“You measly old crook!” he snarled. “Keep your dirty hands off me! Here!” thrusting a roll of bills upon him. “Take this an’ get out of town by the next train. Write me where to forward money an’ I’ll see you get enough to keep you drunk till you die. But if you ever set foot in Granite again I’ll have you railroaded to jail for life. An’, after this, don’t spring that Civil War yarn again. Civil War hard-luck stories are played out. Besides, you were never within two hundred miles of the war; and you know you weren’t. Don’t lie when you don’t have to. It spoils your skill for nec’ssary lies. Now, get away from here! Chase!” CHAPTER XI A PEACE CONFERENCE “I don’t know why we were all so carried away by it,” said Caine, reflectively. “I’ve been thinking it over. There was much more bathos than pathos; and a delightful absence of both elegance and eloquence about his speech. Yet for a moment I was almost tempted to join in your charmingly ill-timed applause. The whole thing savored of cheap melodrama. But--” “It was the man himself. Not what he said,” answered Jack Hawarden, eager in defense of his new-built idol. “He stood there facing a crowd that would have liked nothing better than to annihilate him. That drunken Thing on the floor was enough by itself to ruin him forever at the Arareek. Yet Conover made us listen and he swayed us to suit himself. Not by what he said, but by his own big strength, I think. There’s something about him I don’t understand. But he’s a _man_. And, after to-night,--whatever the others say--I take my hat off to him.” “For the perfecting of a young author’s style,” observed Caine, irrelevantly, “what sample of nervous English can be finer than Carlyle’s ‘_Heroes and Hero Worship_?’” His raillery jarred on the boy’s enthusiasm and checked the gush of extravagant praise. Letty Standish, with whom the two were walking home from the Club, took advantage of Jack’s snubbed silence, to put in a word. “I think Mr. Hawarden is right, Amzi,” she ventured. “There’s something about Mr. Conover that one can’t very well define. I think he could make one do anything he chose. I know _I_ was almost--afraid of him,--before I’d known him ten minutes. I don’t quite think I like him. He’s so powerful, so rough, so domineering. Not like anyone I ever met before. But,” with a slight shudder, “I believe I’d do whatever he ordered me to. Especially if he scowled at me in that bullying way, with his eyes half-shut. Isn’t it funny to feel like that about a person you hardly know?”