# Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 20

HENRY'S was a big office now; it occupied all one corner of the third floor of the Boland Building. His staff had grown rapidly; there were stenographers, and there were clerks, with two or three gray-headed old diggers into the law to look up his points for him. On the morning after love's bright field-day, every face greeted him, it seemed, with knowing welcome as he passed through the outer offices to sit down in the big swivel chair before the wide and polished desk at which he began swiftly to dispose of those matters which Sergeant Thorpe had placed upon it.
In half an hour he was ready to receive callers. Poised, confident, smiling, he took up the first card which the office boy brought in and, as he read, the smile brightened for upon it was engraved in neat and proper script:
Miss Marceau
"Show her in!" Henry directed, thrilling with delightful anticipations.
But something was the matter with the girl. When barely within the room, she halted, white and tense, the black eyes big and burning as with some sort of accusation.
"Why—Lahleet!" protested Henry.
"Did you know that there was oil on the Shell Point ​tract?" She fairly catapulted the question at him.
"Oil? . . . No!" Harrington's voice sounded a trifle bewildered.
"Hundreds of millions of barrels!" the girl declaimed. "Underground lakes of it. . . . Rivers of it! . . . Enough to make the tract worth ten times what Boland offered to pay for it! Did you know it?" demanded the girl, searching with terrible earnestness the face of the man she had trusted so entirely with the interests of all her tribesmen.
"Of course, I didn't know it," Henry fended impatiently. "Did anybody?"
"Mr. Boland knew it," the girl affirmed, bosom heaving. "Read this!"
From out of her red silk hand-bag she flung a crumpled document in pen-script upon the lawyer's desk. There were three foolscap pages of it, and Harrington, separating them for scrutiny, saw that the first page was addressed, "Dear Mr. Boland," and the last was signed, "Hiram Stanfield, M. E." Hiram Stanfield was the greatest authority on oil fields and oil indications in America—perhaps in the world.
Harrington started as he read the first lines and his face had whitened before he turned the first page over, for he was reading in it that the great John Boland was but a low, common trickster. The man who had become his idol, the father of the beautiful girl whose heart he had just won, had connived at a colossal fraud, and used him for the instrument of it. As Henry's eyes reached the end, the page shook with his trembling so that he could hardly see the lines. Last of all it occurred to him to look at the date.
"My God!" he groaned. The date of the document ​was the date of that night when John Boland had made his first proposal to Henry regarding the Shell Point land. "In Stanfield's own handwriting, so that the secret was his and John Boland's alone," he murmured half-dazed; then suddenly and fiercely turned upon the girl. "Where did you get this, Lahleet?" But the girl would not tell him. She shook her head and smiled inscrutably; yet was instantly humble and appealing.
"Did I get it too late?" she whispered fearsomely, and stood with twisting hands, as if the soul of a man she loved were weighing itself in the balance before her eyes.
Harrington's shoulders heaved slowly with the upsurge of his indignation—slowly, till it seemed to the girl that he would never speak. "No!" he exploded thunderously at last. "So help me God, it is not too late!"
"You will block it?" Lahleet cried, her tones freighted with vindictive satisfaction. "You will take this paper back to Washington, and use it to denounce the cause you pleaded? . . . You will prove that John Boland is a despicable fraud? . . . You will tell him so here, and you will prove it to all the world there?"
"Yes—so help me God, I will!" declared Harrington hoarsely.
Out of the girl's breast leaped a low cry of gratitude and she darted upon him. "God bless you, Henry!" she breathed fervently—the first religious sentiment he had ever heard from her—and impulsively she caught his hand to her lips and kissed it. Then, with only a look, but such a look!—all the infinity of a woman's capacity to believe in a man wrapped up in it—she turned and darted out—one of her perfectly characteristic exits.
​Harrington was left staring curiously at the back of the hand which Lahleet had kissed, curiously, for there was a tiny globule upon it that sparkled and glistened. It was a tear—Lahleet's tear. A tear of a Shell Point Indian! The tear of the dull and slowwitted of all the world, crying to be protected somewhat from the too-shrewd and grasping. As Harrington caught the rainbow colors in that quivering globule, and sensed its significance, his soul hardened; he saw the path of duty clear and felt himself strong enough to walk in it.
He kissed the tear away, and for a time was thinking deeply of what it meant—this appalling discovery—and of what it might mean to him today, to his interests, his position, his love—to go stoutly in to John Boland and tell him what he had discovered. A good many possibilities, some of them highly disagreeable, passed in review through Henry Harrington's mind in that ten minutes which intervened before he arose and stepped across the hall into the immediate purlieus of executive power.
Obsequious clerks made way for him. An alert efficient secretary, after the briefest interval, led him to the unmarked door. How perfectly oiled! With what smooth precision did the machinery of Boland General operate! And he was now about to commit an act of sabotage upon it. He felt grim and resolute, yet somehow small and mean—also distressingly embarrassed, painfully embarrassed. The situation was excruciating.
