initial commit of ebook 16573HEADmain

13 files changed, 38052 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/16573-8.txt b/16573-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eba34e3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11607 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: August 21, 2005 [EBook #16573]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+
+
+[Illustration: "He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president]
+
+
+THE HONORABLE
+SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+
+BY
+
+FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+NEW YORK : : : : : 1913
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Published September, 1913
+
+[Illustration]
+
+TO MR. GEORGE ADY
+
+     My Regius Professor in the School of Western Railroading, and
+     himself a keen observer, _in situ_, of the conditions which I have
+     herein sought to portray, this book is most affectionately
+     inscribed.
+
+THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                    PAGE
+
+I. BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"                3
+
+II. THE BOSS                                26
+
+III. A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES             40
+
+IV. THE HIGHBINDERS                         56
+
+V. AT WARTRACE HALL                         69
+
+VI. ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS                86
+
+VII. A BATTLE ROYAL                         96
+
+VIII. THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT                   110
+
+IX. THE RANK AND FILE                      121
+
+X. IN THE HERBARIUM                        138
+
+XI. THE GREAT GAME                         148
+
+XII. A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT           165
+
+XIII. THE LIEGEMAN                         178
+
+XIV. BARRIERS INVISIBLE                    193
+
+XV. SWORD-PLAY                             203
+
+XVI. THE SAFE-BLOWER                       213
+
+XVII. ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS        230
+
+XVIII. THE CHASM                           241
+
+XIX. A COG IN THE WHEEL                    256
+
+XX. A STONE FOR BREAD                      264
+
+XXI. THE UNDER-DOG                         280
+
+XXII. THE ICONOCLAST                       293
+
+XXIII. A CRY IN THE NIGHT                  302
+
+XXIV. FIELD HEADQUARTERS                   320
+
+XXV. BLOOD AND IRON                        327
+
+XXVI. APPLES OF GOLD                       343
+
+XXVII. IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES            356
+
+XXVIII. THE GOSSIPING WIRES                367
+
+XXIX. AT SHONOHO INN                       379
+
+XXX. THE RECKONING                         390
+
+XXXI. _À LA BONNE HEURE_                   407
+
+
+
+
+THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"
+
+
+Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who
+was a week-end guest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be
+resentful. What right had a gay and frivolous world to come and thrust
+its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia had said "No"? It was
+like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had read
+the single telegram which had come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs.
+Beverley's indulgence and went out to find a chair in a corner of the
+veranda where the frivolities had not as yet intruded.
+
+It was a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled
+moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though
+the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting
+verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns.
+At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, and
+one of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear,
+brought the guests of honor--three daughters of a Western senator lately
+home from their summer abroad.
+
+Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had
+resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his
+ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and
+since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover,
+the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of
+the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.
+
+Not that Blount put it that way, either to Mrs. Beverley or to himself.
+He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered young man of an up-to-date world,
+and the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and practical rather than
+poetic or sentimental. But the fact remained, and when he sat back in
+his corner absently folding the lately received telegram into a narrow
+spill and scowling moodily down upon the coming and going procession of
+motor-cars he was unconsciously giving a very life-like imitation of the
+disappointed lover the world over.
+
+It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance, that Gantry found him;
+a chance because the Winnebasset club-house is spacious and the dinner
+dance minimized the hazards of a meeting between two unattached men who
+were merely transient guests. But the railroad man at least was
+unfeignedly glad.
+
+"Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed,
+with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of
+course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap
+up against you here, when there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to
+be bored stiff--" He stopped short, finding it difficult to be shiftily
+insincere with as old a friend as Evan Blount. But in the nature of
+things it was baldly impossible to tell Blount that the meeting was not
+accidental.
+
+"Pull up a chair and sit down," said Blount, not too ungraciously,
+considering his just cause to be more ungracious. "I was thinking of you
+a little while ago, Dick. I saw your name in the list of
+Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting in Boston,
+and--well, at the present moment I'm not sure but you are the one man in
+the world I wanted most to meet."
+
+"Say! that sounds pretty good to me," laughed Gantry, settling himself
+comfortably in a lazy-chair and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.
+"I've been in Boston the full week, skating around over the chilly crust
+of things and never able to get so much as one tenuous little social
+claw-hold. Say, Evan, how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old
+town keep going ever count 'em?"
+
+"Boston is all right when you know it--or, rather, when it comes to know
+you," returned Blount, remembering that Boston or Cambridge--which is
+Boston in the process of elucidation--was the birth and dwelling place
+of Patricia.
+
+Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.
+
+"The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you,
+hasn't it, Evan?--to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it
+would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the
+Harvard Law School. By the way, how much longer are you in for?"
+
+"I am out of the Law School, if that is what you mean--out and admitted
+to the bar," said Blount. "If you get into trouble with the Boston
+police let me know, and I'll ask for a change of venue to the greasewood
+hills and Judge Lynch's court."
+
+"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who
+curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and
+pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I
+believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were
+Western-born."
+
+"I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much
+about going back," was Blount's rather enigmatic reply.
+
+"But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the railroad man, waking up.
+"That's good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young
+lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular fellow you wanted to
+meet?"
+
+Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across
+the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.
+
+Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to
+the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried
+the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"--the capital of
+the State--and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent
+arrival. Below the date-line he read:
+
+TO EVAN SHELBY BLOUNT,
+Standish Apartments, Boston.
+
+     You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me
+     nothing but an occasional sight of your face. If you are not tied
+     to some woman's apron-string, why can't you come West and grow up
+     with your native State?
+
+DAVID BLOUNT.
+
+It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of
+friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of
+a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original
+creases before he passed it back.
+
+"Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.
+
+"I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be
+fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a
+few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."
+
+"He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed everybody knew it."
+
+"_I_ didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may not realize it, but what
+you don't tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it
+were printed."
+
+Blount's smile was altogether friendly.
+
+"What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The world has plenty of
+banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man's personal
+contribution. Why should I bore you or anybody?"
+
+"Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground," said the railroad traffic
+manager. "Just the same, there's another side to it. In an unguarded
+moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me
+that you were Western-born. I always supposed afterward that you
+regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me
+any more."
+
+"Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so little to tell. I had a
+boyhood like other boys--or, no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I
+was born on the 'Circle-Bar,' when the ranch was--as it still is, I
+believe--a hard day's drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the
+nearest shipping-corral on the railroad. At twelve I could 'ride line,'
+'cut out,' and 'rope down' like any other healthy ranch-bred youngster,
+and since the capital was at that time only in process of getting itself
+surveyed and boomed into existence I had never seen a town bigger than
+Painted Hat."
+
+"And what happened when you were twelve?" queried Gantry. He was not
+abnormally curious, but Blount's communicative mood was unusual enough
+to warrant a quickening of interest.
+
+"The greatest possible misfortune that can ever come to a half-grown
+boy, Dick--my mother died."
+
+Gantry's own boyhood was not so deeply buried in the past as to make
+him forgetful of its joys and sorrows. "That was hard--mighty hard," he
+assented. Then: "And pretty soon your father married again?"
+
+"Not for some years," Blount qualified. "But for me the heavens were
+fallen. I was sent away to school, to college, to Europe; then I came
+here to the Law School. In all that time I've never seen the
+'Circle-Bar' or my native State--in fact, I have never been west of
+Chicago."
+
+Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory phrase. As a
+railroad man, continent-crossing travel was to him the merest matter of
+course. Though he might Sunday-over at the Winnebasset Country Club on
+the North Shore, it was well within the possibilities that the following
+week-end might find him sweltering in New Orleans or buttoning his
+overcoat against the raw evening fogs of San Francisco.
+
+"Never been west of Chicago?" he echoed. "Never been--" He stopped
+short, beginning to realize vaguely that there must be strong reasons;
+reasons which might lie beyond the pale of a college friendship, and the
+confidences begotten thereby, in the rendering of them.
+
+"No," said Blount.
+
+"Then the senator's--that is--er--your father's political life has never
+touched you."
+
+The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of Blount's steady gray
+eyes, but this time it was shot through with a faint suggestion of the
+Blount grimness.
+
+"It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick. I saw a large-hearted,
+open-handed old cattle-king wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream
+of politics to gratify an ambition that wasn't at all his own--a woman's
+ambition. In order that the woman might mix and mingle in Washington
+society for a brief minute or two, he got himself elected to fill out an
+unexpired term of two months in the United States Senate--bought the
+election, some said. That was three years ago, wasn't it?--a long time,
+as political incidents or accidents go. But Washington hasn't forgotten.
+When I was down there last winter the five-o'clock-tea people were still
+recalling Mrs. Blount's gowns and the wild-Western naïveté of 'The
+Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"
+
+Gantry was chuckling softly when the half-bitter admission had got
+itself fully made.
+
+"Land of love, Evan!" he said, "you may be an educated post-graduate all
+right, with the proper Boston degree of culture laid on and rubbed down
+to a hard-glaze finish, but you've got a lot to learn yet--about the
+senator and his politics, I mean. Why, Great Snipes, man! he isn't in it
+a little bit for the social frills and furbelows; he never was. Let me
+intimate a few things: Politically speaking, David Blount is by long
+odds the biggest man in his State to-day. He can have anything he wants,
+from the head of the ticket down. You spoke rather contemptuously just
+now of his two months in the Senate; you probably didn't know that he
+might have gone back if he had wanted to; that he actually did a much
+more difficult thing--named his successor."
+
+David Blount's son stood up and put his shoulders against one of the
+veranda pillars. From the new view-point he could look through the
+reading-room windows and on into the assembly-room where the dancers
+were keeping time to the measures of a two-step. But he was not thinking
+of the dancers when he said:
+
+"It's a sheer miracle, Dick, your dropping down here to-night like the
+_deus ex machina_ of the old Greek plays. You've read this
+telegram"--holding up the folded message--"it is just possible that you
+can tell me what lies behind it. Why has my father sent it at this
+particular time and in those words? He knows perfectly well that my
+plans for settling here in Boston were definitely made more than a year
+ago."
+
+"I can tell you the situation out in the greasewood country, if that's
+what you want to know," said Gantry after a thoughtful pause.
+
+"Make it simple," was Blount's condition, adding: "What I don't know
+about the business or the political situation in the West would fill a
+much larger book than the one you were speaking of a few minutes ago."
+
+"'Business or political,' you say; they are Siamese twins nowadays,"
+returned the railroad man, with a short laugh. Then: "The outlook for
+us out yonder in the greasewood hills is precisely what it is in a dozen
+other States this year--east, west, north and south--everything
+promising a renewal of the unreasoning, bull-headed legislative fight
+against the railroads. I suppose our own case is typical. As everybody
+knows, the Transcontinental Railway has practically created two-thirds
+of the States through which it passes--made them out of whole cloth.
+Where you left sage-brush and bare hills and unfenced cattle ranges a
+dozen years ago you will now find irrigation, tilled farms, orchards,
+rich mines--development everywhere, with a rapidly growing population to
+help it along. To make all this possible, the railroad took a chance; it
+was a mighty long chance, and somebody has to pay the bills."
+
+"I know," smiled Blount; "the bill-paying is summed up in some railroad
+man's clever phrase, 'all the tariff the traffic will stand.' I can
+remember one year when my father rose up in his wrath and drove his beef
+cattle one hundred and fifty miles across the Transcontinental tracks to
+the Overland Central."
+
+"That was in the old days," protested Gantry, who was loyal to his salt.
+"As the State has filled up, we've tried to meet the situation half-way,
+as a straight business proposition. Fares and tariffs have been lowered
+from time to time, and--"
+
+"You are not making it simple enough by half," warned Blount
+quizzically. "You are getting further away from my telegram every
+minute."
+
+Gantry paused to relight his cigar.
+
+"I don't know how your telegram figures in it specially, but I do know
+this: the legislature to be elected this fall in our State will be
+chosen entirely without regard to the old party lines. There is only one
+issue before the people and that is the Transcontinental Railway. The
+'Paramounters,' as they call themselves, taking the name from the
+assumption that it is the paramount duty of the voter to pinch any
+business interest bigger than his own, would like to legislate us out of
+existence; as against that we shall beat the tomtom and do our level
+best to stay on top of earth."
+
+"Naturally," Blount agreed, then half-absently, and with his eyes still
+resting upon the merrymakers twirling like paired automatons in the
+distant assembly-room: "And my father--how does he stand?"
+
+"The idea of your having to ask me how the senator stands in his own
+State!" exclaimed Gantry. "But really, Evan, I'd give a good bit of hard
+cash to be able to tell you in so many words just where he does stand.
+There are a good many people in our neck of woods who would like mighty
+well to know. It will make all the difference in the world when it comes
+to a show-down."
+
+"Why will it?"
+
+"Because, apart from the railroad and the anti-railroad factions, there
+is a very complete and smoothly running machine organization."
+
+"And my father is identified with the machine?"
+
+Again Gantry choked over the singular lack of information discovering
+itself in Blount's question.
+
+"Land of glory!" he ejaculated. "Where have you been burying yourself,
+Evan? Didn't I just tell you that he is the biggest man in the State?
+Oh, no"--with heavy irony--"he isn't identified with the machine--not at
+all; he merely owns it and runs it. We may think we can swing a safe
+majority in the legislature, and the 'antis' may be just as firmly
+convinced that they can. But before either side can turn a wheel it will
+have to walk up to the captain's office and get its orders."
+
+"Ah," said Blount, and a little later: "Thank you, Dick, I am pretty
+badly out of touch with the Western political situation, as you've
+discovered." Then he changed the subject abruptly. "How long will your
+traffic meeting last?"
+
+"We practically finished to-day. An hour or two on Monday will wind it
+up."
+
+"After which you'll go West?"
+
+"After which I shall go West by the Monday noon train if I can make it.
+You couldn't hire me to stay in Boston an hour longer than I have to."
+
+Silence for a time until Blount broke in upon Gantry's tapping of the
+dance-music rhythm with: "If I can close up a few unfinished business
+matters and get ready I may go with you, Dick. Would you mind?"
+
+"Yes; I should mind so much that I'd willingly miss a train or so and
+worry out a few more of the chilly Boston hours rather than lose the
+chance of having you along."
+
+"That is good of you, I'm sure. I should bore myself to death if I had
+to travel alone."
+
+Blount's rejoinder might have passed for a mere friendly commonplace if
+it had not been for the rather curiously worded telegram. But it was a
+goodly portion of Gantry's business in life to put two and two together,
+and that phrase in the senator's message about a woman's apron-string
+interested him. Moreover, it was subtly suggestive.
+
+"Ever meet your father's--er--the present Mrs. Blount, Evan?" he asked.
+
+"No." Blount may have been Western-born, but the chilling discouragement
+he could crowd into the two-letter negation spoke eloquently of his
+Eastern training.
+
+Gantry was rebuffed but not disheartened.
+
+"She is a mighty fine woman," he ventured.
+
+"So I have been given to understand." This time Blount's reply was icy.
+But now Gantry's eyes were twinkling and he pressed his advantage.
+
+"You'll have to reckon pretty definitely with her if you go out to the
+greasewood country, Evan. Next to your father, she is the court of last
+resort; indeed, there are a good many people who insist that she _is_
+the court--the power behind the throne, you know."
+
+There is one ditch out of which the most persistent and gladsome mocker
+may not drive his victim, and that is the ditch of silence. Blount said
+nothing. Nevertheless, Gantry tried once more.
+
+"Not interested, Evan?"
+
+Blount turned and looked his companion coldly in the eyes.
+
+"Not in the slightest degree, Dick. Will you take that for your answer
+now, and remember it hereafter?"
+
+"Sure," laughed the railroad man. And then, to round out the forbidden
+topic by adding worse to bad: "I didn't know it was a sore spot with
+you. How should I know? But, as I say, you'll have to reckon with her
+sooner or later, and--"
+
+"Let's talk of something else," snapped Blount.
+
+Gantry found a match and relighted his cigar. When he began again he was
+still thinking of the "apron-string" clause in the senator's telegram.
+
+"I can't understand how any man with Western blood in his veins could
+ever be content to marry and settle down in this over-civilized neck of
+woods," he remarked, looking down upon the parked automobiles and around
+at the country-club evidences of the civilization.
+
+"Can't you?" smiled Blount, with large lenience. One of the things the
+civilization had done for him was to make him good-naturedly tolerant of
+the crudeness of the outlander.
+
+"No, I can't," asserted the Westerner. Then he added: "Of course, I
+don't know the Eastern young woman even by sight. She may be all that is
+lovely, desirable, and enticing--if a man could hope to live long
+enough to get really well acquainted with her."
+
+"She is," declared Blount, with the air of one who had lived quite long
+enough to know.
+
+Once more Gantry was putting two and two together. Blount's
+determination to go West and grow up with the country--his father's
+country--was apparently a very sudden one. Had the decision turned
+entirely upon the senator's telegram? Gantry, wise in his generation,
+thought not.
+
+"You say that as if you'd been taking a few lessons," he laughed. Then,
+with the friendly impudence which only a college comradeship could
+excuse: "Is she here to-night?"
+
+"No," said Blount, unguardedly making the response which admitted so
+much more than it said.
+
+"Tell me about her," Gantry begged. "I don't often read a love story,
+but I like to hear 'em."
+
+If it had been any one but Gantry, Blount would probably have had a
+sharp attack of reticence, with outward symptoms unmistakable to the
+dullest. But the time, the surroundings, and the exceeding newness of
+Patricia's "No" combined to break down the barriers of reserve.
+
+"There isn't much to tell, Dick," he began half humorously, half in
+ill-concealed self-pity. "I've known her for a year, and I've loved her
+from the first day. That is Chapter One; and Chapter Two ends the story
+with one small word. She says 'No.'"
+
+"The dickens she does!" said Gantry, in hearty sympathy. Then: "But
+that's a good sign, isn't it? Haven't I heard somewhere that they always
+say 'No' at first?"
+
+Blount laughed in spite of himself. Gantry, the Dick Gantry of the
+college period, had always been a man's man, gay, light-hearted, and
+care-free to the outward eye, but in reality one who was carrying
+burdens of poverty and distress which might well have crushed an older
+and a stronger man. There had been no time for sentiment then, and
+Blount wondered if there had been in any later period.
+
+"I am afraid I can't get any comfort out of that suggestion," he
+returned. "When Miss Patricia Anners says 'No,' I am quite sure she
+means it."
+
+"Think so?" said Gantry, still sympathetic. "Well, I suppose you are the
+best judge. Tough, isn't it, old man? What's the obstacle?--if you can
+tell it without tearing the bandages off and saying 'Ouch!'"
+
+"It is Miss Anners's career."
+
+"H'm," was the doubtful comment; "I'm afraid you'll have to elaborate
+that a little for me. I'm not up in the 'career' classification."
+
+"She has been studying at home and abroad in preparation for
+social-settlement work in the large cities. Of course, I knew about it;
+but I thought--I hoped--"
+
+"You hoped it was only a young woman's fad--which it probably is,"
+Gantry cut in.
+
+"Y-yes; I'm afraid that was just what I did hope, Dick. But I couldn't
+talk against it. Confound it all, you can't go about smashing ideals
+for the people you love best!"
+
+"Rich?" queried Gantry.
+
+"Oh, no. Her father has the chair of paleontology, and never gets within
+speaking distance of the present century. The mother has been dead many
+years."
+
+"And you say the girl has the Hull House ambition?"
+
+"The social-betterment ambition. It's an ideal, and I can't smash it.
+You wouldn't smash it, either, Dick."
+
+"No; I guess that's so. If I were in your fix I should probably do what
+you are doing--say 'Good-by, fond heart,' and hie me away to the
+forgetful edge of things. And it's simply astonishing how quickly the
+good old sage-brush hills will help a man to forget everything that ever
+happened to him before he ducked."
+
+Blount winced a little at that. It was no part of his programme to
+forget Patricia. Indeed, for twenty-four hours, or the waking moiety of
+that period, he had been assuring himself of the utter impossibility of
+anything remotely approaching forgetfulness. This thought made him
+instantly self-reproachful; regretful for having shown a sort of
+disloyalty by opening the door of the precious and sacred things, even
+to so good a friend as Dick Gantry; and from regretting to amending was
+never more than a step for Evan Blount. There were plenty of
+reminiscences to be threshed over, and Blount brought them forward so
+tactfully that Gantry hardly knew it when he was shouldered away from
+the open door of the acuter personalities.
+
+It was quite late, and the talk had again drifted around to a one-sided
+discussion of practical politics in the Western definition of the term,
+when Gantry, pleading weariness on the score of his hard week's work at
+the railroad meeting, went to bed. The summer night was at its perfect
+best, and Blount was still wakeful enough to refill his pipe and
+well-balanced enough to be thankful for a little solitude in which to
+set in order his plans for the newly struck-out future. In the later
+talk with Gantry he had learned many things about the political
+situation in his native State, things which were enlightening if not
+particularly encouraging. Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school,
+he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his
+own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry's account could be
+trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his
+father was reputed to be the dictator.
+
+Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in
+some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been
+filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a
+possible time when some great corporation should need his services in
+permanence. He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of
+the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business.
+Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over
+into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and
+enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great
+corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be
+law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the
+public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own
+profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests,
+promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, and be the
+adviser of the man or men to whom the greater America owes its place at
+the head of the civilized nations.
+
+Oddly enough, though Gantry's attitude had been uncompromisingly
+partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a
+skilful pleader for the special interests--the interests of the few
+against those of the many. Hence he was preparing to go to the new field
+with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant
+corporation. In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty
+broadly that there was room for an assistant corporation counsel for the
+railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State.
+Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least,
+would be political rather than legal, and in his mind's eye he saw
+himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender
+of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was
+capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack.
+
+The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant
+of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had
+been other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his
+future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work
+is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking
+forward in eager anticipation to the moment when he could begin the
+grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the new environment.
+
+It was after the ashes had been knocked from the bedtime pipe that
+Blount left his chair and the secluded corner of the veranda to go down
+among the parked automobiles on the lawn. His one recreation--and it was
+the only one in which he found the precious fillip of enthusiasm--was
+motoring. There was a choice collection of fine cars in the grouping on
+the lawn, and Blount had just awakened a sleepy chauffeur to ask him to
+uncover and exhibit the engine of a freshly imported Italian machine,
+when a stir at the veranda entrance told him that at least a few of the
+dancing guests were leaving early.
+
+Being more curious at the moment about the mechanism of the Italian
+motor than he was about people, he did not realize that he was an
+intruder until the chauffeur hastily replaced the engine bonnet and
+began to get his car ready for the road. Blount stepped back when the
+little group on the veranda came down the steps preceded by a club
+footman who was calling the number of the car. And it was not until he
+was turning away that he found himself face to face with a very
+beautiful and very clear-eyed young woman who was buttoning an
+automobile dust-coat up under her chin.
+
+"Patricia!" he burst out. And then: "For Heaven's sake! you don't mean
+to tell me that you have been here all evening?"
+
+Her slow smile gave the impression, not quite of frigidity perhaps, but
+of that quality of serene self-possession which strangers sometimes
+mistook for coldness.
+
+"Why shouldn't I be here?" she asked. "Didn't you know that the
+Cranfords--the people who are entertaining--are old friends of ours?"
+
+Blount shook his head. "No, I didn't know it; and because I didn't, I
+have lost an entire evening."
+
+"Oh, no; you shouldn't say that," she protested. "The evening was yours
+to use as you chose. Mrs. Beverley told me you were here, and she added
+that you had particularly requested not to be introduced to the
+Cranfords or their guests. Besides, you know you don't care anything
+about dancing."
+
+The chauffeur had placed his other passengers in the tonneau, and was
+trying to crank the motor. Blount was thankful that the new Italian
+engine was refusing to take the spark. The delay was giving him an added
+moment or two.
+
+"No, I don't care much for dancing; and you know very well why I
+couldn't, or wouldn't, be anybody's good company to-night," he said.
+Then: "It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening by not letting
+me know that you were here."
+
+"'This last evening'?" she echoed. "Why 'last'?"
+
+"Because I am leaving Boston and New England to-morrow--or rather,
+Monday. It is the only thing to do."
+
+"I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan," she deprecated, in the
+sisterly tone that always made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense
+of proportion."
+
+"Sometimes I think you haven't any sense of proportion, Patricia," he
+retorted half-morosely. "If you have, I am sure it is frightfully
+distorted."
+
+The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary explosions, and a
+white-haired old gentleman in the tonneau was calling impatiently to
+Patricia to come and take her place so that he might close the door.
+
+"It is you who have the distorted perspective, Evan," she countered.
+"But I refused to quarrel with you last night, and I am refusing to
+quarrel with you now. It pleases you to believe that a woman's place in
+this twentieth-century world is inevitably at the fireside--her own
+fireside. I don't agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with
+you. Where are you going?"
+
+"I am going West, Monday."
+
+"How odd!" she commented. "We are going West, too--father and I--though
+not quite so soon as Monday."
+
+"You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the West?"
+
+She did not tell him where. The car motor was whirring smoothly now,
+the chauffeur was sliding into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the
+old gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently impatient.
+
+"If we are both going in the same direction we needn't say good-by," she
+said hastily, giving him her hand at parting. "Let it be _auf
+wiedersehen_." Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the
+outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately that Blount had to
+spring nimbly aside to save himself from being run down.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE BOSS
+
+
+It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken mountain ranges, lone
+buttes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of
+an exclusive North Shore club to a private dining-room in the
+Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico faces the Capitol grounds
+in the chief city of the Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows command
+a magnificent view of the Lost River Range, and from whose roof, on a
+clear day, one may see the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the
+distant western horizon.
+
+Allowing for the difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the
+dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain
+synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences
+by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda
+of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was
+ascribing to the good offices of the god of chance.
+
+On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of the men at the table in
+the private dining-room had registered from Chicago. The name was
+illegible to the cursory eye, but since it was the signature of a
+notable empire-builder, it was sufficiently well known in all the vast
+region served by the Transcontinental Railway System. The owner of the
+name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to clip the end from a
+very long and very black cigar. He was a man past middle-age,
+large-framed and heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born master
+of circumstances. Like the younger generation, he was clean shaven;
+hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination
+about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the
+region traversed by the great railway system the virile face with the
+massive jaw was as familiar as the illegible signature on the
+Inter-Mountain's guest-book. Though he figured only as the first
+vice-president of the Transcontinental Company, Hardwick McVickar was
+really the active head of its affairs and the dictator of its policies.
+
+Across the small round table sat the railway magnate's dinner-guest, a
+man who was more than McVickar's match in big-boned, square-shouldered
+physique, and whose half-century was written only in the thick, grizzled
+hair and heavy, graying mustaches. Like McVickar, he had the lion-like
+face of mastership, but the fine wrinkles at the corners of the wide-set
+eyes postulated a sense of humor which was lacking in his table
+companion. His mouth, half hidden by the drooping mustaches, needed the
+relieving wrinkles at the corners of the eyes; it was a grim,
+straight-lined inheritance from his pioneer ancestors--the mouth of a
+man who may yield to persuasion but not easily to opposition.
+
+"I wish I could convince you that it isn't worth while to hold me at
+arm's-length, Senator," McVickar was saying, as he clipped the end from
+his cigar. "You know as well as I do that under the present law in this
+State we are practically bankrupt. We are not making enough to pay the
+fixed charges. We do a losing business from the moment we cross your
+State line."
+
+"Yes; it seems to me I have heard something that sounded a good deal
+like that before," was the noncommittal rejoinder.
+
+"You have heard the simple truth, then. And it is a bald injustice, not
+only to the railroad company, but to the people it serves. We can't give
+adequate service when the cost exceeds the earnings. That is the
+simplest possible proposition in any business undertaking."
+
+"And you can't make out to convince the members of the State Railroad
+Commission of the simpleness?" asked the man whom the vice-president
+addressed as "Senator."
+
+"You know well enough that we can't hope to convince a rabidly
+anti-railroad commission," was the half-angry retort.
+
+"Yet you are still running your railroad," suggested the other. "We
+don't hear anything about your shutting down and tearing up the track."
+
+"No; luckily, the Transcontinental System does not lie wholly within
+your State boundaries. If it did, we might as well surrender our
+charter and go out of business--shut down and tear up the track, as you
+put it."
+
+"All of which has come to be a pretty old and well-worn story with us,
+McVickar," said the listener quietly. "I'm sure you didn't make me motor
+thirty miles to hear you tell it all over again. What do you want?"
+
+"We want a square deal," was the curt reply.
+
+"So do the people of this State," asserted the man across the table.
+"You bled us, Hardwick--bled us to the queen's taste--while you had the
+chance; and the chance lasted a blamed long time. You are equitably, if
+not legally, in debt to every man in this State who had ever shipped a
+car-load of freight or paid a passenger fare over your line before the
+present rate law went into effect. You can shuffle and side-step all you
+want to, but that is the plain fact of the matter."
+
+The vice-president sat up and braced his arms on the edge of the table.
+
+"You are too much for me, Blount--you hold out too many cards; and I'm
+no apprentice at the game, either. In all these years we've been
+dickering together you've always been a hard-bitted and consistent
+fighter for your own hand. What's happened to you lately? Have you
+acquired a new set of convictions? Or have you been figuring out a
+different way of whipping the devil around the stump?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," returned the guest, with large good-nature. "We are
+all growing older--and wiser, perhaps. You don't deny the debt you owe
+us, do you?"
+
+"Do we owe you anything, Blount?" asked the magnate pointedly, and with
+a definite emphasis upon the personal pronoun. "If we do, we are willing
+to pay it in spot cash, on demand."
+
+The big man on the other side of the table was leaning back in his chair
+with his hands in his pockets, and the smile wrinkling at the corners of
+his eyes was half-genial, half-satirical.
+
+"It's lucky we're alone, McVickar," he remarked. "A third fellow
+standing around and hearing you talk might imagine that you are trying
+to bribe me."
+
+"That's all right, Blount; this is between us two, and we understand
+each other. Nothing for nothing is the accepted rule the world over, and
+we both recognize it. You are figuring on something; I know you are.
+Name it. If it is anything less than a mortgage on the earth and one or
+two of the planets I'll get it for you."
+
+"I'm afraid we are a good deal more than a mile or two apart yet,
+McVickar," said the man who was not smoking, after a long minute. "Let's
+ride back to the beginning and get us a fresh start. I said that Gordon
+is going to be the next governor of the State."
+
+"I know you did; and I said--and I say it again--he isn't going to
+be--not if we can help it," declared the railway magnate, with emphatic
+determination.
+
+"The methods you will take to defeat him will insure his election,
+McVickar. You fellows are mighty slow to learn your lesson; mighty slow
+and obstinate, Hardwick. You don't know anything but wire-pulling and
+crookedness and bribery. The times have changed, and you haven't had the
+common-sense or the courage or the business shrewdness to change with
+them. I say Gordon will be the next governor."
+
+Again there was a strained silence like that which follows the
+hand-shake in the prize-ring when the two antagonists have drawn apart
+and are warily watching each for his opening. After the pause the
+vice-president said:
+
+"If we had the safest kind of a majority in both houses of the
+legislature, we couldn't be sure of accomplishing anything worth while
+with Gordon in the governor's office; you know that, Blount. If Gordon
+runs and is elected, his platform will be flatly anti-railroad."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," was the calm rejoinder. "Gordon is a mighty square
+fellow; an honest man and a fair one. If you could stay out of the fight
+and go to him with clean hands--but you couldn't do that, McVickar;
+you're too badly out of practice."
+
+"We needn't go into that phase of it. We are so savagely handicapped in
+this State that we can't afford to take a divided chance; can't afford
+to pass our case up to a man who has been elected by an unfriendly
+opposition. If we should wash our hands of the fight, as you suggest,
+we might just as well throw up our franchises and quit, so far as any
+prospect of earning a reasonable return upon our investment here is
+concerned."
+
+"I know; that is what you always say, and you have said it so often--you
+and your fellow railroad string-pullers--that you have lost the
+straightforward combination completely. If you ever knew how to make a
+clean fight you've forgotten the moves, and it's your own fault."
+
+Once more the man with the fierce eyes and the dominating jaw took time
+to consider. Like others of his class, he was partisan only in the sense
+of one fighting hardily for the side upon which he had happened to be
+drawn in the great world battle. If he had not long ago parted with his
+convictions, the heat and smoke of the battle had obscured them, and he
+chose his weapons now with little regard for anything beyond their
+possible efficacy.
+
+"You are sparring with me, Blount," he said finally. "You are talking to
+me as you might talk to a committee of the Good Government League--and
+possibly for the same reason. Let's get together. You control the
+political situation in your State, and we frankly recognize that fact.
+It's a matter of business, and we can settle it on a business basis. I
+have been outspoken and above-board with you and have told you what we
+want. Meet me halfway and tell me what you want."
+
+"I want a square deal all around, Hardwick; that's all. You've got to
+take the same ground and make a clean fight if you want me with you. I
+can't make it any plainer than that, can I?"
+
+"I don't know yet what you are driving at," frowned the vice-president,
+"nor just why you have taken this particular occasion to read me a
+kindergarten lecture on political methods. In times past I suppose we
+have both done some things that we would like to have decently buried
+and forgotten, but--"
+
+"But right there we break apart, McVickar," cut in the other, setting
+his jaw with a peculiar hardening of the facial muscles that gave him
+the appearance of a fierce old viking attacking at the head of his
+squadrons. "I'm telling you over again that a new day has dawned in
+American politics; I and my kind recognize it, and you and your kind
+don't seem to be big enough to recognize it. That is the difference
+between us. In the present instance it comes down to this: you are going
+to fight for a railroad majority in the legislature, and you want
+Reynolds for the head of the ticket because you know that you can depend
+upon his veto if you don't get your majority in the House and Senate.
+You are not going to get Reynolds, or the majority either, without the
+help of the party organization."
+
+"We can put it much more elementally than that," supplemented the
+railroad man. "We get nothing without your say-so as the head of the
+party organization. That is precisely why I have come a couple of
+thousand miles to ask you to eat dinner with me here to-night."
+
+"I reckon I ought to feel right much set up and biggitty over that,
+Hardwick," smiled the veteran spoilsman, relapsing, as he did now and
+then, into the speech of his Southern boyhood. And then
+half-quizzically: "Are you tolerably well satisfied that you've got
+around to the place where you are willing to tote fair with me? You
+recollect, I gave you a straight pointer two years ago; you wouldn't
+take it, and we did you up. Are you right certain you are ready now to
+holler 'enough'?"
+
+Once again the vice-president refused to be hurried into making a
+capitulative admission. When he spoke, the militant second thought of
+the fighting corporation commander chose the words.
+
+"There is a limit to all things, Senator, and you are pushing us pretty
+well up to it. I suppose you can crack the whip and swing the vote on
+the legislature, and you can take it and be damned. But, by God, we'll
+have our governor and our attorney-general!"
+
+"You are betting confidently on that, are you?" said the veteran mildly.
+"Is that your declaration of war?"
+
+"Call it anything you like. We are not going to be legislated off the
+map if we can help it. Strong as your machine is, you can't swing Gordon
+in against Reynolds if we concede your bare majority in the legislature
+and put up the right kind of a fight. And when it comes to Rankin, our
+candidate for attorney-general, you simply haven't another man in the
+party to put up against him. You'd have to run in a dummy, and even you
+are not big enough to do that, Blount, and put it over."
+
+"You've settled this definitely in your own mind, have you, Hardwick?"
+was the placable rejoinder. "I'm sorry--right sorry. I've been hoping
+that you had learned your lesson--you and your tribe. I came to town
+this evening prepared to show you a decent way out of your troubles, so
+far as this State is concerned; but since you have posted your 'de-fi,'
+as we cow-punchers say, I reckon it isn't worth while to wade any deeper
+into the creek."
+
+Again the railroad magnate rested his arms on the table-edge. "What was
+your 'decent way,' Senator?" he asked, fixing his gaze upon the shrewd
+old eyes of the other, which, for the first time in the conference,
+seemed to be losing a little of their grimly good-natured
+aggressiveness.
+
+"I don't mind telling you, though you will likely call it an old man's
+foolishness. I have a grown son, McVickar. Did you know that?"
+
+The vice-president nodded, and the big man opposite went on
+half-reminiscently:
+
+"He is a lawyer, and a mighty bright one, so they tell me. As I happen
+to know, he is pretty well up on the corporation side of the argument,
+and the one thing I've been afraid of is that he would marry and settle
+down somewhere in the East, where the big corporations have their home
+ranches. I'm getting old, Hardwick, and I'd like mighty well to have the
+boy with me. Out of that notion grew another. I said to myself this:
+Now, here's McVickar; if he could have a good, clean-cut young man in
+this State representing his railroad--a man who not only knew his way
+around in a court-room, but who might also know how to plead his
+client's case before the public--if McVickar could have such a young
+fellow as that for his corporation counsel, and would agree to make his
+railroad company live somewhere within shouting distance of such a young
+fellow's ideals, we might all be persuaded to bury the hatchet and live
+together in peace and amity."
+
+A slow smile was spreading itself over the strong face of the railway
+magnate as he listened.
+
+"Say, David," he retorted mildly, "it isn't much like you to go forty
+miles around when there is a short way across. Why didn't you tell me
+plainly in the beginning that you wanted a place for your boy?"
+
+"Hold on; don't let's get too far along before we get started; I'm not
+saying it now," was the sober protest. "You forget that you've just been
+telling me that you don't intend to comply with the one hard-and-fast
+condition to such an arrangement as the one I've been pipe-dreaming
+about."
+
+"What condition?"
+
+"That you turn over a brand-new leaf and meet the people of this State
+half-way on a proposition of fair play for everybody."
+
+"There isn't any half-way point in a fight for life, David. You know
+that as well, or better, than I do. But let that go. We'll give your son
+the place you want him to have, and do it gladly."
+
+The man who had once been his own foreman of round-ups straightened
+himself in his chair and smote the table with his fist.
+
+"No, by God, you won't--not in a thousand years, McVickar! Maybe you
+could buy me--maybe you _have_ bought me in times past--but you can't
+buy that boy! Listen, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I
+telegraphed the boy this afternoon, telling him to throw up his job in
+Boston and come out here. If he comes within a reasonable time he will
+be legally a citizen of the State before election. You said we didn't
+have anybody but Rankin to run for attorney-general. By Heavens,
+Hardwick, I'll show you if we haven't!"
+
+Mr. Hardwick McVickar was not of those who fight as one beating the air.
+While the deft waiter was clearing the table and serving the small
+coffees he kept silence. But when the time was fully ripe he said what
+there was to be said.
+
+"You've got us by the nape of the neck, as usual, Blount. Name your
+terms."
+
+"I have named them. Get in line with the new public opinion and we'll do
+what we can for you."
+
+During the long pause following this curt ultimatum the masterful
+dictator of railroad policies deliberated thoughtfully upon many things.
+With the ex-senator as the all-powerful head of the machine in this
+State of many costly battle-fields, it would have been a weakness
+inexcusable on the part of so astute a commander as McVickar if David
+Blount's history, political and personal, had not been known to him in
+all its details. As a contingency to be met sooner or later, the
+vice-president had anticipated the thing which had now come to pass.
+That Blount should wish to push the fortunes of his son was perfectly
+natural; and it was no less natural that he should push them by making
+the railroad company's pay-roll furnish the motive-power. The magnate
+smiled inwardly when he remembered that he had given Gantry, the
+division traffic manager of the Transcontinental, a quiet hint to look
+up one Evan Blount, a young lawyer, on his next visit to Boston. By all
+odds it would be better to wait for Gantry's report before taking any
+irrevocable steps in the bargaining with Evan Blount's father; but
+unhappily the crisis had arrived, and in all probability it could not be
+postponed. None the less, the vice-president tried craftily for the
+postponement.
+
+"You're asking a good deal, Blount, and you don't seem to realize it.
+You are practically demanding that we lay down our arms and put a
+possible enemy in the saddle on the eve of a battle. If we should agree
+to meet the people of this State half-way, as you suggest, what
+guarantee have we that we won't be compelled to go all the way?"
+
+The fine-lined wrinkles were appearing again at the corners of the
+hereditary Blount eyes.
+
+"You can't quite rise to the occasion, can you, Hardwick?" smiled the
+boss. "You'd like to behave yourself and be good, of course; but you
+want to be cocksure beforehand that it isn't going to cost too much."
+
+"Well, anyway, I'm going to ask for a little time in which to consider
+it," was the vice-president's final word.
+
+"Sure! You have all the time there is between now and the election. Go
+on and do your considering. I've told you what I'm going to do."
+
+"You know very well that we can't allow you to do what you propose. With
+an unfriendly attorney-general we might as well throw up our hands first
+as last."
+
+"All right; it's right pointedly up to you," was the calm reply.
+
+The vice-president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve
+with the table-napkin. When he looked up, the heavy frown was again
+furrowing itself between his eyes.
+
+"Let me know when your son is coming and I'll try to make it possible to
+meet him here," he said rather gratingly.
+
+And thus, at the precise moment when Richard Gantry, some three thousand
+miles away to the eastward, was declaring his weariness and his
+intention of going to bed, the two-man conference in the Inter-Mountain
+private dining-room was closed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES
+
+
+As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that Evan Blount was not to
+have Gantry for a travelling companion beyond Chicago. On the second day
+of westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose business followed
+him like an implacable Nemesis wherever he went, had wire instructions
+to stop and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois metropolis.
+Hence, on the morning of the following day, Blount continued his journey
+alone.
+
+Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate had crossed his Rubicon;
+in other words, his train had rolled through the majestic steel bridge
+spanning the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he
+was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar--which should
+have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had
+been wrought during his fourteen years of absence.
+
+Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the
+Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The
+through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled,
+and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing
+acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the
+second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a
+well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired
+reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman
+who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment--a man
+whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were
+singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with
+his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.
+
+At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be,
+with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a
+newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The
+hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was
+directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner whose
+property, vaguely located as somewhere "in the mountains," was involved
+in litigation.
+
+It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond
+the boundaries of the commonplaces. Oddly enough, considering the fact
+that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion
+to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law.
+Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself
+thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively helpful to the man who had
+apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.
+
+Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human sympathy the man in the
+wicker chair presently inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching
+another matter. In addition to his mining ventures he had been making
+investments in timber-lands, or, rather, in certain lumber companies
+operating "in the mountains"--bad investments, he feared, since the
+Government had lately taken such a decided stand against the cutting of
+timber in the mountain-land reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he
+asked, that the talk would materialize in restraining action? If so, he
+was in the hole again--worse off than he should be if his mining
+lawsuits should go against him.
+
+Again Blount, good-naturedly charitable and not a little amused by the
+nervous anxiety of the gentleman of many troubles, gave an opinion.
+
+"Conservation, in timber as well as in other remaining resources of the
+country, has come to be a word which is in everybody's mouth," was the
+form the opinion took. "The plain citizen who isn't familiar with the
+methods of the timber sharks would do well to keep his money out of
+their hands if he doesn't wish to be held as _particeps criminis_ with
+them in the day of reckoning."
+
+"Say!" ejaculated the thin man, wriggling nervously in his chair. "If
+you were a Government agent yourself you could hardly put the case
+stronger for the conservation crowd!"
+
+Now, in ordinary circumstances, nothing was ever farther from Blount's
+normal attitude toward his fellow-men than a disposition to yield to the
+sudden joking impulse. But the hawk-faced man's perturbation was so
+real, or so faultlessly simulated, that he could not resist the
+temptation.
+
+"How do you know that I am not a Government agent?" he demanded, with a
+decent show of gravity.
+
+"Because you are not travelling on Government transportation," was the
+shrewd retort.
+
+At another time Blount might have wondered why a casual fellow-traveller
+should have taken the trouble to make the discovery. But at the moment
+he was intent only upon keeping the small misunderstanding alive.
+
+"I suppose you have seen my ticket, but you can't tell anything by
+that," he countered, laughing. "A good many civilian employees of the
+Government travel nowadays on regular tickets, like other people."
+
+"I know damned well they do," admitted the anxious one; and then, with a
+swift eye-shot which Blount missed: "Especially if they happen to be
+travelling on the quiet to catch some poor devil napping on the job."
+
+"You needn't be alarmed; you haven't told me anything that the
+department could make use of," returned Blount, carrying the jest the
+one necessary move farther along.
+
+It was precisely at this point, as Blount remembered afterward, that the
+timber-thieving subject was dropped. Later on, after the talk had
+drifted back to mining, and from mining to politics, the nervous
+gentleman pleaded weariness and declared his intention of going to his
+section to take a nap, and presently disappeared to carry it out.
+
+Blount was not sorry to be left alone. In response to a vague stirring
+of something within him--a thing which might have been the primitive
+underman yawning and stretching to its awakening--he had been trying in
+the window-facing intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of
+mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood. As yet there
+was little familiarity save in the broader outlines. Where he remembered
+only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now vast
+ranches planted to sod corn; and upon the hills the cattle ranges were
+no longer open. The towns, too, at which the train made its momentary
+stops, were changed. The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping
+period, with the shed-roofed railroad station, the whitewashed
+loading-corral, and the towering water-tank--all backgrounded by a thin
+line of saloons and dance-halls--had disappeared completely, and the
+window-watcher found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted,
+cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the West of his boyhood had been
+chiefly peopled.
+
+Farther along toward evening the great range, which had been visible for
+hours in the westward vista, began to define itself in peaks and high,
+bald shoulderings of wind-swept mesas. Here was something definite and
+tangible for the stirring underman to lay hold upon. Blount, the
+sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working
+itself out in quickened pulses and exhilarating nerve-tinglings. Boston,
+the Law School, the East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower
+rut of custom and convention, were fading into a past which already
+seemed age-old and half forgotten. He threw open the window at his elbow
+and drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast. It was sweet
+in his nostrils, and the keen crispness of it was as fine wine in his
+blood. After all, he had been but a sojourner in the other world, and
+this was his homeland.
+
+At the dining-car dinner, which was served while the higher peaks of the
+main range were as vast islands floating in a sea of crimson and gold,
+Blount missed the man of many troubles. The dining-car was well filled,
+and, though the faces of the diners were all unfamiliar, the hum of
+talk, the hurrying of the waiters, and the subdued clamor drowning
+itself in the under-drone of the drumming wheels answered well enough
+for companionship. There are times when even the voice of a friend is an
+intrusion, and the returning exile had happed upon one of them.
+Largeness, the inspiring breadth of the immensities, was what he craved
+most; and when he had cut the many-coursed dinner short, he hurried back
+to his Pullman window, hoping that he might have the smoking-compartment
+to himself again.
+
+The unspoken wish was granted. When he entered the smoking-room he
+found it empty; and, filling his cutty pipe, he drew the cushioned
+wicker chair out to face the open window. Fresh glimpses of the
+northward landscape shortly brought a renewal of the heart-stirrings;
+and when he finally had the longed-for sight of a bunch of grazing
+cattle, with the solitary night-herd hanging by one leg in the saddle to
+watch the passing of the train, the call of the homeland was trumpeting
+in his ears, and he would have given anything in reason to be able to
+changes places, temporarily at least, with the care-free horseman whose
+wiry, muscular figure was struck out so artistically against the
+dun-colored hillside.
+
+"Would I really do such a thing as that?" he asked himself half
+incredulously, when the night-herd and his grazing drove had become only
+a picturesque memory; and out of the heart-stirrings and
+pulse-quickenings came the answer: "I more than half believe that I
+would--that I'd jump at the chance." Then he added regretfully: "But
+there isn't going to be any chance."
+
+"Any chance to do what?" rumbled a mellow voice at his elbow, and Blount
+turned quickly to find that a big, bearded man, smoking an abnormally
+corpulent cigar, had come in to take his seat on the divan.
+
+At another time Blount, the conventional Blount, would have been
+self-conscious and embarrassed, as any human being is when he is caught
+talking to himself. But with the transformation had come a battering
+down of doors in the house of the broader fellowship, and he laughed
+good-naturedly.
+
+"You caught me fairly," he acknowledged. "I thought I still had the
+place to myself."
+
+"But the chance?" persisted the big man, looking him over appraisively.
+"You don't look like a man who has had to hang round on the aidges
+hankerin' after things he couldn't get."
+
+"I guess I haven't had to do that very often," was the reflective
+rejoinder. "But a mile or so back we passed a bunch of cattle, with the
+night man riding watch; I was just saying to myself that I'd like to
+change places with that night-herd--only there wasn't going to be any
+chance."
+
+The bearded man's laugh was a deep-chested rumbling suggestive of rocks
+rolling down a declivity.
+
+"Lordy gracious!" he chuckled. "If you was to get a leg over a bronc',
+and the bronc' should find it out--Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out
+on my place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears to have you try
+it; he shore would. You take my advice, and don't you go huntin' a job
+night-ridin' in the greasewood hills. Don't you do it!"
+
+"I assure you I hadn't thought of doing it for a permanency. But just
+for a bit of adventure, if the chance should offer while I'm in the
+notion. I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony for fourteen
+years, but I don't believe I've lost the knack of it."
+
+"Ho!" said the big man. "Then you ain't as much of a tenderfoot as you
+look to be. Shake!" and he held out a hand as huge as a bear's paw.
+Following the hand-grip he grew confidential. "'Long in the afternoon I
+stuck my head in at the door and saw you chewin' the rag with a
+thin-faced old nester that couldn't set still in his chair while he
+talked. Know him?"
+
+"Not at all," said Blount promptly. "He has the section opposite mine,
+and he got on at Omaha."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't want to know him if I was you," was the bearded man's
+comment. Then: "Tryin' to get you to invest in some o' his properties?"
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Well, he will, if he gets a chance. He'd go furder'n that; he'd nail
+you up to the cross and skin you alive if there was any money in it for
+him. His name's Simon Peter, and it ort to be Judas. I know him down to
+the ground!"
+
+"Simon Peter?" said Blount inquiringly.
+
+"Ya-as; Simon Peter Hathaway. And my name's Griggs; Griggs, of the
+Antelopes, back o' Carnadine--if anybody should ask you who give you
+your pointer on Simon Peter Judas. I don't blacklist no man in the dark,
+and I've said a heap more to that old ratter's face than I've ever said
+behind his back. Ump! him a-wrigglin' in that chair you're settin' in
+and tryin' to fix up some way to skin you! Don't tell me! I know blame'
+well what he was tryin' to do."
+
+Blount listened and was interested, not so much in the bit of gossip as
+in the big, red-faced ranchman, who so evidently had a grudge to pay
+off.
+
+"I am not likely to have any dealings with Mr. Hathaway," he rejoined.
+"And I must do him the bare justice of saying that he wasn't trying to
+sell me anything. The shoe was on the other foot. He seemed to be afraid
+he was in danger of losing out, and he was asking my advice."
+
+"S.P. Hathaway lose out? Not on your life, my young friend! You say he
+was askin' for advice? You've done stirred up my curiosity a whole heap,
+and I reckon you'll have to tell me who you are before it'll ca'm down
+again."
+
+Blount laughed. "Mr. Hathaway thinks I am a special agent for the
+Government, travelling on business for the Forest Service."
+
+"The hell he does!" exploded the big man. Then he reached over and laid
+a swollen finger on Blount's knee. "Say, boy, before you or him ever
+gets off this train--Sufferin' Moses! what was that?"
+
+The break came upon a thunderous crash transmitting itself from car to
+car, and the long, heavy train came to a juggling stop. The ranchman
+sprang to his feet with an alacrity surprising in so huge a body and
+ducked to look out of the open window.
+
+"Twin Buttes!" he gurgled. "And, say, it's a wreck! We've hit something
+right slap in the middle of the yard! Let's make a break for the scene
+of the confliggration till we see who's killed!"
+
+Blount followed the ranchman's lead, but shortly lost sight of the
+burly figure in the crowd of curious passengers pouring from the hastily
+opened vestibules. Seen at closer range, the accident appeared to be
+disastrous only in a material sense. The heavy "Pacific-type" locomotive
+had stumbled over the tongue of a split switch, leaving the rails and
+making a blockading barrier of itself across the tracks. Nobody was
+hurt; but there would be a delay of some hours before the track could be
+cleared.
+
+Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the derailed locomotive,
+Blount strolled on through the railroad yard to the station and the
+town. He remembered the place chiefly by its name. In his boyhood it had
+been the nearest railroad forwarding-point for the mines at Lewiston,
+thirty miles beyond the Lost Hills. Now, as it appeared, it had become a
+lumber-shipping station. To the left of the railroad there were numerous
+sawmills, each with its mountain of waste dominated by a black chimney,
+screen-capped. For the supply of logs an enormous flume led down from
+the slopes of the forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute
+out of which, though the working-day was ended, the great logs were
+still tumbling in an intermittent stream.
+
+North of the town the valley broke away into a region of bare mesas
+dotted with rounded, butte-like hills, with the buttressing ranges on
+either side to lift the eastern and western horizons. The northern
+prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately, and the tide of
+remembrance swept strongly in upon him. Some forty-odd miles away to the
+northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser range, lay the
+"short-grass" region in which he had spent the happy boyhood. An hour's
+gallop through the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting
+sun would be playing upon the little station of Painted Hat, the
+one-time shipping-point for the home ranch. And half-way between Painted
+Hat and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands of the
+mountains, were the horse-corrals of one Debbleby, a true hermit of the
+hills, and the boy Evan's earliest school-master in the great book of
+Nature.
+
+Blount's one meliorating softness during the years of exile had
+manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby. He knew that
+the old horse-breeder was still alive, and that he was still herding his
+brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin. The young man, fresh from the
+well-calculated East, threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool
+breeze sweeping down from the northern hills. He was not given to
+impulsive plan-changing. On the contrary, he was slow to resolve and
+proportionately tenacious of the determination once made. But the
+stirring of boyish memories accounted for something; and in the sanest
+brain there are sleeping cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive
+at the touch of suggestion. What if he should--
+
+He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out
+deliberately. Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared
+and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an
+immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring
+recollections? Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting
+on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin foot-hills,
+smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become
+of the boy whom he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride. Blount
+estimated the distance as he remembered it. With a hired horse he might
+reach Debbleby's by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old
+ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.
+
+Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from
+the capital might be expected decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman
+conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's office at the
+capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a
+livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse,
+borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break
+violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions.
+He would go and see Debbleby--drop in upon the old horse-breeder without
+warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland
+unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless
+awaiting him at the real journey's end.
+
+Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel
+in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the
+thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing
+on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from
+their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or
+cowboys. Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the
+Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail
+to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the
+bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with
+the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later,
+when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that
+all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if
+the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might
+also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of
+the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals
+to stop him. But this he missed.
+
+There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting
+out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the
+hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the
+saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with
+the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and
+free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying
+professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have
+curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single
+mile.
+
+For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from
+civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that
+the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar
+in daylight, lost their remembered featurings. During the first few
+miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern
+mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its
+lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon.
+Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moon-rise, the
+trail disappeared entirely; but so long as he was sure of the general
+direction, Blount held on and gave the tireless little bronco a loose
+rein. The Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills of the western
+range, with the broad gulch of the Pigskin cutting a plain highway
+through the mountains. If he could find one of the head-water streams of
+the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in the gulches of the mesa,
+there could be no danger of losing the way.
+
+It was some little time after he had left the shoulderings of the
+eastern range behind that a singular thing happened. Far away on his
+right he heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the moon was nearly
+full and the treeless landscape was bare of any kind of cover, he could
+not make out the horseman who was evidently passing him and going in the
+same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a
+_détour_ to avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and
+concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was
+confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing
+themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first,
+invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain, passed him at
+speed.
+
+After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it
+was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a
+water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was
+patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that
+the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure which
+might have discomforting consequences.
+
+For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches
+and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man
+from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and
+altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a
+breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the
+puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort
+was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE HIGHBINDERS
+
+
+When the three men who had pulled him from his horse and tied him hand
+and foot had withdrawn to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to
+wrangle morosely over what should be done with him, Evan Blount found it
+simply impossible to realize that they were actually discussing, as one
+of the expedients, the propriety of knocking him on the head and
+flinging his body into the near-by canyon.
+
+The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude grotesqueness of the
+thing that had happened. Five minutes earlier he had been riding
+peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he
+was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden
+sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the
+camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself
+confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a
+sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had
+been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed
+and the surprise had been complete; but the grotesquery remained.
+
+Since his captors had as yet made no attempt to rob him, he could only
+surmise that some incredibly foolish mistake had been made. But when he
+remembered the three invisible horsemen who had passed him on the broad
+mesa he was not so certain about the mistake. Most naturally, his
+thoughts went back to the little episode on the hotel porch. The passing
+glance he had given to the three men with whom the fourth man, Hathaway,
+had been talking did not enable him to identify them with the three who
+were sourly discussing his fate at the near-by fire; none the less, the
+conclusion was fairly obvious. Thus far he had been either too busy or
+too bewildered to break in; but when the more murderous of the
+expedients was apparently about to be adopted, he decided that it was
+high time to try to find out why he was to be effaced. Whereupon he
+called across to the group at the fire.
+
+"Without wishing to interfere with any arrangements you gentlemen are
+making, I shall be obliged if you will tell me why you think you have
+found it necessary to murder me."
+
+"You know mighty good and well why there's one too many of you on Lost
+River, jest at this stage o' the game," growled the hard-faced spokesman
+who had held the Winchester while his two accomplices were doing the
+unhorsing and the binding.
+
+"But I don't," insisted Blount good-naturedly. "So far as I know, there
+is only one of me--on Lost River or anywhere else."
+
+"That'll do for you; it ain't your put-in, nohow," was the gruff
+decision of the court; but Blount was too good a lawyer to be silenced
+thus easily.
+
+"Perhaps you might not especially regret killing the wrong man, but in
+the present case I am very sure I should," he went on. And then: "Are
+you quite sure you've got the right man?"
+
+"The boss knows who you are--that's enough for us."
+
+"The boss?" questioned Blount.
+
+"Yas, I said the boss; now hold your jaw!"
+
+Blount caught at the word. In a flash the talk with Gantry on the
+veranda of the Winnebasset Club flicked into his mind.
+
+"There is only one boss in this State," he countered coolly. "And I am
+very sure he hasn't given you orders to kill me."
+
+"What's that?" demanded the spokesman.
+
+Blount repeated his assertion, adding jocularly: "Perhaps you'd better
+call up headquarters and ask your boss if he wants you to kill the son
+of his boss."
+
+At this the gun-holder came around the fire to stand before his
+prisoner.
+
+"Say, pal--this ain't my night for kiddin', and it hadn't ort to be
+your'n," he remarked grimly. "The boss didn't say you was to be rubbed
+out--they never do. But I reckon it would save a heap o' trouble if you
+_was_ rubbed out."
+
+"On the contrary, I'm inclined to think it would make a heap of
+trouble--for you and your friends, and quite probably for the man or
+men who sent you to waylay me. But, apart from all that, you've got hold
+of the wrong man, as I told you a moment ago."
+
+"No, by grapples! I hain't. I saw you in daylight. If there's been any
+fumblin' done, I hain't done it. So you see it ain't any o' my funeral."
+
+"Think not?" said Blount.
+
+"I know it ain't. Orders is orders, and you don't git over into them
+woods on Upper Lost Creek with no papers to serve on nobody: see?"
+
+It was just here that the light of complete understanding dawned upon
+Blount; and with it came the disconcerting chill of a conviction
+overthrown. As a theorist he had always scoffed at the idea that a
+corporation, which is a creature of the law, could afford to be an open
+law-breaker. But here was a very striking refutation of the charitable
+assumption. His smoking-room companion of the Pullman car was doubtless
+one of the timber-pillagers who had been cutting on the public domain.
+To such a man an agent of the National Forest Service was an enemy to be
+hoodwinked, if possible, or, in the last resort, to be disposed of as
+expeditiously as might be, and Blount saw that he had only himself to
+blame for his present predicament, since he had allowed the man to
+believe that he was a Government emissary. Having this clew to the
+mystery, his course was a little easier to steer.
+
+"I have no papers of the kind you think I have, as you can readily
+determine by searching me," he said. "My name is Blount, and I am the
+son of ex-Senator David Blount, of this State. Now what are you going to
+do with me?"
+
+"What's that you say?" grated the outlaw.
+
+"You heard what I said. Go ahead and heave me into the canyon if you are
+willing to stand for it afterward."
+
+The hard-faced man turned without replying and went back to the other
+two at the fire. Blount caught only a word now and again of the
+low-toned, wrangling argument that followed. But from the overheard word
+or two he gathered that there were still some leanings toward the sound
+old maxim which declares that "dead men tell no tales." When the
+decision was finally reached, he was left to guess its purport. Without
+any explanation the thongs were taken from his wrists and ankles, and he
+was helped upon his horse. After his captors were mounted, the new
+status was defined by the spokesman in curt phrase.
+
+"You go along quiet with us, and you don't make no bad breaks, see? I
+more'n half believe you been lyin' to me, but I'm goin' to give you a
+chance to prove up. If you don't prove up, you pass out--that's all. Now
+git in line and hike out; and if you're countin' on makin' a break, jest
+ricollect that a chunk o' lead out of a Winchester kin travel a heap
+faster thern your cayuse."
+
+If Blount had not already lost all sense of familiarity with his
+surroundings, the devious mountain trail taken by his captors would soon
+have convinced him that the boyhood memories were no longer to be
+trusted. Up and down, the trail zigzagged and climbed, always
+penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountains. At times
+Blount lost even the sense of direction; lost it so completely that the
+high-riding moon seemed to be in the wrong quarter of the heavens.
+
+For the first few miles the trail was so difficult that speed was out of
+the question; but later, in crossing a high-lying valley, the horses
+were pushed. Beyond the valley there were more mountains, and half-way
+through this second range the trail plunged into a deep, cleft-like
+canyon with a brawling torrent for its pathfinder. Once more Blount lost
+the sense of direction, and when the canyon trail came out upon broad
+uplands and became a country road with bordering ranches watered by
+irrigation canals, into which the mountain torrent was diverted, there
+were no recognizable landmarks to tell him whither his captors were
+leading him.
+
+As he was able to determine by holding his watch, face up, to the
+moonlight, it was nearly midnight when the silent cavalcade of four
+turned aside from the main road into an avenue of spreading cottonwood
+trees. At its head the avenue became a circular driveway; and fronting
+the driveway a stately house, with a massive Georgian facade and
+colonnaded portico, flung its shadow across the white gravel of the
+carriage approach.
+
+There were lights in one wing of the house, and another appeared behind
+the fan-light in the entrance-hall when the leader of the three
+highbinders had tramped up the steps and touched the bell-push. Blount
+had a fleeting glimpse of a black head with a fringe of snowy wool when
+the door was opened, but he did not hear what was said. After the negro
+serving-man disappeared there was a little wait. At the end of the
+interval the door was opened wide, and Blount had a gruff order to
+dismount.
+
+What he saw when he stood on the door-mat beside his captor merely added
+mystery to mystery. Just within the luxuriously furnished hall, where
+the light of the softly shaded hall lantern served to heighten the
+artistic effect of her red house-gown, stood a woman--a lady, and
+evidently the mistress of the Georgian mansion. She was small and dark,
+with brown eyes that were almost childlike in their winsomeness; a woman
+who might be twenty, or thirty, or any age between. Beautiful she was
+not, Blount decided, comparing her instantly, as he did all women, with
+Patricia Anners; but--He was not given time to add the qualifying phrase
+or to prepare himself for what was coming.
+
+"What is it, Barto?" the little lady asked, turning to the man with the
+gun.
+
+The reply was direct and straight to the purpose.
+
+"Excuse _me_; but I jest wanted to ask if you know this here young
+feller. He's been allowin' to me th't he is--"
+
+"Of course," she said quickly, and stepping forward she gave her hand
+and a welcome to the dazed one. "Please come in; we have been expecting
+you." Then again to the man with the Winchester: "Thank you so much,
+Barto, for showing the gentleman the way to Wartrace Hall."
+
+It was all done so quietly that Blount was still unconsciously holding
+the hand of welcoming while his late captors were riding away down the
+cottonwood-shaded avenue. When he realized what he was doing he was as
+nearly embarrassed as a self-contained young lawyer could well be. But
+his impromptu hostess quickly set him at ease.
+
+"You needn't make any explanations," she hastened to say, smiling up at
+him and gently disengaging the hand which he was only now remembering
+that he had forgotten to relinquish. "Naturally, I inferred that you
+were in trouble, and that your safety depended in some sense upon my
+answer. Were you in trouble?"
+
+Blount perceived immediately how utterly impossible it would be to make
+her, or any one else, understand the boyish impulse which had prompted
+him to leave his train, or the curious difficulty into which the impulse
+had precipitated him. So his explanation scarcely explained.
+
+"I was on my way to a ranch--that is, to the capital--when these men
+held me up," he stammered. "They--they mistook me for some one else, I
+think, and for reasons best known to themselves they brought me here. If
+you could direct me to some place where I can get a night's lodging--"
+
+"There is nothing like a tavern within twenty miles of here," she broke
+in; "nor is there any house within that radius which would refuse you a
+night's shelter, Mr.--"
+
+Blount made a quick dive for his card-case, found it, and hastened to
+introduce himself by name. She took the bit of pasteboard, and, since
+she scarcely glanced at the engraved line on it, he found himself wholly
+unable to interpret her smile.
+
+"The card is hardly necessary," she said; and then, to his complete
+bewilderment: "You are very much like your father, Mr. Blount."
+
+"You know my father?" he exclaimed.
+
+She laughed softly. "Every one knows the senator," she returned, "and I
+can assure you that his son is heartily welcome under this roof. Uncle
+Barnabas"--to the ancient serving-man who was still hovering in the
+background--"have Mr. Blount's horse put up and the blue room made
+ready."
+
+Blount followed his still unnamed hostess obediently when she led the
+way to the lighted library in the wing of the great house.
+
+"Uncle Barnabas will come for you in a little while," she told him,
+playing the part of the gracious lady to the line and letter. "In the
+meantime you must let me make you a cup of tea. I am sure you must be
+needing it after having ridden so far. Take the easy-chair, and we can
+talk comfortably while the kettle is boiling. Are you new to the West,
+Mr. Blount, or is this only a return to your own? The senator is always
+talking about you, you know; but he is so inordinately proud of you that
+he forgets to tell us all the really interesting things that we want to
+know."
+
+The serving-man took his own time about coming back; so long a time that
+Blount forgot that it was past midnight, that he was a guest in a
+strange house, and that he still had not learned the name of his
+entertainer. For all this forgetfulness the little lady with the
+dark-brown eyes was directly responsible. Almost before he realized it,
+Blount found himself chatting with her as if he had always known her,
+making rapid strides on the way to confidence and finding her alertly
+responsive in whatever field the talk happened to fall. Apparently she
+knew the world--his world--better than he knew it himself: she had
+summered on the North Shore and wintered in Washington. She knew Paris,
+and when the conversation touched upon the Italian art-galleries he was
+led to wonder if he had gone through Italy with his eyes shut. At the
+next turn of the talk he was forced to admit that not even Patricia
+herself could speak more intelligently of the English social problem;
+and when it came to the vital questions of the American moment he gasped
+again and wondered if he were awake--if it could be possible that this
+out-of-place Georgian mansion and its charming mistress could be part
+and parcel of the West which had so far outgrown the boyhood memories.
+
+Since all things mundane must have an end, the old butler with the
+white-fringed head came at last to show him the way to his luxurious
+lodgings on the second floor of the mansion. With a touch of hospitality
+which carried Blount back to his one winter in the South, the hostess
+went with him as far as the stair-foot, and her "Good-night" was still
+ringing musically in his ears when the old negro lighted the candles in
+the guest-room, put another stick of wood on the small fire that was
+crackling and snapping cheerfully on the hearth, and bobbed and bowed
+his way to the door. Blount saw his last chance for better information
+vanishing for the night, and once more broke with the traditions.
+
+"Uncle Barnabas, before you go, suppose you tell me where I am," he
+suggested. "Whose house is this?"
+
+The old man stopped on the threshold, chuckling gleefully. "A-ain't you
+know dat, sah?--a-ain't de mistis done tell you dat? You's at Wa'trace
+Hall--Mahsteh Majah's new country-house; yes, sah; dat's whah you
+is--kee-hee!"
+
+"And who is 'Master Major'?" pressed Blount, whose bewilderment grew
+with every fresh attempt to dispel it.
+
+"A-ain't she tell you dat?--kee-hee! Ev'body knows Mahsteh Majah; yes,
+sah. If de mistis ain't tell you, ol' Barnabas ain't gwine to--no, sah.
+Ah'll bring yo'-all's coffee in de mawnin'; yes, sah--good-night,
+sah--kee-hee!" And the door closed silently upon the wrinkled old face
+and the bobbing head.
+
+Having nothing else to do, Blount went to bed, but sleep came
+reluctantly. Life is said to be full of paper walls thinly dividing the
+commonplace from the amazing; and he decided that he had surely burst
+through one of them when he had given place to the vagrant impulse
+prompting him to go horseback-riding when he should have gone
+comfortably to bed in his sleeper to wait for the track-clearing.
+
+Whither had a curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall,"
+and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked
+as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at
+her tongue's end--who had held him so nearly spellbound over the teacups
+that he had entirely lost sight of everything but his hospitable
+welcome?
+
+These and kindred speculations kept him awake for a long time after the
+door had closed behind the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off
+into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar purring of a
+motor-car aroused him. There was a window at his bed's head, and he
+reached over and drew the curtain. The view gave upon the avenue of
+cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach. A touring-car, with its
+powerful head-lights paling the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up
+at the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man, swathed from head to
+heel in a dust-coat, descending from the tonneau.
+
+"I suppose that will be 'Mahsteh Majah,'" he mused sleepily. "That's
+why the little lady was sitting up so late--she was waiting for him."
+Then to the thronging queries threatening to return and keep him awake:
+"Scat!--go away! call it a pipe-dream and let me go to sleep!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+AT WARTRACE HALL
+
+
+In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a
+home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.
+
+When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular
+adventures, the sun was shining brightly in at the bed's-head window, a
+cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his father, a little
+heavier, a little grayer, but with the same ruggedly strong face and
+kindly eyes, was standing at his bedside.
+
+"Father!"--and "Evan, boy!" were the simple words of greeting; but the
+mighty hand-grip which went with them was for the younger man a
+confirmation of the filial hope and a heart-warming promise for the
+future. Following instantly, there came a rush of mingled emotions: of
+astoundment that he had recognized no familiar landmark in the midnight
+faring through the hills or on the approach to the home of his
+childhood; of something akin to keen regret that the old had given place
+so thoroughly and completely to the new; of a feeling bordering on
+chagrin that he had been surprised into accepting the hospitable
+advances of a woman whom he had been intending to avoid, and for whom he
+had hitherto cherished--and meant to cherish--a settled aversion.
+
+But at the hand-gripping moment there was no time for a nice weighing of
+emotions. He was in his father's house; the home-coming, some phases of
+which he had vaguely dreaded, was a fact accomplished, and the new
+life--the life which must be lived without Patricia--was fairly begun.
+Also, there were many arrears to be brought up.
+
+"Intuition, on the manward side of it at least, doesn't go," he was
+saying with half-boyish candor. "I was awake last night when you drove
+home in the motor, and I looked out of the window and saw you as you
+came up the steps. According to the psychics, there ought to have been
+some inward stirrings of recognition, but there weren't--not a single
+thrill. Did the little--er--did Mrs. Blount tell you that I was here?"
+
+"She did so; but she couldn't tell me much more. Say, son, how on top of
+earth did you happen to blow in at midnight, with Jack Barto for your
+herd leader?"
+
+"It's a fairy tale, and you won't believe it--of a Blount," was the
+laughing reply. "I left Boston Monday, and should have reached the
+capital last night. But my train was laid out by a yard wreck at Twin
+Buttes just before dark, and I left it and took to the hills--horseback.
+Don't ask me why I did such a thing as that; I can only say that the
+smell of the sage-brush got into my blood and I simply had to do it."
+
+The old cattle-king was standing with his feet planted wide apart and
+his hands deep in his pockets. "You hired a horse!" he chuckled, with
+the humorous wrinkles coming and going at the corners of the kindly
+eyes. "Did you have the nerve to think you were going to climb down from
+a three-legged stool in a Boston law office one day and ride the fifty
+miles from Twin Buttes to the capital the next?"
+
+"Oh, no; I wasn't altogether daft. But knowing where I was, I did think
+I could ride out to Debbleby's. So I hired the bronco and set out--and
+that reminds me: the horse will have to be sent back to the liveryman in
+Twin Buttes, some way."
+
+"Never mind the cayuse. Shackford would have made you a present of it
+outright if you had told him who you were. Go on with your story. It
+listens like a novel."
+
+"I took the general direction all right on leaving Twin Buttes, and kept
+it until I got among the Lost River hogbacks. But after that I was
+pretty successfully lost. I'm ashamed to tell it, but about half of the
+time the moon didn't seem to be in the right place."
+
+"Lost, were you? And Jack Barto found you?" queried the father.
+
+"Barto hadn't lost me to any appreciable extent," was the half-humorous
+emendation. And then: "Who is this ubiquitous Barto who goes around
+playing the hold-up one minute and the good angel the next?"
+
+"He is a sort of general utility man for Hathaway, the head pusher of
+the Twin Buttes Lumber Company. He is supposed to be a timber-cruiser
+and log-sealer, but I reckon he doesn't work very hard at his trade.
+Down in the lower wards of New York they'd call him a boss heeler,
+maybe. But you say 'hold-up'; you don't mean to tell me that Jack Barto
+robbed you, son!"
+
+"Oh, no; he held me up with a gun while his helpers pulled me off the
+bronco and hog-tied me, and then fell to discussing with the other two
+the advisability of knocking me on the head and dropping me into Lost
+River Canyon--that's all. Of course, I knew they had stumbled upon the
+wrong man; and after a while I succeeded in making Barto accept that
+hypothesis; at least, he accepted it sufficiently to bring me here for
+identification. Since he wouldn't talk, and I didn't recognize the trail
+or the place, I hadn't the slightest notion of my whereabouts--not the
+least in the world; didn't know where he was taking me or where I had
+landed when we stopped here."
+
+The big man was leaning against the foot-rail of the bed and frowning
+thoughtfully. "Talked about dropping you into Lost River, did they? H'm.
+I reckon we'll have to look into that a little. Who set them on, son?
+Got any idea of that?"
+
+"I have a very clear idea: it was this man Hathaway you speak of--a big
+ranchman named Griggs told me his name. He came across in the Pullman
+with me from Omaha; middle-aged, tall, and slim, with a hatchet face and
+owlish eyes. Before I learned his name we had talked a bit--killing time
+in the smoking-room. He said he was interested in mines and timber.
+Along toward the last he got the notion into his head that I was a
+special agent of some kind, on a mission for the Bureau of Forestry, and
+I was foolish enough to let him escape with the impression uncorrected."
+
+"That was Pete Hathaway, all right," was the senator's comment. "His
+company has been cutting timber in the Lost River watershed reserves,
+and he probably thought you were aiming to get him. You say he sent
+Barto after you?"
+
+"I'm only guessing at that part of it. When I rode away from Twin Buttes
+he was standing on the porch of the tavern, talking to Barto and two
+others; and I'm pretty sure he pointed me out to them. An hour or so
+later, three horsemen passed me on the mesa, one after another. I
+couldn't see them, but I heard them. It might have been another hour or
+more past that when they potted me."
+
+"You gave them your name?"
+
+"Yes; and that seemed to tangle them a little. Barto said he believed I
+was lying, but, anyway, he'd give me a chance to 'prove up.' Then they
+brought me here, and your--er--Mrs. Blount kindly stepped into the
+breach for me."
+
+"You didn't know Honoria when you saw her?" queried the father.
+
+"No; I wasn't in the least expecting--that is, I--you may remember that
+I had never met her," stammered the young man, who had risen on his
+elbow among the pillows.
+
+The older man walked to the window and stood looking out upon the
+distant mountains for a full minute before he faced about to say: "We
+might as well run the boundary lines on this thing one time as another,
+son. You don't like Honoria; you've made up your mind you're not going
+to let yourself like her. I don't mean to make it hard for either of you
+if I can dodge it. This is her home; but it is also yours, my boy. Do
+you reckon you could--"
+
+Evan Blount made affectionate haste to stop the half-pathetic appeal.
+
+"Don't let that trouble you for a minute," he interposed. "I--Mrs.
+Blount is a very different person from the woman I have been picturing
+her to be; and if she were not, I should still try to believe that we
+are both sufficiently civilized not to quarrel." Then: "Have you
+breakfasted yet--you and Mrs. Blount? But of course you have, long ago."
+
+"Breakfasted?--without you? Not much, son! And that reminds me: I was to
+come up here and see if you were awake, and if you were, I was to send
+Barnabas up with your coffee."
+
+"You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven't acquired the coffee-in-bed
+habit yet," laughed the lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my
+apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be down _pronto_. There;
+doesn't that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush
+idiom? Great land! I haven't heard anybody say _pronto_ since I was
+knee-high to a hop-toad!"
+
+Farther on, when he was no longer in the first lilting flush of the new
+impressions, Evan Blount was able to look back upon that first day at
+Wartrace Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the nature of
+things, it could never be lived over again. In all his forecastings he
+had never pictured a homecoming remotely resembling the fact. In each
+succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the
+years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put
+him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a
+corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single
+small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him
+through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the
+old ranch buildings of the "Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his
+heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the
+picture.
+
+"I've kept it all just as it used to be, Evan," the father said gently.
+"I thought maybe you'd come back some day and be sure-enough
+disappointed if it were gone."
+
+The younger man slipped from his saddle and went to look in at the open
+door of the old ranch-house. Everything was precisely as he remembered
+it: the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed quirts over the
+high wooden mantel, his mother's rocking-chair ... that was the final
+touch; he sat down on the worn door-log and put his face in his hands.
+For now the gaping chasm of the years was quite closed and he was a boy
+again.
+
+Still later in this same first day there were ambling gallops along the
+country roads, and the father explained how the transformation from
+cattle-raising to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about; how the
+great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square
+miles of the fertile mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of
+the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the
+telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.
+
+The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land;
+it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find
+sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds
+me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor
+Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."
+
+"We're all fossils--we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed
+the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State."
+"But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the
+professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all
+he wants to."
+
+"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's
+half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it.
+"Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will
+permit him to be."
+
+The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.
+
+"What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.
+
+"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was
+little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any
+one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career--"
+
+"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges.
+Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie
+yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."
+
+Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and
+when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar"
+ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief
+love-tale, hiding nothing--not even the hope that in the years to come
+Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to
+admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better
+after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should
+tell some one; and who better?
+
+David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son
+had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to
+the aging years.
+
+"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling
+saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.
+
+"So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me
+realize that I couldn't hold my own against the 'career,'" was the young
+man's answer. Then he added: "I want work, father--that is what I am out
+here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I
+can put my heart into. Can you find it for me?"
+
+There was the wisdom of the centuries in the gentle smile provoked by
+this unashamed disappointed lover's appeal.
+
+"I wouldn't take it too hard--the career business--if I were you, son,"
+said the wise man. "And as for the work, I reckon we can satisfy you, if
+your appetite isn't too whaling big. How would a State office of some
+kind suit you?"
+
+"Politics?" queried Blount, bringing his horse down to the walk for
+which his father had set the example. "I've thought a good bit about
+that, though I haven't had any special training that way. The schools of
+to-day are turning out business lawyers--men who know the commercial and
+industrial codes and are trained particularly in their application to
+the great business undertakings. That has been my ambition: to be a
+business adviser, and, perhaps, after a while to climb to the top of the
+ladder and be somebody's corporation counsel."
+
+"But now you have changed your notion?"
+
+"I don't know; sometimes I wonder if I haven't. There is another field
+that is exceedingly attractive to me, and you have just named it. No man
+can study the politics of America to-day without seeing the crying need
+for good men: men who will not let the big income they could command in
+private undertakings weigh against pure patriotism and a plain duty to
+their country and their fellow-men; strong men who would administer the
+affairs of the State or the nation absolutely without fear or favor; men
+who will hew to the line under any and all conditions. There's an awful
+dearth of that kind of material in our Government."
+
+A quaint smile was playing under the drooping mustaches of that veteran
+politician the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.
+
+"I reckon we do need a few men like that, Evan; need 'em mighty bad.
+Think you could fill the bill as one of them if you had a right good
+chance?"
+
+The potential hewer of political chips which should lie as they might
+fall smiled at what seemed to be merely an expression of parental
+favoritism.
+
+"I'm not likely to get the chance very soon," he returned. "Just at
+present, you know, I am still a legal resident of the good old
+Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a member of its bar--eligible to
+office there, and nowhere else."
+
+"You'd be a citizen of this State by the time you could get elected to
+an office in it," suggested the senator gravely.
+
+"I know; the required term of residence here is ridiculously short. But
+you are forgetting that I am as completely unknown in the sage-brush
+hills as you are well known. I couldn't get a nomination for the office
+of pound-keeper."
+
+David Blount was chuckling softly as he threw up the brim of the big
+sombrero he was wearing.
+
+"Sounds right funny to hear you talking that way, son," he commented.
+"Mighty near everybody this side of the Bad Lands will tell you that the
+slate hangs up behind the door at Wartrace Hall; and I don't know but
+what some people would say that old Sage-Brush Dave himself does most of
+the writing on it. Anyhow, there is one place on it that is still
+needing a name, and I reckon your name would fit it as well as
+anybody's."
+
+The young man who was so lately out of the well-balanced East was
+astounded.
+
+"Heavens!" he ejaculated. "You're not considering me as a possibility on
+the State ticket before I've been twenty-four hours inside of the State
+lines, are you?"
+
+"No; not exactly as a possibility, son; that isn't quite the word. We'll
+call it a sure thing, if you want it. It's this way: we're needing a
+sort of political house-cleaning right bad this year. We have good
+enough laws, but they're winked at any day in the week when somebody
+comes along with a fistful of yellow-backs. The fight is on between the
+people of this State and the corporations; it was begun two years ago,
+and the people got the laws all right, but they forgot to elect men who
+would carry them out. This time it looks as if the voters had got their
+knives sharpened. We've been a little slow catching step maybe, but the
+marching orders have gone out. We're aiming to clean house, and do it
+right, this fall."
+
+"Not if the slate hangs behind your door--or any man's, father," was the
+theorist's sober reminder. "Reform doesn't come in by that road."
+
+"Hold on, boy; steady-go-easy's the word. Reform comes in by any old
+trail it can find, mostly, and thanks its lucky stars if it doesn't run
+up against any bridges washed out or any mud-holes too deep to ford.
+We've got a good man for governor right now; not any too broad maybe,
+but good--church good. Nobody has ever said he'd take a bribe; but he
+isn't heavy enough to sit on the lid and hold it down. Alec Gordon, the
+man who is going to succeed him next fall, is all the different kinds of
+things that the present governor isn't, so that is fixed."
+
+"How 'fixed'?" queried the younger man, who, though he was not from
+Missouri, was beginning to fear that he would constantly have to be
+shown.
+
+"In the same way that everything has to be fixed if we are going to get
+results," was the calm reply. "After the governor, the man upon whom the
+most depends is the attorney-general. The fellow who is in now,
+Dortscher, is one of the candidates, but we've crossed his name off. The
+next man we considered was Jim Rankin. In some ways he's fit; he's a
+hard fighter, and the man doesn't live who can bluff him. But Jim's
+poor, and he wants mighty bad to be rich, so I reckon that lets him
+out."
+
+All of this was directly subversive of Evan Blount's ideas touching the
+manner in which the political affairs of a free country should be
+conducted, but he was willing to hear more.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"What we want this time is one of your hew-to-the-line fellows, son.
+Reckon you'd like to try it?"
+
+The young man who was less than a week away from the atmosphere of the
+idealistic school and its theories was frankly aghast. That his father
+should be coolly proposing him for a high office in the State in which,
+notwithstanding the birthright, he was as new as the newest immigrant,
+seemed blankly incredible. But when the incredibility began to subside,
+the despotism of the machine methods which could propose and carry out
+such unheard-of things loomed maleficent.
+
+"I'm afraid we are a good many miles apart in this matter of politics,"
+he said, when the proposal had been given time to sink in. "America is
+supposed to be a free country, with a representative government elected
+by the suffrages of the people; do you mean to say that you and a few of
+your friends ignore the basic principles of democracy to such an extent
+that you nominate and elect anybody you please to any office in the
+State?"
+
+The far-seeing eyes of the veteran were twinkling again.
+
+"Oh, I don't know about our being so far apart," was the deprecatory
+protest. "You're just a little bit long on theory, that's all, son. When
+it comes down to the real thing--practical politics, as some folks call
+it--somebody has to head the stampede and turn it. And if we don't do it
+this coming fall, the other bunch will."
+
+"What other bunch?"
+
+"In this case it's the corporations: the timber people, the irrigation
+companies, and, most of all, the railroad."
+
+"Gantry seems to think that the railroads--or his railroad, at
+least--are persecuted."
+
+The senator pulled his horse down to a still slower walk. "Where did you
+see Dick Gantry?" he demanded.
+
+Evan told of the meeting on the veranda of the Winnebasset Club, adding
+the further fact of the college friendship.
+
+"Just happened so, did it?" queried the older man, "that getting
+together last Saturday night?"
+
+"Why--yes, I suppose so. Dick knew I was in Boston, and he said he had
+meant to look me up."
+
+"I reckon he did," was the quiet comment; "yes, I reckon he did. And he
+filled you up plumb full of Hardwick McVickar's notions, _of_ course. I
+reckon that's about what he was told to do. But we won't fall apart on
+that, son. To-morrow we'll run down to the city, and you can look the
+ground over for yourself. I want you to draw your own conclusions, and
+then come and tell me what you'd like to do. Shall we leave it that
+way?"
+
+Evan Blount acquiesced, quite without prejudice, to a firm conviction
+that his opinion, when formed, was going to be based on the larger
+merits of the case, upon a fair and judicial summing-up of the pros and
+cons--all of them. He felt that it would be a blow struck at the very
+root of the tree of good government if he should consent to be the
+candidate of the machine. But, on the other hand, he saw instantly what
+a power a fearless public prosecutor could be in a misguided
+commonwealth where the lack was not of good laws, but of men strong
+enough and courageous enough to administer them. He would see: if the
+good to be accomplished were great enough to over-balance the evil ...
+it was a temptation to compromise--a sharp temptation; and he found
+himself longing for Patricia, for her clear-sighted comment which, he
+felt sure, would go straight to the heart of the tangle.
+
+It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for her, that made him
+absent-minded at the Wartrace Hall dinner-table that evening; and the
+father, looking on, suspected that Evan's taciturnity was an expression
+of his prejudice against the woman who had taken his mother's place.
+After dinner, when the son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his
+room, the senator's suspicion became a belief.
+
+"You'll have to be right patient with the boy, little woman," he said to
+the small person whom Gantry had described as the court of last resort;
+this when Evan had disappeared and the long-stemmed pipe was alight. "I
+shouldn't wonder if Boston had put some mighty queer notions into his
+head."
+
+The little lady looked up from her embroidery frame and a quaint smile
+was twitching at the corners of the pretty mouth. "He is a dear boy, and
+he is trying awfully hard to hate me," she said. "But I sha'n't let him,
+David."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS
+
+
+From the time when it was heralded in the mammoth New Year's edition of
+_The Plainsman_ as "the newest, the finest, and the most luxurious
+hostelry west of the Missouri River," the Inter-Mountain Hotel, in the
+Sage-brush capital, had been the acceptable gathering-place of the
+clans, industrial, promoting, or political.
+
+Anticipating this patronage, Clarkson, its bonanza-king builder and
+owner, had amended the architect's plans to make them include a
+convention-hall, committee-rooms, and a complete floor of suites with
+private dining-rooms. Past this, the amended plans doubled the floor
+space of the lobby--debating-ground dear to the heart of the country
+delegate--and particular pains had been taken to make this semi-public
+forum, where the burning question of the moment could be caucussed and
+the shaky partisan resworn to fealty, attractive and home-like; the
+plainly tiled floor, leather-covered lounging-chairs, and numerous and
+convenient cuspidors lending an air of democratic comfort which was
+somehow missing in the resplendent, bemirrored, onyx-plated bar,
+blazing with its cut glass and polished mahogany.
+
+After the solid costliness of Wartrace Hall and the thirty-mile spin in
+a high-powered gentleman's roadster, which was only one of the three
+high-priced motor-carriages in the Wartrace garage, Evan Blount was not
+surprised to learn that his father was registered in permanence for one
+of the private dining-room suites at the Inter-Mountain. It was amply
+evident that the simple life which had been the rule of the "Circle-Bar"
+ranch household had become a thing of the past; and though he charged
+the new order of things to the ambition of his father's wife, he could
+hardly cavil at it, since he was himself a sharer in the comforts and
+luxuries.
+
+For the first few days after the father and son had gone into bachelor
+quarters at the Inter-Mountain, the returned exile was left almost
+wholly to his own devices. Beyond giving him a good many introductions,
+as the opportunities for them offered in the stirring life of the hotel,
+his father made few demands upon him, and they were together only at
+luncheon and dinner, the midday meal being usually served in their
+suite, while for the dinner they met by appointment in the hotel _café_.
+
+Notwithstanding this hospitable neglect on the part of his father, Evan
+Blount suffered no lack of the social opportunities. Gantry was back,
+and, in addition to a most ready availability as a social sponsor, the
+traffic manager was both able and willing. Almost before he had time to
+realize it, Blount had been put in touch with the busy, breezy life of
+the Western city, was exchanging nods or hand-shakings with more people
+than he had ever known in Cambridge or Boston, and was receiving more
+invitations than he could possibly accept.
+
+"Pretty good old town, isn't it?" laughed Gantry one day, when he had
+tolled Blount away from the Inter-Mountain luncheon to share a table
+with him in the Railway Club. "Getting so you feel a little more at home
+with us?"
+
+"If I'm not, it isn't your fault, Dick, or the fault of your friends.
+Naturally, I expected some sort of a welcome as ex-Senator David
+Blount's son; but that doesn't seem to cut any figure at all."
+
+Gantry's smile was inscrutable.
+
+"The people with whom it cuts the largest figure will never let you know
+anything about it. Just the same, your sonship is cutting a good bit of
+ice, if you care to know it. I've met a number of men in the past few
+days who have discovered that you are just about the brainiest thing
+that ever escaped from the effete East and the law schools."
+
+"Tommy-rot!" derided the brainy one.
+
+"It's a fact. And they are prophesying all sorts of a roseate and
+iridescent future for you. One might almost imagine that the prophets
+are inspired by that kind of gratitude which is a lively sense of favors
+to come."
+
+"Oh, piffle! You know that is all nonsense!"
+
+"Is it?" queried the railroad man, stressing the first word meaningly.
+Then, shifting the point of attack: "You're mighty innocent, aren't
+you, old man? But I think you might have told me. Goodness knows, I'm as
+safe as a brick wall."
+
+"Might have told you what?"
+
+"That you are going to run for attorney-general against Dortscher."
+
+"I couldn't very well tell you what I didn't know myself, Dick," was the
+sober reply. "Who has been romancing to you?"
+
+"It's all over town. Everybody's talking about it--talking a lot and
+guessing a good deal more. You've got 'em running around in circles and
+uttering loud and plaintive cries, especially Jim Rankin, who had--or
+thought he had--a lead-pipe cinch on the job. Dortscher is tickled half
+to death. He knew he wasn't going to be allowed to succeed himself, and
+he hates Rankin worse than poison."
+
+Blount was balancing the spoon on the edge of his coffee-cup and
+scowling abstractedly. It was the first little discord in the filial
+harmony--this evidence that the powers were at work; almost a breach of
+confidence. There was no avoiding the distasteful conclusion. Without
+consulting his wishes, without waiting for his decision, his father had
+publicly committed him--taken "snap judgment" upon him was the way he
+phrased it.
+
+"Dick, will you believe me if I say that I haven't authorized any such
+talk as this you've been hearing?" he asked, looking up quickly.
+
+This time Gantry's smile was a grin of complete intelligence.
+
+"Oh, that's the way of it, eh? The Honorable Senator took it out of
+your hands, did he? You'll understand that I'm not casting any
+aspersions when I say that it's exactly like him. If he has slated you,
+you are booked to run; and if he runs you, you'll be elected. Those are
+two of the things that practically speak right out and say themselves
+here in the old Sage-brush State."
+
+Blount was indignant--justly indignant, he persuaded himself.
+
+"If that is the case, Gantry, it is high time that some one should have
+nerve enough to break the charm. I haven't said that I would accept the
+nomination if it were tendered me, and I am not at all sure that I am
+going to say it. And if I don't say it, by all that's good and great,
+that settles it!"
+
+Gantry was plainly shocked. "You're not trying to make me believe that
+you've got nerve enough to buck the old m--your father, I mean? Why,
+great cats, Evan! you don't know what that stands for in the greasewood
+hills!"
+
+"And I don't care, Dick. Up to this present moment I am a free moral
+agent; I haven't surrendered any right of decision to my father, or to
+any one else, so far as I am aware."
+
+Gantry's eyes dropped to his plate, and his rejoinder was not wholly
+free from guile.
+
+"Will you authorize me to contradict the talk as I can?" he asked,
+without looking up.
+
+Blount was still warm enough to be peremptory.
+
+"Yes, you may contradict it. You may say that it is entirely
+unauthorized--that I have told you so myself." Then he remembered the
+claims of friendship. "I'll be frank with you, Dick; this thing has been
+mentioned to me once, but nothing was decided--absolutely nothing. I
+didn't even promise to take it under advisement."
+
+Among those who knew him only externally, Mr. Richard Gantry had the
+reputation of owning a loose tongue. But none recognized more justly
+than the real Richard Gantry the precise instant at which to bridle the
+loose tongue or when to make it wag away from the subject which has
+reached its nicely calculated climax. While the flush of irritation was
+still making him ashamed that he had shown so much warmth, Blount found
+himself gossiping with his table companion over a social function two
+days old; and subsequently, when the waiter brought the cigars, Gantry
+was congratulating himself that the danger-point, if any there were, was
+safely past.
+
+It was after the club luncheon, and while the two young men were on
+their way to the smoking-room, that some one on business bent stopped
+Gantry in the corridor. Blount strolled on by himself, and, finding the
+smoking-room unoccupied, went to lounge in a lazy-chair standing in a
+little alcove lined with bookcases and half screened by the racks of the
+newspaper files. Notwithstanding the successful topic changing at table,
+he was still brooding over the false position in which his father's
+plans had placed him; wherefore he craved solitude and a chance to think
+things over fairly and without heat.
+
+Shortly afterward Gantry looked in, and, apparently missing the
+half-concealed easy-chair and its occupant in the bookcase alcove, went
+his way. He had scarcely had time to get out of the building, one would
+say, before two men entered the smoking-room, coming down the corridor
+from the grill. Blount saw them, and he made sure that they saw him. But
+when they had taken chairs on the other side of the sheltering newspaper
+files he was suddenly assured that they had not seen him. They were
+talking quite freely of him and of his father.
+
+"Well, the Honorable Dave has got McVickar dead to rights this time,"
+remarked the older of the two, a hard-featured, round-bodied real-estate
+promoter to whom Blount had been introduced on his first day in the
+capital, but whose name he could not now recall. "This scheme of the
+senator's for shoving his son into the race for the attorney-generalship
+is just about the foxiest thing he has ever put across. You can bet the
+air was blue in the Transcontinental Chicago offices when the news got
+there."
+
+"What do you suppose McVickar will do?" asked the other.
+
+"He will do anything the senator wants him to--he's got to. Blount is
+land hungry, and I guess he'll take a few more sections of the railroad
+mesa-land under the Clearwater ditch. That was what he did two years ago
+when McVickar wanted the right of way for the branch through Carnadine
+County."
+
+"Don't you believe he's going to take any little Christmas gift this
+time!" was the rasping reply. "He'll sell the railroad something, and
+take good hard money for it. It's a cinch. The railroad can't afford to
+have the courts against it, and McVickar will be made to sweat blood
+this heat. You watch the wheels go round when McVickar comes out here."
+
+Evan Blount found himself growing strangely sick and faint. Could it be
+his father whom they were thus calmly accusing of graft and trickery and
+blackmailing methods too despicable to be imagined? His first impulse
+was to confront the two; to demand proofs; to do and say what a loyal
+son should. But the crushing conviction that they were discussing only
+well-known and well-assured facts unnerved him; and after that he was
+anxious for only one thing--that they might finish their cigars and go
+away without discovering him.
+
+Fate was kind to him thus far. After a little further talk, in which the
+accepted point of view of the on looker at the great game was made still
+more painfully evident for the unwilling listener, the men went away.
+For a long time after they had gone, Blount sat crumpled in the depths
+of the big chair, chewing his extinct cigar and staring absently at the
+row of books on a level with his eyes in the opposite case.
+
+One clear thought, and one only, came out of the sorrowful confusion:
+not for any inducement that could now be offered would he lend himself
+to the furtherance of his father's plans. Beyond this he did not reason
+in the miserable hour wrought out in the quiet of the club smoking-room.
+But when he got up to go, another prompting was forcing its way to the
+surface--a prompting to throw himself boldly into the scale against
+graft and chicanery; to redeem at any cost, and by whatsoever means
+might offer, the good old name which had been so shamefully dragged in
+the mire.
+
+He did not know just how it was to be done, but he told himself that he
+would find a way. That the path would be full of thorns he could not
+doubt, since every step in it would widen the breach which must be
+opened between his father and himself. Possibly it might lead him to the
+bar of justice as that father's accuser, but even in that hard case he
+must not falter. He said to himself, in a fresh access of passionate
+determination, that though he might have to blush for his father,
+Patricia should not be made ashamed for her lover.
+
+Upon leaving the club, he paused long enough to remember that he was in
+no fit frame of mind to risk an immediate meeting with his father. To
+make even a chance meeting impossible, he crossed the street, and,
+passing through the Capitol grounds, strolled aimlessly out one of the
+residence avenues until he came to the open country beyond the suburbs.
+
+It was quite late in the afternoon when he re-entered the city by
+another street and boarded a trolley car for the down-town centre. The
+long afternoon tramp, and the conclusions it had bred, made it
+imperative for him to see Gantry before the traffic manager should
+leave his office for the day. His business with the railroad man was
+purely personal. He meant to ask Gantry a few pointed questions
+requiring such answers as friendship may demand. If Gantry's replies
+were such as he feared they would be, he would seek his father and come
+at once to a plain understanding with him.
+
+The trolley car dropped him within a square of the railway station, on
+the second floor of which Gantry had his business office. The shortest
+way to the Sierra Avenue end of the station building was through the
+great train-shed. Half-way up the platform Blount met the west-bound
+Overland steaming in from the eastern yards. At the Sierra Avenue
+crossing the yard crew was cutting off a private car. Blount saw the
+number on the medallion, "008," and noted half absently the rich
+window-hangings and the polished brass platform railings. A car
+inspector in greasy overalls and jumper was tapping the wheels with his
+long-handled hammer.
+
+"Whose car is this?" asked Blount.
+
+"'Tis Misther McVickar's, sorr--the vice-prisidint av the coompany,"
+said the man.
+
+Blount turned away, saying something which the hammer-man mistook for a
+word of thanks. So the vice-president had come, hastening upon the wing
+of occasions, it seemed. And in the light of the overheard conversation
+in the club smoking-room, it was only too easy to guess his errand in
+the Sage-brush capital. He had come to make such terms as he could with
+the man who was going to hold him up.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A BATTLE ROYAL
+
+
+Having already convinced himself that the time was ripe for a
+straightforward declaration of principles, Evan Blount saw in the
+arrival of the Overland, with the vice-president's private car attached,
+only an added argument for haste.
+
+During the better part of the long tramp in the outskirts of the city he
+had been halting between two opinions. The fighting blood of the
+Tennessee pioneer strain had clamored for its hearing, prompting him to
+enter the lists, to set up the standard of honesty and fair-dealing in
+the Blount name, to plunge into the approaching political campaign with
+a single purpose--the purpose of overthrowing the power of the machine
+in his native State. On the other hand, filial affection had pleaded
+eloquently. The battle for political honesty would inevitably involve
+his father; would, if successful, defeat and disgrace him. As often as
+he thought he had closed decisively with the idealistic determination,
+the other side of the argument sprang up again, keen-edged and biting.
+Up to the present moment he had owed his father everything--was still
+owing him day by day. Would it not be the part of a son to drop out
+quietly, leaving the political house-cleaning for some one who would not
+be obliged to pay such a costly price?
+
+It was the idealistic decision which had been in the saddle when he
+dropped from the trolley car at the western portal of the railway
+station, and which was sending him to seek the scale-turning interview
+with Gantry. But, after all, it was chance and the swift current of
+events which seized upon him and swept him along, smashing all the
+arguments and fine-spun theories. Before he had gone ten steps in the
+direction of Gantry's office, some one in the throng of debarking
+Overland travellers called his name. Turning quickly, he found himself
+face to face with a white-haired little gentleman who had plucked
+impatiently at his sleeve.
+
+"Why, bless my soul! Of all the lucky miracles!" gasped the young man
+who, but an instant earlier, had been deaf and blind to all external
+things. And then: "Where is Patricia?"
+
+"She's here, somewhere," snapped the little gentleman irascibly. "I've
+lost her in this confounded mob. Find her for me. I've got my
+reading-glasses on, and I can't see anything. Why don't they have this
+barn of a place lighted up?"
+
+"Stand still right where you are," Blount directed, and a moment later
+he had found Patricia guarding a pair of suit-cases which were too heavy
+for her to carry.
+
+"You poor lost child!" was his burbled greeting.
+
+"You don't mean to tell me that _this_ is the West to which you said
+you were coming?"
+
+"I'm not lost; I'm here. It's father who is lost," she laughed. Then she
+answered his question; "Yes, this is the West I meant, and if you
+haven't been telling the truth about it--"
+
+Blount had snatched up the two hand-bags and had effected a reunion of
+the scattered pair. The little gentleman, standing immovable, as he had
+been told to do, was blinking impatiently through his reading-glasses at
+the surging throng. When Blount came up, the professor stabbed him with
+a sharp forefinger.
+
+"Well, we're here, young man," he barked. "If you've been telling me
+fibs about those Megalosauridæ which you said could be dug out of your
+sage-brush hills, you'll pay our fare back home again--just make up your
+mind to that. Now show us the best hotel in this mushroom city of yours,
+and do it quickly."
+
+Having a hospitable thing to do, Blount shoved his problem into a still
+more remote background and bestirred himself generously. Though the
+Inter-Mountain was only three squares distant, he chartered the
+best-looking auto he could find in the rank of waiting vehicles, put his
+charges into it, and went with them to do the honors at the hotel. By
+this postponement of the visit to Gantry he missed a meeting which would
+have done something toward solving a part of his problem. But for the
+hospitable turning aside he might have reached the railroad office in
+time to see a round-bodied man halting at the open door of Gantry's
+private room for a parting word with the traffic manager.
+
+"Oh, yes; he fell for it, all right," was the form the parting word
+took. "If you had seen his face when Lackner and I came away, you'd have
+said there was battle, murder, and sudden death in it for somebody."
+
+"But, see here, Bradbury," Gantry held his visitor to say, "it wasn't in
+the game that you were to fill him up with a lot of lies. I won't stand
+for that, you know. He is too good a fellow, and too good a friend of
+mine."
+
+It was at this conjuncture that Blount, if he had been present and
+invisible, would have seen a sour smile wrinkling upon the face of the
+club gossip.
+
+"I owe the senator one or two on my own account, Gantry. But it wasn't
+necessary to go out of the beaten path. If young Blount or his daddy
+would like to sue us for libel, we could prove every word that was
+said--or prove that it was common report; too common to be doubted. And
+it got the young fellow; got him right in the solar plexus. If you don't
+see some fireworks within the next few days, I miss my guess and lose my
+ante."
+
+This is what Evan Blount, carrying out his intention of going to Gantry,
+might have seen and heard. On the other hand, if he had lingered a few
+minutes longer on the station platform he could scarcely have failed to
+mark the side-tracking of private car "008," and he might have seen the
+herculean figure of the vice-president crossing to the carriage-stand
+to climb heavily into a waiting automobile.
+
+Mr. McVickar's order to the chauffeur was curtly brief, and a little
+later the vice-president entered the lobby of the Inter-Mountain and
+shot a brisk question at the room-clerk.
+
+"Is Senator Blount in his rooms?"
+
+"I think not. He was here a few minutes ago. I'll send a boy to hunt him
+up for you. You want your usual suite, I suppose, Mr. McVickar?"
+
+"No; I'm not stopping overnight. Is young Blount here in the hotel?"
+
+"He has just gone up to the fifth floor with some friends of his--Mr.
+Anners and his daughter, from Boston. Shall I hold him for you when he
+comes down?"
+
+"No; I want to see the senator. Hustle out another boy or two. I can't
+wait all night."
+
+It was at this moment that Evan Blount, bearing luggage-checks and going
+in search of the house baggageman, missed another incident which might
+have drawn him back suddenly to his problem and its unsettled condition.
+The incident was the meeting between his father and the railroad
+vice-president at the room-clerk's counter. It was neither hostile nor
+friendly; on McVickar's part it was gruffly business-like.
+
+"Well, Senator, I'm here," was the follow-up of the perfunctory
+hand-shake. "Let's find a place where we can flail it out," and together
+the two entered an elevator.
+
+Reaching the floor of the private dining-room suites, the
+ex-cattle-king led the way in silence to his own apartments; rather let
+us say he pointed the way, since in the march down the long corridor the
+two field commanders tramped evenly abreast as if neither would give the
+other the advantage of an inch of precedence. In the sitting-room of the
+private suite the senator snapped the latch on the door, and pressed the
+wall-button for the electric lights. McVickar dragged a chair over to
+one of the windows commanding a view of the busy street, and dropping
+solidly into it, like a man bracing himself for a fight, began abruptly:
+
+"I suppose we may as well cut out the preliminaries and come to the
+point at once, Blount. Ackerton wired me that you had definitely
+announced your son as a candidate for the attorney-generalship. Have
+you?"
+
+The senator had found an unopened box of cigars in a cabinet and he was
+inserting the blade of his pocket-knife under the lid when he said, with
+good-natured irony: "The primaries do the nominating in this State,
+Hardwick. Didn't you know that?"
+
+"See here, Blount; I've come half-way across the continent to thresh
+this thing out with you, face to face, and I'm not in the humor to spar
+for an opening. Do you mean to run your son or not? That is a plain
+question, and I'd like to have an equally plain answer."
+
+"I told you two weeks ago what you might expect if you insisted on
+sticking your crow-bar in among the wheels this fall, McVickar, but you
+wouldn't believe me. I'll say it again if you want to hear it."
+
+"And I told you two weeks ago that we couldn't stand for any such
+programme as the one you had mapped out. And I added that you might name
+your own price for an alternative which wouldn't confiscate us and drive
+us off the face of the earth."
+
+"Yes; and I named the price, if you happen to remember."
+
+"I know; you said you wanted us to turn everything over to the
+Paramounters and take our chances on a clean administration. Naturally,
+we're not going to do any such Utopian thing as that. What I want to
+know now is what it is going to cost us to do the practical and possible
+thing."
+
+"Want to buy me outright this time, do you, Hardwick?" said the boss,
+still smiling.
+
+"We"--McVickar was going to say--"We have bought you before," but he
+changed the retort to a less offensive phrasing--"We have had no
+difficulty heretofore in arriving at some practical and sensible _modus
+vivendi_, and we shouldn't have now. But as a condition binding upon any
+sort of an arrangement, I am here to say that we can't let you nominate
+and elect your son as attorney-general; that's out of the question. If
+it's going to prove a personal disappointment to you, we'll be
+reasonable and try to make it up to you in some other way."
+
+Again the grimly humorous smile was twinkling in the gray eyes of the
+old cattleman. "What is the market quotation on disappointments, right
+now, Hardwick?" he inquired.
+
+With another man McVickar might have been too diplomatic to show signs
+of a shortening temper. But David Blount was an open-eyed enemy of long
+standing.
+
+"I don't know anybody west of the Missouri River who has a better idea
+of market values than you have," the vice-president countered smartly.
+Then, dropping a heavy hand upon the arm of his chair: "This thing has
+got to be settled here and now, Blount. If you put your son in as public
+prosecutor, you can have but one object in view--you mean to squeeze us
+till the blood runs. We are willing to discount that object before the
+fact!"
+
+"So you have said before, a number of times and in a whole heap of
+different ways. It's getting sort of monotonous, don't you think?"
+
+"I sha'n't say it many more times, David; you are pushing me too far and
+too hard."
+
+"All right; what will you say, then?"
+
+"Just this: if you won't meet me half-way--if you insist upon a
+fight--I'll fight you with any weapons I can get hold of!"
+
+Once more the quiet smile played about the outer angles of the
+hereditary Blount eyes.
+
+"You've said that in other campaigns, Hardwick; in the end you've always
+been like the 'possum that offered to come down out of the tree if the
+man wouldn't shoot."
+
+"I'll hand you another proverb to go with that one," snapped the man in
+the arm-chair: "The pitcher that goes once too often to the well is sure
+to be broken. You've got a joint in your armor now, Blount. You've
+always been able to snap your fingers at public opinion before this; can
+you afford to do it now?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; I reckon I'll have to grin and bear it if you want to
+buy up a few newspapers and set them to blacklisting me, as you usually
+do," was the half-quizzical reply. Then: "I'm pretty well used to it by
+this time. You and your folks can't paint me much blacker than you have
+always painted me, Hardwick."
+
+"Maybe not. But this time we're going to give you a chance to start a
+few libel suits--if you think you can afford to appear in the courts.
+We've got plenty of evidence, and by heavens we'll produce it! You put
+your son in as public prosecutor and we might be tempted to make your
+own State too hot to hold you. Had you thought of that?"
+
+"Go ahead and try it," was the laconic response.
+
+"But that isn't all," the railroad dictator went on remorselessly. "Your
+fellow citizens here know you for exactly what you are, Blount. You rule
+them with a rod of iron, but that rule can be broken. When it is broken,
+you'll be hounded as a criminal. In our last talk together you had
+something to say to me about our not keeping up with the change in
+public sentiment; public sentiment _has_ changed; changed so far that it
+is coming to demand the punishment of the great offenders as well as the
+jailing of the little ones. If we want to push this fight hard enough,
+it is not impossible that you might find yourself in a hard row of
+stumps at the end of it, David."
+
+"I'm taking all those chances," was the even-toned rejoinder of the man
+who was to be shown up.
+
+"But there is one chance I'm sure you haven't considered," McVickar went
+on aggressively. "This son of yours; I know as much about him as you
+do--more, perhaps, for I have taken more pains to keep tab on him for
+the past few years than you have. He is clean and straight, Blount; a
+son for any father to be proud of. If that is the real reason why we
+don't want to have him instructing the grand juries of this State, it is
+also your best reason for wanting to keep the past decently under cover.
+What will you say to him when the newspapers open up on you? And what
+will he say to you? And suppose you get him in, and we should show you
+up so that you'd be dragged into court with your own son for the
+prosecutor? How does that strike you?"
+
+For the first time since the opening of the one-sided conference the
+senator laid his cigar aside and sat thoughtfully tugging at the
+drooping mustaches.
+
+"You'd set the house afire over my head, would you, Hardwick?" he
+queried, with the gray eyes lighting up as with a glow of smouldering
+embers. "The last time we talked you'll remember that you posted your
+'de-fi'; now I'll post mine. You go ahead and do your damnedest! The boy
+and I will try to see to it that you don't have all the fun. I won't
+say that you mightn't turn him if you went at it right; but you won't go
+at it right, and as matters stand now--well, blood is thicker than
+water, Hardwick, and if you hit me you hit him. I reckon, between us,
+we'll make out to give you as good as you send. That's all"--he rose to
+lean heavily upon the table--"all but one thing: you fight fair,
+Hardwick; say anything you like about me and I'll stand for it; but if
+that boy has anything in his past that I don't know about--any little
+fool trick that he wouldn't want to see published--you let it alone and
+keep your damned newspaper hounds off of it!"
+
+The vice-president, being of those who regain equanimity in exact
+proportion as an opponent loses it, chuckled grimly; was still chuckling
+when an interrupting tap came at the locked door. Blount got up and
+turned the latch to admit an office-boy wearing the uniform of the
+railroad headquarters. "Note for Mr. McVickar," said the messenger; and
+at a gesture from the senator he crossed the room to deliver it.
+
+For a full half-minute after the boy had gone, the vice-president sat
+poring over the pencilled scrawl, which was all that the sealed envelope
+yielded. The note was lacking both date-line and signature, though the
+clerks in Richard Gantry's office were familiar enough with the
+hieroglyph that appeared at the bottom of the sheet. In his own good
+time the vice-president folded the bit of paper and thrust it into his
+pocket. Then he resumed the talk at the precise point at which it had
+been broken off.
+
+"You needn't let the boy's record trouble you," he averred. "As I said a
+few minutes ago, it's as clean as a hound's tooth. That is one of the
+things I'm banking on, David. If you don't look out, I'm going to have
+that young fellow fighting on our side before we're through."
+
+At this the light in the gray eyes flamed fiercely, and the
+ex-cattle-king took the two strides needful to place him before
+McVickar.
+
+"Don't you try that, McVickar; I give you fair warning!" he grated, his
+deep-toned voice rumbling like the burr of grinding wheels. "There's
+only one way you could do it, and--"
+
+The vice-president stood up and reached for his hat.
+
+"And you'll take precious good care that I don't get a chance to try
+that way, you were going to say. All right, David; you tell me to do my
+damnedest, and I'll hand _that_ back to you, too. You do the same, and
+we'll see who comes out ahead."
+
+The vice-president caught an elevator at the end of his leisurely
+progress down the corridor, and had himself lowered to the lobby. The
+electric lights were glowing, and the great gathering-place was
+beginning to take on its evening stir. Mr. Hardwick McVickar pushed his
+way to the desk, and a row of lately arrived guests waited while he
+asked his question.
+
+"Where shall I be most likely to find Mr. Evan Blount at this time of
+day?" he demanded; and the obliging clerk made the guest-line wait still
+longer while he summoned a bell-boy and sent him scurrying over to one
+of the writing-tables.
+
+"This is Mr. Evan Blount," said the clerk, indicating the young man who
+came up with the returning bell-boy. "Mr. Blount, this is Mr. Hardwick
+McVickar, first vice-president of the Transcontinental Railway Company."
+
+There was no trace of the recent battle in Mr. McVickar's voice or
+manner when he shook hands cordially with the son of the man who had so
+lately defied him.
+
+"Your father and I were just now holding a little conference over your
+future prospects, Mr. Blount," he said, going straight to his point.
+"Suppose you come down to the car with me for a private talk on legal
+matters. I'm inclined to think that we shall wish to retain you in a
+cause which is coming up in September. Gantry tells me that you are
+pretty well up in corporation law. Can you spare me a half-hour or so?"
+
+Evan Blount glanced at the big clock over the clerk's head. Patricia had
+told him that she and her father would dine in the _café_ at seven, and
+that there would be a place at their table for him--and another for his
+father, if the ex-senator would so far honor a poor college professor.
+There was an hour to spare; and if the vice-president of the
+Transcontinental was not the king, he was at least a great man, and one
+whose invitation was in some sense a royal command.
+
+"Certainly, I'll be glad to go with you," was Blount's acquiescent
+rejoinder. So much the registry-clerk heard; and he saw, between jabs
+with his pen, the straight path to the revolving doors of the portal
+ploughed by the big man with young Blount at his elbow.
+
+One minute after the spinning doors had engulfed the pair the
+registry-clerk was called on the house telephone. A sad-faced tourist
+who was waiting patiently for his room assignment heard only the answer
+to the question which came over the wire from one of the upper floors:
+"No, Senator, Mr. Evan is not here; he has just this moment gone
+out--with Mr. McVickar. Could I overtake him? I'll try; but I don't know
+where they were going. Yes; all right. I'll send a boy right away."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT
+
+
+When the news went forth to the dwellers in the sage-brush hills that
+Boss David's son had been appointed to fill an important office as a
+member of the railroad company's legal staff, the first wave of
+astoundment was swiftly followed by many speculations as to what young
+Blount's _début_ as a railroad placeman really meant.
+
+_The Plainsman_, the capital city's principal daily, and the outspoken
+organ of the people's party, was quick to discover an ulterior motive in
+Evan Blount's appointment and its acceptance. Blenkinsop, the
+leader-writer on _The Plainsman_, took a half-column in which to point
+out in emphatic and vigorous Western phrase the dangers that threatened
+the commonwealth in this very evident coalition of the railroad octopus
+and the machine.
+
+The _Lost River Miner_, on the contrary, was unwilling to believe that
+the younger Blount was acting in the interest of machine politics in
+taking an employee's place on the railroad pay-roll. In this editor's
+comment there were veiled hints of a disagreement between father and
+son; of differences of opinion which might, later on, lead to a pitched
+battle. The _Capital Daily_, however--the stock in which was said to be
+owned or controlled by local railroad officials--took a different
+ground, covertly insinuating that nothing for nothing was the accepted
+rule in politics; that if the railroad company had made a place for the
+son, it was only a justifiable deduction that the father was not as
+fiercely inimical to the railroad interests as the opposition press was
+willing to have a too credulous public believe.
+
+Elsewhere in the State press comment was divided, as the moulders of
+public opinion happened to read party loss or gain in the appointment of
+the new legal department head. Some were fair enough to say that young
+Blount had merely shown good sense in taking the first job that was
+offered him, following the commendation with the very obvious conclusion
+that the railroad company's pay check would buy just as much bread in
+the open market as anybody's else. On the whole, the senator's son was
+given the benefit of the doubt and a chance to prove up.
+
+Of the interview between the father and the son, in which Evan announced
+his intention of accepting a place under McVickar, nothing was said in
+the newspapers, for the very good reason that no reporter was present.
+If the young man who had so summarily taken his future into his own
+hands was anticipating a storm of disapproval and opposition, he was
+disappointed. He had seen Mr. McVickar's private car coupled to the
+east-bound Fast Mail, and had dined with Patricia and her father, the
+fourth seat at the table of reunion being vacant because the senator was
+dining elsewhere. Later in the evening he faced the music in the
+sitting-room of the private suite, waylaying his father on the Honorable
+David's return to the hotel.
+
+Planning it out beforehand, Blount had meant to give the ethical reasons
+which had constrained him to put a conclusive end to the
+attorney-generalship scheme. But when the crux came, the carefully
+planned argument side-stepped and he was reduced to the necessity of
+declaring his purpose baldly. The railroad people had offered him a
+place, and he had accepted it.
+
+"So McVickar talked you over to his side, did he?" was the boss's gentle
+comment. "It's all right, son; you're a man grown, and I reckon you know
+best what you want to do. If it puts us on opposite sides of the
+political creek, we won't let that roil the water any more than it has
+to, will we?"
+
+To such a mild-mannered surrender, or apparent surrender, the stirring
+filial emotions could do no less than to respond heartily.
+
+"We mustn't let it," was the quick reply; but after this the younger man
+added: "I feel that I ought to make some explanations--they're due to
+you. I've been knocking about here in the city with my eyes and ears
+open, and I must confess that the political field has been made to
+appear decidedly unattractive to me. From all I can learn, the political
+situation in the State is handled as a purely business proposition; it
+is a matter of bargain and sale. I couldn't go into anything like that
+and keep my self-respect."
+
+"No, of course you couldn't, son. So you just took a job where you could
+earn good, clean money in your profession. I don't blame you a
+particle."
+
+Blount was vaguely perturbed, and he showed it by absently laying aside
+the cigar which he had lately lighted and taking a fresh one from the
+open box on the table. He could not help the feeling that he ought to be
+reading between the lines in the paternal surrender.
+
+"You think there will be more or less political work in my job with the
+railroad?" he suggested, determined to get at the submerged facts, if
+there were any.
+
+"Oh, I don't know; you say McVickar has hired you to do a lawyer's work,
+and I reckon that is what he will expect you to do, isn't it?"
+
+Blount laid the second cigar aside and crossed the room to readjust a
+half-opened ventilating transom. Mr. McVickar had not defined the duties
+of the new counselship very clearly, but there had been a strong
+inference running through the private-car conference to the effect that
+the headship of the local legal department would carry with it some
+political responsibilities. At the moment the newly appointed placeman
+had been rather glad that such was the case. The vice-president had
+convinced him of the justice of the railroad company's
+contention--namely, that the present laws of the State, if rigidly
+administered, amounted to a practical confiscation of the company's
+property. While Mr. McVickar was talking, Blount had hoped that the new
+office which the vice-president was apparently creating for him would
+give him a free hand to place the company's point of view fairly before
+the people of the State, and to do this he knew he would have to enter
+the campaign in some sort as a political worker. Surely, his father must
+know this; and he went boldly upon the assumption that his father did
+know it.
+
+"As I have said, I am to be chief of the legal department on this
+division, and as such it will be necessary for me to defend my client
+both in court and out of court," he said finally. "Since I am fairly
+committed, I shall try to stay on the job."
+
+"Of course you will. You've got to be honest with yourself--and with
+McVickar. I don't mind telling you, son, that I'm flat-footed on the
+other side this time, and I had hoped you were going to be. But if
+you're not, why, that's the end of it. We won't quarrel about it."
+
+Now this was not at all the paternal attitude as the young man had been
+prefiguring it. He had looked for opposition; finding it, he would have
+found it possible to say some of the things which were crying to be said
+and which still remained unsaid. But there was absolutely no loophole
+through which he could force the attack. If his late decision had been
+of no more importance than the breaking of a dinner engagement, his
+father could scarcely have dismissed it with less apparent concern.
+Balked and practically talked to a standstill in the business matter,
+Blount switched to other things.
+
+"I missed you to-night at dinner," he said, beginning on the new tack.
+"Two of my Cambridge friends are here, and I wanted you to meet them."
+
+The Honorable David looked up quickly.
+
+"The fossil-digging professor and his daughter?" he queried shrewdly.
+
+"Yes; how did you know? They came in on the Overland, and I find that
+the professor has made the long journey on the strength of what I once
+told him about the megatheriums and things. I guess it's up to me to
+make good in some way."
+
+"Don't you worry a minute about that, Evan, boy," was the instant
+rejoinder. "Honoria's coming in from Wartrace to-morrow, and if you'll
+put us next, we'll take care of your friends--mighty good care of 'em."
+Then, almost wistfully Blount thought: "You won't mind letting Honoria
+do that much for you, will you, son?"
+
+"I'd be a cad if I did. And you've taken a load off of my shoulders, I
+can assure you. If you can persuade Mrs. Blount into it, I'll arrange
+for a little dinner of five to-morrow evening in the _café_ where we can
+all get together. You'll like the professor, I know; and I hope you're
+going to like Patricia. She's New England, and at first you may think
+she's a bit chilly. But really she isn't anything of the kind."
+
+The Honorable Senator got up and strolled to the window.
+
+"You'd better go to bed, son," he advised. "It's getting to be mighty
+late, and you'll want to be surging around some with these friends of
+yours to-morrow. And, before I forget it, the big car is in
+Heffelfinger's garage. Order it out after breakfast and show the
+Cambridge folks a good time."
+
+It was late the following evening, several hours after the informal
+little dinner for five in the Inter-Mountain _café_, when the senator
+had himself lifted from the lobby to the private-suite floor and made
+his way to the door of his own apartments. As was her custom when they
+were together, his wife was waiting up for him.
+
+"Did you find out anything more?" she asked, without looking up from the
+tiny embroidery frame which was her leisure-filling companion at home or
+elsewhere.
+
+"Not enough to hurt anything. McVickar has fixed things to suit himself.
+The boy's law-office job is to be pretty largely nominal; a sort of
+go-as-you-please and do-as-you-like proposition on the side, with
+Ackerton to do all the sure-enough court work and legal drudgery. Since
+Ackerton is a pretty clean fellow, and Evan stands up so straight that
+he leans over backward, this lay-out means that the bribing isn't going
+to be done by the legal department in the coming campaign."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"All but one little thing. Evan's job is to be more or less associated
+with the traffic department, and the word has been passed to Gantry and
+his crowd to see to it that the boy doesn't get to know too much."
+
+"But they can't keep him from finding out about the underground work!"
+protested the small one.
+
+"If it's an order from headquarters, they're going to try mighty hard.
+Evan wants to believe that everything is on the high moral plane, and
+when a man wants to believe a thing it isn't so awfully hard to fool
+him. It'll be a winning card for them if they can send the boy out to
+talk convincingly about the cleanness of the company's campaign. That
+sort of talk, handed out as Evan can hand it, if he is convinced of the
+truth of what he is saying, will capture the honest voter every time. I
+tell you, little woman, there's a thing we politicians are constantly
+losing sight of: that down at the bedrock bottom the American
+voter--'the man in the street,' as the newspapers call him--is a fair
+man and an honest man. Speaking broadly, you couldn't buy him with a
+clear title to a quarter-section in Paradise."
+
+This little eulogy upon the American voter appeared to be wasted upon
+the small person in the wicker rocking-chair. "We must get him back,"
+she remarked, referring, not to the American voter, but to the senator's
+son. "Have you thought of any plan?"
+
+"No."
+
+She smiled up at him sweetly. "You are like the good doctor who cannot
+prescribe for the members of his own family. If he were anybody else's
+son, you would know exactly what to do."
+
+"Perhaps I should."
+
+"I have a plan," she went on quietly, bending again over her embroidery.
+"He may have to take a regular course of treatment, and it may make him
+very ill; would you mind that?"
+
+David Blount leaned back in his chair and regarded her through
+half-closed eyelids. "You're a wonder, little woman," he said; and then:
+"I don't want to see the boy suffer any more than he has to."
+
+"Neither do I," was the swift agreement. Then, with no apparent
+relevance: "What do you think of Miss Anners?"
+
+The senator sat up at the question, with the slow smile wrinkling
+humorously at the corners of his eyes.
+
+"I haven't thought much about her yet. She's the kind that won't let you
+get near enough in a single sitting to think much about her, isn't she?"
+
+"She is a young woman with an exceedingly bright mind and a very high
+purpose," was the little lady's summing-up of Patricia. "But she isn't
+altogether a Boston iceberg. She thinks she is irrevocably in love with
+her chosen career; but, really, I believe she is very much in love with
+Evan. If we could manage to win her over to our side as an active
+ally--"
+
+This time the senator's smile broadened into a laugh.
+
+"You are away yonder out of my depth now," he chuckled. "Does your
+course of treatment for the boy include large doses of the young woman,
+administered frequently?"
+
+"Oh, no," was the instant reply. "I was only wondering if it wouldn't be
+well to enroll her--enlist her sympathies, you know."
+
+"Why not?--if you think best? You're the fine-haired little wire-puller,
+and it's all in your hands."
+
+"Will you give me _carte-blanche_ to do as I please?" asked the small
+plotter.
+
+"Sure!" said the Honorable David heartily, adding: "You can always
+outfigure me, two to one, when it comes to the real thing. You've made a
+fine art of it, Honoria, and I'll turn the steering-wheel over to you
+any day in the week."
+
+When she looked up she was smiling in the way which had made Evan Blount
+wonder, in that midnight meeting at Wartrace Hall, how she could look so
+young and yet be so wise.
+
+"You deal with people in the mass, David, and no one living can do it
+better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That
+is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?"
+
+"I don't know; any time when you will invite them to make Wartrace their
+headquarters, I reckon."
+
+"Then I think it will be to-morrow," decided the confident mistress of
+policies. "It won't do to let Evan see too much of Patricia until after
+his course of treatment is well under way. Shall we make it to-morrow?
+And will you telephone Dawkins to bring down the biggest car? I have a
+notion wandering around in my head somewhere that Miss Patricia Anners
+will stand a little judicious impressing. She is exceedingly democratic,
+you know--in theory."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE RANK AND FILE
+
+
+Considerably to his surprise, and no less to his satisfaction, the newly
+appointed "division counsel," as his title ran, was not required to take
+over the old legal department offices in the second story of the station
+building, where all the other offices of the company were located.
+Instead, he was directed to fit up a suite of rooms in Temple Court, the
+capital's most pretentious up-town sky-scraper, and there was something
+more than a hint that the item of first cost would not be too closely
+scrutinized.
+
+It was the vice-president himself, writing from Chicago, who authorized
+the new departure and loosened the purse strings. "Don't be afraid of
+spending a little money," wrote the great man. "Make your up-town
+headquarters as attractive as may be, and arrange matters with Ackerton
+so that your office will not be burdened with too much of the routine
+legal work. A successful legal representative will be a good mixer--as I
+am sure you are--and will extend the circle of his acquaintance as
+rapidly and as far as possible. Your appointment will be fully justified
+when you have made your up-town office a place where the good citizens
+of the capital and the State can drop in for a cordial word with the
+company's spokesman."
+
+Acting upon this suggestion, Blount opened the Temple Court headquarters
+at once and threw himself energetically into the indicated field.
+Ackerton, a technical expert with a needle-like mind and the State code
+at his fingers'-ends, was left in charge of the working offices in the
+railroad building, with instructions to apply to his chief only when he
+needed specific advice.
+
+At the up-town headquarters, Blount gave himself wholly to the pleasant
+task of making friends. With a good store of introductions upon which to
+make a beginning, and with the open-handed, whole-souled _camaraderie_
+of the West to help, the list of acquaintances grew with amazing
+rapidity. For the three or four weeks after Mrs. Blount had whisked the
+Annerses away to Wartrace Hall and the habitat of the Megalosauridæ, the
+newly appointed "social secretary" for the railroad, as Honoria had
+dubbed him, met all comers joyously and accepted all invitations, never
+inquiring whether they were extended to his father's son, to the
+railroad company's legal chief, or to Evan Blount in his proper person.
+
+During this social interval he saw little of his father, though he was
+still occupying his share of the private dining-room suite at the
+Inter-Mountain. Part of the time, as he knew, the Honorable Senator was
+at Wartrace Hall, looking after his mammoth ranch, and helping to
+entertain the visitors from Massachusetts. But now and again the father
+came and went; and occasionally there was a dinner _à deux_ in the hotel
+_café_, with a little good-natured raillery from the senator's side of
+the table.
+
+"Got you chasing your feet right lively in the social merry-go-round
+these days, haven't they, son? Like it, as far as you've gone?" said the
+ex-cattle-king one evening when Evan had come down in evening clothes,
+ready to go to madam the governor's wife's strictly formal "informal" a
+little later on.
+
+"It's all in the day's work," laughed the younger man. "I shall need all
+the 'pull' I can get a little later on, sha'n't I?"
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if you did, son; I shouldn't wonder if you did. And
+I reckon you're doing pretty good work, too, mixing and mingling the way
+you do. Was it McVickar's idea, or your own--this sudden splash into the
+social water-hole?"
+
+"I don't mind telling you that it is a part of the new policy," returned
+the social splasher, still smiling. "We are out to make friends this
+time; good, solid, open-eyed friends who will know just what we are
+doing and why we are doing it."
+
+"H'm," mused the senator, "so publicity's the new word, is it?"
+
+"Yes; publicity is the word. The Gordon people say they are going to
+show us up; there won't be anything to show up when the time comes. We
+are going to beat them to the billboards."
+
+The grizzled veteran of a goodly number of political battles put down
+his coffee-cup; he was still old-fashioned enough to drink his coffee in
+generous measure with the meat courses.
+
+"You can't do the circus act--ride two horses at once and do the same
+stunt on both, son," he remarked gravely. "If you're really going to put
+the saddle and bridle on the publicity nag, you've got to turn the other
+one out of the corral and let it go back to the short-grass."
+
+"It is already turned out," asserted the young man, not affecting to
+misunderstand. "We neither buy votes nor spend illegitimate money in
+this campaign."
+
+The stout assertion was good as far as it went; the new division counsel
+made it and believed it. But on his way to the governor's mansion, a
+little later, he could not help wondering if he had been altogether
+candid in making it. The offices in the up-town sky-scraper were not
+exclusively a railroad social centre where the disinterested voter could
+come and have the facts ladled out to him without fear or favor on the
+part of the ladler. They had come to be also a rallying-point for a
+heterogeneous crowd of ward-workers, wire-pullers, and small
+politicians, most of whom were anxious to be employed or retained as
+henchmen. Some of these "stretcher men," as Blount contemptuously called
+them, had been employed in past campaigns; others were still the
+beneficiaries of the railroad, holding pay-roll places which Blount
+acutely suspected were chiefly sinecures.
+
+Latterly, this contingent of strikers and heelers had been greatly
+augmented, and it was beginning to make its demands more emphatic. A
+dozen times a day Blount had the worn phrase, "nothing for nothing,"
+dinned into his ears, and he was beginning to harbor a suspicion that
+his office had been made a dumping-ground for all the other departments.
+
+Seeing Gantry at madam the governor's lady's reception, Blount took an
+early opportunity of cornering the traffic manager in one of the
+otherwise deserted smoking-dens, and when he had made sure there were no
+eavesdroppers plunged at once into the middle of things.
+
+"See here, Dick," he began, "you fellows downtown are making my office a
+cesspool, and I won't stand for it. Garrigan, that saloon-keeper in the
+second ward, came up to-day to ask for a free ticket to Worthington and
+return; and when I pinned him down he admitted that you'd sent him to
+me."
+
+"I did," said Gantry, grinning. "Why otherwise have we got a
+post-graduate, double-certificated political manager, I'd like to know?"
+
+Blount dropped into a chair and felt in his pockets for his cigar-case.
+
+"I guess we may as well fight this thing to a finish right here and now,
+Dick," he said coolly. "I'm not chief vote buyer for the
+Transcontinental Company--I'm not any kind of a vote buyer."
+
+"Who said you were?" retorted the traffic manager.
+
+"It says itself, if I am supposed to cut the pie and hand out pieces of
+it to these grub-stakers that you and Carson and Bentley and Kittredge
+are continually sending to me."
+
+This time Gantry's grin was playful, but behind it there was a shrewd
+flash of the Irish-blue eyes that Blount did not see.
+
+"I guess the company would be plenty willing to furnish a few small pies
+for really hungry people, if you think you need them to go along with
+your Temple Court office fittings," he returned.
+
+"Ah?" said Blount calmly, giving the exclamation the true Boston
+inflection. "You are either too shrewd or not quite shrewd enough, Dick.
+You covered that up with a laugh, so that I might take it as a joke if I
+happened to be too thin-skinned to take it in disreputable earnest. Let
+us understand each other; we are fighting squarely in the open in this
+campaign; publicity is the word--I have Mr. McVickar for my authority.
+Anybody who wants to know anything about the railroad company's business
+in this State can learn it for the asking, and at first-hand. Secrecy
+and all the various brands of political claptrap that have been admitted
+in the past are to be shown the door. This is the intimation that was
+made to me: wasn't it made to you?"
+
+Gantry did not reply directly to the direct demand. On the other hand,
+he very carefully refrained from answering it in any degree whatsoever.
+
+"You have your job to hold down and I have mine," he rejoined. "What
+you say goes as it lies, of course; but just the same, I shouldn't be
+too righteously hard on the little brothers, if I were you."
+
+"If by the 'little brothers' you mean the pie-eaters, I'm going to fire
+them out, neck and crop, Richard. They make me excessively weary."
+
+Gantry's playful mood fell away from him like a cast-off garment.
+
+"I don't quite believe I'd do that, if I were you, Evan. There are
+pie-eaters on both sides in every political contest, and while they
+can't do any cause any great amount of good, they can often do a good
+bit of harm. I wouldn't be too hard on them, if I were you."
+
+"What would you do?--or, rather, what did you do when you were managing
+the State campaign two years ago?" inquired Blount pointedly.
+
+"I cut the pie," said the traffic manager simply.
+
+"In other words, you let this riffraff blackmail you and, incidentally,
+put a big black mark against the company's good name."
+
+"Oh, no; I wouldn't put it quite that strong. Not many of these little
+fellows ask for money, or expect it. A free ride now and then in the
+varnished cars is about all they look for."
+
+"But you can't give them passes under the interstate law," protested the
+purist.
+
+"Not outside of the State, of course. But inside of the State boundaries
+it's our own business."
+
+"You mean it _was_ our own business, previous to the passage of the
+State rate law two years ago," corrected Blount.
+
+"It is our own business to this good day--in effect. That part of the
+law has been a complete dead-letter from the day the governor signed it.
+Why, bless your innocent heart, Evan, the very men who argued the
+loudest and voted the most spitefully for it came to me for their return
+tickets home at the end of the session. Of course, we kept the letter of
+the law. It says that no 'free passes' shall be given. We didn't issue
+passes; we merely gave them tickets out of the case and charged them up
+to 'expense.'"
+
+"Faugh!" said Blount, "you make me sick! Gantry, it's that same childish
+whipping of the devil around the stump by the corporations--an expedient
+that wouldn't deceive the most ignorant voter that ever cast a
+ballot--it's that very thing that has stirred the whole nation up to
+this unreasonable fight against corporate capital. Don't you see it?"
+
+Gantry shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I guess I take the line of the least resistance--like the majority of
+them," was the colorless reply. "When it comes down to practical
+politics--"
+
+"Don't say 'practical politics' to me, Dick!" rasped the reformer.
+"We've got the strongest argument in the world in the fact that the
+present law is an unfair one, needing modification or repeal. We mustn't
+spoil that argument by becoming law-breakers ourselves and descending to
+the methods of the grafters and the machine politicians the country
+over. If you have been sending these pie-eaters to me, stop it--don't do
+it any more. I have no earthly use for them; and they won't have any use
+for me after I open up on them and tell them a few things they don't
+seem to know, or to care to know."
+
+"I don't believe I'd do anything brash," Gantry suggested mildly, and he
+was still saying the same thing in diversified forms when Blount led the
+way back to the crowded drawing-rooms.
+
+Dating from this little heart-to-heart talk with the traffic manager,
+Blount began to carry out the new policy--the starvation policy, as it
+soon came to be known among the would-be henchmen. The result was not
+altogether reassuring. The first few rebuffs he administered left him
+with the feeling that he was winning Pyrrhic victories; it was as if he
+were trying to handle a complicated mechanism with the working details
+of which he was only theoretically familiar. There were wheels within
+wheels, and the application of the brakes to the smallest of them led to
+discordant janglings throughout the whole.
+
+Many of the small grafters were on the pay-rolls of the railroad
+company, and Blount was soon definitely assured of what he had before
+only suspected--that they were merely nominal employees given a pay-roll
+standing so that there might be an excuse for giving them free
+transportation, and a retainer in the form of wages, if needful.
+
+In many cases the ramifications of the petty graft were exasperatingly
+intricate. For example: one Thomas Gryson, who was on the pay-rolls as a
+machinist's helper in the repair shops, demanded free transportation
+across the State for eight members of his "family." Questioned closely,
+he admitted that the "family" was his only by a figure of speech; that
+the relationship was entirely political. Blount promptly refused to
+recommend the issuing of employees' passes for the eight, and the result
+was an immediate call from Bentley, the division master mechanic.
