AND now, Henry, here's the first piece of business," beamed Scanlon, exceedingly well pleased with himself; "a little job of diplomacy that Mr. Boland snatched right out of my hand. 'Don't muss that up at all. Give it to Harrington first thing,' he said to me, and here it is." From one of his after pockets the Chief Counsel drew forth a roughly folded blueprint. Henry recognized it as that map of a portion of the shores of Harper's Basin which Quackenbaugh and Scanlon had been arguing over in the den last night.
"It's this way, Henry," Scanlon expounded suavely. "Quack's got to have this island and it belongs to a buck Siwash named Adam John. Now some of these Indians are stubborn about their land, but the dope shows this Adam John was in your platoon overseas, and it was the Old Man's idea that if you'd go out there and offer him a fair price for his land he'd take it from you, smooth and easy—which would settle Quack's trouble quick, and let a whole lot of things go forward that are standing still now."
Henry's face had lighted at the name. "What'll you give Adam John for his island?" he demanded shrewdly, just as if he might not have been retained by the other side after all.
"It's worth probably three thousand dollars for the timber that's on it; it's not worth a damn for anything else," argued Scanlon.
"Let me give him five thousand dollars for it," proposed Henry impulsively. "I like to be generous."
"With other people's money? There are a lot like you." Scanlon's tone was dry. "All right, five thousand. Ten thousand if he holds us up. We've got to have it, you know."
"I don't believe in hold-ups," declared Henry, with a clamping of his lips. "I wouldn't encourage even one of my vets in 'em. Two thousand is premium enough. I'll see him tomorrow afternoon. The next day you can have your deed."
"That will be making it snappy," declared Scanlon with approving emphasis; then as Henry clamped the blueprint down with a paper weight, the Chief Counsel hitched his chair closer. His manner became mysterious and intimate; his voice was lowered significantly.
"As a matter of fact, just what did happen last night, Henry?"
Harrington told him; quite in detail, up to about two minutes before the blow—after that with voids, watching his expression narrowly.
Scanlon listened avidly, yet his only question, penetratingly put, was: "And when you got back to the place there wasn't a clue? . . . Not the sign of a clue?"
"Not one that I could mention," declared Henry. "Unless—by the way, who is this Count Eckstrom that turned up here yesterday and begins running around with Miss Boland right away? Have him looked up for me, will you? Have him looked up for a criminal record through your intelligence department."
Scanlon's mouth fell open. "Criminal record! An importation of Billie's with a criminal record?"
"Keep it dark but look him up," adjured Henry.
"I'll do it. I get his 'dosshiay,'" volunteered Scanlon heartily. "Good night."
Henry stood with a puzzled air contemplating the door which had closed upon his departing visitor. Was Scanlon just the most honest soul in the world, or was he a most convincing actor? Pending an answer, he reached for the telephone, for there were now things so much more pleasant to think of.
"Doctor's been and gone," he reported blithely, if tardily, to Miss Billie Boland; "I'm feeling perfectly chipper, you may tell your father."
"As to your head?"
"Yes, Miss Boland."
"And as to your heart?" He heard the silvery peal of her laughter.
"I didn't consult the doctor about it."
Again that silvery peal. He was both chagrined and stirred. That she could twit him about his stupid confession argued no depth of responsive feeling on her side, yet it argued also the establishment of most amicable relations. It argued—hope.
"I—I'll be on hand for the golf game," he stammered. "Goo—good night, Miss Boland."
"See you are! Good night." The clear voice cadenced and he knew she was still laughing at him, but he didn't care. "Am I in right?" he crowed, and hugged himself boyishly. "Well, I guess yes!"
Then his mind went absurdly off to the fracas on the island. "I wonder . . . I wonder who beaned me," he frowned. Nothing in the silence seemed to answer him and he subsided slowly into a nebulous state of mind. In the nebula a radiant figure glowed, a star, a goddess! at the recognition of whom he stared.
"Yes—I love her," he breathed, a slow smile lighting his face; "I love her." No longer did he reproach himself for having surrendered so soon. "I know a good thing when I see it," he boasted.
No longer did he feel chagrin at having half-confessed himself that afternoon. Rather, he was proud that the strings of his heart had been able to respond so quickly with the tune of a sublime passion when the soft breath of a gracious and beautiful woman had stirred them. And it was a sublime passion—else why was he sublimated by it?
He felt a new zest for all the works of life; and next morning the sun did not merely come up over the white shoulders of Mount Gregory; it burst up like a streaming glory and spread its sheen of light over all the territory of the three towns.
