Just what I'd been hoping for I don't know,but I knew that my chance had come that morning.
For a week I had been talking Obermuller's comedy to Mason,the secretary.In the evenings I stood about in the wings and watched the Van Twiller company in Brambles.There was one fat role in it that I just ached for,but I lost all that ache and found another,when I overheard two of the women talking about Obermuller and me one night.
"He found her and made her,"one of 'em said;"just dug her out of the ground.See what he's done for her;taught her every blessed thing she knows;wrote her mimicking monologues for her;gave her her chance,and--and now--Well,Tausig don't pay salaries for nothing,and she gets hers as regularly as I draw mine.What more I don't know.But she hasn't set foot on the stage yet under Tausig,and they say Obermuller--"I didn't get the rest of it,so I don't know what they say about Obermuller.I only know what they've said to him about me.
'Tisn't hard to make men believe those things.But I had to stand it.What could I do?I couldn't tell Fred Obermuller that I was making over his play,soul and as much body as I could remember,to Tausig's secretary.He'd have found that harder to believe than the other thing.
It hasn't been a very happy week for me,I can tell you,Maggie.
But I forgot it all,every shiver and ache of it,when I came into the office that morning,as usual,and found Mason alone.
Not altogether alone--he had his bottle.And he had had it and others of the same family all the night before.The poor drunken wretch hadn't been home at all.He was worse than he'd been that morning three days before,when I had stood facing him and talking to him,while with my hands behind my back I was taking a wax impression of the lock of the desk;and he as unconscious of it all as Tausig himself.
The last page I had dictated the day before,which he'd been transcribing from his notes,lay in front of him;the gas was still burning directly above him,and a shade he wore over his weak eyes had been knocked awry as his poor old bald head went bumping down on the type-writer before him.
The thing that favored me was Tausig's distrust of everybody connected with him.He hates his partners only a bit less than he hates the men outside the Trust.The bigger and richer the Syndicate grows,the more power and prosperity it has,the more he begrudges them their share of it;the more he wants it all for himself.He is madly suspicious of his clerks,and hires others to watch them,to spy upon them.He is continually moving his valuables from place to place,partly because he trusts no man;partly because he's so deathly afraid his right hand will find out what his left is doing.He is a full partner of Braun and Lowenthal--with mental reservations.He has no confidence in either of them.Half his schemes he keeps from them;the other half he tells them--part of.He's for ever afraid that the Syndicate of which he's the head will fall to pieces and become another Syndicate of which he won't be head.
It all makes him an unhappy,restless little beast;but it helped me to-day.If it'd been any question of safe combinations and tangled things like that,the game would have been all up for Nancy O.But in his official safe Tausig keeps only such papers as he wants Braun and Lowenthal to see.And in his private desk in his private office he keeps--I stole past Mason,sleeping with his forehead on the type-writer keys--he'll be lettered like the obelisk when he wakes up--and crept into the next room to see just what Tausig keeps in that private desk of his.
Oh,yes,it was locked.But hadn't I been carrying the key to it every minute for the last forty-eight hours?There must be a mine of stuff in that desk of Tausig's,Mag.The touch of every paper in it is slimy with some dirty trick,some bad secret,some mean action.It's a pity that I hadn't time to go through 'em all;it would have been interesting;but under a bundle of women's letters,which that old fox keeps for no good reason,I'll bet,Ilit on a paper that made my heart go bumping like a cart over cobbles.
Yes,there it was,just as Obermuller had vowed it was,with Tausig's cramped little signature followed by Heffelfinger's,Dixon's and Weinstock's;a scheme to crush the business life out of men by the cleverest,up-to-date Trust deviltry;a thing that our Uncle Sammy just won't stand for.
And neither will Nancy Olden,Miss Monahan.
She grabbed that precious paper with a gasp of delight and closed the desk.
But she bungled a bit there,for Mason lifted his head and blinked dazedly at her for a moment,recognized her and shook his head.
"No--work to-day,"he said.
"No--I know.I'll just look over what we've done,Mr.Mason,"she answered cheerfully.
His poor head went down again with a bob,and she caught up the type-written sheets of Obermuller's play.She waited a minute longer;half because she wanted to make sure Mason was asleep again before she tore the sheets across and crammed them down into the waste-basket;half because she pitied the old fellow and was sorry to take advantage of his condition.But she knew a cure for this last sorry--a way she'd help him later;and when she danced out into the hall she was the very happiest burglar in a world chock full of opportunities.
Oh,she was in such a twitter as she did it!All that old delight in doing somebody else up,a vague somebody whose meannesses she didn't know,was as nothing to the joy of doing Tausig up.She was dancing on a volcano again,that incorrigible Nance!Oh,but such a volcano,Maggie!It atoned for a year of days when there was nothing doing;no excitement,no risk,nothing to keep a girl interested and alive.