XXV
DEAD WATER AND QUICK
The cubby-hole in which Hildreth earned his bread by the sweat of his brain was dark even at midday; and during working hours the editor sat under a funnel-shaped reflector in a conic shower-bath of electric light which flooded man and desk and left the corners of the room in a penumbra of grateful twilight.
Kent sat just outside of the cone of radiance, watching Hildreth's face as the editor read stolidly through the contents of the box envelope. It was an instructive study in thought dynamics. There was a gleam of battle satisfaction in the editorial eye when Hildreth faced the last sheet down upon the accumulation of evidence, saying:
"You didn't overstate the fact in your brag about the political graves. Only this isn't a spade; it's a steam shovel. Do I understand you are giving me this stuff to use as I please?"
"Just that," said Kent.
"And you have made it serve your turn, too?"
"No." Kent's voice was sharp and crisp.
"Isn't that what you got it for?"
"Yes."
"Then why don't you use it?"
"That was what Bucks wanted to know a little while ago when he came to my rooms to try to buy me off. I don't think I succeeded in making him understand why I couldn't traffic with it; and possibly you wouldn't understand."
"I guess I do. It's public property, and you couldn't divert it into private channels. Is that the way it struck you?"
"It is the way it struck a friend of mine whose sense of ultimate right and wrong hasn't lost its fine edge in the world-mill. I did not want to do it."
"Naturally," said the editor. "Giving it up means the loss of all you have been working for in the railroad game. I wish I could use it, just as it stands."
"Can't you?"
"I am afraid not—effectively. It would make an issue in a campaign; or, sprung on the eve of an election, it might down the ring conclusively. I think it would. But this is the off year, and the people won't rise to a political issue—couldn't make themselves felt if they should."
"I don't agree with you. You have your case all made out, with the evidence in sound legal form. What is to prevent your trying it?"
"The one thing that you ought to be lawyer enough to see at a glance. There is no court to try it in. With the Assembly in session we might do something: as it is, we can only yap at the heels of the ringsters, and our yapping won't help you in the railroad fight. What do you hear from Boston?"
"Nothing new. The stock is still flat on the market, with the stock-holders' pool holding a bare majority, and the Plantagould brokers buying in driblets wherever they can find a small holder who is willing to let go. It is only a question of time; and a very short time at that."
The editor wagged his head in sympathy.
"I wish I could help you, David. You've done a big thing for me—for the Argus; and all I have to hand you in return is a death sentence. MacFarlane is back."
"Here? In town?"
"Yes. And that isn't the worst of it. The governor sent for him."
"Have you any idea what is in the wind?" asked Kent, dry-lipped.
"I am afraid I have. My young men have been nosing around in the Trans-Western affair, and several things have developed. Matters are approaching a crisis. The cut-rate boom is about to collapse, and there is trouble brewing in the labor organizations. If Bucks doesn't get his henchmen out of it pretty soon, they will be involved in the smash—which will be bad for them and for him, politically."
"I developed most of that a good while ago," Kent cut in.
"Yes; I know. But there is more to follow. The stock-smashing plan was all right, but it is proving too slow. Now they are going to do something else."
"Can you give it a name?" asked Kent, nerving himself.
"I can. But first tell me one thing: as matters stand, could Guilford dispose of the road—sell it or lease it?"
"No; he would first have to be made permanent receiver and be given authority by the court."
"Ah! that explains Judge MacFarlane's return. Now what I am going to tell you is the deadest of secrets. It came to me from one of the Overland officials, and I'm not supposed to gossip. Did you know the Overland Short Line had passed under Plantagould domination?"
"I know they elected a Plantagould directory at the annual meeting."
"Exactly. Well, Guilford is going to lease the Trans-Western to its competitor for a term of ninety-nine years. That's your death sentence."
Kent sprang to his feet, and what he said is unrecordable. He was not a profane man, but the sanguine temperament would assert itself explosively in moments of sudden stress.
"When is this thing to be done?" he demanded, when the temperamental gods were appeased a little.
