Kent had not meant to make the open attack until he should have a weapon in his hands which would arm him to win.  But now as he stood looking up at the heckoning windows a mad desire to have it out once for all with the robber-in-chief sent the blood tingling to his finger-tips.  True, he had nothing as yet in the oil-field conspiracy that the newspapers or the public would accept as evidence of fraud and corruption.  But on the other hand, Bucks was only a man, after all; a man with a bucaneer’s record, and by consequence vulnerable beneath the brazen armor of assurance.  If the attack were bold enough——­

Kent did not stop to argue it out.  When a man’s blood is up the odds against him shrink and become as naught.  Two minutes later he was in the upper corridor of the capitol, striding swiftly to the door of the lighted room.

Recalling it afterward he wondered if the occult prompting which had dragged him out of his chair on the Brentwcod porch saw to it that he walked upon the strip of matting in the tile-paved corridor and so made his approach noiseless.  Also, if the same silent monitor bade him stop short of the governor’s office:  at the door, namely, of the public anteroom, which stood ajar?

A low murmur of voices came from beyond, and for a moment he paused listening.  Then he went boldly within, crossing the anteroom and standing fairly in the broad beam of light pouring through the open door of communication with the private office.

Four men sat in low-toned conference around the governor’s writing-table, and if any one of them had looked up the silent witness must have been discovered.  Kent marked them down one by one:  the governor; Hendricks, the secretary of State; Rumford, the oil man; and Senator Duvall.  For five pregnant minutes he stood looking on, almost within arm’s reach of the four; hearing distinctly what was said; seeing the papers which changed hands across the table.  Then he turned and went away, noiselessly as he had come, the thick-piled carpet of the anteroom muffling his footfalls.

It was midnight when he reached his quarters in the Clarendon and flung himself full length upon the bed, sodden with weariness.  For two hours he had tramped the deserted streets, striving in sharp travail of soul to fit the invincible, chance-given weapon to his hand.  When he came in the thing was done, and he slept the sleep of an outworn laborer.

XVIII

DOWN, BRUNO!

For six days after the night of revelations Kent dived deep, personally and by paid proxy, in a sea of secrecy which, but for the five pregnant minutes in the doorway of the governor’s office, might easily have proved fathomless.

On the seventh day the conflagration broke out.  The editor of the Belmount Refiner was the first to smell smoke and to raise the cry of “Fire!” but by midnight the wires were humming with the news and the entire State was ablaze.