"Nothing, nothing—absolutely nothing, if he has any sense and drops this municipal ownership tommyrot. Absolutely nothing."
Again the grin came over his face, and at the end of a pause Barclay said:—
"Well, if not, what then?"
Bemis shut his eyes and crossed his gaunt legs, and began: "Think back twenty years ago—more or less. Do you remember when I brought your car down here for Watts McHurdie and his crowd to go to Washington in, to the G.A.R. celebration? All right; do you remember that I came to the office and told you I saw Bob Hendricks waiting for some one at the Union Station, when the train got into the city that morning?"
"Yes," said Barclay, "you were so mysterious and funny about it, I remember."
"Well," said Bemis, as he got up and poked a log that was annoying him in the fireplace, "well, I have a little document in my desk at home, that I got the night before in the Ridge, which will convince Bobbie, if he has any sense, that this municipal ownership business isn't all it's cracked up to be."
Barclay, who knew from Jane something of the truth, guessed the rest, but he did not question Bemis further. "Oh, I don't know, Lige," he began; "it seems to me I wouldn't drag that into it."
Bemis turned his old face, full of malicious passion, toward Barclay and cried, "Maybe you wouldn't, John Barclay—you forget things; but I never do; and you're a coward sometimes, and I am not."
The blaze of his wrath went out in a moment, and Barclay's mind went back to that afternoon in the seventies when Hendricks picked Bemis up and threw him bodily from the county convention and branded him as a boodler. Barclay knew argument was useless. So he said nothing.
"He has the county officers—every man-jack of them from the treasurer to Jake Dolan, the janitor—and I couldn't get hold of that book by fair means without his knowing it. But I am going to have that book, John—I'm going to have that book."