"Excuse me, Mr. Hatch," was the curt interruption. "Abuse isn't argument. State your case, if you have one."
"Oh, I've got the case, all right. You've been keeping your finger on the pulse, or you think you have, but I can wise you up to a few things that have got away from you. You thought you were the only original trust-buster when you started your scheme of locally owned elevators and warehouses and coal- and lumber-yards and ran us out of business. But I'm here to tell you that your fine-haired little deal to rob us began to die about as soon as it was born."
"How so?" inquired the boss, just as though Major Kendrick hadn't already given him his pointer about the how.
"In the way that everything of that kind is bound to die. It wasn't a month before your little local stockholders began to get together and swap stock and sell it. In a very short time the control of the whole string of local plants was in the hands of a hundred men. To-day it's in the hands of less than twenty, with John Marshall at the head of them."
This time the boss let out a notch. "So far, you haven't told me anything new. Go on."
"If I should name Marshall's bunch, you'd know what's coming to you. But we needn't go into statistics. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is now a consolidated property, and John Marshall, Henckel and I control a majority of its stock. How does that strike you?"
"It strikes me that the people most deeply interested have been exceedingly foolish to sell their birthright. But that is strictly their own business, and not mine or the railroad company's."
"Wait!" Hatch snarled. "It's going to be both yours and the railroad company's business, before you are through with it. Marrow, here, represents Marshall, and I represent Henckel and myself. What are you going to do about those ground leases?"
"Nothing at all, except to insist upon the condition under which they were granted by the railroad company."
"Meaning that you are going to try to hold us to the fixed percentage charge for handling, packing, loading, and transferring?"
"Meaning just that. If you raise the proportional market-price charge on the producers and merchants, the leases will terminate."
"I thought that was about where you'd land. Now listen: we're It – Marshall and Henckel and I – and what we say, goes as it lies. We are going to use the present C. S. & W. plants and equipment, charging our own storage and handling percentages, based on anything we see fit. If you pull that ground-lease business on us and try to drive us out, we'll fight you all the way up to the Supreme Court. If you beat us there, we'll merely move over to the other side of your tracks to our old Red Tower houses and yards and go on doing business at the old stand."
The boss sat back in his chair, and I could tell by the set of his jaw that he was refusing to be panic-stricken.
"You are taking altogether too much for granted, aren't you?" he put in mildly. "You are assuming that the courts will eventually nullify the terms of the ground-leases, or, if they do not, that the railroad company will do nothing to save its patrons from falling into this new graft trap."
Hatch snapped his fingers. "Now you are coming to the milk in the cocoanut!" he rapped out. "That is exactly what we're assuming. You are going to let go, once for all, Norcross. You are not going to fight us in the courts, and neither are you going to harass us out of existence with short cars, over-charges, and the thousand and one petty persecutions that you railroad buccaneers make use of to line your own pockets!"
"But if we refuse to lie down and let you walk over us and our patrons – what then?" the boss inquired.
That brought the explosion. Hatch's eyes blazed and he smacked fist into palm.
"Then we'll knife you, and we'll do it to a velvet finish! After so long a time, we've got you where you can't side-step, Norcross. You thought you played it pretty damned fine in that election deal; but we got the goods on you, just the same!"
Again the boss refused to be panic-stricken; or, anyhow, he looked that way.
"We have heard that kind of talk many times in the past," he said. "The way to make it effective is to produce the goods."
"That's just what we're here to do!" snapped the Red Tower president vindictively. "You, and the Big Fellows in New York, want a lot of the State railroad laws repealed or amended. If you can't get that string untied, you can't gamble any more with your stock. Well and good. You came here six months ago and set out to manufacture public sentiment in favor of the railroad. You ran up your 'public-be-pleased' flag and beat the tom-tom and blew the hewgag until you got a lot of dolts and chuckle-heads and easy marks to believe that you really meant it."
"Well, go on."
