or say. But he was such a splendid fighter that I might have known.
"I heard, no longer ago than this afternoon, that you were not--that
your husband was still living," he said, speaking very gently. "I didn't
believe it--not fully--though I saw that there might easily be room for
the belief. It makes no difference, Sheila. You are my friend, and you
are blameless. But before we go any farther I want you to believe that I
wouldn't have been brutal enough to give you that bit of paper if I had
remotely suspected that Collingwood was the man."
She didn't make any answer to that, and after a while he said:
"Having told me so much, can't you tell me a little more?"
"There isn't much to tell, and even the little is commonplace and--and
disgraceful," she replied, with a touch of weariness that was fairly
heart-breaking. "Don't ask me why we were married; I can't explain that,
simply because I don't know, myself. It was arranged between the two
families, and I suppose Howie and I always took it for granted. I can't
even plead ignorance, for I have known him all my life."
"Go on," said the boss, still speaking as gently as a brother might
have.
"Howie was a spoiled child, an only son, and he is a spoiled man. I
stood it as long as I could--I hope you will believe that. But there are
some things that a woman cannot stand, and----"
"I know," he broke in. "So you came out here to be free."
"It is four years since we have lived together," she went on, "and for a
long time I hoped he would never find out where I was. There was no
divorce: I couldn't endure the thought of the publicity and the--the
disgrace. When I came here to Cousin Basil's there was no attempt made
to hide the facts; or at least the one chief fact that I was a married
woman. But on the other hand, I had taken my mother's name, and only
Cousin Basil and his wife knew that I was not what perhaps every one
else took me to be,--a widow with a dead husband instead of a living
one."
"Did Collingwood try to find you?"
"No, I think not. But when he was here last spring with his Uncle
Breckenridge he saw me and found out that I was living here with Cousin
Basil."
"Did he try to persecute you?"
"No, not then. I was afraid of only one thing: that he might drink too
much and--and talk. Part of the fear was realized. He saw me that Sunday
night in the Bullard. That was why he was trying to fight the hotel
people--because they wouldn't let him come up-stairs. I saw what you
did, and I was sorry. I couldn't help feeling that in some way it would
prove to be the beginning of a tragedy."
"You saw no more of him then?"
"No; I neither saw him nor heard of him until about a month ago when he
came west with a man named Bullock--a New York attorney. I didn't know
why he came, but I thought it was to annoy me."
"And he has annoyed you?"
"Until this night he has never missed an opportunity of doing so when he
could dodge Cousin Basil. Caring nothing for me himself, he has taken
violent exceptions to my friendship with you and with Upton Van Britt,
though that is chiefly when he has been drinking too much. It was his
taunting boast yesterday at the capital that led me to telegraph Cousin
Basil and Upton Van Britt about your trip to Strathcona. He knew that
you were going to the gold camp, and he declared to me that you'd never
come back alive."
"But to-night," the boss persisted. "What did he want to-night?"
"He wanted to--to use me. He said that he had 'put something across' for
his uncle, that he had gotten into trouble for it, and that--to use his
own phrase again, you were the man who would try to 'get his goat.'"
"And his object in telling you this?"
"Was entirely worthy of the man. He asked me, or rather I should say,
commanded me, to 'choke you off.' And, of course, he added the insult.
He said I was the one who could do it."
The boss had gone to tramping again and when he stopped to face her I
could see that he had threshed his way around to some sort of a
conclusion.
"Without intending to, you have tied my hands," he said gravely. "I
wasn't meaning to spare Collingwood if there were any way in which I
could use him as a club to knock Hatch out of the game."
"But now you won't use him?"
"You might justly write me down as a pretty poor friend of yours if I
should--after what you have told me."
"I haven't asked you to spare him."
"No, I know you haven't. But the fact remains that he is your husband.
I----"
The interruption was the opening and closing of the front door and the
heavy tread of the major in the hall. In a flash Mrs. Sheila was up and
getting ready to vanish through the door that led to the dining-room.
With her hand on the door-knob she shot a quick question at the boss.
"How much will you tell Cousin Basil?"
"Nothing of what you have told me."
"Thank you," she whispered back; "you are as big in your friendship as
you are in other ways." And with that she was gone.
