to finances, was dismayed at
the tangle of strategy and cross-strategy, innuendo, vague and formless
cobweb forces by which he was surrounded. He could make nothing of them.
They brushed his face, he felt their influence, yet he could place his
finger on no tangible and comprehensible solidity. Among these delicate
and complicated cross-currents Newmark moved silent, cold, secret. He
seemed to understand them, to play with them, to manipulate them as
elements of the game. Above them was the hollow shock of the ostensible
battle--the speeches, the loud talk in lobbies, the newspaper virtue,
indignation, accusations; but the real struggle was here in the furtive
ways, in whispered words delivered hastily aside, in hotel halls on the
way to and from the stairs, behind closed doors of rooms without open
transoms.

Orde in comic despair acknowledged that it was all "too deep for him."
Nevertheless, it was soon borne in on him that the new company was
struggling for its very right to existence. It had been doing that
from the first; but now, to Orde the fight, the existence, had a new
importance. The company up to this point had been a scheme merely, an
experiment that might win or lose. Now, with the history of a drive
behind it, it had become a living entity. Orde would have fought against
its dissolution as he would have fought against a murder. Yet he had
practically to stand one side, watching Newmark's slender, gray-clad,
tense figure gliding here and there, more silent, more reserved, more
watchful every day.

The fight endured through most of the first half of the session. When
finally it became evident to Heinzman that Newmark would win, he made
the issue of toll rates the ditch of his last resistance, trying to
force legal charges so low as to eat up the profits. At the last,
however, the bill passed the board. The company had its charter.

At what price only Newmark could have told. He had fought with the tense
earnestness of the nervous temperament that fights to win without count
of the cost. The firm was established, but it was as heavily in debt as
its credit would stand. Newmark himself, though as calm and reserved and
precise as ever, seemed to have turned gray, and one of his eyelids had
acquired a slight nervous twitch which persisted for some months. He
took his seat at the desk, however, as calmly as ever. In three days
the scandalised howls of bribery and corruption had given place in the
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