manner she
+was given her choice of paying fare to the conductor or leaving the train
+at Gaston&mdash;these are details with which we need not concern ourselves.
+Suffice it to say that Kent, then local attorney for the company, mastered
+them; and when Mrs. Varnum, through Hawk, her counsel, sued for five
+thousand dollars damages, he was able to get a continuance, knowing from
+long experience that the jury would certainly find for the plaintiff if
+the case were then allowed to go to trial.</p>
+
+<p>And at the succeeding term of court, which was the one that adjourned on
+the day of Kent's transfer to the capital, two of the company's witnesses
+had disappeared; and the one bit of company business Kent had been
+successful in doing that day was to postpone for a second time the coming
+to trial of the Varnum case.</p>
+
+<p>It was while Kent's head was deepest in the flood of reorganization that a
+letter came from one Blashfield Hunnicott, his successor in the local
+attorneyship at Gaston, asking for instructions in the Varnum matter.
+Judge MacFarlane's court would convene in a week. Was he, Hunnicott, to
+let the case come to trial? Or should he&mdash;the witnesses still being
+unproducible&mdash;move for a further continuance?</p>
+
+<p>Kent took his head out of the cross-seas long enough to answer. By all
+means Hunnicott was to obtain another continuance, if possible. And if,
+before the case were called, there should be any new developments, he was
+to wire at once to the general office, and further instructions would
+issue.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this time, or, to be strictly accurate, on the day preceding
+the convening of Judge MacFarlane's court in Gaston, that Governor Bucks
+took a short vacation&mdash;his first since the adjournment of the Assembly.</p>
+
+<p>One of the mysteries of this man&mdash;the only one for which his friends could
+not always account plausibly&mdash;was his habit of dropping out for a day or a
+week at irregular intervals, leaving no clue by which he could be traced.
+While he was merely a private citizen these disappearances figured in the
+local notes of the Gaston <i>Clarion</i> as business trips, object and
+objective point unknown or at least unstated; but since his election the
+newspapers were usually more definite. On this occasion, the public was
+duly informed that "Governor Bucks, with one or two intimate friends, was
+taking a few days' recreation with rod and gun on the headwaters of Jump
+Creek"&mdash;a statement which the governor's private secretary stood ready to
+corroborate to all and sundry calling at the gubernatorial rooms on the
+second floor of the capitol.</p>
+
+<p>Now it chanced that, like all gossip, this statement was subject to
+correction as to details in favor of the exact fact. It is true that the
+governor, his gigantic figure clad in sportsmanlike brown duck, might have
+been seen boarding the train on the Monday evening; and in addition to the
+ample hand-bag there were rod and gun cases to bear out the newspaper
+notices. None the less, it was equally true that the keeper of the Gun
+Club shooting-box at the terminus of the Trans-Western's Jump Creek branch
+was not called upon to entertain so distinguished a guest as the State
+executive. Also, it might have been remarked that the governor traveled
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>Late that same night, Stephen Hawk was keeping a rather discomforting
+vigil with a visitor in the best suite of rooms the Mid-Continent Hotel in
+Gaston afforded. The guest of honor was a brother lawyer&mdash;though he might
+have refused to acknowledge the relationship with the ex-district
+attorney&mdash;a keen-eyed, business-like gentleman, whose name as an organizer
+of vast capitalistic ventures had traveled far, and whose present attitude
+was one of undisguised and angry contempt for Gaston and all things
+Gastonian.</p>
+
+<p>"How much longer have we to wait?" he demanded impatiently, when the hands
+of his watch pointed to the quarter-hour after ten. "You've made me travel
+two thousand miles to see this thing through: why didn't you make sure of
+having your man here?"</p>
+
+<p>Hawk wriggled uneasily in his chair. He was used to being bullied, not
+only by the good and great, but by the little and evil as well. Yet there
+was a rasp to the great man's impatience that irritated him.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been trying to tell you all the evening that I'm only the hired man
+in this business, Mr. Falkland. I can't compel the attendance of the other
+parties."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's damned badly managed, as far as we've gone," was the
+ungracious comment. "You say the judge refuses to confer with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ab-so-lutely."</p>
+
+<p>"And the train&mdash;the last train the other man can come on; is that in yet?"</p>
+
+<p>Hawk consulted his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"A good half-hour ago."</p>
+
+<p>"You had your clerk at the station to meet it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did."</p>
+
+<p>"And he hasn't reported?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet."</p>
+
+<p>Falkland took a cigar from his case, bit the end of it like a man with a
+grudge to satisfy, and began again.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a very unbusinesslike mystery about all this, Mr. Hawk, and I
+may as well tell you shortly that my time is too valuable to make me
+tolerant of half-confidences. Get to the bottom of it. Has your man
+weakened?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; he is not of the weakening kind. And, besides, the scheme is his own
+from start to finish, as you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what is the matter, then?"</p>
+
+<p>Hawk rose.</p>
+
+<p>"If you will be patient a little while longer, I'll go to the wire and try
+to find out. I am as much in the dark as you are."</p>
+
+<p>This last was not strictly true. Hawk had a telegram in his pocket which
+was causing him more uneasiness than all the rasping criticisms of the New
+York attorney, and he was re-reading it by the light of the corridor
+bracket when a young man sprang from the ascending elevator and hurried to
+the door of the parlor suite. Hawk collared his Mercury before he could
+rap on the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he queried sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"It's just as you suspected&mdash;what Mr. Hendricks' telegram hinted at. I
+met him at the station and couldn't do a thing with him."</p>
+
+<p>"Where has he gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"To the same old place."</p>
+
+<p>"You followed him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure. That is what kept me so long."</p>
+
+<p>Hawk hung upon his decision for the barest fraction of a second. Then he
+gave his orders concisely.</p>
+
+<p>"Hunt up Doctor Macquoid and get him out to the club-house as quick as you
+can. Tell him to bring his hypodermic. I'll be there with all the help
+he'll need." And when the young man was gone, Hawk smote the air with a
+clenched fist and called down the Black Curse of Shielygh, or its modern
+equivalent, on all the fates subversive of well-laid plans.</p>
+
+<p>A quarter of an hour later, on the upper floor of the club-house at the
+Gentlemen's Driving Park, four men burst in upon a fifth, a huge figure in
+brown duck, crouching in a corner like a wild beast at bay. A bottle and a
+tumbler stood on the table under the hanging lamp; and with the crash of
+breaking glass which followed the mad-bull rush of the duck-clothed giant,
+the reek of French brandy filled the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold him still, if you can, and pull up that sleeve." It was Macquoid who
+spoke, and the three apparitors, breathing hard, sat upon the prostrate
+man and bared his arm for the physician. When the apomorphia began to do
+its work there was a struggle of another sort, out of which emerged a
+pallid and somewhat stricken reincarnation of the governor.</p>
+
+<p>"Falkland is waiting at the hotel, and he and MacFarlane can't get
+together," said Hawk, tersely, when the patient was fit to listen.
+"Otherwise we shouldn't have disturbed you. It's all day with the scheme
+if you can't show up."</p>
+
+<p>The governor groaned and passed his hand over his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Get me into my clothes&mdash;Johnson has the grip&mdash;and give me all the time
+you can," was the sullen rejoinder; and in due course the Honorable Jasper
+G. Bucks, clothed upon and in his right mind, was enabled to keep his
+appointment with the New York attorney at the Mid-Continent Hotel.</p>
+
+<p>But first came the whipping-in of MacFarlane. Bucks went alone to the
+judge's room on the floor above the parlor suite. It was now near
+midnight, but MacFarlane had not gone to bed. He was a spare man, with
+thin hair graying rapidly at the temples and a care-worn face; the face of
+a man whose tasks or responsibilities, or both, have overmatched him. He
+was walking the floor with his head down and his hands&mdash;thin, nerveless
+hands they were&mdash;tightly locked behind him, when the governor entered.</p>
+
+<p>For a large man the Honorable Jasper was usually able to handle his
+weight admirably; but now he clung to the door-knob until he could launch
+himself at a chair and be sure of hitting it.</p>
+
+<p>"What's this Hawk's telling me about you, MacFarlane?" he demanded,
+frowning portentously.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what he has told you. But it is too flagrant, Bucks; I can't
+do it, and that's all there is about it." The protest was feebly fierce,
+and there was the snarl of a baited animal in the tone.</p>
+
+<p>"It's too late to make difficulties now," was the harsh reply. "You've got
+to do it."</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you I can not, and I will not!"</p>
+
+<p>"A late attack of conscience, eh?" sneered the governor, who was sobering
+rapidly now. "Let me ask a question or two. How much was that security
+debt your son-in-law let you in for?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was ten thousand dollars. It is an honest debt, and I shall pay it."</p>
+
+<p>"But not out of the salary of a circuit judge," Bucks interposed. "Nor yet
+out of the fees you make your clerks divide with you. And that isn't all.
+Have you forgotten the gerrymander business? How would you like to see the
+true inwardness of that in the newspapers?"</p>
+
+<p>The judge shrank as if the huge gesturing hand had struck him.</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't dare," he began. "You were in that, too, deeper than&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Again the governor interrupted him.</p>
+
+<p>"Cut it out," he commanded. "I can reward, and I can punish. You are not
+going to do anything technically illegal; but, by the gods, you are going
+to walk the line laid down for you. If you don't, I shall give the
+documents in the gerrymander affair to the papers the day after you fail.
+Now we'll go and see Falkland."</p>
+
+<p>MacFarlane made one last protest.</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake, Bucks! spare me that. It is nothing less than the foulest
+collusion between the judge, the counsel for the plaintiff&mdash;and the
+devil!"</p>
+
+<p>"Cut that out, too, and come along," said the governor, brutally; and by
+the steadying help of the chair, the door-post and the wall of the
+corridor, he led the way to the parlor suite on the floor below.</p>
+
+<p>The conference in Falkland's rooms was chiefly a monologue with the
+sharp-spoken New York lawyer in the speaking part. When it was concluded
+the judge took his leave abruptly, pleading the lateness of the hour and
+his duties for the morrow. When he was gone the New Yorker began again.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't want to be known in this, I take it," he said, nodding at the
+governor. "Mr. Hawk here will answer well enough for the legal part, but
+how about the business end of it. Have you got a man you can trust?"</p>
+
+<p>The governor's yellow eyebrows met in a meaning scowl.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got a man I can hang, which is more to the purpose. It's Major Jim
+Guilford. He lives here; want to meet him?"</p>
+
+<p>"God forbid!" said Falkland, fervently. He rose and whipped himself into
+his overcoat, turning to Hawk: "Have your young man get me a carriage, and
+see to it that my special is ready to pull east when I give the word, will
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>Hawk went obediently, and the New Yorker had his final word with the
+governor alone.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we understand each other perfectly," he said. "You are to have
+the patronage: we are to pay for all actual betterments for which vouchers
+can be shown at the close of the deal. All we ask is that the stock be
+depressed to the point agreed upon within the half-year."</p>
+
+<p>"It's going to be done," said the governor, trying as he could to keep the
+eye-image of his fellow conspirator from multiplying itself by two.</p>
+
+<p>"All right. Now as to the court affair. If it is managed exactly as I have
+outlined, there will be no trouble&mdash;and no recourse for the other fellows.
+When I say that, I'm leaving out your Supreme Court. Under certain
+conditions, if the defendant's hardship could be definitely shown, a writ
+of <i>certiorari</i> and <i>supersedeas</i> might issue. How about that?"</p>
+
+<p>The governor closed one eye slowly, the better to check the troublesome
+multiplying process.</p>
+
+<p>"The Supreme Court won't move in the matter. The ostensible reason will be
+that the court is now two years behind its docket."</p>
+
+<p>"And the real reason?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of the three justices, one of them was elected on our ticket; another is
+a personal friend of Judge MacFarlane. The goods will be delivered."</p>
+
+<p>"That's all, then; all but one word. Your judge is a weak brother.
+Notwithstanding all the pains I took to show him that his action would be
+technically unassailable, he was ready to fly the track at any moment.
+Have you got him safe?"</p>
+
+<p>Bucks held up one huge hand with the thumb and forefinger tightly pressed
+together.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got him right there," he said. "If you and Hawk have got your papers
+in good shape, the thing will go through like a hog under a barbed-wire
+fence."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH9"></a>
+<h2>IX</h2>
+<h3>THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT</h3>
+
+<p>It was two weeks after the date of the governor's fishing trip, and by
+consequence Judge MacFarlane's court had been the even fortnight in
+session in Gaston, when Kent's attention was recalled to the forgotten
+Varnum case by another letter from the local attorney, Hunnicott.</p>
+
+<p>"Varnum <i>vs</i>. Western Pacific comes up Friday of this week, and they are
+going to press for trial this time, and no mistake," wrote the local
+representative. "Hawk has been chasing around getting affidavits; for what
+purpose I don't know, though Lesher tells me that one of them was sworn by
+Houligan, the sub-contractor who tried to fight the engineer's estimates
+on the Jump Creek work.</p>
+
+<p>"Also, there is a story going the rounds that the suit is to be made a
+blind for bigger game, though I guess this is all gossip, based on the
+fact that Mr. Semple Falkland's private car stopped over here two weeks
+ago, from three o'clock in the afternoon till midnight of the same day.
+Jason, of the <i>Clarion</i>, interviewed the New Yorker, and Falkland told him
+he had stopped over to look up the securities on a mortgage held by one of
+his New York clients."</p>
+
+<p>Kent read this unofficial letter thoughtfully, and later on took it in to
+the general manager.</p>
+
+<p>"Just to show you the kind of jackal we have to deal with in the smaller
+towns," he said, by way of explanation. "Here is a case that Stephen Hawk
+built up out of nothing a year ago. The woman was put off one of our
+trains because she was trying to travel on a scalper's ticket. She didn't
+care to fight about it; but when I had about persuaded her to compromise
+for ten dollars and a pass to her destination, Hawk got hold of her and
+induced her to sue for five thousand dollars."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said Loring.</p>
+
+<p>"We fought it, of course&mdash;in the only way it could be fought in the lower
+court. I got a continuance, and we choked it off in the same way at the
+succeeding term. The woman was tired out long ago, but Hawk will hang on
+till his teeth fall out."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you 'continue' again?" asked the general manager.</p>
+
+<p>Kent nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I so instructed Hunnicott. Luckily, two of our most important witnesses
+are missing. They have always been missing, in point of fact."</p>
+
+<p>Loring was glancing over the letter.</p>
+
+<p>"How about this affidavit business, and the Falkland stop-over?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I fancy that's gossip, pure and simple, as Hunnicott says. Hawk is
+sharp enough not to let us know if he were baiting a trap. And Falkland
+probably told the <i>Clarion</i> man the simple truth."</p>
+
+<p>Loring nodded in his turn. Then he broke away from the subject abruptly.
+"Sit down," he said; and when Kent had found a chair: "I had a caller this
+morning&mdash;Senator Duvall."</p>
+
+<p>State Senator Duvall had been the father, or the ostensible father, of the
+Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine. He was known to the
+corporations' lobby as a legislator who would sign a railroad's
+death-warrant with one hand and take favors from it with the other; and
+Kent laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"How many did he demand passes for, this time? Or was it a special train
+he wanted?"</p>
+
+<p>"Neither the one nor the other, this morning, as it happened," said the
+general manager. "Not to put too fine an edge upon it, he had something to
+sell, and he wanted me to buy it."</p>
+
+<p>"What was it?" Kent asked quickly.</p>
+
+<p>Loring was rubbing his eye-glasses absently with the corner of his
+handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I made a mistake in not turning him over to you, David. He was
+too smooth for me. I couldn't find out just what it was he had for sale.
+He talked vaguely about an impending crisis and a man who had some
+information to dispose of; said the man had come to him because he was
+known to be a firm friend of the Trans-Western, and so on."</p>
+
+<p>Kent gave his opinion promptly.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a capitol-gang deal of some sort to hold us up; and Duvall is
+willing to sell out his fellow conspirators if the price is right."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any notion of what it is?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Not the slightest. The ways have been tallowed for us, thus far, and I
+don't fully understand it. I presented our charter for re-filing
+yesterday, and Hendricks passed it without a word. As I was coming out of
+the secretary's office I met Bucks. We were pretty nearly open enemies in
+the old days in Gaston, but he went out of his way to shake hands and to
+congratulate me on my appointment as general counsel."</p>
+
+<p>"That was warning in itself, wasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I took it that way. But I can't fathom his drift; which is the more
+unaccountable since I have it on pretty good authority that the ring is
+cinching the other companies right and left. Some one was saying at the
+Camelot last night that the Overland's reorganization of its
+within-the-State lines was going to cost all kinds of money in excess of
+the legal fees."</p>
+
+<p>Loring's smile was a wordless sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the reward of virtue," he said ironically. "We were not in the list
+of subscribers to the conditional fund for purchasing a certain veto which
+didn't materialize."</p>
+
+<p>"And for that very reason, if for no other, we may look out for squalls,"
+Kent asserted. "Jasper G. Bucks has a long memory; and just now the fates
+have given him an arm to match. I am fortifying everywhere I can, but if
+the junto has it in for us, we'll be made to sweat blood before we are
+through with it."</p>
+
+<p>"Which brings us back to Senator Duvall. Is it worth while trying to do
+anything with him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know. I'm opposed to the method&mdash;the bargain and sale
+plan&mdash;and I know you are. Turn him over to me if he comes in again."</p>
+
+<p>When Kent had dictated a letter in answer to Hunnicott's, he dismissed the
+Varnum matter from his mind, having other and more important things to
+think of. So, on the Friday, when the case was reached on Judge
+MacFarlane's docket&mdash;but really, it is worth our while to be present in
+the Gaston court-room to see and hear what befalls.</p>
+
+<p>When the Varnum case was called, Hunnicott promptly moved for a third
+continuance, in accordance with his instructions. The judge heard his
+argument, the old and well-worn one of the absence of important witnesses,
+with perfect patience; and after listening to Hawk's protest, which was
+hardly more than mechanical, he granted the continuance.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the after-piece. Court adjourned, and immediately Hawk asked
+leave to present, "at chambers," an amended petition. Hunnicott was
+waylaid by a court officer as he was leaving the room; and a moment later,
+totally unprepared, he was in the judge's office, listening in some dazed
+fashion while Hawk went glibly through the formalities of presenting his
+petition.</p>
+
+<p>Not until the papers were served upon him as the company's attorney, and
+the judge was naming three o'clock of the following afternoon as the time
+which he would appoint for the preliminary hearing, did the local attorney
+come alive.</p>
+
+<p>"But, your Honor!&mdash;a delay of only twenty-four hours in which to prepare a
+rejoinder to this petition&mdash;to allegations of such astounding gravity?" he
+began, shocked into action by the very ungraspable magnitude of the
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>"What more could you ask, Mr. Hunnicott?" said the judge, mildly. "You
+have already had a full measure of delay on the original petition. Yet I
+am willing to extend the time if you can come to an agreement with Mr.
+Hawk, here."</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott knew the hopelessness of that and did not make the attempt.
+Instead, he essayed a new line of objection.</p>
+
+<p>"The time would be long enough if Gaston were the headquarters of the
+company, your Honor. But in such a grave and important charge as this
+amended petition brings, our general counsel should appear in person,
+and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You are the company's attorney, Mr. Hunnicott," said the judge, dryly;
+"and you have hitherto been deemed competent to conduct the case in behalf
+of the defendant. I am unwilling to work a hardship to any one, but I can
+not entertain your protest. The preliminary hearing will be at three
+o'clock to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott knew when he was definitely at the string's end; and when he was
+out of the judge's room and the Court House, he made a dash for his
+office, dry-lipped and panting. Ten minutes sufficed for the writing of a
+telegram to Kent, and he was half-way down to the station with it when it
+occurred to him that it would never do to trust the incendiary thing to
+the wires in plain English. There was a little-used cipher code in his
+desk provided for just such emergencies, and back he went to labor
+sweating over the task of securing secrecy at the expense of the precious
+minutes of time. Wherefore, it was about four o'clock when he handed the
+telegram to the station operator, and adjured him by all that was good and
+great not to delay its sending.</p>
+
+<p>It was just here he made his first and only slip, since he did not stay to
+see the thing done. It chanced that the regular day operator was off on
+leave of absence, and his substitute, a young man from the
+train-despatcher's office, was a person who considered the company wires
+an exclusive appanage of the train service department. At the moment of
+Hunnicott's assault he was taking an order for Number 17; and observing
+that the lawyer's cipher "rush" covered four closely written pages, he
+hung it upon the sending hook with a malediction on the legal department
+for burdening the wires with its mail correspondence, and so forgot it.</p>
+
+<p>It was nine o'clock when the night operator came on duty; and being a
+careful man, he not only looked first to his sending hook, but was
+thoughtful enough to run over the accumulation of messages waiting to be
+transmitted, to the end that he might give precedence to the most
+important. And when he came to Hunnicott's cipher with the
+thrice-underlined "RUSH" written across its face, and had marked the hour
+of its handing in, he had the good sense to hang up the entire wire
+business of the railroad until the thing was safely out of his office.</p>
+
+<p>It was half-past nine when the all-important cipher got itself written out
+in the headquarters office at the capital; and for two anxious hours the
+receiving operator tried by all means in his power to find the general
+counsel&mdash;tried and failed. For, to make the chain of mishaps complete in
+all its links, Kent and Loring were spending the evening at Miss Portia
+Van Brock's, having been bidden to meet a man they were both willing to
+cultivate&mdash;Oliver Marston, the lieutenant-governor. And for this cause it
+wanted but five minutes of midnight when Kent burst into Loring's bedroom
+on the third floor of the Clarendon, catastrophic news in hand.</p>
+
+<p>"For heaven's sake, read that!" he gasped; and Loring sat on the edge of
+the bed to do it.</p>
+
+<p>"So! they've sprung their mine at last: this is what Senator Duvall was
+trying to sell us," he said quietly, when he had mastered the purport of
+Hunnicott's war news.</p>
+
+<p>Kent had caught his second wind in the moment of respite, and was
+settling into the collar in a way to strain the working harness to the
+breaking point.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a put-up job from away back," he gritted. "If I'd had the sense of a
+pack-mule I should have been on the lookout for just such a trap as this.
+Look at the date of that message!"</p>
+
+<p>The general manager did look, and shook his head. "'Received, 3:45, P.M.;
+Forwarded, 9:17, P.M.' That will cost somebody his job. What do we do?"</p>
+
+<p>"We get busy at the drop of the hat. Luckily, we have the news, though
+I'll bet high it wasn't Hawk's fault that this message came through with
+no more than eight hours' delay. Get into your clothes, man! The minutes
+are precious, now!"</p>
+
+<p>Loring began to dress while Kent walked the floor in a hot fit of
+impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"The mastodonic cheek of the thing!" he kept repeating, until Loring
+pulled him down with another quiet remark.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me what we have to do, David. I am a little lame in law matters."</p>
+
+<p>"Do? We have to appear in Judge MacFarlane's court to-morrow afternoon
+prepared to show that this thing is only a hold-up with a blank cartridge.
+Hawk meant to take a snap judgment. He counted on throwing the whole thing
+up against Hunnicott, knowing perfectly well that a little local attorney
+at a way-station couldn't begin to secure the necessary affidavits."</p>
+
+<p>Loring paused with one end of his collar flying loose.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me understand," he said. "Do we have to disprove these charges by
+affidavits?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly; that is the proper rejoinder&mdash;the only one, in fact," said
+Kent; then, as a great doubt laid hold of him and shook him: "You don't
+mean to say there is any doubt about our ability to do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; I suppose not, if it comes to a show-down. But I was thinking of
+your man Hunnicott. Doesn't it occur to you that he is in just about as
+good a fix to secure those affidavits in Gaston as we are here, David?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good Lord! Do you mean that we have to send to Boston for our
+ammunition?"</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't we? Don't you see how nicely the thing is timed? Ten days later
+our Trans-Western reorganization would be complete, and we could swear our
+own officers on the spot. These people know what they are about."</p>
+
+<p>Kent was walking the floor again, but now the strength of the man was
+coming uppermost.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind: we'll wire Boston, and then we'll do what we can here. Could
+you get me to Gaston on a special engine in three hours?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we have till eleven o'clock to-morrow to prepare. I'll be ready by
+that time."</p>
+
+<p>"David, you are a brick when it comes to the in-fighting," said the
+general manager; and then he finished buttoning his collar.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH10"></a>
+<h2>X</h2>
+<h3>WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY</h3>
+
+<p>At ten forty-eight on the Saturday morning Kent was standing with the
+general manager on the Union Station track platform beside the engine
+which was to make the flying run to Gaston.</p>
+
+<p>Nine hours of sharp work lay between the hurried conference in Loring's
+bedroom and the drive to the station at a quarter before eleven. Boston
+had been wired; divers and sundry friends of the railway company had been
+interviewed; some few affidavits had been secured; and now they were
+waiting to give Boston its last chance, with a clerk hanging over the
+operator in the station telegraph office to catch the first word of
+encouragement.</p>
+
+<p>"If the Advisory Board doesn't send us something pretty solid, I'm going
+into this thing lame," said Kent, dubiously. "Of course, what Boston can
+send us will be only corroborative; unfortunately we can't wire
+affidavits. But it will help. What we have secured here lacks
+directness."</p>
+
+<p>"Necessarily," said Loring. "But I'm banking on the Board. If we don't get
+the ammunition before you have to start, I can wire it to you at Gaston.
+That gives us three hours more to go and come on."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and if it comes to the worst&mdash;if the decision be unfavorable&mdash;it can
+only embarrass us temporarily. This is merely the preliminary hearing, and
+nothing permanent can be established until we have had a hearing on the
+merits, and we can go armed to that, at all events."</p>
+
+<p>The general manager was looking at his watch, and he shut the case with a
+snap.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you let it come to that, as long as you have a leg to stand on,
+David," he said impressively. "An interregnum of ten days might make it
+exceedingly difficult for us to prove anything." Then, as the telegraph
+office watcher came to the door and shook his head as a sign that Boston
+was still silent: "Your time is up. Off with you, and don't let Oleson
+scare you when he gets 219 in motion. He is a good runner, and you have a
+clear track."</p>
+
+<p>Kent clambered to the footplate of the smart eight-wheeler.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you make it by two o'clock?" he asked, when the engineer, a
+big-boned, blue-eyed Norwegian, dropped the reversing lever into the
+corner for the start.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay tank maybe so, ain'd it? Yust you climb opp dat odder box, Mester
+Kent, and hol' you' hair on. Ve bane gone to maig dat time, als' ve preak
+somedings, <i>ja</i>!" and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to
+a quickstep of forty miles an hour.</p>
+
+<p>Kent's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture
+of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of
+the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph
+poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of
+now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted,
+passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same
+heart-beat. And for the central figure in the picture, the one constant
+quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct, the big,
+calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box, hurling his huge machine doggedly
+through space.</p>
+
+<p>At 12:45 they stopped for water at a solitary tank in the midst of the
+brown desert. Kent got down stiffly from his cramped seat on the fireman's
+box and wetted his parched lips at the nozzle of the tender hose.</p>
+
+<p>"Do we make it, Jarl?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>The engineer wagged his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay tank so. Ve maig it all right iff dey haf bane got dose track clear."</p>
+
+<p>"There are other trains to meet?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Ja</i>; two bane comin' dis vay; ant Nummer Samteen ve pass opp by."</p>
+
+<p>Oleson dropped off to pour a little oil into the speed-woundings while the
+tank was filling; and presently the dizzying race began again. For a time
+all things were propitious. The two trains to be met were found snugly
+withdrawn on the sidings at Mavero and Agriculta, and the station
+semaphores beckoned the flying special past at full speed. Kent checked
+off the dodging mile-posts: the pace was bettering the fastest run ever
+made on the Prairie Division&mdash;which was saying a good deal.</p>
+
+<p>But at Juniberg, twenty-seven miles out of Gaston, there was a delay.
+Train Number 17, the east-bound time freight, had left Juniberg at one
+o'clock, having ample time to make Lesterville, the next station east,
+before the light engine could possibly overtake it. But Lesterville had
+not yet reported its arrival; for which cause the agent at Juniberg was
+constrained to put out his stop signal, and Kent's special came to a stand
+at the platform.</p>
+
+<p>Under the circumstances, there appeared to be nothing for it but to wait
+until the delayed Number 17 was heard from; and Kent's first care was to
+report to Loring, and to ask if there were anything from Boston.</p>
+
+<p>The reply was encouraging. A complete denial of everything, signed by the
+proper officials, had been received and repeated to Kent at Gaston&mdash;was
+there now awaiting him. Kent saw in anticipation the nicely calculated
+scheme of the junto crumbling into small dust in the precise moment of
+fruition, and had a sharp attack of ante-triumph which he had to walk off
+in turns up and down the long platform. But as the waiting grew longer,
+and the dragging minutes totaled the quarter-hour and then the half, he
+began to perspire again.</p>
+
+<p>Half-past two came and went, and still there was no hopeful word from
+Lesterville. Kent had speech with Oleson, watch in hand. Would the
+engineer take the risk of a rear-end collision on a general manager's
+order? Oleson would obey orders if the heavens fell; and Kent flew to the
+wire again. Hunnicott, at Gaston, was besought to gain time in the hearing
+by any and all means; and Loring was asked to authorize the risk of a
+rear-end smash-up. He did it promptly. The light engine was to go on until
+it should "pick up" the delayed train between stations.</p>
+
+<p>The Juniberg man gave Oleson his release and the order to proceed with due
+care while the sounder was still clicking a further communication from
+headquarters. Loring was providing for the last contingency by sending
+Kent the authority to requisition Number 17's engine for the completion of
+the run in case the track should be blocked, with the freight engine free
+beyond the obstruction.</p>
+
+<p>Having his shackles stricken off, the Norwegian proceeded "with due care,"
+which is to say that he sent the eight-wheeler darting down the line
+toward Lesterville at the rate of a mile a minute. The mystery of the
+delay was solved at a point half-way between the two stations. A broken
+flange had derailed three cars of the freight, and the block was
+impassable.</p>
+
+<p>Armed with the general manager's mandatory wire, Kent ran forward to the
+engine of the freight train and was shortly on his way again. But in the
+twenty-mile run to Gaston more time was lost by the lumbering freight
+locomotive, and it was twenty minutes past three o'clock when the county
+seat came in sight and Kent began to oscillate between two sharp-pointed
+horns of a cruel dilemma.</p>
+
+<p>By dropping off at the street-crossing nearest the Court House, he might
+still be in time to get a hearing with such documentary backing as he had
+been able to secure at the capital. By going on to the station he could
+pick up the Boston wire which, while it was not strictly evidence, might
+create a strong presumption in his favor; but in this case he would
+probably be too late to use it. So he counted the rail-lengths, watch in
+hand, with a curse to the count for his witlessness in failing to have
+Loring repeat the Boston message to him during the long wait at Juniberg;
+and when the time for the decision arrived he signaled the engineer to
+slow down, jumped from the step at the nearest crossing and hastened up
+the street toward the Court House.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time, to go back a little, during this day of hurryings to and
+fro Blashfield Hunnicott had been having the exciting experiences of a
+decade crowded into a corresponding number of hours. Early in the morning
+he had begun besieging the headquarters wire office for news and
+instructions, and, owing to Kent's good intentions to be on the ground in
+person, had got little enough of either.</p>
+
+<p>At length, to his unspeakable relief, he had news of the coming special;
+and with the conviction that help was at hand he waited at the station
+with what coolness there was in him to meet his chief. But as the time for
+the hearing drew near he grew nervous again; and all the keen pains of
+utter helplessness returned with renewed acuteness when the operator, who
+had overheard the Juniberg-Lesterville wire talk, told him that the
+special was hung up at the former station.</p>
+
+<p>"O my good Lord!" he groaned. "I'm in for it with empty hands!" None the
+less, he ran to the baggage-room end of the building and, capturing an
+express wagon, had himself trundled out to the Court House.</p>
+
+<p>The judge was at his desk when Hunnicott entered, and Hawk was on hand,
+calmly reading the morning paper. The hands of the clock on the wall
+opposite the judge's desk pointed to five minutes of the hour, and for
+five minutes Hunnicott sat listening, hoping against hope that he should
+hear the rush and roar of the incoming special.</p>
+
+<p>Promptly on the stroke of three the judge tapped upon his desk with his
+pencil.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, gentlemen, proceed with your case; and I must ask you to be as brief
+as possible. I have an appointment at four which can not be postponed," he
+said quietly; and Hawk threw down his paper and began at once.</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott heard his opponent's argument mechanically, having his ear
+attuned for whistle signals and wheel drummings. Hawk spoke rapidly and
+straight to his point, as befitted a man speaking to the facts and with no
+jury present to be swayed by oratorical effort. When he came to the
+summarizing of the allegations in the amended petition, he did it wholly
+without heat, piling up the accusations one upon another with the careful
+method of a bricklayer building a wall. The wall-building simile thrust
+itself upon Hunnicott with irresistible force as he listened. If the
+special engine should not dash up in time to batter down the wall&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Hawk closed as dispassionately as he had begun, and the judge bowed
+gravely in Hunnicott's direction. The local attorney got upon his feet,
+and as he began to speak a telegram was handed in. It was Kent's wire from
+Juniberg, beseeching him to gain time at all hazards, and he settled
+himself to the task. For thirty dragging minutes he rang the changes on
+the various steps in the suit, knowing well that the fatal moment was
+approaching when&mdash;Kent still failing him&mdash;he would be compelled to submit
+his case without a scrap of an affidavit to support it.</p>
+
+<p>The moment came, and still there was no encouraging whistle shriek from
+the dun plain beyond the open windows. Hawk was visibly disgusted, and
+Judge MacFarlane was growing justly impatient. Hunnicott began again, and
+the judge reproved him mildly.</p>
+
+<p>"Much of what you are saying is entirely irrelevant, Mr. Hunnicott. This
+hearing is on the plaintiff's amended petition."</p>
+
+<p>No one knew better than the local attorney that he was wholly at the
+court's mercy; that he had been so from the moment the judge began to
+consider his purely formal defense, entirely unsupported by affidavits or
+evidence of any kind. None the less, he strung his denials out by every
+amplification he could devise, and, having fired his last shot, sat down
+in despairing breathlessness to hear the judge's summing-up and decision.</p>
+
+<p>Judge MacFarlane was mercifully brief. On the part of the plaintiff there
+was an amended petition fully fortified by uncontroverted affidavits. On
+the part of the defendant company there was nothing but a formal denial of
+the allegations. The duty of the court in the premises was clear. The
+prayer of the plaintiff was granted, the temporary relief asked for was
+given, and the order of the court would issue accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>The judge was rising when the still, hot air of the room began to vibrate
+with the tremulous thunder of the sound for which Hunnicott had been so
+long straining his ears. He was the first of the three to hear it, and he
+hurried out ahead of the others. At the foot of the stair he ran blindly
+against Kent, dusty, travel-worn and haggard.</p>
+
+<p>"You're too late!" he blurted out. "We're done up. Hawk's petition has
+been granted and the road is in the hands of a receiver."</p>
+
+<p>Kent dashed his fist upon the stair-rail.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is the man?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Major Jim Guilford," said Hunnicott. Then, as footfalls coming stairward
+were heard in the upper corridor, he locked arms with Kent, faced him
+about and thrust him out over the door-stone. "Let's get out of this. You
+look as if you might kill somebody."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH11"></a>
+<h2>XI</h2>
+<h3>THE LAST DITCH</h3>
+
+<p>It was a mark of the later and larger development of David Kent that he
+was able to keep his head in the moment of catastrophes. In boyhood his
+hair had been a brick-dust red, and having the temperament which belongs
+of right to the auburn-hued, his first impulse was to face about and make
+a personal matter of the legal robbery with Judge MacFarlane.</p>
+
+<p>Happily for all concerned, Hunnicott's better counsels prevailed, and when
+the anger fit passed Kent found himself growing cool and determined.
+Hunnicott was crestfallen and disposed to be apologetic; but Kent did him
+justice.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't blame yourself: there was nothing else you could have done. Have
+you a stenographer in your office?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"A good one?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's young Perkins: you know him."</p>
+
+<p>"He'll do. 'Phone him to run down to the station and get what telegrams
+there are for me, and we'll talk as we go."</p>
+
+<p>Once free of the Court House, Kent began a rapid-fire of questions.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is Judge MacFarlane stopping?"</p>
+
+<p>"At the Mid-Continent."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any idea when he intends leaving town?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; but he will probably take the first train. He never stays here an
+hour longer than he has to after adjournment."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be the Flyer east at six o'clock. Is he going east?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come to think of it, I believe he is. Somebody said he was going to Hot
+Springs. He's in miserable health."</p>
+
+<p>Kent saw more possibilities, and worse, and quickened his pace a little.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope your young man won't let the grass grow under his feet," he said.
+"The minutes between now and six o'clock are worth days to us."</p>
+
+<p>"What do we do?" asked Hunnicott, willing to take a little lesson in
+practice as he ran.</p>
+
+<p>"The affidavits I have brought with me and the telegrams which are waiting
+at the station must convince MacFarlane that he has made a mistake. We
+shall prepare a motion for the discharge of the receiver and for the
+vacation of the order appointing him, and ask the judge to set an early
+day for the hearing on the merits of the case. He can't refuse."</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"It has been all cut and dried from 'way back," he objected. "They won't
+let you upset it at the last moment."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll give them a run for their money," said Kent. "A good bit of it
+depends upon Perkins' speed as a stenographer."</p>
+
+<p>As it befell, Perkins did not prove a disappointment, and by five o'clock
+Kent was in the lobby of the Mid-Continent, sending his card up to the
+judge's room. Word came back that the judge was in the café fortifying the
+inner man in preparation for his journey, and Kent did not stand upon
+ceremony. From the archway of the dining-room he marked down his man at a
+small table in the corner, and went to him at once, plunging promptly into
+the matter in hand.</p>
+
+<p>"The exigencies of the case must plead my excuse for intruding upon you
+here, Judge MacFarlane," he began courteously. "But I have been told that
+you were leaving town&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The judge waved him down with a deprecatory fork.</p>
+
+<p>"Court is adjourned, Mr. Kent, and I must decline to discuss the case <i>ex
+parte</i>. Why did you allow it to go by default?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is precisely what I am here to explain," said Kent, suavely. "The
+time allowed us was very short; and a series of accidents&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Again the judge interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>"A court can hardly take cognizance of accidents, Mr. Kent. Your local
+attorney was on the ground and he had the full benefit of the delay."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," was the patient rejoinder. "Technically, your order is
+unassailable. None the less, a great injustice has been done, as we are
+prepared to prove. I am not here to ask you to reopen the case at your
+dinner-table, but if you will glance over these papers I am sure you will
+set an early day for the hearing upon the merits."</p>
+
+<p>Judge MacFarlane forced a gray smile.</p>
+
+<p>"You vote yea and nay in the same breath, Mr. Kent. If I should examine
+your papers, I should be reopening the case at my dinner-table. You shall
+have your hearing in due course."</p>
+
+<p>"At chambers?" said Kent. "We shall be ready at any moment; we are ready
+now, in point of fact."</p>
+
+<p>"I can not say as to that. My health is very precarious, and I am under a
+physician's orders to take a complete rest for a time. I am sorry if the
+delay shall work a hardship to the company you represent; but under the
+circumstances, with not even an affidavit offered by your side, it is your
+misfortune. And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. It lacks but a
+few minutes of my train time."</p>
+
+<p>The hotel porter was droning out the call for the east-bound Flyer, and
+Kent effaced himself while Judge MacFarlane was paying his bill and making
+ready for his departure. But when the judge set out to walk to the
+station, Kent walked with him. There were five squares to be measured, and
+for five squares he hung at MacFarlane's elbow and the plea he made should
+have won him a hearing. Yet the judge remained impassible, and at the end
+of the argument turned him back in a word to his starting point.</p>
+
+<p>"I can not recall the order at this time, if I would, Mr. Kent; neither
+can I set a day for the hearing on the merits. What has been done was done
+in open court and in the presence of your attorney, who offered no
+evidence in contradiction of the allegations set forth in the plaintiff's
+amended petition, although they were supported by more than a dozen
+affidavits; and it can not be undone in the streets. Since you have not
+improved your opportunities, you must abide the consequences. The law can
+not be hurried."</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the station and the east-bound train was whistling for
+Gaston. Kent's patience was nearly gone, and the auburn-hued temperament
+was clamoring hotly for its innings.</p>
+
+<p>"This vacation of yours, Judge MacFarlane: how long is it likely to
+last?" he inquired, muzzling his wrath yet another moment.</p>
+
+<p>"I can not say; if I could I might be able to give you a more definite
+answer as to the hearing on the merits. But my health is very miserable,
+as I have said. If I am able to return shortly, I shall give you the
+hearing at chambers at an early date."</p>
+
+<p>"And if not?"</p>
+
+<p>"If not, I am afraid it will have to go over to the next term of court."</p>
+
+<p>"Six months," said Kent; and then his temper broke loose. "Judge
+MacFarlane, it is my opinion, speaking as man to man, that you are a
+scoundrel. I know what you have done, and why you have done it. Also, I
+know why you are running away, now that it is done. So help me God, I'll
+bring you to book for it if I have to make a lifetime job of it! It's all
+right for your political backers; they are thieves and bushwhackers, and
+they make no secret of it. But there is one thing worse than a trickster,
+and that is a trickster's tool!"</p>
+
+<p>For the moment while the train was hammering in over the switches they
+stood facing each other fiercely, all masks flung aside, each after his
+kind; the younger man flushed and battle-mad; the elder white, haggard,
+tremulous. Kent did not guess, then or ever, how near he came to death.
+Two years earlier a judge had been shot and maimed on a western circuit
+and since then, MacFarlane had taken a coward's precaution. Here was a
+man that knew, and while he lived the cup of trembling might never be put
+aside.</p>
+
+<p>It was the conductor's cry of "All aboard!" that broke the homicidal
+spell. Judge MacFarlane started guiltily, shook off the angry eye-grip of
+his accuser, and went to take his place in the Pullman. One minute later
+the east-bound train was threading its way out among the switches of the
+lower yard, and Kent had burst into the telegraph office to wire the
+volcanic news to his chief.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH12"></a>
+<h2>XII</h2>
+<h3>THE MAN IN POSSESSION</h3>
+
+<p>Appraised at its value in the current coin of street gossip, the legal
+seizure of the Trans-Western figured mainly as an example of the failure
+of modern business methods when applied to the concealment of a working
+corporation's true financial condition.</p>
+
+<p>This unsympathetic point of view was sufficiently defined in a bit of
+shop-talk between Harnwicke, the cold-blooded, and his traffic manager in
+the office of the Overland Short Line the morning after the newspaper
+announcement of the receivership.</p>
+
+<p>"I told you they were in deep water," said the lawyer, confidently. "They
+haven't been making any earnings&mdash;net earnings&mdash;since the Y.S.&amp; F. cut into
+them at Rio Verde, and the dividends were only a bluff for stock-bracing
+purposes. I surmised that an empty treasury was what was the matter when
+they refused to join us in the veto affair."</p>
+
+<p>"That is one way of looking at it," said the traffic manager. "But some
+of the papers are claiming that it was a legal hold-up, pure and simple."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing of the kind," retorted the lawyer, whose respect for the law was
+as great as his contempt for the makers of the laws. "Judge MacFarlane had
+no discretion in the matter. Hawk had a perfect right to file an amended
+petition, and the judge was obliged to act upon it. I'm not saying it
+wasn't a devilish sharp trick of Hawk's. It was. He saw a chance to smite
+them under the fifth rib, and he took it."</p>
+
+<p>"But how about his client: the woman who was put off the train? Is she any
+better off than she was before?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she'll get her five thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take
+the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for
+the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness,
+and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I
+understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the
+receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to say for
+himself."</p>
+
+<p>This view of Harnwicke's, colored perhaps by the fact that the
+Trans-Western was a business competitor of the Short Line, was the
+generally accepted one in railroad and financial circles at the capital.
+Civilization apart, there is still a deal of the primitive in human
+nature, and wolves are not the only creatures that are prone to fall upon
+the disabled member of the pack and devour him.</p>
+
+<p>But in the State at large the press was discussing the event from a
+political point of view; one section, small but vehement, raising the cry
+of trickery and judicial corruption, and prophesying the withdrawal of all
+foreign capital from the State, while the other, large and complacent,
+pointed eloquently to the beneficent working of the law under which the
+cause of a poor woman, suing for her undoubted right, might be made the
+whip to flog corporate tyranny into instant subjection.</p>
+
+<p>As for the dispossessed stock-holders in the far-away East, they were slow
+to take the alarm, and still slower to get concerted action. Like many of
+the western roads, the Western Pacific had been capitalized largely by
+popular subscription; hence there was no single holder, or group of
+holders, of sufficient financial weight to enter the field against the
+spoilers.</p>
+
+<p>But when Loring and his associates had fairly got the wires hot with the
+tale of what had been done, and the much more alarming tale of what was
+likely to be done, the Boston inertness vanished. A pool of the stock was
+formed, with the members of the Advisory Board as a nucleus; money was
+subscribed, and no less a legal light than an ex-attorney-general of the
+state of Massachusetts was despatched to the seat of war to advise with
+the men on the ground. None the less, disaster out-travels the swiftest of
+"limited" trains. Before the heavily-feed consulting attorney had crossed
+the Hudson in his westward journey, Wall Street had taken notice, and
+there was a momentary splash in the troubled pool of the Stock Exchange
+and a vanishing circle of ripples to show where Western Pacific had gone
+down.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime Major James Guilford, somewhile president of the Apache
+National Bank of Gaston, and antecedent to that the frowning autocrat of a
+twenty-five-mile logging road in the North Carolina mountains, had given
+bond in some sort and had taken possession of the company's property and
+of the offices in the Quintard Building.</p>
+
+<p>His first official act as receiver was to ask for the resignations of a
+dozen heads of departments, beginning with the general manager and pausing
+for the moment with the supervisor of track. That done, he filled the
+vacancies with political troughsmen; and with these as assistant
+decapitators the major passed rapidly down the line, striking off heads in
+daily batches until the over-flow of the Bucks political following was
+provided for on the railroad's pay-rolls to the wife's cousin's nephew.</p>
+
+<p>This was the work of the first few administrative days or weeks, and while
+it was going on, the business attitude of the road remained unchanged. But
+once seated firmly in the saddle, with his awkward squad well in hand,
+the major proceeded to throw a bomb of consternation into the camp of his
+competitors.</p>
+
+<p>Kent was dining with Ormsby in the grill-room of the Camelot Club when the
+waiter brought in the evening edition of the <i>Argus</i>, whose railroad
+reporter had heard the preliminary fizzing of the bomb fuse. The story was
+set out on the first page, first column, with appropriate headlines.</p>
+
+<p class="ind4">
+  WAR TO THE KNIFE AND THE KNIFE<br />
+  TO THE HILT!</p>
+
+<p class="ind4">
+  TRANS-WESTERN CUTS COMMODITY RATE.</p>
+
+<p class="ind4">
+  Great Excitement in Railroad Circles.<br />
+  Receiver Guilford's Hold-up.</p>
+
+<p>Kent ran his eye rapidly down the column and passed the paper across to
+Ormsby.</p>
+
+<p>"I told you so," he said. "They didn't find the road insolvent, but they
+are going to make it so in the shortest possible order. A rate war will do
+it quicker than anything else on earth."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby thrust out his jaw.</p>
+
+<p>"Have we got to stand by and see 'em do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"The man from Massachusetts says yes, and he knows, or thinks he does. He
+has been here two weeks now, and he has nosed out for himself all the
+dead-walls. We can't appeal, because there is no decision to appeal from.
+We can't take it out of the lower court until it is finished in the lower
+court. We can't enjoin an officer of the court; and there is no authority
+in the State that will set aside Judge MacFarlane's order when that order
+was made under technically legal conditions."</p>
+
+<p>"You could have told him all that in the first five minutes," said Ormsby.</p>
+
+<p>"I did tell him, and was mildly sat upon. To-day he came around and gave
+me back my opinion, clause for clause, as his own. But I have no kick
+coming. Somebody will have to be here to fight the battle to a finish when
+the judge returns, and our expert will advise the Bostonians to retain
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"Does he stay?" Ormsby asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; he is going back with Loring to-night. Loring has an idea of his
+own which may or may not be worth the powder it will take to explode it.
+He is going to beseech the Boston people to enlarge the pool until it
+controls a safe majority of the stock."</p>
+
+<p>"What good will that do?"</p>
+
+<p>"None, directly. It's merely a safe preliminary to anything that may
+happen. I tell Loring he is like all the others: he knows when he has
+enough and is willing to stand from under. I'm the only fool in the lot."
+Ormsby's smile was heartening and good for sore nerves.</p>
+
+<p>"I like your pluck, Kent; I'll be hanged if I don't. And I'll back you to
+win, yet."</p>
+
+<p>Kent shook his head unhopefully.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am fighting for the pure love of it, and
+not with any great hope of saving the stock-holders. These grafters have
+us by the nape of the neck. We can't make a move till MacFarlane comes
+back and gives us a hearing on the merits. That may not be till the next
+term of court. Meanwhile, the temporary receiver is to all intents and
+purposes a permanent receiver; and the interval would suffice to wreck a
+dozen railroads."</p>
+
+<p>"And still you won't give up?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you won't have to. But to a man up a tree it looks very much like
+a dead cock in the pit. As I have said, if there is any backing to do, I'm
+with you, first, last, and all the time, merely from a sportsman's
+interest in the game. But is there any use in a little handful of us
+trying to buck up against a whole state government?"</p>
+
+<p>The coffee had been served, and Kent dropped a lump of sugar into his cup.</p>
+
+<p>"Ormsby, I'll never let go while I'm alive enough to fight," he said
+slowly. "One decent quality I have&mdash;and the only one, perhaps: I don't
+know when I'm beaten. And I'll down this crowd of political plunderers
+yet, if Bucks doesn't get me sand-bagged."</p>
+
+<p>His listener pushed back his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"If you stood to lose anything more than your job I could understand it,"
+he commented. "As it is, I can't. Any way you look at it, your stake in
+the game isn't worth the time and effort it will take to play the string
+out. And I happen to know you're ambitious to do things&mdash;things that
+count."</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you don't understand&mdash;the motive?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's it."</p>
+
+<p>Kent laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not as astute as Miss Van Brock. She pointed it out to me last
+night&mdash;or thought she did&mdash;in two words."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby's eyes darkened, and he did not affect to misunderstand.</p>
+
+<p>"It would be a grand-stand play," he said half-musingly, "if you should
+happen to worry it through, I mean. I believe Mrs. Hepzibah would be ready
+to fall on your neck and forgive you, and turn me down." Then,
+half-jestingly: "Kent, what will you take to drop this thing permanently
+and go away?"</p>
+
+<p>David Kent's smile showed his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"The one thing you wouldn't be willing to give. You asked me once when we
+had fallen over the fence upon this forbidden ground if I were satisfied,
+and I told you I wasn't. Do we understand each other?"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess so," said Ormsby. "But&mdash;Say, Kent, I like you too well to see you
+go up against a stone fence blindfolded. I'm like Guilford: I am the man
+in possession. And possession is nine points of the law."</p>
+
+<p>Kent rose and took the proffered cigar from Ormsby's case.</p>
+
+<p>"It depends a good bit upon how the possession is gained&mdash;and
+held&mdash;doesn't it?" he rejoined coolly. "And your figure is unfortunate in
+its other half. I am going to beat Guilford."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH13"></a>
+<h2>XIII</h2>
+<h3>THE WRECKERS</h3>
+
+<p>Just why Receiver Guilford, an officer of the court who was supposed to be
+nursing an insolvent railroad to the end that its creditors might not lose
+all, should begin by declaring war on the road's revenue, was a question
+which the managers of competing lines strove vainly to answer. But when,
+in defiance of all precedent, he made the cut rates effective to and from
+all local stations on the Trans-Western, giving the shippers at
+intermediate and non-competitive points the full benefit of the
+reductions, the railroad colony denounced him as a madman and gave him a
+month in which to find the bottom of a presumably empty treasury.</p>
+
+<p>But the event proved that the major's madness was not altogether without
+method. It is an axiom in the carrying trade that low rates make business;
+create it, so to speak, out of nothing. Given an abundant crop, low
+prices, and high freight rates in the great cereal belt, and, be the
+farmers never so poor, much of the grain will be stored and held against
+the chance of better conditions.</p>
+
+<p>So it came about that Major Guilford's relief measure was timed to a
+nicety, and the blanket cut in rates opened a veritable flood-gate for
+business in Trans-Western territory. From the day of its announcement the
+traffic of the road increased by leaps and bounds. Stored grain came out
+of its hiding places at every country cross-roads to beg for cars; stock
+feeders drove their market cattle unheard-of distances, across the tracks
+of competing lines, over and around obstacles of every sort, to pour them
+into the loading corrals of the Trans-Western.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was the traffic all outgoing. With the easing of the money burden, the
+merchants in the tributary towns began thriftily to take advantage of the
+low rates to renew their stocks; long-deferred visits and business trips
+suddenly became possible; and the saying that it was cheaper to travel
+than to stay at home gained instant and grateful currency.</p>
+
+<p>In a short time the rolling stock of the road was taxed to its utmost
+capacity, and the newly appointed purchasing agent was buying cars and
+locomotives right and left. Also, to keep pace with the ever-increasing
+procession of trains, a doubled construction force wrought night and day
+installing new side tracks and passing points.</p>
+
+<p>Under the fructifying influence of such a golden shower of prosperity,
+land values began to rise again, slowly at first, as buyers distrusted the
+continuance of the golden shower; more rapidly a little later, as the
+Guilford policy defined itself in terms of apparent permanence.</p>
+
+<p>Towns along the line&mdash;hamlets long since fallen into the way-station rut
+of desuetude&mdash;awoke with a start, bestirring themselves joyfully to meet
+the inspiriting conditions. At Midland City, Stephen Hawk, the new
+right-of-way agent, ventured to ask municipal help to construct a ten-mile
+branch to Lavabee: it was forthcoming promptly; and the mass meeting, at
+which the bond loan was anticipated by public subscription shouted itself
+hoarse in enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>At Gaston, where Hawk asked for a donation of land whereon the company
+might build the long-promised division repair-shops, people fought with
+one another to be first among the donors. And at Juniberg, where the
+company proposed to establish the first of a series of grain
+subtreasuries&mdash;warehouses in which the farmers of the surrounding country
+could store their products and borrow money on them from the railroad
+company at the rate of three per cent, per annum&mdash;at Juniberg enough money
+was subscribed to erect three such depots as the heaviest tributary crop
+could possibly fill.</p>
+
+<p>It was while the pendulum of prosperity was in full swing that David Kent
+took a day off from sweating over his problem of ousting the receiver and
+ran down to Gaston. Single-eyed as he was in the pursuit of justice, he
+was not unmindful of the six lots standing in his name in the Gaston
+suburb, and from all accounts the time was come to dispose of them.</p>
+
+<p>He made the journey in daylight, with his eyes wide open and the mental
+pencil busy at work noting the changes upon which the State press had been
+dilating daily, but which he was now seeing for the first time. They were
+incontestable&mdash;and wonderful. He admitted the fact without prejudice to a
+settled conviction that the sun-burst of prosperity was merely another
+brief period of bubble-blowing. Towns whose streets had been grass-grown
+since the day when each in turn had surrendered its right to be called the
+terminus of the westward-building railroad, were springing into new life.
+The song of the circular saw, the bee-boom of the planing-mill and the
+tapping of hammers were heard in the land, and the wayside hamlets were
+dotted with new roofs. And Gaston&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But Gaston deserved a separate paragraph in the mental note-book, and Kent
+accorded it, marveling still more. It was as if the strenuous onrush of
+the climaxing Year Three had never been interrupted. The material for the
+new company shops was arriving by trainloads, and an army of men was at
+work clearing the grounds. On a siding near the station a huge grain
+elevator was rising. In the streets the hustling activity of the
+"terminus" period was once more in full swing; and at the Mid-Continent
+Kent had some little difficulty in securing a room.</p>
+
+<p>He was smoking his after-dinner cigar in the lobby of the hotel and trying
+as he might to orient himself when Blashfield Hunnicott drifted in. Kent
+gave the sometime local attorney a cigar, made room for him on the
+plush-covered settee, and proceeded to pump him dry of Gaston news. Summed
+up, the inquiries pointed themselves thus: was there any basis for the
+Gaston revival other than the lately changed attitude of the railroad? In
+other words, if the cut rates should be withdrawn and the railroad
+activities cease, would there not be a second and still more disastrous
+collapse of the Gaston bubble?</p>
+
+<p>Pressed hardly, Hunnicott admitted the probability; given another turn,
+the screw of inquiry squeezed out an admission of the fact, slurred over
+by the revivalist, that the railway company's treasury was really the
+alms-box into which all hands were dipping.</p>
+
+<p>"One more question and I'll let up on you," said Kent. "It used to be said
+of you in the flush times that you kept tab on the real estate transfers
+when everybody else was too busy to read the record. Do you still do it?"</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott laughed uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>"Rather more than ever just now, as you'd imagine."</p>
+
+<p>"It is well. Now you know the members of the old gang, from his Excellency
+down. Tell me one thing: are they buying or selling?"</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott sprang up and slapped his leg.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jupiter, Kent! They are selling&mdash;every last man of them!"</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely. And when they have sold all they have to sell?"</p>
+
+<p>"They'll turn us loose&mdash;drop us&mdash;quit booming the town, if your theory is
+the right one. But say, Kent, I can't believe it, you know. It's too big a
+thing to be credited to Jim Guilford and his handful of subs in the
+railroad office. Why, it's all along the line, everywhere."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm telling you that Guilford isn't the man. He is only a cog in the
+wheel. There is a bigger mind than his behind it."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't help it," Hunnicott protested. "I don't believe that any man or
+clique could bring this thing about unless we were really on the upturn."</p>
+
+<p>"Very good; believe what you please, but do as I tell you. Sell every foot
+of Gaston dirt that stands in your name; and while you are about it, sell
+those six lots for me in Subdivision Five. More than that, do it pretty
+soon."</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott promised, in the brokerage affair, at least. Then he switched
+the talk to the receivership.</p>
+
+<p>"Still up in the air, are you, in the railroad grab case?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"No news of MacFarlane?"</p>
+
+<p>"Plenty of it. His health is still precarious, and will likely remain so
+until the spoilsmen have picked the skeleton clean."</p>
+
+<p>Hunnicott was silent for a full minute. Then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Kent, hasn't it occurred to you that they are rather putting meat on
+the bones instead of taking it off? Their bills for betterments must be
+out of sight."</p>
+
+<p>It had occurred to Kent, but he gave his own explanation of Major
+Guilford's policy in a terse sentence.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a part of the bluff; fattening the thing a little before they
+barbecue it."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so. It's a pity we don't live a little farther back in the
+history of the world: say at a time when we could hire MacFarlane's doctor
+to obliterate the judge, and no questions asked."</p>
+
+<p>Who can explain how it is that some jesting word, trivial and purposeless
+it may be, will fire a hidden train of thought which was waiting only for
+some chance spark? "Obliterate the judge," said Hunnicott in grim jest;
+and straightway Kent saw possibilities; saw a thing to be done, though not
+yet the manner of its doing.</p>
+
+<p>"If you'll excuse me," he said abruptly to his companion, "I believe I'll
+try to catch the Flyer back to the capital. I came down to see about
+selling those lots of mine, but if you will undertake it for me&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said Hunnicott; "I'll be only too glad. You've ten minutes:
+can you make it?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent guessed so, and made the guess a certainty with two minutes to spare.
+The through sleeper was lightly loaded, and he picked out the most
+unneighbored section, of the twelve, being wishful only for undisturbed
+thinking ground. But before the train had swung past the suburb lights of
+Gaston, the smoker's unrest seized him and the thought-wheels demanded
+tobacco. Kent fought it as long as he could, making sure that the
+smoking-compartment liars' club would be in session; but when the demand
+became a nagging insistence, he found his pipe and tobacco and went to the
+men's room.</p>
+
+<p>The little den behind the drawing-room had but one occupant besides the
+rear-end brakeman&mdash;-a tall, saturnine man in a gray grass-cloth duster who
+was smoking a Porto Rican stogie. Kent took a second look and held out his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"This is an unexpected pleasure, Judge Marston. I was counting on three
+hours of solitary confinement."</p>
+
+<p>The lieutenant-governor acknowledged the hand-clasp, nodded, and made
+room on the leather-covered divan for the new-comer. Hildreth, the editor
+of the <i>Argus</i>, put it aptly when he said that the grim-faced old cattle
+king had "blown" into politics. He was a compromise on the People's Party
+ticket; was no part of the Bucks programme, and had been made to feel it.
+Tradition had it that he had been a terror to the armed and organized
+cattle thieves of the early days; hence the brevet title of "Judge." But
+those that knew him best did not know that he had once been the brightest
+man upon the Supreme Bench of his native state: this before failing health
+had driven him into exile.</p>
+
+<p>As a mixer, the capital had long since voted Oliver Marston a conspicuous
+failure. A reticent, reserved man by temperament and habit, and with both
+temperament and habit confirmed by his long exile on the cattle ranges, he
+had grown rather less than more talkative after his latest plunge into
+public life; and even Miss Van Brock confessed that she found him
+impossible on the social side. None the less, Kent had felt drawn toward
+him from the first; partly because Marston was a good man in bad company,
+and partly because there was something remindful of the elder Kent in the
+strong face, the slow smile and the introspective eye of the old man from
+the hill country.</p>
+
+<p>For a time the talk was a desultory monologue, with Kent doing his best to
+keep it from dying outright. Later, when he was fairly driven in upon his
+reserves, he began to speak of himself, and of the hopeless fight for
+enlargement in the Trans-Western struggle. Marston lighted the
+match-devouring stogie for the twentieth time, squared himself on the end
+of the divan and listened attentively. At the end of the recounting he
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to be a failure of justice, Mr. Kent. Can you prove your
+postulate?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can. With fifteen minutes more on the day of the preliminary hearing I
+should have shown it to any one's satisfaction."</p>
+
+<p>Marston went into a brown study with his eyes fixed upon the
+stamped-leather devil in the panel at the opposite end of the compartment.
+When he spoke again, Kent wondered at the legal verbiage, and still more
+at the clear-cut, judicial opinion.</p>
+
+<p>"The facts in the case, as you state them, point to judicial connivance,
+and we should always be slow to charge that, Mr. Kent. Technically, the
+court was not at fault. Due notice was served on the company's attorney of
+record, and you admit, yourself, that the delay, short as it was, would
+have been sufficient if you had not been accidentally detained. And, since
+there were no contravening affidavits submitted, Judge MacFarlane was
+technically warranted in granting the prayer for a temporary receiver."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not trying to refute that," said Kent. "But afterward, when I called
+upon the judge with the evidence in hand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He was under no absolute obligation to retry the case out of court, as
+you know, Mr. Kent. Neither was he obliged to give you an unofficial
+notice of the day upon which he would hear your motion for the discharge
+of the receiver and the vacation of his order appointing him."</p>
+
+<p>"Under no absolute legal obligation, perhaps," retorted Kent. "But the
+moral obligation&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We are coming to that. I have been giving you what would probably be a
+minority opinion of an appellate court, if you could take an appeal. The
+majority opinion might take higher ground, pointing to the manifest
+injustice done to the defendant company by the shortness of the delay
+granted; by Judge MacFarlane's refusal to continue the hearing for one
+hour, though your attorney was present and pleading for the same; and
+lastly for the indefinite postponement of the hearing on the merits on
+insufficient grounds, since the judge was not at the time, and has not
+since been, too ill to attend to the routine duties of his office."</p>
+
+<p>Kent looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Judge Marston, do you know that last assertion to be true?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The slow smile came and went in the introspective eyes of the older man.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been giving you the opinion of the higher court," he said, with
+his nearest approach to jocoseness. "It is based upon the supposition that
+your allegations would be supported by evidence."</p>
+
+<p>Kent smoked on in silence while the train measured the rail-lengths
+between two of the isolated prairie stations. When he spoke again there
+was honest deference in his manner.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Marston, you have a far better right to your courtesy title of
+'Judge' than that given by the Great American Title Company, Unlimited,"
+he said. "Will you advise me?"</p>
+
+<p>"As plain Oliver Marston, and a man old enough to be your father, yes.
+What have you been doing? Trying to oust the receiver, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; trying to find some technical flaw by which he could be ousted."</p>
+
+<p>"It can't be done. You must strike higher. Are you fully convinced of
+Judge MacFarlane's venality?"</p>
+
+<p>"As fully as I can be without having seen with my own eyes and heard with
+my own ears."</p>
+
+<p>Marston opened his watch and looked at it. Then he lighted another of the
+villainous little cigars.</p>
+
+<p>"We have an hour yet," he said. "You have been giving me the legal points
+in the case: now give me the inferences&mdash;all of them."</p>
+
+<p>Kent laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid I sha'n't be able to forget the lieutenant-governor. I shall
+have to call some pretty hard names."</p>
+
+<p>"Call them," said his companion, briefly; and Kent went deep into the
+details, beginning with the formation of the political gang in Gaston the
+dismantled.</p>
+
+<p>The listener in the gray dust-coat heard him through without comment. When
+Kent reached the end of the inferences, telling the truth without scruple
+and letting the charge of political and judicial corruption lie where it
+would, the engineer was whistling for the capital.</p>
+
+<p>"You have told me some things I knew, and some others that I only
+suspected," was all the answer he got until the train was slowing into the
+Union Station. Then as he flung away the stump of the little cigar the
+silent one added: "If I were in your place, Mr. Kent, I believe I should
+take a supplementary course of reading in the State law."</p>
+
+<p>"In what particular part of it?" said Kent, keen anxiety in every word.</p>
+
+<p>"In that part of the fundamental law which relates to the election of
+circuit judges, let us say. If I had your case to fight, I should try to
+obliterate Judge MacFarlane."</p>
+
+<p>Kent had but a moment in which to remark the curious coincidence in the
+use of precisely the same word by both Hunnicott and his present adviser.</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear sir! we should gain nothing by MacFarlane's removal when
+his successor would be appointed by the executive!"</p>
+
+<p>Marston turned in the doorway of the smoking-compartment and laid a
+fatherly hand on the younger man's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"My boy, I didn't say 'remove'; I said 'obliterate'. Good night."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH14"></a>
+<h2>XIV</h2>
+<h3>THE GERRYMANDER</h3>
+
+<p>With Judge Marston's hint partly to point the way, Kent was no long time
+in getting at work on the new lead.</p>
+
+<p>Having been at the time a practitioner in one of the counties affected, he
+knew the political deal by which MacFarlane had been elected. Briefly
+described, it was a swapping of horses in midstream. In the preliminary
+canvass it was discovered that in all probability Judge MacFarlane's
+district, as constituted, would not reelect him. But the adjoining
+district was strong enough to spare a county without loss to the party;
+and that county added to MacFarlane's voting strength would tip the scale
+in his favor. The Assembly was in session, and the remedy was applied in
+the shape of a bill readjusting the district lines to fit the political
+necessity.</p>
+
+<p>While this bill was still in the lower house an obstacle presented itself
+in the form of a vigorous protest from Judge Whitcomb, whose district was
+the one to suffer loss. The county in question was a prosperous one, and
+the court fees&mdash;which a compliant clerk might secretly divide with the
+judge appointing him&mdash;were large: wherefore Whitcomb threatened political
+reprisals if Kiowa County should be taken away from him. The outcome was a
+compromise. For elective purposes the two districts were gerrymandered as
+the bill proposed; but it was expressly provided that the transferred
+county should remain judicially in Whitcomb's district until the
+expiration of Whitcomb's term of office.</p>
+
+<p>Having refreshed his memory as to the facts, Kent spent a forenoon in the
+State library. He stayed on past the luncheon hour, feeding on a dry diet
+of Digests; and it was not until hunger began to sharpen his faculties
+that he thought of going back of the statutory law to the fountain-head in
+the constitution of the State. Here, after he had read carefully section
+by section almost through the entire instrument, his eye lighted upon a
+clause which gradually grew luminous as he read and re-read it.</p>
+
+<p>"That is what Marston meant; it must be what he meant," he mused; and
+returning the book to its niche in the alcove he sat down to put his face
+in his hands and sum up the status in logical sequence.</p>
+
+<p>The conclusion must have been convincing, since he presently sprang up and
+left the room quickly to have himself shot down the elevator shaft to the
+street level. The telegraph office in the capitol was closed, but there
+was another in the Hotel Brunswick, two squares distant, and thither he
+went.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold the pool in fighting trim at all hazards. Think I have found weak
+link in the chain," was his wire to Loring, at Boston; and having sent it,
+he went around to Cassatti's and astonished the waiter by ordering a
+hearty luncheon at half-past three o'clock in the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>It was late in the evening before he left the tiny office on the fifth
+floor of the Quintard Building where one of his former stenographers had
+set up in business for herself. Since five o'clock the young woman had
+been steadily driving the type-writer to Kent's dictation. When the final
+sheet came out with a whirring rasp of the ratchet, he suddenly remembered
+that he had promised Miss Van Brock to dine with her. It was too late for
+the dinner, but not too late to go and apologize, and he did the thing
+that he could, stopping at his rooms on the way to dress while his
+cab-driver waited.</p>
+
+<p>He found Portia alone, for which he was glad; but her greeting was
+distinctly accusative.</p>
+
+<p>"If I should pretend to be deeply offended and tell Thomas to show you the
+door, what could you say for yourself?" she began, before he could say a
+word in exculpation.</p>
+
+<p>"I should say every sort of excuseful thing I could think of, knowing
+very well that the most ingenious lie would fall far short of atoning for
+the offense," he replied humbly.</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly it would be better to tell the truth&mdash;had you thought of that?"
+she suggested, quite without malice.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I had; and I shall, if you'll let me begin back a bit." He drew up a
+chair to face her and sat on the edge of it. "You know I told you I was
+going to Gaston to sell my six lots while Major Guilford's little boom is
+on?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm trying to remember: go on."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I went yesterday morning and returned late last night. Do you know,
+it's positively marvelous!"</p>
+
+<p>"Which&mdash;the six lots, the boom, or the celerity of your movements?" she
+asked, with a simulation of the deepest interest.</p>
+
+<p>"All three, if you please; but I meant the miraculous revival of things
+along the Trans-Western. But that is neither here nor there&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it is very much here and there," she interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>"I see you don't want me to tell the truth&mdash;the whole truth; but I am
+determined. The first man I met after dinner was Hunnicott, and when I had
+made him my broker in the real estate affair we fell to talking about the
+railroad steal. Speaking of MacFarlane's continued absence, Hunnicott
+said, jokingly, that it was a pity we couldn't go back to the methods of a
+few hundred years ago and hire the Hot Springs doctor to 'obliterate' him.
+The word stuck in my mind, and I broke away and took the train chiefly to
+have a chance to think out the new line. In the smoking-room of the
+sleeper I found&mdash;whom, do you suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know: Judge MacFarlane, perhaps, coming back to give you a
+chance to poison him at short range?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; it was Marston."</p>
+
+<p>"And he talked so long and so fast that you couldn't get here in time for
+dinner this evening? That would be the most picturesque of the little
+fictions you spoke of."</p>
+
+<p>Kent laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"For the first hour he wouldn't talk at all; just sat there wooden-faced,
+smoking vile little cigars that made me think I was getting hay-fever. But
+I wouldn't give up; and after I had worn out all the commonplaces I began
+on the Trans-Western muddle. At that he woke up all at once, and before I
+knew it he was giving me an expert legal opinion on the case; meaty and
+sound and judicial. Miss Van Brock, that man is a lawyer, and an
+exceedingly able one, at that."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she said coolly. "He was one of the justices of the Supreme
+Court of his own state at forty-two: that was before he had to come West
+for his health. I found that out a long time ago."</p>
+
+<p>"And you never told me!" said Kent, reproachfully. "Well, no matter; I
+found out for myself that he is a man to tie to. After we had canvassed
+the purely legal side of the affair, he wanted to know more, and I went in
+for the details, telling him all the inferences which involve Bucks,
+Meigs, Hendricks, MacFarlane and the lot of them."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Portia's eyes were flashing.</p>
+
+<p>"Good, good, good!" she said. "David, I'm proud of you. That took
+courage&mdash;heaps of it."</p>
+
+<p>"I did have to forget pretty hard that he was the lieutenant-governor and
+nominally one of the gang. But if he is not with us, neither is he against
+us. He took it all in quietly, and when I was through, he said: 'You have
+told me some things that I knew, and some others that I only suspected.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Was that all?" asked Miss Van Brock, eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"No; I took a good long breath and asked his advice."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he give it?"</p>
+
+<p>"He did. He said in sober earnest just what Hunnicott had said in a joke:
+'If I had your case to fight, I should try to obliterate Judge
+MacFarlane.' I began to say that MacFarlane's removal wouldn't help us so
+long as Bucks has the appointing of his successor, and then he turned on
+me and hammered it in with a last word just as we were leaving the train:
+'I didn't say remove; I said obliterate.' I caught on, after so long a
+time, and I've been hard at work ever since."</p>
+
+<p>"You are obliterating me," said Miss Portia. "I haven't the slightest idea
+what it is all about."</p>
+
+<p>"It's easy from this on," said Kent, consolingly. "You know how MacFarlane
+secured his reelection?"</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody knows that."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to cut a long story short, the gerrymander deal won't stand the
+light. The constitution says&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, please don't quote law books at me. Put it in English&mdash;woman-English,
+if you can."</p>
+
+<p>"I will. The special act of the Assembly is void; therefore there was no
+legal election, and, by consequence, there is no judge and no receiver."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Van Brock was silent for a reflective minute. Then she said:</p>
+
+<p>"On second thought, perhaps you would better tell me what the constitution
+says, Mr. David. Possibly I could grasp it."</p>
+
+<p>"It is in the section on elections. It says: 'All circuit or district
+judges, and all special judges, shall be elected by the qualified voters
+of the respective circuits or districts in which they are to hold their
+court.' Kiowa County was cut out of Judge Whitcomb's circuit and placed in
+Judge MacFarlane's for electoral purposes only. In all other respects it
+remains a part of Judge Whitcomb's circuit, and will so continue until
+Whitcomb's term expires. Without the vote of Kiowa, MacFarlane could not
+have been elected; with it he was illegally elected, or, to put it the
+other way about, he was not elected at all. Since he is not lawfully a
+judge, his acts are void, among them this appointment of Major Guilford as
+receiver for the Trans-Western."</p>
+
+<p>She was not as enthusiastic as he thought she ought to be. In the soil
+prepared for it by the political confidences of the winter there had grown
+up a many-branching tree of intimacy between these two; a frank, sexless
+friendship, as Kent would have described it, in which a man who was not
+very much given to free speech with any one unburdened himself, and the
+woman made him believe that her quick, apprehending sympathy was the one
+thing needful&mdash;as women have done since the world began.</p>
+
+<p>Since the looting of the railroad which had taken him out of the steadying
+grind of regular work, Kent had been the prey of mixed motives. From the
+first he had thrown himself heartily into the problem of retrieval, but
+the pugnacious professional ambition to break the power of the machine had
+divided time pretty equally with sentiment. Elinor had said little about
+the vise-nip of hardship which the stock-smashing would impose upon three
+unguardianed women; but Penelope had been less reticent. Wanting bare
+justice at the hands of the wreckers, Elinor would go to her wedding with
+Ormsby as the beggar maid went to King Cophetua; and all the loyalty of an
+unselfish love rose up in Kent to make the fight with the grafters a
+personal duel.</p>
+
+<p>At every step in the hitherto discouraging struggle Portia Van Brock had
+been his keen-sighted adviser, prompter, ally of proof. He told himself
+now and again in a flush of gratitude that he was coming to owe her more
+than he had ever owed any woman; that where other men, more&mdash;or
+less&mdash;fortunate, were not denied the joy of possession, he, the
+disappointed one, was finding a true and loyal comradeship next best, if
+not quite equal to the beatitudes of passion.</p>
+
+<p>In all of which David Kent was not entirely just to himself. However much
+he owed to Portia&mdash;and the debt was large&mdash;she was not his only creditor.
+Something he owed to the unsatisfied love; more, perhaps, to the good
+blood in his veins; but most of all to the battle itself. For out of the
+soul-harrowings of endeavor was emerging a better man, a stronger man,
+than any his friends had known. Brutal as their blind gropings were, the
+Flagellants of the Dark Ages plied their whips to some dim purpose.
+Natures there be that rise only to the occasion; and if there be no
+occasion, no floggings of adversity or bone-wrenchings upon the rack of
+things denied, there will be no awakening&mdash;no victory.</p>
+
+<p>David Kent was suffering in both kinds, and was the better man for it.
+From looking forward to success in the narrow field of professional
+advancement, or in the scarcely broader one of the righting of one woman's
+financial wrongs, he was coming now to crave it in the name of manhood; to
+burn with an eager desire to see justice done for its own sake.</p>
+
+<p>So, when he had come to Portia with the scheme of effacing Judge
+MacFarlane and his receiver at one shrewd blow, the first of the many
+plans which held out a fair promise of success as a reward for daring, he
+was disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter with it?" he demanded, when he had given her five full
+minutes for reflection.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, David," she said gravely. "Have I ever thrown cold water on
+any of your schemes thus far?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, indeed. You have been the loyalest partizan a man ever had, I think;
+the only one I have to whom I can talk freely. And I have told you more
+than I have all the others put together."</p>
+
+<p>"I know you have. And it hurts me to pull back now when you want me to
+push. But I can't help it. Do you believe in a woman's intuition?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose I do: all men do, don't they?"</p>
+
+<p>She was tying little knots in the fringe of the table scarf, but the
+prophetess-eyes, as Penelope called them, were not following the deft
+intertwinings of the slender fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean to set about 'obliterating' Judge MacFarlane forthwith?" she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Assuredly. I have been whipping the thing into shape all afternoon: that
+is what kept me from dining with you."</p>
+
+<p>"It involves some kind of legal procedure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; a rather complicated one."</p>
+
+<p>"Could you explain it so that I could understand it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think so. In the first place the question is raised by means of an
+information or inquiry called a <i>quo warranto</i>. This is directed to the
+receiver, and is a demand to know by what authority he holds. Is it clear
+thus far?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pellucidly," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"In reply the receiver cites his authority, which is the order from Judge
+MacFarlane; and in our turn we proceed to show that the authority does not
+exist&mdash;that the judge's election was illegal and that therefore his acts
+are void. Do I make it plain?"</p>
+
+<p>"You make it seem as though it were impossible to fail. And yet I know you
+will fail."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't ask me; I couldn't begin to tell you that. But in some spiritual
+or mental looking-glass I can see you coming to me with the story of that
+failure&mdash;coming to ask my help."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't need to be the prophetess Penelope says you are to foresee part
+of that. I always come to you with my woes."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you?&mdash;oftener than you go to Miss Brentwood?"</p>
+
+<p>This time his smile was a mere tightening of the lips.</p>
+
+<p>"You do love to grind me on that side, don't you?" he said. "I and my
+affairs are less than nothing to Miss Brentwood, and no one knows it any
+better than you do."</p>
+
+<p>"But you want to go to her," she persisted. "I am only the alternative."</p>
+
+<p>He looked her full in the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Van Brock, what is it you want me to say? What can I say more than I
+said a moment ago&mdash;that you are the truest friend a man ever had?"</p>
+
+<p>The answering look out of the brown eyes was age-old in its infinite
+wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>"How little you men know when you think you know the most," she said
+half-musingly; then she broke off abruptly. "Let us talk about something
+else. If Major Guilford is wrecking the railroad, why is he spending so
+much money on improvements? Have you thought to ask yourself that
+question?"</p>
+
+<p>"A good many times," he admitted, following her promptly back to first
+principles.</p>
+
+<p>"And you have not found the answer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not one that fully satisfies me&mdash;no."</p>
+
+<p>"I've found one."</p>
+
+<p>"Intuitively?" he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"No; it's pure logic, this time. Do you remember showing me a letter that
+Mr. Hunnicott wrote you just before the explosion&mdash;a letter in which he
+repeated a bit of gossip about Mr. Semple Falkland and his mysterious
+visit to Gaston?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I remember it."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know who Mr. Falkland is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who doesn't?" he queried. "He has half of Wall Street in his clientele."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but particularly he is the advisory counsel of the Plantagould
+System. Ever since you showed me that letter I have been trying to account
+for his presence in Gaston on the day before Judge MacFarlane's spring
+term of court. I should never have found out but for Mrs. Brentwood."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Brentwood!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Van Brock nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; the mother of my&mdash;of the young person for whom I am the alternative,
+is in a peck of trouble; I quote her <i>verbatim</i>. She and her two daughters
+hold some three thousand shares of Western Pacific stock. It was
+purchased at fifty-seven, and it is now down to twenty-one."</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty and a quarter to-day," Kent corrected.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind the fractions. The mother of the incomparable&mdash;Penelope, has
+heard that I am a famous business woman; a worthy understudy for Mrs.
+Hetty Green; so she came to me for advice. She had a letter from a New
+York broker offering her a fraction more than the market price for her
+three thousand shares of Western Pacific."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"Meaning what did I do? I did what you did not do&mdash;what you are not doing
+even now; I put two and two together in the twinkling of a bedstaff. Why
+should a New York broker be picking up outlying Western Pacific at a
+fraction more than the market when the stock is sinking every day? I was
+curious enough to pass the 'why' along to a friend of mine in Wall
+Street."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course he told you all about it," said Kent, incredulously.</p>
+
+<p>"He told me what I needed to know. The broker in question is a Plantagould
+man."</p>
+
+<p>"Still I fail to 'connect up,' as the linemen say."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you? Ah, David, David! will you leave it for a woman to point out what
+you should have suspected the moment you read that bit of gossip in Mr.
+Hunnicott's letter?"</p>
+
+<p>Her hand was on the arm of her chair. He covered it with his own.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll leave it for you, Portia. You are my good angel."</p>
+
+<p>She withdrew the hand quickly, but there was no more than playful
+resentment in her retort.</p>
+
+<p>"Shame on you!" she scoffed. "What would Miss Brentwood say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you would leave her out of it," he frowned. "You are continually
+ignoring the fact that she has promised to be the wife of another man."</p>
+
+<p>"And has thereby freed you from all obligations of loyalty? Don't deceive
+yourself: women are not made that way. Doubtless she will go on and marry
+the other man in due season; but she will never forgive you if you smash
+her ideals. But we were talking about the things you ought to have
+guessed. Fetch me the atlas from the book-case&mdash;lower shelf; right-hand
+corner; that's it."</p>
+
+<p>He did it; and in further obedience opened the thin quarto at the map of
+the United States. There were heavy black lines, inked in with a pen,
+tracing out the various ramifications of a great railway system. The
+nucleus of the system lay in the middle West, but there was a growing
+network of the black lines reaching out toward the Pacific. And connecting
+the trans-Mississippi network with the western was a broad red line
+paralleling the Trans-Western Railway.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled at his sudden start of comprehension.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you begin to suspect things?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded his head.</p>
+
+<p>"You ought to be a man. If you were, I should never give you a moment's
+peace until you consented to take a partnership with me. It's as plain as
+day, now."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it? Then I wish you would make it appear so to me. I am not half as
+subtile as you give me credit for being."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you worked this out."</p>
+
+<p>"That was easy enough; after I had seen Mrs. Brentwood's letter, and yours
+from Mr. Hunnicott. The Plantagould people want your railroad, and the
+receivership is a part of a plan for acquiring it. But why is Major
+Guilford spending so much money for improvements?"</p>
+
+<p>"His reasons are not far to seek now that you have shown me where to look.
+His instructions are to run the stock down so that the Plantagould can buy
+it in. Cut rates and big expenditures will do that&mdash;have done it. On the
+other hand, it is doubtless a condition of the deal that the road shall be
+turned over whole as to its property values&mdash;there is to be no wrecking in
+the general acceptance of the word. The Plantagould doesn't want a picked
+skeleton."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Portia's eyes narrowed.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a skilful bit of engineering, isn't it?" she said. "You'd admire it
+as artistic work yourself if your point of view were not so hopelessly
+personal."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know half the artistic skill of it yet," he went on. "Besides
+all these different ends that are being conserved, the gang is taking care
+of its surplus heelers on the pay-rolls of the company. More than that, it
+is making immense political capital for itself. Everybody knows what the
+policy of the road was under the old régime: 'All the tariff the traffic
+will stand.' But now a Bucks man has hold of it, and liberality is the
+word. Every man in Trans-Western territory is swearing by Bucks and
+Guilford. Ah, my dear friend, his Excellency the governor is a truly great
+man!"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been trying to impress you with that fact all along. The mistake you
+made was in not joining the People's Party early in the campaign, David."</p>
+
+<p>But Kent was following out his own line of thought and putting it in words
+as it came.</p>
+
+<p>"Think of the brain-work it took to bring all these things into line.
+There was no hitch, no slip, and nothing was overlooked. They picked their
+time, and it was a moment when we were absolutely helpless. I had filed
+our charter, but our local organization was still incomplete. They had
+their judge and the needful case in his court, pending and ready for use
+at the precise moment. They had Hawk on the ground, armed and equipped;
+and they knew that unless a miracle intervened they would have nobody but
+an unprepared local attorney to obstruct them."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No. The finest bit of sculpture is on the capstone of the pyramid. Since
+we have had no hearing on the merits, Guilford is only a temporary
+receiver, subject to discharge if the allegations in Hawk's amended
+petition are not sustained. After the major has sufficiently smashed the
+stock, Judge MacFarlane will come back, the hearing on the merits will be
+given, we shall doubtless make our point, and the road will revert to the
+stock-holders. But by that time enough of the stock will have changed
+hands on the 'wreck' price to put the Plantagould people safely in the
+saddle, and the freeze-out will be a fact accomplished."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Van Brock drew a long breath that was more than half a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"You spoke the simple truth, David, when you said that his Excellency is a
+great man. It seems utterly hopeless now that we have cleared up all the
+little mysteries."</p>
+
+<p>Kent rose to take his leave.</p>
+
+<p>"No; that is where they all go out and I stay in," he said cheerfully.
+"The shrewder he is, the more credit there will be in making him let go.
+And you mark my words: I am going to make him let go. Good night."</p>
+
+<p>She had gone with him to the door; was in the act of closing it behind
+him, when he turned back for a belated question.</p>
+
+<p>"By the way, what did you tell Mrs. Brentwood to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told her not to do anything until she had consulted you and Mr. Loring
+and Brookes Ormsby. Was that right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite right. If it comes up again, rub it in some more. We'll save her
+alive yet, if she will let us. Did you say I might come to dinner
+to-morrow evening? Thank you: you grow sweeter and more truly
+compassionate day by day. Good night again."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH15"></a>
+<h2>XV</h2>
+<h3>THE JUNKETERS</h3>
+
+<p>When Receiver Guilford took possession of the properties, appurtenances
+and appendages of the sequestered Trans-Western Railway, one of the
+luxuries to which he fell heir was private car "Naught-seven," a
+commodious hotel on wheels originally used as the directors' car of the
+Western Pacific, and later taken over by Loring to be put in commission as
+the general manager's special.</p>
+
+<p>In the hands of a friendly receiver this car became a boon to the capitol
+contingent; its observation platform served as a shifting rostrum from
+which a deep-chested executive or a mellifluous Hawk often addressed
+admiring crowds at way stations, and its dining saloon was the moving
+scene of many little relaxative feasts, at which <i>Veuve Cliquot</i> flowed
+freely, priceless cigars were burned, and the members of the organization
+unbent, each after his kind.</p>
+
+<p>But to the men of the throttle and oil-can, car Naught-seven, in the gift
+of a hospitable receiver, shortly became a nightmare. Like most private
+cars, it was heavier than the heaviest Pullman; and the engineer who was
+constrained to haul it like a dragging anchor at the tail end of a fast
+train was prone to say words not to be found in any vocabulary known to
+respectable philologists.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the evening of a wind-blown day, a week after Kent's visit to
+Gaston, that Engineer "Red" Callahan, oiling around for the all-night run
+with the Flyer on the Western Division, heard above the din and clamor of
+Union Station noises the sullen thump betokening the addition of another
+car to his train.</p>
+
+<p>"Now fwhat the divvle will that be?" he rasped, pausing, torch in hand, to
+apostrophize his fireman.</p>
+
+<p>The answer came up out of the shadows to the rear on the lips of M'Tosh,
+the train-master.</p>
+
+<p>"You have the Naught-seven to-night, Callahan, and a pretty severe head
+wind. Can you make your time?"</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't thim bloody fools in the up-town office anything betther to do
+than to tie that sivinty-ton ball-an'-chain to my leg such a night as
+this?" This is not what Callahan said: it is merely a printable paraphrase
+of his rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>M'Tosh shook his head. He was a hold-over from the Loring administration,
+not because his place was not worth taking, but because as yet no
+political heeler had turned up with the requisite technical ability to
+hold it.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't blame you for cussing it out," he said; and the saying of it was
+a mark of the relaxed discipline which was creeping into all branches of
+the service. "Mr. Loring's car is anybody's private wagon these days. Can
+you make your time with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not on yer life," Callahan growled. "Is it the owld potgutted thafe iv a
+rayceiver that's in her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; with Governor Bucks and a party of his friends. I take it you ought
+to feel honored."</p>
+
+<p>"Do I?" snapped Callahan. "If I don't make thim junketers think they're in
+the scuff iv a cyclone whin I get thim on the crooks beyant Dolores ye can
+gimme time, Misther M'Tosh. Where do I get shut iv thim?"</p>
+
+<p>"At Agua Caliente. They are going to the hotel at Breezeland, I suppose.
+There is your signal to pull out."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go whin I'm dommed good an' ready," said Callahan, jabbing the snout
+of his oiler into the link machinery. And again M'Tosh let the breach of
+discipline go without reproof.</p>
+
+<p>Breezeland Inn, the hotel at Agua Caliente, is a year-round resort for
+asthmatics and other health seekers, with a sanatorium annex which
+utilizes the waters of the warm springs for therapeutic purposes. But
+during the hot months the capital and the plains cities to the eastward
+send their quota of summer idlers and the house fills to its capacity.</p>
+
+<p>It was for this reason that Mr. Brookes Ormsby, looking for a comfortable
+resort to which he might take Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters for an
+outing, hit upon the expedient of going first in person to Breezeland,
+partly to make sure of accommodations, and partly to check up the
+attractions of the place against picturesque descriptions in the
+advertisements.</p>
+
+<p>When he turned out of his sleeper in the early morning at Agua Caliente
+station, car Naught-seven had been thrown in on a siding a little farther
+up the line, and Ormsby recognized the burly person of the governor and
+the florid face and pursy figure of the receiver, in the group of men
+crossing from the private car to the waiting Inn tally-ho. Being a
+seasoned traveler, the club-man lost no time in finding the station agent.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't there some way you can get me up to the hotel before that crowd
+reaches?" he asked; adding: "I'll make it worth your while."</p>
+
+<p>The reply effaced the necessity for haste.</p>
+
+<p>"The Inn auto will be down in a few minutes, and you can go up in that.
+Naught-seven brought Governor Bucks and the receiver and their party, and
+they're going down to Megilp, the mining camp on the other side of the
+State line. They've chartered the tally-ho for the day."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby waited, and a little later was whisked away to the hotel in the
+tonneau of the guests' automobile. Afterward came a day which was rather
+hard to get through. Breakfast, a leisurely weighing and measuring of the
+climatic, picturesque and health-mending conditions, and the writing of a
+letter or two helped him wear out the forenoon; but after luncheon the
+time dragged dispiteously, and he was glad enough when the auto-car came
+to take him to the station for the evening train.</p>
+
+<p>As it happened, there were no other passengers for the east-bound Flyer;
+and finding he still had some minutes to wait, Ormsby lounged into the
+telegraph office. Here the bonds of ennui were loosened by the gradual
+development of a little mystery. First the telephone bell rang smartly,
+and when the telegraph operator took down the ear-piece and said "Well?"
+in the imperious tone common to his kind, he evidently received a
+communication that shocked him.</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby overheard but a meager half of the wire conversation; and the
+excitement, whatever its nature, was at the other end of the line. None
+the less, the station agent's broken ejaculations were provocative of keen
+interest in a man who had been boring himself desperately for the better
+part of a day.</p>
+
+<p>"Caught him doing it, you say?... Great Scott!... Oh, I don't believe
+that, you know ... yes&mdash;uh-huh&mdash;I hear ... But who did the shooting?"
