“Thank you again for protecting my kitten for me,” she said softly. “Good-night.”
Guy Morrow walked down the steps and across to his own lodgings with his brain awhirl. The investigation, through the medium of a small black kitten, had indeed taken an amazing turn. Jimmy Brunell’s daughter was a protégée of the daughter of Pennington Lawton!
CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST COUNTER-MOVE
The little paragraph in the newspaper, which, irrelevant as it would seem, had caught the keenly discerning eye of Henry Blaine, grew in length and importance from day to day until it reached a position on the first page, and then spread in huge headlines over the entire sheet. Instead of relating merely the incidents of a labor strike in a manufacturing city––and that city a far-distant one––it became speedily a sociological question of almost national import. The yellow journals were quick to seize upon it at the psychological moment of civic unrest, and throw out hints, vague but vast in their significance, of the mighty interests behind the mere fact of the strike, the great financial question involved, the crisis between capital and labor, the trusts and the common people, the workers and the wasters, in the land of the free.
Henry Blaine, seated in his office, read the scare-heads and smiled his slow, inscrutable, illuminating smile––the smile which, without menace or rancor, had struck terror to the hearts of the greatest malefactors of his generation––which, without flattery or ingratiation, had won for him the friendship of the greatest men in the country. He knew every move in the gigantic game which was being played solely for his attention, long before a pawn was lifted from its place, a single counter changed; he had known it, from the moment that the 67 seemingly unimportant paragraph had met his eyes; and he also knew the men who sat in the game, whose hands passed over the great chessboard of current events, whose brains directed the moves. And the stakes? Not the welfare of the workingmen in that distant city, not the lifting of the grinding heel of temporal power from the supine bodies of the humble––but the peace of mind, the honorable, untarnished name, the earthly riches of the slender girl who sat in that great darkened house on Belleair Avenue.
Hence Blaine sat back quietly, and waited for the decisive move which he knew to be forthcoming––waited, and not in vain. The spectacular play to the gallery of one was dramatically accomplished; it was heralded by extras bawled through the midnight streets, and full-page display headlines in the papers the next morning.
Promptly on the stroke of nine, Henry Blaine arrived at his office, and as he expected, found awaiting him an urgent telegram from the chief of police of the city where the strike had assumed such colossal importance, earnestly asking him for his immediate presence and assistance. He sent a tentative refusal––and waited. Still more insistent messages followed in rapid succession, from the mayor of that city, the governor of that state, even its representative in the Senate at Washington, to all of which he replied in the same emphatic, negative strain. Then, late in the afternoon, there eventuated that which he had anticipated. Mohammed came to the mountain.