"You"re lying, Ed! Tell me the whole truth. Did you sell what you knew to the _Nationalist_, or to Frost and his crowd?"
He became stubborn all at once, and refused to answer. I turned to the lawyer:--
"See that man! I picked him out of the bankruptcy court two years ago, after giving him his third start in business. Last winter I sent his wife South and kept her there six months so that she could get well."
I turned to Ed.
"Whose bread are you eating now, to-day?"
He picked up his hat and started for the door. But I called him back. It came over me all at once what we had been through together, and I couldn"t let him leave that way, sneak out of my sight for good and all.
"Tell me, Ed," I asked, more miserable than he, "are you going over to Carmichael to get some more pay for this?"
"Maybe, if I did," he replied sullenly, "it"d be some better than it is working for you."
"I don"t think so--not long. Folks like you aren"t worth much. Come, Ed!
Did I ever do a mean thing to you? Didn"t I give fifteen cents when we hadn"t but twenty between us? What were you thinking when you did this dirty piece of business? Just tell me you were drunk when you did it. I would have given you ten times as much as you ever got from them to know you couldn"t do it!"
[Ill.u.s.tration: "_You have done something the taste of which will never get out of your mouth._"]
Then he began to go to pieces and cry, and he told me all I wanted to know. It was a plain case of the poison of envy. I was rich and on top, and he was working for thirty dollars a week for me. His wife, who had always kept a grudge against me for not making up to her in the old days, had taunted him for taking his wages from me. She kept telling him that I did nothing for him, and when she found out about his dealing with Lucas Smith for me, she saw her chance. Somehow Frost got on his track, and evidently they thought his information was worth paying something for. That was the whole story.
While we were talking, Sloc.u.m slipped out of the room. It was a pitiful scene.
"Ed," I said finally, "you must go back to the country. That is the only place for you. You"ll grow worse in the city the longer you stay. Your belly"s got bigger than your brain, and your heart is tainted at the core. I will start you on a ranch I"ve got in Texas. Think it over and get out of this place as soon as you can. I"m sorry for you, Ed. For you have done something the taste of which will never get out of your mouth."
He left my office without a word, and that was the last I ever saw of him. When he had gone Sloc.u.m came back and sat down.
"It was a pretty tough thing for Ed to do," he remarked calmly, looking out into the muddy street, where men were hurrying along the pavements.
I made no remark, and he added in the same far-off tone of voice: "That"s the worst of any piece of crooked business: it breaks up the man you work with. Ed is a rascal now--and he was never that before!"
"That"s true enough," I a.s.sented gloomily.
Sloc.u.m advised me to leave the city for a while, because should the _Nationalist_ charges be investigated by the Grand Jury, it might be awkward for me. But I refused to leave the city: no matter what happened, I was not the man to run and hide. The Democratic papers made all they could out of the affair, and then after the election it died away. Garretson was reelected, and that was a kind of vindication for him.
But the insiders in the city knew that something had been wrong, and, as Sloc.u.m said, the scandal connected with quashing that injunction followed us for many years. It was of less importance to me than to Sloc.u.m; for the men with whom I dealt were used to stories like mine.
They believed what they had a mind to, and did business. But for Sloc.u.m it was more serious.
The worst of it for me was at home. Sarah brooded over the newspaper talk until she was morbid, refusing to go almost anywhere she would be likely to meet people she knew. The Bible cla.s.ses had been given up, and, naturally enough, we never went back to Mr. Hardman"s church, nor returned to our old church. Sarah and I talked about it once or twice, but we got nowhere.
"I should think you would care for the children!" she would cry, persisting in considering me as a criminal.
"You"ll see that it won"t make the smallest difference to any one a year hence, if you"ll only hold up your head!"
"Well, I don"t understand business, but May thinks it pretty bad, I know, because she doesn"t come to the house any more when you are at home."
"She has no reason to act that way. And I don"t mean to have you or May or any other woman holding me up with your notions of what"s right and wrong, just because the newspapers make a lot of talk."
That ended the matter between us; but for a long time Sarah avoided our old friends, and the house was unusually quiet.
What troubled me more than the racket in Chicago was the way that Dround and Farson and a few other of our backers might take the story. The Drounds were in Egypt, but they would hear the news quickly enough. Mr.
Dround was the president of our corporation, and the most influential single stockholder. With his ideas, he might become a nuisance, or draw out altogether, which would be awkward in the present condition of the company.
As for Farson, I always counted a good deal on that crusty bit of rock, and he had never failed me yet. One thing after another had come up in the last four years, and he and his friends had backed me solidly. We were pretty deep in other enterprises than this packing business--railroads and land in that Southwest where I had set my eyes.
While the scandal was the worst we never heard a word from Farson, and I was congratulating myself that he had overlooked the matter, when one morning I received a despatch: "Meet me Union Station twelve to-morrow.
FARSON." That was all.
When he got out of the sleeper that noon I missed his usual warm smile.
He refused my invitation to lunch at the City Club, and led the way into the fly-specked, smelly restaurant at the station. We ate our miserable meal, and he said little while I talked to him about our affairs. It was like talking to a blank wall: he listened but said nothing. After a while he interrupted me in a kind of thin whisper, as if his mind had been absent all the time:--
"What about this Judge Garretson? It isn"t true?"
"You mean what the papers say?"
The old gentleman didn"t like newspapers. But he waived that aside with a frown.
"The facts!" he whispered across the table. "I should not have mentioned it had it not been for a conversation which I had the other day in New York with Judge Sloan, of the Chicago bar. He tells me that it is generally believed to be true that this Garretson was bribed, and that my old friend Jeff Sloc.u.m was mixed up in it. He says that Sloc.u.m has lost his reputation among the best men of the profession on account of his connection with this scandal. What are the facts?"
"This is hardly the place to go into all that," I replied somewhat tartly.
"I don"t know but that the place is good enough," the banker observed dryly, "provided you have the right things to say." But he took the frost out of his severe tone by one of his most genial smiles, and added more gently:--
"Perhaps you young men don"t realize how serious it is to have such rumors get around about your reputation. Why, my boy, it puts you in another cla.s.s! You are no longer gentlemen, who can be trusted with honest people"s money and confidence."
Farson would be a hard man to bring to my point of view! I said by way of allegory:--
"When a man comes out of the alley and puts a pistol in your face, and asks for all the money you have on you, you don"t wait to see where you hit him, do you? We don"t here in Chicago. The men who are making all this talk were the hold-ups, and they did not get our money." I laughed.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "_When a man comes out of the alley and puts a pistol in your face, and asks for all the money you have on you, you don"t wait to see where you hit him, do you?_"]
But he did not laugh with me--instead, he shut up like a clam all at once. He finished his corned beef hash and tea, making a few remarks about the train service on the road he had come over. I asked him some questions about our railroad matters, but he merely mumbled "Um, um" to all I had to say. Finally he said with his usual calm courtesy that he had some letters to write, and as the train for the West he was to take did not leave for some time he would not detain me, but would go upstairs to the waiting-room and write his letters. So he seized his worn old grip and marched off.
"Cursed old Maine Yankee," I said to myself, and I repeated the remark over the telephone to Sloc.u.m, telling him the result of my luncheon with the banker.
"Maybe so," the lawyer telephoned back. "But we can"t afford to let him get his back up."
"It"s up already--he"s been talking with Sloan, and I gather the judge didn"t speak highly of you or me."
"I suppose not," came the answer over the wire, and Sloc.u.m"s voice sounded dreary. "That kind of thing dies hard."
It _was_ dying hard, and no doubt about it!
CHAPTER XXI
A SQUEEZE