The Fighting Chance

Besides Plank scarcely noticed what the press said of him. He was too busy; his days were full days, brimming over deep into the night. Brokers, lawyers, sycophants, tipsters, treacherous ex-employés of Quarrier, detectives, up-State petty officials, lobbyists from Albany, newspaper men, men from Wall Street, Broad Street, Mulberry Street, Forty-second Street--all these he saw in units, relays, regiments--either at his offices or after dinner--and sometimes after midnight in his own house. And these were only a few, picked from the interested or disinterested thousands who besieged him with advice, importunity, threats, and attempted blackmail. And he handled them all in turn, stolidly but with decision. His obstinate under lip protruded further and further with rare recessions; his heavy head was like the lowered head of a bull. Undaunted, inexorable, slow to the verge of stupidity at times, at times swift as a startled tiger, this new, amazing personality steadily developing, looming higher, heavier, athwart the financial horizon--in stature holding his own among giants, then growing, gradually, inch by inch, dominated his surrounding level sky line.

The youth in him was the tragedy to the old; the sudden silence of the man the danger to the secretive. Harrington was already an old man; Quarrier's own weapon had always been secrecy; but the silence of Plank confused him, for he had never learned to parry well another's use of his own weapon. The left-handed swordsman dreads to cross with a man who fights with the left hand. And Harrington, hoary, seamed, scarred, maimed in onslaughts of long forgotten battles, looked long and hard upon this weird of his own dead youth which now rose towering to confront him, menacing him with the armed point of the same shield behind which he himself had so long found shelter--the Law!

The closing of the courts enforced armed truces along certain lines of Plank's battle front; the adjournment of the legislature emptied Albany. Once it was rumoured that Plank had passed an entire morning with the Governor of the greatest State in the Union and that the conference was to be repeated. A swarm of newspaper men settled about the Governor's summer cottage at Saratoga, but they learned nothing, nor could they find a trace of Plank's tracks in the trodden trails of the great Spa.

Besides, the racing had begun; Desmond, Burbank, Sneed, and others of the gilded guild had opened new club-houses; the wretched, half-starved natives in the surrounding hills were violating the game-laws to distend the paunches of the overfed with five-inch troutlings and grouse and woodcock slaughtered out of season; so there was plenty of copy for newspaper men without the daily speculative paragraph devoted to the doings of Beverly Plank. Some scandal, too--but newspapers never touch that; and after all it was nobody's affair that Leroy Mortimer drove a large yellow and black Serin-Chanteur touring-car, new model, all over Saratoga county. Perhaps the similarity of machines gave rise to the rumour of Plank's presence; perhaps not, because the car was often driven by a tall, slender girl with dark eyes and hair; and nobody ever saw that sort of pretty woman in Plank's Serin, or saw Leroy Mortimer for many days without a companion of that species.