Front matter (continued 4)

"The North Bridge wreck?" snapped Forbes. "That was on the M. & N. What are you talking about, Huber?"

Luke realized that he had gone further than the limits of his promise of temporary silence concerning the letters, but he was too bitterly tried not to go still further.

"Yes," he said, "I mean just that. Everybody knows the N. Y. & N. J. crowd own the majority of the stock in the M. & N., and you know it, too. What's more, this wreck was their direct fault. I can prove that and I mean to. That's why they're after me: I mean to prove it if they don't square things. And so they're afraid of me."

"Ridiculous!" said Forbes. "That's just the trouble with you, Huber: you're going about making wild, unfounded statements like this."

"I ought not to tell even you two," Luke answered; "but the fact is, I have letters written by one of these men that will substantiate every word I say."

"You mean they'll show these people owned the road?"

"Practically, and ordered the poor rails that caused that wreck."

"Absurd: they couldn't do that. They didn't operate the road. This sort of thing is what is upsetting legitimate business: a few men going on the way you are. I don't think these people at the top are any better than they should be—I've often said so to you—but you can't go around calling them murderers. That's ridiculous."

Before Luke could reply, Betty again shifted the issue.

"Luke, you won't do it?" she appealed. "You'll give it up—for father's sake?"

He started to speak, but she dropped her father's hand and came to him with hers upraised.

"No," she said; "don't tell me now. Don't say anything now. Don't speak. You'll only be sorry. You're hurt and angry. Of course, you are. Go away. Wait. Go away just for to-night and think it over, and come back to-morrow." Her hand crept into his. "I know it's awfully hard for you to give it all up, even for a few years. I know what it means to you. Don't think I don't know, Luke. But——" She looked into his face. "Please, dear?"

His face was set.

"Good-by," he said.

"You'll be back to-morrow?"

He freed himself.

"Yes," he said. "Good-night."

§7. It was simply that he could not stay any longer. He left the house with his mind made up; he would not withdraw from the fight for the district-attorneyship. To keep his word, he would go back to see her next day, but he would go back only to end what he had not the heart to end to-night.

The thing had ended itself. This was the conclusion of all his chances for Betty. They were over.

He loved her. He went away from her with the certainty that nothing which life might henceforth rob him of could be the equal of this loss.

Yet he did not blame her. Brought up as he had been, he believed that her attitude was the inevitable one and the right. He had ventured that single question about the test of her love for him, but he felt that it was an unfair question. Until a girl married, her first duty was toward her parents. His own duty and Betty's duty clashed. There was no possibility of compromise. Forbes was a weakling, but, in cleaving to Forbes, Betty, Luke felt, did the only thing that she rightly could do.

He wondered what would come of that side of his life which she had gone out of. As much as might be, he would crowd its borders with the activities of his professional and political work, but something of the space would remain: it belonged. He was still black with the despair of his loss when he turned into Thirty-ninth Street and saw, standing there as if waiting for him, the girl that looked like Joan of Arc.

"I've been waitin' for you," she said.

Her cheeks and mouth were not painted to-night, and their lines were softer; they spoke only of what she had suffered and not of what she had inflicted. Her eyes were wet with tears; her underlip quivered.

"I thought I told you last night," began Luke.

"I know," she said. "An' then I wanted what you thought. But not now, not to-night." She spoke rapidly as if determined that he should hear her out before he could escape. "Don't mind the way I talk. I just kind of talk that way because it gets like a habit. What I want's help. I'm in trouble. Honest to God I am."

She was surely in trouble, and she was beautiful.

"You mean——" His hand went to his pocket.

"No, not money," she said. "It ain't that. It's about my sister. They've got her; my fellow has. Listen." She seized his wrist. "Will you listen a minute, please? Here, if you don't want no one to see you in this here apartment house, come on over here toward Six' Av'nue. They've got her: my kid sister!"

Luke looked at the woman. He could see nothing but sincerity. He was not afraid of an attempt at robbery, and he could think of no other reason for her request except the one she gave.

"Yes, I'll go with you," he said.

She hurried him into the darker street.

"Listen," she said: "I'm in the business. You know that. I don't let on to be nothin' much. But I've got a kid sister that lives home; an' she's straight, Jenny is. Well, I was talkin' to her to-night when my fellow came up, an' he sent me on an errand—we was all standin' right over on that corner—an' when I come back, they was gone, both of them—an' I know he's got her in here in Pearl's Six' Av'nue place."

"How do you know that?"

"I guessed it, an' then I rang the bell an' one o' the girls told me I was on, an' then Pearl came down an' yelled for the bouncer an' they throwed me out."

In the lamplight of the street her face looked like the face of an innocent girl.

"Why didn't you call a policeman?" asked Luke.

"Aw, you know them. Pearl stands in."

"But they'd have got your sister, anyhow."

"Not the cop on this beat. I wouldn't give up to him the other night, and he run me in."

They stopped at a narrow door. There was a shop on one side of it and a saloon on the other.

"This is the place," said the girl. "Pearl's joint's over the store."

"You want me," asked Luke, "to go in and bring your sister out?"

The girl assented. "She's only a kid. I know what I am all right; but she's only a kid, an' she's straight; she's always been straight. You won't have no trouble. They're always scared of anybody like you. You'll do it, won't you?" She leaned toward him. "You ain't afraid?"

The infamy burned him.

"Afraid?" he said slowly. "No, I'm not afraid." He rang the bell.

The girl wrung her hands.

"You're good. You're awful good. Mamie'll owe just everything to you."

"Who will?" asked Luke.

"Mamie. That's my sister's name. She'll——"

"I see," said Luke.

The door opened. A negro servant stood in the darkened hallway before them. Luke and the girl stepped inside.

"Wait a minute," said Luke quietly.

He brushed the servant's hand from the knob. He saw the two women standing open-mouthed, but before words came to them, he stepped back into the street, closing the door behind him. The girl's slip about her sister's name had saved him.

