The intruder wheeled at the hoof-beats and waited. Purpling with rage,
Shelby thrust the cob's nozzle fairly in Graves's face.
"You're a damned spy," he taunted.
Graves went pale, but his jaw set.
"You know better, Shelby," he answered, without passion. "I am here
openly. I came before the quarry shut down for the night, as your men
will tell you."
"You're a spy," repeated Shelby, fingering his whip. "Come how or when,
you're a spy. I know your back-door tactics. You sly into other men's
private business, as you're trying to sly into politics."
"I care nothing for any private business of yours which doesn't besmirch
your public character."
"Besmirch!" Shelby pounced upon the word. "I know your kidney--you pure
souls who shirk jury duty and whine down taxes."
Graves backed from the nervous whip.
"I want no words with you," he said.
"I dare say; but you'll have them." He reined the cob to block Graves's
further retreat, forcing him well upon the string-piece of the dock.
"You're here to smell out canal scandals," he charged. "You want to know
what became of the marketable stone that was taken from the canal prism.
You'll get your wish right here and now. I took that stone, my pattern
of civic virtue; sold it, my pink of reformers. You needn't have screwed
Jap Hinchey for that knowledge. I would have told you the truth any
time, and much good may it do you. Are you ass enough to believe that
the contractors went outside their specifications to dispose of the
spoils banks to my company? They had their warrant from Albany in black
and white. Every act was within the law."
"The more shame upon Albany and the law; it is the letter of the law
which shelters you."
Shelby rasped a laugh.
"I know something of the spirit of laws."
"I doubt not. You've helped make enough disreputable legislation to
qualify an expert."
"What right has a dilettante like you to sit in judgment?" he demanded,
the other's barb rankling none the less that he had invited it. "You
have no notion of just political expediency; no notion even of politics
with which you meddle. Politics isn't book knowledge; it's flesh and
blood fact. Party fealty means nothing to you. You've not voted a
straight ticket twice in your life."
"I know where that shoe pinches," retorted Graves. "You mean I've
consistently neglected to vote for you. Somehow I never could swallow
your assumption of divine right to hold office all the time."
Shelby's fingers knotted round his whip-handle.
"I'd like to trounce you," he menaced. "It's a hiding you need."
"For presuming to run against you? Let me make it plain that I'm not to
be intimidated by you or any of your creatures."
"I'd like to trounce you," repeated Shelby, hoarsely, beside himself with
the gadfly inquisition of the past few days. "I'm sick of your
pharisaical ways. I bottom your lofty motives well enough. Jealousy
goaded you into politics. You're a reformer because the heiress wanted
none of you. If Ruth Temple--"
Graves wrenched the whip from Shelby's grasp, and struck with all his
might. The warded blow spent itself on the pommel of the saddle.
"Stung, eh?" Shelby leaped from his stirrups and closed with him. The
cob took fright at the reeling men and pounded off up the tow-path toward
the town.
Then another horse loomed of a sudden from out the dusk, and Ruth herself
rode straight upon them, enforcing a separation.
"How dare you drag my name into a low political quarrel--either of you?"
No one answered her. "Give _me_ the whip." Shelby, who had regained it,
obeyed without a word. Ruth flung it far into the canal. "Now if you
will be brutes, use brutes' weapons." Wherewith she turned an indignant
back and galloped an exit from the scene as spirited as her entrance.
"You knew she was there," accused Graves.
"I left her in the road, damn you. I couldn't know she had seen."
Standing on the dock's sheer edge, they glowered into one another's eyes
through the fading twilight, the great steam cranes behind flinging out
giant arms over the stone heaps, the black water below glancing with
fitful gleams of steel and copper from the sunset's last saffron
afterglow. The yellow headlight of a low-lying grain boat stole nearer,
unheeded till the straining mules toiled by.
"I don't know what keeps me from--"
Shelby's lips were tardy of framing what his heart lusted.
"Fear, perhaps."
"If you think that, then--"
A rain of oaths from the driver warned them too late of the trailing
tow-line. They tripped together, and in an embrace of self-preservation
together fell into the cool still waters which ever draw unruffled,
though their banks smoulder with passion and political intrigue from the
Niagara to the Hudson.
Shelby rose first, half-strangled, and laid hold upon the wall. Still
cursing fluently, the driver pulled him to the string-piece, and both men
peered out over the watery blackness, now cut with a widening shaft of
light from the boat's lantern. Graves seemed to have vanished utterly,
and Shelby made the banks echo with his name, but the canal returned no
answer. The man was now as ready to save as a moment since he had been
ready to destroy, but before he could slip again into the water, the boat
glided past, discovering Graves in dim silhouette against the gray
timbers, swimming at ease.