It was right along in the same half-minute, while the boss was standing
with his back to the fire and the major was going in to talk to him,
that I lost Maisie Ann. I don't know where she went, or how. She had let
go of my wrist, and when I groped for her she was gone. Since I didn't
see any good reason why I should stay and spy upon the boss and the
major, I slipped out to the hall and curled up on the big settee beyond
the coat rack; curled up, and after listening a while to the drone of
voices in the farther room, went to sleep.
It was away deep in the night when the boss took hold of me and shook me
awake. The long talk was just getting itself finished, and the major had
come to the door with his guest.
"We must manage to pull Collingwood out of it in some way," the major
was saying. "I don't love the damn' scoundrel any betteh than you do,
Graham; but thah's a reason--a fam'ly reason, as you might say." Then he
switched off quickly. "You haven't asked me yet why I ran away from home
this evenin' when I was expecting you."
"No," said the boss. "Sheila told me that you had a telephone call to
the Bullard."
The old Kentuckian chuckled.
"Yes, suh; and you'd neveh guess in a thousand yeahs who sent the call,
or what was wanted. It was ouh friend Hatch, and no otheh. And he had
the face to offeh me ten thousand dollahs a yeah to act as consulting
counsel for him against the railroad company!"
"Of course you accepted," said the boss, meaning just the opposite.
The major chuckled again. "I talked with him long enough to find out
about where he stood. He thinks he's got you by the neck, but, like most
men of his breed, he's a paltry coward, suh, at heart."
The boss laughed. "What is he afraid of?"
"He's afraid of his life. He told me, with his eyes buggin' out, that
thah was one man heah in Portal City who would kill him to get
possession of certain papehs that were locked up in the cash vault of
the Security National."
The boss was pulling on his gloves.
"I didn't give him any reason to think that I was anxious to murder
him," he said.
"Oh, no, my deah boy; it isn't you, at all. It's Howie Collingwood.
Thah's where we land afteh all is said and done. Youh hands are tied,
and we've got this heah young maniac to deal with. If Collingwood gets
about three fingehs of red likkeh under his belt, why, thah's one murder
in prospect. And if Hatch has any reason to think that you can still get
the underholt on him, why, thah's another. I'm glad you've seen fit to
take Ripley's advice at last, and got you a body-guard."
"What's that?" queried the boss. But the query was answered a minute
later when we hit the sidewalk for the tramp back to town and Tarbell
fell in to walk three steps behind us all the way to the door of the
railroad club.
It sure did look as if things were just about as bad as they could ever
be, now. Hatch once more on top, the whole bottom knocked out of the
railroad experiment, our good name for political honesty gone
glimmering, and, worst of all, perhaps, the boss's big heart broken
right in two over those four little words that nothing could ever rub
out--"he is my husband." I didn't wonder that the boss said never a word
in all that long walk down-town, or that he forgot to tell me good-night
when he locked himself up in his room at the club.
XXVI
The Dipsomaniac
In a day when bunched money, however arrogant it may be, has been taught
to go sort of softly, the Hatch people were careful not to make any
public announcement of the things they were doing or going to do. But
bad news has wings of its own. Mr. Norcross was still in the midst of
his mail dictation to me the morning after the bottom--all the different
bottoms--fell out, when Mr. Hornack came bulging in.
"What's all this fire-alarm that's been sprung about a new elevator
trust?" he demanded, chewing on his cigar as if it were something he
were trying to eat. "It's all over town that C. S. & W. has been
secretly reorganized, with the Hatch crowd in control. I'm having a
perfect cyclone of telephone calls asking what, and how, and why."
The boss's reply ignored the details. "We're in for it again," he
announced briefly. "The local companies couldn't hold on to a good thing
when they had it. The stock has been swept up, first into little heaps,
and then into big ones, and now the Hatch people have forced a practical
consolidation."
"Is that the fact?--or only the way you are doping it out?" queried the
traffic manager.
"It is the fact. Hatch came here last night to tell me about it; also,
to tell me where we were to get off."
Hornack bit off a piece of the chewed cigar and took a fresh hold on it.
"Does he think for one holy half minute that we're going to sit down
quietly and let him undo all the good work that's been done?" he rasped.
"He does--just that. He's putting us in the nine-hole, Hornack, and up
to the present moment I haven't found the way to climb out of it."