§8. He was glad to be in the light. He hurried across the street with no purpose but that of getting as quickly and as far from the house as possible. He was escaping.

For a minute or more he did not know what it was that he was escaping from. Then he glanced back toward the doorway.

Three policemen were entering the doorway. As Luke reached the corner, a gong clanged and a patrol-wagon turned into Sixth Avenue.

A messenger-boy, who had been standing on the corner, began to trot after the wagon. Luke stopped him.

"What's the matter?" asked Luke.

The boy turned to him a leering face:

"It's a raid, I guess. I knowed there was somethin' doin' when I seen that patrol standin' over on Thirty-nint' Street."

CHAPTER XI

§1. Luke wanted to dismiss the episode of the raid as a coincidence. He tried to argue that the girl had been a stool-pigeon employed to get him into the Sixth Avenue house solely for the purpose of robbery by confederates waiting for her there. Schemes of that sort were common enough in New York and succeeded in spite of their clumsiness; the more often one was reported in the papers and brought to the attention of the papers, the readier a certain portion of the public was to succumb to the next attempts. Luke wanted to believe that the appearance of the police might have proved welcome enough for him.

It was the news Forbes had given him that weighed against any such supposition. If his enemies were at work to ruin him financially, they might well be at work to break him and bring him to terms by means of a scandal in the police courts. It was all very well to say that the attack on the Forbes company ought to suffice them: Luke began to feel that these foes were the kind who want certainty enough to use more than one method of securing it. He had heard of a rebellious city official thus captured in a raid on a gambling-house. That man, he had been told, was released from the police station only upon signing a compromising paper, which was thereafter held by his political superiors as a bond to assure his future obedience to their wishes. Luke saw how a similar course could have been followed in regard to himself.

What worried him most, however, was, of course, the break with Betty and the difficulties in which he had innocently entangled her father. He was sincerely sorry for Forbes, whose shortcomings were forgivable because of worship of tradition, and the loss of Betty meant a descent into the pit of despair.

It was early morning before a sudden hope came to Luke. He had lain sleepless for hours, not trying to solve his financial riddle, but only contemplating its apparent impossibility of solution, and he had turned from that to the machinations of his enemies with genuine relief. This time the change must have rested his resourcefulness, for, in the midst of tearing at the sticky strands in which Stein and the men behind Stein had enmeshed him, the name of Ruysdael shot into his mind as the name of one who could and might advance the money to save Forbes and bring back Betty. He would go to Ruysdael at the earliest possible moment.

With that thought, he could dismiss all memory of the raid in Sixth Avenue. Almost immediately he fell asleep.

§2. The next day was not without its fresh warnings from the powers that opposed him, and the first of these came from the headquarters of the Municipal Reform League itself. Luke thought it better taste for him to remain away from the headquarters while the formalities of the nomination were gone through with by the committee that was then to make its ticket regular by means of petition. But it was too early in the day to call on Ruysdael, so he remained in his rooms at the Arapahoe, and here, at eleven o'clock, Venable telephoned him.

"The meeting is over," said Venable.

"Good," said Luke. "The ticket is the one agreed on?"

"Yes. You have my congratulations, Mr. Huber."

"Thank you." Luke thought that the tone of his supporter was somewhat strained. "I hope everything went off smoothly," he added.

"Well, no," said Venable, "it didn't. It is all right now, but I am bound to tell you that a little opposition had developed against you. We overcame it, but it was there and from some men that we had every reason to believe would support you. I don't understand it, Mr. Huber; it was mysterious."

"I'm coming right down," said Luke.

At headquarters he learned little more. The committee had met with no indication of approaching trouble. Save for two or three persons whose means of livelihood were the practical organization of reform political movements, nearly all the members were business men, in small but sound industries, each of unquestioned probity. The candidates slated for every other post were accepted as a matter of course; but when Luke's name was brought up by Venable for the district-attorneyship, one of the politicians and several of the business men opposed acceptance. They were dogged, but vague. The politician at last spoke of Luke as having courted too much animosity from the upper regions of finance.

"He has talked too wild," said this one. "He oughtn't to have threatened till after election. Of course, I know what he's got to do if he's elected, but he needn't have begun it beforehand. I haven't got anything against him, but he's shown his hand too soon, and so he won't make a good candidate."

The business men spoke much as Forbes had spoken. The Municipal Reform League was a radical organization, but it ought to be radical within reason. Huber's public utterances had been too sweepingly radical. They feared him; they thought him too hot-headed. He was still too young. In pursuing Big Business, he was sure to trample smaller, legitimate business; he would upset credit.

The majority of the committee was loyal to Luke and had its way. Luke received the nomination, but such dissenters as were converted came to him half-heartedly, and two of the timorous business men withdrew from the organization.

"Then, there is Yeates, too," said Venable. "He wasn't at the meeting, but he telephoned he was coming here to see you about this time, and I gathered that he isn't in a particularly pleasant frame of mind."

Luke thought of Venable's long years of battle for reform.

"You know what's at the back of all this?" he said.

"I think I do," said Venable.

"I mean: you know who's back of it?"

"I can guess. Your published attack was rather clear, Mr. Huber."

"Then, are you and the League prepared to go right ahead?"

"Yes, we are."

"You, too? You individually?"

Venable's old eyes glittered.

"I always suspected these people," he said. "I always felt sure they were against us. They were never so strongly against us as they are now, but their being so much more against us now only makes me the more certain that what we are doing is right."

"They have a good deal of power, Mr. Venable."

"I know that better than you do, my boy; but they can't hurt me personally, if that is what you mean. What little money I have comes from the rents of an uptown apartment house. It's in a good neighborhood and full of steady people. Nobody can take that away from me. It isn't as if I drew my income from bonds, but if I did, and if these people could ruin me"—he took Luke's hand—"I should go right ahead."

