There was a crush in the ample mansion in Alameda Square, as there always was at Miss Van Brock's "open evenings," and when Kent came down from the cloakroom he had to inch his way by littles through the crowded reception-parlors in the search for the Brentwood party. It was unsuccessful at first; but later, catching a glimpse of Elinor at the piano, and another of Penelope inducting an up-country legislator into the mysteries of social small-talk, he breathed freer. His haphazard guess had hit the mark, and the finding of Ormsby was now only a question of moments.

It was Miss Van Brock herself who told him where to look for the club-man—though not at his first asking.

"You did come, then," she said, giving him her hand with a frank little smile of welcome. "Some one said you were not going to be frivolous any more, and I wondered if you would take it out on me. Have you been at the night session?"

"Yes; at what you and your frivolities have left of it. A good third of the Solons seem to be sitting in permanence in Alameda Square."

"'Solons'," she repeated. "That recalls Editor Brownlo's little joke—only he didn't mean it. He wrote of them as 'Solons,' but the printer got it 'solans'. The member from Caliente read the article and the word stuck in his mind. In an unhappy hour he asked Colonel Mack's boy—Harry, the irrepressible, you know—to look it up for him. Harry did it, and of course took the most public occasion he could find to hand in his answer. 'It's geese, Mr. Hackett!' he announced triumphantly; and after we were all through laughing at him the member from the warm place turned it just as neatly as a veteran. 'Well, I'm Hackett,' he said."

David Kent laughed, as he was in duty bound, but he still had Ormsby on his mind.

"I see you have Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters here: can you tell me where I can find Mr. Brookes Ormsby?"

"I suppose I could if I should try. But you mustn't hurry me. There is a vacant corner in that davenport beyond the piano: please put me there and fetch me an ice. I'll wait for you."

He did as he was bidden, and when she was served he stood over her, wondering, as other men had wondered, what was the precise secret of her charm. Loring had told him Miss Van Brock's story. She was southern born, the only child of a somewhat ill-considered match between a young California lawyer, wire-pulling in the national capital in the interest of the Central Pacific Railroad, and a Virginia belle tasting the delights of her first winter in Washington.

Later, the young lawyer's state, or his employers, had sent him to Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of frank commercialism. Inheriting her mother's rare beauty of face and form, and uniting with it a sympathetic gift in grasp of detail, political and other, she soon became her father's confidante and loyal partizan, taking the place, as a daughter might, of the ambitious young wife and mother, who had set her heart on seeing the Van Brock name on the roll of the United States Senate.

Rensselaer Van Brock had died before the senatorial dream could be realized, but not before he had made a sufficient number of lucky investments to leave his daughter the arbitress of her own future. What that future should be, not even Loring could guess. Since her father's death Miss Van Brock had been a citizen of the world. With a widowed aunt for the shadowiest of chaperons, she had drifted with the tide of inclination, coming finally to rest in the western capital for no better reason, perhaps, than that some portion of her interest-bearing securities were emblazoned with the great seal of this particular western State.

Kent was thinking of Loring's recountal as he stood looking down on her. Other women were younger—and with features more conventionally beautiful; Kent could find a round dozen within easy eye-reach, to say nothing of the calm-eyed, queenly improvisatrice at the piano—his constant standard of all womanly charm and grace. Unconsciously he fell to comparing the two, his hostess and his love, and was brought back to things present by a sharp reminder from Portia.

"Stop looking at Miss Brentwood that way, Mr. David. She is not for you; and you are keeping me waiting."

He smiled down on her.

"It is the law of compensation. I fancy you have kept many a man waiting—and will keep many another."

There was a little tang of bitterness in her laugh.

"You remind me of the time when I went home from school—oh, years and years ago. Old Chloe—she was my black mammy, you know—had a grown daughter of her own, and her effort to dispose of her 'M'randy' was a standing joke in the family. In answer to my stereotyped question she stood back and folded her arms. 'Naw, honey; dat M'randy ain't ma'ied yit. She gwine be des lak you; look pretty, an' say, Howdy! Misteh Jawnson, an' go 'long by awn turrer side de road.'"

"A very pretty little fable," said Kent. "And the moral?"

"Is that I amuse myself with you—all of you; and in your turn you make use of me—or you think you do. Of what use can I be to Mr. David Kent this evening?"

"See how you misjudge me!" he protested. "My errand here to-night is purely charitable. Which brings me back to Ormsby: did you say you could tell me where to look for him?"

"He is in the smoking-room with five or six other tobacco misanthropes. What do you want of him?"

"I want to say two words in his ear; after which I shall vanish and make room for my betters."

Miss Van Brock was gazing steadfastly at the impassioned face lighted by the piano candles.

"Is it about Miss Brentwood?" she asked abruptly.

"In a way—yes," he confessed.

She rose and stood beside him—a bewitching figure of a woman who knew her part in the human comedy and played it well.

"Is it wise, David?" she asked softly. "I am not denying the possibilities: you might come between them if you should try—I'm rather afraid you could. But you mustn't, you know; it's too late. You've marred her, between you; or rather that convention, which makes a woman deaf, blind and dumb until a man has fairly committed himself, has marred her. For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him: for his sake she could never be quite the same to you."

He drew apart from her, frowning.

"If I should say that I don't fully understand what you mean?" he rejoined.

"I should retort by saying something extremely uncomplimentary about your lack of perspicacity," she cut in maliciously.

"I beg pardon," he said, a little stiffly. "You are laboring under an entirely wrong impression. What I have to say to Mr. Brookes Ormsby does not remotely concern the matter you touch upon. It's an affair of the Stock Exchange."

"As if I didn't know!" she countered. "You merely reminded me of the other thing. But if it is only a business secret you may as well tell me all about it at first hands. Some one is sure to tell me sooner or later."

Now David Kent was growing impatient. Down in the inner depths of him he was persuaded that Ormsby might have difficulty in inducing Mrs. Brentwood to sell her Western Pacific stock even at an advance; might require time, at least. And time, with a Bucks majority tinkering with corporate rights in the Assembly, might well be precious.

"Forgive me if I tell Ormsby first," he pleaded. "Afterward, if you care to know, you shall."

Miss Van Brock let him go at that, but now the way to the smoking-den on the floor above was hedged up. He did battle with the polite requirements, as a man must; shaking hands or exchanging a word with one and another of the obstructors only as he had to. None the less, when he had finally wrought his way to the smoking-room Ormsby had eluded him again.

He went back to the parlors, wondering how he had missed the club-man. In the middle room of the suite he found Portia chatting with Marston, the lieutenant-governor; and a young woman in the smartest of reception gowns had succeeded to Elinor's place at the piano.

"You found him?" queried the hostess, excusing herself to the tall, saturnine man who had shared the honors at the head of the People's Party ticket with Jasper G. Bucks.

"No," said Kent. "Have you seen him?"

"Why, yes; they all came to take leave just a few moments after you left me. I thought of telling Mr. Ormsby you were looking for him, but you shut me off so snippily——"

"Miss Van Brock! What have you done? I must go at once."

"Really? I am complimented. But if you must, you must, I suppose. I had something to tell you—something of importance; but I can't remember what it was now. I never can remember things in the hurry of leave-takings."

As we have intimated, Kent had hitherto found Miss Portia's confidences exceedingly helpful in a business way, and he hesitated. "Tell me," he begged.

"No, I can't remember it: I doubt if I shall ever remember it unless you can remind me by telling me why you are so desperately anxious to find Mr. Ormsby."

"I wonder if you hold everybody up like this," he laughed. "But I don't mind telling you. Western Pacific preferred has gone to fifty-eight and a half."

"And Mr. Ormsby has some to sell? I wish I had. Do you know what I'd do?" She drew closer and laid a hand on his arm. "I'd sell—by wire—to-night; at least, I'd make sure that my telegram would be the first thing my broker would lay his hands on in the morning."

"On general principles, I suppose: so should I, and for the same reason. But have I succeeded in reminding you of that thing you were going to tell me?"

"Not wholly; only partly. You said this matter of Mr. Ormsby's concerned Miss Brentwood—in a way—didn't you?"

"You will have your pound of flesh entire, won't you? The stock is hers, and her mother's and sister's. I want Ormsby to persuade them to sell. They'll listen to him. That is all; all the all."

"Of course!" she said airily. "How simple of me not to have been able to add it up without your help. I saw the quotation in the evening paper; and I know, better, perhaps, than you do, the need for haste. Must you go now?" She had taken his arm and was edging him through the press in the parlors toward the entrance hall.

"You haven't paid me yet," he objected.

"No; I'm trying to remember. Oh, yes; I have it now. Wasn't some one telling me that you are interested in House Bill Twenty-nine?"

They had reached the dimly lighted front vestibule, and her hand was still on his arm.

"I was interested in it," he admitted, correcting the present to the past tense.

"But after it went to the House committee on judiciary you left it to more skilful, or perhaps we'd better say, to less scrupulous hands?"

"I believe you are a witch. Is there anything you don't know?"

"Plenty of things. For example, I don't know exactly how much it cost our good friends of the 'vested interests' to have that bill mislaid in the committee room. But I do know they made a very foolish bargain."

"Beyond all doubt a most demoralizing bargain, which, to say the best of it, was only a choice between two evils. But why foolish?"