Hildreth shrugged.
"I have told you all I could, and rather more than I had any right to. Open the door behind you, won't you? The air is positively sulphurous."
Kent opened the door, entirely missing the point of the sarcasm in his heat.
"But you must have some idea," he insisted.
"I haven't; any more than the general one that they won't let the grass grow under their feet."
"No. God blast the whole—I wish I could swear in Sanscrit. The mother-tongue doesn't begin to do justice to it. Now I know what Bucks meant when he told me to take my railroad, if I could get it. He had the whole thing coopered up in a barrel at that minute."
"I take it you have no alternative to this," said the editor, tapping the pile of affidavits.
"Not a cursed shred of an idea! And, Hildreth—" he broke off short because once again the subject suddenly grew too large for coherent speech.
Hildreth disentangled himself from the legs of his chair and stood up to put his hands on Kent's shoulders.
"You are up against it hard, David," he said; and he repeated: "I'd give all my old shoes to be able to help you out."
"I know it," said Kent; and then he turned abruptly and went away.
Between nine and ten o'clock the same evening Kent was walking the floor of his room, trying vainly to persuade himself that virtue was its own reward, and wondering if a small dose of chloral hydrate would be defensible under the cruel necessity for sleep. He had about decided in favor of the drug when a tap at the door announced the coming of a bell-boy with a note. It was a message from Portia.
"If you have thrown away your chance definitely, and are willing to take a still more desperate one, come to see me," she wrote; and he went mechanically, as a drowning man catches at a straw, knowing it will not save him.
The house in Alameda Square was dark when he went up the walk; and while he was feeling for the bell-push his summoner called to him out of the electric stencilings of leaf shadows under the broad veranda.
"It is too fine a night to stay indoors," she said. "Come and sit in the hammock while I scold you as you deserve." And when he had taken the hammock: "Now give an account of yourself. Where have you been for the past age or two?"
"Wallowing around in the lower depths of the place that Dante visited," he admitted.
"Don't you think you deserve a manhandling?"
"I suppose so; and if you have it in mind, I shall probably get it. But I may say I'm not especially anxious for a tongue-lashing to-night."
"Poor boy!" she murmured, in mock sympathy. "Does it hurt to be truly good?"
"Try it some time when you have a little leisure, and see for yourself," he retorted.
She laughed.
"No; I'll leave that for the Miss Brentwoods. By the way, did you go to tell the household good-by? Penelope was wondering audibly what had become of you."
"I didn't know they were gone. I have been nowhere since the night you drove me out with contumely and opprobrium."
She laughed again.
"You must have dived deep. They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost your ghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop. But it isn't wonderful that you haven't missed Mr. Ormsby. Having elected Miss Brentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further use for the P.S.M."
"And you have no further use for me, apparently," he complained. "Did you send for me so that you might abuse me in the second edition?"
"No; I wanted to give you a bit of news, and to repeat an old question of mine. Do you know what they are going to do next with your railroad?"
"Yes; Hildreth told me this afternoon."
"Well, what are you going to do?"
"Nothing. There is nothing to be done. They have held to the form of legal procedure thus far, but they won't do it any more. They will take MacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanent receiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot. I sha'n't be in it."
"Probably not; certainly not if you don't try to get in it. And that brings me back to the old question. Are you big enough, David?"
"If you think I haven't been big enough to live up to my opportunities thus far, I'm afraid I may disappoint you again," he said doubtfully.
"You have disappointed me," she admitted. "That is why I am asking: I'd like to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going to trip us again."
"Portia, if I thought you really meant that ... A conscienceless man is bad enough, God knows; but a conscienceless woman——"
Her laugh was a decorous little shriek.
"David, you are not big; you are narrow, narrow, narrow! Is there then no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of birth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Is it an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal or mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan's?"
"You may call it all the hard names you can lay tongue to," he allowed. "I'm not getting much comfort out of it, and I rather enjoy hearing it abused. But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance. Do you know what I did this afternoon?"
"How should I know?"
