“I can’t help that, Jim. We’ll have to face it together. But this stone is a thing we can’t trifle with, or equivocate over. I should hate myself, I should even hate you, if I thought it wasn’t to go back to London, by express, tomorrow morning!”
“Then back it goes!” said the man at her side. He could see, even in the dim light of the taxi, the rebellious and wounded look that had crept into her face.
“Whatever it brought me, I couldn’t endure your hate!” he said, taking her hand in his.
CHAPTER XIII
As a result of her midnight conference with Durkin, Frances Candler learned many things. One of these was the fact that the life into which she had flung herself was proving a captor that already threatened to extort a cruelly impossible ransom. Another was the discovery that Durkin stood even deeper than she did in those conspiratorial quicksands from which she tore one limb only to be engulfed by another. For all along, she saw, he had been a quiet observant intrigant, conspiring against a new field of activity toward which she had not even thought to glance.
For after that hurried midnight talk she knew that the Secretary of Agriculture, at Washington, from time to time received sealed mail reports from the South as to the condition of the cotton crop. She also learned that there had been a series of startling and disastrous “leaks” from these confidential government reports, and that a private wire now connected the office of the Department with Savannah and New Orleans. Durkin had already ascertained that over this wire, on the last day, or the last “market” day, of each month, until the leakage had been stopped, would pass those despatches and figures on which the Department of Agriculture would verify and base its monthly report of the cotton outlook.
“That system is going to be kept up,” Durkin had explained to her, “until the Secretary finds out who is stealing the figures and doing the manipulating on them in the New York Cotton Exchange. At any rate, I know he’s going to keep this wire in use until the decent brokers stop bombarding him and the Census Bureau with their telegrams about collusion and fraud. But here’s the point that interests us. If this present wire report turns out to be favorable, the feverish way the market stands now, it means, of course that there’s going to be a pretty serious break in Cotton Exchange trading. But, on the other hand, if this short-cut official report carries the news of a shortage, it’s as plain as day that Curry and all the other New York bears will have a lever to pry up the price of cotton with, high as it stands already.”
“And what is it we want to know?” she had asked.
“We’ve got to find out which way that report goes—whether it’s good or bad. I’ll be here in New York, waiting to get your cipher message over a Postal-Union wire. Whichever way it goes, I’ll govern myself accordingly, jump into the market with every penny I have, and do precisely what three hundred highly respectable brokers have been doing for the last two months. The only thing that makes me hot is that I haven’t a few thousand, instead of a paltry few hundred, to fling into it!”
Her instructions were brief, but explicit. While he waited in New York, ready to act on word from her, she was to hurry to Washington, and from Washington go on to the somnolent little Virginia town of Leeksville. This town, Durkin had already made sure, lay on the route of the Department of Agriculture’s New Orleans wire.