+Whether the information came or not, Ormsby did not know, for at this
+conjuncture the telegraph instruments on the table set up a furious
+chattering, and the railway man dropped the receiver and sprang to his
+key.</p>
+
+<p>This left the listener out of it completely, and Ormsby strolled out to
+the platform, wondering what had happened and where it had happened. He
+glanced up at the telephone wires: two of them ran up the graveled
+driveway toward Breezeland Inn; the poles of the other two sentineled the
+road to the west down which the tally-ho had driven in the early morning.</p>
+
+<p>In the reflective instant the telegraph operator dashed out of his
+bay-windowed retreat and ran up the track to the private car. In a few
+minutes he was back again, holding an excited conference with the
+chauffeur of the Inn automobile, who was waiting to see if the Flyer
+should bring him any fares for the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>Curiosity is said to be peculiarly a foible feminine. It is not, as every
+one knows. But of the major masculine allotment, Ormsby the masterful had
+rather less than his due share. He saw the chauffeur turn his car in the
+length of it and send it spinning down the road and across the line into
+the adjoining State; heard the mellow whistle of the incoming train, and
+saw the station man nervously setting his stop signal; all with no more
+than a mild desire to know the reason for so much excitement and haste&mdash;a
+desire which was content to wait on the explanation of events.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation, such as it was, did not linger. The heavy train thundered
+in from the west; stopped barely long enough to allow the single passenger
+to swing up the steps of the Pullman; and went on again to stop a second
+time with a jerk when it had passed the side-track switch.</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby put his head out of the window and saw that the private car was to
+be taken on; remarked also that the thing was done with the utmost
+celerity. Once out on the main line with car Naught-seven coupled in, the
+train was backed swiftly down to the station and the small mystery of
+hurryings was sufficiently solved. The governor and his party were
+returning, and they did not wish to miss connections.</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby had settled back into the corner of his section when he heard the
+spitting explosions of the automobile and the crash of hoofs and
+iron-tired wheels on the sharp gravel. He looked out again and was in time
+to see the finish of the race. Up the road from the westward came the
+six-horse tally-ho, the horses galloping in the traces and the automobile
+straining in the lead at the end of an improvised tow-line. In a twinkling
+the coach was abreast of the private car, the transfer of passengers was
+effected, and Ormsby was near enough at his onlooking window to remark
+several things: that there was pell-mell haste and suppressed excitement;
+that the governor was the coolest man in the group; and that the receiver
+had to be helped across from the coach to the car. Then the train moved
+out, gathering speed with each added wheel-turn.</p>
+
+<p>The onlooker leaned from his window to see what became of the tangle of
+horses and auto-car precipitated by the sudden stop of the tally-ho.
+Mirage effects are common on the western plains, and if Ormsby had not
+been familiar with them he might have marveled at the striking example
+afforded by the backward look. In the rapidly increasing perspective the
+six horses of the tally-ho were suddenly multiplied into a troop; and
+where the station agent had stood on the platform there seemed to be a
+dozen gesticulating figures fading into indistinctness, as the fast train
+swept on its way eastward.</p>
+
+<p>The club-man saw no more of the junketing party that night. Once when the
+train stopped to cut out the dining-car, and he had stepped down for a
+breath of fresh air on the station platform, he noticed that the private
+car was brilliantly lighted, and that the curtains and window shades were
+closely drawn. Also, he heard the popping of bottle corks and the clink of
+glass, betokening that the governor's party was still celebrating its
+successful race for the train. Singularly enough, Ormsby's reflections
+concerned themselves chiefly with the small dishonesty.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose it all goes into the receiver's expense account and the
+railroad pays for it," he said to himself. "So and so much for an
+inspection trip to Megilp and return. I must tell Kent about it. It will
+put another shovelful of coal into his furnace&mdash;not that he is especially
+needing it."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>At the moment of this saying&mdash;it was between ten and eleven o'clock at
+night&mdash;David Kent's wrath-fire was far from needing an additional stoking.
+Once more Miss Van Brock had given proof of her prophetic gift, and Kent
+had been moodily filling in the details of the picture drawn by her
+woman's intuition. He had gone late to the house in Alameda Square,
+knowing that Portia had dinner guests. And it was imperative that he
+should have her to himself.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't tell me anything but the manner of its doing," she was
+saying. "I knew they would find a way to stop you&mdash;or make one. And you
+needn't be spiteful at me," she added, when Kent gripped the arms of his
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mind your saying 'I told you so'," he fumed. "It's the fact that
+I didn't have sense enough to see what an easy game I was dealing them. It
+didn't take Meigs five minutes to shut me off."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about it," she said; and he did it crisply.</p>
+
+<p>"The <i>quo warranto</i> inquiry is instituted in the name of the State; or
+rather the proceedings are brought by some person with the approval of the
+governor or the attorney-general, one or both. I took to-day for obtaining
+this approval because I knew Bucks was out of town and I thought I could
+bully Meigs."</p>
+
+<p>"And you couldn't?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Not in a thousand years. At first he said he would take the matter under
+advisement: I knew that meant a consultation with Bucks. Then I put the
+whip on; told him a few of the things I know, and let him imagine a lot
+more; but it was no good. He was as smooth as oil, admitting nothing,
+denying nothing. And what grinds me worst is that I let him put me in
+fault; gave him a chance to show conclusively how absurd it was for me to
+expect him to take up a question of such magnitude on the spur of the
+moment."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she said sympathetically. "I knew they would find a way. What
+are you doing?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent laughed in spite of his sore <i>amour-propre</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"At this present moment I am doing precisely what you said I should:
+unloading my woes upon you."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but I didn't say that. I said you would come to me for help. Have
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd say yes, if I didn't know so well just what I am up against."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Van Brock laughed unfeelingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a man's weakness to fight better in the dark?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is a man's common sense to know when he is knocked out," he retorted.</p>
+
+<p>She held him with her eyes while she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me what you want to accomplish, David; at the end of the ends, I
+mean. Is it only that you wish to save Miss Brentwood's little marriage
+portion?"</p>
+
+<p>He told the simple truth, as who could help, with Portia's eyes demanding
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"It was that at first; I'll admit it. But latterly&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Latterly you have begun to think larger things?" She looked away from
+him, and her next word seemed to be part of an unspoken thought. "I have
+been wondering if you are great enough, David."</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head despondently.</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't I just been showing you that I am not?"</p>
+
+<p>"You have been showing me that you can not always out-plan, the other
+person. That is a lack, but it is not fatal. Are you great enough to run
+fast and far when it is a straight-away race depending only upon mere
+man-strength and indomitable determination?"</p>
+
+<p>Her words fired him curiously. He recalled the little thrill of
+inspiration which a somewhat similar appeal from Elinor had once given
+him, and tried to compare the two sensations. There was no comparison. The
+one was a call to moral victory; the other to material success. None the
+less, he decided that the present was the more potent spell, perhaps only
+because it was the present.</p>
+
+<p>"Try me," he said impulsively.</p>
+
+<p>"If I do ... David, no man can serve two masters&mdash;or two mistresses. If I
+do, will you agree to put the sentimental affair resolutely in the
+background?"</p>
+
+<p>He took his head in his hands and was a long minute making up his mind.
+But his refusal was blunt enough when it came.</p>
+
+<p>"No; at least, not until they are married."</p>
+
+<p>It would have taken a keener discernment than Kent's or any man's to have
+fathomed the prompting of her laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"I was only trying you," she said. "Perhaps, if you had said yes I should
+have deserted you and gone over to the other side."</p>
+
+<p>He got up and went to sit beside her on the pillowed divan.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't try me again, please&mdash;not that way. I am only a man."</p>
+
+<p>"I make no promises&mdash;not even good ones," she retorted. And then: "Would
+you like to have your <i>quo warranto</i> blind alley turned into a
+thoroughfare?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you can do it if you try," he admitted, brightening a little.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe I can; or rather maybe I can put you in the way of doing it. You
+say Mr. Meigs is obstinate, and the governor is likely to prove still more
+obstinate. Have you thought of any way of softening them?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know I haven't. It's a stark impossibility from my point of view."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing is impossible; it is always a question of ways and means." Then,
+suddenly: "Have you been paying any attention to the development of the
+Belmount oil field?"</p>
+
+<p>"Enough to know that it is a big thing; the biggest since the Pennsylvania
+discoveries, according to all accounts."</p>
+
+<p>"And the people of the State are enthusiastic about it, thinking that now
+the long tyranny of the oil monopoly will be broken?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is the way most of the newspapers talk, and there seems to be some
+little ground for it, granting the powers of the new law."</p>
+
+<p>She laid the tips of her fingers on his arm and knotted the thread of
+suggestion in a single sentence.</p>
+
+<p>"In the present state of affairs&mdash;with the People's Party as yet on trial,
+and the public mind ready to take fire at the merest hint of a foreign
+capitalistic monopoly in the State&mdash;tell me what would happen to the man
+who would let the Universal Oil Company into the Belmount field in
+defiance of the new trust and corporation law?"</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove!" Kent exclaimed, sitting up as if the shapely hand had given
+him a buffet. "It would ruin him politically, world without end! Tell me;
+is Bucks going to do that?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed softly.</p>
+
+<p>"That is for you to find out, Mr. David Kent; not by hearsay, but in good,
+solid terms of fact that will appeal to a level-headed, conservative
+newspaper editor like&mdash;well, like Mr. Hildreth, of the <i>Argus</i>, let us
+say. Are you big enough to do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am desperate enough to try," was the slow-spoken answer.</p>
+
+<p>"And when you have the weapon in your hands; when you have found the sword
+and sharpened it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I can go to his Excellency and tell him what will happen if he
+doesn't instruct his attorney-general in the <i>quo warranto</i> affair."</p>
+
+<p>"That will probably suffice to save your railroad&mdash;and Miss Brentwood's
+marriage portion. But after, David; what will you do afterward?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go on fighting the devil with fire until I have burned him out. If
+this is to be a government of dictators, I can be one of them, too."</p>
+
+<p>She clapped her hands enthusiastically.</p>
+
+<p>"There spoke the man David Kent; the man I have been trying to discover
+deep down under the rubbish of ill-temper and hesitancy and&mdash;yes, I will
+say it&mdash;of sentiment. Have you learned your lesson, David mine?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a mark of another change in him that he rose and stood over her,
+and that his voice was cool and dispassionate when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"If I have, it is because I have you for an inspired text-book, Portia
+dear."</p>
+
+<p>And with that he took his leave.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH16"></a>
+<h2>XVI</h2>
+<h3>SHARPENING THE SWORD</h3>
+
+<p>In the beginning of the new campaign of investigation David Kent wisely
+discounted the help of paid professional spies&mdash;or rather he deferred, it
+to a later stage&mdash;by taking counsel with Jeffrey Hildreth, night editor of
+the <i>Argus</i>. Here, if anywhere, practical help was to be had; and the
+tender of it was cheerfully hearty and enthusiastic.</p>
+
+<p>"Most assuredly you may depend on the <i>Argus</i>, horse, foot and artillery,"
+said the editor, when Kent had guardedly outlined some portion of his
+plan. "We are on your side of the fence, and have been ever since Bucks
+was sprung as a candidate on the convention. But you've no case. Of
+course, it's an open secret that the Universal people are trying to break
+through the fence of the new law and establish themselves in the Belmount
+field without losing their identity or any of their monopolistic
+privileges. And it is equally a matter of course to some of us that the
+Bucks ring will sell the State out if the price is right. But to
+implicate Bucks and the capitol gang in printable shape is quite another
+matter."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," Kent admitted. "But it isn't impossible; it has got to be
+possible."</p>
+
+<p>The night editor sat back in his chair and chewed his cigar reflectively.
+Suddenly he asked:</p>
+
+<p>"What's your object, Kent? It isn't purely <i>pro lono pullico</i>, I take it?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent could no longer say truthfully that it was, and he did not lie about
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it's purely personal, I guess. I need to get a grip on Bucks and I
+mean to do it."</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"And, having got it, you'll telephone me to let up&mdash;as you did in the
+House Bill Twenty-nine fiasco. Where do we come in?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; you shall come in on the ground floor this time; though I may ask you
+to hold your hand until I have used my leverage. And if you'll go into it
+to stay, you sha'n't be alone. Giving the <i>Argus</i> precedence in any item
+of news, I'll engage to have every other opposition editor in the State
+ready to back you."</p>
+
+<p>"Gad! you're growing, Kent. Do you mean to down the Bucks crowd
+ded-definitely?" demanded the editor, who stammered a little under
+excitable provocation. "Bigger men than you have tried it&mdash;and failed."</p>
+
+<p>"But no one of them with half my obstinacy, Hildreth. It can be done, and
+I am going to do it."</p>
+
+<p>The night editor laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>"If you can show that gang up, Kent, nothing in this State will be too
+good for you."</p>
+
+<p>"I've got it to do," said Kent. "Afterward, perhaps I'll come around for
+some of the good things. I am not in this for health or pleasure. Can I
+count on you after the mud-slinging begins?"</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth reflected further, disregarding the foreman's reproachful calls
+for copy.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go you," he said at last; "and I'll undertake to swing the chief
+into line. But I am going to disagree with you flat on the project of a
+sudden exposé. Right or wrong, Bucks has pup-popular sentiment on his
+side. Take the Trans-Western territory, for example: at the present
+speaking these grafters&mdash;or their man Guilford; it's all the same&mdash;own
+those people down there body and soul. You couldn't pry Bucks out of their
+affections with a crowbar&mdash;suddenly, I mean. We'll have to work up to it
+gradually; educate the people as we go along."</p>
+
+<p>"I concede that much," said Kent. "And you may as well begin on this same
+Trans-Western deal,"&mdash;wherewith he pieced together the inferences which
+pointed to the stock-smashing project behind the receivership.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't use too much of it," he added, in conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>"It is all inference and deduction as yet, as I say. But you will admit
+it's plausible."</p>
+
+<p>The editor was sitting far back in his chair again, chewing absently on
+the extinct cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"Kent, did you fuf-figure all that out by yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kent, briefly. "There is a keener mind than mine behind it&mdash;and
+behind this oil field business, as well."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd like to give that mind a stunt on the <i>Argus</i>," said the editor. "But
+about the Belmount mix-up: you will give us a stickful now and then as we
+go along, if you unearth anything that the public would like to read?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly; any and everything that won't tend to interfere with my little
+intermediate scheme. As I have intimated, I must bring Bucks to terms on
+my own account before I turn him over to you and the people of the State.
+But I mean to be in on that, too."</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth wagged his head dubiously.</p>
+
+<p>"I may be overcautious; and I don't want to seem to scare you out, Kent.
+You ought to know your man better than I do&mdash;better than any of us; but if
+I had your job, I believe I should want to travel with a body-guard. I do,
+for a fact."</p>
+
+<p>David Kent's laugh came easily. Fear, the fear of man, was not among his
+weaknesses.</p>
+
+<p>"I am taking all the chances," he said; and so the conference ended.</p>
+
+<p>Two days later the "educational" campaign was opened by an editorial in
+the <i>Argus</i> setting forth some hitherto unpublished matter concerning the
+manner in which the Trans-Western had been placed in the hands of a
+receiver. In its next issue the paper named the receivership after its
+true author, showing by a list of the officials that the road under Major
+Guilford had been made a hospital for Bucks politicians, and hinting
+pointedly that it was to be wrecked for the benefit of a stock-jobbing
+syndicate of eastern capitalists.</p>
+
+<p>Having thus reawakened public interest in the Trans-Western affair,
+Hildreth sounded a new note of alarm pitched upon the efforts of the
+Universal Oil Company to establish itself in the Belmount oil region; a
+cry which was promptly taken up by other State editors. This editorial was
+followed closely by others in the same strain, and at the end of a
+fortnight Kent was fain to call a halt.</p>
+
+<p>"Not too fast, Hildreth," he cautioned, dropping into the editor's den
+late one night. "You are doing mighty good work, but you are making it
+infinitely harder for me&mdash;driving the game to deeper cover. One of my men
+had a clue: Bucks and Meigs were holding conferences with a man from the
+Belmount field whose record runs back to New York. But they have taken
+the alarm and thrown us off the track."</p>
+
+<p>"The secretary of State's office is the place you want to watch," said
+Hildreth. "New oil companies are incorporating every day. Pretty soon one
+of these will swallow up all the others: that one will be the Universal
+under another name, and in its application for a charter you'll find
+askings big enough to cover all the rights and privileges of the original
+monopoly."</p>
+
+<p>"That is a good idea," said Kent, who already had a clerk in the secretary
+of State's office in his pay. "But how are we coming on in the political
+field?"</p>
+
+<p>"We are doing business there, and you have the <i>Argus</i> to thank for it.
+You&mdash;or your idea, I should say&mdash;has a respectable following all over the
+State now; as it didn't have until we began to leg for it."</p>
+
+<p>Again Kent acquiesced, making no mention of sundry journeys he had made
+for the sole purpose of enlisting other editors, or of the open house Miss
+Van Brock was keeping for out-of-town newspaper men visiting the capital.</p>
+
+<p>"Moreover, we've served your turn in the Trans-Western affair," Hildreth
+went on. "Public interest is on the <i>qui vive</i> for new developments in
+that. By the way, has the capitol gang any notion of your part in all this
+upstirring?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent smiled and handed the editor an open letter. It was from Receiver
+Guilford. The post of general counsel for the Trans-Western was vacant,
+and the letter was a formal tender of the office to the "Hon. David Kent."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm," said the editor. "I don't understand that a little bit."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"If they could get you to accept a general agency in Central Africa or New
+Zealand, or some other antipodean place where you'd be safely out of the
+way, it would be evident enough. But here they are proposing to take you
+right into the heart of things."</p>
+
+<p>Kent got a match out of the editor's desk and relighted his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"You've got brain-fag to-night, Hildreth. It's a bribe, pure and simple.
+They argue that it is merely a matter of dollars and cents to me, as it
+would be to one of them; and they propose to retain me just as they would
+any other attorney whose opposition they might want to get rid of. Don't
+you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure. I was thinking up the wrong spout. Have you replied to the major?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I told him that my present engagements preclude the possibility of
+considering his offer; much to my regret."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you say that? You're a cold-plucked one, Kent, and I'm coming to
+admire you. But now is the time for you to begin to look out. They have
+spotted you, and their attempt to buy you has failed. I don't know how
+deeply you have gone into Bucks' tinkering with the Universal people, but
+if you are in the way of getting the grip you spoke of&mdash;as this letter
+seems to indicate&mdash;you want to be careful."</p>
+
+<p>Kent promised and went his way. One of his saving graces was the ability
+to hold his tongue, even in a confidential talk with as good a friend as
+Hildreth. As for example: he had let the suggestion of watching the
+secretary of State's office come as a new thing from the editor, whereas
+in fact it was one of the earliest measures he had taken.</p>
+
+<p>And on that road he had traveled far, thanks to a keen wit, to Portia Van
+Brock's incessant promptings, and to the help of the leaky clerk in
+Hendricks' office; so far, indeed, that he had found the "stool pigeon"
+oil company, to which Hildreth's hint had pointed&mdash;a company composed,
+with a single exception, of men of "straw," the exception being the man
+Rumford, whose conferences with the governor and the attorney-general had
+aroused his suspicions.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this time that Hunnicott reported the sale of the Gaston lots
+at a rather fancy cash figure, and the money came in good play.</p>
+
+<p>"Two things remain to be proved," said Portia, in one of their many
+connings of the intricate course; "two things that must be proved before
+you can attack openly: that Rumford is really representing the Universal
+Oil Company; and that he is bribing the junto to let the Universal
+incorporate under the mask of his 'straw' company. Now is the time when
+you can not afford to be economical. Have you money?"</p>
+
+<p>Since it was the day after the Hunnicott remittance, Kent could answer yes
+with a good conscience.</p>
+
+<p>"Then spend it," she said; and he did spend it like a millionaire, lying
+awake nights to devise new ways of employing it.</p>
+
+<p>And for the abutments of the arch of proof the money-spending sufficed. By
+dint of a warm and somewhat costly wire investigation of Rumford's
+antecedents, Kent succeeded in placing the Belmount promoter
+unquestionably as one of the trusted lieutenants of the Universal; and the
+leaky clerk in the secretary of State's office gave the text of the
+application for the "straw" company charter, showing that the powers asked
+for were as despotic as the great monopoly could desire.</p>
+
+<p>But for the keystone of the arch, the criminal implication of the plotters
+themselves, he was indebted to a fit of ill-considered anger and to a
+chapter of accidents.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH17"></a>
+<h2>XVII</h2>
+<h3>THE CONSPIRATORS</h3>
+
+<p>It was chiefly due to Portia's urgings that Kent took Ormsby into his
+confidence when the campaign was fairly opened. She put it diplomatically
+on the ground of charity to an exiled millionaire, temporarily out of a
+job; but her real reason went deeper. From its inception as a one-man
+fight against political chicanery in high places, the criticism of the
+Bucks formula was beginning to shape itself in a readjustment of party
+lines in the field of State politics; and Miss Van Brock, whose designs
+upon Kent's future ran far in advance of her admissions to him, was
+anxiously casting about for a managerial promoter.</p>
+
+<p>A little practice-play in municipal politics made the need apparent. It
+came in the midst of things, basing itself upon the year-gone triumph of
+agrarianism in the State. In the upheaval, the capital city had
+participated to the extent of electing a majority of the aldermen on the
+People's Party ticket; and before long it developed that a majority of
+this aldermanic majority could be counted among the spoilsmen&mdash;was in fact
+a creature of the larger ring.</p>
+
+<a name="image-2"> </a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="images/223.jpg"  width="225" height="327"
+alt="HE JAMMED THE FIRE END OF HIS CIGAR AMONG THE FINGERS OF THE GRASPING HAND."></p>
+<h5>HE JAMMED THE FIRE END OF HIS CIGAR<br />
+AMONG THE FINGERS OF THE GRASPING HAND.</h5>
+
+<p>Late in the summer an ordinance was proposed by the terms of which a
+single corporation was to be given a franchise granting a complete
+monopoly of the streets for gas and water mains and transit rights of way.
+Thereupon a bitter struggle ensued. Party lines were obliterated, and men
+who shunned the primaries and otherwise shirked their political duties
+raised the cry of corruption, and a Civic League was formed to fight the
+ring.</p>
+
+<p>Into this struggle, as giving him the chance to front the enemy in a fair
+field, David Kent flung himself with all the ardor of a born fighter. Mass
+meetings were held, with Kent as spokesman for the League, and the outcome
+was a decency triumph which brought Kent's name into grateful public
+prominence. Hildreth played an able second, and by the time the obnoxious
+ordinance had been safely tabled, Kent had a semi-political following
+which was all his own. Men who had hitherto known him only as a
+corporation lawyer began to prophesy large things of the fiery young
+advocate, whose arguments were as sound and convincing as his invective
+was keen and merciless.</p>
+
+<p>Figuratively speaking, Portia stood in the wings and applauded. Also, she
+saw that her protégé had reached the point where he needed grooming for
+whatever race lay before him. Hence her urgings, which made a triumvirate
+out of the council of two, with Brookes Ormsby as the third member.</p>
+
+<p>"You understand, I'm not interested a little bit in the merits of the
+case," said the newly elected chairman, in his first official interview
+with Miss Van Brock. "So far as the internal politics of this particularly
+wild and woolly State are concerned, I'm neither in them nor of them. But
+I am willing to do what I can for Kent."</p>
+
+<p>"Owing him a good turn?" said Portia, with malice aforethought.</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby's laugh was an Englishman's deep-chested haw-haw.</p>
+
+<p>"So he has been making you his confidante in that, too, has he?"</p>
+
+<p>"There was no confidence needed," she retorted. "I have eyes; and, to use
+one of your own pet phrases, I was not born yesterday. But let that go:
+you are willing to help us?"</p>
+
+<p>"I said I was willing to help Kent. If you bracket yourself with him, I am
+more than willing. But I am rather new to the game. You will have to tell
+me the moves."</p>
+
+<p>"We are only in the opening," she said, continuing the figure. "You will
+learn as you go along. By and by you will have to spend money; but just
+now the need is for a cool head to keep our young firebrand out of the
+personalities. Where is he to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby's smile was a grin.</p>
+
+<p>"I left him at 124 Tejon Avenue half an hour ago. Do you think he is
+likely to get into trouble there?"</p>
+
+<p>On the porch of the Brentwood apartment house David Kent was answering
+that question measurably well for himself. With the striking of the City
+Hall clock at nine Mrs. Brentwood had complained of the glare of the
+electric crossing-lamp and had gone in, leaving the caller with Penelope
+in the hammock on one side of him and Elinor in a basket chair on the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>Their talk had been of the late municipal struggle, and of Kent's part in
+it; and, like Miss Van Brock, Penelope was applausive. But Elinor's
+congratulations were tempered with deprecation.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad you won for the League, of course; everybody must be glad of
+that," she said. "But I hope the <i>Argus</i> didn't report your speeches
+correctly. If it did, you have made a host of bitter enemies."</p>
+
+<p>"What does a man&mdash;a real man&mdash;care for that?" This from the depths of the
+hammock.</p>
+
+<p>"I, at least, can afford to be careless," said Kent. "I am not running for
+office, and I have nothing to lose, politically or otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>"Can any man say that truthfully?" Elinor queried.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I can. I have given no hostages to fortune."</p>
+
+<p>Penelope lifted the challenge promptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord Bacon said that, didn't he?&mdash;about men marrying. If he were alive
+now he wouldn't need to say it. Men don't have to be discouraged."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't they?" said Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"No, indeed; they are too utterly selfish for any matrimonial use, as it
+is. No, don't argue with me, please. I'm fixed&mdash;irrevocably fixed."</p>
+
+<p>Elinor overtook the runaway conversation and drove it back into the path
+of her own choosing.</p>
+
+<p>"But I do think you owe it to yourself to be more careful in your public
+utterances," she insisted. "If these men on the other side are only half
+as unprincipled as your accusations make them out to be, they would not
+stop short of personal violence."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not hunting clemency or personal immunity just now," laughed Kent.
+"On the contrary, I am only anxious to make the score as heavy as
+possible. And so far from keeping prudently in the background, I'll
+confess that I went into this franchise fight chiefly to let the capitol
+gang know who I am and where I stand."</p>
+
+<p>A sudden light came into Elinor's eyes and burned there steadily. She was
+of those who lay votive offerings upon the shrine of manly courage.</p>
+
+<p>"One part of me approves as much as another part disapproves," she said
+after a time. "I suppose it isn't possible to avoid making political
+enemies; but is it needful to turn them into personal enemies?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her curiously.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid I don't know any middle path, not being a politician," he
+objected. "And as for the enmity of these men, I shall count it an honor
+to win it. If I do not win it, I shall know I am not succeeding."</p>
+
+<p>Silence for another little space, which Miss Brentwood broke by saying:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you want to smoke? You may."</p>
+
+<p>Kent felt in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no cigar."</p>
+
+<p>She looked past him to the hammock. "Penelope!" she called softly; and
+when there was no response she went to spread the hammock rug over her
+sister.</p>
+
+<p>"You may smoke your pipe," she said; and when she had passed behind him to
+her chair she made another concession: "Let me fill it for you&mdash;you used
+to."</p>
+
+<p>He gave her the pipe and tobacco, and by a curious contradiction of terms
+began to wonder if he ought not to go. Notwithstanding his frank defiance
+of Brookes Ormsby, and his declaration of intention in the sentimental
+affair, he had his own notions about the sanctity of a betrothal. Mrs.
+Brentwood had vanished, and Penelope was asleep in the hammock. Could he
+trust himself to be decently loyal to Ormsby if he should stay? Nice
+questions of conscience had not been troubling him much of late; but this
+was new ground&mdash;or if not new, so old that it had the effect of being new.</p>
+
+<p>He let the question go unanswered&mdash;and stayed. But he was minded to fling
+the biggest barrier he could lay hands on in the way of possible
+disloyalty by saying good things of Ormsby.</p>
+
+<p>"I owe you much for my acquaintance with him," he said, when the subject
+was fairly introduced. "He has been all kinds of a good friend to me, and
+he promises to be more."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't your debt to Penelope, rather than to me?" she returned.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I think not. You are responsible, in the broader sense, at all
+events. He did not come West for Penelope's sake." Then he took the
+plunge: "May I know when it is to be&mdash;or am I to wait for my bidding with
+the other and more formally invited guests?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed, a low little laugh that somehow grated upon his nerves.</p>
+
+<p>"You shall know&mdash;when I know."</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me," he said quickly. "But from something Ormsby said&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He should not have spoken of it; I have given him no right," she said
+coldly.</p>
+
+<p>"You make me twice sorry: once if I am a trespasser, and again if I have
+unwittingly broken a confidence. But as a friend&mdash;a very old friend&mdash;I
+ventured&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She interrupted him again, but this time her laugh did not hurt him.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; our friendship antedates Mr. Ormsby; it is old enough to excuse
+anything you said&mdash;or were going to say."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he rejoined, and he meant it. "What I was going to say
+touches a matter which I believe you haven't confided to any one. May I
+talk business for a few minutes?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you will light your pipe and go on smoking. It makes me nervous to
+have people hang on the brink of things."</p>
+
+<p>He lighted the pipe, wondering what other thing he might do to allay her
+nervousness. None the less, he would not go back from his purpose, which
+was barrier-building.</p>
+
+<p>"I have thought, wholly without warrant, perhaps, that your loss in this
+railroad steal has had something to do with the postponement of your
+happiness&mdash;and Ormsby's. Has it?"</p>
+
+<p>"And if it should have?"</p>
+
+<p>"I merely wanted to say that we still have a fighting chance. But one of
+the hard and fast conditions is that every individual stockholder shall
+hang on to his or her holdings like grim death."</p>
+
+<p>She caught her breath with a little gasp.</p>
+
+<p>"The encouragement comes too late for us. We have parted with our stock."</p>
+
+<p>Kent turned cold and hot and cold again while she was saying it. Then the
+lawyer in him came uppermost.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it gone beyond recall? How much too late am I?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother wrote the letter to-day. She had an offer from some one in New
+York."</p>
+
+<p>Kent was on his feet instantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Has that letter been mailed? Because if it has, it must be stopped by
+wire!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brentwood rose.</p>
+
+<p>"It was on the hall table this afternoon; I'll go and see," and in a
+moment she returned with the letter in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>Kent took it from her as if it had been an edged weapon or a can of high
+explosives.</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens! what a turn you gave me!" he said, sitting down again. "Can I
+see your mother?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think she has gone to bed. What do you want to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to tell her that she mustn't do any such suicidal thing as this."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know my mother," was the calm reply. "Mr. Ormsby said
+everything he could think of."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we must take matters into our own hands. Will you help me?"</p>
+
+<p>"How?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"By keeping your own counsel and trusting me. Your mother supposes this
+letter has gone: it has gone&mdash;this way." He tore the sealed envelope
+across and across and dropped the pieces into his pocket. "Now we are
+safe&mdash;at least until the man at the other end writes again."</p>
+
+<p>It shocked her a little, and she did not promise to be a party to the
+subterfuge. But neither did she say she would not.</p>
+
+<p>"I am willing to believe that you have strong reasons for taking such
+strong measures," she said. "May I know them?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent's gift of reticence came to his rescue in time to prevent the
+introduction of another and rather uncertain factor into his complicated
+problem.</p>
+
+<p>"I can explain it more intelligibly a little later on; or if I don't,
+Ormsby will. In the mean time, you must take my word for it that we shall
+have our railroad back in due season."</p>
+
+<p>It is a question for the psychologists to answer if there be or be not
+crises in a man's life when the event, weighty or trivial, turns upon that
+thing which, for the want of a better name, is called a premonition.</p>
+
+<p>In the silence that followed his dismissal of the subject, Kent became
+aware of a vague prompting which was urging him to cut his visit short.
+There was no definable reason for his going. He had finally brought
+himself to the point of speaking openly to Elinor of her engagement, and
+they were, as he fondly believed, safely beyond the danger point in that
+field. Moreover, Penelope was stirring in her hammock and the perilous
+privacy was at an end. Nevertheless, he rose and said good-night, and was
+half-way to the next corner before he realized how inexcusably abrupt his
+leave-taking had been.</p>
+
+<p>When he did realize it, he was of two minds whether to go back or to let
+the apology excuse another call the following evening. Then the insistent
+prompting seized him again; and when next he came to a competent sense of
+things present he was standing opposite the capitol building, staring
+fixedly up at a pair of lighted windows in the second story.</p>
+
+<p>They were the windows of the governor's room; and David Kent's brain
+cleared suddenly. In the earliest beginnings of the determinate plan to
+wrest the Trans-Western out of the grasp of the junto he had known that it
+must come finally to some desperate duel with the master-spirit of the
+ringsters. Was Jasper Bucks behind those lighted windows&mdash;alone?</p>
+
+<p>Kent had not meant to make the open attack until he should have a weapon
+in his hands which would arm him to win. But now as he stood looking up at
+the heckoning windows a mad desire to have it out once for all with the
+robber-in-chief sent the blood tingling to his finger-tips. True, he had
+nothing as yet in the oil-field conspiracy that the newspapers or the
+public would accept as evidence of fraud and corruption. But on the other
+hand, Bucks was only a man, after all; a man with a bucaneer's record, and
+by consequence vulnerable beneath the brazen armor of assurance. If the
+attack were bold enough&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Kent did not stop to argue it out. When a man's blood is up the odds
+against him shrink and become as naught. Two minutes later he was in the
+upper corridor of the capitol, striding swiftly to the door of the lighted
+room.</p>
+
+<p>Recalling it afterward he wondered if the occult prompting which had
+dragged him out of his chair on the Brentwcod porch saw to it that he
+walked upon the strip of matting in the tile-paved corridor and so made
+his approach noiseless. Also, if the same silent monitor bade him stop
+short of the governor's office: at the door, namely, of the public
+anteroom, which stood ajar?</p>
+
+<p>A low murmur of voices came from beyond, and for a moment he paused
+listening. Then he went boldly within, crossing the anteroom and standing
+fairly in the broad beam of light pouring through the open door of
+communication with the private office.</p>
+
+<p>Four men sat in low-toned conference around the governor's writing-table,
+and if any one of them had looked up the silent witness must have been
+discovered. Kent marked them down one by one: the governor; Hendricks, the
+secretary of State; Rumford, the oil man; and Senator Duvall. For five
+pregnant minutes he stood looking on, almost within arm's reach of the
+four; hearing distinctly what was said; seeing the papers which changed
+hands across the table. Then he turned and went away, noiselessly as he
+had come, the thick-piled carpet of the anteroom muffling his footfalls.</p>
+
+<p>It was midnight when he reached his quarters in the Clarendon and flung
+himself full length upon the bed, sodden with weariness. For two hours he
+had tramped the deserted streets, striving in sharp travail of soul to fit
+the invincible, chance-given weapon to his hand. When he came in the thing
+was done, and he slept the sleep of an outworn laborer.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH18"></a>
+<h2>XVIII</h2>
+<h3>DOWN, BRUNO!</h3>
+
+<p>For six days after the night of revelations Kent dived deep, personally
+and by paid proxy, in a sea of secrecy which, but for the five pregnant
+minutes in the doorway of the governor's office, might easily have proved
+fathomless.</p>
+
+<p>On the seventh day the conflagration broke out. The editor of the Belmount
+<i>Refiner</i> was the first to smell smoke and to raise the cry of "Fire!" but
+by midnight the wires were humming with the news and the entire State was
+ablaze.</p>
+
+<p>The story as it appeared under the scare headlines the next morning was
+crisply told. An oil company had been formed with Senator Duvall at its
+head. After its incorporation it was ascertained that it not only held
+options on all the most valuable wells in the Belmount region, but that
+its charter gave it immunity from the law requiring all corporations to
+have their organizations, officers, and operating headquarters in the
+State. By the time the new company was three days old it had quietly taken
+up its options and was the single big fish in the pool by virtue of its
+having swallowed all the little ones.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the finishing stroke which had set the wires to humming. On the
+sixth day it was noised about that Senator Duvall had transferred his
+controlling interest to Rumford&mdash;otherwise to the Universal Oil Company;
+that he had served only as a figurehead in the transaction, using his
+standing, social and political, to secure the charter which had been
+denied Rumford and his associates.</p>
+
+<p>It had all been managed very skilfully; the capping of the wells by the
+Universal's agent, the practical sealing up of the entire district, being
+the first public intimation of the result of Duvall's treachery and the
+complete triumph of a foreign monopoly.</p>
+
+<p>The storm that swept the State when the facts came out was cyclonic, and
+it was reported, as it needed to be, that Senator Duvall had disappeared.
+Never in the history of the State had public feeling risen so high; and
+there were not lacking those who said that if Duvall showed himself his
+life would not be safe in the streets of the capital.</p>
+
+<p>It was after the <i>Argus</i> had gone to press on the night of explosions that
+Editor Hildreth sought and found David Kent in his rooms at the
+Clarendon, and poured out the vials of his wrath.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, I'd like to know if you cue-call this giving me a fair show!" he
+demanded, flinging into Kent's sitting-room and dropping into a chair.
+"Did I, or did I not understand that I was to have the age on this oil
+business when there was anything fit to print?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent gave the night editor a cigar and was otherwise exasperatingly
+imperturbable.</p>
+
+<p>"Keep your clothes on, and don't accuse a man of disloyalty until you have
+all the documents in the case," he said. "I didn't know, until I saw your
+bulletin a few hours ago, that the thing had been pulled off. In fact,
+I've been too busy with other things to pay much attention to the Belmount
+end of it."</p>
+
+<p>"The ded-devil you have!" sputtered Hildreth, chewing savagely on the gift
+cigar. "I'd like to know what business you had to mix up in other things
+to the detriment of my news column. You were the one man who knew all
+about it; or at least you did a week or two ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but other and more important things have intervened. I have been
+desperately busy, as I say."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you've lost your chance to get your grip on the capitol gang,
+anyway; that is one comfort," growled the editor, getting what consolation
+he could out of Kent's apparent failure. "They played it too fuf-fine for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Did they?" said Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"It looks pretty much that way, doesn't it? Duvall is the scapegoat, and
+the only one. About day after to-morrow Bucks' organ, the <i>Tribune</i>, will
+come out with an 'inspired' editorial whitewashing the entire capitol
+outfit. It will show how Rumford's application for the charter was
+refused, and how a truly good and beneficent state government has been
+hoodwinked and betrayed by one of its most trusted supporters."</p>
+
+<p>Kent threw off his street coat and went to get his dressing-gown from the
+wardrobe in the bedroom. When he came back he said: "Hildreth, you have
+taken me at my word thus far, and you haven't had occasion to call me
+either a knave or a fool. Do it a little longer and I'll put you in the
+way of touching off a set-piece of pyrotechnics that will double discount
+this mild little snap-cracker of the Belmount business."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you do it now?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; the time isn't ripe yet. We must let the <i>Tribune's</i> coat of
+whitewash dry in first."</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth wriggled in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Kent, if I thought it would do any good, I'd cuc-curse you out; I would
+for a fact. You are too blamed close-mouthed for any ordinary newspaper
+use."</p>
+
+<p>But Kent only laughed at him. Now that the strain was in some measure
+relaxed he could stand any amount of abuse from so good a friend as the
+night editor.</p>
+
+<p>"Turn on the hot water if you want to, and if it will relieve the
+pressure. I know about how you feel; and I'd be as sore as you are if I
+didn't know that I am going to make it up to you a little later on. But
+about this oil blaze and to-morrow's&mdash;or to-day's&mdash;issue of the <i>Argus</i>. I
+hope you haven't said too much."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't sus-said anything. The stuff trickled in by Associated wire at
+the last minute, and we had to cut and slash for space and run it pretty
+much as it came&mdash;the bare story."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; that's better. Now suppose you hint darkly that only half of
+the truth has come out; that more&mdash;and more startling&mdash;developments may be
+safely predicted in the immediate hence. Hit it up hard toward the
+capitol, and don't be afraid of libeling anybody."</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth's eyes narrowed.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Kent; you have grown a lot in these last few weeks: what is your
+diet?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hard work&mdash;and a determination to make my brag good."</p>
+
+<p>"To down the ring, you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; to down the ring."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you any nearer to it than you were when you began?"</p>
+
+<p>"A good many parasangs."</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! I more than half believe you've got hold of something
+ded-definite at last!"</p>
+
+<p>"I have, indeed. Hildreth, I have evidence&mdash;printable evidence&mdash;enough to
+dig a dozen political graves, one of them big enough to hold Jasper G.
+Bucks' six-feet-two."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me see it!" said the night editor, eagerly; but Kent laughed and
+pushed him toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Go home and go to bed. I wouldn't show it to you to-night if I had it
+here&mdash;as I have not. I don't go around with a stick of dynamite in my
+pocket."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is it?" Hildreth asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It is in a safety-deposit box in the vault of the Security Bank; where it
+is going to stay until I am ready to use it. Go home, I say, and let me go
+to bed. I'm ragged enough to sleep the clock around."</p>
+
+<p>In spite of his weariness, which was real enough, Kent was up betimes the
+next morning. He had a wire appointment with Blashfield Hunnicott and two
+others in Gaston, and he took an early train to keep it. The ex-local
+attorney met him at the station with a two-seated rig; and on the way to
+the western suburbs they picked up Frazee, the county assessor, and Orton,
+the appraiser of the Apache Building and Loan Association.</p>
+
+<p>"Hunnicott has told you what I am after," said Kent, when the surrey
+party was made up. "We all know the property well enough, but to have it
+all fair and above-board, we'll drive out and look it over, so that our
+knowledge may be said to be fully up to date."</p>
+
+<p>Twenty minutes afterward the quartet was locating the corners of a square
+in Gaston's remotest suburb; an "addition" whose only improvements were
+the weathered and rotting street and lot stakings on the bare, brown
+plain.</p>
+
+<p>"'Lots 1 to 56 in Block 10, Guilford &amp; Hawk's Addition,'" said Kent,
+reading from a memorandum in his note-book. "It lies beautifully, doesn't
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; for a chicken farm," chuckled the assessor.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, give me your candid opinion, you two: what is the property worth?"</p>
+
+<p>The Building and Loan man scratched his chin.</p>
+
+<p>"Say fifty dollars for the plot&mdash;if you'll fence it."</p>
+
+<p>"No, put it up. You are having a little boom here now: give it the top
+boom price, if you like."</p>
+
+<p>The two referees drew apart and laid their heads together.</p>
+
+<p>"As property is going here just now, fifty dollars for the inside lots,
+and one hundred dollars apiece for the corners; say three thousand for the
+plot. And that is just about three times as much as anybody but a
+land-crazy idiot would give for it." It was Frazee who announced the
+decision.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you both until you are better paid. Now we'll go back to town and
+you can write me a joint letter stating the fact. If you think it will get
+you disliked here at home, make the figure higher; make it high enough so
+that all Gaston will be dead sure to approve."</p>
+
+<p>"You are going to print it?" asked the Building and Loan appraiser.</p>
+
+<p>"I may want to. You may shape it to that end."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll stand by my figures," said Frazee. "It will give me my little chance
+to get back at the governor. I had it assessed as unimproved suburban
+property at so much the lot, but he made a kick to the board of
+equalization and got it put in as unimproved farm land at fifty dollars an
+acre." Then, looking at his watch: "We'd better be getting back, if you
+have to catch the Accommodation. Won't you stay over and visit with us?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't, this time; much obliged," said Kent; and they drove to the
+Building and Loan office where the joint letter of appraisal was written
+and signed.</p>
+
+<p>Kent caught his train with something to spare, and was back at the capital
+in good time to keep a dinner engagement at Miss Van Brock's. He had
+understood that Ormsby would be the only other guest. But Portia had a
+little surprise in store for him. Loring had dropped in, unannounced, from
+the East; and Portia, having first ascertained that Mrs. Brentwood's
+asthma was prohibitive of late dinings-out, had instructed Ormsby to bring
+Elinor and Penelope.</p>
+
+<p>Kent had been saving the results of his deep-sea divings in the oil-field
+investigation to spread them out before Miss Van Brock and Ormsby "in
+committee," but he put a padlock on his lips when he saw the others.</p>
+
+<p>Portia gave him Elinor to take out, and he would have rejoiced brazenly if
+the table talk, from the bouillon to the ices, had not been persistently
+general, turning most naturally upon the Universal Oil Company's
+successful <i>coup</i> in the Belmount field. Kent kept out of it as much as he
+could, striving manfully to monopolize Elinor for his own especial behoof;
+but finally Portia laid her commands upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not to be allowed to maroon yourself with Miss Brentwood any
+longer," she said dictatorially. "You know more about the unpublished part
+of this Belmount conspiracy than any one else excepting the conspirators
+themselves, and you are to tell us all about it."</p>
+
+<p>Kent looked up rather helplessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Really, I&mdash;I'm not sure that I know anything worth repeating at your
+dinner-table," he protested.</p>
+
+<p>But Miss Van Brock made a mock of his caution.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't be afraid. I pledged everybody to secrecy before you came. It
+is understood that we are in 'executive session.' And if you don't know
+much, you may tell us what you know now more than you knew before you knew
+so little as you know now."</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on," said Kent; "will you please say that over again and say it
+slowly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind," laughed Ormsby. "Miss Portia has a copyright on that. But
+before you begin, I'd like to know if the newspapers have it straight as
+far as they have gone into it?"</p>
+
+<p>"They have, all but one small detail. They are saying that Senator Duvall
+has left the city and the State."</p>
+
+<p>"Hasn't he?" Loring asked.</p>
+
+<p>"He hadn't yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>"My-oh!" said Portia. "They will mob him if he shows himself."</p>
+
+<p>Kent nodded assent.</p>
+
+<p>"He knows it: he is hiding out. But I found him."</p>
+
+<p>"Where?" from the three women in chorus.</p>
+
+<p>"In his own house, out in Pentland Place. The family has been away since
+April, and the place has been shut up. I took him the first meal he'd had
+in thirty-six hours."</p>
+
+<p>Portia clapped her hands. The butler came in with the coffee and she
+dismissed him and bade him shut the doors.</p>
+
+<p>"Now begin at the very tip end of the beginning," she commanded.</p>
+
+<p>Kent had a sharp little tussle with his inborn reticence, thrust it to
+the wall and told a plain tale.</p>
+
+<p>"It begins in a piece of reckless folly. Shortly after I left Mrs.
+Brentwood's last Thursday evening I had a curious experience. The shortest
+way down-town is diagonally through the capitol grounds, but some
+undefinable impulse led me to go around on the Capitol Avenue side. As I
+was passing the right wing of the building I saw lights in the governor's
+room, and in a sudden fit of desperation resolved to go up and have it out
+with Bucks. It was abnormally foolish, I'll confess. I had nothing
+definite to go on; but I&mdash;well, I was keyed up to just about the right
+pitch, and I thought I might bluff him."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy me! You do need a guardian angel worse than anybody I know!" Portia
+cut in. "Do go on."</p>
+
+<p>Kent nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I had one that night; angel or demon, whichever you please. I was fairly
+dragged into doing what I did. When I reached the upper corridor the door
+of the public anteroom was ajar, and I heard voices. The outer room was
+not lighted, but the door between it and the governor's private office was
+open. I went in and stood in that open doorway for as much as five
+minutes, I think, and none of the four men sitting around the governor's
+writing-table saw me."</p>
+
+<p>He had his small audience well in hand by this time, and Ormsby's
+question was almost mechanical. "Who were the four?"</p>
+
+<p>"After the newspaper rapid-fire of this morning you might guess them all.
+They were his Excellency, Grafton Hendricks, Rumford, and Senator Duvall.
+They were in the act of closing the deal as I became an onlooker. Rumford
+had withdrawn his application for a charter, and another 'straw' company
+had been formed with Duvall at its head. I saw at once what I fancy Duvall
+never suspected; that he was going to be made the scapegoat for the ring.
+They all promised to stand by him&mdash;and you see how that promise has been
+kept."</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens!" ejaculated Loring. "What a despicable lot of scoundrels!
+But the bribe: did you learn anything about that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw it," said Kent, impressively. "It was a slip of paper passed across
+the table by Rumford to Bucks, face down. Bucks glanced at it before he
+thrust it into his pocket, and I had my glimpse, too. It was a draft on a
+Chicago bank, but I could not read the figures, and I doubt if either of
+the other conspirators knew the amount. Then the governor tossed a folded
+paper over to the oil man, saying, 'There is your deed to the choicest
+piece of property in all Gaston, and you've got it dirt cheap.' I came
+away at that."</p>
+
+<p>Elinor's sigh was almost a sob; but Miss Van Brock's eyes were dancing.</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, go on," she exclaimed. "That is only the beginning."</p>
+
+<p>Kent's smile was of reminiscent weariness.</p>
+
+<p>"I found it so, I assure you. So far as any usable evidence was concerned,
+I was no better off than before; it was merely my assertion against their
+denial&mdash;one man against four. But I have had a full week, and it has not
+been wasted. I needn't bore you with the mechanical details. One of my men
+followed Bucks' messenger to Chicago&mdash;he wouldn't trust the banks here or
+the mails&mdash;and we know now, know it in black on white, with the proper
+affidavits, that the draft was for two hundred thousand dollars, payable
+to the order of Jasper G. Bucks. The ostensible consideration was the
+transfer from Bucks to Rumford of a piece of property in the outskirts of
+Gaston. I had this piece of land appraised for me to-day by two
+disinterested citizens of Gaston, and they valued it at a possible, but
+highly improbable, three thousand."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how clumsy!" said Portia, in fine scorn. "Does his Excellency imagine
+for a moment that any one would be deceived by such a primitive bit of
+dust-throwing?" and Ormsby also had something to say about the fatal
+mistakes of the shrewdest criminals.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not so bad," said Kent. "If it should ever be charged that he
+took money from Rumford, here is a plain business transaction to account
+for it. The deed, as recorded, has nothing to say of the enormous price
+paid. The phrasing is the common form used when the parties to the
+transfer do not wish to make the price public: 'For one dollar to me in
+hand paid, and other valuable considerations.' Luckily, we are able to
+establish conclusively what the 'other valuable considerations' were."</p>
+
+<p>"It seems to me that these documents arm and equip you for anything you
+want to do," said Loring, polishing his eye-glasses after his ingrained
+habit.</p>
+
+<p>Kent shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"No; thus far the evidence is all circumstantial, or rather inferential.
+But I picked up the final link in the chain&mdash;the human link&mdash;yesterday.
+One of the detectives had been dogging Duvall. Two days ago the senator
+disappeared, unaccountably. I put two and two together, and late last
+evening took the liberty of breaking into his house."</p>
+
+<p>"Alone?" said Elinor, with the courage-worshiping light in the blue-gray
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; it didn't seem worth while to double the risk. I did it rather
+clumsily, I suppose, and my greeting was a shot fired at random in the
+darkness&mdash;the senator mistaking me for a burglar, as he afterward
+explained. There was no harm done, and the pistol welcome effectually
+broke the ice in what might otherwise have been a rather difficult
+interview. We had it out in an upper room, with the gas turned low and the
+window curtains drawn. To cut a long story short, I finally succeeded in
+making him understand what he was in for; that his confederates had used
+him and thrown him aside. Then I went out and brought him some supper."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby smote softly upon the edge of the table with an extended
+forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"Will he testify?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Kent's rejoinder was definitive.</p>
+
+<p>"He has put himself entirely in my hands. He is a ruined man, politically
+and socially, and he is desperate. While I couldn't make him give me any
+of the details in the Trans-Western affair, he made a clean breast of the
+oil field deal, and I have his statement locked up with the other papers
+in the Security vaults."</p>
+
+<p>It was Penelope who gave David Kent his due meed of praise.</p>
+
+<p>"I am neither a triumphant politician nor a successful detective, but I
+recognize both when they are pointed out to me," she said. "Mr. Kent, will
+you serve these gentlemen up hot for dinner, or cold for luncheon?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Portia chimed in. "You have outrun your pace-setters, and I'm proud
+of you. Tell us what you mean to do next."</p>
+
+<p>Kent laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"You want to make me say some melodramatic thing about having the shackles
+forged and snapping them upon the gubernatorial wrists, don't you? It will
+be prosaic enough from this on. I fancy we shall have no difficulty now in
+convincing his Excellency of the justice of our proceedings to quash Judge
+MacFarlane and his receiver."</p>
+
+<p>"But how will you go about it? Surely you can not go personally and
+threaten the governor of the State!" this from Miss Brentwood.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't I?" said Kent. "Having the score written out and safely committed
+to memory, that will be quite the easiest number on the programme, I
+assure you."</p>
+
+<p>But Loring had something to say about the risk.</p>
+
+<p>"Thus far you have not considered your personal safety&mdash;haven't had to,
+perhaps. But you are coming to that now. You are dealing with a desperate
+man, David; with a gang of them, in fact."</p>
+
+<p>"That is so," said Ormsby. "And, as chairman of the executive committee, I
+shall have to take steps. We can't afford to bury you just yet, Kent."</p>
+
+<p>"I think you needn't select the pall-bearers yet a while," laughed the
+undaunted one; and then Miss Van Brock gave the signal and the "executive
+committee" adjourned to the drawing-room. Here the talk, already so deeply
+channeled in the groove political, ran easily to forecastings and
+predictions for another electoral year; and when Penelope began to yawn
+behind her fan, Ormsby took pity on her and the party broke up.</p>
+
+<p>It was at the moment of leave-taking that Elinor sought and found her
+chance to extract a promise from David Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"I must have a word with you before you do what you say you are going to
+do," she whispered hurriedly. "Will you come to see me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, if you wish it. But you mustn't let Loring's nervousness
+infect you. There is no danger."</p>
+
+<p>"There is a danger," she insisted, "a much greater danger than the one Mr.
+Loring fears. Come as soon as you can, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a new thing for her to plead with him, and he promised in an access
+of tumultuous hope reawakened by her changed attitude. But afterward, when
+he was walking down-town with Loring, the episode troubled him a little;
+would have troubled him more if he had not been so deeply interested in
+Loring's story of the campaign in the East.</p>
+
+<p>Taking it all in all, the ex-manager's report was encouraging. The New
+Englanders were by no means disposed to lie down in the harness, and since
+the Western Pacific proper was an interstate line, the Advisory Board had
+taken its grievance to Washington. Many of the small stockholders were
+standing firm, though there had been panicky defections in spite of all
+that could be done. Loring had no direct evidence to sustain the stock
+deal theory; but it was morally certain that the Plantagould brokers were
+picking up Western Pacific by littles wherever they could find it.</p>
+
+<p>"I am inclined to believe we haven't much time to lose," was Kent's
+comment. "Things will focus here long before Washington can get action.
+The other lines are bringing a tremendous pressure to bear on Guilford,
+whose cut rates are demoralizing business frightfully. The fictitious boom
+in Trans-Western traffic is about worked out; and for political reasons
+Bucks can't afford to have the road in the hands of his henchmen when the
+collapse comes. The major is bolstering things from week to week now until
+the Plantagould people get what they are after&mdash;a controlling majority of
+the stock&mdash;and then Judge MacFarlane will come back."</p>
+
+<p>They were within two squares of the Clarendon, and the cross-street was
+deserted save for a drunken cow-boy in shaps and sombrero staggering
+aimlessly around the corner.</p>
+
+<p>"That's curious," Loring remarked. "Don't you know, I saw that same
+fellow, or his double, lurching across the avenue as we came out of
+Alameda Square, and I wondered what he was doing out in that region."</p>
+
+<p>"It was his double, I guess," said Kent. "This one is many pegs too drunk
+to have covered the distance as fast as we have been walking."</p>
+
+<p>But drunk or sober, the cow-boy turned up again most unexpectedly; this
+time at the entrance of the alley half-way down the block. In passing he
+stumbled heavily against Kent; there was a thick-tongued oath, and Loring
+struck out smartly with his walking-stick. By consequence the man's pistol
+went off harmlessly in the air. The shot brought a policeman lumbering
+heavily up from the street beyond, and the skirling of relief whistles
+shrilled on the night. But the man with a pistol had twisted out of Kent's
+grasp and was gone in a flash.</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove!" said Loring, breathing hard; "he wasn't as drunk as he seemed
+to be!"</p>
+
+<p>Kent drew down his cuffs and shook himself straight in his coat.</p>
+
+<p>"No; he wasn't drunk at all; I guess he was the man you saw when we came
+out of the square." Then, as the policeman came up puffing: "Let me do the
+talking; the whisky theory will be good enough for the newspapers."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH19"></a>
+<h2>XIX</h2>
+<h3>DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS</h3>
+
+<p>"<i>Oof</i>! I feel as if I had been dipped in a warm bath of conspiracy and
+hung up to dry in the cold storage of nihilism! If you take me to any more
+meetings of your committee of safety, I shall be like the man without
+music in his soul&mdash;'fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.'"</p>
+
+<p>Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party. Elinor
+had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and
+Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.</p>
+
+<p>"I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab," said the
+club-man in self-defense. "And you mustn't treat it lightly, either. Ten
+prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip
+pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David."</p>
+
+<p>"We are not very likely to babble," retorted Penelope. "We are not so
+rich in intimates in this aboriginal desert." But Elinor spoke to the
+penal clause in his warning.</p>
+
+<p>"Then Mr. Kent's danger is more real than he admitted?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"It's real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another
+man in his place. He is a curious combination, is David: keen and
+sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it
+comes to the in-fighting he hasn't sense enough to pound sand, as his New
+Hampshire neighbors would say."</p>
+
+<p>"I like that side of him best," Penelope averred. "Deliver me from a man
+of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his
+injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult. Mr. Loring tells a story
+of a transplanted Vermonter in South America. A hot-headed Peruvian called
+him a liar, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw! you can't prove it.'"</p>
+
+<p>"What a merciless generalizer you are!" said Ormsby, laughing. "The man
+who marries you will have his work cut out for him if he proposes to fill
+the requirements."</p>
+
+<p>"Won't he?" said Penelope. "I can fancy him sitting up nights to figure it
+all out."</p>
+
+<p>They had reached the Tejon Avenue apartment house, and to Elinor's "Won't
+you come in?" Ormsby said: "It's pretty late, but I'll smoke a cigar on
+the porch, if you'll let me."</p>
+
+<p>Penelope took the hammock, but she kept it only during the first inch of
+Ormsby's cigar. After her sister had gone in, Elinor went back to the
+lapsed topic.</p>
+
+<p>"I am rather concerned about Mr. Kent. You described him exactly;
+and&mdash;well, he is past the planning part and into the fighting part. Do you
+think he will take ordinary precautions?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so, I'm sure," rejoined the amateur chairman. "As his business
+manager I am responsible for him, after a fashion. I was glad to see
+Loring to-night&mdash;glad he has come back. Kent defers to him more than he
+does to any one else; and Loring is a solid, sober-minded sort."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she agreed; "I was glad, too."</p>
+
+<p>After that the talk languished, and the silence was broken only by the
+distant droning of an electric car, the fizz and click of the arc light
+over the roadway, and the occasional <i>dap</i> of one the great beetles
+darting hither and thither in the glare.</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby was wondering if the time was come for the successful exploiting of
+an idea which had been growing on him steadily for weeks, not to say
+months.</p>
+
+<p>It was becoming more and more evident to him that he was not advancing in
+the sentimental siege beyond the first parallel thrown up so skilfully on
+the last night of the westward journey. It was not that Elinor was lacking
+in loyalty or in acquiescence; she scrupulously gave him both as an
+accepted suitor. But though he could not put his finger upon the precise
+thing said or done which marked the loosening of his hold, he knew he was
+receding rather than advancing.</p>
+
+<p>Now to a man of expedients the interposition of an obstacle suggests only
+ways and means for overcoming it. Ormsby had certain clear-cut convictions
+touching the subjugation of women, and as his stout heart gave him
+resolution he lived up to them. When he spoke again it was of the matter
+which concerned him most deeply; and his plea was a gentle repetition of
+many others in the same strain.</p>
+
+<p>"Elinor, I have waited patiently for a long time, and I'll go on doing it,
+if that is what will come the nearest to pleasing you. But it would be a
+prodigious comfort if I might be counting the days or the weeks. Are you
+still finding it impossible to set the limit?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded slowly, and he took the next step like a man feeling his way in
+the dark.</p>
+
+<p>"That is as large an answer as you have ever given me, I think. Is there
+any speakable reason?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know the reason," she said, looking away from him.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not sure that I do. Is it because the moneygods have been
+unpropitious&mdash;because these robber barons have looted your railroad?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; that is only part of it&mdash;the smallest part."</p>
+
+<p>"I hoped so: if you have too little, I have a good bit too much. But that
+corners it in a way to make me sorry. I am not keeping my promise to win
+what you weren't able to give me at first."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't put it that way. If there be any fault, it is mine. You have
+left nothing undone."</p>
+
+<p>The man of expedients ran over his cards reflectively and decided that the
+moment for playing his long suit was fully come.</p>
+
+<p>"Your goodness of heart excuses me where I am to blame," he qualified. "I
+am coming to believe that I have defeated my own cause."</p>
+
+<p>"By being too good to me?" she suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"No; by running where I should have been content to walk; by shackling you
+with a promise, and so in a certain sense becoming your jailer. That is
+putting it rather clumsily, but isn't it true?"</p>
+
+<p>"I had never thought of it in that light," she said unresponsively.</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't, naturally. But the fact remains. It has wrenched your point
+of view hopelessly aside, don't you think? I have seen it and felt it all
+along, but I haven't had the courage of my convictions."</p>
+
+<p>"In what way?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"In the only way the thing can be stood squarely upon its feet. It's
+hard&mdash;desperately hard; and hardest of all for a man of my peculiar build.
+I am no longer what you would call a young man, Elinor, and I have never
+learned to turn back and begin all over again with any show of heartiness.
+They used to say of me in the Yacht Club that if I gained a half-length in
+a race, I'd hold it if it took the sticks out of my boat."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she assented absently.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's the same way now. But for your sake&mdash;or rather for the sake of
+my love&mdash;I am going to turn back for once. You are free again, Elinor. All
+I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road
+between here and Boston last fall."</p>
+
+<p>She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the
+opposite house, and he let her take her own time. When she spoke there was
+a thrill in her voice that he had never heard before.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't deserve it&mdash;so much consideration, I mean," she said; and he made
+haste to spare her.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you do; you deserve anything the best man in the world could do for
+you, and I'm a good bit short of that."</p>
+
+<p>"But if I don't want you to go back?"</p>
+
+<p>He had gained something&mdash;much more than he knew; and for a tremulous
+instant he was near to losing it again by a passionate retraction of all
+he had been saying. But the cool purpose came to his rescue in time.</p>
+
+<p>"I should still insist on doing it. You gave me what you could, but I want
+more, and I am willing to do what is necessary to win it."</p>
+
+<p>Again she said: "You are too good to me," and again he contradicted her.</p>
+
+<p>"No; it is hardly a question of goodness; indeed, I am not sure that it
+escapes being selfish. But I am very much in earnest, and I am going to
+prove it. Three years ago you met a man whom you thought you could
+love&mdash;don't interrupt me, please. He was like some other men we know: he
+didn't have the courage of his convictions, lacking the few dollars which
+might have made things more nearly equal. May I go on?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you have earned the right to say what you please," was the
+impassive reply.</p>
+
+<p>It was the old struggle in which they were so evenly matched&mdash;of the woman
+to preserve her poise; of the man to break it down. Another lover might
+have given up in despair, but Ormsby's strength lay in holding on in the
+face of all discouragements.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe, as much as I believe anything in this world, that you were
+mistaken in regard to your feeling for the other man," he went on calmly.
+"But I want you to be sure of that for yourself, and you can't be sure
+unless you are free to choose between us."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't!&mdash;you shouldn't say such things to me," she broke out; and then
+he knew he was gaining ground.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I must. We have been stumbling around in the dark all these months,
+and I mean to be the lantern-bearer for once in a way. You know, and I
+know, and Kent is coming to know. That man is going to be a success,
+Elinor: he has it in him, and he sha'n't lack the money-backing he may
+need. When he arrives&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She turned on him quickly, and the blue-gray eyes were suspiciously
+bright.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't bury me alive," she begged.</p>
+
+<p>He saw what he had done; that the nicely calculated purpose had carried
+straight and true to its mark; and for a moment the mixed motives, which
+are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the
+sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast. But it was the better
+Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am neither better nor worse than other
+men, I fancy. My motives, such as they are, would probably turn out to be
+purely selfish in the last analysis. I am proceeding on the theory that
+constraint breeds the desire for the thing it forbids; therefore I remove
+it. Also, it is a part of that theory that the successful David Kent will
+not appeal to you as the unspoiled country lawyer did. No, I'm not going
+to spoil him; if I were, I shouldn't be telling you about it. But&mdash;may I
+be brutally frank?&mdash;the David Kent who will come successfully out of this
+political prize-fight will not be the man you have idealized."</p>
+
+<p>There was a muttering of thunder in the air, and the cool precursory
+breeze of a shower was sweeping through the tree-tops.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we go into the house?" she asked; and he took it as his dismissal.</p>
+
+<p>"You may; I have kept you up long enough." And then, taking her hand: "Are
+we safely ashore on the new continent, Elinor? May I come and go as
+heretofore?"</p>
+
+<p>"You were always welcome, Brookes; you will be twice welcome, now."</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time she had ever called him by his Christian name and it
+went near to toppling down the carefully reared structure of
+self-restraint. But he made shift to shore the tottering walls with a
+playful retort.</p>
+
+<p>"If that is the case, I'll have to think up some more self-abnegations.
+Good night."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH20"></a>
+<h2>XX</h2>
+<h3>THE WINNING LOSER</h3>
+
+<p>Editor Hildreth's prophecy concerning the probable attitude of the
+administration newspapers in the discussion of the oil field affair waited
+but a day for its fulfilment. On the Friday morning there appeared in the
+<i>Capital Tribune</i>, the <i>Midland City Chronicle</i>, the <i>Range County
+Maverick</i> and the <i>Agriculta Ruralist</i> able editorials exonerating the
+People's Party, its policy and the executive, and heaping mountains of
+obloquy on the name of Duvall. These editorials were so similar in tone,
+tenor and texture, as pointedly to suggest a common model&mdash;a coincidence
+which was not allowed to pass unremarked by Hildreth and other molders of
+public opinion on the opposite side of the political fence.</p>
+
+<p>But Hildreth did not pause at generalities. Two days after the Universal's
+triumph in the Belmount field, the <i>Argus</i> began to "hit it up" boldly
+toward the capitol, and two things came of it. The first was an attempt
+by some party or parties unknown to buy up a controlling interest in the
+<i>Argus</i>. The second was the waylaying of David Kent in the lobby of the
+Clarendon Hotel by no less a personage than the Honorable Melton Meigs,
+attorney-general of the State.</p>
+
+<p>In his first conversation with Ormsby, Kent had spoken of the three
+leading spirits of the junto as from personal knowledge; but of the three,
+Bucks, Hendricks and Meigs, the attorney-general was the least known to
+him. Prior to his nomination on the State ticket Meigs had been best known
+as the most astute criminal lawyer in the State, his astuteness lying not
+so much in his ability as a pleader as in a certain oratorical gift by
+which he was able to convince not only a jury but the public of the entire
+innocence of his client.</p>
+
+<p>He was a small man physically, with womanish hands and feet, and a
+beardless face of that prematurely aged cast which is oftenest seen in
+dwarfs and precocious infants; and his distinguishing characteristic, the
+one which stuck longest in the mind of a chance acquaintance or a casual
+observer, was a smile of the congealed sort which served to mask whatever
+emotion there might be behind it.</p>
+
+<p>Kent had seen little of Meigs since the latter had turned him down in the
+<i>quo warranto</i> matter; and his guard went up quickly when the
+attorney-general accosted him in the lobby of the hotel and asked for a
+private interview.</p>
+
+<p>"I am very much occupied just now, Mr. Meigs," he demurred; "but if it is
+a matter of importance&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It is; a matter of the greatest importance," was the smooth-toned reply.
+"I am sure you will not regret it if you will give me a few moments, Mr.
+Kent."</p>
+
+<p>Kent decided quickly. Being forewarned, there was nothing to fear.</p>
+
+<p>"We will go up to my rooms, if you please," he said, leading the way to
+the elevator; and no other word was spoken until they were behind closed
+doors on the fourth floor.</p>
+
+<p>"A prefatory remark may make my business with you seem a little less
+singular, Mr. Kent," Meigs began, when Kent had passed his cigar-case and
+the attorney-general had apologized for a weak digestive tract. "On wholly
+divergent lines and from wholly different motives we are both working
+toward the same end, I believe, and it has occurred to me that we might be
+of some assistance to each other."</p>
+
+<p>Kent's rejoinder was a mute signal to the effect that he was attending.</p>
+
+<p>"Some little time ago you came to me as the legal representative of the
+stock-holders of the Trans-Western Railway Company, and I did not find it
+possible at that time to meet your wishes in the matter of a <i>quo
+warranto</i> information questioning Judge MacFarlane's election and status.
+You will admit, I presume, that your demand was a little peremptory?"</p>
+
+<p>"I admit nothing," said Kent, curtly. "But for the sake of expediting
+present matters&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely," was the smiling rejoinder. "You will note that I said 'at
+that time.' Later developments&mdash;more especially this charge made openly by
+the public press of juggling with foreign corporations&mdash;have led me to
+believe that as the public prosecutor I may have duties which transcend
+all other considerations&mdash;of loyalty to a party standard&mdash;of&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Kent took his turn at interrupting.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Meigs, there is nothing to be gained by indirection. May I ask you to
+come to the point?"</p>
+
+<p>"Briefly, then: the course pursued by Senator Duvall in the Belmount
+affair leaves an unproved charge against others; a charge which I am
+determined to sift to the bottom&mdash;you see, I am speaking quite frankly.
+That charge involves the reputation of men high in authority; but I shall
+be strong to do my sworn duty, Mr. Kent; I ask you to believe that."</p>
+
+<p>Kent nodded and waved him on.</p>
+
+<p>"You will readily understand the delicacy of the task, and how, in the
+nature of things, I am handicapped and hedged up on every side.
+Evidence&mdash;of a kind to enable me to assail a popular idol&mdash;is exceedingly
+difficult to procure."</p>
+
+<p>"It is," said Kent, grimly.</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. But in revolving the matter in my own mind, I thought of you.
+You are known at the capitol, Mr. Kent, and I may say throughout the
+State, as the uncompromising antagonist of the State administration. I
+have asked myself this: Is it possible that a cool-headed, resolute
+attorney like Mr. David Kent would move so far and so determinedly in this
+matter of antagonism without substantially paving the ground under his
+feet with evidence as he went along?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent admitted that it was possible, but highly improbable.</p>
+
+<p>"So I decided," was the smile-tempered rejoinder. "In that case it only
+remains for me to remind you of your public duty, Mr. Kent; to ask you in
+the name of justice and of the people of the State, to place your
+information in the hands of the public prosecutor."</p>
+
+<p>Kent's face betrayed nothing more than his appreciation of the confidence
+reposed in him by the man whose high sense of official honor was making
+him turn traitor to the party leader who had dragged him through a
+successful election.</p>
+
+<p>"I have what evidence I need, Mr. Meigs," he declared. "But if I make no
+secret of this, neither do I conceal the fact that the motive <i>pro bono
+publico</i> has had little to do with its accumulating. I want justice first
+for what might be called a purely private end, and I mean to have it."</p>
+
+<p>"Pre-cisely," smiled the attorney-general. "And now we are beginning to
+see our way a little clearer. It is not too late for us to move in the
+<i>quo warranto</i> proceedings. If you will call at my office I shall be glad
+to reopen the matter with you."</p>
+
+<p>"And the price?" said Kent, shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear sir! must we put it upon the ground of a <i>quid pro quo</i>?
+Rather let us say that we shall help each other. You are in a position to
+assist me very materially: I may be in a position to serve your turn. Come
+to my office to-morrow morning prepared to do your duty as an honest,
+loyal citizen, and you will find me quite willing to meet you half-way."</p>
+
+<p>Kent rose and opened his watch.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Meigs, I have given you your opportunity, and you have seemed to give
+me mine," he said coolly. "Will you pardon me if I say that I can paddle
+my own canoe&mdash;if I ask you to assure his Excellency that one more device
+of his to escape punishment has been tried and found wanting?"</p>
+
+<p>For a flitting moment the cast-iron smile faded from the impassive face of
+the attorney-general and an unrelenting devil came to peer out of the
+colorless eyes. Then Meigs rose cat-like and laid his hand on the
+door-knob.</p>
+
+<p>"Do I understand that you refuse to move in a matter which should be the
+first duty of a good citizen, Mr. Kent?" he asked purringly.</p>
+
+<p>"I certainly do refuse to fall into any such clumsy trap as you have been
+trying to bait for me, Mr. Meigs," said David Kent, dropping back into his
+former curtness.</p>
+
+<p>The door opened slowly under the impulse of the slender womanish hand.</p>
+
+<p>"You have a task of some magnitude before you, Mr. Kent. You can scarcely
+hope to accomplish it alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Meaning that you would like to know if the fight will go on if I should
+chance to meet another drunken cow-boy with a better aim? It will."</p>
+
+<p>The door closed softly behind the retreating figure of the
+attorney-general, and Kent released the spring of the night-latch. Then he
+went to the dropped portière at the farther end of the room, drew it aside
+and looked in on a man who was writing at a table pushed out between the
+windows.</p>
+
+<p>"You heard him, Loring?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>The ex-manager nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"They are hard pressed," he said. Then, looking up quickly: "You could
+name your price if you wanted to close out the stock of goods in hand,
+David."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall name it when the time comes. Are you ready to go over to the
+<i>Argus</i> office with me? I want to have a three-cornered talk with
+Hildreth."</p>
+
+<p>"In a minute. I'll join you in the lobby if you don't want to wait."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>It was in the afternoon of the same day that Kent found a note in his
+key-box at the Clarendon asking him to call up 124 Tejon Avenue by
+telephone. He did it at once, and Penelope answered. The key-box note had
+been placed at Elinor's request, and she, Miss Penelope, could not say
+what was wanted; neither could she say definitely when her sister would be
+in. Elinor had gone out an hour earlier with Mr. Ormsby and Miss Van Brock
+in Mr. Ormsby's motor-car. When was he, David Kent, coming up? Did he know
+they were talking of spending the remainder of the summer at Breezeland
+Inn? And where was Mr. Loring all this time?</p>
+
+<p>Kent made fitting answers to all these queries, hung up the ear-piece and
+went away moodily reflective. He was due at a meeting of the executive
+committee of the Civic League, but he let the public business wait while
+he speculated upon the probable object of Elinor's telephoning him.</p>
+
+<p>Now there is no field in which the inconsistency of human nature is so
+persistent as in that which is bounded by the sentimentally narrowed
+horizon of a man in love. With Ormsby at the nodus of his point of view,
+David Kent made no secret of his open rivalry of the millionaire,
+declaring his intention boldly and taking no shame therefor. But when he
+faced about toward Elinor he found himself growing hotly jealous for her
+good faith; careful and fearful lest she should say or do something not
+strictly in accordance with the letter and spirit of her obligations as
+Ormsby's <i>fiancée</i>.</p>
+
+<p>For example: at the "conspiracy dinner," as Loring dubbed it, Ormsby being
+present to fight for his own hand, Kent, as we have seen, had boldly
+monopolized Miss Brentwood, and would have committed himself still more
+pointedly had the occasion favored him. None the less, when Elinor had
+begged him privately to see her before moving in the attack on the junto,
+he had almost resented the implied establishing of confidential relations
+with her lover's open rival.</p>
+
+<p>For this cause he had been postponing the promised visit, and thereby
+postponing the taking of the final step in the campaign of intimidation.
+The unexplained telephone call decided him, however. He would go and see
+Elinor and have the ordeal over with.</p>
+
+<p>But as a preliminary he dined that evening with Ormsby at the Camelot
+Club, and over the coffee had it out with him.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going out to see Miss Brentwood to-night," he announced abruptly.
+"Have you any objection?"</p>
+
+<p>The millionaire gave him the shrewdest of over-looks, ending with a
+deep-rumbling laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Kent, you are the queerest lot I have ever discovered, and that is saying
+a good bit. Why, in the name of all the proprieties, should I object?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your right is unchallenged," Kent admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it? Better ask Miss Brentwood about that. She might say it isn't."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand," said Kent, dry-tongued.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you? Perhaps I'd better explain: she might find it a little
+difficult. You have been laboring under the impression that we are
+engaged, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Laboring under the&mdash;why, good heavens, man! it's in everybody's mouth!"</p>
+
+<p>"Curious, isn't it, how such things get about," commented the player of
+long suits. "How do you suppose they get started?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't suppose anything about it, so far as we two are concerned; I have
+your own word for it. You said you were the man in possession."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>"You are something of a bluffer yourself, David. Did you let my little
+stagger scare you out?"</p>
+
+<p>David Kent pushed his chair back from the table and nailed Ormsby with a
+look that would have made a younger man betray himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to tell me that there is no engagement between you and Miss
+Brentwood?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just that." Ormsby put all the nonchalance he could muster into the
+laconic reply, but he was anticipating the sequent demand which came like
+a shot out of a gun.</p>
+
+<p>"And there never has been?"</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby grinned.</p>
+
+<p>"When you are digging a well and have found your stream of water, it's
+folly to go deeper, David. Can't you let 'good enough' alone?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent turned it over in his mind, frowning thoughtfully into his
+coffee-cup. When he spoke it was out of the mid-heart of manliness.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you would tell me one thing, Ormsby. Am I responsible for&mdash;for the
+present state of affairs?"</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby stretched the truth a little; partly for Elinor's sake; more,
+perhaps, for Kent's.</p>
+
+<p>"You have done nothing that an honorable rival&mdash;and incidentally a good
+friend of mine&mdash;might not do. Therefore you are not responsible."</p>
+
+<p>"That is putting it very diplomatically," Kent mused. "I am afraid it
+does not exonerate me wholly."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it does. But it doesn't put me out of the running, you understand.
+I'm 'forninst' you yet; rather more stubbornly than before, I fancy."</p>
+
+<p>Kent nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"That, of course; I should think less of you if you were not. And you
+shall have as fair a show as you are giving me&mdash;which is saying a lot.
+Shall we go and smoke?"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH21"></a>
+<h2>XXI</h2>
+<h3>A WOMAN INTERVENES</h3>
+
+<p>It was still early in the evening when Kent mounted the steps of the
+Brentwood apartment house. Mother and daughters were all on the porch, but
+it was Mrs. Brentwood who welcomed him.</p>
+
+<p>"We were just wondering if you would imagine the message which Elinor was
+going to send, and didn't, and come out to see what was wanted," she said.
+"I am in need of a little legal advice. Will you give me a few minutes in
+the library?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent went with her obediently, but not without wondering why she had sent
+for him, of all the retainable lawyers in the capital. And the wonder
+became amazement when she opened her confidence. She had received two
+letters from a New York broker who offered to buy her railroad stock at a
+little more than the market price. To the second letter she had replied,
+asking a price ten points higher than the market. At this the broker had
+apparently dropped the attempted negotiation, since there had been no more
+letters. What would Mr. Kent advise her to do&mdash;write again?</p>
+
+<p>Kent smiled inwardly at the good lady's definition of "legal advice," but
+he rose promptly to the occasion. If he were in Mrs. Brentwood's place, he
+would not write again; nor would he pay any attention whatever to any
+similar proposals from any source. Had there been any others?</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood confessed that there had been; that a firm of Boston
+brokers had also written her. Did Mr. Kent know the meaning of all this
+anxiety to buy in Western Pacific when the stock was going down day by
+day?</p>
+
+<p>Kent took time for reflection before he answered. It was exceedingly
+difficult to eliminate the personal factor in the equation. If all went
+well, if by due process of law the Trans-Western should be rescued out of
+the hands of the wreckers, the property would be a long time recovering
+from the wounds inflicted by the cut rates and the Guilford bad
+management. In consequence, any advance in the market value of the stock
+must be slow and uncertain under the skilfullest handling. But, while it
+might be advisable for Mrs. Brentwood to take what she could get, the
+transfer of the three thousand shares at the critical moment might be the
+death blow to all his hopes in the fight for retrieval.</p>
+
+<p>Happily, he hit upon the expedient of shifting the responsibility for the
+decision to other shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"I scarcely feel competent to advise you in a matter which is personal
+rather than legal," he said at length. "Have you talked it over with Mr.
+Ormsby?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood's reply was openly contemptuous.</p>
+
+<p>"Brookes Ormsby doesn't know anything about dollars. You have to express
+it in millions before he can grasp it. He says for me not to sell at any
+price."</p>
+
+<p>Kent shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't put it quite so strongly. At the same time, I am not the
+person to advise you."</p>
+
+<p>The shrewd eyes looked up at him quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you mind telling me why, Mr. Kent?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in the least. I am an interested party. For weeks Mr. Loring and I
+have been striving by all means to prevent transfers of the stock from the
+hands of the original holders. I don't want to advise you to your hurt;
+but to tell you to sell might be to undo all that has been done."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are still hoping to get the railroad out of Major Guilford's
+hands?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And in that case the price of the stock will go up again?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is just the difficulty. It may be a long time recovering."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think the sale of my three thousand shares would make any
+difference?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"There is reason to fear that it would make all the difference."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent for a time, and when she spoke again Kent realized that he
+was coming to know an entirely unsuspected side of Elinor's mother.</p>
+
+<p>"It makes it pretty hard for me," she said slowly. "This little drib of
+railroad stock is all that my girls have left out of what their father
+willed them. I want to save it if I can."</p>
+
+<p>"So do I," said David Kent, frankly; "and for the same reason."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood confined herself to a dry "Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I have loved your elder daughter well and truly ever since that
+summer at the foot of Old Croydon, Mrs. Brentwood, and her happiness and
+well-being concern me very nearly."</p>
+
+<p>"You are pretty plain-spoken, Mr. Kent. I suppose you know Elinor is to be
+married to Brookes Ormsby?" Mrs. Brentwood was quite herself again.</p>
+
+<p>Kent dexterously equivocated.</p>
+
+<p>"I know they have been engaged for some time," he said; but the small
+quibble availed him nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Which one of them was it told you it was broken off?" she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled in spite of the increasing gravity of the situation.</p>
+
+<p>"You may be sure it was not Miss Elinor."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!" said Mrs. Brentwood. "She didn't tell me, either. 'Twas Brookes
+Ormsby, and he said he wanted to begin all over again, or something of
+that sort. He is nothing but a foolish boy, for all his hair is getting
+thin."</p>
+
+<p>"He is a very honorable man," said Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is giving you another chance? I don't mind telling you plainly
+that it won't do any good, Mr. Kent."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" he asked in his turn.</p>
+
+<p>"For several reasons: one is that Elinor will never marry without my
+consent; another is that she can't afford to marry a poor man."</p>
+
+<p>Kent rose.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad to know how you feel about it, Mrs. Brentwood: nevertheless, I
+shall ask you to give your consent some day, God willing."</p>
+
+<p>He expected an outburst of some sort, and was telling himself that he had
+fairly provoked it, when she cut the ground from beneath his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent," she
+said, not unsympathetically. "She's in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she
+knows it now, if she didn't before." And it was with this arrow rankling
+in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the
+porch.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH22"></a>
+<h2>XXII</h2>
+<h3>A BORROWED CONSCIENCE</h3>
+
+<p>The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a
+health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the
+corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the
+vine-covered trellis.</p>
+
+<p>Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music&mdash;Penelope's
+music&mdash;and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving
+Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them.</p>
+
+<p>It was Elinor's chance for free speech with Kent&mdash;the opportunity she had
+craved. But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had
+departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place. Under other
+conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would
+have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with
+Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arrow was still rankling. None the less,
+he was the first to break away from the commonplaces.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the matter with us this evening?" he queried. "We have been
+sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and
+Loring side-tracked us. I haven't been doing anything I am ashamed of;
+have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she confessed, looking away from him.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is
+good reason to believe he didn't want to come."</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you think he didn't want to come?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;I don't know; did he?" She had turned upon him swiftly with an
+outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings
+in time past&mdash;the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and
+instant and sympathetic apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>"You have never yet asked anything of him that he wasn't glad enough to
+give," he rejoined, keeping up the third person figurative.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that saying very much&mdash;or very little?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very little, indeed. But it is only your askings that have been
+lacking&mdash;not his good will."</p>
+
+<p>"That was said like the David Kent I used to know. Are you really quite
+the same?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope not," he protested gravely. "People used to say of me that I
+matured late, and year by year as I look back I can see that it was a true
+saying. I have done some desperately boyish things since I was a man
+grown; things that make me tingle when I recall them."</p>
+
+<p>"Like wasting a whole summer exploring Mount Croydon with a&mdash;a somebody
+who did not mature late?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I wasn't counting that among my lapses. An older man than I ever hope
+to be might find excuses for the Croydon summer. I meant in other ways.
+For one thing, I have craved success as I think few men have ever craved
+it; and yet my plowings in that field have been ill-timed and boyish to a
+degree."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how you measure success; it is a word of so many, many
+meanings. But I think you are your own severest critic."</p>
+
+<p>"That may be; but the fact remains. It is only within the past few months
+that I have begun to get a true inkling of things; to know, for example,
+that opportunities are things to be compelled&mdash;not waited for."</p>
+
+<p>She was looking away from him again.</p>
+
+<p>"I am not sure that I like you better for your having discovered yourself.
+I liked the other David Kent."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled rather joylessly.</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody has said that for every new point of view gained we have to
+sacrifice all the treasures of the old. I am sorry if I am disappointing
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that you are. And yet, when you were sitting at Miss Van
+Brock's table the other evening telling us about your experience with the
+politicians, I kept saying to myself that I didn't know you&mdash;that I had
+never known you."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I knew just how to take that," he said dubiously.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I knew how to make you understand," she returned; and then: "I
+could have made the other David Kent understand."</p>
+
+<p>"You are in duty bound to try to make this one understand, don't you
+think? You spoke of a danger which was not the violent kind, such as
+Loring fears. What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"You have had two whole days," she rejoined. "Haven't you discovered it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't found anything to fear but failure," was his reply.</p>
+
+<p>"That is it; you have given it a name&mdash;its only true name&mdash;failure."</p>
+
+<p>"But I am not going to fail."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean you are going to take our railroad away from these men who have
+stolen it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is what I mean."</p>
+
+<p>"And you will do it by threatening to expose them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall tell Governor Bucks what I know about the oil field deal,
+assuring him that I shall publish the facts if he doesn't let the law take
+its course in ousting Judge MacFarlane and the receiver."</p>
+
+<p>She rose and stood before him, leaning against one of the vine-clad porch
+pillars with her hands behind her.</p>
+
+<p>"David Kent, are there any circumstances in which you would accept a
+bribe?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered her in all seriousness.</p>
+
+<p>"They say every man has his price: mine is higher than any bid they have
+yet made&mdash;or can make, I hope."</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you let <i>them</i> bribe <i>you</i>?" she asked coolly. "Is it because
+it is inexpedient&mdash;because there is more 'success' the other way?"</p>
+
+<p>He tried to emulate her coolness and made a failure of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Have I ever done anything to make you think I had thrown common honesty
+and self-respect overboard?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Her answer was another question, sharp-edged and well thrust home.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it any worse to take a bribe than it is to give one? You have just
+admitted that you are going to buy the governor's neutrality, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see it in that light at all."</p>
+
+<p>"The other David Kent would have seen it. He would have said: These men
+are public criminals. If I can not bring them to justice, I can at least
+expose them to the scorn of all good men. Therefore I have no right to
+bargain with them."</p>
+
+<p>Kent was silent for a long time. When he spoke it was to say:</p>
+
+<p>"Why have you done this, Elinor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I had to, David. Could I do less?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose not. It's in the blood&mdash;in your blood and mine. Other folk call
+it the Puritan virus of over-righteousness, and scoff at it. I don't know:
+sometimes I think they have the best of the argument."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't believe you are quite sincere when you say that," she asserted.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am. One can not compromise with conscience; that says itself. But
+I have come to believe latterly that one's conscience may be morbidly
+acute, or even diseased. I'll admit I've been taking treatment."</p>
+
+<p>"That sounds very dreadful," she rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"It does, doesn't it? Yet it had to be done. As I intimated a few minutes
+ago, my life has hitherto been a sort of unostentatious failure. I used to
+think it was because I was outclassed: I know now it has been because I
+wouldn't do as other men do. It has been a rather heart-breaking
+process&mdash;to sort out the scruples, admitting the just and overriding the
+others&mdash;but I have been given to see that it is the price of success."</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to succeed," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me; I don't think you do. You have reopened the door to doubt, and
+if I admit the doubt I shall fail."</p>
+
+<p>The sonata Penelope was playing was approaching its finale, and Elinor
+was suddenly shaken with a trembling fit of fear&mdash;the fear of consequences
+which might involve this man's entire future. She knew Kent was leaning on
+her, and she saw herself as one who has ruthlessly thrust an iron bar
+among the wheels of a delicate mechanism. Who was she to be his
+conscience-keeper&mdash;to stand in the way and bid him go back? Were her own
+motives always so exalted? Had she not once deliberately debated this same
+question of expediency, to the utter abasement of her own ideals?</p>
+
+<p>Penelope had left the piano, and Loring was looking at his watch. Kent saw
+them through the open window and got upon his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Grantham is saying he had no idea it was so late," he hazarded. "If I
+thank you for what you have said I am afraid it must be as the patient
+thanks the surgeon for the knife-stroke which leaves him a cripple for
+life."</p>
+
+<p>It was the one word needed to break her resolution.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, forget it; please forget it!" she said. "I had no right.... You are
+doing a man's work in the world, and it must be done in a man's way. If I
+can not help, you must not let me hinder. If you let anything I have said
+discourage you, I shall never cease regretting it."</p>
+
+<p>His smile was a mere indrawing of the lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Having opened the door, you would try to shut it again, would you? How
+like a woman! But I am afraid it can't be done. I had been trying to keep
+away from that point of view.... There is much to be said on both sides.
+There was a time when I wouldn't have gone into such a thing as this fight
+with the junto; but being in, I should have seen it through regardless of
+the public welfare&mdash;ignoring that side of it. I can't do it now; you have
+shown me that I can't."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't want to be a stumbling-block," she insisted. "Won't you
+believe that I wanted to help?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe that your motive was all it should be; yes. But the result is
+the same."</p>
+
+<p>Loring and Penelope were coming out, and the end of their privacy was at
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"What will you do?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know: nothing that I had meant to do. It was a false start and I
+am back under the wire again."</p>
+
+<p>"But you must not turn back unless you are fully convinced of the wrong of
+going on," she protested.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't you mean to convince me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;yes&mdash;I don't know. I&mdash;it seems very clear to me; but I want it to
+seem clear to you. Doesn't your conscience tell you that you ought to turn
+back?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said shortly; but he immediately qualified the denial. "You may
+be right: I am afraid you are right. But I shall have to fight it out for
+myself. There are many things to consider. If I hold my hand, these
+bucaneers will triumph over the stockholders, and a host of innocent
+people will suffer loss." Then, seeing the quick-springing tears in her
+eyes: "But you mustn't be sorry for having done what you had to do; you
+have nothing to reproach yourself for."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but I have!" she said; and so they parted.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH23"></a>
+<h2>XXIII</h2>
+<h3>THE INSURRECTIONARIES</h3>
+
+<p>When the Receiver Guilfords, great and small, set their official
+guillotines at work lopping off department heads, they commonly ignore a
+consequence overlooked by many; namely, the possible effect of such
+wholesale changes in leadership upon the rank and file.</p>
+
+<p>The American railroad in its unconsolidated stage is a modern feudalism.
+Its suzerains are the president and board of directors; its clan chiefs
+are the men who have built it and fought for its footing in the sharply
+contested field of competition. To these leaders the rank and file is
+loyal, as loyalty is accorded to the men who build and do, rather than to
+their successors who inherit and tear down. Add to this the supplanting of
+competent executive officers by a staff of political trenchermen, ignorant
+alike of the science of railroading, and the equally important sub-science
+of industrial manhandling, and you have the kindling for the fire of
+insurrection which had been slowly smoldering in the Trans-Western
+service since the day when Major Guilford had issued his general order
+Number One.</p>
+
+<p>At first the fire had burned fitfully, eating its way into the small
+economies; as when the section hands pelt stray dogs with new spikes from
+the stock keg, and careless freight crews seed down the right of way with
+cast-off links and pins; when engineers pour oil where it should be
+dropped, and firemen feed the stack instead of the steam-dome.</p>
+
+<p>But later, when the incompetence of the new officials became the mocking
+gibe of the service, and the cut-rate avalanche of traffic had doubled all
+men's tasks, the flames rose higher, and out of the smoke of them loomed
+the shape of the dread demon of demoralization.</p>
+
+<p>First it was Hank Brodrick, who misread his orders and piled two freights
+in a mountain of wreckage in the deep cut between Long Pine and Argenta.
+Next it was an overworked night man who lost his head and cranked a switch
+over in front of the west-bound Flyer, laying the 1020 on her side in the
+ditch, with the postal and the baggage-car neatly telescoped on top to
+hold her down.</p>
+
+<p>Two days later it was Patsy Callahan; and though he escaped with his life
+and his job, it was a close call. He was chasing a time freight with the
+fast mail, and the freight was taking the siding at Delhi to let him pass.