With a parting curse, indicative of relief, the driver set off down the
tow-path after his mules, while Shelby waited on the brink till the boat
went by, intending aid if the swimmer's strength should fail. But Graves
was of no mind to cause him the lifting of a finger, and to the watcher's
bewilderment cut directly behind the great rudder into the swirling wake,
headed for the heel-path, which he attained with a dozen vigorous
strokes, and clambering the sloping embankment, disappeared in a clump of
willows.
The autumn frosts nip Tuscarora betimes, but Shelby sat staring in his
sodden clothes, till he fathomed his rival's motive, and chattered forth
a laugh. Then he hurried across the dock to the little tin-roofed office
of the Eureka. He was without a key, but he rummaged a pick from one of
the neighboring sheds, forced the staple of the padlock, and, popping
into the oven warmth of the cabin, mended the fire in the tiny sheet-iron
stove. His first precaution was to drain his pocket flask, which had
somehow come through unscathed, and, as he peeled away his clinging
garments in the flickering light, he telephoned the Tuscarora House for a
change of clothing. In the reflective half-hour before the coming of the
messenger he felt a genuine regret that Graves had gone his own way. The
affair had dropped already into humorous perspective, and it seemed to
him that, had they stood side by side in this cabin, every barrier must
have fallen and the outcome been wholly good.
Nature's reaction from the too tense hours of that crowded day was at its
utmost swing as he gained his hotel room and smoothed the roughness of
his quarry toilet. The familiar chamber revolted him; its warring colors
jarred; the nymphs of his favorite picture were devoid of blandishment.
Nor did his cronies of below stairs attract, and the liquor he had taken
left him no appetite for solid food. He craved nothing so much as rest
and human sympathy.
Mrs. Hilliard was at home.
"You never fail when I need you," she said, as Shelby couched his jaded
body in the cosy library before an open fire. "Joe is always out, of
course. I don't mind that--now. Milicent too is gone to-night,--a
children's party. I've been lonely--depressed. Since you came--ah,
well, see for yourself what I am."
A maudlin self-pity, born of alcohol, dimmed Shelby's eyes.
"It's like a home to me," he confessed, his voice uncertain. "It's like
a home."
"And some call you hard!" Mrs. Hilliard extended both plump hands to
him. "How they misjudge you."
"Everybody misjudges me, Cora," Shelby declared, not backward in manual
demonstration himself; "everybody but you."
The lady released herself adroitly, and fluttered the music at a piano
just beyond the half-drawn portiere of the adjoining room.
"Shall I play?" she asked.
Shelby nodded like a sultan from his cushions.
"Ragtime," he directed. "Something with a tune." The other woman had
surfeited him with classicalities.
He built air castles as he watched and listened; fabrics furnished after
the manner of the Hilliard home and peopled by two kindred souls. If
this insidious luxury were his--the warmth, ease, leisure, Cora! He
considered the turn of her neck, her profile, the famous shoulders, now
clothed yet not concealed. She was handsome still; ripe, but not
over-ripe, ambitious, capable. They were singularly congenial, he and
she. He could have blundered worse than in marrying her, had not burly
Joe forestalled. _He_--inappreciative hulk!--was no fit mate for her.
She needed sympathy, cooeperation, the fellowship of her mind's true
complement: in fine, himself. If the other woman should not--if Joe--!
He clipped the revery of its conclusion.
In that evening's long intimacy--how long or how intimate neither
realized till afterward--the man bared his financial necessity.
"God knows why I blab this," he ended. "I've told nobody else the whole
truth, not even Bowers."
She lagged short of his meaning at first.
"But you'll have plenty in time," she said. "There will be your
congressional salary and all the new opportunities."
"Without money I may never draw that salary."
"You don't mean you'll fail! You don't mean that, Ross?"
He bowed gravely.
"But it's impossible. Why, everybody will vote for you--almost
everybody. Joe alone will give you two hundred votes."
"It will require more than Little Poland's good-will to elect me," he
smiled grimly.
"You must _buy_ votes?"
"Yes."
"And you have nothing?"
"At this moment I haven't enough ready cash to give me a decent burial."
"Don't speak like that." She rose impulsively, and unlocked a cabinet in
the chimneypiece. "Here is a little--not much--a hundred dollars
perhaps. I want you to take it; it's mine--some of my allowance. I want
to give it to the party. And there's more. I've a mortgage--my very
own. You shall have that too--for the party."
Shelby leaped to his feet as she thrust the bills in his hands.
"My God, Cora," he cried, "I can't take this--your pin money!"
She caught the notes from his protesting fingers and forced them into his
nearest pocket.
"You shall," she pleaded; "you shall--for the party."
He seized her hands and bent to meet her eyes.
"Cora, Cora," he whispered hoarsely, "you're not doing this for the
party! It's not for the party! It's for me, Cora, for me--"
"Such a nice party--party--" A fragment of Milicent's treble good nights
drifted in from the sidewalk like an echo.