"Will my eyes have to be kept bandaged long? Shall I have to give up work
for any length of time?" Ingolby asked.
"Longer than you'll like," was the enigmatical reply. "It's the devil's
own business," was the weary answer. "Every minute's valuable to me now.
I ought to be on deck morning, noon, and night. There's all the trouble
between the two towns; there's the strike on hand; there's that business
of the Orange funeral, and more than all a thousand times, there's--" he
paused.
He was going to say, "There's that devil Marchand's designs on my
bridge," but he thought better of it and stopped. It had been his
intention to deal with Marchand directly, to get a settlement of their
differences without resort to the law, to prevent the criminal act
without deepening a feud which might keep the two towns apart for years.
Bad as Marchand was, to prevent his crime was far better than punishing
him for it afterwards. To have Marchand arrested for conspiracy to commit
a crime was a business which would gravely interfere with his freedom of
motion in the near future, would create complications which might cripple
his own purposes in indirect ways. That was why he had declared to Jowett
that even Felix Marchand had his price, and that he would try
negotiations first.
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