+One of the red tail-lights of the freight had gone out, and Callahan
+mistook the other for the target lamp of the second switch. He had time to
+yell at his fireman, to fling himself upon the throttle-bar and to set the
+airbrake before he began to turn Irish handsprings down the embankment;
+but the wrecking crew camped two whole days at Delhi gathering up the
+debris.</p>
+
+<p>It was well on in the summer, when the two divisions, east and west, were
+strewn with wreckage and the pit tracks in the shops and shop yard were
+filled to overflowing with crippled engines, that the insurrectionaries
+began to gather in their respective labor groups to discuss the growing
+hazards of railroading on the Trans-Western.</p>
+
+<p>The outcome was a protest from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers,
+addressed to the receiver in the name of the organization, setting forth
+in plain terms the grievance of the members, and charging it bluntly to
+bad management. This was followed immediately by similar complaints from
+the trainmen, the telegraphers, and the firemen; all praying for relief
+from the incubus of incompetent leadership. Not to be behind these, came
+the Amalgamated Machinists, demanding an increase of pay for night work
+and overtime; and last, but not least, an intimation went forth from the
+Federative Council of all these labor unions hinting at possible political
+consequences and the alienation of the labor vote if the abuses were not
+corrected.</p>
+
+<p>"What d'ye calc'late the major will do about it?" said Brodrick, in the
+roundhouse conclave held daily by the trainmen who were hung up or off
+duty. "Will he listen to reason and give us a sure-enough railroad man or
+two at the top?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in <i>ein</i> t'ousand year," quoth "Dutch" Tischer, Callahan's alternate
+on the fast mail. "Haf you not de <i>Arkoos</i> been reading? It is bolotics
+from der beginning to der ent; mit der governor <i>vorwärts</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I am tellin' you-all right now there's goin' to be a heap o'
+trouble," drawled "Pike County" Griggs, the oldest engineer on the line.
+"The shopmen are b'ilin'; and if the major puts on that blanket cut in
+wages he's talkin' about&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"'If'," broke in Callahan, with fine scorn. "'Tis slaping on yer injuries
+ye are, Misther Griggs. The notice is out; 'twas posted in the shops this
+day."</p>
+
+<p>"Then that settles it," said Griggs, gloomily. "When does it take hold?"</p>
+
+<p>"The first day av the month to come. An' they're telling me it catches
+everybody, down to the missinger b'ys in the of'ces."</p>
+
+<p>Griggs got upon his feet, yawning and stretching before he dropped back
+into his corner of the wooden settle.</p>
+
+<p>"You lissen at me: if that's the fact, I'm tellin' you-all that every
+wheel on this blame', hoodooed railroad is goin' to stop turnin' at
+twelve o'clock on the night before that notice takes hold."</p>
+
+<p>An oil-begrimed wiper crawled from under the 1031, spat at the dope-bucket
+and flung his bunch of waste therein.</p>
+
+<p>"Gur-r-r! Let 'em stop," he rasped. "The dope's bad, and the waste's bad;
+and the old man has cut out the 'lectrics and put us back on <i>them</i>,"
+kicking a small jacket lamp to the bottom of an empty stall. "Give 's a
+chaw o' yer smokin' plug, Mr. Callahan," and he held out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Callahan emptied the hot ashes from his black pipe into the open palm.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis what ye get f'r yer impidunce, an' f'r layin' tongue to ould man
+Durgan, ye scut. 'Tis none av his doin's&mdash;the dhirty oil an' the chape
+waste an' the jacket lamps. It's ay-conomy, me son; an' the other name f'r
+that is a rayceiver."</p>
+
+<p>"Is Durgan with us?" asked Brodrick.</p>
+
+<p>"He's wit' himself, as a master-mechanic shu'd be," said Callahan. "So's
+M'Tosh. But nayther wan n'r t'other av thim'll take a thrain out whin the
+strike's on. They're both Loring min."</p>
+
+<p>At the mention of Loring's name Griggs looked up from the stick he was
+whittling.</p>
+
+<p>"No prospects o' the Boston folks getting the road back again, I reckon,"
+he remarked tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>"You should read dose <i>Arkoos</i> newsbapers: den you should know somet'ings
+alretty, ain'd it?" said Tischer.</p>
+
+<p>Brodrick laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"If you see it in the papers, it's so," he quoted. "What the <i>Argus</i>
+doesn't say would make a 'nough sight bigger book than what it does. But
+I've been kind o' watchin' that man Kent. He's been hot after the major,
+right from the jump. You rec'lect what he said in them Civic League talks
+o' his: said these politicians had stole the road, hide, hair an' horns."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm onto him," said Callahan. "'Tis a bird he is. Oleson was telling me.
+The Scandehoovian was thryin' to get him down to Gaston the day they
+ray-ceivered us. Jarl says he wint a mile a minut', an' the little man
+never turned a hair."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he here yet; or did he go back to God's country?" asked Engineer
+Scott, leaning from the cab window of the 1031.</p>
+
+<p>"He's here; and so is Mr. Loring. They're stopping at the Clarendon," said
+Brodrick.</p>
+
+<p>"Then they haven't quit," drawled Griggs; adding: "I wonder if they have a
+ghost of a show against the politicals?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has annybody been to see 'em?" asked Callahan.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a notion for you, Scott," said Brodrick. Scott was the presiding
+officer in the B. of L.E. local. "Get up a committee from the Federative
+to go and ask Mr. Loring if there's any use in our tryin' to hold on."</p>
+
+<p>The wiper was killing time at a window which commanded a view of the upper
+yards, with the Union Passenger Station at the end of the three-mile
+vista. Being a late comer in the field, the Trans-Western had scanty track
+rights in the upper yard; its local headquarters were in the shops suburb,
+where the two division main lines proper began and ended, diverging, the
+one to the eastward and the other to the west.</p>
+
+<p>"Holy smut!" said the wiper. "See Dicky Dixon comin' out with the Flyer!
+How's that for ten miles an hour in the city limits?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a foot-note commentary on the way the service was going to pieces.
+Halkett, the "political" general superintendent, had called Dixon on the
+carpet for not making time with his train. "If you're afraid to run, say
+so, and we'll get a man that isn't," Halkett had said; and here was Dixon
+coming down a borrowed track in a busy yard at the speed which presupposes
+a ninety-pound rail and nothing in the way.</p>
+
+<p>The conclave had gathered at the wiper's window.</p>
+
+<p>"The dum fool!" said Brodrick. "If anything gets in front of him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>There was a suburb street-crossing three hundred yards townward from the
+"yard limits" telegraph office, which stood in the angle formed by the
+diverging tracks of the two divisions. Beyond the yard the street became a
+country road, well traveled as the principal southern inlet to the city.
+When Dixon was within two train-lengths of the crossing, a farm wagon
+appeared, driven between the cut freight trains on the sidings directly in
+the path of the Flyer. The men at the roundhouse window heard the crash of
+the splintering wagon above the roar of the train; and the wiper on the
+window seat yelped like a kicked dog and went sickly green under his mask
+of grime.</p>
+
+<p>"There it is again," said Scott, when Dixon had brought his train to a
+stand two hundred yards beyond the "limits" office where he should have
+stopped for orders. "We're all hoodooed, the last one of us. I'll get that
+committee together this afternoon and go and buzz Mr. Loring."</p>
+
+<p>Now it fell out that these things happened on a day when the tide of
+retrieval was at its lowest ebb; the day, namely, in which Kent had told
+Loring that he was undecided as to his moral right to use the evidence
+against Bucks as a lever to pry the Trans-Western out of the grip of the
+junto. It befell, also, that it was the day chosen by two other men, not
+members of the labor unions, in which to call upon the ex-manager; and
+Loring found M'Tosh, the train-master, and Durgan, the master-mechanic,
+waiting for him in the hotel corridor when he came in from a late
+luncheon at the Camelot Club.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you give us a few minutes, Mr. Loring?" asked M'Tosh, when Loring had
+shaken hands with them, not as subordinates.</p>
+
+<p>"Surely. My time is not very valuable, just at present. Come in, and I'll
+see if Mr. Kent has left me any cigars."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!" said Durgan, when the ex-manager had gone into Kent's room to
+rummage for the smoke offering. "And they give us the major in the place
+of such a man as that!" with a jerk of his thumb toward the door of the
+bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>"Come off!" warned M'Tosh; "he'll hear you." And when Loring came back
+with the cigars there was dry humor in his eye.</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't let your loyalty to the old guard get you into trouble with
+the receiver," he cautioned; and they both smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"The trouble hasn't waited for our bringing," said M'Tosh. "That is why we
+are here. Durgan has soured on his job, and I'm more than sick of mine.
+It's hell, Mr. Loring. I have been at it twenty years, and I never saw
+such crazy railroading in any one of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Bad management, you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bad management at the top, and rotten demoralization at the bottom as a
+natural consequence. We can't be sure of getting a train out of the yards
+without accident. Dixon is as careful a man as ever stepped on an engine,
+and he smashed a farmer's wagon and killed the farmer this morning within
+two train-lengths of the shop junction."</p>
+
+<p>"Drunk?" inquired the ex-manager.</p>
+
+<p>"Never a drop; Dixon's a Prohibitionist, dyed in the wool. But just before
+he took his train, Halkett had him in the sweat-box, jacking him up for
+not making his time. He came out red in the face, jumped on his engine,
+and yanked the Flyer down the yards forty miles an hour."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is your trouble, Durgan?" asked Loring.</p>
+
+<p>"Another side of the same thing. I wrote Major Guilford yesterday, telling
+him that six pit gangs, all the roundhouse 'emergencies' and two outdoor
+repair squads couldn't begin to keep the cripples moving; and within a
+week every one of the labor unions has kicked through its grievance
+committee. His reply is an order announcing a blanket cut in wages, to go
+into effect the first of the month. That means a strike and a general
+tie-up."</p>
+
+<p>Loring shook his head regretfully.</p>
+
+<p>"It hurts me," he admitted. "We had the best-handled piece of railroad in
+the West, and I give the credit to the men that did the handling. And to
+have it wrecked by a gang of incompetent salary-grabbers&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The two left-overs nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"That's just it, Mr. Loring," said M'Tosh. "And we're here to ask you if
+it's worth while for us to stick to the wreck any longer. Are you folks
+doing anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have been trying all legal means to break the grip of the
+combination&mdash;yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And what are the prospects?" It was the master-mechanic who wanted to
+know.</p>
+
+<p>"They are not very bright at present, I must confess. We have the entire
+political ring to fight, and the odds are overwhelming."</p>
+
+<p>"You say you've been trying legal means'," M'Tosh put in. "Can't we down
+them some other way? I believe you could safely count on the help of every
+man in the service, barring the politicals."</p>
+
+<p>Loring smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't say we should scruple to use force if there were any way to apply
+it. But the way doesn't offer."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know," said the train-master, rising to close the interview.
+"But if the time ever comes, all you or Mr. Kent will have to do will be
+to pass the word. Maybe you can think of some way to use the strike. It
+hasn't been declared yet, but you can bet on it to a dead moral
+certainty."</p>
+
+<p>It was late in the afternoon of the same day that the Federative Council
+sent its committee, chairmaned by Engineer Scott, to interview the
+ex-general manager at his rooms in the Clarendon. Scott acted as
+spokesman, stating the case with admirable brevity and conciseness, and
+asking the same question as that propounded by the train-master, to wit,
+if there were any prospect of a return of the road to its former
+management.</p>
+
+<p>Loring spoke more hopefully to the committee than he had to Durgan and
+M'Tosh. There had been a little more time for reflection, and there was
+the heartening which comes upon the heels of unsolicited help-tenderings,
+however futile. So he told the men that the stockholders were moving
+heaven and earth in the effort to recover their property; that until the
+road should be actually sold under an order from the court, there was
+always room for hope. The committee might rest assured that no stone would
+be left unturned; also that the good will of the rank and file would not
+be forgotten in the day of restitution, if that day should ever dawn.</p>
+
+<p>When Loring was through, Engineer Scott did a thing no union man had ever
+done before: he asked an ex-general manager's advice touching the
+advisability of a strike.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't say as to that," was the prompt reply. "You know your own
+business best&mdash;what it will cost, and what it may accomplish. But I've
+been on the other side often enough to be able to tell you why most
+strikes fail, if you care to know."</p>
+
+<p>A broad grin ran the gamut of the committee.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell us what to do, and we'll do it; Mr. Loring," said Scott, briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"First, then, have a definite object and one that will stand the test of
+public opinion; in this case we'll say it is the maintenance of the
+present wage-scale and the removal of incompetent officers and men.
+Secondly, make your protest absolutely unanimous to a man. Thirdly, don't
+give the major time to fortify: keep your own counsels, and don't send in
+your ultimatum until the final moment. And, lastly, shun violence as you
+would a temptation of the devil."</p>
+
+<p>"Yon's a man," said Angus Duncan, the member from the Amalgamated
+Machinists, when the committee was filing out through the hotel corridor.</p>
+
+<p>"Now you're shouting!" said Engineer Scott. "And you might say a man and a
+brother."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH24"></a>
+<h2>XXIV</h2>
+<h3>INTO THE PRIMITIVE</h3>
+
+<p>Tested upon purely diplomatic principles, Miss Van Brock's temper was
+little less than angelic, exhibiting itself under provocation only in
+guarded pin-pricks of sarcasm, or in small sharp-clawed kitten-buffetings
+of repartee. But she was at no pains to conceal her scornful
+disappointment when David Kent made known his doubts concerning his moral
+right to use the weapon he had so skilfully forged.</p>
+
+<p>He delayed the inevitable confession to Portia until he had told Loring;
+and in making it he did not tell Miss Van Brock to whom he owed the sudden
+change in the point of view. But Portia would have greatly discredited her
+gift of insight if she had not instantly reduced the problem to its lowest
+terms.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been asking Miss Brentwood to lend you her conscience, and she
+has done it," was the form in which she stated the fact. And when Kent did
+not deny it: "You lack at least one quality of greatness, David; you sway
+too easily."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't!" he protested. "I am as obstinate as a mule. Ask Ormsby, or
+Loring. But the logic of the thing is blankly unanswerable. I can either
+get down to the dirty level of these highbinders&mdash;fight the devil with a
+brand taken out of his own fire; or&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Or what?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Or think up some other scheme; some plan which doesn't involve a
+surrender on my part of common decency and self-respect."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?" she retorted. "I suppose you have the other plan all wrought out
+and ready to drop into place?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>"But at least you have some notion of what it is going to be?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>She was pacing back and forth in front of his chair in a way that was
+almost man-like; but her contemptuous impatience made her dangerously
+beautiful. Suddenly she stopped and turned upon him, and there were sharp
+claws in the kitten-buffetings.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate to
+throw away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in this
+railroad affair, we haven't been idle&mdash;your newspaper and political
+friends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and we
+have been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give you
+anything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspire
+to. Have you known this?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have guessed it," he said quite humbly.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: you
+were to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle&mdash;show them up&mdash;and
+climb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shaken
+them. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And now
+you turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!"</p>
+
+<p>There was more of a like quality&mdash;a good bit more; some of it regretful;
+all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and
+Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed
+vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to
+begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the
+tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable
+twirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible to
+his friends and innocuous to his enemies.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brock
+to ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a rather
+anxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmatively
+by the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ran
+to the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following a
+boyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken his
+problem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him plodding
+wearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from much
+tramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out to
+some despairing conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>The City Hall clock was upon the stroke of three when the inbound
+trolley-car landed him in front of the Clarendon. It was a measure of his
+purposeful abstraction that he went on around the corner to the Security
+Bank, dusty and unpresentable as he was, and transferred the packet of
+incriminating affidavits from the safety deposit box to his pocket before
+going to his rooms in the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>This paper weapon was the centering point of the struggle which had now
+lasted for nearly a fortnight. So long as the weapon was his to use or to
+cast away, the outcome of the moral conflict hung in the balance. But now
+he was emerging from the night wanderings among the tombs of the
+undecided.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't give it up; there is too much at stake," he muttered, as he
+trudged heavily back to the hotel. And before he went above stairs he
+asked the young woman at the house telephone exchange to ascertain if
+Governor Bucks were in his office at the capitol, and if so, if he were
+likely to remain there for an hour.</p>
+
+<p>When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on the
+writing-table and went to freshen himself with a bath. That which lay
+before him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity. In
+other times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tub
+and the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to the
+bottle.</p>
+
+<p>He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying where
+he had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card. Kent
+read the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines about
+his mouth. There are times when a man's fate rushes to meet him, and he
+had fallen upon one of them.</p>
+
+<p>"Show him up," was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevator
+cage clacked again, Kent was waiting.</p>
+
+<p>His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a little
+breathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator. Kent
+admitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in a
+chair and begged a light for his cigar. In the match-passing he gathered
+his spent breath and declared his errand.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent,"
+he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it
+in stolid silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly: that is for you to say," was the unencouraging reply.</p>
+
+<p>Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyond
+it into the bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>"We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of," said Kent,
+in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed his
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I came up to see what you want&mdash;what you will take to quit," he
+announced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over his
+knee. "That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, and
+we can dispense with the preliminaries, I take it."</p>
+
+<p>"I told your attorney-general some time ago what I wanted, and he did not
+see fit to grant it," Kent responded. "I am not sure that I want anything
+now&mdash;anything you can have to offer." This was not at all what he had
+intended to say; but the presence of the adversary was breeding a stubborn
+antagonism that was more potent on the moral side than all the prickings
+of conscience.</p>
+
+<p>The yellow-lidded eyes of the governor began to close down, and the look
+came into them which had been there when he had denied a pardon to a widow
+pleading for the life of her convicted son.</p>
+
+<p>"I had hoped you were in the market," he demurred. "It would be better for
+all concerned if you had something to sell, with a price attached. I know
+what you have been doing, and what you think you have got hold of. It's a
+tissue of mistakes and falsehoods and back-bitings from beginning to end,
+but it may serve your purpose with the newspapers. I want to buy that
+package of stuff you've got stowed away in the Security vaults."</p>
+
+<p>The governor's chair was on one side of the writing-table, and Kent's was
+on the other. In plain sight between the two men lay the packet Bucks was
+willing to bargain for. It was inclosed in a box envelope, bearing the
+imprint of the Security Bank. Kent was looking steadily away from the
+table when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"What if I say it isn't for sale?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think it had better be?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I hadn't thought much about the advisable phase of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the time has come when you've got it to do," was the low-toned
+threat.</p>
+
+<p>"But not as a matter of compulsion," said Kent, coolly enough. "What is
+your bid?"</p>
+
+<p>Bucks made it promptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ten thousand dollars: and you promise to leave the State and stay away
+for one year from the first Tuesday in November next."</p>
+
+<p>"That is, until after the next State election." Kent blew a whiff of smoke
+to the ceiling and shook his head slowly. "It is not enough."</p>
+
+<p>The governor uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I'll make it twenty thousand and two years."</p>
+
+<p>"Or thirty thousand and three years," Kent suggested amiably. "Or suppose
+we come at once to the end of that string and say one hundred thousand and
+ten years. That would still leave you a fair price for your block of
+suburban property in Guilford and Hawk's addition to the city of Gaston,
+wouldn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>The governor set his massive jaw with a sharp little click of the teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"You are joking on the edge of your grave, my young friend. I taught you
+in Gaston that you were not big enough to fight me: do you think you are
+big enough now?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think; I know," said Kent, incisively. "And since you have
+referred to the Gaston days: let me ask if I ever gave you any reason to
+believe that I could be scared out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Keep to the point," retorted Bucks, harshly. "This State isn't broad
+enough to hold you and me on opposite sides of the fence. I could make it
+too hot to hold you without mixing up in it myself, but I choose to fight
+my own battles. Will you take twenty thousand dollars spot cash, and
+MacFarlane's job as circuit judge when I'm through with him? Yes or no."</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Then what will you take?"</p>
+
+<p>"Without committing myself in any sense, I might say that you are getting
+off too cheaply on your most liberal proposition. You and your friends
+have looted a seventy-million-dollar railroad, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You might have stood in on that if you had taken Guilford's offer," was
+the brusk rejoinder. "There was more than a corporation lawyer's salary in
+sight, if you'd had sense enough to see it."</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly. But I stayed out&mdash;and I am still out."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you want to get in? Is that your price?"</p>
+
+<p>"I intend to get in&mdash;though not, perhaps, in the way you have in mind. Are
+you ready to recall Judge MacFarlane with instructions to give us our
+hearing on the merits?"</p>
+
+<p>The governor's face was wooden when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all you want? I understand MacFarlane is returning, and you will
+doubtless have your hearing in due season."</p>
+
+<p>"Not unless you authorize it," Kent objected.</p>
+
+<p>"And if I do? If I say that I have already done so, will you come in and
+lay down your arms?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'm through. Give me your key and write me an order on the Security
+Bank for those papers you are holding."</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kent, again.</p>
+
+<p>"I say <i>yes</i>!" came the explosive reassertion; and Kent found himself
+looking down the bright barrel of a pistol thrust into his face across the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>For a man who had been oftenest an onlooker on the football half of life,
+Kent was measurably quick and resourceful. In one motion he clamped the
+weapon and turned it aside; in another he jammed the fire end of his cigar
+among the fingers of the grasping hand. The governor jerked free with an
+oath, pain-extorted; and Kent dropped the captured weapon into the table
+drawer. It was all done in two breaths, and when it was over, Kent flung
+away the broken cigar and lighted a fresh one.</p>
+
+<p>"That was a very primitive expedient, your Excellency, to say the best of
+it," he remarked. "Have you nothing better to offer?"</p>
+
+<p>The reply was a wild-beast growl, and taking it for a negative, Kent went
+on.</p>
+
+<p>"Then perhaps you will listen to my proposal. The papers you are so
+anxious about are here,"&mdash;tapping the envelope on the table. "No, don't
+try to snatch them; you wouldn't get out of here alive with them, lacking
+my leave. Such of them as relate to your complicity in the Universal Oil
+deal are yours&mdash;on one condition; that your health fails and you get
+yourself ordered out of the State for the remainder of your term."</p>
+
+<p>"No!" thundered the governor.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well; you may stay and take a course of home treatment, if you
+prefer. It's optional."</p>
+
+<p>"By God! I don't know what keeps me from throttling you with my hands!"
+Bucks got upon his feet, and Kent rose, also, slipping the box envelope
+into his pocket and laying a precautionary hand on the drawer-pull.</p>
+
+<p>The governor turned away and walked to the window, nursing his burned
+fingers. When he faced about it was to return to the charge.</p>
+
+<p>"Kent, what is it you want? Say it in two words."</p>
+
+<p>"Candidly, I didn't know, until a few minutes ago, Governor. It began with
+a determination to break your grip on my railroad, I believe."</p>
+
+<p>"You can have your railroad, if you can get it&mdash;and be damned to it, and
+to you, too!"</p>
+
+<p>"I said it began that way. My sole idea in gathering up this evidence
+against you and your accomplices was to whittle out a club that would make
+you let go of the Trans-Western. For two weeks I have been debating with
+myself as to whether I should buy you or break you; and half an hour
+before you came, I went to the bank and took these papers out, meaning to
+go and hunt you up."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said the governor, and the word bared his teeth because his lips
+were dry.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I knew, in the old Gaston days, how many different kinds of a
+scoundrel you could be, but you've succeeded in showing me some new
+variations in the last few minutes. It's a thousand pities that the people
+of a great State should be at the mercy of such a gang of pirates as you
+and Hendricks and Meigs and MacFarlane, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Break it off!" said Bucks.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm through. I was merely going to add' that I have concluded not to buy
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it's to be war to the knife, is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is about the size of it," said Kent; and the governor found his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll trouble you to return my property," he growled, pointing to the
+table drawer.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly." Kent broke the revolver over the blotting pad, swept the
+ejected cartridges into the open drawer, and passed the empty weapon to
+its owner.</p>
+
+<p>When the door closed behind the outgoing visitor the victor in the small
+passage at arms began to walk the floor; but at four o'clock, which was
+Hildreth's hour for coming down-town, he put on his hat and went to climb
+the three flights of stairs to the editor's den in the <i>Argus</i> building.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH25"></a>
+<h2>XXV</h2>
+<h3>DEAD WATER AND QUICK</h3>
+
+<p>The cubby-hole in which Hildreth earned his bread by the sweat of his
+brain was dark even at midday; and during working hours the editor sat
+under a funnel-shaped reflector in a conic shower-bath of electric light
+which flooded man and desk and left the corners of the room in a penumbra
+of grateful twilight.</p>
+
+<p>Kent sat just outside of the cone of radiance, watching Hildreth's face as
+the editor read stolidly through the contents of the box envelope. It was
+an instructive study in thought dynamics. There was a gleam of battle
+satisfaction in the editorial eye when Hildreth faced the last sheet down
+upon the accumulation of evidence, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't overstate the fact in your brag about the political graves.
+Only this isn't a spade; it's a steam shovel. Do I understand you are
+giving me this stuff to use as I please?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just that," said Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"And you have made it serve your turn, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"No." Kent's voice was sharp and crisp.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't that what you got it for?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why don't you use it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That was what Bucks wanted to know a little while ago when he came to my
+rooms to try to buy me off. I don't think I succeeded in making him
+understand why I couldn't traffic with it; and possibly you wouldn't
+understand."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I do. It's public property, and you couldn't divert it into
+private channels. Is that the way it struck you?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is the way it struck a friend of mine whose sense of ultimate right
+and wrong hasn't lost its fine edge in the world-mill. I did not want to
+do it."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," said the editor. "Giving it up means the loss of all you have
+been working for in the railroad game. I wish I could use it, just as it
+stands."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid not&mdash;effectively. It would make an issue in a campaign; or,
+sprung on the eve of an election, it might down the ring conclusively. I
+think it would. But this is the off year, and the people won't rise to a
+political issue&mdash;couldn't make themselves felt if they should."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't agree with you. You have your case all made out, with the
+evidence in sound legal form. What is to prevent your trying it?"</p>
+
+<p>"The one thing that you ought to be lawyer enough to see at a glance.
+There is no court to try it in. With the Assembly in session we might do
+something: as it is, we can only yap at the heels of the ringsters, and
+our yapping won't help you in the railroad fight. What do you hear from
+Boston?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing new. The stock is still flat on the market, with the
+stock-holders' pool holding a bare majority, and the Plantagould brokers
+buying in driblets wherever they can find a small holder who is willing to
+let go. It is only a question of time; and a very short time at that."</p>
+
+<p>The editor wagged his head in sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could help you, David. You've done a big thing for me&mdash;for the
+<i>Argus</i>; and all I have to hand you in return is a death sentence.
+MacFarlane is back."</p>
+
+<p>"Here? In town?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. And that isn't the worst of it. The governor sent for him."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any idea what is in the wind?" asked Kent, dry-lipped.</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid I have. My young men have been nosing around in the
+Trans-Western affair, and several things have developed. Matters are
+approaching a crisis. The cut-rate boom is about to collapse, and there
+is trouble brewing in the labor organizations. If Bucks doesn't get his
+henchmen out of it pretty soon, they will be involved in the smash&mdash;which
+will be bad for them and for him, politically."</p>
+
+<p>"I developed most of that a good while ago," Kent cut in.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I know. But there is more to follow. The stock-smashing plan was all
+right, but it is proving too slow. Now they are going to do something
+else."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you give it a name?" asked Kent, nerving himself.</p>
+
+<p>"I can. But first tell me one thing: as matters stand, could Guilford
+dispose of the road&mdash;sell it or lease it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; he would first have to be made permanent receiver and be given
+authority by the court."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! that explains Judge MacFarlane's return. Now what I am going to tell
+you is the deadest of secrets. It came to me from one of the Overland
+officials, and I'm not supposed to gossip. Did you know the Overland Short
+Line had passed under Plantagould domination?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know they elected a Plantagould directory at the annual meeting."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. Well, Guilford is going to lease the Trans-Western to its
+competitor for a term of ninety-nine years. That's your death sentence."</p>
+
+<p>Kent sprang to his feet, and what he said is unrecordable. He was not a
+profane man, but the sanguine temperament would assert itself explosively
+in moments of sudden stress.</p>
+
+<p>"When is this thing to be done?" he demanded, when the temperamental gods
+were appeased a little.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth shrugged.</p>
+
+<p>"I have told you all I could, and rather more than I had any right to.
+Open the door behind you, won't you? The air is positively sulphurous."</p>
+
+<p>Kent opened the door, entirely missing the point of the sarcasm in his
+heat.</p>
+
+<p>"But you must have some idea," he insisted.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't; any more than the general one that they won't let the grass
+grow under their feet."</p>
+
+<p>"No. God blast the whole&mdash;I wish I could swear in Sanscrit. The
+mother-tongue doesn't begin to do justice to it. Now I know what Bucks
+meant when he told me to take my railroad, <i>if I could get it</i>. He had the
+whole thing coopered up in a barrel at that minute."</p>
+
+<p>"I take it you have no alternative to this," said the editor, tapping the
+pile of affidavits.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a cursed shred of an idea! And, Hildreth&mdash;" he broke off short
+because once again the subject suddenly grew too large for coherent
+speech.</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth disentangled himself from the legs of his chair and stood up to
+put his hands on Kent's shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"You are up against it hard, David," he said; and he repeated: "I'd give
+all my old shoes to be able to help you out."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it," said Kent; and then he turned abruptly and went away.</p>
+
+<p>Between nine and ten o'clock the same evening Kent was walking the floor
+of his room, trying vainly to persuade himself that virtue was its own
+reward, and wondering if a small dose of chloral hydrate would be
+defensible under the cruel necessity for sleep. He had about decided in
+favor of the drug when a tap at the door announced the coming of a
+bell-boy with a note. It was a message from Portia.</p>
+
+<p>"If you have thrown away your chance definitely, and are willing to take a
+still more desperate one, come to see me," she wrote; and he went
+mechanically, as a drowning man catches at a straw, knowing it will not
+save him.</p>
+
+<p>The house in Alameda Square was dark when he went up the walk; and while
+he was feeling for the bell-push his summoner called to him out of the
+electric stencilings of leaf shadows under the broad veranda.</p>
+
+<p>"It is too fine a night to stay indoors," she said. "Come and sit in the
+hammock while I scold you as you deserve." And when he had taken the
+hammock: "Now give an account of yourself. Where have you been for the
+past age or two?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wallowing around in the lower depths of the place that Dante visited,"
+he admitted.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think you deserve a manhandling?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so; and if you have it in mind, I shall probably get it. But I
+may say I'm not especially anxious for a tongue-lashing to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor boy!" she murmured, in mock sympathy. "Does it hurt to be truly
+good?"</p>
+
+<p>"Try it some time when you have a little leisure, and see for yourself,"
+he retorted.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"No; I'll leave that for the Miss Brentwoods. By the way, did you go to
+tell the household good-by? Penelope was wondering audibly what had become
+of you."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know they were gone. I have been nowhere since the night you
+drove me out with contumely and opprobrium."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>"You must have dived deep. They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost your
+ghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop. But it
+isn't wonderful that you haven't missed Mr. Ormsby. Having elected Miss
+Brentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further use for the
+P.S.M."</p>
+
+<p>"And you have no further use for me, apparently," he complained. "Did you
+send for me so that you might abuse me in the second edition?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I wanted to give you a bit of news, and to repeat an old question of
+mine. Do you know what they are going to do next with your railroad?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; Hildreth told me this afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what are <i>you</i> going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing. There is nothing to be done. They have held to the form of legal
+procedure thus far, but they won't do it any more. They will take
+MacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanent
+receiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot. I
+sha'n't be in it."</p>
+
+<p>"Probably not; certainly not if you don't try to get in it. And that
+brings me back to the old question. Are you big enough, David?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you think I haven't been big enough to live up to my opportunities
+thus far, I'm afraid I may disappoint you again," he said doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"You have disappointed me," she admitted. "That is why I am asking: I'd
+like to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going to
+trip us again."</p>
+
+<p>"Portia, if I thought you really meant that ... A conscienceless man is
+bad enough, God knows; but a conscienceless woman&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her laugh was a decorous little shriek.</p>
+
+<p>"David, you are <i>not</i> big; you are narrow, narrow, <i>narrow</i>! Is there then
+no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of
+birth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Is
+it an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal or
+mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan's?"</p>
+
+<p>"You may call it all the hard names you can lay tongue to," he allowed.
+"I'm not getting much comfort out of it, and I rather enjoy hearing it
+abused. But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance. Do you
+know what I did this afternoon?"</p>
+
+<p>"How should I know?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know why you shouldn't: you know everything that happens. But
+I'll tell you. I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish and
+back again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and at
+the wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, having
+it in mind to go and give his Excellency a bad quarter of an hour."</p>
+
+<p>"But you didn't do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, he saved me the trouble. While I was getting ready to go and hunt
+him, his card came up. We had it out in my rooms."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm listening," she said; and he rehearsed the-facts for her, concealing
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"What a curious thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made
+an end. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not
+clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can't
+help admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and the
+courage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting
+scruples of yours go. You have made it perfectly plain that if a thief
+should steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you'd
+compromise with him to get it back. But suppose you should catch him at
+it: would you feel compelled to call a policeman&mdash;or would you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He anticipated her.</p>
+
+<p>"You are doing me an injustice on the other side, now. I'll fight as
+furiously as you like. All I ask is to be given a weapon that won't bloody
+my hands."</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" she said approvingly. "I think I have found the weapon, but it's
+desperate, desperate! And O David! you've got to have a cool head and a
+steady hand when you use it. If you haven't, it will kill everybody within
+the swing of it&mdash;everybody but the man you are trying to reach."</p>
+
+<p>"Draw it and let me feel its edge," he said shortly.</p>
+
+<p>Her chair was close beside the low-swung hammock. She bent to his ear and
+whispered a single sentence. For a minute or two he sat motionless,
+weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftly
+multiplying difficulties and hazards.</p>
+
+<p>"You call it desperate," he said at length; "if there is a bigger word in
+the language, you ought to find it and use it. The risk is that of a
+forlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent&mdash;or at
+least ignorant&mdash;accomplices I'll have to enlist."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"That is true. But how much is your railroad worth?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is bonded for fifty millions first, and twenty millions second
+mortgage."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, seventy millions are worth fighting for: worth a very considerable
+risk, I should say."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes." And after another thoughtful interval: "How did you come to think
+of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It grew out of a bit of talk with the man who will have to put the apex
+on our pyramid after we have done our part."</p>
+
+<p>"Will he stand by us? If he doesn't, we shall all be no better than dead
+men the morning after the fact."</p>
+
+<p>She clasped her hands tightly over her knee, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"That is one of the chances we must take, David; one of the many. But it
+is the last of the bridges to be crossed, and there are lots of them in
+between. Are the details possible? That was the part I couldn't go into
+by myself."</p>
+
+<p>He took other minutes for reflection.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell," he said doubtfully. "If I could only know how much time we
+have."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes grew luminous.</p>
+
+<p>"David, what would you do without me?" she asked. "To-morrow night, in
+Stephen Hawk's office in Gaston, you will lose your railroad. MacFarlane
+is there, or if he isn't, he'll be there in the morning. Bucks, Guilford
+and Hawk will go down from here to-morrow evening; and the Overland people
+are to come up from Midland City to meet them."</p>
+
+<p>There was awe undisguised in the look he gave her, and it had crept into
+his voice when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Portia, are you really a flesh-and-blood woman?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Meaning that your ancestors would have burned me for a witch? Perhaps
+they would: I think quite likely they burned women who made better
+martyrs. But I didn't have to call in Flibbertigibbet. The programme is a
+carefully guarded secret, to be sure; but it is known&mdash;it had to be
+known&mdash;to a number of people outside of our friends the enemy. You've
+heard the story of the inventor and his secret, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the man had invented something, and he told the secret of it to
+his son. After a little the son wanted to tell it to a friend. The old man
+said, 'Hold on; I know it&mdash;that's one'&mdash;holding up one finger&mdash;'you know
+it&mdash;that's eleven'&mdash;holding up another finger beside the first; 'and now
+if you tell this other fellow, that'll be one hundred and eleven'&mdash;holding
+up three fingers. That is the case with this programme. One of the one
+hundred and eleven&mdash;he is a person high up in the management of the
+Overland Short Line&mdash;dropped a few words in my hearing and I picked them
+up. That's all."</p>
+
+<p>"It is fearfully short&mdash;the time, I mean," he said after another pause.
+"We can't count on any help from any one in authority. Guilford's broom
+has swept the high-salaried official corners clean. But the wage-people
+are mutinous and ripe for anything. I'll go and find out where we stand."
+And he groped on the floor of the veranda for his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"No, wait a minute," she interposed. "We are not quite ready to adjourn
+yet. There remains a little matter of compensation&mdash;your compensation&mdash;to
+be considered. You are still on the company's payrolls?"</p>
+
+<p>"In a way, yes; as its legal representative on the ground."</p>
+
+<p>"That won't do. If you carry this thing through successfully it must be
+on your own account, and not as the company's paid servant. You must
+resign and make terms with Boston beforehand; and that, too, without
+telling Boston what you propose to do."</p>
+
+<p>He haggled a little at that.</p>
+
+<p>"The company is entitled to my services," he asserted.</p>
+
+<p>"It is entitled to what it pays for&mdash;your legal services. But this is
+entirely different. You will be acting upon your own initiative, and
+you'll have to spend money like water at your own risk. You must be free
+to deal with Boston as an outsider."</p>
+
+<p>"But I have no money to spend," he objected.</p>
+
+<p>Again the brown eyes grew luminous; and again she said:</p>
+
+<p>"What would you do without me? Happily, my information came early enough
+to enable me to get a letter to Mr. Ormsby. He answered promptly by wire
+this morning. Here is his telegram."</p>
+
+<p>She had been winding a tightly folded slip of paper around her fingers,
+and she smoothed it out and gave it to him. He held it in a patch of the
+electric light between the dancing leaf shadows and read:</p>
+
+<p>"Plot Number Two approved. Have wired one hundred thousand to Kent's order
+Security Bank. Have him draw as he needs."</p>
+
+<p>"So now you see," she went on, "you have the sinews of war. But you must
+regard it as an advance and name your fee to the Boston folk so you can
+pay it back."</p>
+
+<p>He protested again, rather weakly.</p>
+
+<p>"It looks like extortion; like another graft," he said; and now she lost
+patience with him.</p>
+
+<p>"Of all the Puritan fanatics!" she cried. "If it were a simple commercial
+transaction by which you would save your clients a round seventy million
+dollars, which would otherwise be lost, would you scruple to take a
+proportionate fee?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; certainly not."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then; you go and tell Mr. Loring to wire his Advisory Board, and to
+do it to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'll have to name a figure," said Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she replied.</p>
+
+<p>Kent thought about it for a long minute. Then he said: "I wonder if ten
+thousand dollars, and expenses, would paralyze them?"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Van Brock's comment was a little shriek of derision.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you'd make difficulties when it came to the paying part of it, and
+since I didn't know, myself, I wired Mr. Ormsby again. Here is what he
+says," and she untwisted a second telegram and read it to him.</p>
+
+<p>"'Fee should not be less than five per cent. of bonded indebtedness;
+four-fifths in stock at par; one-fifth cash; no cure, no pay.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Three million five hundred thousand dollars!" gasped Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only nominally that much," she laughed. "The stock part of it is
+merely your guaranty of good faith: it is worth next to nothing now, and
+it will be many a long day before it goes to par, even if you are
+successful in saving its life. So your magnificent fee shrinks to seven
+hundred thousand dollars, less your expenses."</p>
+
+<p>"But heavens and earth! that's awful!" said Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"Not when you consider it as a surgeon's risk. You happen to be the one
+man who has the idea, and if it isn't carried out, the patient is going to
+die to-morrow night, permanently. You are the specialist in this case, and
+specialists come high. Now you may go and attend to the preliminary
+details, if you like."</p>
+
+<p>He found his hat and stood up. She stood with him; but when he took her
+hand she made him sit down again.</p>
+
+<p>"You have at least three degrees of fever!" she exclaimed; "or is it only
+the three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar shock? What have you been
+doing to yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, I assure you. I haven't been sleeping very well for a few
+nights. But that is only natural."</p>
+
+<p>"And I said you must have a cool head! Will you do exactly as I tell you
+to?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you don't make it too hard."</p>
+
+<p>"Take the car down-town&mdash;don't walk&mdash;and after you have made Mr. Loring
+send his message to Boston, you go straight to Doctor Biddle. Tell him
+what is the matter with you, and that you need to sleep the clock around."</p>
+
+<p>"But the time!" he protested. "I shall need every hour between now and
+to-morrow night!"</p>
+
+<p>"One clear-headed hour is worth a dozen muddled ones. You do as I say."</p>
+
+<p>"I hate drugs," he said, rising again.</p>
+
+<p>"So do I; but there is a time for everything under the sun. It is a crying
+necessity that you go into this fight perfectly fit and with all your wits
+about you. If you don't, somebody&mdash;several somebodies&mdash;will land in the
+penitentiary. Will you mind me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he promised; and this time he got away.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH26"></a>
+<h2>XXVI</h2>
+<h3>ON THE HIGH PLAINS</h3>
+
+<p>Much to Elinor's relief, and quite as much, perhaps, to Penelope's, Mrs.
+Brentwood tired of Breezeland Inn in less than a fortnight and began to
+talk of returning to the apartment house in the capital.</p>
+
+<p>Pressed to give a reason for her dissatisfaction, the younger sister might
+have been at a loss to account for it in words; but Elinor's desire to cut
+the outing short was based upon pride and militant shame. After many
+trap-settings she had succeeded in making her mother confess that the stay
+at Breezeland was at Ormsby's expense; and not all of Mrs. Brentwood's
+petulant justifyings could remove the sting of the nettle of obligation.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no reason in the world why you should make so much of it: I am
+your mother, and I ought to know," was Mrs. Brentwood's dictum. "You
+wouldn't have any scruples if we were his guests on the <i>Amphitrite</i> or in
+his country house on Long Island."</p>
+
+<p>"That would be different," Elinor contended. "We are not his guests here;
+we are his pensioners."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" frowned the mother. "Isn't it beginning to occur to you that
+beggars shouldn't be choosers? And, besides, so far as you are concerned,
+you are only anticipating a little."</p>
+
+<p>It was an exceedingly injudicious, not to say brutal way of putting it;
+and the blue-gray eyes flashed fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you see that you are daily making a marriage between us more and
+more impossible?" was the bitter rejoinder. Elinor's <i>métier</i> was cool
+composure under fire, but she was not always able to compass it.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brentwood fanned herself vigorously. She had been aching to have it
+out with this self-willed young woman who was playing fast and loose with
+attainable millions, and the hour had struck.</p>
+
+<p>"What made you break it off with Brookes Ormsby?" she snapped; adding: "I
+don't wonder you were ashamed to tell me about it."</p>
+
+<p>"I did not break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her
+self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place
+to the cool gray blankness which she cultivated.</p>
+
+<p>"That is what Brookes told me, but I didn't believe him," said the mother.
+"It's all wrong, anyway, and I more than half believe David Kent is at the
+bottom of it."</p>
+
+<p>Elinor left her chair and went to the window, which looked down on the
+sanatorium, the ornate parterre, and the crescent driveway. These family
+bickerings were very trying to her, and the longing to escape them was
+sometimes strong enough to override cool reason and her innate sense of
+the fitness of things.</p>
+
+<p>In her moments of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged
+struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and
+more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood. With the
+unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and
+unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals.
+This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it,
+hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were
+tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely
+tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon
+summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock
+was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten how to
+cry.</p>
+
+<p>But into the turmoil of thoughts half indignant, half self-compassionate,
+came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial. She saw, as with a
+sudden gift of retrospection, her mother's long battle with inadequacy,
+and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought
+unselfishly, since she knew her mother's declaration that she could
+contentedly "go back to nothing" was no mere petulant boast. It was for
+her daughters that she had grown thin and haggard and irritable under the
+persistent reverses of fortune; it was for them that she was sinking the
+Grimkie independence in the match-making mother.</p>
+
+<p>The tears in Elinor's eyes were not altogether of self-pity when she put
+her back to the window. Ormsby was coming up the curved driveway in his
+automobile, and she had seen him but dimly through the rising mist of
+emotion.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you set your heart upon this thing, mother?&mdash;but I know you have.
+And I&mdash;I have tried as I could to be just and reasonable; to you and
+Penelope, and to Brookes Ormsby. He is nobleness itself: it is a shame to
+give him the shadow when he so richly deserves the substance."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke rapidly, almost incoherently; and the mother-love in the woman
+who was careful and troubled about the things that perish put the
+match-maker to the wall. It was almost terrifying to see Elinor, the
+strong-hearted, the self-contained, breaking down like other mothers'
+daughters. So it was the mother who held out her arms, and the daughter
+ran to go down on her knees at the chair-side, burying her face in the lap
+of comforting.</p>
+
+<p>"There, there, Ellie, child; don't cry. It's terrible to hear you sob
+like that," she protested, her own voice shaking in sympathy. "I have been
+thinking only of you and your future, and fearing weakly that you couldn't
+bear the hard things. But we'll bear them together&mdash;we three; and I'll
+never say another word about Brookes Ormsby and what might have been."</p>
+
+<p>"O mother! you are making it harder than ever, now," was the tearful
+rejoinder. "I&mdash;there is no reason why I should be so obstinate. I haven't
+even the one poor excuse you are making for me down deep in your heart."</p>
+
+<p>"David Kent?" said the mother.</p>
+
+<p>The bowed head nodded a wordless assent.</p>
+
+<p>"I sha'n't say that I haven't suspected him all along, dear. I am afraid I
+have. I have nothing against him. But he is a poor man, Elinor; and we are
+poor, too. You'd be miserably unhappy."</p>
+
+<p>"If he stays poor, it is I who am to blame,"&mdash;this most contritely. "He
+had a future before him: the open door was his winning in the railroad
+fight, and I closed it against him."</p>
+
+<p>"You?" said the mother, astonished.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I told him he couldn't go on in the way he meant to. I made it a
+matter of conscience; and he&mdash;he has turned back when he might have fought
+it out and made a name for himself, and saved us all. And it was such a
+hair-splitting thing! All the world would have applauded him if he had
+gone on; and there was only one woman in all the world to pry into the
+secret places of his soul and stir up the sleeping doubt!"</p>
+
+<p>Now, if all the thrifty, gear-getting "faculty" of the dead and gone
+Grimkies had become thin and diluted and inefficient in this Mrs.
+Hepzibah, last of the name, the strong wine and iron of the blood of
+uprightness had come down to her unstrained.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me all about it, daughter," she adjured; and when the tale was told,
+she patted the bowed head tenderly and spoke the words of healing.</p>
+
+<p>"You did altogether right, Ellie, dear; I&mdash;I am proud of you, daughter.
+And if, as you say, you were the only one to do it, that doesn't matter;
+it was all the more necessary. Are you sure he gave it up?"</p>
+
+<p>Elinor rose and stood with clasped hands beside her mother's chair; a very
+pitiful and stricken half-sister of the self-reliant, dependable young
+woman who had boasted herself the head of the household.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no means of knowing what he has done," she said slowly. "But I
+know the man. He has turned back."</p>
+
+<p>There was a tap at the door and a servant was come to say that Mr. Brookes
+Ormsby was waiting with his auto-car. Was Miss Brentwood nearly ready?</p>
+
+<p>Elinor said, "In a minute," and when the door closed, she made a
+confidante of her mother for the first time since her childhood days.</p>
+
+<p>"I know what you have suspected ever since that summer in New Hampshire,
+and it is true," she confessed. "I do love him&mdash;as much as I dare to
+without knowing whether he cares for me. Must I&mdash;may I&mdash;say yes to Brookes
+Ormsby without telling him the whole truth?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear! You couldn't do that!" was the quick reply.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that I am not strong enough? But I am; and Mr. Ormsby is manly
+enough and generous enough to meet me half-way. Is there any other honest
+thing to do, mother?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hepzibah shook her head deliberately and determinedly, though she
+knew she was shaking the Ormsby millions into the abyss of the
+unattainable.</p>
+
+<p>"No; it is his just due. But I can't help being sorry for him, Ellie. What
+will you do if he says it doesn't make any difference?"</p>
+
+<p>The blue-gray eyes were downcast.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. Having asked so much, and accepted so much from him&mdash;it
+shall be as he says, mother."</p>
+
+
+<p>The afternoon had been all that a summer afternoon on the brown highlands
+can be, and the powerful touring car had swept them from mile to mile
+over the dun hills like an earth-skimming dragon whose wing-beat was the
+muffled, explosive thud of the motor.</p>
+
+<p>Through most of the miles Elinor had given herself up to silent enjoyment
+of the rapture of swift motion, and Ormsby had respected her mood, as he
+always did. But when they were on the high hills beyond the mining-camp of
+Megilp, and he had thrown the engines out of gear to brake the car gently
+down the long inclines, there was room for speech.</p>
+
+<p>"This is our last spin together on the high plains, I suppose," he said.
+"Your mother has fixed upon to-morrow for our return to town, hasn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>Elinor confirmed it half-absently. She had been keyed up to face the
+inevitable in this drive with Ormsby, and she was afraid now that he was
+going to break her resolution by a dip into the commonplaces.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you glad or sorry?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Her reply was evasive.</p>
+
+<p>"I have enjoyed the thin, clean air and the freedom of the wide horizons.
+Who could help it?"</p>
+
+<p>"But you have not been entirely happy?"</p>
+
+<p>It was on her lips to say some conventional thing about the constant
+jarring note in all human happiness, but she changed it to a simple "No."</p>
+
+<p>"May I try if I can give the reason?"</p>
+
+<p>She made a reluctant little gesture of assent; some such signal of
+acquiescence as Marie Antoinette may have given the waiting headsman.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been afraid every day lest I should begin a second time to press
+you for an answer, haven't you?"</p>
+
+<p>She could not thrust and parry with him. They were past all that.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she admitted briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"You break my heart, Elinor," he said, after a long pause. "But"&mdash;with a
+sudden tightening of the lips&mdash;"I'm not going to break yours."</p>
+
+<p>She understood him, and her eyes filled quickly with the swift shock of
+gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>"If you had made a study of womankind through ten lifetimes instead of a
+part of one, you could not know when and how to strike truer and deeper,"
+she said; and then, softly: "Why can't you make me love you, Brookes?"</p>
+
+<p>He took his foot from the brake-pedal, and for ten seconds the released
+car shot down the slope unhindered. Then he checked the speed and answered
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"A little while ago I should have said I didn't know; but now I do know.
+It is because you love David Kent: you loved him before I had my chance."</p>
+
+<p>She did not deny the principal fact, but she gave him his opportunity to
+set it aside if he could&mdash;and would.</p>
+
+<p>"Call it foolish, romantic sentiment, if you like. Is there no way to
+shame me out of it?"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean that."</p>
+
+<p>"But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of
+it."</p>
+
+<p>His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your
+true happiness than I do, or ever shall. And it will be a mighty thankless
+service that that 'some one' will render you."</p>
+
+<p>"But I ought to be whipped and sent to bed," she protested, almost
+tearfully. "Do you know what I have done?&mdash;how I have&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She could not quite put it in words, even for him, and he helped her
+generously, as before.</p>
+
+<p>"I know what Kent hasn't done; which is more to the point. But he will do
+it fast enough if you will give him half a chance."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said definitively.</p>
+
+<p>"I say yes. One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you
+any time since last autumn: that is a sort of finical loyalty to me. I saw
+how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston&mdash;I'm asking
+you to believe that I didn't know it beforeand I saw then that my only
+hope was to make a handfast friend of him. And I did it."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you can do anything you try to do," she said warmly.</p>
+
+<p>This time his smile was a mere grimace.</p>
+
+<p>"You will have to make one exception, after this; and so shall I. And
+since it is the first of any consequence in all my mounting years, it
+grinds. I can't throw another man out of the window and take his place."</p>
+
+<p>"If you were anything but what you are, you would have thrown him out of
+the window another way," she rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"That would have been a dago's trick; not a white man's," he asserted. "I
+suppose I might have got in his way and played the dog in the manger
+generally, and you would have stuck to your word and married me, but I am
+not looking for that kind of a winning. I don't mind confessing that I
+played my last card when I released you from your engagement. I said to
+myself: If that doesn't break down the barriers, nothing will."</p>
+
+<p>She looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"You will never know how near it came to doing it, Brookes."</p>
+
+<p>"But it didn't quite?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, it didn't quite."</p>
+
+<p>The brother-smile came again.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's paste that leaf down and turn the other; the one that has David
+Kent's name written, at the top. He is going to succeed all around,
+Elinor; and I am going to help him&mdash;for his sake, as well as yours."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she dissented. "He is going to fail; and I am to blame for it."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her sidewise.</p>
+
+<p>"So you were at the bottom of that, were you? I thought as much, and tried
+to make him admit it, but he wouldn't. What was your reason?"</p>
+
+<p>"I gave it to him: I can't give it to you."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess not," he laughed. "I wasn't born on the right side of the
+Berkshire Hills to appreciate it. But really, you mustn't interfere. As I
+say, we are going to make something of David; and a little conscience&mdash;of
+the right old Pilgrim Fathers' brand&mdash;goes a long way in politics."</p>
+
+<p>"But you promised me you were not going to spoil him&mdash;only it doesn't
+matter; you can't."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby chuckled openly, and when she questioned "What?" he said:</p>
+
+<p>"I was just wondering what you would say if you knew what he is into now;
+if you could guess, for instance, that his backers have put up a cool
+hundred thousand to be used as he sees fit?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" she exclaimed; and there was dismay and sharp disappointment in her
+voice. "You don't mean that he is going to bribe these men?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said, relenting. "As a matter of fact, I don't know precisely
+what he is doing with the money, but I guess it is finding its way into
+legitimate channels. I'll make him give me an itemized expense account for
+your benefit when it's all over, if you like."</p>
+
+<p>"It would be kinder to tell me more about it now," she pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>"No; I'll let him have that pleasure, after the fact&mdash;if we can get him
+pardoned out before you go back East."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent so long that he stole another sidewise look between his
+snubbings of the brake-pedal. Her face was white and still, like the face
+of one suddenly frost-smitten, and he was instantly self-reproachful.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't look that way," he begged. "It hurts me; makes me feel how heavy my
+hand is when I'm doing my best to make it light. He is trying a rather
+desperate experiment, to be sure, but he is in no immediate personal
+danger. I believe it or I shouldn't be here; I should be with him."</p>
+
+<p>She asked no more questions, being unwilling to tempt him to break
+confidence with Kent. But she was thinking of all the desperate things a
+determined man with temperamental unbalancings might do when the touring
+car rolled noiselessly down the final hill into the single street of
+Megilp.</p>
+
+<p>There was but one vehicle in the street at the moment; a freighter's
+ore-wagon drawn by a team of mules, meekest and most shambling-prosaic of
+their tribe. The motor-car was running on the spent velocity of the
+descent, and Ormsby thought to edge past without stopping. But at the
+critical instant the mules gave way to terror, snatched the heavy wagon
+into the opposite plank walk, and tried to climb a near-by telephone pole.
+Ormsby put his foot on the brake and something snapped under the car.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" Elinor asked; and Ormsby got down to investigate.</p>
+
+<p>"It is our brake connection," he announced, after a brief inspection. "And
+we are five good miles from Hudgins and his repair kit."</p>
+
+<p>A ring of town idlers was beginning to form about them. An automobile was
+still enough of a rarity in the mining-camp to draw a crowd.</p>
+
+<p>"Busted?" inquired one of the onlookers.</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby nodded, and asked if there were a machinist in the camp.</p>
+
+<p>"Yep," said the spokesman; "up at the Blue Jay mine."</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody go after him," suggested Ormsby, flipping a coin; and a boy
+started on a run.</p>
+
+<p>The waiting was a little awkward. The ringing idlers were good-natured but
+curious. Ormsby stood by and answered questions multiform, diverting
+curiosity from the lady to the machine. Presently the spokesman said:</p>
+
+<p>"Is this here the steam-buggy that helped a crowd of you fellers to get
+away from Jud Byers and his posse one day a spell back?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Ormsby. Then he remembered the evening of small surprises&mdash;the
+racing tally-ho with the Inn auto-car to help; and, more pointedly now,
+the singular mirage effect in the lengthening perspective as the
+east-bound train shot away from Agua Caliente.</p>
+
+<p>"What was the trouble that day?" he asked, putting in a question on his
+side.</p>
+
+<p>"A little ruction up at the Twin Sisters. There was a furss, an' a gun
+went off, accidintally on purpose killin' Jim Harkins," was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>The machinist was come from the Blue Jay, and Ormsby helped Elinor out of
+her seat while the repairs were making. The town office of the Blue Jay
+was just across the street, and he took her there and begged house-room
+and a chair for her, making an excuse that he must go and see to the
+brake-mending.</p>
+
+<p>But once outside he promptly stultified himself, letting the repairs take
+care of themselves while he went in search of one Jud Byers. The deputy
+sheriff was not hard to find. Normally and in private life he was the
+weigher for the Blue Jay; and Ormsby was directed to the scale shanty
+which served as the weigher's office.</p>
+
+<p>The interview was brief and conclusive; was little more than a rapid fire
+of question and answer; and for the greater part the sheriff's
+affirmatives were heartily eager. Yes, certainly; if the thing could be
+brought to pass, he, Byers, would surely do his part. All he asked was an
+hour or two in which to prepare.</p>
+
+<p>"You shall have all the time there is," was the reply. "Have you a Western
+Union wire here?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; nothing but the railroad office."</p>
+
+<p>"That won't do; they'd stop the message. How about the Inn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Breezeland has a Western Union all right; wire your notice there, and
+I'll fix to have it 'phoned over. I don't believe it can be worked,
+though," added the deputy, doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"We can't tell till we try," said Ormsby; and he hurried back to his car
+to egg on the machinist with golden promises contingent upon haste.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Brentwood found her companion singularly silent on the five-mile race
+to Breezeland; but the lightning speed at which he drove the car put
+conversation out of the question. At the hotel he saw her into the lift
+with decent deliberation; but the moment she was off his hands he fairly
+ran to the telegrapher's alcove in the main hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you a Western Union wire to the capital direct?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>The young man snapped his key and said he had.</p>
+
+<p>"It has no connection with the Trans-Western railroad offices?"</p>
+
+<p>"None whatever."</p>
+
+<p>Ormsby dashed off a brief message to Kent, giving three or four addresses
+at which he might be found.</p>
+
+<p>"Send that, and have them try the Union Station train platform first.
+Don't let them spare expense at the other end, and if you can bring proof
+of delivery to Room 261 within half an hour, it means a month's pay to
+you, individually. Can you do it?"</p>
+
+<p>But the operator was already claiming the wire, writing "deth," "deth,"
+"deth," as rapidly as his fingers could shake off the dots and dashes.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH27"></a>
+<h2>XXVII</h2>
+<h3>BY ORDER OF THE COURT</h3>
+
+<p>Between the hours of eight-thirty and ten P.M. the Union Passenger Station
+at the capital presents a moving and spirited spectacle. Within the hour
+and a half, four through and three local trains are due to leave, and the
+space within the iron grille that fences off the track platforms from the
+public part of the station is filled with hurrying throngs of
+train-takers.</p>
+
+<p>Down at the outer end of the train-shed the stuttering pop-valves of the
+locomotives, the thunderous trundling of the heavy baggage trucks, and the
+shrill, monotonous chant of the express messengers checking in their
+cargoes, lift a din harmonious to the seasoned traveler; a medley softened
+and distance-diminished for those that crowd upon the gate-keepers at the
+iron grille.</p>
+
+<p>It was the evening of the last day in the month; the day when the
+Federative Council of Railway Workers had sent its ultimatum to Receiver
+Guilford. The reduction in wages was to go into effect at midnight: if,
+by midnight, the order had not been rescinded, and the way opened for a
+joint conference touching the removal of certain obnoxious officials, a
+general strike and tie-up would be ordered. Trains in transit carrying
+passengers or United States mail would be run to their respective
+destinations; trains carrying perishable freight would be run to division
+stations: with these exceptions all labor would cease promptly on the
+stroke of twelve.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the text of the ultimatum, a certified copy of which Engineer
+Scott had delivered in person into the hands of the receiver at noon.</p>
+
+<p>It was now eight forty-five P.M. The east-bound night express was ready
+for the run to A. &amp; T. Junction; the fast mail, one hour and thirty-five
+minutes late from the east, was backing in on track nine to take on the
+city mail. On track eight, pulled down so that the smoke from the engine
+should not foul the air of the train-shed, the receiver's private car,
+with the 1010 for motive power and "Red" Callahan in the cab, had been
+waiting since seven o'clock for the order to run special to Gaston. And as
+yet the headquarters office had made no sign; sent no word of reply to the
+strike notice.</p>
+
+<p>Griggs was on for the night run eastward with the express; and "Dutch"
+Tischer had found himself slated to take the fast mail west. The change of
+engines on the mail had been effected at the shops; and when Tischer
+backed his train in on track nine his berth was beside the 1010. Callahan
+swung down from his cab and climbed quickly to that of the mail engine.</p>
+
+<p>"Annything new at the shops, Dutchy?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"I was not somet'ings gehearing, <i>nein</i>. You was dot <i>Arkoos</i> newsbaper
+dis evening <i>schen</i>? He says nodings too, alretty, about dot strike."</p>
+
+<p>"Divil a worrd. Ye might think Scotty'd handed the major a bit av blank
+paper f'r all the notice he's taking. More thin that, he's lavin' town,
+wid me to pull him. The Naught-seven's to run special to Gaston&mdash;bad cess
+to ut!"</p>
+
+<p>"Vell, I can'd hellup id," said the phlegmatic Bavarian. "I haf the mail
+and egspress got, and I go mit dem t'rough to Pighorn. You haf der brivate
+car got, and you go mit dem t'rough to Gaston. Den ve qvits, ain'd it?"</p>
+
+<p>Callahan nodded and dropped to the platform. But before he could mount to
+the foot-board of the 1010, M'Tosh collared him.</p>
+
+<p>"Patsy, I have your orders, at last. Your passengers will be down in a few
+minutes, and you are to pull out ahead of the express."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it to Gaston I'm goin', Misther M'Tosh?"</p>
+
+<p>The fireman was standing by with the oil can and torch, ready to
+Callahan's hand, and the train-master drew the engineer aside.</p>
+
+<p>"Shovel needn't hear," he said in explanation. And then: "Are you willing
+to stand with us, Patsy? You've had time enough to think it over."</p>
+
+<p>Callahan stood with his arms folded and his cap drawn down over his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis not f'r meself I'm thinkin', Misther M'Tosh, as ye well know. But
+I'm a widdy man; an' there's the bit colleen in the convint."</p>
+
+<p>"She'll be well cared for, whatever happens to you," was the quick reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Thin I'm yer man," said Callahan; and when the train-master was gone, he
+ordered Shovel to oil around while he did two or three things which, to an
+initiated onlooker, might have seemed fairly inexplicable. First he
+disconnected the air-hose between the car and the engine, tying the ends
+up with a stout cord so that the connection would not seem to be broken.
+Next he crawled under the Naught-seven and deliberately bled the air-tank,
+setting the cock open a mere hair's-breadth so that it would leak slowly
+but surely until the pressure was entirely gone.</p>
+
+<p>Then he got a hammer and sledge out of the engine tool-box, and after
+hooking up the safety-chain couplings between the private car and the
+1010, he crippled the points of the hooks with the hammer so that they
+could not be disengaged without the use of force and the proper tools.</p>
+
+<p>"There ye are, ye ould divil's band-wagon," he said, apostrophizing the
+private car when his work was done. "Ye'll ride this night where Patsy
+Callahan dhrives, an' be dommed to ye."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the train-master had reached the iron grille at the other end of
+the long track platform. At a small wicket used by the station employees
+and trainmen, Kent was waiting for him.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it all right, M'Tosh? Will he do it?" he asked anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Patsy's game for it; I knew he would be. He'd put his neck in a rope
+to spite the major. But it's a crazy thing, Mr. Kent."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it; but if it will give me twenty-four hours&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It won't. They can't get home on our line because we'll be tied up. But
+they can get the Naught-seven put on the Overland's Limited at A. &amp; T.
+Junction, and that will put them back here before you've had time to turn
+around twice. Have they come down yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kent; and just then he saw Loring coming in from the street
+entrance and went to meet him.</p>
+
+<p>"I have the final word from Boston," said the ex-manager, when he had
+walked Kent out of earshot of the train-takers. "Your terms are
+accepted&mdash;with all sorts of safeguards thrown about the 'no cure, no pay'
+proviso; also with a distinct repudiation of you and your scheme if there
+is anything unlawful afoot. Do you still think it best to keep me in the
+dark as to what you are doing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; there are enough of us involved, as it stands. You couldn't help;
+and you might hinder. Besides, if the mine should happen to explode in our
+direction it'll be a comfort to have a foot-loose friend or two on the
+outside to pick up the pieces of us."</p>
+
+<p>Loring was polishing his eye-glasses with uncommon vigor.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish you'd drop it, David, if it isn't too late. I can't help feeling
+as if I had prodded you into it, whatever it is."</p>
+
+<p>Kent linked arms with him and led him back to the street entrance.</p>
+
+<p>"Go away, Grantham, and don't come back again," he commanded. "Then you
+can swear truthfully that you didn't know anything about it. It is too
+late to interfere, and you are not responsible for me. Go up to see
+Portia; she'll keep you interested while you wait."</p>
+
+<p>When Loring was gone, Kent went back to the wicket in the grille; but
+M'Tosh, who was always a busy man at train-time, had disappeared again.</p>
+
+<p>It was a standing mystery to the train-master, and to the rank and file,
+why Receiver Guilford had elected to ignore the fact that he was within
+three hours of a strike which promised to include at least four-fifths of
+his operatives; had taken no steps for defense, and had not confided, as
+it appeared, in the members of his own official staff.</p>
+
+<p>But Kent was at no loss to account for the official silence. If the secret
+could be kept for a few hours longer, the junto would unload the
+Trans-Western, strike, tie-up and general demoralization, upon an
+unsuspecting Overland management.</p>
+
+<p>None the less, there were other things unexplainable even to Kent; for
+one, this night flitting to Gaston to put the finishing touch on an
+edifice of fraud which had been builded shamelessly in the light of day.</p>
+
+<p>Kent had not the key to unlock this door of mystery; but here the master
+spirit of the junto was doing, not what he would, but what he could. The
+negotiations for the lease had consumed much time at a crisis when time
+was precious. Judge MacFarlane had to be recalled and once more bullied
+into subjection; and Falkland, acting for the Plantagould interest, had
+insisted upon some formal compliance with the letter of the law.</p>
+
+<p>Bucks had striven masterfully to drive and not be driven; but the delays
+were inexorable, and the impending strike threatened to turn the orderly
+charge into a rout. The governor had postponed the <i>coup</i> from day to day,
+waiting upon the leisurely movements of Falkland; and at the end of the
+ends there remained but three hours of the final day of grace when the
+telegram came from Falkland with the welcome news that the Overland
+officials were on their way from Midland City to keep the appointment in
+Gaston.</p>
+
+<p>Of all this Kent knew nothing, and was anxious in just proportion as the
+minutes elapsed and the time for the departure of the east-bound express
+drew near. For the success of the desperate venture turned upon this: that
+the receiver's special must leave ahead of the passenger train. With the
+express blocking the way the difficulties became insurmountable.</p>
+
+<p>Kent was still standing at the trainmen's wicket when Callahan sent the
+private car gently up to the trackhead of track eight. M'Tosh had been
+telephoning again, and the receiver and his party were on the way to the
+station.</p>
+
+<p>"I was afraid you'd have to let the express go first," said Kent, when the
+train-master came his way again. "How much time have we?"</p>
+
+<p>"Five minutes more; and they are on the way down&mdash;there they come."</p>
+
+<p>Kent looked and saw a group of six men making for the nearest exit in the
+grille. Then he smote his fist into his palm.</p>
+
+<p>"Damn!" he muttered; "they've got the vice-president of the Overland with
+them! That's bad."</p>
+
+<p>"It's bad for Mr. Callafield," growled M'Tosh. "We're in too deep now to
+back down on his account."</p>
+
+<p>Kent moved nearer and stood in the shadow of the gate-keeper's box,
+leaving M'Tosh, who was on the track platform, free to show himself. From
+his new point of espial Kent checked off the members of the party. When
+Major Guilford left it to come back for a word with M'Tosh, there were
+five others: the governor, his private secretary, Hawk, Halkett, the
+general superintendent, and the Overland's vice-president.</p>
+
+<p>"All ready, M'Tosh?" said the receiver.</p>
+
+<p>"Ready and waiting, Major," was the bland reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is our engineer?"</p>
+
+<p>"Patrick Callahan."</p>
+
+<p>"That wild Irishman? The governor says he'd as soon ride behind the
+devil."</p>
+
+<p>"Callahan will get you there," said the train-master, with deliberate
+emphasis. Then he asked a question of his own. "Is Mr. Callafield going
+with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. He came down to see us off. How is the fast mail to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's just in&mdash;an hour and thirty-five minutes late."</p>
+
+<p>The major swore pathetically. He was of the generation of railway
+officials, happily fast passing, which cursed and swore itself into
+authority.</p>
+
+<p>"That's another five hundred dollars' forfeit to the Post-office
+Department! Who's taking it west?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tischer."</p>
+
+<p>"Give him orders to cut out all the stops. If he is more than fifty-five
+minutes late at Bighorn, he can come in and get his time."</p>
+
+<p>Tischer had just got the word to go, and was pulling out on the yard main
+line.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll catch him with the wire at yard limits," said M'Tosh. Then: "Would
+you mind hurrying your people a little, Major? The express is due to
+leave."</p>
+
+<p>Guilford was a heavy man for his weight, and he waddled back to the
+others, waving his arms as a signal for them to board the car.</p>
+
+<p>Kent saw the vice-president of the Overland Short Line shake hands with
+Bucks and take his leave, and was so intent upon watching the tableau of
+departure that he failed to notice the small boy in Western Union blue who
+was trying to thrust a telegram, damp from the copying rolls, into his
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a rush, sir," said the boy, panting from his quick dash across the
+track platforms.</p>
+
+<p>It was Ormsby's message from Breezeland; and while Kent was trying to
+grasp the tremendous import of it, M'Tosh was giving Callahan the signal
+to go. Kent sprang past the gate-keeper and gave the square of damp paper
+to the train-master.</p>
+
+<p>"My God! read that!" he gasped, with a dry sob of excitement. "It was our
+chance&mdash;one chance in a million&mdash;and we've lost it!"</p>
+
+<p>M'Tosh was a man for a crisis. The red tail-lights of the private-car
+special were yet within a sprinter's dash of the trackhead, but the
+train-master lost no time chasing a ten-wheel flyer with "Red" Callahan at
+the throttle.</p>
+
+<p>"Up to my office!" he shouted; and ten seconds later Kent was leaning
+breathless over the desk in the despatcher's room while M'Tosh called
+Durgan over the yard limits telephone.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that you, Durgan?" he asked, when the reply came. Then: "Drop the
+board on the mail, quick! and send somebody to tell Tischer to side-track,
+leaving the main line Western Division clear. Got that?"</p>
+
+<p>The answer was evidently prompt and satisfactory, since he began again
+almost in the same breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Now go out yourself and flag Callahan before he reaches the limits. Tell
+him the time-card's changed and he is to run <i>west</i> with the special to
+Megilp as first section of the mail&mdash;no stops, or Tischer will run him
+down. Leg it! He's half-way down the yard, now!"</p>
+
+<p>The train-master dropped the ear-piece of the telephone and crossed
+quickly to the despatcher's table.</p>
+
+<p>"Orders for the Western Division, Donohue," he said curtly, "and don't let
+the grass grow. 'Receiver's car, Callahan, engineer, runs to Megilp as
+first section of fast mail. Fast mail, Hunt, conductor; Tischer, engineer;
+runs to the end of the division without stop, making up all time
+possible.' Add to that last, 'By order of the receiver.'"</p>
+
+<p>The orders were sent as swiftly as the despatcher could rattle them off on
+his key; and then followed an interval of waiting more terrible than a
+battle. Kent tried to speak, but his lips were parched and his tongue was
+like a dry stick between his teeth. What was doing in the lower yard?
+Would Durgan fail at the pinch and mismanage it so as to give the alarm?
+The minutes dragged leaden-winged, and even the sounders on the
+despatcher's table were silent.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the clicking began again. The operator at "yard limits" was
+sending the O.K. to the two train orders. So far, so good. Now if Callahan
+could get safely out on the Western Division...</p>
+
+<p>But there was a hitch in the lower yard. Durgan had obeyed his orders
+promptly and precisely, and had succeeded in stopping Callahan at the
+street-crossing where Engineer Dixon had killed the farmer. Durgan climbed
+to the cab of the 1010, and the changed plan was explained in a dozen
+words. But now came the crux.</p>
+
+<p>"If I stand here till you'd be bringin' me my orders, I'll have the whole
+kit av thim buzzin' round to know fwhat's the matther," said Callahan; but
+there was no other thing to do, and Durgan hurried back to the telegraph
+office to play the messenger.</p>
+
+<p>He was too long about it. Before he got back, Halkett was under the cab
+window of the 1010, demanding to know&mdash;with many objurgations&mdash;why
+Callahan had stopped in the middle of the yards.</p>
+
+<p>"Get a move on you!" he shouted. "The express is right behind us, and
+it'll run us down, you damned bog-trotter!"</p>
+
+<p>Callahan's gauntleted hand shot up to the throttle-bar.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm l'avin', Misther Halkett," he said mildly. "Will yez go back to the
+car, or ride wit' me?"</p>
+
+<p>The general superintendent took no chance of catching the Naught-seven's
+hand-rails in the darkness, and he whipped up into the cab at the first
+sharp cough of the exhaust.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll go back when you stop for your orders," he said; but a shadowy
+figure had leaped upon the engine-step a scant half-second behind him, and
+Callahan was stuffing the crumpled copy of the order into the sweat-band
+of his cap. The next instant the big 1010 leaped forward like a blooded
+horse under an unmerited cut of the whip, slid past the yard limits
+telegraph office and shot out upon the main line of the Western Division.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down, Misther Halkett, an' make yerself aisy!" yelled Callahan across
+the cab. "'Tis small use Jimmy Shovel'll have for his box this night."</p>
+
+<p>"Shut off, you Irish madman!" was the shouted command. "Don't you see
+you're on the wrong division?"</p>
+
+<p>Callahan gave the throttle-bar another outward hitch, tipped his seat and
+took a hammer from the tool-box.</p>
+
+<p>"I know where I'm goin', an' that's more thin you know, ye blandhanderin'
+divil! Up on that box wit' you, an' kape out av Jimmy Shovel's road, or
+I'll be the death av yez! Climb, now!"</p>
+
+<p>It was at this moment that the tense strain of suspense was broken in the
+despatcher's room on the second floor of the Union Station. The telephone
+skirled joyously, and the train-master snatched up the ear-piece.</p>
+
+<p>"What does he say?" asked Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right. He says Callahan is out on the Western Division, with
+Tischer chasing him according to programme. Halkett's in the cab of the
+1010 with Patsy, and&mdash;hold on&mdash;By George! he says one of them jumped the
+car as it was passing the limits station!"</p>
+
+<p>"Which one was it?" asked Kent; and he had to wait till the reply came
+from Durgan.</p>
+
+<p>"It was Hawk, the right-of-way man. He broke and ran for the nearest
+electric-car line the minute he hit the ground, Durgan says. Does he
+count?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kent; but it is always a mistake to under-rate an enemy's
+caliber&mdash;even that of his small arms.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH28"></a>
+<h2>XXVIII</h2>
+<h3>THE NIGHT OF ALARMS</h3>
+
+<p>If Editor Hildreth had said nothing in his evening edition about the
+impending strike on the Trans-Western, it was not because public interest
+was waning. For a fortnight the newspapers in the territory tributary to
+the road had been full of strike talk, and Hildreth had said his say,
+deprecating the threatened appeal to force as fearlessly as he condemned
+the mismanagement which was provoking it.</p>
+
+<p>But it was Kent who was responsible for the dearth of news on the eve of
+the event. Early in the morning of the last day of the month he had sought
+out the editor and begged him to close the columns of the <i>Evening Argus</i>
+to strike news, no matter what should come in during the course of the
+day.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't go into the reasons as deeply now as I hope to a little later,"
+he had said, his secretive habit holding good to the final fathom of the
+slipping hawser of events. "But you must bear with me once more, and
+whatever you hear between now and the time you go to press, don't comment
+on it. I have one more chance to win out, and it hangs in a balance that a
+feather's weight might tip the wrong way. I'll be with you between ten and
+twelve to-night, and you can safely save two columns of the morning paper
+for the sensation I'm going to give you."</p>
+
+<p>It was in fulfilment of this promise that Kent bestirred himself after he
+had sent a wire to Ormsby, and M'Tosh had settled down to the task of
+smoothing Callahan's way westward over a division already twitching in the
+preliminary rigor of the strike convulsion.</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to set the fuse for the newspaper explosion," he said to his
+ally. "Barring accidents, there is no reason why we shouldn't begin to
+figure definitely upon the result, is there?"</p>
+
+<p>M'Tosh was leaning over Despatcher Donohue's shoulder. He had slipped
+Donohue's fingers aside from the key to cut in with a peremptory "G.S."
+order suspending, in favor of the fast mail, the rule which requires a
+station operator to drop his board on a following section that is less
+than ten minutes behind its file-leader.</p>
+
+<p>"The fun is beginning," said the train-master. "Tischer has his tip from
+Durgan to keep Callahan's tail-lights in sight. With the mail treading on
+their heels the gentlemen in the Naught-seven will be chary about pulling
+Patsy down too suddenly in mid career. They have just passed Morning Dew,
+and the operator reports Tischer for disregarding his slow signal."</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you fix that?" asked Kent.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; that is one of the things I can fix. But there are going to be
+plenty of others."</p>
+
+<p>"Still we must take something for granted, Mr. M'Tosh. What I have to do
+up-town won't wait until Callahan has finished his run. I thought the main
+difficulty was safely overcome."</p>
+
+<p>"Umph!" said the train-master; "the troubles are barely getting themselves
+born. You must remember that we swapped horses at the last minute. We were
+ready for the race to the east. Everybody on the Prairie Division had been
+notified that a special was to go through to-night without stop from
+Lesterville to A. &amp; T. Junction."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now we have it all to straighten out by wire on another division; meeting
+points to make, slow trains to side-track, fool operators to hold down;
+all on the dizzy edge of a strike that is making every man on the line
+lose his balance. But you go ahead with your newspaper business. I'll do
+what a man can here. And if you come across that right-of-way agent, I
+wish you'd make it a case of assault and battery and get him locked up.
+I'm leery about him."</p>
+
+<p>Kent went his way dubiously reflective. In the moment of triumph, when
+Durgan had announced the success of the bold change in the programme, he
+had made light of Hawk's escape. But now he saw possibilities. True, the
+junto was leaderless for the moment, and Bucks had no very able
+lieutenants. But Hawk would give the alarm; and there was the rank and
+file of the machine to reckon with. And for weapons, the ring controlled
+the police power of the State and of the city. Let the word be passed that
+the employees of the Trans-Western were kidnapping their receiver and the
+governor, and many things might happen before "Red" Callahan should finish
+his long race to the westward.</p>
+
+<p>Thinking of these things, David Kent walked up-town when he might have
+taken a car. When the toxin of panic is in the air there is no antidote
+like vigorous action.</p>
+
+<p>Passing the Western Union central office, he stopped to send Ormsby a
+second telegram, reporting progress and asking him to be present in person
+at the dénouement to put the facts on the wire at the earliest possible
+instant of time. "Everything depends upon this," he added, when he had
+made the message otherwise emphatic. "If we miss the morning papers, we
+are done."</p>
+
+<p>While he was pocketing his change at the receiving clerk's pigeon-hole, a
+cab rattled up with a horse at a gallop, and Stephen Hawk sprang out. Kent
+saw him through the plate-glass front and turned quickly to the public
+writing-desk, hoping to be overlooked. He was. For once in a way the
+ex-district attorney was too nearly rattled to be fully alert to his
+surroundings. There were others at the standing desk; and Hawk wrote his
+message, after two or three false starts, almost at Kent's elbow.</p>
+
+<p>Kent heard the chink of coin and the low-spoken urgings for haste at the
+receiving clerk's window; but he forbore to move until the cab had rattled
+away. Then he gathered up the spoiled blanks left behind by Hawk and
+smoothed them out. Two of them bore nothing but the date line, made
+illegible, it would seem, by the writer's haste and nervousness. But at
+the third attempt Hawk had got as far as the address: "To All
+Trans-Western agents on Western Division."</p>
+
+<p>Kent stepped quickly to the receiver's window. The only expedient he could
+think of was open to reproach, but it was no time to be over-scrupulous.</p>
+
+<p>"Pardon me," he began, "but didn't the gentleman who was just here forget
+to sign his message?"</p>
+
+<p>The little hook caught its minnow. The receiving clerk was folding Hawk's
+message to place it in the leather carrier of the pneumatic tube, but he
+opened and examined it.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he said; "it's signed all right: 'J.B. Halkett, G.S.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" said Kent. "That's a little odd. Mr. Halkett is out of town, and
+this gentleman, Mr. Hawk, is not in his department. I believe I should
+investigate a little before sending that, if I were you."</p>
+
+<p>Having thus sown the small seed of suspicion, which, by the by, fell on
+barren soil, Kent lost no time in calling up M'Tosh over the nearest
+telephone.</p>
+
+<p>"Do our agents on the Western Division handle Western Union business?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>The reply came promptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; locally. The W-U. has an independent line to Breezeland Inn and
+points beyond."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, our right-of-way man has just sent a telegram to all agents,
+signing Halkett's name. I don't know what he said in it, but you can
+figure that out for yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"You bet I can!" was the emphatic rejoinder. And then: "Where are you
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm at the Clarendon public 'phone, but I am going over to the <i>Argus</i>
+office. I'll let you know when I leave there. Good-by."</p>
+
+<p>When Kent reached the night editor's den on the third floor of the <i>Argus</i>
+building he found Hildreth immersed chin-deep in a sea of work. But he
+quickly extricated himself and cleared a chair for his visitor.</p>
+
+<p>"Praise be!" he ejaculated. "I was beginning to get anxious. Large things
+are happening, and you didn't turn up. I've had Manville wiring all over
+town for you."</p>
+
+<p>"What are some of the large things?" asked Kent, lighting his first cigar
+since dinner.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, for one: do you know that your people are on the verge of the
+much-talked-of strike?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I knew it this morning. That was what I wanted you to suppress in
+the evening edition."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppressed it all right; I didn't know it&mdash;day and date, I mean. They
+kept it beautifully quiet. But that isn't all. Something is happening at
+the capitol. I was over at the club a little while ago, and Hendricks was
+there. Somebody sent in a note, and he positively ran to get out. When I
+came back, I sent Rogers over to Cassatti's to see if he could find you.
+There was a junto dinner confab on; Meigs, Senator Crowley, three or four
+of the ring aldermen and half a dozen wa-ward politicians. Rogers has a
+nose for news, and when he had 'phoned me you weren't there, he hung
+around on the edges."</p>
+
+<p>"Good men you have, Hildreth. What did the unimpeachable Rogers see?"</p>
+
+<p>"He saw on a large scale just what I had seen on a small one: somebody
+pup-passed a note in, and when it had gone the round of the dinner-table
+those fellows tumbled over each other trying to get away."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?" Kent inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Apart from his nose, Rogers is gifted with horse sense. When the
+dinner crowd boarded an up-town car, our man paid fare to the same
+conductor. He wired me from the Hotel Brunswick a few minutes ago. There
+is some sort of a caucus going on in Hendricks' office in the capitol, and
+mum-messengers are flying in all directions."</p>
+
+<p>"And you wanted me to come and tell you all the whys and wherefores?" Kent
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"I told the chief I'd bet a bub-blind horse to a broken-down mule you
+could do it if anybody could."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; listen: something worse than an hour ago the governor, his
+private secretary, Guilford, Hawk and Halkett started out on a special
+train to go to Gaston."</p>
+
+<p>"What for?" interrupted the editor.</p>
+
+<p>"To meet Judge MacFarlane, Mr. Semple Falkland, and the Overland
+officials. You can guess what was to be done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure. Your railroad was to be sold out, lock, stock and barrel; or leased
+to the Overland for ninety-nine years&mdash;which amounts to the same thing."</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely. Well, by some unaccountable mishap the receiver's special was
+switched over to the Western Division at yard limits, and the engineer
+seems to think he has orders to proceed westward. At all events, that is
+what he is doing. And the funny part of it is that he can't stop to find
+out his blunder. The fast mail is right behind him, with the receiver's
+order to smash anything that gets in its way; so you see&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That will do," said the night editor. "We don't print fairy stories in
+the <i>Argus</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"None the less, you are going to print this one to-morrow morning, just as
+I'm telling it to you," Kent asserted confidently. "And when you get the
+epilogue you will say that it makes my little preface wearisome by
+contrast."</p>
+
+<p>The light was slowly dawning in the editorial mind.</p>
+
+<p>"My heaven!" he exclaimed. "Kent, you're good for twenty years, at the
+very lul-least!"</p>
+
+<p>"Am I? It occurs to me that the prosecuting attorney in the case will have
+a hard time proving anything. Doesn't it look that way to you? At the
+worst, it is only an unhappy misunderstanding of orders. And if the end
+should happen to justify the means&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Hildreth shook his head gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand, David. If you could be sure of a fair-minded judge
+and an unbiased jury&mdash;you and those who are implicated with you: but
+you'll get neither in this machine-ridden State."</p>
+
+<p>"We are going to have both, after you have filled your two columns&mdash;by the
+way, you are still saving those two columns for me, aren't you?&mdash;in
+to-morrow morning's <i>Argus</i>. Or rather, I'm hoping there will be no need
+for either judge or jury."</p>
+
+<p>The night editor shook his head again, and once more he said, "My
+heaven!" adding: "What could you possibly hope to accomplish? You'll get
+the receiver and his big boss out of the State for a few minutes, or
+possibly for a few hours, if your strike makes them hunt up another
+railroad to return on. But what will it amount to? Getting rid of the
+receiver doesn't annul the decree of the court."</p>
+
+<p>Kent fell back on his secretive habit yet once again.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care to anticipate the climax, Hildreth. By one o'clock one of
+two things will have happened: you'll get a wire that will make your back
+hair sit up, or I'll get one that will make me wish I'd never been born.
+Let it rest at that for the present; you have work enough on hand to fill
+up the interval, and if you haven't, you can distribute those affidavits I
+gave you among the compositors and get them into type. I want to see them
+in the paper to-morrow morning, along with the other news."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we can't do that, David! The time isn't ripe. You know what I told
+you about&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If the time doesn't ripen to-night, Hildreth, it never will. Do as I tell
+you, and get that stuff into type. Do more; write the hottest editorial
+you can think of, demanding to know if it isn't time for the people to
+rise and clean out this stable once for all."</p>
+
+<p>"By Jove! David, I've half a mum-mind to do it. If you'd only unbutton
+yourself a little, and let me see what my backing is going to be&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"All in good season," laughed Kent. "Your business for the present moment
+is to write; I'm going down to the Union Station."</p>
+
+<p>"What for?" demanded the editor.</p>
+
+<p>"To see if our crazy engineer is still mistaking his orders properly."</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on a minute. How did the enemy get wind of your plot so quickly? You
+can tell me that, can't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I told you Hawk was one of the party in the private car. He fell
+off at the yard limits station and came back to town."</p>
+
+<p>The night editor stood up and confronted his visitor.</p>
+
+<p>"David, you are either the coolest plunger that ever drew breath&mdash;or the
+bub-biggest fool. I wouldn't be standing in your shoes to-night for two
+such railroads as the T-W."</p>
+
+<p>Kent laughed again and opened the door.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose not. But you know there is no accounting for the difference in
+tastes. I feel as if I had never really lived before this night; the only
+thing that troubles me is the fear that somebody or something will get in
+the way of my demented engineer."</p>
+
+<p>He went out into the hall, but as Hildreth was closing the door he turned
+back.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one other thing that I meant to say: when you get your two
+columns of sensation, you've got to be decent and share with the
+Associated Press."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm dud-dashed if I do!" said Hildreth, fiercely.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, you will; just the bare facts, you know. You'll have all the
+exciting details for an 'exclusive,' to say nothing of the batch of
+affidavits in the oil scandal. And it is of the last importance to me that
+the facts shall be known to-morrow morning wherever the Associated has a
+wire."</p>
+
+<p>"Go away!" said the editor, "and dud-don't come back here till you can
+uncork yourself like a man and a Cuc-Christian! Go off, I say!"</p>
+
+<p>It wanted but a few minutes of eleven when Kent mounted the stair to the
+despatcher's room in the Union Station. He found M'Tosh sitting at
+Donohue's elbow, and the sounders on the glass-topped table were crackling
+like overladen wires in an electric storm.</p>
+
+<p>"Strike talk," said the train-master. "Every man on both divisions wants
+to know what's doing. Got your newspaper string tied up all right?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent made a sign of assent.</p>
+
+<p>"We are waiting for Mr. Patrick Callahan. Any news from him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Plenty of it. Patsy would have a story to tell, all right, if he could
+stop to put it on the wires. Durgan ought to have caught that blamed
+right-of-way man and chloroformed him."</p>
+
+<p>"I found him messing, as I 'phoned you. Anything come of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing fatal, I guess, since Patsy is still humping along. But Hawk's
+next biff was more to the purpose. He came down here with Halkett's chief
+clerk, whom he had hauled out of bed, and two policemen. The plan was to
+fire Donohue and me, and put Bicknell in charge. It might have worked if
+Bicknell'd had the sand. But he weakened at the last minute; admitted that
+he wasn't big enough to handle the despatcher's trick. The way Hawk cursed
+him out was a caution to sinners."</p>
+
+<p>"When was this?" Kent asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Just a few minutes ago. Hawk went off ripping; swore he would find
+somebody who wasn't afraid to take the wires. And, between us three, I'm
+scared stiff for fear he will."</p>
+
+<p>"Can it be done?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dead easy, if he knows how to go about it&mdash;and Bicknell will tell him.
+The Overland people don't love us any too well, and if they did, the lease
+deal would make them side with Guilford and the governor. If Hawk asks
+them to lend him a train despatcher for a few minutes, they'll do it."</p>
+
+<p>"But the union?" Kent objected.</p>
+
+<p>"They have three or four non-union men."</p>
+
+<p>"Still, Hawk has no right to discharge you."</p>
+
+<p>"Bicknell has. He is Halkett's representative, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The door opened suddenly and Hawk danced in, followed by a man bareheaded
+and in his shirt-sleeves, the superintendent's chief clerk, and the two
+officers.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, then, we'll trouble you and your man to get out of here, Mr.
+M'Tosh," said the captain of the junto forces, vindictively.</p>
+
+<p>But the train-master was of those who die hard. He protested vigorously,
+addressing himself to Bicknell and ignoring the ex-district attorney as if
+he were not. He, McTosh, was willing to surrender the office on an
+official order in writing over the chief clerk's signature. But did
+Bicknell fully understand what it might mean in loss of life and property
+to put a new man on the wires at a moment's notice?</p>
+
+<p>Bicknell would have weakened again, but Hawk was not to be frustrated a
+second time.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you see he is only sparring to gain time?" he snapped at Bicknell.
+Then to M'Tosh: "Get out of here, and do it quick! And you can go, too,"
+wheeling suddenly upon Kent.</p>
+
+<p>Donohue had taken no part in the conflict of authority. But now he threw
+down his pen and clicked his key to cut in with the "G.S.," which claims
+the wire instantly. Then distinctly, and a word at a time so that the
+slowest operator on the line could get it, he spelled out the message:
+"All Agents: Stop and hold all trains except first and second fast mail,
+west-bound. M'Tosh fired, and office in hands of police&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Stop him!" cried the shirt-sleeved man. "He's giving it away on the
+wire!"</p>
+
+<p>But Donohue had signed his name and was putting on his coat.</p>
+
+<p>"You're welcome to what you can find," he said, scowling at the
+interloper. "If you kill anybody now, it'll be your own fault."</p>
+
+<p>"Arrest that man!" said Hawk to his policemen; but Kent interposed.</p>
+
+<p>"If you do, the force will be two men shy to-morrow. The Civic League
+isn't dead yet." And he took down the numbers of the two officers.</p>
+
+<p>There were no arrests made, and when the ousted three were clear of the
+room and the building, Kent asked an anxious question.</p>
+
+<p>"How near can they come to smashing us, M'Tosh?"</p>
+
+<p>"That depends on Callahan's nerve. The night operators at Donerail,
+Schofield and Agua Caliente are all Guilford appointees, and when the new
+man explains the situation to them, they'll do what they are told to do.
