The tiny chiming clock on his dressing-case in the adjoining bedroom had tinkled forth its ten tapping hammer strokes when the man sitting in the dark heard the pounding of hoofs and the rattling of buggy wheels in the quiet street. He was absently awaking to the fact that the vehicle had stopped at his own door when he heard voices, the widow's and another, in the lower hall, and then a man's footsteps on the stair. To a hard-pressed breaker of the traditions at such a moment an unannounced visitor, coming up in the dark, could mean but one thing. Griswold silently opened a drawer in the writing-table and groped for the mate to the quick-firing pistol which, after the change of wet clothing, he had put aside to dry.

The visitor came heavily upstairs, and Griswold, swinging his chair to face the open door, saw the shadowy bulking of the man as he came through the upper hall. When the bulk filled the doorway it was covered by the pistol held low, and Griswold's finger was pressing the trigger.

"Asleep, old man?" said the intruder in Raymer's well-known voice.

There was a sound like a gasping sob, and another as of a drawer closing softly. Then Griswold said: "No; I'm not asleep. Come in. Shall I light the gas?"

"Not for me," returned the bedtime visitor, entering and groping for the chair at the desk-end, into which, when he had placed it, he dropped wearily. "I want to smoke," he went on. "Have you got a cigar—no, not the pipe; I want something that I can chew on."

A cigar was found, in the drawer which had so lately furnished the weapon, and by the flare of the match in Raymer's fingers Griswold saw a face haggard with anxiety. In the kindlier days it had been one of his redeeming characteristics that he could never dwell long upon his own harassments when another's troubles were brought to him.

"What is the matter, Edward?" he asked.

"A mix-up with the labor unions. It's been brewing for some little time, but I didn't want to worry you with it. Unless we announce a flat increase of twenty per cent in wages to-morrow morning, and declare for the closed shop, the men will go out on us at noon. I've seen it coming. It began with the enlarging of the plant and the taking on of the new men needed. We've always had the open shop, as you know, and it was all right so long as we were too small for the unions to scrap about. But now we get the Iron Workers' ultimatum: we can do as we please about the profit-sharing; but the flat increase must go on the pay-rolls, and the shop must be run as a closed shop."

If the god of mischance had chosen the moment it could not have been more opportune for the fire-lighting of malevolence. Griswold's swing-chair righted itself with a click, and Bainbridge's prophecy that a hot-hearted proletary was likely to become the hardest of masters became a prediction fulfilled.

"We'll see them in hell, first, Raymer! Isn't that the way you feel about it?"

"Partly," allowed the smoker. "But it can hardly be disposed of that easily, Kenneth. A good third of the men are our old standbys; men who were in the shops under my father. Some pretty powerful influence has been brought to bear upon them to swing them against us. I don't know what it is, but I do know this: every second man we have hired lately has turned out to be either a loud-mouthed agitator or a silent mixer of trouble medicine."

"Let the causes go for the present," said Griswold shortly. "We're talking about the men, now. The ungrateful beggars are merely proving that it isn't in human nature to meet justice and fairness and generous liberality half-way. If they want a fight, give it to them. Hit first and hit hard; that's the way to do. Shut up the plant and make it a lock-out."

"I was afraid you might say something like that in the first heat of it," said the young ironmaster. "It's a stout fighting word, and I guess, under the skin, you're a stout fighting man, Kenneth—which I'm not. Where are your convictions about the man-to-man obligations? We've got to take them into the account, haven't we?"

"Damn the convictions!" snapped Griswold viciously. "If I've been giving you the impression that I'm an impracticable theorist, forget it. These fellows want a fight: I say give them a fight—all they want of it and a little more for good measure."

Raymer did not reply at once. This latest Griswold was puzzling him, and with the puzzlement there went sorrowful regret; the regret that has been the recanter's portion in all the ages. When he spoke it was out of the heart of common sense and sanity.

"I know how you feel about it; I had a little attack of the same sort this afternoon when the grievance committee dropped down on me. But facts are pretty stubborn things, and they've got us foul. We have twenty thousand dollars' worth of work for the Pineboro road on the shop tracks, and the trouble-makers have picked their opportunity. If we can't turn out this work, we'll lose the Pineboro's business, which, as I have told you, is a pretty big slice of our business. Under such conditions I don't dare to pull down a fight which may not only shut us up for an indefinite time, but might even go far enough to smash us."

Griswold took his turn of silence, rocking gently in the tilting chair. When the delayed rejoinder came, the harshness had gone out of his voice, but there was a cynical hardness to take its place.

"It's your affair; not mine," he said. "If you've made up your mind not to fight, of course, that settles it. Now we can come down to the causes. You've been stabbed in the back. Do you know who's doing it?"

"The Federated Iron Workers, I suppose."

"Not in a thousand years! They are only the means to an end." The tilting chair squeaked again, and he went on: "If I'm going to show you how you can dodge this fight, I'll have to knock down a door or two first. If I blunder in where I'm not wanted, you can kick me out. There is one way in which you can cure all this trouble-sickness without resorting to surgery and blood-letting."

"Name it," said Raymer eagerly.

"I will; but first I'll have to break over into the personalities. Have you made up your mind that you are going to marry Margery Grierson?"

Raymer laughed silently, leaning his head back on the cushion of the lazy-chair until his cigar stood upright.

"That's a nice way to biff a man in the dark!" he chuckled. "But if you're in earnest I'll tell you the straightforward truth: I don't know."

"Why don't you know?" If there were a scowl to go with the query, Raymer could not see it.

"I'll be frank with you again, Kenneth. What little sentiment there is in me leans pretty heavily that way. You have been with her a good bit and you know her—know how she appeals to any man with a drop of red blood in him. But I'm twenty-eight years old and well past the time when the young man's fancy lightly turns—and all that. I can't ignore the—the—well, the proprieties, you might say, though that isn't exactly the word."

"You mean that Margery Grierson doesn't measure up to the requirements of the Wahaskan Four Hundred?" There was satirical scorn in the observation, but Raymer did not perceive it.

"Oh, I don't know as you would put it quite that baldly," he protested. "But you see, when it comes to marrying and settling down and raising a family, you have to look at all sides of the thing. The father, as we all know, is a cold-blooded old werewolf; the mother nobody knows anything about save that—happily, in all probability—she isn't living. And there you are. Yet I won't deny that there are times when I'm tempted to shut my eyes and take the high dive, anyway—at the risk of splashing a lot of good people who would doubtless be properly scandalized."

By this time Griswold was gripping the arms of his chair savagely and otherwise trying to hold himself down; but this, too, Raymer could not know.

"You have reason to believe that it rests wholly with you, I suppose?" came from the tilting chair after a little pause. "Miss Grierson is only waiting for you to speak?"

"That's a horrible question to ask a man, Kenneth—even in the dark. If I say yes to it, it can't sound any other way than boastful and—and caddish. Yet I honestly believe that— Oh, hang it all! can't you see how impossible you're making it, old man?"

"Not impossible; only a trifle difficult," was the qualifying rejoinder. "It is easier from this on. That is the peaceful way out of the shop trouble for you, Raymer. When you can go to Jasper Grierson and tell him you are going to marry his daughter, the trouble will be as good as cured."

For a little time Raymer was speechless. Then he burst out.

"Well, I'll be— Jove, Griswold, you don't lack much of being as cold-blooded as the old buccaneer himself! What makes you think he is stirring up the trouble?"

"It doesn't require any special thought. He wanted to freeze you out a little while back, and you balked him. Now he has come back at you another way."

"I wonder!" said the iron-founder musingly; and then: "I more than half believe you are right. But if you are, do you realize what you are proposing?"

"I am not proposing anything; I am merely suggesting. But you needn't put in the factor of doubt. This labor trouble that is threatening to smash you is Jasper Grierson's reply to the move you made when you let me in and choked him off. He is reaching for you."

Again Raymer held his peace and the atmosphere of the room grew pungent with tobacco smoke.

"I'm feeling a good bit like a yellow dog, Kenneth," he said, at length. "After what I've admitted and what you've said, I'm left in the position of the poor devil who would be damned if he did and be damned if he didn't. You have succeeded in fixing it so that I can't ask Margery Grierson to be my wife, however much I'd like to."

"That isn't the point," insisted Griswold half-savagely. "How you may feel about it, or what your people may say, is purely secondary. The thing to be considered is, what will happen to Miss Grierson?"

"Oh, the devil! if you put it that way——"

"I am putting it precisely that way."

"Why, see here, old man; if you were Madge's brother, you couldn't be putting the screws on any harder! What's got into you to-night?"

Griswold was inexorable.

"Miss Grierson hasn't any brother, and she might as well not have any father—better, perhaps. As God hears me, Raymer, I'm going to see to it that she gets a square deal."

"In other words, if she has made up her clever little mind that she wants to be Mrs. Ed. Raymer——"

"That is it, exactly."

"By George! I believe you are in love with her, yourself!"

"I am," was the cool reply.

"Well, of all the— Say, Griswold, you're a three-cornered puzzle to me yet. I don't know what the other three-fourths of the town is saying, but my fourth of it has it put up that you've everlastingly cooked my goose at Doctor Bertie's; that you and Charlotte are just about as good as engaged. Perhaps you'll tell me that it isn't true."

