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.