“Dick Hoover. But you leave it alone....”
“Rats! Tell Dick I’ll be there. Or I’ll tell him myself.”
Routt lifted his hands in surrender. “Oh—I’ll tell him,” he agreed. “But you’re a darned fool, Wint.”
“Rats!” Wint repeated; and he grinned. He was unaccountably elated, as though he had shaken off restraining bonds. “Rats!” And he went out to the street with his head high.
Routt picked up the telephone and called Hoover. He was smiling.
CHAPTER V
ALLIANCE
WINTHROP CHASE, SENIOR, was thrown by his son’s election to the office he had counted as his own into a passion in which rage and humiliation were equally commingled.
He was a man fed fat with vanity. He took himself very seriously. He lived a decent and respectable life in the eyes of all men, and he felt himself justly entitled to the respect of all men. He had, before this, seen the smiles of those few who dared mock him; but he had believed them a small minority. When three quarters of the town united in the jest at his expense, he was outraged inexpressibly. And when the city papers took up the story and for a time the whole state tittered over it, Chase trembled and shuddered with his own agony.
His first reaction had been anger at his son; and when he heard Wint had been found, sodden and stupid, in that room at the Weaver House, he cast the boy out of his life, hiding his own honest grief and sorrow under a mantle of resentment and accusation. For he loved Wint, and had wished to be proud of him.
In the beginning, his chief resentment centered on Wint, and he had toward Amos Caretall only that anger which one feels toward a treacherously victorious opponent. But about the time Wint sent him that money order, and stood on his own feet before the world, Chase’s heart softened in spite of himself. He sought to make excuses for his son, and in this effort he found Caretall a convenient scapegoat. By degrees he convinced himself that Caretall had led Wint astray, playing on the boy’s vanity and pride; and after that came the half conviction that when Wint denied all knowledge of the coup, the boy had told the truth. Then all Chase’s anger centered on Amos; and as the first sting of his disgrace passed by, he began to look about him and seek to rebuild the shattered structure of his plans.