.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 45866
   :PG.Title: The Spider's Web
   :PG.Released: 2014-06-02
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Reginald Wright Kauffman
   :MARCREL.ill: Jean Paleologue
   :DC.Title: The Spider's Web
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1913
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

================
THE SPIDER'S WEB
================

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   .. _`BETTY STOOD AT THE WINDOW IN THE FULL LIGHT OF THE STREET-LAMP`:

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      :alt: BETTY STOOD AT THE WINDOW IN THE FULL LIGHT OF THE STREET-LAMP

      BETTY STOOD AT THE WINDOW IN THE FULL LIGHT OF THE STREET-LAMP

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      THE SPIDER'S WEB

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      BY

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      REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN

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      Author of "The House of Bondage," etc., etc.

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      Illustrated by
      JEAN PALEOLOGUE

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      NEW YORK
      MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
      1913

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      COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
      *All Rights Reserved*
      Published October, 1913

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      To
      EVERETT HARRÉ
      *Gratefully*

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..

   |  That's the shout, the shout we shall utter
   |    When, with rifles and spades,
   |  We stand, with the old Red Flag aflutter
   |    On the barricades!
   |                      —FRANCIS ADAMS.

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..

   |  Thou orb of many orbs!
   |  Thou seething principle!  Thou well-kept, latent germ!
   |      Thou center!
   |  Around the idea of thee the strange sad war revolving,
   |  With all its angry and vehement play of causes,
   |  (With yet unknown results to come, for thrice a thousand years)....
   |                      —WHITMAN.

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..

   |  While three men hold together,
   |    The kingdoms are less by three.
   |                      —SWINBURNE.

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   LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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"Betty," he said, "do you understand what your
father is asking me to do?" . . . (Outside cover)
(missing from book)

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`Betty stood at the window in the full light of the
street-lamp`_ . . . . . . . . . *Frontispiece*

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`He found it necessary to be emphatic`_

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`The mob was using the coal from the dismantled wagon`_

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   EXPLANATION

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In order to warn off trespassers, I have begun my
novel with four chapters that an expert
bookmaker—indeed, my own book-maker—has
pronounced dull: I knew that only those to whom the
book belonged would persevere.  By the same token,
being aware that the story which is prefaced by an
apology is ended with suspicion, I preface this story
with an apology: I want to apologize to my friends
for using them and to my enemies for not giving them
what they have expected; I want to create in the
minds of the former the suspicion that I am darker
than I have been painted, and in the minds of the
latter the suspicion that I am not a whited sepulcher
but a blackened altar.

In 1909 I projected, vaguely it is true, a cycle
of four novels, each to be independent of the others
in plot and character, but all carrying forward a
definite view of life.  As, however, the announcement of
a cycle is the surest means of alienating readers, not
to mention publishers, I held my tongue about the
general plan and concerned myself, in public, only
with its separate parts.  These were "The House of
Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," "Running
Sands" and "The Spider's Web."

Privately, the first question demanding answer was
that of method.  In what I had to say I believed
burningly, as I still believe deeply, and the great
thing with me was not to say it in the manner that
most people would call Art, but to say it in the
manner that would convert as many readers as possible
to my way of thinking.  I did not want to produce
the effect of a work of Art; I wanted to produce
conviction of truth.  On the one hand, I must avoid
even the appearance of a personal interest in my
characters, because that would divert my readers
into the charge of sentimentality; and on the other,
I must not hesitate to marshal my events in their
largest force, even though the reviewers called this
melodrama.

Here is a choice that is sure to come sooner or
later to every writer of fiction: the choice between
what he has considered Art for Art's sake and what
he considers art for Man's sake.  He has kept in
mind the day when his books will be judged solely by
their own merits, when the causes with which he
sympathizes have been defeated and forgotten or
established and beyond the need of sympathy; when new
evils demand new remedies and old wounds are
healed.  He knows, as few of his contemporary readers
can know, that then he will be heavily handicapped
by all that is immediate or local in what he writes;
that by nothing save adherence to the eternal
standards of Art can he endure.  He may be certain, in his
own mind, that any true art is the expression, in the
manner best calculated to secure a desired effect, of
the ideas essential to the effect, but he will be equally
sure that the world will not so consider.  If he sets
any propaganda above Art, the future will forget his
work, the present meet it with prejudice, probably
with opposition; and against all this he has to set
only his own faith in the righteousness of the thing
he has to say.

I made my choice and began my cycle with that
one of my four novels which I knew would receive
the readiest hearing.  In "The House of Bondage"
I wanted to put before my readers the theory that
the superimposing of one human being's will, or the
will of any group of human beings, upon any other's
is the Great Crime.  For the purposes of illustration,
I chose for attack the chief present means of such
imposition or compulsion, the pressure of our
economic system, and depicted its effects in forcing
women into prostitution.  The result was amazing:
the book sold and, they tell me, is still selling in my
own and several other countries and tongues; it either
originated or promoted a series of sociological
crusades and legislative investigations concerning
themselves with the symptoms and neglecting the disease,
and by no persons was it so heartily welcomed as by
those who are themselves the instruments of
compulsion.  I began to think that the instruments were
becoming conscious and that I might not be so
unpopular after all.

I was never more mistaken.  In "The Sentence of
Silence" I proceeded to show other effects of the
same evil compulsion: the effects of our failure to
instruct our children in sex-hygiene; of imposing upon
our heirs the moral code that our economic system has
imposed upon us, and of imposing upon our daughters
an abstinence from which we absolve our sons.
In its circulation, this book left its publishers nothing
to complain of; but its reception was of a sort vastly
different from that of its predecessor.  Parents that
were loath to see other people's daughters forced into
prostitution were shocked at a proposal to educate
their own sons against the practice of seduction;
husbands that lived in secret polygamy were aghast at
the idea of instructing their wives in any code save
that which they preached, but did not follow; and
men that took any woman's body they could get were
horrified at the notion of any woman sharing their
liberty.

The remarkable book-reviewer of the generally
sane Philadelphia "Inquirer" upbraided me
because, after I had dragged my central character,
Dan Barnes, through the sewers of debauchery and
venereal disease, I did not "save" him by marrying
him to a "pure" woman!

Came the third novel, "Running Sands," and came
a louder protest.  I had here tried to take a step
further my argument against compulsion and to show
that, if I had been right before, then compulsion by
matrimony—the marriage of the old to the young
and the knowing to the ignorant, rape within
wedlock and forcing of wives to become mothers against
their will—was wrong.  Here again the people read
and the instruments of compulsion condemned me.
Those persons who, without a wry face among them,
swallow the funny but futile jokes of another type of
fiction were so whole-hearted in their curses of my
book that I was inclined to believe their present
bitterness enhanced by their recollection of how they had
once praised me.

Now I have written "The Spider's Web," the last
of my four, and I have read that it is expected to be
to its predecessors what Landor said the fourth
George was to his.  For a good pair of eyes at the
conventional point of view, it is all this and more;
but then there are no good eyes at the conventional
point of view, and so I fear that, without help, the
condemners of "The Sentence of Silence" and
"Running Sands" may find this novel innocent: there
is only one "bad" woman among its speaking-roles,
and she appears but three brief times.  In order that
my condemners may not miss what they want to find
in me, I shall tell them in a simpler form than the
dramatic what I have done.

I have made Luke Huber a man that comes to see
the sin of compulsion exerting itself against humanity
in all the powers that conduct modern society; in the
ownership of men and things; in our entire system of
production and distribution, and in the creatures and
ministers of that system: Government, Politics, Law,
and what passes by the name of Religion.

Such a mind as Huber's comes to Dora Marsden's
conclusion: "Life is no two days the same: the same
measure never fits twice exactly; hence the futility of
state-making, law-making, moral-making, when all
that is of importance is life-augmenting, and that is
the individual's affair."  He sees that only Labor
creates wealth, and that nothing should be robbed of
a fraction of what it creates.  He sees that actually
government is "not the president, congress and the
courts, not any body or power created by the
Constitution, but always a combination of important
business interests,"[#] not even any individual, and that
even if it were completely constitutional it would still
be compulsion—that to "consent" to be governed is
to consent to be compelled.

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[#] Charles Edward Russell.

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He would argue of politics:

"We Americans pretend to hate kings, and so we
devise a republic; finding the rule of one man bad,
we believe we can better it by multiplying it by ninety
millions; finding an ounce has evil effects, we take a
ton.  We simply change the tyranny of one for the
tyranny of many.  Even if the will of our fifteen
million voters ruled us as they tell us it does, then
each one of the fifteen million would be giving all the
14,999,999 others the right to interfere with him
in return for his one fifteen-millionth right to take a
hand in interfering with them.  For that fraction of
power over others, he would be giving away all his
power over himself."

Huber would say of religion and law:

"Both are tools in the hands of compulsion.  Both
try to belittle divine humanity, the first making Man
a pygmy before God and the second making Man a
pygmy before a few men.  There can be no crime
against God, since God, or the force that created the
world, is omnipotent; no crime against law, since law
is an instrument of the great crime.  The law a
deterrent?  It isn't.  The statistics prove that, so far as
statistics can prove anything.  But you prove it
yourself.  Why do you try to refrain from conscious
wrong?  Not because you're afraid of the law in
heaven or on earth—you're not a coward.  You
simply want to do the decent thing because it *is* the
decent thing.  The desire to do the decent thing:
that's all the religion and law there is to-day among
even the people that make laws and religions for the
purpose of ruling other people by them.  The rulers
sin only because their system has dimmed their
judgment of the decent thing, and so they go on
maintaining their law and their religion.  The ruled will
want to do the decent thing just as soon as they
become responsible creatures through the abolition of
these compulsions, exactly as the rulers, though
dulled by keeping up their system, wanted to do it
as soon as they became responsible creatures by
growing above the dictates of these compulsions."

Other men, other religions.  For some faith; for
some denial.  Huber's religion was the Gospel of
Negation.

He came to this by conversion, which means the
sudden revelation by the sub-conscious self to the
conscious self of the meanings that the sub-conscious
self has long been drawing from the conscious self's
experiences.  The outward phenomena of such
conversions—"being saved," "receiving grace,"
"being regenerated," "experiencing religion"—are
perfectly familiar to all persons that have attended
evangelical churches, know the work of the Salvation
Army, or have read Harold Begbie's "Broken
Earthenware."  The psychology of the force causing them
has been elaborately, but not always scientifically,
treated in William James's stimulating volume,
"Some Varieties of Religious Experience."  The
force itself can, and often does, change the entire life
of a man from evil to good.  The men so changed
that we most hear of are changed by an affirmation of
faith, because they are men whose only spiritual
experience has been in connection with accepted religions
and because their change is generally first exhibited in
the public meeting-place of the followers of some such
religion; but there are other men similarly changed by
a denial of faith, because they have had spiritual
experiences distinct from any accepted religion, and of
them we hear little, because their change is generally
wrought in the solitude in which they have had those
spiritual experiences which are unconnected with
accepted religion.

Huber was a man of the latter sort.  Being of that
sort, he says the last word that follows logically from
an acceptance of "The House of Bondage."

About the manner of this last word I should,
perhaps, say something more.  I have not, I confess with
shame, read M. Fabre's book on the habits of the
spider, but I have read other books and studied the
spider in my own garden; and the more I learned of
web and spider the more I realize how Huber would
see their simulacra in our civilization and learn at
last that there the web outlived many spiders.  That
is how I got my title, and that is why I have tried to
construct my chapters with a certain rough
resemblance to the female diadem-spider's web.  At the
end, both the web and Huber win: the former because
it catches its fly and goes on catching other and
larger flies; the latter because his soul has found itself.

The method of procuring data requires a fuller
explanation.  The writer who endeavors to present
actual conditions in fictional form has constantly to
choose between truth and facts, and if his readers
accept his facts, they are inclined to doubt his
imagination.  In all of these four books, I have been careful
to present only types, but I have tried to endow each
type with character, and each character has assumed
a living personality in my own mind.  I have used no
person and no event that was isolated; but, having
individualized my types and chosen my typical events, I
have felt free to employ the latter in whatever way
seemed to me best fitted to enforce my argument,
and at liberty to imagine what the former would
think and do under the stress of the latter.  I have
heard of a dozen women in real life designated as the
originals of Mary Denbigh, three wives selected as
Muriel Stainton, and one man—myself—named as
Dan Barnes.  The discoverers of these prototypes
only flattered my powers of detection and portraiture
at the expense of my imagination and good taste.

I intended to present, and I have presented,
simply certain types produced by our civilization and
working in the media of our economic system.  I
spent considerable time in New York last winter to
procure certain data; I found the data, selected what
was typical as I saw it, and made my story.  "The
Spider's Web," whether well done or ill, has been
done by my own imagination.

Help I have had and eagerly sought.  An historian
always cites his authorities and acknowledges his
assistants; I could never see why a novelist should be
less honest or less courteous, since every realist must
delegate some of his research-work, and even the
writer of that fiction farthest from life must take
something from the fancy of his acquaintances.  I
know, and I shall not soon forget, how much "The
House of Bondage" owes to the encouragement
given my work by its publishers.  During the latter
part of the actual writing of "The Spider's Web,"
it was impossible for either my wife or me to be in
New York, and I taxed the generous patience of many
a friend by inquiries.  I exacted tribute from Max
Eastman's editorials in "The Masses," Walter
Lippmann's papers in "The Forum," and C. P. Connolly's
in "Everybody's Magazine" as expressing
three current phases of American opinion; I even
seized a picture from Mary Macdonald Brown's
accounts of New York and secured from an editorial in
"The Nation" my reference to the past of the Astor
House.  Molière took his own where he found it; I
have taken other men's at my need.  To all of these
my score is long; to those few and fine newspaper and
magazine critics and reviewers who have seen my
purpose and helped it—who, when they have differed
or blamed, blamed or differed honestly—to them,
from whom I have learned so much, my obligation is
still greater.

No opinions that are worth while are unalterable;
only the insincere have fixed convictions: my cycle of
four books expresses an attitude toward life that I
may some day very well change.  This series
completed, I am left with my conscience free and my
brain at liberty to turn toward work that I may try
to design only by the more lasting standards of Art,
but no change of belief or work will make me regret
having expressed what I believed.  I am thoroughly
aware of how, if they understood it, the condemners
of "The Sentence of Silence" and "Running Sands"
would condemn this book.  I am equally aware of
how many persons that are my comrades, friends, and
well-wishers will alter their relations toward me when
they have read "The Spider's Web"; but, though
I shall be sorry to lose these, I shall not be sorry for
the reason of their loss.  Horace Traubel, who puts
most things well, has put this well:

   |  "I have tried to stay in the house of comfort,
   |         to sleep in my bed of ease,
   |  But something not outside of me, something inside of me says:
   |    This will not do....
   |  I have tried the easy way: it was hard:
   |  Now I will try the hard way: I guess it will be easier."

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REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.

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POSCHIAVO, SWITZERLAND,
8th September, 1913.





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   CHARACTERS

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::

   A MAN,

   the head of a group of men virtually controlling industrial,
   financial, and political America.

   GEORGE J. HALLETT, one of his associates.
   L. BERGEN RIVINGTON, another.



   *Politicians*.

   THE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
   THE MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY.

   HON. G. W. HUBER,                    U. S. Congressman, from
                                        Doncaster County, Pennsylvania,
   HON. JESSE KINZER,                   his successor.
   SENATOR SCUDDER,                     the MAN'S lieutenant in the
                                        Albany legislature,
   HON. JARED SPARKS,                   his lieutenant in the Connecticut
                                        legislature.
   BRINLEY,                             commander of his lobby at
                                        Washington.
   KILGOUR,                             City Chamberlain of New York.
   TIM HENEY,                           Leader of Tammany Hall.
   SEELEY,                              an anti-Tammany Democratic
                                        leader.
   ELLISON,                             another.
   THE POLICE-COMMISSIONER OF NEW YORK CITY.
   GEORGE KAINDIAC,                     a U. S. Post-Office Inspector.
   VENABLE,   )                         leaders of the Municipal
   NELSON,    )                         Reform League.
   YEATES,    )
   JARVIE,                              a Municipal Reform League
                                        "worker."



   *Lawyers*.

   BROUWER LEIGHTON,                    District-Attorney of New
                                        York.  A Republican.
   LARRY O'MARA,                        a member of his staff,
   UHLER,                               another member of Leighton's
                                        staff.

   EX-JUDGE MARCUS F. STEIN,            of the firm of Stein, Falconridge,
                                        Falconridge & Perry,
                                        corporation-lawyers.
   IRWIN,                               a member of Stein's staff.
   ANSON QUIRK,                         an underworld lawyer.
   LUKE HUBER,                          a young lawyer.



   *Businessmen*.

   ROBERT M. DOHAN,                     president of the M. & N. R. R.
   HENRY G. McKAY,                      his successor.
   B. FRANK OSSERMAN,                   president of the East County
                                        National Bank.
   WALLACE K. FORBES,                   head of the firm of R. H.
                                        Forbes & Son, manufacturers
                                        of ready-made clothing,
   ALEXANDER TITUS,                     financial-inquiry agent.
   JAMES T. ROLLINS,                    the MAN'S secretary.
   ATWOOD,                              his chief broker.
   SIMPSON,                             his almoner.
   CONOVER,                             one of his confidential clerks.
   HERBERT CROY,                        manager of the Ruysdael estate.
   WHITAKER,                            superintendent of the Forbes
                                        factory.
   THE DESK-CLERK,                      in the Arapahoe Apartment house.
   CHARLEY,                             a clerk in the M. R. L. offices,
   REV. PINKNEY NICHOLSON,              rector of Church of St. Athanasius.



   *Miscellaneous Persons*.

   THE MAN'S NIECE.
   CORNELIUS RUYSDAEL,                  a wealthy New Yorker of
                                        good family.
   MRS. RUYSDAEL,                       his wife.
   TOMMY HALLETT,                       son of George J.
   JOHN JAY PORCELLIS,                  a young man of leisure.
   BETTY FORBES,                        daughter of Wallace K. Forbes.
   MRS. HUBER,                          mother of Luke and wife of
                                        G. W. Huber.
   JANE HUBER,                          her daughter.
   JAMES,                               the Forbes chauffeur.
   MISS WESTON,                         a telephone operator.
   BREIL,                               a strike-breaker.
   AN I.W.W. ORGANIZER.



   *Policeman*.

   HUGH DONOVAN,                        a police-lieutenant
   MITCHELL,    )
   ANDERSON,    )                       patrolmen.
   GUTH,        )



   *Militiamen*.

   CAPTAIN ANTONIO FACCIOLATI,          of the New York N. G.
   TERRY,                               first-lieutenant under Facciolati.
   SCHMIDT,                             a sergeant.



   *Citizens of the Underworld*.

   A BUM.
   GACE,                                an assassin.
   A DISORDERLY WOMAN.
   A WOMAN-RIOTER.
   A DRUNKEN WOMAN.
   REDDY RAWN,                          leader of an East Side "gang."
   REDDY'S "GIRL."
   THE KID,                             one of his associates,
   CRAB ROTELLO.                        head of a rival gang.
   ZANTZINGER,                          a gunman.
   BUTCH DELLITT,                       another gunman.



   *Other Persons*.

   Women of the street, the brothel, the world.
   Clothing-factory workers.
   A mob.
   Waiters in saloons.
   Clerks and foremen in the Forbes factory.
   Stenographers and typists.
   Gamblers.
   Other gangmen.
   Other policemen.
   Various minor Republican, Democratic, Reform, and Progressive
        politicians.
   Newspaper-reporters.
   Some newspaper-editors.
   A corps of strike-breakers.
   Scabs.
   Soldiers of the New York National Guard.

.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER I`:

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   THE SPIDER'S WEB

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.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER I

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  Early that morning, Luke Huber stood before
the Pennsylvania Railroad Station at Americus and
fancied himself a latter-day crusader setting out to
reconquer from the infidels the modern Holy City of
God.  He had graduated from the Harvard Law-School
in the previous June.  Now the Republican
brother-in-law of one of his classmates, having been
elected District-Attorney of corruptly Democratic
New York, offered a place on his staff to Luke as
soon as Huber should meet successfully the necessary
formalities.  This new public-prosecutor was to
"clean up" the largest city in the country, and Luke,
as his assistant, was to aid in restoring to the
metropolis the ideals of the framers of the Constitution.

A slim young man, with a smooth face too rugged
to be handsome, and gray eyes too keen to be always
dreaming, Huber stood erect, the wide collar of his
woolen overcoat turned up, for the spring lingered
that year in the valleys of Virginia, and the brim of
his Alpine hat pulled over his nose.  He disregarded
the group of boys waiting for the "up-train" that
would bring the Philadelphia morning newspapers to
his native Pennsylvania town, disregarded the grimy
station-buildings, and looked toward the river, where
the morning mists were lifting and the cold sunshine
was creeping through to light the Susquehanna hills.
He was one of those fortunate and few human
beings who are born without the original sin of
superstition, but what he saw seemed to him almost a
favorable omen.  He had come down early, because
he disliked to prolong the good-bys of his mother
and sister, and because he felt that even the walk to
the station was an important advance in the quest
which he was so eager to begin.  When he arrived
beside the railway tracks and allowed his father, the
Congressman, to see to the checking of the baggage—a
concession that Luke made to his parent's desire
for some part in the great adventure—the entire
river was hidden from view by a thick dun curtain:
one could see nothing beyond the point by the shore
where the black arms of a derrick, at the Americus
Sand Company's works, were silhouetted against that
curtain and stretched over a tremendous mound of
sand, as if they were the arms of some gigantic
skeleton pronouncing the benediction at a Black Mass.
But now, though the fog really rose, it appeared
to Luke to be torn from above, and as the sun
mounted over distant Turkey Hill and gradually
gilded the pines on the surrounding summits, it
seemed to advance up the bed of the stream, slowly
descending of its own force along the dark hillsides,
until, all at once, the river was a rushing stream of
gold.  Luke found himself thinking of the veil of the
Temple, and how it was rent in twain from the top to
the bottom.

His father, who was taller than Luke, but broad
out of all proportion to his height, came puffing back
from the baggage-room.  He held the checks for
Luke's luggage and a slip of pink paper.

"Here are your checks," he said, "and here's your
pass.  I forgot to give it to you.  It came last night."

Luke took the proffered paper.

"I thought," he began, "that the Interstate
Commerce Commission didn't——"

The Congressman interrupted with a deep chuckle.

"Oh, that's all right," he said.  "Don't let your
conscience worry you about that.  This is for a
continuous ride to a terminus of the road."

"I see," said Luke; but what he saw was that his
father, whom he loved too much to hurt uselessly,
had, out of kindness, strained a legal definition.  His
father, he reflected, was not a man to abuse privilege
in large matters, and would be only hurt by a refusal
in the present trivial affair.  Luke put the pass in the
cuff of his overcoat and silently decided to pay his
fare to the conductor.  The elder man, big as he was,
stamped his feet on the concrete pavement and
complained of the chill in the April air; the younger was
too happy to notice the cold.

"Train's five minutes late," remarked the
Congressman as, through a cautiously unbuttoned
overcoat, he drew and snapped open a heavy watch.

"Is your time correct?" asked Luke.

"Hasn't varied three seconds a week in ten years,"
his father assured him.

Neither was thinking of what was being said.  The
younger man was so full of the high work ahead of
him that he had already forgotten his mother's ill-concealed
tears at parting; the elder, granted political
favors rather because of his personal popularity and
pliant good-nature than for any ability at the game of
vote-keeping, possessed at least the chief virtue of the
politician: he was a man of few words, and the more
truly he felt the less he spoke.

The "up-train" arrived (it was the "down-train"
that Luke must take), and the Congressman was
besieged by the newsboys, who knelt about him,
striking their rolls of newspapers on the pavement the
quicker to burst the wrappers in which the journals
were closely confined.

"*Press*, Mr. Huber?"

"*North American* or *Record*?"

"*Ledger*?"

The boys bobbed up, flourishing their wares.

"Aw, I know what he wants," said an older lad,
elbowing the rest.  "Here's yer *Inquirer*, Mr. Congressman."

Luke's father smiled: he had never outgrown his
liking for homage from whatever quarter; but he
bought a paper from each boy, giving each a
five-cent piece and telling him to keep the change.

"You might as well take the lot," he said to Luke.
"You'll want something to read on the train."  He
was handing all the papers to Luke, when his eyes
were caught by a large headline on the first page
of one of them.  "Hello!" he commented, his lips
immediately pursing themselves as if to whistle.  As
Luke took its fellows, the Congressman folded this
paper with the sudden skill of the confirmed
newspaper-reader, who can handle a journal in the open
air as neatly as a trained yachtsman can reef a
top-sail before an undesirable wind.  "I see the Big
Man's been giving some more testimony to that
committee of the legislature up at Albany."

For the past few weeks, Luke had been too busy
preparing for his bar-examinations to keep track of
current events.

"Who's the Big Man?" he asked.

The elder Huber raised his thick brows.

"You know," said he, and he mentioned the name
of one of the richest men in America; not a man that
had made his wealth even through the building of a
great industry, but one that had, by "editing" money
and combinations of money much in that manner in
which a news-desk copy-reader edits the reporters'
"copy," made himself a member of the triumvirate—rumor
said made the triumvirate and made himself
its head—which had for years controlled alike the
labor and capital of the country.

"What's he been saying?" asked Luke.

"He's been answering questions about campaign
contributions."

"To the Democrats?"

"Well, no."  The Congressman was reluctant.
"It seems it was to the Republicans."

Luke colored.

"Of course," he said, "I always knew those fellows
had no real political convictions, and of course
any party is bound to have some bad lots among its
small fry, but I do wish our National Committee
would kick out of the ranks the men that take money
from such people."

The father did not like this.  Luke had been a
great deal away from him, first at boarding-school
and then at college and the law-school, so that the
two had not seen much of each other for many years;
but since the younger had come home this last time,
he had given frequent expression to sentiments of the
present sort, and the Congressman, although he
disliked argument as keenly as most Congressmen, felt
that now it was his duty to protest.

"My boy," he said, "you won't go far if you go
about talking that way.  This contribution went to
the fund that elected your District-Attorney Leighton."

"I don't believe it!"

"That's the testimony."

"I don't believe it.  This man's swearing to that
so as to hurt the party in New York."

"This man?" Luke's father repeated the phrase
interrogatively.  His usual taciturnity fell from him.
"Why do you say that?  How do you know it?
Why should he want to hurt the party?  As a matter
of fact, what do you know about 'this man,'
anyhow?  Nothing but a lot of unfounded gossip printed
in papers that want him to come over to their side.
Why shouldn't he help our party?  I do know something
about him.  I've never met him, but I know the
whole story of his career—know it intimately—and I
tell you that his is the greatest intellect in America
to-day, and he has used his intellect, and the wealth
it got him, to help—not only once, but again and
again—to help and to save—yes, save, the party and
the prosperity of the nation.  I tell you——"

He did not tell any more.  The down-train had
been rumbling over the last span of the river-bridge
when he began talking; and now it rolled before the
station.

Luke took his suitcase in one hand and extended
the other in farewell.  Unexpectedly he felt a lump
in his throat.

"Good-by," he said.

His father gripped the hand.  His habitual
inarticulateness redescended upon him.  "You've—I
know you're all right, Luke.  Don't forget to write
once a week: your mother worries."

"I won't forget."

They stood, hands clasped.

Close by, the "train-crier" was calling in a high,
nasal voice:

"Train for Mountwille, Doncaster, Downington,
Philadelphy, *and* Noo York!  First stop Mountwille!"

"And, Luke——"

"Yes, father?"

"Don't make charges when you don't know facts."

"Perhaps I have a weakness that way," Luke
smiled.

His smile conjured another.

"That's right; now you're showing the proper
spirit."  With his free hand, the elder man patted the
younger's shoulder.  "Stick to your books and stick
to Leighton.  Gratitude is the best virtue—and the
rarest."

Luke nodded.

"Now, get aboard," concluded his counselor.
"Got your pass?—and the checks?—I'll be running
over occasionally, I dare say.—And let me know if I
can do anything for you."

Luke clambered into the smoking-car.  He took a
seat on the side near the station and waved his hand
to his father as the engine began to snort.  He paid
his fare to the conductor, and, when Americus was
well behind him, he opened the window, tore the pink
pass into a dozen small pieces and let the clean April
breeze carry them away.

At Doncaster he changed to the Pullman car that
was there attached to the train; he again carefully
chose his seat, this time selecting one on the side from
which he could the better enjoy his first view of New
York.  He had always liked this view when it came to
him on his returns to Boston after his vacations; it
wakened in him the dreams of the day which should
light him into the city, there to work for its salvation
and the nation's.  His youthful dreams were still
with him, and, since the moment when the sun had
rent the Susquehanna mists, he was looking forward
to that sight of the southernmost walls of New York
towering like the ramparts of a mighty fortress above
the crowded waters of the Jersey City ferry.  Then,
indeed, with the battle yet to be fought, he would feel
as the crusaders must have felt at their first sight of
Jerusalem.

But Luke's train was late, and by the time that it
reached the point from which the city should have
been visible, the mists had again descended.  They
had deepened.  All that Luke, with straining eyes,
could see were a few spectral turrets, distorted and
ugly in the thickened atmosphere, swaying overhead
upon waves of yellow fog.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  Jack Porcellis, with his mother's motor, met
Luke.  They were driven to the apartment-house in
Thirty-ninth Street where, upon Jack's advice,
Huber had written to engage two small rooms and
bath.  It was Jack Porcellis (his real name was John
Jay Porcellis) who had District-Attorney Leighton
for a brother-in-law and had induced that official to
give Luke a place on the staff of the public prosecutor.

Porcellis was considerably taller than Huber and
very considerably thinner.  He was a quiet member
of an old Knickerbocker family, who was at home
in every sort of society, had gone to law-school as
an intellectual diversion and now spent most of his
time traveling, always well within his income,
through whatever lands chanced to attract his
continually changing fancy.

"I hope you'll be comfortable here," he said,
when they had been lifted to the fifth floor of the
house, which was dry and hot from the steam
radiators and smelled as all steam-heated houses smell.
The elevator-boy was unlocking the door to Luke's
apartments while Porcellis spoke.  He stood aside
as the two men entered.

"I think I'll make out very well," said Luke.  He
handed the boy a tip and dismissed him.  "It's not
so big as our rooms in Ware Hall, but then there
were two of us there."

The quarters were indeed small.  The parlor was
almost diminutive, and the bedroom, which opened
from it, was an alcove; the front window gave upon
the busy street, with a bit of Broadway to the
right, and the bathroom, in American fashion, was
as large as the parlor.

"I did the best I could for you," Porcellis
explained: he failed to account for his friend's tone
by the fact that Luke was fresh from the spaciousness
of a small town.

Huber softened.

"I didn't mean to criticise, Jack.  I'm sure this
will do splendidly.  After all, I'm in New York for
hard work."

"I know you are."  Porcellis smiled faintly.
"You were never anywhere for anything else.  Well,
you'll probably get over that before you've quite
spoiled yourself for everything.  It's a way New
York has."

Huber was tolerant.  "Is it?  You see, I don't
know the town very well."

"Who does?  However, I'll show you what I can
before I sail—I'm going to Russia next week, you
know—and by way of a beginning I've brought you
a ready-made engagement for to-night.  We'll dine
at my club, and see the Follies, and after that—well,
I've got you a card to Mrs. Ruysdael's dance."

"This doesn't sound like preparation for work,"
chuckled Luke; "but, thank you—and who is
Mrs. Ruysdael?"

"Who is Mrs. Ruysdael?" Porcellis repeated.
He was stroking the spot where his blond mustache
had been a year ago, but where, because mustaches
had since become unfashionable, it no longer grew.
"Why, the Mrs. Ruysdael, of course: Mrs. Cornelius
Ruysdael."

When he heard it in full, Luke remembered the
name.  Of Mrs. Ruysdael he knew only that she
was a woman of fashion; but her husband was
everywhere known as the worthy representative of a
Dutch New York name long eminent in the country's
history.  The family had been rich for several
generations, but they had proved themselves
surprisingly able to wear the cloak of wealth with
dignity.

"I remember now," said Luke.  "They're said to
be among the heaviest real-estate owners in New
York, aren't they?"

Porcellis laughed.

"Well, yes, they are," he conceded: "but none
of us ever think of that.  I doubt if even they do.
They leave their estate to their agents to manage,
and we leave the story of it to the yellow press to
talk about."

"I never knew there was any story connected
with it."

"No?  Well, for my part, I don't believe there
is.  Some labor-agitator searched the records and
tried to prove they made their first fortune buying
condemned muskets from the British garrisons just
before the Revolution and selling them as good arms
to the Continental Congress.  He said they invested
the profits in New York land as soon as prices fell
after the Declaration of Independence was signed."

"Was it true?" asked Luke.

Porcellis shrugged.

"It was all a long time ago, at any rate," he said,
"and the Ruysdaels are very nice people now: you
would never guess they were worth more than a
million.  Besides, Charley—that's my Wall Street
cousin—says they've somehow funded their
landholdings with one of Old Nap's concerns.  I don't
know.  I don't pretend to understand finance."

Luke felt extremely ignorant.

"Old Nap?" he wondered.  "Who's he?"

In reply, Porcellis mentioned the name of the man
of whom Luke's father had spoken so highly that
morning at the railway station in Americus.

Huber pushed forward a chair.

"Sit down," he said, "and have a cigarette.  I
want to ask you one question more.  You've been
all over the map.  You've got the cosmopolitan point
of view.  What do you think of this man?"

"I think," said Porcellis, accepting both the chair
and the cigarette, "that it doesn't make any difference
what I think of him."  He lit the cigarette.
"But I'm quite sure," he presently added, "he is
the sort of man nobody can help thinking *something*,
about.  Why do you ask?"

"Because——"  Luke was not certain why he did
ask.  He could not politely inquire of Porcellis
whether he believed that his brother-in-law had
accepted, to aid his election, money from a power that
could not but be interested in the official actions of
a District-Attorney of New York.  "Because," he
compromised, "my father was speaking to me about
him only this morning."

"So were a lot of other fathers.  So are a lot
of other fathers every morning.  That's greatness.
What I think is that Old Napoleon is the greatest
man this country has ever produced."

"You think so well of him as that!"  Luke was
amazed.

"I didn't say I thought he was good," Porcellis
defined; "I said I thought he was great.  Greatness
hasn't anything to do with good or bad, or only
accidentally.  The greatest national figure a country
produces is the figure that most intensely and—well,
and powerfully—expresses that country.  That's why
Shakespeare was the greatest man produced by
Elizabethan England."

"Oh—Shakespeare!" laughed Luke.

"Why not?" asked Porcellis.  "Shakespeare
lived in a country and time of expanding intellectual
conceptions, and he expressed them the way I've said.
We live in a country and time of tremendous financial
combination and expansion; we're not working in
the material of intellectual conceptions, except as we
conceive finance intellectually; we're working with
figures and dollar-marks and differentials and
compound interest and dividends as complicated as an
astronomer's calculations.  Well, this little old man
in Wall Street can see those figures before they
happen; he can make them come to life out of
nothing—make them happen, give them life just the way
Shakespeare gave life to another sort of ideas.
These ideas are the ideas of our country; they are
our country.  Here is a genius that most fully and
powerfully, most intensely and perfectly expresses
them, and so I say he is the American Shakespeare."

Luke writhed in his chair opposite Porcellis.  He
could withhold the question no longer.

"Then"—he almost blurted it out at last—"those
campaign contributions——"

But Porcellis was scandal-proof.

"Those!" he said lightly.  "You'll have to ask
Brouwer Leighton about them."

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  After they left the theater, the two young
men were driven, again in the motor belonging to
Mrs. Porcellis, up the noisy river of yellow light
that was Broadway, where their vehicle joined a long
procession, until they reached a cross-street in the
early Fifties.  Then their car darted from the
parade and plunged through a dark thoroughfare to
Fifth Avenue.  They drew up before a house where
Luke could at first see little save that from its
doorway, high above the pavement, a long and narrow
tent of white canvas striped with red ran to the curb.
Several other motors were ahead of theirs, so theirs
had to wait its turn.

"Is this the place?" asked Luke.

Porcellis nodded.

"It does look rather like a barn from the outside,"
he said, guessing his companion's thought and
agreeing with it.  "That's a Ruysdael way: they
maintain the old tradition of severe exteriors; they
don't believe in flaunting their wealth in the face of
the public; they believe in keeping the best for their
friends."

Luke leaned shamelessly forward.  Whenever he
had gone to dances heretofore, the houses of his
hostesses had shown lights in every window and
dispensed a glow of festivity to the streets; but this
house, essentially forbidding, stood dark and silent,
its windows masked.  Except for the faint illumination
of a street-lamp that sputtered bluely at the
corner, the only scintillations visible were two thin
lines of radiance, one along the pavement, at the
bottom of the entrance-tent, and a corresponding
one above, between the walls of the tent and the
loose overhang of its roof: these and a glowing spot
at the end of the tent upon the curb where, between
rows of ragged night figures watching the scene,
dismounting guests appeared and disappeared—white
shirt-fronts, and opera-cloaks, and the glint of
jewels—like pictures in dissolving views.

With each arrival, motors swung away from the
entrance, turned to the other side of the street, and
proceeded to the farther corner there to await their
recall, while their drivers gossiped in the darkness
or drank beer at a convenient bar.  Thus, with starts
and stops like those of an American railway train
leaving a station, the Porcellis car slowly approached
the canvas mouth.

When that mouth yawned directly before them,
Luke and Porcellis, the door of their automobile
held open by a servant in livery, descended into the
tent.  A string of incandescent lamps had been hung
in this corridor—it was the light from these lamps
which crept from above and below the walls—and a
thick carpet covered the pavement.  Along it they
walked to the house-steps, where two turbaned East
Indians stood ready to relieve them of their hats
and top-coats and show them to a room prepared for
incoming men-guests.

"Now," said Porcellis, "you see what I was
talking about."

A greater contrast between the outside and the
inside of the Ruysdael house it would, indeed, have
been hard to find.  The reception hall was of white
marble and of a height generally seen only in public
buildings.  Pillars held the distant ceiling; the
staircase rose in a pentagonal tower, a copy, Porcellis
explained, of that in the Francis First wing of the
Château of Blois; the light, although its sources were
hidden, was almost blinding to eyes fresh from the
darkness of the street; there was music heard lightly
from a distance, and the air was faint with the scent
of American Beauty roses.

Porcellis and Luke went up the carved staircase in
the tower, which was open at each landing so as to
command a view of the hall, and were directed to
the men's room, where three valets were in attendance.
Against the walls of this room were several
dressing-tables, each with a strong lamp before it
and each covered with toilet articles.

"I'm not sure," said Luke, in a whisper that was
both amazed and amused, "whether I'm in a belle's
boudoir or a musical comedy star's dressing-room."

"It's a judicious combination," said Porcellis in
a conversational tone that disregarded the fluttering
attendants.  He picked up a gold-backed buffer and
polished his always coruscating finger-nails.

Luke contented himself with a touch to his hair,
which had a way of standing upright, and a tug at
his tie, which was forever straining toward independence.

"What's this?" he asked as he lifted a glass case.
He removed its lid and sniffed at the contents.  "It
looks like rouge," he added.

"It is," said Porcellis.

"But I thought this room was for men," said Luke.

Porcellis drew down the corners of his sensitive
mouth.

"It is," he said again.

They went toward the ballroom.

A man-servant with those brief side-whiskers
which, twenty years before, were used to proclaim
the millionaire, stood splendidly against the crush
about the doorway.  He bent to each newcomer and
secured a name, which, turning his head, but not
moving his body, he then shouted, from an
impassive face, into the ballroom.

Porcellis nodded to him familiarly

"Good-evening, James," he said.

"Good-evening, Mr. Porcellis.  And the other
gentleman, sir?"

"Mr. Huber," said Porcellis with careful distinctness.

The servant turned his head toward the crowd in
the room behind him.

"Mr. Porcellis!" he cried, and then, as if it were
an afterthought: "Mr. Urer!"

"It's all right," Porcellis hurriedly reassured
Luke.  "Nobody pays the slightest attention to
him, anyhow."

Nobody did.  As they shouldered their way
forward, the huge apartment that they now entered was
like what Luke thought the rooms of state at
Versailles must be, and the great hall in the Brussels
Palace of Justice.  All about the walls, and
especially about the large entrance, was a press of men
and women, standing still, or moving slowly from
group to group through an invisible, but palpable,
cloud formed by a mixture of the odor of withering
flowers, Parisian scents, and human sweat.  A
band of music, concealed in a far-away balcony,
blared rag-time, but distinct from its impudence,
there rose from all these people the noise of
shoe-leather dragged over parquette flooring, the
composite of laughter in many keys and the perplexed
buzz of small-talk.  The moving figures of the
women, over whom countless aigrettes quivered, had
a kaleidoscopic effect, curiously unreal: an effect of
flashing colors—crimson, ivory, blues, greens, and
pinks—splashing against white breasts and backs,
falling away from dazzling shoulders, the waves
mounting in oily satin, feline velvet, or clinging
peau de cygnes, and breaking in the foam of lace
and the flying spray of diamonds.  Here even the
ordinary black-and-white of the men became
black-and-gray or black-and-lavender, with gems for
waistcoat buttons.  On the dancing-floor many couples,
hugging each other so tightly that their bodies
touched from chest to center, swayed to the sensuous
music of a one-step, the leaders' high collars wilting,
the fingers of their right hands spread wide along the
women's upper vertebras, their partners looking into
their intent faces from narrowed eyes.

The picture was too bright, too varied, for the
unaccustomed mind to seize it: Luke turned to
Porcellis:

"And Mrs. Ruysdael?"

He was expecting his hostess to meet her guests at
the door of the ballroom.

Porcellis, however, did not wholly understand.

"Oh, she's about somewhere, I dare say," he
responded—"though she doesn't care for late hours
and sometimes leaves after the third dance.  Come
on.  I'll introduce you to some worth-while people."

He introduced Luke to a great many people, for
he seemed to know them all.  There was the British
Ambassador and a German baron, a string of
dowagers with marriageable daughters (Luke
danced with each daughter and liked her), an artist,
a scientist, and a bibliophile, and several debutantes
that were not marriageable at all, but were quite
frankly determined to marry.

As is the way when a name runs in one's brain,
three out of five of the people that Luke talked to
sooner or later mentioned the man that the elder
Huber had spoken of that morning and that Porcellis
had later so highly extolled.  The Ambassador
said that this man had, by lending or withholding
tremendous sums, preserved the peace of nations; the
artist praised him as the only true patron of art in
America; the scientist told how the same man had
established and equipped a now world-famous institution
for the study and cure of a world-plague; the
bibliophile envied his first editions and medieval
manuscripts.

Leading his prettiest partner across the floor,
Luke's glance, in spite of his will, rested on a
diamond pendant that hung from a thread of gold about
her neck and fell above her beautiful bust.  She was
a girl with the face of one of those Italian peasant
girls that the early painters loved to paint as
Madonnas, and Huber felt that his regard must be an
insult.

The girl, however, took the pendant between a
white thumb and forefinger and looked from it to
him with pleased eyes.

"You like it?" she asked.

"I think it's wonderful," said he.

"It is pretty," she replied.  "My uncle gave it
to me on my last birthday.  It used to be in a heathen
god's crown in some Chinese or Hindu temple or
other."

"The god ought to be pleased to lose it to you,"
said Luke, "even if it didn't come to you directly."

"Oh, but it did come to me directly," she laughed
prettily.  "That's half the charm of it.  Uncle sent
right over there and got it for me."

When Luke found Porcellis again, he asked him
about this.

"Who's that girl with the broad, low forehead,"
he inquired, "and the expression of a stained-glass
saint?"

"You're aiming high," said Porcellis; "that's one
of the richest girls in New York."

"Who's her uncle?"

"Ah, she's been talking of him, has she?  Well,
I don't blame her.  Her uncle is the man I call the
American Shakespeare.  She'll get a lot of his money,
too, for he has no children of his own."

"Is he here himself?"

"Not he.  He doesn't care for this sort of thing.
That football-playerish sort of fellow that the niece
introduced you to—that's young Hallett she's
dancing with now—he's the son of George J.  And
there's George J. himself!"

Luke remembered that George J. Hallett was one
of the financiers whose name was most frequently
associated with the donor of diamonds and
benefactor of medical research.

"And," continued Porcellis, "do you see that
stoutish, nervous pale man over there talking to the
British Ambassador?  Oh, don't be alarmed: they're
probably not talking about anything more important
than how they hate dances.  Well, that's the third
member of the triumvirate: that's L. Bergen Rivington."

Luke went home in the early dawn, feeling that
these were pleasant people, however they came by
their money, and that he had certainly judged the one
that was not there long before he knew much about him.

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  Leighton was out of town—he, too, was
before the legislature's investigating committee at
Albany—and the bar-examination was not to be held
for a week or more, so that Luke had the next few
days to devote to himself.  The use that he put
them to was an endeavor to learn what he could of
the city of which he had seen so little before he came
to live there.  He saw what, considered of itself,
was a great deal, but what, considered as a part of
New York, was minute; and at many turns, the
number of which surprised him—for long as he had
known of the man's power, he never before looked
for its effects—he came across traces of that
financier who more and more seemed to him to be the
controlling force in America.

He was shown a great college, handsomely
housed, splendidly equipped, in which the higher
education was provided free to every graduate of the
public schools that chose to take advantage of it,
and this, he was told, had been given to New York
by the great "money editor."  He was taken through
a cancer hospital, where mesothorium, which cost
about $52,000 a grain, and radium at $64,000, had
been bought and were kept and used without charge
in the treatment of poor patients—where physicians
and surgeons of international repute were engaged to
spend all their time searching for a true cure and
final prevention—and this institution had been largely
endowed by the same man, whose first wife, it
appeared, had died of cancer.  There were homes for
destitute widows, pure-milk depots, orphan asylums,
all assisted by this man or his associates.

"Do you know him?" Luke asked Porcellis one
evening as they sat at dinner in the latter's club.
They had been talking of many things, but Luke
found this one conspicuously interesting.

"No," said Porcellis.  "He doesn't go out much.
I saw him once.  I was being shown through his
library—it's a marvelous place, full of treasure-trove
that would make a scholar think he was in heaven—and
the librarian pointed him out to me: he was
sitting in the alcove that held the First Folios, and
he was reading the current 'World Almanac.'"

They both laughed.

"Still," protested Luke, "he seems more Jovian
than ever to me.  I don't know whether he's a good
Jove or a bad one, but I don't see how he can really
be bad when he does so much good."

Porcellis was still intolerant of the ethical
question.  He pointed out that nobody of weight ever
knew or cared whether Shakespeare's life was moral
or whether the effect of his work was immoral.  What
had happened in regard to the American was that,
because he had at last been secured to come to a
public hearing, people were beginning to realize that
he was a living man and not a force of nature.  For
a quarter of a century he had been the greatest
individual power in the United States, and for all that
time he had remained hidden.  He had been doing
daily tremendous things, things that were epic in their
sweep and yet affected every man, woman, and child
included in the census—and nobody knew of them, no
paper printed a word about them, until he had passed
them out of his own hands and into those of his
lieutenants, not until, indeed, his lieutenants had sent
them so far from hand to hand that none could
tell precisely when and where they had started.

"The man's a genius," said Porcellis, "and like
all geniuses he's just what we all are when his genius
isn't at work.  What he feels is just what we'd feel
if we were in his place."

"Still," argued Luke, "the influence of such a
man is too great; it's dangerous.  It oughtn't to be
allowed in politics."

"There you go again!" sighed Porcellis.  "Allow?
How are you going to allow or disallow a
force?  It simply is.  This man can give the big
politicians certain large advantages if they pass laws
that suit him.  The big politicians can give the little
politicians certain lesser advantages if they furnish
the votes.  The lesser politicians can get the votes
if they let the police charge the criminals for
protection in crime.  Each man seizes his opportunity,
and that's all there is about it."

"You think so?" said Luke.  "I can't believe it.
I can't believe it would be necessary if the right laws
were passed and enforced.  Wait till your brother-in-law
gets the District-Attorney's office cleaned
out and in working order.  Then you'll see I'm right."


§5.  At ten o'clock on the following Sunday night,
Luke, on a lonely walk through the East Side, noticed
that, whereas the front rooms of the saloons were
darkened, the back rooms were all alight.  The doors
to these back rooms were forever swinging to the
entrance and exit of unmistakable customers, many
of whom came out bearing foaming jugs of beer
under the indifferent noses of policemen at the
corners.  Luke chose a saloon in Essex Street and
entered it.

The room was small, but crowded.  The walls,
which were papered in green, bore a few framed
prints in high colors, advertisements of various
brands of beer and whisky.  All about were small
tables at which blowsy women and men in stained
clothes were drinking.

Luke hesitated.  Nobody had questioned his entrance,
there was no guard and no password: the door
hung free; but now his startled eye could not see a
vacant table, and he knew that he must appear an
alien to this place.

Presently a nearby woman smiled at him.  She
looked to be about fifty years old.  There was a
mangy peacock feather in her straw hat, which was
set a-slant of dank black hair touched with gray.

"Hello, sweetheart," she said.  "Come over
here a minute."  Her smile was toothless.

"Shut up, Mame," somebody else commanded.
"You're drunk."

Luke looked at the man that had spoken.  He
was sitting alone at a table the length of the room
away.  He had a puffed face, red from liquor and
blue from an unshaven beard; his coat, once black,
had turned green; he wore no collar, and a part of
the rim of his greasy derby-hat was torn away.

"Shut up," he repeated.  "You're drunk."

"Thank Gawd," the woman assented.  Her acknowledgment
of the accusation was fervent; she
returned her attention to the glass of whisky that
stood on the table before her.

"You can sit here, if you want to," said the man,
addressing Luke, and nodding at a chair beside him.

Luke crossed the room and took the chair.  The
other people in the room were indifferent to his
entrance with the same indifference that the guests
of Mrs. Ruysdael had shown.  The woman that
had invited him did not look his way; even the man
that had invited him remained for some time silent.
Luke ordered a glass of beer from an aproned
waiter, who came with a tray full of whisky glasses
in one hand, and five foaming beer-mugs in the
fingers and thumb of the other.

"Will you have a drink with me?" Luke
inquired of the derelict beside him.

"Sure," said he, and Luke noticed that, though
he did not cough, his voice was hoarse.

They gave their orders.

"And perhaps your friend would have one?"
Luke suggested.

The man raised his rheumy eyes.

"What friend?"

"The—the one that spoke to me when I came in."

"Who?  That skirt?  I never saw her before
in my life."

Their drinks came, and the men drank for a
while in silence.

"What's *your* graft?" asked the man presently.

"I'm a lawyer," said Luke.  He was first proud
of the answer and then ashamed of himself for being
proud of it.

The man looked at him dreamily through watering eyes.

"Quit yer kiddin'," he presently remarked.

"I'm not kidding."

"You're a lawyer?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm a bum," said the man.  He tilted up
his bristled chin; his seamed throat swelled; sounds
that, because they were not speech, Luke took to be
song, came from his throat.  He sang:

   |  "The Spring has came, I'm just out o' jail;
   |  I haven't any money an' I haven't any bail!
   |    *Hall*\eyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!
   |    Halleyloolyah, bum again!
   |    Halleyloolyah, give——"
   |

He stopped abruptly.  "I'm sorry for *you*," he said.

"Why?" asked Luke.  He thought the sentiment
of that song as horrible as the creature that sang it.

"Because you're all tied up with everything.  But
me—there ain't nothin' *can* tie me.  You fellers is
in jail all the time an' don't know it; I'm only in
jail when you fellers can ketch me and put me there."

Luke realized that he had found a philosopher
who, however mistaken in his deductions, had seen
quite as much of the world as Jack Porcellis.  He
attempted the vernacular.

"Is this a bums' joint?" he inquired.

The philosopher sneered.

"Naw," he said.  "It's a bum joint, but it ain't
a bums' joint.  Too much class for me.  This bunch"—he
included the entire company with a wide
gesture—"is all in the same jail with you.  If they
wasn't here, you'd be where I am."

"I suppose they do give us lawyers cases," Luke
granted; "but they seem to get around the laws
pretty frequently: they're wide open to-night."

"Sure they are.  See that?"  The other man
indicated the waiter, who was disappearing into the
dark vestibule with two drinks on his tray.  "Them's
for the cop on this beat, an' a vice-squad cop 'at's
with him.  I'm wise.  I seen Tony (that's the boss
o' this joint) slip them a fifty-dollar bill last
Sunday—protection money."

"But some day," urged Luke, who was trying to
plumb the dark pool that was this man's mind,
"the Mayor or the District-Attorney will get proof
of that sort of thing—some day when the Mayor
and the District-Attorney are honest men——"

"Don't make me laugh," the derelict interrupted:
"me lip's cracked.  The Mayor and the District-Attorney's
got to get elected, whoever they are, don't they?"

Luke supposed so.