+
+"About that fellow Gryson," Bentley began; "can't you manage some way to
+get him transportation for his Jonesboro crowd? He is going to make
+trouble for us if you don't."
+
+Blount was justly indignant. "Gryson is on your pay-roll," he retorted.
+"Why don't you recommend the passes yourself, on account of the
+motive-power department, if he is entitled to them?"
+
+"I can't," admitted the master mechanic. "I am held down to the issuing
+of passes to employees travelling on company business only. We can
+stretch it a little sometimes, of course, but we can't make it cover the
+whole earth."
+
+"Neither can I!" Blount exploded. "Let it be understood, once for all,
+Mr. Bentley, that I am not the scape-goat for all the other departments!
+I have cut it off short; I am not recommending passes for anybody."
+
+"But, suffering Scott, Mr. Blount, we've simply _got_ to take care of
+Tom Gryson! He's the boss of his ward, and he has influence enough to
+turn even our own employees against us!"
+
+"Influence?" scoffed the young man from the East. "How does he acquire
+his influence? It is merely another illustration of the vicious circle;
+you put into his hands the club with which he proceeds to knock you
+down. Let me tell you what I'm telling everybody; if we want a square
+deal, we've got to set the example by being square. And, by Heavens, Mr.
+Bentley, we're going to set the example!"
+
+The master mechanic went away silenced, but by no means convinced; and a
+week later Gryson, who in appearance was a typical tough, and who in
+reality was a post-graduate of the hard school of violence and
+ruffianage obtaining in the lawless mining-camps of the Carnadine Hills,
+sauntered into Blount's office with his cigar at the belligerent angle
+and an insolent taunt in his mouth.
+
+"Well, pardner, we got them dickie-birds o' mine over to Jonesboro,
+after so long a time, and no thanks to you, neither. I just blew in to
+tell you that I'm goin' to hit you ag'in about day after to-morrow, and
+if you don't come across there's goin' to be somethin' doin'; see?"
+
+Blount sprang from his chair and forgot to be politic.
+
+"You needn't come to me the day after to-morrow, or any other time," he
+raged. "I'm through with you and your tribe. Get out!"
+
+After Gryson, muttering threats, had gone, the young campaign manager
+had an attack of moral nausea. It seemed such a prodigious waste of time
+and energy to traffic and chaffer with these petty scoundrels. Thus far,
+every phase of the actual political problem seemed to be meanly
+degrading, and he was beginning to long keenly for an opportunity to do
+some really worthy thing.
+
+Notwithstanding, his ideals were still unshaken. He still clung to the
+belief that the corporation, which was created by the law and could
+exist only under the protection of the law, must, of necessity, be a
+law-abiding entity. It was manifestly unfair to hold it responsible for
+the disreputable political methods of those whom it could never
+completely control--methods, too, which had been forced upon it by the
+necessity, or the fancied necessity, of meeting conditions as they were
+found.
+
+As if in answer to the wish that he might find the worthier task, it was
+on this day of Gryson's visit that Blount was given his first
+opportunity of entering the wider field. A letter from a local party
+chairman in a distant mining town brought an invitation of the kind for
+which he had been waiting and hoping. He was asked to participate in a
+joint debate at the campaign opening in the town in question, and he was
+so glad of the chance that he instantly wired his acceptance.
+
+That evening, at the Inter-Mountain _café_ dinner hour, he found his
+father dining alone and joined him. In a burst of confidence he told of
+the invitation.
+
+"That's good; that's the real thing this time, isn't it?" was the
+senator's even-toned comment. "Gives you a right nice little chance to
+shine the way you can shine best." Then: "That was one of the things
+McVickar wanted you for, wasn't it?--speech-making and the like?"
+
+"Why, yes; he intimated that there might be some public speaking,"
+admitted the younger man.
+
+"Well, what-all are you going to tell these Ophir fellows when you get
+over there, son?" asked the veteran quizzically. "Going to offer 'em all
+free passes anywhere they want to go if they'll promise to vote for the
+railroad candidates?"
+
+"Not this year," was the laughing reply. "As I told you a while back,
+we've stopped all that."
+
+"You have, eh? I reckon that will be mighty sorry news for a good many
+people in the old Sage-brush State--mighty sorry news. You really reckon
+you _have_ stopped it, do you, son?"
+
+"I not only believe it; I am in a position to assert it definitely."
+
+"McVickar has told you it was stopped?"
+
+The newly fledged political manager tried to be strictly truthful.
+
+"I have had but the one interview with Mr. McVickar, but in that talk he
+gave me to understand that my recommendations would be given due
+consideration. And I have said my say pretty emphatically."
+
+The senator's smile was not derisive; it was merely lenient.
+
+"Sat on 'em good and hard, did you? That's right, son; don't you ever
+be afraid to say what you mean, and to say it straight from the
+shoulder. That's the Blount way, and I reckon we've got to keep the
+family ball rolling--you and I. Don't forget that, when you're making
+your appeal to those horny-handed sons of toil over yonder at Ophir.
+Give 'em straight facts, and back up the facts with figures--if you
+happen to have the figures. When do you pull out for the mining-camp?"
+
+"To-night, at nine-thirty. I can't get there in time if I wait for the
+morning train." Then, dismissing the political topic abruptly: "What do
+you hear from Professor Anners?"
+
+"Oh, he's having the time of his life. I got him a State permit, and
+scraped him up a bunch of pick-and-shovel men, and he is digging out
+those fossil skeletons by the wagon-load."
+
+"And Miss Anners?" pursued Patricia's lover.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if she was having the time of her life, too. I've
+given her the little four-seated car to call her own while she is out
+here, and she and Honoria go careering around the country--breaking the
+speed limit every minute in the day, I reckon."
+
+"I'm glad you are giving her a good time," said Evan, and he looked
+glad. Then he added regretfully: "I wish I could get a chance to chase
+around a little with them. I have seen almost nothing of them since they
+came West. I should think Mrs. Blount might bring Patricia down to the
+city once in a while."
+
+"Well, now! perhaps the young woman doesn't want to come," laughed the
+senator. "You told me you hadn't got her tag, son, and I'm beginning to
+believe it's the sure-enough truth. What has she got against you,
+anyway?"
+
+"Nothing; nothing in the wide world, save that I don't fit into her
+scheme for her life-work."
+
+The senator was eating calmly through his dessert. "If you hadn't made
+up your mind so pointedly to dislike Honoria, you might be getting a few
+tips on that 'career' business along about now, son," he remarked, and
+Evan was silent--had to be silent. For, you see, he had been charging
+Patricia's continued absence from the capital to nothing less than
+spiteful design on the part of his father's wife.
+
+It was at the cigar smoking in the lobby, after the young man had made
+his preparations for the journey and was waiting for the train-caller's
+announcement, that the senator said quite casually: "It's too bad you're
+going out of town to-night, son. Honoria 'phoned me a little spell ago
+that she and Patricia would be driving down after their dinner to take
+in the Weatherford reception. You'll have to miss 'em, won't you?"
+
+The announcer was chanting the call for the night train west, and the
+joint-debater got up and thrust his hand-bag savagely into the hand of
+the nearest porter.
+
+"Isn't that just my infernal luck!" he lamented. Then: "Give them my
+love, and tell them I hope they will stay until I get back."
+
+The senator rose and shook hands with the departing debater. "Shall I
+say that to both of 'em?" he asked, with the quizzical smile which Evan
+was learning to expect.
+
+"Yes; to both of them, if you like--only I suppose Mrs. Blount will hold
+it against me. Good-night and good-by. I'll be back day after to-morrow,
+if the Ophir miners don't mob me."
+
+It was only a few minutes after Evan Blount's train had steamed
+Ophir-ward out of the Sierra Avenue station that a dust-covered
+touring-car drew up at the curb in front of the Inter-Mountain, and the
+same porter who had put Blount's hand-bag into the taxicab opened the
+tonneau door for two ladies in muffling motor-coats and heavy veils.
+
+The senator met the two late travellers in the vestibule, and while the
+three were waiting for an elevator a rapid fire of low-toned question
+and answer passed between husband and wife.
+
+"You got Evan out of the way?" whispered the wife.
+
+The husband nodded. "That was easy. I passed the word to Steuchfield,
+and he helped out on that--invited Evan to come to Ophir to speak in a
+joint debate. He left on the night train."
+
+"And Hathaway? Will he be here?"
+
+"He is here. Gantry has turned him down, according to instructions, and
+he is clawing about in the air, trying to get a fresh hold. I bluffed
+him; told him he'd have to make his peace with you for something, I
+didn't know what, before I could talk to him."
+
+Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal glow as the car descended,
+and the wife's voice sank to a still lower whisper.
+
+"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired eagerly.
+
+"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there."
+
+The small plotter nodded approval.
+
+"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready," she directed;
+and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to
+finish his cigar.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+IN THE HERBARIUM
+
+
+The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people, and so newly rich that
+the crisp bank-notes fairly crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them,
+kept their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like mansion in Mesa
+Circle, the most expensive, if not the most aristocratic,
+no-thoroughfare of the capital city. Weatherford, the father, egged on
+by Mrs. Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward a United
+States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province
+of the next legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with
+a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view
+carefully tucked away inside of it--an outlook upon life which was a
+survival from his hard-working past--would willingly have dodged, but
+Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable. There were two grown daughters and a
+growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.
+
+The reception for which the senator's wife and her guest had driven
+thirty miles through the dust of the sage-brush hills was one of the
+many moves in Mrs. Weatherford's private campaign. For the opening-gun
+occasion the great house in Mesa Circle was lighted from basement to
+turret--to all of the numerous turrets; an awning fringed with electric
+bulbs sheltered the carpeted walk from the street to the grand entrance,
+an army of lackeys paraded in the vestibule, and the wives and daughters
+of the bravest and best in the capital city's political contingent stood
+with Mrs. Weatherford in the long receiving-line.
+
+From room to room in the vast house a curiously assorted throng of the
+bidden ones worked its way as the jam and crush permitted. A firm
+believer in the maxim that in numbers there is strength, the hostess had
+made her invitation-list long and catholic. For the gossips there were
+the crowded drawing-rooms, for the hungry there were Lucullian tables,
+and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.
+
+It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that
+the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension
+of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a
+reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown
+palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted
+interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs.
+Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would
+have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was
+because no one had remembered to mention the name of it to her.
+
+Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably late at the function
+in Mesa Circle, but in the crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the
+hostess and her long line of receiving assistants were still on duty.
+Having successfully passed the line with her husband and Patricia,
+little Mrs. Blount looked about her, saw Mr. Richard Gantry, signalled
+to him with her eyes, and, with the traffic manager for her centre-rush
+to wedge a way through the crowded rooms, was presently lost to
+sight--at least from Miss Anners's point of view.
+
+Whether she knew it or not, from the moment of her appearance at the
+hostess's end of the long receiving-line, the senator's wife had been
+marked and followed in her slow progress through the rooms by a
+thin-faced man who seemed to be nervously trying to hunch himself into
+better relations with his ill-fitting dress-coat, an eager gentleman
+whose hawk-like eyes never lost sight of the little lady with her hand
+on Gantry's arm. Only the senator saw and remarked this bit of by-play,
+and he looked as if he were enjoying it, the shrewd gray eyes lighting
+humorously as he bent to hear what Patricia was saying.
+
+When his quarry stopped, as she did frequently to chat with one or
+another of the guests, the man with the hawk-like profile and the
+nervous hunch circled warily, and once or twice seemed about to make the
+opportunity which was so slow in making itself. But it was not until the
+little lady in the claret-colored party-gown had drifted, still with a
+hand on Gantry's arm, in among the palm and banana trees of the
+herbarium that the bird-of-prey person made his swoop. A moment later
+Gantry, taking a low-toned command from his companion, was disappearing
+in the direction of the refreshment-tables, and the lady looked up to
+say: "Dear me, Mr. Hathaway, you almost startled me!"
+
+"Did I?" said the lumber-king, rather grimly, if he meant the query to
+be apologetic. "I am sorry. I didn't mean to; but Mrs. Gordon said I
+would find you here, and so I took the liberty of following you. I'm
+needing a little straightening out, you know, and--ah--would you mind
+letting me talk business with you for a minute or two, Mrs. Blount?"
+
+She drew her gown aside, and made room for him on the carved rustic
+settee, which was exceedingly uncomfortable to sit in, but which was in
+perfect harmony with the background of gigantic palmettos. He nodded
+gratefully and took the place, and the manner of his sitting down was
+that of a man who wears evening-clothes only under compulsion.
+
+"Business?" she was saying. "Certainly not; if you can talk business in
+such a place as this"--giving him the coveted permission.
+
+"Perhaps it ain't what you'd call business--maybe it's only politics,"
+he resumed; then, with the abruptness of one whose dealings have been
+with men oftener than with women: "In the first place, I wish you'd tell
+me what I've been doing to get myself into your bad books."
+
+She laughed easily. "Who said you had been doing anything, Mr.
+Hathaway?" she asked.
+
+"The senator," he answered shortly, adding: "He told me I'd have to make
+my peace with you."
+
+She had developed a sudden interest in the quaint Japanese figures on
+the ivory sticks of her fan. "You want something, Mr. Hathaway; what is
+it?" she inquired.
+
+"I want to be put next in this pigs-in-clover railroad puzzle," was the
+blunt statement of the need. "Our freight contract with the
+Transcontinental is about to expire, and I'd like to get it renewed on
+the same terms as before."
+
+"Well," she said ingenuously, "why don't you do it?"
+
+"I can't," he blustered. "Everybody has suddenly grown mysterious or
+gone crazy--I don't know which. Kittredge, the general superintendent,
+don't seem to remember that we ever had any contract, and Gantry is just
+as bad. And when I go to the senator he tells me I must make my peace
+with you. I'm left out in the cold; I can't begin to _sabe_ what the
+senator and these railroad brass-collar men are driving at. I've got
+something to sell; something that the railroad company needs. Where the
+d---- I mean, where's the hitch?"
+
+The small person in the fetching party-gown reached up and pinched a
+leaf from a fragrant shrub fronting the settee.
+
+"Mr. Gantry has gone to fetch me an ice, and he will be back in a very
+few minutes," she suggested mildly. "Consider your peace made, Mr.
+Hathaway, and tell me what I can do for you."
+
+"You can put me next," said the lumber lord, going back to the only
+phrase that seemed to fit the exigencies of the case. "Why the--why
+can't we get our contract renewed?"
+
+The little lady was opening and shutting her fan slowly. "What was your
+contract?" she inquired innocently.
+
+"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you,"
+he said bluntly. "But you do know. It's the rebate lumber rate from our
+mills at Twin Buttes and elsewhere, and it was given us two years ago, a
+few days before election."
+
+"And the consideration?" she asked, looking up quickly.
+
+"You know that, too, Mrs. Blount. It was the swinging of the solid
+employees' vote of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company over to the railroad
+ticket."
+
+"And you wish to make the same arrangement again?"
+
+"Exactly. We've got to have that preferential rate or go out of
+business."
+
+"With whom did you make the contract two years ago?"
+
+"With Mr. McVickar, verbally. Of course, there wasn't anything put down
+in black and white, but the railroad folks did their part and we did
+ours."
+
+"I see--a gentleman's agreement," she murmured; and then: "You have
+tried Mr. McVickar again?"
+
+"Yes, and he referred me to Gantry."
+
+"And what did Mr. Gantry say?"
+
+"I couldn't get him to say anything with any sense in it," said the
+lumber magnate grittingly. "The most I could get out of him was that I
+would have to see the boss."
+
+"And instead of doing that you went to see the senator?" she asked.
+
+"Of course I did. Who else would Gantry mean by 'the boss'?" demanded
+the befogged one.
+
+"Possibly he meant the senator's son," she ventured, tapping a pretty
+cheek with the folded fan. "Have you been leaving Evan Blount out in all
+of this?"
+
+"I didn't know where to put him in. That's what brings me here to-night.
+The senator, or McVickar, or both of them together, have set the whole
+State to running around in circles with this appointment of young
+Blount. Some say it's a deal between the senator and McVickar, and some
+say it's a fight. Half of the professional spellbinders are walking in
+their sleep over it right now. I thought maybe you could tell me, Mrs.
+Blount."
+
+"I can't tell you anything that would help the people who are walking in
+their sleep," she returned, "but I might offer a suggestion in your
+personal affair. Mr. Evan Blount is your man."
+
+Hathaway pursed his thin lips and frowned. "I'm in bad there--right at
+the jump," he objected.
+
+"I know," she shot back quickly. "For some reason best known to
+yourself, you saw fit to have Mr. Evan waylaid and man-handled on the
+first night of his return to his native State. But you needn't worry
+about that. He won't hold it against you. I'm sure you'll find him
+entirely amenable to reason."
+
+The tyrant of "timber-jacks" frowned again. "H'm--reason, eh? How big a
+block of Twin Buttes stock shall I offer him?"
+
+Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.
+
+"You always figure in dollars and cents, don't you, Mr. Simon Peter
+Hathaway?" she mocked.
+
+"I have always found it the cheapest in the end."
+
+"Listen," she said, with the folded fan held up like a monitory finger.
+"Mr. Gantry may be back any minute, and I can give you only the tiniest
+hint. You must go to Mr. Evan Blount and appeal to him frankly, as one
+business man to another."
+
+"But I have heard--they say he's all kinds of a crank."
+
+"Never mind what you have heard. Tell him all the facts and ask him to
+help you, and for mercy's sake don't offer him a block of your stock.
+Put it where it will do the most good. Put it in the name of Professor
+William J. Anners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and show Mr. Blount how
+dreadfully disastrous the loss of the preferential freight rate would be
+to all the poor people in your list of stock-holders--including
+Professor Anners."
+
+Hathaway drew down his cuff and made a pencil memorandum of the name and
+address of the new beneficiary.
+
+"You'll notice that I'm not asking any foolish questions about who this
+Professor Anners is, or why I should be making him a present of a block
+of stock. If I don't, it's because what you say goes as it lies.
+Anything else?"
+
+"Yes; don't fail to be perfectly frank with Mr. Blount, and don't let
+him put you off. He may pretend to be very angry at first, but you won't
+mind that."
+
+"I won't mind anything if I can bring this business down to the
+every-day commonplace earth once more. You and the senator and Gantry
+and McVickar are playing some sort of a game, and you ain't showing me
+anything more than the back of the cards. That's all right. I guess I'm
+fly enough to play my hand blindfolded, if I've got to. I don't care,
+just so I win the odd trick."
+
+Gantry was coming down the avenue of banana-trees with the ice he had
+taken so much time to procure, and the lumber magnate rose reluctantly.
+There was time for only one more question, and he put it hastily.
+
+"When and where can I find Evan Blount?" he asked.
+
+"The day after to-morrow, at his office in Temple Court. He is out of
+the city now, but--" Here Gantry's coming put an end to the private
+conference, and the president of the Twin Buttes company went his way.
+
+Not until they had served out their full sentence at Mrs. Weatherford's
+crush, and were back in the private dining-room suite at the
+Inter-Mountain, with Miss Anners safely behind the closed door of her
+own apartment, did the small conspirator pass the word of good hope on
+to her husband.
+
+"It is working beautifully," she exulted. "He will go to see Evan day
+after to-morrow--and after that, the deluge."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE GREAT GAME
+
+
+If Evan Blount, as the representative of the unpopular railroad, had
+been anticipating an unfriendly reception at the great gold-camp in the
+Carnadine Hills, he was agreeably disappointed. A committee of citizens,
+headed by Jasper Steuchfield, the "Paramounter" chairman for Carnadine
+County, met him at the train, escorted him to the hotel, and, during the
+afternoon which was at his disposal, gave him joyously and hilariously
+the freedom of the camp.
+
+The political meeting, called for an early hour in the evening, was held
+in the Carnadine Mining Company's ore-shed, electric-lighted for the
+occasion. When the hour came the big shed was packed with an
+enthusiastic audience, and there were prolonged cheers and
+hand-clappings when the railroad advocate took his seat on the
+improvised platform as the guest of the local committee.
+
+Later, when Judge Crowley, candidate prospective on the popular ticket
+for the State Senate, opened the joint debate with a shrewd arraignment
+of the methods of the railroad company, not only in its dealings with
+the public as a common carrier, but also in the pertinacity with which
+it invaded the political field, there was tumultuous applause; but it
+was no heartier than that which greeted Blount when he rose to present
+the railroad side of the argument.
+
+During the journey from the capital, which had consumed the night and
+the greater portion of the forenoon, he had prepared his speech. His
+argument--the one unanswerable argument, as it appeared to him--was the
+absurdity and injustice of a law which presumed to limit the earning
+power of a corporation by fixing the maximum rates it might charge,
+without at the same time making a corresponding regulation fixing the
+price which the company should pay for its labor and material.
+
+Upon this foundation he was able to build a fair structure of oratory.
+The judge, his opponent, was a rather turgid man whose speech had
+abounded in flights of denunciation and whose appeal had been made
+frankly to prejudice and party rancor. Blount took his cue shrewdly.
+Touching lightly upon the public grievances, some of which he
+characterized as just and entirely defensible, he rang the changes
+calmly and logically upon the square deal, no less for the corporations
+than for the individual. "Take it to yourselves, you merchants," he
+urged. "Imagine a law on the statute-books fixing the prices at which
+you shall sell your goods, and that same law leaving you at the mercy of
+those from whom you must buy! Take it to yourselves, you miners. Suppose
+the legislature had enacted a law fixing the maximum price at which you
+shall sell your skill and your labor, and at the same time leaving it
+optional with every man from whom you buy, the butcher, the baker, the
+grocer, to charge you what he pleases or what he can get! That, my good
+friends, is the situation of the railroad company in this State
+to-day"--and he went on to analyze the hard situation, filling his hour
+very creditably and, if the frequent bursts of applause could be taken
+to mean anything, to the complete satisfaction of his hearers. Indeed,
+at the end of his argument he was given what the local paper of the
+following day was pleased to call "a spontaneous and pandemonious
+ovation."
+
+After the cheering and hand-shaking, Steuchfield and his
+fellow-committeemen went to the train with the visiting speaker, and no
+one in the throng of congratulators was more enthusiastic than the
+opposition chairman.
+
+"That was a cracking good speech--a great speech, Mr. Blount!" he said,
+as the branch train rattled in from the north. "If you can go all over
+the State making as good talks as the one we've just heard, you'll tie
+the whole shooting-match up in a hard knot for us fellows. But McVickar
+won't let you do it--not by a long shot!"
+
+The potential tier of hard knots laughed genially. "I don't blame you
+for wanting to be shown, Mr. Steuchfield. But I can assure you that the
+new policy has come to stay. I have the management behind me in this
+thing, and any day you'll come down to the capital I'll put my time
+against yours and try to show you that we are out for open publicity
+and a square deal for every man--including the railroad man."
+
+"All right," was the cordial reply. "I'll be down along some of these
+days, and if you can convince me that McVickar isn't going into politics
+any further than you've gone here to-night, I'll promise you to come
+back to Carnadine and tell the boys the jig's up."
+
+A few minutes later the branch train pulled out, and the chairman and
+his fellow-committeemen gave the departing joint-debater three cheers
+and another. After the red tail-lights of the train had disappeared
+around the first curve, Steuchfield turned to the others with a broad
+grin.
+
+"Well, boys," he said, "there goes a mighty nice young fellow, and I
+guess we did it up all right for him and accordin' to orders. I don't
+know any more'n a sheep what sort of a game Dave Sage-brush is playin'
+this time, but whatever he says goes as she lays, and I figure it that
+we gave the young chip o' the old block a right jubilant little whirl.
+Anyhow, he seemed to think so."
+
+Blount did not reach his office in the capital until the afternoon of
+the next day. There was an appalling accumulation of letters and
+telegrams waiting to be worked over, but he let the desk litter go
+untouched and called up the hotel, only to have a small disappointment
+sent in over the wire. His father, Mrs. Blount, and their guest had left
+for Wartrace Hall some time during the forenoon, and there had been
+nothing said in the clerk's hearing about their return to the city.
+Blount hung up the receiver, called it one more opportunity missed, and
+sat down to attack the desk litter.
+
+Almost the first thing his eye lighted upon was a stenographer's note
+stating that Mr. Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company,
+had been in several times, and was very anxious to obtain an interview.
+Blount pressed the desk button, and the stenographer came in promptly.
+
+"This man Hathaway; what did he want?" was the brusque question shot at
+the clerk.
+
+"I don't know. He said he was stopping at the Inter-Mountain, and he
+asked me to let him know when you got back."
+
+"Phone him and tell him I'm here," said Blount; and in due time the
+lumber magnate made his appearance.
+
+It was not at all in keeping with Mr. Simon Peter Hathaway's gifts and
+adroitness that he should begin by attempting a clumsy bit of acting.
+
+"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "So you're the senator's son, are
+you? If I'd known that, that day on the train when you were trying to
+make me believe you were one of Uncle Sam's men--"
+
+Blount's smile was neither forgiving nor hostile.
+
+"In a way, I had earned what was handed out to me afterward, Mr.
+Hathaway, and I'm not bearing malice," he said briefly. "I had no
+business to let you get away with the wrong impression, but you were so
+exceedingly anxious to identify me with the Forest Service that it
+seemed a pity to disappoint you. Since your scoundrels didn't kill me,
+we'll set one incident against the other and forget both. What can I do
+for you to-day?"
+
+By this time the lumber lord was apparently recovering his breath and
+some measure of composure, though he had lost neither.
+
+"Great Jehu!" he lamented. "If you had given me half a hint that you
+were Dave Blount's son--but you didn't, you know, and now I'm
+handicapped just when I oughtn't to be. I've come to talk business with
+you to-day, Mr. Blount, and here you've got me on the run the first
+crack out of the box!"
+
+This time Blount's smile was entirely conciliatory.
+
+"Don't let that little misfire in the Lost Mountain foot-hills embarrass
+you, Mr. Hathaway. I assure you I'm not at all vindictive."
+
+"All right," said the visitor, only too willing to dismiss the Jack
+Barto incident and the forced awkwardness of the pretended surprise.
+"That being the case, I'll jump in on the other matter. But first I'd
+like to ask a sort of personal question: I've been given to understand
+that you are handling the political business for the railroad company in
+this campaign. Is that right?"
+
+"It is and it isn't," was the prompt reply. "The railroad company isn't
+in politics in this campaign--as a political factor, I mean. What we are
+trying to do--and all we are trying to do--is to lay the entire matter
+plainly and fairly before the people of this State, with a frank appeal
+for the relief to which we are entitled."
+
+"Ha--h'm--I guess I get you, Mr. Blount. That's the way to talk it; in
+public, anyway. But, just between us two--I guess we needn't beat the
+bushes in a little personal talk like this--we both know there are
+certain things that have to be done in every campaign; things you
+wouldn't want to publish in the newspapers."
+
+Blount sat back in his chair and the conciliatory smile disappeared.
+
+"What kind of things?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"Oh, of course, I don't know all of 'em. But there was one little
+arrangement that was made two years ago with us, and it helped out both
+ways. I thought I'd come around and see if it couldn't be worked again."
+
+"State the facts," said Blount shortly.
+
+"It was like this. As you know, we've got a number of plants scattered
+around at different places in the State, and, one way and another, we
+employ a good many men. These men are residents of the State, but you
+couldn't call 'em citizens in the sense that they take any active
+interest in what's going on. They're here this year, and they may be up
+among the Oregon redwoods next year, and somewhere else the year after.
+When they vote at all they naturally ask us how we'd like to have 'em
+vote; and that's the way it was two years ago at election time."
+
+"I see. But how does this concern the railroad company?"
+
+"I'm coming to that, right now. Two years ago we found that our
+employees' vote was big enough to turn the scale in four of the
+legislative districts and to cut a pretty good-sized figure in a fifth.
+This vote was worth something to your people, and the fact was properly
+recognized. I don't know but what I'm telling you a lot of stale news,
+but--"
+
+"Go on, Mr. Hathaway; if I wasn't greatly interested in the beginning, I
+am now. How was the fact recognized by the Transcontinental Railway
+Company?"
+
+"It was just as easy as twice two. The Twin Buttes Lumber Company is
+practically the only heavy lumber-shipper in this inter-mountain
+territory, and it was given a preferential rate on its products; you
+might say that the amount of business we do entitles us to some special
+consideration, anyway. There wasn't any bargain and sale about it, you
+understand. It was just a sort of friendly recognition of our help in
+the election."
+
+"This rate is lower than the rate made to other lumber-shippers?"
+
+"Well, yes; but, after all, it isn't any big thing. If you were up on
+lumber rates, Mr. Blount--as I don't suppose you are--you'd know that
+the special tariff we get is all that enables us to live and do
+business."
+
+Blount had opened his penknife and was absently sharpening a pencil.
+
+"This special rate you refer to, Mr. Hathaway," he said, speaking
+slowly and quite distinctly--"am I right in inferring that it is not
+confined strictly to points within the State boundaries?"
+
+At this the lumberman repeated a phrase which he had used in the anxious
+conference in the Weatherford herbarium.
+
+"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you,
+Mr. Blount. But of course you do know. If you wasn't on the inside of
+all the insides you wouldn't be sitting here pulling the strings for
+McVickar. The rate is a blanket; it covers all shipments."
+
+Blount nodded and his apparent coolness was no just measure of the
+inward fires the crooked lumber-king was kindling.
+
+"You interest me greatly, Mr. Hathaway. I am a little new to these
+things--as you intimated a few moments ago. How is this matter
+handled--by rebates, I suppose?"
+
+"N-not exactly," was the hesitating denial. "That would be too risky for
+both of us. But the Transcontinental Company is a heavy buyer--lumber
+and cross-ties and bridge timber, you know--and the biggest part of the
+difference between our special and the regular rate is taken up in our
+bills for material furnished to the railroad."
+
+"Let me be quite clear upon that point," said Blount; and if Hathaway
+had had eyes to see, he would have observed that the young lawyer's
+attitude was becoming more judicial with every fresh questioning. "Let
+me be quite sure that I understand. You mean that you are allowed to
+charge the railroad company more than the market price on the material
+it buys?"
+
+Hathaway nodded. "Yes, that's the way of it."
+
+"And this preferential rate is still in force?"
+
+"It is."
+
+"You're sure you have had no notice of its withdrawal--say within the
+past few weeks?"
+
+It was at this point that the lumber lord began to fear that some one
+had slipped a cog in sending him to first one and then another, and
+finally to young Blount.
+
+"Of course, it hasn't been withdrawn!" he retorted. And then: "You seem
+to think there is something off color in the deal, Mr. Blount, and I
+don't know whether you're stringing me or whether you're too new in the
+railroad game to have the dope. If you're going into this political
+knock-down-and-drag-out, you ought to have the dope. There isn't a big
+interest in this State--ore-shippers, power people, irrigation
+companies, or any of 'em--that ain't getting a rake-off. I guess you
+_are_ stringing me; I guess you know all this a good deal better than I
+do. If you don't, I can tell you that it's a fact; not a 'has-been', but
+an 'is'! Ask Gantry; he'll tell you, if he tells the truth. We ain't
+asking or getting anything that other people ain't getting!"
+
+"I see," said Blount soberly. "What do you expect me to do, Mr.
+Hathaway?"
+
+"I want you to set the wheels in motion so that we can have our rate
+made good for another two years--on the same terms as before. You're
+going to need every vote you can get this year, and you can't afford to
+turn us down." Then the lumber-king shifted again to his own
+necessities. "It's the only way we can live and do business nowadays.
+Like every other large corporation, we've got an army of little
+investors to look out for: widows, orphans, charitable institutions, and
+trustees' accounts. I've got a list of our stockholders right here, and
+I'd like to have you look it over."
+
+Blount took the paper mechanically, and quite as mechanically ran his
+eye down the list of names. At the bottom of it, written in with a pen,
+was the name of Patricia's father, with his residence and occupation.
+While he was staring at the pen-written name, Hathaway went on,
+eloquently emphasizing the disastrous results which would fall upon the
+people for whom he was, in the larger sense, a guardian and a
+trustee--the disaster hinging upon the withdrawal of the preferential
+rate.
+
+Blount broke him abruptly in the midst of the special plea. "I see you
+have recently added one new name to this list: the name of Professor
+Anners. How--"
+
+"Yes," interrupted the Twin Buttes diplomatist hastily, fearing that
+this legal-minded young man would presently be asking questions too hard
+to be answered; "now there's a case in point: Mr. Anners is a good
+example of our smaller stockholders. Men like Anners, college
+professors, preachers, and so on, buy stocks, when they buy 'em at all,
+for an investment--for the income--and they pay for 'em out of their
+hard-earned savings."
+
+"I know," said Blount, and, since he was the last man in the world to be
+diverted from his purpose by any conversational dust-throwing, he
+pressed the question cut off by the hasty interruption. "What I was
+going to ask was how you happen to have added Professor Anners's name to
+your list--recently, it seems?"
+
+The lumberman was reduced to the necessity of inventing a ready lie. He
+had obeyed his instructions blindly, on the supposition that young
+Blount would know and understand.
+
+"Anners? Oh, he knows a good thing when he sees it; and I guess maybe
+your father put him on. He's a friend of the family, ain't he? Maybe the
+senator found a little chunk of 'Twin Buttes' that he didn't want
+himself, and passed it along."
+
+Blount's blood ran cold at the sight of the cracking walls and crumbling
+foundations on every hand. The proof that the railroad company's lawless
+attitude was still unchanged was too strong to be doubted; and now there
+was an added blow from the hand of his father. He wheeled short upon the
+lumber-king.
+
+"Who sent you to me, Mr. Hathaway?" he demanded.
+
+The hawk-faced man laughed. "I guess you know just as well or better
+than I do. But just to show you that I can keep my mouth shut, I ain't
+going to tell you. It's all right and straight--and you might say it's
+all in the family, counting the professor in on the side, as it were."
+
+"I see," Blount said, and this time he was only too sure that he did
+see. Then: "What is it you want me to do for you, Mr. Hathaway? You have
+told me once, but I'm afraid I didn't grasp it fully."
+
+"Fix it with Gantry, or somebody, so that we can put the company vote
+where it's most needed and get our rate continued. It's simple enough."
+
+"The simplicity is beyond question." Blount returned the list of
+stockholders and fell back upon the pencil-sharpening. "It is quite
+elementary, as you say; but there is another phase of the transaction
+which seems to have escaped you. Are you aware that the present
+arrangement which you have so accurately described, and the continuance
+of it which you are proposing, are crimes for which both parties
+involved may be called into court and punished?"
+
+Hathaway started as if the comfortable chair in which he was lounging
+had been suddenly electrified.
+
+"Say, Blount, are you working for the railroad, or not?" he demanded.
+"If you are, what in the name of Heaven are you driving at? I know the
+line of talk you've been handing out since McVickar gave you your job
+and set you up in business here, but that's for the dear public. You
+don't have to wear your halo when a man comes in to talk hard facts from
+the inside. It comes to just this: you do something for me, and I do
+something for you. You make it possible for us to live and sell lumber,
+and we do what we can to make it easy for your railroad to get its
+'square deal' from a pie-cutting legislature. That's the whole thing
+in a nutshell."
+
+"One more question," snapped Blount, striving to fix the roving gaze of
+the hawk-like eyes. "With whom did you make this arrangement two years
+ago?"
+
+"With your boss, if you want to know; with Mr. McVickar himself!"
+
+"And you think you can do it again?"
+
+"I know damned well I can; only I don't care to go over your head unless
+I have to. They tell me you're handling this end of it for the railroad
+company, and I'm not going around hunting a chance to make enemies.
+That's all I've got to say"--and he rose to go--"all but this: you've
+got a lot to learn about this something-for-something business, and the
+quicker you get at it, Mr. Blount, the sooner you'll arrive somewhere.
+About this little matter of ours, there's no special hurry. Take your
+own time to think it over; take it up with McVickar, if you want to.
+Then, when you get things fixed, wire me one word to Twin Buttes. Just
+say 'Yes,' and sign your name to it. That'll be enough."
+
+For a long half-hour after the president of the Twin Buttes Lumber
+Company and its allied corporations had closed the door of the private
+office behind him, Blount sat rocking gently in his pivot-chair. In the
+fulness of time the bitter thoughts wrought their way into words.
+
+"So this is what I was hired for!" he mused, "a fence; a wretched mask
+put up to hide the trickery and chicanery and criminality--the
+crookedness which has never been put aside; which nobody ever meant to
+put aside! My God! they've let me stultify myself in a thousand ways;
+let me sit here day after day with a lie in my mouth, saying things that
+nobody in this God-forsaken homeland of mine has believed for a single
+minute! After it's all over, every man who has listened to me will say
+that I _knew_--that all this talk about openness and fair dealing was
+simply that much dust-throwing to hide the workings of a corrupt and
+criminal machine grinding away in the background!"
+
+He turned to his desk and sat with his head propped in his hands,
+staring at the little photograph of Wartrace Hall which he had had
+mounted in a plate-glass paper-weight. The sight gave an added twist to
+the torture screw and he broke out again.
+
+"I've been nothing more than a bit of potter's clay, and the master
+potter--God help me!--is my own father! It's all plain enough now. He
+saw that I wasn't going to fall in with the attorney-general scheme; or
+perhaps he saw that I might be a stumbling-block if I should; so he
+planned this thing with McVickar--planned it deliberately! There is no
+fight, after all; it's merely one of the moves in the game that the
+'boss' and the railroad should seem to be fighting each other. Good God!
+I can't believe it, and yet I've got to believe it. That man Hathaway
+is a self-confessed criminal, but he was telling the truth about the
+law-breaking trickery that is going on; he wouldn't be idiotic enough to
+lie and then give me a chance to prove the lie. And he didn't come to me
+of his own volition; he was sent--sent to break me down, and sent by....
+Oh, dad, dad! how could you do it!"
+
+With his face hidden in the crook of his arm, he was groping in vain
+outreachings for something to lay hold of, for some clear-minded,
+clean-hearted adviser who could tell him what to do; how he should
+clamber out of this pit of humiliation into which nothing more culpable
+than an honest zeal for civic righteousness had precipitated him. In his
+despair he told himself that there was no one, and then suddenly he
+remembered--Patricia would know, and she would understand better than
+any one else in a populous world how to point the way out of the
+labyrinth. He must go to her and tell her. In the meantime....
+
+He got up and shut his desk with a slam. In the meantime there should be
+no more lies told--no more turns taken in the crooked path. Collins, the
+stenographer, heard the noise of the desk closing and came to the door
+of the private room, note-book and pencil in hand. "Anything to give me
+before you go out?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Blount almost savagely. "Take a message to Mr. McVickar. Are
+you ready?"
+
+The stenographer nodded.
+
+Blount dictated curtly: "'Pending another interview with you in person,
+I shall close my offices in Temple Court and confine myself strictly to
+the routine legal business of the company. Meanwhile, my resignation is
+in your hands if you wish to appoint a new division counsel.' Have you
+got that, Collins? Very well; write it out and send it at once. I shall
+be at the Inter-Mountain for a little while, if you want to reach me
+between now and closing time."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT
+
+
+Going to the hotel, Blount shut himself into a telephone booth and
+tried, ineffectually, to get a long-distance connection with Wartrace
+Hall. When he finally grew exasperated at the central operator's
+oft-repeated "line's busy," he called up Gantry to ask if the traffic
+manager knew anything about the purposes and movements of his father.
+Gantry did not know, but he knew something else--a thing which proved
+the leakiness of the railroad telegraph department.
+
+"Come down here and tell me what you mean by sending incendiary
+telegrams to the vice-president," he commanded, with jesting severity.
+And with a hard word for the department which had gossiped, Blount went
+down to the general offices in the station building.
+
+Gantry was busy with the stenographer, but the business was immediately
+postponed and the clerk dismissed when Blount entered.
+
+"'Tell it out among the heathen,'" the traffic manager quoted jocosely,
+when the door closed behind the shorthand man.
+
+"There is nothing to tell--more than you seem to know already," snapped
+Blount morosely. "I have wired my resignation, that's all."
+
+"But why?" persisted Gantry.
+
+"Because I'm not going to be an accessory, either before or after the
+fact--not if I know it," was the curt rejoinder.
+
+"An accessory to what?"
+
+"To the criminal disregard for the laws of this State and the nation
+which seems to be the underlying motive actuating every move in this
+corrupt game of politics. Gantry, if you and some others had your just
+deserts, you would be breaking stone in the penitentiary this blessed
+minute!"
+
+"Suffering Moses!" gasped the traffic manager. "Somebody must have been
+hitting you pretty hard. Who was it; some more of the 'little
+brothers'?"
+
+At another time Blount might have been less angry, and, by consequence,
+more discreet.
+
+"No, it wasn't any of the 'little brothers'; it was Mr. Simon P.
+Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company."
+
+Gantry drew a long breath which ended in a low whistle.
+
+"So that's what you were let in for, was it?" he exclaimed, and then he
+checked himself abruptly and went back to the original contention. "But
+you're not going to throw down your tools and walk out, Evan. You can't
+afford to do that."
+
+"Why can't I?"
+
+"Because you have committed yourself right and left. No man can afford
+to drop out of the ranks on the eve of a battle. You are not stopping to
+consider the construction which will be put upon any such hasty action
+on your part."
+
+"I am not stopping to consider anything, Dick, save the fact that I was
+evidently expected to connive at a cynical and criminal disregard for
+the law of the land, the law which, as a member of the bar, I have sworn
+to uphold and defend. That is enough for me. I don't have to be knocked
+down and run over before I can realize that it's time to get out of the
+way."
+
+"You say it's enough for you; it won't be enough for Mr. McVickar,"
+Gantry interposed. "If you could afford to drop out--and I'm not
+admitting that you can--he couldn't afford to let you." Then, with
+sudden gravity: "Hadn't you better let me hold up that telegram of yours
+for a few hours, Evan, until you've had time to cool down and think it
+over?"
+
+Blount sprang from his chair in a white heat.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that you are already holding it up?" he
+demanded.
+
+"I took the liberty of holding it up--temporarily," confessed the
+traffic man coolly. "There is no harm done. Mr. McVickar is on his way
+West now, and he will be here in a day or two. Why not kill the message
+and have it out with him in person when he comes?"
+
+Blount was not to be so easily appeased.
+
+"I won't have my communications tampered with!" he exploded. "If you
+have given an order to have that telegram held out, you can give another
+to have it sent immediately!"
+
+"All right," said Gantry; "just as you say." And he made no effort to
+detain the enraged one who was turning his back and striding away. But
+after the self-discharged political manager was gone, the traffic man
+chuckled quietly and turned up a square of paper which had been lying on
+his desk during the short and belligerent interview.
+
+"It's a nice lay-out," he mused, reading the type-written lines over
+again, "but the little lady was too fly for you this time, Evan, my boy.
+She was just prophetess enough to guess where and how you would go off
+the handle, clever enough to pass me the word to watch the wires after a
+certain train should get in from Ophir to-day. Great little woman, that.
+I believe she figures out more than half of the fine moves in the
+Honorable Senator's game, though this particularly fine move of sending
+Hathaway to touch a match to Evan's little powder-keg is one that I
+don't begin to understand." And he folded the telegram and carefully put
+it away in his pocket-book.
+
+Evan Blount walked three squares beyond the Inter-Mountain Hotel before
+he had cooled down sufficiently to determine what to do next. As it
+chanced, the cooling-down process had led him to the door of the public
+garage patronized by his father. That thought of flying to Patricia for
+counsel and comfort was still with him, but it was over-shadowed by a
+more militant desire to fight somebody; to go to his father and tell him
+how completely and successfully he had plotted with the vice-president
+to humiliate a son whose only offence was a decent regard for honor and
+uprightness.
+
+Acting upon the impulse of the moment, he went in and asked if any of
+Senator Blount's cars were in the city. There was one--the big roadster;
+and Blount's decision was taken instantly. On that first day at Wartrace
+Hall his father had tried to give him one of the three motor-cars
+outright, and when he had refused to take it as a gift, a compromise had
+been made by which he was under promise to use any one of the machines
+he could get hold of when the need arose. Accordingly, a few minutes
+later he was behind the steering-wheel of the fast roadster, picking his
+way through the traffic-burdened city streets and pointing straight for
+the country road leading north to the sage-brush hills.
+
+Now, among its many attractions, motoring numbers--from the driver's
+point of view--this: that it effectually sweeps the brain of all other
+cares and distractions, sundry and several, since one may not drive a
+high-powered car at speed and successfully think of anything but the
+driving. Blount reached the entrance to the cottonwood-shaded avenue at
+Wartrace Hall just before the dinner hour; and he was so far recovered
+from the attack of righteous indignation that he was able to meet his
+father and the others with a fair degree of equanimity. In the back part
+of his mind, however, he held the fighting ultimatum in suspense. In
+the course of the evening he would make his opportunity and have it out,
+once for all, with the master plotter. So much he determined while he
+was dressing for dinner. But the course of events is sometimes a most
+unmalleable thing, as he was presently to learn.
+
+At the dinner-table it was the professor who monopolized the
+conversation, holding forth learnedly and dictatorially upon matters
+pertaining solely to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the talk
+to approach nearer than several million years to the twentieth century.
+And at the dispersal--only there was no dispersal--the senator took his
+turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room and persuading
+Patricia to go to the piano.
+
+The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his
+brain bided his time. He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and
+Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was
+still outweighing the lesser. Further along, when Miss Anners had played
+herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination. But, in
+spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the
+pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.
+
+The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the
+bamboo _portières_ he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric
+discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should.
+Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and
+that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the
+long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But when his patience was
+finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo
+_portières_ aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It was Patricia,
+and she was alone.
+
+"I thought perhaps I should find you here," she said, taking the easy
+chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was
+blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn. "Did we
+bore you to death with the Pliocenes?"
+
+"Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But since I hadn't remembered to
+have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to
+galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods."
+
+"Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for daddy's sake I do try to.
+But for us who are living to-day there are so many problems of
+critically vital importance--problems that the pterodactyls never knew
+anything about."
+
+"I know," returned the young man, half-absently. "I am up against one of
+them, right now, and I don't know how to solve it."
+
+"Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her
+tone was personal rather than conventional.
+
+"It will not only bear telling; it demands to be told to some one whose
+sense of right and wrong has not been drawn and quartered and flayed
+alive until it has no longer life or breath left with which to
+protest," and thereupon he told her circumstantially all that had
+befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the
+wrecked train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of the lumber
+magnate's attempt at corruption, of which he suppressed nothing but the
+fact that her father's name appeared in Mr. Hathaway's list of
+share-holders. When he had made an end, her eyes were shining, though
+whether with quickened sympathy or indignation he could not determine.
+
+"What did you do?" she asked, referring to the incident of the
+afternoon.
+
+"I didn't do half enough!" he fumed. "I'm afraid I let Hathaway escape
+without being told plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable
+scoundrel he is. When he edged out of the door, he was still telling me
+to take my time to think it over, and was indicating the way in which I
+might communicate my consent without committing anybody. I made a
+mistake in not firing him bodily!"
+
+Miss Anners was tapping one daintily shod foot on the tiled hearth.
+
+"You made your greatest mistake in the very beginning, Evan," she said
+decisively. "You should have made a confidant of your father."
+
+"I did try to," he protested. "Everything was all right until this
+political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I
+couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the
+corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr.
+McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I
+could really do something toward bringing about a better understanding."
+
+"And now you believe you can't?--that it is impossible?"
+
+"Not wholly impossible, I suppose. But the 'great game' seems to be
+everything in this benighted commonwealth, and everybody plays it--my
+father, his wife, the railroad officials, and the politicians. Surely
+you wouldn't say that I should have let father put me on the State
+ticket as a candidate, knowing--as I could not help knowing--that I
+would be expected to carry out the designs of the machine regardless of
+right and wrong?"
+
+"Certainly not," was the quick reply, "not if you were convinced that
+the motive--your father's motive--was unworthy. But if you have been
+telling me the truth, and all the truth, I should say that you didn't
+stop to inquire what his motive was."
+
+"What was the use of inquiring?" he demanded moodily. "He is the boss,
+and he would have used the machine to put me into office as
+attorney-general. In other words, I should have owed my election, not to
+the will and selection of the people, but to the will of one man, and
+that man my nearest kinsman; a man who is, beyond all question of doubt,
+working hand in glove with all the trickery and double-dealing practised
+by the corporations. Under such conditions, would it have been possible
+for me to accept and to administer the office without fear or favor?"
+
+"I don't know why not," she returned. "Notwithstanding your
+charge--which merely shows how angry you are--your 'nearest kinsman,' as
+you call him, would have been the last man in the world to interfere.
+Wasn't that the very reason he gave you for wanting to put you on the
+ticket?"
+
+"I know," said Blount, whose mind was beginning to cloud again. "But
+there are so many other mysteries. We'll say that my father honestly
+wanted me to stand for the candidacy. But right in the midst of things
+he conspires with Mr. McVickar to put me into my present unspeakable
+dilemma."
+
+Her smile was gently reproachful.
+
+"It is my poor opinion, Evan, that you don't half appreciate your
+father. Worse than that, you don't know him. But that is beside the
+present mark. What are you going to do?"
+
+"I have already done it. I have wired my resignation to Mr. McVickar,
+and he will doubtless accept it."
+
+She was looking him fairly in the eyes. "That is the second unwise thing
+you have done," she remarked. And then: "Evan, there are times when you
+are sadly in need of a balance-wheel. Don't you know that?"
+
+"I knew it a good while ago. I applied for one once, and it was refused
+when you said 'No'."
+
+For one who was supposed to be far above and beyond such emotional
+signallings, she blushed very prettily. Which merely proves that one may
+be a diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating the
+miseries of a sodden world, without having parted with the primitive sex
+impulse.
+
+"I am willing to try to help you now," she said, half hesitating; "if
+only you won't try to drag me over into the field of sentiment. It was
+just a bit of boyish rage--fine enough in its way, but foolish--your
+sending that telegram to Mr. McVickar. Can't you recall it?"
+
+"No; not now."
+
+"Then you must do the next best thing: tell him you have reconsidered."
+
+"But I haven't reconsidered; I can't and won't stand in with the
+corruption and bribery that is going on all around me!" he objected
+indignantly.
+
+"Of course you can't; and you mustn't. But the true reformer doesn't
+drop things and run away. You must stay in and fight--fight harder than
+you ever have before, Evan. If you can't do it for the sake of the
+larger right, then you must do it for your own sake. Can't you see the
+open door before you?"
+
+"I can see and hear and feel when the door is slammed in my face," was
+the qualifying rejoinder. "How can I go on preaching the gospel of
+cleanness and fair dealing, when I know that all this crooked work is
+going on behind my back? What will the people of this State say to me
+and about me when the crookedness comes to light?"
+
+"Ah!" she said; "that is just where you begin to grow one-sided. You
+must go on preaching the gospel, but that is only half of the battle.
+The other half is to be big enough and strong enough and insistent
+enough to make the thing itself agree with the gospel. I fully believe
+you lost your best helper when you refused to join hands with your
+father. You don't believe that, so we'll let it go. You have gone your
+own way, choosing what seemed to you to be the better opportunity. Evan,
+you can't turn back; you've simply _got_ to go on and wring success out
+of apparent failure!"
+
+Blount drew a deep breath and sat up in his chair. There was no
+mistaking the light in Patricia's eyes now; the pure flame of which it
+was the visible radiance is the torch which has kindled the beacon fires
+on all the heights since the world began.
+
+"If I had only my own people--the railroad people--to knock down and
+drag out," he was beginning, but she broke in warmly:
+
+"You think you have your father against you, too; I don't believe it,
+but you do. Very well; then you must compel him, as well as the others.
+Be a big man, Evan; be the biggest man in the State until you have
+proved that one man with a righteous cause is better than ten thousand
+without it."
+
+Blount got up and stood with his back to the dying embers of the tiny
+fire, and if he put his hands behind him it was because the passionate
+impulse to break down all the barriers was twitching in every fibre of
+him.
+
+"Patricia, girl, I wonder if you know what you have done to me? I drove
+out here this evening utterly discouraged and disheartened; bitter and
+angry, and ready to throw the whole thing up and go away. You've
+changed all that--you, you know; just you. Oh, girl, girl! if I could
+only have you beside me to give me my battle-word!"
+
+She had her slender fingers locked over one knee and her eyes were
+downcast.
+
+"Now you are tempting me," she said slowly; "and--and it isn't fair. You
+know my weakness and passion to help. You _mustn't_ tempt me, Evan."
+
+What he would have said, with what eager pleadings he would have pressed
+the advantage gained by his appeal for the larger help, is not to be
+here set down. For at that moment the bamboo door curtains parted to
+admit the small house-mistress.
+
+"You two!" she scolded with light-hearted austerity. And then to Evan:
+"Don't you know that we are keeping country hours here at Wartrace now?
+The professor will be up and calling for the car at six o'clock, and
+it's past midnight. Shame on you! Run away and get your beauty
+sleep--both of you!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE LIEGEMAN
+
+
+Evan Blount drove himself back to the capital in the swift roadster the
+following morning, and there was no opportunity for further confidential
+speech with Patricia before he left. But with the new day had arisen,
+full-grown, the determination born in the moment of midnight
+heart-warming and inspiration. To the best of his ability he would live
+up to the high standard set for him by the woman he loved, not only
+preaching the gospel of fair dealing, but doing his utmost to make it
+effective.
+
+With this high purpose singing its song of exaltation in his veins, he
+drove on past the garage and made an early call at the office of the
+traffic manager. Gantry was in the midst of his morning mail-opening,
+but he pushed the desk-load of papers aside when the door swung inward
+to admit the early visitor.
+
+"Hello, old man! Come back to jar me some more about that telegram?" was
+his greeting.
+
+Blount shook his head. "No; if you've sent it, well and good. If you
+haven't, you may pitch it into the waste-basket. I came to talk about
+something else."
+
+"Good, sound, sensible second thought!" Gantry commented, laughing. Then
+he took out his pocket-book and passed the suppressed telegram across to
+Blount. "Here it is; you can do the waste-basket act yourself. I
+couldn't let you commit _hara-kiri_ without at least trying to get the
+cutting tool out of your hands. What is the other thing you've got on
+your mind this early in the morning? It must be a nightmare of some
+sort, by the look in your eyes."
+
+"It may figure as a nightmare to you, Dick, before we're through with
+it. I'll make it short. You know what I have been doing--what I supposed
+I was hired to do--assuring everybody right and left that we were going
+into this campaign with clean hands?"
+
+"I know," admitted the traffic manager, developing a sudden interest in
+the figures of the rug at his feet.
+
+"I have been doing this in a business way at my office up-town, in
+season and out of season, and night before last, at Ophir, I did it
+publicly. As the campaign progresses, I shall doubtless put myself on
+record many times to the same effect."
+
+"Good man!" applauded Gantry, striving to drag the talk down to some
+less portentous altitude. "I'm sure we need all the whitewashing anybody
+can give us."
+
+"That is just the point I have come to make," Blount went on gravely.
+"It mustn't be merely a coat of whitewash, Dick; it has got to be the
+real thing, this time. I began by firing the 'little brothers,' as you
+called them, but I sha'n't stop at that; I mean to go higher up if I am
+compelled to. I am here this morning to ask you to give me your word as
+a gentleman and my friend that you will not, directly or indirectly, do
+or cause to be done anything that will make me stand forth as a
+self-convicted liar before the people of this State. I want you to
+promise me that you will cut out all the deals, all the briberies, all
+the bargainings, all the--"
+
+"Oh, say; see here!" protested the man under fire; "you've got the wrong
+pig by the ear, Evan. I'm not the Transcontinental Railway Company!"
+
+"I know you are not. But, to a greater degree than any other official in
+the local management, you have Mr. McVickar's confidence. If you don't
+feel competent to handle the thing on your own responsibility, of course
+it's your privilege to pass it up to those who have the authority. In
+that case, I wish to make one point clear: you're the man I'm going to
+hold up to the rack. I can't afford to spread myself over the entire
+management, and I don't mean to try. I'm going to look to you, Dick, for
+the backing of the clean sheet, and I warn you in all soberness that
+there must be no blots on it; no compromises; no whipping of the devil
+around the stump."
+
+"Great Scott!" murmured Gantry. "And you're on the pay-rolls, the same
+as the rest of us! But candidly, as man to man, Evan, the thing can't be
+done, you know. We've got to play the game; they'll eat us alive if we
+don't. You needn't figure in it at all; it was a mistake letting Sim
+Hathaway get to you, and I said so at the time. But your--er--the powers
+that be said it had to be that way, and I had to let him go and ball you
+all up. It sha'n't happen again; I can promise you that much, anyway."
+
+Blount caught quickly at the hesitant pause.
+
+"Who were 'the powers that be' in Hathaway's case, Dick?" he inquired.
+
+"I can't tell you that; honestly, I can't, Evan," was the anxious
+refusal. "Don't ask me."
+
+"All right; then I shall assume that Mr. McVickar was responsible," said
+Blount calmly, thus proving that he had not taken his degree in the law
+school for nothing.
+
+"Oh, hold on! You mustn't do that, either!" protested the man who was
+figuring most unwillingly as the occupant of the witness stand.
+
+"Thank you," returned the postgraduate, with the true Blount smile. "Now
+I know that it was my father. No; you needn't deny it; I suppose it was
+for some good reason that this man was sent to teach me how to play the
+game--as reasons go in practical politics. But we are side-stepping the
+real issue. I've asked you for a promise: will you give it?"
+
+"I--I can't give it, Evan, and hold my job; that's God's own truth!"
+
+"No; it isn't God's truth--it's the other kind. But that was about what
+I expected you to say. Now hear my side of it: if you don't clean
+house--you and the other officials of the company--I shall not only
+resign; I shall take the field on the other side and tell what I know
+and why I've thrown up my job. I've been telling everybody that this is
+to be a campaign of publicity, and by all that is good and great, I
+shall keep my word, Dick!"
+
+"Oh, for heaven's sake, you wouldn't do that!" ejaculated the traffic
+man, now thoroughly alarmed. "Land of glory, Evan! you know too much--a
+great deal too much!"
+
+The young man who knew too much got up and relighted his cigar with a
+match taken from Gantry's desk box.
+
+"It's up to you," he said, with his hand on the door-knob. "Get into
+communication with whatever 'powers that be' there are that can give the
+necessary orders; see to it that the orders are given, and that they are
+put in the way of being carried out. As God hears me, Dick, I mean what
+I say: it's a clean sheet, or an exposure that will make a lot of you
+wish you had never been born. If I have to put the screws on--as I hope
+and pray I sha'n't--you can bet they'll be put on lawyer-fashion; with
+evidence that will send a bunch of you to the penitentiary."
+
+"Hold on--one question before you go, Evan!" pleaded Gantry. "I haven't
+known half the time where I'm at in this latest muddle. Is this another
+little blind lead of the Honorable Sen--of your father's?"
+
+Blount's smile was as grim as any that Gantry had ever seen on the face
+of the Honorable David.
+
+"It's against nature for you to play the game straight, isn't it, Dick?"
+he said in mild reproach. "If you don't know that my father is still the
+head of the machine, and that the machine has always been for you in the
+past, I imagine you're the only man in the Sage-Brush State who needs
+enlightening. No, Gantry; you've got only one man to fight; but you
+mustn't forget that his name, also, is Blount. Go to it and send me
+word, and let the first word be that you have scotched the head of this
+lumber-company snake. That's all for to-day. Good-by."
+
+Notwithstanding the fact that his day's work was still ahead of him, the
+traffic manager did not attack it when he was left alone. An able man in
+his calling, and one who had fought his way rapidly by sheer merit and
+hard work from a clerkship to an official desk, Richard Gantry was still
+lacking, in a character admirable and most lovable in many ways, the
+iron that refuses to bend, and--though perhaps in lesser measure--the
+courage of his ultimate convictions. In addition to these basic
+weaknesses he owned another--the weakness of the cog which is
+constrained to turn with the great wheel of which it is a part.
+
+In his heart of hearts Richard Gantry knew that Blount was right; knew
+that the forlorn-hope fight into which his friend and college classmate
+had plunged was a struggle to call out all that was best and finest in
+friendly loyalty. But when he sprang from his chair and began to walk
+the floor of his private office with his head down and his hands deeply
+buried in his pockets, he was once more the true corporation liegeman,
+loyal to his salt, and anxious only to contrive means to an end.
+
+"Confound his picture!" he muttered, "why the devil can't he see that
+he's got everything to lose and nothing to gain? It's a thousand pities
+that such a royal good fellow has to turn himself into a wild-eyed,
+impossible crank! The Lord knows, I'd do anything in reason for him; but
+I can't let him turn anarchist and blow us all to kingdom come. He's got
+to be muzzled in some way, and I'll be hanged if I know how it's going
+to be done."
+
+The pacing monologue paused when the traffic manager stopped at the
+window and stood looking with unseeing eyes upon the morning bustle of
+Sierra Avenue. Then he broke out again.
+
+"It's a beautiful tangle--damn' beautiful! Evan says I know that we've
+got the machine with us; I wish to heaven I did know it, and could be
+sure of it. That would simplify matters a whole lot. But the
+vice-president won't say, and he's the one who has been doing all the
+dickering with the Honorable David. They quarrelled at first; I'd bet
+every dollar I've got on that. But I more than half-believe they've
+patched it up now, and I believe it was Mr. McVickar's quick swiping of
+Evan--jerking him out from under his father's thumb the way he did--that
+brought on the peace negotiations."
+
+He turned away from the window and resumed the floor-pacing, still
+wrestling with the deductions.
+
+"By George! I believe I've got hold of the end of the thread at last!
+The senator _is_ with us, working in the dark, as he always does. And
+that Hathaway business: that was one of his smooth little
+side-moves--his or Mrs. Honoria's. He didn't want Evan to get in too
+deep in the righteousness puddle, and he took that way of letting him
+get a peek at the real thing. It was overdone, though; horribly
+overdone. Confound it all! I wish Mr. McVickar would loosen up a little
+more with me! If he'd tell me a few of the things I ought to know--"
+
+The interruption was the entrance of the boy from the train-despatcher's
+office with a verbal message. The vice-president, moving westward, had
+changed his plans and cut out some of his stop-overs. Car "008" would be
+in on the noon train and would proceed westward, running special, at one
+o'clock. The despatcher had thought that Mr. Gantry might want to know.
+
+The traffic manager did want to know, and when the boy had ducked out,
+the knowledge was promptly utilized. A touch of a desk-button brought
+the stenographer, and Gantry dictated a message. "'Important that I
+should have conference with you on arrival. Will meet you at train at
+twelve-three.' Send that to Mr. McVickar over the despatcher's wire, and
+ask Gilkey to rush it," he directed, and the shorthand man went to do
+it.
+
+"Now, Mr. Evan Anarchist Blount!" said Gantry, apostrophizing the late
+disturber of his peace, "now we'll find out just where we're at and how
+big a rope it's going to take to snub you down," and thereupon the desk
+buzzer rattled again, and Mr. Richard Gantry squared himself for his
+forenoon's work.
+
+At the moment of his apostrophizing Blount was opening his mail in the
+Temple Court office, and lamenting, as a loyal friend might, the
+necessity for the recent clubbing into line of so fine a fellow as Dick
+Gantry. But the mail-opening plunged him once more into the political
+actualities. There were letters from all over the State, and among them
+three invitations from widely separated cities, all based upon the
+newspaper reports of his Ophir speech. It seemed to be plainly evident
+that the "campaign-of-education" idea was striking a popular chord, and
+the proponent of the idea saw what a miraculous opportunity was offering
+for the railroad if only the "powers" that Gantry had refused to name
+were broad enough and high-minded enough to seize it.
+
+After a day and an evening well filled with detail, Blount went to the
+station to take the nine-thirty west-bound, since the first of the three
+speaking engagements--all of which had been promptly accepted by
+wire--lay in that direction. On the platform, whither he went to
+consult the bulletin-board, he found Gantry.
+
+"Your train is half an hour late," said the traffic man, with a glance
+for the travelling-bag in Blount's hand. "Didn't they know enough at the
+hotel to tell you about it?"
+
+"They told me it was on time," said the putative traveller, and he was
+far enough from suspecting that Gantry himself had arranged to have the
+inaccurate information given across the counter at the Inter-Mountain,
+so that he might be sure of an uninterrupted half-hour with Blount
+before he should leave the city.
+
+"Ump!" said the traffic manager, "I've got to wait for it, too. One of
+my men is coming in on it. Let's go up to the office. It's pleasanter
+there."
+
+Together they climbed the stair to the second floor of the station
+building, and Gantry unlocked the door of his private room and turned on
+the lights.
+
+"Feeling any more humane than you did this morning?" he inquired
+genially, after he had opened his desk and found a box of cigars.
+
+"I haven't been feeling otherwise since--well, let's say since midnight
+last night," countered Blount laughing.
+
+"Why midnight?"
+
+"That was about the time when I made up my mind definitely to stay in
+the fight."
+
+"Then you are still meaning to go ahead on the lines you laid down this
+morning?"
+
+"If I wasn't, I shouldn't be here to take the train for the rally at
+Angora to-morrow night."
+
+Gantry smoked in silence for a little time. Then he said: "You can't do
+it, Evan. It's fine and glorious and heart-breaking, and all that; but
+you can't do it."
+
+"I can, and I will!"
+
+"I say you can't. I know a good bit more now than I knew this morning!"
+
+"Catalogue it," said Blount tersely.
+
+"Mr. McVickar came in on the noon train to-day, and I had an interview
+with him."
+
+"That doesn't tell me anything."
+
+Again the traffic manager took time to smoke and to reflect.
+
+"You made some pretty savage threats this morning, Evan; about shoving
+this thing to the point where the grand juries, Federal and State, could
+take hold of it. As a lawyer, you know even better than I do what that
+would mean."
+
+"I told you what it would mean. In the present state of public sentiment
+it would mean prison sentences for every man of you caught with the
+goods."
+
+"Yes, for every man of us," said Gantry slowly; "for the railroad man
+who has given, and for the other man who has taken. Evan, the jails of
+this State wouldn't be big enough to hold us all."
+
+"I can readily believe you. That is the full weight of the stick with
+which I am going to club you fellows into decency."
+
+"And you'll let the club fall wherever it may?"
+
+"I've got to do that, Dick; I can't do any less."
+
+For the third time Gantry paused. The train-waiting interval was half
+gone, and he had been feeling purposefully for the climaxing moment
+without finding it. But now he decided that it had come.
+
+"In the talk this morning there was some reference made to your father
+and his attitude in this fight, Evan. Do you remember what was said?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"Well, suppose I should tell you that I know now--what I didn't know
+certainly then--that when you hit out at us you hit him?"
+
+"You mean that he is with you in this scheme to hoodwink the people?"
+
+"Ask yourself," was the low-toned reply.
+
+"I have asked myself a hundred times, Dick; I've been hoping against
+hope. I'll be utterly frank with you, as man to man. We've kept pretty
+obstinately out of the political field, both of us, father and I, since
+the first day when I told him my views on machine-made government. But
+from a few little things he has said, I've gathered that he isn't with
+you; that there has been a quarrel of some kind between him and Mr.
+McVickar--"
+
+"There was a set-to--a battle royal," Gantry put in. "The last act of it
+was played to a finish that evening when Mr. McVickar took you down to
+his car and hired you. But there has been a meeting since. Ask yourself
+again, Evan. Haven't you had good and sufficient reasons for believing
+that you are bucking, not only the railroad company, but your own flesh
+and blood?"
+
+This time it was Blount who took time for reflection. The shot had gone
+home. He told himself that there were only too many reasons for
+believing that Gantry was stating the simple fact. None the less, he
+made a final effort to break down the conclusion that Gantry was
+relentlessly thrusting upon him.
+
+"In all our talks, Dick--there haven't been very many of them--my father
+has taken, or seemed to take, a different line. I don't recall anything
+specific just now, but he has given me the impression that he hasn't
+much in common with Mr. McVickar and his methods. To hear him talk--"
+
+Gantry smiled. "You know your father very superficially, Evan, if you'll
+permit me to say so. What the Honorable David Blount says in talk with
+you or me or anybody outside of the inner circle is a mighty poor
+foundation upon which to build any idea of what's going on in the back
+of his head. No--hold on; don't get mad. What I'm trying to tell you is
+what everybody in the sage-brush hills--save and excepting
+yourself--knows like a book, and that is that the big boss's moves are
+all made strictly in the dark. He doesn't let his own right hand know
+what the left is doing. That's the secret of his absolutely Czarish
+power, I think."
+
+The shriek of a distant locomotive whistle floated in through the open
+window at Blount's back and he got up stiffly.
+
+"That's my train coming," he said. And then: "Tell me plainly, Dick:
+you brought me up here to throw a final brick--a bigger one than you
+have yet thrown--and I know it. What did Mr. McVickar tell you to-day
+that will make my job harder than I am already finding it?"
+
+Gantry turned his head, refusing to meet the straightforward gaze of the
+questioner.
+
+"You intimated this morning that you would go at it lawyer-fashion,
+Evan," he said; "which means, I suppose, that you would get the evidence
+on us. You can do it; the Lord knows, there's plenty of it to be had.
+But when you pull out one set of props the whole thing will come down.
+We haven't any of us been careful enough about what we put in
+writing--_not even your father_."
+
+Blount staggered as if the words had been a blow.
+
+"You're trying to tell me that my father would be involved in the
+disclosures you fellows might drive me to make?" he demanded, and his
+voice was husky.
+
+Gantry was still looking away. "There always has to be an
+intermediary--you know that. We can't do business direct with
+these--with the people who have something to sell. You can draw your own
+inferences, Evan. I didn't send Hathaway to you; I sent him to your
+father."
+
+The train was thundering into the station and Blount picked up his
+hand-bag and went out, stumbling blindly in the unlighted passage at the
+stair-head. And in the private office behind him the traffic manager
+was crushing his dead cigar in his clenched hand and staring fixedly at
+the square of darkness framed by the open window.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+BARRIERS INVISIBLE
+
+
+During the three weeks following the night journey to Angora, a journey
+on which he once more fought the hard battle to a still sharper
+conclusion, Evan Blount scarcely saw his office in Temple Court for more
+than a brief hour or two at a time. One speaking appointment followed
+another in such rapid succession that he was constantly going or
+returning; and since there was everywhere a repetition of the welcome
+accorded him by the miners of the Carnadine district, there was no
+reason save physical weariness to make him wish to limit his
+opportunity.
+
+It was not until he was deep into the fourth week of the hurryings to
+and fro that he began to admit a suspicion which grew like a juggler's
+rose once he had given it place. Could it be possible that these
+numerous invitations, coming now from all parts of the State, were
+purely spontaneous? If not, if they were so many subtle moves in the
+great game, he could see no possible end to be subserved by them save
+one: they were effectually keeping him away from the capital, which was
+naturally the nucleus and centre of the campaign activities. Was there
+something going on at headquarters that "the powers" did not wish him
+to find out? Of one thing he was well assured. Gantry was dodging him,
+was apparently keeping an accurate record of his movements; for whenever
+the hurryings permitted a flying return to the capital the traffic
+manager was always out of town.
+
+These were small matters, but vital in their way. Failing to keep in
+touch with Gantry, Blount could never be sure that the policy of the
+railroad company had been reformed or changed in any respect. Moreover,
+his journeyings, which brought him in direct contact with the voters
+themselves, seemed to have the effect of isolating him curiously in the
+actual battle-field. That a hot political campaign was raging throughout
+the length and breadth of the State was not to be doubted; the
+newspapers were full of it, and in many districts the fight had become
+acrimonious and bitter. But although he was supposed to be in the thick
+of the fight, he knew that he was not; that some mysterious influence
+was shutting him out and holding him at arm's length.
+
+Everywhere he went the cordial reception, the attentive and hospitable
+committeemen, the packed house, and the generous applause were always
+awaiting him. It was as if his progress had been carefully prearranged,
+like a sort of triumphal procession. None the less, the invisible
+barrier--the barrier which was excluding him from a hand-to-hand grapple
+with the inner workings of the campaign--was always there, and he could
+neither surmount it nor push it aside.
+
+Notwithstanding the hard work and hard travelling, he did not allow the
+missionary effort and its curious isolation to obscure in any sense the
+sturdier purpose. By every means he could devise he was holding his
+principals up to the mirror of a vigilant watchfulness. Arguing that the
+opposition newspapers would be quick to seize upon any charge of
+corruption involving the railroad company, he read them faithfully. As
+yet there had been only innuendoes and a raking over of past misdeeds,
+though by this time many of the editors were openly claiming that the
+old alliance between the railroad and the machine had never been broken,
+and warning their readers accordingly.
+
+Blount winced when he read such editorials as these. Though he was going
+about, striving to do his part manfully, and even with enthusiasm, the
+burden of the cruel responsibility he had voluntarily shouldered was
+never less than crushing. His only hope lay in success. If he could make
+Gantry and his superiors come clean-handed to the election, there need
+be no exposure, no cataclysm involving both the railroad officials and
+his father.
+
+So ran the saving hope; and not content with mere watchfulness, Blount
+tried to get his finger upon the pulse of occasions whenever he could.
+On his brief stop-overs in the capital he kept his eyes and ears open
+for the earliest hint of any charge of chicanery, and though he was
+unable to get hold of Gantry personally, he kept up a steady fire of
+letters and telegrams, all pointing to the same end--absolute and utter
+good faith, and the upholding of his hands in the public plea for a
+square deal. To these the traffic manager always replied guardedly and
+optimistically. Everybody was delighted with the good work done, and
+doing, by the railroad company's field manager; public opinion was
+slowly but surely changing; let the good work go on--and much more to
+the same effect.
+
+Blount did let the good work go on; but as the critical pre-election
+weeks approached, he began to arm himself, reluctantly but resolutely. A
+little quiet investigation, which was made to dovetail cleverly with his
+speech-making journeys, revealed--as Gantry had confessed it
+would--convincing evidence of past corruption and present law-breaking.
+Hathaway had told the truth when he had asserted that his own
+involvement was only one of many similar bargains. Blount called upon
+the president of the Irrigation Alliance at Romero, in the heart of the
+agricultural district, upon the managers of several of the
+electric-power companies, and upon a number of influential mining
+men--all shippers, and all large employers of labor. It was the same
+story everywhere. Preferential freight rates had been given in return
+for votes controlled, and the rates were still in effect.
+
+The investigator turned sick at heart when these men talked quite freely
+to him, thus showing conclusively that they were cynically discounting
+his public utterances. McDarragh, owner and manager of the "Wire-Gold"
+properties in the Moscow district, winked slyly when Blount cautiously
+inserted the probe.
+
+"You're on, Mr. Blount. I sat up there in the Op'ry-house last night
+listening to your game, and says I to myself, 'Thim railroad
+shift-bosses know their trade.' 'Twas a gr-reat talk you gave us, and
+it'll make the swinging of the har-rd-rock vote as easy as twice two. Of
+course, we have a thin paring on the ore rate; you'll be knowing that as
+well as annybody in the game, I'm thinking. 'Tis well that we fellows at
+the top know how to make one hand wash the other. Come again, Mr.
+Blount, and give my regards to the sinator when ye see him. And ye might
+whisper in his ear that it's a waste of good wor-rk for him to be
+sinding his gum-shoe wire-pullers to be laboring with our min. We're
+safe as the clock up here in the Moscow."
+
+This was not the first hint that Blount had been given pointing to the
+underground work of the machine. That this work was being directed
+toward the subversion of the popular will, he made no doubt; and there
+were times when he was strongly tempted to carry the war boldly into the
+wider field of graft and bossism. That he postponed the bigger battle
+was due quite as much to the singleness of purpose which was his best
+gift as to the desire to spare his father. Telling himself resolutely
+that the reformation of the railroad company's political methods was his
+chief object, and the only one which warranted him in retaining his
+place on the Company's payrolls, he held aloof when his father's name
+was mentioned and bent himself to the task of providing the means for
+the subjugation of Gantry--and of Gantry's and his own superiors, if
+need be.
+
+The securing of evidence of the kind which would really give him the
+whip-hand promised to be a delicate undertaking. Men like McDarragh
+talked openly enough about the illegal special freight rates, but talk
+was not evidence. Curiously enough, while he was trying to devise some
+way of obtaining the tangible proof without using his semiofficial
+position in the company's service as a lever, the thing itself was
+thrown at him. From some mysterious source a rumor went out that the
+special rates were in jeopardy; and the very men with whom he had talked
+began to write him importunate letters begging him to deny the rumor.
+With a sheaf of these letters in his pocket, each one inculpating both
+parties to the illegal "deals," Blount grew gayly exultant. The natural
+inference was that Gantry and "the powers" had been finally forced to
+yield--that he had won his victory. But if he had not yet won it,
+chance, or something better, had placed in his hands the weapon with
+which he could compel a return to fair dealing and honesty.
+
+It was on a second speech-making visit to Ophir that Blount had his
+first face-to-face chance at Gantry. A meeting of the Mine-Owners'
+Association, moving for a readjustment of the classification on copper
+matte and bullion at a time when the railroad company might be supposed
+to be on the giving hand, brought Gantry to the gold camp in the
+Carnadine Hills, and the first man he met at the hotel was the stubborn
+dictator of new policies for the Transcontinental Company.
+
+"Hello, Dick! made a mistake, didn't you--coming while I was here?" said
+the reformer, with a very lifelike replica of his father's grim smile.
+"I suppose you have an immediate engagement to go somewhere else, or to
+do something that will give you a chance to dodge?"
+
+"No; I wish to the Lord I had!" was the hearty admission. "You're a
+fright, Evan; you are getting to be a perfect nightmare, with your
+letters and telegrams. You've got me so I'm afraid to open my desk."
+
+Blount nodded gravely. "I'm glad the letters and telegrams have had
+their effect at last," he rejoined.
+
+"Had their effect? Yes, they've had the effect of turning my hair gray,
+if that's what you mean."
+
+"I think you know what I mean, Dick."
+
+"I'll be hanged if I do. What are you driving at?"
+
+"At the fact that you have finally concluded to cancel the crooked deals
+with--wait, and I'll give you the names of the co-respondents"--and he
+drew a packet of neatly docketed letters from his pocket.
+
+"Hold on a minute," protested the traffic manager; "you're getting in
+rather too deep for me. Will you let me see those letters?"
+
+Blount put the letters back into his pocket and mechanically buttoned
+his light top-coat over them for additional safety.
+
+"Do you mean to say that you haven't passed the word to Hathaway and
+McDarragh and a dozen others I could name?" he asked.
+
+"Of course I haven't. You call yourself a lawyer, and yet you ask us to
+set aside promises that are, or ought to be, as binding as so many
+written contracts with penalties attached. You're crazy, Evan; it can't
+be done, and that's all there is to it."
+
+Blount was frowning thoughtfully. "'Can't' goes out of the window when
+'must' comes in at the door, Dick. You remember what I told you--that
+I'd get evidence, lawyer-fashion. I've got it; evidence of the sort that
+would turn the people of this State into a howling mob to tear up your
+tracks if I should publish it."
+
+"But I tell you we _can't_ withdraw the specials, you wild-eyed
+fanatic!"
+
+"All right; then level down the public's rates to fit them. And do it
+quickly, old man. The time is growing fearfully short, and my patience
+isn't what it used to be."
+
+"My Lord! anybody would think you owned the Transcontinental Company,
+lock, stock, and barrel! Where under heaven did you get your nerve,
+Evan? Blest if I don't believe you could out-bluff the old--er--your
+father, himself, if you once got the fool notion into your head that it
+was your duty to try!"
+
+"You are side-stepping again, Dick, and that won't go any longer. You've
+got to fish or cut bait, and do one or the other pretty soon."
+
+"I'd cut the bait all right, if I were Mr. McVickar, Evan. I'd fire you
+so blamed far that you wouldn't be able to find your way back in a month
+of Sundays."
+
+Blount tapped his pocket. "As long as I have these documents, Mr.
+McVickar doesn't dare to fire me. And if you and he don't come down
+within the next few days--yes, it's a matter of days, now--I'll fire
+myself and go over every foot of the ground again, telling what I know."
+
+Gantry's eyes darkened. He had graduated with honors from the particular
+department in railroading in which patience is more than a virtue. Yet
+there are limits.
+
+"You seem to have entirely forgotten that little talk we had in my
+office the night you were going to Angora," he said.
+
+"No; I haven't forgotten it--not for a single waking minute."
+
+"What I said to you then goes as it lies," was the threatening reminder.
+"If you pull the props out, there'll be more than one death in the
+family."
+
+"You mean that you, or Mr. McVickar, will make it a point to include my
+father; I've wrestled that out, too, Dick. I'm going to try to pull him
+out of it, but whether I succeed or fail, the consequences will be the
+same for you fellows. Come and hear me speak to-night, Dick--if you're
+stopping over that long. Then you'll know how much in earnest--how
+deadly in earnest--I am. You spoke of my father just now; I want to
+remind you again that I, too, bear the Blount name--a name that I have
+heard bandied about as a synonym for all that is worst in our political
+life. Don't you see that I've got to make good?"
+
+"Oh, great cats!--you and your high-strung notions of what you've got to
+do!" snorted the traffic manager, and he went away to his classification
+meeting.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+SWORD-PLAY
+
+
+It was during this hard-travelling period that Blount saw, with keen
+regret, the gradual widening of the breach between his father and
+himself. In their infrequent meetings there was never anything remotely
+approaching an open rupture; but in a thousand ways the younger man
+fancied he could see and feel the steady growth of the rift.
+
+That the long arm of the machine of which his father was the
+acknowledged head was reaching out into all corners of the State, was a
+fact no longer to be doubted, and that the influences thus set in motion
+were sinister, he took for granted. Therefore, when it came in his way,
+he scored the machine frankly, charging it with much of the mischief
+which had been wrought in the way of arousing public sentiment against
+the corporations. "The worst in politics joined with the worst elements
+in capitalized industry," was his platform characterization of the
+alliances of the past, and he usually added that he was fighting it as
+every honest man was in duty bound to fight it. But it is hard to fight
+in the dark. After all was said, he could not help admiring the
+subtlety of the master brain which was able to control and direct such a
+complicated piece of human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and
+cleverly that, though the name of the thing was in everybody's mouth,
+its workings were so carefully concealed that it was only by the merest
+chance that he stumbled upon them now and then.
+
+In more than one of the short stop-overs in the capital he had found his
+father still occupying the private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now
+and again there was a meal shared in the more or less crowded _café_. On
+such occasions the son leaned heavily upon the public character of the
+place and carefully steered the table-talk--or thought he did--into
+innocuous channels. But on a day shortly after the meeting with Gantry
+in Ophir this desultory programme was broken. Reaching the hotel in the
+evening after an all-day train journey from Lewiston, Blount found his
+father waiting for him in the lobby, and when he proposed a _café_
+dinner the senator shook his head.
+
+"No, son; not this evening," he said. "I've been feeling sort of set up
+and aristocratic to-day, and I've just ordered a dinner sent upstairs. I
+reckon you'll join me?"
+
+The young man was willing enough; more than willing, since he was now
+ready to say a thing which must be said before he could be prepared to
+set a time limit upon Gantry--a limit beyond which lay the firing of the
+fuse and the blowing up of all things mundane.
+
+"Certainly," he agreed. "Give me a few minutes to change my clothes--"
+
+"You look good enough to me just as you are, boy," said the
+dinner-giver, and he took his son by the arm and walked him to the
+elevator.
+
+In the private dining-room Blount found the table laid for two, much as
+if his coming had been pre-figured. He let that go, and for the time the
+talk was of the doings at Wartrace Hall: of the professor's enthusiastic
+digging for fossils, of Patricia's keen enjoyment of the life in the
+open, and--this put with gentle hesitation on the part of the
+news-bringer--of Mrs. Honoria's growing affection for the young woman
+whose ambitions reached out toward a sociological career.
+
+"You say Patricia is learning to drive a car?" queried Patricia's lover.
+
+"Best woman driver I ever saw," was the senator's praiseful rejoinder.
+"Nothing feazes that little girl, and I'm telling you that she can turn
+the wheels just about as fast as you want to ride."
+
+This was a new aspect of Miss Anners, even to one who knew her as well
+as Blount thought he knew her, and, lover-like, he found a grain of
+encouragement in it. Patricia had never cared for the out-of-door things
+save as they bore upon the hygienic condition of the poor in the great
+cities. If she had changed in one respect, she might change in another.
+
+"I'm glad to know that," he commented. "She was needing an outlet on
+that side. There is a good bit of the Puritan in her--all work and no
+play, you know."
+
+The senator looked out from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "Speaking of
+work; they're working you pretty hard these days, aren't they, son? If
+you belonged to my generation instead of your own, you wouldn't be
+cold-shouldering that young woman out yonder at Wartrace the way you do;
+not for all the politics that were ever hatched."
+
+"I have my work to do, and Patricia Anners would be the last person in
+the world to put obstacles in the way of it," returned the son gravely.
+Then he added: "I wish I could say as much for other people."
+
+The boss shot another keen glance across the table. "Somebody been
+trying to block you, Evan, boy?" he asked.
+
+Blount met the gaze of the shrewd gray eyes without flinching.
+
+"I don't know of any good reason why we shouldn't be entirely frank with
+each other, dad," he said, using for the first time since his return to
+the homeland the old boyhood father-name. "You know, better than any one
+else, I think, what the stumbling-blocks are, and who is putting them in
+my way."
+
+"Maybe so; maybe I do," was the even-toned answer. "It happens so, once
+in a while, that I know a heap of things I can't tell, son." Then: "Has
+McVickar been calling you down?"
+
+"No one has called me down. But some one, or something, is keeping me
+out of the real fight. I don't mean that I'm not doing what I set out to
+do: I've got my own particular abomination by the neck, and I'm about to
+choke the life out of it. But that is, as you might say, a side issue.
+The real struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in it or of it.
+Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same
+predetermined enthusiasm. Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet
+have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me."
+
+The senator's chuckle was barely audible.
+
+"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I were you, son," he
+suggested. "You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating
+over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it
+won't break and let him down into the cold water. You'll get enough of
+the real thing by and by."
+
+Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in precisely the right mood to
+construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to
+make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in
+some mysterious way to insulate him--to make it impossible for him to
+get into the real tide of affairs. But he kept his temper, in a measure,
+at least.
+
+"I guess it's no use for us to try to get together," he said with a tang
+of abruptness in his tone. "We are diametrically opposed to each other
+at every point, you and I, dad. I stand for democracy, the will of the
+people and its fullest and freest expression. You stand for--"
+
+"Well, son, what do I stand for?" queried the father, and the question
+was put with a quizzical smile that brought the hot blood boyishly to
+Blount's cheeks.
+
+"If I should say what all men say--what some of them are frank enough to
+say even to me--" he stopped short, and then went on with better
+self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."
+
+"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured rejoinder. "Being on
+the railroad side, yourself, you can't help feeling sort of hostile at
+the rest of us, I reckon."
+
+Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his
+chair.
+
+"There it is again, you see. We can't get together even on a question of
+admitted fact! Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been
+going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding
+out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the
+railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"
+
+The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've found that out, too, have
+you?" he commented.
+
+"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn't, dad.
+There's a thing behind the alliance that cuts deeper than anything else
+I've had to face."
+
+Once more the deep-set eyes looked out from their bushy penthouses.
+"Reckon you could give it a name, son?"
+
+"Yes; when you found that I wasn't going to let you run me for the
+attorney-generalship, you arranged with Mr. McVickar to have me put on
+the railroad pay-roll. Isn't that the fact?"
+
+"Not exactly," said the senator, and a grim smile went with the
+qualified denial. "It was sort of the other way round. I reckon McVickar
+thought he was putting one across on me when he offered you the railroad
+job and got you to take it."
+
+"I know; that was at first. You and he couldn't come to terms because
+you--because the machine wanted more than he was willing to give. But
+afterward there was another meeting and you got together. That part of
+it was all right, if you see it that way. What broke my heart was the
+fact that you and he agreed to put me up as a fence behind which all the
+crookedness and rascality of a corrupt campaign could be screened."
+
+In the pause which followed, a deft waiter slipped in to change the
+courses. When the man was gone, Blount went on.
+
+"It came mighty near smashing me when I found it out, dad. It wasn't so
+much the thing itself as it was the thought that you'd do it--the
+thought that you had forgotten that I was a Blount, and your son."
+
+Again the older man nodded gravely. "How come you to find out, Evan,
+boy?" he asked.
+
+"It was when Hathaway had been given his chance at me. He opened the
+cesspool for me, as you meant he should when you sent him to me. From
+your point of view, I suppose it was necessary that I should be shown.
+You knew what I was saying and doing; how I was taking it for granted
+that the railroad was going in clean-handed, and the one ray of comfort
+in the whole miserable business is the fact that you cared enough to
+want to give me a glimpse of the real thing that was hiding behind all
+my brave talk. But I don't think you counted fully upon the effect it
+would have upon me."
+
+"What was the effect, son?"
+
+"At first, it made me want to throw up the fight and run away to the
+ends of the earth. It seemed as if I didn't have anybody to turn to. You
+were in it, and Gantry was in it--and Gantry's superiors and mine. That
+evening I borrowed one of your cars and drove out to Wartrace. I meant
+to have it out with you, and then to throw up my hands and quit."
+
+"But you didn't do either one," said the father tentatively.
+
+"No. Nothing went right that day, until just at the last. When I was
+about to give up and go to bed, Patricia came into the smoking-room. I
+had to talk to somebody, so I talked to her; told her where I had
+landed."
+
+"And she advised you to throw up your hands?"
+
+"You don't know Patricia. She put a heart into my body and blood into my
+veins. What she said to me that night is what has kept me going,
+dad--what has made me drive this fight for a clean election on the part
+of the railroad company home to the hilt. I have driven it home. There
+will be no crooked deals on the part of the railroad company this time."
+
+The senator looked up quickly. "That's a mighty good stout thing to
+say," he remarked, adding: "I reckon you're not saying it without having
+the right and proper club hid out somewhere where you can lay hands on
+it?"
+
+Blount tapped his coat-pocket. "I have the club right here--documentary
+evidence that will rip this State wide open and send a lot of people to
+the penitentiary. I've told Gantry to pass the word: a clean sheet, or I
+go over to the other side and tell what I know. And that brings me to
+the thing that I've got to say to you, dad--the thing that made me hope
+I'd find you here to-night. After I'd got my battle-word from Patricia,
+I had a jolt that was worse than the other. When I pulled the gun on
+Gantry, he told me that I couldn't shoot without killing you; that you
+were just as deeply involved as any one of the railroad officials. Is
+that the truth?"
+
+The senator had pushed his chair back and was burying his hands in his
+pockets.
+
+"You've come to try to haul me out of the fire?" he inquired, ignoring
+the direct question.
+
+"I've come to ask you, first, if it is possible for you to stand from
+under. Can you?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I reckon I could dodge, if I had to."
+
+"Then do it, and do it quickly, dad! As there is a God above us, I'm
+going to push this thing through to the bitter end. To-morrow morning I
+shall give Gantry his time limit. If the time goes by, leaving the
+house-cleaning still undone, I shall keep my promise to the letter. You
+know, and I know, what will happen after that."
+
+"Yes; I reckon I know," was the half-absent reply.
+
+Blount threw his napkin aside and glanced at his watch.
+
+"I've got to go back to the office and work a while," he said. And then:
+"I feel better for having had this talk with you, dad. I'm sorry you are
+finding it necessary to fight me, and a thousand times sorrier that I've
+got to fight you. But I can't give ground now, and still be a man and
+your son. Think it over and dodge. It'll break my heart a second time if
+I have to pull the other fellow's house down and bury you in the wreck."
+
+For some little time after his son had left the table and the private
+dining-room, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush sat absently toying with
+his dessert-spoon. When he rose to go out, the battle light in the gray
+eyes was the signal which not even his most faithful henchmen could
+always interpret; but it was a signal which all of them knew by sight,
+and one which many of them feared.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE SAFE-BLOWER
+
+
+About the time that Evan Blount was finishing the fourth week of the
+campaign of education, the senator's wife began to detect signs of
+country weariness in the eyes of Miss Patricia Anners.
+
+"When you are tired of the out-door bignesses, you have only to say the
+word," she told the professor's daughter one morning after they had
+driven to Lost River Canyon and back in the small car. "As you have
+doubtless discovered, the senator and I live either here or at the
+capital indifferently during the season, and we shall be only too glad
+to entertain you in town whenever you feel like going."
+
+To similar proposals made earlier Miss Anners had always returned prompt
+refusals. But for a week or more some impulse which she had not taken
+the trouble to analyze seemed to be drawing her toward the city. The
+mesa roads were just as inviting, and the free pleasures of motoring, in
+a country where speed restrictions were conspicuous only by their
+absence, were just as keen. But now Patricia confessed to a restless
+longing for the sight of city streets and the brabble of city noises.
+
+"Only you mustn't consider us, or me, so much as you do, Mrs. Blount,"
+she protested. "I have a dreadful suspicion that we have already
+interfered shamefully with your autumn plans. You are simply too kind
+and too hospitable to admit it."
+
+"You have interfered with nothing," was the ready assurance. "We were
+not going anywhere, or thinking of going anywhere. No inducement that
+was ever invented would take the senator away from his own State in a
+political year, and your coming has been a blessing. But for the good
+excuse to bring your father out here to the fossil-beds, we should have
+been mewed up in the Inter-Mountain Hotel from the firing of the opening
+gun to the day after election. But that isn't what I meant to say. You
+are tired of so much country; I can read the call of the city in your
+eyes--and they are very pretty eyes, my dear. Shall I telephone the
+senator that we are coming in this afternoon to stay a while?"
+
+"I shall be delighted," said Patricia, and the eyes, which were not only
+pretty but exceedingly apt to tell tales, confirmed the eager assent.
+Then she added: "Now that daddy has his box of books from the university
+library, I doubt if he will know that we are gone."
+
+On their first day in the capital Evan was away, but he returned the
+following morning and Mrs. Blount promptly captured him for a theatre
+box-party which she was inviting for the same evening. In Mrs. Honoria's
+orderly scheme Blount was predestined to go, though he was allowed to
+believe that his acceptance was of free will. Notwithstanding the lapse
+of time and Mrs. Honoria's uniform kindness, he was still unreasonably
+prejudiced, and with the prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin
+to jealousy. It was evident that Patricia's admiration for his father
+extended over to his father's wife; and meaning consistently to dislike
+Mrs. Honoria, he was irrational enough to want Patricia to dislike her,
+too.
+
+The box-party proved to be a more formal affair than he had anticipated,
+since it was large enough to fill two of the open dress-circle boxes.
+Gantry was included, and so were the Weatherfords--father, mother,
+daughters, and son. These, with the Gordons and a Denver man whose name
+of Critchett Blount was not quite sure that he caught in the
+introduction, filled Mrs. Honoria's list. In the seating Blount meant to
+make sure of having a measurably undisturbed evening with Patricia. But
+fate, or a designing hostess, intervened, and he found himself cornered
+between Mrs. Weatherford and her younger daughter, with the
+square-shouldered "Paramounter" candidate for governor strengthening the
+barrier which separated him from Miss Anners.
+
+Blount had met Gordon socially a number of times, and in the intervals
+allowed him by Mrs. Weatherford he was silently studying the face of the
+big man who, singularly enough, as the student thought, was thus
+identifying himself publicly as a friend of the boss. True, Blount did
+not forget his father's warm commendation of Gordon in that earliest
+political talk on the Quaretaro Canyon road, but that was before the
+lines had been drawn and the gage of battle thrown down by the allied
+forces of the machine and the railroad. Now, with the battle drawing to
+its close, Blount thought that nothing could be more certain than the
+fact that his father and his father's organization were joining hands
+with the railroad oligarchy to slaughter Gordon at the polls.
+
+Putting aside the wonder that Gordon should be accepting Mrs. Honoria's
+hospitality, Blount fell to contrasting the strong, large-featured face
+of the Mission Hills ranchman with that of Reynolds, the opposition
+candidate. Though he was himself on the corporation campaigning staff,
+Blount could not help admitting that the comparison was not favorable to
+Reynolds. His first impression of the round-faced, portly gentleman who
+was standing firmly upon what he was pleased to call a platform of law
+and order--a man who was Gordon's opposite in every feature and
+characteristic--had been unfavorable. He had been saying to himself,
+since, that Reynolds's face, in spite of its heavy jaw and prominent
+eyes, was the face of a time-server.
+
+Another point of difference between the two men counted for much.
+Reynolds wanted the office, and was spending money liberally to get it,
+while Gordon had accepted the nomination reluctantly. Throughout the hot
+campaign he had refused to stump the State for himself or his party, and
+was said to be holding steadfastly aloof in the bargaining and
+dickering. Weighing the two men one against the other--Reynolds was
+sitting in an adjacent box with Kittredge and Bentley and two other
+railroad officials--Blount admitted a twinge of regret that chance, or
+his convictions, had made him a partisan of the weaker.
+
+Having been lost in the shuffle, as he expressed it, Blount made the
+most of these reflective excursions during the period of the box-party
+captivity. From the rising of the curtain to the going down thereof the
+Weatherfords, mother and daughter, kept him from exchanging so much as a
+word with Patricia, whom Gantry was shamelessly monopolizing. But on the
+short return walk to the hotel, Blount asserted his rights and gave
+Patricia his arm.
+
+"I think you owe me an abject apology," was the way she began on him,
+when they had gained such privacy as the crowded sidewalk conferred.
+
+"Consider it made, and then tell me what for," he rejoined, striving,
+man-fashion, to catch step with her mood.
+
+"For making us leave that dear, delightful, out-of-date, and
+out-of-place Georgian mansion in the hills and come to town when we want
+to get a sight of your face."
+
+"If anybody else should say a thing like that, I'd blush and call it a
+compliment," he retorted. Her near presence seemed to lift the burden he
+was carrying, and it was good to be light-hearted again, if only for the
+passing moment.
+
+"It wasn't meant for a compliment," she returned, with the
+straightforward sincerity which Blount had always been fond of likening
+to a cup of cold water on a thirsty day. "Consider a moment. You come to
+me with a really harrowing story of your new experiences, and just as I
+am beginning to get interested we are interrupted. In the morning, at
+some perfectly impossible hour, off you go, and we hear no more of you
+for weeks and weeks. What have you been doing?"
+
+"I have been doing precisely what you told me to do; preaching the
+gospel of honesty and fair dealing, and trying my level best to make
+other people practise it."
+
+"You have been successful?" she asked quickly.
+
+"Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended solely upon me. As
+to the other, I don't know. Sometimes I'm credulous enough to believe
+that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they say they are, and
+at other times I'm afraid they are only putting up a bluff to mislead
+me. Some day, perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go into the
+'practical-politics' armory to get my weapons."
+
+There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy available, and she
+made what seemed to be the most necessary use of it.
+
+"And your father, Evan; are you coming to understand him any better?"
+
+He shook his head despondently. "No; or rather yes. I might say that I
+am coming to understand him--or his methods--only too well. The only
+way we can keep from quarrelling now is to banish politics when we are
+together."
+
+"I am sorry," she said, and the sorrow was emphatic in her tone. "As I
+have said before, you don't understand him. You are judging him by
+standards which, however just and true they may be, are peculiarly your
+own standards. I know you can be broad for others when you try. Can't
+you be broad for him?"
+
+It was good to hear her defend his father. It was what he would have
+wished his wife to do. Suddenly there arose within him a huge reluctance
+to lessen or to weaken in any way her trust in David Blount.
+
+"Let us say that the fault is mine," he interposed hastily. "God forbid
+that I should be the means of making you think less of him in any
+respect."
+
+"You couldn't do that, Evan. He is simply a grand old man--the first I
+have ever known for whom the hackneyed phrase seemed to have been made,"
+she asserted warmly. "If he has faults, I am sure they are nothing more
+than gigantic virtues--the faults of a man who is too strong and too
+magnanimous to be little in any respect."
+
+The final half-square lay behind them, and Mrs. Honoria and the senator,
+Gantry, Gordon and his wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the
+marriageable daughters, were at the _café_ door waiting for the
+laggards. Being in no proper frame of mind to enjoy a theatre supper
+with another Weatherford attack as the possible penalty, Blount
+reluctantly surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses, and went
+to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike and democratic lobby.
+
+With Patricia in town the "silver-tongued spellbinder of Quaretaro
+Mesa," as _The Daily Capital_ called the railroad company's campaign
+field-officer, would have been glad to evade some of the speaking
+appointments; but since his engagements had been made some days in
+advance, he was obliged to go.
+
+On his return to the capital he was delighted to find the party of three
+still occupying the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain.
+Arriving on a morning train, he was permitted to make the party of three
+a party of four at the breakfast-table; and with Patricia sitting
+opposite he was able to forget the strenuosities for a restful
+half-hour.
+
+Later, when he went to his offices in the Temple Court Building, the
+strenuosities reasserted themselves with emphasis. Though he found his
+desk closed, and was reasonably certain that he had in his pocket the
+only key that would unlock it, he found his papers scattered in
+confusion under the roll-top. A touch upon the electric button brought
+the stenographer from the anteroom.
+
+"Who's been into my desk, Collins?" he demanded, pointing to the
+confusion and scrutinizing the face of the young man sharply for signs
+of guilt.
+
+"Goodness gracious! How could anybody get into it when you've got the
+only key, Mr. Blount?" stammered the clerk. Then he went on,
+parrot-like: "I've been putting the letters and telegrams through the
+letter-slit, as you told me to, and I've kept the private office
+locked."
+
+"Nevertheless it is very evident that somebody has been here," said
+Blount. Then he had a sudden shock and wheeled shortly upon the
+stenographer. "Collins, what did you do with that packet of papers I
+gave you last Monday--the one I told you to put away in the safe?"
+
+"I did just what you told me to; put it in the inner cash-box, and put
+the key of the cash-box on your desk. Didn't you get it?"
+
+Blount felt in his pockets and found the key, which he handed to
+Collins. "Go and get that packet and bring it to me," he directed. The
+shock was beginning to subside a little by now, and he sat down to bring
+something like order out of the confusion on the desk. At first, he had
+thought that the sheaf of evidence letters which gave him the
+strangle-hold upon Gantry and the lawbreakers had been left in a
+pigeonhole of the desk. Then he remembered having given it to Collins to
+put away.
+
+A minute or two later it occurred to him that the stenographer was
+taking a long time for a short errand. Rising silently, he crossed the
+room and reached for the knob of the door of communication. In the act
+he saw that the door was ajar, and through the crack he saw Collins
+standing before the opened safe. The clerk was running his tongue along
+the flap of a large envelope, preparatory to sealing it. Blount's first
+impulse was to break in with a sharp command. Then he reconsidered and
+went back to his desk; was still busy at it when Collins came in and
+laid the freshly sealed envelope before him.
+
+"That isn't the packet I gave you," said Blount curtly.
+
+The clerk looked away. "You meant those letters, didn't you?" he
+queried. "The rubber band broke and I put them in an envelope."
+
+"When?" snapped Blount.
+
+The young man faced around again and the innocence in his look disarmed
+the questioner.
+
+"When? Just now. That's what made me so long--I couldn't find an
+envelope big enough."
+
+Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the blade under the flap of
+the envelope. If he had looked up at the stenographer then he would have
+seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a face ashen with
+terror. But whatever the shorthand man had to fear from the opening of
+the lately sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of Ackerton,
+the working head of the legal department, with a damage suit to discuss
+with his chief. Blount thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened,
+and later in the day, when he went around to his bank to put the
+evidence letters into his safe-deposit box, the incident of the morning
+had lost its significance so completely, or had been so deeply buried
+under other and more important matters, that he deposited the packet
+without examining it.
+
+The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in
+the ranchman candidate's big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa
+Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there. She was
+there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to
+sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he
+began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to
+grow too large to be easily rolled aside.
+
+"I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you
+got one that you could lend me?"
+
+She laughed lightly.
+
+"You told me once that I had the New England conscience--which was the
+same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass
+around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?"
+
+He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics' again. Suppose I say
+that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of
+the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a
+perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of
+people to jail?"
+
+"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down
+out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals
+and criminality?"
+
+"That is just what I'm trying to find out," he persisted. "At the
+present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some
+of them know what I'm doing, and some of them don't. Those who know
+have been told that they must be good or I'll publish the evidence, and
+they've promised to be good if I won't publish it. At the time I didn't
+question my right to make such a bargain, but--"
+
+"But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell
+what you know?"
+
+"Chaos," he replied briefly.
+
+"May I ask who is implicated?"
+
+"A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few
+outside of it."
+
+"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too big for me, Evan. I can
+only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do
+evil that good may come."
+
+"If you put it that way, I've made myself _particeps criminis_," he said
+gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals
+are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't help
+knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could
+make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob."
+
+She was shaking her head determinedly. "I can't help you this time,
+Evan; truly I can't." Then, in sudden appeal: "Why won't you go to your
+father? He could tell you what to do and how to do it, and his judgment
+would be too big and just to stumble over the tangling little
+moralities."
+
+Blount smiled.
+
+"What if I should tell you that my father is more or less involved,
+Patricia? I don't know precisely how much or how little, but I am
+assured, by those who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in the
+general wreck."
+
+"I can't believe it!" she protested, in generous loyalty. "These people,
+whoever they are, are deceiving you to shelter themselves. Have you ever
+spoken to your father about this?"
+
+"Yes, once; one evening when we were dining together I told him what I
+had, and what use I should make of it if all other means should fail.
+Also, I advised him to dodge."
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"That is the discouraging part of it. I was hoping against hope that he
+would tell me to go ahead; that he would say that he wasn't involved.
+But, as a matter of fact, he didn't say much of anything. I'm horribly
+afraid that his silence meant all that I've been trying to believe it
+didn't mean."
+
+She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if she were trying to
+gain time.
+
+"I can only tell you again what I told you at first," she said at
+length. "You must be bigger than all these hampering circumstances;
+bigger than the little moralities, if need be. You can be, Evan; you've
+given splendid proof of it thus far, and I'm proud--just as proud as I
+can be--"
+
+Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely without scruple, have
+brained young Gordon, to whom the next dance belonged, and who came just
+at this climaxing moment to claim Patricia. But there was no help for
+it, short of a cold-blooded and rather embarrassing deed of violence,
+and the hard-won confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.
+
+When he left the Gordon house, which was far out in the northeastern
+residence suburb, Blount meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed.
+He had been losing much sleep in the activities of the campaign, and the
+loss was beginning to tell upon him. But as the trolley-car was passing
+the Temple Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim light
+illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office. With all his
+suspicions of the morning reawakened, he dropped from the car, dashed
+into the building, and took the all-night elevator for his office floor.
+
+The sleepy elevator-man had to be shaken awake, and when he had set the
+car in motion he let it run past the designated floor. Blount swore
+impatiently, and instead of waiting to be carried back, darted out and
+ran to the stairway. When he reached the lower corridor and was hurrying
+toward his suite in the corner of the building, there was a dull crash,
+as of a muffled explosion, and two or three of the glass doors in the
+street-fronting suite were shattered. Blount quickened his pace to a
+run, let himself in by means of his latch-key, and, cautiously opening
+his desk, groped in an inner drawer for the revolver which Gantry had
+persuaded him to buy as a part of the office furnishings.
+
+With the weapon in hand, he pushed through the unlatched door into
+Collins's room. There was an acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air,
+and when he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases were
+stifling. His first act was to feel for the switch and cut in the
+electric lights. The third room, which had doors of communication with
+his own office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were broken open, and
+the safe-door had been blown from its hinges.
+
+Blount saw the figure of a small man with his cap pulled down over his
+ears bending over the wrecked cash-box. At the upblazing of the ceiling
+lights, the man sprang to his feet and fled, going out through the door
+by which Blount had just entered, and snapping the light-switch as he
+passed to leave the rooms in darkness.
+
+Blount was cursing his own lack of presence of mind when he turned to
+follow the escaping burglar. In the darkness he fell over a chair, and
+by the time he had disentangled himself and had reached the corridor the
+safe-blower was gone. Racing to the elevator, Blount rang the bell until
+the sleepy car-tender set the machinery in motion and lifted himself to
+the floor of happenings. Here the incident ended abruptly, so far as any
+helpful discoveries were concerned. The elevator-man had carried no one
+down, and he confessed shamefacedly that he had again been asleep, and
+could not say whether or not anybody had descended the stair which
+circled the elevator-shaft.
+
+Blount went back to his office, turned in a police alarm, and waited
+until a policeman came from the nearest station. Then he went to report
+the safe-blowing in person to the night captain on duty in the basement
+of the City Hall. A drowsy clerk took notes of the story, and the night
+captain contented himself with asking a single question.
+
+"Do you know how much you lost, Mr. Blount?"
+
+"Nothing of any great consequence, I imagine," said Blount, remembering,
+with an inward thrill of thankfulness, the morning impulse which had
+prompted him to transfer the one thing of inestimable consequence to the
+security of the bank safe-deposit box. Then he added: "There was a
+little money in the box, and some papers of no especial value to
+anybody. Just the same, captain, I want that man caught."
+
+"We'll catch him, come morning," was the assurance, and then Blount went
+away and carried out his original intention of going to the
+Inter-Mountain and to bed.
+
+To bed; but, for a long hour after the post-midnight quiet had settled
+down upon the great hostelry, not to sleep. If he had asked himself why
+he could not close his eyes and take the needed rest, the exciting
+incident in which he had lately been an actor would have offered a
+sufficient answer. But in reality the sharpened spur of wakefulness
+penetrated much more deeply. Beyond all doubt or shadow of doubt, it was
+the sinister, many-armed machine which had reached out to seize and
+destroy the evidence against its allies and fellow conspirators, the
+lawbreaking railroad company and the vote-selling corporations.
+
+And, again beyond doubt, he made sure, it was his own boast made to his
+father which had been passed on to tell the sham burglar where to look
+and what to look for.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS
+
+
+In the evening of the day following the safe-blowing in Blount's office,
+a one-car train, running as second section of the Overland, slipped
+unostentatiously into the capital railroad yard. With as little stir as
+it had made in its arrival, the single-car train took a siding below the
+freight station, where it would be concealed from the prying eyes of any
+chance prowler from the newspaper offices.
+
+Coincident with the side-tracking O'Brien, the vice-president's
+stenographer, dropped from the step of the car and went in search of a
+telephone. When O'Brien was safely out of the way, a small man,
+clean-shaven and alert in his movements, whipped out of the shadows of
+the nearest string of box-cars, pushed brusquely past the guarding
+porter, and presented himself at the desk in the roomy office
+compartment of the private car.
+
+The vice-president looked up and nodded. "How are you, Gibbert?" he
+said, and then: "You may condense your report. I have seen the
+newspapers. In passing I may say that it isn't much to your credit that
+you had to fall back upon the methods of the yeggmen."
+
+"There wasn't any other way," protested the small man. "The papers were
+locked up in the cash-box of the safe, and young Blount carried the only
+key."
+
+"It was crude; not at all worthy of a man of your ability, Gibbert. And
+if the newspapers tell it straight, you came near being caught. How did
+that happen?"
+
+"Blount went to a ball, and I shadowed him. His girl was there, and it
+looked like a safe bet that he'd stay to see the lights put out. But he
+didn't."
+
+"Well, never mind; you got the papers, I suppose?"
+
+The company detective drew a thick envelope from his pocket and laid it
+upon the desk. The vice-president tore it open and read rapidly through
+the file of letters it had enclosed, tearing them one by one from the
+hold of the brass fastener at the upper left-hand corner as he glanced
+them over. "The chuckle-headed fools!" he gritted, apostrophizing the
+writers of the letters. And then: "Gibbert, I'd like to go into this a
+little deeper, if we had time; I'd like to know why in hell every man in
+this State with whom we've had a private business arrangement found it
+necessary to spread the details out on paper and send them to young
+Blount! Here; burn these things as I hand them to you."
+
+The small man struck a match and, using the wide-mouthed metal cuspidor
+for an ash-pan, lighted the letters one at a time as they were given to
+him. When the cinder skeleton of the final sheet had been crushed into
+ashes, he rose from his knees and reached for his hat.
+
+"Any other orders?" he asked.
+
+"No; nothing more. You are reasonably sure that you haven't been
+recognized here by any of our local people?"
+
+"I've kept the 'make-up' on most of the time. I've been in Mr. Gantry's
+office a couple of times, and in Mr. Kittredge's once, and neither of
+them caught on to me."
+
+"That's good. You'd better go now. O'Brien has gone after Gantry and
+Kittredge, and I don't care to have them find you here. Better take the
+first train back to Chicago. These mutton-headed police here might
+possibly get on your track, and we don't want to have to explain
+anything to them."
+
+Five minutes after the small man had dropped from the step of the "008,"
+to disappear in the box-car shadows, Gantry and Kittredge came down the
+yard and entered the private car. Again the vice-president said, "How
+are you?" and nodded toward the nearest chairs. "Sit down; I'll be
+through in a minute," and he went on reading the file of papers taken up
+at the departure of the detective. At the end of the minute he shot a
+question at the two who were waiting.
+
+"You got my message?"
+
+Gantry answered for himself and the superintendent. "Yes. Your orders
+have been carried out. The yards are posted, and nobody, outside of a
+few of our own men, knows that your car is here."
+
+The vice-president took one of the long black cigars from the open box
+on the flat-topped desk, and passed the box to his two lieutenants.
+
+"Light up," he said tersely. "I'm due in Twin Canyons City to-morrow
+morning, and we've got to thresh this thing out in a hurry. Any change
+in the situation since your last report?"
+
+Gantry shook his head. "Nothing very important. Blount's up-town office
+was broken into last night and his safe ripped open with dynamite, as I
+suppose you have read in the papers. Who did it, or why it was done,
+nobody seems to know."
+
+"Well, what came of it?"
+
+"Nothing, so far as I can find out," returned the traffic manager.
+"Blount had been to the Gordon dance, and he saw the light in his office
+as he was coming down-town. When he went up to find out what was going
+on, he caught the safe-blower fairly in the act, but the fellow got
+away."
+
+"Did Blount lose anything?"
+
+"That's the queer part of it. Blount won't say much about it; and this
+morning he went around to police headquarters and told the chief to drop
+the matter, giving as his reason that he was too busy to prosecute the
+fellow even if he was caught."
+
+To a disinterested observer it might have seemed a little singular that
+the vice-president made no further comment upon the burglary. As a
+matter of fact, his next question completely ignored it.
+
+"What has Blount been doing this week?" he asked.
+
+"He has spoken twice; once at Arequipa and once at Hellersville. I
+understand he has engagements enough to keep him out of town right up to
+election day."
+
+"That is good," was the nodded approval. "He would only be in the way
+here at the capital." And then pointedly to Gantry: "Any more of that
+nonsense about putting a barrel of powder under us and blowing us all up
+if we don't build the freight tariffs over to suit his notion?"
+
+"A good bit more of it," Gantry admitted reluctantly. "The other day he
+went so far as to set a time limit; gave me three days of grace in which
+to file the public notice of the change in rates."
+
+"What did you do?"
+
+"I filed the notice--taking care that the only copy should be the one I
+sent to Blount's office."
+
+The vice-president looked coldly at his division traffic manager.
+
+"There are times, Gantry, when you seem to be losing your grip. Dave
+Blount's son isn't a school-boy, to be fooled by such a transparent
+trick as that! Don't you suppose he knows, as well as you do, that the
+public notice has to be filed in every station on the road?"
+
+"I had to take a chance--I've had to take a good many chances,"
+protested the traffic manager in his own defence; and Kittredge, a
+bearded giant who was fully the vice-president's match in heroic
+physique, removed his cigar to say: "That young fellow has been a
+frost. If he isn't a wild-eyed fanatic, as Gantry insists he is, he is
+deeper than the deep blue sea! I'd just about as soon have a box of
+dynamite kicking around underfoot as to have him messing in this
+campaign fight. I've been keeping cases on him, as you ordered, and he
+has worn out three of my best office men on the job."
+
+"You are prejudiced, Kittredge," was the vice-president's comment. "It
+was the best move in the entire campaign--putting him in the field.
+Apart from the public sentiment he has been turning our way, we mustn't
+lose sight of the fact that we got hold of him at a time when the
+Honorable Senator was getting ready to turn us down."
+
+"Speaking of the sentiment," Gantry put in, "I don't know whether it's
+all sentiment or not. There's a sort of mystery mixed up in this
+speech-making business of Blount's. At first I thought maybe his sudden
+popularity was due to some word sent out from your Chicago office; but
+when you told me it wasn't, I began to do a little speculating on my own
+account. I can't make up my mind yet whether it is pure popularity, or
+whether it's the assisted kind."
+
+"Assisted?" said the vice-president, with a lifting of the heavy
+eyebrows.
+
+"Yes. It has been too unanimous. I have a trustworthy man in Blount's
+up-town office, and he says the invitations have fluttered in like
+autumn leaves; more than Blount could accept if he travelled
+continuously. Kittredge's men report that the speech-making has been a
+triumphant progress all over the State; bands, receptions, committees,
+and banquets wherever Blount goes."
+
+Mr. McVickar grunted. "The speeches have been all that anybody could
+ask. I've been reading them."
+
+Kittredge shook his head.
+
+"Gantry says they are, but I say no," he contended. "There is such a
+thing as putting too much sugar in the coffee. Blount's overdoing it;
+he's putting the whitewash on so thick that any little handful of mud
+that happens to be thrown will stick and look bad."
+
+"Of course, we have to take chances on that," was the vice-president's
+qualifying clause. "Nevertheless, young Blount's talk has undoubtedly
+had its effect upon public sentiment. We must be careful not to let the
+opposition newspapers get hold of anything that would tend to nullify
+it."
+
+"They are moving heaven and earth to do it," said the superintendent.
+"The Honorable David is lying low, as he usually does, but I more than
+half believe he's getting ready to give us the double-cross. That is the
+explanation of this safe-blowing scrape, as I put it up."
+
+Again the vice-president failed to comment further on the burglary.
+"What I am most afraid of, now, is that our young man may be, as you
+say, Kittredge, a trifle over-zealous," he said musingly. "We have
+discovered that he is something of a fanatic."
+
+"He's more than that," Kittredge cut in quickly. "One of the men I've
+had following him--Farnsworth--is as good as any Pinkerton that ever
+walked. He says Blount isn't half so innocent as he looks and acts. The
+speech-making has taken him into every corner of the State, and
+Farnsworth says he has been doing a lot of quiet prying around and
+investigating on the side."
+
+"I've been thinking," Gantry added, "what a beautiful mix-up we should
+have if the senator and his son should both conclude to pull out and get
+together at the last moment."
+
+The master plotter shook his head. "You have no sense of perspective,
+Gantry. Young Blount is with us solely because he is too straightforward
+to countenance his father's political methods. On the other hand, if the
+Honorable Dave should turn upon us now, he would be obliged to do it at
+the expense of his son's reputation. Anything he could say against us
+would simply have the effect of holding his son up to public
+exprobration as a common campaign liar. I know David Blount pretty well;
+he won't do anything like that."
+
+Gantry bit his lip and a slow smile of respectful admiration crept up to
+the Irish eyes.
+
+"When it comes to the real fine-haired work, you have us all feeling for
+hand-holds, Mr. McVickar," he said. "Now I know why you made a place for
+Evan Blount, and why you have been giving him a free hand on the
+whitewashing. It's the biggest thing that has ever been pulled off in
+Western politics!"
+
+"It hasn't been pulled off yet," was the quick reply. "We are holding
+old David in a noose that may turn into a rope of sand at any minute;
+don't forget that. During the few days intervening before the election
+we must preserve the present status at any cost. Young Blount is the
+only man who may possibly disturb it. Keep him out of the way. If he
+doesn't have speaking invitations enough to busy him, see to it that he
+gets them. As long as you can keep him talking he won't have any time
+for side issues. Now about this Gryson business: you want to handle that
+yourselves, and I don't want any more telegrams like the one you sent me
+last night, Gantry. What's the condition?"
+
+Gantry outlined the Gryson "condition" briefly. The man Gryson, who had
+developed into a heeler of sorts, had been growing restive, wanting more
+money.
+
+"What can he swing?" was the curt question.
+
+"Six out of seven pretty close counties. I don't pretend to know how he
+has done it, but he has got the goods; I've taken the trouble to check
+up on him. With his pull, we can swing the vote of the capital itself."
+
+The vice-president frowned thoughtfully. "The old game of stuffing the
+registration lists, I suppose," he said. And then: "Young Blount hasn't
+got wind of this, has he?"
+
+Gantry laughed. "You may be sure he hasn't. He has it in for Gryson on
+general principles--made us take him off the shop pay-rolls. If he
+thought we were dickering with him now, he'd be down on us like a
+thousand of brick."
+
+"Well, why don't you fix Gryson, once for all, and have it over with?
+You oughtn't to expect me to come here and tell you what to do!"
+
+It was at this point that Kittredge broke in.
+
+"Gryson isn't safe. I have it straight that he is getting ready to sell
+us out. That's why he wants his pay in advance."
+
+The vice-president's heavy brows met in a frown, and the muscles of his
+square jaw hardened.
+
+"Put Gryson on the rack and show him what you've got on him in that
+Montana bank robbery. That will bring him to book. It will be time
+enough to talk about terms when he delivers the goods. Now another
+thing--that Shonoho Inn matter that I wired about--what has been done?"
+
+"It is all arranged," said the big superintendent. "The house was closed
+for the season last month, and we have taken a short lease. One of our
+dining-car managers will take charge of the service."
+
+"And the wires?"
+
+"We have made a cut-in from the old Shoshone Mine wire, which wasn't
+taken down when the mine was abandoned. That let us out very neatly, and
+no one outside of our own line-men know anything about the job. We have
+four instruments in the hotel writing-room; two on the commercial and
+two on the railroad wires. Will that be enough?"
+
+Mr. McVickar nodded and reached over to press the bell-push which
+signalled to his train conductor.
+
+"That is about all I have to say," he said, in dismissal of the two
+local officials. "Just nail Gryson up to the cross, where he belongs,
+and keep young Blount busy and out of town; I leave the details to you.
+Get orders for me as you go up to your office, Kittredge, and have the
+despatcher let me out as soon as possible. I ought to be half-way to
+Alkali by this time."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE CHASM
+
+
+It was young Ranlett, a reporter for _The Plainsman_, who told Evan
+Blount of the arrival of the vice-president's car, running as second
+section of the Overland, and the scene of the telling was the lobby of
+the Inter-Mountain Hotel, where Blount was smoking a pipe of
+disappointment filled and lighted upon hearing that his father, Mrs.
+Honoria, and Patricia had gone out to dinner somewhere--place unknown to
+the obliging room clerk.
+
+Ranlett had tried ineffectually to get to the private car, having for
+his object the interviewing of the vice-president, but there had been
+curious obstructions. The lower yard was apparently carefully guarded,
+since the reporter had been turned back at three or four different
+points when he had attempted to cross the tracks. Blount thought it a
+little singular that the vice-president should come to the capital
+secretly, but he did not stop to speculate upon this.
+
+Having something more than a suspicion that Gantry had not properly
+passed the threat of exposure up to McVickar, he determined at once to
+seek an interview with the vice-president. Walking rapidly down to the
+Sierra Avenue station, he saw a light in Gantry's office, and meaning to
+be fair first and severe afterward, if needful, he ran up the stair and
+tried the door of the traffic manager's office. It opened under his
+hand, and he found Gantry sitting at his desk.
+
+"Ranlett tells me that Mr. McVickar is in town," he began abruptly.
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Ranlett is mistaken--about twenty minutes mistaken," was Gantry's
+reply. "Mr. McVickar passed through here a few minutes ago on his way to
+Twin Canyons City. His special has been gone some little time."
+
+"When is he coming back?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Did you take up with him the matter of issuing new tariffs to do away
+with the preferentials, or to level the public rates down to them?"
+
+Gantry shifted uneasily in his chair, and tried to evade. "There was
+very little time," he said. "Mr. McVickar was in a great hurry, and his
+special was held only a few minutes."
+
+Blount crossed the room and sat down.
+
+"Dick, we've come to the last round-up," he said gravely. "In the nature
+of things, I can't give you any more time. You've been playing with me
+all along, and your last move in the game was a very childish
+one--sending me what purported to be a copy of a new freight tariff
+notice to the public. Did you suppose for a moment that I wouldn't have
+sense enough to see that the thing wasn't official, that it had no
+signatures and lacked even the name of the railroad company? I'm here
+now to tell you that you've got to do some real thing, and do it
+quickly. Let's go up and see the editor of _The Capital_."
+
+"What for?" demanded Gantry.
+
+"It is the railroad paper, and I want you to give Brinkley, the editor,
+an interview to the effect that a revision of the freight rates is in
+process, and that shippers having grievances should present them at
+once. That will at least start the ball to rolling in the right
+direction."
+
+"I should think it would!" scoffed the traffic manager. "What you don't
+know about the making of freight tariffs would sink a ship, Evan. These
+things can't be done while you wait!"
+
+"But they must be, in this instance," Blount insisted. "If you won't
+withdraw the preferentials given to the corporations, you must do the
+other thing. Post your legal notice of a reduction of the rates on the
+commodities upon which you are now allowing rebates, and I'll fight
+straight through on the line I've been taking all along."
+
+"And if we don't?" queried Gantry.
+
+"What is the use of making me say it for the hundredth time, Dick? If
+you don't do one or the other, there will be an explosion, just as I've
+told you. Of course, you know that my safe was broken open last
+night--wrecked with dynamite?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, unluckily for you, the packet of papers which might otherwise
+have been taken or destroyed, didn't happen to be in the safe. The
+documents are still where they can be used at an hour's notice. And, by
+heaven, Dick, I'll use them if you don't play fair!"
+
+Gantry, long-suffering and patient to a fault in a business affair, was
+not altogether superhuman.
+
+"Evan, you are a frost--a black frost! You harp on one string until you
+wear it to frazzles! Don't you know that the Transcontinental is big
+enough and strong enough to chivvy you from one end of this country to
+the other, if you turn traitor? I love a fighting man, but by God, I
+haven't any use for a fool!"
+
+Blount laughed.
+
+"If I have succeeded in making you angry, perhaps there is a chance that
+you will do something. You may curse me out all you want to, but the
+fact remains. I'm going to explode the bomb, and it will be touched off
+long enough before election to do the work, if you keep on refusing to
+make my word good to the people. That is all--_all_ the all. Now, will
+you go up to _The Capital_ office with me, and dictate that bit of
+information that I mentioned?"
+
+"Not in a thousand years!" raged Gantry. "Not in ten thousand years!"
+Nevertheless he rose, closed his desk, and prepared to accompany the
+importunate political manager. Half-way up the first square he said:
+"There is no use in our going to _The Capital_ office at this time of
+night. Brinkley doesn't get around to his desk much before eleven. Let's
+go up to the club."
+
+At the Railway Club the traffic manager developed a keen desire to kill
+the intervening time in a game of billiards. Blount indulged him, beat
+him three games in succession, and consistently refused to drink with
+him. At the end of the third game, Gantry gave a terse definition,
+abusively worded, of a man who would force his friend to go and drink
+alone, and went to the buffet. Ten minutes later, when Blount went after
+him, he had disappeared, and the visit to the newspaper office was
+postponed, perforce.
+
+On the following morning, Blount found a telegram on his desk. It bore
+the vice-president's name, and the date-line was Twin Canyons City. It
+directed him to go to a remote portion of the State beyond the Lost
+River Mountains to examine the papers in a right-of-way case which was
+coming up for trial at the next term of court. This was in Kittredge's
+department, and Blount called the superintendent on the phone. Kittredge
+was in his office, and he evidently knew about the vice-president's
+telegram. Also, he seemed anxious to have the division counsel go to
+Lewiston at once; so anxious that he offered his own service-car to be
+run as a special train.
+
+Blount saw no way to evade a positive order from the vice-president, but
+he was more than suspicious that Gantry or Kittredge, or possibly both
+of them, had misrepresented the right-of-way case to Mr. McVickar, in an
+attempt to get him away from the city and so to postpone a reiteration
+of the demand for a new freight tariff. What he did not suspect was that
+Mr. McVickar's telegram might possibly have originated in Kittredge's
+office.
+
+Asking the superintendent to have the service-car made ready
+immediately, he packed his handbag, left a note for Patricia, who was
+not yet visible, and another for Gantry, who was not in his office, and
+began the roundabout journey.
+
+In all his travelling up and down the State he had never found anything
+to equal the slowness of the special train. The noon meal, served by
+Kittredge's cook in the open compartment, found the special less than
+fifty miles on its way, and comfortably waiting at that hour on a
+side-track among the sage-brush hills for the coming of a delayed train
+in the opposite direction. Four mortal hours were lost on the lonely
+siding. There was no station, and Blount could not telegraph. So far as
+he knew, the service-car might stay there for a day or a week. It was
+all to no purpose that he quarrelled with his conductor. The train crew
+had orders to wait for the west-bound time freight, and there was
+nothing to do but to keep on waiting.
+
+Late in the afternoon the time freight, or some other train, came along,
+and the special was once more set in motion eastward, but at dinner-time
+it was again side-tracked, eighty-odd miles from its destination, and
+once more at a desert siding where there was no telegraph office. The
+car was still standing on the siding when Blount went to bed. But in the
+morning it was in motion again, jogging now on its leisurely way up the
+branch line.
+
+At Lewiston, the town at the end of the branch where the right-of-way
+trouble had originated, Blount found more delay, carefully planned for,
+as he had now come firmly to believe. The plaintiffs in the right-of-way
+case were out of town, and their lawyers had gone to the capital. Blount
+saw that he might wait a week without accomplishing anything, hence he
+immediately instructed his conductor to get orders for the return.
+
+After having been gone a half-hour or more, the conductor came back to
+the service-car to say that the single telegraph-wire connecting
+Lewiston with the outer world was down, and that the orders for the
+return journey could not be obtained until the telegraph connection was
+restored. At that point Blount took matters into his own hands.
+
+There was a mining company having its headquarters in the isolated town,
+and Blount had met the manager once in the capital--met him in a social
+way, and had been able to show him some little attention. Hiring a
+buckboard at the one livery stable in the place, he drove out to the
+"Little Mary," and found Blatchford, the friendly manager, smoking a
+black clay cutty pipe in his shack office. It did not take Blount over a
+minute to renew the pleasant acquaintance, and to state his dilemma.
+
+"I'm hung up here with my special train, the wires are down and I can't
+get out," was his statement of the crude fact. "Didn't you tell me that
+you owned a motor-car?"
+
+"I did," was the prompt reply. "Want to borrow it?"
+
+"You beat me to it," said Blount, laughing. "That was precisely what I
+was going to beg for--the loan of your car. I believe you told me that
+you had driven it from here to the capital."
+
+"Oh, yes; several times, and the road is fairly good by way of Arequipa
+and Lost River Canyon. It's only about half as far across country as it
+is around by the railroad. You ought to make it in six hours and a half,
+or seven at the longest. Drive me down to the burg, and I'll put you in
+possession."
+
+Blount began to be audibly thankful, but the mine manager good-naturedly
+cut him short.
+
+"It's all in the day's work, Mr. Blount, and I'm glad to be of
+service--not because you are the Transcontinental's lawyer, nor
+altogether because you are the Honorable David's son. I haven't
+forgotten your kindness to me when I was in town three weeks ago. Let's
+go and get out the chug-wagon."
+
+A little later Blount found himself handling the wheel of a very
+serviceable knockabout car equipped for hard work on country roads. When
+he was ready to go, he drove down to the railroad yard and hunted up his
+conductor.
+
+"After you have had your vacation, you may get orders from Mr.
+Kittredge and take his car back to the capital," he told the man. "When
+you do, you may give him my compliments, and tell him I preferred to run
+my own special train."
+
+The conductor grinned and made no reply, and he was still grinning when
+he sauntered into the railroad telegraph office and spoke to the
+operator.
+
+"I dunno what's up," he said, "but whatever it was, the string's broke.
+Old Dave Sage-Brush's son has borrowed him an automobile, and gone back
+to town on his own hook. Guess you'd better call up the division
+despatcher and tell him the broken-wire gag didn't work. Get a move on.
+We hain't got nothin' to stay here for now."
+
+Blount had a very pleasant drive across country, with no mishap worse
+than a blown-out tire and a little carbureter trouble. Being a motorist
+of parts, neither the accident nor the needed readjustment detained him
+very long, and by the middle of the afternoon he was racing down the
+smooth northern road, with the spires and tall buildings of the capital
+fairly in sight.
+
+Not to let gratitude lag too far behind the service rendered, he drove
+Blatchford's car to the garage nearest the freight station, left
+instructions to have it shipped back to Lewiston by the first train, and
+promptly went in search of Gantry. The traffic manager was not in his
+office, but Blount found him at the Railway Club.
+
+"Just a word, Dick," he began, when he had overtaken his man pointing
+for the buffet. "Kittredge put up a job on me, and I think you helped
+him. I had to borrow an automobile to come back in from Lewiston. It's
+down at the Central Garage, and I have given Bankston, the garage man,
+orders to ship it back to Mr. Blatchford, of the 'Little Mary.' I wish
+you'd phone your freight agent to see that it is properly taken care of,
+and that the freight bill is sent to me."
+
+Gantry made no reply, but he went obediently to the house telephone and
+gave the necessary instructions. The thing done, he turned shortly upon
+Blount, scowling morosely.
+
+"Come on in and let's have a drink," he said.
+
+Blount marked the brittleness of tone and the half-quarrelsome light in
+the eyes which were a little bloodshot.
+
+"No, Dick; you've had one too many already," he objected firmly.
+
+Gantry put his back against the wall of the corridor.
+
+"No," he rasped; "I'm not drunk, but I'm ready to fight you to a finish,
+and for once in a way I'm going to get in the first lick. You've been
+bluffing me from the start, and you're going to try it again. It won't
+go this time; you've got to show me!"
+
+If Blount hesitated it was only because he was trying to determine
+whether or not the traffic manager was business-fit. Gantry comprehended
+perfectly, and his laugh was derisive and a trifle bitter.
+
+"You're sizing me up and asking yourself if I'm too far gone to be worth
+while," he jeered. "If I couldn't stand any more liquid grief than you
+can, I would have been down and out years ago. Show your hand, Evan--if
+you have any to show."
+
+Blount hesitated no longer. Taking Gantry's arm, he led him out of the
+club and around the block to the Sierra National Bank. It was after
+banking hours, but the side door giving access to the safe-deposit
+department was still open. With the traffic manager at his elbow, Blount
+asked the custodian for his private box, got it, and led the way to one
+of the cell-like retiring rooms. Gantry proved his capacity for
+transacting business by turning on the lights, locking the door, and
+squaring himself in a chair at one side of the tiny writing-table.
+
+Blount opened the japanned safety box, took out a bulky envelope and
+tossed it across to the traffic manager.
+
+"You can see for yourself whether I've been bluffing or not," he said
+quietly; and then he turned his back and interested himself in the
+lithograph of the latest Atlantic liner framed and hanging upon the
+mahogany end wall of the small room.
+
+For a little time there was a dead silence, broken only by the faint
+rustling of the papers as Gantry withdrew and unfolded them. When he had
+glanced at the last folded letter sheet, he snapped the rubber band upon
+the sheaf and sat back in his chair. Blount turned at the snap and found
+the traffic manager smiling curiously up at him.
+
+"Sit down, Evan," was the friendly invitation. And when Blount had
+dropped into the opposite chair: "We used to be pretty good friends in
+the old days, Ebee," Gantry went on, falling easily into the use of the
+college nickname. "I haven't forgotten the time when I would have had to
+break and go home if you hadn't stood by me like a brother and lent me
+money. For that reason, and for some others, I hate to see you bucking a
+dead wall out here in the greasewood hills."
+
+"It is you and your kind who are bucking the dead wall, Dick."
+
+"No, listen; I'm giving it to you straight, now. A few minutes ago you
+thought I was drunk--possibly too far gone to serve your purpose. I
+wasn't; I was merely sick and disgusted at the spectacle afforded by a
+crafty, crooked, double-dealing old world--the world we're living in.
+Once in a blue moon an honest man turns up, and when that happens he's
+got to be broken on the wheel--as you're going to be broken. Oh, yes; I
+came out with ideals, too, but they've been knocked out of me. We all
+have to keep the lock-step in business, and business is hell, Evan. I'm
+honest to my salt--which is to say that as yet I'm not using my job to
+line my own pockets, but that's the one decent thing that can be said of
+me. Don't let me bore you."
+
+"Go on," said Blount soberly. "I don't see the pointing of it yet,
+but--"
+
+"You will when I tell you that I've been lying to you; faking first one
+thing and then another. Do you get that?"
+
+"I hear you say it; yes."
+
+"It's so. I faked that story about your father's having made an
+underground deal with us. It was a lie out of whole cloth, because I
+didn't believe at that time that he had. There had been a falling out
+between him and Mr. McVickar; that was common talk on the division. But
+until yesterday I didn't know for certain that the trouble had been
+patched up; in fact, I had my own reasons for believing that it hadn't
+been patched up."
+
+"And you told me there was an alliance in order that I might believe
+that my father would be involved in an exposure of the railroad's
+double-dealing with the public?"
+
+"Just that. Self-preservation is the primal law--after you've dropped
+the ideals--and I thought I had invented a way to hold you down. I might
+have saved myself the trouble--and the lie. It comes down to this, Evan:
+you are one man against a crooked world, and you haven't had a ghost of
+a show from the first minute."
+
+"You'll have to make it plainer," was the even-toned rejoinder. "As
+matters stand now, I am pretty well assured that I can do what I set out
+to do. I'm going to be able to make my own employers come through with
+clean hands."
+
+Gantry was shaking his head slowly, and again the curious smile flitted
+across his keen, fine-featured face, lingering for an instant at the
+corners of the eyes.
+
+"You say I'll have to make it plainer, and I will. A little while ago
+you intimated that Kittredge and I were responsible for the telegram
+which sent you to Lewiston yesterday. It was a fake, but it didn't
+originate with Kittredge or with me."
+
+"With whom, then?"
+
+"I hate to tell you, Evan--it'll hit you hard. The frame-up was your
+father's. He got hold of Kittredge the night before, some time after we
+had left my office together to go up-town. He told Kittredge it was for
+the good of 'the cause,' and suggested that a wire purporting to come
+from Mr. McVickar would probably turn the trick. He didn't give his
+reason for wanting to get you out of the way at this time, and Kittredge
+didn't ask it."
+
+Blount was pinning the traffic manager down with an eyehold which was
+like a gripping hand, and the close air of the little mahogany bank cell
+became suddenly charged with the subtle effluence of antagonism. Blount
+was the first to break the painful silence.
+
+"You have told me nothing new, Dick, or at least nothing that I have not
+been taking for granted almost from the beginning. But let it be
+understood between us, once for all, that I discuss my father, his
+motives, or his acts, with no man living. We'll drop that phase of it;
+it's a side issue, and has no bearing upon the business that brought us
+here. You asked for the proof of my ability to compel your employers and
+mine to turn over the clean leaf. You have it there under your hand."
