Once a month, since his return to Utah, she had sent him a check and he had sent her a report on his work. It was too early to hope, but his reports were the only bright points in the stagnant fog of her days in the office.
She raised her head, as she finished reading his pages. The calendar in the distance said: September 2. The lights of the city had grown beneath it, spreading and glittering. She thought of Rearden. She wished he were in the city; she wished she would sec him tonight.
Then, noticing the date, she remembered suddenly that she had to rush home to dress, because she had to attend Jim's wedding tonight.
She had not seen Jim, outside the office, for over a year. She had not met his fiancee, but she had read enough about the engagement in the newspapers. She rose from her desk in wearily distasteful resignation: it seemed easier to attend the wedding than to bother explaining her absence afterwards.
She was hurrying across the concourse of the Terminal when she heard a voice calling, "Miss Taggart!" with a strange note of urgency and reluctance, together. It stopped her abruptly; she took a few seconds to realize that it was the old man at the cigar stand who had called.
"I've been waiting to catch sight of you for days. Miss Taggart. I've been extremely anxious to speak to you." There was an odd expression on his face, the look of an effort not to look frightened.
"I'm sorry," she said, smiling, "I've been rushing in and out of the building all week and didn't have time to stop."
He did not smile. "Miss Taggart, that cigarette with the dollar sign that you gave me some months ago—where did you get it?"
She stood still for a moment. "I'm afraid that's a long, complicated story," she answered.
"Have you any way of getting in touch with the person who gave it to you?"
"I suppose so—though I'm not too sure. Why?"
"Would he tell you where he got it?"
"I don't know. What makes you suspect that he wouldn't?"
He hesitated, then asked, "Miss Taggart, what do you do when you have to tell someone something which you know to be impossible?"
She chuckled. 'The man who gave me the cigarette said that in such a case one must check one's premises."
"He did? About the cigarette?"
"Well, no, not exactly. But why? What is it you have to tell me?"
"Miss Taggart, I have inquired all over the world. I have checked every source of information in and about the tobacco industry. I have had that cigarette stub put through a chemical analysis. There is no plant that manufactures that kind of paper. The flavoring elements in that tobacco have never been used in any smoking mixture I could find. That cigarette was machine-made, but it was not made in any factory I know—and I know them all. Miss Taggart, to the best of my knowledge, that cigarette was not made anywhere on earth."
Rearden stood by, watching absently, while the waiter wheeled the dinner table out of his hotel room. Ken Danagger had left. The room was half-dark; by an unspoken agreement, they had kept the lights low during their dinner, so that Danagger's face would not be noticed and, perhaps, recognized by the waiters.
They had had to meet furtively, like criminals who could not be seen together. They could not meet in their offices or in their homes, only in the crowded anonymity of a city, in his suite at the Wayne Falkland Hotel. There could be a fine of $10,000 and ten years of imprisonment for each of them, if it became known that he had agreed to deliver to Danagger four thousand tons of structural shapes of Rearden Metal.
They had not discussed that law, at their dinner together, or their motives or the risk they were taking. They had merely talked business.
Speaking clearly and dryly, as he always spoke at any conference, Danagger had explained that half of his original order would be sufficient to brace such tunnels as would cave in, if he delayed the bracing much longer, and to recondition the mines of the Confederated Coal Company, gone bankrupt, which he had purchased three weeks ago—
"It's an excellent property, bat in rotten condition; they had a nasty accident there last month, cave-in and gas explosion, forty men killed."
