CHAPTER XXXII.
OMINOUS DEVELOPMENTS.
The first intimation that Flint and Waldron had of any opposition to their plans, of any revolt, of any danger, was at quarter past three on the afternoon of October 8th, 1925. All that afternoon, busy with their final plans for the immediate extension of their system, they had been going over certain data with Herzog, receiving reports from branch managers and conferring with the Congressional committee that—together with Dillon Slade, their secret-service tool, now also President Supple's private secretary—they had peremptorily summoned from Washington to receive instructions.
In the more than four years that had passed since they had put Gabriel behind bars—years fruitful in strikes and lockouts, in prostitutions of justice, in sluggings and crude massacres—both men had altered notably.
Though the National Censorship now no longer permitted any cartooning of a "seditious" nature, i.e., representing any of the Air Trust notables, old Flint's features tempted the artist's pencil more than ever. Save for a little white fringe of hair at the back of his head, he had become almost bald, thus adding greatly to his strong suggestion of a vulture. His face was now more yellow and shrunken than ever, due to a rather heavier consumption of his favorite drug, morphine; his nose had hooked more strongly, and his one gold tooth of other days now had two more to bear it company. His eyes, too, behind his thick pince-nez, had grown more shifty, cold and cruelly calculating. If it be possible to conceive a fox, a buzzard and a jackal merged in one, old Isaac Flint today represented that unnatural and hideous hybrid.
Now, as he stood facing "Tiger" Waldron, in the inner and sancrosanct office of the Air Trust plant at Niagara—the office that even the President of these United States approached with deference and due humility—the snarl on his face revealed the beast-soul of the man.
"Damnation!" he was saying, as he shook a newly-received aerogram at his partner. "What's this, I'd like to know? What does this mean? All telegraphic communication west of Chicago has suddenly stopped, and from half a dozen points in the Southern States news is coming in that railway service is being interrupted! See here, Waldron, this won't do! Your part of the business has always been to carry on the publicity end, the newspaper end, the moulding of public opinion and political thought, and the maintenance of free, clear rail and aero communication everywhere, all over the world. But now, all at once, see here?"
Waldron raised red, bleared eyes at his irate partner. He, too, was more the beast than four years ago. No less the tiger, now, but more the pig. High, evil living had done its work on him. An unhealthy purple suffused his heavily-jowled face. Beneath his eyes, sodden bags of flesh hung pendant. His lips, loose and lascivious, now sucked indolently at the costly cigar he was smoking as he sat leaning far back in his desk-chair. And so those two, angry accuser and indifferent accused, faced each other for a moment; while, incessant, dull, mighty, the thunders of the giant cataract mingled with the trembling diapason of the stupendous turbines in the rock-hewn caverns where old Niagara now toiled in fetters, to swell their power and fling gold into their bottomless coffers.