HENRY turned back to Scanlon. "Say! Help me to get Mr. Boland to see the wrong of this thing, won't you?" he appealed earnestly.
"You haven't got me to see it yet, Henry, "reminded Scanlon bluntly; "and you're not going to."
Quackenbaugh proved equally stubborn. "You couldn't expect us to sit quietly by and see our mill program held up by one stubborn little Siwash, could you?" he sniffed.
"Blind—blind as the rest of them," mourned Henry, as he went back sickly to his office. The next morning there was an important item in the Blade. It began:
The Edgewater & Eastern Railway recorded yesterday a lease of sixty acres of Hurricane Island to the Boland Cedar Company.
Henry smiled grimly. "Smoked 'em out, anyway," he chuckled; but the chuckle died. The item was confession of fact, but it was also defiance—notice that the project was to be carried forward whether or no. Besides, it was clever strategy; it kept any contrary person from making a sensation out of this disclosure.
It is understood [expounded the item] that the Cedar Company will take advantage of the facilities offered by the railroad by immediate erection of the largest shingle mill in the world. This mill will give employment to hundreds of persons and is but the first of many benefits which will accrue to Socatullo County through the new railroad.
"So that's the game!" perceived Henry. "Bribing the whole community—blinding it with self-interest, as Scanlon and Quackenbaugh are blinded."
Now to blind a community eye seemed to Henry to be planting dynamite under every interest of a man like John Boland, all of whose enterprises were ultimately so dependent upon the good will of the people. Conscientiously, therefore, he determined to see Mr. Boland again, and for once was satisfied with the force of his argument; but it was evident that Old Two Blades listened with more self-control than patience.
"Nonsense!" he answered. "Snap out of it! Wake up! I am beginning to be annoyed with you, Henry!" There was a glitter in the recessed eyes and the thin lips clamped with just the faintest suggestion of a twenty-three-ton vault door closing noiselessly, yet closing—till the tick of time should open it again.
Henry gained a feeling that an immense and relentless personal force had manifested itself to him. Yet he, Henry, did not feel bitter against Mr. Boland. "It's Scanlon and Quackenbaugh," he accused. "They've got him fooled completely. He told me once he was entirely surrounded by liars. I told him I'd tell him the truth—always. I'm trying to now, and . . . he won't let me."
Henry had become a very much harried young man. He was not sleeping well. He was not working well. Even his love for Billie that had been everything to him—well, it was inevitable that she should notice.
"You are troubled about something?" she divined one night when they sat indoors before an open fire, for an unseasonable rain was falling in a country where rain is supposed to be always seasonable. It was chill outside and raw, and it was a bit chill in Henry's heart, notwithstanding the cozy comfort of the library fire.
"Troubled? I should say I am troubled," he confessed huskily, and all at once it seemed possible to outline to her the inside story of Hurricane Island—shielding her father carefully, putting the burden of the iniquity entirely on Scanlon and Quackenbaugh.
But when he had finished, Billie viewed him with a clear and sifting gaze. "Aren't you presuming a good deal, Henry?" she asked. "Aren't you . . . reflecting on father's intelligence a little? He's smarter than Scanlon and Quackenbaugh. They couldn't fool him. And he wouldn't do anything that is wrong. Not anything. Father is a very conscientious man. Really, Henry!" Her brows were beautifully arched; her eyes were soft but wondering and accusative, almost as speculating whether all this success which had come to her lover so swiftly might not have turned his head. And there he was, stopped again.
"It's not that she's blind like the rest of them," he reasoned when at length he was out in the misting rain, and crossing to where his car was parked. "It's because I couldn't tell it to her exactly as it is—in all its hideousness—without hurting her." And Henry, standing with the rain in his uplifted face, then and there highly resolved that he would not hurt her. No! For he loved her. No act of his should ever paint the blush of shame upon that proud cheek nor shatter such beautiful faith in her father's rectitude.
But staring between the headlights as he drove down the hill there appeared to him the twisted, half-emerged face of the Indian, Adam John, with the sloe-black eyes set upon him in humblest, sublimest faith. And the noose, he knew, was hourly tightening about the neck of Adam John. Henry found himself struggling for breath as if it were his own neck. "I've got to stop them," he declared desperately, between clenched teeth. "I've got to stop them."
