midnight in his own house. And these were only a few, picked from the
interested or disinterested thousands who besieged him with advice,
importunity, threats, and attempted blackmail. And he handled them all
in turn, stolidly but with decision. His obstinate under lip protruded
further and further with rare recessions; his heavy head was like the
lowered head of a bull. Undaunted, inexorable, slow to the verge of
stupidity at times, at times swift as a startled tiger, this new,
amazing personality steadily developing, looming higher, heavier,
athwart the financial horizon--in stature holding his own among giants,
then growing, gradually, inch by inch, dominated his surrounding level
sky line.

The youth in him was the tragedy to the old; the sudden silence of the
man the danger to the secretive. Harrington was already an old man;
Quarrier's own weapon had always been secrecy; but the silence of Plank
confused him, for he had never learned to parry well another's use of
his own weapon. The left-handed swordsman dreads to cross with a man
who fights with the left hand. And Harrington, hoary, seamed, scarred,
maimed in onslaughts of long forgotten battles, looked long and hard
upon this weird of his own dead youth which now rose towering to
confront him, menacing him with the armed point of the same shield
behind which he himself had so long found shelter--the Law!

The closing of the courts enforced armed truces along certain lines of
Plank's battle front; the adjournment of the legislature emptied Albany.
Once it was rumoured that Plank had passed an entire morning with the
Governor of the greatest State in the Union and that the conference was
to be repeated. A swarm of newspaper men settled about the Governor's
summer cottage at Saratoga, but they learned nothing, nor could they
find a trace of Plank's tracks in the trodden trails of the great Spa.

Besides, the racing had begun; Desmond, Burbank, Sneed, and others of
the gilded guild had opened new club-houses; the wretched, half-starved
natives in the surrounding hills were violating the game-laws to distend
the paunches of the overfed with five-inch troutlings and grouse and
woodcock slaughtered out of season; so there was plenty of copy for
newspaper men without the daily speculative paragraph devoted to the
doings of Beverly Plank. Some scandal, too--but newspapers never touch
that; and after all it was nobody's affair that Leroy Mortimer drove a
large yellow