+
+For answer, Gantry pushed the rubber-banded file across the table to his
+companion. "Take another look, Evan, and see how helpless you are in
+the grip of a crooked world," he said, very gently.
+
+Blount caught up the file and ran it through. It was made up wholly of
+pieces of blank paper, cut to letter-size, and clipped at the corner
+with a brass fastener, as the originals had been.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+A COG IN THE WHEEL
+
+
+While Blount was staring abstractedly at the file of blank sheets which
+had been substituted for the incriminating letters of the vote-selling
+corporation managers, with Gantry sitting back, alert and watchful, to
+mark the first signs of the coming storm, there came a tap on the locked
+door of the little room, and a deprecatory voice said: "It's our closing
+time, gentlemen: if you are about through--"
+
+"In a minute," returned Gantry quickly, and then he took the blank dummy
+out of Blount's hands, pocketed it, shut the japanned safety box, and
+touched his companion's shoulder.
+
+"Let's get out of this, Evan," he said, still speaking as one speaks to
+a hurt child. "Conroy wants to close up."
+
+Blount suffered himself to be led away, and in the vault room he went
+mechanically through the motions of locking up the empty box. In the
+street Gantry once more took the lead, walking his silent charge around
+the block and into the Temple Court elevator. A little later, when the
+door of the private room in the up-town legal office had opened to admit
+them, and Blount had dropped heavily into his own desk chair, Gantry
+plunged promptly into the breach.
+
+"We've been friendly enemies in this thing right from the start, Evan,"
+he began, "and that's as it had to be. But blood--even the blood of a
+college brotherhood--is thicker than water. I know now what you're in
+for, and I'm going to stand by you, if it costs me my job. First, let's
+clear the way a bit. If I say that I haven't had anything to do, even by
+implication, with this jolt you've just been given, will you believe
+me?"
+
+Blount lifted a pair of heavy-lidded eyes and let them rest for an
+instant upon the face of the traffic manager. "If you say so, Dick, I'll
+believe it," he returned.
+
+"Good. Now we can dive into the thick of it. I won't insult you by
+doubting the premising fact. You had the evidence once?"
+
+"I did--enough of it to keep a grand jury busy for a month. It came to
+me in the shape of unsolicited letters from the men who are benefiting
+by the railroad company's evasion of the law, and who are, of course,
+equally criminal with the railroad officials. Why these letters were
+written to me I don't know, Gantry. I merely know that they were wholly
+unsolicited."
+
+"They were written to you because you are supposed to be the doctor in
+the present crisis."
+
+"But good God, Dick! Haven't I been shouting from every platform in the
+State that we were out for a clean campaign?"
+
+Gantry shook his head and his smile was commiserative. "I know; and
+every man who has had his fingers in the pitch-barrel has chuckled to
+himself, and when two of them would get together they'd pound each other
+on the back and swear that you were the smoothest spellbinder that Mr.
+McVickar has ever turned loose on this side of the big mountains. It
+grinds, Evan, but it's the fact. Not one of the men you are after has
+ever taken your speeches seriously."
+
+Blount's head sank lower.
+
+"I'm smashed, Dick!" he groaned; "utterly and irretrievably disgraced
+and discredited in my native State! There isn't a man in the sage-brush
+hills who would believe me under oath, after this."
+
+"It's hard, Evan--damned hard!" said the traffic manager, driven to
+repetition. "But grilling over it doesn't get us anywhere. What are you
+going to do"?
+
+"With the election only five days away, there is nothing that can be
+done. I had you down, Dick; I could have forced my point with the weapon
+I had. Isn't that so?"
+
+Gantry wagged his head dubiously. "I'm not the big boss, but I can tell
+you right now that, if you could have shown me what I was fully
+expecting to see, the wires between here and wherever Mr. McVickar's
+private car happens to be would have been kept pretty hot for a while."
+Then, upon second thought: "Yes; I guess you could have pulled it off.
+We couldn't stand for any such bill-boarding as you were threatening to
+give us."
+
+Blount turned to his desk, opened it, and began to arrange his papers.
+
+"You've been a good friend, after all, Dick," he said, talking as he
+worked. "I'm going to ask you to go one step farther and take charge of
+the funeral, if you will. Find Mr. McVickar and wire him that I've
+dropped out. I'll write him a resignation from somewhere, when I have
+time."
+
+Gantry left his chair and came to stand beside the quitter.
+
+"Honestly, Evan," he said slowly, "I thought you were a grown man.
+You'll forgive the mistake, won't you?"
+
+Blount turned upon his tormentor and swore pathetically. "What's the
+use--what in the devil is the use?" he rasped, when the outburst began
+to grow measurably articulate. "You know as well as I do what's been
+done to me, and who has done it. Can I lift my hand to strike back, even
+if I had a weapon to strike with?"
+
+"Perhaps you can't. But you owe it to yourself, and to a certain
+bright-minded young woman that I know of, not to fly off the handle
+without at least trying to see if you can't stay on. Wait a minute." The
+railroad man took a turn up and down the floor, head down and hands
+behind him. When he came back to the desk end he began again. "Evan,
+who's got those original papers?"
+
+"The man who blew up my safe, of course. You've said you didn't hire
+him, and that leaves only one alternative."
+
+Gantry took the dummy packet from his pocket and held one of the blank
+sheets up to the light of the window. It was growing dusk, and when he
+failed to discern what he was looking for, he turned on the electric
+lights and tried again. At this the script "T-C" water-mark was plainly
+visible, and he showed it to Blount.
+
+"That proves conclusively that the substitution was made here in your
+own office. Whom do you suspect?"
+
+In a flash Blount remembered: how he had sent Collins to get the packet
+out of the safe, the stenographer's delay, the hasty sealing of the
+envelope, and the suspicion which had been cut short by the incoming of
+Ackerton.
+
+"I know now who did it, and when it was done," he said. "The day before
+the office was broken into I told Collins to bring me the papers from
+the safe. What he brought me was that dummy--in a freshly sealed
+envelope. I was going to open the envelope, but just then Ackerton
+came in."
+
+"All clear so far," said Gantry; and then: "Where is Collins now?"
+
+"I don't know; he comes and goes pretty much as he pleases when I'm not
+in town."
+
+"Do you know anything about him personally?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I do. His father was a bank cashier, and he became a defaulter--of the
+easy-mark kind; the kind that is too good-natured to look too curiously
+at a friend's collateral. He would have gone over the road if your
+father hadn't pulled him out by main strength."
+
+"I see," said Blount cynically. "And the son has paid his father's debt
+to my father. But why the safe-blowing?"
+
+"Collins's face had to be saved in some way. He couldn't know that you
+meant to lock the dummy up in the safety vault," returned Gantry, and
+then, after a pause: "That's our one little ray of hope, Evan."
+
+"I don't see it."
+
+"Don't you? Then I'll make it a bit plainer. If some railroad burglar
+had cracked your safe, you could confidently assume that the original
+letters have been carefully cremated by this time, couldn't you?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"But if your father has them ... Evan, I don't know any more than the
+man in the moon what he wants them for, but the man in the street would
+grin and tell you that your father was merely getting ready to hold the
+railroad company up for something it didn't want to part with."
+
+"I'm letting you say it of my own flesh and blood, Dick; and it shows
+you how badly broken I am. After all, it doesn't lead anywhere."
+
+"Yes, it does. Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that your
+father doesn't know how much those letters mean to you--I know it's a
+pretty hard thing to imagine, but we'll do it by main strength and
+awkwardness. Let us suppose again, that being the case, that you go to
+him frankly and show him in a few well-chosen words just where he has
+landed you; tell him you've got to have those letters--simply _got_ to
+have them--to save your face. I know your father, Evan, a good bit
+better than you do; he'd give you the earth with a fence around it if
+you should ask him for it."
+
+Evan Blount got slowly out of his chair, stood up, and put his hands
+upon the smaller man's shoulders.
+
+"Dick, do you realize what you are doing for yourself when you show me a
+possible way of getting my weapon back?" he demanded.
+
+Gantry's lips became a fine straight line and he nodded.
+
+"That's what made me walk the floor a few minutes ago; I was trying to
+find out if I were big enough. It's all right, Ebee; you go to it, and
+I'll throw up my job and run a foot-race with the sheriff, if I have to.
+Damn the job, anyway!" he finished petulantly. "I'm tired of being a
+robber for somebody else's pocket all the time!"
+
+Blount sat down again and put his face in his hands. After a time he
+looked up to say: "I can't let you outbid me in the open market, Dick.
+You can't set the friendship peg any higher than I can."
+
+Gantry crossed the room and recovered his top-coat and hat from the
+chair where he had thrown them.
+
+"Don't you be a fool," he advised curtly. "There's a railroad down in
+Peru that is going bankrupt for the lack of a wide-awake, up-to-date
+traffic man. I've had the offer on my desk for a month, and I'm going
+to cable to-night. That lets you out, whether you do or don't. But if
+you've got the sense of a wooden Indian, you'll do as I've said--and do
+it _pronto_. Your time's mighty short, anyway. So long."
+
+And before Blount could stop him he was gone.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+A STONE FOR BREAD
+
+
+Though he had eaten nothing since the early breakfast in the service-car
+on the way to Lewiston, Evan Blount let the dinner hour go by unnoted.
+For a long time after Gantry had left him he sat motionless, a prey to
+thoughts too bitter to find expression in words; the dismaying thoughts
+of the hard-pressed champion who has discovered that his foes are of his
+own household.
+
+Apart from the one great boyhood sorrow, a sorrow which had been allowed
+unduly to magnify itself with the passing years, he had never been
+brought face to face with any of the hardnesses which alone can make the
+soldier of life entirely intrepid in the shock of battle. In the
+backward glance he saw that his homeless youth had been, none the less,
+a sheltered youth; that his father's love and care had built and
+maintained invisible ramparts which had hitherto shielded him. It was
+most humiliating to find that the crumbling of the ramparts was leaving
+him naked and shivering; to find that he was so far out of touch with
+his pioneer lineage as to be unable to stand alone.
+
+But there are better things in the blood of the pioneers than a
+latter-day descendant of the continent-conquering fathers may be able to
+discern in the moment of defeat and disaster. Slowly, so slowly that he
+did not recognize the precise moment at which the tide of depression and
+wretchedness reached its lowest ebb and turned to sweep him back to a
+firmer footing, Blount found himself emerging from the bitter waters.
+Gantry, the Gantry whom he had been calling hard names, setting him down
+as at best a lovable but wholly unprincipled time-server, had pointed a
+possible way to retrieval, heroically effacing himself that the way
+might be unobstructed. With the warm blood leaping again, Blount
+straightened himself in his chair. He would go to his father, not as a
+son begging a boon, but as a man demanding his rights. The machine had
+seen fit to throw down the challenge by burglarizing his office and
+robbing him. Very good; there were five days remaining in which to
+strike back. He would lift the challenge, and if his reasonable demand
+should be refused, he would drop the railroad crusade and break into the
+wider field of bossism and machine-made majorities, ploughing and
+turning it up to the light as he could.
+
+The fiery resolution had scarcely been taken when he heard the door of
+Collins's outer room open and close, and a moment later the good-looking
+young stenographer came in, bringing a breath of the crisp autumn
+evening with him.
+
+"I didn't know you were back, Mr. Blount!" he exclaimed. "I saw the
+office lights from the street, and thought somebody had left them
+turned on. Is there anything I can do?"
+
+"Yes; sit down," said Blount crisply, and then: "Collins, what do you do
+with yourself when I am out of town?"
+
+"I stay here most of the time. I went out early this afternoon, but I
+don't often do it."
+
+"Were you here all day yesterday?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Was there anything unusual going on?"
+
+The young man looked away as if he expected to find his answer in the
+farther corner of the room.
+
+"I don't know as you'd call it unusual," he replied half-hesitantly.
+"There were a good many callers. Shall I bring you the list?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The stenographer went out to his desk and brought back a slip of paper
+with the names.
+
+"This man Gryson," said Blount, running his eye over the memorandum, "I
+see you've got him down four or five times. What did he want?"
+
+"He wouldn't tell me. But he was all kinds of anxious to see you. That
+was why I telegraphed you; I couldn't get rid of him any other way."
+
+"Let me see the copy of the message."
+
+Again Collins made a journey to his desk, returning with the
+telegraph-impression book open at the proper page. Blount glanced at the
+copy of the brief message: "Thomas Gryson wants to know when he can be
+sure of finding you here," and handed the book back.
+
+"How did you send that?" he asked.
+
+"I sent it down to the despatcher's office by Barney."
+
+Blount nodded. The message had not reached him; and its suppression was
+doubtless another move in the subtle game.
+
+"You say you couldn't find out what Gryson wanted?" he pressed.
+
+"He--he seemed to be all torn up about something; couldn't say three
+words without putting a cuss word in with them. The most I could get out
+of him was that somebody was trying to double-cross him."
+
+Blount took a cigar from his pocket and lighted it. He was faint for
+lack of food, but he absently mistook the hunger for the tobacco
+craving.
+
+"Collins," he said evenly, "you appear to forget at times that you are
+working for a man who has had some little experience with unwilling
+witnesses in the courts. You are not telling me the truth; or, at least,
+you're not telling me all of it. Let's have the part that you are
+keeping back."
+
+"The--the last time he was in, he--he did talk a little," faltered the
+young man. "He's got something to sell, and he's f-fighting mad at Mr.
+Kittredge. He said he was going to throw the gaff into somebody damn'
+quick if Mr. Kittredge didn't wipe off the slate and c-come across with
+the price."
+
+"That is better," was the brief comment. "Now, then, why did you lie to
+me in the first place?"
+
+The stenographer shut his eyes and shrunk lower in his chair, but he
+made no reply.
+
+"I'll tell you why you lied," Blount went on, less harshly. "It was
+because you were told to. Isn't that so?"
+
+Collins nodded.
+
+Reaching out quickly, Blount laid a hand on the young man's knee. "Fred,
+what do you think of a soldier who takes his pay from one side and
+fights on the other? That is what you've been doing, you know; it is
+what you did when you put a dozen sheets of blank paper into an envelope
+the other day--the day I sent you to get a file of letters marked
+'private' from the safe."
+
+The culprit drew away from the touch of the hand on his knee, and there
+was fear, and behind the fear the courage of desperation, in his eyes
+when he lifted them.
+
+"You can give me the third degree if you want to, Mr. Blount, but as
+long as I've got the breath to say no, I'll never tell you the next
+thing you're going to ask me!"
+
+Blount sprang up and went to stand at the window. There was a street
+arc-lamp swinging in its high sling some distance below the window
+level, its scintillant spark changing weirdly to blue and green and back
+to blinding orange, and he stared so steadily at it that his eyes were
+full of tears when he turned to look down upon the waiting culprit.
+
+"No, Collins; I'm not going to ask you the name of the other master for
+whom you have thrown me down," he said gravely; and then: "That's
+all--you may go now."
+
+The young man got up and groped for the hat which had fallen from his
+hands to the floor and rolled away out of reach.
+
+"You mean that I'm to get my time-check?" he asked.
+
+"No," he grated--the harshness returning suddenly. "You are disloyal,
+and I know it; your successor would probably be the same, and I
+shouldn't know it."
+
+Nerved to the strident pitch now by the new resolution, Blount hurriedly
+set his desk in order, slammed it shut, and followed the stenographer to
+the street level. In the avenue he hesitated for a moment, the thoughts
+shuttling swiftly. In a flash the inferences fell into place. Gantry had
+said that his father was responsible for the time-killing journey to
+Lewiston. Why had it been necessary? Was it to keep him out of Gryson's
+way? What did the ward-organizer have to communicate that made him so
+anxious to secure an interview? Was that anxiety the breach through
+which the wider field of corruption might be reached?
+
+Again swift decision came to its own and Blount faced to the right,
+walking rapidly until he turned in at the foot of the worn double flight
+of stairs leading to the editorial rooms of _The Plainsman_. Blenkinsop,
+the editor, a lean, haggard man with a sallow face, coarse black hair
+worn always a little longer than the prevailing cut, and deep-set,
+gloomy eyes, was at his desk.
+
+"Can you give me a few minutes of your time, Blenkinsop?" the caller
+asked shortly.
+
+"I can sell 'em to you, maybe," said the editor, and the lift of the
+gloomy eyes merely served to turn the jest into a bit of morbid sarcasm.
+Then he gave the sarcasm a half-bitter twist: "You railroad gentlemen
+are always willing to buy what you can't reach out and take."
+
+"I know that is what you believe," said Blount, drawing up a broken
+chair and planting himself carefully in it; "we are on opposite sides of
+the fence in this fight, if you are fighting the railroad merely because
+it is a railroad; otherwise, perhaps, we are not so far apart as we
+might be. I don't know whether or not you have listened to any of my
+speeches, but you've printed a good many of them."
+
+The editor nodded. "I've read 'em, and I'm willing to be the hundredth
+man and say that I believe you are individually honest. I hope you're
+not going to ask me to go any further than that."
+
+"I'm not; I came for quite another purpose. First, let me ask a frank
+question: Is _The Plainsman_ out for a square deal all around,
+regardless of who may be hit?"
+
+Blenkinsop took time to consider the question and his answer, chewing
+thoughtfully upon his extinct cigar while he reflected.
+
+"This is straight goods?" he asked finally. "You're not trying to pull
+me into an admission that can be used against us a little later on?"
+
+"At the present moment you are talking to Evan Blount, the man, and not
+to the Transcontinental company's lawyer, Blenkinsop."
+
+"All right; then I'll tell you flat that we are out for blood. We hold
+no brief for any living man. There are no strings tied to us, and we
+wear nobody's brass collar."
+
+"Then you are fighting the machine as well as the railroad?" Blount put
+in quickly.
+
+The editor sat back in his chair, and the two furrows which deepened
+upon either side of his hard-bitted mouth answered for a smile.
+
+"When you find a machine that hasn't got 'T-C.R.' lettered on it
+somewhere, you let us know about it," was his rather cryptic reply.
+
+"That is not the point," said Blount dryly. "Here is the question I
+wanted to ask: There are only five days intervening before the election.
+How wide a swath could you cut if the evidence of wholesale corruption
+could be placed in your hands within twenty-four hours?"
+
+Again the editor took time to consider. When he spoke it was to say: "I
+can't quite believe that you are going to be disloyal to your salt at
+this late stage of the game, Blount. Do you mean that you are going to
+show your own company up for what it really is?"
+
+"Never mind about that. I asked a question, and you haven't answered
+it."
+
+"It was a question of time, wasn't it? There's time enough to tip the
+skillet over and spill all the grease into the fire, if that's what you
+mean; always time enough, up to the last issue before the polls open."
+
+"And you'd do it--no matter who might happen to get in the way of the
+burning grease?"
+
+"We print the news, and we try to get all the news there is. But it
+would have to be straight goods, Blount; no 'ifs' and 'ands' about it.
+I'm not saying that you couldn't produce the goods, you know. If you
+could break into Gantry's and Kittredge's private files, the trick would
+be turned. But I know well enough you're not going to do that."
+
+Blount got up out of the broken chair and buttoned his coat.
+
+"I needn't take any more of your time just now," he said. "I merely
+wanted to know how far you'd go if somebody should happen along at the
+last moment and give you a plain map of the road."
+
+"We'll go as far, and drive as hard, as any newspaper this side of the
+Missouri River. But we've got to have the facts--don't forget that."
+
+Blount was turning to go, but he faced around again sharply.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me, Blenkinsop, that you don't know, as well as you
+know you're alive, that this campaign is honeycombed with deals and
+trades and dishonesty and trickery in every legislative district?" he
+demanded.
+
+Again the ghastly smile which was only a deepening of the natural
+furrows flitted across the editor's face.
+
+"Of course, I know it," he returned. "But you'll excuse me if I say
+that I scarcely expected to have the railroad company's field-manager
+come and tell me about it."
+
+Blount's grim smile was a match for the editorial face-wrinkling. "You
+are like a good many others, Blenkinsop; you see red when you hear the
+noise of a railroad train. Perhaps, a little later, I may be able to
+persuade you to see another color--yellow, for example. Let it go at
+that. Good-night."
+
+Once more in the avenue, Blount turned his steps toward the
+Inter-Mountain. Since the campaign was now in its final week, the clans
+were gathering in the capital, and the lobby of the great hotel was
+filled with groups of caucussing politicians. Blount was halted half a
+dozen times before he could make his way to the room-clerk's desk, and
+the pumping process to which he was subjected at each fresh stoppage
+would have amused him if the fiery resolution which was driving him on
+had not temporarily killed his sense of humor. It was evident that, in
+spite of all he had been saying and doing, a considerable majority of
+the caucussers were still regarding him as his father's lieutenant. He
+did not try very hard to remove the impression. It mattered little, in
+the present crisis, what the various party henchmen thought or believed.
+
+It was a sharp disappointment when the room-clerk told him that his
+father and Mrs. Honoria and their guest had gone to the theatre. He was
+keyed to the fighting-pitch, and he wanted to have the deciding word
+spoken while his blood was up and there was still time to act. A glance
+at the clock showed him that he had a full half-hour to wait; and, as
+much to escape the buzzing lobbyists as to satisfy his hunger, he went
+to the _café_ and ordered a belated dinner, choosing a table from which
+he could look out through the open doors and command the main entrance
+through which the theatre-goers would return.
+
+He was through with the dinner, and was slowly sipping his black coffee,
+when he saw them come in. Since it was no part of his plan to dull the
+edge of opportunity by holding it first upon the social grindstone, he
+let the party of three go on to the elevators, and a little later sent a
+card up-stairs asking his father to meet him in the lounge on the
+mezzanine floor.
+
+Having the advantage of time, he was first at the appointed
+meeting-place. He had drawn a chair to the balustrade, and was glooming
+thoughtfully down at the lobby gathering, upon which even the lateness
+of the hour appeared to have no dispersing effect, when a mellow voice
+behind him said: "Well, son, taking a quiet little squint at the
+menagerie?"
+
+Blount got up and gave the speaker his chair, dragging up another for
+himself. The senator sat down and stretched his great frame like a man
+wearied. "Ah, Lord!" he said. "The old man isn't as young as he used to
+be, Evan, boy. There was a time once when eleven o'clock didn't seem any
+later to me than it does now to you; but it's gone by, son, and I don't
+reckon it'll ever come back again."
+
+Blount drew his chair nearer. "I have a hard thing to say to you
+to-night, dad," he began, "and you mustn't make it harder by speaking of
+your--of the things that get near to me. I am a man grown, and a Blount,
+like yourself; I want you to give me back those papers which your
+dynamiter or somebody else in your pay took from my office safe three
+nights ago."
+
+The senator's eyes lighted with the gentle smile, and the tips of the
+great mustaches twitched slightly.
+
+"So McVickar's been telling tales out of school, has he?" he inquired
+half-jocularly.
+
+"I have had no communication with Mr. McVickar. It wasn't necessary, nor
+is it needful for us to go aside out of the straight road. I want those
+papers. They are mine, and they were stolen."
+
+The elder man smiled again. "What if I should say that I haven't got
+'em, son--what then?" he asked mildly.
+
+"I don't want you to say that. I want to believe that, however bitter
+this fight may grow, we shall still speak the truth to each other."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and then the father broke it to
+say: "Reckon I could ask you what papers you mean, without roiling the
+water any more than it's already been roiled, son?"
+
+"You may ask and I'll answer, if you'll let me say that it is hardly
+worth while for you to spar with me to gain time. I had certain
+documents--letters--which would have enabled me to come through clean
+with my own people--with the railroad management. You knew I had them;
+I was imprudent enough to boast of it one evening when we were dining
+together in your rooms. I know what I'm talking about, dad, when I make
+this demand of you. One of my clerks has been tampered with. Three days
+ago, when I asked him to bring me the letters from the safe, he brought
+me, instead, a packet of blank paper which he allowed me to go and lock
+up in my safety-box in the Sierra National. I don't know why you had the
+safe blown up, unless it was to save Collins's face."
+
+Again a silence intervened, and in the midst of it the senator sat up
+and began to feel half-absently in his pockets for a cigar. Blount
+offered his own pocket-case, following it with the tender of a lighted
+match. With the cigar going, the Honorable David settled back in the
+deep chair, chuckling thoughtfully.
+
+"They wrote me from back yonder on the Eastern edge of things that you
+had the makings of a mighty fine lawyer in you, boy, and I'll be
+switched if I don't believe they had it about right. The way you've
+trailed this thing out doesn't leave the old man a hole as big as a
+dog-burrow to crawl out of, does it, now? Reckon you've sure-enough got
+to have those papers back before you can go on, do you?"
+
+"You know I must. You know what I've been preaching and talking: I have
+meant every word of it in good faith, and when I began to doubt the good
+faith of those behind me, I was forced to cast about for a weapon. It
+was handed to me almost miraculously, and as long as I held it my good
+name before the people of the State was safe. As the matter stands now,
+I'm a broken man, dad. After the election I shall be billeted from one
+end of the State to the other as the most shameless liar that ever
+breathed!"
+
+The senator was rocking his great head slowly upon the chair-pillow.
+"That's bad; that's mighty bad, son. I reckon we'll have to fix some way
+to trail you out of that bog-hole, sure enough!"
+
+"I'm not asking for help; I'm asking for bare justice. Give me those
+papers and I'll fight myself clear."
+
+"And if I say I can't give 'em to you, Evan, boy, what then?"
+
+"Then, hard and unfilial as it may seem to you, I shall fight you and
+your machine to a finish. You think I can't do it? I'll show you. I've
+got five days, and they are all my own. This campaign has been rotten to
+the core from the very beginning. You have tried to keep me from finding
+it out, and you have partly succeeded. But I know a little, and inside
+of the next twenty-four hours I shall know more. That's my last word,
+dad, and it breaks my heart to have to say it. But, by the God who made
+us both, if you drive me to it, I shall stir up such a revolution in
+this State that the people will forget to curse me for the lies I have
+been allowed to tell them!"
+
+Blount was upon his feet when he finished, and the senator was rising
+stiffly from the depths of the big chair.
+
+"That's good, man-sized talk, son," he commented gently, "and I reckon I
+haven't a word to say against it. All I'm going to beg for is this:
+we're kin, boy--mighty close kin. Belt away as hard as you like in the
+big scrap; it does me good to see that all these little Eastern frills
+haven't made you any less a two-fisted, hard-hitting Blount; but don't
+let it make you turn your back when your old daddy comes into the room.
+That's all I ask. Now you'd better go to bed and sleep up some. There's
+another day coming, and if there isn't, none of these little things
+we've been haggling over is going to count for much to any of us."
+
+Three minutes later the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush was letting himself
+into the sitting-room of his suite on the private dining-room floor by
+means of his night-key. The small person whom Gantry and a few others
+were still calling the court of last resort was sitting up, and the tiny
+embroidery-frame on the table had evidently just been laid aside.
+
+"Well?" she said inquiringly.
+
+The senator shook his head in patient tolerance.
+
+"Whatever you've been doing, it's knocked the bottom clean out for the
+boy, Honoria. For a little spell he had me going, and I thought I'd just
+naturally have to turn loose and spill all the fat into the fire."
+
+"You mustn't do that," she returned quickly. "There are five days yet,
+and I need at least three of them. He was very angry?"
+
+"Fighting mad."
+
+"Of course," said the small one thoughtfully. "But we can't allow that
+to get in the way of the bigger things. It won't make any family break,
+will it? For Patricia's sake I shall be sorry if he is desperate enough
+to make the quarrel a personal one."
+
+"I did the best I could on that, little woman, and I reckon he's big
+enough to keep on telling us 'Howdy.' What comes next on the programme?"
+
+"To-morrow I'm going to try to get him to take Patricia driving. Beyond
+that I haven't planned, and anyway it doesn't matter, now that you have
+Gryson out of the way." Then she offered a bit of news. "Richard Gantry
+telephoned me a few minutes ago. He has sent in his resignation, and is
+going to Peru."
+
+The senator was opening the door to the adjoining bedroom and turning on
+the lights.
+
+"Oh, no, I reckon not," he rejoined, with a mellow laugh rumbling deep
+in his great body. "Dick only thinks he is going to Peru. We all think
+such things now and then."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+THE UNDER-DOG
+
+
+Blount's first move on the morning following the militant interview with
+his father was telegraphic; he wired the campaign chairmen in the three
+towns remaining on his list, cancelling his speaking-engagements. Beyond
+that he went forth to institute a painstaking search in the purlieus of
+the city, a quest having for its object the unearthing of the man Thomas
+Gryson. More and more he was coming to believe that this man was the key
+to a larger situation in the field of political corruption than any
+which had as yet developed. Wherefore he made the search thorough.
+
+Oddly enough, considering the man and his habits, the quest proved
+fruitless. Blount was too clean a man to be on familiar terms with the
+saloon men and dive-keepers of the capital-city underworld, or with the
+crooks and turnings of the underworld itself; but he found his way
+around easily enough in daylight, and had his labor for his pains. For
+when he went back to the hotel at the luncheon-hour he brought little
+with him save a stench in his nostrils and a slightly increased fund of
+mystification. Gryson had disappeared as completely as if the earth had
+opened and swallowed him. And Blount knew the disappearance was real,
+because the ward-heeler's own henchmen were searching for him.
+
+Daunted but not beaten, Blount meant to continue the quest in the
+afternoon. But man proposes, and a small _dea ex machina_ may dispose.
+At the _café_ family luncheon, at which Blount was careful to make his
+appearance, not only because Patricia was there, but also for the sake
+of keeping the kinsman peace his father had begged for, it transpired
+that Patricia had been promised an auto drive to Fort Parker, the
+military reservation sixteen miles to the westward, and that there were
+difficulties. The senator's wife took his arm and explained her dilemma
+at the table dispersal.
+
+"It is parade day at the Fort, you know, and Patricia has set her heart
+on going. I don't know how I came to be so absurdly thoughtless, but I
+promised her before I remembered that this is the Kismet Club election
+afternoon, and if I don't go, they'll make me president again in spite
+of everything," she said in low tones as they were leaving the _café_.
+"I simply _can't_ serve another year; and at the same time, I do so
+dislike to disappoint Patricia. She is such a dear girl!" Mrs. Honoria
+was strictly within the bounds of truth in claiming to have forgotten
+the date of the Kismet election of officers; but it was equally true
+that the club would re-elect her, present or absent, since she was its
+founder and chief patroness.
+
+Blount saw the pointing of all this with perfect clarity, and he had no
+need to assure himself that it had every ear-mark of another expedient
+to get him out of the way. But while he was with Mrs. Honoria and
+listening to her persuasive little appeals it was much harder to
+maintain the antagonistic attitude than it was when she figured--at a
+distance--merely as his father's second wife and his mother's
+supplanter. Foolish? Oh, yes; but at times when the star of impulse is
+in the ascendant every man hath a fool in his sleeve.
+
+"It _is_ too bad to disappoint her," he found himself saying, matching
+the little lady's low tone. "If I wasn't so terribly busy--"
+
+"I know; and just now, with the election so near, you must be busier
+than ever. I suppose I shall have to explain to Patricia, and it hurts
+me, when she is going home so soon."
+
+"Going home?" echoed the victim.
+
+"Yes; in a few days now. The professor has already overstayed his leave
+of absence, so he says."
+
+Blount clenched a figurative fist and shook it savagely at an unkind
+fate. Nevertheless, he fell.
+
+"If you can shift your responsibility to my shoulders, Mrs. Blount--" he
+began, but she would not let him finish.
+
+"Oh! that is _so_ good of you, Evan. Take the little car, and be sure to
+ask the garage man to put in new batteries. The magneto isn't working
+very well. And be here by half past one if you can. The parade is at
+half past two, you know."
+
+Under other conditions the railroad company's "social secretary," as
+the society editors of the capital were still calling him, might have
+had a joyous half-holiday. The autumn afternoon was picture-fine, the
+little car ran well, and Patricia's mood was tempered with the gayety
+which strives to extract the final thrill of enjoyment out of the
+closing days of a delightful vacation. Blount was grateful for the
+light-hearted mood. He felt that it would be next to impossible to tell
+Patricia how wretchedly he had failed in the single-handed crusade, and,
+as to the desperate alternative, there could be no confidences with one
+whose every reference to his father was shot through with loving and
+loyal admiration.
+
+At the military reservation there were fewer opportunities for the
+confidences, or rather fewer temptations to indulge in them. It was a
+gala day at the post, and there were a number of auto parties out from
+the city. Blount knew most of the officers and their wives, and Patricia
+was welcomed not less for her own sake than for the reason that she had
+figured in former visits as the _protégée_ of an ex-senator's wife.
+After the parade there was an impromptu game of baseball, with the broad
+verandas of the officers' quarters serving for the grandstand. Beyond
+the game there was tea, and the sunset gun had been fired before the
+young lieutenant, who had attached himself to Miss Anners at the
+earliest possible moment in the afternoon, reluctantly surrendered his
+prize and handed Patricia into the waiting runabout for the return to
+the capital.
+
+"We shall be late for dinner, if we don't hurry," was the young woman's
+comment when Blount steered the little car clear of the post settlement
+and took the road well in the wake of the Weatherford touring machine.
+Then she added: "We mustn't be; we are dining out this evening--at the
+Gordons."
+
+Blount was entirely willing to hurry. Half of one of the precious days
+of challenge had been wasted in the futile search for Gryson, and here
+was the other half worse than wasted, since the handsome young
+lieutenant had so brazenly monopolized Patricia.
+
+"I'll get you home in time for dinner, never fear," he returned, but
+apparently the little car was no party to the promise. A short mile from
+the reservation the motor began to miss, and a few minutes farther along
+it stopped altogether. Blount got out and began to investigate. There
+was plenty of gasolene, but the spark appeared to be dead.
+
+"I ought to have a leather medal!" he confided to Patricia, in great
+disgust. "Mrs. Blount told me that the batteries needed to be changed,
+and I had them changed, but neglected to have them tested. Sit still and
+let me spin it on the magneto a while."
+
+She let him do it until the perspiration was standing in fine little
+beads on his forehead and he was hot and desperate. Then she said
+sweetly: "I don't believe I'd wear myself out that way, if I were you,
+Evan. Something happened to the magneto two or three weeks ago, and it
+has never been fixed."
+
+Blount pushed his driving-cap back, mopped his face, and came around to
+dive once more into the wiring in the battery box. Dusk was coming on,
+and he had to light one of the side-lamps to serve as a lantern. By
+changing the wiring he was finally able to evoke a desultory response
+from the spark-coil, and a little later to start the motor after some
+limping fashion.
+
+"Oh, my poor dinner!" said Miss Anners, who was still in the
+light-hearted mood; this after Blount's careful nursing had resulted in
+a creeping resumption of the cityward progress. And then: "I hope you
+didn't have any engagement for this evening?"
+
+"I have but one ambition in life," he rejoined grimly, "and that is to
+get you back to the hotel in time for your engagement. Surely Mrs.
+Blount will wait for you."
+
+At the rate they were going the waiting promised to be long. But after
+another half-hour had been killed, the headlights of a westward-driven
+car appeared in the road ahead. Blount pulled quickly into the ditch and
+jumped out to flag the oncoming machine; did flag it, and was able to
+borrow a set of batteries. With the new equipment the remainder of the
+drive was accomplished swiftly, but not swiftly enough. At the
+Inter-Mountain they found that the senator and Mrs. Honoria had gone to
+keep their dinner engagement, and a note in the little lady's
+copperplate handwriting informed Blount that the invitation had been
+made to include him, and that he was to hurry and bring Patricia.
+
+Fully alive now to the time-killing purpose of the clever little
+machinator in arranging to have spent batteries given him, Blount,
+nevertheless, did his duty like a man, and the pair made a late descent
+upon the Gordon dinner-table. Though the dinner was informal, there were
+other guests besides the senator's party, and among them the traffic
+manager. Blount, sitting next to Patricia, made their tardiness an
+excuse and devoted himself to her, thus escaping the toils of the
+general table-talk, which was frankly political. But at the adjournment
+to the drawing-room he cornered Gantry.
+
+"I meant to hunt you up this afternoon," he began, "but I was otherwise
+spoken for. What have you done?"
+
+"I've cabled a conditional acceptance of the offer I was telling you
+about."
+
+"But you haven't resigned?"
+
+"No. Mr. McVickar will probably be here within a day or two, and I'll
+make it verbal."
+
+Yielding to the urgings of the younger Gordon, Patricia was going to the
+piano, and Blount snatched at his opportunity.
+
+"Give me a few minutes in the smoking-room," he said to the traffic
+manager, and when the privacy was secured: "You needn't resign, Dick.
+There isn't going to be any earthquake--of the kind you were fearing."
+
+"You don't mean that the Honorable Senator has turned you down, Evan?"
+
+"Just that."
+
+"I'm sorry," said the friend in need, feeling his way cautiously. Then
+he added: "You needn't tell me anything more than you want to, you
+know."
+
+"There isn't much to tell. I asked for bare justice, and it was
+refused."
+
+"Your father has the papers?"
+
+"He neither admitted nor denied."
+
+"But you didn't quarrel?"
+
+Blount's smile was mirthless. "We are here together, as you see. After
+all is said, we are still father and son."
+
+"Of course; that's as it should be, Evan. What are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know: go on fighting until I'm wiped out, I suppose. And that
+reminds me: have you seen that fellow Gryson within the last day or
+two?"
+
+Gantry dropped into the depths of a lounging-chair and lighted a
+cigarette. "So you're after Thomas Matthew, too, are you? Kittredge has
+been ransacking the town for him all day, and up to a couple of hours
+ago he hadn't found him. What's in the wind?"
+
+"I don't know, but I mean to find out. What can you tell me about
+Gryson--more than you have already told me?"
+
+"Not very much, I guess. He's a scalawag, of course, but unhappily for
+all of us he is a scalawag with a pull. Kittredge has been dickering
+with him--I don't mind telling you that now."
+
+"What is the nature of the pull?"
+
+"Votes," said Gantry succinctly.
+
+"Straight or crooked?"
+
+"You may search me. But knowing Tom Gryson a little, I should put my
+money on the marked card."
+
+"Naturally," said Blount dryly. "Still, I am needing to be shown. I've
+had two or three chances to size Gryson up, and he didn't impress me as
+a man with any ability beyond the requirements of a bully and the lowest
+type of a political heeler."
+
+"Tom is bigger than that; I don't know how much bigger, but some. He has
+votes to sell, and Kittredge, at least, seems to believe that he can
+deliver the goods. I don't know the inside of the deal. I'll tell you
+frankly that I tried to shove it over to you, neck and heels, at first.
+When that little notion failed, I pushed it along to Kittredge."
+
+Blount's eyebrows, which promised in time to be as portentous as the
+Honorable Senator's, met in a frown. "I'm going to find Gryson, dead or
+alive," he said.
+
+Gantry looked up quickly.
+
+"Which means that you know what has become of him?"
+
+"He has been put out of the way for a purpose, and the purpose is to
+keep me from finding out something that Gryson wants to tell me. That
+was the animus of the scheme to send me on a fool's errand to Lewiston.
+After you left me last night I found out that Gryson had been worrying
+Collins the day before; had been in the office a number of times and was
+sweatingly anxious about something."
+
+Gantry flung his cigarette away and lighted another. After a deep
+inhalation or two he said: "Let it alone, Evan. I have a hunch that
+you'll be happier if you don't try to drag the cover off of that
+particular cesspool."
+
+"Listen," said Blount shortly. "When my father turned me down last night
+I told him that I still had five days in which to--"
+
+"I know," Gantry nodded. "Just the same, you're not going to do it."
+
+"If I don't, it will be because I can't; because the time is too short."
+Then, with a sudden and impulsive gesture of appeal: "Dick, for Heaven's
+sake help me to find that man Gryson, if you know where he is! I shall
+blow up if I can't do something!"
+
+Gantry rose and tossed the second cigarette among the coals in the
+grate.
+
+"I've been afraid all along that they'd corner you and beat you to death
+with feather-dusters," he lamented. "And the only thing I can say will
+make matters worse instead of better. I have it pretty straight that
+Gryson has been fired--shooed out of town, and probably out of the
+State."
+
+"Who did it, Gantry?"
+
+"There is only one man in this bailiwick who can take the whip to a
+fellow like Tom Gryson. I guess I don't need to name him for you, Evan."
+
+Blount got out of his chair and stood with his back to the fire, and his
+face was white.
+
+"Good God! the rottenness of it, Dick!" he groaned. And then: "I've got
+to get out of this and begin all over again in some corner of the world
+where at least one man in ten hasn't forgotten the meaning of common
+honesty and decency and fair dealing. Heaven knows I'm no saint, but if
+I stay here this cursed crookedness will get into my blood and I'll be
+just as degraded as the worst of them. No, I'm not raving; there have
+been times when I've felt myself slipping--times when I've been tempted
+to get down and fight with the weapons that everybody fights with in
+this God-forsaken, law-breaking, graft-ridden commonwealth!"
+
+Gantry had risen and he was slowly shaking his head.
+
+"You're hot now--and with good enough cause, I guess. But that sort of a
+temperature makes a man near-sighted and color-blind. Human nature is
+pretty much the same the world over, Evan, and if you could see beyond
+the crookedness you'd find a lot of good people out here, averaging
+about the same as the decent majority anywhere. It's an inarticulate
+majority generally; it doesn't stand up on its hind legs and rear around
+and call attention to itself--couldn't if it should try. But it's here
+and there and everywhere in America, just the same. A railroad car with
+one drunken fool in it gives you the idea. You focus on him and say,
+'What a beastly shame!' and you entirely overlook the other fifty-odd
+people in the car who are quietly minding their own business."
+
+Blount's smile was for the man rather than for the theory.
+
+"You are an implacable optimist, Dick, and you always have been," he
+returned. "Your theory is good humanitarianism, and I wish I could
+accept it as applying to this abandoned community out here in my native
+hills; but I can't. Let's go back to the others. We've established a
+sort of family _modus vivendi_, my father and I, and I don't want him to
+think that I'm breaking it by plotting with you."
+
+It was while the evening was still measurably young that Blount made his
+excuses to his hostess and got away, fondly believing that he was
+escaping without attracting the attention of the small lady who was deep
+in a political discussion with candidate Gordon at the critical moment.
+He was mistaken, but the escape was not interrupted. At the curb the
+Blount touring-car was waiting, with two others, and for an instant
+Blount hesitated, half inclined to ask his father's chauffeur, to drive
+him down-town. On such inconsequent pivots fate, or accident, twirls the
+most momentous affairs of life. If Blount had taken the car he would
+have been driven directly to the hotel. As it was, he walked, and in
+passing the Temple Court Building he remembered that he had not seen his
+mail since early morning.
+
+Rousing the sleepy boy in charge of the all-night elevator, he had
+himself lifted to his office floor. The upper corridor was dimly
+lighted, and on leaving the car he went directly to the door of his
+private room, walking swiftly and neither seeing nor hearing a man who,
+materializing mysteriously out of the corridor shadows, followed him
+step by step.
+
+In the office Blount snapped the lights on and turned to unlock his
+desk. As the key clicked in the lock the sixth sense, which is perhaps
+only a mingling of the subtler essences of the other five, warned him
+sharply, and he wheeled to face the door which had been left on the
+latch. As he looked, the door opened silently and the materializing
+shadow, haggard of face and with bloodshot eyes mirroring blind rage and
+the terror of a cornered rat, slipped into the room and stood warily
+aside out of the direct light from the electric chandelier. Blount
+looked again and swore softly. The dodging intruder was the man Thomas
+Gryson.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+THE ICONOCLAST
+
+
+It is a threadbare saying that the environment moulds the man. Yet, much
+more than the philosophers have contended, there are chameleon
+tendencies in the strongest character, and one finely determining to
+coerce his surroundings is quite likely to end by realizing that the
+surroundings have appealed to unsuspected color-changings in himself.
+Thus it may chance that the fairest fighter, finding himself
+sufficiently kicked and cuffed in the rough-and-tumble, will discover
+how facilely easy it is to descend to the level of his antagonists, and
+from this discovery to the awakening of the remorseless passion for
+success at any price is but a step, long or short according to the
+exigencies of the struggle.
+
+Checked in his luggage, if not precisely pinned openly upon his sleeve,
+Blount had brought with him from the scholastic banks of the Charles a
+choice assortment of ideals, which are things precious only as they can
+be preserved inviolate. But for weeks, endless weeks as they seemed to
+him in the retrospect, he had been rubbing shoulders with a crude world
+which appeared to care little for ideals and less for the man who upheld
+them. Inevitably, as he had admitted to Gantry, the change was wrought,
+or working; the exclamation springing to his lips when he recognized
+Gryson evinced it, and when he beckoned the shifty intruder to the chair
+at the desk end the ruthless _zeitgeist_ had taken full possession of
+him, and the thought uppermost had grown suddenly indifferent to the
+means if by their employment the end might be gained.
+
+"Come over here and sit down," he commanded; then, seeing that Gryson
+hesitated and flung a glance over his shoulder at the door: "What are
+you afraid of?"
+
+"They've got my number," said the ward-heeler, in a convict whisper
+which was little more than a facial contortion. "There's a couple o'
+bulls waitin' f'r me down on the sidewalk."
+
+Blount crossed the room, shut the door and locked it. Then he went back
+to the self-confessed fugitive.
+
+"You're safe for the time being," he told the man. "Now talk fast and
+talk straight. What do you want this time?"
+
+Gryson hammered the arm of his chair with his fist and babbled
+profanity. When he became coherent he told his story, or rather Blount
+got it out of him piecemeal, of how he had been employed by the
+"organization" to falsify the registration lists in certain districts;
+of how, when the work was done, he had been denied the price and driven
+out with cursings. In the accusation, which was shot through with
+tremulous imprecations, the "organization" and the railroad company
+were implicated as if they were one. In one breath the fugitive charged
+the "double-crossing" to Kittredge, and in the next he accused the "big
+boss" himself, of having passed the sentence of deportation.
+
+"You say you were driven out? How could they drive you if you didn't
+want to go?" queried the cross-examiner.
+
+"That's on me: it was a job I pulled off two years ago in another
+place--up north of this--and the night-watchman got in the way when I
+was leavin'. They jerked that on me and showed me th' rope. They had me
+by th' neck, with th' word passed to Chief Robertson. I'm back here now
+wit' my life in my hand, but I'd chance it twice over to get square wit'
+them welshers that have bawled me out!"
+
+"Why have you come to me?" asked Blount briefly.
+
+"Gawd knows; I took a chance again. I've heard your speeches, and says
+I, 'There's your wan chance, cully,' and I'm here to grab f'r it. If
+you've been meanin' the half of what you've been sayin', Mr. Blount--"
+There was more of it, half pleadings and half mere rageful babblings of
+a vengeful soul hampered by the tongue of inadequacy.
+
+Blount left his chair and began to pace the floor, with Gryson watching
+him furtively. At any time earlier in the struggle the thought of using
+this wretched time-server as a means to any end, however desirable and
+just, would have been nauseating. True, if there could be any such thing
+as honor among thieves, the man had earned the price of his crooked
+work among the registration clerks; but for another man to profit by the
+broken bargain, and by the confessed criminal's rage and lust for
+vengeance, was a thing to make even a hard-pressed loser in an unequal
+battle hesitate.
+
+The hesitation was only momentary. With a gesture which was more
+expressive than many words, Blount turned short upon the furtive watcher
+in the chair at the desk end.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" he demanded.
+
+"You're on before I could stall it f'r you. You've been swearin' you'd
+back th' square deal to th' limit; it ain't square; it's crooked as
+hell. Grab f'r this knife I'm handin' you and cut the heart out o' these
+welshin' bosses that are givin' you th' double-cross the same as they're
+givin' it to me. You're the on'y man that can do it; the on'y man on
+Gawd's green earth they're afraid of. I know it damn' well. That's why
+they handed my number to th' chief and passed th' word to have me
+pinched. They was afraid I'd come here and squeal to you!"
+
+Blount stopped him with an impatient gesture. "Let that part of it rest
+and get down to business. What you have been telling me may be true, but
+I can't do anything on your bare word--the word of a man who is dodging
+the police. You've got to bring me proofs in black and white; lists of
+the faked names, and a straight-out give-away of how they are to be
+used; names and dates, and a written story of your bargainings with the
+men higher up. This is Thursday; to be of any use, these documents
+would have to be in my hands by Saturday noon, at the latest. You know
+best whether the thing can be done in time--or done at all. What do you
+say?"
+
+For a little time Gryson said nothing. When he spoke it was evident that
+the lust for vengeance and a guilty conscience were fighting an
+even-handed battle.
+
+"I could get the affidavits--maybe," he said. "There's a dozen 'r more
+of the cullies down-along got their notice to fade away when I got mine,
+and they'd jump at th' chance to get back at the bosses. But f'r Gawd's
+sake, look at what it means to me! Anny minute I'm on the job I'd be
+lookin' to see some bull with a star on 'im holdin' a gun on me; and
+after that, it's this f'r mine"--with a jerk of the head and a
+pantomimic gesture simulating the hangman's knot under his ear.
+
+"That is your risk," said Blount coldly, making this small concession to
+the expiring sense of uprightness. "You know how badly you want to 'get
+square,' as you put it, and I am interested only in the results. If you
+get caught, I sha'n't turn my hand over to help you--you can take that
+straight. But if you show up here with the proofs, proofs that I can
+use, any time before Saturday night, I'll undertake to see that you get
+safely out of the State."
+
+It was in the little pause which followed that some one in the corridor
+rapped smartly on the locked door. At the sound, Gryson collapsed and
+his face became an ashen mask of fear. Blount, the law-abiding, might
+have hesitated, but this newer Blount had slain his scruples. Snatching
+Gryson out of his chair, he thrust him silently through the half-open
+door of the work-room, and a moment later he was answering the rap at
+the corridor entrance, opening the door and calmly facing the two
+policemen on the threshold.
+
+"Well?" he said brusquely.
+
+One of the men touched his helmet.
+
+"We're looking for a felly that ducked in below a couple of hours ago,
+Mr. Blount. He's in the building, somewheres, and your office being
+lighted, we thought maybe you'd--"
+
+Blount threw the door wide.
+
+"You can see for yourselves," he said. "Would you like to come in and
+look around?"
+
+"Sure not; your word's as good as the search, Mr. Blount. 'Twas only on
+the chance that he might have faked an excuse and ducked in on you to be
+out of reach."
+
+Blount left the door open and went to get his coat and hat.
+
+"Who is the man?" he asked, while the officers lingered.
+
+"A felly named Gryson. He's been working in the railroad shops what
+times he wasn't pullin' off something crooked in the p'litical line."
+
+"What is he wanted for?" Blount was closing his desk and preparing to
+leave the office.
+
+"Croaking a bank watchman up in Montana afther he'd souped the vault
+door for a kick-shot."
+
+"In that case, perhaps I'm lucky that he didn't drop in and croak me,"
+laughed Blount, turning off the lights and joining the two men in the
+corridor. And then: "There is a back stair to the engine-room in the
+basement in the other wing of the building: have you been watching
+that?"
+
+The bigger of the two policemen prodded the other in the ribs with his
+night-stick. "That's on us, Jakey. He'll have been gone hours ago. Let's
+be drilling. 'Tis a fine mind ye have, Mr. Blount, to be thinking of
+thim back stairs right off the bat." And the pair went down in the
+elevator with Blount, chuckling to themselves at their own discomfiture.
+
+Having set his hand to the plough, Blount did nothing carelessly.
+Sauntering slowly, and even pausing to light a cigar, he trailed the two
+policemen until they were safely in another street. Then he turned back
+to the great office building and once more had himself lifted to the
+upper floor. In the office corridor he waited until the car had dropped
+out of sight; waited still longer to give the drowsy night-boy time to
+settle himself on his stool and go to sleep. Then he went swiftly to the
+door of the private room and unlocked it.
+
+Gryson was ready, and even in the dim light of the corridor Blount could
+see that he was white-faced and trembling. In the silent faring to the
+stair which wound down in a spiral around the freight elevator Blount
+gripped the arm of trembling.
+
+"You've got to get your nerve," he gritted savagely, "or you'll be
+nipped before you've gone a block!" And then: "Here's the stair: follow
+it down until you get to the basement. There's a coal entrance from the
+alley, and the engineer will be with his boilers in the other wing--and
+probably asleep. You've got it straight, have you? You're to bring the
+papers to my office on or before Saturday night. I'll be looking out for
+you, and if you bring me the evidence, you'll be taken care of. That's
+all. Down with you, now, and go quietly. If you're caught, I drop you
+like a hot nail; remember that."
+
+Still puffing at the cigar which glowed redly in the darkness of the
+wing corridor, Blount waited until his man had been given time to reach
+the basement. Then he walked slowly back to the main corridor and
+descended by the public stair without awakening the elevator boy, who
+was sleeping soundly in his car on the ground level.
+
+On the short walk to the hotel the full significance of the thing he had
+done had its innings. Cynical criticism to the contrary notwithstanding,
+there is now and then an honest lawyer who regards his oath of admission
+to the bar--the oath which binds him to uphold the cause of justice and
+fair dealing--as something more than a mere form of words. Beyond all
+question, an honest man who has sworn to uphold the law may neither
+connive at crime nor shield a criminal. Blount tried the shift of every
+man who has ever stepped aside out of the plain path of rectitude; he
+told himself morosely that he had nothing to do with Gryson's past; that
+he had taken no retainer from the Montana authorities; that the criminal
+was merely a cog in a wheel which was grinding toward a righteous end,
+and as such should be permitted to serve his turn.
+
+The well-worn argument is always specious to the beginner, and Blount
+thought he had sufficiently justified himself by the time he was pushing
+through the revolving doors into the Inter-Mountain lobby. But when he
+saw his father quietly smoking his bed-time cigar in one of the big
+leather-covered lounging-chairs, he realized that the first step had
+been taken in an exceedingly thorny path; that whatever else might be
+the outcome of the bargain with Thomas Gryson, a son was coldly plotting
+to bring disgrace and humiliation upon a father.
+
+For this reason, and because, when all is said, blood is much thicker
+than water, Blount made as if he did not see the beckoning hand-wave
+from the depths of the big chair in the smokers' alcove; ignored it, and
+with set lips and burning eyes made for the nearest elevator to take
+refuge in his room.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+A CRY IN THE NIGHT.
+
+
+With the critical election, a struggle which was to decide for another
+two-year period whether or not the people of the Sage-Brush State were
+to be the masters or the servants of chartered monopoly, only four days
+distant, the capital city took on the aspect of a stirring camp--two
+rival camps, in fact, since the State headquarters of the two chief
+parties were in the Inter-Mountain Hotel--and each incoming train
+brought fresh relays of henchmen and district spellbinders to swell the
+sidewalk throngs and to crowd the lobbies.
+
+On the Friday morning Blount awoke with the feeling that he had
+definitely cut himself off from all the commonplace activities of the
+campaign. There were two days of suspense to be outworn, and if he could
+have compassed it he would have been glad to efface himself completely.
+Since that was impossible, and since it seemed equally impossible that
+he should go on keeping up the farce of the _modus vivendi_ after he had
+taken the step which would presently blazon his name to the world as
+that of his father's accuser, he bought the morning papers hurriedly at
+the hotel news-stand and went down the avenue to get his breakfast at
+the railroad restaurant, where he would be measurably sure of isolation.
+
+After giving his order he ran hastily through the local news in the
+papers. There was no mention of the arrest of one Thomas Gryson in any
+of the police notes, and he breathed freer. But in _The Plainsman_ there
+was an editorial which was vaguely disturbing. Blenkinsop, who wrote his
+own leaders, hinted pointedly at coming disclosures which would change
+the political map of the State for all time. Blount, trying to determine
+how much or how little the editorial was based upon his talk with the
+editor on the Wednesday night, found his omelet tasteless. Ready enough,
+as he was persuaded, to fire the disrupting mine with his own hand, he
+was not ready to surrender the match to any one else. Manifestly he must
+see Blenkinsop and caution him.
+
+Breakfast over, he walked, by the longest way around, to his office in
+the Temple Court, hoping to find work which would help him through the
+forenoon. It was an idle hope. From a State-wide shower of political
+correspondence the daily mail had dropped suddenly to an inconsequential
+drizzle, and there were no callers. Here, again, he saw, or thought he
+saw, the all-powerful hand of the machine. He had been used for a
+purpose, the purpose of hoodwinking and deceiving the voters. That
+purpose having been served, he was to be dropped--was already dropped,
+as it seemed. By noon the sheer time-killing effort became blankly
+unbearable, and in desperation he broke with another of the ideals--the
+one labelled sincerity--and going boldly to the Inter-Mountain he waited
+in the lobby for the family party of three to come down to the
+one-o'clock luncheon in the public _café_.
+
+Joining the party when it came down, he found it difficult only in the
+inner sanctuaries to maintain the _status quo ante_ Gryson. There was no
+shadow of suspicion or coolness in his father's kindly smile and genial
+greeting, and Mrs. Honoria rallied him playfully upon the narrow margin
+by which he had held his own and Patricia's places at the Gordon
+dinner-table the night before. Only in Patricia's eyes he read a curious
+questioning, a hint that they were finding something in his eyes which
+was new and not wholly understandable. He knew well enough what it was
+that she saw; and though she was sitting opposite him at the table for
+four, he looked at her as seldom as possible, devoting himself, for once
+in a way, resolutely to his father's wife.
+
+After luncheon he again fell back upon the dogged boldness. Unable to
+contemplate a second plunge into the solitude of the Temple Court
+offices, he asked and was accorded permission to take Patricia for a
+country drive in the little car. When the city was left behind, and the
+small machine was purring steadily northwestward over a road which led
+to nowhere in particular, Blount put his finger accurately upon the
+thing which had been building little barriers of silence between them
+all the way out from town.
+
+"You knew me well enough yesterday to be reasonably certain of what I
+would do in given circumstances, didn't you, Patricia?" he began
+abruptly. "To-day you are not so sure about it. Why?"
+
+She laughed lightly, but there was a serious undernote in her voice when
+she said: "There are moments when you make me wonder if you haven't been
+dabbling in necromancy, Evan. I was at that very instant telling myself
+that it wasn't so."
+
+"But you know it is so," he persisted. "Why am I different?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Yet you recognize the fact?"
+
+"Is it a fact?" she queried.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"In what way are you different?"
+
+"I am not altogether certain that I know, myself. But I do know this:
+between yesterday and to-day there is a gulf so wide that it seems
+measureless. The scientists claim there are no cataclysms; no sudden and
+sweeping changes taking place either in the physical or the metaphysical
+field. If that be true, the changes must go on subconsciously for a long
+time before they are recognized. There is no other way of accounting for
+the gulfs."
+
+"You are talking miles over my head," she protested; and, though the
+assertion was not strictly true, it served its purpose.
+
+"I can make it a little plainer," he went on, slowing the motor until
+the small car was merely ambling. "You remember that night at Wartrace
+Hall, and what you told me? I went out from that talk resolved to do
+what you had shown me I ought to do, stubbornly refusing to consider the
+possibility of failure. None the less, I have failed."
+
+"Oh, no!" she exclaimed; "not that!"
+
+"Yes, just that. But the failure is not the worst thing that has
+befallen me. I have lost or gained something that pushes the yesterdays
+into a past which can never be recovered. Let me tell you, girl: I have
+been fighting in the open, against treachery and deceit fighting always
+under cover. I have been fighting bare-handed where others were armed.
+Day by day I have been finding out the baseness and the trickery; how my
+own side has used me as a screen behind which the old dishonorable
+expedients could be safely planned and carried out. I never knew until
+within the past two days what all this chicanery and double-dealing
+might be doing to me, but now I do know."
+
+"Will it bear telling?" she asked quietly.
+
+"I think not--to you," he returned, matching her low tone. "Let it be
+enough to say that I am no longer the man I was when I came out here.
+Patricia, I'm not fighting bare-handed any more; I'm smashing in with
+any weapon I can get hold of. There will be no such reform as the one
+you urged me to champion--as the era of fair-dealing and sincerity which
+I have been trying honestly and earnestly to inaugurate. Nevertheless,
+if my hand doesn't tremble too much at the critical moment, there will
+be, on the morning of next Tuesday, such a revolution as this
+commonwealth has never seen. Though they have robbed me and made a
+puppet of me, I can still bring it about."
+
+He had gone farther than he meant to, and he thought she would protest.
+He knew that her convictions of what should be and what should not be
+were clear-cut and definite. But a man, even though he be a lover, may
+know a woman's mind without knowing very much about the woman herself.
+There was no protest forthcoming. Quite the contrary, she answered him
+with a little shudder that was almost a caress, saying: "I think you
+have grown--bigger and stronger than I ever thought you could grow,
+Evan; and I'm sure your hand won't tremble. Is that what you want me to
+say?"
+
+Since there is no more contradictory being in a sentient world than a
+man in love, Blount was not quite sure that it was what he wanted her to
+say. By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures
+as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all
+that is high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard by which he
+can measure his own baser desires and ambitions and be shrived of them.
+At other times the straitly human has its innings, and the longing is
+for a comrade, a companion, a second self buried, lost, submerged in the
+loyalty which never questions. Having come slowly to maturity as a
+lover, Blount had been leaning toward the divinity definition of
+Patricia Anners. But now the iconoclastic change was breaking many
+images.
+
+"You are willing to believe that I haven't gone altogether backward?" he
+queried, after the little car had measured an additional stretch of the
+mesa road.
+
+"You are bigger and stronger," she repeated.
+
+"How do you know I am?"
+
+"I can tell; any woman could tell."
+
+"Is the acquirement of size and strength so great a thing that--"
+
+"I think it is--in a woman's eyes," she admitted fearlessly. "We are all
+more or less primitive and--and, well, 'Stone-Agey,' let us say, in the
+last analysis; at least, women are." And then: "You don't know women
+very well, Evan."
+
+"Don't I?"
+
+"No, you don't. You judge us by standards which have no existence
+outside of your own purely masculine deductions. For example: I suppose
+you wouldn't admit for a moment that a good woman might properly do
+things which would be entirely discreditable in a man?"
+
+He shook his head slowly and said: "Yesterday, or the day before, I
+might have said 'no,' with all the cocksureness of a boy of twenty.
+To-day I can only say: 'Who am I, that I should judge any man--or any
+woman?'" Then suddenly: "You are making excuses for my father's wife.
+You needn't, you know. She has fought me from the beginning, and I know
+it. Sometimes I think that she is solely responsible for my failure to
+accomplish the thing I had set my heart upon. Let it go; I don't bear
+malice. Just now I'm more interested in what you were saying about the
+sex differences and the woman's point of view. Have you been calling me
+a weak man, Patricia?"
+
+"No; only--a little--conventional," she returned half reluctantly.
+
+"But you are the quintessence of conventionality yourself!" he burst
+out.
+
+"Am I? Perhaps that was a passing phase, too. Quite probably the little
+things will remain--the dressing for dinner and the paying of party
+calls and all that. But one really big man has made many things seem
+petty and trifling--things that I used to think were of the greatest
+possible importance."
+
+"My father, you mean?"
+
+"Yes. If I should ever marry, Evan, I should be deliriously happy if I
+could find a man who promised to grow to the stature of your father."
+
+There was manifestly no rejoinder to be made to this by David Blount's
+son, though it pointed to another and still more painful involvement.
+What would Patricia say when the _débâcle_ came? Would she lose faith in
+his father, and in all masculinity, in the crash? Or would she borrow
+yet again from the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging and
+still be loyal? In either case Blount saw his own finish, and he was
+rather relieved when she left the sex argument indeterminate and began
+to talk of other things: of her father's decision to go home at the end
+of the following week, of the good times she had been having, and of the
+regret with which she would turn her back upon the wide horizons and the
+freedom of it all.
+
+"I brought my shell with me when I came," she confessed, laughing, "but
+I think it is broken into little pieces by now. You will know how small
+the pieces are when I tell you that 'Tennessee Jim,' your father's horse
+wrangler, calls me 'Miz' Pat,' and it always makes me want to shake
+hands with him."
+
+Blount made the afternoon last as he could, sending the little car over
+many miles of the mesa roads and encouraging the small confidences which
+were enabling him to postpone his own evil hour. When the sun was
+dipping toward the Carnadine Hills they returned over a trail which came
+into the main Quaretaro road at a point where the northern highway
+begins its descent to the lower mesa level. Half-way down the descending
+gulch they came to the mouth of a small lateral canyon breaking into the
+larger gorge from the eastward; a canyon dry for the greater part of the
+year, but in the rainy season affording an outlet for the flood-waters
+of the Little Shonoho.
+
+"That is a road I have always wanted to explore," said Patricia,
+pointing to the fine driveway leading up the small canyon. "That is one
+of my weaknesses when I am driving; I am never able to pass a branch
+road without wanting to turn aside and explore it."
+
+"Then we'll explore this one, right now," said Blount, cutting the car
+to the left. He was more than willing to delay, even by littles, the
+moment when he should be obliged to resume the sorry business of waiting
+and dissembling.
+
+Miss Anners glanced at the tiny watch pinned upon her shoulder.
+
+"Shall we have time? It's getting late."
+
+"Plenty of time for all we shall be able to do or see up here," Blount
+returned. "The road ends at the canyon head, a mile above. There is a
+very small and very exclusive summer-resort hotel, called the Shonoho
+Inn, on the upper level. It has a six-weeks' season--like the Florida
+resorts--they tell me, and it is closed now."
+
+It was within the next five hundred yards that the prediction that there
+would be nothing to see anticipated its fulfilment. At a sudden turn in
+the narrow defile they came to a brush-built barricade posted with a
+sign:
+
+ROAD WASHED OUT ABOVE
+NO PASSING FOR VEHICLES!
+
+"That settles it," said Blount shortly, and he turned the car and let it
+roll back down the grade to the main gulch.
+
+When they were once more speeding toward town Blount stole a glance at
+his companion, wondering if it were the small disappointment which made
+her silent.
+
+"Are you tired?" he asked quickly.
+
+"Oh, no," she rejoined, brightening again. "I have enjoyed every minute
+of it. I was just thinking of what I said a little while ago; of how it
+is going to break my heart to leave it all."
+
+It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she needn't leave it.
+But he remembered and caught himself sharply. When the dreadful Tuesday
+should have come and gone, she might be only too willing to go away;
+and, in any event, he would have to go. There would be no place in his
+own and his father's State for him after Gryson returned, and the match
+had been touched to the hidden mine of high explosives. This was what
+was in his mind when he said rather tamely: "I suppose you will have to
+go. There isn't any chance for social-settlement work out here yet."
+
+"No," she responded half-absently; and thereupon he gave the little car
+still more spark and throttle and sent it flying over the final stretch
+of the fine road to the city.
+
+The electric lights were showing like faint yellow stars against the
+sunset sky when Blount skilfully placed the small car at the
+Inter-Mountain curb and lifted his companion to the sidewalk.
+
+"Are you going anywhere to-night?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know," was the reply. "There is a 'crush' on at the
+Weatherfords', but I don't know whether Mrs. Blount has accepted for us
+or not."
+
+"Don't go," he pleaded quickly. "Back out of it some way, and give me
+just this one evening to myself. Won't you do that, Patricia?"
+
+"I'll try," she agreed. "But if Mrs. Blount has accepted--"
+
+"Confound Mrs. Blount!" he growled. And then the newly aroused underman
+in him added: "You tell her that I want you to give me the evening, and
+let that settle it."
+
+As it turned out a little later, Miss Anners found it unnecessary to be
+rude to her hostess. For some reason best known to herself, Mrs. Honoria
+had declined the invitation--engraved in the correctest shaded Old
+English and made to include the senator and Miss Anners--and was
+planning a free evening for herself and her guest.
+
+After the _café_ dinner--a dinner at which Evan Blount, once more
+calling himself all the hard names in the hypocrite's vocabulary, made
+the fourth--Mrs. Honoria proposed an adjournment to the hotel parlors,
+which were in the mezzanine lounge. Later, she found herself alone on
+the divan which had been drawn up to command a view of the spirited
+scene in the lobby below. The senator had gone down to mingle with the
+politicians, and she could see him--big, masterful, and smiling--moving
+about from group to group. On the opposite side of the mezzanine
+gallery, Evan and Patricia were "doing time," as the little lady
+musingly phrased it: walking up and down and talking quietly; a handsome
+couple, as the approving glances of more than one passing guest
+testified.
+
+To Mrs. Honoria, thus isolated, came at the appointed time the
+sober-eyed young traffic manager for the railroad company. Gantry had
+been under orders from the little lady for the better part of the
+afternoon, but the business of the day had given him no chance to report
+earlier.
+
+"You got my note?" he asked, taking the place she made for him on the
+tête-à-tête divan.
+
+"Yes; a little while before dinner. It came just in time to let me send
+frightfully late 'regrets' to Mrs. Weatherford."
+
+"I couldn't come sooner. I've had the Hathaway crowd on my hands all
+afternoon. There is something in the wind, and those fellows are scared
+stiff. They say that Evan's speech-making has stirred up the working men
+and the rank and file like a declaration of war with Mexico, and nobody
+can tell what is going to happen next Tuesday."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"No, not quite all. There is a mild panic on in at least three of the
+city wards over the disappearance of a fellow named Gryson, a sort
+of--er--wire-puller and all-around general-utility man. Some say he has
+been doing crooked work and had to disappear; others say that he has
+taken his pay for whatever job he was doing and has skipped out, leaving
+his journeymen strikers to hold the bag."
+
+"Gryson," said the little lady, her eyes narrowing; "Gryson--the name is
+curiously familiar. He is what you call a ward-worker, isn't he?"
+
+Gantry nodded. "Something of the sort, yes. Evan calls him one of the
+'pie-eaters,' and away along early in the game they had a set-to in
+Evan's office and Evan fired him; told him if he ever came back he'd
+throw him out."
+
+Again Mrs. Honoria's fine eyes became reflective.
+
+"Richard," she said softly, "I'd give anything in the world if I could
+know that Evan still feels that way about Thomas Gryson."
+
+"Then you know the plug-ugly, do you?" said Gantry.
+
+"I know of him. He is a criminal and a dangerous man."
+
+"Well, he is out of it, I guess; he must be, if his own running-mates
+can't find him."
+
+"Isn't Mr. Kittredge trying to find him, too?"
+
+"Yes. And I think Kittredge played it rather low down on the poor
+beggar. They had a deal of some sort, and when Gryson put his price on
+the job--"
+
+"I know," she interrupted. "Mr. Kittredge ought to have paid him and let
+him go."
+
+Gantry's smile was a tribute to superior genius.
+
+"You've got me going," he said; "you always have me going. With the
+election only three days off, I can't tell yet what you and the senator
+are trying to do."
+
+"The senator, at least, has never made any secret of his object," she
+smiled back at him. "He has told everybody that he is out for a clean
+sweep."
+
+"Exactly," said Gantry; "but no man living knows what he means by a
+'clean sweep.' I'll bet there are a hundred men down there in the lobby
+right now who would give the best year out of their lives to know. And
+they can't guess--they can't begin to guess!"
+
+"Let us leave them to their guesses, while we go back to the
+certainties," she suggested. "Did you find out what I asked you to?"
+
+"Yes; and I don't know whether I ought to tell you or not. I'm still
+drawing my salary from the railroad, you know."
+
+"And you are not sure that I am drawing mine?" she laughed. "Don't you
+remember when Mr. McVickar gave me this?" touching the little
+jewel-incrusted watch on her shoulder.
+
+"Yes, I remember; also I remember that this is the first time I have
+ever seen you wearing it." And then: "I'd never try to bribe you in the
+wide, wide world, Mrs. Blount."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For two reasons: you are too much in love with your husband; and, if
+you took a notion to fly the track, a king's ransom wouldn't be big
+enough to make you stay bribed."
+
+"I am flattered, I'm sure; but I'm still in the dark about the thing you
+have come here to tell me," she reminded him.
+
+"I presume you may as well know it, though I can tell you that it has
+been kept the darkest kind of a secret. Mr. McVickar came west to-day
+from Bald Butte in a new gasolene unit-car which is supposed to be
+making a trial trip over the road. The car is supposed to have a bunch
+of the Chicago officials on board, though not half a dozen men on this
+division know that the vice-president is the only official, and that
+the others are clerks and telegraphers."
+
+"Go on," said the small person quickly.
+
+"That gasolene special is lost. No station west of Bald Butte has yet
+reported it. Strictly between us two, it left the main line at the old
+disused track leading out to the abandoned Shoshone mine workings. There
+were autos to meet it at the mine, and by this time Mr. McVickar is
+probably toasting his feet before an open wood-fire in the Shonoho Inn."
+
+Mrs. Honoria leaned her two round arms on the mezzanine rail, and looked
+long and earnestly down upon the caucussing lobby throng. When she
+looked up it was to say: "There are wires?"
+
+"A full set of cut-ins. You can trust the big boss for that. He is in
+touch with every corner of the State, just the same as he would be if he
+were here in his usual election headquarters in the hotel."
+
+The small plotter became silent again, and when she spoke she was
+smiling brightly.
+
+"You are a good boy, Richard, and you shall have your reward. And it is
+going to be something that will make you happy, this time. Run away,
+now, and let me have a little solitude. I want to think."
+
+It was a full hour after Gantry's disappearance that the senator came
+up-stairs, and Mrs. Honoria beckoned to the pair on the opposite side of
+the gallery.
+
+"It's bedtime," she said, when they came around to her divan. And then,
+with a malicious little grimace for Evan: "I've been counting, and I've
+seen Patricia stifle three distinct and separate yawns in the last five
+minutes. She has been up every night since we came to town, and--"
+
+Left to himself, Blount sat watching the crowd for a time, and then went
+to his room to read himself to sleep. One of the two crucial days of
+suspense was outworn, but there was another coming; and after he had
+read for an hour he went to bed, resolutely determined to get the rest
+necessary to carry him through the dreaded Saturday. Sleep came quickly
+when he had turned off the lights, but it was merely a transition to a
+troubled dreamland in which Patricia, Mrs. Honoria, Gryson, and Gantry
+were weirdly confused. In the thick of it he seemed to see the
+ward-heeler standing at his bedside and beating furiously upon a huge
+Chinese gong. When he sprang up and began to rub his eyes, the room was
+lighted by a red glare, and the dream-noise was translated into the
+rattling of wheels and the clanging of alarm-gongs and cries of "Fire!"
+in the avenue below.
+
+As a city dweller, Blount should have felt the wall of the room, and,
+finding it still cool, should have turned over and gone to sleep again.
+Instead, he slipped out of bed and went to the window. One glance showed
+him that the fire was in the business district, either in or near the
+Temple Court Building. That was enough to make him dress hurriedly and
+hasten to the street, where he found a handful of policemen trying
+ineffectually to keep a clear pavement for the racing fire-trucks.
+Watching his chance, Blount darted out to make the crossing. He was
+half-way to the opposite curb when an unwieldy hook-and-ladder truck,
+drawn by a pair of magnificent grays, came lurching and plunging down
+the side street upon which the hotel cornered.
+
+In front of the horses, and leaping and barking at their heads in a
+frenzy of excitement, was a spotted coach-dog--the truck squad's mascot.
+Blount was within a few feet of the farther sidewalk, and was well out
+of danger when the long truck slewed into the avenue. But at the passing
+instant the mascot dog, leaping and whirling like a four-footed dervish,
+sprang backward. Blount felt the catapulting shock of a yielding body
+between his shoulders, heard a yell from the truck-driver on his high
+seat, and went plunging headlong to the curb. After which he felt and
+heard no more.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+FIELD HEADQUARTERS
+
+
+In the great world-battles of yesterday, or the day before, the
+commanding general rode, with a few chosen officers of his staff, to
+some near-by hill-top, shell-swept and perilous, and with the help of a
+pair of field-glasses and a corps of hard-riding aides kept in touch as
+he could with the shifting fortunes of his divisions and brigades. It
+would be small credit to an up-to-date day of progress and
+invention if this were not all changed. The present-moment
+commander-in-chief--warring, industrial, or political--may sit, thanks
+to the Morses and the Edisons, comfortably in office-coat and slippers,
+far removed from the battle turmoil, directing his forces with the
+pressure of a finger upon the appropriate electric button, or in a few
+words dictated to the human ear of a clicking telegraph-instrument.
+
+By all these adventitious aids Vice-President McVickar was profiting on
+the Saturday morning following the mysterious disappearance on the
+Friday of the gasolene unit-car somewhere between Bald Butte and the
+capital. The small resort hotel at the head of Shonoho Canyon had been
+transformed into a field headquarters. The hotel manager's desk,
+wheeled out in front of a crackling wood-fire in the ornate little
+lobby, was studded with its row of electric call-buttons; a railroad
+dining-car crew had taken possession of the kitchen; and the spacious
+writing-and lounging-room, sacred, in the season, to the guests of the
+exclusive hotel, housed a ranking of glass-topped telegraph-tables and
+impromptu desks--a work-room manned by a dozen picked young men, with
+O'Brien, the vice-president's private secretary, acting as the chief.
+
+Though the momentous Tuesday was still three days in the future, Mr.
+McVickar was actively at work on the Saturday morning, gathering in the
+loose ends and strengthening the railroad company's defences. With his
+arm-chair drawn up to the borrowed desk he was running rapidly through
+the telegrams filtering in a steady shower from the crackling sounders
+in the writing-room. When the situation had begun to outline itself with
+something like coherence, he pressed a call-button for O'Brien.
+
+"How about that wire to Detwiler at Ophir--any reply yet?" was the
+rasping demand shot at the secretary.
+
+"Nothing yet; no, sir."
+
+"Go after him again! There's a screw loose among those miners! How about
+Hathaway? Did you phone Twin Buttes?"
+
+"Yes; and Grogan, the mill time-keeper, answered. He says Mr. Hathaway
+is in the capital and something has gone wrong--he doesn't know what."
+
+"Keep the wires hot until you can get hold of Hathaway himself, and
+when you nail him, switch him over to my phone. Any word from the
+irrigation people at Natcho?"
+
+"Yes. They say that the farmers under the High Line have been getting
+restive and forming associations. Daniels was the man who talked to me,
+and he says it's a Gordon movement, though the ranchmen are trying to
+keep it quiet."
+
+"Take a message to Daniels!" snapped the vice-president; and then,
+dictating: "'How would it do to let it be known quietly that Gordon's
+election means raise in price of water to High Line users?' Send that,
+and sign it 'Committee of Safety.' Now how about Kittredge? Did you get
+him?"
+
+"I did; he's driving out in his car, and he ought to be here in a few
+minutes."
+
+As if to make O'Brien's word good, the roar of an automobile came from
+the driveway, dominating for the moment the chattering of the
+telegraph-instruments, and a little later Kittredge came in, lifting his
+goggles and wiping the road dust from his closely clipped black beard.
+
+"That car of yours isn't what it might be, Kittredge," was the
+vice-president's crusty greeting. "You'd better get a faster one. Sit
+down, and let's have it. How are things shaping up in the city?"
+
+The big superintendent sat down and found a cigar in an inner pocket of
+his driving-coat.
+
+"We are holding our own, as far as anybody can see," he returned.
+
+"That 'as far as anybody can see' is just your weakness, Kittredge,"
+said the chief testily. "What we want--what we've got to have first,
+last, and all the time--is the _fact_. Now see if you can answer a few
+straight questions. What is the senator doing?"
+
+"His wife has a young girl visiting her, and if the Honorable Dave is
+doing anything more than to show the two women a good time, I can't find
+it out."
+
+"There you go again! You say 'if.' It's your business to know."
+
+Kittredge held his peace. Being designed by nature for a heavy-weight
+ring-fighter, there were times when he felt like taking off his coat to
+the vice-president.
+
+"Well?" prompted McVickar, when Kittredge remained obstinately silent.
+
+"If I knew what sort of a deal you have made with the senator--"
+
+"That cuts no figure. But let it go. What's young Blount doing?"
+
+"He's out of it, good and plenty. He started to go to the Sampson Block
+fire last night and was knocked down by a hook-and-ladder truck. It's a
+cracked skull, and Doc Dillon says he's safe to stay in bed for a week
+or so."
+
+"H'm," said the chief reflectively. "That is almost what you might call
+opportune, Kittredge. The young fellow has done his work well, but there
+was always the danger that he might overdo it. In fact, there was a
+time, a week or two ago, when I thought he would have to be called down
+and given a lesson. Now then, how about that Gryson business?"
+
+"It was just as you said: I had to take Tom by the neck and get rid of
+him."
+
+"He did his work all right?"
+
+"Yes, and came swaggering around for his pay. I sized it up one side and
+down the other. He had a pretty bad case of swelled head and tried to
+hold me up for a bonus, hinting around about what he could do if he
+wanted to throw the gaff into us. As I say, I sized it up, and took snap
+judgment on him--pulled the Montana racket and gave him twenty-four
+hours' start of the police."
+
+The vice-president frowned and shook his head. "You took a chance--a
+long chance, Kittredge! Twenty-four hours gave him all the time he
+needed to fall afoul of young Blount."
+
+The big superintendent grinned amiably.
+
+"The senator helped out on that," he explained.
+
+"The senator? How was that?"
+
+"It's the first time he has shown any part of his hand to me in the
+entire campaign. About an hour after I had shot Tom Gryson to pieces a
+note came down from the Inter-Mountain, asking me to come up. I didn't
+get to see the senator himself, but Mrs. Blount gave me the dope. As a
+result, young Blount got a hurry telegram from you, directing him to go
+to Lewiston at once in that right-of-way matter of Brodhead's. I gave
+him my car, and the trip cost him the better part of two whole days."
+
+Again the vice-president shook his head.
+
+"Your methods are always pretty crude, Kittredge," he commented. "You
+took another long chance when you forged my name to a telegram for as
+shrewd a young lawyer as Evan Blount. But go on. You got Blount out of
+the way--then what?"
+
+"Then I went after Gryson again. The little woman's hint hit the
+bull's-eye as true as a rifle bullet. Tom meant to give us away to
+Blount. He haunted Blount's up-town office the better part of the day;
+and finally, in sheer self-defence, I had to tip him off to the police,
+as I had threatened to. Another little mystery bobbed up there. Chief
+Robertson winked one eye at me and said: 'You're too late, Mr.
+Kittredge; your man has already been piped off and he's gone.'"
+
+"Who did it?" snapped McVickar.
+
+"I don't know, and Robertson wouldn't tell me. But I got him to promise
+to put out the reward quietly. If Gryson comes back he'll be nipped
+before he can talk."
+
+"With young Blount laid up, it won't make much difference," was the
+summing-up rejoinder. And then: "I think that is all--for this morning.
+Go around to the telephone-exchange when you get back to town and tell
+the manager that I want a special operator--a man, if he's got one--put
+on this long-distance wire. Have you sent your linemen out to guard the
+wires on the Shoshone mine track?"
+
+"Yes; all the way from the switch to the hills."
+
+"All right; that's all. Keep your finger on the pulse of things in town
+to-day, and arrange with your despatcher to give my operators here a
+clear wire in any direction whenever it's called for. Above all, keep me
+posted, Kittredge; don't let anything get by you, no matter how trivial
+it may seem."
+
+As the superintendent was climbing into his car, the railroad
+electrician who was in charge of the men guarding the telegraph-wires
+came up.
+
+"One minute, Mr. Kittredge. I've put the box in, according to orders--"
+
+"What box, and whose orders?"
+
+"The recording microphone in Mr. McVickar's office, in there; and by his
+orders, I guess--at least they came from one of his men. We're needing a
+couple more batteries, and I was just wondering if it'd be all right to
+take 'em from that gasolene unit-car. We could put 'em back afterwards."
+
+"Yes; take 'em wherever you can find 'em," said the superintendent, who
+was thinking pointedly of other things just then; and the permission
+given, he started his motor and drove away.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+BLOOD AND IRON
+
+
+Ten o'clock in the Saturday forenoon marked the time of Superintendent
+Kittredge's flying visit to his chief's headquarters-on-the-field at the
+head of Shonoho Canyon; and at that hour Evan Blount, blinking dizzily,
+and with his head bandaged and throbbing as if the premier company of
+all the African tom-tom symphonists were making free with it, was
+letting Mrs. Honoria beat up his pillows and prop him with them, so that
+the drum-beating clamor might be minimized to some bearable degree.
+
+"You are feeling better now?" suggested the volunteer nurse, going to
+adjust the window-curtains for the better comfort of the blinking and
+aching eyes.
+
+The victim of the hook-and-ladder squad's mascot answered qualitatively.
+
+"I feel as if I had been having an argument with a battering-ram and had
+come off second-best. I've been out of my head, haven't I?"
+
+"A little, yes; but that was to be expected. You were pretty badly
+hurt."
+
+"Have I been talking?"
+
+"Not very much--nothing intelligible." The little lady had drawn her
+chair to the window and was busying herself with the never-finished
+embroidery.
+
+"What hit me--was it the truck?"
+
+"No; some of the people in the street said it was a dog; a coach-dog
+running and jumping at the heads of the fire-horses. In falling you
+struck your head against the iron grating of a sewer inlet."
+
+"Umph!" said Blount, and the face-wrinkling which was meant to be a
+sardonic smile turned itself into a painful grin. "Shot to death by a
+dog! Blenkinsop or some of the others ought to have run that for a
+head-line." Then, with a twist of the hot eyeballs: "This isn't my room.
+Where am I?"
+
+"You are in the spare room of our suite. Your father had you brought
+here so that we could take care of you properly. But you mustn't talk
+too much; it's the doctor's orders."
+
+Blount lay for a long time watching her as she passed the needle in and
+out through the bit of snowy linen stretched upon the tiny
+embroidery-ring. She had fine eyes, he admitted; eyes with the little
+downward curve in brow and lid at the outer corners--the curve of
+allurement, he had heard it called. Also, her hands were shapely and
+pretty. He recalled the saying that a woman may keep her age out of her
+face, but her hands will betray her. Mrs. Honoria's hands were still
+young; they looked almost as young as Patricia's, he decided. At the
+comparison he broke over the rule of silence.
+
+"Does Patricia know?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly. She has been here nearly all morning. She wouldn't let
+anybody else hold your head while the doctor was sewing it up."
+
+"I know," he returned; "that is a part of her--of her special training:
+first aid to the injured, and all that. They teach it in the German
+sociological schools she attended last year."
+
+"Oh, yes; I see"--with a malicious little smile to accentuate the
+curving downdroop of the pretty eyelids. "You mean that she was just
+getting a bit of practice. I wondered why she was so willing; most young
+women are so silly about the sight of a little blood. Don't you think
+you'd better try to sleep for a while? Doctor Dillon said it would be
+good for you if you could."
+
+"Heavens and earth!" he chanted impatiently; "I'm not sick!" And then,
+with a sharp fear stabbing him: "What day is this, please?"
+
+She looked up with a smile. "Are you wondering if you have lost a day?
+You haven't. The fire was at three o'clock this morning, and this is
+Saturday."
+
+As if the naming of the day had been a spell to strike him dumb, Blount
+shut his eyes and groped helplessly for some hand-hold upon the suddenly
+rehabilitated responsibilities. Saturday--the day when Gryson would
+return with the proofs which, if they were to serve any good end, must
+be given the widest possible publicity in the two days remaining before
+the election. Blount recalled his carefully laid plans: he had intended
+giving Collins and the two record clerks a half-holiday, so that Gryson
+might come and go unnoticed. Also, he had meant to make a definite
+appointment with Blenkinsop and the representative of the United Press,
+to the end that there might be no delay in the firing of the mine.
+Lastly, Gryson must be shielded and gotten out of the city in safety; so
+much the traitor had a right to demand if he should risk his liberty and
+his life by returning with the evidence.
+
+It was a hideous tangle to owe itself to the joyous gambollings of the
+firemen's mascot dog. And there was more to it than the hopeless
+smashing of the Saturday's plans. Into the midst of the mordant
+reflections, and adding a sting which was all its own, came the thought
+of this newest obligation laid upon him by his father and his father's
+wife. They had taken him in and were loading him down with kinsman gifts
+of care and loving-kindness, while his purpose had been--must still
+be--to strike back like a merciless enemy. He remembered the old fable
+of the adder warmed to life in a man's bosom, and it left him sick and
+nerveless.
+
+None the less, the obsession of the indomitable purpose persisted,
+gripping him like the compelling hand of a giant in whose grasp he was
+powerless. For a time he sought to escape, not realizing that the
+obsession was the call of the blood passed on from the men of his race
+who, with axe and rifle, had hewn and fought their way in the primeval
+wilderness, and would not be denied. Neither did he suspect that the
+dominating passion driving him on was his best gift from the man
+against whom he was pitting his strength. What he did presently realize
+was that the giant grip of purpose was not to be broken; and thereupon a
+vast cunning came to possess him. He must have time and a chance to plan
+again: if he should feign sleep, perhaps the woman whose presence and
+personality were shackling the inventive thought would go away and leave
+him free to think.
+
+She did go after a while, though so noiselessly that when he opened his
+eyes it was with the fear that he should see her still bending over the
+little embroidery frame at the window. Finding himself alone, he sat up
+in bed and gave the broken head an opportunity to blot him out if it
+could. For a little space the walls of the room became as the interior
+of a hollow peg-top, spinning furiously with a noise like the rushing of
+many waters. After the surroundings had resumed their normal figurings
+he rose to his knees. There was another grapple with the whirling
+peg-top, and again he mastered the dizzying confusion. Made bold by
+success, he got his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the
+brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments had once
+more come to rest.
+
+By this time he was able to conquer all save the throbbing headache.
+Shuffling first to one door and then to the other, he shot the bolts
+against intrusion. Then he staggered across to the dressing-case and
+took a look at himself in the glass. The bandaged head, with its
+haggard, pain-distorted face grimacing back at him, extorted a grunt of
+sardonic disapproval, but the mirror answered the query which had sent
+him stumbling across to it. The bandage was comparatively small and
+tightly drawn; a soft hat could be worn over it--the hat would cover and
+decently hide it.
+
+Next he found his clothes, those he had been wearing at the time of the
+accident. Somebody had been thoughtful enough to have them cleaned and
+pressed; from which he argued that the plunging fall on the wet asphalt
+had been demoralizing in more ways than one. Continuing the experimental
+venture, he walked back and forth and up and down until he could do it
+without clutching at the bed-rails to save himself from falling. Then he
+reshot the door-bolts and went back to bed to await developments.
+
+The first of these came when Patricia brought his luncheon. He had been
+wondering if she would be the one to come; wondering and hoping. With
+the unfilial purpose driving him on, there were added twinges at the
+thought of his father's wife going on piling the mountain of obligation
+higher and still higher by waiting upon him, and thus reminding him at
+every turn of the adder fable. With Patricia it was different.
+
+"Good morning," he grimaced, when Patricia came in with the daintily
+appointed server. "Getting a bit more of the first-aid practice, are
+you?"
+
+"I am obeying orders," she flashed back, when she had shaken up the
+pillows and placed the appetizing meal within his reach. "Mrs. Blount
+said I'd probably have a less disturbing influence upon you than she
+would. Shall I feed you?"
+
+"Good heavens, no! I'm not that near dead, I hope! If you don't believe
+it, you may sit down and watch me eat--if you're not missing your own
+luncheon."
+
+"Nurses have no regular meal-times," she retorted. And then: "You are
+feeling a great deal better, aren't you?"
+
+"Much better--since you came. Did they tell you it was a dog?"
+
+She nodded, and he went on.
+
+"It was my unlucky night, I guess. Did the fire burn up my office? I
+forgot to ask Mrs. Blount about that."
+
+"No; it was a building across the street from the Temple Court."
+
+"'Small favors thankfully received,'" he quoted, resolutely pushing a
+fresh recurrence of the tomtom beatings into the background; "small
+favors and larger ones in proportion--this broth, for example. It's
+simply delicious. I hadn't realized how hungry I was."
+
+"The broth ought to be good; I made it myself, you know."
+
+"You did? Where, for pity's sake?"
+
+"In the hotel kitchen. The _chef_ was furious at first. He twirled his
+Napoleon-III mustaches and sputtered and swelled up like an angry old
+turkey. But when I talked nice to him in his own beloved Bordelaise he
+let me do anything I pleased."
+
+Blount looked up quickly, and the movement brought the head-throbbings
+back with disconcerting celerity.
+
+"You are cruelly kind to me, Patricia; everybody is kind to me. And I'm
+not needing kindness just now," he ended.
+
+"Aren't you? I don't agree with you, and I'm sure your father and Mrs.
+Blount wouldn't." Then she went on to tell him how they had all been up,
+watching the progress of the fire from their windows, when the word came
+that he had been hurt in the street. Also, she told how his father had
+impatiently smashed the telephone because, the wires having been cut and
+tangled in the fire, he could get no response, and how, thereupon, he
+had turned the entire night force of the hotel out to go in search of a
+doctor. "But with all that, he couldn't stand it to look on while the
+doctor was taking the stitches," she added. "He turned his back and
+tramped over here to the window; and I could hear him gritting his teeth
+and--and swearing."
+
+If Evan Blount ate faster than a sick man should, it was because there
+are limits to the finest fortitude. Patricia ran on cheerfully,
+minimizing her own part in the first-aid incidents, and magnifying the
+anxious and affectionate concern of the senator and his wife. He
+listened because he could not help it; but when he had finished, and she
+was inquiring if there was anything else she could do for him, he
+dissembled, saying that he would try to sleep, and asking her to shut
+out more of the daylight and to deny him to everybody until evening.
+
+She promised; but naturally enough, with the dreadful responsibility
+drawing nearer with every hour-striking of the tiny leather-cased
+travelling-clock on the dresser, sleep was out of the question for him.
+Hot-eyed and restless, he wore out the long afternoon in feverish
+impatience, slipping now and then into the shadow land of delirium when
+the pain was severest, but clinging always to the obsessing idea. At
+whatever cost, the crisis must find him resolute to do his part. Gryson
+must be met, the evidence of fraud must be secured, and the fraud itself
+must be defeated.
+
+The bright autumn day was fading to its twilight, and the shadows were
+gathering around his bed, when Patricia tiptoed in to ask, first, if he
+were awake, and, next, what he would like to have for his supper.
+Exhausted by the waiting battle, he answered briefly: he was not hungry;
+if he could be left alone again, with the assurance that no one would
+come to disturb him, it was all he would ask. He tried to say it
+crustily, with the irritable impatience of the convalescent--dissembling
+again. But the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in view had
+lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic intuition.
+
+"You are not so well this evening," she said softly, laying a cool palm
+on his forehead. "I think I'd better telephone Doctor Dillon."
+
+Now the thing for Patricia's lover to do was obvious. With pity thus
+trembling on the very crumbling brink of love, the opportunity which
+months of patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand. It was a
+fair measure of the mastery an obsession may obtain--the lover's ability
+to thrust the gentler emotion into the background, to feign restless
+irritation under the passion-stirring touch, and to say: "No; I don't
+want Dillon or anybody; I want to be left alone. Please latch the door
+when you go out, and tell father and his--and Mrs. Blount that I don't
+want to be disturbed."
+
+She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after she was gone Blount
+sat up in bed and cursed himself fervently and painstakingly for the
+little brutality. But the remorseful cursings took nothing from the grim
+determination which had prompted the brutality. The dusk was thickening,
+and the street electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway of
+radiance. Blount got up, and with a disheartening renewal of the
+splitting headache, began to dress, but there were many pauses in which
+he had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the throbbing pain to
+subside.
+
+The next step was to reach his own room, two floors above, and he let
+himself cautiously into the corridor and locked the door from the
+outside. Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he dragged himself
+up two flights of stairs and so came to his goal.
+
+Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat drawn well over his eyes,
+he compassed the escape from the upper floor by means of the remote
+stair he had used in ascending, and so reached the ground-floor.
+Fortunately, the lobby was crowded; and turning up the collar of the
+rain-coat to hide the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the
+revolving doors. More than once in the dodging progress he rubbed
+shoulders with men whom he knew, and who knew him; but the shielding
+hat-brim and the muffling rain-coat saved him.
+
+Reaching the street, he did not attempt to walk to the Temple Court.
+Instead, he crept around to a garage near the hotel and hired a
+two-seated road-car. Quite naturally, the garage-keeper wanted to send
+his own driver, and Blount counted it as an unavoidable misfortune that
+he was obliged to give his name, and to hear the motor-liveryman say:
+"Oh, sure! I didn't recognize you, Mr. Blount. I reckon Senator Dave's
+son can have anything o' mine that he wants."
+
+Blount drove the road-car all the way around the Capitol grounds to come
+into his office street inconspicuously. Across from the Temple Court the
+fire ruins were still smouldering, and there was an acrid odor of stale
+smoke in the air. For a full third of the block the street was littered
+with débris. Blount stopped his machine at the nearest corner and got
+out to reconnoitre the office-building entrance. In the vestibule he
+glanced up at the face of the illuminated wall-clock, making a hasty
+calculation based upon the leaving time of the east-bound Overland.
+There were fifty minutes to spare, and when he reached his office, and
+had turned on the desk-light and dropped heavily into his chair, he
+called up the railroad station to inquire about the train. The Overland
+was reported ten minutes late. If Gryson should show up in time, this
+earliest outgoing train must be made to serve as the means for his
+flight.
+
+Blount had scarcely formulated the condition when the office-door winged
+noiselessly, and the man himself, hollow-eyed and haggard, stumbled in.
+As once before, Blount got up and went to shut the door and lock it.
+When he came back, Gryson had taken his seat in a chair at the desk-end,
+where the light from the shaded working-lamp fell upon his sinister
+face.
+
+"Well, I've been all th' way t' hell and back ag'in," he announced in a
+grating whisper. "They've put th' reward out, and three times since last
+night some of me own pals 've tried to snitch on me." Then he drew a
+carefully wrapped package from its hiding-place under his coat and laid
+it on the desk. "It's all there," he went on in the same rasping
+undertone. "Some of 'em give up to get square wit' th' bosses, and some
+of 'em had to have a gun shoved in their faces. No matter; they've come
+across--the last damn' wan of 'em; and th' affidavits are there,
+too--when I c'd get next to a dub of a not'ry that'd make 'em."
+
+Blount did not untie the package, nor did he cross-examine the traitor.
+His head was throbbing again almost unbearably, and he was beginning to
+fear that he might not last to carry out the plan of safe-conduct for
+the informer. Slipping the precious package into an inner pocket of the
+enveloping coat, he took a compact roll of bank-bills from a drawer in
+the desk and gave it to Gryson, saying tersely: "That isn't a bribe, you
+understand; it's merely to help you make your getaway. Can you manage to
+ride on Transcontinental trains without being recognized offhand?"
+
+Gryson pulled a false beard from his pocket and showed it. "Wit' that,
+and me old hat, I've been keepin' most o' th' boys from tippin' me off,"
+he said.
+
+"All right; here's the lay-out. You have earned immunity, so far as this
+latest raid on you is concerned, by turning State's evidence. But you've
+got to move on, and keep moving. Do you get that?"
+
+The fugitive nodded, and Blount got up to stagger across to the office
+wardrobe, from which he took the extra rain-coat kept there for
+emergencies.
+
+"Here, get into this and go down-stairs. At the corner above, you'll
+find a two-seated motor-car backed against the curb. Do you know enough
+about machinery to start an auto-engine?"
+
+Gryson nodded again. "I'd ought to, seein' that I've been a gang boss in
+a shop that made 'em."
+
+"Good enough; crank the motor, climb in, and wait. I'll do the rest."
+
+Five minutes later, Blount had stumbled out of the elevator at the
+ground-floor and was groping his way along the sidewalk toward the
+corner--groping because the pain had become blinding again and the
+street-lights were taking on many-colored and fantastic brilliancies.
+
+When he finally found the car, it was mainly by the sense of hearing;
+the motor was drumming softly under the hood, and there was a blur in
+the mechanician's seat which answered for the crouching figure of the
+ward-worker. By a supreme effort of will Blount swung himself up behind
+the steering-wheel and let the clutch in. Luckily, the street was clear
+of vehicles and he made the turn in safety; but fully realizing his
+handicap, he steered straight away from the business district, and
+making a wide circuit through the residence quarter, brought the car out
+in the eastern suburb at the beginning of a road paralleling the
+Transcontinental tracks.
+
+With the lights of the city dropping away to the rear, and the drumming
+motor quickened to racing speed, he told the fugitive from justice what
+was to be done and the manner of its doing. Twenty-two miles out they
+would reach the coal-mine station of Wardlaw, a few minutes ahead of the
+Overland. Since all east-bound trains stopped at the coal-mines to coal
+the engines, the way of escape would be open.
+
+Something more than a wordless, space-devouring half-hour beyond this,
+Blount applied the brakes and dropped his passenger at the rear of the
+small iron-roofed building which served as the railroad station for the
+coal-mines. Far to the rear on the twenty-two-mile tangent the headlight
+of the coming train showed like a blazing star low on the western
+horizon.
+
+"Go and blacken your face and hands at one of the slack dumps and pass
+yourself for a miner quitting his job," was Blount's parting suggestion;
+but the hollow-eyed fugitive had a last word to say, too, and he said
+it.
+
+"I've been t' hell and back, as I told you, and 'twas f'r on'y th' wan
+thing: give me your word, Evan Blount, that you'll chop th' damn' tree
+down and let it lie where it falls! That's all I'm askin', this trip."
+
+"You needn't lose any sleep worrying about that," was the curt reply;
+and without waiting for the train arrival, Blount turned the car and
+sent it racing on the way back to the city.
+
+By all the tests he knew how to apply, he was little better than a dead
+man when he returned the hired auto to the side-street garage and made
+his halting way around to the hotel. He had long since given up the idea
+of trying to see Blenkinsop. He knew that the editor would not be in his
+office much before ten o'clock, and the two-hour wait was not to be
+endured.
+
+Clinging desperately to the single purpose of getting back to the
+deserted room before his absence should be discovered, and weighed down
+by a crushing sense of the immorality of the step he had just taken in
+bargaining with a hunted criminal and in conniving at his escape, he
+pressed on, pushing through the revolving doors and slipping once more
+into the Saturday evening lobby throng. Edging around to the stair, he
+took all the cautious steps in reverse; ascending first to his own room
+to leave the rain-coat and the hat, and afterward feeling his way down
+the servants' stair and through the lower corridor to the locked door in
+his father's private suite.
+
+Past this he had a hazy notion that part of him--the observing
+part--stood aside and looked on while the other part slowly and
+painfully struggled out of its clothes and into its pajamas. Also he saw
+the other part, after it had carefully secreted the wrapped package of
+papers under the mattress, beat the pillows feebly and bury its head in
+them. After that there was a great blank.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+APPLES OF GOLD
+
+
+Notwithstanding the pillow-muffled plunge which was almost a lapse into
+the coma of utter exhaustion, Evan Blount awoke early on the Sunday
+morning, refreshed and measurably free from pain. Since the sun was just
+beginning to gild the lofty finial on the dome of the Capitol opposite,
+there was no one stirring as yet in the adjoining rooms of the suite,
+and the streets were silent save for the chanting cries of the newsboys.
+
+Slipping out of bed, Blount crossed to the window and threw it open. It
+was good to be able to stand and walk without wincing; and a breath of
+the sunrise breeze sweeping down from the eastern hills was like a
+draught of invigorating wine. As he leaned out for an instant to make
+sure that not even the height would bring a return of the vertigo, the
+wail of the nearest newsboy became shrilly articulate: _"Here's yer
+Morning Plainsman! All erbout the great election frauds!"_
+
+Hardly crediting his ears, Blount listened again, and when the cry was
+repeated he closed the window softly and sat down to grapple with this
+newest development of his problem. Did the newsboy's selling-cry mean
+that Blenkinsop had found out for himself, and independently, about the
+falsified registration lists? If so, there would be no public
+vindication for one Evan Blount; but also--thank God!--no need for a son
+to blazon himself to the world as his father's accuser. A great wave of
+thankfulness rolled over Blount's head, submerging him and turning the
+exclamation which sprang to his lips into a pæan of rejoicing. Instantly
+he saw himself throwing up his railroad connection and taking his
+rightful place as his father's counsel and defender. Here, at last, was
+a cause into which he could fling himself body and soul. True, people
+would say that he had been in league with the corporations, the boss,
+and the machine, from the first, but what did that matter?
+
+But would his father need a defender? No shadow of doubt as to this was
+admissible in the face of the accumulating evidence, he told himself.
+From the opening day of the campaign the machine and the corporations
+had been working hand in hand; Gryson and his fellow-crooks were the
+sufficient proof; and besides.... Blount reached under the mattress and
+drew out the wrapped package, untying the string with fingers that
+trembled. A cursory examination of the affidavits sufficed. In Gryson's
+sworn statement, and in two others, the "Big Boss" was inculpated
+definitely and by name.
+
+Blount glanced at the little clock on the dressing-case. The early
+Sunday morning silence still prevailed in the great hotel, and his
+resolve was quickly taken. Dressing hurriedly, he went up to his own
+room, and after a shave, a bath, and a freshening change which included
+the removal of the disfiguring bandage, he put on a close-fitting silk
+travelling-cap under the soft hat and went down to the lobby.
+
+There were but few guests stirring at that hour, and Blount had the
+writing-room to himself when he bought a copy of _The Plainsman_ and
+turned anxiously to the editorial page. After the first thrilling of
+relief born of the newsboy's cry, an unnerving fear had crept in to
+whisper that possibly the facts might not bear out the thankful
+assumption. A rapid reading of Blenkinsop's editorial confirmed the
+fear, and the reader's lips grew dry and his breath came quickly when he
+realized that the submerging wave of thankfulness had risen only to be
+driven back. Blenkinsop had no facts, no evidence; he was merely hitting
+out blindly with a general accusation of fraud which he made no effort
+to substantiate or prove!
+
+Evan Blount saw the thorny path stretching away before him again, and he
+rose up to walk in it like a man. As once before, he went down to the
+railroad restaurant for his breakfast, seeking solitude, and the meal
+had been half-absently eaten before he had readjusted himself,
+sorrowfully but firmly, to the unchanged situation. His duty was as
+clearly defined now as it had been the day previous, or at any time in
+the past. There was nothing changed, nothing different, save that a new
+complication had arisen in the crucial shortness of the interval for
+action. Knowing human nature a little, he knew how difficult it is to
+arouse an effective public sentiment on the eve of an election, no
+matter how important the issues involved. In a hard school of experience
+the voter has learned to discount the final-moment cry of fraud. Would
+an exposure, however convincing, appearing only in the Monday and
+Tuesday morning newspapers have the desired effect?
+
+Blount walked by devious ways from the railroad station to the Temple
+Court, and secluded himself behind the locked door of his office to have
+a chance to think the problem out to some effective conclusion. What
+should he do? Should he find Blenkinsop and get him and the United Press
+representative together at once, laying before them the damning evidence
+and telling them to use it as they could? Or was there some surer way of
+firing the mine of protest and exposure?
+
+There was one other way, at least, but the mere thought of it made him
+sick and shaken. As an upright citizen and a member of the bar, was it
+not his duty to lay the evidence, not before the public in the
+newspapers, but before a competent court of justice? And in that event,
+was there in this land of graft and corruption a judge sufficiently
+fearless and incorruptible to act with the needful vigor and promptness?
+
+When Blount asked himself this question, the answer came quickly. Though
+it was the common accusation, well or ill founded, that the lower courts
+of the State were the creatures of the corporations, the judges on the
+supreme bench still commanded the respect of the people. Hemingway, the
+chief justice, was peculiarly a man for a crisis; strong, honest, and
+entirely fearless; a man who would not stop to haggle over nice
+questions of precedent and jurisdiction where the public welfare
+demanded prompt and effective action.
+
+For a long half-hour Blount sat staring absently at the desk litter,
+trying to decide between the two courses open to him. He knew that his
+father and Judge Hemingway had been lifelong friends, and this added
+another drop of bitterness to a cup which was already overflowing. None
+the less, he was confident that the judge would do his duty as he saw
+it. It was a merciless thing to do--to make this just judge the slayer
+of the friend of his youth; but at the end Blount reached for the
+telephone-book and began to search for the chief justice's residence
+number. Before he could find it the phone bell rang.
+
+"Well?" he answered shortly, putting the receiver to his ear.
+
+It was Miss Anners who was at the other end of the wire, and he was
+instantly aware of the note of anxiety in her voice.
+
+"_Evan!_" she exclaimed; "you don't know what a fright you have given
+us! What are you doing at your office when you ought to be here and in
+bed?"
+
+Blount drew the desk instrument closer and tried to put her off lightly.
+
+"I'm all right again. I turned out early this morning to make up for
+lost time. You wouldn't expect me to stay in bed for more than a day to
+oblige a common, ordinary coach-dog, would you?"
+
+"Yes, but see here--listen: Doctor Dillon has been here, and he is
+perfectly shocked. He says there may be complications, and the very
+least you can do is to be careful. Your father has had the hotel boys
+looking everywhere for you. When are you coming back?"
+
+Here was the direct question which Blount had been dreading. Now, if
+never before, the wretched involvement had reached a point beyond which
+it was impossible to follow his father's plea for a continuance of the
+kinsman amenities.
+
+"I think you had better leave me out of any plans you are making for the
+day," he answered evasively. "I shall be pretty busy."
+
+"No--listen," she insisted. "It's wrong to work on Sunday, but if you
+will be obstinate, you must stop at luncheon-time. We are going to drive
+out to Wartrace Hall this afternoon; Doctor Dillon says we positively
+_must_ take you away from town and keep you quiet for a few days."
+
+"I can't go with you," he answered brusquely, adding: "And I'm not sure
+that I can join you at luncheon. There is so much to be done that I
+shall probably drop around to the club for a bite at one o'clock. Don't
+wait for me, and don't worry. Above all, please don't tell anybody where
+I am--not even Dick Gantry."
+
+He was considerably relieved when she said "Good-by" rather abruptly,
+and rang off. None the less, he thought it a little strange that his
+father should be planning to leave the capital on the very eve of the
+great struggle. Was he so sure that nothing could happen within the next
+twenty-four hours? Leaving the query answerless, he returned to the
+interrupted duty. Deliberately, with the open telephone-book before him,
+he sought and found Judge Hemingway's number; and a few seconds later he
+had the judge's house in Mesa Circle, with the judge himself answering
+his call. The wire conversation was brief and to the point. Cautiously,
+and in well-guarded phrase, Blount stated his case. By a series of
+correlated incidents which could be explained later, documentary
+evidence of a great conspiracy had fallen into his hands; would the
+judge step aside so far as to accord him a Sunday interview, taking his
+word for it that the emergency was most urgent, and that the time was
+too short to admit of the ordinary methods of procedure?
+
+The judge's answer was satisfactory, though Blount fancied it was rather
+reluctantly given. A family engagement--an accepted luncheon
+invitation--would intervene; but between four and five o'clock in the
+afternoon the chief justice would be in his chambers in the Capitol
+building, and would be glad to have the son of his old friend the
+senator come at that hour.
+
+With time on his hands, Blount squared himself at his desk and began to
+set his railroad house in order. Now that the dreadful step was
+practically taken, he was free to wind up the business of his office,
+leaving things in order for his successor. Once he had thought that he
+could not stay in the capital or in the West after the cataclysm. But
+now the manlier thought prevailed. A hard fate was making him his
+father's betrayer; but beyond the betrayal, with the bare duty done, he
+would take his place as his father's son, proving his love and loyalty
+by going down with him to any depth of infamy into which the cataclysm
+might drag him.
+
+Since there was much to be done in the winding-up task, the forenoon
+fled quickly, and the hands of the small paper-weight clock on the desk
+were pointing to a quarter of two when Blount snapped the rubber band
+upon the final file of referred papers. There were other odds and ends
+to be set in order, but he determined to let them wait until he had
+eaten. A scant half-hour in the club grill-room was all he allowed
+himself, and at a quarter past two he was back at his desk, preparing to
+make the cleaning-up task complete. Between four and five, Judge
+Hemingway had said; and Blount began on one of the odds and ends, which
+was the writing of his letter of resignation from the railroad service.
+
+He was enclosing the letter when there came a light tap at the
+office-door, and then the door itself opened to admit Patricia--a
+Patricia bright-eyed and determined, alluringly charming in her tightly
+veiled driving-hat, muffling motor-coat, and dainty gauntlets.
+
+"You?" said Blount not too hospitably. "I thought you said something
+about going to Wartrace?"
+
+"So I did, and so I am," she asserted, coming to sit in the chair last
+occupied by one Thomas Gryson.
+
+"And the others?" he queried.
+
+"They have just left; gone on ahead in the touring-car. I was deputed to
+bring you."
+
+"But I told you this morning that I couldn't go, and I can't!" he
+protested.
+
+She looked him squarely in the eye. "Evan, you don't dare tell me why
+you can't!"
+
+"Business," he pleaded.
+
+"That may be half of the truth, but it isn't any more than half." Then
+she made the direct appeal: "I wish you'd tell me, Evan. I know a
+little--just the little that Mrs. Blount has seen fit to tell me--and no
+more. There is trouble threatening; some dreadful trouble. I saw it
+yesterday when you were so miserable; I can see it in your eyes this
+minute."
+
+Blount got up and began to pace the floor so that she might not see his
+eyes. He was no more proof against such an appeal than any lover gladly
+ready to bare his soul to the woman chosen out of a world of women for
+his confidant and second self would be.
+
+"I want to tell you," he affirmed, wheeling abruptly to face her; "I
+wanted to tell you yesterday, only it was too horrible. You will know it
+all when I say that by this time to-morrow the whole State will be
+ringing with the story of David Blount's degradation and ruin; and
+I--his only son, Patricia--I shall be the one who will have betrayed him
+and brought it to pass!"
+
+She blanched a little at that, and there was a great horror in her
+eyes. But he noted at the moment, and remembered it afterward, that she
+did not push him into the harrowing details, as another woman might have
+done.
+
+"You are very sure, I suppose?" she said gently.
+
+He drew the packet of affidavits from his pocket.
+
+"This is the evidence: sworn statements incriminating my father and many
+others."
+
+"You had those papers yesterday?"
+
+"No. I got up last night to keep my appointment with the man who brought
+them. But you see now why I can't go to Wartrace with you."
+
+"I see that you are going to do something for which you will never,
+never be able to forgive yourself," she said gravely. "You are going to
+make use of those papers?"
+
+He sat down and stared gloomily at her. "Patricia, I have taken a solemn
+oath. The law which I have sworn to uphold is greater than--" He was
+going to say, "greater than any man's claim for immunity," but she
+finished the sentence otherwise for him.
+
+"Is greater than your love for your father. I suppose I ought to be able
+to understand that, but I am not. Evan, you can't do it--you mustn't do
+it; every drop of that father's blood in your veins ought to cry out
+against it."
+
+"Ah!" he exclaimed with a sudden indrawing of his breath. "You don't
+know what it is costing me!"
+
+"Truly, I don't," she asserted calmly. "Your father is a great and good
+man. If he had a daughter instead of a son, she would know and
+understand." Then, in a quick and generous upflash of feeling: "I wish
+he had a daughter--I wish I were she! I should try to show him that
+blood is thicker than water!"
+
+"You wish--you were--his daughter? Do you realize what you are saying?"
+Then he went on brokenly: "_Don't_, Patricia, girl--for God's sake don't
+tempt me to do evil that good may come! Can't you understand how I am
+driven to do this thing--how every fibre of me is rebelling against the
+savage necessity? God knows, I'd give anything I am or hope to be if the
+necessity could be wiped out!"
+
+Instantly she changed her attack.
+
+"But I say you can not do it. You are a brave man, Evan; I know, because
+I have seen you tried. You mustn't turn cowardly now."
+
+"Nor shall I!" he countered quickly. "But I don't understand."
+
+"Don't you? Isn't it cowardly to strike this cruel blow in the dark? You
+_can't_ do this thing without giving your father the warning that you
+would give your bitterest enemy--you simply can't, and still be the man
+I have known and l--liked for two whole years!"
+
+"Father's going to Wartrace this afternoon is merely an added twist of
+the thumb-screws," he protested in fresh wretchedness. "I should have
+gone to him first--I meant to go to him first. From what you said over
+the telephone this morning I gathered that the Wartrace trip was to be
+made on my account, and I hoped, I believed, it would be given up when I
+refused to go. Now I can not see him first; the time is too short. That
+which is to be done must be done to-day--this afternoon; otherwise it
+will be too late. Don't make it any harder for me, Patricia. Surely you
+can see how hard it is, in any case!"
+
+"As I said a moment ago, I can see that you are about to do something
+for which, in all the years to come, you will never be able to get your
+own forgiveness. Oh, I know," she went on bitterly. "You will tell me
+that I am a woman, with only a woman's standards, which are valueless
+when they get mixed up with the emotions. But I can tell you that I know
+your father better than you do--much better. And I believe in him,
+utterly, absolutely. Won't you give him a chance, Evan? Won't you show
+him those dreadful papers and ask him what he will do when you have
+betrayed him?"
+
+Blount winced painfully at the hard word, and then he remembered that he
+had been the first to apply it. But he answered her in the only way that
+seemed possible:
+
+"The time: I have promised to meet Chief Justice Hemingway at his
+chambers between four and five this afternoon."
+
+"Chief Justice Hemingway?" she queried. "Why, he--" she broke off
+suddenly and sprang from her chair. "I have the little car here in the
+street. It was Mrs. Blount's proposal; she said you would change your
+mind if I came after you and offered to drive you. Come! I'll promise to
+bring you back before five o'clock. I know the time is awfully short,
+but I can do it!"
+
+If Blount hesitated it was only because her beauty and her eagerness
+thrilled him until, for the moment, he could think of nothing else. Then
+he closed his desk quickly and struggled into his overcoat, saying: "It
+shall be as you wish. Let's go."
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES
+
+
+For fifteen miles north of the capital the Quaretaro road is a
+well-kept, level speedway, and Miss Anners amply proved the worth of her
+summer's training by showing herself a fearless driver. Half an hour
+after the small roadster had left the curb in front of the Temple Court
+Building it was among the hills and climbing to the upper mesa level.
+
+Nearing the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, they overtook and passed a horseman
+turning into the canyon road. The man's horse shied and threatened to
+bolt at sight of the storming car, but Patricia was looking straight
+ahead, and she made no movement to slacken speed. At the passing
+glimpse, Blount's mind went shuttling backward to the homecoming night
+in the Lost Hills, and he made sure he recognized the rider as
+Hathaway's morose henchman, the man Barto.
+
+He wondered vaguely what Barto could be doing at the turn in the
+obstructed side-canyon road, and the wonder went with him while the
+little car was covering the remaining distance and flying up the
+cottonwood-shaded avenue at Wartrace Hall. But a glance at his watch
+made him forget the Barto incident in a heart-warming thrill of
+admiration--the joy of a skilled motorist recognizing kindred skill in
+another. The thirty miles from the city had been made in something under
+fifty minutes.
+
+When she brought the roadster to a stand at the carriage entrance,
+Patricia spoke for the first time since she had taken the wheel for the
+record-breaking drive.
+
+"Find your father quickly and say to him what you have come to say. When
+you are ready to go back, I'll keep my promise and drive you."
+
+"That won't be at all necessary," he protested, getting out to stand
+with his hand on the dash. "I am perfectly well able to drive myself;
+and, besides, it would leave you at the wrong end of the road, and
+alone."
+
+"Don't stand there talking about it," she commanded. "Go and do what you
+have to do. I'll wait here."
+
+Blount turned away and found old Barnabas holding the door open for him.
+A word passed, and the old negro bobbed his head. "Yas, sah; Marsteh
+David's in de libra'y," was the answer to Blount's query, and, throwing
+his overcoat and soft hat aside, the bearer of burdens not his own
+walked quickly through the hall and let himself into the room of trial.
+
+The bright autumn day was cool--cool enough to warrant the crackling
+wood-fire on the library hearth. With his easy chair planted at the
+cosey corner of the fire and an open book on the table at his elbow,
+the senator sat smoking his long-stemmed pipe in the Sunday afternoon
+quiet. Mingled with the fire-snapping there were faint tappings, as if
+one of the cottonwoods, growing too near the house, were sending twig
+signals to the inmates.
+
+The senator moved the open book a little farther aside when his son made
+an abrupt entrance into the cheerful room.
+
+"Well, son, you made out to get here after so long a time, didn't you?"
+he said gently. And then: "How's the broken head to-day?"
+
+"Better," answered the son shortly, adding: "It's the least of my
+troubles just now."
+
+"That's good," was the hearty comment. Then, with the long stem of the
+pipe pointing to a Morris-chair: "Draw up and sit down. I reckon the
+drive has tired you some, even if you won't admit it. Where's the little
+girl?"
+
+Evan Blount saw instantly that he must be brief and pitiless.
+
+"Patricia is waiting in the car to drive me back to town," he explained,
+forcing himself to speak calmly. "I have an appointment with Chief
+Justice Hemingway which must be kept, and he will wait in his chambers
+in the Capitol only until five o'clock. Father, do you know why I have
+made that appointment?"
+
+The senator wagged his great head in a way which might mean anything or
+nothing, and said: "How should I know, son?"
+
+"I hoped you would know. It's not a very pleasant task for me to tell
+you," the younger man went on, ignoring the chair to which the
+long-stemmed pipe was still pointing. "A short time ago--yesterday, to
+be exact--evidence, legal evidence, of corruption and false registration
+in four of the city wards, and in a number of outlying districts in the
+State, was put into my hands. This evidence incriminates a group of
+ringleaders and a still larger number of election officers. You know
+what I've got to do with it."
+
+The older man nodded slowly.
+
+"Yes, I reckon I know, son; and I'm not saying a word. If you weren't a
+Blount, I might ask if you haven't learned that one of the first rules
+in the book of politics is the one that says we mustn't hang the dirty
+clothes out where everybody can see 'em, but I know better than to say
+anything like that to you."
+
+The young man's heart sank within him. It seemed evident that his father
+was still unsuspecting, still unconscious of the dreadful consequences
+to himself. Only utter frankness could avail now.
+
+"I can't discuss the question of expediency with you," he said hastily,
+"any further than to say that I'd cheerfully give ten years of my life
+to be able to consider it. Let me be perfectly plain: This evidence I am
+speaking of involves you personally. If the papers are put into Judge
+Hemingway's hands there will be a searching investigation, prompt
+indictments, criminal proceedings, and all the disgrace that the widest
+publicity can bring upon the men who are responsible for the present
+desperate state of affairs."
+
+The senator had laid his pipe aside and was staring soberly into the
+fire. "Go on, son," he said quietly; "let's have the rest of it."
+
+"You know what has led up to the present wretched involvement--my
+involvement," Blount went on. "When I took the railroad job, I did it in
+good faith and went about preaching the gospel of the square deal for
+everybody, including the corporations. But in a very short time I
+discovered that my own people were not keeping faith with me; had no
+intention of keeping it. Later on, a number of corporation officials and
+managers, men who had formerly made corrupt deals with the railroad
+company, and are to this day profiting by them, became frightened.
+Assuming that I was the chief broker for the railroad company in the
+present campaign, these men wrote me letters which were in the highest
+degree incriminating."
+
+The big man who was staring into the heart of the fire nodded
+thoughtfully.
+
+"I remember; you told me something about that before, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes, and we needn't go into the details again. I meant to use those
+letters as a club to hammer a little honesty into my own employers. Up
+to that time I had been trying to believe that the machine--your
+machine--and the railroad lawbreakers were not one and the same thing."
+
+"But you changed your mind about that?"
+
+"I had to, after I found out that you had corrupted one of my clerks and
+had sent one of your thugs to dynamite my safe. That is past and gone;
+but you can see where it left me. As you and everybody in the State
+know, I had been committing myself publicly everywhere, doing it with
+the assurance that when it came to the pinch I could bring Gantry and
+Kittredge and even Mr. McVickar himself to terms--the terms of honesty
+and fair dealing. With my weapon stolen, I was left helpless, facing the
+certainty that on the day after the election I should be pilloried in
+every hole and corner of my native State as the most shameless liar that
+ever breathed. Do you wonder that I was desperate?"
+
+"No, son; I reckon you wouldn't have been much of a Blount if you hadn't
+been."
+
+"I was desperate. I said to myself that I would find another weapon,
+even if I should have to take a leaf out of your own book, dad, to do
+it. I took the leaf, and I have the weapon. You drove Gryson away, but
+you made one small miscalculation. You didn't believe that his desire
+for revenge would be stronger than his fear of the gallows."
+
+Again the older man nodded thoughtfully.
+
+"Yes, son; I know. He came back twice: once when he found you in your
+office last Wednesday night; and again yesterday, or rather last
+evening, when you got out of your bed and went to help him make his
+getaway on the east-bound Overland."
+
+Evan Blount started back, and his exclamation was of pure astoundment.
+
+"You knew all this?" he gasped.
+
+"Oh, yes; I reckon there isn't much happening that such a double-dyed
+old villain as I am doesn't find out, Evan," was the sober rejoinder.
+
+"But, good heavens! if you know so much, you must know what Gryson came
+back for, and what he gave me!"
+
+"Yes; I know that, too. I reckon I might as well make a clean breast of
+it while I'm at it."
+
+"You knew it last night, and yet you didn't send somebody to hold me up
+and take the papers away from me?"
+
+The senator's chuckle rumbled deep in his mighty chest.
+
+"Maybe I was counting a little on the kinship, Evan, boy. Maybe I was
+saying to myself: 'No, I reckon the boy won't do it, after all--not when
+he reads what's set down in the papers; he just naturally couldn't do
+it.'"
+
+"Oh, my Lord, dad!" was the choking response. "Can't you see that you
+are killing me by inches? Can't you see that I've got to choose between
+being a man clear through, or a scoundrel as weak and shifty as any of
+those I have been denouncing? My God, it's terrible!"
+
+"I reckon you're going to choose straight," said the older man, still
+with eyes averted.
+
+"I have chosen," said the son brokenly; "or perhaps it would be truer to
+say that there never has been any choice since the moment when I set my
+foot in the path which has led me thus far on the way to hell. I can
+despise myself utterly for the means I took to secure the evidence, but
+that very lapse makes it all the more needful that I should atone as I
+can."
+
+David Blount rose and put his back to the fire.
+
+"Son, you are a man among a thousand--among ten thousand," he said
+quietly. "When it comes to a pure question of good, old-fashioned right
+and wrong, you can buck up just like your old great-gran'pap, the judge,
+did when he had to sentence one of his own sons for killing an Indian.
+You haven't said it in so many words, so I'll say it for you: you've got
+me, and maybe some others, right where you can shove us into the
+penitentiary. That's about what you're trying to tell me, isn't it?"
+
+"For God's sake, don't put it that way!" Blount protested. "I gave you
+fair warning almost at the first. I've got to fight for the right as I
+see it. If I don't, I shall be less than a man--less than your son.
+Can't you see that it is breaking my heart?"
+
+A silence electrically surcharged with possibilities settled down upon
+the isolated room, with the stillness broken only by the crackling of
+the fire and that other distant tapping as of tree-twigs on the roof. At
+the end of the pause the senator took a forward step and put a hand on
+his son's shoulder.
+
+"I haven't one word to say, Evan, boy," he began slowly. "As you told me
+that first day out here, son, it's your job to hew to the line and let
+the chips fall where they may. You go ahead and do just what seems
+right and law-abiding to you. I'd rather go to jail twice over than have
+you do any different. Is that what you're wanting me to say?"
+
+Blount dropped into a chair, as if the touch on his shoulder had crushed
+him, and covered his face with his hands. It was hard--harder than even
+his own prefigurings had forecast it. Fighting against the patent facts,
+he had been cherishing a lingering hope that his father might be able to
+brush away the cruel necessity at the last moment. But now the hope was
+dead.
+
+It was a long minute before he staggered to his feet and groped his way
+to the door, leaving his father standing before the fire and once more
+puffing absently at the long-stemmed pipe. When old Barnabas had helped
+him into his coat and had given him his hat, he found Patricia still
+sitting in the car, with the motor purring softly under the hood.
+
+"Must you go back?" she queried, when he had descended the steps to
+climb stiffly into the seat beside her.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Your duty is clear?"
+
+"Perfectly clear--now."
+
+"And the consequences?" she asked.
+
+"I can only guess," he muttered. "Ruin and disgrace for all of us, I
+suppose. Of course, you understand that I have resigned from the
+railroad service and shall stand with my father when--when the thing is
+done."
+
+She was backing the little roadster into the circling driveway to turn
+for the start. At the reversing moment she made her final plea.
+
+"Don't do it, Evan--_don't do it!_ I have no more than a woman's reason
+to offer, but I am sure you are opening the door to a lifelong sorrow
+for yourself and--and--for me!"
+
+It was the last two words that steeled him suddenly. Not even at her
+beseeching would he turn aside from the plain path of the oath-bound
+obligation. It struck him like a blow that the turning aside would make
+him forever unworthy of her.
+
+"Take me back to the city as quickly as you can!" he said. "Or, better
+still, stay here and let me have the car. That is my last word."
+
+"You're not fit to drive a car!" she snapped; and for further answer she
+threw the speed lever into the intermediate gear and released the
+clutch. Like a projectile hurled from a catapult, the swift little
+roadster shot away down the cottonwood avenue, and with a jerk of the
+lever into the "high" the second race against time was begun.
+
+For the first few miles Patricia's passenger had all he could do to keep
+his seat. On its upper mesa windings the Quaretaro road follows the
+course of the stream which has been robbed of its waters for the
+cultivated lands, and though the roadway was good the hazards were
+plentiful when taken at speed. More than once Blount caught himself in
+the act of reaching for the steering-wheel, but as often he desisted. As
+on the outward race, Patricia was staring straight ahead, and giving
+the little car every throb of speed there was in its machinery. None the
+less, he could see that she had it under perfect control.
+
+What finally happened came with the suddenness of the thunder-clap
+following a bolt which strikes near at hand. They were on the down-grade
+approach to the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, and they could not see beyond
+the gentle curve to the left, where the smaller gulch found its
+intersection with the main ravine. When they were within a hundred yards
+of the curve the stretch below came into view. Blount had a momentary
+glimpse of some barrier--a pine-tree, as it proved to be--lying across
+the main road. Seeing it, he realized at the same instant that Patricia
+was neither throttling the motor nor applying the brakes. After that he
+had barely time to snap the switch and to throw the heavy wind-shield
+down before the devastating crash came.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+THE GOSSIPING WIRES
+
+
+After his son had left him, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush remained
+standing before the library fire until he heard the machine-gun exhausts
+of the small roadster distance-diminishing down the driveway avenue.
+Then he stepped aside and pressed the bell-push ordinarily used to
+summon the old negro footman.
+
+In answer to the call a door opened beyond the chimney-jamb, and
+immediately the gentle twig-tapping sounds resolved themselves into the
+clickings of a pair of telegraph relays and the chatter of a typewriter.
+A good-looking young fellow, with his coat off, entered the library,
+carefully closing the door behind him.
+
+"Want to send something, senator?" he asked, whipping a note-book from
+his hip-pocket.
+
+"No, not just this minute. Anything new coming over the wires?"
+
+"Nothing startling. Steuchfield reports from Ophir that we swing the
+miners' vote almost to a man unless something unforeseen breaks loose.
+Hetchy gives us a good word from Twin Buttes; and Griggs, up in the
+Carnadines, wires from Alkire that he has just completed an auto
+canvass of the High Line district. The ranchmen up that way have had a
+pretty bad scare. There was a threat made that the price of water was
+going to be raised. But they're all right now."
+
+The boss nodded approvingly. Then: "How about those microphone notes?"
+
+"Crowell is writing them off," was the reply. "He'll have them in half
+an hour or so."
+
+The senator drew out his watch, a huge thick-crystalled time-piece
+dating back to the range-riding period.
+
+"As matters have turned out, I shall be going to the city before long,"
+he said. "If the notes are not ready before I leave, you can order out
+the speed-car and send them in by Gallagher any time before six o'clock.
+Don't slip up on that, Fred; tell Gallagher to deliver the notes to me,
+in person, at the Inter-Mountain. What's become of Professor Anners?"
+
+"He's staying over at Haworth's ranch, just to be near the fossil
+bone-field. They've made another plesio-something find, and Haworth
+telephones that the professor couldn't be dragged away with a derrick
+until those bones are safely out of the ground and boxed for shipment."
+
+The professor's host smiled indulgently, saying: "It's just as well, I
+reckon. The professor's about as blind as a bat when it comes to seeing
+anything this side of a million years ago, but if he were here he might
+wonder why we've set up a telegraph-office--wonder, and talk about it."
+
+The young man in his shirt-sleeves was turning to go. "I'll hustle
+Crowell on those notes," he promised: but as he was reaching for the
+door-knob the senator stopped him.
+
+"Hold on a minute, Fred; how is that contrivance of ours at the mouth of
+Shonoho working?"
+
+"It's working all right. Canby is on watch there now, and he says he can
+see everything that passes on both roads."
+
+"That's good. These little precautions are mighty necessary in a close
+fight. Those folks over at Shonoho Inn ought to have thought of this
+outer-guard business for themselves, but it seems they didn't. They'd be
+right awkwardly embarrassed if some fellow they don't want to see should
+slip in on 'em without notice. While I think of it, don't fail to keep
+me posted on what Canby sees after I go back to town. He thinks he's
+safe, does he?"
+
+"Perfectly. Nobody can see his dugout from the road, and his oil-heater
+doesn't make any smoke. That scheme of laying insulated wires on the
+ground works like a charm. You could walk all over them without noticing
+them." The young man was opening the door as he spoke, and he broke off
+suddenly to say: "That's his call ringing now. Would you like to come
+and talk to him?"
+
+"No; you can tell me what he says, if it's worth telling."
+
+The clerk disappeared into the room of the tapping noises, but he was
+back again almost immediately.
+
+"It was Canby," he said hurriedly. "He says two men on horseback have
+just dragged a good-sized pine-tree down the Shonoho road and are
+placing it across the county road. He can't see the men's faces very
+well, but he thinks the bigger of the two is Jack Barto."
+
+It was the senator's boast that he had never lost a tooth or had one
+filled, and his smile showed the double row, strong and evenly matched,
+under the drooping grayish mustaches.
+
+"That boy Canby is a mighty good guesser, Fred. I shouldn't be surprised
+if the fellow he has spotted _is_ Jack Barto, sure enough. If you didn't
+know beforehand what a good-natured, meechin' sort of rooster Jack is,
+you might think he was fixing to play some kind of a hold-up game on
+somebody."
+
+"That's what Canby thinks, and he asked me to hold the wire open."
+
+The big boss smiled again. "Then don't you reckon you'd better go and
+hold it?" he suggested mildly; and the young man in his shirt-sleeves
+vanished to do it.
+
+When he was left alone, the senator went to the house phone connecting
+the library with the remoter suites. A touch of the button brought an
+answering word, and he spoke softly into the transmitter.
+
+"The time is getting right ripe, and I thought you might want a minute
+or so to put on your things," he said, in answer to the low-toned
+"Well?" that came over the house wire. Then he added: "I don't know but
+what we may have to make a little bluff at somebody on the way in. When
+you order the car around, suppose you tell Rickert to put 'Tennessee'
+and Billy Shack in the tonneau, with a couple of shot-guns. We can drop
+'em if they look too warlike and conspicuous."
+
+He was hanging the ear-piece on its hook when the shirt-sleeved young
+man burst in again excitedly.
+
+"It _is_ a hold-up!" he declared breathlessly. "Miss Anners and Mr. Evan
+have slammed their car into the tree, and Canby says the two horseback
+men are watching them from the dry gulch just below him!"
+
+"All right," was the even-toned reply. "You go and tell Canby to keep
+his shirt on, Fred; and don't forget to send those papers in by
+Gallagher."
+
+While the senator was speaking, the door opened and the old negro came
+hobbling in with a driving-coat and the broad-brimmed planter's hat
+which made the Honorable David a marked man throughout the length and
+breadth of the Sage-Brush State.
+
+"De cyar's at de do', Marsteh David, and Mistis say she plumb ready when
+you is, yes-sah," stammered the serving-man, holding the coat for his
+master; and a moment later the senator was climbing to his place behind
+the big wheel of the touring-car, with Mrs. Honoria for his seat-mate on
+the mechanician's side, and the chauffeur, the horse wrangler, and Billy
+Shack comfortably filling the tonneau.
+
+While the touring-car, with its curiously assorted complement of
+passengers, was leaving Wartrace Hall, Evan Blount, having assured
+himself that Patricia was not hurt, was trying to estimate the extent
+of the damage done to the little red roadster by the collision with the
+tree. The inspection was brief. With the front axle bent and the
+radiator crushed, the car was safely out of commission.
+
+"We're definitely out of the fight," he reported shortly, helping his
+companion down from the driving-seat.
+
+Patricia was still trembling and pale.
+
+"You mean that we can't go on to the city?" she quavered.
+
+"Not unless we walk; and of course that is out of the question."
+
+"Then you--you can't keep your appointment with Judge Hemingway."
+
+Blount's smile was scornful. "I imagine it was no part of my father's
+plans that I should keep my appointment," he commented bitterly. "He
+took it for granted that I would drive out to Wartrace with you, and
+made his preparations accordingly. This tree wasn't here half an hour
+ago, and it is here now."
+
+"I can't believe it of him," she denied, and her lip quivered. And then
+she added: "Just think, Evan; we might have been killed--both of us!"
+
+Blount's teeth came together with a little clicking noise. "Politics, or
+what passes for politics in this God-forsaken region, seems to make no
+account of such a small thing as a human life or two," he said. And
+then: "I suppose we are due to wait until somebody comes along to pick
+us up. It's four miles or more back to the nearest ranch on the mesa."
+
+"It is all my fault!" lamented the young woman. "I--I might have
+stopped the car, don't you think?"
+
+"I wondered a little that you didn't at least try to stop it," he
+permitted himself to say; and at this she forgot the traditions,
+sociological or other, reverting to the type of the eternal feminine.
+
+"Say it all," she flashed out. "You are beginning to wonder if I didn't
+do it purposely. I _did_ do it purposely. All the way along I had been
+trying to muster up courage enough to smash the car in the ditch, and if
+I hadn't been such a coward I would have done it. Now hate me, if you
+want to!"
+
+Blount would have been less the lover than he was if he had not been
+moved to something much warmer than hatred.
+
+"Let us say that you are doing your level best to save my faith in human
+nature, Patricia, girl," he said soberly. "Do you know what you are? You
+are the one loyal person in a tricky world. I am still fair enough to
+say that it was fine--splendid! And I only wish my father were worthier
+of such superb loyalty and affection."
+
+She looked at him curiously for a moment. Then her mood changed in the
+twinkling of an eye, and she laughed and said: "Yes, I think women are
+more loyal than men; and I am sure they are vastly more discerning at
+times. Don't you think--"
+
+The interruption was the appearance of two horsemen pushing their
+animals out of a small gorge on the right. When they had gained the main
+road they came up, ambling easily, and Blount instantly recognized the
+leader of the pair. It was Barto again.
