Then something not of her own consciousness, something deep within the machinery of her soul, moved and controlled her. She acted, but not as one acts of his own volition, rather as one acts in a mesmeric trance.... Her impulse was to go to find him—to find him, to weep over him ... to avenge him!
She snatched the receiver from its hook and telephoned Jared Whitefield again. He would help. He would know what to do. But Jared Whitefield had not returned.... She must act alone.
Calmly, like an automaton, she put on her hat, extinguished the lights, locked the door, and walked up the street. The direction she took was toward the Lakeside Hotel. She reached the fringe of the village which bordered upon the black woods, but did not pause. Steadily, urged on by some inexorable force, she continued down that gloomy avenue, between woodland banks of inky blackness.... She neither hesitated nor paused nor looked behind her.
Had she looked behind it may have been she would have seen the shadowy figures of two men who followed, followed stealthily keeping always a stated distance, drawing no nearer, flitting at the edge of the blackness.
CHAPTER XXII
ABNER FOWNES was apprehensive. Notwithstanding his success in obtaining the appointment of Deputy Jenney as sheriff and the utter discomfiture of Carmel Lee, uneasiness possessed him. He felt driven, pursued. Events marshaled their forces against him with a sort of sinister inexorability. Being a man of superior intelligence, he was able to see the intricacies and dangers of his position more surely than a lesser man could have done; and as he sat in the train on his return to Gibeon he took stock of himself, reviewed the past, and prepared himself for the future.
To see Carmel Lee in the capital was a shock. He had not expected to see her, but, on the contrary, was awaiting reports on the success of his plan to eliminate her.... It was his first piece of bad luck; the first time things had worked out crookedly for him, and it alarmed him. Every successful man believes in his luck, and now Fownes was apprehensive lest luck had deserted him.
That Carmel had accused him of crimes in the Governor’s presence did not alarm him especially—except for this: that anybody would dare to speak such words concerning him. It was not the thing uttered, the person who listened, but that fact of the utterance. Hitherto people had been afraid of him, but this girl was unafraid.... It must mean something, some turning of the tide. He felt a trembling of his foundations.
It is at such a moment that a man of Fownes’s type is most to be feared. He was vain; his position in the world meant more to him than any other consideration. To have that position assailed, to face the possibility of being thrust from his eminence in ignominy, was an eventuality he would avert by any means within reach of his hand. Indeed, he had already reached for the weapon—but luck had intervened.
He felt stifled by adversities. Never before had he doubted his ability to come through this emergency with satisfaction to himself. He had believed in himself. Even when he had been forced outside the law to protect his position, he regarded it only as a makeshift, undesirable, perhaps, but necessary to him, and therefore permissible. It had been his intention to stabilize his business again, and then to withdraw to lawful practices and a life of conscious rectitude.... But adversities, of late, erected themselves with such rapidity! Money was required of him when he had hoped promises to pay would have sufficed; he was rushed into expedients endangering the whole edifice of his life. So far there had been no slip, but he was intelligent enough to perceive there might be a slip....