It was a Kind of Prodigy
"The report is set in minion," explained Mr. Sands, "and with this light you can read it plain as ink."
Richard discovered the truth of what Mr. Sands averred; here indeed was Senator Hanway's Northern Consolidated report, and as readily made out as though printed in a book.
"This is the idea," vouchsafed Mr. Sands, who saw that Richard was warm for explanations. "The boss gave out the report in little 'takes' of about fifty words each. That was because it must be kept secret. Fifty printers set it up; then the boss locked the galleys in the strong room. No one except the boss himself had had a glimpse of it. Of course, that made me the more eager to nail it; anything a fellow wants to hide is bound to be big news, d'ye see. Now I'm the man who takes the proofs, and this morning the boss tells me that Senator Hanway wants a copy—one proof, no more. The boss goes to the strong room and brings the galleys to the proof-press. I'm ready for him; I've dampened two sheets of proof-paper and pasted them together. I spread both of them on the types. After I've sent the roller over them, I peel the sheets apart and throw the white one, the one that was on top, on the floor. The bottom one that has the ink-impression on it I pass to the boss. He sees me peel the top sheet off, and it rouses his suspicions.
"'What's that for?' he asks.
"I'm filling my pipe as calm as duck-ponds, and explain that the proof-press in which the galley lies is too deep. It takes two thicknesses to force the sheet down on the face of the types and get a good impression. The boss is only a politician, not a printer, so this explanation does him. While he's locking up the galleys again, I get away with these. You see, with two thicknesses of paper, the types cut through; it makes a stencil of it. With a little light behind, the stencil shows up as well as a regular proof. After I'd got organized, I took a day off, clapped a 'sub' on my stool, and headed for you. As I've said, it struck me like a big piece of news."
"It's bigger than you know, Mr. Sands," observed Richard, giving that worthy's hand a squeeze that made him flinch. "If you don't mind, I'll not use it as news. You will not mention the fact, but there's a deal on in Wall Street; I can do better with it there. I cannot thank you too much for what you've done."
Mr. Sands was pleased, and departed for the nearest rum counter, his face expressing complacency. He had partly evened up, he said, for what Richard did the night that he, Mr. Sands, became entangled with the Hottentots. He, Mr. Sands, would lie in ambush for further scoops; he could promise Richard everything in the Government printing office which any statesman was trying to conceal.
Richard drew his desk before the window and, reading the stencils line by line, made a perfect copy. As his pen swept across the paper he reflected on the deceitfulness of Senator Hanway, who, with the report written out in full, was for having him think that the committee would not conclude its labors for weeks.
"What a mendacious ingrate it is!" thought Richard.
Mr. Bayard had taken the ten-o'clock limited for New York that identical morning. Richard caught a train a trifle after one, wiring Mr. Bayard to meet him at the hotel. They would have dinner together. To make sure of Mr. Bayard, Richard's message read:
"I have that report. You were right."
Mr. Bayard pored over the Hanway findings, and the further he read the more his satisfaction stood on tiptoe. Conceive a gallery hung round with paintings that would baffle a Rubens and set a Murillo to biting the nail of envy! Have an orchestra polished to the last touch of execution, discoursing the divinest work of some highest priest of music. Sentinel the scene with marbles that would have doubled the fame of a Praxiteles. Now, with your stage set, invite to its sumptuous midst some amateur of all the arts whose senses were born for the beautiful. Do what you will to endow your artist with contentment in perfection. Fill his pockets with gold, give him wine of his fancy, have the woman he loves by his side, so surround him that the eye, the ear, the stomach, the heart, the pocket, or whatever is the soul of his soul may be appealed to and enthralled—this artist, with whom love is a religion, wine a cult, music a passion, and pictures are as dreams! When you have him thus fortunately established, this artist of yours—for you are not to forget he is none of mine—peruse his face. You should find it expressing ecstasy in sublimation—you should discover it wearing the twin to that look which mounted the brow of Mr. Bayard as he devoured the Hanway report.
