JOHN STEELE’S friends were amazed to find him back in town almost within a week after he had left with such lavish preparations for a long stay in the wilderness. It was difficult for him to offer an adequate explanation, and it grew to be most annoying, once he had constructed his excuses, to be compelled to repeat them to every friend he met, and listen without cursing to the inane advice given by people who didn’t in the least know what they were talking about.
“What! back already?” cried Philip Manson, who had offered to place a private car at his disposal if he would keep close to the railway. Manson held that camping out in a private car was the right way to do it, and that a canvas tent was a delusion and a snare. “Back already?” exclaimed the general manager. “Why, John, you look as haggard as if you’d been through a panic in the wheat market. Didn’t the Black Hills agree with you?”
“No,” said John shortly and truthfully; “threatened to develop throat trouble,” and he tapped his neck significantly.
“How long were you in the mountains?”
“Five days.”
“Oh, well, I told you how it would be before you left. That’s what comes of sleeping in a cot-bed, over damp ground, under thin canvas. You should have taken both my advice and my private car then you could have carried all the comforts of town with you.”
Now that the immediate tension of the crisis had relaxed, John Steele found himself very close to a mental and physical collapse. It was true that the great Peter Berrington was dead, but the elation which that startling piece of news had first caused subsided long before he reached the city. Men die, but systems remain. Had the shadow of Peter Berrington been lifted, after all, even though Peter himself was now a shadow? The grotesque uncertainty of the situation was making rags of John Steele’s nerves. Even as he walked through the crowded streets he had to fight down an impulse to shriek aloud, raising his hands to heaven and crying: “In God’s name, if you’re going to do anything, do it now, and let’s have it over!”
It was not that he shrank from ruin, or even from death, both of which he had faced within the past year. It was the uncertainty of when and how the blow was to fall. He began to fear that something worse than either ruin or death would overtake him. In the privacy of his own room he would sometimes march up and down with set teeth and clenched fists, saying to himself: “You must quit thinking of this, or you’ll go mad,” and yet with all his strength of mind he could not stop his planning to circumvent the unseen danger which threatened him.
The fantastic nature of the peril that surrounded him was such that if it were made public, he would be laughed at from one end of the country to the other. In a busy, practical, work-a-day world, it was incredible that a group of men, only one of whom he had ever seen, and that most casually, should sit in a sky-scraper in New York and actually plan the murder of a young man in Chicago; for this group of men were churchgoers, Sunday-school teachers, philanthropists who had founded colleges; bestowers of charity on a scale of munificence hitherto unexampled. And yet more potent than all these things was the fact that they were hard-headed business men, the most successful business men in the world, intent on their own affairs, and naturally far removed from any thought of revenge, for the simple reason that revenge is not business, and there is no money in it. It was quite true that this same group, in early days, had been accused of burning rival factories, of inciting riots, and of many other crimes against the peace and security of the commonwealth, but these things had never been legally proven or brought home to the group by irrefutable evidence. Where investigation had followed crime, and the inquiry was not quashed, it had always been shown that the rash acts were the work of over-zealous employees exceeding their instructions. The hands of the financial group in the tall building on Broadway were clean. No band of Quakers were more set against violence than these mild-mannered men in New York. If John Steele had told the story of the attempted lynching among the Black Hills, the incredulous public would have looked upon the affair as a practical joke played by humourous mountaineers on a tenderfoot from the East. No one knew better than John Steele that to connect Dakota Bill of the Black Hills with Nicholson of New York was an impossibility. He was certain the miners knew nothing of Nicholson; that they held a genuine lynching grievance against the owner of the mine, whoever he was, and that they were acting quite naturally according to their instincts when this supposed owner had fallen into their hands.
Alice Fuller, who led him so easily into the trap, as the tame animal in the stockyards leads its fellows to the slaughter-pen—she, of course, knew for whom she was acting, but John doubted if this knowledge led by any followable clue to Nicholson. When he thought of the handsome girl, he shuddered; and, for ten thousand reasons, that episode must never become public. To be hoodwinked by a pretty woman was merely to join the procession of fools that extended from the time of Adam to the year 1905.