"I don't know why you shouldn't: you know everything that happens. But I'll tell you. I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish and back again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and at the wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, having it in mind to go and give his Excellency a bad quarter of an hour."
"But you didn't do it?"
"No, he saved me the trouble. While I was getting ready to go and hunt him, his card came up. We had it out in my rooms."
"I'm listening," she said; and he rehearsed the-facts for her, concealing nothing.
"What a curious thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made an end. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can't help admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and the courage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting scruples of yours go. You have made it perfectly plain that if a thief should steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you'd compromise with him to get it back. But suppose you should catch him at it: would you feel compelled to call a policeman—or would you——"
He anticipated her.
"You are doing me an injustice on the other side, now. I'll fight as furiously as you like. All I ask is to be given a weapon that won't bloody my hands."
"Good!" she said approvingly. "I think I have found the weapon, but it's desperate, desperate! And O David! you've got to have a cool head and a steady hand when you use it. If you haven't, it will kill everybody within the swing of it—everybody but the man you are trying to reach."
"Draw it and let me feel its edge," he said shortly.
Her chair was close beside the low-swung hammock. She bent to his ear and whispered a single sentence. For a minute or two he sat motionless, weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftly multiplying difficulties and hazards.
"You call it desperate," he said at length; "if there is a bigger word in the language, you ought to find it and use it. The risk is that of a forlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent—or at least ignorant—accomplices I'll have to enlist."
She nodded.
"That is true. But how much is your railroad worth?"
"It is bonded for fifty millions first, and twenty millions second mortgage."
"Well, seventy millions are worth fighting for: worth a very considerable risk, I should say."
"Yes." And after another thoughtful interval: "How did you come to think of it?"
"It grew out of a bit of talk with the man who will have to put the apex on our pyramid after we have done our part."
"Will he stand by us? If he doesn't, we shall all be no better than dead men the morning after the fact."
She clasped her hands tightly over her knee, and said:
"That is one of the chances we must take, David; one of the many. But it is the last of the bridges to be crossed, and there are lots of them in between. Are the details possible? That was the part I couldn't go into by myself."
He took other minutes for reflection.
"I can't tell," he said doubtfully. "If I could only know how much time we have."
Her eyes grew luminous.
"David, what would you do without me?" she asked. "To-morrow night, in Stephen Hawk's office in Gaston, you will lose your railroad. MacFarlane is there, or if he isn't, he'll be there in the morning. Bucks, Guilford and Hawk will go down from here to-morrow evening; and the Overland people are to come up from Midland City to meet them."
There was awe undisguised in the look he gave her, and it had crept into his voice when he said:
"Portia, are you really a flesh-and-blood woman?"
She smiled.
"Meaning that your ancestors would have burned me for a witch? Perhaps they would: I think quite likely they burned women who made better martyrs. But I didn't have to call in Flibbertigibbet. The programme is a carefully guarded secret, to be sure; but it is known—it had to be known—to a number of people outside of our friends the enemy. You've heard the story of the inventor and his secret, haven't you?"
"No."
"Well, the man had invented something, and he told the secret of it to his son. After a little the son wanted to tell it to a friend. The old man said, 'Hold on; I know it—that's one'—holding up one finger—'you know it—that's eleven'—holding up another finger beside the first; 'and now if you tell this other fellow, that'll be one hundred and eleven'—holding up three fingers. That is the case with this programme. One of the one hundred and eleven—he is a person high up in the management of the Overland Short Line—dropped a few words in my hearing and I picked them up. That's all."
"It is fearfully short—the time, I mean," he said after another pause. "We can't count on any help from any one in authority. Guilford's broom has swept the high-salaried official corners clean. But the wage-people are mutinous and ripe for anything. I'll go and find out where we stand." And he groped on the floor of the veranda for his hat.
"No, wait a minute," she interposed. "We are not quite ready to adjourn yet. There remains a little matter of compensation—your compensation—to be considered. You are still on the company's payrolls?"
"In a way, yes; as its legal representative on the ground."
