Kent caught his train with something to spare, and was back at the capital in good time to keep a dinner engagement at Miss Van Brock's. He had understood that Ormsby would be the only other guest. But Portia had a little surprise in store for him. Loring had dropped in, unannounced, from the East; and Portia, having first ascertained that Mrs. Brentwood's asthma was prohibitive of late dinings-out, had instructed Ormsby to bring Elinor and Penelope.

Kent had been saving the results of his deep-sea divings in the oil-field investigation to spread them out before Miss Van Brock and Ormsby "in committee," but he put a padlock on his lips when he saw the others.

Portia gave him Elinor to take out, and he would have rejoiced brazenly if the table talk, from the bouillon to the ices, had not been persistently general, turning most naturally upon the Universal Oil Company's successful coup in the Belmount field. Kent kept out of it as much as he could, striving manfully to monopolize Elinor for his own especial behoof; but finally Portia laid her commands upon him.

"You are not to be allowed to maroon yourself with Miss Brentwood any longer," she said dictatorially. "You know more about the unpublished part of this Belmount conspiracy than any one else excepting the conspirators themselves, and you are to tell us all about it."

Kent looked up rather helplessly.

"Really, I—I'm not sure that I know anything worth repeating at your dinner-table," he protested.

But Miss Van Brock made a mock of his caution.

"You needn't be afraid. I pledged everybody to secrecy before you came. It is understood that we are in 'executive session.' And if you don't know much, you may tell us what you know now more than you knew before you knew so little as you know now."

"Hold on," said Kent; "will you please say that over again and say it slowly?"

"Never mind," laughed Ormsby. "Miss Portia has a copyright on that. But before you begin, I'd like to know if the newspapers have it straight as far as they have gone into it?"

"They have, all but one small detail. They are saying that Senator Duvall has left the city and the State."

"Hasn't he?" Loring asked.

"He hadn't yesterday."

"My-oh!" said Portia. "They will mob him if he shows himself."

Kent nodded assent.

"He knows it: he is hiding out. But I found him."

"Where?" from the three women in chorus.

"In his own house, out in Pentland Place. The family has been away since April, and the place has been shut up. I took him the first meal he'd had in thirty-six hours."

Portia clapped her hands. The butler came in with the coffee and she dismissed him and bade him shut the doors.

"Now begin at the very tip end of the beginning," she commanded.

Kent had a sharp little tussle with his inborn reticence, thrust it to the wall and told a plain tale.

"It begins in a piece of reckless folly. Shortly after I left Mrs. Brentwood's last Thursday evening I had a curious experience. The shortest way down-town is diagonally through the capitol grounds, but some undefinable impulse led me to go around on the Capitol Avenue side. As I was passing the right wing of the building I saw lights in the governor's room, and in a sudden fit of desperation resolved to go up and have it out with Bucks. It was abnormally foolish, I'll confess. I had nothing definite to go on; but I—well, I was keyed up to just about the right pitch, and I thought I might bluff him."

"Mercy me! You do need a guardian angel worse than anybody I know!" Portia cut in. "Do go on."

Kent nodded.

"I had one that night; angel or demon, whichever you please. I was fairly dragged into doing what I did. When I reached the upper corridor the door of the public anteroom was ajar, and I heard voices. The outer room was not lighted, but the door between it and the governor's private office was open. I went in and stood in that open doorway for as much as five minutes, I think, and none of the four men sitting around the governor's writing-table saw me."

He had his small audience well in hand by this time, and Ormsby's question was almost mechanical. "Who were the four?"

"After the newspaper rapid-fire of this morning you might guess them all. They were his Excellency, Grafton Hendricks, Rumford, and Senator Duvall. They were in the act of closing the deal as I became an onlooker. Rumford had withdrawn his application for a charter, and another 'straw' company had been formed with Duvall at its head. I saw at once what I fancy Duvall never suspected; that he was going to be made the scapegoat for the ring. They all promised to stand by him—and you see how that promise has been kept."

"Good heavens!" ejaculated Loring. "What a despicable lot of scoundrels! But the bribe: did you learn anything about that?"

"I saw it," said Kent, impressively. "It was a slip of paper passed across the table by Rumford to Bucks, face down. Bucks glanced at it before he thrust it into his pocket, and I had my glimpse, too. It was a draft on a Chicago bank, but I could not read the figures, and I doubt if either of the other conspirators knew the amount. Then the governor tossed a folded paper over to the oil man, saying, 'There is your deed to the choicest piece of property in all Gaston, and you've got it dirt cheap.' I came away at that."

Elinor's sigh was almost a sob; but Miss Van Brock's eyes were dancing.

"Go on, go on," she exclaimed. "That is only the beginning."

Kent's smile was of reminiscent weariness.

"I found it so, I assure you. So far as any usable evidence was concerned, I was no better off than before; it was merely my assertion against their denial—one man against four. But I have had a full week, and it has not been wasted. I needn't bore you with the mechanical details. One of my men followed Bucks' messenger to Chicago—he wouldn't trust the banks here or the mails—and we know now, know it in black on white, with the proper affidavits, that the draft was for two hundred thousand dollars, payable to the order of Jasper G. Bucks. The ostensible consideration was the transfer from Bucks to Rumford of a piece of property in the outskirts of Gaston. I had this piece of land appraised for me to-day by two disinterested citizens of Gaston, and they valued it at a possible, but highly improbable, three thousand."

"Oh, how clumsy!" said Portia, in fine scorn. "Does his Excellency imagine for a moment that any one would be deceived by such a primitive bit of dust-throwing?" and Ormsby also had something to say about the fatal mistakes of the shrewdest criminals.

"It was not so bad," said Kent. "If it should ever be charged that he took money from Rumford, here is a plain business transaction to account for it. The deed, as recorded, has nothing to say of the enormous price paid. The phrasing is the common form used when the parties to the transfer do not wish to make the price public: 'For one dollar to me in hand paid, and other valuable considerations.' Luckily, we are able to establish conclusively what the 'other valuable considerations' were."

"It seems to me that these documents arm and equip you for anything you want to do," said Loring, polishing his eye-glasses after his ingrained habit.

Kent shook his head.

"No; thus far the evidence is all circumstantial, or rather inferential. But I picked up the final link in the chain—the human link—yesterday. One of the detectives had been dogging Duvall. Two days ago the senator disappeared, unaccountably. I put two and two together, and late last evening took the liberty of breaking into his house."

"Alone?" said Elinor, with the courage-worshiping light in the blue-gray eyes.

"Yes; it didn't seem worth while to double the risk. I did it rather clumsily, I suppose, and my greeting was a shot fired at random in the darkness—the senator mistaking me for a burglar, as he afterward explained. There was no harm done, and the pistol welcome effectually broke the ice in what might otherwise have been a rather difficult interview. We had it out in an upper room, with the gas turned low and the window curtains drawn. To cut a long story short, I finally succeeded in making him understand what he was in for; that his confederates had used him and thrown him aside. Then I went out and brought him some supper."

Ormsby smote softly upon the edge of the table with an extended forefinger.

"Will he testify?" he asked.

Kent's rejoinder was definitive.

"He has put himself entirely in my hands. He is a ruined man, politically and socially, and he is desperate. While I couldn't make him give me any of the details in the Trans-Western affair, he made a clean breast of the oil field deal, and I have his statement locked up with the other papers in the Security vaults."

It was Penelope who gave David Kent his due meed of praise.

"I am neither a triumphant politician nor a successful detective, but I recognize both when they are pointed out to me," she said. "Mr. Kent, will you serve these gentlemen up hot for dinner, or cold for luncheon?"

"Yes," Portia chimed in. "You have outrun your pace-setters, and I'm proud of you. Tell us what you mean to do next."

Kent laughed.

"You want to make me say some melodramatic thing about having the shackles forged and snapping them upon the gubernatorial wrists, don't you? It will be prosaic enough from this on. I fancy we shall have no difficulty now in convincing his Excellency of the justice of our proceedings to quash Judge MacFarlane and his receiver."

"But how will you go about it? Surely you can not go personally and threaten the governor of the State!" this from Miss Brentwood.

"Can't I?" said Kent. "Having the score written out and safely committed to memory, that will be quite the easiest number on the programme, I assure you."

But Loring had something to say about the risk.

"Thus far you have not considered your personal safety—haven't had to, perhaps. But you are coming to that now. You are dealing with a desperate man, David; with a gang of them, in fact."

"That is so," said Ormsby. "And, as chairman of the executive committee, I shall have to take steps. We can't afford to bury you just yet, Kent."

"I think you needn't select the pall-bearers yet a while," laughed the undaunted one; and then Miss Van Brock gave the signal and the "executive committee" adjourned to the drawing-room. Here the talk, already so deeply channeled in the groove political, ran easily to forecastings and predictions for another electoral year; and when Penelope began to yawn behind her fan, Ormsby took pity on her and the party broke up.

It was at the moment of leave-taking that Elinor sought and found her chance to extract a promise from David Kent.

"I must have a word with you before you do what you say you are going to do," she whispered hurriedly. "Will you come to see me?"

"Certainly, if you wish it. But you mustn't let Loring's nervousness infect you. There is no danger."

"There is a danger," she insisted, "a much greater danger than the one Mr. Loring fears. Come as soon as you can, won't you?"