"With all this humbug and hullaballoo you still couldn't be quite certain that you had made your point; that your measures would carry through the incoming Legislature. After the primaries you counted noses among the candidates and found it was going to be a tight squeak – a damned tight squeak. Then you did what you railroad people always do; you slipped out quietly and bought a few men – just to be on the safe side."
So it was sprung at last. Hatch was accusing us of the one thing that we hadn't done; that the boss knew we hadn't done.
"I'm afraid you'll have to try again, Mr. Hatch," he said, with a sour little smile. Then he added: "Anybody can make charges, you know."
Hatch jumped to his feet and he was almost foaming at the mouth.
"Right there is where we've got you!" he shouted. "You were too cautious to put one of your own men in the field, so you sent outside for your briber. He was fly, too; he never came near you nor any of your officials – to start curious talk. But he was a stranger, and he had to have help in finding the right men to buy. Dedmon, here, was out of a job – thanks to you and your meddling – and the steering stunt offered good pay. Do you want any more?"
The boss shook his head.
"It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I don't know in the least what you are talking about, and you'll pardon me, I hope, if I say that it doesn't greatly interest me."
"By heavens – I'll make it interest you! The easy-mark candidates were found and bought and paid for – and maybe they'll stay bought, and maybe they won't. But that isn't the point. For a little more money – my money, this time – each of these men has made an affidavit to the fact that railroad money was offered him. They don't say whether or not they accepted it, mind you, and that doesn't cut any figure. They have sworn that the money was tendered. That lets them out and lets you in. You don't believe it? I'll show you," and Hatch whipped a list of names from his pocket and slapped it upon the boss's desk. "Go to those men and ask them; if you want to carry it that far. They'll tell you."
I could see that the boss barely glanced at the list. The glib story of the bribery was like the bite of a slipping crane-hitch – slow to take hold. So far as we were concerned, of course, the charge fell flat; and upon any other hypothesis it was blankly incredible, unbelievable, absurd.
"The affidavits themselves would be much more convincing," I heard the boss say, "though even then I should wish to have reasonable proof that they were genuine."
Hatch was sitting down again and his grin showed his teeth unpleasantly.
"Do you think for a minute that I'd bring the papers here and trust them in your hands?" he rapped out insultingly. "Not much! But we've got them all right, as you'll find out if you balk and force us to use them."
At this point I could see that something in the persistent assurance of the man was getting under the boss's skin and giving him a cold chill. What if it were not the colossal bluff it had looked like in the beginning? What if… Like a blaze of lightning out of a clear sky a possible explanation hit me under the fifth rib, and I guess it hit the boss at about the same instant. What if President Dunton and the New York stock-jobbers, believing as they did that nothing but legislative favor would give them their trading capital in the depressed stock, had cut in and done this thing without consulting us?
The boss stirred uneasily in his chair and picked up the paper-knife – a little unconscious trick of his when he wanted time to gather himself.
"Perhaps you would be willing to give me the name of this briber, Mr. Hatch?" he said, after a little pause.
"As if you didn't know it!" was the scoffing retort. "You drive us to the newspapers and everybody'll know it."
"But I don't know it," the boss insisted patiently. Then he seemed to take a sort of fresh grip on himself, for he added: "And I don't believe you do, either, Mr. Hatch. You are a pretty good bluffer, but – "
Hatch broke in with a short laugh.
"There were two of them; one who was hired to do the talking while the real wire-puller stood aside and held the coin bag. We'll skip the hired man." Then he turned to the ex-sheriff: "Write out the name of the bag-holder for him, Dedmon," he commanded, tearing a leaf from his pocket notebook and thrusting it, with a stubby pencil, into Dedmon's hands.
The man from Arrowhead County bent over his knee and wrote a name on the slip of paper, laying the slip on the drawn-out slide of the boss's desk when he had finished the slow penciling. The effect of the thing was all that any plotter could have desired. I saw the boss's face go gray, saw him stare at the slip and heard him say, half to himself, "Howard Collingwood!"
