§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!"CHAPTER XIILuke 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.CHAPTER XIII§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 byhim? 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!"§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."§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.§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."§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."§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'."§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?"§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?"§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 fromhim?""It came direct from L. Bergen Rivington. But, of course, it really came fromhim."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."§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."§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."
§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!"
CHAPTER XII
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.
CHAPTER XIII
§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 byhim? 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!"
§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."
"Too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden;Too like the lightning."
"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."
§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.
§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."
§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."
§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'."
§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?"
§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?"
§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 fromhim?"
"It came direct from L. Bergen Rivington. But, of course, it really came fromhim."
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."
§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."
§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."