This reference to Harbinger, which he understood to be sarcastic, completed his rage.
“Do I get them?” he asked, bulging at me in a menacing manner.
“Sorry,” I said. “There’s no hole for you in my instructions.”
At that he began to pass in front of me, with long, stealthy steps, his shoulders crouched, his hands in his pockets, his head low and cocked right and then left as he turned and passed again, all the while looking at me fixedly with a preposterous, maleficent glare. The effect was so ludicrous that I laughed. And then for only so long as it takes to see a flashing thing there was a look in his eyes that made me shudder. Suddenly he went out, slamming the door so hard that I held my breath for the sound of falling glass.
As the pantomime reconstructed itself in reflection it assumed a comic aspect. No, it couldn’t have been serious. I was almost persuaded it had been a bit of undignified acting, an absurd though harmless way of working off a fit of temper, when I recalled that look and shuddered again. Once before I had seen that expression in the eyes of a malevolent hunchback. It was the look of a giant tragically trapped in a puny body. Galt was a small man, weighing less than one hundred pounds, with a fretful, nagging body.
Before lunch the president called me on the G. M.’s private telegraph wire. He stood at the key in the Chicago office and I stood at the key in the New York office, and we conversed through the operators without written messages. Was everything all right? he asked me. Yes, everything was all right. There was nothing urgent? he asked. No, there was nothing urgent, I said. Then, as if he had but chanced to think of it, he said: “I forgot to tell you. It’s all right for Mr. Galt to have the earnings.”
His anxiety to seem casual about it betrayed the fact that he had called me expressly to say that Galt should have the earnings; and there was no doubt in my thoughts that Galt since leaving me had been in communication with my chief by telegraph. What an amazing to-do!
If my deductions were true, then I might expect to be presently favored with another visit. So I was. He came in about 2 o’clock and sat down at the end of my desk without speaking. I did not speak either, but handed him the statement of earnings. He crumpled the paper in his hand and dropped it in the waste basket. I was sure he hadn’t looked at it.
“Coxey,” he said, “promise never again to laugh at me like that.... We’ve got a long way to go ... up and down grade ... but promise whatever happens never to do that again.”
Somehow I was not surprised. For a little time we sat looking at each other.