It was a new thing for her to plead with him, and he promised in an access of tumultuous hope reawakened by her changed attitude. But afterward, when he was walking down-town with Loring, the episode troubled him a little; would have troubled him more if he had not been so deeply interested in Loring's story of the campaign in the East.

Taking it all in all, the ex-manager's report was encouraging. The New Englanders were by no means disposed to lie down in the harness, and since the Western Pacific proper was an interstate line, the Advisory Board had taken its grievance to Washington. Many of the small stockholders were standing firm, though there had been panicky defections in spite of all that could be done. Loring had no direct evidence to sustain the stock deal theory; but it was morally certain that the Plantagould brokers were picking up Western Pacific by littles wherever they could find it.

"I am inclined to believe we haven't much time to lose," was Kent's comment. "Things will focus here long before Washington can get action. The other lines are bringing a tremendous pressure to bear on Guilford, whose cut rates are demoralizing business frightfully. The fictitious boom in Trans-Western traffic is about worked out; and for political reasons Bucks can't afford to have the road in the hands of his henchmen when the collapse comes. The major is bolstering things from week to week now until the Plantagould people get what they are after—a controlling majority of the stock—and then Judge MacFarlane will come back."

They were within two squares of the Clarendon, and the cross-street was deserted save for a drunken cow-boy in shaps and sombrero staggering aimlessly around the corner.

"That's curious," Loring remarked. "Don't you know, I saw that same fellow, or his double, lurching across the avenue as we came out of Alameda Square, and I wondered what he was doing out in that region."

"It was his double, I guess," said Kent. "This one is many pegs too drunk to have covered the distance as fast as we have been walking."

But drunk or sober, the cow-boy turned up again most unexpectedly; this time at the entrance of the alley half-way down the block. In passing he stumbled heavily against Kent; there was a thick-tongued oath, and Loring struck out smartly with his walking-stick. By consequence the man's pistol went off harmlessly in the air. The shot brought a policeman lumbering heavily up from the street beyond, and the skirling of relief whistles shrilled on the night. But the man with a pistol had twisted out of Kent's grasp and was gone in a flash.

"By Jove!" said Loring, breathing hard; "he wasn't as drunk as he seemed to be!"

Kent drew down his cuffs and shook himself straight in his coat.

"No; he wasn't drunk at all; I guess he was the man you saw when we came out of the square." Then, as the policeman came up puffing: "Let me do the talking; the whisky theory will be good enough for the newspapers."



XIX

DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS

"Oof! I feel as if I had been dipped in a warm bath of conspiracy and hung up to dry in the cold storage of nihilism! If you take me to any more meetings of your committee of safety, I shall be like the man without music in his soul—'fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.'"

Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party. Elinor had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.

"I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab," said the club-man in self-defense. "And you mustn't treat it lightly, either. Ten prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David."

"We are not very likely to babble," retorted Penelope. "We are not so rich in intimates in this aboriginal desert." But Elinor spoke to the penal clause in his warning.

"Then Mr. Kent's danger is more real than he admitted?" she said.

"It's real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another man in his place. He is a curious combination, is David: keen and sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it comes to the in-fighting he hasn't sense enough to pound sand, as his New Hampshire neighbors would say."

"I like that side of him best," Penelope averred. "Deliver me from a man of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult. Mr. Loring tells a story of a transplanted Vermonter in South America. A hot-headed Peruvian called him a liar, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw! you can't prove it.'"

"What a merciless generalizer you are!" said Ormsby, laughing. "The man who marries you will have his work cut out for him if he proposes to fill the requirements."

"Won't he?" said Penelope. "I can fancy him sitting up nights to figure it all out."

They had reached the Tejon Avenue apartment house, and to Elinor's "Won't you come in?" Ormsby said: "It's pretty late, but I'll smoke a cigar on the porch, if you'll let me."

Penelope took the hammock, but she kept it only during the first inch of Ormsby's cigar. After her sister had gone in, Elinor went back to the lapsed topic.

"I am rather concerned about Mr. Kent. You described him exactly; and—well, he is past the planning part and into the fighting part. Do you think he will take ordinary precautions?"

"I hope so, I'm sure," rejoined the amateur chairman. "As his business manager I am responsible for him, after a fashion. I was glad to see Loring to-night—glad he has come back. Kent defers to him more than he does to any one else; and Loring is a solid, sober-minded sort."

"Yes," she agreed; "I was glad, too."

After that the talk languished, and the silence was broken only by the distant droning of an electric car, the fizz and click of the arc light over the roadway, and the occasional dap of one the great beetles darting hither and thither in the glare.

Ormsby was wondering if the time was come for the successful exploiting of an idea which had been growing on him steadily for weeks, not to say months.

It was becoming more and more evident to him that he was not advancing in the sentimental siege beyond the first parallel thrown up so skilfully on the last night of the westward journey. It was not that Elinor was lacking in loyalty or in acquiescence; she scrupulously gave him both as an accepted suitor. But though he could not put his finger upon the precise thing said or done which marked the loosening of his hold, he knew he was receding rather than advancing.

Now to a man of expedients the interposition of an obstacle suggests only ways and means for overcoming it. Ormsby had certain clear-cut convictions touching the subjugation of women, and as his stout heart gave him resolution he lived up to them. When he spoke again it was of the matter which concerned him most deeply; and his plea was a gentle repetition of many others in the same strain.

"Elinor, I have waited patiently for a long time, and I'll go on doing it, if that is what will come the nearest to pleasing you. But it would be a prodigious comfort if I might be counting the days or the weeks. Are you still finding it impossible to set the limit?"

She nodded slowly, and he took the next step like a man feeling his way in the dark.

"That is as large an answer as you have ever given me, I think. Is there any speakable reason?"

"You know the reason," she said, looking away from him.

"I am not sure that I do. Is it because the moneygods have been unpropitious—because these robber barons have looted your railroad?"

"No; that is only part of it—the smallest part."

"I hoped so: if you have too little, I have a good bit too much. But that corners it in a way to make me sorry. I am not keeping my promise to win what you weren't able to give me at first."

"Please don't put it that way. If there be any fault, it is mine. You have left nothing undone."

The man of expedients ran over his cards reflectively and decided that the moment for playing his long suit was fully come.

"Your goodness of heart excuses me where I am to blame," he qualified. "I am coming to believe that I have defeated my own cause."

"By being too good to me?" she suggested.

"No; by running where I should have been content to walk; by shackling you with a promise, and so in a certain sense becoming your jailer. That is putting it rather clumsily, but isn't it true?"

"I had never thought of it in that light," she said unresponsively.

"You wouldn't, naturally. But the fact remains. It has wrenched your point of view hopelessly aside, don't you think? I have seen it and felt it all along, but I haven't had the courage of my convictions."

"In what way?" she asked.

"In the only way the thing can be stood squarely upon its feet. It's hard—desperately hard; and hardest of all for a man of my peculiar build. I am no longer what you would call a young man, Elinor, and I have never learned to turn back and begin all over again with any show of heartiness. They used to say of me in the Yacht Club that if I gained a half-length in a race, I'd hold it if it took the sticks out of my boat."

"I know," she assented absently.

"Well, it's the same way now. But for your sake—or rather for the sake of my love—I am going to turn back for once. You are free again, Elinor. All I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road between here and Boston last fall."

She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the opposite house, and he let her take her own time. When she spoke there was a thrill in her voice that he had never heard before.

"I don't deserve it—so much consideration, I mean," she said; and he made haste to spare her.

"Yes, you do; you deserve anything the best man in the world could do for you, and I'm a good bit short of that."

"But if I don't want you to go back?"

He had gained something—much more than he knew; and for a tremulous instant he was near to losing it again by a passionate retraction of all he had been saying. But the cool purpose came to his rescue in time.

"I should still insist on doing it. You gave me what you could, but I want more, and I am willing to do what is necessary to win it."

Again she said: "You are too good to me," and again he contradicted her.

"No; it is hardly a question of goodness; indeed, I am not sure that it escapes being selfish. But I am very much in earnest, and I am going to prove it. Three years ago you met a man whom you thought you could love—don't interrupt me, please. He was like some other men we know: he didn't have the courage of his convictions, lacking the few dollars which might have made things more nearly equal. May I go on?"

"I suppose you have earned the right to say what you please," was the impassive reply.

It was the old struggle in which they were so evenly matched—of the woman to preserve her poise; of the man to break it down. Another lover might have given up in despair, but Ormsby's strength lay in holding on in the face of all discouragements.

"I believe, as much as I believe anything in this world, that you were mistaken in regard to your feeling for the other man," he went on calmly. "But I want you to be sure of that for yourself, and you can't be sure unless you are free to choose between us."

"Oh, don't!—you shouldn't say such things to me," she broke out; and then he knew he was gaining ground.

"Yes, I must. We have been stumbling around in the dark all these months, and I mean to be the lantern-bearer for once in a way. You know, and I know, and Kent is coming to know. That man is going to be a success, Elinor: he has it in him, and he sha'n't lack the money-backing he may need. When he arrives——"

She turned on him quickly, and the blue-gray eyes were suspiciously bright.

"Please don't bury me alive," she begged.

He saw what he had done; that the nicely calculated purpose had carried straight and true to its mark; and for a moment the mixed motives, which are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast. But it was the better Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict.

