Old Hosie raised his lean figure from his chair and shook her hand, at first silently. He, too, was dazed by the collapse of Bruce’s fortunes.
“Things certainly do look bad,” he said slowly. “I never suspected that his case would suddenly stand on its head like that.”
“Nor did I—though from the beginning I had an instinctive feeling that it was too good, too easy, to be true.”
“And to think that after all we know the boy is right!” groaned the old man.
“That’s what makes the whole affair so tantalizing. We know he is right—we know my father is innocent—we know the danger the city is in—we know Mr. Blake’s guilt—we know just what his plans are. We know everything! But we have not one jot of evidence that would be believed by the public. The irony of it! To think, for all our knowledge, we can only look helplessly on and watch Mr. Blake succeed in everything.”
Old Hosie breathed an imprecation that must have made his ancestors, asleep behind the old Quaker meeting-house down in Buck Creek, gasp in their grassy, cedar-shaded graves.
“All the same,” Katherine added desperately, “we’ve got to half kill ourselves trying between now and election day!”
They subsided into silence. In nervous impatience Katherine awaited the appearance of the pseudo-investor in run-down farms. He seemed a long time in coming, but the delay was all in her suspense, for as the Court House clock was tolling the appointed hour Mr. Manning, alias Mr. Hartsell, walked into the office. He was, as Katherine had once described him to Old Hosie, a quiet, reserved man with that confidence-inspiring amplitude in the equatorial regions commonly observable in bank presidents and trusted officials of corporations.
As he closed the door his subdued but confident dignity dropped from him and he warmly shook hands with Katherine, for this was their first meeting since their conference in New York six weeks before.
“You must know how very, very terrible our situation is,” Katherine rapidly began. “We’ve simply got to do something!”