+
+"Howdy?" said the timber-looker, riding up to hang with one knee over
+the saddle while he grinned genially at the two castaways. "Lost out
+ag'in, ain't ye, Mr. Blount? Couldn't make out, nohow, to run yer
+chug-wagon over that there pine-tree, could ye?"
+
+"Did you put the tree in the road?" snapped Blount, his anger rising
+promptly, now that there was a man to quarrel with.
+
+"I reckon we did; and it was one Hades of a job, too," was the cool
+reply. "Had to drag the dern thing f'r more'n half a mile down the gulch
+with the hawss-ropes."
+
+Here was plenty of material for a wrathful explosion, but Blount
+controlled himself.
+
+"By whose orders did you do it?" he demanded.
+
+"Th' boss's."
+
+"Mr. Hathaway?"
+
+"Not on yer life; it was the big boss this time."
+
+Blount's quick glance aside at his companion was a wordless "I told you
+so!" and then to Barto: "Well, now that you have stopped us, what's
+next?"
+
+The outlaw grinned again and kicked his horse a little nearer.
+
+"I'm a-holdin' you up sure enough this time, Mr. Blount--jest like
+another little Billy th' Kid," he confided. "You're goin' to gimme them
+papers you've got in your pocket, and then me an' Kinky we rides away
+all peaceful and leaves you and the lady to set down quiet till
+somebuddy comes along to pick you up."
+
+Blount put his hand to his head. His wound was throbbing painfully
+again, and the pain may have been partly responsible for his answer.
+
+"When you get those papers you'll take them from a dead man, Barto. Do
+your instructions go that far?"
+
+The man of many trades swung straight in his saddle and fell into the
+attitude of one listening. Then the good-natured grin became a menacing
+scowl.
+
+"Shuck them papers out, and do it sudden!" he commanded.
+
+"No," said Blount crisply.
+
+Instantly the timber-looker's pistol was out.
+
+"Give 'em up!" he shouted; "shell 'em out, quick, 'r by the holy--"
+
+The interposition broke in stormily. Down the grade from the upper mesa
+level came a touring-car, with a big man at the wheel, a veiled woman
+beside him, and three men in the tonneau. "Holy smoke!" said the outlaw,
+and with his riding mate was slipping away up the Shonoho road when the
+touring-car, with brakes protesting, came to a stand at the tree
+barrier. Like a flash, two of the three men in the tonneau leaped out,
+and a charge of buckshot whistling over the heads of the two
+obstructionists halted them. Thereupon the Honorable David gave his
+orders tersely.
+
+"Tennessee, you go up yonder and argue with Jack Barto a spell," he
+directed. "Tell him and his partner that the Wartrace smoke-house is the
+safest place in Quaretaro County for a couple of club-witted bunglers
+like they are, and then you see to it that they get there. You, Billy,
+help Rickert get a tow-rope hitch on that road-car, and we'll see if we
+can't jerk it out of the way." After which he turned to his son as
+casually as if only the preconceived and preconcerted had come to pass:
+"Tried to wreck you, did they? Mighty near made a job of it, too, from
+the looks of Miss Patty's little car. Not hurt, are you? That's good.
+Climb in here, both of you, and when we get this windfall out of the
+road we'll go on to town."
+
+Blount put Patricia into the empty tonneau while Shack and the chauffeur
+were making the tow-rope hitch, but he was still angry enough to
+hesitate when it came his turn. A glance at his watch decided him. It
+was still only half past four. Had his father repented so far as to
+override the obstacle which he himself had interposed? Patricia was
+holding the tonneau-door open, and Blount got in and took his seat
+beside her.
+
+A small engineering feat, made possible by the power plant of the big
+car and the tow-rope, soon cleared the way of the wrecked roadster and
+the tree. Then the senator gave another order.
+
+"You and Billy stay here and see if you can't get that roadster so you
+can run it to town on its own power," he said to the chauffeur; and over
+his shoulder to the pair behind him: "If you'll change partners back
+there, and let Honoria ride on the cushions--"
+
+Though he could not remotely apprehend his father's reason for the
+rearrangement, Blount got out, helped Mrs. Honoria down and up again,
+and then climbed into the seat she had just vacated. At the click of the
+tonneau door-latch the big car rolled on down the grade, and for a good
+half of the straightaway fifteen miles to the city the younger man held
+his peace grimly. Finally he turned to his father and said:
+
+"I'm blaming you for the tree, and for Barto's attempt to get those
+papers away from me. Am I wrong?"
+
+The Honorable David shook his head.
+
+"This close to an election you're mighty near safe in blaming anybody
+and everybody in sight, son," he returned gravely; and apart from this
+small break in the monotony, the second half of the fifteen miles went
+speechless.
+
+The clock in the Temple Court tower was pointing to five minutes of five
+when the senator, instead of taking the direct street to the
+Inter-Mountain, as his son expected him to, turned the car aside into
+the Capitol grounds and brought it to rest before the side entrance
+which led to the chambers of the Supreme Court justices.
+
+"You're still in time, Evan, boy," he intimated gently; "and I'm only
+going to ask one thing of you. When you get through with Hemingway, come
+around to the hotel and show your grit by taking dinner with the rest
+of us. Are you man enough to do that?"
+
+If the son hesitated, it was only for a fraction of a second. When he
+answered, it was to say: "If I were going up-stairs to put a noose
+around my own neck, it would be simpler and easier than the thing I've
+got to do. As to your one condition--dad, I'll be with you at dinner,
+and at all other times, after this thing is done. I've quit the
+railroad, and I did it so that I might be free to be your son and your
+lawyer when the smash comes. Can I say more?"
+
+"You don't need to say another blessed word, son," was the sober
+rejoinder; and when Evan Blount got out, the Honorable David drove away
+without a backward glance for the young man who was dragging himself up
+the granite steps of the Capitol entrance like a condemned criminal
+going to execution.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+AT SHONOHO INN
+
+
+Evan Blount's interview with the venerable chief justice was not at all
+what he had imagined it would be. To begin with, he found it blankly
+impossible to take the attitude he had meant to take--namely, that of a
+conscientious member of the bar, rigorously ignoring all the little
+cross-currents of human sympathy and the affections.
+
+Almost at once he found himself telling his story incident by incident
+to the kindly old man who was figuring rather as a father confessor than
+as a judge and a legal superior. When it was done, and the chief justice
+had gone thoughtfully over the mass of evidence, Blount saw no
+thunder-cloud of righteous indignation gathering upon the judicial brow.
+Nor was Judge Hemingway's comment in the least what he had expected it
+would be.
+
+"I can not commend too highly your prudence and good judgment in
+bringing these papers to me, Mr. Blount," was the form the comment took.
+"Your position was a difficult one, and not one young man in a hundred
+would have been judicious enough to choose the conservative middle path
+you have chosen. The fanatic would have rushed into print, and the vast
+majority would have weakly compromised with conscience. It is a source
+of the deepest satisfaction to me, as your father's friend, to find that
+you have done neither."
+
+"As my father's friend?" echoed Blount.
+
+"Yes, just that, Mr. Blount. There is an appreciation which transcends
+the commonplace things of life, and I don't know which is worthier of
+the greater admiration, your courage in coming to me, or your father's
+single-heartedness in urging you to do it after he had learned the
+purport of these papers. Yet this is what I should have expected of
+David Blount as I know him. Men say of him that he has sometimes wielded
+his tremendous political power regardless of the law and of other men's
+rights. But in the field of pure ethics, in the exercise of the high and
+holy duty which is laid upon the man who has become a father, I should
+look to find your father doing precisely what he has done. I assure you
+that it is not without reason that many of his fellow citizens call him
+most affectionately the 'Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"
+
+"But the consequences!" gasped the unwilling informer. "His name in
+those affidavits!"
+
+The chief justice was nodding slowly.
+
+"Without doubt a great crime has been committed, and a still greater one
+is contemplated. We shall take prompt action to defeat the contemplated
+crime at the polls next Tuesday, rest assured of that. But at the same
+time, let me say a word for your comfort: these papers came to you from
+the hands of a criminal, and that particular criminal had--as I am well
+informed--every reason to be vindictively enraged against your father. I
+am sure you are too good a lawyer to fail to see the point. If this man
+Gryson, in 'getting even,' as he expressed it to you, has added perjury
+to his other crimes--But we need not follow the suggestion any further
+at this time. Be hopeful, Mr. Blount, as I am. Leave these matters with
+me, and go and be as good a son as he deserves to my old friend David."
+
+Evan Blount left the venerable presence in the judges' chambers of the
+Capitol with a heart strangely mellowed, and with a feeling of relief
+too great to be measured. At last, without compromise, and equally
+without the slightest concession to the natural human passion for
+vindication, the momentous step had been taken. Whatever might come of
+it, there would be no daggerings from an outraged conscience, no remorse
+for an unworthy passion impulsively yielded to. Also, with the rolling
+of the terrible burden to other and entirely competent shoulders there
+came a sense of freedom that was almost jubilant; and under the
+promptings of this new light-heartedness he was able to make a
+reasonably cheerful fourth at the _café_ dinner-table a little later.
+
+Oddly enough, as he thought, Patricia was also cheerful, though she
+vanished with Mrs. Honoria to the private suite shortly after the
+adjournment to the mezzanine lounge. Past this, after the father and son
+had smoked their cigars in man-like silence for a time, Mrs. Honoria,
+coated and hatted as if to go out, came back to sit near the
+balustrade, looking down upon the kindling lobby activities. Shortly
+after her coming the senator rose to go. Instantly his wife sprang up to
+walk with him to the head of the great stair.
+
+"The time has come?" she asked quickly.
+
+"I reckon it has, little woman."
+
+"I wish I might be there to see," she said softly. And then, whipping a
+packet of papers from under her street-coat: "Take these. When you see
+what they are, you'll know why I haven't given them to you before this.
+As long as you didn't know anything about it, you could tell Evan the
+simple truth--that you didn't have them."
+
+The Honorable David pocketed the papers without looking at them.
+
+"I suspected you--or, rather, young Collins--quite a little spell ago,"
+he said with imperturbable good nature. "I couldn't have done it myself;
+I reckon no right-minded man could have done it, but--"
+
+"--But women have no conscience," she finished for him. "_I_ hadn't in
+this instance. There was too much at stake with a firebrand like Evan to
+deal with. Don't be too good-natured, David--to-night, I mean. You know
+that is your failing when you have a man down. But to-night you must
+make the man pay the price. That's all, I think. I'm going back to Evan
+now to see if I can't make him talk to me. That is the one thing I have
+seldom been able to do thus far."
+
+If Blount was a little surprised when the small plotter came back to
+take the chair recently vacated by his father, he was generous enough
+not to show it. The huge sense of relief was still with him, and its
+mellowing influence made him smile leniently when she said: "I want to
+be reasoned with, Evan. I have just let your father persuade me that a
+certain thing he is about to do is perfectly safe, when I am afraid it
+isn't."
+
+"Since he is undertaking to do it, it's safe enough, you may be sure,"
+he replied at random.
+
+"Then you know what it is?"
+
+"Oh, no; he didn't tell me where he was going. But on general
+principles, you know, I think he can be trusted to take care of himself.
+He is a many-sided man, Mrs. Blount. You are his wife, but I have
+sometimes found myself wondering if, after all, you know him as he
+really is."
+
+"Perhaps I don't," she agreed readily enough. "But I do know his
+absolute fearlessness, at least. That's why I'm a little nervous just
+now."
+
+Blount took the alarm at once, as she hoped he would.
+
+"You mean that he is really going into danger of some sort?" he
+demanded.
+
+She nodded. "He is going to meet a man who is--well, he is a big man
+with many of the same qualities that your father has. But down at the
+very bottom of him there is a quality that even your father doesn't
+suspect. Have you ever seen a cornered rat, Evan?"
+
+Blount had got upon his feet and was buttoning his coat.
+
+"I don't know how much or how little you know about what has taken place
+this afternoon, Mrs. Blount," he broke out hastily, "but I can tell you
+this much: I am my father's son now, whatever I have been in the past,
+and if he is in danger, my place is with him. Tell me where he has
+gone."
+
+The little lady's eyes were demurely downcast. "I shouldn't dare tell
+you that, but--but perhaps I might show you. I didn't promise not
+to--not to follow him," she returned with exactly the proper shade of
+half-frightened reluctance.
+
+"Is it far?" he asked.
+
+"Y-yes; we should have to drive."
+
+"Excuse me for a minute or two," he said abruptly, and, making a bolt
+for the elevator, he was back almost within the limit named with a
+top-coat for himself and a driving-wrap for his companion. "I broke into
+your suite and made Patricia give me the wrap," he explained. "If it
+isn't what you want, I'll try again."
+
+"It will do nicely," she told him; and together they went down the broad
+marble stair to the ground-floor.
+
+"Do we take a cab?" he asked, when they reached the sidewalk.
+
+"No; it's only a short walk to the garage, and we can take the
+touring-car."
+
+"I'm entirely in your hands," he rejoined; and then: "Perhaps you'd
+better take my arm. We can make quicker time that way."
+
+The small plotter's eyes were dancing when she slipped her hand under
+his arm. In a career which had not been entirely devoid of excitement,
+Mrs. Honoria had rarely found men difficult. But this particular young
+man was proving himself to be the easiest among many.
+
+At the garage Blount asked for the family touring-car, more than
+half-expecting to be told that his father had taken it. The garage man
+nodded and laughed. "You can have it, but you came within an ace of
+losing out," he said. "The senator was just here, and he was going to
+take it, but he changed his mind when I told him the big roadster was
+in."
+
+Blount made no comment, and when the car was ready he asked his
+companion where she would ride.
+
+"In front, with you," was the quick reply; and when they were placed she
+gave him his running orders. "Slip out of the city by the quietest
+streets you can find and take the Quaretaro road," she directed, and he
+obeyed in silence, holding the speed down until they had left the
+capital behind them and were bowling along under the stars on the fine
+boulevarded county road.
+
+"Do we take it easy or the other way?" he asked, speaking for the first
+time since they had left the town garage.
+
+"You may drive as fast as you like until we come to the hills," he was
+told; and with this permission Blount let the motor out and speedily put
+the fifteen miles of the straightaway road to the rear.
+
+"Is it Wartrace?" he inquired, when the touring-car was breasting the
+first of the grades in the gulch-threading climb to the second mesa
+level.
+
+"No. When you come to the pine-tree, turn to the right up Shonoho
+Canyon."
+
+"We can't get anywhere on that road," he objected. "It's washed out and
+posted. I tried to go up there the other day when I had Patricia out in
+the little car."
+
+"I think you will find it quite passable to-night," was all the answer
+he got; and a little later, when they had turned out of the main road
+and were ascending the small canyon, the prophecy came true. The brush
+barricade had been thrown aside, and there were fresh wheel tracks in
+the sand.
+
+At sight of the wheel marks the senator's wife spoke again.
+
+"You have been up here before?"
+
+"Yes, once; in the middle of the summer."
+
+"There is a small hotel at the head of the road."
+
+"I know; but it is closed."
+
+"It has been reopened--please throttle the motor so it won't make so
+much noise--the hotel is occupied now, as I say, and that is where we
+shall find your father. Are you still willing to do as I tell you to?"
+
+"In all things reasonable."
+
+"As if I'd ask you to do anything unreasonable!" she broke out
+half-petulantly. "Listen; there is a lawn with a circular driveway in
+front of the hotel. Drive to the outer edge, near the cliff, and stop
+the car."
+
+Five minutes later he had obeyed his instructions literally. Through
+the groving of trees on the lawn he could see the lights in the lower
+story of the inn. At the flicking of the motor-switch a man with a pair
+of lineman's climbing spurs at his belt rose up out of the shadows and
+touched his cap to the lady, saying: "The boss is here; he has just gone
+in."
+
+"I know," was the low-toned response. And then to Evan: "Help me out,
+please."
+
+When they stood together beside the car she spoke again to the lineman.
+
+"Is it all right, Jackson? Can you do what I asked you to?"
+
+"We can try it a whirl," said the man; and thereupon he led the way
+across the lawn, around to the darkened end of the bungalow-built resort
+house, and through a sheltering pergola to a side door. "I got hold of
+the key, and it's open," he signified, meaning the door. "Can you find
+your way in the dark on the inside?"
+
+"Perfectly," was the whispered reply; and then the lineman guide got his
+further orders: "Go back to the car and see that nobody interferes with
+it, Jackson." Then, when the man had disappeared in the tree shadows,
+the little lady turned short upon Blount. "I am going to take you where
+you can see and hear, but you must promise me not to interfere unless it
+becomes perfectly plain that your father needs you. Is it a bargain?"
+
+"It is--if you'll allow me to be the judge of the need."
+
+She laughed softly. "You are simply incorrigible, and I should think
+there would be times when Patricia would be tempted to stick pins into
+you," she mocked. Then: "Come on; we are wasting time," and, entering
+the house, she took his hand and led him through a dark passage, up a
+stair, through another passage into a long, low-pitched room, bare and
+empty save for a great pyramid of dining-tables and chairs piled in the
+middle of it, and lastly through a cautiously opened door which admitted
+a flood of yellow lamp-light from below.
+
+"The musicians' gallery," she whispered. "Go to the screen and look
+down, but for Heaven's sake, don't make any noise!"
+
+Blount obeyed mechanically. The orchestra gallery, screened on three
+sides by an open fretwork of Moorish design, was built out from the wall
+of the dining-room, and through the latticings of the fretwork he could
+look down upon the oblong lobby of the resort hotel. There was a
+table-desk with lamps on it drawn out in front of a cheerful wood-fire
+burning in a great stone fireplace, and in front of the fire, standing
+with his back to the blaze, Blount saw his father. From a lighted room
+at the opposite end of the lobby space came a confused clattering of
+telegraph instruments. Blount caught a glimpse of shirt-sleeved clerks
+moving about in the room beyond, and then a door opened beneath him and
+the vice-president of the Transcontinental Company strode out into the
+firelight to shake hands with his visitor and to say: "I've been looking
+for you; I thought you'd come in out of the wet before it was too late,
+David. Sit down and tell me how much you're going to bleed us for, and
+I'll make out the check."
+
+With a cold hand gripping at his heart, Blount turned away, sick and
+revolted, and there was a curse on his lips for the cruelty of the woman
+who had brought him to be a witness to his father's shame. But when he
+groped for the door of egress and found it, the knob refused to turn.
+The door was locked and he could not retreat.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+THE RECKONING
+
+
+Evan Blount's first impulse when he found his retreat cut off by the
+locked door of the musicians' gallery was to make his presence known
+instantly to the two men standing before the fire in the lobby below.
+Shame, vicarious shame for the father who would thus find himself
+unmasked before his son, was all that made him hesitate; and in the
+pausing moment he heard his father's reply to the vice-president's
+challenging greeting.
+
+"The same old song; always the same old song with you, isn't it,
+Hardwick?" the senator was saying in jocose deprecation. "What money
+can't buy, isn't worth having; that's about the way you fellows always
+stack it up." Then, with sudden grimness: "Sit down, Hardwick. I've come
+to say a few things to you that won't listen very good, but you've got
+to take your medicine this time."
+
+"What's that?" demanded the vice-president, dropping mechanically into
+his desk-chair. And then: "It's no use, David. We've beat you at your
+own game. We're going to roll up a majority next Tuesday that will wipe
+you and your broken-down machine out of existence. Don't you believe
+it?"
+
+"Not yet--not quite yet" was the mild rejoinder.
+
+"Well, you'd better believe it, because it's the truth. You are down and
+out. I had you beat, David, that night last summer when you gave me your
+'de-fi' and I came back by taking your son away from you. The young
+gentleman you were going to spring on us for your next attorney-general
+has done more than any other one man in the campaign to help our lame
+dog over the stile."
+
+"Yes," said the big man, sunning his back at the fire, "that is one of
+the things we're going to flail out right here and now, Hardwick; about
+the boy and what he's been doing. You told him to go out and preach the
+good, clean gospel of the square deal, didn't you?"
+
+It was at this point that the listener in the musicians' gallery, a prey
+to tumultuous emotions which were making the freshly healing wound in
+his head throb like a trip-hammer, lost all of his compunctions and drew
+closer to the fretwork screen.
+
+"He didn't need any special instructions," was the vice-president's
+rejoinder, and his tone chimed in with the hard-bitted smile. "Now that
+it is all over, I don't mind telling you that he mapped the thing out
+for himself, and all we had to do was to sit tight and give him plenty
+of rope. Candidly, David, I don't believe I'm hardened enough to play
+the game as it ought to be played out here in the sage-brush hills. The
+young fellow's sincerity came pretty near getting away with me when I
+saw how ridiculously in earnest he was."
+
+"Yet you let him go on, putting himself deeper and deeper in the hole
+every time he stood up before an audience, and you never said a
+word--never gave him a hint that you were not going to back him up in
+everything he was saying?"
+
+This time the hard-bitted smile broke into a laugh.
+
+"Let's get down to business, David. You wouldn't expect us to throw the
+game away when somebody was trying his best to put the winning card into
+our hands. We needn't dig back into the campaign for something to jangle
+over, you and I. We can come right down to the present moment. You're
+cornered, but I don't deny that you've still got a few votes to dispose
+of. How much do you want for them?"
+
+Blount saw his father take a step forward, and for a flitting instant he
+thought there would be violence. But apparently nothing was farther from
+the senator's intention.
+
+"I'm not selling to-night, Hardwick; I'm buying," he said, with the
+good-natured smile wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. "I want to know
+how much you'll take to clean up right where you are and make my boy's
+word good to the people of this State."
+
+Mr. McVickar turned to his table-desk and took up a sheaf of telegrams.
+
+"I'm a pretty busy man this evening, David; and if you haven't anything
+better than that to offer--"
+
+"You've got a lot of crooked deals out--special rates and rebates and
+such things; the boy believed you were going to call them all off and
+be good, Hardwick."
+
+The vice-president laid the telegrams aside and turned back again with
+the air of a man determined to sweep away all the obstructions at one
+shrewd push.
+
+"You're wasting your time and mine; let's get down to business," he
+snapped. "Some little time ago your son began to urge this same 'reform
+measure,' as he termed it. I believe he even went so far as to threaten
+Gantry and Kittredge with the publication of certain private letters
+from our patrons, letters written to him in his capacity of field
+campaigner for our company. I don't suppose he really meant to do any
+such disloyal thing as that, but--"
+
+"But to make sure he wouldn't, you had one of your hired shadow-men blow
+up his safe and steal the letters," put in the senator mildly. "That was
+prudent, Hardwick. I was a little scared up myself for fear Evan might
+get real good and mad, and let the cat out of the bag; I was, for a
+fact."
+
+"Without admitting the safe-blowing, I may say that the letters were
+destroyed, and our friends were advised to be a little more conservative
+in their correspondence. That settles the 'reform measure' incident and
+brings us down to the present argument. If you are not here to get in
+line with us, what did you come for?"
+
+"I came to give you one more chance to be decent, Hardwick;
+just--one--more--last--chance."
+
+"David, there are times when you make me tired, and this is one of
+them. For years you've held us up and dictated to us; but this time
+we've got you by the neck. Did you ever happen to hear of a fellow named
+Thomas Gryson?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I've heard of him. I believe he has been on your pay-rolls for
+a while--notwithstanding the fact that he is an escaped criminal," was
+the shrewd counter-thrust.
+
+"He's a scoundrel; we'll admit that. Just the same, your son hired him
+to go out and get evidence in a certain matter of alleged crookedness in
+the registration lists. He got it, and delivered the papers to your son
+last night. Some of those affidavits incriminate you, David. If we
+wanted to use them, we could send you to the penitentiary, right here in
+your own State."
+
+The senator drew up a mock-Sheraton arm-chair and lowered his huge frame
+gently into it.
+
+"In order to use those papers against me you'd first have to get hold of
+them, wouldn't you, Hardwick?" he asked.
+
+"We have them," was the terse assertion.
+
+The Honorable David's chuckle rumbled deep in his capacious chest.
+
+"Barto phoned you an hour or so ago that he had 'em, but, owing to
+circumstances over which he had no control, he couldn't deliver 'em to
+you until to-morrow morning. Isn't that about the way it shapes up?"
+
+The vice-president's frown marked an added degree of irritation. "So
+you have a cut-in on my telephone wire, have you?" he rasped.
+
+The senator leaned forward and laid a forefinger on the
+vice-presidential knee.
+
+"Listen, Hardwick," he said. "I dictated that phone message to you, and
+Barto repeated it word for word because he had to--I reckon maybe it was
+because one of my men was holding a gun to his other ear while he talked
+to you. The little hold-up that you planned this afternoon didn't come
+off. Barto lost out bad, and when we get around to giving him the third
+degree, I shouldn't wonder if he'd tell a whole lot of things that you
+wouldn't want to see printed in the newspapers."
+
+Mr. McVickar sprang out of his chair with an agility surprising in so
+heavy a man, crossed to the open door of the room where his clerical
+force was at work, and slammed it shut. When he returned, he was no
+longer the confident tyrant of foregone conclusions.
+
+"Where are those papers now, Blount?" he inquired.
+
+"They are in the hands of Chief Justice Hemingway, for investigation and
+such action as he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court bench see fit
+to take."
+
+"Good God! Your son did that, knowing that you are as deep in the mud as
+we are in the mire?"
+
+"I reckon he did, so. That boy is all wool and a yard wide. He thought
+he was putting me in the hole, too, along with Kittredge and your
+railroad crooks, and it came mighty near tearing him in two. But he did
+it. You haven't been more than half-appreciating that boy, Hardwick."
+
+"'He thought,' you say; isn't it the fact that you are in the hole,
+David?"
+
+The senator reached over, took one of the gigantic McVickar cigars from
+the open box on the desk, and calmly lighted it.
+
+"You're a pretty hard man to convince, Hardwick," he said slowly, when
+the big cigar was filling the air of the lobby with its fragrance. "Away
+along back at the beginning of this fight I told you what I was aiming
+to do, and why. You wouldn't believe it then, and you don't want to
+believe it now; but that's because you don't happen to have a son of
+your own. When that boy of mine wired me that he was coming out here to
+get into the harness, I began to turn over the leaves of the record and
+look back a little. It was a mighty dirty record, McVickar. I don't know
+that I'm any better man now than I was in the days when we made that
+record--you and I--but when I looked it over, it struck me all in a heap
+that I'd have to get out the bucket and scrubbing-brush if I didn't want
+to make a clean-hearted, clean-minded boy plumb ashamed of his old
+daddy."
+
+"But, say--you haven't quit your scheming for a single minute, Blount!"
+retorted the railroad tyrant. "You are just as much the boss of the
+machine to-day as you've ever been!"
+
+"I reckon, that's so, too," was the measured reply. "But there's just
+this one little difference, Hardwick: a machine, in a factory or in
+politics, is a mighty necessary thing, and we wouldn't get very far
+nowadays without it. Here in America we're just coming to learn that
+machine politics--which is sometimes only another name for intelligent
+organization--needn't be bad politics unless we make 'em bad. To put it
+another way, the machine will grind corn or clean up the streets and
+alleys just as easily as it will grind up men and principles."
+
+The vice-president made a gesture of impatience.
+
+"Come to the point," he urged. "Do you mean to tell me that you can face
+an investigation by the Supreme Court?"
+
+"For this one time, Hardwick, I can. For this one time in the history of
+the Sage-Brush State, the slate--the machine slate--is as clean as the
+back of your hand. When the court comes to investigate, it will find
+that every crooked deal in this campaign has had a railroad man or a
+corporation man at the back of it. Let me tell you what's due to happen.
+Chief Justice Hemingway had luncheon with me to-day, and he came early
+enough to give me a quiet hour before we went to table with the ladies.
+There is going to be an investigation, and some sharp, shrewd young
+lawyer is going to be appointed by the court to take evidence. When this
+young man gets to work, every wheel in the machine is going to roll his
+way. Every bribe you've offered and paid, every false name you've put on
+the registration lists, every deal you've made with men like Pete
+Hathaway and McDarragh, has had its witnesses, and by the gods,
+Hardwick, they'll testify--every man of them!"
+
+Again the vice-president sprang from his chair, but this time it was to
+walk the floor with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets. The
+listener in the musicians' gallery found a seat and sat down to let the
+intoxicating, overwhelming joy of it all have its will of him. In the
+fulness of time the tramping magnate who had been so crushingly
+out-generalled in his own chosen field came to stand before the big man,
+who was still quietly smoking in the sham-Sheraton arm-chair.
+
+"You spoke of the appointment of a special prosecuting attorney, David,"
+he said in a harsh monotone. "Who will it be?"
+
+"You've guessed it already, I reckon. It'll be the boy, Hardwick.
+Hemingway will appoint him if he is willing to serve."
+
+"He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president.
+
+"Not much, he hasn't! you hired him for wages, and if he wants to
+resign--he has resigned, by the way--and take another job, I reckon he
+can do it without breaking any of the Ten Commandments."
+
+"We can't stand for that--you know we can't."
+
+"No; I don't think you can--not as a corporation. Besides the flock of
+witnesses that we can drum up, he'll have those letters that we were
+talking about a while back. You missed fire on that, too, Hardwick. What
+your man dynamited out of Evan's office safe, and what you destroyed,
+were only clever copies. The real letters were stolen by the boy's
+friends, and little as you may believe it, the object of that theft was
+to give you this last chance. The boy was mighty hot under the collar,
+and we couldn't be sure that he wouldn't start the fireworks before the
+band was ready to play. He would have started them, too, if his match
+hadn't been taken away from him."
+
+Mr. McVickar walked around the other end of the table-desk and sat down
+heavily.
+
+"You've spoken twice of a 'last chance' David," he said grittingly.
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's the chance I gave you in the beginning. First, let me tell you
+what I reckon you're already admitting. You're whipped, Hardwick; your
+slate's broken, and your man Reynolds hasn't a ghost of a show--he nor
+any of the others on your string. You haven't made a move that we
+haven't caught onto just about as soon as you put your fingers on the
+piece you meant to move. For instance, that little box up there in the
+beaming just over your head--the one that looks as if it were a part of
+the house electric installation--is a microphone, and one of your own
+men helped to put it up. We've got copies of every letter and telegram
+you've dictated since you had this desk dragged out here a week ago
+Saturday."
+
+"I'm taking all that for granted," was the curt admission.
+
+"Then we'll come down to the nib of the thing and put you out of your
+misery. You've got two things to do--just two, Hardwick. One of 'em is
+to clean house and make a good job of it, just like you let Evan believe
+you were going to do when you sent him out to tell the people of this
+State a lot of things that you didn't mean to have come true; cut out
+all the deals, all the private tariffs, all the little preferentials and
+palm-warmings. When you've done that, you'll find that the other thing
+will mighty nearly do itself."
+
+"Name it," rasped the magnate.
+
+"It's just merely to take your railroad out of politics in this State,
+and keep it out. We've had enough of you, McVickar, and more than
+enough. Is it a bargain?"
+
+"It's a damned one-sided bargain thus far, Blount. What do we get for
+all this?"
+
+Again the senator chuckled genially. "You may not believe it, but we're
+going to let you down easy. You do these two things that I've mentioned,
+and get rid of Kittredge and a few others that have been caught
+red-handed, and the Supreme Court investigation won't touch your
+railroad as a corporation--in other words, it'll go after individuals.
+But you've got to play fair, you know--and bring forth fruits meet for
+repentance, before the fact. How does that strike you?"
+
+Again the vice-president got up to walk the floor, but this time the
+deliberative interval was shorter.
+
+"What is the political programme, as you have it figured out, David?" he
+asked presently.
+
+"It'll be a landslide for us, as I have told you. Gordon will go in by
+the biggest majority that has ever been rolled up in this State.
+Dortscher will succeed himself as attorney-general; and by and by, after
+things have quieted down, he will resign. That will give Gordon the
+appointment of his successor, and I'm thinking it might be a pretty good
+thing for you, as well as for the people of the State, if Alec should
+happen to pick out a bright young fellow who knows your side of the
+question as well as the people's, and who is square enough to give you a
+fair show when it comes to framing up any new railroad legislation."
+
+"That will be your son, I suppose?"
+
+"If he'll take it," was the imperturbable rejoinder.
+
+For the third time the vice-president, dying hard, as befitted him,
+deliberated thoughtfully. At the end of the thoughtful interval he took
+a cigar from the open box and clamped it between his teeth.
+
+"We trade," he said shortly. And then: "How will you take it--in stock
+or bonds?"
+
+The Honorable David rose slowly and snapped the cigar ash into the fire.
+
+"I'm right sorry, Hardwick, but this is one time when I reckon we'll
+have to have what you might call the spot cash. Promises don't go.
+You're too good a fighter to be allowed to get up merely because you've
+hollered 'enough.' Come on into your telegraph-shop and let me hear you
+dictate that string of 'come-off' orders. Then we'll drive to town in my
+road-car, and you can tip off Kittredge and a few of the other
+prominent victims by word of mouth, as you'll most likely want to."
+
+For a full minute after the two had left the lobby together Evan Blount
+sat motionless in the screened orchestra gallery. Then he got up and
+groped once more for the door-knob. It yielded at his touch, and in the
+semi-darkness beyond the opening he saw his father's wife with her arms
+upstretched to him.
+
+"Oh, Evan, dear--am I forgiven?" she asked softly.
+
+"Little mother!" he said, and then he took her face between his hands
+and kissed her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the Honorable David Blount reached the city an hour or more later,
+and had dropped his passenger at the Railway Club, he found his son
+waiting for him in the otherwise deserted sitting-room of the
+Inter-Mountain private suite.
+
+"I couldn't sleep without telling you first, dad," the waiting one broke
+out. "I've been eavesdropping; I was a listener, unwilling at first, but
+not afterward, to everything that was said an hour or so ago in the
+lobby of the little hotel at the head of Shonoho. Do I need to tell you
+in so many words how deep the plough has gone?"
+
+"I reckon not," was the gentle reply. "Neither do you need to tell me
+how you came to be out at Shonoho when I thought I'd left you tied hand
+and foot right here in the hotel." Then, with the quizzical smile
+wrinkling at the corners of the grave eyes: "How does the political
+wrestle strike you by this time, son?"
+
+"It strikes me that I haven't been in it; not even in the outer edges of
+it. Isn't that about the size of it?"
+
+"Oh, no; you've been doing good work, mighty good work. You've helped
+out in the only way that help could come in this campaign; you've
+stirred up a good, healthy public sentiment in favor of a square deal
+for everybody. McVickar was fixing to tangle it all up--get the people
+down on him until they'd simply legislate the life out of his railroad.
+But he couldn't see that."
+
+"He sees it now--the 'machine' has made him see it."
+
+"Yes. You didn't know that a machine could be put to any really
+righteous use, did you, boy? But in this campaign it has gone in to
+knock out the crookedness, big _and_ little. Listen, son; you heard what
+I told McVickar. After you'd sent me that wire from Boston last summer,
+saying you'd come, I lay awake nights projecting how I'd put you in
+training for a spell, and then help you into the saddle and make you the
+boss of the round-up, the same as I'd been. Then it came over me, all of
+a sudden, that I'd been as crooked as a dog's hind leg--that we'd all
+been crooked. Not that I've ever taken a dollar for my personal pocket,
+for I haven't; but I've bought and sold and dickered and schemed with
+the best of 'em, and the worst of 'em. On top of that, I began to ask
+myself how I'd like it to see you wallowing in the same old mud-hole,
+and--well, Evan, boy, you may have a son of your own some day, and then
+you'll know. I let things rock along until you came; until that first
+day at Wartrace when you ripped out at me about hewing to the line.
+Right then and there I made up my mind that I'd put the whole power of
+the 'machine,' as you call it, into one campaign for a clean election
+and a square deal."
+
+"Oh, good Lord!" ejaculated the son, "and I've been fighting you and
+your organization at every turn!"
+
+"Oh, no, you haven't," was the quick rejoinder.
+
+"You've been fighting graft and crookedness, and that's what you thought
+you were hired to do. As you know now, McVickar wasn't playing quite
+fair with you. Just the same, you've been in the hands of your friends,
+right from the start. It's the organization that's been giving you all
+these chances to preach the gospel of the square deal; it was a shrewd
+little captain-general of the organization who pushed Hathaway up
+against you to let you know that the railroad people were running around
+in the same old circles--hollering for justice, and doing everything
+under the sun to defeat the ends of justice--muddying the spring
+because, they say, they don't know what else to do. And, by the way, it
+was that same little captain-general who put you up against the real
+thing to-night, without telling me or anybody else what she was going to
+do."
+
+The younger man left his chair to go to one of the windows where he
+stood for a moment or two looking down upon the street-lights. When he
+turned, it was to say: "I'm with you, dad, heart and soul. But you won't
+mind my saying that I'm still a little bit afraid that you and your kind
+are a menace to civilization and a free government. You'll let me hang
+on to that much of my prejudice, won't you?"
+
+"Sure! Hang on to anything you like, son, and say anything you like. Or,
+rather, let me say something first. How about this 'career' business of
+Patricia's? Have you fixed that up yet?"
+
+Blount shook his head. "She's going home with her father next week," he
+said. And then: "Do you know what she did to-day, dad? She ran the
+little red car into that pine-tree intentionally--so I couldn't get back
+here in time to give Judge Hemingway those affidavits, which we both
+supposed would incriminate you."
+
+"Well, God bless her loyal little soul!" exclaimed the Honorable David,
+and the grave eyes were suspiciously bright. "I hadn't told her a word
+of what I was trying to do; but, Lord love you, Evan, she knew: you
+trust a good woman for knowing, every time, son. And now one more thing:
+Have you come to know Honoria any better in these last few days?"
+
+"Yes; much better, within the last few hours, dad."
+
+"That's good; that does my old heart a heap of good, son! Now then, you
+go straight off to bed and sleep up some. You've had a mighty hard day
+for a sick man. To-morrow morning we'll drive out to Wartrace and get
+ready to touch off the fireworks when the returns trickle in on Tuesday.
+I tell you, boy, Tuesday's election is going to be a regular
+old-fashioned, heave-'em-up and keep-'em-a-going land-slide! Good-night,
+and good dreams--if that cracked head doesn't go and roil 'em all up for
+you."
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+_À LA BONNE HEURE_
+
+
+By some law of contraries, whose workings not even the politically
+profound can fathom, the election proved the truth of the adage that all
+signs fail in a dry time by recording itself as one of the quietest and
+most orderly ever known in the Sage-Brush State. A few editors there
+were, like Blenkinsop, of _The Plainsman_, who maintained stoutly that
+it sounded the death-knell of the machine, but there was no gainsaying
+the result. The "Paramounters" ticket, with or without the help of the
+machine, was elected by sweeping majorities everywhere; and Gantry,
+roaming the corridors and lounging-rooms of the Railway Club and reading
+the bulletins as they were posted, shook his head despairingly over each
+fresh announcement.
+
+Late in the evening, finding that the senator's party had left the
+Inter-Mountain the day before to drive to Wartrace, the traffic manager
+called up the Quaretaro Mesa country-house and poured the news of the
+_débâcle_ into Evan Blount's ear.
+
+"We've gone to the everlasting bow-wows, and Mr. McVickar has
+disappeared, and the end of the world has come," was the way he phrased
+it for the listening ear; but the word which came back must have been
+peculiarly heartening, since from that time on to an hour well past
+midnight Gantry figured hilariously as the self-constituted host of any
+and all who would be entertained.
+
+At Wartrace Hall there was also rejoicing, albeit of a quieter sort.
+Five people sat around the cheerful blaze in the library, and when
+Crowell, whose telegraph instrument was in the adjoining den, had
+brought the final report from the outlying wards of the capital, he was
+told to close his key and go to bed.
+
+After the young man had withdrawn, the Honorable David rose to stand
+with his back to the fire.
+
+"Well, Evan, boy, are all the tangles straightened out for you for
+keeps, now?" he asked jovially.
+
+"Just about all of them, dad," laughed the younger man. He had been
+spending a very happy evening, due less to the triumphant story which
+had been pouring in over the wires than to the fact that Patricia had
+been occupying the other half of the small sofa which he had dragged out
+to face the fire.
+
+"Don't feel sore because you didn't get the governor you thought you
+were going to get when you went around preaching the gospel?" said the
+father, still chuckling.
+
+"We've got a better man and a bigger one, I'm sure," was the quick
+reply. Then he added: "But I think I am still doubtful about the
+advisability of injecting the machine principle into politics."
+
+The senator laughed silently.
+
+"Call it 'the organization' instead of 'the machine,' son, and you've
+named the power that moves the civilized world to-day. Man, the
+individual, is just about as helpless as a new-born baby. If you want to
+reform anything, from an unjust poor-law to the tariff, your first move
+is to rustle up a following; after that, you've got to solidify your
+bunch of sympathizers into a working organization--in other words, into
+a machine. Isn't that so, Professor Anners?"
+
+The white-haired professor of palæontology nodded sleepily. He had been
+dreaming of the Megalosauridæ, and had not heard the question.
+
+"You've heard me called 'the boss' from the time Dick Gantry had his
+first talk with you back yonder in Massachusetts," the senator went on,
+turning again to his son. "Call me a man with friends enough to make me
+a sort of foreman of round-ups in the old home State, and you've got it
+about right. I don't say that I've always used the power as it ought to
+be used; the good Lord knows, I'm no more infallible than other folks.
+You've gone through a heap of trouble and worry because you thought,
+when you got ready to knock the wedge out of the log, my fingers were
+going to get caught in the split, along with a lot of others. That would
+have been true enough any other year but this, I reckon, so you didn't
+have your fight and your worry for nothing. I've bought and trafficked
+and bargained and compromised--I don't deny that--but only when it
+seemed as though the end justified the means. Maybe the end never does
+justify the means--I'm open to conviction on that. But sometimes it's
+mighty easy to persuade yourself that it does."
+
+It was just here that the professor awoke with a start and a snort,
+excused himself abruptly, and stumped off to bed. Mrs. Honoria, sitting
+under the drop-light and stitching patiently at her bit of stretched
+linen, laid the tiny embroidery-hoop aside, signalled to her husband,
+and vanished in her turn. A few minutes after she had gone, the senator
+crossed from his corner of the fireplace to stand before the two sitting
+on the little sofa.
+
+"Son," he said gravely, "you've got your work cut out for you from this
+on, and it's a good-sized job. You're going to have a string of hard
+fights, one after the other, and there'll be times when you'll long with
+all your soul for some good, clean-hearted, bright-minded little girl to
+go to for comfort and counsel. Of course, I know that Patricia, here,
+has another job, but--"
+
+The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush had been out of sight and hearing for
+five full minutes when Evan Blount reached over and possessed himself of
+the hand that was shading a pair of deep-welled eyes from the firelight.
+
+"Last Sunday afternoon, Patricia, when I had right and reason and logic
+on my side, your woman's intuition found the truer path," he said, in
+sober humility. "I know I am only one, and your poor people to whom you
+have been planning to give yourself are many; still, I am selfish enough
+to--"
+
+She looked up quickly and the deep-welled eyes were shining.
+
+"We can't learn everything all at once, Evan, dear," she interrupted,
+breaking in upon his pleading. "There was one moment in that Sunday
+afternoon when I learned the greatest thing of all; it was the moment
+when I saw the pine-tree lying across the road and knew what I should
+do, and for whom I should do it."
+
+"I know," he returned gently. "You learned that love is stronger than
+death or the fear of death; and that loyalty is greater than many
+ideals. You heard what my father said just now, and it is true--only he
+didn't put it half vitally enough; I can't walk in the way he has marked
+out for me without you, Patricia."
+
+With a swift little love impulse she lifted his hand and pressed it to
+her cheek.
+
+"You needn't, Evan, dear," she said simply.
+
+THE END
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Transcribers Note: This section was originally at the beginning of the
+text.]
+
+
+BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.
+  12mo                          _net_ $1.30
+
+Scientific Sprague. Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.25
+
+The Price. 12mo                 _net_ $1.30
+
+The Taming of Red Butte Western.
+  Illus. 12mo                       $1.50
+
+The King of Arcadia. Illus. 12mo    $1.50
+
+A Romance in Transit. 16mo            .75
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush, by Francis Lynde
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16573-8.txt or 16573-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/5/7/16573/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
+
diff --git a/16573-8.zip b/16573-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7b3f120
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-8.zip
diff --git a/16573-h.zip b/16573-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ff8518d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-h.zip
diff --git a/16573-h/16573-h.htm b/16573-h/16573-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7fbf410
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-h/16573-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,14822 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /><title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush, by Francis Lynde.</title>
+
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+	img {border: 0;}
+
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; padding-bottom: .5em; padding-top: .5em;
+               padding-left: .5em; padding-right: .5em; margin-left: 1em;
+               float: right; clear: right; margin-top: 1em;
+               font-size: smaller; background: #eeeeee; border: dashed 1px;}
+
+    .bb       {border-bottom: solid 2px;}
+    .bl       {border-left: solid 2px;}
+    .bt       {border-top: solid 2px;}
+    .br       {border-right: solid 2px;}
+    .bbox     {border: solid 2px;}
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+    .u        {text-decoration: underline;}
+
+    .caption  {font-weight: bold;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+	.left		{text-align: left;}
+
+	.padtop		{padding-top: 2em;}
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style></head>
+
+
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: August 21, 2005 [EBook #16573]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a></p>
+<p>
+<a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a>
+</p><h2>THE HONORABLE
+SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH</h2>
+<p><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a></p>
+<p class="figcenter"><a href="./images/1.jpg"><img src="./images/1-t.jpg" alt="He's taken our retainer! snapped the vice-president"
+title="He's taken our retainer! snapped the vice-president" /></a></p><p class="figcenter">
+"He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president</p>
+<hr />
+
+<p><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a></p>
+<h3>THE HONORABLE</h3>
+<h3>SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH</h3>
+<p><br /></p>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<p><br /></p>
+<h3>FRANCIS LYNDE</h3>
+
+<p class="center">CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+NEW YORK : : : : : 1913<br />
+</p>
+<p><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a></p>
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright, 1913, by</span><br />
+<br />
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+<br />
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p class="center">Published September, 1913</p>
+<p><br /></p>
+<p class="figcenter"><a href="./images/2.png"><img src="./images/2-th.png" alt="colophon" /></a></p>
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p><br /><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a></p>
+<p class="padtop">TO MR. GEORGE ADY</p>
+
+
+<p>My Regius Professor in the School of
+Western Railroading, and himself a keen
+observer, <i>in situ</i>, of the conditions which
+I have herein sought to portray, this
+book is most affectionately inscribed.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>The Author.</span><br />
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a></p>
+
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p class="center">
+<a href="#I"><b>CHAPTER I, <span class="smcap">Because Patricia Said "No"</span></b></a><br />
+<a href="#II"><b>CHAPTER II, <span class="smcap">The Boss</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#III"><b>CHAPTER III, <span class="smcap">The Highbinders</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#IV"><b>CHAPTER IV, <span class="smcap">A False Gallop of Memories</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#V"><b>CHAPTER V, <span class="smcap">At Wartrace Hall</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#VI"><b>CHAPTER VI, <span class="smcap">On the Wing of Occasions</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#VII"><b>CHAPTER VII, <span class="smcap">A Battle Royal</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII, <span class="smcap">The Queen's Gambit</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#IX"><b>CHAPTER IX, <span class="smcap">The Rank and File</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#X"><b>CHAPTER X, <span class="smcap">In the Herbarium</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XI"><b>CHAPTER XI, <span class="smcap">The Great Game</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XII"><b>CHAPTER XII, <span class="smcap">A Well-Spring in the Desert</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XIII"><b>CHAPTER XIII, <span class="smcap">The Liegeman</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XIV"><b>CHAPTER XIV, <span class="smcap">Barriers Invisible</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XV"><b>CHAPTER XV, <span class="smcap">Sword-Play</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XVI"><b>CHAPTER XVI, <span class="smcap">The Safe-Blower</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XVII"><b>CHAPTER XVII, <span class="smcap">On the Knees of the High Gods</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XVIII"><b>CHAPTER XVIII, <span class="smcap">The Chasm</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XIX"><b>CHAPTER XIX, <span class="smcap">A Cog in the Wheel</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XX"><b>CHAPTER XX, <span class="smcap">A Stone for Bread</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXI"><b>CHAPTER XXI, <span class="smcap">The Under-Dog</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXII"><b>CHAPTER XXII, <span class="smcap">The Iconoclast</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXIII"><b>CHAPTER XXIII, <span class="smcap">A Cry in the Night</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXIV"><b>CHAPTER XXIV, <span class="smcap">Field Headquarters</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXV"><b>CHAPTER XXV, <span class="smcap">Blood and Iron</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXVI"><b>CHAPTER XXVI, <span class="smcap">Apples of Gold</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXVII"><b>CHAPTER XXVII, <span class="smcap">In Which Patricia Drives</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXVIII"><b>CHAPTER XXVIII, <span class="smcap">The Gossiping Wires</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXIX"><b>CHAPTER XXIX, <span class="smcap">At Shonoho Inn</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXX"><b>CHAPTER XXX, <span class="smcap">The Reckoning</span> </b></a><br />
+<a href="#XXXI"><b>CHAPTER XXXI, <span class="smcap"><i>À la Bonne Heure</i> </span> </b></a><br />
+
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+<p><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_HONORABLE_SENATOR" id="THE_HONORABLE_SENATOR"></a>THE HONORABLE SENATOR<br />
+SAGE-BRUSH</h2>
+
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h3>BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country
+club, and Blount, who was a week-end guest of
+the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be resentful.
+What right had a gay and frivolous world to
+come and thrust its light-hearted happiness upon
+him when Patricia had said "No"? It was like
+bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, an<a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>d
+when he had read the single telegram which had
+come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs. Beverley's
+indulgence and went out to find a chair in a
+corner of the veranda where the frivolities had not
+as yet intruded.</p>
+
+<p>It was a North Shore night like that in which
+Shakespeare has mingled moon-shadows with the
+gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream."
+Though the dance was in-doors, the trees on the
+lawn and the road-fronting verandas of the club-house
+were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns.
+At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were
+coming and going, and one of them, with the dust
+of the Boston parkways on its running-gear, brought
+the guests of honor&#8212;three daughters of a Western
+senator lately home from their summer abroad.</p>
+
+<p>Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored
+ones, and had resolutely refused the chance
+offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his ignorance.
+For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four
+hours old, and since it had changed the stars
+in their courses for Patricia's lover, the cataclysm
+was much too recent to postulate anything like a
+return of the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.</p>
+
+<p>Not that Blount put it th<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>at way, either to Mrs.
+Beverley or to himself. He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered
+young man of an up-to-date world, and
+the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and
+practical rather than poetic or sentimental. But
+the fact remained, and when he sat back in his
+corner absently folding the lately received telegram
+into a narrow spill and scowling moodily down upon
+the coming and going procession of motor-cars he
+was unconsciously giving a very life-like imitation
+of the disappointed lover the world over.</p>
+
+<p>It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance,
+that Gantry found him; a chance because the Winnebasset
+club-house is spacious and the dinner dance
+minimized the hazards of a meeting between two
+unattached men who were merely transient guests.
+But the railroad man at least was unfeignedly glad.</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world
+this is?" he exclaimed, with a true bromidian disregard
+for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of
+course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere,
+but to run slap up against you here, when
+there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to be
+bored stiff&#8212;" He stopped short, finding it difficult
+to be shiftily insincere with as old a friend as Evan
+Blount. But in the nature of things it was baldly
+impossible to tell Blount that the meeting was not
+<a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>accidental.</p>
+
+<p>"Pull up a chair and sit down," said Blount, not
+too ungraciously, considering his just cause to be
+more ungracious. "I was thinking of you a little
+while ago, Dick. I saw your name in the list of
+Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting
+in Boston, and&#8212;well, at the present moment
+I'm not sure but you are the one man in the world
+I wanted most to meet."</p>
+
+<p>"Say! that sounds pretty good to me," laughed
+Gantry, settling himself comfortably in a lazy-chair
+and feeling in his pockets for a cigar. "I've been
+in Boston the full week, skating around over the
+chilly crust of things and never able to get so much
+as one tenuous little social claw-hold. Say, Evan,
+how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old
+town keep going ever count 'em?"</p>
+
+<p>"Boston is all right when you know it&#8212;or, rather,
+when it comes to know you," returned Blount, remembering
+that Boston or Cambridge&#8212;which is
+Boston in the process of elucidation&#8212;was the birth
+and dwelling place of Patricia.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically
+corralled yo<a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>u, hasn't it, Evan?&#8212;to put it in
+choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it would when
+I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in
+the Harvard Law School. By the way, how much
+longer are you in for?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am out of the Law School, if that is what you
+mean&#8212;out and admitted to the bar," said Blount.
+"If you get into trouble with the Boston police let
+me know, and I'll ask for a change of venue to the
+greasewood hills and Judge Lynch's court."</p>
+
+<p>"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry,
+who was of those who curse their homeland to
+its face and praise it consistently and pugnaciously
+elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them,
+Blount? I believe you told me once, in the old
+college days, that you were Western-born."</p>
+
+<p>"I told you the truth; and until to-night I have
+never thought much about going back," was Blount's
+rather enigmatic reply.</p>
+
+<p>"But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the
+railroad man, waking up. "That's good; the old
+Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young
+lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular
+fellow you wanted to meet?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount passed the telegram which had come while
+he was at dinner across the interval between the
+two chairs. "Read that," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully
+and held it up to the softened glow of the electric
+ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried the name of
+his own city in the "greasewood country"&#8212;the capital
+of the State&#8212;and the time-markings sufficiently
+indicated its recent arrival. Below the date-line he
+read:</p>
+<p><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+<span class="smcap">To Evan Shelby Blount</span>,</p>
+
+<p>Standish Apartments, Boston.
+</p>
+
+<p>You have had everything that money could buy, and
+you owe me nothing but an occasional sight of your face.
+If you are not tied to some woman's apron-string, why
+can't you come West and grow up with your native State?</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">David Blount.</span><br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed
+juggler of friendly phrases, but none the
+less a careful and methodical official of a great railway
+company, that he folded the telegram in the
+original creases before he passed it back.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown
+over-abundantly long.</p>
+
+<p>"I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder.
+<a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>"We used to be fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor
+days, Evan, and yet I never, until a few days ago,
+knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your
+father."</p>
+
+<p>"He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed
+everybody knew it."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may
+not realize it, but what you don't tell people about
+yourself would make a pretty big book if it were
+printed."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's smile was altogether friendly.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The
+world has plenty of banalities and commonplaces
+without the adding of any man's personal contribution.
+Why should I bore you or anybody?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground,"
+said the railroad traffic manager. "Just the same,
+there's another side to it. In an unguarded moment,
+back in the college days, as I have said, you
+admitted to me that you were Western-born. I always
+supposed afterward that you regretted either
+the fact or the mention of it, since you never told
+me any more."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a></p>
+<p>"Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so
+little to tell. I had a boyhood like other boys&#8212;or,
+no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I was
+born on the 'Circle-Bar,' when the ranch was&#8212;as it
+still is, I believe&#8212;a hard day's drive for a bunch
+of prime steers distant from the nearest shipping-corral
+on the railroad. At twelve I could 'ride line,'
+'cut out,' and 'rope down' like any other healthy
+ranch-bred youngster, and since the capital was at
+that time only in process of getting itself surveyed
+and boomed into existence I had never seen a town
+bigger than Painted Hat."</p>
+
+<p>"And what happened when you were twelve?"
+queried Gantry. He was not abnormally curious,
+but Blount's communicative mood was unusual
+enough to warrant a quickening of interest.</p>
+
+<p>"The greatest possible misfortune that can ever
+come to a half-grown boy, Dick&#8212;my mother
+died."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry's own boyhood was not so deeply buried
+in the past as to make him forgetful of its joys and
+sorrows. "That was hard&#8212;mighty hard," he assented.<a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>
+Then: "And pretty soon your father married
+again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not for some years," Blount qualified. "But
+for me the heavens were fallen. I was sent away
+to school, to college, to Europe; then I came here
+to the Law School. In all that time I've never
+seen the 'Circle-Bar' or my native State&#8212;in fact,
+I have never been west of Chicago."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory
+phrase. As a railroad man, continent-crossing
+travel was to him the merest matter of
+course. Though he might Sunday-over at the Winnebasset
+Country Club on the North Shore, it was
+well within the possibilities that the following week-end
+might find him sweltering in New Orleans or
+buttoning his overcoat against the raw evening fogs
+of San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>"Never been west of Chicago?" he echoed.
+"Never been&#8212;" He stopped short, beginning to
+realize vaguely that there must be strong reasons;
+reasons which might lie beyond the pale of a college
+friendship, and the confidences begotten thereby, in
+the rendering of them.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a></p>
+<p>"No," said Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"Then the senator's&#8212;that is&#8212;er&#8212;your father's
+political life has never touched you."</p>
+
+<p>The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of
+Blount's steady gray eyes, but this time it was shot
+through with a faint suggestion of the Blount grimness.</p>
+
+<p>"It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick.
+I saw a large-hearted, open-handed old cattle-king
+wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream of
+politics to gratify an ambition that wasn't at all
+his own&#8212;a woman's ambition. In order that the
+woman might mix and mingle in Washington society
+for a brief minute or two, he got himself elected to
+fill out an unexpired term of two months in the
+United States Senate&#8212;bought the election, some
+said. That was three years ago, wasn't it?&#8212;a long
+time, as political incidents or accidents go. But
+Washington hasn't forgotten. When I was down
+there last winter the five-o'clock-tea people were
+still recalling Mrs. Blount's gowns and the wild-Western
+naïveté of 'The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was chuckling softly when the half-bitter
+admission had got itself fully made.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a></p>
+<p>"Land of love, Evan!" he said, "you may be an
+educated post-graduate all right, with the proper
+Boston degree of culture laid on and rubbed down
+to a hard-glaze finish, but you've got a lot to learn
+yet&#8212;about the senator and his politics, I mean.
+Why, Great Snipes, man! he isn't in it a little bit
+for the social frills and furbelows; he never was.
+Let me intimate a few things: Politically speaking,
+David Blount is by long odds the biggest man in
+his State to-day. He can have anything he wants,
+from the head of the ticket down. You spoke rather
+contemptuously just now of his two months in the
+Senate; you probably didn't know that he might
+have gone back if he had wanted to; that he actually
+did a much more difficult thing&#8212;named his
+successor."</p>
+
+<p>David Blount's son stood up and put his shoulders
+against one of the veranda pillars. From the
+new view-point he could look through the reading-room
+windows and on into the assembly-room where
+the dancers were keeping time to the measures of a
+two-step. But he was not thinking of the dancers
+when he said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's a sheer miracle, Dick, your dropping down
+here to-night like the <i>deus ex machina</i> of the old
+Greek plays. You've read this telegram"&#8212;holding
+up the folded message&#8212;"it is just possible that
+<a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>you can tell me what lies behind it. Why has my
+father sent it at this particular time and in those
+words? He knows perfectly well that my plans for
+settling here in Boston were definitely made more
+than a year ago."</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell you the situation out in the greasewood
+country, if that's what you want to know,"
+said Gantry after a thoughtful pause.</p>
+
+<p>"Make it simple," was Blount's condition, adding:
+"What I don't know about the business or the political
+situation in the West would fill a much larger
+book than the one you were speaking of a few minutes
+ago."</p>
+
+<p>"'Business or political,' you say; they are Siamese
+twins nowadays," returned the railroad man, with
+a short laugh. Then: "The outlook for us out yonder
+in the greasewood hills is precisely what it is in a
+dozen other States this year&#8212;east, west, north and
+south&#8212;everything promising a renewal of the unreasoning,
+bull-headed legislative fight against the
+railroads. I suppose our own case is typical. As
+everybody knows, the Transcontinental Railway has
+practically created two-thirds of the States through
+which it passes&#8212;made them out of whole cloth.
+Where you left sage-brush and bare hills and unfenced
+cattle ranges a dozen years ago you will now
+find irrigation, tilled farm<a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>s, orchards, rich mines&#8212;development
+everywhere, with a rapidly growing
+population to help it along. To make all this possible,
+the railroad took a chance; it was a mighty
+long chance, and somebody has to pay the bills."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," smiled Blount; "the bill-paying is
+summed up in some railroad man's clever phrase,
+'all the tariff the traffic will stand.' I can remember
+one year when my father rose up in his wrath
+and drove his beef cattle one hundred and fifty miles
+across the Transcontinental tracks to the Overland
+Central."</p>
+
+<p>"That was in the old days," protested Gantry,
+who was loyal to his salt. "As the State has filled
+up, we've tried to meet the situation half-way, as a
+straight business proposition. Fares and tariffs have
+been lowered from time to time, and&#8212;&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"You are not making it simple enough by half,"
+warned Blount quizzically. "You are getting further
+away from my telegram every minute."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry paused to relight his cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how your telegram figures in it
+specially, but I do know this: the legislature to be
+elected this fall in our State will be chosen entirely
+without regard to the old party lines. There is only
+one issue before the people and that is the Transcontinental
+Railway. The 'Paramounters<a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>,' as they
+call themselves, taking the name from the assumption
+that it is the paramount duty of the voter to
+pinch any business interest bigger than his own,
+would like to legislate us out of existence; as against
+that we shall beat the tomtom and do our level
+best to stay on top of earth."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," Blount agreed, then half-absently,
+and with his eyes still resting upon the merrymakers
+twirling like paired automatons in the distant
+assembly-room: "And my father&#8212;how does he
+stand?"</p>
+
+<p>"The idea of your having to ask me how the
+senator stands in his own State!" exclaimed Gantry.
+"But really, Evan, I'd give a good bit of hard
+cash to be able to tell you in so many words just
+where he does stand. There are a good many people
+in our neck of woods who would like mighty well to
+know. It will make all the difference in the world
+when it comes to a show-down."</p>
+
+<p>"Why will it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because, apart from the railroad and the anti-railroad
+factions, there is a very complete and
+smoothly running machine organization."</p>
+
+<p>"And my father is identified with the machine?"</p>
+
+<p>Again Gantry choked over the singular lack of<a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>
+information discovering itself in Blount's question.</p>
+
+<p>"Land of glory!" he ejaculated. "Where have
+you been burying yourself, Evan? Didn't I just
+tell you that he is the biggest man in the State?
+Oh, no"&#8212;with heavy irony&#8212;"he isn't identified
+with the machine&#8212;not at all; he merely owns it
+and runs it. We may think we can swing a safe
+majority in the legislature, and the 'antis' may be
+just as firmly convinced that they can. But before
+either side can turn a wheel it will have to walk up
+to the captain's office and get its orders."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said Blount, and a little later: "Thank
+you, Dick, I am pretty badly out of touch with the
+Western political situation, as you've discovered."
+Then he changed the subject abruptly. "How long
+will your traffic meeting last?"</p>
+
+<p>"We practically finished to-day. An hour or two
+on Monday will wind it up."</p>
+
+<p>"After which you'll go West?"</p>
+
+<p>"After which I shall go West by the Monday noon
+train if I can make it. You couldn't hire me to
+stay in Boston an hour longer than I have to."</p>
+
+<p>Silence for a time until Blount broke in upon
+Gantry's tapping of the dance-music rhythm with:
+"If I can close up a few unfinished business matters
+and get ready I may go with you, Dick. Would<a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>
+you mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I should mind so much that I'd willingly
+miss a train or so and worry out a few more of the
+chilly Boston hours rather than lose the chance of
+having you along."</p>
+
+<p>"That is good of you, I'm sure. I should bore
+myself to death if I had to travel alone."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's rejoinder might have passed for a mere
+friendly commonplace if it had not been for the
+rather curiously worded telegram. But it was a
+goodly portion of Gantry's business in life to put
+two and two together, and that phrase in the senator's
+message about a woman's apron-string interested
+him. Moreover, it was subtly suggestive.</p>
+
+<p>"Ever meet your father's&#8212;er&#8212;the present Mrs.
+Blount, Evan?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No." Blount may have been Western-born, but
+the chilling discouragement he could crowd into the
+two-letter negation spoke eloquently of his Eastern
+training.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was rebuffed but not disheartened.</p>
+
+<p>"She is a mighty fine woman," he ventured.</p>
+
+<p>"So I have been given to understand." This
+time Blount's reply was icy. <a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>But now Gantry's
+eyes were twinkling and he pressed his advantage.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to reckon pretty definitely with her
+if you go out to the greasewood country, Evan.
+Next to your father, she is the court of last resort;
+indeed, there are a good many people who insist
+that she <i>is</i> the court&#8212;the power behind the throne,
+you know."</p>
+
+<p>There is one ditch out of which the most persistent
+and gladsome mocker may not drive his victim,
+and that is the ditch of silence. Blount said nothing.
+Nevertheless, Gantry tried once more.</p>
+
+<p>"Not interested, Evan?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount turned and looked his companion coldly
+in the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Not in the slightest degree, Dick. Will you take
+that for your answer now, and remember it hereafter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," laughed the railroad man. And then, to
+round out the forbidden topic by adding worse to
+bad: "I didn't know it was a sore spot with you.
+How should I know? But, as I say, you'll have to
+reckon with her sooner or later, and&#8212;"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a></p>
+<p>"Let's talk of something else," snapped Blount.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry found a match and relighted his cigar.
+When he began again he was still thinking of the
+"apron-string" clause in the senator's telegram.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't understand how any man with Western
+blood in his veins could ever be content to marry
+and settle down in this over-civilized neck of woods,"
+he remarked, looking down upon the parked automobiles
+and around at the country-club evidences
+of the civilization.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you?" smiled Blount, with large lenience.
+One of the things the civilization had done for him
+was to make him good-naturedly tolerant of the
+crudeness of the outlander.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I can't," asserted the Westerner. Then he
+added: "Of course, I don't know the Eastern young
+woman even by sight. She may be all that is lovely,
+desirable, and enticing&#8212;if a man could hope to live
+long enough to get really well acquainted with
+her."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a></p>
+<p>"She is," declared Blount, with the air of one
+who had lived quite long enough to know.</p>
+
+<p>Once more Gantry was putting two and two together.
+Blount's determination to go West and
+grow up with the country&#8212;his father's country&#8212;was
+apparently a very sudden one. Had the decision
+turned entirely upon the senator's telegram?
+Gantry, wise in his generation, thought not.</p>
+
+<p>"You say that as if you'd been taking a few lessons,"
+he laughed. Then, with the friendly impudence
+which only a college comradeship could
+excuse: "Is she here to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Blount, unguardedly making the response
+which admitted so much more than it said.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about her," Gantry begged. "I don't
+often read a love story, but I like to hear 'em."</p>
+
+<p>If it had been any one but Gantry, Blount would
+probably have had a sharp attack of reticence, with
+outward symptoms unmistakable to the dullest.
+<a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>But the time, the surroundings, and the exceeding
+newness of Patricia's "No" combined to break down
+the barriers of reserve.</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't much to tell, Dick," he began half
+humorously, half in ill-concealed self-pity. "I've
+known her for a year, and I've loved her from
+the first day. That is Chapter One; and Chapter
+Two ends the story with one small word. She says
+'No.'"</p>
+
+<p>"The dickens she does!" said Gantry, in hearty
+sympathy. Then: "But that's a good sign, isn't
+it? Haven't I heard somewhere that they always
+say 'No' at first?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount laughed in spite of himself. Gantry, the
+Dick Gantry of the college period, had always been
+a man's man, gay, light-hearted, and care-free to the
+outward eye, but in reality one who was carrying
+burdens of poverty and distress which might well
+have crushed an older and a stronger man. There
+had been no time for sentiment then, and Blount
+wondered if there had been in any later period.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a></p>
+<p>"I am afraid I can't get any comfort out of that
+suggestion," he returned. "When Miss Patricia
+Anners says 'No,' I am quite sure she means it."</p>
+
+<p>"Think so?" said Gantry, still sympathetic.
+"Well, I suppose you are the best judge. Tough,
+isn't it, old man? What's the obstacle?&#8212;if you
+can tell it without tearing the bandages off and
+saying 'Ouch!'"</p>
+
+<p>"It is Miss Anners's career."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm," was the doubtful comment; "I'm afraid
+you'll have to elaborate that a little for me. I'm
+not up in the 'career' classification."</p>
+
+<p>"She has been studying at home and abroad in
+preparation for social-settlement work in the large
+cities. Of course, I knew about it; but I thought&#8212;I
+hoped&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"You hoped it was only a young woman's fad&#8212;which
+it probably is," Gantry cut in.</p>
+
+<p>"Y-yes; I'm afraid that was just what I did hope,
+Dick. But I couldn't talk against it. Confound it
+all, you can't go about smashing ideals for the
+people you love best!"</p>
+
+<p>"Rich?" queried Gantry.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no. Her father has the chair of paleontology,
+<a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>and never gets within speaking distance of the
+present century. The mother has been dead many
+years."</p>
+
+<p>"And you say the girl has the Hull House ambition?"</p>
+
+<p>"The social-betterment ambition. It's an ideal,
+and I can't smash it. You wouldn't smash it, either,
+Dick."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I guess that's so. If I were in your fix
+I should probably do what you are doing&#8212;say
+'Good-by, fond heart,' and hie me away to the forgetful
+edge of things. And it's simply astonishing
+how quickly the good old sage-brush hills will help
+a man to forget everything that ever happened to
+him before he ducked."</p>
+
+<p>Blount winced a little at that. It was no part
+of his programme to forget Patricia. Indeed, for
+twenty-four hours, or the waking moiety of that
+period, he had been assuring himself of the utter
+impossibility of anything remotely approaching forgetfulness.
+This thought made him instantly self-reproachful;
+regretful for having shown a sort of
+disloyalty by opening the door of the precious and
+sacred things, even to so good a friend as Dick Gantry;
+and from regretting to amending was never
+more than a step for Evan Blount. There were
+plenty of reminiscences to be threshed over, and</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>Blount brought them forward so tactfully that
+Gantry hardly knew it when he was shouldered away
+from the open door of the acuter personalities.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite late, and the talk had again drifted
+around to a one-sided discussion of practical politics
+in the Western definition of the term, when Gantry,
+pleading weariness on the score of his hard week's
+work at the railroad meeting, went to bed. The
+summer night was at its perfect best, and Blount
+was still wakeful enough to refill his pipe and well-balanced
+enough to be thankful for a little solitude
+in which to set in order his plans for the newly
+<a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>struck-out future. In the later talk with Gantry
+he had learned many things about the political situation
+in his native State, things which were
+enlightening if not particularly encouraging. Trained
+in the ethics of a theoretical school, he knew only
+enough about practical politics to be very certain
+in his own mind that they were all wrong. And if
+Gantry's account could be trusted, there were none
+but practical politics in the State where his father
+was reputed to be the dictator.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a
+modest business practice in some Eastern city, and,
+like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been filling
+out the perspective of the picture with the look
+ahead to a possible time when some great corporation
+should need his services in permanence. He
+was of the new generation, and he knew that the
+lawyer of the courts was slowly but surely giving
+place to the lawyer of business. Without attempting
+to carry the modern business situation bodily
+over into the domain of pure ethics, he was still
+young enough and enthusiastic enough to lay down
+the general principle that a great corporation, being<a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>
+itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be law-abiding,
+and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings
+with the public, at least equitably just. Therefore
+his ideal in his own profession was the man who
+could successfully safeguard large interests, promote
+the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital,
+and be the adviser of the man or men to whom the
+greater America owes its place at the head of the
+civilized nations.</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, though Gantry's attitude had been
+uncompromisingly partisan, Blount had failed to
+recognize in the railroad official a skilful pleader
+for the special interests&#8212;the interests of the few
+against those of the many. Hence he was preparing
+to go to the new field with a rather strong prepossession
+in favor of the defendant corporation.
+In their later conversation Gantry had intimated
+pretty broadly that there was room for an assistant
+corporation counsel for the railroad, with headquarters
+in the capital of the Sage-brush State.
+Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present
+crisis at least, would be politi<a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>cal rather than legal,
+and in his mind's eye he saw himself in the prefigured
+perspective, standing firmly as the defender of
+legitimate business rights in a region where popular
+prejudice was capable of rising to anarchistic
+heights of denunciation and attack.</p>
+
+<p>The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have
+been a true descendant of the fighting Blounts of
+Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had been
+other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia
+in his future, ambition must be made to fill all the
+horizons; and since work is the best surcease for
+any sorrow, he found himself already looking forward
+in eager anticipation to the moment when he could
+begin the grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the
+new environment.</p>
+
+<p>It was after the ashes had been knocked from the
+bedtime pipe that Blount left his chair and the secluded
+corner of the veranda to go down among the
+parked automobiles on the lawn. His one recreation&#8212;and
+it was the only one in which he found
+the precious fillip of enthusiasm&#8212;was motoring.
+There was a choice collection of fine cars in the
+grouping on the lawn, and Blount had just awakened
+a sleepy chauffeur to ask him to uncover and exhibit
+the engine of a freshly imported Italian machine,
+when a stir at the veranda entrance told him that at
+least a few of the dancing gu<a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>ests were leaving early.</p>
+
+<p>Being more curious at the moment about the
+mechanism of the Italian motor than he was about
+people, he did not realize that he was an intruder
+until the chauffeur hastily replaced the engine bonnet
+and began to get his car ready for the road.
+Blount stepped back when the little group on the
+veranda came down the steps preceded by a club
+footman who was calling the number of the car.
+And it was not until he was turning away that he
+found himself face to face with a very beautiful and
+very clear-eyed young woman who was buttoning
+an automobile dust-coat up under her chin.</p>
+
+<p>"Patricia!" he burst out. And then: "For
+Heaven's sake! you don't mean to tell me that you
+have been here all evening?"</p>
+
+<p>Her slow smile gave the impression, not quite of
+frigidity perhaps, but of that quality of serene self-possession
+which strangers sometimes mistook for
+coldness.</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't I be here?" she asked. "Didn't
+you know that the Cranfords&#8212;the people who are
+entertaining&#8212;are old friends of ours?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a></p>
+<p>Blount shook his head. "No, I didn't know it;
+and because I didn't, I have lost an entire evening."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; you shouldn't say that," she protested.
+"The evening was yours to use as you chose. Mrs.
+Beverley told me you were here, and she added that
+you had particularly requested not to be introduced
+to the Cranfords or their guests. Besides, you
+know you don't care anything about dancing."</p>
+
+<p>The chauffeur had placed his other passengers in
+the tonneau, and was trying to crank the motor.
+Blount was thankful that the new Italian engine was
+refusing to take the spark. The delay was giving
+him an added moment or two.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I don't care much for dancing; and you
+know very well why I couldn't, or wouldn't, be anybody's
+good company to-night," he said. Then:
+"It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening
+by not letting me know that you were here."</p>
+
+<p>"'This last evening'?" she echoed. "Why
+'last'?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I am leaving Boston and New England
+to-morrow&#8212;or rather, Monday. It is the only
+thing to do."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan,"
+<a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>she deprecated, in the sisterly tone that always
+made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense of
+proportion."</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes I think you haven't any sense of
+proportion, Patricia," he retorted half-morosely.
+"If you have, I am sure it is frightfully distorted."</p>
+
+<p>The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary
+explosions, and a white-haired old gentleman in
+the tonneau was calling impatiently to Patricia to
+come and take her place so that he might close the
+door.</p>
+
+<p>"It is you who have the distorted perspective,
+Evan," she countered. "But I refused to quarrel
+with you last night, and I am refusing to quarrel
+with you now. It pleases you to believe that a
+woman's place in this twentieth-century world is inevitably
+at the fireside&#8212;her own fireside. I don't
+agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with
+you. Where are you going?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am going West, Monday."</p>
+
+<p>"How odd!" she commented. "We are going<a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>
+West, too&#8212;father and I&#8212;though not quite so soon
+as Monday."</p>
+
+<p>"You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the
+West?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not tell him where. The car motor was
+whirring smoothly now, the chauffeur was sliding
+into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the old
+gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently
+impatient.</p>
+
+<p>"If we are both going in the same direction we
+needn't say good-by," she said hastily, giving him
+her hand at parting. "Let it be <i>auf wiedersehen</i>."
+Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the
+outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately
+that Blount had to spring nimbly aside to
+save himself from being run down.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BOSS</h3>
+<p><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a></p>
+
+<p>It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken
+mountain ranges, lone buttes, and irrigated mesas,
+and a still farther one from the veranda of an exclusive
+North Shore club to a private dining-room in
+the Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico
+faces the Capitol grounds in the chief city of the
+Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows command
+a magnificent view of the Lost River Range,
+and from whose roof, on a clear day, one may see
+the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the distant
+western horizon.</p>
+
+<p>Allowing for the difference between Eastern and
+Mountain time, the dinner for two in the private
+dining-room of the Inter-Mountain synchronized
+very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences
+by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous
+meeting on the veranda of the far-away
+North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was
+ascribing to the good offices of the god of chance.</p>
+
+<p>On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of
+the men at the table in the private dining-room had
+registered from Chicago. The name was illegible
+to the cursory eye, but since it was the signature
+<a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>of a notable empire-builder, it was sufficiently well
+known in all the vast region served by the Transcontinental
+Railway System. The owner of the
+name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to
+clip the end from a very long and very black cigar.
+He was a man past middle-age, large-framed and
+heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born
+master of circumstances. Like the younger generation,
+he was clean shaven; hence there was no
+mask for the deeply graven lines of determination
+about the mouth and along the angle of the strong,
+leonine jaw. In the region traversed by the great
+railway system the virile face with the massive jaw
+was as familiar as the illegible signature on the
+Inter-Mountain's guest-book. Though he figured
+only as the first vice-president of the Transcontinental
+Company, Hardwick McVickar was really
+the active head of its affairs and the dictator of its
+policies.</p>
+
+<p>Across the small round table sat the railway
+magnate's dinner-guest, a man who was more than
+McVickar's match in big-boned, square-shouldered
+physique, and whose half-century was written only
+in the thick, grizzled hair and heavy, graying
+mustaches. Like McVickar, he had the lion-like
+face of mastership, but the fine wrinkle<a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>s at the
+corners of the wide-set eyes postulated a sense of
+humor which was lacking in his table companion.
+His mouth, half hidden by the drooping mustaches,
+needed the relieving wrinkles at the corners of the
+eyes; it was a grim, straight-lined inheritance from
+his pioneer ancestors&#8212;the mouth of a man who may
+yield to persuasion but not easily to opposition.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could convince you that it isn't worth
+while to hold me at arm's-length, Senator," McVickar
+was saying, as he clipped the end from his
+cigar. "You know as well as I do that under the
+present law in this State we are practically bankrupt.
+We are not making enough to pay the fixed charges.
+We do a losing business from the moment we cross
+your State line."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; it seems to me I have heard something that
+sounded a good deal like that before," was the noncommittal
+rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>"You have heard the simple truth, then. And it
+is a bald injustice, not only to the railroad company,
+but to the people it serves. We can't give adequate
+service when the cost exceeds the earnings. That
+is the simplest possible proposition in any business
+undertaking."</p>
+
+<p>"And you can't make out t<a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>o convince the members
+of the State Railroad Commission of the simpleness?"
+asked the man whom the vice-president
+addressed as "Senator."</p>
+
+<p>"You know well enough that we can't hope to
+convince a rabidly anti-railroad commission," was
+the half-angry retort.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you are still running your railroad," suggested
+the other. "We don't hear anything about
+your shutting down and tearing up the track."</p>
+
+<p>"No; luckily, the Transcontinental System does
+not lie wholly within your State boundaries. If it
+did, we might as well surrender our charter and go
+out of business&#8212;shut down and tear up the track,
+as you put it."</p>
+
+<p>"All of which has come to be a pretty old and
+well-worn story with us, McVickar," said the listener
+quietly. "I'm sure you didn't make me
+motor thirty miles to hear you tell it all over again.
+What do you want?"</p>
+
+<p>"We want a square deal," was the curt reply.</p>
+
+<p>"So do the people of this State," asserted the
+man across the table. "You bled us, Hardwick&#8212;bled
+us to the queen's taste&#8212;while you had the
+chance; and the chance lasted a blamed long time.
+You are equitably, if not legally, in debt to<a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a> every
+man in this State who had ever shipped a car-load
+of freight or paid a passenger fare over your line
+before the present rate law went into effect. You
+can shuffle and side-step all you want to, but that is
+the plain fact of the matter."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president sat up and braced his arms on
+the edge of the table.</p>
+
+<p>"You are too much for me, Blount&#8212;you hold
+out too many cards; and I'm no apprentice at the
+game, either. In all these years we've been dickering
+together you've always been a hard-bitted and
+consistent fighter for your own hand. What's happened
+to you lately? Have you acquired a new set
+of convictions? Or have you been figuring out a
+different way of whipping the devil around the
+stump?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know," returned the guest, with
+large good-nature. "We are all growing older&#8212;and
+wiser, perhaps. You don't deny the debt you
+owe us, do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do we owe you anything, Blount?" asked the
+magnate pointedly, and with a definite emphasis
+upon the personal pronoun. "If we do, we are willing
+to pay it in spot cash, on demand."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a></p>
+<p>The big man on the other side of the table was
+leaning back in his chair with his hands in his
+pockets, and the smile wrinkling at the corners of
+his eyes was half-genial, half-satirical.</p>
+
+<p>"It's lucky we're alone, McVickar," he remarked.
+"A third fellow standing around and hearing you
+talk might imagine that you are trying to bribe me."</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right, Blount; this is between us two,
+and we understand each other. Nothing for nothing
+is the accepted rule the world over, and we
+both recognize it. You are figuring on something;
+I know you are. Name it. If it is anything less
+than a mortgage on the earth and one or two of
+the planets I'll get it for you."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid we are a good deal more than a mile
+or two apart yet, McVickar," said the man who was
+not smoking, after a long minute. "Let's ride back
+to the beginning and get us a fresh start. I said
+that Gordon is going to be the next governor of the
+State."</p>
+
+<p>"I know you did; and I said&#8212;and I say it again&#8212;he
+isn't going to be&#8212;not if we can help it," declared
+<a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>the railway magnate, with emphatic determination.</p>
+
+<p>"The methods you will take to defeat him will
+insure his election, McVickar. You fellows are
+mighty slow to learn your lesson; mighty slow and
+obstinate, Hardwick. You don't know anything
+but wire-pulling and crookedness and bribery. The
+times have changed, and you haven't had the
+common-sense or the courage or the business
+shrewdness to change with them. I say Gordon will be
+the next governor."</p>
+
+<p>Again there was a strained silence like that which
+follows the hand-shake in the prize-ring when the
+two antagonists have drawn apart and are warily
+watching each for his opening. After the pause the
+vice-president said:</p>
+
+<p>"If we had the safest kind of a majority in both
+houses of the legislature, we couldn't be sure of
+accomplishing anything worth while with Gordon in
+the governor's office; you know that, Blount. If
+Gordon runs and is elected, his platform will be
+flatly anti-railroad."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know," was the calm rejoinder.
+"Gordon is a mighty square fellow; an honest man
+<a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>and a fair one. If you could stay out of the fight
+and go to him with clean hands&#8212;but you couldn't
+do that, McVickar; you're too badly out of
+practice."</p>
+
+<p>"We needn't go into that phase of it. We are
+so savagely handicapped in this State that we can't
+afford to take a divided chance; can't afford to pass
+our case up to a man who has been elected by an
+unfriendly opposition. If we should wash our hands
+of the fight, as you suggest, we might just as well
+throw up our franchises and quit, so far as any
+prospect of earning a reasonable return upon our
+investment here is concerned."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; that is what you always say, and you
+have said it so often&#8212;you and your fellow railroad
+string-pullers&#8212;that you have lost the straightforward
+combination completely. If you ever knew how to
+make a clean fight you've forgotten the moves, and
+it's your own fault."</p>
+
+<p>Once more the man with the fierce eyes and the<a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>
+dominating jaw took time to consider. Like others
+of his class, he was partisan only in the sense of one
+fighting hardily for the side upon which he had
+happened to be drawn in the great world battle. If he
+had not long ago parted with his convictions, the
+heat and smoke of the battle had obscured them,
+and he chose his weapons now with little regard for
+anything beyond their possible efficacy.</p>
+
+<p>"You are sparring with me, Blount," he said
+finally. "You are talking to me as you might talk
+to a committee of the Good Government League&#8212;and
+possibly for the same reason. Let's get together.
+You control the political situation in your State, and
+we frankly recognize that fact. It's a matter of
+business, and we can settle it on a business basis.
+I have been outspoken and above-board with you
+and have told you what we want. Meet me halfway
+and tell me what you want."</p>
+
+<p>"I want a square deal all around, Hardwick;
+that's all. You've got to take the same ground
+and make a clean fight if you want me with you.
+I can't make it any plainer than that, can I?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a></p>
+<p>"I don't know yet what you are driving at,"
+frowned the vice-president, "nor just why you have
+taken this particular occasion to read me a
+kindergarten lecture on political methods. In times past
+I suppose we have both done some things that we
+would like to have decently buried and forgotten,
+but&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"But right there we break apart, McVickar,"
+cut in the other, setting his jaw with a peculiar
+hardening of the facial muscles that gave him the appearance
+of a fierce old viking attacking at the head of
+his squadrons. "I'm telling you over again that a
+new day has dawned in American politics; I and
+my kind recognize it, and you and your kind don't
+seem to be big enough to recognize it. That is the
+difference between us. In the present instance it
+comes down to this: you are going to fight for a
+railroad majority in the legislature, and you want
+Reynolds for the head of the ticket because you
+know that you can depend upon his veto if you
+don't get your majority in the House and Senate.
+You are not going to get Reynolds, or the majority
+either, without the help of the party organization."</p>
+
+<p>"We can put it much more elementally than
+<a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>that," supplemented the railroad man. "We get
+nothing without your say-so as the head of the
+party organization. That is precisely why I have
+come a couple of thousand miles to ask you to eat
+dinner with me here to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon I ought to feel right much set up and
+biggitty over that, Hardwick," smiled the veteran
+spoilsman, relapsing, as he did now and then, into
+the speech of his Southern boyhood. And then
+half-quizzically: "Are you tolerably well satisfied
+that you've got around to the place where you are
+willing to tote fair with me? You recollect, I gave
+you a straight pointer two years ago; you wouldn't
+take it, and we did you up. Are you right certain
+you are ready now to holler 'enough'?"</p>
+
+<p>Once again the vice-president refused to be
+hurried into making a capitulative admission. When
+he spoke, the militant second thought of the fighting
+corporation commander chose the words.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a limit to all things, Senator, and you
+are pushing us pretty well up to it. I suppose you
+can crack the whip and swing the vote on the
+legislature, and you can take it and be damned. But,
+by God, we'll have our governor and our attorney-general!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are betting confidently on that, are you?"
+said the veteran mildly.<a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a> "Is that your declaration
+of war?"</p>
+
+<p>"Call it anything you like. We are not going to
+be legislated off the map if we can help it. Strong
+as your machine is, you can't swing Gordon in
+against Reynolds if we concede your bare majority
+in the legislature and put up the right kind of a fight.
+And when it comes to Rankin, our candidate for
+attorney-general, you simply haven't another man
+in the party to put up against him. You'd have
+to run in a dummy, and even you are not big enough
+to do that, Blount, and put it over."</p>
+
+<p>"You've settled this definitely in your own mind,
+have you, Hardwick?" was the placable rejoinder.
+"I'm sorry&#8212;right sorry. I've been hoping that you
+had learned your lesson&#8212;you and your tribe. I
+came to town this evening prepared to show you a
+decent way out of your troubles, so far as this State
+is concerned; but since you have posted your 'de-fi,'
+as we cow-punchers say, I reckon it isn't worth while
+to wade any deeper into the creek."</p>
+
+<p>Again the railroad magnate rested his arms on the<a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>
+table-edge. "What was your 'decent way,' Senator?"
+he asked, fixing his gaze upon the shrewd old
+eyes of the other, which, for the first time in the
+conference, seemed to be losing a little of their
+grimly good-natured aggressiveness.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mind telling you, though you will likely
+call it an old man's foolishness. I have a grown
+son, McVickar. Did you know that?"</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president nodded, and the big man
+opposite went on half-reminiscently:</p>
+
+<p>"He is a lawyer, and a mighty bright one, so they
+tell me. As I happen to know, he is pretty well up
+on the corporation side of the argument, and the one
+thing I've been afraid of is that he would marry
+and settle down somewhere in the East, where the
+big corporations have their home ranches. I'm getting
+old, Hardwick, and I'd like mighty well to have
+the boy with me. Out of that notion grew another.
+I said to myself this: Now, here's McVickar; if
+he could have a good, clean-cut young man in this
+State representing his railroad&#8212;a man who not
+<a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>only knew his way around in a court-room, but
+who might also know how to plead his client's case
+before the public&#8212;if McVickar could have such a
+young fellow as that for his corporation counsel,
+and would agree to make his railroad company live
+somewhere within shouting distance of such a young
+fellow's ideals, we might all be persuaded to bury
+the hatchet and live together in peace and amity."</p>
+
+<p>A slow smile was spreading itself over the strong
+face of the railway magnate as he listened.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, David," he retorted mildly, "it isn't much
+like you to go forty miles around when there is a
+short way across. Why didn't you tell me plainly in
+the beginning that you wanted a place for your boy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on; don't let's get too far along before we
+get started; I'm not saying it now," was the sober
+protest. "You forget that you've just been telling
+me that you don't intend to comply with the one
+hard-and-fast condition to such an arrangement as
+the one I've been pipe-dreaming about."</p>
+
+<p>"What condition?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a></p>
+<p>"That you turn over a brand-new leaf and meet
+the people of this State half-way on a proposition
+of fair play for everybody."</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't any half-way point in a fight for life,
+David. You know that as well, or better, than I
+do. But let that go. We'll give your son the place
+you want him to have, and do it gladly."</p>
+
+<p>The man who had once been his own foreman of
+round-ups straightened himself in his chair and
+smote the table with his fist.</p>
+
+<p>"No, by God, you won't&#8212;not in a thousand
+years, McVickar! Maybe you could buy me&#8212;maybe
+you <i>have</i> bought me in times past&#8212;but you
+can't buy that boy! Listen, and I'll tell you what
+I'm going to do. I telegraphed the boy this afternoon,
+telling him to throw up his job in Boston and
+come out here. If he comes within a reasonable
+time he will be legally a citizen of the State before
+election. You said we didn't have anybody but
+Rankin to run for attorney-general. By Heavens,
+Hardwick, I'll show you if we haven't!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hardwick McVickar was not of those who
+fight as one beating the air. While the deft waiter
+was clearing the table and serving the small coffees
+he kept silence. But when the time was fully ripe
+he said what there was to be said.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a></p>
+<p>"You've got us by the nape of the neck, as usual,
+Blount. Name your terms."</p>
+
+<p>"I have named them. Get in line with the new
+public opinion and we'll do what we can for you."</p>
+
+<p>During the long pause following this curt ultimatum
+the masterful dictator of railroad policies
+deliberated thoughtfully upon many things. With
+the ex-senator as the all-powerful head of the machine
+in this State of many costly battle-fields, it
+would have been a weakness inexcusable on the
+part of so astute a commander as McVickar if
+David Blount's history, political and personal, had
+not been known to him in all its details. As a contingency
+to be met sooner or later, the vice-president
+had anticipated the thing which had now come to
+pass. That Blount should wish to push the fortunes
+of his son was perfectly natural; and it was no less
+natural that he should push them by making the
+railroad company's pay-roll furnish the motive-power.
+The magnate smiled inwardly when he remembered
+that he had given Gantry, the division
+traffic manager of the Transcontinental, a quiet hint
+to look up one Evan Blount, a young lawyer, on
+his next visit to Boston. By all odds it would be
+better to wait for Gantry's report before taking
+any irrevocable steps in the bargaining with Evan
+Blount's father; but unhappily the crisis had arrived,
+and in all probability it could not be postponed<a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>.
+None the less, the vice-president tried craftily
+for the postponement.</p>
+
+<p>"You're asking a good deal, Blount, and you don't
+seem to realize it. You are practically demanding
+that we lay down our arms and put a possible enemy
+in the saddle on the eve of a battle. If we should
+agree to meet the people of this State half-way, as
+you suggest, what guarantee have we that we won't
+be compelled to go all the way?"</p>
+
+<p>The fine-lined wrinkles were appearing again at
+the corners of the hereditary Blount eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't quite rise to the occasion, can you,
+Hardwick?" smiled the boss. "You'd like to behave
+yourself and be good, of course; but you want
+to be cocksure beforehand that it isn't going to
+cost too much."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, anyway, I'm going to ask for a little time
+in which to consider it," was the vice-president's
+final word.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure! You have all the time there is between
+now and the election. Go on and do your considering.
+I've told you what I'm going to do."</p>
+
+<p>"You know very well that we can't allow you to
+do what you propose. With an unfriendly attorney-<a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>general
+we might as well throw up our hands first
+as last."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; it's right pointedly up to you," was
+the calm reply.</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president rose and dusted the cigar-ash
+from his coat-sleeve with the table-napkin. When
+he looked up, the heavy frown was again furrowing
+itself between his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me know when your son is coming and
+I'll try to make it possible to meet him here," he
+said rather gratingly.</p>
+
+<p>And thus, at the precise moment when Richard
+Gantry, some three thousand miles away to the
+eastward, was declaring his weariness and his intention
+of going to bed, the two-man conference in the
+Inter-Mountain private dining-room was closed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a></p>
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h3>A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES</h3>
+
+
+<p>As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that
+Evan Blount was not to have Gantry for a travelling
+companion beyond Chicago. On the second day of
+westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose
+business followed him like an implacable Nemesis
+wherever he went, had wire instructions to stop
+and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois
+metropolis. Hence, on the morning of the following
+day, Blount continued his journey alone.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate
+had crossed his Rubicon; in other words, his train
+had rolled through the majestic steel bridge spanning
+the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at
+Omaha, and he was entering upon scenes which
+ought to have been familiar&#8212;which should have
+been and were not, so many and striking were the
+changes which had been wrought during his fourteen
+years of absence.</p>
+
+<p>Though h<a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>e was far enough from realizing it,
+his education and the Eastern environment had
+given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The
+through sleeper in which he had his allotment of
+space was well filled, and there were the usual opportunities
+for the making of passing acquaintanceships
+in the smoking-compartment. But it was not
+until the second day, after the dining-car luncheon
+and its aftermath of a well-chosen cigar had broken
+down some of the barriers of the acquired reserve,
+that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking
+gentleman who had seized upon the only chair
+in the smoking-compartment&#8212;a man whose thin,
+hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner
+were singularly out of keeping with the fashionable
+cut of his clothes, with his liberal tips, and
+with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.</p>
+
+<p>At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as
+it was bound to be, with an escaped lover, whose
+disappointment was still rasping him like a newly
+devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half
+of it. The hawk-faced one, who had boarded the
+train at Omaha and whose section was directly
+oppos<a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>ite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner
+whose property, vaguely located as somewhere "in
+the mountains," was involved in litigation.</p>
+
+<p>It was the reference to the litigation which first
+drew Blount beyond the boundaries of the commonplaces.
+Oddly enough, considering the fact that
+his planned-for Eastern career would have given
+him little occasion to dip into the mining codes, he
+had specialized somewhat in mining law. Hence,
+when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount
+found himself thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively
+helpful to the man who had apparently purchased
+more trouble than profits in his mining
+ventures.</p>
+
+<p>Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human
+sympathy the man in the wicker chair presently
+inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching another
+matter. In addition to his mining ventures he
+had been making investments in timber-lands, or,
+rather, in certain lumber companies operating "in
+the mountains"&#8212;bad investments, he feared, since
+the Government had lately taken such a decided
+stand against the cutting of timber in the mountain-land
+<a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he
+asked, that the talk would materialize in restraining
+action? If so, he was in the hole again&#8212;worse
+off than he should be if his mining lawsuits should
+go against him.</p>
+
+<p>Again Blount, good-naturedly charitable and not
+a little amused by the nervous anxiety of the gentleman
+of many troubles, gave an opinion.</p>
+
+<p>"Conservation, in timber as well as in other remaining
+resources of the country, has come to be
+a word which is in everybody's mouth," was the
+form the opinion took. "The plain citizen who isn't
+familiar with the methods of the timber sharks
+would do well to keep his money out of their hands
+if he doesn't wish to be held as <i>particeps criminis</i>
+with them in the day of reckoning."</p>
+
+<p>"Say!" ejaculated the thin man, wriggling nervously
+in his chair. "If you were a Government
+agent yourself you could hardly put the case stronger
+for the conservation crowd!"</p><p><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a></p>
+
+<p>Now, in ordinary circumstances, nothing was ever
+farther from Blount's normal attitude toward his
+fellow-men than a disposition to yield to the sudden
+joking impulse. But the hawk-faced man's perturbation
+was so real, or so faultlessly simulated, that
+he could not resist the temptation.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that I am not a Government
+agent?" he demanded, with a decent show of gravity.</p>
+
+<p>"Because you are not travelling on Government
+transportation," was the shrewd retort.</p>
+
+<p>At another time Blount might have wondered
+why a casual fellow-traveller should have taken the
+trouble to make the discovery. But at the moment
+he was intent only upon keeping the small misunderstanding
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you have seen my ticket, but you
+can't tell anything by that," he countered, laughing.
+"A good many civilian employees of the Government
+travel nowadays on regular tickets, like other
+<a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>people."</p>
+
+<p>"I know damned well they do," admitted the
+anxious one; and then, with a swift eye-shot which
+Blount missed: "Especially if they happen to be
+travelling on the quiet to catch some poor devil
+napping on the job."</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't be alarmed; you haven't told me
+anything that the department could make use of,"
+returned Blount, carrying the jest the one necessary
+move farther along.</p>
+
+<p>It was precisely at this point, as Blount remembered
+afterward, that the timber-thieving subject
+was dropped. Later on, after the talk had drifted
+back to mining, and from mining to politics, the
+nervous gentleman pleaded weariness and declared
+his intention of going to his section to take a nap,
+and presently disappeared to carry it out.</p>
+
+<p>Blount was not sorry to be left alone. In response
+to a vague stirring of something within
+<a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>him&#8212;a thing which might have been the primitive
+underman yawning and stretching to its awakening&#8212;he
+had been trying in the window-facing intervals
+to reconstruct the passing panorama of mountain
+and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood.
+As yet there was little familiarity save in the
+broader outlines. Where he remembered only the
+fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there
+were now vast ranches planted to sod corn; and
+upon the hills the cattle ranges were no longer open.
+The towns, too, at which the train made its momentary
+stops, were changed. The straggling shack
+hamlets of the cattle-shipping period, with the shed-roofed
+railroad station, the whitewashed loading-corral,
+and the towering water-tank&#8212;all backgrounded
+by a thin line of saloons and dance-halls&#8212;had
+disappeared completely, and the window-watcher
+found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted,
+cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the
+West of his boyhood had been chiefly peopled.</p>
+
+<p>Farther along toward evening the great range,
+which had been visible for hours in the westward
+vista, began to define itself in peaks and high, bald
+shoulderings of wind-swept mesas. Here was something
+definite and tangible for the stirring underman
+<a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>to lay hold upon. Blount, the sober-minded,
+the self-contained, found a curious transformation
+working itself out in quickened pulses and exhilarating
+nerve-tinglings. Boston, the Law School, the
+East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower
+rut of custom and convention, were fading into a
+past which already seemed age-old and half forgotten.
+He threw open the window at his elbow and
+drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast.
+It was sweet in his nostrils, and the keen crispness
+of it was as fine wine in his blood. After all, he had
+been but a sojourner in the other world, and this
+was his homeland.</p>
+
+<p>At the dining-car dinner, which was served while
+the higher peaks of the main range were as vast
+islands floating in a sea of crimson and gold, Blount
+missed the man of many troubles. The dining-car
+was well filled, and, though the faces of the diners
+were all unfamiliar, the hum of talk, the hurrying
+of the waiters, and the subdued clamor drowning
+itself in the under-drone of the drumming wheels
+answered well enough for companionship. There
+are times when even the voice of a friend is an intrusion,
+and the returning exile had happed upon
+one of them. Largeness, the inspiring breadth of
+the immensities, was what he craved most; and
+when he had cut the many-coursed dinner short, he
+hurried back to his Pullman window, hoping that
+he might have the smoking-compartment to himself
+again.</p>
+
+<p>The unspoken wish was granted. When he entered
+the smoking-room he found it empty; and,
+filling his cutty pipe, he drew the cushioned wicker
+chair out to face the open window. <a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>Fresh glimpses
+of the northward landscape shortly brought a renewal
+of the heart-stirrings; and when he finally
+had the longed-for sight of a bunch of grazing cattle,
+with the solitary night-herd hanging by one leg in
+the saddle to watch the passing of the train, the
+call of the homeland was trumpeting in his ears,
+and he would have given anything in reason to be
+able to changes places, temporarily at least, with
+the care-free horseman whose wiry, muscular figure
+was struck out so artistically against the dun-colored
+hillside.</p>
+
+<p>"Would I really do such a thing as that?" he
+asked himself half incredulously, when the night-herd
+and his grazing drove had become only a picturesque
+memory; and out of the heart-stirrings
+and pulse-quickenings came the answer: "I more
+than half believe that I would&#8212;that I'd jump at
+the chance." Then he added regretfully: "But
+there isn't going to be any chance."</p>
+
+<p>"Any chance to do what?" rumbled a mellow
+voice at his elbow, and Blount turned quickly to
+find that a big, bearded man, smoking an abnormally
+corpulent cigar, had come in to take his seat
+on the divan.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a></p>
+<p>At another time Blount, the conventional Blount,
+would have been self-conscious and embarrassed, as
+any human being is when he is caught talking to
+himself. But with the transformation had come a
+battering down of doors in the house of the broader
+fellowship, and he laughed good-naturedly.</p>
+
+<p>"You caught me fairly," he acknowledged. "I
+thought I still had the place to myself."</p>
+
+<p>"But the chance?" persisted the big man, looking
+him over appraisively. "You don't look like a man
+who has had to hang round on the aidges hankerin'
+after things he couldn't get."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I haven't had to do that very often,"
+was the reflective rejoinder. "But a mile or so
+back we passed a bunch of cattle, with the night
+man riding watch; I was just saying to myself that
+I'd like to change places with that night-herd&#8212;only
+there wasn't going to be any chance."</p>
+
+<p>The bearded man's laugh was a deep-chested
+rumbling suggestive of rocks rolling down a declivity.</p>
+
+<p>"Lordy gracious!" he chuckled. "If you was to
+get a leg over a bronc', and the bronc' should find
+it out&#8212;<a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out on my
+place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears
+to have you try it; he shore would. You take my
+advice, and don't you go huntin' a job night-ridin'
+in the greasewood hills. Don't you do it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I assure you I hadn't thought of doing it for
+a permanency. But just for a bit of adventure,
+if the chance should offer while I'm in the notion.
+I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony
+for fourteen years, but I don't believe I've lost the
+knack of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Ho!" said the big man. "Then you ain't as
+much of a tenderfoot as you look to be. Shake!"
+and he held out a hand as huge as a bear's paw.
+Following the hand-grip he grew confidential.
+"'Long in the afternoon I stuck my head in at the
+door and saw you chewin' the rag with a thin-faced
+old nester that couldn't set still in his chair while
+he talked. Know him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," said Blount promptly. "He has
+the section opposite mine, and he got on at Omaha."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I wouldn't want to know him if I was
+you," was the bearded man's co<a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>mment. Then:
+"Tryin' to get you to invest in some o' his properties?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he will, if he gets a chance. He'd go furder'n
+that; he'd nail you up to the cross and skin
+you alive if there was any money in it for him.
+His name's Simon Peter, and it ort to be Judas.
+I know him down to the ground!"</p>
+
+<p>"Simon Peter?" said Blount inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ya-as; Simon Peter Hathaway. And my name's
+Griggs; Griggs, of the Antelopes, back o' Carnadine&#8212;if
+anybody should ask you who give you your
+pointer on Simon Peter Judas. I don't blacklist no
+man in the dark, and I've said a heap more to that
+old ratter's face than I've ever said behind his
+back. Ump! him a-wrigglin' in that chair you're
+settin' in and tryin' to fix up some way to skin
+you! Don't tell me! I know blame' well what he
+was tryin' to do."</p>
+
+<p>Blount listened and was interested, not so much
+in the bit of gossip as in the big, red-faced ranchman,
+who so evidently had a grudge to pay off.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a></p>
+<p>"I am not likely to have any dealings with Mr.
+Hathaway," he rejoined. "And I must do him the
+bare justice of saying that he wasn't trying to sell
+me anything. The shoe was on the other foot. He
+seemed to be afraid he was in danger of losing out,
+and he was asking my advice."</p>
+
+<p>"S.P. Hathaway lose out? Not on your life, my
+young friend! You say he was askin' for advice?
+You've done stirred up my curiosity a whole heap,
+and I reckon you'll have to tell me who you are
+before it'll ca'm down again."</p>
+
+<p>Blount laughed. "Mr. Hathaway thinks I am
+a special agent for the Government, travelling on
+business for the Forest Service."</p>
+
+<p>"The hell he does!" exploded the big man. Then
+he reached over and laid a swollen finger on Blount's
+knee. "Say, boy, before you or him ever gets off
+this train&#8212;Sufferin' Moses! what was that?"</p>
+
+<p>The break came upon a thunderous crash transmitting
+itself from car to car, and the long, heavy
+train came to a juggling stop. The ranchman
+sprang to his feet with an alacrity surprising in so
+<a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>huge a body and ducked to look out of the open
+window.</p>
+
+<p>"Twin Buttes!" he gurgled. "And, say, it's a
+wreck! We've hit something right slap in the middle
+of the yard! Let's make a break for the scene
+of the confliggration till we see who's killed!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount followed the ranchman's lead, but shortly
+lost sight of the burly figure in the crowd of curious
+passengers pouring from the hastily opened vestibules.
+Seen at closer range, the accident appeared
+to be disastrous only in a material sense. The
+heavy "Pacific-type" locomotive had stumbled over
+the tongue of a split switch, leaving the rails and
+making a blockading barrier of itself across the
+tracks. Nobody was hurt; but there would be a
+delay of some hours before the track could be
+cleared.</p>
+
+<p>Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the
+derailed locomotive, Blount strolled on through the
+railroad yard to the station and the town. He remembered
+the place chiefly by its name. In his
+boyhood it had been the nearest railroad forwarding-point
+for the mines at Lewiston, thirty miles
+beyond the Lost Hills. Now, as it appeared, it
+had become a lumber-shipping station. To the left
+of the railroad there were numerous s<a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>awmills, each
+with its mountain of waste dominated by a black
+chimney, screen-capped. For the supply of logs an
+enormous flume led down from the slopes of the
+forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute
+out of which, though the working-day was
+ended, the great logs were still tumbling in an intermittent
+stream.</p>
+
+<p>North of the town the valley broke away into a
+region of bare mesas dotted with rounded, butte-like
+hills, with the buttressing ranges on either side
+to lift the eastern and western horizons. The northern
+prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately,
+and the tide of remembrance swept strongly
+in upon him. Some forty-odd miles away to the
+northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser
+range, lay the "short-grass" region in which he had
+spent the happy boyhood. An hour's gallop through
+the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting
+sun would be playing upon the little station
+of Painted Hat, the one-time shipping-point for the
+home ranch. And half-way between Painted Hat
+and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands
+of the mountains, were the horse-corrals of one<a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a> Debbleby,
+a true hermit of the hills, and the boy Evan's
+earliest school-master in the great book of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Blount's one meliorating softness during the years
+of exile had manifested itself in an effort to keep
+track of Debbleby. He knew that the old horse-breeder
+was still alive, and that he was still herding
+his brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin. The
+young man, fresh from the well-calculated East,
+threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool breeze
+sweeping down from the northern hills. He was
+not given to impulsive plan-changing. On the contrary,
+he was slow to resolve and proportionately
+tenacious of the determination once made. But the
+stirring of boyish memories accounted for something;
+and in the sanest brain there are sleeping
+cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive at the
+touch of suggestion. What if he should&#8212;</p>
+
+<p>He sat down upon the edge of the station platform
+and thought it out deliberately. Since it would
+be hours before the tracks could be cleared and the
+rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from
+taking an immediate and delightful plunge into the
+region of the heart-stirring recollections? Doubtless
+old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting on the
+door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin
+<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>foot-hills, smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly,
+wondering what had become of the boy whom
+he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride.
+Blount estimated the distance as he remembered it.
+With a hired horse he might reach Debbleby's by
+late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old
+ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to
+the capital.</p>
+
+<p>Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon
+the relief train from the capital might be expected
+decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman conductor
+to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's
+office at the capital, the man in search of his boyhood
+crossed quickly to a livery-stable opposite the
+station, bargained for a saddle-horse, borrowed a
+poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to
+break violently, for the moment at least, with all
+the civilized traditions. He would go and see Debbleby&#8212;drop
+in upon the old horse-breeder without
+warning, and thus get his first revivified impression
+of the homeland unmixed with any of the disappointing
+changes which were doubtless awaiting him at
+the real journey's end.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a></p>
+<p>Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct
+to the single hotel in the small sawmill town,
+and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the thin-faced
+man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named
+for him, standing on the porch of the hotel in earnest
+talk with three others who, from their appearance,
+might have figured either as "timber jacks" or cowboys.
+<a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>Blount was on the point of recognizing his
+companion of the Pullman smoking-compartment as
+he rode past the hotel to take the trail to the northward,
+but a curious conviction that the gentleman
+with the bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject
+of the earnest talk with the three men of doubtful
+occupation restrained him. A moment later,
+when he looked back from the crossing of the
+railroad track, he saw that all four of the men on
+the porch were watching him. This he saw; and
+if the backward glance had been prolonged for a
+single instant he might also have seen a big, barrel-bodied
+man with a red face stumbling out of the side
+door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding
+signals to stop him. But this he missed.</p>
+
+<p>There was an excuse for the oversight as well as
+for the speedy blotting out of the picture of the
+four men watching him from the porch of the hotel.
+With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak
+of the saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it
+in his nostrils, and with the wide world of the immensities
+into which to ride unhampered and f<a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>ree,
+the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying
+professional triumph the fettered East
+could offer him would he have curtailed the free-reined
+flight into the silent wilderness by a single
+mile.</p>
+
+<p>For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop
+the fugitive from civilization had the sunset glow to
+help him find the trail. After that the moon rose,
+and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less
+familiar in daylight, lost their remembered featurings.
+During the first few miles the trail had
+led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern
+mountains withdrawing and the Lost River
+Range looming larger as its lofty sky-line was struck
+out sharply against the sunset horizon. Farther on,
+in the transition darkness between sunset and moonrise,
+the trail disappeared entirely; but so long as
+he was sure of the general direction, Blount held on
+and gave the tireless little bronco a loose rein. The
+Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills
+of the western range, with the broad gulch of the
+Pigskin cutting a plain highway through the mountains.
+If he could find one of the head-water streams
+of the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in the
+<a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>gulches of the mesa, there could be no danger of
+losing the way.</p>
+
+<p>It was some little time after he had left the
+shoulderings of the eastern range behind that a singular
+thing happened. Far away on his right he
+heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the
+moon was nearly full and the treeless landscape
+was bare of any kind of cover, he could not make
+out the horseman who was evidently passing him
+and going in the same direction. At first he thought
+it was some one who was making a <i>détour</i> to avoid
+him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess
+and concluded that he himself was off the trail.
+This conclusion was confirmed a little later when
+two other travellers, announcing themselves to the
+ear as the first one had, and also, like the first, invisible
+to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain,
+passed him at speed.</p>
+
+<p>After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses
+to himself, and it was not until after the
+mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a
+water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin,
+and the bronco was patiently picking its way through
+the hogback of the western range, that the boyish
+thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure
+<a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>which might have discomforting consequences.</p>
+
+<p>For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly
+through many gulches and had climbed a good
+half-score of the hogback hills, the young man from
+the East admitted that the boyhood memories were
+hopelessly and altogether at fault in the deceptive
+moonlight. Blount gave the horse a breathing halt
+on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the
+puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember.
+The effort was fruitless. He was very
+thoroughly and painstakingly lost.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HIGHBINDERS</h3>
+
+
+<p>When the three men who had pulled him from
+his horse and tied him hand and foot had withdrawn
+to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to wrangle
+morosely over what should be done with him, Evan
+Blount found it simply impossible to realize that
+they were actually dis<a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>cussing, as one of the expedients,
+the propriety of knocking him on the head
+and flinging his body into the near-by canyon.</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude
+grotesqueness of the thing that had happened. Five
+minutes earlier he had been riding peacefully up
+the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly
+he was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's.
+Then, at a sudden sharp turn in the canyon
+bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the camp-fire,
+had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had
+found himself confronted by three men, with one of
+the three covering him with a sawed-off Winchester.
+From that to the unhorsing and the binding had
+been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch
+as he was unarmed and the surprise had been
+complete; but the grotesquery remained.</p>
+
+<p>Since his captors had as yet made no attempt to
+rob him, he could only surmise that some incredibly
+foolish mistake had been made. But when he
+remembered the three invisible horsemen who had
+passed him on the broad mesa he was not so certain
+about the mistake. Most naturally, his thoughts
+went back to the little episode on the hotel porch.
+The passing glance he had given to the three men
+with whom the fourth man, Hathaway, had been
+talking did not enable him to identify them with
+<a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>the three who were sourly discussing his fate at the
+near-by fire; none the less, the conclusion was fairly
+obvious. Thus far he had been either too busy or
+too bewildered to break in; but when the more murderous
+of the expedients was apparently about to be
+adopted, he decided that it was high time to try to
+find out why he was to be effaced. Whereupon he
+called across to the group at the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Without wishing to interfere with any arrangements
+you gentlemen are making, I shall be obliged
+if you will tell me why you think you have found
+it necessary to murder me."</p>
+
+<p>"You know mighty good and well why there's
+one too many of you on Lost River, jest at this
+stage o' the game," growled the hard-faced spokesman
+who had held the Winchester while his two
+accomplices were doing the unhorsing and the binding.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't," insisted Blount good-naturedly.
+"So far as I know, there is only one of me&#8212;on Lost
+River or anywhere else."</p>
+
+<p>"That'll do for you; it ain't your put-in, nohow,"
+was the gruff decision of the court; but Blount was
+<a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>too good a lawyer to be silenced thus easily.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you might not especially regret killing
+the wrong man, but in the present case I am very
+sure I should," he went on. And then: "Are you
+quite sure you've got the right man?"</p>
+
+<p>"The boss knows who you are&#8212;that's enough
+for us."</p>
+
+<p>"The boss?" questioned Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"Yas, I said the boss; now hold your jaw!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount caught at the word. In a flash the talk
+with Gantry on the veranda of the Winnebasset
+Club flicked into his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"There is only one boss in this State," he countered
+coolly. "And I am very sure he hasn't given
+you orders to kill me."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" demanded the spokesman.</p>
+
+<p>Blount repeated his assertion, adding jocularly:
+"Perhaps you'd better call up headquarters and
+<a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>ask your boss if he wants you to kill the son of his
+boss."</p>
+
+<p>At this the gun-holder came around the fire to
+stand before his prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, pal&#8212;this ain't my night for kiddin', and
+it hadn't ort to be your'n," he remarked grimly.
+"The boss didn't say you was to be rubbed out&#8212;they
+never do. But I reckon it would save a heap
+o' trouble if you <i>was</i> rubbed out."</p>
+
+<p>"On the contrary, I'm inclined to think it would
+make a heap of trouble&#8212;for you and your friends,
+and quite probably for the man or men who sent
+you to waylay me. But, apart from all that, you've
+got hold of the wrong man, as I told you a moment
+ago."</p>
+
+<p>"No, by grapples! I hain't. I saw you in daylight.
+If there's been any fumblin' done, I hain't
+done it. So you see it ain't any o' my funeral."</p>
+
+<p>"Think not?" said Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it ain't. Orders is orders, and you
+<a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>don't git over into them woods on Upper Lost
+Creek with no papers to serve on nobody: see?"</p>
+
+<p>It was just here that the light of complete understanding
+dawned upon Blount; and with it came
+the disconcerting chill of a conviction overthrown.
+As a theorist he had always scoffed at the idea that
+a corporation, which is a creature of the law, could
+afford to be an open law-breaker. But here was a
+very striking refutation of the charitable assumption.
+His smoking-room companion of the Pullman
+car was doubtless one of the timber-pillagers who
+had been cutting on the public domain. To such
+a man an agent of the National Forest Service was
+an enemy to be hoodwinked, if possible, or, in the
+last resort, to be disposed of as expeditiously as
+might be, and Blount saw that he had only himself
+to blame for his present predicament, since he
+had allowed the man to believe that he was a Government
+emissary. Having this clew to the mystery,
+his course was a little easier to steer.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no papers of the kind you think I have,
+as you can readily determine by searching me," he
+said. "My name is Blount, and I am the son of
+ex-Senator David Blount, of this State. Now what
+are you going to do with me?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a></p>
+<p>"What's that you say?" grated the outlaw.</p>
+
+<p>"You heard what I said. Go ahead and heave
+me into the canyon if you are willing to stand for
+it afterward."</p>
+
+<p>The hard-faced man turned without replying and
+went back to the other two at the fire. Blount
+caught only a word now and again of the low-toned,
+wrangling argument that followed. But from the
+overheard word or two he gathered that there were
+still some leanings toward the sound old maxim
+which declares that "dead men tell no tales."
+When the decision was finally reached, he was left
+to guess its purport. Without any explanation the
+thongs were taken from his wrists and ankles, and
+he was helped upon his horse. After his captors
+were mounted, the new status was defined by the
+spokesman in curt phrase.</p>
+
+<p>"You go along quiet with us, and you don't make
+no bad breaks, see? I more'n half believe you been
+lyin' to me, but I'm goin' to give you a chance to
+prove up. If you don't prove up, you pass out&#8212;that's
+all. Now git in line and hike out; and if
+you're countin' on makin' a break, jest ricollect that
+a chunk o' lead out of a Winchester kin travel a
+heap faster thern your cayuse."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a></p>
+<p>If Blount had not already lost all sense of familiarity
+with his surroundings, the devious mountain
+trail taken by his captors would soon have convinced
+him that the boyhood memories were no
+longer to be trusted. Up and down, the trail zigzagged
+and climbed, always penetrating deeper and
+deeper into the heart of the mountains. At times
+Blount lost even the sense of direction; lost it so
+completely that the high-riding moon seemed to be
+in the wrong quarter of the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>For the first few miles the trail was so difficult
+that speed was out of the question; but later, in
+crossing a high-lying valley, the horses were pushed.
+Beyond the valley there were more mountains, and
+half-way through this second range the trail plunged
+into a deep, cleft-like canyon with a brawling torrent
+for its pathfinder. Once more Blount lost the sense
+of direction, and when the canyon trail came out
+upon broad uplands and became a country road
+with bordering ranches watered by irrigation canals,
+into which the mountain torrent was diverted, there
+were no recognizable landmarks to tell him whither
+his captors were leading him.</p>
+
+<p>As he was able to determine by holding his
+watch, face up, to the moonlight, it was nearly midnight
+when the silent cavalcade of four turned aside
+from the main road into an avenue of spreading
+cottonwood trees. At its head the avenue became
+<a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>a circular driveway; and fronting the driveway a
+stately house, with a massive Georgian facade and
+colonnaded portico, flung its shadow across the
+white gravel of the carriage approach.</p>
+
+<p>There were lights in one wing of the house, and another
+appeared behind the fan-light in the entrance-hall
+when the leader of the three highbinders had
+tramped up the steps and touched the bell-push.
+Blount had a fleeting glimpse of a black head
+with a fringe of snowy wool when the door was
+opened, but he did not hear what was said. After
+the negro serving-man disappeared there was a
+little wait. At the end of the interval the door
+was opened wide, and Blount had a gruff order to
+dismount.</p>
+
+<p>What he saw when he stood on the door-mat
+beside his captor merely added mystery to mystery.
+Just within the luxuriously furnished hall, where
+the light of the softly shaded hall lantern served
+to heighten the artistic effect of her red housegown,
+stood a woman&#8212;a lady, and evidently the
+mistress of the Georgian mansion. She was small
+and dark, with brown eyes that were almost childlike
+in their winsomeness; a woman who might
+be twenty, or thirty, or any age between. Beautiful
+she was not, Blount decided, comparing her instantly,
+as he did all women, with Patricia Anners;
+but&#8212;He was not given time t<a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>o add the qualifying
+phrase or to prepare himself for what was
+coming.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Barto?" the little lady asked, turning
+to the man with the gun.</p>
+
+<p>The reply was direct and straight to the purpose.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse <i>me</i>; but I jest wanted to ask if you know
+this here young feller. He's been allowin' to me
+th't he is&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she said quickly, and stepping forward
+she gave her hand and a welcome to the dazed
+one. "Please come in; we have been expecting
+you." Then again to the man with the Winchester:
+"Thank you so much, Barto, for showing the gentleman
+the way to Wartrace Hall."</p>
+
+<p>It was all done so quietly that Blount was still
+unconsciously holding the hand of welcoming while
+his late captors were riding away down the cottonwood-shaded
+avenue. When he realized what he
+was doing he was as nearly embarrassed as a selfcontained
+young lawyer could well be. But his
+impromptu hostess quickly set him at ease.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a></p>
+<p>"You needn't make any explanations," she hastened
+to say, smiling up at him and gently disengaging
+the hand which he was only now remembering
+that he had forgotten to relinquish. "Naturally,
+I inferred that you were in trouble, and that your
+safety depended in some sense upon my answer.
+Were you in trouble?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount perceived immediately how utterly impossible
+it would be to make her, or any one else,
+understand the boyish impulse which had prompted
+him to leave his train, or the curious difficulty into
+which the impulse had precipitated him. So his explanation
+scarcely explained.</p>
+
+<p>"I was on my way to a ranch&#8212;that is, to the capital&#8212;when
+these men held me up," he stammered.
+"They&#8212;they mistook me for some one else, I think,
+and for reasons best known to themselves they
+brought me here. If you could direct me to some
+place where I can get a night's lodging&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing like a tavern within twenty
+miles of here," she broke in; "nor is there any
+house within that radius which would refuse you a
+night's shelter, Mr.&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Blount made a quick dive for his card-case, found
+it, and hastened to introduce himself by name. She
+took the bit of pasteboard, and, since she scarcely
+<a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>glanced at the engraved line on it, he found himself
+wholly unable to interpret her smile.</p>
+
+<p>"The card is hardly necessary," she said; and
+then, to his complete bewilderment: "You are very
+much like your father, Mr. Blount."</p>
+
+<p>"You know my father?" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed softly. "Every one knows the senator,"
+she returned, "and I can assure you that
+his son is heartily welcome under this roof. Uncle
+Barnabas"&#8212;to the ancient serving-man who was
+still hovering in the background&#8212;"have Mr.
+Blount's horse put up and the blue room made
+ready."</p>
+
+<p>Blount followed his still unnamed hostess obediently
+when she led the way to the lighted library</p>
+
+<p>in the wing of the great house.</p>
+
+<p>"Uncle Barnabas will come for you in a little
+while," she told him, playing the part of the gracious
+lady to the line and letter. "In the meantime
+you must let me make you a cup of tea. I
+am sure you must be needing it after having ridden
+so far. Take the easy-chair, and we can talk comfortably
+while the kettle is boiling. Are you new
+to the West, Mr. Blount, or is this only a return
+to your own? The senator is always talking about<a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>
+you, you know; but he is so inordinately proud of
+you that he forgets to tell us all the really interesting
+things that we want to know."</p>
+
+<p>The serving-man took his own time about coming
+back; so long a time that Blount forgot that it was
+past midnight, that he was a guest in a strange
+house, and that he still had not learned the name
+of his entertainer. For all this forgetfulness the
+little lady with the dark-brown eyes was directly
+responsible. Almost before he realized it, Blount
+found himself chatting with her as if he had always
+known her, making rapid strides on the way to confidence
+and finding her alertly responsive in whatever
+field the talk happened to fall. Apparently
+she knew the world&#8212;his world&#8212;better than he knew
+it himself: she had summered on the North Shore
+and wintered in Washington. She knew Paris, and
+when the conversation touched upon the Italian
+art-galleries he was led to wonder if he had gone
+through Italy with his eyes shut. At the next turn
+of the talk he was forced to admit that not even
+Patricia herself could speak more intelligently of the
+English social problem; and when it came to the
+vital questions of the American moment he gasped
+again and wondered if he were awake&#8212;if it could
+<a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>be possible that this out-of-place Georgian mansion
+and its charming mistress could be part and parcel
+of the West which had so far outgrown the boyhood
+memories.</p>
+
+<p>Since all things mundane must have an end, the
+old butler with the white-fringed head came at last
+to show him the way to his luxurious lodgings on
+the second floor of the mansion. With a touch of
+hospitality which carried Blount back to his one
+winter in the South, the hostess went with him as
+far as the stair-foot, and her "Good-night" was
+<a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>still ringing musically in his ears when the old negro
+lighted the candles in the guest-room, put another
+stick of wood on the small fire that was crackling
+and snapping cheerfully on the hearth, and bobbed
+and bowed his way to the door. Blount saw his
+last chance for better information vanishing for the
+night, and once more broke with the traditions.</p>
+
+<p>"Uncle Barnabas, before you go, suppose you tell
+me where I am," he suggested. "Whose house is
+this?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man stopped on the threshold, chuckling
+gleefully. "A-ain't you know dat, sah?&#8212;a-ain't de
+mistis done tell you dat? You's at Wa'trace Hall&#8212;Mahsteh
+Majah's new country-house; yes, sah;
+dat's whah you is&#8212;kee-hee!"</p>
+
+<p>"And who is 'Master Major'?" pressed Blount,
+whose bewilderment grew with every fresh attempt
+to dispel it.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a></p>
+<p>"A-ain't she tell you dat?&#8212;kee-hee! Ev'body
+knows Mahsteh Majah; yes, sah. If de mistis
+ain't tell you, ol' Barnabas ain't gwine to&#8212;no, sah.
+Ah'll bring yo'-all's coffee in de mawnin'; yes, sah&#8212;good-night,
+sah&#8212;kee-hee!" And the door closed
+silently upon the wrinkled old face and the bobbing
+head.</p>
+
+<p>Having nothing else to do, Blount went to bed,
+but sleep came reluctantly. Life is said to be full
+of paper walls thinly dividing the commonplace
+from the amazing; and he decided that he had
+surely burst through one of them when he had given
+place to the vagrant impulse prompting him to go
+horseback-riding when he should have gone comfortably
+to bed in his sleeper to wait for the track-clearing.</p>
+
+<p>Whither had a curiously bizarre fate led him?
+Where was "Wartrace Hall," and who was "Mahsteh Majah"?
+Who was the winsome little lady
+who looked as if she might be twenty, and had
+all the wit and wisdom of the ages at her tongue's
+end&#8212;who had held him so nearly spellbound over
+the teacups that he had entirely lost sight of everything
+but his hospitable welcome?</p>
+<p><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a></p>
+<p>These and kindred speculations kept him awake
+for a long time after the door had closed behind
+the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off
+into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar
+purring of a motor-car aroused him. There was a
+window at his bed's head, and he reached over and
+drew the curtain. The view gave upon the avenue
+of cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach.
+A touring-car, with its powerful head-lights paling
+the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up at
+the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man,
+swathed from head to heel in a dust-coat, descending
+from the tonneau.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose that will be 'Mahsteh Majah,'" he
+mused sleepily. "That's why the little lady was
+sitting up so late&#8212;she was waiting for him." Then
+to the thronging queries threatening to return and
+keep him awake: "Scat!&#8212;go away! call it a pipe-dream
+and let me go to sleep!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h3>AT WARTRACE HALL</h3>
+
+
+<p>In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount
+had never prefigured a home-coming to coincide in
+any detail of it with the re<a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>ality.</p>
+
+<p>When he opened his eyes on the morning following
+the night of singular adventures, the sun was
+shining brightly in at the bed's-head window, a
+cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his
+father, a little heavier, a little grayer, but with the
+same ruggedly strong face and kindly eyes, was
+standing at his bedside.</p>
+
+<p>"Father!"&#8212;and "Evan, boy!" were the simple
+words of greeting; but the mighty hand-grip which
+went with them was for the younger man a confirmation
+of the filial hope and a heart-warming
+promise for the future. Following instantly, there
+came a rush of mingled emotions: of astoundment
+that he had recognized no familiar landmark in the
+midnight faring through the hills or on the approach
+to the home of his childhood; of something
+akin to keen regret that the old had given place so
+thoroughly and completely to the new; of a feeling
+bordering on chagrin that he had been surprised
+into accepting the hospitable advances of a woman
+whom he had been intending to avoid, and for whom
+he had hitherto cherished&#8212;and meant to cherish&#8212;a
+settled aversion.</p>
+
+<p>But at the hand-gripping moment there was no
+time for a nice weighing of emotions. He was in
+his father's house; the home-coming, some phases
+of which he had vaguely dreaded, was a fact accomplished,
+<a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>and the new life&#8212;the life which must
+be lived without Patricia&#8212;was fairly begun. Also,
+there were many arrears to be brought up.</p>
+
+<p>"Intuition, on the manward side of it at least,
+doesn't go," he was saying with half-boyish candor.
+"I was awake last night when you drove home in
+the motor, and I looked out of the window and saw
+you as you came up the steps. According to the
+psychics, there ought to have been some inward
+stirrings of recognition, but there weren't&#8212;not a
+single thrill. Did the little&#8212;er&#8212;did Mrs. Blount
+tell you that I was here?"</p>
+
+<p>"She did so; but she couldn't tell me much more.
+Say, son, how on top of earth did you happen to
+blow in at midnight, with Jack Barto for your herd
+leader?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a fairy tale, and you won't believe it&#8212;of a
+Blount," was the laughing reply. "I left Boston
+Monday, and should have reached the capital last
+night. But my train was laid out by a yard wreck
+at Twin Buttes just before dark, and I left it and
+took to the hills&#8212;horseback. Don't ask me why
+I did such a thing as that; I can only say that the
+smell of the sage-brush got into my blood and I
+simply had to do it."</p>
+
+<p>The old cattle-king was standing with his feet
+planted wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets.
+"You hired a horse!" he chuckled, with the humorous
+wrinkles coming and going at the corners of th<a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>e
+kindly eyes. "Did you have the nerve to think
+you were going to climb down from a three-legged
+stool in a Boston law office one day and ride the
+fifty miles from Twin Buttes to the capital the
+next?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; I wasn't altogether daft. But knowing
+where I was, I did think I could ride out to Debbleby's.
+So I hired the bronco and set out&#8212;and
+that reminds me: the horse will have to be sent
+back to the liveryman in Twin Buttes, some way."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind the cayuse. Shackford would have
+made you a present of it outright if you had told
+him who you were. Go on with your story. It
+listens like a novel."</p>
+
+<p>"I took the general direction all right on leaving
+Twin Buttes, and kept it until I got among the Lost
+River hogbacks. But after that I was pretty successfully
+lost. I'm ashamed to tell it, but about half
+of the time the moon didn't seem to be in the right
+place."</p>
+
+<p>"Lost, were you? And Jack Barto found you?"
+queried the father.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a></p>
+<p>"Barto hadn't lost me to any appreciable extent,"
+was the half-humorous emendation. And then:
+"Who is this ubiquitous Barto who goes around
+playing the hold-up one minute and the good angel
+the next?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is a sort of general utility man for Hathaway,
+the head pusher of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company.
+He is supposed to be a timber-cruiser and
+log-sealer, but I reckon he doesn't work very hard
+at his trade. Down in the lower wards of New York
+they'd call him a boss heeler, maybe. But you say
+'hold-up'; you don't mean to tell me that Jack
+Barto robbed you, son!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; he held me up with a gun while his
+helpers pulled me off the bronco and hog-tied me,
+and then fell to discussing with the other two the
+advisability of knocking me on the head and dropping
+me into Lost River Canyon&#8212;that's all. Of
+course, I knew they had stumbled upon the wrong
+man; and after a while I succeeded in making Barto
+accept that hypothesis; at least, he accepted it sufficiently
+to bring me here for identification. Since
+he wouldn't talk, and I didn't recognize the trail
+<a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>or the place, I hadn't the slightest notion of my
+whereabouts&#8212;not the least in the world; didn't
+know where he was taking me or where I had landed
+when we stopped here."</p>
+
+<p>The big man was leaning against the foot-rail of
+the bed and frowning thoughtfully. "Talked about
+dropping you into Lost River, did they? H'm. I
+reckon we'll have to look into that a little. Who
+set them on, son? Got any idea of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have a very clear idea: it was this man Hathaway
+you speak of&#8212;a big ranchman named Griggs
+told me his name. He came across in the Pullman
+with me from Omaha; middle-aged, tall, and slim,
+with a hatchet face and owlish eyes. Before I
+learned his name we had talked a bit&#8212;killing time
+in the smoking-room. He said he was interested in
+mines and timber. Along toward the last he got the
+notion into his head that I was a special agent of
+some kind, on a mission for the Bureau of Forestry,
+and I was foolish enough to let him escape with the
+impression uncorrected."</p>
+
+<p>"That was Pete Hathaway, all right," was the<a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>
+senator's comment. "His company has been cutting
+timber in the Lost River watershed reserves,
+and he probably thought you were aiming to get
+him. You say he sent Barto after you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm only guessing at that part of it. When I
+rode away from Twin Buttes he was standing on
+the porch of the tavern, talking to Barto and two
+others; and I'm pretty sure he pointed me out to
+them. An hour or so later, three horsemen passed
+me on the mesa, one after another. I couldn't see
+them, but I heard them. It might have been another
+hour or more past that when they potted me."</p>
+
+<p>"You gave them your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and that seemed to tangle them a little.
+Barto said he believed I was lying, but, anyway,
+he'd give me a chance to 'prove up.' Then they
+brought me here, and your&#8212;er&#8212;Mrs. Blount kindly
+stepped into the breach for me."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't know Honoria when you saw her?"
+queried the father.</p>
+
+<p>"No; I wasn't in the least expecting&#8212;that is, I&#8212;yo<a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>u
+may remember that I had never met her,"
+stammered the young man, who had risen on his
+elbow among the pillows.</p>
+
+<p>The older man walked to the window and stood
+looking out upon the distant mountains for a full
+minute before he faced about to say: "We might
+as well run the boundary lines on this thing one
+time as another, son. You don't like Honoria;
+you've made up your mind you're not going to let
+yourself like her. I don't mean to make it hard
+for either of you if I can dodge it. This is her
+home; but it is also yours, my boy. Do you reckon
+you could&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount made affectionate haste to stop the
+half-pathetic appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let that trouble you for a minute," he
+interposed. "I&#8212;Mrs. Blount is a very different
+person from the woman I have been picturing her
+to be; and if she were not, I should still try to believe
+that we are both sufficiently civilized not to
+quarrel." Then: "Have you breakfasted yet&#8212;you
+and Mrs. Blount? But of course you have, long
+ago."</p>
+
+<p>"Breakfasted?&#8212;without you? Not much, son!
+And that reminds me: I was to come up here and
+see if you were awake, and if you were, I was to
+send Barnabas up with your coffee."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>"You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven't
+acquired the coffee-in-bed habit yet," laughed the
+lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my
+apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be down
+<i>pronto</i>. There; doesn't that sound as if I were getting
+back to the good old sage-brush idiom? Great
+land! I haven't heard anybody say <i>pronto</i> since
+I was knee-high to a hop-toad!"</p>
+
+<p>Farther on, when he was no longer in the first
+lilting flush of the new impressions, Evan Blount
+was able to look back upon that first day at Wartrace
+Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the
+nature of things, it could never be lived over again.
+In all his forecastings he had never pictured a homecoming
+remotely resembling the fact. In each succeeding
+hour of the long summer day the edges of
+the chasm of the years drew closer together; and
+when, in the afternoon, his father put him on a
+horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast
+home domain, a corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods
+and watered by the single small irrigation
+ditch of his chil<a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>dish recollections; rode with him
+through the screening cottonwoods and showed him,
+lying beyond them, the old ranch buildings of the
+"Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his heart
+was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to
+dim the picture.</p>
+
+<p>"I've kept it all just as it used to be, Evan," the
+father said gently. "I thought maybe you'd come
+back some day and be sure-enough disappointed if
+it were gone."</p>
+
+<p>The younger man slipped from his saddle and
+went to look in at the open door of the old ranchhouse.
+Everything was precisely as he remembered
+it: the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed
+quirts over the high wooden mantel, his mother's
+rocking-chair ... that was the final touch; he sat
+down on the worn door-log and put his face in his
+hands. For now the gaping chasm of the years was
+quite closed and he was a boy again.</p>
+
+<p>Still later in this same first day there were ambling
+gallops along the country roads, and the father explained
+how the transformation from cattle-raising
+to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about;
+how the great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon
+had put a thousand square miles of the fertile
+mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of
+the new population had come new blood, new methods,
+<a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>good roads, the telephone, the rural mail route,
+and other civilizing agencies.</p>
+
+<p>The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned.
+"I've lost my birth-land; it's as extinct as the
+prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find
+sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By
+the way, that reminds me: are there any of those
+giant fossils left? I was telling Professor Anners
+about them the other day, and he was immensely
+interested."</p>
+
+<p>"We're all fossils&#8212;we older folks of the cattle-raising
+times," laughed the man whom Richard
+Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State."
+"But there are some of the petrified bones left,
+too, I reckon. If the professor is a friend of yours,
+we'll get him a State permit to dig all he wants
+to."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was
+the younger Blount's half-absent rejoinder. But
+after the admission was made he qualified it. "Perhaps
+I ought to say that he is as much a friend as
+his daughter will permit him to be."</p>
+
+<p>The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon<a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>
+the senator.</p>
+
+<p>"What-all has the daughter got against you,
+son?" he asked mildly.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover,
+with a laugh which was little better than a grimace.
+"It's merely that she is jealous of any one
+who tries to share her father with her. Next to her
+career&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king
+of the cattle ranges. Then he added: "I'm right
+glad it hasn't come in your way to tie yourself up
+to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."</p>
+
+<p>Now all the influences of this red-letter day had
+been humanizing, and when Evan Blount remembered
+the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar"
+ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted
+it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing&#8212;not
+even the hope that in the years to come Patricia
+might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying
+to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration.
+He felt better after he had told his
+father. It was highly necessary that he should tell
+some one; and who better?</p>
+
+<p>David Blount listened wi<a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>th the far-away look in
+his eyes which the son had more than once marked
+as the greatest of the changes chargeable to the
+aging years.</p>
+
+<p>"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said,
+when the ambling saddle-animals had covered another
+half-mile of the homeward journey.</p>
+
+<p>"So much that it went near to spoiling me when
+she finally made me realize that I couldn't hold my
+own against the 'career,'" was the young man's answer.