"It isn't—yet."

"But it may be, later on? Now you are getting over into my little garden-patch, Kenneth. If you think I'm going to stand still and see you put a wedding ring on Charlotte Farnham's finger when I know you'd like to be putting it on Madge Grierson's——"

Griswold's low laugh came as an easing of stresses.

"You can't very well marry both of them, yourself, you know," he suggested mildly. And then: "If you were not so badly torn up over this shop trouble, you'd see that I'm trying to give you the entire field. I shall probably leave town to-morrow, and I merely wanted to do you, or Miss Grierson, or both of you, a small kindness by way of leave-taking."

"Leave town?" echoed the iron-founder. "Where are you going?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you are coming back?"

"No."

Once more Raymer puffed at the shortened cigar until the end of it glowed like a small distress signal in the dark.

"Tell me," he broke out finally: "has Margery Grierson turned you down?"

"No."

"Then Charlotte has?"

"No."

"Confound it all! can't you say anything but 'No'? Do you mean to tell me that you are going away, leaving me bucked and gagged by this labor outfit to live or die as I may? Great Scott, man! if my money's gone, yours goes with it!"

"You are freely welcome to the money, Edward—if you can manage to hang on to it; and I have pointed out the easy way to salvage the industrial ship. Can't you give me your blessing and let me go in peace?"

The blessing was not withheld, but neither was it given.

"I came here with my own back-load of trouble, but it seems that I'm not the only camel in the caravan," said the young ironmaster, thoughtfully. "What is it, Kenneth? anything you can unload on me?"

"You wouldn't understand," was the gentle evasion. "I can only give you my word that neither Miss Margery nor Miss Charlotte are in any way concerned in it."

"And you don't want to draw your money out of the plant?"

"No. For your sake I wish I had more to put in."

Once again Raymer took refuge in silence. After a time he said: "You've been a brother to me, Griswold, and I shall never forget that. But if I needed your help in the money pinch, I'm needing it worse now. I'll do the right thing by Margery; I think I've been meaning to, all along; if I haven't, it's only because this whole town has been fixing up a match between Charlotte and me ever since we were school kids together—you know how a fellow gets into the way of taking a thing like that for granted merely because everybody else does?"

"Yes; I know."

"Well, I guess it isn't a heart-breaker on either side. If Charlotte cares, she doesn't take the trouble to show it. Just the same, on the other hand, I've got a shred or two of decency left, Kenneth. I'm not going to marry myself out of this fight with Jasper Grierson—not in a million years. Stay over and help me see it through; and when we win out, I promise you I'll do the square thing."

By no means could Edward Raymer know that he had set the whispering devil at work again at the ear of the man who was rocking gently in the desk-chair. But the demon was busily suggesting, and the man was listening. Was there not more than an even chance that Andrew Galbraith would die, after all? He was old, with the life-reserves spent and the weight of the years upon him. And if he should not die, there was still a chance that days might elapse before he would be able to gather himself sufficiently to remember and to raise the hue and cry. Griswold put a hot hand across the corner of the table and felt for Raymer's cool one.

"There's only one other way, Edward; and that is to fight like the devil," he said, speaking as one who has weighed and measured and decided. "What do you say?"

"If you will stay," Raymer began, hesitantly.

"I'll stay—as long as I can." Then, with the note of harshness returning: "We'll make the fight, and we'll give these muckers of yours all they are looking for. Shut the plant doors to-morrow morning and make it a lock-out. I'll be over bright and early and we'll place a bunch of wire orders in the cities for strike-breakers. That will bring them to time."

Raymer got up slowly and felt in the dark for his hat.

"Strike-breakers!" he groaned. "Griswold, it would make my father turn over in his coffin if he could know that we've come to that! But I guess you're right. Everybody says I'm too soft-hearted to be a master of men. Well, I must be getting home. To-morrow morning, at the plant? All right; good-night."

And he turned to grope his way to the door and through the dark upper hall and down the stair.



XXXI

NARROWING WALLS

When Griswold had reached across the corner of his writing-table in the unlighted study to strike hands with Edward Raymer upon the promise to stay and help, it is conceivable that he gave the impelling motive its just due. To step aside was to become a fugitive, leaving a fugitive's plain trail and half-confession of guilt behind him to direct the pursuit. To stay and face the crisis coldly was equally out of the question for a man of temperament. The call to action came as a draught of fiery wine to the overspent and he accepted in a sudden upsurge of self-centring that took nothing into the account save the welcome excitement of a conflict.

It was with rather more than less of the self-centring that he joined the conference with Raymer and the shop bosses in the offices of the plant the following morning. Having slept upon the quarrel, Raymer was on the conciliatory hand, and four of the five department foremen were with him. In the early hours of the forenoon a compromise was still possible. The prompt closing of the shops had had its effect, and a deputation of the older workmen came to plead for arbitration and a peaceful settlement of the trouble. Raymer, who had evidently been taking counsel with his womankind, would have consented to this proposal, but Griswold fought it and finally carried his point. "No compromise" was the answer sent back to the locked-out workmen, and with it went the ultimatum, which Griswold himself snapped out at the leader of the conciliators: "Tell your committee that it is unconditional surrender, and it must be made before five o'clock this afternoon. Otherwise, not a man of you can come back on any terms."

At the hurling of this firebrand, three of the five department heads drew their pay-envelopes and went away. Then Griswold proceeded to make the breach impassable by calling upon the sheriff for a guard of deputies. Raymer shook his head gloomily when the thrower of firebrands sent the 'phone message to the sheriff's office.

"That settles it beyond any hope of a patch-up," he said sorrowfully. "If we hadn't declared war before, we've done it now. I'm prophesying that nobody will weaken when it comes to the pay-roll test this afternoon."

"Because we have taken steps to protect our property?" rasped the fighting partner.

"Because we have taken the step which serves notice upon them that we consider them criminals, at least in intention. You'd resent it yourself, Griswold. If anybody should pull the law on you before you had done anything to deserve it, I'm much mistaken if you wouldn't——"

"Oh, hell!" was the biting interruption; and Raymer could not know upon what inward fires he had unwittingly flung a handful of inflammables.

It was during the paying-off interval in the afternoon that Broffin strolled across the railroad tracks, and, after listening to one or two of the incendiary speeches at the storm-centre mass meeting in front of McGuire's, went on past the potteries to the Raymer plant.

Several things had happened since the afternoon when he had sat behind the sheltering window curtain in the writing-room of the summer-resort hotel listening to Miss Grierson's story. For one, Teller Johnson, of the Bayou State Security, had pleaded his inability to leave his post unless ordered to do so by the president: the cashier was sick and the bank was short-handed. For another, there had been a peppery protest entered by the good Doctor Bertie—transformed for the moment into an exasperated Doctor Bertie. If Broffin did not quit his annoying espionage upon the house in Lake Boulevard, and upon the visitors thereto, there was going to be trouble, and he, Doctor Bertie, would be the trouble-maker. For a third untoward thing, he had found that Wahaska as a community was beginning to look a little askance at him. The village consciousness which had made it so easy for him to find out all he wished to know about everybody was turning against him, and now, as it seemed, everybody was wishing to know more than he cared to tell about the past, present, and future concerns of one Matthew Broffin: in short, he was becoming a suspicious character.

Broffin the pertinacious, again with an unlighted cigar between his teeth, was ruminating thoughtfully over these things when he came in sight of the closed gates and smokeless chimneys of the Foundry and Machine Works. Once more the scent had grown cold. Miss Grierson's story had seemed to clear Griswold—if anything short of a court acquittal could clear him; and in the peppery interview Doctor Farnham had told him plainly that, if Mr. Griswold were the object of his attentions, he was barking up the wrong tree; that Miss Farnham would, if necessary, go into court and testify that Mr. Griswold was not the man whom she had seen in the Bayou State Security. Also, Griswold was doing something for himself. It was he who had pulled Mr. Galbraith out of the lake little better than a dead man, and had brought him to life again; and now he was taking an active part in the foundry fight—about the last thing that might be expected of a man dodging the police.

In spite of all these buffetings the man from Tennessee was only bruised; not beaten. It is possible to be convinced without evidence; to believe without being able to prove. Also, convincement may grow into certainty as the evidence to support it becomes altogether incertitude. Broffin was as sure now that Griswold was his man as he was of his own present inability to prove it. Which is to say that he had discounted Miss Farnham's refusal to help, and President Galbraith's refusal to remember; was discounting Miss Grierson's skilfully told story, and Griswold's breaking of all the criminal precedents by staying on in Wahaska after he had been warned. For Broffin made no doubt that the warning had been given, either by Miss Farnham or by Miss Grierson—or both.

"All the same, he'll make a miss-go, sooner or later," the pertinacious one was saying to himself as he strolled past the Raymer plant with a keen eye for the barred gates, the lounging guards in the yard, and the sober-faced workmen coming and going at the pay-office. "If he can carry a steady head through what's comin' to him here, he's a better man than I've been stacking him up to be."

Coming even with the grouping around the office door, Broffin sat down on a discarded cylinder casting, chewed his dry smoke, whittled a stick, and kept an open ear for the sidewalk talk. It was angrily vindictive for the greater part, with the new member of the Raymer company for a target. Now and then it was threatening. If the company should attempt to bring in foreign labor there would be blood on the moon.

