Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/323

 John Boland, if he don't want the mob to take him. . . the crooked old coyote!" Gaylord smashed down his fist upon his desk.

Titmarsh hurried out. With his going, the banker lost something of his self-control. "My God!" he cried, raging to and fro in his glass-walled office. "My God! . . . That old devil lied to me. He's been lying to me all these years. Business man? He's a gambler. He must have known every minute what might happen—every minute for thirty years. Think of that, will you? And when Hornblower started this thing three years ago and we wanted to lynch him and Henry Harrington stopped it, the old hypocrite interfered on Harrington's side. My God, what a nerve! . . . Well, I suppose that was part of the game—he had to be like that to make suckers of us all, to dope us into the notion that he was God-a'mighty. What a gall!" Gaylord was still walking up and down, clapping the palms of his hands together excitedly. "What a gall!" he cried, almost admiringly. "That's why I couldn't be a great big crook myself; I just haven't got gall enough." Jim Gaylord sank, collar wilting, although it was not a warm day, into his chair, and began to swear, softly, fervently, almost unctuously.

Around the corner Titmarsh had stopped his press and was himself pounding feverishly upon a typewriter. He was preparing the bulletin. The rising venom in a small nature inflamed his mind, made him do the clearest, the most convincing piece of writing he had ever done in his life. Into one hundred words he got the succinct story of a colossal crime which, justly if tardily overtaking its perpetrator, had brought cataclysmic disaster upon innocent thousands.