She was putting the catboat up into the wind, and Griswold stumbled forward to get the broader outlook. Suddenly he called back to her.
"Port!—port your helm hard! there's a man in a life-belt—he's just out of reach. Hold her there—steady—steady!" He had thrown himself flat, face down, on the half-deck forward and was clutching at something in the heaving seas. "I've got him!" he cried, and a moment later he was working his way aft, holding the man's face out of water.
It asked for their united strength to get the gray-haired, heavy-bodied victim of the capsize over theClytie'srail. They had to bring the life-belt too; the old man's fingers were sunk into it with a dying grip that could not be broken. At first Griswold was too much preoccupied and shocked to recognize the drawn face with its hard-lined mouth and long upper lip. When he did recognize it the gripping fear was at his heart—the fear that makes a cruel coward of the hunted thing in all nature.
What might have happened if he had been alone; if Margery, taking her place at the tiller and busying herself swiftly in getting the catboat under way again, had not been looking on; he dared not think. And that other frightful thought he put away, fighting against it madly as a condemned man might push the cup of hemlock from his lips. Forcibly breaking the drowned one's hold upon thelife-belt, he fell to work energetically, resorting to the first-aid expedients for the reviving of the drowned as he had learned them in his boyhood. Once, only, he flung a word over his shoulder at Margery as he fought for the old man's life. "Make for the nearest landing where we can get a doctor!" he commanded; and then, in a passion of gratitude: "O God, I thank thee that I am not a murderer!—he's coming back! he's breathing again!"
A little later he was able to leave off the first-aid arm-pumpings and chest-pressings; to straighten the limp and sprawling limbs, and to dive into the cuddy cabin, under Margery's directions, for blankets and rugs. When all was done that could be done, and he had propped the blanket-swathed body with the cushions so that the crash and plunge of the pitching catboat would be minimized for the sufferer, he went aft to sit beside the helmswoman, who was getting the final wave-leap of speed out of the little vessel.
"He is alive?" she asked.
"Yes; and that is about all that can be said. He isn't drowned; but he is old, and the shock has gone pretty near to snapping the thread."
"Of course, you remember him?" she said, looking away across the leaping waters.
Griswold, with his heart on fire with generous emotions, felt the cold hand gripping him again.
"He is the old gentleman you introduced me to at the Inn the other day: Galbraith; is that the name?"
"Yes," she rejoined, still looking away; "that is the name."
Griswold fell silent for the time; but a little later, when the catboat was rushing in long plunges through the entrance to the Wahaskan arm of the lake, he said: "You are going to take him to Mereside?"
"Yes. He is a friend of poppa's. And, anyway, it's the nearest place, and you said there was no time to lose."
There were anxious watchers on the Mereside landing-stage: the gardener, the stable-man, Thorsen, and three or four others. When the landing was safely made, Miss Grierson took command and issued her orders briskly.
"Four of you carry Mr. Galbraith up to the house, and you, Thorsen, put Baldur into the two-wheeled trap and be ready to go for Doctor Farnham when I tell you where you can find him. Johnnie Fergus, you come here and take care of theClytie; you know how to furl down and moor her."
Griswold helped the bearers lift the blanketed figure out of theClytie'scockpit, and while he was doing it, the steel-gray eyes of the rescued one opened slowly to fix a stony gaze upon the face of the man who was bending over him. What the thin lips were muttering Griswold heard, and so did one other. "So it's you, is it, ye murdering blue-eyed deevil?" And then: "Eh, man, man, but I'm sick!"
Griswold walked with Margery at the tail of thelittle procession as it wound its way up the path to the great house.
"You heard what he said?" he inquired craftily.
"Yes: he is out of his head, and no wonder," she said soberly. Then: "You must go home and change at once; you are drenched to the skin. Don't wait to come in. I'll take care of your manuscript."
The cyclonic summer storm had blown itself out, and the clouds were beginning to break away in the west, when Griswold, obeying Margery's urging to go home and change his clothes, turned his back upon Mereside and his face toward a future of thickening doubts and unnerving possibilities.
Once more he found himself wrestling with the keeper of the gate, the angel of the flaming sword set to drive him forth among the outcasts. One by one the confidently imagined safeguards were crumbling. He had been traced to Wahaska—so much could be read between the lines of Charlotte Farnham's story; if Margery's newsboy protégé was to be believed, he was watched and followed. And now, after having successfully passed the ordeal of a face-to-face meeting and hand-shaking with Andrew Galbraith, chance or destiny or the powers of darkness had intervened, and a danger met and vanquished had been suddenly brought to life again, armed and menacing.
Griswold had not deceived himself, nor had he allowed Margery's apparent convincement to deceive him. The old man's mind had not been wanderingin the eye-opening moment of consciousness regained. On the contrary, what he had failed to do under ordinary and conventional conditions had become instantly possible when the plunge into the dark shadow had brushed away all the artificial becloudings of the memory page. What action he would take when he should recover was as easy to prefigure as it was, for the present at least, a matter negligible. The dismaying thing was that the broad earth seemed too narrow to hide in; that invention itself became the clumsiest of blunderers when, it was given the simple task of losing a single individual among the millions of unrelated human atoms.
Thus the threat of the peril which might be called the physical. But beyond this there was another, and, for a man of temperament, a still more ominous foreshadowing of evil to come. Of some subtle, deep-seated change in himself he had long been conscious. Again and again it had manifested itself in those moments of craven fear and ruthless, murderous promptings, when kindliness, gratitude, love, all the humanizing motives, had turned suddenly to frenzied hatred, and the primitive savage had leaped up, fiercely raging with the blood-lust.
Here, again, he suffered loss, and was conscious of it. The point of view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable, but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, andin its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured, and complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life, who need no guiding lamp and will never see the glimmer of the bale-fires. But the breaker of traditions was of those who, having once seen the light, must follow where it leads or violate a primal law of being. Some vague sense of this was stirring the dying embers for the proletary as he was climbing the hill to the street of quiet entrances; but he pushed the saving thought aside and chose to call it fanaticism. He had drawn the line and he would hew to it.
