IT WAS the jailor himself who admitted Harrington, gazing in unconcealed astonishment at the dejected figure of the man whom he had seen dart out of that same door half an hour before, radiating cheer and confidence.
"I've come back to you, White," Henry confessed hoarsely. "I want a place to kind of sit down and pull myself together. I've had one more wallop, White; and one more was the limit!"
"Sure," said the jailor sympathetically. "Sure, Henry! Come right in here to my office. Set there as long as you like."
Tactfully he led Harrington within and tactfully took himself out; but the door remained open and from the corridor he gazed speculatively upon the bowed shoulders of the young attorney—speculatively and, he fancied, knowingly. "Henry," he ventured presently, advancing to the door, "excuse me for butting in but there's one thing I probably oughta tell you."
"Yes?" inquired Harrington, without looking up, not relishing White's intervention yet recognizing its friendly intent.
"Sometimes a guy makes a promise he oughta break and I got a notion I oughta bust one now."
"Well?" interrogated Henry, raising his eyes and forcing a faint smile. "Let your conscience be your guide!"
"It was the night of the fire, hell a-poppin' all round us," began White, edging inside and lowering his voice to a confidential note, when advancing footsteps—quick, impatient footsteps—interrupted and there loomed in the doorway the tall, once tough and wiry, but now fragile-looking figure of John Boland.
"Henry!" Old Two Blades faltered huskily. "Henry!"
"Gosh! Come in, Mr. Boland!" blundered Jailor White, unable to get over his long-instilled deference to the man, then faded somehow out of the room, while Mr. Boland advanced an eager stride and the door closed behind him.
Harrington straightened instantly, lifted to his feet by the sheer force of indignation. Was he to be boxed in willy-nilly with the man he hated more than any other in the world—the man whom he regarded as the sole author of that very despair which enveloped him at this moment?
"Henry!" faltered Boland, again.
"Don't 'Henry' me!" the young man blazed vehemently. "You did everything in your power to ruin me and it isn't your fault that you didn't succeed any farther than you have."
"That's right," admitted Old Two Blades, humble to the heels. "But you told me sometime I'd turn—and I have. You told me I'd see my mistake and I have. I've come back to you, Harrington, and I—I want you again."
"Well, I don't want you again!" scorned Henry, with vengeful emphasis. "That's a mortal cinch!"
"That's hard, Harrington," reproached Boland whitening to the lips.
"I feel hard," Henry bit out uncompromisingly.
"Naturally," conceded his caller, swallowing contritely; "but perhaps you won't feel so bitter when I tell you how horrified and ashamed I am at finding out what wrongs I did you."
"Ha! You admit that?" Henry exulted, rather in spite of himself, but with an implacable light in his stern gray eyes.
Boland wavered on his legs, not knowing how to go on. He was nonplused by such hardness. Why, this was as hard as he could have been in his own hardest days. He could make no impression—get no start with a real confession of fault. How was he to get over to this rightly outraged young man that he was a changed Two Blades now, a contrite, broken-shelled Two Blades, secking his own merely that he might right the wrongs that he had done with it before.
"I—I wanted to have a little talk with you," he stammered, and his face filled with yearning. "I—I" His voice broke as he passed over everything else to blurt out his one great objective—his now dearest hope: "Harrington, I—I wanted to ask you to be receiver of Boland General!"
Harrington only started, then laughed bitterly, almost mockingly. "Me? Receiver of Boland General? Ha, ha! That's a hot one! Ha, ha!" And yet there had been circumstances in which this would have seemed a marvelous, a grateful triumph to him. It was the very triumph he had looked forward to. "No. That would be impossible!" he declared with finality.
"Why?" persisted his petitioner, and persisted with a manner so damply abject that Henry felt that in justice to his own humanity he must give an answer.
"Well—for one thing"—he hesitated, eyes roving questioningly as his mind did—"for one thing, I am leaving here tomorrow!" he discovered suddenly.
"Leaving?" The shaken Old Two Blades almost wept. He was aghast, frightened, trembling. Horror peered out of his recessed eyes. "Why, you are the only man who can cope with the situation at all—the only man everybody trusts!" he quavered.
"Everybody? Huh!" scoffed Henry, with another bitter laugh: for the one person who hadn't trusted him made all the rest negligible. Yet the very genuineness of this tenacious old man's consternation waked something within that made Henry question wildly the justice of his own sudden resolve, so that instead of arguing with a hated enemy, he seemed to himself to be merely protesting to his own conscience, and was presently answering in hoarse desperation, eyes roving helplessly again: "I had thought I—I might cope with it—try to cope with it; but—it's not worth the—the Oh, what the hell's the use?" And a frankly harried man, harried beyond enduring, beyond caring, opened his hands in a gesture of helpless negation.
"But you're trustee for the Indians," reminded Boland, taking hope. "They sent me here to make terms with you."
Henry recalled the Salisheuttes with a start, and then with a sigh of resignation, consigned them to the discard. "They'll have to get somebody else."
"But the townspeople have put their faith in you!" argued Boland cunningly.
