"Eh! See here, I half believe you don't want my aid!" he blurted out.

Standing there above him, smiling down upon him, she could hardly resist telling him the truth--that sooner would she allow her right hand to be burnt off than to accept aid from a man who had flaunted and jeered at her lawyership--that it was her changeless determination not to tell him one single word about her plans--that it was her purpose to go silently ahead and let her success, should she succeed, be her reply to his unbelief. But she checked the impulse to fling the truth in his face--and instead continued to smile inscrutably down upon him.

"I hope that you will do all for my father, for the city, for your own election, that you can," she said. "All I ask is that for the present I be allowed to handle the case by myself."

The Court House tower tolled five. She held out to him a gloved hand.

"Good-by. I'm sorry I can't invite you in," she said lightly, and turned away.

He watched the slender figure go up the steps and into the jail, then turned and walked down the street--exasperated, puzzled, in profound thought.

CHAPTER XIV

THE NIGHT WATCH

The next morning Elijah Stone appeared in Katherine's office as per request. He was a thickly, if not solidly, built gentleman, in imminent danger of a double chin, and with that submerged blackness of the complexion which is the result of a fresh-shaven heavy beard. He kept his jaw clinched to give an appearance of power, and his black eyebrows lowered to diffuse a sense of deeply pondered mystery. His wife considered him a rarely handsome specimen of his s.e.x, and he permitted art to supplement the acknowledged gifts of nature so far as to perfume his glossy black hair, to wear a couple of large diamond rings, and to carry upon the watch chain that clanked heavily across the broad and arching acreage of his waistcoat a begemmed lodge emblem in size a trifle smaller than a paper weight.

He was an affable, if somewhat superior, being, and he listened to Katherine with a still further lowering of his impressive brows. She informed him, in a perplexed, helpless, womanly way, that she was inclined to believe that her father was "the victim of foul play"--the black brows sank yet another degree--and that she wished him privately to investigate the matter. He of course would know far, far better what to do than she, but she would suggest that he keep an eye upon Blake. At first Mr. Stone appeared somewhat sceptical and hesitant, but after peering darkly out for a long and ruminative period at the dusty foliage of the Court House elms, and after hearing the comfortable fee Katherine was willing to pay, he consented to accept the case. As he left he kindly a.s.sured her, with manly pity for her woman's helplessness, that if there was anything in her suspicion she "needn't waste no sleep now about gettin' the goods."

In the days that followed, Katherine saw her Monsieur Lecoque shadowing the movements of Blake with the lightness and general un.o.btrusiveness of a mahogany bedstead ambling about upon its castors.

She soon guessed that Blake perceived that he was being watched, and she imagined how he must be smiling up his sleeve at her simplicity.

Had the matters at stake not been so grave, had she been more certain of the issue, she might have put her own sleeve to a similar purpose.

In the meantime, as far as she could do so without exciting suspicion, she kept close watch upon Blake. It had occurred to her that there was a chance that he had an unknown accomplice whose discovery would make the gaining of the rest of the evidence a simple matter. There was a chance that he might let slip some revealing action. At any rate, till Mr. Manning came, her role was to watch with unsleeping eye for developments. Her office window commanded the entrance to Blake's suite of rooms, and no one went up by day whom she did not see. Her bedroom commanded Blake's house and grounds, and every night she sat at her darkened window till the small hours and watched for possible suspicious visitors, or possible suspicious movements on the part of Blake.

Also she did not forget Doctor Sherman. On the day of her departure for New York, she had called upon Doctor Sherman, and in the privacy of his study had charged him with playing a guilty part in Blake's conspiracy. She had been urged to this course by the slender chance that, when directly accused as she had dared not accuse him in the court-room, he might break down and confess. But Doctor Sherman had denied her charge and had clung to the story he had told upon the witness stand. Since Katherine had counted but little on this chance, she had gone away but little disappointed.

But she did not now let up upon the young minister. Regular attendance at church had of late years not been one of Katherine's virtues, but after her return it was remarked that she did not miss a single service at which Doctor Sherman spoke. She always tried to sit in the very centre of his vision, seeking to keep ever before his mind, while he preached G.o.d's word, the sin he had committed against G.o.d's law and man's. He visibly grew more pale, more thin, more distraught. The changes inspired his congregation with concern; they began to talk of overwork, of the danger of a breakdown; and seeing the dire possibility of losing so popular and pew-filling a pastor, they began to urge upon him the need of a long vacation.