"Because—well, because mislaid things have a way of turning up unexpectedly, you know, and—"

He stopped her in a sudden gust of feverish excitement.

"Tell me what you mean in one word, Miss Van Brock. Don't those fellows intend to stay bought?"

She smiled pityingly.

"You are very young, Mr. David—or very honest. Supposing those 'fellows', as you dub the honorable members of the committee on judiciary, had a little plan of their own; a plan suggested by the readiness of certain of their opponents to rush into print with statements which might derange things?"

"I am supposing it with all my might."

"That is right; we are only supposing, you must remember. We may suppose their idea was to let the excitement about the amended bill die down; to let people generally, and one fiercely honest young corporation attorney in particular, have time to forget that there was such a thing as House Bill Twenty-nine. And in such a suppositional case, how much they would be surprised, and how they would laugh in their sleeves, if some one came along and paid them handsomely for doing precisely what they meant to do."

David Kent's smile was almost ferocious.

"My argument is as good now as it was in the beginning: they have yet to reckon with the man who will dare to expose them."

She turned from him and spoke to the footman at the door.

"Thomas, fetch Mr. Kent's coat and hat from the dressing-room." And then to Kent, in the tone she might have used in telling him of the latest breeziness of the member from the Rio Blanco: "I remember now what it was that I wanted to tell you. While you have been trying to find Mr. Ormsby, the committee on judiciary has been reporting the long-lost House Bill Twenty-nine. If you hurry you may be in time to see it passed—it will doubtless go through without any tiresome debate. But you will hardly have time to obstruct it by arousing public sentiment through the newspapers."

David Kent shook the light touch of her hand from his arm and set his teeth hard upon a word hot from the furnace of righteous indignation. For a moment he fully believed she was in league with the junto; that she had been purposely holding him in talk while the very seconds were priceless.

She saw the scornful wrath in his eyes and turned it aside with a swift denial.

"No, David; I didn't do that," she said, speaking to his inmost thought. "If there had been anything you could do—the smallest shadow of a chance for you—I should have sent you flying at the first word. But there wasn't; it was all too well arranged—"

But he had snatched coat and hat from the waiting Thomas and was running like a madman for the nearest cab-stand.



VII

THE SENTIMENTALISTS

Kent's time from Alameda Square to the capitol was the quickest a flogged cab-horse could make, but he might have spared the horse and saved the double fee. On the broad steps of the south portico he, uprushing three at a bound, met the advance guard of the gallery contingent, down-coming. The House had adjourned.

"One minute, Harnwicke!" he gasped, falling upon the first member of the corporations' lobby he could identify in the throng. "What's been done?"

"They've taken a fall out of us," was the brusk reply. "House Bill Twenty-nine was reported by the committee on judiciary and rushed through after you left. Somebody engineered it to the paring of a fingernail: bare quorum to act; members who might have filibustered weeded out, on one pretext or another, to a man; pages all excused, and nobody here with the privilege of the floor. It was as neat a piece of gag-work as I ever hope to see if I live to be a hundred."

Kent faced about and joined the townward dispersal with his informant.

"Well, I suppose that settles it definitely; at least, until we can test its constitutionality in the courts," he said.

Harnwicke thought not, being of the opinion that the vested interests would never say die until they were quite dead. As assistant counsel for the Overland Short Line, he was in some sense the dean of the corps of observation, and could speak with authority.

"There is one chance left for us this side of the courts," he went on; "and now I think of it, you are the man to say how much of a chance it is. The bill still lacks the governor's signature."

Kent shook his head.

"It is his own measure. I have proof positive that he and Meigs and Hendricks drafted it. And all this fine-haired engineering to-night was his, or Meigs'."

"Of course; we all know that. But we don't know the particular object yet. Do they need the new law in their business as a source of revenue? Or do they want to be hired to kill it? In other words, does Bucks want a lump sum for a veto? You know the man better than any of us."

"By Jove!" said Kent. "Do you mean to say you would buy the governor of a state?"

Harnwicke turned a cold eye on his companion as they strode along. He was of the square-set, plain-spoken, aggressive type—a finished product of the modern school of business lawyers.

"I don't understand that you are raising the question of ethics at this stage of the game, do I?" he remarked.

Kent fired up a little.

"And if I am?" he retorted.

"I should say you had missed your calling. It is baldly a question of business—or rather of self-preservation. We needn't mince matters among ourselves. If Bucks is for sale, we buy him."

Kent shrugged.

"There isn't any doubt about his purchasability. But I confess I don't quite see how you will go about it."

"Never mind that part of it; just leave the ways and means with those of us who have riper experience—and fewer hamperings, perhaps—than you have. Your share in it is to tell us how big a bid we must make. As I say, you know the man."

David Kent was silent for the striding of half a square. The New England conscience dies hard, and while it lives it is given to drawing sharp lines on all the boundaries of culpability. Kent ended by taking the matter in debate violently out of the domain of ethics and standing it upon the ground of expediency.

"It will cost too much. You would have to bid high—not to overcome his scruples, for he has none; but to satisfy his greed—which is abnormal. And, besides, he has his pose to defend. If he can see his way clear to a harvest of extortions under the law, he will probably turn you down—and will make it hot for you later on in the name of outraged virtue."

Harnwicke's laugh was cynical.

"He and his little clique don't own the earth in fee simple. Perhaps we shall be able to make them grasp that idea before we are through with them. We have had this fight on in other states. Would ten thousand be likely to satisfy him?"

"No," said Kent. "If you add another cipher, it might."

"A hundred thousand is a pot of money. I take it for granted the Western Pacific will stand its pro-rate?"

The New England conscience bucked again, and Kent made his first open protest against the methods of the demoralizers.

"I am not in a position to say: I should advise against it. Unofficially, I think I can speak for Loring and the Boston people. We are not more saintly than other folk, perhaps; and we are not in the railroad business for health or pleasure. But I fancy the Advisory Board would draw the line at bribing a governor—at any rate, I hope it would."

"Rot!" said Harnwicke. And then: "You'll reap the benefits with other interstate interests; you'll have to come in."

Kent hesitated, but not now on the ground of the principle to be defended.

"That brings in a question which I am not competent to decide. Loring is your man. You will call a conference of the 'powers,' I take it?"

"It is already called. I sent Atherton out to notify everybody as soon as the trap was sprung in the House. We meet in the ordinary at the Camelot. You'll be there?"

"A little later—if Loring wants me. I have some telephoning to do before this thing gets on the wires."

They parted at the entrance to the Camelot Club, and Kent went two squares farther on to the Wellington. Ormsby had not yet returned, and Kent went to the telephone and called up the Brentwood apartments. It was Penelope that answered.

"Well, I think you owe it," she began, as soon as he had given his name. "What did I do at Miss Van Brock's to make you cut me dead?"

"Why, nothing at all, I'm sure. I—I was looking for Mr. Ormsby, and——"

"Not when I saw you," she broke in flippantly. "You were handing Miss Portia an ice. Are you still looking for Mr. Ormsby?"

"I am—just that. Is he with you?"

"No; he left here about twenty minutes ago. Is it anything serious?"

"Serious enough to make me want to find him as soon as I can. Did he say he was coming down to the Wellington?"

"Of course, he didn't," laughed Penelope. And then: "Whatever is the matter with you this evening, Mr. Kent?"

"I guess I'm a little excited," said Kent. "Something has happened—something I can't talk about over the wires. It concerns you and your mother and sister. You'll know all about it as soon as I can find Ormsby and send him out to you."

Penelope's "Oh!" was long-drawn and gasping.

"Is any one dead?" she faltered.

"No, no; it's nothing of that kind. I'll send Ormsby out, and he will tell you all about it."

"Can't you come yourself?"

"I may have to if I can't find Ormsby. Please don't let your mother go to bed until you have heard from one or the other of us. Did you get that?"

"Ye-es; but I should like to know more—a great deal more."

"I know; and I'd like to tell you. But I am using the public telephone here at the Wellington, and—Oh, damn!" Central had cut him out, and it was some minutes before the connection was switched in again. "Is that you, Miss Penelope? All right; I wasn't quite through. When Ormsby comes, you must do as he tells you to, and you and Miss Elinor must help him convince your mother. Do you understand?"

"No, I don't understand anything. For goodness' sake, find Mr. Ormsby and make him run! This is perfectly dreadful!"

"Isn't it? And I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."

Kent hung up the receiver, and when he was asking a second time at the clerk's desk for the missing man, Ormsby came in to answer for himself. Whereupon the crisis was outlined to him in brief phrase, and he rose to the occasion, though not without a grimace.

"I'm not sure just how well you know Mrs. Hepzibah Brentwood," he demurred; "but it will be quite like her to balk. Don't you think you'd better go along? You are the company's attorney, and your opinion ought to carry some weight."

David Kent thought not; but a cautious diplomatist, having got the idea well into the back part of his head, was not to be denied.

"Of course, you'll come. You are just the man I'll need to back me up. I shan't shirk; I'll take the mother into the library and break the ice, while you are squaring things with the young women. Penelope won't care the snap of her finger either way; but Elinor has some notion's that you are fitter to cope with than I am. After, if you can give me a lift with Mrs. Hepzibah, I'll call you in. Come on; it's getting pretty late to go visiting."

