“But, my friend, this is an age of investigation, and of suspicion toward all public officials. And such rumors wouldn’t look well on the front pages of the press throughout the country. Of course, our young friend here isn’t going to mention them to her superiors; but, nevertheless, they ought to be suppressed at once. Their effect upon your second-term prospects would be simply annihilating. Now I am in a position to greatly assist in the matter of––well, in fact, I have already once offered my aid to the Express. And I stand ready now to join with it in giving the lie to those who are seeking to embarrass the present administration. Miss Carmen is with us––”
“Mr. Ames,” the girl quietly interrupted, “I wish you were with us.”
“But, my dear girl, have I––”
“For then there would be no more suffering in Avon,” she added.
“Ha! Then it was you who wrote that misleading stuff in the Express, eh? I might have known it! May I ask,” he added with a contemptuous sneer, “by whose authority you have visited the houses occupied by my tenants, without my permission or knowledge? I take it you were down there, although the cloudy weather must have quite dimmed your perception.”
“Yes,” she answered in a low voice, “I have been there. And it was very cloudy. Yes, I visited your charnel houses and your cemeteries. I saw your victims. I held their trembling hands, and stroked their hot brows. I fed them, and gave them the promise that I would plead their cause with you.”
“Humph! But you first come here to––”
“It was with no thought of seeing you that I came to Washington, Mr. Ames. If I cross your path often, it must be for a purpose not yet revealed to either of us. Perhaps it is to warn you, to awaken you, if not too late, to a sense of your desperate state.”
“My desperate state!”
“Yes. You are drunk, you know, drunk with greed. And such continuous drunkenness has made you sick unto death. It is the same dread disease of the soul that the wicked Cortez told the bewildered Mexicans he had, and that could be cured only with gold. You––you don’t see, Mr. Ames, that you are mesmerized by the evil which is always using you.”