The secretary opened the door. Mr. Boland swung around in his great chair and upon his fine strong features was a most benevolent radiance, as he cried:
​"Henry, my boy! Henry, our new Vice-President!"
"Vice-President?" Harrington mumbled, struck rather dumb.
"Yes," glowed Mr. Boland, rubbing his hands benignly; "we shall organize the Shell Point Land Company today—and you will be its president, and become automatically thereby one of the vice-presidents of Boland General and so a member of our general staff. You have been unofficially one of us for some time; now you are officially there."
To be preferred so young for such a place, was honor, reward, unassailable position. It was a more subtle emolument than money. If it were aimed to make Harrington feel both the lure of what was ahead for him and the baseness of that ingratitude which would turn and bite the hand that was feeding him so generously, it had been designed most skilfully. Besides, there was this engaging, ingratiating personality of Old Two Blades, bathing the young man in its warmth.
"That is wonderful of you, Mr. Boland—wonderful!" Henry found himself murmuring, and then something jerked his head up straight. "But I don't think I can accept it. I don't think you'll want to give it to me." He stopped breathless, but so far triumphant. He had broken through. There was perspiration on his brow, but he had made an opening. "I saw the Stanfield report this morning," he blurted.
There ensued silence. For the slightest fraction of time not a muscle, not a nerve of John Boland appeared to move. "Stanfield report?" he queried in an even colorless tone.
"About the oil in the Shell Point Land," elucidated Henry desperately.
​For yet another infinitesimal fraction of time a veil as of blank incomprehension was lowered, and then suddenly the face of John Boland was the face of a man who saw his way clear before him.
"Yes—oh, yes! It looks pretty nice, doesn't it?" The magnate's hands fondled each other, while his face was permitted to beam the natural enthusiasm of a trader who has just bought for three millions what promises to be worth thirty.
"It doesn't look so nice to me," Harrington confessed miserably. "It makes the whole transaction look rather . . . phony; rather . . . suspicious."
"Suspicious?" inquired Mr. Boland, his features tight and edged, showing heat for the first time. "Why, what in the devil are you talking about?" His manner was finely indignant. It almost swept Harrington off his feet mentally. What in the devil was he talking about, really?
"I should have thought the Indians ought to have had more money for their land, in that case," he tried to explain. "I should have thought so."
"We gave them enough—far more than anybody else would have given," affirmed Mr. Boland with decision. "We paid them for the timber and the land; why should we pay them for the oil? They didn't put it there. Why, if the report had got out that there was oil in this Shell Point tract, do you think you would have got the Indian Commissioner to consent to the sale? Not on your life. He would have been afraid to. The department would have tied us up and hedged us around with restrictions till development was impossible, just like the coal in Alaska."
"But the oil couldn't run away—it would be there for ​somebody to take out sometime," Henry struggled.
"Somebody! Sometime? . . ." Mr. Boland's mounting scorn blasted the whole idea from consideration; and then, as tapping the reservoirs of a very great patience, he began to pour out counsel. "But, don't you see, Henry, my boy, we—you and I—are living today. Your duty and mine is to our own time. Look out around us at these thriving, happy towns. Our policy has created them out of raw wilderness. I will build a city on Shell Point finer than Edgewater. Where now a few Indians fish and hunt, I'll show you in five years fifty thousand people earning a good living, some of them getting rich—the world paying them wages that they will buy food with and build homes with and educate their children with and enjoy life with—just because they are sending the Shell Point oil out to make ships go and drive automobiles and turn factory wheels and help do the world's work for it.
"That's the idea, Henry. These little matters of land laws and commissioners' rulings and congressional committees, all that—they are circumstances. They are the native obstacles that empire builders like me—and you, now you are one of us—have to cope with.
"We don't quit before things like that, do we? Any more than we quit when we find timber growing a long way from the water. We build a log chute, don't we? or a railroad, or we rig up a cable and snake it out. That's what we do with obstacles, Henry." Mr. Boland was standing up and slapping Harrington cheeringly on the shoulder. "We go around 'em if we can, and if we can't we go through 'em." The chest of Old Two Blades swelled proudly.
​Henry was feeling as if he were off his feet and beginning to be swept downstream. "You think, then, it was perfectly ethical to keep from the Indians the knowledge that oil underlaid their land?" he asked.
"Ethical?" It was an uncommon word to Mr. Boland as applied to business. He chewed on it for a moment, and then swallowed it vigorously. "Why, certainly! It was my knowledge, my information that oil was there; and information, my son—business information—is property, just like land—just like oil itself, or any other commodity. Every big business is built on information—business secrets, trade secrets, manufacturing secrets—information.
"I always knew about the oil slicks on Shell Point streams. So did everybody. But it was me that got Stanfield here, that paid him ten thousand dollars for thirty days of his time and promised him a royalty of two percent on the gross of a ten-year output, if he kept his mouth shut on what he found until I was ready to make it public."