For a long time after he had reached his room, and had had his bath and change, Griswold sat at his writing-table with his head in his hands, thinking in monotonous circles. As in those other stressful moments, the importunate devil was at his ear; now mocking him for not having left the drowned enemy as he was; now whispering the dreadful hope that age and the shock and the drowning might still re-erect the barrier of safety. The eyes of the recusant grew hot and a loathsome fever ran sluggishly through his veins when he realized the depths to which he had descended; that he, once the brother-loving, could coldly weigh the chance of life and death for another and be unable to find in any corner of his heart the hope that life might prevail.
He was still sitting, miserably reflective, in the dark, when Mrs. Holcomb came up to call him to dinner. What excuse he made he could not remember two minutes after she had gone down.But to make a fourth with the motherly widow and her two bank clerks at the cheerful dinner-table was a thing beyond him. Somewhat later he heard the two young men come upstairs, and, still further along, go down again. They were social souls, his two fellow lodgers; kindly young fellows with boyish faces and honest eyes: Griswold wondered if they would still look up to him and defer to him as the older man of broader culture if they could know....
The tiny chiming clock on his dressing-case in the adjoining bedroom had tinkled forth its ten tapping hammer strokes when the man sitting in the dark heard the pounding of hoofs and the rattling of buggy wheels in the quiet street. He was absently awaking to the fact that the vehicle had stopped at his own door when he heard voices, the widow's and another, in the lower hall, and then a man's footsteps on the stair. To a hard-pressed breaker of the traditions at such a moment an unannounced visitor, coming up in the dark, could mean but one thing. Griswold silently opened a drawer in the writing-table and groped for the mate to the quick-firing pistol which, after the change of wet clothing, he had put aside to dry.
The visitor came heavily upstairs, and Griswold, swinging his chair to face the open door, saw the shadowy bulking of the man as he came through the upper hall. When the bulk filled the doorway it was covered by the pistol held low, and Griswold's finger was pressing the trigger.
"Asleep, old man?" said the intruder in Raymer's well-known voice.
There was a sound like a gasping sob, and another as of a drawer closing softly. Then Griswold said: "No; I'm not asleep. Come in. Shall I light the gas?"
"Not for me," returned the bedtime visitor, entering and groping for the chair at the desk-end, into which, when he had placed it, he dropped wearily. "I want to smoke," he went on. "Have you got a cigar—no, not the pipe; I want something that I can chew on."
A cigar was found, in the drawer which had so lately furnished the weapon, and by the flare of the match in Raymer's fingers Griswold saw a face haggard with anxiety. In the kindlier days it had been one of his redeeming characteristics that he could never dwell long upon his own harassments when another's troubles were brought to him.
"What is the matter, Edward?" he asked.
"A mix-up with the labor unions. It's been brewing for some little time, but I didn't want to worry you with it. Unless we announce a flat increase of twenty per cent in wages to-morrow morning, and declare for the closed shop, the men will go out on us at noon. I've seen it coming. It began with the enlarging of the plant and the taking on of the new men needed. We've always had the open shop, as you know, and it was all right so long as we were too small for the unions to scrap about. But now we get the Iron Workers' ultimatum:we can do as we please about the profit-sharing; but the flat increase must go on the pay-rolls, and the shop must be run as a closed shop."
If the god of mischance had chosen the moment it could not have been more opportune for the fire-lighting of malevolence. Griswold's swing-chair righted itself with a click, and Bainbridge's prophecy that a hot-hearted proletary was likely to become the hardest of masters became a prediction fulfilled.
"We'll see them in hell, first, Raymer! Isn't that the way you feel about it?"
"Partly," allowed the smoker. "But it can hardly be disposed of that easily, Kenneth. A good third of the men are our old standbys; men who were in the shops under my father. Some pretty powerful influence has been brought to bear upon them to swing them against us. I don't know what it is, but I do know this: every second man we have hired lately has turned out to be either a loud-mouthed agitator or a silent mixer of trouble medicine."
"Let the causes go for the present," said Griswold shortly. "We're talking about the men, now. The ungrateful beggars are merely proving that it isn't in human nature to meet justice and fairness and generous liberality half-way. If they want a fight, give it to them. Hit first and hit hard; that's the way to do. Shut up the plant and make it a lock-out."
"I was afraid you might say something like that in the first heat of it," said the young ironmaster. "It's a stout fighting word, and I guess, under theskin, you're a stout fighting man, Kenneth—which I'm not. Where are your convictions about the man-to-man obligations? We've got to take them into the account, haven't we?"
"Damn the convictions!" snapped Griswold viciously. "If I've been giving you the impression that I'm an impracticable theorist, forget it. These fellows want a fight: I say give them a fight—all they want of it and a little more for good measure."
Raymer did not reply at once. This latest Griswold was puzzling him, and with the puzzlement there went sorrowful regret; the regret that has been the recanter's portion in all the ages. When he spoke it was out of the heart of common sense and sanity.
"I know how you feel about it; I had a little attack of the same sort this afternoon when the grievance committee dropped down on me. But facts are pretty stubborn things, and they've got us foul. We have twenty thousand dollars' worth of work for the Pineboro road on the shop tracks, and the trouble-makers have picked their opportunity. If we can't turn out this work, we'll lose the Pineboro's business, which, as I have told you, is a pretty big slice of our business. Under such conditions I don't dare to pull down a fight which may not only shut us up for an indefinite time, but might even go far enough to smash us."
Griswold took his turn of silence, rocking gently in the tilting chair. When the delayed rejoinder came, the harshness had gone out of his voice, but there was a cynical hardness to take its place.
"It's your affair; not mine," he said. "If you've made up your mind not to fight, of course, that settles it. Now we can come down to the causes. You've been stabbed in the back. Do you know who's doing it?"
"The Federated Iron Workers, I suppose."
"Not in a thousand years! They are only the means to an end." The tilting chair squeaked again, and he went on: "If I'm going to show you how you can dodge this fight, I'll have to knock down a door or two first. If I blunder in where I'm not wanted, you can kick me out. There is one way in which you can cure all this trouble-sickness without resorting to surgery and blood-letting."
"Name it," said Raymer eagerly.
"I will; but first I'll have to break over into the personalities. Have you made up your mind that you are going to marry Margery Grierson?"
