Many things passed through his mind as he stood at the open window. His life, he felt, could never be again as it had been before, and he sighed deeply as he recalled his talk with the old prime minister at Geneva. Then he laughed quietly as he remembered Chauvenet and Durand and the dark house on the Boulevard Froissart; but the further recollection of the attack made on his life on the deck of the King Edward sobered him, and he turned away from the window impatiently. He had seen the sick second-cabin passenger leave the steamer at New York, but had taken no trouble either to watch or to avoid him. Very likely the man was under instructions, and had been told to follow the Claibornes home; and the thought of their identification with himself by his enemies angered him. Chauvenet was likely to appear in Washington at any time, and would undoubtedly seek the Claibornes at once. The fact that the man was a scoundrel might, in some circumstances, have afforded Armitage comfort, but here again Armitage’s mood grew dark. Jules Chauvenet was undoubtedly a rascal of a shrewd and dangerous type; but who, pray, was John Armitage?
The bell in his entry rang, and he flashed on the lights and opened the door.
“Well, I like this! Setting yourself up here in gloomy splendor and never saying a word. You never deserved to have any friends, John Armitage!”
“Jim Sanderson, come in!” Armitage grasped the hands of a red-bearded giant of forty, the possessor of alert brown eyes and a big voice.
“It’s my rural habit of reading the register every night in search of constituents that brings me here. They said they guessed you were in, so I just came up to see whether you were opening a poker game or had come to sneak a claim past the watch-dog of the treasury.”
The caller threw himself into a chair and rolled a fat, unlighted cigar about in his mouth. “You’re a peach, all right, and as offensively hale and handsome as ever. When are you going to the ranch?”
“Well, not just immediately; I want to sample the flesh-pots for a day or two.”
“You’re getting soft,—that’s what’s the matter with you! You’re afraid of the spring zephyrs on the Montana range. Well, I’ll admit that it’s rather more diverting here.”
“There is no debating that, Senator. How do you like being a statesman? It was so sudden and all that. I read an awful roast of you in an English paper. They took your election to the Senate as another evidence of the complete domination of our politics by the plutocrats.”
Sanderson winked prodigiously.