The Way of the Strong Part 68

That's when I saw him."

"You're on your back, man. You got a nightmare," cried Josh scornfully.

"Him drivin' about in an automobile."

Abe grinned.

"That's what they're out for," he cried contemptuously. Then he turned back to the bar. "Guess we'll have another drink--anyway."

Alexander Hendrie was leaving Angus Moraine's office, where he had spent the early hours of the afternoon discussing matters of business and receiving reports. The two men had also spent some time considering the conditions prevailing on the railroad, conditions threatening to affect them considerably. That a big strike was imminent was sufficiently apparent to them both, and each understood the disastrous possibilities to the harvest if it should occur at that time.

There had been strikes before, but, from Hendrie's confidential sources, it had been learned that the forthcoming strike would be of a particularly comprehensive nature. There was big talk of sympathetic strikes on the part of all transport workers, and among those who were required to handle goods ultimately intended for transport on the railroad.

The Scot was troubled. But Hendrie seemed to revel in the contemplation of a great struggle with Labor. Truth to tell, he was actually pleased that all his energies would be involved in the forthcoming fight. He would have less time to think, and he had no desire to think just now.

He left the office by the outer door, and walked leisurely round to the front of the house, intent upon the threatened struggle, and those things which would be affected by it. He was calmly considering every point, every detail in the great game in which his life was spent, which might be brought into contact with it.

At the entrance porch of the house he paused, and drew a bundle of cipher messages from his pocket. He read them carefully. Each one represented a financial transaction with some well-known Chicago wheat speculator, the completion of which would place his interests beyond the reach of disaster through any strikes. He had only to wire an affirmative to any one of them to set all doubts at rest.

However, he finally returned them to his pocket and shook his head. No, it was too easy. It would rob him of all place in the fight to come--if such fight really were coming. Besides, there would be that loss of profit for the speculator's risk; a loss which his keen, financial mind begrudged. No, not yet. There was time enough. He would only yield to the temptation of safeguarding the affairs of the Trust when it became absolutely necessary.

He thrust his hands deeply into his coat pockets, as though to emphasize his decision, and his gaze wandered toward the fair woodland picture of the river banks, crowded with virgin growth. Acres and acres of ripening grain lay beyond, and here and there, through breaks in the foliage, he could discern the tint of yellow amid the paling carpet of green. The sight of it further hardened his decision.

To a man of lesser caliber the responsibility of that wheat world must have been a burden to tax the nerves to the uttermost. But to Hendrie it was scarcely a labor. He loved this world he had made his, and it weighed far less upon him than did the more trifling worries adding friction to the routine of daily life. But for Monica's illness, and a curious sort of nightmare haunting the back cells of this man's memory, Alexander Hendrie must have been a perfectly happy man, reveling in a success which had been his life-long ambition.

Finally he turned from the pleasant scenes his thoughts were conjuring.

He was about to pa.s.s into the house to visit the woman who was the choicest jewel in his crown of success. He moved toward the doorway, but paused abruptly. The sweep of the private trail on the north bank of the river had come within his view, and he beheld a powerful automobile rapidly approaching the house.

For the moment he believed it to be the visit of one of his a.s.sociates in business, perhaps from Calford, or even Winnipeg. Then he doubted.

He was expecting no one. Anyway he would have been notified of their coming.

He left the porch and stood out in the open, watching the vehicle curiously. It came swiftly on, its soft purr humming upon the still, hot air. It was a large touring car, and two people were occupying the front seat. The rest was empty.

A few moments later it drew up sharply abreast of him. A pair of keen eyes were staring at him from the other side of the chauffeur. Hendrie caught their stare, and a quick, deep breath filled his lungs.

For a while, it seemed quite a long time to the millionaire, no word was spoken. Then he saw the man on the other side of the driver jump out of the car. Then he heard him speak.

"You can go back up the trail," he said to his man. "I'll walk out and meet you when I want you."

Then the car moved off. It turned about, and finally rolled away.

Hendrie saw all this without taking any interest. For some reason his thoughts had been abruptly carried back into a dim past, to a vision of a land of lofty, barren hills, a land of drear woods and shadowed valleys, a land where fierce cold ate into the bones, and strangled the joy of living.

And all the while his eyes were fixed upon the back of the powerful figure that remained turned toward him until the car had pa.s.sed out of sight. Then the stranger swung about. His narrow eyes were alight with a pa.s.sion that seemed unaccountable. He raised one hand, and his forefinger pointed a deadly hatred.

"You! Leo!" he cried.