"Well, then.  Tony an' his kind gets the votes.
They can't elect without the Tony kind says so.  It's
a fair trade.  An' the Mayors an' the District-Attorneys
ain't got no easy thing of it, neither.  Votes costs
money.  They've got to get the money from the
money-guys, the candidates do, an' then they've got
to let the money-guys kill as many people as they
wants to on their railroads without sendin' them to
jail for it.—Have another?"

Luke consented to another drink.

"This one's on me," said the other man, and he
paid for the order.  "No, sir," he went on, as they
were finishing their second drink together, "there's
only two sorts o' men that ain't tied up.  One sort's
me that knows things an' ain't afraid to starve
(there's lots of me); the other sort's the guys at
the top that does the tyin', an' there's only a few of
them, with the King as the boss-knotter."

"The King?" repeated Luke.  "Who's he?"

But he had guessed the answer before the derelict
gave it: the answer was the man that Porcellis
considered the greatest American.....

All the way to his apartments in Thirty-ninth
Street that night, Luke's feet were pounding to the
wretched derelict's wretched hymn:

   |  "*Hall*\eyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!
   |  Halleyloolyah, bum again!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER II`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER II

.. vspace:: 2

On a morning of that same April in a large rear
room on the twentieth floor of a Wall Street
skyscraper, three men were seated around a large
mahogany table.  They were talking business.  Each
man had his own offices and his own businesses, but
they frequently and quietly met in this, the inner
office of one, because most of the businesses of each
were closely connected, at several points, with the
business interests of all.

There was nothing unusual about the outward
appearance of the public actions of this trio; they
were apparently but three units of the legion that
makes this portion of New York a city by day and
a desert by night.  Each had come downtown in his
own motor that morning, defying speed laws and
traffic regulations, just as scores of his business
neighbors had done.  Each had descended at his own
offices, passed through a half-dozen doors guarded
by six bowing attendants, and proceeded to his own
desk in his own private room, precisely as a small
army of other business men were doing at the same
time within a radius of half a mile.  Each looked like
the rest of that army.  All three were men of about
the average in height, not noticeably either above or
below it, and inclined to bulkiness.  They had pale
faces and close mouths and quiet eyes, which looked
out upon the world from under bushy brows with
glances that gave the lie to the lethargic indications
of the little pouches of loose skin below their lower
lids.  Each man wore a flower in the lapel of his
dark coat; one wore a white waistcoat; the cropped
mustache of one was black; that of another was
touched with gray; the man at the head of the table
was clean-shaven.

The man at the head of the table was, for the
most of the time, even less remarkable than his
companions.  He was somewhat shorter and heavier; his
abdomen swelled so that his shoulders were
somewhat farther from the table than were those of his
associates; his bushy eyebrows were somewhat more
bushy; his pale face somewhat paler; his calm eyes
somewhat sharper, yet more calm;—and his lips,
in addition to closing tightly, were so heavy that
the compression of the mouth must have resulted
from a habit acquired only by a strong and long
effort of the will.  He sat with his great hands flat
upon the surface of the table, his thick fingers
extended, his elbows raised at right angles to his torso
and pointing ceilingward.  His chest heaved visibly,
but his breathing was inaudible.  His eyes were
everywhere.  He spoke rarely, but when he did
speak it was as if he darted over the table, seized
something, and returned: he was startlingly brief
and sudden, and was instantly back again in his quiet
watchfulness, apparently heavy, unruffled, slow.

He had come to work that morning with his
usual promptness—the moment of his coming never
changed—and in his usual temper.  He had threaded
the maze of corridors with a springing step.  In the
mahogany-paneled room with its heavy table and
arm-chairs, and its one decoration, a rare engraving
of George Washington, hung between the two
windows that gave the place its only chance for
sunlight, he found on his desk, in a corner, a clean
blotter, a fresh pen, a small pad of cheap paper for
memoranda, and nothing else.  He pressed one of
a row of worn buttons in the side of the desk.  He
was ringing for his private secretary.

The secretary, who patently tried to look as much
like his master as possible, and succeeded, entered, a
sheaf of open letters in his hand, and noiselessly
closed the door behind him.

"Good-morning," said his master.  His voice was
quite low; it was thin and cool, but his words fell
quickly.

"Good-morning," said the secretary.

"What's in the mail?"

"Not much, sir.  Only about twenty things that
need your personal attention."

"*About* twenty!"  The master's words seemed
to leap from him and assault the secretary, but his
face was set like a plaster-cast of calm and his tone
was even.  "Do you mean nineteen or twenty-one?"

The secretary was too used to this manner of
speech to be alarmed by it.

"Twenty-two," he said.  He handed the letters
to his master.

That one ran them over with a quick hand and a
quicker eye.  In terse, sharp sentences, he directed
his secretary how to reply to them, the latter taking
rapid stenographic notes of the commands.

"You have turned the begging communications
over to Simpson to investigate?" the employer inquired.

"Yes, sir."

"And the requests for contributions?"

"Yes, sir.  There was one for a new hospital at
Akron.  The rubber people have given five thousand,
and——"

"Tell Simpson to write that I'll give ten
thousand if the town raises ten thousand more."

"Very well, sir."

"Has Mr. Brinley telephoned from Washington?"

"Yes, sir.  He says he is to take breakfast at
the White House to-morrow."

"What's that?  He was told to arrange it for to-day."

"He was; but he said he'd got word from the——"

"Never mind.  To-morrow will do, if he only
keeps his word this time.  Wire him: 'Right; but
positively no more postponements.'  Use the code
signature and send from somewhere uptown,—Anything
from Albany?"

"Yes.  Senator Scudder says to tell you that bill
will be reported to-day and rushed through before
evening."

"Have Conover go up to the Astor and get
Scudder on the 'phone and say that the bill must be
passed before noon recess.  The Governor will sign
it immediately."

"Yes, sir."

"And Conover is not to mention names."

"Of course not, sir."

"Anything else?"

"No—except somebody has been trying to get you
on the long-distance wire from Hartford."

"That's Sparks.—Run over to the corner pay-station
and call up the legislative building at Hartford.
Get Sparks on the 'phone.  Be sure it's the
right man you're talking to.  Tell him that the New
York gentleman he wanted to speak to—just that:
the New York gentleman he wanted to speak to—is
out of town, but has telegraphed you to say to him
it is all right for him to go ahead.  Got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Read it."

The secretary read from his notes.

"Now," said the business man, "get Mr. Rivington
and Mr. Hallett on your own 'phone and ask
them if they can find it convenient to come around
here to see me for a half-hour.  Tell me what they
say, and then give me Atwood and the other brokers
in the regular order."

"Yes, sir."

"And, Rollins——"

"Yes, sir?"

"When Mr. Hallett and Mr. Rivington arrive,
we are not to be disturbed."

The secretary went; the brokers were given their
orders, and then came L. Bergen Rivington and
George J. Hallett, the two men with whom this third
man was now consulting.

"About the Manhattan and Niagara——" began
Rivington.  He had a way of moving his hands
nervously when he spoke, and he rarely completed a
sentence.

Hallett, who was the man in a white waistcoat,
stopped chewing his cigar to ask:

"What are they kickin' about?  We own seventy-five
per cent. of the preferred and sixty of the common."

"And it is too much, I think," said Rivington.
"We need it only to keep from unsettling the N. Y. &
N. J. interests, because——  Fifty-five of the
preferred and fifty-two of the common, perhaps, but
seventy-five and sixty——"

"And, now," chimed Hallett, "this little
fellow—what's his name?—the president.  Oh, yes:
Dohan, that's it—starts out to launch a new
stock-issue to bridge the river five miles from town and
come into New York, an' all without as much as
sayin' 'If you please' to us!  We ought to wreck his
damned picayune road for him; that's what we ought
to do."

The two continued their indignant comments.
Every little while they paused to give the crouching
man at the head of the table a chance to speak, and
more often they looked at him to see whether he
wanted to speak; but, though his eyes were always
alert to meet theirs, he did not, for some time,
utter a word.

"Of course," said Rivington, "we are not directors
of the road, but still——"

"Oh, hell!" grunted Hallett disgustedly.  "Didn't
you just say between us we owned all the stock
worth ownin'?  We ought to unload and smash 'em."

"You may be right.  I am inclined to think——"

"Right?  Of course I'm right.  I'm not goin' to
be bullied by a handful of dummies when I can sell
them up as if I was a sheriff closing down on a
crossroads grocery store!"

"They certainly are impudent and——"

"They're beggars on horseback!  Wastin' our
money like this!"

"They have——  We should tell the legislature——"

"Gentlemen,"—it was the clear, crisp voice of
the man at the head of the table that interrupted; he
spoke in a tone somewhat different from that in
which he habitually addressed his clerks and his
brokers, but he spoke as suddenly and with all the
authority that he used toward them—"if the
M. & N. comes into New York, it will not take one-half
of one per cent. of the profits away from our other
roads.  For all but its last thirty-two miles, the new
line taps territory new to us, and the new stock will
have paid for itself, and have paid a profit too, in
five years."

Rivington and Hallett looked at each other.  The
latter took his cigar between his fingers and folded
his arms.

"What do we care?" he asked, but his tone had
lost the assertiveness that had marked it a moment
earlier.  The man at the head of the table did not
answer this question directly.  He proceeded:

"Except for ourselves, most of the old stockholders
are poor people.  They need the money, and
the old holders are to have the first chance at the new
issue.  In five years, then, the minor stockholders will
have realized a profit on their investment; so shall
we.  At that time we could unload without hurting
anybody but the officials that have defied us.
Always supposing," he added, "that the management
observe a proper economy."

Hallett's eyes burned.

"You're right," he said.  "We can win both
ways if we do that.  The road will be bankrupt,
and we can buy it in."

The man at the head of the table did not smile.
He only said:

"You have always been very naïve, Hallett; but
I did think you would have seen this point sooner."

Rivington at length cut in:

"But the cost of getting the bill through the
legislature——"

"The bill will pass this morning," said the man at
the head of the table.  "The Governor will sign
it immediately."

His certainty silenced them for a moment; but
Rivington, whom the outside world pictured as a
pirate, was still timid.

"Yes," he said, "but the expense of the city
ordinance——"

"Oh, we'll take care of that," grinned Hallett.

"And the cost of construction——"

"I said," repeated the man at the head of the
table: "'Always supposing the management observe
a proper economy.'"

He settled back in his chair.  He seemed to consider
the subject closed, and so, presently, did his
companions.  Within five minutes they had left him,
and he was ringing for Rollins.

"Rollins," he said, "take this letter."

The secretary seated himself at the far end of the
table.

His employer walked to a window and looked out.
His hands were clasped behind him now, and he did
not turn his head as he rapidly dictated:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: small

"Robert M. Dohan.  (Send it to his house address, Rollins,
and mark it 'Confidential.')  I understand that the bill of which
you have spoken to me will be passed and become a law to-day.
I have just seen Messrs. Hallett and Rivington and have secured
their agreement to the plan outlined in my personal conversation
with you last week.  In view of the favors that you have done
me in the past, I think it fair to tell you, for your own use
only, (Underline that, Rollins), that my friends have decided
that they and I ought to do what you thought they might decide,
viz.: unload at the end of five years.  Considering your
contemplated resignation next year, this will not affect you, except
favorably in case you care to manipulate your own holdings
in accordance with this news.

.. class:: small

"(Paragraph) I note what you say about the estimate submitted
by the construction-department; also the letter of the
steel-rail manufacturers which you inclosed, in which they say
that the grade I suggested might not wear well.  I think their
use of the word 'dangerous' is absurdly exaggerated.  We have
used this grade on several of our roads and feel sure from
long experience that, with proper repair-gangs, it will wear for
five years as well as the best.

.. class:: small

"(Paragraph) My desire, and the desire of my associates, is
to protect the interests of the stockholders.  With that in mind,
I should state, what you have probably already gathered, that
we feel that the new line must be built and operated with all
possible economy. —— Very truly yours."

.. vspace:: 2

The secretary closed his book.

"Is that all?" he asked.

Without turning, his employer nodded, and
Rollins left the room.

In the corner by the desk, a stock-ticker was
clicking out yards of tape into a high wicker basket.
The man that had just given the M. &. N. Railway
permission to enter New York started to walk to
the ticker; but he paused again, at the second
window, to look down on the thoroughfare and buildings
below him.  From that height the streets of the city
seemed to be threads leading in every direction; they
seemed to radiate from the building in which the
watcher stood.  On the threads black dots that were
hurrying men and women seemed to quiver like
entangled flies.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER III`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER III

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  The legislature's committee made its report—the
legislature was heavily Republican that year—declaring
that no wrong had been done, and Luke
accepted this verdict as a proof and triumph of
right.  He passed his examinations and, shortly after
Porcellis sailed for Russia, became a member of the
staff of the District-Attorney, who was to "clean
up" New York.

District-Attorney Leighton was a pleasant man,
still young at forty, who had a plausible and
engaging manner supported by that bluff and downright
good-humor which passes current as the legal tender
of honesty.  He had been in politics, and on the losing
side, since his twenty-first year, and during all that
time he was fighting toward the office which he had
ultimately attained.  Even his relatives, who were
people of so high a position that they regarded
voting as something beneath their caste and would rather
be pillaged than lay hands upon the pillagers, had
kept him at a distance and were a little ashamed of
their pride in his success now that he had secured it.
With a few other men, all his elders, he had found
his party a ruined fortress and rebuilt it, stone by
stone, now seeing the work of months plundered in a
day, now resisting his assailants by their own sort
of arms, until the stronghold, still far from
impregnable or potent to command the entire city,
could at least dominate that spot beneath its guns
on which he had been able to take up his present
position.

Under him Luke went cheerfully to work.  He
was at first disappointed because his tasks were
minor tasks and seemed to possess only the most
distant connection with the great crusade; but he was,
in those times, as modest as he was ardent, and he
realized that he was still in his novitiate.  He tried
petty offenders whose crimes were so insignificant
that he frequently found it hard to consider them
crimes at all, and he was often too sorry for the
accused to be glad when he convicted them.  The
first time he won a sentence, which was by no means
the first time he tried a case, he passed a sleepless
night, because he feared that the defendant's plea
might have been the true one.  It was long thereafter
before he could exult in a conviction that carried
with it a term in prison, even when he was certain
of the condemned man's guilt.

The other members of the staff, more experienced
in criminal practice, showed no compunctions.  They
were a rather jolly lot of men, ranging in age from
twenty-five to thirty, with a cynical tolerance of life
and a tendency to regard their work as a game that
everybody played solely for the sake of winning it,
with the opposing lawyers as the rival players and
with the accused as insensate pawns.  Luke forgave
them only because of their unanimous and unbounded
loyalty to their high-purposing chief.

"I got that case," declared one of these young
men, a Larry O'Mara, when he came through Luke's
little office one afternoon after the court had risen.

"What case?" Luke inquired.

"That one I had against Burroughs—and old
Laurie was sitting, too.  The jury was only out ten
minutes."

O'Mara was pink with triumph.

"What was the charge?" asked Luke.

"Larceny.  It was hard work to make out; but
the fellow's past record did for him.  I got that in
while Burroughs was asleep at the switch.  When
he did object, Laurie ruled against me, but the jury'd
heard it all right.  Laurie's the strictest man on
the bench, and Burroughs is about the cleverest
criminal lawyer in town."

Luke blushed for this victor:

"Was the man guilty?"

O'Mara's eyes were first wondering and then
amused.

"They all are," he said.  "If he didn't do this
he did something else we didn't know about—lots
else.  They're all guilty."

Luke supposed they were, but he could not understand
his associates' desire to secure convictions for
the convictions' sake.

The innocent did not always suffer, nor yet the
guilty.  Luke was not directly attached to the
homicide bureau, the name applied to that branch of the
staff regularly employed to investigate and try cases
of suspected murder.  Nevertheless, Leighton
believed in giving his men some chance at many
branches of practice, because he wanted them to be
what he called "all-round criminal practitioners"
when the time should come for them to leave his
service, and so Luke was once or twice called into a
capital trial.  On one such occasion he was helping young
Uhler.  Leighton himself had tried a striker named
Gace on the charge of shooting and killing a
detective during a strike-riot, and Gace, greatly to the
District-Attorney's chagrin, was acquitted.  Some
slight evidence adduced at the Gace trial seemed to
point to another striker, Reardon, and, though there
was small hope of convicting Reardon, popular
clamor forced Leighton to plead for a true bill
against him and bring him to trial.

"I won't touch it any more, though," laughed
Leighton.  "Uhler, you'll have to take it, and you
might as well have Huber with you.  We're bound
to lose, and so I'm going to give my assistants a
chance to bear the discredit.  That's what you boys
are here for."

Smarting under his chief's prophecy, Uhler, one
of the youngest of the staff, went into court and
fought hard, which was doubtless the intention
behind Leighton's words.  His enthusiasm was strong
and contagious.  He convinced himself of Reardon's
guilt, and he ended by convincing Luke.  The
proceedings, indeed, went largely in the State's
favor until, shortly after the defense had opened its
case, the man Gace, who had previously been
acquitted, was called to the stand to testify to some
minor detail.  His examination was about to be
completed when he quite calmly volunteered the
statement that it was he who had done the killing.

"Cross-examine," said the defending lawyer and,
covering amazement, sat down.

Uhler looked helplessly at Luke.  Luke, now
enough of a lawyer to believe that this was no more
than a clever ruse to secure an unjust acquittal, sprang
to his feet and shook an angry finger under the nose
of the witness murderer, whose confession, had it
been expected, would have been prevented.

"So," he cried, "not satisfied with cheating
justice in your own case, you come back here to taunt
it, do you?"

"Oh, I don't know as I'm taunting anything,"
replied the witness.  He was a big man with the
frame of a blacksmith and the eyes of a ruminating cow.

"Then," thundered Luke, "you really mean to
tell this court that you actually killed that man?"

The faintest shadow of a smile brushed the
murderer's lips.

"They buried him, didn't they?" he inquired.

That answer lost Luke's case.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  Luke's enthusiasm long resisted these miscarriages
of justice and the undeniably slow progress of
his chief to secure indictments against the
Democratic politicians whose drastic punishment Leighton
had promised in his ante-election speeches.  It
resisted even the callousness of the participants in the
legal game, and the discovery that the best minds at
the Bar, of course seeking the most lucrative field
for their practice, were in the position of advisers to
the great financiers, their incomes, which far exceeded
those of their more active fellows, being composed
almost entirely of the annual retaining fees and
"tips" for speculation.  It required more and more
resistance, but Luke continued to hug tightly the
faith that the wrongs of the world could be set right
through honest laws administered by honest men.

As he loved his work, so also he came to love the
scene of it.  The vortex of the city fascinated him.
Broadway, one color by day and another by night,
one spot of color uptown, a second at its middle, and
a third below the street that lies across New York
like a gorged but devouring anaconda; the dark
passages full of tenements; the quiet pavements
bordered by prosperous dwellings; the roar of every sort
of business and the crackle of all sorts of pleasure;
the joy and suffering eternally intermingled, yet so
intermingled that he could not tell which caused the
other, or whether they were independent; the whole
tremendous whirlpool whirled him, a straw among
uncounted straws, now on its surface and now sucked
below beyond all plummets' soundings, and intoxicated
him by its dizzy revolutions.

He knew Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and Central
Park.  Because he felt it his duty, he learned the
outsides of the houses in the Italian quarter, the
French quarter, the Syrian quarter.  He walked the
Bowery and thought that he understood it.  From
that artery of America, he turned a corner and found
himself in China, in crooked streets heavy with the
smells of the East, among shops whose signs bore
Oriental characters, among crowds of impassive
yellow faces—men and only men—where there was no
sound of English speech.  Once, passing the door
of a slum mission, he saw a crowd of half-human
things, their heads sunk upon their chests, listlessly
droning a popular hymn around a puffing harmonium:
on one side of the mission was a saloon
and on the other a shop that displayed the legend:

::

    +----------------+
    |   BLACK EYES   |
    |  PAINTED HERE  |
    +----------------+

.. vspace:: 2

With some of his friends—for he made many
friends both in the office and out of it, and
Mrs. Ruysdael and her husband, whom he finally met, were
exceedingly kind to him—he went on a tour of those
cafés that called themselves Bohemian.  That night
he descended from restaurants where one drank
champagne and heard songs by vaudeville performers
who thus earned more money than at the theaters
which they had deserted, to seats in shoddy beer-halls
where there was dancing by women too old or too
unskilled to continue upon the stage; and on the way
home from "Little Hungary," a place in which a
dull company drank strange wines to the music of
a good band, the motor that conveyed his party crept
under smoking naphtha lamps through a jumble of
push-carts converted into bargain counters, and past
the overcrowded squalor of the quarter of the
Russian Jews.

Poverty hurt him, or the sight of poverty.  Somewhere
he read that one per cent. of the families in
the United States owned more than the other ninety-nine
per cent., but he explained this by the theory that
the one per cent. had created the wealth that they
owned.  He was told that there were four million
paupers in the country; but he ascribed their condition
to their failure to take advantage of a republic's
free opportunities.  Somebody said that, during the
past winter, seventy thousand New York children
had gone hungry to the public schools; Luke was
sure that the schools would soon supply their pupils
with free meals.  From a report of the New Jersey
Department of Charities that came into his hands,
he learned that, in New Jersey, one person in every
two hundred and six of the population was a ward
of the State; but his reflection was only that New
Jersey must be badly governed.  His heart ached
over what he saw; but his intellect satisfactorily
explained all hearsay evidence.  He could go out to
Ellis Island and, listening to its thousands of
immigrants prattle their hopes in forty-three languages
and dialects, could share their hopes.  Evil
administrators had hurt the country by overturning the
purpose of its founders; the remedy lay in a return to
first principles.

Already in men of the Leighton type and in their
works, he saw signs of the revival.  He had more
than one occasion to visit the Children's Court.  Its
quarters near Third Avenue were cramped, but it
was soon to be fittingly housed, and already here
especially adapted magistrates, acting as judge, jury,
and parent, conducted in kindly, quiet, and colloquial
fashion the cases of fourteen thousand children in one
year.  These, all of them under the age of sixteen,
were no longer herded with mature criminals that
completed their education in vice, though their
offenses ranged from mere waywardness to burglary.
Their judges were patient and sympathetic men.
One was the president of a society called the Big
Brothers, the duty of whose members was to act in
fraternally helpful fashion to boys less fortunate
than they themselves had been; and some of the
women probation officers of this court belonged to a
similar organization known as the Big Sisters.  There
were twenty-six probation officers, some men and
some women, and into their care were given all the
little offenders for whom the court entertained any
hope of reformation.

Luke concluded that the public schools, because
of bettered conditions, were turning out fewer
candidates for the Children's Court than ever before.  He
saw with high hope the Washington Irving High
School for Girls, the result of an agitation begun by
pupils.  Here was a building eight stories high, and
Luke, with the American love for size and numbers,
wrote enthusiastically home to his sister that it was
the largest school in the world.

"It cost half a million dollars," he told her; "it
has a hundred and sixty rooms and it holds six
thousand pupils.  Think of that!  Six thousand,—not
your pasty-faced, moping diggers either, but all
noisy, laughing, healthy girls.  The equipment is
wonderful—just wonderful: you girls from the old
Americus High School would think you were in
Heaven if you came here.  There are two big restaurants,
chemical and physical laboratories, a conservatory,
a zoological garden and a roof-garden, and
laundries.  There's a regular theater—stage, scenery,
and all that—a store, a bank, a housekeeping
department, and an employment bureau.  They have an
orchestra, and they dance.  There are nurseries with
real babies in them—babies that can cry—and there is
a five-room model house, a hospital, and a section
where they train nurses.  They use all these things
really to *teach*, and this is in addition to languages
and the usual unpractical stuff.  They teach librarians'
work, shorthand, typewriting, bookbinding,
costume-designing, and dressmaking.  Why, Jane,
the girls are taught to make their own clothes.  Every
girl is expected to make her own graduation dress,
and only a few of the dresses cost more than a
dollar apiece.  I'll bet you wouldn't like that part of it!"

Even his social life served subtly to confirm him,
during this period, in the opinions he had brought to
it.  He mistrusted combinations of capital, because
he thought they tended to restrain honest trade, but
he believed such combinations could properly and
effectively be curbed by legislation, and he had a
fine respect for such of his acquaintances as had made
their own money by building up their own
industries.  He doubted certain men in whose hands lay
the administration of government, but he was sure
that the cure for this was the election of honorable
men.  He brought to New York, and long retained,
what he called a muscular Christianity (he had read
Kingsley), and, under its control, he sought a
remedy for the world's evils that he could synthesize
with, a respect for authority and an acceptance of the
dogma that the individual man is nothing and the
omnipotent Deity everything.

He used often to be invited to dinners at the
Ruysdaels' when there was no other guest, because
Ruysdael liked this earnest lad and enjoyed long evening
talks with him.  On one such occasion, his host, little,
sallow, with almond eyes that gave him a strangely
Japanese appearance, fell to talking of these
questions while the two men sat over a glass of port—for
Ruysdael liked the old-fashioned English custom
of after-dinner port—in the candle-lit, oak-paneled
dining-room.

"I can't understand," said Ruysdael, "the shortsightedness
of these really honest men who call property
a crime."

"They call it that," said Luke, "because it's the
result of profit."

"Yes, but what's profit?"

"Selling dear what you buy cheap, I suppose."

"Yes, that's one way of putting it, but it's really
wages.  It's the wages that the employer draws for
his executive ability: he must be paid for his work
if his employees are paid for theirs.  It's the fair
return that he gets for the risk he's run in starting
his business, and it's his reward for his years of
saving up his money till he had enough to start that
business."

Luke agreed.

"Of course," said he, "we don't want the man
that's done these things to use his power so as to
prevent other men from doing them, but we haven't
any right to take from him what he's earned or to
stop him from going on earning it."

In much Ruysdael's manner, Luke's father, during
Luke's visits to his home in Americus, would talk of
government.  Government, by which he meant the
particular form of government adopted by the
United States, was one of the few topics that could
move the Congressman from his characteristic
reticence.  He scorned the tyranny of Russia and the
English make-shift of a constitutional monarchy.  In
the United States the people could rule; the means
were provided; if they failed now and then, it was
for a brief time only.  To Mr. Huber the majority
was as infallible in matters of government as, in
matters of faith, the Pope is to a devout Catholic, and
the hope of the majority lay in that party which had
freed the negro from slavery and saved the country
from disruption.

To these ideals Luke was true.  He saw the
rottenness of Tammany rule in New York and knew it for
a symptom of the disease that made a national
danger of the entire rank and file of the Democrats; he
saw the integrity of Leighton, and accepted it as
a true token of Republican virtue.  He wanted the
government restored to its pristine simplicity, wealth
curbed of its newly developed predatory instincts,
religion restored to its place in the daily thought
and conduct of man.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  Leighton's announced intention to "clean
up" New York was proving, nevertheless, a slow
process.  He had great difficulty in obtaining
evidence against the Democratic politicians whose scalps
he had promised to hang to the belt of the public.
Grand Juries had a way of including enough partisans
of these politicians to prevent the finding of true
bills.  When true bills were found, petty juries
generally contained enough Democrats to persuade the
other jurors to acquit or to hold out for a
disagreement.  Even when convictions were secured, the
appeals had to be argued before appellate courts
composed of men that owed their positions to friends
of the appellants.

"It's rotten luck," said Leighton, "but I believe
they've got us scotched.  We've tried seven cases,
four of them twice and two three times; we've had
our hands full with appeals, and the only one of the
lot that we've sent to jail is a peanut politician from
Second Avenue who doesn't control ten votes."

"Yes," said O'Mara, "and they let *him* go because
they believed he was getting ready to go back
on them next election."

"We've got to begin lower down," concluded
Leighton, "and work up."

He began immediately.  He found that, in violation
of the law, cocaine was sold at scores of places
on the East Side, and that the use of the drug was
spreading alarmingly.  Against these retailers he
proceeded with all the vigor he had shown in his larger
and less productive efforts.  Evidence to convict the
sources of supply was hard to get, since those sources
were high in Tammany politics, but small sellers and
street peddlers were rushed to jail with such
commendable speed that the trade soon seemed abolished.

Luke appeared in some of these cases, and won
most that he appeared in.  He had been feeling the
chill of disappointment, but this gave him fresh
courage.  One day, when Uhler was on vacation and
Luke was taking the work of the absent man, he
thought he saw the chance to approach "the people
higher up," which they had all been waiting for.

A gang-leader named Zantzinger had been dancing
with his wife at a ball on the second floor of a house
in Avenue A.  As he waltzed past the door leading
to the back stairs, a friend looked in and called
Zantzinger aside.

"Excuse me a minute," said the gangster to his wife.

He left her and went to his friend.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Butch Dellitt's down there," warned his friend,
nodding toward the door.  "His crowd's after you
'cause they say you piped off Dutch's brother-in-law's
poolroom to the fly cops.  He says he's goin' to
croak you."

"Where is he?"

"He'll be 'round front when you come out."

"Where is he now?"

"Down back."

"Down these stairs?"

The friend nodded.

Zantzinger walked to his wife.

"I've got a little business below," he explained.
"Wait here: I'll be right back."

He opened the door and descended the stairs.  As
he went, he drew his revolver.  Dellitt was standing
in the doorway, with his back to the stairs, smoking
a cigarette.  Without warning, Zantzinger shot him
through the head.  Then he returned to the
ballroom, apologized to his wife for leaving her so
hurriedly, and resumed his interrupted dance.

This was the story that came to the homicide
bureau.  Luke took it at once to Leighton.

"And this man Zantzinger," he reminded the
District-Attorney, "is the right-hand man of the
Tammany leader in that ward."

"Who saw him?" asked Leighton.

"Three men on the street."

"Got their names?"

"We can get them."

"Is the coroner on the case?"

Luke thought he was.

Leighton shrugged.

"Then that'll be the end of it," he said.

Luke could not credit this.

"Oh, yes," said Leighton wearily, "I mean it.
By the time he's done with the case, he'll see to it
nobody knows anything.  Why, man alive, that
coroner's the cousin of the ward leader."

"But you'll try?" urged Luke.  "You'll fight?"

Leighton swung back in his swivel-chair.  He put
his feet on his desk and clasped his hands behind his
head.

"No," he said, "I won't.  What's the use?  I'm
getting tired of trying to do things with all the
people taking no interest and a Democratic Mayor and
Police Commissioner fighting against me."  He spoke
like a man at last driven to declare something he has
long striven to conceal.  "If ever I want to be
re-elected," he continued, "this office has got to be
more careful about taking up cases that are lost to
begin with."

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  Luke fought hard with the ugly doubt this
incident raised.  He tried to convince himself that
Leighton had spoken only in a moment of passing
weariness and discouragement; but he daily found
this endeavor more difficult.  What suddenly turned
his mind to other things was the news that an aunt,
his father's widowed sister who lived in Philadelphia,
had died, leaving him a hundred thousand dollars.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  Luke had never expected to be possessed of
so much money.  His father's income was comfortable,
but it was well understood that the family
lived somewhat beyond it, and that what might be
left at the Congressman's death would go to his
widow for life and, after that, to Luke's sister Jane.
The Philadelphia aunt had inherited her fortune
from her husband, and her affection for her relatives
was generally supposed to be slight.  Luke,
consequently, found himself in a position for which he
was totally unprepared.

"I suppose," he said to Ruysdael, to whom he
went for advice, "that I ought to invest it."

"You ought to lose no time," counseled Ruysdael.
"A hundred thousand dollars is too much for a
young man to have at his call in New York.  It's
not enough to spend, and it's too much to gamble
with in the bucket-shops."

Ruysdael thought he knew a safe investment.

"There's a man named Forbes," he said—"Wallace
K. Forbes, who came to the offices of our estate
the other day when I happened to be there.  He
wanted to borrow just the amount you name, and my
agent says it's a good thing; but we happened to have
a bigger one on hand.  His concern's an old one, one
of the oldest American firms in its line; this man's the
third generation of his family to be in it, so it's
well-established and has the good old-fashioned element
of family pride behind it.  Nowadays, you don't
find many men regard their businesses the way an
English landed gentleman used to regard his estates
and his family honor; but Forbes seems to be an exception."

"What is the business?" asked Luke.

"Ready-made clothing, and well made, too, I'm told."

"Still, he does need money."

"Yes, but you couldn't get in if he didn't need it.
He only wants it to complete some improvements
he's begun.  He's perfectly well-grounded, but I
suppose he has to keep up with the progress of the
trade.  Of course, that very element of family pride
might disincline him to give an outsider any hold
on the business, but if you want me to, I'll have
Croy—that's the man that runs our estate for us—look
into the situation and sound Forbes."

Luke, after some satisfactory inquiries in other
quarters, acquiesced in this proposal.  All the
reports were good, and that of Herbert Croy, the
shriveled Ruysdael lawyer, was especially rosy.
Forbes expressed his willingness to meet Luke, and
Luke called at the offices of the R. H. Forbes &
Son's factory in Brooklyn.

The present head of the firm was a grave man with
a direct and unassuming manner.  His aquiline nose
gave his face the air of strength, and his mustache
and the hair about his temples being slightly touched
with gray, he seemed sober and conservative.  He
sat at a plain roll-top desk, in a room simply
furnished, and he lost no time in coming at once to
business.

"Would you like to walk through the place?" he
inquired, when he had told Luke much of what
Ruysdael had already said.

"I suppose I ought to," smiled Luke; "though
of course I don't know enough about the business to
appreciate what you show me."

Forbes smiled sadly.

"You are no different, then," he said, "from
most modern investors, or, for the matter of that,
most owners of businesses either.  In these times the
average president of a company thinks he earns his
salary by manipulating its stock; he seldom knows
anything about the work that makes the stock
marketable.  Our firm isn't like that."

Under Forbes's care, Luke was accordingly taken
through the factory, with which, he noted, the office
of the chief administrative was in close touch.  He
was shown the room where the cloth manufacturers
brought their products; the scales to weigh the
material; the windmill-like machine that spread the
offered fabric on its wide arms and, turning at the
will of the expert buyers, displayed its burden before
the examiners in a strong north light; the long boards
on which, having been re-rolled, the cloth, once its
quality had been thus determined, was again uncoiled,
an ingenious contrivance attached to the uncoiling-wheel
stamping its measurements at every fifth revolution.

"We have to be careful," Forbes explained.
"Business isn't so honest as it once was, and if the
cloth-makers could gain an inch in ten yards, they'd
do it."

The factory, which closed the end of a street,
was built about four sides of a small square, and the
center of this square was occupied by a large room
with overhead ventilation and lighting, the glass
fluted and sloping as the ribs of a Venetian blind may
be made to slope, so that, in summer, the sun's rays
would be tempered to the workers under it.  Here,
at the tables nearest the entrance, men were employed
at designing patterns of cardboard and working, amid
busy calculations, with rulers and T-squares, like so
many architects' draughtsmen.  From them the
completed patterns were taken to other tables at which
they met the cloth accepted in the first room, other
workmen tracing the designs in chalk upon pieces of
the cloth.  The problem of these second workers,
Forbes explained, was to arrange the designs in such
a way that almost no shred of cloth was wasted.
Luke observed that they solved it with astonishing
skill; and, as each piece was completed, a ticket was
roughly sewn on it with written directions for its
further progress and blanks to be filled in by the
signature of each worker responsible for its future steps.

Then came what to Luke was the most wonderful
part of the work.  Nineteen pieces of unmarked
cloth to be made into suits of the same style as that
on which the chalk pattern had been outlined, were
laid under that piece and the whole bundle given
to a man at a large table.  Through a slit in the
center of this table, a knife of incredible strength and
keenness plunged rapidly up and down.  The man in
charge forced the bundle against the knife, deftly
pushing it forward, so that the blade followed the
lines drawn upon the top piece, and in three minutes
a score of suits of clothes were cut into their various
parts and were being sorted and ticketed and signed
for waiting boys to carry them to the sewing-machines.

"Those patterns look like the parts of a jig-saw
puzzle," said Luke, "and that knife looks like a
cross between a jig-saw and the guillotine."

"It cuts twenty suits at a time," said Forbes
gravely, "and the bottom one doesn't vary the
thirtieth of an inch from the one on top."

"Twenty suits!"  Luke wanted to rub his eyes.

"Yes; but the inventor is still at work on the
knife.  We hope soon to get one that will do three
dozen."

At each corner of the building was an elevator and
a stairway, the latter walled in so to serve as a
fire-escape.  Forbes took Luke up one of these stairways,
a broad and easy flight of which the corners at each
landing were protected by curved wainscoting to
prevent jamming in case of panic.

The three floors above ground contained the rooms
in which the sewing was done and one room known
as the matching-room.  All seemed well lighted and
well aired and well protected by the overhead pipes
of an automatic sprinkling-plant.

In the matching-room girls especially trained to
the task selected, from vast quantities of samples,
the fitting shades of thread and buttons best adapted
to the different bundles of cut fabric brought by
elevators from the cutting department below.  Beside
them were four other girls, who worked at a
contrivance in which, when covered buttons were
required, an uncovered button, a piece of tin and a bit
of cloth were inserted, a lever pulled and the three
factors withdrawn ready clamped together and
complete for use.  From here, after the tickets had been
signed, and the necessary further directions added to
them, the cloth was sent on to the sewing-rooms.

Luke found those sewing-rooms crowded with machines
of possibilities that he had heretofore never
dreamed machines could realize; machines horrible
because they seemed half-human, and diabolically
intelligent; machines that not only moved up and
down in the manner of the old foot-pumped
sewing-machine in the second floor back of his home in
Americus, but twirled and danced over the cloth
pressed under them by women feeding them as a
frightened keeper in a menagerie might feed an angry
beast.  They were all of them run by steam or
gasoline, and Forbes told Luke that they were all made by
one trust, which owned all the patents.  There were
different machines for every kind of sewing, for every
loop that could be required of the thread: machines
for hemming; machines for the cord-stitch, the
lock-stitch, the chain-stitch, and the damask-stitch;
machines for sewing the cloth together, for sewing the
lining, for sewing the trouser-seams; and there was
one machine, the needle of which moved in dizzy
zigzag, for sewing, on a sort of herring-bone design,
the stiffening material into coats.

Next Luke was shown a room in which, on
benches a foot from the floor, beside tables six inches
high, sat rows of intent little girls, their arms flying
like flails as they stitched the shoulders into the coats,
and still another row in which still other girls, their
arms flying in a similar manner, sewed buttons on
coats, waistcoats, and trousers—the only two
processes that invention was as yet unable wholly to
deliver over to machinery.  Lastly, there was a
half-floor given to what at first looked like linotype
machines, and at these sat brawny women who passed
over the coat-shoulders long flat-irons, each heated
by flexible tubes attached to it and reminiscent, for
Luke, of those terrible instruments that, immediately
revolving, grind the heart and lungs out of a
patient's teeth.

Forbes exhibited it all with a quiet pride.  He
said there was no work sent out of the factory, and
so no "sweating"; the factory was a union shop;
there had never been but one strike, and that one
was speedily adjusted by arbitration.

Luke was impressed.  He secured favorable reports
from a financial agency and from a firm of
expert accountants.  Then he invested his fortune
in R. H. Forbes & Son.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  About this time, the United States Senate
happened to be investigating itself and unavoidably
stumbled upon a witness whose testimony filled all
the newspapers for several weeks and remained a
matter of public comment for quite two months.
Perhaps because he had fallen out with his
employers, this witness insisted upon telling how he had
for ten years been hired by a combination of the
ruling corporations to influence national legislation.
Five hundred letters and telegrams substantiated his
assertions; he gave dates and mentioned places; the
names of popular idols fell from his lips with
infinite carelessness, and the idols broke as their names
fell.

Speaking in unimpassioned detail, the informer
showed how his activities had covered the entire
country and included the chiefs of both the large
parties with a splendid catholicity.  He had bought
the services of labor leaders to end strikes, had
broken up unions by purchasing information from
their members, and had ended one dispute by having
himself appointed a member of its arbitration board.
He had operated in congressional campaigns throughout
the Union, and he told how he had bought the
defeat at the polls of members of Congress that
sought re-election after having opposed the corporate
interests at Washington, and how he had spent
thousands of the trusts' dollars in electing candidates
who, personally or through their bosses, promised
that they would support a high tariff and prevent
the passage of laws too kindly to the working class.
He had hired congressional clerks and pages, the
former to betray what advance information came
to them, the latter to pick up valuable gossip.  He
had the secretaries of Congressmen on his salary-roll
when he could not buy or defeat their masters
or when, having bought those masters, he feared
treachery.  He had secured the appointment of those
legislators in his pay to important committees, and
he had, he said, planned and secured the establishment
of a national tariff commission for the benefit
of the powers he served.  Those powers were headed
by the man that Jack Porcellis likened to Shakespeare
and that the derelict in the Essex Street saloon called
the King.

Luke, who of course had nothing to do with the
management of the Forbes company, nevertheless
occasionally passed an evening at the quiet Brooklyn
home of its president, who was a widower living
alone with his only child, Betty, a pretty,
high-colored, brown-eyed girl, as yet unformed and only
twenty-two years old.  As a rule, these two men sat
in the parlor, a room that retained the character of
Forbes's grandfather, and talked of everything and
nothing, the girl rarely intruding upon them.  It
was inevitable that they should, during the floodtide
of the Washington scandal, speak of its revelations.

"I don't know what to make of them," sighed
Luke.  "It seems as if the fellows at the head of our
party were no better than the fellows at the head of
the other."

"They are not," said Forbes with conviction.
"Here they all are blackmailing the tariff, a system
the country owes all its prosperity to."

"We shall have to pick honest leaders in the future,"
Luke reflected.  He still believed in the power
of a party's individual members.  "We've simply
been too easy-going in the past."

Forbes thought this would avail nothing.

"The parties themselves are rotten," he declared,
"and the deeper a man gets into them, no matter
how well he starts out, the more certain he is to be
infected.  You see how even the good measures are
fraudulently put through.  Then here's our own
state with a Governor we all believed in—a
Democrat, to be sure, but an anti-Tammany man.  He
comes out for a fine thing like direct primaries.  Well,
the other day an Assemblyman I know went to him
and asked him to sign a bill this Assemblyman wanted
passed.  What happened?  The Governor said:
'Will you vote for the direct primary law?'  The
Assemblyman happens to be a fool and against that
law.  He said he'd vote against it, and he tells me
the Governor told him in that case the other bill
wouldn't be signed.  No, the thing we need in this
country is a brand-new party run by honest business
men on sound business principles."

Luke could not yet consider such a revolution; but
the next day the papers contained further news of the
senatorial investigation, which lent weight to Forbes's
opinion.  A witness, after testimony further
entangling that great financier whose power seemed to
pervade the country's entire industrial system, described
an alleged forgery in the books of a railway known
to be controlled by Porcellis's hero and eager to
evade the anti-trust laws.  According to this witness,
a "double entry" of $2,000,000, representing
securities that the road assumed in taking over two
other roads, was carried in the "Consolidated balance
sheet" for some time, then erased from one side of
the ledger, and left as a credit balance on the other
side.

"They took all the securities of the acquired
roads," he swore, "and used them as securities for
a bond-issue.  They got that money and used it to
finance two other outside transactions that they sold
out at a tremendous profit."

He named as participants in this three Senators
high in the councils of Luke's party.

"Of course they're a bad lot," Leighton cheerfully
admitted when the District-Attorney's staff
gossiped about the latest revelation, "and the party is
no better right here in New York than it is in any
other state.  But you can't repair an organization
by smashing it.  What we need is reform within the
party.  The party must reform itself.  And that's
what I'm trying to bring about."

He did, indeed, give out interviews to this effect,
and gathered a considerable following.  A little
convention was called at Saratoga where, fired by fresh
faith, Luke made his first political speech, holding
up Leighton as the Erasmus of Republicanism.  It
was an unfortunate simile, for the opposition press
lost no time in lampooning the District-Attorney as
Erasmus at his weakest; but the movement grew, and
Luke, in common with his fellow-believers, began to
see light in the political darkness.

He still possessed the beautiful power of dreaming,
and when, by night, coming from a theater or
leaving the house of Mrs. Ruysdael or one of her
friends, he turned into Broadway and saw the myriad
lights of its cafés mount heavenward and mix with
and illuminate the pillars of smoke and steam rising
from its chimneys, he could detect in their wreaths
the faces of grinning devils raised by the pestilential
life below, laughing at it, dipping enormous white
claws to stir it, and then hissing skyward as if to
proclaim, because of what New York was, their
defiance of God.  Once or twice, to escape from them,
he walked as far downtown as Wall Street and
loitered through the silent night, where the three
churches stood on the modern battleground of mad
finance to remind of its history the city with the
shortest memory in Christendom.  Mentally, he converted
that portion of the town to what it once had been.
He saw it the home of a modest aristocracy in simple
houses along shaded streets, a center of good taste,
of culture, of social well-being.

The old Astor House, now fallen into shabby
desuetude, he pictured as it was when state banquets
were given there, and when it was the one place in
which the distinguished visitor would stop.  Close by
the spot where the Woolworth Building to-day
houses eighteen thousand persons, the Astor House
had moved Horace Greeley to admiration because
six hundred and forty-seven persons slept under its
roof.  There Clay had received the news of his
nomination in 1844, and Webster the word of his
defeat at the hands of the Whig convention in 1852.
That hotel had been familiar to Pierce, Van Buren,
Buchanan, and Taylor, to Seward, Choate, and
Douglas.  Edward, Prince of Wales, had given it an
almost royal atmosphere, and recollections of
Lincoln still hung about its tarnished walls.

Would the old spirit come back again?  Could it
return?  Luke was sure that it could and would.
He was sure that Leighton, and the honest men
associated with him, had begun a movement that must
end by restoring the nation's lost ideals.  Government
would govern, honest property would be protected,
religion would again open man's eyes to his own
littleness and the omnipotence of the Deity.  There
would be legislation that would be the end of
industrial combinations, of the crushing of the small
manufacturer and the grinding of the faces of the poor.
No more national banks would be merged, none
would engage in promoting or underwriting; interlocking
directorates would cease, and the concentration
of credit, the Money Trust, would forever after
be an impossibility.  It was so easy.  It needed but
an awakened conscience in the majority of the voters
and a few conscientious men to lead.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  Luke's father died within three years after
the young man entered upon his duties under Brouwer
Leighton.  The elder Huber had embarked his small
fortune in an adventure that, as events soon proved,
was opposed to one of the interests of the great
financier whom he had once so much admired: those
interests ruined the adventure and, more from grief
because of this than from any specific malady, the
Congressman fell in the fight.  He died proud of
his son—a pride that Mrs. Huber and Jane zealously
shared—and he left the family in Luke's care.

The young man, who had loved his father in spite
of all the differences between them, and long felt the
loss, met this situation without complaint.  Neither
the mother nor the sister wanted to go to New York,
and, as Luke managed to live within his meager
salary, he was able to continue for them the home
in Americus upon the income from his now
well-paying investment in R. H. Forbes & Son.  Jane,
indeed, soon engaged herself and was married to a
Doncaster lawyer who secured an election to the late
Mr. Huber's seat in Congress, so that Luke's
expenses in Americus were light.

He began to fall in love with Betty Forbes.  The
women of the Ruysdael set did not fail to attract
him, but he never considered them as within his
means, and so speedily placed them outside of his
desires.  Forbes's daughter, on the other hand, was
the feminine counterpart of her father, and, as she
grew, she developed many of his qualities, being
quiet, determined, unobtrusive, and womanly in the
sense in which men like Forbes used that word before
Woman began to give it a new significance.  Accepting
the world in the garb in which Forbes thought it
well to present it to her, she owned only the finest
standards of her type, and there was no meanness in
her.  Physically, she had that rarity in young women:
height combined with grace.  Her hair, as Luke saw
it, was like so much sunshine, her eyes were clear and
brown, and the radiance of her coloring not even a
man that was not her lover could deny.  Luke, for
his part, thought her far too good for him.  He told
himself she was all that the people of the Ruysdael
set should be and were not: she made important and
shameful the casual relations he had had with women
of the half-world and that in their occurrence—less
frequent than is usual in the lives of young men—had
seemed trivial and matter-of-fact; and therefore he
determined to win her, so soon as he could make
a place for himself through the pursuit of his ideals.

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  That pursuit grew daily more difficult.  The
candle of his faith in Leighton, though it continued
to burn steadily, burned less fiercely than of old.
The movement for reform within the party spread,
but it spread almost too rapidly; it came to include
certain politicians who were now for the first time
in their careers evincing a desire for the organization's
betterment, and that only after the organization
had failed to re-elect them to office.  These men, in
one or two instances, came into control, and it was
soon necessary to reform the reformers.  Sometimes
Leighton appeared disheartened, and Luke began to
acquire a weary and well-nigh uninterested manner in
dealing with his part of the crusade.

"Look here," he once said to his chief, "that
fellow you got a pardon for last week has been in
to see me."

"Yes?" said Leighton.  His feet were cocked on
his desk and, in his favorite attitude, he was leaning
back in his chair with his fingers clasped in his crisp,
black hair.  His face was not the face that Luke had
known when he first came to New York.

"Well," continued the assistant, "he came in just
after I got back from the Ludlow Street Jail.  That
place is full of nobody but husbands who won't pay
alimony, but the keepers act as valets and barbers
and do light housekeeping for the prisoners."

"It's the civil prison.  We can't help it."

"Couldn't you swing things so a Grand Jury would
report on it?"

"What's the use?  And what has Ludlow Street
got to do with Auburn, where our pardoned friend
has been?"

"Only this: the rich men in Ludlow Street are
living as if they were in a hotel, but at Auburn, this
fellow says, they've got a cell with pointed nails in
the floor so a prisoner sent to it for bad behavior
can't sit down or sleep.  They've——  Oh, I can't
go into it all now; but the women are treated as bad
as the men; the thing must be worse than the Black
Hole of Calcutta, and all the while the State's
paying for the warden's horses and carriages."

Leighton showed some interest, but later, when
Luke returned to the subject, he said there was nothing
to be done: the political situation would not just
then permit it.

Came the unmasking of one of the new partisans
of reform.  This man, a Simon Kaindiac, was an
inspector in the New York post-office.  Federal
detectives arrested him and showed him to have made a
fortune by extortion from swindling concerns that
were using the United States mails to entrap their
victims.

"I know, I know!" cried Leighton peevishly
when Uhler brought him the news in Luke's presence.
"But how am I to blame for that?  All the
papers will be at me for it.  As if I were responsible
for the business morals of every man that happened
to think as I do about the political ethics of the
party!"  He turned to Luke.  "What's on *your*
mind, Huber?"

Luke said that what was on his mind was this: the
office had that morning received the report of
investigators who pointed out that, since the success of
the cocaine raids, heroin had taken the place of the
proscribed drug.

"Well," said Leighton, "I'm sorry, but the laws
governing the sale of heroin aren't the same as those
governing the sale of cocaine, and, until they are,
you'll find you can't successfully prosecute under
them."

"We might get at the thing another way," Luke
protested.  His growing love for Betty had given
him new views on some old subjects.  "They say the
girls in the houses——"

Leighton swung his feet to the floor.  His tired
face worked irritably.

"Now, don't begin on them," he commanded.
"They're the police's affair, anyhow.  They've
always existed and always will.  They simply adapt
themselves to whatever form of society happens to
exist.  No really effective method of regulation, let
alone suppression, has ever been devised or ever will
be.  Gee whiz, young man, do you know what you'll
get up against if you tackle this subject?  For four
thousand years the high-brows have been trying to
make it unpopular, and they haven't succeeded yet."

It was much the same when Luke and O'Mara
came across the trail of corruption among the police.
They found one man who would make affidavit to the
fact that patrolmen had paid him to instigate
burglaries in order that the patrolmen might make arrests
and win promotion.  This man had friends among
the keepers of illegal resorts who would swear to
paying tribute to police captains.  He introduced the
two lawyers to a collector who said that $2,400,000
were yearly paid in this way, that he himself was the
go-between for a police lieutenant, securing from
fifty to five hundred dollars a month each from those
who bought protection.  No discretion seemed to be
used, and he showed checks to corroborate his story.

"Do you think you could do anything on such
evidence?" sneered Leighton.  "You couldn't send a
yellow dog to jail on it.  This fellow confesses he's
a crook himself.  Start an agitation to force the
Police Commissioner to resign as unfit?  Not much!
If he resigned, 'unfit' would mean 'guilty.'  His
crowd's in the saddle, and if you want to unhorse
him, you've got to unhorse them."

He walked up and down the floor.

"The trouble with us is we don't fight the devil
with fire," he said; "and the trouble with the whole
system is too many laws.  There are too many lawyers
at Albany and Washington; they know all about law
and nothing about Man, so when the public
conscience turns over and whines in its sleep, these
fellows think they can cure it of what ails it by passing
a few more laws.  They pass a law against dance-halls,
and they breed brothels.  That's the way it
goes all down the line.  They pass a lot of such laws
and then say: 'Now, let the District-Attorney do
the rest.'  I wish they had my job for one day!
People have got to understand that other people don't
indulge their tastes out of mere love of law-breaking."