Next morning two things happened. Henry saw Billie off on the day boat for a week of visiting, shopping and theater-going in Portland; and John Boland refused him an audience. This was the first time that had ever happened. Henry received the announcement almost incredulously; and got hastily back to his own room. "If I can't talk to him, how can I make him see it?" he murmured huskily. "And if I can't make him see it, what do I do then?"
He was still pondering the last question when Lahleet entered, looking pale and anxious, and flapped five hundred dollars down upon his desk. "Thompson's retainer!" she exclaimed excitedly.
"Public opinion, eh?" scorned Henry, thinking withering thoughts of Stacey Thompson.
"No! He was very frank about it," explained Lahleet; "said he'd had intimations from somewhere in the Boland cabinet that if he made more than a perfunctory defense of Adam John it would be the worse for him."
"What!" Harrington was on his feet with a roar. "They won't even let the poor devil have his case fairly presented?" His sense of justice had never been quite so outraged. "Well, that settles it," he declared in vibrant tones. "I will defend Adam John myself!"
"Henry!" The word, a cry rather, was abrupt and ringing, full of vibrant joy, the sudden relief after long and painful suspense. With it the girl came over quickly and bent her face into his arm, weeping.
Harrington smiled wonderingly and, looking down, touched caressingly the glossy braids of her hair. As he felt pleasurably the weight of her little body upon his arm, he was inspired with a new, quick compassion for the girl, realizing that she who had always been so strong and self-sufficient, teasing him, challenging him at times, was after all mere frail femininity.
"But—are you strong enough, do you think?" Lahleet asked, suddenly lifting her tearful face. "Strong enough for what they will do to you?"
"Do to me?" laughed Henry. "What can they do to me? Besides, I shall not attack Mr. Boland—not at all. I shall merely show that Boland General resorted to a mistaken piece of strategy on the ground of which Adam John is entitled to acquittal."
But the little school-teacher's face was full of apprehension. "He will fight you; it will cost you . . . everything!" she persisted.
Henry did not try to argue. Lahleet, with all that white blood and white education could do for her, was still simple, elemental; she scorned to fathom the complexities of highly organized natures like, for instance, his and Mr. Boland's.
"At least I ought to tell Billie," he saw quite clearly, when Lahleet had gone, after kissing his hand impulsively, as she had done once before; "for I—I'm going to have to hurt her a little—a very little at least," he perceived, a sickish feeling in his breast.
But he told Scanlon first, because Scanlon was nearer to him—told him firmly: "I'm going to defend Adam John. I'm going to read the Hurricane Island lease to the jury, explain what it means." Scanlon seemed greatly astonished and greatly distressed.
"Why, you wouldn't do that, would you, Henry?" he remonstrated feelingly. "We're all your friends," he urged. "You can't turn on us, you know." His reproach was so gentle that it made Harrington feel very mean.
"But I shall not be turning on you," the young man urged earnestly. "It's just this one matter that we differ on."
"Besides, you can't go back on the Old Man," reminded Scanlon as if horrified at the thought. "Why, he loves you, Henry. You wouldn't want to break old J. B.'s heart, would you?" he urged with astonishing tenderness, for so gross a man.
"Certainly not," averred Henry wretchedly, "but I guess I will have to hurt him a little to make him understand."
Scanlon must have seen that Harrington was absolutely determined. "Oh, Lord!" he groaned. "This is going to be awful." Tough old Scanlon! Why, it looked as if he were about to cry. "Wait here, Henry," he suddenly appealed, "wait. Promise me to wait." Harrington nodded and the Chief Fixer hurried out of the room.
"Got him going!" Henry smiled to himself. "He's gone to see Mr. Boland. Gone after him, perhaps."
