The man drew away for a moment and fumbled for words. His aptness of speech had deserted him and at last he spoke clumsily:
“It’s hard to explain just now, when you’ve accused me of not taking you into my confidence, but I stand at a point, Glory, where I’ve got the hardest fight 260 ahead of me I ever made. I stand to be ruined or to make good. I’ve got to use every minute and every thought in competition with quick brains and enormous power. Until its over I must be a machine with one idea ... and I’ll fail, dear, unless I can take with me the knowledge that you trust me.”
She looked up into his face and the misery in her eyes gave place to confidence.
“Go ahead, Jack,” she said. “I believe in you and I’m not even afraid of your failing.” After a moment she clasped her arms tightly about him and added vehemently: “But whether you succeed or fail, come back to me, dear, because, except for your sake, it won’t make any difference to me.”
That same afternoon Spurrier found time to visit the “witch woman.” It had dawned upon him since that night in the Senate chamber that, after all, Sim Colby might have been the least dangerous of his enemies, and the thought made him inquisitive.
The old crone made her magic with abundant grotesquerie, but at its end she peered shrewdly into his eyes, and said:
“I reads hyar in the omends thet mebby ye comes too late.”
Spurrier smiled grimly. He thought that himself.
“I dis’arns,” went on the hag portentously, “thet a blind man impereled ye mightily—a blind man thet plays a fiddle—but thars others beside him thet dwells fur away an’ holds a mighty power of wealth.”
A blind man! Spurrier’s remembrance flashed back to the visit of blind Joe Givins and the papers incautiously left on his table. Yet if he was genuinely blind they could have meant nothing to him—and if 261 he was not genuinely blind it was hard to conceive of human nerves enduring without wincing that test of the gun thrust against the temple.