Kent yielded reluctantly, and they took a car for the sake of speed. It was Penelope who opened the door for them at 124 Tejon Avenue; and Ormsby made it easy for his coadjutor, as he had promised.

"I want to see your mother in the library for a few minutes," he began. "Will you arrange it, and take care of Mr. Kent until I come for him?"

Penelope "arranged" it, not without another added pang of curiosity, whereupon David Kent found himself the rather embarrassed third of a silent trio gathered about the embers of the sitting-room fire.

"Is it to be a Quaker meeting?" asked Penelope, sweetly, when the silence had grown awe-inspiring.

Kent laughed for pure joy at the breaking of the spell.

"One would think we had come to drag you all off to jail, Ormsby and I," he said; and then he went on to explain. "It's about your Western Pacific stock, you know. To-day's quotations put it a point and a half above your purchase price, and we've come to persuade you to unload, pronto, as the member from the Rio Blanco would say."

"Is that all?" said Penelope, stifling a yawn. "Then I'm not in it: I'm an infant." And she rose and went to the piano.

"You haven't told us all of it: what has happened?" queried Elinor, speaking for the first time since her greeting of Kent.

He briefed the story of House Bill Twenty-nine for her, pointing out the probabilities.

"Of course, no one can tell what the precise effect will be," he qualified. "But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of dividends. Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of those who administer it. In fact, I happen to know that it was designed and carried through for that very purpose."

She smiled.

"I have understood you were in the opposition. Are you speaking politically?"

"I am stating the plain fact," said Kent, nettled a little by her coolness. "Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into office than we have here in this State at the present moment."

He spoke warmly, and she liked him best when he put her on the footing of an equal antagonist.

"I can't agree with your inference," she objected. "As a people we are neither obsequious nor stupid."

"Perhaps not. But it is one of the failures of a popular government that an honest majority may be controlled and directed by a small minority of shrewd rascals. That is exactly what has happened in the passage of this bill. I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the faintest suspicion that it was a 'graft'."

"If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!" she said half-absently; and he started forward and said: "I beg pardon?"

She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of disappointment in them.

"I ought to beg yours. I'm afraid I was thinking aloud. But it is one of my dreams. If I were a man I should go into politics."

"To purify them?"

"To do my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too. But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who could and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it must be led."

"There is no lack of leadership, such as it is," he hazarded.

"No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind: men who will put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of justice and right-doing for its own sake. Are there any such men nowadays?"

"I don't know," he rejoined gravely. "Sometimes I'm tempted to doubt it. It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part. The kind of man you have in mind isn't in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot."

She contradicted him firmly.

"No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn't shun it; he would take hold with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following—be the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority."

Kent shook his head slowly.

"Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call patriotism."

"I don't understand," she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to understand.

"I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of patriotism to make him do his best."

"But that would be self-seeking again."

"Not necessarily in the narrow sense. The old knightly chivalry was a beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would have been frankly brutal without it: yet it had its well-spring in what appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment."

"And we are not sentimentalists?" she suggested.

"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a political constituency."

She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.

Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful. They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.

Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field of the Lust of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash, it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is transmitted in terms of self-seeking.

He turned upon her suddenly.

"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.

"How absurd!"

"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."

"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.

"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been trying to be a money-getter."

"You can be something vastly better."

"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."

Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone, of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There would be time enough to drain it farther on.

"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said, breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I——"

She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.

"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always do."

David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon summer for a background.

It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism in them, as thus:

"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we were both very young that summer—years younger than we can ever be again. Don't you?"

"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pass in which he would have agreed with her if she had asserted that black was white. It was not weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the word which would fit her changed mood.

"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"

"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her resentful.

She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just. And you were not quite just, I think."

"To you?" he demanded.

"Oh, no; to yourself."

Portia Van Brock's accusation was hammering itself into his brain. You have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to you. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise him?

The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.

"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at once.

"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the house and had turned their faces townward.

"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank to sell her stock—won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now, when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted, mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the jaw—intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"

Kent's laugh was mirthless.

"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for the accusation.

If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to steer clear of that shoal.

"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with Elinor."

"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother would have the casting vote."

"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."

"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now—as between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean—but there will probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go. We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."

The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said: "Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the god in the car. Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."

David Kent stopped short and wheeled suddenly upon his companion.

"Ormsby, that's a thing I've been afraid of, all along; and it's the one thing you must never do."

"Why not?" demanded the straightforward Ormsby.

Kent knew he was skating on the thinnest of ice, but his love for Elinor made him fearless of consequences.

"If you don't know without being told, it proves that your money has spoiled you to that extent. It is because you have no right to entrap Miss Brentwood into an obligation that would make her your debtor for the very food she eats and the clothes she wears. You will say she need never know: be very sure she would find out, one way or another; and she would never forgive you."

"Um," said Ormsby, turning visibly grim. "You are frank enough—to draw it mildly. Another man in my place might suggest that it isn't Mr. David Kent's affair."

Kent turned about and caught step again.

"I've said my say—all of it," he rejoined stolidly. "We've been decently modern up to now, and we won't go back to the elemental things so late in the day. All the same, you'll not take it amiss if I say that I know Miss Brentwood rather better than you do."

Ormsby did not say whether he would or would not, and the talk went aside to less summary ways and means preservative of the Brentwood fortunes. But at the archway of the Camelot Club, where Kent paused, Ormsby went back to the debatable ground in an outspoken word.

"I know pretty well now what there is between us, Kent, and we mustn't quarrel if we can help it," he said. "If you complain that I didn't give you a fair show, I'll retort that I didn't dare to. Are you satisfied?"

"No," said David Kent; and with that they separated.



VIII

THE HAYMAKERS

By the terms of its dating clause the new trust and corporation law became effective at once, "the public welfare requiring it"; and though there was an immediate sympathetic decline in the securities involved, there was no panic, financial or industrial, to mark the change from the old to the new.

Contrary to the expectations of the alarmists and the lawyers, and somewhat to the disappointment of the latter, the vested interests showed no disposition to test the constitutionality of the act in the courts. So far, indeed, from making difficulties, the various alien corporations affected by the new law wheeled promptly into line in compliance with its provisions, vying with one another in proving, or seeming to prove, the time-worn aphorism that capital can never afford to be otherwise than strictly law-abiding.

In the reorganization of the Western Pacific, David Kent developed at once and heartily into that rare and much-sought-for quantity, a man for an emergency. Loring, also, was a busy man in this transition period, yet he found time to keep an appreciative eye on Kent, and, true to his implied promise, pushed him vigorously for the first place in the legal department of the localized company. Since the resident manager stood high in the Boston counsels of the company, the pushing was not without results; and while David Kent was still up to his eyes in the work of flogging the affairs of the newly named Trans-Western into conformity with the law, his appointment as general counsel came from the Advisory Board.

At one time, when success in his chosen vocation meant more to him than he thought it could ever mean again, the promoted subordinate would have had an attack of jubilance little in keeping with the grave responsibilities of his office. As it fell out, he was too busy to celebrate, and too sore on the sentimental side to rejoice. Hence, his recognition of the promotion was merely a deeper plunge into the flood of legalities and the adding of two more stenographers to his office force.

Now there is this to be said of such submersive battlings in a sea of work: while the fierce toil of the buffeting may be good for the swimmer's soul, it necessarily narrows his horizon, inasmuch as a man with his head in the sea-smother lacks the view-point of the captain who fights his ship from the conning tower.

So it befell that while the newly appointed general counsel of the reorganized Western Pacific was bolting his meals and clipping the nights at both ends in a strenuous endeavor to clear the decks for a possible battle-royal at the capital, events of a minatory nature were shaping themselves elsewhere.

To bring these events down to their focusing point in the period of transition, it is needful to go back a little; to a term of the circuit court held in the third year of Gaston the prosperous.

Who Mrs. Melissa Varnum was; how she came to be traveling from Midland City to the end of the track on a scalper's ticket; and in what manner she was given her choice of paying fare to the conductor or leaving the train at Gaston—these are details with which we need not concern ourselves. Suffice it to say that Kent, then local attorney for the company, mastered them; and when Mrs. Varnum, through Hawk, her counsel, sued for five thousand dollars damages, he was able to get a continuance, knowing from long experience that the jury would certainly find for the plaintiff if the case were then allowed to go to trial.

And at the succeeding term of court, which was the one that adjourned on the day of Kent's transfer to the capital, two of the company's witnesses had disappeared; and the one bit of company business Kent had been successful in doing that day was to postpone for a second time the coming to trial of the Varnum case.

It was while Kent's head was deepest in the flood of reorganization that a letter came from one Blashfield Hunnicott, his successor in the local attorneyship at Gaston, asking for instructions in the Varnum matter. Judge MacFarlane's court would convene in a week. Was he, Hunnicott, to let the case come to trial? Or should he—the witnesses still being unproducible—move for a further continuance?

Kent took his head out of the cross-seas long enough to answer. By all means Hunnicott was to obtain another continuance, if possible. And if, before the case were called, there should be any new developments, he was to wire at once to the general office, and further instructions would issue.

It was about this time, or, to be strictly accurate, on the day preceding the convening of Judge MacFarlane's court in Gaston, that Governor Bucks took a short vacation—his first since the adjournment of the Assembly.

One of the mysteries of this man—the only one for which his friends could not always account plausibly—was his habit of dropping out for a day or a week at irregular intervals, leaving no clue by which he could be traced. While he was merely a private citizen these disappearances figured in the local notes of the Gaston Clarion as business trips, object and objective point unknown or at least unstated; but since his election the newspapers were usually more definite. On this occasion, the public was duly informed that "Governor Bucks, with one or two intimate friends, was taking a few days' recreation with rod and gun on the headwaters of Jump Creek"—a statement which the governor's private secretary stood ready to corroborate to all and sundry calling at the gubernatorial rooms on the second floor of the capitol.

Now it chanced that, like all gossip, this statement was subject to correction as to details in favor of the exact fact. It is true that the governor, his gigantic figure clad in sportsmanlike brown duck, might have been seen boarding the train on the Monday evening; and in addition to the ample hand-bag there were rod and gun cases to bear out the newspaper notices. None the less, it was equally true that the keeper of the Gun Club shooting-box at the terminus of the Trans-Western's Jump Creek branch was not called upon to entertain so distinguished a guest as the State executive. Also, it might have been remarked that the governor traveled alone.

Late that same night, Stephen Hawk was keeping a rather discomforting vigil with a visitor in the best suite of rooms the Mid-Continent Hotel in Gaston afforded. The guest of honor was a brother lawyer—though he might have refused to acknowledge the relationship with the ex-district attorney—a keen-eyed, business-like gentleman, whose name as an organizer of vast capitalistic ventures had traveled far, and whose present attitude was one of undisguised and angry contempt for Gaston and all things Gastonian.

"How much longer have we to wait?" he demanded impatiently, when the hands of his watch pointed to the quarter-hour after ten. "You've made me travel two thousand miles to see this thing through: why didn't you make sure of having your man here?"

Hawk wriggled uneasily in his chair. He was used to being bullied, not only by the good and great, but by the little and evil as well. Yet there was a rasp to the great man's impatience that irritated him.

"I've been trying to tell you all the evening that I'm only the hired man in this business, Mr. Falkland. I can't compel the attendance of the other parties."

"Well, it's damned badly managed, as far as we've gone," was the ungracious comment. "You say the judge refuses to confer with me?"

"Ab-so-lutely."

"And the train—the last train the other man can come on; is that in yet?"

Hawk consulted his watch.

"A good half-hour ago."

"You had your clerk at the station to meet it?"

"I did."

"And he hasn't reported?"

"Not yet."

Falkland took a cigar from his case, bit the end of it like a man with a grudge to satisfy, and began again.

"There is a very unbusinesslike mystery about all this, Mr. Hawk, and I may as well tell you shortly that my time is too valuable to make me tolerant of half-confidences. Get to the bottom of it. Has your man weakened?"

"No; he is not of the weakening kind. And, besides, the scheme is his own from start to finish, as you know."

"Well, what is the matter, then?"

Hawk rose.

"If you will be patient a little while longer, I'll go to the wire and try to find out. I am as much in the dark as you are."

This last was not strictly true. Hawk had a telegram in his pocket which was causing him more uneasiness than all the rasping criticisms of the New York attorney, and he was re-reading it by the light of the corridor bracket when a young man sprang from the ascending elevator and hurried to the door of the parlor suite. Hawk collared his Mercury before he could rap on the door.

"Well?" he queried sharply.

"It's just as you suspected—what Mr. Hendricks' telegram hinted at. I met him at the station and couldn't do a thing with him."

"Where has he gone?"

"To the same old place."

"You followed him?"

"Sure. That is what kept me so long."

Hawk hung upon his decision for the barest fraction of a second. Then he gave his orders concisely.

"Hunt up Doctor Macquoid and get him out to the club-house as quick as you can. Tell him to bring his hypodermic. I'll be there with all the help he'll need." And when the young man was gone, Hawk smote the air with a clenched fist and called down the Black Curse of Shielygh, or its modern equivalent, on all the fates subversive of well-laid plans.

A quarter of an hour later, on the upper floor of the club-house at the Gentlemen's Driving Park, four men burst in upon a fifth, a huge figure in brown duck, crouching in a corner like a wild beast at bay. A bottle and a tumbler stood on the table under the hanging lamp; and with the crash of breaking glass which followed the mad-bull rush of the duck-clothed giant, the reek of French brandy filled the room.

"Hold him still, if you can, and pull up that sleeve." It was Macquoid who spoke, and the three apparitors, breathing hard, sat upon the prostrate man and bared his arm for the physician. When the apomorphia began to do its work there was a struggle of another sort, out of which emerged a pallid and somewhat stricken reincarnation of the governor.

"Falkland is waiting at the hotel, and he and MacFarlane can't get together," said Hawk, tersely, when the patient was fit to listen. "Otherwise we shouldn't have disturbed you. It's all day with the scheme if you can't show up."

The governor groaned and passed his hand over his eyes.

"Get me into my clothes—Johnson has the grip—and give me all the time you can," was the sullen rejoinder; and in due course the Honorable Jasper G. Bucks, clothed upon and in his right mind, was enabled to keep his appointment with the New York attorney at the Mid-Continent Hotel.

But first came the whipping-in of MacFarlane. Bucks went alone to the judge's room on the floor above the parlor suite. It was now near midnight, but MacFarlane had not gone to bed. He was a spare man, with thin hair graying rapidly at the temples and a care-worn face; the face of a man whose tasks or responsibilities, or both, have overmatched him. He was walking the floor with his head down and his hands—thin, nerveless hands they were—tightly locked behind him, when the governor entered.

For a large man the Honorable Jasper was usually able to handle his weight admirably; but now he clung to the door-knob until he could launch himself at a chair and be sure of hitting it.

"What's this Hawk's telling me about you, MacFarlane?" he demanded, frowning portentously.

"I don't know what he has told you. But it is too flagrant, Bucks; I can't do it, and that's all there is about it." The protest was feebly fierce, and there was the snarl of a baited animal in the tone.

"It's too late to make difficulties now," was the harsh reply. "You've got to do it."

"I tell you I can not, and I will not!"

"A late attack of conscience, eh?" sneered the governor, who was sobering rapidly now. "Let me ask a question or two. How much was that security debt your son-in-law let you in for?"

"It was ten thousand dollars. It is an honest debt, and I shall pay it."

"But not out of the salary of a circuit judge," Bucks interposed. "Nor yet out of the fees you make your clerks divide with you. And that isn't all. Have you forgotten the gerrymander business? How would you like to see the true inwardness of that in the newspapers?"

The judge shrank as if the huge gesturing hand had struck him.

"You wouldn't dare," he began. "You were in that, too, deeper than——"

Again the governor interrupted him.

"Cut it out," he commanded. "I can reward, and I can punish. You are not going to do anything technically illegal; but, by the gods, you are going to walk the line laid down for you. If you don't, I shall give the documents in the gerrymander affair to the papers the day after you fail. Now we'll go and see Falkland."

MacFarlane made one last protest.

"For God's sake, Bucks! spare me that. It is nothing less than the foulest collusion between the judge, the counsel for the plaintiff—and the devil!"

"Cut that out, too, and come along," said the governor, brutally; and by the steadying help of the chair, the door-post and the wall of the corridor, he led the way to the parlor suite on the floor below.

The conference in Falkland's rooms was chiefly a monologue with the sharp-spoken New York lawyer in the speaking part. When it was concluded the judge took his leave abruptly, pleading the lateness of the hour and his duties for the morrow. When he was gone the New Yorker began again.

"You won't want to be known in this, I take it," he said, nodding at the governor. "Mr. Hawk here will answer well enough for the legal part, but how about the business end of it. Have you got a man you can trust?"

The governor's yellow eyebrows met in a meaning scowl.

"I've got a man I can hang, which is more to the purpose. It's Major Jim Guilford. He lives here; want to meet him?"

"God forbid!" said Falkland, fervently. He rose and whipped himself into his overcoat, turning to Hawk: "Have your young man get me a carriage, and see to it that my special is ready to pull east when I give the word, will you?"

Hawk went obediently, and the New Yorker had his final word with the governor alone.

"I think we understand each other perfectly," he said. "You are to have the patronage: we are to pay for all actual betterments for which vouchers can be shown at the close of the deal. All we ask is that the stock be depressed to the point agreed upon within the half-year."

"It's going to be done," said the governor, trying as he could to keep the eye-image of his fellow conspirator from multiplying itself by two.

"All right. Now as to the court affair. If it is managed exactly as I have outlined, there will be no trouble—and no recourse for the other fellows. When I say that, I'm leaving out your Supreme Court. Under certain conditions, if the defendant's hardship could be definitely shown, a writ of certiorari and supersedeas might issue. How about that?"

The governor closed one eye slowly, the better to check the troublesome multiplying process.

"The Supreme Court won't move in the matter. The ostensible reason will be that the court is now two years behind its docket."

"And the real reason?"

"Of the three justices, one of them was elected on our ticket; another is a personal friend of Judge MacFarlane. The goods will be delivered."

