"Oh, I can prove them, all right. Proof is pretty easily secured--circ.u.mstantial evidence enough to hang a man with any jury.

But I didn't really think you'd look at it in quite this light, sir. I had not come to the point of recommending that the company withdraw from the Conference. It struck me that before we made that move, certain expedients might be tried."

"Expedients? Such as what, sir?"

"Well, I thought possibly you might be willing to--meet a few of these most open cases of compet.i.tion with similar methods--"

He stopped, at the expression of his chief's face.

"You thought, did you, that because these men, my compet.i.tors, have no respect for their publicly pledged word, I would be willing to be equally indulgent. Mr. O'Connor, you have served a long time under me, and I am surprised at you! When James Wintermuth gets to the point where he is unable to live up to his promises, it will be time for him to quit. We are not in that business, sir."

The Vice-President summoned a forced smile to his lips.

"I think you misunderstood me, sir," he replied smoothly. "I would not myself suggest special commission deals at these places. Of course I agree with you that we should always respect our pledges. But at the same time it struck me that--"

"I don't want to hear what struck you," retorted Mr. Wintermuth, with unwonted asperity. "Let me see the proofs--I will take the necessary action. Is that what you have there--those papers?"

"One or two of them, sir. My princ.i.p.al ones naturally come from word of mouth. For example, I have talked with responsible men who have seen the Trenton agent's bank deposit slips for certain sums, dated, month after month, coincidently with the visit of a certain special agent. I can give you all the proofs any one could wish--if you need any more after what you have in your hand."

Mr. Wintermuth turned to his desk to indicate that the interview was over and he wished to be alone. And it was a well-satisfied conspirator who retired to his own office. Privately reflecting that the deed was as good as done, Mr. O'Connor returned almost instantly to his ruling pa.s.sion of caution. Now to conceal or to make vague as far as possible his own intent in the matter.

"Ask Mr. Smith to step here a moment," he said to Jimmy, and a shadow of a smile crossed his face. The idea of using Smith to help serve as a foil for himself had an element of grim humor to which Mr. O'Connor was not entirely blind. Smith, of all men, by all means.

With a troubled expression on his face he turned to meet his subordinate.

"I've been talking to the chief about the crooked work in the Conference," he said. "Trenton and Syracuse and some of the rotten spots. I'm afraid I made it a little strong. I swear I didn't imagine he'd take the thing so much to heart or I believe I'd have kept still entirely."

"What did you tell him for?" asked the General Agent, not especially impressed.

"Well, I was getting pretty tired of seeing some of those fellows put it over us, and I thought perhaps he'd let us fight fire with--well, fireworks. Instead of which, he flew up to the ceiling. He wants to get out."

"Get out? Out of the Eastern Conference?" Smith inquired with more interest.

"Yes. And such a move might be justified, strictly speaking, but it seems to me a little extreme--just a little uncalled for. There are a few crooked companies in every agreement, concerns that take advantage of the good faith of the rest--like the Protection of Newark--but after all, even under present conditions, we're getting about as much business as we're ent.i.tled to, and pretty nearly as much as we're willing to write. What do you think?"

Smith looked sharply at his superior officer.

"Why do you put it up to me?" he asked. "If the President has decided to get out, that settles it--out we go."

"Oh, he hasn't absolutely decided. I thought I'd tell you about it, in case he asked you what you thought."

"I see," replied the General Agent, thoughtfully, and said no more.

"Well?" queried O'Connor, expectantly, after a moment.

"If he asks me, I'll tell him what I think. Is that all, sir?"

"Yes, that's about all."

The Vice-President, gazing a trifle uneasily at Smith's departing back, somehow felt that he could not flatter himself on having done what he wished toward the covering of his tracks. But, as it chanced, Mr.

O'Connor's elaborate mechanism for befogging his trail was entirely wasted, for the President, so far as could be learned, said not a thing on the subject to anybody. He took home the papers O'Connor had left him, and studied them, presumably alone, for several days. He did not seek to cross-examine O'Connor's witnesses. From something that gentleman had said, he had gained the impression that outside parole evidence would probably be prejudiced, and he felt that the doc.u.ments in his possession were sufficient to govern his verdict. He conceived that here was a matter for calm, deliberate judgment, for the exercise of the critical, judicial faculty, which he felt he possessed in a high degree. This was not precisely vanity; it was rather the long habit of undisputed dicta. He felt that here was an excellent opportunity for justifying his reputation for independence of decision and action.

