“Nor am I making them. I am merely stating facts 265 which you seem inclined to confuse. I grant the failure but I also claim the partial success.”
Harrison seated himself, and as the interview stretched Spurrier’s nerves stretched with it under the placid surface of his plunger’s camouflage. He had, as yet, no way of guessing how the verdict would go, and now the capitalist’s face was hardened in discouragement. It was a face of merciless inflexibility. The sentence had been prepared in the judge’s mind. There remained only its enunciation.
“Nothing is to be gained by mincing my words, Spurrier,” declared Spurrier’s chief. “We know precisely where you stand.”
Harrison extended his hand with its fingers spread and closed it slowly into a clenched fist. “I hold you—there! I can crush you to a pulp of absolute ruin. You know that. The only question is whether I want, or not, to do it.”
“And whether, or not, you can afford to do it,” amended the other with an audacity that he by no means felt. “You must decide whether you can afford to accept tamely and as a final defeat, a mere reversal, which I—and no one else—can turn into eventual victory.”
“I have duly considered that. I had implicit confidence in your abilities. You have struck at my personal feeling for you by a silence that was not frank. You have allied yourself with the mountain people by marriage, and we stand on opposite sides of the line of interest. You have all the while been watched by our enemies, and I regard you as a defeated man. If I choose to cast you aside, you go to the scrap heap. You will never recover.”
That was an assertion which there was neither health nor wisdom in contradicting and Spurrier waited. His last card was played.
“And I am going to cast you aside—bankrupt you—ruin you!” blazed out Harrison, “unless you absolutely meet my requirements during a period of probation. That period will engage you in a very different matter. For the present you are through with the Kentucky mountains. The new task will be a difficult one, and it should put you on your mettle. It is one that can’t be accomplished at all unless you can do it. You have that one chance to retrieve yourself. Take it or leave it.”
“What are your terms?”