"That won't do. If you carry this thing through successfully it must be on your own account, and not as the company's paid servant. You must resign and make terms with Boston beforehand; and that, too, without telling Boston what you propose to do."
He haggled a little at that.
"The company is entitled to my services," he asserted.
"It is entitled to what it pays for—your legal services. But this is entirely different. You will be acting upon your own initiative, and you'll have to spend money like water at your own risk. You must be free to deal with Boston as an outsider."
"But I have no money to spend," he objected.
Again the brown eyes grew luminous; and again she said:
"What would you do without me? Happily, my information came early enough to enable me to get a letter to Mr. Ormsby. He answered promptly by wire this morning. Here is his telegram."
She had been winding a tightly folded slip of paper around her fingers, and she smoothed it out and gave it to him. He held it in a patch of the electric light between the dancing leaf shadows and read:
"Plot Number Two approved. Have wired one hundred thousand to Kent's order Security Bank. Have him draw as he needs."
"So now you see," she went on, "you have the sinews of war. But you must regard it as an advance and name your fee to the Boston folk so you can pay it back."
He protested again, rather weakly.
"It looks like extortion; like another graft," he said; and now she lost patience with him.
"Of all the Puritan fanatics!" she cried. "If it were a simple commercial transaction by which you would save your clients a round seventy million dollars, which would otherwise be lost, would you scruple to take a proportionate fee?"
"No; certainly not."
"Well, then; you go and tell Mr. Loring to wire his Advisory Board, and to do it to-night."
"But I'll have to name a figure," said Kent.
"Of course," she replied.
Kent thought about it for a long minute. Then he said: "I wonder if ten thousand dollars, and expenses, would paralyze them?"
Miss Van Brock's comment was a little shriek of derision.
"I knew you'd make difficulties when it came to the paying part of it, and since I didn't know, myself, I wired Mr. Ormsby again. Here is what he says," and she untwisted a second telegram and read it to him.
"'Fee should not be less than five per cent. of bonded indebtedness; four-fifths in stock at par; one-fifth cash; no cure, no pay.'"
"Three million five hundred thousand dollars!" gasped Kent.
"It's only nominally that much," she laughed. "The stock part of it is merely your guaranty of good faith: it is worth next to nothing now, and it will be many a long day before it goes to par, even if you are successful in saving its life. So your magnificent fee shrinks to seven hundred thousand dollars, less your expenses."
"But heavens and earth! that's awful!" said Kent.
"Not when you consider it as a surgeon's risk. You happen to be the one man who has the idea, and if it isn't carried out, the patient is going to die to-morrow night, permanently. You are the specialist in this case, and specialists come high. Now you may go and attend to the preliminary details, if you like."
He found his hat and stood up. She stood with him; but when he took her hand she made him sit down again.
"You have at least three degrees of fever!" she exclaimed; "or is it only the three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar shock? What have you been doing to yourself?"
"Nothing, I assure you. I haven't been sleeping very well for a few nights. But that is only natural."
"And I said you must have a cool head! Will you do exactly as I tell you to?"
"If you don't make it too hard."
"Take the car down-town—don't walk—and after you have made Mr. Loring send his message to Boston, you go straight to Doctor Biddle. Tell him what is the matter with you, and that you need to sleep the clock around."
"But the time!" he protested. "I shall need every hour between now and to-morrow night!"
"One clear-headed hour is worth a dozen muddled ones. You do as I say."
"I hate drugs," he said, rising again.
"So do I; but there is a time for everything under the sun. It is a crying necessity that you go into this fight perfectly fit and with all your wits about you. If you don't, somebody—several somebodies—will land in the penitentiary. Will you mind me?"
"Yes," he promised; and this time he got away.
XXVI
ON THE HIGH PLAINS
Much to Elinor's relief, and quite as much, perhaps, to Penelope's, Mrs. Brentwood tired of Breezeland Inn in less than a fortnight and began to talk of returning to the apartment house in the capital.