Later, a big, red-faced man with his hat on the back of his head and a paste diamond in his shirt bosom, came to join the shifting group on the office sidewalk. Broffin marked him as one of the inflammatory speakers he had seen and heard on the dry-goods-box rostrum in front of McGuire's, and had since been trying to place. The nearer view turned up the proper page in the mental note-book. The man's name was Clancy; he was a Chicago ward-worker, sham labor leader, demagogue; a bad man with a "pull." Broffin remembered the "pull" because it had once got in his way when he was trying to bag Clancy for a violation of the revenue laws.

Instantly the detective began to speculate upon the chance that had brought the Chicago ward bully into a village labor fight, and since it was his business to put two and two together, he was not long in finding the answer to his own query. Clancy had come because he had been hired to come. Assuming this much, the remainder was easy. The town gossips had supplied all the major facts of the Raymer-Grierson checkmate, and Broffin saw a great light. It was not labor and capital that were at odds; it was competition and monopoly. And monopoly, invoking the aid of the Clancys, stood to win in a canter.

Broffin dropped the stick he had been whittling and got up to move away. Though some imaginative persons would have it otherwise, a detective may still be a man of like passions—and generous prepossessions—with other men. For the time Broffin's Anglo-Saxon heritage, the love of fair play, made him forget the limitations of his trade. "By grapples, the old swine!" he was muttering to himself as he made a slow circuit of the plant enclosure. "Somebody ought to tell them two young ducks what they're up against. For a picayune, I'd do it, myself. Huh!—and the little black-eyed girl playin' fast an' loose with both of 'em at once while the old money-octippus eats 'em alive!"

Thus Broffin, circling the Raymer works by way of the four enclosing streets; and when his back was turned the man called Clancy pointed him out to the group of discontents.

"D'ye see that felly doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks on ye. If ye have the nerve of a bunch of hoboes, ye'll watch yer chances and step on him like a cockroach. He's a Pinkerton!"



XXXII

THE LION'S SHARE

Wahaska, microcosmic and village-conscious in spite of its city charter, was duly thrilled and excited when, on the day following the storm and shipwreck, it found itself the scene of an angry conflict between capital and labor.

Reports varied as to the origin of the trouble. Among the retired farmers, who still called Raymer "Eddie" and spoke of him as "John Raymer's boy," it was the generally expressed opinion that he was both too young and too easy-going to be a successful industry captain in the larger field he had lately entered. In the workingmen's quarter, which lay principally beyond the railroad tracks, public opinion was less lenient and the young ironmaster, figuring hitherto only as a good boss with a few unnecessary college ideas, was denounced as a "kid-glove" reformer who made his profit-sharing fad an excuse for advancing his favorites, and who was accordingly to be "brought to time" by the strong hand of the organization.

It was a crude surprise, both to the West Side and to "Pottery Flat," to find the new book-writing partner not only taking an active part in the fight, but apparently directing the capitalistic hostilities with a high hand. Quite early in the forenoon it was known on the street that Griswold had taken the field with Raymer; that the lock-out was his reply to the strike notice; and that it was at his suggestion that a dozen deputies had been sworn in to guard the Raymer plant—the iron works lying just outside of the corporation lines. A little later came the news that he had sent a counter ultimatum to the representatives of the labor forces sitting in permanence in their hall over McGuire's saloon. From two o'clock until five the offices of the plant would be open, and all former employees would be paid in full and discharged. Those who failed to make application between the hours named would not be taken back on any terms.

From two to five in the afternoon Wahaska, figuratively speaking, held its breath. At half-past three, young Dahlgren, of the Daily Wahaskan, spoiled a good story for his own paper by spreading the report that most of the men had sullenly drawn their pay, but as yet not a man of them had signed on for further employment. At four o'clock the Daily Wahaskan's windows bore a bulletin to the effect that a mass indignation meeting was in progress in front of the Pottery Flat saloon; and at half-past four it was whispered about that war had been declared. Raymer and Griswold were telegraphing for strike-breakers; and the men were swearing that the plant would be picketed and that scabs would be dealt with as traitors and enemies.

It was between half-past four and five that Miss Grierson, driving in the basket phaeton, made her appearance on the streets, evoking the usual ripple of comment among the gossipers on the Winnebago porch as she tooled her clean-limbed little Morgan to a stop in front of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank.

Since it was long past the closing hours, the curtains were drawn in the bank doors and street-facing windows. But there was a side entrance, and when she tapped on the glass of the door an obsequious janitor made haste to admit her. "Yo' paw's busy, right now, Miss Mahg'ry," the negro said; but she ignored the hint and went straight to the door of the private room, entering without warning.

As the janitor had intimated, her father was not alone. In the chair at the desk-end sat a man florid of face, hard-eyed and gross-bodied. His hat was on the back of his head, and clamped between his teeth under the bristling mustaches he held one of Jasper Grierson's fat black cigars. The conference paused when the door opened; but when Margery crossed the room and perched herself on the deep seat of the farthest window, it went on in guarded tones at a silent signal from the banker to his visitor.

There was a trade journal lying in the window-seat, and Miss Grierson took it up to become idly immersed in a study of the advertising pictures. If she listened to the low-toned talk it was only mechanically, one would say. Yet there was a quickening of the breath now and again, and a pressing of the white teeth upon the ripe lower lip, as she turned the pages of the advertising supplement; these, though only detached sentences of the talk drifted across to her window-seat.

"You're fixed to put the entire responsibility for the ruction over onto the other side of the house?" was one of the overheard sentences: it was her father's query, and she also heard the answer. "We're goin' to put 'em in bad, don't you forget it. There'll be some broken heads, most likely, and if they're ours, somebody'll pay for 'em." A little farther along it was her father who said: "You've got to quit this running to me. Keep to your own side of the fence. Murray's got his orders, and he'll pay the bills. If anything breaks loose, I won't know you. Get that?" "I'm on," said the red-faced man; and shortly afterward he took his leave.

When the door had closed behind the man who looked like a ward heeler or a walking delegate, and who had been both, and many other and more questionable things, by turns, Jasper Grierson swung his huge chair to face the window.

"Well?" he said, "how's Galbraith coming along?"

"There is no change," was the sober rejoinder. "He is still lying in a half-stupor, just as he was last night and this morning. Doctor Farnham shakes his head and won't say anything."

"You mustn't let him die," warned the man in the big chair, half jocularly. "There's too much money in him."

The smouldering fires in the daughter's eyes leaped up at the provocation lurking in the grim brutality; but they were dying down again when she put the trade journal aside and said: "I didn't come here to tell you about Mr. Galbraith. I came to give you notice that it is time to quit."

"Time to quit what?"

"You know. When I asked you to put Mr. Raymer under obligations to you, I said I'd tell you when it was time to stop."

Jasper Grierson sat back in his chair and chuckled.

"Lord love you!" he said, "I'd clean forgot that you had a tea-party stake in that game, Madgie; I had, for a fact!"

"Well, it is time to remember it," was the cool reply.

"What was I to remember?"

"That you were to turn around and help him out of his trouble when I gave you the word."

The president of the Farmers' and Merchants' tilted his chair to the lounging angle and laughed; a slow gurgling laugh that spread from lip to eye and thence abroad through his great frame until he shook like a grotesque incarnation of the god of mirth.

"I was to turn around and help him out of the hole, was I? Oh, no; I guess not," he denied. "It's business now, little girl, and the tea-fights are barred. I'll give you a check for that span o' blacks you were looking at, and we'll call it square."

"Does that mean that you intend to go on until you have smashed him?" she asked, quietly ignoring the putative bribe.

"I'm going to put him out of business—him and that other fool friend of yours—if that's what you mean."

Again the sudden lightning glowed in Margery Grierson's eyes, but, as before, the flash was only momentary. There was passion enough in blood and brain, but there was also a will, and the will was the stronger.

"Please!" she besought him.

"Please what?"

"Please ruin somebody else, and let Mr.——let these two go!"

Grierson's laugh this time was brutally sardonic.

"So you're caught at last, are you, girlie? I was wondering if you wouldn't come out o' that pool with the hook in your mouth. But you might as well pull loose, even if it does hurt a little. Raymer and Griswold have got to come under."

She looked across at him steadily and again there was a struggle, short and sharp, between the leaping passions and the indomitable will. Yet she could speak softly.

"That is your last word, is it?"

"You can call it that, if you like: yes."

"What is the reason? Why do you hate these two so desperately?" she asked.

Jasper Grierson fanned away the nimbus of cigar smoke with which he had surrounded himself and stared gloomily at her through the rift.

"Who said anything about hating?" he derided. "That's a fool woman's notion. This is business, and there ain't any such thing as hate in business. Raymer's iron-shop happens to be in the road of a bigger thing, and it's got to move out; that's all."

She nodded slowly. "I thought so," she said, half-absently: "and the 'bigger thing' has some more money in it for you. Oh, how I do despise it all!"

