Page:The council of seven.djvu/152

 he chanced to look up from the book whose naïveté had palled already, and suddenly caught the eye of his fellow traveler.

It was the eye of John Endor.

The two men had a nodding acquaintance with each other. All the personalities of the time were known to Saul Hartz. He went everywhere, he rubbed shoulders continually with the celebrated, the notorious, in fact with all the members of that heterogeneous body who from whatever cause are large in the public eye. John Endor was not yet forty but he was a figure already in the life of the time.

The Colossus never forgot a face. And he never forgot any material fact that was involved in the process of recognition. His glance was held at once, less by John Endor than by an ugly bruise above the right eye. Seeing it, he gave a slight start. Involuntarily his gaze fell to the eyes beneath, and again he started, this time, at their look of open, implacable enmity.

Saul Hartz smiled. On all occasions his power of recovery was automatic. As became one who saw himself as a modern dictator, he allowed nothing to come between the wind and his nobility.

The eyes of John Endor would have quelled a lesser man. They merely goaded the Colossus into action.

"I wonder if we are going to the same place." Hartz's voice, which seldom rose above a husky wheeze and yet had the power of carrying a great distance, had a note of half insolent bonhomie. It had, too, the com