Pressed to give a reason for her dissatisfaction, the younger sister might have been at a loss to account for it in words; but Elinor's desire to cut the outing short was based upon pride and militant shame. After many trap-settings she had succeeded in making her mother confess that the stay at Breezeland was at Ormsby's expense; and not all of Mrs. Brentwood's petulant justifyings could remove the sting of the nettle of obligation.
"There is no reason in the world why you should make so much of it: I am your mother, and I ought to know," was Mrs. Brentwood's dictum. "You wouldn't have any scruples if we were his guests on the Amphitrite or in his country house on Long Island."
"That would be different," Elinor contended. "We are not his guests here; we are his pensioners."
"Nonsense!" frowned the mother. "Isn't it beginning to occur to you that beggars shouldn't be choosers? And, besides, so far as you are concerned, you are only anticipating a little."
It was an exceedingly injudicious, not to say brutal way of putting it; and the blue-gray eyes flashed fire.
"Can't you see that you are daily making a marriage between us more and more impossible?" was the bitter rejoinder. Elinor's métier was cool composure under fire, but she was not always able to compass it.
Mrs. Brentwood fanned herself vigorously. She had been aching to have it out with this self-willed young woman who was playing fast and loose with attainable millions, and the hour had struck.
"What made you break it off with Brookes Ormsby?" she snapped; adding: "I don't wonder you were ashamed to tell me about it."
"I did not break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place to the cool gray blankness which she cultivated.
"That is what Brookes told me, but I didn't believe him," said the mother. "It's all wrong, anyway, and I more than half believe David Kent is at the bottom of it."
Elinor left her chair and went to the window, which looked down on the sanatorium, the ornate parterre, and the crescent driveway. These family bickerings were very trying to her, and the longing to escape them was sometimes strong enough to override cool reason and her innate sense of the fitness of things.
In her moments of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood. With the unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals. This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it, hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten how to cry.
But into the turmoil of thoughts half indignant, half self-compassionate, came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial. She saw, as with a sudden gift of retrospection, her mother's long battle with inadequacy, and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought unselfishly, since she knew her mother's declaration that she could contentedly "go back to nothing" was no mere petulant boast. It was for her daughters that she had grown thin and haggard and irritable under the persistent reverses of fortune; it was for them that she was sinking the Grimkie independence in the match-making mother.
The tears in Elinor's eyes were not altogether of self-pity when she put her back to the window. Ormsby was coming up the curved driveway in his automobile, and she had seen him but dimly through the rising mist of emotion.
"Have you set your heart upon this thing, mother?—but I know you have. And I—I have tried as I could to be just and reasonable; to you and Penelope, and to Brookes Ormsby. He is nobleness itself: it is a shame to give him the shadow when he so richly deserves the substance."
She spoke rapidly, almost incoherently; and the mother-love in the woman who was careful and troubled about the things that perish put the match-maker to the wall. It was almost terrifying to see Elinor, the strong-hearted, the self-contained, breaking down like other mothers' daughters. So it was the mother who held out her arms, and the daughter ran to go down on her knees at the chair-side, burying her face in the lap of comforting.
"There, there, Ellie, child; don't cry. It's terrible to hear you sob like that," she protested, her own voice shaking in sympathy. "I have been thinking only of you and your future, and fearing weakly that you couldn't bear the hard things. But we'll bear them together—we three; and I'll never say another word about Brookes Ormsby and what might have been."
"O mother! you are making it harder than ever, now," was the tearful rejoinder. "I—there is no reason why I should be so obstinate. I haven't even the one poor excuse you are making for me down deep in your heart."
"David Kent?" said the mother.
The bowed head nodded a wordless assent.
"I sha'n't say that I haven't suspected him all along, dear. I am afraid I have. I have nothing against him. But he is a poor man, Elinor; and we are poor, too. You'd be miserably unhappy."
"If he stays poor, it is I who am to blame,"—this most contritely. "He had a future before him: the open door was his winning in the railroad fight, and I closed it against him."
"You?" said the mother, astonished.
