XXIV
INTO THE PRIMITIVE
Tested upon purely diplomatic principles, Miss Van Brock's temper waslittle less than angelic, exhibiting itself under provocation only inguarded pin-pricks of sarcasm, or in small sharp-clawed kitten-buffetingsof repartee. But she was at no pains to conceal her scornfuldisappointment when David Kent made known his doubts concerning his moralright to use the weapon he had so skilfully forged.
He delayed the inevitable confession to Portia until he had told Loring;and in making it he did not tell Miss Van Brock to whom he owed the suddenchange in the point of view. But Portia would have greatly discredited hergift of insight if she had not instantly reduced the problem to its lowestterms.
"You have been asking Miss Brentwood to lend you her conscience, and shehas done it," was the form in which she stated the fact. And when Kent didnot deny it: "You lack at least one quality of greatness, David; you swaytoo easily."
"No, I don't!" he protested. "I am as obstinate as a mule. Ask Ormsby, orLoring. But the logic of the thing is blankly unanswerable. I can eitherget down to the dirty level of these highbinders--fight the devil with abrand taken out of his own fire; or----"
"Or what?" she asked.
"Or think up some other scheme; some plan which doesn't involve asurrender on my part of common decency and self-respect."
"Yes?" she retorted. "I suppose you have the other plan all wrought outand ready to drop into place?"
"No, I haven't," he admitted reluctantly.
"But at least you have some notion of what it is going to be?"
"No."
She was pacing back and forth in front of his chair in a way that wasalmost man-like; but her contemptuous impatience made her dangerouslybeautiful. Suddenly she stopped and turned upon him, and there were sharpclaws in the kitten-buffetings.
"Do you know you are spoiling a future that most men would hesitate tothrow away?" she asked. "While you have been a man of one idea in thisrailroad affair, we haven't been idle--your newspaper and politicalfriends, and Ormsby and I. You are ambitious; you want to succeed; and wehave been laying the foundations for you. The next election would give youanything in the gift of the State that a man of your years could aspireto. Have you known this?"
"I have guessed it," he said quite humbly.
"Of course you have. But it has all been contingent upon one thing: youwere to crush the grafters in this railroad struggle--show them up--andclimb to distinction yourself on the ladder from which you had shakenthem. It might have been done; it was in a fair way to be done. And nowyou turn back and leave the plow in the furrow!"
There was more of a like quality--a good bit more; some of it regretful;all of it pungent and logical from Miss Van Brock's point of view; andKent was no rock not to be moved by the small tempest of disappointedvicarious ambition. Wherefore he escaped when he could, though only tobegin the ethical battle all over again; to fight and to wander among thetombs in the valley of indecision for a week and a day, eight miserabletwirlings of the earth in space, during which interval he was invisible tohis friends and innocuous to his enemies.
On the morning of the ninth day Editor Hildreth telephoned Miss Van Brockto ask if she knew where Kent could be found. The answer was a ratheranxious negative; though the query could have been answered affirmativelyby the conductor and motorman of an early morning electric car which ranto the farthest outskirts of the eastern suburb of the city. Following aboyish habit he had never fully outgrown, Kent had once more taken hisproblem to the open, and the hour after luncheon time found him ploddingwearily back to the end of the car line, jaded, dusty and stiff from muchtramping of the brown plain, but with the long duel finally fought out tosome despairing conclusion.
The City Hall clock was upon the stroke of three when the inboundtrolley-car landed him in front of the Clarendon. It was a measure of hispurposeful abstraction that he went on around the corner to the SecurityBank, dusty and unpresentable as he was, and transferred the packet ofincriminating affidavits from the safety deposit box to his pocket beforegoing to his rooms in the hotel.
This paper weapon was the centering point of the struggle which had nowlasted for nearly a fortnight. So long as the weapon was his to use or tocast away, the outcome of the moral conflict hung in the balance. But nowhe was emerging from the night wanderings among the tombs of theundecided.