"Beautiful!" he whispered when he had finished.
Then he fell silent, prisoner to himself, walled in with his own thoughts. A moment passed and the clouds rolled away; the delight faded, and this artist among gamblers for whom speculation possessed harmony and color and form, and whose life had been an Odyssey of Stocks, recovered the practical.
"It is as I surmised," he said, with a sigh of content. "They will fall upon Northern Consolidated bear-fashion—all claw and tooth. This report finds the road to be a thief for millions; and a debtor for millions upon that. The Attorney General must collect. The road must be taken by a receiver until the public is repaid—the public indeed! Then those priceless grants are to be repealed. Northern Consolidated is to be stabbed with a score of knives at once. Beautiful! What a trap they have set for themselves!"
Richard, not knowing what reply might be expected, smiled to fetch his countenance into sympathy with Mr. Bayard's, and retreated to his usual refuge of a cigar.
"Now," went on Mr. Bayard briskly, "I can give you the rougher outlines of what will occur. This report, as I told you, may be weeks in finding its way into the Senate. Stocks opened the year very strong; the markets are upon an upgrade. While the boom continues, the pool will do nothing. The moment prices show a weakness our friends will act. Given three days of falling prices, this report will come out. The Senate will be invoked to an attack upon Northern Consolidated. The pool will spring upon the market, right and left, selling thousands upon thousands of shares. They will try for a stampede. They look to drop Northern Consolidated twenty-five points, as woodmen fell a tree."
"And what is to be our course?" asked Richard.
"We shall buy every share of Northern Consolidated as fast as it is offered; go with them to the end. They will find themselves in their own net.
"Since our first talk," Mr. Bayard continued, "I have been gathering information. Of the one million shares which form the stock of Northern Consolidated, over six hundred thousand are held in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, and even a bundle or two in Sweden. I shall keep the cables warm to-morrow. The day following, our agents will be quietly buying those European shares at private sale in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Stockholm, wherever they are to be found. Should they give us a week, we shall have so narrowed the field of operations for our 'bears' that their first day's sales will land them in a corner. Once we have them penned, we may take our time. They will be as helpless as so many caged animals."
When Storri on that jealous evening left the San Reve, his nerves were somewhat tossed and shaken. It was not over-late; he would stroll to the club by roundabout paths, the walk and cold night air might steady him.
That roundabout route led Storri past the Treasury Building, and, as he slowly paced the pavement bordering one side of the massive structure, he was brought to sudden stop by a heavy timber platform six feet square and lifted a foot and a half from the ground, which cumbered the sidewalk nearest the curb. Storri surveyed the platform in a lack-luster way. It had, from its appearance, been there years; it was strange he had never noticed it before.
An old man, one of the night guards of the Treasury, buttoned to the chin, was standing in a narrowish basement door-way of the great building not fifteen feet away. The old man took his pipe out of his mouth, and seeing Storri survey the obstructing platform, observed:
"If I had a sack or two of the billions of gold that's been dumped on that platform, I wouldn't be smokin' my pipe 'round here to-night."
Gold as a term never failed to attract the Storri ear. He opened converse with the old man of the pipe. It was to this heavy platform the treasure-wagons backed up when they brought bullion to the Treasury. Storri learned another thing that gave him the sort of thrill that setters feel when in the near vicinity of a covey of grouse. The vault that held the gold reserve was within sixty feet of him as he stood in the street. Just inside those thick, hopeless walls they lay—millions of piled-up yellow treasure. Storri stared hard at the impassive granite and licked his lips. The nearness of those millions pleased him like music.
"Sixty feet!" exclaimed Storri unctuously. "That doesn't sound far, but before a robber pierced such a wall as that he would fancy it far enough."
"Oh, a robber wouldn't try the wall," said the old man, turning to look at it. "I've often wondered though that no one ever thought of the sewer out there;" and the old man marked a line in the air with his pipe-stem as though tracing the direction of the great street drain that ran beneath the pavement.
