"I"m listening," she said; and he rehea.r.s.ed the-facts for her, concealing nothing.
"What a curious thing human nature is!" she commented, when he had made an end. "My better judgment says you were all kinds of a somebody for not clinching the nail when you had it so well driven home. And yet I can"t help admiring your exalted fanaticism. I do love consistency, and the courage of it. But tell me, if you can, how far these fair-fighting scruples of yours go. You have made it perfectly plain that if a thief should steal your pocketbook, you would suffer loss before you"d compromise with him to get it back. But suppose you should catch him at it: would you feel compelled to call a policeman--or would you----"
He antic.i.p.ated her.
"You are doing me an injustice on the other side, now. I"ll fight as furiously as you like. All I ask is to be given a weapon that won"t b.l.o.o.d.y my hands."
"Good!" she said approvingly. "I think I have found the weapon, but it"s desperate, desperate! And O David! you"ve got to have a cool head and a steady hand when you use it. If you haven"t, it will kill everybody within the swing of it--everybody but the man you are trying to reach."
"Draw it and let me feel its edge," he said shortly.
Her chair was close beside the low-swung hammock. She bent to his ear and whispered a single sentence. For a minute or two he sat motionless, weighing and balancing the chance of success against the swiftly multiplying difficulties and hazards.
"You call it desperate," he said at length; "if there is a bigger word in the language, you ought to find it and use it. The risk is that of a forlorn hope; not so much for me, perhaps, as for the innocent--or at least ignorant--accomplices I"ll have to enlist."
She nodded.
"That is true. But how much is your railroad worth?"
"It is bonded for fifty millions first, and twenty millions second mortgage."
"Well, seventy millions are worth fighting for: worth a very considerable risk, I should say."
"Yes." And after another thoughtful interval: "How did you come to think of it?"
"It grew out of a bit of talk with the man who will have to put the apex on our pyramid after we have done our part."
"Will he stand by us? If he doesn"t, we shall all be no better than dead men the morning after the fact."
She clasped her hands tightly over her knee, and said:
"That is one of the chances we must take, David; one of the many. But it is the last of the bridges to be crossed, and there are lots of them in between. Are the details possible? That was the part I couldn"t go into by myself."
He took other minutes for reflection.
"I can"t tell," he said doubtfully. "If I could only know how much time we have."
Her eyes grew luminous.
"David, what would you do without me?" she asked. "To-morrow night, in Stephen Hawk"s office in Gaston, you will lose your railroad. MacFarlane is there, or if he isn"t, he"ll be there in the morning. Bucks, Guilford and Hawk will go down from here to-morrow evening; and the Overland people are to come up from Midland City to meet them."
There was awe undisguised in the look he gave her, and it had crept into his voice when he said:
"Portia, are you really a flesh-and-blood woman?"
She smiled.
"Meaning that your ancestors would have burned me for a witch? Perhaps they would: I think quite likely they burned women who made better martyrs. But I didn"t have to call in Flibbertigibbet. The programme is a carefully guarded secret, to be sure; but it is known--it had to be known--to a number of people outside of our friends the enemy. You"ve heard the story of the inventor and his secret, haven"t you?"
"No."
"Well, the man had invented something, and he told the secret of it to his son. After a little the son wanted to tell it to a friend. The old man said, "Hold on; I know it--that"s one"--holding up one finger--"you know it--that"s eleven"--holding up another finger beside the first; "and now if you tell this other fellow, that"ll be one hundred and eleven"--holding up three fingers. That is the case with this programme. One of the one hundred and eleven--he is a person high up in the management of the Overland Short Line--dropped a few words in my hearing and I picked them up. That"s all."
"It is fearfully short--the time, I mean," he said after another pause.
"We can"t count on any help from any one in authority. Guilford"s broom has swept the high-salaried official corners clean. But the wage-people are mutinous and ripe for anything. I"ll go and find out where we stand."
And he groped on the floor of the veranda for his hat.
"No, wait a minute," she interposed. "We are not quite ready to adjourn yet. There remains a little matter of compensation--your compensation--to be considered. You are still on the company"s payrolls?"
"In a way, yes; as its legal representative on the ground."
"That won"t do. If you carry this thing through successfully it must be on your own account, and not as the company"s paid servant. You must resign and make terms with Boston beforehand; and that, too, without telling Boston what you propose to do."
He haggled a little at that.
"The company is ent.i.tled to my services," he a.s.serted.
"It is ent.i.tled to what it pays for--your legal services. But this is entirely different. You will be acting upon your own initiative, and you"ll have to spend money like water at your own risk. You must be free to deal with Boston as an outsider."
"But I have no money to spend," he objected.
Again the brown eyes grew luminous; and again she said:
"What would you do without me? Happily, my information came early enough to enable me to get a letter to Mr. Ormsby. He answered promptly by wire this morning. Here is his telegram."
She had been winding a tightly folded slip of paper around her fingers, and she smoothed it out and gave it to him. He held it in a patch of the electric light between the dancing leaf shadows and read:
"Plot Number Two approved. Have wired one hundred thousand to Kent"s order Security Bank. Have him draw as he needs."
"So now you see," she went on, "you have the sinews of war. But you must regard it as an advance and name your fee to the Boston folk so you can pay it back."
He protested again, rather weakly.
"It looks like extortion; like another graft," he said; and now she lost patience with him.
"Of all the Puritan fanatics!" she cried. "If it were a simple commercial transaction by which you would save your clients a round seventy million dollars, which would otherwise be lost, would you scruple to take a proportionate fee?"
"No; certainly not."
"Well, then; you go and tell Mr. Loring to wire his Advisory Board, and to do it to-night."
"But I"ll have to name a figure," said Kent.
"Of course," she replied.
Kent thought about it for a long minute. Then he said: "I wonder if ten thousand dollars, and expenses, would paralyze them?"
Miss Van Brock"s comment was a little shriek of derision.