But as my mind harks back, there clashes with this another, a hellish picture, which the same Henry H. Rogers painted with the brush of Amalgamated, and a procession of convicts and suicides trail slowly toward me out of the canvas. Then I realize that my pen is but the instrument of a righteous retribution and that no personal feelings, however tender, must be allowed to interfere.
"Come this way," said my host, striding ahead of me along the hall. "In here we can have our talk and our smoke undisturbed." He led me into the big, empty dining-room and closed the door.
"Mr. Rogers," I began, "it is kind of you to be so friendly after the mean things we have said of each other. Am I to understand you don't lay any of all that has passed up against me?"
"Lay it up against you, my boy? Drop that all out of your mind. You probably know I talk to the point and mean what I say. If you had hit below the belt as that—Addicks has, I would lay it up against you and a hundred years would not make me forget it. I know what you've done and why you've done it, and it was as much your right to do it as mine to do what I have done. I have nothing against you, and if events place me in a position where I can do anything to make your job easier without hurting my own interests—mind that, without hurting my own interests—I will do it. You have my word for it."
We sat within a few feet of each other, and I looked squarely into his eyes as he said, "You have my word for it," and they were honest eyes—honest as the ten-year-old boy's who with legs apart and hands in pockets throws his head back and says: "Wait until I am a man, and I will do it if I die for it!" I looked into them and I knew "My word for it" was all gold and a hundred cents to the dollar. For a minute we gazed steadily into—through each other, and I knew he was reading away into the back of my head. Inwardly I said: "If I do business with this man for a day or for a