"But the ground leases?" Hornack began. "Why can't we pull them on him?"
"We might, if we hadn't been shot dead in our tracks by the very men who
ought to be backing us to win," said the boss soberly. And then he went
on to tell about the new grip Hatch had on us.
Of course, Hornack blew up at that, and what he said wasn't for
publication. For a minute or so the air of the office was blue. When he
got down to common, ordinary English again he was saying, between
cusses: "But you can't let it stand at that, Norcross; you simply
_can't_!"
"I don't intend to," was the even-toned rejoinder. "But anything we can
do will always lack the element of finality, Hornack, while Wall Street
owns us. I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: the only
hope for the public service corporation to-day lies in a distribution of
its securities among the people it actually serves."
Hornack's teeth met in the middle of the chewed cigar.
"That's excellent logic--bully good logic, if anybody should ask you!
But we're fighting a condition, not a theory. Nobody wants P. S. L.
Common even at thirty-two. You wouldn't advise your worst enemy to buy
it at that figure."
"I don't know," said the boss, kind of musingly. "You're forgetting the
water that's been put into it from time to time by the speculators and
reorganizers; there has been a good deal of that, first and last.
Nevertheless, value for value, you know, and I know, that the property
is worth more than thirty-two, including the bonds. What I mean is that
if anybody would buy the control at that figure,--the control, mind you,
and not merely a minority--and handle the road purely as a
dividend-earning business proposition, he wouldn't lose money; he'd make
money--a lot of it."
"All of which doesn't get us anywhere in the present pinch," returned
the traffic manager. "I suppose we'll have to wait until Hatch makes his
first move, and I've still got fight enough left in me to hope that
he'll make it suddenly. Punch the button for me if anything new
develops. I'm going back to swing on to my telephone."
Following this talk with Hornack there was a try-out with Billoughby and
Juneman, but as this three-cornered conference was held in the private
room of the suite, I don't know what was said. A little farther along,
when the boss was once more whittling at the dictation, Mr. Van Britt
strolled in. Mr. Norcross told me to take my bunch of notes to May and
then he gave Mr. Van Britt his inning, starting off with: "Well, how is
the general superintendent this fine morning?"
Mr. Van Britt wrinkled his nose.
"The general superintendent is wondering, one more time, why under the
starry heavens he is out here in this country that God has forgotten,
scrapping for a living on this one-horse railroad of yours when he might
be in good little old New York, living easy and clipping coupons in the
safety-deposit room of a Broad Street bank."
The boss laughed at that, and I'm telling you right now that I was glad
to know that he was still able to laugh.
"You've never seen the day when you wanted to renege, Upton, and you
know it," he hit back. "Think of the perfectly good technical education
you were wasting when I took hold of you and jerked you out here."
"Huh!" said our millionaire; "I've got other things to think of. I've
just had two enginemen on the carpet for running over an old ranchman's
pet cow. They said they couldn't help it; but I told them that under the
'public-be-pleased' policy, they'd got to help it."
Again the boss chuckled. "I believe you'd joke at your own funeral,
Upton. You didn't come here to tell me about the ranchman's pet cow."
"Not exactly. I came to tell you that Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is
due to have a strike on its hands. The management--which seems to have
got itself consolidated in some way--shot out a lot of new bosses all
along the line on the through train last night, and this morning the
entire works, elevators, packeries, coal yards, lumber millers, and
everything, are posted with notices of a blanket cut in wages; twenty
per cent, flat, for everybody. The news has been trickling in over the
wires all morning; and the last word is that a general strike of all C.
S. & W. employees will go on at noon to-morrow."
"That is move number one," said the boss. And then: "You have heard that
the Hatch people have reached out and taken in the C. S. & W.?"
"Hornack was telling me something about it; yes."
"It is true; and the fight is on. You see what Hatch is doing. At one
stroke he gets rid of all the local employees of C. S. & W., who have
been drawing good pay and who might make trouble for him a little later
on, and fills their places with strike-breakers who have no local
sympathizers."
"But there will be another result which he may not have counted upon,"
Mr. Van Britt put in. "The blanket cut serves notice upon everybody that
once more the old strong-arm monopoly is in the saddle. The newspapers
will tell us about it to-morrow morning. Also, a good many of them will
be asking us what _we_ are going to do about it; whether we are going to
fight the new monopoly as we did in the old, or stand in with the graft,
as our predecessors did."