He took another turn of the room.

"And if we're going to whip political gangs," he
said, "we must have a political gang of our own, and
one better than the one we happen to be fighting.
There's Tim Heney over on the East Side.  He may
be as crooked as God makes them, but when people
give him votes, he gives them coal in winter and
picnics in summer.  He goes to their funerals and their
weddings, and he knows more about what the people
of this country want than Thomas Jefferson would
have known if he'd lived to be a hundred.  And
what's more, he can do what none of your statesmen
ever can do: he can keep them quiet.  Do you
wonder?  Think what he does for them.  Do you wonder
they stick to him?"

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  Luke began to believe that Forbes was right:
There was need of a new party.  Daily his lethargy
increased; daily he lived more in his love for Betty
and in the dreams that emerged less and less upon
the plane of his actual life.

His contact with the bar did not raise either it or
the bench in his estimation.  In a file of documents
at his office, the legacy of a former administration,
he came across vouchers for sums aggregating
$3,000 paid by a local railway to witnesses who had
sworn against a lawyer indicted for subornation of
perjury in pressing a damage-case against the
company, and among these was one for $500 paid to
the referee that signed the report.  He heard of a
rural courthouse that by night became a gambling-house
conducted by court officers; there was a judge
on the Pacific Slope who sold a patent, the idea for
which he stole from the plaintiff in a patent case in
his own court; the District-Attorney of Doncaster
County, in Pennsylvania, told Luke that only the
statute of limitations saved from jail three associate
judges of that county who had accepted bribes in the
granting of liquor licenses, and that a judge in a
nearby county had accepted $3,500 toward his
campaign fund from brewing companies whose retailers
must apply to him for licenses.  It seemed that of
two of the most prominent judges of the higher
court in New York, one was chosen directly through
the efforts of Tim Heney, and the other was the
brother of the principal member of a trust which
had cases in his court.  A judge of a Federal Court
was forced from the bench because of his financial
interests in a company with which he had to deal
in his judicial capacity, and a New Jersey judge,
a friend of Leighton, was said to be hearing suits
to which a certain railway was a party and then,
during vacations, appearing in a neighboring county
court as a lawyer retained by the same company.

The follies of the law appeared to be more numerous
than its faults.  One judicial decision enjoined
members of a labor union from the peaceable
persuasion from work of individuals not under agreement
to work for the corporation in the mills of which a
strike was in progress.  A Philadelphia jurist denied
the right of free speech to aliens.  In Illinois, Smith
appealed from a conviction for swindling Brown, and
the Supreme Court upheld him because the indictment,
which read that Smith "did unlawfully and
feloniously obtain from Brown his money," was
indefinite and misleading: the learned court held that
the pronoun "his" might refer to either party, and
that the Grand Jury might simply have been indicating
its belief that Brown obtained his own money
unlawfully.

Worse miscarriages of justice were, of course,
common, even in Leighton's office, and sentences were
often out of all proportion to the crimes that incurred
them.  The editor of a radical paper in Paterson was
given an indeterminate term in prison of not less
than one year and not more than fifteen years for
criticising the Paterson police.  The larger the scope
of a swindler's transactions, the better his chances of
immunity.  One minor case long remained in Luke's
memory.  A clerk in a trust company disappeared
with $25,000, and a fugitive bill of indictment was
returned against him; the runaway opened negotiations
with his former employers by means of advertisements
in the Paris newspapers and then used his
wife as an intermediary until the trust company
promised to have the District-Attorney submit the
indictment for a verdict of not guilty if the clerk
would return with the $15,000 still in his hands;
the careful fugitive hid $7,500 in Germany, and
returned with the rest; he refused to tell the
hiding-place until he was safe; the company found the
District-Attorney willing to follow its suggestion;
the verdict of Not Guilty was accordingly recorded,
and the clerk, free from further harm, made over to
the company the remaining $7,500 that he had left
in Europe as an anchor to windward.

There was probably no more laxity among lawyers
than among men of other professions, but to
Luke's mind it seemed imperative that traders in
justice should be especially just.  He came across
countless cases of pettifogging among shyster
practitioners, and nearly as many suspicious actions in
the ranks of their cleverer and, therefore, more
successful and eminent brethren.

Ever seeking remedies, he once drew up a list of
such as he found.  He wanted more publicity and
freedom of criticism; measures to curb the bench's
power to declare laws unconstitutional, to force it to
give fuller reasons in support of its decisions; he
wanted devices to end "the law's delays," simplified
procedure and judges who were closer to the people
and farther from the corporations; he thought the
courts of appeal ought to be forced to decide every
question in every case appealed to them; and he
advocated but one appeal in civil actions together with
the right of recall both in regard to judges and
to their decisions.

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  He had come to a point where he doubted, not
it is true Leighton's intentions, but his ability to
achieve them.  Those were the days when the
Progressive Party was being formed, and Luke for some
time considered it as a hopeful sign.  Forbes enlisted
in the ranks of the new organization and championed
it wherever he went, not least among the workers in
his factory.  Luke had joined a club of young men
who had for the most part inherited their money
and were unanimous for the new movement; it was
time, they said, that politics should be taken out of
the hands of the muckers, and they came near to
convincing Luke until, in a moment of enthusiasm, he
happened upon secrets which showed him that the
men in power in this party were not different from
the men that had spoiled Leighton's plan for the
purification of the Republican Party from within.
From a source he could not doubt, he heard that even
George Hallett had talked of offering his support
"because these old crowds are too greedy; they're
chargin' us too much; it's got to be highway
robbery that big business has to submit to, and I'm
tired of it."

For some time Luke lost faith in the possibility
of any cure.  There was talk of a movement to fuse
the reform voters of all parties, but it left him cold.
He had been a successful prosecutor, and his name
was familiar to newspaper readers; his advocacy of
Leighton had won him a prominence, even a certain
following, among the public; but the irony of life
was too much for him; he had, at this period, an eye
too appreciative of the odds against him.  He saw
Betty two or three times a week, took her motoring
and to the theaters, but he refrained from showing
her that he loved her, because he saw no chance of
offering her himself as a man worth while.  The
lethargy of his manner became more marked.  He
began to bear the outward tokens of one that does
not care.  To this he had come after four years in
New York.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER V`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  The hideous North Bridge disaster occurred
on a spring morning during the last year of
Leighton's first term in office.  The District-Attorney,
whose habitual disparagement of his post did not
dull his desire to retain it, was busy planning for
re-election, and the work of his staff, labor how they
would, was congested.  The assistants were straining
to make a record of convictions with which their
chief might go before the electors in the autumn,
and were giving to participation in political
councils every half-hour that they dared spare from their
legal tasks; they were hard driven and worn to
the nerves; yet the news of the wreck of the
Manhattan & Niagara Railway, immediately within the
city's limits, burst through doors that had been
opened only to men with power or appointments and
swept, even from the collective mind of the corps,
the bulking thought of jury lists and ballots.

The Manhattan and Niagara had entered New
York only a few years before, with a line that tapped
fresh territory.  Along this line real-estate
operators forthwith plotted ten or a dozen towns, and
white-and-yellow suburbs leaped up like mushrooms.
They were peopled by clerks and small businessmen
that came into the city over the M. & N. every
morning and returned home by the same route each
evening.

From the opening of the new line, complaints had
been common: it was said that the service was
inadequate, that the cars and other rolling-stock were
largely second-hand material purchased from the
older New York & New Jersey Railroad; that the
rails were the cheapest obtainable, the ties bought
from an abandoned branch line near Buffalo.  One
serious wreck had preceded that at the North Bridge,
but had not been followed by the improvements the
company had promised.  The patrons had protested
with all the vigor Americans exhibit when they feel
that a public-service corporation is cheating them,
and had stopped as far on the discreet side of action
as protesting Americans usually stop: the M. & N.'s
parsimony became grist for the mill of the humorous
weeklies and produced no further reaction.  This
morning, a train crowded with men going to their
offices plunged through a bridge crossing an uptown
street: a hundred passengers were wounded and
twenty-five killed.

The earliest editions of the evening papers
shrieked the news, and special editions rushed from
the presses.  In most of them the M. & N. had
taken care to be a heavy advertiser, but here was an
event so clearly due to the railway's known policy
that no paper could belittle the culpability of the
management: the bridge had been recently examined
and pronounced safe by state inspectors, yet all
reports agreed that it was constructed of the very
lightest material, and the earliest evidence showed that a
rail had flattened and thrown the train.  To persons
having a fair knowledge of current finance, it was
known that the M. & N. was controlled by the group
of capitalists who were actively at the management of
the nominally rival N. Y. & N. J.

Luke sent his office-boy to buy him the first edition
that he heard called beneath his window.  It placed
the dead at a hundred and the injured at thrice that
figure, and when Huber's eyes caught the obscure
paragraph that hinted at the real ownership of the
road, his cheeks, now so generally pale, reddened,
and the hand that held the paper trembled.
Something of his old indignation and purpose woke in
him.  He ordered the boy to bring him a copy of
each fresh edition as it appeared on the street, and
though the lists of victims shrank to their true
number, the outstanding fact of the owners' guilt remained.

Leighton passed through Luke's room on his
return from luncheon.  His face was drawn with the
long worry of his campaign; he had been eating with
two politicians and shaping plans while he bolted
food.

"Begins to look as if we can get the indorsement
of the anti-Tammany Democrats," he said as he
hurried by.  "I've just had a talk with Seeley and
Ellison.  They're coming here at three o'clock."

Luke held up his paper.

"This is an awful thing," he said.

"What?" asked Leighton.  He passed beside
Luke's desk.  "Oh, the North Bridge wreck?  Yes,
isn't it?  When Ellison and Seeley come, don't let
anybody butt in on me."

"You know who are really the responsible crowd
in the M. & N.?" Luke persisted.  His manner was
the sleepy manner that had grown upon him for the
past twelvemonth, but his eyes were keen.

"Yes," said Leighton absently.  He ran his
fingers through his always disordered hair.  "Yes I
know, but we couldn't prove it."  He looked at his
watch.  "Don't forget," he concluded, "you're to
head off anybody that comes after three o'clock,
and if you're busy, then turn them over to one of the
other fellows."


§2.  At half-past four Luke's office-boy announced
James T. Rollins.

Luke looked up heavily from the latest edition of
the *Evening World*.

"Who's James T. Rollins?" he inquired.

The boy did not know.  "But he looks like he
owned the Stock Exchange," he said.  "Wanted the
Boss: I told him he was busy."

Luke wearily laid aside his paper.

"Very well, bring him in."

The boy went out and straightway reopened the
door to admit the visitor.

Dressed in a russet brown, Rollins was short and
stout; his eyebrows were bushy, and he made an
effort to keep his thick lips drawn in a firm line.
He so much resembled the pictures of the man just
then predominant in Luke's mind that the assistant
District-Attorney was startled.

"Mr. Rollins?"

The visitor tried to speak, but seemed to be
unable to accomplish articulation.  He nodded.  He
stood erect in the attitude of one accustomed to
receive orders, and his right hand tapped his stiff
hat against his thigh.

Luke indicated a chair beside his desk.

"Sit down."

Rollins complied.  He sat far forward in the
chair, as if expecting to be ordered out of it at the
next moment.  Both hands now clutched the brim
of his hat, which he held between his fat, outspread
knees.

"You wanted to see Mr. Leighton?" inquired Luke.

Rollins coughed.

"Yes, sir."

"I'm sorry."  Luke was accustomed to callers of
the hesitant sort: he wished that this one would go
and leave him alone with the new idea that was growing
in his brain; but Leighton, like the good politician
that he was, had always given strict orders that every
caller should be well received.  "I'm afraid
Mr. Leighton's very busy now.  He has some most
important business in hand."

Rollins made an effort toward dignity; his words
succeeded, but his manner of uttering them failed:

"My business is important, too."

"And immediate?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then perhaps I can attend to it for you."

Rollins shook his head.

"I've got to see the District-Attorney."

"But I am his assistant."

"Yes, sir, I know.  But this is confidential."

Luke began to lose patience.

"Well," he said, "as I told you, I'm sorry, but
you can't see him."

In spite of Leighton's orders and his own
customary obedience to them, Luke's voice had become
sharp.  It was just then only the sharpness of an
underling; but, because Rollins himself was an underling,
the visitor resented it, and this resentment gave
him the courage he wanted.  He stood up, and he
bore himself with an erectness which had a fresh
character.

"It's him that will be sorry," he said.  "I came
here to give him information that'd re-elect him."

Notwithstanding the man's new attitude, Luke
thought he scented the crank.  All sorts of cranks
infested the District-Attorney's office, and every sort
was certain it could purge the city or re-elect
Leighton.  Luke lost his temper.  He spoke with the drawl
with which he commonly spoke, but his tone was
bitter.  His tongue laid hold of the uppermost
thought in his head.

"I suppose," he said, "you've come here to place
the blame for the North Bridge wreck?"

The breath caught in Rollins's throat.

"How did you know?" he demanded.

It was not a crank that asked that question: it
was a sane man badly startled.  Luke recognized
the distinction and instantly resolved to push the
advantage he had fortuitously gained.  He rose,
smiling slowly.

"You've told me you knew I was one of the
assistant district-attorneys of New York," he
drawled.  "I would advise you to act on the knowledge,
Mr. Rollins, and not to lose any time about it."

"I——" began Rollins; but bluster came to the
aid of his timidity.  "No," he said, "I've got to see
Mr. Leighton."

Luke had no idea who his visitor was or what
information he might possess, but he was now
certain that worth-while information was in Rollins's
possession.  Without further fencing, the lawyer,
therefore, resorted to an old stratagem that he had
learned when he first entered the District-Attorney's
office: on the bare chance that the evidence might be
documentary and within reach, he took a quick stride
towards Rollins, raising his right hand as if to seize
him.  At once the right hand of Rollins shot
upward and stopped protectingly over his breast.

"Now then," said Luke, "hand me those papers
that you've got in your breast-pocket."

"No," said Rollins; "no; they're for Mr. Leighton."

"Hand them over.'"

"They're mine."

"If you don't hand them over," said Luke lazily,
"I shall take them."

"You've got no right to!"

"You'd better save yourself trouble, Mr. Rollins."

"I won't!"

From under his lazy lids, Luke saw that the man
was only frightened.  With a flash of inspiration, the
lawyer guessed something of the truth.  This fellow
was probably a clerk in the M. & N. offices.

"You won't be arrested for robbing the office-files,
if that's what you're scared about," he said;
"and you won't be told on and discharged."

Rollins was visibly relieved.

"You give me your word, Mr. Huber?"

"I do.  Come on now: let's see what you've got."

"And—I'm not a rich man, Mr. Huber."

Luke's face showed his disgust.

"I shan't pay you a cent," he said; "but I
daresay Leighton won't mind paying.  Only even he
won't buy a pig in a poke.  Give me those papers.
If they're worth anything, I'll take you into the
District-Attorney's room right away—or, if there's
somebody in there, I'll have him out here."

Rollins realized that Luke meant what he said.
He believed, moreover, that his inquisitor was merely
cautious.

"All right," he agreed, though with some
reluctance.  "This is a letter from my employer to a man
that always had to return such letters after he's read
them.  The other letter is the letter from the rail
manufacturers that's referred to in the first one.  I
got them both by——"

"I can guess how," said Luke.

He put out his hand and into it Rollins placed
two sheets of paper, that were headed on top simply
by an embossed Wall Street address and dated almost
five years before.

Luke read:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class::  small noindent white-space-pre-line

"*Confidential*.
   "MR. ROBERT M. DOHAN,
      "Delaware Avenue,
         "Buffalo, N. Y.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: small

"DEAR MR. DOHAN:

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: small

"I understand that the bill of which you have spoken to
me will be passed and become a law to-day.  I have just
seen Messrs. Hallett and Rivington and have secured their
agreement to the plan outlined in my personal conversation
with you last week.  In view of the favors that you have
done me in the past, I think it fair to tell you, *for your own
use only*, that my friends have decided that they and I ought
to do what you thought they might decide, viz.: unload at the
end of five years.  Considering your contemplated resignation
next year, this will not affect you, except favorably in case
you care to manipulate your own holdings in accordance with
this news.

.. class:: small

"I note what you say about the estimate submitted by the
construction-department; also the letter of the steel-rail
manufacturers which you inclosed, in which they say that the grade
I suggested might not wear well.  I think their use of the
word 'dangerous' is absurdly exaggerated.  We have used this
grade on several of our roads and feel sure from long experience
that, with proper repair-gangs, it will wear for five years as
well as the best.

.. class:: small

"My desire and the desire of my associates is to protect the
interests of the stockholders.  With that in mind, I should
state, what you have probably already gathered, that we feel
that the new line must be built and operated with all possible
economy."

.. vspace:: 2

The signature was the signature that Luke expected.

"Those rails," said Rollins, "weren't replaced.
Dohan resigned, and these letters have been in our
office ever since.  The crowd was planning to
unload in November."

"Yes," said Luke dryly.  His face was immobile
and his voice calm, but his heart seemed to beat
against his ribs, demanding freedom.  "Come on in
here to Mr. Leighton's office."

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  He had forgotten Seeley and Ellison, but
they were already gone, and Leighton was alone.
Apparently the conference had been satisfactory, for the
District-Attorney's face was a little less careworn.

"Mr. Leighton," said Luke, closing the door,
"this man"—he indicated Rollins by a lazy movement
of his hand—"is a secretary in the employ of
the person to whom these letters belong—or
belonged."  He held out the letters that Rollins had
given him.

Leighton's face clouded.

"Office business?  I thought I told you I had some
personal matters to think over."

Luke choked an impulse of resentment.

"If you'll look at these letters," he said, "I
believe you'll find they apply to—both sorts of duties."

Leighton took the papers with a gesture of annoyance,
but when he saw the signature to the more
important of them, his eyes shone, and he looked up
quickly.

"Where did you get these?"  He flung the question
at Rollins.

The informer had been standing behind Luke, as
if seeking his shelter.  His breath came heavily.

"I found them in the office-files," he mumbled.

"He stole them," said Luke quietly.

"Oh, Mr. Huber, if you're going to talk like
that——"

"He stole them," Luke pursued—"or so he says.
The only question in my mind is: are they genuine?"

Rollins showed signs of resenting this suggestion
more keenly than the declaration that he was a thief.
Leighton, however, interrupted: he was squinting
at the letter that Luke had read in full.

"No," he said, "this is real enough.  I know the
signature."

"You know it?"  Luke was surprised.

"Yes, yes."  Leighton read the letter through;
then turned upon Rollins with a resumption of his
cross-examining manner.  "How much d'you want
for these?"

Rollins beat his hat upon his thigh.

"Well," he said, "they ought to be worth a good
deal to you, Mr. Leighton."

"I'll give you five hundred dollars."

"Mr. Leighton!"  Rollins was deprecating.
"Five hundred dollars!"

"What do you want, then?  Speak up."

"Five thousand would be nearer value, Mr. Leighton."

Luke turned away.  This was the part of the
business that he loathed.

"I'll give you two thousand and not a cent more,"
said Leighton.

Rollins thought himself now in a commanding
position.

"I can't consider that," he said with the nearest
approach to firmness he had yet shown.

"All right," said Leighton.  "Huber!"  He
handed the letters to Luke.  "Put these in your safe
while I telephone this fellow's employer."

"Mr. Leighton!"  Rollins bounded forward.
His fat face worked with rage, disappointment, and
fear.  "You wouldn't do that.  This is robbery.  It's
blackmail!  For God's sake, Mr. Leighton——"

"Two thousand dollars," said Leighton.

"But think a minute, Mr. Leighton!  I've been
in my job for seven years—worked up to it from
office-boy.  I could any time have sold tips along the
street for twice that money, and yet this is the first
time I've ever—ever——"

"Ever double-crossed your boss.  Well, why'd
you do it?"

"I don't know.  It was because this wreck is so awful."

"And what else?"

"Nothing else."

Leighton thrust a forefinger into the informer's face.

"*What else?*"

Rollins jumped back.

"Well, he—he didn't raise my pay.  I've got a
big family, and there's a mortgage on my little house
in Roseville, and a man in my position has to live
well, or people'd talk."

Leighton relaxed.  He swung back in his chair and
cocked his feet on the desk.

"I'll make it two thousand five hundred for your
family's sake.  That's my last word."

Luke, who had again turned his back on the hagglers,
the letters safely buttoned in an inside pocket
of his coat, wondered how his chief could afford such
an outlay.

"Is that really the best you can do?" whined Rollins.

"It is the best I *will* do," said Leighton.  Without
lowering his feet, he pulled toward him the
telephone, which was attached to his desk by an arm
that could be lengthened or shortened at the user's
will.  "Now, then, your boss has gone home long
ago; but I can get him at his house; do you want to
lose your job or make this money?"

Rollins surrendered.

"I guess I'll have to take your price," he said.
"But it's almost a charity I'm doing."

"Right!"  Leighton released the telephone,
quickly swung his legs from the desk and sat straight.

"And you'll promise nobody'll ever know where
you got these letters?"

"Certainly."

Rollins looked toward Luke's significant back.

"And Mr. Huber, too?"

Luke turned.

"I've already promised you that," he said.

Leighton smiled faintly as he said to Luke:

"I guess you don't happen to have two thousand
five hundred in loose change about you, do you,
Huber?"

"No," said Luke.  He saw nothing humorous
anywhere in the situation.

"Well, this is no affair for checks, and my bank's
uptown," Leighton continued.  "I don't suppose," he
said to Rollins, "you would care to give credit, my
dear sir?"

Rollins could smile, if Luke could not.  He shook
his head.

"My bank," said Luke, anxious to end the scene,
"is just around the corner.  It's closed, but the clerks
will still be there.  They know me.  I can get them
to let me in the side door, and I know they'll do me a
favor.  I've got just about that much on deposit."  He
looked at Leighton.  "Shall I take Rollins along?"

"Rollins?  Yes."  Leighton's good-humor seemed
to have returned to stay.  "Then hurry back here—alone.
I'll want to talk this thing over with you."

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  Luke paid and dismissed Rollins.  Returning,
he found Leighton walking rapidly up and
down his office.

"Shut the door," said the District-Attorney.  His
face was flushed; he spoke quickly.

Luke shut the door.

Leighton came forward and brought his hand
down on Luke's shoulder with a resounding smack.

"Do you know what this means?" he cried.  His
mouth was wide with laughter; the whole man
exulted.  "This re-elects me!  Nothing can keep us
out now, Huber—not a thing on God's green footstool.
All we've got to do is use these letters and
then sit back and fold our arms and attend to office
business.  Politics?  These two pieces of paper will
play all the politics we need, and more besides.  I
could shout, Huber; I could sing a regular Song of
Deborah.  What about Mr. Timothy Heney, *now*?
And his Tammany?  Gone the way of Sisera, my
boy.  Tim Heney!  'At her feet he bowed, he fell,
he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he
bowed, there he fell down dead!'"

Luke's old enthusiasm was rekindled.  He thought
that he had been misjudging Leighton.  Of course
the man had been discouraged: he had never before
been able to seize an efficient weapon with which to
shatter the forces of wrong; even at this time it was
only reasonable that his first thought should be of his
immediate political opponents; but the weapon was
put into his hand at last, the blow would be given
against both Tammany and Wall Street; it would
be the blow that Luke had hoped for when he read
the first accounts of the North Bridge wreck.

"There must be a special Grand Jury to investigate
the disaster," said Luke, his words falling over
one another much as Leighton's had done.  "We
must keep the letters dark till it's in session, and then
produce them.  We can give them to the papers right
afterward.  It will be jail for the lot of them.  Big
as they are, it'll be that.  It'll be the end of the whole
crowd!"

Leighton drew away.  His face changed.  His
entire attitude altered.

"What are you talking about?" he asked dryly.

"Why"—Luke was amazed—"about these letters,
of course."

"Well, do you think I'm green enough to waste
them on a jury?  Not much!"

Luke began to comprehend.  He felt unsteady.
He was standing close to Leighton's desk, and he put
out a hand and gripped the edge of its top shelf.

"Not give them to the jury?"  But perhaps he
was wrong.  Of course he was wrong.  "Oh, I see,"
he said; "maybe it's better not to risk any more lives
by waiting.  You're going to force this crowd to
put down a decent road-bed?  Only if you do
that——  Well, it's fine of you, but you'll not be any
better off politically."

Leighton turned his swivel-chair and sat down in
it.  His manner became that of an employer trying
to be calm and to instill reason into an annoying
employee.

"Young man," said he, "just you listen to me for
about two minutes.  Those fellows do control this
road, but they didn't operate it.  In spite of Rollins's
blessed letters, you can't absolutely say they operate
it.  But what they do operate, when they want to,
are the politics of this city, and if they tell
Tammany, yes, or me, to hold off and let an election go
the way they want it, why, hold off Tammany or
anybody else has to.  Nobody could win if they
said 'No.'  Now, then"—Leighton punctuated his
words with the rise and fall of an index finger—"they're
not actually morally responsible for the
conduct of the M. & N., but they'll know the publication
of these letters would make the public think
they were.  They'll know the publication would
wreck the road they're still interested in, smash all
their other stocks and depreciate all their other
interests, start a panic that might swamp even them,
and maybe begin a public row that would send them
close to jail, on general principles, legal evidence or
no legal evidence.  To stop that, they'd be willing
to have me elected, which they weren't yet quite
certain about being to-day.  I'll go to them quietly, and
then I'll surrender these letters, when they've kept
their part of the bargain I'll make.  And don't you
worry about loss of life.  That engineer was
probably green or drunk, or the signal man got rattled.
You'll see the coroner's jury says so.  But, anyhow,
once I'm safely re-elected, I'll take care the M. &
N. is better regulated than it has been.  There's no use
in a row: a little moral suasion will do the trick."

He tossed back, and clasped his hands behind his head.

The explanation had been too long: it was long
enough to allow Luke to master the shock of what
it implied.  He saw his last illusions concerning
Leighton fall under the impact of Leighton's own
words.  He was aghast.  He was ashamed of his
master; he was ashamed of himself for ever having
served such a master.  But he was not crushed.  As
his chief proceeded, Luke's soul rose through
indignation to red revolt.  By the time that Leighton
ceased speaking, Luke, except for two spots of
crimson on his cheeks, was captain of his rage.  He
leaned against the desk-side indolently, his eyelids
lowered, and when he replied it was with an
indifferent drawl.

"It doesn't much matter whether the engineer was
drunk or the signal man rattled," he said: "the rail
flattened, and the bridge fell.  The rail was drunk
and the bridge was rattled."

Leighton shook himself peevishly.

"You're trying to be humorous," he said.

"No; oh, no," said Luke gently.  "What I'm
getting at is, it seems to me the men who directly
controlled this road were directly responsible for its
operation.  I mean that the men who authorized
that letter, and insisted on the policy it lays down,
are guilty.  It strikes me they ought to be either
reformed or punished."

"Oh, hell!" said Leighton.  Heretofore, Luke
had always appeared to be on his side, so that the
District-Attorney did not know the meaning of his
assistant's outward calm.  "Those letters aren't
legal evidence enough."

"I think they are, Leighton.  Besides, I think
there are times when moral evidence goes ahead of
legal evidence, and ought to—and I think this is one
of those times."

"Well," said Leighton, "I don't.  So that ends it."

"Of course," Luke calmly pursued, "if you could
make these fellows re-lay the road, it might be worth
while to do no more than scare them, at least if you
don't consider the political ethics and consider only
the immediate protection of life."

"I told you I'd take care of the regulation of the
road as soon as I was re-elected."

"Ye-es.  But could you?"

"Certainly I could."

"I should say that once they'd got their letters
back, *you'd* be in *their* power."

Leighton got to his feet.  He was angry.  He
faced Luke, who did not shift his lazy pose.

"Look here," he said, "we've been friends, and
you've done good work for me, especially this afternoon——"

"Thanks," said Luke.

"But it looks as if the time had come when you'd
better understand who's the head of this office."

"You are," Luke assured his chief; and then
added: "I'm glad to say."

"Well, then, Huber, I've got to tell you that if
you don't act accordingly, we must part company."

Luke raised his listless eyes.

"You've quite made up your mind to do this thing,
Leighton?"

"Let you go?  Not if you'll only be reasonable."

"I mean this thing about the letters."

"Yes."

"You're going to make use of these fellows'
money-power in politics?"

"It's already in politics.  It always has been."

"But you are going to try to use it for yourself?"

"Yes, I am.  It's my own business."

"Is it?  That money is blood-money, Leighton."

"You're a fool!"

"I know I am.  But it's you that I'm worried
about.  You're quite determined?"

"*Absolutely.*"

Luke shrugged his shoulders.  He began to move
slowly toward the door.

"Here!" said Leighton sharply.  "Where're
you going?"

Luke scarcely looked at him.

"I'm going to write my resignation."

Leighton was startled, but he tried not to show it.

"Very well," he said, "write it.  But don't be
too fast: you may hand over those letters first."

"Letters?"  Luke seemed never to have heard
the word before.  "What letters?"

"Why do you try so hard to be an ass, Huber?"  The
District-Attorney extended his hand for the
papers that he had given Luke during the interview
with Rollins.  "Drop all this resignation rot—*My*
letters, of course."

Luke's face met Leighton's fairly.

"The only letters I have about me," he said with
quiet distinctness, "are two that are my property.  I
bought them with the last two thousand five hundred
dollars of my own money."

As the words came home to him, Leighton's face
grew purple.  His brows met in a knot.  At his
temples two veins pulsed visibly.

"What's that?" he cried with a straining throat.
"What's that?  You——  Give them here this
minute; they're mine!  They're mine.  They're mine!
You know damned well they're mine!"

He had not counted on this.  The unexpected
disappointment tossed him from the summit of the
hopes to which, that afternoon, he had been so
unexpectedly lifted.  He made a blind dash at Huber.

Luke's two hands caught both of Leighton's
wrists.  By the exertion of a superior strength that
scarcely showed itself, the assistant forced down the
master's arms and held them at his flanks.

"They are my letters," said Luke.

"Let go!"  Leighton wrenched at the imprisoning
grip; but he wrenched without effect.  "Let me go!"

"Certainly," said Luke.  He freed the panting
man.  "I merely wanted to protect myself and show
you it wouldn't help you to use force."

Leighton, his face still contorted, tried another
tone.

"It isn't fair of you, Huber.  I'm sorry I went at
you that way; but you know well enough those letters
belong to me."

"They belong," said Luke, "to the man that can
make the better use of them."

"What use can *you* make?"

"A better one than you say you will."

"They were brought here for me."

"By a thief."

"Well, you're not going to restore them to their
owner, are you?"

"Perhaps."

"What?" Leighton laughed cynically.  "So
*that's* what your moral tone's for, is it?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh, come on, Huber, I didn't mean that.
Anyhow, you know, I only asked you to lend me the
money."

"The letters," said Luke again, "belong to the
man that can make the better use of them."

"I'll do the right thing by you, Huber, if you give
them back to me."

"Thank you.  The real owner of the letters can
do more—when I'm for sale."

Leighton bent forward and began to whisper.

"I'll tell you what I'll do for you politically," he
began.  "I'll——"

"No thank you," said Luke.

"Well, then,"—Leighton, his face now white
from fear of loss, appeared to capitulate-"give
them back and I'll use them the way you want them
used."

The two men's eyes probed one another.

"I don't believe you," said Luke.

It was final, and it drove Leighton back to his
purple rage.

"I'll ruin you!" he threatened.  "And they'll
ruin you.  Go ahead and resign.  Resign?  You
can't.  You're fired!  Do you hear that?  You're
fired!  Now go and try to do something.  You can't
do a thing but sell those letters to the people they
were stolen from.  If you try that, I'll show you up,
and if you try anything else with those people, they'll
bury you so deep nobody ever can dig down far
enough to find you.  Do you know who you're up
against when you buck that crowd?  They won't let
you walk the same earth with them!  Go on.  You'll
be killed, and I'll be damned glad of it.  Fight them,
will you?  You might as well draw a gun on God
Almighty!  Now, then, get out of here.  Get out,
or I'll have you kicked out!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI

.. vspace:: 2

To his office on the twentieth floor of a Wall
Street skyscraper—that office with the mahogany
table at its center and the engraving of George
Washington between two windows—the master
came at his usual time on the morning of the day
following the North Bridge wreck.  He was dressed
neatly, as always, in a suit of russet brown.  Breathing
visibly, but noiselessly, he passed the resting ticker
and walked to one of the windows overlooking the
labyrinth.  His near-sighted, beady eyes peered
toward the web of streets below, on the cross-threads
of which the black dots that were hurrying men and
women bobbed like struggling flies.

The master rang for his secretary.

"Rollins," he said, "what's in the——"  He
stopped.  He had not looked up, yet he asked:
"What's the matter with you this morning?"

"Nothing," said Rollins.  "I——"  He coughed
behind his hand.  "I didn't sleep well last night."

"Take more exercise," said his master.  "What's
in the mail?"

"Thirty letters that need your personal attention, sir."

Nimbly the master ran them through his short
and stumpy fingers, the tips of which were delicately
rounded.  He dictated his terse instructions.  With
the daily routine again in motion, Rollins recaught
his employer's calm.

"Simpson has the begging letters?"

"Yes, sir."

"I guess," said the master in his most commonplace
tone, "there were more than the usual number
of anonymous threats."

"Only ten or twelve more."

"Burn them."

"Yes, sir.  I always do."

"And, Rollins, draw up a letter to the cancer
hospital and tell the management I have decided to
give them a special ward for fibroid tumor cases.
Their lawyers may consult with Judge Stein; I gave
him the details last evening.  Bring me the letter for
revision."

"Yes, sir."

The master proceeded through his customary schedule.

"Rollins," he said, when it was at last completed
and the secretary had been recalled.  "Mr. Hallett
and Mr. Rivington will be here"—he consulted
his watch—"in five minutes.  We are on no account
to be disturbed."

Hallett and Rivington came in, five minutes later.
Hallett looked angry, and Rivington frightened.
Though the hour was early, Hallett's white waistcoat,
fresh every morning, showed wrinkles, and its
wearer chewed hard at an unlighted cigar; there was
a deep perpendicular line over his short, thick nose.
Rivington, immaculate, pulled at his slightly gray
mustache.

"Good-morning," said their host.  His voice was
as nearly cheerful as it was ever.  "Sit down."

They took their places at the table, where there
was a pad of scribbling paper and a freshly sharpened
pencil before each.  Their host sat at the head
of the table, his hands flat upon the table-top, their
fingers extended, his elbows pointing ceilingward.

Rivington began at the midst of what worried him.

"It's a terrible thing!" he groaned.  "Think of
it; twenty-five people—and the women too!"

Hallett's comment was almost a bark.

"As soon as the coroner's jury lets 'em down
easy," he said, "we've got to see that everybody's
fired, from the division-superintendent to the
president of the road; that's what we've got to do.
There's one kind of carelessness that's not much
better than murder."

"Twenty-five people!" repeated Rivington.  The
numbers seemed to hypnotize him; he made a futile
gesture.  "And the morning papers——  Their
tone——  I don't like it."

The man at the head of the table watched them
both, but said nothing.

"Oh, the newspapers never worry me," said
Hallett.  "We can stop all but one or two, and nobody
cares what they say, anyhow.  They've been talkin'
for years.  They've got to fill their columns."

"Then there's the Board meeting," said Rivington.
"Next Thursday——  I don't see——  Really
I don't."

"The Board of Directors of the M. & N.'s all
right," Hallett reassured him.

"Perhaps.  But then, too, there is this new
reform element in town.  Talk of a fusion movement:
a fourth candidate for District-Attorney——  They
will be only too eager to get hold of something, and
this terrible accident——  It will give them just what
they want."

"They can't elect."

"I am not so sure.  The people—they aren't
what they used to be.  Something—I don't know
what—has taken possession of them."

Hallett bobbed assent to that.

"Yes," he said, "nowadays as soon as a man gets
a vote he stops minding his own business.  But we've
still got our grip on the wires."

"They may break."  Rivington's fingers returned
to their tugging at his mustache.  "The
wires, I mean.  It's ugly.  Twenty-five dead and a
hundred hurt——"

"*We* didn't hurt 'em."

Rivington looked toward the man at the head of
the table, but he sat crouched and silent.

"No," said Rivington; "but——"  His sentence
ended in a helpless waving of the hand.

"Then what are you worryin' about?" Hallett
challenged.  "We were only tryin' to keep up
dividends.  We had to choose between a little risk and
protecting the stockholders.  Lots of the stockholders
are widows and orphans.  Besides, it wasn't a
real risk; it was a recognized, legitimate business
risk.  Lots of other roads do it right along.  Our
own roads do."

"That bridge——" said Rivington.

"The state inspectors passed it a month ago.
And they passed the rails, too.  It's all up to them."

In his turn, Hallett glanced at the man at the
head of the table.  He saw the man's hairy hands,
fat and white against the mahogany, begin to move
as they always began to move before he made a
verbal attack upon conversation; but the man did not
speak.

"I know," Rivington was saying, "but with the
four candidates for the district-attorneyship all
looking for vote-getting material——"

"Buy 'em," said Hallett.

"Four?"

"Who's the fourth?"

"They haven't chosen him yet; but——"

"Buy 'em," repeated Hallett.

"Out of the four there might be one we
couldn't——"

"Anybody can buy anybody.  There are more
ways than one.  Anyhow, we're not even directors."

"We own the road.  Practically——"

"Nobody knows that."

"It seems to me——"

"They don't!"  Hallett spat to the floor a bit
of tobacco that, bitten from the end of his cigar, had
clung to his lips.  "They only think they do.  It'd
be the hardest thing in the world to prove that was
ever tried."

"Would it?" Rivington questioned.  "I really
believe——"

The quick, cold voice of the third man flashed
across their talk.  It was as if he leaped at them.

"We may own the road," he said; "but we don't
operate it.  Not one of us has officially any
administrative power in the matter of its operation.  You
gentlemen have forgotten that."  He smiled: his
teeth were pointed.

"Still," said Rivington, "if the fusion movement——"

He stopped there, not because of his habit of
speaking in tangents, but because the door opened,
and an old man timidly paused at its threshold.

The master of the office turned his head slowly.

"Simpson?" he said.

"Yes, sir," said the man at the door.

"What does this mean?  Where's Rollins?"

"He was using my room to compose that letter
about the hospital, and so I took his place."

"Didn't he tell you we were not to be disturbed?"

"Yes, sir; but this man"—Simpson held out an
envelope—"got by everybody.  He told me you
would see him at once if you only received his
message."

The man at the head of the table reached for the
envelope.  He read a card that it had contained.

"Show him in," he said.

He waited until Simpson had left to obey.  Then,
without wasting a glance on his associates, he
explained:

"This is the card of a man called Luke Huber,
Assistant District-Attorney.  He's written on it:
'Five minutes in regard to the North Bridge wreck
and your letters about it.'"

"Letters?" said Hallett.  "What letters?"

As he replied, the strong jaw of the man at the
head of the table worked as if he were chewing.

"That's what I mean to find out."

"Here?  Now?" Rivington gasped.

The man addressed nodded.  When a nod could
save words, he saved words.

"Is that the careful thing?" asked Hallett.

"I'll bet his card's a bluff and he never expected to
get in at all."

"That is precisely why I am having him in."

"Mr. Huber," announced Simpson.

Huber was still a young man.  He was so young,
and his youth was so ostentatious, that he
immediately courted the rebuke once administered to Pitt.
Moreover, he seemed to lack energy.  He was thin;
his face, though pleasant, was white.  The lids
dropped wearily over eyes that were at first veiled
from the three men who looked up, but did not rise
at his entrance.  His mouth, the lips of which were
only a pale pink, might have appeared firm, but
would certainly have given the impression of being
tired of firmness, and, when he bowed gravely to his
host, his bristling head inclined itself so slowly and
so slightly that the effort of the inclination, whether
mental or physical, was insultingly apparent.

There was no form of presentation.  Instead,
there was a pause that only Huber seemed not to
notice.  Rivington drummed on the table with his
long fingers.  Hallett chewed his cigar.  The other
man smiled so enigmatically that it was impossible
to say whether he intended to welcome or was amused
by his friends' discomfiture.

"Bring a chair for Mr. Huber."

Simpson did as he was bid.

Luke deposited a carefully brushed hat on the
table.  Then he sank into the proffered chair opposite
the leader of the trio and extended his long legs
under the mahogany.  His feet touched Rivington's,
and Rivington jumped.

"Well?" asked the man at the head of the table.

Huber did not raise his heavy lids.

"I am glad I found you three together," he said
slowly in a low and extremely gentle voice, "because
you are the three men that control the railroad."

Hallett grinned a broad grin.  This young fellow
talked as if there were but one railroad in which
the group was interested.

"What railroad?" he asked.

Luke slowly drew in his legs.  He regarded the
figure of the Persian rug that happened to be between
the points of his patent-leather boots.

"The railroad," said he, "that I suppose you have
been talking most about this morning."

"The Manhattan & Niagara?" blurted Rivington.

"We're not directors of that road," said Hallett
hurriedly.

"No," agreed Rivington.

"No," said Luke, quite as heartily, "you aren't
directors, but you direct it."

"We don't," snapped Rivington.

The man at the head of the table raised a soothing
hand.  He was still smiling.

"Come, come," he said, with an air of good-nature
that his friends had seldom seen him assume
during business hours.  "We're all gentlemen, I'm
sure.  Anything that Mr. Huber wants to say to us
in confidence——"

Huber interrupted.

"I never talk in confidence," said he; "and I
don't want anybody to say anything to me that he
would be ashamed to say in public."

His eyes were still hidden, and he still spoke
slowly and gently; but the mere import of his words
brought up short even the leader of the trio before
him.  That one's manner changed.  He was curt.

"We are busy men, Mr. Huber," he said.
"There are not many people in New York that we
would have allowed to take up our time this morning.
What do you want?"

Luke studied the figure on the rug.

"I want you three," he said in a tone not to be
quickened, "to tear up every mile of rails on the
M. & N. and replace those pieces of scrap-iron with
rails of a grade fit to bear the traffic they have to
carry."

Rivington's drumming fingers closed into his
palms.  Hallett let out an ugly laugh.  Only the man
at the head of the table, again changing his manner,
equaled Luke in tranquillity.

"Really, Mr. Huber," he said pleasantly, "without
admitting for a moment that we have the power
to do what you suggest, don't you think your request
is a rather large one?"  He had the air of
indulgently correcting a mistaken child.

The young man, gazing at the rug, shook his round head.

"No," he said, "not so large for you as its alternative."

"And that?  It is——"

Rivington had put the question, but it was toward
the man at the head of the table that Luke as he
shot out his sudden reply, raised his eyes.

"Jail," said Luke.

"Do you mean to threaten us?" cried Rivington angrily.

Hallett laughed.

The man at the head of the table only smiled.

"Not at all," said Luke.  "I am merely stating
a fact.  In coming here, the only thing I hesitated
about was whether it would be better for the people
to have safe transportation immediately guaranteed
or to have you three in jail."

"You seem to forget, young man," said Hallett,
"who it was elected the man that made you assistant
district-attorney."

Luke gave him the briefest of glances.

"It was because I found out who elected him that
I resigned the job," he answered.  "I have just been
offered the Municipal League's nomination for
District-Attorney.  When *I* am elected, it will be by the
people."

"That will be about 2000 A.D.," sneered Hallett.

Luke shrugged his thin shoulders and returned his
gaze toward the leader of the trio.

"A bridge falls on one of your roads in this
county," he said.  "It kills twenty-five people and
wounds a hundred—all passengers in one of your
trains.  You will say the state inspectors declared
the bridge O.K.  Maybe they did, though they ought
to go to the electric chair for it.  That doesn't
matter.  What I can prove by thirty witnesses is that
the train left the bridge before the bridge fell.  A
rail flattened and threw the train.  Instead of
sending you men to jail—and only because I think this is
better for the safety of the public—I will give you
one month to begin laying decent rails on this
road—actually get *bona fide* work under way.  If you
don't do that, I'll make public the whole truth, get
you indicted, go into court as a witness and produce
two letters, one forwarded to you and the other
signed by you.  The first of these is a letter to the
president of the road written by the steel manufacturers;
it warns him that the cheap rails he's ordered
are dangerous: that letter he sent to you.  The
second is a letter from you to the president of the road
in which you say you want the poor-grade rails used
because you don't want to increase the running
expenses, and you order a general keeping-down of the
road's expenses because of a plan for you three to
unload your stock along about this December."

Luke rose.  He relapsed into the weary young
man of ten minutes before.

"You have one month," he said.

He picked up his hat, rubbed it with a caressing
hand, and left the room.

The three that he left stared at one another.  Then
both Hallett and Rivington looked at their leader.

"It's an infamous—it must be an infamous lie!"
cried Rivington.  "Letters like that—men don't
write them!"

Without moving a muscle of his face, the man at
the head of the table looked at Rivington.

"All men say they don't," he corrected, "and all
men do."

"What?" asked Hallett.  "You're joking, and
this fellow can't ever make it good.  It's a bluff."

"Gentlemen," said the man at the head of the
table, "it's the truth."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VII

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  When Luke, on the afternoon preceding his
Wall Street interview, had walked out of Leighton's
office and the city's employ, it was with no certain
plan for further action.  His years of experience as
an assistant prosecutor had demonstrated to him that
something was drastically wrong with the modern
administration of justice and practice of the law; his
life in New York had shown him the evil influence of
the money-power that seemed to be set in motion by
the author of the Rollins letter and certainly
corrupted the entire body of the nation, and his political
work had discovered to him what he came to consider
the inherent rottenness of the organized political
parties.  The effect of all this was made acute by
the horror at the North Bridge wreck and the
culmination of his mistrust in Leighton.  Luke's sole
immediate sensation was that of a man who finds
himself in a bog: he did not think of draining the bog
for the benefit of future pedestrians; he thought only
of extricating himself from the mire.

That night at his club, however, he began to
consider the larger aspects of the case.  He was in the
writing-room, intent on composing for the next
evening's papers a statement of his reasons for parting
company with Leighton.  In formulating these, he
found his charges to be precisely the charges recently
formulated by the group of municipal reformers who
were clamoring for a fusion of the best elements of
all parties to elect, by honest methods, honest men
that would purge New York of its civic shame.  He
recalled how this Municipal Reform League, growing
steadily, had worried Leighton, and how its
promoters prophesied that, if successful in the place of
its origin, it might well spread throughout the
country.  When he first heard of it, Luke had been too
deep in the affairs of his chief to be warmed by it;
but to-night his vision was cleared.

He telephoned to two of the League's leaders.
They came to his club and talked with him until long
past midnight, themselves telephoning inquiries and
instructions to friends and lieutenants, and
summoning other leaders to join them.

Luke told them much.  He betrayed no secrets of
his recent employer, but he could honorably tell
enough to make it clear to them that their belief
in the necessity of reform was correct, enough to
have weight with the voters should he speak to them
in the new cause.  His public record, it appeared,
had long impressed the reformers; the firmness
underlying his slow habit of talk, and the
determination imperfectly covered by his lazy manner,
impressed them now.  He moved and fired them.

The Rollins letter he did not mention.  He was
more than once tempted, but he had resolved upon
provisional silence before ever he sent for these
leaders.  He weighed carefully the merits of the courses
open to him and decided that, large as would be
the benefit of a public airing of his charges, and
excellent as might prove the salutary example of a
prison term for America's chief financiers, the
airing might be lessened by those financiers' subtle
influences upon popular opinion, the prison term might
be escaped through similar influences, and all good
results would in any case be long delayed.  On the
other hand, it was evident to him, in his present
frame of mind, that the immediate safety of the
M. & N.'s patrons was paramount, and that this safety
could probably be secured by threatening those
morally responsible for it.  Such a threat, with a
rigid time-limit, he therefore elected to administer.

The first result of his conference with the
reformers was unexpected.  At eight o'clock next morning,
three of their most prominent men, who had not been
with him on the night before, came to his apartments
at the Arapahoe in Thirty-ninth Street.  They
had been in all-night consultation, and they told him
that their organization had determined to put a full
ticket in the field at the coming municipal election,
but to center efforts in a struggle for the
district-attorneyship: they had chosen him for their
candidate.

Luke, in dressing-gown and pajamas, his unbrushed
hair more than ever erect, looked from one
of his callers to the other.  There was Venable, a
man of small but independent means, who had grown
gray in the long war for civic betterment, meeting
defeat at the polls and, what is harder to bear,
disappointment in elected candidates, and again and
again emerging to hope and fight on; Nelson, a
successful wholesale druggist, whose business seemed
divorced from politics, and whose hobby was the
improvement of political conditions; and Yeates, a
young man of family and fortune who belonged to
Luke's club.  Luke was flattered and confident, but
did not show it.

"Do you really think I can do it?" he asked
slowly.  "Do you think I am the best man for the job?"

Each of the committee assured him he was.  They
said he had given a good account of himself as
assistant district-attorney, won influential friends in
his daily life, and secured, through his political
speech-making for Leighton, a strong following
among the voters.

"Of course," persisted Luke, "it's unnecessary to
ask men of your standing that there shan't be
anything but clean politics in our campaign."

Venable tossed his head proudly.

"My record is a guarantee of that," he said.

"No undue influence?" asked Luke.  "No outside
interests coming in to boss us or affect us in any
way?"

"Rot!" said Yeates.

"And I am to have an absolutely free hand?"

They assured him of that.

Luke's lowered lids hid his eyes, but his eyes
gleamed.  Here, at last, was his Great Chance.
Here was what he had lived and hoped for.  He
wanted to shout his war-cry, to go out and fight at
once.  Would he be worthy?  The wing of that
doubt brushed the farthest edges of his conscience,
but he was young, and he did not heed it.  He
thought of all that he could do with this
opportunity; and he thought, too, of Betty Forbes.

He had not seen much of Betty for some weeks.
The lethargy that the slow process of his recent
disillusionment flung over him, had left him despairing
of her, kept her beyond his reach.  But now he
saw the way—saw that the way to win his ideals
of honorable victory was also the way to win her.

He asked again a hundred questions, some that
he had asked of his other counselors the night
before and more that he had not: questions about
purpose, ways-and-means, finances, organization,
headquarters, district leaders, probable support, the
temper of the public mind.  To all of them he received
sanguine answers.

"And your other candidates?" asked Luke.
"The Mayor?  Comptroller?  President of the
Board of Aldermen and the Borough Presidents?"

They gave him the names of known and honest men.

Luke stood up, but his air was the languid air
that had become part of him.

"Good," he said, "of course, I'm pleased that
you think of me as you do, and I accept."

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  He would be a busy man now, but he must
have that morning and afternoon to himself.
However much he might want to start his campaign, he
must make that visit to Wall Street, and after
luncheon he intended to go to Betty.

The Wall Street interview seemed to him as
successful as he could have expected.  He was unterrified
by the strength of the fortress to be attacked,
but he had not looked forward to speedy surrender,
so he was satisfied with the conviction that he
affected the three financiers more than they cared to
show.  If they did not obey him, he would make the
Rollins letters a part of his appeal to the electors; but
he felt that, in the end, he would be offered obedience.

He lunched leisurely in the café attached to his
apartment house, and then went to his own room to
change his clothes before seeking Betty.  He had
completed the change and was about to leave when
the telephone rang and the voice of the clerk below
stairs announced a visitor:

"Judge Marcus F. Stein."

It had begun already.  Luke knew who Stein was,
though the two had never met.  The man's title had
been earned by a political appointment to fill the
unexpired term of a judge that died while on the bench.
Stein had begun his career as a young lawyer who
specialized in damage suits against the N. Y. &
N. J. railway.  He was once charged, before the Bar
Association—though the charges were never proved—with
being a "hospital runner": that is, with employing
men to hurry to the hospital, or the scenes
of accidents, and induce victims to retain Stein to
press their claims for damages against the railroad
on which they had been injured.  By devoting his
best efforts against the N. Y. & N. J., he tried to
make the corporation realize that it would be cheaper
to employ him than to fight him, and he was, indeed,
at last given a place on the legal staff of the
company's claim department.  There was an ugly story
to the effect that, for a brief time before this charge
was openly announced, he received a salary from the
road while apparently acting for claimants against it
and inducing them to compromise their claims for
trivial sums.

It was a subject of common rumor at the New
York Bar.  Stein soon worked his way to the head
of the claim department and thoroughly reorganized
it.  He used old tactics for his new employers: he
had the news of all accidents immediately
communicated to him, whereupon he would despatch his
agents, with no loss of time, to the hospital, there
to persuade the wounded, half stupefied by pain or
drugs, to sign releases in return for pittances in
ready money.  It was said he built up a secret service,
composed of men and women from private detective
agencies, whose duty it was to discover discreditable
secrets in the lives of such claimants as refused to
compromise, or, failing in discovery, to manufacture
or invent such incidents.  One married woman from
Syracuse, who had been injured in a wreck in New
York and came there to press her suit, was
inveigled into a friendship with a woman detective
commissioned to engage a neighboring room in the
house where the plaintiff took temporary lodgings.
The detective succeeded in getting the claimant
drunk and brought her, in this condition, with two
of the road's employees, to a house in which, when
the four were partially unclothed, another detective
took a flashlight photograph of them.  Then when
the victim's case was called for trial, she was told
that, unless she dropped her suit, the picture would
be shown to her husband.  By methods of this sort,
Stein was said to have reduced his road's expenses
for damages by two-thirds in three years.

