"You are evidently laboring under some misapprehension, Mr. Armstrong," cried Trafford, pulling at his neat little beard, while one of his neat little feet tapped the carpet agitatedly.
"Bosh!" said Armstrong. "I know all about you. Don't lie to me. What do you want? Come to the point!"
There was a pink spot in each of Trafford's cheeks. "I have been much distressed," said he, "at the confusion downtown, at the strained relations between interests that ought to be working together in harmony for the general good." Armstrong's frown hastened him. "I have come to see if it isn't possible to bring about good feeling and peace."
"You come from Atwater?"
"No—that is—Frankly, no."
Armstrong rose with a gesture of dismissal. "We're wasting time. Atwater is the man. Unless you have some authority from him, I'll not detain you."
"But, my dear sir," cried Trafford, in a ferment to the very depths now, because convinced by Armstrong's manner that he was not dealing with a beaten man but with one champing for the fray. "You do not seem to hear me," he implored. "I tell you I can make terms. In this matter Atwater is dependent upon me."
"You've come about the attack he's going to make on the O.A.D.?"
"Precisely. I've come to arrange to stop it, to say I wish to make no attack."
"You mean, you don't wish to be attacked," rejoined Armstrong with a cold laugh that made Trafford's flesh creep. "By the time Morris gets through with you, I don't see how you can possibly be kept out of the penitentiary. He has all the necessary facts. I think he can compel you to disgorge at least two thirds of what you've stolen and salted away. I don't see where you got the courage to go into a fight, when you're such an easy target. The wonder is you weren't caught and sent up years ago."