Gradually his indignation died away. Nothing so stings the soul of a man as injustice, and the entire content of that Seattle letter was false to the core—falser even than Armstrong dreamed at the moment. It was not the threatened trouble which hurt, not the warning sent Macgowan, but the black falsity of the whole affair.
Armstrong laughed at the thought of heading off the threatened inquiry. Any probe into the methods of Consolidated or of the Armstrong Company, would only result in exoneration. That the salesmen were misrepresenting Food Products was ridiculously untrue. Armstrong knew his salesmen.
"Yet that letter worries me," thought Armstrong. "I wish now that I'd gone ahead and employed Dorns. Why the devil was Mac so worried over a Federal inquiry? We've nothing to fear from that end. Something queer about it all; I don't savvy it."
At this moment he remembered the promise he had made to Dorothy.
The thought disturbed him. That request had not been empty words. When she asked for his promise, she meant exactly what she said; perhaps, he reflected, that request of hers had some unguessed reason behind it.
Armstrong frowned. He realized that now he must either break his promise to her, or keep it. Some such emergency as this, some such threat of trouble, was just what she must have had in mind when she had extracted the promise. Business was no overwhelming mystery to her. Yet this letter from Seattle—nonsense! There was no trouble here. The whole thing was absurd. Nothing could come of this; there was no basis. And just now the important thing was to keep Dorothy's peace of mind secure and serene.
"I wouldn't bother her now if the whole organization were collapsing—which it's not!" thought Armstrong.
At four-thirty Jimmy Wren appeared beaming, and displayed a telegram from the Seattle sales manager, branding the report as wholly false. There was not a single dissatisfied investor in the coast territory, so far as was known.
"Want to stop Macgowan?" asked Wren. "I can catch him at his office."
"Let him go," said Armstrong. "If there's anything at all in this, he'd better ferret it out and kill it. You wire the Seattle manager to investigate Elmer Lewis. That letter looks queer to me. Let me know at Evansville what you learn."