"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am neither better nor worse than other men, I fancy. My motives, such as they are, would probably turn out to be purely selfish in the last analysis. I am proceeding on the theory that constraint breeds the desire for the thing it forbids; therefore I remove it. Also, it is a part of that theory that the successful David Kent will not appeal to you as the unspoiled country lawyer did. No, I'm not going to spoil him; if I were, I shouldn't be telling you about it. But—may I be brutally frank?—the David Kent who will come successfully out of this political prize-fight will not be the man you have idealized."

There was a muttering of thunder in the air, and the cool precursory breeze of a shower was sweeping through the tree-tops.

"Shall we go into the house?" she asked; and he took it as his dismissal.

"You may; I have kept you up long enough." And then, taking her hand: "Are we safely ashore on the new continent, Elinor? May I come and go as heretofore?"

"You were always welcome, Brookes; you will be twice welcome, now."

It was the first time she had ever called him by his Christian name and it went near to toppling down the carefully reared structure of self-restraint. But he made shift to shore the tottering walls with a playful retort.

"If that is the case, I'll have to think up some more self-abnegations. Good night."



XX

THE WINNING LOSER

Editor Hildreth's prophecy concerning the probable attitude of the administration newspapers in the discussion of the oil field affair waited but a day for its fulfilment. On the Friday morning there appeared in the Capital Tribune, the Midland City Chronicle, the Range County Maverick and the Agriculta Ruralist able editorials exonerating the People's Party, its policy and the executive, and heaping mountains of obloquy on the name of Duvall. These editorials were so similar in tone, tenor and texture, as pointedly to suggest a common model—a coincidence which was not allowed to pass unremarked by Hildreth and other molders of public opinion on the opposite side of the political fence.

But Hildreth did not pause at generalities. Two days after the Universal's triumph in the Belmount field, the Argus began to "hit it up" boldly toward the capitol, and two things came of it. The first was an attempt by some party or parties unknown to buy up a controlling interest in the Argus. The second was the waylaying of David Kent in the lobby of the Clarendon Hotel by no less a personage than the Honorable Melton Meigs, attorney-general of the State.

In his first conversation with Ormsby, Kent had spoken of the three leading spirits of the junto as from personal knowledge; but of the three, Bucks, Hendricks and Meigs, the attorney-general was the least known to him. Prior to his nomination on the State ticket Meigs had been best known as the most astute criminal lawyer in the State, his astuteness lying not so much in his ability as a pleader as in a certain oratorical gift by which he was able to convince not only a jury but the public of the entire innocence of his client.

He was a small man physically, with womanish hands and feet, and a beardless face of that prematurely aged cast which is oftenest seen in dwarfs and precocious infants; and his distinguishing characteristic, the one which stuck longest in the mind of a chance acquaintance or a casual observer, was a smile of the congealed sort which served to mask whatever emotion there might be behind it.

Kent had seen little of Meigs since the latter had turned him down in the quo warranto matter; and his guard went up quickly when the attorney-general accosted him in the lobby of the hotel and asked for a private interview.

"I am very much occupied just now, Mr. Meigs," he demurred; "but if it is a matter of importance——"

"It is; a matter of the greatest importance," was the smooth-toned reply. "I am sure you will not regret it if you will give me a few moments, Mr. Kent."

Kent decided quickly. Being forewarned, there was nothing to fear.

"We will go up to my rooms, if you please," he said, leading the way to the elevator; and no other word was spoken until they were behind closed doors on the fourth floor.

"A prefatory remark may make my business with you seem a little less singular, Mr. Kent," Meigs began, when Kent had passed his cigar-case and the attorney-general had apologized for a weak digestive tract. "On wholly divergent lines and from wholly different motives we are both working toward the same end, I believe, and it has occurred to me that we might be of some assistance to each other."

Kent's rejoinder was a mute signal to the effect that he was attending.

"Some little time ago you came to me as the legal representative of the stock-holders of the Trans-Western Railway Company, and I did not find it possible at that time to meet your wishes in the matter of a quo warranto information questioning Judge MacFarlane's election and status. You will admit, I presume, that your demand was a little peremptory?"

"I admit nothing," said Kent, curtly. "But for the sake of expediting present matters——"

"Precisely," was the smiling rejoinder. "You will note that I said 'at that time.' Later developments—more especially this charge made openly by the public press of juggling with foreign corporations—have led me to believe that as the public prosecutor I may have duties which transcend all other considerations—of loyalty to a party standard—of——"

Kent took his turn at interrupting.

"Mr. Meigs, there is nothing to be gained by indirection. May I ask you to come to the point?"

"Briefly, then: the course pursued by Senator Duvall in the Belmount affair leaves an unproved charge against others; a charge which I am determined to sift to the bottom—you see, I am speaking quite frankly. That charge involves the reputation of men high in authority; but I shall be strong to do my sworn duty, Mr. Kent; I ask you to believe that."

Kent nodded and waved him on.

"You will readily understand the delicacy of the task, and how, in the nature of things, I am handicapped and hedged up on every side. Evidence—of a kind to enable me to assail a popular idol—is exceedingly difficult to procure."

"It is," said Kent, grimly.

"Exactly. But in revolving the matter in my own mind, I thought of you. You are known at the capitol, Mr. Kent, and I may say throughout the State, as the uncompromising antagonist of the State administration. I have asked myself this: Is it possible that a cool-headed, resolute attorney like Mr. David Kent would move so far and so determinedly in this matter of antagonism without substantially paving the ground under his feet with evidence as he went along?"

Kent admitted that it was possible, but highly improbable.

"So I decided," was the smile-tempered rejoinder. "In that case it only remains for me to remind you of your public duty, Mr. Kent; to ask you in the name of justice and of the people of the State, to place your information in the hands of the public prosecutor."

Kent's face betrayed nothing more than his appreciation of the confidence reposed in him by the man whose high sense of official honor was making him turn traitor to the party leader who had dragged him through a successful election.

"I have what evidence I need, Mr. Meigs," he declared. "But if I make no secret of this, neither do I conceal the fact that the motive pro bono publico has had little to do with its accumulating. I want justice first for what might be called a purely private end, and I mean to have it."

"Pre-cisely," smiled the attorney-general. "And now we are beginning to see our way a little clearer. It is not too late for us to move in the quo warranto proceedings. If you will call at my office I shall be glad to reopen the matter with you."

"And the price?" said Kent, shortly.

"Oh, my dear sir! must we put it upon the ground of a quid pro quo? Rather let us say that we shall help each other. You are in a position to assist me very materially: I may be in a position to serve your turn. Come to my office to-morrow morning prepared to do your duty as an honest, loyal citizen, and you will find me quite willing to meet you half-way."

Kent rose and opened his watch.

"Mr. Meigs, I have given you your opportunity, and you have seemed to give me mine," he said coolly. "Will you pardon me if I say that I can paddle my own canoe—if I ask you to assure his Excellency that one more device of his to escape punishment has been tried and found wanting?"

For a flitting moment the cast-iron smile faded from the impassive face of the attorney-general and an unrelenting devil came to peer out of the colorless eyes. Then Meigs rose cat-like and laid his hand on the door-knob.

"Do I understand that you refuse to move in a matter which should be the first duty of a good citizen, Mr. Kent?" he asked purringly.

"I certainly do refuse to fall into any such clumsy trap as you have been trying to bait for me, Mr. Meigs," said David Kent, dropping back into his former curtness.

The door opened slowly under the impulse of the slender womanish hand.

"You have a task of some magnitude before you, Mr. Kent. You can scarcely hope to accomplish it alone."

"Meaning that you would like to know if the fight will go on if I should chance to meet another drunken cow-boy with a better aim? It will."

The door closed softly behind the retreating figure of the attorney-general, and Kent released the spring of the night-latch. Then he went to the dropped portiere at the farther end of the room, drew it aside and looked in on a man who was writing at a table pushed out between the windows.

"You heard him, Loring?" he asked.

The ex-manager nodded.

"They are hard pressed," he said. Then, looking up quickly: "You could name your price if you wanted to close out the stock of goods in hand, David."

"I shall name it when the time comes. Are you ready to go over to the Argus office with me? I want to have a three-cornered talk with Hildreth."

"In a minute. I'll join you in the lobby if you don't want to wait."

* * * * *

It was in the afternoon of the same day that Kent found a note in his key-box at the Clarendon asking him to call up 124 Tejon Avenue by telephone. He did it at once, and Penelope answered. The key-box note had been placed at Elinor's request, and she, Miss Penelope, could not say what was wanted; neither could she say definitely when her sister would be in. Elinor had gone out an hour earlier with Mr. Ormsby and Miss Van Brock in Mr. Ormsby's motor-car. When was he, David Kent, coming up? Did he know they were talking of spending the remainder of the summer at Breezeland Inn? And where was Mr. Loring all this time?

Kent made fitting answers to all these queries, hung up the ear-piece and went away moodily reflective. He was due at a meeting of the executive committee of the Civic League, but he let the public business wait while he speculated upon the probable object of Elinor's telephoning him.

Now there is no field in which the inconsistency of human nature is so persistent as in that which is bounded by the sentimentally narrowed horizon of a man in love. With Ormsby at the nodus of his point of view, David Kent made no secret of his open rivalry of the millionaire, declaring his intention boldly and taking no shame therefor. But when he faced about toward Elinor he found himself growing hotly jealous for her good faith; careful and fearful lest she should say or do something not strictly in accordance with the letter and spirit of her obligations as Ormsby's fiancee.