The dreary scenes of the Yukon heights faded abruptly from the millionaire's mind. He looked into that narrow, evilly expressive face with a cold, hard stare.

"Yes," he said. "Well?"

There was no flinching. There was no surprise even. He spoke utterly without emotion, like the echo of those ruthless hills which only a moment before he had contemplated.

"So--I've come up with you at last!" cried Austin Leyburn. "Oh, I knew I should do so some day. It was not possible for it to be otherwise.

I've searched. I've sounded every corner of this continent. Some day, I guessed I'd turn the stone under which you were hiding."

For an instant Hendrie's eyes lit. Then they smiled with a contempt for the mind that could suggest his hiding.

"Guess that's my name--has always been my name." said, with an expressive lifting of the shoulders. "Your search sounds better than it could have been in fact. I allow the world has known just where to set its finger on Alexander Hendrie for many years now. Say, p'raps you're not interested in wheat, and so missed finding me."

"You? Alexander Hendrie?" Leyburn cried incredulously.

"Guess that's my name--has always been my name." Hendrie smoothed his mane of hair with one steady hand. "Folks used to call me Leo, because--of this. By the way, you apparently came to see me?"

The face of Austin Leyburn expressed a devilish hatred no words could have told. It was a hatred nursed and fostered through long years when his mind and energies were wholly turned upon profit extracted through the ignorance and pa.s.sion of fellow-creatures of inferior mentality. It was an atmosphere in which such pa.s.sionate bitterness might well be fostered.

But the calmness of his intended victim, for the moment, had a restraining effect. He felt the need for coolness.

So he laughed. There was no mirth in his laughter. It was a hollow sound that jarred terribly.

"Yes, I came here to find Alexander Hendrie, and not--Leo. I came to find the millionaire wheat grower, and challenge him with the injustices he is handing out to white agricultural labor, whose representative I am. I came to warn him that it was impossible for men of our union to work side by side with black labor, which earns white man's pay. I came to tell him that if he persisted, there is not a white man in the country will work for him, and that he must dismiss all black labor at once. I came to tell Alexander Hendrie these things, and I find--Leo."

Hendrie smiled into his face.

"You came to tell him all this, and you found, in his stead --Leo, the feller I guess you're not particularly well disposed toward. In fact, whom you--rather dislike. Well?"

Years of self-discipline had given Austin Leyburn a fine control of himself. But before that control had been acquired he had been robbed of all he possessed in the world by a man named Leo. He had been made to suffer by this man as few men are made to suffer, and after facing trials and hardships few men face successfully. These sufferings had ingrained into his heart a pa.s.sionate hatred and desire for revenge no acquired control could withstand, and now the torrent of his bitter animosity broke out.

"Whom I hate better than any man on earth," Leyburn cried, in a low, pa.s.sionate tone. "Listen to me, Leo. You're a great man now. You're among the rich of this continent, and so you're the more worth crushing. We both find ourselves in different positions now. Very different positions. You are powerful in the control of huge capital, founded upon the gold you stole from me twenty years ago on the Yukon trail. I--I control hundreds of thousands of workers in this country.

That is no mean power. Hitherto my power has been exercised in the legitimate process of protecting that labor from men of your cla.s.s. But from this moment all that is changed. Before all things in my life I have a mission to fulfill. It is my personal vengeance upon the man who robbed me twenty years ago, and left his mistress, bearing her unborn child, to starve on the long winter trail."

"It is a lie! She was not left to starve. She was provided for."

Hendrie was driven to furious denial by the taunt.

"Ah, that's better!" cried Leyburn. "Much better. I've cut through your rough hide. I say you left her to starve--for all you cared. And I've set myself up as the champion of her cause as well as my own. I'm going to carry it through with all the power at my command. Oh, I know no law will help me to my vengeance. That highway robbery is just between ourselves. Well, I guess I don't need any one's help to avenge it."

Hendrie had himself well under control again. He nodded as the man paused.

"Go on," he said.

"I intend to," Leyburn cried, his face livid and working with the fury that drove him. "I'm going back now to Toronto to set the machinery working. And that machinery will grind its way on till you are reduced to the dust I intend to crush you into. It will not be Labor against Capital. But Labor against Alexander Hendrie."

"And what shall I be doing?" Hendrie's eyes were alight with something like amus.e.m.e.nt.

"You--you? I'll tell you what you'll be doing when I've finished.

You'll be wishing to G.o.d you had never stolen a dead man's gold."

Hendrie started. His eyes grew tigerish. But he remained silent.