WHEN next morning Henry viewed his stubbled, haggard face in the glass he reviled himself at his own weakness. "'Hellfire' Harrington!" he scoffed. "You look like it now, don't you? Crying like a baby, crumpling like a man of straw just because a girl goes back on you—quitting as if there was a streak of yellow in you wider than the inlet out there. Oh, yes, you're a hell of a Hellfire, you are!"
But after a little bit he had decided desperately: "I must see her again! I must see her immediately." He dressed for the occasion with that precise attention to detail of the gallant who expects this day to die with his boots on and is proudly concerned to make an immaculate corpse. Passing up between the statues of Lewis and Clark he came face to face with Mr. Boland—their first encounter in some days—the first since Mr. Boland had refused to see him.
"Good morning, Mr. Boland," said Henry, politely.
"Well, young man!" hailed the magnate sternly, harshly, as addressing a culprit, and Henry felt for the first time the bare impact of the man's displeasure. It was as if a blow, instead of a glance, had struck him. It conveyed an ominous, creeping feeling that he couldn't shake off when Mr. Boland had passed; for Old Two Blades did pass, stiff and uncompromising, without another word. This manner of his struck Henry as somehow sinister; and there was a sinister coldness in the eye of the sun this morning; a sinister sharpness in the bite of the air, nothing of which was so very strange since it was to be a sinister day. Mr. Boland was even now on his way to meet Scanlon and issue staff orders—orders with a sinister significance so far as Henry Harrington was concerned.
Down at the state capital, too, things were moving. Senator Madden and Charlie Clayton were getting the McKenzie's Tongue bill jumped forward for action tonight. And away off at the capital of the nation things were happening also, which had a significance for Henry.
For one thing, the great seal of the United States was about to go down upon a document of vast importance that had been moving through the routine of the bureau for weeks, slipping from desk to desk, from hand to hand, from eye to eye.
For another, an associate justice of the Supreme Court was busy correcting the typewritten pages of a decision which he had just been dictating, meticulously concerned that his meanings should be clear and his references exact. To be sure of this latter, he occasionally turned to bound volumes of typewritten testimony and to the lines of two maps, one old and faded, the other new and distinct.
There had been conference and debate already between the justices, goings over of briefs and studyings of the record. Gradually the briefs had been discarded and those eminent, shrewd, tenacious, legal minds contemplated only the record. Now Justice Bradshaw had written their opinion—their unanimous opinion. Within a few days the Court in bank would hand it down.
But a third arm of the government at Washington was also busy upon concerns that had to do with this far-off corner of the country. The Secret Service Bureau, tracing the movements and contemplating the mystery of the appearance and disappearance of a dangerous criminal, had focused its eye upon this great Northwest, because of certain facts which had this day come to its knowledge.
But Henry, unaware of some of these convergences and unmindful of others, took his way wretchedly up the wide walk to Humboldt House with the chill of John Boland's bitter glance in his marrow and the slight consolation of a very sickly hope within his breast.
As for Billie, that haughty reserve with which she had parted from her lover had presently given place to anguished misgivings and she had spent a restless night. In her morning room, with wide windows looking to the inlet and the sea, but with the bright sun letting no cheer into her heart, Henry found her. She was wearing a weeping-willow air and a frock in some shade so neutral that it declined entirely to announce itself, merely blending with the pathos of a disconsolate yet beautiful figure which drooped in a grass-woven chair, banked round with cretonne cushions. But at sight of her lover Billie sprang up with a cry of eagerness and suddenly inspired hope.
"Henry! Oh, Henry!" she rejoiced; then observing the lined gravity of his expression and the mournful, pleading light of his great gray eyes, hope died, and her own eyes filled with tears. She flung out her hands to him hoarsely and pleaded: "Henry . . . Henry . . . You must not do this mad thing. You must not!"
The lover, touched even as he had not been before, and with all that sense of the sinister chilling him, could only shake his head more gravely still and plead in turn, voice freighted with all the tenderness of which he was capable: "Billie, you must not take it as you do—must not. You must see that I am right. You must."
He felt her mood change, her figure harden in his grasp. "But you're—you're not right," she stormed indignantly. "You're not right!" Her manner was instantly imperious; she could never be suppliant for long.
Meeting the blaze of those eyes, Harrington read in them the worst that he had feared; but he was firm this morning—he had to be as thoughts of the nearness of the noose to trustful Adam John came to him—but with all his firmness he had to be very, very gentle too. "Then you'll—you'll just have to wait, dear," he told her softly, whisperingly almost; "wait a little bit till you can sce the thing more clearly."
"But you—you're ruining everything," she flung out at him petulantly.
"On the contrary, I'm saving everything," he told her quite calmly.