Directly from his desk in the offices of the N. Y. &
N. J., Stein was appointed to the bench, where he
did not cease his usefulness to his employers.  When
his brief judicial term had ended, he took offices of
his own, and cultivated the higher branches of
corporation law.  The men controlling the N. Y. &
N. J. controlled many other corporations and saw to
it that Stein received a regular annual retainer as a
consulting lawyer from each of these.  His business
was not to win cases, but so to aid in directing his
clients' plans that they would avoid litigation; he,
therefore, rarely nowadays appeared in court and,
though not one of the most learned men so engaged
by his principals, he was one of the most serviceable,
because to his merely crafty skill in the law he added
a deep knowledge of practical politics and a wide
intimacy with politicians.

Luke's first impulse was to deny himself to this
caller, for he wanted to hurry to Betty and he thought
there might be a strategic value in refusing to
negotiate with any emissary.  Curiosity, however, proved
strong, and he reflected that the emissary might just
possibly come with a word of complete capitulation.

"Show him up," said Luke into the telephone.

The ex-Judge was an imposing figure.  He was big
and broad and frock-coated, and he moved with
befitting gravity.  His hair was plentiful and white, his
face clean-shaven.  He had a strong nose and a wide,
firm mouth, and his eyes were large and benevolent.
His air was that of a man who has dealt with great
interests for so many years that they have become the
weighty commonplaces of his existence.

Luke had resolved not to shake hands with his
visitor, but the Judge gave him no opportunity for
refusal.  He bowed courteously, smiled politely, and
settled into the most comfortable of Luke's chairs,
which he deliberately turned so that the light from
the windows fell full on his own face, thus leaving
Luke to front him from the shadow.

Luke, who had been prepared for the contrary
move, managed to show no surprise.  He sat down,
extended his legs, and lowered his eyes.  He made
no inquiry concerning the reason of the Judge's call:
he wanted the Judge to begin the talk.

Stein required no urging.

"I have never had the pleasure of meeting you
before, Mr. Huber," he said, speaking with what was
evidently no more than characteristic deliberation,
"but I have watched your career with a great deal
of interest—a very great deal.  It reminded me so
much of my own early struggles."  He was looking
steadily at Luke, whose eyes remained lowered.
"You will forgive an old man who is a scarred
veteran of the law for speaking frankly with you
and for taking such an interest, I'm sure."

"Very kind of you, indeed," Luke murmured.

"I thought," said the Judge, "that you handled
that Maretti case excellently, and the Dow trial, too;
you showed an original cleverness there.  More than
that, Mr. Huber, you showed promise.  There has
been a great deal of promise in your professional
work, and I thought I detected the same promise in
the reports of your political speeches.  With
influential friends—for, of course, everybody needs
influential friends in these days: people of real and
solid standing—you ought to go far."

"Thank you," said Luke.

"Now," the Judge pursued, "I see by the early
evening papers you may be offered the candidacy
for District-Attorney on the Municipal League
ticket."

"I believe there is some talk of that, Judge."

"Well, we need such a movement as this reform
movement: we need it badly.  With proper backing,
you ought to win.  With proper backing, of course."

Luke gave no sign of hearing this.  Quite out of
the air he drawled:

"I suppose you came about those letters, Judge Stein?"

For all the disturbance that he produced, he might
as well have said that it was a pleasant day, or that
he expected rain.  When his eyes at this question
were raised to meet the Judge's, the benevolent eyes
of the Judge did not quiver: like his voice, they were
steady and deliberate.

"Yes," said the Judge, "and I had them in mind
when I spoke of your career.  Now, Mr. Huber, my
friends think, and I think, that you have been a little
hasty and unreasonable because—and remember, it is
an old man who tells you so—you are still rather
young.  But because I know you are an able young
man, I have told them I was sure you would see your
haste and unreasonableness when you came to
consider the matter.  As their friend and as a lawyer
who has watched your career and remembers his own
start in life, I undertook to say so to you and to
offer my advice."

Luke's eyelids were again lowered.  His hands
were clasped in his lap.  To a less astute man than
Stein, he might have seemed asleep.

"I shall be glad," continued Stein, "if I can help
you out of your embarrassing position."

"Who are your friends, Judge?" asked Luke.

The Judge smiled tolerantly.

"Come, come, Mr. Huber," he said; "you don't
expect me to mention names, I know.  All I will say
on that point—all you can justly ask me to say—is
that I don't come from them in my professional
capacity.  They haven't retained me to do this.  They
haven't even asked me to do it.  I am acting entirely
of my own volition, and on my own initiative, out of
good will for all the parties concerned and not least
of all for you."

"Yet you seem prepared to plead their case."

"I am—on my own initiative, I am, because their
case is the right one, as I am sure you will end by
seeing.  In the first place, these letters are their
property."

"I doubt," said Luke, "whether they would go
into court to prove property."

"I do not think," said the unruffled Judge, "that
they will go into court for any purpose—unless their
burden of good nature is rendered intolerable.  They
can afford to appeal to their own conscience, because
they are morally clear."

"Of the North Bridge wreck?"

"Of the North Bridge wreck, Mr. Huber.  Granting
that those letters are admissible evidence—which
I shouldn't grant, if I were in the case—the one is
not an expert declaration; it is merely an expression
of opinion from persons with many grades of rails to
sell and naturally anxious to sell their most
expensive and most profitable grade.  As for the other
letter, it is informed by the knowledge of what
prompted the rail-makers' opinion, and in itself offers
only a counter-opinion based on the writer's long and
successful experience with the cheaper rails."

"Yes—but the accident happened."

"Exactly: it merely happened and it was an
accident.  In other words, it was something unforeseen
and contrary to the experience of the writer of the
second letter."

The Judge waited a moment for a reply but, as
Luke gave none, presently continued:

"Now, the course I propose—quite personally,
you will understand—is honorable, harmless, and in
the best interests of all concerned: you, us, and even
the public."

"What is it?" asked Luke.

"All that I would grant my friends is the return
of those letters, which are their own property, and
are not admissible evidence in a court of law.  That
is all I would grant them.  On their part, I should
exact a pledge from them to have better rails laid
throughout the suspected sections of the M. & N. road."

Luke's eyes opened.

"That's all *I* asked them to do," he said.

"Ah, yes; but to do it at once would be taken as
a public confession of guilt—and my friends are not
guilty.  You will see that the coroner's jury says so."

Luke relapsed.

"It will," he said.  "I'm sure of it."

"Therefore, the thing must be done slowly and
discreetly, and meanwhile we must protect the public
by an increase of track-walkers and road-inspectors."

"Would your friends," inquired Luke, "instruct
the road not to fight the damage claims growing out
of the wreck?"

"Of course not," chuckled Stein.  "You are too
good a lawyer to expect that, Mr. Huber, and too
good a lawyer not to know how the sorrow or
wounds of the claimants—yes, and the big appetites
of their attorneys, too, I'm afraid—exaggerate their
losses on the one hand and the riches of the company
on the other.  No, no; the most we could get for
them would be liberal settlements.  We mustn't
bankrupt the road.  There are more widows owning
stock in it than there are widows caused by this
wreck."

"Well," said Luke, "I'm afraid you don't
convince me, Judge."

"Not if I could promise all this?"

"No.  You see, there was a smaller wreck some
months ago, and the additional track-walkers and
inspectors were promised the public then."

Undisturbed, the Judge repeated all his arguments.
"I really think you must see this as I do,"
he concluded.  "And all we want is the letters——.
By the way, Mr. Huber, I congratulate you on
getting hold of them.  That was a clever piece of work.
How did you manage it?"

Luke grinned.

"I found them growing on an apple tree in
Madison Square," he said.

The Judge nodded a smiling approval.

"At any rate," he submitted, "you will not mind
telling me if any other person knows of their existence?"

"No, I don't mind.  Except you and your friends
and me and the apple tree, there is only one other
person that knows as yet, and he's in no position to
mention them."  Luke rose as if to end the
interview.  "I've told nobody because I keep my
bargains, Judge.  But I do keep my bargains to the
letter.  You haven't convinced me, and you can't.  I've
given your clients——"

"My friends," Stein suavely corrected.

"Your friends, then; I've given them one month.
If they don't do as I've suggested——"

The judge raised a hand gravely.

"I think you mean 'ordered,' Mr. Huber,"
said he.

"Thank you.  Yes, of course, I meant 'ordered.'  If
they don't begin to do as I've ordered by one
month from to-day, and do it in a way that
convinces everybody of their intention to finish the
job—yes, and their consciousness of guilt—I'll make those
letters public."

The Judge remained seated.  He looked at Luke
sadly, and his voice rang true as he said:

"I wonder if you have fully considered, I shall
not say the dangers, but the difficulties and annoyances
your course may expose you to—may very well
expose you to?"

"No," said Luke shortly.  "I'm too busy."

"A great many men have tried what you are trying,"
the Judge went on, "and they have all failed.
I tried it once myself.  None has succeeded; not
one.  Some of them, of course, entirely through their
own faults, were ruined by it, Mr. Huber."

"I dare say," said Luke, unmoved.

"And you," warned the Judge, "have the success
of a new and valuable political movement in your
hands.  You are responsible for it and to it.  This
might end by losing you the nomination."

"I can stand that."

"It might even hurt the men in the movement that
have trusted you."

"I sha'n't blame myself for it, if it does."

"And if it did not do these things, it would surely
wreck the faction at the polls—a faction that you
believe in and that, if successful, could do such a wide
public good."

Luke was standing above his caller, his hands deep
in his pockets.

"Look here, Judge," he drawled, "are you by any
chance threatening me?"

The Judge was not at all threatening him.  "I
am only telling you," he frankly explained, "what a
long life in New York has shown me.  I like you,
Mr. Huber; I believe you could make a great success
in life if you were less hot-headed; but I believe
your hot-headedness can ruin you at the bar, can ruin
you socially and financially, and can put a stop to
your political career forever.  I knew one man that
attempted something such as you are attempting and
never had another client afterward.  I knew another
that people heard a nasty story about and shut all
their doors against.  I knew a dozen that became
political corpses, and I knew more that went bankrupt."

Luke smiled.

"And some," he suggested, "disappeared altogether,
I dare say?"

The Judge looked him full in the eyes.

"I have heard so," said he.  Then he brightened
somewhat.  "But you will not defy the lightning,"
he continued.  "You are too practical.  I am quite
sure you must see how very right I am and how very
well disposed my friends are toward you, Mr. Huber.
Think what they could do for you, socially, financially,
politically.  Think what they could do for you
personally and for this reform movement."

Luke's smile broke into a laugh.

"Help the reform?" he exploded.  "Oh, Lord!"  Then,
as quickly, the laugh ended.  "In plain terms,"
he said, "what have you been telling me?"  His
languor had disappeared, and a sharp rage succeeded
it.  His words cracked like a whip.  "You've been
telling me that if I handed the safety of the M. &
N. patrons over to the men that hire you, and let those
men go free on the strength of a promise already
broken, they would make me rich, elect me
District-Attorney to do their work for them, advance me in
their own social set and maybe, if I kept on doing all
they asked, turn me into a Judge or a Governor or a
millionaire!  And you've been saying if I don't do it,
they'll have me forced out of politics, out of the
practice of the law, out of decent people's houses—and
maybe knocked over the head or shot in the back
at a dark corner.  Well, here's my answer: I don't
believe they would help me, I don't believe they can
hurt me, and I don't care a damn, one way or the other!"

The Judge bowed.  He rose.  He knew the world
too well to give way to anger: he never lost his
temper; he only sometimes advisedly loosed it.

"Is this," he asked, "your final decision, Mr. Huber?"

"Yes," raged Luke; "and you may bet your last
cent on that.  It's my final decision, and it's a plain
'No.'  If these fellows don't do what I've ordered,
I'll show them up—the whole bunch of them.  I'll
do it—why, I'd do it if they were the seraphim and
cherubim, and all the Thrones, Dominions, Virtues,
Powers, Principalities, and Archangels rolled into one!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VIII

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  Ex-Judge Marcus Stein had mastered, in
common with most truly dignified men, the art of acting
quickly without hurrying.  Upon leaving Luke's
apartments, he exercised this art.

His motor-car was waiting for him at the door.
He climbed into it with a judicial deliberation and
gave his order to the chauffeur.  The car started
noiselessly.  By proceeding with an even speed that
avoided blind dashes into the back-waters of the
traffic-stream, it made better time than its more
impetuous peers and, without jolt or pause, bore its
occupant quickly to the building in which the firm
of Stein, Falconridge, Falconridge & Perry had their
offices.

As Judge Stein passed through the outer room of
the suite, he spoke to the girl who was seated at
the firm's telephone switchboard:

"Good-afternoon, Miss Weston."

The girl's neurasthenic face lighted with pleasure:
Marcus Stein was liked and respected by his
office-force.

"Good-afternoon, Judge Stein," she said.

"I think," said the Judge, "that you might see if
you can get Mr. Hallett on his private wire, and
connect him with my telephone.  Will you, please?"

Miss Weston always felt that the Judge conferred
a favor when he asked one.  Consequently, she made
a practice of giving his calls precedence over those
of anybody else connected with the firm.

"Right away," she said.  "And if he's left his
office, shall I try his house or his club?"

"Both, please, Miss Weston.  But I have an idea
that he will be at his office."

The Judge passed on to his own handsome room
overlooking the turmoil of lower Broadway.  He had
scarcely reached his desk, and was just bending to
smell of the two Abel Chatney roses that stood in a
vase there, when the soft bell of his telephone tinkled.

"Stein?" asked Hallett's voice through the black
receiver that the Judge placed to his ear.

"Yes.  This is Mr. Hallett?"

"Yes."

"I was about to telephone you, and I have just
been to see our young friend."

"Well—well?"

"It is no use, Mr. Hallett."

Hallett's voice was incredulous: "The fool won't
give up?"

"Not yet."

"How much does he want?"

"Nothing."

"Well, but didn't you throw the fear of God into him?"

"We can't purchase and we can't coerce—at least
not by mere threats."

"Then, we've got to frighten him by something
else, Stein.  How'd he get those things that he's got?"

"He wouldn't say.  I scarcely expected that he would."

"Did you put on the political screws?"

"I put on all, as far as was wise.  He is a clever
young man, and he knows we can't hurt him so long
as he has certain things in his possession."

The situation apparently passed Hallett's
comprehension: it was outside of his experience.

"But what does he want?  He must want something."

"I'm afraid not," the Judge sighed.

"Hell!  Of course, he must.  Everybody does."

"If he does, I couldn't find it out."

"Well, then," asked Hallett, "what's he goin' to do?"

"Nothing—for a month."

"You don't think he'll keep his word?"

"I'm sure of it."

"Wait a minute," said Hallett.

The Judge waited fifteen minutes.  At the end
of that time, Hallett's voice, regretful, but firm,
sounded again in the telephone:

"Well," he said, "we've got to get those things
he's got.  We're all agreed on that.  Understand?"

"Yes?"

"Yes—and it's up to you, Judge."

"Have you any course to suggest?"

"No, we haven't, and we don't want to know
anything about courses.  That's your job."

As if Hallett were in the room, Stein bowed his
white head to him.

"Very well," he said, and hung up the receiver.

He bent to the pink roses again, and again inhaled
their cultivated fragrance.  His face was not
perplexed, but it was sad.

"I am sorry," he seemed to be saying.  "A nice
young man.  I am very sorry, indeed."

He returned the telephone-receiver to his ear.

"Miss Weston?"

"Yes, Judge Stein?"

"Thank you for getting that call so promptly.
Now, will you please get me Mr. Titus?"

"Mr. William Titus, or Titus & Titherington,
the mercantile agency?"

"Mr. Alexander Titus, of Titus & Titherington:
the one that I was speaking to before I went out
to luncheon."

"Yes, Judge Stein.  Just a minute."

There was no long wait before Titus, who owed
half of his business as a financial-agent to Stein and
Stein's chief employer, was in conversation with the
Judge.

"Have you secured that report yet?" asked Stein.

"Which one, Judge?"

"The one I asked you for at lunch-time."

"It's being typed now.  I'll send it over as soon
as it's finished."

"I wish you would.  Meantime, get the chief
points from the man that looked into the matter and
'phone them to me."

"All right, Judge."

"Call me up.  I have somebody to talk to while
I'm waiting."

The Judge rang off and then another time spoke
to Miss Weston.

"Is Mr. Irwin in his office?"

Miss Weston said he was.

"Then, please ask him to step in to see me for
a moment."

Mr. Irwin was a member of the Judge's firm whose
name did not appear upon its letter-heads, although
he had been attached to it for more years than
Mr. Perry or even the younger Mr. Falconridge.  He
was a little man with a gray Vandyck beard, pink
cheeks, and twinkling blue eyes.

In the fewest possible words, Stein gave him a
description of the letters that were in Luke Huber's
possession.  He did not say who wanted these letters,
or why they were wanted, but he left no doubt about
the urgency of the commission he was delivering.

"It is rather a difficult assignment," he concluded,
"but it must be done.  There are great interests at
stake."

"I think I can manage it," said Irwin cheerfully.

"I am afraid you will have to manage it," said
the Judge.

"I'll simply tell my friend——"

The Judge raised his hand and smiled.

"No details, please," said he.

"Very well," Irwin, still cheerful, agreed.

"All that I need add," said the Judge, "is this:
we must take only one step at a time.  If we can
succeed by persuasion, there is no need to use other
measures.  I do not want to use other measures unless
he forces us to use them.  Remember that.  The first
thing to do is to convince him that we are too strong
for him.  For instance, he has this reform nomination
for the district-attorneyship.  If he could be
made to see that we could take that nomination away
from him, he might listen to reason."

"I see."

"You will report results to me.  Not methods,
Irwin: only the results, but please report the results
step by step.  And understand that whoever
undertakes this matter must not know too much to be
dangerous, but must know enough to make no error."

"How soon do you want the letters, Judge?"

"As soon as I can get them."

"And the outside limit?"

"The first step must be immediate.  We must not
run so fast that we stumble; but for the completion
it will be impossible to wait long.  Say twenty-eight
days from date."

"Right," said Irwin, and walked briskly from the room.

Irwin had a manner of telephoning that was more
hurried than the Judge's, and Miss Weston treated
him with greater deliberation.  However, he had
soon called up the office of Anson Quirk and learned
that Quirk was there.

"Then, stay there for twenty minutes, will you?"
asked Irwin.  "I'm coming right around to see you."

Anson Quirk was a lawyer who had a small office
and a large reputation on the East Side.  His round,
smiling face shone in every important case where
was endangered the liberty or life of minor politicians
or major thugs; the number of acquittals to his credit
was surpassed only by the number of clients whom he
had saved from ever appearing in court.  He called
every patrolman, magistrate, and tipstaff in the City
and County of New York by his first name.  He was
successful before a judge, but he was magnificent
before a magistrate, and with a police-officer he was a
worker of miracles.  In his own world, Quirk, whom
Stein would have refused to shake hands with,
was what Stein was upon a somewhat higher plane.

He talked with the bright-eyed Irwin for less than
half an hour.  Then he showed his visitor from his
dusty office full of law-books that were never
consulted.

"Easy?" he chuckled as he bowed Irwin out.
"It's a hundred-to-one shot.  I'll tell you what I'll
do: I'll——"

"No, you won't tell me," laughed Irwin.  "The
less I know, the better for me.  All I want to be sure
of is that I can count on you."

"Sure, you can."

"And don't do everything at once."

"Not me.  The frame-up comes first."

"Let me know as soon as it's tried.  Then we'll
talk about the next move—if one's needed."

"I understand.  And whatever's needed, I'll
deliver the goods inside of three weeks."

Irwin said he hoped nothing more would be needed
and that a few days would suffice, and Quirk,
screwing a derby-hat on one side of his head, walked
around the corner to the police-station to see his
friend, the red-faced, genial Hugh Donovan,
lieutenant of police.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  Ex-Judge Stein, in the handsome room
overlooking Broadway, had been having another
telephone-conversation with the head of the Titus &
Titherington Mercantile Agency while Mr. Irwin
was consulting with Mr. Quirk.

"That man has saved a bit," Alexander Titus was
reporting; "but outside of his salary he has really
only a hundred thousand dollars, and it's all invested
in the R. H. Forbes & Son clothing firm over in
Brooklyn."

The Judge made a note of this on a desk-pad.

"I see," he said.  "Who is the head of that firm,
now?"

"Wallace K. Forbes; I think he's a grandson of
old R. H."

The Judge made another note.

"How do they stand?  Oddly enough, I have a
client interested in their affairs, too."

"The Forbes people?  Pretty well.  I had to get
a report on them last week."

"Have they any heavy loans?"

"Only one that might hurt them: two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars at call with the East
County National."

The Judge's pencil was still busy.

"I want to be quite clear about this," he said—"quite
clear: my client in this Forbes matter is
considering an investment.  Am I to understand that if
the East County National should call this loan, if
it could not be renewed elsewhere, the firm would
become insolvent?"

"Oh, there's no doubt about that.  But then,
there's no doubt about its not being called, either.
The company's quite sound, Judge."

"Thank you," said Stein.  "You will have that
other full report sent over?"

"It's on its way now."

"Thank you again.  You had better follow it with
a copy of the Forbes report.  If that bears out all you
say, I shall instruct my client to go ahead."

"He'll be safe if he does, Judge."

"Very well.  Good-afternoon," said Stein.

He called Miss Weston again.

"Miss Weston," he said, "please get me City
Chamberlain Kilgour, and, while I am speaking to
him, call up the East County National and ask
where you can find president Osserman.  He will
have left the bank, but I should like to reach him
before I go home to-day."

Miss Weston obeyed with her usual readiness to
serve this one of her employers.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  Police Lieutenant Donovan had not listened
to half a dozen of Quirk's words before he rose
quickly and closed the door of his private room.
His was one of those voices that cannot whisper, but
it descended now to a hoarse muttering.

"How much is there in this for me?" he demanded.

"Nothin'," grinned Quirk.

Donovan's broad palm banged the table at which
he sat.

"Then good-*night*," said he.

Quirk was undisturbed.

"Could you do the trick?" he inquired.

"You mean if it was worth my while?"

"I mean what I say: could you do it?"

"Could I do it?  Of course, I could.  It'd be
like takin' pennies from a blind man."

"Then," said Quirk, rattling some coins in a
pocket beneath his round abdomen, "I guess you'd
better get busy."

Donovan's eyes narrowed.

"What's your game, Quirk?" he asked.

"It's not *my* game, Hughie," smiled the lawyer.

"Well, you're not in it for your health, I know
that damn well.  If it ain't your game, whose is it?"

"I don't know for sure," said Quirk.

"Oh, come on.  You know me: you've got to
cough up if you want me to help."

Quirk did know the police-lieutenant.  He had
expected all along to be forced into an admission; but
he was aware that by letting Donovan suspect
reluctance he could the more speedily gain his point.

"Well," he said, "it didn't come to me straight,
but I'll tell you how it did."

He embarked upon a narrative brief and abounding
in gaps that Donovan's imagination was not,
however, slow to fill as Quirk intended it should.

The officer nodded comprehendingly.  "Then
who's at the back of it?" he asked.

Quirk walked quietly to the door.  He opened it
suddenly: nobody had been listening at the keyhole;
so he turned to Donovan and said a certain name.

The police-lieutenant's red face grew redder.  He
opened and shut his mouth twice before he spoke.

"Again?" he muttered.

Quirk nodded.

"That's all I know about it," he said.

"Well, why in hell didn't you tell me this right
off at first?" asked the querulous Donovan.

"Because I didn't think I'd have to," pleaded
Quirk.

"Have to?  Looks to me like the have-to business
all came on to me!  How long've I got to put this
across?"

Quirk appeared to consider.

"You'd have to begin with the first thing right
away," he said, "and let me know about that.  If it
didn't work, I'd get my party to give me fuller
instructions, and then I guess you'd have eighteen
days."

"I'm gettin' sick of the whole game," said Donovan.

"So am I," said the lawyer blithely.  "But what
are we going to do about it?  We've got to make a
living, don't we?"

"I ain't so sure of that."

"Anyhow, we've got to buy shoes for our kids,
Hughie."

"Oh, come on," muttered Donovan, "let's talk
business."

They talked business until Quirk remembered
another appointment and had to leave.  When the
lawyer had gone, Donovan put his head into the large
room next his own and called to a sleepy officer
seated at a desk.

"Anderson," he asked, "where's Patrolman Guth?"

Anderson yawned.

"Just come in, Lieutenant," he vouchsafed:
"him and Mitchell.  He's in the locker-room."

"Send him in here."

Donovan closed the door and sat at his table,
frowning at its surface, until Guth entered.

"Hello, Bill," said the Lieutenant.

Guth was as big as the Lieutenant and more
powerful.  He would have been handsome, but his mouth
had been torn in some obscure street-fight, and the
scar from this wound carried the line of his lips to
the left corner of his jaw-bone.

"*How're* you, Lieutenant?" he replied.

Donovan resumed his study of the table.

"What's Reddy Rawn doin' these days?" he
presently continued.

Guth shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
As much as that scar would permit, he smiled, the
right corner of his mouth shooting upward and the
left turning down.

"Well," he said, "you know how it is.  I warned
him he'd got to keep in the quiet ever since that night
him and the Kid shot-up Crab Rotello for tryin' to
steal Reddy's girl."

"Rotello's still in Bellevue, ain't he?"

"Won't be out for near a month yet."

"He hasn't squealed?"

"Naw.  You know these here guys: wouldn't tell
if they was dyin'—rather leave it to their own gang
to square things.  Crab'll wait till he gets well, an'
then he'll fix Reddy's feet for himself."

"Still, you told Reddy what I said you should?"

"Tol' him we was on."

"Find him to-night."

"All right, Lieutenant."

"Tell him Rotello's squealed: he'll believe it
because he hates him.  Tell him the Dago's goin' to
croak an's give me an ante-mortem statement—see?"

The patrolman stolidly bowed assent.

"Tell him the only way for him to square me's to
do me a good turn," continued Donovan.

Guth nodded again.

"Same's we worked on the Crab himself ten or
twelve weeks ago," he said.  "I got you."

"That's it.  Remember, I don't know much, an'
you know a lot less, an' this guy's got to know less
than you do.  He's got to pull it off inside of two
weeks.  Now, sit down here, an' I'll tell you what
he's got to do.  There maybe'll be more later, but
this is the start."

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  The last talk that Judge Stein had that day
was one with a brisk, bald-headed man, whose
close-cropped mustache only accentuated the heavy mouth
below it.  This man called in person at the offices
of Stein, Falconridge, Falconridge & Perry; he
seemed to have come in a hurry, and he handed Miss
Weston a card bearing the legend:

::

   +-----------------------------+
   |     B. FRANK OSSERMAN       |
   |        *PRESIDENT*          |
   |  EAST COUNTY NATIONAL BANK  |
   +-----------------------------+

.. vspace:: 2

With him the Judge began by being as deliberate
as he had been with Luke Huber.  He mentioned
the names of the three men upon whom Huber had
that morning paid so unusual a visit to Wall Street;
but this time Stein frankly declared that these three
men empowered him to speak.

At the mention of their names, Osserman's fingers
played with a thin gold watch-chain that ran taut
through a buttonhole of his waistcoat, from one
pocket to another.

"I dare say that you will remember," pursued
the Judge, "that I have acted with you for these
gentlemen on one or two previous occasions."

Osserman cleared his throat.  "I hope there is no
trouble," he said.

"No.  Oh, no; there need be no trouble," said the
Judge.  Then he sat and watched Osserman move
uneasily in his chair.

The bank-president by saying nothing tried to
force Stein to explain; Stein, by the same means, tried
to force Osserman to make a confession of weakness.
At last Stein won.

"Of course," said Osserman, "I know the favors
they've done us."

"Exactly," said the Judge; but he said only that.

"And so," continued Osserman, as one who cannot
turn back, "our bank will be glad to do anything
we can for them."  He paused and looked at Stein;
but Stein only looked pityingly at him.  "Indeed,"
the banker ruefully resumed, "their connection with
our investments and securities is such that we would
have to."

"Exactly," repeated the Judge, bending his face
toward the pink roses at his elbow.  But he was a
little sorry for Osserman, and so he added: "Not
that the East County is in a position very different,
in that respect, from most of the other banks."

Osserman took a deep breath.

"Well," he said, "what is it?"

"You are carrying," said the Judge, "a call-loan
at two hundred and fifty thousand to R. H. Forbes
& Son."

The banker showed his relief.  It was clear that
he had expected something more important.

"Are we?" he asked.  "I dare say we are."

"Mr. Osserman," said the Judge, "the finances
of the R. H. Forbes company are not long going
to be what they should be.  In the interest of your
depositors, I should advise you to stand ready to
call that loan when I give you the word."

The banker looked at the Judge and knew that,
before this loan would be called, the Judge's clients
would see to it that no other bank would take it
up.  That, however, was no affair of Osserman's: he
considered that he was escaping by means of a small
service.

"If there's any danger of the Forbes people failing,"
he said, "it would be only good business to do
as you say."

"Yes," the Judge assented.  "The fact of the
matter is this, Mr. Osserman: that young man named
Huber, who has been backing Leighton, is leaving
Leighton and will be the candidate for the reform
people to succeed him."

"I saw something about it in the afternoon papers."

"Yes.  Now, my clients have no objection to those
reformers; we see that they may do a great deal of
good, if they put a temperate man at the head of
their ticket.  But we happen to know that this Huber
is a young, hot-headed demagogue.  He is the kind
of man that attracts the crowd.  He might be elected.
If he was not, he would hurt credit by his wild
speeches; if he was, he would undoubtedly upset
it by trying to put his impossible promises into
action.  The safest thing for Business is to take the
nomination away from him before he gets started:
then nobody is hurt.  What money he has (it is not
much) is invested in this Forbes concern.  My advice
to you is to see Mr. Forbes to-morrow; make him
appreciate how your bank feels about the unsettling
nature of this candidacy, and tell him that you will
have to call his loan if the candidacy continues."

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  That was a busy night for the president and
cashier of more than one bank in New York City, and
for certain gentlemen whose business it is to negotiate
for loans from banks in other cities.  Judge Stein's
telephonic talk with City Chamberlain Kilgour was
as effective as the conversation with president
Osserman.  It is in the chamberlain's official province to
deposit municipal funds with almost whatsoever
institution he chooses, and to withdraw such funds as
he may elect: the thin, energetic figure of Kilgour,
long familiar to the tents of Tammany, was this
evening hurrying from private houses to Madison Square
Clubs and from clubs to Broadway cafés.  The swift,
quiet motor-car of ex-Judge Stein was busy, too.

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  Somebody else was busy: Patrolman Guth.
Patrolman Guth, in citizen's garb, was standing
almost invisible in the shadowy alley behind a saloon
near Forty-third Street and Third Avenue, and was
muttering to the darkness.  And at last the darkness
answered.

"I'm on," said the darkness.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IX

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  "No, sir; she's gone out," said the servant
that answered Luke's ring at the door of the Forbes
house and his inquiry for Betty on the afternoon of
his interview with Judge Stein.

"To town?" asked Luke.

"Yes, sir; I think so.  I think she's gone over to
Mr. Nicholson's Hester Street mission."

Luke had frequently met the Rev. Pinkney Nicholson;
he liked him.  The young clergyman was a friend
of both Forbes and Forbes's daughter.  The latter
often helped in Nicholson's slum-missionary work;
an attendance at Nicholson's church of St. Athanasius
was the only occupation that brought Forbes
and Betty even slightly into touch with the world
of the Ruysdaels.  With Betty, Luke often went to
the Sunday morning services.  Indeed, he had
recently become a consistent member of the congregation,
partly because Betty liked the church and partly
because Luke himself admired Nicholson's simple and
forcible eloquence and believed enough in Nicholson's
philanthropy to forgive a ritualism that in itself
had only a superficial appeal for him.

"She didn't say when she would be back?" Luke
inquired.  Until this moment he had not known how
badly he wanted to see her.

"No, sir.  By dinner-time, I guess.  Would you
like to leave any message, Mr. Huber?"

"Only that if she isn't going out this evening,
I'll call."

"Very well, sir."

Luke had hurried to the Forbes house in Brooklyn
as soon as Stein left him, for he knew that Betty
was usually at home from three o'clock in the
afternoon until five; but the Judge had consumed some
time; there was a block in the subway and another
block on the surface-line at the subway's end: Luke
had missed Betty.  There was nothing to be done but
to return to town, where he should have remained
in order to be in touch with the new friends that
were announcing him as their certain chance for the
district-attorneyship.

He considered himself ready for the fight.  He
knew that Stein, although checked in the engagement
at the Thirty-ninth Street apartments, would not be
defeated and would resume the offensive from some
other quarter at some later date; but Luke looked for
no serious oppilation by these secret enemies before
the end of the month that he had given them in which
to come to terms.  He underestimated, in short, both
the power and the unencumbered license of his foes.
He would not realize the handicap that his grant of a
four weeks' armistice placed on his own movements,
he would not believe that his antagonists might
violate the truce, and he refused to credit them with the
vast influence and free conscience which were at their
command.

The open war, the war that the reformers and the
public saw, was, however, waging.  The Municipal
Reform League had taken city headquarters in an
office-building in Broadway below Madison Square
weeks ago, before they began their search for a
candidate.  At that time divisional headquarters were
opened in every ward in New York, and the remnants
of an older reform organization, left from a defeat
ten years old, were gathered and cemented for present
use.  Nelson, Venable, and Yeates were working day
and night with their lieutenants, and when Luke
returned to his apartments, the loneliness that he was
beginning to feel because of the sudden end of his
duties under Leighton, was banished by the news
that the League headquarters had been telephoning
madly for him.

He bought a newspaper on his way downtown and
discovered what was one of the things that his
associates wanted to see him about: Leighton had issued
a statement saying that he had forced Luke's
resignation from the District-Attorney's staff because of
Luke's inefficiency.

"You must nail that lie immediately!" cried Venable
as soon as Luke entered the offices of the League.
The old man was standing at a desk with Yeates and
Nelson beside him.

"Why did he fire you, anyway?" asked Yeates.
"I always thought Leighton was a rather decent
kind of fellow."

"Jealousy," suggested Nelson.  "He was afraid
of him."

Luke sat on a table and dangled his long legs.  He
did not like the necessity that Leighton had put upon
him.

"Of course, he didn't discharge you at all," said
Venable.  "We all know that.  But we have called
the committee for the day after to-morrow, and you
must make the public see the matter as we do."

"I'm not so sure that he didn't fire me," said
Luke.  He chose to be blind to his hearers' astonishment.
"It was a race to see whether he'd chuck
me or me him, and I think it ended in a dead-heat."

"Oh, come off!" said Yeates.

Venable stroked his white hair.

"But the reason?" he commanded.  "You must
give the full story to the public.  We stand for
absolute honesty in politics, and we can't begin with
any suppression of facts in public office."

"Well," said Luke, "I think I gave Leighton,
in a general way, to understand I believed he was
willing to use the Money Power in politics, if he
could get it to use."  He smiled at them.  "Does
sound rather vague, doesn't it?"

Nelson puffed out his cheeks.  "Men don't break
up a partnership for such things," said he.

"Leighton and I did."

"Perhaps you did, but people won't think so."

Venable cut in:

"We don't want to pry into your private affairs,
and, of course, we don't expect you to violate any
personal confidences that you naturally had with
Mr. Leighton; but a broad statement of the basic facts
has to go to the papers at once.  The charge wouldn't
be so serious if it was specific and vulgar, because
then you would have no trouble in disproving it; but
Mr. Leighton is a thorough politician; he knows the
value of vagueness, and he gives the impression that
he could tell a great deal if he wasn't so much of a
gentleman as to want to spare your feelings."

Luke slowly got down from the table.

"I will say this much," he replied; "I will answer
Leighton in his own language: I will say he tried to
get hold of some documents that would make trouble
for a group of unscrupulous and influential men, and
he wasn't going to use those documents in court or
out of it to stop those men in a wrong they were
doing, but only as a means to force them to give him
their political support."

Venable reflected.

"I think it would suit if you published that," he said.

"Did he get the documents?" asked Nelson.

"No," said Luke, "he didn't.  Now, send me in
a stenographer, and I'll dictate a statement along
those lines."

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  The headquarters of the Municipal Reform
League occupied a half of the second floor.  They
were accessible by either the stairs, or any of the three
elevators that all day long shot down and up narrow
shafts from the roof to the hall opening on Broadway.
Entering the offices, one came first to a
reception-room; beyond that, one passed along the cleared
side of a railing in the large apartment, behind which
sat the company of stenographers and typewriters,
and so came to a series of offices with ground-glass
doors and windows giving upon the street.  It was
one of these offices which was permanently assigned
to Luke.

Here, pacing the floor between the roll-top desk
at one side and the small safe for private papers on
the other, Luke dictated his public letter.  He tried to
word it in such a way that its facts would not sound
incredible to the uninitiated reader, would not seem
so vague as to excite suspicion, and would yet convey
to both Leighton and Stein the threat of complete
publicity to be fulfilled if the writer were pushed too
far.  It was a hard task, but Luke, after several
revisions, was satisfied with it.

"Yes," said Venable, "I think that will do.  The
reporters are waiting outside; I sent for them.  I
have only one addition to suggest."

"What's that?" asked Luke.

"You deal exclusively with your resignation, and
yet you are issuing this statement from the League's
headquarters.  Don't you think you had better say
something about your candidacy?

"Hadn't I better wait till I get it?"

"You will have it as soon as the committee meets.
Everybody knows that.  I don't propose that you
should anticipate all the good points of your letter
of acceptance, but merely that you should state what
you will stand for.  You could say that your name
has been mentioned for the nomination and that, if
nominated, you will make your campaign on such and
such issues."

"All right."  Luke shrugged his lean shoulders.
He turned to the waiting stenographer.  "Take
this," he said:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: small

"In conclusion, I wish to say that my recent experience in the
service of the city has convinced me of the crying need of a
new movement for civic improvement: a non-partisan movement
in which the one object shall be the purification of municipal
government and the fearless administration of the law, all of its
supporters working together not for any man or party, but for
the good of New York.  Such a movement is that now started
by the conscientious men who compose the Municipal Reform
League.

.. class:: small

"My name has been mentioned as a candidate for office on the
ticket of this league, and I shall feel honored, indeed, if I
receive my nomination under such happy auspices.  In that event,
I shall go before the people with a frank appeal to them to drive
the money-changers out of the Temple of Justice, the grafters
out of the police-force, vice and crime from the streets; and,
if elected, I should attempt to do these things, as the will of
the people who placed me in power, with favor to no persons, or
combination of persons, in Greater New York.  But whether I
am nominated or not, I shall take my coat off and roll up my
sleeves and go to work for the Municipal Reform League as for
the only present hope of this city's moral regeneration."

.. vspace:: 2

Luke turned to Venable.

"How's that?" he inquired.

Venable agreed that it ought to do.

"*I* think it's stodgy enough," said Luke.

Venable visibly winced, but passed the comment by.

"I am not quite sure," he said, "about that
expression concerning taking off your coat and so on.
Our first appeal has to be made to the cultivated
voters, you see, and we don't want to sound
too—well, too agricultural."

Luke smiled his weary smile.  No doubt Venable
was right.

"Change that," said Luke to the stenographer—"change
it to: 'I shall put on my armor and take
up my broadsword to go into this battle.'"

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  "Miss Forbes got back?" Luke asked that
evening when he again rang the bell at the Forbes
house.

"Yes, sir," said the servant, "she's in the parlor.
Mr. Forbes is in the library.  Shall I——"

"I think I can make out with only Miss Forbes—for
a while," Luke interrupted.  He started to
walk past the servant.

"Mr. Nicholson is there, too," the careful servant
warned him.  "He stayed to dinner."

"Oh, that's good," said Luke.  "Well, I'll be
glad to see him."  But his tone was not so enthusiastic
as it had been, and his step hesitated half-way to
the parlor door.

The door was open.  Through it Betty heard him,
and through it she now hurried into the hall to meet
him, her hands outstretched.

"How splendid of you!" she was saying.
"We've just been reading your letter in the paper,
The papers are full of you, and you don't know how
proud we are to know you, and how proud that you
come here to see us at such a busy time."

Her cheeks were flushed, her brown eyes shone.
Luke noted a little curl that escaped from the mass
of golden hair, so like a saint's glory to her head, and
seemed to caress one coral ear.

"It's all nothing but my good luck," he said as
he took both her hands in his and thought not half
so much of her words as of the woman that uttered
them.  "But I didn't expect your father's approval."

"You have it, anyway," she assured him.  "Of
course, he's a Progressive, and he thinks you would
have done better to come into his party; but he does
admire your courage, and so does Mr. Nicholson."

"Does he?" said Luke dryly.  "I hope not: it
might go to my head."  He remembered that Nicholson
believed in celibacy for the clergy, and he was
glad of it.

The young priest rose as his hostess and her new
guest came into the Eighteen-Sixty parlor.  He was a
handsome man and his eyes were kindly, yet he had
the face of an ascetic.

"Miss Forbes is right," he said.  "New York
needs men with high convictions and the courage of
them."

"So does the Church," replied Luke heartily—"and
she is getting them now."

They sat down.

"The Church," said Nicholson, "has always had
them.  What she lacked was the co-operation of such
men in the practical world.  If all of our millionaires
were like some few of them, our work would be
easy; but now we scarcely know which is more
dangerous: the evil tyrant or the evil demagogue."

He talked for some time in this strain, not to
weariness, but with the completeness of the zealot.
Nicholson regarded wealth as a sacred trust, a gift
from God given to the great intellects of the world
only that it might be administered for the benefit
of the lesser of God's creatures.  He mentioned no
specific instance, but he saw in many of the country's
rich men souls that were proving worthy of their
trust and others that were using their money selfishly
and even cruelly.  For the former he had the highest
regard, for the latter the severest condemnation; the
spiritual and physical welfare of the poor he
considered as the especial care of the more fortunate,
and charity was not only the right of penury: it was
the salvation of the rich.

Betty listened to him with a rapt face; Luke
honored him, but sincerely hoped that he would go.
Fearing that this desire was becoming too patent,
Luke said:

"The Manhattan and Niagara people don't seem
to share your views."

"Ah," said Nicholson, "there you touch a vexed
problem, because there you have to do with a corporation,
and it is almost a fact that corporations have
no souls."

"If that corporation ever had any, it is damned,"
said Luke; "but what I'm driving at is that the
individuals composing a corporation have moral
responsibilities."

The clergyman agreed, but in corporations, he
thought, responsibility was so intricately subdivided
and so sinuously delegated that no one man had much
left to him or could incur much guilt for his
individual errors.  In connection with most such accidents
as a railway wreck, there was really an ethical basis
for the legal phrase "an act of God."

"Not in the North Bridge wreck," said Luke.
"It's been shown that the company used cheap
material, didn't have any proper system for checking
its work-reports so as to tell whether ordered repairs
were made, and didn't hire competent men.  The
company can't get out of this mess by saying its
experts were forced on it by the unions: it hasn't any
legal right to delegate its choice of experts to a union.
It's a common carrier and, if it can't do its work
properly, then it ought to stop work."

Nicholson saw this much as Luke did, and said so
at a good deal of length.  It was some time before
his part of the conversation lagged and he rose to go.

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  Luke waited only until he heard the door
close upon the departing clergyman.  Then he turned
to Betty with a relieved sigh.

"Phew!" he said.  "I'm glad that's over."

She was sitting opposite him in the full glare of
light from an old-fashioned, crystal-hung chandelier.
Betty could bear strong lights.

"Why?" she asked.  Her brow was puckered,
but her lips smiled.  "I like him.  He's very good,
and he's doing a really great work.  I like him ever
so much."

"Oh, yes," said Luke.  "Nicholson's all right.
He has what he admires in other men: high
convictions and the courage of them.  Most of us always
admire in others what we don't have ourselves; but
not Nicholson.  He is doing a big work, too.  But
I'm glad he's gone, just the same."

"Why?" repeated Betty.

Luke rose.  He came over to Betty and stood
looking down at her, his arms folded across his chest.

"Because," he said, "I wanted to talk to you."

"It didn't look so.  It looked as if you wanted to
talk to Mr. Nicholson."

"I wanted to talk to you and about you."

She stopped fencing.  She gave him her full, frank
gaze.

"Well?" she asked.

"You know what I want to say, Betty," he
answered.  "You've seen for a long time what I was
coming to.  I held off.  I held off because I hadn't
anything to offer you.  Even now I haven't much.
I haven't half enough.  If I win this fight I'm in, it
won't give me anything that would make me deserve
you.  I've not been a bit better than I should be."  His
voice grew tense.  "When I come down to brass
tacks, when I—I beg your pardon; but what I mean
is that when I get to the point of telling you I love
you, I see how far I've been from being what I should
be.  I——  Oh, hang it all, Betty!"  He put out his
hands.  "I love you.  I've never really loved anybody
else and never can.  If I win this confounded—blessed
fight, will you marry me?"

She got slowly to her feet: it seemed to Luke
minutes before she had stood up and begun her answer.
Then she took both his hands.

"You don't have to win the fight to win me,
Luke," she said.

The realization swept over him.  He took her in
his arms.  He looked in her upturned face—the eyes
wide, the sweet, fresh cheeks hot, the lips parted,
breathing quickly—and then he felt the blood rush
to his head, felt it hammer at his temples.  It got
into his eyes and blinded him.  He ground his lips
upon hers.

The dull despair of his last months under Leighton
commanded a reaction.  The rushing changes of the
last two days had set his nerves to a speed that would
not now cease in whatever physical activities he
engaged himself.  These things flung him along a new
road; they raced him down a way of which he had
known but little.  As he felt the warmth of her
gracious young body next his, he was hurled with such
violence down a course so unfamiliar to him that only
the thought of losing his race by running it too
swiftly could serve to lessen his straining speed.  Like
a quarter-mile runner stopping himself short in the
last hundred yards before the tape, he almost fell as
he forced himself to release her.

"Your father," he panted.  He looked away from
her: "I must see him now."

Betty did not understand.  She was only exalted
by this new thing; she was only happy.

"Now?" she whispered.

"Yes."  He looked back at her and, with a white
face, smiled.  "He has a right to know."  He caught
her hand, pressed it only as tightly as he dared.
"I'll go to him in the library.  Wait for me."

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  Forbes was seated at a round table, engaged
in his regular nightly task of reading the editorial-page
of the *Evening Star*, nodding his head when he
agreed with its generalities and muttering maledictions
upon it when it specifically ridiculed the
Progressive Party.  As Luke came in, Forbes was in
the midst of one of the paper's attacks on progressivism,
and his frown seemed to drive his beaked nose
into his mustache.

"Oh, Huber," he said, without at once relaxing
his scowl; "I didn't know you were here.  Come in.
Been here long?"

Luke could not have guessed how long he had been
in the house.

"Not very," he ventured.

"Sit down," said Forbes.  He had not risen.  He
indicated an easy-chair near his own.

"Thanks," said Luke; but he did not sit down.

Forbes at last noticed his visitor's nervousness.

"I suppose you've had a hard day," he said.
"Pardon me for not congratulating you sooner on
your success.  This sheet"—he brandished the
*Evening Star*—"doesn't want anything but to be against
everything.  It upsets me every evening.  But you've
done a big thing.  I think you should have come
clear over to our side, but I dare say you will do that
in time.  Meanwhile, I'm sincerely glad for your
good fortune.  You deserve it."

"You're very good," said Luke.  His eyes
twinkled a little.  "I wonder if you know about it—all."

"Only what this mealy-mouthed sheet says.  It's
absolutely inexplicable to me, Huber, how a paper
written by such able men can be so narrow-minded
on broad subjects.  However, I think they're going
to support *your* party, if they may be said ever to
support anything."

"I'm afraid they *are* rather reticent about the real
news," said Luke.

"They never tell anything that weighs against their
theories."

"They haven't had a chance to tell this."

Forbes looked puzzled.

"What do you mean?"

"It's only just happened."  Luke breathed deeply.
"I'm engaged to be married," he said.  He spoke
with an unusual rapidity.  "Engaged to be married,
and I'd like it to come off—the wedding, I
mean—right after the election."

Forbes scrambled up.  He wrung Luke's hand.

"Well, well," he said, "you are to be congratulated!"

"I am glad you think so," said Luke, "for you
know the girl better than I do."

"The girl?  I know her better——" Forbes's
voice rose.  "You don't mean——  You don't mean
to say——"

"Yes," Luke nodded.  "It *is* luck, isn't it?  It's
Betty."

"Bless my soul!"  Forbes brought his left hand
down on Luke's right shoulder.  "Bless my soul!
My little girl!  Huber, you—you rather knock the
wind out of me."

He said all the conventional things; his manner
showed all the proper surprise; and both men
understood that he had been expecting this news for a
long time and wanting it.

"Huber," he said, "of course this is sudden, and
of course I'm an old fool not to have got over
considering Betty a child—a mere baby—but, now
you're here with the announcement, I'm quite
certain that, out of all the men who've been tagging
after her, you're the one that I'd want for a
son-in-law."

Luke again mumbled his thanks.

"You're not standing still," pursued Forbes:
"you're going ahead.  You have a great deal to you,
and Betty's the very girl to make you make the best
of yourself"—Forbes's voice abandoned the
commonplace note and fell to the note of genuine
feeling—"then there's your interest in the Business.
Huber, I've always regretted that I didn't have a
son to leave the Business to, as my father left it to
me and his father to him.  If you'd married
somebody else, and Betty had married some chap that had
no interest in it, the Business might have gone over
to you eventually, and so on to children of another
stock than mine; whereas, now"—he looked around
Luke to the doorway—"Betty!" he said.

She had not obeyed Luke; she was standing at
the door.

"I couldn't wait," she confessed; but she said it
with an allegiance that was now all for Luke.

"Come here," her father ordered.

He released Luke's hand and shoulder.  The girl
ran to him and put her arms about his neck.

"Please be nice, daddy," she whispered.  "Please
be nice."

Forbes managed to draw a handkerchief and blow
his nose.

"I *am* a fool," he said.  "I—Betty, you're
looking so much to-night the way your mother—By
George, I *am* a fool!  I think I must be getting old,
Huber."


§6.  In the room at the end of the hall marked
"Family Entrance" to a saloon in Fifty-second
Street, near Eighth Avenue, a red-headed man
dressed in cheap clothes of fashionable cut, was
leaning across a table at which he was drinking raw
whisky with a girl who, had she not been too heavily
painted, would have had a face like that popularly
ascribed to Joan of Arc.

.. _`HE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO BE EMPHATIC`:

.. figure:: images/img-192.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: HE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO BE EMPHATIC

   HE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO BE EMPHATIC

"I've got him showed to me," the man was saying.
"He lives at the Arapahoe on Thirty-ninth
Street.  I'll play lighthouse.  All you gotta do's put
on them glad clothes an' get him into Pearl's Six'
Av'nue place.  He's in wrong, anyhow.  Then I'll
tip off Charley Guth, an' he'll put Donovan wise an'
pinch the joint.  See?"

The girl that looked like Joan of Arc nodded
comprehendingly.

"But the clothes has got to be real swell," she said.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER X`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  As Luke left the Forbes house that night, his
step kept time with the beat of his pulses, and he
walked fast.  At last he thought that he saw
happiness within reach.

He was not yet happy; he was quite clear about
this.  One half of him, perhaps the nobler half, was
engaged in a political battle with the forces of
corruption, but it was so engaged that those forces
affected it; they invaded his individuality and,
therefore, curtailed his freedom and curtailed
completeness.  Happiness, if it was to be found at all, was
to be found only in the perfect development of self,
and such a development was impossible so long as
self, seeking expression in politics, found expression
thwarted by an evil opposition in the political field.

Nevertheless, this opposition, Luke was sure, could
be crushed and swept away; his ideal for the good of
the city, which had become his own good, could be
attained; and then, he told himself, that other part
of him, the part that loved Betty and that Betty
loved, could enjoy Betty as the reward of the whole
man.  It was as if he were one of two runners.
Betty he saw not as the goal, but as the prize to be
given him for leading at the goal; not a prize that
any other runner could win by worsting him in the
race, but a prize that he himself could deserve only
if he were to lead at the finish.

He was thinking of this when he left the Subway
station and walked toward the Arapahoe, but under
his conscious thoughts the subconscious self was still
tingling with the emotions that had flamed up in him
when he took Betty in his arms and felt her lips on
his.  He quivered with the physical recollection, and
though the flame had burned, his flesh found the pain
of it sweet.