+Then he added: "I want work, father&#8212;that
+is what I am out here for; the hardest kind of work,
+and plenty of it; something that I can put my heart
+into. Can you find it for me?"</p>
+
+<p>There was the wisdom of the centuries in the
+gentle smile provoked by this unashamed disappointed
+lover's appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't take it too hard&#8212;the career business&#8212;if
+I were you, son," said the wise man. "And as
+for the work, I reckon we can satisfy you, if your
+appetite isn't too whaling big. How would a State
+office of some kind suit you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Politics?" queried Blount, bringing his horse
+down to the walk for which his father had set the
+example. "I've thought a good bit about that,
+though I haven't had any special training that way.
+The schools of to-day are turning out business lawyers&#8212;men
+<a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>who know the commercial and industrial
+codes and are trained particularly in their application
+to the great business undertakings. That
+has been my ambition: to be a business adviser,
+and, perhaps, after a while to climb to the top of
+the ladder and be somebody's corporation counsel."</p>
+
+<p>"But now you have changed your notion?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; sometimes I wonder if I haven't.
+There is another field that is exceedingly attractive
+to me, and you have just named it. No man can
+study the politics of America to-day without seeing
+the crying need for good men: men who will not
+let the big income they could command in private
+undertakings weigh against pure patriotism and a
+plain duty to their country and their fellow-men;
+strong men who would administer the affairs of the
+State or the nation absolutely without fear or favor;
+men who will hew to the line under any and all
+conditions. There's an awful dearth of that kind
+of material in our Government."</p>
+
+<p>A quaint smile was playing under the drooping
+mustaches of that veteran politician the Honorable
+Senator Sage-Brush.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a></p>
+<p>"I reckon we do need a few men like that, Evan;
+need 'em mighty bad. Think you could fill the bill
+as one of them if you had a right good chance?"</p>
+
+<p>The potential hewer of political chips which should
+lie as they might fall smiled at what seemed to be
+merely an expression of parental favoritism.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not likely to get the chance very soon," he
+returned. "Just at present, you know, I am still
+a legal resident of the good old Commonwealth of
+Massachusetts, and a member of its bar&#8212;eligible to
+office there, and nowhere else."</p>
+
+<p>"You'd be a citizen of this State by the time you
+could get elected to an office in it," suggested the
+senator gravely.</p>
+
+<p>"I know; the required term of residence here is
+ridiculously short. But you are forgetting that I
+am as completely unknown in the sage-brush hills
+as you are well known. I couldn't get a nomination
+for the office of pound-keeper."</p>
+
+<p>David Blount was chuckling softly as he threw
+up the brim of the big sombrero he was wearing.</p>
+
+<p>"Sounds right funny to hear you talking that
+way, son," he commented.<a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a> "Mighty near everybody
+this side of the Bad Lands will tell you that the
+slate hangs up behind the door at Wartrace Hall;
+and I don't know but what some people would say
+that old Sage-Brush Dave himself does most of the
+writing on it. Anyhow, there is one place on it that
+is still needing a name, and I reckon your name
+would fit it as well as anybody's."</p>
+
+<p>The young man who was so lately out of the well-balanced
+East was astounded.</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens!" he ejaculated. "You're not considering
+me as a possibility on the State ticket before
+I've been twenty-four hours inside of the State lines,
+are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; not exactly as a possibility, son; that isn't
+quite the word. We'll call it a sure thing, if you
+want it. It's this way: we're needing a sort of political
+house-cleaning right bad this year. We have
+good enough laws, but they're winked at any day in
+the week when somebody comes along with a fistful
+of yellow-backs. The fight is on between the
+people of this State and the corporations; it was
+begun two years ago, and the people got the laws
+all right, but they forgot to elect men who would
+carry them out. This time it looks as if the voters
+had got their knives sharpened. We've been a little
+slow catching step maybe, but the marching orders
+have gone out. We're aiming to clean house, and
+do it right, this fall."</p>
+
+<p>"Not if the slate hangs behind your door&#8212;or an<a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>y
+man's, father," was the theorist's sober reminder.
+"Reform doesn't come in by that road."</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on, boy; steady-go-easy's the word. Reform
+comes in by any old trail it can find, mostly,
+and thanks its lucky stars if it doesn't run up against
+any bridges washed out or any mud-holes too deep
+to ford. We've got a good man for governor right
+now; not any too broad maybe, but good&#8212;church
+good. Nobody has ever said he'd take a bribe; but
+he isn't heavy enough to sit on the lid and hold it
+down. Alec Gordon, the man who is going to succeed
+him next fall, is all the different kinds of things
+that the present governor isn't, so that is fixed."</p>
+
+<p>"How 'fixed'?" queried the younger man, who,
+though he was not from Missouri, was beginning to
+fear that he would constantly have to be shown.</p>
+
+<p>"In the same way that everything has to be
+fixed if we are going to get results," was the calm
+reply. "After the governor, the man upon whom
+the most depends is the attorney-general. The fellow
+who is in now, Dortscher, is one of the candidates,
+but we've crossed his name off. The next
+man we considered was Jim Rankin. In some ways
+he's<a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a> fit; he's a hard fighter, and the man doesn't
+live who can bluff him. But Jim's poor, and he
+wants mighty bad to be rich, so I reckon that lets
+him out."</p>
+
+<p>All of this was directly subversive of Evan Blount's
+ideas touching the manner in which the political
+affairs of a free country should be conducted, but
+he was willing to hear more.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"What we want this time is one of your hew-to-the-line
+fellows, son. Reckon you'd like to try it?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man who was less than a week away
+from the atmosphere of the idealistic school and its
+theories was frankly aghast. That his father should
+be coolly proposing him for a high office in the State
+in which, notwithstanding the birthright, he was as
+new as the newest immigrant, seemed blankly incredible.
+But when the incredibility began to subside,
+the despotism of the machine methods which
+could propose and carry out such unheard-of things
+loomed maleficent.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid we are a good many miles apart in
+this matter<a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a> of politics," he said, when the proposal
+had been given time to sink in. "America is supposed
+to be a free country, with a representative
+government elected by the suffrages of the people;
+do you mean to say that you and a few of your
+friends ignore the basic principles of democracy to
+such an extent that you nominate and elect anybody
+you please to any office in the State?"</p>
+
+<p>The far-seeing eyes of the veteran were twinkling
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know about our being so far apart,"
+was the deprecatory protest. "You're just a little
+bit long on theory, that's all, son. When it comes
+down to the real thing&#8212;practical politics, as some
+folks call it&#8212;somebody has to head the stampede
+and turn it. And if we don't do it this coming fall,
+the other bunch will."</p>
+
+<p>"What other bunch?"</p>
+
+<p>"In this case it's the corporations: the timber
+people, the irrigation companies, and, most of all,<a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>
+the railroad."</p>
+
+<p>"Gantry seems to think that the railroads&#8212;or
+his railroad, at least&#8212;are persecuted."</p>
+
+<p>The senator pulled his horse down to a still slower
+walk. "Where did you see Dick Gantry?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Evan told of the meeting on the veranda of the
+Winnebasset Club, adding the further fact of the
+college friendship.</p>
+
+<p>"Just happened so, did it?" queried the older
+man, "that getting together last Saturday night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why&#8212;yes, I suppose so. Dick knew I was in
+Boston, and he said he had meant to look me
+up."</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon he did," was the quiet comment; "yes,
+I reckon he did. And he filled you up plumb full
+of Hardwick McVickar's notions, <i>of</i> course. I reckon
+that's about what he was told to do. But we won't
+fall apart on that, son. To-morrow we'll run down
+to the city, and you can look the ground over for
+yourself. I want you to draw your own conclusions,
+and then come and tell me what you'd like to do.
+Shall we leave it that way?"</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount acquiesced, quite without prejudice,
+<a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>to a firm conviction that his opinion, when formed,
+was going to be based on the larger merits of the
+case, upon a fair and judicial summing-up of the
+pros and cons&#8212;all of them. He felt that it would
+be a blow struck at the very root of the tree of good
+government if he should consent to be the candidate
+of the machine. But, on the other hand, he saw
+instantly what a power a fearless public prosecutor
+could be in a misguided commonwealth where the
+lack was not of good laws, but of men strong enough
+and courageous enough to administer them. He
+would see: if the good to be accomplished were
+great enough to over-balance the evil ... it was
+a temptation to compromise&#8212;a sharp temptation;
+and he found himself longing for Patricia, for her
+clear-sighted comment which, he felt sure, would
+go straight to the heart of the tangle.</p>
+
+<p>It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for
+her, that made him absent-minded at the Wartrace
+Hall dinner-table that evening; and the father, looking
+on, suspected that Evan's taciturnity was an expression
+of his prejudice against the woman who had
+taken his mother's place. After dinner, when the
+son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his room,
+the senator's suspicion became a belief.</p><p><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a></p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to be right patient with the boy,
+little woman," he said to the small person whom
+Gantry had described as the court of last resort;
+this when Evan had disappeared and the long-stemmed
+pipe was alight. "I shouldn't wonder if
+Boston had put some mighty queer notions into his
+head."</p>
+
+<p>The little lady looked up from her embroidery
+frame and a quaint smile was twitching at the corners
+of the pretty mouth. "He is a dear boy, and
+he is trying awfully hard to hate me," she said.
+"But I sha'n't let him, David."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS</h3>
+<p><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a></p>
+
+<p>From the time when it was heralded in the mammoth
+New Year's edition of <i>The Plainsman</i> as "the
+newest, the finest, and the most luxurious hostelry
+west of the Missouri River," the Inter-Mountain
+Hotel, in the Sage-brush capital, had been the
+acceptable gathering-place of the clans, industrial,
+promoting, or political.</p>
+
+<p>Anticipating this patronage, Clarkson, its bonanza-king
+builder and owner, had amended the architect's
+plans to make them include a convention-hall,
+committee-rooms, and a complete floor of suites
+with private dining-rooms. Past this, the amended
+plans doubled the floor space of the lobby&#8212;debating-ground
+dear to the heart of the country delegate&#8212;and
+particular pains had been taken to make
+this semi-public forum, where the burning question
+of the moment could be caucussed and the shaky
+partisan resworn to fealty, attractive and home-like;
+the plainly tiled floor, leather-covered lounging-chairs,
+and numerous and convenient cuspidors
+lending an air of de<a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>mocratic comfort which was
+somehow missing in the resplendent, bemirrored,
+onyx-plated bar, blazing with its cut glass and
+polished mahogany.</p>
+
+<p>After the solid costliness of Wartrace Hall and
+the thirty-mile spin in a high-powered gentleman's
+roadster, which was only one of the three high-priced
+motor-carriages in the Wartrace garage, Evan
+Blount was not surprised to learn that his father
+was registered in permanence for one of the private
+dining-room suites at the Inter-Mountain. It was
+amply evident that the simple life which had been
+the rule of the "Circle-Bar" ranch household had
+become a thing of the past; and though he charged
+the new order of things to the ambition of his father's
+wife, he could hardly cavil at it, since he was
+himself a sharer in the comforts and luxuries.</p>
+
+<p>For the first few days after the father and son had
+gone into bachelor quarters at the Inter-Mountain,
+the returned exile was left almost wholly to his own
+devices. Beyond giving him a good many introductions,
+as the opportunities for them offered in the
+stirring life of<a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a> the hotel, his father made few demands
+upon him, and they were together only at
+luncheon and dinner, the midday meal being usually
+served in their suite, while for the dinner they met
+by appointment in the hotel <i>café</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding this hospitable neglect on the
+part of his father, Evan Blount suffered no lack of
+the social opportunities. Gantry was back, and, in
+addition to a most ready availability as a social
+sponsor, the traffic manager was both able and willing.
+Almost before he had time to realize it, Blount
+had been put in touch with the busy, breezy life of
+the Western city, was exchanging nods or hand-shakings
+with more people than he had ever known
+in Cambridge or Boston, and was receiving more
+invitations than he could possibly accept.</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty good old town, isn't it?" laughed Gantry
+one day, when he had tolled Blount away from
+the Inter-Mountain luncheon to share a table with
+him in the Railway Club. "Getting so you feel a
+little more at home with us?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I'm not, it isn't your fault, Dick, or the fault
+of your friends. Naturally, I expected some sort of
+a welcome as ex-Senator David Blount's son; but
+that doesn't seem to cut any figure at all."</p><p><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a></p>
+
+<p>Gantry's smile was inscrutable.</p>
+
+<p>"The people with whom it cuts the largest figure
+will never let you know anything about it. Just
+the same, your sonship is cutting a good bit of ice,
+if you care to know it. I've met a number of men
+in the past few days who have discovered that you
+are just about the brainiest thing that ever escaped
+from the effete East and the law schools."</p>
+
+<p>"Tommy-rot!" derided the brainy one.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a fact. And they are prophesying all sorts
+of a roseate and iridescent future for you. One
+might almost imagine that the prophets are inspired
+by that kind of gratitude which is a lively sense of
+favors to come."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, piffle! You know that is all nonsense!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it?" queried the railroad man, stressing the
+first word meaningly. Then, shifting the point of
+attack: "You're mighty innocent, aren't you, old
+man? But I think you might have told me. Goodness
+knows, I'm as safe as a brick wall."</p>
+
+<p>"Might have told you what?"</p><p><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a></p>
+
+<p>"That you are going to run for attorney-general
+against Dortscher."</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't very well tell you what I didn't know
+myself, Dick," was the sober reply. "Who has been
+romancing to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's all over town. Everybody's talking about
+it&#8212;talking a lot and guessing a good deal more.
+You've got 'em running around in circles and uttering
+loud and plaintive cries, especially Jim Rankin,
+who had&#8212;or thought he had&#8212;a lead-pipe cinch on
+the job. Dortscher is tickled half to death. He
+knew he wasn't going to be allowed to succeed himself,
+and he hates Rankin worse than poison."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was balancing the spoon on the edge of
+his coffee-cup and scowling abstractedly. It was
+the first little discord in the filial harmony&#8212;this
+evidence that the powers were at work; almost a
+breach of confidence. There was no avoiding the
+distasteful conclusion. Without consulting his wishes,
+without waiting for his decision, his father had publicly
+committed him&#8212;taken "snap judgment" upon
+him was<a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a> the way he phrased it.</p>
+
+<p>"Dick, will you believe me if I say that I haven't
+authorized any such talk as this you've been hearing?"
+he asked, looking up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>This time Gantry's smile was a grin of complete
+intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's the way of it, eh? The Honorable
+Senator took it out of your hands, did he? You'll
+understand that I'm not casting any aspersions when
+I say that it's exactly like him. If he has slated
+you, you are booked to run; and if he runs you,
+you'll be elected. Those are two of the things that
+practically speak right out and say themselves here
+in the old Sage-brush State."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was indignant&#8212;justly indignant, he persuaded
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"If that is the case, Gantry, it is high time that
+some one should have nerve enough to break the
+charm. I haven't said that I would accept the
+nomination if it were tendered me, and I am not at
+all sure that I am going to say it. And if I don't
+say it, by all that's good and great, that settles it!"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was plainly shocked. "You're not trying
+<a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>to make me believe that you've got nerve
+enough to buck the old m&#8212;your father, I mean?
+Why, great cats, Evan! you don't know what that
+stands for in the greasewood hills!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I don't care, Dick. Up to this present moment
+I am a free moral agent; I haven't surrendered
+any right of decision to my father, or to any one
+else, so far as I am aware."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry's eyes dropped to his plate, and his rejoinder
+was not wholly free from guile.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you authorize me to contradict the talk as
+I can?" he asked, without looking up.</p>
+
+<p>Blount was still warm enough to be peremptory.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you may contradict it. You may say that
+it is entirely unauthorized&#8212;that I have told you so
+myself." Then he remembered the claims of friendship.
+"I'll be frank with you, Dick; this thing has
+been mentioned to me once, but nothing was decided&#8212;absolutely
+nothing. I didn't even promise
+to take it under advisement."</p>
+
+<p>Among those who knew him only externally, Mr.
+Richard Gantry had the reputation of owning a
+loose tongue. But none recognized more justly t<a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>han
+the real Richard Gantry the precise instant at which
+to bridle the loose tongue or when to make it wag
+away from the subject which has reached its nicely
+calculated climax. While the flush of irritation was
+still making him ashamed that he had shown so
+much warmth, Blount found himself gossiping with
+his table companion over a social function two
+days old; and subsequently, when the waiter brought
+the cigars, Gantry was congratulating himself that
+the danger-point, if any there were, was safely past.</p>
+
+<p>It was after the club luncheon, and while the two
+young men were on their way to the smoking-room,
+that some one on business bent stopped Gantry in
+the corridor. Blount strolled on by himself, and,
+finding the smoking-room unoccupied, went to
+lounge in a lazy-chair standing in a little alcove
+lined with bookcases and half screened by the
+racks of the newspaper files. Notwithstanding the
+successful topic changing at table, he was still brooding
+over the false position in which his father's plans
+had placed him; wherefore he craved solitude and a
+chance to think things over fairly and without heat.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly afterward Gantry looked in, and, apparently
+missing the half-concealed easy-chair and its
+occupant in the bookcase alcove, went his way. H<a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a>e
+had scarcely had time to get out of the building, one
+would say, before two men entered the smoking-room,
+coming down the corridor from the grill.
+Blount saw them, and he made sure that they saw
+him. But when they had taken chairs on the other
+side of the sheltering newspaper files he was suddenly
+assured that they had not seen him. They
+were talking quite freely of him and of his father.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the Honorable Dave has got McVickar
+dead to rights this time," remarked the older of
+the two, a hard-featured, round-bodied real-estate
+promoter to whom Blount had been introduced on
+his first day in the capital, but whose name he could
+not now recall. "This scheme of the senator's for
+shoving his son into the race for the attorney-generalship
+is just about the foxiest thing he has
+ever put across. You can bet the air was blue
+in the Transcontinental Chicago offices when the
+news got there."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you suppose McVickar will do?" asked
+the other.</p>
+
+<p>"He will do anything the senator wants him to&#8212;he's
+got to. Blount is land hungry, and I guess
+he'll take a few more sections of the railroad mesa-land
+under the Clearwater ditch. That was what
+he did two years ago when McVickar wanted the
+<a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>right of way for the branch through Carnadine
+County."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you believe he's going to take any little
+Christmas gift this time!" was the rasping reply.
+"He'll sell the railroad something, and take good
+hard money for it. It's a cinch. The railroad can't
+afford to have the courts against it, and McVickar
+will be made to sweat blood this heat. You watch
+the wheels go round when McVickar comes out
+here."</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount found himself growing strangely sick
+and faint. Could it be his father whom they were
+thus calmly accusing of graft and trickery and
+blackmailing methods too despicable to be imagined?
+His first impulse was to confront the two; to demand
+proofs; to do and say what a loyal son should.
+But the crushing conviction that they were discussing
+only well-known and well-assured facts unnerved
+him; and after that he was anxious for only
+one thing&#8212;that they might finish their cigars and
+go away without discovering him.</p>
+
+<p>Fate was kind to him thus far. After a little
+further talk, in which the accepted point of view of
+the on looker at the great game was made still more
+painfully evident for the unwilling listener, the men
+went away. For a long time after they had gone,
+Blount sat crumpled in the depths of the big chair,
+chewing his extinct cigar and staring absently at the
+row of books on a level with his eyes in the oppo<a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>site
+case.</p>
+
+<p>One clear thought, and one only, came out of the
+sorrowful confusion: not for any inducement that
+could now be offered would he lend himself to the
+furtherance of his father's plans. Beyond this he did
+not reason in the miserable hour wrought out in the
+quiet of the club smoking-room. But when he got
+up to go, another prompting was forcing its way
+to the surface&#8212;a prompting to throw himself boldly
+<a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>into the scale against graft and chicanery; to redeem
+at any cost, and by whatsoever means might
+offer, the good old name which had been so shamefully
+dragged in the mire.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know just how it was to be done, but
+he told himself that he would find a way. That
+the path would be full of thorns he could not doubt,
+since every step in it would widen the breach which
+must be opened between his father and himself.
+Possibly it might lead him to the bar of justice as
+that father's accuser, but even in that hard case he
+must not falter. He said to himself, in a fresh access
+of passionate determination, that though he
+might have to blush for his father, Patricia should
+not be made ashamed for her lover.</p>
+
+<p>Upon leaving the club, he paused long enough to
+remember that he was in no fit frame of mind to
+risk an immediate meeting with his father. To
+make even a chance meeting impossible, he crossed
+the street, and, passing through the Capitol grounds,
+strolled aimlessly out one of the residence avenues
+unt<a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>il he came to the open country beyond the suburbs.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite late in the afternoon when he re-entered
+the city by another street and boarded a
+trolley car for the down-town centre. The long afternoon
+tramp, and the conclusions it had bred, made
+it imperative for him to see Gantry before the traffic
+manager should leave his office for the day. His
+business with the railroad man was purely personal.
+He meant to ask Gantry a few pointed questions
+requiring such answers as friendship may demand.
+If Gantry's replies were such as he feared they
+would be, he would seek his father and come at once
+to a plain understanding with him.</p>
+
+<p>The trolley car dropped him within a square of
+the railway station, on the second floor of which
+Gantry had his business office. The shortest way
+to the Sierra Avenue end of the station building
+was through the great train-shed. Half-way up the
+platform Blount met the west-bound Overland steaming
+in from the eastern yards. At the Sierra Avenue
+crossing the yard crew was cutting off a private car.
+Blount saw the number on the medallion, "008,"
+and noted half absently the rich window-hangings
+and the polished brass platf<a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>orm railings. A car inspector
+in greasy overalls and jumper was tapping
+the wheels with his long-handled hammer.</p>
+
+<p>"Whose car is this?" asked Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis Misther McVickar's, sorr&#8212;the vice-prisidint
+av the coompany," said the man.</p>
+
+<p>Blount turned away, saying something which the
+hammer-man mistook for a word of thanks. So the
+vice-president had come, hastening upon the wing
+of occasions, it seemed. And in the light of the
+overheard conversation in the club smoking-room,
+it was only too easy to guess his errand in the Sage-brush
+capital. He had come to make such terms as
+he could with the man who was going to hold him up.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>A BATTLE ROYAL</h3>
+
+
+<p>Having already convinced himself that the time
+was ripe for a straightforward declaration of principles,
+Evan Blount saw in the arrival of the Overland,
+with the vice-president's private car attached,
+only an added argument for haste.</p><p><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a></p>
+
+<p>During the better part of the long tramp in the
+outskirts of the city he had been halting between
+two opinions. The fighting blood of the Tennessee
+pioneer strain had clamored for its hearing, prompting
+him to enter the lists, to set up the standard
+of honesty and fair-dealing in the Blount name, to
+plunge into the approaching political campaign with
+a single purpose&#8212;the purpose of overthrowing the
+power of the machine in his native State. On the
+other hand, filial affection had pleaded eloquently.
+The battle for political honesty would inevitably involve
+his father; would, if successful, defeat and disgrace
+him. As often as he thought he had closed
+decisively with the idealistic determination, the other
+side of the argument sprang up again, keen-edged
+and biting. Up to the present moment he had owed
+his father everything&#8212;was still owing him day by
+day. Would it not be the part of a son to drop out
+quietly, leaving the political house-cleaning for some
+one who would not be obliged to pay such a costly
+price?</p>
+
+<p>It was the idealistic decision which had been in the
+saddle when he dropped from the trolley car at the
+western portal of the railway station, and which was
+<a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>sending him to seek the scale-turning interview with
+Gantry. But, after all, it was chance and the swift
+current of events which seized upon him and swept
+him along, smashing all the arguments and fine-spun
+theories. Before he had gone ten steps in the
+direction of Gantry's office, some one in the throng
+of debarking Overland travellers called his name.
+Turning quickly, he found himself face to face with
+a white-haired little gentleman who had plucked impatiently
+at his sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, bless my soul! Of all the lucky miracles!"
+gasped the young man who, but an instant earlier,
+had been deaf and blind to all external things. And
+then: "Where is Patricia?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's here, somewhere," snapped the little gentleman
+irascibly. "I've lost her in this confounded
+mob. Find her for me. I've got my reading-glasses
+on, and I can't see anything. Why don't they have
+this barn of a place lighted up?"</p>
+
+<p>"Stand still right where you are," Blount directed,
+and a moment later he had found Patricia guarding
+a pair of suit-cases which were too heavy for her to
+carry.</p>
+
+<p>"You poor lost child!" was his burbled greeting.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a></p>
+<p>"You don't mean to tell me that <i>this</i> is the West
+to which you said you were coming?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not lost; I'm here. It's father who is lost,"
+she laughed. Then she answered his question;
+"Yes, this is the West I meant, and if you haven't
+been telling the truth about it&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Blount had snatched up the two hand-bags and
+had effected a reunion of the scattered pair. The
+little gentleman, standing immovable, as he had
+been told to do, was blinking impatiently through
+his reading-glasses at the surging throng. When
+Blount came up, the professor stabbed him with
+a sharp forefinger.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we're here, young man," he barked. "If
+you've been telling me fibs about those Megalosauridæ
+which you said could be dug out of your sage-brush
+hills, you'll pay our fare back home again&#8212;just
+make up your mind to that. Now show us
+the best hotel in this mushroom city of yours, and
+do it quickly."</p>
+
+<p>Having a hospitable thing to do, Blount shoved
+his problem into a still more remote backgr<a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>ound
+and bestirred himself generously. Though the Inter-Mountain
+was only three squares distant, he chartered
+the best-looking auto he could find in the
+rank of waiting vehicles, put his charges into it, and
+went with them to do the honors at the hotel. By
+this postponement of the visit to Gantry he missed
+a meeting which would have done something toward
+solving a part of his problem. But for the hospitable
+turning aside he might have reached the railroad
+office in time to see a round-bodied man halting at
+the open door of Gantry's private room for a parting
+word with the traffic manager.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; he fell for it, all right," was the form
+the parting word took. "If you had seen his face
+when Lackner and I came away, you'd have said
+there was battle, murder, and sudden death in it for
+somebody."</p>
+
+<p>"But, see here, Bradbury," Gantry held his visitor
+to say, "it wasn't in the game that you were to fill
+him up with a lot of lies. I won't stand for that,
+you know. He is too good a fellow, and too good
+a friend of mine."</p>
+
+<p>It was at this conjuncture that Blount, if he had
+been present and invisible, would have seen a sour
+smile wrinkling upon the face of the club gossip.</p>
+
+<p>"I owe the senator one or two on my own account,
+Gantry. But it wasn't necessary to go out
+of the beaten path. If young Blount or his daddy<a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>
+would like to sue us for libel, we could prove every
+word that was said&#8212;or prove that it was common
+report; too common to be doubted. And it got the
+young fellow; got him right in the solar plexus. If
+you don't see some fireworks within the next few
+days, I miss my guess and lose my ante."</p>
+
+<p>This is what Evan Blount, carrying out his intention
+of going to Gantry, might have seen and heard.
+On the other hand, if he had lingered a few minutes
+longer on the station platform he could scarcely have
+failed to mark the side-tracking of private car "008,"
+and he might have seen the herculean figure of the
+vice-president crossing to the carriage-stand to climb
+heavily into a waiting automobile.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McVickar's order to the chauffeur was curtly
+brief, and a little later the vice-president entered
+the lobby of the Inter-Mountain and shot a brisk
+question at the room-clerk.</p>
+
+<p>"Is Senator Blount in his rooms?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think not. He was here a few minutes ago.
+I'll send a boy to hunt him up for you. You want
+your usual suite, I suppose, Mr. McVickar?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I'm not stopping overnight. Is young<a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>
+Blount here in the hotel?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has just gone up to the fifth floor with some
+friends of his&#8212;Mr. Anners and his daughter, from
+Boston. Shall I hold him for you when he comes
+down?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I want to see the senator. Hustle out another
+boy or two. I can't wait all night."</p>
+
+<p>It was at this moment that Evan Blount, bearing
+luggage-checks and going in search of the house
+baggageman, missed another incident which might
+have drawn him back suddenly to his problem and
+its unsettled condition. The incident was the meeting
+between his father and the railroad vice-president
+at the room-clerk's counter. It was neither
+hostile nor friendly; on McVickar's part it was
+gruffly business-like.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Senator, I'm here," was the follow-up of
+the perfunctory hand-shake. "Let's find a place
+where we can flail it out," and together the two
+entered an elevator.</p>
+
+<p>Reaching the floor of the private dining-room<a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>
+suites, the ex-cattle-king led the way in silence to
+his own apartments; rather let us say he pointed
+the way, since in the march down the long corridor
+the two field commanders tramped evenly abreast
+as if neither would give the other the advantage
+of an inch of precedence. In the sitting-room of
+the private suite the senator snapped the latch on
+the door, and pressed the wall-button for the electric
+lights. McVickar dragged a chair over to one
+of the windows commanding a view of the busy
+street, and dropping solidly into it, like a man bracing
+himself for a fight, began abruptly:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose we may as well cut out the preliminaries
+and come to the point at once, Blount.
+Ackerton wired me that you had definitely announced
+your son as a candidate for the attorney-generalship.
+Have you?"</p>
+
+<p>The senator had found an unopened box of cigars
+in a cabinet and he was inserting the blade of his
+pocket-knife under the lid when he said, with good-natured
+irony: "The primaries do the nominating
+in this State, Hardwick. Didn't you know that?"</p>
+
+<p>"See here, Blount; I've come half-way across the
+continent to thresh this thin<a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>g out with you, face to
+face, and I'm not in the humor to spar for an opening.
+Do you mean to run your son or not? That
+is a plain question, and I'd like to have an equally
+plain answer."</p>
+
+<p>"I told you two weeks ago what you might expect
+if you insisted on sticking your crow-bar in
+among the wheels this fall, McVickar, but you
+wouldn't believe me. I'll say it again if you want
+to hear it."</p>
+
+<p>"And I told you two weeks ago that we couldn't
+stand for any such programme as the one you had
+mapped out. And I added that you might name
+your own price for an alternative which wouldn't
+confiscate us and drive us off the face of the earth."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and I named the price, if you happen to
+remember."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; you said you wanted us to turn everything
+over to the Paramounters and take our chances
+on a clean administration. Naturally, we're not
+going to do any such Utopian thing as that. What
+I want to know now is what it is going to cost us to
+do the practical and possible thing."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a></p>
+<p>"Want to buy me outright this time, do you,
+Hardwick?" said the boss, still smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"We"&#8212;McVickar was going to say&#8212;"We have
+bought you before," but he changed the retort to
+a less offensive phrasing&#8212;"We have had no difficulty
+heretofore in arriving at some practical and
+sensible <i>modus vivendi</i>, and we shouldn't have now.
+But as a condition binding upon any sort of an
+arrangement, I am here to say that we can't let you
+nominate and elect your son as attorney-general;
+that's out of the question. If it's going to prove
+a personal disappointment to you, we'll be reasonable
+and try to make it up to you in some other way."</p>
+
+<p>Again the grimly humorous smile was twinkling
+in the gray eyes of the old cattleman. "What is
+the market quotation on disappointments, right
+now, Hardwick?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>With another man McVickar might have been
+too diplomatic to show signs of a shortening temper.
+But David Blount was an open-eyed enemy of long
+standing.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know anybody west of the Missouri River
+who has a better idea of market values than you
+<a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>have," the vice-president countered smartly. Then,
+dropping a heavy hand upon the arm of his chair:
+"This thing has got to be settled here and now,
+Blount. If you put your son in as public prosecutor,
+you can have but one object in view&#8212;you
+mean to squeeze us till the blood runs. We are
+willing to discount that object before the fact!"</p>
+
+<p>"So you have said before, a number of times and
+in a whole heap of different ways. It's getting sort
+of monotonous, don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"I sha'n't say it many more times, David; you
+are pushing me too far and too hard."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; what will you say, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just this: if you won't meet me half-way&#8212;if
+you insist upon a fight&#8212;I'll fight you with any
+weapons I can get hold of!"</p>
+
+<p>Once more the quiet smile played about the outer
+angles of the hereditary Blount eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You've said that in other campaigns, Hardwick;
+in the end you've always been like the 'possum that
+offered to come down out of the tree if the man
+wouldn't shoot."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll hand you another proverb to go with that
+one," snapped the man in the arm-chair: "The
+pitcher that goes once too often to the well is sure
+<a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>to be broken. You've got a joint in your armor
+now, Blount. You've always been able to snap
+your fingers at public opinion before this; can you
+afford to do it now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know; I reckon I'll have to grin
+and bear it if you want to buy up a few newspapers
+and set them to blacklisting me, as you usually do,"
+was the half-quizzical reply. Then: "I'm pretty
+well used to it by this time. You and your folks
+can't paint me much blacker than you have always
+painted me, Hardwick."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe not. But this time we're going to give
+you a chance to start a few libel suits&#8212;if you think
+you can afford to appear in the courts. We've got
+plenty of evidence, and by heavens we'll produce
+it! You put your son in as public prosecutor and
+we might be tempted to make your own State too
+hot to hold you. Had you thought of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go ahead and try it," was the laconic response.</p>
+
+<p>"But that isn't all," the railroad dictator went
+on remorselessly. "Your fellow citizens here know
+you for exactly what you are, Blount. You rule them
+with a rod of iron, but that rule can be broken.
+When it is broken, you'll be hounded as a criminal.
+In our last talk together you had something to say
+<a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>to me about our not keeping up with the change in
+public sentiment; public sentiment <i>has</i> changed;
+changed so far that it is coming to demand the
+punishment of the great offenders as well as the jailing
+of the little ones. If we want to push this fight
+hard enough, it is not impossible that you might find
+yourself in a hard row of stumps at the end of it,
+David."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm taking all those chances," was the even-toned
+rejoinder of the man who was to be shown up.</p>
+
+<p>"But there is one chance I'm sure you haven't
+considered," McVickar went on aggressively. "This
+son of yours; I know as much about him as you do&#8212;more,
+perhaps, for I have taken more pains to
+keep tab on him for the past few years than you
+have. He is clean and straight, Blount; a son for
+any father to be proud of. If that is the real reason
+why we don't want to have him instructing the
+grand juries of this State, it is also your best reason
+for wanting to keep the past decently under cover.
+What will you say to him when the newspapers open
+up on you? And what will he say to you? And
+suppose you get him in, and we should show you up
+so that you'd be dragged into court with your own
+son for the prosecutor? How does that strike you?"</p>
+
+<p>For the first time since the opening of the one-sided
+conference the senator laid his cigar aside<a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>
+and sat thoughtfully tugging at the drooping mustaches.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd set the house afire over my head, would
+you, Hardwick?" he queried, with the gray eyes
+lighting up as with a glow of smouldering embers.
+"The last time we talked you'll remember that you
+posted your 'de-fi'; now I'll post mine. You go
+ahead and do your damnedest! The boy and I will
+try to see to it that you don't have all the fun. I
+won't say that you mightn't turn him if you went
+at it right; but you won't go at it right, and as
+matters stand now&#8212;well, blood is thicker than
+water, Hardwick, and if you hit me you hit him.
+I reckon, between us, we'll make out to give you
+as good as you send. That's all"&#8212;he rose to lean
+heavily upon the table&#8212;"all but one thing: you
+fight fair, Hardwick; say anything you like about
+me and I'll stand for it; but if that boy has anything
+in his past that I don't know about&#8212;any little
+fool trick that he wouldn't want to see published&#8212;you
+let it alone and keep your damned newspaper
+hounds off of it!"</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president, being of those who regain
+equanimity in exact proportion as an opponent loses
+it, chuckled grimly; was still chuckling when an interrupting
+tap came at the locked door. Blount
+got up and turned the latch to admit an office-boy
+wearing the uniform of the railroad headquarters.
+"Note for Mr. McVickar," said the messenger; and
+<a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a>at a gesture from the senator he crossed the room
+to deliver it.</p>
+
+<p>For a full half-minute after the boy had gone, the
+vice-president sat poring over the pencilled scrawl,
+which was all that the sealed envelope yielded. The
+note was lacking both date-line and signature, though
+the clerks in Richard Gantry's office were familiar
+enough with the hieroglyph that appeared at the
+bottom of the sheet. In his own good time the
+vice-president folded the bit of paper and thrust it
+into his pocket. Then he resumed the talk at the
+precise point at which it had been broken off.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't let the boy's record trouble you,"
+he averred. "As I said a few minutes ago, it's as
+<a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>clean as a hound's tooth. That is one of the things
+I'm banking on, David. If you don't look out,
+I'm going to have that young fellow fighting on our
+side before we're through."</p>
+
+<p>At this the light in the gray eyes flamed fiercely,
+and the ex-cattle-king took the two strides needful
+to place him before McVickar.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you try that, McVickar; I give you fair
+warning!" he grated, his deep-toned voice rumbling
+like the burr of grinding wheels. "There's only one
+way you could do it, and&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president stood up and reached for his
+hat.</p>
+
+<p>"And you'll take precious good care that I
+don't get a chance to try that way, you were going
+to say. All right, David; you tell me to do my
+damnedest, and I'll hand <i>that</i> back to you, too.
+You do the same, and we'll see who comes out<a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>
+ahead."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president caught an elevator at the end
+of his leisurely progress down the corridor, and had
+himself lowered to the lobby. The electric lights
+were glowing, and the great gathering-place was
+beginning to take on its evening stir. Mr. Hardwick
+McVickar pushed his way to the desk, and a
+row of lately arrived guests waited while he asked
+his question.</p>
+
+<p>"Where shall I be most likely to find Mr. Evan
+Blount at this time of day?" he demanded; and the
+obliging clerk made the guest-line wait still longer
+while he summoned a bell-boy and sent him scurrying
+over to one of the writing-tables.</p>
+
+<p>"This is Mr. Evan Blount," said the clerk, indicating
+the young man who came up with the returning
+bell-boy. "Mr. Blount, this is Mr. Hardwick
+McVickar, first vice-president of the Transcontinental
+Railway Company."</p>
+
+<p>There was no trace of the recent battle in Mr.
+<a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>McVickar's voice or manner when he shook hands
+cordially with the son of the man who had so lately
+defied him.</p>
+
+<p>"Your father and I were just now holding a little
+conference over your future prospects, Mr. Blount,"
+he said, going straight to his point. "Suppose you
+come down to the car with me for a private talk on
+legal matters. I'm inclined to think that we shall
+wish to retain you in a cause which is coming up in
+September. Gantry tells me that you are pretty
+well up in corporation law. Can you spare me a
+half-hour or so?"</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount glanced at the big clock over the
+clerk's head. Patricia had told him that she and
+her father would dine in the <i>café</i> at seven, and that
+there would be a place at their table for him&#8212;and
+another for his father, if the ex-senator would so far
+honor a poor college professor. There was an hour
+to spare; and if the vice-president of the Transcontinental
+was not the king, he was at least a great
+man, and one whose invitation was in some sense
+a royal command.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a></p>
+<p>"Certainly, I'll be glad to go with you," was
+Blount's acquiescent rejoinder. So much the registry-clerk
+heard; and he saw, between jabs with his
+pen, the straight path to the revolving doors of the
+portal ploughed by the big man with young Blount
+at his elbow.</p>
+
+<p>One minute after the spinning doors had engulfed
+the pair the registry-clerk was called on the house
+telephone. A sad-faced tourist who was waiting
+patiently for his room assignment heard only the
+answer to the question which came over the wire
+from one of the upper floors: "No, Senator, Mr.
+Evan is not here; he has just this moment gone
+out&#8212;with Mr. McVickar. Could I overtake him?
+I'll try; but I don't know where they were going.
+Yes; all right. I'll send a boy right away."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT</h3>
+
+<p><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a></p>
+<p>When the news went forth to the dwellers in the
+sage-brush hills that Boss David's son had been
+appointed to fill an important office as a member
+of the railroad company's legal staff, the first
+wave of astoundment was swiftly followed by many
+speculations as to what young Blount's <i>début</i> as a
+railroad placeman really meant.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Plainsman</i>, the capital city's principal daily,
+and the outspoken organ of the people's party, was
+quick to discover an ulterior motive in Evan Blount's
+appointment and its acceptance. Blenkinsop, the
+leader-writer on <i>The Plainsman</i>, took a half-column
+in which to point out in emphatic and vigorous
+Western phrase the dangers that threatened the
+commonwealth in this very evident coalition of the
+railroad octopus and the machine.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Lost River Miner</i>, on the contrary, was unwilling
+to believe that the younger Blount was acting
+in the interest of machine politics in taking an employee's
+place on the railroad pay-roll. In this
+editor's comment there were veiled hints of a disagreement
+between father and son; of differences
+of opinion which might, later on, lead to a pitched
+battle. The <i>Capital Daily</i>, however&#8212;the stock in
+which was said to be owned or controlled by local
+railroad officials&#8212;took a different ground, covertly
+insinuating that nothing for nothing was the accepted
+rule in politics; that if th<a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>e railroad company had
+made a place for the son, it was only a justifiable
+deduction that the father was not as fiercely inimical
+to the railroad interests as the opposition press
+was willing to have a too credulous public believe.</p>
+
+<p>Elsewhere in the State press comment was divided,
+as the moulders of public opinion happened
+to read party loss or gain in the appointment of the
+new legal department head. Some were fair enough
+to say that young Blount had merely shown good
+sense in taking the first job that was offered him,
+following the commendation with the very obvious
+conclusion that the railroad company's pay check
+would buy just as much bread in the open market
+as anybody's else. On the whole, the senator's son
+was given the benefit of the doubt and a chance to
+prove up.</p>
+
+<p>Of the interview between the father and the son,
+in which Evan announced his intention of accepting
+a place under McVickar, nothing was said in
+the newspapers, for the very good reason that no
+reporter was present. If the young man who had
+so summarily taken his future into his own hands
+was anticipating a storm of disapproval and opposition,
+he was disappointed. He had seen Mr. McVickar's
+private car coupled to the east-bound Fast</p>
+
+<p>Mail, and had dined with Patricia and her father,
+the fourth seat at the table of reunion being vacant
+because the senator was dining elsewhere. Later in
+the evening he faced the music in the sitting-room
+of the private suite, waylaying his father on the
+Honorable David's return to the hotel.</p>
+
+<p>Planning it out beforehand, Blount had meant to
+<a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>give the ethical reasons which had constrained him
+to put a conclusive end to the attorney-generalship
+scheme. But when the crux came, the carefully
+planned argument side-stepped and he was reduced
+to the necessity of declaring his purpose baldly. The
+railroad people had offered him a place, and he had
+accepted it.</p>
+
+<p>"So McVickar talked you over to his side, did
+he?" was the boss's gentle comment. "It's all
+right, son; you're a man grown, and I reckon you
+know best what you want to do. If it puts us on
+opposite sides of the political creek, we won't let
+that roil the water any more than it has to, will we?"</p>
+
+<p>To such a mild-mannered surrender, or apparent
+surrender, the stirring filial emotions could do no
+less than to respond heartily.</p>
+
+<p>"We mustn't let it," was the quick reply; but after
+this the younger man added: "I feel that I ought to
+make some explanations&#8212;they're due to you. I've
+been knocking about here in the city with my eyes
+and ears open, and I must confess that the political
+field has been made to appear decidedly unattractive
+to me. From all I can learn, the political situation
+in the State is handled as a purely business
+proposition; it is a matter of bargain and sale. I
+couldn't go into anything like that and keep my
+self-respect."</p>
+
+<p>"No, of course you couldn't, son. So you just
+took a<a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a> job where you could earn good, clean money
+in your profession. I don't blame you a particle."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was vaguely perturbed, and he showed it
+by absently laying aside the cigar which he had
+lately lighted and taking a fresh one from the open
+box on the table. He could not help the feeling
+that he ought to be reading between the lines in the
+paternal surrender.</p>
+
+<p>"You think there will be more or less political
+work in my job with the railroad?" he suggested,
+determined to get at the submerged facts, if there
+were any.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know; you say McVickar has hired
+you to do a lawyer's work, and I reckon that is what
+he will expect you to do, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount laid the second cigar aside and crossed the
+room to readjust a half-opened ventilating transom.
+Mr. McVickar had not defined the duties of the new
+counselship very clearly, but there had been a strong
+inference running through the private-car conference
+to the effect that the headship of the local
+legal department would carry with it some political
+responsibilities. At the moment the newly appointed
+placeman had been rather glad that such
+was the case. The vice-president had convinced
+him of the justice of the railroad company's contention&#8212;namely,
+that the present laws of the</p>
+
+<p>State, if rigidly administered, amounted to a p<a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>ractical
+confiscation of the company's property. While
+Mr. McVickar was talking, Blount had hoped that
+the new office which the vice-president was apparently
+creating for him would give him a free hand
+to place the company's point of view fairly before
+the people of the State, and to do this he knew he
+would have to enter the campaign in some sort as a
+political worker. Surely, his father must know this;
+and he went boldly upon the assumption that his
+father did know it.</p>
+
+<p>"As I have said, I am to be chief of the legal department
+on this division, and as such it will be
+necessary for me to defend my client both in court
+and out of court," he said finally. "Since I am
+fairly committed, I shall try to stay on the job."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you will. You've got to be honest
+with yourself&#8212;and with McVickar. I don't mind
+telling you, son, that I'm flat-footed on the other
+side this time, and I had hoped you were going to
+be. But if you're not, why, that's the end of it.
+We won't quarrel about it."</p>
+
+<p>Now this was not at all the paternal attitude as
+the young man had been prefiguring it. He had
+looked for opposition; finding it, he would have
+found it possibl<a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>e to say some of the things which
+were crying to be said and which still remained
+unsaid. But there was absolutely no loophole
+through which he could force the attack. If his
+late decision had been of no more importance than
+the breaking of a dinner engagement, his father
+could scarcely have dismissed it with less apparent
+concern. Balked and practically talked to a standstill
+in the business matter, Blount switched to
+other things.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a></p>
+<p>"I missed you to-night at dinner," he said, beginning
+on the new tack. "Two of my Cambridge
+friends are here, and I wanted you to meet them."</p>
+
+<p>The Honorable David looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"The fossil-digging professor and his daughter?"
+he queried shrewdly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; how did you know? They came in on the
+Overland, and I find that the professor has made the
+long journey on the strength of what I once told
+him about the megatheriums and things. I guess
+it's up to me to make good in some way."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you worry a minute about that, Evan,
+boy," was the instant rejoinder. "Honoria's coming
+in from Wartrace to-morrow, and if you'll put
+us next, we'll take care of your friends&#8212;mighty
+good care of 'em." Then, almost wistfully Blount
+thought: "You won't mind letting Honoria do that
+much for you, will you, son?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'd be a cad i<a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>f I did. And you've taken a load
+off of my shoulders, I can assure you. If you can
+persuade Mrs. Blount into it, I'll arrange for a little
+dinner of five to-morrow evening in the <i>café</i> where
+we can all get together. You'll like the professor,
+I know; and I hope you're going to like Patricia.
+She's New England, and at first you may think she's
+a bit chilly. But really she isn't anything of the
+kind."</p>
+
+<p>The Honorable Senator got up and strolled to the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd better go to bed, son," he advised. "It's
+getting to be mighty late, and you'll want to be
+surging around some with these friends of yours to-morrow.
+And, before I forget it, the big car is in
+Heffelfinger's garage. Order it out after breakfast
+and show the Cambridge folks a good time."</p>
+
+<p>It was late the following evening, several hours
+after the informal little dinner for five in the Inter-Mountain
+<i>café</i>, when the senator had himself lifted
+from the lobby to the private-suite floor and made
+his way to <a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>the door of his own apartments. As was
+her custom when they were together, his wife was
+waiting up for him.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you find out anything more?" she asked,
+without looking up from the tiny embroidery frame
+which was her leisure-filling companion at home or
+elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>"Not enough to hurt anything. McVickar has
+fixed things to suit himself. The boy's law-office
+job is to be pretty largely nominal; a sort of go-as-you-please
+and do-as-you-like proposition on the
+side, with Ackerton to do all the sure-enough court
+work and legal drudgery. Since Ackerton is a pretty
+clean fellow, and Evan stands up so straight that
+he leans over backward, this lay-out means that
+the bribing isn't going to be done by the legal department
+in the coming campaign."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?"</p>
+
+<p>"All but one little thing. Evan's job is to be
+more or less associated with the traffic department,
+and the word has been passed to Gantry and his
+crowd to see to it that the boy doesn't get to know
+too much."</p><p><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a></p>
+
+<p>"But they can't keep him from finding out about
+the underground work!" protested the small one.</p>
+
+<p>"If it's an order from headquarters, they're going
+to try mighty hard. Evan wants to believe that
+everything is on the high moral plane, and when a
+man wants to believe a thing it isn't so awfully
+hard to fool him. It'll be a winning card for them
+if they can send the boy out to talk convincingly
+about the cleanness of the company's campaign.
+That sort of talk, handed out as Evan can hand it,
+if he is convinced of the truth of what he is saying,
+will capture the honest voter every time. I tell
+you, little woman, there's a thing we politicians are
+constantly losing sight of: that down at the bedrock
+bottom the American voter&#8212;'the man in the
+street,' as the newspapers call him&#8212;is a fair man
+and an honest man. Speaking broadly, you couldn't
+buy him with a clear title to a quarter-section in
+Paradise."</p>
+
+<p>This little eulogy upon the American voter appeared
+to be wasted upon the small person in the
+wicker rocking-chair. "We must get him back,"
+she remarked, referring, not to the American voter,<a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>
+but to the senator's son. "Have you thought of
+any plan?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled up at him sweetly. "You are like the
+good doctor who cannot prescribe for the members
+of his own family. If he were anybody else's son,
+you would know exactly what to do."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I should."</p>
+
+<p>"I have a plan," she went on quietly, bending
+again over her embroidery. "He may have to take
+a regular course of treatment, and it may make him
+very ill; would you mind that?"</p>
+
+<p>David Blount leaned back in his chair and regarded
+her through half-closed eyelids. "You're
+a wonder, little woman," he said; and then: "I
+don't want to see the boy suffer any more than he
+has to."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither do I," was the swift agreement. Then,
+with no apparent relevance: "What do you think
+of Miss Anners?"</p>
+
+<p>The senator sat up at the question, with the slow
+smile wrinkling humorously at the corners of his
+eyes.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a></p>
+<p>"I haven't thought much about her yet. She's
+the kind that won't let you get near enough in
+a single sitting to think much about her, isn't
+she?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is a young woman with an exceedingly
+bright mind and a very high purpose," was the
+little lady's summing-up of Patricia. "But she isn't
+altogether a Boston iceberg. She thinks she is irrevocably
+in love with her chosen career; but, really,
+I believe she is very much in love with Evan. If
+we could manage to win her over to our side as an
+active ally&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>This time the senator's smile broadened into a
+laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"You are away yonder out of my depth now,"
+he chuckled. "Does your course of treatment for
+the boy include large doses of the young woman,
+administered frequently?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," was the instant reply. "I was only
+wondering if it wouldn't be well to enroll her&#8212;enlist
+her sympathies, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?&#8212;if you think best? You're the fine-haired
+little wire-puller, and it's all in your hands."</p><p><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Will you give me <i>carte-blanche</i> to do as I please?"
+asked the small plotter.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure!" said the Honorable David heartily, adding:
+"You can always outfigure me, two to one,
+when it comes to the real thing. You've made a
+fine art of it, Honoria, and I'll turn the steering-wheel
+over to you any day in the week."</p>
+
+<p>When she looked up she was smiling in the way
+which had made Evan Blount wonder, in that midnight
+meeting at Wartrace Hall, how she could look
+so young and yet be so wise.</p>
+
+<p>"You deal with people in the mass, David, and
+no one living can do it better. I am like most
+women, I think: I deal with the individual. That
+is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out
+to the fossil-beds?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; any time when you will invite
+them to make Wartrace their headquarters, I
+reckon."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I think it will be to-morrow," decided the
+confident mistress of policies. "It won't do to let
+Evan see too much of Patricia until after his course
+<a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>of treatment is well under way. Shall we make it
+to-morrow? And will you telephone Dawkins to
+bring down the biggest car? I have a notion wandering
+around in my head somewhere that Miss
+Patricia Anners will stand a little judicious impressing.
+She is exceedingly democratic, you know&#8212;in
+theory."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE RANK AND FILE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Considerably to his surprise, and no less to his
+satisfaction, the newly appointed "division counsel,"
+as his title ran, was not required to take over
+the old legal department offices in the second story
+of the station building, where all the other offices of
+the company were located. Instead, he was directed
+to fit up a suite of rooms in Temple Court, the capital's
+most pretentious up-town sky-scraper, and there
+was something more than a hint that the item of
+first cost would not be too closely scrutinized.</p>
+
+<p>It was the vice-president himself, writing from
+Chicago, who authorized the new departure and
+loosened the purse strings. "Don't be afraid of
+<a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>spending a little money," wrote the great man.
+"Make your up-town headquarters as attractive as
+may be, and arrange matters with Ackerton so that
+your office will not be burdened with too much of
+the routine legal work. A successful legal representative
+will be a good mixer&#8212;as I am sure you are&#8212;and
+will extend the circle of his acquaintance as
+rapidly and as far as possible. Your appointment
+will be fully justified when you have made your
+up-town office a place where the good citizens of
+the capital and the State can drop in for a cordial
+word with the company's spokesman."</p>
+
+<p>Acting upon this suggestion, Blount opened the
+Temple Court headquarters at once and threw himself
+energetically into the indicated field. Ackerton,
+a technical expert with a needle-like mind and
+the State code at his fingers'-ends, was left in charge
+of the working offices in the railroad building, with
+instructions to apply to his chief only when he needed
+specific advice.</p>
+
+<p>At the up-town headquarters, Blount gave himself
+wholly to the pleasant task of making friends.
+With a good store of introductions upon which to
+make a beginning, and with the open-handed, whole-souled
+<i>camaraderie</i> of the West to help, the list of
+acquaintances grew with amazing rapidity. For<a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>
+the three or four weeks after Mrs. Blount had
+whisked the Annerses away to Wartrace Hall and
+the habitat of the Megalosauridæ, the newly appointed
+"social secretary" for the railroad, as Honoria
+had dubbed him, met all comers joyously and
+accepted all invitations, never inquiring whether
+they were extended to his father's son, to the railroad
+company's legal chief, or to Evan Blount in
+his proper person.</p>
+
+<p>During this social interval he saw little of his
+father, though he was still occupying his share of
+the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain.
+Part of the time, as he knew, the Honorable Senator
+was at Wartrace Hall, looking after his mammoth
+ranch, and helping to entertain the visitors from</p>
+
+<p>Massachusetts. But now and again the father came
+and went; and occasionally there was a dinner <i>à
+deux</i> in the hotel <i>café</i>, with a little good-natured
+raillery from the senator's side of the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Got you chasing your feet right lively in the
+social merry-go-round these days, haven't they,
+son? Like it, as far as you've gone?" said the ex-cattle-king
+one evening when Evan had come down
+in evening clothes, ready to go to madam the
+governor's wife's strictly formal "informal" a little
+later on.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all in the day's work," laughed the younger
+man. "I shall need all the 'pull' I can get a little
+later on, sha'n't I?"</p><p><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a></p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't wonder if you did, son; I shouldn't
+wonder if you did. And I reckon you're doing
+pretty good work, too, mixing and mingling the
+way you do. Was it McVickar's idea, or your own&#8212;this
+sudden splash into the social water-hole?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't mind telling you that it is a part of the
+new policy," returned the social splasher, still smiling.
+"We are out to make friends this time; good,
+solid, open-eyed friends who will know just what
+we are doing and why we are doing it."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm," mused the senator, "so publicity's the
+new word, is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; publicity is the word. The Gordon people
+say they are going to show us up; there won't be
+anything to show up when the time comes. We
+are going to beat them to the billboards."</p>
+
+<p>The grizzled veteran of a goodly number of political
+battles put down his coffee-cup; he was
+still old-fashioned enough to drink his coffee in
+generous measure with the meat courses.</p>
+
+<p>"You can't do the circus act&#8212;ride<a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a> two horses at
+once and do the same stunt on both, son," he
+remarked gravely. "If you're really going to put
+the saddle and bridle on the publicity nag, you've
+got to turn the other one out of the corral and let
+it go back to the short-grass."</p>
+
+<p>"It is already turned out," asserted the young
+man, not affecting to misunderstand. "We neither
+buy votes nor spend illegitimate money in this
+campaign."</p>
+
+<p>The stout assertion was good as far as it went;
+the new division counsel made it and believed it. But
+on his way to the governor's mansion, a little later,
+he could not help wondering if he had been altogether
+candid in making it. The offices in the up-town
+sky-scraper were not exclusively a railroad social
+centre where the disinterested voter could come and
+have the facts ladled out to him without fear or
+favor on the part of the ladler. They had come to
+be also a rallying-point for a heterogeneous crowd
+of ward-workers, wire-pullers, and small politicians,
+most of whom were anxious to be employed or retained
+as henchmen. Some of these "stretcher men,"
+as Blount contemptuously called them, had been
+employed in past campaigns; others were still the
+beneficiaries of the railroad, holding pay-roll places
+which Blount acutely suspected were chiefly sinecures.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a></p>
+<p>Latterly, this contingent of strikers and heelers
+had been greatly augmented, and it was beginning
+to make its demands more emphatic. A dozen
+times a day Blount had the worn phrase, "nothing
+for nothing," dinned into his ears, and he was beginning
+to harbor a suspicion that his office had
+been made a dumping-ground for all the other
+departments.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing Gantry at madam the governor's lady's
+reception, Blount took an early opportunity of cornering
+the traffic manager in one of the otherwise
+deserted smoking-dens, and when he had made sure
+there were no eavesdroppers plunged at once into
+the middle of things.</p>
+
+<p>"See here, Dick," he began, "you fellows downtown
+are making my office a cesspool, and I won't
+stand for it. Garrigan, that saloon-keeper in the
+second ward, came up to-day to ask for a free ticket
+to Worthington and return; and when I pinned him
+down he admitted that you'd sent him to me."</p>
+
+<p>"I did," said Gantry, grinning. "Why otherwise
+have we got a post-graduate, double-certificated
+political manager, I'd like to know?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount dropped into a chair and felt in his pockets
+<a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>for his cigar-case.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess we may as well fight this thing to a
+finish right here and now, Dick," he said coolly.
+"I'm not chief vote buyer for the Transcontinental
+Company&#8212;I'm not any kind of a vote buyer."</p>
+
+<p>"Who said you were?" retorted the traffic manager.</p>
+
+<p>"It says itself, if I am supposed to cut the pie
+and hand out pieces of it to these grub-stakers that
+you and Carson and Bentley and Kittredge are
+continually sending to me."</p>
+
+<p>This time Gantry's grin was playful, but behind
+it there was a shrewd flash of the Irish-blue eyes
+that Blount did not see.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess the company would be plenty willing to
+furnish a few small pies for really hungry people,
+if you think you need them to go along with your
+Temple Court office fittings," he returned.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah?" said Blount calmly, giving the exclamation
+the true Boston inflection. "You are either
+too shrewd or not quite shrewd enough, Dick. You<a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>
+covered that up with a laugh, so that I might take
+it as a joke if I happened to be too thin-skinned to
+take it in disreputable earnest. Let us understand
+each other; we are fighting squarely in the open
+in this campaign; publicity is the word&#8212;I have Mr.
+McVickar for my authority. Anybody who wants
+to know anything about the railroad company's
+business in this State can learn it for the asking,
+and at first-hand. Secrecy and all the various
+brands of political claptrap that have been
+admitted in the past are to be shown the door. This
+is the intimation that was made to me: wasn't it
+made to you?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry did not reply directly to the direct demand.
+On the other hand, he very carefully refrained
+from answering it in any degree whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>"You have your job to hold down and I have
+mine," he rejoined. "What you say goes as it
+lies, of course; but just the same, I shouldn't be
+too righteously hard on the little brothers, if I were
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"If by the 'little brothers' you mean the pie-eaters,
+I'm going to fire them out, neck and crop,
+<a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>Richard. They make me excessively weary."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry's playful mood fell away from him like a
+cast-off garment.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't quite believe I'd do that, if I were you,
+Evan. There are pie-eaters on both sides in every
+political contest, and while they can't do any cause
+any great amount of good, they can often do a good
+bit of harm. I wouldn't be too hard on them, if I
+were you."</p>
+
+<p>"What would you do?&#8212;or, rather, what did you
+do when you were managing the State campaign
+two years ago?" inquired Blount pointedly.</p>
+
+<p>"I cut the pie," said the traffic manager simply.</p>
+
+<p>"In other words, you let this riffraff blackmail
+you and, incidentally, put a big black mark against
+the company's good name."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; I wouldn't put it quite that strong.
+Not many of these little fellows ask for money, or
+expect it. A free ride now and then in the varnished
+cars is about all they look for."</p>
+
+<p>"But you can't give them passes under the interstate
+<a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>law," protested the purist.</p>
+
+<p>"Not outside of the State, of course. But inside
+of the State boundaries it's our own business."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean it <i>was</i> our own business, previous to
+the passage of the State rate law two years ago,"
+corrected Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"It is our own business to this good day&#8212;in effect.
+That part of the law has been a complete dead-letter
+<a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>from the day the governor signed it. Why,
+bless your innocent heart, Evan, the very men who
+argued the loudest and voted the most spitefully for
+it came to me for their return tickets home at the
+end of the session. Of course, we kept the letter
+of the law. It says that no 'free passes' shall be
+given. We didn't issue passes; we merely gave
+them tickets out of the case and charged them up
+to 'expense.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Faugh!" said Blount, "you make me sick!
+Gantry, it's that same childish whipping of the devil
+around the stump by the corporations&#8212;an expedient
+that wouldn't deceive the most ignorant voter
+that ever cast a ballot&#8212;it's that very thing that
+has stirred the whole nation up to this unreasonable
+fight against corporate capital. Don't you see it?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I take the line of the least resistance&#8212;like
+the majority of them," was the colorless reply.
+"When it comes down to practical politics&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>"Don't say 'practical politics' to me, Dick!"
+rasped the reformer. "We've got the strongest argument
+in the world in the fact that the present
+law is an unfair one, needing modification or repeal.
+We mustn't spoil that argument by becoming law-breakers
+ourselves and descending to the methods
+of the grafters and the machine politicians the
+country over. If you have been sending these pie-eaters
+to me, stop it&#8212;don't do it any more. I have
+no earthly use for them; and they won't have any
+use for me after I open up on them and tell them
+a few things they don't seem to know, or to care
+to know."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe I'd do anything brash," Gantry
+suggested mildly, and he was still saying the same
+thing in diversified forms when Blount led the way
+back to the crowded drawing-rooms.</p>
+
+<p>Dating from this little heart-to-heart talk with
+the traffic manager, Blount began to carry out the
+new policy&#8212;the starvation policy, as it soon came
+to be known among the would-be henchmen. The
+result was not altogether reassuring. The first few
+rebuffs he administered left him with the feeling that
+he was winning Pyrrhic victories; it was as if he
+were trying to handle a complicated mechanism with
+the working details of which he was only theoretically
+familiar. There were wheels within wheels,
+and the application of the brakes to the smallest
+of them led to discordant janglings throughout the
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the small grafters were on the pay-rolls
+of the railroad company, and Blount was soon definitely
+<a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>assured of what he had before only suspected&#8212;that
+they were merely nominal employees given
+a pay-roll standing so that there might be an excuse
+for giving them free transportation, and a retainer
+in the form of wages, if needful.</p>
+
+<p>In many cases the ramifications of the petty graft
+were exasperatingly intricate. For example: one
+Thomas Gryson, who was on the pay-rolls as a
+machinist's helper in the repair shops, demanded
+free transportation across the State for eight members
+of his "family." Questioned closely, he admitted
+that the "family" was his only by a figure
+of speech; that the relationship was entirely political.
+Blount promptly refused to recommend the
+issuing of employees' passes for the eight, and the
+result was an immediate call from Bentley, the division
+master mechanic.</p>
+
+<p>"About that fellow Gryson," Bentley began;
+"can't you manage some way to get him transportation
+for his Jonesboro crowd? He is going to
+make trouble for us if you don't."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was justly indignant. "Gryson is on your
+pay-roll," he retorted. "Why don't you recommend
+the passes yourself, on account of the motive-power
+department, if he is entitled to them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't," admitted the master mechanic. "I am
+held down to the issuing of passes to employees travelling
+on company business only. We can stretch <a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>it
+a little sometimes, of course, but we can't make it
+cover the whole earth."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither can I!" Blount exploded. "Let it be
+understood, once for all, Mr. Bentley, that I am
+not the scape-goat for all the other departments! I
+have cut it off short; I am not recommending
+passes for anybody."</p>
+
+<p>"But, suffering Scott, Mr. Blount, we've simply
+<i>got</i> to take care of Tom Gryson! He's the boss of
+his ward, and he has influence enough to turn even
+our own employees against us!"</p>
+
+<p>"Influence?" scoffed the young man from the
+East. "How does he acquire his influence? It is
+merely another illustration of the vicious circle;
+you put into his hands the club with which he
+proceeds to knock you down. Let me tell you what
+I'm telling everybody; if we want a square deal,
+we've got to set the example by being square. And,
+by Heavens, Mr. Bentley, we're going to set the
+example!"</p>
+
+<p>The master mechanic went away silenced, but by<a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>
+no means convinced; and a week later Gryson, who
+in appearance was a typical tough, and who in reality
+was a post-graduate of the hard school of violence
+and ruffianage obtaining in the lawless mining-camps
+of the Carnadine Hills, sauntered into Blount's
+office with his cigar at the belligerent angle and an
+insolent taunt in his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, pardner, we got them dickie-birds o' mine
+over to Jonesboro, after so long a time, and no
+thanks to you, neither. I just blew in to tell you
+that I'm goin' to hit you ag'in about day after to-morrow,
+and if you don't come across there's goin'
+to be somethin' doin'; see?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount sprang from his chair and forgot to be
+politic.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't come to me the day after to-morrow,
+or any other time," he raged. "I'm through with
+you and your tribe. Get out!"</p>
+
+<p>After Gryson, muttering threats, had gone, the
+young campaign manager had an attack of moral
+nausea. It seemed such a prodigiou<a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>s waste of time
+and energy to traffic and chaffer with these petty
+scoundrels. Thus far, every phase of the actual
+political problem seemed to be meanly degrading,
+and he was beginning to long keenly for an opportunity
+to do some really worthy thing.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding, his ideals were still unshaken.
+He still clung to the belief that the corporation,
+which was created by the law and could exist only
+under the protection of the law, must, of necessity,
+be a law-abiding entity. It was manifestly unfair
+to hold it responsible for the disreputable political
+methods of those whom it could never completely
+control&#8212;methods, too, which had been forced upon
+it by the necessity, or the fancied necessity, of meeting
+conditions as they were found.</p>
+
+<p>As if in answer to the wish that he might find the
+worthier task, it was on this day of Gryson's visit
+that Blount was given his first opportunity of entering
+the wider field. A letter from a local party
+chairman in a distant mining town brought an invitation
+of the kind for which he had been waiting
+and hoping. He was asked to participate in a joint
+debate at the campaign opening in the town in
+question, and he was s<a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>o glad of the chance that he
+instantly wired his acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>That evening, at the Inter-Mountain <i>café</i> dinner
+hour, he found his father dining alone and joined
+him. In a burst of confidence he told of the invitation.</p>
+
+<p>"That's good; that's the real thing this time,
+isn't it?" was the senator's even-toned comment.
+"Gives you a right nice little chance to shine the
+way you can shine best." Then: "That was one
+of the things McVickar wanted you for, wasn't it?&#8212;speech-making
+and the like?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes; he intimated that there might be
+some public speaking," admitted the younger man.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what-all are you going to tell these Ophir
+fellows when you get over there, son?" asked the
+veteran quizzically. "Going to offer 'em all free
+passes anywhere they want to go if they'll promise
+to vote for the railroad candidates?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not this year," was the laughing reply. "As
+I told you a while back, we've stopped all that."</p>
+
+<p>"You have, eh? I reckon that will be mighty
+sorry news for a good many people in the old Sage-brush
+State&#8212;mighty sorry news. You really reckon<a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a>
+you <i>have</i> stopped it, do you, son?"</p>
+
+<p>"I not only believe it; I am in a position to assert
+it definitely."</p>
+
+<p>"McVickar has told you it was stopped?"</p>
+
+<p>The newly fledged political manager tried to be
+strictly truthful.</p>
+
+<p>"I have had but the one interview with Mr. McVickar,
+but in that talk he gave me to understand
+that my recommendations would be given due consideration.
+And I have said my say pretty emphatically."</p>
+
+<p>The senator's smile was not derisive; it was merely
+lenient.</p>
+
+<p>"Sat on 'em good and hard, did you? That's
+right, son; don't you ever be afraid to say what
+you mean, and to say it straight from the shoulder.
+That's the Blount way, and I reckon we've got to
+keep the family ball rolling&#8212;you and I. Don't forget
+that, when you're making your appeal to those
+horny-handed sons of toil over yonder at Ophir.
+Give 'em straight facts, and back up the facts with
+figures&#8212;if you happen to have the figures. When
+do you pull out for <a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a>the mining-camp?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-night, at nine-thirty. I can't get there in
+time if I wait for the morning train." Then,
+dismissing the political topic abruptly: "What do
+you hear from Professor Anners?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he's having the time of his life. I got him
+a State permit, and scraped him up a bunch of
+pick-and-shovel men, and he is digging out those
+fossil skeletons by the wagon-load."</p>
+
+<p>"And Miss Anners?" pursued Patricia's lover.</p>
+
+<p>"I shouldn't wonder if she was having the time
+of her life, too. I've given her the little four-seated
+car to call her own while she is out here, and she
+and Honoria go careering around the country&#8212;breaking
+the speed limit every minute in the day,
+I reckon."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad you are giving her a good time," said
+Evan, and he looked glad. Then he added regretfully:
+"I wish I could get a chance to chase around
+a little with them. I have seen almost nothing of
+them since they came West. I should think Mrs.
+Blount might bring Patricia down to the city once
+<a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a>in a while."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now! perhaps the young woman doesn't
+want to come," laughed the senator. "You told
+me you hadn't got her tag, son, and I'm beginning
+to believe it's the sure-enough truth. What has she
+got against you, anyway?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing; nothing in the wide world, save that
+I don't fit into her scheme for her life-work."</p>
+
+<p>The senator was eating calmly through his dessert.
+"If you hadn't made up your mind so pointedly to
+dislike Honoria, you might be getting a few tips on
+that 'career' business along about now, son," he
+remarked, and Evan was silent&#8212;had to be silent.
+For, you see, he had been charging Patricia's continued
+absence from the capital to nothing less than
+spiteful design on the part of his father's wife.</p>
+
+<p>It was at the cigar smoking in the lobby, after
+the young man had made his preparations for the
+journey and was waiting for the train-caller's announcement,
+that the senator said quite casually:
+"It's too bad you're going out of town to-night, son.
+Honoria 'phoned me a little spell ago that she and
+Patricia would be driving down after their dinner
+to take in the Weatherford reception. You'll have
+to miss 'em, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>The a<a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a>nnouncer was chanting the call for the
+night train west, and the joint-debater got up and
+thrust his hand-bag savagely into the hand of the
+nearest porter.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't that just my infernal luck!" he lamented.
+Then: "Give them my love, and tell them I hope
+they will stay until I get back."</p>
+
+<p>The senator rose and shook hands with the departing
+debater. "Shall I say that to both of 'em?"
+he asked, with the quizzical smile which Evan was
+learning to expect.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; to both of them, if you like&#8212;only I suppose
+Mrs. Blount will hold it against me. Good-night
+and good-by. I'll be back day after to-morrow, if
+the Ophir miners don't mob me."</p>
+
+<p>It was only a few minutes after Evan Blount's
+train had steamed Ophir-ward out of the Sierra
+Avenue station that a dust-covered touring-car drew
+up at the curb in front of the Inter-Mountain, and
+the same porter who had put Blount's hand-bag
+into the taxicab opened the tonneau door for two
+ladies in muffling motor-coats and heavy veils.</p>
+
+<p>The senator met the two late travellers in the
+vestibule, and while the three were waiting for an
+elevator a rapid fire of low-toned question and answer
+passed between husband and wife.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a></p>
+<p>"You got Evan out of the way?" whispered the
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>The husband nodded. "That was easy. I passed
+the word to Steuchfield, and he helped out on that&#8212;invited
+Evan to come to Ophir to speak in a
+joint debate. He left on the night train."</p>
+
+<p>"And Hathaway? Will he be here?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is here. Gantry has turned him down, according
+to instructions, and he is clawing about in
+the air, trying to get a fresh hold. I bluffed him;
+told him he'd have to make his peace with you for
+something, I didn't know what, before I could talk
+to him."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal
+glow as the car descended, and the wife's voice
+sank to a still lower whisper.</p>
+
+<p>"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired
+eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be
+there."</p>
+
+<p>The small plotter nodded approval.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a></p>
+<p>"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car
+ready," she directed; and then the senator put the
+two into the elevator and turned away to finish his
+cigar.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h3>IN THE HERBARIUM</h3>
+
+
+<p>The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people,
+and so newly rich that the crisp bank-notes fairly
+crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them, kept
+their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like
+mansion in Mesa Circle, the most expensive, if not
+the most aristocratic, no-thoroughfare of the capital
+city. Weatherford, the father, egged on by Mrs.
+Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward
+a United States senatorship, the election to
+which would fall within the province of the next
+<a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a>legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little
+man with a bald spot on top of his head and a
+corner-grocery point of view carefully tucked away
+inside of it&#8212;an outlook upon life which was a survival
+from his hard-working past&#8212;would willingly
+have dodged, but Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable.
+There were two grown daughters and a growing
+son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.</p>
+
+<p>The reception for which the senator's wife and
+her guest had driven thirty miles through the dust
+of the sage-brush hills was one of the many moves
+in Mrs. Weatherford's private campaign. For the
+opening-gun occasion the great house in Mesa Circle
+was lighted from basement to turret&#8212;to all of the
+numerous turrets; an awning fringed with electric
+bulbs sheltered the carpeted walk from the street
+to the grand entrance, an army of lackeys paraded
+in the vestibule, and the wives and daughters of
+the bravest and best in the capital city's political
+contingent stood with Mrs. Weatherford in the long
+receiving-line.</p>
+
+<p>From room to room in the vast house a curiously
+assorted throng of the bid<a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a>den ones worked its way
+as the jam and crush permitted. A firm believer
+in the maxim that in numbers there is strength, the
+hostess had made her invitation-list long and catholic.
+For the gossips there were the crowded drawing-rooms,
+for the hungry there were Lucullian tables,
+and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.</p>
+
+<p>It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the
+Weatherford riches that the conservatory, a glass-and-iron
+greenhouse, built out as an extension of
+one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium."
+It was a reproduction, on a generous scale,
+of a tropical garden. Half-grown palms and banana-trees
+made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted
+interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures,
+Mrs. Weatherford had omitted any precious
+bit of greenery whose cost would have shed additional
+lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was
+because no one had remembered to mention the
+name of it to her.</p>
+
+<p>Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably
+late at the function in Mesa Circle, but in the
+crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the hostess
+and her long line of receiving assistants were still
+on duty. Having successfully passed the line with
+her husband and Patricia, little Mrs. Blount looked
+about her, saw Mr. Richard Gantry, signalled t<a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a>o
+him with her eyes, and, with the traffic manager for
+her centre-rush to wedge a way through the crowded
+rooms, was presently lost to sight&#8212;at least from
+Miss Anners's point of view.</p>
+
+<p>Whether she knew it or not, from the moment of
+her appearance at the hostess's end of the long receiving-line,
+the senator's wife had been marked and
+followed in her slow progress through the rooms by
+a thin-faced man who seemed to be nervously trying
+to hunch himself into better relations with his ill-fitting
+dress-coat, an eager gentleman whose hawk-like
+eyes never lost sight of the little lady with her
+hand on Gantry's arm. Only the senator saw and
+remarked this bit of by-play, and he looked as if
+he were enjoying it, the shrewd gray eyes lighting
+humorously as he bent to hear what Patricia was
+saying.</p>
+
+<p>When his quarry stopped, as she did frequently
+to chat with one or another of the guests, the man
+with the hawk-like profile and the nervous hunch
+circled warily, and once or twice seemed about to
+make the opportunity which was so slow in making
+<a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a>itself. But it was not until the little lady in the
+claret-colored party-gown had drifted, still with a
+hand on Gantry's arm, in among the palm and banana trees
+of the herbarium that the bird-of-prey
+person made his swoop. A moment later Gantry,
+taking a low-toned command from his companion,
+was disappearing in the direction of the refreshment-tables,
+and the lady looked up to say: "Dear me,
+Mr. Hathaway, you almost startled me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did I?" said the lumber-king, rather grimly, if
+he meant the query to be apologetic. "I am sorry.
+I didn't mean to; but Mrs. Gordon said I would
+find you here, and so I took the liberty of following
+you. I'm needing a little straightening out, you
+know, and&#8212;ah&#8212;would you mind letting me talk
+business with you for a minute or two, Mrs.
+Blount?"</p>
+
+<p>She drew her gown aside, and made room for him
+on the carved rustic settee, which was exceedingly
+uncomfortable to sit in, but which was in perfect
+harmony with the background of gigantic palmettos.
+He nodded gratefully and took the place, and the
+manner of his sitting down was that of a man who
+wears evening-clothes only under compulsion.</p>
+
+<p>"Business?" she was saying. "Certainly not; if
+<a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a>you can talk business in such a place as this"&#8212;giving
+him the coveted permission.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps it ain't what you'd call business&#8212;maybe
+it's only politics," he resumed; then, with the
+abruptness of one whose dealings have been with
+men oftener than with women: "In the first place,
+I wish you'd tell me what I've been doing to get
+myself into your bad books."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed easily. "Who said you had been
+doing anything, Mr. Hathaway?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"The senator," he answered shortly, adding:
+"He told me I'd have to make my peace with you."</p>
+
+<p>She had developed a sudden interest in the quaint
+Japanese figures on the ivory sticks of her fan.
+"You want something, Mr. Hathaway; what is it?"
+she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to be put next in this pigs-in-clover railroad
+puzzle," was the blunt statement of the need.
+"Our freight contract with the Transcontinental is
+about to expire, and I'd like to get it renewed on
+the same terms as before."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a></p>
+<p>"Well," she said ingenuously, "why don't you
+do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can't," he blustered. "Everybody has suddenly
+grown mysterious or gone crazy&#8212;I don't
+know which. Kittredge, the general superintendent,
+don't seem to remember that we ever had
+any contract, and Gantry is just as bad. And when
+I go to the senator he tells me I must make my
+peace with you. I'm left out in the cold; I can't
+begin to <i>sabe</i> what the senator and these railroad
+brass-collar men are driving at. I've got something
+to sell; something that the railroad company needs.
+Where the d&#8212;&#8212; I mean, where's the hitch?"</p>
+
+<p>The small person in the fetching party-gown
+reached up and pinched a leaf from a fragrant shrub
+fronting the settee.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Gantry has gone to fetch me an ice, and he
+will be back in a very few minutes," she suggested
+mildly. "Consider your peace made, Mr. Hathaway,
+and tell me what I can do for you."</p>
+
+<p>"You can put me next," said the lumber lord,
+<a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a>going back to the only phrase that seemed to fit
+the exigencies of the case. "Why the&#8212;why can't
+we get our contract renewed?"</p>
+
+<p>The little lady was opening and shutting her fan
+slowly. "What was your contract?" she inquired
+innocently.</p>
+
+<p>"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long
+time without telling you," he said bluntly. "But
+you do know. It's the rebate lumber rate from our
+mills at Twin Buttes and elsewhere, and it was given
+us two years ago, a few days before election."</p>
+
+<p>"And the consideration?" she asked, looking up
+quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"You know that, too, Mrs. Blount. It was the
+swinging of the solid employees' vote of the Twin
+Buttes Lumber Company over to the railroad ticket."</p>
+
+<p>"And you wish to make the same arrangement
+again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. We've got to have that preferential
+rate or go out of business."</p><p><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a></p>
+
+<p>"With whom did you make the contract two
+years ago?"</p>
+
+<p>"With Mr. McVickar, verbally. Of course, there
+wasn't anything put down in black and white, but
+the railroad folks did their part and we did ours."</p>
+
+<p>"I see&#8212;a gentleman's agreement," she murmured;
+and then: "You have tried Mr. McVickar again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and he referred me to Gantry."</p>
+
+<p>"And what did Mr. Gantry say?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't get him to say anything with any
+sense in it," said the lumber magnate grittingly.
+"The most I could get out of him was that I would
+have to see the boss."</p>
+
+<p>"And instead of doing that you went to see the
+senator?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I did. Who else would Gantry mean
+by 'the boss'?" demanded the befogged one.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a></p>
+<p>"Possibly he meant the senator's son," she ventured,
+tapping a pretty cheek with the folded fan.
+"Have you been leaving Evan Blount out in all of
+this?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know where to put him in. That's what
+brings me here to-night. The senator, or McVickar,
+or both of them together, have set the whole State
+to running around in circles with this appointment
+of young Blount. Some say it's a deal between the
+senator and McVickar, and some say it's a fight.
+Half of the professional spellbinders are walking in
+their sleep over it right now. I thought maybe
+you could tell me, Mrs. Blount."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell you anything that would help the
+people who are walking in their sleep," she returned,
+"but I might offer a suggestion in your personal
+affair. Mr. Evan Blount is your man."</p>
+
+<p>Hathaway pursed his thin lips and frowned.
+"I'm in bad there&#8212;right at the jump," he objected.</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she shot back quickly. "For some
+reason best known to yourself, you saw fit to have
+Mr. Evan waylaid and man-handled on <a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a>the first
+night of his return to his native State. But you
+needn't worry about that. He won't hold it against
+you. I'm sure you'll find him entirely amenable to
+reason."</p>
+
+<p>The tyrant of "timber-jacks" frowned again.
+"H'm&#8212;reason, eh? How big a block of Twin
+Buttes stock shall I offer him?"</p>
+
+<p>Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.</p>
+
+<p>"You always figure in dollars and cents, don't
+you, Mr. Simon Peter Hathaway?" she mocked.</p>
+
+<p>"I have always found it the cheapest in the end."</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," she said, with the folded fan held up
+like a monitory finger. "Mr. Gantry may be back
+any minute, and I can give you only the tiniest
+hint. You must go to Mr. Evan Blount and appeal
+to him frankly, as one business man to another."</p>
+
+<p>"But I have heard&#8212;they say he's all kinds of a
+crank."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind what you have heard. Tell him all
+the facts and ask him to help you, and for mercy's
+sake don't offer him a block of your stock. Put it
+where it will do the most good. Put it in the name
+of Professor William J. Anners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
+and show Mr. Blount how dreadfully
+disastrous the loss of the preferential freight rate
+would be to all the poor people in your list of stock-holders&#8212;including
+Professor Anners."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a></p>
+<p>Hathaway drew down his cuff and made a pencil
+memorandum of the name and address of the new
+beneficiary.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll notice that I'm not asking any foolish
+questions about who this Professor Anners is, or
+why I should be making him a present of a block
+of stock. If I don't, it's because what you say goes
+as it lies. Anything else?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; don't fail to be perfectly frank with Mr.
+Blount, and don't let him put you off. He may
+pretend to be very angry at first, but you won't
+mind that."</p>
+
+<p>"I won't mind anything if I can bring this business
+down to the every-day commonplace earth once
+more. You and the senator and Gantry and McVickar
+are playing some sort of a game, and you
+ain't showing me anything more than the back of
+the cards. That's all right. I guess I'm fly enough
+to play my hand blindfolded, if I've got to. I don't
+care, just so I win the odd trick."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was coming down the avenue of banana-trees
+with the ice he had taken so much time to
+procure, and the lumber magnate rose reluctantly.
+There was time for only one more question, and he
+put it hastily.</p>
+
+<p>"When and where can I find Evan Blount?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"The day after to-morrow, at his office in Temple
+Court. He is out of the city now, but&#8212;" Here
+Gantry's coming put an end to the private conference,
+and the president of the Twin Buttes company went his way.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a></p>
+<p>Not until they had served out their full sentence
+at Mrs. Weatherford's crush, and were back in the
+private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain,
+with Miss Anners safely behind the closed door of
+her own apartment, did the small conspirator pass
+the word of good hope on to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"It is working beautifully," she exulted. "He
+will go to see Evan day after to-morrow&#8212;and after
+that, the deluge."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GREAT GAME</h3>
+
+
+<p>If Evan Blount, as the representative of the unpopular
+railroad, had been anticipating an unfriendly
+reception at the great gold-camp in the Carnadine
+Hills, he was agreeably disappointed. A committee
+of citizens, headed by Jasper Steuchfield, the "Paramounter"
+chairman for Carnadine County, met him
+at the train, escorted him to the hotel, and, during
+the afternoon which was at his disposal, gave him
+joyously and hilariously the freedom of the camp.</p>
+
+<p>The polit<a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a>ical meeting, called for an early hour in
+the evening, was held in the Carnadine Mining
+Company's ore-shed, electric-lighted for the occasion.
+When the hour came the big shed was packed
+with an enthusiastic audience, and there were prolonged
+cheers and hand-clappings when the railroad
+advocate took his seat on the improvised platform
+as the guest of the local committee.</p>
+
+<p>Later, when Judge Crowley, candidate prospective
+on the popular ticket for the State Senate, opened
+the joint debate with a shrewd arraignment of the
+methods of the railroad company, not only in its
+dealings with the public as a common carrier, but
+also in the pertinacity with which it invaded the
+political field, there was tumultuous applause; but
+it was no heartier than that which greeted Blount
+when he rose to present the railroad side of the
+argument.</p>
+
+<p>During the journey from the capital, which had
+consumed the night and the greater portion of the
+forenoon, he had prepared his speech. His argument&#8212;the
+one unanswerable argument, as it appeared
+to him&#8212;was the absurdity and injustice of a
+law which presumed to limit the earning power of
+a corporation by fixing the maximum rates it might
+charge, without at the same time making a corresponding
+<a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a>regulation fixing the price which the company
+should pay for its labor and material.</p>
+
+<p>Upon this foundation he was able to build a fair
+structure of oratory. The judge, his opponent, was
+a rather turgid man whose speech had abounded
+in flights of denunciation and whose appeal had
+been made frankly to prejudice and party rancor.
+Blount took his cue shrewdly. Touching lightly
+upon the public grievances, some of which he characterized
+as just and entirely defensible, he rang the
+changes calmly and logically upon the square deal,
+no less for the corporations than for the individual.
+"Take it to yourselves, you merchants," he urged.
+"Imagine a law on the statute-books fixing the
+prices at which you shall sell your goods, and that
+same law leaving you at the mercy of those from
+whom you must buy! Take it to yourselves, you
+miners. Suppose the legislature had enacted a law
+fixing the maximum price at which you shall sell
+your skill and your labor, and at the same time
+leaving it optional with every man from whom you
+buy, the butcher, the baker, the grocer, to charge
+you what he pleases or what he can get! That, my
+good friends, is the situation of the railroad company
+in this State to-day"&#8212;and he went on to
+analyze the hard situation, filling his hour very
+creditably and, if the frequent bursts of applause
+could be taken to mean anything, to the complete
+satisf<a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a>action of his hearers. Indeed, at the end of
+his argument he was given what the local paper of
+the following day was pleased to call "a spontaneous
+and pandemonious ovation."</p>
+
+<p>After the cheering and hand-shaking, Steuchfield
+and his fellow-committeemen went to the train with
+<a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a>the visiting speaker, and no one in the throng of
+congratulators was more enthusiastic than the opposition
+chairman.</p>
+
+<p>"That was a cracking good speech&#8212;a great speech,
+Mr. Blount!" he said, as the branch train rattled in
+from the north. "If you can go all over the State
+making as good talks as the one we've just heard,
+you'll tie the whole shooting-match up in a hard
+knot for us fellows. But McVickar won't let you
+do it&#8212;not by a long shot!"</p>
+
+<p>The potential tier of hard knots laughed genially.
+"I don't blame you for wanting to be shown, Mr.
+Steuchfield. But I can assure you that the new
+policy has come to stay. I have the management
+behind me in this thing, and any day you'll come
+down to the capital I'll put my time against yours
+and try to show you that we are out for open publicity
+and a square deal for every man&#8212;including
+the railroad man."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," was the cordial reply. "I'll be down
+along some of these days, and if you can conv<a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a>ince
+me that McVickar isn't going into politics any further
+than you've gone here to-night, I'll promise you
+to come back to Carnadine and tell the boys the
+jig's up."</p>
+
+<p>A few minutes later the branch train pulled out,
+and the chairman and his fellow-committeemen gave
+the departing joint-debater three cheers and another.
+After the red tail-lights of the train had disappeared
+around the first curve, Steuchfield turned
+to the others with a broad grin.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, boys," he said, "there goes a mighty nice
+young fellow, and I guess we did it up all right for
+him and accordin' to orders. I don't know any
+more'n a sheep what sort of a game Dave Sage-brush
+is playin' this time, but whatever he says
+goes as she lays, and I figure it that we gave the
+young chip o' the old block a right jubilant little
+whirl. Anyhow, he seemed to think so."</p>
+
+<p>Blount did not reach his office in the capital until
+the afternoon of the next day. There was an appalling
+accumulation of letters and telegrams waiting
+to be worked over, but he let the desk litter go untouched
+<a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a>and called up the hotel, only to have a
+small disappointment sent in over the wire. His
+father, Mrs. Blount, and their guest had left for
+Wartrace Hall some time during the forenoon, and
+there had been nothing said in the clerk's hearing
+about their return to the city. Blount hung up the
+receiver, called it one more opportunity missed, and
+sat down to attack the desk litter.</p>
+
+<p>Almost the first thing his eye lighted upon was
+a stenographer's note stating that Mr. Hathaway,
+president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company,
+had been in several times, and was very anxious
+to obtain an interview. Blount pressed the desk
+button, and the stenographer came in promptly.</p>
+
+<p>"This man Hathaway; what did he want?" was
+the brusque question shot at the clerk.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. He said he was stopping at the
+Inter-Mountain, and he asked me to let him know
+when you got back."</p>
+
+<p>"Phone him and tell him I'm here," said Blount;
+and in due time the lumber magnate made his appearance.</p><p><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a></p>
+
+<p>It was not at all in keeping with Mr. Simon Peter
+Hathaway's gifts and adroitness that he should begin
+by attempting a clumsy bit of acting.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "So you're
+the senator's son, are you? If I'd known that, that
+day on the train when you were trying to make me
+believe you were one of Uncle Sam's men&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Blount's smile was neither forgiving nor hostile.</p>
+
+<p>"In a way, I had earned what was handed out
+to me afterward, Mr. Hathaway, and I'm not bearing
+malice," he said briefly. "I had no business to
+let you get away with the wrong impression, but
+you were so exceedingly anxious to identify me with
+the Forest Service that it seemed a pity to disappoint
+you. Since your scoundrels didn't kill me,
+we'll set one incident against the other and forget
+both. What can I do for you to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>By this time the lumber lord was apparently recovering
+his breath and some measure of composure,
+though he had lost neithe<a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a>r.</p>
+
+<p>"Great Jehu!" he lamented. "If you had given
+me half a hint that you were Dave Blount's son&#8212;but
+you didn't, you know, and now I'm handicapped
+just when I oughtn't to be. I've come to
+talk business with you to-day, Mr. Blount, and here
+you've got me on the run the first crack out of the
+box!"</p>
+
+<p>This time Blount's smile was entirely conciliatory.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let that little misfire in the Lost Mountain
+foot-hills embarrass you, Mr. Hathaway. I
+assure you I'm not at all vindictive."</p>
+
+<p>"All right," said the visitor, only too willing to
+dismiss the Jack Barto incident and the forced awkwardness
+of the pretended surprise. "That being
+the case, I'll jump in on the other matter. But
+first I'd like to ask a sort of personal question: I've
+been given to understand that you are handling the
+political business for the railroad company in this
+campaign. Is that right?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is <a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a>and it isn't," was the prompt reply. "The
+railroad company isn't in politics in this campaign&#8212;as
+a political factor, I mean. What we are trying
+to do&#8212;and all we are trying to do&#8212;is to lay
+the entire matter plainly and fairly before the people
+of this State, with a frank appeal for the relief to
+which we are entitled."</p>
+
+<p>"Ha&#8212;h'm&#8212;I guess I get you, Mr. Blount.
+That's the way to talk it; in public, anyway. But,
+just between us two&#8212;I guess we needn't beat the
+bushes in a little personal talk like this&#8212;we both
+know there are certain things that have to be done
+in every campaign; things you wouldn't want to
+publish in the newspapers."</p>
+
+<p>Blount sat back in his chair and the conciliatory
+smile disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"What kind of things?" he asked abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course, I don't know all of 'em. But
+there was one little arrangement that was made two
+years ago with us, and it helped out both ways. I
+thought I'd come around and see if it couldn't be
+<a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a>worked again."</p>
+
+<p>"State the facts," said Blount shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"It was like this. As you know, we've got a
+number of plants scattered around at different
+places in the State, and, one way and another, we
+employ a good many men. These men are residents
+of the State, but you couldn't call 'em citizens
+in the sense that they take any active interest
+in what's going on. They're here this year, and
+they may be up among the Oregon redwoods next
+year, and somewhere else the year after. When
+they vote at all they naturally ask us how we'd
+like to have 'em vote; and that's the way it was
+two years ago at election time."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. But how does this concern the railroad company?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm coming to that, right now. Two years ago
+we found that our employees' vote was big enough
+to turn the scale in four of the legislative districts
+and to cut a pretty good-sized figure in a fifth. This
+vote was worth something to your people, and the
+fact was properly recognized. I don't know but
+what I'm telling you a lot of stale news, but&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"Go on, Mr. Hathaway; if I wasn't greatly interested
+<a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a>in the beginning, I am now. How was the
+fact recognized by the Transcontinental Railway
+Company?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was just as easy as twice two. The Twin
+Buttes Lumber Company is practically the only
+heavy lumber-shipper in this inter-mountain territory,
+and it was given a preferential rate on its
+products; you might say that the amount of business
+we do entitles us to some special consideration,
+anyway. There wasn't any bargain and sale about
+it, you understand. It was just a sort of friendly
+recognition of our help in the election."</p>
+
+<p>"This rate is lower than the rate made to other
+lumber-shippers?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes; but, after all, it isn't any big thing.
+If you were up on lumber rates, Mr. Blount&#8212;as I
+don't suppose you are&#8212;you'd know that the special
+tariff we get is all that enables us to live and do
+business."</p>
+
+<p>Blount had opened his penknife and was absently
+sharpening a pencil.</p>
+
+<p>"This special rate you refer to, Mr. Hathaway,"
+he said, speaking slowly and quite distinctly&#8212;"am
+I right in inferring that it is not confined strictly to
+points within the State boundaries?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a></p>
+<p>At this the lumberman repeated a phrase which
+he had used in the anxious conference in the Weatherford
+herbarium.</p>
+
+<p>"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long
+time without telling you, Mr. Blount. But of course
+you do know. If you wasn't on the inside of all
+the insides you wouldn't be sitting here pulling the
+strings for McVickar. The rate is a blanket; it
+covers all shipments."</p>
+
+<p>Blount nodded and his apparent coolness was no
+just measure of the inward fires the crooked lumber-king
+was kindling.</p>
+
+<p>"You interest me greatly, Mr. Hathaway. I am
+a little new to these things&#8212;as you intimated a few
+moments ago. How is this matter handled&#8212;by
+rebates, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"N-not exactly," was the hesitating denial.
+"That would be too risky for both of us. But
+the Transcontinental Company is a heavy buyer&#8212;lumber
+and cross-ties and bridge timber, you
+know&#8212;and the biggest part of the difference between
+our special and the regular rate is taken up
+in our bills for material furnished to the railroad."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a>"Let me be quite clear upon that point," said
+Blount; and if Hathaway had had eyes to see, he
+would have observed that the young lawyer's attitude
+was becoming more judicial with every fresh
+questioning. "Let me be quite sure that I understand.
+You mean that you are allowed to charge
+the railroad company more than the market price
+on the material it buys?"</p>
+
+<p>Hathaway nodded. "Yes, that's the way of it."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a></p>
+<p>"And this preferential rate is still in force?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is."</p>
+
+<p>"You're sure you have had no notice of its withdrawal&#8212;say
+within the past few weeks?"</p>
+
+<p>It was at this point that the lumber lord began
+to fear that some one had slipped a cog in sending
+him to first one and then another, and finally to
+young Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, it hasn't been withdrawn!" he retorted.
+And then: "You seem to think there is
+something off color in the deal, Mr. Blount, and I
+don't know whether you're stringing me or whether
+you're too new in the railroad game to have the
+dope. If you're going into this political knock-down-and-drag-out,
+you ought to have the dope.
+There isn't a big interest in this State&#8212;ore-shippers,
+power people, irrigation companies, or any of 'em&#8212;that<a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a>
+ain't getting a rake-off. I guess you <i>are</i> stringing
+me; I guess you know all this a good deal better
+than I do. If you don't, I can tell you that it's a
+fact; not a 'has-been', but an 'is'! Ask Gantry;
+he'll tell you, if he tells the truth. We ain't asking
+or getting anything that other people ain't getting!"</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Blount soberly. "What do you expect
+me to do, Mr. Hathaway?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want you to set the wheels in motion so that
+we can have our rate made good for another two
+years&#8212;on the same terms as before. You're going
+to need every vote you can get this year, and you
+can't afford to turn us down." Then the lumber-king
+shifted again to his own necessities. "It's the
+only way we can live and do business nowadays.
+Like every other large corporation, we've got an
+army of little investors to look out for: widows,
+orphans, charitable institutions, and trustees' accounts.
+I've got a list of our stockholders right
+here, and I'd like to have you look it over."</p>
+
+<p>Blount took the paper mechanically, and quite
+as mechanically ran his eye down the list of names.
+At the bottom of it, written in with a pen, was the
+<a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a>name of Patricia's father, with his residence and occupation.
+While he was staring at the pen-written
+name, Hathaway went on, eloquently emphasizing
+the disastrous results which would fall upon the people
+for whom he was, in the larger sense, a guardian
+and a trustee&#8212;the disaster hinging upon the
+withdrawal of the preferential rate.</p>
+
+<p>Blount broke him abruptly in the midst of the
+special plea. "I see you have recently added one
+new name to this list: the name of Professor Anners.
+How&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," interrupted the Twin Buttes diplomatist
+hastily, fearing that this legal-minded young man
+would presently be asking questions too hard to be
+answered; "now there's a case in point: Mr. Anners
+is a good example of our smaller stockholders. Men
+like Anners, college professors, preachers, and so on,
+buy stocks, when they buy 'em at all, for an investment&#8212;for
+the income&#8212;and they pay for 'em out
+of their hard-earned savings."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Blount, and, since he was the last
+man in the world to be diverted from his purpose
+by any conversational dust-throwing, he pressed
+the question cut off by the hasty interruption.
+"What I was going to ask wa<a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a>s how you happen
+to have added Professor Anners's name to your
+list&#8212;recently, it seems?"</p>
+
+<p>The lumberman was reduced to the necessity of
+inventing a ready lie. He had obeyed his instructions
+blindly, on the supposition that young Blount
+would know and understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Anners? Oh, he knows a good thing when he
+sees it; and I guess maybe your father put him on.
+He's a friend of the family, ain't he? Maybe the
+senator found a little chunk of 'Twin Buttes' that
+he didn't want himself, and passed it along."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's blood ran cold at the sight of the cracking
+walls and crumbling foundations on every hand.
+The proof that the railroad company's lawless attitude
+was still unchanged was too strong to be
+doubted; and now there was an added blow from
+the hand of his father. He wheeled short upon the
+lumber-king.</p>
+
+<p>"Who sent you to me, Mr. Hathaway?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>The hawk-faced man laughed. "I guess you
+know just as well or better than I do. But just
+to show you that I can keep my mouth shut, I ain't
+going to tell you. It's all right and straigh<a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a>t&#8212;and
+you might say it's all in the family, counting the
+professor in on the side, as it were."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," Blount said, and this time he was only
+too sure that he did see. Then: "What is it you
+want me to do for you, Mr. Hathaway? You have
+told me once, but I'm afraid I didn't grasp it fully."</p>
+
+<p>"Fix it with Gantry, or somebody, so that we can
+put the company vote where it's most needed and
+get our rate continued. It's simple enough."</p>
+
+<p>"The simplicity is beyond question." Blount returned
+the list of stockholders and fell back upon
+the pencil-sharpening. "It is quite elementary, as
+you say; but there is another phase of the transaction
+which seems to have escaped you. Are you
+aware that the present arrangement which you have
+so accurately described, and the continuance of it
+which you are proposing, are crimes for which both
+parties involved may be called into court and punished?"</p>
+
+<p>Hathaway started as if the comfortable chair in
+which he was lounging had been suddenly electrified.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, Blount, are you working for the railroad,<a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a>
+or not?" he demanded. "If you are, what in the
+name of Heaven are you driving at? I know the
+line of talk you've been handing out since McVickar
+gave you your job and set you up in business here,
+but that's for the dear public. You don't have to
+wear your halo when a man comes in to talk hard
+facts from the inside. It comes to just this: you
+do something for me, and I do something for you.
+You make it possible for us to live and sell lumber,
+and we do what we can to make it easy for your
+railroad to get its 'square deal' from a pie-cutting
+legislature. That's the whole thing in a nutshell."</p>
+
+<p>"One more question," snapped Blount, striving to
+fix the roving gaze of the hawk-like eyes. "With
+whom did you make this arrangement two years
+ago?"</p>
+
+<p>"With your boss, if you want to know; with Mr.
+McVickar himself!"</p>
+
+<p>"And you think you can do it again?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know damned well I can; only I don't care
+to go over your head unless I have to. They tell
+me you're handling this end of it for the railroad
+company, and I'm not going around hunting a
+chance to make enemies. That's all I've got to
+say"&#8212;and he rose to go&#8212;"all but this: you've got
+a lot to learn about this something-for-something
+business, and the quicker you get at it, Mr. Blount,
+the sooner you'll arrive somewhere. About this
+<a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a>little matter of ours, there's no special hurry. Take
+your own time to think it over; take it up with
+McVickar, if you want to. Then, when you get
+things fixed, wire me one word to Twin Buttes.
+Just say 'Yes,' and sign your name to it. That'll
+be enough."</p>
+
+<p>For a long half-hour after the president of the
+Twin Buttes Lumber Company and its allied corporations
+had closed the door of the private office
+behind him, Blount sat rocking gently in his pivot-chair.
+In the fulness of time the bitter thoughts
+wrought their way into words.</p>
+
+<p>"So this is what I was hired for!" he mused, "a
+fence; a wretched mask put up to hide the trickery
+and chicanery and criminality&#8212;the crookedness
+which has never been put aside; which nobody
+ever meant to put aside! My God! they've let me
+stultify myself in a thousand ways; let me sit here
+day after day with a lie in my mouth, saying things
+that nobody in this God-forsaken homeland of mine
+has believed for a single minute! After it's all over,
+every man who has listened to me will say that I
+<i>knew</i>&#8212;that all this talk about openness and fair
+dealing was simply that much dust-throwing to
+hide the workings of a corrupt and criminal machine
+grinding away in the background!"</p><p><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a></p>
+
+<p>He turned to his desk and sat with his head propped
+in his hands, staring at the little photograph of Wartrace
+Hall which he had had mounted in a plateglass
+paper-weight. The sight gave an added twist
+to the torture screw and he broke out again.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been nothing more than a bit of potter's
+clay, and the master potter&#8212;God help me!&#8212;is my
+own father! It's all plain enough now. He saw
+that I wasn't going to fall in with the attorney-general
+scheme; or perhaps he saw that I might
+be a stumbling-block if I should; so he planned
+this thing with McVickar&#8212;planned it deliberately!
+There is no fight, after all; it's merely one of the
+moves in the game that the 'boss' and the railroad
+should seem to be fighting each other. Good God!
+I can't believe it, and yet I've got to believe it.
+That man Hathaway is a self-confessed criminal,
+but he was telling the truth about the law-breaking
+trickery that is going on; he wouldn't be idiotic
+enough to lie and then give me a chance to prove
+the lie. And he didn't come to me of his own volition;
+he was sent&#8212;sent to break me down, and sent
+by.... Oh, dad, dad! how could you do it!"</p>
+
+<p>With his face hidden in the crook of his arm, he
+was groping in vain outreachings<a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a> for something to
+lay hold of, for some clear-minded, clean-hearted
+adviser who could tell him what to do; how he
+should clamber out of this pit of humiliation into
+which nothing more culpable than an honest zeal
+for civic righteousness had precipitated him. In his
+despair he told himself that there was no one, and
+then suddenly he remembered&#8212;Patricia would know,
+and she would understand better than any one else
+in a populous world how to point the way out of the
+labyrinth. He must go to her and tell her. In
+the meantime....</p>
+
+<p>He got up and shut his desk with a slam. In the
+meantime there should be no more lies told&#8212;no
+more turns taken in the crooked path. Collins, the
+stenographer, heard the noise of the desk closing
+and came to the door of the private room, note-book
+and pencil in hand. "Anything to give me
+before you go out?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Blount almost savagely. "Take a
+message to Mr. McVickar. Are you ready?"</p>
+
+<p>The stenographer nodded.</p>
+
+<p>Blount dictated curtly: "'Pending another interview
+with you in person, I shall close my offices in
+Temple Court and confine myself strictly to the
+routine legal business of the company. Meanwhile,
+my resignation is in your hands if you wish to appoint
+a new division counsel.' Have you<a name="Page_221" id="Page_221"></a> got that,
+Collins? Very well; write it out and send it at
+once. I shall be at the Inter-Mountain for a little
+while, if you want to reach me between now and
+closing time."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT</h3>
+
+
+<p>Going to the hotel, Blount shut himself into a
+telephone booth and tried, ineffectually, to get a
+long-distance connection with Wartrace Hall. When
+he finally grew exasperated at the central operator's
+oft-repeated "line's busy," he called up Gantry to
+ask if the traffic manager knew anything about the
+purposes and movements of his father. Gantry did
+not know, but he knew something else&#8212;a thing
+which proved the leakiness of the railroad telegraph
+department.</p>
+
+<p>"Come down here and tell me what you mean by
+<a name="Page_222" id="Page_222"></a>sending incendiary telegrams to the vice-president,"
+he commanded, with jesting severity. And with a
+hard word for the department which had gossiped,
+Blount went down to the general offices in the station
+building.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was busy with the stenographer, but the
+business was immediately postponed and the clerk
+dismissed when Blount entered.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tell it out among the heathen,'" the traffic
+manager quoted jocosely, when the door closed behind
+the shorthand man.</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing to tell&#8212;more than you seem
+to know already," snapped Blount morosely. "I
+have wired my resignation, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"But why?" persisted Gantry.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I'm not going to be an accessory, either
+before or after the fact&#8212;not if I know it," was the
+curt rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223"></a>"An accessory to what?"</p>
+
+<p>"To the criminal disregard for the laws of this
+State and the nation which seems to be the underlying
+motive actuating every move in this corrupt game
+of politics. Gantry, if you and some others had
+your just deserts, you would be breaking stone in
+the penitentiary this blessed minute!"</p>
+
+<p>"Suffering Moses!" gasped the traffic manager.
+"Somebody must have been hitting you pretty
+hard. Who was it; some more of the 'little brothers'?"</p>
+
+<p>At another time Blount might have been less
+angry, and, by consequence, more discreet.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it wasn't any of the 'little brothers'; it was
+Mr. Simon P. Hathaway, president of the Twin
+Buttes Lumber Company."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry drew a long breath which ended in a low
+whistle.</p>
+
+<p>"So that's what you were let in for, was it?" he
+exclaimed, and then he checked h<a name="Page_224" id="Page_224"></a>imself abruptly
+and went back to the original contention. "But
+you're not going to throw down your tools and walk
+out, Evan. You can't afford to do that."</p>
+
+<p>"Why can't I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you have committed yourself right and
+left. No man can afford to drop out of the ranks
+on the eve of a battle. You are not stopping to
+consider the construction which will be put upon
+any such hasty action on your part."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not stopping to consider anything, Dick,
+save the fact that I was evidently expected to connive
+at a cynical and criminal disregard for the law
+of the land, the law which, as a member of the bar,
+I have sworn to uphold and defend. That is enough
+for me. I don't have to be knocked down and run
+over before I can realize that it's time to get out of
+the way."</p>
+
+<p>"You say it's enough for you; it won't be enough
+for Mr. McVickar," Gantry interposed. "If you
+could afford to drop out&#8212;and I'm not admitting that
+you can&#8212;he cou<a name="Page_225" id="Page_225"></a>ldn't afford to let you." Then, with
+sudden gravity: "Hadn't you better let me hold up
+that telegram of yours for a few hours, Evan, until
+you've had time to cool down and think it over?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount sprang from his chair in a white heat.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to tell me that you are already
+holding it up?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"I took the liberty of holding it up&#8212;temporarily,"
+confessed the traffic man coolly. "There is no
+harm done. Mr. McVickar is on his way West now,
+and he will be here in a day or two. Why not kill
+the message and have it out with him in person
+when he comes?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount was not to be so easily appeased.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't have my communications tampered
+with!" he exploded. "If you have given an order
+to have that telegram held out, you can give another
+to have it sent immediately!"</p>
+
+<p>"All<a name="Page_226" id="Page_226"></a> right," said Gantry; "just as you say." And
+he made no effort to detain the enraged one who was
+turning his back and striding away. But after the
+self-discharged political manager was gone, the traffic
+man chuckled quietly and turned up a square of
+paper which had been lying on his desk during the
+short and belligerent interview.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a nice lay-out," he mused, reading the
+type-written lines over again, "but the little lady
+was too fly for you this time, Evan, my boy. She
+was just prophetess enough to guess where and how
+you would go off the handle, clever enough to pass
+me the word to watch the wires after a certain train
+should get in from Ophir to-day. Great little woman,
+that. I believe she figures out more than half of
+the fine moves in the Honorable Senator's game,
+though this particularly fine move of sending Hathaway
+to touch a match to Evan's little powder-keg
+is one that I don't begin to understand." And he
+folded the telegram and carefully put it away in his
+pocket-book.</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount walked three squares beyond the
+Inter-Mountain Hotel before he had cooled down
+sufficiently to determine what to do next. As it
+chanced, the cooling-down process had led him to
+the door of the public garage patronized by his
+father. That thought of flying to Patricia for counsel
+<a name="Page_227" id="Page_227"></a>and comfort was still with him, but it was over-shadowed
+by a more militant desire to fight somebody;
+to go to his father and tell him how completely
+and successfully he had plotted with the vice-president
+to humiliate a son whose only offence was a
+decent regard for honor and uprightness.</p>
+
+<p>Acting upon the impulse of the moment, he went
+in and asked if any of Senator Blount's cars were
+in the city. There was one&#8212;the big roadster; and
+Blount's decision was taken instantly. On that first
+day at Wartrace Hall his father had tried to give
+him one of the three motor-cars outright, and when
+he had refused to take it as a gift, a compromise had
+been made by which he was under promise to use
+any one of the machines he could get hold of when
+the need arose. Accordingly, a few minutes later
+he was behind the steering-wheel of the fast roadster,
+picking his way through the traffic-burdened
+city streets and pointing straight for the country
+road leading north to the sage-brush hills.</p>
+
+<p>Now, among its many attractions, motoring numbers&#8212;from
+the driver's point of view&#8212;this: that
+it effectually sweeps the brain of all other cares and
+distractions, sundry and several, since one may not
+drive a high-powered car at speed and successfully
+think of anything but th<a name="Page_228" id="Page_228"></a>e driving. Blount
+reached the entrance to the cottonwood-shaded avenue
+at Wartrace Hall just before the dinner hour;
+and he was so far recovered from the attack of righteous
+indignation that he was able to meet his father
+and the others with a fair degree of equanimity. In
+the back part of his mind, however, he held the
+fighting ultimatum in suspense. In the course of
+the evening he would make his opportunity and have
+it out, once for all, with the master plotter. So
+much he determined while he was dressing for dinner.
+But the course of events is sometimes a most
+unmalleable thing, as he was presently to learn.</p>
+
+<p>At the dinner-table it was the professor who
+monopolized the conversation, holding forth learnedly
+and dictatorially upon matters pertaining solely
+to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the
+talk to approach nearer than several million years
+to the twentieth century. And at the dispersal&#8212;only
+there was no dispersal&#8212;the senator took his
+turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room
+and persuading Patricia to go to the piano.</p>
+
+<p>The young man with the fighting determination
+in the back part of his brain bided his time. He
+was willing enough to listen to Grieg and Brahms
+as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater
+matter was still outweighing the lesser. Further
+along, when <a name="Page_229" id="Page_229"></a>Miss Anners had played herself out,
+Blount tried to break the obstructing combination.
+But, in spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to
+the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls, and when he
+finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.</p>
+
+<p>The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room,
+and through the bamboo <i>portières</i> he could
+hear the animated hum of the prehistoric discussion,
+in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter
+should. Hoping against hope that the professor
+would some time go to bed, and that his father would
+come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the long-stemmed
+pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But
+when his patience was finally rewarded, it was not
+the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo <i>portières</i>
+aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It
+was Patricia, and she was alone.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought perhaps I should find you here," she
+said, taking the easy chair at the opposite corner
+of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was blazing
+in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn.
+"Did we bore you to death with the Pliocenes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But
+since I hadn't remembered to have myself born six
+or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to
+galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone
+periods."</p><p><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for
+daddy's sake I do try to. But for us who are
+living to-day there are so many problems of critically
+vital importance&#8212;problems that the pterodactyls
+never knew anything about."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," returned the young man, half-absently.
+"I am up against one of them, right now, and I don't
+know how to solve it."</p>
+
+<p>"Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped
+that the sympathy in her tone was personal rather
+than conventional.</p>
+
+<p>"It will not only bear telling; it demands to be
+told to some one whose sense of right and wrong
+has not been drawn and quartered and flayed alive
+until it has no longer life or breath left with which
+to protest," and thereupon he told her circumstantially
+all that had befallen him since the eventful
+evening on which he had forsaken the wrecked
+train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of
+the lumber magnate's attempt at corruption, of
+which he suppressed nothing but the fact that her
+father's name appeared in Mr. Hathaway's list of
+share-holders. When he had made an end, her eyes
+<a name="Page_231" id="Page_231"></a>were shining, though whether with quickened sympathy
+or indignation he could not determine.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do?" she asked, referring to the
+incident of the afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't do half enough!" he fumed. "I'm
+afraid I let Hathaway escape without being told
+plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable
+scoundrel he is. When he edged out of the door,
+he was still telling me to take my time to think it
+over, and was indicating the way in which I might
+communicate my consent without committing anybody.
+I made a mistake in not firing him bodily!"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anners was tapping one daintily shod foot
+on the tiled hearth.</p>
+
+<p>"You made your greatest mistake in the very
+beginning, Evan," she said decisively. "You should
+have made a confidant of your father."</p>
+
+<p>"I did try to," he protested. "Everything was
+all right until this political business came up between
+us. But that opened the rift. I couldn't
+do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were
+with the corporations which I thought he was fighting
+unjustly. So when Mr. McVickar made me an
+offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I could
+really do something toward bringing about a better
+understanding."</p><p><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232"></a></p>
+
+<p>"And now you believe you can't?&#8212;that it is impossible?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not wholly impossible, I suppose. But the 'great
+game' seems to be everything in this benighted commonwealth,
+and everybody plays it&#8212;my father,
+his wife, the railroad officials, and the politicians.
+Surely you wouldn't say that I should have let father
+put me on the State ticket as a candidate,
+knowing&#8212;as I could not help knowing&#8212;that I would
+be expected to carry out the designs of the machine
+regardless of right and wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not," was the quick reply, "not if you
+were convinced that the motive&#8212;your father's motive&#8212;was
+unworthy. But if you have been telling
+me the truth, and all the truth, I should say that
+you didn't stop to inquire what his motive was."</p>
+
+<p>"What was the use of inquiring?" he demanded
+moodily. "He is the boss, and he would have used
+the machine to put me into office as attorney-general.
+In other words, I should have owed my election,
+not to the will and selection of the people, but to
+the will of one man, and that man my nearest kinsman;
+a man who is, beyond all question of doubt,
+working hand in glove with all the trickery and
+double-d<a name="Page_233" id="Page_233"></a>ealing practised by the corporations. Under
+such conditions, would it have been possible
+for me to accept and to administer the office without
+fear or favor?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know why not," she returned. "Notwithstanding
+your charge&#8212;which merely shows how
+angry you are&#8212;your 'nearest kinsman,' as you call
+him, would have been the last man in the world to
+interfere. Wasn't that the very reason he gave
+you for wanting to put you on the ticket?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Blount, whose mind was beginning
+to cloud again. "But there are so many other
+mysteries. We'll say that my father honestly
+wanted me to stand for the candidacy. But right
+in the midst of things he conspires with Mr. McVickar
+to put me into my present unspeakable dilemma."</p>
+
+<p>Her smile was gently reproachful.</p>
+
+<p>"It is my poor opinion, Evan, that you don't half
+appreciate your father. Worse than that, you don't
+know him. But that is beside the present mark.
+What are you going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have already done it. I have wired my resignation
+to Mr. McVickar, and he will doubtless
+accept it."</p>
+
+<p>She was looking him fairly in the eyes. "That
+is the second unwise thing you have done," she remarked.
+And then: "Evan, there are times when
+you are sadly in need of a balance-wheel. Don't<a name="Page_234" id="Page_234"></a>
+you know that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I knew it a good while ago. I applied for one
+once, and it was refused when you said 'No'."</p>
+
+<p>For one who was supposed to be far above and
+beyond such emotional signallings, she blushed very
+prettily. Which merely proves that one may be a
+diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating
+the miseries of a sodden world, without having
+parted with the primitive sex impulse.</p>
+
+<p>"I am willing to try to help you now," she said,
+half hesitating; "if only you won't try to drag me
+over into the field of sentiment. It was just a bit
+of boyish rage&#8212;fine enough in its way, but foolish&#8212;your
+sending that telegram to Mr. McVickar. Can't
+you recall it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; not now."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you must do the next best thing: tell him
+you have reconsidered."</p>
+
+<p>"But I haven't reconsidered; I can't and won't
+stand in with the corruption and bribery that is going
+on all around me!" he objected indignantly.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you can't; and you mustn't. But
+the true reformer doesn't drop things and run away.
+You must stay in and fight&#8212;fight harder than you
+ever have before, Evan. If you can't do it for the<a name="Page_235" id="Page_235"></a>
+sake of the larger right, then you must do it for your
+own sake. Can't you see the open door before you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can see and hear and feel when the door is
+slammed in my face," was the qualifying rejoinder.
+"How can I go on preaching the gospel of cleanness
+and fair dealing, when I know that all this
+crooked work is going on behind my back? What
+will the people of this State say to me and about
+me when the crookedness comes to light?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" she said; "that is just where you begin
+to grow one-sided. You must go on preaching the
+gospel, but that is only half of the battle. The other
+half is to be big enough and strong enough and insistent
+enough to make the thing itself agree with
+the gospel. I fully believe you lost your best helper
+when you refused to join hands with your father.
+You don't believe that, so we'll let it go. You have
+gone your own way, choosing what seemed to you
+to be the better opportunity. Evan, you can't turn
+back; you've simply <i>got</i> to go on and wring success
+out of apparent failure!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount drew a deep breath and<a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"></a> sat up in his chair.
+There was no mistaking the light in Patricia's eyes
+now; the pure flame of which it was the visible
+radiance is the torch which has kindled the beacon
+fires on all the heights since the world began.</p>
+
+<p>"If I had only my own people&#8212;the railroad people&#8212;to
+knock down and drag out," he was beginning,
+but she broke in warmly:</p>
+
+<p>"You think you have your father against you,
+too; I don't believe it, but you do. Very well; then
+you must compel him, as well as the others. Be a
+big man, Evan; be the biggest man in the State
+until you have proved that one man with a righteous
+cause is better than ten thousand without it."</p>
+
+<p>Blount got up and stood with his back to the
+dying embers of the tiny fire, and if he put his
+hands behind him it was because the passionate
+impulse to break down all the barriers was twitching
+in every fibre of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Patricia, girl, I wonder if you know what you
+have done to me? I drove out here this evening
+utterly discouraged and disheart<a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"></a>ened; bitter and
+angry, and ready to throw the whole thing up and
+go away. You've changed all that&#8212;you, you know;
+just you. Oh, girl, girl! if I could only have you
+beside me to give me my battle-word!"</p>
+
+<p>She had her slender fingers locked over one knee
+and her eyes were downcast.</p>
+
+<p>"Now you are tempting me," she said slowly;
+"and&#8212;and it isn't fair. You know my weakness
+and passion to help. You <i>mustn't</i> tempt me, Evan."</p>
+
+<p>What he would have said, with what eager pleadings
+he would have pressed the advantage gained
+by his appeal for the larger help, is not to be here
+set down. For at that moment the bamboo door
+curtains parted to admit the small house-mistress.</p>
+
+<p>"You two!" she scolded with light-hearted austerity.
+And then to Evan: "Don't you know that
+we are keeping country hours here at Wartrace
+now? The professor will be up and calling for the
+car at six o'clock, and it's past midnight. Shame
+on you! Run away and get your beauty sleep&#8212;both
+of you!"</p>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238"></a></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LIEGEMAN</h3>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239"></a>Evan Blount drove himself back to the capital
+in the swift roadster the following morning, and
+there was no opportunity for further confidential
+speech with Patricia before he left. But with the
+new day had arisen, full-grown, the determination
+born in the moment of midnight heart-warming and
+inspiration. To the best of his ability he would
+live up to the high standard set for him by the
+woman he loved, not only preaching the gospel of
+fair dealing, but doing his utmost to make it effective.</p>
+
+<p>With this high purpose singing its song of exaltation
+in his veins, he drove on past the garage and
+made an early call at the office of the traffic manager.
+Gantry was in the midst of his morning mail-opening,
+but he pushed the desk-load of papers aside
+when the door swung inward to admit the early
+visitor.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, old man! Come back to jar me some
+more about that telegram?" was his greeting.</p>
+
+<p>Blount shook his head. "No; if you've sent it,
+well and good. If you haven't, you may pitch it
+into the waste-basket. I came to talk about something
+<a name="Page_240" id="Page_240"></a>else."</p>
+
+<p>"Good, sound, sensible second thought!" Gantry
+commented, laughing. Then he took out his
+pocket-book and passed the suppressed telegram
+across to Blount. "Here it is; you can do the
+waste-basket act yourself. I couldn't let you commit
+<i>hara-kiri</i> without at least trying to get the cutting
+tool out of your hands. What is the other
+thing you've got on your mind this early in the
+morning? It must be a nightmare of some sort, by
+the look in your eyes."</p>
+
+<p>"It may figure as a nightmare to you, Dick, before
+we're through with it. I'll make it short. You
+know what I have been doing&#8212;what I supposed I
+was hired to do&#8212;assuring everybody right and left
+that we were going into this campaign with clean
+hands?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," admitted the traffic manager, developing
+a sudden interest in the figures of the rug at
+his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been doing this in a business way at my
+office up-town, in season and out of season, and night
+before last, at Ophir, I did it publicly. As the campaign
+progr<a name="Page_241" id="Page_241"></a>esses, I shall doubtless put myself on
+record many times to the same effect."</p>
+
+<p>"Good man!" applauded Gantry, striving to drag
+the talk down to some less portentous altitude.
+"I'm sure we need all the whitewashing anybody
+can give us."</p>
+
+<p>"That is just the point I have come to make,"
+Blount went on gravely. "It mustn't be merely a
+coat of whitewash, Dick; it has got to be the real
+thing, this time. I began by firing the 'little
+brothers,' as you called them, but I sha'n't stop at
+that; I mean to go higher up if I am compelled to.
+I am here this morning to ask you to give me your
+word as a gentleman and my friend that you will
+not, directly or indirectly, do or cause to be done
+anything that will make me stand forth as a self-convicted
+liar before the people of this State. I
+want you to promise me that you will cut out all
+the deals, all the briberies, all the bargainings, all
+the&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, say; see here!" protested the man under
+fire; "you've got the wrong pig by the ear,
+Evan. I'm not the Transcontinental Railway
+Company!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know you are not. But, to a greater degree
+than any other official<a name="Page_242" id="Page_242"></a> in the local management,
+you have Mr. McVickar's confidence. If you don't
+feel competent to handle the thing on your own
+responsibility, of course it's your privilege to pass
+it up to those who have the authority. In that
+case, I wish to make one point clear: you're the
+man I'm going to hold up to the rack. I can't afford
+to spread myself over the entire management,
+and I don't mean to try. I'm going to look to you,
+Dick, for the backing of the clean sheet, and I warn
+you in all soberness that there must be no blots on
+it; no compromises; no whipping of the devil around
+the stump."</p>
+
+<p>"Great Scott!" murmured Gantry. "And you're
+on the pay-rolls, the same as the rest of us! But
+candidly, as man to man, Evan, the thing can't be
+done, you know. We've got to play the game;
+they'll eat us alive if we don't. You needn't figure
+in it at all; it was a mistake letting Sim Hathaway
+get to you, and I said so at the time. But your&#8212;er&#8212;the
+powers that be said it had to be that way,
+and I had to let him go and ball you all up. It
+sha'n't happen again; I can promise you that much,
+anyway."</p>
+
+<p>Blount caught quickly at the hesitant pause.</p>
+
+<p>"Who were 'the powers that be' in Hathaway's
+case, Dick?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't tell you that; honestly, I can't, Evan,"
+was the anxious refusal. "Don't ask me."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243"></a>"All right; then I shall assume that Mr. McVickar
+was responsible," said Blount calmly, thus proving
+that he had not taken his degree in the law school
+for nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, hold on! You mustn't do that, either!"
+protested the man who was figuring most unwillingly
+as the occupant of the witness stand.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," returned the postgraduate, with
+the true Blount smile. "Now I know that it was
+my father. No; you needn't deny it; I suppose it
+was for some good reason that this man was sent
+to teach me how to play the game&#8212;as reasons go
+in practical politics. But we are side-stepping the
+real issue. I've asked you for a promise: will you
+give it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&#8212;I can't give it, Evan, and hold my job; that's
+God's own truth!"</p>
+
+<p>"No; it isn't God's truth&#8212;it's the other kind.
+But that was about what I expected you to say.
+Now hear my side of it: if you don't clean house&#8212;you
+and the other officials of the company&#8212;I shall
+not only resign; I shall take the field on the other
+side and tell what I know and why I've thrown up
+my job. I've been telling everybody that this is to
+be a campaign of publicity, and by all that is good
+and great, I shall keep my word, Dick!"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244"></a></p>
+<p>"Oh, for heaven's sake, you wouldn't do that!"
+ejaculated the traffic man, now thoroughly alarmed.
+"Land of glory, Evan! you know too much&#8212;a great
+deal too much!"</p>
+
+<p>The young man who knew too much got up and
+relighted his cigar with a match taken from Gantry's
+desk box.</p>
+
+<p>"It's up to you," he said, with his hand on the
+door-knob. "Get into communication with whatever
+'powers that be' there are that can give the
+necessary orders; see to it that the orders are given,
+and that they are put in the way of being carried
+out. As God hears me, Dick, I mean what I say:
+it's a clean sheet, or an exposure that will make a
+lot of you wish you had never been born. If I have
+to put the screws on&#8212;as I hope and pray I sha'n't&#8212;you
+can bet they'll be put on lawyer-fashion; with
+evidence that will send a bunch of you to the penitentiary."</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on&#8212;one question before you go, Evan!"
+pleaded Gantry. "I haven't known half the time
+where I'm at in this latest muddle. Is this another
+little blind lead of the Honorable Sen&#8212;of your
+father's?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245"></a></p>
+<p>Blount's smile was as grim as any that Gantry
+had ever seen on the face of the Honorable David.</p>
+
+<p>"It's against nature for you to play the game
+straight, isn't it, Dick?" he said in mild reproach.
+"If you don't know that my father is still the head
+of the machine, and that the machine has always
+been for you in the past, I imagine you're the
+only man in the Sage-Brush State who needs enlightening.
+No, Gantry; you've got only one man
+to fight; but you mustn't forget that his name, also,
+is Blount. Go to it and send me word, and let the
+first word be that you have scotched the head of
+this lumber-company snake. That's all for to-day.
+Good-by."</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the fact that his day's work was
+still ahead of him, the traffic manager did not attack
+it when he was left alone. An able man in his calling,
+and one who had fought his way rapidly by sheer
+merit and hard work from a clerkship to an official
+desk, Richard Gantry was still lacking, in a character
+admirable and most lovable in many ways,
+the iron that refuses to bend, and&#8212;though perhaps
+in lesser measure&#8212;the courage of his ultimate convictions.
+In addition to these basic weaknesses he
+owned another&#8212;the weakness of the cog which is
+constrained to turn with the great wheel of which
+it is a part.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246"></a></p>
+<p>In his heart of hearts Richard Gantry knew that
+Blount was right; knew that the forlorn-hope fight
+into which his friend and college classmate had
+plunged was a struggle to call out all that was best
+and finest in friendly loyalty. But when he sprang
+from his chair and began to walk the floor of his
+private office with his head down and his hands
+deeply buried in his pockets, he was once more the
+true corporation liegeman, loyal to his salt, and
+anxious only to contrive means to an end.</p>
+
+<p>"Confound his picture!" he muttered, "why the
+devil can't he see that he's got everything to lose
+and nothing to gain? It's a thousand pities that
+such a royal good fellow has to turn himself into a
+wild-eyed, impossible crank! The Lord knows, I'd
+do anything in reason for him; but I can't let him
+turn anarchist and blow us all to kingdom come.
+He's got to be muzzled in some way, and I'll be
+hanged if I know how it's going to be done."</p>
+
+<p>The pacing monologue paused when the traffic
+manager stopped at the window and stood looking
+with unseeing eyes upon the morning bustle of
+Sierra Avenue. Then he broke out again.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a beautiful tangle&#8212;damn' beautiful! Evan
+says I know that we've got the machine with us; I
+<a name="Page_247" id="Page_247"></a>wish to heaven I did know it, and could be sure of
+it. That would simplify matters a whole lot. But
+the vice-president won't say, and he's the one who
+has been doing all the dickering with the Honorable
+David. They quarrelled at first; I'd bet every dollar
+I've got on that. But I more than half-believe
+they've patched it up now, and I believe it was Mr.
+McVickar's quick swiping of Evan&#8212;jerking him out
+from under his father's thumb the way he did&#8212;that
+brought on the peace negotiations."</p>
+
+<p>He turned away from the window and resumed
+the floor-pacing, still wrestling with the deductions.</p>
+
+<p>"By George! I believe I've got hold of the end
+of the thread at last! The senator <i>is</i> with us, working
+in the dark, as he always does. And that Hathaway
+business: that was one of his smooth little
+side-moves&#8212;his or Mrs. Honoria's. He didn't want
+Evan to get in too deep in the righteousness puddle,
+and he took that way of letting him get a peek at
+the real thing. It was overdone, though; horribly
+overdone. Confound it all! I wish Mr. McVickar
+would loosen up a little more with me! If he'd tell
+me a few of the things I ought to know&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>The interruption was the entrance of the boy
+from the<a name="Page_248" id="Page_248"></a> train-despatcher's office with a verbal message.
+The vice-president, moving westward, had
+changed his plans and cut out some of his stop-overs.
+Car "008" would be in on the noon train
+and would proceed westward, running special, at
+one o'clock. The despatcher had thought that Mr.
+Gantry might want to know.</p>
+
+<p>The traffic manager did want to know, and when
+the boy had ducked out, the knowledge was promptly
+utilized. A touch of a desk-button brought the
+stenographer, and Gantry dictated a message. "'Important
+that I should have conference with you on
+arrival. Will meet you at train at twelve-three.'
+Send that to Mr. McVickar over the despatcher's
+wire, and ask Gilkey to rush it," he directed, and
+the shorthand man went to do it.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Mr. Evan Anarchist Blount!" said Gantry,
+apostrophizing the late disturber of his peace, "now
+we'll find out just where we're at and how big a rope
+it's going to take to snub you down," and thereupon
+the desk buzzer rattled again, and Mr. Richard Gantry
+squared himself for his forenoon's work.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment of his apostrophizing Blount was
+opening his mail in the Temple Court office, and lamenting,
+as a loyal friend might, the necessity for
+the recent clubbing into line of so fine a fellow as
+Dick Gantry. But the mail-opening plunged him
+once more into the political actualities. There were
+letters from all over the State, and among them
+three invitations from widely separated cities, all
+based upon the newspaper reports of his Ophir
+<a name="Page_249" id="Page_249"></a>speech. It seemed to be plainly evident that the
+"campaign-of-education" idea was striking a popular
+chord, and the proponent of the idea saw what
+a miraculous opportunity was offering for the railroad
+if only the "powers" that Gantry had refused to
+name were broad enough and high-minded enough
+to seize it.</p>
+
+<p>After a day and an evening well filled with detail,
+Blount went to the station to take the nine-thirty
+<a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a>west-bound, since the first of the three speaking
+engagements&#8212;all of which had been promptly
+accepted by wire&#8212;lay in that direction. On the
+platform, whither he went to consult the bulletin-board,
+he found Gantry.</p>
+
+<p>"Your train is half an hour late," said the traffic
+man, with a glance for the travelling-bag in Blount's
+hand. "Didn't they know enough at the hotel to
+tell you about it?"</p>
+
+<p>"They told me it was on time," said the putative
+traveller, and he was far enough from suspecting
+that Gantry himself had arranged to have the inaccurate
+information given across the counter at the
+Inter-Mountain, so that he might be sure of an uninterrupted
+half-hour with Blount before he should
+leave the city.</p>
+
+<p>"Ump!" said the traffic manager, "I've got to
+wait for it, too. One of my men is coming in on it.
+Let's go up to the office. It's pleasanter there."</p>
+
+<p>Together they climbed the stair to the second<a name="Page_251" id="Page_251"></a>
+floor of the station building, and Gantry unlocked
+the door of his private room and turned on the
+lights.</p>
+
+<p>"Feeling any more humane than you did this
+morning?" he inquired genially, after he had opened
+his desk and found a box of cigars.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't been feeling otherwise since&#8212;well,
+let's say since midnight last night," countered
+Blount laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Why midnight?"</p>
+
+<p>"That was about the time when I made up my
+mind definitely to stay in the fight."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are still meaning to go ahead on the
+lines you laid down this morning?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I wasn't, I shouldn't be here to take the
+train for the rally at Angora to-morrow night."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry smoked in silence for a little time. Then
+he said: "You can't do it, Evan. It's fine and glorious
+and heart-breaking, and all that; but you can't
+do it."</p>
+
+<p>"I can, and I will!"</p>
+
+<p>"I say you can't. I know a good bit more now
+than I knew this morning!"</p>
+
+<p>"Catalogue it," said B<a name="Page_252" id="Page_252"></a>lount tersely.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. McVickar came in on the noon train to-day,
+and I had an interview with him."</p>
+
+<p>"That doesn't tell me anything."</p>
+
+<p>Again the traffic manager took time to smoke and
+to reflect.</p>
+
+<p>"You made some pretty savage threats this morning,
+Evan; about shoving this thing to the point
+where the grand juries, Federal and State, could take
+hold of it. As a lawyer, you know even better than
+I do what that would mean."</p>
+
+<p>"I told you what it would mean. In the present
+state of public sentiment it would mean prison sentences
+for every man of you caught with the goods."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, for every man of us," said Gantry slowly;
+"for the railroad man who has given, and for the
+other man who has taken. Evan, the jails of this
+State wouldn't be big enough to hold us all."</p>
+
+<p>"I can readily believe you. That is the full
+weight of the stick with which I am going to club
+you fellows into decency."</p>
+
+<p>"And you'll let the club fall wherever it may?"</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253"></a>"I've got to do that, Dick; I can't do any less."</p>
+
+<p>For the third time Gantry paused. The train-waiting
+interval was half gone, and he had been
+feeling purposefully for the climaxing moment without
+finding it. But now he decided that it had
+come.</p>
+
+<p>"In the talk this morning there was some reference
+made to your father and his attitude in this
+fight, Evan. Do you remember what was said?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, suppose I should tell you that I know
+now&#8212;what I didn't know certainly then&#8212;that when
+you hit out at us you hit him?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that he is with you in this scheme
+to hoodwink the people?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ask yourself," was the low-toned reply.</p>
+
+<p>"I have asked myself a hundred times, Dick;
+I've been hoping against hope. I'll be utterly frank
+with you, as man to man. We've kept pretty obstinately
+out of the political field, both of us, father
+and I, since the first day when I told him my views
+on machine-made government. But from a few little<a name="Page_254" id="Page_254"></a>
+things he has said, I've gathered that he isn't with
+you; that there has been a quarrel of some kind
+between him and Mr. McVickar&#8212;&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"There was a set-to&#8212;a battle royal," Gantry put
+in. "The last act of it was played to a finish that
+evening when Mr. McVickar took you down to his
+car and hired you. But there has been a meeting
+since. Ask yourself again, Evan. Haven't you had
+good and sufficient reasons for believing that you
+are bucking, not only the railroad company, but your
+own flesh and blood?"</p>
+
+<p>This time it was Blount who took time for reflection.
+The shot had gone home. He told himself
+that there were only too many reasons for believing
+that Gantry was stating the simple fact. None the
+less, he made a final effort to break down the conclusion
+that Gantry was relentlessly thrusting upon
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"In all our talks, Dick&#8212;there haven't been very
+many of them&#8212;my father has taken, or seemed to
+take, a different line. I don't recall anything specific
+just now, but he has given me the impression
+that he hasn't much in commo<a name="Page_255" id="Page_255"></a>n with Mr. McVickar
+and his methods. To hear him talk&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry smiled. "You know your father very
+superficially, Evan, if you'll permit me to say so.
+What the Honorable David Blount says in talk with
+you or me or anybody outside of the inner circle is
+a mighty poor foundation upon which to build any
+idea of what's going on in the back of his head. No&#8212;hold
+on; don't get mad. What I'm trying to tell
+you is what everybody in the sage-brush hills&#8212;save
+and excepting yourself&#8212;knows like a book, and
+that is that the big boss's moves are all made strictly
+in the dark. He doesn't let his own right hand know
+what the left is doing. That's the secret of his absolutely
+Czarish power, I think."</p>
+
+<p>The shriek of a distant locomotive whistle floated
+in through the open window at Blount's back and
+he got up stiffly.</p>
+
+<p>"That's my train coming," he said. And then:
+"Tell me plainly, Dick: you brought me up here
+to throw a final brick&#8212;a bigger one than you have
+yet thrown&#8212;and I know it. What did Mr. McVickar
+tell you to-day that will make my job harder
+than I am already finding it?"</p><p><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256"></a></p>
+
+<p>Gantry turned his head, refusing to meet the
+straightforward gaze of the questioner.</p>
+
+<p>"You intimated this morning that you would go
+at it lawyer-fashion, Evan," he said; "which means,
+I suppose, that you would get the evidence on us.