"Yes. I told him he couldn't go on in the way he meant to. I made it a matter of conscience; and he—he has turned back when he might have fought it out and made a name for himself, and saved us all. And it was such a hair-splitting thing! All the world would have applauded him if he had gone on; and there was only one woman in all the world to pry into the secret places of his soul and stir up the sleeping doubt!"
Now, if all the thrifty, gear-getting "faculty" of the dead and gone Grimkies had become thin and diluted and inefficient in this Mrs. Hepzibah, last of the name, the strong wine and iron of the blood of uprightness had come down to her unstrained.
"Tell me all about it, daughter," she adjured; and when the tale was told, she patted the bowed head tenderly and spoke the words of healing.
"You did altogether right, Ellie, dear; I—I am proud of you, daughter. And if, as you say, you were the only one to do it, that doesn't matter; it was all the more necessary. Are you sure he gave it up?"
Elinor rose and stood with clasped hands beside her mother's chair; a very pitiful and stricken half-sister of the self-reliant, dependable young woman who had boasted herself the head of the household.
"I have no means of knowing what he has done," she said slowly. "But I know the man. He has turned back."
There was a tap at the door and a servant was come to say that Mr. Brookes Ormsby was waiting with his auto-car. Was Miss Brentwood nearly ready?
Elinor said, "In a minute," and when the door closed, she made a confidante of her mother for the first time since her childhood days.
"I know what you have suspected ever since that summer in New Hampshire, and it is true," she confessed. "I do love him—as much as I dare to without knowing whether he cares for me. Must I—may I—say yes to Brookes Ormsby without telling him the whole truth?"
"Oh, my dear! You couldn't do that!" was the quick reply.
"You mean that I am not strong enough? But I am; and Mr. Ormsby is manly enough and generous enough to meet me half-way. Is there any other honest thing to do, mother?"
Mrs. Hepzibah shook her head deliberately and determinedly, though she knew she was shaking the Ormsby millions into the abyss of the unattainable.
"No; it is his just due. But I can't help being sorry for him, Ellie. What will you do if he says it doesn't make any difference?"
The blue-gray eyes were downcast.
"I don't know. Having asked so much, and accepted so much from him—it shall be as he says, mother."
The afternoon had been all that a summer afternoon on the brown highlands can be, and the powerful touring car had swept them from mile to mile over the dun hills like an earth-skimming dragon whose wing-beat was the muffled, explosive thud of the motor.
Through most of the miles Elinor had given herself up to silent enjoyment of the rapture of swift motion, and Ormsby had respected her mood, as he always did. But when they were on the high hills beyond the mining-camp of Megilp, and he had thrown the engines out of gear to brake the car gently down the long inclines, there was room for speech.
"This is our last spin together on the high plains, I suppose," he said. "Your mother has fixed upon to-morrow for our return to town, hasn't she?"
Elinor confirmed it half-absently. She had been keyed up to face the inevitable in this drive with Ormsby, and she was afraid now that he was going to break her resolution by a dip into the commonplaces.
"Are you glad or sorry?" he asked.
Her reply was evasive.
"I have enjoyed the thin, clean air and the freedom of the wide horizons. Who could help it?"
"But you have not been entirely happy?"
It was on her lips to say some conventional thing about the constant jarring note in all human happiness, but she changed it to a simple "No."
"May I try if I can give the reason?"
She made a reluctant little gesture of assent; some such signal of acquiescence as Marie Antoinette may have given the waiting headsman.
"You have been afraid every day lest I should begin a second time to press you for an answer, haven't you?"
She could not thrust and parry with him. They were past all that.
"Yes," she admitted briefly.
"You break my heart, Elinor," he said, after a long pause. "But"—with a sudden tightening of the lips—"I'm not going to break yours."
She understood him, and her eyes filled quickly with the swift shock of gratitude.
"If you had made a study of womankind through ten lifetimes instead of a part of one, you could not know when and how to strike truer and deeper," she said; and then, softly: "Why can't you make me love you, Brookes?"
