ice-president."

"Do you imagine that _I_ knew these things--that I have been a party to
what you seem to believe has been a deliberate wrecking?" Valiant
towered over him, his breath coming fast, his hands clenched hard.

"You?" The manager laughed again--an unpleasant laugh that scraped the
other's quivering nerves like hot sandpaper. "Oh, lord, no! How should
you? You've been too busy playing polo and winning bridge prizes. How
many board meetings have you attended this year? Your vote is proxied
as regular as clockwork. But you're _supposed_ to know. The people down
there in the street won't ask questions about patent-leather pumps and
ponies; they'll want to hear about such things as rotten irrigation
loans in the Stony-River Valley--to market an alkali desert that is the
personal property of the president of this Corporation."

Valiant turned a blank white face. "Sedgwick?"

"Yes. You know his principle: 'It's all right to be honest, if you're
not too _damn_ honest.' He owns the Stony-River Valley bag and baggage.
It was a big gamble and he lost."

For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside came
the rising murmur of the crowd and cutting through it the shrill cry of
a newsboy calling an evening extra. Valiant was staring at the other
with a strange look. Emotions to which in all his self-indulgent life he
had been a stranger were running through his mind, and outre passions
had him by the throat. Fool and doubly blind! A poor pawn, a catspaw
raking the chestnuts for unscrupulous men whose ignominy he was now
called on, perforce, to share! In his pitiful egotism he had consented
to be a figurehead, and he had been made a tool. A red rage surged over
him. No one had ever seen on John Valiant's face such a look as grew on
it now.

He turned, retrieved the Panama, and without a word opened the door.
The older man took a step toward him--he had a sense of dangerous
electric forces in the air--but the door closed sharply in his face. He
smiled grimly. "Not crooked," he said to himself; "merely callow. A
well-meaning, manicured young fop wholly surrounded by men who knew what
they wanted!" He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his chair.

Valiant plunged down in the elevator to the street. Its single other
passenger had his nose buried in a newspaper, and over the reader's
shoulder he saw the double-leaded head-line: "Collapse of the Valiant
Corporation!"

He pushed past the guarded d