+You can do it; the Lord knows, there's plenty of it
+to be had. But when you pull out one set of props
+the whole thing will come down. We haven't any
+of us been careful enough about what we put in
+writing&#8212;<i>not even your father</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Blount staggered as if the words had been a
+blow.</p>
+
+<p>"You're trying to tell me that my father would
+be involved in the disclosures you fellows might
+drive me to make?" he demanded, and his voice was
+husky.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was still looking away. "There always
+has to be an intermediary&#8212;you know that. We
+can't do business direct with these&#8212;with the people
+who have something to sell. You can draw your
+own inferences, Evan. I didn't send Hathaway to
+<a name="Page_257" id="Page_257"></a>you; I sent him to your father."</p>
+
+<p>The train was thundering into the station and
+Blount picked up his hand-bag and went out, stumbling
+blindly in the unlighted passage at the stair-head.
+And in the private office behind him the
+traffic manager was crushing his dead cigar in his
+clenched hand and staring fixedly at the square of
+darkness framed by the open window.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV" id="XIV"></a>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>BARRIERS INVISIBLE</h3>
+
+
+<p>During the three weeks following the night journey
+to Angora, a journey on which he once more
+fought the hard battle to a still sharper conclusion,
+Evan Blount scarcely saw his office in Temple Court
+for more than a brief hour or two at a time. One
+speaking appointment followed another in such rapid
+succession that he was constantly going or returning;
+and since there was everywhere a repetition
+of the welcome accorded him by the miners of the
+Carnadine district, there was no reason save physical
+weariness to make him wish to limit his opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until he was deep into the fourth we<a name="Page_258" id="Page_258"></a>ek
+of the hurryings to and fro that he began to admit
+a suspicion which grew like a juggler's rose once he
+had given it place. Could it be possible that these
+numerous invitations, coming now from all parts
+of the State, were purely spontaneous? If not, if
+they were so many subtle moves in the great game,
+he could see no possible end to be subserved by
+them save one: they were effectually keeping him
+away from the capital, which was naturally the nucleus
+and centre of the campaign activities. Was
+there something going on at headquarters that "the
+powers" did not wish him to find out? Of one
+thing he was well assured. Gantry was dodging
+him, was apparently keeping an accurate record
+of his movements; for whenever the hurryings permitted
+a flying return to the capital the traffic
+manager was always out of town.</p>
+
+<p>These were small matters, but vital in their way.
+Failing to keep in touch with Gantry, Blount could
+never be sure that the policy of the railroad
+company had been reformed or changed in any respect.
+Moreover, his journeyings, which brought him in
+direct contact with the voters themselves, seemed
+to have the effect of isolating him curiously in the
+actual battle-field. That a hot political campaign
+was raging throughout the length and breadth of
+the State was not to be doubted; the newspapers
+were full of it, and in man<a name="Page_259" id="Page_259"></a>y districts the fight had
+become acrimonious and bitter. But although he
+was supposed to be in the thick of the fight, he knew
+that he was not; that some mysterious influence was
+shutting him out and holding him at arm's length.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere he went the cordial reception, the
+attentive and hospitable committeemen, the packed
+house, and the generous applause were always awaiting
+him. It was as if his progress had been carefully
+prearranged, like a sort of triumphal procession.
+None the less, the invisible barrier&#8212;the
+barrier which was excluding him from a hand-to-hand
+grapple with the inner workings of the campaign&#8212;was
+always there, and he could neither surmount
+it nor push it aside.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the hard work and hard travelling,
+he did not allow the missionary effort and its
+curious isolation to obscure in any sense the sturdier
+purpose. By every means he could devise he was
+holding his principals up to the mirror of a vigilant
+watchfulness. Arguing that the opposition newspapers
+would be quick to seize upon any charge of
+corruption involving the railroad company, he read
+them faithfully. As yet there had been only innuendoes
+and a raking over of past misdeeds, though
+by this time many of the editors were openly claiming
+that the old alliance between the railroad and
+the machine had never been broken, and warning
+their readers accordingly<a name="Page_260" id="Page_260"></a>.</p>
+
+<p>Blount winced when he read such editorials as
+these. Though he was going about, striving to do
+his part manfully, and even with enthusiasm, the
+burden of the cruel responsibility he had voluntarily
+shouldered was never less than crushing. His
+only hope lay in success. If he could make Gantry
+and his superiors come clean-handed to the election,
+there need be no exposure, no cataclysm involving
+both the railroad officials and his father.</p>
+
+<p>So ran the saving hope; and not content with
+mere watchfulness, Blount tried to get his finger
+upon the pulse of occasions whenever he could. On
+his brief stop-overs in the capital he kept his eyes
+and ears open for the earliest hint of any charge
+of chicanery, and though he was unable to get hold
+of Gantry personally, he kept up a steady fire of
+letters and telegrams, all pointing to the same end&#8212;absolute
+and utter good faith, and the upholding
+of his hands in the public plea for a square deal.
+To these the traffic manager always replied guardedly
+and optimistically. Everybody was delighted
+with the good work done, and doing, by the railroad
+company's field manager; public opinion was slowly
+but surely changing; let the good work go on&#8212;and
+much more to the same effect.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261"></a></p>
+<p>Blount did let the good work go on; but as the
+critical pre-election weeks approached, he began to
+arm himself, reluctantly but resolutely. A little
+quiet investigation, which was made to dovetail
+cleverly with his speech-making journeys, revealed&#8212;as
+Gantry had confessed it would&#8212;convincing
+evidence of past corruption and present law-breaking.
+Hathaway had told the truth when he had
+asserted that his own involvement was only one of
+many similar bargains. Blount called upon the
+president of the Irrigation Alliance at Romero, in
+the heart of the agricultural district, upon the managers
+of several of the electric-power companies, and
+upon a number of influential mining men&#8212;all shippers,
+and all large employers of labor. It was the
+same story everywhere. Preferential freight rates
+had been given in return for votes controlled, and
+the rates were still in effect.</p>
+
+<p>The investigator turned sick at heart when these
+men talked quite freely to him, thus showing conclusively
+that they were cynically discounting his
+public utterances. McDarragh, owner and manager
+of the "Wire-Gold" properties in the Moscow
+district, winked slyly when Blount cautiously inserted
+the probe.</p>
+
+<p>"You're on, Mr. Blount. I sat up there in the
+<a name="Page_262" id="Page_262"></a>Op'ry-house last night listening to your game, and
+says I to myself, 'Thim railroad shift-bosses know
+their trade.' 'Twas a gr-reat talk you gave us, and
+it'll make the swinging of the har-rd-rock vote as
+easy as twice two. Of course, we have a thin paring
+on the ore rate; you'll be knowing that as well as
+annybody in the game, I'm thinking. 'Tis well that
+we fellows at the top know how to make one hand
+wash the other. Come again, Mr. Blount, and give
+my regards to the sinator when ye see him. And
+ye might whisper in his ear that it's a waste of good
+wor-rk for him to be sinding his gum-shoe wire-pullers
+to be laboring with our min. We're safe as
+the clock up here in the Moscow."</p>
+
+<p>This was not the first hint that Blount had been
+given pointing to the underground work of the machine.
+That this work was being directed toward
+the subversion of the popular will, he made no doubt;
+and there were times when he was strongly tempted
+to carry the war boldly into the wider field of graft
+and bossism. That he postponed the bigger battle
+was due quite as much to the singleness of purpose
+which was his best gift as to the desire to spare his
+father. Telling himself resolutely that the reformation
+of the railroad company's political methods was
+his chief object, and the only one which warranted
+him in retaining his place on the Company's payrolls,
+he held aloof when his father's n<a name="Page_263" id="Page_263"></a>ame was mentioned
+and bent himself to the task of providing the
+means for the subjugation of Gantry&#8212;and of Gantry's
+and his own superiors, if need be.</p>
+
+<p>The securing of evidence of the kind which would
+really give him the whip-hand promised to be a
+delicate undertaking. Men like McDarragh talked
+openly enough about the illegal special freight rates,
+but talk was not evidence. Curiously enough, while
+he was trying to devise some way of obtaining the
+tangible proof without using his semiofficial position
+in the company's service as a lever, the thing
+itself was thrown at him. From some mysterious
+source a rumor went out that the special rates were
+in jeopardy; and the very men with whom he had
+talked began to write him importunate letters begging
+him to deny the rumor. With a sheaf of these
+letters in his pocket, each one inculpating both parties
+to the illegal "deals," Blount grew gayly exultant.
+The natural inference was that Gantry and
+"the powers" had been finally forced to yield&#8212;that
+he had won his victory. But if he had not yet won
+it, chance, or something better, had placed in his
+hands the weapon with which he could compel a
+return to fair dealing and honesty.</p>
+
+<p>It was on a second speech-making visit to Ophir
+that Blount had his first<a name="Page_264" id="Page_264"></a> face-to-face chance at Gantry.
+A meeting of the Mine-Owners' Association,
+moving for a readjustment of the classification on
+copper matte and bullion at a time when the railroad
+company might be supposed to be on the giving
+hand, brought Gantry to the gold camp in the
+Carnadine Hills, and the first man he met at the
+hotel was the stubborn dictator of new policies for
+the Transcontinental Company.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265"></a>"Hello, Dick! made a mistake, didn't you&#8212;coming
+while I was here?" said the reformer, with
+a very lifelike replica of his father's grim smile.
+"I suppose you have an immediate engagement to
+go somewhere else, or to do something that will give
+you a chance to dodge?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; I wish to the Lord I had!" was the hearty
+admission. "You're a fright, Evan; you are getting
+to be a perfect nightmare, with your letters and
+telegrams. You've got me so I'm afraid to open
+my desk."</p>
+
+<p>Blount nodded gravely. "I'm glad the letters
+and telegrams have had their effect at last," he rejoined.</p>
+
+<p>"Had their effect? Yes, they've had the effect
+of turning my hair gray, if that's what you mean."</p>
+
+<p>"I think you know what I mean, Dick."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be hanged if I do. What are you driving at?"</p>
+
+<p>"At the fact that you have finally concluded to
+cancel the crooked deals with&#8212;wait, and I'll <a name="Page_266" id="Page_266"></a>give
+you the names of the co-respondents"&#8212;and he drew
+a packet of neatly docketed letters from his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on a minute," protested the traffic manager;
+"you're getting in rather too deep for me.
+Will you let me see those letters?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount put the letters back into his pocket and
+mechanically buttoned his light top-coat over them
+for additional safety.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean to say that you haven't passed
+the word to Hathaway and McDarragh and a dozen
+others I could name?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I haven't. You call yourself a lawyer,
+and yet you ask us to set aside promises that
+are, or ought to be, as binding as so many written
+contracts with penalties attached. You're crazy,
+Evan; it can't be done, and that's all there is to it."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was frowning thoughtfully. "'Can't' goes
+out of the window when 'must' comes in at the door,
+Dick. You remember what I told you&#8212;that I'd
+get evidence, lawyer-fashion. I've got it; evidence
+of the sort that would turn the people of this State
+into a howling mob to tear up your tracks if I should
+publish it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I tell you we <i>can't</i> withdraw the specials,
+<a name="Page_267" id="Page_267"></a>you wild-eyed fanatic!"</p>
+
+<p>"All right; then level down the public's rates to
+fit them. And do it quickly, old man. The time
+is growing fearfully short, and my patience isn't
+what it used to be."</p>
+
+<p>"My Lord! anybody would think you owned the
+Transcontinental Company, lock, stock, and barrel!
+Where under heaven did you get your nerve, Evan?
+Blest if I don't believe you could out-bluff the old&#8212;er&#8212;your
+father, himself, if you once got the fool
+notion into your head that it was your duty to try!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are side-stepping again, Dick, and that
+won't go any longer. You've got to fish or cut
+bait, and do one or the other pretty soon."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd cut the bait all right, if I were Mr. McVickar,
+Evan. I'd fire you so blamed far that you
+wouldn't be able to find your way back in a month
+of Sundays."</p>
+
+<p>Blount tapped his pocket. "As long as I have
+these documents, Mr. McVickar doesn't dare to
+fire me. And if you and he don't come down within
+the next few days&#8212;yes, it's a matter of days, now&#8212;I'll
+fire myself and go over every foot of the ground
+again, telling what I know."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268"></a>Gantry's eyes darkened. He had graduated with
+honors from the particular department in railroading
+in which patience is more than a virtue. Yet
+there are limits.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to have entirely forgotten that little
+talk we had in my office the night you were going
+to Angora," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"No; I haven't forgotten it&#8212;not for a single
+waking minute."</p>
+
+<p>"What I said to you then goes as it lies," was the
+threatening reminder. "If you pull the props out,
+there'll be more than one death in the family."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that you, or Mr. McVickar, will make
+it a point to include my father; I've wrestled that
+out, too, Dick. I'm going to try to pull him out
+of it, but whether I succeed or fail, the consequences
+will be the same for you fellows. Come and hear
+me speak to-night, Dick&#8212;if you're stopping over
+that long. Then you'll know how much in earnest&#8212;how
+deadly in earnest&#8212;I am. You spoke of my
+father just now; I want to remind you again that
+I, too, bear the Blount name&#8212;a name that I have
+heard bandied about as a synonym for all that is
+worst in our political life. Don't you see that I've
+got to make good?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269"></a></p>
+<p>"Oh, great cats!&#8212;you and your high-strung notions
+of what you've got to do!" snorted the traffic
+manager, and he went away to his classification
+meeting.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV" id="XV"></a>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>SWORD-PLAY</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was during this hard-travelling period that
+Blount saw, with keen regret, the gradual widening
+of the breach between his father and himself. In
+their infrequent meetings there was never anything
+remotely approaching an open rupture; but in a
+thousand ways the younger man fancied he could
+see and feel the steady growth of the rift.</p>
+
+<p>That the long arm of the machine of which his
+father was the acknowledged head was reaching out
+into all corners of the State, was a fact no longer to
+be doubted, and that the influences thus set in motion
+were sinister, he took for granted. Therefore,
+when it came in his way, he scored the machine
+frankly, charging it with much of the mischief which
+had been wrought in the way of arousing public
+sentiment against the corporations. "The worst in
+politics joined with the worst elements in capital<a name="Page_270" id="Page_270"></a>ized
+industry," was his platform characterization of
+the alliances of the past, and he usually added that
+he was fighting it as every honest man was in duty
+bound to fight it. But it is hard to fight in the
+dark. After all was said, he could not help admiring
+the subtlety of the master brain which was able
+to control and direct such a complicated piece of
+human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and cleverly
+that, though the name of the thing was in everybody's
+mouth, its workings were so carefully concealed
+that it was only by the merest chance that
+he stumbled upon them now and then.</p>
+
+<p>In more than one of the short stop-overs in the
+capital he had found his father still occupying the
+private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now and
+again there was a meal shared in the more or less
+crowded <i>café</i>. On such occasions the son leaned
+heavily upon the public character of the place and
+carefully steered the table-talk&#8212;or thought he did&#8212;into
+innocuous channels. But on a day shortly
+after the meeting with Gantry in Ophir this desultory
+programme was broken. Reaching the hotel
+in the evening after an all-day train journey from
+Lewiston, Blount found his father waiting for him
+in the lobby, and when he proposed a <i>café</i> dinner
+the senator shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"No, son; not this evening," he sai<a name="Page_271" id="Page_271"></a>d. "I've
+been feeling sort of set up and aristocratic to-day,
+and I've just ordered a dinner sent upstairs. I
+reckon you'll join me?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man was willing enough; more than
+willing, since he was now ready to say a thing which
+must be said before he could be prepared to set a
+time limit upon Gantry&#8212;a limit beyond which lay
+the firing of the fuse and the blowing up of all
+things mundane.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," he agreed. "Give me a few minutes
+to change my clothes&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"You look good enough to me just as you are,
+boy," said the dinner-giver, and he took his son by
+the arm and walked him to the elevator.</p>
+
+<p>In the private dining-room Blount found the table
+laid for two, much as if his coming had been pre-figured.
+He let that go, and for the time the talk
+was of the doings at Wartrace Hall: of the professor's
+enthusiastic digging for fossils, of Patricia's
+keen enjoyment of the life in the open, and&#8212;this
+put with gentle hesitation on the part of the news-bringer&#8212;of
+Mrs. Honoria's growing affection for
+the young woman whose ambitions reached out toward
+a sociological career.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272"></a>"You say Patricia is learning to drive a car?"
+queried Patricia's lover.</p>
+
+<p>"Best woman driver I ever saw," was the senator's
+praiseful rejoinder. "Nothing feazes that little
+girl, and I'm telling you that she can turn the wheels
+just about as fast as you want to ride."</p>
+
+<p>This was a new aspect of Miss Anners, even to
+one who knew her as well as Blount thought he
+<a name="Page_273" id="Page_273"></a>knew her, and, lover-like, he found a grain of encouragement
+in it. Patricia had never cared for the
+out-of-door things save as they bore upon the hygienic
+condition of the poor in the great cities. If
+she had changed in one respect, she might change
+in another.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm glad to know that," he commented. "She
+was needing an outlet on that side. There is a good
+bit of the Puritan in her&#8212;all work and no play, you
+know."</p>
+
+<p>The senator looked out from beneath his shaggy
+eyebrows. "Speaking of work; they're working
+you pretty hard these days, aren't they, son? If
+you belonged to my generation instead of your own,
+you wouldn't be cold-shouldering that young woman
+out yonder at Wartrace the way you do; not for
+all the politics that were ever hatched."</p>
+
+<p>"I have my work to do, and Patricia Anners would
+be the last person in the world to put obstacles in
+the way of it," returned the son gravely. Then he
+added: "I wish I could say as much for other<a name="Page_274" id="Page_274"></a>
+people."</p>
+
+<p>The boss shot another keen glance across the
+table. "Somebody been trying to block you, Evan,
+boy?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Blount met the gaze of the shrewd gray eyes
+without flinching.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know of any good reason why we
+shouldn't be entirely frank with each other, dad,"
+he said, using for the first time since his return to
+the homeland the old boyhood father-name. "You
+know, better than any one else, I think, what the
+stumbling-blocks are, and who is putting them in
+my way."</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe so; maybe I do," was the even-toned
+answer. "It happens so, once in a while, that I
+know a heap of things I can't tell, son." Then:
+"Has McVickar been calling you down?"</p>
+
+<p>"No one has called me down. But some one, or
+something, is keeping me out of the real fight. I
+don't mean that I'm not doing w<a name="Page_275" id="Page_275"></a>hat I set out to do:
+I've got my own particular abomination by the
+neck, and I'm about to choke the life out of it. But
+that is, as you might say, a side issue. The real
+struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in
+it or of it. Everywhere I go there is the same
+cut-and-dried welcome, the same predetermined enthusiasm.
+Sometimes it seems as if all the people I
+meet have been instructed to make things pleasant
+and easy for me."</p>
+
+<p>The senator's chuckle was barely audible.</p>
+
+<p>"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I
+were you, son," he suggested. "You are like the
+boy who has found a good piece of skating over a
+sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining
+because it won't break and let him down into the
+cold water. You'll get enough of the real thing by
+and by."</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in
+precisely the right mood to construe the gentle jest
+into an admission that his father, failing to make
+him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had
+gone about in some mysterious way to insulate him&#8212;to
+make it impossible for him to get into the real
+tide of affairs. But he kept his temper, in a measure,
+at least.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess it's no use for us to try to get together,"
+he said with a tang of abruptness in his tone. "We
+are diametrically opposed to each other at every
+point, you and I, dad. I stand for democracy, the
+will of the people and its fullest and freest expression.
+You stand for&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, son, what do I stand for?" queried the
+father, and the question was put with a quizzical
+<a name="Page_276" id="Page_276"></a>smile that brought the hot blood boyishly to Blount's
+cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"If I should say what all men say&#8212;what some of
+them are frank enough to say even to me&#8212;" he
+stopped short, and then went on with better
+self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured
+rejoinder. "Being on the railroad side, yourself,
+you can't help feeling sort of hostile at the rest
+of us, I reckon."</p>
+
+<p>Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened
+himself in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"There it is again, you see. We can't get together
+even on a question of admitted fact! Do
+you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been
+going up and down, and around and about, all these
+weeks without finding out that the old alliance of
+the machine with the very element in the railroad
+policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"</p>
+
+<p>The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've
+found that out, too, have you?" he commented.</p>
+
+<p>"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but
+it isn't, dad. There's a thing behind the alliance
+that cuts deeper than anything else I've had to face."</p>
+
+<p>Once more the deep-set eyes looked out from their
+bushy penthouses. "Reckon you could give it a
+name, son?"</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277"></a>"Yes; when you found that I wasn't going to let
+you run me for the attorney-generalship, you arranged
+with Mr. McVickar to have me put on the
+railroad pay-roll. Isn't that the fact?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not exactly," said the senator, and a grim smile
+went with the qualified denial. "It was sort of the
+other way round. I reckon McVickar thought he
+was putting one across on me when he offered you
+the railroad job and got you to take it."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; that was at first. You and he couldn't
+come to terms because you&#8212;because the machine
+wanted more than he was willing to give. But
+afterward there was another meeting and you got
+together. That part of it was all right, if you see
+it that way. What broke my heart was the fact
+that you and he agreed to put me up as a fence
+behind which all the crookedness and rascality of a
+corrupt campaign could be screened."</p>
+
+<p>In the pause which followed, a deft waiter slipped
+in to change the courses. When the man was gone,
+Blount went on.</p>
+
+<p>"It came mighty near smashing me when I found
+it out, dad. It wasn't so much the thing itself as
+it was the thought that you'd do it&#8212;the thought
+that you had forgotten that I was a Blount, and
+your son."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278"></a></p>
+<p>Again the older man nodded gravely. "How
+come you to find out, Evan, boy?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It was when Hathaway had been given his
+chance at me. He opened the cesspool for me, as
+you meant he should when you sent him to me.
+From your point of view, I suppose it was necessary
+that I should be shown. You knew what I was
+saying and doing; how I was taking it for granted
+that the railroad was going in clean-handed, and the
+one ray of comfort in the whole miserable business
+is the fact that you cared enough to want to give
+me a glimpse of the real thing that was hiding behind
+all my brave talk. But I don't think you
+counted fully upon the effect it would have upon me."</p>
+
+<p>"What was the effect, son?"</p>
+
+<p>"At first, it made me want to throw up the fight
+and run away to the ends of the earth. It seemed
+as if I didn't have anybody to turn to. You were
+in it, and Gantry was in it&#8212;and Gantry's superiors
+and mine. That evening I borrowed one of your
+cars and drove out to Wartrace. I meant to have
+it out with you, and then to throw up my hands
+and quit."</p>
+
+<p>"But you didn't do either one," said the father
+<a name="Page_279" id="Page_279"></a>tentatively.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Nothing went right that day, until just at
+the last. When I was about to give up and go to bed,
+Patricia came into the smoking-room. I had to
+talk to somebody, so I talked to her; told her where
+I had landed."</p>
+
+<p>"And she advised you to throw up your hands?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know Patricia. She put a heart into
+my body and blood into my veins. What she said
+to me that night is what has kept me going, dad&#8212;what
+has made me drive this fight for a clean election
+on the part of the railroad company home to
+the hilt. I have driven it home. There will be no
+crooked deals on the part of the railroad company
+this time."</p>
+
+<p>The senator looked up quickly. "That's a mighty
+good stout thing to say," he remarked, adding: "I
+reckon you're not saying it without having the right
+and proper club hid out somewhere where you can
+lay hands on it?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount tapped his coat-pocket. "I have the club
+right here&#8212;documentary evidence that will rip <a name="Page_280" id="Page_280"></a>this
+State wide open and send a lot of people to the penitentiary.
+I've told Gantry to pass the word: a
+clean sheet, or I go over to the other side and tell
+what I know. And that brings me to the thing that
+I've got to say to you, dad&#8212;the thing that made me
+hope I'd find you here to-night. After I'd got my
+battle-word from Patricia, I had a jolt that was
+worse than the other. When I pulled the gun on
+Gantry, he told me that I couldn't shoot without
+killing you; that you were just as deeply involved
+as any one of the railroad officials. Is that the
+truth?"</p>
+
+<p>The senator had pushed his chair back and was
+burying his hands in his pockets.</p>
+
+<p>"You've come to try to haul me out of the fire?"
+he inquired, ignoring the direct question.</p>
+
+<p>"I've come to ask you, first, if it is possible for
+you to stand from under. Can you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I reckon I could dodge, if I had to."</p>
+
+<p>"Then do it, and do it quickly, dad! As there is
+a God above us, I'm going to push this thing through
+to the bitter end. To-morrow morning I shall give
+Gantry his time limit. If the time goes by, leaving
+the house-cleaning still undone, I shall keep my
+promise to the letter. You know, and I know, what
+will happen a<a name="Page_281" id="Page_281"></a>fter that."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I reckon I know," was the half-absent
+reply.</p>
+
+<p>Blount threw his napkin aside and glanced at his
+watch.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got to go back to the office and work a
+while," he said. And then: "I feel better for having
+had this talk with you, dad. I'm sorry you are
+finding it necessary to fight me, and a thousand times
+sorrier that I've got to fight you. But I can't give
+ground now, and still be a man and your son. Think
+it over and dodge. It'll break my heart a second
+time if I have to pull the other fellow's house down
+and bury you in the wreck."</p>
+
+<p>For some little time after his son had left the
+table and the private dining-room, the Honorable
+Senator Sage-Brush sat absently toying with his
+dessert-spoon. When he rose to go out, the battle
+light in the gray eyes was the signal which not even
+his most faithful henchmen could always interpret;
+but it was a signal which all of them knew by sight,
+and one which many of them feared.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282"></a></p>
+<h2><a name="XVI" id="XVI"></a>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SAFE-BLOWER</h3>
+
+
+<p>About the time that Evan Blount was finishing
+the fourth week of the campaign of education, the
+senator's wife began to detect signs of country weariness
+in the eyes of Miss Patricia Anners.</p>
+
+<p>"When you are tired of the out-door bignesses,
+you have only to say the word," she told the professor's
+daughter one morning after they had driven
+to Lost River Canyon and back in the small car.
+"As you have doubtless discovered, the senator and
+I live either here or at the capital indifferently during
+the season, and we shall be only too glad to
+entertain you in town whenever you feel like going."</p>
+
+<p>To similar proposals made earlier Miss Anners
+had always returned prompt refusals. But for a
+week or more some impulse which she had not taken
+the trouble to analyze seemed to be drawing her toward
+the city. The mesa roads were just as inviting,
+and the free pleasures of motoring, in a country where
+speed restrictions were conspicuous only by their
+absence, were just as keen. But no<a name="Page_283" id="Page_283"></a>w Patricia confessed
+to a restless longing for the sight of city streets
+and the brabble of city noises.</p>
+
+<p>"Only you mustn't consider us, or me, so much
+as you do, Mrs. Blount," she protested. "I have
+a dreadful suspicion that we have already interfered
+shamefully with your autumn plans. You are
+simply too kind and too hospitable to admit it."</p>
+
+<p>"You have interfered with nothing," was the
+ready assurance. "We were not going anywhere,
+or thinking of going anywhere. No inducement
+that was ever invented would take the senator away
+from his own State in a political year, and your
+coming has been a blessing. But for the good excuse
+to bring your father out here to the fossil-beds,
+we should have been mewed up in the Inter-Mountain
+Hotel from the firing of the opening gun to the
+day after election. But that isn't what I meant to
+say. You are tired of so much country; I can read
+the call of the city in your eyes&#8212;and they are very
+pretty eyes, my dear. Shall I telephone the senator
+that we are coming in this afternoon to stay
+a while?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be delighted," said Patricia, and the eyes,
+which were not only pretty but exceedingly apt to
+<a name="Page_284" id="Page_284"></a>tell tales, confirmed the eager assent. Then she
+added: "Now that daddy has his box of books
+from the university library, I doubt if he will know
+that we are gone."</p>
+
+<p>On their first day in the capital Evan was away,
+but he returned the following morning and Mrs.
+Blount promptly captured him for a theatre box-party
+which she was inviting for the same evening.
+In Mrs. Honoria's orderly scheme Blount was predestined
+to go, though he was allowed to believe that
+his acceptance was of free will. Notwithstanding
+the lapse of time and Mrs. Honoria's uniform kindness,
+he was still unreasonably prejudiced, and with
+the prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin
+to jealousy. It was evident that Patricia's admiration
+for his father extended over to his father's wife;
+and meaning consistently to dislike Mrs. Honoria,
+he was irrational enough to want Patricia to dislike
+her, too.</p>
+
+<p>The box-party proved to be a more formal affair
+than he had anticipated, since it was large enough
+to fill two of the open dress-circle boxes. Gantry
+was included, and so were the Weatherfords&#8212;father,
+mother, daughters, and son. These, with the Gordons
+and a Denver man whose name of Critchett
+Blount was not quite sure that he caught in the
+introduction, filled Mrs. Honoria's list. In the seating
+Blount meant to make sure of having a measurably
+undisturbed evening with Patricia. But fate,<a name="Page_285" id="Page_285"></a>
+or a designing hostess, intervened, and he found
+himself cornered between Mrs. Weatherford and her
+younger daughter, with the square-shouldered "Paramounter"
+candidate for governor strengthening the
+barrier which separated him from Miss Anners.</p>
+
+<p>Blount had met Gordon socially a number of
+times, and in the intervals allowed him by Mrs.
+Weatherford he was silently studying the face of
+the big man who, singularly enough, as the student
+thought, was thus identifying himself publicly as a
+friend of the boss. True, Blount did not forget his
+father's warm commendation of Gordon in that earliest
+political talk on the Quaretaro Canyon road,
+but that was before the lines had been drawn and the
+gage of battle thrown down by the allied forces of
+the machine and the railroad. Now, with the battle
+drawing to its close, Blount thought that nothing
+could be more certain than the fact that his father
+and his father's organization were joining hands with
+the railroad oligarchy to slaughter Gordon at the
+polls.</p>
+
+<p>Putting aside the wonder that Gordon should be<a name="Page_286" id="Page_286"></a>
+accepting Mrs. Honoria's hospitality, Blount fell to
+contrasting the strong, large-featured face of the Mission
+Hills ranchman with that of Reynolds, the opposition
+candidate. Though he was himself on the corporation
+campaigning staff, Blount could not help
+admitting that the comparison was not favorable to
+Reynolds. His first impression of the round-faced,
+portly gentleman who was standing firmly upon what
+he was pleased to call a platform of law and order&#8212;a
+man who was Gordon's opposite in every feature and
+characteristic&#8212;had been unfavorable. He had been
+saying to himself, since, that Reynolds's face, in spite
+of its heavy jaw and prominent eyes, was the face
+of a time-server.</p>
+
+<p>Another point of difference between the two men
+counted for much. Reynolds wanted the office, and
+was spending money liberally to get it, while Gordon
+had accepted the nomination reluctantly.
+Throughout the hot campaign he had refused to
+stump the State for himself or his party, and was
+said to be holding steadfastly aloof in the bargaining
+and dickering. Weighing the two men one
+against the other&#8212;Reynolds was sitting in an adjacent
+box with Kittredge and Bentley and two
+other railroad officials&#8212;Blount admitted a twinge
+of regret that chance, or his convictions, had <a name="Page_287" id="Page_287"></a>made
+him a partisan of the weaker.</p>
+
+<p>Having been lost in the shuffle, as he expressed it,
+Blount made the most of these reflective excursions
+during the period of the box-party captivity. From
+the rising of the curtain to the going down thereof
+the Weatherfords, mother and daughter, kept him
+from exchanging so much as a word with Patricia,
+whom Gantry was shamelessly monopolizing. But
+on the short return walk to the hotel, Blount asserted
+his rights and gave Patricia his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you owe me an abject apology," was the
+way she began on him, when they had gained such
+privacy as the crowded sidewalk conferred.</p>
+
+<p>"Consider it made, and then tell me what for,"
+he rejoined, striving, man-fashion, to catch step
+with her mood.</p>
+
+<p>"For making us leave that dear, delightful, out-of-date,
+and out-of-place Georgian mansion in the
+hills and come to town when we want to get a sight
+of your face."</p>
+
+<p>"If anybody else should say a thing like that, I'd
+blush and call it a compliment," he retorted.<a name="Page_288" id="Page_288"></a> Her
+near presence seemed to lift the burden he was carrying,
+and it was good to be light-hearted again, if
+only for the passing moment.</p>
+
+<p>"It wasn't meant for a compliment," she returned,
+with the straightforward sincerity which Blount had
+always been fond of likening to a cup of cold water
+on a thirsty day. "Consider a moment. You come
+to me with a really harrowing story of your new
+experiences, and just as I am beginning to get interested
+we are interrupted. In the morning, at
+some perfectly impossible hour, off you go, and we
+hear no more of you for weeks and weeks. What
+have you been doing?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have been doing precisely what you told me
+to do; preaching the gospel of honesty and fair dealing,
+and trying my level best to make other people
+practise it."</p>
+
+<p>"You have been successful?" she asked quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended
+solely upon me. As to the other, I don't
+know. Sometimes I'm credulous enough to believe
+that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they
+say they are, and at other times I'm afraid they are
+only putting up a bluff to mislead me. Some day,
+<a name="Page_289" id="Page_289"></a>perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go
+into the 'practical-politics' armory to get my
+weapons."</p>
+
+<p>There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy
+available, and she made what seemed to be
+the most necessary use of it.</p>
+
+<p>"And your father, Evan; are you coming to understand
+him any better?"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head despondently. "No; or rather
+yes. I might say that I am coming to understand
+him&#8212;or his methods&#8212;only too well. The only way
+we can keep from quarrelling now is to banish politics
+when we are together."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry," she said, and the sorrow was emphatic
+in her tone. "As I have said before, you
+don't understand him. You are judging him by
+standards which, however just and true they may
+be, are peculiarly<a name="Page_290" id="Page_290"></a> your own standards. I know you
+can be broad for others when you try. Can't you
+be broad for him?"</p>
+
+<p>It was good to hear her defend his father. It was
+what he would have wished his wife to do. Suddenly
+there arose within him a huge reluctance to lessen
+or to weaken in any way her trust in David Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us say that the fault is mine," he interposed
+hastily. "God forbid that I should be the means
+of making you think less of him in any respect."</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't do that, Evan. He is simply a
+grand old man&#8212;the first I have ever known for whom
+the hackneyed phrase seemed to have been made,"
+she asserted warmly. "If he has faults, I am sure
+they are nothing more than gigantic virtues&#8212;the
+faults of a man who is too strong and too magnanimous
+to be little in any respect."</p>
+
+<p>The final half-square lay behind them, and Mrs.
+Honoria and the senator, Gantry, Gordon and his
+wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the
+marriageable daughters, were at the <i>café</i> door waiting
+for the laggards. Being in no proper frame of
+<a name="Page_291" id="Page_291"></a>mind to enjoy a theatre supper with another Weatherford
+attack as the possible penalty, Blount reluctantly
+surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses,
+and went to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike
+and democratic lobby.</p>
+
+<p>With Patricia in town the "silver-tongued spellbinder
+of Quaretaro Mesa," as <i>The Daily Capital</i>
+called the railroad company's campaign field-officer,
+would have been glad to evade some of the speaking
+appointments; but since his engagements had
+been made some days in advance, he was obliged to go.</p>
+
+<p>On his return to the capital he was delighted to
+find the party of three still occupying the private
+dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain. Arriving
+on a morning train, he was permitted to make
+the party of three a party of four at the breakfast-table;
+and with Patricia sitting opposite he was able
+to forget the strenuosities for a restful half-hour.</p>
+
+<p>Later, when he went to his offices in the Temple
+Court Building, the strenuosities reasserted themselves
+with emphasis. Though he found his desk
+closed, and was reasonably certain that he had in
+his pocket the only key that would unlock it, he
+found his papers scattered in confusion under the
+roll-top. A touch upon the electric button brought
+the stenographer from the anteroom.</p>
+
+<p>"Who's been into my desk, Collins?" he demanded,
+pointing to the confusion and scrutinizing
+<a name="Page_292" id="Page_292"></a>the face of the young man sharply for signs of guilt.</p>
+
+<p>"Goodness gracious! How could anybody get
+into it when you've got the only key, Mr. Blount?"
+stammered the clerk. Then he went on, parrot-like:
+"I've been putting the letters and telegrams through
+the letter-slit, as you told me to, and I've kept the
+private office locked."</p>
+
+<p>"Nevertheless it is very evident that somebody
+has been here," said Blount. Then he had a sudden
+shock and wheeled shortly upon the stenographer.
+"Collins, what did you do with that packet of papers
+I gave you last Monday&#8212;the one I told you to put
+away in the safe?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did just what you told me to; put it in the
+inner cash-box, and put the key of the cash-box on
+your desk. Didn't you get it?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount felt in his pockets and found the key, which
+he handed to Collins. "Go and get that packet and
+bring it to me," he directed. The shock was beginning
+to subside a little by now, and he sat down to
+bring something like order out of the confusion on
+the desk. At first, he had thought that the sheaf
+<a name="Page_293" id="Page_293"></a>of evidence letters which gave him the strangle-hold
+upon Gantry and the lawbreakers had been left in
+a pigeonhole of the desk. Then he remembered having
+given it to Collins to put away.</p>
+
+<p>A minute or two later it occurred to him that the
+stenographer was taking a long time for a short errand.
+Rising silently, he crossed the room and
+reached for the knob of the door of communication.
+In the act he saw that the door was ajar, and
+through the crack he saw Collins standing before
+the opened safe. The clerk was running his tongue
+along the flap of a large envelope, preparatory to
+sealing it. Blount's first impulse was to break in
+with a sharp command. Then he reconsidered and
+went back to his desk; was still busy at it when
+Collins came in and laid the freshly sealed envelope
+before him.</p>
+
+<p>"That isn't the packet I gave you," said Blount
+curtly.</p>
+
+<p>The clerk looked away. "You meant those letters,
+didn't you?" he queried. "The rubber band
+broke and I put them in an envelope."</p>
+
+<p>"When?" snapped Blount.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294"></a>The young man faced around again and the innocence
+in his look disarmed the questioner.</p>
+
+<p>"When? Just now. That's what made me so
+long&#8212;I couldn't find an envelope big enough."</p>
+
+<p>Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the
+blade under the flap of the envelope. If he had
+looked up at the stenographer then he would have
+seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a
+face ashen with terror. But whatever the shorthand
+man had to fear from the opening of the lately
+sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of
+Ackerton, the working head of the legal department,
+with a damage suit to discuss with his chief. Blount
+thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened,
+and later in the day, when he went around to his
+bank to put the evidence letters into his safe-deposit
+box, the incident of the morning had lost its
+significance so completely, or had been so deeply
+buried under other and more important matters,
+that he deposited the packet without examining it.</p>
+
+<p>The evening of this same day there was a dance
+given by the Gordons in the ranchman candidate's
+big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa Circle,
+and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be
+<a name="Page_295" id="Page_295"></a>there. She was there; and in the heart of the evening,
+when Blount had persuaded her to sit out a
+dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall,
+he began to pry at a little stone of
+stumbling which was threatening to grow too large
+to be easily rolled aside.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said,
+without preface. "Have you got one that you
+could lend me?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed lightly.</p>
+
+<p>"You told me once that I had the New England
+conscience&#8212;which was the same as saying that I
+had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass
+around among my friends. What bad thing have
+you been doing now?"</p>
+
+<p>He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics'
+again. Suppose I say that I have obtained
+positive evidence of a crime against the laws of the
+State and the nation. How far am I justified in
+suppressing, for a perfectly right and proper end,
+this evidence which would send a lot of people to
+jail?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a
+thunderbolt crashing down out of a perfectly clear
+sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals and
+criminality?"</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296"></a>"That is just what I'm trying to find out," he
+persisted. "At the present moment I am shielding
+a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some of them
+know what I'm doing, and some of them don't.
+Those who know have been told that they must be
+good or I'll publish the evidence, and they've promised
+to be good if I won't publish it. At the time
+I didn't question my right to make such a bargain,
+but&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"But now you are questioning it? What would
+happen if you should tell what you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chaos," he replied briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"May I ask who is implicated?"</p>
+
+<p>"A good half of the corporation officials in the
+State, and some few outside of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too
+big for me, Evan. I can only go back to first principles
+and ask if it is ever justifiable to do evil that
+good may come."</p>
+
+<p>"If you put it that way, I've made myself <i>particeps
+criminis</i>," he said gravely. "I have given my
+word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals are broken
+off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't
+help knowing that the exposure which I have threatened
+to make, and could make, would practically
+turn the people of this State into a mob."</p>
+
+<p>She was shaking her head determinedly. "I can't
+help you this time, Evan; truly I can't." Then,
+in sudden appeal: "Why won't you go to your
+father? He could tell you what to do and how to
+do it, and his judgment would be too big and just
+<a name="Page_297" id="Page_297"></a>to stumble over the tangling little moralities."</p>
+
+<p>Blount smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"What if I should tell you that my father is more
+or less involved, Patricia? I don't know precisely
+how much or how little, but I am assured, by those
+who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in
+the general wreck."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't believe it!" she protested, in generous
+loyalty. "These people, whoever they are, are deceiving
+you to shelter themselves. Have you ever
+spoken to your father about this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, once; one evening when we were dining
+together I told him what I had, and what use I
+should make of it if all other means should fail.
+Also, I advised him to dodge."</p>
+
+<p>"What did he say?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is the discouraging part of it. I was hoping
+against hope that he would tell me to go ahead;
+that he would say that he wasn't involved. But,
+as a matter of fact, he didn't say much of anything.
+I'm horribly afraid that his silence meant all that
+I've been trying to believe it didn't mean."</p>
+
+<p>She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if
+she were trying to gain time.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298"></a></p>
+<p>"I can only tell you again what I told you at
+first," she said at length. "You must be bigger
+than all these hampering circumstances; bigger than
+the little moralities, if need be. You can be, Evan;
+you've given splendid proof of it thus far, and I'm
+proud&#8212;just as proud as I can be&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely
+without scruple, have brained young Gordon, to
+whom the next dance belonged, and who came just at
+this climaxing moment to claim Patricia. But there
+was no help for it, short of a cold-blooded and rather
+embarrassing deed of violence, and the hard-won
+confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.</p>
+
+<p>When he left the Gordon house, which was far
+out in the northeastern residence suburb, Blount
+meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed. He
+had been losing much sleep in the activities of the
+campaign, and the loss was beginning to tell upon
+him. But as the trolley-car was passing the Temple
+Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim
+light illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office.
+With all his suspicions of the morning reawakened,
+he dropped from the car, dashed into the
+building, and took the all-night elevator for his office
+floor.</p>
+
+<p>The sleepy elevator-man had to be shaken awake,
+and when he had set the car in motion he let it run
+past the designated floor. Blount swore impatiently,
+and instead of waiting to be carried back, darted
+out and ran to the <a name="Page_299" id="Page_299"></a>stairway. When he reached the
+lower corridor and was hurrying toward his suite in
+the corner of the building, there was a dull crash, as
+of a muffled explosion, and two or three of the glass
+doors in the street-fronting suite were shattered.
+Blount quickened his pace to a run, let himself in
+by means of his latch-key, and, cautiously opening
+his desk, groped in an inner drawer for the revolver
+which Gantry had persuaded him to buy as
+a part of the office furnishings.</p>
+
+<p>With the weapon in hand, he pushed through the
+unlatched door into Collins's room. There was an
+acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air, and when
+he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases
+were stifling. His first act was to feel for the
+switch and cut in the electric lights. The third room,
+which had doors of communication with his own
+office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were
+broken open, and the safe-door had been blown from
+its hinges.</p>
+
+<p>Blount saw the figure of a small man with his cap
+pulled down over his ears bending over the wrecked
+cash-box. At the upblazing of the ceiling lights,
+<a name="Page_300" id="Page_300"></a>the man sprang to his feet and fled, going out through
+the door by which Blount had just entered, and snapping
+the light-switch as he passed to leave the rooms
+in darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Blount was cursing his own lack of presence of
+mind when he turned to follow the escaping burglar.
+In the darkness he fell over a chair, and by the time
+he had disentangled himself and had reached the
+corridor the safe-blower was gone. Racing to the
+elevator, Blount rang the bell until the sleepy car-tender
+set the machinery in motion and lifted himself
+to the floor of happenings. Here the incident
+ended abruptly, so far as any helpful discoveries
+were concerned. The elevator-man had carried no
+one down, and he confessed shamefacedly that he
+had again been asleep, and could not say whether
+or not anybody had descended the stair which circled
+the elevator-shaft.</p>
+
+<p>Blount went back to his office, turned in a police
+alarm, and waited until a policeman came from the
+nearest station. Then he went to report the safe-blowing
+in person to the night captain on duty in<a name="Page_301" id="Page_301"></a>
+the basement of the City Hall. A drowsy clerk took
+notes of the story, and the night captain contented
+himself with asking a single question.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know how much you lost, Mr. Blount?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing of any great consequence, I imagine,"
+said Blount, remembering, with an inward thrill
+of thankfulness, the morning impulse which had
+prompted him to transfer the one thing of inestimable
+consequence to the security of the bank safe-deposit
+box. Then he added: "There was a little
+money in the box, and some papers of no especial
+value to anybody. Just the same, captain, I want
+that man caught."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll catch him, come morning," was the assurance,
+<a name="Page_302" id="Page_302"></a>and then Blount went away and carried
+out his original intention of going to the Inter-Mountain
+and to bed.</p>
+
+<p>To bed; but, for a long hour after the post-midnight
+quiet had settled down upon the great hostelry, not
+to sleep. If he had asked himself why he could not
+close his eyes and take the needed rest, the exciting
+incident in which he had lately been an actor would
+have offered a sufficient answer. But in reality the
+sharpened spur of wakefulness penetrated much more
+deeply. Beyond all doubt or shadow of doubt, it
+was the sinister, many-armed machine which had
+reached out to seize and destroy the evidence against
+its allies and fellow conspirators, the lawbreaking
+railroad company and the vote-selling corporations.</p>
+
+<p>And, again beyond doubt, he made sure, it was his
+own boast made to his father which had been passed
+on to tell the sham burglar where to look and what
+to look for.</p>
+
+
+<p><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303"></a></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the evening of the day following the safe-blowing
+in Blount's office, a one-car train, running as
+second section of the Overland, slipped unostentatiously
+into the capital railroad yard. With as little
+stir as it had made in its arrival, the single-car train
+took a siding below the freight station, where it would
+be concealed from the prying eyes of any chance
+prowler from the newspaper offices.</p>
+
+<p>Coincident with the side-tracking O'Brien, the
+vice-president's stenographer, dropped from the
+step of the car and went in search of a telephone.
+When O'Brien was safely out of the way, a small
+man, clean-shaven and alert in his movements,
+whipped out of the shadows of the nearest string of
+box-cars, pushed brusquely past the guarding porter,
+and presented himself at the desk in the roomy office
+compartment of the private car.</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president looked up and nodded. "How
+are you, Gibbert?" he said, and the<a name="Page_304" id="Page_304"></a>n: "You may condense
+your report. I have seen the newspapers.
+In passing I may say that it isn't much to your
+credit that you had to fall back upon the methods
+of the yeggmen."</p>
+
+<p>"There wasn't any other way," protested the
+small man. "The papers were locked up in the
+cash-box of the safe, and young Blount carried the
+only key."</p>
+
+<p>"It was crude; not at all worthy of a man of
+your ability, Gibbert. And if the newspapers tell
+it straight, you came near being caught. How did
+that happen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Blount went to a ball, and I shadowed him.
+His girl was there, and it looked like a safe bet
+that he'd stay to see the lights put out. But he
+didn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, never mind; you got the papers, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>The company detective drew a thick envelope
+from his pocket and laid it upon the desk. The
+vice-president tore it open and read rapidly through
+the file of letters it had enclosed, tearing them one
+by one fr<a name="Page_305" id="Page_305"></a>om the hold of the brass fastener at the
+upper left-hand corner as he glanced them over.
+"The chuckle-headed fools!" he gritted, apostrophizing
+the writers of the letters. And then: "Gibbert,
+I'd like to go into this a little deeper, if we had
+time; I'd like to know why in hell every man in
+this State with whom we've had a private business
+arrangement found it necessary to spread the details
+out on paper and send them to young Blount! Here;
+burn these things as I hand them to you."</p>
+
+<p>The small man struck a match and, using the
+wide-mouthed metal cuspidor for an ash-pan, lighted
+the letters one at a time as they were given to him.
+When the cinder skeleton of the final sheet had been
+crushed into ashes, he rose from his knees and
+reached for his hat.</p>
+
+<p>"Any other orders?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No; nothing more. You are reasonably sure
+that you haven't been recognized here by any of
+our local people?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've kept the 'make-up' on most of the time.
+I've been in Mr. Gantry's office a couple of times,
+and in Mr. Kittredge's once, and neither of them
+caught on to me."</p><p><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306"></a></p>
+
+<p>"That's good. You'd better go now. O'Brien
+has gone after Gantry and Kittredge, and I don't
+care to have them find you here. Better take the
+first train back to Chicago. These mutton-headed
+police here might possibly get on your track, and
+we don't want to have to explain anything to
+them."</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes after the small man had dropped
+from the step of the "008," to disappear in the box-car
+shadows, Gantry and Kittredge came down the
+yard and entered the private car. Again the vice-president
+said, "How are you?" and nodded toward
+the nearest chairs. "Sit down; I'll be through in a
+minute," and he went on reading the file of papers
+taken up at the departure of the detective. At the
+end of the minute he shot a question at the two
+who were waiting.</p>
+
+<p>"You got my message?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry answered for himself and the superintendent.
+"Yes. Your orders have been carried out.
+The yards are posted, and nobody, outside of a few
+of our own men, knows that yo<a name="Page_307" id="Page_307"></a>ur car is here."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president took one of the long black
+cigars from the open box on the flat-topped desk,
+and passed the box to his two lieutenants.</p>
+
+<p>"Light up," he said tersely. "I'm due in Twin
+Canyons City to-morrow morning, and we've got
+to thresh this thing out in a hurry. Any change
+in the situation since your last report?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry shook his head. "Nothing very important.
+Blount's up-town office was broken into last
+night and his safe ripped open with dynamite, as I
+suppose you have read in the papers. Who did it,
+or why it was done, nobody seems to know."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what came of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, so far as I can find out," returned the
+traffic manager. "Blount had been to the Gordon
+dance, and he saw the light in his office as he was
+coming down-town. When he went up to find out
+what was going on, he caught the safe-blower fairly
+in the act, but the fellow got away."</p>
+
+<p>"Did Blount lose anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's the queer part of it. Blount won't say
+much about it; and this morning he went around
+to police headquarters and told the chief to drop
+the matter, giving as his reason that he was too busy
+to prosecute the fellow even if he was caught."</p>
+
+<p>To a disinterested observer it might have seemed
+<a name="Page_308" id="Page_308"></a>a little singular that the vice-president made no further
+comment upon the burglary. As a matter of
+fact, his next question completely ignored it.</p>
+
+<p>"What has Blount been doing this week?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"He has spoken twice; once at Arequipa and once
+at Hellersville. I understand he has engagements
+enough to keep him out of town right up to election
+day."</p>
+
+<p>"That is good," was the nodded approval. "He
+would only be in the way here at the capital." And
+then pointedly to Gantry: "Any more of that nonsense
+about putting a barrel of powder under us
+and blowing us all up if we don't build the freight
+tariffs over to suit his notion?"</p>
+
+<p>"A good bit more of it," Gantry admitted reluctantly.
+"The other day he went so far as to set a
+time limit; gave me three days of grace in which to
+file the public notice of the change in rates."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I filed the notice&#8212;taking care that the only
+copy should be the one I sent to Blount's office."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309"></a>The vice-president looked coldly at his division
+traffic manager.</p>
+
+<p>"There are times, Gantry, when you seem to be
+losing your grip. Dave Blount's son isn't a school-boy,
+to be fooled by such a transparent trick as that!
+Don't you suppose he knows, as well as you do, that
+the public notice has to be filed in every station on
+the road?"</p>
+
+<p>"I had to take a chance&#8212;I've had to take a good
+many chances," protested the traffic manager in his
+own defence; and Kittredge, a bearded giant who
+was fully the vice-president's match in heroic physique,
+removed his cigar to say: "That young fellow
+has been a frost. If he isn't a wild-eyed fanatic,
+as Gantry insists he is, he is deeper than the
+deep blue sea! I'd just about as soon have a box
+of dynamite kicking around underfoot as to have
+him messing in this campaign fight. I've been keeping
+cases on him, as you ordered, and he has worn
+out three of my best office men on the job."</p>
+
+<p>"You are prejudiced, Kittredge," was the vice-preside<a name="Page_310" id="Page_310"></a>nt's
+comment. "It was the best move in
+the entire campaign&#8212;putting him in the field.
+Apart from the public sentiment he has been turning
+our way, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that
+we got hold of him at a time when the Honorable
+Senator was getting ready to turn us down."</p>
+
+<p>"Speaking of the sentiment," Gantry put in, "I
+don't know whether it's all sentiment or not. There's
+a sort of mystery mixed up in this speech-making
+business of Blount's. At first I thought maybe his
+sudden popularity was due to some word sent out
+from your Chicago office; but when you told me it
+wasn't, I began to do a little speculating on my own
+account. I can't make up my mind yet whether it
+is pure popularity, or whether it's the assisted kind."</p>
+
+<p>"Assisted?" said the vice-president, with a lifting
+of the heavy eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. It has been too unanimous. I have a
+trustworthy man in Blount's up-town office, and he
+says the invitations have fluttered in like autumn
+<a name="Page_311" id="Page_311"></a>leaves; more than Blount could accept if he travelled
+continuously. Kittredge's men report that the
+speech-making has been a triumphant progress all
+over the State; bands, receptions, committees, and
+banquets wherever Blount goes."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McVickar grunted. "The speeches have been
+all that anybody could ask. I've been reading
+them."</p>
+
+<p>Kittredge shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Gantry says they are, but I say no," he contended.
+"There is such a thing as putting too much
+sugar in the coffee. Blount's overdoing it; he's
+putting the whitewash on so thick that any little
+handful of mud that happens to be thrown will stick
+and look bad."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, we have to take chances on that,"
+was the vice-president's qualifying clause. "Nevertheless,
+young Blount's talk has undoubtedly had<a name="Page_312" id="Page_312"></a>
+its effect upon public sentiment. We must be careful
+not to let the opposition newspapers get hold of
+anything that would tend to nullify it."</p>
+
+<p>"They are moving heaven and earth to do it,"
+said the superintendent. "The Honorable David
+is lying low, as he usually does, but I more than
+half believe he's getting ready to give us the double-cross.
+That is the explanation of this safe-blowing
+scrape, as I put it up."</p>
+
+<p>Again the vice-president failed to comment further
+on the burglary. "What I am most afraid of,
+now, is that our young man may be, as you say,
+Kittredge, a trifle over-zealous," he said musingly.
+"We have discovered that he is something of a
+fanatic."</p>
+
+<p>"He's more than that," Kittredge cut in quickly.
+"One of the men I've had following him&#8212;Farnsworth&#8212;is
+as good as any Pinkerton that ever walked.
+He says Blount isn't half so innocent as he looks
+and acts. The speech-making has taken him into
+every corner of t<a name="Page_313" id="Page_313"></a>he State, and Farnsworth says he
+has been doing a lot of quiet prying around and
+investigating on the side."</p>
+
+<p>"I've been thinking," Gantry added, "what a
+beautiful mix-up we should have if the senator and
+his son should both conclude to pull out and get
+together at the last moment."</p>
+
+<p>The master plotter shook his head. "You have
+no sense of perspective, Gantry. Young Blount is
+with us solely because he is too straightforward to
+countenance his father's political methods. On the
+other hand, if the Honorable Dave should turn upon
+us now, he would be obliged to do it at the expense
+of his son's reputation. Anything he could say
+against us would simply have the effect of holding
+his son up to public exprobration as a common
+campaign liar. I know David Blount pretty well;
+he won't do anything like that."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry bit his lip and a slow smile of respectful
+admiration crept up to the Irish eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"When it comes to the real fine-haire<a name="Page_314" id="Page_314"></a>d work, you
+have us all feeling for hand-holds, Mr. McVickar,"
+he said. "Now I know why you made a place for
+Evan Blount, and why you have been giving him a
+free hand on the whitewashing. It's the biggest thing
+that has ever been pulled off in Western politics!"</p>
+
+<p>"It hasn't been pulled off yet," was the quick
+reply. "We are holding old David in a noose that
+may turn into a rope of sand at any minute; don't
+forget that. During the few days intervening before
+the election we must preserve the present status
+at any cost. Young Blount is the only man who
+may possibly disturb it. Keep him out of the way.
+If he doesn't have speaking invitations enough to
+busy him, see to it that he gets them. As long
+as you can keep him talking he won't have any time
+for side issues. Now about this Gryson business:
+you want to handle that yourselves, and I don't
+want any more telegrams like the one you sent me
+last night, Gantry. What's the condition?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry outlined the Gryson "condition" briefly.
+The man Gryson, who had developed into a heeler
+of sorts, had been growing restive, wanting more
+money.</p>
+
+<p>"What can he swing?" was the curt question.</p>
+
+<p>"Six out of seven pretty close counties. I don't
+pretend to know how he has done it, but he has got
+the goods; I've taken the trouble to check up on
+him. With his pull, we can swing the vote of the capital
+itself."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president frowned thoughtfully. "The<a name="Page_315" id="Page_315"></a>
+old game of stuffing the registration lists, I suppose,"
+he said. And then:"Young Blount hasn't got wind
+of this, has he?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry laughed. "You may be sure he hasn't.
+He has it in for Gryson on general principles&#8212;made
+us take him off the shop pay-rolls. If he thought
+we were dickering with him now, he'd be down on
+us like a thousand of brick."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, why don't you fix Gryson, once for all,
+and have it over with? You oughtn't to expect me
+to come here and tell you what to do!"</p>
+
+<p>It was at this point that Kittredge broke in.</p>
+
+<p>"Gryson isn't safe. I have it straight that he is
+getting ready to sell us out. That's why he wants
+his pay in advance."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president's heavy brows met in a frown,
+and the muscles of his square jaw hardened.</p>
+
+<p>"Put Gryson on the rack and show him what
+you've got on him in that Montana bank robbery.
+That will bring him to book. It will be time enough
+to talk abo<a name="Page_316" id="Page_316"></a>ut terms when he delivers the goods.
+Now another thing&#8212;that Shonoho Inn matter that
+I wired about&#8212;what has been done?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is all arranged," said the big superintendent.
+"The house was closed for the season last month,
+and we have taken a short lease. One of our dining-car
+managers will take charge of the service."</p>
+
+<p>"And the wires?"</p>
+
+<p>"We have made a cut-in from the old Shoshone
+Mine wire, which wasn't taken down when the mine
+was abandoned. That let us out very neatly, and
+no one outside of our own line-men know anything
+about the job. We have four instruments in the
+hotel writing-room; two on the commercial and two
+on the railroad wires. Will that be enough?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McVickar nodded and reached over to press
+the bell-push which signalled to his train conductor.</p>
+
+<p>"That is about all I have to say," he said, in dismissal
+of the two local officials. "Just nail Gryson
+up to the cross, where he belongs, and keep young<a name="Page_317" id="Page_317"></a>
+Blount busy and out of town; I leave the details
+to you. Get orders for me as you go up to your
+office, Kittredge, and have the despatcher let me
+out as soon as possible. I ought to be half-way to
+Alkali by this time."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XVIII" id="XVIII"></a>XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CHASM</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was young Ranlett, a reporter for <i>The Plainsman</i>,
+who told Evan Blount of the arrival of the
+vice-president's car, running as second section of the
+Overland, and the scene of the telling was the lobby
+of the Inter-Mountain Hotel, where Blount was
+smoking a pipe of disappointment filled and lighted
+upon hearing that his father, Mrs. Honoria, and
+Patricia had gone out to dinner somewhere&#8212;place
+unknown to the obliging room clerk.</p>
+
+<p>Ranlett had tried ineffectually to get to the private
+car, having for his object the interviewing of
+the vice-president, but there had been curious obstructions.
+The lower yard was apparently carefully
+guarded, since the reporter had been turned
+back at three or four different points when he had
+attempted to cross the tracks. Blount thought it
+a little singular that the vice-president should come
+to the capital secretly, but he did not s<a name="Page_318" id="Page_318"></a>top to speculate
+upon this.</p>
+
+<p>Having something more than a suspicion that
+Gantry had not properly passed the threat of exposure
+up to McVickar, he determined at once to
+seek an interview with the vice-president. Walking
+rapidly down to the Sierra Avenue station, he saw
+a light in Gantry's office, and meaning to be fair
+first and severe afterward, if needful, he ran up the
+stair and tried the door of the traffic manager's office.
+It opened under his hand, and he found Gantry sitting
+at his desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Ranlett tells me that Mr. McVickar is in town,"
+he began abruptly. "Where is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ranlett is mistaken&#8212;about twenty minutes mistaken,"
+was Gantry's reply. "Mr. McVickar passed
+through here a few minutes ago on his way to Twin
+Canyons City. His special has been gone some little
+time."</p>
+
+<p>"When is he coming back?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I <a name="Page_319" id="Page_319"></a>did."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you take up with him the matter of issuing
+new tariffs to do away with the preferentials, or to
+level the public rates down to them?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry shifted uneasily in his chair, and tried to
+evade. "There was very little time," he said. "Mr.
+McVickar was in a great hurry, and his special was
+held only a few minutes."</p>
+
+<p>Blount crossed the room and sat down.</p>
+
+<p>"Dick, we've come to the last round-up," he said
+gravely. "In the nature of things, I can't give you
+any more time. You've been playing with me all
+along, and your last move in the game was a very
+childish one&#8212;sending me what purported to be a
+copy of a new freight tariff notice to the public.
+Did you suppose for a moment that I wouldn't have
+sense enough to see that the thing wasn't official,
+that it had no signatures and lacked even the name
+of the railroad company? I'm here now to tell you
+that you've got to do some real thing, and do it
+quickly. Let's go up and see the editor of <i>The
+Capital</i>."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320"></a>"What for?" demanded Gantry.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the railroad paper, and I want you to give
+Brinkley, the editor, an interview to the effect that
+a revision of the freight rates is in process, and that
+shippers having grievances should present them at
+once. That will at least start the ball to rolling in
+the right direction."</p>
+
+<p>"I should think it would!" scoffed the traffic manager.
+"What you don't know about the making of
+freight tariffs would sink a ship, Evan. These things
+can't be done while you wait!"</p>
+
+<p>"But they must be, in this instance," Blount
+insisted. "If you won't withdraw the preferentials
+given to the corporations, you must do the other
+thing. Post your legal notice of a reduction of the
+rates on the commodities upon which you are now
+allowing rebates, and I'll fight straight through on
+the line I've been taking all along."</p>
+
+<p>"And if we don't?" queried Gantry.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the use of making me say it for the
+hundredth time, Dick? If you don't do one or the
+other, there will be an explosion, just as I've told
+you. Of course, you know that my safe was broken
+open last night&#8212;wrecked with dynamite?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, unluckily for you, the packet of papers
+which might otherwise have been taken or destroyed,
+didn't happen to be in the safe. The documents are
+<a name="Page_321" id="Page_321"></a>still where they can be used at an hour's notice.
+And, by heaven, Dick, I'll use them if you don't
+play fair!"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry, long-suffering and patient to a fault in a
+business affair, was not altogether superhuman.</p>
+
+<p>"Evan, you are a frost&#8212;a black frost! You harp
+on one string until you wear it to frazzles! Don't
+you know that the Transcontinental is big enough
+and strong enough to chivvy you from one end of
+this country to the other, if you turn traitor? I
+love a fighting man, but by God, I haven't any use
+for a fool!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"If I have succeeded in making you angry, perhaps
+there is a chance that you will do something.
+You may curse me out all you want to, but the
+fact remains. I'm going to explode the bomb, and
+it will be touched off long enough before election to
+do the work, if you keep on refusing to make my
+word good to the people. That is all&#8212;<i>all</i> the all.
+Now, will you go up to <i>The Capital</i> office with me,
+and dictate that bit of information that I mentioned?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in a thousand years!" raged Gantry. "Not
+in ten thousand years!" Nevertheless he rose, closed
+his desk, and prepared to accompany the importunate
+<a name="Page_322" id="Page_322"></a>political manager. Half-way up the first square
+he said: "There is no use in our going to <i>The Capital</i>
+office at this time of night. Brinkley doesn't get
+around to his desk much before eleven. Let's go
+up to the club."</p>
+
+<p>At the Railway Club the traffic manager developed
+a keen desire to kill the intervening time in a game
+of billiards. Blount indulged him, beat him three
+games in succession, and consistently refused to
+drink with him. At the end of the third game,
+Gantry gave a terse definition, abusively worded,
+of a man who would force his friend to go and drink
+alone, and went to the buffet. Ten minutes later,
+when Blount went after him, he had disappeared,
+and the visit to the newspaper office was postponed,
+perforce.</p>
+
+<p>On the following morning, Blount found a telegram
+on his desk. It bore the vice-president's name,
+and the date-line was Twin Canyons City. It directed
+him to go to a remote portion of the State
+beyond the Lost River Mountains to examine the
+papers in a right-of-way case which was coming up
+for trial at the next term of court. This was in Kittredge's
+department, and Blount called the superintendent
+on the phone. Kittredge was in hi<a name="Page_323" id="Page_323"></a>s office,
+and he evidently knew about the vice-president's
+telegram. Also, he seemed anxious to have the division
+counsel go to Lewiston at once; so anxious that
+he offered his own service-car to be run as a special
+train.</p>
+
+<p>Blount saw no way to evade a positive order from
+the vice-president, but he was more than suspicious
+that Gantry or Kittredge, or possibly both of them,
+had misrepresented the right-of-way case to Mr.
+McVickar, in an attempt to get him away from the
+city and so to postpone a reiteration of the demand
+for a new freight tariff. What he did not suspect
+was that Mr. McVickar's telegram might possibly
+have originated in Kittredge's office.</p>
+
+<p>Asking the superintendent to have the service-car
+made ready immediately, he packed his handbag,
+left a note for Patricia, who was not yet visible,
+and another for Gantry, who was not in his office,
+and began the roundabout journey.</p>
+
+<p>In all his travelling up and down the State he
+had never found anything to equal the slowness of
+the special train. The noon meal, served by Kittredge's
+cook in the open compartment, found the
+special less than fifty miles on its way, and comfortably
+waiting at that hour on a side-track among
+the sage-brush hills for the coming of a delayed train
+in the opposite direction. Four mortal hours were
+lost on<a name="Page_324" id="Page_324"></a> the lonely siding. There was no station, and
+Blount could not telegraph. So far as he knew, the
+service-car might stay there for a day or a week.
+It was all to no purpose that he quarrelled with his
+conductor. The train crew had orders to wait for
+the west-bound time freight, and there was nothing
+to do but to keep on waiting.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the afternoon the time freight, or some
+other train, came along, and the special was once
+more set in motion eastward, but at dinner-time it
+was again side-tracked, eighty-odd miles from its
+destination, and once more at a desert siding where
+there was no telegraph office. The car was still
+standing on the siding when Blount went to bed.
+But in the morning it was in motion again, jogging
+now on its leisurely way up the branch line.</p>
+
+<p>At Lewiston, the town at the end of the branch
+where the right-of-way trouble had originated, Blount
+found more delay, carefully planned for, as he had
+now come firmly to believe. The plaintiffs in the
+right-of-way case were out of town, and their lawyers
+had gone to the capital. Blount saw that he
+might wait a week without accomplishing anything,
+hence he immediately instructed his conductor to
+get orders for the return.</p>
+
+<p>After having been gone a half-hour or more, the
+conductor came back to the service-car to say that
+the single telegraph-wire connecting Lewiston with
+the outer world was down, and that the orders for
+the return journey could not be obtained until the
+telegraph connection was restored. At that point
+Blount took matters into his own hands.</p>
+
+<p>There was a mining company having its headquarters<a name="Page_325" id="Page_325"></a>
+in the isolated town, and Blount had met
+the manager once in the capital&#8212;met him in a social
+way, and had been able to show him some little
+attention. Hiring a buckboard at the one livery
+stable in the place, he drove out to the "Little
+Mary," and found Blatchford, the friendly manager,
+smoking a black clay cutty pipe in his shack office.
+It did not take Blount over a minute to renew the
+pleasant acquaintance, and to state his dilemma.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm hung up here with my special train, the wires
+are down and I can't get out," was his statement of
+the crude fact. "Didn't you tell me that you owned
+a motor-car?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did," was the prompt reply. "Want to borrow
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"You beat me to it," said Blount, laughing.
+"That was precisely what I was going to beg for&#8212;the
+loan of your car. I believe you told me that
+you had driven it from here to the capital."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; several times, and the road is fairly
+good by way of Arequipa and Lost River Canyon.
+It's only about half as far across country as it is
+around by the railroad. You ought to make it in
+six hours and a half, or seven at the longest. Drive
+me down to the burg, and I'll put you in possession."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326"></a>Blount began to be audibly thankful, but the mine
+manager good-naturedly cut him short.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all in the day's work, Mr. Blount, and I'm
+glad to be of service&#8212;not because you are the
+Transcontinental's lawyer, nor altogether because
+you are the Honorable David's son. I haven't forgotten
+your kindness to me when I was in town
+three weeks ago. Let's go and get out the chug-wagon."</p>
+
+<p>A little later Blount found himself handling the
+wheel of a very serviceable knockabout car equipped
+for hard work on country roads. When he was ready
+to go, he drove down to the railroad yard and hunted
+up his conductor.</p>
+
+<p>"After you have had your vacation, you may get
+orders from Mr. Kittredge and take his car back to
+the capital," he told the man. "When you do, you
+may give him my compliments, and tell him I preferred
+to run my own special train."</p>
+
+<p>The conductor grinned and made no reply, and
+he was still grinning when he sauntered into the
+railroad telegraph office and spoke to the operator.</p>
+
+<p>"I dunno what's up," he said, "but whatever it
+was, the string's broke. Old Dave Sage-Brush's
+son has borrowed him an automobile, and gone back
+to town on his own hook. Guess you'd better call
+<a name="Page_327" id="Page_327"></a>up the division despatcher and tell him the broken-wire
+gag didn't work. Get a move on. We hain't
+got nothin' to stay here for now."</p>
+
+<p>Blount had a very pleasant drive across country,
+with no mishap worse than a blown-out tire and a
+little carbureter trouble. Being a motorist of parts,
+neither the accident nor the needed readjustment
+detained him very long, and by the middle of the
+afternoon he was racing down the smooth northern
+road, with the spires and tall buildings of the capital
+fairly in sight.</p>
+
+<p>Not to let gratitude lag too far behind the service
+rendered, he drove Blatchford's car to the garage
+nearest the freight station, left instructions to have
+it shipped back to Lewiston by the first train, and
+promptly went in search of Gantry. The traffic
+manager was not in his office, but Blount found him
+at the Railway Club.</p>
+
+<p>"Just a word, Dick," he began, when he had overtaken
+his man pointing for the buffet. "Kittredge
+put up a job on me, and I think you helped him.<a name="Page_328" id="Page_328"></a>
+I had to borrow an automobile to come back in
+from Lewiston. It's down at the Central Garage,
+and I have given Bankston, the garage man, orders
+to ship it back to Mr. Blatchford, of the 'Little
+Mary.' I wish you'd phone your freight agent to
+see that it is properly taken care of, and that the
+freight bill is sent to me."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry made no reply, but he went obediently to
+the house telephone and gave the necessary instructions.
+The thing done, he turned shortly upon
+Blount, scowling morosely.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on in and let's have a drink," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Blount marked the brittleness of tone and the
+half-quarrelsome light in the eyes which were a little
+bloodshot.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Dick; you've had one too many already,"
+<a name="Page_329" id="Page_329"></a>he objected firmly.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry put his back against the wall of the corridor.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he rasped; "I'm not drunk, but I'm ready
+to fight you to a finish, and for once in a way I'm
+going to get in the first lick. You've been bluffing
+me from the start, and you're going to try it again.
+It won't go this time; you've got to show me!"</p>
+
+<p>If Blount hesitated it was only because he was
+trying to determine whether or not the traffic manager
+was business-fit. Gantry comprehended perfectly,
+and his laugh was derisive and a trifle bitter.</p>
+
+<p>"You're sizing me up and asking yourself if I'm
+too far gone to be worth while," he jeered. "If I
+couldn't stand any more liquid grief than you can,
+I would have been down and out years ago. Show
+your hand, Evan&#8212;if you have any to show."</p>
+
+<p>Blount hesitated no longer. Taking Gantry's arm,
+he led him out of the club and around the block to<a name="Page_330" id="Page_330"></a>
+the Sierra National Bank. It was after banking
+hours, but the side door giving access to the safe-deposit
+department was still open. With the traffic
+manager at his elbow, Blount asked the custodian
+for his private box, got it, and led the way to one
+of the cell-like retiring rooms. Gantry proved his
+capacity for transacting business by turning on the
+lights, locking the door, and squaring himself in a
+chair at one side of the tiny writing-table.</p>
+
+<p>Blount opened the japanned safety box, took out
+a bulky envelope and tossed it across to the traffic
+manager.</p>
+
+<p>"You can see for yourself whether I've been
+bluffing or not," he said quietly; and then he turned
+his back and interested himself in the lithograph of
+the latest Atlantic liner framed and hanging upon
+the mahogany end wall of the small room.</p>
+
+<p>For a little time there was a dead silence, broken
+only by the faint rustling of the papers as Gantry
+withdrew and unfolded them. When he had glanced
+at the last folded letter sheet, he snapped the rubber
+band upon the sheaf and sat back in his chair.
+Blount turned at the snap and found the traffic
+manager smiling curiously up at him.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331"></a></p>
+<p>"Sit down, Evan," was the friendly invitation.
+And when Blount had dropped into the opposite
+chair: "We used to be pretty good friends in the
+old days, Ebee," Gantry went on, falling easily into
+the use of the college nickname. "I haven't forgotten
+the time when I would have had to break
+and go home if you hadn't stood by me like a brother
+and lent me money. For that reason, and for some
+others, I hate to see you bucking a dead wall out
+here in the greasewood hills."</p>
+
+<p>"It is you and your kind who are bucking the
+dead wall, Dick."</p>
+
+<p>"No, listen; I'm giving it to you straight, now.
+A few minutes ago you thought I was drunk&#8212;possibly
+too far gone to serve your purpose. I wasn't;
+I was merely sick and disgusted at the spectacle
+afforded by a crafty, crooked, double-dealing old
+world&#8212;the world we're living in. Once in a blue
+moon an honest man turns up, and when that happens
+he's got to be broken on the wheel&#8212;as you're
+going to be broken. Oh, yes; I came out with
+ideals, too, but they've been knocked out of me.
+We all have to keep the lock-step in business, and
+business is hell, Evan. I'm honest to my salt&#8212;which
+is to say that as yet I'm not using my job to
+line my own pockets, but that's the one decent thing
+that can be said of me. Don't let me bore you."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said Blount soberly. "I don't see the
+<a name="Page_332" id="Page_332"></a>pointing of it yet, but&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"You will when I tell you that I've been lying
+to you; faking first one thing and then another.
+Do you get that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hear you say it; yes."</p>
+
+<p>"It's so. I faked that story about your father's
+having made an underground deal with us. It was
+a lie out of whole cloth, because I didn't believe at
+that time that he had. There had been a falling
+out between him and Mr. McVickar; that was common
+talk on the division. But until yesterday I
+didn't know for certain that the trouble had been
+patched up; in fact, I had my own reasons for believing
+that it hadn't been patched up."</p>
+
+<p>"And you told me there was an alliance in order
+that I might believe that my father would be involved
+in an exposure of the railroad's double-dealing
+with the public?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just that. Self-preservation is the primal law&#8212;after
+you've dropped the ideals&#8212;and I thought
+I had invented a way to hold you down. I might
+have saved myself the trouble&#8212;and the lie. It
+comes down to this, Evan: you are one man against
+a crooked world, and you haven't had a ghost of a
+show from the first minute."</p><p><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333"></a></p>
+
+<p>"You'll have to make it plainer," was the even-toned
+rejoinder. "As matters stand now, I am
+pretty well assured that I can do what I set out to
+do. I'm going to be able to make my own employers
+come through with clean hands."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry was shaking his head slowly, and again
+the curious smile flitted across his keen, fine-featured
+face, lingering for an instant at the corners of
+the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You say I'll have to make it plainer, and I will.
+A little while ago you intimated that Kittredge and
+I were responsible for the telegram which sent you
+to Lewiston yesterday. It was a fake, but it didn't
+originate with Kittredge or with me."</p>
+
+<p>"With whom, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hate to tell you, Evan&#8212;it'll hit you hard.
+The frame-up was your father's. He got hold of
+Kittredge the night before, some time after we had
+left my office together to go up-town. He told Kittredge
+it was for the good of 'the cause,' and suggested
+that a wire purporting to come from Mr.
+McVickar would probably turn the trick. He didn't
+give his reason for wanting to get you out of the
+way at this time, and Kittredge didn't ask it."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was pinning the traffic manager down with
+an eyehold which was like a gripping hand, and the
+<a name="Page_334" id="Page_334"></a>close air of the little mahogany bank cell became
+suddenly charged with the subtle effluence of antagonism.
+Blount was the first to break the painful
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>"You have told me nothing new, Dick, or at least
+nothing that I have not been taking for granted almost
+from the beginning. But let it be understood
+between us, once for all, that I discuss my father,
+his motives, or his acts, with no man living. We'll
+drop that phase of it; it's a side issue, and has no
+bearing upon the business that brought us here.
+You asked for the proof of my ability to compel
+your employers and mine to turn over the clean
+leaf. You have it there under your hand."</p>
+
+<p>For answer, Gantry pushed the rubber-banded file
+across the table to his companion. "Take another
+look, Evan, and see how helpless you are in the grip
+of a crooked world," he said, very gently.</p>
+
+<p>Blount caught up the file and ran it through. It
+was made up wholly of pieces of blank paper, cut to
+letter-size, and clipped at the corner with a brass
+fastener, as the originals had been.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIX" id="XIX"></a>XIX</h2>
+<p><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335"></a></p>
+
+<h3>A COG IN THE WHEEL</h3>
+
+
+<p>While Blount was staring abstractedly at the
+file of blank sheets which had been substituted for
+the incriminating letters of the vote-selling corporation
+managers, with Gantry sitting back, alert and
+watchful, to mark the first signs of the coming storm,
+there came a tap on the locked door of the little
+room, and a deprecatory voice said: "It's our closing
+time, gentlemen: if you are about through&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"In a minute," returned Gantry quickly, and then
+he took the blank dummy out of Blount's hands,
+pocketed it, shut the japanned safety box, and
+touched his companion's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's get out of this, Evan," he said, still speaking
+as one speaks to a hurt child. "Conroy wants
+to close up."</p>
+
+<p>Blount suffered himself to be led away, and in
+the vault room he went mechanically through the
+motions of locking up the empty box. In the street
+Gantry once more took the lead, walking his silent
+<a name="Page_336" id="Page_336"></a>charge around the block and into the Temple Court
+elevator. A little later, when the door of the private
+room in the up-town legal office had opened to
+admit them, and Blount had dropped heavily into his
+own desk chair, Gantry plunged promptly into the
+breach.</p>
+
+<p>"We've been friendly enemies in this thing right
+from the start, Evan," he began, "and that's as it
+had to be. But blood&#8212;even the blood of a college
+brotherhood&#8212;is thicker than water. I know now
+what you're in for, and I'm going to stand by you,
+if it costs me my job. First, let's clear the way a
+bit. If I say that I haven't had anything to do,
+even by implication, with this jolt you've just been
+given, will you believe me?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount lifted a pair of heavy-lidded eyes and let
+them rest for an instant upon the face of the traffic
+manager. "If you say so, Dick, I'll believe it," he
+returned.</p>
+
+<p>"Good. Now we can dive into the thick of it.
+I won't insult you by doubting the premising fact.
+You had the evidence once?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did&#8212;enough of it to keep a grand jury busy
+<a name="Page_337" id="Page_337"></a>for a month. It came to me in the shape of unsolicited
+letters from the men who are benefiting by the
+railroad company's evasion of the law, and who are,
+of course, equally criminal with the railroad officials.
+Why these letters were written to me I don't know,
+Gantry. I merely know that they were wholly unsolicited."</p>
+
+<p>"They were written to you because you are supposed
+to be the doctor in the present crisis."</p>
+
+<p>"But good God, Dick! Haven't I been shouting
+from every platform in the State that we were out
+for a clean campaign?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry shook his head and his smile was commiserative.
+"I know; and every man who has
+had his fingers in the pitch-barrel has chuckled to
+himself, and when two of them would get together
+they'd pound each other on the back and swear that
+you were the smoothest spellbinder that Mr. McVickar
+has ever turned loose on this side of the big
+mountains. It grinds, Evan, but it's the fact. Not
+one of the men you are after has ever taken your
+speeches seriously."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's head sank lower.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm smashed, Dick!" he groaned; "utterly and
+irretrievably disgraced and discredited in my native
+State! There isn't a man in the sage-brush
+hills who would believe me under oath, after this."</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338"></a>"It's hard, Evan&#8212;damned hard!" said the traffic
+manager, driven to repetition. "But grilling over it
+doesn't get us anywhere. What are you going to do"?</p>
+
+<p>"With the election only five days away, there is
+nothing that can be done. I had you down, Dick;
+I could have forced my point with the weapon I
+had. Isn't that so?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry wagged his head dubiously. "I'm not the
+big boss, but I can tell you right now that, if you
+could have shown me what I was fully expecting to
+see, the wires between here and wherever Mr. McVickar's
+private car happens to be would have been
+kept pretty hot for a while." Then, upon second
+thought: "Yes; I guess you could have pulled it off.
+We couldn't stand for any such bill-boarding as you
+were threatening to give us."</p>
+
+<p>Blount turned to his desk, opened it, and began
+to arrange his papers.</p>
+
+<p>"You've been a good friend, after all, Dick," he
+said, talking as he worked. "I'm going to ask you
+to go one step farther and take charge of the funeral,
+if you will. Find Mr. McVickar and wire him that
+I've dropped out. I'll write him a resignation from
+somewhere, when I have time."</p><p><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339"></a></p>
+
+<p>Gantry left his chair and came to stand beside
+the quitter.</p>
+
+<p>"Honestly, Evan," he said slowly, "I thought you
+were a grown man. You'll forgive the mistake,
+won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount turned upon his tormentor and swore
+pathetically. "What's the use&#8212;what in the devil
+is the use?" he rasped, when the outburst began to
+grow measurably articulate. "You know as well as
+I do what's been done to me, and who has done it.
+Can I lift my hand to strike back, even if I had a
+weapon to strike with?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you can't. But you owe it to yourself,
+and to a certain bright-minded young woman that
+I know of, not to fly off the handle without at least
+trying to see if you can't stay on. Wait a minute."
+The railroad man took a turn up and down the floor,
+head down and hands behind him. When he came
+back to the desk end he began again. "Evan, who's
+got those original papers?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340"></a></p>
+<p>"The man who blew up my safe, of course.
+You've said you didn't hire him, and that leaves
+only one alternative."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry took the dummy packet from his pocket
+and held one of the blank sheets up to the light of
+the window. It was growing dusk, and when he
+failed to discern what he was looking for, he turned
+on the electric lights and tried again. At this the
+script "T-C" water-mark was plainly visible, and
+he showed it to Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"That proves conclusively that the substitution
+was made here in your own office. Whom do you
+suspect?"</p>
+
+<p>In a flash Blount remembered: how he had sent
+Collins to get the packet out of the safe, the stenographer's
+delay, the hasty sealing of the envelope,
+and the suspicion which had been cut short by the
+incoming of Ackerton.</p>
+
+<p>"I know now who did it, and when it was done,"
+he said. "The day before the office was broken
+into I told Collins to bring <a name="Page_341" id="Page_341"></a>me the papers from the
+safe. What he brought me was that dummy&#8212;in a
+freshly sealed envelope. I was going to open
+the envelope, but just then Ackerton came in."</p>
+
+<p>"All clear so far," said Gantry; and then: "Where
+is Collins now?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know; he comes and goes pretty much
+as he pleases when I'm not in town."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know anything about him personally?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"I do. His father was a bank cashier, and he
+became a defaulter&#8212;of the easy-mark kind; the
+kind that is too good-natured to look too curiously
+at a friend's collateral. He would have gone over
+the road if your father hadn't pulled him out by
+main strength."</p>
+
+<p>"I see," said Blount cynically. "And the son
+has paid his father's debt to my father. But why
+the safe-blowing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Collins's face had to be<a name="Page_342" id="Page_342"></a> saved in some way. He
+couldn't know that you meant to lock the dummy
+up in the safety vault," returned Gantry, and then,
+after a pause: "That's our one little ray of hope,
+Evan."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see it."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you? Then I'll make it a bit plainer. If
+some railroad burglar had cracked your safe, you
+could confidently assume that the original letters
+have been carefully cremated by this time, couldn't
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so."</p>
+
+<p>"But if your father has them ... Evan, I don't
+know any more than the man in the moon what he
+wants them for, but the man in the street would
+grin and tell you that your father was merely getting
+ready to hold the railroad company up for something
+it didn't want to part with."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm letting you say it of my own flesh and blood,
+Dick; and it shows you how badly broken I am.
+After all, it doesn't lead anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it does. Let us suppose, just for the sake
+of argument, that your father doesn't know how
+much those letters mean to you&#8212;I know it's a pretty
+hard thing to imagine, but we'll do it by main
+strength and awkwardness. Let us suppose agai<a name="Page_343" id="Page_343"></a>n,
+that being the case, that you go to him frankly and
+show him in a few well-chosen words just where he
+has landed you; tell him you've got to have those
+letters&#8212;simply <i>got</i> to have them&#8212;to save your face.
+I know your father, Evan, a good bit better than you
+do; he'd give you the earth with a fence around it
+if you should ask him for it."</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount got slowly out of his chair, stood up,
+and put his hands upon the smaller man's shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Dick, do you realize what you are doing for yourself
+when you show me a possible way of getting
+my weapon back?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry's lips became a fine straight line and he
+nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what made me walk the floor a few minutes
+ago; I was trying to find out if I were big
+enough. It's all right, Ebee; you go to it, and I'll
+throw up my job and run a foot-race with the sheriff,
+if I have to. Damn the job, anyway!" he finished
+petulantly. "I'm tired of being a robber for
+somebody else's pocket all the time!"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344"></a></p>
+<p>Blount sat down again and put his face in his
+hands. After a time he looked up to say: "I can't
+let you outbid me in the open market, Dick. You
+can't set the friendship peg any higher than I can."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry crossed the room and recovered his top-coat
+and hat from the chair where he had thrown
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you be a fool," he advised curtly.
+"There's a railroad down in Peru that is going
+bankrupt for the lack of a wide-awake, up-to-date
+traffic man. I've had the offer on my desk for a
+month, and I'm going to cable to-night. That lets
+you out, whether you do or don't. But if you've
+got the sense of a wooden Indian, you'll do as I've
+said&#8212;and do it <i>pronto</i>. Your time's mighty short,
+anyway. So long."</p>
+
+<p>And before Blount could stop him he was gone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XX" id="XX"></a>XX</h2>
+
+<h3><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345"></a>A STONE FOR BREAD</h3>
+
+
+<p>Though he had eaten nothing since the early
+breakfast in the service-car on the way to Lewiston,
+Evan Blount let the dinner hour go by unnoted.
+For a long time after Gantry had left him he sat
+motionless, a prey to thoughts too bitter to find
+expression in words; the dismaying thoughts of the
+hard-pressed champion who has discovered that his
+foes are of his own household.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the one great boyhood sorrow, a sorrow
+which had been allowed unduly to magnify
+itself with the passing years, he had never been
+brought face to face with any of the hardnesses
+which alone can make the soldier of life entirely
+intrepid in the shock of battle. In the backward
+glance he saw that his homeless youth had been,
+none the less, a sheltered youth; that his father's
+love and care had built and maintained invisible ramparts
+which had hitherto shielded him. It was most
+humiliating to find that the crumbling of the ramparts
+was leaving him naked and shivering; to find
+that he was so far out of touch with his pioneer
+lineage as to be unable to stand alone.</p><p><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346"></a></p>
+
+<p>But there are better things in the blood of the
+pioneers than a latter-day descendant of the continent-conquering
+fathers may be able to discern in
+the moment of defeat and disaster. Slowly, so
+slowly that he did not recognize the precise moment
+at which the tide of depression and wretchedness
+reached its lowest ebb and turned to sweep him
+back to a firmer footing, Blount found himself emerging
+from the bitter waters. Gantry, the Gantry
+whom he had been calling hard names, setting him
+down as at best a lovable but wholly unprincipled
+time-server, had pointed a possible way to retrieval,
+heroically effacing himself that the way might be
+unobstructed. With the warm blood leaping again,
+Blount straightened himself in his chair. He would
+go to his father, not as a son begging a boon, but as
+a man demanding his rights. The machine had seen
+fit to throw down the challenge by burglarizing his
+office and robbing him. Very good; there were five
+days remaining in which to strike back. He would
+lift the challenge, and if his reasonable demand should
+be refused, he would drop the railroad crusade and
+break into the wider field of bossism and machine-made
+<a name="Page_347" id="Page_347"></a>majorities, ploughing and turning it up to the
+light as he could.</p>
+
+<p>The fiery resolution had scarcely been taken when
+he heard the door of Collins's outer room open and
+close, and a moment later the good-looking young
+stenographer came in, bringing a breath of the crisp
+autumn evening with him.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't know you were back, Mr. Blount!" he
+exclaimed. "I saw the office lights from the street,
+and thought somebody had left them turned on. Is
+there anything I can do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; sit down," said Blount crisply, and then:
+"Collins, what do you do with yourself when I am
+out of town?"</p>
+
+<p>"I stay here most of the time. I went out early
+this afternoon, but I don't often do it."</p>
+
+<p>"Were you here all day yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Was there anything unu<a name="Page_348" id="Page_348"></a>sual going on?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man looked away as if he expected to
+find his answer in the farther corner of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know as you'd call it unusual," he replied
+half-hesitantly. "There were a good many callers.
+Shall I bring you the list?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>The stenographer went out to his desk and brought
+back a slip of paper with the names.</p>
+
+<p>"This man Gryson," said Blount, running his eye
+over the memorandum, "I see you've got him down
+four or five times. What did he want?"</p>
+
+<p>"He wouldn't tell me. But he was all kinds of
+anxious to see you. That was why I telegraphed you;
+I couldn't get rid of him any other way."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me see the copy of the message."</p>
+
+<p>Again Collins made a journey to his desk, returning
+with the telegraph-impression book open at the
+proper page. Blount glanced at the copy of the
+brief message: "Thomas Gryson wants to know when
+he can be sure of finding you here," and handed the
+book back.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349"></a></p>
+<p>"How did you send that?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I sent it down to the despatcher's office by
+Barney."</p>
+
+<p>Blount nodded. The message had not reached
+him; and its suppression was doubtless another move
+in the subtle game.</p>
+
+<p>"You say you couldn't find out what Gryson
+wanted?" he pressed.</p>
+
+<p>"He&#8212;he seemed to be all torn up about something;
+couldn't say three words without putting a
+cuss word in with them. The most I could get out
+of him was that somebody was trying to double-cross
+him."</p>
+
+<p>Blount took a cigar from his pocket and lighted
+it. He was faint for lack of food, but he absently
+mistook the hunger for the tobacco craving.</p>
+
+<p>"Collins," he said evenly, "you appear to forget
+at times that you are working for a man who has
+had some little experience with unwilling witnesses
+in the cou<a name="Page_350" id="Page_350"></a>rts. You are not telling me the truth;
+or, at least, you're not telling me all of it. Let's
+have the part that you are keeping back."</p>
+
+<p>"The&#8212;the last time he was in, he&#8212;he did talk a
+little," faltered the young man. "He's got something
+to sell, and he's f-fighting mad at Mr. Kittredge.
+He said he was going to throw the gaff into
+somebody damn' quick if Mr. Kittredge didn't wipe
+off the slate and c-come across with the price."</p>
+
+<p>"That is better," was the brief comment. "Now,
+then, why did you lie to me in the first place?"</p>
+
+<p>The stenographer shut his eyes and shrunk lower
+in his chair, but he made no reply.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you why you lied," Blount went on, less
+harshly. "It was because you were told to. Isn't
+that so?"</p>
+
+<p>Collins nodded.</p>
+
+<p>Reaching out quickly, Blount laid a hand on the
+young man's knee. "Fred, what do you think of
+a soldier who takes his pay from one side and fights
+on the other? That is what you've been doing, you
+know; it is what you did when you put a dozen
+<a name="Page_351" id="Page_351"></a>sheets of blank paper into an envelope the other
+day&#8212;the day I sent you to get a file of letters
+marked 'private' from the safe."</p>
+
+<p>The culprit drew away from the touch of the hand
+on his knee, and there was fear, and behind the fear
+the courage of desperation, in his eyes when he lifted
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"You can give me the third degree if you want
+to, Mr. Blount, but as long as I've got the breath
+to say no, I'll never tell you the next thing you're
+going to ask me!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount sprang up and went to stand at the window.
+There was a street arc-lamp swinging in its
+<a name="Page_352" id="Page_352"></a>high sling some distance below the window level, its
+scintillant spark changing weirdly to blue and green
+and back to blinding orange, and he stared so steadily
+at it that his eyes were full of tears when he turned
+to look down upon the waiting culprit.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Collins; I'm not going to ask you the name
+of the other master for whom you have thrown me
+down," he said gravely; and then: "That's all&#8212;you
+may go now."</p>
+
+<p>The young man got up and groped for the hat
+which had fallen from his hands to the floor and
+rolled away out of reach.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that I'm to get my time-check?" he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No," he grated&#8212;the harshness returning suddenly.
+"You are disloyal, and I know it; your
+successor would probably be the same, and I
+shouldn't know it."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353"></a></p>
+<p>Nerved to the strident pitch now by the new
+resolution, Blount hurriedly set his desk in order,
+slammed it shut, and followed the stenographer to
+the street level. In the avenue he hesitated for a
+moment, the thoughts shuttling swiftly. In a flash
+the inferences fell into place. Gantry had said that
+his father was responsible for the time-killing journey
+to Lewiston. Why had it been necessary? Was
+it to keep him out of Gryson's way? What did the
+ward-organizer have to communicate that made him
+so anxious to secure an interview? Was that anxiety
+the breach through which the wider field of corruption
+might be reached?</p>
+
+<p>Again swift decision came to its own and Blount
+faced to the right, walking rapidly until he turned
+in at the foot of the worn double flight of stairs
+leading to the editorial rooms of <i>The Plainsman</i>.
+Blenkinsop, the editor, a lean, haggard man with a
+sallow face, coarse black hair worn always a little
+longer than the prevailing cut, and deep-set, gloomy
+eyes, was at his desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you give me a few minutes of your time,
+Blenkinsop?" the cal<a name="Page_354" id="Page_354"></a>ler asked shortly.</p>
+
+<p>"I can sell 'em to you, maybe," said the editor,
+and the lift of the gloomy eyes merely served to
+turn the jest into a bit of morbid sarcasm. Then
+he gave the sarcasm a half-bitter twist: "You railroad
+gentlemen are always willing to buy what you
+can't reach out and take."</p>
+
+<p>"I know that is what you believe," said Blount,
+drawing up a broken chair and planting himself
+carefully in it; "we are on opposite sides of the
+fence in this fight, if you are fighting the railroad
+merely because it is a railroad; otherwise, perhaps,
+we are not so far apart as we might be. I don't
+know whether or not you have listened to any of
+my speeches, but you've printed a good many of
+them."</p>
+
+<p>The editor nodded. "I've read 'em, and I'm
+willing to be the hundredth man and say that I believe
+you are individually honest. I hope you're
+not going to ask me to go any further than
+that."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not; I came for quite another purpose.<a name="Page_355" id="Page_355"></a>
+First, let me ask a frank question: Is <i>The Plainsman</i>
+out for a square deal all around, regardless of who
+may be hit?"</p>
+
+<p>Blenkinsop took time to consider the question and
+his answer, chewing thoughtfully upon his extinct
+cigar while he reflected.</p>
+
+<p>"This is straight goods?" he asked finally.
+"You're not trying to pull me into an admission
+that can be used against us a little later on?"</p>
+
+<p>"At the present moment you are talking to Evan
+Blount, the man, and not to the Transcontinental
+company's lawyer, Blenkinsop."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; then I'll tell you flat that we are out
+for blood. We hold no brief for any living man.
+There are no strings tied to us, and we wear nobody's
+brass collar."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are fighting the machine as well as
+the railroad?" Blount put in quickly.</p>
+
+<p>The editor sat back in his cha<a name="Page_356" id="Page_356"></a>ir, and the two furrows
+which deepened upon either side of his hard-bitted
+mouth answered for a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"When you find a machine that hasn't got
+'T-C.R.' lettered on it somewhere, you let us
+know about it," was his rather cryptic reply.</p>
+
+<p>"That is not the point," said Blount dryly.
+"Here is the question I wanted to ask: There are
+only five days intervening before the election. How
+wide a swath could you cut if the evidence of wholesale
+corruption could be placed in your hands within
+twenty-four hours?"</p>
+
+<p>Again the editor took time to consider. When he
+spoke it was to say: "I can't quite believe that you
+are going to be disloyal to your salt at this late
+stage of the game, Blount. Do you mean that you
+are going to show your own company up for what
+it really is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind about that. I asked a question, and
+you haven't answered it."</p>
+
+<p>"It was a question of time, wasn't it? There's
+time enough to tip the skillet over and spill all the
+grease into the fire, if that's what you mean; always
+time enough, up to the l<a name="Page_357" id="Page_357"></a>ast issue before the polls
+open."</p>
+
+<p>"And you'd do it&#8212;no matter who might happen
+to get in the way of the burning grease?"</p>
+
+<p>"We print the news, and we try to get all the news
+there is. But it would have to be straight goods,
+Blount; no 'ifs' and 'ands' about it. I'm not saying
+that you couldn't produce the goods, you know.
+If you could break into Gantry's and Kittredge's
+private files, the trick would be turned. But I know
+well enough you're not going to do that."</p>
+
+<p>Blount got up out of the broken chair and buttoned
+his coat.</p>
+
+<p>"I needn't take any more of your time just now,"
+he said. "I merely wanted to know how far you'd
+go if somebody should happen along at the last moment
+and give you a plain map of the road."</p>
+
+<p>"We'll go as far, and drive as hard, as any newspaper
+this side of the Missouri River. But we've
+got to have the facts&#8212;don't forget that."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was turning to go, but he faced around
+again sharply.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358"></a></p>
+<p>"Do you mean to tell me, Blenkinsop, that you
+don't know, as well as you know you're alive, that
+this campaign is honeycombed with deals and trades
+and dishonesty and trickery in every legislative district?"
+he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>Again the ghastly smile which was only a deepening
+of the natural furrows flitted across the editor's
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, I know it," he returned. "But you'll
+excuse me if I say that I scarcely expected to have
+the railroad company's field-manager come and tell
+me about it."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's grim smile was a match for the editorial
+face-wrinkling. "You are like a good many others,
+Blenkinsop; you see red when you hear the noise
+of a railroad train. Perhaps, a little later, I may
+be able to persuade you to see another color&#8212;yellow,
+for example. Let it go at that. Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>Once more in the avenue, Blount turned his steps
+toward the Inter-Mountain. Since the campaign<a name="Page_359" id="Page_359"></a>
+was now in its final week, the clans were gathering
+in the capital, and the lobby of the great hotel was
+filled with groups of caucussing politicians. Blount
+was halted half a dozen times before he could make
+his way to the room-clerk's desk, and the pumping
+process to which he was subjected at each fresh stoppage
+would have amused him if the fiery resolution
+which was driving him on had not temporarily
+killed his sense of humor. It was evident that, in
+spite of all he had been saying and doing, a considerable
+majority of the caucussers were still regarding
+him as his father's lieutenant. He did not try very
+hard to remove the impression. It mattered little,
+in the present crisis, what the various party henchmen
+thought or believed.</p>
+
+<p>It was a sharp disappointment when the room-clerk
+told him that his father and Mrs. Honoria and
+their guest had gone to the theatre. He was keyed
+to the fighting-pitch, and he wanted to have the
+deciding word spoken while his blood was up and
+there was still time to act. A glance at the clock
+showed him that he had a full half-hour to wait; and,
+as much to escape the buzzing lobbyists as to satisfy
+his hunger, he went to the <i>café</i> and ordered a belated
+dinner, choosing a table from which he could
+look out through the open doors and command the
+<a name="Page_360" id="Page_360"></a>main entrance through which the theatre-goers would
+return.</p>
+
+<p>He was through with the dinner, and was slowly
+sipping his black coffee, when he saw them come in.
+Since it was no part of his plan to dull the edge of
+opportunity by holding it first upon the social grindstone,
+he let the party of three go on to the elevators,
+and a little later sent a card up-stairs asking his father
+to meet him in the lounge on the mezzanine floor.</p>
+
+<p>Having the advantage of time, he was first at the
+appointed meeting-place. He had drawn a chair
+to the balustrade, and was glooming thoughtfully
+down at the lobby gathering, upon which even the
+lateness of the hour appeared to have no dispersing
+effect, when a mellow voice behind him said: "Well,
+son, taking a quiet little squint at the menagerie?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount got up and gave the speaker his chair,
+dragging up another for himself. The senator sat
+down and stretched his great frame like a man
+wearied. "Ah, Lord!" he said. "The old man isn't
+as young as he used to be, Evan, boy. There was
+a time once when eleven o'clock didn't seem any
+later to me than it does now to you; but it's gone
+by, son, and I don't reckon it'll ever come back
+again."</p>
+
+<p>Blount drew his chair nearer. "I have a hard
+thing to say to you to-night, dad," he began, "and
+you mustn't make it harder by speaking of your&#8212;of
+the things that get near to me. I am a man
+grown, and a Blount, like yourself; I want you to
+give me back those papers which your dynamiter
+or somebody else in your pay took from my offic<a name="Page_361" id="Page_361"></a>e
+safe three nights ago."</p>
+
+<p>The senator's eyes lighted with the gentle smile,
+and the tips of the great mustaches twitched slightly.</p>
+
+<p>"So McVickar's been telling tales out of school,
+has he?" he inquired half-jocularly.</p>
+
+<p>"I have had no communication with Mr. McVickar.
+It wasn't necessary, nor is it needful for
+us to go aside out of the straight road. I want those
+papers. They are mine, and they were stolen."</p>
+
+<p>The elder man smiled again. "What if I should
+say that I haven't got 'em, son&#8212;what then?" he
+asked mildly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want you to say that. I want to believe
+that, however bitter this fight may grow, we shall
+still speak the truth to each other."</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a little time, and then the
+father broke it to say: "Reckon I could ask you
+what papers you mean, without roiling the water
+any more than it's already been roiled, son?"</p>
+
+<p>"You may ask and I'll answer, if you'll let me say
+that it is hardly worth while for you to spar with me
+to gain time. I had certain documents&#8212;letters&#8212;which
+would have enabled me to come through clean
+with my own people&#8212;with the railroad management.
+You knew I had them; I was imprudent enough to
+boast of it one evening when we were dining together
+in your rooms. I know what I'm talking about,
+dad, when I make this <a name="Page_362" id="Page_362"></a>demand of you. One of my
+clerks has been tampered with. Three days ago,
+when I asked him to bring me the letters from the
+safe, he brought me, instead, a packet of blank
+paper which he allowed me to go and lock up in
+my safety-box in the Sierra National. I don't know
+why you had the safe blown up, unless it was to
+save Collins's face."</p>
+
+<p>Again a silence intervened, and in the midst of
+it the senator sat up and began to feel half-absently
+in his pockets for a cigar. Blount offered his own
+pocket-case, following it with the tender of a lighted
+match. With the cigar going, the Honorable David
+settled back in the deep chair, chuckling thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"They wrote me from back yonder on the Eastern
+edge of things that you had the makings of a mighty
+fine lawyer in you, boy, and I'll be switched if I
+don't believe they had it about right. The way
+you've trailed this thing out doesn't leave the old
+man a hole as big as a dog-burrow to crawl out of,
+does it, now? Reckon you've sure-enough got to
+have those papers back before you can go on, do
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know I must. You know what I've been
+preaching and talking: I have<a name="Page_363" id="Page_363"></a> meant every word of it
+in good faith, and when I began to doubt the good
+faith of those behind me, I was forced to cast about
+for a weapon. It was handed to me almost miraculously,
+and as long as I held it my good name before
+the people of the State was safe. As the matter
+stands now, I'm a broken man, dad. After the
+election I shall be billeted from one end of the State
+to the other as the most shameless liar that ever
+breathed!"</p>
+
+<p>The senator was rocking his great head slowly
+upon the chair-pillow. "That's bad; that's mighty
+bad, son. I reckon we'll have to fix some way to
+trail you out of that bog-hole, sure enough!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not asking for help; I'm asking for bare justice.
+Give me those papers and I'll fight myself
+clear."</p>
+
+<p>"And if I say I can't give 'em to you, Evan, boy,
+what then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then, hard and unfilial as it may seem to you,
+I shall fight you and your machine to a finish. You
+think I can't do it? I'll show you. I've got five
+days, and they are all my own. This campaign has<a name="Page_364" id="Page_364"></a>
+been rotten to the core from the very beginning.
+You have tried to keep me from finding it out, and
+you have partly succeeded. But I know a little, and
+inside of the next twenty-four hours I shall know
+more. That's my last word, dad, and it breaks my
+heart to have to say it. But, by the God who made
+us both, if you drive me to it, I shall stir up such a
+revolution in this State that the people will forget
+to curse me for the lies I have been allowed to tell
+them!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount was upon his feet when he finished, and
+<a name="Page_365" id="Page_365"></a>the senator was rising stiffly from the depths of the
+big chair.</p>
+
+<p>"That's good, man-sized talk, son," he commented
+gently, "and I reckon I haven't a word to
+say against it. All I'm going to beg for is this:
+we're kin, boy&#8212;mighty close kin. Belt away as
+hard as you like in the big scrap; it does me good
+to see that all these little Eastern frills haven't
+made you any less a two-fisted, hard-hitting Blount;
+but don't let it make you turn your back when
+your old daddy comes into the room. That's all I
+ask. Now you'd better go to bed and sleep up
+some. There's another day coming, and if there
+isn't, none of these little things we've been haggling
+over is going to count for much to any of us."</p>
+
+<p>Three minutes later the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush
+was letting himself into the sitting-room of
+his suite on the private dining-room floor by means
+of his night-key. The small person whom Gantry
+and a few others were still calling the court of last
+resort was sitting up, and the tiny embroidery-frame
+on the table had evi<a name="Page_366" id="Page_366"></a>dently just been laid
+aside.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" she said inquiringly.</p>
+
+<p>The senator shook his head in patient tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever you've been doing, it's knocked the
+bottom clean out for the boy, Honoria. For a little
+spell he had me going, and I thought I'd just naturally
+have to turn loose and spill all the fat into the
+fire."</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't do that," she returned quickly.
+"There are five days yet, and I need at least three
+of them. He was very angry?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fighting mad."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said the small one thoughtfully.
+"But we can't allow that to get in the way of the
+bigger things. It won't make any family break, will
+it? For Patricia's sake I shall be sorry if he is
+desperate enough to make the quarrel a personal
+one."</p>
+
+<p>"I did the best I could on that, little woman, and
+I reckon he's big enough to keep on telling us
+'Howdy.' What comes <a name="Page_367" id="Page_367"></a>next on the programme?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow I'm going to try to get him to take
+Patricia driving. Beyond that I haven't planned,
+and anyway it doesn't matter, now that you have
+Gryson out of the way." Then she offered a bit
+of news. "Richard Gantry telephoned me a few
+minutes ago. He has sent in his resignation, and is
+going to Peru."</p>
+
+<p>The senator was opening the door to the adjoining
+bedroom and turning on the lights.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, I reckon not," he rejoined, with a mellow
+laugh rumbling deep in his great body. "Dick
+only thinks he is going to Peru. We all think such
+things now and then."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE UNDER-DOG</h3>
+
+
+<p>Blount's first move on the morning following the
+militant interview with his father was telegraphic;
+he wired the campaign chairmen in the three towns
+remaining on his list, cancelling his speaking-engagements.
+Beyond that he went forth to institute a
+<a name="Page_368" id="Page_368"></a>painstaking search in the purlieus of the city, a quest
+having for its object the unearthing of the man
+Thomas Gryson. More and more he was coming to
+believe that this man was the key to a larger situation
+in the field of political corruption than any
+which had as yet developed. Wherefore he made
+the search thorough.</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, considering the man and his habits,
+the quest proved fruitless. Blount was too clean
+a man to be on familiar terms with the saloon men
+and dive-keepers of the capital-city underworld, or
+with the crooks and turnings of the underworld itself;
+but he found his way around easily enough in
+daylight, and had his labor for his pains. For when
+he went back to the hotel at the luncheon-hour he
+brought little with him save a stench in his nostrils
+and a slightly increased fund of mystification. Gryson
+had disappeared as completely as if the earth
+had opened and swallowed him. And Blount knew
+the disappearance was real, because the ward-heeler's
+own henchmen were searching for him.</p>
+
+<p>Daunted but not beaten, Blount meant to continue
+the quest in the afternoon. But man proposes,
+and a small <i>dea ex machina</i> may dispose. At the
+<i>café</i> family luncheon, at which Blount was c<a name="Page_369" id="Page_369"></a>areful
+to make his appearance, not only because Patricia
+was there, but also for the sake of keeping the kinsman
+peace his father had begged for, it transpired
+that Patricia had been promised an auto drive to
+Fort Parker, the military reservation sixteen miles
+to the westward, and that there were difficulties.
+The senator's wife took his arm and explained her
+dilemma at the table dispersal.</p>
+
+<p>"It is parade day at the Fort, you know, and
+Patricia has set her heart on going. I don't know
+how I came to be so absurdly thoughtless, but I
+promised her before I remembered that this is the
+Kismet Club election afternoon, and if I don't go,
+they'll make me president again in spite of everything,"
+she said in low tones as they were leaving
+the <i>café</i>. "I simply <i>can't</i> serve another year; and
+at the same time, I do so dislike to disappoint Patricia.
+She is such a dear girl!" Mrs. Honoria was
+strictly within the bounds of truth in claiming to
+have forgotten the date of the Kismet election of
+officers; but it was equally true that the club would
+re-elect her, present or absent, since she was its
+founder and chief patroness.</p>
+
+<p>Blount saw the pointing of all this with perfect
+clarity, and he had no need to assure himself that
+it had every ear-mark of another expedient to get
+<a name="Page_370" id="Page_370"></a>him out of the way. But while he was with Mrs.
+Honoria and listening to her persuasive little appeals
+it was much harder to maintain the antagonistic
+attitude than it was when she figured&#8212;at
+a distance&#8212;merely as his father's second wife and
+his mother's supplanter. Foolish? Oh, yes; but at
+times when the star of impulse is in the ascendant
+every man hath a fool in his sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>is</i> too bad to disappoint her," he found himself
+saying, matching the little lady's low tone. "If I
+wasn't so terribly busy&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know; and just now, with the election so near,
+you must be busier than ever. I suppose I shall
+have to explain to Patricia, and it hurts me, when
+she is going home so soon."</p>
+
+<p>"Going home?" echoed the victim.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; in a few days now. The professor has
+already overstayed his leave of absence, so he says."</p>
+
+<p>Blount clenched a figurative fist and shook it savagely
+at an unkind fate. Nevertheless, he fell.</p>
+
+<p>"If you can shift your responsibility to my shoulders,
+Mrs. Blount&#8212;" he began, but she would not
+let him finish.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371"></a></p>
+<p>"Oh! that is <i>so</i> good of you, Evan. Take the
+little car, and be sure to ask the garage man to put
+in new batteries. The magneto isn't working very
+well. And be here by half past one if you can.
+The parade is at half past two, you know."</p>
+
+<p>Under other conditions the railroad company's
+"social secretary," as the society editors of the capital
+were still calling him, might have had a joyous
+half-holiday. The autumn afternoon was picture-fine,
+the little car ran well, and Patricia's mood was
+tempered with the gayety which strives to extract
+the final thrill of enjoyment out of the closing days
+of a delightful vacation. Blount was grateful for
+the light-hearted mood. He felt that it would be
+next to impossible to tell Patricia how wretchedly
+he had failed in the single-handed crusade, and, as
+to the desperate alternative, there could be no confidences
+with one whose every reference to his father
+was shot through with loving and loyal admiration.</p>
+
+<p>At the military reservation there were fewer opportunities
+for the confidences, or rather fewer temptations
+to indulge in them. It was a gala day at
+the post, and there were a number of auto parties
+out from the city. Blount knew most of the officers
+and their wives, and Patricia was welcomed not less
+for her own sake than for the reason that she had
+figured in former visits as the <i>protégée</i> of an ex-senator's
+wife. After the parade there was an impromptu
+game of baseball, with the broad verandas of the
+officers' quarters servin<a name="Page_372" id="Page_372"></a>g for the grandstand. Beyond
+the game there was tea, and the sunset gun
+had been fired before the young lieutenant, who had
+attached himself to Miss Anners at the earliest possible
+moment in the afternoon, reluctantly surrendered
+his prize and handed Patricia into the waiting
+runabout for the return to the capital.</p>
+
+<p>"We shall be late for dinner, if we don't hurry,"
+was the young woman's comment when Blount
+steered the little car clear of the post settlement and
+took the road well in the wake of the Weatherford
+touring machine. Then she added: "We mustn't
+be; we are dining out this evening&#8212;at the Gordons."</p>
+
+<p>Blount was entirely willing to hurry. Half of one
+of the precious days of challenge had been wasted
+in the futile search for Gryson, and here was the
+other half worse than wasted, since the handsome
+young lieutenant had so brazenly monopolized Patricia.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll get you home in time for dinner, never fear,"
+he returned, but apparently the little car was no
+party to the promise. A short mile from the reservation
+the motor began to miss, and a few minutes
+farther along it stopped altogether. Blount got out
+and began to investigate. There was plenty of gasolene,
+but the spark appeared to be dead.</p>
+
+<p>"I ought t<a name="Page_373" id="Page_373"></a>o have a leather medal!" he confided
+to Patricia, in great disgust. "Mrs. Blount told
+me that the batteries needed to be changed, and I
+had them changed, but neglected to have them
+tested. Sit still and let me spin it on the magneto
+a while."</p>
+
+<p>She let him do it until the perspiration was standing
+in fine little beads on his forehead and he was
+hot and desperate. Then she said sweetly: "I don't
+believe I'd wear myself out that way, if I were you,
+Evan. Something happened to the magneto two
+or three weeks ago, and it has never been fixed."</p>
+
+<p>Blount pushed his driving-cap back, mopped his
+face, and came around to dive once more into the
+wiring in the battery box. Dusk was coming on,
+and he had to light one of the side-lamps to serve
+as a lantern. By changing the wiring he was finally
+able to evoke a desultory response from the spark-coil,
+and a little later to start the motor after some
+limping fashion.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my poor dinner!" said Miss Anners, who was
+still in the light-hearted mood; this after Blount's
+careful nursing had resulted in a creeping resumption
+of the cityward progress. And then: "I hope
+you didn't have any engagement for this evening?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have but one ambition in life," he rejoined
+grimly, "and that is to get you back to the hotel
+in time for your engagement. Surely Mrs. Blount
+will wait for you."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374"></a></p>
+<p>At the rate they were going the waiting promised
+to be long. But after another half-hour had been
+killed, the headlights of a westward-driven car appeared
+in the road ahead. Blount pulled quickly
+into the ditch and jumped out to flag the oncoming
+machine; did flag it, and was able to borrow a set
+of batteries. With the new equipment the remainder
+of the drive was accomplished swiftly, but not swiftly
+enough. At the Inter-Mountain they found that
+the senator and Mrs. Honoria had gone to keep their
+dinner engagement, and a note in the little lady's
+copperplate handwriting informed Blount that the
+invitation had been made to include him, and that
+he was to hurry and bring Patricia.</p>
+
+<p>Fully alive now to the time-killing purpose of the
+clever little machinator in arranging to have spent
+batteries given him, Blount, nevertheless, did his
+duty like a man, and the pair made a late descent
+upon the Gordon dinner-table. Though the dinner
+was informal, there were other guests besides the
+senator's party, and among them the traffic manager.
+Blount, sitting next to Patricia, made their tardiness
+an excuse and devoted himself to her, thus escaping
+the toils of the general table-talk, which was frankly
+political. But at the adjournment to the drawing-room
+he cornered Gantry.</p><p><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375"></a></p>
+
+<p>"I meant to hunt you up this afternoon," he began,
+"but I was otherwise spoken for. What have you
+done?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've cabled a conditional acceptance of the offer
+I was telling you about."</p>
+
+<p>"But you haven't resigned?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Mr. McVickar will probably be here within
+a day or two, and I'll make it verbal."</p>
+
+<p>Yielding to the urgings of the younger Gordon,
+Patricia was going to the piano, and Blount snatched
+at his opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>"Give me a few minutes in the smoking-room,"
+<a name="Page_376" id="Page_376"></a>he said to the traffic manager, and when the privacy
+was secured: "You needn't resign, Dick. There
+isn't going to be any earthquake&#8212;of the kind you
+were fearing."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean that the Honorable Senator has
+turned you down, Evan?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just that."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry," said the friend in need, feeling his
+way cautiously. Then he added: "You needn't
+tell me anything more than you want to, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't much to tell. I asked for bare justice,
+and it was refused."</p>
+
+<p>"Your father has the papers?"</p>
+
+<p>"He neither admitted nor denied."</p>
+
+<p>"But you didn't quarrel?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount's smile was mirthless. "We are here together,
+as you see. After all is said, we are still
+father and son."</p><p><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377"></a></p>
+
+<p>"Of course; that's as it should be, Evan. What
+are you going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know: go on fighting until I'm wiped
+out, I suppose. And that reminds me: have you
+seen that fellow Gryson within the last day or two?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry dropped into the depths of a lounging-chair
+and lighted a cigarette. "So you're after
+Thomas Matthew, too, are you? Kittredge has been
+ransacking the town for him all day, and up to a
+couple of hours ago he hadn't found him. What's
+in the wind?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, but I mean to find out. What
+can you tell me about Gryson&#8212;more than you have
+already told me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not very much, I guess. He's a scalawag, of
+course, but unhappily for all of us he is a scalawag
+with a pull. Kittredge has been dickering with him&#8212;I
+don't mind telling you that now."</p>
+
+<p>"What is the nature of the pull?"</p>
+
+<p>"Votes," said Gantry succinctly.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378"></a>"Straight or crooked?"</p>
+
+<p>"You may search me. But knowing Tom Gryson
+a little, I should put my money on the marked
+card."</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally," said Blount dryly. "Still, I am needing
+to be shown. I've had two or three chances
+to size Gryson up, and he didn't impress me as a
+man with any ability beyond the requirements of a
+bully and the lowest type of a political heeler."</p>
+
+<p>"Tom is bigger than that; I don't know how
+much bigger, but some. He has votes to sell, and
+Kittredge, at least, seems to believe that he can
+deliver the goods. I don't know the inside of the
+deal. I'll tell you frankly that I tried to shove it
+over to you, neck and heels, at first. When that
+little notion failed, I pushed it along to Kittredge."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's eyebrows, which promised in time to be
+as portentous as the Honorable Senator's, met in a
+frown. "I'm going to find Gryson, dead or alive,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>Gantry looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Which means that you know what has become
+of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has been put out of the way for a purpose,<a name="Page_379" id="Page_379"></a>
+and the purpose is to keep me from finding out
+something that Gryson wants to tell me. That was
+the animus of the scheme to send me on a fool's
+errand to Lewiston. After you left me last night I
+found out that Gryson had been worrying Collins
+the day before; had been in the office a number of
+times and was sweatingly anxious about something."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry flung his cigarette away and lighted another.
+After a deep inhalation or two he said: "Let
+it alone, Evan. I have a hunch that you'll be happier
+if you don't try to drag the cover off of that
+particular cesspool."</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," said Blount shortly. "When my father
+turned me down last night I told him that I still
+had five days in which to&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," Gantry nodded. "Just the same,
+you're not going to do it."</p>
+
+<p>"If I don't, it will be because I can't; because
+the time is too short." Then, with a sudden and
+impulsive gesture of appeal: "Dick, for Heaven's
+sake help me to find that man Gryson, if you know
+where he is! I shall blow up if I can't do something!"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry rose and tossed the second cigare<a name="Page_380" id="Page_380"></a>tte among
+the coals in the grate.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been afraid all along that they'd corner you
+and beat you to death with feather-dusters," he lamented.
+"And the only thing I can say will make
+matters worse instead of better. I have it pretty
+straight that Gryson has been fired&#8212;shooed out of
+town, and probably out of the State."</p>
+
+<p>"Who did it, Gantry?"</p>
+
+<p>"There is only one man in this bailiwick who can
+take the whip to a fellow like Tom Gryson. I guess
+I don't need to name him for you, Evan."</p>
+
+<p>Blount got out of his chair and stood with his
+back to the fire, and his face was white.</p>
+
+<p>"Good God! the rottenness of it, Dick!" he
+groaned. And then: "I've got to get out of this
+and begin all over again in some corner of the world
+where at least one man in ten hasn't forgotten the
+meaning of common honesty and decency and fair
+dealing. Heaven knows I'm no saint, but if I stay
+here this cursed crookedness will get into my blood
+and I'll be just as degraded as the worst of them.
+No, I'm not raving; there have been times when
+I've felt myself slipping&#8212;times when I've been
+tempted to get down and fight with the weapons
+that everybody <a name="Page_381" id="Page_381"></a>fights with in this God-forsaken,
+law-breaking, graft-ridden commonwealth!"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry had risen and he was slowly shaking his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>"You're hot now&#8212;and with good enough cause,
+I guess. But that sort of a temperature makes a
+man near-sighted and color-blind. Human nature
+is pretty much the same the world over, Evan, and
+if you could see beyond the crookedness you'd find
+a lot of good people out here, averaging about the
+same as the decent majority anywhere. It's an inarticulate
+majority generally; it doesn't stand up
+on its hind legs and rear around and call attention
+to itself&#8212;couldn't if it should try. But it's here
+and there and everywhere in America, just the
+same. A railroad car with one drunken fool in it
+gives you the idea. You focus on him and say,
+'What a beastly shame!' and you entirely overlook
+the other fifty-odd people in the car who are quietly
+minding their own business."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's smile was for the man rather than for
+the theory.</p>
+
+<p>"You are an implacable optimist, Dick, and you
+always have been," he returned. "Your theory is
+good humanitarianism, and I wish I could accept
+it as applying to this abandoned community out
+here in my native hills; but I can't. Let's go back
+<a name="Page_382" id="Page_382"></a>to the others. We've established a sort of family
+<i>modus vivendi</i>, my father and I, and I don't want
+him to think that I'm breaking it by plotting with
+you."</p>
+
+<p>It was while the evening was still measurably
+young that Blount made his excuses to his hostess
+and got away, fondly believing that he was escaping
+without attracting the attention of the small
+lady who was deep in a political discussion with
+candidate Gordon at the critical moment. He was
+mistaken, but the escape was not interrupted. At
+the curb the Blount touring-car was waiting, with
+two others, and for an instant Blount hesitated,
+half inclined to ask his father's chauffeur, to drive
+him down-town. On such inconsequent pivots fate,
+or accident, twirls the most momentous affairs of
+life. If Blount had taken the car he would have
+been driven directly to the hotel. As it was, he
+walked, and in passing the Temple Court Building
+he remembered that he had not seen his mail since
+early morning.</p>
+
+<p>Rousing the sleepy boy in charge of the all-night
+elevator, he had himself lifted to his office floor.
+The upper corridor was dimly lighted, and on leaving
+the car he went directly to the door of his private
+room, walking swiftly and neither seeing nor hearing
+a man who, materializing mysteriously out of
+the corridor shadows, followed him step by step.</p><p><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383"></a></p>
+
+<p>In the office Blount snapped the lights on and
+turned to unlock his desk. As the key clicked in the
+lock the sixth sense, which is perhaps only a mingling
+of the subtler essences of the other five, warned
+him sharply, and he wheeled to face the door which
+had been left on the latch. As he looked, the door
+opened silently and the materializing shadow, haggard
+of face and with bloodshot eyes mirroring blind
+rage and the terror of a cornered rat, slipped into the
+room and stood warily aside out of the direct light
+from the electric chandelier. Blount looked again
+and swore softly. The dodging intruder was the
+man Thomas Gryson.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXII" id="XXII"></a>XXII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ICONOCLAST</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is a threadbare saying that the environment
+moulds the man. Yet, much more than the philosophers
+have contended, there are chameleon tendencies
+in the strongest character, and one finely determining
+to coerce his surroundings is quite likely to
+end by realizing that the surroundings have appealed
+to unsuspected color-changings in himself. Thus it
+may chance that the fairest fighter, finding himself
+sufficiently kicked and cuffed in the rough-and-tumble,
+will discover how facilely easy it is to descend
+to the level of his antagonists, and from this
+discovery to the awakening of the re<a name="Page_384" id="Page_384"></a>morseless passion
+for success at any price is but a step, long or
+short according to the exigencies of the struggle.</p>
+
+<p>Checked in his luggage, if not precisely pinned
+openly upon his sleeve, Blount had brought with
+him from the scholastic banks of the Charles a
+choice assortment of ideals, which are things precious
+only as they can be preserved inviolate. But
+for weeks, endless weeks as they seemed to him in the
+retrospect, he had been rubbing shoulders with a
+crude world which appeared to care little for ideals
+and less for the man who upheld them. Inevitably,
+as he had admitted to Gantry, the change was
+wrought, or working; the exclamation springing to
+his lips when he recognized Gryson evinced it, and
+when he beckoned the shifty intruder to the chair
+at the desk end the ruthless <i>zeitgeist</i> had taken full
+possession of him, and the thought uppermost had
+grown suddenly indifferent to the means if by their
+employment the end might be gained.</p>
+
+<p>"Come over here and sit down," he commanded;
+then, seeing that Gryson hesitated and flung a glance
+over his shoulder at the door: "What are you afraid
+of?"</p>
+
+<p>"They've got my number," said the ward-heeler,
+in a convict whisper which was little more than a
+facial contortion. "There's a couple o' bulls waitin'
+f'r me down on the sidewalk."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385"></a></p>
+<p>Blount crossed the room, shut the door and locked
+it. Then he went back to the self-confessed fugitive.</p>
+
+<p>"You're safe for the time being," he told the man.
+"Now talk fast and talk straight. What do you
+want this time?"</p>
+
+<p>Gryson hammered the arm of his chair with his
+fist and babbled profanity. When he became coherent
+he told his story, or rather Blount got it out
+of him piecemeal, of how he had been employed by
+the "organization" to falsify the registration lists
+in certain districts; of how, when the work was
+done, he had been denied the price and driven out
+with cursings. In the accusation, which was shot
+through with tremulous imprecations, the "organization"
+and the railroad company were implicated
+as if they were one. In one breath the fugitive
+charged the "double-crossing" to Kittredge, and in
+the next he accused the "big boss" himself, of having
+passed the sentence of deportation.</p>
+
+<p>"You say you were driven out? How could they
+drive you if you didn't want to go?" queried the
+cross-examiner.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386"></a></p>
+<p>"That's on me: it was a job I pulled off two years
+ago in another place&#8212;up north of this&#8212;and the
+night-watchman got in the way when I was leavin'.
+They jerked that on me and showed me th' rope.
+They had me by th' neck, with th' word passed to
+Chief Robertson. I'm back here now wit' my life
+in my hand, but I'd chance it twice over to get square
+wit' them welshers that have bawled me out!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why have you come to me?" asked Blount
+briefly.</p>
+
+<p>"Gawd knows; I took a chance again. I've
+heard your speeches, and says I, 'There's your wan
+chance, cully,' and I'm here to grab f'r it. If you've
+been meanin' the half of what you've been sayin',
+Mr. Blount&#8212;" There was more of it, half pleadings
+and half mere rageful babblings of a vengeful soul
+hampered by the tongue of inadequacy.</p>
+
+<p>Blount left his chair and began to pace the floor,
+with Gryson watching him furtively. At any time
+earlier in the struggle the thought of using this
+wretched time-server as a means to any end, however
+desirable and just, would have been nauseating.
+True, if there could be any such thing as honor
+among thieves, the man had earned the price of his
+crooked work among the registration clerks; but f<a name="Page_387" id="Page_387"></a>or
+another man to profit by the broken bargain, and
+by the confessed criminal's rage and lust for vengeance,
+was a thing to make even a hard-pressed
+loser in an unequal battle hesitate.</p>
+
+<p>The hesitation was only momentary. With a
+gesture which was more expressive than many words,
+Blount turned short upon the furtive watcher in the
+chair at the desk end.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want me to do?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"You're on before I could stall it f'r you. You've
+been swearin' you'd back th' square deal to th' limit;
+it ain't square; it's crooked as hell. Grab f'r this
+knife I'm handin' you and cut the heart out o' these
+welshin' bosses that are givin' you th' double-cross
+the same as they're givin' it to me. You're the
+on'y man that can do it; the on'y man on Gawd's
+<a name="Page_388" id="Page_388"></a>green earth they're afraid of. I know it damn' well.
+That's why they handed my number to th' chief
+and passed th' word to have me pinched. They was
+afraid I'd come here and squeal to you!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount stopped him with an impatient gesture.
+"Let that part of it rest and get down to business.
+What you have been telling me may be true, but I
+can't do anything on your bare word&#8212;the word of a
+man who is dodging the police. You've got to bring
+me proofs in black and white; lists of the faked
+names, and a straight-out give-away of how they
+are to be used; names and dates, and a written story
+of your bargainings with the men higher up. This
+is Thursday; to be of any use, these documents
+would have to be in my hands by Saturday noon,
+at the latest. You know best whether the thing
+can be done in time&#8212;or done at all. What do you
+say?"</p>
+
+<p>For a little time Gryson said nothing. When he
+spoke it was evident that the lust for vengeance and
+a guilty conscience were fighting an even-handed
+battle.</p><p><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389"></a></p>
+
+<p>"I could get the affidavits&#8212;maybe," he said.
+"There's a dozen 'r more of the cullies down-along
+got their notice to fade away when I got mine, and
+they'd jump at th' chance to get back at the bosses.
+But f'r Gawd's sake, look at what it means to me!
+Anny minute I'm on the job I'd be lookin' to see
+some bull with a star on 'im holdin' a gun on me;
+and after that, it's this f'r mine"&#8212;with a jerk of
+the head and a pantomimic gesture simulating the
+hangman's knot under his ear.</p>
+
+<p>"That is your risk," said Blount coldly, making
+this small concession to the expiring sense of
+uprightness. "You know how badly you want to 'get
+square,' as you put it, and I am interested only in
+the results. If you get caught, I sha'n't turn my
+hand over to help you&#8212;you can take that straight.
+But if you show up here with the proofs, proofs that
+I can use, any time before Saturday night, I'll
+undertake to see that you get safely out of the
+State."</p>
+
+<p>It was in the little pause which followed that
+some one in the corridor rapped smartly on the locked
+door. At the sound, Gryson collapsed and his face
+became an ashen mask of fear. Blount, the law-abiding,
+might have hesitated, but this newer Blount
+had <a name="Page_390" id="Page_390"></a>slain his scruples. Snatching Gryson out of his
+chair, he thrust him silently through the half-open
+door of the work-room, and a moment later he was
+answering the rap at the corridor entrance, opening
+the door and calmly facing the two policemen on the
+threshold.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he said brusquely.</p>
+
+<p>One of the men touched his helmet.</p>
+
+<p>"We're looking for a felly that ducked in below
+a couple of hours ago, Mr. Blount. He's in the
+building, somewheres, and your office being lighted,
+we thought maybe you'd&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Blount threw the door wide.</p>
+
+<p>"You can see for yourselves," he said. "Would
+you like to come in and look around?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure not; your word's as good as the search,
+Mr. Blount. 'Twas only on the chance that he
+might have faked an excuse and ducked in on you
+to be out of reach."</p><p><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391"></a></p>
+
+<p>Blount left the door open and went to get his
+coat and hat.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is the man?" he asked, while the officers
+lingered.</p>
+
+<p>"A felly named Gryson. He's been working in
+the railroad shops what times he wasn't pullin' off
+something crooked in the p'litical line."</p>
+
+<p>"What is he wanted for?" Blount was closing his
+desk and preparing to leave the office.</p>
+
+<p>"Croaking a bank watchman up in Montana afther
+he'd souped the vault door for a kick-shot."</p>
+
+<p>"In that case, perhaps I'm lucky that he didn't
+drop in and croak me," laughed Blount, turning off
+the lights and joining the two men in the corridor.
+And then: "There is a back stair to the engine-room
+in the basement in the other wing of the
+building: have you been watching that?"</p>
+
+<p>The bigger of the two policemen prodded the other
+in the ribs with his night-stick. "That's on us,
+Jakey. He'll have been gone hours ago. Let's be
+drilling. 'Tis a fine mind ye have, Mr. Blount, to
+<a name="Page_392" id="Page_392"></a>be thinking of thim back stairs right off the bat."
+And the pair went down in the elevator with Blount,
+chuckling to themselves at their own discomfiture.</p>
+
+<p>Having set his hand to the plough, Blount did nothing
+carelessly. Sauntering slowly, and even pausing
+to light a cigar, he trailed the two policemen until
+they were safely in another street. Then he turned
+back to the great office building and once more had
+himself lifted to the upper floor. In the office
+corridor he waited until the car had dropped out of
+sight; waited still longer to give the drowsy night-boy
+time to settle himself on his stool and go to
+sleep. Then he went swiftly to the door of the
+private room and unlocked it.</p>
+
+<p>Gryson was ready, and even in the dim light of
+the corridor Blount could see that he was white-faced
+and trembling. In the silent faring to the
+stair which wound down in a spiral around the
+freight elevator Blount gripped the arm of trembling.</p>
+
+<p>"You've got to get your nerve," he gritted savagely,
+"or you'll be nipped before you've gone a
+block!" And then: "Here's the stair: follow it
+down until you get to the basement. There's a coal
+entrance from the alley, and the engineer will be
+with his boilers in the other wing&#8212;and probably
+asleep. You've got it straight, have you? You're
+to bring the papers to my office on or before Saturday
+night. I'll be looking out for you, and if you
+bring me the evidence, you'll be taken care of.
+That's all. Down with you, now, and go quietly.
+<a name="Page_393" id="Page_393"></a>If you're caught, I drop you like a hot nail;
+remember that."</p>
+
+<p>Still puffing at the cigar which glowed redly in the
+darkness of the wing corridor, Blount waited until
+his man had been given time to reach the basement.
+Then he walked slowly back to the main corridor
+and descended by the public stair without awakening
+the elevator boy, who was sleeping soundly in his
+car on the ground level.</p>
+
+<p>On the short walk to the hotel the full significance
+of the thing he had done had its innings. Cynical
+criticism to the contrary notwithstanding, there is
+now and then an honest lawyer who regards his oath
+of admission to the bar&#8212;the oath which binds him
+to uphold the cause of justice and fair dealing&#8212;as
+something more than a mere form of words. Beyond
+all question, an honest man who has sworn to uphold
+the law may neither connive at crime nor shield
+a criminal. Blount tried the shift of every man
+who has ever stepped aside out of the plain path
+of rectitude; he told himself morosely that he had
+nothing to do with Gryson's past; that he had taken
+no retainer from the Montana authorities; that the
+criminal was merely a cog in a wheel which was
+grinding toward a righteous end, and as such should
+be permitted to serve his turn.</p>
+
+<p>The well-worn argument is always specious to the
+beginner, and Blount thought he had sufficiently
+justified himself by the time he was pushing through
+the revolving doors into the Inter-Mountain lobby.
+But when he saw his father quietly smoking his bed-time
+<a name="Page_394" id="Page_394"></a>cigar in one of the big leather-covered lounging-chairs,
+he realized that the first step had been taken
+in an exceedingly thorny path; that whatever else
+might be the outcome of the bargain with Thomas
+Gryson, a son was coldly plotting to bring disgrace
+and humiliation upon a father.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason, and because, when all is said,
+blood is much thicker than water, Blount made as
+if he did not see the beckoning hand-wave from the
+depths of the big chair in the smokers' alcove;
+ignored it, and with set lips and burning eyes made
+for the nearest elevator to take refuge in his room.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIII" id="XXIII"></a>XXIII</h2>
+
+<h3>A CRY IN THE NIGHT.</h3>
+
+
+<p>With the critical election, a struggle which was to
+decide for another two-year period whether or not
+the people of the Sage-Brush State were to be the
+masters or the servants of chartered monopoly, only
+four days distant, the capital city took on the
+aspect of a stirring camp&#8212;two rival camps, in fact,
+since the State headquarters of the two chief parties
+were in the Inter-Mountain Hotel&#8212;and each<a name="Page_395" id="Page_395"></a>
+incoming train brought fresh relays of henchmen
+and district spellbinders to swell the sidewalk throngs
+and to crowd the lobbies.</p>
+
+<p>On the Friday morning Blount awoke with the
+feeling that he had definitely cut himself off from
+all the commonplace activities of the campaign.
+There were two days of suspense to be outworn,
+and if he could have compassed it he would have
+been glad to efface himself completely. Since that
+was impossible, and since it seemed equally impossible
+that he should go on keeping up the farce of
+the <i>modus vivendi</i> after he had taken the step which
+would presently blazon his name to the world as
+that of his father's accuser, he bought the morning
+papers hurriedly at the hotel news-stand and went
+down the avenue to get his breakfast at the railroad
+restaurant, where he would be measurably sure of
+isolation.</p>
+
+<p>After giving his order he ran hastily through the
+local news in the papers. There was no mention of
+the arrest of one Thomas Gryson in any of the police
+notes, and he breathed freer. But in <i>The Plainsman</i>
+there was an editorial which was vaguely disturbing.