+But I'm thinking Patsy won't pull up for anything milder than a spiked
+switch."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they might throw a switch on him. I wonder somebody hasn't done it
+before this."</p>
+
+<p>The train-master shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"If Tischer is keeping close up behind, that would jeopardize more lives
+than Callahan's. But there is another thing that doesn't depend on
+nerve&mdash;Patsy's or anybody's."</p>
+
+<p>"What is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Water. The run is one hundred and eighty miles. The 1010's tank is good
+for one hundred with a train, or a possible hundred and sixty, light.
+There is about one chance in a thousand that Callahan's crown-sheet won't
+get red-hot and crumple up on him in the last twenty miles. Let's take a
+car and go down to yard limits. We can sit in the office and hear what
+goes over the wires, even if we can't get a finger in to help Patsy out of
+his troubles."</p>
+
+<p>They boarded a Twentieth Avenue car accordingly, but when they reached the
+end of the line, which was just across the tracks from the junction in the
+lower yards, they found the yard limits office and the shops surrounded by
+a cordon of militia.</p>
+
+<p>"By George!" said M'Tosh. "They got quick action, didn't they? I suppose
+it's on the ground of the strike and possible violence."</p>
+
+<p>Kent spun on his heel, heading for the electric car they had just left.</p>
+
+<p>"Back to town," he said; "unless you two want to jump the midnight
+Overland as it goes out and get away while you can. If Callahan fails&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH29"></a>
+<h2>XXIX</h2>
+<h3>THE RELENTLESS WHEELS</h3>
+
+<p>But Engineer Callahan had no notion of failing. When he had drawn the
+hammer on his superior officer, advising discretion and a seat on Jimmy
+Shovel's box, the 1010 was racking out over the switches in the Western
+Division yards. Three minutes later the electric beam of Tischer's
+following headlight sought and found the first section on the long tangent
+leading up to the high plains, and the race was in full swing.</p>
+
+<p>At Morning Dew, the first night telegraph station out of the capital, the
+two sections were no more than a scant quarter of a mile apart; and the
+operator tried to flag the second section down, as reported. This did not
+happen again until several stations had been passed, and Callahan set his
+jaw and gave the 1010 more throttle. But at Lossing, a town of some size,
+the board was down and a man ran out at the crossing, swinging a red
+light.</p>
+
+<p>Callahan looked well to the switches, with the steam shut off and his hand
+dropping instinctively to the air; and the superintendent shrank into his
+corner and gripped the window ledge when the special roared past the
+warning signals and on through the town beyond. He had maintained a dazed
+silence since the episode of the flourished hammer, but now he was moved
+to yell across the cab.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you know what you're in for, if you live to get out of this!
+It's twenty years, in this State, to pass a danger signal!" This is not
+all that the superintendent said: there were forewords and interjections,
+emphatic but unprintable.</p>
+
+<p>Callahan's reply was another flourish of the hammer, and a sudden
+outpulling of the throttle-bar; and the superintendent subsided again.</p>
+
+<p>But enforced silence and the grindstone of conscious helplessness will
+sharpen the dullest wit. The swerving lurch of the 1010 around the next
+curve set Halkett clutching for hand-holds, and the injector lever fell
+within his grasp. What he did not know about the working parts of a modern
+locomotive was very considerable; but he did know that an injector, half
+opened, will waste water as fast as an inch pipe will discharge it. And
+without water the Irishman would have to stop.</p>
+
+<p>Callahan heard the chuckling of the wasting boiler feed before he had gone
+a mile beyond the curve. It was a discovery to excuse bad language, but
+his protest was lamb-like.</p>
+
+<p>"No more av that, if ye plaze, Misther Halkett, or me an' Jimmy Shovel'll
+have to&mdash;Ah! would yez, now?"</p>
+
+<p>Before his promotion to the superintendency Halkett had been a ward boss
+in the metropolis of the State. Thinking he saw his chance, he took it,
+and the blow knocked Callahan silly for the moment. Afterward there was a
+small free-for-all buffeting match in the narrow cab in which the fireman
+took a hand, and during which the racing 1010 was suffered to find her way
+alone. When it was over, Callahan spat out a broken tooth and gave his
+orders concisely.</p>
+
+<p>"Up wid him over the coal, an' we'll put him back in the car where he
+belongs. Now, thin!"</p>
+
+<p>Halkett had to go, and he went, not altogether unwillingly. And when it
+came to jumping across from the rear of the tender to the forward
+vestibule of the Naught-seven, or being chucked across, he jumped.</p>
+
+<p>Now it so chanced that the governor and his first lieutenant in the great
+railway steal had weighty matters to discuss, and they had not missed the
+superintendent or the lawyer, supposing them to be still out on the rear
+platform enjoying the scenery. Wherefore Halkett's sudden appearance,
+mauled, begrimed and breathless from his late tussle with the two
+enginemen, was the first intimation of wrong-going that had penetrated to
+the inner sanctum of the private car.</p>
+
+<p>"What's that you say, Mr. Halkett?&mdash;on the Western Division?
+Whereabouts?" demanded the governor.</p>
+
+<p>"Between Lossing and Skipjack siding&mdash;if we haven't passed the siding in
+the last two or three minutes. I've been too busy to notice," was the
+reply.</p>
+
+<p>"And you say you were on the engine? Why the devil didn't you call your
+man down?"</p>
+
+<p>"I knocked him down," gritted the superintendent, savagely, "and I'd have
+beat his face in for him if there hadn't been two of them. It's a plot of
+some kind, and Callahan knows what he is about. He had me held up with a
+hammer till just a few minutes ago, and he's running past stop-signals and
+over red lights like a madman!"</p>
+
+<p>Bucks and Guilford exchanged convictions by the road of the eye, and the
+governor said:</p>
+
+<p>"This is pretty serious, Major. Have you anything to suggest?" And without
+waiting for a reply he turned upon Halkett: "Where is Mr. Hawk?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. I supposed he was in here with you. Or maybe he's out on
+the rear platform."</p>
+
+<p>The three of them went to the rear, passing the private secretary
+comfortably asleep in his wicker chair. When they stepped out upon the
+recessed observation platform they found it empty.</p>
+
+<p>"He must have suspected something and dropped off in the yard or at the
+shops," said Halkett. And at the saying of it he shrank back involuntarily
+and added: "Ah! Look at that, will you?"</p>
+
+<p>The car had just thundered past another station, and Callahan had underrun
+one more stop-signal at full speed. At the same instant Tischer's
+headlight swung into view, half blinding them with its glare.</p>
+
+<p>"What is that following us?" asked Bucks.</p>
+
+<p>"It's the fast mail," said Halkett.</p>
+
+<p>Guilford turned livid and caught at the hand-rail.</p>
+
+<p>"S-s-say&mdash;are you sure of that?" he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course: it was an hour and thirty-five minutes late, and we are on its
+time."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we can't stop unless somebody throws us on a siding!" quavered the
+receiver, who had a small spirit in a large body. "I told M'Tosh to give
+the mail orders to make up her lost time or I'd fire the engineer&mdash;told
+him to cut out all the stops this side of Agua Caliente!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what you get for your infernal meddling!" snapped Halkett. In
+catastrophic moments many barriers go down; deference to superior officers
+among the earliest.</p>
+
+<p>But the master spirit of the junto was still cool and collected.</p>
+
+<p>"This is no time to quarrel," he said. "The thing to be done is to stop
+this train without getting ourselves ripped open by that fellow behind the
+headlight yonder. The stop-signals prove that Hawk and the others are
+doing their best, but we must do ours. What do you say, Halkett?"</p>
+
+<p>"There is only one thing," replied the superintendent; "we've got to make
+the Irishman run ahead fast enough and far enough to give us room to stop
+or take a siding."</p>
+
+<p>The governor planned it in a few curt sentences. Was there a weapon to be
+had? Danforth, the private secretary, roused from his nap in the wicker
+chair, was able to produce a serviceable revolver. Two minutes later, the
+sleep still tingling in his nerves to augment another tingling less
+pleasurable, the secretary had spanned the terrible gap separating the car
+from the engine and was making his way over the coal, fluttering his
+handkerchief in token of his peaceful intentions.</p>
+
+<p>He was charged with a message to Callahan, mandatory in its first form,
+and bribe-promising in its second; and he was covered from the forward
+vestibule of the private car by the revolver in the hands of a resolute
+and determined state executive.</p>
+
+<p>"One of them's comin' ahead over the coal," warned James Shovel; and
+Callahan found his hammer.</p>
+
+<p>"Run ahead an' take a siding, is ut?" he shouted, glaring down on the
+messenger. "I have me ordhers fr'm betther men than thim that sint you. Go
+back an' tell thim so."</p>
+
+<p>"You'll be paid if you do, and you'll be shot if you don't," yelled the
+secretary, persuasively.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell the boss he can't shoot two av us to wanst; an' the wan that's
+left'll slap on the air," was Callahan's answer; and he slacked off a
+little to bring the following train within easy striking distance.</p>
+
+<p>Danforth went painfully and carefully back with this defiance, and while
+he was bridging the nerve-trying gap, another station with the stop-board
+down and red lights frantically swinging was passed with a roar and a
+whistle shriek.</p>
+
+<p>"Fwhat are they doing now?" called Callahan to his fireman.</p>
+
+<p>"They've gone inside again," was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Go back an' thry the tank," was the command; and Jimmy Shovel climbed
+over the coal and let himself down feet foremost into the manhole. When he
+slid back to the footplate his legs were wet to the mid shin.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only up to there," he reported, measuring with his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Callahan looked at his watch. There was yet a full hour's run ahead of
+him, and there was no more than a scant foot of water in the tank with
+which to make it.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter he forgot the Naught-seven, and whatever menace it held for
+him, and was concerned chiefly with the thing mechanical. Would the water
+last him through? He had once made one hundred and seventy miles on a
+special run with the 1010 without refilling his tank; but that was with
+the light engine alone. Now he had the private car behind him, and it
+seemed at times to pull with all the drag of a heavy train.</p>
+
+<p>But one expedient remained, and that carried with it the risk of his life.
+An engine, not overburdened, uses less water proportionately to miles run
+as the speed is increased. He could outpace the safe-guarding mail, save
+water&mdash;and take the chance of being shot in the back from the forward
+vestibule of the Naught-seven when he had gained lead enough to make a
+main-line stop safe for the men behind him.</p>
+
+<p>Callahan thought once of the child mothered by the Sisters of Loretto in
+the convent at the capital, shut his eyes to that and to all things
+extraneous, and sent the 1010 about her business. At the first reversed
+curve he hung out of his window for a backward look. Tischer's headlight
+had disappeared and his protection was gone.</p>
+
+<p>On the rear platform of the private car four men watched the threatening
+second section fade into the night.</p>
+
+<p>"Our man has thought better of it," said the governor, marking the
+increased speed and the disappearance of the menacing headlight.</p>
+
+<p>Guilford's sigh of relief was almost a groan.</p>
+
+<p>"My God!" he said; "it makes me cold to think what might happen if he
+should pull us over into the other State!"</p>
+
+<p>But Halkett was still smarting from the indignities put upon him, and his
+comment was a vindictive threat.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll send that damned Irishman over the road for this, if it is the last
+thing I ever do!" he declared; and he confirmed it with an oath.</p>
+
+<p>But Callahan was getting his punishment as he went along. He had scarcely
+settled the 1010 into her gait for the final run against the failing water
+supply when another station came in sight. It was a small cattle town, and
+in addition to the swinging red lights and a huge bonfire to illuminate
+the yards, the obstructionists had torn down the loading corral and were
+piling the lumber on the track.</p>
+
+<p>Once again Callahan's nerve flickered, and he shut off the steam. But
+before it was too late he reflected that the barrier was meant only to
+scare him into stopping. One minute later the air was full of flying
+splinters, and that danger was passed. But one of the broken planks came
+through the cab window, missing the engineer by no more than a
+hand's-breadth. And the shower of splinters, sucked in by the whirl of the
+train, broke glass in the private car and sprinkled the quartet on the
+platform with split kindling and wreckage.</p>
+
+<p>"What was that?" gasped the receiver.</p>
+
+<p>Halkett pointed to the bonfire, receding like a fading star in the
+rearward distance.</p>
+
+<p>"Our friends are beginning to throw stones, since clods won't stop him."
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>Bucks shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"If that is the case, we'll have to be doing something on our own account.
+The next obstruction may derail us."</p>
+
+<p>Halkett stepped into the car and pulled the cord of the automatic air.</p>
+
+<p>"No good," he muttered. "The Irishman bled our tank before he started.
+Help me set the hand brakes, a couple of you."</p>
+
+<p>Danforth and the governor took hold of the brake wheel with him, and for a
+minute or two the terrible speed slackened a little. Then some part of the
+disused hand-gear gave way under the three-man strain and that hope was
+gone.</p>
+
+<p>"There's one thing left," said the superintendent, indomitable to the
+last. "We'll uncouple and let him drop us behind."</p>
+
+<p>The space in the forward vestibule was narrow and cramped, and with the
+strain of the dragging car to make the pin stick, it took two of them
+lying flat, waiting for the back-surging moment and wiggling it for slack,
+to pull it. The coupling dropped out of the hook and the engine shot
+ahead to the length of the safety-chains; thus far, but no farther.</p>
+
+<p>Halkett stood up.</p>
+
+<p>"It's up to you, Danforth," he said, raising his voice to be heard above
+the pounding roar of the wheels. "You're the youngest and lightest: get
+down on the 1010's brake-beam and unhook those chains."</p>
+
+<p>The secretary looked once into the trap with the dodging jaws and the
+backward-flying bottom and declined the honor.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't get down there," he cried. "And I shouldn't know what to do if I
+could."</p>
+
+<p>Once more the superintendent exhibited his nerve. He had nothing at stake
+save a desire to defeat Callahan; but he had the persistent courage of the
+bull-terrier. With Bucks and the secretary to steady him he lowered
+himself in the gap till he could stand upon the brake-beam of the 1010's
+tender and grope with one free hand for the hook of the nearest
+safety-chain. Death nipped at him every time the engine gave or took up
+the slack of the loose coupling, but he dodged and hung on until he had
+satisfied himself.</p>
+
+<p>"It's no good," he announced, when they had dragged him by main strength
+back to a footing in the narrow vestibule. "The hooks are bent into the
+links. We're due to go wherever that damned Irishman is taking us."</p>
+
+<p>Shovel was firing, and the trailing smoke and cinders quickly made the
+forward vestibule untenable. When they were driven in, Bucks and the
+receiver went through to the rear platform, where they were presently
+joined by Halkett and Danforth.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been trying the air again," said the superintendent, "but it's no
+go. What's next?"</p>
+
+<p>The governor gave the word.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," he said; and the four of them clung to the hand-rails, swaying and
+bending to the bounding lurches of the flying car.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Mile after mile reels from beneath the relentless wheels, and still the
+speed increases. Station Donerail is passed, and now the pace is so
+furious that the watchers on the railed platform can not make out the
+signals in the volleying wake of dust. Station Schofield is passed, and
+again the signals, if any there be, are swiftly drowned in the gray
+dust-smother. From Schofield to Agua Caliente is but a scant ten miles;
+and as the flying train rushes on toward the State boundary, two faces in
+the quartet of watchers show tense and drawn under the yellow light of the
+Pintsch platform lamp.</p>
+
+<p>The governor swings himself unsteadily to the right-hand railing and the
+long look ahead brings the twinkling arc-star of the tower light on
+Breezeland Inn into view. He turns to Guilford, who has fallen limp into
+one of the platform chairs.</p>
+
+<p>"In five minutes more we shall pass Agua Caliente," he says. "Will you
+kill the Irishman, or shall I?" Guilford's lips move, but there is no
+audible reply; and Bucks takes Danforth's weapon and passes quickly and
+alone to the forward vestibule.</p>
+
+<p>The station of Agua Caliente swings into the field of 1010's electric
+headlight. Callahan's tank has been bone dry for twenty minutes, and he is
+watching the glass water-gage where the water shows now only when the
+engine lurches heavily to the left. He knows that the crown-sheet of the
+fire-box is bare, and that any moment it may give down and the end will
+come. Yet his gauntleted hand never falls from the throttle-bar to the
+air-cock, and his eyes never leave the bubble appearing and disappearing
+at longer intervals in the heel of the water-glass.</p>
+
+<p>Shovel has stopped firing, and is hanging out of his window for the
+straining look ahead. Suddenly he drops to the footplate to grip
+Callahan's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"See!" he says. "They have set the switch to throw us in on the siding!"
+In one motion the flutter of the exhaust ceases, and the huge ten-wheeler
+buckles to the sudden setting of the brakes. The man standing in the
+forward vestibule of the Naught-seven lowers his weapon. Apparently it is
+not going to be necessary to kill the engineer, after all.</p>
+
+<p>But Callahan's nerve has failed him only for the moment. There is one
+chance in ten thousand that the circumambulating side track is empty; one
+and one only, and no way to make sure of it. Beyond the station, as
+Callahan well knows, the siding comes again into the main line, and the
+switch is a straight-rail "safety." Once again the thought of his
+motherless child flickers into the engineer's brain; then he releases the
+air and throws his weight backward upon the throttle-bar. Two gasps and a
+heart-beat decide it; and before the man in the vestibule can level his
+weapon and fire, the one-car train has shot around the station, heaving
+and lurching over the uneven rails of the siding, and grinding shrilly
+over the points of the safety switch to race on the down grade to Megilp.</p>
+
+<p>At the mining-camp the station is in darkness save for the goggle eyes of
+an automobile drawn up beside the platform, and deep silence reigns but
+for the muffled, irregular thud of the auto-car's motor. But the beam of
+the 1010's headlight shows the small station building massed by men, a
+score of them poising for a spring to the platforms of the private car
+when the slackening speed shall permit. A bullet tears into the woodwork
+at Callahan's elbow, and another breaks the glass of the window beside
+him, but he makes the stop as steadily as if death were not snapping at
+him from behind and roaring in his ears from the belly of the burned
+engine.</p>
+
+<p>"Be doomping yer fire lively, now, Jimmy, b'y," he says, dropping from his
+box to help. And while they wrestle with the dumping-bar, these two, the
+poising figures have swarmed upon the Naught-seven, and a voice is lifted
+above the Babel of others in sharp protest.</p>
+
+<p>"Put away that rope, boys! There's law here, and by God, we're going to
+maintain it!"</p>
+
+<p>At this a man pushes his way out of the thick of the crowd and climbs to a
+seat beside the chauffeur in the waiting automobile.</p>
+
+<p>"They've got him," he says shortly. "To the hotel for all you're worth,
+Hudgins; our part is to get this on the wires before one o'clock. Full
+speed; and never mind the ruts."</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<a name="CH30"></a>
+<h2>XXX</h2>
+<h3>SUBHI SADIK</h3>
+
+<p>The dawn of a new day was graying over the capital city, and the newsboys
+were crying lustily in the streets, when David Kent felt his way up the
+dark staircases of the Kittleton Building to knock at the door of Judge
+Oliver Marston's rooms on the top floor. He was the bearer of tidings, and
+he made no more than a formal excuse for the unseemly hour when the door
+was opened by the lieutenant-governor.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to disturb you, Judge Marston," he began, when he had the
+closed door at his back and was facing the tall thin figure in flannel
+dressing gown and slippers, "but I imagine I'm only a few minutes ahead of
+the crowd. Have you heard the news of the night?"</p>
+
+<p>The judge pressed the button of the drop-light and waved his visitor to a
+chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard nothing, Mr. Kent. Have a cigar?"&mdash;passing the box of
+unutterable stogies.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you; not before breakfast," was the hasty reply. Then, without
+another word of preface: "Judge Marston, for the time being you are the
+governor of the State, and I have come to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"One moment," interrupted his listener. "There are some stories that read
+better for a foreword, however brief. What has happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"This: last night it was the purpose of Governor Bucks and Receiver
+Guilford to go to Gaston by special train. In some manner, which has not
+yet been fully explained, there was a confusion of orders. Instead of
+proceeding eastward, the special was switched to the tracks of the Western
+Division; was made the first section of the fast mail, which had orders to
+run through without stop. You can imagine the result."</p>
+
+<p>Marston got upon his feet slowly and began pacing the length of the long
+room. Kent waited, and the shrill cries of the newsboys floated up and in
+through the open windows. When the judge finally came back to his chair
+the saturnine face was gray and haggard.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope it was an accident that can be clearly proved," he said; and a
+moment later: "You spoke of Bucks and Guilford; were there others in the
+private car?"</p>
+
+<p>"Two others; Halkett, and the governor's private secretary."</p>
+
+<p>"And were they all killed?"</p>
+
+<p>A great light broke in upon Kent when he saw how Marston had
+misapprehended. Also, he saw how much it would simplify matters if he
+should be happy enough to catch the ball in the reactionary rebound.</p>
+
+<p>"They are all alive and uninjured, to the best of my knowledge and belief;
+though I understand that one of them narrowly escaped lynching at the
+hands of an excited mob."</p>
+
+<p>The long lean figure erected itself in the chair, and the weight of years
+seemed to slip from its shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"But I understood you to say that the duties of the executive had devolved
+upon me, Mr. Kent. You also said I could imagine the result of this
+singular mistaking of train-orders, and I fancied I could. What was the
+result?"</p>
+
+<p>"A conclusion not quite as sanguinary as that you had in mind, though it
+is likely to prove serious enough for one member of the party in the
+private car. The special train was chased all the way across the State by
+the fast mail. It finally outran the pursuing section and was stopped at
+Megilp. A sheriff's posse was in waiting, and an arrest was made."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said the lieutenant-governor.</p>
+
+<p>"I must first go back a little. Some weeks ago there was a shooting affray
+in the mining-camp, arising out of a dispute over a 'salted' mine, and a
+man was killed. The murderer escaped across the State line. Since the
+authorities of the State in which the crime was committed had every reason
+to believe that a governor's requisition for this particular criminal
+would not be honored, two courses were open to them: to publish the facts
+and let the moral sentiment of the neighboring commonwealth punish the
+criminal as it could, or would; or, suppressing the facts, to bide their
+chance of catching their man beyond the boundaries of the State which gave
+him an asylum. They chose the latter."</p>
+
+<p>A second time Marston left his chair and began to pace the floor. After a
+little he paused to say:</p>
+
+<p>"This murderer is James Guilford, I take it; and the governor&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Kent, gravely. "The murderer is&mdash;Jasper G. Bucks." He handed
+the judge a copy of the <i>Argus</i>. "You will find it all in the press
+despatches; all I have told you, and a great deal more."</p>
+
+<p>The lieutenant-governor read the newspaper story as he walked, lighting
+the electric chandelier to enable him to do so. When it was finished he
+sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>"What a hideous cesspool it is!" was his comment. "But we shall clean it,
+Mr. Kent; we shall clean it if it shall leave the People's Party without a
+vote in the State. Now what can I do for you? You didn't come here at
+this hour in the morning merely to bring me the news."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I didn't, Judge Marston. I want my railroad."</p>
+
+<p>"You shall have it," was the prompt response. "What have you done since
+our last discussion of the subject?"</p>
+
+<p>"I tried to 'obliterate' Judge MacFarlane, as you suggested. But I failed
+in the first step. Bucks and Meigs refused to approve the <i>quo warranto</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The judge knitted his brows thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"That way is open to you now; but it is long and devious, and delays are
+always dangerous. You spoke of the receivership as being part of a plan by
+which your road was to be turned over to an eastern monopoly. How nearly
+has that plan succeeded?"</p>
+
+<p>Kent hesitated, not because he was afraid to trust the man Oliver Marston,
+but because there were some things which the governor of the State might
+feel called upon to investigate if the knowledge of them were thrust upon
+him. But in the end he took counsel of utter frankness.</p>
+
+<p>"So nearly that if Bucks and the receiver had reached Gaston last night,
+our road would now be in the hands of the Plantagoulds under a
+ninety-nine-year lease."</p>
+
+<p>The merest ghost of a smile flitted over the lieutenant-governor's face
+when he said, with his nearest approach to sarcasm:</p>
+
+<p>"How extremely opportune the confusion of train-orders becomes as we go
+along! But answer one more question if you please&mdash;it will not involve
+these singularly heedless railway employees of yours: is Judge MacFarlane
+in Gaston now?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is. He was to have met the others on the arrival of the special
+train."</p>
+
+<p>There were footsteps on the stair and in the corridor, and Marston rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Our privacy is about to be invaded, Mr. Kent. This is a miserable
+business; miserable for everybody, but most of all for the deceived and
+hoodwinked people of an unhappy State. God knows, I did not seek this
+office; but since it has fallen on me, I shall do my duty as I see it, and
+my hand shall be heaviest upon that man who makes a mockery of the justice
+he is sworn to administer. Come to the capitol a little later in the day,
+prepared to go at once to Gaston. I think I can promise you your hearing
+on the merits without further delay."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," said Kent, simply, grasping the hand of leave-taking. Then he
+tried to find other and larger words. "I wish I could do something to show
+my appreciation of your&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But the lieutenant-governor was pushing him toward the door.</p>
+
+<p>"You have done something, Mr. Kent, and you can do more. Head those
+people off at the door and say that for the present I refuse positively to
+be seen or interviewed. They will find me at the capitol during office
+hours."</p>
+
+<p>It was seven o'clock in the evening of the fiercest working day Kent had
+ever fought through when the special train&mdash;his own private special, sent
+to Gaston and brought back again over the strike-paralyzed road by the
+express permission and command of the strikers themselves&mdash;set him down in
+the Union Station at the capital.</p>
+
+<p>Looking back to the gray of the morning when he had shaken hands with
+Governor Marston at the door of the room on the top floor of the Kittleton
+Building, the crowding events made the interval seem more like a week; and
+now the events themselves were beginning to take on dream-like
+incongruities in the haze of utter weariness.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Evening Argus</i>! all about the p'liminary trial of Governor Bucks.
+<i>Argus</i>, sir?" piped a small boy at the station exit; but Kent shook his
+head, found a cab and had himself conveyed quickly through streets still
+rife with excitement to the Clarendon Hotel.</p>
+
+<p>In the lobby was the same bee-buzzing crowd with which he had been
+contending all day, and he edged his way through it to the elevator,
+praying that he might go unrecognized&mdash;as he did. Once safe in his rooms
+he sent for Loring, stretching himself on the bed in a very ecstasy of
+relaxation until the ex-manager came up. Then he emptied his mind as an
+overladen ass spills its panniers.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm done, Grantham," he said; "and that is more different kinds of truth
+than you have heard in a week. Go and reorganize your management, and
+M'Tosh is the man to put in Halkett's place. The strike will be declared
+off at the mere mention of your name and his. That's all. Now go away and
+let me sleep."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, hold on!" was the good-natured protest; "I'm not more curious than I
+have to be, but I'd like to know how it was done."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, myself; and that's the plain fact. But I suspect Marston
+fell upon Judge MacFarlane: gave him a wire hint of what was due to arrive
+if he didn't give us a clean bill of health. I had my preliminary
+interview with the governor at daybreak this morning; and I was with him
+again between nine and ten. He went over the original papers with me, and
+about all he said was, 'Be in Gaston by two o'clock this afternoon, and
+MacFarlane will give you the hearing in chambers.' I went on my knees to
+the Federative Council to get a train."</p>
+
+<p>"You shouldn't have had any trouble there."</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't have, after the men understood what was in the wind. Jarl Oleson
+took me down and brought me back. The council did it handsomely, dipping
+into its treasury and paying the mileage on a Pullman car."</p>
+
+<p>"And MacFarlane reversed his own order?"</p>
+
+<p>"Without a question. It was the merest formality. Jennison, Hawk's former
+law partner, stood for the other side; but he made no argument."</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" said Loring. "That will do for the day's work. But now I'd like to
+know how last night's job was managed."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid you want to know more than is good for you. What do the papers
+say? I haven't looked at one all day."</p>
+
+<p>"They say there was a misunderstanding of orders. That will answer for the
+public, perhaps, but it won't do for me."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess it will have to do for you, too, Grantham," said Kent, yawning
+shamelessly. "Five men, besides myself&mdash;six of us in all&mdash;know the true
+inwardness of last night's round-up. There will never be a seventh."</p>
+
+<p>Loring's eye-glasses fell from his nose, and he was smiling shrewdly when
+he replaced them.</p>
+
+<p>"There is one small consequence that doesn't please you, I'm sure. You'll
+have to bury the hatchet with MacFarlane."</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I?" flashed Kent, sitting up as if he had been struck with a whip.
+"Let me tell you: Marston is going to call an extra session of the
+Assembly. There is a death vacancy in this district, and I shall be a
+candidate in the special election. If there is no other way to get at
+MacFarlane, he shall be impeached!"</p>
+
+<p>"H'm: so you're going into politics?"</p>
+
+<p>"You've said it," said Kent, subsiding among the pillows. "Now will you
+go?"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>It took the general manager a wakeful twenty-four hours to untangle the
+industrial snarl which was the receiver's legacy to his successor; and
+David Kent slept through the major part of that interval, rising only in
+time to dress for dinner on the day following the retrieval of the
+Trans-Western.</p>
+
+<p>In the grill-room of the Camelot he came face to face with Ormsby, and
+learned, something to his astonishment, that the Breezeland party had
+returned to the capital on the first train in from the west.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you were going to stay a month or more," he said, with his eyes
+cast down.</p>
+
+<p>"So did I," said Ormsby. "But Mrs. Brentwood cut it short. She's a town
+person, and so is Penelope." And it was not until the soup plates had been
+removed that he added a question. "Are you going out to see them this
+evening, David? You have my royal permission."</p>
+
+<p>"No"&mdash;bluntly.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it up to you to go and give them a chance to jolly you a little? I
+think they are all aching to do it. Mrs. Hepzibah has seen the rising
+stock quotations, and she thinks you are It."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I can't go there any more," said Kent, and his voice was gruffer than
+he meant it to be.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"There were good reasons before: there are better ones now."</p>
+
+<p>"A seven-hundred-thousand-dollar difference?" suggested Ormsby, who had
+had speech with Loring.</p>
+
+<p>Kent flushed a dull red.</p>
+
+<p>"I sha'n't strike you, Ormsby, no matter what you say," he said doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>"Humph! There is one difference between you and Rabbi Balaam's burro,
+David: it could talk sense, and you can't," was the offensive rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>Kent changed the subject abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Ormsby; I'm going into a political office-hunt. There is a death
+vacancy in the House, and I mean to have the nomination and election. I
+don't need money now, but I do need a friend. Are you with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sure. Miss Van Brock will answer for that."</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't want you to do it on her account; I want you to do it for
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"It's all one," said the club-man.</p>
+
+<p>Kent looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right; that is the truest word you've said to-night," and he
+went away, leaving the dessert untouched.</p>
+
+<p>The evening was still young when Kent reached the house in Alameda Square.
+Within the week the weather had changed, and the first chill of the
+approaching autumn was in the air. The great square house was lighted and
+warmed, and the homelikeness of the place appealed to him as it never had
+before. To her other gifts, which were many and diverse, Miss Van Brock
+added that of home-making; and the aftermath of battle is apt to be an
+acute longing for peace and quiet, for domesticity and creature comforts.</p>
+
+<p>He had not seen Portia since the night when she had armed him for the
+final struggle with the enemy; he told himself that he should not see her
+again until the battle was fought and won. But in no part of the struggle
+had he been suffered to lose sight of his obligation to her. He had seen
+the chain lengthen link by link, and now the time was come for the welding
+of it into a shackle to bind. He did not try to deceive himself, nor did
+he allow the glamour of false sentiment to blind him. With an undying love
+for Elinor Brentwood in his heart, he knew well what was before him. None
+the less, Portia should have her just due.</p>
+
+<p>She was waiting for him when he entered the comfortable library.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew you would come to-night," she said cheerfully. "I gave you a day
+to drive the nail&mdash;and, O David! you have driven it well!&mdash;another day to
+clinch it, and a third to recover from the effects. Have you fully
+recovered?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so. I took the day for it, at all events," he laughed. "I am just
+out of bed, as you might say."</p>
+
+<p>"I can imagine how it took it out of you," she assented. "Not so much the
+work, but the anxiety. Night before last, after Mr. Loring went away, I
+sat it out with the telephone, nagging poor Mr. Hildreth for news until I
+know he wanted to murder me."</p>
+
+<p>"How much did you get of it?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"He told me all he dared&mdash;or perhaps it was all he knew&mdash;and it made me
+feel miserably helpless. The little I could get from the <i>Argus</i> office
+was enough to prove that all your plans had been changed at the last
+moment."</p>
+
+<p>"They were," he admitted; and he began at the beginning and filled in the
+details for her.</p>
+
+<p>She heard him through without comment other than a kindling of the brown
+eyes at the climaxes of daring; but at the end she gave him praise
+unstinted.</p>
+
+<p>"You have played the man, David, as I knew you would if you could be once
+fully aroused. I've had faith in you from the very first."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been more than faith, Portia," he asserted soberly. "You have
+taken me up and carried me when I could neither run nor walk. Do you
+suppose I am so besotted as not to realize that you have been the head,
+while I have been only the hand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" she said lightly. "You are in the dumps of the reaction now.
+You mustn't say things that you will be sorry for, later on."</p>
+
+<p>"I am going to say one thing, nevertheless; and will remain for you to
+make it a thing hard to be remembered, or the other kind. Will you take
+what there is of me and make what you can of it?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed in his face.</p>
+
+<p>"No, my dear David; no, no, no." And after a little pause: "How
+deliciously transparent you are, to be sure!"</p>
+
+<p>He would have been less than a man if his self-love had not been touched
+in its most sensitive part.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad if it amuses you," he frowned. "Only I meant it in all
+seriousness."</p>
+
+<p>"No, you didn't; you only thought you did," she contradicted, and the
+brown eyes were still laughing at him. "Let me tell you what you did mean.
+You are pleased to think that I have helped you&mdash;that an obligation has
+been incurred; and you meant to pay your debt like a man and a gentleman
+in the only coin a woman is supposed to recognize."</p>
+
+<p>"But if I should say that you are misinterpreting the motive?" he
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"It would make your nice little speech a perjury instead of a simple
+untruth, and I should say no, again, on other, and perhaps better,
+grounds."</p>
+
+<p>"Name them," he said shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"I will, David, though I am neither a stick nor a stone to do it without
+wincing. You love another woman with all your heart and soul, and you know
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well? You see I am neither admitting nor denying."</p>
+
+<p>"As if you needed to!" she scoffed. "But don't interrupt me, please. You
+said I might take what there is of you and make what I can of it: I might
+make you anything and everything in the world, David, except that which a
+woman craves most in a husband&mdash;a lover."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes grew dark.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I knew how much that word means to you, Portia."</p>
+
+<p>"It means just as much to me as it does to every woman who has ever drawn
+the breath of life in a passionate world, David. But that isn't all.
+Leaving Miss Brentwood entirely out of the question, you'd be miserably
+unhappy."</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I shouldn't be able to realize a single one of your ideals. I
+know what they are&mdash;what you will expect in a wife. I could make you a
+rich man, a successful man, as the world measures success, and perhaps I
+could even give you love: after the first flush of youth is past, the
+heavenly-affinity sentiment loses its hold and a woman comes to know that
+if she cares to try hard enough she can love any man who will be
+thoughtful and gentle, and whose habits of life are not hopelessly at war
+with her own. But that kind of love doesn't breed love. Your vanity would
+pique itself for a little while, and then you would know the curse of
+unsought love and murder me in your heart a thousand times a day. No,
+David, I have read you to little purpose if these are the things you will
+ask of the woman who takes your name and becomes the mother of your
+children." She had risen and was standing beside his chair, with her hand
+lightly touching his shoulder. "Will you go now? There are others coming,
+and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He made his adieux gravely and went away half dazed and a prey to many
+emotions, but strangely light-hearted withal: and as once before, he
+walked when he might have ridden. But the mixed-emotion mood was not
+immortal. At the Clarendon he found a committee of Civic Leaguers waiting
+to ask him if he would stand as a "Good Government" candidate in the
+special election to fill the House vacancy in the capital district; and in
+the discussion of ways and means, and the setting of political pins which
+followed there was little food for sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>It was three weeks and more after Governor Marston's call summoning the
+Assembly for an investigative session. Kent had fought his way
+triumphantly through the special election to a seat in the House, aided
+and abetted manfully by Ormsby, Hildreth, and the entire Trans-Western
+influence and vote. And now men were beginning to say that without the
+tireless blows of the keen-witted, sharp-tongued young corporation lawyer,
+the junto might still have reasserted itself.</p>
+
+<p>But the House committee, of which Kent was the youngest member and the
+chairman, had proved incorruptible, and the day of the Gaston wolf-pack
+was over. Hendricks resigned, to escape a worse thing; Meigs came over to
+the majority with a show of heartiness that made Kent doubly watchful of
+him; heads fell to the right and left, until at the last there was left
+only one member of the original cabal to reckon with; the judicial tool of
+the capitol ring.</p>
+
+<p>Kent had hesitated when MacFarlane's name came up; and the judge never
+knew that he owed his escape from the inquisitorial House committee, and
+his permission to resign on the plea of broken health, to a young woman
+whom he had never seen.</p>
+
+<p>It was Elinor Brentwood who was his intercessor; and the occasion was the
+last day of the third week of the extra session&mdash;a Saturday afternoon and
+a legislative recess when Kent had borrowed Ormsby's auto-car, and had
+driven Elinor and Penelope out to Pentland Place to look at a house he was
+thinking of buying. For with means to indulge it, Kent's Gaston-bred mania
+for plunging in real estate had returned upon him with all the acuteness
+of a half-satisfied passion.</p>
+
+<p>They had gone all over the house and grounds with the caretaker, and when
+there was nothing more to see, Penelope had prevailed on the woman to open
+the Venetians in the music-room. There was a grand piano in the place of
+honor, presided over by a mechanical piano-player; and Penelope went into
+ecstasies of mockery.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait till I can find the music scrolls, and I'll hypnotize you," she said
+gleefully; and Kent and Elinor beat a hasty retreat to the wide entrance
+hall.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't quite understand it," was Elinor's comment, when they had put
+distance between themselves and Penelope's joyous grinding-out of a Wagner
+scroll. "It looks as if the owners had just walked out at a moment's
+notice."</p>
+
+<p>"They did," said Kent. "They went to Europe, I believe. And by the way; I
+think I have a souvenir here somewhere. Will you go up to the first
+landing of the stair and point your finger at that window?"</p>
+
+<p>She did it, wondering; and when he had the line of direction he knelt in
+the cushioned window-seat and began to probe with the blade of his
+pen-knife in a small round hole in the woodwork.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" she asked, coming down to stand beside him.</p>
+
+<p>"This." He had cut out a flattened bullet and was holding it up for her to
+see. "It was meant for me, and I've always had an idea that I heard it
+strike the woodwork."</p>
+
+<p>"For you? Were you ever here when the house was occupied?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, once; it is the Senator Duvall place. This is the window where I
+broke in."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>"I know now why you are going to buy it. The senator is another of those
+whom you haven't forgiven."</p>
+
+<p>His laugh was a ready denial.</p>
+
+<p>"I have nothing against Duvall. He was one of Bucks' dupes, and he is
+paying the price. The property is to be sold at a forced sale, and it is a
+good investment."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all it means to you? It is too fine to be hawked about as a thing
+to make money with. It's a splendidly ideal home&mdash;leaving out that thing
+that Penelope is quarreling with." And she made a feint of stopping her
+ears.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>"Ormsby says I ought to buy it, and marry and settle down."</p>
+
+<p>She took him seriously.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't need it. Miss Van Brock has a very lovely home of her own," she
+said soberly.</p>
+
+<p>It was at his tongue's end to tell the woman he loved how the woman he did
+not love had refused him, but he saved himself on the brink and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Why Miss Van Brock?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because she is vindictive, too, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But I am not vindictive."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you are. Do you know anything about Judge MacFarlane's family
+affairs?"</p>
+
+<p>"A little. He has three daughters; one of them rather unhappily married, I
+believe."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you considered the cost to these three women if you make their
+father's name a byword in the city where they were born?"</p>
+
+<p>"He should have considered it," was the unmoved reply.</p>
+
+<p>"David!" she said; and he looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"You want me to let him resign? It would be compounding a felony. He is a
+Judge, and he was bribed."</p>
+
+<p>She sat down beside him in the cushioned window seat and began to plead
+with him.</p>
+
+<p>"You must let him go," she insisted. "It is entirely in your hands as
+chairman of the House committee; the governor, himself, told me so. I know
+all you say about him is true; but he is old and wretched, with only a
+little while to live, at best."</p>
+
+<p>There was a curious little smile curling his lip when he answered her.</p>
+
+<p>"He has chosen a good advocate. It is quite like a man of his stamp to try
+to reach me through you."</p>
+
+<p>"David!" she said again. Then: "I really shouldn't know him if I were to
+see him."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why&mdash;&mdash;" he began; but there was a love-light in the blue-gray eyes
+to set his heart afire. "You are doing this for me?" he said, trembling on
+the verge of things unutterable.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. You don't know how it hurts me to see you growing hard and merciless
+as you climb higher and higher in the path you have marked out for
+yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"The path you have marked out for me," he corrected. "Do you remember our
+little talk over the embers of the fire in your sitting-room at home? I
+knew then that I had lost the love I might have won; but the desire to be
+the kind of leader you were describing was born in me at that moment. I
+haven't always been true to the ideal. I couldn't be, lacking the right to
+wear your colors on my heart&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't!" she said. "I haven't been true to my ideals. I&mdash;I sold them,
+David!"</p>
+
+<p>She was in his arms when she said it, and the bachelor maid was quite
+lost in the woman.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll never believe that," he said loyally. "But if you did, we'll buy
+them back&mdash;together."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Penelope was good to them. It was a full half-hour before she professed
+herself satisfied with the mechanical piano-toy; and when she was through,
+she helped the woman caretaker to shut the Venetians with clangings that
+would have warned the most oblivious pair of lovers.</p>
+
+<p>And afterward, when they were free of the house, she ran ahead to the
+waiting auto-car, leaving Kent and Elinor to follow at a snail's pace down
+the leaf-covered walk to the gate. There was a cedar hedge to mark the
+sidewalk boundary, and while it still screened them Kent bent quickly to
+the upturned face of happiness.</p>
+
+<p>"One more," he pleaded; and when he had it: "Do you know now, dearest, why
+I brought you here to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded joyously.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the sweetest old place. And, David, dear; we'll bring our
+ideals&mdash;all of them; and it shall be your haven when the storms beat."</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grafters, by Francis Lynde
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grafters, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Grafters
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2004 [EBook #11418]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GRAFTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Andrea Ball and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "DO YOU BEGIN TO SUSPECT THINGS?" SHE ASKED.]
+
+
+
+THE
+GRAFTERS
+
+BY
+FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY
+ARTHUR I. KELLER
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I  ASHES OF EMPIRE
+    II  A MAN OF THE PEOPLE
+   III  THE BOSTONIANS
+    IV  THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT
+     V  JOURNEYS END--
+    VI  OF THE MAKING OF LAWS
+   VII  THE SENTIMENTALISTS
+  VIII  THE HAYMAKERS
+    IX  THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT
+     X  WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY
+    XI  THE LAST DITCH
+   XII  THE MAN IN POSSESSION
+  XIII  THE WRECKERS
+   XIV  THE GERRYMANDER
+    XV  THE JUNKETERS
+   XVI  SHARPENING THE SWORD
+  XVII  THE CONSPIRATORS
+ XVIII  DOWN, BRUNO!
+   XIX  DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS
+    XX  THE WINNING LOSER
+   XXI  A WOMAN INTERVENES
+  XXII  A BORROWED CONSCIENCE
+ XXIII  THE INSURRECTIONARIES
+  XXIV  INTO THE PRIMITIVE
+   XXV  DEAD WATER AND QUICK
+  XXVI  ON THE HIGH PLAINS
+ XXVII  BY ORDER OF THE COURT
+XXVIII  THE NIGHT OF ALARMS
+  XXIX  THE RELENTLESS WHEELS
+   XXX  SUBHI SADIK
+
+
+TO MY GOOD FRIEND
+MR. EDWARD YOUNG CHAPIN
+
+
+THE GRAFTERS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+ASHES OF EMPIRE
+
+In point of age, Gaston the strenuous was still no more than a lusty
+infant among the cities of the brown plain when the boom broke and the
+junto was born, though its beginnings as a halt camp ran back to the days
+of the later Mormon migrations across the thirsty plain; to that day when
+the advanced guard of Zophar Smith's ox-train dug wells in the damp sands
+of Dry Creek and called them the Waters of Merom.
+
+Later, one Jethro Simsby, a Mormon deserter, set up his rod and staff on
+the banks of the creek, home-steaded a quarter-section of the sage-brush
+plain, and in due time came to be known as the Dry Creek cattle king. And
+the cow-camp was still Simsby's when the locating engineers of the Western
+Pacific, searching for tank stations in a land where water was scarce and
+hard to come by, drove their stakes along the north line of the
+quarter-section; and having named their last station Alphonse, christened
+this one Gaston.
+
+From the stake-driving of the engineers to the spike-driving of the
+track-layers was a full decade. For hard times overtook the Western
+Pacific at Midland City, eighty miles to the eastward; while the State
+capital, two days' bronco-jolting west of Dry Creek, had railroad outlets
+in plenty and no inducements to offer a new-comer.
+
+But, with the breaking of the cloud of financial depression, the Western
+Pacific succeeded in placing its extension bonds, and a little later the
+earth began to fly on the grade of the new line to the west. Within a
+Sundayless month the electric lights of the night shift could be seen,
+and, when the wind was right, the shriek of the locomotive whistle could
+be heard at Dry Creek; and in this interval between dawn and daylight
+Jethro Simsby sold his quarter-section for the nominal sum of two thousand
+dollars, spot cash, to two men who buck-boarded in ahead of the
+track-layers.
+
+This purchase of the "J-lazy-S" ranch by Hawk and Guilford marked the
+modest beginning of Gaston the marvelous. By the time the temporary
+sidings were down and the tank well was dug in the damp sands, it was
+heralded far and wide that the Western Pacific would make the city on the
+banks of Dry Creek--a city consisting as yet only of the Simsby ranch
+shacks--its western terminus. Thereupon followed one of the senseless
+rushes that populate the waste places of the earth and give the
+professional city-builder his reason for being. In a fortnight after the
+driving of the silver spike the dusty plain was dotted with the
+black-roofed shelters of the Argonauts; and by the following spring the
+plow was furrowing the cattle ranges in ever-widening circles, and Gaston
+had voted a bond loan of three hundred thousand dollars to pave its
+streets.
+
+Then under the forced draft of skilful exploitation, three years of high
+pressure passed quickly; years named by the promoters the period of
+development. In the Year One the very heavens smiled and the rainfall
+broke the record of the oldest inhabitant. Thus the region round about
+lost the word "arid" as a qualifying adjective, and the picturesque
+fictions of the prospectus makers were miraculously justified. In Year Two
+there was less rain, but still an abundant crop; and Jethro Simsby,
+drifting in from some unnamed frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what he
+had missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of the
+Mid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five-storied, brick-and-terra-cotta
+structure standing precisely upon the site of the "J-lazy-S" branding
+corral.
+
+It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas for
+young men having penetrated to the provincial backgrounds of New
+Hampshire, that David Kent came.
+
+By virtue of his diploma, and three years of country practice in the New
+Hampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone and
+Chitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Building
+lettered "Attorney and Counselor at Law"; but up to the day in the latter
+part of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was best
+known as a reckless plunger in real estate--this, mind you, at a moment
+when every third man counted his gains in "front feet", and was shouting
+himself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales.
+
+When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it,
+though not altogether as far or as hard as many another. One of his
+professional hold-fasts--it was the one that afterward became the
+bread-tackle in the famine time--was his position as local attorney for
+the railway company. By reason of this he was among the first to have a
+hint of the impending cataclysm. The Western Pacific, after so long a
+pause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds and
+would presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-station
+quietude. Therefore and wherefore----
+
+Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy. He foresaw, not the
+pitiable bubble-burst which ensued, indeed, but the certain and inevitable
+end of the speculative era. Like every one else, he had bought chiefly
+with promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated a sum
+equal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.
+
+"How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the
+secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his
+hint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying
+contracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on the
+Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to
+"unload".
+
+As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.
+On the morning when the _Daily Clarion_ sounded the first note of public
+alarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, and
+transferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was done
+he locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced the
+account. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast for
+fortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony into
+cash--some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill of
+exchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier,
+there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, bought
+and paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience.
+
+Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastily
+filled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. When
+he reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and Texas
+Streets, he was the one hundred and twenty-seventh man in the queue, which
+extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street
+to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the _Clarion_ had done
+its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for
+quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with
+its acrid perfume--the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad.
+
+Major James Guilford, the president of the Apache National, was in the
+cage with the sweating paying tellers, and it was to him that Kent
+presented his check when his turn came.
+
+"What! You, too, Kent?" said the president, reproachfully. "I thought you
+had more backbone."
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"Gaston has absorbed nine-tenths of the money I brought here; I'll absorb
+the remaining tenth myself, if it's just the same to you, Major. Thank
+you." And the hundred and twenty-seventh man pocketed his salvage from the
+wreck and fought his way out through the jam at the doors. Two hours
+farther along in the forenoon the Apache National suspended payment, and
+the bank examiner was wired for.
+
+For suddenness and thoroughgoing completeness the Gaston bubble-bursting
+was a record-breaker. For a week and a day there was a frantic struggle
+for enlargement, and by the expiration of a fortnight the life was pretty
+well trampled out of the civic corpse and the stench began to arise.
+
+Flight upon any terms then became the order of the day, and if the place
+had been suddenly plague-smitten the panicky exodus could scarcely have
+been more headlong. None the less, in any such disorderly up-anchoring
+there are stragglers perforce: some left like stranded hulks by the ebbing
+tide; others riding by mooring chains which may be neither slipped nor
+capstaned. When all was over there were deserted streets and empty suburbs
+in ruthless profusion; but there was also a hungry minority of the crews
+of the stranded and anchored hulks left behind to live or die as they
+might, and presently to fall into cannibalism, preying one upon another
+between whiles, or waiting like their prototypes of the Spanish Main for
+the stray spoils of any luckless argosy that might drift within grappling
+distance.
+
+Kent stayed partly because a local attorney for the railroad was as
+necessary in Gaston the bereaved as in Gaston the strenuous; partly, also,
+because he was a student of his kind, and the broken city gave him
+laboratory opportunities for the study of human nature at its worst.
+
+He marked the raising of the black flag as the Gaston castaways, getting
+sorrily afloat one by one, cleared their decks for action. Some Bluebeard
+admiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent,
+standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk,
+the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks,
+sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent.
+
+Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the former
+mayor. For when the famine time was fully come, and there were no more
+argosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it was
+Jasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forth
+his new cast for fortune, and brought the junto, the child of sheer
+desperation fiercely at bay, into being.
+
+It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring,
+traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the Western
+Pacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dispiriting dinner
+in the deserted Mid-Continent cafe, and some plowing of the field of
+recollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took the
+deserted street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway station.
+
+"It was a decent thing for you to do--stopping over a train with me,
+Grantham," said the host, when the five squares intervening had been half
+measured. "I have had all kinds of a time out here in this God-forsaken
+desert, but never until to-day anything approaching a chummy hour with a
+man I know and care for."
+
+Kent had not spoken since they had felt their way out of the dark lower
+hall of the Farquhar Building. Up to this point the talk had been
+pointedly reminiscent; of the men of their university year, of mutual
+friends in the far-away "God's country" to the eastward, of the Gastonian
+epic, of all things save only two--the exile's cast for fortune in the
+untamed West, and one other.
+
+"That brings us a little nearer to the things that be--and to your
+prospects, David," said the guest. "How are you fixed here?"
+
+Kent shrugged.
+
+"Gaston is dead, as you see; too dead to bury."
+
+"Why don't you get out of it, then?"
+
+"I shall some day, perhaps. Up to date there has been no place to go to,
+and no good way to arrive. Like some thousands of others, I've made an ass
+of myself here, Loring."
+
+"By coming, you mean? Oh, I don't know about that. You have had some hard
+knocks, I take it, but if you are the same David Kent I used to know, they
+have made a bigger man of you."
+
+"Think so?"
+
+"I'd bet on it. We have had the Gaston epic done out for us in the
+newspapers. No man could live through such an experience as you must have
+had without growing a few inches. Hello! What's this?"
+
+A turned corner had brought them in front of a lighted building in Texas
+Street with a straggling crowd gathered about the porticoed entrance. As
+Loring spoke, there was a rattle of snare drums followed by the _dum-dum_
+of the bass, and a brass band ramped out the opening measures of a
+campaign march.
+
+"It is a rally," said Kent, when they had passed far enough beyond the
+zone of brass-throated clamorings to make the reply audible. "I told you
+that the Gaston wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes of
+a State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at the
+Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title role. And there is a fair
+measure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock together
+like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that the
+town hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed that
+and all other stages and is well on its way to the cemetery."
+
+"That is one way of putting it," Loring rejoined. "If things are as bad as
+that, it's time you were moving on, don't you think?"
+
+"I guess so," was the lack-luster response. "Only I don't know where to
+go, or what to do when I get there."
+
+They were crossing the open square in front of the wide-eaved passenger
+station. A thunderous tremolo, dominating the distant band music, thrilled
+on the still air, and the extended arm of the station semaphore with its
+two dangling lanterns wagged twice.
+
+"My train," said Loring, quickening his step.
+
+"No," Kent corrected. "It is a special from the west, bringing a Bucks
+crowd to the political rally. Number Three isn't due for fifteen minutes
+yet, and she is always late."
+
+They mounted the steps to the station platform in good time to meet the
+three-car special as it came clattering in over the switches, and
+presently found themselves in the thick of the crowd of debarking
+ralliers.
+
+It was a mixed masculine multitude, fairly typical of time, place and
+occasion; stalwart men of the soil for the greater part, bearded and
+bronzed and rough-clothed, with here and there a range-rider in
+picturesque leathern shaps, sagging pistols and wide-flapped sombrero.
+
+Loring stood aside and put up his eye-glasses. It was his first sight near
+at hand of the untrammeled West _in puris naturalibus_, and he was finding
+the spectacle both instructive and diverting. Looking to Kent for
+fellowship he saw that his companion was holding himself stiffly aloof;
+also, he remarked that none of the boisterous partizans flung a word of
+recognition in Kent's direction.
+
+"Don't you know any of them?" he asked.
+
+Kent's reply was lost in the deep-chested bull-bellow of a cattleman from
+the Rio Blanco.
+
+"Hold on a minute, boys, before you scatter! Line up here, and let's give
+three cheers and a tail-twister for next-Governor Bucks! Now,
+then--_everybody_! Hip, hip----"
+
+The ripping crash of the cheer jarred Loring's eye-glasses from their
+hold, and he replaced them with a smile. Four times the ear-splitting
+shout went up, and as the echoes of the "tiger" trailed off into silence
+the stentorian voice was lifted again.
+
+"Good enough! Now, then; three groans for the land syndicates, alien
+mortgagees, and the Western Pacific Railroad, by grabs! and to hell with
+'em!"
+
+The responsive clamor was a thing to be acutely remembered--sustained,
+long-drawn, vindictive; a nerve-wrenching pandemonium of groans, yelpings
+and cat-calls, in the midst of which the partizans shuffled into loose
+marching order and tramped away townward.
+
+"That answers your question, doesn't it?" said Kent, smiling sourly. "If
+not, I can set it out for you in words. The Western Pacific is the
+best-hated corporation this side of the Mississippi, and I am its local
+attorney."
+
+"I don't envy you," said Loring. "I had no idea the opposition
+crystallized itself in any such concrete ill will. You must have the whole
+weight of public sentiment against you in any railroad litigation."
+
+"I do," said Kent, simply. "If every complainant against us had the right
+to pack his own jury, we couldn't fare worse."
+
+"What is at the bottom of it? Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble by
+building on to the capital?"
+
+"Oh, no; it's much more personal to these shouters. As you may, or may
+not, know, our line--like every other western railroad with no
+competition--has for its motto, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
+and it bleeds the country accordingly. But we are forgetting your train.
+Shall we go and see how late it is?"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+A MAN OF THE PEOPLE
+
+Train Number Three, the Western Flyer, was late, as Kent had
+predicted--just how late the operator could not tell; and pending the
+chalking-up of its arriving time on the bulletin board, the two men sat on
+an empty baggage truck and smoked in companionable silence.
+
+While they waited, Loring's thoughts were busy with many things, friendly
+solicitude for the exile serving as the point of departure. He knew what a
+handfast friend might know: how Kent had finished his postgraduate course
+in the law and had succeeded to his father's small practice in the New
+Hampshire county town where he was born and bred. Also, he knew how Kent's
+friends, college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecated
+the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to
+spy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffy
+little law office which had been his father's, Kent had made a clean
+breast of it: there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed
+before Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with no
+notion for a change of environment; wherefore she had determined Kent's
+career and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of her
+own choosing.
+
+Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it was
+hopelessly off holding-ground. The young woman had laid the blame at the
+door of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault-finding
+and recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowing
+her dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer.
+
+Thereafter Kent had stagnated quietly, living with simple rigor the life
+he had marked out for himself; thankful at heart, Loring had suspected,
+for the timely intervention of the farmer's son, but holding himself well
+in hand against a repetition of the sentimental offense. All this until
+the opening of the summer hotel at the foot of Old Croydon, and the coming
+of Elinor Brentwood.
+
+No one knew just how much Miss Brentwood had to do with the long-delayed
+awakening of David Kent; but in Loring's forecastings she enjoyed the full
+benefit of the doubt. From tramping the hills alone, or whipping the
+streams for brook trout, David had taken to spending his afternoons with
+lover-like regularity at the Croydon Inn; and at the end of the season had
+electrified the sleepy home town by declaring his intention to go West and
+grow up with the country.
+
+In Loring's setting-forth of the awakening, the motive was not far to
+seek. Miss Brentwood was ambitious, and if her interest in Kent had been
+only casual she would not have been likely to point him to the wider
+battle-field. Again, apart from his modest patrimony, Kent had only his
+profession. The Brentwoods were not rich, as riches are measured in
+millions; but they lived in their own house in the Back Bay wilderness,
+moved in Boston's older substantial circle, and, in a world where success,
+economic or other, is in some sort the touchstone, were many social planes
+above a country lawyer.
+
+Loring knew Kent's fierce poverty-pride--none better. Hence, he was at no
+loss to account for the exile's flight afield, or for his unhopeful
+present attitude. Meaning to win trophies to lay at Miss Brentwood's feet,
+the present stage of the rough joust with Fortune found him unhorsed,
+unweaponed and rolling in the dust of the lists.
+
+Loring chewed his cigar reflectively, wishing his companion would open the
+way to free speech on the subject presumably nearest his heart. He had a
+word of comfort, negative comfort, to offer, but it might not be said
+until Kent should give him leave by taking the initiative. Kent broke
+silence at last, but the prompting was nothing more pertinent than the
+chalking-up of the delayed train's time.
+
+"An hour and twenty minutes: that means any time after nine o'clock. I'm
+honestly sorry for you, Grantham--sorry for any one that has to stay in
+this charnel-house of a town ten minutes after he's through. What will you
+do with yourself?"
+
+Loring got up, looked at his watch, and made a suggestion, hoping that
+Kent would fall in with it.
+
+"I don't know. Shall we go back to your rooms and sit a while?"
+
+The exile's eyes gloomed suddenly.
+
+"Not unless you insist on it. We should get back among the relics and I
+should bore you. I'm not the man you used to know, Grantham."
+
+"No?" said Loring. "I sha'n't be hypocritical enough to contradict you.
+Nevertheless, you are my host. It is for you to say what you will do with
+me until train time."
+
+"We can kill an hour at the rally, if you like. You have seen the street
+parade and heard the band play: it is only fair that you should see the
+menagerie on exhibition."
+
+Loring found his match-box and made a fresh light for his cigar.
+
+"It's pretty evident that you and 'next-Governor' Bucks are on opposite
+sides of the political fence," he observed.
+
+"We are. I should think a good bit less of myself than I do--and that's
+needless--if I trained in his company."
+
+"Yet you will give him a chance to make a partizan of me? Well, come
+along. Politics are not down on my western programme, but I'm here to see
+all the new things."
+
+The Gaston Opera House was a survival of the flush times, and barring a
+certain tawdriness from disuse and neglect, and a rather garish effect
+which marched evenly with the brick-and-terra-cotta fronts in Texas Street
+and the American-Tudor cottages of the suburbs, it was a creditable relic.
+The auditorium was well filled in pit, dress-circle and gallery when Kent
+and his guest edged their way through the standing committee in the foyer;
+but by dint of careful searching they succeeded in finding two seats well
+around to the left, with a balcony pillar to separate them from their
+nearest neighbors.
+
+Since the public side of American politics varies little with the
+variation of latitude or longitude, the man from the East found himself at
+once in homely and remindful surroundings. There was the customary draping
+of flags under the proscenium arch and across the set-piece villa of the
+background. In the semicircle of chairs arched from wing to wing sat the
+local and visiting political lights; men of all trades, these, some of
+them a little shamefaced and ill at ease by reason of their unwonted
+conspicuity; all of them listening with a carefully assumed air of
+strained attention to the speaker of the moment.
+
+Also, there was the characteristic ante-election audience, typical of all
+America--the thing most truly typical in a land where national types are
+sought for microscopically: wheel-horses who came at the party call; men
+who came in the temporary upblaze of enthusiastic patriotism, which is
+lighted with the opening of the campaign, and which goes out like a candle
+in a gust of wind the day after the election; men who came to applaud
+blindly, and a few who came to cavil and deride. Loring oriented himself
+in a leisurely eye-sweep, and so came by easy gradations to the speaker.
+
+Measured by the standard of fitness for his office of prolocutor the man
+standing beside the stage-properties speaker's desk was worthy a second
+glance. He was dark, undersized, trimly built; with a Vandyke beard
+clipped closely enough to show the lines of a bull-dog jaw, and eyes that
+had the gift, priceless to the public speaker, of seeming to hold every
+onlooking eye in the audience. Unlike his backers in the awkward
+semicircle, he wore a professional long coat; and the hands that marked
+his smoothly flowing sentences were slim and shapely.
+
+"Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent.
+
+"Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter--a
+charter member of the Gaston wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you into
+believing in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you in
+the back for a ten-dollar bill in the next," was the rejoinder.
+
+Loring nodded, and again became a listener. Hawk's speech was merely
+introductory, and it was nearing its peroration.
+
+"Fellow citizens, this occasion is as auspicious as it is significant.
+When the people rise in their might to say to tyranny in whatsoever form
+it oppresses them, 'Thus far and no farther shalt thou go,' the night is
+far spent and the light is breaking in the east.
+
+"Since the day when we first began to wrest with compelling hands the
+natural riches from the soil of this our adoptive State, political
+trickery in high places, backed by the puissant might of alien
+corporations, has ground us into the dust.
+
+"But now the time of our deliverance is at hand. Great movements give
+birth to great leaders; and in this, our holy crusade against oppression
+and tyranny, the crisis has bred the man. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the
+pleasure of presenting to you the speaker of the evening: our friend and
+fellow citizen the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks, by the grace of God, and
+your suffrages, the next governor of the State."
+
+In the storm of applause that burst upon the dramatic peroration of the
+ex-district attorney, a man rose from the center of the stage semicircle
+and lumbered heavily forward to the footlights. Loring's first emotion was
+of surprise, tempered with pity. The crisis-born leader, heralded by such
+a flourish of rhetorical trumpets, was a giant in size; but with his huge
+figure, unshapely and ill-clad, all promise of greatness seemed to pause.
+
+His face, broad-featured, colorless, and beardless as a boy's, was either
+a blank or an impenetrable mask. There was no convincement in the
+lack-luster gaze of the small, porcine eyes; no eloquence in the harsh,
+nasal tones of the untrained voice, or in the ponderous and awkward
+wavings of the beam-like arms. None the less, before he had uttered a
+dozen halting sentences he was carrying the audience with him step by
+step; moving the great concourse of listeners with his commonplace periods
+as a mellifluous Hawk could never hope to move it.
+
+Loring saw the miracle in the throes of its outworking; saw and felt it in
+his own proper person, and sought in vain to account for it. Was there
+some subtile magnetism in this great hulk of a man that made itself felt
+in spite of its hamperings? Or was it merely that the people, weary of
+empty rhetoric and unkept promises, were ripe to welcome and to follow any
+man whose apparent earnestness and sincerity atoned for all his lacks?
+
+Explain it as he might, Loring soon assured himself that the Honorable
+Jasper G. Bucks was laying hold of the sentiment of the audience as though
+it were a thing tangible to be grasped by the huge hands. Unlike Hawk,
+whose speech flamed easily into denunciation when it touched on the alien
+corporations, he counseled moderation and lawful reprisals. Land
+syndicates, railroads, foreign capital in whatever employment, were prime
+necessities in any new and growing commonwealth. The province of the
+people was not to wreck the ship, but to guide it. And the remedy for all
+ills lay in controlling legislation, faithfully and rigidly enforced.
+
+"My friends: I'm only a plain, hard-handed farmer, as those of you who are
+my fellow townsmen can testify. But I've seen what you've seen, and I've
+suffered what you've suffered. Year after year we send our representatives
+to the legislature, and what comes of it? Why, these corporations, looking
+only to their own interests, as they're in duty bound to do, buys 'em if
+they can. You can't blame 'em for that; it's business--their business. But
+it is our business, as citizens of this great commonwealth, to prevent it.
+We have good laws on our statute books, but we need more of 'em; laws for
+control, with plain, honest men at the capital, in the judiciary, in every
+root and branch of the executive, to enforce 'em. With such laws, and such
+men to see that they are executed, there wouldn't be any more extortion,
+any more raising of the rates of transportation on the produce of our
+ranches and farms merely because the eastern market for that particular
+product happened to jump a few cents on the dollar.
+
+"No, my friends; plain, hard-handed farmer though I be, I can see what
+will follow an honest election of the people, by the people, and for the
+people. The State can be--it ought to be--sovereign within its own
+boundaries. If we rise up as one man next Tuesday and put a ticket into
+the ballot-box that says we are going to make it so, and keep it so,
+you'll see a new commodity tariff put into effect on the Western Pacific
+Railroad the day after."
+
+The speaker paused, and into the little gap of silence barked a voice from
+the gallery.
+
+"That's what you say. But supposin' they don't do it?"
+
+Loring was gazing steadfastly at the blank, heavy face, so utterly devoid
+of the enthusiasm the man was evoking in others. For one flitting instant
+he thought he saw behind the mask. The immobile face, the awkward
+gestures, the slipshod English became suddenly transparent, revealing the
+real man; a man of titanic strength, of tremendous possibilities for good
+or evil. Loring put up his glasses and looked again; but the figure of the
+flash-light inner vision had vanished, and the speaker was answering his
+objector as calmly as though the house held only the single critic to be
+set right.
+
+"I'm always glad to hear a man speak right out in meeting," he said,
+dropping still deeper into the colloquialisms. "Supposing the corporations
+don't see the handwriting on the wall--won't see it, you say? Then, my
+friend, it will become the manifest duty of the legislature and the
+executive to make 'em see it: always lawfully, you understand; always with
+a just and equitable respect for the rights of property in which our free
+and glorious institutions are founded, but with level-handed justice, and
+without fear or favor."
+
+A thunderous uproar of applause clamored on the heels of the answer, and
+the Honorable Jasper mopped his face with a colored handkerchief and took
+a swallow of water from the glass on the desk.
+
+"Mind you, my friends, I'm not saying we are not going to find plenty of
+stumps and roots and a tough sod in this furrow we are going to plow. It's
+only the fool or the ignoramus who underrates the strength of his
+opponent. It is going to be just plain, honest justice and the will of the
+people against the money of the Harrimans and the Goulds and the
+Vanderbilts and all the rest of 'em. But the law is mighty, and it will
+prevail. Give us an honest legislature to make such laws, and an executive
+strong enough to enforce 'em, and the sovereign State will stand out
+glorious and triumphant as a monument against oppression.
+
+"When that time comes--and it's a-coming, my friends--the corporations and
+the syndicates will read the handwriting on the wall; don't you be afraid
+of that. If they should be a little grain thick-headed and sort o' blind
+at first, as old King Belshazzar was, it may be that the sovereign State
+will have to give 'em an object-lesson--lawfully, always lawfully, you
+understand. But when they see, through the medium of such an object-lesson
+or otherwise, as the case may be, that we mean business; when they see
+that we, the people of this great and growing commonwealth, mean to assert
+our rights to live and move and have our being, to have fair, even-handed
+justice meted out to ourselves, our wives and our little children, they'll
+come down and quit watering their stock with the sweat of our brows; and
+that hold-up motto of theirs, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
+will be no more known in Israel!"
+
+Again the clamor of applause rose like fine dust on the throng-heated air,
+and Kent looked at his watch.
+
+"It is time we were going," he said; adding: "I guess you have had enough
+of it, haven't you?"
+
+Loring was silent for the better part of the way back to the railway
+station. When he spoke it was in answer to a delayed question of Kent's.
+
+"What do I think of him? I don't know, David; and that's the plain truth.
+He is not the man he appears to be as he stands there haranguing that
+crowd. That is a pose, and an exceedingly skilful one. He is not
+altogether apparent to me; but he strikes me as being a man of immense
+possibilities--whether for good or evil, I can't say."
+
+"You needn't draw another breath of uncertainty on that score," was the
+curt rejoinder. "He is a demagogue, pure and unadulterated."
+
+Loring did not attempt to refute the charge.
+
+"Are he and his party likely to win?" he asked.
+
+"God knows," said Kent. "We have had so many lightning transformations in
+politics in the State that nothing is impossible."
+
+"I'd like to know," was Loring's comment. "It might make some difference
+to me, personally."
+
+"To you?" said Kent, inquiringly. "That reminds me: I haven't given you a
+chance to say ten words about yourself."
+
+"The chance hasn't been lacking. But my business out here is--well, it
+isn't exactly a Star Chamber matter, but I'm under promise in a way not to
+talk about it until I have had a conference with our people at the
+capital. I'll write you about it in a few days."
+
+They were ascending the steps at the end of the passenger platform again,
+and Loring broke away from the political and personal entanglement to give
+Kent one more opportunity to hear his word of negative comfort.
+
+"We dug up the field of recollection pretty thoroughly in our after-dinner
+seance in your rooms, David, but I noticed there was one corner of it you
+left undisturbed. Was there any good reason?"
+
+Kent made no show of misunderstanding.
+
+"There was the excellent reason which must have been apparent to you
+before you had been an hour in Gaston. I've made my shot, and missed."
+
+Loring entered the breach with his shield held well to the fore. He was
+the last man in the world to assault a friend's confidence recklessly.
+
+"I thought a good while ago, and I still think, that you are making a
+mountain out of a mole-hill, David. Elinor Brentwood is a true woman in
+every inch of her. She is as much above caring for false notions of caste
+as you ought to be."
+
+"I know her nobility: which is all the more reason why I shouldn't take
+advantage of it. We may scoff at the social inequalities as much as we
+please, but we can't laugh them out of court. As between a young woman who
+is an heiress in her own right, and a briefless lawyer, there are
+differences which a decent man is bound to efface. And I haven't been
+able."
+
+"Does Miss Brentwood know?"
+
+"She knows nothing at all. I was unwilling to entangle her, even with a
+confidence."
+
+"The more fool you," said Loring, bluntly. "You call yourself a lawyer,
+and you have not yet learned one of the first principles of common
+justice, which is that a woman has some rights which even a besotted lover
+is bound to respect. You made love to her that summer at Croydon; you
+needn't deny it. And at the end of things you walk off to make your
+fortune without committing yourself; without knowing, or apparently
+caring, what your stiff-necked poverty-pride may cost her in years of
+uncertainty. You deserve to lose her."
+
+Kent's smile was a fair measure of his unhopeful mood.
+
+"You can't well lose what you have never had. I'm not such an ass as to
+believe that she cared greatly."
+
+"How do you know? Not by anything you ever gave her a chance to say, I'll
+dare swear. I've a bit of qualified good news for you, but the spirit is
+moving me mightily to hold my tongue."
+
+"Tell me," said Kent, his indifference vanishing in the turning of a leaf.
+
+"Well, to begin with, Miss Brentwood is still unmarried, though the
+gossips say she doesn't lack plenty of eligible offers."
+
+"Half of that I knew; the other half I took for granted. Go on."
+
+"Her mother, under the advice of the chief of the clan Brentwood, has been
+making a lot of bad investments for herself and her two daughters: in
+other words, she has been making ducks and drakes of the Brentwood
+fortune."
+
+Kent was as deeply moved as if the loss had been his own, and said as
+much, craving more of the particulars.
+
+"I can't give them. But I may say that the blame lies at your door,
+David."
+
+"At my door? How do you arrive at that?"
+
+"By the shortest possible route. If you had done your duty by Elinor in
+the Croydon summer, Mrs. Brentwood would have had a bright young attorney
+for a son-in-law and adviser, and the bad investments would not have been
+made."
+
+Kent's laugh was entirely devoid of mirth.
+
+"Don't trample on a man when he's down. I was neither a prophet nor the
+son of a prophet. But how bad is the smash? Surely you know that?"
+
+"No, I don't. Bradford was telling me about it the day I left Boston. He
+gave me to understand that the principal family holding at present is in
+the stock of a certain western railway."
+
+"Did he happen to know the name of the stock?" asked Kent, moistening his
+lips.
+
+"He did. Fate flirts with you two in the usual fashion. Mrs. Brentwood's
+little fortune--and by consequence, Elinor's and Penelope's--is tied up in
+the stock of the company whose platform we are occupying at the present
+moment--the Western Pacific."
+
+Kent let slip a hard word directed at ill-advisers in general, and Loring
+took his cue from the malediction.
+
+"You swear pretty feelingly, David. Isn't our property as good a thing as
+we of the Boston end have been cracking it up to be?"
+
+"You know better about the financial part of it than I do. But--well, you
+are fresh from this anarchistic conclave at the Opera House. You can
+imagine what the stock of the Western Pacific, or of any other foreign
+corporation doing business in this State, will be worth in six months
+after Bucks and his crowd get into the saddle."
+
+"You speak as if the result of the election were a foregone conclusion. I
+hope it isn't. But we were talking more particularly of Miss Brentwood,
+and your personal responsibilities." The belated train was whistling for
+the lower yard, and Loring was determined to say all that was in his mind.
+
+"Yes; go on. I'm anxious to hear--more anxious than I seem to be,
+perhaps."
+
+"Well, she is coming West, after a bit. She, and her sister and the
+mother. Mrs. Brentwood's asthma is worse, and the wise men have ordered
+her to the interior. I thought you'd like to know."
+
+"Is she--are they coming this way?" asked Kent.
+
+The train was in, and the porter had fetched Loring's hand-bag from the
+check-stand. The guest paused with one foot on the step of the
+sleeping-car.
+
+"If I were you, David, I'd write and ask; I should, by Jove. It would be a
+tremendously cheeky thing to do, of course, having such a slight
+acquaintance with her as you have; but I'll be hanged if I shouldn't
+chance it. And in the mean time, if I don't go back East next week, you'll
+hear from me. When you do, or if you do, take a day off and run up to the
+capital. I shall need you. Good-by."
+
+Kent watched the train pull out; stood looking after it until the two red
+eyes of the rear signals had disappeared in the dusty darkness of the
+illimitable plain. Then he went to his rooms, to the one which was called
+by courtesy his office, and without allowing himself time for a nice
+balancing of the pros and cons, squared himself at the desk to write a
+letter.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THE BOSTONIANS
+
+It was precisely on the day set for the Brentwoods' westward flitting that
+the postman, making his morning round, delivered David Kent's asking at
+the house in the Back Bay sub-district. Elinor was busy packing for the
+migration, but she left Penelope and the maid to cope with the problem of
+compressing two trunkfuls into one while she read the letter, and she was
+reading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Ormsby's card came up.
+
+"You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do."
+
+"Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me."
+Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of her
+brow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the early
+morning caller.
+
+Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of athletic leisure, and inheritor
+of the Ormsby millions, was pacing back and forth before the handful of
+fire in the drawing-room grate when she entered.
+
+"You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protested
+reproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?"
+
+Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but
+just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.
+
+"How was I to know you didn't know?" she retorted. "It was in the
+_Transcript_."
+
+"Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to
+keep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper.
+Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a
+propeller blade on the _Amphitrite_ trying to get here in time."
+
+"I am so sorry--for the _Amphitrite_," she said. "But you are here, and in
+good season. Shall I call mother and Nell?"
+
+"No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your errands for you--take your
+tickets, and so on."
+
+"Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things.
+And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of
+this household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the family all over
+Europe?"
+
+"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for the
+capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German
+frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to
+help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?"
+
+"If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it."
+
+He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the
+clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward
+presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.
+
+"You are hard with me, Elinor--always flinty and adamantine, and that
+sort. Have you no soft side at all?"
+
+She laughed.
+
+"The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can't
+be an anachronism."
+
+"I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other things
+about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?"
+
+"I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of
+the house since father died."
+
+"I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put
+the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; to
+take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. When
+are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little
+worries, Elinor?"
+
+She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.
+
+"You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispassionately. "We
+were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar
+Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong
+enough to make it possible."
+
+He looked at her with narrowing eyes.
+
+"It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it
+is that I haven't been able to open."
+
+She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient.
+
+"If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also--to
+Abigail and the trunk-packing."
+
+He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful
+soul asserting itself boldly.
+
+"It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you."
+
+"To Abigail and the trunk-room?"
+
+"Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West--wherever it is you are going
+to hibernate."
+
+"No," she said decisively; "you must not."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"My saying so ought to be sufficient reason."
+
+"It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I
+tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid."
+
+"I am not," she denied.
+
+"Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you
+should continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I might
+over-persuade you."
+
+Her eyes--they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue
+tints in stressful moments--met his defiantly.
+
+"If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and
+Penelope will be delighted, I am sure."
+
+"And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'll
+be decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like."
+
+Again she made the little gesture of petulant impatience.
+
+"You are continually placing me in a false position. Can't you leave me
+out of it entirely?"
+
+It is one of the prime requisites of successful mastership to know when to
+press the point home, and when to recede gracefully. Ormsby abruptly shut
+the door upon sentiment and came down to things practical.
+
+"It is your every-day comfort that concerns me chiefly. I am going to take
+all three of you in charge, giving the dependable young person a
+well-earned holiday--a little journey in which she won't have to chaffer
+with the transit people. Have you chosen your route to the western
+somewhere?"
+
+Miss Brentwood had the fair, transparent skin that tells tales, and the
+blue-gray eyes were apt to confirm them. David Kent's letter was hidden in
+the folds of her loose-waisted morning gown, and she fancied it stirred
+like a thing alive to remind her of its message. Ormsby was looking past
+her to the old-fashioned ormolu clock on the high mantel, comparing the
+time with his watch, but he was not oblivious of the telltale flush.
+
+"There is nothing embarrassing about the choosing of a route, is there?"
+he queried.
+
+"Oh, no; being true Americans, we don't know one route from another in our
+own country," she confessed. "But at the western end of it we want to go
+over the Western Pacific."
+
+Ormsby knew the West by rail routes as one who travels much for
+time-killing purposes.
+
+"It's a rather roundabout cow-path," he objected. "The Overland Short Line
+is a good bit more direct; not to mention the service, which is a lot
+better."
+
+But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent's letter, and she
+would not withdraw it.
+
+"Probably you don't own any Western Pacific stock," she suggested. "We do;
+and we mean to be loyal to our salt."
+
+Ormsby laughed.
+
+"I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election of
+Governor Bucks. If I had any, I'd wire my broker to sell."
+
+"We are not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch of
+the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so
+conscienceless as you men."
+
+"Conscience," he repeated half absently; "is there any room for such an
+out-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists? But seriously; you ought
+to get rid of Western Pacific. There can be no possible question of
+conscience involved."
+
+"I don't agree with you," she retorted with prompt decision. "If we were
+to sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a bad
+investment. Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, we
+have no right to sell."
+
+He smiled leniently.
+
+"All of which goes to prove that you three lone women need a guardian. But
+I mustn't keep you any longer from Abigail and the trunks. What time shall
+I send the expediters after your luggage?"
+
+She told him, and went with him to the door.
+
+"Please don't think me ungrateful," she said, when she had thrown the
+night-latch for him. "I don't mean to be."
+
+"I don't think anything of you that I ought not to think: in that I am as
+conscientious as even you could wish. Good-by, until this evening. I'll
+meet you all at the station."
+
+As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself under
+fire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.
+
+Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had she
+forgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon. She was
+a thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness;
+a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had become
+panic-acidulous. And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction,
+it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also the
+passivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less assertive folk.
+
+Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but of
+her tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring's
+summing-up of Elinor's mother as a woman who had taken culture and the
+humanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her native
+hills takes polish--reluctantly, and without prejudice to its inner
+granular structure.
+
+"Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the way
+you do," was her comment when Elinor came back. "You are your father's
+daughters, both of you: there isn't a drop of the Grimkie blood in either
+of you, I do believe."
+
+Elinor was sufficiently her father's daughter to hold her peace under her
+mother's reproaches: also, there was enough of the Grimkie blood in her
+veins to stiffen her in opposition when the need arose. So she said
+nothing.
+
+"Since your Uncle Ichabod made such a desperate mess of that copper
+business in Montana, we have all been next door to poverty, and you know
+it," the mother went on, irritated by Elinor's silence. "I don't care so
+much for myself: your father and I began with nothing, and I can go back
+to nothing, if necessary. But you can't, and neither can Penelope; you'd
+both starve. I should like to know what Brookes Ormsby has done that you
+can't tolerate him."
+
+"It isn't anything he has done, or failed to do," said Elinor, wearily.
+"Please let's not go over it all again, mother."
+
+Mrs. Brentwood let that gun cool while she fired another.
+
+"I suppose he came to say good-by: what is he going to do with himself
+this winter?"
+
+The temptation to equivocate for pure perversity's sake was strong upon
+Elinor, and she yielded to it.
+
+"How should I know? He has the _Amphitrite_ and the Florida coast, hasn't
+he?"
+
+Mrs. Brentwood groaned.
+
+"To think of the way he squanders his money in sheer dissipation!" she
+exclaimed. "Of course, he will take an entire house-party with him, as
+usual, and the cost of that one cruise would set you up in housekeeping."
+
+Penelope laughed with a younger daughter's license. She was a statuesque
+young woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyes
+with an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose that
+was neither the Brentwood, which was severely classic, nor the Grimkie,
+which was pure Puritan renaissance.
+
+"Which is to intimate that he won't have money enough left to do it when
+he comes back," she commented. "I wish there were some way of making him
+believe he had to give me what remains of his income after he has spent
+all he can on the Florida cruise. I'd wear Worth gowns and be lapped in
+luxury for the next ten years at the very least."
+
+"He isn't going to Florida this winter," said Elinor, repenting her of the
+small quibble. "He is going West."
+
+Mrs. Brentwood looked up sharply.
+
+"With us?" she queried.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Penelope clasped her hands and tried to look soulful.
+
+"Oh, Ellie!" she said; "have you----"
+
+"No," Elinor retorted; "I have not."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+THE FLESH-POTS OF EGYPT
+
+The westward journey began at the appointed hour in the evening with the
+resourceful Ormsby in command; and when the outsetting, in which she had
+to sustain only the part of an obedient automaton, was a fact
+accomplished, Elinor settled back into the pillowed corner of her
+sleeping-car section to enjoy the unwonted sensation of being the one
+cared for instead of the caretaker.
+
+She had traveled more or less with her mother and Penelope ever since her
+father's death, and was well used to taking the helm. Experience and the
+responsibilities had made her self-reliant, and her jesting boast that she
+was a dependable young woman was the simple truth. Yet to the most modern
+of girl bachelors there may come moments when the soul harks back to the
+eternal-womanly, and the desire to be petted and looked after and
+safe-conducted is stronger than the bachelor conventions.
+
+Two sections away the inevitable newly married pair posed unconsciously to
+point the moral for Miss Brentwood. She marked the eagerly anticipative
+solicitude of the boyish groom, contrasting it now and then with Ormsby's
+less obtrusive attentions. It was all very absurd and sentimental, she
+thought; and yet she was not without a curious heart-stirring of envy
+provoked by the self-satisfied complacency of the bride.
+
+What had that chit of a girl done to earn her immunity from
+self-defendings and the petty anxieties? Nothing, Elinor decided; at
+least, nothing more purposeful than the swimmer does when he lets himself
+drift with the current. None the less, the immunity was hers, undeniably,
+palpably. For the first time in her life Miss Brentwood found herself
+looking, with a little shudder of withdrawal and dismay, down the possible
+vista--possible to every unmarried woman of twenty-four--milestoned by
+unbroken years of spinsterhood and self-helpings.
+
+Was she strong enough to walk this hedged-up path alone?--single-hearted
+enough to go on holding out against her mother's urgings, against Ormsby's
+masterful wooing, against her own unconquerable longing for a sure
+anchorage in some safe haven of manful care and supervision; all this that
+she might continue to preserve her independence and live the life which,
+despite its drawbacks, was yet her own?
+
+There were times when she doubted her resolution; and this first night of
+the westward journey was one of them. She had thought at one time that she
+might be able to idealize David Kent, but he had gone his way to hew out
+his fortune, taking her upstirrings of his ambition in a purely literal
+and selfish sense, so far as she could determine. And now there was
+Brookes Ormsby. She could by no possibility idealize him. He was a fixed
+fact, stubbornly asserted. Yet he was a great-hearted gentleman, unspoiled
+by his millions, thoughtful always for her comfort, generous,
+self-effacing. Just now, for example, when he had done all, he had seemed
+to divine her wish to be alone and had betaken himself to the
+smoking-compartment.
+
+"I promised not to bore you," he had said, "and I sha'n't. Send the porter
+after me if there is anything I have forgotten to do."
+
+She took up the magazine he had left on the seat beside her and sought to
+put away the disquieting thoughts. But they refused to be dismissed; and
+now among them rose up another, dating back to that idealizing summer at
+the foot of Old Croydon, and having its genesis in a hard saying of her
+mother's.
+
+She closed her eyes, recalling the words and the occasion of them. "You
+are merely wasting time and sentiment on this young upstart of a country
+lawyer, Elinor. So long as you were content to make it a summer day's
+amusement, I had nothing to say; you are old enough and sensible enough to
+choose your own recreations. But in justice to yourself, no less than to
+him, you must let it end with our going home. You haven't money enough for
+two."
+
+Her eyes grew hot under the closed lids when she remembered. At the time
+the hard saying was evoked there was money enough for two, if David Kent
+would have shared it. But he had held his peace and gone away, and now
+there was not enough for two.
+
+Elinor faced her major weakness unflinchingly. She was not a slave to the
+luxuries--the luxuries of the very rich. On the contrary, she had tried to
+make herself believe that hardness was a part of her creed. But latterly,
+she had been made to see that there was a formidable array of things which
+she had been calling comforts: little luxuries which Brookes Ormsby's wife
+might reckon among the simplest necessities of the daily life, but which
+David Kent's wife might have to forego; nay, things which Elinor Brentwood
+might presently have to forego. For she compelled herself to front the
+fact of the diminished patrimony squarely. So long as the modest Western
+Pacific dividends were forthcoming, they could live comfortably and
+without pinching. But failing these----
+
+"No, I'm not great enough," she confessed, with a little shiver. "I should
+be utterly miserable. If I could afford to indulge in ideals it would be
+different; but I can't--not when one word of mine will build a barrier so
+high that all the soul-killing little skimpings can never climb over it.
+And besides, I owe something to mother and Nell."
+
+It was the final straw. When any weakness of the human heart can find a
+seeming virtue to go hand in hand with it, the battle is as good as lost;
+and at that moment Brookes Ormsby, placidly refilling his short pipe in
+the smoking-room of the Pullman, was by no means in the hopeless case he
+was sometimes tempted to fancy himself.
+
+As may be surmised, a diligent suitor, old enough to plan thoughtfully,
+and yet young enough to simulate the youthful ardor of a lover whose hair
+has not begun to thin at the temples, would lose no ground in a three
+days' journey and the opportunities it afforded.
+
+In Penelope's phrase, Elinor "suffered him", enjoying her freedom from
+care like a sleepy kitten; shutting the door on the past and keeping it
+shut until the night when their through sleeper was coupled to the Western
+Pacific Flyer at A.& T. Junction. But late that evening, when she was
+rummaging in her hand-bag for a handkerchief, she came upon David Kent's
+letter and read it again.
+
+"Loring tells me you are coming West," he wrote. "I assume there is at
+least one chance in three that you will pass through Gaston. If you do,
+and if the hour is not altogether impossible, I should like to meet your
+train. One thing among the many the past two years have denied me--the
+only thing I have cared much about, I think--is the sight of your face. I
+shall be very happy if you will let me look at you--just for the minute or
+two the train may stop."
+
+There was more of it; a good bit more: but it was all guarded commonplace,
+opening no window in the heart of the man David Kent. Yet even in the
+commonplace she found some faint interlinings of the change in him; not a
+mere metamorphosis of the outward man, as a new environment might make,
+but a radical change, deep and biting, like the action of a strong acid
+upon a fine-grained metal.
+
+She returned the letter to its envelope, and after looking up Gaston on
+the time-table fell into a heart-stirring reverie, with unseeing eyes
+fixed on the restful blackness of the night rushing rearward past the car
+windows.
+
+"He has forgotten," she said, with a little lip-curl of disappointment.
+"He thinks he ought to remember, and he is trying--trying because Grantham
+said something that made him think he ought to try. But it's no use. It
+was only a little summer idyl, and we have both outlived it."
+
+She was still gazing steadfastly upon the wall of outer darkness when the
+porter began to make down the berths and Penelope came over to sit in the
+opposite seat. A moment later the younger sister made a discovery, or
+thought she did.
+
+"Why, Elinor Brentwood!" she said. "I do believe you are crying!"
+
+Elinor's smile was serenity undisturbed.
+
+"What a vivid imagination you have, Nell, dear," she scoffed. Then she
+changed the subject arbitrarily: "Is mother quite comfortable? Did you
+have the porter put a screen in her window?--you know she always insists
+she can't breathe without it."
+
+Penelope evaded the queries and took her turn at subject-wrenching--an art
+in which she excelled.
+
+"We are on our own railroad now, aren't we?" she asked, with purposeful
+lack-interest. "And--let me see--isn't Mr. Kent at some little town we
+pass through?"
+
+"It is a city," said Elinor. "And the name is Gaston."
+
+"I remember now," Penelope rejoined. "I wonder if we shall see him?"
+
+"It is most unlikely. He does not know we are coming, and he wouldn't be
+looking for us."
+
+Penelope's fine eyes clouded. At times Elinor's thought-processes were as
+plain as print to the younger sister; at other times they were not.
+
+"I should think the least we could do would be to let him know," she
+ventured. "Does anybody know what time the train passes Gaston?"
+
+"At seven-fifteen to-morrow evening," was the unguarded reply; and
+Penelope drew her own conclusions from the ready answer and the folded
+time-table in Elinor's lap.
+
+"Well, why don't you send him a wire? I'm sure I should."
+
+"Why should I?" said Elinor, warily.
+
+"Oh, I don't know: any other young woman of his acquaintance would, I
+fancy. I have half a mind to do it myself. _I_ like him, if you don't care
+for him any more."
+
+Thus Penelope; and a little while afterward, finding herself in the
+library compartment with blanks and pen and ink convenient and nothing
+better to do, she impulsively made the threat good in a ten-word message
+to Kent.
+
+"If he should happen to drop in unexpectedly it will give Ellie the shock
+of her life," she mused; and the telegram was smuggled into the hands of
+the porter to be sent as occasion offered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those who knew Mr. Brookes Ormsby best were wont to say that the world of
+action, a world lusting avidly for resourceful men, had lost the chance of
+acquiring a promising leader when he was born heir to the Ormsby millions.
+Be that as it may, he made the most of such opportunities for the
+exercising of his gift as came to one for whom the long purse leveled most
+barriers; had been making the most of the present leaguer of a woman's
+heart--a citadel whose capitulation was not to be compassed by mere
+money-might, he would have said.
+
+Up to the final day of the long westward flight all things had gone well
+with him. True, Elinor had not thawed visibly, but she had been tolerant;
+Penelope had amused herself at no one's expense save her own--a boon for
+which Ormsby did not fail to be duly thankful; and Mrs. Brentwood had
+contributed her mite by keeping hands off.