For example: at the "conspiracy dinner," as Loring dubbed it, Ormsby being present to fight for his own hand, Kent, as we have seen, had boldly monopolized Miss Brentwood, and would have committed himself still more pointedly had the occasion favored him. None the less, when Elinor had begged him privately to see her before moving in the attack on the junto, he had almost resented the implied establishing of confidential relations with her lover's open rival.

For this cause he had been postponing the promised visit, and thereby postponing the taking of the final step in the campaign of intimidation. The unexplained telephone call decided him, however. He would go and see Elinor and have the ordeal over with.

But as a preliminary he dined that evening with Ormsby at the Camelot Club, and over the coffee had it out with him.

"I am going out to see Miss Brentwood to-night," he announced abruptly. "Have you any objection?"

The millionaire gave him the shrewdest of over-looks, ending with a deep-rumbling laugh.

"Kent, you are the queerest lot I have ever discovered, and that is saying a good bit. Why, in the name of all the proprieties, should I object?"

"Your right is unchallenged," Kent admitted.

"Is it? Better ask Miss Brentwood about that. She might say it isn't."

"I don't understand," said Kent, dry-tongued.

"Don't you? Perhaps I'd better explain: she might find it a little difficult. You have been laboring under the impression that we are engaged, haven't you?"

"Laboring under the—why, good heavens, man! it's in everybody's mouth!"

"Curious, isn't it, how such things get about," commented the player of long suits. "How do you suppose they get started?"

"I don't suppose anything about it, so far as we two are concerned; I have your own word for it. You said you were the man in possession."

Ormsby laughed again.

"You are something of a bluffer yourself, David. Did you let my little stagger scare you out?"

David Kent pushed his chair back from the table and nailed Ormsby with a look that would have made a younger man betray himself.

"Do you mean to tell me that there is no engagement between you and Miss Brentwood?"

"Just that." Ormsby put all the nonchalance he could muster into the laconic reply, but he was anticipating the sequent demand which came like a shot out of a gun.

"And there never has been?"

Ormsby grinned.

"When you are digging a well and have found your stream of water, it's folly to go deeper, David. Can't you let 'good enough' alone?"

Kent turned it over in his mind, frowning thoughtfully into his coffee-cup. When he spoke it was out of the mid-heart of manliness.

"I wish you would tell me one thing, Ormsby. Am I responsible for—for the present state of affairs?"

Ormsby stretched the truth a little; partly for Elinor's sake; more, perhaps, for Kent's.

"You have done nothing that an honorable rival—and incidentally a good friend of mine—might not do. Therefore you are not responsible."

"That is putting it very diplomatically," Kent mused. "I am afraid it does not exonerate me wholly."

"Yes, it does. But it doesn't put me out of the running, you understand. I'm 'forninst' you yet; rather more stubbornly than before, I fancy."

Kent nodded.

"That, of course; I should think less of you if you were not. And you shall have as fair a show as you are giving me—which is saying a lot. Shall we go and smoke?"



XXI

A WOMAN INTERVENES

It was still early in the evening when Kent mounted the steps of the Brentwood apartment house. Mother and daughters were all on the porch, but it was Mrs. Brentwood who welcomed him.

"We were just wondering if you would imagine the message which Elinor was going to send, and didn't, and come out to see what was wanted," she said. "I am in need of a little legal advice. Will you give me a few minutes in the library?"

Kent went with her obediently, but not without wondering why she had sent for him, of all the retainable lawyers in the capital. And the wonder became amazement when she opened her confidence. She had received two letters from a New York broker who offered to buy her railroad stock at a little more than the market price. To the second letter she had replied, asking a price ten points higher than the market. At this the broker had apparently dropped the attempted negotiation, since there had been no more letters. What would Mr. Kent advise her to do—write again?

Kent smiled inwardly at the good lady's definition of "legal advice," but he rose promptly to the occasion. If he were in Mrs. Brentwood's place, he would not write again; nor would he pay any attention whatever to any similar proposals from any source. Had there been any others?

Mrs. Brentwood confessed that there had been; that a firm of Boston brokers had also written her. Did Mr. Kent know the meaning of all this anxiety to buy in Western Pacific when the stock was going down day by day?

Kent took time for reflection before he answered. It was exceedingly difficult to eliminate the personal factor in the equation. If all went well, if by due process of law the Trans-Western should be rescued out of the hands of the wreckers, the property would be a long time recovering from the wounds inflicted by the cut rates and the Guilford bad management. In consequence, any advance in the market value of the stock must be slow and uncertain under the skilfullest handling. But, while it might be advisable for Mrs. Brentwood to take what she could get, the transfer of the three thousand shares at the critical moment might be the death blow to all his hopes in the fight for retrieval.

Happily, he hit upon the expedient of shifting the responsibility for the decision to other shoulders.

"I scarcely feel competent to advise you in a matter which is personal rather than legal," he said at length. "Have you talked it over with Mr. Ormsby?"

Mrs. Brentwood's reply was openly contemptuous.

"Brookes Ormsby doesn't know anything about dollars. You have to express it in millions before he can grasp it. He says for me not to sell at any price."

Kent shook his head.

"I shouldn't put it quite so strongly. At the same time, I am not the person to advise you."

The shrewd eyes looked up at him quickly.

"Would you mind telling me why, Mr. Kent?"

"Not in the least. I am an interested party. For weeks Mr. Loring and I have been striving by all means to prevent transfers of the stock from the hands of the original holders. I don't want to advise you to your hurt; but to tell you to sell might be to undo all that has been done."

"Then you are still hoping to get the railroad out of Major Guilford's hands?"

"Yes."

"And in that case the price of the stock will go up again?"

"That is just the difficulty. It may be a long time recovering."

"Do you think the sale of my three thousand shares would make any difference?" she asked.

"There is reason to fear that it would make all the difference."

She was silent for a time, and when she spoke again Kent realized that he was coming to know an entirely unsuspected side of Elinor's mother.

"It makes it pretty hard for me," she said slowly. "This little drib of railroad stock is all that my girls have left out of what their father willed them. I want to save it if I can."

"So do I," said David Kent, frankly; "and for the same reason."

Mrs. Brentwood confined herself to a dry "Why?"

"Because I have loved your elder daughter well and truly ever since that summer at the foot of Old Croydon, Mrs. Brentwood, and her happiness and well-being concern me very nearly."

"You are pretty plain-spoken, Mr. Kent. I suppose you know Elinor is to be married to Brookes Ormsby?" Mrs. Brentwood was quite herself again.

Kent dexterously equivocated.

"I know they have been engaged for some time," he said; but the small quibble availed him nothing.

"Which one of them was it told you it was broken off?" she inquired.

He smiled in spite of the increasing gravity of the situation.

"You may be sure it was not Miss Elinor."

"Humph!" said Mrs. Brentwood. "She didn't tell me, either. 'Twas Brookes Ormsby, and he said he wanted to begin all over again, or something of that sort. He is nothing but a foolish boy, for all his hair is getting thin."

"He is a very honorable man," said Kent.

"Because he is giving you another chance? I don't mind telling you plainly that it won't do any good, Mr. Kent."

"Why?" he asked in his turn.

"For several reasons: one is that Elinor will never marry without my consent; another is that she can't afford to marry a poor man."

Kent rose.

"I am glad to know how you feel about it, Mrs. Brentwood: nevertheless, I shall ask you to give your consent some day, God willing."

He expected an outburst of some sort, and was telling himself that he had fairly provoked it, when she cut the ground from beneath his feet.

"Don't you go off with any such foolish notion as that, David Kent," she said, not unsympathetically. "She's in love with Brookes Ormsby, and she knows it now, if she didn't before." And it was with this arrow rankling in him that Kent bowed himself out and went to join the young women on the porch.



XXII

A BORROWED CONSCIENCE

The conversation on the Brentwood porch was chiefly of Breezeland Inn as a health and pleasure resort, until an outbound electric car stopped at the corner below and Loring came up to make a quartet of the trio behind the vine-covered trellis.

Later, the ex-manager confessed to a desire for music—Penelope's music—and the twain went in to the sitting-room and the piano, leaving Elinor and Kent to make the best of each other as the spirit moved them.

It was Elinor's chance for free speech with Kent—the opportunity she had craved. But now it was come, the simplicity of the thing to be said had departed and an embarrassing complexity had taken its place. Under other conditions Kent would have been quick to see her difficulty, and would have made haste to efface it; but he was fresh from the interview with Mrs. Brentwood, and the Parthian arrow was still rankling. None the less, he was the first to break away from the commonplaces.

"What is the matter with us this evening?" he queried. "We have been sitting here talking the vaguest trivialities ever since Penelope and Loring side-tracked us. I haven't been doing anything I am ashamed of; have you?"

"Yes," she confessed, looking away from him.

"What is it?"

"I asked a certain good friend of mine to come to see me when there is good reason to believe he didn't want to come."

"What makes you think he didn't want to come?"

"Why—I don't know; did he?" She had turned upon him swiftly with an outflash of the playful daring which had been one of his major fetterings in time past—the ecstatic little charm that goes with quick repartee and instant and sympathetic apprehension.

"You have never yet asked anything of him that he wasn't glad enough to give," he rejoined, keeping up the third person figurative.

"Is that saying very much—or very little?"

"Very little, indeed. But it is only your askings that have been lacking—not his good will."

"That was said like the David Kent I used to know. Are you really quite the same?"