He took his foot from the brake-pedal, and for ten seconds the released car shot down the slope unhindered. Then he checked the speed and answered her.
"A little while ago I should have said I didn't know; but now I do know. It is because you love David Kent: you loved him before I had my chance."
She did not deny the principal fact, but she gave him his opportunity to set it aside if he could—and would.
"Call it foolish, romantic sentiment, if you like. Is there no way to shame me out of it?"
He shook his head slowly.
"You don't mean that."
"But if I say that I do; if I insist that I am willing to be shamed out of it."
His smile was that of a brother who remembers tardily to be loving-kind.
"I shall leave that task for some one who cares less for you and for your true happiness than I do, or ever shall. And it will be a mighty thankless service that that 'some one' will render you."
"But I ought to be whipped and sent to bed," she protested, almost tearfully. "Do you know what I have done?—how I have——"
She could not quite put it in words, even for him, and he helped her generously, as before.
"I know what Kent hasn't done; which is more to the point. But he will do it fast enough if you will give him half a chance."
"No," she said definitively.
"I say yes. One thing, and one thing only, has kept him from telling you any time since last autumn: that is a sort of finical loyalty to me. I saw how matters stood when he came aboard of our train at Gaston—I'm asking you to believe that I didn't know it beforeand I saw then that my only hope was to make a handfast friend of him. And I did it."
"I believe you can do anything you try to do," she said warmly.
This time his smile was a mere grimace.
"You will have to make one exception, after this; and so shall I. And since it is the first of any consequence in all my mounting years, it grinds. I can't throw another man out of the window and take his place."
"If you were anything but what you are, you would have thrown him out of the window another way," she rejoined.
"That would have been a dago's trick; not a white man's," he asserted. "I suppose I might have got in his way and played the dog in the manger generally, and you would have stuck to your word and married me, but I am not looking for that kind of a winning. I don't mind confessing that I played my last card when I released you from your engagement. I said to myself: If that doesn't break down the barriers, nothing will."
She looked up quickly.
"You will never know how near it came to doing it, Brookes."
"But it didn't quite?"
"No, it didn't quite."
The brother-smile came again.
"Let's paste that leaf down and turn the other; the one that has David Kent's name written, at the top. He is going to succeed all around, Elinor; and I am going to help him—for his sake, as well as yours."
"No," she dissented. "He is going to fail; and I am to blame for it."
He looked at her sidewise.
"So you were at the bottom of that, were you? I thought as much, and tried to make him admit it, but he wouldn't. What was your reason?"
"I gave it to him: I can't give it to you."
"I guess not," he laughed. "I wasn't born on the right side of the Berkshire Hills to appreciate it. But really, you mustn't interfere. As I say, we are going to make something of David; and a little conscience—of the right old Pilgrim Fathers' brand—goes a long way in politics."
"But you promised me you were not going to spoil him—only it doesn't matter; you can't."
Ormsby chuckled openly, and when she questioned "What?" he said:
"I was just wondering what you would say if you knew what he is into now; if you could guess, for instance, that his backers have put up a cool hundred thousand to be used as he sees fit?"
"Oh!" she exclaimed; and there was dismay and sharp disappointment in her voice. "You don't mean that he is going to bribe these men?"
"No," he said, relenting. "As a matter of fact, I don't know precisely what he is doing with the money, but I guess it is finding its way into legitimate channels. I'll make him give me an itemized expense account for your benefit when it's all over, if you like."
"It would be kinder to tell me more about it now," she pleaded.
"No; I'll let him have that pleasure, after the fact—if we can get him pardoned out before you go back East."
She was silent so long that he stole another sidewise look between his snubbings of the brake-pedal. Her face was white and still, like the face of one suddenly frost-smitten, and he was instantly self-reproachful.
"Don't look that way," he begged. "It hurts me; makes me feel how heavy my hand is when I'm doing my best to make it light. He is trying a rather desperate experiment, to be sure, but he is in no immediate personal danger. I believe it or I shouldn't be here; I should be with him."