They had been talking in Luke's office. Shortly after Venable left it, Yeates was shown in. The young man was excited.

"Look here, Huber," he said. "A little bit's good, but you're going pretty damned far."

He dragged a chair toward Luke's desk, turned it about, and sat down astride of it with his arms folded across its back.

A smile twitched at Luke's mouth.

"What way-station do you want to get off at?" he inquired.

"I don't want you to make a monkey out of the League," said Yeates. "I've been reading over your letters and interviews and things, and I think you ought to realize that this is a reform organization and not a bunch of Anarchists."

"You're a slow reader, Yeates. Haven't you been hearing these things talked over, too?"

Yeates blushed, but he did not flinch.

"Well, what if I have? The people I've heard talking are the people you've been slamming, and I want to tell you that those people are the backbone of this country."

"I haven't mentioned any names."

"Oh, don't think I'm a fool, Huber, and don't think these people are fools, either. Everybody knows. What do you do it for? It won't catch any votes, if that's what you want."

"I rather wanted to do some good."

"Good? Good?" Yeates laughed angrily. "What are you talking about? You're talking as if these men were pirates. You're talking like one of those fellows that make speeches on a soap-box on the corner. It's all right to fight police-graft, and it's all right to run the crooks out of town—that's what the League's for and why I'm for the League—but I'm not going to keep on with an organization that's mixing up the biggest men in America with that sort of cattle. I won't stand for having my personal friends called thieves. I can't stand for it, and I won't!"

Luke looked at his watch. He rose.

"I have to be uptown in half a hour," he said.

"But see here——" Yeates's chair clattered to the floor as Yeates sprang up.

"When this nomination was offered to me," said Luke, "you were present. Do you remember something you said—something about outside influences and so on?"

"Oh, rot! Who's talking about outside influences?"

"I am. The nomination was given me along with certain promises. I've accepted it. I mean to act on the strength of those promises."

"You mean you're going crazy."

"Then, the League's going crazy, too. As the only sane man in it, I'm afraid you won't find yourself in congenial company, Yeates. You'd better get out."

"Get out?" Yeates could scarcely credit his ears.

"Get out," Luke repeated.

"I like that!" shouted Yeates. "This is a nice reform party, this is! Anti-boss! Why, you're more of a boss than Tim Heney ever dreamed of being."

Luke had not looked at the matter that way. He saw now that he was indeed using boss-methods, but he also saw that boss-methods were unavoidable.

"This League," he said, "is pledged to a course of action you don't agree with, so you can't consistently remain in it."

"I will!—I will get out!" cried Yeates. "I'd like to know who had more to do with this League: you or me. Why, you only came in the other day, and it was me and my friends got you in. But I'll get out all right: you needn't worry about that. I'm through."

He left the room. It was a few weeks later when Luke heard of Yeates's engagement to the girl whose diamond pendant Luke had admired the first time that he went to the Ruysdaels' house. That, Huber knew, was indeed coincidence, but the previous connection of Yeates with the Municipal Reform League served the more to shake Luke's confidence in the radicalism of some of its remaining members.

§3. His mission to Ruysdael was far more satisfactory than his talk with Yeates. Luke did not tell the millionaire the circumstances that made it necessary for R. H. Forbes & Son to borrow money, nor, as things fell out, did he have to explain why the Ruysdael estate, and not a bank, was wanted as a creditor. He went into details only concerning the nature of the securities that Forbes could offer; he was honest about the chances of the business, which he believed to be good, and he was no more pressing in his request than he thought it wise to be.

"So," said Ruysdael, smiling, "you find some use for predatory wealth, after all?"

Luke remembered Jack Porcellis's assertion that the Ruysdaels were in some way connected with the forces now opposed to the loan, but the connection, if it existed, must be slight. The Ruysdael money was not in a form that could well be hurt by Luke's enemies; and Ruysdael, though subsequent pressure might well stop him from further aid, was the sort of man who, having gone into such a venture as the present one, would not undo anything he had already done.

"I don't consider you one of the pirates," said Luke.

"No? Well, I'm not active, perhaps," Ruysdael reassured him. "I was just thinking you rather strong in some of your public utterances. There's no use in attacks unless they can win, you know."

The swarthy man was interested in Huber's request, though solely on Huber's own account. Ruysdael felt that he had been in a measure responsible for Luke's investment, and he was anxious to protect that investment so long as the protection was real and not a mere tossing of good money after bad. He took Luke at once to the offices of the Ruysdael estate.

There it was clear that, whatever influence Luke's enemies might have, they had issued no orders against him. Perhaps they had not thought of the possibility of his turning in this direction, perhaps they had meant to do no more than frighten him by their show of power with the banks. In any case, old Herbert Croy, the manager of the estate, was amiable and suggested that Forbes be sent for without delay.

It was a moment of triumph for Luke. He met Forbes in one of the outer offices of the suite used for the administration of the Ruysdael estate, and he was not entirely sorry to find Forbes contrite.

"Is it—it's really true?" asked Forbes.

He had been having a bad time. His face was drawn, and the feverish hand that grasped Luke's was trembling.

"Yes," said Luke. "I think I've induced Ruysdael to advance the money."

Forbes looked away.

"I'm sorry—very sorry for my attitude last night, Huber; and yet, you must have seen——"

"That's all right. Forget it."

"I know. You're good. But I do want you to understand. And you have turned out to be the real business man of the pair of us, after all!"

"So it seems," said Luke dryly.

Forbes missed the reflection on his own ability.

"Oh, but you have! Huber, you've—you've saved the Business!"

"No; that's up to you. I've only made it possible for you to get the money. You have to finish convincing these people; so buck up."

"I will, I will."

"And they'll probably turn in and fight us in the market."

"We'll see about that." All of Forbes's courage had come back to him. "Let them try. Huber, I can't thank you enough. I never can."

"Then don't try to." Luke took Forbes by the arm and led him to the door behind which Ruysdael and Croy were waiting.