Hatch followed up his advantage promptly. He was afoot and struggling into his overcoat when he said:
"You've got what you were after, Norcross, and it has got your goat. We've known all along that you were only bluffing and sparring to gain time. We've nailed you to the cross. You let this deal with Marshall and his people stand as it's made, or we'll show you up for what you are. That's the plain English of it."
"You mean that you will go to the newspapers with this?" said the boss, and it was no wonder that his voice was a bit husky.
"Just that. We'll give you plenty of time to think it over. The joint deal with C. S. & W. goes into effect to-morrow, and it's up to you to sit tight in the boat and let us alone. If you don't – if you butt in with the ground-leases, or in any other way – the story will go to the newspapers and every sucker on the line of the P. S. L. will know how you've been pulling the wool over his eyes with all this guff about 'justice first,' and 'the public be pleased.' You're no fool, Norcross. You know they won't lay it to Dunton and the New Yorkers. You've taken pains to advertise it far and wide that you are running this railroad on your own responsibility, and the people are going to take you at your word."
Dedmon, and the lawyer – who hadn't spoken a single word in all the talk – were edging toward the door. I heard just the faintest possible little noise in the ante-room, betokening Tarbell's withdrawal. The boss didn't make any answer to Hatch's wind-up except to say, "Is that all?"
The other two were out, now, and Hatch turned to stick his ugly jaw out at the boss, and to say, just as if I hadn't been there to look on and hear him:
"No, by Jupiter – it isn't all! In the past six months you've made Gus Henckel and me lose a cold half-million, Norcross. For a less provocation than that, many a man in this neck of woods has been sent back east in the baggage-car, wearing a wooden overcoat. You climb down, and do it while you can stay alive!"
For some little time after the three men went away the boss sat staring at the slip of paper on the desk slide. At the long last he got up, sort of tired-like, I thought, and said to me: "Jimmie, you go down and see if you can find a taxi, and we'll drive out to Major Kendrick's. I promised him I'd go out to the house, you remember."
XXV
Flagged Down
When our taxi stopped at the major's gate, somebody was coming out just as we were getting ready to go in. The light from the street arc was broken a good bit by the sidewalk trees, and the man had the visor of his big flat golf cap pulled down well over his eyes, but I knew him just the same. It was Collingwood!
This looked like more trouble. What was the president's nephew doing here? I wondered about that, and also, if the boss had recognized Collingwood. If he had, he made no sign, and a moment later I had punched the bell-push and Maisie Ann was opening the door for us.
"Both of you? oh, how nice!" she said, with a smile for the boss and a queer little grimace for me. "Come in. This is our evening for callers. Cousin Basil is out, but he'll be back pretty soon, and he left word for you to wait if you got here before he did."
That message was for the boss, and I lagged behind in the dimly lighted hall while she was showing him into the back parlor. I heard her wheel up a chair for him before the fire, and go on chattering to him about nothing, and by that I knew that there wasn't anybody else in the parlor and that she was just filling in the time until something else should happen.
It wasn't long until the something happened. I had dropped down on the hall settee, in the end of it next to the coat-rack, and when Mrs. Sheila came down-stairs and went through the hall, she didn't see me. A second later I heard the boss jump up and say, "At last! It seems as if you had been gone a year rather than a fortnight," and then Maisie Ann came dodging out and plunked herself down on the settee beside me.
You needn't tell me that we had no right to sit there listening; I know it well enough. On the other hand, I was just shirky enough to shift the responsibility to Maisie Ann. She didn't make any move to duck, so I didn't.
"You came out to see Cousin Basil?" Mrs. Sheila was saying to the boss. And then: "He had a telephone call from the Bullard, and he asked me to tell you to wait." After that, I guess she sat down to help him wait, for pretty soon we heard her say: "Cousin Basil has told me a little about the new trouble: have you been having another bad quarter of an hour?"
"The worst of the lot," the boss said gravely, and from that he went on to tell her about the Hatch visit and what had come of it; how the grafters had a new claw hold on him, now, made possible by an unwarranted piece of meddling on the part of the New York people in the political game.