"Oh, no, you don't," he contradicted, falling back into the half-jocular vein. "You're a pretty good spender, yourself, Madgie. If you didn't have plenty of money to eat and drink and wear and breathe——"

"I hate it!" she said coldly. Then she dragged the talk back to the channel it was leaving. "I ought to have broken in sooner; I might have known what you would do. You are responsible for this labor trouble they are having over at the iron works. Don't bother to deny it; I know. That was your 'heeler'—the man you had here when I came. You don't play fair with many people: don't you think you'd better make an exception of me?"

Grierson was mouthing his cigar again and the smoky nimbus was thickening to its customary density when he said: "You're nothing but a spoiled baby, Madge. If you'd cry for the moon, you'd think you ought to have it. I've said my say, and that's all there is to it. Trot along home and 'tend to your tea-parties: that's your part of the game. I can play my hand alone."

She slipped out of the window-seat and crossed the room quickly to stand before him.

"I'll go, when you have answered one question," she said, the suppressed passions finding their way into her voice. "I've asked for bread and you've given me a stone. I've said 'please' to you, and you slapped me for it. Do you think you can afford to shove me over to the other side?"

"I don't know what you're driving at, now," was the even-toned rejoinder.

"Don't you? Then I'll tell you. You have been pinching this town for the lion's share ever since we came here—shaking it down as you used to shake down the"—she broke off short, and again the indomitable will got the better of the seething passions. "We'll let the by-gones go, and come down to the present. What if some of the things you are doing here and now should get into print?"

"For instance?" he suggested, when she paused.

"This Raymer affair, for one thing. You don't own the Wahaskan—yet: supposing it should come out to-morrow morning with the true story of this disgraceful piece of buccaneering, telling how you tried first to squeeze him through the bank loan, and when that failed, how you bribed his workmen to make trouble?"

"You go to Randolph and try it," said the gray wolf, jeeringly. "In the first place, he wouldn't believe it—coming from you. He wouldn't forget that you're my daughter, however much you are trying to forget it. In the next place he'd want proof—damned good proof—if he was going to make a fight on me. He'd know that one of two things would happen; if he failed to get me, I'd get him."

The daughter who had asked for bread and had been given a stone put her face in her hands and moved toward the door. But at the last moment she turned again like a spiteful little tiger-cat at bay.

"You think I can't prove it? That is where you fall down. I can convince Mr. Randolph if I choose to try. And that isn't all: I can tell him how you have planned to sell Mr. Galbraith a tract of 'virgin' pine that has been culled over for the best timber at least three times in the past five years!"

Jasper Grierson started from his chair and made a quick clutch into smoky space. "Madge—you little devil!" he gritted.

But the grasping hands closed upon nothing, and the sound of the closing door was his only answer.

* * * * *

When she had unhitched the little Morgan and had driven away from the bank, Miss Grierson did a thing unprecedented in any of her former grapplings with a crisis—she hesitated. Twice she drove down Sioux Avenue with the apparent intention of stopping at the Daily Wahaskan building, and twice she went on past with no more than an irresolute glance for the upper windows beyond which lay the editorial rooms and the office of Mr. Carter Randolph, the owner of the newspaper. But on the third circuit of the square, decision had evidently come to its own again. Turning the mare into Main Street, she drove quickly to the Winnebago House and drew up at the carriage step. A bell-boy ran out to hold the horse, but she shook her head and called him to the wheel of the phaeton to slip a coin into his hand and to give him a brief message.

Two minutes after the boy's disappearance, Broffin came out and touched his hat to the trim little person in the basket seat.

"You wanted to see me, Miss Grierson?" he said, shelving his surprise, if he had any.

"Yes. You are Mr. Matthew Broffin, of the Colburne Detective Agency, are you not?" she asked, sweetly.

Broffin took the privilege of the accused and lied promptly.

"Not that anybody ever heard of, I reckon," he denied, matching the smile in the inquiring eyes.

"How curious!" she commented.

Broffin's smile became a grin of triumph. "There's a heap o' curious things in this little old world," he volunteered. "What?"

"But none quite so singular as this," she averred. Then she laughed softly. "You see, it resolves itself into a question of veracity—between you and Mr. Andrew Galbraith. You say you are not, and he says you are. Which am I to believe?"

Broffin did some pretty swift thinking. There had been times when he had fancied that Miss Grierson, rather than Miss Farnham, might be the key to his problem. There was one chance in a thousand that she might inadvertently put the key into his hands if he should play his cards skilfully, and he took the chance.

"You can call it a mistake of mine, if you like," he yielded; and she nodded brightly.

"That is better; now we can go on comfortably. Are you too busy to take a little commission from me?"

"Maybe not. What is it?" He was looking for a trap, and would not commit himself too broadly.

"There are two things that I wish to know definitely. Of course, you have heard about the accident on the lake? Mr. Galbraith is at our house, and he is very ill—out of his head most of the time. He is continually trying to tell some one whom he calls 'MacFarland' to be careful. Do you know any one of that name?"

Broffin put a foot on the phaeton step and a hand on the dash. There were loungers on the hotel porch and it was not necessary for them to hear.

"Yes; MacFarland is his confidential man in the bank," he returned.

"Oh; that explains it. But what is it that Mr. Galbraith wants him to be careful about?"

Again Broffin thought quickly. If he should tell the plain truth.... "Tell me one thing, Miss Grierson," he said bluntly. "Am I doin' business with you, or with your father?"

"Most emphatically, with me, Mr. Broffin."

"All right; everything goes, then. Mr. Galbraith has been figurin' on buying some pine lands up north."

"I know that much. Go on."

"And he has sent MacFarland up to verify the boundary records on the county survey."

"To Duluth?"

Broffin nodded.

"I thought so," she affirmed. And then: "The records are all right, Mr. Broffin; but the lands which Mr. MacFarland will be shown will not be the lands which Mr. Galbraith is talking of buying. I want evidence of this—in black and white. Can you telegraph to some one in Duluth?"

Broffin permitted himself a small sigh of relief. He thought he had seen the trap; that she was going to try to get him away from Wahaska.

"I can do better than that," he offered. "I can send a man from St. Paul; a good safe man who will do just what he is told to do—and keep his mouth shut."

She nodded approvingly.

"Do it; and tell your messenger that time is precious and expense doesn't count. That is the first half of your commission. Come a little closer and I'll tell you the second half."

Broffin bent his head and she whispered the remainder of his instructions. When she had finished he looked up and wagged his head apprehendingly.

"Yes; I see what you mean—and it's none o' my business what you mean it for," he answered. "I'll get the evidence, if there is any."

"It must be like the other; in black and white," she stipulated. "And you needn't say 'if.' Look for a red-faced man with stiff mustaches and a big make-believe diamond in his shirt-front, and make him tell you."

Broffin wagged his head again. "There ain't goin' to be any grand jury business about it, is there?" he questioned; adding: "I know your man—saw him this afternoon over at the plant. He's goin' to be a tough customer to handle unless I can tell him there ain't goin' to be any come-back in the courts."

Miss Grierson was opening her purse and she passed a yellow-backed bank-note to her newest confederate.

"Your retainer," she explained. "And about the red-faced man: we sha'n't take him into court. But I'd rather you wouldn't buy him, if you can help it. Can't you get him like this, some way?"—she held up a thumb and finger tightly pressed together.

Broffin's grin this time was wholly of appreciation.

"You're the right kind—the kind that leads trumps all the while, Miss Grierson," he told her. Then he did the manly thing. "I'll go into this, just as you say—what? But it's only fair to warn you that it may turn up some things that'll feaze you. You know that old sayin' about sleepin' dogs?"

Miss Grierson was gathering the reins over the little Morgan's back and her black eyes snapped.

"This is one time when we are going to kick the dogs and make them wake up," she returned. "Good-by, Mr. Broffin."



XXXIII

GATES OF BRASS

It was an hour beyond the normal quitting time on the day of ultimatums and counter-threatenings, the small office force had gone home, and the night squad of deputies had come to relieve the day guard. Griswold closed the spare desk in the manager's room and twirled his chair to face Raymer.

"We may as well go and get something to eat," he suggested. "There will be nothing doing to-night."

Raymer began to put his desk in order.

"No, not to-night. The trouble will begin when we try to start up with a new force. Call it a weakness if you like, but I dread it, Kenneth."

Griswold's smile was a mere baring of the teeth. "That's all right, Ned; you do the dreading and I'll do the fighting," he said; adding: "What we've had to-day has merely whetted my appetite."

The man of peace shook his head dejectedly.

"I can't understand it," he protested. "Up to last night I was calling you a benevolent Socialist, and my only fear was that you might some time want to reorganize things and turn the plant into a little section of Utopia. Now you are out-heroding Herod on the other side."

Griswold got up and crushed his soft hat upon his head.

"Only fools and dead folk are denied the privilege of changing their minds," he returned. "Let's go up to the Winnebago and feed."

The dinner to which they sat down a little later was a small feast of silence. Each was busy with his own thoughts, and it was not until after the coffee had been served that Griswold leaned across the table to call Raymer's attention to a man who was finishing his meal in a distant corner of the dining-room, a swarthy-faced man who drank his coffee with the meat course to the unpleasant detriment of a pair of long drooping mustaches.

"Wait a minute before you look around, and then tell me who that fellow is over on the right—the man with the black mustaches," he directed.

Raymer looked and shook his head.

"He's a new-comer—comparatively; somebody at the club said he gave himself out for a lumberman from Louisiana."