But Henry had got his feet on bottom again for one swirling instant. "It was very shrewd, Mr. Boland, no doubt; but was it—right?"
"Right? Of course it was right. Why, Henry! I'm surprised at you. I'll have to give you some lessons in the fundamental principles of business."
"I guess you will," confessed Harrington rather grimly.
"All right, here goes," began his self-appointed school-master resolutely, wetting an aggressive lip: "You were born in Missouri, didn't you tell me? Northwest Missouri? Well, I was born just over the line in Iowa. Let me ask you now, did you ever, in the ​late summer, happen on a grove of wild plums down in the creek bottom, just as pink and ripe as your best girl's cheeks and just as sweet as sugar?"
"I found a rare patch of wild strawberries once," recalled the young man wonderingly.
"Well, what did you do?" demanded Mr. Boland quickly. "Rush out and tell the whole town about it? Or did you keep that secret rather carefully, and just sneak off down there every day or two yourself, and maybe take one trusted pal with you, and keep those strawberries to yourself all summer?"
Harrington flushed. "Well, I guess I kept it kind of dark," he smiled, "until the pal peached on me."
"Exactly," exulted Mr. Boland; "and then what did you do?"
"I licked him," admitted Henry.
"Well, was that ethical?"
"It was rather—rather human, I suppose," he confessed with a sickly smile.
"Exactly!" gloated Mr. Boland. "It was very human, and business, Henry, is very human. The ethics of business is the ethics of human nature. Business doesn't try to remake humanity—it caters to it. And the more successfully you cater, Henry, the bigger the business you build."
The young man was frankly stopped; he was beginning to surrender. He felt somehow that he had been out-maneuvered rather than out-argued, but here he was with nothing on his tongue.
"You mustn't let your sympathies run away with you, Henry," smiled Mr. Boland expansively. "You've done a big job for us; you found a nice little strawberry patch. Now don't go and tell all the boys in town ​where it is. You remember what happened to that pal of yours, don't you?"
Mr. Boland made this observation jocularly, but if Henry had had time to think of it twice, he might have suspected a double meaning; but the generous head of B. G. was hurrying him a little.
"Your salary, Henry, as President of Shell Point will be twenty thousand a year, with the usual opportunities to acquire stock. And now—that's enough of business for this morning. Especially when there's something more important to talk about—and that's rare."
Mr. Boland's voice dropped significantly and his expression softened to a kind of domestic tenderness. "That was great news you and Billie had for us yesterday," he began in fond accents, eyes aglow. "I congratulate myself, Henry; for I love you almost as if you were my own boy. God did not give me a son. I have had to acquire one." The tone of this announcement was almost hallowed; the gratification it conveyed enormous.
Henry, recalling that mood of stern insurgence in which he had entered the office a few minutes ago and how grossly he had misjudged this acquisitive but gentle, kindly man, lowered his eyes in shame to the pattern of the rug.
"The dreams of my life are being realized, Henry," the older man went on mellowingly. "To see Billie pick up a fine run-of-the-mill young American like you, instead of one of these job-lot foreigners and team up with him to develop the business that I have created, you don't know how . . . how happy . . ."
There was a sudden halt in the mellow flow, and ​Henry looked up quickly to find his intended father-in-law overcome with grateful emotion, Henry couldn't stand it. He reached out quickly and touched one of J. B.'s hands, meaning thereby a lot—everything.
A little later the President of the Shell Point Land Company and Vice-President of Boland General, with twenty thousand a year for that combination job alone, walked out rather dizzily.
"I must ring up Billie, right away," he was thinking; but as he reached his desk remembered: "Holy smoke! I left that Stanfield report . . . well, I don't want it any more. It's his, anyway," he murmured hollowly, and began to ruminate upon the wonder he had just beheld, the wonder of sublime patience and measureless generosity.
"Meandering Moses, but he must have been surprised—keen to know where I'd got it. . . . Must have been madder than a hornet at somebody's treachery . . . but he never turned a hair. Knew perfectly well what I'd come in there for, and just calmly, patiently showed me where I was wrong, then—smothered me with kindness, with affection. Wouldn't that jar you now?"
It did jar Henry a good deal and the more he pondered it the more it jarred him; yet eventually his mind turned from it to the scanning of a pile of opened letters which Thorpe had placed upon his desk. One of these jarred him also, It was dated New York; it was on the letterhead of Barrett & Wendell, those brilliant lawyers who had been specially retained by Mr. Boland to represent the respondent in the case of Adolph Salzberg vs. The First National Bank; for Hornblower had carried it up—up to the Supreme Court of the United States. It had been a relief to ​Henry, with all he had on hand, to have the case taken out of his hands; and it never occurred to him that the real reason might have been because of that doubt he had confessed once to Mr. Boland and once again to Thomas Scanlon. If it had, he might have been mean enough to exult: for here were Barrett & Wendell confessing the same doubt.