It was while he was talking about this that Maisie Ann grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me bodily into the darkened front parlor, the door to which was just on the other side of the coat rack. I thought she had come to her right senses, at last, and was making the shift to break off the eavesdropping. That being the case, I was simply horrified when I found that she was merely fixing it so that we could both see and hear. The sliding doors between the two parlors were cracked open about an inch, and before I realized what she was doing she had pulled me down on the floor beside her, right in front of that crack.
"If you move or make a noise, I'll scream and they'll come in here and find us both!" she hissed in my ear; and because I didn't know what else to do with such a kiddish little termagent, I sat still. It was dastardly, I know; but what was I to do?
The first thing we saw was that the two in the other room were sitting at opposite sides of the fire. Mrs. Sheila was awfully pretty; prettier than I had ever seen her, because she had a lot more color in her face, and her eyes had that warm glow in them that even the grayest eyes can get when there is a human soul behind them, and the soul has got itself stirred up about something.
When the boss finished telling her about the Hatch talk, she said: "You mean that Mr. Dunton and his associates sent somebody out here to influence the election?"
The boss looked up sort of quick.
"Yes; that is it, precisely. But how did you know?"
"You made the inference perfectly plain," she countered. "I have a reasoning mind, Graham; haven't you discovered it before this?"
The boss nodded soberly. "I have discovered a good many things about you during the past six months: one of them is that there was never another woman like you since the world began."
Knowing, as I did, that she had a husband alive and kicking around somewhere, it seemed as if I just couldn't stay there and listen to what a break of that kind on the boss's part was likely to lead up to. But Maisie Ann gripped my wrist until she hurt.
"You must listen!" she whispered fiercely. "You're taking care of him, and you've got to know!"
As on many other earlier occasions, Mrs. Sheila slid away from the sentimental side of things just as easy as turning your hand over.
"You are too big a man to let an added difficulty defeat you now," she remarked calmly, going back to the business field. "You are really making a miraculous success. I have just spent two weeks in the capital, as you know, and everybody is talking about you. They say you are in a fair way to solve the big problem – the problem of bringing the railroads and the people together in a peaceable and profitable partnership – which is as it should be."
"It can be done; and I could do it right here on the Pioneer Short Line if I didn't have to fight so many different kinds of devils at the same time," said the boss, scowling down at the fire in the grate. And then with a quick jerk of his head to face her: "You sent the major a wire from the capital last night, telling him to persuade me not to go to Strathcona. Why did you do it? And how did you know I was thinking of going?"
For the first time in the whole six months I saw Mrs. Sheila get a little flustered, though she didn't show it much, only in a little more color in her cheeks.
"Some day, perhaps, I may tell you, but I can't now," she said sort of hurriedly. And then: "You mustn't ask me."
"But you did send the wire?"
"Yes."
"And you also sent another to Upton Van Britt?"
"I did."
The boss smiled. "That second message was an after-thought. You were afraid I'd be stubborn and go, anyway. That was some more of your marvelous inner reasoning. Tell me, Sheila, did you know that there was going to be a broken rail-joint set to kill me on that trip?"
That got her in spite of her heavenly calm and I could see her press her pretty lips together hard.
"Was that what they did?" she asked, a bit trembly.
He nodded. "Van Britt was on the pilot engine ahead of my car, and he found it. There was no harm done. It was bad enough, God knows, to set a trap that would have killed everybody on my train; but this other thing that has been pulled off to-night is even worse. Mr. Dunton and his unprincipled followers have set a thing on foot here which is due to grind us all to powder. Past that, they have contrived to handcuff me so that I can't make a move without pulling down consequences of a personal nature upon President Dunton, himself."
"Now my 'marvelous inner reasoning' has gone quite blind," she said, with a queer little smile. "You'll have to explain."
"It's simple enough," said the boss shortly. "If Mr. Dunton had sent only hired emissaries out here to bribe the members of the Legislature – but he didn't; he included a member of his own family."
