“You mean if she marries some feller who’s high up in that set, she’ll be made to home there?”
There was something wistfully eager beneath the Fighter’s gruff tones,—a something Caine detected in time to check the flippant reply that had risen to his own lips. He eyed Conover with veiled curiosity as he asked:
“You would want her to marry such a man?”
“Sure! If he treated her right an’ she was happy. But if she’s goin’ to be looked down on, an’ guyed behind folk’s fans, an’ reminded that her old man used to eat corned beef and cabbage in his shirt-sleeves—why, then I’m damned if I don’t b’lieve I’d buy up the whole of Granite an’ turn the swells out into the next County.”
“It all depends, as I said, on the man she marries,” pursued Caine. “If she marries a man of good family and turns her back on her old associates and has enough money of her own—”
“She’ll have it,” interrupted Conover. “She’ll have enough to make her the richest woman in this burg,—an’ it’ll be in her own name, too. As for shakin’ folks like me,—if I haven’t got my own foot hold there by that time,—she’ll do that too. I’ll see that she does.”
“And yet you’re fond of her?”
“That’s why I’m doin’ it, son. An’ remember you’ll keep on bein’ the only one besides the Hawardens that knows anything ’bout my share in the deal. Speakin’ of ‘deals,’ Blacarda means trouble for us.”
“In the Steeloid affair?” queried Caine. “I thought you’d won that fight.”
“I won that, but there’s another a-comin’. I got a tip on it same time I heard of the incorp’ration, to-day. Blacarda pulls a pretty big oar in the Legislature. He’s back of that Starke Anti-Combine bill we side-tracked early in the session. If the Starke bill passes, then goodbye to our Steeloid corner! I’ve a tip he’s renewed it an’ tryin’ to rush it through before the session closes. It’s to be sprung on the Assembly, Monday. An’ he figgers on gettin’ it railroaded through. If it once passes the Assembly, we’re goners. For he’s got the State Senate where he wants it. An’ the Gov’nor’s on his side. Owns a nice block of stock in Blacarda’s comp’ny. So it all hangs on the Assembly.”