Blake denied the charge with desperate energy and with all his power of eloquence; he declared that the epidemic was but another consequence of that supremest folly of mankind, public ownership. He was angrily supported by his party, his friends and his followers—but those followers were not so many as a few short weeks before. Passion was at its highest—so high that trustworthy forecasts of the election were impossible. But ten days before election it was freely talked about the streets, and even privately admitted by some of Blake’s best friends, that nothing but a miracle could save him from defeat.
In these days of promise Bruce seemed to pour forth an even greater energy; and in his efforts he was now aided by Mr. Wilson, the Indianapolis lawyer, who was spending his entire time in Westville. Katherine caught in Bruce’s face, when they passed upon the street, a gleam of triumph which he could not wholly suppress. She wondered, with a pang of jealousy, if he and Mr. Wilson were succeeding where she had failed—if all her efforts were to come to nothing—if her ambition to demonstrate to Bruce that she could do things was to prove a mere dream?
Toward noon one day, as she was walking along the Square homeward bound from Elsie Sherman’s, she passed Bruce and Mr. Wilson headed for the stairway of the Express Building. Both bowed to her, then Katherine overheard Bruce say, “I’ll be with you in a minute, Wilson,” and the next instant he was at her side.
“Excuse me, Miss West,” he said. “But we have just unearthed something which I think you should be the first person to learn.”
“I shall be glad to hear it,” she said in the cold, polite tone they reserved for one another.
“Let’s go over into the Court House yard.”
They silently crossed the street and entered the comparative seclusion of the yard.
“I suppose it is something very significant?” she asked.
“So significant,” he burst out, “that the minute the Express appears this afternoon Harrison Blake is a has-been!”
She looked at him quickly. The triumph she had of late seen gleaming in his face was now openly blazing there.