The Way of the Strong

by Ridgwell Cullum

The completeness with which the last details of his plans were executed was at once a tribute to his consummate manipulation, and the merciless quality of his hatred. The cruelty he displayed must have been indefensible except for that one touch of human—nay, animal nature, which belongs to all life. He honestly believed in this man's guilty relations with his own wife, and his blindly furious jealousy thus inspired he saw no penalty, no vengeance too cruel or too lasting to deal out to the offender.

Alexander Hendrie had no scruples when dealing with his enemies. His was the merciless fighting nature of the brute. But he was also capable of prodigal generosities, lofty passions, and great depths of human gentleness.

No feeling of pity stirred him as he sat in his office in Winnipeg, with the telephone close to his hand, on the afternoon of his victim's trial.

He was waiting for the news of the verdict which was to reach him over those hundreds of miles of silent wire. He was waiting patiently, but absorbed in his desire that word should reach him at the earliest moment. His desk was littered with business papers which required his attention, but they remained untouched. It was an acknowledgment that paramount in the man's mind is passionate feeling for the woman he had married.

It was a strange metamorphosis in a man of his long-cultivated purpose. All his life success had been his most passionate desire. Now he almost regarded his millions with contempt. Nature had claimed him at last, and the lateness of her call had only increased the force and peremptoriness of her demands.

Even now, while he waited, his thoughts were in that up-town mansion where Monica was waiting for him. Nor were they the harsh thoughts of the wronged husband for the woman in whom his faith had been shattered. He was thinking of her as the wonderful creature, so fair, so perfect in form, so delightful in the appeal of her whole personality, around whom shone the deepest, most glowing fires of his hopes. She was to him the fairest of all God's creatures; she was to him the most desirable thing in all the world.

The fierce tempest which had so bitterly raged in his soul at the first discovery of her frailty had abated, it had almost worn itself out. Now he had taken the wreckage and deliberately set it behind him, and once more the flame of his passion had leaped up—fanned by the breath of the strong life which was his.

Another might have cast the woman out of his life; another of lesser caliber. This man might have turned and rent her, as he had turned and rent the man who was her secret lover. But such was not Alexander Hendrie. His passions were part of him, uncontrolled by any lukewarm considerations of right and wrong. To love, with him, was to hurl aside all caution, all deliberation, and yield himself up to it, body and soul. To have cast Monica out of his life must have been to tear the heart from the depths of his bosom.

The time crept on, and still the telephone remained silent. But the waiting man's patience seemed inexhaustible. His was the patience of certainty. So he smoked on in his leisurely fashion, dreaming his dreams in the delicate spirals of fragrant smoke which rose upon the still air of the room to the clouded ceiling above.

He had no thought for the innocent young life he was crushing with the power of his wealth so many miles away. He cared not one jot for the ethics of his merciless actions. His thwarted love for his erring wife filled all his dreams to the exclusion of every other consideration.