Yes—life had kindled for Henry Harrington. The Edgewater Blade proved this, for he was the hero of the two most sensational stories it had ever printed. "That's piling the blurb on thick," he smiled over his coffee, and felt a genuine confusion; "but I guess it won't hurt me any with the girl on the hill—what!"
As to the news value in these stories: well, for one thing, it appeared that the Blade had taken legal advice concerning the land titles and could assure its readers they were as sound as Gibraltar—as sound as the Government upon whose patents they were based. For another—as to the documents stolen: they were not irreplaceable.
The two affairs, the auction and the vault robberies, represented a typical Hornblower's mare's nest; that was the Blade's deduction. And Henry Harrington had emerged from both with luster—Titmarsh's stories made clear—wherefore, after breakfast, the young attorney's progress along North Street to the office was almost triumphal. Everybody had to greet him, shake hands with him, slap him on the back, congratulate him on his daring.
But Henry shook his congratulators off long enough to stop in at Charlie Culp's place and leave an order for an automobile. "The finest little chase-about that five thousand dollars will buy." That was his specification, whereat Culp grinned, because the demand for nifty little cars designed exclusively for two had been looking up the last day or so in Edgewater.
Yet it was not apropos of this order for a car that Henry, as he rode out to the Country Club, assured himself stoutly: "But I won't tell her today. I'll show her I can contain myself a little while at least."
However, the very first glimpse of Billie in her golf togs was shattering to resolution of any sort. Her color scheme this morning was the greenest of green with the whitest of white—while the color contrasts in her face were never more vivid—those pinks, those reds, the eyes blue as the water of the inlet—the picture was devastating and her greeting was cordiality itself.
"And so everybody is talking about you today," she hailed; and the light of congratulation dancing in her eyes shook Harrington all loose inside.
"Absurd—what they're saying," he blushed; "let's go to it," and he motioned toward the links. His eyes fell before hers—he was in a strange state of confusion. "Lord, I've got to hold on to myself or I'll blurt it out right now," he confessed to himself. "Lord, I wish she'd stop looking at me that way." But he didn't wish it.
His only chance seemed to be to concentrate fiercely on his game; he beat her—most ungallantly.
She was a little vexed; but after the first blush of chagrin, secretly amused. "Do you go about everything with such deadly earnestness?" she taunted, still breathing quickly from the vigor of the play.
He bit his lips, confused again. "Was I—was I so deadly?"
"Yes; you were." She was almost pouty.
"It's you that have made me deadly," he accused, tentatively.
"I?" She eyed him mischievously from under long lashes. "Before me they had learned to call you 'Hellfire.'"
Harrington flushed at the old sobriquet, that seemed never so inapt as now, and was suddenly angry—with himself—with her. "You have made me deadly—deadly as a cobra," he charged, advancing on her. "I'm in love with you!" He said it savagely. "No doubt about it; I'm in love with you. In just forty hours you've made me want everything just because I want you."
Billie, leaning on her putter, dared to laugh at him—mockingly; but his earnestness would not be mocked. "You were in doubt yesterday," she reminded him.
"I have decided—it is love." He stood frowning.
"And is it much of a calamity to find that you are in love with me?" she twitted.
"The calamity is that it has come so quickly that you won't believe in it at all."
"You are speedy," she admitted, mirthful, yet admiring.
"Speedy! I'm a plunger," Harrington avowed hoarsely.
The blue eyes regarded him siftingly. "You may have fallen but you are not plunging!" she dared him slyly.
He took the dare—fiercely—with one of his fighting smiles. "Miss Boland—Billie, I want you!" he exclaimed, seizing her hand.
"Oh, now you are 'Hellfire'!" she laughed mischievously.
"As the steel wants the magnet so everything in me cries out for you," he clamored so fiercely that she became suddenly serious. "I'm not a mollycoddle. I don't pretend I haven't wanted other women. I wanted a woman once with all my soul; but that was in France."
Into Miss Billie's blue eyes there came a startled look.
"My want was very intense, because life itself was to be short and I had to be intense or get cheated," Harrington was assuring her. "But the want that makes me do this abrupt thing, speak these abrupt words to you this morning is far bigger. I wanted Jeanne so that I could have her and die. I want you so that I can have you and live. There is more in me than there was five years ago; more in me than there was twenty-four hours ago. You have made me something that I was not and that something, all of it, turns back to you, its creator. . . . I—I love you, Billie!" His impetuous utterance softened infinitely.
He sought to draw her toward him; but her hand struggled for its release and was permitted to obtain it. Her face had whitened, as did his. Her figure had straightened and she pushed him from her with a look of resentment, the reason for which he understood.
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"I had to tell you" he urged huskily.
She laid a quick hand on his sleeve, perhaps partly to reassure him, perhaps partly because she found herself swaying dizzily.
