Again his voice rang out, “What brings you here?  Do you come to plead again for that dastard Reinhart after the warning I gave you?”

I clenched both hands until I felt the nails cut the flesh of my palms.  I loved Bob Brownley.  I would have done anything to make him happy, would willingly have sacrificed my own life to protect his from himself or others, but this madman, this wild brute, was no more Bob Brownley as I had known him than the howling northeast gale of December is the gentle, welcome zephyr of August; and I felt a resentment at his brutal speech that I could hardly suppress.  With a mighty effort I crushed it back, trying to think of nothing but his awful misery and the Bob of our college days.

I said in a firm voice, “Bob, is this the way to talk to me in your own office?” At any time before, my words and tone would have touched his all-generous Southern chivalry, but now he said harshly—­“To hell with sentiment.  What——­” He did not take his eyes from mine, but they told me that he was listening to a voice in the receiver.  Only for a second; then he let loose a wild laugh, which must have penetrated to the outer office.

“Eighty and coming like a spring freshet,” he said into the mouthpiece, “and the boys want to know if I won’t let up now that Reinhart is down?  Go back and smother them with all they will take down to 60.  That’s my answer.  Tell them if Reinhart had ten more wives and daughters and they were all killed, I’d rend his bastard trust to help him dull his sorrow.  Give the word at every pole that I will have Reinhart where he will curse his luck that he was not in the automobile with the rest of his tribe——­

“To hell with sentiment!” He was speaking to me again.  “What do you want?  If you are here to beg for Reinhart and his pack of yellow curs, you’ve got your answer.  I wouldn’t let up on that fiendish hyena, not if his wife and daughter and all the dead wives and daughters of every ‘System’ man came back in their grave clothes and begged.  I wouldn’t let up a share.”  I gasped in horror.

“When did those robbers of men and despoilers of women and children ever let up because of death?  When were they ever known to wait even till the corpse stiffened to pluck out the hearts of the victims?  It is my turn now, and if I let up a hair may I, yes, and Beulah, too, be damned, eternally damned.”

I could not stand it.  If I stayed, I, too, should become mad.  I reached for the doorknob, but before I could swing the door open Bob was upon me like a wolf.  He grasped me by the shoulders and with the strength of a madman hurled me half across the room.  I sank into a chair.

“No, you don’t, Jim Randolph, no, you don’t.  You came here for something and, by heaven, you will tell me what it is!  You know me; you are the only human being who does.  You know what I was, you see what I am.  You know what they did to me to make me what I am.  You know, Jim Randolph, you know whether I deserved it.  You know whether in all my life up to the day those dollar-frenzied hounds tore my soul, I had done any man, woman, or child a wrong.  You know whether I had, and now you are going to sneak off and leave me as though I were a cur dog of the Reinhart-’Standard Oil’ breed gone mad!”