Not only had every resource he could muster gone into the scrapped enterprise, leaving him worse than bankrupt, but through him Martin Harrison had been led into the sinking of a fortune.
Harrison would, in all likelihood, be less bitter about the money loss, than the thought of the triumphant smile on Trabue’s thin lips, but it was quite in the cards that, with his contempt for failure, he would wash his hands of Spurrier.
That, of course, spelled ruin. The exhibition skater had gone through the thin ice.
Harrison could, if he chose, do more than dismiss John Spurrier. He had seen to it that his lieutenant was bound to his standards by debts he could not pay, save out of some future enrichment contingent on success. If he chose to call those loans he would leave his employee shattered beyond hope of recovery.
But when Spurrier went down to the hotel dining room at breakfast time, a cold bath and a superhuman exertion of will power had transformed him. His bearing was a nice blending of the debonair and the dignified.
To no eye of observation was there any trace of 250 collapse or reversal. He seemed the man who demanded the best from life and who got it.
At a table not far from his own sat Senator Chew with a companion whom Spurrier did not know. The traitor glanced up and his eye met that of the man he had betrayed, then fell flinching.
Perhaps the mountaineer expected the dining room to stage such a scene of recrimination and violence as it had in the past on more than one occasion, for his crafty face went brick red, then darkened into truculence as he half pushed back his chair and his hand swept tentatively toward his hip.
But the plunger had still his pride left, or its remnant, and it was no part of his plan to stand the self-confessed and vanquished victim, by any patent demonstration of wrath. He met the eyes of the politician who had played on both sides of the same game, and smiled, and if there was contempt in the expression, it was recognized only by the man who knew its cause.
Later he wrote a telegram to Harrison. It was not the thing he had expected to say, yet in it went no whine of despair: