The World for Sale Part 25

Ingolby heaved himself in the bed and threw up his arms, wresting them from Rockwell's grasp.

"My G.o.d--oh, my G.o.d-blind!" he cried in agony. Rockwell drew the head with the sightless eyes to his shoulder.

For a moment he laid one hand on the heart, that, suddenly still, now went leaping under his fingers. "Steady," he said firmly. "Steady. It may be only temporary. Keep your head up to the storm. We'll have a specialist, and you must not get mired till then. Steady, Chief."

"Chief! Chief!" murmured Ingolby. "Dear G.o.d, what a chief! I risked everything, and I've lost everything by my own vanity. Barbazon's--the horseshoe--among the wolves, just to show I could do things better than any one else--as if I had the patent for setting the world right. And now--now--"

The thought of the bridge, of Marchand's devilish design, shot into his mind, and once more he was shaken. "The bridge! Blind! Mother!" he called in a voice twisted in an agony which only those can feel to whom life's purposes are even more than life itself. Then, with a moan, he became unconscious, and his head rolled over against Rockwell's cheek.

The damp of his brow was as the damp of death as Rockwell's lips touched it.

"Old boy, old boy!" Rockwell said tenderly, "I wish it had been me instead. Life means so much to you--and so little to me. I've seen too much, and you've only just begun to see."

Laying him gently down, Rockwell summoned the nurse and Jim Beadle and spoke to them in low tones. "He knows now, and it has. .h.i.t him hard, but not so hard that he won't stiffen to it. It might have been worse."

He gave instructions as to the care that should be taken, and replaced the bandages on the eyes. It was, however, long before Ingolby was restored to consciousness, and when it came, Rockwell put to his lips a cooling drink containing a powerful opiate. Ingolby drank it without protest and in silence. He was like one whose sense of life was automatic and of an inner rather than an outer understanding. But when he lay back on the pillow again, he said slowly:

"I want the Chief Constable to come here to-night at eight o'clock. It will be dark then. He must come. It is important. Will you see to it, Rockwell?"

He thrust out a hand as though to find Rockwell's, and there was a grat.i.tude and an appeal in the pressure of his fingers which went to Rockwell's heart.

"All right, Chief. I'll have him here," Rockwell answered briskly, but with tears standing in his eyes. Ingolby had, as it were, been stricken out of the active, sentient, companionable world into a world where he was alone, detached, solitary. His being seemed suspended in an atmosphere of misery and helplessness.

"Blind! I am blind!" That was the phrase which kept beating with the pulses in Ingolby's veins, that throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed like engines in a creaking s.h.i.+p which the storm was shaking and pounding in the vast seas between the worlds. Here was the one incomprehensible, stupefying fact: nothing else mattered. Every plan he had ever had, every design which he had made his own by an originality that even his foes acknowledged, were pa.s.sing before his brain in swift procession, s.h.i.+ning, magnified, and magnificent, and in that sudden clear-seeing of his soul he beheld their full value, their exact concrete force and ultimate effect. Yet he knew himself detached from them, inactive, incapable, because he could not see with the eyes of the body. The great essential thing to him was that one thing he had lost. A man might be a cripple and still direct the great concerns of life and the business of life. He might be shorn of limb and scarred of body, but with eye sight still direct the courses of great schemes, in whatever sphere of life his purposes were at work. He might be deaf to every sound and forever dumb, but seeing enabled him still to carry forward every enterprise.

In darkness, however, those things were naught, because judgment must depend on the eyes and senses of others. The report might be true or false, the deputy might deceive, and his blind chief might never know the truth unless some other spectator of his schemes should report it; and the truth could not surely be checked, save by some one, perhaps, whose life was joined to his, by one that truly loved him, whose fate was his.

His brain was afire. By one that truly loved him! Who was there that loved him? Who was there at one with him in all his deep designs, in all he had done and meant to do? Neither brother, nor sister, nor friend, nor any other. None of his blood was there who could share with him the constructive work he had set out to do. There was no friend whose fate was part of his own. There was the Boss Doctor: but Rockwell was tied to his own responsibilities, and he could not give up, of course, would not give up his life to the schemes of another. There were a dozen men whom he had helped to forge ahead by his own schemes, but their destinies were not linked with his. Only one whose life was linked with his could be trusted to be his eyes, to be the true reporter of all he did, had done, or planned to do. Only one who loved him.