Raymer laughed silently, leaning his head back on the cushion of the lazy-chair until his cigar stood upright.
"That's a nice way to biff a man in the dark!" he chuckled. "But if you're in earnest I'll tell you the straightforward truth: I don't know."
"Why don't you know?" If there were a scowl to go with the query, Raymer could not see it.
"I'll be frank with you again, Kenneth. What little sentiment there is in me leans pretty heavily that way. You have been with her a good bit and you know her—know how she appeals to any man with a drop of red blood in him. But I'm twenty-eightyears old and well past the time when the young man's fancy lightly turns—and all that. I can't ignore the—the—well, the proprieties, you might say, though that isn't exactly the word."
"You mean that Margery Grierson doesn't measure up to the requirements of the Wahaskan Four Hundred?" There was satirical scorn in the observation, but Raymer did not perceive it.
"Oh, I don't know as you would put it quite that baldly," he protested. "But you see, when it comes to marrying and settling down and raising a family, you have to look at all sides of the thing. The father, as we all know, is a cold-blooded old werewolf; the mother nobody knows anything about save that—happily, in all probability—she isn't living. And there you are. Yet I won't deny that there are times when I'm tempted to shut my eyes and take the high dive, anyway—at the risk of splashing a lot of good people who would doubtless be properly scandalized."
By this time Griswold was gripping the arms of his chair savagely and otherwise trying to hold himself down; but this, too, Raymer could not know.
"You have reason to believe that it rests wholly with you, I suppose?" came from the tilting chair after a little pause. "Miss Grierson is only waiting for you to speak?"
"That's a horrible question to ask a man, Kenneth—even in the dark. If I say yes to it, it can't sound any other way than boastful and—and caddish. Yet I honestly believe that— Oh, hang it all!can't you see how impossible you're making it, old man?"
"Not impossible; only a trifle difficult," was the qualifying rejoinder. "It is easier from this on. That is the peaceful way out of the shop trouble for you, Raymer. When you can go to Jasper Grierson and tell him you are going to marry his daughter, the trouble will be as good as cured."
For a little time Raymer was speechless. Then he burst out.
"Well, I'll be— Jove, Griswold, you don't lack much of being as cold-blooded as the old buccaneer himself! What makes you think he is stirring up the trouble?"
"It doesn't require any special thought. He wanted to freeze you out a little while back, and you balked him. Now he has come back at you another way."
"I wonder!" said the iron-founder musingly; and then: "I more than half believe you are right. But if you are, do you realize what you are proposing?"
"I am not proposing anything; I am merely suggesting. But you needn't put in the factor of doubt. This labor trouble that is threatening to smash you is Jasper Grierson's reply to the move you made when you let me in and choked him off. He is reaching for you."
Again Raymer held his peace and the atmosphere of the room grew pungent with tobacco smoke.
"I'm feeling a good bit like a yellow dog, Kenneth," he said, at length. "After what I've admitted andwhat you've said, I'm left in the position of the poor devil who would be damned if he did and be damned if he didn't. You have succeeded in fixing it so that Ican'task Margery Grierson to be my wife, however much I'd like to."
"That isn't the point," insisted Griswold half-savagely. "How you may feel about it, or what your people may say, is purely secondary. The thing to be considered is, what will happen to Miss Grierson?"
"Oh, the devil! if you put it that way——"
"I am putting it precisely that way."
"Why, see here, old man; if you were Madge's brother, you couldn't be putting the screws on any harder! What's got into you to-night?"
Griswold was inexorable.
"Miss Grierson hasn't any brother, and she might as well not have any father—better, perhaps. As God hears me, Raymer, I'm going to see to it that she gets a square deal."
"In other words, if she has made up her clever little mind that she wants to be Mrs. Ed. Raymer——"
"That is it, exactly."
"By George! I believe you are in love with her, yourself!"
"I am," was the cool reply.
"Well, of all the— Say, Griswold, you're a three-cornered puzzle to me yet. I don't know what the other three-fourths of the town is saying, but my fourth of it has it put up that you've everlastingly cooked my goose at Doctor Bertie's; that you andCharlotte are just about as good as engaged. Perhaps you'll tell me that it isn't true."
"It isn't—yet."
"But it may be, later on? Now you are getting over into my little garden-patch, Kenneth. If you think I'm going to stand still and see you put a wedding ring on Charlotte Farnham's finger when I know you'd like to be putting it on Madge Grierson's——"
Griswold's low laugh came as an easing of stresses.
"You can't very well marry both of them, yourself, you know," he suggested mildly. And then: "If you were not so badly torn up over this shop trouble, you'd see that I'm trying to give you the entire field. I shall probably leave town to-morrow, and I merely wanted to do you, or Miss Grierson, or both of you, a small kindness by way of leave-taking."
"Leave town?" echoed the iron-founder. "Where are you going?"
"I don't know yet."
"But you are coming back?"
"No."
Once more Raymer puffed at the shortened cigar until the end of it glowed like a small distress signal in the dark.
"Tell me," he broke out finally: "has Margery Grierson turned you down?"
"No."
"Then Charlotte has?"
"No."
"Confound it all! can't you say anything but'No'? Do you mean to tell me that you are going away, leaving me bucked and gagged by this labor outfit to live or die as I may? Great Scott, man! if my money's gone, yours goes with it!"
"You are freely welcome to the money, Edward—if you can manage to hang on to it; and I have pointed out the easy way to salvage the industrial ship. Can't you give me your blessing and let me go in peace?"
The blessing was not withheld, but neither was it given.
"I came here with my own back-load of trouble, but it seems that I'm not the only camel in the caravan," said the young ironmaster, thoughtfully. "What is it, Kenneth? anything you can unload on me?"
"You wouldn't understand," was the gentle evasion. "I can only give you my word that neither Miss Margery nor Miss Charlotte are in any way concerned in it."
"And you don't want to draw your money out of the plant?"
"No. For your sake I wish I had more to put in."
Once again Raymer took refuge in silence. After a time he said: "You've been a brother to me, Griswold, and I shall never forget that. But if I needed your help in the money pinch, I'm needing it worse now. I'll do the right thing by Margery; I think I've been meaning to, all along; if I haven't, it's only because this whole town has been fixing up a match between Charlotte and me ever since wewere school kids together—you know how a fellow gets into the way of taking a thing like that for granted merely because everybody else does?"
