“What?” cried Locke, shaken out of his usual calm. If this were true the enemy had again executed a masterly retreat. It annoyed him exceedingly to be blocked twice by the same trick, although he did not see how he could have helped it.
“As I told you, we don’t want litigation just now,” said Garwood. “Without admitting Dingle’s claim at all, we considered a settlement the easiest way.”
“No doubt,” said Locke dryly. “Well, you won’t be able to buy off the next action. I’ll take care of that.”
“You persist in your refusal to make terms?”
“That is a very cool way of putting it,” said Locke. “I tell you now, Garwood, I’m going after you, and when I get you I’ll nail your hide to the sunny side of the barn.”
Garwood rose and shook a threatening forefinger at the lawyer. “Remember, if you make trouble for me I’ll smash your business. Perhaps you don’t think I can. You’ll see. Inside a year you won’t have a case in any court.”
“You own a couple of judges, don’t you?” said Locke cheerfully. “A nice pair they are, too. You think my clients will get the worst of it from them. Of course they will, but I appeal most of their decisions now. You can injure me to some extent, but not as much as you think. Go to it, Garwood. When I get through with you you’ll be a discredited man.”
On the whole he considered that he had broken even with the railway magnate. The settlement of the Dingle action was a confession of weakness. When that individual made an apologetic appearance the next day, Locke turned his anger loose and almost kicked him out of the office. Then he sat down and did some really first-class thinking, marshalling all the facts he had, drawing deductions, sorting and arranging, and finally he decided that he had a prima facie case.
Thereupon he brought action against everybody concerned, directly or remotely, in the assault on the business of Kent and Crooks.
Meanwhile Joe Kent was impatient to get back to the woods, but certain business held him. A year before he would have been quite content to pass his evenings at the club, with cards, billiards and the like. Now these seemed strangely futile and inadequate, as did the current conversation of the young men about town. It all struck him as not worth while. He longed for the little log shack with the dully glowing stove within, the winter storm without, and the taciturn MacNutt. As he lay back with a cigar in a luxurious chair he could see the bunk-house filled with the smoke of unspeakable tobacco, the unkempt, weather-hardened men on the “deacon seat,” and the festoons of garments drying above the stove. The smart slang and mild swearing disgusted him. He preferred the ribald, man’s-size oaths of the shanty men, the crackling blasphemies which embellished their speech. In fact, though he did not know it, he was passing through a process of change; shedding the lightness of extreme youth, hardening a little, coming to the stature of a man.