But it was Quackenbaugh who came back with Scanlon, wild-eyed this time, hoarse with excitement. "Henry!" he cried, rushing upon him. "Henry!" and the reproach in his tone was greater than Scanlon had been able to manage and harder to resist, for Quackenbaugh's was a perceptibly finer soul. "You're not going to turn on me, Henry, are you? Hurricane Island is my scheme, you know. You're not going to make it hard for me, are you, with J. B.?" There was almost a quaver in the voice; and there was that about the way in which Quackenbaugh's misty eyes bored into his that made Harrington feel small and ornery.
"Of course I'm not, Quack. It's just"
"But you are, Henry," persisted the president of Boland Cedar, in teary tones; "you are turning against me if you attack that lease."
"I'm going to attack it," announced Harrington resolutely.
Quackenbaugh calmed himself, accepting the inevitable. "I'm hurt, Henry—that's all," he said solemnly, and exchanged a glance with Scanlon.
Harrington felt a knife turning in his own heart, appreciating freshly what a fine manly fellowship it was to which he had been admitted in this Cabinet of Boland General, and realizing how much he wanted to retain that fellowship.
"Promise you won't say anything about it, Henry; this nutty notion of yours—not yet—till I can get some of the other boys to talk to you, won't you?" Scanlon pleaded wistfully.
"Why, sure, old man; let 'em come," Harrington's heart made answer. It was no use, of course, but—it was fair. He wrung the hands of the two more sympathetically at parting than he had ever wrung them before.
"They're making more of it than I expected," he ruminated, strolling toward his office. "Suppose I must seem like a regular Judas to them. Isn't it the devil that they can't see it? Good fellows, they are—darned good fellows. Lord, but they've been nice to me. It's going to be hard—harder than I thought." He braced himself in his swivel chair and waited for the appeals of the "other boys."
Edmunds, president of the transportation interest, was first of the cabinet to come, entering full of solicitude, as for a friend. He warned, coaxed, cajoled. He made it clear that Henry owed him several debts of gratitude and wanted to know if his idea of reciprocation was to betray them all over a worthless Siwash?
Then came others. Each pleader succeeded in making Henry feel that somehow he was under obligation to him; and not one of them was able to see that the attorney's proposal to defend Adam John was anything but a rash, reckless, inconsiderate sort of sabotage upon a sacred fabric of friendships.
"This is going to be fierce," the young man muttered to himself, "fierce." Every favor he had ever given or received, every nod or smile he had ever exchanged, seemed to be remembered against him now, made the ground of an appeal to bend him from a moral purpose. He saw himself bound with ropes of velyet, but none the less ropes; shackled with the chains of a golden association, but none the less chains. "It's a regular third degree," he groaned, sweating distress at every pore. "If they would only get mad!" he stewed. "But this damned buttonholing, teary-eyed stuff! It's fierce—that's what it is, fierce!"
Two days this sort of thing kept up; two nights reproachful faces were round him in his sleep and voices muttered at him in his dreams; but by the third day rumor of what Henry intended seemed to have spread, and a procession of the townspeople began to visit his office—men like Gaylord and Schuler and Foster.
"I'm interested in seeing that nobody pitches a monkey wrench into the Boland machinery," the Mayor explained. "Henry, you don't want to do anything to injure the community," mourned Schuler.
But this outside pressure made Henry angry. "Community, rot!" he blazed. "It's mere selfishness that brings you fellows here. I'm getting fed up anyway—tired of having everybody try to make a goat out of me. Community, eh? Why, the community's very existence depends on justice from the courts for small as for great. Community? By George, that's the big point. It isn't the scrawny little Indian; it's the community I'm going to stand up for and defend."
Thus did the issue widen in Harrington's mind.
"I can't make out Henry at all," Mayor Foster told Gaylord and Schuler, going down the stairs, and the banker and the merchant confessed themselves mystified by this sudden clouding of one of the city's brightest minds.
But it was not alone self-appointed meddlers who were discussing Henry now.
His rumored intention had traveled widely this third day. He was being talked about every where, in the lodges, in the women's clubs; before the county medical association, by the ministerial association, on the corners of the streets, in the front rooms of soft drink parlors and in the back rooms of bootleg joints; and always with disfavor—because of a mere rumored intent of his, the first ever to invoke a criticism of any sort.