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A shadow fell across the window. The heavy tread of Budsey approached. Farnham's voice was heard: "Never mind the windows, Budsey. I will close them and the front door. I will wait here awhile; somebody else may come. You can go to bed." "Good-night, sir." "Good-night." Offitt waited only a moment. He rose and looked cautiously in at the window. Farnham was seated at his desk.
Both the old people bustled up at this authoritative summons, and Offitt as they went out said, "I'll stay a while and keep Miss Maud from gettin' lonesome." "I wish you would," said Mrs. Matchin. "The house seems creepy-like with Sam where he is." Maud felt her heart sink at the prospect of being left alone with the man she had been longing all day to see.
He gruffly answered: "That's none of your business; you can't help me in this thing, and I ain't agoin' to chin about it any more." They sat for awhile in silence, drank their beer, and ordered more. Offitt at last spoke again: "Well, I'll be hanged if you ain't the best grit of any fellow I know. If you don't want to talk, a team of Morgan horses couldn't make you.
He went in and arranged that the face of Offitt, which was horrible, should be turned away as much as possible; the head, and shoulders and back being left exposed, and the hat placed on the head. He then brought Mrs. Belding in. "That is the man," she said, promptly, "or at least some one exactly like him." "Thank you," he said, reconducting her to her carriage.
He went without a moment's delay to the chief of police and told him that he had a disagreeable duty to perform; that he knew the murderer of Captain Farnham; that the criminal was an intimate friend of his, a young man hitherto of good character named Sleeny. "Ah-ha!" said the chief. "That was the fellow that Captain Farnham knocked down and arrested in the riot." "The same," said Offitt.
Bowersox interrupted, "I know all about that, but what are we goin' to do?" Offitt paled a little, but did not flinch at the savage tone of the surly brute. He began again in his smoothest manner: "I am of the opinion that the discussion of sound principles, such as we have listened to to-night, is among the objects of our order.
Each of them, nevertheless, gave free space and license to their reporters, and Offitt was a saint, a miscreant, a disguised prince, and an escaped convict, according to the state of the reporter's imagination or his digestion; while the stories told of Sleeny varied from cannibalism to feats of herculean goodness.
Budsey evidently regarded him with no favorable eye; he said to Sleeny, "This person says he comes from Matchin's; do you know him?" "Yes, it's all right," said Sam, who could say nothing less; but when Budsey had left them, he turned to Offitt with anything but welcome in his eye. "Well, you've come, after all." "Yes," Offitt answered, with an uneasy laugh. "Curiosity gets us all, from Eve down.
"That's all solid," said Sleeny, who was indifferently interested in these abstractions. "But what you goin' to do about it?" "Do!" cried Offitt. "We are goin' to make war on capital. We are goin' to scare the blood-suckers into terms. We are goin' to get our rights peaceably, if we can't get them any other way. We are goin' to prove that a man is better than a moneybag."
He clapped his hand, with a soldier's instinct, to the place where his sword-hilt was not, and then staggered, rather than rushed, at his assailant, to grapple him with his naked hands. Offitt struck him once more, and he fell headlong on the floor, in the blaze of a myriad lights that flashed all at once into deep darkness and silence.
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