“If you say there has been crooked work, Calvin, that settles it; I believe it. Now tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.”
Kendall’s lean, leathery jaw was set hard, and he was furtively watching the big expert. That a fierce struggle of some kind was going on behind the mask of the ruddy, half-boyish face, he made no doubt. And Sprague’s answer quickly confirmed the editor’s conclusion.
“You don’t know what you’re asking, Dick,” said the big man slowly.
“I do!” said Maxwell hotly. “I’m asking you to help us send a bunch of criminals—just low-down, ordinary thieving criminals—to jail! Sprague, if you can do it, and won’t do it——”
There was a strained silence in the shabby little law office that seemed as if it would never be broken. Kendall turned his face away, and Starbuck slid noiselessly out of his chair and went to stand at the window with his back to the others. At length the reply to Maxwell’s demand came, wrung out, as it seemed, from the very heart of reluctance.
“It can be done. Every chain that was ever forged has its weak link. For reasons which are purely personal to me, I’d rather be shot than go into this thing with you. I’d refuse, if I could in common decency; and, in any event, I may fall down on you when it comes to the pinch. But I’ll go as far as I can. Will that do?”
“Say it!” snapped the ex-superintendent eagerly.
“All right. Stillings, you may come to my room in the hotel at two o’clock, and bring Mr. David Kinzie, our downstairs bank president, with you if you have to club him to do it. Kendall, I’m going to ask you to make just as little as possible of this railroad grab in your news columns for the present, taking my word for it that you shall have the biggest story of the year if we win out. Starbuck, you’ll come over to the hotel with me now, and I’ll give you your stunt. That’s all; the meeting’s adjourned.”
To say that the little inter-mountain city was stirred to the depths by the news which quickly spread from lip to lip is putting it mildly. In its beginnings, Brewster had been a railroad town in the strictest sense, owing its location and its phenomenal after-growth largely to the fostering policy of the railroad. Under Maxwell’s wise and just management the Nevada Short Line had identified itself very closely with the growth and prosperity of the entire inter-mountain region, and it had stood as a shining example of a “good” corporation. To have the popular management swept ruthlessly aside and the rule of another company, operating under the thin mask of a receivership, set up in its place, provoked a storm of indignant protest.
Moreover, many of the well-to-do citizens of the Timanyoni were stockholders in the Short Line, and upon these the blow fell as a disaster. Prominent among these local stockholders stood the owner of the Kinzie Building, Brewster’s one multi-millionaire and the president of the Brewster National Bank. At precisely two o’clock David Kinzie, gray and pale, and with his small ferret-like eyes peering shrewdly from under the rim of the soft, gray hat which he always wore, stepped into the Hotel Topaz elevator with Stillings. It had not been necessary for the attorney to bludgeon him to induce him to come to the conference with Sprague.