But even one who loved him could not carry through his incompleted work against the a.s.saults of his enemies, who were powerful, watchful, astute, and merciless; who had a greed which set money higher than all else in the world. They were of the new order of things in the New World. The business of life was to them not a system of barter and exchange, a giving something of value to get something of value, with a margin of profit for each, and a sense of human equity behind; it was a c.o.c.kpit where one man sought to get what another man had--and get it almost anyhow.

It was the work of the faro-bank man, whose sleight of hand deceived the man that carried the gun.

All the old humanity and good-fellows.h.i.+p of the trader, the man who exchanged, as it was in the olden days of the world and continued in greater or less degree till the present generation--all that was gone.

It was held in contempt. It had prevailed when men were open robbers and filibusters and warriors, giving their lives, if need be, to get what they wanted, making force their G.o.d. It had triumphed over the violence and robbery of the open road until the dying years of one century and the young years of a new century. Then the day of the trickster came--and men laughed at the idea of fair exchange and strove to give an illusive value for a thing of real value--the remorseless sleight of hand which the law could not reach. The desire to get profit by honest toiling was dying down to ashes.

Against such men had Ingolby worked--the tricksters, the manipulators.

At the basis of his schemes was organization and the economy which concentrated and conserved energy begets, together with its profit. He had been the enemy of waste, the apostle of frugality and thrift; and it was that which had enabled him, in his short career, to win the confidence of the big men behind him in Montreal, to make good every step of the way. He had worked for profit out of legitimate product and industry and enterprise, out of the elimination of waste. It was his theory (and his practice) that no bit of old iron, no bolt or screw, no sc.r.a.p of paper should be thrown away; that the cinders of the engines could and should be utilized for that which they would make; and that was why there was a paper-mill and foundry on the Sagalac at Manitou.

That was why and how, so far, he had beaten the tricksters.

But while his schemes flashed before his mind, as the opiate suspended him in the middle heaven between sleep and waking, the tricksters and manipulators came hurrying after him like marauders that waited for the moment when they could rush the camp in the watches of the night. His disordered imagination saw the ruin and wreck of his work, the seizure of what was his own--the place of control on his railways, the place of the Master Man who cared infinitely more to see his designs accomplished than for the profit they would bring to himself. Yesterday he had been just at the top of the hill. The key in his fingers was turning in the lock which would make safe the securities of his life and career, when it snapped, and the world grew dark as the black curtain fell and shut out the lighted room from the wayfarer in the gloom. Then, it was, came the opaque blackness which could be felt, and his voice calling in despair: "Blind! I am blind!"

He did not know that he had taken an opiate, that his friend had mercifully atrophied his rebellious nerves. These visions he was seeing were terribly true, but they somehow gave him no physical torture. It was as though one saw an operation performed upon one's body with the nerves stilled and deadened by ether. Yet he was cruelly conscious of the disaster which had come to him. For a time at least. Then his mind seemed less acute, the visions came, then without seeing them go, they went. And others came in broken patches, shreds, and dreams, phantasmagoria of the brain, and at last all were mingled and confused; but as they pa.s.sed they seemed to burn his sight. How he longed for a cool bandage over his eyes, for a soft linen which would shut out the c.u.muli of broken hopes and designs, life's goals obliterated! He had had enough of the black procession of futile things.

His longing was not denied, for even as he roused himself from the oblivion coming on him, as though by a last effort to remember his dire misfortune, maybe his everlasting tragedy, something soothing and soft like linen dipped in dew was laid upon his forehead. A cool, delicious hand covered his eyes caressingly; a voice from spheres so far away that worlds were the echoing points of the sound, came whispering to him like a stir of wings in a singing grove. With a last effort to remain in the waking world, he raised his head so very little, but fell gently back again with one sighing word on his lips:

"Fleda!"

It was no illusion. Fleda had come from her own night of trouble to his motherless, wifeless home, and would not be denied admittance by the nurse. It was Jim Beadle who admitted her.

"He'd be mad if he knew we wouldn't let her come," Jim had said to the nurse.

It was Fleda who had warned Ingolby of the dangers that surrounded him--the physical as well as business dangers. She came now to serve the blind victim of that Fate which she had seen hovering over him.

