“I should say it would!” exclaimed Old Hosie.
They whispered on, excitedly, hopefully; and when the two men had departed and Katherine had gone up to her room to try to snatch a few hours’ sleep, she continued to dwell eagerly upon the plan that seemed so near of consummation. She tossed about her bed, and heard the Court House clock sound three, and then four. Then the heat of her excitement began to pass away, and cold doubts began to creep into her mind. Perhaps Blake and Peck would refuse to sign. And even if they did sign, she began to see this prospective success as a thing of lesser magnitude. The agreement would prove the alliance between Blake and Peck, and would make clear that a conspiracy existed. It was good, but it was not enough. It fell short by more than half. It would not clear her father, though his innocence might be inferred, and it would not prove Blake’s responsibility for the epidemic.
As she lay there staring wide-eyed into the gloom of the night, listening to the town clock count off the hours of her last day, she realized that what she needed most of all, far more than Manning’s document even should he get it, was the testimony which she believed was sealed behind the lips of Doctor Sherman, whose present whereabouts God only knew.
CHAPTER XXIII
AT ELSIE’S BEDSIDE
The day before election, a day of hope deferred, had dragged slowly by and night had at length settled upon the city. Doctor West had the minute before come in from a long, dinnerless day of hastening from case to case, and now he, Katherine, and her aunt were sitting about the supper table. To Katherine’s eye her father looked very weary and white and frail. The day-and-night struggle at scores of bedsides was sorely wearing him down.
As for Katherine, she was hardly less worn. She scarcely touched the food before her. The fears that always assail one at a crisis, now swarmed in upon her. With the election but a few hours distant, with no word as yet from Mr. Manning, she saw all her high plans coming to naught and saw herself overwhelmed with utter defeat. From without there dimly sounded the beginning of the ferment of the campaign’s final evening; it brought to her more keenly that to-morrow the city was going to give itself over unanimously to be despoiled. Across the table, her father, pale and worried, was a reminder that, when his fight of the plague was completed, he must return to jail. Her mind flashed now and then to Bruce; she saw him in prison; she saw not only his certain defeat on the morrow, but she saw him crushed and ruined for life as far as a career in Westville was concerned; and though she bravely tried to master her feeling, the throbbing anguish with which she looked upon his fate was affirmation of how poignant and deep-rooted was her love.
And yet, despite these flooding fears, she clung with a dizzy desperation to hope, and to the determination to fight on to the last second of the last minute.