“How do we know?” repeated Blaney. “I'm not quite as green as you think. I know because I've got it down in black and white. They can't get around a contract like that.”
Unlocking a drawer in his desk, he drew out a sheet of paper which he thrust into Bridge's hands. “Read it,” he said.
Bridge read it through once and then again; it was briefly worded, and he had no difficulty in remembering it. As he laid the paper down he was conscious of a violent throbbing in his head, and he shivered as though an icy breeze had blown upon him. He rose uncertainly from his chair and moved toward the door.
“What's the matter?” demanded Blaney. “Where are you going?”
“I don't feel very well,” said Bridge. “I think I'll go home and go to bed.”
When he reached the foot of the stairs, however, he turned not toward his room, but toward the railway station; for in his mind there was a confused purpose of going to Chicago immediately and telling Jim Weeks exactly what he had found out.
Scarlet fever is not ordinarily a man's disease, but it had fallen upon Bridge. He had exposed himself to it on the evening when he went to Blaney's house to make the preliminary move in his game; and now after the five days of tense inaction it attacked him furiously.
He was in a raging fever when he left Blaney's office, but he did not realize it, borne up as he was by the excitement of winning. There could be no doubt that he had done as good a stroke of work for himself as for Jim Weeks, for Jim was not the man to let the merit of his lieutenants go unrecognized. He felt sure that Jim would win the fight, even with C. & S.C. against him, and though he had not recognized the worthlessness of the contract Blaney held, he was confident that Jim could use his knowledge of the existence of such a contract with telling effect.
As he walked on, the exhilaration of his triumph died out of him, and his steps faltered and his sight became untrustworthy. He realized that he was not fit for travelling, and reluctantly he turned back to his room. He was a long time in reaching it, and when he staggered in and dropped into an easy-chair he knew that he was a very sick man. With a foreboding of the delirium that was coming upon him he gathered himself together for a final effort and scrawled a copy of the contract upon a slip of paper. With shaking hands he folded it and crammed it into an inner pocket; then he rose and moved slowly toward the bed. He fell twice in the short distance, but he kept on, and his head sank back in the pillows before consciousness forsook him.