+
+But at the dining-car luncheon on the last day's run, Penelope,
+languishing at a table for two with an unresponsive Ormsby for a
+vis-a-vis, made sly mention of the possible recrudescence of one David
+Kent at a place called Gaston: this merely to note the effect upon an
+unresponsive table-mate.
+
+In Penelope's observings there was no effect perceptible. Ormsby said
+"Ah?" and asked if she would have more of the salad. But later, in a
+contemplative half-hour with his pipe in the smoking-compartment, he let
+the scrap of information sink in and take root.
+
+Hitherto Kent had been little more than a name to him; a name he had never
+heard on Elinor's lips. But if love be blind in the teens and twenties, it
+is more than apt to have a keen gift of insight in the thirties and
+beyond. Hence, by the time Ormsby had come to the second filling of his
+pipe, he had pieced together bits of half-forgotten gossip about the
+Croydon summer, curious little reticences on Elinor's part, vague hints
+let fall by Mrs. Brentwood; enough to enable him to chart the rock on
+which his love-argosy was drifting, and to name it--David Kent.
+
+Now to a well-knit man of the world--who happens to be a heaven-born
+diplomatist into the bargain--to be forewarned is to be doubly armed. At
+the end of the half-hour of studious solitude in the smoking-room, Ormsby
+had pricked out his course on the chart to a boat's-length; had trimmed
+his sails to the minutest starting of a sheet. A glance at his watch and
+another at the time-table gave him the length of his respite. Six hours
+there were; and a dining-car dinner intervened. Those six hours, and the
+dinner, he decided, must win or lose the race.
+
+Picturing for ourselves, if we may, how nine men out of ten would have
+given place to panic-ardor, turning a possible victory into a hopeless
+rout, let us hold aloof and mark the generalship of the tenth, who chances
+to be the heaven-born.
+
+For five of the six precious hours Ormsby merely saw to it that Elinor was
+judiciously marooned. Then the dining-car was reopened and the evening
+meal was announced. Waiting until a sufficient number of passengers had
+gone forward to insure a crowded car, Ormsby let his party fall in with
+the tail of the procession, and the inevitable happened. Single seats only
+could be had, and Elinor was compelled to dine in solemn silence at a
+table with three strangers.
+
+Dinner over, there remained but twenty minutes of the respite; but the
+diplomatist kept his head, going back to the sleeping-car with his charges
+and dropping into the seat beside Elinor with the light of calm assurance
+in his eye.
+
+"You are quite comfortable?" he began. "Sha'n't I have the Presence in the
+buffet make you a cup of tea? That in the diner didn't deserve the name."
+
+She was regarding him with curious anger in the gray eyes, and her reply
+quite ignored the kindly offer of refreshment.
+
+"You are the pink of dragomans," she said. "Don't you want to go and
+smoke?"
+
+"To be entirely consistent, I suppose I ought to," he confessed, wondering
+if his throw had failed. "Do you want me to go?"
+
+"I have been alone all the afternoon: I can endure it a little while
+longer, I presume."
+
+Ormsby permitted himself a single heart-throb of exultation. He had
+deliberately gone about to break down her poise, her only barrier of
+defense, and it began to look as if he had succeeded.
+
+"I couldn't help it, you know," he said, catching his cue swiftly. "There
+are times when I'm obliged to keep away from you--times when every fiber
+of me rebels against the restraints of the false position you have thrust
+me into. When I'm taken that way I don't dare play with the fire."
+
+"I wish I could know how much you mean by that," she said musingly. Deep
+down in her heart she knew she was as far as ever from loving this man;
+but his love, or the insistent urging of it, was like a strong current
+drifting her whither she would not go.
+
+"I mean all that an honest man can mean," he rejoined. "I have fought like
+a soldier for standing-room in the place you have assigned me; I have
+tried sincerely--and stupidly, you will say--to be merely your friend,
+just the best friend you ever had. But it's no use. Coming or going, I
+shall always be your lover."
+
+"Please don't," she said, neither coldly nor warmly. "You are getting over
+into the domain of the very young people when you say things like that."
+
+It was an unpleasant thing to say, and he was not beyond wincing a little.
+None the less, he would not be turned aside.
+
+"You'll overlook it in me if I've pressed the thing too hard on the side
+of sentiment, won't you? Apart from the fact that I feel that way, I've
+been going on the supposition that you'd like it, if you could only make
+up your mind to like me."
+
+"I do like you," she admitted; "more than any one I have ever known, I
+think."
+
+The drumming wheels and a long-drawn trumpet blast from the locomotive
+made a shield of sound to isolate them. The elderly banker in the opposite
+section was nodding over his newspaper; and the newly married ones were
+oblivious, each to all else but the other. Mrs. Brentwood was apparently
+sleeping peacefully three seats away; and Penelope was invisible.
+
+"There was a time when I should have begged hard for something more,
+Elinor; but now I'm willing to take what I can get, and be thankful. Will
+you give me the right to make you as happy as I can on the unemotional
+basis?"
+
+She felt herself slipping.
+
+"If you could fully understand----"
+
+"I understand that you don't love me, in the novelist's sense of the word,
+and I am not asking more than you can give. But if you can give me the
+little now, and more when I have won it--don't curl your lip at me,
+please: I'm trying to put it as mildly as I can."
+
+She was looking at him level-eyed, and he could have sworn that she was
+never calmer or more self-possessed.
+
+"I don't know why you should want my promise--or any woman's--on such
+conditions," she said evenly.
+
+"But I do," he insisted.
+
+The lights of a town suburb were flitting past the windows, and the
+monotonous song of the tires was drowned in the shrill crescendo of the
+brakes. She turned from him suddenly and laid her cheek against the
+grateful cool of the window-pane. But when he took her hand she did not
+withdraw it.
+
+"Is it mine, Elinor?" he whispered. "You see, I'm not asking much."
+
+"Is it worth taking--by itself?"
+
+"You make me very happy," he said quietly; and just then the train stopped
+with a jerk, and a shuffling bustle of station-platform noises floated in
+through the open deck transoms of the car.
+
+As if the solution of continuity had been a call to arouse her, Elinor
+freed her hand with a swift little wrench and sat bolt upright in her
+corner.
+
+"This station--do you know the name of it?" she asked, fighting hard for
+the self-control that usually came so easily.
+
+Ormsby consulted his watch.
+
+"I am not quite sure. It ought to be----"
+
+He broke off when he saw that she was no longer listening to him. There
+was a stir in the forward vestibule, and the porter came in with a
+hand-bag. At his heels was a man in a rough-weather box-coat; a youngish
+man, clean-shaven and wind-tanned to a healthy bronze, with an eager face
+and alert eyes that made an instant inventory of the car and its
+complement of passengers. So much Ormsby saw. Then Penelope stood up in
+her place to greet the new-comer.
+
+"Why, Mr. Kent!" she exclaimed. "Are you really going on with us? How nice
+of you!"
+
+Elinor turned coolly upon her seat-mate, self-possession once more firmly
+seated in the saddle.
+
+"Did you know Mr. Kent was going to board the train here?" she asked
+abruptly.
+
+"Do you mean the gentleman Penelope has waylaid? I haven't the pleasure of
+his acquaintance. Will you introduce us?"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+JOURNEYS END--
+
+It had been a day of upsettings for David Kent, beginning with the late
+breakfast at which Neltje, the night watchman at the railway station, had
+brought him Penelope's telegram.
+
+At ten he had a case in court: Shotwell _vs_. Western Pacific Co., damages
+for stock-killing; for the plaintiff--Hawk; for the defendant--Kent. With
+the thought that he was presently going to see Elinor again, Kent went
+gaily to the battle legal, meaning to wring victory out of a jury drawn
+for the most part from the plaintiff's stock-raising neighbors. By dint of
+great perseverance he managed to prolong the fight until the middle of the
+afternoon, was worsted, as usual, and so far lost his temper as to get
+himself called down by the judge, MacFarlane.
+
+Whereupon he went back to the Farquhar Building and to his office and sat
+down at the type-writer to pound out a letter to the general counsel,
+resigning his sinecure. The Shotwell case was the third he had lost for
+the company in a single court term. Justice for the railroad company,
+under present agrarian conditions, was not to be had in the lower courts,
+and he was weary of fighting the losing battle. Therefore----
+
+In the midst of the type-rattling the boy that served the few occupied
+offices in the Farquhar Building had brought the afternoon mail. It
+included a letter from Loring, and there was another reversive upheaval
+for the exile. Loring's business at the capital was no longer a secret. He
+had been tendered the resident management of the Western Pacific, with
+headquarters on the ground, and had accepted. His letter was a brief note,
+asking Kent to report at once for legal duty in the larger field.
+
+"I am not fairly in the saddle yet, and shall not be for a week or so,"
+wrote the newly appointed manager. "But I find I am going to need a
+level-headed lawyer at my elbow from the jump--one who knows the State
+political ropes and isn't afraid of a scrap. Come in on Number Three
+to-day, if you can; if not, send a wire and say when I may look for you.
+Or, better still, wire anyway."
+
+David Kent struggled with his emotions until he had got his feet down to
+the solid earth again. Then he tore up the half-written resignation and
+began to smite things in order for the flight. Could he make Number Three?
+Since that was the train named in Penelope's message, nothing short of a
+catastrophe should prevent his making it.
+
+He did make it, with an hour to spare; an hour which he proceeded to turn
+into a time of sharp trial for the patient telegraph operator at the
+station, with his badgerings of the man for news of Number Three. The
+train reported--he took it as a special miracle wrought in his behalf that
+the Flyer was for this once abreast of her schedule--he fell to tramping
+up and down the long platform, deep in anticipative prefigurings. The
+mills of the years grind many grists besides the trickling stream of the
+hours: would he find Miss Brentwood as he had left her? Could he be sure
+of meeting her on the frank, friendly footing of the Croydon summer? He
+feared not; feared all things--lover-like.
+
+He hoped there would be no absence-reared barrier to be painfully leveled.
+A man among men, a leader in some sort, and in battle a soldier who could
+hew his way painstakingly, if not dramatically, to his end, David Kent was
+no carpet knight, and he knew his lack. Would Elinor make things easy for
+him, as she used to daily in the somewhat difficult social atmosphere of
+the exclusive summer hotel?
+
+Measuring it out in all its despairing length and breadth after the fact,
+he was deeply grateful to Penelope. Missing her ready help at the moment
+of cataclysms when he entered the sleeping-car, he might have betrayed
+himself. His first glance lighted on Elinor and Ormsby, and he needed no
+gloss on the love-text. He had delayed too long; had asked too much of the
+Fates, and Atropos, the scissors-bearing sister, had snipped his thread of
+hope.
+
+It is one of the consequences of civilization that we are denied the
+privilege of unmasking at the behest of the elemental emotions; that we
+are constrained to bleed decorously. Making shift to lean heavily on
+Penelope, Kent came through without doing or saying anything unseemly.
+Mrs. Brentwood, who had been sleeping with one eye open, and that eye upon
+Elinor and Ormsby, made sure that she had now no special reason to be
+ungracious to David Kent. For the others, Ormsby was good-naturedly suave;
+Elinor was by turns unwontedly kind and curiously silent; and
+Penelope--but, as we say, it was to Penelope that Kent owed most.
+
+So it came about that the outcome of the cataclysm was a thing which
+happens often enough in a conventionalized world. David Kent, with his
+tragedy fresh upon him, dropped informally into place as one of the party
+of five; and of all the others, Penelope alone suspected how hard he was
+hit. And when all was said; when the new _modus vivendi_ had been fairly
+established and the hour grew late, Kent went voluntarily with Ormsby to
+the smoking-compartment, "to play the string out decently," as he
+afterward confessed to Loring.
+
+"I see you know how to get the most comfort out of your tobacco," said the
+club-man, when they were companionably settled in the men's room and Kent
+produced his pipe and tobacco pouch. "I prefer the pipe myself, for a
+steady thing; but at this time of night a light Castilla fits me pretty
+well. Try one?" tendering his cigar-case.
+
+Fighting shrewdly against a natural prompting to regard Ormsby as an
+hereditary enemy, Kent forced himself to be neighborly.
+
+"I don't mind," he said, returning the pipe to its case. And when the
+Havanas were well alight, and the talk had circled down upon the political
+situation in the State, he was able to bear his part with a fair exterior,
+giving Ormsby an impressionistic outline of the late campaign and the
+conditions that had made the sweeping triumph of the People's Party
+possible.
+
+"We have been coming to it steadily through the last administration, and a
+part of the preceding one," he explained. "Last year the drought cut the
+cereals in half, and the country was too new to stand it without
+borrowing. There was little local capital, and the eastern article was
+hungry, taking all the interest the law allows, and as much more as it
+could get. This year the crop broke all records for abundance, but the
+price is down and the railroads, trying to recoup for two bad years, have
+stiffened the freight rates. The net result is our political overturn."
+
+"Then the railroads and the corporations are not primarily to blame?" said
+Ormsby.
+
+"Oh, no. Corporations here, as elsewhere, are looking out for the present
+dollar, but if the country were generally prosperous, the people would pay
+the tax carelessly, as they do in the older sections. With us it has been
+a sort of Donnybrook Fair: the agricultural voter has shillalahed the head
+he could reach most easily."
+
+The New Yorker nodded. His millions were solidly placed, and he took no
+more than a sportsman's interest in the fluctuations of the stock market.
+
+"Of course, there have been all sorts of rumors East: 'bull' prophecies
+that the triumph of the new party means an era of unexampled prosperity
+for the State--and by consequence for western stocks; 'bear' growlings
+that things are sure to go to the bow-wows under the Bucks regime. What do
+you think of it?"
+
+Kent blew a series of smoke rings and watched them rise to become a part
+of the stratified tobacco cloud overhead before replying.
+
+"I may as well confess that I am not entirely an unprejudiced observer,"
+he admitted. "For one thing, I am in the legal department of one of the
+best-hated of the railroads; and for another, Governor Bucks, Meigs, the
+attorney-general, and Hendricks, the new secretary of State, are men whom
+I know as, it is safe to say, the general public doesn't know them. If I
+could be sure that these three men are going to be able to control their
+own party majority in the Assembly, I should take the first train East and
+make my fortune selling tips in Wall Street."
+
+"You put it graphically. Then the Bucks idea is likely to prove a
+disturbing element on 'Change?"
+
+"It is; always providing it can dominate its own majority. But this is by
+no means certain. The political earthquake is essentially a popular
+protest against hard conditions brought about, as the voters seem to
+believe, by the oppressions of the alien corporations and extortionate
+railroad rates. Yet there are plenty of steady-going, conservative men in
+the movement; men who have no present idea of revolutionizing things.
+Marston, the lieutenant-governor, is one of that kind. It all depends on
+whether these men will allow themselves to be whipped into line by the
+leaders, who, as I am very well convinced, are a set of conscienceless
+demagogues, fighting solely for their own hand."
+
+Ormsby nodded again.
+
+"You are likely to have good hunting this winter, Mr. Kent. It hasn't
+begun yet, I take it?"
+
+"Oh, no; the Assembly does not convene for a fortnight, and nobody short
+of an inspired prophet can foretell what legislation will be sprung. But
+one thing is safe to count on: the leaders are out for spoils. They mean
+to rob somebody, and, if my guess is worth anything, they are sharp enough
+to try first to get their schemes legalized by having enabling laws passed
+by the Assembly."
+
+"Um," said the eastern man. Then he took the measure of his companion in a
+shrewd overlook. "You are the man on the ground, Mr. Kent, and I'll ask a
+straightforward question. If you had a friend owning stock in one of the
+involved railways, what would you advise?"
+
+Kent smiled.
+
+"We needn't make it a hypothetical case. If I had the right to advise Mrs.
+Brentwood and her daughters, I should counsel them to sit tight in the
+boat for the present."
+
+"Would you? But Western Pacific has gone off several points already."
+
+"I know it has; and unfortunately, Mrs. Brentwood bought in at the top of
+the market. That is why I counsel delay. If she sells now, she is sure to
+lose. If she holds on, there is an even chance for a spasmodic upward
+reaction before worse things happen."
+
+"Perhaps: you know more about the probabilities than I pretend to. But on
+the other hand, she may lose more if she holds on."
+
+Kent bit deep into his cigar.
+
+"We must see to it that she doesn't lose, Mr. Ormsby."
+
+The club-man laughed broadly.
+
+"Isn't that a good bit like saying that the shallop must see to it that
+the wind doesn't blow too hard for it?"
+
+"Possibly. But in the sorriest wreck there is usually some small chance
+for salvage. I understand Mrs. Brentwood's holding is not very large?"
+
+"A block of some three thousand shares, held jointly by her and her two
+daughters, I believe."
+
+"Exactly: not enough to excite anybody's cupidity; and yet enough to turn
+the scale if there should ever be a fight for a majority control."
+
+"There is no such fight in prospect, is there?"
+
+"No; not that I know of. But I was thinking of the possibilities. If a
+smash comes there will be a good deal of horse-swapping in the middle of
+the stream--buying up of depressed stocks by people who need the lines
+worse than the original owners do."
+
+"I see," said Ormsby. "Then you would counsel delay?"
+
+"I should; and I'll go a step farther. I am on the inside, in a way, and
+any hint I can give you for Miss--for Mrs. Brentwood's benefit shall be
+promptly forthcoming."
+
+"By Jove! that's decent," said Ormsby, heartily. "You are a friend worth
+having, Mr. Kent. But which 'inside' do you mean--the railroad or the
+political?"
+
+"Oh, the railroad, of course. And while I think of it, my office will be
+in the Quintard Building; and you--I suppose you will put up at the
+Wellington?"
+
+"For the present, we all shall. It is Mrs. Brentwood's notion to take a
+furnished house later on for herself and daughters, if she can find one.
+I'll keep in touch with you."
+
+"Do. It may come to a bit of quick wiring when our chance arrives. You
+know Loring--Grantham Loring?"
+
+"Passably well. I came across him one summer in the mountains of Peru,
+where he was managing a railroad. He is a mighty good sort. I had mountain
+fever, and he took me in and did for me."
+
+"He is with us now," said David Kent; "the newly appointed general manager
+of the Western Pacific."
+
+"Good!" said the club-man "I think a lot of him; he is an all-around
+dependable fellow, and plenty capable. I'm glad to know he has caught on
+higher up."
+
+The locomotive whistle was droning again, and a dodging procession of
+red-eyed switch-lights flicked past the windows. Kent stood up and flung
+away the stump of his cigar.
+
+"The capital," he announced. "I'll go back with you and help out with the
+shawl-strap things." And in the vestibule he added: "I spoke of Loring
+because he will be with us in anything we have to do in Mrs. Brentwood's
+behalf. Look him up when you have time--fourth floor of the Quintard."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+OF THE MAKING OF LAWS
+
+The session, the shortest in the history of the State, and thus far the
+least eventful, was nearing its close; and the alarmists who had
+prophesied evil and evil only of the "Populist" victory were fast losing
+credit with the men of their own camp and with the country at large.
+
+After the orthodox strife over the speakership of the House, and the
+equally orthodox wrangle over contested seats, the State Assembly had
+settled down to routine business, despatching it with such unheard-of
+celerity as to win columns of approval from the State press as a whole;
+though there were not wanting a few radical editors to raise the
+ante-election cry of reform, and to ask pointedly when it was to begin.
+
+Notwithstanding the lack of alarms, however, the six weeks had been a
+period of unceasing vigilance on the part of the interests which were
+supposed to be in jeopardy. Every alien corporation owning property and
+doing business in the State had its quota of watchful defenders on the
+ground; men who came and went, in the lobbies of the capitol, in the
+visitors' galleries, at the receptions; men who said little, but who saw
+and heard all things down to the small talk of the corridors and the
+clubs, and the gossip of the hotel rotundas.
+
+David Kent was of this silent army of observation, doing watch-dog duty
+for the Western Pacific; thankful enough, if the truth be told, to have a
+thing to do which kept him from dwelling overmuch upon the wreck of his
+hopes. But in the closing days of the session, when a despatchful
+Assembly, anxious to be quit of its task, had gone into night sittings,
+the anodyne drug of work began to lose its effect.
+
+The Brentwoods had taken furnished apartments in Tejon Avenue, two squares
+from the capitol, and Kent had called no oftener than good breeding
+prescribed. Yet their accessibility, and his unconquerable desire to sear
+his wound in the flame that had caused it, were constant temptations, and
+he was battling with them for the hundredth time on the Friday night when
+he sat in the House gallery listening to a perfunctory debate which
+concerned itself with a bill touching State water-ways.
+
+"Heavens! This thing is getting to be little short of deadly!" fumed
+Crenshawe, his right-hand neighbor, who was also a member of the corps of
+observation. "I'm going to the club for a game of pool. Won't you come
+along?"
+
+Kent nodded and left his seat with the bored one. But in the great rotunda
+he changed his mind.
+
+"You'll find plenty of better players than I am at the club," he said in
+extenuation. "I think I'll smoke a whiff or two here and go back. They
+can't hold on much longer for to-night."
+
+Five minutes later, when he had lighted a cigar and was glancing over the
+evening paper, two other members of the corporation committee of safety
+came down from the Senate gallery and stopped opposite Kent's pillar to
+struggle into their overcoats.
+
+"It's precisely as I wrote our people two weeks ago--timidity scare, pure
+and simple," one of them was saying. "I've a mind to start home to-morrow.
+There is nothing doing here, or going to be done."
+
+"No," said the other. "If it wasn't for House Bill Twenty-nine, I'd go
+to-night. They will adjourn to-morrow or Monday."
+
+"House Bill Twenty-nine is much too dead to bury," was the reassuring
+rejoinder. "The committee is ours, and the bill will not be heard of again
+at this session. If that is all you are holding on for----"
+
+They passed out of earshot, and Kent folded his newspaper absently. House
+Bill Twenty-nine had been the one measure touching the sensitive "vested
+interests"; the one measure for the suppression of which the corporations'
+lobby had felt called on to take steps. It was an omnibus bill put forth
+as a substitute for the existing law defining the status of foreign
+corporations. It had originated in the governor's office,--a fact which
+Kent had ferreted out within twenty-four hours of its first reading,--and
+for that reason he had procured a printed copy, searching it diligently
+for the hidden menace he was sure it embodied.
+
+When the search proved fruitless, he had seen the bill pass the House by a
+safe majority, had followed it to the Senate, and in a cunningly worded
+amendment tacked on in the upper house had found what he was seeking.
+Under the existing law foreign corporations were subject to State
+supervision, and were dealt with as presumably unfriendly aliens. But the
+Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine fairly swept the interstate
+corporations, as such, out of existence, by making it obligatory upon them
+to acquire the standing of local corporations. Charters were to be refiled
+with the secretary of State; resident directories and operating
+headquarters were to be established within the boundaries and jurisdiction
+of the State; in short, the State proposed, by the terms of the new law,
+to deal only with creatures of its own creation.
+
+Kent saw, or thought he saw, the fine hand of the junto in all this. It
+was a still hunt in which the longest way around was the shortest way
+home. Like all new-country codes, the organic law of the State favored
+local corporations, and it might be argued that a bill placing the foreign
+companies on a purely local footing was an unmixed blessing to the aliens.
+But on the other hand, an unprincipled executive might easily make the new
+law an engine of extortion. To go no further into the matter than the
+required refiling of charters: the State constitution gave the secretary
+of State quasi-judicial powers. It was within his province to pass upon
+the applications for chartered rights, and to deny them if the question
+_pro bono publico_ were involved.
+
+Kent put two and two together, saw the wide door of exactions which might
+be opened, and passed the word of warning among his associates; after
+which he had watched the course of the amended House Bill Twenty-nine with
+interest sharp-set, planning meanwhile with Hildreth, the editor of the
+_Daily Argus_, an expose which should make plain the immense possibilities
+for corruption opened up by the proposed law; a journalistic salvo of
+publicity to be fired as a last resort.
+
+The measure as amended had passed the Senate without debate, and had gone
+back to the House. Here, after the second reading, and in the very hour
+when the _Argus_ editorial was getting itself cast in the linotypes, there
+was a hitch. The member from the Rio Blanco, favoring the measure in all
+its parts, and fearful only lest corporation gold might find a technical
+flaw in it, moved that it be referred to the committee on judiciary for a
+report on its constitutionality; and, accordingly, to the committee on
+judiciary it had gone.
+
+Kent recalled the passing of the crisis, remembering how he had hastened
+to telephone the _Argus_ editor to kill the expose at the last moment. The
+incident was now a month in the past, and the committee had not yet
+reported; would never report, Kent imagined. He knew the personnel of the
+committee on judiciary; knew that at least three members of it were down
+on the list, made up at the beginning of the session by his colleagues in
+the army of observation, as "approachables". Also, he knew by inference at
+least, that these three men had been approached, not without success, and
+that House Bill Twenty-nine, with its fee-gathering amendment, was safely
+shelved.
+
+"It's an ill-smelling muck-heap!" he frowned, recalling the incidents of
+the crisis at the suggestion let fall by the two outgoing lobbyists. "And
+so much of this dog-watch as isn't sickeningly demoralizing is deadly
+dull, as Crenshawe puts it. If I had anywhere to go, I'd cut the galleries
+for to-night."
+
+He was returning the newspaper to his pocket when it occurred to him that
+his object in buying it had been to note the stock quotations; a daily
+duty which, for Elinor's sake, he had never omitted. Whereupon he reopened
+it and ran his eye down the lists. There was a decided upward tendency in
+westerns. Overland Short Line had gained two points; and Western
+Pacific----
+
+He held the paper under the nearest electric globe to make sure: Western
+Pacific, preferred, was quoted at fifty-eight and a half, which was one
+point and a half above the Brentwood purchase price.
+
+One minute later an excited life-saver was shut in the box of the public
+telephone, gritting his teeth at the inanity of the central operator who
+insisted on giving him "A-1224" instead of "A-1234," the Hotel Wellington.
+
+"No, no! Can't you understand? I want twelve-thirty-four; one, two,
+_three_, four; the Hotel Wellington."
+
+There was more skirling of bells, another nerve-trying wait, and at last
+the clerk of the hotel answered.
+
+"What name did you say? Oh, it's you, is it, Mr. Kent? Ormsby? Mr. Brookes
+Ormsby? No, he isn't here; he went out about two minutes ago. What's that
+you say? _Damn_? Well, I'm sorry, too. No message that I can take? All
+right. Good-by."
+
+This was the beginning. For the middle part Kent burst out of the
+telephone-box and took the nearest short-cut through the capitol grounds
+for the street-car corner. At a quarter of nine he was cross-questioning
+the clerk face to face in the lobby of the Wellington. There was little
+more to be learned about Ormsby. The club-man had left his key and gone
+out. He was in evening dress, and had taken a cab at the hotel entrance.
+
+Kent dashed across to his rooms and, in a feverish race against time, made
+himself fit to chase a man in evening dress. There was no car in sight
+when he came down, and he, too, took a cab with an explosive order to the
+driver: "124 Tejon Avenue, and be quick about it!"
+
+It was the housemaid that answered his ring at the door of the Brentwood
+apartment. She was a Swede, a recent importation; hence Kent learned
+nothing beyond the bare fact that the ladies had gone out. "With Mr.
+Ormsby?" he asked.
+
+"Yaas; Aye tank it vill pee dat yentlemans."
+
+The pursuer took the road again, rather unhopefully. There were a dozen
+places where Ormsby might have taken his charges. Among them there was the
+legislative reception at Portia Van Brock's. Kent flipped a figurative
+coin, and gave the order for Alameda Square. The reception was perhaps the
+least unlikely place of the dozen.
+
+He was no more than fashionably late at the Van Brock house, and
+fortunately he was able to reckon himself among the chosen few for whom
+Miss Portia's door swung on hospitable hinges at all hours. Loring had
+known her in Washington, and he had stood sponsor for Kent in the first
+week of the exile's residence at the capital. Thereafter she had taken
+Kent up on his own account, and by now he was deep in her debt. For one
+thing, she had set the fashion in the matter of legislative
+receptions--her detractors, knowing nothing whatever about it, hinted that
+she had been an amateur social lobbyist in Washington, playing the game
+for the pure zest of it--and at these functions Kent had learned many
+things pertinent to his purpose as watch-dog for the railroad company and
+legal adviser to his chief--things not named openly on the floor of the
+House or of the Senate chamber.
+
+There was a crush in the ample mansion in Alameda Square, as there always
+was at Miss Van Brock's "open evenings," and when Kent came down from the
+cloakroom he had to inch his way by littles through the crowded
+reception-parlors in the search for the Brentwood party. It was
+unsuccessful at first; but later, catching a glimpse of Elinor at the
+piano, and another of Penelope inducting an up-country legislator into the
+mysteries of social small-talk, he breathed freer. His haphazard guess had
+hit the mark, and the finding of Ormsby was now only a question of
+moments.
+
+It was Miss Van Brock herself who told him where to look for the
+club-man--though not at his first asking.
+
+"You did come, then," she said, giving him her hand with a frank little
+smile of welcome. "Some one said you were not going to be frivolous any
+more, and I wondered if you would take it out on me. Have you been at the
+night session?"
+
+"Yes; at what you and your frivolities have left of it. A good third of
+the Solons seem to be sitting in permanence in Alameda Square."
+
+"'Solons'," she repeated. "That recalls Editor Brownlo's little joke--only
+he didn't mean it. He wrote of them as 'Solons,' but the printer got it
+'solans'. The member from Caliente read the article and the word stuck in
+his mind. In an unhappy hour he asked Colonel Mack's boy--Harry, the
+irrepressible, you know--to look it up for him. Harry did it, and of
+course took the most public occasion he could find to hand in his answer.
+'It's geese, Mr. Hackett!' he announced triumphantly; and after we were
+all through laughing at him the member from the warm place turned it just
+as neatly as a veteran. 'Well, I'm Hackett,' he said."
+
+David Kent laughed, as he was in duty bound, but he still had Ormsby on
+his mind.
+
+"I see you have Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters here: can you tell me
+where I can find Mr. Brookes Ormsby?"
+
+"I suppose I could if I should try. But you mustn't hurry me. There is a
+vacant corner in that davenport beyond the piano: please put me there and
+fetch me an ice. I'll wait for you."
+
+He did as he was bidden, and when she was served he stood over her,
+wondering, as other men had wondered, what was the precise secret of her
+charm. Loring had told him Miss Van Brock's story. She was southern born,
+the only child of a somewhat ill-considered match between a young
+California lawyer, wire-pulling in the national capital in the interest of
+the Central Pacific Railroad, and a Virginia belle tasting the delights of
+her first winter in Washington.
+
+Later, the young lawyer's state, or his employers, had sent him to
+Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown
+up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of
+frank commercialism. Inheriting her mother's rare beauty of face and form,
+and uniting with it a sympathetic gift in grasp of detail, political and
+other, she soon became her father's confidante and loyal partizan, taking
+the place, as a daughter might, of the ambitious young wife and mother,
+who had set her heart on seeing the Van Brock name on the roll of the
+United States Senate.
+
+Rensselaer Van Brock had died before the senatorial dream could be
+realized, but not before he had made a sufficient number of lucky
+investments to leave his daughter the arbitress of her own future. What
+that future should be, not even Loring could guess. Since her father's
+death Miss Van Brock had been a citizen of the world. With a widowed aunt
+for the shadowiest of chaperons, she had drifted with the tide of
+inclination, coming finally to rest in the western capital for no better
+reason, perhaps, than that some portion of her interest-bearing securities
+were emblazoned with the great seal of this particular western State.
+
+Kent was thinking of Loring's recountal as he stood looking down on her.
+Other women were younger--and with features more conventionally beautiful;
+Kent could find a round dozen within easy eye-reach, to say nothing of the
+calm-eyed, queenly _improvisatrice_ at the piano--his constant standard of
+all womanly charm and grace. Unconsciously he fell to comparing the two,
+his hostess and his love, and was brought back to things present by a
+sharp reminder from Portia.
+
+"Stop looking at Miss Brentwood that way, Mr. David. She is not for you;
+and you are keeping me waiting."
+
+He smiled down on her.
+
+"It is the law of compensation. I fancy you have kept many a man
+waiting--and will keep many another."
+
+There was a little tang of bitterness in her laugh.
+
+"You remind me of the time when I went home from school--oh, years and
+years ago. Old Chloe--she was my black mammy, you know--had a grown
+daughter of her own, and her effort to dispose of her 'M'randy' was a
+standing joke in the family. In answer to my stereotyped question she
+stood back and folded her arms. 'Naw, honey; dat M'randy ain't ma'ied yit.
+She gwine be des lak you; look pretty, an' say, _Howdy! Misteh Jawnson_,
+an' go 'long by awn turrer side de road.'"
+
+"A very pretty little fable," said Kent. "And the moral?"
+
+"Is that I amuse myself with you--all of you; and in your turn you make
+use of me--or you think you do. Of what use can _I_ be to Mr. David Kent
+this evening?"
+
+"See how you misjudge me!" he protested. "My errand here to-night is
+purely charitable. Which brings me back to Ormsby: did you say you could
+tell me where to look for him?"
+
+"He is in the smoking-room with five or six other tobacco misanthropes.
+What do you want of him?"
+
+"I want to say two words in his ear; after which I shall vanish and make
+room for my betters."
+
+Miss Van Brock was gazing steadfastly at the impassioned face lighted by
+the piano candles.
+
+"Is it about Miss Brentwood?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"In a way--yes," he confessed.
+
+She rose and stood beside him--a bewitching figure of a woman who knew her
+part in the human comedy and played it well.
+
+"Is it wise, David?" she asked softly. "I am not denying the
+possibilities: you might come between them if you should try--I'm rather
+afraid you could. But you mustn't, you know; it's too late. You've marred
+her, between you; or rather that convention, which makes a woman deaf,
+blind and dumb until a man has fairly committed himself, has marred her.
+For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him: for his
+sake she could never be quite the same to you."
+
+He drew apart from her, frowning.
+
+"If I should say that I don't fully understand what you mean?" he
+rejoined.
+
+"I should retort by saying something extremely uncomplimentary about your
+lack of perspicacity," she cut in maliciously.
+
+"I beg pardon," he said, a little stiffly. "You are laboring under an
+entirely wrong impression. What I have to say to Mr. Brookes Ormsby does
+not remotely concern the matter you touch upon. It's an affair of the
+Stock Exchange."
+
+"As if I didn't know!" she countered. "You merely reminded me of the other
+thing. But if it is only a business secret you may as well tell me all
+about it at first hands. Some one is sure to tell me sooner or later."
+
+Now David Kent was growing impatient. Down in the inner depths of him he
+was persuaded that Ormsby might have difficulty in inducing Mrs. Brentwood
+to sell her Western Pacific stock even at an advance; might require time,
+at least. And time, with a Bucks majority tinkering with corporate rights
+in the Assembly, might well be precious.
+
+"Forgive me if I tell Ormsby first," he pleaded. "Afterward, if you care
+to know, you shall."
+
+Miss Van Brock let him go at that, but now the way to the smoking-den on
+the floor above was hedged up. He did battle with the polite requirements,
+as a man must; shaking hands or exchanging a word with one and another of
+the obstructors only as he had to. None the less, when he had finally
+wrought his way to the smoking-room Ormsby had eluded him again.
+
+He went back to the parlors, wondering how he had missed the club-man. In
+the middle room of the suite he found Portia chatting with Marston, the
+lieutenant-governor; and a young woman in the smartest of reception gowns
+had succeeded to Elinor's place at the piano.
+
+"You found him?" queried the hostess, excusing herself to the tall,
+saturnine man who had shared the honors at the head of the People's Party
+ticket with Jasper G. Bucks.
+
+"No," said Kent. "Have you seen him?"
+
+"Why, yes; they all came to take leave just a few moments after you left
+me. I thought of telling Mr. Ormsby you were looking for him, but you shut
+me off so snippily----"
+
+"Miss Van Brock! What have you done? I must go at once."
+
+"Really? I am complimented. But if you must, you must, I suppose. I had
+something to tell you--something of importance; but I can't remember what
+it was now. I never can remember things in the hurry of leave-takings."
+
+As we have intimated, Kent had hitherto found Miss Portia's confidences
+exceedingly helpful in a business way, and he hesitated. "Tell me," he
+begged.
+
+"No, I can't remember it: I doubt if I shall ever remember it unless you
+can remind me by telling me why you are so desperately anxious to find Mr.
+Ormsby."
+
+"I wonder if you hold everybody up like this," he laughed. "But I don't
+mind telling you. Western Pacific preferred has gone to fifty-eight and a
+half."
+
+"And Mr. Ormsby has some to sell? I wish I had. Do you know what I'd do?"
+She drew closer and laid a hand on his arm. "I'd sell--by wire--to-night;
+at least, I'd make sure that my telegram would be the first thing my
+broker would lay his hands on in the morning."
+
+"On general principles, I suppose: so should I, and for the same reason.
+But have I succeeded in reminding you of that thing you were going to tell
+me?"
+
+"Not wholly; only partly. You said this matter of Mr. Ormsby's concerned
+Miss Brentwood--in a way--didn't you?"
+
+"You will have your pound of flesh entire, won't you? The stock is hers,
+and her mother's and sister's. I want Ormsby to persuade them to sell.
+They'll listen to him. That is all; all the all."
+
+"Of course!" she said airily. "How simple of me not to have been able to
+add it up without your help. I saw the quotation in the evening paper; and
+I know, better, perhaps, than you do, the need for haste. Must you go
+now?" She had taken his arm and was edging him through the press in the
+parlors toward the entrance hall.
+
+"_You_ haven't paid me yet," he objected.
+
+"No; I'm trying to remember. Oh, yes; I have it now. Wasn't some one
+telling me that you are interested in House Bill Twenty-nine?"
+
+They had reached the dimly lighted front vestibule, and her hand was still
+on his arm.
+
+"I was interested in it," he admitted, correcting the present to the past
+tense.
+
+"But after it went to the House committee on judiciary you left it to more
+skilful, or perhaps we'd better say, to less scrupulous hands?"
+
+"I believe you are a witch. Is there anything you don't know?"
+
+"Plenty of things. For example, I don't know exactly how much it cost our
+good friends of the 'vested interests' to have that bill mislaid in the
+committee room. But I do know they made a very foolish bargain."
+
+"Beyond all doubt a most demoralizing bargain, which, to say the best of
+it, was only a choice between two evils. But why foolish?"
+
+"Because--well, because mislaid things have a way of turning up
+unexpectedly, you know, and--"
+
+He stopped her in a sudden gust of feverish excitement.
+
+"Tell me what you mean in one word, Miss Van Brock. Don't those fellows
+intend to stay bought?"
+
+She smiled pityingly.
+
+"You are very young, Mr. David--or very honest. Supposing those 'fellows',
+as you dub the honorable members of the committee on judiciary, had a
+little plan of their own; a plan suggested by the readiness of certain of
+their opponents to rush into print with statements which might derange
+things?"
+
+"I am supposing it with all my might."
+
+"That is right; we are only supposing, you must remember. We may suppose
+their idea was to let the excitement about the amended bill die down; to
+let people generally, and one fiercely honest young corporation attorney
+in particular, have time to forget that there was such a thing as House
+Bill Twenty-nine. And in such a suppositional case, how much they would be
+surprised, and how they would laugh in their sleeves, if some one came
+along and paid them handsomely for doing precisely what they meant to do."
+
+David Kent's smile was almost ferocious.
+
+"My argument is as good now as it was in the beginning: they have yet to
+reckon with the man who will dare to expose them."
+
+She turned from him and spoke to the footman at the door.
+
+"Thomas, fetch Mr. Kent's coat and hat from the dressing-room." And then
+to Kent, in the tone she might have used in telling him of the latest
+breeziness of the member from the Rio Blanco: "I remember now what it was
+that I wanted to tell you. While you have been trying to find Mr. Ormsby,
+the committee on judiciary has been reporting the long-lost House Bill
+Twenty-nine. If you hurry you may be in time to see it passed--it will
+doubtless go through without any tiresome debate. But you will hardly have
+time to obstruct it by arousing public sentiment through the newspapers."
+
+David Kent shook the light touch of her hand from his arm and set his
+teeth hard upon a word hot from the furnace of righteous indignation. For
+a moment he fully believed she was in league with the junto; that she had
+been purposely holding him in talk while the very seconds were priceless.
+
+She saw the scornful wrath in his eyes and turned it aside with a swift
+denial.
+
+"No, David; I didn't do that," she said, speaking to his inmost thought.
+"If there had been anything you could do--the smallest shadow of a chance
+for you--I should have sent you flying at the first word. But there
+wasn't; it was all too well arranged--"
+
+But he had snatched coat and hat from the waiting Thomas and was running
+like a madman for the nearest cab-stand.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+THE SENTIMENTALISTS
+
+Kent's time from Alameda Square to the capitol was the quickest a flogged
+cab-horse could make, but he might have spared the horse and saved the
+double fee. On the broad steps of the south portico he, uprushing three at
+a bound, met the advance guard of the gallery contingent, down-coming. The
+House had adjourned.
+
+"One minute, Harnwicke!" he gasped, falling upon the first member of the
+corporations' lobby he could identify in the throng. "What's been done?"
+
+"They've taken a fall out of us," was the brusk reply. "House Bill
+Twenty-nine was reported by the committee on judiciary and rushed through
+after you left. Somebody engineered it to the paring of a fingernail: bare
+quorum to act; members who might have filibustered weeded out, on one
+pretext or another, to a man; pages all excused, and nobody here with the
+privilege of the floor. It was as neat a piece of gag-work as I ever hope
+to see if I live to be a hundred."
+
+Kent faced about and joined the townward dispersal with his informant.
+
+"Well, I suppose that settles it definitely; at least, until we can test
+its constitutionality in the courts," he said.
+
+Harnwicke thought not, being of the opinion that the vested interests
+would never say die until they were quite dead. As assistant counsel for
+the Overland Short Line, he was in some sense the dean of the corps of
+observation, and could speak with authority.
+
+"There is one chance left for us this side of the courts," he went on;
+"and now I think of it, you are the man to say how much of a chance it is.
+The bill still lacks the governor's signature."
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"It is his own measure. I have proof positive that he and Meigs and
+Hendricks drafted it. And all this fine-haired engineering to-night was
+his, or Meigs'."
+
+"Of course; we all know that. But we don't know the particular object yet.
+Do they need the new law in their business as a source of revenue? Or do
+they want to be hired to kill it? In other words, does Bucks want a lump
+sum for a veto? You know the man better than any of us."
+
+"By Jove!" said Kent. "Do you mean to say you would buy the governor of a
+state?"
+
+Harnwicke turned a cold eye on his companion as they strode along. He was
+of the square-set, plain-spoken, aggressive type--a finished product of
+the modern school of business lawyers.
+
+"I don't understand that you are raising the question of ethics at this
+stage of the game, do I?" he remarked.
+
+Kent fired up a little.
+
+"And if I am?" he retorted.
+
+"I should say you had missed your calling. It is baldly a question of
+business--or rather of self-preservation. We needn't mince matters among
+ourselves. If Bucks is for sale, we buy him."
+
+Kent shrugged.
+
+"There isn't any doubt about his purchasability. But I confess I don't
+quite see how you will go about it."
+
+"Never mind that part of it; just leave the ways and means with those of
+us who have riper experience--and fewer hamperings, perhaps--than you
+have. Your share in it is to tell us how big a bid we must make. As I say,
+you know the man."
+
+David Kent was silent for the striding of half a square. The New England
+conscience dies hard, and while it lives it is given to drawing sharp
+lines on all the boundaries of culpability. Kent ended by taking the
+matter in debate violently out of the domain of ethics and standing it
+upon the ground of expediency.
+
+"It will cost too much. You would have to bid high--not to overcome his
+scruples, for he has none; but to satisfy his greed--which is abnormal.
+And, besides, he has his pose to defend. If he can see his way clear to a
+harvest of extortions under the law, he will probably turn you down--and
+will make it hot for you later on in the name of outraged virtue."
+
+Harnwicke's laugh was cynical.
+
+"He and his little clique don't own the earth in fee simple. Perhaps we
+shall be able to make them grasp that idea before we are through with
+them. We have had this fight on in other states. Would ten thousand be
+likely to satisfy him?"
+
+"No," said Kent. "If you add another cipher, it might."
+
+"A hundred thousand is a pot of money. I take it for granted the Western
+Pacific will stand its pro-rate?"
+
+The New England conscience bucked again, and Kent made his first open
+protest against the methods of the demoralizers.
+
+"I am not in a position to say: I should advise against it. Unofficially,
+I think I can speak for Loring and the Boston people. We are not more
+saintly than other folk, perhaps; and we are not in the railroad business
+for health or pleasure. But I fancy the Advisory Board would draw the line
+at bribing a governor--at any rate, I hope it would."
+
+"Rot!" said Harnwicke. And then: "You'll reap the benefits with other
+interstate interests; you'll have to come in."
+
+Kent hesitated, but not now on the ground of the principle to be defended.
+
+"That brings in a question which I am not competent to decide. Loring is
+your man. You will call a conference of the 'powers,' I take it?"
+
+"It is already called. I sent Atherton out to notify everybody as soon as
+the trap was sprung in the House. We meet in the ordinary at the Camelot.
+You'll be there?"
+
+"A little later--if Loring wants me. I have some telephoning to do before
+this thing gets on the wires."
+
+They parted at the entrance to the Camelot Club, and Kent went two squares
+farther on to the Wellington. Ormsby had not yet returned, and Kent went
+to the telephone and called up the Brentwood apartments. It was Penelope
+that answered.
+
+"Well, I think you owe it," she began, as soon as he had given his name.
+"What did I do at Miss Van Brock's to make you cut me dead?"
+
+"Why, nothing at all, I'm sure. I--I was looking for Mr. Ormsby, and----"
+
+"Not when I saw you," she broke in flippantly. "You were handing Miss
+Portia an ice. Are you still looking for Mr. Ormsby?"
+
+"I am--just that. Is he with you?"
+
+"No; he left here about twenty minutes ago. Is it anything serious?"
+
+"Serious enough to make me want to find him as soon as I can. Did he say
+he was coming down to the Wellington?"
+
+"Of course, he didn't," laughed Penelope. And then: "Whatever is the
+matter with you this evening, Mr. Kent?"
+
+"I guess I'm a little excited," said Kent. "Something has
+happened--something I can't talk about over the wires. It concerns you and
+your mother and sister. You'll know all about it as soon as I can find
+Ormsby and send him out to you."
+
+Penelope's "Oh!" was long-drawn and gasping.
+
+"Is any one dead?" she faltered.
+
+"No, no; it's nothing of that kind. I'll send Ormsby out, and he will tell
+you all about it."
+
+"Can't you come yourself?"
+
+"I may have to if I can't find Ormsby. Please don't let your mother go to
+bed until you have heard from one or the other of us. Did you get that?"
+
+"Ye-es; but I should like to know more--a great deal more."
+
+"I know; and I'd like to tell you. But I am using the public telephone
+here at the Wellington, and--Oh, damn!" Central had cut him out, and it
+was some minutes before the connection was switched in again. "Is that
+you, Miss Penelope? All right; I wasn't quite through. When Ormsby comes,
+you must do as he tells you to, and you and Miss Elinor must help him
+convince your mother. Do you understand?"
+
+"No, I don't understand anything. For goodness' sake, find Mr. Ormsby and
+make him run! This is perfectly dreadful!"
+
+"Isn't it? And I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."
+
+Kent hung up the receiver, and when he was asking a second time at the
+clerk's desk for the missing man, Ormsby came in to answer for himself.
+Whereupon the crisis was outlined to him in brief phrase, and he rose to
+the occasion, though not without a grimace.
+
+"I'm not sure just how well you know Mrs. Hepzibah Brentwood," he
+demurred; "but it will be quite like her to balk. Don't you think you'd
+better go along? You are the company's attorney, and your opinion ought to
+carry some weight."
+
+David Kent thought not; but a cautious diplomatist, having got the idea
+well into the back part of his head, was not to be denied.
+
+"Of course, you'll come. You are just the man I'll need to back me up. I
+shan't shirk; I'll take the mother into the library and break the ice,
+while you are squaring things with the young women. Penelope won't care
+the snap of her finger either way; but Elinor has some notion's that you
+are fitter to cope with than I am. After, if you can give me a lift with
+Mrs. Hepzibah, I'll call you in. Come on; it's getting pretty late to go
+visiting."
+
+Kent yielded reluctantly, and they took a car for the sake of speed. It
+was Penelope who opened the door for them at 124 Tejon Avenue; and Ormsby
+made it easy for his coadjutor, as he had promised.
+
+"I want to see your mother in the library for a few minutes," he began.
+"Will you arrange it, and take care of Mr. Kent until I come for him?"
+
+Penelope "arranged" it, not without another added pang of curiosity,
+whereupon David Kent found himself the rather embarrassed third of a
+silent trio gathered about the embers of the sitting-room fire.
+
+"Is it to be a Quaker meeting?" asked Penelope, sweetly, when the silence
+had grown awe-inspiring.
+
+Kent laughed for pure joy at the breaking of the spell.
+
+"One would think we had come to drag you all off to jail, Ormsby and I,"
+he said; and then he went on to explain. "It's about your Western Pacific
+stock, you know. To-day's quotations put it a point and a half above your
+purchase price, and we've come to persuade you to unload, _pronto_, as the
+member from the Rio Blanco would say."
+
+"Is that all?" said Penelope, stifling a yawn. "Then I'm not in it: I'm an
+infant." And she rose and went to the piano.
+
+"You haven't told us all of it: what has happened?" queried Elinor,
+speaking for the first time since her greeting of Kent.
+
+He briefed the story of House Bill Twenty-nine for her, pointing out the
+probabilities.
+
+"Of course, no one can tell what the precise effect will be," he
+qualified. "But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of
+dividends. Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable
+enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of
+those who administer it. In fact, I happen to know that it was designed
+and carried through for that very purpose."
+
+She smiled.
+
+"I have understood you were in the opposition. Are you speaking
+politically?"
+
+"I am stating the plain fact," said Kent, nettled a little by her
+coolness. "Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into
+office than we have here in this State at the present moment."
+
+He spoke warmly, and she liked him best when he put her on the footing of
+an equal antagonist.
+
+"I can't agree with your inference," she objected. "As a people we are
+neither obsequious nor stupid."
+
+"Perhaps not. But it is one of the failures of a popular government that
+an honest majority may be controlled and directed by a small minority of
+shrewd rascals. That is exactly what has happened in the passage of this
+bill. I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the
+faintest suspicion that it was a 'graft'."
+
+"If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true
+leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!" she said
+half-absently; and he started forward and said: "I beg pardon?"
+
+She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of
+disappointment in them.
+
+"I ought to beg yours. I'm afraid I was thinking aloud. But it is one of
+my dreams. If I were a man I should go into politics."
+
+"To purify them?"
+
+"To do my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and
+well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too.
+But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who
+_could_ and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it must be led."
+
+"There is no lack of leadership, such as it is," he hazarded.
+
+"No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind: men who will
+put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of
+justice and right-doing for its own sake. Are there any such men
+nowadays?"
+
+"I don't know," he rejoined gravely. "Sometimes I'm tempted to doubt it.
+It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part. The kind
+of man you have in mind isn't in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot."
+
+She contradicted him firmly.
+
+"No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn't shun it; he would take hold
+with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish
+temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following--be
+the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority."
+
+Kent shook his head slowly.
+
+"Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call
+patriotism."
+
+"I don't understand," she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to
+understand.
+
+"I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to
+have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of
+patriotism to make him do his best."
+
+"But that would be self-seeking again."
+
+"Not necessarily in the narrow sense. The old knightly chivalry was a
+beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would
+have been frankly brutal without it: yet it had its well-spring in what
+appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment."
+
+"And we are not sentimentalists?" she suggested.
+
+"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your
+ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly
+spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he
+will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a
+political constituency."
+
+She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the
+nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.
+
+Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was
+searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful.
+They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made
+sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As
+many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry
+there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling
+down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.
+
+Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field
+of the Lust of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash,
+it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she
+had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small
+field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his
+training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had
+been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is
+transmitted in terms of self-seeking.
+
+He turned upon her suddenly.
+
+"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"How absurd!"
+
+"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me
+out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."
+
+"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.
+
+"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a
+worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been
+trying to be a money-getter."
+
+"You can be something vastly better."
+
+"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."
+
+Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on
+his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now
+what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his
+way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call
+out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone,
+of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in
+keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire
+him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There
+would be time enough to drain it farther on.
+
+"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said,
+breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I----"
+
+She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of
+apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.
+
+"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother
+will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always
+do."
+
+David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive
+responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon
+summer for a background.
+
+It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many
+things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however
+bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this
+new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she
+was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism
+in them, as thus:
+
+"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over
+the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I
+recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things
+which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we
+were both very young that summer--years younger than we can ever be again.
+Don't you?"
+
+"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pass in which he would have
+agreed with her if she had asserted that black was white. It was not
+weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the
+word which would fit her changed mood.
+
+"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more
+charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on
+our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"
+
+"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the
+mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no
+good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her
+resentful.
+
+She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just.
+And you were not quite just, I think."
+
+"To you?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, no; to yourself."
+
+Portia Van Brock's accusation was hammering itself into his brain. _You
+have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all
+she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to
+you_. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most
+unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise
+him?
+
+The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a
+door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.
+
+"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he
+announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at
+once.
+
+"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the
+house and had turned their faces townward.
+
+"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank
+to sell her stock--won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now,
+when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted,
+mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I
+tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the
+jaw--intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people
+needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"
+
+Kent's laugh was mirthless.
+
+"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for
+the accusation.
+
+If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to
+steer clear of that shoal.
+
+"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with
+Elinor."
+
+"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother
+would have the casting vote."
+
+"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."
+
+"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now--as
+between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean--but there will
+probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go.
+We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."
+
+The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said:
+"Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't
+altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes
+to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the god in the car.
+Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss
+what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."
+
+David Kent stopped short and wheeled suddenly upon his companion.
+
+"Ormsby, that's a thing I've been afraid of, all along; and it's the one
+thing you must never do."
+
+"Why not?" demanded the straightforward Ormsby.
+
+Kent knew he was skating on the thinnest of ice, but his love for Elinor
+made him fearless of consequences.
+
+"If you don't know without being told, it proves that your money has
+spoiled you to that extent. It is because you have no right to entrap Miss
+Brentwood into an obligation that would make her your debtor for the very
+food she eats and the clothes she wears. You will say she need never know:
+be very sure she would find out, one way or another; and she would never
+forgive you."
+
+"Um," said Ormsby, turning visibly grim. "You are frank enough--to draw it
+mildly. Another man in my place might suggest that it isn't Mr. David
+Kent's affair."
+
+Kent turned about and caught step again.
+
+"I've said my say--all of it," he rejoined stolidly. "We've been decently
+modern up to now, and we won't go back to the elemental things so late in
+the day. All the same, you'll not take it amiss if I say that I know Miss
+Brentwood rather better than you do."
+
+Ormsby did not say whether he would or would not, and the talk went aside
+to less summary ways and means preservative of the Brentwood fortunes. But
+at the archway of the Camelot Club, where Kent paused, Ormsby went back to
+the debatable ground in an outspoken word.
+
+"I know pretty well now what there is between us, Kent, and we mustn't
+quarrel if we can help it," he said. "If you complain that I didn't give
+you a fair show, I'll retort that I didn't dare to. Are you satisfied?"
+
+"No," said David Kent; and with that they separated.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+THE HAYMAKERS
+
+By the terms of its dating clause the new trust and corporation law became
+effective at once, "the public welfare requiring it"; and though there was
+an immediate sympathetic decline in the securities involved, there was no
+panic, financial or industrial, to mark the change from the old to the
+new.
+
+Contrary to the expectations of the alarmists and the lawyers, and
+somewhat to the disappointment of the latter, the vested interests showed
+no disposition to test the constitutionality of the act in the courts. So
+far, indeed, from making difficulties, the various alien corporations
+affected by the new law wheeled promptly into line in compliance with its
+provisions, vying with one another in proving, or seeming to prove, the
+time-worn aphorism that capital can never afford to be otherwise than
+strictly law-abiding.
+
+In the reorganization of the Western Pacific, David Kent developed at once
+and heartily into that rare and much-sought-for quantity, a man for an
+emergency. Loring, also, was a busy man in this transition period, yet he
+found time to keep an appreciative eye on Kent, and, true to his implied
+promise, pushed him vigorously for the first place in the legal department
+of the localized company. Since the resident manager stood high in the
+Boston counsels of the company, the pushing was not without results; and
+while David Kent was still up to his eyes in the work of flogging the
+affairs of the newly named Trans-Western into conformity with the law, his
+appointment as general counsel came from the Advisory Board.
+
+At one time, when success in his chosen vocation meant more to him than he
+thought it could ever mean again, the promoted subordinate would have had
+an attack of jubilance little in keeping with the grave responsibilities
+of his office. As it fell out, he was too busy to celebrate, and too sore
+on the sentimental side to rejoice. Hence, his recognition of the
+promotion was merely a deeper plunge into the flood of legalities and the
+adding of two more stenographers to his office force.
+
+Now there is this to be said of such submersive battlings in a sea of
+work: while the fierce toil of the buffeting may be good for the swimmer's
+soul, it necessarily narrows his horizon, inasmuch as a man with his head
+in the sea-smother lacks the view-point of the captain who fights his ship
+from the conning tower.
+
+So it befell that while the newly appointed general counsel of the
+reorganized Western Pacific was bolting his meals and clipping the nights
+at both ends in a strenuous endeavor to clear the decks for a possible
+battle-royal at the capital, events of a minatory nature were shaping
+themselves elsewhere.
+
+To bring these events down to their focusing point in the period of
+transition, it is needful to go back a little; to a term of the circuit
+court held in the third year of Gaston the prosperous.
+
+Who Mrs. Melissa Varnum was; how she came to be traveling from Midland
+City to the end of the track on a scalper's ticket; and in what manner she
+was given her choice of paying fare to the conductor or leaving the train
+at Gaston--these are details with which we need not concern ourselves.
+Suffice it to say that Kent, then local attorney for the company, mastered
+them; and when Mrs. Varnum, through Hawk, her counsel, sued for five
+thousand dollars damages, he was able to get a continuance, knowing from
+long experience that the jury would certainly find for the plaintiff if
+the case were then allowed to go to trial.
+
+And at the succeeding term of court, which was the one that adjourned on
+the day of Kent's transfer to the capital, two of the company's witnesses
+had disappeared; and the one bit of company business Kent had been
+successful in doing that day was to postpone for a second time the coming
+to trial of the Varnum case.
+
+It was while Kent's head was deepest in the flood of reorganization that a
+letter came from one Blashfield Hunnicott, his successor in the local
+attorneyship at Gaston, asking for instructions in the Varnum matter.
+Judge MacFarlane's court would convene in a week. Was he, Hunnicott, to
+let the case come to trial? Or should he--the witnesses still being
+unproducible--move for a further continuance?
+
+Kent took his head out of the cross-seas long enough to answer. By all
+means Hunnicott was to obtain another continuance, if possible. And if,
+before the case were called, there should be any new developments, he was
+to wire at once to the general office, and further instructions would
+issue.
+
+It was about this time, or, to be strictly accurate, on the day preceding
+the convening of Judge MacFarlane's court in Gaston, that Governor Bucks
+took a short vacation--his first since the adjournment of the Assembly.
+
+One of the mysteries of this man--the only one for which his friends could
+not always account plausibly--was his habit of dropping out for a day or a
+week at irregular intervals, leaving no clue by which he could be traced.
+While he was merely a private citizen these disappearances figured in the
+local notes of the Gaston _Clarion_ as business trips, object and
+objective point unknown or at least unstated; but since his election the
+newspapers were usually more definite. On this occasion, the public was
+duly informed that "Governor Bucks, with one or two intimate friends, was
+taking a few days' recreation with rod and gun on the headwaters of Jump
+Creek"--a statement which the governor's private secretary stood ready to
+corroborate to all and sundry calling at the gubernatorial rooms on the
+second floor of the capitol.
+
+Now it chanced that, like all gossip, this statement was subject to
+correction as to details in favor of the exact fact. It is true that the
+governor, his gigantic figure clad in sportsmanlike brown duck, might have
+been seen boarding the train on the Monday evening; and in addition to the
+ample hand-bag there were rod and gun cases to bear out the newspaper
+notices. None the less, it was equally true that the keeper of the Gun
+Club shooting-box at the terminus of the Trans-Western's Jump Creek branch
+was not called upon to entertain so distinguished a guest as the State
+executive. Also, it might have been remarked that the governor traveled
+alone.
+
+Late that same night, Stephen Hawk was keeping a rather discomforting
+vigil with a visitor in the best suite of rooms the Mid-Continent Hotel in
+Gaston afforded. The guest of honor was a brother lawyer--though he might
+have refused to acknowledge the relationship with the ex-district
+attorney--a keen-eyed, business-like gentleman, whose name as an organizer
+of vast capitalistic ventures had traveled far, and whose present attitude
+was one of undisguised and angry contempt for Gaston and all things
+Gastonian.
+
+"How much longer have we to wait?" he demanded impatiently, when the hands
+of his watch pointed to the quarter-hour after ten. "You've made me travel
+two thousand miles to see this thing through: why didn't you make sure of
+having your man here?"
+
+Hawk wriggled uneasily in his chair. He was used to being bullied, not
+only by the good and great, but by the little and evil as well. Yet there
+was a rasp to the great man's impatience that irritated him.
+
+"I've been trying to tell you all the evening that I'm only the hired man
+in this business, Mr. Falkland. I can't compel the attendance of the other
+parties."
+
+"Well, it's damned badly managed, as far as we've gone," was the
+ungracious comment. "You say the judge refuses to confer with me?"
+
+"Ab-so-lutely."
+
+"And the train--the last train the other man can come on; is that in yet?"
+
+Hawk consulted his watch.
+
+"A good half-hour ago."
+
+"You had your clerk at the station to meet it?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"And he hasn't reported?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+Falkland took a cigar from his case, bit the end of it like a man with a
+grudge to satisfy, and began again.
+
+"There is a very unbusinesslike mystery about all this, Mr. Hawk, and I
+may as well tell you shortly that my time is too valuable to make me
+tolerant of half-confidences. Get to the bottom of it. Has your man
+weakened?"
+
+"No; he is not of the weakening kind. And, besides, the scheme is his own
+from start to finish, as you know."
+
+"Well, what is the matter, then?"
+
+Hawk rose.
+
+"If you will be patient a little while longer, I'll go to the wire and try
+to find out. I am as much in the dark as you are."
+
+This last was not strictly true. Hawk had a telegram in his pocket which
+was causing him more uneasiness than all the rasping criticisms of the New
+York attorney, and he was re-reading it by the light of the corridor
+bracket when a young man sprang from the ascending elevator and hurried to
+the door of the parlor suite. Hawk collared his Mercury before he could
+rap on the door.
+
+"Well?" he queried sharply.
+
+"It's just as you suspected--what Mr. Hendricks' telegram hinted at. I met
+him at the station and couldn't do a thing with him."
+
+"Where has he gone?"
+
+"To the same old place."
+
+"You followed him?"
+
+"Sure. That is what kept me so long."
+
+Hawk hung upon his decision for the barest fraction of a second. Then he
+gave his orders concisely.
+
+"Hunt up Doctor Macquoid and get him out to the club-house as quick as you
+can. Tell him to bring his hypodermic. I'll be there with all the help
+he'll need." And when the young man was gone, Hawk smote the air with a
+clenched fist and called down the Black Curse of Shielygh, or its modern
+equivalent, on all the fates subversive of well-laid plans.
+
+A quarter of an hour later, on the upper floor of the club-house at the
+Gentlemen's Driving Park, four men burst in upon a fifth, a huge figure in
+brown duck, crouching in a corner like a wild beast at bay. A bottle and a
+tumbler stood on the table under the hanging lamp; and with the crash of
+breaking glass which followed the mad-bull rush of the duck-clothed giant,
+the reek of French brandy filled the room.
+
+"Hold him still, if you can, and pull up that sleeve." It was Macquoid who
+spoke, and the three apparitors, breathing hard, sat upon the prostrate
+man and bared his arm for the physician. When the apomorphia began to do
+its work there was a struggle of another sort, out of which emerged a
+pallid and somewhat stricken reincarnation of the governor.
+
+"Falkland is waiting at the hotel, and he and MacFarlane can't get
+together," said Hawk, tersely, when the patient was fit to listen.
+"Otherwise we shouldn't have disturbed you. It's all day with the scheme
+if you can't show up."
+
+The governor groaned and passed his hand over his eyes.
+
+"Get me into my clothes--Johnson has the grip--and give me all the time
+you can," was the sullen rejoinder; and in due course the Honorable Jasper
+G. Bucks, clothed upon and in his right mind, was enabled to keep his
+appointment with the New York attorney at the Mid-Continent Hotel.
+
+But first came the whipping-in of MacFarlane. Bucks went alone to the
+judge's room on the floor above the parlor suite. It was now near
+midnight, but MacFarlane had not gone to bed. He was a spare man, with
+thin hair graying rapidly at the temples and a care-worn face; the face of
+a man whose tasks or responsibilities, or both, have overmatched him. He
+was walking the floor with his head down and his hands--thin, nerveless
+hands they were--tightly locked behind him, when the governor entered.
+
+For a large man the Honorable Jasper was usually able to handle his weight
+admirably; but now he clung to the door-knob until he could launch himself
+at a chair and be sure of hitting it.
+
+"What's this Hawk's telling me about you, MacFarlane?" he demanded,
+frowning portentously.
+
+"I don't know what he has told you. But it is too flagrant, Bucks; I can't
+do it, and that's all there is about it." The protest was feebly fierce,
+and there was the snarl of a baited animal in the tone.
+
+"It's too late to make difficulties now," was the harsh reply. "You've got
+to do it."
+
+"I tell you I can not, and I will not!"
+
+"A late attack of conscience, eh?" sneered the governor, who was sobering
+rapidly now. "Let me ask a question or two. How much was that security
+debt your son-in-law let you in for?"
+
+"It was ten thousand dollars. It is an honest debt, and I shall pay it."
+
+"But not out of the salary of a circuit judge," Bucks interposed. "Nor yet
+out of the fees you make your clerks divide with you. And that isn't all.
+Have you forgotten the gerrymander business? How would you like to see the
+true inwardness of that in the newspapers?"
+
+The judge shrank as if the huge gesturing hand had struck him.
+
+"You wouldn't dare," he began. "You were in that, too, deeper than----"
+
+Again the governor interrupted him.
+
+"Cut it out," he commanded. "I can reward, and I can punish. You are not
+going to do anything technically illegal; but, by the gods, you are going
+to walk the line laid down for you. If you don't, I shall give the
+documents in the gerrymander affair to the papers the day after you fail.
+Now we'll go and see Falkland."
+
+MacFarlane made one last protest.
+
+"For God's sake, Bucks! spare me that. It is nothing less than the foulest
+collusion between the judge, the counsel for the plaintiff--and the
+devil!"
+
+"Cut that out, too, and come along," said the governor, brutally; and by
+the steadying help of the chair, the door-post and the wall of the
+corridor, he led the way to the parlor suite on the floor below.
+
+The conference in Falkland's rooms was chiefly a monologue with the
+sharp-spoken New York lawyer in the speaking part. When it was concluded
+the judge took his leave abruptly, pleading the lateness of the hour and
+his duties for the morrow. When he was gone the New Yorker began again.
+
+"You won't want to be known in this, I take it," he said, nodding at the
+governor. "Mr. Hawk here will answer well enough for the legal part, but
+how about the business end of it. Have you got a man you can trust?"
+
+The governor's yellow eyebrows met in a meaning scowl.
+
+"I've got a man I can hang, which is more to the purpose. It's Major Jim
+Guilford. He lives here; want to meet him?"
+
+"God forbid!" said Falkland, fervently. He rose and whipped himself into
+his overcoat, turning to Hawk: "Have your young man get me a carriage, and
+see to it that my special is ready to pull east when I give the word, will
+you?"
+
+Hawk went obediently, and the New Yorker had his final word with the
+governor alone.
+
+"I think we understand each other perfectly," he said. "You are to have
+the patronage: we are to pay for all actual betterments for which vouchers
+can be shown at the close of the deal. All we ask is that the stock be
+depressed to the point agreed upon within the half-year."
+
+"It's going to be done," said the governor, trying as he could to keep the
+eye-image of his fellow conspirator from multiplying itself by two.
+
+"All right. Now as to the court affair. If it is managed exactly as I have
+outlined, there will be no trouble--and no recourse for the other fellows.
+When I say that, I'm leaving out your Supreme Court. Under certain
+conditions, if the defendant's hardship could be definitely shown, a writ
+of _certiorari_ and _supersedeas_ might issue. How about that?"
+
+The governor closed one eye slowly, the better to check the troublesome
+multiplying process.
+
+"The Supreme Court won't move in the matter. The ostensible reason will be
+that the court is now two years behind its docket."
+
+"And the real reason?"
+
+"Of the three justices, one of them was elected on our ticket; another is
+a personal friend of Judge MacFarlane. The goods will be delivered."
+
+"That's all, then; all but one word. Your judge is a weak brother.
+Notwithstanding all the pains I took to show him that his action would be
+technically unassailable, he was ready to fly the track at any moment.
+Have you got him safe?"
+
+Bucks held up one huge hand with the thumb and forefinger tightly pressed
+together.
+
+"I've got him right there," he said. "If you and Hawk have got your papers
+in good shape, the thing will go through like a hog under a barbed-wire
+fence."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT
+
+It was two weeks after the date of the governor's fishing trip, and by
+consequence Judge MacFarlane's court had been the even fortnight in
+session in Gaston, when Kent's attention was recalled to the forgotten
+Varnum case by another letter from the local attorney, Hunnicott.
+
+"Varnum _vs_. Western Pacific comes up Friday of this week, and they are
+going to press for trial this time, and no mistake," wrote the local
+representative. "Hawk has been chasing around getting affidavits; for what
+purpose I don't know, though Lesher tells me that one of them was sworn by
+Houligan, the sub-contractor who tried to fight the engineer's estimates
+on the Jump Creek work.
+
+"Also, there is a story going the rounds that the suit is to be made a
+blind for bigger game, though I guess this is all gossip, based on the
+fact that Mr. Semple Falkland's private car stopped over here two weeks
+ago, from three o'clock in the afternoon till midnight of the same day.
+Jason, of the _Clarion_, interviewed the New Yorker, and Falkland told him
+he had stopped over to look up the securities on a mortgage held by one of
+his New York clients."
+
+Kent read this unofficial letter thoughtfully, and later on took it in to
+the general manager.
+
+"Just to show you the kind of jackal we have to deal with in the smaller
+towns," he said, by way of explanation. "Here is a case that Stephen Hawk
+built up out of nothing a year ago. The woman was put off one of our
+trains because she was trying to travel on a scalper's ticket. She didn't
+care to fight about it; but when I had about persuaded her to compromise
+for ten dollars and a pass to her destination, Hawk got hold of her and
+induced her to sue for five thousand dollars."
+
+"Well?" said Loring.
+
+"We fought it, of course--in the only way it could be fought in the lower
+court. I got a continuance, and we choked it off in the same way at the
+succeeding term. The woman was tired out long ago, but Hawk will hang on
+till his teeth fall out."
+
+"Do you 'continue' again?" asked the general manager.
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"I so instructed Hunnicott. Luckily, two of our most important witnesses
+are missing. They have always been missing, in point of fact."
+
+Loring was glancing over the letter.
+
+"How about this affidavit business, and the Falkland stop-over?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, I fancy that's gossip, pure and simple, as Hunnicott says. Hawk is
+sharp enough not to let us know if he were baiting a trap. And Falkland
+probably told the _Clarion_ man the simple truth."
+
+Loring nodded in his turn. Then he broke away from the subject abruptly.
+"Sit down," he said; and when Kent had found a chair: "I had a caller this
+morning--Senator Duvall."
+
+State Senator Duvall had been the father, or the ostensible father, of the
+Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine. He was known to the
+corporations' lobby as a legislator who would sign a railroad's
+death-warrant with one hand and take favors from it with the other; and
+Kent laughed.
+
+"How many did he demand passes for, this time? Or was it a special train
+he wanted?"
+
+"Neither the one nor the other, this morning, as it happened," said the
+general manager. "Not to put too fine an edge upon it, he had something to
+sell, and he wanted me to buy it."
+
+"What was it?" Kent asked quickly.
+
+Loring was rubbing his eye-glasses absently with the corner of his
+handkerchief.
+
+"I guess I made a mistake in not turning him over to you, David. He was
+too smooth for me. I couldn't find out just what it was he had for sale.
+He talked vaguely about an impending crisis and a man who had some
+information to dispose of; said the man had come to him because he was
+known to be a firm friend of the Trans-Western, and so on."
+
+Kent gave his opinion promptly.
+
+"It's a capitol-gang deal of some sort to hold us up; and Duvall is
+willing to sell out his fellow conspirators if the price is right."
+
+"Have you any notion of what it is?"
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"Not the slightest. The ways have been tallowed for us, thus far, and I
+don't fully understand it. I presented our charter for re-filing
+yesterday, and Hendricks passed it without a word. As I was coming out of
+the secretary's office I met Bucks. We were pretty nearly open enemies in
+the old days in Gaston, but he went out of his way to shake hands and to
+congratulate me on my appointment as general counsel."
+
+"That was warning in itself, wasn't it?"
+
+"I took it that way. But I can't fathom his drift; which is the more
+unaccountable since I have it on pretty good authority that the ring is
+cinching the other companies right and left. Some one was saying at the
+Camelot last night that the Overland's reorganization of its
+within-the-State lines was going to cost all kinds of money in excess of
+the legal fees."
+
+Loring's smile was a wordless sarcasm.
+
+"It's the reward of virtue," he said ironically. "We were not in the list
+of subscribers to the conditional fund for purchasing a certain veto which
+didn't materialize."
+
+"And for that very reason, if for no other, we may look out for squalls,"
+Kent asserted. "Jasper G. Bucks has a long memory; and just now the fates
+have given him an arm to match. I am fortifying everywhere I can, but if
+the junto has it in for us, we'll be made to sweat blood before we are
+through with it."
+
+"Which brings us back to Senator Duvall. Is it worth while trying to do
+anything with him?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I'm opposed to the method--the bargain and sale
+plan--and I know you are. Turn him over to me if he comes in again."
+
+When Kent had dictated a letter in answer to Hunnicott's, he dismissed the
+Varnum matter from his mind, having other and more important things to
+think of. So, on the Friday, when the case was reached on Judge
+MacFarlane's docket--but really, it is worth our while to be present in
+the Gaston court-room to see and hear what befalls.
+
+When the Varnum case was called, Hunnicott promptly moved for a third
+continuance, in accordance with his instructions. The judge heard his
+argument, the old and well-worn one of the absence of important witnesses,
+with perfect patience; and after listening to Hawk's protest, which was
+hardly more than mechanical, he granted the continuance.
+
+Then came the after-piece. Court adjourned, and immediately Hawk asked
+leave to present, "at chambers," an amended petition. Hunnicott was
+waylaid by a court officer as he was leaving the room; and a moment later,
+totally unprepared, he was in the judge's office, listening in some dazed
+fashion while Hawk went glibly through the formalities of presenting his
+petition.
+
+Not until the papers were served upon him as the company's attorney, and
+the judge was naming three o'clock of the following afternoon as the time
+which he would appoint for the preliminary hearing, did the local attorney
+come alive.
+
+"But, your Honor!--a delay of only twenty-four hours in which to prepare a
+rejoinder to this petition--to allegations of such astounding gravity?" he
+began, shocked into action by the very ungraspable magnitude of the thing.
+
+"What more could you ask, Mr. Hunnicott?" said the judge, mildly. "You
+have already had a full measure of delay on the original petition. Yet I
+am willing to extend the time if you can come to an agreement with Mr.
+Hawk, here."
+
+Hunnicott knew the hopelessness of that and did not make the attempt.
+Instead, he essayed a new line of objection.
+
+"The time would be long enough if Gaston were the headquarters of the
+company, your Honor. But in such a grave and important charge as this
+amended petition brings, our general counsel should appear in person,
+and----"
+
+"You are the company's attorney, Mr. Hunnicott," said the judge, dryly;
+"and you have hitherto been deemed competent to conduct the case in behalf
+of the defendant. I am unwilling to work a hardship to any one, but I can
+not entertain your protest. The preliminary hearing will be at three
+o'clock to-morrow."
+
+Hunnicott knew when he was definitely at the string's end; and when he was
+out of the judge's room and the Court House, he made a dash for his
+office, dry-lipped and panting. Ten minutes sufficed for the writing of a
+telegram to Kent, and he was half-way down to the station with it when it
+occurred to him that it would never do to trust the incendiary thing to
+the wires in plain English. There was a little-used cipher code in his
+desk provided for just such emergencies, and back he went to labor
+sweating over the task of securing secrecy at the expense of the precious
+minutes of time. Wherefore, it was about four o'clock when he handed the
+telegram to the station operator, and adjured him by all that was good and
+great not to delay its sending.
+
+It was just here he made his first and only slip, since he did not stay to
+see the thing done. It chanced that the regular day operator was off on
+leave of absence, and his substitute, a young man from the
+train-despatcher's office, was a person who considered the company wires
+an exclusive appanage of the train service department. At the moment of
+Hunnicott's assault he was taking an order for Number 17; and observing
+that the lawyer's cipher "rush" covered four closely written pages, he
+hung it upon the sending hook with a malediction on the legal department
+for burdening the wires with its mail correspondence, and so forgot it.
+
+It was nine o'clock when the night operator came on duty; and being a
+careful man, he not only looked first to his sending hook, but was
+thoughtful enough to run over the accumulation of messages waiting to be
+transmitted, to the end that he might give precedence to the most
+important. And when he came to Hunnicott's cipher with the
+thrice-underlined "RUSH" written across its face, and had marked the hour
+of its handing in, he had the good sense to hang up the entire wire
+business of the railroad until the thing was safely out of his office.
+
+It was half-past nine when the all-important cipher got itself written out
+in the headquarters office at the capital; and for two anxious hours the
+receiving operator tried by all means in his power to find the general
+counsel--tried and failed. For, to make the chain of mishaps complete in
+all its links, Kent and Loring were spending the evening at Miss Portia
+Van Brock's, having been bidden to meet a man they were both willing to
+cultivate--Oliver Marston, the lieutenant-governor. And for this cause it
+wanted but five minutes of midnight when Kent burst into Loring's bedroom
+on the third floor of the Clarendon, catastrophic news in hand.
+
+"For heaven's sake, read that!" he gasped; and Loring sat on the edge of
+the bed to do it.
+
+"So! they've sprung their mine at last: this is what Senator Duvall was
+trying to sell us," he said quietly, when he had mastered the purport of
+Hunnicott's war news.
+
+Kent had caught his second wind in the moment of respite, and was settling
+into the collar in a way to strain the working harness to the breaking
+point.
+
+"It's a put-up job from away back," he gritted. "If I'd had the sense of a
+pack-mule I should have been on the lookout for just such a trap as this.
+Look at the date of that message!"
+
+The general manager did look, and shook his head. "'Received, 3:45, P.M.;
+Forwarded, 9:17, P.M.' That will cost somebody his job. What do we do?"
+
+"We get busy at the drop of the hat. Luckily, we have the news, though
+I'll bet high it wasn't Hawk's fault that this message came through with
+no more than eight hours' delay. Get into your clothes, man! The minutes
+are precious, now!"
+
+Loring began to dress while Kent walked the floor in a hot fit of
+impatience.
+
+"The mastodonic cheek of the thing!" he kept repeating, until Loring
+pulled him down with another quiet remark.
+
+"Tell me what we have to do, David. I am a little lame in law matters."
+
+"Do? We have to appear in Judge MacFarlane's court to-morrow afternoon
+prepared to show that this thing is only a hold-up with a blank cartridge.
+Hawk meant to take a snap judgment. He counted on throwing the whole thing
+up against Hunnicott, knowing perfectly well that a little local attorney
+at a way-station couldn't begin to secure the necessary affidavits."
+
+Loring paused with one end of his collar flying loose.
+
+"Let me understand," he said. "Do we have to disprove these charges by
+affidavits?"
+
+"Certainly; that is the proper rejoinder--the only one, in fact," said
+Kent; then, as a great doubt laid hold of him and shook him: "You don't
+mean to say there is any doubt about our ability to do it?"
+
+"Oh, no; I suppose not, if it comes to a show-down. But I was thinking of
+your man Hunnicott. Doesn't it occur to you that he is in just about as
+good a fix to secure those affidavits in Gaston as we are here, David?"
+
+"Good Lord! Do you mean that we have to send to Boston for our
+ammunition?"
+
+"Haven't we? Don't you see how nicely the thing is timed? Ten days later
+our Trans-Western reorganization would be complete, and we could swear our
+own officers on the spot. These people know what they are about."
+
+Kent was walking the floor again, but now the strength of the man was
+coming uppermost.
+
+"Never mind: we'll wire Boston, and then we'll do what we can here. Could
+you get me to Gaston on a special engine in three hours?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then we have till eleven o'clock to-morrow to prepare. I'll be ready by
+that time."
+
+"David, you are a brick when it comes to the in-fighting," said the
+general manager; and then he finished buttoning his collar.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY
+
+At ten forty-eight on the Saturday morning Kent was standing with the
+general manager on the Union Station track platform beside the engine
+which was to make the flying run to Gaston.
+
+Nine hours of sharp work lay between the hurried conference in Loring's
+bedroom and the drive to the station at a quarter before eleven. Boston
+had been wired; divers and sundry friends of the railway company had been
+interviewed; some few affidavits had been secured; and now they were
+waiting to give Boston its last chance, with a clerk hanging over the
+operator in the station telegraph office to catch the first word of
+encouragement.
+
+"If the Advisory Board doesn't send us something pretty solid, I'm going
+into this thing lame," said Kent, dubiously. "Of course, what Boston can
+send us will be only corroborative; unfortunately we can't wire
+affidavits. But it will help. What we have secured here lacks directness."
+
+"Necessarily," said Loring. "But I'm banking on the Board. If we don't get
+the ammunition before you have to start, I can wire it to you at Gaston.
+That gives us three hours more to go and come on."
+
+"Yes; and if it comes to the worst--if the decision be unfavorable--it can
+only embarrass us temporarily. This is merely the preliminary hearing, and
+nothing permanent can be established until we have had a hearing on the
+merits, and we can go armed to that, at all events."
+
+The general manager was looking at his watch, and he shut the case with a
+snap.
+
+"Don't you let it come to that, as long as you have a leg to stand on,
+David," he said impressively. "An interregnum of ten days might make it
+exceedingly difficult for us to prove anything." Then, as the telegraph
+office watcher came to the door and shook his head as a sign that Boston
+was still silent: "Your time is up. Off with you, and don't let Oleson
+scare you when he gets 219 in motion. He is a good runner, and you have a
+clear track."
+
+Kent clambered to the footplate of the smart eight-wheeler.
+
+"Can you make it by two o'clock?" he asked, when the engineer, a
+big-boned, blue-eyed Norwegian, dropped the reversing lever into the
+corner for the start.
+
+"Ay tank maybe so, ain'd it? Yust you climb opp dat odder box, Mester
+Kent, and hol' you' hair on. Ve bane gone to maig dat time, als' ve preak
+somedings, _ja_!" and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to
+a quickstep of forty miles an hour.
+
+Kent's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture
+of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of
+the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph
+poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of
+now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted,
+passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same
+heart-beat. And for the central figure in the picture, the one constant
+quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct, the big,
+calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box, hurling his huge machine doggedly
+through space.
+
+At 12:45 they stopped for water at a solitary tank in the midst of the
+brown desert. Kent got down stiffly from his cramped seat on the fireman's
+box and wetted his parched lips at the nozzle of the tender hose.
+
+"Do we make it, Jarl?" he asked.
+
+The engineer wagged his head.
+
+"Ay tank so. Ve maig it all right iff dey haf bane got dose track clear."
+
+"There are other trains to meet?"
+
+"_Ja_; two bane comin' dis vay; ant Nummer Samteen ve pass opp by."
+
+Oleson dropped off to pour a little oil into the speed-woundings while the
+tank was filling; and presently the dizzying race began again. For a time
+all things were propitious. The two trains to be met were found snugly
+withdrawn on the sidings at Mavero and Agriculta, and the station
+semaphores beckoned the flying special past at full speed. Kent checked
+off the dodging mile-posts: the pace was bettering the fastest run ever
+made on the Prairie Division--which was saying a good deal.
+
+But at Juniberg, twenty-seven miles out of Gaston, there was a delay.
+Train Number 17, the east-bound time freight, had left Juniberg at one
+o'clock, having ample time to make Lesterville, the next station east,
+before the light engine could possibly overtake it. But Lesterville had
+not yet reported its arrival; for which cause the agent at Juniberg was
+constrained to put out his stop signal, and Kent's special came to a stand
+at the platform.
+
+Under the circumstances, there appeared to be nothing for it but to wait
+until the delayed Number 17 was heard from; and Kent's first care was to
+report to Loring, and to ask if there were anything from Boston.
+
+The reply was encouraging. A complete denial of everything, signed by the
+proper officials, had been received and repeated to Kent at Gaston--was
+there now awaiting him. Kent saw in anticipation the nicely calculated
+scheme of the junto crumbling into small dust in the precise moment of
+fruition, and had a sharp attack of ante-triumph which he had to walk off
+in turns up and down the long platform. But as the waiting grew longer,
+and the dragging minutes totaled the quarter-hour and then the half, he
+began to perspire again.
+
+Half-past two came and went, and still there was no hopeful word from
+Lesterville. Kent had speech with Oleson, watch in hand. Would the
+engineer take the risk of a rear-end collision on a general manager's
+order? Oleson would obey orders if the heavens fell; and Kent flew to the
+wire again. Hunnicott, at Gaston, was besought to gain time in the hearing
+by any and all means; and Loring was asked to authorize the risk of a
+rear-end smash-up. He did it promptly. The light engine was to go on until
+it should "pick up" the delayed train between stations.
+
+The Juniberg man gave Oleson his release and the order to proceed with due
+care while the sounder was still clicking a further communication from
+headquarters. Loring was providing for the last contingency by sending
+Kent the authority to requisition Number 17's engine for the completion of
+the run in case the track should be blocked, with the freight engine free
+beyond the obstruction.
+
+Having his shackles stricken off, the Norwegian proceeded "with due care,"
+which is to say that he sent the eight-wheeler darting down the line
+toward Lesterville at the rate of a mile a minute. The mystery of the
+delay was solved at a point half-way between the two stations. A broken
+flange had derailed three cars of the freight, and the block was
+impassable.
+
+Armed with the general manager's mandatory wire, Kent ran forward to the
+engine of the freight train and was shortly on his way again. But in the
+twenty-mile run to Gaston more time was lost by the lumbering freight
+locomotive, and it was twenty minutes past three o'clock when the county
+seat came in sight and Kent began to oscillate between two sharp-pointed
+horns of a cruel dilemma.
+
+By dropping off at the street-crossing nearest the Court House, he might
+still be in time to get a hearing with such documentary backing as he had
+been able to secure at the capital. By going on to the station he could
+pick up the Boston wire which, while it was not strictly evidence, might
+create a strong presumption in his favor; but in this case he would
+probably be too late to use it. So he counted the rail-lengths, watch in
+hand, with a curse to the count for his witlessness in failing to have
+Loring repeat the Boston message to him during the long wait at Juniberg;
+and when the time for the decision arrived he signaled the engineer to
+slow down, jumped from the step at the nearest crossing and hastened up
+the street toward the Court House.
+
+In the mean time, to go back a little, during this day of hurryings to and
+fro Blashfield Hunnicott had been having the exciting experiences of a
+decade crowded into a corresponding number of hours. Early in the morning
+he had begun besieging the headquarters wire office for news and
+instructions, and, owing to Kent's good intentions to be on the ground in
+person, had got little enough of either.
+
+At length, to his unspeakable relief, he had news of the coming special;
+and with the conviction that help was at hand he waited at the station
+with what coolness there was in him to meet his chief. But as the time for
+the hearing drew near he grew nervous again; and all the keen pains of
+utter helplessness returned with renewed acuteness when the operator, who
+had overheard the Juniberg-Lesterville wire talk, told him that the
+special was hung up at the former station.
+
+"O my good Lord!" he groaned. "I'm in for it with empty hands!" None the
+less, he ran to the baggage-room end of the building and, capturing an
+express wagon, had himself trundled out to the Court House.
+
+The judge was at his desk when Hunnicott entered, and Hawk was on hand,
+calmly reading the morning paper. The hands of the clock on the wall
+opposite the judge's desk pointed to five minutes of the hour, and for
+five minutes Hunnicott sat listening, hoping against hope that he should
+hear the rush and roar of the incoming special.
+
+Promptly on the stroke of three the judge tapped upon his desk with his
+pencil.
+
+"Now, gentlemen, proceed with your case; and I must ask you to be as brief
+as possible. I have an appointment at four which can not be postponed," he
+said quietly; and Hawk threw down his paper and began at once.
+
+Hunnicott heard his opponent's argument mechanically, having his ear
+attuned for whistle signals and wheel drummings. Hawk spoke rapidly and
+straight to his point, as befitted a man speaking to the facts and with no
+jury present to be swayed by oratorical effort. When he came to the
+summarizing of the allegations in the amended petition, he did it wholly
+without heat, piling up the accusations one upon another with the careful
+method of a bricklayer building a wall. The wall-building simile thrust
+itself upon Hunnicott with irresistible force as he listened. If the
+special engine should not dash up in time to batter down the wall----
+
+Hawk closed as dispassionately as he had begun, and the judge bowed
+gravely in Hunnicott's direction. The local attorney got upon his feet,
+and as he began to speak a telegram was handed in. It was Kent's wire from
+Juniberg, beseeching him to gain time at all hazards, and he settled
+himself to the task. For thirty dragging minutes he rang the changes on
+the various steps in the suit, knowing well that the fatal moment was
+approaching when--Kent still failing him--he would be compelled to submit
+his case without a scrap of an affidavit to support it.
+
+The moment came, and still there was no encouraging whistle shriek from
+the dun plain beyond the open windows. Hawk was visibly disgusted, and
+Judge MacFarlane was growing justly impatient. Hunnicott began again, and
+the judge reproved him mildly.
+
+"Much of what you are saying is entirely irrelevant, Mr. Hunnicott. This
+hearing is on the plaintiff's amended petition."
+
+No one knew better than the local attorney that he was wholly at the
+court's mercy; that he had been so from the moment the judge began to
+consider his purely formal defense, entirely unsupported by affidavits or
+evidence of any kind. None the less, he strung his denials out by every
+amplification he could devise, and, having fired his last shot, sat down
+in despairing breathlessness to hear the judge's summing-up and decision.
+
+Judge MacFarlane was mercifully brief. On the part of the plaintiff there
+was an amended petition fully fortified by uncontroverted affidavits. On
+the part of the defendant company there was nothing but a formal denial of
+the allegations. The duty of the court in the premises was clear. The
+prayer of the plaintiff was granted, the temporary relief asked for was
+given, and the order of the court would issue accordingly.
+
+The judge was rising when the still, hot air of the room began to vibrate
+with the tremulous thunder of the sound for which Hunnicott had been so
+long straining his ears. He was the first of the three to hear it, and he
+hurried out ahead of the others. At the foot of the stair he ran blindly
+against Kent, dusty, travel-worn and haggard.
+
+"You're too late!" he blurted out. "We're done up. Hawk's petition has
+been granted and the road is in the hands of a receiver."
+
+Kent dashed his fist upon the stair-rail.
+
+"Who is the man?" he demanded.
+
+"Major Jim Guilford," said Hunnicott. Then, as footfalls coming stairward
+were heard in the upper corridor, he locked arms with Kent, faced him
+about and thrust him out over the door-stone. "Let's get out of this. You
+look as if you might kill somebody."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+THE LAST DITCH
+
+It was a mark of the later and larger development of David Kent that he
+was able to keep his head in the moment of catastrophes. In boyhood his
+hair had been a brick-dust red, and having the temperament which belongs
+of right to the auburn-hued, his first impulse was to face about and make
+a personal matter of the legal robbery with Judge MacFarlane.
+
+Happily for all concerned, Hunnicott's better counsels prevailed, and when
+the anger fit passed Kent found himself growing cool and determined.
+Hunnicott was crestfallen and disposed to be apologetic; but Kent did him
+justice.
+
+"Don't blame yourself: there was nothing else you could have done. Have
+you a stenographer in your office?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A good one?"
+
+"It's young Perkins: you know him."
+
+"He'll do. 'Phone him to run down to the station and get what telegrams
+there are for me, and we'll talk as we go."
+
+Once free of the Court House, Kent began a rapid-fire of questions.
+
+"Where is Judge MacFarlane stopping?"
+
+"At the Mid-Continent."
+
+"Have you any idea when he intends leaving town?"
+
+"No; but he will probably take the first train. He never stays here an
+hour longer than he has to after adjournment."