Griswold was nodding slowly. "His name?" he asked.

"I can't remember. It's an odd name; Boffin, or Giffin, or something like that. They're beginning to say now that he isn't a lumberman at all—just why, I don't know."

Griswold's right hand stole softly to his hip pocket. The touch was reassuring. But a little while after, when he was leaving the dining-room with Raymer, he dropped behind and made a quick transfer of something from the hip pocket to the side pocket of his coat. His hand was still in the coat pocket when he parted from the young iron-founder on the sidewalk.

"You'll be going home, I suppose?" he said.

Raymer made a wry face.

"Yes; and I wish to gracious you were the one who had to face my mother and sister. They're all for peace, you know—peace at any old price."

Griswold laughed.

"Tell them we're going to have peace if we are obliged to fight for it. And don't let them swing you. If we back down now we may as well go into court and ask for a receiver. Good-night."

Though he had not betrayed it, Griswold was fiercely impatient to get away. One tremendous question had been dominating all others from the earliest moment of the morning awakening, and all day long it had fed upon doubtings and uncertainty. Would Andrew Galbraith recover from the effects of the drowning accident? At first, he thought he would go to his room and telephone to Margery. But before he had reached the foot of Shawnee Street he had changed his mind. What he wanted to say could scarcely be trusted to the wires.

Twice before he reached the gate of the Grierson lawn he fancied he was followed, and twice he stepped behind the nearest shade-tree and tightened his grip upon the thing in his right-hand pocket. But both times the rearward sidewalk showed itself empty. Since false alarms may have, for the moment, all the shock of the real, he found that his hands were trembling when he came to unlatch the Grierson gate, and it made him vindictively self-scornful. Also, it gave him a momentary glimpse into another and hitherto unmeasured depth in the valley of stumblings. In the passing of the glimpse he was made to realize that it is the coward who kills; and kills because he is a coward.

He had traversed the stone-flagged approach and climbed the steps of the broad veranda to reach for the bell-push when he heard his name called softly in the voice that he had come to know in all of its many modulations. The call came from the depths of one of the great wicker lounging-chairs half-hidden in the veranda shadows. In a moment he had placed another of the chairs for himself, dropping into it wearily.

"How did you know it was I?" he asked, when he could trust himself to speak.

"I saw you at the gate," she returned. "Are you just up from the Iron Works?"

"I have been to dinner since we came up-town—Raymer and I."

A pause, and then: "The men are still holding out?"

"We are holding out. The plant is closed, and it will stay closed until we can get another force of workmen."

"There will be lots of suffering," she ventured.

"Inevitably. But they have brought it upon themselves."

"Not the ones who will suffer the most—the women and children," she corrected.

"It's no use," he said, answering her thought. "There is nothing in me to appeal to."

"There was yesterday, or the day before," she suggested.

"Perhaps. But yesterday was yesterday, and to-day is to-day. As I told Raymer a little while ago, I've changed my mind."

"About the rights of the down-trodden?"

"About all things under the sun."

"No," she denied, "you only think you have. But you didn't come here to tell me that?"

"No; I came to ask a single question. How is Mr. Galbraith?"

"He is a very sick man."

Another pause, for which the questioner was responsible.

"You mean that there is a chance that he may not recover?"

"More than a chance, I'm afraid. The first thing Doctor Bertie did yesterday evening was to wire St. Paul for two trained nurses; and to-day he telegraphed Chicago for Doctor Holworthy, who charges twenty-five dollars a minute for mere office consultations."

"Humph!" said Griswold, "money needn't cut any figure." And then, after a moment of silence: "I did my best; you know I did my best?"

Her answer puzzled him a little.

"I could almost find it in my heart to hate you if you hadn't."

"But you know I did."

"Yes; I know you did."

Silence again, broken only by the whispering of the summer night breeze rustling the leaves of the lawn oaks and the lapping of tiny waves on the lake beach. At the end of it, Griswold got up and groped for his hat.

"I'm going home," he said. "It has been a pretty strenuous day, and there is another one coming. But before I go I want you to promise me one thing. Will you let me know immediately, by 'phone or messenger, if Mr. Galbraith takes a turn for the better?"

"Certainly," she said; and she let him say good-night and get as far as the steps before she called him back.

"There was another thing," she began, with the sober gravity that he could never be sure was not one of her many poses, and not the least alluring one. "Do you believe in God, Kenneth?"

The query took him altogether by surprise, but he made shift to answer it with becoming seriousness.

"I suppose I do. Why?"

"It is a time to pray to Him," she said softly; "to pray very earnestly that Mr. Galbraith's life may be spared."

He could not let that stand.

"Why should I concern myself, specially?" he asked; adding: "Of course, I'm sorry, and all that, but——"

"Never mind," she interposed, and she left her chair to walk beside him to the steps. "I've had a hard day, too, Kenneth, boy, and I—I guess it has got on my nerves. But, all the same, you ought to do it, you know."

He stopped and looked down into the eyes whose depths he could never wholly fathom.

"Why don't you do it?" he demanded.

"I? oh, God doesn't know me; and, besides, I thought—oh, well, it doesn't matter what I thought. Good-night."

And before he could return the leave-taking word, she was gone.



XXXIV

THE ABYSS

Raymer's prediction that the real trouble would begin when the attempt should be made to start the plant with imported workmen was amply fulfilled during the militant week which followed the opening of hostilities.

The appearance of the first detachment of strike-breakers, a trampish crew gathered up hastily by the employment agencies in the cities in response to Griswold's telegrams, was the signal for active resistance. Promptly the Iron Works plant and the approaches to it were picketed, and of the twenty-five or thirty men who came in on the first day's train only a badly frightened and cowed half-dozen won through the persuading, jeering, threatening picket line to the offices of the plant.

Other days followed in which the scenes of the first were repeated—with the difference that each succeeding day saw the inevitable increase of lawlessness. From taunts and abuse the insurrectionaries passed easily to violence. Street fights, when the trampish place-takers came in any considerable numbers, were of daily occurrence, and the tale of the wounded grew like the returns from a battle. By the middle of the week Raymer and Griswold were asking for a sheriff's posse to maintain peace in the neighborhood of the plant; and were getting their first definite hint that some one higher up was playing the game of politics against them.

"No, gentlemen; I've done all that the law requires and a little more," was the sheriff's response to the plea for better protection. Then came the hint. "You can take it as a word from a friend that this private scrap of yours with your men is making everybody pretty tired. First and last, it's only a question of whether you'll pay out a little more money, or a little less money, not to a lot of imported hoboes, but to certain citizens of Red Earth County,"—to which was added significantly—"citizens with votes."

"In other words, Mr. Bradford, you've got your orders from the men higher up, have you?" rasped Griswold, who was by this time lost to all sense of expediency.

"I don't have to reply to any such charge as that," said the chief peace officer, turning back to his desk; and so the brittle little conference ended.

"All of which means that we shall lose the plant guard of deputies that Bradford has been maintaining," commented Raymer, as they were descending the Court House stairs; and again his prediction came true. Later in the day the guard was withdrawn; and Griswold, savagely reluctant, was forced to make a concession repeatedly urged and argued for by the older men among the strikers, namely, that the guarding of the company's property be entrusted to a picked squad of the ex-employees themselves.

During these days of turmoil and rioting the transformed idealist passed through many stages of the journey down a certain dark and mephitic valley not of amelioration. With the bitter industrial conflict to feed it, a slow fire within him ate its way into all the foundations, and as the fair superstructure of character settled, the moral perpendiculars and planes of projection became more and more distorted. Fairness was gone, and in its place stood angry resentment, ready to rend and tear. Pity and ruth were going: the daily report from Margery told of the lessening chance of life for Andrew Galbraith, and the stirrings evoked were neither regretful nor compassionate. On the contrary, he knew very well that the news of Galbraith's death would be a relief for which, in his heart of hearts, he was secretly thirsting.

It was at the close of the week of tumult that the dreadful beckoning came. One of the two trained nurses installed at Mereside had been called away to the bedside of a sick father. Another had been wired for immediately, but between the going and the coming a night would intervene. So much Griswold got from Margery over the Iron Works telephone late in the afternoon of a day thickly besprinkled with the sidewalk waylayings and riotings. When he reached his Shawnee Street lodgings at nine o'clock that night he found Miss Grierson's phaeton standing at the curb.

"Get in," she said, briefly, making room for him in the basket seat. And when the mare had been given the word to go: "I hope you are not too tired to chaperon me. I've got to drive over to the college infirmary. We simply must have another nurse for to-night."

He denied the weariness—most untruthfully—and after that, she made him talk all the way across town to the college campus; compelled him, and found him absently irresponsive. Oh, yes; the fight was still going on: No, they would never give in to the demands of the strikers: Yes, he had seen Miss Farnham twice since the trouble began; she was frankly agreed with Raymer's mother and sister; they all wanted peace, and they were all against him. She led him on, and meanwhile they encountered one failure after another in the nurse-hunting. The town clock was striking the quarter-past ten when Miss Grierson confessed that she had exhausted the list of possibilities.

"I must go back at once," she declared. "Miss Davidson—the day nurse—has been on duty constantly since six this morning, and I'm not going to let her kill herself."