Storri kept on his journey to the club, but the notion of those millions, almost within hand's touch of the open street, continued to haunt him pleasantly. The sewer, too! Would a tunnel reach this treasure? The question used to come back upon Storri. Also he got into the habit, as he went about the streets, of walking by the Treasury. This was not offspring of any purpose; Storri had none. It was only that he took an instinctive satisfaction in the nearness of that heaped-up gold. He could feel its close neighborhood, and the feeling was as wine to his imagination.
Storri was not permitted respite by the San Reve concerning the Harleys. The jealous one of the green-gray eyes insisted upon seeing Storri often; and he, putting on a best face, pretended that he loved the San Reve the better for her jealousy. To keep the peace, he was wont to drop round to Grant Place three or four times a week.
These concessions to the San Reve and her rather too fervid love would not get in the way of Storri's dinners at the Harleys'. For a time he should go there but once a week. When despair had chilled Dorothy to tameness he would go oftener. Just then he must give her terrors opportunity to do their freezing work.
Storri could not have told whether he loved or hated Dorothy; he was only conscious of a fire-fed passion that consumed him. He must possess her; or, if not that, then he must grind her into the earth. He would torture her as he was tortured; he would blacken her by blackening Mr. Harley; with her pride in the dirt, with disgrace upon her, where then was that man who would wed her? The daughter of a forger—she would stain the name of wife! Richard might have her then; Storri would give her to him for a revenge! These were the mutterings of Storri as he went preyed upon by love and hate at once.
"If you do not love Miss Harley," said the flushed but logical San Reve, "why do you go there? You say, 'Once a week!' Why once a week? Why once a month? Why at any time? Storri, you do love her! And you come to me with lies!" This was on the evening following the scene that gave Storri such disquiet.
Storri, being spurred, and resolute to silence the San Reve, took that pertinacious beauty into his confidence, lying wherever it was inconvenient to tell the truth, and bragging always like a Cheyenne. Storri strode about the San Reve's rooms and told his tale grandly. His San Reve must listen; he would show her how a Russian gentleman avenged himself. He, Storri, hated the Harleys. Mr. Harley had cheated him; Dorothy had laughed at him; her lover, that Richard, bah! he had even threatened Storri. Chastise him? Could a nobleman chastise a toad—a reptile? No; there was a debt due his caste.
Mrs. Hanway-Harley?—a vapid fool! Storri despised her. He despised them all and hated them all. They had affronted him. And for those injuries done his pride he would punish and spare not. He, Storri, would bring sorrow and shame to them; he would mark their lives with black.
Being launched, Storri drew great joy from the rehearsal of what griefs he had devised against the Harleys. To prove his own superior cleverness, Storri told the San Reve how he trapped Mr. Harley into forging his name to the French shares.
"There is my weapon!" cried the triumphant Storri. "With that I may smite them when I choose! To-morrow, within the hour, I could have this scoundrel Harley in a criminal's cell! Some day I shall do that. Meanwhile, he knows; the proud girl knows. It is for vengeance I go to the Harleys', my San Reve, not love. I sit at their table, I eat their food, I drink their wine; and I laugh and I gloat over them—these little people! Yes, my San Reve, the hand of the coward Harley shakes as he lifts his glass; the fair, proud Dorothy shows me my triumph in her whitened cheek and frightened eye. And best of all, the empty chatter of the magpie Mrs. Hanway-Harley—who knows nothing, being a fool! It is that magpie chatter to be poison in the ears of the others! Oh, you should behold them, my San Reve! You should witness how they writhe and how they tremble in the presence of your Storri!"
The San Reve listened, but the gloom hung low on her brow. She did not believe her Storri who said he ate a weekly dinner for revenge. Yes, he had obtained a mastery over Mr. Harley; he had forced his way into the company of Dorothy and shut the door on Richard! The San Reve shook her jealous head; that was not vengeance, that was love.