+
+"That would be the Flyer east at six o'clock. Is he going east?"
+
+"Come to think of it, I believe he is. Somebody said he was going to Hot
+Springs. He's in miserable health."
+
+Kent saw more possibilities, and worse, and quickened his pace a little.
+
+"I hope your young man won't let the grass grow under his feet," he said.
+"The minutes between now and six o'clock are worth days to us."
+
+"What do we do?" asked Hunnicott, willing to take a little lesson in
+practice as he ran.
+
+"The affidavits I have brought with me and the telegrams which are waiting
+at the station must convince MacFarlane that he has made a mistake. We
+shall prepare a motion for the discharge of the receiver and for the
+vacation of the order appointing him, and ask the judge to set an early
+day for the hearing on the merits of the case. He can't refuse."
+
+Hunnicott shook his head.
+
+"It has been all cut and dried from 'way back," he objected. "They won't
+let you upset it at the last moment."
+
+"We'll give them a run for their money," said Kent. "A good bit of it
+depends upon Perkins' speed as a stenographer."
+
+As it befell, Perkins did not prove a disappointment, and by five o'clock
+Kent was in the lobby of the Mid-Continent, sending his card up to the
+judge's room. Word came back that the judge was in the cafe fortifying the
+inner man in preparation for his journey, and Kent did not stand upon
+ceremony. From the archway of the dining-room he marked down his man at a
+small table in the corner, and went to him at once, plunging promptly into
+the matter in hand.
+
+"The exigencies of the case must plead my excuse for intruding upon you
+here, Judge MacFarlane," he began courteously. "But I have been told that
+you were leaving town----"
+
+The judge waved him down with a deprecatory fork.
+
+"Court is adjourned, Mr. Kent, and I must decline to discuss the case _ex
+parte_. Why did you allow it to go by default?"
+
+"That is precisely what I am here to explain," said Kent, suavely. "The
+time allowed us was very short; and a series of accidents----"
+
+Again the judge interrupted.
+
+"A court can hardly take cognizance of accidents, Mr. Kent. Your local
+attorney was on the ground and he had the full benefit of the delay."
+
+"I know," was the patient rejoinder. "Technically, your order is
+unassailable. None the less, a great injustice has been done, as we are
+prepared to prove. I am not here to ask you to reopen the case at your
+dinner-table, but if you will glance over these papers I am sure you will
+set an early day for the hearing upon the merits."
+
+Judge MacFarlane forced a gray smile.
+
+"You vote yea and nay in the same breath, Mr. Kent. If I should examine
+your papers, I should be reopening the case at my dinner-table. You shall
+have your hearing in due course."
+
+"At chambers?" said Kent. "We shall be ready at any moment; we are ready
+now, in point of fact."
+
+"I can not say as to that. My health is very precarious, and I am under a
+physician's orders to take a complete rest for a time. I am sorry if the
+delay shall work a hardship to the company you represent; but under the
+circumstances, with not even an affidavit offered by your side, it is your
+misfortune. And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. It lacks but a
+few minutes of my train time."
+
+The hotel porter was droning out the call for the east-bound Flyer, and
+Kent effaced himself while Judge MacFarlane was paying his bill and making
+ready for his departure. But when the judge set out to walk to the
+station, Kent walked with him. There were five squares to be measured, and
+for five squares he hung at MacFarlane's elbow and the plea he made should
+have won him a hearing. Yet the judge remained impassible, and at the end
+of the argument turned him back in a word to his starting point.
+
+"I can not recall the order at this time, if I would, Mr. Kent; neither
+can I set a day for the hearing on the merits. What has been done was done
+in open court and in the presence of your attorney, who offered no
+evidence in contradiction of the allegations set forth in the plaintiff's
+amended petition, although they were supported by more than a dozen
+affidavits; and it can not be undone in the streets. Since you have not
+improved your opportunities, you must abide the consequences. The law can
+not be hurried."
+
+They had reached the station and the east-bound train was whistling for
+Gaston. Kent's patience was nearly gone, and the auburn-hued temperament
+was clamoring hotly for its innings.
+
+"This vacation of yours, Judge MacFarlane: how long is it likely to last?"
+he inquired, muzzling his wrath yet another moment.
+
+"I can not say; if I could I might be able to give you a more definite
+answer as to the hearing on the merits. But my health is very miserable,
+as I have said. If I am able to return shortly, I shall give you the
+hearing at chambers at an early date."
+
+"And if not?"
+
+"If not, I am afraid it will have to go over to the next term of court."
+
+"Six months," said Kent; and then his temper broke loose. "Judge
+MacFarlane, it is my opinion, speaking as man to man, that you are a
+scoundrel. I know what you have done, and why you have done it. Also, I
+know why you are running away, now that it is done. So help me God, I'll
+bring you to book for it if I have to make a lifetime job of it! It's all
+right for your political backers; they are thieves and bushwhackers, and
+they make no secret of it. But there is one thing worse than a trickster,
+and that is a trickster's tool!"
+
+For the moment while the train was hammering in over the switches they
+stood facing each other fiercely, all masks flung aside, each after his
+kind; the younger man flushed and battle-mad; the elder white, haggard,
+tremulous. Kent did not guess, then or ever, how near he came to death.
+Two years earlier a judge had been shot and maimed on a western circuit
+and since then, MacFarlane had taken a coward's precaution. Here was a man
+that knew, and while he lived the cup of trembling might never be put
+aside.
+
+It was the conductor's cry of "All aboard!" that broke the homicidal
+spell. Judge MacFarlane started guiltily, shook off the angry eye-grip of
+his accuser, and went to take his place in the Pullman. One minute later
+the east-bound train was threading its way out among the switches of the
+lower yard, and Kent had burst into the telegraph office to wire the
+volcanic news to his chief.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+THE MAN IN POSSESSION
+
+Appraised at its value in the current coin of street gossip, the legal
+seizure of the Trans-Western figured mainly as an example of the failure
+of modern business methods when applied to the concealment of a working
+corporation's true financial condition.
+
+This unsympathetic point of view was sufficiently defined in a bit of
+shop-talk between Harnwicke, the cold-blooded, and his traffic manager in
+the office of the Overland Short Line the morning after the newspaper
+announcement of the receivership.
+
+"I told you they were in deep water," said the lawyer, confidently. "They
+haven't been making any earnings--net earnings--since the Y.S.& F. cut
+into them at Rio Verde, and the dividends were only a bluff for
+stock-bracing purposes. I surmised that an empty treasury was what was the
+matter when they refused to join us in the veto affair."
+
+"That is one way of looking at it," said the traffic manager. "But some of
+the papers are claiming that it was a legal hold-up, pure and simple."
+
+"Nothing of the kind," retorted the lawyer, whose respect for the law was
+as great as his contempt for the makers of the laws. "Judge MacFarlane had
+no discretion in the matter. Hawk had a perfect right to file an amended
+petition, and the judge was obliged to act upon it. I'm not saying it
+wasn't a devilish sharp trick of Hawk's. It was. He saw a chance to smite
+them under the fifth rib, and he took it."
+
+"But how about his client: the woman who was put off the train? Is she any
+better off than she was before?"
+
+"Oh, she'll get her five thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take
+the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for
+the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness,
+and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I
+understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the
+receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to say for
+himself."
+
+This view of Harnwicke's, colored perhaps by the fact that the
+Trans-Western was a business competitor of the Short Line, was the
+generally accepted one in railroad and financial circles at the capital.
+Civilization apart, there is still a deal of the primitive in human
+nature, and wolves are not the only creatures that are prone to fall upon
+the disabled member of the pack and devour him.
+
+But in the State at large the press was discussing the event from a
+political point of view; one section, small but vehement, raising the cry
+of trickery and judicial corruption, and prophesying the withdrawal of all
+foreign capital from the State, while the other, large and complacent,
+pointed eloquently to the beneficent working of the law under which the
+cause of a poor woman, suing for her undoubted right, might be made the
+whip to flog corporate tyranny into instant subjection.
+
+As for the dispossessed stock-holders in the far-away East, they were slow
+to take the alarm, and still slower to get concerted action. Like many of
+the western roads, the Western Pacific had been capitalized largely by
+popular subscription; hence there was no single holder, or group of
+holders, of sufficient financial weight to enter the field against the
+spoilers.
+
+But when Loring and his associates had fairly got the wires hot with the
+tale of what had been done, and the much more alarming tale of what was
+likely to be done, the Boston inertness vanished. A pool of the stock was
+formed, with the members of the Advisory Board as a nucleus; money was
+subscribed, and no less a legal light than an ex-attorney-general of the
+state of Massachusetts was despatched to the seat of war to advise with
+the men on the ground. None the less, disaster out-travels the swiftest of
+"limited" trains. Before the heavily-feed consulting attorney had crossed
+the Hudson in his westward journey, Wall Street had taken notice, and
+there was a momentary splash in the troubled pool of the Stock Exchange
+and a vanishing circle of ripples to show where Western Pacific had gone
+down.
+
+In the meantime Major James Guilford, somewhile president of the Apache
+National Bank of Gaston, and antecedent to that the frowning autocrat of a
+twenty-five-mile logging road in the North Carolina mountains, had given
+bond in some sort and had taken possession of the company's property and
+of the offices in the Quintard Building.
+
+His first official act as receiver was to ask for the resignations of a
+dozen heads of departments, beginning with the general manager and pausing
+for the moment with the supervisor of track. That done, he filled the
+vacancies with political troughsmen; and with these as assistant
+decapitators the major passed rapidly down the line, striking off heads in
+daily batches until the over-flow of the Bucks political following was
+provided for on the railroad's pay-rolls to the wife's cousin's nephew.
+
+This was the work of the first few administrative days or weeks, and while
+it was going on, the business attitude of the road remained unchanged. But
+once seated firmly in the saddle, with his awkward squad well in hand, the
+major proceeded to throw a bomb of consternation into the camp of his
+competitors.
+
+Kent was dining with Ormsby in the grill-room of the Camelot Club when the
+waiter brought in the evening edition of the _Argus_, whose railroad
+reporter had heard the preliminary fizzing of the bomb fuse. The story was
+set out on the first page, first column, with appropriate headlines.
+
+  WAR TO THE KNIFE AND THE KNIFE
+  TO THE HILT!
+
+  TRANS-WESTERN CUTS COMMODITY RATE.
+
+  Great Excitement in Railroad Circles.
+  Receiver Guilford's Hold-up.
+
+Kent ran his eye rapidly down the column and passed the paper across to
+Ormsby.
+
+"I told you so," he said. "They didn't find the road insolvent, but they
+are going to make it so in the shortest possible order. A rate war will do
+it quicker than anything else on earth."
+
+Ormsby thrust out his jaw.
+
+"Have we got to stand by and see 'em do it?"
+
+"The man from Massachusetts says yes, and he knows, or thinks he does. He
+has been here two weeks now, and he has nosed out for himself all the
+dead-walls. We can't appeal, because there is no decision to appeal from.
+We can't take it out of the lower court until it is finished in the lower
+court. We can't enjoin an officer of the court; and there is no authority
+in the State that will set aside Judge MacFarlane's order when that order
+was made under technically legal conditions."
+
+"You could have told him all that in the first five minutes," said Ormsby.
+
+"I did tell him, and was mildly sat upon. To-day he came around and gave
+me back my opinion, clause for clause, as his own. But I have no kick
+coming. Somebody will have to be here to fight the battle to a finish when
+the judge returns, and our expert will advise the Bostonians to retain
+me."
+
+"Does he stay?" Ormsby asked.
+
+"Oh, no; he is going back with Loring to-night. Loring has an idea of his
+own which may or may not be worth the powder it will take to explode it.
+He is going to beseech the Boston people to enlarge the pool until it
+controls a safe majority of the stock."
+
+"What good will that do?"
+
+"None, directly. It's merely a safe preliminary to anything that may
+happen. I tell Loring he is like all the others: he knows when he has
+enough and is willing to stand from under. I'm the only fool in the lot."
+Ormsby's smile was heartening and good for sore nerves.
+
+"I like your pluck, Kent; I'll be hanged if I don't. And I'll back you to
+win, yet."
+
+Kent shook his head unhopefully.
+
+"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am fighting for the pure love of it, and
+not with any great hope of saving the stock-holders. These grafters have
+us by the nape of the neck. We can't make a move till MacFarlane comes
+back and gives us a hearing on the merits. That may not be till the next
+term of court. Meanwhile, the temporary receiver is to all intents and
+purposes a permanent receiver; and the interval would suffice to wreck a
+dozen railroads."
+
+"And still you won't give up?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I hope you won't have to. But to a man up a tree it looks very much like
+a dead cock in the pit. As I have said, if there is any backing to do, I'm
+with you, first, last, and all the time, merely from a sportsman's
+interest in the game. But is there any use in a little handful of us
+trying to buck up against a whole state government?"
+
+The coffee had been served, and Kent dropped a lump of sugar into his cup.
+
+"Ormsby, I'll never let go while I'm alive enough to fight," he said
+slowly. "One decent quality I have--and the only one, perhaps: I don't
+know when I'm beaten. And I'll down this crowd of political plunderers
+yet, if Bucks doesn't get me sand-bagged."
+
+His listener pushed back his chair.
+
+"If you stood to lose anything more than your job I could understand it,"
+he commented. "As it is, I can't. Any way you look at it, your stake in
+the game isn't worth the time and effort it will take to play the string
+out. And I happen to know you're ambitious to do things--things that
+count."
+
+"What is it you don't understand--the motive?"
+
+"That's it."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"You are not as astute as Miss Van Brock. She pointed it out to me last
+night--or thought she did--in two words."
+
+Ormsby's eyes darkened, and he did not affect to misunderstand.
+
+"It would be a grand-stand play," he said half-musingly, "if you should
+happen to worry it through, I mean. I believe Mrs. Hepzibah would be ready
+to fall on your neck and forgive you, and turn me down." Then,
+half-jestingly: "Kent, what will you take to drop this thing permanently
+and go away?"
+
+David Kent's smile showed his teeth.
+
+"The one thing you wouldn't be willing to give. You asked me once when we
+had fallen over the fence upon this forbidden ground if I were satisfied,
+and I told you I wasn't. Do we understand each other?"
+
+"I guess so," said Ormsby. "But--Say, Kent, I like you too well to see you
+go up against a stone fence blindfolded. I'm like Guilford: I am the man
+in possession. And possession is nine points of the law."
+
+Kent rose and took the proffered cigar from Ormsby's case.
+
+"It depends a good bit upon how the possession is gained--and
+held--doesn't it?" he rejoined coolly. "And your figure is unfortunate in
+its other half. I am going to beat Guilford."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+THE WRECKERS
+
+Just why Receiver Guilford, an officer of the court who was supposed to be
+nursing an insolvent railroad to the end that its creditors might not lose
+all, should begin by declaring war on the road's revenue, was a question
+which the managers of competing lines strove vainly to answer. But when,
+in defiance of all precedent, he made the cut rates effective to and from
+all local stations on the Trans-Western, giving the shippers at
+intermediate and non-competitive points the full benefit of the
+reductions, the railroad colony denounced him as a madman and gave him a
+month in which to find the bottom of a presumably empty treasury.
+
+But the event proved that the major's madness was not altogether without
+method. It is an axiom in the carrying trade that low rates make business;
+create it, so to speak, out of nothing. Given an abundant crop, low
+prices, and high freight rates in the great cereal belt, and, be the
+farmers never so poor, much of the grain will be stored and held against
+the chance of better conditions.
+
+So it came about that Major Guilford's relief measure was timed to a
+nicety, and the blanket cut in rates opened a veritable flood-gate for
+business in Trans-Western territory. From the day of its announcement the
+traffic of the road increased by leaps and bounds. Stored grain came out
+of its hiding places at every country cross-roads to beg for cars; stock
+feeders drove their market cattle unheard-of distances, across the tracks
+of competing lines, over and around obstacles of every sort, to pour them
+into the loading corrals of the Trans-Western.
+
+Nor was the traffic all outgoing. With the easing of the money burden, the
+merchants in the tributary towns began thriftily to take advantage of the
+low rates to renew their stocks; long-deferred visits and business trips
+suddenly became possible; and the saying that it was cheaper to travel
+than to stay at home gained instant and grateful currency.
+
+In a short time the rolling stock of the road was taxed to its utmost
+capacity, and the newly appointed purchasing agent was buying cars and
+locomotives right and left. Also, to keep pace with the ever-increasing
+procession of trains, a doubled construction force wrought night and day
+installing new side tracks and passing points.
+
+Under the fructifying influence of such a golden shower of prosperity,
+land values began to rise again, slowly at first, as buyers distrusted the
+continuance of the golden shower; more rapidly a little later, as the
+Guilford policy defined itself in terms of apparent permanence.
+
+Towns along the line--hamlets long since fallen into the way-station rut
+of desuetude--awoke with a start, bestirring themselves joyfully to meet
+the inspiriting conditions. At Midland City, Stephen Hawk, the new
+right-of-way agent, ventured to ask municipal help to construct a ten-mile
+branch to Lavabee: it was forthcoming promptly; and the mass meeting, at
+which the bond loan was anticipated by public subscription shouted itself
+hoarse in enthusiasm.
+
+At Gaston, where Hawk asked for a donation of land whereon the company
+might build the long-promised division repair-shops, people fought with
+one another to be first among the donors. And at Juniberg, where the
+company proposed to establish the first of a series of grain
+subtreasuries--warehouses in which the farmers of the surrounding country
+could store their products and borrow money on them from the railroad
+company at the rate of three per cent, per annum--at Juniberg enough money
+was subscribed to erect three such depots as the heaviest tributary crop
+could possibly fill.
+
+It was while the pendulum of prosperity was in full swing that David Kent
+took a day off from sweating over his problem of ousting the receiver and
+ran down to Gaston. Single-eyed as he was in the pursuit of justice, he
+was not unmindful of the six lots standing in his name in the Gaston
+suburb, and from all accounts the time was come to dispose of them.
+
+He made the journey in daylight, with his eyes wide open and the mental
+pencil busy at work noting the changes upon which the State press had been
+dilating daily, but which he was now seeing for the first time. They were
+incontestable--and wonderful. He admitted the fact without prejudice to a
+settled conviction that the sun-burst of prosperity was merely another
+brief period of bubble-blowing. Towns whose streets had been grass-grown
+since the day when each in turn had surrendered its right to be called the
+terminus of the westward-building railroad, were springing into new life.
+The song of the circular saw, the bee-boom of the planing-mill and the
+tapping of hammers were heard in the land, and the wayside hamlets were
+dotted with new roofs. And Gaston----
+
+But Gaston deserved a separate paragraph in the mental note-book, and Kent
+accorded it, marveling still more. It was as if the strenuous onrush of
+the climaxing Year Three had never been interrupted. The material for the
+new company shops was arriving by trainloads, and an army of men was at
+work clearing the grounds. On a siding near the station a huge grain
+elevator was rising. In the streets the hustling activity of the
+"terminus" period was once more in full swing; and at the Mid-Continent
+Kent had some little difficulty in securing a room.
+
+He was smoking his after-dinner cigar in the lobby of the hotel and trying
+as he might to orient himself when Blashfield Hunnicott drifted in. Kent
+gave the sometime local attorney a cigar, made room for him on the
+plush-covered settee, and proceeded to pump him dry of Gaston news. Summed
+up, the inquiries pointed themselves thus: was there any basis for the
+Gaston revival other than the lately changed attitude of the railroad? In
+other words, if the cut rates should be withdrawn and the railroad
+activities cease, would there not be a second and still more disastrous
+collapse of the Gaston bubble?
+
+Pressed hardly, Hunnicott admitted the probability; given another turn,
+the screw of inquiry squeezed out an admission of the fact, slurred over
+by the revivalist, that the railway company's treasury was really the
+alms-box into which all hands were dipping.
+
+"One more question and I'll let up on you," said Kent. "It used to be said
+of you in the flush times that you kept tab on the real estate transfers
+when everybody else was too busy to read the record. Do you still do it?"
+
+Hunnicott laughed uneasily.
+
+"Rather more than ever just now, as you'd imagine."
+
+"It is well. Now you know the members of the old gang, from his Excellency
+down. Tell me one thing: are they buying or selling?"
+
+Hunnicott sprang up and slapped his leg.
+
+"By Jupiter, Kent! They are selling--every last man of them!"
+
+"Precisely. And when they have sold all they have to sell?"
+
+"They'll turn us loose--drop us--quit booming the town, if your theory is
+the right one. But say, Kent, I can't believe it, you know. It's too big a
+thing to be credited to Jim Guilford and his handful of subs in the
+railroad office. Why, it's all along the line, everywhere."
+
+"I'm telling you that Guilford isn't the man. He is only a cog in the
+wheel. There is a bigger mind than his behind it."
+
+"I can't help it," Hunnicott protested. "I don't believe that any man or
+clique could bring this thing about unless we were really on the upturn."
+
+"Very good; believe what you please, but do as I tell you. Sell every foot
+of Gaston dirt that stands in your name; and while you are about it, sell
+those six lots for me in Subdivision Five. More than that, do it pretty
+soon."
+
+Hunnicott promised, in the brokerage affair, at least. Then he switched
+the talk to the receivership.
+
+"Still up in the air, are you, in the railroad grab case?"
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"No news of MacFarlane?"
+
+"Plenty of it. His health is still precarious, and will likely remain so
+until the spoilsmen have picked the skeleton clean."
+
+Hunnicott was silent for a full minute. Then he said:
+
+"Say, Kent, hasn't it occurred to you that they are rather putting meat on
+the bones instead of taking it off? Their bills for betterments must be
+out of sight."
+
+It had occurred to Kent, but he gave his own explanation of Major
+Guilford's policy in a terse sentence.
+
+"It is a part of the bluff; fattening the thing a little before they
+barbecue it."
+
+"I suppose so. It's a pity we don't live a little farther back in the
+history of the world: say at a time when we could hire MacFarlane's doctor
+to obliterate the judge, and no questions asked."
+
+Who can explain how it is that some jesting word, trivial and purposeless
+it may be, will fire a hidden train of thought which was waiting only for
+some chance spark? "Obliterate the judge," said Hunnicott in grim jest;
+and straightway Kent saw possibilities; saw a thing to be done, though not
+yet the manner of its doing.
+
+"If you'll excuse me," he said abruptly to his companion, "I believe I'll
+try to catch the Flyer back to the capital. I came down to see about
+selling those lots of mine, but if you will undertake it for me----"
+
+"Of course," said Hunnicott; "I'll be only too glad. You've ten minutes:
+can you make it?"
+
+Kent guessed so, and made the guess a certainty with two minutes to spare.
+The through sleeper was lightly loaded, and he picked out the most
+unneighbored section, of the twelve, being wishful only for undisturbed
+thinking ground. But before the train had swung past the suburb lights of
+Gaston, the smoker's unrest seized him and the thought-wheels demanded
+tobacco. Kent fought it as long as he could, making sure that the
+smoking-compartment liars' club would be in session; but when the demand
+became a nagging insistence, he found his pipe and tobacco and went to the
+men's room.
+
+The little den behind the drawing-room had but one occupant besides the
+rear-end brakeman---a tall, saturnine man in a gray grass-cloth duster who
+was smoking a Porto Rican stogie. Kent took a second look and held out his
+hand.
+
+"This is an unexpected pleasure, Judge Marston. I was counting on three
+hours of solitary confinement."
+
+The lieutenant-governor acknowledged the hand-clasp, nodded, and made room
+on the leather-covered divan for the new-comer. Hildreth, the editor of
+the _Argus_, put it aptly when he said that the grim-faced old cattle king
+had "blown" into politics. He was a compromise on the People's Party
+ticket; was no part of the Bucks programme, and had been made to feel it.
+Tradition had it that he had been a terror to the armed and organized
+cattle thieves of the early days; hence the brevet title of "Judge." But
+those that knew him best did not know that he had once been the brightest
+man upon the Supreme Bench of his native state: this before failing health
+had driven him into exile.
+
+As a mixer, the capital had long since voted Oliver Marston a conspicuous
+failure. A reticent, reserved man by temperament and habit, and with both
+temperament and habit confirmed by his long exile on the cattle ranges, he
+had grown rather less than more talkative after his latest plunge into
+public life; and even Miss Van Brock confessed that she found him
+impossible on the social side. None the less, Kent had felt drawn toward
+him from the first; partly because Marston was a good man in bad company,
+and partly because there was something remindful of the elder Kent in the
+strong face, the slow smile and the introspective eye of the old man from
+the hill country.
+
+For a time the talk was a desultory monologue, with Kent doing his best to
+keep it from dying outright. Later, when he was fairly driven in upon his
+reserves, he began to speak of himself, and of the hopeless fight for
+enlargement in the Trans-Western struggle. Marston lighted the
+match-devouring stogie for the twentieth time, squared himself on the end
+of the divan and listened attentively. At the end of the recounting he
+said:
+
+"It seems to be a failure of justice, Mr. Kent. Can you prove your
+postulate?"
+
+"I can. With fifteen minutes more on the day of the preliminary hearing I
+should have shown it to any one's satisfaction."
+
+Marston went into a brown study with his eyes fixed upon the
+stamped-leather devil in the panel at the opposite end of the compartment.
+When he spoke again, Kent wondered at the legal verbiage, and still more
+at the clear-cut, judicial opinion.
+
+"The facts in the case, as you state them, point to judicial connivance,
+and we should always be slow to charge that, Mr. Kent. Technically, the
+court was not at fault. Due notice was served on the company's attorney of
+record, and you admit, yourself, that the delay, short as it was, would
+have been sufficient if you had not been accidentally detained. And, since
+there were no contravening affidavits submitted, Judge MacFarlane was
+technically warranted in granting the prayer for a temporary receiver."
+
+"I'm not trying to refute that," said Kent. "But afterward, when I called
+upon the judge with the evidence in hand----"
+
+"He was under no absolute obligation to retry the case out of court, as
+you know, Mr. Kent. Neither was he obliged to give you an unofficial
+notice of the day upon which he would hear your motion for the discharge
+of the receiver and the vacation of his order appointing him."
+
+"Under no absolute legal obligation, perhaps," retorted Kent. "But the
+moral obligation--"
+
+"We are coming to that. I have been giving you what would probably be a
+minority opinion of an appellate court, if you could take an appeal. The
+majority opinion might take higher ground, pointing to the manifest
+injustice done to the defendant company by the shortness of the delay
+granted; by Judge MacFarlane's refusal to continue the hearing for one
+hour, though your attorney was present and pleading for the same; and
+lastly for the indefinite postponement of the hearing on the merits on
+insufficient grounds, since the judge was not at the time, and has not
+since been, too ill to attend to the routine duties of his office."
+
+Kent looked up quickly.
+
+"Judge Marston, do you know that last assertion to be true?" he demanded.
+
+The slow smile came and went in the introspective eyes of the older man.
+
+"I have been giving you the opinion of the higher court," he said, with
+his nearest approach to jocoseness. "It is based upon the supposition that
+your allegations would be supported by evidence."
+
+Kent smoked on in silence while the train measured the rail-lengths
+between two of the isolated prairie stations. When he spoke again there
+was honest deference in his manner.
+
+"Mr. Marston, you have a far better right to your courtesy title of
+'Judge' than that given by the Great American Title Company, Unlimited,"
+he said. "Will you advise me?"
+
+"As plain Oliver Marston, and a man old enough to be your father, yes.
+What have you been doing? Trying to oust the receiver, I suppose."
+
+"Yes; trying to find some technical flaw by which he could be ousted."
+
+"It can't be done. You must strike higher. Are you fully convinced of
+Judge MacFarlane's venality?"
+
+"As fully as I can be without having seen with my own eyes and heard with
+my own ears."
+
+Marston opened his watch and looked at it. Then he lighted another of the
+villainous little cigars.
+
+"We have an hour yet," he said. "You have been giving me the legal points
+in the case: now give me the inferences--all of them."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"I'm afraid I sha'n't be able to forget the lieutenant-governor. I shall
+have to call some pretty hard names."
+
+"Call them," said his companion, briefly; and Kent went deep into the
+details, beginning with the formation of the political gang in Gaston the
+dismantled.
+
+The listener in the gray dust-coat heard him through without comment. When
+Kent reached the end of the inferences, telling the truth without scruple
+and letting the charge of political and judicial corruption lie where it
+would, the engineer was whistling for the capital.
+
+"You have told me some things I knew, and some others that I only
+suspected," was all the answer he got until the train was slowing into the
+Union Station. Then as he flung away the stump of the little cigar the
+silent one added: "If I were in your place, Mr. Kent, I believe I should
+take a supplementary course of reading in the State law."
+
+"In what particular part of it?" said Kent, keen anxiety in every word.
+
+"In that part of the fundamental law which relates to the election of
+circuit judges, let us say. If I had your case to fight, I should try to
+obliterate Judge MacFarlane."
+
+Kent had but a moment in which to remark the curious coincidence in the
+use of precisely the same word by both Hunnicott and his present adviser.
+
+"But, my dear sir! we should gain nothing by MacFarlane's removal when his
+successor would be appointed by the executive!"
+
+Marston turned in the doorway of the smoking-compartment and laid a
+fatherly hand on the younger man's shoulder.
+
+"My boy, I didn't say 'remove'; I said 'obliterate'. Good night."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+THE GERRYMANDER
+
+With Judge Marston's hint partly to point the way, Kent was no long time
+in getting at work on the new lead.
+
+Having been at the time a practitioner in one of the counties affected, he
+knew the political deal by which MacFarlane had been elected. Briefly
+described, it was a swapping of horses in midstream. In the preliminary
+canvass it was discovered that in all probability Judge MacFarlane's
+district, as constituted, would not reelect him. But the adjoining
+district was strong enough to spare a county without loss to the party;
+and that county added to MacFarlane's voting strength would tip the scale
+in his favor. The Assembly was in session, and the remedy was applied in
+the shape of a bill readjusting the district lines to fit the political
+necessity.
+
+While this bill was still in the lower house an obstacle presented itself
+in the form of a vigorous protest from Judge Whitcomb, whose district was
+the one to suffer loss. The county in question was a prosperous one, and
+the court fees--which a compliant clerk might secretly divide with the
+judge appointing him--were large: wherefore Whitcomb threatened political
+reprisals if Kiowa County should be taken away from him. The outcome was a
+compromise. For elective purposes the two districts were gerrymandered as
+the bill proposed; but it was expressly provided that the transferred
+county should remain judicially in Whitcomb's district until the
+expiration of Whitcomb's term of office.
+
+Having refreshed his memory as to the facts, Kent spent a forenoon in the
+State library. He stayed on past the luncheon hour, feeding on a dry diet
+of Digests; and it was not until hunger began to sharpen his faculties
+that he thought of going back of the statutory law to the fountain-head in
+the constitution of the State. Here, after he had read carefully section
+by section almost through the entire instrument, his eye lighted upon a
+clause which gradually grew luminous as he read and re-read it.
+
+"That is what Marston meant; it must be what he meant," he mused; and
+returning the book to its niche in the alcove he sat down to put his face
+in his hands and sum up the status in logical sequence.
+
+The conclusion must have been convincing, since he presently sprang up and
+left the room quickly to have himself shot down the elevator shaft to the
+street level. The telegraph office in the capitol was closed, but there
+was another in the Hotel Brunswick, two squares distant, and thither he
+went.
+
+"Hold the pool in fighting trim at all hazards. Think I have found weak
+link in the chain," was his wire to Loring, at Boston; and having sent it,
+he went around to Cassatti's and astonished the waiter by ordering a
+hearty luncheon at half-past three o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+It was late in the evening before he left the tiny office on the fifth
+floor of the Quintard Building where one of his former stenographers had
+set up in business for herself. Since five o'clock the young woman had
+been steadily driving the type-writer to Kent's dictation. When the final
+sheet came out with a whirring rasp of the ratchet, he suddenly remembered
+that he had promised Miss Van Brock to dine with her. It was too late for
+the dinner, but not too late to go and apologize, and he did the thing
+that he could, stopping at his rooms on the way to dress while his
+cab-driver waited.
+
+He found Portia alone, for which he was glad; but her greeting was
+distinctly accusative.
+
+"If I should pretend to be deeply offended and tell Thomas to show you the
+door, what could you say for yourself?" she began, before he could say a
+word in exculpation.
+
+"I should say every sort of excuseful thing I could think of, knowing very
+well that the most ingenious lie would fall far short of atoning for the
+offense," he replied humbly.
+
+"Possibly it would be better to tell the truth--had you thought of that?"
+she suggested, quite without malice.
+
+"Yes, I had; and I shall, if you'll let me begin back a bit." He drew up a
+chair to face her and sat on the edge of it. "You know I told you I was
+going to Gaston to sell my six lots while Major Guilford's little boom is
+on?"
+
+"I'm trying to remember: go on."
+
+"Well, I went yesterday morning and returned late last night. Do you know,
+it's positively marvelous!"
+
+"Which--the six lots, the boom, or the celerity of your movements?" she
+asked, with a simulation of the deepest interest.
+
+"All three, if you please; but I meant the miraculous revival of things
+along the Trans-Western. But that is neither here nor there--"
+
+"I think it is very much here and there," she interrupted.
+
+"I see you don't want me to tell the truth--the whole truth; but I am
+determined. The first man I met after dinner was Hunnicott, and when I had
+made him my broker in the real estate affair we fell to talking about the
+railroad steal. Speaking of MacFarlane's continued absence, Hunnicott
+said, jokingly, that it was a pity we couldn't go back to the methods of a
+few hundred years ago and hire the Hot Springs doctor to 'obliterate' him.
+The word stuck in my mind, and I broke away and took the train chiefly to
+have a chance to think out the new line. In the smoking-room of the
+sleeper I found--whom, do you suppose?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know: Judge MacFarlane, perhaps, coming back to give you a
+chance to poison him at short range?"
+
+"No; it was Marston."
+
+"And he talked so long and so fast that you couldn't get here in time for
+dinner this evening? That would be the most picturesque of the little
+fictions you spoke of."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"For the first hour he wouldn't talk at all; just sat there wooden-faced,
+smoking vile little cigars that made me think I was getting hay-fever. But
+I wouldn't give up; and after I had worn out all the commonplaces I began
+on the Trans-Western muddle. At that he woke up all at once, and before I
+knew it he was giving me an expert legal opinion on the case; meaty and
+sound and judicial. Miss Van Brock, that man is a lawyer, and an
+exceedingly able one, at that."
+
+"Of course," she said coolly. "He was one of the justices of the Supreme
+Court of his own state at forty-two: that was before he had to come West
+for his health. I found that out a long time ago."
+
+"And you never told me!" said Kent, reproachfully. "Well, no matter; I
+found out for myself that he is a man to tie to. After we had canvassed
+the purely legal side of the affair, he wanted to know more, and I went in
+for the details, telling him all the inferences which involve Bucks,
+Meigs, Hendricks, MacFarlane and the lot of them."
+
+Miss Portia's eyes were flashing.
+
+"Good, good, good!" she said. "David, I'm proud of you. That took
+courage--heaps of it."
+
+"I did have to forget pretty hard that he was the lieutenant-governor and
+nominally one of the gang. But if he is not with us, neither is he against
+us. He took it all in quietly, and when I was through, he said: 'You have
+told me some things that I knew, and some others that I only suspected.'"
+
+"Was that all?" asked Miss Van Brock, eagerly.
+
+"No; I took a good long breath and asked his advice."
+
+"Did he give it?"
+
+"He did. He said in sober earnest just what Hunnicott had said in a joke:
+'If I had your case to fight, I should try to obliterate Judge
+MacFarlane.' I began to say that MacFarlane's removal wouldn't help us so
+long as Bucks has the appointing of his successor, and then he turned on
+me and hammered it in with a last word just as we were leaving the train:
+'I didn't say remove; I said obliterate.' I caught on, after so long a
+time, and I've been hard at work ever since."
+
+"You are obliterating me," said Miss Portia. "I haven't the slightest idea
+what it is all about."
+
+"It's easy from this on," said Kent, consolingly. "You know how MacFarlane
+secured his reelection?"
+
+"Everybody knows that."
+
+"Well, to cut a long story short, the gerrymander deal won't stand the
+light. The constitution says--"
+
+"Oh, please don't quote law books at me. Put it in English--woman-English,
+if you can."
+
+"I will. The special act of the Assembly is void; therefore there was no
+legal election, and, by consequence, there is no judge and no receiver."
+
+Miss Van Brock was silent for a reflective minute. Then she said:
+
+"On second thought, perhaps you would better tell me what the constitution
+says, Mr. David. Possibly I could grasp it."
+
+"It is in the section on elections. It says: 'All circuit or district
+judges, and all special judges, shall be elected by the qualified voters
+of the respective circuits or districts in which they are to hold their
+court.' Kiowa County was cut out of Judge Whitcomb's circuit and placed in
+Judge MacFarlane's for electoral purposes only. In all other respects it
+remains a part of Judge Whitcomb's circuit, and will so continue until
+Whitcomb's term expires. Without the vote of Kiowa, MacFarlane could not
+have been elected; with it he was illegally elected, or, to put it the
+other way about, he was not elected at all. Since he is not lawfully a
+judge, his acts are void, among them this appointment of Major Guilford as
+receiver for the Trans-Western."
+
+She was not as enthusiastic as he thought she ought to be. In the soil
+prepared for it by the political confidences of the winter there had grown
+up a many-branching tree of intimacy between these two; a frank, sexless
+friendship, as Kent would have described it, in which a man who was not
+very much given to free speech with any one unburdened himself, and the
+woman made him believe that her quick, apprehending sympathy was the one
+thing needful--as women have done since the world began.
+
+Since the looting of the railroad which had taken him out of the steadying
+grind of regular work, Kent had been the prey of mixed motives. From the
+first he had thrown himself heartily into the problem of retrieval, but
+the pugnacious professional ambition to break the power of the machine had
+divided time pretty equally with sentiment. Elinor had said little about
+the vise-nip of hardship which the stock-smashing would impose upon three
+unguardianed women; but Penelope had been less reticent. Wanting bare
+justice at the hands of the wreckers, Elinor would go to her wedding with
+Ormsby as the beggar maid went to King Cophetua; and all the loyalty of an
+unselfish love rose up in Kent to make the fight with the grafters a
+personal duel.
+
+At every step in the hitherto discouraging struggle Portia Van Brock had
+been his keen-sighted adviser, prompter, ally of proof. He told himself
+now and again in a flush of gratitude that he was coming to owe her more
+than he had ever owed any woman; that where other men, more--or
+less--fortunate, were not denied the joy of possession, he, the
+disappointed one, was finding a true and loyal comradeship next best, if
+not quite equal to the beatitudes of passion.
+
+In all of which David Kent was not entirely just to himself. However much
+he owed to Portia--and the debt was large--she was not his only creditor.
+Something he owed to the unsatisfied love; more, perhaps, to the good
+blood in his veins; but most of all to the battle itself. For out of the
+soul-harrowings of endeavor was emerging a better man, a stronger man,
+than any his friends had known. Brutal as their blind gropings were, the
+Flagellants of the Dark Ages plied their whips to some dim purpose.
+Natures there be that rise only to the occasion; and if there be no
+occasion, no floggings of adversity or bone-wrenchings upon the rack of
+things denied, there will be no awakening--no victory.
+
+David Kent was suffering in both kinds, and was the better man for it.
+From looking forward to success in the narrow field of professional
+advancement, or in the scarcely broader one of the righting of one woman's
+financial wrongs, he was coming now to crave it in the name of manhood; to
+burn with an eager desire to see justice done for its own sake.
+
+So, when he had come to Portia with the scheme of effacing Judge
+MacFarlane and his receiver at one shrewd blow, the first of the many
+plans which held out a fair promise of success as a reward for daring, he
+was disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm.
+
+"What is the matter with it?" he demanded, when he had given her five full
+minutes for reflection.
+
+"I don't know, David," she said gravely. "Have I ever thrown cold water on
+any of your schemes thus far?"
+
+"No, indeed. You have been the loyalest partizan a man ever had, I think;
+the only one I have to whom I can talk freely. And I have told you more
+than I have all the others put together."
+
+"I know you have. And it hurts me to pull back now when you want me to
+push. But I can't help it. Do you believe in a woman's intuition?"
+
+"I suppose I do: all men do, don't they?"
+
+She was tying little knots in the fringe of the table scarf, but the
+prophetess-eyes, as Penelope called them, were not following the deft
+intertwinings of the slender fingers.
+
+"You mean to set about 'obliterating' Judge MacFarlane forthwith?" she
+asked.
+
+"Assuredly. I have been whipping the thing into shape all afternoon: that
+is what kept me from dining with you."
+
+"It involves some kind of legal procedure?"
+
+"Yes; a rather complicated one."
+
+"Could you explain it so that I could understand it?"
+
+"I think so. In the first place the question is raised by means of an
+information or inquiry called a _quo warranto_. This is directed to the
+receiver, and is a demand to know by what authority he holds. Is it clear
+thus far?"
+
+"Pellucidly," she said.
+
+"In reply the receiver cites his authority, which is the order from Judge
+MacFarlane; and in our turn we proceed to show that the authority does not
+exist--that the judge's election was illegal and that therefore his acts
+are void. Do I make it plain?"
+
+"You make it seem as though it were impossible to fail. And yet I know you
+will fail."
+
+"How do you know it?"
+
+"Don't ask me; I couldn't begin to tell you that. But in some spiritual or
+mental looking-glass I can see you coming to me with the story of that
+failure--coming to ask my help."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"You don't need to be the prophetess Penelope says you are to foresee part
+of that. I always come to you with my woes."
+
+"Do you?--oftener than you go to Miss Brentwood?"
+
+This time his smile was a mere tightening of the lips.
+
+"You do love to grind me on that side, don't you?" he said. "I and my
+affairs are less than nothing to Miss Brentwood, and no one knows it any
+better than you do."
+
+"But you want to go to her," she persisted. "I am only the alternative."
+
+He looked her full in the eyes.
+
+"Miss Van Brock, what is it you want me to say? What can I say more than I
+said a moment ago--that you are the truest friend a man ever had?"
+
+The answering look out of the brown eyes was age-old in its infinite
+wisdom.
+
+"How little you men know when you think you know the most," she said
+half-musingly; then she broke off abruptly. "Let us talk about something
+else. If Major Guilford is wrecking the railroad, why is he spending so
+much money on improvements? Have you thought to ask yourself that
+question?"
+
+"A good many times," he admitted, following her promptly back to first
+principles.
+
+"And you have not found the answer?"
+
+"Not one that fully satisfies me--no."
+
+"I've found one."
+
+"Intuitively?" he smiled.
+
+"No; it's pure logic, this time. Do you remember showing me a letter that
+Mr. Hunnicott wrote you just before the explosion--a letter in which he
+repeated a bit of gossip about Mr. Semple Falkland and his mysterious
+visit to Gaston?"
+
+"Yes, I remember it."
+
+"Do you know who Mr. Falkland is?"
+
+"Who doesn't?" he queried. "He has half of Wall Street in his clientele."
+
+"Yes; but particularly he is the advisory counsel of the Plantagould
+System. Ever since you showed me that letter I have been trying to account
+for his presence in Gaston on the day before Judge MacFarlane's spring
+term of court. I should never have found out but for Mrs. Brentwood."
+
+"Mrs. Brentwood!"
+
+Miss Van Brock nodded.
+
+"Yes; the mother of my--of the young person for whom I am the alternative,
+is in a peck of trouble; I quote her _verbatim_. She and her two daughters
+hold some three thousand shares of Western Pacific stock. It was purchased
+at fifty-seven, and it is now down to twenty-one."
+
+"Twenty and a quarter to-day," Kent corrected.
+
+"Never mind the fractions. The mother of the incomparable--Penelope, has
+heard that I am a famous business woman; a worthy understudy for Mrs.
+Hetty Green; so she came to me for advice. She had a letter from a New
+York broker offering her a fraction more than the market price for her
+three thousand shares of Western Pacific."
+
+"Well?" said Kent.
+
+"Meaning what did I do? I did what you did not do--what you are not doing
+even now; I put two and two together in the twinkling of a bedstaff. Why
+should a New York broker be picking up outlying Western Pacific at a
+fraction more than the market when the stock is sinking every day? I was
+curious enough to pass the 'why' along to a friend of mine in Wall
+Street."
+
+"Of course he told you all about it," said Kent, incredulously.
+
+"He told me what I needed to know. The broker in question is a Plantagould
+man."
+
+"Still I fail to 'connect up,' as the linemen say."
+
+"Do you? Ah, David, David! will you leave it for a woman to point out what
+you should have suspected the moment you read that bit of gossip in Mr.
+Hunnicott's letter?"
+
+Her hand was on the arm of her chair. He covered it with his own.
+
+"I'll leave it for you, Portia. You are my good angel."
+
+She withdrew the hand quickly, but there was no more than playful
+resentment in her retort.
+
+"Shame on you!" she scoffed. "What would Miss Brentwood say?"
+
+"I wish you would leave her out of it," he frowned. "You are continually
+ignoring the fact that she has promised to be the wife of another man."
+
+"And has thereby freed you from all obligations of loyalty? Don't deceive
+yourself: women are not made that way. Doubtless she will go on and marry
+the other man in due season; but she will never forgive you if you smash
+her ideals. But we were talking about the things you ought to have
+guessed. Fetch me the atlas from the book-case--lower shelf; right-hand
+corner; that's it."
+
+He did it; and in further obedience opened the thin quarto at the map of
+the United States. There were heavy black lines, inked in with a pen,
+tracing out the various ramifications of a great railway system. The
+nucleus of the system lay in the middle West, but there was a growing
+network of the black lines reaching out toward the Pacific. And connecting
+the trans-Mississippi network with the western was a broad red line
+paralleling the Trans-Western Railway.
+
+She smiled at his sudden start of comprehension.
+
+"Do you begin to suspect things?" she asked.
+
+He nodded his head.
+
+"You ought to be a man. If you were, I should never give you a moment's
+peace until you consented to take a partnership with me. It's as plain as
+day, now."
+
+"Is it? Then I wish you would make it appear so to me. I am not half as
+subtile as you give me credit for being."
+
+"Yet you worked this out."
+
+"That was easy enough; after I had seen Mrs. Brentwood's letter, and yours
+from Mr. Hunnicott. The Plantagould people want your railroad, and the
+receivership is a part of a plan for acquiring it. But why is Major
+Guilford spending so much money for improvements?"
+
+"His reasons are not far to seek now that you have shown me where to look.
+His instructions are to run the stock down so that the Plantagould can buy
+it in. Cut rates and big expenditures will do that--have done it. On the
+other hand, it is doubtless a condition of the deal that the road shall be
+turned over whole as to its property values--there is to be no wrecking in
+the general acceptance of the word. The Plantagould doesn't want a picked
+skeleton."
+
+Miss Portia's eyes narrowed.
+
+"It's a skilful bit of engineering, isn't it?" she said. "You'd admire it
+as artistic work yourself if your point of view were not so hopelessly
+personal."
+
+"You don't know half the artistic skill of it yet," he went on. "Besides
+all these different ends that are being conserved, the gang is taking care
+of its surplus heelers on the pay-rolls of the company. More than that, it
+is making immense political capital for itself. Everybody knows what the
+policy of the road was under the old regime: 'All the tariff the traffic
+will stand.' But now a Bucks man has hold of it, and liberality is the
+word. Every man in Trans-Western territory is swearing by Bucks and
+Guilford. Ah, my dear friend, his Excellency the governor is a truly great
+man!"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"I've been trying to impress you with that fact all along. The mistake you
+made was in not joining the People's Party early in the campaign, David."
+
+But Kent was following out his own line of thought and putting it in words
+as it came.
+
+"Think of the brain-work it took to bring all these things into line.
+There was no hitch, no slip, and nothing was overlooked. They picked their
+time, and it was a moment when we were absolutely helpless. I had filed
+our charter, but our local organization was still incomplete. They had
+their judge and the needful case in his court, pending and ready for use
+at the precise moment. They had Hawk on the ground, armed and equipped;
+and they knew that unless a miracle intervened they would have nobody but
+an unprepared local attorney to obstruct them."
+
+"Is that all?" she asked.
+
+"No. The finest bit of sculpture is on the capstone of the pyramid. Since
+we have had no hearing on the merits, Guilford is only a temporary
+receiver, subject to discharge if the allegations in Hawk's amended
+petition are not sustained. After the major has sufficiently smashed the
+stock, Judge MacFarlane will come back, the hearing on the merits will be
+given, we shall doubtless make our point, and the road will revert to the
+stock-holders. But by that time enough of the stock will have changed
+hands on the 'wreck' price to put the Plantagould people safely in the
+saddle, and the freeze-out will be a fact accomplished."
+
+Miss Van Brock drew a long breath that was more than half a sigh.
+
+"You spoke the simple truth, David, when you said that his Excellency is a
+great man. It seems utterly hopeless now that we have cleared up all the
+little mysteries."
+
+Kent rose to take his leave.
+
+"No; that is where they all go out and I stay in," he said cheerfully.
+"The shrewder he is, the more credit there will be in making him let go.
+And you mark my words: I am going to make him let go. Good night."
+
+She had gone with him to the door; was in the act of closing it behind
+him, when he turned back for a belated question.
+
+"By the way, what did you tell Mrs. Brentwood to do?"
+
+"I told her not to do anything until she had consulted you and Mr. Loring
+and Brookes Ormsby. Was that right?"
+
+"Quite right. If it comes up again, rub it in some more. We'll save her
+alive yet, if she will let us. Did you say I might come to dinner
+to-morrow evening? Thank you: you grow sweeter and more truly
+compassionate day by day. Good night again."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+THE JUNKETERS
+
+When Receiver Guilford took possession of the properties, appurtenances
+and appendages of the sequestered Trans-Western Railway, one of the
+luxuries to which he fell heir was private car "Naught-seven," a
+commodious hotel on wheels originally used as the directors' car of the
+Western Pacific, and later taken over by Loring to be put in commission as
+the general manager's special.
+
+In the hands of a friendly receiver this car became a boon to the capitol
+contingent; its observation platform served as a shifting rostrum from
+which a deep-chested executive or a mellifluous Hawk often addressed
+admiring crowds at way stations, and its dining saloon was the moving
+scene of many little relaxative feasts, at which _Veuve Cliquot_ flowed
+freely, priceless cigars were burned, and the members of the organization
+unbent, each after his kind.
+
+But to the men of the throttle and oil-can, car Naught-seven, in the gift
+of a hospitable receiver, shortly became a nightmare. Like most private
+cars, it was heavier than the heaviest Pullman; and the engineer who was
+constrained to haul it like a dragging anchor at the tail end of a fast
+train was prone to say words not to be found in any vocabulary known to
+respectable philologists.
+
+It was in the evening of a wind-blown day, a week after Kent's visit to
+Gaston, that Engineer "Red" Callahan, oiling around for the all-night run
+with the Flyer on the Western Division, heard above the din and clamor of
+Union Station noises the sullen thump betokening the addition of another
+car to his train.
+
+"Now fwhat the divvle will that be?" he rasped, pausing, torch in hand, to
+apostrophize his fireman.
+
+The answer came up out of the shadows to the rear on the lips of M'Tosh,
+the train-master.
+
+"You have the Naught-seven to-night, Callahan, and a pretty severe head
+wind. Can you make your time?"
+
+"Haven't thim bloody fools in the up-town office anything betther to do
+than to tie that sivinty-ton ball-an'-chain to my leg such a night as
+this?" This is not what Callahan said: it is merely a printable paraphrase
+of his rejoinder.
+
+M'Tosh shook his head. He was a hold-over from the Loring administration,
+not because his place was not worth taking, but because as yet no
+political heeler had turned up with the requisite technical ability to
+hold it.
+
+"I don't blame you for cussing it out," he said; and the saying of it was
+a mark of the relaxed discipline which was creeping into all branches of
+the service. "Mr. Loring's car is anybody's private wagon these days. Can
+you make your time with her?"
+
+"Not on yer life," Callahan growled. "Is it the owld potgutted thafe iv a
+rayceiver that's in her?"
+
+"Yes; with Governor Bucks and a party of his friends. I take it you ought
+to feel honored."
+
+"Do I?" snapped Callahan. "If I don't make thim junketers think they're in
+the scuff iv a cyclone whin I get thim on the crooks beyant Dolores ye can
+gimme time, Misther M'Tosh. Where do I get shut iv thim?"
+
+"At Agua Caliente. They are going to the hotel at Breezeland, I suppose.
+There is your signal to pull out."
+
+"I'll go whin I'm dommed good an' ready," said Callahan, jabbing the snout
+of his oiler into the link machinery. And again M'Tosh let the breach of
+discipline go without reproof.
+
+Breezeland Inn, the hotel at Agua Caliente, is a year-round resort for
+asthmatics and other health seekers, with a sanatorium annex which
+utilizes the waters of the warm springs for therapeutic purposes. But
+during the hot months the capital and the plains cities to the eastward
+send their quota of summer idlers and the house fills to its capacity.
+
+It was for this reason that Mr. Brookes Ormsby, looking for a comfortable
+resort to which he might take Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters for an
+outing, hit upon the expedient of going first in person to Breezeland,
+partly to make sure of accommodations, and partly to check up the
+attractions of the place against picturesque descriptions in the
+advertisements.
+
+When he turned out of his sleeper in the early morning at Agua Caliente
+station, car Naught-seven had been thrown in on a siding a little farther
+up the line, and Ormsby recognized the burly person of the governor and
+the florid face and pursy figure of the receiver, in the group of men
+crossing from the private car to the waiting Inn tally-ho. Being a
+seasoned traveler, the club-man lost no time in finding the station agent.
+
+"Isn't there some way you can get me up to the hotel before that crowd
+reaches?" he asked; adding: "I'll make it worth your while."
+
+The reply effaced the necessity for haste.
+
+"The Inn auto will be down in a few minutes, and you can go up in that.
+Naught-seven brought Governor Bucks and the receiver and their party, and
+they're going down to Megilp, the mining camp on the other side of the
+State line. They've chartered the tally-ho for the day."
+
+Ormsby waited, and a little later was whisked away to the hotel in the
+tonneau of the guests' automobile. Afterward came a day which was rather
+hard to get through. Breakfast, a leisurely weighing and measuring of the
+climatic, picturesque and health-mending conditions, and the writing of a
+letter or two helped him wear out the forenoon; but after luncheon the
+time dragged dispiteously, and he was glad enough when the auto-car came
+to take him to the station for the evening train.
+
+As it happened, there were no other passengers for the east-bound Flyer;
+and finding he still had some minutes to wait, Ormsby lounged into the
+telegraph office. Here the bonds of ennui were loosened by the gradual
+development of a little mystery. First the telephone bell rang smartly,
+and when the telegraph operator took down the ear-piece and said "Well?"
+in the imperious tone common to his kind, he evidently received a
+communication that shocked him.
+
+Ormsby overheard but a meager half of the wire conversation; and the
+excitement, whatever its nature, was at the other end of the line. None
+the less, the station agent's broken ejaculations were provocative of keen
+interest in a man who had been boring himself desperately for the better
+part of a day.
+
+"Caught him doing it, you say?... Great Scott!... Oh, I don't believe
+that, you know ... yes--uh-huh--I hear ... But who did the shooting?"
+Whether the information came or not, Ormsby did not know, for at this
+conjuncture the telegraph instruments on the table set up a furious
+chattering, and the railway man dropped the receiver and sprang to his
+key.
+
+This left the listener out of it completely, and Ormsby strolled out to
+the platform, wondering what had happened and where it had happened. He
+glanced up at the telephone wires: two of them ran up the graveled
+driveway toward Breezeland Inn; the poles of the other two sentineled the
+road to the west down which the tally-ho had driven in the early morning.
+
+In the reflective instant the telegraph operator dashed out of his
+bay-windowed retreat and ran up the track to the private car. In a few
+minutes he was back again, holding an excited conference with the
+chauffeur of the Inn automobile, who was waiting to see if the Flyer
+should bring him any fares for the hotel.
+
+Curiosity is said to be peculiarly a foible feminine. It is not, as every
+one knows. But of the major masculine allotment, Ormsby the masterful had
+rather less than his due share. He saw the chauffeur turn his car in the
+length of it and send it spinning down the road and across the line into
+the adjoining State; heard the mellow whistle of the incoming train, and
+saw the station man nervously setting his stop signal; all with no more
+than a mild desire to know the reason for so much excitement and haste--a
+desire which was content to wait on the explanation of events.
+
+The explanation, such as it was, did not linger. The heavy train thundered
+in from the west; stopped barely long enough to allow the single passenger
+to swing up the steps of the Pullman; and went on again to stop a second
+time with a jerk when it had passed the side-track switch.
+
+Ormsby put his head out of the window and saw that the private car was to
+be taken on; remarked also that the thing was done with the utmost
+celerity. Once out on the main line with car Naught-seven coupled in, the
+train was backed swiftly down to the station and the small mystery of
+hurryings was sufficiently solved. The governor and his party were
+returning, and they did not wish to miss connections.
+
+Ormsby had settled back into the corner of his section when he heard the
+spitting explosions of the automobile and the crash of hoofs and
+iron-tired wheels on the sharp gravel. He looked out again and was in time
+to see the finish of the race. Up the road from the westward came the
+six-horse tally-ho, the horses galloping in the traces and the automobile
+straining in the lead at the end of an improvised tow-line. In a twinkling
+the coach was abreast of the private car, the transfer of passengers was
+effected, and Ormsby was near enough at his onlooking window to remark
+several things: that there was pell-mell haste and suppressed excitement;
+that the governor was the coolest man in the group; and that the receiver
+had to be helped across from the coach to the car. Then the train moved
+out, gathering speed with each added wheel-turn.
+
+The onlooker leaned from his window to see what became of the tangle of
+horses and auto-car precipitated by the sudden stop of the tally-ho.
+Mirage effects are common on the western plains, and if Ormsby had not
+been familiar with them he might have marveled at the striking example
+afforded by the backward look. In the rapidly increasing perspective the
+six horses of the tally-ho were suddenly multiplied into a troop; and
+where the station agent had stood on the platform there seemed to be a
+dozen gesticulating figures fading into indistinctness, as the fast train
+swept on its way eastward.
+
+The club-man saw no more of the junketing party that night. Once when the
+train stopped to cut out the dining-car, and he had stepped down for a
+breath of fresh air on the station platform, he noticed that the private
+car was brilliantly lighted, and that the curtains and window shades were
+closely drawn. Also, he heard the popping of bottle corks and the clink of
+glass, betokening that the governor's party was still celebrating its
+successful race for the train. Singularly enough, Ormsby's reflections
+concerned themselves chiefly with the small dishonesty.
+
+"I suppose it all goes into the receiver's expense account and the
+railroad pays for it," he said to himself. "So and so much for an
+inspection trip to Megilp and return. I must tell Kent about it. It will
+put another shovelful of coal into his furnace--not that he is especially
+needing it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the moment of this saying--it was between ten and eleven o'clock at
+night--David Kent's wrath-fire was far from needing an additional stoking.
+Once more Miss Van Brock had given proof of her prophetic gift, and Kent
+had been moodily filling in the details of the picture drawn by her
+woman's intuition. He had gone late to the house in Alameda Square,
+knowing that Portia had dinner guests. And it was imperative that he
+should have her to himself.
+
+"You needn't tell me anything but the manner of its doing," she was
+saying. "I knew they would find a way to stop you--or make one. And you
+needn't be spiteful at me," she added, when Kent gripped the arms of his
+chair.
+
+"I don't mind your saying 'I told you so'," he fumed. "It's the fact that
+I didn't have sense enough to see what an easy game I was dealing them. It
+didn't take Meigs five minutes to shut me off."
+
+"Tell me about it," she said; and he did it crisply.
+
+"The _quo warranto_ inquiry is instituted in the name of the State; or
+rather the proceedings are brought by some person with the approval of the
+governor or the attorney-general, one or both. I took to-day for obtaining
+this approval because I knew Bucks was out of town and I thought I could
+bully Meigs."
+
+"And you couldn't?" she said.
+
+"Not in a thousand years. At first he said he would take the matter under
+advisement: I knew that meant a consultation with Bucks. Then I put the
+whip on; told him a few of the things I know, and let him imagine a lot
+more; but it was no good. He was as smooth as oil, admitting nothing,
+denying nothing. And what grinds me worst is that I let him put me in
+fault; gave him a chance to show conclusively how absurd it was for me to
+expect him to take up a question of such magnitude on the spur of the
+moment."
+
+"Of course," she said sympathetically. "I knew they would find a way. What
+are you doing?"
+
+Kent laughed in spite of his sore _amour-propre_.
+
+"At this present moment I am doing precisely what you said I should:
+unloading my woes upon you."
+
+"Oh, but I didn't say that. I said you would come to me for help. Have
+you?"
+
+"I'd say yes, if I didn't know so well just what I am up against."
+
+Miss Van Brock laughed unfeelingly.
+
+"Is it a man's weakness to fight better in the dark?"
+
+"It is a man's common sense to know when he is knocked out," he retorted.
+
+She held him with her eyes while she said:
+
+"Tell me what you want to accomplish, David; at the end of the ends, I
+mean. Is it only that you wish to save Miss Brentwood's little marriage
+portion?"
+
+He told the simple truth, as who could help, with Portia's eyes demanding
+it.
+
+"It was that at first; I'll admit it. But latterly--"
+
+"Latterly you have begun to think larger things?" She looked away from
+him, and her next word seemed to be part of an unspoken thought. "I have
+been wondering if you are great enough, David."
+
+He shook his head despondently.
+
+"Haven't I just been showing you that I am not?"
+
+"You have been showing me that you can not always out-plan, the other
+person. That is a lack, but it is not fatal. Are you great enough to run
+fast and far when it is a straight-away race depending only upon mere
+man-strength and indomitable determination?"
+
+Her words fired him curiously. He recalled the little thrill of
+inspiration which a somewhat similar appeal from Elinor had once given
+him, and tried to compare the two sensations. There was no comparison. The
+one was a call to moral victory; the other to material success. None the
+less, he decided that the present was the more potent spell, perhaps only
+because it was the present.
+
+"Try me," he said impulsively.
+
+"If I do ... David, no man can serve two masters--or two mistresses. If I
+do, will you agree to put the sentimental affair resolutely in the
+background?"
+
+He took his head in his hands and was a long minute making up his mind.
+But his refusal was blunt enough when it came.
+
+"No; at least, not until they are married."
+
+It would have taken a keener discernment than Kent's or any man's to have
+fathomed the prompting of her laugh.
+
+"I was only trying you," she said. "Perhaps, if you had said yes I should
+have deserted you and gone over to the other side."
+
+He got up and went to sit beside her on the pillowed divan.
+
+"Don't try me again, please--not that way. I am only a man."
+
+"I make no promises--not even good ones," she retorted. And then: "Would
+you like to have your _quo warranto_ blind alley turned into a
+thoroughfare?"
+
+"I believe you can do it if you try," he admitted, brightening a little.
+
+"Maybe I can; or rather maybe I can put you in the way of doing it. You
+say Mr. Meigs is obstinate, and the governor is likely to prove still more
+obstinate. Have you thought of any way of softening them?"
+
+"You know I haven't. It's a stark impossibility from my point of view."
+
+"Nothing is impossible; it is always a question of ways and means." Then,
+suddenly: "Have you been paying any attention to the development of the
+Belmount oil field?"
+
+"Enough to know that it is a big thing; the biggest since the Pennsylvania
+discoveries, according to all accounts."
+
+"And the people of the State are enthusiastic about it, thinking that now
+the long tyranny of the oil monopoly will be broken?"
+
+"That is the way most of the newspapers talk, and there seems to be some
+little ground for it, granting the powers of the new law."
+
+She laid the tips of her fingers on his arm and knotted the thread of
+suggestion in a single sentence.
+
+"In the present state of affairs--with the People's Party as yet on trial,
+and the public mind ready to take fire at the merest hint of a foreign
+capitalistic monopoly in the State--tell me what would happen to the man
+who would let the Universal Oil Company into the Belmount field in
+defiance of the new trust and corporation law?"
+
+"By Jove!" Kent exclaimed, sitting up as if the shapely hand had given him
+a buffet. "It would ruin him politically, world without end! Tell me; is
+Bucks going to do that?"
+
+She laughed softly.
+
+"That is for you to find out, Mr. David Kent; not by hearsay, but in good,
+solid terms of fact that will appeal to a level-headed, conservative
+newspaper editor like--well, like Mr. Hildreth, of the _Argus_, let us
+say. Are you big enough to do it?"
+
+"I am desperate enough to try," was the slow-spoken answer.
+
+"And when you have the weapon in your hands; when you have found the sword
+and sharpened it?"
+
+"Then I can go to his Excellency and tell him what will happen if he
+doesn't instruct his attorney-general in the _quo warranto_ affair."
+
+"That will probably suffice to save your railroad--and Miss Brentwood's
+marriage portion. But after, David; what will you do afterward?"
+
+"I'll go on fighting the devil with fire until I have burned him out. If
+this is to be a government of dictators, I can be one of them, too."
+
+She clapped her hands enthusiastically.
+
+"There spoke the man David Kent; the man I have been trying to discover
+deep down under the rubbish of ill-temper and hesitancy and--yes, I will
+say it--of sentiment. Have you learned your lesson, David mine?"
+
+It was a mark of another change in him that he rose and stood over her,
+and that his voice was cool and dispassionate when he said:
+
+"If I have, it is because I have you for an inspired text-book, Portia
+dear."
+
+And with that he took his leave.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+SHARPENING THE SWORD
+
+In the beginning of the new campaign of investigation David Kent wisely
+discounted the help of paid professional spies--or rather he deferred, it
+to a later stage--by taking counsel with Jeffrey Hildreth, night editor of
+the _Argus_. Here, if anywhere, practical help was to be had; and the
+tender of it was cheerfully hearty and enthusiastic.
+
+"Most assuredly you may depend on the _Argus_, horse, foot and artillery,"
+said the editor, when Kent had guardedly outlined some portion of his
+plan. "We are on your side of the fence, and have been ever since Bucks
+was sprung as a candidate on the convention. But you've no case. Of
+course, it's an open secret that the Universal people are trying to break
+through the fence of the new law and establish themselves in the Belmount
+field without losing their identity or any of their monopolistic
+privileges. And it is equally a matter of course to some of us that the
+Bucks ring will sell the State out if the price is right. But to implicate
+Bucks and the capitol gang in printable shape is quite another matter."
+
+"I know," Kent admitted. "But it isn't impossible; it has got to be
+possible."
+
+The night editor sat back in his chair and chewed his cigar reflectively.
+Suddenly he asked:
+
+"What's your object, Kent? It isn't purely _pro lono pullico_, I take it?"
+
+Kent could no longer say truthfully that it was, and he did not lie about
+it.
+
+"No, it's purely personal, I guess. I need to get a grip on Bucks and I
+mean to do it."
+
+Hildreth laughed.
+
+"And, having got it, you'll telephone me to let up--as you did in the
+House Bill Twenty-nine fiasco. Where do we come in?"
+
+"No; you shall come in on the ground floor this time; though I may ask you
+to hold your hand until I have used my leverage. And if you'll go into it
+to stay, you sha'n't be alone. Giving the _Argus_ precedence in any item
+of news, I'll engage to have every other opposition editor in the State
+ready to back you."
+
+"Gad! you're growing, Kent. Do you mean to down the Bucks crowd
+ded-definitely?" demanded the editor, who stammered a little under
+excitable provocation. "Bigger men than you have tried it--and failed."
+
+"But no one of them with half my obstinacy, Hildreth. It can be done, and
+I am going to do it."
+
+The night editor laughed again.
+
+"If you can show that gang up, Kent, nothing in this State will be too
+good for you."
+
+"I've got it to do," said Kent. "Afterward, perhaps I'll come around for
+some of the good things. I am not in this for health or pleasure. Can I
+count on you after the mud-slinging begins?"
+
+Hildreth reflected further, disregarding the foreman's reproachful calls
+for copy.
+
+"I'll go you," he said at last; "and I'll undertake to swing the chief
+into line. But I am going to disagree with you flat on the project of a
+sudden expose. Right or wrong, Bucks has pup-popular sentiment on his
+side. Take the Trans-Western territory, for example: at the present
+speaking these grafters--or their man Guilford; it's all the same--own
+those people down there body and soul. You couldn't pry Bucks out of their
+affections with a crowbar--suddenly, I mean. We'll have to work up to it
+gradually; educate the people as we go along."
+
+"I concede that much," said Kent. "And you may as well begin on this same
+Trans-Western deal,"--wherewith he pieced together the inferences which
+pointed to the stock-smashing project behind the receivership.
+
+"Don't use too much of it," he added, in conclusion.
+
+"It is all inference and deduction as yet, as I say. But you will admit
+it's plausible."
+
+The editor was sitting far back in his chair again, chewing absently on
+the extinct cigar.
+
+"Kent, did you fuf-figure all that out by yourself?"
+
+"No," said Kent, briefly. "There is a keener mind than mine behind it--and
+behind this oil field business, as well."
+
+"I'd like to give that mind a stunt on the _Argus_," said the editor. "But
+about the Belmount mix-up: you will give us a stickful now and then as we
+go along, if you unearth anything that the public would like to read?"
+
+"Certainly; any and everything that won't tend to interfere with my little
+intermediate scheme. As I have intimated, I must bring Bucks to terms on
+my own account before I turn him over to you and the people of the State.
+But I mean to be in on that, too."
+
+Hildreth wagged his head dubiously.
+
+"I may be overcautious; and I don't want to seem to scare you out, Kent.
+You ought to know your man better than I do--better than any of us; but if
+I had your job, I believe I should want to travel with a body-guard. I do,
+for a fact."
+
+David Kent's laugh came easily. Fear, the fear of man, was not among his
+weaknesses.
+
+"I am taking all the chances," he said; and so the conference ended.
+
+Two days later the "educational" campaign was opened by an editorial in
+the _Argus_ setting forth some hitherto unpublished matter concerning the
+manner in which the Trans-Western had been placed in the hands of a
+receiver. In its next issue the paper named the receivership after its
+true author, showing by a list of the officials that the road under Major
+Guilford had been made a hospital for Bucks politicians, and hinting
+pointedly that it was to be wrecked for the benefit of a stock-jobbing
+syndicate of eastern capitalists.
+
+Having thus reawakened public interest in the Trans-Western affair,
+Hildreth sounded a new note of alarm pitched upon the efforts of the
+Universal Oil Company to establish itself in the Belmount oil region; a
+cry which was promptly taken up by other State editors. This editorial was
+followed closely by others in the same strain, and at the end of a
+fortnight Kent was fain to call a halt.
+
+"Not too fast, Hildreth," he cautioned, dropping into the editor's den
+late one night. "You are doing mighty good work, but you are making it
+infinitely harder for me--driving the game to deeper cover. One of my men
+had a clue: Bucks and Meigs were holding conferences with a man from the
+Belmount field whose record runs back to New York. But they have taken the
+alarm and thrown us off the track."
+
+"The secretary of State's office is the place you want to watch," said
+Hildreth. "New oil companies are incorporating every day. Pretty soon one
+of these will swallow up all the others: that one will be the Universal
+under another name, and in its application for a charter you'll find
+askings big enough to cover all the rights and privileges of the original
+monopoly."
+
+"That is a good idea," said Kent, who already had a clerk in the secretary
+of State's office in his pay. "But how are we coming on in the political
+field?"
+
+"We are doing business there, and you have the _Argus_ to thank for it.
+You--or your idea, I should say--has a respectable following all over the
+State now; as it didn't have until we began to leg for it."
+
+Again Kent acquiesced, making no mention of sundry journeys he had made
+for the sole purpose of enlisting other editors, or of the open house Miss
+Van Brock was keeping for out-of-town newspaper men visiting the capital.
+
+"Moreover, we've served your turn in the Trans-Western affair," Hildreth
+went on. "Public interest is on the _qui vive_ for new developments in
+that. By the way, has the capitol gang any notion of your part in all this
+upstirring?"
+
+Kent smiled and handed the editor an open letter. It was from Receiver
+Guilford. The post of general counsel for the Trans-Western was vacant,
+and the letter was a formal tender of the office to the "Hon. David Kent."
+
+"H'm," said the editor. "I don't understand that a little bit."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"If they could get you to accept a general agency in Central Africa or New
+Zealand, or some other antipodean place where you'd be safely out of the
+way, it would be evident enough. But here they are proposing to take you
+right into the heart of things."
+
+Kent got a match out of the editor's desk and relighted his cigar.
+
+"You've got brain-fag to-night, Hildreth. It's a bribe, pure and simple.
+They argue that it is merely a matter of dollars and cents to me, as it
+would be to one of them; and they propose to retain me just as they would
+any other attorney whose opposition they might want to get rid of. Don't
+you see?"
+
+"Sure. I was thinking up the wrong spout. Have you replied to the major?"
+
+"Yes. I told him that my present engagements preclude the possibility of
+considering his offer; much to my regret."
+
+"Did you say that? You're a cold-plucked one, Kent, and I'm coming to
+admire you. But now is the time for you to begin to look out. They have
+spotted you, and their attempt to buy you has failed. I don't know how
+deeply you have gone into Bucks' tinkering with the Universal people, but
+if you are in the way of getting the grip you spoke of--as this letter
+seems to indicate--you want to be careful."
+
+Kent promised and went his way. One of his saving graces was the ability
+to hold his tongue, even in a confidential talk with as good a friend as
+Hildreth. As for example: he had let the suggestion of watching the
+secretary of State's office come as a new thing from the editor, whereas
+in fact it was one of the earliest measures he had taken.
+
+And on that road he had traveled far, thanks to a keen wit, to Portia Van
+Brock's incessant promptings, and to the help of the leaky clerk in
+Hendricks' office; so far, indeed, that he had found the "stool pigeon"
+oil company, to which Hildreth's hint had pointed--a company composed,
+with a single exception, of men of "straw," the exception being the man
+Rumford, whose conferences with the governor and the attorney-general had
+aroused his suspicions.
+
+It was about this time that Hunnicott reported the sale of the Gaston lots
+at a rather fancy cash figure, and the money came in good play.
+
+"Two things remain to be proved," said Portia, in one of their many
+connings of the intricate course; "two things that must be proved before
+you can attack openly: that Rumford is really representing the Universal
+Oil Company; and that he is bribing the junto to let the Universal
+incorporate under the mask of his 'straw' company. Now is the time when
+you can not afford to be economical. Have you money?"
+
+Since it was the day after the Hunnicott remittance, Kent could answer yes
+with a good conscience.
+
+"Then spend it," she said; and he did spend it like a millionaire, lying
+awake nights to devise new ways of employing it.
+
+And for the abutments of the arch of proof the money-spending sufficed. By
+dint of a warm and somewhat costly wire investigation of Rumford's
+antecedents, Kent succeeded in placing the Belmount promoter
+unquestionably as one of the trusted lieutenants of the Universal; and the
+leaky clerk in the secretary of State's office gave the text of the
+application for the "straw" company charter, showing that the powers asked
+for were as despotic as the great monopoly could desire.
+
+But for the keystone of the arch, the criminal implication of the plotters
+themselves, he was indebted to a fit of ill-considered anger and to a
+chapter of accidents.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+THE CONSPIRATORS
+
+It was chiefly due to Portia's urgings that Kent took Ormsby into his
+confidence when the campaign was fairly opened. She put it diplomatically
+on the ground of charity to an exiled millionaire, temporarily out of a
+job; but her real reason went deeper. From its inception as a one-man
+fight against political chicanery in high places, the criticism of the
+Bucks formula was beginning to shape itself in a readjustment of party
+lines in the field of State politics; and Miss Van Brock, whose designs
+upon Kent's future ran far in advance of her admissions to him, was
+anxiously casting about for a managerial promoter.
+
+A little practice-play in municipal politics made the need apparent. It
+came in the midst of things, basing itself upon the year-gone triumph of
+agrarianism in the State. In the upheaval, the capital city had
+participated to the extent of electing a majority of the aldermen on the
+People's Party ticket; and before long it developed that a majority of
+this aldermanic majority could be counted among the spoilsmen--was in fact
+a creature of the larger ring.
+
+[Illustration: HE JAMMED THE FIRE END OF HIS CIGAR AMONG THE FINGERS OF
+THE GRASPING HAND.]
+
+Late in the summer an ordinance was proposed by the terms of which a
+single corporation was to be given a franchise granting a complete
+monopoly of the streets for gas and water mains and transit rights of way.
+Thereupon a bitter struggle ensued. Party lines were obliterated, and men
+who shunned the primaries and otherwise shirked their political duties
+raised the cry of corruption, and a Civic League was formed to fight the
+ring.
+
+Into this struggle, as giving him the chance to front the enemy in a fair
+field, David Kent flung himself with all the ardor of a born fighter. Mass
+meetings were held, with Kent as spokesman for the League, and the outcome
+was a decency triumph which brought Kent's name into grateful public
+prominence. Hildreth played an able second, and by the time the obnoxious
+ordinance had been safely tabled, Kent had a semi-political following
+which was all his own. Men who had hitherto known him only as a
+corporation lawyer began to prophesy large things of the fiery young
+advocate, whose arguments were as sound and convincing as his invective
+was keen and merciless.
+
+Figuratively speaking, Portia stood in the wings and applauded. Also, she
+saw that her protege had reached the point where he needed grooming for
+whatever race lay before him. Hence her urgings, which made a triumvirate
+out of the council of two, with Brookes Ormsby as the third member.
+
+"You understand, I'm not interested a little bit in the merits of the
+case," said the newly elected chairman, in his first official interview
+with Miss Van Brock. "So far as the internal politics of this particularly
+wild and woolly State are concerned, I'm neither in them nor of them. But
+I am willing to do what I can for Kent."
+
+"Owing him a good turn?" said Portia, with malice aforethought.
+
+Ormsby's laugh was an Englishman's deep-chested haw-haw.
+
+"So he has been making you his confidante in that, too, has he?"
+
+"There was no confidence needed," she retorted. "I have eyes; and, to use
+one of your own pet phrases, I was not born yesterday. But let that go:
+you are willing to help us?"
+
+"I said I was willing to help Kent. If you bracket yourself with him, I am
+more than willing. But I am rather new to the game. You will have to tell
+me the moves."
+
+"We are only in the opening," she said, continuing the figure. "You will
+learn as you go along. By and by you will have to spend money; but just
+now the need is for a cool head to keep our young firebrand out of the
+personalities. Where is he to-night?"
+
+Ormsby's smile was a grin.
+
+"I left him at 124 Tejon Avenue half an hour ago. Do you think he is
+likely to get into trouble there?"
+
+On the porch of the Brentwood apartment house David Kent was answering
+that question measurably well for himself. With the striking of the City
+Hall clock at nine Mrs. Brentwood had complained of the glare of the
+electric crossing-lamp and had gone in, leaving the caller with Penelope
+in the hammock on one side of him and Elinor in a basket chair on the
+other.
+
+Their talk had been of the late municipal struggle, and of Kent's part in
+it; and, like Miss Van Brock, Penelope was applausive. But Elinor's
+congratulations were tempered with deprecation.
+
+"I am glad you won for the League, of course; everybody must be glad of
+that," she said. "But I hope the _Argus_ didn't report your speeches
+correctly. If it did, you have made a host of bitter enemies."
+
+"What does a man--a real man--care for that?" This from the depths of the
+hammock.
+
+"I, at least, can afford to be careless," said Kent. "I am not running for
+office, and I have nothing to lose, politically or otherwise."
+
+"Can any man say that truthfully?" Elinor queried.
+
+"I think I can. I have given no hostages to fortune."
+
+Penelope lifted the challenge promptly.
+
+"Lord Bacon said that, didn't he?--about men marrying. If he were alive
+now he wouldn't need to say it. Men don't have to be discouraged."
+
+"Don't they?" said Kent.
+
+"No, indeed; they are too utterly selfish for any matrimonial use, as it
+is. No, don't argue with me, please. I'm fixed--irrevocably fixed."
+
+Elinor overtook the runaway conversation and drove it back into the path
+of her own choosing.
+
+"But I do think you owe it to yourself to be more careful in your public
+utterances," she insisted. "If these men on the other side are only half
+as unprincipled as your accusations make them out to be, they would not
+stop short of personal violence."
+
+"I am not hunting clemency or personal immunity just now," laughed Kent.
+"On the contrary, I am only anxious to make the score as heavy as
+possible. And so far from keeping prudently in the background, I'll
+confess that I went into this franchise fight chiefly to let the capitol
+gang know who I am and where I stand."
+
+A sudden light came into Elinor's eyes and burned there steadily. She was
+of those who lay votive offerings upon the shrine of manly courage.
+
+"One part of me approves as much as another part disapproves," she said
+after a time. "I suppose it isn't possible to avoid making political
+enemies; but is it needful to turn them into personal enemies?"
+
+He looked at her curiously.
+
+"I am afraid I don't know any middle path, not being a politician," he
+objected. "And as for the enmity of these men, I shall count it an honor
+to win it. If I do not win it, I shall know I am not succeeding."
+
+Silence for another little space, which Miss Brentwood broke by saying:
+
+"Don't you want to smoke? You may."
+
+Kent felt in his pocket.
+
+"I have no cigar."
+
+She looked past him to the hammock. "Penelope!" she called softly; and
+when there was no response she went to spread the hammock rug over her
+sister.
+
+"You may smoke your pipe," she said; and when she had passed behind him to
+her chair she made another concession: "Let me fill it for you--you used
+to."
+
+He gave her the pipe and tobacco, and by a curious contradiction of terms
+began to wonder if he ought not to go. Notwithstanding his frank defiance
+of Brookes Ormsby, and his declaration of intention in the sentimental
+affair, he had his own notions about the sanctity of a betrothal. Mrs.
+Brentwood had vanished, and Penelope was asleep in the hammock. Could he
+trust himself to be decently loyal to Ormsby if he should stay? Nice
+questions of conscience had not been troubling him much of late; but this
+was new ground--or if not new, so old that it had the effect of being new.
+
+He let the question go unanswered--and stayed. But he was minded to fling
+the biggest barrier he could lay hands on in the way of possible
+disloyalty by saying good things of Ormsby.
+
+"I owe you much for my acquaintance with him," he said, when the subject
+was fairly introduced. "He has been all kinds of a good friend to me, and
+he promises to be more."
+
+"Isn't your debt to Penelope, rather than to me?" she returned.
+
+"No, I think not. You are responsible, in the broader sense, at all
+events. He did not come West for Penelope's sake." Then he took the
+plunge: "May I know when it is to be--or am I to wait for my bidding with
+the other and more formally invited guests?"
+
+She laughed, a low little laugh that somehow grated upon his nerves.
+
+"You shall know--when I know."
+
+"Forgive me," he said quickly. "But from something Ormsby said----"
+
+"He should not have spoken of it; I have given him no right," she said
+coldly.
+
+"You make me twice sorry: once if I am a trespasser, and again if I have
+unwittingly broken a confidence. But as a friend--a very old friend--I
+ventured----"
+
+She interrupted him again, but this time her laugh did not hurt him.
+
+"Yes; our friendship antedates Mr. Ormsby; it is old enough to excuse
+anything you said--or were going to say."
+
+"Thank you," he rejoined, and he meant it. "What I was going to say
+touches a matter which I believe you haven't confided to any one. May I
+talk business for a few minutes?"
+
+"If you will light your pipe and go on smoking. It makes me nervous to
+have people hang on the brink of things."
+
+He lighted the pipe, wondering what other thing he might do to allay her
+nervousness. None the less, he would not go back from his purpose, which
+was barrier-building.
+
+"I have thought, wholly without warrant, perhaps, that your loss in this
+railroad steal has had something to do with the postponement of your
+happiness--and Ormsby's. Has it?"
+
+"And if it should have?"
+
+"I merely wanted to say that we still have a fighting chance. But one of
+the hard and fast conditions is that every individual stockholder shall
+hang on to his or her holdings like grim death."
+
+She caught her breath with a little gasp.
+
+"The encouragement comes too late for us. We have parted with our stock."
+
+Kent turned cold and hot and cold again while she was saying it. Then the
+lawyer in him came uppermost.
+
+"Is it gone beyond recall? How much too late am I?" he demanded.
+
+"My mother wrote the letter to-day. She had an offer from some one in New
+York."
+
+Kent was on his feet instantly.
+
+"Has that letter been mailed? Because if it has, it must be stopped by
+wire!"
+
+Miss Brentwood rose.
+
+"It was on the hall table this afternoon; I'll go and see," and in a
+moment she returned with the letter in her hand.
+
+Kent took it from her as if it had been an edged weapon or a can of high
+explosives.
+
+"Heavens! what a turn you gave me!" he said, sitting down again. "Can I
+see your mother?"
+
+"I think she has gone to bed. What do you want to do?"
+
+"I want to tell her that she mustn't do any such suicidal thing as this."
+
+"You don't know my mother," was the calm reply. "Mr. Ormsby said
+everything he could think of."
+
+"Then we must take matters into our own hands. Will you help me?"
+
+"How?" she asked.
+
+"By keeping your own counsel and trusting me. Your mother supposes this
+letter has gone: it has gone--this way." He tore the sealed envelope
+across and across and dropped the pieces into his pocket. "Now we are
+safe--at least until the man at the other end writes again."
+
+It shocked her a little, and she did not promise to be a party to the
+subterfuge. But neither did she say she would not.
+
+"I am willing to believe that you have strong reasons for taking such
+strong measures," she said. "May I know them?"
+
+Kent's gift of reticence came to his rescue in time to prevent the
+introduction of another and rather uncertain factor into his complicated
+problem.
+
+"I can explain it more intelligibly a little later on; or if I don't,
+Ormsby will. In the mean time, you must take my word for it that we shall
+have our railroad back in due season."
+
+It is a question for the psychologists to answer if there be or be not
+crises in a man's life when the event, weighty or trivial, turns upon that
+thing which, for the want of a better name, is called a premonition.
+
+In the silence that followed his dismissal of the subject, Kent became
+aware of a vague prompting which was urging him to cut his visit short.
+There was no definable reason for his going. He had finally brought
+himself to the point of speaking openly to Elinor of her engagement, and
+they were, as he fondly believed, safely beyond the danger point in that
+field. Moreover, Penelope was stirring in her hammock and the perilous
+privacy was at an end. Nevertheless, he rose and said good-night, and was
+half-way to the next corner before he realized how inexcusably abrupt his
+leave-taking had been.
+
+When he did realize it, he was of two minds whether to go back or to let
+the apology excuse another call the following evening. Then the insistent
+prompting seized him again; and when next he came to a competent sense of
+things present he was standing opposite the capitol building, staring
+fixedly up at a pair of lighted windows in the second story.
+
+They were the windows of the governor's room; and David Kent's brain
+cleared suddenly. In the earliest beginnings of the determinate plan to
+wrest the Trans-Western out of the grasp of the junto he had known that it
+must come finally to some desperate duel with the master-spirit of the
+ringsters. Was Jasper Bucks behind those lighted windows--alone?
+
+Kent had not meant to make the open attack until he should have a weapon
+in his hands which would arm him to win. But now as he stood looking up at
+the heckoning windows a mad desire to have it out once for all with the
+robber-in-chief sent the blood tingling to his finger-tips. True, he had
+nothing as yet in the oil-field conspiracy that the newspapers or the
+public would accept as evidence of fraud and corruption. But on the other
+hand, Bucks was only a man, after all; a man with a bucaneer's record, and
+by consequence vulnerable beneath the brazen armor of assurance. If the
+attack were bold enough----
+
+Kent did not stop to argue it out. When a man's blood is up the odds
+against him shrink and become as naught. Two minutes later he was in the
+upper corridor of the capitol, striding swiftly to the door of the lighted
+room.
+
+Recalling it afterward he wondered if the occult prompting which had
+dragged him out of his chair on the Brentwcod porch saw to it that he
+walked upon the strip of matting in the tile-paved corridor and so made
+his approach noiseless. Also, if the same silent monitor bade him stop
+short of the governor's office: at the door, namely, of the public
+anteroom, which stood ajar?
+
+A low murmur of voices came from beyond, and for a moment he paused
+listening. Then he went boldly within, crossing the anteroom and standing
+fairly in the broad beam of light pouring through the open door of
+communication with the private office.
+
+Four men sat in low-toned conference around the governor's writing-table,
+and if any one of them had looked up the silent witness must have been
+discovered. Kent marked them down one by one: the governor; Hendricks, the
+secretary of State; Rumford, the oil man; and Senator Duvall. For five
+pregnant minutes he stood looking on, almost within arm's reach of the
+four; hearing distinctly what was said; seeing the papers which changed
+hands across the table. Then he turned and went away, noiselessly as he
+had come, the thick-piled carpet of the anteroom muffling his footfalls.
+
+It was midnight when he reached his quarters in the Clarendon and flung
+himself full length upon the bed, sodden with weariness. For two hours he
+had tramped the deserted streets, striving in sharp travail of soul to fit
+the invincible, chance-given weapon to his hand. When he came in the thing
+was done, and he slept the sleep of an outworn laborer.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+DOWN, BRUNO!
+
+For six days after the night of revelations Kent dived deep, personally
+and by paid proxy, in a sea of secrecy which, but for the five pregnant
+minutes in the doorway of the governor's office, might easily have proved
+fathomless.
+
+On the seventh day the conflagration broke out. The editor of the Belmount
+_Refiner_ was the first to smell smoke and to raise the cry of "Fire!" but
+by midnight the wires were humming with the news and the entire State was
+ablaze.
+
+The story as it appeared under the scare headlines the next morning was
+crisply told. An oil company had been formed with Senator Duvall at its
+head. After its incorporation it was ascertained that it not only held
+options on all the most valuable wells in the Belmount region, but that
+its charter gave it immunity from the law requiring all corporations to
+have their organizations, officers, and operating headquarters in the
+State. By the time the new company was three days old it had quietly taken
+up its options and was the single big fish in the pool by virtue of its
+having swallowed all the little ones.
+
+Then came the finishing stroke which had set the wires to humming. On the
+sixth day it was noised about that Senator Duvall had transferred his
+controlling interest to Rumford--otherwise to the Universal Oil Company;
+that he had served only as a figurehead in the transaction, using his
+standing, social and political, to secure the charter which had been
+denied Rumford and his associates.
+
+It had all been managed very skilfully; the capping of the wells by the
+Universal's agent, the practical sealing up of the entire district, being
+the first public intimation of the result of Duvall's treachery and the
+complete triumph of a foreign monopoly.
+
+The storm that swept the State when the facts came out was cyclonic, and
+it was reported, as it needed to be, that Senator Duvall had disappeared.
+Never in the history of the State had public feeling risen so high; and
+there were not lacking those who said that if Duvall showed himself his
+life would not be safe in the streets of the capital.
+
+It was after the _Argus_ had gone to press on the night of explosions that
+Editor Hildreth sought and found David Kent in his rooms at the Clarendon,
+and poured out the vials of his wrath.
+
+"Say, I'd like to know if you cue-call this giving me a fair show!" he
+demanded, flinging into Kent's sitting-room and dropping into a chair.
+"Did I, or did I not understand that I was to have the age on this oil
+business when there was anything fit to print?"
+
+Kent gave the night editor a cigar and was otherwise exasperatingly
+imperturbable.
+
+"Keep your clothes on, and don't accuse a man of disloyalty until you have
+all the documents in the case," he said. "I didn't know, until I saw your
+bulletin a few hours ago, that the thing had been pulled off. In fact,
+I've been too busy with other things to pay much attention to the Belmount
+end of it."
+
+"The ded-devil you have!" sputtered Hildreth, chewing savagely on the gift
+cigar. "I'd like to know what business you had to mix up in other things
+to the detriment of my news column. You were the one man who knew all
+about it; or at least you did a week or two ago."
+
+"Yes; but other and more important things have intervened. I have been
+desperately busy, as I say."
+
+"Well, you've lost your chance to get your grip on the capitol gang,
+anyway; that is one comfort," growled the editor, getting what consolation
+he could out of Kent's apparent failure. "They played it too fuf-fine for
+you."
+
+"Did they?" said Kent.
+
+"It looks pretty much that way, doesn't it? Duvall is the scapegoat, and
+the only one. About day after to-morrow Bucks' organ, the _Tribune_, will
+come out with an 'inspired' editorial whitewashing the entire capitol
+outfit. It will show how Rumford's application for the charter was
+refused, and how a truly good and beneficent state government has been
+hoodwinked and betrayed by one of its most trusted supporters."
+
+Kent threw off his street coat and went to get his dressing-gown from the
+wardrobe in the bedroom. When he came back he said: "Hildreth, you have
+taken me at my word thus far, and you haven't had occasion to call me
+either a knave or a fool. Do it a little longer and I'll put you in the
+way of touching off a set-piece of pyrotechnics that will double discount
+this mild little snap-cracker of the Belmount business."
+
+"Can't you do it now?"
+
+"No; the time isn't ripe yet. We must let the _Tribune's_ coat of
+whitewash dry in first."