So Mr. Wintermuth, pondering in silence for nearly a fortnight, left his Vice-President stretched on the rack of uncertainty without a glance in his direction. To all the tentative efforts O'Connor made to reopen the subject, his chief returned a curt refusal. There was nothing to do but to wait, and O'Connor, with increasingly bad grace, waited.

Not until the close of the second week was his suspense ended, and then not by any intimation from headquarters. Mr. Wintermuth had acted overnight, and had given his verdict directly to the press; and thus it was that the Vice-president, opening one morning the _Journal of Commerce_ to the insurance page, found himself confronted by the headline:--

"Guardian Quits the Conference."

Mr. O'Connor sank back into his chair with a sigh of relief, and carefully read and reread the article from beginning to end. It was very brief, stating simply that Mr. Wintermuth had sent to the Conference the resignation of the Guardian, for "reasons which could be better imagined than discussed," and proposed henceforward to conduct the operations of the company without reference to any "unequally restrictive restrictions."

It was with positive buoyancy that the Vice-president delivered the paper into the hands of Jimmy, for its processional through the office.

CHAPTER XII

It was late afternoon in the drawing room of Miss Wardrop's house in Washington Square. The short November dusk was fading into night, and outside in the old Square, the street lights gleamed in the frosty air.

In the fireplace, before which two people were sitting, a wood fire crackled, throwing fantastic shadows about the old room.

Dinner at Miss Wardrop's was at half after seven. Just why Mr. Smith should have considered it necessary to drop in, on his way home from the Guardian, could no doubt have been better explained had his face not been shaded by his hand. The face in the room best worth seeing, however, was not so shaded, and Smith manifested no displeasure at the fact. He himself sat on the chimney seat, and he appeared to be less talkative than usual. His reticence may or may not have been understood by Miss Maitland, but if it were, she chose to pretend otherwise.

"Why are you so very silent?" she finally asked. "Do you know, it isn't at all flattering. One might think your thoughts were a thousand miles away from here."

"Well, perhaps some of them are," Smith confessed. "And I must really ask your pardon for thinking far away, when I am with you. And yet,"

he smiled slightly, "perhaps you also came in as an important factor in the background of those far-off thoughts."

"If you are trying to stimulate my curiosity, you have been quite successful," said Miss Maitland, and she waited expectantly.

"Do you remember Mr. O'Connor, the Vice-President of the Guardian?"

Smith asked abruptly.

"Yes. He was the one, wasn't he, who came into Mr. Wintermuth's office for a minute?"

"Yes."

"You say he is Vice-president of the company? Is he a great friend of yours? Perhaps my first impression was wrong, but I don't believe I liked Mr. O'Connor very much--not nearly so much as that amusing Mr.

Cuyler, or nice, polite Mr. Wintermuth, or queer, silent Mr. Bartels."

"Well, between you and me, I don't believe your first impression was far from correct. I don't like O'Connor much, myself," said Smith.

"More than that, I know he is unfriendly to me. But that is not the point. The point is that he is up to something, and I don't know what it is. And I've got to find out what it is. That's what I was thinking of."

"What kind of a thing do you mean? And what has he done to make you think so?" the girl asked.

"He has succeeded in persuading the President to take the Guardian out of the Eastern Conference. And I can't figure out why. He's got some ulterior motive, but I can't guess what it is."

"What is the Eastern Conference?"

"It's a sort of a.s.sociation of insurance companies doing business in New England, New York, and other Atlantic states. Most of the best companies belong to it. It's a sort of offensive and defensive alliance. It keeps down the general expense of conducting business by limiting the rate of commission its members can pay to any agent, and it supplies inspections to its members and does a lot of other things.

But it really isn't a question of what the Conference does for its members so much as a question of what it may do to the Guardian, if the Guardian gets out. There's considerable quiet coercion about such a union, you see--the Conference companies can make it very interesting for an outsider, if they choose to do so. And after a company has been operating on the inside for a good many years, it's hard to jump the fence and make so radical a change. It upsets your organization."