“The ungrateful cub!” was Colonel Duxbury’s indignant comment.  “To use his influence over Major Dabney to sequestrate, absolutely sequestrate, a full third of our property!”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” said the son coolly.  “It’s up to us to break the slate.”

“We’ll do it, never fear.  Just give me a little more time in which to win public sentiment over to our side, and don’t press Ardea to name the exact day until I give the word,” was the promoter’s parting injunction to his son; and Vincent trimmed his sails accordingly, as we have seen.

Planting the good seed, which was a little later to yield an abundant harvest of public approbation sanctioning anything he might see fit to do to the Gordons, was a congenial task to Mr. Farley; but in the midst it was rather rudely interrupted by a belated unburdening on the part of his first lieutenant in the South Tredegar offices.

Dyckman held his peace as long as he dared; in point of fact he did not speak until he saw his superiors rushing blindly into the pit digged for their feet by the astute young tyrant of the pipe foundry.  If they could have fallen without carrying him with them, it is conceivable that the bookkeeper might have remained dumb.  But their immunity was doubly his, and the end of it was a bad quarter of an hour for him, two of them, to be precise:  the first, in which he told the president and the treasurer the story of the missing cash-book and ledger pages and the extorted confession, and the other, during which he sat under a scathing fire of abuse poured on him by the younger of his two listeners.  After it was over, he escaped to the welcome refuge of his own office while father and son took counsel together against this new and unsuspected peril.

“Anybody but an idiot like Dyckman would have found out long ago if those papers were burned in Gordon’s safe,” snapped Vincent, when the danger had been duly weighed and measured.

The president shook his head mournfully.

“Anybody but Dyckman would have burned them himself, you’d think.  It was criminally careless in him not to do so.”

“They are the key to the lock,” summed up the younger man.  “We’ve got to have them.”

“Assuredly—­if they are in existence.”

“You needn’t try to squeeze comfort out of that.  I tell you, they went through the fire all right, and Tom has them.”

“I am afraid you are right, Vincent; afraid, also, that Dyckman so far forgot himself as to set fire to Gordon’s office in the hope of retrieving his own neglect.  But how are we to regain them?” Mr. Farley’s weapons were two, only:  first persuasion, and when that failed, corruption.

Vincent’s cold blue eyes were darkening.  The little virtues interpose but a slight barrier to a sharp attack of the large vices.

“The fight has fallen into halves,” he said briefly.  “You go on with your part as if nothing had happened, and I’ll do mine.  Has the old iron-melter been taken in on it, do you think?”