"Fool!" she cried angrily, and flung him from her. "Obstinate fool! Go away. You make me so—so ashamed!" And she pitched herself into the cushions again, face hidden, weeping inconsolably.
Harrington stood biting his lip, knees trembling, for it weakened him immeasurably to have finally and definitely lost her moral support. Moreover it dismayed him to realize that she was not and never had been quite what he had thought—to perceive that she whom he had idealized, the goddess whom he had worshiped, who had inspired him to a deepening adherence to that very principle which dictated to him today, could not comprehend that principle herself, and for his holding to it she called him "fool" and "obstinate" and bade him go away.
Yet he knew in his heart that he still worshiped her, idealized her; that she still inspired him. Confessing this to himself, he regarded her wistfully, very greatly perplexed, a pained expression on his face, not knowing whether to approach or to hold himself off.
"Go!" she burst out at him with an impetuous headto-foot gesture of her quivering body. "Go!" She was utterly and irrecoverably out of patience with him.
Yet Henry still gazed at her now unregarding figure, his face full of a growing compassion. He thought that he began to understand. Billie, so regal and so beautiful, so imperious and so appealingly broken just now, so unaccustomed to be thwarted, so utterly outraged with him, was not the hard-hearted, morally obtuse little despot that she seemed. She was merely spoiled, self-willed, self-deluded, blinded by a veil of materialism, dominated by the personality of her really great but somewhat misguided father, repeating his grandiloquent phrases after him with less understanding of their meaning than he had, which perhaps was little enough.
She thought that she was an independent thinker, self-sufficient, schooled, seasoned by her travel and observation, when in fact she had been screened and sheltered; she was soft and tenderly nurtured, a mere Persian kitten of a woman, who had yet to learn what it is to be actually and not theoretically sympathetic, who would have to acquire softness of heart and toughness of fiber as other women acquired it, in the school of suffering. Well, so be it.
And today she was matriculating in that school, while he appeared to be in for some sort of post-graduate course himself. They would be separated and yet in a way they would be together—in suffering. There was a kind of sad satisfaction in that. Instead of despair, hope grew in his breast. Even her angry sobbings proved how much she loved him. But she had told him to go.
"Good-by, Billie," he said huskily, hoping she would favor him with the glint of a tear-filled eye, summon him to her perhaps, for one last embrace—a touch of her hand at least. But she did not. Her face was still from him and she flirted a shoulder irritably. "Just . . . good-by," he faltered, disappointed; then ventured to add with solemn hopefulness: "You and your father will see this thing right pretty soon, and then you'll see me right. Until then—I can wait."
"Fool!" she flung at him again, out of her tears. "Fool!" And he had to go without a touch, a look even, with that word ringing in his ears. Still he went in hope, unable to believe that he had lost her. He thought that he had made sure of her rather. Love—love like theirs might even be stabbed through the heart and yet it would pulse on and on, he told himself.
And it was true that the minute his presence had cleared the room, Billie was sitting bolt upright and frowning intently through her tears. "What's got into him?" she asked herself. "Some influence . . . somebody . . . I wonder if it could be that. . . . But, no! He loves me," she exulted;" he loves me! Love must save him. I must be firm with him—firm. O God," she prayed, clasping her hands tightly and lifting tear-stained eyes, "help me to be firm."
When, considerably agitated, the young man got back to his desk, it was twenty minutes past ten by the ivory clock on the blotter—twenty-one minutes past, to be exact, and a few seconds. He sat taking stock of his position. Scanlon and all the other back-scratchers were against him. Billie was against him. Mr. Boland was aloof and accusatory. Certain handpicked individuals in the community were reproaching him—but the people! The people generally trusted and believed in him. His great popularity in the community was secure, and this was the sole necessary asset in his battle for justice for Adam John.
That was exactly what he was thinking, when just then the people—that is, just then a long-distance call came in from the state capitol. It was Charlie Clayton, one of the people's representatives, speaking: "That McKenzie's Tongue matter has been set forward to tonight, Henry," said Charlie, and his voice sounded anxious, a bit overwrought. "We're going to need every vote we can dig up; and it's a good three hours run up here, you know."
"I'll be there," assured Henry; and it was a kind of relief to have his attention diverted to a duty that was easy to perform; but—"McKenzie's Tongue!" he suddenly remembered. "Why, Sarah Murphy was in here telling me that deal was crooked."
There before him was the pile of papers she had left to prove her assertion. For half an hour he was hunched over them; and that night in the Assembly Room he denounced the McKenzie's Tongue project as a job and voted against it, but was careful to deny that any responsibility for it was Boland's. He proclaimed John Boland as a high-minded citizen of the best intent—mistaken sometimes, of course, as men will be—but a high-minded citizen who put always, as far as he could see, the welfare of all the people above the profit of his personal ventures.
