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Page 93
She paused.
"Crewe is a Nietzsche creature. Victory is the only thing with
him. Nothing else counts. The way the road was going he would
have got it in the bankrupt court by now. He's howling `safety
first' all over the country. `Negligence' is the big word in
every report he issues. It won't do for Clinton to have an
accident now that any degree of human foresight could have
prevented."
"Well," I said, "the dragon will give the hero no further
trouble. Dr. Martin told mother to-day that Mr. Crewe's mind had
broken down, and they had brought him out from New York. He got
up in a directors' meeting and tried to kill the president of the
Pacific Trust Company, with a chair. He went suddenly mad, Dr.
Martin said."
Marion put out her hands in an unconscious gesture.
"I am not surprised," she said. "That sort of temperament in the
strain of a great struggle is apt to break down and attempt to
gain its end by some act of direct violence."
Then she added:
"My grandfather says in his work on evidence that the human mind
if dominated by a single idea will finally break out in some
bizarre act. And he cites the case of the minister who, having
maneuvered in vain to compass the death of the king by some sort
of accident, finally undertook to kill him with an andiron."
She reflected a moment.
"I am afraid," she continued, "that the harm is already done.
Crewe has set the whole country on the watch. Clinton says there
simply must not be a slip anywhere now. The road must be safe;
he must make it safe." She repeated her expression.
"An accident now that any sort of human foresight could prevent
would ruin him."
"Oh, dear, it's an awful strain on us . . . on him," she
corrected. "He simply can't be everywhere to see that everything
is right and everybody careful. And besides, there's the
finances of the road to keep in shape. He had to go to Montreal
to-day to see about that."
She leaned over toward me in her eager interest.
"I don't see how he can sleep with the thing on him. The big
trains must go through on time, and every workman and every piece
of machinery must be right as a clock. I get in a panic. I
asked him to-day if he thought he could run a railroad like that,
like a machine, everything in place on the second, and he said,
`Sure, Mike!'"
I laughed.
"`Sure, Mike,"' I said, "is the spirit in which the world is
conquered."
And then the strange attraction of these two persons for one
another arose before me; this big, crude, virile, direct son of
the hustling West, and this delicate, refined, intellectual
daughter of New England. The ancestors of the man had been the
fighting and the building pioneer. And those of the girl,
reflective people, ministers of the gospel and counselors at law.
Marion's grandfather had been a writer on the law. Warfield on
Evidence, had been the leading authority in this country. And
this ambitious girl had taken a special course in college to fit
her to revise her grandfather's great work. There was no
grandson to undertake this labor, and she had gone about the task
herself. She would not trust the great book to outside hands. A
Warfield had written it, and a Warfield should keep the edition
up. Her revision was now in the hands of a publisher in Boston,
and it was sound and comprehensive, the critics said; the ablest
textbook on circumstantial evidence in America. I looked in a
sort of wonder at this girl, carried off her feet by a tawny
barbarian!
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