There was, indeed, a great deal of work for him to do: enough to ruffle the temper of any man. He did it all grimly, speedily, with no waste of words. He attended to each detail with as much energy and care as he gave to every other detail, and one detail that he dealt with in a necessarily long talk with Hallett he dealt with thus:
"What about that Huber matter?" he asked.
Rivington was not in the room, but the master of the room was seated at the head of the table just as he always seated himself when both Hallett and Rivington were there. He crouched with his large hands on the mahogany surface, the thick fingers extended, his elbows raised at right angles to his torso and pointing ceilingward.
Hallett was as near to nervousness as he could be brought.
"Hasn’t any action been taken?" snapped the man at the head of the table.
"A lot of action’s been taken, but nothin’s come of it yet."
"Stop him. He’s got to be stopped. Don’t you know that he really might hurt us? Stop him."
"And now what about this Memphis & New Orleans deal?" the man in russet brown went on. His beady eyes glittered, and the tips of his stumpy fingers caressed the shining surface of the table.
§1. Luke was no longer inclined to doubt the wide extent and the unscrupulous power of the influences opposing him. When he had first come to acknowledge their evil, he thought it latent rather than active. Disillusioned in this respect, he then minimized its activity, maintaining that there was a vast difference between merely questionable moves in the game of business and the hiring of criminal violence. He assumed a tolerant skepticism toward the vague stories of how his enemies, long before they became his personal enemies, employed the basest tactics to crush rivals or gain ends, and even when he narrowly escaped arrest in the raid on the house in Sixth Avenue, he tried to tell himself that these enemies were only endeavoring to frighten him. Now his second interview with Stein convinced him of the truth.
Notwithstanding this, he stubbornly persevered. He no more belittled the puissance of the wrong against which he had arrayed himself, but he believed too firmly in the strength of his own right. Had he accurately perceived relative values, he might have broken his promise and tried to make the Rollins letters public; but he was sure that he could evade harm until the month was past, and so he kept his word and went about his hurrying and harrowing political work with the letters scornfully bestowed in an inside pocket among a collection of trivial memoranda.