“Don't you throw that bomb!” he gasped. In his panic he was not able to deduce any other explanation for the presence of this stranger who had so strenuously disclaimed all reasonable motives for his visit. He quailed before this man who seemed to be a dangerous crank--for Farr's attire was out of the ordinary and his eyes were flashing and his poise was that of a man sure of himself.
“What do you think I have here in this package?”
“Dynamite!” mumbled the magnate.
“It's worse.”
Colonel Dodd rolled his head to and fro on the back of his chair, shutting his eyes in vain attempt to find somebody to whom to appeal for help. He started a furtive hand in the direction of the battery of buttons.
“Keep your hands in your lap,” commanded Farr. “I say that what I have here in this package is worse than dynamite.” He tore the paper and disclosed a half-dozen faucets that were still dripping with slime. “You know now what I mean, Colonel Dodd. This is the stuff your water company is pumping through the pipes in this state.”
The president of the Consolidated straightened in his chair, but he had been thoroughly frightened.
While Farr talked on the colonel seemed to be gathering himself--recovering his voice.
“It's a mighty bold act for me to come in here like this, Colonel Dodd. I understand it. I'm a poor man and a stranger in this city. Just consider me a voice--call me Balaam's ass if you want to. But I've come up from the tenement-house districts where the children are dying.”
“What do you want?” The magnate discharged the question explosively.
“Pure water in the city mains.”
“Whom do you represent?”
Farr hesitated. Colonel Dodd scented possible political strategy in this visit, and was controlling his ire in order to probe the matter.
“Come, my man. Out with it! Who commissioned you to come here?”
“I'll not claim that I have any powers delegated to me, sir.”
“How did you dare to force your way in here?”
“Considering what kind of a man I was a few weeks ago, I'm having pretty hard work to explain to myself what I'm doing, sir.”
The colonel knotted bushy brows. This person seemed to be playing with him. “Who told you to come here?”
“The soul of a little girl who was named Rosemarie.”
Colonel Dodd came out of his chair, thoroughly angry--and yet he repressed his anger. This person, more than ever, seemed to him to be a crank with vagaries.
Farr put up a protesting palm. His tones trembled, and into them he put all the appeal a human voice can compass.
“I know I astonish you, Colonel,” he added. “I astonish myself. I'm not much on self-analysis. I don't know just what has come over me the last few weeks. But they do say the Deity picks out queer instruments when He wants things done. Man to man, now, forgetting you're a mighty man and I'm a small one, won't you say you'll give the people of this state pure water instead of poison?”
“You don't think you can stroll in here and coax me to build over the whole Consolidated system, do you?”
“That isn't the idea at all, sir. Treat me simply as a voice--a jog of your conscience--a reminder. I'll go away and you'll never see me again.”
“If you think the cranks in this state can influence me in the least item about running my own business you're the worst lunatic outside the state asylum,” declared the colonel, with passion.
“You mean that what I have asked on behalf of women and children hasn't had any effect on you?”
“Not the slightest. Get out!” In his present mood Colonel Dodd would not admit to this interloper that he planned reforms, and in that moment he unwittingly created his Frankenstein's monster.
Farr retreated a couple of steps and bowed. “Colonel Dodd, in my part of the West we fellows had a little code: help a woman, always, everywhere; tote a tired child in our arms; and, in the case of a man who announced himself an enemy, give him fair notice when it came time to pull guns. Better get your weapon loose on your hip.”
He bowed again and went out.
Briggs rose from his knees and his master snapped an angry stare from the door that the young man had closed softly behind himself.
“What kind of a resort is my office getting to be? Do you know who that devilish fool is, Briggs?”
“No, sir. He has been hanging around here, that's all I know. I kept at him.” He made a little dab of his woodpecker beak. “But I couldn't find out anything from him.”
“Well find out from somebody else, then. And get judge Warren on the 'phone for me.”
When the bell rang and the colonel heard the voice of the Consolidated's corporation counsel greeting him on the wire he ordered the judge to come over at once.
