Held to Answer: A Novel - Peter Clark MacFarlane

Turning back, he closed the door, felt his way to the gas, and turned it off. He had no need of gas now. Then he lay down, fully clothed, upon the bed, with a cold cloth upon his eyes, thinking flightily and feeling very sorry for himself.

CHAPTER III

WHEN THE DARK WENT AWAY

This was the sign on the door that John Hampstead had opened every morning for seven years. This morning he did not open it, and there was something like consternation when as late as nine-thirty the chair of the big, amiable, stenographic drudge was still vacant. Old Heitmuller, the chief clerk, after swearing his way helplessly from one point of the compass to another, was about to dispatch the office boy to Hampstead's residence.

Inside, and unaware of all this pother, sat the General Freight Agent. Big of body, with the topography of his father's heath upon his wide face, soft in the heart and hard in the head, Robert Mitchell was a man of no airs. His origin was probably shanty Irish, and he didn't care who suspected it. By painful labor, a ready smile, a hearty laugh, a square deal to his company and as square a deal to the public as he could give—"consistently"—he had got to his present modest eminence. He was going higher and was not particular who suspected that either; but was not boastful, had the respect of all men who knew him well, and the affection of those who knew him intimately.

He sat just now in a thoroughly characteristic pose, with the stubby fingers of one fat hand thoughtfully teasing a wisp of reddish brown hair, while his shrewd blue eyes were screwing at the exact significance of the top letter on a pile before him.

Over in a corner was Mitchell's guest and vast superior, Malden H. Hale, the president of the twelve thousand miles of shining steel which made up the Great South-western Railway System, in which Mitchell's little road nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python. Mr. Hale was signing some letters dictated yesterday to John, finding them paragraphed and punctuated to his complete satisfaction, with here and there a word better than his own looming up in the context. For a time there was no sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the sheets as he turned them over. Then he chuckled softly, and presently spoke.

"Bob," he said, "that's an odd genius, that stenographer out there."

"Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking up from his work, and then suddenly he stabbed the atmosphere with a significant rising inflection: "Genius?"