saw
suddenly and clearly all that for so many weeks the darkness had hidden
from him.

"And did you accept his resignation, sir?" he asked at last.

The President turned swiftly to face the question.

"He tendered his resignation as of December thirty-first. I told him
his resignation was accepted as of nine-forty-five this morning. And I
told him to pack up his stuff and get out of here and never show
himself in the Guardian office again."

CHAPTER XIII

In the course of his extended career Mr. Wintermuth had been called
upon to face many serious and unexpected crises. Conflagrations; rate
wars; eruptions of idiotic and ruinous legislation adopted by state
senates and assemblies composed of meddlesome agriculturalists, saloon
keepers, impractical young lawyers, and intensely practical old
politicians;--all these he had lived through not once, but often, and
had always piloted the Guardian's bark to port in safety. In fact, he
had done this with such aplomb that long ago he had dismissed from his
mind such a thing as the possibility of a wave insurmountable.

In his first flush of anger against O'Connor's betrayal--for by Mr.
Wintermuth the action of his Vice-President could not otherwise be
regarded--he had but one thought, and that was to make O'Connor's act
recoil upon his own head. At that time, however, he was still in
ignorance of the full scope of the betrayal, and when the element of
bitter personal resentment had largely faded out, his pride and dignity
reasserted themselves and bade him choose a different course. Let
O'Connor go his way--inevitably justice would overtake him. After all,
the first duty was to the company, and the first thing to be done was
to fill O'Connor's place.

The cardinal principle of Mr. Wintermuth's administration of the
Guardian, during all the years he had been chief executive, had been
that all vacancies be filled by promotion of the company's own men.
All those who occupied positions of responsibility with the Guardian
had come up from the ranks, and it was one of the President's favorite
themes for self-congratulation that it had always been possible to fill
every opening without going outside the home office.

Unfortunately, however, of late years the current flowing toward the
top had been rather clogged by the unusual pertinacity of the
incumbents of important places. O'Connor, Bartels, Wagstaff--for years
undisturbed all these had held their positions.