"Exactly!" said Woodruff. "Now, Mr. Sayler, the point is just here. I don't blame you for wanting to get out. If I had any other game, I'd get out myself. But what's to become of us—of all your friends, not only in this state but throughout the country? Are you going to stand by and see them slaughtered and not lift a finger to help 'em?"
There was no answering him. Yet the spur of vanity, which clipped into me at thought of myself thrown down and out by these cheap ingrates and scoundrels, had almost instantly ceased to sting; and my sense of weary disgust had returned. If I went into the battle again, what work faced me? The same old monotonous round. To outflank Burbank and Goodrich by tricks as old as war and politics, and effective only because human stupidity is infinite and unteachable. To beat down and whip back into the ranks again these bandits of commerce disguised as respectable, church-going, law-upholding men of property—and to do this by the same old methods of terror and force.
"You can't leave us in the lurch," said Doc. "And the game promises to be interesting once more. I don't like racing on the flat. It's the hurdles that make the fun."
I pictured myself again a circus horse, going round and round the ring, jumping the same old hurdles at the same old intervals. "Take my place, Doc," said I.
He shook his head. "I'm a good second," said he, "but a rotten bad first."
It was true enough. He mysteriously lacked that mysterious something which, when a man happens to have been born with it, makes other men yield him the command—give it to him, force it on him, if he hangs back.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked.
"That dinner to-morrow night is in Suite L. Go to it—that's the shortest way to put Roebuck and Dominick out of business. Face 'em and they'll skulk."
"It's a risk," said I. I saw at once that he was right, but I was in a reluctant humor.
"Not a bit of it," was his confident reply. "I had a horse that was crazy—would run away on any old provocation. But no matter how busy he was at kicking up the dust and the dashboard, you could always halt him by ringing a bell once. He'd been in the street-car service. That's the way it is with men, especially strong men, that have been broken to the bell. They hear it ring and they can't resist. Go up and ring the bell."