"I hope not," he protested gravely. "People used to say of me that I matured late, and year by year as I look back I can see that it was a true saying. I have done some desperately boyish things since I was a man grown; things that make me tingle when I recall them."

"Like wasting a whole summer exploring Mount Croydon with a—a somebody who did not mature late?"

"No; I wasn't counting that among my lapses. An older man than I ever hope to be might find excuses for the Croydon summer. I meant in other ways. For one thing, I have craved success as I think few men have ever craved it; and yet my plowings in that field have been ill-timed and boyish to a degree."

She shook her head.

"I don't know how you measure success; it is a word of so many, many meanings. But I think you are your own severest critic."

"That may be; but the fact remains. It is only within the past few months that I have begun to get a true inkling of things; to know, for example, that opportunities are things to be compelled—not waited for."

She was looking away from him again.

"I am not sure that I like you better for your having discovered yourself. I liked the other David Kent."

He smiled rather joylessly.

"Somebody has said that for every new point of view gained we have to sacrifice all the treasures of the old. I am sorry if I am disappointing you."

"I don't know that you are. And yet, when you were sitting at Miss Van Brock's table the other evening telling us about your experience with the politicians, I kept saying to myself that I didn't know you—that I had never known you."

"I wish I knew just how to take that," he said dubiously.

"I wish I knew how to make you understand," she returned; and then: "I could have made the other David Kent understand."

"You are in duty bound to try to make this one understand, don't you think? You spoke of a danger which was not the violent kind, such as Loring fears. What is it?"

"You have had two whole days," she rejoined. "Haven't you discovered it?"

"I haven't found anything to fear but failure," was his reply.

"That is it; you have given it a name—its only true name—failure."

"But I am not going to fail."

"You mean you are going to take our railroad away from these men who have stolen it?"

"That is what I mean."

"And you will do it by threatening to expose them?"

"I shall tell Governor Bucks what I know about the oil field deal, assuring him that I shall publish the facts if he doesn't let the law take its course in ousting Judge MacFarlane and the receiver."

She rose and stood before him, leaning against one of the vine-clad porch pillars with her hands behind her.

"David Kent, are there any circumstances in which you would accept a bribe?"

He answered her in all seriousness.

"They say every man has his price: mine is higher than any bid they have yet made—or can make, I hope."

"Why don't you let them bribe you?" she asked coolly. "Is it because it is inexpedient—because there is more 'success' the other way?"

He tried to emulate her coolness and made a failure of it.

"Have I ever done anything to make you think I had thrown common honesty and self-respect overboard?" he demanded.

Her answer was another question, sharp-edged and well thrust home.

"Is it any worse to take a bribe than it is to give one? You have just admitted that you are going to buy the governor's neutrality, you know."

"I don't see it in that light at all."

"The other David Kent would have seen it. He would have said: These men are public criminals. If I can not bring them to justice, I can at least expose them to the scorn of all good men. Therefore I have no right to bargain with them."

Kent was silent for a long time. When he spoke it was to say:

"Why have you done this, Elinor?"

"Because I had to, David. Could I do less?"

"I suppose not. It's in the blood—in your blood and mine. Other folk call it the Puritan virus of over-righteousness, and scoff at it. I don't know: sometimes I think they have the best of the argument."

"I can't believe you are quite sincere when you say that," she asserted.

"Yes, I am. One can not compromise with conscience; that says itself. But I have come to believe latterly that one's conscience may be morbidly acute, or even diseased. I'll admit I've been taking treatment."

"That sounds very dreadful," she rejoined.

"It does, doesn't it? Yet it had to be done. As I intimated a few minutes ago, my life has hitherto been a sort of unostentatious failure. I used to think it was because I was outclassed: I know now it has been because I wouldn't do as other men do. It has been a rather heart-breaking process—to sort out the scruples, admitting the just and overriding the others—but I have been given to see that it is the price of success."

"I want you to succeed," she said.

"Pardon me; I don't think you do. You have reopened the door to doubt, and if I admit the doubt I shall fail."

The sonata Penelope was playing was approaching its finale, and Elinor was suddenly shaken with a trembling fit of fear—the fear of consequences which might involve this man's entire future. She knew Kent was leaning on her, and she saw herself as one who has ruthlessly thrust an iron bar among the wheels of a delicate mechanism. Who was she to be his conscience-keeper—to stand in the way and bid him go back? Were her own motives always so exalted? Had she not once deliberately debated this same question of expediency, to the utter abasement of her own ideals?

Penelope had left the piano, and Loring was looking at his watch. Kent saw them through the open window and got upon his feet.

"Grantham is saying he had no idea it was so late," he hazarded. "If I thank you for what you have said I am afraid it must be as the patient thanks the surgeon for the knife-stroke which leaves him a cripple for life."

It was the one word needed to break her resolution.

"Oh, forget it; please forget it!" she said. "I had no right.... You are doing a man's work in the world, and it must be done in a man's way. If I can not help, you must not let me hinder. If you let anything I have said discourage you, I shall never cease regretting it."

His smile was a mere indrawing of the lips.

"Having opened the door, you would try to shut it again, would you? How like a woman! But I am afraid it can't be done. I had been trying to keep away from that point of view.... There is much to be said on both sides. There was a time when I wouldn't have gone into such a thing as this fight with the junto; but being in, I should have seen it through regardless of the public welfare—ignoring that side of it. I can't do it now; you have shown me that I can't."

"But I don't want to be a stumbling-block," she insisted. "Won't you believe that I wanted to help?"

"I believe that your motive was all it should be; yes. But the result is the same."

Loring and Penelope were coming out, and the end of their privacy was at hand.

"What will you do?" she asked.

"I don't know: nothing that I had meant to do. It was a false start and I am back under the wire again."

"But you must not turn back unless you are fully convinced of the wrong of going on," she protested.

"Didn't you mean to convince me?"

"No—yes—I don't know. I—it seems very clear to me; but I want it to seem clear to you. Doesn't your conscience tell you that you ought to turn back?"

"No," he said shortly; but he immediately qualified the denial. "You may be right: I am afraid you are right. But I shall have to fight it out for myself. There are many things to consider. If I hold my hand, these bucaneers will triumph over the stockholders, and a host of innocent people will suffer loss." Then, seeing the quick-springing tears in her eyes: "But you mustn't be sorry for having done what you had to do; you have nothing to reproach yourself for."

"Oh, but I have!" she said; and so they parted.



XXIII

THE INSURRECTIONARIES

When the Receiver Guilfords, great and small, set their official guillotines at work lopping off department heads, they commonly ignore a consequence overlooked by many; namely, the possible effect of such wholesale changes in leadership upon the rank and file.

The American railroad in its unconsolidated stage is a modern feudalism. Its suzerains are the president and board of directors; its clan chiefs are the men who have built it and fought for its footing in the sharply contested field of competition. To these leaders the rank and file is loyal, as loyalty is accorded to the men who build and do, rather than to their successors who inherit and tear down. Add to this the supplanting of competent executive officers by a staff of political trenchermen, ignorant alike of the science of railroading, and the equally important sub-science of industrial manhandling, and you have the kindling for the fire of insurrection which had been slowly smoldering in the Trans-Western service since the day when Major Guilford had issued his general order Number One.

At first the fire had burned fitfully, eating its way into the small economies; as when the section hands pelt stray dogs with new spikes from the stock keg, and careless freight crews seed down the right of way with cast-off links and pins; when engineers pour oil where it should be dropped, and firemen feed the stack instead of the steam-dome.

But later, when the incompetence of the new officials became the mocking gibe of the service, and the cut-rate avalanche of traffic had doubled all men's tasks, the flames rose higher, and out of the smoke of them loomed the shape of the dread demon of demoralization.

First it was Hank Brodrick, who misread his orders and piled two freights in a mountain of wreckage in the deep cut between Long Pine and Argenta. Next it was an overworked night man who lost his head and cranked a switch over in front of the west-bound Flyer, laying the 1020 on her side in the ditch, with the postal and the baggage-car neatly telescoped on top to hold her down.

Two days later it was Patsy Callahan; and though he escaped with his life and his job, it was a close call. He was chasing a time freight with the fast mail, and the freight was taking the siding at Delhi to let him pass. One of the red tail-lights of the freight had gone out, and Callahan mistook the other for the target lamp of the second switch. He had time to yell at his fireman, to fling himself upon the throttle-bar and to set the airbrake before he began to turn Irish handsprings down the embankment; but the wrecking crew camped two whole days at Delhi gathering up the debris.

It was well on in the summer, when the two divisions, east and west, were strewn with wreckage and the pit tracks in the shops and shop yard were filled to overflowing with crippled engines, that the insurrectionaries began to gather in their respective labor groups to discuss the growing hazards of railroading on the Trans-Western.

The outcome was a protest from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, addressed to the receiver in the name of the organization, setting forth in plain terms the grievance of the members, and charging it bluntly to bad management. This was followed immediately by similar complaints from the trainmen, the telegraphers, and the firemen; all praying for relief from the incubus of incompetent leadership. Not to be behind these, came the Amalgamated Machinists, demanding an increase of pay for night work and overtime; and last, but not least, an intimation went forth from the Federative Council of all these labor unions hinting at possible political consequences and the alienation of the labor vote if the abuses were not corrected.

"What d'ye calc'late the major will do about it?" said Brodrick, in the roundhouse conclave held daily by the trainmen who were hung up or off duty. "Will he listen to reason and give us a sure-enough railroad man or two at the top?"

