“Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?” I asked, gently.
“Reasonable—from your standpoint,” she said.
She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise that startled her; by the way she trembled, I gauged how tense her nerves must have been. I rose and, in a fairly calm tone, said: “We understand each other?”
“Yes,” she answered. “As before.”
I ignored this. “Think it over, Anita,” I urged—she seemed to me so like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon’s name on my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.
I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot.
XVI.
No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either the fear or the cupidity of his assailants, for men fight either to protect that which they have or to gain that which they feel they must have. So far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity was inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn’t enough to tempt them. Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of which I was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck’s fears. But what could it be?
Besides Langdon and Roebuck and me, there were six principals in the proposed Coal combine, three of them richer and more influential in finance than even Langdon, all of them except possibly Dykeman, the lawyer or navigating officer of the combine, more formidable figures than I. Yet none of these men was being assailed. “Why am I singled out?” I asked myself, and I felt that if I could answer, I should find I had the means wholly or partly to defeat them. But I could not even explain to my satisfaction Langdon’s activities against me. I felt that Anita was somehow the cause; but, even so, how had he succeeded in convincing Roebuck that I must be clipped and plucked into a groundling?
“It must have something to do with the Manasquale mines,” I decided. “I thought I had given over my control of them, but somehow I must still have a control that makes me too powerful for Roebuck to be at ease so long as I am afoot and armed.” And I resolved to take my lawyers and search the whole Manasquale transaction—to explore it from attic to underneath the cellar flooring. “We’ll go through it,” said I, “like ferrets through a ship’s hold.”