“A pussyfooter, eh?”
“Don’t you believe it,” returned Galpin. “Martin Embree will fight and fight like the devil when he sees good cause for it. How else do you think he could have got where he is?”
“I don’t know,” retorted the younger man sullenly. “But I don’t see where he comes in to interfere with me.”
“Ask him.”
“I will. Where can I find him?”
“As quick as all that!” commented The Guardian reporter. He noted a hardening of the small muscles at the corner of Robson’s mouth. “Scrappy little feller, ain’t you!”
“Thanks,” said Jeremy Robson, with his sudden, pleasant grin. “I get what you mean. Don’t think I’m going to make a fool of myself. Just the same I will ask him, if you’ll tell me where I can catch him.”
“’Round at Trask’s boarding-house, after dinner, most likely. That’s where he lives.”
At Trask’s that evening Jeremy Robson ascended through a clinging aroma of cookery, to a third-floor room, very tiny, very tidy, very much overcrowded with books, pamphlets, a cot, and the spare squareness of the Honorable Martin Embree. The visitor was somewhat surprised at finding a political leader of such prominence so frugally housed. Embree sat at a small table, making notes from a federal report on railroad earnings. He lifted his head and Robson noted a single splash of gray in the brown hair that waved luxuriantly up from the broad forehead. His meetings with the Northern Tier leader had been casual: so he had been the more flattered at Embree’s ready recognition on the previous evening. Now he was struck anew with the soft, almost womanish brilliance of the prominent eyes, and the sense of power in the upper part of the face, sharpening down into shrewdness, in the mouth and chin. A thoroughly attractive face, and more than that, a winning as well as an impressive personality. Embree smiled as he greeted his caller by name, and the reporter suddenly felt all the animus ooze from his purpose. He still wanted to know the why and wherefore of Embree’s action. But his interest in knowing was equally apportioned between himself and his adversary. Characteristically, Jeremy went straight to the point.
“I came to find out why you got The Record to kill my story.”