At the corner nearest the apartment house in which
he lived, he became aware of a woman.  The street
was nearly empty, but until she was close beside him
he did not notice her.  How she came to be at his
elbow he did not appreciate, nor did he at first realize
whether she were young or old, beautiful or ugly.

"Will you tell me the time, please?" she asked.

Luke's experience in Leighton's office had long ago
taught him that such a request was the commonest
form of watch-stealing, but he was not afraid of
losing his watch.  He stopped under a lamp-post.

"Certainly," he said.

"I know it's late," pursued the woman, "but
I don't know how late."

The words were thick.  The voice was the voice
of all the phantoms of the street, low in pitch and
hoarse, but luring because of all that it connoted:
because of the mystery, the adventure which, after
all knowledge of her sordidness and all understanding
of her frigidity, the woman who most reveals
her body has maintained by that revelation's forced
screening of her soul.

Luke consulted his watch.

"It's a quarter to eleven," he said.

He looked at her, and he was glad to look.  That
she was well-dressed, but overdressed and wore her
clothes with the defiance of one unhabituated to them,
did not impress him.  What impressed him was the
face that, in spite of its tokens of much evil done and
more evil suffered, retained the fragile beauty which
men associate with innocence.  The calm, broad brow,
the gray eyes wide and steady, the underlip timidly
drawn back, the delicate chin upturned above a slim
white throat, reminded him of the pictures of Joan
of Arc on trial and foredoomed by her English accusers.

"It *is* late, isn't it?" she said.

"Yes," said Luke.  He had forgotten about his
watch; he was holding it loosely in his hand.

"I wonder," said the woman, "if it's too late for
you to take a little walk with me."

Her eyes had narrowed coldly; a smile that was
a trade grimace distorted her mouth.

The change in her wakened Luke.  He restored
his watch to his pocket.  He felt a slight chill at his
heart and a self-accusation.

"No," he said brusquely; and started to walk away.

The woman followed.

"Aw, come on," she urged.  Her tone coarsened
under his refusal.

"No," said Luke.

"Please?" her voice whined.  She put her hand
on his arm.

Luke shook off the hand.  He was too angry with
himself to have pity for her.

"Stop this," he ordered.

"But won't you listen?"  The woman's hand returned
persistently; it clutched.  "I got somethin'
to——"

Luke saw that they were at the door of the
Arapahoe.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't stop to listen
to you."

He went into the apartment house.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  He really was sorry.  Once inside the door of
the Arapahoe, he said to himself that the woman
had only been plying her trade, and that what he
had visited upon her was a portion of the wrath
against his own momentary weakness.  He could
never have given way to her, because he was so firm
in his resolve to live worthily for Betty that he could
not enough want to give way to offset the efficacy of
his resolve; only the portion of him subject to his
will without being a part of his will had momentarily
weakened; it could not have rebelled victoriously,
and although it merited punishment, the exterior
cause of its weakness did not deserve censure.
Altogether, Luke concluded, he had behaved in a rather
contemptible fashion.

His mind was immediately diverted.  As he passed
the clerk's desk in the hall, the clerk beckoned darkly
to him.

"There are some reporters looking for you here,"
he whispered.  "I sent them into the waiting-room
so's you could get by them when you came in, if you
wanted to.  Do you?"

Luke almost laughed as he reflected upon the
figure he would have presented to the representatives
of the press, had they been waiting for him at the
door.

"Yes, I'll see them," he said.

They came to him in a body, seven of them.  They
worked for the morning papers and, because the
evening papers had printed Luke's letter about his
resignation from the District-Attorney's staff, they
wanted a fresh sensation for their journals.

Luke leaned against a pillar in the lobby and
talked to them.  Most of them he had met while in
Leighton's office.  Personally, he was popular with
them, and he liked them.

"I'll say anything you want," he agreed.  "But
what is there to say?"

The spokesman was a keen man with curling
black hair.

"You might develop the last part of your letter,"
he suggested: "the part about the big financiers that
you're going gunning for."

"I haven't got the gun yet," objected Luke.  "Better
wait and see if I'm nominated, boys."

"Oh, you'll be nominated, all right.  Come on,
Mr. Huber."

"You're going to support the League, anyhow,"
said a stout little fellow, whose paper opposed all
reformers.  "You can tell us how the League will go
for the men at the top."

To this Luke agreed.  He began to speak and, as
he saw the busy pencils noting his best phrases upon
sheets of roughly-folded copy-paper, he fell into
stride with his subject.  He declared that the League
meant to put an end to the influence of Big Business
in municipal politics, and, although he mentioned no
names, it was evident what big business men he had
in mind.

The reporters tried to make him mention names,
but their efforts only seemed to restore his caution.
They urged him to be specific in his charges against
the present administration of the District-Attorney's
office; but here again they encountered the impassive
side of Luke with which they were more familiar.

"No, no," said Luke; "there may be a time for
all that, but this isn't the time.  Just wind up by
saying we mean, once and for all, to put Wall Street
out of politics and graft out of the administration
of justice in New York City and to keep them out,
if we have to send every financier and every
policeman to jail."

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  The reporters made all that they could of
what Luke gave them, and the next morning's papers
were full of it.  Leighton, on his way downtown,
read them with anger against Luke and annoyance
with himself for losing a man that might have been
so valuable to him.

He began to be afraid of the effect of Huber's
implications regarding the District-Attorney's office.
Remembering that his party was in no position to
risk putting up a weak candidate, he telephoned to
George J. Hallett and was granted an interview: he
said he knew of the letters in Luke's possession and
knew how Luke came by them.

Hallett, whose office was almost the counterpart
of that in which he consulted with his master and
Rivington, sprawled in a deeply upholstered chair.
He smoked steadily at a cigar, and when the letters
were mentioned, he accepted the mention with
complete composure.

"Who else knows about 'em?" he frankly inquired.

"Nobody," said Leighton—"unless Huber's been talking."

"He's got 'em, hasn't he?"

"Had them the last time I saw him."

"Anyway, you haven't 'em?"

"No, of course, I haven't."

Hallett took his cigar from his mouth; he looked
at the cigar, and from it to Leighton.

"I don't see what use *you* are to us, then," he said.

Leighton understood that the only satisfactory
way to deal with this man was the direct way.

"I can't be any use to you except to tell you where
the leak is these letters came through."

"What do you want us to do for you?"

"I want your support at election time."

"Can't promise it.  The other side has just as good
a claim on us."

"Heney?"

"An' the whole Democratic organization, yes."

"Would you promise not to interfere on either side?"

"Can't do it.  You see, you haven't got much to sell."

Leighton ran his fingers through his black hair.

"Look here, Mr. Hallett," he began again, "we
don't know each other personally——"

"That's all right," said Hallett.

"Well, then, if I can't count on your influence for
the election, may I count on it for the nomination?"

"Who stole those letters?" said Hallett.

"I can count on you people in the matter of the
nomination?"

"Yes."

"A man named Rollins."

Late that afternoon it was found that Rollins had
made an overcharge for postage-stamps in the course
of his secretarial work.  He was arrested and
"railroaded" to jail.

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  It was somewhat later when the Republicans
nominated Leighton and then, to the amazement of
the public, the Democrats and Progressives each
opposed him with candidates so weak that every
politician understood this as a surrender to Leighton in
order to defeat the candidate of the Municipal
Reform League.  In advance of their occurrence,
however, all these things were gossiped about by the
leaders of every faction and so confidently expected
that plans were shaped in accordance with them.
Somehow, they sent word ahead to the Reform
headquarters even on the day of the happening that set
them in motion, and Venable and Nelson, together
with the other executives of the M. R. L. bestirred
themselves.

"Where's Yeates?" asked Nelson, as he came
into Luke's room, where Venable and Luke were
busy.  "That young fellow's never around when he's
wanted."

"He sent in word he had some other engagements,"
said Venable.

"Had to play golf with Hallett's son, I guess, if
it wasn't L. Bergen Rivington," Nelson sneered.
"There's too much society in that boy for any
political usefulness."

Luke looked up from the notes he was preparing
for his formal letter accepting the nomination that
the League was next day to offer him:

"Is Yeates a friend of those people?" he asked.
"I knew he knew some of them, but is he a friend?"

"Only socially," he said.  "Yeates was born to it,
but politically he is all right.  He has high ideals and
a really fine enthusiasm."

"Hum," said Luke.  "What do you think of this
paragraph, Nelson?"

He read from his notes:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: small

"During the past few years, those persons in a position to
observe the inner workings of our politics, both in national and
municipal affairs, have been alarmed to see the steady encroachment
made upon them by High Finance.  There is no longer any
room left for doubt.  The purpose of this invading power is
clear: its purpose is conquest.  Unless the free voters act, and act
quickly, the true government of the United States in general, and
of New York in particular, will not rest in the President or
Congress, in Mayors and Boards of Aldermen, in the Constitution,
the charter, or the courts: it will rest in a combination of Big
Business interests that will control the men elected as
representatives of the people."

.. vspace:: 2

Nelson slapped his thigh.

"That's it!" he said.  "That's the talk.  We
ought to have had some of that kind of medicine
long ago.  Look at all this recent drug-legislation,
for instance.  You can't imagine what my firm's been
up against.  They're getting an appetite for the
wholesale drug-trade now, these big fellows are, and
they're paving their way by lobbies at Washington
and Albany and half a dozen state capitals!"

The three worked over the letter for the rest of
that day, having a scanty luncheon brought into the
office from a nearby restaurant, and talking plans
while they ate.  All the time callers were sending in
their names with requests for interviews, workers
were reporting, men at the telephone were ringing
up to ask instructions, and clerks and stenographers
were running in and out to deliver telegrams and
special-delivery letters and to receive replies.

Luke's only appreciable pause was to read two
notes of congratulation from his mother and Jane,
the former commending him for adopting a course
that the writer was sure her husband would have
adopted had he lived, the latter full of pride in his
approaching success, but ending with the postscript:
"Jesse [Jesse Kinzer was Jane's husband, the new
Congressman] says that conditions in New York are
'purely local,' whatever that means."  Altogether,
Luke had a busy day.  He was a tired man when, at
nine o'clock, he again rang the bell of the Forbes
house in Brooklyn.

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  To Luke's surprise, it was Forbes himself that
opened the door.

"I've been looking for you," he said seriously.
"Can you come into the library?  I want to see you
for a few minutes.  It's important."

The concluding words were unnecessary.  The
tone of the words that preceded them would alone
have been sufficient to warn Luke of trouble: Forbes's
voice was husky, tense, uncertain.

"Of course," Luke assented.

He followed Forbes into the library, and there, as
the host closed the door, Luke saw in the face that
confronted him an expression which conformed with
the tone and import of Forbes's first words.  The
elder man's face was haggard.

"I shall have to tell you something," he was
saying—"something that I ought to have told you long
ago, or as much of it as had happened then.  But,
you see, I had no idea it could be so important—ever
be so important."  He broke off with a remembrance
of his accustomed courtesy: "I beg your pardon.
Won't you sit down, Huber?  I quite forgot to ask
you.  For my part, I couldn't sit still if my life
depended on it."

Luke stood by the center-table.

"No, no," he said.  "Don't bother—and don't
worry."  He thought that Forbes looked as if death
were in the house.  "Is anything wrong with
Betty?" he suddenly asked.

"No, it's not that.  It's what I say.  Of course
I never supposed your going in for the Municipal
Reform League movement could have any business
significance——"

Luke, relieved about Betty, was unable to follow
Forbes's disjointed sentences.

"It hasn't," he said.  "It hasn't any business
significance whatever."

"Ah"—Forbes shook his head—"that's what I
thought, too.  But it has.  Huber, this may mean the
end of R. H. Forbes & Son.  Think of it: it may
mean the end of the Business—a business that has
been honorably conducted by my family for three
generations."

What such a catastrophe would mean to Forbes
nobody knew better than Luke, but how the Municipal
Reform League could be concerned in it was beyond
guessing.

"Won't you try to begin at the beginning?" said
Luke.  He was used to getting coherent stories in
preliminary interviews with incoherent witnesses, and
he fell into his professional manner.

"It's this way."  Forbes turned his gray eyes
away and fumbled with an ornament on the
mantel-tree.  "When you came into the Business, I had
several loans outstanding—the Business had.  They
were all well secured, and you know how solid the
concern's always been.  With the money you put in
and the earnings, I was able to take up some of them,
but there were the improvements and extensions made
necessary by fresh competition and the new
inventions and the machine-trust's raise of prices.  Well,
I had to leave a loan outstanding at the East County
National."

"Yes," said Luke encouragingly.  "How much was it?"

"Two hundred and fifty thousand.  It was a good
deal, I know, but, you see, when I negotiated it——"

"Never mind the reasons now.  What were its terms?"

"It was a call-loan," said Forbes in a shaken voice.

Luke's amazement conquered his reserve.

"What?  And for two hundred and fifty thousand?"

"Yes.  There was the competition.  It was
growing hot.  The Business——"

"How did you ever arrange it?"

"I was surprised myself at the time to find it so
easy, but I was too glad to get it to ask questions.
Now, I wish I had.  I believe the bank was
influenced by some people that wanted to get us into
trouble—want to form a ready-made clothing trust."

"It's incredible!" cried Luke.  "Not one of the
agents that I had look into your business for me
mentioned this."

"I didn't know that, Huber."  Forbes looked his
appeal.  "I ask you to believe me."

"All right.  It was my own fault.  I should have
asked you more questions.  What puzzles me is how
this loan was concealed."

"It was at the request of the bank.  They said
it was so unusual that they didn't want it more widely
known than was absolutely necessary, and I agreed
because of the credit of the Business.  Now I believe
it was all a trap set by the men that want to form the
trust."

Luke did not pause to waste reproaches over either
his own stupid blindness or Forbes's culpable
rashness.  He pressed forward:

"And now they're going to call the loan?"

Forbes bowed his head.

"And we can't meet it?"

"If—if we tried, we could do it only by wrecking
the Business."

"But we can go somewhere else.  The East
County isn't the only bank in New York."

"That is what I thought.  It's what I said."

Forbes was swallowing a sob.  "I said it to
Osserman—that's the president—I said it to him himself."

"Well?" persisted Luke.

"Well"—Forbes's eyes met Huber's—"it wasn't
any use."

"Now, look here," said Luke.  He put into his
voice a calm that he did not feel.  "Try to tell me
just what happened.  I can't advise you till I know
that, even if I'm not the business-fool I seem to have
proved myself to be.  First of all, Osserman sent
you some sort of word, didn't he?"

"Yes, of course."

"What was it?"

"It was a letter—just a personal letter."

"When did you get it?"

"About eleven this morning."

"So then you went over to the bank?"

"Yes."

"And asked to see this man Osserman?"

"Yes."

"And what did he say?"

"Well," he said—"I can't tell you exactly; he
was careful not to use definite words; but careful
to make his meaning clear."

"What was his meaning, then?"

"He said in effect that he understood you were
interested in our Business."

"What of it?  That's what I want to know,
Forbes.  What's my interest in your firm got to do
with your standing at the East County National?"

"Oh, he didn't say at first.  At first he said he
understood we were not sound."

"So you told him he was mistaken and offered to
show the books?"

"Of course I did."  Forbes's chin shot upward.
"I told him that the Forbes firm was one of the
oldest and——"

"Yes, yes.  And then he mentioned me.  How did
I hurt the firm's standing?"

"He was really very plausible about that.  I
must say, Huber, that he rather opened my eyes to a
phase of your political activities I hadn't before
thought of."

"What phase?"

"To be quite frank, he called your public utterances
wild.  He said they attacked credit and might
shake it.  He even intimated that if you were elected,
you'd go in for a course of action—you had pledged
yourself to go in for one that would upset credit
altogether.  And that's true, Huber."  Forbes gained a
certain confidence.  "When you come to think of it,
the business interests of the city—I mean the sound
conservative business interests—ought not to be made
to suffer for the sins of the big financiers."

Luke recaptured his composure.  His face
relaxed; he looked lazy and uninterested.

"So I suppose," he said, "that this banker asked
you to tell me to get out of the fight."

"Yes, but of course——"

"Really, that's the highest testimony to the
League's strength that we've had yet."

"Yes, but, of course, I told him I couldn't do
that."

"What did he say then?"

"He said he was afraid the City Chamberlain
would withdraw all the city funds on deposit at the
East County if the bank kept on carrying a loan you
were interested in."

"And you took all this like a child?"

"I didn't.  You ought to know me better than that."

"What did you do?"

"I was indignant.  I told you I was.  I said I
would not have a loan from a concern that interfered
with the political convictions of its creditors.
I said I would go somewhere else."

"Did you go?"

The sob returned to Forbes's throat.

"Yes, I did," he said; "and it was the most
humiliating experience of my career.  When I
thought of the firm of R. H. Forbes & Son begging
credit, I could hardly bear it.  But I went to the
Lexington National."

"They turned you down?"

"They listened very politely and said they would
consider the proposition."

"Well, then," said Luke, "you're crossing a
bridge before you come to it."

"No, I am not; for presently they sent over a
messenger with a note that was no more than an
insulting refusal."

"You gave up then?"

"No, I tried again.  I tried Clement & Co."  Forbes
seemed unable to conclude.

"And they?" urged Luke.

"They wouldn't consider it for a moment, Huber."

Luke did not like to look at Forbes's suffering, but
he had to hear the end.

"Well?" he said.

Forbes flung out his hands.

"What more could I do?" he demanded.  "If
it became known that the firm was going begging—yes,
begging—from bank to bank, what would happen
to our credit?  I didn't dare to go anywhere
else.  I—Huber, I went back to Osserman and asked
him for time."

Luke sat down.  He picked up a paper and made a
transparent pretense of glancing at it.

"Did he give you time?"

"He said he'd give me a week."

"A whole week?"  Luke tried to appear encouraged.
"That's six good working days.  You can get
the money together in that time."

"Huber"—Forbes came over to Luke and stood
above the newspaper—"I've told you what it would
do to our credit to try.  But I've come to the
conclusion that we could not get this money from any
bank in America."

"What do you mean?  Not if we have security?"

"Not if we could offer the Metropolitan Life
Building for security.  Not from any bank in
America."

Luke put down the paper.

"But that——"  He stopped a moment,
and then went on: "But there's only one group
of men in the country that could put up such a wall."

"That," said Forbes simply, "is the group I mean."

Luke's eyes were veiled.  He rose and walked
across the room.  Presently, over his shoulder, he
inquired sharply:

"What makes you think this?"

Forbes was frank:

"I don't know.  I can't tell you.  A hundred little
things.  But I am sure."

"I thought you said something about a clothing
trust."

"I did.  It was the same crowd.  Now they have
some additional reason.  Oh, I couldn't doubt it.
It was behind every word Osserman said.  It was
standing back of his words, but it was on tiptoe,
looking over them."

Luke turned and came up to Forbes.  He was
quite calm again.

"I know what you want me to do," he said.

"Yes," said Forbes: it was his way of saying:
"You have read my meaning, and I will stand by it."

"Well, I can't do it."

Luke spoke quietly.  It hurt him to have to say
this thing.

"I was afraid that was the way you'd take it,"
said Forbes.

"How else could I take it?"

"You know what it means to me, Huber?"

"Yes.  I know what the firm means to you, but
I can't do what you ask.  You want me to give up
what I think is right for the sake of saving your firm.
I can't do it."

"It's your firm, too, Huber."

"Then I've got a right to hurt it."

"I'm not asking you to do anything wrong; I'm
only asking you to wait."

"That's just what I can't do," said Luke.

Forbes would hear no more.  He twitched with
a spasm of weak rage.  His voice rang high.

"You're a fool!" he cried.  "You talk as if I
were trying to compound a felony with you.  What
am I asking?  I'm only asking you to hold off for
this campaign.  I'm only asking you to stand by the
man that took you into his business—my Business, the
one that my grandfather founded and my father
handed down to me.  Haven't *I* stood by *you*?
Didn't I trust you?  I've kept out of all these big
combinations, but I know how they work—nobody
can help knowing these days—and when I took you
in, how was I to be sure you weren't a dummy
representing somebody else, and so on, higher and higher
up, till the trail ended with just these same men?
But no, I trusted you.  I trusted you, and now——  You've
no right to humiliate me!  You've no right
to wreck my Business!  Do you know what you're
doing?  You're making a beggar out of my daughter—out
of the girl you told me last night you wanted
to be your wife!"

Luke had been expecting this.  The muscles
about his mouth tightened, but all that he said was:

"I suppose you have spoken to her?"

"Yes, I have.  Of course I have!" cried Forbes.

"And what does she say?"

Forbes tried to take Luke's hand.

"Why do you act this way?" he pleaded.  "Why
can't you wait?  They haven't nominated you yet.
Withdraw your name.  That won't hurt the League,
and it will only make you all the stronger for the
next time; and by the next time we'll be ready to meet
all opposition.  This time you can't be elected even if
you are nominated.  Why do you want to jump into
the fire?"

"What," insisted Luke, "does Betty say?"

She was at the door.  She came in as he asked
the question.  She looked from her lover to her
father, and then she ran to her father and put her
head on his shoulder.

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  Luke took a short breath.  He wanted to
leave them.  He felt that he could not face much
more.  He wondered what Forbes had said to her
and how much she had heard of what Forbes and he
were saying.

"Betty!" said her father.  He patted her head.
Luke thought that the caressing hand looked old.
"Betty!"

She spoke with her face hidden:

"Oh, Luke, you wouldn't hurt father?"

"It isn't that, Betty."  Luke was angry.  The girl
was behaving as he thought that a girl placed as she
was ought to behave, and he loved her no less for
that, but he was angry at her father's weakness in
putting her in such a position, "It isn't that, Betty,
I've got to do it.  You don't understand these things.
You can't understand them."

"She knows that *I* understand them," Forbes interposed.

"What of it?" challenged Luke.  "Betty, I've
got to do what I think's right.  You wouldn't have
me go against everything I believe, would you?  You
wouldn't have me do something I thought was wrong?"

Betty half raised her head:

"But it can't be wrong not to ruin us!"

Luke turned his words on Forbes.

"I'll withdraw from the company," he said.

"I couldn't buy you out," Forbes answered.  He
bit his lip; shame colored his cheeks.  "And if you
sold to anybody else it would be sure to be letting in
our enemies.  Even the mere report that you wanted
to sell would wreck us, coming on top of those bank
interviews."

Luke knew Forbes was right.

"Betty," he said, "a lot of men that believe in me
are going to offer me this nomination.  It's a nomination
to a place that makes its holder an officer of the
court, an officer of justice, yet the plain truth is your
father wants me to let these other men's money, or the
power of their money, buy me off from doing justice
to them."

"Nonsense!"  Forbes was strengthened by his
daughter's meed of comfort.  "You won't be elected
if you are nominated."

"They seem to think I will," said Luke.

"And somebody else," urged Betty, "could do
just as well against them, Luke."

"That's not the point, Betty.  It's a personal question,
a question of personal morals; it's a matter of
my own conscience."

She turned until she stood no longer between the
two men.  She stood at her father's side.  Her cheeks
were damp from weeping, but her eyes shone.

"But think, Luke," she said.  "You *are* young.
Father's twice as old, and he *must* know more.  He
must be right.  He wouldn't ask you to do anything
that was wrong, would you, father?"

Forbes shook his head.

"I know it's a lot for you to have to give up," she
went on; "but you ought to be willing to give up a
lot if—if you——"

"If I love you?" asked Luke.

She met him.

"Yes," she said.

"She's right, Luke," nodded her father.

"Then," pursued Luke—the tone was his laziest—"what
about her love for me?  Isn't it to——"

Betty interrupted.  She had taken Forbes's hand:

"You're not going to make me choose between
you and father, are you?" she pleaded.

"I tell you," said Luke, "it isn't anything of that
sort, Betty.  I've got to do what I'm going to do.
You haven't any choice, and neither have I.  You
might almost say it's a religious question.  It's like
saving my soul.  I've got to do it; I've just got to;
just because it's the one right thing, I've got to do it.
Why"—his manner grew tense—"you don't know;
even your father doesn't know.  This North Bridge
wreck, with all those people killed and wounded:
that's what these men did, these men that are trying
to keep me out of the district-attorneyship."

"The North Bridge wreck?" snapped Forbes.
"That was on the M. & N.  What are you talking
about, Huber?"

Luke realized that he had gone further than the
limits of his promise of temporary silence concerning
the letters, but he was too bitterly tried not to go
still further.

"Yes," he said, "I mean just that.  Everybody
knows the N. Y. & N. J. crowd own the majority of
the stock in the M. & N., and you know it, too.
What's more, this wreck was their direct fault.  I
can prove that and I mean to.  That's why they're
after me: I mean to prove it if they don't square
things.  And so they're afraid of me."

"Ridiculous!" said Forbes.  "That's just the
trouble with you, Huber: you're going about making
wild, unfounded statements like this."

"I ought not to tell even you two," Luke answered;
"but the fact is, I have letters written by
one of these men that will substantiate every word
I say."

"You mean they'll show these people owned the road?"

"Practically, and ordered the poor rails that caused
that wreck."

"Absurd: they couldn't do that.  They didn't
operate the road.  This sort of thing is what is
upsetting legitimate business: a few men going on the
way you are.  I don't think these people at the
top are any better than they should be—I've often
said so to you—but you can't go around calling them
murderers.  That's ridiculous."

Before Luke could reply, Betty again shifted the
issue.

"Luke, you won't do it?" she appealed.  "You'll
give it up—for father's sake?"

He started to speak, but she dropped her father's
hand and came to him with hers upraised.

"No," she said; "don't tell me now.  Don't say
anything now.  Don't speak.  You'll only be sorry.
You're hurt and angry.  Of course, you are.  Go
away.  Wait.  Go away just for to-night and think
it over, and come back to-morrow."  Her hand
crept into his.  "I know it's awfully hard for you
to give it all up, even for a few years.  I know what
it means to you.  Don't think I don't know, Luke.
But——"  She looked into his face.  "Please, dear?"

His face was set.

"Good-by," he said.

"You'll be back to-morrow?"

He freed himself.

"Yes," he said.  "Good-night."

.. vspace:: 2

§7.  It was simply that he could not stay any
longer.  He left the house with his mind made up;
he would not withdraw from the fight for the
district-attorneyship.  To keep his word, he would go back
to see her next day, but he would go back only to
end what he had not the heart to end to-night.

The thing had ended itself.  This was the conclusion
of all his chances for Betty.  They were over.

He loved her.  He went away from her with the
certainty that nothing which life might henceforth
rob him of could be the equal of this loss.

Yet he did not blame her.  Brought up as he had
been, he believed that her attitude was the inevitable
one and the right.  He had ventured that single
question about the test of her love for him, but he
felt that it was an unfair question.  Until a girl
married, her first duty was toward her parents.  His own
duty and Betty's duty clashed.  There was no
possibility of compromise.  Forbes was a weakling, but,
in cleaving to Forbes, Betty, Luke felt, did the only
thing that she rightly could do.

He wondered what would come of that side of his
life which she had gone out of.  As much as might
be, he would crowd its borders with the activities
of his professional and political work, but
something of the space would remain: it belonged.  He
was still black with the despair of his loss when he
turned into Thirty-ninth Street and saw, standing
there as if waiting for him, the girl that looked like
Joan of Arc.

"I've been waitin' for you," she said.

Her cheeks and mouth were not painted to-night,
and their lines were softer; they spoke only of what
she had suffered and not of what she had inflicted.
Her eyes were wet with tears; her underlip quivered.

"I thought I told you last night," began Luke.

"I know," she said.  "An' then I wanted what
you thought.  But not now, not to-night."  She spoke
rapidly as if determined that he should hear her out
before he could escape.  "Don't mind the way I
talk.  I just kind of talk that way because it gets
like a habit.  What I want's help.  I'm in trouble.
Honest to God I am."

She was surely in trouble, and she was beautiful.

"You mean——"  His hand went to his pocket.

"No, not money," she said.  "It ain't that.  It's
about my sister.  They've got her; my fellow has.
Listen."  She seized his wrist.  "Will you listen a
minute, please?  Here, if you don't want no one to
see you in this here apartment house, come on over
here toward Six' Av'nue.  They've got her: my kid
sister!"

Luke looked at the woman.  He could see nothing
but sincerity.  He was not afraid of an attempt at
robbery, and he could think of no other reason for
her request except the one she gave.

"Yes, I'll go with you," he said.

She hurried him into the darker street.

"Listen," she said: "I'm in the business.  You
know that.  I don't let on to be nothin' much.  But
I've got a kid sister that lives home; an' she's straight,
Jenny is.  Well, I was talkin' to her to-night when
my fellow came up, an' he sent me on an errand—we
was all standin' right over on that corner—an' when
I come back, they was gone, both of them—an' I
know he's got her in here in Pearl's Six' Av'nue
place."

"How do you know that?"

"I guessed it, an' then I rang the bell an' one o'
the girls told me I was on, an' then Pearl came
down an' yelled for the bouncer an' they throwed
me out."

In the lamplight of the street her face looked like
the face of an innocent girl.

"Why didn't you call a policeman?" asked Luke.

"Aw, you know them.  Pearl stands in."

"But they'd have got your sister, anyhow."

"Not the cop on this beat.  I wouldn't give up
to him the other night, and he run me in."

They stopped at a narrow door.  There was a
shop on one side of it and a saloon on the other.

"This is the place," said the girl.  "Pearl's joint's
over the store."

"You want me," asked Luke, "to go in and bring
your sister out?"

The girl assented.  "She's only a kid.  I know
what I am all right; but she's only a kid, an' she's
straight; she's always been straight.  You won't have
no trouble.  They're always scared of anybody like
you.  You'll do it, won't you?"  She leaned toward
him.  "You ain't afraid?"

The infamy burned him.

"Afraid?" he said slowly.  "No, I'm not afraid."  He
rang the bell.

The girl wrung her hands.

"You're good.  You're awful good.  Mamie'll
owe just everything to you."

"Who will?" asked Luke.

"Mamie.  That's my sister's name.  She'll——"

"I see," said Luke.

The door opened.  A negro servant stood in the
darkened hallway before them.  Luke and the girl
stepped inside.

"Wait a minute," said Luke quietly.

He brushed the servant's hand from the knob.  He
saw the two women standing open-mouthed, but
before words came to them, he stepped back into the
street, closing the door behind him.  The girl's slip
about her sister's name had saved him.

.. vspace:: 2

§8.  He was glad to be in the light.  He hurried
across the street with no purpose but that of getting
as quickly and as far from the house as possible.  He
was escaping.

For a minute or more he did not know what it
was that he was escaping from.  Then he glanced
back toward the doorway.

Three policemen were entering the doorway.  As
Luke reached the corner, a gong clanged and a
patrol-wagon turned into Sixth Avenue.

A messenger-boy, who had been standing on the
corner, began to trot after the wagon.  Luke stopped
him.

"What's the matter?" asked Luke.

The boy turned to him a leering face:

"It's a raid, I guess.  I knowed there was somethin'
doin' when I seen that patrol standin' over on
Thirty-nint' Street."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XI

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  Luke wanted to dismiss the episode of the raid
as a coincidence.  He tried to argue that the girl had
been a stool-pigeon employed to get him into the
Sixth Avenue house solely for the purpose of robbery
by confederates waiting for her there.  Schemes of
that sort were common enough in New York and
succeeded in spite of their clumsiness; the more often
one was reported in the papers and brought to the
attention of the papers, the readier a certain portion
of the public was to succumb to the next attempts.
Luke wanted to believe that the appearance of the
police might have proved welcome enough for him.

It was the news Forbes had given him that weighed
against any such supposition.  If his enemies were
at work to ruin him financially, they might well be
at work to break him and bring him to terms by means
of a scandal in the police courts.  It was all very well
to say that the attack on the Forbes company ought
to suffice them: Luke began to feel that these foes
were the kind who want certainty enough to use more
than one method of securing it.  He had heard of a
rebellious city official thus captured in a raid on a
gambling-house.  That man, he had been told, was
released from the police station only upon signing a
compromising paper, which was thereafter held by his
political superiors as a bond to assure his future
obedience to their wishes.  Luke saw how a similar
course could have been followed in regard to himself.

What worried him most, however, was, of course,
the break with Betty and the difficulties in which he
had innocently entangled her father.  He was
sincerely sorry for Forbes, whose shortcomings were
forgivable because of worship of tradition, and the
loss of Betty meant a descent into the pit of despair.

It was early morning before a sudden hope came
to Luke.  He had lain sleepless for hours, not trying
to solve his financial riddle, but only contemplating
its apparent impossibility of solution, and he had
turned from that to the machinations of his enemies
with genuine relief.  This time the change must have
rested his resourcefulness, for, in the midst of tearing
at the sticky strands in which Stein and the men behind
Stein had enmeshed him, the name of Ruysdael shot
into his mind as the name of one who could and might
advance the money to save Forbes and bring back
Betty.  He would go to Ruysdael at the earliest
possible moment.

With that thought, he could dismiss all memory
of the raid in Sixth Avenue.  Almost immediately he
fell asleep.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  The next day was not without its fresh warnings
from the powers that opposed him, and the first
of these came from the headquarters of the Municipal
Reform League itself.  Luke thought it better taste
for him to remain away from the headquarters while
the formalities of the nomination were gone through
with by the committee that was then to make its ticket
regular by means of petition.  But it was too early in
the day to call on Ruysdael, so he remained in his
rooms at the Arapahoe, and here, at eleven o'clock,
Venable telephoned him.

"The meeting is over," said Venable.

"Good," said Luke.  "The ticket is the one agreed on?"

"Yes.  You have my congratulations, Mr. Huber."

"Thank you."  Luke thought that the tone of his
supporter was somewhat strained.  "I hope
everything went off smoothly," he added.

"Well, no," said Venable, "it didn't.  It is all
right now, but I am bound to tell you that a little
opposition had developed against you.  We overcame
it, but it was there and from some men that we had
every reason to believe would support you.  I don't
understand it, Mr. Huber; it was mysterious."

"I'm coming right down," said Luke.

At headquarters he learned little more.  The
committee had met with no indication of approaching
trouble.  Save for two or three persons whose means
of livelihood were the practical organization of
reform political movements, nearly all the members
were business men, in small but sound industries, each
of unquestioned probity.  The candidates slated for
every other post were accepted as a matter of course;
but when Luke's name was brought up by Venable for
the district-attorneyship, one of the politicians and
several of the business men opposed acceptance.
They were dogged, but vague.  The politician at last
spoke of Luke as having courted too much animosity
from the upper regions of finance.

"He has talked too wild," said this one.  "He
oughtn't to have threatened till after election.  Of
course, I know what he's got to do if he's elected,
but he needn't have begun it beforehand.  I haven't
got anything against him, but he's shown his hand too
soon, and so he won't make a good candidate."

The business men spoke much as Forbes had
spoken.  The Municipal Reform League was a
radical organization, but it ought to be radical within
reason.  Huber's public utterances had been too
sweepingly radical.  They feared him; they thought him
too hot-headed.  He was still too young.  In
pursuing Big Business, he was sure to trample smaller,
legitimate business; he would upset credit.

The majority of the committee was loyal to Luke
and had its way.  Luke received the nomination, but
such dissenters as were converted came to him
half-heartedly, and two of the timorous business men
withdrew from the organization.

"Then, there is Yeates, too," said Venable.  "He
wasn't at the meeting, but he telephoned he was
coming here to see you about this time, and I gathered
that he isn't in a particularly pleasant frame of mind."

Luke thought of Venable's long years of battle for
reform.

"You know what's at the back of all this?" he said.

"I think I do," said Venable.

"I mean: you know *who's* back of it?"

"I can guess.  Your published attack was rather
clear, Mr. Huber."

"Then, are you and the League prepared to go
right ahead?"

"Yes, we are."

"You, too?  You individually?"

Venable's old eyes glittered.

"I always suspected these people," he said.  "I
always felt sure they were against us.  They were
never so strongly against us as they are now, but their
being so much more against us now only makes
me the more certain that what we are doing is right."

"They have a good deal of power, Mr. Venable."

"I know that better than you do, my boy; but they
can't hurt me personally, if that is what you mean.
What little money I have comes from the rents of an
uptown apartment house.  It's in a good neighborhood
and full of steady people.  Nobody can take
that away from me.  It isn't as if I drew my income
from bonds, but if I did, and if these people could
ruin me"—he took Luke's hand—"I should go right
ahead."

They had been talking in Luke's office.  Shortly
after Venable left it, Yeates was shown in.  The
young man was excited.

"Look here, Huber," he said.  "A little bit's
good, but you're going pretty damned far."

He dragged a chair toward Luke's desk, turned it
about, and sat down astride of it with his arms folded
across its back.

A smile twitched at Luke's mouth.

"What way-station do you want to get off at?"
he inquired.

"I don't want you to make a monkey out of the
League," said Yeates.  "I've been reading over your
letters and interviews and things, and I think you
ought to realize that this is a reform organization
and not a bunch of Anarchists."

"You're a slow reader, Yeates.  Haven't you been
hearing these things talked over, too?"

Yeates blushed, but he did not flinch.

"Well, what if I have?  The people I've heard
talking are the people you've been slamming, and I
want to tell you that those people are the backbone
of this country."

"I haven't mentioned any names."

"Oh, don't think I'm a fool, Huber, and don't
think these people are fools, either.  Everybody
knows.  What do you do it for?  It won't catch any
votes, if that's what you want."

"I rather wanted to do some good."

"Good?  Good?" Yeates laughed angrily.
"What are you talking about?  You're talking as if
these men were pirates.  You're talking like one of
those fellows that make speeches on a soap-box on
the corner.  It's all right to fight police-graft, and
it's all right to run the crooks out of town—that's
what the League's for and why I'm for the League—but
I'm not going to keep on with an organization
that's mixing up the biggest men in America with
that sort of cattle.  I won't stand for having my
personal friends called thieves.  I can't stand for it,
and I won't!"

Luke looked at his watch.  He rose.

"I have to be uptown in half a hour," he said.

"But see here——"  Yeates's chair clattered to
the floor as Yeates sprang up.

"When this nomination was offered to me," said
Luke, "you were present.  Do you remember something
you said—something about outside influences
and so on?"

"Oh, rot!  Who's talking about outside influences?"

"I am.  The nomination was given me along with
certain promises.  I've accepted it.  I mean to act on
the strength of those promises."

"You mean you're going crazy."

"Then, the League's going crazy, too.  As the
only sane man in it, I'm afraid you won't find
yourself in congenial company, Yeates.  You'd better get
out."

"Get out?"  Yeates could scarcely credit his ears.

"Get out," Luke repeated.

"I like that!" shouted Yeates.  "This is a nice
reform party, this is!  Anti-boss!  Why, you're more
of a boss than Tim Heney ever dreamed of being."

Luke had not looked at the matter that way.  He
saw now that he was indeed using boss-methods,
but he also saw that boss-methods were unavoidable.

"This League," he said, "is pledged to a course
of action you don't agree with, so you can't
consistently remain in it."

"I will!—I *will* get out!" cried Yeates.  "I'd
like to know who had more to do with this League:
you or me.  Why, you only came in the other day,
and it was me and my friends got you in.  But I'll
get out all right: you needn't worry about that.  I'm
through."

He left the room.  It was a few weeks later when
Luke heard of Yeates's engagement to the girl whose
diamond pendant Luke had admired the first time
that he went to the Ruysdaels' house.  That, Huber
knew, was indeed coincidence, but the previous
connection of Yeates with the Municipal Reform League
served the more to shake Luke's confidence in the
radicalism of some of its remaining members.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  His mission to Ruysdael was far more
satisfactory than his talk with Yeates.  Luke did not tell
the millionaire the circumstances that made it
necessary for R. H. Forbes & Son to borrow money, nor,
as things fell out, did he have to explain why the
Ruysdael estate, and not a bank, was wanted as a
creditor.  He went into details only concerning the
nature of the securities that Forbes could offer; he
was honest about the chances of the business, which
he believed to be good, and he was no more pressing
in his request than he thought it wise to be.

"So," said Ruysdael, smiling, "you find some use
for predatory wealth, after all?"

Luke remembered Jack Porcellis's assertion that
the Ruysdaels were in some way connected with the
forces now opposed to the loan, but the connection,
if it existed, must be slight.  The Ruysdael money
was not in a form that could well be hurt by Luke's
enemies; and Ruysdael, though subsequent pressure
might well stop him from further aid, was the sort
of man who, having gone into such a venture as the
present one, would not undo anything he had already
done.

"I don't consider you one of the pirates," said Luke.

"No?  Well, I'm not active, perhaps," Ruysdael
reassured him.  "I was just thinking you rather
strong in some of your public utterances.  There's no
use in attacks unless they can win, you know."

The swarthy man was interested in Huber's
request, though solely on Huber's own account.
Ruysdael felt that he had been in a measure responsible
for Luke's investment, and he was anxious to protect
that investment so long as the protection was real
and not a mere tossing of good money after bad.
He took Luke at once to the offices of the Ruysdael
estate.

There it was clear that, whatever influence Luke's
enemies might have, they had issued no orders against
him.  Perhaps they had not thought of the possibility
of his turning in this direction, perhaps they had
meant to do no more than frighten him by their
show of power with the banks.  In any case, old
Herbert Croy, the manager of the estate, was amiable
and suggested that Forbes be sent for without delay.

It was a moment of triumph for Luke.  He met
Forbes in one of the outer offices of the suite used for
the administration of the Ruysdael estate, and he was
not entirely sorry to find Forbes contrite.

"Is it—it's really true?" asked Forbes.

He had been having a bad time.  His face was
drawn, and the feverish hand that grasped Luke's was
trembling.

"Yes," said Luke.  "I think I've induced
Ruysdael to advance the money."

Forbes looked away.

"I'm sorry—very sorry for my attitude last night,
Huber; and yet, you must have seen——"

"That's all right.  Forget it."

"I know.  You're good.  But I do want you to
understand.  And you have turned out to be the real
business man of the pair of us, after all!"

"So it seems," said Luke dryly.

Forbes missed the reflection on his own ability.

"Oh, but you have!  Huber, you've—you've saved
the Business!"

"No; that's up to you.  I've only made it possible
for you to get the money.  You have to finish
convincing these people; so buck up."

"I will, I will."

"And they'll probably turn in and fight us in the
market."

"We'll see about that."  All of Forbes's courage
had come back to him.  "Let them try.  Huber, I
can't thank you enough.  I never can."

"Then don't try to."  Luke took Forbes by the
arm and led him to the door behind which Ruysdael
and Croy were waiting.

But Forbes felt that there was more to be said.
"It was splendid of you," he continued, as Luke
drew him forward.

"Was it?  You overlook the fact that I stood to
lose a little money of my own—if nothing else!"

"I did.  I actually did!  By Jove, I don't see how
you can forgive me, Huber."

Luke's answer was to push open the door.  Within
half an hour the interview was concluded.  Forbes
had deposited his securities and received a certified
check.  It was all so simple that, while Luke was
wondering why he had not thought of it twelve hours
before, Forbes was saying to himself:

"How was it *I* didn't think of it last night?"

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  Luke intended to go from the Ruysdael offices
to those of the League, but as he parted from Forbes
on the street after the loan had been secured,
something happened that changed his plans.  At the foot
of the elevator-shaft of the building, he noticed a
little man leaning against the marble-paneled wall:
the man was an unostentatious fellow, commonplace
as to both face and clothes, but Luke thought he had
seen the figure before.

He passed with Forbes through the revolving
doors of the office-building and walked to the curb.
He glanced back and saw the commonplace man
coming through the doorway behind him.  Then he
remembered: when he left the Arapahoe that morning,
he saw this man walking down the other side of
Thirty-ninth Street.  He had thought nothing of it at
the time, but now his experience of detectives told
him that this man bore the marks of the
detective.

Luke called a taxicab.  The man, he saw, prepared
to call another.

"I'll try to keep my promise to see Betty to-night,"
said Luke to Forbes.

"You must," said Forbes.  His gratitude, though
not so hot as it had been, was still warm.

"I'll try.  There's a lot to be done—politically,
you know.  But I'll try-"

They shook hands.  Forbes started away.  Luke
gave his chauffeur that address in Wall Street at
which he had issued his orders to the men who were
now fighting him.

He was disappointed; the person whom he sought
was not there.  Luke doubted the statement of the
doorkeeper, but could get no other.  He went to the
offices of Hallett and to those of Rivington, but with
no better luck.  At each descent from his taxi, he
caught sight of the detective and knew that the
detective meant to be seen.  Then he sought the quarters
of Stein, Falconridge, Falconridge & Perry, and was
immediately admitted to the presence of the head of
that firm.

The Judge sat at his handsome desk, a telephone
at one elbow and a vase of Abel Chatney roses at the
other.  His plentiful white hair and his smooth
frock-coat still potent, still spread around him the aura of
dignity.  He rose slowly as Luke came in and bowed
with magisterial calm.

"How do you do, Mr. Huber?" he said pleasantly.
"I am glad to see you—very glad, indeed."

He resumed his chair.  Luke took a chair close by.

"The papers," pursued the Judge, "tell me that
you are open to congratulations.  You have mine."

"Thank you," said Luke.  He stretched his legs.
"Yes, I got the nomination.  There was a little
opposition, but I got it."

"Opposition?"  The Judge raised his white
eyebrows.  "Hum!  Well, of course, Mr. Huber, you
had to expect that in the circumstances."

"What were the circumstances, Judge?"

Stein shook his head and smiled benignantly.

"There you go," he said.  "You will insist on
flattering me with your assumptions of my omniscience."

"But not of your omnipotence, Judge; for I did
get the nomination.  What were the circumstances?"

The Judge still smiled:

"You can't expect to hurt the more important
business interests without hurting the lesser ones; and
the lesser dislike being hurt even more than the
greater, Mr. Huber."

"I gathered that you might think so."

This time the Judge's smile was a song without
words.

"Very well," said the younger man.  "As I say,
I overcame the opposition inside the League.  I
believe I can overcome the same opposition at the
polls."

"I hope so," Stein answered.  "But it is a pity
that you have not more powerful backing."

"I have a very active following at any rate."

"It will require a great deal of activity to
overcome the prejudices of the majority."

"Yes, but I'm not talking about the activity of the
voters.  I am talking about the active following I
am having from my apartments to my office, and
from my office wherever else I go."

Judge Stein leaned over to smell the roses on his
desk.  When he looked up, his firm mouth seemed
innocent.  He offered the vase to Luke.

"Aren't they beautiful?" he asked.

"Quite."

"I often think it is such a pity that they haven't
more perfume.  What they have is good, but it is not
a great deal.  What we gain in form, we lose in
scent.  The law of compensation, I suppose."

"I know this detective had orders to let me see he
was following me."

The Judge put down the vase.

"I am sorry you don't care for roses," he said.
"Yes, Mr. Huber, I dare say you are followed.
You are fighting the Democratic police force and
the Republican District-Attorney's office; they both
have detectives attached to them, and I have heard
that they frequently use their detectives to watch their
political rivals.  You are fighting the Progressive
organization, too, and they could use private detectives.
I quite agree with you that it isn't pleasant."

"This fellow isn't on the job to watch me.  He's
only used to frighten me.  I'm not easily frightened,
Judge."

"No?"

"No.  If I had been, I'd have turned tail when your
friends tried to ruin a business I am interested in, or
when they tried to have me caught in a police-raid."  Luke
spoke as if he were mentioning incidents in the
lives of people dead these thousand years.  "The
raiders didn't find me, as you, of course, know.
What you don't know is that the business move has
failed just as badly."

If he had not known it, the Judge's face betrayed
no surprise.

"Really, Mr. Huber, I told you at our last interview
that I had no professional interest in this matter."

"You admitted that the people back of all this
were your friends."

"I *said* that I was a friend of certain persons."

"Then, you might as well say now that your
friends intend to prevent my election and that they'll
use any means to do it."

"Don't get excited, Mr. Huber."  The Judge's
right hand waved a deliberate protest against Luke's
violent language.  "Of course, I say nothing of the
sort.  What I do say is that you must understand that
your own plan of action is bound to alienate the
voters.  There are more people interested in this election
than you and me—more even than my friends.  A
great many people don't want to see you elected
District-Attorney.  There are the business men, there
are the police, and there are the people of the
underworld.  You have been reckless enough to make no
ethical distinctions.  You lump the good with the
bad, and attack everybody.  Well, you must not be
surprised at the result."

Luke kept to his low key.

"I only came here to tell you that I couldn't be
scared."

"Why to me?"

"Perhaps just because I like to talk to you, Judge."

The Judge bowed a sincere acknowledgment.

"I have already told you," he said, "that I think
you could go far if you were cooler.  Now you are
confusing possible legitimate influence—I say
possible, not certain—with physical attack."

"They've both seemed probable, Judge."

"The former may be.  As to the latter—well, like
most young enthusiasts, you have forgotten that
elections go by majorities, and that the majorities are
controlled by the lower forces of society.  That is the
one flaw in our republican system, and nothing but
social evolution, generations of free education, will
cure it.  You have not only very wrongly assailed
legitimate business; you have quite properly threatened
to close to the criminal classes their chief sources
of revenue.  It is their livelihood against yours.  My
friends can have nothing in common with these
people.  We cannot control them.  You must know that."

Luke shrugged his shoulders.  Stein continued:

"As a politician and a lawyer, you must have
counted on the opposition of the criminal classes when
you began your campaign.  If you did not" the
Judge bent his head to the roses—"well, I don't want
to alarm you, but if I were in your place, I should
leave the fight."

Luke got up.

"The alternative?" he inquired.

The Judge did not answer.  He merely looked at Luke.

"I won't take it," said Luke.

"I tell you again, that we have nothing to do with
the forces that seem to worry you most."

"I know you say so.  Well, we haven't got much
further than at our last talk, have we?"

"At that talk, Mr. Huber, I said to you that you
could help yourself, your party, the public good——"

"If I'd do what you wanted?  I won't.  I merely
thought that if I told you you'd failed so far, you
might do what *I* asked."

The Judge sadly shook his head.

"If you would only listen to reason!"

"I'll wait for the month and not a day longer.
Meanwhile, I'm not the kind that's easy scared.
Nothing you can do—you, and your friends, or
anybody hired by your friends—will stop me."

The Judge stood up.

"I am afraid you will be stopped," he said.

"Try it," said Luke.  "Good-by."

"Good-day, Mr. Huber," Stein replied.  "I shall
always be glad to have a call from you.  I am
interested in your career—more genuinely interested than
you suppose."

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  That night it was Betty who came to the door
when Luke rang the bell.  She ran to it.

"Luke," she cried, "father told me!  I knew you
would find a way out.  And, oh, Luke, I don't believe,
in the end, I could have given you up, even if you
hadn't found one!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII

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Luke had been lied to at the offices of Hallett and
at those of Rivington, but at the first office at which
he had called, he was told the truth: the stout man,
with the bright, short-sighted eyes and the pointed
teeth was not at work that day.  He was not at work
for several days, and breaths of rumors, tremulous,
expectant, began to shake the threads which centered
at his working-place.

The business of that place proceeded with its usual
regularity and speed.  Conover, promoted to the post
of confidential clerk, went back and forth from Wall
Street to his master's house in one of his master's
motor-cars.  Atwood and the other brokers
telephoned hourly for orders to the house uptown.
Simpson saw callers.  But in the inner room,
Washington wasted his stupid solemnity on emptiness, the
ticker spun its yards and yards of tape for none to
see, and nobody looked from the high windows down
the maze of streets on which the people buzzed like
flies.

All this had been thus before, and more frequently
thus during the past few years; the man with the hairy
hands and crooked arms often suffered attacks from
some malady that the newspapers did not name.  His
world, therefore, should not have taken the present
seizure too seriously; but it always leaped to the
belief that each seizure was the last.  Rumor never
learned from precedence, and on each occasion
expected the worst.  Now official bulletins and
authorized announcements of a slight cold and a catarrhal
affection of the mucous membrane of the throat did
not check rumor.  The doctors said no more than that,
the papers printed no more; but news of another sort
spread with a stronger conviction than the doctors
could secure and a wider circulation than the
circulation of all the newspapers combined.

Rumor said that the sick man had always been a
glutton, and that now, at last, his digestion had given
way.  Rumor said that he had been in the habit of
rising early and working late, in the dawn and
through the night, planning the crowded actions of
the too brief business day; and rumor added that the
price of these exertions must, at last, be paid.  Rumor
said that the man overworked his brain and nerves,
and that, at last, the brain was working no more and
the nerves strained to breaking-point.  Rumor
whispered of a projected sea-voyage and a change of
scene to Biskra or the Riviera, and rumor sagely
shook its many heads.

The luxurious house in which the sick man lived
among the best things that his money had bought
him, and from which he used to dart out each
morning to his office in the maze, was closed to the
reporters and to most of the acquaintances who called
there.  L. Bergen Rivington went in and came out,
worried and elliptical.  George J. Hallett went and
came out with loud, but brief, denials.  The
newspaper men, from the steps of a house directly across
the street, watched in relays and, every hour,
rang the muffled bell of the sick man's house and
asked the same questions, and were given the
same answers, from the servant who came to the door.