But Forbes felt that there was more to be said. "It was splendid of you," he continued, as Luke drew him forward.

"Was it? You overlook the fact that I stood to lose a little money of my own—if nothing else!"

"I did. I actually did! By Jove, I don't see how you can forgive me, Huber."

Luke's answer was to push open the door. Within half an hour the interview was concluded. Forbes had deposited his securities and received a certified check. It was all so simple that, while Luke was wondering why he had not thought of it twelve hours before, Forbes was saying to himself:

"How was it I didn't think of it last night?"

§4. Luke intended to go from the Ruysdael offices to those of the League, but as he parted from Forbes on the street after the loan had been secured, something happened that changed his plans. At the foot of the elevator-shaft of the building, he noticed a little man leaning against the marble-paneled wall: the man was an unostentatious fellow, commonplace as to both face and clothes, but Luke thought he had seen the figure before.

He passed with Forbes through the revolving doors of the office-building and walked to the curb. He glanced back and saw the commonplace man coming through the doorway behind him. Then he remembered: when he left the Arapahoe that morning, he saw this man walking down the other side of Thirty-ninth Street. He had thought nothing of it at the time, but now his experience of detectives told him that this man bore the marks of the detective.

Luke called a taxicab. The man, he saw, prepared to call another.

"I'll try to keep my promise to see Betty to-night," said Luke to Forbes.

"You must," said Forbes. His gratitude, though not so hot as it had been, was still warm.

"I'll try. There's a lot to be done—politically, you know. But I'll try-"

They shook hands. Forbes started away. Luke gave his chauffeur that address in Wall Street at which he had issued his orders to the men who were now fighting him.

He was disappointed; the person whom he sought was not there. Luke doubted the statement of the doorkeeper, but could get no other. He went to the offices of Hallett and to those of Rivington, but with no better luck. At each descent from his taxi, he caught sight of the detective and knew that the detective meant to be seen. Then he sought the quarters of Stein, Falconridge, Falconridge & Perry, and was immediately admitted to the presence of the head of that firm.

The Judge sat at his handsome desk, a telephone at one elbow and a vase of Abel Chatney roses at the other. His plentiful white hair and his smooth frock-coat still potent, still spread around him the aura of dignity. He rose slowly as Luke came in and bowed with magisterial calm.

"How do you do, Mr. Huber?" he said pleasantly. "I am glad to see you—very glad, indeed."

He resumed his chair. Luke took a chair close by.

"The papers," pursued the Judge, "tell me that you are open to congratulations. You have mine."

"Thank you," said Luke. He stretched his legs. "Yes, I got the nomination. There was a little opposition, but I got it."

"Opposition?" The Judge raised his white eyebrows. "Hum! Well, of course, Mr. Huber, you had to expect that in the circumstances."

"What were the circumstances, Judge?"

Stein shook his head and smiled benignantly.

"There you go," he said. "You will insist on flattering me with your assumptions of my omniscience."

"But not of your omnipotence, Judge; for I did get the nomination. What were the circumstances?"

The Judge still smiled:

"You can't expect to hurt the more important business interests without hurting the lesser ones; and the lesser dislike being hurt even more than the greater, Mr. Huber."

"I gathered that you might think so."

This time the Judge's smile was a song without words.

"Very well," said the younger man. "As I say, I overcame the opposition inside the League. I believe I can overcome the same opposition at the polls."

"I hope so," Stein answered. "But it is a pity that you have not more powerful backing."

"I have a very active following at any rate."

"It will require a great deal of activity to overcome the prejudices of the majority."

"Yes, but I'm not talking about the activity of the voters. I am talking about the active following I am having from my apartments to my office, and from my office wherever else I go."

Judge Stein leaned over to smell the roses on his desk. When he looked up, his firm mouth seemed innocent. He offered the vase to Luke.

"Aren't they beautiful?" he asked.

"Quite."

"I often think it is such a pity that they haven't more perfume. What they have is good, but it is not a great deal. What we gain in form, we lose in scent. The law of compensation, I suppose."

"I know this detective had orders to let me see he was following me."

The Judge put down the vase.

"I am sorry you don't care for roses," he said. "Yes, Mr. Huber, I dare say you are followed. You are fighting the Democratic police force and the Republican District-Attorney's office; they both have detectives attached to them, and I have heard that they frequently use their detectives to watch their political rivals. You are fighting the Progressive organization, too, and they could use private detectives. I quite agree with you that it isn't pleasant."

"This fellow isn't on the job to watch me. He's only used to frighten me. I'm not easily frightened, Judge."

"No?"

"No. If I had been, I'd have turned tail when your friends tried to ruin a business I am interested in, or when they tried to have me caught in a police-raid." Luke spoke as if he were mentioning incidents in the lives of people dead these thousand years. "The raiders didn't find me, as you, of course, know. What you don't know is that the business move has failed just as badly."

If he had not known it, the Judge's face betrayed no surprise.

"Really, Mr. Huber, I told you at our last interview that I had no professional interest in this matter."

"You admitted that the people back of all this were your friends."

"I said that I was a friend of certain persons."

"Then, you might as well say now that your friends intend to prevent my election and that they'll use any means to do it."

"Don't get excited, Mr. Huber." The Judge's right hand waved a deliberate protest against Luke's violent language. "Of course, I say nothing of the sort. What I do say is that you must understand that your own plan of action is bound to alienate the voters. There are more people interested in this election than you and me—more even than my friends. A great many people don't want to see you elected District-Attorney. There are the business men, there are the police, and there are the people of the underworld. You have been reckless enough to make no ethical distinctions. You lump the good with the bad, and attack everybody. Well, you must not be surprised at the result."

Luke kept to his low key.

"I only came here to tell you that I couldn't be scared."

"Why to me?"

"Perhaps just because I like to talk to you, Judge."

