Had John Spurrier gone to see the “witch woman” when Mosebury advised it, his course from that point on would have brought him to a different ending.
In looking back on that night, he could never quite remember it with consecutive distinctness. Gaps of forgetfulness were fitfully shot through with disconnected scraps of recollection. When events began to marshal themselves into orderly sequence, the windowpanes of his hotel room were turning a dirty gray with the coming of dawn, and he was sitting in a straight-backed chair. His bed had not been touched. Back of that lay a chaotic sense of irremediable disaster and despair.
At last he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and that picture of disheveled wildness startled him and brought him back to realization.
Then self-contempt swept in on him. He had been 248 called a man of iron nerve; a plunger who never turned a hair under reversals of fortune—and now he stood looking through the glass at a broken gambler with frenzied eyes. It was such a face as one might see in the circle before the Casino at Monte Carlo—the place of suicides.
The man who had seemed to come from nowhere and who had talked last night with such destructive volubility, had been a pure shyster. To be outwitted by such a clown carried the sting of chagrin, quite apart from the material disaster. Yet into his disordered thoughts came the realization that the senator had been only a puppet. His actuating wires had been pulled by the fingers of A. O. and G. and the men who sat as overlords of A. O. and G. were only shysters of a greater caliber. The men whom he, himself, served were no better. Compared to this backwoods statesman he, John Spurrier, was as a smooth and sophisticated confidence man paralleled with a pickpocket. Ethically, they were cut from the same cloth, though to differing patterns—one rustic and the other urban.
He had been engaged in a tawdry game, for all its gilding of rich prospects, but in the face of defeat a man cannot change his colors.
Had he been able to undertake this fight as his own man and choose his own methods—changing them as he grew in stature—there might have been a man’s zest in the game.
Now, less than ever, could he speak open truth to these simple friends who had trusted him. Now he must fight out a damaged campaign to the end along 249 the lines to which he stood committed, and until the end there was nothing to say.
Perhaps if he could avert total ruin, he might yet have opportunity to reclaim the confidence of these Esaus who had traded for a mess of pottage. Certainly they had nothing to hope for from the myrmidons of Trabue.
John Spurrier forced his shoulders back into military erectness. He compelled his lips into the stiff and counterfeited curvature of a smile.