+
+Hildreth wriggled in his chair.
+
+"Kent, if I thought it would do any good, I'd cuc-curse you out; I would
+for a fact. You are too blamed close-mouthed for any ordinary newspaper
+use."
+
+But Kent only laughed at him. Now that the strain was in some measure
+relaxed he could stand any amount of abuse from so good a friend as the
+night editor.
+
+"Turn on the hot water if you want to, and if it will relieve the
+pressure. I know about how you feel; and I'd be as sore as you are if I
+didn't know that I am going to make it up to you a little later on. But
+about this oil blaze and to-morrow's--or to-day's--issue of the _Argus_. I
+hope you haven't said too much."
+
+"I haven't sus-said anything. The stuff trickled in by Associated wire at
+the last minute, and we had to cut and slash for space and run it pretty
+much as it came--the bare story."
+
+"All right; that's better. Now suppose you hint darkly that only half of
+the truth has come out; that more--and more startling--developments may be
+safely predicted in the immediate hence. Hit it up hard toward the
+capitol, and don't be afraid of libeling anybody."
+
+Hildreth's eyes narrowed.
+
+"Say, Kent; you have grown a lot in these last few weeks: what is your
+diet?"
+
+"Hard work--and a determination to make my brag good."
+
+"To down the ring, you mean?"
+
+"Yes; to down the ring."
+
+"Are you any nearer to it than you were when you began?"
+
+"A good many parasangs."
+
+"By Jove! I more than half believe you've got hold of something
+ded-definite at last!"
+
+"I have, indeed. Hildreth, I have evidence--printable evidence--enough to
+dig a dozen political graves, one of them big enough to hold Jasper G.
+Bucks' six-feet-two."
+
+"Let me see it!" said the night editor, eagerly; but Kent laughed and
+pushed him toward the door.
+
+"Go home and go to bed. I wouldn't show it to you to-night if I had it
+here--as I have not. I don't go around with a stick of dynamite in my
+pocket."
+
+"Where is it?" Hildreth asked.
+
+"It is in a safety-deposit box in the vault of the Security Bank; where it
+is going to stay until I am ready to use it. Go home, I say, and let me go
+to bed. I'm ragged enough to sleep the clock around."
+
+In spite of his weariness, which was real enough, Kent was up betimes the
+next morning. He had a wire appointment with Blashfield Hunnicott and two
+others in Gaston, and he took an early train to keep it. The ex-local
+attorney met him at the station with a two-seated rig; and on the way to
+the western suburbs they picked up Frazee, the county assessor, and Orton,
+the appraiser of the Apache Building and Loan Association.
+
+"Hunnicott has told you what I am after," said Kent, when the surrey party
+was made up. "We all know the property well enough, but to have it all
+fair and above-board, we'll drive out and look it over, so that our
+knowledge may be said to be fully up to date."
+
+Twenty minutes afterward the quartet was locating the corners of a square
+in Gaston's remotest suburb; an "addition" whose only improvements were
+the weathered and rotting street and lot stakings on the bare, brown
+plain.
+
+"'Lots 1 to 56 in Block 10, Guilford & Hawk's Addition,'" said Kent,
+reading from a memorandum in his note-book. "It lies beautifully, doesn't
+it?"
+
+"Yes; for a chicken farm," chuckled the assessor.
+
+"Well, give me your candid opinion, you two: what is the property worth?"
+
+The Building and Loan man scratched his chin.
+
+"Say fifty dollars for the plot--if you'll fence it."
+
+"No, put it up. You are having a little boom here now: give it the top
+boom price, if you like."
+
+The two referees drew apart and laid their heads together.
+
+"As property is going here just now, fifty dollars for the inside lots,
+and one hundred dollars apiece for the corners; say three thousand for the
+plot. And that is just about three times as much as anybody but a
+land-crazy idiot would give for it." It was Frazee who announced the
+decision.
+
+"Thank you both until you are better paid. Now we'll go back to town and
+you can write me a joint letter stating the fact. If you think it will get
+you disliked here at home, make the figure higher; make it high enough so
+that all Gaston will be dead sure to approve."
+
+"You are going to print it?" asked the Building and Loan appraiser.
+
+"I may want to. You may shape it to that end."
+
+"I'll stand by my figures," said Frazee. "It will give me my little chance
+to get back at the governor. I had it assessed as unimproved suburban
+property at so much the lot, but he made a kick to the board of
+equalization and got it put in as unimproved farm land at fifty dollars an
+acre." Then, looking at his watch: "We'd better be getting back, if you
+have to catch the Accommodation. Won't you stay over and visit with us?"
+
+"I can't, this time; much obliged," said Kent; and they drove to the
+Building and Loan office where the joint letter of appraisal was written
+and signed.
+
+Kent caught his train with something to spare, and was back at the capital
+in good time to keep a dinner engagement at Miss Van Brock's. He had
+understood that Ormsby would be the only other guest. But Portia had a
+little surprise in store for him. Loring had dropped in, unannounced, from
+the East; and Portia, having first ascertained that Mrs. Brentwood's
+asthma was prohibitive of late dinings-out, had instructed Ormsby to bring
+Elinor and Penelope.
+
+Kent had been saving the results of his deep-sea divings in the oil-field
+investigation to spread them out before Miss Van Brock and Ormsby "in
+committee," but he put a padlock on his lips when he saw the others.
+
+Portia gave him Elinor to take out, and he would have rejoiced brazenly if
+the table talk, from the bouillon to the ices, had not been persistently
+general, turning most naturally upon the Universal Oil Company's
+successful _coup_ in the Belmount field. Kent kept out of it as much as he
+could, striving manfully to monopolize Elinor for his own especial behoof;
+but finally Portia laid her commands upon him.
+
+"You are not to be allowed to maroon yourself with Miss Brentwood any
+longer," she said dictatorially. "You know more about the unpublished part
+of this Belmount conspiracy than any one else excepting the conspirators
+themselves, and you are to tell us all about it."
+
+Kent looked up rather helplessly.
+
+"Really, I--I'm not sure that I know anything worth repeating at your
+dinner-table," he protested.
+
+But Miss Van Brock made a mock of his caution.
+
+"You needn't be afraid. I pledged everybody to secrecy before you came. It
+is understood that we are in 'executive session.' And if you don't know
+much, you may tell us what you know now more than you knew before you knew
+so little as you know now."
+
+"Hold on," said Kent; "will you please say that over again and say it
+slowly?"
+
+"Never mind," laughed Ormsby. "Miss Portia has a copyright on that. But
+before you begin, I'd like to know if the newspapers have it straight as
+far as they have gone into it?"
+
+"They have, all but one small detail. They are saying that Senator Duvall
+has left the city and the State."
+
+"Hasn't he?" Loring asked.
+
+"He hadn't yesterday."
+
+"My-oh!" said Portia. "They will mob him if he shows himself."
+
+Kent nodded assent.
+
+"He knows it: he is hiding out. But I found him."
+
+"Where?" from the three women in chorus.
+
+"In his own house, out in Pentland Place. The family has been away since
+April, and the place has been shut up. I took him the first meal he'd had
+in thirty-six hours."
+
+Portia clapped her hands. The butler came in with the coffee and she
+dismissed him and bade him shut the doors.
+
+"Now begin at the very tip end of the beginning," she commanded.
+
+Kent had a sharp little tussle with his inborn reticence, thrust it to the
+wall and told a plain tale.
+
+"It begins in a piece of reckless folly. Shortly after I left Mrs.
+Brentwood's last Thursday evening I had a curious experience. The shortest
+way down-town is diagonally through the capitol grounds, but some
+undefinable impulse led me to go around on the Capitol Avenue side. As I
+was passing the right wing of the building I saw lights in the governor's
+room, and in a sudden fit of desperation resolved to go up and have it out
+with Bucks. It was abnormally foolish, I'll confess. I had nothing
+definite to go on; but I--well, I was keyed up to just about the right
+pitch, and I thought I might bluff him."
+
+"Mercy me! You do need a guardian angel worse than anybody I know!" Portia
+cut in. "Do go on."
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"I had one that night; angel or demon, whichever you please. I was fairly
+dragged into doing what I did. When I reached the upper corridor the door
+of the public anteroom was ajar, and I heard voices. The outer room was
+not lighted, but the door between it and the governor's private office was
+open. I went in and stood in that open doorway for as much as five
+minutes, I think, and none of the four men sitting around the governor's
+writing-table saw me."
+
+He had his small audience well in hand by this time, and Ormsby's question
+was almost mechanical. "Who were the four?"
+
+"After the newspaper rapid-fire of this morning you might guess them all.
+They were his Excellency, Grafton Hendricks, Rumford, and Senator Duvall.
+They were in the act of closing the deal as I became an onlooker. Rumford
+had withdrawn his application for a charter, and another 'straw' company
+had been formed with Duvall at its head. I saw at once what I fancy Duvall
+never suspected; that he was going to be made the scapegoat for the ring.
+They all promised to stand by him--and you see how that promise has been
+kept."
+
+"Good heavens!" ejaculated Loring. "What a despicable lot of scoundrels!
+But the bribe: did you learn anything about that?"
+
+"I saw it," said Kent, impressively. "It was a slip of paper passed across
+the table by Rumford to Bucks, face down. Bucks glanced at it before he
+thrust it into his pocket, and I had my glimpse, too. It was a draft on a
+Chicago bank, but I could not read the figures, and I doubt if either of
+the other conspirators knew the amount. Then the governor tossed a folded
+paper over to the oil man, saying, 'There is your deed to the choicest
+piece of property in all Gaston, and you've got it dirt cheap.' I came
+away at that."
+
+Elinor's sigh was almost a sob; but Miss Van Brock's eyes were dancing.
+
+"Go on, go on," she exclaimed. "That is only the beginning."
+
+Kent's smile was of reminiscent weariness.
+
+"I found it so, I assure you. So far as any usable evidence was concerned,
+I was no better off than before; it was merely my assertion against their
+denial--one man against four. But I have had a full week, and it has not
+been wasted. I needn't bore you with the mechanical details. One of my men
+followed Bucks' messenger to Chicago--he wouldn't trust the banks here or
+the mails--and we know now, know it in black on white, with the proper
+affidavits, that the draft was for two hundred thousand dollars, payable
+to the order of Jasper G. Bucks. The ostensible consideration was the
+transfer from Bucks to Rumford of a piece of property in the outskirts of
+Gaston. I had this piece of land appraised for me to-day by two
+disinterested citizens of Gaston, and they valued it at a possible, but
+highly improbable, three thousand."
+
+"Oh, how clumsy!" said Portia, in fine scorn. "Does his Excellency imagine
+for a moment that any one would be deceived by such a primitive bit of
+dust-throwing?" and Ormsby also had something to say about the fatal
+mistakes of the shrewdest criminals.
+
+"It was not so bad," said Kent. "If it should ever be charged that he took
+money from Rumford, here is a plain business transaction to account for
+it. The deed, as recorded, has nothing to say of the enormous price paid.
+The phrasing is the common form used when the parties to the transfer do
+not wish to make the price public: 'For one dollar to me in hand paid, and
+other valuable considerations.' Luckily, we are able to establish
+conclusively what the 'other valuable considerations' were."
+
+"It seems to me that these documents arm and equip you for anything you
+want to do," said Loring, polishing his eye-glasses after his ingrained
+habit.
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"No; thus far the evidence is all circumstantial, or rather inferential.
+But I picked up the final link in the chain--the human link--yesterday.
+One of the detectives had been dogging Duvall. Two days ago the senator
+disappeared, unaccountably. I put two and two together, and late last
+evening took the liberty of breaking into his house."
+
+"Alone?" said Elinor, with the courage-worshiping light in the blue-gray
+eyes.
+
+"Yes; it didn't seem worth while to double the risk. I did it rather
+clumsily, I suppose, and my greeting was a shot fired at random in the
+darkness--the senator mistaking me for a burglar, as he afterward
+explained. There was no harm done, and the pistol welcome effectually
+broke the ice in what might otherwise have been a rather difficult
+interview. We had it out in an upper room, with the gas turned low and the
+window curtains drawn. To cut a long story short, I finally succeeded in
+making him understand what he was in for; that his confederates had used
+him and thrown him aside. Then I went out and brought him some supper."
+
+Ormsby smote softly upon the edge of the table with an extended
+forefinger.
+
+"Will he testify?" he asked.
+
+Kent's rejoinder was definitive.
+
+"He has put himself entirely in my hands. He is a ruined man, politically
+and socially, and he is desperate. While I couldn't make him give me any
+of the details in the Trans-Western affair, he made a clean breast of the
+oil field deal, and I have his statement locked up with the other papers
+in the Security vaults."
+
+It was Penelope who gave David Kent his due meed of praise.
+
+"I am neither a triumphant politician nor a successful detective, but I
+recognize both when they are pointed out to me," she said. "Mr. Kent, will
+you serve these gentlemen up hot for dinner, or cold for luncheon?"
+
+"Yes," Portia chimed in. "You have outrun your pace-setters, and I'm proud
+of you. Tell us what you mean to do next."
+
+Kent laughed.
+
+"You want to make me say some melodramatic thing about having the shackles
+forged and snapping them upon the gubernatorial wrists, don't you? It will
+be prosaic enough from this on. I fancy we shall have no difficulty now in
+convincing his Excellency of the justice of our proceedings to quash Judge
+MacFarlane and his receiver."
+
+"But how will you go about it? Surely you can not go personally and
+threaten the governor of the State!" this from Miss Brentwood.
+
+"Can't I?" said Kent. "Having the score written out and safely committed
+to memory, that will be quite the easiest number on the programme, I
+assure you."
+
+But Loring had something to say about the risk.
+
+"Thus far you have not considered your personal safety--haven't had to,
+perhaps. But you are coming to that now. You are dealing with a desperate
+man, David; with a gang of them, in fact."
+
+"That is so," said Ormsby. "And, as chairman of the executive committee, I
+shall have to take steps. We can't afford to bury you just yet, Kent."
+
+"I think you needn't select the pall-bearers yet a while," laughed the
+undaunted one; and then Miss Van Brock gave the signal and the "executive
+committee" adjourned to the drawing-room. Here the talk, already so deeply
+channeled in the groove political, ran easily to forecastings and
+predictions for another electoral year; and when Penelope began to yawn
+behind her fan, Ormsby took pity on her and the party broke up.
+
+It was at the moment of leave-taking that Elinor sought and found her
+chance to extract a promise from David Kent.
+
+"I must have a word with you before you do what you say you are going to
+do," she whispered hurriedly. "Will you come to see me?"
+
+"Certainly, if you wish it. But you mustn't let Loring's nervousness
+infect you. There is no danger."
+
+"There is a danger," she insisted, "a much greater danger than the one Mr.
+Loring fears. Come as soon as you can, won't you?"
+
+It was a new thing for her to plead with him, and he promised in an access
+of tumultuous hope reawakened by her changed attitude. But afterward, when
+he was walking down-town with Loring, the episode troubled him a little;
+would have troubled him more if he had not been so deeply interested in
+Loring's story of the campaign in the East.
+
+Taking it all in all, the ex-manager's report was encouraging. The New
+Englanders were by no means disposed to lie down in the harness, and since
+the Western Pacific proper was an interstate line, the Advisory Board had
+taken its grievance to Washington. Many of the small stockholders were
+standing firm, though there had been panicky defections in spite of all
+that could be done. Loring had no direct evidence to sustain the stock
+deal theory; but it was morally certain that the Plantagould brokers were
+picking up Western Pacific by littles wherever they could find it.
+
+"I am inclined to believe we haven't much time to lose," was Kent's
+comment. "Things will focus here long before Washington can get action.
+The other lines are bringing a tremendous pressure to bear on Guilford,
+whose cut rates are demoralizing business frightfully. The fictitious boom
+in Trans-Western traffic is about worked out; and for political reasons
+Bucks can't afford to have the road in the hands of his henchmen when the
+collapse comes. The major is bolstering things from week to week now until
+the Plantagould people get what they are after--a controlling majority of
+the stock--and then Judge MacFarlane will come back."
+
+They were within two squares of the Clarendon, and the cross-street was
+deserted save for a drunken cow-boy in shaps and sombrero staggering
+aimlessly around the corner.
+
+"That's curious," Loring remarked. "Don't you know, I saw that same
+fellow, or his double, lurching across the avenue as we came out of
+Alameda Square, and I wondered what he was doing out in that region."
+
+"It was his double, I guess," said Kent. "This one is many pegs too drunk
+to have covered the distance as fast as we have been walking."
+
+But drunk or sober, the cow-boy turned up again most unexpectedly; this
+time at the entrance of the alley half-way down the block. In passing he
+stumbled heavily against Kent; there was a thick-tongued oath, and Loring
+struck out smartly with his walking-stick. By consequence the man's pistol
+went off harmlessly in the air. The shot brought a policeman lumbering
+heavily up from the street beyond, and the skirling of relief whistles
+shrilled on the night. But the man with a pistol had twisted out of Kent's
+grasp and was gone in a flash.
+
+"By Jove!" said Loring, breathing hard; "he wasn't as drunk as he seemed
+to be!"
+
+Kent drew down his cuffs and shook himself straight in his coat.
+
+"No; he wasn't drunk at all; I guess he was the man you saw when we came
+out of the square." Then, as the policeman came up puffing: "Let me do the
+talking; the whisky theory will be good enough for the newspapers."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS
+
+"_Oof_! I feel as if I had been dipped in a warm bath of conspiracy and
+hung up to dry in the cold storage of nihilism! If you take me to any more
+meetings of your committee of safety, I shall be like the man without
+music in his soul--'fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.'"
+
+Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party. Elinor
+had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and
+Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.
+
+"I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab," said the
+club-man in self-defense. "And you mustn't treat it lightly, either. Ten
+prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip
+pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David."
+
+"We are not very likely to babble," retorted Penelope. "We are not so rich
+in intimates in this aboriginal desert." But Elinor spoke to the penal
+clause in his warning.
+
+"Then Mr. Kent's danger is more real than he admitted?" she said.
+
+"It's real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another
+man in his place. He is a curious combination, is David: keen and
+sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it
+comes to the in-fighting he hasn't sense enough to pound sand, as his New
+Hampshire neighbors would say."
+
+"I like that side of him best," Penelope averred. "Deliver me from a man
+of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his
+injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult. Mr. Loring tells a story
+of a transplanted Vermonter in South America. A hot-headed Peruvian called
+him a liar, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw! you can't prove it.'"
+
+"What a merciless generalizer you are!" said Ormsby, laughing. "The man
+who marries you will have his work cut out for him if he proposes to fill
+the requirements."
+
+"Won't he?" said Penelope. "I can fancy him sitting up nights to figure it
+all out."
+
+They had reached the Tejon Avenue apartment house, and to Elinor's "Won't
+you come in?" Ormsby said: "It's pretty late, but I'll smoke a cigar on
+the porch, if you'll let me."
+
+Penelope took the hammock, but she kept it only during the first inch of
+Ormsby's cigar. After her sister had gone in, Elinor went back to the
+lapsed topic.
+
+"I am rather concerned about Mr. Kent. You described him exactly;
+and--well, he is past the planning part and into the fighting part. Do you
+think he will take ordinary precautions?"
+
+"I hope so, I'm sure," rejoined the amateur chairman. "As his business
+manager I am responsible for him, after a fashion. I was glad to see
+Loring to-night--glad he has come back. Kent defers to him more than he
+does to any one else; and Loring is a solid, sober-minded sort."
+
+"Yes," she agreed; "I was glad, too."
+
+After that the talk languished, and the silence was broken only by the
+distant droning of an electric car, the fizz and click of the arc light
+over the roadway, and the occasional _dap_ of one the great beetles
+darting hither and thither in the glare.
+
+Ormsby was wondering if the time was come for the successful exploiting of
+an idea which had been growing on him steadily for weeks, not to say
+months.
+
+It was becoming more and more evident to him that he was not advancing in
+the sentimental siege beyond the first parallel thrown up so skilfully on
+the last night of the westward journey. It was not that Elinor was lacking
+in loyalty or in acquiescence; she scrupulously gave him both as an
+accepted suitor. But though he could not put his finger upon the precise
+thing said or done which marked the loosening of his hold, he knew he was
+receding rather than advancing.
+
+Now to a man of expedients the interposition of an obstacle suggests only
+ways and means for overcoming it. Ormsby had certain clear-cut convictions
+touching the subjugation of women, and as his stout heart gave him
+resolution he lived up to them. When he spoke again it was of the matter
+which concerned him most deeply; and his plea was a gentle repetition of
+many others in the same strain.
+
+"Elinor, I have waited patiently for a long time, and I'll go on doing it,
+if that is what will come the nearest to pleasing you. But it would be a
+prodigious comfort if I might be counting the days or the weeks. Are you
+still finding it impossible to set the limit?"
+
+She nodded slowly, and he took the next step like a man feeling his way in
+the dark.
+
+"That is as large an answer as you have ever given me, I think. Is there
+any speakable reason?"
+
+"You know the reason," she said, looking away from him.
+
+"I am not sure that I do. Is it because the moneygods have been
+unpropitious--because these robber barons have looted your railroad?"
+
+"No; that is only part of it--the smallest part."
+
+"I hoped so: if you have too little, I have a good bit too much. But that
+corners it in a way to make me sorry. I am not keeping my promise to win
+what you weren't able to give me at first."
+
+"Please don't put it that way. If there be any fault, it is mine. You have
+left nothing undone."
+
+The man of expedients ran over his cards reflectively and decided that the
+moment for playing his long suit was fully come.
+
+"Your goodness of heart excuses me where I am to blame," he qualified. "I
+am coming to believe that I have defeated my own cause."
+
+"By being too good to me?" she suggested.
+
+"No; by running where I should have been content to walk; by shackling you
+with a promise, and so in a certain sense becoming your jailer. That is
+putting it rather clumsily, but isn't it true?"
+
+"I had never thought of it in that light," she said unresponsively.
+
+"You wouldn't, naturally. But the fact remains. It has wrenched your point
+of view hopelessly aside, don't you think? I have seen it and felt it all
+along, but I haven't had the courage of my convictions."
+
+"In what way?" she asked.
+
+"In the only way the thing can be stood squarely upon its feet. It's
+hard--desperately hard; and hardest of all for a man of my peculiar build.
+I am no longer what you would call a young man, Elinor, and I have never
+learned to turn back and begin all over again with any show of heartiness.
+They used to say of me in the Yacht Club that if I gained a half-length in
+a race, I'd hold it if it took the sticks out of my boat."
+
+"I know," she assented absently.
+
+"Well, it's the same way now. But for your sake--or rather for the sake of
+my love--I am going to turn back for once. You are free again, Elinor. All
+I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road
+between here and Boston last fall."
+
+She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the
+opposite house, and he let her take her own time. When she spoke there was
+a thrill in her voice that he had never heard before.
+
+"I don't deserve it--so much consideration, I mean," she said; and he made
+haste to spare her.
+
+"Yes, you do; you deserve anything the best man in the world could do for
+you, and I'm a good bit short of that."
+
+"But if I don't want you to go back?"
+
+He had gained something--much more than he knew; and for a tremulous
+instant he was near to losing it again by a passionate retraction of all
+he had been saying. But the cool purpose came to his rescue in time.
+
+"I should still insist on doing it. You gave me what you could, but I want
+more, and I am willing to do what is necessary to win it."
+
+Again she said: "You are too good to me," and again he contradicted her.
+
+"No; it is hardly a question of goodness; indeed, I am not sure that it
+escapes being selfish. But I am very much in earnest, and I am going to
+prove it. Three years ago you met a man whom you thought you could
+love--don't interrupt me, please. He was like some other men we know: he
+didn't have the courage of his convictions, lacking the few dollars which
+might have made things more nearly equal. May I go on?"
+
+"I suppose you have earned the right to say what you please," was the
+impassive reply.
+
+It was the old struggle in which they were so evenly matched--of the woman
+to preserve her poise; of the man to break it down. Another lover might
+have given up in despair, but Ormsby's strength lay in holding on in the
+face of all discouragements.
+
+"I believe, as much as I believe anything in this world, that you were
+mistaken in regard to your feeling for the other man," he went on calmly.
+"But I want you to be sure of that for yourself, and you can't be sure
+unless you are free to choose between us."
+
+"Oh, don't!--you shouldn't say such things to me," she broke out; and then
+he knew he was gaining ground.
+
+"Yes, I must. We have been stumbling around in the dark all these months,
+and I mean to be the lantern-bearer for once in a way. You know, and I
+know, and Kent is coming to know. That man is going to be a success,
+Elinor: he has it in him, and he sha'n't lack the money-backing he may
+need. When he arrives----"
+
+She turned on him quickly, and the blue-gray eyes were suspiciously
+bright.
+
+"Please don't bury me alive," she begged.
+
+He saw what he had done; that the nicely calculated purpose had carried
+straight and true to its mark; and for a moment the mixed motives, which
+are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the
+sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast. But it was the better
+Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict.
+
+"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am neither better nor worse than other
+men, I fancy. My motives, such as they are, would probably turn out to be
+purely selfish in the last analysis. I am proceeding on the theory that
+constraint breeds the desire for the thing it forbids; therefore I remove
+it. Also, it is a part of that theory that the successful David Kent will
+not appeal to you as the unspoiled country lawyer did. No, I'm not going
+to spoil him; if I were, I shouldn't be telling you about it. But--may I
+be brutally frank?--the David Kent who will come successfully out of this
+political prize-fight will not be the man you have idealized."
+
+There was a muttering of thunder in the air, and the cool precursory
+breeze of a shower was sweeping through the tree-tops.
+
+"Shall we go into the house?" she asked; and he took it as his dismissal.
+
+"You may; I have kept you up long enough." And then, taking her hand: "Are
+we safely ashore on the new continent, Elinor? May I come and go as
+heretofore?"
+
+"You were always welcome, Brookes; you will be twice welcome, now."
+
+It was the first time she had ever called him by his Christian name and it
+went near to toppling down the carefully reared structure of
+self-restraint. But he made shift to shore the tottering walls with a
+playful retort.
+
+"If that is the case, I'll have to think up some more self-abnegations.
+Good night."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+THE WINNING LOSER
+
+Editor Hildreth's prophecy concerning the probable attitude of the
+administration newspapers in the discussion of the oil field affair waited
+but a day for its fulfilment. On the Friday morning there appeared in the
+_Capital Tribune_, the _Midland City Chronicle_, the _Range County
+Maverick_ and the _Agriculta Ruralist_ able editorials exonerating the
+People's Party, its policy and the executive, and heaping mountains of
+obloquy on the name of Duvall. These editorials were so similar in tone,
+tenor and texture, as pointedly to suggest a common model--a coincidence
+which was not allowed to pass unremarked by Hildreth and other molders of
+public opinion on the opposite side of the political fence.
+
+But Hildreth did not pause at generalities. Two days after the Universal's
+triumph in the Belmount field, the _Argus_ began to "hit it up" boldly
+toward the capitol, and two things came of it. The first was an attempt by
+some party or parties unknown to buy up a controlling interest in the
+_Argus_. The second was the waylaying of David Kent in the lobby of the
+Clarendon Hotel by no less a personage than the Honorable Melton Meigs,
+attorney-general of the State.
+
+In his first conversation with Ormsby, Kent had spoken of the three
+leading spirits of the junto as from personal knowledge; but of the three,
+Bucks, Hendricks and Meigs, the attorney-general was the least known to
+him. Prior to his nomination on the State ticket Meigs had been best known
+as the most astute criminal lawyer in the State, his astuteness lying not
+so much in his ability as a pleader as in a certain oratorical gift by
+which he was able to convince not only a jury but the public of the entire
+innocence of his client.
+
+He was a small man physically, with womanish hands and feet, and a
+beardless face of that prematurely aged cast which is oftenest seen in
+dwarfs and precocious infants; and his distinguishing characteristic, the
+one which stuck longest in the mind of a chance acquaintance or a casual
+observer, was a smile of the congealed sort which served to mask whatever
+emotion there might be behind it.
+
+Kent had seen little of Meigs since the latter had turned him down in the
+_quo warranto_ matter; and his guard went up quickly when the
+attorney-general accosted him in the lobby of the hotel and asked for a
+private interview.
+
+"I am very much occupied just now, Mr. Meigs," he demurred; "but if it is
+a matter of importance----"
+
+"It is; a matter of the greatest importance," was the smooth-toned reply.
+"I am sure you will not regret it if you will give me a few moments, Mr.
+Kent."
+
+Kent decided quickly. Being forewarned, there was nothing to fear.
+
+"We will go up to my rooms, if you please," he said, leading the way to
+the elevator; and no other word was spoken until they were behind closed
+doors on the fourth floor.
+
+"A prefatory remark may make my business with you seem a little less
+singular, Mr. Kent," Meigs began, when Kent had passed his cigar-case and
+the attorney-general had apologized for a weak digestive tract. "On wholly
+divergent lines and from wholly different motives we are both working
+toward the same end, I believe, and it has occurred to me that we might be
+of some assistance to each other."
+
+Kent's rejoinder was a mute signal to the effect that he was attending.
+
+"Some little time ago you came to me as the legal representative of the
+stock-holders of the Trans-Western Railway Company, and I did not find it
+possible at that time to meet your wishes in the matter of a _quo
+warranto_ information questioning Judge MacFarlane's election and status.
+You will admit, I presume, that your demand was a little peremptory?"
+
+"I admit nothing," said Kent, curtly. "But for the sake of expediting
+present matters----"
+
+"Precisely," was the smiling rejoinder. "You will note that I said 'at
+that time.' Later developments--more especially this charge made openly by
+the public press of juggling with foreign corporations--have led me to
+believe that as the public prosecutor I may have duties which transcend
+all other considerations--of loyalty to a party standard--of----"
+
+Kent took his turn at interrupting.
+
+"Mr. Meigs, there is nothing to be gained by indirection. May I ask you to
+come to the point?"
+
+"Briefly, then: the course pursued by Senator Duvall in the Belmount
+affair leaves an unproved charge against others; a charge which I am
+determined to sift to the bottom--you see, I am speaking quite frankly.
+That charge involves the reputation of men high in authority; but I shall
+be strong to do my sworn duty, Mr. Kent; I ask you to believe that."
+
+Kent nodded and waved him on.
+
+"You will readily understand the delicacy of the task, and how, in the
+nature of things, I am handicapped and hedged up on every side.
+Evidence--of a kind to enable me to assail a popular idol--is exceedingly
+difficult to procure."
+
+"It is," said Kent, grimly.
+
+"Exactly. But in revolving the matter in my own mind, I thought of you.
+You are known at the capitol, Mr. Kent, and I may say throughout the
+State, as the uncompromising antagonist of the State administration. I
+have asked myself this: Is it possible that a cool-headed, resolute
+attorney like Mr. David Kent would move so far and so determinedly in this
+matter of antagonism without substantially paving the ground under his
+feet with evidence as he went along?"
+
+Kent admitted that it was possible, but highly improbable.
+
+"So I decided," was the smile-tempered rejoinder. "In that case it only
+remains for me to remind you of your public duty, Mr. Kent; to ask you in
+the name of justice and of the people of the State, to place your
+information in the hands of the public prosecutor."
+
+Kent's face betrayed nothing more than his appreciation of the confidence
+reposed in him by the man whose high sense of official honor was making
+him turn traitor to the party leader who had dragged him through a
+successful election.
+
+"I have what evidence I need, Mr. Meigs," he declared. "But if I make no
+secret of this, neither do I conceal the fact that the motive _pro bono
+publico_ has had little to do with its accumulating. I want justice first
+for what might be called a purely private end, and I mean to have it."
+
+"Pre-cisely," smiled the attorney-general. "And now we are beginning to
+see our way a little clearer. It is not too late for us to move in the
+_quo warranto_ proceedings. If you will call at my office I shall be glad
+to reopen the matter with you."
+
+"And the price?" said Kent, shortly.
+
+"Oh, my dear sir! must we put it upon the ground of a _quid pro quo_?
+Rather let us say that we shall help each other. You are in a position to
+assist me very materially: I may be in a position to serve your turn. Come
+to my office to-morrow morning prepared to do your duty as an honest,
+loyal citizen, and you will find me quite willing to meet you half-way."
+
+Kent rose and opened his watch.
+
+"Mr. Meigs, I have given you your opportunity, and you have seemed to give
+me mine," he said coolly. "Will you pardon me if I say that I can paddle
+my own canoe--if I ask you to assure his Excellency that one more device
+of his to escape punishment has been tried and found wanting?"
+
+For a flitting moment the cast-iron smile faded from the impassive face of
+the attorney-general and an unrelenting devil came to peer out of the
+colorless eyes. Then Meigs rose cat-like and laid his hand on the
+door-knob.
+
+"Do I understand that you refuse to move in a matter which should be the
+first duty of a good citizen, Mr. Kent?" he asked purringly.
+
+"I certainly do refuse to fall into any such clumsy trap as you have been
+trying to bait for me, Mr. Meigs," said David Kent, dropping back into his
+former curtness.
+
+The door opened slowly under the impulse of the slender womanish hand.
+
+"You have a task of some magnitude before you, Mr. Kent. You can scarcely
+hope to accomplish it alone."
+
+"Meaning that you would like to know if the fight will go on if I should
+chance to meet another drunken cow-boy with a better aim? It will."
+
+The door closed softly behind the retreating figure of the
+attorney-general, and Kent released the spring of the night-latch. Then he
+went to the dropped portiere at the farther end of the room, drew it aside
+and looked in on a man who was writing at a table pushed out between the
+windows.
+
+"You heard him, Loring?" he asked.
+
+The ex-manager nodded.
+
+"They are hard pressed," he said. Then, looking up quickly: "You could
+name your price if you wanted to close out the stock of goods in hand,
+David."
+
+"I shall name it when the time comes. Are you ready to go over to the
+_Argus_ office with me? I want to have a three-cornered talk with
+Hildreth."
+
+"In a minute. I'll join you in the lobby if you don't want to wait."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in the afternoon of the same day that Kent found a note in his
+key-box at the Clarendon asking him to call up 124 Tejon Avenue by
+telephone. He did it at once, and Penelope answered. The key-box note had
+been placed at Elinor's request, and she, Miss Penelope, could not say
+what was wanted; neither could she say definitely when her sister would be
+in. Elinor had gone out an hour earlier with Mr. Ormsby and Miss Van Brock
+in Mr. Ormsby's motor-car. When was he, David Kent, coming up? Did he know
+they were talking of spending the remainder of the summer at Breezeland
+Inn? And where was Mr. Loring all this time?
+
+Kent made fitting answers to all these queries, hung up the ear-piece and
+went away moodily reflective. He was due at a meeting of the executive
+committee of the Civic League, but he let the public business wait while
+he speculated upon the probable object of Elinor's telephoning him.
+
+Now there is no field in which the inconsistency of human nature is so
+persistent as in that which is bounded by the sentimentally narrowed
+horizon of a man in love. With Ormsby at the nodus of his point of view,
+David Kent made no secret of his open rivalry of the millionaire,
+declaring his intention boldly and taking no shame therefor. But when he
+faced about toward Elinor he found himself growing hotly jealous for her
+good faith; careful and fearful lest she should say or do something not
+strictly in accordance with the letter and spirit of her obligations as
+Ormsby's _fiancee_.
+
+For example: at the "conspiracy dinner," as Loring dubbed it, Ormsby being
+present to fight for his own hand, Kent, as we have seen, had boldly
+monopolized Miss Brentwood, and would have committed himself still more
+pointedly had the occasion favored him. None the less, when Elinor had
+begged him privately to see her before moving in the attack on the junto,
+he had almost resented the implied establishing of confidential relations
+with her lover's open rival.
+
+For this cause he had been postponing the promised visit, and thereby
+postponing the taking of the final step in the campaign of intimidation.
+The unexplained telephone call decided him, however. He would go and see
+Elinor and have the ordeal over with.
+
+But as a preliminary he dined that evening with Ormsby at the Camelot
+Club, and over the coffee had it out with him.
+
+"I am going out to see Miss Brentwood to-night," he announced abruptly.
+"Have you any objection?"
+
+The millionaire gave him the shrewdest of over-looks, ending with a
+deep-rumbling laugh.
+
+"Kent, you are the queerest lot I have ever discovered, and that is saying
+a good bit. Why, in the name of all the proprieties, should I object?"
+
+"Your right is unchallenged," Kent admitted.
+
+"Is it? Better ask Miss Brentwood about that. She might say it isn't."
+
+"I don't understand," said Kent, dry-tongued.
+
+"Don't you? Perhaps I'd better explain: she might find it a little
+difficult. You have been laboring under the impression that we are
+engaged, haven't you?"
+
+"Laboring under the--why, good heavens, man! it's in everybody's mouth!"
+
+"Curious, isn't it, how such things get about," commented the player of
+long suits. "How do you suppose they get started?"
+
+"I don't suppose anything about it, so far as we two are concerned; I have
+your own word for it. You said you were the man in possession."
+
+Ormsby laughed again.
+
+"You are something of a bluffer yourself, David. Did you let my little
+stagger scare you out?"
+
+David Kent pushed his chair back from the table and nailed Ormsby with a
+look that would have made a younger man betray himself.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that there is no engagement between you and Miss
+Brentwood?"
+
+"Just that." Ormsby put all the nonchalance he could muster into the
+laconic reply, but he was anticipating the sequent demand which came like
+a shot out of a gun.
+
+"And there never has been?"
+
+Ormsby grinned.
+
+"When you are digging a well and have found your stream of water, it's
+folly to go deeper, David. Can't you let 'good enough' alone?"
+
+Kent turned it over in his mind, frowning thoughtfully into his
+coffee-cup. When he spoke it was out of the mid-heart of manliness.
+
+"I wish you would tell me one thing, Ormsby. Am I responsible for--for the
+present state of affairs?"
+
+Ormsby stretched the truth a little; partly for Elinor's sake; more,
+perhaps, for Kent's.
+
+"You have done nothing that an honorable rival--and incidentally a good
+friend of mine--might not do. Therefore you are not responsible."
+
+"That is putting it very diplomatically," Kent mused. "I am afraid it does
+not exonerate me wholly."
+
+"Yes, it does. But it doesn't put me out of the running, you understand.
+I'm 'forninst' you yet; rather more stubbornly than before, I fancy."
+
+Kent nodded.
+
+"That, of course; I should think less of you if you were not. And you
+shall have as fair a show as you are giving me--which is saying a lot.
+Shall we go and smoke?"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+A WOMAN INTERVENES
+
+It was still early in the evening when Kent mounted the steps of the
+Brentwood apartment house. Mother and daughters were all on the porch, but
+it was Mrs. Brentwood who welcomed him.
+
+"We were just wondering if you would imagine the message which Elinor was
+going to send, and didn't, and come out to see what was wanted," she said.
+"I am in need of a little legal advice. Will you give me a few minutes in
+the library?"
+
+Kent went with her obediently, but not without wondering why she had sent
+for him, of all the retainable lawyers in the capital. And the wonder
+became amazement when she opened her confidence. She had received two
+letters from a New York broker who offered to buy her railroad stock at a
+little more than the market price. To the second letter she had replied,
+asking a price ten points higher than the market. At this the broker had
+apparently dropped the attempted negotiation, since there had been no more
+letters. What would Mr. Kent advise her to do--write again?
+
+Kent smiled inwardly at the good lady's definition of "legal advice," but
+he rose promptly to the occasion. If he were in Mrs. Brentwood's place, he
+would not write again; nor would he pay any attention whatever to any
+similar proposals from any source. Had there been any others?
+
+Mrs. Brentwood confessed that there had been; that a firm of Boston
+brokers had also written her. Did Mr. Kent know the meaning of all this
+anxiety to buy in Western Pacific when the stock was going down day by
+day?
+
+Kent took time for reflection before he answered. It was exceedingly
+difficult to eliminate the personal factor in the equation. If all went
+well, if by due process of law the Trans-Western should be rescued out of
+the hands of the wreckers, the property would be a long time recovering
+from the wounds inflicted by the cut rates and the Guilford bad
+management. In consequence, any advance in the market value of the stock
+must be slow and uncertain under the skilfullest handling. But, while it
+might be advisable for Mrs. Brentwood to take what she could get, the
+transfer of the three thousand shares at the critical moment might be the
+death blow to all his hopes in the fight for retrieval.
+
+Happily, he hit upon the expedient of shifting the responsibility for the
+decision to other shoulders.
+
+"I scarcely feel competent to advise you in a matter which is personal
+rather than legal," he said at length. "Have you talked it over with Mr.
+Ormsby?"
+
+Mrs. Brentwood's reply was openly contemptuous.
+
+"Brookes Ormsby doesn't know anything about dollars. You have to express
+it in millions before he can grasp it. He says for me not to sell at any
+price."
+
+Kent shook his head.
+
+"I shouldn't put it quite so strongly. At the same time, I am not the
+person to advise you."
+
+The shrewd eyes looked up at him quickly.
+
+"Would you mind telling me why, Mr. Kent?"
+
+"Not in the least. I am an interested party. For weeks Mr. Loring and I
+have been striving by all means to prevent transfers of the stock from the
+hands of the original holders. I don't want to advise you to your hurt;
+but to tell you to sell might be to undo all that has been done."
+
+"Then you are still hoping to get the railroad out of Major Guilford's
+hands?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And in that case the price of the stock will go up again?"
+
+"That is just the difficulty. It may be a long time recovering."
+
+"Do you think the sale of my three thousand shares would make any
+difference?" she asked.
+
+"There is reason to fear that it would make all the difference."
+
+She was silent for a time, and when she spoke again Kent realized that he
+was coming to know an entirely unsuspected side of Elinor's mother.
+
+"It makes it pretty hard for me," she said slowly. "This little drib of
+railroad stock is all that my girls have left out of what their father
+willed them. I want to save it if I can."
+
+"So do I," said David Kent, frankly; "and for the same reason."
+
+Mrs. Brentwood confined herself to a dry "Why?"
+
+"Because I have loved your elder daughter well and truly ever since that
+summer at the foot of Old Croydon, Mrs. Brentwood, and her happiness and
+well-being concern me very nearly."
+
+"You are pretty plain-spoken, Mr. Kent. I suppose you know Elinor is to be
+married to Brookes Ormsby?" Mrs. Brentwood was quite herself again.
+
+Kent dexterously equivocated.
+
+"I know they have been engaged for some time," he said; but the small
+quibble availed him nothing.
+
+"Which one of them was it told you it was broken off?" she inquired.
+
+He smiled in spite of the increasing gravity of the situation.
+
+"You may be sure it was not Miss Elinor."
+
+"Humph!" said Mrs. Brentwood. "She didn't tell me, either. 'Twas Brookes
+Ormsby, and he said he wanted to begin all over again, or something of
+that sort. He is nothing but a foolish boy, for all his hair is getting
+thin."
+
+"He is a very honorable man," said Kent.
+
+"Because he is giving you another chance? I don't mind telling you plainly
+that it won't do any good, Mr. Kent."
+
+"Why?" he asked in his turn.
+
+"For several reasons: one is that Elinor will never marry without my
+consent; another is that she can't afford to marry a poor man."
+
+Kent rose.
+
+"I am glad to know how you feel about it, Mrs. Brentwood: nevertheless, I
+shall ask you to give your consent some day, God willing."
+
+He expected an outburst of some sort, and was telling himself that he had
+fairly provoked it, when she cut the ground from beneath his feet.
+
+"Don't you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent," she
+said, not unsympathetically. "She's in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she
+knows it now, if she didn't before." And it was with this arrow rankling
+in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the
+porch.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+A BORROWED CONSCIENCE
+
+The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a
+health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the
+corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the
+vine-covered trellis.
+
+Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music--Penelope's
+music--and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving
+Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them.
+
+It was Elinor's chance for free speech with Kent--the opportunity she had
+craved. But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had
+departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place. Under other
+conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would
+have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with
+Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arrow was still rankling. None the less,
+he was the first to break away from the commonplaces.
+
+"What is the matter with us this evening?" he queried. "We have been
+sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and
+Loring side-tracked us. I haven't been doing anything I am ashamed of;
+have you?"
+
+"Yes," she confessed, looking away from him.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is
+good reason to believe he didn't want to come."
+
+"What makes you think he didn't want to come?"
+
+"Why--I don't know; did he?" She had turned upon him swiftly with an
+outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings
+in time past--the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and
+instant and sympathetic apprehension.
+
+"You have never yet asked anything of him that he wasn't glad enough to
+give," he rejoined, keeping up the third person figurative.
+
+"Is that saying very much--or very little?"
+
+"Very little, indeed. But it is only your askings that have been
+lacking--not his good will."
+
+"That was said like the David Kent I used to know. Are you really quite
+the same?"
+
+"I hope not," he protested gravely. "People used to say of me that I
+matured late, and year by year as I look back I can see that it was a true
+saying. I have done some desperately boyish things since I was a man
+grown; things that make me tingle when I recall them."
+
+"Like wasting a whole summer exploring Mount Croydon with a--a somebody
+who did not mature late?"
+
+"No; I wasn't counting that among my lapses. An older man than I ever hope
+to be might find excuses for the Croydon summer. I meant in other ways.
+For one thing, I have craved success as I think few men have ever craved
+it; and yet my plowings in that field have been ill-timed and boyish to a
+degree."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I don't know how you measure success; it is a word of so many, many
+meanings. But I think you are your own severest critic."
+
+"That may be; but the fact remains. It is only within the past few months
+that I have begun to get a true inkling of things; to know, for example,
+that opportunities are things to be compelled--not waited for."
+
+She was looking away from him again.
+
+"I am not sure that I like you better for your having discovered yourself.
+I liked the other David Kent."
+
+He smiled rather joylessly.
+
+"Somebody has said that for every new point of view gained we have to
+sacrifice all the treasures of the old. I am sorry if I am disappointing
+you."
+
+"I don't know that you are. And yet, when you were sitting at Miss Van
+Brock's table the other evening telling us about your experience with the
+politicians, I kept saying to myself that I didn't know you--that I had
+never known you."
+
+"I wish I knew just how to take that," he said dubiously.
+
+"I wish I knew how to make you understand," she returned; and then: "I
+could have made the other David Kent understand."
+
+"You are in duty bound to try to make this one understand, don't you
+think? You spoke of a danger which was not the violent kind, such as
+Loring fears. What is it?"
+
+"You have had two whole days," she rejoined. "Haven't you discovered it?"
+
+"I haven't found anything to fear but failure," was his reply.
+
+"That is it; you have given it a name--its only true name--failure."
+
+"But I am not going to fail."
+
+"You mean you are going to take our railroad away from these men who have
+stolen it?"
+
+"That is what I mean."
+
+"And you will do it by threatening to expose them?"
+
+"I shall tell Governor Bucks what I know about the oil field deal,
+assuring him that I shall publish the facts if he doesn't let the law take
+its course in ousting Judge MacFarlane and the receiver."
+
+She rose and stood before him, leaning against one of the vine-clad porch
+pillars with her hands behind her.
+
+"David Kent, are there any circumstances in which you would accept a
+bribe?"
+
+He answered her in all seriousness.
+
+"They say every man has his price: mine is higher than any bid they have
+yet made--or can make, I hope."
+
+"Why don't you let _them_ bribe _you_?" she asked coolly. "Is it because
+it is inexpedient--because there is more 'success' the other way?"
+
+He tried to emulate her coolness and made a failure of it.
+
+"Have I ever done anything to make you think I had thrown common honesty
+and self-respect overboard?" he demanded.
+
+Her answer was another question, sharp-edged and well thrust home.
+
+"Is it any worse to take a bribe than it is to give one? You have just
+admitted that you are going to buy the governor's neutrality, you know."
+
+"I don't see it in that light at all."
+
+"The other David Kent would have seen it. He would have said: These men
+are public criminals. If I can not bring them to justice, I can at least
+expose them to the scorn of all good men. Therefore I have no right to
+bargain with them."
+
+Kent was silent for a long time. When he spoke it was to say:
+
+"Why have you done this, Elinor?"
+
+"Because I had to, David. Could I do less?"
+
+"I suppose not. It's in the blood--in your blood and mine. Other folk call
+it the Puritan virus of over-righteousness, and scoff at it. I don't know:
+sometimes I think they have the best of the argument."
+
+"I can't believe you are quite sincere when you say that," she asserted.
+
+"Yes, I am. One can not compromise with conscience; that says itself. But
+I have come to believe latterly that one's conscience may be morbidly
+acute, or even diseased. I'll admit I've been taking treatment."
+
+"That sounds very dreadful," she rejoined.
+
+"It does, doesn't it? Yet it had to be done. As I intimated a few minutes
+ago, my life has hitherto been a sort of unostentatious failure. I used to
+think it was because I was outclassed: I know now it has been because I
+wouldn't do as other men do. It has been a rather heart-breaking
+process--to sort out the scruples, admitting the just and overriding the
+others--but I have been given to see that it is the price of success."
+
+"I want you to succeed," she said.
+
+"Pardon me; I don't think you do. You have reopened the door to doubt, and
+if I admit the doubt I shall fail."
+
+The sonata Penelope was playing was approaching its finale, and Elinor was
+suddenly shaken with a trembling fit of fear--the fear of consequences
+which might involve this man's entire future. She knew Kent was leaning on
+her, and she saw herself as one who has ruthlessly thrust an iron bar
+among the wheels of a delicate mechanism. Who was she to be his
+conscience-keeper--to stand in the way and bid him go back? Were her own
+motives always so exalted? Had she not once deliberately debated this same
+question of expediency, to the utter abasement of her own ideals?
+
+Penelope had left the piano, and Loring was looking at his watch. Kent saw
+them through the open window and got upon his feet.
+
+"Grantham is saying he had no idea it was so late," he hazarded. "If I
+thank you for what you have said I am afraid it must be as the patient
+thanks the surgeon for the knife-stroke which leaves him a cripple for
+life."
+
+It was the one word needed to break her resolution.
+
+"Oh, forget it; please forget it!" she said. "I had no right.... You are
+doing a man's work in the world, and it must be done in a man's way. If I
+can not help, you must not let me hinder. If you let anything I have said
+discourage you, I shall never cease regretting it."
+
+His smile was a mere indrawing of the lips.
+
+"Having opened the door, you would try to shut it again, would you? How
+like a woman! But I am afraid it can't be done. I had been trying to keep
+away from that point of view.... There is much to be said on both sides.
+There was a time when I wouldn't have gone into such a thing as this fight
+with the junto; but being in, I should have seen it through regardless of
+the public welfare--ignoring that side of it. I can't do it now; you have
+shown me that I can't."
+
+"But I don't want to be a stumbling-block," she insisted. "Won't you
+believe that I wanted to help?"
+
+"I believe that your motive was all it should be; yes. But the result is
+the same."
+
+Loring and Penelope were coming out, and the end of their privacy was at
+hand.
+
+"What will you do?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know: nothing that I had meant to do. It was a false start and I
+am back under the wire again."
+
+"But you must not turn back unless you are fully convinced of the wrong of
+going on," she protested.
+
+"Didn't you mean to convince me?"
+
+"No--yes--I don't know. I--it seems very clear to me; but I want it to
+seem clear to you. Doesn't your conscience tell you that you ought to turn
+back?"
+
+"No," he said shortly; but he immediately qualified the denial. "You may
+be right: I am afraid you are right. But I shall have to fight it out for
+myself. There are many things to consider. If I hold my hand, these
+bucaneers will triumph over the stockholders, and a host of innocent
+people will suffer loss." Then, seeing the quick-springing tears in her
+eyes: "But you mustn't be sorry for having done what you had to do; you
+have nothing to reproach yourself for."
+
+"Oh, but I have!" she said; and so they parted.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+THE INSURRECTIONARIES
+
+When the Receiver Guilfords, great and small, set their official
+guillotines at work lopping off department heads, they commonly ignore a
+consequence overlooked by many; namely, the possible effect of such
+wholesale changes in leadership upon the rank and file.
+
+The American railroad in its unconsolidated stage is a modern feudalism.
+Its suzerains are the president and board of directors; its clan chiefs
+are the men who have built it and fought for its footing in the sharply
+contested field of competition. To these leaders the rank and file is
+loyal, as loyalty is accorded to the men who build and do, rather than to
+their successors who inherit and tear down. Add to this the supplanting of
+competent executive officers by a staff of political trenchermen, ignorant
+alike of the science of railroading, and the equally important sub-science
+of industrial manhandling, and you have the kindling for the fire of
+insurrection which had been slowly smoldering in the Trans-Western service
+since the day when Major Guilford had issued his general order Number One.
+
+At first the fire had burned fitfully, eating its way into the small
+economies; as when the section hands pelt stray dogs with new spikes from
+the stock keg, and careless freight crews seed down the right of way with
+cast-off links and pins; when engineers pour oil where it should be
+dropped, and firemen feed the stack instead of the steam-dome.
+
+But later, when the incompetence of the new officials became the mocking
+gibe of the service, and the cut-rate avalanche of traffic had doubled all
+men's tasks, the flames rose higher, and out of the smoke of them loomed
+the shape of the dread demon of demoralization.
+
+First it was Hank Brodrick, who misread his orders and piled two freights
+in a mountain of wreckage in the deep cut between Long Pine and Argenta.
+Next it was an overworked night man who lost his head and cranked a switch
+over in front of the west-bound Flyer, laying the 1020 on her side in the
+ditch, with the postal and the baggage-car neatly telescoped on top to
+hold her down.
+
+Two days later it was Patsy Callahan; and though he escaped with his life
+and his job, it was a close call. He was chasing a time freight with the
+fast mail, and the freight was taking the siding at Delhi to let him pass.
+One of the red tail-lights of the freight had gone out, and Callahan
+mistook the other for the target lamp of the second switch. He had time to
+yell at his fireman, to fling himself upon the throttle-bar and to set the
+airbrake before he began to turn Irish handsprings down the embankment;
+but the wrecking crew camped two whole days at Delhi gathering up the
+debris.
+
+It was well on in the summer, when the two divisions, east and west, were
+strewn with wreckage and the pit tracks in the shops and shop yard were
+filled to overflowing with crippled engines, that the insurrectionaries
+began to gather in their respective labor groups to discuss the growing
+hazards of railroading on the Trans-Western.
+
+The outcome was a protest from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers,
+addressed to the receiver in the name of the organization, setting forth
+in plain terms the grievance of the members, and charging it bluntly to
+bad management. This was followed immediately by similar complaints from
+the trainmen, the telegraphers, and the firemen; all praying for relief
+from the incubus of incompetent leadership. Not to be behind these, came
+the Amalgamated Machinists, demanding an increase of pay for night work
+and overtime; and last, but not least, an intimation went forth from the
+Federative Council of all these labor unions hinting at possible political
+consequences and the alienation of the labor vote if the abuses were not
+corrected.
+
+"What d'ye calc'late the major will do about it?" said Brodrick, in the
+roundhouse conclave held daily by the trainmen who were hung up or off
+duty. "Will he listen to reason and give us a sure-enough railroad man or
+two at the top?"
+
+"Not in _ein_ t'ousand year," quoth "Dutch" Tischer, Callahan's alternate
+on the fast mail. "Haf you not de _Arkoos_ been reading? It is bolotics
+from der beginning to der ent; mit der governor _vorwaerts_."
+
+"Then I am tellin' you-all right now there's goin' to be a heap o'
+trouble," drawled "Pike County" Griggs, the oldest engineer on the line.
+"The shopmen are b'ilin'; and if the major puts on that blanket cut in
+wages he's talkin' about----"
+
+"'If'," broke in Callahan, with fine scorn. "'Tis slaping on yer injuries
+ye are, Misther Griggs. The notice is out; 'twas posted in the shops this
+day."
+
+"Then that settles it," said Griggs, gloomily. "When does it take hold?"
+
+"The first day av the month to come. An' they're telling me it catches
+everybody, down to the missinger b'ys in the of'ces."
+
+Griggs got upon his feet, yawning and stretching before he dropped back
+into his corner of the wooden settle.
+
+"You lissen at me: if that's the fact, I'm tellin' you-all that every
+wheel on this blame', hoodooed railroad is goin' to stop turnin' at twelve
+o'clock on the night before that notice takes hold."
+
+An oil-begrimed wiper crawled from under the 1031, spat at the dope-bucket
+and flung his bunch of waste therein.
+
+"Gur-r-r! Let 'em stop," he rasped. "The dope's bad, and the waste's bad;
+and the old man has cut out the 'lectrics and put us back on _them_,"
+kicking a small jacket lamp to the bottom of an empty stall. "Give 's a
+chaw o' yer smokin' plug, Mr. Callahan," and he held out his hand.
+
+Callahan emptied the hot ashes from his black pipe into the open palm.
+
+"'Tis what ye get f'r yer impidunce, an' f'r layin' tongue to ould man
+Durgan, ye scut. 'Tis none av his doin's--the dhirty oil an' the chape
+waste an' the jacket lamps. It's ay-conomy, me son; an' the other name f'r
+that is a rayceiver."
+
+"Is Durgan with us?" asked Brodrick.
+
+"He's wit' himself, as a master-mechanic shu'd be," said Callahan. "So's
+M'Tosh. But nayther wan n'r t'other av thim'll take a thrain out whin the
+strike's on. They're both Loring min."
+
+At the mention of Loring's name Griggs looked up from the stick he was
+whittling.
+
+"No prospects o' the Boston folks getting the road back again, I reckon,"
+he remarked tentatively.
+
+"You should read dose _Arkoos_ newsbapers: den you should know somet'ings
+alretty, ain'd it?" said Tischer.
+
+Brodrick laughed.
+
+"If you see it in the papers, it's so," he quoted. "What the _Argus_
+doesn't say would make a 'nough sight bigger book than what it does. But
+I've been kind o' watchin' that man Kent. He's been hot after the major,
+right from the jump. You rec'lect what he said in them Civic League talks
+o' his: said these politicians had stole the road, hide, hair an' horns."
+
+"I'm onto him," said Callahan. "'Tis a bird he is. Oleson was telling me.
+The Scandehoovian was thryin' to get him down to Gaston the day they
+ray-ceivered us. Jarl says he wint a mile a minut', an' the little man
+never turned a hair."
+
+"Is he here yet; or did he go back to God's country?" asked Engineer
+Scott, leaning from the cab window of the 1031.
+
+"He's here; and so is Mr. Loring. They're stopping at the Clarendon," said
+Brodrick.
+
+"Then they haven't quit," drawled Griggs; adding: "I wonder if they have a
+ghost of a show against the politicals?"
+
+"Has annybody been to see 'em?" asked Callahan.
+
+"There's a notion for you, Scott," said Brodrick. Scott was the presiding
+officer in the B. of L.E. local. "Get up a committee from the Federative
+to go and ask Mr. Loring if there's any use in our tryin' to hold on."
+
+The wiper was killing time at a window which commanded a view of the upper
+yards, with the Union Passenger Station at the end of the three-mile
+vista. Being a late comer in the field, the Trans-Western had scanty track
+rights in the upper yard; its local headquarters were in the shops suburb,
+where the two division main lines proper began and ended, diverging, the
+one to the eastward and the other to the west.
+
+"Holy smut!" said the wiper. "See Dicky Dixon comin' out with the Flyer!
+How's that for ten miles an hour in the city limits?"
+
+It was a foot-note commentary on the way the service was going to pieces.
+Halkett, the "political" general superintendent, had called Dixon on the
+carpet for not making time with his train. "If you're afraid to run, say
+so, and we'll get a man that isn't," Halkett had said; and here was Dixon
+coming down a borrowed track in a busy yard at the speed which presupposes
+a ninety-pound rail and nothing in the way.
+
+The conclave had gathered at the wiper's window.
+
+"The dum fool!" said Brodrick. "If anything gets in front of him----"
+
+There was a suburb street-crossing three hundred yards townward from the
+"yard limits" telegraph office, which stood in the angle formed by the
+diverging tracks of the two divisions. Beyond the yard the street became a
+country road, well traveled as the principal southern inlet to the city.
+When Dixon was within two train-lengths of the crossing, a farm wagon
+appeared, driven between the cut freight trains on the sidings directly in
+the path of the Flyer. The men at the roundhouse window heard the crash of
+the splintering wagon above the roar of the train; and the wiper on the
+window seat yelped like a kicked dog and went sickly green under his mask
+of grime.
+
+"There it is again," said Scott, when Dixon had brought his train to a
+stand two hundred yards beyond the "limits" office where he should have
+stopped for orders. "We're all hoodooed, the last one of us. I'll get that
+committee together this afternoon and go and buzz Mr. Loring."
+
+Now it fell out that these things happened on a day when the tide of
+retrieval was at its lowest ebb; the day, namely, in which Kent had told
+Loring that he was undecided as to his moral right to use the evidence
+against Bucks as a lever to pry the Trans-Western out of the grip of the
+junto. It befell, also, that it was the day chosen by two other men, not
+members of the labor unions, in which to call upon the ex-manager; and
+Loring found M'Tosh, the train-master, and Durgan, the master-mechanic,
+waiting for him in the hotel corridor when he came in from a late luncheon
+at the Camelot Club.
+
+"Can you give us a few minutes, Mr. Loring?" asked M'Tosh, when Loring had
+shaken hands with them, not as subordinates.
+
+"Surely. My time is not very valuable, just at present. Come in, and I'll
+see if Mr. Kent has left me any cigars."
+
+"Humph!" said Durgan, when the ex-manager had gone into Kent's room to
+rummage for the smoke offering. "And they give us the major in the place
+of such a man as that!" with a jerk of his thumb toward the door of the
+bedroom.
+
+"Come off!" warned M'Tosh; "he'll hear you." And when Loring came back
+with the cigars there was dry humor in his eye.
+
+"You mustn't let your loyalty to the old guard get you into trouble with
+the receiver," he cautioned; and they both smiled.
+
+"The trouble hasn't waited for our bringing," said M'Tosh. "That is why we
+are here. Durgan has soured on his job, and I'm more than sick of mine.
+It's hell, Mr. Loring. I have been at it twenty years, and I never saw
+such crazy railroading in any one of them."
+
+"Bad management, you mean?"
+
+"Bad management at the top, and rotten demoralization at the bottom as a
+natural consequence. We can't be sure of getting a train out of the yards
+without accident. Dixon is as careful a man as ever stepped on an engine,
+and he smashed a farmer's wagon and killed the farmer this morning within
+two train-lengths of the shop junction."
+
+"Drunk?" inquired the ex-manager.
+
+"Never a drop; Dixon's a Prohibitionist, dyed in the wool. But just before
+he took his train, Halkett had him in the sweat-box, jacking him up for
+not making his time. He came out red in the face, jumped on his engine,
+and yanked the Flyer down the yards forty miles an hour."
+
+"And what is your trouble, Durgan?" asked Loring.
+
+"Another side of the same thing. I wrote Major Guilford yesterday, telling
+him that six pit gangs, all the roundhouse 'emergencies' and two outdoor
+repair squads couldn't begin to keep the cripples moving; and within a
+week every one of the labor unions has kicked through its grievance
+committee. His reply is an order announcing a blanket cut in wages, to go
+into effect the first of the month. That means a strike and a general
+tie-up."
+
+Loring shook his head regretfully.
+
+"It hurts me," he admitted. "We had the best-handled piece of railroad in
+the West, and I give the credit to the men that did the handling. And to
+have it wrecked by a gang of incompetent salary-grabbers----"
+
+The two left-overs nodded.
+
+"That's just it, Mr. Loring," said M'Tosh. "And we're here to ask you if
+it's worth while for us to stick to the wreck any longer. Are you folks
+doing anything?"
+
+"We have been trying all legal means to break the grip of the
+combination--yes."
+
+"And what are the prospects?" It was the master-mechanic who wanted to
+know.
+
+"They are not very bright at present, I must confess. We have the entire
+political ring to fight, and the odds are overwhelming."
+
+"You say you've been trying legal means'," M'Tosh put in. "Can't we down
+them some other way? I believe you could safely count on the help of every
+man in the service, barring the politicals."
+
+Loring smiled.
+
+"I don't say we should scruple to use force if there were any way to apply
+it. But the way doesn't offer."
+
+"I didn't know," said the train-master, rising to close the interview.
+"But if the time ever comes, all you or Mr. Kent will have to do will be
+to pass the word. Maybe you can think of some way to use the strike. It
+hasn't been declared yet, but you can bet on it to a dead moral
+certainty."
+
+It was late in the afternoon of the same day that the Federative Council
+sent its committee, chairmaned by Engineer Scott, to interview the
+ex-general manager at his rooms in the Clarendon. Scott acted as
+spokesman, stating the case with admirable brevity and conciseness, and
+asking the same question as that propounded by the train-master, to wit,
+if there were any prospect of a return of the road to its former
+management.
+
+Loring spoke more hopefully to the committee than he had to Durgan and
+M'Tosh. There had been a little more time for reflection, and there was
+the heartening which comes upon the heels of unsolicited help-tenderings,
+however futile. So he told the men that the stockholders were moving
+heaven and earth in the effort to recover their property; that until the
+road should be actually sold under an order from the court, there was
+always room for hope. The committee might rest assured that no stone would
+be left unturned; also that the good will of the rank and file would not
+be forgotten in the day of restitution, if that day should ever dawn.
+
+When Loring was through, Engineer Scott did a thing no union man had ever
+done before: he asked an ex-general manager's advice touching the
+advisability of a strike.
+
+"I can't say as to that," was the prompt reply. "You know your own
+business best--what it will cost, and what it may accomplish. But I've
+been on the other side often enough to be able to tell you why most
+strikes fail, if you care to know."
+
+A broad grin ran the gamut of the committee.
+
+"Tell us what to do, and we'll do it; Mr. Loring," said Scott, briefly.
+
+"First, then, have a definite object and one that will stand the test of
+public opinion; in this case we'll say it is the maintenance of the
+present wage-scale and the removal of incompetent officers and men.
+Secondly, make your protest absolutely unanimous to a man. Thirdly, don't
+give the major time to fortify: keep your own counsels, and don't send in
+your ultimatum until the final moment. And, lastly, shun violence as you
+would a temptation of the devil."
+
+"Yon's a man," said Angus Duncan, the member from the Amalgamated
+Machinists, when the committee was filing out through the hotel corridor.
+
+"Now you're shouting!" said Engineer Scott. "And you might say a man and a
+brother."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+INTO THE PRIMITIVE
+
+Tested upon purely diplomatic principles, Miss Van Brock's temper was
+little less than angelic, exhibiting itself under provocation only in
+guarded pin-pricks of sarcasm, or in small sharp-clawed kitten-buffetings
+of repartee. But she was at no pains to conceal her scornful
+disappointment when David Kent made known his doubts concerning his moral
+right to use the weapon he had so skilfully forged.
+
+He delayed the inevitable confession to Portia until he had told Loring;
+and in making it he did not tell Miss Van Brock to whom he owed the sudden
+change in the point of view. But Portia would have greatly discredited her
+gift of insight if she had not instantly reduced the problem to its lowest
+terms.
+
+"You have been asking Miss Brentwood to lend you her conscience, and she
+has done it," was the form in which she stated the fact. And when Kent did
+not deny it: "You lack at least one quality of greatness, David; you sway
+too easily."
+
+"No, I don't!" he protested. "I am as obstinate as a mule. Ask Ormsby, or
+Loring. But the logic of the thing is blankly unanswerable. I can either
+get down to the dirty level of these highbinders--fight the devil with a
+brand taken out of his own fire; or----"
+
+"Or what?" she asked.
+
+"Or think up some other scheme; some plan which doesn't involve a
+surrender on my part of common decency and self-respect."
+
+"Yes?" she retorted. "I suppose you have the other plan all wrought out
+and ready to drop into place?"
+
+"No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly.
+
+"But at least you have some notion of what it is going to be?"
+
+"No."
+
+She was pacing back and forth in front of his chair in a way that was
+almost man-like; but her contemptuous impatience made her dangerously
+beautiful. Suddenly she stopped and turned upon him, and there were sharp
+claws in the kitten-buffetings.
+
+"Do you know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate to
+throw away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in this
+railroad affair, we haven't been idle--your newspaper and political
+friends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and we
+have been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give you
+anything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspire
+to. Have you known this?"
+
+"I have guessed it," he said quite humbly.
+
+"Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: you
+were to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle--show them up--and
+climb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shaken
+them. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And now
+you turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!"
+
+There was more of a like quality--a good bit more; some of it regretful;
+all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and
+Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed
+vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to
+begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the
+tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable
+twirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible to
+his friends and innocuous to his enemies.
+
+On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brock
+to ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a rather
+anxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmatively
+by the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ran
+to the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following a
+boyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken his
+problem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him plodding
+wearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from much
+tramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out to
+some despairing conclusion.
+
+The City Hall clock was upon the stroke of three when the inbound
+trolley-car landed him in front of the Clarendon. It was a measure of his
+purposeful abstraction that he went on around the corner to the Security
+Bank, dusty and unpresentable as he was, and transferred the packet of
+incriminating affidavits from the safety deposit box to his pocket before
+going to his rooms in the hotel.
+
+This paper weapon was the centering point of the struggle which had now
+lasted for nearly a fortnight. So long as the weapon was his to use or to
+cast away, the outcome of the moral conflict hung in the balance. But now
+he was emerging from the night wanderings among the tombs of the
+undecided.
+
+"I can't give it up; there is too much at stake," he muttered, as he
+trudged heavily back to the hotel. And before he went above stairs he
+asked the young woman at the house telephone exchange to ascertain if
+Governor Bucks were in his office at the capitol, and if so, if he were
+likely to remain there for an hour.
+
+When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on the
+writing-table and went to freshen himself with a bath. That which lay
+before him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity. In
+other times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tub
+and the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to the
+bottle.
+
+He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying where
+he had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card. Kent
+read the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines about
+his mouth. There are times when a man's fate rushes to meet him, and he
+had fallen upon one of them.
+
+"Show him up," was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevator
+cage clacked again, Kent was waiting.
+
+His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a little
+breathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator. Kent
+admitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in a
+chair and begged a light for his cigar. In the match-passing he gathered
+his spent breath and declared his errand.
+
+"I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent,"
+he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it
+in stolid silence.
+
+"Possibly: that is for you to say," was the unencouraging reply.
+
+Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyond
+it into the bedroom.
+
+"We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of," said Kent,
+in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed his
+chair.
+
+"I came up to see what you want--what you will take to quit," he
+announced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over his
+knee. "That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, and
+we can dispense with the preliminaries, I take it."
+
+"I told your attorney-general some time ago what I wanted, and he did not
+see fit to grant it," Kent responded. "I am not sure that I want anything
+now--anything you can have to offer." This was not at all what he had
+intended to say; but the presence of the adversary was breeding a stubborn
+antagonism that was more potent on the moral side than all the prickings
+of conscience.
+
+The yellow-lidded eyes of the governor began to close down, and the look
+came into them which had been there when he had denied a pardon to a widow
+pleading for the life of her convicted son.
+
+"I had hoped you were in the market," he demurred. "It would be better for
+all concerned if you had something to sell, with a price attached. I know
+what you have been doing, and what you think you have got hold of. It's a
+tissue of mistakes and falsehoods and back-bitings from beginning to end,
+but it may serve your purpose with the newspapers. I want to buy that
+package of stuff you've got stowed away in the Security vaults."
+
+The governor's chair was on one side of the writing-table, and Kent's was
+on the other. In plain sight between the two men lay the packet Bucks was
+willing to bargain for. It was inclosed in a box envelope, bearing the
+imprint of the Security Bank. Kent was looking steadily away from the
+table when he said:
+
+"What if I say it isn't for sale?"
+
+"Don't you think it had better be?"
+
+"I don't know. I hadn't thought much about the advisable phase of it."
+
+"Well, the time has come when you've got it to do," was the low-toned
+threat.
+
+"But not as a matter of compulsion," said Kent, coolly enough. "What is
+your bid?"
+
+Bucks made it promptly.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars: and you promise to leave the State and stay away
+for one year from the first Tuesday in November next."
+
+"That is, until after the next State election." Kent blew a whiff of smoke
+to the ceiling and shook his head slowly. "It is not enough."
+
+The governor uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way, and said:
+
+"I'll make it twenty thousand and two years."
+
+"Or thirty thousand and three years," Kent suggested amiably. "Or suppose
+we come at once to the end of that string and say one hundred thousand and
+ten years. That would still leave you a fair price for your block of
+suburban property in Guilford and Hawk's addition to the city of Gaston,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+The governor set his massive jaw with a sharp little click of the teeth.
+
+"You are joking on the edge of your grave, my young friend. I taught you
+in Gaston that you were not big enough to fight me: do you think you are
+big enough now?"
+
+"I don't think; I know," said Kent, incisively. "And since you have
+referred to the Gaston days: let me ask if I ever gave you any reason to
+believe that I could be scared out?"
+
+"Keep to the point," retorted Bucks, harshly. "This State isn't broad
+enough to hold you and me on opposite sides of the fence. I could make it
+too hot to hold you without mixing up in it myself, but I choose to fight
+my own battles. Will you take twenty thousand dollars spot cash, and
+MacFarlane's job as circuit judge when I'm through with him? Yes or no."
+
+"No."
+
+"Then what will you take?"
+
+"Without committing myself in any sense, I might say that you are getting
+off too cheaply on your most liberal proposition. You and your friends
+have looted a seventy-million-dollar railroad, and----"
+
+"You might have stood in on that if you had taken Guilford's offer," was
+the brusk rejoinder. "There was more than a corporation lawyer's salary in
+sight, if you'd had sense enough to see it."
+
+"Possibly. But I stayed out--and I am still out."
+
+"Do you want to get in? Is that your price?"
+
+"I intend to get in--though not, perhaps, in the way you have in mind. Are
+you ready to recall Judge MacFarlane with instructions to give us our
+hearing on the merits?"
+
+The governor's face was wooden when he said:
+
+"Is that all you want? I understand MacFarlane is returning, and you will
+doubtless have your hearing in due season."
+
+"Not unless you authorize it," Kent objected.
+
+"And if I do? If I say that I have already done so, will you come in and
+lay down your arms?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I'm through. Give me your key and write me an order on the Security
+Bank for those papers you are holding."
+
+"No," said Kent, again.
+
+"I say _yes_!" came the explosive reassertion; and Kent found himself
+looking down the bright barrel of a pistol thrust into his face across the
+table.
+
+For a man who had been oftenest an onlooker on the football half of life,
+Kent was measurably quick and resourceful. In one motion he clamped the
+weapon and turned it aside; in another he jammed the fire end of his cigar
+among the fingers of the grasping hand. The governor jerked free with an
+oath, pain-extorted; and Kent dropped the captured weapon into the table
+drawer. It was all done in two breaths, and when it was over, Kent flung
+away the broken cigar and lighted a fresh one.
+
+"That was a very primitive expedient, your Excellency, to say the best of
+it," he remarked. "Have you nothing better to offer?"
+
+The reply was a wild-beast growl, and taking it for a negative, Kent went
+on.
+
+"Then perhaps you will listen to my proposal. The papers you are so
+anxious about are here,"--tapping the envelope on the table. "No, don't
+try to snatch them; you wouldn't get out of here alive with them, lacking
+my leave. Such of them as relate to your complicity in the Universal Oil
+deal are yours--on one condition; that your health fails and you get
+yourself ordered out of the State for the remainder of your term."
+
+"No!" thundered the governor.
+
+"Very well; you may stay and take a course of home treatment, if you
+prefer. It's optional."
+
+"By God! I don't know what keeps me from throttling you with my hands!"
+Bucks got upon his feet, and Kent rose, also, slipping the box envelope
+into his pocket and laying a precautionary hand on the drawer-pull.
+
+The governor turned away and walked to the window, nursing his burned
+fingers. When he faced about it was to return to the charge.
+
+"Kent, what is it you want? Say it in two words."
+
+"Candidly, I didn't know, until a few minutes ago, Governor. It began with
+a determination to break your grip on my railroad, I believe."
+
+"You can have your railroad, if you can get it--and be damned to it, and
+to you, too!"
+
+"I said it began that way. My sole idea in gathering up this evidence
+against you and your accomplices was to whittle out a club that would make
+you let go of the Trans-Western. For two weeks I have been debating with
+myself as to whether I should buy you or break you; and half an hour
+before you came, I went to the bank and took these papers out, meaning to
+go and hunt you up."
+
+"Well?" said the governor, and the word bared his teeth because his lips
+were dry.
+
+"I thought I knew, in the old Gaston days, how many different kinds of a
+scoundrel you could be, but you've succeeded in showing me some new
+variations in the last few minutes. It's a thousand pities that the people
+of a great State should be at the mercy of such a gang of pirates as you
+and Hendricks and Meigs and MacFarlane, and----"
+
+"Break it off!" said Bucks.
+
+"I'm through. I was merely going to add' that I have concluded not to buy
+you."
+
+"Then it's to be war to the knife, is it?"
+
+"That is about the size of it," said Kent; and the governor found his hat.
+
+"I'll trouble you to return my property," he growled, pointing to the
+table drawer.
+
+"Certainly." Kent broke the revolver over the blotting pad, swept the
+ejected cartridges into the open drawer, and passed the empty weapon to
+its owner.
+
+When the door closed behind the outgoing visitor the victor in the small
+passage at arms began to walk the floor; but at four o'clock, which was
+Hildreth's hour for coming down-town, he put on his hat and went to climb
+the three flights of stairs to the editor's den in the _Argus_ building.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+DEAD WATER AND QUICK
+
+The cubby-hole in which Hildreth earned his bread by the sweat of his
+brain was dark even at midday; and during working hours the editor sat
+under a funnel-shaped reflector in a conic shower-bath of electric light
+which flooded man and desk and left the corners of the room in a penumbra
+of grateful twilight.
+
+Kent sat just outside of the cone of radiance, watching Hildreth's face as
+the editor read stolidly through the contents of the box envelope. It was
+an instructive study in thought dynamics. There was a gleam of battle
+satisfaction in the editorial eye when Hildreth faced the last sheet down
+upon the accumulation of evidence, saying:
+
+"You didn't overstate the fact in your brag about the political graves.
+Only this isn't a spade; it's a steam shovel. Do I understand you are
+giving me this stuff to use as I please?"
+
+"Just that," said Kent.
+
+"And you have made it serve your turn, too?"
+
+"No." Kent's voice was sharp and crisp.
+
+"Isn't that what you got it for?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then why don't you use it?"
+
+"That was what Bucks wanted to know a little while ago when he came to my
+rooms to try to buy me off. I don't think I succeeded in making him
+understand why I couldn't traffic with it; and possibly you wouldn't
+understand."
+
+"I guess I do. It's public property, and you couldn't divert it into
+private channels. Is that the way it struck you?"
+
+"It is the way it struck a friend of mine whose sense of ultimate right
+and wrong hasn't lost its fine edge in the world-mill. I did not want to
+do it."
+
+"Naturally," said the editor. "Giving it up means the loss of all you have
+been working for in the railroad game. I wish I could use it, just as it
+stands."
+
+"Can't you?"
+
+"I am afraid not--effectively. It would make an issue in a campaign; or,
+sprung on the eve of an election, it might down the ring conclusively. I
+think it would. But this is the off year, and the people won't rise to a
+political issue--couldn't make themselves felt if they should."
+
+"I don't agree with you. You have your case all made out, with the
+evidence in sound legal form. What is to prevent your trying it?"
+
+"The one thing that you ought to be lawyer enough to see at a glance.
+There is no court to try it in. With the Assembly in session we might do
+something: as it is, we can only yap at the heels of the ringsters, and
+our yapping won't help you in the railroad fight. What do you hear from
+Boston?"
+
+"Nothing new. The stock is still flat on the market, with the
+stock-holders' pool holding a bare majority, and the Plantagould brokers
+buying in driblets wherever they can find a small holder who is willing to
+let go. It is only a question of time; and a very short time at that."
+
+The editor wagged his head in sympathy.
+
+"I wish I could help you, David. You've done a big thing for me--for the
+_Argus_; and all I have to hand you in return is a death sentence.
+MacFarlane is back."
+
+"Here? In town?"
+
+"Yes. And that isn't the worst of it. The governor sent for him."
+
+"Have you any idea what is in the wind?" asked Kent, dry-lipped.
+
+"I am afraid I have. My young men have been nosing around in the
+Trans-Western affair, and several things have developed. Matters are
+approaching a crisis. The cut-rate boom is about to collapse, and there is
+trouble brewing in the labor organizations. If Bucks doesn't get his
+henchmen out of it pretty soon, they will be involved in the smash--which
+will be bad for them and for him, politically."
+
+"I developed most of that a good while ago," Kent cut in.
+
+"Yes; I know. But there is more to follow. The stock-smashing plan was all
+right, but it is proving too slow. Now they are going to do something
+else."
+
+"Can you give it a name?" asked Kent, nerving himself.
+
+"I can. But first tell me one thing: as matters stand, could Guilford
+dispose of the road--sell it or lease it?"
+
+"No; he would first have to be made permanent receiver and be given
+authority by the court."
+
+"Ah! that explains Judge MacFarlane's return. Now what I am going to tell
+you is the deadest of secrets. It came to me from one of the Overland
+officials, and I'm not supposed to gossip. Did you know the Overland Short
+Line had passed under Plantagould domination?"
+
+"I know they elected a Plantagould directory at the annual meeting."
+
+"Exactly. Well, Guilford is going to lease the Trans-Western to its
+competitor for a term of ninety-nine years. That's your death sentence."
+
+Kent sprang to his feet, and what he said is unrecordable. He was not a
+profane man, but the sanguine temperament would assert itself explosively
+in moments of sudden stress.
+
+"When is this thing to be done?" he demanded, when the temperamental gods
+were appeased a little.
+
+Hildreth shrugged.
+
+"I have told you all I could, and rather more than I had any right to.
+Open the door behind you, won't you? The air is positively sulphurous."
+
+Kent opened the door, entirely missing the point of the sarcasm in his
+heat.
+
+"But you must have some idea," he insisted.
+
+"I haven't; any more than the general one that they won't let the grass
+grow under their feet."
+
+"No. God blast the whole--I wish I could swear in Sanscrit. The
+mother-tongue doesn't begin to do justice to it. Now I know what Bucks
+meant when he told me to take my railroad, _if I could get it_. He had the
+whole thing coopered up in a barrel at that minute."
+
+"I take it you have no alternative to this," said the editor, tapping the
+pile of affidavits.
+
+"Not a cursed shred of an idea! And, Hildreth--" he broke off short
+because once again the subject suddenly grew too large for coherent
+speech.
+
+Hildreth disentangled himself from the legs of his chair and stood up to
+put his hands on Kent's shoulders.
+
+"You are up against it hard, David," he said; and he repeated: "I'd give
+all my old shoes to be able to help you out."
+
+"I know it," said Kent; and then he turned abruptly and went away.
+
+Between nine and ten o'clock the same evening Kent was walking the floor
+of his room, trying vainly to persuade himself that virtue was its own
+reward, and wondering if a small dose of chloral hydrate would be
+defensible under the cruel necessity for sleep. He had about decided in
+favor of the drug when a tap at the door announced the coming of a
+bell-boy with a note. It was a message from Portia.
+
+"If you have thrown away your chance definitely, and are willing to take a
+still more desperate one, come to see me," she wrote; and he went
+mechanically, as a drowning man catches at a straw, knowing it will not
+save him.
+
+The house in Alameda Square was dark when he went up the walk; and while
+he was feeling for the bell-push his summoner called to him out of the
+electric stencilings of leaf shadows under the broad veranda.
+
+"It is too fine a night to stay indoors," she said. "Come and sit in the
+hammock while I scold you as you deserve." And when he had taken the
+hammock: "Now give an account of yourself. Where have you been for the
+past age or two?"
+
+"Wallowing around in the lower depths of the place that Dante visited," he
+admitted.
+
+"Don't you think you deserve a manhandling?"
+
+"I suppose so; and if you have it in mind, I shall probably get it. But I
+may say I'm not especially anxious for a tongue-lashing to-night."
+
+"Poor boy!" she murmured, in mock sympathy. "Does it hurt to be truly
+good?"
+
+"Try it some time when you have a little leisure, and see for yourself,"
+he retorted.
+
+She laughed.
+
+"No; I'll leave that for the Miss Brentwoods. By the way, did you go to
+tell the household good-by? Penelope was wondering audibly what had become
+of you."
+
+"I didn't know they were gone. I have been nowhere since the night you
+drove me out with contumely and opprobrium."
+
+She laughed again.
+
+"You must have dived deep. They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost your
+ghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop. But it
+isn't wonderful that you haven't missed Mr. Ormsby. Having elected Miss
+Brentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further use for the
+P.S.M."
+
+"And you have no further use for me, apparently," he complained. "Did you
+send for me so that you might abuse me in the second edition?"
+
+"No; I wanted to give you a bit of news, and to repeat an old question of
+mine. Do you know what they are going to do next with your railroad?"
+
+"Yes; Hildreth told me this afternoon."
+
+"Well, what are _you_ going to do?"
+
+"Nothing. There is nothing to be done. They have held to the form of legal
+procedure thus far, but they won't do it any more. They will take
+MacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanent
+receiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot. I
+sha'n't be in it."
+
+"Probably not; certainly not if you don't try to get in it. And that
+brings me back to the old question. Are you big enough, David?"
+
+"If you think I haven't been big enough to live up to my opportunities
+thus far, I'm afraid I may disappoint you again," he said doubtfully.
+
+"You have disappointed me," she admitted. "That is why I am asking: I'd
+like to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going to
+trip us again."
+
+"Portia, if I thought you really meant that ... A conscienceless man is
+bad enough, God knows; but a conscienceless woman----"
+
+Her laugh was a decorous little shriek.
+
+"David, you are _not_ big; you are narrow, narrow, _narrow_! Is there then
+no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of
+birth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Is
+it an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal or
+mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan's?"
+
+"You may call it all the hard names you can lay tongue to," he allowed.
+"I'm not getting much comfort out of it, and I rather enjoy hearing it
+abused. But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance. Do you
+know what I did this afternoon?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"I don't know why you shouldn't: you know everything that happens. But
+I'll tell you. I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish and
+back again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and at
+the wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, having
+it in mind to go and give his Excellency a bad quarter of an hour."
+
+"But you didn't do it?"
+
+"No, he saved me the trouble. While I was getting ready to go and hunt
+him, his card came up. We had it out in my rooms."
+
+"I'm listening," she said; and he rehearsed the-facts for her, concealing
+nothing.
+
+"What a curious thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made an
+end. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not
+clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can't
+help admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and the
+courage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting
+scruples of yours go. You have made it perfectly plain that if a thief
+should steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you'd
+compromise with him to get it back. But suppose you should catch him at
+it: would you feel compelled to call a policeman--or would you----"
+
+He anticipated her.
+
+"You are doing me an injustice on the other side, now. I'll fight as
+furiously as you like. All I ask is to be given a weapon that won't bloody
+my hands."
+
+"Good!" she said approvingly. "I think I have found the weapon, but it's
+desperate, desperate! And O David! you've got to have a cool head and a
+steady hand when you use it. If you haven't, it will kill everybody within
+the swing of it--everybody but the man you are trying to reach."
+
+"Draw it and let me feel its edge," he said shortly.
+
+Her chair was close beside the low-swung hammock. She bent to his ear and
+whispered a single sentence. For a minute or two he sat motionless,
+weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftly
+multiplying difficulties and hazards.
+
+"You call it desperate," he said at length; "if there is a bigger word in
+the language, you ought to find it and use it. The risk is that of a
+forlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent--or at
+least ignorant--accomplices I'll have to enlist."
+
+She nodded.
+
+"That is true. But how much is your railroad worth?"
+
+"It is bonded for fifty millions first, and twenty millions second
+mortgage."
+
+"Well, seventy millions are worth fighting for: worth a very considerable
+risk, I should say."
+
+"Yes." And after another thoughtful interval: "How did you come to think
+of it?"
+
+"It grew out of a bit of talk with the man who will have to put the apex
+on our pyramid after we have done our part."
+
+"Will he stand by us? If he doesn't, we shall all be no better than dead
+men the morning after the fact."
+
+She clasped her hands tightly over her knee, and said:
+
+"That is one of the chances we must take, David; one of the many. But it
+is the last of the bridges to be crossed, and there are lots of them in
+between. Are the details possible? That was the part I couldn't go into by
+myself."
+
+He took other minutes for reflection.
+
+"I can't tell," he said doubtfully. "If I could only know how much time we
+have."
+
+Her eyes grew luminous.
+
+"David, what would you do without me?" she asked. "To-morrow night, in
+Stephen Hawk's office in Gaston, you will lose your railroad. MacFarlane
+is there, or if he isn't, he'll be there in the morning. Bucks, Guilford
+and Hawk will go down from here to-morrow evening; and the Overland people
+are to come up from Midland City to meet them."
+
+There was awe undisguised in the look he gave her, and it had crept into
+his voice when he said:
+
+"Portia, are you really a flesh-and-blood woman?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"Meaning that your ancestors would have burned me for a witch? Perhaps
+they would: I think quite likely they burned women who made better
+martyrs. But I didn't have to call in Flibbertigibbet. The programme is a
+carefully guarded secret, to be sure; but it is known--it had to be
+known--to a number of people outside of our friends the enemy. You've
+heard the story of the inventor and his secret, haven't you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, the man had invented something, and he told the secret of it to his
+son. After a little the son wanted to tell it to a friend. The old man
+said, 'Hold on; I know it--that's one'--holding up one finger--'you know
+it--that's eleven'--holding up another finger beside the first; 'and now
+if you tell this other fellow, that'll be one hundred and eleven'--holding
+up three fingers. That is the case with this programme. One of the one
+hundred and eleven--he is a person high up in the management of the
+Overland Short Line--dropped a few words in my hearing and I picked them
+up. That's all."
+
+"It is fearfully short--the time, I mean," he said after another pause.
+"We can't count on any help from any one in authority. Guilford's broom
+has swept the high-salaried official corners clean. But the wage-people
+are mutinous and ripe for anything. I'll go and find out where we stand."
+And he groped on the floor of the veranda for his hat.
+
+"No, wait a minute," she interposed. "We are not quite ready to adjourn
+yet. There remains a little matter of compensation--your compensation--to
+be considered. You are still on the company's payrolls?"
+
+"In a way, yes; as its legal representative on the ground."
+
+"That won't do. If you carry this thing through successfully it must be on
+your own account, and not as the company's paid servant. You must resign
+and make terms with Boston beforehand; and that, too, without telling
+Boston what you propose to do."
+
+He haggled a little at that.
+
+"The company is entitled to my services," he asserted.
+
+"It is entitled to what it pays for--your legal services. But this is
+entirely different. You will be acting upon your own initiative, and
+you'll have to spend money like water at your own risk. You must be free
+to deal with Boston as an outsider."
+
+"But I have no money to spend," he objected.
+
+Again the brown eyes grew luminous; and again she said:
+
+"What would you do without me? Happily, my information came early enough
+to enable me to get a letter to Mr. Ormsby. He answered promptly by wire
+this morning. Here is his telegram."
+
+She had been winding a tightly folded slip of paper around her fingers,
+and she smoothed it out and gave it to him. He held it in a patch of the
+electric light between the dancing leaf shadows and read:
+
+"Plot Number Two approved. Have wired one hundred thousand to Kent's order
+Security Bank. Have him draw as he needs."
+
+"So now you see," she went on, "you have the sinews of war. But you must
+regard it as an advance and name your fee to the Boston folk so you can
+pay it back."
+
+He protested again, rather weakly.
+
+"It looks like extortion; like another graft," he said; and now she lost
+patience with him.
+
+"Of all the Puritan fanatics!" she cried. "If it were a simple commercial
+transaction by which you would save your clients a round seventy million
+dollars, which would otherwise be lost, would you scruple to take a
+proportionate fee?"
+
+"No; certainly not."
+
+"Well, then; you go and tell Mr. Loring to wire his Advisory Board, and to
+do it to-night."
+
+"But I'll have to name a figure," said Kent.
+
+"Of course," she replied.
+
+Kent thought about it for a long minute. Then he said: "I wonder if ten
+thousand dollars, and expenses, would paralyze them?"
+
+Miss Van Brock's comment was a little shriek of derision.
+
+"I knew you'd make difficulties when it came to the paying part of it, and
+since I didn't know, myself, I wired Mr. Ormsby again. Here is what he
+says," and she untwisted a second telegram and read it to him.
+
+"'Fee should not be less than five per cent. of bonded indebtedness;
+four-fifths in stock at par; one-fifth cash; no cure, no pay.'"
+
+"Three million five hundred thousand dollars!" gasped Kent.
+
+"It's only nominally that much," she laughed. "The stock part of it is
+merely your guaranty of good faith: it is worth next to nothing now, and
+it will be many a long day before it goes to par, even if you are
+successful in saving its life. So your magnificent fee shrinks to seven
+hundred thousand dollars, less your expenses."
+
+"But heavens and earth! that's awful!" said Kent.