Katherine could not but also give attention to the campaign, since it was daily growing more sensational, and was completely engrossing the town. Blake, in his speeches, stood for a continuance of the rule that had made Westville so prosperous, and dwelt especially upon an improvement in the service of the water-works, though as to the nature of the improvements he confined himself to language that was somewhat vague. Katherine heard him often. He was always eloquent, clever, forceful, with a manly grace of presence upon the platform--just what she, and just what the town, expected him to be.

But the surprise of the campaign, to Katherine and to Westville, was Arnold Bruce. Katherine had known Bruce to be a man of energy; now, in her mind, a forceful if not altogether elegant phrase of Carlyle attached itself to him--"A steam-engine in pants." He was never clever, never polished, he never charmed with the physical grace of his opponent, but he spoke with a power, an earnestness, and an energy that were tremendous. By the main strength of his ideas and his personality he seemed to bear down the prejudice against the principle for which he stood. He seemed to stand out in the mid-current of hostile opinion and by main strength hurl it back into its former course. The man's efforts were nothing less than herculean. He was a bigger man, a more powerful man, than Westville had ever dreamed; and his spirited battle against such apparently hopeless odds had a compelling fascination. Despite her defiantly critical att.i.tude, Katherine was profoundly impressed; and she heard it whispered about that, notwithstanding Blake's great popularity, his party's certainty of success was becoming very much disturbed.

Both Katherine and Bruce were fond of horseback riding--Doctor West's single luxury, his saddle horse, was ever at Katherine's disposal--and at the end of one afternoon they met by chance out along the winding River Road, with its border of bowing willows and mottled sycamores, between whose browned foliage could be glimpsed long reaches of the broad and polished river, steel-gray in the shadows, a flaming copper where the low sun poured over it its parting fire. Little by little Bruce began to talk of his ideals. Presently he was speaking with a simplicity and openness that he had not yet used with Katherine. She perceived, more clearly than before, that whereas he was dogmatic in his ideas and brutally direct in their expression, he was a hot-souled idealist, overflowing with a pa.s.sionate, even desperate, love of democracy, which he feared was in danger of dying out in the land--quietly and painlessly suffocated by a narrowing oligarchy which sought to blind the people to its rule by allowing them the exercise of democracy's dead forms.

His square, rude face, which she watched with a rising fascination, was no longer repellent. It had that compelling beauty, superior to mere tint and moulding of the flesh, which is born of great and glowing ideas. She saw that there was sweetness in his nature, that beneath his rough exterior was a violent, all-inclusive tenderness.

Now and then she put in a word of discriminating approval, now and then a word of well-reasoned dissent.

"I believe you are even more radical than I am!" he exclaimed, looking at her keenly.

"A woman, if she is really radical, has got to be more radical than a man. She sees all the evils and dangers that he sees, and in addition she suffers from injustices and restrictions from which man is wholly free."

He was too absorbed in the afterglow of what he had been saying to take in all the meanings implicated in her last phrase.

"Do you know," he said, as they neared the town, "you are the first woman I have met in Westville to whom one could talk about real things and who could talk back with real sense."

A very sly and pat remark upon his inconsistency was at her tongue's tip. But she realized that he had spoken impulsively, unguardedly, and she felt that it would be little short of sacrilege to be even gently sarcastic after the exalted revelation he had made of himself.

"Thank you," she said quietly, and turned her face and smiled at the now steel-blue reaches of the river.

He dropped in several evenings to see her. When he was in an idealistic mood she was warmly responsive. When he was arbitrary and opinionated, she met him with chaffing and raillery, and at such times she was as elusive, as baffling, as exasperating as a sprite. On occasions when he rather insistently asked her plans and her progress in her father's case, she evaded him and held him at bay. She felt that he admired her, but with a grudging, unwilling admiration that left his fundamental disapproval of her quite unshaken.

The more she saw of this dogmatic dreamer, this erratic man of action, the more she liked him, the more she found really admirable in him.

But mixed with her admiration was an alert and pugnacious fear, so big was he, so powerful, so violently hostile to all the principles involved in her belief that the whole wide world of action should in justice lie as much open to woman to choose from as to man.

Without cessation Katherine kept eyes and mind on Blake. She searched out and pondered over the thousand possible details and ramifications his conspiracy might have. No human plan was a perfect plan. By patiently watching and studying every point there was a chance that she might discover one detail, one slip, one oversight, that would give her the key to the case.

