"Congratulations," she said calmly, entering the studio and extending her hand. "You have won!"
"How do you know?" he said, taken back by her composure.
"It is there—in your eyes," she said, passing her fingers so close to them that he seemed to feel their soft contact. "Tell me all about it."
"Yes, I've beaten them—Fontaine, Barton, Forscheim, Haggerty, the whole lot of them," he cried with a gleeful laugh. "More, I've forced myself into their hidebound circle. You'll see—in a month I'll be one of them."
At times roguishly delighted as a boy, at others with flashes of primitive power, he related to the eager woman all the details of the night and the desperate stake he had played to make a failure so colossal that they themselves would recoil before it.
"And if Majendie had not killed himself?" she said breathlessly, womanlike perceiving the hazards of fate.
"But he did!" he cried impatiently, unwilling to admit the element of chance in the destiny he had hewn for himself. But the thought sobered him. He looked down from the height to which his ambition had flung him. "It's true. It was either Majendie or me," he said quietly. "Shall I tell you something? That night we were here I knew he was lost—that he would do it. Don't ask me how I knew!" Then, shaking off the memory as an evil dream, he continued, extending his arm in crude magnetic gestures: "Well, that's over. I am where I want to be; the rest is easy. In a month—two months—they will see, Forscheim and Haggerty, how the trap they laid for me has sprung against them. Tonight will be worth twenty millions to me."
"How do you mean?" she said eagerly, but she did not look at him. Slade, triumphant in his brute power, inspired her with an emotion she did not dare to show him yet.
"Forscheim and Haggerty, the United Mining," he said, forgetting his habitual caution in the now present desire to dazzle and overcome this woman who had so resisted him, who had become so suddenly necessary to him, "have laid their trap to get hold of the Osaba territory. They've stripped Gilbert and old General Paxton of their holdings, and they were sure they'd strip me. The Osaba gold fields will be one day worth hundreds of millions—another Eldorado. Well, they'll get a third interest tonight. I've got a third, and Striker and Benz. Mexican United, who've fought them tooth and nail, have another third. Each now has got to have what I've got or get out. I've got the control and when I sell—" He ended with a laugh. "I've licked Forscheim before but it will be nothing to this. They thought they had me down and they played into my hands!"
Suddenly he changed his tone as the memory came to him of Gunther impassively waiting in his anteroom.