"You want to make me say some melodramatic thing about having the shackles forged and snapping them upon the gubernatorial wrists, don't you? It will be prosaic enough from this on. I fancy we shall have no difficulty now in convincing his Excellency of the justice of our proceedings to quash Judge MacFarlane and his receiver."

"But how will you go about it? Surely you can not go personally and threaten the governor of the State!" this from Miss Brentwood.

"Can't I?" said Kent. "Having the score written out and safely committed to memory, that will be quite the easiest number on the programme, I a.s.sure you."

But Loring had something to say about the risk.

"Thus far you have not considered your personal safety--haven't had to, perhaps. But you are coming to that now. You are dealing with a desperate man, David; with a gang of them, in fact."

"That is so," said Ormsby. "And, as chairman of the executive committee, I shall have to take steps. We can't afford to bury you just yet, Kent."

"I think you needn't select the pall-bearers yet a while," laughed the undaunted one; and then Miss Van Brock gave the signal and the "executive committee" adjourned to the drawing-room. Here the talk, already so deeply channeled in the groove political, ran easily to forecastings and predictions for another electoral year; and when Penelope began to yawn behind her fan, Ormsby took pity on her and the party broke up.

It was at the moment of leave-taking that Elinor sought and found her chance to extract a promise from David Kent.

"I must have a word with you before you do what you say you are going to do," she whispered hurriedly. "Will you come to see me?"

"Certainly, if you wish it. But you mustn't let Loring's nervousness infect you. There is no danger."

"There is a danger," she insisted, "a much greater danger than the one Mr.

Loring fears. Come as soon as you can, won't you?"

It was a new thing for her to plead with him, and he promised in an access of tumultuous hope reawakened by her changed att.i.tude. But afterward, when he was walking down-town with Loring, the episode troubled him a little; would have troubled him more if he had not been so deeply interested in Loring's story of the campaign in the East.

Taking it all in all, the ex-manager's report was encouraging. The New Englanders were by no means disposed to lie down in the harness, and since the Western Pacific proper was an interstate line, the Advisory Board had taken its grievance to Washington. Many of the small stockholders were standing firm, though there had been panicky defections in spite of all that could be done. Loring had no direct evidence to sustain the stock deal theory; but it was morally certain that the Plantagould brokers were picking up Western Pacific by littles wherever they could find it.

"I am inclined to believe we haven't much time to lose," was Kent's comment. "Things will focus here long before Washington can get action.

The other lines are bringing a tremendous pressure to bear on Guilford, whose cut rates are demoralizing business frightfully. The fict.i.tious boom in Trans-Western traffic is about worked out; and for political reasons Bucks can't afford to have the road in the hands of his henchmen when the collapse comes. The major is bolstering things from week to week now until the Plantagould people get what they are after--a controlling majority of the stock--and then Judge MacFarlane will come back."

They were within two squares of the Clarendon, and the cross-street was deserted save for a drunken cow-boy in shaps and sombrero staggering aimlessly around the corner.

"That's curious," Loring remarked. "Don't you know, I saw that same fellow, or his double, lurching across the avenue as we came out of Alameda Square, and I wondered what he was doing out in that region."

"It was his double, I guess," said Kent. "This one is many pegs too drunk to have covered the distance as fast as we have been walking."

But drunk or sober, the cow-boy turned up again most unexpectedly; this time at the entrance of the alley half-way down the block. In pa.s.sing he stumbled heavily against Kent; there was a thick-tongued oath, and Loring struck out smartly with his walking-stick. By consequence the man's pistol went off harmlessly in the air. The shot brought a policeman lumbering heavily up from the street beyond, and the skirling of relief whistles shrilled on the night. But the man with a pistol had twisted out of Kent's grasp and was gone in a flash.

"By Jove!" said Loring, breathing hard; "he wasn't as drunk as he seemed to be!"

Kent drew down his cuffs and shook himself straight in his coat.

"No; he wasn't drunk at all; I guess he was the man you saw when we came out of the square." Then, as the policeman came up puffing: "Let me do the talking; the whisky theory will be good enough for the newspapers."

XIX

DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS

"_Oof_! I feel as if I had been dipped in a warm bath of conspiracy and hung up to dry in the cold storage of nihilism! If you take me to any more meetings of your committee of safety, I shall be like the man without music in his soul--'fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.'"

Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party. Elinor had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.

"I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab," said the club-man in self-defense. "And you mustn't treat it lightly, either. Ten prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David."

"We are not very likely to babble," retorted Penelope. "We are not so rich in intimates in this aboriginal desert." But Elinor spoke to the penal clause in his warning.

"Then Mr. Kent's danger is more real than he admitted?" she said.

"It's real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another man in his place. He is a curious combination, is David: keen and sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it comes to the in-fighting he hasn't sense enough to pound sand, as his New Hampshire neighbors would say."

"I like that side of him best," Penelope averred. "Deliver me from a man of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult. Mr. Loring tells a story of a transplanted Vermonter in South America. A hot-headed Peruvian called him a liar, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw! you can't prove it.'"

"What a merciless generalizer you are!" said Ormsby, laughing. "The man who marries you will have his work cut out for him if he proposes to fill the requirements."

"Won't he?" said Penelope. "I can fancy him sitting up nights to figure it all out."

They had reached the Tejon Avenue apartment house, and to Elinor's "Won't you come in?" Ormsby said: "It's pretty late, but I'll smoke a cigar on the porch, if you'll let me."

Penelope took the hammock, but she kept it only during the first inch of Ormsby's cigar. After her sister had gone in, Elinor went back to the lapsed topic.

"I am rather concerned about Mr. Kent. You described him exactly; and--well, he is past the planning part and into the fighting part. Do you think he will take ordinary precautions?"

"I hope so, I'm sure," rejoined the amateur chairman. "As his business manager I am responsible for him, after a fashion. I was glad to see Loring to-night--glad he has come back. Kent defers to him more than he does to any one else; and Loring is a solid, sober-minded sort."

"Yes," she agreed; "I was glad, too."

After that the talk languished, and the silence was broken only by the distant droning of an electric car, the fizz and click of the arc light over the roadway, and the occasional _dap_ of one the great beetles darting hither and thither in the glare.

Ormsby was wondering if the time was come for the successful exploiting of an idea which had been growing on him steadily for weeks, not to say months.

It was becoming more and more evident to him that he was not advancing in the sentimental siege beyond the first parallel thrown up so skilfully on the last night of the westward journey. It was not that Elinor was lacking in loyalty or in acquiescence; she scrupulously gave him both as an accepted suitor. But though he could not put his finger upon the precise thing said or done which marked the loosening of his hold, he knew he was receding rather than advancing.

Now to a man of expedients the interposition of an obstacle suggests only ways and means for overcoming it. Ormsby had certain clear-cut convictions touching the subjugation of women, and as his stout heart gave him resolution he lived up to them. When he spoke again it was of the matter which concerned him most deeply; and his plea was a gentle repet.i.tion of many others in the same strain.

"Elinor, I have waited patiently for a long time, and I'll go on doing it, if that is what will come the nearest to pleasing you. But it would be a prodigious comfort if I might be counting the days or the weeks. Are you still finding it impossible to set the limit?"

She nodded slowly, and he took the next step like a man feeling his way in the dark.

"That is as large an answer as you have ever given me, I think. Is there any speakable reason?"

"You know the reason," she said, looking away from him.

"I am not sure that I do. Is it because the moneyG.o.ds have been unpropitious--because these robber barons have looted your railroad?"

"No; that is only part of it--the smallest part."