"But you haven't been able to find anybody. Who will relieve her?"

Then came the thunderbolt—and beyond it the beckoning. "You and I will," she said calmly. And then, as if to forestall the possible refusal: "It is merely to sit in the next room and to go in and give him his medicine at half-hour intervals. Either of us can do that much for a poor old man who is making his last stand in the fight for his life."

Three days earlier, nay, one day earlier, Griswold might have recoiled in horror from the suggestion that thrust itself into heart and brain. But now he merely pushed the unspeakable prompting into the background. Of course, he would go; and, equally of course, he would share the night watch with her. One question he permitted himself, and it was not asked until after they had reached the darkened mansion on the lake's edge and were mounting the stair to the sick-room. Was Mr. Galbraith conscious? Could he recognize any one?

"No," was the low-voiced response; and presently they had reached the outer room of shaded lights, and the sleepy day nurse had been released, and Margery was explaining the medicines to her watch sharer.

It was a simple matter, as she had said; the medicine from the larger bottle was to be given in tea-spoonful doses on the even hour, and that in the smaller, ten drops in a little water, on the alternating half-hours.

"It's his heart chiefly, now," she explained, "and this drop-medicine is for that. If you should forget to give it—but I know you won't forget. There are books in the hall case, and you can sit in here and read. When you are tired, come and tap at the door of my room and I'll take what you leave."

While she was speaking the softly chiming clock in the lower hall struck the half-hour. "I'll help you give him the first dose," she went on; and he stood by and watched her as she dropped the heart-stimulant into a spoon and diluted it with a little water. "Come," she said; and they went together into the adjoining room.

Griswold had been hardening himself deliberately to look unmoved upon what the shaded electric night-light in the farther room should reveal: it was nothing more terrible than the sight of a drawn face, half-hidden in the pillows; a face in which life and death still fought for the mastery as they had fought on that other day when life, unhelped, would have been the loser.

The small service was quickly rendered. Griswold lifted the sick man, and his companion, deft and steady-handed, administered the stimulant.

"Ten drops; no more and no less; exactly on the half-hour: those are Doctor Bertie's orders," she said, when they had withdrawn to the outer room. And then: "Good-night, for a little while. Don't hesitate to call me when you've had enough."

For so long as he could distinguish her light step in the corridor, Griswold stood motionless as she had left him. Then he flung himself into the nearest chair and covered his face with his hands.

* * * * *

The quarter-hour passed, and after the three mellow strokes had died away the silence grew slowly maddening. When inaction was no longer bearable, Griswold sprang up and went to stand at the open window. The summer night was hot and breathless. In the north-west a storm cloud was creeping up into the sky, and he watched its black shadow climbing like a terrifying threat of doom out of the illimitable and blotting out the stars one by one.... "For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain...." Out of a childhood which seemed very far away and unreal the words of the Psalmist came to ring in his ears like the muffled tolling of a passing-bell. So it must be soon for all the living; and whether a little sooner or a little later, what could it matter? A breath more or less to be drawn; a longer or shorter fluttering of the feeble heart; that was all.

The clock struck eleven, and mechanically he poured out the dose from the larger bottle and gave it to the sick man. When it was done he left the bedside and the inner room quickly and went back to the open window. The air was thick and stifling, and when he sat down in the deep window-seat he was gasping for breath. It was going to be harder than he had thought it would, though now that the time had come he realized that he had been subconsciously planning for it, preparing for it. And the means which had been thrust into his hands could scarcely have been simpler. He had only to sit still and do nothing—and no one would ever know. He took up the small phial and held it to the light: ten drops, or forty drops; they would neither be missed, nor counted if they should remain.

The single chiming stroke of the quarter-past struck while he was putting the bottle down, and he started as if the mellow cadence had been a pistol shot. For fifteen minutes longer he could live and breathe and be as other men are; and after that.... He saw himself looking back upon the normal world from the new view-point, as he fancied Cain might have looked back after the mark had been set upon his brow. Would it really make the hideous, monstrous difference that all men seemed to think it did? He would know, presently, when the revocable should have become the irrevocable. He heard the sick man stir feebly, and then the sound of his slow, labored breathing made itself felt, rather than heard, in the crushing, stifling silence. How the minutes dragged! He leaned his head against the window jamb and closed his eyes, striving fiercely to drive forth the thronging thoughts; to make his mind a blank. Gradually the effort succeeded. He was conscious of a dull, throbbing, soothing pulse beating slow measures in his temples, and a curious roaring as of distant cataracts in his ears; and after that, nothing.

* * * * *

A tempestuous thunder shower was lashing the trees on the lawn when he awoke with a start and found Margery bending over him to close the window. With every nerve a needle to prick him alive he dragged out his watch. It was a quarter-past two. Miserably, wretchedly he pulled himself together and stood up to face her, putting his hands on her shoulders to make her look up at him.

"Margery, girl; do you know what I have done?—Oh, my God! I am a murderer—a murderer at last!"

She turned her face away quickly.

"Oh, no, no, boy!—not meaning to be!" she murmured.

"What is the difference?" he demanded harshly. And then: "God knows—He knows whether I meant it or not."

She looked up again, and, as once or twice before in his knowing of her, he saw the dark eyes swimming.

"It was too hard; I shouldn't have asked it of you, Kenneth. I knew what a cruel strain you've been under all these bad days. And there was no harm done. I—I have been here a long time—ever since half-past eleven; and I've been giving Mr. Galbraith his medicine. Now go down-stairs and stretch out on the hall lounge. I'll run down and send you home as soon as it stops raining."



XXXV

MARGERY'S ANSWER

"Well, it has come at last," said Raymer, passing a newly opened letter of the morning delivery over to Griswold. "The railroad people are taking their work away from us. I've been looking for that in every mail."

Griswold glanced at the letter and handed it back. The burden of the night of horrors was still lying heavily upon him, and his only comment was a questioning, "Well?"

"I've been thinking," was the reply. "I know Atherton, the new president of the Pineboro, pretty well; suppose I should run over to St. Paul and see him—make it a personal plea. We have enough of the hoboes now to run half-gangs; and perhaps, if I could make Atherton believe that we are going to win——"

"You couldn't," Griswold interrupted, shortly. "And, besides, you have told me yourself that Atherton is only a figurehead. Grierson's the man."

At this, Raymer let go again.

"What's the use?" he said dejectedly. "We're down, and everything we do merely prolongs the agony. Do you know that they tried to burn the plant last night?"

"No; I hadn't heard."

"They did. It was just before the thunder storm. They had everything fixed; a pile of kindlings laid in the corner back of the machine-shop annex and the whole thing saturated with kerosene."

"Well, why didn't they do it?" queried Griswold, half-heartedly. After the heavens have fallen, no mere terrestrial cataclysm can evoke a thrill.

"That's a mystery. Something happened; just what, the watchman who had the machine-shop beat couldn't tell. He says there was a flash of light bright enough to blind him, and then a scrap of some kind. When he got out of the shop and around to the place, there was no one there; nothing but the pile of kindlings."

Griswold took up the letter from the railway people and read it again. When he faced it down on Raymer's desk, he had closed with the conclusion which had been thrusting itself upon him since the early morning hour when he had picked his way among the sidewalk pools from Mereside to upper Shawnee Street.

"You can still save yourself, Edward," he said, still with the colorless note in his voice. And he added: "You know the way."

Raymer jerked his head out of his desk and swung around in the pivot-chair.

"See here, Griswold; the less said about that at this stage of the game, the better it will be for both of us!" he exploded. "I'm going to do as I said I should, but not until this fight is settled, one way or the other!"

Griswold did not retort in kind.

"The condition has already expired by limitation; the fight is as good as settled now," he said, placably. "We are only making a hopeless bluff. We can hold our forty or fifty tramp workmen just as long as we pay their board over in town, and don't ask them to report for work. But the day the shop whistle is blown, four out of every five will vanish. We both know that."

"Then there is nothing for it but a receivership," was Raymer's gloomy decision.

"Not without a miracle," Griswold admitted. "And the day of miracles is past."

Thus the idealist, out of a depth of wretchedness and self-exprobration hitherto unplumbed. But if he could have had even a momentary gift of telepathic vision he might have seen a miracle at that moment in the preliminary stage of its outworking.

The time was half-past nine; the place a grotto-like summer-house on the Mereside lawn. The miracle workers were two: Margery Grierson, radiant in the daintiest of morning house-gowns, and the man who had taken her retainer. Miss Grierson was curiously examining a photographic print: the pictured scene was a well-littered foundry yard with buildings forming an angle in the near background. Against the buildings a pile of shavings with kindlings showed quite clearly; and, stooping to ignite the pile, was a man who had evidently looked up at, or just before, the instant of camera-snapping. There was no mistaking the identity of the man. He had a round, pig-jowl face; his bristling mustaches stood out stiffly as if in sudden horror; and his hat was on the back of his head.

"It ain't very good," Broffin apologized. "The sun ain't high enough yet to make a clear print. But you said 'hurry,' and I reckon it will do."

Miss Grierson nodded. "You caught him in the very act, didn't you?" she said coolly. "What did he do?"