"We needn't go over that ground again--you and I, Upton," said Mr.
Norcross. "You know where I stand. But the conditions have changed. We
have been knifed in the back." And with that he gave the stocky little
operating chief a crisp outline of the new situation precipitated by the
Dunton-Collingwood political bribery.
Mr. Van Britt took it quietly, as he did most things, sitting with his
hands in his pockets and smiling blandly where Hornack had exploded in
wrathful profanity. At the wind-up he said:
"Old Uncle Breckenridge is one too many for you, Graham. You can't stand
the gaff--this new gaff of Hatch's; and neither can you go before the
people as the accuser of your president--and hope to hold your job. The
one thing for you to do is to lock up your office and walk out."
"Upton, if I thought you meant that--but I never know when to take you
seriously."
"The two enginemen who ran over the ranchman's pet cow had no such
difficulty, I assure you. And isn't it good advice? You know, as well as
I do, that Chadwick is holding you here by main strength; that you can
never accomplish anything permanent while Dunton and his cronies are at
the steering-wheel. It might be different if you had the local backing
of your constituency--the people served by the Short Line. But you
haven't that; up to date, the people are merely interested spectators."
"Go on," said the boss, frowning again.
"They have a stake in the game--the biggest of the stakes, as a matter
of fact--but it isn't sufficiently apparent to make them climb in and
fight for you. They are saying, with a good bit of reason, that, after
all is said and done, Big Money--Wall Street--still has the call, and
any twenty-four hours may see the whole thing slump back into graft and
crooked politics."
"It is so true that you might be reading it out of a book," was the
boss's comment. And then: "What's the answer?"
Mr. Van Britt shook his head. "I don't know. If you had money enough to
buy the voting control in P. S. L. you might get somewhere; but as it
is, you're like a cat in Hades without claws."
"Tell me," said Mr. Norcross, after a little pause: "You're a native New
Yorker: do you know this man Collingwood?"
"Only by hearsay. He is what our English friends call a 'blooming
bounder'; fast yachts, fast motor-cars, the fast set generally. It's a
pretty bad case of money-spoil, I fancy. They say he wasn't always a
total loss."
"Did you ever hear that he was married?"
"Oh, yes; he married a Kentucky girl some years ago: I don't remember
her name. They say she stood him for about six months and then dropped
out. I suppose he needs killing for that."
At this the boss went a step farther, saying: "He does, indeed, Upton. I
happen to know the young woman."
That was when Mr. Van Britt fired his own little bomb-shell. "So do I,"
he answered quietly.
"But you said you had forgotten her name!"
"So I have--her married name. And what's more, I mean to keep on
forgetting it."
There was no mistake about the boss's frown this time.
"That won't do, Upton," he said, kind of warningly.
"It will do well enough for the present. I'd marry her to-morrow,
Graham, if she were free, and there were no other obstacles. Unhappily,
there are two--besides the small legal difficulty; she doesn't care for
my money--having a little of her own; and she happens to be in love with
the other fellow."
I guess the boss was remembering what Mrs. Sheila had told him in that
confidence before the back-parlor fire, about its being all off between
her and Collingwood, for he said: "I think you are mistaken as to that
last."
"No, I'm not mistaken. But that's neither here nor there. Neither you
nor I can send Collingwood to the penitentiary--that's a cinch.
Wherefore, I'm advising you to quit, walk out, jump the job."
At that the boss took a fresh brace, righting his swing chair with a
snap.
"You know very little about me, Upton, if you think I'm going to throw
up my hands now, when the real pinch has come. A while back I might have
done it, but now I'll fight until I'm permanently killed. I have a
scheme--if it could only be worked. But it can't be worked on a rising
market. I suppose you have seen the morning's quotations. By some trick
or other, the Dunton people are boosting the stock again. It went up
three points yesterday."
Mr. Van Britt grinned. "They're discounting the effect of this little
political deal--which will at least rope your reform scheme down, if it
doesn't do anything else. What you need is a good, old-fashioned
cataclysm of some sort; something that would fairly knock the tar out of
P. S. L. securities and send them skittering down the toboggan slide in
spite of anything Uncle Breckenridge could do to stop them; down to
where they could be safely and profitably picked up by the dear public.