Then, one morning, at its old-accustomed hour, the
motor-car that the sick man had most affected purred
up to the house.  The door opened.  The sick man,
apparently no longer a sick man, came out, neat and
trim in a suit of russet brown, stepped into the car
and was started for his office before the quickest
reporter could get a word with him.

"He has quite recovered," said the doctors, when
the newspaper men overhauled them, and, although
they swathed the answer in long phrases, they would
say no more than that.

"He's quite well again and will not leave New
York," said Simpson to the representatives of the
press when they reached his Wall Street offices; and
Simpson would add nothing save that his employer
was too busy with accumulated work to have time for
press interviewers.

Simpson, however, and Conover too, and all the
office-force and all the brokers, knew something more.
They knew that, whereas their master was generally
not quick of temper, he had returned to work in an
ugly mood.

There was, indeed, a great deal of work for
him to do: enough to ruffle the temper of any man.
He did it all grimly, speedily, with no waste of
words.  He attended to each detail with as much
energy and care as he gave to every other detail, and
one detail that he dealt with in a necessarily long
talk with Hallett he dealt with thus:

"What about that Huber matter?" he asked.

Rivington was not in the room, but the master of
the room was seated at the head of the table just as he
always seated himself when both Hallett and Rivington
were there.  He crouched with his large hands on
the mahogany surface, the thick fingers extended, his
elbows raised at right angles to his torso and pointing
ceilingward.

Hallett was as near to nervousness as he could be
brought.

"Nothin' yet," he said.

"Hasn't any action been taken?" snapped the
man at the head of the table.

"A lot of action's been taken, but nothin's come
of it yet."

"He hasn't been bought?"

"Stein says——"

"I know that.  He hasn't been stopped?"

"No."

"Stop him.  He's got to be stopped.  Don't
you know that he really might hurt us?  Stop him."

"All right," said Hallett.

"And now what about this Memphis & New
Orleans deal?" the man in russet brown went on.
His beady eyes glittered, and the tips of his stumpy
fingers caressed the shining surface of the table.





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.. _`CHAPTER XIII`:

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   CHAPTER XIII

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§1.  Luke was no longer inclined to doubt the wide
extent and the unscrupulous power of the influences
opposing him.  When he had first come to acknowledge
their evil, he thought it latent rather than
active.  Disillusioned in this respect, he then
minimized its activity, maintaining that there was a vast
difference between merely questionable moves in the
game of business and the hiring of criminal violence.
He assumed a tolerant skepticism toward the vague
stories of how his enemies, long before they became
his personal enemies, employed the basest tactics to
crush rivals or gain ends, and even when he narrowly
escaped arrest in the raid on the house in Sixth
Avenue, he tried to tell himself that these enemies were
only endeavoring to frighten him.  Now his second
interview with Stein convinced him of the truth.

Notwithstanding this, he stubbornly persevered.
He no more belittled the puissance of the wrong
against which he had arrayed himself, but he believed
too firmly in the strength of his own right.  Had he
accurately perceived relative values, he might have
broken his promise and tried to make the Rollins
letters public; but he was sure that he could evade harm
until the month was past, and so he kept his word and
went about his hurrying and harrowing political
work with the letters scornfully bestowed in an
inside pocket among a collection of trivial memoranda.

Events moved rapidly.  The Ruysdael loan served
its turn, but its turn soon gave evidence of being
brief.  As if from plans matured at least a year
before, the ready-made clothing trust that Forbes had
feared sprang into full being.  It issued from the
offices of Hallett, but it originated, almost as frankly,
from the brain of the man whose lieutenant Hallett
was.  It threatened the life of the Forbes firm.
Controlling nearly all the other large firms of the
country, it could dictate to the retail trade, and secure
favors from the railways.  It so combined its mills
as to reduce running-expenses as a whole while lowering
prices on the one hand and, on the other, raising
wages in its consolidated factories.

Luke had no doubt that this trust had been long
prepared; he also had no doubt that its birth had
been hurried as a new move in the war against him.
He knew that the combination was contrary to the
most rudimentary business ethics, and he hastened to
inquire into its charter and organization, in the hope
of finding some chink in its armor through which the
blade of the Sherman anti-trust law might be thrust.
He overhauled the law-reports in the libraries, he
consulted the most eminent corporation authorities in
his profession; but he discovered nothing to his
liking.  The trust was built upon the statute itself; the
weakness of the latter was the firm rock on which
the former was founded.  Its strength lay in its
iniquity.

"It is absurd for us to suppose," the greatest
lawyer in New York told him, "that we can end the
trust by passing laws.  The trusts are a step in social
evolution, and you can't successfully legislate against
evolution.  When the trusts can't hire the law's
makers, they will still be able to hire better lawyers to
build new trusts within the law than such lawyers as
the voters can afford to elect to Congress to frame
new anti-trust laws.  The laws against the trusts are
of no more practical use than the laws in favor of
the unions."

Luke returned to Forbes with this dictum.

"Can't we get some of the outside firms to join
us?" asked Luke.

Forbes did not approve the idea.

"I have had several offers of the kind," he said,
"and I am suspicious of them.  I think the firms that
made them weren't really independent.  I think it was
a move to let the trust into our concern.  Besides, this
house has always been a Forbes house, and it must
remain that or go down honorably."

"There'll be trouble," Luke prophesied.

"I think I know something about the trade,"
Forbes said: he had moments when he did not wholly
like the superior ability shown by Luke in securing
the Ruysdael loan.  "This is my part of the Business."

Luke was too much occupied by the political
campaign not to acknowledge that, weak or strong,
Forbes must be left in control of the firm.  The battle
for votes was four-cornered without being square;
it was hot and bitter.  On the issue of the
district-attorneyship, the Democrats and Progressives were
helping Leighton and the Republicans by directing
all their energies against Luke and the Municipal
Reform League.  They raised high the accusation of
demagogism and appealed to business large and small
to rescue credit from the hurts that Huber threatened.
Leighton, supported by the full strength of his
organization, was pretending that Luke's disaffection
was that of a discharged servant; the District-Attorney
pleaded for a safe and sane conduct of the office
of the public prosecutor.

Although the League's lesser workers undertook
the task of canvassing the city, treating with politicians
and employers, advertising, arguing, pleading,
promising, and threatening, doing all the mysterious
multitude of things that are necessary to practical
politics; although, too, the other candidates and the
volunteer and hired speakers performed heavy shares
of the speech-making from cart-ends and stages, on
street and in hall, Luke was constantly being called
on to help his associates and had more than enough in
his own department to keep him busy from the time
when he got out of bed of a morning until, often the
next morning, he got in again.

By telegraph, telephone, motor-car, and messenger,
he had to be in perpetual touch with every election-precinct
in the city and with every important Leaguer
in every precinct.  He had to answer hundreds of
letters, see hundreds of callers, give out scores of
interviews, compose and deliver from three to a dozen
speeches a day to as many different sorts of
audiences.  There was nothing considered too small to
merit his attention, nothing too large to be beyond
his watchfulness.  Once every day he was in each
quarter of New York, and he was nowhere for more
than half an hour at a time.

Only his elaborately acquired calm and his
inherited strength of constitution saved him from
nervous breakdown.  Except for them, his burning
sincerity, his zeal, and the endless calls made upon these
characteristics, would have driven him to a hospital.
Even so, his body grew leaner and his face deeply
lined.  He was fighting with every ounce of muscle
and every particle of brain.

For now, as in every alley and at every turning, his
political progress revealed some new though ever
partial phase of the power he attacked, Luke saw all
that he hated centered in one figure, originated by one
mind.  He individualized Evil.  That entire
meshwork of wrong which he was trying to tear into
shreds, he traced directly to the plump, pale man in
russet brown, the malignant thing with the hairy
hands and beady eyes, the creature that he had once
seen crouched at the end of a mahogany table in a
Wall Street skyscraper, from the windows of which
the maze of streets resembled the strands of a web
with men and women struggling on them like
entangled flies.

Of all the fine and fatal threads that were snaring
alike the helpless and the strong, what threads were
not spun by *him*?  Of all the corruption that was
poisoning the country and infecting the ideals of the
Republic, what was there that did not proceed from
his fangs?  Luke seemed to see it all now—was
certain that he saw it—with awful clarity.  The Rollins
letters, the interview in Wall Street, the action of
the banks, and Osserman's hint from the City
Chamberlain, the part played by the street-girl, the raid
by the police, the talks with Stein and the daily
partial liftings of the political curtain: these,
reviewed in the lurid glow of the campaign, confirmed
the accumulated gossip of years, corroborated every
wild story that came to him on the teeming battlefield:
of bribery and thieving, of perjury and murder,
of all the crimes that men have known, each
committed again and again and again—safely committed
in the dark, cravenly done under the protection of
bought-and-paid-for law.

What mattered now this power's culture?  What
mattered its benefactions, its colleges for the
ignorant, its hospitals for the ill?  As Luke saw them
now, these were only dust for the eyes of the public,
cheap peace-offerings for intricate wrongs.  The good
could be counted on the fingers of the hand, the evil
was as the sands of the sea.

It was everywhere.  It mocked religion, because
It supported churches; It debauched Government,
because It governed the governors; It destroyed Law,
because It controlled the Law's administrators.  It
was master of the means of production and distribution;
It owned the storehouses of wealth; the clothes
upon the backs of the people, the houses that they
lived in; the meat on the tables of the rich, the bread
in the bellies of the poor.  It secured Its own prices
for them, and withheld them as It chose.  Directly or
indirectly, the whole nation took Its wages—such
wages as It chose to pay.

At the great League meeting in Cooper Union,
Luke, fronting a wilderness of faces, shouted his
defiance of this Power.  He said no name, but none
that heard him could doubt whom he meant.  For
that night, Luke Huber's friends no longer knew
the languid young lawyer in this shouting, quivering,
torch-bearing evangel on the historic Cooper Union
Stage.  The boy had died that, bound for New
York, thought himself as a Templar entering Jerusalem,
but from his ashes there rose a new Peter the
Hermit preaching a new crusade.

"If we had the eyes to see," he said, "we'd know
that from this city, the center of our civilization,
slender threads, so numerous as to be beyond our
counting, run out to every corner of the land.
Slender threads: the merest gossamer, but so tough
that, once entangled in them, no man escapes.  No
man, no woman, and no child.  The delicate filaments
catch and hold us by the thousand every day.  They
catch us at our birth and they hold us till our death:
life-prisoners even when we are unaware of it, more
desperately prisoners when we are unaware of it.
The good and the bad and the hopelessly
neither-good-nor-bad; efficient and inefficient, every sort and
condition, men and boys, women and girls—the net
has use for us all: for the labor of the child, the body
of the woman, the hand or the brain, the money or the
muscles, of the man.  It has uses for our virtues and
more use for our vices.  All are needed, none that is
caught goes free.  If we had the eyes to see, we
should see it; but the strands are as fine as they are
tough, and only when a victim has so much blood in
him that his dying struggles ensanguine the thread
that holds him do we, noting his blood, note what has
received his blood—and even there, we rarely
consider that thread in relation to its fellows, hardly
ever realize that it is part of a plan, hardly ever
trace it to its center."

Luke followed the Power along thread after
thread through the labyrinth of American life, and
he made it clear that the Power was one man.  He
pictured the stock-market, where the trade in traitors
began and where the fortunes of speculators and the
riches of the country were counters in the game of
roulette that this Power conducted with a braced
wheel.  He passed on, across the map of the Union,
through the wrecks of industries that this Power had
razed.  He showed how it had ruined numberless
houses and spoiled countless lives.  He pointed to the
bloated bodies of the suicides it had flung into rivers
it had never seen, the graves it had filled in the
potters' fields of distant towns, the twisted limbs of
children it had enslaved, the bodies of women it had
forced into the arms of lust, the muscles of men it
had condemned to lifelong servitude.  He described
its command over Congress, legislatures, and judges;
its collar around the necks of the police, who brought
to its service, in return for criminal immunity,
gamblers, thieves, highwaymen, tramps, prostitutes, and
pimps.  He clutched its hairy hand in the ballot-box,
and called upon his hearers to end this Power's
practices as they loved their souls.

Luke pledged himself, if elected, to drive the thing
out of every department of the city's life that the
District-Attorney could in any way influence.  He
pledged himself to fear no man and to serve none.

"You have the eyes!" he shouted.  "If you'll
only use them, you have the eyes to see.  Look about
you, and what you see will give you the strength you
need.  This thing thwarts and perverts the purposes
of Government, and you know it!  The men that are
pledged to the people, it buys with gold.  These are
its crimes, but not the worst of its crimes.  The worst
it does is not what it does to things material.  The
worst it does is what it does to things spiritual.  The
spoiling of high aims, the rape and ravage of honorable
purposes: these are its sins against the Holy Ghost!"

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  Betty had gone to the mass-meeting, and so
had the Rev. Pinkney Nicholson.  Even in the rush
of his campaign, Luke had found time to see Betty
every day, and, because the Ruysdael loan had
resolved all her doubts, she was his most ardent
supporter.  He sent her two stage-tickets to the
gathering at Cooper Union, one of which he hoped that
her father would use; but Forbes was busy with plans
to meet the competition of the clothing trust and to
quiet the grumblings of his employees, who wanted a
raise of wages to the sums paid by his rivals, and so
was kept late at the offices of the firm.  Betty,
therefore, brought Nicholson with her, and Nicholson,
thinking that it would not be wise for a clergyman to
seem to give the sanction of the Church to any party
in a political fight, had taken her not to the stage,
but to the body of the auditorium.

The girl listened to Luke's speech with parted lips
and flushed face.  She was inspired by her lover's
every word and proud for each interruption of
applause.  She was so inspired and so proud that she
did not notice the increasing frigidity of her
companion.

"Isn't he wonderful?" she demanded of Nicholson
as the meeting ended with the entire audience on
its feet.

The band was playing "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
and it had been hoped that the crowd would
sing that national anthem.  Most of the people
present did not, however, know the words, and those who
did know them had voices of too slight a range to
accede to the severe demands of the music.

"Isn't he just wonderful?" repeated Betty.  She
caught Nicholson's arm.  "He reminds me of a
French orator father and I once heard in the Chamber
of Deputies in Paris.  You must take me up to the
stage to tell him so."

Nicholson had listened with mixed emotions.  His
attention, moreover, was loose because he had lately
been much worried by the presence of a heavy debt
on his church.

"I think he is an excellent speaker," said Nicholson,
"but I'm afraid I don't approve of his tone."

"His tone?"  Betty turned sharply.  "What's
the matter with his tone?"

Nicholson's ascetic face relaxed.  He quoted:

   |  "Too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden;
   |  Too like the lightning."
   |

"He isn't rash; he's brave," said Betty.  "And
he isn't unadvised or sudden, for he has been thinking
of all these things for a long time.  But he is like the
lightning, and these people he says are so wrong
will find that out."

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  Mr. Irwin was at the mass-meeting, too; he
of the gray Vandyck beard and pink cheeks and
twinkling eyes, the member of the law firm of Stein,
Falconridge, Falconridge & Perry, whose name did
not appear on the firm's letter-heads.

Irwin left Cooper Union directly the chief speech
of the evening ended.  He had been seated in an
unostentatious corner high in air and close beneath the
roof.  The people about him must have thought him
a warm admirer of the speaker, since he was so busy
taking notes of what was said that he had leisure
for only the most perfunctory applause.  Irwin
hurried down the Bowery.  He went into the nearest
public telephone booth, and from it he called up the
hotel in which ex-Judge Stein made his home.

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  Ex-Judge Stein had himself experienced a
trying day, and Irwin was absent from the office, or he
would have known it.  Somebody, it seemed, had
asked embarrassing questions of George J. Hallett
and issued exacting orders to Hallett, who had passed
on the embarrassing questions and the exacting
orders to Stein.  The questions and the orders gained
in intensity by transmission, and Stein was upset.

"Yes, yes, this is Judge Stein," he answered into
the black transmitter of the telephone when Irwin
called him.  "Who's talking, please?"

"Irwin."

"Eh?  Well, where have you been, Mr. Irwin?
I have wanted you to-day on some important business.

"I think I have been attending to it, Judge."

"Where have you been?"

"Several places.  To-night I've been to that
mass-meeting in Cooper Union."

"Yes.  Was there much enthusiasm?"

"A great deal."

"Spontaneous?  Genuine?"

"Partly."

"And the tone of the speech?"

Mr. Irwin went at some length into that side of
the subject.  He read excerpts from his notes.  It
was evident that, since the afternoon when his senior
partner had first discussed Huber with him, necessity,
had forced a greater degree of confidence.

The present conversation continued for several
minutes.  No eavesdropper, unless previously
acquainted with the facts of the case, could have
gathered much from it, but it was intelligent and
significant to the principals.  At its end, Stein said:

"There is very little time left us, and this young
man means us to understand that he will keep his
word.  The people for whom we are acting are
rather importunate, Mr. Irwin.  They are not
satisfied; not at all satisfied; and I've already had to
extend to you the time-limit I first gave you.  I have
received instructions to the effect that we must act at
once."

"Yes, sir."

"You understand?"

"I understand."

"At once."

"All right, Judge."

"That had better mean to-night."

"I'll do my best."

"I think you had better, Mr. Irwin.  I sha'n't be
going to bed for two or three hours yet."

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  Irwin left the telephone and hailed the first
taxicab that passed.  It was free, and he had himself
driven to a political club with quarters not far from
the office of Anson Quirk.

The quarters were over a saloon in Second Avenue.
The entrance was a hallway and a stairway back of
the saloon.  Here Irwin rang a bell, which was
immediately answered by a man in his shirt-sleeves.

"Mr. Quirk upstairs?"

"No," said the man.  He eyed the questioner sullenly
in the twilight of the hall.  "I don't think he
is," he added.

Irwin took a card from his pocket.  He placed it
in a blank envelope, sealed the envelope, and handed
it to the doorkeeper.

"Give him this," he said, and stepped back into
the street to wait.

The man closed the door upon him.  It was presently
reopened by Quirk, his round face smiling, his
manner jovial.

"Hello," said Quirk.  "It's time good little boys
were in bed, but I'm glad to see you, anyhow.  Come
in and have a drink."

"No, thank you," Irwin replied.  "I'll be back
here in two hours.  There's something you've got
to do in the meantime."

"Me?  Now?"

"You; right away.  We've been too slow about
that little business, Quirk.  We can't stand them off
much longer.  There's not much more time for delay,
and the people higher up want to be shown action."

"Want to see the goods, do they?" chuckled
Quirk.  He rattled some coins in the pocket under
his round abdomen.

"Yes."

"Well, what do they want me to do?"

"Show the goods, I guess."

"Any suggestions?"

"No, that's up to you."

"I'm on," said Quirk.  "Come back in two hours.
I'll run right upstairs and get my hat.  An' here, if
you won't take a drink, have a cigar: it's a long wait.
See you later."

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  The great bulk of Police Lieutenant Donovan
was hunched up in an upholstered armchair beside
the table in his private office when Quirk entered.
He looked as if his caller was not welcome.

"Nothin' doin' so far," he said.

Quirk, too, was serious.

"I know it," said he.  "They fell down so hard
in that raid scheme that they must have had all the
sense knocked out of them.  Well, you've got to put
some in."

Donovan's growl was wordless.

"You've got to," said Quirk.  "To-night."

"To-night?" Donovan stood up.  "What in
hell do you think I am?"

The lawyer leaned across the table.

"I think you're a bluff," he said.

"Do you?  Well, I'd just like you to have my job."

"Donovan," said Quirk, "if you don't put this
thing across, an' do it soon, somebody'll have your
job sooner than you think."

"What's that?" thundered the lieutenant.  But
before a reply was possible, his tone changed; his
hands thrust deep in his pockets, he turned away, his
shoulders drooping.  "Oh, I know you've got the
evidence to use for an excuse," he said: "I know
you could do it, an' I know you would."

"I wouldn't do it if I didn't have to," said Quirk
gently; "but you know how I'm fixed myself.  Don't
take it so hard, Hughie.  You can pull this thing
across, if you'll only try.  I'm sorry, but if I haven't
something to show pretty soon, I'll get it in the
neck—hard, I will."

Donovan walked to the door of the rollroom.  He
opened it.

"Say, one o' you fellows," he called to a group
of officers in plain clothes.  "Go out an' find Guth
an' tell him to come in here right away.  I want
him."  Then he turned to Quirk: "It's got to be
to-night?"

Quirk nodded:

"Make it an hour and a half if you can."

"Well, I can't."

"Then as near as you can."

"Gee," said Donovan, "I certainly am sick of this
whole business!  Well—come back in an hour an'
forty-five minutes an' we'll see what's doin'."

.. vspace:: 2

§7.  He greeted Guth with a roar.

"You're a hell of a cop, you are!  What sort of
a job do you think you've got, anyway?  Rag-pickin'?"

Guth, who was used to these rages, stood at
attention.  The scar from his mouth to the corner of his
jaw-bone twitched heavily.

"I done all I could, Lieutenant," he said.

"You're a liar!" said Donovan.  "You've been
on this job Gawd knows how long, an' your foot's
slipped twice.  All you've found is that he hasn't
got any safety-deposit box.  You know he must have
the goods at his office, an' you're afraid to get 'em."

"They might be at his apartment house," said
Guth.  He shifted his feet uneasily.

"They might be, but they ain't.  I had Anderson
play that end of it.  What d'you mean lettin' Reddy
Rawn t'row you down this way?"

"He ain't t'rowed me down.  He wouldn't dare."

"Wouldn't he?  Well, then, he's stallin' you all
right, all right, an' he's had a cinch doin' it.  This
thing's got to stop.  I got to have them letters right
off.  To-night.  Now.  Get that?"

The giant subordinate gnawed his upper lip.

"That's goin' some, Lieutenant," he said.

"If you don't do it, you'll be goin' more: you'll
be goin' off the force.  Now then: you beat it.  Get
Reddy on the job.  Tell him Mitchell knows the
officer on that beat an' 'll see he an' his friends ain't
interfered with.  Nobody'll be in the offices to-night;
they've all been over to Cooper Union an' 'll be tired
out.  Reddy'll be as safe as if he was at home in bed.
He'd better have the Kid to help him."  Donovan
banged the table with his fist.  "I want you back
here in an hour with everything that's inside that
fellow Huber's safe.  See?"

.. vspace:: 2

§8.  In that shadowy alley near Forty-third Street
and Third Avenue, where he had talked to Reddy
Rawn before, Patrolman Guth talked now with
Reddy Rawn and the Kid.

"It ain't my fault," he said.  "I've stood him off
as long as I could.  You gotta do it now, an' if you
don't he'll have you two up for Crab Rotello's
assault.  I know it.  He means business this time.  You
can crack a safe, Kid, can't you?"

.. vspace:: 2

§9.  On the stage at Cooper Union, Luke was
holding an impromptu reception.  Hundreds of
people were streaming by him and shaking his hand.
His arm ached, but he was proud and glad.

At the end of the stream came Betty and Nicholson.
Luke saw the girl long before she could reach
him, and he smiled to her over the heads of the
crowd.

"You dear!" she whispered when, at last, her
hand caught his.  "I'm proud of you.  I'm so
proud!"

He pressed her hand.

"That's the best praise of all," he said, and to
her companion: "I'm glad you're here, Mr. Nicholson."

Nicholson shook hands.

"I was glad to be here.  I admired your delivery
even where I disapproved of your treatment."

"What?" laughed Luke.  "Is the church going
to make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness?"  He
was hoarse and hot and nervous, but he
was too warmly aglow with his success to heed
seriously the reply that Nicholson was beginning when
one of his friends on the stage plucked his sleeve.
He turned.  "What is it?" he asked.

"Nelson wants to see you.  I don't know what
about, but he says it's very important."

"All right."  Luke faced Betty and Nicholson
again.  "You'll forgive me for just a moment, won't
you?" he said.  "I'll be right back, and then, if
you'll let me, I'll drive over to Brooklyn with you
both.  I have a note from your father, Betty, asking
me to come to the house."

"I thought he was at the office," said Betty; "but
I do hope you'll come with us."

"He's back at the house now.  This note came by
messenger."

"Then," said Nicholson, "I shan't interfere with
business.  I'll go home from here.  Run along,
Mr. Huber.  I'll guard Miss Forbes while you're gone."

Luke followed the man that had sought him and
found Nelson standing at the farthest corner of the
stage.

The wholesale druggist was in evident distress.
He was an honorable man and a practical, and these
qualities spoke in the lines of his troubled face.  As
soon as they were left together, Nelson came to the
point.

"Huber," he said, "I've got to get out."

"Out?  What of?"

"The League.  I've got to leave it."

Nelson was almost the last man that Luke would
have expected to desert.  Moreover, he had so long
been prominent in the reform movement that his
defection would be a serious blow to the League.  Luke
had to call loudly on his lethargic manner to conceal
his anxiety and surprise.

"Why?" he inquired.  "What's wrong?"

"This speech of yours to-night," explained
Nelson.  "You've been getting nearer and nearer that
fellow all along, but I'd no idea you meant to go
right at him."

"What was the matter with the speech?  I didn't
tell anything but the truth."

"No, I dare say you didn't, but I can't honorably
stand by you, Huber, now that you've openly taken
this line."

Nelson swallowed hard.  It was plain that he did
not like the dish prepared for him.

"I don't understand," said Luke.  "If it was true,
and if we're to make a real fight for real reform,
we've got to begin at the cause of corruption."

"I know.  I admit it was the truth, but it wasn't
the whole truth.  He does lots of good."

"Good and bad are relative.  Relatively he doesn't
do any good."

"I'm not so sure of that."

"I am."

"Yes, but there's the League to think of."

"The League nominated me,"

"Of course it did, but you're not the whole ticket
nor the whole movement."

This was a detail that Luke in his triumph had
forgotten.

"Still," he said, "we can't dodge the facts.  I
won't dodge them, Nelson."

"I understand," Nelson said.  "Perhaps you're
right.  Anyhow, right or wrong, you've done what
you've done, and so I've got to go."

"But why?"

Nelson fidgeted.

"I may as well tell you," he at last said.  "You
know my business has always been one that didn't
cross these fellows' trail.  But lately they've been
coming toward us.  I think I mentioned that?"

Luke nodded.

"Well, I've been hard up.  The other day I
needed money badly.  I had to have money or I'd
have failed.  I have a wife and family to think of,
Huber.  I tried everywhere to raise the wind, and
there was only one place where I could raise it."

"You mean—"  Luke wet his lips.  "You mean
that crowd?"

"Yes."

"It came from *him*?"

"It came direct from L. Bergen Rivington.  But,
of course, it really came from *him*."

Luke put out his hand.  Nelson wrung it.

"I wasn't bought, Huber," he said.  "You don't
think that?"

"I know," said Luke kindly.

"I wish I'd told you sooner, Huber.  I didn't
expect you'd go so far."

"I'd have gone just as far, Nelson.  I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too, Huber.  Good-night."

.. vspace:: 2

§10.  "Betty," said Luke, as the girl nestled
against him in the darkness of the cab that drove
them toward her home, "this is going to be a hard
battle."

"Then you'll win because you're right."

"I'm not so sure."

Her arms went round his neck.

"I don't care whether you win or not," she
whispered, "so long as you ought to win."

.. vspace:: 2

§11.  Forbes was waiting for them in the library.
His rapidly-graying hair was disordered, and his
face was even more worried than Nelson's had
been.

"You'd better run to bed, dear," he said to Betty
as he kissed her.  "It's late, and I've some heavy
business to talk about to Luke."

"I'm wide awake," protested Betty.  "I couldn't
sleep if I did go to bed.  I'll sleep late to-morrow."

"But then there is the business we must talk about."

"I don't care.  I'll like it.  I won't interrupt."  She
looked at Luke.  "May I stay?" she asked.

Luke smiled.

"I wish you would," he said.

Forbes made a gesture of surrender.

"All right," said he.  He turned to Luke and, as
Betty seated herself between the two men, who
remained standing, he continued: "They're going to
strike."

"At the factory?"  Luke had feared this.
"What do they want?"

"They want us to meet the hours and the wages
that the trust is giving."

"We can meet them as to hours, can't we?"

"We might.  It would hurt us, but we might."

"But not the wages?"

"Not in five years."

Luke lit a cigarette.  He noted that his hand
was steady, and its steadiness gratified him.

"They're well enough paid, aren't they?"

"You know the scale."

"Well, it's a fair one, isn't it?"

"What does that matter to them when they think
they can get more?"

"But you say they can't, Forbes."

"I can't convince them of it.  Their attitude is
that if we can't pay them what they want, the
Business had better go out of existence.'

"You saw the men's committee?"

"This evening.  That's why I couldn't come to
your meeting."

"And they won't compromise?"

"They might have, but things have gone too far.
A lot of these I.W.W. organizers and agitators
have been at work among them.  I don't know what
will happen to the Business now."

"We can get in strike-breakers and run the
factory in spite of them."

"If we do, there'll be rioting.  They might burn
the building.  These Industrial Workers of the
World—you don't know them."

"I don't see that we have any choice."

Forbes looked away.

"We have one," he muttered.

Luke caught his wrist.

"Look here," he demanded, "do you mean to
say that this may have a political origin?"

"I believe it has.  I believe those letters you told
me about——"

"You want me to knuckle under?" asked Luke.

Forbes looked at him.

"Think what a strike might do to you politically,"
he said.

"I don't care about that."

"Your friends might."

"Not if they want to stay my friends.  Besides,
it can't be true.  The writer of those letters hates the
I.W.W. like poison.  He can't have inspired them."

"Oh, not that.  I know he can't.  But if you'd
be sensible about those letters, I believe he'd be
willing to put down the trust's wages and join us in this
fight."

"What did you tell the men's committee?"

"I didn't show them what I felt," said Forbes.
"That would never do.  You can't tell workmen
what you really think.  I just said if they wanted to
strike, they would have to strike."

Luke flung aside Forbes's arm.

"Then stick to that," he said.

"But, Huber——"

Luke interrupted.  He fronted Betty.

"Betty," he said, "do you understand what your
father is asking me to do?  You know how I am
placed, and you heard my speech to-night.  Now,
your father wants me to go back on all that in order
to save him from poverty and you from poverty and
me from poverty and defeat.  I won't do it.
Whether you like it or not, I won't do it!"

The girl got up slowly and put a hand on his
shoulder.  Her eyes, as she looked from one man
to the other, were very beautiful, but they were firm.

"Father," she said, "I've learned a lot lately.
Luke's right and—and I'm with him."

Forbes turned toward her irritably.

"Oh, go to bed!" said he.

Luke laughed and, reaching up, patted the hand
that was on his shoulder.

"No, no," he protested, "you mustn't intrigue
with my allies, Forbes."

"Well," said Forbes, "you'll see that I'm right
if you keep on antagonizing these people."

"We can starve them out."

"Not before there is violence."

"The law will defend us there.  We'll have the
police: they can't deny us adequate protection in
such a matter—and if we have to, we'll get the
Governor to call out the troops."

Forbes argued and pleaded for a long time, but
to no avail.  Luke would not go over to his enemies:
the strike must proceed.

"I've got to leave you now," he said.  "I'll have
to have a statement ready about this for the papers
first thing in the morning.  Perhaps I'll get out of
the Subway at Fourteenth Street and open up the
League's headquarters and get it ready there."

It was Betty that stopped this plan.

"You'll do nothing of the sort," she ordered.
"You're tired out.  I won't let you kill
yourself."  She kissed him on the mouth.  "You must
promise me to go straight to the Arapahoe and to
sleep."

At the touch of her lips, he softened.

"All right," he promised, "but I'm no more
sleepy now than you said you were an hour ago."

.. vspace:: 2

§12.  Luke would not have had to open the offices
of the Municipal League; that was being attended
to.  While he was still in the Subway train returning
from Brooklyn to Manhattan, two men, one of them
carrying a small bundle, crossed Union Square and
turned down Broadway.  Before the entrance to the
building in which the League was housed, they paused
to speak to a policeman.

"That's all right," he told them.  "I know.  I
got me orders ten minutes ago.  That's why I'm
standin' here.  But get a move on, you fellows.  I
don't want to stick here all night."

The two men rounded a corner.

In the deserted street, the officer of the law walked
up and down, twenty paces to the north, then twenty
to the south.  A party of strayed revelers came by
and tried to talk with him; but he ordered them to
move on if they didn't want him to arrest them.  He
resumed his walk when they had gone, his thumbs
tucked in his belt, his lips pursed and whistling softly
a popular tune.  Once he heard the sound of a
window opened overhead.  A little later he saw a dim
light pass from one window to another in the
building above him.  A dulled report sounded from
behind the walls: the Elevated is not near Broadway
at this spot, but in the night noises travel far, and
this noise might have been the crash of a late
train.  The officer of the law did not raise his
head....

Around the corner came two figures.  Both of
them carried bundles now.

The officer of the law strolled past them.  He
did not stop as he spoke.

"All right?" he asked.

"All right," said one of the figures.

The officer of the law walked on, whistling his
popular tune.

.. vspace:: 2

§13.  Somewhat nearer the hour of sunrise,
Mr. Irwin, his merry eyes grown weary, stood in the
sitting-room of the Hon.  Marcus Stein's suite of
hotel apartments.  He was bending over a table on
which lay an opened bundle.

Stein was bending over the table, too.  His
dignified demeanor was ruffled.

"This is nothing but a collection of junk," he was
saying.  "It is no use to anybody but its owners.
Get it out of here at once, Mr. Irwin, and tell your
friends to return it to the place they got it from."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XIV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIV

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  As every man has his day in court, so nearly
every man has his day in the newspapers, and which
is the more trying it is difficult to decide.  The day
following the night of the Cooper Union meeting
was Luke's: the morning papers seemed to contain
little news that did not refer to him; the editorial
columns presented satiric paragraphs and serious
leaders regarding his speech and his position before
the public, and spread over the first pages were
accounts of his address and stories of the strike in the
factory, with which his connection was now loudly
heralded.

Comment on the speech was about equally divided.
Half of the press ridiculed it as the vaporing of a
misinformed dreamer, and half denounced it as an
anarchistic appeal to the violence of the mob.  Some
journals gave stenographic reports of the entire
matter; most printed only those portions which, lifted
from their context, were best suited to the policy of
the paper using them.  The extremes were shown by
two headlines.  One read:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center

   NIGHTMARES OF A CANDIDATE

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   Br'er Huber Consults His Dream-Book
   And Says Innocent New York Is
   Being Tortured Without
   Knowing It

.. vspace:: 2

And the other flung across eight columns, in letters
of vermilion, the legend:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   CANDIDATE PREACHES PRIVATE WAR
   WITH FIRE AND SWORD!

.. vspace:: 2

In the treatment of the strike, Luke fared even
worse.  He was held up as a hypocrite that
championed the People from the platform and sweated the
poor in the shops.  He was paraded as the real owner
of R. H. Forbes & Son.  The papers generally most
bitter against labor movements published long
accounts of the strike, denunciatory interviews with the
strike-leaders, and tables showing how badly the
wages paid by the Forbes firm compared with the
wage-scale already in operation in the factories
controlled by the clothing-trust.  There was a hurriedly
drawn cartoon that depicted Luke wearing a
Liberty-cap and hurling a bomb at a figure labeled
"Conservative Business": he was addressing a mob from
a soap-box that was supported by the bowed
shoulders of his oppressed employees.  The most
respectable newspaper in New York hinted that his political
attack was made against his business rivals solely
because they were his business rivals, and the least
respectable declared that his quarrel with the workers
stamped his election doctrines as the gospel of
Murder for Profit.

As Luke entered the door of the Broadway building
in which the Municipal Reform League had its
headquarters, he came up with Venable also going
in.  The old man's hand trembled as he greeted
the candidate.

"We seem to have raised a real thunderstorm,"
said Luke, smiling.  "I hope it'll clear the atmosphere."

"Then you know?" asked Venable.  "You've
seen it in the papers?"

"How could I help it?" said Luke.  "It's all
over them."

"Oh, the speech?"

"That and this strike at the Forbes factory, yes."

"I didn't mean those things," said Venable.  "I
meant this."

He took from his coat-pocket a folded newspaper
open at the financial and real estate page.  He pointed
a shaking finger at first one and then another obscure
paragraph, both printed in small type and far
separated.

Luke read the paragraphs.  Each applied to the
same block of an uptown street.  The former said
that a new branch of an elevated railroad would
be run through this street, and the latter curtly
announced that two of the apartment houses in the
block were about to be converted into tenements for
negroes.

"My apartment house," said Venable simply, "the
one that all my money is invested in, will have those
'L'-tracks running in front of its second-floor
windows.  It is just between the two houses that are to
to be made into tenements."

Luke swore softly.

"Who's back of this?" he demanded.

"You know what influences control that elevated
road," said Venable.

"And the tenements?"

"They've just been bought by Hallett."

"It's ruin?"

"It will be very close to it."

Luke gripped Venable's shoulder.

"You get out of this," he commanded.  "Leave
the League and go to them; they'll change their
plans: that's why they've made their plans the way
they have."

"No," said Venable, "I won't do it.  I can't.
I'm pretty old to be poor, but I'm too old to change
my opinions."

He was still talking in this manner when they
entered the League's quarters and were greeted with
the news that burglars had been there the night
before.

"Nothin's been touched in any of the offices but
yours, Mr. Huber," said the breathless clerk who
poured out this story to them; "but there the safe's
been blown open, and I don't know what's missin'.  I
sent for the police right away."

"The police?" said Luke.  "Stop your joking, Charley."

"I'm not jokin', Mr. Huber.  I did send for
them.  They've been here.  They said they'd have a
detective over from headquarters before long."

Luke hurried to his office.  Bits of charred
blanket and several match-ends lay about the floor.
The door of the safe swung lamely upon a single
hinge.  Inside was a tumbled mass of papers.
Otherwise the room seemed undisturbed.

Quickly, Luke ran over the papers in the
yawning safe.  He looked up at Venable.

"Everything's here," he said.

"Are you sure?" asked Venable.

"Quite."  Luke went to his desk.  Its lock had
been forced.  There had been a rude attempt to
restore the contents to the order in which Luke had left
them when he quitted the office the day before, but
he saw at once that everything had been examined.
"And they didn't get anything from here, either," he
added.

"I wonder what they were after?" said Venable.

"So do I," said Luke acridly.  "At any rate, they
didn't get it."  The telephone rang as he bent beside
it.  He took the receiver from its hook.  "Yes?"
he said.  "Oh, Mr. Venable?  Yes, he's here—right:
he's here in my office, I say.  Want to talk to
him?"  He held up the receiver.  "It's that new
worker, Jarvie," he explained.  "He wants to talk to
you."

Rapidly as events had of late happened to Luke and
the Municipal Reform League, they were happening
this morning with a speed theretofore unequaled.
Venable had not exchanged a dozen sentences over
the telephone before he told Jarvie to wait a minute
and, ringing off, faced Luke, with his cheeks gone
gray.

"This—this is the worst thing yet!" he gasped.

Luke was leaning against the desk, his hands closed
over its edge.

"What is?"

"This, that Jarvie says.  It's—Oh!"  Venable
flung up his hands.  "It's too much!"

Luke's grip tightened.

"Tell me what it is."

Venable crumpled into the chair before the telephone.

"A couple of the Progressives' detectives have
caught Jarvie trying to buy one of Heney's lieutenants."

"What?" cried Luke.  The veins stood out, big
and blue, on his gripping hands.

"Of course the Heney man was really working
with the detectives," moaned Venable; "but that
won't help.  They had a dictaphone in the hotel
room——"

"In what hotel room?"

"The one that Jarvie was to meet the Heney man
in.  I thought he'd be more careful.  I told him——"

Luke stood erect.  He folded his arms.  Venable's
confession shook him, but he exerted all his strength
of will to command himself.

"What are you telling me?" he asked.  "Are
you telling me that the League has been going in for
rotten work of that sort?  Are you telling me that
you—you of all people—have been engineering it?"

Venable's terror gave quick place to amazement.

"You don't mean to say you didn't understand
that?" he countered.  "How do you suppose politics
are run, anyway?  Where have you been all these
years under Leighton?"  Anger came to his aid; his
loose jaw wagged.  "Don't try to get out of this
trouble by pretending you didn't know about it.
What we do, we do for the best ends, but I have
always said—always—that the only way to beat the
devil is to fight him with fire."

"Wait, please," said Luke.  "I want to get this
thing straight.  You say that all your reform
movements have had some of this element in them?"

"I say we have always fought the devil with fire."

"And this campaign.  You've used your fire in it?"

"As little as possible.  We never used more than
we could help."

"Did the committee know it?"

Venable reached for the telephone.

"I can't waste time over such quibbles now," he
said.  "Jarvie's arrested and we must get him out
and learn the details to prepare our defense."

"But the committee knew?"

"Oh, ask them yourself!  They have a meeting
this afternoon.  Of course, they knew!  They have
been in these fights since long before you were sent
to school, and they are not fools."

"You bet I *will* ask them!" said Luke.

He walked out of his office, out of the League
headquarters and into the street.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  His tired brain demanded action.  It presented
one picture, a canvas as full of figures as a battlefield
by Delacroix.  There he saw all that he had done
or caused to be done: Yeates turned back to the baser
cause, Nelson forced to follow, Venable facing
financial disaster and soiling his old hands with crime;
burglary, prostitution, and fraud stimulated to defeat
him; police, city officials, and bankers corrupted to
ensnare him; his little fortune, on which hung his
mother's living, imperiled; Betty imperiled, Forbes
and the honorable business history of his firm
imperiled; the factory's employees fronting starvation
and threatening violence; the elder political parties
dragged into a repetition of their former offenses,
the reform organization sharing in the evils it
sought to reform—these were the present results of
his endeavors to civic righteousness.  Could
mankind be so closely linked?  Was there no end to the
lives and souls that must be wronged or made wrong
by one man trying to do right?  He could not
contemplate the question.

To escape thought and find action, he went to
Brooklyn.  He took a taxi to the factory.

The huge brown building rose taciturn before him,
ugly, dour.  It ran the whole way across the end
of the street and was flanked by rows of tumbledown
dwellings.  One tenuous column of smoke curled
from the chimney of its engine-room, but, all about,
the streets had an air to which Luke was wholly
unaccustomed.  The traffic that used to rattle through
them had ceased; they seemed at first sight empty;
yet at every corner were groups of men and women,
idle with that idleness which sits like the outward
tokens of a contagious disease upon workers who
have ceased their work in anger.

Luke saw them glance up at him as his open
taxicab whirled past them: uncouth, slouching figures,
with stooped shoulders and sullen faces.  He had
not supposed that he could be known to a score of
them, but the portraits of him distributed for
campaign purposes had made him familiar: the first few
groups merely looked at him and sneered; then
someone shouted an obscene epithet after him, and when
the cab drew up before the office-door of the factory,
a half-brick, tossed from the farther side of the street,
shattered the glass windscreen at the chauffeur's back.

Luke's impulse was toward physical reprisal.  He
jumped from the taxi and darted around it.

On the other side of the street there was only a
single figure in sight: a figure that leaned against a
lamp-post.  Once it had been a woman; now it was
only misery.  Red toes burst from its bulging shoes
from which the stockings fell so far that, the filthy
skirt held up by a claw-like hand, at least six inches
of thin shank, a pale blue, were visible.  The ragged
jacket hung open over an open blouse that showed
a flat chest.  Tangled hair, hatless, fell about and
almost hid a red and swollen face.  Through the
hair a loose mouth gaped, and a pair of eyes burned
yellow.  The right hand was extended, clenched.

"You go to hell, you hypocrite!" croaked the figure.

Luke turned toward the factory-door.  To reach
it, he had to press through a double line of men and
women, silent, ominous: the strikers' picket-line.  The
woman's voice croaked from across the street:

   |  "*Hall*\eyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!
   |  *Hall*\eyloolyah, bum again!"
   |

Luke's memory saw a small, crowded room
papered in green, with framed advertisements about
the walls and many tables, at one of which sat an
unshaven, uncollared man who wore a greasy derby
hat....

Luke pushed open the office-door and hurried to
Forbes's office.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  The office was crowded.  Forbes, determined,
sat at his desk; he faced a line of slouching men in
shabby clothes, who held their hats in their hands
and shuffled their uneasy feet, and were headed by
one man, dressed as they were, but better fed and
brawny, his large face hard, his hat upon his head.
Luke knew that this was the workers' committee led
by the organizer.

"I haven't another word to say," Forbes was
declaring.  A hint of relief came to his voice when he
saw Luke.  "Oh, Huber," he broke off: "Good-morning.
Come over here and sit down.  I am just
telling these men for the last time that we will meet
them in the matter of hours, but we can't and won't
grant them the ruinous increase of wages they want."  As
Luke took a chair beside him, he continued,
addressing his employees and carefully avoiding the
organizer: "I have one gang of men coming here in
half an hour to take your jobs.  There are more
where they came from, and we'll be running full blast
this time to-morrow.  If you're not back at work by
the time the first gang of men gets here, you'll never
get back."

Luke expected a growl of anger: there was no
sound from them.

The organizer coughed.

"Mr. Forbes——" he began.

Forbes smacked his hands together.

"I don't know you!" he snapped.

"You know who I am," said the organizer calmly.
"I told you."

"I don't recognize your right to be here."

"I haven't any right, because it's against the
principles of our organization to treat with employers,
but I thought——"

Raging, Forbes stood up.

"Against *your* principles, is it?" he cried.  "Well,
it's against the principles of this firm to talk to
*you*!"

"Mr. Forbes——"

"That's all I've got to say."

The organizer was unruffled.  He maintained a
rather terrifying dignity.  He turned to the men.

"Come on, fellows," he said.

With a loud scraping of feet, the strikers and
their leader passed out of the room.

Luke and Forbes remained quiet.  Even for some
time after the room was empty, they said nothing,
and while they sat thus, a boyish voice rose from the
street:

   |  "Oh, I love my boss:
   |    He's a good friend o' mine;
   |  An' that's why I'm starving
   |    Out in the bread-line!"
   |

Somebody laughed, and several voices took up the
chorus:

   |  "*Hall*\eyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!..."
   |

The boyish voice continued:

   |  "Oh, why don't you work
   |    Like other men do?
   |  *How in Hell can I work*
   |    *When there's no work to do?*"
   |

"That's their logic," said Forbes fretfully.  He
nodded toward the street.  "How can you argue
with people of that sort?"

"It didn't strike me that you were arguing," said
Luke.  "What are you going to do?"

"What I said."

"You meant it, then?"

"Every word.  I've taken your advice, after all:
I've employed that strike-breaker: Breil, you know."

Luke had heard of him.  Breil, he knew, owned
several hundred fighting-men and took them to all
parts of the country under the pretense that they were
workers anxious to start the wheels of industries
stopped by strikers.  Wherever Breil went, trouble
followed.

"Then you'd better employ the Pinkertons, too,"
said Luke.

"They're too expensive," Forbes said.  "Besides,"
he added, "that sort of thing's un-American.
We won't need detectives to protect the right of the
worker to work.  If we need any help, we'll call
in the police.  I thought you understood that.  I'm
afraid you will never learn the art of handling men,
Huber."

Luke was anxious for a fight.  The corruption
that he had discovered in the League fired his
primitive instincts.  He was angry, and it was of small
consequence to him upon whom he visited his anger.
Here his own fortune, honestly come by, was threatened;
his mother's support, Forbes's and Betty's.  It
was an excellent opportunity.

"I'm with you," he said.  "When do you expect
the first contingent of Breil's men?"

"When I said: in half an hour."

"Have you 'phoned police headquarters?"

"No.  What's the use?  I don't want to court a
fight.  The presence of the police before there was
a fight might only start one.  Headquarters sent me
down two extra men this morning when I asked for
them, and that's enough for the present."

Luke bent to the telephone.

"I don't agree with you," he said.

Forbes's protest was mild.  Luke called police
headquarters and stated his case.  When he
mentioned his name, he was told that the Police
Commissioner was not to be found.

"Then find him," said Luke.

"I think he's gone out," came the answer.

"If you don't find him after what I've told you,
I'll show up your action at the next meeting I speak
at," said Luke.

The Commissioner was found.

"But what trouble have you had so far?" he demanded.

"We haven't had any so far," said Luke.  "What
we want is to avoid trouble."

"I think you're easy scared," laughed the
Commissioner.  "Have there been any threats?"

"No."

"Well, what's itching you, anyhow?  My
department's got three campaign parades and a
dozen meetings on its hands to-day besides its
regular business.  I can't spare my men unless I know
they're needed."

He rang off.

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  Luke wanted to stay for the arrival of Breil's
men; but there was something else that he had to
do and could not postpone.  He left the factory
a few minutes before the hour at which the
strike-breakers were to arrive.  He passed into a street
slowly filling with strikers, but he reassured himself
by the reflection that what he had to do would be
brief and that he would soon be free to return.  He
hurried to the League's headquarters, where he knew
that the Committee would soon be in session.

For, under all his absorption in the affairs of the
factory, and in spite of his desire to abjure thought
for action, his brain had been busy.  It was telling
him something new about politics.  It was receiving
the truth about parties as, from his vantage-ground,
he had seen it.

He did not stop in his own office.  He went at
once to the committee-room, which opened from that
of the typists'.  The Committee must have received
a special summons and begun its work before the
usual time.  Business, as Luke entered, was already
under weigh, and the room was filled.  In the body
of the narrow hall a crowd of men lounged upon
rows of those collapsible chairs, clamped together,
which undertakers hire out for funerals; most of
the men had cigars in their mouths, and the smoky
air smelled of tobacco and the fumes from the action
of alcohol on the digestive juices.  On a small
platform at one end of the room sat Venable, who was
chairman, and, among the several persons grouped
about him, Luke was surprised to note both Yeates
and Nelson.  Nearly all of the company looked at
the newcomer, and Venable, after looking, glanced
quickly away.  Several committeemen whispered
together, and one laughed.

Luke sat in the first vacant chair that he could find.

"It is moved and seconded," Venable was saying,
"that the order of business be suspended.  All
those in favor will signify their consent in the usual
manner."

A droning assent answered him.

"So ordered," said Venable, and looked uneasily
in Luke's direction.

There was an embarrassed pause.  Finally Yeates
got to his feet.

"Mr. Chairman," he said.

Venable bowed.

Yeates's hands were in his pockets; his glance was
fixed on the floor.

"I propose this resolution," he said, his voice
low, his words coming rapidly: "That it is the belief
of the Executive Committee of the Municipal
Reform League of New York that Mr. Luke Huber
should be asked to withdraw from its ticket, on
which he now appears as its candidate for
District-Attorney, and that he is hereby so asked to do."

There was no hubbub; everybody but Luke
appeared to have known what was coming.  If there
was any discomposure, it was plainly due to Luke's
unexpectedly early appearance.  Everybody looked
at him again.

From a front seat, one man, evidently assigned
to the task, rose abruptly.

"Second the motion," he mumbled, and sat down.

Luke was standing before Venable could ask:

"Any remarks?"

"Yes," said Luke.

"Question!  Question!" called a dozen voices.

Luke's voice was raised above theirs.

"I want——" he began.

"Sit down!" yelled somebody behind him.

Luke turned, but the interrupter did not reveal
himself.

"I want to say one word about this motion,"
Luke began.  He swept the room with a steady gaze
and then let his eyes rest on the chairman.

Perhaps because their candidate had never seemed
more lazy or unconcerned, the Committee offered no
immediate objection.  It was Venable that, without
meeting Luke's glance, interposed.

"Considering the topic under discussion," said
he, "it would be more in accord with the usual
procedure if Mr. Huber were not in the hall."

"Good for you!" cried a man in the back row
of chairs.

"No!  Give him a chance!" cried another.

Luke raised his hand to quiet them.

"Considering that this is supposed to be a meeting
of the Executive Committee of the League," he
said, "it would be more in accord with the usual
procedure if any motions made to it were made by
members of the Committee.  Mr. Yeates is not even a
member of the League."

"*Sit* down!" said the voice from the back row.

"Oh, sit *down*!" echoed a neighbor wearily.

"We can easy find somebody else if Yeates won't
do!" cried another voice.

"I am well aware of that," said Luke, "and so
I don't propose to quibble——"

"Ain't he obligin'?" called the back-row man.

"And besides," Luke continued, "if you would
only listen to me for a minute, you'll find out that I
came here with my mind made up to do just what
you're now asking me to do."

He could feel their amazement at his words and
so he no longer heeded the back-row man's comment:

"You mean you came here to sit down?"

"Have I the floor?" asked Luke of Venable.

The chairman writhed.

"In that case," Luke pursued, choosing to accept
Venable's movement as a sign of assent, "I only
want to say that I made up my mind this morning,
*of my own free will*, to leave the ticket and the
League."

He was interrupted by a roar of disapproval.
The crowd had recovered its wits.  Resignation
would not suit its purpose.  Dismissal alone would
suit that.  A turmoil of voices arose.

