When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on the writing-table and went to freshen himself with a bath. That which lay before him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity. In other times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tub and the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to the bottle.
He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying where he had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card. Kent read the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines about his mouth. There are times when a man's fate rushes to meet him, and he had fallen upon one of them.
"Show him up," was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevator cage clacked again, Kent was waiting.
His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a little breathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator. Kent admitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in a chair and begged a light for his cigar. In the match-passing he gathered his spent breath and declared his errand.
"I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent," he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it in stolid silence.
"Possibly: that is for you to say," was the unencouraging reply.
Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyond it into the bedroom.
"We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of," said Kent, in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed his chair.
"I came up to see what you want—what you will take to quit," he announced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over his knee. "That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, and we can dispense with the preliminaries, I take it."
"I told your attorney-general some time ago what I wanted, and he did not see fit to grant it," Kent responded. "I am not sure that I want anything now—anything you can have to offer." This was not at all what he had intended to say; but the presence of the adversary was breeding a stubborn antagonism that was more potent on the moral side than all the prickings of conscience.