"Yes. Your own company is organized under the laws of that state, I believe?"
"It is; they were both organized at the same time. By the way, there's something I want to ask you about—"
Armstrong had not forgotten the information which Jimmy Wren had laid before him, that day when Wren turned up in Evansville. He now told Mansfield how the Deming Food Products Company had been taken over and reorganized. He went on to relate Wren's discovery—that Deming's directors, probably without Deming's knowledge, had sworn to a false financial condition in obtaining licenses to market their stock issue.
"Can Macgowan rake that up against us in any possible way?" he concluded. "At the time the licenses were issued, we had nothing to do with Food Products, you know."
"No; you're entirely safe there, I think," promptly declared Mansfield. "Don't let it worry you for a minute—it has nothing whatever to do with you."
There was something else, however, which in the rush of business Armstrong had quite forgotten. Upon the following Monday, the last Monday in February, he was reminded of his delinquency in abrupt and terrible fashion.
By this time the fight between Findlater and the Protective Association was not only public property but was being keenly followed by banking circles and kindred interests. Among all these there was a cynically lucid understanding of the real issue; it was no secret to them that the struggle lay between looters and honest men. Yet they looked on with a phlegmatic acuity; it was to them only another battle wherein the dreamer would probably lose to the clever fighter who knew how to hit foul and hard.
Armstrong knew this. He felt that he knew exactly how to appraise the spoken word from his bankers, his friends, his acquaintances. In this he was wrong; he was still too conscious of himself and his campaign, and it tended to give him a false view. A man is at his best only when he can forget himself. His best work is done only when his "office clothes" are forgotten.
On this eventful Monday, Armstrong was taken unawares, in a moment of self-consciousness.
He took the day off, for it was his birthday, and spent it quietly at home with Dorothy before going into the city in the evening for Lohengrin. Before a blazing log fire in the wide hearth of the living room that afternoon, he was recounting to Dorothy the prospects for the final few weeks of the campaign; he had given up hope of ousting Findlater and Macgowan before the annual meeting. Then, in the gathering dusk, a caller arrived, a stranger. Armstrong had the man shown in.