+Blenkinsop, who wrote his own leaders,
+hinted pointedly at coming disclosures which would
+change the political map of the State for all time.
+Blount, trying to determine how much or how little
+the editorial was based upon his talk with the editor
+on the Wednesday night, found his omelet tasteless.
+Ready enough, as he was persuaded, to fire
+the disrupting mine with his own hand, he was not
+ready to surrender the match to any one else. Manifestly
+he must see Blenkinsop and caution him.</p>
+
+<p>Breakfast over, he walked, by the longest way
+<a name="Page_396" id="Page_396"></a>around, to his office in the Temple Court, hoping to
+find work which would help him through the forenoon.
+It was an idle hope. From a State-wide
+shower of political correspondence the daily mail
+had dropped suddenly to an inconsequential drizzle,
+and there were no callers. Here, again, he saw, or
+thought he saw, the all-powerful hand of the
+machine. He had been used for a purpose, the purpose
+of hoodwinking and deceiving the voters.
+That purpose having been served, he was to be
+dropped&#8212;was already dropped, as it seemed. By
+noon the sheer time-killing effort became blankly
+unbearable, and in desperation he broke with another
+of the ideals&#8212;the one labelled sincerity&#8212;and
+going boldly to the Inter-Mountain he waited in
+the lobby for the family party of three to come
+down to the one-o'clock luncheon in the public
+<i>café</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Joining the party when it came down, he found it
+difficult only in the inner sanctuaries to maintain
+the <i>status quo ante</i> Gryson. There was no shadow
+of suspicion or coolness in his father's kindly smile
+and genial greeting, and Mrs. Honoria rallied him
+playfully upon the narrow margin by which he had
+held his own and Patricia's places at the Gordon
+dinner-table the night before. Only in Patricia's
+eyes he read a curious questioning, a hint that
+they were finding something in his eyes which was
+<a name="Page_397" id="Page_397"></a>new and not wholly understandable. He knew well
+enough what it was that she saw; and though she
+was sitting opposite him at the table for four, he
+looked at her as seldom as possible, devoting himself,
+for once in a way, resolutely to his father's wife.</p>
+
+<p>After luncheon he again fell back upon the dogged
+boldness. Unable to contemplate a second plunge
+into the solitude of the Temple Court offices, he
+asked and was accorded permission to take Patricia
+for a country drive in the little car. When the city
+was left behind, and the small machine was purring
+steadily northwestward over a road which led to
+nowhere in particular, Blount put his finger accurately
+upon the thing which had been building little
+barriers of silence between them all the way out
+from town.</p>
+
+<p>"You knew me well enough yesterday to be reasonably
+certain of what I would do in given circumstances,
+didn't you, Patricia?" he began abruptly.
+"To-day you are not so sure about it. Why?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed lightly, but there was a serious undernote
+in her voic<a name="Page_398" id="Page_398"></a>e when she said: "There are moments
+when you make me wonder if you haven't
+been dabbling in necromancy, Evan. I was at that
+very instant telling myself that it wasn't so."</p>
+
+<p>"But you know it is so," he persisted. "Why am
+I different?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you recognize the fact?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it a fact?" she queried.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399"></a></p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"In what way are you different?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not altogether certain that I know, myself.
+But I do know this: between yesterday and to-day
+there is a gulf so wide that it seems measureless.
+The scientists claim there are no cataclysms; no
+sudden and sweeping changes taking place either in
+the physical or the metaphysical field. If that be
+true, the changes must go on subconsciously for a
+long time before they are recognized. There is no
+other way of accounting for the gulfs."</p>
+
+<p>"You are talking miles over my head," she protested;
+and, though the assertion was not strictly
+true, it served its purpose.</p>
+
+<p>"I can make it a little plainer," he went on, slowing
+the motor until the small car was merely ambling.
+"You remember that night at Wartrace
+Hall, and what you told me? I went out from that
+talk resolved to do what you had shown me I ought
+to do, stubbornly refusing to consider the possibility
+of failure. None the less, I have failed."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400"></a></p>
+<p>"Oh, no!" she exclaimed; "not that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, just that. But the failure is not the worst
+thing that has befallen me. I have lost or gained
+something that pushes the yesterdays into a past
+which can never be recovered. Let me tell you,
+girl: I have been fighting in the open, against treachery
+and deceit fighting always under cover. I have
+been fighting bare-handed where others were armed.
+Day by day I have been finding out the baseness
+and the trickery; how my own side has used me as
+a screen behind which the old dishonorable expedients
+could be safely planned and carried out. I never
+knew until within the past two days what all this
+chicanery and double-dealing might be doing to me,
+but now I do know."</p>
+
+<p>"Will it bear telling?" she asked quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"I think not&#8212;to you," he returned, matching her
+low tone. "Let it be enough to say that I am no
+longer the man I was when I came out here. Patricia,
+I'm not fighting bare-handed any more; I'm
+smashing in with any weapon I can get hold of.
+There will be no such reform as the one you urged
+me to champion&#8212;as the era of fair-dealing and sincerity
+which I have been trying honestly and earnestly
+<a name="Page_401" id="Page_401"></a>to inaugurate. Nevertheless, if my hand
+doesn't tremble too much at the critical moment,
+there will be, on the morning of next Tuesday, such
+a revolution as this commonwealth has never seen.
+Though they have robbed me and made a puppet
+of me, I can still bring it about."</p>
+
+<p>He had gone farther than he meant to, and he
+thought she would protest. He knew that her convictions
+of what should be and what should not be
+were clear-cut and definite. But a man, even though
+he be a lover, may know a woman's mind without
+knowing very much about the woman herself.
+There was no protest forthcoming. Quite the contrary,
+she answered him with a little shudder that
+was almost a caress, saying: "I think you have
+grown&#8212;bigger and stronger than I ever thought
+you could grow, Evan; and I'm sure your hand
+won't tremble. Is that what you want me to say?"</p>
+
+<p>Since there is no more contradictory being in a
+sentient world than a man in love, Blount was not
+quite sure that it was what he wanted her to say.
+By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the
+chosen woman figures as a goddess, a tutelary divinity
+postulating for a mere earthly man all that is
+high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard
+by which he can measure his own baser desires and
+ambitions and be shrived of them. At other times
+the straitly human has its inn<a name="Page_402" id="Page_402"></a>ings, and the longing
+is for a comrade, a companion, a second self buried,
+lost, submerged in the loyalty which never questions.
+Having come slowly to maturity as a lover,
+Blount had been leaning toward the divinity definition
+of Patricia Anners. But now the iconoclastic
+change was breaking many images.</p>
+
+<p>"You are willing to believe that I haven't gone
+altogether backward?" he queried, after the little
+car had measured an additional stretch of the mesa
+road.</p>
+
+<p>"You are bigger and stronger," she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know I am?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell; any woman could tell."</p>
+
+<p>"Is the acquirement of size and strength so great
+a thing that&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"I think it is&#8212;in a woman's eyes," she admitted
+fearlessly. "We are all more or less primitive and&#8212;and,
+well, 'Stone-Agey,' let us say, in the last
+analysis; at least, women are." And then: "You
+don't know women very well, Evan."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't I?"</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403"></a>"No, you don't. You judge us by standards
+which have no existence outside of your own purely
+masculine deductions. For example: I suppose you
+wouldn't admit for a moment that a good woman
+might properly do things which would be entirely
+discreditable in a man?"</p>
+
+<p>He shook his head slowly and said: "Yesterday,
+or the day before, I might have said 'no,' with all
+the cocksureness of a boy of twenty. To-day I can
+only say: 'Who am I, that I should judge any man&#8212;or
+any woman?'" Then suddenly: "You are
+making excuses for my father's wife. You needn't,
+you know. She has fought me from the beginning,
+and I know it. Sometimes I think that she is solely
+responsible for my failure to accomplish the thing
+I had set my heart upon. Let it go; I don't bear
+malice. Just now I'm more interested in what you
+were saying about the sex differences and the woman's
+point of view. Have you been calling me a
+weak man, Patricia?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; only&#8212;a little&#8212;conventional," she returned
+half reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>"But you are the quintessence of conventionality
+yourself!" he burst out.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I? Perhaps that was a passing phase, too.
+Quite probably the little things will remain&#8212;the
+dressing for dinner and the paying of party c<a name="Page_404" id="Page_404"></a>alls
+and all that. But one really big man has made
+many things seem petty and trifling&#8212;things that I
+used to think were of the greatest possible importance."</p>
+
+<p>"My father, you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. If I should ever marry, Evan, I should
+be deliriously happy if I could find a man who
+promised to grow to the stature of your father."</p>
+
+<p>There was manifestly no rejoinder to be made to
+this by David Blount's son, though it pointed to
+another and still more painful involvement. What
+would Patricia say when the <i>débâcle</i> came? Would
+she lose faith in his father, and in all masculinity,
+in the crash? Or would she borrow yet again from
+the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging
+and still be loyal? In either case Blount saw
+his own finish, and he was rather relieved when she
+left the sex argument indeterminate and began to
+talk of other things: of her father's decision to go
+home at the end of the following week, of the good
+times she had been having, and of the regret with
+which she would turn her back upon the wide horizons
+and the freedom of it all.</p>
+
+<p>"I brought my shell with me when I came," she
+confessed, laughing, "but I think it is broken into
+little pieces by now. You will know how small the
+pieces ar<a name="Page_405" id="Page_405"></a>e when I tell you that 'Tennessee Jim,'
+your father's horse wrangler, calls me 'Miz' Pat,' and
+it always makes me want to shake hands with him."</p>
+
+<p>Blount made the afternoon last as he could, sending
+the little car over many miles of the mesa roads
+and encouraging the small confidences which were
+enabling him to postpone his own evil hour. When
+the sun was dipping toward the Carnadine Hills
+they returned over a trail which came into the main
+Quaretaro road at a point where the northern highway
+begins its descent to the lower mesa level.
+Half-way down the descending gulch they came to
+the mouth of a small lateral canyon breaking into
+the larger gorge from the eastward; a canyon dry
+for the greater part of the year, but in the rainy
+season affording an outlet for the flood-waters of
+the Little Shonoho.</p>
+
+<p>"That is a road I have always wanted to explore,"
+said Patricia, pointing to the fine driveway leading
+up the small canyon. "That is one of my weaknesses
+when I am driving; I am never able to pass
+a branch road without wanting to turn aside and
+explore it."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we'll explore this one, right now," said
+Blount, cutting the car to the left. He was mor<a name="Page_406" id="Page_406"></a>e
+than willing to delay, even by littles, the moment
+when he should be obliged to resume the sorry business
+of waiting and dissembling.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Anners glanced at the tiny watch pinned
+upon her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we have time? It's getting late."</p>
+
+<p>"Plenty of time for all we shall be able to do or
+see up here," Blount returned. "The road ends at
+the canyon head, a mile above. There is a very
+small and very exclusive summer-resort hotel, called
+the Shonoho Inn, on the upper level. It has a six-weeks'
+season&#8212;like the Florida resorts&#8212;they tell me,
+and it is closed now."</p>
+
+<p>It was within the next five hundred yards that
+the prediction that there would be nothing to see
+anticipated its fulfilment. At a sudden turn in the
+narrow defile they came to a brush-built barricade
+posted with a sign:</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407"></a></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>ROAD WASHED OUT ABOVE<br />
+NO PASSING FOR VEHICLES!</p></div>
+
+<p>"That settles it," said Blount shortly, and he
+turned the car and let it roll back down the grade
+to the main gulch.</p>
+
+<p>When they were once more speeding toward town
+Blount stole a glance at his companion, wondering
+if it were the small disappointment which made her
+silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you tired?" he asked quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she rejoined, brightening again. "I
+have enjoyed every minute of it. I was just thinking
+of what I said a little while ago; of how it is
+going to break my heart to leave it all."</p>
+
+<p>It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she
+needn't leave it. But he remembered and caught
+himself sharply. When the dreadful Tuesday should
+have come and gone, she might be only too willing
+to go away; and, in any event, he would have to
+go. There would be no place in his own and his
+father's State for him after Gryson returned, and
+the match had been touched to the hidden mine of
+high explosives. This was what wa<a name="Page_408" id="Page_408"></a>s in his mind
+when he said rather tamely: "I suppose you will
+have to go. There isn't any chance for social-settlement
+work out here yet."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she responded half-absently; and thereupon
+he gave the little car still more spark and
+throttle and sent it flying over the final stretch of
+the fine road to the city.</p>
+
+<p>The electric lights were showing like faint yellow
+stars against the sunset sky when Blount skilfully
+placed the small car at the Inter-Mountain curb
+and lifted his companion to the sidewalk</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going anywhere to-night?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," was the reply. "There is a
+'crush' on at the Weatherfords', but I don't know
+whether Mrs. Blount has accepted for us or not."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't go," he pleaded quickly. "Back out of
+it some way, and give me just this one evening to
+myself. Won't you do that, Patricia?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll try," she agreed. "But if Mrs. Blount has
+accepted&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"Confound Mrs. Blount!" he growled. And then<a name="Page_409" id="Page_409"></a>
+the newly aroused underman in him added: "You
+tell her that I want you to give me the evening, and
+let that settle it."</p>
+
+<p>As it turned out a little later, Miss Anners found
+it unnecessary to be rude to her hostess. For some
+reason best known to herself, Mrs. Honoria had declined
+the invitation&#8212;engraved in the correctest
+shaded Old English and made to include the senator
+and Miss Anners&#8212;and was planning a free evening
+for herself and her guest.</p>
+
+<p>After the <i>café</i> dinner&#8212;a dinner at which Evan
+Blount, once more calling himself all the hard names
+in the hypocrite's vocabulary, made the fourth&#8212;Mrs.
+Honoria proposed an adjournment to the hotel
+parlors, which were in the mezzanine lounge. Later,
+she found herself alone on the divan which had been
+drawn up to command a view of the spirited scene
+in the lobby below. The senator had gone down
+to mingle with the politicians, and she could see
+him&#8212;big, masterful, and smiling&#8212;moving about
+from group to group. On the opposite side of the
+mezzanine gallery, Evan and Patricia were "doing
+time," as the little lady musingly phrased it: walking
+up and down and talking quietly; a handsome
+couple, as the approving glances of more than one
+passing guest testified.</p>
+
+<p>To Mrs. Honoria, thus isolated, came at the appointed
+time the sober-eyed young traffic manager
+<a name="Page_410" id="Page_410"></a>for the railroad company. Gantry had been under
+orders from the little lady for the better part of
+the afternoon, but the business of the day had
+given him no chance to report earlier.</p>
+
+<p>"You got my note?" he asked, taking the place
+she made for him on the tête-à-tête divan.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; a little while before dinner. It came just
+in time to let me send frightfully late 'regrets' to
+Mrs. Weatherford."</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't come sooner. I've had the Hathaway
+crowd on my hands all afternoon. There is something
+in the wind, and those fellows are scared stiff.
+They say that Evan's speech-making has stirred up
+the working men and the rank and file like a declaration
+of war with Mexico, and nobody can tell what
+is going to happen next Tuesday."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not quite all. There is a mild panic on in
+at least three of the city wards over the disappearance
+of a fellow named Gryson, a sort of&#8212;er&#8212;wire-puller
+and all-around general-utility man. Some
+say he has been doing crooked work and had to disappear;
+others say that he has taken his pay for
+whatever job he was doing and has skippe<a name="Page_411" id="Page_411"></a>d out,
+leaving his journeymen strikers to hold the bag."</p>
+
+<p>"Gryson," said the little lady, her eyes narrowing;
+"Gryson&#8212;the name is curiously familiar. He
+is what you call a ward-worker, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>Gantry nodded. "Something of the sort, yes.
+Evan calls him one of the 'pie-eaters,' and away
+along early in the game they had a set-to in Evan's
+office and Evan fired him; told him if he ever came
+back he'd throw him out."</p>
+
+<p>Again Mrs. Honoria's fine eyes became reflective.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard," she said softly, "I'd give anything
+in the world if I could know that Evan still feels
+that way about Thomas Gryson."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you know the plug-ugly, do you?" said
+Gantry.</p>
+
+<p>"I know of him. He is a criminal and a dangerous
+man."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he is out of it, I guess; he must be, if his
+own running-mates can't find him."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't Mr. Kittredge trying to find him, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. And I think Kittredge played it <a name="Page_412" id="Page_412"></a>rather
+low down on the poor beggar. They had a deal of
+some sort, and when Gryson put his price on the
+job&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she interrupted. "Mr. Kittredge ought
+to have paid him and let him go."</p>
+
+<p>Gantry's smile was a tribute to superior genius.</p>
+
+<p>"You've got me going," he said; "you always
+have me going. With the election only three days
+off, I can't tell yet what you and the senator are
+trying to do."</p>
+
+<p>"The senator, at least, has never made any secret
+of his object," she smiled back at him. "He
+has told everybody that he is out for a clean sweep."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly," said Gantry; "but no man living
+knows what he means by a 'clean sweep.' I'll bet
+there are a hundred men down there in the lobby
+right now who would give the best year out of their
+lives to know. And they can't guess&#8212;they can't
+begin to guess!"</p>
+
+<p>"Let us leave them to their gu<a name="Page_413" id="Page_413"></a>esses, while we go
+back to the certainties," she suggested. "Did you
+find out what I asked you to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and I don't know whether I ought to tell
+you or not. I'm still drawing my salary from the
+railroad, you know."</p>
+
+<p>"And you are not sure that I am drawing mine?"
+she laughed. "Don't you remember when Mr. McVickar
+gave me this?" touching the little jewel-incrusted
+watch on her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I remember; also I remember that this
+is the first time I have ever seen you wearing it."
+And then: "I'd never try to bribe you in the wide,
+wide world, Mrs. Blount."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"For two reasons: you are too much in love with
+your husband; and, if you took a notion to fly the
+track, a king's ransom wouldn't be big enough to
+make you stay bribed."</p>
+
+<p>"I am flattered, I'm sure; but I'm still in the
+dark about the thing you have come here to tell
+me," she reminded him.</p><p><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414"></a></p>
+
+<p>"I presume you may as well know it, though I
+can tell you that it has been kept the darkest kind
+of a secret. Mr. McVickar came west to-day from
+Bald Butte in a new gasolene unit-car which is supposed
+to be making a trial trip over the road. The
+car is supposed to have a bunch of the Chicago officials
+on board, though not half a dozen men on this
+division know that the vice-president is the only
+official, and that the others are clerks and telegraphers."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on," said the small person quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"That gasolene special is lost. No station west
+of Bald Butte has yet reported it. Strictly between
+us two, it left the main line at the old disused track
+leading out to the abandoned Shoshone mine workings.
+There were autos to meet it at the mine, and
+by this time Mr. McVickar is probably toasting his
+feet before an open wood-fire in the Shonoho Inn."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Honoria leaned her two round arms on the
+mezzanine rail, and looked long and earnestly down
+upon the caucussing lobby throng. When she looked
+up it was to say: "There are wires?"</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415"></a>"A full set of cut-ins. You can trust the big
+boss for that. He is in touch with every corner
+of the State, just the same as he would be if he
+were here in his usual election headquarters in the
+hotel."</p>
+
+<p>The small plotter became silent again, and when
+she spoke she was smiling brightly.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a good boy, Richard, and you shall
+<a name="Page_416" id="Page_416"></a>have your reward. And it is going to be something
+that will make you happy, this time. Run away,
+now, and let me have a little solitude. I want to
+think."</p>
+
+<p>It was a full hour after Gantry's disappearance
+that the senator came up-stairs, and Mrs. Honoria
+beckoned to the pair on the opposite side of the
+gallery.</p>
+
+<p>"It's bedtime," she said, when they came around
+to her divan. And then, with a malicious little
+grimace for Evan: "I've been counting, and I've
+seen Patricia stifle three distinct and separate
+yawns in the last five minutes. She has been up
+every night since we came to town, and&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Left to himself, Blount sat watching the crowd
+for a time, and then went to his room to read himself
+to sleep. One of the two crucial days of suspense
+was outworn, but there was another coming;
+and after he had read for an hour he went to bed,
+resolutely determined to get the rest necessary to
+carry him through the dreaded Saturday. Sleep
+came quickl<a name="Page_417" id="Page_417"></a>y when he had turned off the lights, but
+it was merely a transition to a troubled dreamland
+in which Patricia, Mrs. Honoria, Gryson, and Gantry
+were weirdly confused. In the thick of it he
+seemed to see the ward-heeler standing at his bedside
+and beating furiously upon a huge Chinese
+gong. When he sprang up and began to rub his
+eyes, the room was lighted by a red glare, and the
+dream-noise was translated into the rattling of wheels
+and the clanging of alarm-gongs and cries of "Fire!"
+in the avenue below.</p>
+
+<p>As a city dweller, Blount should have felt the
+wall of the room, and, finding it still cool, should
+have turned over and gone to sleep again. Instead,
+he slipped out of bed and went to the window. One
+glance showed him that the fire was in the business
+district, either in or near the Temple Court
+Building. That was enough to make him dress hurriedly
+and hasten to the street, where he found a
+handful of policemen trying ineffectually to keep a
+clear pavement for the racing fire-trucks. Watching
+his chance, Blount darted out to make the crossing.
+He was half-way to the opposite curb when an
+unwieldy hook-and-ladder truck, drawn by a pair
+of magnificent grays, came lurching and plunging
+down the side street upon which the hotel cornered.</p>
+
+<p>In front of the horses, and leaping and barking
+at their heads in a frenzy of excitement, was a spotted
+coach-dog&#8212;the truck squad's mascot. Blount was
+within a few feet of the farther sidewalk, and was
+well out of danger when the long truck slewed into
+<a name="Page_418" id="Page_418"></a>the avenue. But at the passing instant the mascot
+dog, leaping and whirling like a four-footed dervish,
+sprang backward. Blount felt the catapulting shock
+of a yielding body between his shoulders, heard a
+yell from the truck-driver on his high seat, and went
+plunging headlong to the curb. After which he felt
+and heard no more.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIV" id="XXIV"></a>XXIV</h2>
+
+<h3>FIELD HEADQUARTERS</h3>
+
+
+<p>In the great world-battles of yesterday, or the
+day before, the commanding general rode, with a
+few chosen officers of his staff, to some near-by hill-top,
+shell-swept and perilous, and with the help of
+a pair of field-glasses and a corps of hard-riding
+aides kept in touch as he could with the shifting
+fortunes of his divisions and brigades. It would be
+small credit to an up-to-date day of progress <a name="Page_419" id="Page_419"></a>and
+invention if this were not all changed. The present-moment
+commander-in-chief&#8212;warring, industrial,
+or political&#8212;may sit, thanks to the Morses and the
+Edisons, comfortably in office-coat and slippers, far
+removed from the battle turmoil, directing his forces
+with the pressure of a finger upon the appropriate
+electric button, or in a few words dictated to the
+human ear of a clicking telegraph-instrument.</p>
+
+<p>By all these adventitious aids Vice-President McVickar
+was profiting on the Saturday morning following
+the mysterious disappearance on the Friday
+of the gasolene unit-car somewhere between Bald
+Butte and the capital. The small resort hotel at
+the head of Shonoho Canyon had been transformed
+into a field headquarters. The hotel manager's
+desk, wheeled out in front of a crackling wood-fire
+in the ornate little lobby, was studded with its row
+of electric call-buttons; a railroad dining-car crew
+had taken possession of the kitchen; and the spacious
+writing-and lounging-room, sacred, in the season,
+to the guests of the exclusive hotel, housed a
+ranking of glass-topped telegraph-tables and impromptu
+desks&#8212;a work-room manned by a dozen
+picked young men, with O'Brien, the vice-president's
+private secretary, acting as the chief.</p>
+
+<p>Though the momentous Tuesday was still three
+<a name="Page_420" id="Page_420"></a>days in the future, Mr. McVickar was actively at
+work on the Saturday morning, gathering in the
+loose ends and strengthening the railroad company's
+defences. With his arm-chair drawn up to the borrowed
+desk he was running rapidly through the telegrams
+filtering in a steady shower from the crackling
+sounders in the writing-room. When the situation
+had begun to outline itself with something like coherence,
+he pressed a call-button for O'Brien.</p>
+
+<p>"How about that wire to Detwiler at Ophir&#8212;any
+reply yet?" was the rasping demand shot at
+the secretary.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing yet; no, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Go after him again! There's a screw loose
+among those miners! How about Hathaway?
+Did you phone Twin Buttes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and Grogan, the mill time-keeper, answered.
+He says Mr. Hathaway is in the capital
+and something has gone wrong&#8212;he doesn't know
+what."</p>
+
+<p>"Keep the wires hot until you can get hold of
+Hathaway himself, and when you nail him, switch
+him over to my phone. Any word from the irrigation
+people at Natcho?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. They say that the farmers under the High
+Line have been getting restive and forming associations.
+Daniels was the man who talked to me, and
+he says it's a Gordon movement, though the ranchmen
+are trying to keep it quiet."</p>
+
+<p>"Take a message to Daniels!" snapped the vice-president;
+and then, dictating: "'How would it do
+to let it be known quietly that Gordon's election
+means raise in price of water to High Line users?'
+Send that, and sign it 'Committee of Safety.' Now
+how about Kittredge? Did you get him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did; he's driving out in his car, and he ought
+to be here in a few minutes."</p>
+
+<p>As if to make O'Brien's word good, the roar of an
+automobile came from the driveway, dominating
+for the moment the chattering of the telegraph-instruments,
+and a little later Kittredge came in, lifting
+his goggles and wiping the road dust from his
+closely clipped black beard.</p>
+
+<p>"That car of yours isn't what it might be, Kittredge,"
+was the vice-president's crusty greeting.
+"You'd better get a faster one. Sit down, and let's
+have it. How are things shaping up in the city?"</p>
+
+<p>The big superintendent sat down and found a
+cigar in an inner pocket of his driving-coat.</p>
+
+<p>"We are holding our own, as far as anybody can
+see," he returned.</p>
+
+<p>"That 'as far as anybody can see' is just your
+weakness, Kittredge," said the chief testily. "What
+we want&#8212;what we've got to have first, last, and all
+the time&#8212;is the <i>fact</i>. Now see if you can answer
+a few straight questions. What is the senator
+doing?"</p>
+
+<p>"His wife has a young girl visiting her, and if the
+Honorable Dave is doing anything more than to
+show the two women a good time, I can't find it out."</p>
+
+<p>"There you go again! You say 'if.' It's your
+business to know."</p>
+
+<p>Kittredge held his peace. Being designed by nature
+for a heavy-weight ring-fighter, there were times
+when he felt like taking off his coat to the vice-president.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" prompted McVickar, when Kittredge
+remained obstinately silent.</p>
+
+<p>"If I knew what sort of a deal you have made
+with the senator&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"That cuts no figure. But let it go. What's
+young Blount doing?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's out of it, good and plenty. He started to
+go to the Sampson Block fire last night and was
+knocked down by a hook-and-ladder truck. It's
+a cracked skull, and Doc Dillon says he's safe to
+stay in bed for a week or so."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm," said the chief reflectively. "That is almost
+what you might call opportune, Kittredge.
+The young fellow has done his work well, but there
+was always the danger that he might overdo it.
+In fact, there was a time, a week or two ago, when
+I thought he would have to be called down and
+given a lesson. Now then, how about that Gryson
+business?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was just as you said: I had to take Tom by
+the neck and get rid of him."</p>
+
+<p>"He did his work all right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and came swaggering around for his pay.
+I sized it up one side and down the other. He had
+a pretty bad case of swelled head and tried to hold
+me up for a bonus, hinting around about what he
+could do if he wanted to throw the gaff into us. As
+I say, I sized it up, and took snap judgment on him&#8212;pulled
+the Montana racket and gave him twenty-four
+hours' start of the police."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president frowned and shook his head.
+"You took a chance&#8212;a long chance, Kittredge!
+Twenty-four hours gave him all the time he needed
+to fall afoul of young Blount."</p>
+
+<p>The big superintendent grinned amiably.</p>
+
+<p>"The senator helped out on that," he explained.</p>
+
+<p>"The senator? How was that?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's the first time he has shown any part of his
+hand to me in the entire campaign. About an hour
+after I had shot Tom Gryson to pieces a note came
+down from the Inter-Mountain, asking me to come
+up. I didn't get to see the senator himself, but
+Mrs. Blount gave me the dope. As a result, young
+Blount got a hurry telegram from you, directing
+him to go to Lewiston at once in that right-of-way
+matter of Brodhead's. I gave him my car, and the
+trip cost him the better part of two whole days."</p>
+
+<p>Again the vice-president shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Your methods are always pretty crude, Kittredge,"
+he commented. "You took another long
+chance when you forged my name to a telegram
+for as shrewd a young lawyer as Evan Blount. But
+go on. You got Blount out of the way&#8212;then what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I went after Gryson again. The little
+woman's hint hit the bull's-eye as true as a rifle bullet.
+Tom meant to give us away to Blount. He
+haunted Blount's up-town office the better part of
+the day; and finally, in sheer self-defence, I had
+to tip him off to the police, as I had threatened
+to. Another little mystery bobbed up there. Chief
+Robertson winked one eye at me and said: 'You're
+too late, Mr. Kittredge; your man has already been
+piped off and he's gone.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Who did it?" snapped McVickar.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, and Robertson wouldn't tell me.
+But I got him to promise to put out the reward
+quietly. If Gryson comes back he'll be nipped before
+he can talk."</p>
+
+<p>"With young Blount laid up, it won't make much
+difference," was the summing-up rejoinder. And
+then: "I think that is all&#8212;for this morning. Go
+around to the telephone-exchange when you get
+back to town and tell the manager that I want a
+special operator&#8212;a man, if he's got one&#8212;put on
+this long-distance wire. Have you sent your linemen
+out to guard the wires on the Shoshone mine
+track?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; all the way from the switch to the hills."</p>
+
+<p>"All right; that's all. Keep your finger on the
+pulse of things in town to-day, and arrange with
+your despatcher to give my operators here a clear
+wire in any direction whenever it's called for. Above
+all, keep me posted, Kittredge; don't let anything
+get by you, no matter how trivial it may seem."</p>
+
+<p>As the superintendent was climbing into his car,
+the railroad electrician who was in charge of the
+men guarding the telegraph-wires came up.</p>
+
+<p>"One minute, Mr. Kittredge. I've put the box
+in, according to orders&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"What box, and whose orders?"</p>
+
+<p>"The recording microphone in Mr. McVickar's
+office, in there; and by his orders, I guess&#8212;at least
+they came from one of his men. We're needing a
+couple more batteries, and I was just wondering if
+it'd be all right to take 'em from that gasolene
+unit-car. We could put 'em back afterwards."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; take 'em wherever you can find 'em," said
+the superintendent, who was thinking pointedly of
+other things just then; and the permission given,
+he started his motor and drove away.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXV" id="XXV"></a>XXV</h2>
+
+<h3>BLOOD AND IRON</h3>
+
+
+<p>Ten o'clock in the Saturday forenoon marked the
+time of Superintendent Kittredge's flying visit to
+his chief's headquarters-on-the-field at the head of
+Shonoho Canyon; and at that hour Evan Blount,
+blinking dizzily, and with his head bandaged and
+throbbing as if the premier company of all the African
+tom-tom symphonists were making free with it,
+was letting Mrs. Honoria beat up his pillows and
+prop him with them, so that the drum-beating clamor
+might be minimized to some bearable degree.</p>
+
+<p>"You are feeling better now?" suggested the volunteer
+nurse, going to adjust the window-curtains
+for the better comfort of the blinking and aching
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The victim of the hook-and-ladder squad's mascot
+answered qualitatively.</p>
+
+<p>"I feel as if I had been having an argument with
+a battering-ram and had come off second-best. I've
+been out of my head, haven't I?"</p>
+
+<p>"A little, yes; but that was to be expected. You
+were pretty badly hurt."</p>
+
+<p>"Have I been talking?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not very much&#8212;nothing intelligible." The little
+lady had drawn her chair to the window and was
+busying herself with the never-finished embroidery.</p>
+
+<p>"What hit me&#8212;was it the truck?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; some of the people in the street said it was
+a dog; a coach-dog running and jumping at the
+heads of the fire-horses. In falling you struck your
+head against the iron grating of a sewer inlet."</p>
+
+<p>"Umph!" said Blount, and the face-wrinkling
+which was meant to be a sardonic smile turned itself
+into a painful grin. "Shot to death by a dog!
+Blenkinsop or some of the others ought to have run
+that for a head-line." Then, with a twist of the hot
+eyeballs: "This isn't my room. Where am I?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are in the spare room of our suite. Your
+father had you brought here so that we could take
+care of you properly. But you mustn't talk too
+much; it's the doctor's orders."</p>
+
+<p>Blount lay for a long time watching her as she
+passed the needle in and out through the bit of
+snowy linen stretched upon the tiny embroidery-ring.
+She had fine eyes, he admitted; eyes with the
+little downward curve in brow and lid at the outer
+corners&#8212;the curve of allurement, he had heard it
+called. Also, her hands were shapely and pretty.
+He recalled the saying that a woman may keep her
+age out of her face, but her hands will betray her.
+Mrs. Honoria's hands were still young; they looked
+almost as young as Patricia's, he decided. At the
+comparison he broke over the rule of silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Does Patricia know?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. She has been here nearly all morning. She
+wouldn't let anybody else hold your head while the
+doctor was sewing it up."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he returned; "that is a part of her&#8212;of
+her special training: first aid to the injured, and
+all that. They teach it in the German sociological
+schools she attended last year."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I see"&#8212;with a malicious little smile
+to accentuate the curving downdroop of the pretty
+eyelids. "You mean that she was just getting a
+bit of practice. I wondered why she was so willing;
+most young women are so silly about the sight
+of a little blood. Don't you think you'd better try
+to sleep for a while? Doctor Dillon said it would
+be good for you if you could."</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens and earth!" he chanted impatiently;
+"I'm not sick!" And then, with a sharp fear stabbing
+him: "What day is this, please?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked up with a smile. "Are you wondering if
+you have lost a day? You haven't. The fire was at
+three o'clock this morning, and this is Saturday."</p>
+
+<p>As if the naming of the day had been a spell to
+strike him dumb, Blount shut his eyes and groped
+helplessly for some hand-hold upon the suddenly rehabilitated
+responsibilities. Saturday&#8212;the day when
+Gryson would return with the proofs which, if they
+were to serve any good end, must be given the widest
+possible publicity in the two days remaining before
+the election. Blount recalled his carefully laid plans:
+he had intended giving Collins and the two record
+clerks a half-holiday, so that Gryson might come
+and go unnoticed. Also, he had meant to make a
+definite appointment with Blenkinsop and the representative
+of the United Press, to the end that there
+might be no delay in the firing of the mine. Lastly,
+Gryson must be shielded and gotten out of the city
+in safety; so much the traitor had a right to demand if he
+should risk his liberty and his life by
+returning with the evidence.</p>
+
+<p>It was a hideous tangle to owe itself to the joyous
+gambollings of the firemen's mascot dog. And
+there was more to it than the hopeless smashing of
+the Saturday's plans. Into the midst of the mordant
+reflections, and adding a sting which was all
+its own, came the thought of this newest obligation
+laid upon him by his father and his father's wife.
+They had taken him in and were loading him down
+with kinsman gifts of care and loving-kindness, while
+his purpose had been&#8212;must still be&#8212;to strike back
+like a merciless enemy. He remembered the old
+fable of the adder warmed to life in a man's bosom,
+and it left him sick and nerveless.</p>
+
+<p>None the less, the obsession of the indomitable
+purpose persisted, gripping him like the compelling
+hand of a giant in whose grasp he was powerless.
+For a time he sought to escape, not realizing that
+the obsession was the call of the blood passed on
+from the men of his race who, with axe and rifle,
+had hewn and fought their way in the primeval wilderness,
+and would not be denied. Neither did he
+suspect that the dominating passion driving him on
+was his best gift from the man against whom he was
+pitting his strength. What he did presently realize
+was that the giant grip of purpose was not to be
+broken; and thereupon a vast cunning came to possess
+him. He must have time and a chance to plan
+again: if he should feign sleep, perhaps the woman
+whose presence and personality were shackling the
+inventive thought would go away and leave him
+free to think.</p>
+
+<p>She did go after a while, though so noiselessly
+that when he opened his eyes it was with the fear
+that he should see her still bending over the little
+embroidery frame at the window. Finding himself
+alone, he sat up in bed and gave the broken head an
+opportunity to blot him out if it could. For a little
+space the walls of the room became as the interior
+of a hollow peg-top, spinning furiously with a noise
+like the rushing of many waters. After the surroundings
+had resumed their normal figurings he
+rose to his knees. There was another grapple with
+the whirling peg-top, and again he mastered the
+dizzying confusion. Made bold by success, he got
+his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the
+brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments
+had once more come to rest.</p>
+
+<p>By this time he was able to conquer all save the
+throbbing headache. Shuffling first to one door
+and then to the other, he shot the bolts against intrusion.
+Then he staggered across to the dressing-case
+and took a look at himself in the glass. The
+bandaged head, with its haggard, pain-distorted face
+grimacing back at him, extorted a grunt of sardonic
+disapproval, but the mirror answered the query
+which had sent him stumbling across to it. The
+bandage was comparatively small and tightly drawn;
+a soft hat could be worn over it&#8212;the hat would cover
+and decently hide it.</p>
+
+<p>Next he found his clothes, those he had been
+wearing at the time of the accident. Somebody had
+been thoughtful enough to have them cleaned and
+pressed; from which he argued that the plunging
+fall on the wet asphalt had been demoralizing in
+more ways than one. Continuing the experimental
+venture, he walked back and forth and up and down
+until he could do it without clutching at the bed-rails
+to save himself from falling. Then he reshot
+the door-bolts and went back to bed to await developments.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these came when Patricia brought his
+luncheon. He had been wondering if she would be
+the one to come; wondering and hoping. With the
+unfilial purpose driving him on, there were added
+twinges at the thought of his father's wife going on
+piling the mountain of obligation higher and still
+higher by waiting upon him, and thus reminding
+him at every turn of the adder fable. With Patricia
+it was different.</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning," he grimaced, when Patricia
+came in with the daintily appointed server. "Getting
+a bit more of the first-aid practice, are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am obeying orders," she flashed back, when
+she had shaken up the pillows and placed the appetizing
+meal within his reach. "Mrs. Blount said
+I'd probably have a less disturbing influence upon
+you than she would. Shall I feed you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens, no! I'm not that near dead, I
+hope! If you don't believe it, you may sit down and
+watch me eat&#8212;if you're not missing your own luncheon."</p>
+
+<p>"Nurses have no regular meal-times," she retorted.
+And then: "You are feeling a great deal
+better, aren't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Much better&#8212;since you came. Did they tell
+you it was a dog?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded, and he went on.</p>
+
+<p>"It was my unlucky night, I guess. Did the fire
+burn up my office? I forgot to ask Mrs. Blount
+about that."</p>
+
+<p>"No; it was a building across the street from the
+Temple Court."</p>
+
+<p>"'Small favors thankfully received,'" he quoted,
+resolutely pushing a fresh recurrence of the tomtom
+beatings into the background; "small favors
+and larger ones in proportion&#8212;this broth, for example.
+It's simply delicious. I hadn't realized how
+hungry I was."</p>
+
+<p>"The broth ought to be good; I made it myself,
+you know."</p>
+
+<p>"You did? Where, for pity's sake?"</p>
+
+<p>"In the hotel kitchen. The <i>chef</i> was furious
+at first. He twirled his Napoleon-III mustaches
+and sputtered and swelled up like an angry old
+turkey. But when I talked nice to him in his
+own beloved Bordelaise he let me do anything I
+pleased."</p>
+
+<p>Blount looked up quickly, and the movement
+brought the head-throbbings back with disconcerting
+celerity.</p>
+
+<p>"You are cruelly kind to me, Patricia; everybody
+is kind to me. And I'm not needing kindness just
+now," he ended.</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you? I don't agree with you, and I'm
+sure your father and Mrs. Blount wouldn't." Then
+she went on to tell him how they had all been up,
+watching the progress of the fire from their windows,
+when the word came that he had been hurt in the
+street. Also, she told how his father had impatiently
+smashed the telephone because, the wires having
+been cut and tangled in the fire, he could get no response,
+and how, thereupon, he had turned the entire
+night force of the hotel out to go in search of a
+doctor. "But with all that, he couldn't stand it to
+look on while the doctor was taking the stitches,"
+she added. "He turned his back and tramped over
+here to the window; and I could hear him gritting
+his teeth and&#8212;and swearing."</p>
+
+<p>If Evan Blount ate faster than a sick man should,
+it was because there are limits to the finest fortitude.
+Patricia ran on cheerfully, minimizing her
+own part in the first-aid incidents, and magnifying
+the anxious and affectionate concern of the senator
+and his wife. He listened because he could not
+help it; but when he had finished, and she was
+inquiring if there was anything else she could do
+for him, he dissembled, saying that he would try
+to sleep, and asking her to shut out more of the
+daylight and to deny him to everybody until evening.</p>
+
+<p>She promised; but naturally enough, with the
+dreadful responsibility drawing nearer with every
+hour-striking of the tiny leather-cased travelling-clock
+on the dresser, sleep was out of the question for him.
+Hot-eyed and restless, he wore out the long afternoon
+in feverish impatience, slipping now and then
+into the shadow land of delirium when the pain was
+severest, but clinging always to the obsessing idea.
+At whatever cost, the crisis must find him resolute
+to do his part. Gryson must be met, the evidence
+of fraud must be secured, and the fraud itself must
+be defeated.</p>
+
+<p>The bright autumn day was fading to its twilight,
+and the shadows were gathering around his bed,
+when Patricia tiptoed in to ask, first, if he were
+awake, and, next, what he would like to have for
+his supper. Exhausted by the waiting battle, he
+answered briefly: he was not hungry; if he could
+be left alone again, with the assurance that no one
+would come to disturb him, it was all he would ask.
+He tried to say it crustily, with the irritable impatience
+of the convalescent&#8212;dissembling again. But
+the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in
+view had lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic
+intuition.</p>
+
+<p>"You are not so well this evening," she said softly,
+laying a cool palm on his forehead. "I think I'd
+better telephone Doctor Dillon."</p>
+
+<p>Now the thing for Patricia's lover to do was obvious.
+With pity thus trembling on the very crumbling
+brink of love, the opportunity which months of
+patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand.
+It was a fair measure of the mastery an obsession
+may obtain&#8212;the lover's ability to thrust the gentler
+emotion into the background, to feign restless irritation
+under the passion-stirring touch, and to say:
+"No; I don't want Dillon or anybody; I want to
+be left alone. Please latch the door when you go
+out, and tell father and his&#8212;and Mrs. Blount that
+I don't want to be disturbed."</p>
+
+<p>She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after
+she was gone Blount sat up in bed and cursed himself
+fervently and painstakingly for the little brutality.
+But the remorseful cursings took nothing from
+the grim determination which had prompted the
+brutality. The dusk was thickening, and the street
+electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway
+of radiance. Blount got up, and with a disheartening
+renewal of the splitting headache, began
+to dress, but there were many pauses in which he
+had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the
+throbbing pain to subside.</p>
+
+<p>The next step was to reach his own room, two
+floors above, and he let himself cautiously into the
+corridor and locked the door from the outside.
+Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he
+dragged himself up two flights of stairs and so came
+to his goal.</p>
+
+<p>Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat
+drawn well over his eyes, he compassed the escape
+from the upper floor by means of the remote stair
+he had used in ascending, and so reached the
+ground-floor. Fortunately, the lobby was crowded;
+and turning up the collar of the rain-coat to hide
+the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the
+revolving doors. More than once in the dodging
+progress he rubbed shoulders with men whom he
+knew, and who knew him; but the shielding hat-brim
+and the muffling rain-coat saved him.</p>
+
+<p>Reaching the street, he did not attempt to walk
+to the Temple Court. Instead, he crept around to
+a garage near the hotel and hired a two-seated
+road-car. Quite naturally, the garage-keeper wanted
+to send his own driver, and Blount counted it as an
+unavoidable misfortune that he was obliged to give
+his name, and to hear the motor-liveryman say:
+"Oh, sure! I didn't recognize you, Mr. Blount. I
+reckon Senator Dave's son can have anything o'
+mine that he wants."</p>
+
+<p>Blount drove the road-car all the way around the
+Capitol grounds to come into his office street inconspicuously.
+Across from the Temple Court the fire
+ruins were still smouldering, and there was an acrid
+odor of stale smoke in the air. For a full third of
+the block the street was littered with débris. Blount
+stopped his machine at the nearest corner and got
+out to reconnoitre the office-building entrance. In
+the vestibule he glanced up at the face of the illuminated
+wall-clock, making a hasty calculation based
+upon the leaving time of the east-bound Overland.
+There were fifty minutes to spare, and when he
+reached his office, and had turned on the desk-light
+and dropped heavily into his chair, he called
+up the railroad station to inquire about the train.
+The Overland was reported ten minutes late. If
+Gryson should show up in time, this earliest outgoing
+train must be made to serve as the means for
+his flight.</p>
+
+<p>Blount had scarcely formulated the condition when
+the office-door winged noiselessly, and the man himself,
+hollow-eyed and haggard, stumbled in. As once
+before, Blount got up and went to shut the door
+and lock it. When he came back, Gryson had taken
+his seat in a chair at the desk-end, where the light
+from the shaded working-lamp fell upon his sinister
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I've been all th' way t' hell and back ag'in,"
+he announced in a grating whisper. "They've put
+th' reward out, and three times since last night some
+of me own pals 've tried to snitch on me." Then
+he drew a carefully wrapped package from its hiding-place
+under his coat and laid it on the desk. "It's
+all there," he went on in the same rasping undertone.
+"Some of 'em give up to get square wit' th'
+bosses, and some of 'em had to have a gun shoved
+in their faces. No matter; they've come across&#8212;the
+last damn' wan of 'em; and th' affidavits are
+there, too&#8212;when I c'd get next to a dub of a not'ry
+that'd make 'em."</p>
+
+<p>Blount did not untie the package, nor did he
+cross-examine the traitor. His head was throbbing
+again almost unbearably, and he was beginning to
+fear that he might not last to carry out the plan of
+safe-conduct for the informer. Slipping the precious
+package into an inner pocket of the enveloping coat,
+he took a compact roll of bank-bills from a drawer
+in the desk and gave it to Gryson, saying tersely:
+"That isn't a bribe, you understand; it's merely to
+help you make your getaway. Can you manage
+to ride on Transcontinental trains without being
+recognized offhand?"</p>
+
+<p>Gryson pulled a false beard from his pocket and
+showed it. "Wit' that, and me old hat, I've been
+keepin' most o' th' boys from tippin' me off," he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>"All right; here's the lay-out. You have earned
+immunity, so far as this latest raid on you is concerned,
+by turning State's evidence. But you've got
+to move on, and keep moving. Do you get that?"</p>
+
+<p>The fugitive nodded, and Blount got up to stagger
+across to the office wardrobe, from which he took
+the extra rain-coat kept there for emergencies.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, get into this and go down-stairs. At the
+corner above, you'll find a two-seated motor-car
+backed against the curb. Do you know enough
+about machinery to start an auto-engine?"</p>
+
+<p>Gryson nodded again. "I'd ought to, seein' that
+I've been a gang boss in a shop that made 'em."</p>
+
+<p>"Good enough; crank the motor, climb in, and
+wait. I'll do the rest."</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes later, Blount had stumbled out of
+the elevator at the ground-floor and was groping
+his way along the sidewalk toward the corner&#8212;groping
+because the pain had become blinding again
+and the street-lights were taking on many-colored
+and fantastic brilliancies.</p>
+
+<p>When he finally found the car, it was mainly by
+the sense of hearing; the motor was drumming softly
+under the hood, and there was a blur in the mechanician's
+seat which answered for the crouching figure
+of the ward-worker. By a supreme effort of will
+Blount swung himself up behind the steering-wheel
+and let the clutch in. Luckily, the street was clear
+of vehicles and he made the turn in safety; but
+fully realizing his handicap, he steered straight away
+from the business district, and making a wide circuit
+through the residence quarter, brought the
+car out in the eastern suburb at the beginning of a
+road paralleling the Transcontinental tracks.</p>
+
+<p>With the lights of the city dropping away to the
+rear, and the drumming motor quickened to racing
+speed, he told the fugitive from justice what was to
+be done and the manner of its doing. Twenty-two
+miles out they would reach the coal-mine station of
+Wardlaw, a few minutes ahead of the Overland.
+Since all east-bound trains stopped at the coal-mines
+to coal the engines, the way of escape would be open.</p>
+
+<p>Something more than a wordless, space-devouring
+half-hour beyond this, Blount applied the brakes
+and dropped his passenger at the rear of the small
+iron-roofed building which served as the railroad
+station for the coal-mines. Far to the rear on the
+twenty-two-mile tangent the headlight of the coming
+train showed like a blazing star low on the western
+horizon.</p>
+
+<p>"Go and blacken your face and hands at one of
+the slack dumps and pass yourself for a miner quitting
+his job," was Blount's parting suggestion; but
+the hollow-eyed fugitive had a last word to say, too,
+and he said it.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been t' hell and back, as I told you, and
+'twas f'r on'y th' wan thing: give me your word,
+Evan Blount, that you'll chop th' damn' tree down
+and let it lie where it falls! That's all I'm askin',
+this trip."</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't lose any sleep worrying about that,"
+was the curt reply; and without waiting for the
+train arrival, Blount turned the car and sent it
+racing on the way back to the city.</p>
+
+<p>By all the tests he knew how to apply, he was
+little better than a dead man when he returned the
+hired auto to the side-street garage and made his
+halting way around to the hotel. He had long
+since given up the idea of trying to see Blenkinsop.
+He knew that the editor would not be in his office
+much before ten o'clock, and the two-hour wait was
+not to be endured.</p>
+
+<p>Clinging desperately to the single purpose of getting
+back to the deserted room before his absence
+should be discovered, and weighed down by a crushing
+sense of the immorality of the step he had just
+taken in bargaining with a hunted criminal and in
+conniving at his escape, he pressed on, pushing
+through the revolving doors and slipping once more
+into the Saturday evening lobby throng. Edging
+around to the stair, he took all the cautious steps in
+reverse; ascending first to his own room to leave the
+rain-coat and the hat, and afterward feeling his way
+down the servants' stair and through the lower corridor
+to the locked door in his father's private suite.</p>
+
+<p>Past this he had a hazy notion that part of him&#8212;the
+observing part&#8212;stood aside and looked on
+while the other part slowly and painfully struggled
+out of its clothes and into its pajamas. Also he
+saw the other part, after it had carefully secreted
+the wrapped package of papers under the mattress,
+beat the pillows feebly and bury its head in them.
+After that there was a great blank.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVI" id="XXVI"></a>XXVI</h2>
+
+<h3>APPLES OF GOLD</h3>
+
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the pillow-muffled plunge
+which was almost a lapse into the coma of utter
+exhaustion, Evan Blount awoke early on the Sunday
+morning, refreshed and measurably free from
+pain. Since the sun was just beginning to gild the
+lofty finial on the dome of the Capitol opposite, there
+was no one stirring as yet in the adjoining rooms of
+the suite, and the streets were silent save for the
+chanting cries of the newsboys.</p>
+
+<p>Slipping out of bed, Blount crossed to the window
+and threw it open. It was good to be able to stand
+and walk without wincing; and a breath of the sunrise
+breeze sweeping down from the eastern hills
+was like a draught of invigorating wine. As he leaned
+out for an instant to make sure that not even the
+height would bring a return of the vertigo, the wail
+of the nearest newsboy became shrilly articulate:
+<i>"Here's yer Morning Plainsman! All erbout the great
+election frauds!"</i></p>
+
+<p>Hardly crediting his ears, Blount listened again,
+and when the cry was repeated he closed the window
+softly and sat down to grapple with this newest
+development of his problem. Did the newsboy's
+selling-cry mean that Blenkinsop had found out for
+himself, and independently, about the falsified registration
+lists? If so, there would be no public vindication
+for one Evan Blount; but also&#8212;thank God!&#8212;no
+need for a son to blazon himself to the world
+as his father's accuser. A great wave of thankfulness
+rolled over Blount's head, submerging him and
+turning the exclamation which sprang to his lips
+into a pæan of rejoicing. Instantly he saw himself
+throwing up his railroad connection and taking his
+rightful place as his father's counsel and defender.
+Here, at last, was a cause into which he could fling
+himself body and soul. True, people would say
+that he had been in league with the corporations,
+the boss, and the machine, from the first, but what
+did that matter?</p>
+
+<p>But would his father need a defender? No
+shadow of doubt as to this was admissible in the
+face of the accumulating evidence, he told himself.
+From the opening day of the campaign the machine
+and the corporations had been working hand in
+hand; Gryson and his fellow-crooks were the sufficient
+proof; and besides.... Blount reached under
+the mattress and drew out the wrapped package,
+untying the string with fingers that trembled.
+A cursory examination of the affidavits sufficed. In
+Gryson's sworn statement, and in two others, the
+"Big Boss" was inculpated definitely and by name.</p>
+
+<p>Blount glanced at the little clock on the dressing-case.
+The early Sunday morning silence still prevailed
+in the great hotel, and his resolve was quickly
+taken. Dressing hurriedly, he went up to his own
+room, and after a shave, a bath, and a freshening
+change which included the removal of the disfiguring bandage,
+he put on a close-fitting silk travelling-cap
+under the soft hat and went down to the lobby.</p>
+
+<p>There were but few guests stirring at that hour,
+and Blount had the writing-room to himself when
+he bought a copy of <i>The Plainsman</i> and turned anxiously
+to the editorial page. After the first thrilling
+of relief born of the newsboy's cry, an unnerving fear
+had crept in to whisper that possibly the facts might
+not bear out the thankful assumption. A rapid
+reading of Blenkinsop's editorial confirmed the fear,
+and the reader's lips grew dry and his breath came
+quickly when he realized that the submerging wave
+of thankfulness had risen only to be driven back.
+Blenkinsop had no facts, no evidence; he was merely
+hitting out blindly with a general accusation of fraud
+which he made no effort to substantiate or prove!</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount saw the thorny path stretching away
+before him again, and he rose up to walk in it like
+a man. As once before, he went down to the railroad
+restaurant for his breakfast, seeking solitude,
+and the meal had been half-absently eaten before
+he had readjusted himself, sorrowfully but firmly,
+to the unchanged situation. His duty was as clearly
+defined now as it had been the day previous, or at
+any time in the past. There was nothing changed,
+nothing different, save that a new complication had
+arisen in the crucial shortness of the interval for action.
+Knowing human nature a little, he knew how
+difficult it is to arouse an effective public sentiment
+on the eve of an election, no matter how important
+the issues involved. In a hard school of experience
+the voter has learned to discount the final-moment
+cry of fraud. Would an exposure, however convincing,
+appearing only in the Monday and Tuesday
+morning newspapers have the desired effect?</p>
+
+<p>Blount walked by devious ways from the railroad
+station to the Temple Court, and secluded himself
+behind the locked door of his office to have a chance
+to think the problem out to some effective conclusion.
+What should he do? Should he find Blenkinsop
+and get him and the United Press representative
+together at once, laying before them the
+damning evidence and telling them to use it as they
+could? Or was there some surer way of firing the
+mine of protest and exposure?</p>
+
+<p>There was one other way, at least, but the mere
+thought of it made him sick and shaken. As an
+upright citizen and a member of the bar, was it
+not his duty to lay the evidence, not before the public
+in the newspapers, but before a competent court
+of justice? And in that event, was there in this
+land of graft and corruption a judge sufficiently
+fearless and incorruptible to act with the needful
+vigor and promptness?</p>
+
+<p>When Blount asked himself this question, the
+answer came quickly. Though it was the common
+accusation, well or ill founded, that the lower courts
+of the State were the creatures of the corporations,
+the judges on the supreme bench still commanded
+the respect of the people. Hemingway, the chief
+justice, was peculiarly a man for a crisis; strong,
+honest, and entirely fearless; a man who would not
+stop to haggle over nice questions of precedent and
+jurisdiction where the public welfare demanded
+prompt and effective action.</p>
+
+<p>For a long half-hour Blount sat staring absently
+at the desk litter, trying to decide between the
+two courses open to him. He knew that his father
+and Judge Hemingway had been lifelong friends,
+and this added another drop of bitterness to a cup
+which was already overflowing. None the less, he
+was confident that the judge would do his duty as
+he saw it. It was a merciless thing to do&#8212;to
+make this just judge the slayer of the friend of his
+youth; but at the end Blount reached for the
+telephone-book and began to search for the chief
+justice's residence number. Before he could find it
+the phone bell rang.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he answered shortly, putting the receiver
+to his ear.</p>
+
+<p>It was Miss Anners who was at the other end of
+the wire, and he was instantly aware of the note of
+anxiety in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Evan!</i>" she exclaimed; "you don't know what a
+fright you have given us! What are you doing at
+your office when you ought to be here and in bed?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount drew the desk instrument closer and tried
+to put her off lightly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm all right again. I turned out early this
+morning to make up for lost time. You wouldn't
+expect me to stay in bed for more than a day to
+oblige a common, ordinary coach-dog, would you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but see here&#8212;listen: Doctor Dillon has
+been here, and he is perfectly shocked. He says
+there may be complications, and the very least you
+can do is to be careful. Your father has had the
+hotel boys looking everywhere for you. When are
+you coming back?"</p>
+
+<p>Here was the direct question which Blount had
+been dreading. Now, if never before, the wretched
+involvement had reached a point beyond which it
+was impossible to follow his father's plea for a continuance
+of the kinsman amenities.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you had better leave me out of any plans
+you are making for the day," he answered evasively.
+"I shall be pretty busy."</p>
+
+<p>"No&#8212;listen," she insisted. "It's wrong to work
+on Sunday, but if you will be obstinate, you must
+stop at luncheon-time. We are going to drive out
+to Wartrace Hall this afternoon; Doctor Dillon says
+we positively <i>must</i> take you away from town and
+keep you quiet for a few days."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't go with you," he answered brusquely,
+adding: "And I'm not sure that I can join you at
+luncheon. There is so much to be done that I shall
+probably drop around to the club for a bite at one
+o'clock. Don't wait for me, and don't worry.
+Above all, please don't tell anybody where I am&#8212;not
+even Dick Gantry."</p>
+
+<p>He was considerably relieved when she said
+"Good-by" rather abruptly, and rang off. None
+the less, he thought it a little strange that his father
+should be planning to leave the capital on the very
+eve of the great struggle. Was he so sure that nothing
+could happen within the next twenty-four hours?
+Leaving the query answerless, he returned to the
+interrupted duty. Deliberately, with the open telephone-book
+before him, he sought and found Judge
+Hemingway's number; and a few seconds later he
+had the judge's house in Mesa Circle, with the
+judge himself answering his call. The wire conversation
+was brief and to the point. Cautiously, and
+in well-guarded phrase, Blount stated his case. By
+a series of correlated incidents which could be explained
+later, documentary evidence of a great conspiracy
+had fallen into his hands; would the judge
+step aside so far as to accord him a Sunday interview,
+taking his word for it that the emergency was
+most urgent, and that the time was too short to
+admit of the ordinary methods of procedure?</p>
+
+<p>The judge's answer was satisfactory, though
+Blount fancied it was rather reluctantly given. A
+family engagement&#8212;an accepted luncheon invitation&#8212;would
+intervene; but between four and five
+o'clock in the afternoon the chief justice would be
+in his chambers in the Capitol building, and would
+be glad to have the son of his old friend the senator
+come at that hour.</p>
+
+<p>With time on his hands, Blount squared himself
+at his desk and began to set his railroad house in
+order. Now that the dreadful step was practically
+taken, he was free to wind up the business of his
+office, leaving things in order for his successor. Once
+he had thought that he could not stay in the capital
+or in the West after the cataclysm. But now the
+manlier thought prevailed. A hard fate was making
+him his father's betrayer; but beyond the betrayal,
+with the bare duty done, he would take his place
+as his father's son, proving his love and loyalty by
+going down with him to any depth of infamy into
+which the cataclysm might drag him.</p>
+
+<p>Since there was much to be done in the winding-up
+task, the forenoon fled quickly, and the hands of the
+small paper-weight clock on the desk were pointing
+to a quarter of two when Blount snapped the rubber
+band upon the final file of referred papers. There
+were other odds and ends to be set in order, but he
+determined to let them wait until he had eaten. A
+scant half-hour in the club grill-room was all he allowed
+himself, and at a quarter past two he was
+back at his desk, preparing to make the cleaning-up
+task complete. Between four and five, Judge Hemingway
+had said; and Blount began on one of the
+odds and ends, which was the writing of his letter
+of resignation from the railroad service.</p>
+
+<p>He was enclosing the letter when there came a light
+tap at the office-door, and then the door itself opened
+to admit Patricia&#8212;a Patricia bright-eyed and determined,
+alluringly charming in her tightly veiled driving-hat,
+muffling motor-coat, and dainty gauntlets.</p>
+
+<p>"You?" said Blount not too hospitably. "I
+thought you said something about going to Wartrace?"</p>
+
+<p>"So I did, and so I am," she asserted, coming to
+sit in the chair last occupied by one Thomas Gryson.</p>
+
+<p>"And the others?" he queried.</p>
+
+<p>"They have just left; gone on ahead in the touring-car.
+I was deputed to bring you."</p>
+
+<p>"But I told you this morning that I couldn't go,
+and I can't!" he protested.</p>
+
+<p>She looked him squarely in the eye. "Evan, you
+don't dare tell me why you can't!"</p>
+
+<p>"Business," he pleaded.</p>
+
+<p>"That may be half of the truth, but it isn't any
+more than half." Then she made the direct appeal:
+"I wish you'd tell me, Evan. I know a little&#8212;just
+the little that Mrs. Blount has seen fit to tell me&#8212;and
+no more. There is trouble threatening; some
+dreadful trouble. I saw it yesterday when you were
+so miserable; I can see it in your eyes this minute."</p>
+
+<p>Blount got up and began to pace the floor so that
+she might not see his eyes. He was no more proof
+against such an appeal than any lover gladly ready
+to bare his soul to the woman chosen out of a world
+of women for his confidant and second self would be.</p>
+
+<p>"I want to tell you," he affirmed, wheeling abruptly
+to face her; "I wanted to tell you yesterday, only
+it was too horrible. You will know it all when I
+say that by this time to-morrow the whole State
+will be ringing with the story of David Blount's
+degradation and ruin; and I&#8212;his only son, Patricia&#8212;I
+shall be the one who will have betrayed him and
+brought it to pass!"</p>
+
+<p>She blanched a little at that, and there was a
+great horror in her eyes. But he noted at the
+moment, and remembered it afterward, that she did
+not push him into the harrowing details, as another
+woman might have done.</p>
+
+<p>"You are very sure, I suppose?" she said gently.</p>
+
+<p>He drew the packet of affidavits from his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the evidence: sworn statements incriminating
+my father and many others."</p>
+
+<p>"You had those papers yesterday?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. I got up last night to keep my appointment
+with the man who brought them. But you see now
+why I can't go to Wartrace with you."</p>
+
+<p>"I see that you are going to do something for
+which you will never, never be able to forgive yourself,"
+she said gravely. "You are going to make
+use of those papers?"</p>
+
+<p>He sat down and stared gloomily at her. "Patricia,
+I have taken a solemn oath. The law which
+I have sworn to uphold is greater than&#8212;" He was
+going to say, "greater than any man's claim for immunity,"
+but she finished the sentence otherwise for
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"Is greater than your love for your father. I
+suppose I ought to be able to understand that, but
+I am not. Evan, you can't do it&#8212;you mustn't do
+it; every drop of that father's blood in your veins
+ought to cry out against it."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" he exclaimed with a sudden indrawing of
+his breath. "You don't know what it is costing me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Truly, I don't," she asserted calmly. "Your
+father is a great and good man. If he had a daughter
+instead of a son, she would know and understand."
+Then, in a quick and generous upflash of
+feeling: "I wish he had a daughter&#8212;I wish I were
+she! I should try to show him that blood is thicker
+than water!"</p>
+
+<p>"You wish&#8212;you were&#8212;his daughter? Do you
+realize what you are saying?" Then he went on
+brokenly: "<i>Don't</i>, Patricia, girl&#8212;for God's sake
+don't tempt me to do evil that good may come!
+Can't you understand how I am driven to do this
+thing&#8212;how every fibre of me is rebelling against
+the savage necessity? God knows, I'd give anything
+I am or hope to be if the necessity could be
+wiped out!"</p>
+
+<p>Instantly she changed her attack.</p>
+
+<p>"But I say you can not do it. You are a brave
+man, Evan; I know, because I have seen you tried.
+You mustn't turn cowardly now."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor shall I!" he countered quickly. "But I
+don't understand."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you? Isn't it cowardly to strike this
+cruel blow in the dark? You <i>can't</i> do this thing
+without giving your father the warning that you
+would give your bitterest enemy&#8212;you simply can't,
+and still be the man I have known and l&#8212;liked for
+two whole years!"</p>
+
+<p>"Father's going to Wartrace this afternoon is
+merely an added twist of the thumb-screws," he
+protested in fresh wretchedness. "I should have
+gone to him first&#8212;I meant to go to him first. From
+what you said over the telephone this morning I
+gathered that the Wartrace trip was to be made on
+my account, and I hoped, I believed, it would be
+given up when I refused to go. Now I can not see
+him first; the time is too short. That which is to
+be done must be done to-day&#8212;this afternoon; otherwise
+it will be too late. Don't make it any harder
+for me, Patricia. Surely you can see how hard it is,
+in any case!"</p>
+
+<p>"As I said a moment ago, I can see that you are
+about to do something for which, in all the years
+to come, you will never be able to get your own
+forgiveness. Oh, I know," she went on bitterly.
+"You will tell me that I am a woman, with only a
+woman's standards, which are valueless when they
+get mixed up with the emotions. But I can tell
+you that I know your father better than you do&#8212;much
+better. And I believe in him, utterly, absolutely.
+Won't you give him a chance, Evan? Won't
+you show him those dreadful papers and ask him
+what he will do when you have betrayed him?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount winced painfully at the hard word, and
+then he remembered that he had been the first to
+apply it. But he answered her in the only way
+that seemed possible:</p>
+
+<p>"The time: I have promised to meet Chief Justice
+Hemingway at his chambers between four and
+five this afternoon."</p>
+
+<p>"Chief Justice Hemingway?" she queried. "Why,
+he&#8212;" she broke off suddenly and sprang from her
+chair. "I have the little car here in the street. It
+was Mrs. Blount's proposal; she said you would
+change your mind if I came after you and offered
+to drive you. Come! I'll promise to bring you
+back before five o'clock. I know the time is awfully
+short, but I can do it!"</p>
+
+<p>If Blount hesitated it was only because her beauty
+and her eagerness thrilled him until, for the moment,
+he could think of nothing else. Then he closed his
+desk quickly and struggled into his overcoat, saying:
+"It shall be as you wish. Let's go."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVII" id="XXVII"></a>XXVII</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES</h3>
+
+
+<p>For fifteen miles north of the capital the Quaretaro
+road is a well-kept, level speedway, and Miss
+Anners amply proved the worth of her summer's
+training by showing herself a fearless driver. Half
+an hour after the small roadster had left the curb
+in front of the Temple Court Building it was among
+the hills and climbing to the upper mesa level.</p>
+
+<p>Nearing the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, they
+overtook and passed a horseman turning into the
+canyon road. The man's horse shied and threatened
+to bolt at sight of the storming car, but Patricia
+was looking straight ahead, and she made no movement
+to slacken speed. At the passing glimpse,
+Blount's mind went shuttling backward to the homecoming
+night in the Lost Hills, and he made sure he
+recognized the rider as Hathaway's morose henchman,
+the man Barto.</p>
+
+<p>He wondered vaguely what Barto could be doing
+at the turn in the obstructed side-canyon road,
+and the wonder went with him while the little car
+was covering the remaining distance and flying up
+the cottonwood-shaded avenue at Wartrace Hall.
+But a glance at his watch made him forget the
+Barto incident in a heart-warming thrill of admiration&#8212;the
+joy of a skilled motorist recognizing
+kindred skill in another. The thirty miles from
+the city had been made in something under fifty
+minutes.</p>
+
+<p>When she brought the roadster to a stand at the
+carriage entrance, Patricia spoke for the first time
+since she had taken the wheel for the record-breaking
+drive.</p>
+
+<p>"Find your father quickly and say to him what
+you have come to say. When you are ready to go
+back, I'll keep my promise and drive you."</p>
+
+<p>"That won't be at all necessary," he protested,
+getting out to stand with his hand on the dash. "I
+am perfectly well able to drive myself; and, besides,
+it would leave you at the wrong end of the road,
+and alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't stand there talking about it," she commanded.
+"Go and do what you have to do. I'll
+wait here."</p>
+
+<p>Blount turned away and found old Barnabas
+holding the door open for him. A word passed,
+and the old negro bobbed his head. "Yas, sah;
+Marsteh David's in de libra'y," was the answer to
+Blount's query, and, throwing his overcoat and soft
+hat aside, the bearer of burdens not his own walked
+quickly through the hall and let himself into the
+room of trial.</p>
+
+<p>The bright autumn day was cool&#8212;cool enough to
+warrant the crackling wood-fire on the library hearth.
+With his easy chair planted at the cosey corner of the
+fire and an open book on the table at his elbow, the
+senator sat smoking his long-stemmed pipe in the
+Sunday afternoon quiet. Mingled with the fire-snapping
+there were faint tappings, as if one of the
+cottonwoods, growing too near the house, were
+sending twig signals to the inmates.</p>
+
+<p>The senator moved the open book a little farther
+aside when his son made an abrupt entrance into
+the cheerful room.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, son, you made out to get here after so
+long a time, didn't you?" he said gently. And then:
+"How's the broken head to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Better," answered the son shortly, adding: "It's
+the least of my troubles just now."</p>
+
+<p>"That's good," was the hearty comment. Then,
+with the long stem of the pipe pointing to a Morris-chair:
+"Draw up and sit down. I reckon the drive
+has tired you some, even if you won't admit it.
+Where's the little girl?"</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount saw instantly that he must be brief
+and pitiless.</p>
+
+<p>"Patricia is waiting in the car to drive me back
+to town," he explained, forcing himself to speak
+calmly. "I have an appointment with Chief Justice
+Hemingway which must be kept, and he will
+wait in his chambers in the Capitol only until five
+o'clock. Father, do you know why I have made
+that appointment?"</p>
+
+<p>The senator wagged his great head in a way which
+might mean anything or nothing, and said: "How
+should I know, son?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hoped you would know. It's not a very pleasant
+task for me to tell you," the younger man went
+on, ignoring the chair to which the long-stemmed
+pipe was still pointing. "A short time ago&#8212;yesterday,
+to be exact&#8212;evidence, legal evidence, of corruption
+and false registration in four of the city wards,
+and in a number of outlying districts in the
+State, was put into my hands. This evidence incriminates
+a group of ringleaders and a still larger
+number of election officers. You know what I've
+got to do with it."</p>
+
+<p>The older man nodded slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I reckon I know, son; and I'm not saying
+a word. If you weren't a Blount, I might ask if
+you haven't learned that one of the first rules in the
+book of politics is the one that says we mustn't hang
+the dirty clothes out where everybody can see 'em,
+but I know better than to say anything like that to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>The young man's heart sank within him. It
+seemed evident that his father was still unsuspecting,
+still unconscious of the dreadful consequences
+to himself. Only utter frankness could avail now.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't discuss the question of expediency with
+you," he said hastily, "any further than to say that
+I'd cheerfully give ten years of my life to be able
+to consider it. Let me be perfectly plain: This evidence
+I am speaking of involves you personally. If
+the papers are put into Judge Hemingway's hands
+there will be a searching investigation, prompt indictments,
+criminal proceedings, and all the disgrace
+that the widest publicity can bring upon the
+men who are responsible for the present desperate
+state of affairs."</p>
+
+<p>The senator had laid his pipe aside and was staring
+soberly into the fire. "Go on, son," he said
+quietly; "let's have the rest of it."</p>
+
+<p>"You know what has led up to the present
+wretched involvement&#8212;my involvement," Blount
+went on. "When I took the railroad job, I did it
+in good faith and went about preaching the gospel
+of the square deal for everybody, including the corporations.
+But in a very short time I discovered
+that my own people were not keeping faith with
+me; had no intention of keeping it. Later on, a
+number of corporation officials and managers, men
+who had formerly made corrupt deals with the railroad
+company, and are to this day profiting by
+them, became frightened. Assuming that I was the
+chief broker for the railroad company in the present
+campaign, these men wrote me letters which
+were in the highest degree incriminating."</p>
+
+<p>The big man who was staring into the heart of
+the fire nodded thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"I remember; you told me something about that
+before, didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and we needn't go into the details again.
+I meant to use those letters as a club to hammer a
+little honesty into my own employers. Up to that
+time I had been trying to believe that the machine&#8212;your
+machine&#8212;and the railroad lawbreakers were
+not one and the same thing."</p>
+
+<p>"But you changed your mind about that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I had to, after I found out that you had corrupted
+one of my clerks and had sent one of your
+thugs to dynamite my safe. That is past and gone;
+but you can see where it left me. As you and
+everybody in the State know, I had been committing
+myself publicly everywhere, doing it with the assurance
+that when it came to the pinch I could bring
+Gantry and Kittredge and even Mr. McVickar himself
+to terms&#8212;the terms of honesty and fair dealing.
+With my weapon stolen, I was left helpless, facing
+the certainty that on the day after the election I
+should be pilloried in every hole and corner of my
+native State as the most shameless liar that ever
+breathed. Do you wonder that I was desperate?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, son; I reckon you wouldn't have been much
+of a Blount if you hadn't been."</p>
+
+<p>"I was desperate. I said to myself that I would
+find another weapon, even if I should have to take
+a leaf out of your own book, dad, to do it. I took
+the leaf, and I have the weapon. You drove Gryson
+away, but you made one small miscalculation.
+You didn't believe that his desire for revenge would
+be stronger than his fear of the gallows."</p>
+
+<p>Again the older man nodded thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, son; I know. He came back twice: once
+when he found you in your office last Wednesday
+night; and again yesterday, or rather last evening,
+when you got out of your bed and went to help
+him make his getaway on the east-bound Overland."</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount started back, and his exclamation
+was of pure astoundment.</p>
+
+<p>"You knew all this?" he gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I reckon there isn't much happening
+that such a double-dyed old villain as I am doesn't
+find out, Evan," was the sober rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>"But, good heavens! if you know so much, you
+must know what Gryson came back for, and what
+he gave me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; I know that, too. I reckon I might as
+well make a clean breast of it while I'm at it."</p>
+
+<p>"You knew it last night, and yet you didn't send
+somebody to hold me up and take the papers away
+from me?"</p>
+
+<p>The senator's chuckle rumbled deep in his mighty
+chest.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe I was counting a little on the kinship,
+Evan, boy. Maybe I was saying to myself: 'No,
+I reckon the boy won't do it, after all&#8212;not when
+he reads what's set down in the papers; he just
+naturally couldn't do it.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my Lord, dad!" was the choking response.
+"Can't you see that you are killing me by inches?
+Can't you see that I've got to choose between being
+a man clear through, or a scoundrel as weak and
+shifty as any of those I have been denouncing?
+My God, it's terrible!"</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon you're going to choose straight," said
+the older man, still with eyes averted.</p>
+
+<p>"I have chosen," said the son brokenly; "or perhaps
+it would be truer to say that there never has
+been any choice since the moment when I set my
+foot in the path which has led me thus far on the
+way to hell. I can despise myself utterly for the
+means I took to secure the evidence, but that very
+lapse makes it all the more needful that I should
+atone as I can."</p>
+
+<p>David Blount rose and put his back to the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Son, you are a man among a thousand&#8212;among
+ten thousand," he said quietly. "When it comes
+to a pure question of good, old-fashioned right and
+wrong, you can buck up just like your old great-gran'pap,
+the judge, did when he had to sentence
+one of his own sons for killing an Indian. You
+haven't said it in so many words, so I'll say it for
+you: you've got me, and maybe some others, right
+where you can shove us into the penitentiary.
+That's about what you're trying to tell me, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake, don't put it that way!" Blount
+protested. "I gave you fair warning almost at the
+first. I've got to fight for the right as I see it. If
+I don't, I shall be less than a man&#8212;less than your
+son. Can't you see that it is breaking my heart?"</p>
+
+<p>A silence electrically surcharged with possibilities
+settled down upon the isolated room, with the stillness
+broken only by the crackling of the fire and
+that other distant tapping as of tree-twigs on the
+roof. At the end of the pause the senator took a
+forward step and put a hand on his son's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't one word to say, Evan, boy," he began
+slowly. "As you told me that first day out here,
+son, it's your job to hew to the line and let the chips
+fall where they may. You go ahead and do just
+what seems right and law-abiding to you. I'd rather
+go to jail twice over than have you do any different.
+Is that what you're wanting me to say?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount dropped into a chair, as if the touch on
+his shoulder had crushed him, and covered his face
+with his hands. It was hard&#8212;harder than even his
+own prefigurings had forecast it. Fighting against
+the patent facts, he had been cherishing a lingering
+hope that his father might be able to brush away
+the cruel necessity at the last moment. But now
+the hope was dead.</p>
+
+<p>It was a long minute before he staggered to his
+feet and groped his way to the door, leaving his
+father standing before the fire and once more puffing
+absently at the long-stemmed pipe. When old Barnabas
+had helped him into his coat and had given
+him his hat, he found Patricia still sitting in the car,
+with the motor purring softly under the hood.</p>
+
+<p>"Must you go back?" she queried, when he had
+descended the steps to climb stiffly into the seat
+beside her.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Your duty is clear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly clear&#8212;now."</p>
+
+<p>"And the consequences?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I can only guess," he muttered. "Ruin and
+disgrace for all of us, I suppose. Of course, you
+understand that I have resigned from the railroad
+service and shall stand with my father when&#8212;when
+the thing is done."</p>
+
+<p>She was backing the little roadster into the circling
+driveway to turn for the start. At the reversing
+moment she made her final plea.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't do it, Evan&#8212;<i>don't do it!</i> I have no more
+than a woman's reason to offer, but I am sure you
+are opening the door to a lifelong sorrow for yourself
+and&#8212;and&#8212;for me!"</p>
+
+<p>It was the last two words that steeled him suddenly.
+Not even at her beseeching would he turn
+aside from the plain path of the oath-bound obligation.
+It struck him like a blow that the turning
+aside would make him forever unworthy of her.</p>
+
+<p>"Take me back to the city as quickly as you can!"
+he said. "Or, better still, stay here and let me have
+the car. That is my last word."</p>
+
+<p>"You're not fit to drive a car!" she snapped; and
+for further answer she threw the speed lever into the
+intermediate gear and released the clutch. Like a
+projectile hurled from a catapult, the swift little
+roadster shot away down the cottonwood avenue,
+and with a jerk of the lever into the "high" the
+second race against time was begun.</p>
+
+<p>For the first few miles Patricia's passenger had
+all he could do to keep his seat. On its upper mesa
+windings the Quaretaro road follows the course of
+the stream which has been robbed of its waters for
+the cultivated lands, and though the roadway was
+good the hazards were plentiful when taken at speed.
+More than once Blount caught himself in the act
+of reaching for the steering-wheel, but as often he
+desisted. As on the outward race, Patricia was
+staring straight ahead, and giving the little car
+every throb of speed there was in its machinery.
+None the less, he could see that she had it under
+perfect control.</p>
+
+<p>What finally happened came with the suddenness
+of the thunder-clap following a bolt which strikes
+near at hand. They were on the down-grade approach
+to the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, and they
+could not see beyond the gentle curve to the left,
+where the smaller gulch found its intersection with
+the main ravine. When they were within a hundred
+yards of the curve the stretch below came into
+view. Blount had a momentary glimpse of some
+barrier&#8212;a pine-tree, as it proved to be&#8212;lying across
+the main road. Seeing it, he realized at the same
+instant that Patricia was neither throttling the motor
+nor applying the brakes. After that he had barely
+time to snap the switch and to throw the heavy
+wind-shield down before the devastating crash came.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXVIII" id="XXVIII"></a>XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GOSSIPING WIRES</h3>
+
+
+<p>After his son had left him, the Honorable Senator
+Sage-Brush remained standing before the library
+fire until he heard the machine-gun exhausts
+of the small roadster distance-diminishing down the
+driveway avenue. Then he stepped aside and pressed
+the bell-push ordinarily used to summon the old
+negro footman.</p>
+
+<p>In answer to the call a door opened beyond the
+chimney-jamb, and immediately the gentle twig-tapping
+sounds resolved themselves into the clickings
+of a pair of telegraph relays and the chatter of
+a typewriter. A good-looking young fellow, with
+his coat off, entered the library, carefully closing the
+door behind him.</p>
+
+<p>"Want to send something, senator?" he asked,
+whipping a note-book from his hip-pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"No, not just this minute. Anything new coming
+over the wires?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing startling. Steuchfield reports from
+Ophir that we swing the miners' vote almost to a
+man unless something unforeseen breaks loose.
+Hetchy gives us a good word from Twin Buttes; and
+Griggs, up in the Carnadines, wires from Alkire that
+he has just completed an auto canvass of the High
+Line district. The ranchmen up that way have had
+a pretty bad scare. There was a threat made that
+the price of water was going to be raised. But they're
+all right now."</p>
+
+<p>The boss nodded approvingly. Then: "How about
+those microphone notes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Crowell is writing them off," was the reply.
+"He'll have them in half an hour or so."</p>
+
+<p>The senator drew out his watch, a huge thick-crystalled
+time-piece dating back to the range-riding
+period.</p>
+
+<p>"As matters have turned out, I shall be going to
+the city before long," he said. "If the notes are not
+ready before I leave, you can order out the speed-car
+and send them in by Gallagher any time before six
+o'clock. Don't slip up on that, Fred; tell Gallagher
+to deliver the notes to me, in person, at the Inter-Mountain.
+What's become of Professor Anners?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's staying over at Haworth's ranch, just to
+be near the fossil bone-field. They've made another
+plesio-something find, and Haworth telephones that
+the professor couldn't be dragged away with a derrick
+until those bones are safely out of the ground
+and boxed for shipment."</p>
+
+<p>The professor's host smiled indulgently, saying:
+"It's just as well, I reckon. The professor's about
+as blind as a bat when it comes to seeing anything
+this side of a million years ago, but if he were here
+he might wonder why we've set up a telegraph-office&#8212;wonder,
+and talk about it."</p>
+
+<p>The young man in his shirt-sleeves was turning to
+go. "I'll hustle Crowell on those notes," he promised:
+but as he was reaching for the door-knob the senator
+stopped him.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on a minute, Fred; how is that contrivance
+of ours at the mouth of Shonoho working?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's working all right. Canby is on watch there
+now, and he says he can see everything that passes
+on both roads."</p>
+
+<p>"That's good. These little precautions are mighty
+necessary in a close fight. Those folks over at Shonoho
+Inn ought to have thought of this outer-guard
+business for themselves, but it seems they didn't.
+They'd be right awkwardly embarrassed if some fellow
+they don't want to see should slip in on 'em without
+notice. While I think of it, don't fail to keep me
+posted on what Canby sees after I go back to town.
+He thinks he's safe, does he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly. Nobody can see his dugout from the
+road, and his oil-heater doesn't make any smoke.
+That scheme of laying insulated wires on the ground
+works like a charm. You could walk all over them
+without noticing them." The young man was opening
+the door as he spoke, and he broke off suddenly
+to say: "That's his call ringing now. Would you
+like to come and talk to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; you can tell me what he says, if it's worth
+telling."</p>
+
+<p>The clerk disappeared into the room of the tapping
+noises, but he was back again almost immediately.</p>
+
+<p>"It was Canby," he said hurriedly. "He says two
+men on horseback have just dragged a good-sized
+pine-tree down the Shonoho road and are placing
+it across the county road. He can't see the men's
+faces very well, but he thinks the bigger of the two
+is Jack Barto."</p>
+
+<p>It was the senator's boast that he had never lost
+a tooth or had one filled, and his smile showed the
+double row, strong and evenly matched, under the
+drooping grayish mustaches.</p>
+
+<p>"That boy Canby is a mighty good guesser, Fred.
+I shouldn't be surprised if the fellow he has spotted
+<i>is</i> Jack Barto, sure enough. If you didn't know
+beforehand what a good-natured, meechin' sort of
+rooster Jack is, you might think he was fixing to play
+some kind of a hold-up game on somebody."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what Canby thinks, and he asked me to
+hold the wire open."</p>
+
+<p>The big boss smiled again. "Then don't you
+reckon you'd better go and hold it?" he suggested
+mildly; and the young man in his shirt-sleeves vanished
+to do it.</p>
+
+<p>When he was left alone, the senator went to the
+house phone connecting the library with the remoter
+suites. A touch of the button brought an
+answering word, and he spoke softly into the transmitter.</p>
+
+<p>"The time is getting right ripe, and I thought you
+might want a minute or so to put on your things,"
+he said, in answer to the low-toned "Well?" that
+came over the house wire. Then he added: "I don't
+know but what we may have to make a little bluff
+at somebody on the way in. When you order the
+car around, suppose you tell Rickert to put 'Tennessee'
+and Billy Shack in the tonneau, with a couple
+of shot-guns. We can drop 'em if they look too
+warlike and conspicuous."</p>
+
+<p>He was hanging the ear-piece on its hook when the
+shirt-sleeved young man burst in again excitedly.</p>
+
+<p>"It <i>is</i> a hold-up!" he declared breathlessly. "Miss
+Anners and Mr. Evan have slammed their car into
+the tree, and Canby says the two horseback men are
+watching them from the dry gulch just below him!"</p>
+
+<p>"All right," was the even-toned reply. "You go
+and tell Canby to keep his shirt on, Fred; and don't
+forget to send those papers in by Gallagher."</p>
+
+<p>While the senator was speaking, the door opened
+and the old negro came hobbling in with a driving-coat
+and the broad-brimmed planter's hat which
+made the Honorable David a marked man throughout
+the length and breadth of the Sage-Brush State.</p>
+
+<p>"De cyar's at de do', Marsteh David, and Mistis
+say she plumb ready when you is, yes-sah," stammered
+the serving-man, holding the coat for his
+master; and a moment later the senator was climbing
+to his place behind the big wheel of the touring-car,
+with Mrs. Honoria for his seat-mate on the
+mechanician's side, and the chauffeur, the horse
+wrangler, and Billy Shack comfortably filling the
+tonneau.</p>
+
+<p>While the touring-car, with its curiously assorted
+complement of passengers, was leaving Wartrace
+Hall, Evan Blount, having assured himself that Patricia
+was not hurt, was trying to estimate the extent
+of the damage done to the little red roadster
+by the collision with the tree. The inspection was
+brief. With the front axle bent and the radiator
+crushed, the car was safely out of commission.</p>
+
+<p>"We're definitely out of the fight," he reported
+shortly, helping his companion down from the driving-seat.</p>
+
+<p>Patricia was still trembling and pale.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that we can't go on to the city?" she
+quavered.</p>
+
+<p>"Not unless we walk; and of course that is out
+of the question."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you&#8212;you can't keep your appointment
+with Judge Hemingway."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's smile was scornful. "I imagine it was no
+part of my father's plans that I should keep my appointment,"
+he commented bitterly. "He took it
+for granted that I would drive out to Wartrace with
+you, and made his preparations accordingly. This
+tree wasn't here half an hour ago, and it is here now."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't believe it of him," she denied, and her
+lip quivered. And then she added: "Just think,
+Evan; we might have been killed&#8212;both of us!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount's teeth came together with a little clicking
+noise. "Politics, or what passes for politics in this
+God-forsaken region, seems to make no account of
+such a small thing as a human life or two," he said.
+And then: "I suppose we are due to wait until
+somebody comes along to pick us up. It's four
+miles or more back to the nearest ranch on the mesa."</p>
+
+<p>"It is all my fault!" lamented the young woman.
+"I&#8212;I might have stopped the car, don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wondered a little that you didn't at least try
+to stop it," he permitted himself to say; and at this
+she forgot the traditions, sociological or other, reverting
+to the type of the eternal feminine.</p>
+
+<p>"Say it all," she flashed out. "You are beginning
+to wonder if I didn't do it purposely. I <i>did</i> do it
+purposely. All the way along I had been trying to
+muster up courage enough to smash the car in the
+ditch, and if I hadn't been such a coward I would
+have done it. Now hate me, if you want to!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount would have been less the lover than he was
+if he had not been moved to something much warmer
+than hatred.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us say that you are doing your level best to
+save my faith in human nature, Patricia, girl," he
+said soberly. "Do you know what you are? You
+are the one loyal person in a tricky world. I am
+still fair enough to say that it was fine&#8212;splendid!
+And I only wish my father were worthier of such
+superb loyalty and affection."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him curiously for a moment. Then
+her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye, and
+she laughed and said: "Yes, I think women are more
+loyal than men; and I am sure they are vastly more
+discerning at times. Don't you think&#8212;&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>The interruption was the appearance of two horsemen
+pushing their animals out of a small gorge on
+the right. When they had gained the main road
+they came up, ambling easily, and Blount instantly
+recognized the leader of the pair. It was Barto
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"Howdy?" said the timber-looker, riding up to
+hang with one knee over the saddle while he grinned
+genially at the two castaways. "Lost out ag'in,
+ain't ye, Mr. Blount? Couldn't make out, nohow,
+to run yer chug-wagon over that there pine-tree,
+could ye?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you put the tree in the road?" snapped
+Blount, his anger rising promptly, now that there
+was a man to quarrel with.</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon we did; and it was one Hades of a job,
+too," was the cool reply. "Had to drag the dern
+thing f'r more'n half a mile down the gulch with the
+hawss-ropes."</p>
+
+<p>Here was plenty of material for a wrathful explosion,
+but Blount controlled himself.</p>
+
+<p>"By whose orders did you do it?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Th' boss's."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Hathaway?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not on yer life; it was the big boss this time."</p>
+
+<p>Blount's quick glance aside at his companion was
+a wordless "I told you so!" and then to Barto:
+"Well, now that you have stopped us, what's next?"</p>
+
+<p>The outlaw grinned again and kicked his horse a
+little nearer.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a-holdin' you up sure enough this time, Mr.
+Blount&#8212;jest like another little Billy th' Kid," he
+confided. "You're goin' to gimme them papers
+you've got in your pocket, and then me an' Kinky
+we rides away all peaceful and leaves you and the
+lady to set down quiet till somebuddy comes along
+to pick you up."</p>
+
+<p>Blount put his hand to his head. His wound was
+throbbing painfully again, and the pain may have
+been partly responsible for his answer.</p>
+
+<p>"When you get those papers you'll take them
+from a dead man, Barto. Do your instructions go
+that far?"</p>
+
+<p>The man of many trades swung straight in his
+saddle and fell into the attitude of one listening.
+Then the good-natured grin became a menacing
+scowl.</p>
+
+<p>"Shuck them papers out, and do it sudden!" he
+commanded.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Blount crisply.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly the timber-looker's pistol was out.</p>
+
+<p>"Give 'em up!" he shouted; "shell 'em out,
+quick, 'r by the holy&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>The interposition broke in stormily. Down the
+grade from the upper mesa level came a touring-car,
+with a big man at the wheel, a veiled woman
+beside him, and three men in the tonneau. "Holy
+smoke!" said the outlaw, and with his riding mate
+was slipping away up the Shonoho road when the
+touring-car, with brakes protesting, came to a stand
+at the tree barrier. Like a flash, two of the three
+men in the tonneau leaped out, and a charge of
+buckshot whistling over the heads of the two obstructionists
+halted them. Thereupon the Honorable
+David gave his orders tersely.</p>
+
+<p>"Tennessee, you go up yonder and argue with
+Jack Barto a spell," he directed. "Tell him and his
+partner that the Wartrace smoke-house is the safest
+place in Quaretaro County for a couple of club-witted
+bunglers like they are, and then you see to
+it that they get there. You, Billy, help Rickert get
+a tow-rope hitch on that road-car, and we'll see if
+we can't jerk it out of the way." After which he
+turned to his son as casually as if only the preconceived
+and preconcerted had come to pass: "Tried
+to wreck you, did they? Mighty near made a job
+of it, too, from the looks of Miss Patty's little car.
+Not hurt, are you? That's good. Climb in here,
+both of you, and when we get this windfall out of
+the road we'll go on to town."</p>
+
+<p>Blount put Patricia into the empty tonneau
+while Shack and the chauffeur were making the tow-rope
+hitch, but he was still angry enough to hesitate
+when it came his turn. A glance at his watch decided
+him. It was still only half past four. Had his
+father repented so far as to override the obstacle
+which he himself had interposed? Patricia was
+holding the tonneau-door open, and Blount got in
+and took his seat beside her.</p>
+
+<p>A small engineering feat, made possible by the
+power plant of the big car and the tow-rope, soon
+cleared the way of the wrecked roadster and the
+tree. Then the senator gave another order.</p>
+
+<p>"You and Billy stay here and see if you can't get
+that roadster so you can run it to town on its own
+power," he said to the chauffeur; and over his
+shoulder to the pair behind him: "If you'll change
+partners back there, and let Honoria ride on the
+cushions&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>Though he could not remotely apprehend his
+father's reason for the rearrangement, Blount got
+out, helped Mrs. Honoria down and up again, and
+then climbed into the seat she had just vacated.
+At the click of the tonneau door-latch the big car
+rolled on down the grade, and for a good half of the
+straightaway fifteen miles to the city the younger
+man held his peace grimly. Finally he turned to
+his father and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I'm blaming you for the tree, and for Barto's
+attempt to get those papers away from me. Am I
+wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>The Honorable David shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"This close to an election you're mighty near safe
+in blaming anybody and everybody in sight, son," he
+returned gravely; and apart from this small break in
+the monotony, the second half of the fifteen miles
+went speechless.</p>
+
+<p>The clock in the Temple Court tower was pointing
+to five minutes of five when the senator, instead of
+taking the direct street to the Inter-Mountain, as
+his son expected him to, turned the car aside into
+the Capitol grounds and brought it to rest before
+the side entrance which led to the chambers of the
+Supreme Court justices.</p>
+
+<p>"You're still in time, Evan, boy," he intimated
+gently; "and I'm only going to ask one thing of
+you. When you get through with Hemingway, come
+around to the hotel and show your grit by taking
+dinner with the rest of us. Are you man enough to
+do that?"</p>
+
+<p>If the son hesitated, it was only for a fraction of a
+second. When he answered, it was to say: "If I
+were going up-stairs to put a noose around my own
+neck, it would be simpler and easier than the thing
+I've got to do. As to your one condition&#8212;dad, I'll
+be with you at dinner, and at all other times, after
+this thing is done. I've quit the railroad, and I
+did it so that I might be free to be your son and your
+lawyer when the smash comes. Can I say more?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't need to say another blessed word,
+son," was the sober rejoinder; and when Evan
+Blount got out, the Honorable David drove away
+without a backward glance for the young man who
+was dragging himself up the granite steps of the
+Capitol entrance like a condemned criminal going
+to execution.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXIX" id="XXIX"></a>XXIX</h2>
+
+<h3>AT SHONOHO INN</h3>
+
+
+<p>Evan Blount's interview with the venerable
+chief justice was not at all what he had imagined it
+would be. To begin with, he found it blankly impossible
+to take the attitude he had meant to take&#8212;namely,
+that of a conscientious member of the
+bar, rigorously ignoring all the little cross-currents
+of human sympathy and the affections.</p>
+
+<p>Almost at once he found himself telling his story
+incident by incident to the kindly old man who was
+figuring rather as a father confessor than as a judge
+and a legal superior. When it was done, and the
+chief justice had gone thoughtfully over the mass of
+evidence, Blount saw no thunder-cloud of righteous
+indignation gathering upon the judicial brow. Nor
+was Judge Hemingway's comment in the least what
+he had expected it would be.</p>
+
+<p>"I can not commend too highly your prudence and
+good judgment in bringing these papers to me, Mr.
+Blount," was the form the comment took. "Your
+position was a difficult one, and not one young man
+in a hundred would have been judicious enough to
+choose the conservative middle path you have
+chosen. The fanatic would have rushed into print,
+and the vast majority would have weakly compromised
+with conscience. It is a source of the deepest
+satisfaction to me, as your father's friend, to find
+that you have done neither."</p>
+
+<p>"As my father's friend?" echoed Blount.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, just that, Mr. Blount. There is an appreciation
+which transcends the commonplace things of
+life, and I don't know which is worthier of the greater
+admiration, your courage in coming to me, or your
+father's single-heartedness in urging you to do it
+after he had learned the purport of these papers.
+Yet this is what I should have expected of David
+Blount as I know him. Men say of him that he has
+sometimes wielded his tremendous political power
+regardless of the law and of other men's rights.
+But in the field of pure ethics, in the exercise of the
+high and holy duty which is laid upon the man who
+has become a father, I should look to find your father
+doing precisely what he has done. I assure you
+that it is not without reason that many of his fellow
+citizens call him most affectionately the 'Honorable
+Senator Sage-Brush.'"</p>
+
+<p>"But the consequences!" gasped the unwilling informer.
+"His name in those affidavits!"</p>
+
+<p>The chief justice was nodding slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"Without doubt a great crime has been committed,
+and a still greater one is contemplated. We shall
+take prompt action to defeat the contemplated
+crime at the polls next Tuesday, rest assured of
+that. But at the same time, let me say a word for
+your comfort: these papers came to you from the
+hands of a criminal, and that particular criminal
+had&#8212;as I am well informed&#8212;every reason to be vindictively
+enraged against your father. I am sure
+you are too good a lawyer to fail to see the point.
+If this man Gryson, in 'getting even,' as he expressed
+it to you, has added perjury to his other crimes&#8212;But
+we need not follow the suggestion any further
+at this time. Be hopeful, Mr. Blount, as I am.
+Leave these matters with me, and go and be as good
+a son as he deserves to my old friend David."</p>
+
+<p>Evan Blount left the venerable presence in the
+judges' chambers of the Capitol with a heart strangely
+mellowed, and with a feeling of relief too great to
+be measured. At last, without compromise, and
+equally without the slightest concession to the natural
+human passion for vindication, the momentous
+step had been taken. Whatever might come of it,
+there would be no daggerings from an outraged conscience,
+no remorse for an unworthy passion impulsively
+yielded to. Also, with the rolling of the
+terrible burden to other and entirely competent shoulders
+there came a sense of freedom that was almost
+jubilant; and under the promptings of this new light-heartedness
+he was able to make a reasonably cheerful
+fourth at the <i>café</i> dinner-table a little later.</p>
+
+<p>Oddly enough, as he thought, Patricia was also
+cheerful, though she vanished with Mrs. Honoria to
+the private suite shortly after the adjournment to
+the mezzanine lounge. Past this, after the father
+and son had smoked their cigars in man-like silence
+for a time, Mrs. Honoria, coated and hatted as if
+to go out, came back to sit near the balustrade, looking
+down upon the kindling lobby activities. Shortly
+after her coming the senator rose to go. Instantly
+his wife sprang up to walk with him to the head of
+the great stair.</p>
+
+<p>"The time has come?" she asked quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon it has, little woman."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I might be there to see," she said softly.
+And then, whipping a packet of papers from under
+her street-coat: "Take these. When you see what
+they are, you'll know why I haven't given them to
+you before this. As long as you didn't know anything
+about it, you could tell Evan the simple truth&#8212;that
+you didn't have them."</p>
+
+<p>The Honorable David pocketed the papers without
+looking at them.</p>
+
+<p>"I suspected you&#8212;or, rather, young Collins&#8212;quite
+a little spell ago," he said with imperturbable
+good nature. "I couldn't have done it myself; I
+reckon no right-minded man could have done it,
+but&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"&#8212;But women have no conscience," she finished
+for him. "<i>I</i> hadn't in this instance. There was too
+much at stake with a firebrand like Evan to deal
+with. Don't be too good-natured, David&#8212;to-night,
+I mean. You know that is your failing when you
+have a man down. But to-night you must make
+the man pay the price. That's all, I think. I'm
+going back to Evan now to see if I can't make him
+talk to me. That is the one thing I have seldom
+been able to do thus far."</p>
+
+<p>If Blount was a little surprised when the small
+plotter came back to take the chair recently vacated
+by his father, he was generous enough not to show
+it. The huge sense of relief was still with him, and
+its mellowing influence made him smile leniently
+when she said: "I want to be reasoned with, Evan.
+I have just let your father persuade me that a certain
+thing he is about to do is perfectly safe, when I
+am afraid it isn't."</p>
+
+<p>"Since he is undertaking to do it, it's safe enough,
+you may be sure," he replied at random.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you know what it is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; he didn't tell me where he was going.
+But on general principles, you know, I think he can
+be trusted to take care of himself. He is a many-sided
+man, Mrs. Blount. You are his wife, but I
+have sometimes found myself wondering if, after
+all, you know him as he really is."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I don't," she agreed readily enough.
+"But I do know his absolute fearlessness, at least.
+That's why I'm a little nervous just now."</p>
+
+<p>Blount took the alarm at once, as she hoped he
+would.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean that he is really going into danger of
+some sort?" he demanded.</p>
+
+<p>She nodded. "He is going to meet a man who is&#8212;well,
+he is a big man with many of the same qualities
+that your father has. But down at the very
+bottom of him there is a quality that even your
+father doesn't suspect. Have you ever seen a cornered
+rat, Evan?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount had got upon his feet and was buttoning
+his coat.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how much or how little you know
+about what has taken place this afternoon, Mrs.
+Blount," he broke out hastily, "but I can tell you
+this much: I am my father's son now, whatever I
+have been in the past, and if he is in danger, my
+place is with him. Tell me where he has gone."</p>
+
+<p>The little lady's eyes were demurely downcast.
+"I shouldn't dare tell you that, but&#8212;but perhaps I
+might show you. I didn't promise not to&#8212;not to
+follow him," she returned with exactly the proper
+shade of half-frightened reluctance.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it far?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Y-yes; we should have to drive."</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me for a minute or two," he said abruptly,
+and, making a bolt for the elevator, he was back almost
+within the limit named with a top-coat for
+himself and a driving-wrap for his companion. "I
+broke into your suite and made Patricia give me
+the wrap," he explained. "If it isn't what you
+want, I'll try again."</p>
+
+<p>"It will do nicely," she told him; and together they
+went down the broad marble stair to the ground-floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Do we take a cab?" he asked, when they reached
+the sidewalk.</p>
+
+<p>"No; it's only a short walk to the garage, and we
+can take the touring-car."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm entirely in your hands," he rejoined; and
+then: "Perhaps you'd better take my arm. We
+can make quicker time that way."</p>
+
+<p>The small plotter's eyes were dancing when she
+slipped her hand under his arm. In a career which
+had not been entirely devoid of excitement, Mrs.
+Honoria had rarely found men difficult. But this
+particular young man was proving himself to be the
+easiest among many.</p>
+
+<p>At the garage Blount asked for the family touring-car,
+more than half-expecting to be told that his
+father had taken it. The garage man nodded and
+laughed. "You can have it, but you came within an
+ace of losing out," he said. "The senator was just
+here, and he was going to take it, but he changed
+his mind when I told him the big roadster was in."</p>
+
+<p>Blount made no comment, and when the car was
+ready he asked his companion where she would ride.</p>
+
+<p>"In front, with you," was the quick reply; and
+when they were placed she gave him his running
+orders. "Slip out of the city by the quietest streets
+you can find and take the Quaretaro road," she directed,
+and he obeyed in silence, holding the speed
+down until they had left the capital behind them
+and were bowling along under the stars on the fine
+boulevarded county road.</p>
+
+<p>"Do we take it easy or the other way?" he asked,
+speaking for the first time since they had left the
+town garage.</p>
+
+<p>"You may drive as fast as you like until we come
+to the hills," he was told; and with this permission
+Blount let the motor out and speedily put the fifteen
+miles of the straightaway road to the rear.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it Wartrace?" he inquired, when the touring-car
+was breasting the first of the grades in the gulch-threading
+climb to the second mesa level.</p>
+
+<p>"No. When you come to the pine-tree, turn to
+the right up Shonoho Canyon."</p>
+
+<p>"We can't get anywhere on that road," he objected.
+"It's washed out and posted. I tried to go
+up there the other day when I had Patricia out in
+the little car."</p>
+
+<p>"I think you will find it quite passable to-night,"
+was all the answer he got; and a little later, when
+they had turned out of the main road and were
+ascending the small canyon, the prophecy came
+true. The brush barricade had been thrown aside,
+and there were fresh wheel tracks in the sand.</p>
+
+<p>At sight of the wheel marks the senator's wife
+spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been up here before?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, once; in the middle of the summer."</p>
+
+<p>"There is a small hotel at the head of the road."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; but it is closed."</p>
+
+<p>"It has been reopened&#8212;please throttle the motor
+so it won't make so much noise&#8212;the hotel is occupied
+now, as I say, and that is where we shall find
+your father. Are you still willing to do as I tell
+you to?"</p>
+
+<p>"In all things reasonable."</p>
+
+<p>"As if I'd ask you to do anything unreasonable!"
+she broke out half-petulantly. "Listen; there is a
+lawn with a circular driveway in front of the hotel.
+Drive to the outer edge, near the cliff, and stop the
+car."</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes later he had obeyed his instructions
+literally. Through the groving of trees on the lawn
+he could see the lights in the lower story of the inn.
+At the flicking of the motor-switch a man with a
+pair of lineman's climbing spurs at his belt rose up
+out of the shadows and touched his cap to the lady,
+saying: "The boss is here; he has just gone in."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," was the low-toned response. And then
+to Evan: "Help me out, please."</p>
+
+<p>When they stood together beside the car she
+spoke again to the lineman.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it all right, Jackson? Can you do what I
+asked you to?"</p>
+
+<p>"We can try it a whirl," said the man; and thereupon
+he led the way across the lawn, around to the
+darkened end of the bungalow-built resort house,
+and through a sheltering pergola to a side door. "I
+got hold of the key, and it's open," he signified,
+meaning the door. "Can you find your way in the
+dark on the inside?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perfectly," was the whispered reply; and then
+the lineman guide got his further orders: "Go back
+to the car and see that nobody interferes with it,
+Jackson." Then, when the man had disappeared in
+the tree shadows, the little lady turned short upon
+Blount. "I am going to take you where you can
+see and hear, but you must promise me not to interfere
+unless it becomes perfectly plain that your
+father needs you. Is it a bargain?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is&#8212;if you'll allow me to be the judge of the
+need."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed softly. "You are simply incorrigible,
+and I should think there would be times when Patricia
+would be tempted to stick pins into you," she
+mocked. Then: "Come on; we are wasting time,"
+and, entering the house, she took his hand and led
+him through a dark passage, up a stair, through
+another passage into a long, low-pitched room, bare
+and empty save for a great pyramid of dining-tables
+and chairs piled in the middle of it, and lastly through
+a cautiously opened door which admitted a flood of
+yellow lamp-light from below.</p>
+
+<p>"The musicians' gallery," she whispered. "Go
+to the screen and look down, but for Heaven's sake,
+don't make any noise!"</p>
+
+<p>Blount obeyed mechanically. The orchestra gallery,
+screened on three sides by an open fretwork of
+Moorish design, was built out from the wall of the
+dining-room, and through the latticings of the fretwork
+he could look down upon the oblong lobby of
+the resort hotel. There was a table-desk with lamps
+on it drawn out in front of a cheerful wood-fire
+burning in a great stone fireplace, and in front of
+the fire, standing with his back to the blaze, Blount
+saw his father. From a lighted room at the opposite
+end of the lobby space came a confused clattering
+of telegraph instruments. Blount caught a glimpse
+of shirt-sleeved clerks moving about in the room
+beyond, and then a door opened beneath him and
+the vice-president of the Transcontinental Company
+strode out into the firelight to shake hands with his
+visitor and to say: "I've been looking for you; I
+thought you'd come in out of the wet before it was
+too late, David. Sit down and tell me how much
+you're going to bleed us for, and I'll make out the
+check."</p>
+
+<p>With a cold hand gripping at his heart, Blount
+turned away, sick and revolted, and there was a
+curse on his lips for the cruelty of the woman who
+had brought him to be a witness to his father's
+shame. But when he groped for the door of egress
+and found it, the knob refused to turn. The door
+was locked and he could not retreat.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXX" id="XXX"></a>XXX</h2>
+
+<h3>THE RECKONING</h3>
+
+
+<p>Evan Blount's first impulse when he found his
+retreat cut off by the locked door of the musicians'
+gallery was to make his presence known instantly
+to the two men standing before the fire in the lobby
+below. Shame, vicarious shame for the father who
+would thus find himself unmasked before his son,
+was all that made him hesitate; and in the pausing
+moment he heard his father's reply to the vice-president's
+challenging greeting.</p>
+
+<p>"The same old song; always the same old song
+with you, isn't it, Hardwick?" the senator was saying
+in jocose deprecation. "What money can't
+buy, isn't worth having; that's about the way you
+fellows always stack it up." Then, with sudden
+grimness: "Sit down, Hardwick. I've come to say
+a few things to you that won't listen very good, but
+you've got to take your medicine this time."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" demanded the vice-president,
+dropping mechanically into his desk-chair. And then:
+"It's no use, David. We've beat you at your own
+game. We're going to roll up a majority next Tuesday
+that will wipe you and your broken-down machine
+out of existence. Don't you believe it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not yet&#8212;not quite yet" was the mild rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you'd better believe it, because it's the
+truth. You are down and out. I had you beat,
+David, that night last summer when you gave me
+your 'de-fi' and I came back by taking your son
+away from you. The young gentleman you were
+going to spring on us for your next attorney-general
+has done more than any other one man in the campaign
+to help our lame dog over the stile."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said the big man, sunning his back at the
+fire, "that is one of the things we're going to flail
+out right here and now, Hardwick; about the boy
+and what he's been doing. You told him to go out
+and preach the good, clean gospel of the square deal,
+didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>It was at this point that the listener in the musicians'
+gallery, a prey to tumultuous emotions which
+were making the freshly healing wound in his head
+throb like a trip-hammer, lost all of his compunctions
+and drew closer to the fretwork screen.</p>
+
+<p>"He didn't need any special instructions," was
+the vice-president's rejoinder, and his tone chimed
+in with the hard-bitted smile. "Now that it is all
+over, I don't mind telling you that he mapped the
+thing out for himself, and all we had to do was to
+sit tight and give him plenty of rope. Candidly,
+David, I don't believe I'm hardened enough to play
+the game as it ought to be played out here in the
+sage-brush hills. The young fellow's sincerity came
+pretty near getting away with me when I saw how
+ridiculously in earnest he was."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you let him go on, putting himself deeper
+and deeper in the hole every time he stood up before
+an audience, and you never said a word&#8212;never gave
+him a hint that you were not going to back him up
+in everything he was saying?"</p>
+
+<p>This time the hard-bitted smile broke into a
+laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"Let's get down to business, David. You wouldn't
+expect us to throw the game away when somebody
+was trying his best to put the winning card into our
+hands. We needn't dig back into the campaign for
+something to jangle over, you and I. We can come
+right down to the present moment. You're cornered,
+but I don't deny that you've still got a few votes to
+dispose of. How much do you want for them?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount saw his father take a step forward, and
+for a flitting instant he thought there would be violence.
+But apparently nothing was farther from the
+senator's intention.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not selling to-night, Hardwick; I'm buying,"
+he said, with the good-natured smile wrinkling at
+the corners of his eyes. "I want to know how much
+you'll take to clean up right where you are and
+make my boy's word good to the people of this
+State."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McVickar turned to his table-desk and took
+up a sheaf of telegrams.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a pretty busy man this evening, David; and
+if you haven't anything better than that to offer&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"You've got a lot of crooked deals out&#8212;special
+rates and rebates and such things; the boy believed
+you were going to call them all off and be good,
+Hardwick."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president laid the telegrams aside and
+turned back again with the air of a man determined
+to sweep away all the obstructions at one shrewd
+push.</p>
+
+<p>"You're wasting your time and mine; let's get
+down to business," he snapped. "Some little time
+ago your son began to urge this same 'reform measure,'
+as he termed it. I believe he even went so
+far as to threaten Gantry and Kittredge with the
+publication of certain private letters from our patrons,
+letters written to him in his capacity of field
+campaigner for our company. I don't suppose he
+really meant to do any such disloyal thing as that,
+but&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>"But to make sure he wouldn't, you had one of
+your hired shadow-men blow up his safe and steal
+the letters," put in the senator mildly. "That was
+prudent, Hardwick. I was a little scared up myself
+for fear Evan might get real good and mad, and let
+the cat out of the bag; I was, for a fact."</p>
+
+<p>"Without admitting the safe-blowing, I may say
+that the letters were destroyed, and our friends were
+advised to be a little more conservative in their correspondence.
+That settles the 'reform measure' incident
+and brings us down to the present argument.
+If you are not here to get in line with us, what did
+you come for?"</p>
+
+<p>"I came to give you one more chance to be decent,
+Hardwick; just&#8212;one&#8212;more&#8212;last&#8212;chance."</p>
+
+<p>"David, there are times when you make me tired,
+and this is one of them. For years you've held us
+up and dictated to us; but this time we've got you
+by the neck. Did you ever happen to hear of a fellow
+named Thomas Gryson?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; I've heard of him. I believe he has
+been on your pay-rolls for a while&#8212;notwithstanding
+the fact that he is an escaped criminal," was the
+shrewd counter-thrust.</p>
+
+<p>"He's a scoundrel; we'll admit that. Just the
+same, your son hired him to go out and get evidence
+in a certain matter of alleged crookedness in the
+registration lists. He got it, and delivered the papers
+to your son last night. Some of those affidavits incriminate
+you, David. If we wanted to use them,
+we could send you to the penitentiary, right here in
+your own State."</p>
+
+<p>The senator drew up a mock-Sheraton arm-chair
+and lowered his huge frame gently into it.</p>
+
+<p>"In order to use those papers against me you'd
+first have to get hold of them, wouldn't you, Hardwick?"
+he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"We have them," was the terse assertion.</p>
+
+<p>The Honorable David's chuckle rumbled deep in
+his capacious chest.</p>
+
+<p>"Barto phoned you an hour or so ago that he
+had 'em, but, owing to circumstances over which he
+had no control, he couldn't deliver 'em to you until
+to-morrow morning. Isn't that about the way it
+shapes up?"</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president's frown marked an added degree
+of irritation. "So you have a cut-in on my
+telephone wire, have you?" he rasped.</p>
+
+<p>The senator leaned forward and laid a forefinger
+on the vice-presidential knee.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, Hardwick," he said. "I dictated that
+phone message to you, and Barto repeated it word
+for word because he had to&#8212;I reckon maybe it was
+because one of my men was holding a gun to his
+other ear while he talked to you. The little hold-up
+that you planned this afternoon didn't come off.
+Barto lost out bad, and when we get around to
+giving him the third degree, I shouldn't wonder if
+he'd tell a whole lot of things that you wouldn't
+want to see printed in the newspapers."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McVickar sprang out of his chair with an
+agility surprising in so heavy a man, crossed to the
+open door of the room where his clerical force was
+at work, and slammed it shut. When he returned,
+he was no longer the confident tyrant of foregone
+conclusions.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are those papers now, Blount?" he inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"They are in the hands of Chief Justice Hemingway,
+for investigation and such action as he and his
+colleagues on the Supreme Court bench see fit to
+take."</p>
+
+<p>"Good God! Your son did that, knowing that you
+are as deep in the mud as we are in the mire?"</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon he did, so. That boy is all wool and a
+yard wide. He thought he was putting me in the
+hole, too, along with Kittredge and your railroad
+crooks, and it came mighty near tearing him in two.
+But he did it. You haven't been more than half-appreciating
+that boy, Hardwick."</p>
+
+<p>"'He thought,' you say; isn't it the fact that you
+are in the hole, David?"</p>
+
+<p>The senator reached over, took one of the gigantic
+McVickar cigars from the open box on the desk, and
+calmly lighted it.</p>
+
+<p>"You're a pretty hard man to convince, Hardwick,"
+he said slowly, when the big cigar was filling
+the air of the lobby with its fragrance. "Away along
+back at the beginning of this fight I told you what
+I was aiming to do, and why. You wouldn't believe
+it then, and you don't want to believe it now; but
+that's because you don't happen to have a son of
+your own. When that boy of mine wired me that
+he was coming out here to get into the harness, I
+began to turn over the leaves of the record and look
+back a little. It was a mighty dirty record, McVickar.
+I don't know that I'm any better man
+now than I was in the days when we made that
+record&#8212;you and I&#8212;but when I looked it over, it
+struck me all in a heap that I'd have to get out the
+bucket and scrubbing-brush if I didn't want to make
+a clean-hearted, clean-minded boy plumb ashamed
+of his old daddy."</p>
+
+<p>"But, say&#8212;you haven't quit your scheming for a
+single minute, Blount!" retorted the railroad tyrant.
+"You are just as much the boss of the machine to-day
+as you've ever been!"</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon, that's so, too," was the measured reply.
+"But there's just this one little difference,
+Hardwick: a machine, in a factory or in politics,
+is a mighty necessary thing, and we wouldn't get
+very far nowadays without it. Here in America
+we're just coming to learn that machine politics&#8212;which
+is sometimes only another name for intelligent
+organization&#8212;needn't be bad politics unless we
+make 'em bad. To put it another way, the machine
+will grind corn or clean up the streets and alleys
+just as easily as it will grind up men and principles."</p>
+
+<p>The vice-president made a gesture of impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"Come to the point," he urged. "Do you mean
+to tell me that you can face an investigation by the
+Supreme Court?"</p>
+
+<p>"For this one time, Hardwick, I can. For this
+one time in the history of the Sage-Brush State, the
+slate&#8212;the machine slate&#8212;is as clean as the back of
+your hand. When the court comes to investigate,
+it will find that every crooked deal in this campaign
+has had a railroad man or a corporation man at the
+back of it. Let me tell you what's due to happen.
+Chief Justice Hemingway had luncheon with me to-day,
+and he came early enough to give me a quiet
+hour before we went to table with the ladies. There
+is going to be an investigation, and some sharp,
+shrewd young lawyer is going to be appointed by
+the court to take evidence. When this young man
+gets to work, every wheel in the machine is going
+to roll his way. Every bribe you've offered and
+paid, every false name you've put on the registration
+lists, every deal you've made with men like
+Pete Hathaway and McDarragh, has had its witnesses,
+and by the gods, Hardwick, they'll testify&#8212;every
+man of them!"</p>
+
+<p>Again the vice-president sprang from his chair,
+but this time it was to walk the floor with his head
+bowed and his hands in his pockets. The listener
+in the musicians' gallery found a seat and sat down to
+let the intoxicating, overwhelming joy of it all have
+its will of him. In the fulness of time the tramping
+magnate who had been so crushingly out-generalled
+in his own chosen field came to stand before the big
+man, who was still quietly smoking in the sham-Sheraton
+arm-chair.</p>
+
+<p>"You spoke of the appointment of a special prosecuting
+attorney, David," he said in a harsh monotone.
+"Who will it be?"</p>
+
+<p>"You've guessed it already, I reckon. It'll be
+the boy, Hardwick. Hemingway will appoint him
+if he is willing to serve."</p>
+
+<p>"He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president.</p>
+
+<p>"Not much, he hasn't! you hired him for wages,
+and if he wants to resign&#8212;he has resigned, by the way&#8212;and
+take another job, I reckon he can do it without
+breaking any of the Ten Commandments."</p>
+
+<p>"We can't stand for that&#8212;you know we can't."</p>
+
+<p>"No; I don't think you can&#8212;not as a corporation.
+Besides the flock of witnesses that we can
+drum up, he'll have those letters that we were talking
+about a while back. You missed fire on that, too,
+Hardwick. What your man dynamited out of Evan's
+office safe, and what you destroyed, were only clever
+copies. The real letters were stolen by the boy's
+friends, and little as you may believe it, the object of
+that theft was to give you this last chance. The boy
+was mighty hot under the collar, and we couldn't be
+sure that he wouldn't start the fireworks before the
+band was ready to play. He would have started
+them, too, if his match hadn't been taken away from
+him."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. McVickar walked around the other end of the
+table-desk and sat down heavily.</p>
+
+<p>"You've spoken twice of a 'last chance' David,"
+he said grittingly. "What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's the chance I gave you in the beginning.
+First, let me tell you what I reckon you're already
+admitting. You're whipped, Hardwick; your slate's
+broken, and your man Reynolds hasn't a ghost of a
+show&#8212;he nor any of the others on your string. You
+haven't made a move that we haven't caught onto
+just about as soon as you put your fingers on the
+piece you meant to move. For instance, that little
+box up there in the beaming just over your head&#8212;the
+one that looks as if it were a part of the house
+electric installation&#8212;is a microphone, and one of
+your own men helped to put it up. We've got
+copies of every letter and telegram you've dictated
+since you had this desk dragged out here a week ago
+Saturday."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm taking all that for granted," was the curt
+admission.</p>
+
+<p>"Then we'll come down to the nib of the thing
+and put you out of your misery. You've got two
+things to do&#8212;just two, Hardwick. One of 'em is
+to clean house and make a good job of it, just like
+you let Evan believe you were going to do when you
+sent him out to tell the people of this State a lot of
+things that you didn't mean to have come true; cut
+out all the deals, all the private tariffs, all the little
+preferentials and palm-warmings. When you've
+done that, you'll find that the other thing will
+mighty nearly do itself."</p>
+
+<p>"Name it," rasped the magnate.</p>
+
+<p>"It's just merely to take your railroad out of
+politics in this State, and keep it out. We've had
+enough of you, McVickar, and more than enough.
+Is it a bargain?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a damned one-sided bargain thus far, Blount.
+What do we get for all this?"</p>
+
+<p>Again the senator chuckled genially. "You may
+not believe it, but we're going to let you down easy.
+You do these two things that I've mentioned, and
+get rid of Kittredge and a few others that have been
+caught red-handed, and the Supreme Court investigation
+won't touch your railroad as a corporation&#8212;in
+other words, it'll go after individuals. But
+you've got to play fair, you know&#8212;and bring forth
+fruits meet for repentance, before the fact. How
+does that strike you?"</p>
+
+<p>Again the vice-president got up to walk the floor,
+but this time the deliberative interval was shorter.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the political programme, as you have it
+figured out, David?" he asked presently.</p>
+
+<p>"It'll be a landslide for us, as I have told you.
+Gordon will go in by the biggest majority that has
+ever been rolled up in this State. Dortscher will
+succeed himself as attorney-general; and by and by,
+after things have quieted down, he will resign. That
+will give Gordon the appointment of his successor,
+and I'm thinking it might be a pretty good thing
+for you, as well as for the people of the State, if
+Alec should happen to pick out a bright young fellow
+who knows your side of the question as well as
+the people's, and who is square enough to give you
+a fair show when it comes to framing up any new
+railroad legislation."</p>
+
+<p>"That will be your son, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"If he'll take it," was the imperturbable rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>For the third time the vice-president, dying hard,
+as befitted him, deliberated thoughtfully. At the
+end of the thoughtful interval he took a cigar from
+the open box and clamped it between his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"We trade," he said shortly. And then: "How
+will you take it&#8212;in stock or bonds?"</p>
+
+<p>The Honorable David rose slowly and snapped
+the cigar ash into the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm right sorry, Hardwick, but this is one time
+when I reckon we'll have to have what you might
+call the spot cash. Promises don't go. You're too
+good a fighter to be allowed to get up merely because
+you've hollered 'enough.' Come on into your
+telegraph-shop and let me hear you dictate that
+string of 'come-off' orders. Then we'll drive to
+town in my road-car, and you can tip off Kittredge
+and a few of the other prominent victims by word of
+mouth, as you'll most likely want to."</p>
+
+<p>For a full minute after the two had left the lobby
+together Evan Blount sat motionless in the screened
+orchestra gallery. Then he got up and groped once
+more for the door-knob. It yielded at his touch, and
+in the semi-darkness beyond the opening he saw his
+father's wife with her arms upstretched to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Evan, dear&#8212;am I forgiven?" she asked
+softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Little mother!" he said, and then he took her
+face between his hands and kissed her.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When the Honorable David Blount reached the
+city an hour or more later, and had dropped his passenger
+at the Railway Club, he found his son waiting
+for him in the otherwise deserted sitting-room
+of the Inter-Mountain private suite.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't sleep without telling you first, dad,"
+the waiting one broke out. "I've been eavesdropping;
+I was a listener, unwilling at first, but not
+afterward, to everything that was said an hour or
+so ago in the lobby of the little hotel at the head of
+Shonoho. Do I need to tell you in so many words
+how deep the plough has gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"I reckon not," was the gentle reply. "Neither
+do you need to tell me how you came to be out at
+Shonoho when I thought I'd left you tied hand and
+foot right here in the hotel." Then, with the quizzical
+smile wrinkling at the corners of the grave
+eyes: "How does the political wrestle strike you by
+this time, son?"</p>
+
+<p>"It strikes me that I haven't been in it; not even
+in the outer edges of it. Isn't that about the size
+of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; you've been doing good work, mighty
+good work. You've helped out in the only way
+that help could come in this campaign; you've
+stirred up a good, healthy public sentiment in favor
+of a square deal for everybody. McVickar was fixing
+to tangle it all up&#8212;get the people down on him
+until they'd simply legislate the life out of his railroad.
+But he couldn't see that."</p>
+
+<p>"He sees it now&#8212;the 'machine' has made him
+see it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. You didn't know that a machine could be
+put to any really righteous use, did you, boy? But
+in this campaign it has gone in to knock out the
+crookedness, big <i>and</i> little. Listen, son; you heard
+what I told McVickar. After you'd sent me that
+wire from Boston last summer, saying you'd come,
+I lay awake nights projecting how I'd put you in
+training for a spell, and then help you into the saddle
+and make you the boss of the round-up, the same
+as I'd been. Then it came over me, all of a sudden,
+that I'd been as crooked as a dog's hind leg&#8212;that
+we'd all been crooked. Not that I've ever taken a
+dollar for my personal pocket, for I haven't; but I've
+bought and sold and dickered and schemed with
+the best of 'em, and the worst of 'em. On top of
+that, I began to ask myself how I'd like it to see
+you wallowing in the same old mud-hole, and&#8212;well,
+Evan, boy, you may have a son of your own some
+day, and then you'll know. I let things rock along
+until you came; until that first day at Wartrace
+when you ripped out at me about hewing to the
+line. Right then and there I made up my mind
+that I'd put the whole power of the 'machine,' as
+you call it, into one campaign for a clean election
+and a square deal."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, good Lord!" ejaculated the son, "and I've
+been fighting you and your organization at every
+turn!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, you haven't," was the quick rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>"You've been fighting graft and crookedness, and
+that's what you thought you were hired to do. As
+you know now, McVickar wasn't playing quite fair
+with you. Just the same, you've been in the hands
+of your friends, right from the start. It's the organization
+that's been giving you all these chances
+to preach the gospel of the square deal; it was a
+shrewd little captain-general of the organization
+who pushed Hathaway up against you to let you
+know that the railroad people were running around
+in the same old circles&#8212;hollering for justice, and
+doing everything under the sun to defeat the ends
+of justice&#8212;muddying the spring because, they say,
+they don't know what else to do. And, by the way,
+it was that same little captain-general who put you
+up against the real thing to-night, without telling
+me or anybody else what she was going to do."</p>
+
+<p>The younger man left his chair to go to one of the
+windows where he stood for a moment or two looking
+down upon the street-lights. When he turned,
+it was to say: "I'm with you, dad, heart and soul.
+But you won't mind my saying that I'm still a little
+bit afraid that you and your kind are a menace to
+civilization and a free government. You'll let me
+hang on to that much of my prejudice, won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure! Hang on to anything you like, son, and
+say anything you like. Or, rather, let me say something
+first. How about this 'career' business of
+Patricia's? Have you fixed that up yet?"</p>
+
+<p>Blount shook his head. "She's going home with
+her father next week," he said. And then: "Do
+you know what she did to-day, dad? She ran the
+little red car into that pine-tree intentionally&#8212;so
+I couldn't get back here in time to give Judge Hemingway
+those affidavits, which we both supposed
+would incriminate you."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, God bless her loyal little soul!" exclaimed
+the Honorable David, and the grave eyes were suspiciously
+bright. "I hadn't told her a word of what
+I was trying to do; but, Lord love you, Evan, she
+knew: you trust a good woman for knowing, every
+time, son. And now one more thing: Have you
+come to know Honoria any better in these last few
+days?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; much better, within the last few hours,
+dad."</p>
+
+<p>"That's good; that does my old heart a heap of
+good, son! Now then, you go straight off to bed
+and sleep up some. You've had a mighty hard day
+for a sick man. To-morrow morning we'll drive out
+to Wartrace and get ready to touch off the fireworks
+when the returns trickle in on Tuesday. I tell you,
+boy, Tuesday's election is going to be a regular old-fashioned,
+heave-'em-up and keep-'em-a-going land-slide!
+Good-night, and good dreams&#8212;if that cracked
+head doesn't go and roil 'em all up for you."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XXXI" id="XXXI"></a>XXXI</h2>
+
+<h3><i>À LA BONNE HEURE</i></h3>
+
+
+<p>By some law of contraries, whose workings not
+even the politically profound can fathom, the election
+proved the truth of the adage that all signs
+fail in a dry time by recording itself as one of the
+quietest and most orderly ever known in the Sage-Brush
+State. A few editors there were, like Blenkinsop,
+of <i>The Plainsman</i>, who maintained stoutly
+that it sounded the death-knell of the machine,
+but there was no gainsaying the result. The "Paramounters"
+ticket, with or without the help of the
+machine, was elected by sweeping majorities everywhere;
+and Gantry, roaming the corridors and lounging-rooms
+of the Railway Club and reading the
+bulletins as they were posted, shook his head despairingly
+over each fresh announcement.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the evening, finding that the senator's
+party had left the Inter-Mountain the day before to
+drive to Wartrace, the traffic manager called up the
+Quaretaro Mesa country-house and poured the news
+of the <i>débâcle</i> into Evan Blount's ear.</p>
+
+<p>"We've gone to the everlasting bow-wows, and
+Mr. McVickar has disappeared, and the end of the
+world has come," was the way he phrased it for the
+listening ear; but the word which came back must
+have been peculiarly heartening, since from that time
+on to an hour well past midnight Gantry figured
+hilariously as the self-constituted host of any and all
+who would be entertained.</p>
+
+<p>At Wartrace Hall there was also rejoicing, albeit
+of a quieter sort. Five people sat around the cheerful
+blaze in the library, and when Crowell, whose
+telegraph instrument was in the adjoining den, had
+brought the final report from the outlying wards of
+the capital, he was told to close his key and go to
+bed.</p>
+
+<p>After the young man had withdrawn, the Honorable
+David rose to stand with his back to the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Evan, boy, are all the tangles straightened
+out for you for keeps, now?" he asked jovially.</p>
+
+<p>"Just about all of them, dad," laughed the younger
+man. He had been spending a very happy evening,
+due less to the triumphant story which had been
+pouring in over the wires than to the fact that Patricia
+had been occupying the other half of the small
+sofa which he had dragged out to face the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't feel sore because you didn't get the
+governor you thought you were going to get when
+you went around preaching the gospel?" said the
+father, still chuckling.</p>
+
+<p>"We've got a better man and a bigger one, I'm
+sure," was the quick reply. Then he added: "But
+I think I am still doubtful about the advisability of
+injecting the machine principle into politics."</p>
+
+<p>The senator laughed silently.</p>
+
+<p>"Call it 'the organization' instead of 'the machine,'
+son, and you've named the power that moves
+the civilized world to-day. Man, the individual, is
+just about as helpless as a new-born baby. If you
+want to reform anything, from an unjust poor-law
+to the tariff, your first move is to rustle up a following;
+after that, you've got to solidify your bunch
+of sympathizers into a working organization&#8212;in
+other words, into a machine. Isn't that so, Professor
+Anners?"</p>
+
+<p>The white-haired professor of palæontology nodded
+sleepily. He had been dreaming of the Megalosauridæ,
+and had not heard the question.</p>
+
+<p>"You've heard me called 'the boss' from the time
+Dick Gantry had his first talk with you back yonder
+in Massachusetts," the senator went on, turning again
+to his son. "Call me a man with friends enough to
+make me a sort of foreman of round-ups in the old
+home State, and you've got it about right. I don't
+say that I've always used the power as it ought to
+be used; the good Lord knows, I'm no more infallible
+than other folks. You've gone through a heap of
+trouble and worry because you thought, when you
+got ready to knock the wedge out of the log, my
+fingers were going to get caught in the split, along
+with a lot of others. That would have been true
+enough any other year but this, I reckon, so you
+didn't have your fight and your worry for nothing.
+I've bought and trafficked and bargained and compromised&#8212;I
+don't deny that&#8212;but only when it
+seemed as though the end justified the means.
+Maybe the end never does justify the means&#8212;I'm
+open to conviction on that. But sometimes it's
+mighty easy to persuade yourself that it does."</p>
+
+<p>It was just here that the professor awoke with a
+start and a snort, excused himself abruptly, and
+stumped off to bed. Mrs. Honoria, sitting under the
+drop-light and stitching patiently at her bit of
+stretched linen, laid the tiny embroidery-hoop aside,
+signalled to her husband, and vanished in her turn.
+A few minutes after she had gone, the senator
+crossed from his corner of the fireplace to stand
+before the two sitting on the little sofa.</p>
+
+<p>"Son," he said gravely, "you've got your work
+cut out for you from this on, and it's a good-sized
+job. You're going to have a string of hard fights,
+one after the other, and there'll be times when you'll
+long with all your soul for some good, clean-hearted,
+bright-minded little girl to go to for comfort and
+counsel. Of course, I know that Patricia, here, has
+another job, but&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush had been out
+of sight and hearing for five full minutes when Evan
+Blount reached over and possessed himself of the
+hand that was shading a pair of deep-welled eyes
+from the firelight.</p>
+
+<p>"Last Sunday afternoon, Patricia, when I had
+right and reason and logic on my side, your woman's
+intuition found the truer path," he said, in sober
+humility. "I know I am only one, and your poor
+people to whom you have been planning to give
+yourself are many; still, I am selfish enough to&#8212;"</p>
+
+<p>She looked up quickly and the deep-welled eyes
+were shining.</p>
+
+<p>"We can't learn everything all at once, Evan,
+dear," she interrupted, breaking in upon his pleading.
+"There was one moment in that Sunday afternoon
+when I learned the greatest thing of all; it
+was the moment when I saw the pine-tree lying
+across the road and knew what I should do, and for
+whom I should do it."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," he returned gently. "You learned
+that love is stronger than death or the fear of death;
+and that loyalty is greater than many ideals. You
+heard what my father said just now, and it is true&#8212;only
+he didn't put it half vitally enough; I can't
+walk in the way he has marked out for me without
+you, Patricia."</p>
+
+<p>With a swift little love impulse she lifted his hand
+and pressed it to her cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"You needn't, Evan, dear," she said simply.</p>
+
+<p>THE END</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<p><br /></p>
+<p>[Transcriber's Note: This section was originally at the beginning of the text.]<br /></p>
+<p class="padtop left">BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Published by</span> CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</p>
+
+<p class="padtop">
+The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">12mo&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <i>net</i> $1.30</span><br />
+<br />
+Scientific Sprague. Illus. 12mo <i>net</i> $1.25<br />
+<br />
+The Price. 12mo                 <i>net</i> $1.30<br />
+<br />
+The Taming of Red Butte Western.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Illus. 12mo&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  $1.50</span><br />
+<br />
+The King of Arcadia. Illus. 12mo    $1.50<br />
+<br />
+A Romance in Transit. 16mo            .75<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush, by Francis Lynde
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16573-h.htm or 16573-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/5/7/16573/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/16573-h/images/1-t.jpg b/16573-h/images/1-t.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b40ecd7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-h/images/1-t.jpg
diff --git a/16573-h/images/1.jpg b/16573-h/images/1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2c7c847
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-h/images/1.jpg
diff --git a/16573-h/images/2-th.png b/16573-h/images/2-th.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e91412b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-h/images/2-th.png
diff --git a/16573-h/images/2.png b/16573-h/images/2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bc0d079
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573-h/images/2.png
diff --git a/16573.txt b/16573.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..76f0cc2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11607 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush, by Francis Lynde
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush
+
+Author: Francis Lynde
+
+Release Date: August 21, 2005 [EBook #16573]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+
+
+[Illustration: "He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president]
+
+
+THE HONORABLE
+SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+
+BY
+
+FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+NEW YORK : : : : : 1913
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Published September, 1913
+
+[Illustration]
+
+TO MR. GEORGE ADY
+
+     My Regius Professor in the School of Western Railroading, and
+     himself a keen observer, _in situ_, of the conditions which I have
+     herein sought to portray, this book is most affectionately
+     inscribed.
+
+THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                    PAGE
+
+I. BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"                3
+
+II. THE BOSS                                26
+
+III. A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES             40
+
+IV. THE HIGHBINDERS                         56
+
+V. AT WARTRACE HALL                         69
+
+VI. ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS                86
+
+VII. A BATTLE ROYAL                         96
+
+VIII. THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT                   110
+
+IX. THE RANK AND FILE                      121
+
+X. IN THE HERBARIUM                        138
+
+XI. THE GREAT GAME                         148
+
+XII. A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT           165
+
+XIII. THE LIEGEMAN                         178
+
+XIV. BARRIERS INVISIBLE                    193
+
+XV. SWORD-PLAY                             203
+
+XVI. THE SAFE-BLOWER                       213
+
+XVII. ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS        230
+
+XVIII. THE CHASM                           241
+
+XIX. A COG IN THE WHEEL                    256
+
+XX. A STONE FOR BREAD                      264
+
+XXI. THE UNDER-DOG                         280
+
+XXII. THE ICONOCLAST                       293
+
+XXIII. A CRY IN THE NIGHT                  302
+
+XXIV. FIELD HEADQUARTERS                   320
+
+XXV. BLOOD AND IRON                        327
+
+XXVI. APPLES OF GOLD                       343
+
+XXVII. IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES            356
+
+XXVIII. THE GOSSIPING WIRES                367
+
+XXIX. AT SHONOHO INN                       379
+
+XXX. THE RECKONING                         390
+
+XXXI. _A LA BONNE HEURE_                   407
+
+
+
+
+THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"
+
+
+Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who
+was a week-end guest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be
+resentful. What right had a gay and frivolous world to come and thrust
+its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia had said "No"? It was
+like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had read
+the single telegram which had come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs.
+Beverley's indulgence and went out to find a chair in a corner of the
+veranda where the frivolities had not as yet intruded.
+
+It was a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled
+moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though
+the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting
+verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns.