But any such gratuitous apologetic for their master was lost upon the proponents of the bill. The point with them was that it failed of passage by just one vote—Henry's of course—and in the lobby Madden, deeply chagrined, breathed threatenings.
"You've been the golden-haired boy of Boland General for quite a spell now, Harrington," he sneered, "but the old man'll have your locks trimmed for this trick and trimmed short."
"And I suppose you think you're going to be one of the barbers, eh, Madden?" retorted Henry.
"Oh, the folks back in Edgewater will attend to you, all right," sneered Madden. "Oh, what they will do to you!"
"My constituents are not grafters," boasted Henry, "and if there is any question about it, I'll hire the Opera House in Edgewater tomorrow night and tell them just what a cheap steal the project is."
With a good conscience and rumbling defiance, Henry drove back through the night to his home. Occasionally his smoldering mind lit up with a brilliant flash. That was when he visioned his ultimate triumph—when illumination should come to Billie and he would feel her arms again ecstatically about his neck.
Next morning the Blade in a three-ply headline screamed out that Assemblyman Henry Harrington had betrayed Socatullo County. It carried also an editorial written earlier, commenting on the "rumored defection of one of our most popular and influential attorneys from the sacred cause of law and order, as also from that equally sacred program of progress and prosperity which for years has been the ideal of the best people in the Three Towns."
"Titmarsh—the dirty dog!" exploded Henry. "I may have to hire the opera house after all." But he was entirely unsuspicious that the people of Edgewater and Wahpeectah and Socatullo had been for some days being skilfully prepared to believe much evil of him; and when there came from Oskison, private secretary to Old Two Blades, a suave summons to the imperial presence, Harrington actually scented victory.
"Now's my chance," he said to his deluded self, "and the McKenzie's Tongue project will be as good an opening as any to show that Scanlon simply can't be trusted." But the very first sight of that bland, unbending autocrat behind the unmarked door was shattering to any sanguine state of mind on Henry's part.
To begin with, Mr. Boland appeared as one who had quite lost his blandness and lost it permanently. Tightlipped, he sat with recessed eyes a-glitter and tense hands that gripped like talons the claw-carved arms of his chair. He gazed upon Henry not as upon a being but a thing, and a thing which displeased him utterly. He dispensed with grecting and bit out acridly: "Well, young man, are you going to defend that Siwash?"
And Henry, although his hopes were instantly dashed and although he felt the force of his patron's displeasure, was yet in no mood to cower. Besides, he didn't think self-willed autocracy should be encouraged. "I am," he said quietly.
"And attack the lease?" The old eyes glared.
"Yes, sir," responded Henry.
"With all that that implies?" Boland asked, and his tone was the calculated menace of a man of ruthless will and tremendous power.
Now Henry Harrington was young—not seasoned yet for such a stroke. A kind of awe—in spite of himself, a kind of fear—crept into him. Still he would not be cowed—not by a mere tone at any rate.
"Yes; yes, sir. I suppose so, sir," he responded, his gaze straight into the face that awed him.
For a moment Old Two Blades was motionless and glaring. There ensued a stunned, nerve-pricking silence. Then came the acceptance of the inevitable; the admission that the combat was joined—mild words enough but of momentous meaning, with quick acidulated utterance. "Very well! . . . Very—well!" The autocratic voice was so crisp it fairly crackled. "Scanlon will arrange to take over whatever legal business you have on hand, and to receive your resignation as special counsel."
These were brief words but they contained a good deal for the senses to drink in all at once. Henry could not quite believe his ears. His mouth fell open in spite of him. There it was! As simply as that. He was to be put out—actually out! The world grew black about him and began to whirl. His career, his prospects—his . . . everything. What Billie, what Clayton, what Madden had so clearly intimated had befallen him. And yet the thing was so unreasonable—so silly—so . . . "Mr. Boland," he said, "I—I didn't suppose that this honest difference over what seems to both of us a vital matter would necessarily"
"Bah!" Old Two Blades barked. "You've got too much sense not to see that you can't break with me in a thing as big as this Hurricane Island matter and not break in everything." Mr. Boland looked quite incredulous, and Henry passed his hand blunderingly across his brow, as wondering how he could have made such a mistake himself; then all at once he understood and grasped at the explanation, for he did not like to appear a fool.
"With an ordinary man, Mr. Boland, yes," Henry discriminated; "but I did not think you were an ordinary man."
Mr. Boland acknowledged with an imperious nod that he was not an ordinary man, but started impatiently to say: "Because in this county alone twenty thousand families draw their living from my enterprises it doesn't follow that" When Henry broke out in exultant speech as if he suddenly accounted for his stupendous misconception.