"That's all, then; all but one word. Your judge is a weak brother. Notwithstanding all the pains I took to show him that his action would be technically unassailable, he was ready to fly the track at any moment. Have you got him safe?"

Bucks held up one huge hand with the thumb and forefinger tightly pressed together.

"I've got him right there," he said. "If you and Hawk have got your papers in good shape, the thing will go through like a hog under a barbed-wire fence."



IX

THE SHOCKING OF HUNNICOTT

It was two weeks after the date of the governor's fishing trip, and by consequence Judge MacFarlane's court had been the even fortnight in session in Gaston, when Kent's attention was recalled to the forgotten Varnum case by another letter from the local attorney, Hunnicott.

"Varnum vs. Western Pacific comes up Friday of this week, and they are going to press for trial this time, and no mistake," wrote the local representative. "Hawk has been chasing around getting affidavits; for what purpose I don't know, though Lesher tells me that one of them was sworn by Houligan, the sub-contractor who tried to fight the engineer's estimates on the Jump Creek work.

"Also, there is a story going the rounds that the suit is to be made a blind for bigger game, though I guess this is all gossip, based on the fact that Mr. Semple Falkland's private car stopped over here two weeks ago, from three o'clock in the afternoon till midnight of the same day. Jason, of the Clarion, interviewed the New Yorker, and Falkland told him he had stopped over to look up the securities on a mortgage held by one of his New York clients."

Kent read this unofficial letter thoughtfully, and later on took it in to the general manager.

"Just to show you the kind of jackal we have to deal with in the smaller towns," he said, by way of explanation. "Here is a case that Stephen Hawk built up out of nothing a year ago. The woman was put off one of our trains because she was trying to travel on a scalper's ticket. She didn't care to fight about it; but when I had about persuaded her to compromise for ten dollars and a pass to her destination, Hawk got hold of her and induced her to sue for five thousand dollars."

"Well?" said Loring.

"We fought it, of course—in the only way it could be fought in the lower court. I got a continuance, and we choked it off in the same way at the succeeding term. The woman was tired out long ago, but Hawk will hang on till his teeth fall out."

"Do you 'continue' again?" asked the general manager.

Kent nodded.

"I so instructed Hunnicott. Luckily, two of our most important witnesses are missing. They have always been missing, in point of fact."

Loring was glancing over the letter.

"How about this affidavit business, and the Falkland stop-over?" he asked.

"Oh, I fancy that's gossip, pure and simple, as Hunnicott says. Hawk is sharp enough not to let us know if he were baiting a trap. And Falkland probably told the Clarion man the simple truth."

Loring nodded in his turn. Then he broke away from the subject abruptly. "Sit down," he said; and when Kent had found a chair: "I had a caller this morning—Senator Duvall."

State Senator Duvall had been the father, or the ostensible father, of the Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine. He was known to the corporations' lobby as a legislator who would sign a railroad's death-warrant with one hand and take favors from it with the other; and Kent laughed.

"How many did he demand passes for, this time? Or was it a special train he wanted?"

"Neither the one nor the other, this morning, as it happened," said the general manager. "Not to put too fine an edge upon it, he had something to sell, and he wanted me to buy it."

"What was it?" Kent asked quickly.

Loring was rubbing his eye-glasses absently with the corner of his handkerchief.

"I guess I made a mistake in not turning him over to you, David. He was too smooth for me. I couldn't find out just what it was he had for sale. He talked vaguely about an impending crisis and a man who had some information to dispose of; said the man had come to him because he was known to be a firm friend of the Trans-Western, and so on."

Kent gave his opinion promptly.

"It's a capitol-gang deal of some sort to hold us up; and Duvall is willing to sell out his fellow conspirators if the price is right."

"Have you any notion of what it is?"

Kent shook his head.

"Not the slightest. The ways have been tallowed for us, thus far, and I don't fully understand it. I presented our charter for re-filing yesterday, and Hendricks passed it without a word. As I was coming out of the secretary's office I met Bucks. We were pretty nearly open enemies in the old days in Gaston, but he went out of his way to shake hands and to congratulate me on my appointment as general counsel."

"That was warning in itself, wasn't it?"

"I took it that way. But I can't fathom his drift; which is the more unaccountable since I have it on pretty good authority that the ring is cinching the other companies right and left. Some one was saying at the Camelot last night that the Overland's reorganization of its within-the-State lines was going to cost all kinds of money in excess of the legal fees."

Loring's smile was a wordless sarcasm.

"It's the reward of virtue," he said ironically. "We were not in the list of subscribers to the conditional fund for purchasing a certain veto which didn't materialize."

"And for that very reason, if for no other, we may look out for squalls," Kent asserted. "Jasper G. Bucks has a long memory; and just now the fates have given him an arm to match. I am fortifying everywhere I can, but if the junto has it in for us, we'll be made to sweat blood before we are through with it."

"Which brings us back to Senator Duvall. Is it worth while trying to do anything with him?"

"Oh, I don't know. I'm opposed to the method—the bargain and sale plan—and I know you are. Turn him over to me if he comes in again."

When Kent had dictated a letter in answer to Hunnicott's, he dismissed the Varnum matter from his mind, having other and more important things to think of. So, on the Friday, when the case was reached on Judge MacFarlane's docket—but really, it is worth our while to be present in the Gaston court-room to see and hear what befalls.

When the Varnum case was called, Hunnicott promptly moved for a third continuance, in accordance with his instructions. The judge heard his argument, the old and well-worn one of the absence of important witnesses, with perfect patience; and after listening to Hawk's protest, which was hardly more than mechanical, he granted the continuance.

Then came the after-piece. Court adjourned, and immediately Hawk asked leave to present, "at chambers," an amended petition. Hunnicott was waylaid by a court officer as he was leaving the room; and a moment later, totally unprepared, he was in the judge's office, listening in some dazed fashion while Hawk went glibly through the formalities of presenting his petition.

Not until the papers were served upon him as the company's attorney, and the judge was naming three o'clock of the following afternoon as the time which he would appoint for the preliminary hearing, did the local attorney come alive.

"But, your Honor!—a delay of only twenty-four hours in which to prepare a rejoinder to this petition—to allegations of such astounding gravity?" he began, shocked into action by the very ungraspable magnitude of the thing.

"What more could you ask, Mr. Hunnicott?" said the judge, mildly. "You have already had a full measure of delay on the original petition. Yet I am willing to extend the time if you can come to an agreement with Mr. Hawk, here."

Hunnicott knew the hopelessness of that and did not make the attempt. Instead, he essayed a new line of objection.

"The time would be long enough if Gaston were the headquarters of the company, your Honor. But in such a grave and important charge as this amended petition brings, our general counsel should appear in person, and——"

"You are the company's attorney, Mr. Hunnicott," said the judge, dryly; "and you have hitherto been deemed competent to conduct the case in behalf of the defendant. I am unwilling to work a hardship to any one, but I can not entertain your protest. The preliminary hearing will be at three o'clock to-morrow."

Hunnicott knew when he was definitely at the string's end; and when he was out of the judge's room and the Court House, he made a dash for his office, dry-lipped and panting. Ten minutes sufficed for the writing of a telegram to Kent, and he was half-way down to the station with it when it occurred to him that it would never do to trust the incendiary thing to the wires in plain English. There was a little-used cipher code in his desk provided for just such emergencies, and back he went to labor sweating over the task of securing secrecy at the expense of the precious minutes of time. Wherefore, it was about four o'clock when he handed the telegram to the station operator, and adjured him by all that was good and great not to delay its sending.

It was just here he made his first and only slip, since he did not stay to see the thing done. It chanced that the regular day operator was off on leave of absence, and his substitute, a young man from the train-despatcher's office, was a person who considered the company wires an exclusive appanage of the train service department. At the moment of Hunnicott's assault he was taking an order for Number 17; and observing that the lawyer's cipher "rush" covered four closely written pages, he hung it upon the sending hook with a malediction on the legal department for burdening the wires with its mail correspondence, and so forgot it.

It was nine o'clock when the night operator came on duty; and being a careful man, he not only looked first to his sending hook, but was thoughtful enough to run over the accumulation of messages waiting to be transmitted, to the end that he might give precedence to the most important. And when he came to Hunnicott's cipher with the thrice-underlined "RUSH" written across its face, and had marked the hour of its handing in, he had the good sense to hang up the entire wire business of the railroad until the thing was safely out of his office.

It was half-past nine when the all-important cipher got itself written out in the headquarters office at the capital; and for two anxious hours the receiving operator tried by all means in his power to find the general counsel—tried and failed. For, to make the chain of mishaps complete in all its links, Kent and Loring were spending the evening at Miss Portia Van Brock's, having been bidden to meet a man they were both willing to cultivate—Oliver Marston, the lieutenant-governor. And for this cause it wanted but five minutes of midnight when Kent burst into Loring's bedroom on the third floor of the Clarendon, catastrophic news in hand.

"For heaven's sake, read that!" he gasped; and Loring sat on the edge of the bed to do it.

"So! they've sprung their mine at last: this is what Senator Duvall was trying to sell us," he said quietly, when he had mastered the purport of Hunnicott's war news.

Kent had caught his second wind in the moment of respite, and was settling into the collar in a way to strain the working harness to the breaking point.

