"You mean that you——" Dalton exploded.
"I mean that nobody has been injured, to the best of my knowledge, and that your daughter Mary is perfectly safe," Anthony smiled sadly. "Put the gun away, Dalton, and hear me through at least. Later on, if you feel inclined to use it, I don't know that I shall object greatly. I quite understand what is likely to happen to me when you have heard what I have to tell and—in spite of that the whole affair seems to have tangled itself so terribly that there is nothing to do but tell it!"
He himself was sitting behind the table now, and he certainly claimed their attention. Dalton perched on the edge of a chair; Robert took one of its arms. Beatrice seemed at first unwilling to leave the center of the stage, but presently she, too, was seated—and Johnson Boller shuffled to a chair and went into it quite limply, gazing at Anthony and breathing hard.
Unless Anthony was lying, he meant to tell the truth; and while some of those present might believe the truth, Beatrice Boller was not among the number.
"I don't know, Dalton," Anthony began evenly, "that I have anything to say in extenuation of what I have done. Evidently I lost my head, even to the point of downright insanity; some of us do that occasionally, you know. Brooding over the business was responsible, I suppose. Your Celestial Oil has been cutting pretty heavily into Imperial Liniment this last year."
"Humph!" said Dalton.
"Cutting in so heavily that whatever efforts I have been able to put forth have been of no avail whatever," Anthony pursued. "Last week—all day last Saturday, in fact—I went over the year's business and it fairly maddened me to see the falling off. I spent Sunday thinking and I am frank to say, Dalton, that by Sunday night I was all but ready to murder you. Toward midnight I conceived what seemed to be a means of forcing you into some sort of mutual contract, by which each of us could do business with the assurance that the other wasn't coming over to take away what didn't belong to him."
"You get away with a thing like that?" Dalton demanded.
"It was a wild notion," Anthony sighed. "I knew that talking was useless, I knew that fighting you openly was equally useless, because once I became too conspicuous I knew that you'd sail in and wreck me. At the same time something had to be done and that in mighty short order, or Fry's Imperial was likely to die a natural death. Therefore, Dalton, I perfected the scheme of kidnaping your daughter and holding her until you'd come to terms."
"Great——"