"I can't give it up; there is too much at stake," he muttered, as hetrudged heavily back to the hotel. And before he went above stairs heasked the young woman at the house telephone exchange to ascertain ifGovernor Bucks were in his office at the capitol, and if so, if he werelikely to remain there for an hour.
When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on thewriting-table and went to freshen himself with a bath. That which laybefore him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity. Inother times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tuband the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to thebottle.
He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying wherehe had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card. Kentread the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines abouthis mouth. There are times when a man's fate rushes to meet him, and hehad fallen upon one of them.
"Show him up," was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevatorcage clacked again, Kent was waiting.
His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a littlebreathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator. Kentadmitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in achair and begged a light for his cigar. In the match-passing he gatheredhis spent breath and declared his errand.
"I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent,"he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted itin stolid silence.
"Possibly: that is for you to say," was the unencouraging reply.
Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyondit into the bedroom.
"We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of," said Kent,in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed hischair.
"I came up to see what you want--what you will take to quit," heannounced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over hisknee. "That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, andwe can dispense with the preliminaries, I take it."
"I told your attorney-general some time ago what I wanted, and he did notsee fit to grant it," Kent responded. "I am not sure that I want anythingnow--anything you can have to offer." This was not at all what he hadintended to say; but the presence of the adversary was breeding a stubbornantagonism that was more potent on the moral side than all the prickingsof conscience.
The yellow-lidded eyes of the governor began to close down, and the lookcame into them which had been there when he had denied a pardon to a widowpleading for the life of her convicted son.
"I had hoped you were in the market," he demurred. "It would be better forall concerned if you had something to sell, with a price attached. I knowwhat you have been doing, and what you think you have got hold of. It's atissue of mistakes and falsehoods and back-bitings from beginning to end,but it may serve your purpose with the newspapers. I want to buy thatpackage of stuff you've got stowed away in the Security vaults."
The governor's chair was on one side of the writing-table, and Kent's wason the other. In plain sight between the two men lay the packet Bucks waswilling to bargain for. It was inclosed in a box envelope, bearing theimprint of the Security Bank. Kent was looking steadily away from thetable when he said:
"What if I say it isn't for sale?"
"Don't you think it had better be?"
"I don't know. I hadn't thought much about the advisable phase of it."
"Well, the time has come when you've got it to do," was the low-tonedthreat.
"But not as a matter of compulsion," said Kent, coolly enough
. "What isyour bid?"
Bucks made it promptly.
"Ten thousand dollars: and you promise to leave the State and stay awayfor one year from the first Tuesday in November next."
"That is, until after the next State election." Kent blew a whiff of smoketo the ceiling and shook his head slowly. "It is not enough."
The governor uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way, and said:
"I'll make it twenty thousand and two years."
"Or thirty thousand and three years," Kent suggested amiably. "Or supposewe come at once to the end of that string and say one hundred thousand andten years. That would still leave you a fair price for your block ofsuburban property in Guilford and Hawk's addition to the city of Gaston,wouldn't it?"
The governor set his massive jaw with a sharp little click of the teeth.
"You are joking on the edge of your grave, my young friend. I taught youin Gaston that you were not big enough to fight me: do you think you arebig enough now?"
"I don't think; I know," said Kent, incisively. "And since you havereferred to the Gaston days: let me ask if I ever gave you any reason tobelieve that I could be scared out?"
"Keep to the point," retorted Bucks, harshly. "This State isn't broadenough to hold you and me on opposite sides of the fence. I could make ittoo hot to hold you without mixing up in it myself, but I choose to fightmy own battles. Will you take twenty thousand dollars spot cash, andMacFarlane's job as circuit judge when I'm through with him? Yes or no."
"No."
"Then what will you take?"
