"But they have defeated him," he said bitterly. "They turned him out of his directorship—or, at least, he got out—and are fighting him at every turn. They will destroy him, if possible. They almost have him beat now. Well, it is nothing to me," he added with a shrug of his shoulders and a sort of denial of the self-made suggestion. "He is but an individual victim of a rotten system that must go."
My mind had drifted to the conference which I had witnessed in McSheen's office not long before, when suddenly Wolffert said,
"Your old friend, Peck, appears to have gotten up. I judge he is very successful—after his kind."
"Yes, it would seem so," I said dryly, with a sudden fleeting across my mind of a scene from the past, in which not Peck figured, but one who now bore his name; and a slightly acrid taste came in my mouth at the recollection. "Well, up or down, he is the same," I added.
"He is a serpent," said Wolffert. "You remember how he tried to make us kill each other?"
"Yes, and what a fool I made of myself."
"No, no. He was at the bottom of it. He used to come and tell me all the things you said and—didn't say. He made a sore spot in my heart and kept it raw. He's still the same—reptile."
"Have you seen him?" I asked. He leaned back and rested his eyes on me.
"Yes, he took the trouble to hunt me up a day or two ago, and for some reason went over the whole thing again. What's McSheen to him?"
"I shall break his neck some day, yet," I observed quietly.