“Show him up,” was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevator cage clacked again, Kent was waiting.

His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a little breathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator.  Kent admitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in a chair and begged a light for his cigar.  In the match-passing he gathered his spent breath and declared his errand.

“I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent,” he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it in stolid silence.

“Possibly:  that is for you to say,” was the unencouraging reply.

Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyond it into the bedroom.

“We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of,” said Kent, in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed his chair.

“I came up to see what you want—­what you will take to quit,” he announced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over his knee.  “That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, and we can dispense with the preliminaries, I take it.”

“I told your attorney-general some time ago what I wanted, and he did not see fit to grant it,” Kent responded.  “I am not sure that I want anything now—­anything you can have to offer.”  This was not at all what he had intended to say; but the presence of the adversary was breeding a stubborn antagonism that was more potent on the moral side than all the prickings of conscience.

The yellow-lidded eyes of the governor began to close down, and the look came into them which had been there when he had denied a pardon to a widow pleading for the life of her convicted son.

“I had hoped you were in the market,” he demurred.  “It would be better for all concerned if you had something to sell, with a price attached.  I know what you have been doing, and what you think you have got hold of.  It’s a tissue of mistakes and falsehoods and back-bitings from beginning to end, but it may serve your purpose with the newspapers.  I want to buy that package of stuff you’ve got stowed away in the Security vaults.”

The governor’s chair was on one side of the writing-table, and Kent’s was on the other.  In plain sight between the two men lay the packet Bucks was willing to bargain for.  It was inclosed in a box envelope, bearing the imprint of the Security Bank.  Kent was looking steadily away from the table when he said: 

“What if I say it isn’t for sale?”

“Don’t you think it had better be?”

“I don’t know.  I hadn’t thought much about the advisable phase of it.”

“Well, the time has come when you’ve got it to do,” was the low-toned threat.

“But not as a matter of compulsion,” said Kent, coolly enough.  “What is your bid?”