"I am going away, Knox. There isn't anything in this political game for me, and the law is too long. I have a chum in Mexico, and he wants me to go down there."
"Yes. There's nothing to hold me here now," he said.
I turned and faced him in the glare of the station lights.
"I mean that there isn't any longer a reason why one part of the earth is better than another. Mexico or Alaska, it's all the same to me."
He turned on his heel and left me. I watched him swing up the path, with his head down; I saw the shadowy figure of the other man fall into line behind him. Then I caught the platform of the last car as it passed, and that short ride into town was a triumphal procession with the wheels beating time and singing: "It's all the same--the same--to me--to me."
I called Burton by telephone, and was lucky enough to find him at the office. He said he had just got in, and, as usual, he wanted something to eat. We arranged to meet at a little Chinese restaurant, where at that hour, nine o'clock, we would be almost alone. Later on, after the theater, I knew that the place would be full of people, and conversation impossible.
Burton knew the place well, as he did every restaurant in the city.
"Hello, Mike," he said to the unctuous Chinaman who admitted us. And "Mike" smiled a slant-eyed welcome. The room was empty; it was an unpretentious affair, with lace curtains at the windows and small, very clean tables. At one corner a cable and slide communicated through a hole in the ceiling with the floor above, and through the aperture, Burton's order for chicken and rice, and the inevitable tea, was barked.
Burton listened attentively to Wardrop's story, as I repeated it.
"So Schwartz did it, after all!" he said regretfully, when I finished. "It's a tame ending. It had all the elements of the unusual, and it resolves itself into an ordinary, every-day, man-to-man feud. I'm disappointed; we can't touch Schwartz."
"I thought the _Times-Post_ was hot after him."
"Schwartz bought the _Times-Post_ at three o'clock this afternoon," Burton said, with repressed rage. "I'm called off. To-morrow we run a photograph of Schwartzwold, his place at Plattsburg, and the next day we eulogize the administration. I'm going down the river on an excursion boat, and write up the pig-killing contest at the union butchers' picnic."