She asked no more questions, being unwilling to tempt him to break confidence with Kent. But she was thinking of all the desperate things a determined man with temperamental unbalancings might do when the touring car rolled noiselessly down the final hill into the single street of Megilp.
There was but one vehicle in the street at the moment; a freighter's ore-wagon drawn by a team of mules, meekest and most shambling-prosaic of their tribe. The motor-car was running on the spent velocity of the descent, and Ormsby thought to edge past without stopping. But at the critical instant the mules gave way to terror, snatched the heavy wagon into the opposite plank walk, and tried to climb a near-by telephone pole. Ormsby put his foot on the brake and something snapped under the car.
"What was that?" Elinor asked; and Ormsby got down to investigate.
"It is our brake connection," he announced, after a brief inspection. "And we are five good miles from Hudgins and his repair kit."
A ring of town idlers was beginning to form about them. An automobile was still enough of a rarity in the mining-camp to draw a crowd.
"Busted?" inquired one of the onlookers.
Ormsby nodded, and asked if there were a machinist in the camp.
"Yep," said the spokesman; "up at the Blue Jay mine."
"Somebody go after him," suggested Ormsby, flipping a coin; and a boy started on a run.
The waiting was a little awkward. The ringing idlers were good-natured but curious. Ormsby stood by and answered questions multiform, diverting curiosity from the lady to the machine. Presently the spokesman said:
"Is this here the steam-buggy that helped a crowd of you fellers to get away from Jud Byers and his posse one day a spell back?"
"No," said Ormsby. Then he remembered the evening of small surprises—the racing tally-ho with the Inn auto-car to help; and, more pointedly now, the singular mirage effect in the lengthening perspective as the east-bound train shot away from Agua Caliente.
"What was the trouble that day?" he asked, putting in a question on his side.
"A little ruction up at the Twin Sisters. There was a furss, an' a gun went off, accidintally on purpose killin' Jim Harkins," was the reply.
The machinist was come from the Blue Jay, and Ormsby helped Elinor out of her seat while the repairs were making. The town office of the Blue Jay was just across the street, and he took her there and begged house-room and a chair for her, making an excuse that he must go and see to the brake-mending.
But once outside he promptly stultified himself, letting the repairs take care of themselves while he went in search of one Jud Byers. The deputy sheriff was not hard to find. Normally and in private life he was the weigher for the Blue Jay; and Ormsby was directed to the scale shanty which served as the weigher's office.
The interview was brief and conclusive; was little more than a rapid fire of question and answer; and for the greater part the sheriff's affirmatives were heartily eager. Yes, certainly; if the thing could be brought to pass, he, Byers, would surely do his part. All he asked was an hour or two in which to prepare.
"You shall have all the time there is," was the reply. "Have you a Western Union wire here?"
"No; nothing but the railroad office."
"That won't do; they'd stop the message. How about the Inn?"
"Breezeland has a Western Union all right; wire your notice there, and I'll fix to have it 'phoned over. I don't believe it can be worked, though," added the deputy, doubtfully.
"We can't tell till we try," said Ormsby; and he hurried back to his car to egg on the machinist with golden promises contingent upon haste.
Miss Brentwood found her companion singularly silent on the five-mile race to Breezeland; but the lightning speed at which he drove the car put conversation out of the question. At the hotel he saw her into the lift with decent deliberation; but the moment she was off his hands he fairly ran to the telegrapher's alcove in the main hall.
"Have you a Western Union wire to the capital direct?" he inquired.
The young man snapped his key and said he had.
"It has no connection with the Trans-Western railroad offices?"
"None whatever."
Ormsby dashed off a brief message to Kent, giving three or four addresses at which he might be found.
"Send that, and have them try the Union Station train platform first. Don't let them spare expense at the other end, and if you can bring proof of delivery to Room 261 within half an hour, it means a month's pay to you, individually. Can you do it?"
But the operator was already claiming the wire, writing "deth," "deth," "deth," as rapidly as his fingers could shake off the dots and dashes.