It was heady wine for the morning. He described himself briefly as a lunatic, and walked on again. But the crazy notion would not be gone. The day before he had been passive. Now he was active, acutely aware of himself and all his wants. He walked a mile trying to dismiss the idea. He sat down again, and it flooded back upon him with new force.
Her people were gone. She had even intimated a wish to talk with him again. It could be done quickly. He knew. He felt the primitive superiority of man's mere brute force over woman. He gloried in his knotted muscles and the crushing power of his desires.
Afterward, she would reproach him bitterly. They would both be unhappy. It was no matter. It was the present, the time when he should be living. He would have her, and Shepler—Shepler might have had the One Girl mine—but this girl, never!
Again he tried faithfully to walk off the obsession. Again were his essays at sober reason unavailing.
His mind was set as it had been when he bought the stocks day after day against the advice of the best judges in the Street. He could not turn himself back. There must be success. There could not be a giving up—and there must not be failure.
Hour after hour he alternately walked and rested, combating and favouring the mad project. It was a foolish little world, and people were always waiting for another time to begin the living of life. The German had quoted Martial: "To-morrow I will live, the fool says; to-day itself's too late. The wise lived yesterday."
If he did go away alone he knew he would always regret it. If he carried her triumphantly off, doubtless his regret for that would eventually be as great. The first regret was certain. The latter was equally plausible; but, if it came, would it not be preferable to the other? To have held her once—to have taken her away, to have triumphed over her own calculations, and, best of all, to have triumphed over the money-king resting fatuously confident behind his wealth, dignifying no man as rival who was not rich. The present, so, was more than any possible future, how dire soever it might be.
He was mad to prove to her—and to Shepler—that she was more a woman than either had supposed,—a woman in spite of herself, weak, unreasoning; to prove to them both that a determined man has a vital power to coerce which no money may ever equal.
Not until five o'clock had he by turns urged and fought himself to the ferry. By that time he had given up arguing. He was dwelling entirely upon his plan of action. Strive and grope as he would, the thing had driven him on relentlessly. His reason could not take him beyond the reach of its goad. Far as he went he loved her even farther. She belonged to him. He would have her. He seemed to have been storing, the day before, a vast quantity of energy that he was now drawing lavishly upon. For the time, he was pure, raw force, needing, to be resistless, only the guidance of a definite purpose.
He crossed the ferry and went to the hotel, where he shaved and freshened himself. He found Grant, the porter, waiting for him when he went downstairs, and gave him written directions to the railroad people to have the car attached to the Chicago Express leaving at eight the next morning; also instructions about his baggage.