The renegade daughter of the Romanys, as Jethro Fawe had called her, was, for the first time, in the house of her master Gorgio.

CHAPTER XIII. THE CHAIN OF THE PAST

For once in its career, Lebanon was absolutely united. The blow that had brought down the Master Man had also struck the town between the eyes, and there was no one--friend or foe of Ingolby--who did not regard it as an insult and a challenge. It was now known that the roughs of Manitou, led by the big river-driver, were about to start on a raid upon Lebanon and upon Ingolby at the very moment the horseshoe did its work. All night there were groups of men waiting outside Ingolby's house. They were of all cla.s.ses-carters, railway workers, bartenders, lawyers, engineers, bankers, accountants, merchants, ranchmen, carpenters, insurance agents, manufacturers, millers, horse-dealers, and so on.

Some prayed for Ingolby's life, others swore viciously; and those who swore had no contempt for those who prayed, while those who prayed were tolerant of those who swore. It was a union of incongruous elements.

Men who had nothing in common were one in the spirit of faction; and all were determined that the Orangeman, whose funeral was fixed for this memorable Sat.u.r.day, should be carried safely to his grave. Civic pride had almost become civic fanaticism in Lebanon. One of the men beaten by Ingolby in the recent struggle for control of the railways said to the others s.h.i.+vering in the grey dawn: "They were bound to get him in the back. They're dagos, the lot of 'em. Skunks are skunks, even when you skin 'em."

When, just before dawn, old Gabriel Druse issued from the house into which he had carried Ingolby the night before, they questioned him eagerly. He had been a figure apart from both Lebanon and Manitou, and they did not regard him as a dago, particularly as it was more than whispered that Ingolby "had a lien" on his daughter. In the grey light, with his long grizzled beard and iron-grey, s.h.a.ggy hair, Druse looked like a mystic figure of the days when the G.o.ds moved among men like mortals. His great height, vast proportions, and silent ways gave him a place apart, and added to the superst.i.tious feeling by which he was surrounded.

"How is he?" they asked whisperingly, as they crowded round him.

"The danger is over," was the slow, heavy reply. "He will live, but he has bad days to face."

"What was the danger?" they asked. "Fever--maybe brain fever," he replied. "We'll see him through," someone said.

"Well, he cannot see himself through," rejoined the old man solemnly.

The enigmatical words made them feel there was something behind.

"Why can't he see himself through?" asked Osterhaut the universal, who had just arrived from the City Hall.

"He can't see himself through because he is blind," was the heavy answer.

There was a moment of shock, of hushed surprise, and then a voice burst forth: "Blind--they've blinded him, boys! The dagos have killed his sight. He's blind, boys!"

A profane and angry muttering ran through the crowd, who were thirsty, hungry, and weary with watching.

Osterhaut held up the horseshoe which had brought Ingolby down. "Here it is, the thing that done it. It's tied with a blue ribbon-for luck,"

he added ironically. "It's got his blood on it. I'm keeping it till Manitou's paid the price of it. Then I'll give it to Lebanon for keeps."

"That's the thing that did it, but where's the man behind the thing?"

snarled a voice.

Again there was a moment's silence, and then Billy Kyle, the veteran stage-driver, said: "He's in the jug, but a gaol has doors, and doors'll open with or without keys. I'm for opening the door, boys."

"What for?" asked a man who knew the answer, but who wanted the thing said.

"I spent four years in Arizona, same as Jowett," Billy Kyle answered, "and I got in the way of thinking as they do there, and acting just as quick as you think. I drove stage down in the Verde Valley. Sometimes there wasn't time to bring a prisoner all the way to a judge and jury, and people was busy, and hadn't time to wait for the wagon; so they done what was right, and there was always a tree that would carry that kind o' fruit for the sake of humanity. It's the best way, boys."

"This isn't Arizona or any other lyncher's country," said Halliday, the lawyer, making his way to the front. "It isn't the law, and in this country it's the law that counts. It's the Gover'ment's right to attend to that drunken dago that threw the horseshoe, and we've got to let the Gover'ment do it. No lynching on my plate, thank you. If Ingolby could speak to us, you can bet your boots it's what he'd say."

"What's your opinion, boss?" asked Billy Kyle of Gabriel Druse, who had stood listening, his chin on his breast, his sombre eyes fixed on them abstractedly.