"Yes; I know."
"Well, I guess it isn't a heart-breaker on either side. If Charlotte cares, she doesn't take the trouble to show it. Just the same, on the other hand, I've got a shred or two of decency left, Kenneth. I'm not going to marry myself out of this fight with Jasper Grierson—not in a million years. Stay over and help me see it through; and when we win out, I promise you I'll do the square thing."
By no means could Edward Raymer know that he had set the whispering devil at work again at the ear of the man who was rocking gently in the desk-chair. But the demon was busily suggesting, and the man was listening. Was there not more than an even chance that Andrew Galbraith would die, after all? He was old, with the life-reserves spent and the weight of the years upon him. And if he should not die, there was still a chance that days might elapse before he would be able to gather himself sufficiently to remember and to raise the hue and cry. Griswold put a hot hand across the corner of the table and felt for Raymer's cool one.
"There's only one other way, Edward; and that is to fight like the devil," he said, speaking as one who has weighed and measured and decided. "What do you say?"
"If you will stay," Raymer began, hesitantly.
"I'll stay—as long as I can." Then, with thenote of harshness returning: "We'll make the fight, and we'll give these muckers of yours all they are looking for. Shut the plant doors to-morrow morning and make it a lock-out. I'll be over bright and early and we'll place a bunch of wire orders in the cities for strike-breakers. That will bring them to time."
Raymer got up slowly and felt in the dark for his hat.
"Strike-breakers!" he groaned. "Griswold, it would make my father turn over in his coffin if he could know that we've come to that! But I guess you're right. Everybody says I'm too soft-hearted to be a master of men. Well, I must be getting home. To-morrow morning, at the plant? All right; good-night."
And he turned to grope his way to the door and through the dark upper hall and down the stair.
When Griswold had reached across the corner of his writing-table in the unlighted study to strike hands with Edward Raymer upon the promise to stay and help, it is conceivable that he gave the impelling motive its just due. To step aside was to become a fugitive, leaving a fugitive's plain trail and half-confession of guilt behind him to direct the pursuit. To stay and face the crisis coldly was equally out of the question for a man of temperament. The call to action came as a draught of fiery wine to the overspent and he accepted in a sudden upsurge of self-centring that took nothing into the account save the welcome excitement of a conflict.
It was with rather more than less of the self-centring that he joined the conference with Raymer and the shop bosses in the offices of the plant the following morning. Having slept upon the quarrel, Raymer was on the conciliatory hand, and four of the five department foremen were with him. In the early hours of the forenoon a compromise was still possible. The prompt closing of the shops had had its effect, and a deputation of the older workmen came to plead for arbitration and a peaceful settlementof the trouble. Raymer, who had evidently been taking counsel with his womankind, would have consented to this proposal, but Griswold fought it and finally carried his point. "No compromise" was the answer sent back to the locked-out workmen, and with it went the ultimatum, which Griswold himself snapped out at the leader of the conciliators: "Tell your committee that it is unconditional surrender, and it must be made before five o'clock this afternoon. Otherwise, not a man of you can come back on any terms."
At the hurling of this firebrand, three of the five department heads drew their pay-envelopes and went away. Then Griswold proceeded to make the breach impassable by calling upon the sheriff for a guard of deputies. Raymer shook his head gloomily when the thrower of firebrands sent the 'phone message to the sheriff's office.
"That settles it beyond any hope of a patch-up," he said sorrowfully. "If we hadn't declared war before, we've done it now. I'm prophesying that nobody will weaken when it comes to the pay-roll test this afternoon."
"Because we have taken steps to protect our property?" rasped the fighting partner.
"Because we have taken the step which serves notice upon them that we consider them criminals, at least in intention. You'd resent it yourself, Griswold. If anybody should pull the law on you before you had done anything to deserve it, I'm much mistaken if you wouldn't——"
"Oh, hell!" was the biting interruption; and Raymer could not know upon what inward fires he had unwittingly flung a handful of inflammables.
It was during the paying-off interval in the afternoon that Broffin strolled across the railroad tracks, and, after listening to one or two of the incendiary speeches at the storm-centre mass meeting in front of McGuire's, went on past the potteries to the Raymer plant.
Several things had happened since the afternoon when he had sat behind the sheltering window curtain in the writing-room of the summer-resort hotel listening to Miss Grierson's story. For one, Teller Johnson, of the Bayou State Security, had pleaded his inability to leave his post unless ordered to do so by the president: the cashier was sick and the bank was short-handed. For another, there had been a peppery protest entered by the good Doctor Bertie—transformed for the moment into an exasperated Doctor Bertie. If Broffin did not quit his annoying espionage upon the house in Lake Boulevard, and upon the visitors thereto, there was going to be trouble, and he, Doctor Bertie, would be the trouble-maker. For a third untoward thing, he had found that Wahaska as a community was beginning to look a little askance at him. The village consciousness which had made it so easy for him to find out all he wished to know about everybody was turning against him, and now, as it seemed, everybody was wishing to know more than he cared to tell about the past, present, and future concernsof one Matthew Broffin: in short, he was becoming a suspicious character.
Broffin the pertinacious, again with an unlighted cigar between his teeth, was ruminating thoughtfully over these things when he came in sight of the closed gates and smokeless chimneys of the Foundry and Machine Works. Once more the scent had grown cold. Miss Grierson's story had seemed to clear Griswold—if anything short of a court acquittal could clear him; and in the peppery interview Doctor Farnham had told him plainly that, if Mr. Griswold were the object of his attentions, he was barking up the wrong tree; that Miss Farnham would, if necessary, go into court and testify that Mr. Griswold was not the man whom she had seen in the Bayou State Security. Also, Griswold was doing something for himself. It was he who had pulled Mr. Galbraith out of the lake little better than a dead man, and had brought him to life again; and now he was taking an active part in the foundry fight—about the last thing that might be expected of a man dodging the police.
