e on
my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.

I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon
the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand
and foot.

XVI.

No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love
of fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited
either the fear or the cupidity of his assailants, for men fight
either to protect that which they have or to gain that which they feel
they must have. So far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity was
inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn't enough to tempt
them. Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of
which I was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck's fears. But what
could it be?

Besides Langdon and Roebuck and me, there were six principals in the
proposed Coal combine, three of them richer and more influential in
finance than even Langdon, all of them except possibly Dykeman, the
lawyer or navigating officer of the combine, more formidable figures
than I. Yet none of these men was being assailed. "Why am I singled
out?" I asked myself, and I felt that if I could answer, I should find
I had the means wholly or partly to defeat them. But I could not even
explain to my satisfaction Langdon's activities against me. I felt
that Anita was somehow the cause; but, even so, how had he succeeded
in convincing Roebuck that I must be clipped and plucked into a
groundling?

"It must have something to do with the Manasquale mines," I decided.
"I thought I had given over my control of them, but somehow I must
still have a control that makes me too powerful for Roebuck to be at
ease so long as I am afoot and armed." And I resolved to take my
lawyers and search the whole Manasquale transaction--to explore it
from attic to underneath the cellar flooring. "We'll go through it,"
said I, "like ferrets through a ship's hold."

As I was finishing breakfast, Anita came in. She had evidently slept
well, and I regarded that as ominous. At her age, a crisis means
little sleep until a decision has been reached. I rose, but her manner
warned me not to advance and try to shake hands with her.

"I have asked Alva to stop with me here for a few days," she said,
formally.

"Alva!" said I, much surprised. She had not asked one of her own
friends; she had asked a girl she had met less than two days before,
and that girl my partner's da