Kent took it from her as if it had been an edged weapon or a can of high explosives.

“Heavens! what a turn you gave me!” he said, sitting down again.  “Can I see your mother?”

“I think she has gone to bed.  What do you want to do?”

“I want to tell her that she mustn’t do any such suicidal thing as this.”

“You don’t know my mother,” was the calm reply.  “Mr. Ormsby said everything he could think of.”

“Then we must take matters into our own hands.  Will you help me?”

“How?” she asked.

“By keeping your own counsel and trusting me.  Your mother supposes this letter has gone:  it has gone—­this way.”  He tore the sealed envelope across and across and dropped the pieces into his pocket.  “Now we are safe—­at least until the man at the other end writes again.”

It shocked her a little, and she did not promise to be a party to the subterfuge.  But neither did she say she would not.

“I am willing to believe that you have strong reasons for taking such strong measures,” she said.  “May I know them?”

Kent’s gift of reticence came to his rescue in time to prevent the introduction of another and rather uncertain factor into his complicated problem.

“I can explain it more intelligibly a little later on; or if I don’t, Ormsby will.  In the mean time, you must take my word for it that we shall have our railroad back in due season.”

It is a question for the psychologists to answer if there be or be not crises in a man’s life when the event, weighty or trivial, turns upon that thing which, for the want of a better name, is called a premonition.

In the silence that followed his dismissal of the subject, Kent became aware of a vague prompting which was urging him to cut his visit short.  There was no definable reason for his going.  He had finally brought himself to the point of speaking openly to Elinor of her engagement, and they were, as he fondly believed, safely beyond the danger point in that field.  Moreover, Penelope was stirring in her hammock and the perilous privacy was at an end.  Nevertheless, he rose and said good-night, and was half-way to the next corner before he realized how inexcusably abrupt his leave-taking had been.

When he did realize it, he was of two minds whether to go back or to let the apology excuse another call the following evening.  Then the insistent prompting seized him again; and when next he came to a competent sense of things present he was standing opposite the capitol building, staring fixedly up at a pair of lighted windows in the second story.

They were the windows of the governor’s room; and David Kent’s brain cleared suddenly.  In the earliest beginnings of the determinate plan to wrest the Trans-Western out of the grasp of the junto he had known that it must come finally to some desperate duel with the master-spirit of the ringsters.  Was Jasper Bucks behind those lighted windows—­alone?