In spite of all these buffetings the man from Tennessee was only bruised; not beaten. It is possible to be convinced without evidence; to believe without being able to prove. Also, convincement may grow into certainty as the evidence to support it becomes altogether incertitude. Broffin was as sure now that Griswold was his man as he was of his own present inability to prove it. Which is to say that he had discounted Miss Farnham'srefusal to help, and President Galbraith's refusal to remember; was discounting Miss Grierson's skilfully told story, and Griswold's breaking of all the criminal precedents by staying on in Wahaska after he had been warned. For Broffin made no doubt that the warning had been given, either by Miss Farnham or by Miss Grierson—or both.
"All the same, he'll make a miss-go, sooner or later," the pertinacious one was saying to himself as he strolled past the Raymer plant with a keen eye for the barred gates, the lounging guards in the yard, and the sober-faced workmen coming and going at the pay-office. "If he can carry a steady head through what's comin' to him here, he's a better man than I've been stacking him up to be."
Coming even with the grouping around the office door, Broffin sat down on a discarded cylinder casting, chewed his dry smoke, whittled a stick, and kept an open ear for the sidewalk talk. It was angrily vindictive for the greater part, with the new member of the Raymer company for a target. Now and then it was threatening. If the company should attempt to bring in foreign labor there would be blood on the moon.
Later, a big, red-faced man with his hat on the back of his head and a paste diamond in his shirt bosom, came to join the shifting group on the office sidewalk. Broffin marked him as one of the inflammatory speakers he had seen and heard on the dry-goods-box rostrum in front of McGuire's, and had since been trying to place. The nearerview turned up the proper page in the mental note-book. The man's name was Clancy; he was a Chicago ward-worker, sham labor leader, demagogue; a bad man with a "pull." Broffin remembered the "pull" because it had once got in his way when he was trying to bag Clancy for a violation of the revenue laws.
Instantly the detective began to speculate upon the chance that had brought the Chicago ward bully into a village labor fight, and since it was his business to put two and two together, he was not long in finding the answer to his own query. Clancy had come because he had been hired to come. Assuming this much, the remainder was easy. The town gossips had supplied all the major facts of the Raymer-Grierson checkmate, and Broffin saw a great light. It was not labor and capital that were at odds; it was competition and monopoly. And monopoly, invoking the aid of the Clancys, stood to win in a canter.
Broffin dropped the stick he had been whittling and got up to move away. Though some imaginative persons would have it otherwise, a detective may still be a man of like passions—and generous prepossessions—with other men. For the time Broffin's Anglo-Saxon heritage, the love of fair play, made him forget the limitations of his trade. "By grapples, the old swine!" he was muttering to himself as he made a slow circuit of the plant enclosure. "Somebody ought to tell them two young ducks what they're up against. For a picayune, I'd do it,myself. Huh!—and the little black-eyed girl playin' fast an' loose with both of 'em at once while the old money-octippus eats 'em alive!"
Thus Broffin, circling the Raymer works by way of the four enclosing streets; and when his back was turned the man called Clancy pointed him out to the group of discontents.
"D'ye see that felly doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows, ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep tricks on ye. If ye have the nerve of a bunch of hoboes, ye'll watch yer chances and step on him like a cockroach. He's a Pinkerton!"
Wahaska, microcosmic and village-conscious in spite of its city charter, was duly thrilled and excited when, on the day following the storm and shipwreck, it found itself the scene of an angry conflict between capital and labor.
Reports varied as to the origin of the trouble. Among the retired farmers, who still called Raymer "Eddie" and spoke of him as "John Raymer's boy," it was the generally expressed opinion that he was both too young and too easy-going to be a successful industry captain in the larger field he had lately entered. In the workingmen's quarter, which lay principally beyond the railroad tracks, public opinion was less lenient and the young ironmaster, figuring hitherto only as a good boss with a few unnecessary college ideas, was denounced as a "kid-glove" reformer who made his profit-sharing fad an excuse for advancing his favorites, and who was accordingly to be "brought to time" by the strong hand of the organization.
It was a crude surprise, both to the West Side and to "Pottery Flat," to find the new book-writing partner not only taking an active part in the fight,but apparently directing the capitalistic hostilities with a high hand. Quite early in the forenoon it was known on the street that Griswold had taken the field with Raymer; that the lock-out was his reply to the strike notice; and that it was at his suggestion that a dozen deputies had been sworn in to guard the Raymer plant—the iron works lying just outside of the corporation lines. A little later came the news that he had sent a counter ultimatum to the representatives of the labor forces sitting in permanence in their hall over McGuire's saloon. From two o'clock until five the offices of the plant would be open, and all former employees would be paid in full and discharged. Those who failed to make application between the hours named would not be taken back on any terms.
From two to five in the afternoon Wahaska, figuratively speaking, held its breath. At half-past three, young Dahlgren, of theDaily Wahaskan, spoiled a good story for his own paper by spreading the report that most of the men had sullenly drawn their pay, but as yet not a man of them had signed on for further employment. At four o'clock theDaily Wahaskan'swindows bore a bulletin to the effect that a mass indignation meeting was in progress in front of the Pottery Flat saloon; and at half-past four it was whispered about that war had been declared. Raymer and Griswold were telegraphing for strike-breakers; and the men were swearing that the plant would be picketed and that scabs would be dealt with as traitors and enemies.
It was between half-past four and five that Miss Grierson, driving in the basket phaeton, made her appearance on the streets, evoking the usual ripple of comment among the gossipers on the Winnebago porch as she tooled her clean-limbed little Morgan to a stop in front of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank.
Since it was long past the closing hours, the curtains were drawn in the bank doors and street-facing windows. But there was a side entrance, and when she tapped on the glass of the door an obsequious janitor made haste to admit her. "Yo' paw's busy, right now, Miss Mahg'ry," the negro said; but she ignored the hint and went straight to the door of the private room, entering without warning.
As the janitor had intimated, her father was not alone. In the chair at the desk-end sat a man florid of face, hard-eyed and gross-bodied. His hat was on the back of his head, and clamped between his teeth under the bristling mustaches he held one of Jasper Grierson's fat black cigars. The conference paused when the door opened; but when Margery crossed the room and perched herself on the deep seat of the farthest window, it went on in guarded tones at a silent signal from the banker to his visitor.
