"That's enough, he'll know."
They went off together, but rather silently, to lunch. On the way to the street Stoughton asserted several times aloud, and with complete conviction, that he would be damned, while the rest began to experience a carefully concealed regret for the victim of their mission. At the club they sat aimlessly and played with their food, conscious that they were observed and known by all as the insiders in one of Philadelphia's largest investments. Then, too, they learned that that morning the stock of the Consolidated companies had leaped forward in one of those unexpected boosts for which it was noted. Wimperley and the rest of them had never gambled in it, but time and time again it moved as though animated by the spread of secret and definite information. Just as they were about to rise Birch leaned forward and began to arrange pepper pots and salt cellars in a semi-symmetrical design.
"This," he said, "is all right and that, and that. These are out of the question. You get me?"
The others nodded.
"No blast furnaces," he went on almost inaudibly. "No railway—no further capital expenditure—and then we reach the melon of dividend," here he touched his untasted cantaloupe.
Now, just at this moment, Wimperley nodded energetically and laughed outright, whereupon a man whose name was Marsham, who sat at an adjoining table, turned—for Wimperley did not often laugh—and saw Birch's long finger resting on the melon, and, since Marsham was, without the knowledge of the others, one of the largest operators, in Consolidated stock, that stock took a further jump just half an hour later, and all through Pennsylvania there were farmers, mechanics, country doctors and storekeepers who read the news and rejoiced exceedingly thereat.
The others went their way, and Wimperley walked back to his office immersed in profound contemplation. Feelings of personal injury were mixed with those of apprehension. How would the affair proceed after Clark had taken with him his unrivaled and intimate knowledge of the works; for, and in spite of all the dictates of prudence, it seemed impossible to think of the vast enterprise at St. Marys without its central pivot.
X.—CUPIDITY VS. LOYALTY
And all this time the chief constable of St. Marys was speculating in property with steadily increasing success. So crafty was he that few people in the town knew it. When the fourth year of Clark's régime was completed, Manson had made profits that astonished him. His purchases covered both farm and town lands, and amongst the latter was a mortgage on the vine clad cottage of Fisette. But not a man in his circle would have guessed that what prompted the acquisition of the Fisette mortgage was Manson's remembrance of a friendly joke about a Unitarian wolf; a joke which still lived and set up a minute but unceasing irritation. Now, at any time, Manson might be in a position to teach the bishop a lesson.
It fell on a day that he was at the head of the old portage leading round the rapids. Here he had recently acquired an option on a considerable acreage, calculating that before long a new town would spring up in the shadow of the works, and, just as he pushed through the underbrush and came out on the gravel beach, he caught the flash of a paddle a mile away. He was hot and breathless and, lighting his big pipe, sat in the shade, his ruminative eye on the fast approaching canoe. Twenty minutes later it touched the shore, and Fisette, leaning forward on the thwarts, surveyed him with black and lustrous eyes.