And Storri would succeed, too! This Dorothy would come to love him as she, the San Reve, loved. Dorothy was a woman; and what woman could resist Storri? This Dorothy loved him even now; her coldness was an attitude, a fiction. It was meant to be a lure to Storri and whet his eagerness!
These were the thoughts like living coals which the San Reve hid in her heart. But while her head whirled, and her sight was blurred, and her pulses set a-throb with the jealous storms that swept her, it was wonderful to note how the San Reve's office-trained mind seized upon and registered those French shares. It was those shares that constituted Storri's hold upon the Harleys. Could she break the hold? Those shares were the locks of her Samson. Oh, if she might but shear the locks! Then she would have her Storri again—in his weakness she would have him. The San Reve knitted her brows.
These days of separation were more easily borne by Richard than by Dorothy. Richard was rich in a dogged fortitude common enough with men. Moreover, he had his work, and he went into it more deeply than before. Eleven o'clock still found him in the study with Senator Hanway, albeit Dorothy was no longer there to make a lovely third. Perhaps for that reason more politics and news of legislation were discussed by Richard and Senator Hanway.
The latter gentleman, these days, was in the best of tempers. Nothing could be more smoothly hopeful than the outlook for that nomination. Senator Gruff, who was indefatigable for Senator Hanway, told him that Speaker Frost reported his own State delegation as already in line. Also the President of the Anaconda, from whom Senator Gruff had letters every week, described the Hanway sentiment in Anaconda regions as invincible. The National Convention, in the interests of Senator Hanway and over the objection of the friends of Governor Obstinate, had been fixed for the last of May. This was a help; Senator Hanway's forces were organized and Governor Obstinate's were not. The less space permitted that candidate and his henchmen, the better for Senator Hanway. As Senator Gruff and Richard sat together in Senator Hanway's study one morning, the Senator pointed out on the map a sufficient number of States, and each certain to send a Hanway delegation, to carry the nomination.
"If the convention were held to-morrow," observed Senator Gruff, "we would win. The effort now must be to head off encroachments by Governor Obstinate."
The above came on an occasion when Senator Gruff was in a confidential mood. Commonly, as a chief Hanway manager, he lay as blandly close and noncommittal as a clam.
There was the issue of finance, Senator Gruff explained, and that was a growing source of trouble to Senator Hanway. The latter gentleman's endeavor had always been to say nothing upon finance, but silence was becoming difficult. Governor Obstinate was openly and offensively for gold in a sod-pawing, horn-lowering, threatening way, and just as a buffalo bull might have been for gold. This settled the standing of Governor Obstinate in silver communities; they would have none of him. Those same silver people, however, demanded all the more that Senator Hanway define his position in the money war. They gave tongue to those pig-and-poke objections voiced by Senator Coot. It was clamors such as these, so Senator Gruff told Richard, that made silence a work of weariness.
"Now I thought," observed Richard, "that Mr. Bayard talked wisely upon silver and gold the evening of the dinner. Why wouldn't it be well to talk to the people in the same manner even if one did not adopt the theories expressed? Let Senator Hanway clearly announce his views and give his reasons. The latter should defend him with thinking men."
"Thinking men," retorted Senator Gruff with an experienced smile, "are in a hopeless minority. Talk reason to the public? One might as well talk reason to the winds. Politics, as a science, is not addressed to the intelligence but to the ignorance of men."
Senator Hanway, after sundry conferences with Senator Gruff and others, offered the resolution asking for a committee to meet with the Ottawa government on the matter of that Georgian Bay-Ontario Canal. The majority opinion of those consulted was that the resolution ought to strengthen Senator Hanway. Certain railways might object; there were influences infinitely larger, however, that would applaud. Besides, the resolution had a big look and sounded like statesmanship. It could not do otherwise than dignify Senator Hanway in public estimation. Senator Hanway gave Richard for the Daily Tory an interview of depth and power in which he urged the international value of such a waterway America and Canada should dig and own it together; it would be a bond to unite them. It would promote friendship, and what was better than friendship between countries? Senator Hanway said nothing about Credit Magellan, nor did he intimate any relationship between his Georgian Bay-Ontario Canal and the investigation of Northern Consolidated.