The Judge bowed a sincere acknowledgment.

"I have already told you," he said, "that I think you could go far if you were cooler. Now you are confusing possible legitimate influence—I say possible, not certain—with physical attack."

"They've both seemed probable, Judge."

"The former may be. As to the latter—well, like most young enthusiasts, you have forgotten that elections go by majorities, and that the majorities are controlled by the lower forces of society. That is the one flaw in our republican system, and nothing but social evolution, generations of free education, will cure it. You have not only very wrongly assailed legitimate business; you have quite properly threatened to close to the criminal classes their chief sources of revenue. It is their livelihood against yours. My friends can have nothing in common with these people. We cannot control them. You must know that."

Luke shrugged his shoulders. Stein continued:

"As a politician and a lawyer, you must have counted on the opposition of the criminal classes when you began your campaign. If you did not" the Judge bent his head to the roses—"well, I don't want to alarm you, but if I were in your place, I should leave the fight."

Luke got up.

"The alternative?" he inquired.

The Judge did not answer. He merely looked at Luke.

"I won't take it," said Luke.

"I tell you again, that we have nothing to do with the forces that seem to worry you most."

"I know you say so. Well, we haven't got much further than at our last talk, have we?"

"At that talk, Mr. Huber, I said to you that you could help yourself, your party, the public good——"

"If I'd do what you wanted? I won't. I merely thought that if I told you you'd failed so far, you might do what I asked."

The Judge sadly shook his head.

"If you would only listen to reason!"

"I'll wait for the month and not a day longer. Meanwhile, I'm not the kind that's easy scared. Nothing you can do—you, and your friends, or anybody hired by your friends—will stop me."

The Judge stood up.

"I am afraid you will be stopped," he said.

"Try it," said Luke. "Good-by."

"Good-day, Mr. Huber," Stein replied. "I shall always be glad to have a call from you. I am interested in your career—more genuinely interested than you suppose."

§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 by him? Of all the corruption that was poisoning the country and infecting the ideals of the Republic, what was there that did not proceed from his fangs? Luke seemed to see it all now—was certain that he saw it—with awful clarity. The Rollins letters, the interview in Wall Street, the action of the banks, and Osserman's hint from the City Chamberlain, the part played by the street-girl, the raid by the police, the talks with Stein and the daily partial liftings of the political curtain: these, reviewed in the lurid glow of the campaign, confirmed the accumulated gossip of years, corroborated every wild story that came to him on the teeming battlefield: of bribery and thieving, of perjury and murder, of all the crimes that men have known, each committed again and again and again—safely committed in the dark, cravenly done under the protection of bought-and-paid-for law.

What mattered now this power's culture? What mattered its benefactions, its colleges for the ignorant, its hospitals for the ill? As Luke saw them now, these were only dust for the eyes of the public, cheap peace-offerings for intricate wrongs. The good could be counted on the fingers of the hand, the evil was as the sands of the sea.

It was everywhere. It mocked religion, because It supported churches; It debauched Government, because It governed the governors; It destroyed Law, because It controlled the Law's administrators. It was master of the means of production and distribution; It owned the storehouses of wealth; the clothes upon the backs of the people, the houses that they lived in; the meat on the tables of the rich, the bread in the bellies of the poor. It secured Its own prices for them, and withheld them as It chose. Directly or indirectly, the whole nation took Its wages—such wages as It chose to pay.

At the great League meeting in Cooper Union, Luke, fronting a wilderness of faces, shouted his defiance of this Power. He said no name, but none that heard him could doubt whom he meant. For that night, Luke Huber's friends no longer knew the languid young lawyer in this shouting, quivering, torch-bearing evangel on the historic Cooper Union Stage. The boy had died that, bound for New York, thought himself as a Templar entering Jerusalem, but from his ashes there rose a new Peter the Hermit preaching a new crusade.

"If we had the eyes to see," he said, "we'd know that from this city, the center of our civilization, slender threads, so numerous as to be beyond our counting, run out to every corner of the land. Slender threads: the merest gossamer, but so tough that, once entangled in them, no man escapes. No man, no woman, and no child. The delicate filaments catch and hold us by the thousand every day. They catch us at our birth and they hold us till our death: life-prisoners even when we are unaware of it, more desperately prisoners when we are unaware of it. The good and the bad and the hopelessly neither-good-nor-bad; efficient and inefficient, every sort and condition, men and boys, women and girls—the net has use for us all: for the labor of the child, the body of the woman, the hand or the brain, the money or the muscles, of the man. It has uses for our virtues and more use for our vices. All are needed, none that is caught goes free. If we had the eyes to see, we should see it; but the strands are as fine as they are tough, and only when a victim has so much blood in him that his dying struggles ensanguine the thread that holds him do we, noting his blood, note what has received his blood—and even there, we rarely consider that thread in relation to its fellows, hardly ever realize that it is part of a plan, hardly ever trace it to its center."

Luke followed the Power along thread after thread through the labyrinth of American life, and he made it clear that the Power was one man. He pictured the stock-market, where the trade in traitors began and where the fortunes of speculators and the riches of the country were counters in the game of roulette that this Power conducted with a braced wheel. He passed on, across the map of the Union, through the wrecks of industries that this Power had razed. He showed how it had ruined numberless houses and spoiled countless lives. He pointed to the bloated bodies of the suicides it had flung into rivers it had never seen, the graves it had filled in the potters' fields of distant towns, the twisted limbs of children it had enslaved, the bodies of women it had forced into the arms of lust, the muscles of men it had condemned to lifelong servitude. He described its command over Congress, legislatures, and judges; its collar around the necks of the police, who brought to its service, in return for criminal immunity, gamblers, thieves, highwaymen, tramps, prostitutes, and pimps. He clutched its hairy hand in the ballot-box, and called upon his hearers to end this Power's practices as they loved their souls.

