“I’ve got to see a man,” and Wint understood that his father did not want his company, so he stayed at home when the older man departed.
Chase wanted to see Kite. He had no definite idea why he wanted to see Kite, but he felt the need of reassurance from some one, and he knew Kite would reassure him as to what he had done. So he went downtown to find Kite and talk to him. The Bazaar was closed. He telephoned Kite’s home, and the old woman who kept house for him said Mr. Kite had gone uptown to see Mr. Routt. So Chase went to the building on the second floor of which Routt had his office, and saw a light behind the drawn blind in Routt’s window and went up. He heard their voices inside, Kite’s and Routt’s, before he tried the door. The door was locked; and when he touched the knob, silence fell inside. Routt called: “Hello, who’s there?”
Chase told him, and Routt said: “In a minute,” and unlocked the door and let him in. Chase saw Kite sitting by the desk, his side whiskers bristling angrily.
There are no modern office buildings in Hardiston. Routt’s office was on the second floor of the three-story building at the corner of Main and Broad streets. There was a hardware store on the first floor, and a lodge room on the floor above Routt’s office. Routt and three or four others had quarters on the second floor. Routt’s office faced the street; a single room with a hot-air register in the wall near the door. There were shelves around the wall, with a meager library of brand-new and little-used law books. Routt’s desk was shiny, yellow oak. A diploma, or perhaps a certificate of admission to the bar, framed in mission oak, hung on the wall above the desk. There was an electric light in the middle of the ceiling, and it shed a bald and naked light over the three men who faced each other in the room.
Kite said: “Hello, Chase,” and Chase responded to the greeting. Routt asked:
“How’d you happen to drop in? Glad to see you.”
“I was looking for Kite,” Chase said. “Heard he was with you.”
Kite asked eagerly: “Looking for me, Chase? Good news? What’s happened?”
Chase looked at Routt, with a curious, dull inquiry. The man was moving in something like a daze; he had not yet found himself in this new alliance. He was hating himself for opposing Wint, and he was flogging his courage to the venture. He wondered what Kite and Jack Routt were doing together. Routt was a Caretall man in politics; also he was a friend of Wint. Chase tried to puzzle this out, and Kite asked again:
“What’s happened?”