I was looking straight at Mrs. Sheila as he spoke, and I saw a sudden frightened shock jump into the slate-gray eyes. Just for a second. Before you could count one, it was gone and she was saying quietly:
"A member of his own family? That is very singular, isn't it?"
"It is, and it isn't. The man who was sent with the bribe money has every qualification for the job, I should say, save one – discretion. And I'm not sure that he may not be discreet enough, when he isn't drunk."
Again I saw the curious look in her eyes, and this time it was almost like the shrinking from a blow.
"Was there – was this thing that was done actually criminal?" she asked, just breathing it at him.
"It was, indeed. The election laws of this State have teeth. It is a penitentiary offense to bribe either the electorate or the law-makers."
There was silence for a little time, and she was no longer looking at him; she was staring into the heart of the glowing coals in the grate basket. By and by she said: "You haven't told me this man's name – the one who did the bribing; may I know it?"
I knew just what the boss was going to do, and he did it; took the slip of paper that Dedmon had written on from his pocket and passed it across to her. If there was another shock for her none of us could see it. She had her face turned away when she looked at the name on the paper. Pretty soon she said, sort of drearily:
"Once you told me that the true test of any human being came when he was asked to eliminate the personal factor; to efface himself completely in order that his cause might prosper. Do you still believe that?"
"Of course. It's all in the day's work. Any cause worth while is vastly bigger than any man who is trying to advance it."
"Than any man, yes; but for a woman, Graham; wouldn't you allow something for the woman?"
"I thought we had agreed long ago that there is no double standard, either in morals or ethics – one thing for the man and another for the woman. That is your own attitude, isn't it?"
She didn't say whether it was or not. She was holding the bit of paper he had given her so that the light from the fire fell upon it when she said: "I suppose your duty is quite clear. In the slang of the street, you must 'beat Mr. Hatch to it.' You must be the first to denounce this bribery, clearing yourself and letting the axe fall where it will. You owe that much to yourself, to the men who have fought shoulder to shoulder with you, and to that wider circle of the public which is beginning to believe that you are honest and sincere, don't you?"
The boss was shaking his head a bit doubtfully.
"It isn't quite so simple as that," he objected. "I don't know that I'd have any compunctions about sending Collingwood to the dump. If the half of what they say of him is true, he is a spineless degenerate and hardly worth saving. But to do as you suggest would be open rebellion, you know; while Dunton remains president, I am his subordinate, and if I should expose him and his nephew, the situation here would become simply impossible."
"Well?" she prompted.
"Such a move would rightly and properly bring a wire demand for my resignation, of a nature that couldn't be ignored – only it wouldn't, because I should anticipate it by resigning first. That is a small matter, introducing the personal element which we have agreed should be eliminated. But the results to others; to the men of my staff and the rank and file, and to the public, which, as you say, is just beginning to realize some of the benefits of a real partnership with its principal railroad; these things can't be so easily ignored."
"You have thought of some other expedient?"
"No; I haven't got that far yet. But I am determined that Hatch shall not be allowed to work his graft a second time upon the people who are trusting me. I believe in the new policy we are trying out. I'd fling my own fortune into the gap if I had one, and, more than that, I'd pull in every friend I have in the world if by so doing I could stand the Pioneer Short Line upon a solid foundation of honest ownership. That is all that is needed in the present crisis – absolutely all."
He was on his feet now and tramping back and forth on the hearth rug. At one of his back-turnings I saw Mrs. Sheila reach out quickly and lay the bit of paper with its accusing scrawl on the glowing coals. Then she said, quite calm again:
"In time to come you will accomplish even that, Graham – this change of ownership that we have talked of and dreamed about. It is the true solution of the problem; not Government ownership, but ownership by the people who have the most at stake – the public and the workers. You are a strong man, and you will bring it about. But this other man – who is not strong; the man whose name was written upon the bit of paper I have just thrown into the fire…"
He wheeled quickly, and what he said made me feel as if a cold wind were blowing up the back of my neck, because I hadn't dreamed that he would remember Collingwood well enough to recognize him in that passing moment on the sidewalk.