"Not in ein t'ousand year," quoth "Dutch" Tischer, Callahan's alternate on the fast mail. "Haf you not de Arkoos been reading? It is bolotics from der beginning to der ent; mit der governor vorwaerts."

"Then I am tellin' you-all right now there's goin' to be a heap o' trouble," drawled "Pike County" Griggs, the oldest engineer on the line. "The shopmen are b'ilin'; and if the major puts on that blanket cut in wages he's talkin' about——"

"'If'," broke in Callahan, with fine scorn. "'Tis slaping on yer injuries ye are, Misther Griggs. The notice is out; 'twas posted in the shops this day."

"Then that settles it," said Griggs, gloomily. "When does it take hold?"

"The first day av the month to come. An' they're telling me it catches everybody, down to the missinger b'ys in the of'ces."

Griggs got upon his feet, yawning and stretching before he dropped back into his corner of the wooden settle.

"You lissen at me: if that's the fact, I'm tellin' you-all that every wheel on this blame', hoodooed railroad is goin' to stop turnin' at twelve o'clock on the night before that notice takes hold."

An oil-begrimed wiper crawled from under the 1031, spat at the dope-bucket and flung his bunch of waste therein.

"Gur-r-r! Let 'em stop," he rasped. "The dope's bad, and the waste's bad; and the old man has cut out the 'lectrics and put us back on them," kicking a small jacket lamp to the bottom of an empty stall. "Give 's a chaw o' yer smokin' plug, Mr. Callahan," and he held out his hand.

Callahan emptied the hot ashes from his black pipe into the open palm.

"'Tis what ye get f'r yer impidunce, an' f'r layin' tongue to ould man Durgan, ye scut. 'Tis none av his doin's—the dhirty oil an' the chape waste an' the jacket lamps. It's ay-conomy, me son; an' the other name f'r that is a rayceiver."

"Is Durgan with us?" asked Brodrick.

"He's wit' himself, as a master-mechanic shu'd be," said Callahan. "So's M'Tosh. But nayther wan n'r t'other av thim'll take a thrain out whin the strike's on. They're both Loring min."

At the mention of Loring's name Griggs looked up from the stick he was whittling.

"No prospects o' the Boston folks getting the road back again, I reckon," he remarked tentatively.

"You should read dose Arkoos newsbapers: den you should know somet'ings alretty, ain'd it?" said Tischer.

Brodrick laughed.

"If you see it in the papers, it's so," he quoted. "What the Argus doesn't say would make a 'nough sight bigger book than what it does. But I've been kind o' watchin' that man Kent. He's been hot after the major, right from the jump. You rec'lect what he said in them Civic League talks o' his: said these politicians had stole the road, hide, hair an' horns."

"I'm onto him," said Callahan. "'Tis a bird he is. Oleson was telling me. The Scandehoovian was thryin' to get him down to Gaston the day they ray-ceivered us. Jarl says he wint a mile a minut', an' the little man never turned a hair."

"Is he here yet; or did he go back to God's country?" asked Engineer Scott, leaning from the cab window of the 1031.

"He's here; and so is Mr. Loring. They're stopping at the Clarendon," said Brodrick.

"Then they haven't quit," drawled Griggs; adding: "I wonder if they have a ghost of a show against the politicals?"

"Has annybody been to see 'em?" asked Callahan.

"There's a notion for you, Scott," said Brodrick. Scott was the presiding officer in the B. of L.E. local. "Get up a committee from the Federative to go and ask Mr. Loring if there's any use in our tryin' to hold on."

The wiper was killing time at a window which commanded a view of the upper yards, with the Union Passenger Station at the end of the three-mile vista. Being a late comer in the field, the Trans-Western had scanty track rights in the upper yard; its local headquarters were in the shops suburb, where the two division main lines proper began and ended, diverging, the one to the eastward and the other to the west.

"Holy smut!" said the wiper. "See Dicky Dixon comin' out with the Flyer! How's that for ten miles an hour in the city limits?"

It was a foot-note commentary on the way the service was going to pieces. Halkett, the "political" general superintendent, had called Dixon on the carpet for not making time with his train. "If you're afraid to run, say so, and we'll get a man that isn't," Halkett had said; and here was Dixon coming down a borrowed track in a busy yard at the speed which presupposes a ninety-pound rail and nothing in the way.

The conclave had gathered at the wiper's window.

"The dum fool!" said Brodrick. "If anything gets in front of him——"

There was a suburb street-crossing three hundred yards townward from the "yard limits" telegraph office, which stood in the angle formed by the diverging tracks of the two divisions. Beyond the yard the street became a country road, well traveled as the principal southern inlet to the city. When Dixon was within two train-lengths of the crossing, a farm wagon appeared, driven between the cut freight trains on the sidings directly in the path of the Flyer. The men at the roundhouse window heard the crash of the splintering wagon above the roar of the train; and the wiper on the window seat yelped like a kicked dog and went sickly green under his mask of grime.

"There it is again," said Scott, when Dixon had brought his train to a stand two hundred yards beyond the "limits" office where he should have stopped for orders. "We're all hoodooed, the last one of us. I'll get that committee together this afternoon and go and buzz Mr. Loring."

Now it fell out that these things happened on a day when the tide of retrieval was at its lowest ebb; the day, namely, in which Kent had told Loring that he was undecided as to his moral right to use the evidence against Bucks as a lever to pry the Trans-Western out of the grip of the junto. It befell, also, that it was the day chosen by two other men, not members of the labor unions, in which to call upon the ex-manager; and Loring found M'Tosh, the train-master, and Durgan, the master-mechanic, waiting for him in the hotel corridor when he came in from a late luncheon at the Camelot Club.

"Can you give us a few minutes, Mr. Loring?" asked M'Tosh, when Loring had shaken hands with them, not as subordinates.

"Surely. My time is not very valuable, just at present. Come in, and I'll see if Mr. Kent has left me any cigars."

"Humph!" said Durgan, when the ex-manager had gone into Kent's room to rummage for the smoke offering. "And they give us the major in the place of such a man as that!" with a jerk of his thumb toward the door of the bedroom.

"Come off!" warned M'Tosh; "he'll hear you." And when Loring came back with the cigars there was dry humor in his eye.

"You mustn't let your loyalty to the old guard get you into trouble with the receiver," he cautioned; and they both smiled.

"The trouble hasn't waited for our bringing," said M'Tosh. "That is why we are here. Durgan has soured on his job, and I'm more than sick of mine. It's hell, Mr. Loring. I have been at it twenty years, and I never saw such crazy railroading in any one of them."

"Bad management, you mean?"

"Bad management at the top, and rotten demoralization at the bottom as a natural consequence. We can't be sure of getting a train out of the yards without accident. Dixon is as careful a man as ever stepped on an engine, and he smashed a farmer's wagon and killed the farmer this morning within two train-lengths of the shop junction."

"Drunk?" inquired the ex-manager.

"Never a drop; Dixon's a Prohibitionist, dyed in the wool. But just before he took his train, Halkett had him in the sweat-box, jacking him up for not making his time. He came out red in the face, jumped on his engine, and yanked the Flyer down the yards forty miles an hour."

"And what is your trouble, Durgan?" asked Loring.

"Another side of the same thing. I wrote Major Guilford yesterday, telling him that six pit gangs, all the roundhouse 'emergencies' and two outdoor repair squads couldn't begin to keep the cripples moving; and within a week every one of the labor unions has kicked through its grievance committee. His reply is an order announcing a blanket cut in wages, to go into effect the first of the month. That means a strike and a general tie-up."

Loring shook his head regretfully.

"It hurts me," he admitted. "We had the best-handled piece of railroad in the West, and I give the credit to the men that did the handling. And to have it wrecked by a gang of incompetent salary-grabbers——"

The two left-overs nodded.

"That's just it, Mr. Loring," said M'Tosh. "And we're here to ask you if it's worth while for us to stick to the wreck any longer. Are you folks doing anything?"

"We have been trying all legal means to break the grip of the combination—yes."

"And what are the prospects?" It was the master-mechanic who wanted to know.

"They are not very bright at present, I must confess. We have the entire political ring to fight, and the odds are overwhelming."

"You say you've been trying legal means'," M'Tosh put in. "Can't we down them some other way? I believe you could safely count on the help of every man in the service, barring the politicals."

Loring smiled.

"I don't say we should scruple to use force if there were any way to apply it. But the way doesn't offer."

"I didn't know," said the train-master, rising to close the interview. "But if the time ever comes, all you or Mr. Kent will have to do will be to pass the word. Maybe you can think of some way to use the strike. It hasn't been declared yet, but you can bet on it to a dead moral certainty."

It was late in the afternoon of the same day that the Federative Council sent its committee, chairmaned by Engineer Scott, to interview the ex-general manager at his rooms in the Clarendon. Scott acted as spokesman, stating the case with admirable brevity and conciseness, and asking the same question as that propounded by the train-master, to wit, if there were any prospect of a return of the road to its former management.

Loring spoke more hopefully to the committee than he had to Durgan and M'Tosh. There had been a little more time for reflection, and there was the heartening which comes upon the heels of unsolicited help-tenderings, however futile. So he told the men that the stockholders were moving heaven and earth in the effort to recover their property; that until the road should be actually sold under an order from the court, there was always room for hope. The committee might rest assured that no stone would be left unturned; also that the good will of the rank and file would not be forgotten in the day of restitution, if that day should ever dawn.