+
+"Not when you consider it as a surgeon's risk. You happen to be the one
+man who has the idea, and if it isn't carried out, the patient is going to
+die to-morrow night, permanently. You are the specialist in this case, and
+specialists come high. Now you may go and attend to the preliminary
+details, if you like."
+
+He found his hat and stood up. She stood with him; but when he took her
+hand she made him sit down again.
+
+"You have at least three degrees of fever!" she exclaimed; "or is it only
+the three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar shock? What have you been
+doing to yourself?"
+
+"Nothing, I assure you. I haven't been sleeping very well for a few
+nights. But that is only natural."
+
+"And I said you must have a cool head! Will you do exactly as I tell you
+to?"
+
+"If you don't make it too hard."
+
+"Take the car down-town--don't walk--and after you have made Mr. Loring
+send his message to Boston, you go straight to Doctor Biddle. Tell him
+what is the matter with you, and that you need to sleep the clock around."
+
+"But the time!" he protested. "I shall need every hour between now and
+to-morrow night!"
+
+"One clear-headed hour is worth a dozen muddled ones. You do as I say."
+
+"I hate drugs," he said, rising again.
+
+"So do I; but there is a time for everything under the sun. It is a crying
+necessity that you go into this fight perfectly fit and with all your wits
+about you. If you don't, somebody--several somebodies--will land in the
+penitentiary. Will you mind me?"
+
+"Yes," he promised; and this time he got away.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+ON THE HIGH PLAINS
+
+Much to Elinor's relief, and quite as much, perhaps, to Penelope's, Mrs.
+Brentwood tired of Breezeland Inn in less than a fortnight and began to
+talk of returning to the apartment house in the capital.
+
+Pressed to give a reason for her dissatisfaction, the younger sister might
+have been at a loss to account for it in words; but Elinor's desire to cut
+the outing short was based upon pride and militant shame. After many
+trap-settings she had succeeded in making her mother confess that the stay
+at Breezeland was at Ormsby's expense; and not all of Mrs. Brentwood's
+petulant justifyings could remove the sting of the nettle of obligation.
+
+"There is no reason in the world why you should make so much of it: I am
+your mother, and I ought to know," was Mrs. Brentwood's dictum. "You
+wouldn't have any scruples if we were his guests on the _Amphitrite_ or in
+his country house on Long Island."
+
+"That would be different," Elinor contended. "We are not his guests here;
+we are his pensioners."
+
+"Nonsense!" frowned the mother. "Isn't it beginning to occur to you that
+beggars shouldn't be choosers? And, besides, so far as you are concerned,
+you are only anticipating a little."
+
+It was an exceedingly injudicious, not to say brutal way of putting it;
+and the blue-gray eyes flashed fire.
+
+"Can't you see that you are daily making a marriage between us more and
+more impossible?" was the bitter rejoinder. Elinor's _metier_ was cool
+composure under fire, but she was not always able to compass it.
+
+Mrs. Brentwood fanned herself vigorously. She had been aching to have it
+out with this self-willed young woman who was playing fast and loose with
+attainable millions, and the hour had struck.
+
+"What made you break it off with Brookes Ormsby?" she snapped; adding: "I
+don't wonder you were ashamed to tell me about it."
+
+"I did not break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her
+self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place
+to the cool gray blankness which she cultivated.
+
+"That is what Brookes told me, but I didn't believe him," said the mother.
+"It's all wrong, anyway, and I more than half believe David Kent is at the
+bottom of it."
+
+Elinor left her chair and went to the window, which looked down on the
+sanatorium, the ornate parterre, and the crescent driveway. These family
+bickerings were very trying to her, and the longing to escape them was
+sometimes strong enough to override cool reason and her innate sense of
+the fitness of things.
+
+In her moments of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged
+struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and
+more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood. With the
+unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and
+unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals.
+This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it,
+hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were
+tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely
+tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon
+summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock
+was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten how to
+cry.
+
+But into the turmoil of thoughts half indignant, half self-compassionate,
+came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial. She saw, as with a
+sudden gift of retrospection, her mother's long battle with inadequacy,
+and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought
+unselfishly, since she knew her mother's declaration that she could
+contentedly "go back to nothing" was no mere petulant boast. It was for
+her daughters that she had grown thin and haggard and irritable under the
+persistent reverses of fortune; it was for them that she was sinking the
+Grimkie independence in the match-making mother.
+
+The tears in Elinor's eyes were not altogether of self-pity when she put
+her back to the window. Ormsby was coming up the curved driveway in his
+automobile, and she had seen him but dimly through the rising mist of
+emotion.
+
+"Have you set your heart upon this thing, mother?--but I know you have.
+And I--I have tried as I could to be just and reasonable; to you and
+Penelope, and to Brookes Ormsby. He is nobleness itself: it is a shame to
+give him the shadow when he so richly deserves the substance."
+
+She spoke rapidly, almost incoherently; and the mother-love in the woman
+who was careful and troubled about the things that perish put the
+match-maker to the wall. It was almost terrifying to see Elinor, the
+strong-hearted, the self-contained, breaking down like other mothers'
+daughters. So it was the mother who held out her arms, and the daughter
+ran to go down on her knees at the chair-side, burying her face in the lap
+of comforting.
+
+"There, there, Ellie, child; don't cry. It's terrible to hear you sob like
+that," she protested, her own voice shaking in sympathy. "I have been
+thinking only of you and your future, and fearing weakly that you couldn't
+bear the hard things. But we'll bear them together--we three; and I'll
+never say another word about Brookes Ormsby and what might have been."
+
+"O mother! you are making it harder than ever, now," was the tearful
+rejoinder. "I--there is no reason why I should be so obstinate. I haven't
+even the one poor excuse you are making for me down deep in your heart."
+
+"David Kent?" said the mother.
+
+The bowed head nodded a wordless assent.
+
+"I sha'n't say that I haven't suspected him all along, dear. I am afraid I
+have. I have nothing against him. But he is a poor man, Elinor; and we are
+poor, too. You'd be miserably unhappy."
+
+"If he stays poor, it is I who am to blame,"--this most contritely. "He
+had a future before him: the open door was his winning in the railroad
+fight, and I closed it against him."
+
+"You?" said the mother, astonished.
+
+"Yes. I told him he couldn't go on in the way he meant to. I made it a
+matter of conscience; and he--he has turned back when he might have fought
+it out and made a name for himself, and saved us all. And it was such a
+hair-splitting thing! All the world would have applauded him if he had
+gone on; and there was only one woman in all the world to pry into the
+secret places of his soul and stir up the sleeping doubt!"
+
+Now, if all the thrifty, gear-getting "faculty" of the dead and gone
+Grimkies had become thin and diluted and inefficient in this Mrs.
+Hepzibah, last of the name, the strong wine and iron of the blood of
+uprightness had come down to her unstrained.
+
+"Tell me all about it, daughter," she adjured; and when the tale was told,
+she patted the bowed head tenderly and spoke the words of healing.
+
+"You did altogether right, Ellie, dear; I--I am proud of you, daughter.
+And if, as you say, you were the only one to do it, that doesn't matter;
+it was all the more necessary. Are you sure he gave it up?"
+
+Elinor rose and stood with clasped hands beside her mother's chair; a very
+pitiful and stricken half-sister of the self-reliant, dependable young
+woman who had boasted herself the head of the household.
+
+"I have no means of knowing what he has done," she said slowly. "But I
+know the man. He has turned back."
+
+There was a tap at the door and a servant was come to say that Mr. Brookes
+Ormsby was waiting with his auto-car. Was Miss Brentwood nearly ready?
+
+Elinor said, "In a minute," and when the door closed, she made a
+confidante of her mother for the first time since her childhood days.
+
+"I know what you have suspected ever since that summer in New Hampshire,
+and it is true," she confessed. "I do love him--as much as I dare to
+without knowing whether he cares for me. Must I--may I--say yes to Brookes
+Ormsby without telling him the whole truth?"
+
+"Oh, my dear! You couldn't do that!" was the quick reply.
+
+"You mean that I am not strong enough? But I am; and Mr. Ormsby is manly
+enough and generous enough to meet me half-way. Is there any other honest
+thing to do, mother?"
+
+Mrs. Hepzibah shook her head deliberately and determinedly, though she
+knew she was shaking the Ormsby millions into the abyss of the
+unattainable.
+
+"No; it is his just due. But I can't help being sorry for him, Ellie. What
+will you do if he says it doesn't make any difference?"
+
+The blue-gray eyes were downcast.
+
+"I don't know. Having asked so much, and accepted so much from him--it
+shall be as he says, mother."
+
+
+The afternoon had been all that a summer afternoon on the brown highlands
+can be, and the powerful touring car had swept them from mile to mile over
+the dun hills like an earth-skimming dragon whose wing-beat was the
+muffled, explosive thud of the motor.
+
+Through most of the miles Elinor had given herself up to silent enjoyment
+of the rapture of swift motion, and Ormsby had respected her mood, as he
+always did. But when they were on the high hills beyond the mining-camp of
+Megilp, and he had thrown the engines out of gear to brake the car gently
+down the long inclines, there was room for speech.
+
+"This is our last spin together on the high plains, I suppose," he said.
+"Your mother has fixed upon to-morrow for our return to town, hasn't she?"
+
+Elinor confirmed it half-absently. She had been keyed up to face the
+inevitable in this drive with Ormsby, and she was afraid now that he was
+going to break her resolution by a dip into the commonplaces.
+
+"Are you glad or sorry?" he asked.
+
+Her reply was evasive.
+
+"I have enjoyed the thin, clean air and the freedom of the wide horizons.
+Who could help it?"
+
+"But you have not been entirely happy?"
+
+It was on her lips to say some conventional thing about the constant
+jarring note in all human happiness, but she changed it to a simple "No."
+
+"May I try if I can give the reason?"
+
+She made a reluctant little gesture of assent; some such signal of
+acquiescence as Marie Antoinette may have given the waiting headsman.
+
+"You have been afraid every day lest I should begin a second time to press
+you for an answer, haven't you?"
+
+She could not thrust and parry with him. They were past all that.
+
+"Yes," she admitted briefly.
+
+"You break my heart, Elinor," he said, after a long pause. "But"--with a
+sudden tightening of the lips--"I'm not going to break yours."
+
+She understood him, and her eyes filled quickly with the swift shock of
+gratitude.
+
+"If you had made a study of womankind through ten lifetimes instead of a
+part of one, you could not know when and how to strike truer and deeper,"
+she said; and then, softly: "Why can't you make me love you, Brookes?"
+
+He took his foot from the brake-pedal, and for ten seconds the released
+car shot down the slope unhindered. Then he checked the speed and answered
+her.
+
+"A little while ago I should have said I didn't know; but now I do know.
+It is because you love David Kent: you loved him before I had my chance."
+
+She did not deny the principal fact, but she gave him his opportunity to
+set it aside if he could--and would.
+
+"Call it foolish, romantic sentiment, if you like. Is there no way to
+shame me out of it?"
+
+He shook his head slowly.
+
+"You don't mean that."
+
+"But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of
+it."
+
+His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind.
+
+"I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your
+true happiness than I do, or ever shall. And it will be a mighty thankless
+service that that 'some one' will render you."
+
+"But I ought to be whipped and sent to bed," she protested, almost
+tearfully. "Do you know what I have done?--how I have----"
+
+She could not quite put it in words, even for him, and he helped her
+generously, as before.
+
+"I know what Kent hasn't done; which is more to the point. But he will do
+it fast enough if you will give him half a chance."
+
+"No," she said definitively.
+
+"I say yes. One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you
+any time since last autumn: that is a sort of finical loyalty to me. I saw
+how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston--I'm asking
+you to believe that I didn't know it beforeand I saw then that my only
+hope was to make a handfast friend of him. And I did it."
+
+"I believe you can do anything you try to do," she said warmly.
+
+This time his smile was a mere grimace.
+
+"You will have to make one exception, after this; and so shall I. And
+since it is the first of any consequence in all my mounting years, it
+grinds. I can't throw another man out of the window and take his place."
+
+"If you were anything but what you are, you would have thrown him out of
+the window another way," she rejoined.
+
+"That would have been a dago's trick; not a white man's," he asserted. "I
+suppose I might have got in his way and played the dog in the manger
+generally, and you would have stuck to your word and married me, but I am
+not looking for that kind of a winning. I don't mind confessing that I
+played my last card when I released you from your engagement. I said to
+myself: If that doesn't break down the barriers, nothing will."
+
+She looked up quickly.
+
+"You will never know how near it came to doing it, Brookes."
+
+"But it didn't quite?"
+
+"No, it didn't quite."
+
+The brother-smile came again.
+
+"Let's paste that leaf down and turn the other; the one that has David
+Kent's name written, at the top. He is going to succeed all around,
+Elinor; and I am going to help him--for his sake, as well as yours."
+
+"No," she dissented. "He is going to fail; and I am to blame for it."
+
+He looked at her sidewise.
+
+"So you were at the bottom of that, were you? I thought as much, and tried
+to make him admit it, but he wouldn't. What was your reason?"
+
+"I gave it to him: I can't give it to you."
+
+"I guess not," he laughed. "I wasn't born on the right side of the
+Berkshire Hills to appreciate it. But really, you mustn't interfere. As I
+say, we are going to make something of David; and a little conscience--of
+the right old Pilgrim Fathers' brand--goes a long way in politics."
+
+"But you promised me you were not going to spoil him--only it doesn't
+matter; you can't."
+
+Ormsby chuckled openly, and when she questioned "What?" he said:
+
+"I was just wondering what you would say if you knew what he is into now;
+if you could guess, for instance, that his backers have put up a cool
+hundred thousand to be used as he sees fit?"
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed; and there was dismay and sharp disappointment in her
+voice. "You don't mean that he is going to bribe these men?"
+
+"No," he said, relenting. "As a matter of fact, I don't know precisely
+what he is doing with the money, but I guess it is finding its way into
+legitimate channels. I'll make him give me an itemized expense account for
+your benefit when it's all over, if you like."
+
+"It would be kinder to tell me more about it now," she pleaded.
+
+"No; I'll let him have that pleasure, after the fact--if we can get him
+pardoned out before you go back East."
+
+She was silent so long that he stole another sidewise look between his
+snubbings of the brake-pedal. Her face was white and still, like the face
+of one suddenly frost-smitten, and he was instantly self-reproachful.
+
+"Don't look that way," he begged. "It hurts me; makes me feel how heavy my
+hand is when I'm doing my best to make it light. He is trying a rather
+desperate experiment, to be sure, but he is in no immediate personal
+danger. I believe it or I shouldn't be here; I should be with him."
+
+She asked no more questions, being unwilling to tempt him to break
+confidence with Kent. But she was thinking of all the desperate things a
+determined man with temperamental unbalancings might do when the touring
+car rolled noiselessly down the final hill into the single street of
+Megilp.
+
+There was but one vehicle in the street at the moment; a freighter's
+ore-wagon drawn by a team of mules, meekest and most shambling-prosaic of
+their tribe. The motor-car was running on the spent velocity of the
+descent, and Ormsby thought to edge past without stopping. But at the
+critical instant the mules gave way to terror, snatched the heavy wagon
+into the opposite plank walk, and tried to climb a near-by telephone pole.
+Ormsby put his foot on the brake and something snapped under the car.
+
+"What was that?" Elinor asked; and Ormsby got down to investigate.
+
+"It is our brake connection," he announced, after a brief inspection. "And
+we are five good miles from Hudgins and his repair kit."
+
+A ring of town idlers was beginning to form about them. An automobile was
+still enough of a rarity in the mining-camp to draw a crowd.
+
+"Busted?" inquired one of the onlookers.
+
+Ormsby nodded, and asked if there were a machinist in the camp.
+
+"Yep," said the spokesman; "up at the Blue Jay mine."
+
+"Somebody go after him," suggested Ormsby, flipping a coin; and a boy
+started on a run.
+
+The waiting was a little awkward. The ringing idlers were good-natured but
+curious. Ormsby stood by and answered questions multiform, diverting
+curiosity from the lady to the machine. Presently the spokesman said:
+
+"Is this here the steam-buggy that helped a crowd of you fellers to get
+away from Jud Byers and his posse one day a spell back?"
+
+"No," said Ormsby. Then he remembered the evening of small surprises--the
+racing tally-ho with the Inn auto-car to help; and, more pointedly now,
+the singular mirage effect in the lengthening perspective as the
+east-bound train shot away from Agua Caliente.
+
+"What was the trouble that day?" he asked, putting in a question on his
+side.
+
+"A little ruction up at the Twin Sisters. There was a furss, an' a gun
+went off, accidintally on purpose killin' Jim Harkins," was the reply.
+
+The machinist was come from the Blue Jay, and Ormsby helped Elinor out of
+her seat while the repairs were making. The town office of the Blue Jay
+was just across the street, and he took her there and begged house-room
+and a chair for her, making an excuse that he must go and see to the
+brake-mending.
+
+But once outside he promptly stultified himself, letting the repairs take
+care of themselves while he went in search of one Jud Byers. The deputy
+sheriff was not hard to find. Normally and in private life he was the
+weigher for the Blue Jay; and Ormsby was directed to the scale shanty
+which served as the weigher's office.
+
+The interview was brief and conclusive; was little more than a rapid fire
+of question and answer; and for the greater part the sheriff's
+affirmatives were heartily eager. Yes, certainly; if the thing could be
+brought to pass, he, Byers, would surely do his part. All he asked was an
+hour or two in which to prepare.
+
+"You shall have all the time there is," was the reply. "Have you a Western
+Union wire here?"
+
+"No; nothing but the railroad office."
+
+"That won't do; they'd stop the message. How about the Inn?"
+
+"Breezeland has a Western Union all right; wire your notice there, and
+I'll fix to have it 'phoned over. I don't believe it can be worked,
+though," added the deputy, doubtfully.
+
+"We can't tell till we try," said Ormsby; and he hurried back to his car
+to egg on the machinist with golden promises contingent upon haste.
+
+Miss Brentwood found her companion singularly silent on the five-mile race
+to Breezeland; but the lightning speed at which he drove the car put
+conversation out of the question. At the hotel he saw her into the lift
+with decent deliberation; but the moment she was off his hands he fairly
+ran to the telegrapher's alcove in the main hall.
+
+"Have you a Western Union wire to the capital direct?" he inquired.
+
+The young man snapped his key and said he had.
+
+"It has no connection with the Trans-Western railroad offices?"
+
+"None whatever."
+
+Ormsby dashed off a brief message to Kent, giving three or four addresses
+at which he might be found.
+
+"Send that, and have them try the Union Station train platform first.
+Don't let them spare expense at the other end, and if you can bring proof
+of delivery to Room 261 within half an hour, it means a month's pay to
+you, individually. Can you do it?"
+
+But the operator was already claiming the wire, writing "deth," "deth,"
+"deth," as rapidly as his fingers could shake off the dots and dashes.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+BY ORDER OF THE COURT
+
+Between the hours of eight-thirty and ten P.M. the Union Passenger Station
+at the capital presents a moving and spirited spectacle. Within the hour
+and a half, four through and three local trains are due to leave, and the
+space within the iron grille that fences off the track platforms from the
+public part of the station is filled with hurrying throngs of
+train-takers.
+
+Down at the outer end of the train-shed the stuttering pop-valves of the
+locomotives, the thunderous trundling of the heavy baggage trucks, and the
+shrill, monotonous chant of the express messengers checking in their
+cargoes, lift a din harmonious to the seasoned traveler; a medley softened
+and distance-diminished for those that crowd upon the gate-keepers at the
+iron grille.
+
+It was the evening of the last day in the month; the day when the
+Federative Council of Railway Workers had sent its ultimatum to Receiver
+Guilford. The reduction in wages was to go into effect at midnight: if, by
+midnight, the order had not been rescinded, and the way opened for a joint
+conference touching the removal of certain obnoxious officials, a general
+strike and tie-up would be ordered. Trains in transit carrying passengers
+or United States mail would be run to their respective destinations;
+trains carrying perishable freight would be run to division stations: with
+these exceptions all labor would cease promptly on the stroke of twelve.
+
+Such was the text of the ultimatum, a certified copy of which Engineer
+Scott had delivered in person into the hands of the receiver at noon.
+
+It was now eight forty-five P.M. The east-bound night express was ready
+for the run to A. & T. Junction; the fast mail, one hour and thirty-five
+minutes late from the east, was backing in on track nine to take on the
+city mail. On track eight, pulled down so that the smoke from the engine
+should not foul the air of the train-shed, the receiver's private car,
+with the 1010 for motive power and "Red" Callahan in the cab, had been
+waiting since seven o'clock for the order to run special to Gaston. And as
+yet the headquarters office had made no sign; sent no word of reply to the
+strike notice.
+
+Griggs was on for the night run eastward with the express; and "Dutch"
+Tischer had found himself slated to take the fast mail west. The change of
+engines on the mail had been effected at the shops; and when Tischer
+backed his train in on track nine his berth was beside the 1010. Callahan
+swung down from his cab and climbed quickly to that of the mail engine.
+
+"Annything new at the shops, Dutchy?" he inquired.
+
+"I was not somet'ings gehearing, _nein_. You was dot _Arkoos_ newsbaper
+dis evening _schen_? He says nodings too, alretty, about dot strike."
+
+"Divil a worrd. Ye might think Scotty'd handed the major a bit av blank
+paper f'r all the notice he's taking. More thin that, he's lavin' town,
+wid me to pull him. The Naught-seven's to run special to Gaston--bad cess
+to ut!"
+
+"Vell, I can'd hellup id," said the phlegmatic Bavarian. "I haf the mail
+and egspress got, and I go mit dem t'rough to Pighorn. You haf der brivate
+car got, and you go mit dem t'rough to Gaston. Den ve qvits, ain'd it?"
+
+Callahan nodded and dropped to the platform. But before he could mount to
+the foot-board of the 1010, M'Tosh collared him.
+
+"Patsy, I have your orders, at last. Your passengers will be down in a few
+minutes, and you are to pull out ahead of the express."
+
+"Is it to Gaston I'm goin', Misther M'Tosh?"
+
+The fireman was standing by with the oil can and torch, ready to
+Callahan's hand, and the train-master drew the engineer aside.
+
+"Shovel needn't hear," he said in explanation. And then: "Are you willing
+to stand with us, Patsy? You've had time enough to think it over."
+
+Callahan stood with his arms folded and his cap drawn down over his eyes.
+
+"'Tis not f'r meself I'm thinkin', Misther M'Tosh, as ye well know. But
+I'm a widdy man; an' there's the bit colleen in the convint."
+
+"She'll be well cared for, whatever happens to you," was the quick reply.
+
+"Thin I'm yer man," said Callahan; and when the train-master was gone, he
+ordered Shovel to oil around while he did two or three things which, to an
+initiated onlooker, might have seemed fairly inexplicable. First he
+disconnected the air-hose between the car and the engine, tying the ends
+up with a stout cord so that the connection would not seem to be broken.
+Next he crawled under the Naught-seven and deliberately bled the air-tank,
+setting the cock open a mere hair's-breadth so that it would leak slowly
+but surely until the pressure was entirely gone.
+
+Then he got a hammer and sledge out of the engine tool-box, and after
+hooking up the safety-chain couplings between the private car and the
+1010, he crippled the points of the hooks with the hammer so that they
+could not be disengaged without the use of force and the proper tools.
+
+"There ye are, ye ould divil's band-wagon," he said, apostrophizing the
+private car when his work was done. "Ye'll ride this night where Patsy
+Callahan dhrives, an' be dommed to ye."
+
+Meanwhile the train-master had reached the iron grille at the other end of
+the long track platform. At a small wicket used by the station employees
+and trainmen, Kent was waiting for him.
+
+"Is it all right, M'Tosh? Will he do it?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"Yes, Patsy's game for it; I knew he would be. He'd put his neck in a rope
+to spite the major. But it's a crazy thing, Mr. Kent."
+
+"I know it; but if it will give me twenty-four hours--"
+
+"It won't. They can't get home on our line because we'll be tied up. But
+they can get the Naught-seven put on the Overland's Limited at A. & T.
+Junction, and that will put them back here before you've had time to turn
+around twice. Have they come down yet?"
+
+"No," said Kent; and just then he saw Loring coming in from the street
+entrance and went to meet him.
+
+"I have the final word from Boston," said the ex-manager, when he had
+walked Kent out of earshot of the train-takers. "Your terms are
+accepted--with all sorts of safeguards thrown about the 'no cure, no pay'
+proviso; also with a distinct repudiation of you and your scheme if there
+is anything unlawful afoot. Do you still think it best to keep me in the
+dark as to what you are doing?"
+
+"Yes; there are enough of us involved, as it stands. You couldn't help;
+and you might hinder. Besides, if the mine should happen to explode in our
+direction it'll be a comfort to have a foot-loose friend or two on the
+outside to pick up the pieces of us."
+
+Loring was polishing his eye-glasses with uncommon vigor.
+
+"I wish you'd drop it, David, if it isn't too late. I can't help feeling
+as if I had prodded you into it, whatever it is."
+
+Kent linked arms with him and led him back to the street entrance.
+
+"Go away, Grantham, and don't come back again," he commanded. "Then you
+can swear truthfully that you didn't know anything about it. It is too
+late to interfere, and you are not responsible for me. Go up to see
+Portia; she'll keep you interested while you wait."
+
+When Loring was gone, Kent went back to the wicket in the grille; but
+M'Tosh, who was always a busy man at train-time, had disappeared again.
+
+It was a standing mystery to the train-master, and to the rank and file,
+why Receiver Guilford had elected to ignore the fact that he was within
+three hours of a strike which promised to include at least four-fifths of
+his operatives; had taken no steps for defense, and had not confided, as
+it appeared, in the members of his own official staff.
+
+But Kent was at no loss to account for the official silence. If the secret
+could be kept for a few hours longer, the junto would unload the
+Trans-Western, strike, tie-up and general demoralization, upon an
+unsuspecting Overland management.
+
+None the less, there were other things unexplainable even to Kent; for
+one, this night flitting to Gaston to put the finishing touch on an
+edifice of fraud which had been builded shamelessly in the light of day.
+
+Kent had not the key to unlock this door of mystery; but here the master
+spirit of the junto was doing, not what he would, but what he could. The
+negotiations for the lease had consumed much time at a crisis when time
+was precious. Judge MacFarlane had to be recalled and once more bullied
+into subjection; and Falkland, acting for the Plantagould interest, had
+insisted upon some formal compliance with the letter of the law.
+
+Bucks had striven masterfully to drive and not be driven; but the delays
+were inexorable, and the impending strike threatened to turn the orderly
+charge into a rout. The governor had postponed the _coup_ from day to day,
+waiting upon the leisurely movements of Falkland; and at the end of the
+ends there remained but three hours of the final day of grace when the
+telegram came from Falkland with the welcome news that the Overland
+officials were on their way from Midland City to keep the appointment in
+Gaston.
+
+Of all this Kent knew nothing, and was anxious in just proportion as the
+minutes elapsed and the time for the departure of the east-bound express
+drew near. For the success of the desperate venture turned upon this: that
+the receiver's special must leave ahead of the passenger train. With the
+express blocking the way the difficulties became insurmountable.
+
+Kent was still standing at the trainmen's wicket when Callahan sent the
+private car gently up to the trackhead of track eight. M'Tosh had been
+telephoning again, and the receiver and his party were on the way to the
+station.
+
+"I was afraid you'd have to let the express go first," said Kent, when the
+train-master came his way again. "How much time have we?"
+
+"Five minutes more; and they are on the way down--there they come."
+
+Kent looked and saw a group of six men making for the nearest exit in the
+grille. Then he smote his fist into his palm.
+
+"Damn!" he muttered; "they've got the vice-president of the Overland with
+them! That's bad."
+
+"It's bad for Mr. Callafield," growled M'Tosh. "We're in too deep now to
+back down on his account."
+
+Kent moved nearer and stood in the shadow of the gate-keeper's box,
+leaving M'Tosh, who was on the track platform, free to show himself. From
+his new point of espial Kent checked off the members of the party. When
+Major Guilford left it to come back for a word with M'Tosh, there were
+five others: the governor, his private secretary, Hawk, Halkett, the
+general superintendent, and the Overland's vice-president.
+
+"All ready, M'Tosh?" said the receiver.
+
+"Ready and waiting, Major," was the bland reply.
+
+"Who is our engineer?"
+
+"Patrick Callahan."
+
+"That wild Irishman? The governor says he'd as soon ride behind the
+devil."
+
+"Callahan will get you there," said the train-master, with deliberate
+emphasis. Then he asked a question of his own. "Is Mr. Callafield going
+with you?"
+
+"No. He came down to see us off. How is the fast mail to-night?"
+
+"She's just in--an hour and thirty-five minutes late."
+
+The major swore pathetically. He was of the generation of railway
+officials, happily fast passing, which cursed and swore itself into
+authority.
+
+"That's another five hundred dollars' forfeit to the Post-office
+Department! Who's taking it west?"
+
+"Tischer."
+
+"Give him orders to cut out all the stops. If he is more than fifty-five
+minutes late at Bighorn, he can come in and get his time."
+
+Tischer had just got the word to go, and was pulling out on the yard main
+line.
+
+"I'll catch him with the wire at yard limits," said M'Tosh. Then: "Would
+you mind hurrying your people a little, Major? The express is due to
+leave."
+
+Guilford was a heavy man for his weight, and he waddled back to the
+others, waving his arms as a signal for them to board the car.
+
+Kent saw the vice-president of the Overland Short Line shake hands with
+Bucks and take his leave, and was so intent upon watching the tableau of
+departure that he failed to notice the small boy in Western Union blue who
+was trying to thrust a telegram, damp from the copying rolls, into his
+hand.
+
+"It's a rush, sir," said the boy, panting from his quick dash across the
+track platforms.
+
+It was Ormsby's message from Breezeland; and while Kent was trying to
+grasp the tremendous import of it, M'Tosh was giving Callahan the signal
+to go. Kent sprang past the gate-keeper and gave the square of damp paper
+to the train-master.
+
+"My God! read that!" he gasped, with a dry sob of excitement. "It was our
+chance--one chance in a million--and we've lost it!"
+
+M'Tosh was a man for a crisis. The red tail-lights of the private-car
+special were yet within a sprinter's dash of the trackhead, but the
+train-master lost no time chasing a ten-wheel flyer with "Red" Callahan at
+the throttle.
+
+"Up to my office!" he shouted; and ten seconds later Kent was leaning
+breathless over the desk in the despatcher's room while M'Tosh called
+Durgan over the yard limits telephone.
+
+"Is that you, Durgan?" he asked, when the reply came. Then: "Drop the
+board on the mail, quick! and send somebody to tell Tischer to side-track,
+leaving the main line Western Division clear. Got that?"
+
+The answer was evidently prompt and satisfactory, since he began again
+almost in the same breath.
+
+"Now go out yourself and flag Callahan before he reaches the limits. Tell
+him the time-card's changed and he is to run _west_ with the special to
+Megilp as first section of the mail--no stops, or Tischer will run him
+down. Leg it! He's half-way down the yard, now!"
+
+The train-master dropped the ear-piece of the telephone and crossed
+quickly to the despatcher's table.
+
+"Orders for the Western Division, Donohue," he said curtly, "and don't let
+the grass grow. 'Receiver's car, Callahan, engineer, runs to Megilp as
+first section of fast mail. Fast mail, Hunt, conductor; Tischer, engineer;
+runs to the end of the division without stop, making up all time
+possible.' Add to that last, 'By order of the receiver.'"
+
+The orders were sent as swiftly as the despatcher could rattle them off on
+his key; and then followed an interval of waiting more terrible than a
+battle. Kent tried to speak, but his lips were parched and his tongue was
+like a dry stick between his teeth. What was doing in the lower yard?
+Would Durgan fail at the pinch and mismanage it so as to give the alarm?
+The minutes dragged leaden-winged, and even the sounders on the
+despatcher's table were silent.
+
+Suddenly the clicking began again. The operator at "yard limits" was
+sending the O.K. to the two train orders. So far, so good. Now if Callahan
+could get safely out on the Western Division...
+
+But there was a hitch in the lower yard. Durgan had obeyed his orders
+promptly and precisely, and had succeeded in stopping Callahan at the
+street-crossing where Engineer Dixon had killed the farmer. Durgan climbed
+to the cab of the 1010, and the changed plan was explained in a dozen
+words. But now came the crux.
+
+"If I stand here till you'd be bringin' me my orders, I'll have the whole
+kit av thim buzzin' round to know fwhat's the matther," said Callahan; but
+there was no other thing to do, and Durgan hurried back to the telegraph
+office to play the messenger.
+
+He was too long about it. Before he got back, Halkett was under the cab
+window of the 1010, demanding to know--with many objurgations--why
+Callahan had stopped in the middle of the yards.
+
+"Get a move on you!" he shouted. "The express is right behind us, and
+it'll run us down, you damned bog-trotter!"
+
+Callahan's gauntleted hand shot up to the throttle-bar.
+
+"I'm l'avin', Misther Halkett," he said mildly. "Will yez go back to the
+car, or ride wit' me?"
+
+The general superintendent took no chance of catching the Naught-seven's
+hand-rails in the darkness, and he whipped up into the cab at the first
+sharp cough of the exhaust.
+
+"I'll go back when you stop for your orders," he said; but a shadowy
+figure had leaped upon the engine-step a scant half-second behind him, and
+Callahan was stuffing the crumpled copy of the order into the sweat-band
+of his cap. The next instant the big 1010 leaped forward like a blooded
+horse under an unmerited cut of the whip, slid past the yard limits
+telegraph office and shot out upon the main line of the Western Division.
+
+"Sit down, Misther Halkett, an' make yerself aisy!" yelled Callahan across
+the cab. "'Tis small use Jimmy Shovel'll have for his box this night."
+
+"Shut off, you Irish madman!" was the shouted command. "Don't you see
+you're on the wrong division?"
+
+Callahan gave the throttle-bar another outward hitch, tipped his seat and
+took a hammer from the tool-box.
+
+"I know where I'm goin', an' that's more thin you know, ye blandhanderin'
+divil! Up on that box wit' you, an' kape out av Jimmy Shovel's road, or
+I'll be the death av yez! Climb, now!"
+
+It was at this moment that the tense strain of suspense was broken in the
+despatcher's room on the second floor of the Union Station. The telephone
+skirled joyously, and the train-master snatched up the ear-piece.
+
+"What does he say?" asked Kent.
+
+"It's all right. He says Callahan is out on the Western Division, with
+Tischer chasing him according to programme. Halkett's in the cab of the
+1010 with Patsy, and--hold on--By George! he says one of them jumped the
+car as it was passing the limits station!"
+
+"Which one was it?" asked Kent; and he had to wait till the reply came
+from Durgan.
+
+"It was Hawk, the right-of-way man. He broke and ran for the nearest
+electric-car line the minute he hit the ground, Durgan says. Does he
+count?"
+
+"No," said Kent; but it is always a mistake to under-rate an enemy's
+caliber--even that of his small arms.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+THE NIGHT OF ALARMS
+
+If Editor Hildreth had said nothing in his evening edition about the
+impending strike on the Trans-Western, it was not because public interest
+was waning. For a fortnight the newspapers in the territory tributary to
+the road had been full of strike talk, and Hildreth had said his say,
+deprecating the threatened appeal to force as fearlessly as he condemned
+the mismanagement which was provoking it.
+
+But it was Kent who was responsible for the dearth of news on the eve of
+the event. Early in the morning of the last day of the month he had sought
+out the editor and begged him to close the columns of the _Evening Argus_
+to strike news, no matter what should come in during the course of the
+day.
+
+"I can't go into the reasons as deeply now as I hope to a little later,"
+he had said, his secretive habit holding good to the final fathom of the
+slipping hawser of events. "But you must bear with me once more, and
+whatever you hear between now and the time you go to press, don't comment
+on it. I have one more chance to win out, and it hangs in a balance that a
+feather's weight might tip the wrong way. I'll be with you between ten and
+twelve to-night, and you can safely save two columns of the morning paper
+for the sensation I'm going to give you."
+
+It was in fulfilment of this promise that Kent bestirred himself after he
+had sent a wire to Ormsby, and M'Tosh had settled down to the task of
+smoothing Callahan's way westward over a division already twitching in the
+preliminary rigor of the strike convulsion.
+
+"I am going to set the fuse for the newspaper explosion," he said to his
+ally. "Barring accidents, there is no reason why we shouldn't begin to
+figure definitely upon the result, is there?"
+
+M'Tosh was leaning over Despatcher Donohue's shoulder. He had slipped
+Donohue's fingers aside from the key to cut in with a peremptory "G.S."
+order suspending, in favor of the fast mail, the rule which requires a
+station operator to drop his board on a following section that is less
+than ten minutes behind its file-leader.
+
+"The fun is beginning," said the train-master. "Tischer has his tip from
+Durgan to keep Callahan's tail-lights in sight. With the mail treading on
+their heels the gentlemen in the Naught-seven will be chary about pulling
+Patsy down too suddenly in mid career. They have just passed Morning Dew,
+and the operator reports Tischer for disregarding his slow signal."
+
+"Can't you fix that?" asked Kent.
+
+"Oh, yes; that is one of the things I can fix. But there are going to be
+plenty of others."
+
+"Still we must take something for granted, Mr. M'Tosh. What I have to do
+up-town won't wait until Callahan has finished his run. I thought the main
+difficulty was safely overcome."
+
+"Umph!" said the train-master; "the troubles are barely getting themselves
+born. You must remember that we swapped horses at the last minute. We were
+ready for the race to the east. Everybody on the Prairie Division had been
+notified that a special was to go through to-night without stop from
+Lesterville to A. & T. Junction."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Now we have it all to straighten out by wire on another division; meeting
+points to make, slow trains to side-track, fool operators to hold down;
+all on the dizzy edge of a strike that is making every man on the line
+lose his balance. But you go ahead with your newspaper business. I'll do
+what a man can here. And if you come across that right-of-way agent, I
+wish you'd make it a case of assault and battery and get him locked up.
+I'm leery about him."
+
+Kent went his way dubiously reflective. In the moment of triumph, when
+Durgan had announced the success of the bold change in the programme, he
+had made light of Hawk's escape. But now he saw possibilities. True, the
+junto was leaderless for the moment, and Bucks had no very able
+lieutenants. But Hawk would give the alarm; and there was the rank and
+file of the machine to reckon with. And for weapons, the ring controlled
+the police power of the State and of the city. Let the word be passed that
+the employees of the Trans-Western were kidnapping their receiver and the
+governor, and many things might happen before "Red" Callahan should finish
+his long race to the westward.
+
+Thinking of these things, David Kent walked up-town when he might have
+taken a car. When the toxin of panic is in the air there is no antidote
+like vigorous action.
+
+Passing the Western Union central office, he stopped to send Ormsby a
+second telegram, reporting progress and asking him to be present in person
+at the denouement to put the facts on the wire at the earliest possible
+instant of time. "Everything depends upon this," he added, when he had
+made the message otherwise emphatic. "If we miss the morning papers, we
+are done."
+
+While he was pocketing his change at the receiving clerk's pigeon-hole, a
+cab rattled up with a horse at a gallop, and Stephen Hawk sprang out. Kent
+saw him through the plate-glass front and turned quickly to the public
+writing-desk, hoping to be overlooked. He was. For once in a way the
+ex-district attorney was too nearly rattled to be fully alert to his
+surroundings. There were others at the standing desk; and Hawk wrote his
+message, after two or three false starts, almost at Kent's elbow.
+
+Kent heard the chink of coin and the low-spoken urgings for haste at the
+receiving clerk's window; but he forbore to move until the cab had rattled
+away. Then he gathered up the spoiled blanks left behind by Hawk and
+smoothed them out. Two of them bore nothing but the date line, made
+illegible, it would seem, by the writer's haste and nervousness. But at
+the third attempt Hawk had got as far as the address: "To All
+Trans-Western agents on Western Division."
+
+Kent stepped quickly to the receiver's window. The only expedient he could
+think of was open to reproach, but it was no time to be over-scrupulous.
+
+"Pardon me," he began, "but didn't the gentleman who was just here forget
+to sign his message?"
+
+The little hook caught its minnow. The receiving clerk was folding Hawk's
+message to place it in the leather carrier of the pneumatic tube, but he
+opened and examined it.
+
+"No," he said; "it's signed all right: 'J.B. Halkett, G.S.'"
+
+"Ah!" said Kent. "That's a little odd. Mr. Halkett is out of town, and
+this gentleman, Mr. Hawk, is not in his department. I believe I should
+investigate a little before sending that, if I were you."
+
+Having thus sown the small seed of suspicion, which, by the by, fell on
+barren soil, Kent lost no time in calling up M'Tosh over the nearest
+telephone.
+
+"Do our agents on the Western Division handle Western Union business?" he
+asked.
+
+The reply came promptly.
+
+"Yes; locally. The W-U. has an independent line to Breezeland Inn and
+points beyond."
+
+"Well, our right-of-way man has just sent a telegram to all agents,
+signing Halkett's name. I don't know what he said in it, but you can
+figure that out for yourself."
+
+"You bet I can!" was the emphatic rejoinder. And then: "Where are you
+now?"
+
+"I'm at the Clarendon public 'phone, but I am going over to the _Argus_
+office. I'll let you know when I leave there. Good-by."
+
+When Kent reached the night editor's den on the third floor of the _Argus_
+building he found Hildreth immersed chin-deep in a sea of work. But he
+quickly extricated himself and cleared a chair for his visitor.
+
+"Praise be!" he ejaculated. "I was beginning to get anxious. Large things
+are happening, and you didn't turn up. I've had Manville wiring all over
+town for you."
+
+"What are some of the large things?" asked Kent, lighting his first cigar
+since dinner.
+
+"Well, for one: do you know that your people are on the verge of the
+much-talked-of strike?"
+
+"Yes; I knew it this morning. That was what I wanted you to suppress in
+the evening edition."
+
+"I suppressed it all right; I didn't know it--day and date, I mean. They
+kept it beautifully quiet. But that isn't all. Something is happening at
+the capitol. I was over at the club a little while ago, and Hendricks was
+there. Somebody sent in a note, and he positively ran to get out. When I
+came back, I sent Rogers over to Cassatti's to see if he could find you.
+There was a junto dinner confab on; Meigs, Senator Crowley, three or four
+of the ring aldermen and half a dozen wa-ward politicians. Rogers has a
+nose for news, and when he had 'phoned me you weren't there, he hung
+around on the edges."
+
+"Good men you have, Hildreth. What did the unimpeachable Rogers see?"
+
+"He saw on a large scale just what I had seen on a small one: somebody
+pup-passed a note in, and when it had gone the round of the dinner-table
+those fellows tumbled over each other trying to get away."
+
+"Is that all?" Kent inquired.
+
+"No. Apart from his nose, Rogers is gifted with horse sense. When the
+dinner crowd boarded an up-town car, our man paid fare to the same
+conductor. He wired me from the Hotel Brunswick a few minutes ago. There
+is some sort of a caucus going on in Hendricks' office in the capitol, and
+mum-messengers are flying in all directions."
+
+"And you wanted me to come and tell you all the whys and wherefores?" Kent
+suggested.
+
+"I told the chief I'd bet a bub-blind horse to a broken-down mule you
+could do it if anybody could."
+
+"All right; listen: something worse than an hour ago the governor, his
+private secretary, Guilford, Hawk and Halkett started out on a special
+train to go to Gaston."
+
+"What for?" interrupted the editor.
+
+"To meet Judge MacFarlane, Mr. Semple Falkland, and the Overland
+officials. You can guess what was to be done?"
+
+"Sure. Your railroad was to be sold out, lock, stock and barrel; or leased
+to the Overland for ninety-nine years--which amounts to the same thing."
+
+"Precisely. Well, by some unaccountable mishap the receiver's special was
+switched over to the Western Division at yard limits, and the engineer
+seems to think he has orders to proceed westward. At all events, that is
+what he is doing. And the funny part of it is that he can't stop to find
+out his blunder. The fast mail is right behind him, with the receiver's
+order to smash anything that gets in its way; so you see--"
+
+"That will do," said the night editor. "We don't print fairy stories in
+the _Argus_."
+
+"None the less, you are going to print this one to-morrow morning, just as
+I'm telling it to you," Kent asserted confidently. "And when you get the
+epilogue you will say that it makes my little preface wearisome by
+contrast."
+
+The light was slowly dawning in the editorial mind.
+
+"My heaven!" he exclaimed. "Kent, you're good for twenty years, at the
+very lul-least!"
+
+"Am I? It occurs to me that the prosecuting attorney in the case will have
+a hard time proving anything. Doesn't it look that way to you? At the
+worst, it is only an unhappy misunderstanding of orders. And if the end
+should happen to justify the means----"
+
+Hildreth shook his head gravely.
+
+"You don't understand, David. If you could be sure of a fair-minded judge
+and an unbiased jury--you and those who are implicated with you: but
+you'll get neither in this machine-ridden State."
+
+"We are going to have both, after you have filled your two columns--by the
+way, you are still saving those two columns for me, aren't you?--in
+to-morrow morning's _Argus_. Or rather, I'm hoping there will be no need
+for either judge or jury."
+
+The night editor shook his head again, and once more he said, "My heaven!"
+adding: "What could you possibly hope to accomplish? You'll get the
+receiver and his big boss out of the State for a few minutes, or possibly
+for a few hours, if your strike makes them hunt up another railroad to
+return on. But what will it amount to? Getting rid of the receiver doesn't
+annul the decree of the court."
+
+Kent fell back on his secretive habit yet once again.
+
+"I don't care to anticipate the climax, Hildreth. By one o'clock one of
+two things will have happened: you'll get a wire that will make your back
+hair sit up, or I'll get one that will make me wish I'd never been born.
+Let it rest at that for the present; you have work enough on hand to fill
+up the interval, and if you haven't, you can distribute those affidavits I
+gave you among the compositors and get them into type. I want to see them
+in the paper to-morrow morning, along with the other news."
+
+"Oh, we can't do that, David! The time isn't ripe. You know what I told
+you about----"
+
+"If the time doesn't ripen to-night, Hildreth, it never will. Do as I tell
+you, and get that stuff into type. Do more; write the hottest editorial
+you can think of, demanding to know if it isn't time for the people to
+rise and clean out this stable once for all."
+
+"By Jove! David, I've half a mum-mind to do it. If you'd only unbutton
+yourself a little, and let me see what my backing is going to be----"
+
+"All in good season," laughed Kent. "Your business for the present moment
+is to write; I'm going down to the Union Station."
+
+"What for?" demanded the editor.
+
+"To see if our crazy engineer is still mistaking his orders properly."
+
+"Hold on a minute. How did the enemy get wind of your plot so quickly? You
+can tell me that, can't you?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I told you Hawk was one of the party in the private car. He fell
+off at the yard limits station and came back to town."
+
+The night editor stood up and confronted his visitor.
+
+"David, you are either the coolest plunger that ever drew breath--or the
+bub-biggest fool. I wouldn't be standing in your shoes to-night for two
+such railroads as the T-W."
+
+Kent laughed again and opened the door.
+
+"I suppose not. But you know there is no accounting for the difference in
+tastes. I feel as if I had never really lived before this night; the only
+thing that troubles me is the fear that somebody or something will get in
+the way of my demented engineer."
+
+He went out into the hall, but as Hildreth was closing the door he turned
+back.
+
+"There is one other thing that I meant to say: when you get your two
+columns of sensation, you've got to be decent and share with the
+Associated Press."
+
+"I'm dud-dashed if I do!" said Hildreth, fiercely.
+
+"Oh, yes, you will; just the bare facts, you know. You'll have all the
+exciting details for an 'exclusive,' to say nothing of the batch of
+affidavits in the oil scandal. And it is of the last importance to me that
+the facts shall be known to-morrow morning wherever the Associated has a
+wire."
+
+"Go away!" said the editor, "and dud-don't come back here till you can
+uncork yourself like a man and a Cuc-Christian! Go off, I say!"
+
+It wanted but a few minutes of eleven when Kent mounted the stair to the
+despatcher's room in the Union Station. He found M'Tosh sitting at
+Donohue's elbow, and the sounders on the glass-topped table were crackling
+like overladen wires in an electric storm.
+
+"Strike talk," said the train-master. "Every man on both divisions wants
+to know what's doing. Got your newspaper string tied up all right?"
+
+Kent made a sign of assent.
+
+"We are waiting for Mr. Patrick Callahan. Any news from him?"
+
+"Plenty of it. Patsy would have a story to tell, all right, if he could
+stop to put it on the wires. Durgan ought to have caught that blamed
+right-of-way man and chloroformed him."
+
+"I found him messing, as I 'phoned you. Anything come of it?"
+
+"Nothing fatal, I guess, since Patsy is still humping along. But Hawk's
+next biff was more to the purpose. He came down here with Halkett's chief
+clerk, whom he had hauled out of bed, and two policemen. The plan was to
+fire Donohue and me, and put Bicknell in charge. It might have worked if
+Bicknell'd had the sand. But he weakened at the last minute; admitted that
+he wasn't big enough to handle the despatcher's trick. The way Hawk cursed
+him out was a caution to sinners."
+
+"When was this?" Kent asked.
+
+"Just a few minutes ago. Hawk went off ripping; swore he would find
+somebody who wasn't afraid to take the wires. And, between us three, I'm
+scared stiff for fear he will."
+
+"Can it be done?"
+
+"Dead easy, if he knows how to go about it--and Bicknell will tell him.
+The Overland people don't love us any too well, and if they did, the lease
+deal would make them side with Guilford and the governor. If Hawk asks
+them to lend him a train despatcher for a few minutes, they'll do it."
+
+"But the union?" Kent objected.
+
+"They have three or four non-union men."
+
+"Still, Hawk has no right to discharge you."
+
+"Bicknell has. He is Halkett's representative, and----"
+
+The door opened suddenly and Hawk danced in, followed by a man bareheaded
+and in his shirt-sleeves, the superintendent's chief clerk, and the two
+officers.
+
+"Now, then, we'll trouble you and your man to get out of here, Mr.
+M'Tosh," said the captain of the junto forces, vindictively.
+
+But the train-master was of those who die hard. He protested vigorously,
+addressing himself to Bicknell and ignoring the ex-district attorney as if
+he were not. He, McTosh, was willing to surrender the office on an
+official order in writing over the chief clerk's signature. But did
+Bicknell fully understand what it might mean in loss of life and property
+to put a new man on the wires at a moment's notice?
+
+Bicknell would have weakened again, but Hawk was not to be frustrated a
+second time.
+
+"Don't you see he is only sparring to gain time?" he snapped at Bicknell.
+Then to M'Tosh: "Get out of here, and do it quick! And you can go, too,"
+wheeling suddenly upon Kent.
+
+Donohue had taken no part in the conflict of authority. But now he threw
+down his pen and clicked his key to cut in with the "G.S.," which claims
+the wire instantly. Then distinctly, and a word at a time so that the
+slowest operator on the line could get it, he spelled out the message:
+"All Agents: Stop and hold all trains except first and second fast mail,
+west-bound. M'Tosh fired, and office in hands of police----"
+
+"Stop him!" cried the shirt-sleeved man. "He's giving it away on the
+wire!"
+
+But Donohue had signed his name and was putting on his coat.
+
+"You're welcome to what you can find," he said, scowling at the
+interloper. "If you kill anybody now, it'll be your own fault."
+
+"Arrest that man!" said Hawk to his policemen; but Kent interposed.
+
+"If you do, the force will be two men shy to-morrow. The Civic League
+isn't dead yet." And he took down the numbers of the two officers.
+
+There were no arrests made, and when the ousted three were clear of the
+room and the building, Kent asked an anxious question.
+
+"How near can they come to smashing us, M'Tosh?"
+
+"That depends on Callahan's nerve. The night operators at Donerail,
+Schofield and Agua Caliente are all Guilford appointees, and when the new
+man explains the situation to them, they'll do what they are told to do.
+But I'm thinking Patsy won't pull up for anything milder than a spiked
+switch."
+
+"Well, they might throw a switch on him. I wonder somebody hasn't done it
+before this."
+
+The train-master shook his head.
+
+"If Tischer is keeping close up behind, that would jeopardize more lives
+than Callahan's. But there is another thing that doesn't depend on
+nerve--Patsy's or anybody's."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"Water. The run is one hundred and eighty miles. The 1010's tank is good
+for one hundred with a train, or a possible hundred and sixty, light.
+There is about one chance in a thousand that Callahan's crown-sheet won't
+get red-hot and crumple up on him in the last twenty miles. Let's take a
+car and go down to yard limits. We can sit in the office and hear what
+goes over the wires, even if we can't get a finger in to help Patsy out of
+his troubles."
+
+They boarded a Twentieth Avenue car accordingly, but when they reached the
+end of the line, which was just across the tracks from the junction in the
+lower yards, they found the yard limits office and the shops surrounded by
+a cordon of militia.
+
+"By George!" said M'Tosh. "They got quick action, didn't they? I suppose
+it's on the ground of the strike and possible violence."
+
+Kent spun on his heel, heading for the electric car they had just left.
+
+"Back to town," he said; "unless you two want to jump the midnight
+Overland as it goes out and get away while you can. If Callahan fails----"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+THE RELENTLESS WHEELS
+
+But Engineer Callahan had no notion of failing. When he had drawn the
+hammer on his superior officer, advising discretion and a seat on Jimmy
+Shovel's box, the 1010 was racking out over the switches in the Western
+Division yards. Three minutes later the electric beam of Tischer's
+following headlight sought and found the first section on the long tangent
+leading up to the high plains, and the race was in full swing.
+
+At Morning Dew, the first night telegraph station out of the capital, the
+two sections were no more than a scant quarter of a mile apart; and the
+operator tried to flag the second section down, as reported. This did not
+happen again until several stations had been passed, and Callahan set his
+jaw and gave the 1010 more throttle. But at Lossing, a town of some size,
+the board was down and a man ran out at the crossing, swinging a red
+light.
+
+Callahan looked well to the switches, with the steam shut off and his hand
+dropping instinctively to the air; and the superintendent shrank into his
+corner and gripped the window ledge when the special roared past the
+warning signals and on through the town beyond. He had maintained a dazed
+silence since the episode of the flourished hammer, but now he was moved
+to yell across the cab.
+
+"I suppose you know what you're in for, if you live to get out of this!
+It's twenty years, in this State, to pass a danger signal!" This is not
+all that the superintendent said: there were forewords and interjections,
+emphatic but unprintable.
+
+Callahan's reply was another flourish of the hammer, and a sudden
+outpulling of the throttle-bar; and the superintendent subsided again.
+
+But enforced silence and the grindstone of conscious helplessness will
+sharpen the dullest wit. The swerving lurch of the 1010 around the next
+curve set Halkett clutching for hand-holds, and the injector lever fell
+within his grasp. What he did not know about the working parts of a modern
+locomotive was very considerable; but he did know that an injector, half
+opened, will waste water as fast as an inch pipe will discharge it. And
+without water the Irishman would have to stop.
+
+Callahan heard the chuckling of the wasting boiler feed before he had gone
+a mile beyond the curve. It was a discovery to excuse bad language, but
+his protest was lamb-like.
+
+"No more av that, if ye plaze, Misther Halkett, or me an' Jimmy Shovel'll
+have to--Ah! would yez, now?"
+
+Before his promotion to the superintendency Halkett had been a ward boss
+in the metropolis of the State. Thinking he saw his chance, he took it,
+and the blow knocked Callahan silly for the moment. Afterward there was a
+small free-for-all buffeting match in the narrow cab in which the fireman
+took a hand, and during which the racing 1010 was suffered to find her way
+alone. When it was over, Callahan spat out a broken tooth and gave his
+orders concisely.
+
+"Up wid him over the coal, an' we'll put him back in the car where he
+belongs. Now, thin!"
+
+Halkett had to go, and he went, not altogether unwillingly. And when it
+came to jumping across from the rear of the tender to the forward
+vestibule of the Naught-seven, or being chucked across, he jumped.
+
+Now it so chanced that the governor and his first lieutenant in the great
+railway steal had weighty matters to discuss, and they had not missed the
+superintendent or the lawyer, supposing them to be still out on the rear
+platform enjoying the scenery. Wherefore Halkett's sudden appearance,
+mauled, begrimed and breathless from his late tussle with the two
+enginemen, was the first intimation of wrong-going that had penetrated to
+the inner sanctum of the private car.
+
+"What's that you say, Mr. Halkett?--on the Western Division? Whereabouts?"
+demanded the governor.
+
+"Between Lossing and Skipjack siding--if we haven't passed the siding in
+the last two or three minutes. I've been too busy to notice," was the
+reply.
+
+"And you say you were on the engine? Why the devil didn't you call your
+man down?"
+
+"I knocked him down," gritted the superintendent, savagely, "and I'd have
+beat his face in for him if there hadn't been two of them. It's a plot of
+some kind, and Callahan knows what he is about. He had me held up with a
+hammer till just a few minutes ago, and he's running past stop-signals and
+over red lights like a madman!"
+
+Bucks and Guilford exchanged convictions by the road of the eye, and the
+governor said:
+
+"This is pretty serious, Major. Have you anything to suggest?" And without
+waiting for a reply he turned upon Halkett: "Where is Mr. Hawk?"
+
+"I don't know. I supposed he was in here with you. Or maybe he's out on
+the rear platform."
+
+The three of them went to the rear, passing the private secretary
+comfortably asleep in his wicker chair. When they stepped out upon the
+recessed observation platform they found it empty.
+
+"He must have suspected something and dropped off in the yard or at the
+shops," said Halkett. And at the saying of it he shrank back involuntarily
+and added: "Ah! Look at that, will you?"
+
+The car had just thundered past another station, and Callahan had underrun
+one more stop-signal at full speed. At the same instant Tischer's
+headlight swung into view, half blinding them with its glare.
+
+"What is that following us?" asked Bucks.
+
+"It's the fast mail," said Halkett.
+
+Guilford turned livid and caught at the hand-rail.
+
+"S-s-say--are you sure of that?" he gasped.
+
+"Of course: it was an hour and thirty-five minutes late, and we are on its
+time."
+
+"Then we can't stop unless somebody throws us on a siding!" quavered the
+receiver, who had a small spirit in a large body. "I told M'Tosh to give
+the mail orders to make up her lost time or I'd fire the engineer--told
+him to cut out all the stops this side of Agua Caliente!"
+
+"That's what you get for your infernal meddling!" snapped Halkett. In
+catastrophic moments many barriers go down; deference to superior officers
+among the earliest.
+
+But the master spirit of the junto was still cool and collected.
+
+"This is no time to quarrel," he said. "The thing to be done is to stop
+this train without getting ourselves ripped open by that fellow behind the
+headlight yonder. The stop-signals prove that Hawk and the others are
+doing their best, but we must do ours. What do you say, Halkett?"
+
+"There is only one thing," replied the superintendent; "we've got to make
+the Irishman run ahead fast enough and far enough to give us room to stop
+or take a siding."
+
+The governor planned it in a few curt sentences. Was there a weapon to be
+had? Danforth, the private secretary, roused from his nap in the wicker
+chair, was able to produce a serviceable revolver. Two minutes later, the
+sleep still tingling in his nerves to augment another tingling less
+pleasurable, the secretary had spanned the terrible gap separating the car
+from the engine and was making his way over the coal, fluttering his
+handkerchief in token of his peaceful intentions.
+
+He was charged with a message to Callahan, mandatory in its first form,
+and bribe-promising in its second; and he was covered from the forward
+vestibule of the private car by the revolver in the hands of a resolute
+and determined state executive.
+
+"One of them's comin' ahead over the coal," warned James Shovel; and
+Callahan found his hammer.
+
+"Run ahead an' take a siding, is ut?" he shouted, glaring down on the
+messenger. "I have me ordhers fr'm betther men than thim that sint you. Go
+back an' tell thim so."
+
+"You'll be paid if you do, and you'll be shot if you don't," yelled the
+secretary, persuasively.
+
+"Tell the boss he can't shoot two av us to wanst; an' the wan that's
+left'll slap on the air," was Callahan's answer; and he slacked off a
+little to bring the following train within easy striking distance.
+
+Danforth went painfully and carefully back with this defiance, and while
+he was bridging the nerve-trying gap, another station with the stop-board
+down and red lights frantically swinging was passed with a roar and a
+whistle shriek.
+
+"Fwhat are they doing now?" called Callahan to his fireman.
+
+"They've gone inside again," was the reply.
+
+"Go back an' thry the tank," was the command; and Jimmy Shovel climbed
+over the coal and let himself down feet foremost into the manhole. When he
+slid back to the footplate his legs were wet to the mid shin.
+
+"It's only up to there," he reported, measuring with his hand.
+
+Callahan looked at his watch. There was yet a full hour's run ahead of
+him, and there was no more than a scant foot of water in the tank with
+which to make it.
+
+Thereafter he forgot the Naught-seven, and whatever menace it held for
+him, and was concerned chiefly with the thing mechanical. Would the water
+last him through? He had once made one hundred and seventy miles on a
+special run with the 1010 without refilling his tank; but that was with
+the light engine alone. Now he had the private car behind him, and it
+seemed at times to pull with all the drag of a heavy train.
+
+But one expedient remained, and that carried with it the risk of his life.
+An engine, not overburdened, uses less water proportionately to miles run
+as the speed is increased. He could outpace the safe-guarding mail, save
+water--and take the chance of being shot in the back from the forward
+vestibule of the Naught-seven when he had gained lead enough to make a
+main-line stop safe for the men behind him.
+
+Callahan thought once of the child mothered by the Sisters of Loretto in
+the convent at the capital, shut his eyes to that and to all things
+extraneous, and sent the 1010 about her business. At the first reversed
+curve he hung out of his window for a backward look. Tischer's headlight
+had disappeared and his protection was gone.
+
+On the rear platform of the private car four men watched the threatening
+second section fade into the night.
+
+"Our man has thought better of it," said the governor, marking the
+increased speed and the disappearance of the menacing headlight.
+
+Guilford's sigh of relief was almost a groan.
+
+"My God!" he said; "it makes me cold to think what might happen if he
+should pull us over into the other State!"
+
+But Halkett was still smarting from the indignities put upon him, and his
+comment was a vindictive threat.
+
+"I'll send that damned Irishman over the road for this, if it is the last
+thing I ever do!" he declared; and he confirmed it with an oath.
+
+But Callahan was getting his punishment as he went along. He had scarcely
+settled the 1010 into her gait for the final run against the failing water
+supply when another station came in sight. It was a small cattle town, and
+in addition to the swinging red lights and a huge bonfire to illuminate
+the yards, the obstructionists had torn down the loading corral and were
+piling the lumber on the track.
+
+Once again Callahan's nerve flickered, and he shut off the steam. But
+before it was too late he reflected that the barrier was meant only to
+scare him into stopping. One minute later the air was full of flying
+splinters, and that danger was passed. But one of the broken planks came
+through the cab window, missing the engineer by no more than a
+hand's-breadth. And the shower of splinters, sucked in by the whirl of the
+train, broke glass in the private car and sprinkled the quartet on the
+platform with split kindling and wreckage.
+
+"What was that?" gasped the receiver.
+
+Halkett pointed to the bonfire, receding like a fading star in the
+rearward distance.
+
+"Our friends are beginning to throw stones, since clods won't stop him."
+he said.
+
+Bucks shook his head.
+
+"If that is the case, we'll have to be doing something on our own account.
+The next obstruction may derail us."
+
+Halkett stepped into the car and pulled the cord of the automatic air.
+
+"No good," he muttered. "The Irishman bled our tank before he started.
+Help me set the hand brakes, a couple of you."
+
+Danforth and the governor took hold of the brake wheel with him, and for a
+minute or two the terrible speed slackened a little. Then some part of the
+disused hand-gear gave way under the three-man strain and that hope was
+gone.
+
+"There's one thing left," said the superintendent, indomitable to the
+last. "We'll uncouple and let him drop us behind."
+
+The space in the forward vestibule was narrow and cramped, and with the
+strain of the dragging car to make the pin stick, it took two of them
+lying flat, waiting for the back-surging moment and wiggling it for slack,
+to pull it. The coupling dropped out of the hook and the engine shot ahead
+to the length of the safety-chains; thus far, but no farther.
+
+Halkett stood up.
+
+"It's up to you, Danforth," he said, raising his voice to be heard above
+the pounding roar of the wheels. "You're the youngest and lightest: get
+down on the 1010's brake-beam and unhook those chains."
+
+The secretary looked once into the trap with the dodging jaws and the
+backward-flying bottom and declined the honor.
+
+"I can't get down there," he cried. "And I shouldn't know what to do if I
+could."
+
+Once more the superintendent exhibited his nerve. He had nothing at stake
+save a desire to defeat Callahan; but he had the persistent courage of the
+bull-terrier. With Bucks and the secretary to steady him he lowered
+himself in the gap till he could stand upon the brake-beam of the 1010's
+tender and grope with one free hand for the hook of the nearest
+safety-chain. Death nipped at him every time the engine gave or took up
+the slack of the loose coupling, but he dodged and hung on until he had
+satisfied himself.
+
+"It's no good," he announced, when they had dragged him by main strength
+back to a footing in the narrow vestibule. "The hooks are bent into the
+links. We're due to go wherever that damned Irishman is taking us."
+
+Shovel was firing, and the trailing smoke and cinders quickly made the
+forward vestibule untenable. When they were driven in, Bucks and the
+receiver went through to the rear platform, where they were presently
+joined by Halkett and Danforth.
+
+"I've been trying the air again," said the superintendent, "but it's no
+go. What's next?"
+
+The governor gave the word.
+
+"Wait," he said; and the four of them clung to the hand-rails, swaying and
+bending to the bounding lurches of the flying car.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mile after mile reels from beneath the relentless wheels, and still the
+speed increases. Station Donerail is passed, and now the pace is so
+furious that the watchers on the railed platform can not make out the
+signals in the volleying wake of dust. Station Schofield is passed, and
+again the signals, if any there be, are swiftly drowned in the gray
+dust-smother. From Schofield to Agua Caliente is but a scant ten miles;
+and as the flying train rushes on toward the State boundary, two faces in
+the quartet of watchers show tense and drawn under the yellow light of the
+Pintsch platform lamp.
+
+The governor swings himself unsteadily to the right-hand railing and the
+long look ahead brings the twinkling arc-star of the tower light on
+Breezeland Inn into view. He turns to Guilford, who has fallen limp into
+one of the platform chairs.
+
+"In five minutes more we shall pass Agua Caliente," he says. "Will you
+kill the Irishman, or shall I?" Guilford's lips move, but there is no
+audible reply; and Bucks takes Danforth's weapon and passes quickly and
+alone to the forward vestibule.
+
+The station of Agua Caliente swings into the field of 1010's electric
+headlight. Callahan's tank has been bone dry for twenty minutes, and he is
+watching the glass water-gage where the water shows now only when the
+engine lurches heavily to the left. He knows that the crown-sheet of the
+fire-box is bare, and that any moment it may give down and the end will
+come. Yet his gauntleted hand never falls from the throttle-bar to the
+air-cock, and his eyes never leave the bubble appearing and disappearing
+at longer intervals in the heel of the water-glass.
+
+Shovel has stopped firing, and is hanging out of his window for the
+straining look ahead. Suddenly he drops to the footplate to grip
+Callahan's arm.
+
+"See!" he says. "They have set the switch to throw us in on the siding!"
+In one motion the flutter of the exhaust ceases, and the huge ten-wheeler
+buckles to the sudden setting of the brakes. The man standing in the
+forward vestibule of the Naught-seven lowers his weapon. Apparently it is
+not going to be necessary to kill the engineer, after all.
+
+But Callahan's nerve has failed him only for the moment. There is one
+chance in ten thousand that the circumambulating side track is empty; one
+and one only, and no way to make sure of it. Beyond the station, as
+Callahan well knows, the siding comes again into the main line, and the
+switch is a straight-rail "safety." Once again the thought of his
+motherless child flickers into the engineer's brain; then he releases the
+air and throws his weight backward upon the throttle-bar. Two gasps and a
+heart-beat decide it; and before the man in the vestibule can level his
+weapon and fire, the one-car train has shot around the station, heaving
+and lurching over the uneven rails of the siding, and grinding shrilly
+over the points of the safety switch to race on the down grade to Megilp.
+
+At the mining-camp the station is in darkness save for the goggle eyes of
+an automobile drawn up beside the platform, and deep silence reigns but
+for the muffled, irregular thud of the auto-car's motor. But the beam of
+the 1010's headlight shows the small station building massed by men, a
+score of them poising for a spring to the platforms of the private car
+when the slackening speed shall permit. A bullet tears into the woodwork
+at Callahan's elbow, and another breaks the glass of the window beside
+him, but he makes the stop as steadily as if death were not snapping at
+him from behind and roaring in his ears from the belly of the burned
+engine.
+
+"Be doomping yer fire lively, now, Jimmy, b'y," he says, dropping from his
+box to help. And while they wrestle with the dumping-bar, these two, the
+poising figures have swarmed upon the Naught-seven, and a voice is lifted
+above the Babel of others in sharp protest.
+
+"Put away that rope, boys! There's law here, and by God, we're going to
+maintain it!"
+
+At this a man pushes his way out of the thick of the crowd and climbs to a
+seat beside the chauffeur in the waiting automobile.
+
+"They've got him," he says shortly. "To the hotel for all you're worth,
+Hudgins; our part is to get this on the wires before one o'clock. Full
+speed; and never mind the ruts."
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+SUBHI SADIK
+
+The dawn of a new day was graying over the capital city, and the newsboys
+were crying lustily in the streets, when David Kent felt his way up the
+dark staircases of the Kittleton Building to knock at the door of Judge
+Oliver Marston's rooms on the top floor. He was the bearer of tidings, and
+he made no more than a formal excuse for the unseemly hour when the door
+was opened by the lieutenant-governor.
+
+"I am sorry to disturb you, Judge Marston," he began, when he had the
+closed door at his back and was facing the tall thin figure in flannel
+dressing gown and slippers, "but I imagine I'm only a few minutes ahead of
+the crowd. Have you heard the news of the night?"
+
+The judge pressed the button of the drop-light and waved his visitor to a
+chair.
+
+"I have heard nothing, Mr. Kent. Have a cigar?"--passing the box of
+unutterable stogies.
+
+"Thank you; not before breakfast," was the hasty reply. Then, without
+another word of preface: "Judge Marston, for the time being you are the
+governor of the State, and I have come to----"
+
+"One moment," interrupted his listener. "There are some stories that read
+better for a foreword, however brief. What has happened?"
+
+"This: last night it was the purpose of Governor Bucks and Receiver
+Guilford to go to Gaston by special train. In some manner, which has not
+yet been fully explained, there was a confusion of orders. Instead of
+proceeding eastward, the special was switched to the tracks of the Western
+Division; was made the first section of the fast mail, which had orders to
+run through without stop. You can imagine the result."
+
+Marston got upon his feet slowly and began pacing the length of the long
+room. Kent waited, and the shrill cries of the newsboys floated up and in
+through the open windows. When the judge finally came back to his chair
+the saturnine face was gray and haggard.
+
+"I hope it was an accident that can be clearly proved," he said; and a
+moment later: "You spoke of Bucks and Guilford; were there others in the
+private car?"
+
+"Two others; Halkett, and the governor's private secretary."
+
+"And were they all killed?"
+
+A great light broke in upon Kent when he saw how Marston had
+misapprehended. Also, he saw how much it would simplify matters if he
+should be happy enough to catch the ball in the reactionary rebound.
+
+"They are all alive and uninjured, to the best of my knowledge and belief;
+though I understand that one of them narrowly escaped lynching at the
+hands of an excited mob."
+
+The long lean figure erected itself in the chair, and the weight of years
+seemed to slip from its shoulders.
+
+"But I understood you to say that the duties of the executive had devolved
+upon me, Mr. Kent. You also said I could imagine the result of this
+singular mistaking of train-orders, and I fancied I could. What was the
+result?"
+
+"A conclusion not quite as sanguinary as that you had in mind, though it
+is likely to prove serious enough for one member of the party in the
+private car. The special train was chased all the way across the State by
+the fast mail. It finally outran the pursuing section and was stopped at
+Megilp. A sheriff's posse was in waiting, and an arrest was made."
+
+"Go on," said the lieutenant-governor.
+
+"I must first go back a little. Some weeks ago there was a shooting affray
+in the mining-camp, arising out of a dispute over a 'salted' mine, and a
+man was killed. The murderer escaped across the State line. Since the
+authorities of the State in which the crime was committed had every reason
+to believe that a governor's requisition for this particular criminal
+would not be honored, two courses were open to them: to publish the facts
+and let the moral sentiment of the neighboring commonwealth punish the
+criminal as it could, or would; or, suppressing the facts, to bide their
+chance of catching their man beyond the boundaries of the State which gave
+him an asylum. They chose the latter."
+
+A second time Marston left his chair and began to pace the floor. After a
+little he paused to say:
+
+"This murderer is James Guilford, I take it; and the governor--"
+
+"No," said Kent, gravely. "The murderer is--Jasper G. Bucks." He handed
+the judge a copy of the _Argus_. "You will find it all in the press
+despatches; all I have told you, and a great deal more."
+
+The lieutenant-governor read the newspaper story as he walked, lighting
+the electric chandelier to enable him to do so. When it was finished he
+sat down again.
+
+"What a hideous cesspool it is!" was his comment. "But we shall clean it,
+Mr. Kent; we shall clean it if it shall leave the People's Party without a
+vote in the State. Now what can I do for you? You didn't come here at this
+hour in the morning merely to bring me the news."
+
+"No, I didn't, Judge Marston. I want my railroad."
+
+"You shall have it," was the prompt response. "What have you done since
+our last discussion of the subject?"
+
+"I tried to 'obliterate' Judge MacFarlane, as you suggested. But I failed
+in the first step. Bucks and Meigs refused to approve the _quo warranto_."
+
+The judge knitted his brows thoughtfully.
+
+"That way is open to you now; but it is long and devious, and delays are
+always dangerous. You spoke of the receivership as being part of a plan by
+which your road was to be turned over to an eastern monopoly. How nearly
+has that plan succeeded?"
+
+Kent hesitated, not because he was afraid to trust the man Oliver Marston,
+but because there were some things which the governor of the State might
+feel called upon to investigate if the knowledge of them were thrust upon
+him. But in the end he took counsel of utter frankness.
+
+"So nearly that if Bucks and the receiver had reached Gaston last night,
+our road would now be in the hands of the Plantagoulds under a
+ninety-nine-year lease."
+
+The merest ghost of a smile flitted over the lieutenant-governor's face
+when he said, with his nearest approach to sarcasm:
+
+"How extremely opportune the confusion of train-orders becomes as we go
+along! But answer one more question if you please--it will not involve
+these singularly heedless railway employees of yours: is Judge MacFarlane
+in Gaston now?"
+
+"He is. He was to have met the others on the arrival of the special
+train."
+
+There were footsteps on the stair and in the corridor, and Marston rose.
+
+"Our privacy is about to be invaded, Mr. Kent. This is a miserable
+business; miserable for everybody, but most of all for the deceived and
+hoodwinked people of an unhappy State. God knows, I did not seek this
+office; but since it has fallen on me, I shall do my duty as I see it, and
+my hand shall be heaviest upon that man who makes a mockery of the justice
+he is sworn to administer. Come to the capitol a little later in the day,
+prepared to go at once to Gaston. I think I can promise you your hearing
+on the merits without further delay."
+
+"Thank you," said Kent, simply, grasping the hand of leave-taking. Then he
+tried to find other and larger words. "I wish I could do something to show
+my appreciation of your--"
+
+But the lieutenant-governor was pushing him toward the door.
+
+"You have done something, Mr. Kent, and you can do more. Head those people
+off at the door and say that for the present I refuse positively to be
+seen or interviewed. They will find me at the capitol during office
+hours."
+
+It was seven o'clock in the evening of the fiercest working day Kent had
+ever fought through when the special train--his own private special, sent
+to Gaston and brought back again over the strike-paralyzed road by the
+express permission and command of the strikers themselves--set him down in
+the Union Station at the capital.
+
+Looking back to the gray of the morning when he had shaken hands with
+Governor Marston at the door of the room on the top floor of the Kittleton
+Building, the crowding events made the interval seem more like a week; and
+now the events themselves were beginning to take on dream-like
+incongruities in the haze of utter weariness.
+
+"_Evening Argus_! all about the p'liminary trial of Governor Bucks.
+_Argus_, sir?" piped a small boy at the station exit; but Kent shook his
+head, found a cab and had himself conveyed quickly through streets still
+rife with excitement to the Clarendon Hotel.
+
+In the lobby was the same bee-buzzing crowd with which he had been
+contending all day, and he edged his way through it to the elevator,
+praying that he might go unrecognized--as he did. Once safe in his rooms
+he sent for Loring, stretching himself on the bed in a very ecstasy of
+relaxation until the ex-manager came up. Then he emptied his mind as an
+overladen ass spills its panniers.
+
+"I'm done, Grantham," he said; "and that is more different kinds of truth
+than you have heard in a week. Go and reorganize your management, and
+M'Tosh is the man to put in Halkett's place. The strike will be declared
+off at the mere mention of your name and his. That's all. Now go away and
+let me sleep."
+
+"Oh, hold on!" was the good-natured protest; "I'm not more curious than I
+have to be, but I'd like to know how it was done."
+
+"I don't know, myself; and that's the plain fact. But I suspect Marston
+fell upon Judge MacFarlane: gave him a wire hint of what was due to arrive
+if he didn't give us a clean bill of health. I had my preliminary
+interview with the governor at daybreak this morning; and I was with him
+again between nine and ten. He went over the original papers with me, and
+about all he said was, 'Be in Gaston by two o'clock this afternoon, and
+MacFarlane will give you the hearing in chambers.' I went on my knees to
+the Federative Council to get a train."
+
+"You shouldn't have had any trouble there."
+
+"I didn't have, after the men understood what was in the wind. Jarl Oleson
+took me down and brought me back. The council did it handsomely, dipping
+into its treasury and paying the mileage on a Pullman car."
+
+"And MacFarlane reversed his own order?"
+
+"Without a question. It was the merest formality. Jennison, Hawk's former
+law partner, stood for the other side; but he made no argument."
+
+"Good!" said Loring. "That will do for the day's work. But now I'd like to
+know how last night's job was managed."
+
+"I'm afraid you want to know more than is good for you. What do the papers
+say? I haven't looked at one all day."
+
+"They say there was a misunderstanding of orders. That will answer for the
+public, perhaps, but it won't do for me."
+
+"I guess it will have to do for you, too, Grantham," said Kent, yawning
+shamelessly. "Five men, besides myself--six of us in all--know the true
+inwardness of last night's round-up. There will never be a seventh."
+
+Loring's eye-glasses fell from his nose, and he was smiling shrewdly when
+he replaced them.
+
+"There is one small consequence that doesn't please you, I'm sure. You'll
+have to bury the hatchet with MacFarlane."
+
+"Shall I?" flashed Kent, sitting up as if he had been struck with a whip.
+"Let me tell you: Marston is going to call an extra session of the
+Assembly. There is a death vacancy in this district, and I shall be a
+candidate in the special election. If there is no other way to get at
+MacFarlane, he shall be impeached!"
+
+"H'm: so you're going into politics?"
+
+"You've said it," said Kent, subsiding among the pillows. "Now will you
+go?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took the general manager a wakeful twenty-four hours to untangle the
+industrial snarl which was the receiver's legacy to his successor; and
+David Kent slept through the major part of that interval, rising only in
+time to dress for dinner on the day following the retrieval of the
+Trans-Western.
+
+In the grill-room of the Camelot he came face to face with Ormsby, and
+learned, something to his astonishment, that the Breezeland party had
+returned to the capital on the first train in from the west.
+
+"I thought you were going to stay a month or more," he said, with his eyes
+cast down.
+
+"So did I," said Ormsby. "But Mrs. Brentwood cut it short. She's a town
+person, and so is Penelope." And it was not until the soup plates had been
+removed that he added a question. "Are you going out to see them this
+evening, David? You have my royal permission."
+
+"No"--bluntly.
+
+"Isn't it up to you to go and give them a chance to jolly you a little? I
+think they are all aching to do it. Mrs. Hepzibah has seen the rising
+stock quotations, and she thinks you are It."
+
+"No; I can't go there any more," said Kent, and his voice was gruffer than
+he meant it to be.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"There were good reasons before: there are better ones now."
+
+"A seven-hundred-thousand-dollar difference?" suggested Ormsby, who had
+had speech with Loring.
+
+Kent flushed a dull red.
+
+"I sha'n't strike you, Ormsby, no matter what you say," he said doggedly.
+
+"Humph! There is one difference between you and Rabbi Balaam's burro,
+David: it could talk sense, and you can't," was the offensive rejoinder.
+
+Kent changed the subject abruptly.
+
+"Say, Ormsby; I'm going into a political office-hunt. There is a death
+vacancy in the House, and I mean to have the nomination and election. I
+don't need money now, but I do need a friend. Are you with me?"
+
+"Oh, sure. Miss Van Brock will answer for that."
+
+"But I don't want you to do it on her account; I want you to do it for
+me."
+
+"It's all one," said the club-man.
+
+Kent looked up quickly.
+
+"You are right; that is the truest word you've said to-night," and he went
+away, leaving the dessert untouched.
+
+The evening was still young when Kent reached the house in Alameda Square.
+Within the week the weather had changed, and the first chill of the
+approaching autumn was in the air. The great square house was lighted and
+warmed, and the homelikeness of the place appealed to him as it never had
+before. To her other gifts, which were many and diverse, Miss Van Brock
+added that of home-making; and the aftermath of battle is apt to be an
+acute longing for peace and quiet, for domesticity and creature comforts.
+
+He had not seen Portia since the night when she had armed him for the
+final struggle with the enemy; he told himself that he should not see her
+again until the battle was fought and won. But in no part of the struggle
+had he been suffered to lose sight of his obligation to her. He had seen
+the chain lengthen link by link, and now the time was come for the welding
+of it into a shackle to bind. He did not try to deceive himself, nor did
+he allow the glamour of false sentiment to blind him. With an undying love
+for Elinor Brentwood in his heart, he knew well what was before him. None
+the less, Portia should have her just due.
+
+She was waiting for him when he entered the comfortable library.
+
+"I knew you would come to-night," she said cheerfully. "I gave you a day
+to drive the nail--and, O David! you have driven it well!--another day to
+clinch it, and a third to recover from the effects. Have you fully
+recovered?"
+
+"I hope so. I took the day for it, at all events," he laughed. "I am just
+out of bed, as you might say."
+
+"I can imagine how it took it out of you," she assented. "Not so much the
+work, but the anxiety. Night before last, after Mr. Loring went away, I
+sat it out with the telephone, nagging poor Mr. Hildreth for news until I
+know he wanted to murder me."
+
+"How much did you get of it?" he asked.
+
+"He told me all he dared--or perhaps it was all he knew--and it made me
+feel miserably helpless. The little I could get from the _Argus_ office
+was enough to prove that all your plans had been changed at the last
+moment."
+
+"They were," he admitted; and he began at the beginning and filled in the
+details for her.
+
+She heard him through without comment other than a kindling of the brown
+eyes at the climaxes of daring; but at the end she gave him praise
+unstinted.
+
+"You have played the man, David, as I knew you would if you could be once
+fully aroused. I've had faith in you from the very first."
+
+"It has been more than faith, Portia," he asserted soberly. "You have
+taken me up and carried me when I could neither run nor walk. Do you
+suppose I am so besotted as not to realize that you have been the head,
+while I have been only the hand?"
+
+"Nonsense!" she said lightly. "You are in the dumps of the reaction now.
+You mustn't say things that you will be sorry for, later on."
+
+"I am going to say one thing, nevertheless; and will remain for you to
+make it a thing hard to be remembered, or the other kind. Will you take
+what there is of me and make what you can of it?"
+
+She laughed in his face.
+
+"No, my dear David; no, no, no." And after a little pause: "How
+deliciously transparent you are, to be sure!"
+
+He would have been less than a man if his self-love had not been touched
+in its most sensitive part.
+
+"I am glad if it amuses you," he frowned. "Only I meant it in all
+seriousness."
+
+"No, you didn't; you only thought you did," she contradicted, and the
+brown eyes were still laughing at him. "Let me tell you what you did mean.
+You are pleased to think that I have helped you--that an obligation has
+been incurred; and you meant to pay your debt like a man and a gentleman
+in the only coin a woman is supposed to recognize."
+
+"But if I should say that you are misinterpreting the motive?" he
+suggested.
+
+"It would make your nice little speech a perjury instead of a simple
+untruth, and I should say no, again, on other, and perhaps better,
+grounds."
+
+"Name them," he said shortly.
+
+"I will, David, though I am neither a stick nor a stone to do it without
+wincing. You love another woman with all your heart and soul, and you know
+it."
+
+"Well? You see I am neither admitting nor denying."
+
+"As if you needed to!" she scoffed. "But don't interrupt me, please. You
+said I might take what there is of you and make what I can of it: I might
+make you anything and everything in the world, David, except that which a
+woman craves most in a husband--a lover."
+
+His eyes grew dark.
+
+"I wish I knew how much that word means to you, Portia."
+
+"It means just as much to me as it does to every woman who has ever drawn
+the breath of life in a passionate world, David. But that isn't all.
+Leaving Miss Brentwood entirely out of the question, you'd be miserably
+unhappy."
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"Because I shouldn't be able to realize a single one of your ideals. I
+know what they are--what you will expect in a wife. I could make you a
+rich man, a successful man, as the world measures success, and perhaps I
+could even give you love: after the first flush of youth is past, the
+heavenly-affinity sentiment loses its hold and a woman comes to know that
+if she cares to try hard enough she can love any man who will be
+thoughtful and gentle, and whose habits of life are not hopelessly at war
+with her own. But that kind of love doesn't breed love. Your vanity would
+pique itself for a little while, and then you would know the curse of
+unsought love and murder me in your heart a thousand times a day. No,
+David, I have read you to little purpose if these are the things you will
+ask of the woman who takes your name and becomes the mother of your
+children." She had risen and was standing beside his chair, with her hand
+lightly touching his shoulder. "Will you go now? There are others coming,
+and--"
+
+He made his adieux gravely and went away half dazed and a prey to many
+emotions, but strangely light-hearted withal: and as once before, he
+walked when he might have ridden. But the mixed-emotion mood was not
+immortal. At the Clarendon he found a committee of Civic Leaguers waiting
+to ask him if he would stand as a "Good Government" candidate in the
+special election to fill the House vacancy in the capital district; and in
+the discussion of ways and means, and the setting of political pins which
+followed there was little food for sentiment.
+
+It was three weeks and more after Governor Marston's call summoning the
+Assembly for an investigative session. Kent had fought his way
+triumphantly through the special election to a seat in the House, aided
+and abetted manfully by Ormsby, Hildreth, and the entire Trans-Western
+influence and vote. And now men were beginning to say that without the
+tireless blows of the keen-witted, sharp-tongued young corporation lawyer,
+the junto might still have reasserted itself.
+
+But the House committee, of which Kent was the youngest member and the
+chairman, had proved incorruptible, and the day of the Gaston wolf-pack
+was over. Hendricks resigned, to escape a worse thing; Meigs came over to
+the majority with a show of heartiness that made Kent doubly watchful of
+him; heads fell to the right and left, until at the last there was left
+only one member of the original cabal to reckon with; the judicial tool of
+the capitol ring.
+
+Kent had hesitated when MacFarlane's name came up; and the judge never
+knew that he owed his escape from the inquisitorial House committee, and
+his permission to resign on the plea of broken health, to a young woman
+whom he had never seen.
+
+It was Elinor Brentwood who was his intercessor; and the occasion was the
+last day of the third week of the extra session--a Saturday afternoon and
+a legislative recess when Kent had borrowed Ormsby's auto-car, and had
+driven Elinor and Penelope out to Pentland Place to look at a house he was
+thinking of buying. For with means to indulge it, Kent's Gaston-bred mania
+for plunging in real estate had returned upon him with all the acuteness
+of a half-satisfied passion.
+
+They had gone all over the house and grounds with the caretaker, and when
+there was nothing more to see, Penelope had prevailed on the woman to open
+the Venetians in the music-room. There was a grand piano in the place of
+honor, presided over by a mechanical piano-player; and Penelope went into
+ecstasies of mockery.
+
+"Wait till I can find the music scrolls, and I'll hypnotize you," she said
+gleefully; and Kent and Elinor beat a hasty retreat to the wide entrance
+hall.
+
+"I don't quite understand it," was Elinor's comment, when they had put
+distance between themselves and Penelope's joyous grinding-out of a Wagner
+scroll. "It looks as if the owners had just walked out at a moment's
+notice."
+
+"They did," said Kent. "They went to Europe, I believe. And by the way; I
+think I have a souvenir here somewhere. Will you go up to the first
+landing of the stair and point your finger at that window?"
+
+She did it, wondering; and when he had the line of direction he knelt in
+the cushioned window-seat and began to probe with the blade of his
+pen-knife in a small round hole in the woodwork.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, coming down to stand beside him.
+
+"This." He had cut out a flattened bullet and was holding it up for her to
+see. "It was meant for me, and I've always had an idea that I heard it
+strike the woodwork."
+
+"For you? Were you ever here when the house was occupied?"
+
+"Yes, once; it is the Senator Duvall place. This is the window where I
+broke in."
+
+She nodded intelligence.
+
+"I know now why you are going to buy it. The senator is another of those
+whom you haven't forgiven."
+
+His laugh was a ready denial.
+
+"I have nothing against Duvall. He was one of Bucks' dupes, and he is
+paying the price. The property is to be sold at a forced sale, and it is a
+good investment."
+
+"Is that all it means to you? It is too fine to be hawked about as a thing
+to make money with. It's a splendidly ideal home--leaving out that thing
+that Penelope is quarreling with." And she made a feint of stopping her
+ears.
+
+He laughed again.
+
+"Ormsby says I ought to buy it, and marry and settle down."
+
+She took him seriously.
+
+"You don't need it. Miss Van Brock has a very lovely home of her own," she
+said soberly.
+
+It was at his tongue's end to tell the woman he loved how the woman he did
+not love had refused him, but he saved himself on the brink and said:
+
+"Why Miss Van Brock?"
+
+"Because she is vindictive, too, and----"
+
+"But I am not vindictive."
+
+"Yes, you are. Do you know anything about Judge MacFarlane's family
+affairs?"
+
+"A little. He has three daughters; one of them rather unhappily married, I
+believe."
+
+"Have you considered the cost to these three women if you make their
+father's name a byword in the city where they were born?"
+
+"He should have considered it," was the unmoved reply.
+
+"David!" she said; and he looked up quickly.
+
+"You want me to let him resign? It would be compounding a felony. He is a
+Judge, and he was bribed."
+
+She sat down beside him in the cushioned window seat and began to plead
+with him.
+
+"You must let him go," she insisted. "It is entirely in your hands as
+chairman of the House committee; the governor, himself, told me so. I know
+all you say about him is true; but he is old and wretched, with only a
+little while to live, at best."
+
+There was a curious little smile curling his lip when he answered her.
+
+"He has chosen a good advocate. It is quite like a man of his stamp to try
+to reach me through you."
+
+"David!" she said again. Then: "I really shouldn't know him if I were to
+see him."
+
+"Then why----" he began; but there was a love-light in the blue-gray eyes
+to set his heart afire. "You are doing this for me?" he said, trembling on
+the verge of things unutterable.
+
+"Yes. You don't know how it hurts me to see you growing hard and merciless
+as you climb higher and higher in the path you have marked out for
+yourself."
+
+"The path you have marked out for me," he corrected. "Do you remember our
+little talk over the embers of the fire in your sitting-room at home? I
+knew then that I had lost the love I might have won; but the desire to be
+the kind of leader you were describing was born in me at that moment. I
+haven't always been true to the ideal. I couldn't be, lacking the right to
+wear your colors on my heart----"
+
+"Don't!" she said. "I haven't been true to my ideals. I--I sold them,
+David!"
+
+She was in his arms when she said it, and the bachelor maid was quite lost
+in the woman.
+
+"I'll never believe that," he said loyally. "But if you did, we'll buy
+them back--together."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Penelope was good to them. It was a full half-hour before she professed
+herself satisfied with the mechanical piano-toy; and when she was through,
+she helped the woman caretaker to shut the Venetians with clangings that
+would have warned the most oblivious pair of lovers.
+
+And afterward, when they were free of the house, she ran ahead to the
+waiting auto-car, leaving Kent and Elinor to follow at a snail's pace down
+the leaf-covered walk to the gate. There was a cedar hedge to mark the
+sidewalk boundary, and while it still screened them Kent bent quickly to
+the upturned face of happiness.
+
+"One more," he pleaded; and when he had it: "Do you know now, dearest, why
+I brought you here to-day?"
+
+She nodded joyously.
+
+"It is the sweetest old place. And, David, dear; we'll bring our
+ideals--all of them; and it shall be your haven when the storms beat."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grafters, by Francis Lynde
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