The Collected Western Classics & Adventures Novels. William MacLeod Raine
cripple the octopus, what could the best blood of the State, standing together, not accomplish? He flung Patrick Henry and Robert Emmet and Daniel Webster at their devoted heads, demanding liberty or death with the bridled eloquence of his race.
But Ridgway was not such a tyro at the game of politics as to depend upon speeches for results. His fine hand had been working quietly for months to bring the malcontents into one camp, shaping every passion to which men are heir to serve his purpose. As he looked down the table he could read in the faces before him hatred, revenge, envy, fear, hope, avarice, recklessness, and even love, as the motives which he must fuse to one common end. His vanity stood on tiptoe at his superb skill in playing on men's wills. He knew he could mold these men to work his desire, and the sequel showed he was right.
When the votes were counted at the end of the bitter campaign that followed, Simon Harley's candidates went down to disastrous defeat all over the State, though he had spent money with a lavish hand. In Mesa County, Ridgway had elected every one of his judges and retired to private life those he could not influence.
Harley's grim lips tightened when the news reached him. "Very well," he said to Mott "We'll see if these patriots can't be reached through their stomachs better than their brains. Order every mill and mine and smelter of the Consolidated closed to-night. Our employees have voted for this man Ridgway. Let him feed them or let them starve."
"But the cost to you—won't it be enormous?" asked Mott, startled at his chief's drastic decision.
Harley bared his fangs with a wolfish smile. "We'll make the public pay. Our store-houses are full of copper. Prices will jump when the supply is reduced fifty per cent. We'll sell at an advance, and clean up a few millions out of the shut-down. Meanwhile we'll starve this patriotic State into submission."
It came to pass even as Harley had predicted. With the Consolidated mines closed, copper, jumped up—up—up. The trust could sit still and coin money without turning a hand, while its employees suffered in the long, bitter Northern winter. All the troubles usually pursuant on a long strike began to fall upon the families of the miners.
When a delegation from the miners' union came to discuss the situation with Harley he met them blandly, with many platitudes of sympathy. He regretted—he regretted exceedingly—the necessity that had been forced upon him of closing the mines. He had delayed doing so in the hope that the situation might be relieved. But it had grown worse, until he had been forced to close. No, he was afraid he could not promise to reopen this winter, unless something were done to ameliorate conditions in the court. Work would begin at once, however, if the legislators would pass a bill making it optional with any party to a suit to have the case transferred to another judge in case he believed the bias of the presiding judge would be prejudicial to an impartial hearing.
Ridgway was flung at once upon the defensive. His allies, the working men, demanded of him that his legislature pass the bill wanted by Harley, in order that work might recommence. He evaded their demands by proposing to arbitrate his difficulties with the Consolidated, by offering to pay into the union treasury hall a million dollars to help carry its members through the winter. He argued to the committee that Harley was bluffing, that within a few weeks the mines and smelters would again be running at their full capacity; but when the pressure on the legislators he had elected became so great that he feared they would be swept from their allegiance to him, he was forced to yield to the clamor.
It was a great victory for Harley. Nobody recognized how great a one more accurately than Waring Ridgway. The leader of the octopus had dogged him over the shoulders of the people, had destroyed at a single blow one of his two principal sources of power. He could no longer rely on the courts to support him, regardless of justice.
Very well. If he could not play with cogged dice, he was gambler enough to take the honest chances of the game without flinching. No despair rang in his voice. The look in his eye was still warm and confident. Mesa questioned him with glimpses friendly but critical. They found no fear in his bearing, no hint of doubt in his indomitable assurance.
Chapter 22.
"Not Guilty"—"Guilty"
Ridgway's answer to the latest move of Simon Harley was to put him on trial for his life to answer the charge of having plotted and instigated the death of Vance Edwards. Not without reason, the defense had asked for a change of venue, alleging the impossibility of securing a fair trial at Mesa. The courts had granted the request and removed the case to Avalanche.
On the second day of the trial Aline sat beside her husband, a dainty little figure of fear, shrinking from the observation focused upon her from all sides. The sight of her forlorn sensitiveness so touched Ridgway's heart that he telegraphed Virginia Balfour to come and help support her through the ordeal.
Virginia came, and henceforth two women, both of them young and unusually attractive, gave countenance to the man being tried for his life. Not that he needed their support for himself, but for the effect they might have on the jury. Harley had shrewdly guessed that the white-faced child he had married, whose pathetic beauty was of so haunting a type, and whose big eyes were so quick to reflect emotions, would be a valuable asset to set against the black-clad widow of Vance Edwards.
For its effect upon himself, so far as the trial was concerned, Simon Harley cared not a whit. He needed no bolstering. The old wrecker carried an iron face to the ordeal. His leathern heart was as foreign to fear as to pity. The trial was an unpleasant bore to him, but nothing worse. He had, of course, cast an anchor of caution to windward by taking care to have the jury fixed. For even though his array of lawyers was a formidably famous one, he was no such child as to trust his case to a Western jury on its merits while the undercurrent of popular opinion was setting so strongly against him. Nor had he neglected to see that the court-room was packed with detectives to safeguard him in the event that the sympathy of the attending miners should at any time become demonstrative against him.
The most irritating feature of the trial to the defendant was the presence of the little woman in black, whose burning eyes never left for long his face. He feigned to be unconscious of her regard, but nobody in the court-room was more sure of that look of enduring, passionate hatred than its victim. He had made her a widow, and her heart cried for revenge. That was the story the eyes told dumbly.
From first to last the case was bitterly contested, and always with the realization among those present—except for that somber figure in black, whose beady eyes gimleted the defendant—that it was another move in the fight between the rival copper kings. The district attorney had worked up his case very carefully, not with much hope of securing a conviction, but to mass a total of evidence that would condemn the Consolidated leader-before the world.
To this end, the foreman, Donleavy, had been driven by a process of sweating to turn State's evidence against his master. His testimony made things look black for Harley, but when Hobart took the stand, a palpably unwilling witness, and supported his evidence, the Ridgway adherents were openly jubilant. The lawyers for the defense made much of the fact that Hobart had just left the Consolidated service after a disagreement with the defendant and had been elected to the senate by his enemies, but the impression made by his moderation and the fine restraint of his manner, combined with his reputation for scrupulous honesty, was not to be shaken by the subtle innuendos and blunt aspersions of the legal array he faced.
Nor did the young district attorney content himself with Hobart's testimony. He put his successor, Mott, on the stand, and gave him a bad hour while he tried to wring the admission out of him that Harley had personally ordered the attack on the miners of the Taurus. But for the almost constant objections of the opposing counsel, which gave him time to recover himself, the prosecuting attorney would have succeeded.
Ridgway, meeting him by chance after luncheon at the foot of the hotel elevator—for in a town the size of Avalanche, Waring had found it necessary to put up at the same hotel as the enemy or take second best, an alternative not to his fastidious taste—rallied him upon the predicament in which he had found himself.