"Catch me taking anything away from a girl like that to give it to a damn Yankee like Steering," he would tell himself over and over. "Won't she do the most good with it? It'll be hers soon. Won't she do the most good? Answer me that, now."
So much for the outside where Madeira lived in the world of realities and met the various demands of each day's relations capably and coolly. Inside his private office behind the bank, at his desk, he lived in another world, a world where shadow became substance, possibility became actuality and fear made facts out of fancy.
At night, after Canaan had put its lights out and had lapsed into the shroud-like stillness of a country town's sleep, Madeira was there, with his ghost, in his office,—figuring, figuring. On the roll-top of his desk he kept a letter spread out in front of him. It always happened that he took that letter out of his vest pocket for the purpose of destroying it, and it always happened that when he got up, far into the night, he picked the letter up and replaced it in his pocket. If the words of the letter had been seared across eternity with the red-hot iron of fate they could not have been more indestructible.
Besides the letter, Madeira always had on the desk maps, geological surveys, time estimates. Von Moltke never figured half so carefully nor on half so many shaky hypotheses as did Madeira in his office during these nights. He came to know, through awful, blood-sweating hours, that with so much blasting, so much pick-and-shovel work, allowing for so many back-sets from water and blind rock, so many shifts of men could progress to certain points, in so many days. He sometimes realised that all this was unnecessary; that it was aging him and crazing him; that he could put his work through on the Tigmores long before word of old Grierson's death would, by any unfortuitous accident, leak into Canaan, if it ever got there; that he would never have to resort to the subways that he was figuring on to steal the ore out of the Canaan Tigmores; that all this ceaseless, merciless calculation was but the reaction of a conscience, stalking, gaunt and lunatic, through the charnel-house of its own experience. But for all that he had to go on crossing bridges that he was never to reach, covering black tracks that he was never to make. Often at his desk there, his mind became strangely obtunded and he babbled vapidly; his big face pinched up till it seemed lean and grey, and he pitched forward, face down, upon the desk.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] The author acknowledges a conspicuous indebtedness to a Southwestern weekly for this editorial.