The Fighting Chance

Plank's phlegmatic features flushed. "I'm more obliged to you than I can say," he began, but Mortimer silenced him with a gesture: "Don't interrupt. I'm going to put you through The Patroons Club by April. That's thirty yards through the centre; d'ye see, you dunderheaded Dutchman? It's solid gain, and it's our ball. The Lenox will take longer; they're a 'holier-than-thou' bunch of nincompoops, and it always horrifies them to have any man elected, no matter who he is. They'd rather die of dry rot than elect anybody; it shocks them to think that any man could have the presumption to be presented. They require the spectacle of fasting and prayer--a view of a candidate seated in sackcloth and ashes in outer darkness. You've got to wait for the Lenox, Plank."

"I am waiting," said Plank, squaring his massive jaws.

"You've got to," growled Mortimer, emptying his glass aggressively.

Plank looked out of the window, his shrewd blue eyes closing in retrospection.

"Another thing," continued Mortimer thickly; "the Kemp Ferralls are disposed to be decent. I don't mean in asking you to meet some intellectual second-raters, but in doing it handsomely. I don't know whether it's time yet," he added, with a sidelong glance at Plank's stolid face; "I don't want to push the mourners too hard … Well, I'll see about it … And if it's the thing to do, and the time to do it"--he turned on Plank with his boisterous and misleading laugh and clapped him on the shoulder--"it will be done, as sure as snobs are snobs; and that's the surest thing you ever bet on. Here's to them!" and he emptied his glass and fell back into his chair, wheezing and sucking at his unlighted cigar.

"I want to say," began Plank, speaking the more slowly because he was deeply in earnest, "that all this you are doing for me is very handsome of you, Mortimer. I'd like to say--to convey to you something of how I feel about the way you and Mrs. Mortimer--"

"Oh, Leila has done it all."

"Mrs. Mortimer is very kind, and you have been so, too. I--I wish there was something--some way to--to--"

"To what?" asked Mortimer so bluntly that Plank flushed up and stammered: "To be--to do a--to show my gratitude."

"How? You're scarcely in a position to do anything for us," said Mortimer, brutally staring him out of countenance.

"I know it," said Plank, the painful flush deepening.

Mortimer, fussing and growling over his cigar, was nevertheless stealthily intent on the game which had so long absorbed him. His wits, clogged, dulled by excesses, were now aroused to a sort of gross activity through the menace of necessity. At last Plank had given him an opening. He recognised his chance.