“Hell has just burned through here in three small patches,” stated the colonel, grimly. “The sooner we turn on the Consolidated hose, the better.”
In the early dusk of a summer evening Mr. Peter Briggs stood at the edge of the sidewalk of one of the squalid avenues of the district of the tenement-houses of Marion. His hands were behind him, propping out his coat-tails. He kept peering at the gloomy stairway of a house near at hand. Take the gloom, his attitude, and his sooty garb, and he gave a very picturesque impression of a raven doing sentinel duty.
At last a tall young man came down the stairs which Mr. Briggs was watching and strolled off leisurely up the avenue, stopping here and there to chat, nodding to this man, flourishing a hand salute to that man. The young man apparently had nothing whatever on his mind except to enjoy a stroll in the summer evening.
Mr. Briggs watched him out of sight without moving from his tracks. Then he withdrew both hands from under his coat-tails. In one hand was a note-book, in the other hand was a pencil. Mr. Briggs made an entry, closed the book with decision, and snapped an elastic band around the covers. Then he made off toward his home. He lived up-town in a section where there were fewer smells and better scenery. He determined that this should be his last tour of surveillance. He had found his trips into the nooks and crannies of the Eleventh Ward to be very distasteful employment for a man who had served Colonel Dodd for so many years in the sumptuous surroundings of that office in the First National block.
He asked himself what would be the use of hunting for any more information regarding such an inconsequential individual as one Walker Farr? He wondered why this crank had impressed Colonel Symonds Dodd sufficiently to stir up all this trouble for himself, Peter Briggs. The fellow had come from somewhere--nobody in Marion seemed to know. He had been discharged from the employment of the Consolidated. Now he was going about, warning all the people to boil the city water they drew from the faucets. He seemed to be a crank on the water subject, so Peter Brigg's note-book recorded.
The book also recorded that this queer Walker Farr strolled about the streets in the poorer quarters, “currying favor”: so Peter Briggs expressed the young man's evening activities in the note-book. That seemed to be all there was to it. At any rate, Peter Briggs decided that he had finished his quest.
Thereupon he had snapped the elastic band with vigor and made up his mind to tell Colonel Dodd the next morning that chasing that worthless fellow around or thinking that such a fellow could do anything to interfere with Colonel Dodd was poppycock. Peter Briggs hoped he would dare to call it “poppycock” in the presence of his master--for he was thoroughly sick of being a sleuth in the ill-smelling Eleventh Ward.
He did dare to call it poppycock. And Colonel Dodd shrugged his shoulders and forgot one Walker Farr. The fellow seemed inconsiderable--and Colonel Dodd found other matters very pressing.
For one thing, those three men from Danburg had brought suit against both Stone & Adams and the Consolidated Water Company and had engaged as counsel no less a personage than the Honorable Archer Converse, the state's most eminent corporation lawyer, a man of such high ideals and such scrupulous conception of legal responsibility that he had never been willing to accept a retainer from the great System which dominated state affairs. Colonel Symonds Dodd feared the Honorable Archer Converse. It was hinted that the Danburg case would involve charges of conspiracy with intent to restrain independents, and would be used to show up what the opponents of the Consolidated insisted was general iniquity in finance and politics.
Colonel Dodd outwardly was not intimidated. He sent no flag of truce. He decided to intrench and fight. He cursed when he remembered the interview with the Danburg triumvirate.
“Under ordinary circumstances I would buy them off in the usual way,” he informed Judge Warren. “But that damnation lunatic raved at me with all the insults he could think of--then he up with his dirty bunch of plans and knocked my flowers on to the floor--yes, sir, that was what the mad bull did--he knocked my flowers on to the floor!”
And Colonel Dodd emphasized that as the crime unforgivable.
XIV
THE MATTER OF DOING WHAT ONE CAN
It was from Citizen Drew that Walker Farr heard the story of Captain Andrew Kilgour.