She interrupted him again, but this time her laugh did not hurt him.

"Yes; our friendship antedates Mr. Ormsby; it is old enough to excuse anything you said--or were going to say."

"Thank you," he rejoined, and he meant it. "What I was going to say touches a matter which I believe you haven't confided to any one. May I talk business for a few minutes?"

"If you will light your pipe and go on smoking. It makes me nervous to have people hang on the brink of things."

He lighted the pipe, wondering what other thing he might do to allay her nervousness. None the less, he would not go back from his purpose, which was barrier-building.

"I have thought, wholly without warrant, perhaps, that your loss in this railroad steal has had something to do with the postponement of your happiness--and Ormsby's. Has it?"

"And if it should have?"

"I merely wanted to say that we still have a fighting chance. But one of the hard and fast conditions is that every individual stockholder shall hang on to his or her holdings like grim death."

She caught her breath with a little gasp.

"The encouragement comes too late for us. We have parted with our stock."

Kent turned cold and hot and cold again while she was saying it. Then the lawyer in him came uppermost.

"Is it gone beyond recall? How much too late am I?" he demanded.

"My mother wrote the letter to-day. She had an offer from some one in New York."

Kent was on his feet instantly.

"Has that letter been mailed? Because if it has, it must be stopped by wire!"

Miss Brentwood rose.

"It was on the hall table this afternoon; I'll go and see," and in a moment she returned with the letter in her hand.

Kent took it from her as if it had been an edged weapon or a can of high explosives.

"Heavens! what a turn you gave me!" he said, sitting down again. "Can I see your mother?"

"I think she has gone to bed. What do you want to do?"

"I want to tell her that she mustn't do any such suicidal thing as this."

"You don't know my mother," was the calm reply. "Mr. Ormsby said everything he could think of."

"Then we must take matters into our own hands. Will you help me?"

"How?" she asked.

"By keeping your own counsel and trusting me. Your mother supposes this letter has gone: it has gone--this way." He tore the sealed envelope across and across and dropped the pieces into his pocket. "Now we are safe--at least until the man at the other end writes again."

It shocked her a little, and she did not promise to be a party to the subterfuge. But neither did she say she would not.

"I am willing to believe that you have strong reasons for taking such strong measures," she said. "May I know them?"

Kent's gift of reticence came to his rescue in time to prevent the introduction of another and rather uncertain factor into his complicated problem.

"I can explain it more intelligibly a little later on; or if I don't, Ormsby will. In the mean time, you must take my word for it that we shall have our railroad back in due season."

It is a question for the psychologists to answer if there be or be not crises in a man's life when the event, weighty or trivial, turns upon that thing which, for the want of a better name, is called a premonition.

In the silence that followed his dismissal of the subject, Kent became aware of a vague prompting which was urging him to cut his visit short.

There was no definable reason for his going. He had finally brought himself to the point of speaking openly to Elinor of her engagement, and they were, as he fondly believed, safely beyond the danger point in that field. Moreover, Penelope was stirring in her hammock and the perilous privacy was at an end. Nevertheless, he rose and said good-night, and was half-way to the next corner before he realized how inexcusably abrupt his leave-taking had been.

When he did realize it, he was of two minds whether to go back or to let the apology excuse another call the following evening. Then the insistent prompting seized him again; and when next he came to a competent sense of things present he was standing opposite the capitol building, staring fixedly up at a pair of lighted windows in the second story.

They were the windows of the governor's room; and David Kent's brain cleared suddenly. In the earliest beginnings of the determinate plan to wrest the Trans-Western out of the grasp of the junto he had known that it must come finally to some desperate duel with the master-spirit of the ringsters. Was Jasper Bucks behind those lighted windows--alone?

Kent had not meant to make the open attack until he should have a weapon in his hands which would arm him to win. But now as he stood looking up at the heckoning windows a mad desire to have it out once for all with the robber-in-chief sent the blood tingling to his finger-tips. True, he had nothing as yet in the oil-field conspiracy that the newspapers or the public would accept as evidence of fraud and corruption. But on the other hand, Bucks was only a man, after all; a man with a bucaneer's record, and by consequence vulnerable beneath the brazen armor of a.s.surance. If the attack were bold enough----

Kent did not stop to argue it out. When a man's blood is up the odds against him shrink and become as naught. Two minutes later he was in the upper corridor of the capitol, striding swiftly to the door of the lighted room.

Recalling it afterward he wondered if the occult prompting which had dragged him out of his chair on the Brentwcod porch saw to it that he walked upon the strip of matting in the tile-paved corridor and so made his approach noiseless. Also, if the same silent monitor bade him stop short of the governor's office: at the door, namely, of the public anteroom, which stood ajar?

A low murmur of voices came from beyond, and for a moment he paused listening. Then he went boldly within, crossing the anteroom and standing fairly in the broad beam of light pouring through the open door of communication with the private office.

Four men sat in low-toned conference around the governor's writing-table, and if any one of them had looked up the silent witness must have been discovered. Kent marked them down one by one: the governor; Hendricks, the secretary of State; Rumford, the oil man; and Senator Duvall. For five pregnant minutes he stood looking on, almost within arm's reach of the four; hearing distinctly what was said; seeing the papers which changed hands across the table. Then he turned and went away, noiselessly as he had come, the thick-piled carpet of the anteroom m.u.f.fling his footfalls.

It was midnight when he reached his quarters in the Clarendon and flung himself full length upon the bed, sodden with weariness. For two hours he had tramped the deserted streets, striving in sharp travail of soul to fit the invincible, chance-given weapon to his hand. When he came in the thing was done, and he slept the sleep of an outworn laborer.

XVIII

DOWN, BRUNO!

For six days after the night of revelations Kent dived deep, personally and by paid proxy, in a sea of secrecy which, but for the five pregnant minutes in the doorway of the governor's office, might easily have proved fathomless.

On the seventh day the conflagration broke out. The editor of the Belmount _Refiner_ was the first to smell smoke and to raise the cry of "Fire!" but by midnight the wires were humming with the news and the entire State was ablaze.

The story as it appeared under the scare headlines the next morning was crisply told. An oil company had been formed with Senator Duvall at its head. After its incorporation it was ascertained that it not only held options on all the most valuable wells in the Belmount region, but that its charter gave it immunity from the law requiring all corporations to have their organizations, officers, and operating headquarters in the State. By the time the new company was three days old it had quietly taken up its options and was the single big fish in the pool by virtue of its having swallowed all the little ones.

Then came the finishing stroke which had set the wires to humming. On the sixth day it was noised about that Senator Duvall had transferred his controlling interest to Rumford--otherwise to the Universal Oil Company; that he had served only as a figurehead in the transaction, using his standing, social and political, to secure the charter which had been denied Rumford and his a.s.sociates.

It had all been managed very skilfully; the capping of the wells by the Universal's agent, the practical sealing up of the entire district, being the first public intimation of the result of Duvall's treachery and the complete triumph of a foreign monopoly.

The storm that swept the State when the facts came out was cyclonic, and it was reported, as it needed to be, that Senator Duvall had disappeared.

Never in the history of the State had public feeling risen so high; and there were not lacking those who said that if Duvall showed himself his life would not be safe in the streets of the capital.