Storri had become very fond of the company of Mr. Harley. He would find him in the Marble Room in the rear of the Senate Chamber, or he might cross his path at Chamberlin's. Washington is a small town; there it is not difficult to keep a man in sight. Storri kept Mr. Harley excessively in sight; and it wore visibly on Mr. Harley, whose health was breaking down. Storri liked the pain his presence gave Mr. Harley; and besides, he argued that to see him frequently strengthened his hold upon that unhappy man. When they were together, Storri's manner was hideously cheerful; he would talk Credit Magellan and consider Northern Consolidated as though nothing were awry. This was the refinement of cruelty, as when a cat pretends to let the mouse escape.
One day, when Storri and Mr. Harley were together, the former's face was purposely dark. Mr. Harley grew uneasy; his courage had all slipped from him by now, and he waited in terror upon the looks of Storri.
"Harley," cried Storri, having sufficiently enjoyed the effect of his scowls, "you John Harley, I have ever your credit at heart. Yes, Harley, I have kept a guard, what you call a spy, about your house to see if the vile Storms would enter when you were not there to repel him. He goes each day, I find, to see the honorable Senator Hanway. It does not please me, who am a Russian gentleman and a nobleman, that so low a being, although he does not personally meet her, should yet come beneath the same roof with your lovely daughter who is to become my Countess wife. You will correct this; eh, you Harley—you John Harley?"
Mr. Harley had not named Storri to Dorothy since that awful New Year's night. However, so worn to abject thinness was now his spirit on the constant wheel of fear that he carried Storri's latest word to her without apology. Richard must not visit Senator Hanway in his study. Mr. Harley could not go to Senator Hanway, he could not go to Richard; he could come only to her.
Dorothy, whose trembling concern was her father, and who felt ever more and more like some fly caught fast in a spider's web, made no reply. There was nothing to say—nothing save obedience. She wrote Richard that Storri had set a spy upon the house, and asked him to forego his calls upon Senator Hanway. The close of the letter was a hysteria of love and grief.
Richard sought Bess; he saw much of the pythoness now. Dorothy, for her part, never crossed the street lest she meet him, and bring down Storri's wrath upon her father. Richard knew what Bess would say, but he must have someone to converse with. Bess took the course anticipated: he must obey Dorothy in this as in the rest.
"It comes to little either way, the calling upon Senator Hanway," was Bess's comment.
"It comes to this," cried Richard, "that we are the slaves of Storri! I'd give ten years off my life if he and I might settle this together."
"The real settlement would be made by Mr. Harley—by Dorothy. You must not go near Storri. But isn't there a hint in this?" Bess considered. "Would it not be wise to imitate the gentleman and set a spy to dogging him? Perhaps something worth while might be discovered."
The thought found favor with Richard, who, under usual circumstances, would have been against the proposal. Yes, he would have Storri shadowed day and night. It would be a retort for that spy about the Harley house.
Richard sent a message to Mr. Bayard, reciting his determination and asking advice. He desired to do nothing that might work an interference in Mr. Bayard's arrangements concerning Northern Consolidated.
Mr. Bayard replied that he thought a better knowledge of Storri could do no harm; news of the enemy was ever a good thing. Mr. Bayard went a step beyond, and said that he would send a man to Richard whom he could trust for the work.
The morning following the receipt of Mr. Bayard's message, a foppish, slender young gentleman accosted Richard.
"Mr. Storms, I believe?" remarked the foppish stranger, lifting his hat.
"Yes, sir; Mr. Storms," said Richard.
"Mr. Bayard asked me to say that I am Inspector Val of the Central Office, New York, with two months' leave of absence at your service."