delivery, himself drove in search of the other; but Wooddrop was out
somewhere in his wide holdings; the superintendent could not be located.
A sense of an implacable fatality hung over him; every chance turned
against him, mocked the insecurity of his boasted position, deepened the
abyss waiting for his suspended fall.
He returned finally, baffled and weary, to his house; yet still tense
with the spirit of angry combat. A species of fatalism now enveloped him
in the conviction that he had reached the zenith of his misfortunes; if
he could survive the present day.... A stableman met him at the veranda.
“Mrs. Hulings has gone,” the servant told him. “A man came looking for
you. It seems they had Wooddrop's manager back in the Mills tract and
were going to string him up. But you couldn't be found. Mrs. Hulings,
she went to stop it.”
An inky cloud floated nauseously before his eyes—not himself alone, but
Gisela, dragged into the dark whirlpool gathered about his destiny! He
was momentarily stunned, with twitching hands and a riven, haggard face,
remembering the sodden brutality of the men he had seen in the smoke of
charring, isolated stacks; and then a sharp energy seized him.
“How long back?” Hulings demanded.
“An hour or more, perhaps a couple.”
Alexander raged at the mischance that had sent Gisela on such an errand.
Nothing, he felt, with Wooddrop's manager secured, would halt the
charcoal burners' revenge of Wishon's death. The rain now beat down in a
heavy diagonal pour, and twilight was gathering.
“We must go at once for Mrs. Hulings,” he said. Then he saw Gisela
approaching, accompanied by a small knot of men. She walked directly up
to him, her crinoline soggy with rain, her hair plastered on her brow;
but her deathly pallor drove everything else from his observation. She
shuddered slowly, her skirt dripping ceaselessly about her on the sod.
“I was too late!” she said in a dull voice. “They had done it!”
She covered her eyes, moved back from the men beside her, from him.
“Swinging a little... all alone! So sudden—there, before me!” A violent
shivering seized her.
“Come,” Alexander Hulings said hoarsely; “you must get out of the wet.
Warm things. Immediately!”
He called imperatively for Gisela's maid, and together they assisted her
up to her room. Above, Gisela had a long, violent chill; and he sent a
wagon for the doctor at Harmony.
The doctor arrived, and mounted the stairs; but, half an hour later,
he would say little. Alexander Hulings commanded him to remain in the
house. The lines deepened momentarily on the former's countenance; he
saw himself unexpectedly in a shadowy pier glass, and stood for a long
while subconsciously surveying the lean, grizzled countenance that
followed his gaze out of the immaterial depths. “Alexander Hulings,” he
said aloud, in a tormented mockery; “the master of—of life!” He was busy
with the local marshal when the doctor summoned him from the office.
“Your wife,” the other curtly informed him, “has developed pneumonia.”
Hulings steadied himself with a hand against a wall.
“Pneumonia!” he repeated, to no one in particular. “Send again for John
Wooddrop.”
He was seated, a narrow, rigid figure, waiting for the older man, in the
midst of gorgeous upholstery. Two facts hammered with equal persistence
on his numbed brain: one that all his projects, his dream of power, of
iron, now approached ruin, and the other that Gisela had pneumonia.
It was a dreadful thing that she had come on in the Mills tract! The
Columbus System must triumphantly absorb all that he had, that he was to
be. Gisela had been chilled to the bone; pneumonia! It became difficult
and then impossible to distinguish one from the other—Gisela and the
iron were inexplicably welded in the poised catastrophe of his ambition.
Alexander Hulings rose, his thin lips pinched, his eyes mere sparks,
his body tense, as if he were confronting the embodied force that had
checked him. He stood upright, so still that he might have been cast
in the metal that had formed his vision of power, holding an unquailing
mien. His inextinguishable pride cloaked him in a final contempt for all
that life, that fate, might do. Then his rigidity was assaulted by John
Wooddrop's heavy and hurried entrance into the room.
Hulings briefly repeated the doctor's pronouncement Wooddrop's face was
darkly pouched, his unremoved hat a mere wet film, and he left muddy
exact footprints wherever he stepped on the velvet carpet.
“By heaven!” he quavered, his arms upraised.
“If between us we have killed her——” His voice abruptly expired.
As Alexander Hulings watched him the old man's countenance grew livid,
his jaw dropped; he was at the point of falling. He gasped, his
hands beating the air; then the unnatural color receded, words became
distinguishable: “Gisela!... Never be forgiven! Hellish!” It was as if
Death had touched John Wooddrop on the shoulder, dragging a scarifying
hand across his face, and then briefly, capriciously, withdrawn.
“Hulings! Hulings,” he articulated, sinking weakly on a chair, “we
must save her. And, anyhow, God knows we were blind!” He peered out
of suffused rheumy eyes at Alexander, appalling in his sudden
disintegration under shock and the weight of his years. “I'm done!”
he said tremulously. “And there's a good bit to see to—patent lawyer
tomorrow, and English shipments. Swore I'd keep you from it.” He held
out a hand, “But there's Gisela, brought down between us now, and—and
iron's colder than a daughter, a wife. We'd best cover up the past quick
as we can!”
At the instant of grasping John Wooddrop's hand Alexander Hulings'
inchoate emotion shifted to a vast realization, blotting out all else
from his mind. In the control of the immense Wooddrop resources he was
beyond, above, all competition, all danger. What he had fought for,
persistently dreamed, had at last come about—he was the greatest
Ironmaster of the state!