Luke pledged himself, if elected, to drive the thing out of every department of the city's life that the District-Attorney could in any way influence. He pledged himself to fear no man and to serve none.

"You have the eyes!" he shouted. "If you'll only use them, you have the eyes to see. Look about you, and what you see will give you the strength you need. This thing thwarts and perverts the purposes of Government, and you know it! The men that are pledged to the people, it buys with gold. These are its crimes, but not the worst of its crimes. The worst it does is not what it does to things material. The worst it does is what it does to things spiritual. The spoiling of high aims, the rape and ravage of honorable purposes: these are its sins against the Holy Ghost!"

§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 from him?"

"It came direct from L. Bergen Rivington. But, of course, it really came from him."

Luke put out his hand. Nelson wrung it.

"I wasn't bought, Huber," he said. "You don't think that?"

"I know," said Luke kindly.

"I wish I'd told you sooner, Huber. I didn't expect you'd go so far."

"I'd have gone just as far, Nelson. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too, Huber. Good-night."

§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."

§12. Luke would not have had to open the offices of the Municipal League; that was being attended to. While he was still in the Subway train returning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, two men, one of them carrying a small bundle, crossed Union Square and turned down Broadway. Before the entrance to the building in which the League was housed, they paused to speak to a policeman.

"That's all right," he told them. "I know. I got me orders ten minutes ago. That's why I'm standin' here. But get a move on, you fellows. I don't want to stick here all night."

The two men rounded a corner.

In the deserted street, the officer of the law walked up and down, twenty paces to the north, then twenty to the south. A party of strayed revelers came by and tried to talk with him; but he ordered them to move on if they didn't want him to arrest them. He resumed his walk when they had gone, his thumbs tucked in his belt, his lips pursed and whistling softly a popular tune. Once he heard the sound of a window opened overhead. A little later he saw a dim light pass from one window to another in the building above him. A dulled report sounded from behind the walls: the Elevated is not near Broadway at this spot, but in the night noises travel far, and this noise might have been the crash of a late train. The officer of the law did not raise his head....

Around the corner came two figures. Both of them carried bundles now.

The officer of the law strolled past them. He did not stop as he spoke.

"All right?" he asked.

"All right," said one of the figures.

The officer of the law walked on, whistling his popular tune.

§13. Somewhat nearer the hour of sunrise, Mr. Irwin, his merry eyes grown weary, stood in the sitting-room of the Hon. Marcus Stein's suite of hotel apartments. He was bending over a table on which lay an opened bundle.

Stein was bending over the table, too. His dignified demeanor was ruffled.

"This is nothing but a collection of junk," he was saying. "It is no use to anybody but its owners. Get it out of here at once, Mr. Irwin, and tell your friends to return it to the place they got it from."

CHAPTER XIV

§1. As every man has his day in court, so nearly every man has his day in the newspapers, and which is the more trying it is difficult to decide. The day following the night of the Cooper Union meeting was Luke's: the morning papers seemed to contain little news that did not refer to him; the editorial columns presented satiric paragraphs and serious leaders regarding his speech and his position before the public, and spread over the first pages were accounts of his address and stories of the strike in the factory, with which his connection was now loudly heralded.

Comment on the speech was about equally divided. Half of the press ridiculed it as the vaporing of a misinformed dreamer, and half denounced it as an anarchistic appeal to the violence of the mob. Some journals gave stenographic reports of the entire matter; most printed only those portions which, lifted from their context, were best suited to the policy of the paper using them. The extremes were shown by two headlines. One read:

NIGHTMARES OF A CANDIDATE

Br'er Huber Consults His Dream-Book And Says Innocent New York Is Being Tortured Without Knowing It

And the other flung across eight columns, in letters of vermilion, the legend:

CANDIDATE PREACHES PRIVATE WAR WITH FIRE AND SWORD!

In the treatment of the strike, Luke fared even worse. He was held up as a hypocrite that championed the People from the platform and sweated the poor in the shops. He was paraded as the real owner of R. H. Forbes & Son. The papers generally most bitter against labor movements published long accounts of the strike, denunciatory interviews with the strike-leaders, and tables showing how badly the wages paid by the Forbes firm compared with the wage-scale already in operation in the factories controlled by the clothing-trust. There was a hurriedly drawn cartoon that depicted Luke wearing a Liberty-cap and hurling a bomb at a figure labeled "Conservative Business": he was addressing a mob from a soap-box that was supported by the bowed shoulders of his oppressed employees. The most respectable newspaper in New York hinted that his political attack was made against his business rivals solely because they were his business rivals, and the least respectable declared that his quarrel with the workers stamped his election doctrines as the gospel of Murder for Profit.

As Luke entered the door of the Broadway building in which the Municipal Reform League had its headquarters, he came up with Venable also going in. The old man's hand trembled as he greeted the candidate.

"We seem to have raised a real thunderstorm," said Luke, smiling. "I hope it'll clear the atmosphere."

"Then you know?" asked Venable. "You've seen it in the papers?"

"How could I help it?" said Luke. "It's all over them."

"Oh, the speech?"

"That and this strike at the Forbes factory, yes."

"I didn't mean those things," said Venable. "I meant this."

He took from his coat-pocket a folded newspaper open at the financial and real estate page. He pointed a shaking finger at first one and then another obscure paragraph, both printed in small type and far separated.

Luke read the paragraphs. Each applied to the same block of an uptown street. The former said that a new branch of an elevated railroad would be run through this street, and the latter curtly announced that two of the apartment houses in the block were about to be converted into tenements for negroes.

"My apartment house," said Venable simply, "the one that all my money is invested in, will have those 'L'-tracks running in front of its second-floor windows. It is just between the two houses that are to to be made into tenements."

Luke swore softly.

"Who's back of this?" he demanded.

"You know what influences control that elevated road," said Venable.

"And the tenements?"

"They've just been bought by Hallett."

"It's ruin?"

"It will be very close to it."

Luke gripped Venable's shoulder.