As if to climb above their noise, Luke stood on
tiptoe.

"Because this morning," he shouted, "I discovered——"

Old Venable banged his desk with the gavel

"Out of order!" he bawled.

Luke waved him down.

"That this League," he yelled, "was as corrupt
as——"

They were all on their feet.  Some were standing
on their chairs.  The men next to Luke tugged
at his coat.  Other men rushed at him crying threats.
They shook their fists and cursed him.

Luke was as mad as any of them now.  His hands
struck out at the twisting figures about him.  The
tendons of his throat swelled like knots as he
screamed:

"——as corrupt as its enemies!  Corrupt!
Corrupt!  Corrupt!  And I leave you to your own
rottenness!"

He fought his way through them to the door.  He
flung one man across a chair that crashed under its
sudden burden.  Another man who stood in his way,
he struck with an upper-cut under the chin and sent
him bouncing against the wall.  Hooting, swearing,
yelling, they crowded behind him, and he fought his
way clear and almost ran through the outer room
full of astonished stenographers.

A girl ran after him.

"Someone was wantin' you on the telephone,
Mr. Huber," she panted.  "I think he said his name
was Forbes and I know he said it was very important."

Luke paused, looked at her as if she were speaking
an alien tongue and, unanswering, pressed on to
the elevators.

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  What now?

He thought about the newspapers, because his
whole soul was still set upon self-justification.  He
went to the Union Square Hotel; found the public
stenographer, dictated to her, and signed, copies of
a statement briefly saying that he had left the ticket
of the League because he had found the organization
corrupt; posted these to the press, and then, already
wondering why he had bothered to follow a course
of publicity that was really directed solely by habit,
turned again into the street.

The idea of party had been torn out of him, and
he felt as if an arm or a leg had been torn out of
him.  He could not imagine a man being whole without
being part of a party and thereby having a party
as part of him.  Even yet the lingering hope of the
impossible made its claim.

But his reason fought that claim with the sword
of remembered experiences.  It recalled his faith in
the party into which, almost literally, he had been
born, and how that faith was shattered; his
subsequent belief in the theory of reform within the
party, or the party's ability to reform itself, and
how that belief was broken; his intimate knowledge
of corruption at the head of the other two parties;
his discovery, that morning, of the same baseness
in independent reform movements.  Certain as he
was of the rightness of his attitude toward those
strikers at the Forbes mill, he was yet able to see
that even the working-class, cheated by one political
organization after the other, could not win its
ultimate desires through any political organization,
though they formed one of their own.  Where was
the entity?  What was a party but the people that
composed it?  Could a party be a thing-in-itself?
Could it have any existence save in and through its
members?  That mattered nothing.  Whether the
members imposed evil upon the organization that
they created, or whether the thing that they created
imposed evil on its creators, the evil was
inherent in Party.  The irrefutable fact was that the
disease lay not in the form of a party and political
system, but in the system itself: parties were wrong
ab initio, politics were evil in their conception and
being.  Not this or that party was responsible, nor
were these or those politics; parties were not diseased,
politics were not diseased.  Party in the abstract,
Politics in themselves were the disease.

Nevertheless, he would hold those letters for a
little while....

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  That turn of his passing thought toward the
position of Labor reminded him of the message that
the stenographer had given him.  He went to a
telephone and called up the factory.

Over the wire, Forbes's voice came in a broken
cry.  Breil's men had arrived on time, and the
strikers were waiting for them.  There was a pitched
battle in the street.  The few policemen on duty
disappeared.  The strike-breakers fled into the
factory, where two of them now lay dangerously
wounded and a dozen others were badly cut and
bruised.

"Why didn't you telephone sooner?" Forbes
demanded.  "It's awful!  I sent for doctors and
nurses.  I've been trying everywhere to get you.
There's one man—I couldn't find you anywhere—I
don't know——"

Luke gritted his teeth.

"Haven't you 'phoned for more police?" he asked.

"Of course I have; but the Commissioner said
it wasn't anything but a street-fight."

"Then I'll try the Mayor."

"I have done that, Huber."

"What did he say?"

"He said—you would hardly believe it—he said
that these matters were the Commissioner's business."

.. vspace:: 2

§7.  Luke went himself to the Commissioner and
the Mayor, and was given the answers that Forbes
had been given.  The Commissioner said that he
had the reports of his patrolmen, and that these
spoke of the matter as trivial when it happened and
described it as now ended.  In the Mayor's office he
was told:

"I have to depend on the word of my Commissioner."

Luke spent the remainder of the afternoon trying
by long-distance telephone to reach the executive
office at Albany.  When he got an answer, it was
from the Governor's secretary, and was to the effect
that he now expected: no troops could be called
out for service in any county of the State until the
local civil authorities asked for them.

.. vspace:: 2

§8.  That night, when there was a lull in the
turmoil around the factory, Luke and Forbes sat late
in the library of Forbes's house, trying to devise
some plan to save the situation.  It was two o'clock
in the morning when Luke walked into the darkened
hall; but there Betty's warm arms were around his
neck, and Betty's voice was whispering in his ear:

"It will come out all right.  I know it will come
out all right, because *we're* right."

He kissed her.

"I hope I do better at this than I did in politics,"
he said.  "I haven't had time to tell you, but I lost
there, dear."

"No, you didn't."  He felt her hair brush his
cheek as she shook her head in contradiction.  "No,
you didn't.  You had your choice between doing what
was right and what was wrong.  The only way to
win was the way they thought was losing.  But you
did what was right—and so it was they that lost, and
it was my brave man that won!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XV

.. vspace:: 2

Something had gone wrong again with the head
of that office in the Wall Street skyscraper where
George Washington watched the stock-ticker and
where the windows looked down on filmy streets
full of figures bobbing like entangled flies: the plump
man in brown, the man with the pointed teeth and
the beady eyes, was once more absent.  The slight
cold that the doctors mentioned, the catarrhal
affection, had returned; the mucous membranes of the
throat were re-inflamed; the malady that no
newspaper gave a name to renewed its war.

As always, the office work proceeded with silent
regularity.  Simpson, the almoner, saw callers.
Atwood, the chief broker, telephoned for orders
uptown.  Conover, the confidential clerk, traveled
several times a day between his master's house and his
master's place of business in one of his master's
motor-cars.  At the brown man's home, the famous
physicians issued their non-committal bulletins;
L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett came in
and went out, the former worried and elliptical, the
latter loud in denial.  And directly across the street
the relays of reporters resumed their watching, asked
hourly the same questions and received always the
same replies.  Rumor once more hinted dark things
about a ruined digestion and an overworked brain.

Nevertheless, there was a difference between this
occasion and its predecessors, and the delicate nerves
of the financial world quivered with their subtle and
sure appreciation of it.  The interval of good health
had been briefer than ever before.  Simpson looked
grave.  Atwood received few orders.  Conover more
often than not failed to see whom he sought.  The
famous physicians called other famous physicians into
consultation.  Rivington and Hallett were sometimes
denied audience.  The reporters sent their chiefs
a word that made every newspaper-office in the
country hunt up a certain long-prepared obituary, set
it in type and keep it standing on the bank with a
slug-line that read, "Hold for Orders."  Rumor
shook its thousand heads, and this time rumor was
right: the thumbs of the gods were turned down.

No more rising early and working late for the
man with the beady eyes and hairy hands.  No more
gluttony.  No more scheming.  All hours are alike
in the sickroom; his only food was tepid broth, and
about a brain too tired to scheme for itself, the only
scheming was how to drag forward from minute to
minute its life that was death-in-life.

In the street straw had one day been strewn to
quiet the noise of traffic, and the next day commands
from City Hall closed that street to traffic.  Outside
was silence, and silence was inside, behind the
brownstone walls and shuttered windows, over the rich
rugs, among the pictures by the great dead artists.

In a darkened room, in a big Louis XV. bed,
bought from the poor descendant of a Provençal
marquis for whose mistress it was made, the patient
lay.  His legs were beneath the covers, but an
upholstered bed-rest propped him so that his trunk was
almost upright, wrapped in a house-jacket of French
flannel, russet brown.  Freshly shaven and carefully
brushed, he was as neat as if he were about to go to
business; but his cheeks hung like folds of dough over
his heavy jaw-bone; his short-sighted eyes were fixed
on the tapestried canopy above him, which showed
the rape of Europa; his lips, turned pale, were pulled
back tightly over his yellow fangs.  On the edge of
the coverlet, high-drawn, his hairy hands gave the
only sign of life in all his body: the rounded tips
of their stumpy fingers moved constantly as if they
were spinning ... spinning...

He would not go to business any more.

It was the day on which Luke's month of promised
suppression was to expire.  In the sick-room of
the man in russet-brown two doctors stood at one
side of the bed now, with a nurse between them.
L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett were
admitted to the room, and Rivington stood at the foot
of the bed with his trembling hand before his face,
while Hallett, beside him, squared his jaw and looked
at the dying man, who did not look at him.  Some
servants that had worked in the house for twenty
years hovered in the shadows and sobbed, because
they loved their master and had long cause to love
him.  A clergyman, in his vestments, knelt at the
side of the bed opposite the doctors and read from
a little book.

"O Almighty God," read the clergyman, his voice
sounding loud in the quiet of the room—"with
whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect,
after they are delivered from their earthly prisons;
we humbly commend the soul of thy servant, our
dear brother, into thy hands..."

One doctor quietly reached out and placed a
seeking finger on the dying man's wrist.

"... that it may be precious in thy sight..."

The doctor looked over his shoulder at his colleague.
The colleague's eyes asked a question.  The
examining doctor nodded.

"... it may be presented pure and without
spot before thee."

Then the man on the bed died.  He died silently,
speedily, grimly.  The stumpy fingers stopped their
weaving motion; they shot into the palms of the
hands, and the hands clenched until only their hairy
backs were visible.  The lips tightened for a moment
until the pointed fangs seemed to have bitten through
them; the beady eyes protruded still farther from
their sockets; the crooked arms curved stiffly toward
the belly; the crooked knees shot toward the chest;
the whole figure seemed to curl up; the mouth fell open.

The clergyman looked, hesitated and continued:

"... teach us who survive, in this and other
like daily spectacles of mortality, to see how frail
and uncertain our own condition is; and so to
number our days, that we may seriously apply our hearts
to that holy and heavenly wisdom, whilst we live
here, which may in the end bring us to life everlasting,
through the merits of Jesus Christ, thine only
Son our Lord.  Amen."

.. vspace:: 2

Far down in the offices on the twentieth floor of
a Wall Street skyscraper, everything was going on
as usual.  Only one room of the suite was empty, and
even in it, under the solemn Washington, the
stock-ticker was weaving out its yards and yards of tape
by the windows that looked to the web of streets on
which the people buzzed always like entangled flies.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XVI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVI

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  Public opinion had been unanimous concerning
Luke's break with the Municipal Reform League.
Only in the terms of their condemnation did the
newspapers differ: they were all agreed that Luke
was anathema.  His letters to the press served him to
small purpose; the Executive Committee issued a
statement declaring that his withdrawal had been
requested "because of inflammatory utterances and
practical policies contrary to the spirit and purpose
of the organization."  The official statement was
accepted and his individual version treated as a futile
attempt to blacken a reputable, if mistaken,
movement.  It was everywhere believed that he had been
forced to resign because of his Cooper Union speech,
and it was in some quarters hinted that his former
comrades held him responsible for the attempt to
bribe the Heney lieutenant—a scandal made the most
of during the subsequent period of the campaign and
thereafter dropped before it reached the courts.
In spite of the fact that the Committee had met in
secret session, some of its members gave their own
story of its turbulent dénouement to the reporters,
and this was published in a form that made Luke
appear as a cornered bully.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: small

"Mr. Huber [said the most dignified editorial on the subject]
was once doubtless a well-intentioned young man, but his first
taste of popular applause seems to have intoxicated him, made
him see visions of one real evil in every impossible quarter and
caused a fit of that acute mania wherein one's best friends are
mistaken for one's worst enemies.  This is the only charitable
explanation of the tragic end to a promising career, but on that
end the Municipal Reform League is certainly to be
congratulated."

.. vspace:: 2

Other editorials laughed at Luke's habit of hitting
at vast conspiracies of which he never produced
proof, and some charged him with flagrant
dishonesty.  He reverted for a time to his belief in
publicity and bombarded the papers with letters of
explanation; but the papers at first garbled and then
forgot to print what he wrote.  He sent for reporters
to give them interviews, but, although the men still
liked him, and politely took down his every word,
they could never get their "copy" beyond the
editorial desks.  Within a few days, the former
candidate was a newspaper joke.

He had, of course, written to his mother and sister
about his engagement to Betty, since publicly
announced, and they had replied with kindly letters,
glad because of his planned marriage to the daughter
of a man of good family supposed to be well-to-do,
and hopeful for his continued happiness.  Now, with
the news of his political overthrow published
broadcast, Jane wrote to ask him why he had been so
foolish and to quote her husband the Congressman, to
the effect that what Luke needed was an apprenticeship
at practical politics; his mother's comment was
one of love triumphant over the defects of the loved
object and forgiveness for behavior inexplicable in
his father's son.

The strike dragged on wearily.  After the first
outbreak of violence, the leaders were able, for a
time, to prevail upon the strikers to use more
peaceable methods; but the resulting days of siege were
as trying for both sides as the active warfare had
been.  Forbes's boasts to the contrary notwithstanding,
the firm, handicapped by the unskilled labor of
the strike-breakers, found itself unable to fulfil its
contracts; the new recruits were all raw men, whereas
much of the factory's work was intended for trained
women: badly needed money was being forfeited.
The dispossessed employees, on the other hand,
rapidly exhausted their own supplies; because they
had gone over to industrial unionism, the American
Federation of Labor, to which their old "local" had
been attached through the trade-union that it was a
part of, refused help and forbade the union to give
any; there had been a national reaction against the
I.W.W., and it could furnish but little money.  The
strikers held angry meetings and faced starvation;
Luke and Forbes met in long conferences and faced ruin.

In those days, only Luke's love for Betty
sustained him, and Betty, being new to both love and
disaster, remained loyal.  She was confident that the
politicians and the papers were conspiring against
him, and, knowing her father's gentleness in his
home, she was equally confident that the strikers were wrong.

Luke did not inquire as to the reasons of her
steadfastness.  In the first darkness of disaster, he was too
glad for support to quarrel with its origin.  She was
warm and human, sympathetic and at hand; she
loved him.  With all his heart and soul, he returned
her love.  In the last analysis, he fought, he told
himself, for an ideal that, if greater than them both
or separately, was yet necessary to them.  The ideal
had an undeniable lien upon the best of his strength
of body and mind; yet whatever of these the ideal
could spare was not for him, but for Betty.

Then came the death of the man whom Luke had
regarded as the personification of the evils from
which the country was suffering.  It came close
enough upon the Cooper Union speech to make
that speech appear in the worst possible taste; but
it was an event considered of such tremendous
importance in itself that Luke was forgotten and
once for all swept from the columns of the newspapers.

Those papers, even the daring few that had once
or twice had the temerity feebly to question the lesser
schemes of the man who now pursued no more
schemes, were crowded with reverential accounts of
his illness, awed pictures of his last moments,
laudatory descriptions of his Napoleonic career, and
editorials that spoke only of his undeniable greatness
and his outstanding benefactions.  The country talked
as if its king had died; the achievements of none of
the three presidents killed while in office had
received louder praise or more lengthy attention.  He
left two large fortunes to individuals: one to the
niece to whom Yeates was engaged, and one to be
divided among more distant relatives, with bequests
to faithful servants in his house and businesses; but
the bulk of his money went to the colleges and
hospitals that he had so magnificently assisted during his
life.  Firmly, the entire press observed the Latin
maxim: they let nothing but good be spoken of the dead.

Luke was by this time prepared for such an attitude
on the part of the papers, but, on his own part,
he permitted no illusions.  The fact of death must
always be solemn; but the force that ended wrong-doing
did not palliate it.  This blow was like a
judgment from Heaven.  Luke did not think so much of
how it would benefit him as of how it would benefit
the country, but he was of too common clay not to
spare some reflection to the influence of the event
upon his own affairs: it would probably mean the
dissolution of the antagonism to him in business; it
would surely mean the cessation of the personal
persecution that had already wrecked his political and
professional career.  Yet it was more for the triumph
of the larger and broader good that he felt ready to
chant a *Jubilate*.

Once the thoughts crossed his mind: If Heaven
were just, and this death were indeed Heaven's
judgment, why had Heaven's judgment been so long
delayed?  And, since Heaven had been tardy when
the death of a single man could thus ease the world
and make for social righteousness, how could he
have held it wrong had some sufferer from that evil
struck, in Heaven's default, this single blow for the
freedom of society?  But he was in no mood to front
casuistry: the thing had happened, and that was
happiness enough.

He was reading the news in his rooms at the
Arapahoe.  He had sat up late with Forbes the night
before and had risen late this morning, breakfasting
in the apartment house.  He knew that he ought
to go to the factory, but he could not go at once.

He began again to dream dreams as he used to
dream them.  His personal failure counted for
nothing in what must happen now.  Suppose he were
discredited and unable to win back the public
confidence: somebody, without party and without
politics, a larger and better man than he had been, would
assume a national leadership, where his had been
small and local, and would now bring the whole
country back to the simple political faith and the plain,
honest financial and industrial policies of the nation's
founders.  The mercenaries of darkness that had
served the evil mind could not now, with the evil
mind in perdition, stand for one day against the
Army of Light.

Himself?  He would begin over again, with Betty
and for her.  In the new order, under the reign of
equity, public opinion would soon clarify, and he
could re-establish himself and perform some part,
however small, of the mighty work of reconstruction.
He had been too busy of late with love and politics
and business to continue in the social life in which Jack
Porcellis had launched him.  Porcellis's sporadic
returns to New York—the man was just now in India
on the pretense of studying its religions—were,
latterly, Luke's sole occasions of approaching that
existence.  Save to secure the loan, he now contritely
recalled, he had neglected Ruysdael, whose agent as
yet evinced no misgivings over the effect of the strike
upon Forbes's securities, and on his last incursions
into Mrs. Ruysdael's set, though Luke had found
himself liked, he was made aware that the liking
for his small-talk was severely tempered by scorn
for his enthusiasms.  He must overcome all
that now.  To be of use, to help Betty, he must regain.

When he was a small boy, his ambition in life had
been carpentry.  At some remote time or other, he
must have seen and admired one of those journeymen
joiners of the elder type that used to tramp the
country roads from small town to town and keep
alive by doing odd jobs at the houses on their
endless way.  He loved tools and he loved wandering;
even yet he loved them, and this figure had once
represented Romance to him as definitely as the dead
man in russet brown, long afterward, represented
Evil.  This morning, while he smiled at the memory
of those young imaginings, Luke felt a little of their
charm: it seemed impossible for him to form, as he
should, his new plans while he sat in an apartment
house in the city in which his plans must eventually
be applied; he wished that he could drop everything
for the day and go somewhere far out into the
country to tramp the dusty roads and dream at
ease.

It was then that the telephone announced a caller:
ex-Judge Stein.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  The Judge, as he entered, presented the same
dignified figure that he had presented when Luke last
talked with him.  His strong face was solemn, but
undisturbed by its solemnity.  He arranged with care
the tails of his frock-coat as he seated himself in
the best chair, but on this occasion he came directly
to the point of his visit.

"Mr. Huber," he said, "a great many things
have happened since we met."

Luke shrugged his shoulders.

"I'll admit you've kept me pretty busy, Judge."

"I was not referring to the unnecessary trouble
in which you involved yourself.  I was referring
to the fact that your month has elapsed and that
the man you threatened is dead."

The news of the morning had temporarily annulled
Luke's sense of time.  Only yesterday he had
wondered what use he should make of the Rollins
letters, now carried in a safer place than his
coat-pocket; to-day he had forgotten them.

"Yes," he said, gathering his thoughts behind
his impassive face: "the month's over and the man's
dead."

The Judge leaned impressively forward.  He
shook his white head gravely.

"Death," said the Judge, "wipes out all animosities.
I know you would not use those letters
now, Mr. Huber, because I know you would not
strike a dead man.  So I have come to ask you to
deliver them to me."  He held out his opened hand.

Luke blinked at it.

"I don't understand," said he.  "I thought you
always represented yourself as—well, as not
professionally retained in this matter?"

"I am now," said the Judge.

"Oh!  By the estate?"

"Not directly and not altogether."  Stein chose
his words.  "I am retained by the company whose
property those letters are."

"I thought you had left the railroad-claim business
long ago.  Perhaps you are specially retained for this
one job?"

The Judge looked hurt.  His firm mouth quivered.

"Mr. Huber," he said, "I am in no frame of
mind for joking to-day.  This man is dead, and he
was my friend——"

"I'm sorry to have seemed to joke," Luke interrupted.

Stein bowed and went on:

"He is dead, and whatever his faults—we all have
our faults, Mr. Huber—they died with him.  I am
here only to ask you to show a decent respect for the
memory of a dead enemy.  I am here to ask you to
be magnanimous, Mr. Huber."

"Magnanimous?  You talk as if I had won!"

"The living are always the winners," said the Judge.

Luke began to doubt that theory.

"And so you want me to surrender these letters?"

"Exactly.  What use can they be to you now?"

"There were other people involved.  Are they
willing to accept my terms?  I know they can't hurt me,
because I know they haven't the courage or the
power of the man you've been talking about.  But
that's neither here nor there: will they accept my
terms?"

"They did not write either of the letters, Mr. Huber."

"They're inculpated by them."

"Not legally."

"Enough inculpated to serve my purpose."

"If you think that," said the Judge, "I can only
repeat the offer I made you when I called here before."

Luke smiled.

"And I can only refuse it."

"Mr. Huber," the Judge began again, "the man
is dead——"

Luke's nerves had been strained for many a day.
He leaped to his feet.

"Of course the man's dead!" he cried.  "He
was dead this morning, and he's still dead.  Why do
you keep saying that over and over?  I'm tired of
hearing it."  He saw the look of pain return.  "I
beg your pardon," he said; "but I might as well tell
you first and last that I won't surrender those
letters, no matter what you plead or threaten.  I won't
tell you what I intend to do with them, either.  And
the only reason I know that they must be of use to
me is your coming here and saying they aren't any use."

The Judge rose also.

"Mr. Huber," said he, "I am very sorry to hear
you speak this way.  I can't tell you how sorry I am.
You ought to know by this time——"

"I couldn't know anything," Luke cut in, "that
would make me change my mind."

"But suppose," said the Judge heavily, "suppose
my friends happen to know that the situation of the
Forbes Company——"

Luke's face went very white.

He opened the door.

"Good-morning, Judge," he said.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  Stein's polite, but portentous adieux were not
a quarter of an hour old before Luke sought the
office of the newspaper that had been the last to
refuse him space in its columns for his political
explanations.  The man that was dead had, it seemed,
left a something of his influence behind him: Luke
resolved to strike at it.

The office-boy was a long time returning, and,
when he did, it was to announce:

"He says ter find out whatcher want."

"Give me my card," said Luke.

He scribbled on the card: "Non-political."

"Now," he said, "try him again."

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  The editor was one of those men whom
newspaper-work so affects that they look any age between
thirty and fifty.  His nervous face was full of tense
lines, and every few minutes his mouth twitched.

Luke told his story and showed the letters.  The
editor read them.

"Why do you want to do this?" he asked.

"Why?"  Luke was amazed.  "Because I want
to protect the public."

"Then you'd better go to the M. & N. railroad."

"But you know they wouldn't do anything.
They've promised before."

"I can't believe that," said the editor.

"I know it," said Luke.

"I can't believe it.  You have always been too
sudden, Mr. Huber—if you'll pardon my saying so.
At any rate, we can't print these things."  He
returned the letters.  "After all, the man's dead, you
know."

"What's that got to do with it?" Luke's voice
rose in reply to the hated phrase.  "I want to keep
some other people from dying."

The editor picked up a proof-sheet and began to
read it.

"It would be bad taste for us to print that, just
now," he said.  "Come around in a couple of weeks,
and we may think about it.  Why, the body's hardly
cold yet."

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  As Forbes had once gone from bank to bank,
Luke went that morning from newspaper-office to
newspaper-office.  Yet there was this difference: that,
whereas Forbes had only tried a few banks, Luke
tried a dozen newspaper-offices.  His search included
the papers notoriously controlled by the money or
the advertising of the power that opposed him; he
even tried some of those journals of the city which are
printed in foreign tongues, and he tried the radical
press.  He tried all in vain.

Most of the editors were men that had fought
him when he was the candidate of the Municipal
Reform League; some that he sought were of those
who had tired of him when he pestered them with
explanations of his political overthrow.  Many
refused to see him; one or two pronounced him mad.
The radicals shared the view of the man with whom
he first spoke: they would not be guilty of bad taste.
Wherever he got word with a person in authority,
the word was the same; he met with that all-sufficient
argument:

"After all, the man's dead."

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  When, finally, he acknowledged defeat, his
wearied nerves manifested their condition through
deep physical exhaustion.  He could not front the
thought of passing the remainder of the day at the
factory; could not go at once from one losing fight to
another.  However much he might be needed, he
could not do it.  Until he had rested, he would be
useless, and worse than useless.

He did not go back to the Arapahoe.  Instead,
with the open country calling him, he went to the
Grand Central Station and took a train into
Connecticut.

The day was Saturday, and the cars were filled
with released workers, but Luke avoided them by
going far and descending at the least important of
the train's stops.  Tired though he was, he walked
beyond the little town.  He cut across fields to a hill
crowned by a clump of trees and there, in the shade,
threw himself on the ground and lay for hours
thinking of nothing and looking at white clouds sailing
across a blue sky.  He wished that he could lie here
forever....

It was one o'clock in the morning before he
returned to his rooms.  It was far too late to reply
to the score of telephone-calls that, he was told,
Forbes had made on him.

Luke remembered that he had promised Betty to
go with her to service at Nicholson's church.

.. vspace:: 2

§7.  He was strengthened by his brief rest, and he
went to Betty with a heart renewed.

"Father's still asleep," she said, as she met him in
the hall of the Forbes house, her gloved fingers
busied with her hair, preventing the escape of one of
the yellow wire pins that held the few strands too
short for her pins of tortoise-shell.  "He wanted
to be called, but he was so tired out, I told the maid
not to disturb him.  He sat up ever so late, waiting
for you.  Where were you, Luke?"

Luke had rarely seen her looking better.  The
Sunday calm had erased all the tokens of the recent
trying days from her face: it was rosy and young;
it was appealingly almost childish.  The morning sun
was in her hair; her brown eyes were wide and
bright.  He did not want to spoil her by the story
of his yesterday's defeat, and so he passed it by
with some facile excuses for his absence from the
factory.

"We're late," he said, as he helped her into the
Forbes motor-car.

The chauffeur ran close to the speed-laws all the
way to Manhattan.  They reached their journey's
end immediately after the choir had taken its
position in the chancel.

The ritualistic church of St. Athanasius is one of
the handsomest in New York.  It was built in close
imitation of Beverley Minster, and so elaborate was
the work done upon it that, in spite of its wealthy
congregation's assistance, it still staggered under the
load of a heavy debt.  It has the Yorkshire building's
two Early English transepts, Perpendicular towers,
and a Late Decorated nave with flying and pinnacled
buttresses.  Inside, as Luke and Betty entered it, the
warmly-colored light fell through many Lancet
windows on the crowd of fashionable worshipers kneeling
before narrow chairs.  Nicholson's voice, coming
from behind the choir-screen, sounded clear but far
away.

Luke and Betty walked up the nearest aisle and
took the seats assigned to the Forbes family, close
to the carved pulpit and under the triforium.  The
high arches were carried on clustered pillars, and,
down the perspective of the nave, Luke could see into
the choir, to the Decorated reredos, where, as in
Beverley, the piers increased in size by successive
groups of shafts that projected like corbels.  He
knelt beside her and tried to give his mind to the
service; but his eyes, familiar though they were with
the church, wandered to the north aisle's windows
and the ogee and foliated arcade under them, to the
people in front of him, and so, inevitably, to the girl
at his side.

The service proceeded.  The people said the
Lord's Prayer; Nicholson recited the collect, and
then read the Ten Commandments of Moses, the
congregation responding.

"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts
to keep this law."

After the creed, Nicholson walked to the pulpit.
He climbed its steps, and for a few moments only his
clasped hands were visible as he knelt inside.  Then
rising, he took his stole from the pulpit rail, kissed the
cross embroidered at the top of the stole, and put
it on.

"In the Book of Ecclesiastes," he began, "in the
ninth chapter and the second verse, it is written:

"'All things come alike to all: there is one event to
the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good, and
to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that
sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.'"

Nicholson's face was earnest.  It was at once stern
and irradiated, the face of an ascetic turned seer.

"And in the General Epistle of St. James," he
proceeded, "in the second chapter and the
twenty-second verse:

"'Seest thou how faith wrought with his works,
and by works was faith made perfect?'"

Nicholson spoke without notes, but without hesitation.

"A great man," he said, "has just died.  We have
heard evil report of him, and good report.  We have
heard whispers against him, and we have seen good
that he has done; but his greatness no man
questioned.  To-day he has passed to his last account.
To-day the dead man stands before his Eternal Judge.
One of those events that happen to the rich and poor
alike has happened to him.  With what he has done
that is over, the Court of Heaven now alone, in all
its boundless mercy, has to deal.  We that remain
here on earth may not judge of that.  We that remain
on earth must consider the things that he has done
and are not over, the things he has left behind; we
must concern ourselves only with what concerns us;
it is our duty to remember him by the works that he
has made his monument."

The preacher dwelt upon the dead man's rise from
poverty to vast riches, a hopeful lesson in the reward
of thrift and wisdom to every poor boy in a republic
that grants equal opportunity to all.  He spoke with
an admiration of the genius that had carved its way to
power until its will was felt in the uttermost corners
of the earth.

As he proceeded, Nicholson seemed to forget his
admonition against the judgment of things over and
done with.  He made direct reference to Luke's
Cooper Union speech, and he looked full in Luke's
face as he made it.

"Not long ago," he said, "while this man was
tottering upon the brink of eternity, another man, a
sincere, but misguided man, made terrible charges
against him, charges that reflected, however veiled,
upon the character and motives not only of the man
now dead, but a whole group of people eminent in
public and business life.  And what was the result?
Nothing that lent the least credit to the accuser's
intelligence or appreciation of the value of evidence,
for nothing at all was proven, nothing even corroborated."

Luke flushed.  He felt Betty looking at him, but he
would not return her gaze.  He felt other people in
the congregation turned toward him.  He could not
guess what had changed Nicholson.

The sermon was proceeding with praises of the
dead man's benefactions.  One by one they were
described and extolled.

"His greatness," said Nicholson, "would have
availed him nothing at this one event for the righteous
and the wicked if he had not had charity, for we are
told that though we speak with the tongues of men
and of angels and have not charity, we are become as
sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.  Charity,
however, this man had.  The institutions that he
supported and has endowed have given and now forever
will give learning to thousands who, but for them,
would have lived in ignorance—healing to
thousands who, but for them, would have died in agony.

"Charity: but charity alone will not suffice.
Sounding brass itself, unless it is informed by faith!
And this man's sublime faith even his worst enemy
cannot deny.  For his counsel and advice, for his
painstaking and sagacious investment of its funds the
Church is indebted to this man as it is to no other.
Many a denomination outside our own fold can truly
say the same of him and should say and does say how
much we owe him, also, for the unceasing flow of his
money into our treasuries.  He did not speak of these
things.  He did not let his right hand know what his
left hand did; but we of the Church remember that
he gave millions of dollars to the faith.

"The faith of men of money is tested by their
money; yet this man's faith had many another test and
rose triumphant from them all.  His attendance at the
Church's services—not only on Sundays, but on fast-days
and holidays, on saints'-days and work-days—never
failed.  His wisdom was free to our councils,
and I have been told on reliable authority that he
never rose in the morning, went to bed at night, or
embarked on any business enterprise, however small,
without first humbly and privately asking direction of
the Most High.  He knew in his every act that the
greatest man is as nothing before God; and when he
came to die, he died like a Christian, a priest of God
by his side and the words of God's mercy sounding
in his dulling ears.  From first to last, his works and
his faith were one: 'Seest thou how faith wrought
with his works, and by works was faith made
perfect?'  For us who are Christians, that is enough.
It is enough to make us each pray to meet his end,
each at his own station in life, as this great man met
his.  *De mortuis nil nisi bonum*."

Only amazement had held Luke in his chair.  At
this phrase, he half rose.

Nicholson, however, was concluding:

"There is but one word more, a word personal
to us of this congregation, to be said.  I need not
recall to you the heavy privations that this church in
which we now are has undergone.  They were
generously met and nobly borne, but, in spite of all your
nobility and all your generosity, the time came, a
week since, when it seemed indeed as if the forces of
evil were about to conquer, and as if, unless Heaven
intervened, this beautiful building must pass out of
our hands.

"Three days before the death of the man I have
been speaking of this morning, an impulse came to me,
and I wrote him a letter.  My friends, I do not
believe that that impulse was of this world.

"I have since been told that when the letter reached
him, his eyes were too dim to read it; yet, when he
was informed of its purport, he asked that it be read
to him.  It was read, and then, with a hand already
trembling at the touch of death, he took a pen and
signed the last check of his career.  That check was
our emancipation; it was a check for the entire sum
for which this Church of St. Athanasius—this
beautiful church in which it is our privilege to worship
God—stood indebted.  I ask you to join in prayer for
the soul of our dead benefactor and then to unite in
the doxology for thanksgiving to God.  'Seest thou
how faith wrought with his works, and by works was
faith made perfect?'"

.. vspace:: 2

§8.  "Where are you going?" gasped Betty.

The people were kneeling, but Luke was on his feet.

"I'm going to get out of here," he answered.
"I'm going to get into the open.  I want fresh air."

He strode down the aisle under the clustered pillars
of the triforium, and Betty hurried after.  At
the church door stood a table bearing a pile of leaflets,
and unconsciously he took one as he passed.

.. vspace:: 2

§9.  In the sunlit street, he felt a little ashamed of
his impetuosity.  Betty was indignant.

"Why did you make such a scene?" she asked.

"I'm sorry," said Luke.  "I simply couldn't stand
it.  A priest talking like that!  And Nicholson the
priest!"

"He shouldn't have attacked you," Betty granted,
"but you didn't put him in the wrong by behaving
impolitely."

"Oh, I don't care about putting him in the wrong,
and I don't care about his attacking me!"  Luke
helped her into the waiting motor, and the car started
smoothly on its return journey.  "What I couldn't
stand was the Church making a hero out of such a
man; the Church selling itself for a few thousand
dollars."

"But the man did do good, Luke."

"How much—compared with the evil he did?"

"I can't know that.  Who can?"

"You talk like Nicholson!"

"No, I don't."  She put her hand on his.  "But
what good can come of abusing the man?"

"I don't want him abused: I only don't want God's
Church to make a saint out of him."

"Nobody's doing that, Luke.  They're simply
being decent about him.  After all, he *is* dead."

Luke shook her hand free.  Then, suddenly, he
tossed back his head and broke into a high laugh.  He
frightened her.

"Luke!  What is it?"

He could not at once answer.

"Oh, what is the matter?" she pleaded.

"You!" he laughed.  "You, too!"  To control
himself he unfolded and looked at the leaflet that he
had picked up in the church doorway, and had been
heedlessly folding and unfolding ever since.  His
mirth stopped.  "Listen to this," he ordered.  "By
Jove, it's not Nicholson alone; it's the whole bunch,
and speaking officially, too!  Listen to this.  It's a
printed statement issued by the General Executive
Committee of the whole church—not St. Athanasius
alone, but the entire denomination—and it's worse
than Nicholson's sermon."  His eyes ran from line to
line.  "'We call upon the prayers of the faithful,'"
he read as well as the motion of the car permitted....
"'He has not buried his talent nor hidden his
candle under a bushel....  So far as a man's life can,
his life exemplified Law and Order, realized the
truth uttered by Richard Hooker: "Of Law there
can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is in
the bosom of God, the harmony of the world."'"

Betty had been listening attentively.

"Well?" she asked.

"'Well?'" repeated Luke.  "'Well?'  Don't
you see?  The whole Church is standing up for him.
And not our Church alone: all churches.  He'd
bought them—bought them!"

"Luke!  How can you?"

"Yes, he has.  One way or another.  He or
his kind: for I'm beginning to see at last he wasn't
alone—never was and never will be.  And seeing
that, I'm not blaming him so much—any of the *hims*.
I don't say, any more, he was worse than the rest of
us; he was only stronger.  Maybe he was only the
average man in extraordinary circumstances.  He
didn't make them—I'm beginning to believe that,
too,—they made him.  But the Church!  The
churches!  They've sinned against the light.  They're
liars.  They're—why, they must be founded on a
lie: their light must be darkness!"

The girl had edged away from him, her brown
eyes big with horror at his blasphemy.  The motor
was drawing up before the door of the Forbes house;
it was drawing up in a quiet Brooklyn street.  And
there, in that Sunday stillness, and among those
surroundings of commonplace respectability, suddenly
the Marvel came to him.

It came to him, this denial of Religion, as a
profound religious experience.  It was Miracle, burning,
blinding, transfiguring.  Elemental, tremendous.  It
was a stroke that affected his entire being; suffused
him; changed him, spiritually, in every atom.  It
hurled him from all his old bases and set him in a
new relation to the universe.  It was not reformation;
it was revolution.  Luke was another personality:
this was the "new birth."  He saw the glory of
individuality, the divinity of his humanity.  In the flash
of revelation, he learned to walk and knew that for
all his life he had been permitting himself to be
carried.  Without guessing it, he had been, he now
knew, all these years, afraid, and now, with this
new inspiration, he faced all things and feared none.
Believing, he had been dead, but denying, was alive
again; faithful, he had been lost, faithless, he was
found, and not by any other help than his own: he
had found himself.  It was the thing that, in the
twinkling of an eye, can make an honest man of a liar,
an abstainer of a dipsomaniac, good out of evil.
It was the same thing that happens to a penitent at the
moment of "conversion," of "receiving grace," of
"experiencing religion"; the same force operating
with the same power and the same manner, but in an
opposite direction.

As St. Paul rose from the earth after his vision
near Damascus, so Luke staggered from the Forbes
motor-car.  His hands groped at the air.

"Betty!" he gasped; "tell your father I can't see
him.  Not now.—I'll be back later.—Perhaps in a
little while.—Later."

She put out her arms to him.

"What is it, Luke?" she cried.  "What's the matter?"

His eyes looked at her, but he did not see her.  He
turned from her to the street.

"I don't know," he said, "but I think—I think
I'm Being Saved."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XVII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVII

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  For an hour, for two hours, he tried to adjust
his mental and spiritual sight to the blazing
illumination; but adjustment, he at length realized, must be
a matter of many days.  The illumination was too
sudden and too intense.  He could no more assess
moral values and determine ethical duties than a
new-born baby can know the use of those objects most
habitual to its elders—a new-born baby to whom the
lamp on a table and the moon in the sky are one and
the same.  There must be false starts on wrong roads;
there must be disappointment and stumbling; there
must even be moments of relapse.  The great thing
for Luke was that, as the lives of some men are
changed forever for the better by an affirmation of
faith, his life had now forever been changed for the
better by a rejection of faith.  He had denied the
superhuman in man's affairs, and the banishment of
the superhuman raised the human; it left the man no
longer a pigmy trembling before a giant, but himself
a giant, limited and mortal, yet self-sufficient and
divine.  He had found what was for him the ultimate
strength; for the knowledge of how to use that
strength rightly he could wait.

Meanwhile, there was the patent obligation to
Forbes.  Forbes needed him; Luke returned to the
Forbes house.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  Forbes was waiting in the library.

"Where were you yesterday?  Are you going
crazy, Huber?  You knew I needed you."

The elder man had borne disaster hardly.  He
looked tired and ill.

"I'm sorry," said Luke.  "I was busy."

"Busy?  What could have kept you busy in town
when you knew this strike was going on?  And you
went to church this morning instead of waking me!
Betty says you're sick.  Are you?"

"No.  I'm only getting well."

Forbes's tone was more considerate:

"Anyhow, you might have come in to luncheon.
Have you had anything to eat?"

"I'm all right," said Luke.

"But Betty says——"

"Where is she?"

"She's in her room.  I told her to lie down.  She's
all upset.  Really, Huber——"

Luke seated himself by the table covered with
magazines and sprawling sections of the Sunday
newspapers.  Outwardly, he was as self-contained as
during his days in Leighton's office.

"What was it you wanted to see me about?" he
interrupted.

Forbes took a chair opposite.  He assumed the
voice of persuasion.

"I want to be perfectly frank with you, Huber,"
he began.

Luke thought: "I wonder what he is going to keep
back."  All that he said was: "Yes?"

"Yes," resumed Forbes, "and I want you to be
perfectly frank with me.  You once told me you'd
made enemies of the people who've since made such
trouble for us, because you had some letters or other
that belonged to them, didn't you?"

Luke bowed assent.  He knew now what to expect.

"Well," Forbes went on, "the only use those
letters were to you was political.  Now that you
can't use them politically, why don't you give them up?"

"You mean now that I've been chucked out of
politics?"

"Well, you know you've ruined yourself there.
You can never get back again.  When you can't hurt
your enemies, why not make them your friends?"

"No, thank you."

"But these letters are of no use to you."

"How do you know that?" asked Luke quietly.

Forbes blushed.

"Are they?" he countered.

"And why," persisted Luke, "didn't you suggest
this to me days ago?"  His eyes probed the man
before him.  "What else did Judge Stein say to you?"
he demanded.

Forbes drew back in his chair.  His flush deepened,
but presently he made an impatient gesture.

"Oh, very well," he said defiantly, "the Judge did
see me yesterday, and if you had been at the factory,
as you should have been, you'd have seen him, too."

Luke thought it unnecessary to remark that he
had been honored by a previous call from Stein.

"What else did he say?" Luke repeated.

"He said a great deal; but the upshot of it was
that he would induce your enemies, who are the men
that control the trust we're competing with, to lower
wages and join the fight against the employees, if you
would agree to surrender those letters."

"I won't do it," said Luke.

"Don't be hasty," Forbes implored.  "Think of
me.  Think of Betty——"

Luke winced.

"Don't begin that," he commanded.

"But what have you to gain?" asked Forbes.

"Nothing.  I've nothing to gain.  I've only
something to keep: my self-respect."

"Your self-conceit, you mean.  Be reasonable,
Huber.  These people won't give in."

"So I must?"

"They won't give in, and you can't get back to
politics and can't get any paper to take up your
case."

"Oh,"—Luke could have laughed—"so Stein
told you that, too, did he?"

"Never mind what he told me.  The point is: his
people can help you if you'll only acknowledge defeat,
now that you're defeated.  They can give you back
all you've lost, and nobody else can."

"And if I don't admit I'm whipped, they'll whip
me some more?"

"They'll finish what they've begun, Huber; they
will wipe out the Business, too."

"I'm sorry," said Luke—"very sorry for you, I
mean.  But there's no use arguing: I won't give in."

Forbes exhausted his every resource.  He pleaded
for the business, for Luke, for Betty.  For an hour he
sent the squadrons of his appeal against the
impregnable wall of Luke's determination.

"What have you to gain?" he reiterated; and
once he said: "The worst of the crowd is dead, anyhow."

Luke was not listening.  He was saying to himself:

"What is it I am to do next?  There is still a little
money left to my account at the bank.  It will keep
me for a year and mother for a year—and then?  I'm
making Forbes hold out against the trust, and if he
does hold out his mill is doomed.  No hope there!
Can I go back to the Law?  I can't, because the Law
is just what the Church is.  The Law was made by
the powerful, it is interpreted by their paid servants
and administered by their slaves.  It is a game
devised by the crafty powerful to cheat the simple weak.
The last five years have proved that to me, and I'm
ashamed that it took me so long to learn.  Betty——"

He did not dare to think of Betty.  He thought
rather of the open country, of the smell of the earth
on which he had been lying twenty-four hours ago,
and the coolness and freedom of the white clouds
against that sky of blue....

Forbes was saying something about his
grandfather and the Business.  Luke got up.

"There's no use your wasting your breath," he
declared.  "Nothing that you could say would
change me—no, nothing that even Betty could say!
But I'll do this: I'll never be away from the factory
again when I ought to be there; I'll stand by you till
we've beaten these strikers or till they've ruined us."

He walked out of the room and closed the door
before Forbes could answer him, and he walked into
Betty's arms.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  "Luke," she whispered, "what was the
matter this morning?  Won't you tell me, dear?"

He felt the blood mount hotly to his head.  Her
hair was sweet to his nostrils.

"Don't," he said sharply.

"But, Luke——"

He drew her hands from his neck.  He imprisoned
her wrists in his grasp.

"I don't quite know what's the matter—yet," he
said.  "It's all come too suddenly.  But, Betty—O,
Betty, I don't believe I'm the man for you!"

She asked him what he meant, and he could not tell
her.  She pressed him, and he could only repeat his
conviction.

"Do you mean"—she drew her hands away—"that
you like some other girl better?"

He laughed rudely.

"No," he said, "not that."

"But you don't care for me?"  She recovered all
her dignity.  "If you don't care for me, why aren't
you brave enough to say so?"

The afternoon sun fell through the hall-window
and showed her to him very fair.

"Betty," he said slowly, "there are only two kinds
of marriages you understand: there is the Church, but
I don't believe any more in any church; and there's
the Law, but the Law can't make a marriage for me."

At least the immediate purport of the words she
understood.  Her face burned red and then became
white and still.

"You mean——" she began.  Her hands
clenched.  "Oh!" she cried.

She tried to pass him.

Passion left him, but a great sorrow took its place
as his master.  He wanted to justify himself; he even
so wanted to repair the hurt done her that he would
have shut his eyes to the new light.  He seized her
hand.

"Betty!"

She wrenched her hand.

"Let me go!  I want to go to father!  Let me go!"

"But, Betty, wait—listen——"

She freed her hand.

"I shan't tell him.  Don't be afraid.  He has
enough to worry him.  Only don't let me ever see
you again!"

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  All that night Luke walked the streets.  It
was breakfast-time when he returned to the Arapahoe.
His letters and the morning papers were lying on the
floor of his sitting-room where they had fallen when
the bell-boy dropped them through the slit in the
door.

He read the letters first.  There were not many,
for his correspondence had of late declined to almost
nothing.  The only things of interest were a note
from Porcellis, announcing that he would soon return
to New York and a letter from Luke's mother, saying
that she had written Betty to pay her a visit: "It
is only right that your fiancée should do this," wrote
Mrs. Huber, "and that I should have an early
chance of knowing the girl that is to be my son's
wife."

Luke wondered how Betty would reply to the invitation.
As he was thinking of this, his eye caught the
heaviest headlines on the first page of the newspaper:
during the night, a body of strikers at the Forbes
factory had marched to the main entrance and
battered down the door in an endeavor to drag out the
Breil men who slept there as guards by night and
worked there by day; the Breil men resisted; there
was a general battle with at least two deaths; the
attacking party were repulsed, but the police,
summoned by a riot-call, gained what appeared to be no
more than a preliminary skirmish, for the entire
neighborhood was in arms and more bloodshed was
expected to-day.

Luke dropped the paper with an oath.  He was
more hungry than before for a part in this fight—in
any fight.  If Religion was a coward, he would make
one more appeal to Government, to force.  He called
Albany on the long-distance telephone.  He kept on
calling until he had brought the Governor to the
other end of the wire, and then he was astonished to
hear that the proper civil authorities in New York
had already asked for troops.

"It is always best," he was told, "not to drag local
men into an affair of this sort, if it can be helped;
so I'm having the Adjutant General send down a
company from Poughkeepsie.  That ought to be
enough for the present, and they ought to get there
by noon."

Luke muttered his thanks and rang off.

"I know why that was done," he said to himself:
"They think they'll make more trouble for us
with the militia here than without it.  Well, we'll see."

He stripped off his clothes, went to the bathroom,
and began to run the water for a cold plunge.  He
was talking to himself.

"The worst of the crowd's dead," he said.  "That
was Forbes's way of putting it.  There he had a
glimpse.  Started down to rock-bottom.  But he
didn't arrive.  I felt that way till only a little while
ago.  But I see I was wrong.  I thought this was a
one-man show; I believed in a sort of personal Devil.
I wish I'd been right.  It would have been all so
simple, if I'd been right in that.  But I wasn't.  It
isn't the men; it's the system.  The man didn't make
the system; the system made the man."

He was wonderfully clear about that now.  All
his fight against evil had been directed toward one
man, and the man was dead and the evil remained.
He could almost pity that man in russet brown.  That
man who had sat at the fountain of forces reaching
up and down through all the life of the world, seemed
to originate the forces and use them for his own
malign purpose; but now—and herein lay one of the
reasons for Luke's present wonder at life—he
perceived certainly that the man had been only a little
better treated by the forces than the forces treated all
the rest of mankind, was their creation and their slave
just as wholly as the most obscure victim.  Industrial
evolution, working through the collective ignorance
of the race, had devised the Great Evil.  Here
was a web that no spider wove, a web that killed
spiders as well as flies, lived on with a life of its
own, grew and spread of itself.  So long as the web
existed, there would always be a spider.  The Web
remained.  It was the Web that must be broken.

Yet he wanted to fight.  He would fight.  The
Gospel of Negation had given him its light; it had
yet to teach him to see.

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  Other forces vitally affecting Luke were at
work that day, at first far distant from the factory.
They were forces that had affected him imperfectly
heretofore, but that now were set in motion in a
manner no longer to be diverted.

Ex-Judge Stein was summoned from his office
almost at the moment of his appearance there.  His
motor-car took him into Wall Street, to a certain
skyscraper, into which he went and was taken as far as
the twentieth floor.

He entered an unmarked door and passed an
attendant who bowed to him respectfully.  He passed
another attendant.  A third, at sight of him, got up
and went through a second door, leaving the Judge
to wait in dignified repose.  Then the last attendant
reappeared and nodded, and the Judge passed the
second door.

He remained inside for an hour.  When he came
out his mien was undisturbed, but his strong and
kindly face was even graver than usual.  He almost
forgot to return the farewells of the attendants as he
left them.  He rang twice for the elevator, although
the elevator was not long delayed.

"The office," he said to his chauffeur as he climbed
again into the car.

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  Returned at his own quarters at half-past ten,
he sent immediately for Irwin, to whom he talked for
perhaps forty-five minutes.  He spoke with a sad
inevitability.

"No more excuses, no more extensions of time,
no more delays," he concluded—"and no more failures."

The twinkle left Irwin's eyes.

"I understand," he said.

He could not fail to understand.  His superior had
been once and for all explicit.  Judge Stein, during
his service to the public on the bench, had never been
called upon to pronounce a sentence of death, but,
had he been so called upon, he would have spoken
much as he now spoke to Irwin.

.. vspace:: 2

§7.  "I hate to have to tell you this," said Irwin
to Quirk at noon in the latter's shabby law-office,
"but if that job isn't done before to-morrow morning,
those affidavits charging you with jury-fixing are
going to be turned over to the District-Attorney, and
the people that have them are now in a position to
make Leighton act on them, too."

Irwin also had become specific.  The plump Mr. Quirk
lost his habitual smile.

"It's a rotten business," he said.

"It is," Irwin agreed; "but your arrest would be
a worse one—for you."

"We may have to go the limit," said Quirk.

"Then," said Irwin, "you'd better go it.  That's
no affair of mine."

.. vspace:: 2

§8.  "This time," said Quirk, "you've got till
to-night to make up your mind."

He was talking to Police-Lieutenant Donovan.  It
was just after lunch-time.

"What about?" asked Donovan.

"Whether you want to bluff us again or lose your job."

"We never did bluff you."

"Well, then: whether you want to get those letters
or get fired.  Not *try* to get them: *get* them.  It's
get them or get out."  All the kindliness and
good-fellowship was missing from Quirk's voice.  "It's one
thing or the other.  We got evidence to fire you on.
You knew we had, last time I talked to you.  Well,
they were easy on you then, Hughie.  This time they
mean business."

Donovan looked at Quirk.

"Suppose somebody gets hurt?" he said.

Quirk shrugged his shoulders.

.. vspace:: 2

§9.  When Guth came in late in the afternoon,
Donovan said:

"I got a warrant in my desk for you, Guth.  A
friend o' mine swore it out.  If I don't stop him, it
means a criminal trial where you won't have the
chance of a goat.  You know what it's for: that little
girl up in Fifty-second Street.  The only way I can
get him to hold off's for you to get Reddy Rawn to
do what you'd ought t' got him to do long ago.  If
somebody gets hurt, it ain't our fault."

.. vspace:: 2

§10.  At eight p.m. in the shadowy alley near
Forty-third Street and Third Avenue, Patrolman
Guth's twisted mouth was menacing the darkness.

