Keast faced the audience.
“Liars,” he shouted, striving with all the power of his voice to dominate the clamour, “liars and slanderers. Your paper is the paid organ of the corporation. You have not one shadow of proof to back you up. Do you choose this, of all times, to heap your calumny upon the head of an honourable gentleman, already prostrated by your murder of his son? Proofs—we demand your proofs!”
“We’ve got the very assemblymen themselves,” came back the answering shout. “Let Derrick speak. Where is he hiding? If this is a lie, let him deny it. Let him disprove the charge.” “Derrick, Derrick,” thundered the Opera House.
Keast wheeled about. Where was Magnus? He was not in sight upon the stage. He had disappeared. Crowding through the throng of Leaguers, Keast got from off the stage into the wings. Here the crowd was no less dense. Nearly everyone had a copy of the Mercury. It was being read aloud to groups here and there, and once Keast overheard the words, “Say, I wonder if this is true, after all?”
“Well, and even if it was,” cried Keast, turning upon the speaker, “we should be the last ones to kick. In any case, it was done for our benefit. It elected the Ranchers’ Commission.”
“A lot of benefit we got out of the Ranchers’ Commission,” retorted the other.
“And then,” protested a third speaker, “that ain’t the way to do—if he did do it—bribing legislatures. Why, we were bucking against corrupt politics. We couldn’t afford to be corrupt.”
Keast turned away with a gesture of impatience. He pushed his way farther on. At last, opening a small door in a hallway back of the stage, he came upon Magnus.
The room was tiny. It was a dressing-room. Only two nights before it had been used by the leading actress of a comic opera troupe which had played for three nights at Bonneville. A tattered sofa and limping toilet table occupied a third of the space. The air was heavy with the smell of stale grease paint, ointments, and sachet. Faded photographs of young women in tights and gauzes ornamented the mirror and the walls. Underneath the sofa was an old pair of corsets. The spangled skirt of a pink dress, turned inside out, hung against the wall.
And in the midst of such environment, surrounded by an excited group of men who gesticulated and shouted in his very face, pale, alert, agitated, his thin lips pressed tightly together, stood Magnus Derrick.
“Here,” cried Keast, as he entered, closing the door behind him, “where’s the Governor? Here, Magnus, I’ve been looking for you. The crowd has gone wild out there. You’ve got to talk ’em down. Come out there and give those blacklegs the lie. They are saying you are hiding.”
But before Magnus could reply, Garnett turned to Keast.
“Well, that’s what we want him to do, and he won’t do it.”
“Yes, yes,” cried the half-dozen men who crowded around Magnus, “yes, that’s what we want him to do.”
Keast turned to Magnus.
“Why, what’s all this, Governor?” he exclaimed. “You’ve got to answer that. Hey? why don’t you give ’em the lie?”
“I—I,” Magnus loosened the collar about his throat “it is a lie. I will not stoop—I would not—would be—it would be beneath my—my—it would be beneath me.”
Keast stared in amazement. Was this the Great Man the Leader, indomitable, of Roman integrity, of Roman valour, before whose voice whole conventions had quailed? Was it possible he was afraid to face those hired villifiers?
“Well, how about this?” demanded Garnett suddenly. “It is a lie, isn’t it? That Commission was elected honestly, wasn’t it?”
“How dare you, sir!” Magnus burst out. “How dare you question me—call me to account! Please understand, sir, that I tolerate—”
“Oh, quit it!” cried a voice from the group. “You can’t scare us, Derrick. That sort of talk was well enough once, but it don’t go any more. We want a yes or no answer.”
It was gone—that old-time power of mastery, that faculty of command. The ground crumbled beneath his feet. Long since it had been, by his own hand, undermined. Authority was gone. Why keep up this miserable sham any longer? Could they not read the lie in his face, in his voice? What a folly to maintain the wretched pretence! He had failed. He was ruined. Harran was gone. His ranch would soon go; his money was gone. Lyman was worse than dead. His own honour had been prostituted. Gone, gone, everything he held dear, gone, lost, and swept away in that fierce struggle. And suddenly and all in a moment the last remaining shells of the fabric of his being, the sham that had stood already wonderfully long, cracked and collapsed.
“Was the Commission honestly elected?” insisted Garnett. “Were the delegates—did you bribe the delegates?”
“We were obliged to shut our eyes to means,” faltered Magnus. “There was no other way to—” Then suddenly and with the last dregs of his resolution, he concluded with: “Yes, I gave them two thousand dollars each.”
“Oh, hell! Oh, my God!” exclaimed Keast, sitting swiftly down upon the ragged sofa.
There was a long silence. A sense of poignant embarrassment descended upon those present. No one knew what to say or where to look. Garnett, with a laboured attempt at nonchalance, murmured:
“I see. Well, that’s what I was trying to get at. Yes, I see.”
“Well,” said Gethings at length, bestirring himself, “I guess I’ll go home.”
There was a movement. The group broke up, the men making for the door. One by one they went out. The last to go was Keast. He came up to Magnus and shook the Governor’s limp hand.
“Goodbye, Governor,” he said. “I’ll see you again pretty soon. Don’t let this discourage you. They’ll come around all right after a while. So long.”
He went out, shutting the door.
And seated in the one chair
