Marion was absorbed in the thing; and I understood her anxiety. But the most pressing danger, she did not seem to realize.
It lay, I thought, in the revenge of a discharged workman. Clinton Howard had to drop any number of incompetent persons, and they wrote him all sorts of threatening letters, I had been told. With all the awful things that happen over the country some of these angry people might do anything. There are always some half-mad people.
She went on.
“But Clinton says the public is as just as Daniel. If he has an accident in the ordinary course of affairs the public will hold him for it. But if anything should happen that he could not help, the public will not hold him responsible.”
I realized the force of that. What reasonable human care could prevent he must answer for, but the outrage of a criminal would not be taken in the public mind against him. On the contrary, the sympathy of the public would flow in. When the people feel that a man is making every effort for their welfare, the criminal act of an outsider brings them over wholly to his support. Profound interest carried Marion off her feet.
“I was in a panic the other day, and Clinton said, 'Don't let rotten luck get your goat. I'm done if an engineer runs by a block, but nothing else can put it over on me'!”
She laughed with me at the direct, virile idiom of young America in action.
An event interrupted the discourse. The motor took a sharp curve and a young man running across the road suddenly flung himself face down in the grass beyond the curb.
“Is he hurt?” said Marion to the chauffeur.
“No, Miss, he's hiding, Miss,” said the man, and we swept out of sight.