Page:Scribners Magazine volume 27.djvu/259

 in Felt's with a glare that forced the twinkle into a laugh.

When Wharton met his private secretary in the committee-room, to Wharton's implied question the secretary nodded and said: "I gave him the key; he hasn't brought it back yet."

The Senator's safety deposit box had been the trysting-place for many of his affairs before. On occasion he had found there stocks and bonds and all sorts of booty. Half an hour later a messenger boy brought Dunning a package. It contained the key to the Senator's safety deposit box. Wharton took the key and hurried away. It seemed to him that if he could but get the bonds again he would never put them down until he replaced them in the State treasurer's vault. Sheer fear came upon him and quickened his pace almost to a trot. But when he walked out of the bank with the valise containing the stolen bonds in his hands he was bearing down upon his heels and not upon his toes, and planning to take the midnight train for the West. He was atremble and felt a revulsion for the routine of the day. His lips were dry, his feet were heavy, and he loathed the sight of his associates. It was nearly three o'clock when he hailed a green car and rode for ten minutes with eyes half shut, planning a score of things. He viewed the wreck of his fortune with something like composure. He believed that with four years more in the Senate he could find opportunities to rebuild most of the crumbled structure, and he pinned a complacent faith to his service pension bill to add at least one more term to his service. In ten years—Tom Wharton had blind faith in his power to do anything he pleased in that time. Indeed, he felt himself so fully restored to his day-dreams that he took from his pocket-book a well-worn clipping from the Davenport, Iowa, Democrat and Gazette, and read, for the hundredth time in the two years that he had carried it, the editorial which announced Senator Wharton, the Tribune of the People, as a presidential possibility in 1900. He knew the piece by heart and it was manna to his ravening soul in times of trouble. The conductor stopped the car with a "Here you are, Senator." Wharton walked to a flat-house near by and entered with a latch-key. No one greeted him, and he lay down on a couch in the parlor with his hand-satchel for a pillow. Wharton slept like a log. At six o'clock a servant, bringing in the last edition of the Stat', awakened him. Glancing over the heads on the news page this item attracted him:

NEW COMPANY SWALLOWED BY OLD.

Wharton's vision skipped nervously down the column. He saw that the consolidation had been accomplished before the hour of his speech. Then his eyes stopped roaming as he read these words under a sub-head:

"To a reporter for the Star, President Williams gave out the following statement, which he had dictated to his stenographer and revised before letting it pass out of his hands: 'There is room for but one electric company here. For some time the matter of consolidation has been talked of. During the last twenty-four hours, however, it has become imperative. The situation this morning is this: either to unite and fight the bandits who had planned to rifle our treasury, or being separate to stand and deliver to every brigand with a legislative club who chooses to come out on a dark night. The books of the old company contain some interesting entries, and I believe that no confidence is violated by the assertion that the wires will not be laid underground.' "

When Wharton finished the paragraph his mouth was open and his eyes distended. A pulse in his head was beating madly, and he breathed like a stunned ox. He saw his face in the mirror. It was purple and it seemed bloated. A terror seized him. He tried to rise. He summoned control of his nerves, and, holding to his chair-arm, rose and poured a glass of water from a sweating silver pitcher in the room. When the Thompson woman came in five minutes later Wharton's wrinkle-scratched face