When Loring was through, Engineer Scott did a thing no union man had ever done before: he asked an ex-general manager's advice touching the advisability of a strike.

"I can't say as to that," was the prompt reply. "You know your own business best—what it will cost, and what it may accomplish. But I've been on the other side often enough to be able to tell you why most strikes fail, if you care to know."

A broad grin ran the gamut of the committee.

"Tell us what to do, and we'll do it; Mr. Loring," said Scott, briefly.

"First, then, have a definite object and one that will stand the test of public opinion; in this case we'll say it is the maintenance of the present wage-scale and the removal of incompetent officers and men. Secondly, make your protest absolutely unanimous to a man. Thirdly, don't give the major time to fortify: keep your own counsels, and don't send in your ultimatum until the final moment. And, lastly, shun violence as you would a temptation of the devil."

"Yon's a man," said Angus Duncan, the member from the Amalgamated Machinists, when the committee was filing out through the hotel corridor.

"Now you're shouting!" said Engineer Scott. "And you might say a man and a brother."



XXIV

INTO THE PRIMITIVE

Tested upon purely diplomatic principles, Miss Van Brock's temper was little less than angelic, exhibiting itself under provocation only in guarded pin-pricks of sarcasm, or in small sharp-clawed kitten-buffetings of repartee. But she was at no pains to conceal her scornful disappointment when David Kent made known his doubts concerning his moral right to use the weapon he had so skilfully forged.

He delayed the inevitable confession to Portia until he had told Loring; and in making it he did not tell Miss Van Brock to whom he owed the sudden change in the point of view. But Portia would have greatly discredited her gift of insight if she had not instantly reduced the problem to its lowest terms.

"You have been asking Miss Brentwood to lend you her conscience, and she has done it," was the form in which she stated the fact. And when Kent did not deny it: "You lack at least one quality of greatness, David; you sway too easily."

"No, I don't!" he protested. "I am as obstinate as a mule. Ask Ormsby, or Loring. But the logic of the thing is blankly unanswerable. I can either get down to the dirty level of these highbinders—fight the devil with a brand taken out of his own fire; or——"

"Or what?" she asked.

"Or think up some other scheme; some plan which doesn't involve a surrender on my part of common decency and self-respect."

"Yes?" she retorted. "I suppose you have the other plan all wrought out and ready to drop into place?"

"No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly.

"But at least you have some notion of what it is going to be?"

"No."

She was pacing back and forth in front of his chair in a way that was almost man-like; but her contemptuous impatience made her dangerously beautiful. Suddenly she stopped and turned upon him, and there were sharp claws in the kitten-buffetings.

"Do you know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate to throw away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in this railroad affair, we haven't been idle—your newspaper and political friends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and we have been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give you anything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspire to. Have you known this?"

"I have guessed it," he said quite humbly.

"Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: you were to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle—show them up—and climb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shaken them. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And now you turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!"

There was more of a like quality—a good bit more; some of it regretful; all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; and Kent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointed vicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only to begin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among the tombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserable twirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible to his friends and innocuous to his enemies.

On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brock to ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a rather anxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmatively by the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ran to the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following a boyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken his problem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him plodding wearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from much tramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out to some despairing conclusion.

The City Hall clock was upon the stroke of three when the inbound trolley-car landed him in front of the Clarendon. It was a measure of his purposeful abstraction that he went on around the corner to the Security Bank, dusty and unpresentable as he was, and transferred the packet of incriminating affidavits from the safety deposit box to his pocket before going to his rooms in the hotel.

This paper weapon was the centering point of the struggle which had now lasted for nearly a fortnight. So long as the weapon was his to use or to cast away, the outcome of the moral conflict hung in the balance. But now he was emerging from the night wanderings among the tombs of the undecided.

"I can't give it up; there is too much at stake," he muttered, as he trudged heavily back to the hotel. And before he went above stairs he asked the young woman at the house telephone exchange to ascertain if Governor Bucks were in his office at the capitol, and if so, if he were likely to remain there for an hour.

When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on the writing-table and went to freshen himself with a bath. That which lay before him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity. In other times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tub and the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to the bottle.

He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying where he had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card. Kent read the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines about his mouth. There are times when a man's fate rushes to meet him, and he had fallen upon one of them.

"Show him up," was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevator cage clacked again, Kent was waiting.

His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a little breathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator. Kent admitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in a chair and begged a light for his cigar. In the match-passing he gathered his spent breath and declared his errand.

"I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent," he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it in stolid silence.

"Possibly: that is for you to say," was the unencouraging reply.

Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyond it into the bedroom.

"We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of," said Kent, in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed his chair.

"I came up to see what you want—what you will take to quit," he announced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over his knee. "That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, and we can dispense with the preliminaries, I take it."

"I told your attorney-general some time ago what I wanted, and he did not see fit to grant it," Kent responded. "I am not sure that I want anything now—anything you can have to offer." This was not at all what he had intended to say; but the presence of the adversary was breeding a stubborn antagonism that was more potent on the moral side than all the prickings of conscience.

The yellow-lidded eyes of the governor began to close down, and the look came into them which had been there when he had denied a pardon to a widow pleading for the life of her convicted son.

"I had hoped you were in the market," he demurred. "It would be better for all concerned if you had something to sell, with a price attached. I know what you have been doing, and what you think you have got hold of. It's a tissue of mistakes and falsehoods and back-bitings from beginning to end, but it may serve your purpose with the newspapers. I want to buy that package of stuff you've got stowed away in the Security vaults."

The governor's chair was on one side of the writing-table, and Kent's was on the other. In plain sight between the two men lay the packet Bucks was willing to bargain for. It was inclosed in a box envelope, bearing the imprint of the Security Bank. Kent was looking steadily away from the table when he said:

"What if I say it isn't for sale?"

"Don't you think it had better be?"

"I don't know. I hadn't thought much about the advisable phase of it."

"Well, the time has come when you've got it to do," was the low-toned threat.

"But not as a matter of compulsion," said Kent, coolly enough. "What is your bid?"

Bucks made it promptly.

"Ten thousand dollars: and you promise to leave the State and stay away for one year from the first Tuesday in November next."

"That is, until after the next State election." Kent blew a whiff of smoke to the ceiling and shook his head slowly. "It is not enough."

The governor uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way, and said:

"I'll make it twenty thousand and two years."

"Or thirty thousand and three years," Kent suggested amiably. "Or suppose we come at once to the end of that string and say one hundred thousand and ten years. That would still leave you a fair price for your block of suburban property in Guilford and Hawk's addition to the city of Gaston, wouldn't it?"

The governor set his massive jaw with a sharp little click of the teeth.

"You are joking on the edge of your grave, my young friend. I taught you in Gaston that you were not big enough to fight me: do you think you are big enough now?"

"I don't think; I know," said Kent, incisively. "And since you have referred to the Gaston days: let me ask if I ever gave you any reason to believe that I could be scared out?"

"Keep to the point," retorted Bucks, harshly. "This State isn't broad enough to hold you and me on opposite sides of the fence. I could make it too hot to hold you without mixing up in it myself, but I choose to fight my own battles. Will you take twenty thousand dollars spot cash, and MacFarlane's job as circuit judge when I'm through with him? Yes or no."

"No."

"Then what will you take?"

"Without committing myself in any sense, I might say that you are getting off too cheaply on your most liberal proposition. You and your friends have looted a seventy-million-dollar railroad, and——"

"You might have stood in on that if you had taken Guilford's offer," was the brusk rejoinder. "There was more than a corporation lawyer's salary in sight, if you'd had sense enough to see it."

"Possibly. But I stayed out—and I am still out."

"Do you want to get in? Is that your price?"

"I intend to get in—though not, perhaps, in the way you have in mind. Are you ready to recall Judge MacFarlane with instructions to give us our hearing on the merits?"

The governor's face was wooden when he said:

"Is that all you want? I understand MacFarlane is returning, and you will doubtless have your hearing in due season."

"Not unless you authorize it," Kent objected.

"And if I do? If I say that I have already done so, will you come in and lay down your arms?"

"No."

"Then I'm through. Give me your key and write me an order on the Security Bank for those papers you are holding."

"No," said Kent, again.

"I say yes!" came the explosive reassertion; and Kent found himself looking down the bright barrel of a pistol thrust into his face across the table.

For a man who had been oftenest an onlooker on the football half of life, Kent was measurably quick and resourceful. In one motion he clamped the weapon and turned it aside; in another he jammed the fire end of his cigar among the fingers of the grasping hand. The governor jerked free with an oath, pain-extorted; and Kent dropped the captured weapon into the table drawer. It was all done in two breaths, and when it was over, Kent flung away the broken cigar and lighted a fresh one.

"That was a very primitive expedient, your Excellency, to say the best of it," he remarked. "Have you nothing better to offer?"

The reply was a wild-beast growl, and taking it for a negative, Kent went on.

"Then perhaps you will listen to my proposal. The papers you are so anxious about are here,"—tapping the envelope on the table. "No, don't try to snatch them; you wouldn't get out of here alive with them, lacking my leave. Such of them as relate to your complicity in the Universal Oil deal are yours—on one condition; that your health fails and you get yourself ordered out of the State for the remainder of your term."

"No!" thundered the governor.

"Very well; you may stay and take a course of home treatment, if you prefer. It's optional."