Unfortunately, those things don't happen outside of the story books. If
they did, if the earthquake should happen along our way just now, I
don't know but I'd be disloyal enough to get out and help it shake
things up a bit."
After Mr. Van Britt had gone, the boss put in the remainder of the day
like a workingman, skipping the noon luncheon as he sometimes did when
the work drive was extra heavy. Meanwhile, as you'd suppose, rumor was
plentifully busy, on the railroad, and also in town.
By noon it was well understood that there had been a radical change in
the management of C. S. & W., and that there was going to be a general
strike in answer to the slashing cut in wages. I slipped up-town to get
a bite while Fred May was spelling me at the dictation desk, and I heard
some of the talk. It was pretty straight, most of it--which shows how
useless it is to try to keep any business secrets, nowadays.
For example: the three men at my table in the Bullard grill-room--they
didn't know me or who I was--knew that a council of war had been called
in the railroad headquarters, and that Ripley had been pulled in by wire
from Lesterburg, and that we were rushing around hurriedly to provide
storage room for the wheat shippers in case of a tie-up, and that we
were arranging to distribute railroad company coal in case the tie-up
should bring on a fuel famine--knew all these things and talked about
them.
They were facts, as far as they went--these things. The boss hadn't been
idle during the forenoon, and he kept up the drive straight through to
quitting time. Word was brought in during the afternoon by Tarbell that
the Hatch people were wiring the Kansas City and Omaha employment
agencies and placing hurry orders for strike-breakers. The boss's answer
to this was a peremptory wire to our passenger agents at both points to
make no rate concessions whatever, of any kind, for the transportation
of laborers under contract. It was a shrewd little knock. Labor of that
kind is mighty hard to move unless it can get free transportation or a
low rate of fare, and I could see that Mr. Norcross was hoping to keep
the strike-breakers away.
When six o'clock came, the boss asked May to stay and keep the office
open while I could go down-stairs and get my dinner in the station
restaurant, and he went off up-town--to the club, I suppose. After I'd
had my bite, I let May go. Everything was moving along all right, so far
as anybody could see. We had five extra fuel trains loading at the
company's chutes at Coalville, and the despatcher was instructed to work
them out on the line during the night, distributing them to the towns
that had reported shortages. They were not to be turned over to the
regular coal yards; they were to be side-tracked and held for
emergencies.
Mr. Norcross came back about eight o'clock, and I gave him my report of
how things were going on the line. A little later Mr. Cantrell dropped
in, and there was a quiet talk about the situation, and what it was
likely to develop. The _Mountaineer_ editor was given all the facts,
except the one big one about Hatch's death-grip on us, and in turn Mr.
Cantrell promised the help of his paper to the last ditch--though, of
course, he had no idea of how deep that last ditch was going to be. I
had a lot of filing and indexing to do, and I kept at work while they
were talking, wondering all the time if the boss would venture to tell
the editor about the depth of that "last ditch." He didn't. I guess he
thought he wouldn't until he had to.
It was pretty nearly nine o'clock when the editor went away, and Mr.
Norcross was just saying to me that he guessed we'd better knock off for
the night, when we both heard a step in May's room. A second later the
door was pushed open and a man came in, making for the nearest chair and
flinging himself into it as if he'd reached the limit. It was
Collingwood. He was chewing on a dead cigar and his face was like the
face of a corpse. But he was sober.
Naturally, I supposed he had come to make trouble with the boss on Mrs.
Sheila's account, and I quietly edged open the drawer of my desk where I
kept Fred May's automatic, so as to be ready. He didn't waste much time.
"I saw you as I was coming away from Kendrick's last night," he began,
with a bickering rasp in his voice. "Did you go up against the gun I had
loaded for you?"
Mr. Norcross cut straight through to the bottom of that little
complication at a single stroke.
"What Mrs. Collingwood said to me, or what I said to her, can have no
possible bearing upon anything that you may have to say to me, or that I
can consent to listen to, Mr. Collingwood."
The derelict sat up in his chair.
"But you've got to keep hands off, just the same; at Kendrick's, and in
this other business, too. If you don't, there is going to be blood on
the moon! Get me?"