"I know, I know," she whispered, with white lips, "But—but—of course, Mr. Harrington, you couldn't expect me to love you in forty hours. Know whether I love you?"
"Yes," he demanded. "Yes. You're quick. You know now. If something in you hadn't been drawn to me I couldn't have been drawn so headlong to you. Yes, I expect you to put your hands in mine this minute and say, 'I love you, Henry!'" He offered his hands to her and waited.
He did not have to wait long. She swayed toward him, lifting her bright face to his; and she did put her hands in his—but not with yielding in their pressure.
"You are very clever, aren't you?" she conceded with a sober smile. "And I do admire you very much. I am drawn to you, but I do not know yet that I am drawn in the same way that you are."
"Oh, but it must be the same!" Harrington urged.
"Yours is a reckless nature," she warned, with a slow sidewise shake of her pretty head that to Henry was utterly destroying; "mine is not. You plunge; I reflect. You feel that you want me to make your life complete. I consider if I could make my life complete through you."
"Your—your life complete?" stammered Henry, his emphasis revealing just the old, benighted male notion; yet she was patient.
"But I have a life to live," she reminded him. "My position, my opportunities" And then all at once Henry understood that she was thinking of stocks and bonds and mills, all the wide inheritance that would some day be hers. "These confer on me an obligation. It's a trusteeship I was born to—not just to be a gay, careless spender and joy-chaser."
Henry's face lighted frankly. "I knew it," he beamed. "I knew you couldn't be just—just a bunch of chiffon. Of course, I'd—I'd expect to help you bear your responsibilities—if there was anything a fellow like me could do, but I don't pretend to anything much along that line. Love, I guess, is selfish. Love just wants what it wants. But I'd—I'd try not to hinder," he smiled, half playfully.
"Hinder?" The eloquent eyes threw him a look as conceding that a young man of just his qualities could be very helpful indeed—could be. "My love can't be just selfish," she explained to him; "it must remember those responsibilities. You see, father, being what he is, created them for me, and when I inherit that's part of it. Do you know what the world is demanding today, Mr. Harrington?" She was suddenly very much in earnest, and the more earnest the more beautiful she seemed to him. "It's that simple little word—enough! Enough of food, enough of clothes, enough of warmth, enough of house and home and light. Enough!"
It seemed to Harrington wonderful that a girl in Billie Boland's position should have thoughts like this—at a moment like this; for wasn't she encouraging him? Wasn't she taking the precaution to tell him what it would be like if he married her? Anyway, it deepened all his feeling for her.
"You're right, of course," he could agree avidly. "It's fierce—little shavers wanting just one grape, just one taste of an orange, just one glass of milk for their breakfast, and they don't get it and they don't know why they don't get it; and it isn't their fault or a thing that they can help while they're little. By George, we ought all to be trying to do something to help them get it."
"It's a problem of production," the girl affirmed; "you have to heap it before you can scatter it. What the world needs is production—men like my father who make the traditional two blades grow."
"But it's a problem of distribution, also. Besides enough of food and clothes, the world wants the intangible things, love and faith and hope and . . . justice!" Henry reminded. "That's where we lawyers come in. We are battlers for the square deal. The courts are the agencies to see that the little shavers, the weak and helpless, are not trampled under the contending feet of these big producers you are talking about and pulling for."
The blue eyes looked puzzled. Billie appeared to view Harrington's enthusiasm with approval but his sentiments with doubt. "True, perhaps," she decided swiftly, "but abstract—rather vague, too vague, don't you think, for practical people to work at?"
Henry was slightly disappointed until her face brightened with: "But you are helping father to produce when you help solve his technical difficulties for him. When you help get the Shell Point reservation so that homes for a million people can be made out of trees that shelter the game a hundred Indians live on! When you get an Indian to give up his unproductive island for a shingle mill that will cover the roofs of ten thousand homes!"
It was Henry's turn to be puzzled. The Shell Point project was a dead secret—yet she knew it. She knew even about Adam John and his island—which was a small matter.
But the blue shafts of her eyes were holding him hard to the point: "That is so," he admitted with the emphasis of new discovery. "Yet it's really as a sort of special agent of justice that I come into these affairs—justice for your father—justice for the Indians—justice for all those people needing homes, needing roofs." He stopped, confused. This was vague. It sounded almost silly.
Billie noted his confusion and sweetly abolished it by a queen's decree. "I see you as a co-producer with father," she ruled, blissfully autocratic! And he went down the hill very, very happy—gravely, deeply happy. His existence had found its bright particular star and he was on terms of adoration with it. His devotion was to be permitted. He asked no more—now.