XXV
DEAD WATER AND QUICK
The cubby-hole in which Hildreth earned his bread by the sweat of hisbrain was dark even at midday; and during working hours the editor satunder a funnel-shaped reflector in a conic shower-bath of electric lightwhich flooded man and desk and left the corners of the room in a penumbraof grateful twilight.
Kent sat just outside of the cone of radiance, watching Hildreth's face asthe editor read stolidly through the contents of the box envelope. It wasan instructive study in thought dynamics. There was a gleam of battlesatisfaction in the editorial eye when Hildreth faced the last sheet downupon 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 aregiving 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 myrooms to try to buy me off. I don't think I succeeded in making himunderstand why I couldn't traffic with it; and possibly you wouldn'tunderstand."
"I guess I do. It's public property, and you couldn't divert it intoprivate channels. Is that the way it struck you?"
"It is the way it struck a friend of mine whose sense of ultimate rightand wrong hasn't lost its fine edge in the world-mill. I did not want todo it."
"Naturally," said the editor. "Giving it up means the loss of all you havebeen working for in the railroad game. I wish I could use it, just as itstands."
"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. Ithink it would. But this is the off year, and the people won't rise to apolitical issue--couldn't make themselves felt if they should."
"I don't agree with you. You have your case all made out, with theevidence 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 dosomething: as it is, we can only yap at the heels of the ringsters, andour yapping won't help you in the railroad fight. What do you hear fromBoston?"
"Nothing new. The stock is still flat on the market, with thestock-holders' pool holding a bare majority, and the Plantagould brokersbuying in driblets wherever they can find a small holder who is willing tolet 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 theTrans-Western affair, and several things have developed. Matters areapproaching a crisis. The cut-rate boom is about to collapse, and there istrouble brewing in the labor organizations. If Bucks doesn't get hishenchmen out of it pretty soon, they will be involved in the smash--whichwill 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 allright, but it is proving too slow. Now they are going to do somethingelse."
"Can you give it a name?" asked Kent, nerving himself.
"I can. But first tell me one thing: as matters stand, could Guilforddispose of the road--sell it or lease it?"
"No; he would first have to be made permanent receiver and be givenauthority by the court."
"Ah! that explains Judge MacFarlane's return. Now what I am going to tellyou is the deadest of secrets. It came to me from one of the Overlandofficials, and I'm not supposed to gossip. Did you know the Overland ShortLine 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 itscompetitor 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 aprofane man, but the sanguine temperament would assert itself explosivelyin moments of sudden stress.
"When is this thing to be done?" he demanded, when the temperamental godswere 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 hisheat.
"But you must have some idea," he insisted.
"I haven't; any more than the general one that they won't let the grassgrow under their feet."
"No. God blast the whole--I wish I could swear in Sanscrit. Themother-tongue doesn't begin to do justice to it. Now I know what Bucksmeant when he told me to take my railroad, _if I could get it_. He had thewhole thing coopered up in a barrel at that minute."
"I take it you have no alternative to this," said the editor, tapping thepile of affidavits.
"Not a cursed shred of an idea! And, Hildreth--" he broke off shortbecause once again the subject suddenly grew too large for coherentspeech.
Hildreth disentangled himself from the legs of his chair and stood up toput his hands on Kent's shoulders.
"You are up against it hard, David," he said; and he repeated: "I'd giveall 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 floorof his room, trying vainly to persuade himself that virtue was its ownreward, and wondering if a small dose of chloral hydrate would bedefensible under the cruel necessity for sleep. He had about decided infavor of the drug when a tap at the door announced the coming of abell-boy with a note. It was a message from Portia.
"If you have thrown away your chance definitely, and are willing to take astill more desperate one, come to see me," she wrote; and he wentmechanically, as a drowning man catches at a straw, knowing it will notsave him.
The house in Alameda Square was dark when he went up the walk; and whilehe was feeling for the bell-push his summoner called to him out of theelectric stencilings of leaf shadows under the broad veranda.
"It is too fine a night to stay indoors," she said. "Come and sit in thehammock while I scold you as you deserve." And when he had taken thehammock: "Now give an account of yourself. Where have you been for thepast age or two?"
"Wallowing around in the lower depths of the place that Dante visited," headmitted.
"Don't you think you deserve a manhandling?"
"I suppose so; and if you have it in mind, I shall probably get it. But Imay say I'm not especially anxious for a tongue-lashing to-night."
"Poor boy!" she murmured, in mock sympathy. "Does it hurt to be trulygood?"
"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 totell the household good-by? Penelope was wondering audibly what had becomeof you."
"I didn't know they were gone. I have been nowhere since the night youdrove me out with contumely and opprobrium."
She laughed again.
"You must have dived deep. They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost yourghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop. But itisn't wonderful that you haven't missed Mr. Ormsby. Having elected MissBrentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further u
se for theP.S.M."
"And you have no further use for me, apparently," he complained. "Did yousend 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 ofmine. 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 legalprocedure thus far, but they won't do it any more. They will takeMacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanentreceiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot. Isha'n't be in it."
"Probably not; certainly not if you don't try to get in it. And thatbrings 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 opportunitiesthus 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'dlike to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going totrip us again."
"Portia, if I thought you really meant that ... A conscienceless man isbad 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 thenno other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident ofbirth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Isit an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal ormine, 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 itabused. But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance. Do youknow what I did this afternoon?"
