V.
A few minutes later, down in the city, little Jim Neenan drove hurriedly up to the hotel where Forsythe had headquarters, leaped from his car and made his way up to the Forsythe suite with all speed.
Forsythe was closeted in his private office, going over for the last time, the address that he was to deliver over the radio in a few minutes, but Jim burst in on him unannounced.
“Now do you owe me the two grand?” he demanded triumphantly.
“I do not! What for? Get out of here. Can’t you see I’m busy!” Forsythe snapped at him.
“What for?” Neenan snarled. “Why, for putting Hammond out of the running! Didn’t you know I did it?”
Forsythe stared at him in contempt.
“You did it!” he sneered. “That’s a delightful bluff, but I’m too busy to be amused. I don’t owe you two thousand dollars, and never will. Now get out, I tell you.”
“But listen, I can prove—”
Neenan got no further. Forsythe stood over him menacingly.
“Another word from you and I’ll ring for a cop and have you arrested for conspiracy. Remember I know who broke Hammond’s legs.”
Neenan stared back at him for a moment with eyes turned to steel gimlets, white hot at the points. Then without a word he left the room and the suite and hurried down the corridor to his own apartment.
A few minutes later the eloquent voice of Forsythe was being poured into the convention hall. He was surpassing himself in his flights of oratory.
He wound up, deprecating his opponent’s position on the water power question, and pledging himself to continue a safe and sane policy of watchful waiting until the time was ripe for the State to act.
Forsythe laid down his manuscript and turned to receive the plaudits of the group around him.
“Stop! Just a moment, Mr. Forsythe!” came an unfamiliar voice of thunder from the amplifier of the convention hall, and from the radio horn in the Forsythe suite. “You have something to confess, Mr. Forsythe. Do it now, before I’m compelled not only to confess it for you, but to make a further statement that will make you a fugitive from justice.”
The booming voice ceased, and for a moment there was absolute silence.
Then another voice came from the radio. Forsythe started, and turned deadly pale. He had not spoken a word, but the voice that he was hearing was seemingly his own.
“I am afraid I will have to confess,” the voice was saying. “My opponent, Mr. Hammond, has been the victim of a conspiracy. The closing words of his speech which led you to condemn him just now were not his own, but the artful interpolation of an impostor clever at disguising his voice. If you will go to the woodland near the home of Mr. Hammond, just outside the city, through which the telephone line passes that brought his speech this morning from his bedroom to the broadcasting station, you will find still dangling from one of the poles a wire which the impostor had cut into the telephone line. It was a simple thing for him to attach a telephone to the end of that wire and listen in while Mr. Hammond read his speech. When my opponent reached his long-waited-for conclusion regarding State water power, the impostor cut him out of the line, and cleverly imitating Mr. Hammond’s voice, he delivered the false statement which you heard with so much consternation. What Mr. Hammond actually read, and you can prove it by getting his manuscript, was in substance as follows:”
The simulated voice of Forsythe then gave a close approximation of what Hammond had intended them to hear.
“That is all I have to say,” concluded the pseudo Forsythe.
The real Forsythe, still deathly pale, whirled away from the radio.
“That damned little rat of a Neenan! He double crossed me because I wouldn’t bribe him! He played the same trick on me that he did on Hammond. Down to his room quick!”
The group rushed pell-mell down the hall and burst into the room which Neenan had occupied. But Mr. Neenan had gone, taking with him the sweet flavor of his revenge.
Over the window sill dangled a wire attached to a telephone instrument. It ran out along the ledge and connected with the special wire that had been installed in Forsythe’s suite.
The crafty Neenan had lately feared that his service to Forsythe would be repudiated, and had prepared the instrument of his revenge beforehand.
And in the convention hall at this moment the uproar had subsided to the point where one of Forsythe’s former adherents could make himself heard.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I move that we dispense with the roll call and instruct the secretary of the convention to cast one ballot for Mr. Warren Hammond as our candidate for Governor.”
It was seconded and carried without a dissenting voice.
A few minutes later a local man came across Boss Quaid as he was slipping quietly out of a side entrance of the convention hall.
“Not leaving us, are you, chief?” the other asked.
“Yep,” he sighed. “Barney’s been intimating lately that I’m a has-been. Barney’s right.”