"He's down at the Forbes factory now," said
Guth.  "There's sure to be a fight there to-night, an'
anybody can get in.  It's a cinch."

The darkness did not reply.

"Anyhow, you got to," said Guth.  "The old
man's crazy mad.  He says it's the chair for yours if
you fall down this time.  Crab Rotello's got worse.
He can't live the night, an' the old man says he's
goin' to have you railroaded soon as Crab cashes in,
if you don't do what he says.  He means it, too,
Reddy."

Out of the darkness came the answer:

"I'll maybe have to croak this guy."

"That's up to you," said Guth.  "It'll look like
some strikers done it.  It's his own fault for bein' a
fool.  What in hell do you care, anyway?  We'll
look out for you."

"All right," said the darkness.

"Mind you," Guth repeated, "no more stallin'
this time.  If you don't get the goods, an' get 'em
to-night, you're a dead boy, Reddy."

There was an instant of silence.  Then the darkness
spoke again:

"It won't be me's the dead one."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XVIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVIII

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  The text of the newspaper article, which Luke
read carefully while he dressed, added few facts to
those marshaled in its headlines.  To Luke it was
evident that the past few days had brought the strikers
to desperation.  Their own funds were gone, and they
had no help from outside.  They were not strong in
numbers, and many of them were women.  The ranks
of the men had, however, been swelled to a formidable
figure by unsought additions from the hundreds
of hooligans that, in every city, are attracted to seats
of industrial war, and these provided an element
which the leaders were unable to control.  The
affair had gone the usual way: a picket had jeered at
a non-union worker; two policemen attacked the
offending picket; the crowd ran to the rescue, and a
general disturbance, with the assault on the mill, was
the inevitable result.  Now there was no telling
to what extent the trouble might go.

Luke was savagely glad that physical action was
imperative.  He wanted something that would stop
thought.  He wanted rest from thought: from the
spiritual strain, from the yearning for Betty.  Again
and again, as he hurried through a breakfast forced
upon himself only by the knowledge of his need, he
found his mind playing with the childish idea of the
carpenter that he wanted to be, tramping the country
roads from casual job to job.  He might well come to
that.  Meanwhile, it was good to have this chance for
a fight.

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  Luke drove to the factory in a taxicab that he
insisted should be open.  As he neared his destination
through rows of grimy buildings and vacant lots
in which goats grazed among ash-heaps and tin cans
and "For Sale" signs, the streets began to look as if
a heavy skirmish had been fought through them.
Knots of idle sightseers already lined the uneven
sidewalks and pointed to the relics of the conflict; at
corners the former workers were gathered in low-speaking
groups—shrunken figures; slouching forms in
poor clothing, whose business was the making of
better clothes for luckier beings; faces angry and sullen,
faces savage, debased, hungry; women's faces as
sexless as the men's—and everywhere, furtive and
sinister, those other faces, the faces most to be feared, of
the gathered condors of the underworld, the feeders
on economic carrion, who had slunk here from the
darkest corners of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City,
rising from a hundred alleys and pot-houses, and
circling toward the factory as birds of prey come from
the four quarters of the compass toward a battlefield;
he saw them crouched at the shadowy thresholds of
tumble-down dwellings, leering from fetid passageways,
peering from the swinging doors of stinking
saloons, stealthy, determined.

Overhead the sky was clear sapphire.  A strong
breeze came in from the Sound, laden with health.
It fanned the memories of yesterday out of his brain
and for a moment made the present seem a picture
from the remote past.  It was unreal: he felt himself
an unimportant spectator of some unconvincing play.

Then, rising above rows of rickety houses, the mill
came into sight, blocking the street-end, and restored
his appreciation of the imminent.  A wrecked
coal-wagon lay horseless in the middle of the street
opposite a bent lamp-post, the coal heaped where it had
fallen.  Battered hats were in the gutter, and on the
pavement was a coat, torn and muddy.  No smoke
curled to-day from the chimney of the mill's
engine-room, and in front of its shattered main-door, rudely
repaired by unpainted planks of fresh pine, two
policemen lounged, facing a string of mute pickets.

Luke passed the door unmolested and entered the
office.  The superintendent, a whiskered man named
Whitaker, was there, and one or two pasty and
frightened clerks.

"Mr. Forbes down yet?" asked Luke briskly.

"No, sir," said Whitaker.  "He just sent word he
was sick."

"Sick?  What's the matter with him?"

"I don't know exactly, Mr. Huber.  It was Miss
Forbes telephoned, and she said he'd had a kind of
fainting fit right after breakfast."

Luke sat down at the desk and called up the Forbes
house.

"Mr. Forbes there?" he asked of the maid that
answered him.

"No, sir.  Mr. Forbes is in bed."

"Ill?"

"Not very well."

"Ask Miss Forbes to come to the 'phone.  This is
Mr. Huber talking.  I'm at the factory, and I must
know something about Mr. Forbes' condition."

The maid assented, but, after he had waited, it was
again she that spoke to him.

"Miss Forbes asks you please to excuse her.  She's
very busy.  She says to tell you Mr. Forbes was a
little dizzy and had to lie down.  He thinks he can
get to his office late in the day."

Luke felt the mortification that it was patently
intended he should feel; but he lost no time over it.
He turned at once to Whitaker and the clerks, and
secured from them what verification he could of the
newspaper's story.  Then he sent for the brawny,
flannel-shirted Breil and learned what remained for
him to know.

"You think there'll be more trouble?" he asked,
after he had sent Whitaker and his assistant from the
room.

"Sure there will," said Breil cheerfully, "but not
before to-night."

"When'll the soldiers get here?"

"'Long about noon, I guess."

"How many police have they given us?"

"Half a dozen.  I couldn't beg more."

"Better send some of them out to have that coal
cleared away."

"I tried to, but they said it wasn't their duty, an' I
couldn't get any satisfaction at City Hall.  You know
how these cops are."

"Couldn't you have a detail of your own men do it?"

"I'd like to first-rate; but it'd mean a fight, an' we
don't want to put ourselves in the position, to the
public, of courtin' that.  Mr. Forbes said Saturday——"

"He was right.  How many men have you in good shape?"

"Seventy-two.  I'd send for more, but they're on a
job at Hazleton."

"Will City Hall send more police if there's trouble?"

"Not till they can't help doin' it."

The hours passed slowly.  Luke made the rounds
of the mill as the commander of a fortress inspects it
before an attack.  He saw that the strike-breakers, an
anxious lot of men, were stationed at the vulnerable
places, and he talked again with Breil.

Forbes did not appear, and Luke was too proud to
try a second time to question Betty about him; but
reporters came and sent in urgent requests for a
statement from the company.  Luke refused to see them.
It was his turn to refuse the newspapers.

"Better feed 'em a little pap," Breil advised.

"I won't so much as look at them," said Luke.

"They'll knock us if you don't."

"That can't hurt us.  I won't see them and you're
not to talk to them either, Breil."

He began to chafe under the delay.  He made the
rounds of the mill again and smoked incessantly at
cigars that he found in a box in Forbes's desk.  He
bolted a cold lunch sent in at noon, and he wondered
why the soldiers were late.

The soldiers came at two o'clock.  Out in the
street there were some derisive shouts, and then the
regular tramp of marching feet.  Luke hurried to an
office above Forbes's, a room furnished with a small
desk at one side, a large table in the center, and a few
chairs, and there, from a window, saw the column of
men in khaki, advancing four abreast, down the street.

"They're nothing but a lot of boys," he said as,
when they drew nearer, he looked at their young
faces.  "It's a shame to send a lot of kids like that
into—a mix-up of this kind."

He received the Captain and the first-lieutenant in
the main office.  The Captain had taken off his
broad-brimmed service hat and was mopping his face with a
blue bandana handkerchief.

"Phew!" he said.  "This looks as if it was goin'
to be the real thing!"

"It *is* the real thing," said Luke.

"You haven't got a drink handy, have you?"
asked the Captain.  He was an olive-complexioned
young man of twenty-two or -three with a girlish
mouth and bright black eyes.

Luke produced a bottle and glasses, and the Captain
drank.  He spoke in the high tone of excitement
as he rattled on:

"Somebody threw a brick at us just up here.  Did
you see 'em?  It near cracked Sergeant Schmidt's
coco.  Poor old Schmidt; he was scared yellow,
wasn't he, Terry?"

Terry was the lieutenant, a raw Irish lad with the
face of a fighter.

"You bet," said he.

Luke drew the Captain aside.

"You may as well understand at once," said he,
"that this isn't any picnic.  You've been sent here to
protect our property, and you may have a hot time
doing it.  We have seventy-two strike-breakers here
under Mr. Breil; the superintendent; one or two
clerks; and five foremen who've remained loyal to the
company.  That, with me, makes up the inside force.
There's half a dozen police, too.  What I want you to
do is to draw a cordon of your men along the front
of the building.  Stand them on the pavement.
Breil's men'll watch the back.  Half your people had
better go on duty now and be relieved by the other
half at five o'clock.  But from seven on, we'll need
your whole company on the job."

The Captain looked serious and worried.

"You think there'll be real trouble to-night?"

"I shouldn't be a bit surprised, especially as I see
the Governor's sent us just enough of you fellows to
excite a mob and yet be powerless against it.  What
were your instructions from up top?"

"I was to use my own discretion."

Luke looked at the young man and smiled at the
idea of intrusting men's lives to such discretion.

"Well, the main thing is not to lose your head,"
said Luke.

"They'll outnumber us?"

"If they attacked, yes—undoubtedly."

The Captain returned to the whiskey bottle.

"And we'd be powerless, unless——"  He hesitated.

"Unless you fired," Luke concluded for him.

They looked at each other, the man and the boy.

"You mustn't fire," said Luke.

"No," said the boy.

"Unless you have to," said the man....

The afternoon dragged by.  Luke gave up all hope
of Forbes and spent most of the time in the upper
office, looking at the soldiers stationed in front of
the building and at the groups of men staring at the
soldiers.  It seemed to Luke that the numbers of the
staring men were increasing....

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  The night was dark.  The purple arc-lamp
that burned directly in front of the main entrance to
the factory flared vividly upon a circle of the street
beneath it, but beyond this circle, which was long
empty, one could scarcely see, one could rather only
feel, the presence of a slowly gathering, silent crowd.
In the main office, Luke was again consulting with
the Captain, Breil, and a policeman.  The policeman,
as if acting under instructions, had sneered at the idea
of further trouble so long as the crowd was
unmolested, and Luke would not ask again for aid from
City Hall.  His lieutenants were standing about the
room in attitudes of uncertainty.  All were agreed
against precipitating a fight by attempts to disperse
the enemy.

The Captain drew up his boyish form.

"My men——" he began.

"Your kids," corrected Breil.

"We're all right, anyhow," the Captain lamely
concluded, his cheeks hot under this indignity.

Raucous cries came now and then from the street.

"You've got enough to take care of with your
own affairs," said Luke.  He turned to the policeman.

"Are there many in that crowd out there?" he asked.

"Not many," said the policeman, "but I think
there's more comin'!"

Still smarting under Breil's rebuke, the Captain
felt some show of his bravery to be a duty to the
organization to which he belonged.

"We can handle 'em all right," he said, "however
many there are.  They're mostly nothin' but
foreigners, anyhow."

Luke wanted above all to preserve harmony in his
ranks, but an imp of perversity whipped his tongue.

"What's your name?" he asked the Captain.

"Antonio Facciolati," said the Captain, "but I'm
a naturalized American citizen."

Luke patted his shoulder.

"That's all right," he said reassuringly.  "What
have your men got in their guns, Captain?  Blank
cartridges?"

"Not much," said the Captain boldly: "ball."

"Good," Luke smiled.  "But don't use it.  Butts
are best for this work."

He decided that Forbes, well or ill, ought to know
how things were going.  He bent to the telephone,
placing the receiver to his ear.

There was no answer.  He rattled the hook impatiently.

"What's the matter with this 'phone?" he growled.

He rattled the hook again, but could get no reply.

Breil left the room.  Presently he returned.

"I've tried the one in the hall," he said,
"and the one in the cloth-room.  The wires are cut."

For a moment nobody spoke.  Facciolati's hand
crept to his sword-hilt, and the sword clattered.
From somewhere far up the street came a choral
murmur of voices:

   |  "*Hall*\eyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!"
   |

Breil stepped to the window.

"That's them.  That's the others.  They're comin',"
he said.

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  The men ran to their posts.  Luke climbed to
the upper office and went to its window.

They were coming indeed.  They were there,
vividly from the circle of light beneath him, vaguely
to the walls of the tumbledown dwellings across the
street.  At his feet was a line of khaki-clad militiamen,
standing at ease beside their magazine-rifles, along the
curb; beyond them a few yards of open street, and
then what at first looked to Luke like a field of wheat
under a high gale, gigantic wheat, black of stalk and
white of head, tossing in the wind: the shoving,
swaying bodies, the gesticulating arms, the threatening
faces of the mob.

They had come to complete the work of the previous
night.  His startled eyes could pick out no one
individual, his ears could select no single word; but he
could see leaders, who had lost their leadership,
making gestures of despair; men, who had seized license,
waving fists and shaking sticks; could hear a turmoil
of cries and curses.  The whole impression was
blurred and general; yet, as he looked, the wheatfield
changed to a roaring sea, the black pitching and
tossing of a terrible tide ever mounting nearer,
nearer to the soldiers drawn up in front of the broken
factory door.

The thought mastered him: this was his property
which only that frail door separated from
them—that frail door and those frightened boys in khaki.
They were going to destroy his property—his!

A second street-lamp, farther up the way, lighted
the rear of the crowd, and into the circle of its
illumination Luke saw running a motor-car.  He saw the
mob scatter, the car stop, the crowd close around it.
He heard more distant shouts above the shouts that
were nearer.

The broken section of the crowd swayed, hesitated,
attacked the car.  For an instant, the arms of the
chauffeur beat at the man that climbed to his seat, and
then the chauffeur was pulled to the ground.  Luke
strained his eyes to see if the car were familiar to him.
It was.  There was a woman in it: its only occupant.
It was the Forbes car, and the woman must be Betty.

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  Luke circled the center table and ran down
the steps three at a time.  He nearly fell upon the
huge form of Breil, coatless, a revolver in his hand,
hurtling from one group of his forces to another.
Luke pushed him away.

"Where are you going?" cried Breil.

Luke did not answer.  He was tugging at the door.

Breil's heavy hand fell on Luke's arm.

"Here!  Stop that!" he bellowed.  "Where
d'you think you're goin'?"

"Get away!" shouted Luke.  "I'm going out."

The door leaped open.  The howls of the mob
beat upon the two men's faces.

Breil thrust his lips against Luke's ear.

"Are you crazy?" he yelled.

"Yes!" said Luke.

He slipped through the door.

Facciolati was there, white-faced, standing behind
his soldiers.

Luke made an egress through the ranks by shoving
away a soldier with either hand.

"You're not going out *there*?" cried the
Captain.  "They'll kill you!"

Luke jumped to the curb.

"I don't care!" he answered.

He was crazy, and he didn't care whether he was
killed or not.  Of these two things he was certain.
He was mad from the torments of his conflict
between logic and desire, and death would be an easy
solution—perhaps it was the only one.  It flashed
upon him that such a solution might be cowardly;
but the next instant he had but one impulse; he was
going to save Betty, and that was enough.  A new
madness, the madness of what seemed an absolutely
unselfish act, of an act that intoxicated him with its
unselfishness, gave him the strength of ten and fired
a berserker rage in his breast, hurled him forward
like a rock from a ballista.  He was going to save
Betty, and he was a hundred yards away from her in
the midst of a mob that hated him.

The ocean of raging men closed over his head; its
pandemonium smashed his ear-drums; but he was
deep in the crowd before any of its members realized
whence he had come.  He was clearing a way,
striking, kicking, biting, shouting he knew not
what—shrill oaths and guttural threats—thrusting their
heavy bodies from side to side.  He felt their hot
breath, encountered their resisting arms and legs,
smelled the sweat of them.

"Stop him!" yelled somebody.  "He came out
of the factory!"

He saw a host of faces about him, dark with anger;
eyes big with hunger and hate.  He felt blows that
could not hurt him, felt his own fists sink into flabby
bellies, crack upon stout skulls.

"The scab!"

A hand fell across his mouth, and he used his teeth
like a were-wolf; he tasted the smooth salt blood
before it began to trickle down his jowl.  A second
hand snatched at his collar, another grabbed his arm.
He pulled frenziedly, he struck out blindly, he threw
all his weight far forward.  He knew that his coat
ripped; he twisted his arm free, lowered his head
and dodged forward, men sprawling before him.  He
had gained the motor-car.

Betty was standing up in the tonneau.  Her hands
were clasped before her breast, her face was set.  She
saw him falling toward her.

Luke jumped beside her, his coat gone, his shirt
torn, his face bleeding from a cut above the right eye,
his hair matted over his forehead.  She did not know
him as he seized her roughly and picked her up in his
arms; but, in the moment that he balanced on the
edge of the car, with the light full in his face, the
crowd knew him.

"That's him!  That's Huber!" they shrieked.

He jumped with her directly back into the crowd.

While he was still in the air, he thought that was
the worst thing to have done.  Without him, she
might have had some chance; with him she would
have almost no chance at all.  But it was too late
now; he could only fight until he could fight no more,
and then they must die together....

.. vspace:: 2

§6.  They did not die.  Somebody, as the mob
laid hold of them, broke through its ranks—somebody
with still some shred of authority left him.

"Get back, you fools!  Get back!  Do you want
to kill the woman?"

It was that organizer of the strikers whom Luke
had seen in Forbes's office when the employees made
their last appeal to Forbes.  It was the man Forbes
had ignored.

With infinite slowness, against infinite opposition,
the rescuer made way for them.  Grumbling, growling,
threatening, the crowd fell back.  It menaced, it
cursed, it hurled ribald jokes; but it fell back before
the leader that it no longer obeyed in anything else,
until he, followed by Luke with Betty in his arms,
came to the line of soldiers at the battered factory
door.

Luke swayed a little.  Facciolati stepped up and
tried to steady him, but he tossed Facciolati away.
Luke turned to the organizer.

"Won't you come inside?" he panted.

The man shook his head.

"I'm—I can't tell you how much I owe you for
this," said Luke.

"Oh, you go to Hell," said the man.

.. vspace:: 2

§7.  Inside the factory, Luke would not waste a
glance on the strike-breakers that gathered,
open-mouthed, around him.

"Get away," he ordered.  "I'm taking her to
the upper office.  Nobody is to disturb her there.
You understand?  Nobody."

.. vspace:: 2

§8.  During all that frightful progress back
through the mob, she had lain in his arms silent, her
eyes closed.  Only now, when he brought her to the
upper office, banged the door behind them and put
her in an arm-chair, which he kicked the length of the
room in order to place her as far as might be from
the window, did she look at him.

"I didn't faint," she said.  "I only pretended.  I
thought that was safest."

He had dropped to his knees beside her and had
begun to chafe her hands.  He was unconscious of
the renewed din outside.  Thus alone with her, he
was thinking only how much he wanted her.

She was leaning far back in the chair.  The rays of
the street-lamp were the only light in the room, and
they made her face seem as peaceful as the faces of
the dead.  When she opened her eyes, her eyes were
luminous.

"You're safe," she continued.  "You're safe,
aren't you?"

He kissed her hand hotly.

"You!" he said.  "I'm all right.  But you?"

She stood up, smiling.

"Quite."

He rose also.

"The brutes!  the beasts!  I'd like to—I'll do it, too!"

He had stepped into the light.  His shirt was torn,
his hair dank.  Blood caked over the cut on his
forehead, and his jaws were red with the blood of the
man whose hand he had bitten.

"Luke!  You *are* hurt!"

She came toward him.

"No, I'm not," he persisted, but he let her fingers
touch the wound on his head, and her fingers thrilled
him.

"Luke," she said, when she had convinced herself
that the cut was superficial, "I'm glad it was you."

"That came for you?"

"Yes."

"I didn't do much.  I was nearly the death of you.
For a minute I thought it was death.  That other
fellow's the one you have to thank."

"Anyhow, I thank you."  She pressed his hand.

A shout came from the mob.  It brought him back
to material concerns.

"How did you come to this part of town?"

She had complete command of herself.

"Can't you guess?" she asked.

Her eyes were unafraid.

"Don't say you came on my account."

"But I did; I did.  Father's too ill to ask questions.
It was a slight heart attack, the doctor said:
he's been so worried lately, Father has, and so
overworked.  But I wanted to know, and I tried to
telephone here, but they said the connection was broken.
Then I was sorry for not answering that call you
made before, and when they said you hadn't got back
to the Arapahoe, I was afraid.  So I told Father I
was going to Mr. Nicholson's mission—he must have
thought me dreadfully unkind to leave him for
that—and I had James drive me—Oh!" she broke off: "I
wonder if *he's* hurt?"

"The chauffeur?" Luke remembered.  "I saw
him just as I got to the car," he chuckled.  "He'd
reached the outskirts of the crowd and was running
for dear life.  I don't think they'll catch him."

The noise of the mob would grow from a hoarse
mutter to a loud howl and then sink to a low murmur.

"Luke," she said, "it *was* you rescued me."

He listened to the noise.

"Then I've probably only rescued you from the
frying-pan to dump you into the fire.  I wish I'd had
the sense to take you in the opposite direction.  I
don't know what I could have been thinking of.  Of
course, they'll simply have to send more police soon
and attack these fellows from the rear: the soldiers
haven't the right to drive away the crowd, and Breil's
men daren't leave the building.  But I do wish I
hadn't brought you here!"

"You've brought me where *you* are," said Betty.

Her eyes were wide, her lips parted.  Luke's breath
caught in his throat.

"Betty," he said, "do you mean——"

She did not quail.

"I mean I love you."

"What?"  He drew back, afraid of her, afraid
of himself.

"I know you weren't yourself," she said.  "I
know how all this trouble has upset you.  I know you
didn't mean those things."

The reversal was too much for him.  He leaned
against the table and burst into laughter.  An instant
ago the roar of the crowd had seemed miles away,
had seemed no more than any recurrent noise of
city life.  They two, Betty and he, had seemed to
him set apart from it all, remote from it, together.
Now——

"Luke!" she was crying.

A picture drifted into his mind.  It was a picture
of pine trees and the sun in a blue sky full of fleecy
clouds and a long white road winding, dusty and
carefree, to the end of the world.

"Luke——"

He could not hear her now.  He saw terror in her
face, but the noise from the street rose, rattled at the
window-pane, and engulfed her words.

A new cry rang out from the mob—a cry so sharp
and loud that both the persons in the room forgot
themselves and ran to the window.  They looked out
upon the tossing faces below.

The crowd had turned.  It was elbowing, straining
necks, rising on tiptoe, gazing backward.

Far back there something dark fluttered in the
night air.  It was seized and passed from hand to
hand.  It reached the circle of light and waved high
above the center of the crowd, a banner of crimson,
tossing like a beacon over the swarm of black heads,
defiant, audacious: the Red Flag.

And then came a new sound.  It began in the heart
of the mob and spread outwards like circles in water
broken by a dropped stone.  It did not stop the other
noises; it assimilated them.  It was low, but strong;
it seemed to contain all the history of past wrongs,
all the arsenal of present determination; but it was
touched with far hopes and freighted with tremendous
dreams.  It was a chant, a song, a hymn, and all
the crowd was singing it with the strength of a
thousand pair of lungs.

"What's that?" asked Luke, although he
expected no answer.

But the girl gave him one.

"It's a thing called 'The International,'" she
said, her voice trembling.  "I heard it once in Paris.
It's a terrible song."

Luke's eyes were caught by a movement at the
window of one of the tumbledown dwellings across
the street.  He saw the window open and a frowsy
woman lean out.  She held something white in her
hands.  She raised it, then dashed its contents toward
the nearest soldier.  The shot fell short, and two men
in the crowd were drenched.

The hymn ended in a shriek.  The mob believed
that the insult had come from the factory and
instantly resolved itself into a fuming whirlpool.  Luke
saw tossed aside people who were evidently strike-leaders
frantically trying to quiet their one-time
followers, but he did not guess the purport of the new
commotion in the seething mass.  Then he saw
something that made him jerk Betty away from the
window and fling her against the wall at its side.

There was a crash—a pause—a tinkling.  A gust of
air, fresh and cool, invaded the room.  A missile had
broken the window.  A whole volley followed,
smashing more glass and battering at the factory walls.
The mob was using the coals from the dismantled
wagon that Luke had noticed in the street hours ago.

.. _`THE MOB WAS USING THE COAL FROM THE DISMANTLED WAGON`:

.. figure:: images/img-380.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: THE MOB WAS USING THE COAL FROM THE DISMANTLED WAGON

   THE MOB WAS USING THE COAL FROM THE DISMANTLED WAGON

Somebody had been pounding unheard at the office-door.
Luke saw the door bend and ran to it.  He
flung it wide.

Breil stood there, his revolver in his hand.

"I've got to disturb you——" he began, and,
though he shouted, his voice did not reach to where
Betty stood against the wall.

"That's all right," called Luke.  "I've been a
fool and a coward to stay here.  Give me that gun."

He wrenched the weapon from Breil's resisting
hand.  He leaped to Betty and slipped the revolver to
her.

"Got to go downstairs," he cried to her, for the
broken window let in a roar that made ordinary
speaking tones futile.  "Bolt the door after us!
You'll be safe!  We'll fall back to the stairs, if we
have to fall back.  Good-bye!"

He would not look back.  His last sight of her was
of a woman standing erect, alert, comprehending, the
revolver shining in her hand.  Then, with the following
Breil calling out that he must go to his own men
at the rear, Luke ran down the stairs, opened the
main door and, leaving it gaping behind him,
plunged outside.

.. vspace:: 2

§9.  Coherent purpose he had none.  All that he
realized was this: here was a struggle; here was a
final endeavor to destroy his property, which,
however endangered by the trust, was almost his sole
means of support.  There would be no more chance
given him for delay; there would be no further help
from the police—the half-dozen sent that morning
had disappeared—until help was too late; there was
only the boyish soldiery.  He would go to them, and
he would fight.

As he emerged upon the street, he saw the circle of
light empty of the human mass that had lately swirled
there.  A resounding cacophony from the darkness,
and dimly perceived objects moving a hundred yards
and more away, told him that the rioters had
withdrawn to the upturned coal wagon.  At the moment
of understanding this, he heard a rending staccato
noise.

The frightened Facciolati heard it, too.  He was
standing on the pavement by the door and had drawn
up his men in a closer column before him.  His bared
sword was in his right hand.

"What's that?" asked Luke.

"It's the tongue of that coal wagon," gasped the
Captain, "they're rippin' it off."

"What?  For a battering-ram?  For this door?"

The Italian nodded.

"Yes.  I heard someone yell for them to do it.
Then they all ran over there."

A terrible stillness fell.  Behind the curtain of the
night, the mob only hummed and shuffled its feet.

"Well?" asked Luke.

His eyes pierced Facciolati's.  His voice was
pregnant with meaning.

"What had I better do?" faltered the Captain.

Before Luke could reply, a strident yell came from
the invisible ranks of the mob:

"Now then: come on!  Burn their damned shop!"

A thousand voices echoed:

"Burn it!  Burn it down!"

The Captain turned to Luke.

"You've got to stop them," said Luke.

The din increased.

"O my God!" said Facciolati.

In Luke blazed up all the furnace of battle.  He
gripped the Captain's collar and shook the man as if
he were a frightened, disobedient child.

"Give the order!" he commanded.  He hated this boy.

In a shrill, hysterical voice that cut the rising noise
of the mob, Facciolati gave the preliminary order,
and the rows of lads in khaki, standing on the curb,
raised their black-blue rifles to their shoulders.

"We won't shoot!" he called into Luke's ear.
"We'll only frighten 'em!"

"Burn it——"  From the street the cries were
merged into a wordless roar.  There was the wild
rush of two thousand feet, and into the light burst the
mob again: a long trotting column with the Red Flag
swaying overhead, and in the midst five or six men
bearing the wagon-tongue leveled like a lance.

A veil of crimson seemed to flutter before Luke's
eyes—the eyes of the man that had counseled caution
and the use of only the butts of rifles.  He did not
think, he could only feel—only feel that here at last
was the chance, here the unavoidable need of action
that had the splendid conclusiveness of brutality.
This was man's work.  This was no rescuing of a
girl: it was war.  The world had meshed him in a
net of intellectual doubts and quibbles: here was his
moment to cut the net, and to cut his way to freedom,
to take vengeance on the world.

That and something more.  Betty was in danger
and the property that was partly his, that in part he
owned and had bought.  But above all this, riding it
all, goading it, spurning it, mad with its mastery,
the blood-lust, the Sense of Power, the dizzy
knowledge that he could kill.

The mob was almost upon them.  It was a tidal wave.

"Now!" shouted Luke to the Italian.

But the Captain caught his hand.  He gabbled the
nothings of panic.  Luke threw the boy to the pavement.
With all the breath in his body he vociferated:

"*Fire!*"

.. vspace:: 2

§10.  Hell belched its flames: a thunder-clap, a
thunder-cloud knifed by red flashes of lightning.

Luke felt his head bashed against the wall of the
factory.  He was choking in a cloud of smoke.  He
could see nothing, but once he thought he heard the
crack of other shots from somewhere above.

Then he felt his knees clutched.  He felt a pawing
at his elbow; and presently he heard the chattering
voice of Facciolati screaming against his cheek:

"Why in Hell did you do that?  How in Hell did
you dare?—Don't you know what you might have
done?  Who's in command here?"

"Shut up," bellowed Luke, "or I'll show you
who's in command."  He tried vainly to see through
the smoke.  "Take your hands off me!"

It was as if he were in the crater of an erupting
volcano.  The reverberation split his head, and through
it came shrieks, groans, curses, and then, as the smoke
slowly lifted, the pound of two thousand feet on the
paving-stones, while, with the Red Flag sagging to
and fro like a wounded eagle above it, the mob fled
pell-mell up the street.

But the Captain had not heeded Luke's warning.

"Now they'll be back!" he was wailing.  "We'll
all be goners now.  Why did you give that order?
Why didn't you let me change it?—I'd instructed
the men to fire over their heads—An' you didn't let
me change it—An' of course they *did* fire over
their heads—an' nobody's hurt—Do you know what
that means?  They'll be back and kill all of us!"

It was impossible for Luke to believe.  Then, not
fear, but the rage of thwarted blood-lust sent out his
clawing hands.

"You did that?"

He caught Facciolati under the arm-pits and raised
him clear of the ground.

"You——"

A new sound interrupted him.  At first he thought
that the mob had wheeled a machine-gun into the
street and turned it on the factory.  Then the sound
became a clatter and, looking through the ranks of
soldiers, Luke saw, far ahead, a tangle of rearing
horses and falling men: even City Hall had been
unable longer to hold its hand; one of the patrolmen
who had fled to the factory must have telephoned a
final word to headquarters; the mounted police were
charging the crowd; the riot was ended.

.. vspace:: 2

§11.  Luke ran up the stairs to the upper office and
found the door unbolted.  He did not know what he
went for.  He was not glad that the riot was ended;
he was raging like a man-eating tiger foiled of its
quarry.

Betty stood at the window in the full light of the
street-lamp.  He scarcely knew her face.  He had
never seen her look like this.  He had never dreamed
that she could look like this.  Her hat had fallen to
the floor; her golden hair tossed above her head like
licking tongues of flame; her eyes were bright coals;
her cheeks were scarlet; her white upper teeth bit deep
into the vermilion of her lower lip.  As if to give
freer play to a breast that panted, she had torn open
her dress at the base of her splendid throat.  The
revolver was in her hand.  It was cocked and
smoking.  She looked like Bellona invoked and materialized
from the fire and smoke of that roaring inferno
of the street.

"How many?" she gasped.  "How many have we killed?"

Luke stopped at the door.  He knew now that he
had indeed heard shots from overhead.  He knew
that the same primæval passion which had made him
a tiger—and still maintained its sway—had worked
this metamorphosis also, had changed this gentle girl
into what he saw.  At another time, in another mood,
he would have loathed it; but in his present mood he
gloried in it.  He thought that he had never seen her
so beautiful or imagined her so splendid; her madness
matched his own.

He came toward her, circling the table that stood
between them.

"None!" he cried.  "That fool Captain told the
men to shoot high."

He put out his arms.  He wrenched her to him.
His right arm clutched her about the supple shoulders,
the fingers of his right hand sinking into her
firm left breast.  With his left hand he shoved her
face upwards.  Brown from the caked blood of the
man he had bitten, his opened mouth closed upon hers.

He heard the revolver clatter to the floor.  She
writhed in his embrace.  He had expected the perfect
response.  Meeting an abrupt refusal, he was taken
off his guard, and she escaped from him.

She staggered into a corner.  The devil that
possessed him had lost its power over her.  She had
reverted to her natural being.  She did not cry, but
she stood there with her hands pressed tight against
her breast, the fingers mechanically busied with
repairing the opened blouse, her face all horror at the
thing she had been.

"What must you think of me?" she was moaning—"I
don't know what came over me!—What must
you think of me?"

He thought nothing.  He could think nothing.
He could realize only that he was again to be robbed.
Twice to-night the cheat that played with men at the
game of life had given him the winning hand, only to
sweep the stakes from the board just as Luke reached
for what he had won.  The blood-lust changed its
form; it assumed an ungovernable fury.  Something
crackled in his brain as he had seen imperfect
feed-wires at the touch of a trolley-wheel.  The crimson
veil fluttered again before his eyes.

He turned and bolted the door.  He turned again
and ran to her.  His face was wet with sweat, black
with powder, terrible.

She understood.  She lowered her head and tried
to dodge past him.  She cried out.

His strong fingers caught her hair.  The hair
streamed down.  Her forward lurch brought it taut.
He jerked at it; she fell toward him.  His free hand
caught her throat and stopped her fall.  He tossed
her against the table; her feet brushed the floor, but
he pressed her shoulders tight to the table's top.
He bent over her, one hand at her throat, the other
raised to stop her mouth, his beating breath on her face.

She was wholly in his power now.  The outside
world was impotent because the outside world could
not have heeded her appeal; the woman herself was
helpless because her captor's was the strongest body.
Again came to Luke the frightful sense of Power,
again the dizzy knowledge that he could do
whatever he chose.

At that instant the madness fell from him.

A physical motive there of course was, since the
more intense the passion the briefer is its duration;
but even if it originated in the physical, this reaction
transcended things material and wheeled about to
crush them.  It was the second and fuller phase of
that revelation which had come to him in the Sunday
quiet of the Brooklyn streets.  Burning, blinding,
transfiguring, the Marvel and the Miracle, elemental
and tremendous, returned, and what they had once
done from the flesh to the spirit, they now did from
the spirit to the flesh.  They returned to remain.
They completed the revolution, the new birth.

Luke saw yet more dazzlingly the glory of
individuality, the holiness of his humanity; but it was
as if scales fell from his eyes, for he saw entire.
Here had been one of the false starts on a wrong
road, one of the moments of relapse that he had
expected.  The individuality was divine; physical
passion was a splendid thing; but when the individual's
physical passion stooped to force or cunning, what
had been splendid became foul, and what had been
divine was bestial.  Luke, in his denial of revealed
Religion, was no longer a pygmy trembling before a
giant; he was himself a giant; but what he was in
actuality he must recognize as potential in his fellow
creatures.  His mental and spiritual sight was at
last adjusted to the new illumination.  He could
assess moral values, could determine ethical duties
now.  It remained only to find their reason and
decipher their credentials.  On Sunday he had gained
his strength; to-night he had gained the knowledge
of how rightly to use it.

He ran to the door and tore back the bolt.

"Whitaker!" he called.

The superintendent came cringing from the main
office, where he had cowered through all the riot.

"Get two policemen and have them see Miss
Forbes safely home."

Betty was secure now, and the mill was safe.  He
borrowed a hat too large for him, and put over his
ragged shirt the alpaca office-coat of some clerk,
which he found in a locker.  He walked out into the
street.  Far away he heard a woman's strident voice
singing:

   |  "Oh, why don't you save
   |    All the money you earn?
   |  *If I did not eat*
   |    *I'd have money to burn.*"
   |

There was the sound of a distant shot.

Then silence.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XIX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIX

.. vspace:: 2

§1.  He could not stay in the factory while she
was there.  To go to the upper office where he had
left her, to attempt to explain, to offer a shoddy
apology—this would be to add the last insult to the
wrong that he had done her.  He thought that worse
than to have completed the thing that he had begun.

He cut northwestward toward the more peopled
part of the borough, not because he wanted to be
among people, but because he did not even yet want
to have to think.  He tried to think, but he did not
want to.  He saw clearly his new duties and his new
restrictions; but they presented themselves to him as
isolated facts which, offending his reason, spurred
his reason to demand their credentials, and these he
could not yet read.  Moreover, the memory of the
scene with Betty would rise before his restless mind,
burning all else away, and, to burn memory away,
his heart drove him into the more crowded streets.

Women of the streets accosted him.  He passed a
house from a window on the ground-floor of which
two girls with painted faces beckoned.  He passed
brightly lighted saloons that sent into the street
inviting streams of light and the lure of clinking glasses
and laughter.  In a jostling thoroughfare he noticed
that passersby were looking strangely at him and,
recollecting what a queer picture his disordered
clothes and bloody face must present, he blamed
himself for not repairing the damages of the fight before
setting out.  He turned again into the less frequented
quarters.

Here he looked at his watch, but his watch had
stopped at half-past seven, the moment, probably, of
his charge to Betty's rescue.  Seeing the lighted
window of a jeweler's shop near by, he went to it and
looked at the clock displayed there.  It was nine
o'clock.  As he could not have been walking for more
than an hour, and as the active rioting must have
begun no later than seven-fifteen, all the events of the
riot must have been massed within forty-five minutes.
He turned back toward the factory.  He hated
these city thoroughfares.  His boyish dreams of the
open road and the tramping carpenter returned to
him....

If he could only read his credentials....

.. vspace:: 2

§2.  When Luke entered the office on the ground
floor, the little militia captain was there.  He had
come for whiskey and finished the bottle.  He was
quite drunk, and evinced a thick but facile desire to
describe the victory that his troops had won.

"Oh, go away!" said Luke.

He turned Facciolati out.

Breil came next, and some of the policemen, the
former anxious to report the present condition of the
mill, the latter that of the streets; but to these men
Luke was scarcely more civil than he had been to the
Italian.  Whether he liked it or not, he must think
things out.

"There's no reason for you to stay any longer, if
you don't want to," said Breil.

Luke looked at him vacantly.

"I do want to," he said.

One of the policemen glanced significantly at the
empty whiskey-bottle and smiled.

"I have some things to think about," said Luke.
"I'll go up to the office over this.  Tell the fellows I
don't want anybody to butt in, Breil."

He decided that it would be well for him to do his
thinking in the room in which he had so nearly done
Betty what she must consider the ultimate wrong.
He went there.

.. vspace:: 2

§3.  He closed, but did not lock the door; he
trusted to his orders against intrusion.

The street-lamp furnished the room with sufficient
illumination.  Luke saw that one of the chairs had
been overturned and lay close beside the table.  He
must have overturned it while struggling with Betty,
but, so far as he could recollect—and his mind for
some time employed itself with such trifles—he had
not remarked the fall at the moment of its occurrence.

He went to the broken window and lounged there,
now looking out upon the scene of the street-battle,
now back at the scene of the essentially similar combat
that had been fought inside.  It was astonishing how
little he remembered of the details of either, but
perhaps the reason for that was to be found in the size
of their results.

Something glittered in the lamplight on the floor at
his feet.  He stooped and picked it up; it was one of
those yellow wire hairpins that Betty used to
supplement the pins of tortoiseshell.  Down in the street
he saw a draggled necktie that had been torn from the
throat of some striker.  His gaze wandered from one
object to the other and back again.

He stood there for a long time....

He was beginning to find out at last the logic that
he had sought.

Betty was lost to him, and if she were not lost he
must give her up.  All that was vital in what he had
all along felt for her was only one of the forces that
go to make up complete love—right enough, he told
himself, when combined with its fellow elements;
right enough upon occasion when frankly acknowledged
between a free woman and a free man; but, he
determined, disastrously insufficient to be made the
sole element of anything more than the briefest union
between two individuals, and criminal when it was the
only motive of but one of the individuals in any union.
About what Betty had felt for him he was equally
clear; it was another of the forces that compose real
love; it was the element of Romance, just as insufficient
and just as wrong, when it was alone, or when it
existed on the one side only, as was the merely
physical.  Real love was the fusion of the physical, the
romantic, the spiritual and the comradely, the fusion of
two people for whom there was but one means of
salvation.  He knew now, beyond all questioning,
that, however they had deceived themselves, Betty's
thoughts and his, her hopes and his, her aims and his,
her work and his, were and had always been divided
beyond the possibility of junction.  No marriage
service that might have been performed between
them could have married but the least of their
outlying selves.  Not Church and State together could
have joined their true selves that, living where
there was no church and no state, had yet no natural
relationship to each other.  Some day real love might
come to him; some day it would surely come to Betty.
To-day, though it tore his heart, though it was as if
he were ripping the heart out of his breast, he must,
for Betty's sake—since she was the weaker—even
more than for his own, tear her out of his life.  His
desire for her would long remain; the moments would
be full of her when he sank from waking into sleep,
or climbed from sleep to waking; but though he might
regain the power to enslave her soul and make a
servant of the self of which he could not make a
work-fellow, to use that power would be to sin against
what was best in her.  He must not see her again,
even were she willing to see him, and he must leave
her thinking the worst of him in order that she might
the sooner want to forget him.

He tossed the gilt pin out of the window.  Following
its flight, his glance came again to the worker's
necktie, lying in the street.

What right had he over the man who had worn
that?  What right that he did not have over Betty?

His reason answered: None.

There, he tremendously realized, was the key to
his credentials.  He leaned heavily against the
window-sill.  He understood.  It was a bitter lesson, but
he learned it, there and then.

What he had done to these men was what he had
tried to do to Betty, not in the riot only, but in
accepting the position that society had offered him in
relation to them; it was what every employer, from
the actual boss to the smallest shareholder,
everywhere was doing.  It was living upon the work of
others, profiting by values for the creation of which
the pay had to be low enough to permit of profit.  It
was compulsion.  If he sold dear what he bought
cheap, what was it that he bought cheap but their
labor?  If he wanted pay for executive ability, what
executive ability did he, or any shareholder in any
company, exercise?  If he claimed a return for the
risk of his investment, what return did these men get,
who invested that labor-power which was their whole
capital?  If any stockbuyer talked of profits as the
reward of previous years of saving, how could he
explain the fact that his savings would secure no profit
until they employed labor to produce it?  He had
been fighting against his own ideals.  It was the
workers that had been right and he that had been
wrong.  What the man in russet brown had been to
him, that he and all who directly or indirectly
employed labor for profit, had been and were to the employed.

So, quite as suddenly as he had come to see life in
the new light, he came now, in the little office of the
lonely factory, to see the reason from which the light
proceeded; there was only one evil in the world and
that was Compulsion; only one good, and that was
power over one's self.

The awful thing, he said to himself as one who
reads what is written, was not to have too little power
over others; it was to have too much.  To have the
means of oppression was to go mad and use them; it
was to confuse the means with the right.  Too much
power over others and too little over himself, both
states a result of a system based upon compulsion,
had made the man in russet brown all that the man in
russet brown had been; it made Luke a potential
murderer and ravisher.  He saw all life as endlessly
creating and no two hours the same.  Seeing this, he
understood why it was that, when authority was laid
upon any one, that one rebelled in proportion to his
vitality.  He saw the present wrong and the future
impotence of churches and laws, of politics,
governments, and property.  To believe in any one of them,
to traffic with any of them, was now to exercise
compulsion over his fellows and now to delegate to his
fellows his power over himself.

He must give up everything that was easy and
comfortable—the easy thought and faith as freely as the
easy food and lodging.  He must join the oppressed.

He leaned through the battered window and filled
his lungs with the pure night air.  He looked up to
the patch of heaven overhead where a yellow moon
was riding.

"I haven't let their corruption destroy my purpose,"
he said to the moon.  "I've simply put myself
where they can't destroy *me*.  I've put myself where
they can't lie to me again.  I'll fight them as one man
against the world; I'll lose, but I won't be using their
weapons; I won't be what they are, and I'll lose as a
free man.  So far as the world inside of me's
concerned, they invaded it and bossed it.  I've chucked
them out of it, and *I've* destroyed *them*!"

It seemed wonderfully simple now and wonderfully
peaceful.  He would go to Forbes to-morrow and
draw up a legal paper, the last legal paper he would
ever put his name to, his last compromise, turning
over his interest in this factory to his mother; and
Forbes—poor old Forbes!  He was sorry for Forbes,
but he knew what would happen; left alone, Forbes
would end by selling out, profitably, to the trust.  And
then for Luke the open road, the old open road
that he had always loved, the learning of a manual
trade, the sale of his labor-power no more than was
necessary to keep him alive and free to go wherever
slaves fought the system of corruption for their
liberty, until sometime, when the soldiers would
have Luke before them instead of behind them, and
did not shoot over the heads of the mob.  He was
tasting of contentment for the first time in his life.
He was glad that he had not died out there in the
riot.  There was so much to do.  There was so much
to do in this life that he did not see how he had
ever had time to think of any other.  And now he
was about to do his part of it conscientiously, with
open eyes and with all his soul, and to do it with
complete power over himself, using no compulsion
upon others and allowing no other to use
compulsion upon him.  Luke had conquered.  For every
soul there is, somewhere, a separate road to
salvation.  Luke had found his own....

Somewhere out in the city a clock struck eleven.
He knew that he had been standing at the window
for a long time, but he had no idea it was so long as
this.  If he had been so engrossed, what, he
wondered, had finally roused him.  He remembered: it
was something about the door.  He had not heard
it move; he merely thought that it was moving.  He
turned to it, but it did not move.  Perhaps a draught
of air had deceived him.

The factory was very quiet....

.. vspace:: 2

§4.  "Don't open your trap!  I got you covered!
If you let out one yip, I'll croak you."

The door had opened and closed, letting in a figure
that quickly bolted it and then discreetly avoided the
light from the window.  Luke saw a dim form in the
shadow.  All that projected into the shaft of light
was a fist tightly clenched about a leveled revolver.

"What do you want?" asked Luke.

He was not afraid to disregard this intruder's
command to silence.  He was curiously fearless.  He
supposed that this unseen man was some fanatic
from the mob.  Anybody could have slipped into
the factory through the door that Luke had left
open when the terror of the soldiers' fire swept the
street and the smoke of it clouded the doorway.
This was an avenger thus arrived.  Luke felt the presence
of a certain crude justice.  He had deserved this.

"Don't worry; I'm not going to yell," he said.

He was expecting death now, expecting absolute
extinction; but he faced it with a serenity that mildly
surprised him.  This was not the mad courage, too
sudden to be fine, which had hurled him into the
crater of the riot to rescue Betty.  It was a courage
that weighed results.  He thought of the dusty, open
road.  He was rather sorry to have to miss that, but
no doubt he would never have got it anyhow.

"Well," he said with a faint touch of impatience,
"why don't you answer my question?  What do you want?"

The barrel of the revolver wavered ever so
slightly.

The intruder's voice came again out of the darkness;
it was as if the darkness itself made answer:

"I want them letters."

Luke's teeth came together with a snap.  He had
been carrying the letters in a money-belt about his
middle, next his body.  It was hours since he had
thought of them.  He had just now been feeling that
perhaps he ought to be shot, but this feeling had no
origin in the affair of the letters.  They were a
different matter.  For the letters he had fought so much
and so fairly that he was ready and willing to fight
for them once more.  He tried to gain time.

"What letters?" he asked.

"I dunno," said the darkness.  "But you do.
Come on, now; don't try to flimflam me: them letters
you got in your coat."

Luke glanced at the alpaca coat that he had put on
when he last left the factory.

"If you want anything that was in my coat, you'll
have to look in the street for it: I left it there."

The intruder did not at once reply.  Luke saw the
revolver advance toward him in the light.  It was
followed by a thick, short arm, and the arm was
followed by a short thick man.  He wore a velours
Alpine hat.  It was pushed to one side of his head,
and Luke saw that the hair below it was red.

That was almost the last thing he did see before
the shot was fired.  Luke made a flying leap at the
red-headed man and tried to knock the revolver into
the air.  As he did so, the revolver spat at him.

A loud report.  A darting arrow of flame.

Luke lay on the office floor.  The red-headed
man's skilled fingers ran deftly through his clothes.
Then the killer raised the shattered window and
dropped into the street.

.. vspace:: 2

§5.  One of Breil's strike-breakers, making his
round of the factory, heard the shot and came
running toward the noise.  He ran to the upper office
and burst into the room.

A curling cloud of lazy smoke was weaving graceful
figures in the shaft of light from the street-lamp
outside; it embraced an overturned chair, and circled
the top of the center table.  Above it the
strike-breaker saw the upper half of a disheveled figure,
the figure of Luke Huber, leaning out of the window
and shaking its fist at all the city round about.  In
a high, cracked voice, Luke was yelling curses at the
world.

"God damn your system and your politics!"
yelled he.  "God damn your law and your
government!  God damn your god!"

He turned toward the noise behind him and
showed himself with matted hair and staring eyes,
with a cut in his forehead and a white face that had
brown stains about its lolling mouth, with a slowly
broadening patch of blood in his torn shirt.

"Mr. Huber!" gasped the strike-breaker.  He
ran forward.

As he did so, Huber's voice howled into shattered
song:

   |  "Hallelujah, I'm a bum—bum!
   |    Hallelujah, I'm a——"
   |

He lurched forward into the strike-breaker's arms.
Before those arms closed about him, he was dead.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XX

.. vspace:: 2

On the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper,
in that office where the engraving of George
Washington hung between the windows, three men sat in
the mid-morning light, about the mahogany table.
They were talking business.  Each man had his own
offices and his own businesses, but they frequently and
quietly met in this one because most of the businesses
of each were closely allied with the business-interests
of all.

There was nothing unusual about the outward
appearance or public actions of this trio; they were
apparently but three units of the legion that makes this
portion of New York a city by day and a desert by
night.  Each had come down town in his own motor
that morning, defying speed-laws and traffic
regulations, just as scores of his business neighbors had
done.  Each had descended at his own offices, passed
through half a dozen doors guarded by six bowing
attendants, and proceeded to his own desk in his
own private room, precisely as a small army of other
business men were doing at the same time within a
radius of half a mile.  Each looked like the rest of
that army.  All three were men of about the average
height, not noticeably either above or below it, and
two were inclined to bulkiness.  Those two had pale
faces and close mouths and steady eyes, which looked
out from under bushy brows with glances that gave
the lie to the lethargic indications of the little
pouches of lax skin below their lower lids.  They
wore flowers in the lapels of their coats; one wore a
white waistcoat; the cropped mustache of one was
black; that of the other was touched with grey.
Hallett chewed leisurely at the end of an unlighted
cigar; Rivington's slim hand stroked his mustache
with a contemplative movement.

The man at the head of the table was almost of
the age of the man that used to sit there, but he was
somewhat shorter, and he was thin.  His clothes fell
loosely about his bony frame.  His eyes were
narrow.  He sat before a neat pile of memoranda, with
his thin hands, the blue veins of which marked them
like a map, tapping upon the surface of the table.
Like his predecessor's, his elbows were raised at right
angles to his torso and pointed ceilingward; his
chest heaved visibly, but his breathing was inaudible.
His eyes were everywhere.

He had come to his office betimes that morning.
He had read his letters, directed his charities,
instructed his brokers, given his orders to lieutenants
at the state capitals and to such lieutenants at the
national capital as needed them.  Now he was
receiving his fellow commanders in council.

"McKay?" he said in thin comment on some
remark of Rivington.  "What McKay?"

"Henry," said Rivington.  "Dohan's successor
in the M. & N.  He's the sort of man——"

"We can unload this stock," said Hallett, "any
time now."

Rivington began a question.

"It's all right," nodded Hallett.  "And by the
way, that little Forbes concern's come into the
combine."

"I know," said Rivington; "but those letters—You
remember——"

"Stein sent 'em over to me yesterday morning.
We'll burn 'em this time."

The man at the head of the table rapped with his
spatulate finger-ends.

"We are too busy to bother with trifles," he
said.  "I've got here"—he indicated the
memoranda—"all the reports on the proposed
foodstuffs monopoly.  I must decide on that right
away...."

.. vspace:: 2

After a momentary silence, the stock-ticker, with
metallic insistence, went on weaving out its yards of
tape beside the windows that looked down to the
web of radiating streets, on which minute black
objects that were men and women bobbed and buzzed
like entangled flies....

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center

   THE END

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*      \*

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center bold

   BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE
   THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG
   THE SENTENCE OF SILENCE
   THE WAY OF PEACE
   WHAT IS SOCIALISM?
   RUNNING SANDS
   THE THINGS THAT ARE CÆSAR'S
   ETC., ETC.

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::