The hansom was caught in a jam at Chambers Street. The clamor of shouting, swearing drivers roused him. The breeze from the open sea, blowing straight up Broadway into his face, braced him like the tonic that it is. He straightened himself, recovered his train of thought, stared at one of the newspapers and tried to grasp the meaning of its head-lines. But they made only a vague impression on him.
"It's all lies," he muttered. "Lies! How could those fellows smash ME!" And he flung the newspapers out of the hansom into the faces of two boys seated upon the tail of a truck.
"You're drunk early," yelled one of the boys.
"That's no one-day jag," shouted the other. "It's a hang-over."
He made a wild, threatening gesture and, as his hansom drove on, muttered and mumbled to himself, vague profanity aimed at nothing and at everything. At the Edison Building he got out.
"Wait!" he said to the driver. He did not see the impudent smirk on the face of the elevator boy nor the hesitating, sheepish salutation of the door-man, uncertain how to greet the fallen king. He went straight to his office, unlocked his desk and, just in time to save himself from fainting, seized and half-emptied a flask of brandy he kept in a drawer. It had been there—but untouched ever since he came to New York and took those offices; he never drank in business hours.
His head was aching horribly and at every throb of his pulse a pain tore through him. He rang for his messenger.
"Tell Mr. Giddings I want to see him—you!" he said, his teeth clenched and his eyes blazing—he looked insane.
Giddings came. His conscience was clear—he had never liked Dumont, owed him nothing, yet had stood by him until further fidelity would have ruined himself, would not have saved Dumont, or prevented the Herron-Cassell raiders from getting control. Now that he could afford to look at his revenge-books he was deeply resenting the insults and indignities heaped upon him in the past five years. But he was unable to gloat, was moved to pity, at sight of the physical and mental wreck in that chair which he had always seen occupied by the most robust of despots.
"Well," said Dumont in a dull, far-away voice, without looking at him. "What's happened?"