Mordecai, still gazing at the ceiling, nodded with satisfaction. Then he returned to the plane below and led them back to the Board Room, waiting himself until they were all through and closing the door carefully.
The reporters were admitted. We took care to get all of them in at one time, twenty or more, and held the doors open while the directors, passing through Harbinger’s office, made their august escape.
ii
When the reporters were gone a stillness seemed to rise about us like an enveloping atmosphere. Receding events left phantom echoes in our ears. Valentine, having gazed for some time fixedly at a non-existent object, looked slowly about him, saying:
“The corpse is gone.”
Then he went and stood in one of the west windows. I stood at the other. The rain had congealed. Snow was falling in that ominous, isolating way which produces in blond people a sense of friendly huddling, instinctive memory perhaps of a north time when contact meant warmth and security. It blotted out everything of the view beyond Trinity church and graveyard. There was a surrounding impression of vertical gray planes in the windows of which lights were beginning to appear, for it was suddenly dark. The Trinity chimes proclaimed in this vortex the hour of noon.
“What day of the month is it?” he asked, clearing his voice after speaking.
“The eighteenth.”
“Twenty years, lacking two days, I have been president of the Great Midwestern,” he said. “In that time—” He stopped.... Trinity chimes struck the quarter past. “How it snows,” he said, turning from the window. “Well, you see what the railroad business is like. Shall I ask a place for you on one of the New York papers? I promised to do that, you remember, if anything should happen.”
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’ll stay on here to clear things up a bit.”