"Dropped things and jumped for the camera. But the flash had blinded him, and, besides, the camera had been moved. I let him have a foot to fall over, and he took it; after which I made a bluff at tryin' to hold him. Lordy gracious! new ropes wouldn't 'a' held him, then. I'll bet he's runnin' yet—what?"

"What did he hope to accomplish by setting fire to the works?"

"It was a frame-up to capture public sympathy. There's been a report circulating 'round that Raymer and Griswold was goin' to put some o' the ringleaders in jail, if they had to make a case against 'em. Clancy had it figured out that the fire'd be charged up to the owners, themselves."

Miss Grierson was still examining the picture. "You made two of these prints?" she asked.

"Yes; here's the other one—and the film."

"And you have the papers to make them effective?"

Broffin handed her a large envelope, unsealed. "You'll find 'em in there. That part of it was a cinch. Your governor ought to fire that man Murray. He was payin' Clancy in checks!"

Again Miss Grierson nodded.

"About the other matter?" she inquired. "Have you heard from your messenger?"

Broffin produced another envelope. It had been through the mails and bore the Duluth postmark.

"Affidavits was the best we could do there," he said. "My man worked it to go with MacFarland as the driver of the rig. They saw some mighty fine timber, but it happened to be on the wrong side of the St. Louis County line. He's a tolerably careful man, and he verified the landmarks."

"Affidavits will do," was the even-toned rejoinder. Then: "These papers are all in duplicate?"

"Everything in pairs—just as you ordered."

Miss Grierson took an embroidered chamois-skin money-book from her bosom and began to open it. Broffin raised his hand.

"Not any more," he objected. "You overpaid me that first evening in front of the Winnebago."

"You needn't hesitate," she urged. "It's my own money."

"I've had a-plenty."

"Enough so that we can call it square?"

"Yes, and more than enough."

"Then I can only thank you," she said, rising.

He knew that he was being dismissed, but the one chance in a thousand had yet to be tested.

"Just a minute, Miss Grierson," he begged. "I've done you right in this business, haven't I?"

"You have."

"I said I didn't want any more money, and I don't. But there's one other thing. Do you know what I'm here in this little jay town of yours for?"

"Yes; I have known it for a long time."

"I thought so. You knew it that day out at the De Soto, when you was tellin' Mr. Raymer a little story that was partly true and partly made up—what?"

"And when you were sitting behind the window curtains listening," she laughed. "Yes; I knew it then. What about it?"

"I've been wonderin' as I set here, if there was anything on the top side of God's green earth that'd persuade you to tell me how much o' that story was made up."

She was smiling deliciously when she said: "You are from the South, Mr. Broffin, and I didn't suppose a Southerner could be so unchivalrous as to suspect a lady of fibbing."

He shook his head. "I wish you'd tell me, Miss Grierson. I'm in pretty bad on this thing, and if——"

"I can tell you what to do, if that will help you."

"It might," he allowed.

"Go away and take some other commission. It's a cold trail, Mr. Broffin."

"But you won't say that Griswold isn't the man?"

"It is not for me to say. But Miss Farnham says he isn't, and Mr. Galbraith—you tried him, didn't you? What more do you want?"

"I want you to say he isn't; then I'll go away."

"You may put me in jail for contempt of court, if you like," she jested. "I refuse to testify. But I will tell you what you asked to know—if that will do any good. Every word of the story about Mr. Griswold—the story that you overheard, you know—was true; every single word of it. Do you suppose I should have dared to embroider it the least little bit—with you sitting right there at my back?"

"But you did think for a while that he might be the man—what?"

"Yes; I did think so—for a while."

Broffin got up and took a half-burned cigar from the ledge of the summer-house where he had carefully laid it at the beginning of the interview.

"You've got me down," he confessed, with a good-natured grin. "The man that plays a winnin' hand against you has got to get up before sun in the morning and hold all trumps, Miss Grierson—to say nothin' of being a mighty good bluffer, on the side." Then he switched suddenly. "How's Mr. Galbraith this morning?"

"He is very low, but he is conscious again. He has asked us to wire for the cashier of his bank to come up."

Broffin's eyes narrowed.

"The cashier is sick and can't come," he said.

"Well, some one in authority will come, I suppose."

Once more Broffin was thinking in terms of speed. Johnson, the paying teller, was next in rank to the cashier. If he should be the one to come to Wahaska....

"If you haven't anything else for me to do, I reckon I'll be going," he said, hastily, and forthwith made his escape. The telegraph office was a good ten minutes' walk from the lake front, and in the light of what Miss Grierson had just told him, the minutes were precious.

Something less than a half-hour after Broffin's hurried departure, Miss Grierson, coated and gauntleted, came down the Mereside carriage steps to take the reins of the big trap horse from Thorsen's hands. Contrary to her usual custom, she avoided Main Street and drove around past the college grounds to come by quieter thoroughfares to the industrial district beyond the railroad tracks.

For the first time in a riotous week, Pottery Flat was outwardly peaceful and its narrow streets were practically empty. Just what this portended, Margery did not know; but she found out when she turned into the street upon which the Raymer property fronted. Smoke was pouring from the tall central stack of the plant, and it had evidently provoked a sudden and wrathful gathering of the clans. The sidewalks were filled with angry workmen, and an excited argument was going forward at one of the barred gates between the locked-out men and a watchman inside of the yard.

The crowd let the trap pass without hindrance. However coldly Lake Boulevard and upper Shawnee Street might regard Miss Grierson, there was no enmity in the glances of the Flat dwellers—and for good reasons. In want, Miss Margery had poured largesse out of a liberal hand; and in sickness she had many times proved herself the veritable good angel that some people called her.

It was one of the strikers who offered to hold the big Englishman when the magnate's daughter sprang from the trap at the office door, and for the young fellow who offered she had a smile and a pleasant word. "I wouldn't trouble you to do that, Malcolm; but if you'll lead him along to that post and hitch him, I'll be much obliged," she said.

Though it was the first time she had been in the new offices, she seemed to know where to find what she sought; and when Raymer took his face out of his desk, she was standing on the threshold of the open door and smiling across at him.

"May I come in?" she asked; and when he fairly bubbled over in the effort to make her understand how welcome she was: "No; I mustn't sit down, because if I do, I shall stay too long—and this is a business call. Where is Mr. Griswold?"

"He went up-town a little while ago, and I wish to goodness he'd come back. You'd think, to look out of the windows, that we were due to have battle and murder and sudden death, wouldn't you? It's all because we have put a little fire under one battery of boilers. They tried to burn us out last night, and I'm going to carry steam enough for the fire pumps, if the heavens fall."

"You have been having a great deal of trouble, haven't you?" she said, sympathetically. "I'm sorry, and I've come to help you cure it."

Raymer shook his head despondently.

"I'm afraid it has gone past the curing point," he said.

"Oh, no, it hasn't. I have discovered the remedy and I've brought it with me." She took a sealed envelope from the inside pocket of her driving-coat and laid it on the desk before him. "I'm going to ask you to lock that up in your office safe for a little while, just as it is," she went on. "If there are no signs of improvement in the sick situation by three o'clock, you are to open it—you and Mr. Griswold—and read the contents. Then you will know exactly what to do, and how to go about it."

Her lip was trembling when she got through, and he saw it.

"What have you done, Margery?" he asked gently. "If it is something that hurts you——"

"Don't!" she pleaded; "you mu-mustn't break my nerve just at the time when I'm going to need every shred of it. Do as I say, and please, please don't ask any questions!"

She was going then, but he got before her and shut the door and put his back against it.

"I don't know what you have done, but I can guess," he said, lost now to everything save the intoxicating joy of the barrier-breakers. "You have a heart of gold, Margery, and I——"

"Please don't," she said, trying to stop him; but he would not listen.

"No; before that envelope is opened, before I can possibly know what it contains, I'm going to ask you one question in spite of your prohibition; and I'm going to ask it now because, afterward, I may not—you may not—that is, perhaps it won't be possible for me to ask, or for you to listen. I love you, Margery; I——"

She was looking up at him with the faintest shadow of a smile lurking in the depths of the alluring eyes. And her lips were no longer tremulous when she said: "Oh, no, you don't; I know just how you feel; you are excited, and—and impulsive, and there's a sort of getting-ready-to-be-grateful feeling roaming around in you, and all that. If I were as mean as some people think I am, I might take advantage of all this, mightn't I? But I sha'n't. Won't you open the door and let me go? It's very important."

"Heavens, Margery! don't make a joke of it!" he burst out. "Can't you see that I mean it? Girl, girl, I want you—I need you!"

This time she laughed outright. Then she grew suddenly grave.

"My dear friend, you don't know what you are saying. The gate that you are trying to break down opens upon nothing but misery and wretchedness. If I loved you as a woman ought to love her lover, for your sake and for my own I should still say no—a thousand times no! Now will you open the door and let me go?"

He turned and fumbled for the door-knob like a man in a daze.

"Don't you—don't you think you might learn to—to think of me in that way?—after a while?" he pleaded.

He had opened the door a little way, and she slipped past him. But in the corridor she turned and laughed at him again.

"I am going to cure you—you, personally, as well as the sick situation—Mr. Raymer," she said flippantly. Then, mimicking him as a spoiled child might have done: "I might possibly learn to—think of you—in that way—after a while. But I could never, never, never learn to love your mother and your sister."