"How should I know?"
"I don't know why you shouldn't: you know everything that happens. ButI'll tell you. I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish andback again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and atthe wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, havingit 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 hunthim, his card came up. We had it out in my rooms."
"I'm listening," she said; and he rehearsed the-facts for her, concealingnothing.
"What a curious thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made anend. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for notclinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can'thelp admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and thecourage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fightingscruples of yours go. You have made it perfectly plain that if a thiefshould steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you'dcompromise with him to get it back. But suppose you should catch him atit: 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 asfuriously as you like. All I ask is to be given a weapon that won't bloodymy hands."
"Good!" she said approvingly. "I think I have found the weapon, but it'sdesperate, desperate! And O David! you've got to have a cool head and asteady hand when you use it. If you haven't, it will kill everybody withinthe 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 andwhispered a single sentence. For a minute or two he sat motionless,weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftlymultiplying difficulties and hazards.
"You call it desperate," he said at length; "if there is a bigger word inthe language, you ought to find it and use it. The risk is that of aforlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent--or atleast 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 secondmortgage."
"Well, seventy millions are worth fighting for: worth a very considerablerisk, I should say."
"Yes." And after another thoughtful interval: "How did you come to thinkof it?"
"It grew out of a bit of talk with the man who will have to put the apexon our pyramid after we have done our part."
"Will he stand by us? If he doesn't, we shall all be no better than deadmen 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 itis the last of the bridges to be crossed, and there are lots of them inbetween. Are the details possible? That was the part I couldn't go into bymyself."
He took other minutes for reflection.
"I can't tell," he said doubtfully. "If I could only know how much time wehave."
Her eyes grew luminous.
"David, what would you do without me?" she asked. "To-morrow night, inStephen Hawk's office in Gaston, you will lose your railroad. MacFarlaneis there, or if he isn't, he'll be there in the morning. Bucks, Guilfordand Hawk will go down from here to-morrow evening; and the Overland peopleare to come up from Midland City to meet them."
There was awe undisguised in the look he gave her, and it had crept intohis 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? Perhapsthey would: I think quite likely they burned women who made bettermartyrs. But I didn't have to call in Flibbertigibbet. The programme is acarefully guarded secret, to be sure; but it is known--it had to beknown--to a number of people outside of our friends the enemy. You'veheard 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 hisson. After a little the son wanted to tell it to a friend. The old mansaid, 'Hold on; I know it--that's one'--holding up one finger--'you knowit--that's eleven'--holding up another finger beside the first; 'and nowif you tell this other fellow, that'll be one hundred and eleven'--holdingup three fingers. That is the case with this programme. One of the onehundred and eleven--he is a person high up in the management of theOverland Short Line--dropped a few words in my hearing and I picked themup. 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 broomhas swept the high-salaried official corners clean. But the wage-peopleare 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 adjournyet. There remains a little matter of compensation--your compensation--tobe 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 onyour own account, and not as the company's paid servant. You must resignand make terms with Boston beforehand; and that, too, without tellingBoston 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 isentirely different. You will be acting upon your own initiative, andyou'll have to spend money like water at your own risk. You must be freeto 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 enoughto enable me to get a letter to Mr. Ormsby. He answered promptly by wirethis morning. Here is his t
elegram."
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 theelectric light between the dancing leaf shadows and read:
"Plot Number Two approved. Have wired one hundred thousand to Kent's orderSecurity Bank. Have him draw as he needs."
"So now you see," she went on, "you have the sinews of war. But you mustregard it as an advance and name your fee to the Boston folk so you canpay it back."
He protested again, rather weakly.
"It looks like extortion; like another graft," he said; and now she lostpatience with him.
"Of all the Puritan fanatics!" she cried. "If it were a simple commercialtransaction by which you would save your clients a round seventy milliondollars, which would otherwise be lost, would you scruple to take aproportionate fee?"
"No; certainly not."
"Well, then; you go and tell Mr. Loring to wire his Advisory Board, and todo 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 tenthousand 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, andsince I didn't know, myself, I wired Mr. Ormsby again. Here is what hesays," 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 ismerely your guaranty of good faith: it is worth next to nothing now, andit will be many a long day before it goes to par, even if you aresuccessful in saving its life. So your magnificent fee shrinks to sevenhundred 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 oneman who has the idea, and if it isn't carried out, the patient is going todie to-morrow night, permanently. You are the specialist in this case, andspecialists come high. Now you may go and attend to the preliminarydetails, if you like."
He found his hat and stood up. She stood with him; but when he took herhand she made him sit down again.
"You have at least three degrees of fever!" she exclaimed; "or is it onlythe three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar shock? What have you beendoing to yourself?"
"Nothing, I assure you. I haven't been sleeping very well for a fewnights. But that is only natural."
"And I said you must have a cool head! Will you do exactly as I tell youto?"
"If you don't make it too hard."
"Take the car down-town--don't walk--and after you have made Mr. Loringsend his message to Boston, you go straight to Doctor Biddle. Tell himwhat 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 andto-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 cryingnecessity that you go into this fight perfectly fit and with all your witsabout you. If you don't, somebody--several somebodies--will land in thepenitentiary. Will you mind me?"
"Yes," he promised; and this time he got away.
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