There was a trade journal lying in the window-seat, and Miss Grierson took it up to become idly immersed in a study of the advertising pictures. If she listened to the low-toned talk it was only mechanically, one would say. Yet there was a quickening of the breath now and again, and a pressing ofthe white teeth upon the ripe lower lip, as she turned the pages of the advertising supplement; these, though only detached sentences of the talk drifted across to her window-seat.
"You're fixed to put the entire responsibility for the ruction over onto the other side of the house?" was one of the overheard sentences: it was her father's query, and she also heard the answer. "We're goin' to put 'em in bad, don't you forget it. There'll be some broken heads, most likely, and if they're ours, somebody'll pay for 'em." A little farther along it was her father who said: "You've got to quit this running to me. Keep to your own side of the fence. Murray's got his orders, and he'll pay the bills. If anything breaks loose, I won't know you. Get that?" "I'm on," said the red-faced man; and shortly afterward he took his leave.
When the door had closed behind the man who looked like a ward heeler or a walking delegate, and who had been both, and many other and more questionable things, by turns, Jasper Grierson swung his huge chair to face the window.
"Well?" he said, "how's Galbraith coming along?"
"There is no change," was the sober rejoinder. "He is still lying in a half-stupor, just as he was last night and this morning. Doctor Farnham shakes his head and won't say anything."
"You mustn't let him die," warned the man in the big chair, half jocularly. "There's too much money in him."
The smouldering fires in the daughter's eyes leaped up at the provocation lurking in the grim brutality; but they were dying down again when she put the trade journal aside and said: "I didn't come here to tell you about Mr. Galbraith. I came to give you notice that it is time to quit."
"Time to quit what?"
"You know. When I asked you to put Mr. Raymer under obligations to you, I said I'd tell you when it was time to stop."
Jasper Grierson sat back in his chair and chuckled.
"Lord love you!" he said, "I'd clean forgot that you had a tea-party stake in that game, Madgie; I had, for a fact!"
"Well, it is time to remember it," was the cool reply.
"What was I to remember?"
"That you were to turn around and help him out of his trouble when I gave you the word."
The president of the Farmers' and Merchants' tilted his chair to the lounging angle and laughed; a slow gurgling laugh that spread from lip to eye and thence abroad through his great frame until he shook like a grotesque incarnation of the god of mirth.
"I was to turn around and help him out of the hole, was I? Oh, no; I guess not," he denied. "It's business now, little girl, and the tea-fights are barred. I'll give you a check for that span o' blacks you were looking at, and we'll call it square."
"Does that mean that you intend to go on untilyou have smashed him?" she asked, quietly ignoring the putative bribe.
"I'm going to put him out of business—him and that other fool friend of yours—if that's what you mean."
Again the sudden lightning glowed in Margery Grierson's eyes, but, as before, the flash was only momentary. There was passion enough in blood and brain, but there was also a will, and the will was the stronger.
"Please!" she besought him.
"Please what?"
"Please ruin somebody else, and let Mr.——let these two go!"
Grierson's laugh this time was brutally sardonic.
"So you're caught at last, are you, girlie? I was wondering if you wouldn't come out o' that pool with the hook in your mouth. But you might as well pull loose, even if it does hurt a little. Raymer and Griswold have got to come under."
She looked across at him steadily and again there was a struggle, short and sharp, between the leaping passions and the indomitable will. Yet she could speak softly.
"That is your last word, is it?"
"You can call it that, if you like: yes."
"What is the reason? Why do you hate these two so desperately?" she asked.
Jasper Grierson fanned away the nimbus of cigar smoke with which he had surrounded himself and stared gloomily at her through the rift.
"Who said anything about hating?" he derided. "That's a fool woman's notion. This is business, and there ain't any such thing as hate in business. Raymer's iron-shop happens to be in the road of a bigger thing, and it's got to move out; that's all."
She nodded slowly. "I thought so," she said, half-absently: "and the 'bigger thing' has some more money in it for you. Oh, how I do despise it all!"
"Oh, no, you don't," he contradicted, falling back into the half-jocular vein. "You're a pretty good spender, yourself, Madgie. If you didn't have plenty of money to eat and drink and wear and breathe——"
"I hate it!" she said coldly. Then she dragged the talk back to the channel it was leaving. "I ought to have broken in sooner; I might have known what you would do. You are responsible for this labor trouble they are having over at the iron works. Don't bother to deny it; I know. That was your 'heeler'—the man you had here when I came. You don't play fair with many people: don't you think you'd better make an exception of me?"
Grierson was mouthing his cigar again and the smoky nimbus was thickening to its customary density when he said: "You're nothing but a spoiled baby, Madge. If you'd cry for the moon, you'd think you ought to have it. I've said my say, and that's all there is to it. Trot along home and 'tend to your tea-parties: that's your part of the game. I can play my hand alone."
She slipped out of the window-seat and crossed the room quickly to stand before him.
"I'll go, when you have answered one question," she said, the suppressed passions finding their way into her voice. "I've asked for bread and you've given me a stone. I've said 'please' to you, and you slapped me for it. Do you think you can afford to shove me over to the other side?"
"I don't know what you're driving at, now," was the even-toned rejoinder.
"Don't you? Then I'll tell you. You have been pinching this town for the lion's share ever since we came here—shaking it down as you used to shake down the"—she broke off short, and again the indomitable will got the better of the seething passions. "We'll let the by-gones go, and come down to the present. What if some of the things you are doing here and now should get into print?"
"For instance?" he suggested, when she paused.
"This Raymer affair, for one thing. You don't own theWahaskan—yet: supposing it should come out to-morrow morning with the true story of this disgraceful piece of buccaneering, telling how you tried first to squeeze him through the bank loan, and when that failed, how you bribed his workmen to make trouble?"
"You go to Randolph and try it," said the gray wolf, jeeringly. "In the first place, he wouldn't believe it—coming from you. He wouldn't forget that you're my daughter, however much you aretrying to forget it. In the next place he'd want proof—damned good proof—if he was going to make a fight on me. He'd know that one of two things would happen; if he failed to get me, I'd get him."
The daughter who had asked for bread and had been given a stone put her face in her hands and moved toward the door. But at the last moment she turned again like a spiteful little tiger-cat at bay.
