“Yes. You know his principle: ‘It’s all right to be honest, if you’re not too damn honest.’ He owns the Stony-River Valley bag and baggage. It was a big gamble and he lost.”
For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside came the rising murmur of the crowd and cutting through it the shrill cry of a newsboy calling an evening extra. Valiant was staring at the other with a strange look. Emotions to which in all his self-indulgent life he had been a stranger were running through his mind, and outré passions had him by the throat. Fool and doubly blind! A poor pawn, a catspaw raking the chestnuts for unscrupulous men whose ignominy he was now called on, perforce, to share! In his pitiful egotism he had consented to be a figurehead, and he had been made a tool. A red rage surged over him. No one had ever seen on John Valiant’s face such a look as grew on it now.
He turned, retrieved the Panama, and without a word opened the door. The older man took a step toward him—he had a sense of dangerous electric forces in the air—but the door closed sharply in his face. He smiled grimly. “Not crooked,” he said to himself; “merely callow. A well-meaning, manicured young fop wholly surrounded by men who knew what they wanted!” He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his chair.
Valiant plunged down in the elevator to the street. Its single other passenger had his nose buried in a newspaper, and over the reader’s shoulder he saw the double-leaded head-line: “Collapse of the Valiant Corporation!”
He pushed past the guarded door, and threading the crowd, made toward the curb, where the bulldog, with a bark of delight, leaped upon the seat of a burnished car, rumbling and vibrating with pent-up power. There were those in the sullen anxious crowd who knew whose was that throbbing metal miracle, the chauffeur spick and span from shining cap-visor to polished brown puttees, and recognizing the white face that went past, pelted it with muttered sneers. But he scarcely saw or heard them, as he stepped into the seat, took the wheel from the chauffeur’s hand and threw on the gear.
He had afterward little memory of that ride. Once the leaping anger within him jerked the throttle wide and the car responded with a breakneck dart through the startled traffic, till the sight of an infuriated mounted policeman, baton up, brought him to himself with a thud. He had small mind to be stopped at the moment. His mouth set in a sudden hard sharp line, and under it his hands gripped the slewing wheel to a tearing serpentine rush that sent the skidding monster rearing on side wheels, to swoop between two drays in a hooting plunge down a side street. His tight lips parted then in a ragged laugh, bit off by the jolt of the lurching motor and the slap of the bulging air.
As the sleek rubber shoes spun noiselessly and swiftly along the avenue the myriad lights that were beginning to gleam wove into a twinkling mist. He drove mechanically past a hundred familiar things and places: the particular chop-house of which he was an habitué—the ivied wall of his favorite club, with the cluster of faces at the double window—the florist’s where daily he stopped for his knot of Parma violets—but he saw nothing, till the massive marble fronts of the upper park side ceased their mad dance as the car halted before a tall iron-grilled doorway with wide glistening steps, between windows strangely shuttered and dark.
He sprang out and touched the bell. The heavy oak parted slowly; the confidential secretary of the man he had come to face stood in the gloomy doorway.
“I want to see Mr. Sedgwick.”