"You get out of this," he commanded. "Leave the League and go to them; they'll change their plans: that's why they've made their plans the way they have."

"No," said Venable, "I won't do it. I can't. I'm pretty old to be poor, but I'm too old to change my opinions."

He was still talking in this manner when they entered the League's quarters and were greeted with the news that burglars had been there the night before.

"Nothin's been touched in any of the offices but yours, Mr. Huber," said the breathless clerk who poured out this story to them; "but there the safe's been blown open, and I don't know what's missin'. I sent for the police right away."

"The police?" said Luke. "Stop your joking, Charley."

"I'm not jokin', Mr. Huber. I did send for them. They've been here. They said they'd have a detective over from headquarters before long."

Luke hurried to his office. Bits of charred blanket and several match-ends lay about the floor. The door of the safe swung lamely upon a single hinge. Inside was a tumbled mass of papers. Otherwise the room seemed undisturbed.

Quickly, Luke ran over the papers in the yawning safe. He looked up at Venable.

"Everything's here," he said.

"Are you sure?" asked Venable.

"Quite." Luke went to his desk. Its lock had been forced. There had been a rude attempt to restore the contents to the order in which Luke had left them when he quitted the office the day before, but he saw at once that everything had been examined. "And they didn't get anything from here, either," he added.

"I wonder what they were after?" said Venable.

"So do I," said Luke acridly. "At any rate, they didn't get it." The telephone rang as he bent beside it. He took the receiver from its hook. "Yes?" he said. "Oh, Mr. Venable? Yes, he's here—right: he's here in my office, I say. Want to talk to him?" He held up the receiver. "It's that new worker, Jarvie," he explained. "He wants to talk to you."

Rapidly as events had of late happened to Luke and the Municipal Reform League, they were happening this morning with a speed theretofore unequaled. Venable had not exchanged a dozen sentences over the telephone before he told Jarvie to wait a minute and, ringing off, faced Luke, with his cheeks gone gray.

"This—this is the worst thing yet!" he gasped.

Luke was leaning against the desk, his hands closed over its edge.

"What is?"

"This, that Jarvie says. It's—Oh!" Venable flung up his hands. "It's too much!"

Luke's grip tightened.

"Tell me what it is."

Venable crumpled into the chair before the telephone.

"A couple of the Progressives' detectives have caught Jarvie trying to buy one of Heney's lieutenants."

"What?" cried Luke. The veins stood out, big and blue, on his gripping hands.

"Of course the Heney man was really working with the detectives," moaned Venable; "but that won't help. They had a dictaphone in the hotel room——"

"In what hotel room?"

"The one that Jarvie was to meet the Heney man in. I thought he'd be more careful. I told him——"

Luke stood erect. He folded his arms. Venable's confession shook him, but he exerted all his strength of will to command himself.

"What are you telling me?" he asked. "Are you telling me that the League has been going in for rotten work of that sort? Are you telling me that you—you of all people—have been engineering it?"

Venable's terror gave quick place to amazement.

"You don't mean to say you didn't understand that?" he countered. "How do you suppose politics are run, anyway? Where have you been all these years under Leighton?" Anger came to his aid; his loose jaw wagged. "Don't try to get out of this trouble by pretending you didn't know about it. What we do, we do for the best ends, but I have always said—always—that the only way to beat the devil is to fight him with fire."

"Wait, please," said Luke. "I want to get this thing straight. You say that all your reform movements have had some of this element in them?"

"I say we have always fought the devil with fire."

"And this campaign. You've used your fire in it?"

"As little as possible. We never used more than we could help."

"Did the committee know it?"

Venable reached for the telephone.

"I can't waste time over such quibbles now," he said. "Jarvie's arrested and we must get him out and learn the details to prepare our defense."

"But the committee knew?"

"Oh, ask them yourself! They have a meeting this afternoon. Of course, they knew! They have been in these fights since long before you were sent to school, and they are not fools."

"You bet I will ask them!" said Luke.

He walked out of his office, out of the League headquarters and into the street.

§2. His tired brain demanded action. It presented one picture, a canvas as full of figures as a battlefield by Delacroix. There he saw all that he had done or caused to be done: Yeates turned back to the baser cause, Nelson forced to follow, Venable facing financial disaster and soiling his old hands with crime; burglary, prostitution, and fraud stimulated to defeat him; police, city officials, and bankers corrupted to ensnare him; his little fortune, on which hung his mother's living, imperiled; Betty imperiled, Forbes and the honorable business history of his firm imperiled; the factory's employees fronting starvation and threatening violence; the elder political parties dragged into a repetition of their former offenses, the reform organization sharing in the evils it sought to reform—these were the present results of his endeavors to civic righteousness. Could mankind be so closely linked? Was there no end to the lives and souls that must be wronged or made wrong by one man trying to do right? He could not contemplate the question.

To escape thought and find action, he went to Brooklyn. He took a taxi to the factory.

The huge brown building rose taciturn before him, ugly, dour. It ran the whole way across the end of the street and was flanked by rows of tumbledown dwellings. One tenuous column of smoke curled from the chimney of its engine-room, but, all about, the streets had an air to which Luke was wholly unaccustomed. The traffic that used to rattle through them had ceased; they seemed at first sight empty; yet at every corner were groups of men and women, idle with that idleness which sits like the outward tokens of a contagious disease upon workers who have ceased their work in anger.

Luke saw them glance up at him as his open taxicab whirled past them: uncouth, slouching figures, with stooped shoulders and sullen faces. He had not supposed that he could be known to a score of them, but the portraits of him distributed for campaign purposes had made him familiar: the first few groups merely looked at him and sneered; then someone shouted an obscene epithet after him, and when the cab drew up before the office-door of the factory, a half-brick, tossed from the farther side of the street, shattered the glass windscreen at the chauffeur's back.

Luke's impulse was toward physical reprisal. He jumped from the taxi and darted around it.