"You think I can't prove it? That is where you fall down. I can convince Mr. Randolph if I choose to try. And that isn't all: I can tell him how you have planned to sell Mr. Galbraith a tract of 'virgin' pine that has been culled over for the best timber at least three times in the past five years!"
Jasper Grierson started from his chair and made a quick clutch into smoky space. "Madge—you little devil!" he gritted.
But the grasping hands closed upon nothing, and the sound of the closing door was his only answer.
When she had unhitched the little Morgan and had driven away from the bank, Miss Grierson did a thing unprecedented in any of her former grapplings with a crisis—she hesitated. Twice she drove down Sioux Avenue with the apparent intention of stopping at theDaily Wahaskanbuilding, and twice she went on past with no more than an irresolute glance for the upper windows beyond which lay the editorial rooms and the office of Mr. CarterRandolph, the owner of the newspaper. But on the third circuit of the square, decision had evidently come to its own again. Turning the mare into Main Street, she drove quickly to the Winnebago House and drew up at the carriage step. A bell-boy ran out to hold the horse, but she shook her head and called him to the wheel of the phaeton to slip a coin into his hand and to give him a brief message.
Two minutes after the boy's disappearance, Broffin came out and touched his hat to the trim little person in the basket seat.
"You wanted to see me, Miss Grierson?" he said, shelving his surprise, if he had any.
"Yes. You are Mr. Matthew Broffin, of the Colburne Detective Agency, are you not?" she asked, sweetly.
Broffin took the privilege of the accused and lied promptly.
"Not that anybody ever heard of, I reckon," he denied, matching the smile in the inquiring eyes.
"How curious!" she commented.
Broffin's smile became a grin of triumph. "There's a heap o' curious things in this little old world," he volunteered. "What?"
"But none quite so singular as this," she averred. Then she laughed softly. "You see, it resolves itself into a question of veracity—between you and Mr. Andrew Galbraith. You say you are not, and he says you are. Which am I to believe?"
Broffin did some pretty swift thinking. There hadbeen times when he had fancied that Miss Grierson, rather than Miss Farnham, might be the key to his problem. There was one chance in a thousand that she might inadvertently put the key into his hands if he should play his cards skilfully, and he took the chance.
"You can call it a mistake of mine, if you like," he yielded; and she nodded brightly.
"That is better; now we can go on comfortably. Are you too busy to take a little commission from me?"
"Maybe not. What is it?" He was looking for a trap, and would not commit himself too broadly.
"There are two things that I wish to know definitely. Of course, you have heard about the accident on the lake? Mr. Galbraith is at our house, and he is very ill—out of his head most of the time. He is continually trying to tell some one whom he calls 'MacFarland' to be careful. Do you know any one of that name?"
Broffin put a foot on the phaeton step and a hand on the dash. There were loungers on the hotel porch and it was not necessary for them to hear.
"Yes; MacFarland is his confidential man in the bank," he returned.
"Oh; that explains it. But what is it that Mr. Galbraith wants him to be careful about?"
Again Broffin thought quickly. If he should tell the plain truth.... "Tell me one thing, Miss Grierson," he said bluntly. "Am I doin' business with you, or with your father?"
"Most emphatically, with me, Mr. Broffin."
"All right; everything goes, then. Mr. Galbraith has been figurin' on buying some pine lands up north."
"I know that much. Go on."
"And he has sent MacFarland up to verify the boundary records on the county survey."
"To Duluth?"
Broffin nodded.
"I thought so," she affirmed. And then: "The records are all right, Mr. Broffin; but the lands which Mr. MacFarland will be shown will not be the lands which Mr. Galbraith is talking of buying. I want evidence of this—in black and white. Can you telegraph to some one in Duluth?"
Broffin permitted himself a small sigh of relief. He thought he had seen the trap; that she was going to try to get him away from Wahaska.
"I can do better than that," he offered. "I can send a man from St. Paul; a good safe man who will do just what he is told to do—and keep his mouth shut."
She nodded approvingly.
"Do it; and tell your messenger that time is precious and expense doesn't count. That is the first half of your commission. Come a little closer and I'll tell you the second half."
Broffin bent his head and she whispered the remainder of his instructions. When she had finished he looked up and wagged his head apprehendingly.
"Yes; I see what you mean—and it's none o'my business what you mean it for," he answered. "I'll get the evidence, if there is any."
"It must be like the other; in black and white," she stipulated. "And you needn't say 'if.' Look for a red-faced man with stiff mustaches and a big make-believe diamond in his shirt-front, and make him tell you."
Broffin wagged his head again. "There ain't goin' to be any grand jury business about it, is there?" he questioned; adding: "I know your man—saw him this afternoon over at the plant. He's goin' to be a tough customer to handle unless I can tell him there ain't goin' to be any come-back in the courts."
Miss Grierson was opening her purse and she passed a yellow-backed bank-note to her newest confederate.
"Your retainer," she explained. "And about the red-faced man: we sha'n't take him into court. But I'd rather you wouldn't buy him, if you can help it. Can't you get him like this, some way?"—she held up a thumb and finger tightly pressed together.
Broffin's grin this time was wholly of appreciation.
"You're the right kind—the kind that leads trumps all the while, Miss Grierson," he told her. Then he did the manly thing. "I'll go into this, just as you say—what? But it's only fair to warn you that it may turn up some things that'll feaze you. You know that old sayin' about sleepin' dogs?"
Miss Grierson was gathering the reins over the little Morgan's back and her black eyes snapped.
"This is one time when we are going to kick the dogs and make them wake up," she returned. "Good-by, Mr. Broffin."
It was an hour beyond the normal quitting time on the day of ultimatums and counter-threatenings, the small office force had gone home, and the night squad of deputies had come to relieve the day guard. Griswold closed the spare desk in the manager's room and twirled his chair to face Raymer.
"We may as well go and get something to eat," he suggested. "There will be nothing doing to-night."
Raymer began to put his desk in order.
"No, not to-night. The trouble will begin when we try to start up with a new force. Call it a weakness if you like, but I dread it, Kenneth."
Griswold's smile was a mere baring of the teeth. "That's all right, Ned; you do the dreading and I'll do the fighting," he said; adding: "What we've had to-day has merely whetted my appetite."