"Without committing myself in any sense, I might say that you are gettingoff too cheaply on your most liberal proposition. You and your friendshave looted a seventy-million-dollar railroad, and----"
"You might have stood in on that if you had taken Guilford's offer," wasthe brusk rejoinder. "There was more than a corporation lawyer's salary insight, if you'd had sense enough to see it."
"Possibly. But I stayed out--and I am still out."
"Do you want to get in? Is that your price?"
"I intend to get in--though not, perhaps, in the way you have in mind. Areyou ready to recall Judge MacFarlane with instructions to give us ourhearing on the merits?"
The governor's face was wooden when he said:
"Is that all you want? I understand MacFarlane is returning, and you willdoubtless have your hearing in due season."
"Not unless you authorize it," Kent objected.
"And if I do? If I say that I have already done so, will you come in andlay down your arms?"
"No."
"Then I'm through. Give me your key and write me an order on the SecurityBank for those papers you are holding."
"No," said Kent, again.
"I say _yes_!" came the explosive reassertion; and Kent found himselflooking down the bright barrel of a pistol thrust into his face across thetable.
For a man who had been oftenest an onlooker on the football half of life,Kent was measurably quick and resourceful. In one motion he clamped theweapon and turned it aside; in another he jammed the fire end of his cigaramong the fingers of the grasping hand. The governor jerked free with anoath, pain-extorted; and Kent dropped the captured weapon into the tabledrawer. It was all done in two breaths, and when it was over, Kent flungaway the broken cigar and lighted a fresh one.
"That was a very primitive expedient, your Excellency, to say the best ofit," he remarked. "Have you nothing better to offer?"
The reply was a wild-beast growl, and taking it for a negative, Kent wenton.
"Then perhaps you will listen to my proposal. The papers you are soanxious about are here,"--tapping the envelope on the table. "No, don'ttry to snatch them; you wouldn't get out of here alive with them, lackingmy leave. Such of them as relate to your complicity in the Universal Oildeal are yours--on one condition; that your health fails and you getyourself ordered out of the State for the remainder of your term."
"No!" thundered the governor.
"Very well; you may stay and take a course of home treatment, if youprefer. It's optional."
"By God! I don't know what keeps me from throttling you with my hands!"Bucks got upon his feet, and Kent rose, also, slipping the box envelopeinto his pocket and laying a precautionary hand on the drawer-pull.
The governor turned away and walked to the window, nursing his burnedfingers. When he faced about it was to return to the charge.
"Kent, what is it you want? Say it in two words."
"Candidly, I didn't know, until a few minutes ago, Governor. It began witha determination to break your grip on my railroad, I believe."
"You can have your railroad, if you can get it--and be damned to it, andto you, too!"
"I said it began that way. My sole idea in gathering up this evidenceagainst you and your accomplices was to whittle out a club that would makeyou let go of the Trans-Western. For two weeks I have been debating withmyself as to whether I should buy you or break you; and half an hourbefore you came, I went to the bank and took these papers out, meaning togo and hunt you up."
"Well?" said the governor, and the word bared his teeth because his lipswere dry.
"I thought I knew, in the old Gaston days, how many different kinds of ascoundrel you could be, but you've succeeded in showing me some newvariations in the last few minutes. It's a thousand pities that the peopleof a great State should be at the mercy of such a gang of pirates as youand Hendricks and Meigs and MacFarlane, and----"
"Break it off!" said Bucks.
"I'm through. I was merely going to add' that I have concluded not to buyyou."
"Then it's to be war to the knife, is it?"
"That is about the size of it," said Kent; and the governor found his hat.
"I'll trouble you to return my property," he growled, pointing to thetable drawer.
"Certainly." Kent broke the revolver over the blotting pad, swept theejected cartridges into the open drawer, and passed the empty weapon toits owner.
When the door closed behind the outgoing visitor the victor in the smallpassage at arms began to walk the floor; but at four o'clock, which wasHildreth's hour for coming down-town, he put on his hat and went to climbthe three flights of stairs to the editor's den in the _Argus_ building.
The Grafters Page 24