The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Best Man, by Harold MacGrath, Illustrated by Will Grefé

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Title: The Best Man

The Best Man; Two Candidates; The Advent of Mr. "Shifty" Sullivan; The Girl and the Poet

Author: Harold MacGrath

Release Date: April 29, 2014 [eBook #45528]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEST MAN***

E-text prepared by Larry B. Harrison, Ernest Schaal,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Copyright 1907

The Bobbs-Merrill Company

—

October

To the Ramsdells

In Memory of

Many Pleasant Florentine Days

Thanks are due Ainslee's Magazine for permission to republish The Advent of Mr. "Shifty" Sullivan.

The BEST MAN

THE BEST MAN

I

CARRINGTON folded the document and thoughtfully balanced it on his palm. What an ironical old world it was! There was a perpendicular wrinkle about his nose, and his lips had thinned into a mere line which drooped at the corners. The drone of a type-writer in the adjoining room sounded above the rattle-tattle of the street below. Through the opened windows came a vague breath of summer redolent of flowers and grasses; for it was but eleven o'clock of the morning, and the smell of sun-baked brick and asphalt had not yet risen through the air. Far beyond the smoking, ragged sky-line Carrington could see the shifting, glittering river and the great ships going down to the sea. Presently the ashes from his dead cigar fell in a gray cascade down his coat and tumbled across his knees, but he gave no heed.

Ironical old world indeed! Here, suddenly and unexpectedly, he found himself upon the battle-field of love and duty, where all honest men find themselves, sooner or later. To pit the heart against the conscience, impulse against calculation! Heigh-ho! Duty is an implacable goddess, and those who serve her most loyally are most ruthlessly driven. She buffets us into this corner and into that, digs pitfalls for the hesitant foot, and crushes the vacillating.

As all men will, Carrington set about to argue down his conscience; the heart is so insistent a counselor. Why should he give up the woman he loved, simply because duty demanded he should? After all, was not duty merely social obligation? What was it to him that the sheep were sheared? Was it right that he, of all men, should divide the house, throw the black pall of dishonesty over it, destroy his own happiness and hers, when so simple a thing as a match would crumble into nothingness this monument to one man's greed and selfishness? The survival of the fittest; if he put aside Self, who would thank him? Few, and many would call him a fool or a meddler. So many voices spoke that he seemed to hear none distinctly.

He alone had made these astonishing discoveries; he alone had followed the cunningly hidden trail of the serpent. He could stop where he was and none would be the wiser. To be sure, it was only a question of time when the scandal would become public through other channels; but in that event he would not be held responsible for bringing about the catastrophe. Besides, the ways of the serpent are devious and many, and other investigators might not come so close to the trail.

He had gone about his investigations without the least idea where they would lead him. At the beginning he had believed that the guilty ones were none higher than petty officials; but presently he found himself going over their heads, higher and higher, until, behold! he was at the lair of the old serpent himself. A client had carelessly dropped a bit of information, and it had taken seed with this surprising result. Henry Cavenaugh, millionaire promoter, financier, trust magnate, director in a hundred money-gathering concerns; Henry Cavenaugh, the father of the girl he loved and who loved him! Could it be he, indeed? It seemed incredible.

It was not a case of misappropriation of funds, such as a man may be guilty of when temporarily hard pressed. It was a bold and fraudulent passing of dividends that rightfully belonged to the investors; of wrongfully issuing statements of bolstered expenses, lack of markets, long strikes (promoted by Cavenaugh and his associates!), insufficient means of transportation. An annual dividend of seven per cent. on many millions had been dishonestly passed over. The reports that there would be no dividends encouraged a slump in the listed price of the stock, and many had sold under par value, thereby netting to Cavenaugh and others several millions. And the proof of all this lay in his hand!

It had been a keen hunt. Many and many a blind trail had he followed, only to come back to the start again. All that now remained for him to do was to pass this document on to the hands of the intrepid district attorney, and justice would be meted out to the