"That's it exactly, Mr. Boland, your genius for organization has given you a twenty thousand man-power mind, and I—I guess I figured it had given you a twenty thousand man-power heart—a twenty thousand man-power conscience, too."
Harrington stopped abruptly, almost reverently, before what seemed to him a very large idea which he had stumbled upon; but Mr. Boland's long lips were already curling in scorn at the fantastic absurdity, and his sneer made him utterly unlovely! "Why do you do this rash thing, Harrington? Oppose me like this?" he reproached, with the very slightest note of consideration mellowing the gall of his bitterness.
"Because I told you once, Mr. Boland, that I would never lie to you," flashed Harrington like a rapier thrust. "You confessed to me that you knew you were surrounded by liars—that you liked to have men lie to you. That is why you are displeased with me today—because I am not lying to you."
The old man's rage flared up again. He crashed his talon hands down again impatiently upon the talon chair arms and roared: "You will resign everything—everything—not forgetting," he remembered to specify spitefully, "the presidency of the Shell Point Land Company."
"Shell Point?" recalled Harrington. "By heavens! Shell Point!" Then he hesitated. In these moments of astounding self-revelation on Mr. Boland's part, he had learned swiftly that he must mistrust everything the magnate had ever told him, every enterprise to which he had ever committed him; and now, at the mere thought of Shell Point, a flood of light broke in upon, and enraged him with himself as with this wily schemer who had duped him.
"Do you know, Mr. Boland," he observed cuttingly, "since I've been through this Hurricane Island transaction, I've been less and less satisfied with that finespun reasoning of yours about Shell Point. I believe this scheme was a damned fraud. I think I'll block it." He was intrepid now.
"The Shell Point patent was signed this morning," defied Mr. Boland.
Henry, startled, glanced at the calendar upon the desk and took account of the flight of days.
"I'll block it yet," he challenged. "I'll prove it's a fraud—just exactly as I'll prove that the Edgewater & Eastern Railway is a fraud."
John Boland straightened on his feet. Hurricane Island was a trifle but Shell Point was a matter of millions. His lips parted, his teeth gleamed like yellow fangs, his cold wrath became hot; his fierce brows beetled and crawled like excited caterpillars. He was no longer an offended majesty but a baffled beast of prey, halted above his kill.
"Young man!" he raged, and his voice was freighted with a sense of the inadequacy of words to convey his feelings, "I warn you!" He shook his lean forefinger. "If you, by so much as one word, breathe a hint against the integrity of that Shell Point transaction, I'll have you pilloried in this community. I'll have you stripped! . . . I'll have you put in jail!!!! That's what I'll do with you." The walls of the private office vibrated to the venomous crescendo.
Yet Henry found Mr. Boland less terrible as he became less subtle. Put him in jail? That sounded cheap and weak; as well as absurd. Put him in jail for being helplessly honest and decently truthful? Ridiculous!
"Do your worst, Mr. Boland," he invited, with a low vibrancy in his tone; "for me the zero hour has come."
"You traitor! . . . You ingrate!" raved Mr. Boland futilely.
This was a good deal to stand. Henry whitened, then reddened, then bit his lip, while his brow was elevated a trifle. "No; neither of them. But, by thunder, it looks to me as if I'm the only man near you who isn't both. I feel sorry for you, Mr. Boland."
Mr. Boland relieved himself of a gesture of irritated contempt; yet appeared to hold his final burst of resentment in a state of suspended utterance until youth's infatuated conceit might reach its climax.
"You're treating me rather badly, Mr. Boland," Henry remonstrated, "saying some pretty harsh things to me, and I know they seem justified; but they're not. You'll see they are not. You have ordained that I shall be fighting you for a time—for the sake of simple justice to some humble creatures all of whom have trusted me and some of whom have trusted you. The result of that fight will vindicate me, Mr. Boland; vindicate my judgment. I expect, when it is over, that you will invite me back to your friendship and your confidence, with a frank confession that you are entirely wrong. It is this—this faith in you"
"Faith in me?" roared the insulted magnate, only to be rendered freshly speechless by another example of youth's magnificent assurance.
"In you," affirmed Henry with low emphasis. "I accept your present ultimatum because I know it will be withdrawn. I go under your displeasure, but I believe I shall return under your favor. I am sorry for what you have said to me, but have not resented it too greatly because you are today a man beside yourself, deceived by bad advisors, a man whose business counselors have become mere toadies and flatterers. We are about to part—you in anger, I in sorrow. You have been a friend and a father to me. I am grateful. Yet today you have called me ingrate and traitor. Mr. Boland, I believe I have never been so loyal to you as now—never done you so great a service as that which I am about to do."
Mr. Boland's expression during the latter part of this speech had been one of utter incapacity to believe what he was hearing. "You—you n-n-nut!" he exploded.