On the other side of the street there was only a single figure in sight: a figure that leaned against a lamp-post. Once it had been a woman; now it was only misery. Red toes burst from its bulging shoes from which the stockings fell so far that, the filthy skirt held up by a claw-like hand, at least six inches of thin shank, a pale blue, were visible. The ragged jacket hung open over an open blouse that showed a flat chest. Tangled hair, hatless, fell about and almost hid a red and swollen face. Through the hair a loose mouth gaped, and a pair of eyes burned yellow. The right hand was extended, clenched.

"You go to hell, you hypocrite!" croaked the figure.

Luke turned toward the factory-door. To reach it, he had to press through a double line of men and women, silent, ominous: the strikers' picket-line. The woman's voice croaked from across the street:

"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!

Halleyloolyah, bum again!"

Luke's memory saw a small, crowded room papered in green, with framed advertisements about the walls and many tables, at one of which sat an unshaven, uncollared man who wore a greasy derby hat....

Luke pushed open the office-door and hurried to Forbes's office.

§3. The office was crowded. Forbes, determined, sat at his desk; he faced a line of slouching men in shabby clothes, who held their hats in their hands and shuffled their uneasy feet, and were headed by one man, dressed as they were, but better fed and brawny, his large face hard, his hat upon his head. Luke knew that this was the workers' committee led by the organizer.

"I haven't another word to say," Forbes was declaring. A hint of relief came to his voice when he saw Luke. "Oh, Huber," he broke off: "Good-morning. Come over here and sit down. I am just telling these men for the last time that we will meet them in the matter of hours, but we can't and won't grant them the ruinous increase of wages they want." As Luke took a chair beside him, he continued, addressing his employees and carefully avoiding the organizer: "I have one gang of men coming here in half an hour to take your jobs. There are more where they came from, and we'll be running full blast this time to-morrow. If you're not back at work by the time the first gang of men gets here, you'll never get back."

Luke expected a growl of anger: there was no sound from them.

The organizer coughed.

"Mr. Forbes——" he began.

Forbes smacked his hands together.

"I don't know you!" he snapped.

"You know who I am," said the organizer calmly. "I told you."

"I don't recognize your right to be here."

"I haven't any right, because it's against the principles of our organization to treat with employers, but I thought——"

Raging, Forbes stood up.

"Against your principles, is it?" he cried. "Well, it's against the principles of this firm to talk to you!"

"Mr. Forbes——"

"That's all I've got to say."

The organizer was unruffled. He maintained a rather terrifying dignity. He turned to the men.

"Come on, fellows," he said.

With a loud scraping of feet, the strikers and their leader passed out of the room.

Luke and Forbes remained quiet. Even for some time after the room was empty, they said nothing, and while they sat thus, a boyish voice rose from the street:

"Oh, I love my boss:

He's a good friend o' mine;

An' that's why I'm starving

Out in the bread-line!"

Somebody laughed, and several voices took up the chorus:

"Halleyloolyah, I'm a bum—bum!..."

The boyish voice continued:

"Oh, why don't you work

Like other men do?

How in Hell can I work

When there's no work to do?"

"That's their logic," said Forbes fretfully. He nodded toward the street. "How can you argue with people of that sort?"

"It didn't strike me that you were arguing," said Luke. "What are you going to do?"

"What I said."

"You meant it, then?"

"Every word. I've taken your advice, after all: I've employed that strike-breaker: Breil, you know."

Luke had heard of him. Breil, he knew, owned several hundred fighting-men and took them to all parts of the country under the pretense that they were workers anxious to start the wheels of industries stopped by strikers. Wherever Breil went, trouble followed.

"Then you'd better employ the Pinkertons, too," said Luke.

"They're too expensive," Forbes said. "Besides," he added, "that sort of thing's un-American. We won't need detectives to protect the right of the worker to work. If we need any help, we'll call in the police. I thought you understood that. I'm afraid you will never learn the art of handling men, Huber."

Luke was anxious for a fight. The corruption that he had discovered in the League fired his primitive instincts. He was angry, and it was of small consequence to him upon whom he visited his anger. Here his own fortune, honestly come by, was threatened; his mother's support, Forbes's and Betty's. It was an excellent opportunity.

"I'm with you," he said. "When do you expect the first contingent of Breil's men?"

"When I said: in half an hour."

"Have you 'phoned police headquarters?"

"No. What's the use? I don't want to court a fight. The presence of the police before there was a fight might only start one. Headquarters sent me down two extra men this morning when I asked for them, and that's enough for the present."

Luke bent to the telephone.

"I don't agree with you," he said.

Forbes's protest was mild. Luke called police headquarters and stated his case. When he mentioned his name, he was told that the Police Commissioner was not to be found.

"Then find him," said Luke.

"I think he's gone out," came the answer.

"If you don't find him after what I've told you, I'll show up your action at the next meeting I speak at," said Luke.

The Commissioner was found.

"But what trouble have you had so far?" he demanded.

"We haven't had any so far," said Luke. "What we want is to avoid trouble."

"I think you're easy scared," laughed the Commissioner. "Have there been any threats?"

"No."

"Well, what's itching you, anyhow? My department's got three campaign parades and a dozen meetings on its hands to-day besides its regular business. I can't spare my men unless I know they're needed."

He rang off.

§4. Luke wanted to stay for the arrival of Breil's men; but there was something else that he had to do and could not postpone. He left the factory a few minutes before the hour at which the strike-breakers were to arrive. He passed into a street slowly filling with strikers, but he reassured himself by the reflection that what he had to do would be brief and that he would soon be free to return. He hurried to the League's headquarters, where he knew that the Committee would soon be in session.

For, under all his absorption in the affairs of the factory, and in spite of his desire to abjure thought for action, his brain had been busy. It was telling him something new about politics. It was receiving the truth about parties as, from his vantage-ground, he had seen it.