Katherine stumbled down into the dusty, quivering heat of the Square. She was still awed and dumfounded by her discovery; she could not as yet realize its full significance and whither it would lead; but her mind was a ferment of thoughts that were unfinished and questions that did not await reply.
How had a man once so splendid come to sell his soul for money or ambition? What would Westville think and do, Westville who worshipped him, if it but knew the truth? How was she to give battle to an antagonist, so able in himself, so powerfully supported by the public? What a strange caprice of fate it was that had given her as the man she must fight, defeat, or be defeated by, her former idol, her former lover!
Shaken with emotion, her mind shot through with these fragmentary thoughts, she turned into a side street. But she had walked beneath its withered maples no more than a block or two, when her largest immediate problem, her father’s trial on the morrow, thrust itself into her consciousness, and the pressing need of further action drove all this spasmodic speculation from her mind. She began to think upon what she should next do. Almost instantly her mind darted to the man whom she had definitely connected with the plot against her father, Arnold Bruce, and she turned back toward the Square, afire with a new idea.
She had made great advance through suddenly, though unintentionally, confronting Blake with knowledge of his guilt. Might she not make some further advance, gain some new clue, by confronting Bruce in similar manner?
Ten minutes after she had left the office of Harrison Blake, Katherine entered the Express Building. From the first floor sounded a deep and continuous thunder; that afternoon’s issue was coming from the press. She lifted her skirts and gingerly mounted the stairway, over which the Express’s “devil” was occasionally seen to make incantations with the stub of an undisturbing broom.
At the head of the stairway a door stood open. This she entered, and found herself in the general editorial room, ankle-deep with dirt and paper. The air of the place told that the day’s work was done. In one corner a telegraph sounder was chattering its tardy world-gossip to unheeding ears. In the centre at a long table, typewriters before them, three shirt-sleeved young men sprawled at ease reading the Express, which the “devil” had just brought them from the nether regions, moist with the black spittle of the beast that there roared and rumbled.
At sight of her tall, fresh figure, a red spot in her either cheek, defiance in her brown eyes, Billy Harper, quicker than the rest, sprang up and crossed the room.
“Miss West, I believe,” he said. “Can I do anything for you?”
“I wish to speak with Mr. Bruce,” was her cold reply.
“This way,” and Billy led her across the wilderness of proofs, discarded copy and old newspapers, to a door beside the stairway that led down into the press-room. “Just go right in,” he said.