"It's a put-up job from away back," he gritted. "If I'd had the sense of a pack-mule I should have been on the lookout for just such a trap as this. Look at the date of that message!"

The general manager did look, and shook his head. "'Received, 3:45, P.M.; Forwarded, 9:17, P.M.' That will cost somebody his job. What do we do?"

"We get busy at the drop of the hat. Luckily, we have the news, though I'll bet high it wasn't Hawk's fault that this message came through with no more than eight hours' delay. Get into your clothes, man! The minutes are precious, now!"

Loring began to dress while Kent walked the floor in a hot fit of impatience.

"The mastodonic cheek of the thing!" he kept repeating, until Loring pulled him down with another quiet remark.

"Tell me what we have to do, David. I am a little lame in law matters."

"Do? We have to appear in Judge MacFarlane's court to-morrow afternoon prepared to show that this thing is only a hold-up with a blank cartridge. Hawk meant to take a snap judgment. He counted on throwing the whole thing up against Hunnicott, knowing perfectly well that a little local attorney at a way-station couldn't begin to secure the necessary affidavits."

Loring paused with one end of his collar flying loose.

"Let me understand," he said. "Do we have to disprove these charges by affidavits?"

"Certainly; that is the proper rejoinder—the only one, in fact," said Kent; then, as a great doubt laid hold of him and shook him: "You don't mean to say there is any doubt about our ability to do it?"

"Oh, no; I suppose not, if it comes to a show-down. But I was thinking of your man Hunnicott. Doesn't it occur to you that he is in just about as good a fix to secure those affidavits in Gaston as we are here, David?"

"Good Lord! Do you mean that we have to send to Boston for our ammunition?"

"Haven't we? Don't you see how nicely the thing is timed? Ten days later our Trans-Western reorganization would be complete, and we could swear our own officers on the spot. These people know what they are about."

Kent was walking the floor again, but now the strength of the man was coming uppermost.

"Never mind: we'll wire Boston, and then we'll do what we can here. Could you get me to Gaston on a special engine in three hours?"

"Yes."

"Then we have till eleven o'clock to-morrow to prepare. I'll be ready by that time."

"David, you are a brick when it comes to the in-fighting," said the general manager; and then he finished buttoning his collar.



X

WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY

At ten forty-eight on the Saturday morning Kent was standing with the general manager on the Union Station track platform beside the engine which was to make the flying run to Gaston.

Nine hours of sharp work lay between the hurried conference in Loring's bedroom and the drive to the station at a quarter before eleven. Boston had been wired; divers and sundry friends of the railway company had been interviewed; some few affidavits had been secured; and now they were waiting to give Boston its last chance, with a clerk hanging over the operator in the station telegraph office to catch the first word of encouragement.

"If the Advisory Board doesn't send us something pretty solid, I'm going into this thing lame," said Kent, dubiously. "Of course, what Boston can send us will be only corroborative; unfortunately we can't wire affidavits. But it will help. What we have secured here lacks directness."

"Necessarily," said Loring. "But I'm banking on the Board. If we don't get the ammunition before you have to start, I can wire it to you at Gaston. That gives us three hours more to go and come on."

"Yes; and if it comes to the worst—if the decision be unfavorable—it can only embarrass us temporarily. This is merely the preliminary hearing, and nothing permanent can be established until we have had a hearing on the merits, and we can go armed to that, at all events."

The general manager was looking at his watch, and he shut the case with a snap.

"Don't you let it come to that, as long as you have a leg to stand on, David," he said impressively. "An interregnum of ten days might make it exceedingly difficult for us to prove anything." Then, as the telegraph office watcher came to the door and shook his head as a sign that Boston was still silent: "Your time is up. Off with you, and don't let Oleson scare you when he gets 219 in motion. He is a good runner, and you have a clear track."

Kent clambered to the footplate of the smart eight-wheeler.

"Can you make it by two o'clock?" he asked, when the engineer, a big-boned, blue-eyed Norwegian, dropped the reversing lever into the corner for the start.

"Ay tank maybe so, ain'd it? Yust you climb opp dat odder box, Mester Kent, and hol' you' hair on. Ve bane gone to maig dat time, als' ve preak somedings, ja!" and he sent the light engine spinning down the yards to a quickstep of forty miles an hour.

Kent's after-memory of that distance-devouring rush was a blurred picture of a plunging, rocking, clamoring engine bounding over mile after mile of the brown plain; of the endless dizzying procession of oncoming telegraph poles hurtling like great side-flung projectiles past the cab windows; of now and then a lonely prairie station with waving semaphore arms, sighted, passed and left behind in a whirling sand-cloud in one and the same heart-beat. And for the central figure in the picture, the one constant quantity when all else was mutable and shifting and indistinct, the big, calm-eyed Norwegian on the opposite box, hurling his huge machine doggedly through space.

At 12:45 they stopped for water at a solitary tank in the midst of the brown desert. Kent got down stiffly from his cramped seat on the fireman's box and wetted his parched lips at the nozzle of the tender hose.

"Do we make it, Jarl?" he asked.

The engineer wagged his head.

"Ay tank so. Ve maig it all right iff dey haf bane got dose track clear."

"There are other trains to meet?"

"Ja; two bane comin' dis vay; ant Nummer Samteen ve pass opp by."

Oleson dropped off to pour a little oil into the speed-woundings while the tank was filling; and presently the dizzying race began again. For a time all things were propitious. The two trains to be met were found snugly withdrawn on the sidings at Mavero and Agriculta, and the station semaphores beckoned the flying special past at full speed. Kent checked off the dodging mile-posts: the pace was bettering the fastest run ever made on the Prairie Division—which was saying a good deal.

But at Juniberg, twenty-seven miles out of Gaston, there was a delay. Train Number 17, the east-bound time freight, had left Juniberg at one o'clock, having ample time to make Lesterville, the next station east, before the light engine could possibly overtake it. But Lesterville had not yet reported its arrival; for which cause the agent at Juniberg was constrained to put out his stop signal, and Kent's special came to a stand at the platform.

Under the circumstances, there appeared to be nothing for it but to wait until the delayed Number 17 was heard from; and Kent's first care was to report to Loring, and to ask if there were anything from Boston.

The reply was encouraging. A complete denial of everything, signed by the proper officials, had been received and repeated to Kent at Gaston—was there now awaiting him. Kent saw in anticipation the nicely calculated scheme of the junto crumbling into small dust in the precise moment of fruition, and had a sharp attack of ante-triumph which he had to walk off in turns up and down the long platform. But as the waiting grew longer, and the dragging minutes totaled the quarter-hour and then the half, he began to perspire again.

Half-past two came and went, and still there was no hopeful word from Lesterville. Kent had speech with Oleson, watch in hand. Would the engineer take the risk of a rear-end collision on a general manager's order? Oleson would obey orders if the heavens fell; and Kent flew to the wire again. Hunnicott, at Gaston, was besought to gain time in the hearing by any and all means; and Loring was asked to authorize the risk of a rear-end smash-up. He did it promptly. The light engine was to go on until it should "pick up" the delayed train between stations.

The Juniberg man gave Oleson his release and the order to proceed with due care while the sounder was still clicking a further communication from headquarters. Loring was providing for the last contingency by sending Kent the authority to requisition Number 17's engine for the completion of the run in case the track should be blocked, with the freight engine free beyond the obstruction.

Having his shackles stricken off, the Norwegian proceeded "with due care," which is to say that he sent the eight-wheeler darting down the line toward Lesterville at the rate of a mile a minute. The mystery of the delay was solved at a point half-way between the two stations. A broken flange had derailed three cars of the freight, and the block was impassable.

Armed with the general manager's mandatory wire, Kent ran forward to the engine of the freight train and was shortly on his way again. But in the twenty-mile run to Gaston more time was lost by the lumbering freight locomotive, and it was twenty minutes past three o'clock when the county seat came in sight and Kent began to oscillate between two sharp-pointed horns of a cruel dilemma.

By dropping off at the street-crossing nearest the Court House, he might still be in time to get a hearing with such documentary backing as he had been able to secure at the capital. By going on to the station he could pick up the Boston wire which, while it was not strictly evidence, might create a strong presumption in his favor; but in this case he would probably be too late to use it. So he counted the rail-lengths, watch in hand, with a curse to the count for his witlessness in failing to have Loring repeat the Boston message to him during the long wait at Juniberg; and when the time for the decision arrived he signaled the engineer to slow down, jumped from the step at the nearest crossing and hastened up the street toward the Court House.

In the mean time, to go back a little, during this day of hurryings to and fro Blashfield Hunnicott had been having the exciting experiences of a decade crowded into a corresponding number of hours. Early in the morning he had begun besieging the headquarters wire office for news and instructions, and, owing to Kent's good intentions to be on the ground in person, had got little enough of either.

At length, to his unspeakable relief, he had news of the coming special; and with the conviction that help was at hand he waited at the station with what coolness there was in him to meet his chief. But as the time for the hearing drew near he grew nervous again; and all the keen pains of utter helplessness returned with renewed acuteness when the operator, who had overheard the Juniberg-Lesterville wire talk, told him that the special was hung up at the former station.