And with that spiteful thrust she left him.



XXXVI

THE GRAY WOLF

As it chanced, Jasper Grierson was in the act of concluding a long and apparently satisfactory telephone conversation with his agent in Duluth at the moment when the door of his private room opened and his daughter entered.

As on a former occasion, she went to sit in the window until the way to free speech should be open, and she could not well help hearing the closing words of the long-distance conference.

"You sit tight in the boat; that's all you've got to do," her father was saying. "Keep the young fellow with you as long as you can; the other man is too sick to talk business, right now. When you can't hold the young one any longer, let me know. We'll play the hand out as it lays. Get that? I say, we'll play the hand out as it lays."

He had hung the receiver on its hook and was pushing the bracketted telephone-set aside when Margery crossed the room swiftly and placed an envelope, the counterpart of the one left with Raymer, on the desk.

"There is your notice to quit," she said calmly. "You threw me down and gave me the double-cross the other day, and now I've come back at you."

Another man might have hastened to meet the crisis. But the gray wolf was of a different mettle. He let the envelope lie untouched until after he had pulled out a drawer in the desk, found his box of cigars, and had leisurely selected and lighted one of the fat black monstrosities. When he tore the envelope across, the photographic print fell out, and he studied it carefully for many seconds before he read the accompanying documents. For a little time after he had tossed the papers aside there was a silence that bit. Then he said, slowly:

"So that's your raise, is it? Where does the game stand, right now?"

"You stand to lose."

Again the biting silence; and then: "You don't think I'm fool enough to give you back your ammunition so that you can use it on me, do you?"

"Those papers and that picture are copies: the originals are in a sealed envelope in Mr. Raymer's safe. If you haven't taken your hands off of Mr. Raymer's throat by three o'clock this afternoon, the envelope will be opened."

Jasper Grierson's teeth met in the marrow of the fat cigar. Equally without heat and without restraint, he stripped her of all that was womanly, pouring out upon her a flood of foul epithets and vile names garnished with bitter, brutal oaths. She shrank from the crude and savage upbraidings as if the words had been hot irons to touch the bare flesh, but at the end of it she was still facing him hardily.

"Calling me bad names doesn't change anything," she pointed out, and her tone reflected something of his own elemental contempt for the euphemisms. "You have five hours in which to make Mr. Raymer understand that you have stopped trying to smash him. Wouldn't it be better to begin on that? You can curse me out any time, you know."

Jasper Grierson's rage fit, or the mud-volcano manifestation of it, passed as suddenly as it had broken out. Swinging heavily in his chair he took up the papers again and reread them thoughtfully.

"You had a spotter working this up, I suppose: who is he, and where is he?" he demanded.

"That is my affair. He was a high-priced man and he did his work well. You can see that for yourself."

Once more the papers were tossed aside and the big chair swung slowly to face the situation.

"Let's see what you want: show up your hand."

"I have shown it. Take the prop of your backing from behind this labor trouble, and let Mr. Raymer settle with his men on a basis of good-will and fair dealing."

"Is that all?"

"No. You must cancel this pine-land deal. You have broken bread with Mr. Galbraith as a friend, and I'm not going to let you be worse than an Arab."

Grierson's shaggy brows met in a reflective frown, and when he spoke the bestial temper was rising again.

"When this is all over, and you've gone to live with Raymer, I'll kill him," he said, with an out-thrust of the hard jaw; adding: "You know me, Madge."

"I thought I did," was the swift retort. "But it was a mistake. And as for taking it out on Mr. Raymer, you'd better wait until I go 'to live with him,' as you put it. Besides, this isn't Yellow Dog Gulch. They hang people here."

"You little she-devil! If you push me into this thing, you'd better get Raymer, or somebody, to take you in. You'll be out in the street!"

"I have thought of that, too," she said, coolly; "about quitting you. I'm sick of it all—the getting and the spending and the crookedness. I'd put the money—yours and mine—in a pile and set fire to it, if some decent man would give me a calico dress and a chance to cook for two."

"Raymer, for instance?" the father cut in, in heavy mockery.

"Mr. Raymer has asked me to marry him, if you care to know," she struck back.

"Oho! So that's the milk in the cocoanut, is it? You sold me out to buy in with him!"

"You may put it that way, if you like; I don't care." She was drawing on her driving-gloves methodically and working the fingers into place, and there were sullen fires in the brooding eyes.

"I've been thinking it was the other one—the book-writer," said the father. Then, without warning: "He's a damned crook."

The daughter went on smoothing the wrinkles out of the fingers of her gloves. "What makes you think so?" she inquired, with indifference, real or skilfully assumed.

"He's got too much money to be straight. I've been keeping cases on him."

"Never mind Mr. Griswold," she interposed. "He is my friend, and I suppose that is enough to make you hate him. About this other matter: ten minutes before three o'clock this afternoon I shall go back to Mr. Raymer. If he tells me that his troubles are straightening themselves out, I'll get the papers."

"You'll bring 'em here to me?"

"Some day; after I'm sure that you have broken off the deal with Mr. Galbraith."

Jasper Grierson let his daughter get as far as the door before he stopped her with a blunt-pointed arrow of contempt.

"I suppose you've fixed it up to marry that college-sharp dub so that his mother and sister can rub it into you right?" he sneered.

"You can suppose again," she returned, shortly. "If I should marry him, it would be out of pure spite to those women."

"If?"

"Yes, 'if.' Because, when he asked me, I told him No. You weren't counting on that, were you?" And having fired this final shot of contradiction she departed.

After Miss Grierson had driven home from the bank between ten and eleven in the morning, an admiring public saw her no more until just before bank-closing hours in the afternoon. Broffin was among those who made obeisance to her as she passed down Main Street in the basket phaeton between half-past two and three; and a minute later he abandoned his chair on the hotel porch to keep the phaeton in view and to mark its route.

"It's Raymer, all right, and not the other one," he mused when the little vehicle had gone rocketing over the railroad crossing to take the turn toward the Iron Works. "The iron-man is the duck she's tryin' to help out of the labor-rookus. She was over there this morning, and she's goin' there again, right now."

As the phaeton sped along through the over-crossing suburb there were signs of an armistice apparent, even before the battle-field was reached. Pottery Flat was populated again, and the groups of men bunched on the street corners were arguing peacefully. Miss Grierson pulled up at one of the corners and beckoned to the young iron-moulder who had offered to be her horse-holder on the morning visit.

"Anything new, Malcolm?" she asked.

"You bet your sweet life!" said the young moulder, meeting her, as most men did, on a plane of perfect equality and frankness. "We was hoodooed to beat the band, and Mr. Raymer's got us, comin' and goin'. There wasn't no orders from the big Federation, at all; and that crooked guy, Clancy, was a fake!"

"He has gone?" she said.

"He'd better be. If he shows himself 'round here again, there's goin' to be a mix-up."

Miss Grierson drove on, and at the Iron Works there were more of the peaceful indications. The gates were open, and a switching-engine from the railroad yards was pushing in a car-load of furnace coal. By all the signs the trouble flood was abating.

Raymer saw her when she drove under his window and calmly made a hitching-post of the clerk who went out to see what she wanted. A moment later she came down the corridor to stand in the open doorway of the manager's room.

"I'm back again," she said, and her manner was that of the dainty soubrette with whom the audience falls helplessly in love at first sight.

"No, you're not," Raymer denied; "you won't be until you come in and sit down."

She entered to take the chair he was placing for her, and the soubrette manner fell away from her like a garment flung aside.

"You are still alone?" she asked.

"Yes; Griswold hasn't shown up since morning. I don't know what has become of him."

"And the labor trouble: is that going to be settled?"

He looked away and ran his fingers through his hair as one still puzzled and bewildered. "Some sort of a miracle has been wrought," he said. "A little while ago a committee came to talk over terms of surrender. It seems that the whole thing was the result of a—of a mistake."

"Yes," she returned quietly, "it was just that—a mistake." And then: "You are going to take them back?"

"Certainly. The plant will start up again in the morning." Then his curiosity broke bounds. "I can't understand it. How did you work the miracle?"

"Perhaps I didn't work it."

"I know well enough you did, in some way."

She dismissed the matter with a toss of the pretty head. "What difference does it make so long as you are out of the deep water and in a place where you can wade ashore? You can wade ashore now, can't you?"

He nodded. "This morning I should have said that we couldn't; but now—" he reached over to his desk and handed her a letter to which was pinned a telegram less than an hour old.

She read the letter first. It was a curt announcement of the withdrawal of the Pineboro Railroad's repair work. The telegram was still briefer: "Disregard my letter of yesterday"; this, and the signature, "Atherton." The small plotter returned the correspondence with a little sigh of relief. It had been worse than she had thought, and it was now better than she had dared hope.

"I must be going," she said, rising. "If you will give me my envelope?"

He crossed to the safe and got it for her. His curiosity was still keen-edged, but he beat it back manfully.

"I wish you wouldn't hurry," he said hospitably. He was searching the changeful eyes for the warrant to say more, but he could not find it.

"Yes, I really must," she insisted. "You know we have a sick man at home, and——"

"Oh, yes; how is Mr. Galbraith getting along? He has been having a pretty hard time of it, hasn't he?"