The man of peace shook his head dejectedly.
"I can't understand it," he protested. "Up to last night I was calling you a benevolent Socialist, and my only fear was that you might some time want to reorganize things and turn the plant into a little section of Utopia. Now you are out-heroding Herod on the other side."
Griswold got up and crushed his soft hat upon his head.
"Only fools and dead folk are denied the privilege of changing their minds," he returned. "Let's go up to the Winnebago and feed."
The dinner to which they sat down a little later was a small feast of silence. Each was busy with his own thoughts, and it was not until after the coffee had been served that Griswold leaned across the table to call Raymer's attention to a man who was finishing his meal in a distant corner of the dining-room, a swarthy-faced man who drank his coffee with the meat course to the unpleasant detriment of a pair of long drooping mustaches.
"Wait a minute before you look around, and then tell me who that fellow is over on the right—the man with the black mustaches," he directed.
Raymer looked and shook his head.
"He's a new-comer—comparatively; somebody at the club said he gave himself out for a lumberman from Louisiana."
Griswold was nodding slowly. "His name?" he asked.
"I can't remember. It's an odd name; Boffin, or Giffin, or something like that. They're beginning to say now that he isn't a lumberman at all—just why, I don't know."
Griswold's right hand stole softly to his hip pocket. The touch was reassuring. But a little while after, when he was leaving the dining-room with Raymer, he dropped behind and made a quick transfer of somethingfrom the hip pocket to the side pocket of his coat. His hand was still in the coat pocket when he parted from the young iron-founder on the sidewalk.
"You'll be going home, I suppose?" he said.
Raymer made a wry face.
"Yes; and I wish to gracious you were the one who had to face my mother and sister. They're all for peace, you know—peace at any old price."
Griswold laughed.
"Tell them we're going to have peace if we are obliged to fight for it. And don't let them swing you. If we back down now we may as well go into court and ask for a receiver. Good-night."
Though he had not betrayed it, Griswold was fiercely impatient to get away. One tremendous question had been dominating all others from the earliest moment of the morning awakening, and all day long it had fed upon doubtings and uncertainty. Would Andrew Galbraith recover from the effects of the drowning accident? At first, he thought he would go to his room and telephone to Margery. But before he had reached the foot of Shawnee Street he had changed his mind. What he wanted to say could scarcely be trusted to the wires.
Twice before he reached the gate of the Grierson lawn he fancied he was followed, and twice he stepped behind the nearest shade-tree and tightened his grip upon the thing in his right-hand pocket. But both times the rearward sidewalk showed itself empty. Since false alarms may have, for the moment, all the shock of the real, he found that his hands were tremblingwhen he came to unlatch the Grierson gate, and it made him vindictively self-scornful. Also, it gave him a momentary glimpse into another and hitherto unmeasured depth in the valley of stumblings. In the passing of the glimpse he was made to realize that it is the coward who kills; and kills because he is a coward.
He had traversed the stone-flagged approach and climbed the steps of the broad veranda to reach for the bell-push when he heard his name called softly in the voice that he had come to know in all of its many modulations. The call came from the depths of one of the great wicker lounging-chairs half-hidden in the veranda shadows. In a moment he had placed another of the chairs for himself, dropping into it wearily.
"How did you know it was I?" he asked, when he could trust himself to speak.
"I saw you at the gate," she returned. "Are you just up from the Iron Works?"
"I have been to dinner since we came up-town—Raymer and I."
A pause, and then: "The men are still holding out?"
"We are holding out. The plant is closed, and it will stay closed until we can get another force of workmen."
"There will be lots of suffering," she ventured.
"Inevitably. But they have brought it upon themselves."
"Not the ones who will suffer the most—the women and children," she corrected.
"It's no use," he said, answering her thought. "There is nothing in me to appeal to."
"There was yesterday, or the day before," she suggested.
"Perhaps. But yesterday was yesterday, and to-day is to-day. As I told Raymer a little while ago, I've changed my mind."
"About the rights of the down-trodden?"
"About all things under the sun."
"No," she denied, "you only think you have. But you didn't come here to tell me that?"
"No; I came to ask a single question. How is Mr. Galbraith?"
"He is a very sick man."
Another pause, for which the questioner was responsible.
"You mean that there is a chance that he may not recover?"
"More than a chance, I'm afraid. The first thing Doctor Bertie did yesterday evening was to wire St. Paul for two trained nurses; and to-day he telegraphed Chicago for Doctor Holworthy, who charges twenty-five dollars a minute for mere office consultations."
"Humph!" said Griswold, "money needn't cut any figure." And then, after a moment of silence: "I did my best; you know I did my best?"
Her answer puzzled him a little.
"I could almost find it in my heart to hate you if you hadn't."
"But you know I did."
"Yes; I know you did."
Silence again, broken only by the whispering of the summer night breeze rustling the leaves of the lawn oaks and the lapping of tiny waves on the lake beach. At the end of it, Griswold got up and groped for his hat.
"I'm going home," he said. "It has been a pretty strenuous day, and there is another one coming. But before I go I want you to promise me one thing. Will you let me know immediately, by 'phone or messenger, if Mr. Galbraith takes a turn for the better?"
"Certainly," she said; and she let him say good-night and get as far as the steps before she called him back.
"There was another thing," she began, with the sober gravity that he could never be sure was not one of her many poses, and not the least alluring one. "Do you believe in God, Kenneth?"
The query took him altogether by surprise, but he made shift to answer it with becoming seriousness.
"I suppose I do. Why?"
"It is a time to pray to Him," she said softly; "to pray very earnestly that Mr. Galbraith's life may be spared."
He could not let that stand.
"Why should I concern myself, specially?" he asked; adding: "Of course, I'm sorry, and all that, but——"
"Never mind," she interposed, and she left her chair to walk beside him to the steps. "I've had a hard day, too, Kenneth, boy, and I—I guess it hasgot on my nerves. But, all the same, you ought to do it, you know."
He stopped and looked down into the eyes whose depths he could never wholly fathom.
"Why don't you do it?" he demanded.
"I? oh, God doesn't know me; and, besides, I thought—oh, well, it doesn't matter what I thought. Good-night."
And before he could return the leave-taking word, she was gone.