"O my good Lord!" he groaned. "I'm in for it with empty hands!" None the less, he ran to the baggage-room end of the building and, capturing an express wagon, had himself trundled out to the Court House.

The judge was at his desk when Hunnicott entered, and Hawk was on hand, calmly reading the morning paper. The hands of the clock on the wall opposite the judge's desk pointed to five minutes of the hour, and for five minutes Hunnicott sat listening, hoping against hope that he should hear the rush and roar of the incoming special.

Promptly on the stroke of three the judge tapped upon his desk with his pencil.

"Now, gentlemen, proceed with your case; and I must ask you to be as brief as possible. I have an appointment at four which can not be postponed," he said quietly; and Hawk threw down his paper and began at once.

Hunnicott heard his opponent's argument mechanically, having his ear attuned for whistle signals and wheel drummings. Hawk spoke rapidly and straight to his point, as befitted a man speaking to the facts and with no jury present to be swayed by oratorical effort. When he came to the summarizing of the allegations in the amended petition, he did it wholly without heat, piling up the accusations one upon another with the careful method of a bricklayer building a wall. The wall-building simile thrust itself upon Hunnicott with irresistible force as he listened. If the special engine should not dash up in time to batter down the wall——

Hawk closed as dispassionately as he had begun, and the judge bowed gravely in Hunnicott's direction. The local attorney got upon his feet, and as he began to speak a telegram was handed in. It was Kent's wire from Juniberg, beseeching him to gain time at all hazards, and he settled himself to the task. For thirty dragging minutes he rang the changes on the various steps in the suit, knowing well that the fatal moment was approaching when—Kent still failing him—he would be compelled to submit his case without a scrap of an affidavit to support it.

The moment came, and still there was no encouraging whistle shriek from the dun plain beyond the open windows. Hawk was visibly disgusted, and Judge MacFarlane was growing justly impatient. Hunnicott began again, and the judge reproved him mildly.

"Much of what you are saying is entirely irrelevant, Mr. Hunnicott. This hearing is on the plaintiff's amended petition."

No one knew better than the local attorney that he was wholly at the court's mercy; that he had been so from the moment the judge began to consider his purely formal defense, entirely unsupported by affidavits or evidence of any kind. None the less, he strung his denials out by every amplification he could devise, and, having fired his last shot, sat down in despairing breathlessness to hear the judge's summing-up and decision.

Judge MacFarlane was mercifully brief. On the part of the plaintiff there was an amended petition fully fortified by uncontroverted affidavits. On the part of the defendant company there was nothing but a formal denial of the allegations. The duty of the court in the premises was clear. The prayer of the plaintiff was granted, the temporary relief asked for was given, and the order of the court would issue accordingly.

The judge was rising when the still, hot air of the room began to vibrate with the tremulous thunder of the sound for which Hunnicott had been so long straining his ears. He was the first of the three to hear it, and he hurried out ahead of the others. At the foot of the stair he ran blindly against Kent, dusty, travel-worn and haggard.

"You're too late!" he blurted out. "We're done up. Hawk's petition has been granted and the road is in the hands of a receiver."

Kent dashed his fist upon the stair-rail.

"Who is the man?" he demanded.

"Major Jim Guilford," said Hunnicott. Then, as footfalls coming stairward were heard in the upper corridor, he locked arms with Kent, faced him about and thrust him out over the door-stone. "Let's get out of this. You look as if you might kill somebody."



XI

THE LAST DITCH

It was a mark of the later and larger development of David Kent that he was able to keep his head in the moment of catastrophes. In boyhood his hair had been a brick-dust red, and having the temperament which belongs of right to the auburn-hued, his first impulse was to face about and make a personal matter of the legal robbery with Judge MacFarlane.

Happily for all concerned, Hunnicott's better counsels prevailed, and when the anger fit passed Kent found himself growing cool and determined. Hunnicott was crestfallen and disposed to be apologetic; but Kent did him justice.

"Don't blame yourself: there was nothing else you could have done. Have you a stenographer in your office?"

"Yes."

"A good one?"

"It's young Perkins: you know him."

"He'll do. 'Phone him to run down to the station and get what telegrams there are for me, and we'll talk as we go."

Once free of the Court House, Kent began a rapid-fire of questions.

"Where is Judge MacFarlane stopping?"

"At the Mid-Continent."

"Have you any idea when he intends leaving town?"

"No; but he will probably take the first train. He never stays here an hour longer than he has to after adjournment."

"That would be the Flyer east at six o'clock. Is he going east?"

"Come to think of it, I believe he is. Somebody said he was going to Hot Springs. He's in miserable health."

Kent saw more possibilities, and worse, and quickened his pace a little.

"I hope your young man won't let the grass grow under his feet," he said. "The minutes between now and six o'clock are worth days to us."

"What do we do?" asked Hunnicott, willing to take a little lesson in practice as he ran.

"The affidavits I have brought with me and the telegrams which are waiting at the station must convince MacFarlane that he has made a mistake. We shall prepare a motion for the discharge of the receiver and for the vacation of the order appointing him, and ask the judge to set an early day for the hearing on the merits of the case. He can't refuse."

Hunnicott shook his head.

"It has been all cut and dried from 'way back," he objected. "They won't let you upset it at the last moment."

"We'll give them a run for their money," said Kent. "A good bit of it depends upon Perkins' speed as a stenographer."

As it befell, Perkins did not prove a disappointment, and by five o'clock Kent was in the lobby of the Mid-Continent, sending his card up to the judge's room. Word came back that the judge was in the cafe fortifying the inner man in preparation for his journey, and Kent did not stand upon ceremony. From the archway of the dining-room he marked down his man at a small table in the corner, and went to him at once, plunging promptly into the matter in hand.

"The exigencies of the case must plead my excuse for intruding upon you here, Judge MacFarlane," he began courteously. "But I have been told that you were leaving town——"

The judge waved him down with a deprecatory fork.

"Court is adjourned, Mr. Kent, and I must decline to discuss the case ex parte. Why did you allow it to go by default?"

"That is precisely what I am here to explain," said Kent, suavely. "The time allowed us was very short; and a series of accidents——"

Again the judge interrupted.

"A court can hardly take cognizance of accidents, Mr. Kent. Your local attorney was on the ground and he had the full benefit of the delay."

"I know," was the patient rejoinder. "Technically, your order is unassailable. None the less, a great injustice has been done, as we are prepared to prove. I am not here to ask you to reopen the case at your dinner-table, but if you will glance over these papers I am sure you will set an early day for the hearing upon the merits."

Judge MacFarlane forced a gray smile.

"You vote yea and nay in the same breath, Mr. Kent. If I should examine your papers, I should be reopening the case at my dinner-table. You shall have your hearing in due course."

"At chambers?" said Kent. "We shall be ready at any moment; we are ready now, in point of fact."

"I can not say as to that. My health is very precarious, and I am under a physician's orders to take a complete rest for a time. I am sorry if the delay shall work a hardship to the company you represent; but under the circumstances, with not even an affidavit offered by your side, it is your misfortune. And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. It lacks but a few minutes of my train time."

The hotel porter was droning out the call for the east-bound Flyer, and Kent effaced himself while Judge MacFarlane was paying his bill and making ready for his departure. But when the judge set out to walk to the station, Kent walked with him. There were five squares to be measured, and for five squares he hung at MacFarlane's elbow and the plea he made should have won him a hearing. Yet the judge remained impassible, and at the end of the argument turned him back in a word to his starting point.

"I can not recall the order at this time, if I would, Mr. Kent; neither can I set a day for the hearing on the merits. What has been done was done in open court and in the presence of your attorney, who offered no evidence in contradiction of the allegations set forth in the plaintiff's amended petition, although they were supported by more than a dozen affidavits; and it can not be undone in the streets. Since you have not improved your opportunities, you must abide the consequences. The law can not be hurried."

They had reached the station and the east-bound train was whistling for Gaston. Kent's patience was nearly gone, and the auburn-hued temperament was clamoring hotly for its innings.

"This vacation of yours, Judge MacFarlane: how long is it likely to last?" he inquired, muzzling his wrath yet another moment.

"I can not say; if I could I might be able to give you a more definite answer as to the hearing on the merits. But my health is very miserable, as I have said. If I am able to return shortly, I shall give you the hearing at chambers at an early date."

"And if not?"

"If not, I am afraid it will have to go over to the next term of court."

"Six months," said Kent; and then his temper broke loose. "Judge MacFarlane, it is my opinion, speaking as man to man, that you are a scoundrel. I know what you have done, and why you have done it. Also, I know why you are running away, now that it is done. So help me God, I'll bring you to book for it if I have to make a lifetime job of it! It's all right for your political backers; they are thieves and bushwhackers, and they make no secret of it. But there is one thing worse than a trickster, and that is a trickster's tool!"

For the moment while the train was hammering in over the switches they stood facing each other fiercely, all masks flung aside, each after his kind; the younger man flushed and battle-mad; the elder white, haggard, tremulous. Kent did not guess, then or ever, how near he came to death. Two years earlier a judge had been shot and maimed on a western circuit and since then, MacFarlane had taken a coward's precaution. Here was a man that knew, and while he lived the cup of trembling might never be put aside.

