“No,” Henry interrupted. “No, I'd rather leave it like this.”
“But, look here, Henry,—why, great guns! You aren't even convicted of illicit distilling yet, let alone—why, even if you should be, don't you see, you might lose a few years, but—”
“Oh, there wouldn't be any doubt about the conviction, Dick. The game is up, so far as I am concerned. Supposing I should escape, what good would it do me? I should be a fugitive. I should have to leave the country, and go to a new place and begin all over again, just as I began here on the Lakes twenty odd years ago. I have amounted to something here,—I have held first place. I have kept these fellows,”—he indicated Beveridge, with a slight upward turn at the corners of his mouth—“I have kept these fellows guessing from the start. Anywhere else I should be nobody, and at my age that doesn't appeal very strongly to a man. Supposing, even, I could buy an acquittal and stay right on here, would it be any better? You see, my boy, I have been ambitious in a way. I have built up a machine—a new kind of a machine. If I could have been let alone a year or so longer, I should have had everything running as smooth and safe as the Republican County Committee. That was the one thing I set out to do. But it's busted now. With these fellows once on to the whole thing, it could never be carried on again. Oh, in a cheap, shyster way, maybe; but that's not my way. It was my work and now it's over. And when a man has come as near success as I have, and spent the best part of his life working up toward it, he doesn't care about beginning at the little end of something else. His mainspring is broken.”
They were silent. Henry was easily the most self-possessed of the three. Finally Beveridge said:—
“You have spoken once or twice, Mr. Smiley, about telling us how you worked this business.”
“Yes, certainly, any time,—now, if you like.”
“You won't mind if I take down the main points and then ask you to put your name to it?”
“Not at all. I supposed of course you would want to do that.”
This cold-blooded courtesy brought Dick near to shuddering again. But he straightened up in his chair and prepared to listen.
“You say you are the man known as Whiskey Jim?”