"By God! I don't know what keeps me from throttling you with my hands!" Bucks got upon his feet, and Kent rose, also, slipping the box envelope into his pocket and laying a precautionary hand on the drawer-pull.

The governor turned away and walked to the window, nursing his burned fingers. When he faced about it was to return to the charge.

"Kent, what is it you want? Say it in two words."

"Candidly, I didn't know, until a few minutes ago, Governor. It began with a determination to break your grip on my railroad, I believe."

"You can have your railroad, if you can get it—and be damned to it, and to you, too!"

"I said it began that way. My sole idea in gathering up this evidence against you and your accomplices was to whittle out a club that would make you let go of the Trans-Western. For two weeks I have been debating with myself as to whether I should buy you or break you; and half an hour before you came, I went to the bank and took these papers out, meaning to go and hunt you up."

"Well?" said the governor, and the word bared his teeth because his lips were dry.

"I thought I knew, in the old Gaston days, how many different kinds of a scoundrel you could be, but you've succeeded in showing me some new variations in the last few minutes. It's a thousand pities that the people of a great State should be at the mercy of such a gang of pirates as you and Hendricks and Meigs and MacFarlane, and——"

"Break it off!" said Bucks.

"I'm through. I was merely going to add' that I have concluded not to buy you."

"Then it's to be war to the knife, is it?"

"That is about the size of it," said Kent; and the governor found his hat.

"I'll trouble you to return my property," he growled, pointing to the table drawer.

"Certainly." Kent broke the revolver over the blotting pad, swept the ejected cartridges into the open drawer, and passed the empty weapon to its owner.

When the door closed behind the outgoing visitor the victor in the small passage at arms began to walk the floor; but at four o'clock, which was Hildreth's hour for coming down-town, he put on his hat and went to climb the three flights of stairs to the editor's den in the Argus building.



XXV

DEAD WATER AND QUICK

The cubby-hole in which Hildreth earned his bread by the sweat of his brain was dark even at midday; and during working hours the editor sat under a funnel-shaped reflector in a conic shower-bath of electric light which flooded man and desk and left the corners of the room in a penumbra of grateful twilight.

Kent sat just outside of the cone of radiance, watching Hildreth's face as the editor read stolidly through the contents of the box envelope. It was an instructive study in thought dynamics. There was a gleam of battle satisfaction in the editorial eye when Hildreth faced the last sheet down upon the accumulation of evidence, saying:

"You didn't overstate the fact in your brag about the political graves. Only this isn't a spade; it's a steam shovel. Do I understand you are giving me this stuff to use as I please?"

"Just that," said Kent.

"And you have made it serve your turn, too?"

"No." Kent's voice was sharp and crisp.

"Isn't that what you got it for?"

"Yes."

"Then why don't you use it?"

"That was what Bucks wanted to know a little while ago when he came to my rooms to try to buy me off. I don't think I succeeded in making him understand why I couldn't traffic with it; and possibly you wouldn't understand."

"I guess I do. It's public property, and you couldn't divert it into private channels. Is that the way it struck you?"

"It is the way it struck a friend of mine whose sense of ultimate right and wrong hasn't lost its fine edge in the world-mill. I did not want to do it."

"Naturally," said the editor. "Giving it up means the loss of all you have been working for in the railroad game. I wish I could use it, just as it stands."

"Can't you?"

"I am afraid not—effectively. It would make an issue in a campaign; or, sprung on the eve of an election, it might down the ring conclusively. I think it would. But this is the off year, and the people won't rise to a political issue—couldn't make themselves felt if they should."

"I don't agree with you. You have your case all made out, with the evidence in sound legal form. What is to prevent your trying it?"

"The one thing that you ought to be lawyer enough to see at a glance. There is no court to try it in. With the Assembly in session we might do something: as it is, we can only yap at the heels of the ringsters, and our yapping won't help you in the railroad fight. What do you hear from Boston?"

"Nothing new. The stock is still flat on the market, with the stock-holders' pool holding a bare majority, and the Plantagould brokers buying in driblets wherever they can find a small holder who is willing to let go. It is only a question of time; and a very short time at that."

The editor wagged his head in sympathy.

"I wish I could help you, David. You've done a big thing for me—for the Argus; and all I have to hand you in return is a death sentence. MacFarlane is back."

"Here? In town?"

"Yes. And that isn't the worst of it. The governor sent for him."

"Have you any idea what is in the wind?" asked Kent, dry-lipped.

"I am afraid I have. My young men have been nosing around in the Trans-Western affair, and several things have developed. Matters are approaching a crisis. The cut-rate boom is about to collapse, and there is trouble brewing in the labor organizations. If Bucks doesn't get his henchmen out of it pretty soon, they will be involved in the smash—which will be bad for them and for him, politically."

"I developed most of that a good while ago," Kent cut in.

"Yes; I know. But there is more to follow. The stock-smashing plan was all right, but it is proving too slow. Now they are going to do something else."

"Can you give it a name?" asked Kent, nerving himself.

"I can. But first tell me one thing: as matters stand, could Guilford dispose of the road—sell it or lease it?"

"No; he would first have to be made permanent receiver and be given authority by the court."

"Ah! that explains Judge MacFarlane's return. Now what I am going to tell you is the deadest of secrets. It came to me from one of the Overland officials, and I'm not supposed to gossip. Did you know the Overland Short Line had passed under Plantagould domination?"

"I know they elected a Plantagould directory at the annual meeting."

"Exactly. Well, Guilford is going to lease the Trans-Western to its competitor for a term of ninety-nine years. That's your death sentence."

Kent sprang to his feet, and what he said is unrecordable. He was not a profane man, but the sanguine temperament would assert itself explosively in moments of sudden stress.

"When is this thing to be done?" he demanded, when the temperamental gods were appeased a little.

Hildreth shrugged.

"I have told you all I could, and rather more than I had any right to. Open the door behind you, won't you? The air is positively sulphurous."

Kent opened the door, entirely missing the point of the sarcasm in his heat.

"But you must have some idea," he insisted.

"I haven't; any more than the general one that they won't let the grass grow under their feet."

"No. God blast the whole—I wish I could swear in Sanscrit. The mother-tongue doesn't begin to do justice to it. Now I know what Bucks meant when he told me to take my railroad, if I could get it. He had the whole thing coopered up in a barrel at that minute."

"I take it you have no alternative to this," said the editor, tapping the pile of affidavits.

"Not a cursed shred of an idea! And, Hildreth—" he broke off short because once again the subject suddenly grew too large for coherent speech.

Hildreth disentangled himself from the legs of his chair and stood up to put his hands on Kent's shoulders.

"You are up against it hard, David," he said; and he repeated: "I'd give all my old shoes to be able to help you out."

"I know it," said Kent; and then he turned abruptly and went away.

Between nine and ten o'clock the same evening Kent was walking the floor of his room, trying vainly to persuade himself that virtue was its own reward, and wondering if a small dose of chloral hydrate would be defensible under the cruel necessity for sleep. He had about decided in favor of the drug when a tap at the door announced the coming of a bell-boy with a note. It was a message from Portia.

"If you have thrown away your chance definitely, and are willing to take a still more desperate one, come to see me," she wrote; and he went mechanically, as a drowning man catches at a straw, knowing it will not save him.

The house in Alameda Square was dark when he went up the walk; and while he was feeling for the bell-push his summoner called to him out of the electric stencilings of leaf shadows under the broad veranda.

"It is too fine a night to stay indoors," she said. "Come and sit in the hammock while I scold you as you deserve." And when he had taken the hammock: "Now give an account of yourself. Where have you been for the past age or two?"

"Wallowing around in the lower depths of the place that Dante visited," he admitted.

"Don't you think you deserve a manhandling?"

"I suppose so; and if you have it in mind, I shall probably get it. But I may say I'm not especially anxious for a tongue-lashing to-night."

"Poor boy!" she murmured, in mock sympathy. "Does it hurt to be truly good?"

"Try it some time when you have a little leisure, and see for yourself," he retorted.

She laughed.

"No; I'll leave that for the Miss Brentwoods. By the way, did you go to tell the household good-by? Penelope was wondering audibly what had become of you."

"I didn't know they were gone. I have been nowhere since the night you drove me out with contumely and opprobrium."

She laughed again.

"You must have dived deep. They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost your ghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop. But it isn't wonderful that you haven't missed Mr. Ormsby. Having elected Miss Brentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further use for the P.S.M."

"And you have no further use for me, apparently," he complained. "Did you send for me so that you might abuse me in the second edition?"

"No; I wanted to give you a bit of news, and to repeat an old question of mine. Do you know what they are going to do next with your railroad?"

"Yes; Hildreth told me this afternoon."

"Well, what are you going to do?"

"Nothing. There is nothing to be done. They have held to the form of legal procedure thus far, but they won't do it any more. They will take MacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanent receiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot. I sha'n't be in it."

"Probably not; certainly not if you don't try to get in it. And that brings me back to the old question. Are you big enough, David?"

"If you think I haven't been big enough to live up to my opportunities thus far, I'm afraid I may disappoint you again," he said doubtfully.

"You have disappointed me," she admitted. "That is why I am asking: I'd like to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going to trip us again."

"Portia, if I thought you really meant that ... A conscienceless man is bad enough, God knows; but a conscienceless woman——"

Her laugh was a decorous little shriek.

"David, you are not big; you are narrow, narrow, narrow! Is there then no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of birth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Is it an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal or mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan's?"