"By God! I don't know what keeps me from throttling you with my hands!" Bucks got upon his feet, and Kent rose, also, slipping the box envelope into his pocket and laying a precautionary hand on the drawer-pull. The governor turned away and walked to the window, nursing his burned fingers. When he faced about it was to return to the charge. "Kent, what is it you want? Say it in two words." "Candidly, I didn't know, until a few minutes ago, Governor. It began with a determination to break your grip on my railroad, I believe." "You can have your railroad, if you can get it--and be damned to it, and to you, too!" "I said it began that way. My sole idea in gathering up this evidence against you and your accomplices was to whittle out a club that would make you let go of the Trans-Western. For two weeks I have been debating with myself as to whether I should buy you or break you; and half an hour before you came, I went to the bank and took these papers out, meaning to go and hunt you up." "Well?" said the governor, and the word bared his teeth because his lips were dry. "I thought I knew, in the old Gaston days, how many different kinds of a scoundrel you could be, but you've succeeded in showing me some new variations in the last few minutes. It's a thousand pities that the people of a great State should be at the mercy of such a gang of pirates as you and Hendricks and Meigs and MacFarlane, and----" "Break it off!" said Bucks. "I'm through. I was merely going to add' that I have concluded not to buy you." "Then it's to be war to the knife, is it?" "That is about the size of it," said Kent; and the governor found his hat. "I'll trouble you to return my property," he growled, pointing to the table drawer. "Certainly." Kent broke the revolver over the blotting pad, swept the ejected cartridges into the open drawer, and passed the empty weapon to its owner. When the door closed behind the outgoing visitor the victor in the small passage at arms began to walk the floor; but at four o'clock, which was Hildreth's hour for coming down-town, he put on his hat and went to climb the three flights of stairs to the editor's den in the _Argus_ building. XXV DEAD WATER AND QUICK The cubby-hole in which Hildreth earned his bread by the sweat of his brain was dark even at midday; and during working hours the editor sat under a funnel-shaped reflector in a conic shower-bath of electric light which flooded man and desk and left the corners of the room in a penumbra of grateful twilight. Kent sat just outside of the cone of radiance, watching Hildreth's face as the editor read stolidly through the contents of the box envelope. It was an instructive study in thought dynamics. There was a gleam of battle satisfaction in the editorial eye when Hildreth faced the last sheet down upon the accumulation of evidence, saying: