Chapter 16

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.

XXV

DEAD WATER AND QUICK

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."