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.