Chapter XXXI
TOM'S LEVEE
It was seven o'clock the next morning. Tom lay propped up on the couch in his sitting-room, his foot on a pillow, waiting for Maggie to come back with the morning papers. A minute before he had asked Ferdinand to run down and get them for him, but Maggie, who just then had been starting out for a loaf of bread, had said shortly to the boy that she would get them herself.
When Maggie had opened the door the night before, while Petersen was clumsily trying to fit Tom's key into the keyhole, the sight of Tom standing against the wall on one foot, his clothes in disorder, had been to her imagination a full explanation of what had happened. Her face had hardened and she had flung up her clenched hands in fierce helplessness. "Oh, my God! So you've been at Foley again!" she had burst out. "More trouble! My God, my God! I can't stand it any longer!" She would have gone on, but the presence of a third person had suddenly checked her. She had stood unmoving in the doorway, her eyes flashing, her breast rising and falling. For an instant Tom, remembering a former declaration, had expected her to close the door in his face, but with a gesture of infinite, rageful despair she had stepped back from the door without a word, and Petersen had supported him to the couch. Almost immediately a doctor had appeared, for whom Tom and Petersen had left a message on their way home; and by the time the doctor and Petersen had gone, leaving Tom in bed, her fury had solidified into that obdurate, resentful silence which was the characteristic second stage of her wrath. Her injustice had roused Tom's antagonism, and thus far not a word had passed between them.
The nearest newsstand was only a dozen steps from the tenement's door, but minute after minute passed and still Maggie did not return. After a quarter hour's waiting Tom heard the hall door open and close, and then Maggie came into the sitting-room. He was startled at the change fifteen minutes had made in her expression. The look of set hardness was gone; the face was white and drawn, almost staring. She dropped the papers on a chair beside the couch. The top one, crumpled, explained the length of her absence and her altered look.
Tom's heart began to beat wildly; she knew it then! She paused beside him, and with his eyes down-turned he waited for her to speak. Seconds passed. He could see her hands straining, and hear her deep breath coming and going. Suddenly she turned about abruptly and went into the kitchen.
Tom looked wonderingly after her a moment; then his eyes were caught by a black line half across the top of the crumpled paper: "Contractors Trap Foley." He seized the paper and his eyes took in the rest of the headline at a glance. "Arrested, But Makes Spectacular Escape"; a dozen words about the contractors' plan; and then at the very end, in smallest display type: "Also Exposed in Union." He quickly glanced through the headlines of the other papers. In substance they were the same.
Utterly astounded, he raced through the several accounts of Foley's exposure. They were practically alike. They told of Mr. Baxter's visit to the District Attorney, and then recited the events of the past three weeks just as Mr. Baxter had given them to the official prosecutor: How Foley had tried to hold the Executive Committee up for fifty thousand dollars; how the committee had seen in his demand a chance to get him into the hands of the law, and so rid labor and capital of a common enemy; how, after much deliberation, they had decided to make the attempt; how the sham negotiations had proceeded; how yesterday, to make the evidence perfect, Foley had been given the fifty thousand dollars he had demanded as the price of settlement—altogether a most complete and plausible story. "A perfect case," the District Attorney had called it. Tom's part in the affair was told in a couple of paragraphs under a subhead.