One of the thousand possibilities was that he had an active partner in his scheme. Since no such partner was visible in the open, it was likely that his a.s.sociate was a man with whom Blake wished to have seemingly no relations. Were this conjecture true, then naturally he would meet this confederate in secret. She began to think upon all possible means and places of holding secret conferences. Such a meeting might be held there in Westville in the dead of night. It might be held in any large city in which individuals might lose themselves--Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Chicago. It might be held at any appointed spot within the radius of an automobile journey.

Katherine a.n.a.lyzed every possible place of this last possibility. She began to watch, as she watched other possibilities, the comings and goings of the Blake automobile. It occurred to her that, if anything were in this conjecture, the meeting would be held at night; and then, a little later, it occurred to her to make a certain regular observation. The Blake garage and the West stable stood side by side and opened into the same alley. Every evening while Blake's car was being cleaned--if it had been in use during the day--Katherine went out to say good night to her saddle horse, and as she was on friendly terms with Blake's man she contrived, while exchanging a word with him, to read the mileage record of the speedometer. This observation she carried on with no higher hope of anything resulting from it than from any of a score of other measures. It was merely one detail of her all-embracing vigilance.

Every night she sat on watch--the evening's earlier half usually in the rustic summer-house in the backyard, the latter part at her bedroom window. One night after most of Westville was in bed, her long, patient vigil was rewarded by seeing the Blake automobile slip out with a single vague figure at the wheel and turn into the back streets of the town.

Hours pa.s.sed, and still she sat wide-eyed at her window. It was not till raucous old muzzains of roosters raised from the watch-towers of their various coops their concatenated prophecy of the dawn, that she saw the machine return with its single pa.s.senger. The next morning, as soon as she saw Blake's man stirring about his work, she slipped out to her stable. Watching her chance, she got a glimpse of Blake's speedometer. Then she quickly slipped back to her room and sat there in excited thought.

The evening before the mileage had read 1437; this morning the reading was 1459. Blake, in his furtive midnight journey, had travelled twenty-two miles. If he had slipped forth to meet a secret ally, then evidently their place of meeting was half of twenty-two miles distant.

Where was this rendezvous?

Almost instantly she thought of The Sycamores. That fitted the requirements exactly. It was eleven miles distant--Blake had a cabin there--the place was deserted at this season of the year. Nothing could be safer than for two men, coming in different vehicles, from different points perhaps, to meet at that retired spot at such an eyeless hour.

Perhaps there was no confederate. Perhaps Blake's night trip was not to a secret conference. Perhaps The Sycamores was not the rendezvous. But there was a chance that all three of these conjectures were correct. And if so, there was a chance,--aye, more, a probability--that there would be further midnight trysts.

Bruce had fallen into the habit of dropping in occasionally for a few minutes at the end of an evening's speaking to tell Katherine how matters seemed to be progressing. When he called that night toward ten he was surprised to be directed around to the summer-house. His surprise was all the more because the three months' drought had that afternoon been broken, and the rain was now driving down in gusts and there was a far rumbling of thunder that threatened a nearer and a fiercer cannonading.

Crouching beneath his umbrella, he made his way through the blackness to the summer-house, in which he saw sitting a dim, solitary figure.

"In mercy's name, what are you doing out here?" he demanded as he entered.

"Watching the rain. I love to be out in a storm." Every clap of thunder sent a shiver through her.

"You must go right into the house!" he commanded. "You'll get wet.

I'll bet you're soaked already!"

"Oh, no. I have a raincoat on," she answered calmly. "I'm going to stay and watch the storm a little longer."

He expostulated, spoke movingly of colds and pneumonia. But she kept her seat and sweetly suggested that he avoid his vividly pictured dangers of a premature death by following his own advice. He jerked a rustic chair up beside her, growled a bit in faint imitation of the thunder, then ran off into the wonted subject of the campaign.

As the situation now stood he had a chance of winning, so successful had been his fight to turn back public opinion; and if only he had and could use the evidence Katherine was seeking, an overwhelming victory would be his beyond a doubt. He plainly was chafing at her delays, and as plainly made it evident that he was sceptical of her gaining proof.

But she did not let herself be ruffled. She evaded all his questions, and when she spoke she spoke calmly and with good-nature.

Presently, sounding dimly through a lull in the rising tumult of the night, they heard the Court House clock strike eleven. Soon after, Katherine's ear, alert for a certain sound, caught a m.u.f.fled throbbing that was not distinguishable to Bruce from the other noises of the storm.

She sprang up.