"They'll have to put it in somebody else," said Harrington desperately.
"There isn't anybody else," agonized Old Two Blades, with a wail in his voice.
But for Henry this thing had reached its limit. Nerves frazzled, tears of vexation springing to his eyes, banging the table with his hand, he cried: "Damn it, what if there isn't? . . . This place is torture to me. Torture! Do you understand. I'm going to get out of it—tomorrow—today—now! Ditch the whole thing!"
Despite the frenzy of this announcement, there was a ring of unalterable conviction in the words and in the manner, from which Old Two Blades stood back appalled. That this young man should fail them, prove a deserter, refuse himself to him—to Edgewater! Well—if Henry Harrington was going to collapse, what was there left? Who was there left?
The Boland chin was trembling. This seemed the last, the crowning calamity to Old Two Blades—greater than the upsetting of his fortune, the burning of his mills, the destruction of the town. Why, they had all, all of them, come to believe in these last forty-eight hours that Henry Harrington was a sort of human rock who could not crumble.
The spectacle of him weakening, threatening to run away, affected Boland strangely. As he looked at this disheveled, distraught young man so innocently ruined, he fancied he saw a picture of himself. He wondered if he too had not been innocently ruined. It raised the whole question. It sent him like a Napoleon groping back over the plan of his Waterloo to see why and wherein he had lost the battle. As of a comrade in catastrophe, he asked: "Why did it have to happen, Harrington—all—all of this?"
But sensing this note of self-pity on Boland's part, Henry was instantly fierce. "Because you made it happen!" he snapped out.
"I? . . . How could I have helped it?" fended Two Blades, forgetting his penitence, leaning on the old fallacies again.
"By being what you seemed to be—an honest, benevolent-hearted man!" retorted Henry, direct and painful as a poke to the nose.
Boland winced. "But I've stood for the law!" he urged.
"Law?" scorned Harrington, wrathfully. There was something he had been waiting the longest days of his life to say to this old half-devil, who was trying to repent and couldn't quite make the grade; and here was his opportunity. "Boland," he began hotly, "I told you once you must make the law respectable if you wanted people to respect it. Your regard for law has been pretense only. You have made the law a convenient weapon—a pistol to make the world stand still while you picked pockets."
Boland lifted a hand in pained protest, but Henry blazed along: "By the subtlest forms of bribery, Boland, by the most skilful appeals to self-interest, you have corrupted this whole community. Councils, legislatures, yes, and the very voters, have framed the laws to suit your purposes. District attorneys, sheriffs, tax-assessors, juries and judges have bent the laws to suit your will—because you had enlisted them all in a selfish partnership."
"But it was a partnership for the common good," labored J. B., when Henry had stopped to breathe.
"It was a partnership in selfish lawlessness," insisted Harrington. "Lawless in your heart, you have made these people lawless; hence the mobs. A crowd does not proceed by the nice forms of diplomacy and self-control that you employ. It gets what it wants as you get what you want; but its methods are different. It is quick, primal, brutal—yet not more brutal, not more remorseless than you with your calculating cunning—less cruel, if you ask me."
"Why, even—even the big—the biggest chance I took was a chance in the interest of civilization," Boland defended stubbornly.
But Henry lashed out indignantly: "You mean that fundamental rapacity of yours in accepting U. S. patents which you knew were based on an error—an error which you connived at suppressing? No—emphatically no! It was cold, calculating fraud. Better, Boland, that forest had stood untouched for generations than that you should hack it down to build a business on a crime, and create a county government which was not sound because the power was in the top instead of in the bottom. Oh, you can't be law and court and conscience for forty thousand people and have them retain character and courage and self-control! You make children out of them, not citizens. The very essential of democracy is that people shall do their own thinking."
"But the people make mistakes," urged Old Two Blades weakly.
"They couldn't make a bigger one than you have!"
Boland started, then went white and stood silent, with head slightly bowed.
"This country is a democracy, not a paternalism," Harrington declaimed. "You want to go too fast. The fern grows six feet in the season, but it takes a hundred years to grow a fir. The civilization which you created, Boland, has reduced itself to the ashes you see around you."
This was the final unanswerable argument. Ashes—failure! By it Boland was crushed and self-convicted. He reached for a chair and sank into it. There was nothing left but—but this young man who had weakened so incomprehensibly but now seemed to have grown strong again. He reached an appealing hand across the table. "You—you won't refuse—the receivership?" he implored.
"Yes, Boland; I do refuse it," he answered decisively. "And in saying my say to you, I think I've done my last duty to the town of Edgewater. Good day!"
John Boland started and stared, then wet a pendent lip. This was refusal, flat and final; it was also dismissal, so curt and imperative that no course was left him but to accept it. Rebuked and rebuffed, he gathered what shreds of dignity remained to him into the stiffest bow that he could manage and went out, baffled in mind, buffeted in spirit, wondering what could possibly have made Henry Harrington so hard.
On his part, Henry watched that departure with a vast deal of satisfaction. "I guess I made him look crooked, what! Even to himself," he reflected, recalling that last word with Scanlon—who was upstairs now in the cell de luxe.