It was the conductor's cry of "All aboard!" that broke the homicidal spell. Judge MacFarlane started guiltily, shook off the angry eye-grip of his accuser, and went to take his place in the Pullman. One minute later the east-bound train was threading its way out among the switches of the lower yard, and Kent had burst into the telegraph office to wire the volcanic news to his chief.



XII

THE MAN IN POSSESSION

Appraised at its value in the current coin of street gossip, the legal seizure of the Trans-Western figured mainly as an example of the failure of modern business methods when applied to the concealment of a working corporation's true financial condition.

This unsympathetic point of view was sufficiently defined in a bit of shop-talk between Harnwicke, the cold-blooded, and his traffic manager in the office of the Overland Short Line the morning after the newspaper announcement of the receivership.

"I told you they were in deep water," said the lawyer, confidently. "They haven't been making any earnings—net earnings—since the Y.S.& F. cut into them at Rio Verde, and the dividends were only a bluff for stock-bracing purposes. I surmised that an empty treasury was what was the matter when they refused to join us in the veto affair."

"That is one way of looking at it," said the traffic manager. "But some of the papers are claiming that it was a legal hold-up, pure and simple."

"Nothing of the kind," retorted the lawyer, whose respect for the law was as great as his contempt for the makers of the laws. "Judge MacFarlane had no discretion in the matter. Hawk had a perfect right to file an amended petition, and the judge was obliged to act upon it. I'm not saying it wasn't a devilish sharp trick of Hawk's. It was. He saw a chance to smite them under the fifth rib, and he took it."

"But how about his client: the woman who was put off the train? Is she any better off than she was before?"

"Oh, she'll get her five thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness, and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to say for himself."

This view of Harnwicke's, colored perhaps by the fact that the Trans-Western was a business competitor of the Short Line, was the generally accepted one in railroad and financial circles at the capital. Civilization apart, there is still a deal of the primitive in human nature, and wolves are not the only creatures that are prone to fall upon the disabled member of the pack and devour him.

But in the State at large the press was discussing the event from a political point of view; one section, small but vehement, raising the cry of trickery and judicial corruption, and prophesying the withdrawal of all foreign capital from the State, while the other, large and complacent, pointed eloquently to the beneficent working of the law under which the cause of a poor woman, suing for her undoubted right, might be made the whip to flog corporate tyranny into instant subjection.

As for the dispossessed stock-holders in the far-away East, they were slow to take the alarm, and still slower to get concerted action. Like many of the western roads, the Western Pacific had been capitalized largely by popular subscription; hence there was no single holder, or group of holders, of sufficient financial weight to enter the field against the spoilers.

But when Loring and his associates had fairly got the wires hot with the tale of what had been done, and the much more alarming tale of what was likely to be done, the Boston inertness vanished. A pool of the stock was formed, with the members of the Advisory Board as a nucleus; money was subscribed, and no less a legal light than an ex-attorney-general of the state of Massachusetts was despatched to the seat of war to advise with the men on the ground. None the less, disaster out-travels the swiftest of "limited" trains. Before the heavily-feed consulting attorney had crossed the Hudson in his westward journey, Wall Street had taken notice, and there was a momentary splash in the troubled pool of the Stock Exchange and a vanishing circle of ripples to show where Western Pacific had gone down.

In the meantime Major James Guilford, somewhile president of the Apache National Bank of Gaston, and antecedent to that the frowning autocrat of a twenty-five-mile logging road in the North Carolina mountains, had given bond in some sort and had taken possession of the company's property and of the offices in the Quintard Building.

His first official act as receiver was to ask for the resignations of a dozen heads of departments, beginning with the general manager and pausing for the moment with the supervisor of track. That done, he filled the vacancies with political troughsmen; and with these as assistant decapitators the major passed rapidly down the line, striking off heads in daily batches until the over-flow of the Bucks political following was provided for on the railroad's pay-rolls to the wife's cousin's nephew.

This was the work of the first few administrative days or weeks, and while it was going on, the business attitude of the road remained unchanged. But once seated firmly in the saddle, with his awkward squad well in hand, the major proceeded to throw a bomb of consternation into the camp of his competitors.

Kent was dining with Ormsby in the grill-room of the Camelot Club when the waiter brought in the evening edition of the Argus, whose railroad reporter had heard the preliminary fizzing of the bomb fuse. The story was set out on the first page, first column, with appropriate headlines.

WAR TO THE KNIFE AND THE KNIFE TO THE HILT!

TRANS-WESTERN CUTS COMMODITY RATE.

Great Excitement in Railroad Circles. Receiver Guilford's Hold-up.

Kent ran his eye rapidly down the column and passed the paper across to Ormsby.

"I told you so," he said. "They didn't find the road insolvent, but they are going to make it so in the shortest possible order. A rate war will do it quicker than anything else on earth."

Ormsby thrust out his jaw.

"Have we got to stand by and see 'em do it?"

"The man from Massachusetts says yes, and he knows, or thinks he does. He has been here two weeks now, and he has nosed out for himself all the dead-walls. We can't appeal, because there is no decision to appeal from. We can't take it out of the lower court until it is finished in the lower court. We can't enjoin an officer of the court; and there is no authority in the State that will set aside Judge MacFarlane's order when that order was made under technically legal conditions."

"You could have told him all that in the first five minutes," said Ormsby.

"I did tell him, and was mildly sat upon. To-day he came around and gave me back my opinion, clause for clause, as his own. But I have no kick coming. Somebody will have to be here to fight the battle to a finish when the judge returns, and our expert will advise the Bostonians to retain me."

"Does he stay?" Ormsby asked.

"Oh, no; he is going back with Loring to-night. Loring has an idea of his own which may or may not be worth the powder it will take to explode it. He is going to beseech the Boston people to enlarge the pool until it controls a safe majority of the stock."

"What good will that do?"

"None, directly. It's merely a safe preliminary to anything that may happen. I tell Loring he is like all the others: he knows when he has enough and is willing to stand from under. I'm the only fool in the lot." Ormsby's smile was heartening and good for sore nerves.

"I like your pluck, Kent; I'll be hanged if I don't. And I'll back you to win, yet."

Kent shook his head unhopefully.

"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am fighting for the pure love of it, and not with any great hope of saving the stock-holders. These grafters have us by the nape of the neck. We can't make a move till MacFarlane comes back and gives us a hearing on the merits. That may not be till the next term of court. Meanwhile, the temporary receiver is to all intents and purposes a permanent receiver; and the interval would suffice to wreck a dozen railroads."

"And still you won't give up?"

"No."

"I hope you won't have to. But to a man up a tree it looks very much like a dead cock in the pit. As I have said, if there is any backing to do, I'm with you, first, last, and all the time, merely from a sportsman's interest in the game. But is there any use in a little handful of us trying to buck up against a whole state government?"

The coffee had been served, and Kent dropped a lump of sugar into his cup.

"Ormsby, I'll never let go while I'm alive enough to fight," he said slowly. "One decent quality I have—and the only one, perhaps: I don't know when I'm beaten. And I'll down this crowd of political plunderers yet, if Bucks doesn't get me sand-bagged."

His listener pushed back his chair.

"If you stood to lose anything more than your job I could understand it," he commented. "As it is, I can't. Any way you look at it, your stake in the game isn't worth the time and effort it will take to play the string out. And I happen to know you're ambitious to do things—things that count."

"What is it you don't understand—the motive?"

"That's it."

Kent laughed.

"You are not as astute as Miss Van Brock. She pointed it out to me last night—or thought she did—in two words."

Ormsby's eyes darkened, and he did not affect to misunderstand.

"It would be a grand-stand play," he said half-musingly, "if you should happen to worry it through, I mean. I believe Mrs. Hepzibah would be ready to fall on your neck and forgive you, and turn me down." Then, half-jestingly: "Kent, what will you take to drop this thing permanently and go away?"

David Kent's smile showed his teeth.

"The one thing you wouldn't be willing to give. You asked me once when we had fallen over the fence upon this forbidden ground if I were satisfied, and I told you I wasn't. Do we understand each other?"

"I guess so," said Ormsby. "But—Say, Kent, I like you too well to see you go up against a stone fence blindfolded. I'm like Guilford: I am the man in possession. And possession is nine points of the law."

Kent rose and took the proffered cigar from Ormsby's case.

"It depends a good bit upon how the possession is gained—and held—doesn't it?" he rejoined coolly. "And your figure is unfortunate in its other half. I am going to beat Guilford."



XIII

THE WRECKERS

Just why Receiver Guilford, an officer of the court who was supposed to be nursing an insolvent railroad to the end that its creditors might not lose all, should begin by declaring war on the road's revenue, was a question which the managers of competing lines strove vainly to answer. But when, in defiance of all precedent, he made the cut rates effective to and from all local stations on the Trans-Western, giving the shippers at intermediate and non-competitive points the full benefit of the reductions, the railroad colony denounced him as a madman and gave him a month in which to find the bottom of a presumably empty treasury.

But the event proved that the major's madness was not altogether without method. It is an axiom in the carrying trade that low rates make business; create it, so to speak, out of nothing. Given an abundant crop, low prices, and high freight rates in the great cereal belt, and, be the farmers never so poor, much of the grain will be stored and held against the chance of better conditions.