+At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, and
+one of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear,
+brought the guests of honor--three daughters of a Western senator lately
+home from their summer abroad.
+
+Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had
+resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his
+ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and
+since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover,
+the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of
+the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.
+
+Not that Blount put it that way, either to Mrs. Beverley or to himself.
+He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered young man of an up-to-date world,
+and the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and practical rather than
+poetic or sentimental. But the fact remained, and when he sat back in
+his corner absently folding the lately received telegram into a narrow
+spill and scowling moodily down upon the coming and going procession of
+motor-cars he was unconsciously giving a very life-like imitation of the
+disappointed lover the world over.
+
+It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance, that Gantry found him;
+a chance because the Winnebasset club-house is spacious and the dinner
+dance minimized the hazards of a meeting between two unattached men who
+were merely transient guests. But the railroad man at least was
+unfeignedly glad.
+
+"Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed,
+with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of
+course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap
+up against you here, when there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to
+be bored stiff--" He stopped short, finding it difficult to be shiftily
+insincere with as old a friend as Evan Blount. But in the nature of
+things it was baldly impossible to tell Blount that the meeting was not
+accidental.
+
+"Pull up a chair and sit down," said Blount, not too ungraciously,
+considering his just cause to be more ungracious. "I was thinking of you
+a little while ago, Dick. I saw your name in the list of
+Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting in Boston,
+and--well, at the present moment I'm not sure but you are the one man in
+the world I wanted most to meet."
+
+"Say! that sounds pretty good to me," laughed Gantry, settling himself
+comfortably in a lazy-chair and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.
+"I've been in Boston the full week, skating around over the chilly crust
+of things and never able to get so much as one tenuous little social
+claw-hold. Say, Evan, how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old
+town keep going ever count 'em?"
+
+"Boston is all right when you know it--or, rather, when it comes to know
+you," returned Blount, remembering that Boston or Cambridge--which is
+Boston in the process of elucidation--was the birth and dwelling place
+of Patricia.
+
+Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.
+
+"The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you,
+hasn't it, Evan?--to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it
+would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the
+Harvard Law School. By the way, how much longer are you in for?"
+
+"I am out of the Law School, if that is what you mean--out and admitted
+to the bar," said Blount. "If you get into trouble with the Boston
+police let me know, and I'll ask for a change of venue to the greasewood
+hills and Judge Lynch's court."
+
+"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who
+curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and
+pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I
+believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were
+Western-born."
+
+"I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much
+about going back," was Blount's rather enigmatic reply.
+
+"But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the railroad man, waking up.
+"That's good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young
+lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular fellow you wanted to
+meet?"
+
+Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across
+the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.
+
+Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to
+the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried
+the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"--the capital of
+the State--and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent
+arrival. Below the date-line he read:
+
+TO EVAN SHELBY BLOUNT,
+Standish Apartments, Boston.
+
+     You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me
+     nothing but an occasional sight of your face. If you are not tied
+     to some woman's apron-string, why can't you come West and grow up
+     with your native State?
+
+DAVID BLOUNT.
+
+It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of
+friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of
+a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original
+creases before he passed it back.
+
+"Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.
+
+"I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be
+fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a
+few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."
+
+"He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed everybody knew it."
+
+"_I_ didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may not realize it, but what
+you don't tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it
+were printed."
+
+Blount's smile was altogether friendly.
+
+"What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The world has plenty of
+banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man's personal
+contribution. Why should I bore you or anybody?"
+
+"Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground," said the railroad traffic
+manager. "Just the same, there's another side to it. In an unguarded
+moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me
+that you were Western-born. I always supposed afterward that you
+regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me
+any more."
+
+"Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so little to tell. I had a
+boyhood like other boys--or, no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I
+was born on the 'Circle-Bar,' when the ranch was--as it still is, I
+believe--a hard day's drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the
+nearest shipping-corral on the railroad. At twelve I could 'ride line,'
+'cut out,' and 'rope down' like any other healthy ranch-bred youngster,
+and since the capital was at that time only in process of getting itself
+surveyed and boomed into existence I had never seen a town bigger than
+Painted Hat."
+
+"And what happened when you were twelve?" queried Gantry. He was not
+abnormally curious, but Blount's communicative mood was unusual enough
+to warrant a quickening of interest.
+
+"The greatest possible misfortune that can ever come to a half-grown
+boy, Dick--my mother died."
+
+Gantry's own boyhood was not so deeply buried in the past as to make
+him forgetful of its joys and sorrows. "That was hard--mighty hard," he
+assented. Then: "And pretty soon your father married again?"
+
+"Not for some years," Blount qualified. "But for me the heavens were
+fallen. I was sent away to school, to college, to Europe; then I came
+here to the Law School. In all that time I've never seen the
+'Circle-Bar' or my native State--in fact, I have never been west of
+Chicago."
+
+Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory phrase. As a
+railroad man, continent-crossing travel was to him the merest matter of
+course. Though he might Sunday-over at the Winnebasset Country Club on
+the North Shore, it was well within the possibilities that the following
+week-end might find him sweltering in New Orleans or buttoning his
+overcoat against the raw evening fogs of San Francisco.
+
+"Never been west of Chicago?" he echoed. "Never been--" He stopped
+short, beginning to realize vaguely that there must be strong reasons;
+reasons which might lie beyond the pale of a college friendship, and the
+confidences begotten thereby, in the rendering of them.
+
+"No," said Blount.
+
+"Then the senator's--that is--er--your father's political life has never
+touched you."
+
+The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of Blount's steady gray
+eyes, but this time it was shot through with a faint suggestion of the
+Blount grimness.
+
+"It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick. I saw a large-hearted,
+open-handed old cattle-king wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream
+of politics to gratify an ambition that wasn't at all his own--a woman's
+ambition. In order that the woman might mix and mingle in Washington
+society for a brief minute or two, he got himself elected to fill out an
+unexpired term of two months in the United States Senate--bought the
+election, some said. That was three years ago, wasn't it?--a long time,
+as political incidents or accidents go. But Washington hasn't forgotten.
+When I was down there last winter the five-o'clock-tea people were still
+recalling Mrs. Blount's gowns and the wild-Western naivete of 'The
+Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"
+
+Gantry was chuckling softly when the half-bitter admission had got
+itself fully made.
+
+"Land of love, Evan!" he said, "you may be an educated post-graduate all
+right, with the proper Boston degree of culture laid on and rubbed down
+to a hard-glaze finish, but you've got a lot to learn yet--about the
+senator and his politics, I mean. Why, Great Snipes, man! he isn't in it
+a little bit for the social frills and furbelows; he never was. Let me
+intimate a few things: Politically speaking, David Blount is by long
+odds the biggest man in his State to-day. He can have anything he wants,
+from the head of the ticket down. You spoke rather contemptuously just
+now of his two months in the Senate; you probably didn't know that he
+might have gone back if he had wanted to; that he actually did a much
+more difficult thing--named his successor."
+
+David Blount's son stood up and put his shoulders against one of the
+veranda pillars. From the new view-point he could look through the
+reading-room windows and on into the assembly-room where the dancers
+were keeping time to the measures of a two-step. But he was not thinking
+of the dancers when he said:
+
+"It's a sheer miracle, Dick, your dropping down here to-night like the
+_deus ex machina_ of the old Greek plays. You've read this
+telegram"--holding up the folded message--"it is just possible that you
+can tell me what lies behind it. Why has my father sent it at this
+particular time and in those words? He knows perfectly well that my
+plans for settling here in Boston were definitely made more than a year
+ago."
+
+"I can tell you the situation out in the greasewood country, if that's
+what you want to know," said Gantry after a thoughtful pause.
+
+"Make it simple," was Blount's condition, adding: "What I don't know
+about the business or the political situation in the West would fill a
+much larger book than the one you were speaking of a few minutes ago."
+
+"'Business or political,' you say; they are Siamese twins nowadays,"
+returned the railroad man, with a short laugh. Then: "The outlook for
+us out yonder in the greasewood hills is precisely what it is in a dozen
+other States this year--east, west, north and south--everything
+promising a renewal of the unreasoning, bull-headed legislative fight
+against the railroads. I suppose our own case is typical. As everybody
+knows, the Transcontinental Railway has practically created two-thirds
+of the States through which it passes--made them out of whole cloth.
+Where you left sage-brush and bare hills and unfenced cattle ranges a
+dozen years ago you will now find irrigation, tilled farms, orchards,
+rich mines--development everywhere, with a rapidly growing population to
+help it along. To make all this possible, the railroad took a chance; it
+was a mighty long chance, and somebody has to pay the bills."
+
+"I know," smiled Blount; "the bill-paying is summed up in some railroad
+man's clever phrase, 'all the tariff the traffic will stand.' I can
+remember one year when my father rose up in his wrath and drove his beef
+cattle one hundred and fifty miles across the Transcontinental tracks to
+the Overland Central."
+
+"That was in the old days," protested Gantry, who was loyal to his salt.
+"As the State has filled up, we've tried to meet the situation half-way,
+as a straight business proposition. Fares and tariffs have been lowered
+from time to time, and--"
+
+"You are not making it simple enough by half," warned Blount
+quizzically. "You are getting further away from my telegram every
+minute."
+
+Gantry paused to relight his cigar.
+
+"I don't know how your telegram figures in it specially, but I do know
+this: the legislature to be elected this fall in our State will be
+chosen entirely without regard to the old party lines. There is only one
+issue before the people and that is the Transcontinental Railway. The
+'Paramounters,' as they call themselves, taking the name from the
+assumption that it is the paramount duty of the voter to pinch any
+business interest bigger than his own, would like to legislate us out of
+existence; as against that we shall beat the tomtom and do our level
+best to stay on top of earth."
+
+"Naturally," Blount agreed, then half-absently, and with his eyes still
+resting upon the merrymakers twirling like paired automatons in the
+distant assembly-room: "And my father--how does he stand?"
+
+"The idea of your having to ask me how the senator stands in his own
+State!" exclaimed Gantry. "But really, Evan, I'd give a good bit of hard
+cash to be able to tell you in so many words just where he does stand.
+There are a good many people in our neck of woods who would like mighty
+well to know. It will make all the difference in the world when it comes
+to a show-down."
+
+"Why will it?"
+
+"Because, apart from the railroad and the anti-railroad factions, there
+is a very complete and smoothly running machine organization."
+
+"And my father is identified with the machine?"
+
+Again Gantry choked over the singular lack of information discovering
+itself in Blount's question.
+
+"Land of glory!" he ejaculated. "Where have you been burying yourself,
+Evan? Didn't I just tell you that he is the biggest man in the State?
+Oh, no"--with heavy irony--"he isn't identified with the machine--not at
+all; he merely owns it and runs it. We may think we can swing a safe
+majority in the legislature, and the 'antis' may be just as firmly
+convinced that they can. But before either side can turn a wheel it will
+have to walk up to the captain's office and get its orders."
+
+"Ah," said Blount, and a little later: "Thank you, Dick, I am pretty
+badly out of touch with the Western political situation, as you've
+discovered." Then he changed the subject abruptly. "How long will your
+traffic meeting last?"
+
+"We practically finished to-day. An hour or two on Monday will wind it
+up."
+
+"After which you'll go West?"
+
+"After which I shall go West by the Monday noon train if I can make it.
+You couldn't hire me to stay in Boston an hour longer than I have to."
+
+Silence for a time until Blount broke in upon Gantry's tapping of the
+dance-music rhythm with: "If I can close up a few unfinished business
+matters and get ready I may go with you, Dick. Would you mind?"
+
+"Yes; I should mind so much that I'd willingly miss a train or so and
+worry out a few more of the chilly Boston hours rather than lose the
+chance of having you along."
+
+"That is good of you, I'm sure. I should bore myself to death if I had
+to travel alone."
+
+Blount's rejoinder might have passed for a mere friendly commonplace if
+it had not been for the rather curiously worded telegram. But it was a
+goodly portion of Gantry's business in life to put two and two together,
+and that phrase in the senator's message about a woman's apron-string
+interested him. Moreover, it was subtly suggestive.
+
+"Ever meet your father's--er--the present Mrs. Blount, Evan?" he asked.
+
+"No." Blount may have been Western-born, but the chilling discouragement
+he could crowd into the two-letter negation spoke eloquently of his
+Eastern training.
+
+Gantry was rebuffed but not disheartened.
+
+"She is a mighty fine woman," he ventured.
+
+"So I have been given to understand." This time Blount's reply was icy.
+But now Gantry's eyes were twinkling and he pressed his advantage.
+
+"You'll have to reckon pretty definitely with her if you go out to the
+greasewood country, Evan. Next to your father, she is the court of last
+resort; indeed, there are a good many people who insist that she _is_
+the court--the power behind the throne, you know."
+
+There is one ditch out of which the most persistent and gladsome mocker
+may not drive his victim, and that is the ditch of silence. Blount said
+nothing. Nevertheless, Gantry tried once more.
+
+"Not interested, Evan?"
+
+Blount turned and looked his companion coldly in the eyes.
+
+"Not in the slightest degree, Dick. Will you take that for your answer
+now, and remember it hereafter?"
+
+"Sure," laughed the railroad man. And then, to round out the forbidden
+topic by adding worse to bad: "I didn't know it was a sore spot with
+you. How should I know? But, as I say, you'll have to reckon with her
+sooner or later, and--"
+
+"Let's talk of something else," snapped Blount.
+
+Gantry found a match and relighted his cigar. When he began again he was
+still thinking of the "apron-string" clause in the senator's telegram.
+
+"I can't understand how any man with Western blood in his veins could
+ever be content to marry and settle down in this over-civilized neck of
+woods," he remarked, looking down upon the parked automobiles and around
+at the country-club evidences of the civilization.
+
+"Can't you?" smiled Blount, with large lenience. One of the things the
+civilization had done for him was to make him good-naturedly tolerant of
+the crudeness of the outlander.
+
+"No, I can't," asserted the Westerner. Then he added: "Of course, I
+don't know the Eastern young woman even by sight. She may be all that is
+lovely, desirable, and enticing--if a man could hope to live long
+enough to get really well acquainted with her."
+
+"She is," declared Blount, with the air of one who had lived quite long
+enough to know.
+
+Once more Gantry was putting two and two together. Blount's
+determination to go West and grow up with the country--his father's
+country--was apparently a very sudden one. Had the decision turned
+entirely upon the senator's telegram? Gantry, wise in his generation,
+thought not.
+
+"You say that as if you'd been taking a few lessons," he laughed. Then,
+with the friendly impudence which only a college comradeship could
+excuse: "Is she here to-night?"
+
+"No," said Blount, unguardedly making the response which admitted so
+much more than it said.
+
+"Tell me about her," Gantry begged. "I don't often read a love story,
+but I like to hear 'em."
+
+If it had been any one but Gantry, Blount would probably have had a
+sharp attack of reticence, with outward symptoms unmistakable to the
+dullest. But the time, the surroundings, and the exceeding newness of
+Patricia's "No" combined to break down the barriers of reserve.
+
+"There isn't much to tell, Dick," he began half humorously, half in
+ill-concealed self-pity. "I've known her for a year, and I've loved her
+from the first day. That is Chapter One; and Chapter Two ends the story
+with one small word. She says 'No.'"
+
+"The dickens she does!" said Gantry, in hearty sympathy. Then: "But
+that's a good sign, isn't it? Haven't I heard somewhere that they always
+say 'No' at first?"
+
+Blount laughed in spite of himself. Gantry, the Dick Gantry of the
+college period, had always been a man's man, gay, light-hearted, and
+care-free to the outward eye, but in reality one who was carrying
+burdens of poverty and distress which might well have crushed an older
+and a stronger man. There had been no time for sentiment then, and
+Blount wondered if there had been in any later period.
+
+"I am afraid I can't get any comfort out of that suggestion," he
+returned. "When Miss Patricia Anners says 'No,' I am quite sure she
+means it."
+
+"Think so?" said Gantry, still sympathetic. "Well, I suppose you are the
+best judge. Tough, isn't it, old man? What's the obstacle?--if you can
+tell it without tearing the bandages off and saying 'Ouch!'"
+
+"It is Miss Anners's career."
+
+"H'm," was the doubtful comment; "I'm afraid you'll have to elaborate
+that a little for me. I'm not up in the 'career' classification."
+
+"She has been studying at home and abroad in preparation for
+social-settlement work in the large cities. Of course, I knew about it;
+but I thought--I hoped--"
+
+"You hoped it was only a young woman's fad--which it probably is,"
+Gantry cut in.
+
+"Y-yes; I'm afraid that was just what I did hope, Dick. But I couldn't
+talk against it. Confound it all, you can't go about smashing ideals
+for the people you love best!"
+
+"Rich?" queried Gantry.
+
+"Oh, no. Her father has the chair of paleontology, and never gets within
+speaking distance of the present century. The mother has been dead many
+years."
+
+"And you say the girl has the Hull House ambition?"
+
+"The social-betterment ambition. It's an ideal, and I can't smash it.
+You wouldn't smash it, either, Dick."
+
+"No; I guess that's so. If I were in your fix I should probably do what
+you are doing--say 'Good-by, fond heart,' and hie me away to the
+forgetful edge of things. And it's simply astonishing how quickly the
+good old sage-brush hills will help a man to forget everything that ever
+happened to him before he ducked."
+
+Blount winced a little at that. It was no part of his programme to
+forget Patricia. Indeed, for twenty-four hours, or the waking moiety of
+that period, he had been assuring himself of the utter impossibility of
+anything remotely approaching forgetfulness. This thought made him
+instantly self-reproachful; regretful for having shown a sort of
+disloyalty by opening the door of the precious and sacred things, even
+to so good a friend as Dick Gantry; and from regretting to amending was
+never more than a step for Evan Blount. There were plenty of
+reminiscences to be threshed over, and Blount brought them forward so
+tactfully that Gantry hardly knew it when he was shouldered away from
+the open door of the acuter personalities.
+
+It was quite late, and the talk had again drifted around to a one-sided
+discussion of practical politics in the Western definition of the term,
+when Gantry, pleading weariness on the score of his hard week's work at
+the railroad meeting, went to bed. The summer night was at its perfect
+best, and Blount was still wakeful enough to refill his pipe and
+well-balanced enough to be thankful for a little solitude in which to
+set in order his plans for the newly struck-out future. In the later
+talk with Gantry he had learned many things about the political
+situation in his native State, things which were enlightening if not
+particularly encouraging. Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school,
+he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his
+own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry's account could be
+trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his
+father was reputed to be the dictator.
+
+Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in
+some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been
+filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a
+possible time when some great corporation should need his services in
+permanence. He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of
+the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business.
+Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over
+into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and
+enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great
+corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be
+law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the
+public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own
+profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests,
+promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, and be the
+adviser of the man or men to whom the greater America owes its place at
+the head of the civilized nations.
+
+Oddly enough, though Gantry's attitude had been uncompromisingly
+partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a
+skilful pleader for the special interests--the interests of the few
+against those of the many. Hence he was preparing to go to the new field
+with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant
+corporation. In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty
+broadly that there was room for an assistant corporation counsel for the
+railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State.
+Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least,
+would be political rather than legal, and in his mind's eye he saw
+himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender
+of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was
+capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack.
+
+The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant
+of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had
+been other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his
+future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work
+is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking
+forward in eager anticipation to the moment when he could begin the
+grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the new environment.
+
+It was after the ashes had been knocked from the bedtime pipe that
+Blount left his chair and the secluded corner of the veranda to go down
+among the parked automobiles on the lawn. His one recreation--and it was
+the only one in which he found the precious fillip of enthusiasm--was
+motoring. There was a choice collection of fine cars in the grouping on
+the lawn, and Blount had just awakened a sleepy chauffeur to ask him to
+uncover and exhibit the engine of a freshly imported Italian machine,
+when a stir at the veranda entrance told him that at least a few of the
+dancing guests were leaving early.
+
+Being more curious at the moment about the mechanism of the Italian
+motor than he was about people, he did not realize that he was an
+intruder until the chauffeur hastily replaced the engine bonnet and
+began to get his car ready for the road. Blount stepped back when the
+little group on the veranda came down the steps preceded by a club
+footman who was calling the number of the car. And it was not until he
+was turning away that he found himself face to face with a very
+beautiful and very clear-eyed young woman who was buttoning an
+automobile dust-coat up under her chin.
+
+"Patricia!" he burst out. And then: "For Heaven's sake! you don't mean
+to tell me that you have been here all evening?"
+
+Her slow smile gave the impression, not quite of frigidity perhaps, but
+of that quality of serene self-possession which strangers sometimes
+mistook for coldness.
+
+"Why shouldn't I be here?" she asked. "Didn't you know that the
+Cranfords--the people who are entertaining--are old friends of ours?"
+
+Blount shook his head. "No, I didn't know it; and because I didn't, I
+have lost an entire evening."
+
+"Oh, no; you shouldn't say that," she protested. "The evening was yours
+to use as you chose. Mrs. Beverley told me you were here, and she added
+that you had particularly requested not to be introduced to the
+Cranfords or their guests. Besides, you know you don't care anything
+about dancing."
+
+The chauffeur had placed his other passengers in the tonneau, and was
+trying to crank the motor. Blount was thankful that the new Italian
+engine was refusing to take the spark. The delay was giving him an added
+moment or two.
+
+"No, I don't care much for dancing; and you know very well why I
+couldn't, or wouldn't, be anybody's good company to-night," he said.
+Then: "It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening by not letting
+me know that you were here."
+
+"'This last evening'?" she echoed. "Why 'last'?"
+
+"Because I am leaving Boston and New England to-morrow--or rather,
+Monday. It is the only thing to do."
+
+"I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan," she deprecated, in the
+sisterly tone that always made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense
+of proportion."
+
+"Sometimes I think you haven't any sense of proportion, Patricia," he
+retorted half-morosely. "If you have, I am sure it is frightfully
+distorted."
+
+The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary explosions, and a
+white-haired old gentleman in the tonneau was calling impatiently to
+Patricia to come and take her place so that he might close the door.
+
+"It is you who have the distorted perspective, Evan," she countered.
+"But I refused to quarrel with you last night, and I am refusing to
+quarrel with you now. It pleases you to believe that a woman's place in
+this twentieth-century world is inevitably at the fireside--her own
+fireside. I don't agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with
+you. Where are you going?"
+
+"I am going West, Monday."
+
+"How odd!" she commented. "We are going West, too--father and I--though
+not quite so soon as Monday."
+
+"You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the West?"
+
+She did not tell him where. The car motor was whirring smoothly now,
+the chauffeur was sliding into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the
+old gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently impatient.
+
+"If we are both going in the same direction we needn't say good-by," she
+said hastily, giving him her hand at parting. "Let it be _auf
+wiedersehen_." Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the
+outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately that Blount had to
+spring nimbly aside to save himself from being run down.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE BOSS
+
+
+It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken mountain ranges, lone
+buttes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of
+an exclusive North Shore club to a private dining-room in the
+Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico faces the Capitol grounds
+in the chief city of the Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows command
+a magnificent view of the Lost River Range, and from whose roof, on a
+clear day, one may see the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the
+distant western horizon.
+
+Allowing for the difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the
+dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain
+synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences
+by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda
+of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was
+ascribing to the good offices of the god of chance.
+
+On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of the men at the table in
+the private dining-room had registered from Chicago. The name was
+illegible to the cursory eye, but since it was the signature of a
+notable empire-builder, it was sufficiently well known in all the vast
+region served by the Transcontinental Railway System. The owner of the
+name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to clip the end from a
+very long and very black cigar. He was a man past middle-age,
+large-framed and heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born master
+of circumstances. Like the younger generation, he was clean shaven;
+hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination
+about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the
+region traversed by the great railway system the virile face with the
+massive jaw was as familiar as the illegible signature on the
+Inter-Mountain's guest-book. Though he figured only as the first
+vice-president of the Transcontinental Company, Hardwick McVickar was
+really the active head of its affairs and the dictator of its policies.
+
+Across the small round table sat the railway magnate's dinner-guest, a
+man who was more than McVickar's match in big-boned, square-shouldered
+physique, and whose half-century was written only in the thick, grizzled
+hair and heavy, graying mustaches. Like McVickar, he had the lion-like
+face of mastership, but the fine wrinkles at the corners of the wide-set
+eyes postulated a sense of humor which was lacking in his table
+companion. His mouth, half hidden by the drooping mustaches, needed the
+relieving wrinkles at the corners of the eyes; it was a grim,
+straight-lined inheritance from his pioneer ancestors--the mouth of a
+man who may yield to persuasion but not easily to opposition.
+
+"I wish I could convince you that it isn't worth while to hold me at
+arm's-length, Senator," McVickar was saying, as he clipped the end from
+his cigar. "You know as well as I do that under the present law in this
+State we are practically bankrupt. We are not making enough to pay the
+fixed charges. We do a losing business from the moment we cross your
+State line."
+
+"Yes; it seems to me I have heard something that sounded a good deal
+like that before," was the noncommittal rejoinder.
+
+"You have heard the simple truth, then. And it is a bald injustice, not
+only to the railroad company, but to the people it serves. We can't give
+adequate service when the cost exceeds the earnings. That is the
+simplest possible proposition in any business undertaking."
+
+"And you can't make out to convince the members of the State Railroad
+Commission of the simpleness?" asked the man whom the vice-president
+addressed as "Senator."
+
+"You know well enough that we can't hope to convince a rabidly
+anti-railroad commission," was the half-angry retort.
+
+"Yet you are still running your railroad," suggested the other. "We
+don't hear anything about your shutting down and tearing up the track."
+
+"No; luckily, the Transcontinental System does not lie wholly within
+your State boundaries. If it did, we might as well surrender our
+charter and go out of business--shut down and tear up the track, as you
+put it."
+
+"All of which has come to be a pretty old and well-worn story with us,
+McVickar," said the listener quietly. "I'm sure you didn't make me motor
+thirty miles to hear you tell it all over again. What do you want?"
+
+"We want a square deal," was the curt reply.
+
+"So do the people of this State," asserted the man across the table.
+"You bled us, Hardwick--bled us to the queen's taste--while you had the
+chance; and the chance lasted a blamed long time. You are equitably, if
+not legally, in debt to every man in this State who had ever shipped a
+car-load of freight or paid a passenger fare over your line before the
+present rate law went into effect. You can shuffle and side-step all you
+want to, but that is the plain fact of the matter."
+
+The vice-president sat up and braced his arms on the edge of the table.
+
+"You are too much for me, Blount--you hold out too many cards; and I'm
+no apprentice at the game, either. In all these years we've been
+dickering together you've always been a hard-bitted and consistent
+fighter for your own hand. What's happened to you lately? Have you
+acquired a new set of convictions? Or have you been figuring out a
+different way of whipping the devil around the stump?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," returned the guest, with large good-nature. "We are
+all growing older--and wiser, perhaps. You don't deny the debt you owe
+us, do you?"
+
+"Do we owe you anything, Blount?" asked the magnate pointedly, and with
+a definite emphasis upon the personal pronoun. "If we do, we are willing
+to pay it in spot cash, on demand."
+
+The big man on the other side of the table was leaning back in his chair
+with his hands in his pockets, and the smile wrinkling at the corners of
+his eyes was half-genial, half-satirical.
+
+"It's lucky we're alone, McVickar," he remarked. "A third fellow
+standing around and hearing you talk might imagine that you are trying
+to bribe me."
+
+"That's all right, Blount; this is between us two, and we understand
+each other. Nothing for nothing is the accepted rule the world over, and
+we both recognize it. You are figuring on something; I know you are.
+Name it. If it is anything less than a mortgage on the earth and one or
+two of the planets I'll get it for you."
+
+"I'm afraid we are a good deal more than a mile or two apart yet,
+McVickar," said the man who was not smoking, after a long minute. "Let's
+ride back to the beginning and get us a fresh start. I said that Gordon
+is going to be the next governor of the State."
+
+"I know you did; and I said--and I say it again--he isn't going to
+be--not if we can help it," declared the railway magnate, with emphatic
+determination.
+
+"The methods you will take to defeat him will insure his election,
+McVickar. You fellows are mighty slow to learn your lesson; mighty slow
+and obstinate, Hardwick. You don't know anything but wire-pulling and
+crookedness and bribery. The times have changed, and you haven't had the
+common-sense or the courage or the business shrewdness to change with
+them. I say Gordon will be the next governor."
+
+Again there was a strained silence like that which follows the
+hand-shake in the prize-ring when the two antagonists have drawn apart
+and are warily watching each for his opening. After the pause the
+vice-president said:
+
+"If we had the safest kind of a majority in both houses of the
+legislature, we couldn't be sure of accomplishing anything worth while
+with Gordon in the governor's office; you know that, Blount. If Gordon
+runs and is elected, his platform will be flatly anti-railroad."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," was the calm rejoinder. "Gordon is a mighty square
+fellow; an honest man and a fair one. If you could stay out of the fight
+and go to him with clean hands--but you couldn't do that, McVickar;
+you're too badly out of practice."
+
+"We needn't go into that phase of it. We are so savagely handicapped in
+this State that we can't afford to take a divided chance; can't afford
+to pass our case up to a man who has been elected by an unfriendly
+opposition. If we should wash our hands of the fight, as you suggest,
+we might just as well throw up our franchises and quit, so far as any
+prospect of earning a reasonable return upon our investment here is
+concerned."
+
+"I know; that is what you always say, and you have said it so often--you
+and your fellow railroad string-pullers--that you have lost the
+straightforward combination completely. If you ever knew how to make a
+clean fight you've forgotten the moves, and it's your own fault."
+
+Once more the man with the fierce eyes and the dominating jaw took time
+to consider. Like others of his class, he was partisan only in the sense
+of one fighting hardily for the side upon which he had happened to be
+drawn in the great world battle. If he had not long ago parted with his
+convictions, the heat and smoke of the battle had obscured them, and he
+chose his weapons now with little regard for anything beyond their
+possible efficacy.
+
+"You are sparring with me, Blount," he said finally. "You are talking to
+me as you might talk to a committee of the Good Government League--and
+possibly for the same reason. Let's get together. You control the
+political situation in your State, and we frankly recognize that fact.
+It's a matter of business, and we can settle it on a business basis. I
+have been outspoken and above-board with you and have told you what we
+want. Meet me halfway and tell me what you want."
+
+"I want a square deal all around, Hardwick; that's all. You've got to
+take the same ground and make a clean fight if you want me with you. I
+can't make it any plainer than that, can I?"
+
+"I don't know yet what you are driving at," frowned the vice-president,
+"nor just why you have taken this particular occasion to read me a
+kindergarten lecture on political methods. In times past I suppose we
+have both done some things that we would like to have decently buried
+and forgotten, but--"
+
+"But right there we break apart, McVickar," cut in the other, setting
+his jaw with a peculiar hardening of the facial muscles that gave him
+the appearance of a fierce old viking attacking at the head of his
+squadrons. "I'm telling you over again that a new day has dawned in
+American politics; I and my kind recognize it, and you and your kind
+don't seem to be big enough to recognize it. That is the difference
+between us. In the present instance it comes down to this: you are going
+to fight for a railroad majority in the legislature, and you want
+Reynolds for the head of the ticket because you know that you can depend
+upon his veto if you don't get your majority in the House and Senate.
+You are not going to get Reynolds, or the majority either, without the
+help of the party organization."
+
+"We can put it much more elementally than that," supplemented the
+railroad man. "We get nothing without your say-so as the head of the
+party organization. That is precisely why I have come a couple of
+thousand miles to ask you to eat dinner with me here to-night."
+
+"I reckon I ought to feel right much set up and biggitty over that,
+Hardwick," smiled the veteran spoilsman, relapsing, as he did now and
+then, into the speech of his Southern boyhood. And then
+half-quizzically: "Are you tolerably well satisfied that you've got
+around to the place where you are willing to tote fair with me? You
+recollect, I gave you a straight pointer two years ago; you wouldn't
+take it, and we did you up. Are you right certain you are ready now to
+holler 'enough'?"
+
+Once again the vice-president refused to be hurried into making a
+capitulative admission. When he spoke, the militant second thought of
+the fighting corporation commander chose the words.
+
+"There is a limit to all things, Senator, and you are pushing us pretty
+well up to it. I suppose you can crack the whip and swing the vote on
+the legislature, and you can take it and be damned. But, by God, we'll
+have our governor and our attorney-general!"
+
+"You are betting confidently on that, are you?" said the veteran mildly.
+"Is that your declaration of war?"
+
+"Call it anything you like. We are not going to be legislated off the
+map if we can help it. Strong as your machine is, you can't swing Gordon
+in against Reynolds if we concede your bare majority in the legislature
+and put up the right kind of a fight. And when it comes to Rankin, our
+candidate for attorney-general, you simply haven't another man in the
+party to put up against him. You'd have to run in a dummy, and even you
+are not big enough to do that, Blount, and put it over."
+
+"You've settled this definitely in your own mind, have you, Hardwick?"
+was the placable rejoinder. "I'm sorry--right sorry. I've been hoping
+that you had learned your lesson--you and your tribe. I came to town
+this evening prepared to show you a decent way out of your troubles, so
+far as this State is concerned; but since you have posted your 'de-fi,'
+as we cow-punchers say, I reckon it isn't worth while to wade any deeper
+into the creek."
+
+Again the railroad magnate rested his arms on the table-edge. "What was
+your 'decent way,' Senator?" he asked, fixing his gaze upon the shrewd
+old eyes of the other, which, for the first time in the conference,
+seemed to be losing a little of their grimly good-natured
+aggressiveness.
+
+"I don't mind telling you, though you will likely call it an old man's
+foolishness. I have a grown son, McVickar. Did you know that?"
+
+The vice-president nodded, and the big man opposite went on
+half-reminiscently:
+
+"He is a lawyer, and a mighty bright one, so they tell me. As I happen
+to know, he is pretty well up on the corporation side of the argument,
+and the one thing I've been afraid of is that he would marry and settle
+down somewhere in the East, where the big corporations have their home
+ranches. I'm getting old, Hardwick, and I'd like mighty well to have the
+boy with me. Out of that notion grew another. I said to myself this:
+Now, here's McVickar; if he could have a good, clean-cut young man in
+this State representing his railroad--a man who not only knew his way
+around in a court-room, but who might also know how to plead his
+client's case before the public--if McVickar could have such a young
+fellow as that for his corporation counsel, and would agree to make his
+railroad company live somewhere within shouting distance of such a young
+fellow's ideals, we might all be persuaded to bury the hatchet and live
+together in peace and amity."
+
+A slow smile was spreading itself over the strong face of the railway
+magnate as he listened.
+
+"Say, David," he retorted mildly, "it isn't much like you to go forty
+miles around when there is a short way across. Why didn't you tell me
+plainly in the beginning that you wanted a place for your boy?"
+
+"Hold on; don't let's get too far along before we get started; I'm not
+saying it now," was the sober protest. "You forget that you've just been
+telling me that you don't intend to comply with the one hard-and-fast
+condition to such an arrangement as the one I've been pipe-dreaming
+about."
+
+"What condition?"
+
+"That you turn over a brand-new leaf and meet the people of this State
+half-way on a proposition of fair play for everybody."
+
+"There isn't any half-way point in a fight for life, David. You know
+that as well, or better, than I do. But let that go. We'll give your son
+the place you want him to have, and do it gladly."
+
+The man who had once been his own foreman of round-ups straightened
+himself in his chair and smote the table with his fist.
+
+"No, by God, you won't--not in a thousand years, McVickar! Maybe you
+could buy me--maybe you _have_ bought me in times past--but you can't
+buy that boy! Listen, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I
+telegraphed the boy this afternoon, telling him to throw up his job in
+Boston and come out here. If he comes within a reasonable time he will
+be legally a citizen of the State before election. You said we didn't
+have anybody but Rankin to run for attorney-general. By Heavens,
+Hardwick, I'll show you if we haven't!"
+
+Mr. Hardwick McVickar was not of those who fight as one beating the air.
+While the deft waiter was clearing the table and serving the small
+coffees he kept silence. But when the time was fully ripe he said what
+there was to be said.
+
+"You've got us by the nape of the neck, as usual, Blount. Name your
+terms."
+
+"I have named them. Get in line with the new public opinion and we'll do
+what we can for you."
+
+During the long pause following this curt ultimatum the masterful
+dictator of railroad policies deliberated thoughtfully upon many things.
+With the ex-senator as the all-powerful head of the machine in this
+State of many costly battle-fields, it would have been a weakness
+inexcusable on the part of so astute a commander as McVickar if David
+Blount's history, political and personal, had not been known to him in
+all its details. As a contingency to be met sooner or later, the
+vice-president had anticipated the thing which had now come to pass.
+That Blount should wish to push the fortunes of his son was perfectly
+natural; and it was no less natural that he should push them by making
+the railroad company's pay-roll furnish the motive-power. The magnate
+smiled inwardly when he remembered that he had given Gantry, the
+division traffic manager of the Transcontinental, a quiet hint to look
+up one Evan Blount, a young lawyer, on his next visit to Boston. By all
+odds it would be better to wait for Gantry's report before taking any
+irrevocable steps in the bargaining with Evan Blount's father; but
+unhappily the crisis had arrived, and in all probability it could not be
+postponed. None the less, the vice-president tried craftily for the
+postponement.
+
+"You're asking a good deal, Blount, and you don't seem to realize it.
+You are practically demanding that we lay down our arms and put a
+possible enemy in the saddle on the eve of a battle. If we should agree
+to meet the people of this State half-way, as you suggest, what
+guarantee have we that we won't be compelled to go all the way?"
+
+The fine-lined wrinkles were appearing again at the corners of the
+hereditary Blount eyes.
+
+"You can't quite rise to the occasion, can you, Hardwick?" smiled the
+boss. "You'd like to behave yourself and be good, of course; but you
+want to be cocksure beforehand that it isn't going to cost too much."
+
+"Well, anyway, I'm going to ask for a little time in which to consider
+it," was the vice-president's final word.
+
+"Sure! You have all the time there is between now and the election. Go
+on and do your considering. I've told you what I'm going to do."
+
+"You know very well that we can't allow you to do what you propose. With
+an unfriendly attorney-general we might as well throw up our hands first
+as last."
+
+"All right; it's right pointedly up to you," was the calm reply.
+
+The vice-president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve
+with the table-napkin. When he looked up, the heavy frown was again
+furrowing itself between his eyes.
+
+"Let me know when your son is coming and I'll try to make it possible to
+meet him here," he said rather gratingly.
+
+And thus, at the precise moment when Richard Gantry, some three thousand
+miles away to the eastward, was declaring his weariness and his
+intention of going to bed, the two-man conference in the Inter-Mountain
+private dining-room was closed.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES
+
+
+As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that Evan Blount was not to
+have Gantry for a travelling companion beyond Chicago. On the second day
+of westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose business followed
+him like an implacable Nemesis wherever he went, had wire instructions
+to stop and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois metropolis.
+Hence, on the morning of the following day, Blount continued his journey
+alone.
+
+Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate had crossed his Rubicon;
+in other words, his train had rolled through the majestic steel bridge
+spanning the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he
+was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar--which should
+have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had
+been wrought during his fourteen years of absence.
+
+Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the
+Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The
+through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled,
+and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing
+acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the
+second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a
+well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired
+reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman
+who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment--a man
+whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were
+singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with
+his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.
+
+At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be,
+with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a
+newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The
+hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was
+directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner whose
+property, vaguely located as somewhere "in the mountains," was involved
+in litigation.
+
+It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond
+the boundaries of the commonplaces. Oddly enough, considering the fact
+that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion
+to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law.
+Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself
+thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively helpful to the man who had
+apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.
+
+Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human sympathy the man in the
+wicker chair presently inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching
+another matter. In addition to his mining ventures he had been making
+investments in timber-lands, or, rather, in certain lumber companies
+operating "in the mountains"--bad investments, he feared, since the
+Government had lately taken such a decided stand against the cutting of
+timber in the mountain-land reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he
+asked, that the talk would materialize in restraining action? If so, he
+was in the hole again--worse off than he should be if his mining
+lawsuits should go against him.
+
+Again Blount, good-naturedly charitable and not a little amused by the
+nervous anxiety of the gentleman of many troubles, gave an opinion.
+
+"Conservation, in timber as well as in other remaining resources of the
+country, has come to be a word which is in everybody's mouth," was the
+form the opinion took. "The plain citizen who isn't familiar with the
+methods of the timber sharks would do well to keep his money out of
+their hands if he doesn't wish to be held as _particeps criminis_ with
+them in the day of reckoning."
+
+"Say!" ejaculated the thin man, wriggling nervously in his chair. "If
+you were a Government agent yourself you could hardly put the case
+stronger for the conservation crowd!"
+
+Now, in ordinary circumstances, nothing was ever farther from Blount's
+normal attitude toward his fellow-men than a disposition to yield to the
+sudden joking impulse. But the hawk-faced man's perturbation was so
+real, or so faultlessly simulated, that he could not resist the
+temptation.
+
+"How do you know that I am not a Government agent?" he demanded, with a
+decent show of gravity.
+
+"Because you are not travelling on Government transportation," was the
+shrewd retort.
+
+At another time Blount might have wondered why a casual fellow-traveller
+should have taken the trouble to make the discovery. But at the moment
+he was intent only upon keeping the small misunderstanding alive.
+
+"I suppose you have seen my ticket, but you can't tell anything by
+that," he countered, laughing. "A good many civilian employees of the
+Government travel nowadays on regular tickets, like other people."
+
+"I know damned well they do," admitted the anxious one; and then, with a
+swift eye-shot which Blount missed: "Especially if they happen to be
+travelling on the quiet to catch some poor devil napping on the job."
+
+"You needn't be alarmed; you haven't told me anything that the
+department could make use of," returned Blount, carrying the jest the
+one necessary move farther along.
+
+It was precisely at this point, as Blount remembered afterward, that the
+timber-thieving subject was dropped. Later on, after the talk had
+drifted back to mining, and from mining to politics, the nervous
+gentleman pleaded weariness and declared his intention of going to his
+section to take a nap, and presently disappeared to carry it out.
+
+Blount was not sorry to be left alone. In response to a vague stirring
+of something within him--a thing which might have been the primitive
+underman yawning and stretching to its awakening--he had been trying in
+the window-facing intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of
+mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood. As yet there
+was little familiarity save in the broader outlines. Where he remembered
+only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now vast
+ranches planted to sod corn; and upon the hills the cattle ranges were
+no longer open. The towns, too, at which the train made its momentary
+stops, were changed. The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping
+period, with the shed-roofed railroad station, the whitewashed
+loading-corral, and the towering water-tank--all backgrounded by a thin
+line of saloons and dance-halls--had disappeared completely, and the
+window-watcher found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted,
+cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the West of his boyhood had been
+chiefly peopled.
+
+Farther along toward evening the great range, which had been visible for
+hours in the westward vista, began to define itself in peaks and high,
+bald shoulderings of wind-swept mesas. Here was something definite and
+tangible for the stirring underman to lay hold upon. Blount, the
+sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working
+itself out in quickened pulses and exhilarating nerve-tinglings. Boston,
+the Law School, the East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower
+rut of custom and convention, were fading into a past which already
+seemed age-old and half forgotten. He threw open the window at his elbow
+and drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast. It was sweet
+in his nostrils, and the keen crispness of it was as fine wine in his
+blood. After all, he had been but a sojourner in the other world, and
+this was his homeland.
+
+At the dining-car dinner, which was served while the higher peaks of the
+main range were as vast islands floating in a sea of crimson and gold,
+Blount missed the man of many troubles. The dining-car was well filled,
+and, though the faces of the diners were all unfamiliar, the hum of
+talk, the hurrying of the waiters, and the subdued clamor drowning
+itself in the under-drone of the drumming wheels answered well enough
+for companionship. There are times when even the voice of a friend is an
+intrusion, and the returning exile had happed upon one of them.
+Largeness, the inspiring breadth of the immensities, was what he craved
+most; and when he had cut the many-coursed dinner short, he hurried back
+to his Pullman window, hoping that he might have the smoking-compartment
+to himself again.
+
+The unspoken wish was granted. When he entered the smoking-room he
+found it empty; and, filling his cutty pipe, he drew the cushioned
+wicker chair out to face the open window. Fresh glimpses of the
+northward landscape shortly brought a renewal of the heart-stirrings;
+and when he finally had the longed-for sight of a bunch of grazing
+cattle, with the solitary night-herd hanging by one leg in the saddle to
+watch the passing of the train, the call of the homeland was trumpeting
+in his ears, and he would have given anything in reason to be able to
+changes places, temporarily at least, with the care-free horseman whose
+wiry, muscular figure was struck out so artistically against the
+dun-colored hillside.
+
+"Would I really do such a thing as that?" he asked himself half
+incredulously, when the night-herd and his grazing drove had become only
+a picturesque memory; and out of the heart-stirrings and
+pulse-quickenings came the answer: "I more than half believe that I
+would--that I'd jump at the chance." Then he added regretfully: "But
+there isn't going to be any chance."
+
+"Any chance to do what?" rumbled a mellow voice at his elbow, and Blount
+turned quickly to find that a big, bearded man, smoking an abnormally
+corpulent cigar, had come in to take his seat on the divan.
+
+At another time Blount, the conventional Blount, would have been
+self-conscious and embarrassed, as any human being is when he is caught
+talking to himself. But with the transformation had come a battering
+down of doors in the house of the broader fellowship, and he laughed
+good-naturedly.
+
+"You caught me fairly," he acknowledged. "I thought I still had the
+place to myself."
+
+"But the chance?" persisted the big man, looking him over appraisively.
+"You don't look like a man who has had to hang round on the aidges
+hankerin' after things he couldn't get."
+
+"I guess I haven't had to do that very often," was the reflective
+rejoinder. "But a mile or so back we passed a bunch of cattle, with the
+night man riding watch; I was just saying to myself that I'd like to
+change places with that night-herd--only there wasn't going to be any
+chance."
+
+The bearded man's laugh was a deep-chested rumbling suggestive of rocks
+rolling down a declivity.
+
+"Lordy gracious!" he chuckled. "If you was to get a leg over a bronc',
+and the bronc' should find it out--Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out
+on my place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears to have you try
+it; he shore would. You take my advice, and don't you go huntin' a job
+night-ridin' in the greasewood hills. Don't you do it!"
+
+"I assure you I hadn't thought of doing it for a permanency. But just
+for a bit of adventure, if the chance should offer while I'm in the
+notion. I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony for fourteen
+years, but I don't believe I've lost the knack of it."
+
+"Ho!" said the big man. "Then you ain't as much of a tenderfoot as you
+look to be. Shake!" and he held out a hand as huge as a bear's paw.
+Following the hand-grip he grew confidential. "'Long in the afternoon I
+stuck my head in at the door and saw you chewin' the rag with a
+thin-faced old nester that couldn't set still in his chair while he
+talked. Know him?"
+
+"Not at all," said Blount promptly. "He has the section opposite mine,
+and he got on at Omaha."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't want to know him if I was you," was the bearded man's
+comment. Then: "Tryin' to get you to invest in some o' his properties?"
+
+"Oh, no."
+
+"Well, he will, if he gets a chance. He'd go furder'n that; he'd nail
+you up to the cross and skin you alive if there was any money in it for
+him. His name's Simon Peter, and it ort to be Judas. I know him down to
+the ground!"
+
+"Simon Peter?" said Blount inquiringly.
+
+"Ya-as; Simon Peter Hathaway. And my name's Griggs; Griggs, of the
+Antelopes, back o' Carnadine--if anybody should ask you who give you
+your pointer on Simon Peter Judas. I don't blacklist no man in the dark,
+and I've said a heap more to that old ratter's face than I've ever said
+behind his back. Ump! him a-wrigglin' in that chair you're settin' in
+and tryin' to fix up some way to skin you! Don't tell me! I know blame'
+well what he was tryin' to do."
+
+Blount listened and was interested, not so much in the bit of gossip as
+in the big, red-faced ranchman, who so evidently had a grudge to pay
+off.
+
+"I am not likely to have any dealings with Mr. Hathaway," he rejoined.
+"And I must do him the bare justice of saying that he wasn't trying to
+sell me anything. The shoe was on the other foot. He seemed to be afraid
+he was in danger of losing out, and he was asking my advice."
+
+"S.P. Hathaway lose out? Not on your life, my young friend! You say he
+was askin' for advice? You've done stirred up my curiosity a whole heap,
+and I reckon you'll have to tell me who you are before it'll ca'm down
+again."
+
+Blount laughed. "Mr. Hathaway thinks I am a special agent for the
+Government, travelling on business for the Forest Service."
+
+"The hell he does!" exploded the big man. Then he reached over and laid
+a swollen finger on Blount's knee. "Say, boy, before you or him ever
+gets off this train--Sufferin' Moses! what was that?"
+
+The break came upon a thunderous crash transmitting itself from car to
+car, and the long, heavy train came to a juggling stop. The ranchman
+sprang to his feet with an alacrity surprising in so huge a body and
+ducked to look out of the open window.
+
+"Twin Buttes!" he gurgled. "And, say, it's a wreck! We've hit something
+right slap in the middle of the yard! Let's make a break for the scene
+of the confliggration till we see who's killed!"
+
+Blount followed the ranchman's lead, but shortly lost sight of the
+burly figure in the crowd of curious passengers pouring from the hastily
+opened vestibules. Seen at closer range, the accident appeared to be
+disastrous only in a material sense. The heavy "Pacific-type" locomotive
+had stumbled over the tongue of a split switch, leaving the rails and
+making a blockading barrier of itself across the tracks. Nobody was
+hurt; but there would be a delay of some hours before the track could be
+cleared.
+
+Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the derailed locomotive,
+Blount strolled on through the railroad yard to the station and the
+town. He remembered the place chiefly by its name. In his boyhood it had
+been the nearest railroad forwarding-point for the mines at Lewiston,
+thirty miles beyond the Lost Hills. Now, as it appeared, it had become a
+lumber-shipping station. To the left of the railroad there were numerous
+sawmills, each with its mountain of waste dominated by a black chimney,
+screen-capped. For the supply of logs an enormous flume led down from
+the slopes of the forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute
+out of which, though the working-day was ended, the great logs were
+still tumbling in an intermittent stream.
+
+North of the town the valley broke away into a region of bare mesas
+dotted with rounded, butte-like hills, with the buttressing ranges on
+either side to lift the eastern and western horizons. The northern
+prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately, and the tide of
+remembrance swept strongly in upon him. Some forty-odd miles away to the
+northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser range, lay the
+"short-grass" region in which he had spent the happy boyhood. An hour's
+gallop through the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting
+sun would be playing upon the little station of Painted Hat, the
+one-time shipping-point for the home ranch. And half-way between Painted
+Hat and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands of the
+mountains, were the horse-corrals of one Debbleby, a true hermit of the
+hills, and the boy Evan's earliest school-master in the great book of
+Nature.
+
+Blount's one meliorating softness during the years of exile had
+manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby. He knew that
+the old horse-breeder was still alive, and that he was still herding his
+brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin. The young man, fresh from the
+well-calculated East, threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool
+breeze sweeping down from the northern hills. He was not given to
+impulsive plan-changing. On the contrary, he was slow to resolve and
+proportionately tenacious of the determination once made. But the
+stirring of boyish memories accounted for something; and in the sanest
+brain there are sleeping cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive
+at the touch of suggestion. What if he should--
+
+He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out
+deliberately. Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared
+and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an
+immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring
+recollections? Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting
+on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin foot-hills,
+smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become
+of the boy whom he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride. Blount
+estimated the distance as he remembered it. With a hired horse he might
+reach Debbleby's by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old
+ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.
+
+Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from
+the capital might be expected decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman
+conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's office at the
+capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a
+livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse,
+borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break
+violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions.
+He would go and see Debbleby--drop in upon the old horse-breeder without
+warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland
+unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless
+awaiting him at the real journey's end.
+
+Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel
+in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the
+thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing
+on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from
+their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or
+cowboys. Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the
+Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail
+to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the
+bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with
+the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later,
+when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that
+all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if
+the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might
+also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of
+the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals
+to stop him. But this he missed.
+
+There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting
+out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the
+hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the
+saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with
+the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and
+free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying
+professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have
+curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single
+mile.
+
+For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from
+civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that
+the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar
+in daylight, lost their remembered featurings. During the first few
+miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern
+mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its
+lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon.
+Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moon-rise, the
+trail disappeared entirely; but so long as he was sure of the general
+direction, Blount held on and gave the tireless little bronco a loose
+rein. The Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills of the western
+range, with the broad gulch of the Pigskin cutting a plain highway
+through the mountains. If he could find one of the head-water streams of
+the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in the gulches of the mesa,
+there could be no danger of losing the way.
+
+It was some little time after he had left the shoulderings of the
+eastern range behind that a singular thing happened. Far away on his
+right he heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the moon was nearly
+full and the treeless landscape was bare of any kind of cover, he could
+not make out the horseman who was evidently passing him and going in the
+same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a
+_detour_ to avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and
+concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was
+confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing
+themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first,
+invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain, passed him at
+speed.
+
+After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it
+was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a
+water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was
+patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that
+the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure which
+might have discomforting consequences.
+
+For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches
+and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man
+from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and
+altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a
+breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the
+puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort
+was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE HIGHBINDERS
+
+
+When the three men who had pulled him from his horse and tied him hand
+and foot had withdrawn to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to
+wrangle morosely over what should be done with him, Evan Blount found it
+simply impossible to realize that they were actually discussing, as one
+of the expedients, the propriety of knocking him on the head and
+flinging his body into the near-by canyon.
+
+The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude grotesqueness of the
+thing that had happened. Five minutes earlier he had been riding
+peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he
+was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden
+sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the
+camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself
+confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a
+sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had
+been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed
+and the surprise had been complete; but the grotesquery remained.
+
+Since his captors had as yet made no attempt to rob him, he could only
+surmise that some incredibly foolish mistake had been made. But when he
+remembered the three invisible horsemen who had passed him on the broad
+mesa he was not so certain about the mistake. Most naturally, his
+thoughts went back to the little episode on the hotel porch. The passing
+glance he had given to the three men with whom the fourth man, Hathaway,
+had been talking did not enable him to identify them with the three who
+were sourly discussing his fate at the near-by fire; none the less, the
+conclusion was fairly obvious. Thus far he had been either too busy or
+too bewildered to break in; but when the more murderous of the
+expedients was apparently about to be adopted, he decided that it was
+high time to try to find out why he was to be effaced. Whereupon he
+called across to the group at the fire.
+
+"Without wishing to interfere with any arrangements you gentlemen are
+making, I shall be obliged if you will tell me why you think you have
+found it necessary to murder me."
+
+"You know mighty good and well why there's one too many of you on Lost
+River, jest at this stage o' the game," growled the hard-faced spokesman
+who had held the Winchester while his two accomplices were doing the
+unhorsing and the binding.
+
+"But I don't," insisted Blount good-naturedly. "So far as I know, there
+is only one of me--on Lost River or anywhere else."
+
+"That'll do for you; it ain't your put-in, nohow," was the gruff
+decision of the court; but Blount was too good a lawyer to be silenced
+thus easily.
+
+"Perhaps you might not especially regret killing the wrong man, but in
+the present case I am very sure I should," he went on. And then: "Are
+you quite sure you've got the right man?"
+
+"The boss knows who you are--that's enough for us."
+
+"The boss?" questioned Blount.
+
+"Yas, I said the boss; now hold your jaw!"
+
+Blount caught at the word. In a flash the talk with Gantry on the
+veranda of the Winnebasset Club flicked into his mind.
+
+"There is only one boss in this State," he countered coolly. "And I am
+very sure he hasn't given you orders to kill me."
+
+"What's that?" demanded the spokesman.
+
+Blount repeated his assertion, adding jocularly: "Perhaps you'd better
+call up headquarters and ask your boss if he wants you to kill the son
+of his boss."
+
+At this the gun-holder came around the fire to stand before his
+prisoner.
+
+"Say, pal--this ain't my night for kiddin', and it hadn't ort to be
+your'n," he remarked grimly. "The boss didn't say you was to be rubbed
+out--they never do. But I reckon it would save a heap o' trouble if you
+_was_ rubbed out."
+
+"On the contrary, I'm inclined to think it would make a heap of
+trouble--for you and your friends, and quite probably for the man or
+men who sent you to waylay me. But, apart from all that, you've got hold
+of the wrong man, as I told you a moment ago."
+
+"No, by grapples! I hain't. I saw you in daylight. If there's been any
+fumblin' done, I hain't done it. So you see it ain't any o' my funeral."
+
+"Think not?" said Blount.
+
+"I know it ain't. Orders is orders, and you don't git over into them
+woods on Upper Lost Creek with no papers to serve on nobody: see?"
+
+It was just here that the light of complete understanding dawned upon
+Blount; and with it came the disconcerting chill of a conviction
+overthrown. As a theorist he had always scoffed at the idea that a
+corporation, which is a creature of the law, could afford to be an open
+law-breaker. But here was a very striking refutation of the charitable
+assumption. His smoking-room companion of the Pullman car was doubtless
+one of the timber-pillagers who had been cutting on the public domain.
+To such a man an agent of the National Forest Service was an enemy to be
+hoodwinked, if possible, or, in the last resort, to be disposed of as
+expeditiously as might be, and Blount saw that he had only himself to
+blame for his present predicament, since he had allowed the man to
+believe that he was a Government emissary. Having this clew to the
+mystery, his course was a little easier to steer.
+
+"I have no papers of the kind you think I have, as you can readily
+determine by searching me," he said. "My name is Blount, and I am the
+son of ex-Senator David Blount, of this State. Now what are you going to
+do with me?"
+
+"What's that you say?" grated the outlaw.
+
+"You heard what I said. Go ahead and heave me into the canyon if you are
+willing to stand for it afterward."
+
+The hard-faced man turned without replying and went back to the other
+two at the fire. Blount caught only a word now and again of the
+low-toned, wrangling argument that followed. But from the overheard word
+or two he gathered that there were still some leanings toward the sound
+old maxim which declares that "dead men tell no tales." When the
+decision was finally reached, he was left to guess its purport. Without
+any explanation the thongs were taken from his wrists and ankles, and he
+was helped upon his horse. After his captors were mounted, the new
+status was defined by the spokesman in curt phrase.
+
+"You go along quiet with us, and you don't make no bad breaks, see? I
+more'n half believe you been lyin' to me, but I'm goin' to give you a
+chance to prove up. If you don't prove up, you pass out--that's all. Now
+git in line and hike out; and if you're countin' on makin' a break, jest
+ricollect that a chunk o' lead out of a Winchester kin travel a heap
+faster thern your cayuse."
+
+If Blount had not already lost all sense of familiarity with his
+surroundings, the devious mountain trail taken by his captors would soon
+have convinced him that the boyhood memories were no longer to be
+trusted. Up and down, the trail zigzagged and climbed, always
+penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountains. At times
+Blount lost even the sense of direction; lost it so completely that the
+high-riding moon seemed to be in the wrong quarter of the heavens.
+
+For the first few miles the trail was so difficult that speed was out of
+the question; but later, in crossing a high-lying valley, the horses
+were pushed. Beyond the valley there were more mountains, and half-way
+through this second range the trail plunged into a deep, cleft-like
+canyon with a brawling torrent for its pathfinder. Once more Blount lost
+the sense of direction, and when the canyon trail came out upon broad
+uplands and became a country road with bordering ranches watered by
+irrigation canals, into which the mountain torrent was diverted, there
+were no recognizable landmarks to tell him whither his captors were
+leading him.
+
+As he was able to determine by holding his watch, face up, to the
+moonlight, it was nearly midnight when the silent cavalcade of four
+turned aside from the main road into an avenue of spreading cottonwood
+trees. At its head the avenue became a circular driveway; and fronting
+the driveway a stately house, with a massive Georgian facade and
+colonnaded portico, flung its shadow across the white gravel of the
+carriage approach.
+
+There were lights in one wing of the house, and another appeared behind
+the fan-light in the entrance-hall when the leader of the three
+highbinders had tramped up the steps and touched the bell-push. Blount
+had a fleeting glimpse of a black head with a fringe of snowy wool when
+the door was opened, but he did not hear what was said. After the negro
+serving-man disappeared there was a little wait. At the end of the
+interval the door was opened wide, and Blount had a gruff order to
+dismount.
+
+What he saw when he stood on the door-mat beside his captor merely added
+mystery to mystery. Just within the luxuriously furnished hall, where
+the light of the softly shaded hall lantern served to heighten the
+artistic effect of her red house-gown, stood a woman--a lady, and
+evidently the mistress of the Georgian mansion. She was small and dark,
+with brown eyes that were almost childlike in their winsomeness; a woman
+who might be twenty, or thirty, or any age between. Beautiful she was
+not, Blount decided, comparing her instantly, as he did all women, with
+Patricia Anners; but--He was not given time to add the qualifying phrase
+or to prepare himself for what was coming.
+
+"What is it, Barto?" the little lady asked, turning to the man with the
+gun.
+
+The reply was direct and straight to the purpose.
+
+"Excuse _me_; but I jest wanted to ask if you know this here young
+feller. He's been allowin' to me th't he is--"
+
+"Of course," she said quickly, and stepping forward she gave her hand
+and a welcome to the dazed one. "Please come in; we have been expecting
+you." Then again to the man with the Winchester: "Thank you so much,
+Barto, for showing the gentleman the way to Wartrace Hall."
+
+It was all done so quietly that Blount was still unconsciously holding
+the hand of welcoming while his late captors were riding away down the
+cottonwood-shaded avenue. When he realized what he was doing he was as
+nearly embarrassed as a self-contained young lawyer could well be. But
+his impromptu hostess quickly set him at ease.
+
+"You needn't make any explanations," she hastened to say, smiling up at
+him and gently disengaging the hand which he was only now remembering
+that he had forgotten to relinquish. "Naturally, I inferred that you
+were in trouble, and that your safety depended in some sense upon my
+answer. Were you in trouble?"
+
+Blount perceived immediately how utterly impossible it would be to make
+her, or any one else, understand the boyish impulse which had prompted
+him to leave his train, or the curious difficulty into which the impulse
+had precipitated him. So his explanation scarcely explained.
+
+"I was on my way to a ranch--that is, to the capital--when these men
+held me up," he stammered. "They--they mistook me for some one else, I
+think, and for reasons best known to themselves they brought me here. If
+you could direct me to some place where I can get a night's lodging--"
+
+"There is nothing like a tavern within twenty miles of here," she broke
+in; "nor is there any house within that radius which would refuse you a
+night's shelter, Mr.--"
+
+Blount made a quick dive for his card-case, found it, and hastened to
+introduce himself by name. She took the bit of pasteboard, and, since
+she scarcely glanced at the engraved line on it, he found himself wholly
+unable to interpret her smile.
+
+"The card is hardly necessary," she said; and then, to his complete
+bewilderment: "You are very much like your father, Mr. Blount."
+
+"You know my father?" he exclaimed.
+
+She laughed softly. "Every one knows the senator," she returned, "and I
+can assure you that his son is heartily welcome under this roof. Uncle
+Barnabas"--to the ancient serving-man who was still hovering in the
+background--"have Mr. Blount's horse put up and the blue room made
+ready."
+
+Blount followed his still unnamed hostess obediently when she led the
+way to the lighted library in the wing of the great house.
+
+"Uncle Barnabas will come for you in a little while," she told him,
+playing the part of the gracious lady to the line and letter. "In the
+meantime you must let me make you a cup of tea. I am sure you must be
+needing it after having ridden so far. Take the easy-chair, and we can
+talk comfortably while the kettle is boiling. Are you new to the West,
+Mr. Blount, or is this only a return to your own? The senator is always
+talking about you, you know; but he is so inordinately proud of you that
+he forgets to tell us all the really interesting things that we want to
+know."
+
+The serving-man took his own time about coming back; so long a time that
+Blount forgot that it was past midnight, that he was a guest in a
+strange house, and that he still had not learned the name of his
+entertainer. For all this forgetfulness the little lady with the
+dark-brown eyes was directly responsible. Almost before he realized it,
+Blount found himself chatting with her as if he had always known her,
+making rapid strides on the way to confidence and finding her alertly
+responsive in whatever field the talk happened to fall. Apparently she
+knew the world--his world--better than he knew it himself: she had
+summered on the North Shore and wintered in Washington. She knew Paris,
+and when the conversation touched upon the Italian art-galleries he was
+led to wonder if he had gone through Italy with his eyes shut. At the
+next turn of the talk he was forced to admit that not even Patricia
+herself could speak more intelligently of the English social problem;
+and when it came to the vital questions of the American moment he gasped
+again and wondered if he were awake--if it could be possible that this
+out-of-place Georgian mansion and its charming mistress could be part
+and parcel of the West which had so far outgrown the boyhood memories.
+
+Since all things mundane must have an end, the old butler with the
+white-fringed head came at last to show him the way to his luxurious
+lodgings on the second floor of the mansion. With a touch of hospitality
+which carried Blount back to his one winter in the South, the hostess
+went with him as far as the stair-foot, and her "Good-night" was still
+ringing musically in his ears when the old negro lighted the candles in
+the guest-room, put another stick of wood on the small fire that was
+crackling and snapping cheerfully on the hearth, and bobbed and bowed
+his way to the door. Blount saw his last chance for better information
+vanishing for the night, and once more broke with the traditions.
+
+"Uncle Barnabas, before you go, suppose you tell me where I am," he
+suggested. "Whose house is this?"
+
+The old man stopped on the threshold, chuckling gleefully. "A-ain't you
+know dat, sah?--a-ain't de mistis done tell you dat? You's at Wa'trace
+Hall--Mahsteh Majah's new country-house; yes, sah; dat's whah you
+is--kee-hee!"
+
+"And who is 'Master Major'?" pressed Blount, whose bewilderment grew
+with every fresh attempt to dispel it.
+
+"A-ain't she tell you dat?--kee-hee! Ev'body knows Mahsteh Majah; yes,
+sah. If de mistis ain't tell you, ol' Barnabas ain't gwine to--no, sah.
+Ah'll bring yo'-all's coffee in de mawnin'; yes, sah--good-night,
+sah--kee-hee!" And the door closed silently upon the wrinkled old face
+and the bobbing head.
+
+Having nothing else to do, Blount went to bed, but sleep came
+reluctantly. Life is said to be full of paper walls thinly dividing the
+commonplace from the amazing; and he decided that he had surely burst
+through one of them when he had given place to the vagrant impulse
+prompting him to go horseback-riding when he should have gone
+comfortably to bed in his sleeper to wait for the track-clearing.
+
+Whither had a curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall,"
+and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked
+as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at
+her tongue's end--who had held him so nearly spellbound over the teacups
+that he had entirely lost sight of everything but his hospitable
+welcome?
+
+These and kindred speculations kept him awake for a long time after the
+door had closed behind the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off
+into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar purring of a
+motor-car aroused him. There was a window at his bed's head, and he
+reached over and drew the curtain. The view gave upon the avenue of
+cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach. A touring-car, with its
+powerful head-lights paling the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up
+at the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man, swathed from head to
+heel in a dust-coat, descending from the tonneau.
+
+"I suppose that will be 'Mahsteh Majah,'" he mused sleepily. "That's
+why the little lady was sitting up so late--she was waiting for him."
+Then to the thronging queries threatening to return and keep him awake:
+"Scat!--go away! call it a pipe-dream and let me go to sleep!"
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+AT WARTRACE HALL
+
+
+In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a
+home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.
+
+When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular
+adventures, the sun was shining brightly in at the bed's-head window, a
+cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his father, a little
+heavier, a little grayer, but with the same ruggedly strong face and
+kindly eyes, was standing at his bedside.
+
+"Father!"--and "Evan, boy!" were the simple words of greeting; but the
+mighty hand-grip which went with them was for the younger man a
+confirmation of the filial hope and a heart-warming promise for the
+future. Following instantly, there came a rush of mingled emotions: of
+astoundment that he had recognized no familiar landmark in the midnight
+faring through the hills or on the approach to the home of his
+childhood; of something akin to keen regret that the old had given place
+so thoroughly and completely to the new; of a feeling bordering on
+chagrin that he had been surprised into accepting the hospitable
+advances of a woman whom he had been intending to avoid, and for whom he
+had hitherto cherished--and meant to cherish--a settled aversion.
+
+But at the hand-gripping moment there was no time for a nice weighing of
+emotions. He was in his father's house; the home-coming, some phases of
+which he had vaguely dreaded, was a fact accomplished, and the new
+life--the life which must be lived without Patricia--was fairly begun.
+Also, there were many arrears to be brought up.
+
+"Intuition, on the manward side of it at least, doesn't go," he was
+saying with half-boyish candor. "I was awake last night when you drove
+home in the motor, and I looked out of the window and saw you as you
+came up the steps. According to the psychics, there ought to have been
+some inward stirrings of recognition, but there weren't--not a single
+thrill. Did the little--er--did Mrs. Blount tell you that I was here?"
+
+"She did so; but she couldn't tell me much more. Say, son, how on top of
+earth did you happen to blow in at midnight, with Jack Barto for your
+herd leader?"
+
+"It's a fairy tale, and you won't believe it--of a Blount," was the
+laughing reply. "I left Boston Monday, and should have reached the
+capital last night. But my train was laid out by a yard wreck at Twin
+Buttes just before dark, and I left it and took to the hills--horseback.
+Don't ask me why I did such a thing as that; I can only say that the
+smell of the sage-brush got into my blood and I simply had to do it."
+
+The old cattle-king was standing with his feet planted wide apart and
+his hands deep in his pockets. "You hired a horse!" he chuckled, with
+the humorous wrinkles coming and going at the corners of the kindly
+eyes. "Did you have the nerve to think you were going to climb down from
+a three-legged stool in a Boston law office one day and ride the fifty
+miles from Twin Buttes to the capital the next?"
+
+"Oh, no; I wasn't altogether daft. But knowing where I was, I did think
+I could ride out to Debbleby's. So I hired the bronco and set out--and
+that reminds me: the horse will have to be sent back to the liveryman in
+Twin Buttes, some way."
+
+"Never mind the cayuse. Shackford would have made you a present of it
+outright if you had told him who you were. Go on with your story. It
+listens like a novel."
+
+"I took the general direction all right on leaving Twin Buttes, and kept
+it until I got among the Lost River hogbacks. But after that I was
+pretty successfully lost. I'm ashamed to tell it, but about half of the
+time the moon didn't seem to be in the right place."
+
+"Lost, were you? And Jack Barto found you?" queried the father.
+
+"Barto hadn't lost me to any appreciable extent," was the half-humorous
+emendation. And then: "Who is this ubiquitous Barto who goes around
+playing the hold-up one minute and the good angel the next?"
+
+"He is a sort of general utility man for Hathaway, the head pusher of
+the Twin Buttes Lumber Company. He is supposed to be a timber-cruiser
+and log-sealer, but I reckon he doesn't work very hard at his trade.
+Down in the lower wards of New York they'd call him a boss heeler,
+maybe. But you say 'hold-up'; you don't mean to tell me that Jack Barto
+robbed you, son!"
+
+"Oh, no; he held me up with a gun while his helpers pulled me off the
+bronco and hog-tied me, and then fell to discussing with the other two
+the advisability of knocking me on the head and dropping me into Lost
+River Canyon--that's all. Of course, I knew they had stumbled upon the
+wrong man; and after a while I succeeded in making Barto accept that
+hypothesis; at least, he accepted it sufficiently to bring me here for
+identification. Since he wouldn't talk, and I didn't recognize the trail
+or the place, I hadn't the slightest notion of my whereabouts--not the
+least in the world; didn't know where he was taking me or where I had
+landed when we stopped here."
+
+The big man was leaning against the foot-rail of the bed and frowning
+thoughtfully. "Talked about dropping you into Lost River, did they? H'm.
+I reckon we'll have to look into that a little. Who set them on, son?
+Got any idea of that?"
+
+"I have a very clear idea: it was this man Hathaway you speak of--a big
+ranchman named Griggs told me his name. He came across in the Pullman
+with me from Omaha; middle-aged, tall, and slim, with a hatchet face and
+owlish eyes. Before I learned his name we had talked a bit--killing time
+in the smoking-room. He said he was interested in mines and timber.
+Along toward the last he got the notion into his head that I was a
+special agent of some kind, on a mission for the Bureau of Forestry, and
+I was foolish enough to let him escape with the impression uncorrected."
+
+"That was Pete Hathaway, all right," was the senator's comment. "His
+company has been cutting timber in the Lost River watershed reserves,
+and he probably thought you were aiming to get him. You say he sent
+Barto after you?"
+
+"I'm only guessing at that part of it. When I rode away from Twin Buttes
+he was standing on the porch of the tavern, talking to Barto and two
+others; and I'm pretty sure he pointed me out to them. An hour or so
+later, three horsemen passed me on the mesa, one after another. I
+couldn't see them, but I heard them. It might have been another hour or
+more past that when they potted me."
+
+"You gave them your name?"
+
+"Yes; and that seemed to tangle them a little. Barto said he believed I
+was lying, but, anyway, he'd give me a chance to 'prove up.' Then they
+brought me here, and your--er--Mrs. Blount kindly stepped into the
+breach for me."
+
+"You didn't know Honoria when you saw her?" queried the father.
+
+"No; I wasn't in the least expecting--that is, I--you may remember that
+I had never met her," stammered the young man, who had risen on his
+elbow among the pillows.
+
+The older man walked to the window and stood looking out upon the
+distant mountains for a full minute before he faced about to say: "We
+might as well run the boundary lines on this thing one time as another,
+son. You don't like Honoria; you've made up your mind you're not going
+to let yourself like her. I don't mean to make it hard for either of you
+if I can dodge it. This is her home; but it is also yours, my boy. Do
+you reckon you could--"
+
+Evan Blount made affectionate haste to stop the half-pathetic appeal.
+
+"Don't let that trouble you for a minute," he interposed. "I--Mrs.
+Blount is a very different person from the woman I have been picturing
+her to be; and if she were not, I should still try to believe that we
+are both sufficiently civilized not to quarrel." Then: "Have you
+breakfasted yet--you and Mrs. Blount? But of course you have, long ago."
+
+"Breakfasted?--without you? Not much, son! And that reminds me: I was to
+come up here and see if you were awake, and if you were, I was to send
+Barnabas up with your coffee."
+
+"You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven't acquired the coffee-in-bed
+habit yet," laughed the lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my
+apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be down _pronto_. There;
+doesn't that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush
+idiom? Great land! I haven't heard anybody say _pronto_ since I was
+knee-high to a hop-toad!"
+
+Farther on, when he was no longer in the first lilting flush of the new
+impressions, Evan Blount was able to look back upon that first day at
+Wartrace Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the nature of
+things, it could never be lived over again. In all his forecastings he
+had never pictured a homecoming remotely resembling the fact. In each
+succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the
+years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put
+him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a
+corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single
+small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him
+through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the
+old ranch buildings of the "Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his
+heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the
+picture.
+
+"I've kept it all just as it used to be, Evan," the father said gently.
+"I thought maybe you'd come back some day and be sure-enough
+disappointed if it were gone."
+
+The younger man slipped from his saddle and went to look in at the open
+door of the old ranch-house. Everything was precisely as he remembered
+it: the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed quirts over the
+high wooden mantel, his mother's rocking-chair ... that was the final
+touch; he sat down on the worn door-log and put his face in his hands.
+For now the gaping chasm of the years was quite closed and he was a boy
+again.
+
+Still later in this same first day there were ambling gallops along the
+country roads, and the father explained how the transformation from
+cattle-raising to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about; how the
+great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square
+miles of the fertile mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of
+the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the
+telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.
+
+The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land;
+it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find
+sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds
+me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor
+Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."
+
+"We're all fossils--we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed
+the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State."
+"But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the
+professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all
+he wants to."
+
+"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's
+half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it.
+"Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will
+permit him to be."
+
+The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.
+
+"What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.
+
+"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was
+little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any
+one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career--"
+
+"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges.
+Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie
+yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."
+
+Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and
+when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar"
+ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief
+love-tale, hiding nothing--not even the hope that in the years to come
+Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to
+admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better
+after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should
+tell some one; and who better?
+
+David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son
+had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to
+the aging years.
+
+"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling
+saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.
+
+"So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me
+realize that I couldn't hold my own against the 'career,'" was the young
+man's answer. Then he added: "I want work, father--that is what I am out
+here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I
+can put my heart into. Can you find it for me?"
+
+There was the wisdom of the centuries in the gentle smile provoked by
+this unashamed disappointed lover's appeal.
+
+"I wouldn't take it too hard--the career business--if I were you, son,"
+said the wise man. "And as for the work, I reckon we can satisfy you, if
+your appetite isn't too whaling big. How would a State office of some
+kind suit you?"
+
+"Politics?" queried Blount, bringing his horse down to the walk for
+which his father had set the example. "I've thought a good bit about
+that, though I haven't had any special training that way. The schools of
+to-day are turning out business lawyers--men who know the commercial and
+industrial codes and are trained particularly in their application to
+the great business undertakings. That has been my ambition: to be a
+business adviser, and, perhaps, after a while to climb to the top of the
+ladder and be somebody's corporation counsel."
+
+"But now you have changed your notion?"
+
+"I don't know; sometimes I wonder if I haven't. There is another field
+that is exceedingly attractive to me, and you have just named it. No man
+can study the politics of America to-day without seeing the crying need
+for good men: men who will not let the big income they could command in
+private undertakings weigh against pure patriotism and a plain duty to
+their country and their fellow-men; strong men who would administer the
+affairs of the State or the nation absolutely without fear or favor; men
+who will hew to the line under any and all conditions. There's an awful
+dearth of that kind of material in our Government."
+
+A quaint smile was playing under the drooping mustaches of that veteran
+politician the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.
+
+"I reckon we do need a few men like that, Evan; need 'em mighty bad.
+Think you could fill the bill as one of them if you had a right good
+chance?"
+
+The potential hewer of political chips which should lie as they might
+fall smiled at what seemed to be merely an expression of parental
+favoritism.
+
+"I'm not likely to get the chance very soon," he returned. "Just at
+present, you know, I am still a legal resident of the good old
+Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a member of its bar--eligible to
+office there, and nowhere else."
+
+"You'd be a citizen of this State by the time you could get elected to
+an office in it," suggested the senator gravely.
+
+"I know; the required term of residence here is ridiculously short. But
+you are forgetting that I am as completely unknown in the sage-brush
+hills as you are well known. I couldn't get a nomination for the office
+of pound-keeper."
+
+David Blount was chuckling softly as he threw up the brim of the big
+sombrero he was wearing.
+
+"Sounds right funny to hear you talking that way, son," he commented.
+"Mighty near everybody this side of the Bad Lands will tell you that the
+slate hangs up behind the door at Wartrace Hall; and I don't know but
+what some people would say that old Sage-Brush Dave himself does most of
+the writing on it. Anyhow, there is one place on it that is still
+needing a name, and I reckon your name would fit it as well as
+anybody's."
+
+The young man who was so lately out of the well-balanced East was
+astounded.
+
+"Heavens!" he ejaculated. "You're not considering me as a possibility on
+the State ticket before I've been twenty-four hours inside of the State
+lines, are you?"
+
+"No; not exactly as a possibility, son; that isn't quite the word. We'll
+call it a sure thing, if you want it. It's this way: we're needing a
+sort of political house-cleaning right bad this year. We have good
+enough laws, but they're winked at any day in the week when somebody
+comes along with a fistful of yellow-backs. The fight is on between the
+people of this State and the corporations; it was begun two years ago,
+and the people got the laws all right, but they forgot to elect men who
+would carry them out. This time it looks as if the voters had got their
+knives sharpened. We've been a little slow catching step maybe, but the
+marching orders have gone out. We're aiming to clean house, and do it
+right, this fall."
+
+"Not if the slate hangs behind your door--or any man's, father," was the
+theorist's sober reminder. "Reform doesn't come in by that road."
+
+"Hold on, boy; steady-go-easy's the word. Reform comes in by any old
+trail it can find, mostly, and thanks its lucky stars if it doesn't run
+up against any bridges washed out or any mud-holes too deep to ford.
+We've got a good man for governor right now; not any too broad maybe,
+but good--church good. Nobody has ever said he'd take a bribe; but he
+isn't heavy enough to sit on the lid and hold it down. Alec Gordon, the
+man who is going to succeed him next fall, is all the different kinds of
+things that the present governor isn't, so that is fixed."
+
+"How 'fixed'?" queried the younger man, who, though he was not from
+Missouri, was beginning to fear that he would constantly have to be
+shown.
+
+"In the same way that everything has to be fixed if we are going to get
+results," was the calm reply. "After the governor, the man upon whom the
+most depends is the attorney-general. The fellow who is in now,
+Dortscher, is one of the candidates, but we've crossed his name off. The
+next man we considered was Jim Rankin. In some ways he's fit; he's a
+hard fighter, and the man doesn't live who can bluff him. But Jim's
+poor, and he wants mighty bad to be rich, so I reckon that lets him
+out."
+
+All of this was directly subversive of Evan Blount's ideas touching the
+manner in which the political affairs of a free country should be
+conducted, but he was willing to hear more.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"What we want this time is one of your hew-to-the-line fellows, son.
+Reckon you'd like to try it?"
+
+The young man who was less than a week away from the atmosphere of the
+idealistic school and its theories was frankly aghast. That his father
+should be coolly proposing him for a high office in the State in which,
+notwithstanding the birthright, he was as new as the newest immigrant,
+seemed blankly incredible. But when the incredibility began to subside,
+the despotism of the machine methods which could propose and carry out
+such unheard-of things loomed maleficent.
+
+"I'm afraid we are a good many miles apart in this matter of politics,"
+he said, when the proposal had been given time to sink in. "America is
+supposed to be a free country, with a representative government elected
+by the suffrages of the people; do you mean to say that you and a few of
+your friends ignore the basic principles of democracy to such an extent
+that you nominate and elect anybody you please to any office in the
+State?"
+
+The far-seeing eyes of the veteran were twinkling again.
+
+"Oh, I don't know about our being so far apart," was the deprecatory
+protest. "You're just a little bit long on theory, that's all, son. When
+it comes down to the real thing--practical politics, as some folks call
+it--somebody has to head the stampede and turn it. And if we don't do it
+this coming fall, the other bunch will."
+
+"What other bunch?"
+
+"In this case it's the corporations: the timber people, the irrigation
+companies, and, most of all, the railroad."
+
+"Gantry seems to think that the railroads--or his railroad, at
+least--are persecuted."
+
+The senator pulled his horse down to a still slower walk. "Where did you
+see Dick Gantry?" he demanded.
+
+Evan told of the meeting on the veranda of the Winnebasset Club, adding
+the further fact of the college friendship.
+
+"Just happened so, did it?" queried the older man, "that getting
+together last Saturday night?"
+
+"Why--yes, I suppose so. Dick knew I was in Boston, and he said he had
+meant to look me up."
+
+"I reckon he did," was the quiet comment; "yes, I reckon he did. And he
+filled you up plumb full of Hardwick McVickar's notions, _of_ course. I
+reckon that's about what he was told to do. But we won't fall apart on
+that, son. To-morrow we'll run down to the city, and you can look the
+ground over for yourself. I want you to draw your own conclusions, and
+then come and tell me what you'd like to do. Shall we leave it that
+way?"
+
+Evan Blount acquiesced, quite without prejudice, to a firm conviction
+that his opinion, when formed, was going to be based on the larger
+merits of the case, upon a fair and judicial summing-up of the pros and
+cons--all of them. He felt that it would be a blow struck at the very
+root of the tree of good government if he should consent to be the
+candidate of the machine. But, on the other hand, he saw instantly what
+a power a fearless public prosecutor could be in a misguided
+commonwealth where the lack was not of good laws, but of men strong
+enough and courageous enough to administer them. He would see: if the
+good to be accomplished were great enough to over-balance the evil ...
+it was a temptation to compromise--a sharp temptation; and he found
+himself longing for Patricia, for her clear-sighted comment which, he
+felt sure, would go straight to the heart of the tangle.
+
+It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for her, that made him
+absent-minded at the Wartrace Hall dinner-table that evening; and the
+father, looking on, suspected that Evan's taciturnity was an expression
+of his prejudice against the woman who had taken his mother's place.
+After dinner, when the son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his
+room, the senator's suspicion became a belief.
+
+"You'll have to be right patient with the boy, little woman," he said to
+the small person whom Gantry had described as the court of last resort;
+this when Evan had disappeared and the long-stemmed pipe was alight. "I
+shouldn't wonder if Boston had put some mighty queer notions into his
+head."
+
+The little lady looked up from her embroidery frame and a quaint smile
+was twitching at the corners of the pretty mouth. "He is a dear boy, and
+he is trying awfully hard to hate me," she said. "But I sha'n't let him,
+David."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS
+
+
+From the time when it was heralded in the mammoth New Year's edition of
+_The Plainsman_ as "the newest, the finest, and the most luxurious
+hostelry west of the Missouri River," the Inter-Mountain Hotel, in the
+Sage-brush capital, had been the acceptable gathering-place of the
+clans, industrial, promoting, or political.
+
+Anticipating this patronage, Clarkson, its bonanza-king builder and
+owner, had amended the architect's plans to make them include a
+convention-hall, committee-rooms, and a complete floor of suites with
+private dining-rooms. Past this, the amended plans doubled the floor
+space of the lobby--debating-ground dear to the heart of the country
+delegate--and particular pains had been taken to make this semi-public
+forum, where the burning question of the moment could be caucussed and
+the shaky partisan resworn to fealty, attractive and home-like; the
+plainly tiled floor, leather-covered lounging-chairs, and numerous and
+convenient cuspidors lending an air of democratic comfort which was
+somehow missing in the resplendent, bemirrored, onyx-plated bar,
+blazing with its cut glass and polished mahogany.
+
+After the solid costliness of Wartrace Hall and the thirty-mile spin in
+a high-powered gentleman's roadster, which was only one of the three
+high-priced motor-carriages in the Wartrace garage, Evan Blount was not
+surprised to learn that his father was registered in permanence for one
+of the private dining-room suites at the Inter-Mountain. It was amply
+evident that the simple life which had been the rule of the "Circle-Bar"
+ranch household had become a thing of the past; and though he charged
+the new order of things to the ambition of his father's wife, he could
+hardly cavil at it, since he was himself a sharer in the comforts and
+luxuries.
+
+For the first few days after the father and son had gone into bachelor
+quarters at the Inter-Mountain, the returned exile was left almost
+wholly to his own devices. Beyond giving him a good many introductions,
+as the opportunities for them offered in the stirring life of the hotel,
+his father made few demands upon him, and they were together only at
+luncheon and dinner, the midday meal being usually served in their
+suite, while for the dinner they met by appointment in the hotel _cafe_.
+
+Notwithstanding this hospitable neglect on the part of his father, Evan
+Blount suffered no lack of the social opportunities. Gantry was back,
+and, in addition to a most ready availability as a social sponsor, the
+traffic manager was both able and willing. Almost before he had time to
+realize it, Blount had been put in touch with the busy, breezy life of
+the Western city, was exchanging nods or hand-shakings with more people
+than he had ever known in Cambridge or Boston, and was receiving more
+invitations than he could possibly accept.
+
+"Pretty good old town, isn't it?" laughed Gantry one day, when he had
+tolled Blount away from the Inter-Mountain luncheon to share a table
+with him in the Railway Club. "Getting so you feel a little more at home
+with us?"
+
+"If I'm not, it isn't your fault, Dick, or the fault of your friends.
+Naturally, I expected some sort of a welcome as ex-Senator David
+Blount's son; but that doesn't seem to cut any figure at all."
+
+Gantry's smile was inscrutable.
+
+"The people with whom it cuts the largest figure will never let you know
+anything about it. Just the same, your sonship is cutting a good bit of
+ice, if you care to know it. I've met a number of men in the past few
+days who have discovered that you are just about the brainiest thing
+that ever escaped from the effete East and the law schools."
+
+"Tommy-rot!" derided the brainy one.
+
+"It's a fact. And they are prophesying all sorts of a roseate and
+iridescent future for you. One might almost imagine that the prophets
+are inspired by that kind of gratitude which is a lively sense of favors
+to come."
+
+"Oh, piffle! You know that is all nonsense!"
+
+"Is it?" queried the railroad man, stressing the first word meaningly.
+Then, shifting the point of attack: "You're mighty innocent, aren't
+you, old man? But I think you might have told me. Goodness knows, I'm as
+safe as a brick wall."
+
+"Might have told you what?"
+
+"That you are going to run for attorney-general against Dortscher."
+
+"I couldn't very well tell you what I didn't know myself, Dick," was the
+sober reply. "Who has been romancing to you?"
+
+"It's all over town. Everybody's talking about it--talking a lot and
+guessing a good deal more. You've got 'em running around in circles and
+uttering loud and plaintive cries, especially Jim Rankin, who had--or
+thought he had--a lead-pipe cinch on the job. Dortscher is tickled half
+to death. He knew he wasn't going to be allowed to succeed himself, and
+he hates Rankin worse than poison."
+
+Blount was balancing the spoon on the edge of his coffee-cup and
+scowling abstractedly. It was the first little discord in the filial
+harmony--this evidence that the powers were at work; almost a breach of
+confidence. There was no avoiding the distasteful conclusion. Without
+consulting his wishes, without waiting for his decision, his father had
+publicly committed him--taken "snap judgment" upon him was the way he
+phrased it.
+
+"Dick, will you believe me if I say that I haven't authorized any such
+talk as this you've been hearing?" he asked, looking up quickly.
+
+This time Gantry's smile was a grin of complete intelligence.
+
+"Oh, that's the way of it, eh? The Honorable Senator took it out of
+your hands, did he? You'll understand that I'm not casting any
+aspersions when I say that it's exactly like him. If he has slated you,
+you are booked to run; and if he runs you, you'll be elected. Those are
+two of the things that practically speak right out and say themselves
+here in the old Sage-brush State."
+
+Blount was indignant--justly indignant, he persuaded himself.
+
+"If that is the case, Gantry, it is high time that some one should have
+nerve enough to break the charm. I haven't said that I would accept the
+nomination if it were tendered me, and I am not at all sure that I am
+going to say it. And if I don't say it, by all that's good and great,
+that settles it!"
+
+Gantry was plainly shocked. "You're not trying to make me believe that
+you've got nerve enough to buck the old m--your father, I mean? Why,
+great cats, Evan! you don't know what that stands for in the greasewood
+hills!"
+
+"And I don't care, Dick. Up to this present moment I am a free moral
+agent; I haven't surrendered any right of decision to my father, or to
+any one else, so far as I am aware."
+
+Gantry's eyes dropped to his plate, and his rejoinder was not wholly
+free from guile.
+
+"Will you authorize me to contradict the talk as I can?" he asked,
+without looking up.
+
+Blount was still warm enough to be peremptory.
+
+"Yes, you may contradict it. You may say that it is entirely
+unauthorized--that I have told you so myself." Then he remembered the
+claims of friendship. "I'll be frank with you, Dick; this thing has been
+mentioned to me once, but nothing was decided--absolutely nothing. I
+didn't even promise to take it under advisement."
+
+Among those who knew him only externally, Mr. Richard Gantry had the
+reputation of owning a loose tongue. But none recognized more justly
+than the real Richard Gantry the precise instant at which to bridle the
+loose tongue or when to make it wag away from the subject which has
+reached its nicely calculated climax. While the flush of irritation was
+still making him ashamed that he had shown so much warmth, Blount found
+himself gossiping with his table companion over a social function two
+days old; and subsequently, when the waiter brought the cigars, Gantry
+was congratulating himself that the danger-point, if any there were, was
+safely past.
+
+It was after the club luncheon, and while the two young men were on
+their way to the smoking-room, that some one on business bent stopped
+Gantry in the corridor. Blount strolled on by himself, and, finding the
+smoking-room unoccupied, went to lounge in a lazy-chair standing in a
+little alcove lined with bookcases and half screened by the racks of the
+newspaper files. Notwithstanding the successful topic changing at table,
+he was still brooding over the false position in which his father's
+plans had placed him; wherefore he craved solitude and a chance to think
+things over fairly and without heat.
+
+Shortly afterward Gantry looked in, and, apparently missing the
+half-concealed easy-chair and its occupant in the bookcase alcove, went
+his way. He had scarcely had time to get out of the building, one would
+say, before two men entered the smoking-room, coming down the corridor
+from the grill. Blount saw them, and he made sure that they saw him. But
+when they had taken chairs on the other side of the sheltering newspaper
+files he was suddenly assured that they had not seen him. They were
+talking quite freely of him and of his father.
+
+"Well, the Honorable Dave has got McVickar dead to rights this time,"
+remarked the older of the two, a hard-featured, round-bodied real-estate
+promoter to whom Blount had been introduced on his first day in the
+capital, but whose name he could not now recall. "This scheme of the
+senator's for shoving his son into the race for the attorney-generalship
+is just about the foxiest thing he has ever put across. You can bet the
+air was blue in the Transcontinental Chicago offices when the news got
+there."
+
+"What do you suppose McVickar will do?" asked the other.
+
+"He will do anything the senator wants him to--he's got to. Blount is
+land hungry, and I guess he'll take a few more sections of the railroad
+mesa-land under the Clearwater ditch. That was what he did two years ago
+when McVickar wanted the right of way for the branch through Carnadine
+County."
+
+"Don't you believe he's going to take any little Christmas gift this
+time!" was the rasping reply. "He'll sell the railroad something, and
+take good hard money for it. It's a cinch. The railroad can't afford to
+have the courts against it, and McVickar will be made to sweat blood
+this heat. You watch the wheels go round when McVickar comes out here."
+
+Evan Blount found himself growing strangely sick and faint. Could it be
+his father whom they were thus calmly accusing of graft and trickery and
+blackmailing methods too despicable to be imagined? His first impulse
+was to confront the two; to demand proofs; to do and say what a loyal
+son should. But the crushing conviction that they were discussing only
+well-known and well-assured facts unnerved him; and after that he was
+anxious for only one thing--that they might finish their cigars and go
+away without discovering him.
+
+Fate was kind to him thus far. After a little further talk, in which the
+accepted point of view of the on looker at the great game was made still
+more painfully evident for the unwilling listener, the men went away.
+For a long time after they had gone, Blount sat crumpled in the depths
+of the big chair, chewing his extinct cigar and staring absently at the
+row of books on a level with his eyes in the opposite case.
+
+One clear thought, and one only, came out of the sorrowful confusion:
+not for any inducement that could now be offered would he lend himself
+to the furtherance of his father's plans. Beyond this he did not reason
+in the miserable hour wrought out in the quiet of the club smoking-room.
+But when he got up to go, another prompting was forcing its way to the
+surface--a prompting to throw himself boldly into the scale against
+graft and chicanery; to redeem at any cost, and by whatsoever means
+might offer, the good old name which had been so shamefully dragged in
+the mire.
+
+He did not know just how it was to be done, but he told himself that he
+would find a way. That the path would be full of thorns he could not
+doubt, since every step in it would widen the breach which must be
+opened between his father and himself. Possibly it might lead him to the
+bar of justice as that father's accuser, but even in that hard case he
+must not falter. He said to himself, in a fresh access of passionate
+determination, that though he might have to blush for his father,
+Patricia should not be made ashamed for her lover.
+
+Upon leaving the club, he paused long enough to remember that he was in
+no fit frame of mind to risk an immediate meeting with his father. To
+make even a chance meeting impossible, he crossed the street, and,
+passing through the Capitol grounds, strolled aimlessly out one of the
+residence avenues until he came to the open country beyond the suburbs.
+
+It was quite late in the afternoon when he re-entered the city by
+another street and boarded a trolley car for the down-town centre. The
+long afternoon tramp, and the conclusions it had bred, made it
+imperative for him to see Gantry before the traffic manager should
+leave his office for the day. His business with the railroad man was
+purely personal. He meant to ask Gantry a few pointed questions
+requiring such answers as friendship may demand. If Gantry's replies
+were such as he feared they would be, he would seek his father and come
+at once to a plain understanding with him.
+
+The trolley car dropped him within a square of the railway station, on
+the second floor of which Gantry had his business office. The shortest
+way to the Sierra Avenue end of the station building was through the
+great train-shed. Half-way up the platform Blount met the west-bound
+Overland steaming in from the eastern yards. At the Sierra Avenue
+crossing the yard crew was cutting off a private car. Blount saw the
+number on the medallion, "008," and noted half absently the rich
+window-hangings and the polished brass platform railings. A car
+inspector in greasy overalls and jumper was tapping the wheels with his
+long-handled hammer.
+
+"Whose car is this?" asked Blount.
+
+"'Tis Misther McVickar's, sorr--the vice-prisidint av the coompany,"
+said the man.
+
+Blount turned away, saying something which the hammer-man mistook for a
+word of thanks. So the vice-president had come, hastening upon the wing
+of occasions, it seemed. And in the light of the overheard conversation
+in the club smoking-room, it was only too easy to guess his errand in
+the Sage-brush capital. He had come to make such terms as he could with
+the man who was going to hold him up.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A BATTLE ROYAL
+
+
+Having already convinced himself that the time was ripe for a
+straightforward declaration of principles, Evan Blount saw in the
+arrival of the Overland, with the vice-president's private car attached,
+only an added argument for haste.
+
+During the better part of the long tramp in the outskirts of the city he
+had been halting between two opinions. The fighting blood of the
+Tennessee pioneer strain had clamored for its hearing, prompting him to
+enter the lists, to set up the standard of honesty and fair-dealing in
+the Blount name, to plunge into the approaching political campaign with
+a single purpose--the purpose of overthrowing the power of the machine
+in his native State. On the other hand, filial affection had pleaded
+eloquently. The battle for political honesty would inevitably involve
+his father; would, if successful, defeat and disgrace him. As often as
+he thought he had closed decisively with the idealistic determination,
+the other side of the argument sprang up again, keen-edged and biting.
+Up to the present moment he had owed his father everything--was still
+owing him day by day. Would it not be the part of a son to drop out
+quietly, leaving the political house-cleaning for some one who would not
+be obliged to pay such a costly price?
+
+It was the idealistic decision which had been in the saddle when he
+dropped from the trolley car at the western portal of the railway
+station, and which was sending him to seek the scale-turning interview
+with Gantry. But, after all, it was chance and the swift current of
+events which seized upon him and swept him along, smashing all the
+arguments and fine-spun theories. Before he had gone ten steps in the
+direction of Gantry's office, some one in the throng of debarking
+Overland travellers called his name. Turning quickly, he found himself
+face to face with a white-haired little gentleman who had plucked
+impatiently at his sleeve.
+
+"Why, bless my soul! Of all the lucky miracles!" gasped the young man
+who, but an instant earlier, had been deaf and blind to all external
+things. And then: "Where is Patricia?"
+
+"She's here, somewhere," snapped the little gentleman irascibly. "I've
+lost her in this confounded mob. Find her for me. I've got my
+reading-glasses on, and I can't see anything. Why don't they have this
+barn of a place lighted up?"
+
+"Stand still right where you are," Blount directed, and a moment later
+he had found Patricia guarding a pair of suit-cases which were too heavy
+for her to carry.
+
+"You poor lost child!" was his burbled greeting.
+
+"You don't mean to tell me that _this_ is the West to which you said
+you were coming?"
+
+"I'm not lost; I'm here. It's father who is lost," she laughed. Then she
+answered his question; "Yes, this is the West I meant, and if you
+haven't been telling the truth about it--"
+
+Blount had snatched up the two hand-bags and had effected a reunion of
+the scattered pair. The little gentleman, standing immovable, as he had
+been told to do, was blinking impatiently through his reading-glasses at
+the surging throng. When Blount came up, the professor stabbed him with
+a sharp forefinger.
+
+"Well, we're here, young man," he barked. "If you've been telling me
+fibs about those Megalosauridae which you said could be dug out of your
+sage-brush hills, you'll pay our fare back home again--just make up your
+mind to that. Now show us the best hotel in this mushroom city of yours,
+and do it quickly."
+
+Having a hospitable thing to do, Blount shoved his problem into a still
+more remote background and bestirred himself generously. Though the
+Inter-Mountain was only three squares distant, he chartered the
+best-looking auto he could find in the rank of waiting vehicles, put his
+charges into it, and went with them to do the honors at the hotel. By
+this postponement of the visit to Gantry he missed a meeting which would
+have done something toward solving a part of his problem. But for the
+hospitable turning aside he might have reached the railroad office in
+time to see a round-bodied man halting at the open door of Gantry's
+private room for a parting word with the traffic manager.
+
+"Oh, yes; he fell for it, all right," was the form the parting word
+took. "If you had seen his face when Lackner and I came away, you'd have
+said there was battle, murder, and sudden death in it for somebody."
+
+"But, see here, Bradbury," Gantry held his visitor to say, "it wasn't in
+the game that you were to fill him up with a lot of lies. I won't stand
+for that, you know. He is too good a fellow, and too good a friend of
+mine."
+
+It was at this conjuncture that Blount, if he had been present and
+invisible, would have seen a sour smile wrinkling upon the face of the
+club gossip.
+
+"I owe the senator one or two on my own account, Gantry. But it wasn't
+necessary to go out of the beaten path. If young Blount or his daddy
+would like to sue us for libel, we could prove every word that was
+said--or prove that it was common report; too common to be doubted. And
+it got the young fellow; got him right in the solar plexus. If you don't
+see some fireworks within the next few days, I miss my guess and lose my
+ante."
+
+This is what Evan Blount, carrying out his intention of going to Gantry,
+might have seen and heard. On the other hand, if he had lingered a few
+minutes longer on the station platform he could scarcely have failed to
+mark the side-tracking of private car "008," and he might have seen the
+herculean figure of the vice-president crossing to the carriage-stand
+to climb heavily into a waiting automobile.
+
+Mr. McVickar's order to the chauffeur was curtly brief, and a little
+later the vice-president entered the lobby of the Inter-Mountain and
+shot a brisk question at the room-clerk.
+
+"Is Senator Blount in his rooms?"
+
+"I think not. He was here a few minutes ago. I'll send a boy to hunt him
+up for you. You want your usual suite, I suppose, Mr. McVickar?"
+
+"No; I'm not stopping overnight. Is young Blount here in the hotel?"
+
+"He has just gone up to the fifth floor with some friends of his--Mr.
+Anners and his daughter, from Boston. Shall I hold him for you when he
+comes down?"
+
+"No; I want to see the senator. Hustle out another boy or two. I can't
+wait all night."
+
+It was at this moment that Evan Blount, bearing luggage-checks and going
+in search of the house baggageman, missed another incident which might
+have drawn him back suddenly to his problem and its unsettled condition.
+The incident was the meeting between his father and the railroad
+vice-president at the room-clerk's counter. It was neither hostile nor
+friendly; on McVickar's part it was gruffly business-like.
+
+"Well, Senator, I'm here," was the follow-up of the perfunctory
+hand-shake. "Let's find a place where we can flail it out," and together
+the two entered an elevator.
+
+Reaching the floor of the private dining-room suites, the
+ex-cattle-king led the way in silence to his own apartments; rather let
+us say he pointed the way, since in the march down the long corridor the
+two field commanders tramped evenly abreast as if neither would give the
+other the advantage of an inch of precedence. In the sitting-room of the
+private suite the senator snapped the latch on the door, and pressed the
+wall-button for the electric lights. McVickar dragged a chair over to
+one of the windows commanding a view of the busy street, and dropping
+solidly into it, like a man bracing himself for a fight, began abruptly:
+
+"I suppose we may as well cut out the preliminaries and come to the
+point at once, Blount. Ackerton wired me that you had definitely
+announced your son as a candidate for the attorney-generalship. Have
+you?"
+
+The senator had found an unopened box of cigars in a cabinet and he was
+inserting the blade of his pocket-knife under the lid when he said, with
+good-natured irony: "The primaries do the nominating in this State,
+Hardwick. Didn't you know that?"
+
+"See here, Blount; I've come half-way across the continent to thresh
+this thing out with you, face to face, and I'm not in the humor to spar
+for an opening. Do you mean to run your son or not? That is a plain
+question, and I'd like to have an equally plain answer."
+
+"I told you two weeks ago what you might expect if you insisted on
+sticking your crow-bar in among the wheels this fall, McVickar, but you
+wouldn't believe me. I'll say it again if you want to hear it."
+
+"And I told you two weeks ago that we couldn't stand for any such
+programme as the one you had mapped out. And I added that you might name
+your own price for an alternative which wouldn't confiscate us and drive
+us off the face of the earth."
+
+"Yes; and I named the price, if you happen to remember."
+
+"I know; you said you wanted us to turn everything over to the
+Paramounters and take our chances on a clean administration. Naturally,
+we're not going to do any such Utopian thing as that. What I want to
+know now is what it is going to cost us to do the practical and possible
+thing."
+
+"Want to buy me outright this time, do you, Hardwick?" said the boss,
+still smiling.
+
+"We"--McVickar was going to say--"We have bought you before," but he
+changed the retort to a less offensive phrasing--"We have had no
+difficulty heretofore in arriving at some practical and sensible _modus
+vivendi_, and we shouldn't have now. But as a condition binding upon any
+sort of an arrangement, I am here to say that we can't let you nominate
+and elect your son as attorney-general; that's out of the question. If
+it's going to prove a personal disappointment to you, we'll be
+reasonable and try to make it up to you in some other way."
+
+Again the grimly humorous smile was twinkling in the gray eyes of the
+old cattleman. "What is the market quotation on disappointments, right
+now, Hardwick?" he inquired.
+
+With another man McVickar might have been too diplomatic to show signs
+of a shortening temper. But David Blount was an open-eyed enemy of long
+standing.
+
+"I don't know anybody west of the Missouri River who has a better idea
+of market values than you have," the vice-president countered smartly.
+Then, dropping a heavy hand upon the arm of his chair: "This thing has
+got to be settled here and now, Blount. If you put your son in as public
+prosecutor, you can have but one object in view--you mean to squeeze us
+till the blood runs. We are willing to discount that object before the
+fact!"
+
+"So you have said before, a number of times and in a whole heap of
+different ways. It's getting sort of monotonous, don't you think?"
+
+"I sha'n't say it many more times, David; you are pushing me too far and
+too hard."
+
+"All right; what will you say, then?"
+
+"Just this: if you won't meet me half-way--if you insist upon a
+fight--I'll fight you with any weapons I can get hold of!"
+
+Once more the quiet smile played about the outer angles of the
+hereditary Blount eyes.
+
+"You've said that in other campaigns, Hardwick; in the end you've always
+been like the 'possum that offered to come down out of the tree if the
+man wouldn't shoot."
+
+"I'll hand you another proverb to go with that one," snapped the man in
+the arm-chair: "The pitcher that goes once too often to the well is sure
+to be broken. You've got a joint in your armor now, Blount. You've
+always been able to snap your fingers at public opinion before this; can
+you afford to do it now?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know; I reckon I'll have to grin and bear it if you want to
+buy up a few newspapers and set them to blacklisting me, as you usually
+do," was the half-quizzical reply. Then: "I'm pretty well used to it by
+this time. You and your folks can't paint me much blacker than you have
+always painted me, Hardwick."
+
+"Maybe not. But this time we're going to give you a chance to start a
+few libel suits--if you think you can afford to appear in the courts.
+We've got plenty of evidence, and by heavens we'll produce it! You put
+your son in as public prosecutor and we might be tempted to make your
+own State too hot to hold you. Had you thought of that?"
+
+"Go ahead and try it," was the laconic response.
+
+"But that isn't all," the railroad dictator went on remorselessly. "Your
+fellow citizens here know you for exactly what you are, Blount. You rule
+them with a rod of iron, but that rule can be broken. When it is broken,
+you'll be hounded as a criminal. In our last talk together you had
+something to say to me about our not keeping up with the change in
+public sentiment; public sentiment _has_ changed; changed so far that it
+is coming to demand the punishment of the great offenders as well as the
+jailing of the little ones. If we want to push this fight hard enough,
+it is not impossible that you might find yourself in a hard row of
+stumps at the end of it, David."
+
+"I'm taking all those chances," was the even-toned rejoinder of the man
+who was to be shown up.
+
+"But there is one chance I'm sure you haven't considered," McVickar went
+on aggressively. "This son of yours; I know as much about him as you
+do--more, perhaps, for I have taken more pains to keep tab on him for
+the past few years than you have. He is clean and straight, Blount; a
+son for any father to be proud of. If that is the real reason why we
+don't want to have him instructing the grand juries of this State, it is
+also your best reason for wanting to keep the past decently under cover.
+What will you say to him when the newspapers open up on you? And what
+will he say to you? And suppose you get him in, and we should show you
+up so that you'd be dragged into court with your own son for the
+prosecutor? How does that strike you?"
+
+For the first time since the opening of the one-sided conference the
+senator laid his cigar aside and sat thoughtfully tugging at the
+drooping mustaches.
+
+"You'd set the house afire over my head, would you, Hardwick?" he
+queried, with the gray eyes lighting up as with a glow of smouldering
+embers. "The last time we talked you'll remember that you posted your
+'de-fi'; now I'll post mine. You go ahead and do your damnedest! The boy
+and I will try to see to it that you don't have all the fun. I won't
+say that you mightn't turn him if you went at it right; but you won't go
+at it right, and as matters stand now--well, blood is thicker than
+water, Hardwick, and if you hit me you hit him. I reckon, between us,
+we'll make out to give you as good as you send. That's all"--he rose to
+lean heavily upon the table--"all but one thing: you fight fair,
+Hardwick; say anything you like about me and I'll stand for it; but if
+that boy has anything in his past that I don't know about--any little
+fool trick that he wouldn't want to see published--you let it alone and
+keep your damned newspaper hounds off of it!"
+
+The vice-president, being of those who regain equanimity in exact
+proportion as an opponent loses it, chuckled grimly; was still chuckling
+when an interrupting tap came at the locked door. Blount got up and
+turned the latch to admit an office-boy wearing the uniform of the
+railroad headquarters. "Note for Mr. McVickar," said the messenger; and
+at a gesture from the senator he crossed the room to deliver it.
+
+For a full half-minute after the boy had gone, the vice-president sat
+poring over the pencilled scrawl, which was all that the sealed envelope
+yielded. The note was lacking both date-line and signature, though the
+clerks in Richard Gantry's office were familiar enough with the
+hieroglyph that appeared at the bottom of the sheet. In his own good
+time the vice-president folded the bit of paper and thrust it into his
+pocket. Then he resumed the talk at the precise point at which it had
+been broken off.
+
+"You needn't let the boy's record trouble you," he averred. "As I said a
+few minutes ago, it's as clean as a hound's tooth. That is one of the
+things I'm banking on, David. If you don't look out, I'm going to have
+that young fellow fighting on our side before we're through."
+
+At this the light in the gray eyes flamed fiercely, and the
+ex-cattle-king took the two strides needful to place him before
+McVickar.
+
+"Don't you try that, McVickar; I give you fair warning!" he grated, his
+deep-toned voice rumbling like the burr of grinding wheels. "There's
+only one way you could do it, and--"
+
+The vice-president stood up and reached for his hat.
+
+"And you'll take precious good care that I don't get a chance to try
+that way, you were going to say. All right, David; you tell me to do my
+damnedest, and I'll hand _that_ back to you, too. You do the same, and
+we'll see who comes out ahead."
+
+The vice-president caught an elevator at the end of his leisurely
+progress down the corridor, and had himself lowered to the lobby. The
+electric lights were glowing, and the great gathering-place was
+beginning to take on its evening stir. Mr. Hardwick McVickar pushed his
+way to the desk, and a row of lately arrived guests waited while he
+asked his question.
+
+"Where shall I be most likely to find Mr. Evan Blount at this time of
+day?" he demanded; and the obliging clerk made the guest-line wait still
+longer while he summoned a bell-boy and sent him scurrying over to one
+of the writing-tables.
+
+"This is Mr. Evan Blount," said the clerk, indicating the young man who
+came up with the returning bell-boy. "Mr. Blount, this is Mr. Hardwick
+McVickar, first vice-president of the Transcontinental Railway Company."
+
+There was no trace of the recent battle in Mr. McVickar's voice or
+manner when he shook hands cordially with the son of the man who had so
+lately defied him.
+
+"Your father and I were just now holding a little conference over your
+future prospects, Mr. Blount," he said, going straight to his point.
+"Suppose you come down to the car with me for a private talk on legal
+matters. I'm inclined to think that we shall wish to retain you in a
+cause which is coming up in September. Gantry tells me that you are
+pretty well up in corporation law. Can you spare me a half-hour or so?"
+
+Evan Blount glanced at the big clock over the clerk's head. Patricia had
+told him that she and her father would dine in the _cafe_ at seven, and
+that there would be a place at their table for him--and another for his
+father, if the ex-senator would so far honor a poor college professor.
+There was an hour to spare; and if the vice-president of the
+Transcontinental was not the king, he was at least a great man, and one
+whose invitation was in some sense a royal command.
+
+"Certainly, I'll be glad to go with you," was Blount's acquiescent
+rejoinder. So much the registry-clerk heard; and he saw, between jabs
+with his pen, the straight path to the revolving doors of the portal
+ploughed by the big man with young Blount at his elbow.
+
+One minute after the spinning doors had engulfed the pair the
+registry-clerk was called on the house telephone. A sad-faced tourist
+who was waiting patiently for his room assignment heard only the answer
+to the question which came over the wire from one of the upper floors:
+"No, Senator, Mr. Evan is not here; he has just this moment gone
+out--with Mr. McVickar. Could I overtake him? I'll try; but I don't know
+where they were going. Yes; all right. I'll send a boy right away."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT
+
+
+When the news went forth to the dwellers in the sage-brush hills that
+Boss David's son had been appointed to fill an important office as a
+member of the railroad company's legal staff, the first wave of
+astoundment was swiftly followed by many speculations as to what young
+Blount's _debut_ as a railroad placeman really meant.
+
+_The Plainsman_, the capital city's principal daily, and the outspoken
+organ of the people's party, was quick to discover an ulterior motive in
+Evan Blount's appointment and its acceptance. Blenkinsop, the
+leader-writer on _The Plainsman_, took a half-column in which to point
+out in emphatic and vigorous Western phrase the dangers that threatened
+the commonwealth in this very evident coalition of the railroad octopus
+and the machine.
+
+The _Lost River Miner_, on the contrary, was unwilling to believe that
+the younger Blount was acting in the interest of machine politics in
+taking an employee's place on the railroad pay-roll. In this editor's
+comment there were veiled hints of a disagreement between father and
+son; of differences of opinion which might, later on, lead to a pitched
+battle. The _Capital Daily_, however--the stock in which was said to be
+owned or controlled by local railroad officials--took a different
+ground, covertly insinuating that nothing for nothing was the accepted
+rule in politics; that if the railroad company had made a place for the
+son, it was only a justifiable deduction that the father was not as
+fiercely inimical to the railroad interests as the opposition press was
+willing to have a too credulous public believe.
+
+Elsewhere in the State press comment was divided, as the moulders of
+public opinion happened to read party loss or gain in the appointment of
+the new legal department head. Some were fair enough to say that young
+Blount had merely shown good sense in taking the first job that was
+offered him, following the commendation with the very obvious conclusion
+that the railroad company's pay check would buy just as much bread in
+the open market as anybody's else. On the whole, the senator's son was
+given the benefit of the doubt and a chance to prove up.
+
+Of the interview between the father and the son, in which Evan announced
+his intention of accepting a place under McVickar, nothing was said in
+the newspapers, for the very good reason that no reporter was present.
+If the young man who had so summarily taken his future into his own
+hands was anticipating a storm of disapproval and opposition, he was
+disappointed. He had seen Mr. McVickar's private car coupled to the
+east-bound Fast Mail, and had dined with Patricia and her father, the
+fourth seat at the table of reunion being vacant because the senator was
+dining elsewhere. Later in the evening he faced the music in the
+sitting-room of the private suite, waylaying his father on the Honorable
+David's return to the hotel.
+
+Planning it out beforehand, Blount had meant to give the ethical reasons
+which had constrained him to put a conclusive end to the
+attorney-generalship scheme. But when the crux came, the carefully
+planned argument side-stepped and he was reduced to the necessity of
+declaring his purpose baldly. The railroad people had offered him a
+place, and he had accepted it.
+
+"So McVickar talked you over to his side, did he?" was the boss's gentle
+comment. "It's all right, son; you're a man grown, and I reckon you know
+best what you want to do. If it puts us on opposite sides of the
+political creek, we won't let that roil the water any more than it has
+to, will we?"
+
+To such a mild-mannered surrender, or apparent surrender, the stirring
+filial emotions could do no less than to respond heartily.
+
+"We mustn't let it," was the quick reply; but after this the younger man
+added: "I feel that I ought to make some explanations--they're due to
+you. I've been knocking about here in the city with my eyes and ears
+open, and I must confess that the political field has been made to
+appear decidedly unattractive to me. From all I can learn, the political
+situation in the State is handled as a purely business proposition; it
+is a matter of bargain and sale. I couldn't go into anything like that
+and keep my self-respect."
+
+"No, of course you couldn't, son. So you just took a job where you could
+earn good, clean money in your profession. I don't blame you a
+particle."
+
+Blount was vaguely perturbed, and he showed it by absently laying aside
+the cigar which he had lately lighted and taking a fresh one from the
+open box on the table. He could not help the feeling that he ought to be
+reading between the lines in the paternal surrender.
+
+"You think there will be more or less political work in my job with the
+railroad?" he suggested, determined to get at the submerged facts, if
+there were any.
+
+"Oh, I don't know; you say McVickar has hired you to do a lawyer's work,
+and I reckon that is what he will expect you to do, isn't it?"
+
+Blount laid the second cigar aside and crossed the room to readjust a
+half-opened ventilating transom. Mr. McVickar had not defined the duties
+of the new counselship very clearly, but there had been a strong
+inference running through the private-car conference to the effect that
+the headship of the local legal department would carry with it some
+political responsibilities. At the moment the newly appointed placeman
+had been rather glad that such was the case. The vice-president had
+convinced him of the justice of the railroad company's
+contention--namely, that the present laws of the State, if rigidly
+administered, amounted to a practical confiscation of the company's
+property. While Mr. McVickar was talking, Blount had hoped that the new
+office which the vice-president was apparently creating for him would
+give him a free hand to place the company's point of view fairly before
+the people of the State, and to do this he knew he would have to enter
+the campaign in some sort as a political worker. Surely, his father must
+know this; and he went boldly upon the assumption that his father did
+know it.
+
+"As I have said, I am to be chief of the legal department on this
+division, and as such it will be necessary for me to defend my client
+both in court and out of court," he said finally. "Since I am fairly
+committed, I shall try to stay on the job."
+
+"Of course you will. You've got to be honest with yourself--and with
+McVickar. I don't mind telling you, son, that I'm flat-footed on the
+other side this time, and I had hoped you were going to be. But if
+you're not, why, that's the end of it. We won't quarrel about it."
+
+Now this was not at all the paternal attitude as the young man had been
+prefiguring it. He had looked for opposition; finding it, he would have
+found it possible to say some of the things which were crying to be said
+and which still remained unsaid. But there was absolutely no loophole
+through which he could force the attack. If his late decision had been
+of no more importance than the breaking of a dinner engagement, his
+father could scarcely have dismissed it with less apparent concern.
+Balked and practically talked to a standstill in the business matter,
+Blount switched to other things.
+
+"I missed you to-night at dinner," he said, beginning on the new tack.
+"Two of my Cambridge friends are here, and I wanted you to meet them."
+
+The Honorable David looked up quickly.
+
+"The fossil-digging professor and his daughter?" he queried shrewdly.
+
+"Yes; how did you know? They came in on the Overland, and I find that
+the professor has made the long journey on the strength of what I once
+told him about the megatheriums and things. I guess it's up to me to
+make good in some way."
+
+"Don't you worry a minute about that, Evan, boy," was the instant
+rejoinder. "Honoria's coming in from Wartrace to-morrow, and if you'll
+put us next, we'll take care of your friends--mighty good care of 'em."
+Then, almost wistfully Blount thought: "You won't mind letting Honoria
+do that much for you, will you, son?"
+
+"I'd be a cad if I did. And you've taken a load off of my shoulders, I
+can assure you. If you can persuade Mrs. Blount into it, I'll arrange
+for a little dinner of five to-morrow evening in the _cafe_ where we can
+all get together. You'll like the professor, I know; and I hope you're
+going to like Patricia. She's New England, and at first you may think
+she's a bit chilly. But really she isn't anything of the kind."
+
+The Honorable Senator got up and strolled to the window.
+
+"You'd better go to bed, son," he advised. "It's getting to be mighty
+late, and you'll want to be surging around some with these friends of
+yours to-morrow. And, before I forget it, the big car is in
+Heffelfinger's garage. Order it out after breakfast and show the
+Cambridge folks a good time."
+
+It was late the following evening, several hours after the informal
+little dinner for five in the Inter-Mountain _cafe_, when the senator
+had himself lifted from the lobby to the private-suite floor and made
+his way to the door of his own apartments. As was her custom when they
+were together, his wife was waiting up for him.
+
+"Did you find out anything more?" she asked, without looking up from the
+tiny embroidery frame which was her leisure-filling companion at home or
+elsewhere.
+
+"Not enough to hurt anything. McVickar has fixed things to suit himself.
+The boy's law-office job is to be pretty largely nominal; a sort of
+go-as-you-please and do-as-you-like proposition on the side, with
+Ackerton to do all the sure-enough court work and legal drudgery. Since
+Ackerton is a pretty clean fellow, and Evan stands up so straight that
+he leans over backward, this lay-out means that the bribing isn't going
+to be done by the legal department in the coming campaign."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"All but one little thing. Evan's job is to be more or less associated
+with the traffic department, and the word has been passed to Gantry and
+his crowd to see to it that the boy doesn't get to know too much."
+
+"But they can't keep him from finding out about the underground work!"
+protested the small one.
+
+"If it's an order from headquarters, they're going to try mighty hard.
+Evan wants to believe that everything is on the high moral plane, and
+when a man wants to believe a thing it isn't so awfully hard to fool
+him. It'll be a winning card for them if they can send the boy out to
+talk convincingly about the cleanness of the company's campaign. That
+sort of talk, handed out as Evan can hand it, if he is convinced of the
+truth of what he is saying, will capture the honest voter every time. I
+tell you, little woman, there's a thing we politicians are constantly
+losing sight of: that down at the bedrock bottom the American
+voter--'the man in the street,' as the newspapers call him--is a fair
+man and an honest man. Speaking broadly, you couldn't buy him with a
+clear title to a quarter-section in Paradise."
+
+This little eulogy upon the American voter appeared to be wasted upon
+the small person in the wicker rocking-chair. "We must get him back,"
+she remarked, referring, not to the American voter, but to the senator's
+son. "Have you thought of any plan?"
+
+"No."
+
+She smiled up at him sweetly. "You are like the good doctor who cannot
+prescribe for the members of his own family. If he were anybody else's
+son, you would know exactly what to do."
+
+"Perhaps I should."
+
+"I have a plan," she went on quietly, bending again over her embroidery.
+"He may have to take a regular course of treatment, and it may make him
+very ill; would you mind that?"
+
+David Blount leaned back in his chair and regarded her through
+half-closed eyelids. "You're a wonder, little woman," he said; and then:
+"I don't want to see the boy suffer any more than he has to."
+
+"Neither do I," was the swift agreement. Then, with no apparent
+relevance: "What do you think of Miss Anners?"
+
+The senator sat up at the question, with the slow smile wrinkling
+humorously at the corners of his eyes.
+
+"I haven't thought much about her yet. She's the kind that won't let you
+get near enough in a single sitting to think much about her, isn't she?"
+
+"She is a young woman with an exceedingly bright mind and a very high
+purpose," was the little lady's summing-up of Patricia. "But she isn't
+altogether a Boston iceberg. She thinks she is irrevocably in love with
+her chosen career; but, really, I believe she is very much in love with
+Evan. If we could manage to win her over to our side as an active
+ally--"
+
+This time the senator's smile broadened into a laugh.
+
+"You are away yonder out of my depth now," he chuckled. "Does your
+course of treatment for the boy include large doses of the young woman,
+administered frequently?"
+
+"Oh, no," was the instant reply. "I was only wondering if it wouldn't be
+well to enroll her--enlist her sympathies, you know."
+
+"Why not?--if you think best? You're the fine-haired little wire-puller,
+and it's all in your hands."
+
+"Will you give me _carte-blanche_ to do as I please?" asked the small
+plotter.
+
+"Sure!" said the Honorable David heartily, adding: "You can always
+outfigure me, two to one, when it comes to the real thing. You've made a
+fine art of it, Honoria, and I'll turn the steering-wheel over to you
+any day in the week."
+
+When she looked up she was smiling in the way which had made Evan Blount
+wonder, in that midnight meeting at Wartrace Hall, how she could look so
+young and yet be so wise.
+
+"You deal with people in the mass, David, and no one living can do it
+better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That
+is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?"
+
+"I don't know; any time when you will invite them to make Wartrace their
+headquarters, I reckon."
+
+"Then I think it will be to-morrow," decided the confident mistress of
+policies. "It won't do to let Evan see too much of Patricia until after
+his course of treatment is well under way. Shall we make it to-morrow?
+And will you telephone Dawkins to bring down the biggest car? I have a
+notion wandering around in my head somewhere that Miss Patricia Anners
+will stand a little judicious impressing. She is exceedingly democratic,
+you know--in theory."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE RANK AND FILE
+
+
+Considerably to his surprise, and no less to his satisfaction, the newly
+appointed "division counsel," as his title ran, was not required to take
+over the old legal department offices in the second story of the station
+building, where all the other offices of the company were located.
+Instead, he was directed to fit up a suite of rooms in Temple Court, the
+capital's most pretentious up-town sky-scraper, and there was something
+more than a hint that the item of first cost would not be too closely
+scrutinized.
+
+It was the vice-president himself, writing from Chicago, who authorized
+the new departure and loosened the purse strings. "Don't be afraid of
+spending a little money," wrote the great man. "Make your up-town
+headquarters as attractive as may be, and arrange matters with Ackerton
+so that your office will not be burdened with too much of the routine
+legal work. A successful legal representative will be a good mixer--as I
+am sure you are--and will extend the circle of his acquaintance as
+rapidly and as far as possible. Your appointment will be fully justified
+when you have made your up-town office a place where the good citizens
+of the capital and the State can drop in for a cordial word with the
+company's spokesman."
+
+Acting upon this suggestion, Blount opened the Temple Court headquarters
+at once and threw himself energetically into the indicated field.
+Ackerton, a technical expert with a needle-like mind and the State code
+at his fingers'-ends, was left in charge of the working offices in the
+railroad building, with instructions to apply to his chief only when he
+needed specific advice.
+
+At the up-town headquarters, Blount gave himself wholly to the pleasant
+task of making friends. With a good store of introductions upon which to
+make a beginning, and with the open-handed, whole-souled _camaraderie_
+of the West to help, the list of acquaintances grew with amazing
+rapidity. For the three or four weeks after Mrs. Blount had whisked the
+Annerses away to Wartrace Hall and the habitat of the Megalosauridae, the
+newly appointed "social secretary" for the railroad, as Honoria had
+dubbed him, met all comers joyously and accepted all invitations, never
+inquiring whether they were extended to his father's son, to the
+railroad company's legal chief, or to Evan Blount in his proper person.
+
+During this social interval he saw little of his father, though he was
+still occupying his share of the private dining-room suite at the
+Inter-Mountain. Part of the time, as he knew, the Honorable Senator was
+at Wartrace Hall, looking after his mammoth ranch, and helping to
+entertain the visitors from Massachusetts. But now and again the father
+came and went; and occasionally there was a dinner _a deux_ in the hotel
+_cafe_, with a little good-natured raillery from the senator's side of
+the table.
+
+"Got you chasing your feet right lively in the social merry-go-round
+these days, haven't they, son? Like it, as far as you've gone?" said the
+ex-cattle-king one evening when Evan had come down in evening clothes,
+ready to go to madam the governor's wife's strictly formal "informal" a
+little later on.
+
+"It's all in the day's work," laughed the younger man. "I shall need all
+the 'pull' I can get a little later on, sha'n't I?"
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if you did, son; I shouldn't wonder if you did. And
+I reckon you're doing pretty good work, too, mixing and mingling the way
+you do. Was it McVickar's idea, or your own--this sudden splash into the
+social water-hole?"
+
+"I don't mind telling you that it is a part of the new policy," returned
+the social splasher, still smiling. "We are out to make friends this
+time; good, solid, open-eyed friends who will know just what we are
+doing and why we are doing it."
+
+"H'm," mused the senator, "so publicity's the new word, is it?"
+
+"Yes; publicity is the word. The Gordon people say they are going to
+show us up; there won't be anything to show up when the time comes. We
+are going to beat them to the billboards."
+
+The grizzled veteran of a goodly number of political battles put down
+his coffee-cup; he was still old-fashioned enough to drink his coffee in
+generous measure with the meat courses.
+
+"You can't do the circus act--ride two horses at once and do the same
+stunt on both, son," he remarked gravely. "If you're really going to put
+the saddle and bridle on the publicity nag, you've got to turn the other
+one out of the corral and let it go back to the short-grass."
+
+"It is already turned out," asserted the young man, not affecting to
+misunderstand. "We neither buy votes nor spend illegitimate money in
+this campaign."
+
+The stout assertion was good as far as it went; the new division counsel
+made it and believed it. But on his way to the governor's mansion, a
+little later, he could not help wondering if he had been altogether
+candid in making it. The offices in the up-town sky-scraper were not
+exclusively a railroad social centre where the disinterested voter could
+come and have the facts ladled out to him without fear or favor on the
+part of the ladler. They had come to be also a rallying-point for a
+heterogeneous crowd of ward-workers, wire-pullers, and small
+politicians, most of whom were anxious to be employed or retained as
+henchmen. Some of these "stretcher men," as Blount contemptuously called
+them, had been employed in past campaigns; others were still the
+beneficiaries of the railroad, holding pay-roll places which Blount
+acutely suspected were chiefly sinecures.
+
+Latterly, this contingent of strikers and heelers had been greatly
+augmented, and it was beginning to make its demands more emphatic. A
+dozen times a day Blount had the worn phrase, "nothing for nothing,"
+dinned into his ears, and he was beginning to harbor a suspicion that
+his office had been made a dumping-ground for all the other departments.
+
+Seeing Gantry at madam the governor's lady's reception, Blount took an
+early opportunity of cornering the traffic manager in one of the
+otherwise deserted smoking-dens, and when he had made sure there were no
+eavesdroppers plunged at once into the middle of things.
+
+"See here, Dick," he began, "you fellows downtown are making my office a
+cesspool, and I won't stand for it. Garrigan, that saloon-keeper in the
+second ward, came up to-day to ask for a free ticket to Worthington and
+return; and when I pinned him down he admitted that you'd sent him to
+me."
+
+"I did," said Gantry, grinning. "Why otherwise have we got a
+post-graduate, double-certificated political manager, I'd like to know?"
+
+Blount dropped into a chair and felt in his pockets for his cigar-case.
+
+"I guess we may as well fight this thing to a finish right here and now,
+Dick," he said coolly. "I'm not chief vote buyer for the
+Transcontinental Company--I'm not any kind of a vote buyer."
+
+"Who said you were?" retorted the traffic manager.
+
+"It says itself, if I am supposed to cut the pie and hand out pieces of
+it to these grub-stakers that you and Carson and Bentley and Kittredge
+are continually sending to me."
+
+This time Gantry's grin was playful, but behind it there was a shrewd
+flash of the Irish-blue eyes that Blount did not see.
+
+"I guess the company would be plenty willing to furnish a few small pies
+for really hungry people, if you think you need them to go along with
+your Temple Court office fittings," he returned.
+
+"Ah?" said Blount calmly, giving the exclamation the true Boston
+inflection. "You are either too shrewd or not quite shrewd enough, Dick.
+You covered that up with a laugh, so that I might take it as a joke if I
+happened to be too thin-skinned to take it in disreputable earnest. Let
+us understand each other; we are fighting squarely in the open in this
+campaign; publicity is the word--I have Mr. McVickar for my authority.
+Anybody who wants to know anything about the railroad company's business
+in this State can learn it for the asking, and at first-hand. Secrecy
+and all the various brands of political claptrap that have been admitted
+in the past are to be shown the door. This is the intimation that was
+made to me: wasn't it made to you?"
+
+Gantry did not reply directly to the direct demand. On the other hand,
+he very carefully refrained from answering it in any degree whatsoever.
+
+"You have your job to hold down and I have mine," he rejoined. "What
+you say goes as it lies, of course; but just the same, I shouldn't be
+too righteously hard on the little brothers, if I were you."
+
+"If by the 'little brothers' you mean the pie-eaters, I'm going to fire
+them out, neck and crop, Richard. They make me excessively weary."
+
+Gantry's playful mood fell away from him like a cast-off garment.
+
+"I don't quite believe I'd do that, if I were you, Evan. There are
+pie-eaters on both sides in every political contest, and while they
+can't do any cause any great amount of good, they can often do a good
+bit of harm. I wouldn't be too hard on them, if I were you."
+
+"What would you do?--or, rather, what did you do when you were managing
+the State campaign two years ago?" inquired Blount pointedly.
+
+"I cut the pie," said the traffic manager simply.
+
+"In other words, you let this riffraff blackmail you and, incidentally,
+put a big black mark against the company's good name."
+
+"Oh, no; I wouldn't put it quite that strong. Not many of these little
+fellows ask for money, or expect it. A free ride now and then in the
+varnished cars is about all they look for."
+
+"But you can't give them passes under the interstate law," protested the
+purist.
+
+"Not outside of the State, of course. But inside of the State boundaries
+it's our own business."
+
+"You mean it _was_ our own business, previous to the passage of the
+State rate law two years ago," corrected Blount.
+
+"It is our own business to this good day--in effect. That part of the
+law has been a complete dead-letter from the day the governor signed it.
+Why, bless your innocent heart, Evan, the very men who argued the
+loudest and voted the most spitefully for it came to me for their return
+tickets home at the end of the session. Of course, we kept the letter of
+the law. It says that no 'free passes' shall be given. We didn't issue
+passes; we merely gave them tickets out of the case and charged them up
+to 'expense.'"
+
+"Faugh!" said Blount, "you make me sick! Gantry, it's that same childish
+whipping of the devil around the stump by the corporations--an expedient
+that wouldn't deceive the most ignorant voter that ever cast a
+ballot--it's that very thing that has stirred the whole nation up to
+this unreasonable fight against corporate capital. Don't you see it?"
+
+Gantry shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I guess I take the line of the least resistance--like the majority of
+them," was the colorless reply. "When it comes down to practical
+politics--"
+
+"Don't say 'practical politics' to me, Dick!" rasped the reformer.
+"We've got the strongest argument in the world in the fact that the
+present law is an unfair one, needing modification or repeal. We mustn't
+spoil that argument by becoming law-breakers ourselves and descending to
+the methods of the grafters and the machine politicians the country
+over. If you have been sending these pie-eaters to me, stop it--don't do
+it any more. I have no earthly use for them; and they won't have any use
+for me after I open up on them and tell them a few things they don't
+seem to know, or to care to know."
+
+"I don't believe I'd do anything brash," Gantry suggested mildly, and he
+was still saying the same thing in diversified forms when Blount led the
+way back to the crowded drawing-rooms.
+
+Dating from this little heart-to-heart talk with the traffic manager,
+Blount began to carry out the new policy--the starvation policy, as it
+soon came to be known among the would-be henchmen. The result was not
+altogether reassuring. The first few rebuffs he administered left him
+with the feeling that he was winning Pyrrhic victories; it was as if he
+were trying to handle a complicated mechanism with the working details
+of which he was only theoretically familiar. There were wheels within
+wheels, and the application of the brakes to the smallest of them led to
+discordant janglings throughout the whole.
+
+Many of the small grafters were on the pay-rolls of the railroad
+company, and Blount was soon definitely assured of what he had before
+only suspected--that they were merely nominal employees given a pay-roll
+standing so that there might be an excuse for giving them free
+transportation, and a retainer in the form of wages, if needful.
+
+In many cases the ramifications of the petty graft were exasperatingly
+intricate. For example: one Thomas Gryson, who was on the pay-rolls as a
+machinist's helper in the repair shops, demanded free transportation
+across the State for eight members of his "family." Questioned closely,
+he admitted that the "family" was his only by a figure of speech; that
+the relationship was entirely political. Blount promptly refused to
+recommend the issuing of employees' passes for the eight, and the result
+was an immediate call from Bentley, the division master mechanic.
+
+"About that fellow Gryson," Bentley began; "can't you manage some way to
+get him transportation for his Jonesboro crowd? He is going to make
+trouble for us if you don't."
+
+Blount was justly indignant. "Gryson is on your pay-roll," he retorted.
+"Why don't you recommend the passes yourself, on account of the
+motive-power department, if he is entitled to them?"
+
+"I can't," admitted the master mechanic. "I am held down to the issuing
+of passes to employees travelling on company business only. We can
+stretch it a little sometimes, of course, but we can't make it cover the
+whole earth."
+
+"Neither can I!" Blount exploded. "Let it be understood, once for all,
+Mr. Bentley, that I am not the scape-goat for all the other departments!
+I have cut it off short; I am not recommending passes for anybody."
+
+"But, suffering Scott, Mr. Blount, we've simply _got_ to take care of
+Tom Gryson! He's the boss of his ward, and he has influence enough to
+turn even our own employees against us!"
+
+"Influence?" scoffed the young man from the East. "How does he acquire
+his influence? It is merely another illustration of the vicious circle;
+you put into his hands the club with which he proceeds to knock you
+down. Let me tell you what I'm telling everybody; if we want a square
+deal, we've got to set the example by being square. And, by Heavens, Mr.
+Bentley, we're going to set the example!"
+
+The master mechanic went away silenced, but by no means convinced; and a
+week later Gryson, who in appearance was a typical tough, and who in
+reality was a post-graduate of the hard school of violence and
+ruffianage obtaining in the lawless mining-camps of the Carnadine Hills,
+sauntered into Blount's office with his cigar at the belligerent angle
+and an insolent taunt in his mouth.
+
+"Well, pardner, we got them dickie-birds o' mine over to Jonesboro,
+after so long a time, and no thanks to you, neither. I just blew in to
+tell you that I'm goin' to hit you ag'in about day after to-morrow, and
+if you don't come across there's goin' to be somethin' doin'; see?"
+
+Blount sprang from his chair and forgot to be politic.
+
+"You needn't come to me the day after to-morrow, or any other time," he
+raged. "I'm through with you and your tribe. Get out!"
+
+After Gryson, muttering threats, had gone, the young campaign manager
+had an attack of moral nausea. It seemed such a prodigious waste of time
+and energy to traffic and chaffer with these petty scoundrels. Thus far,
+every phase of the actual political problem seemed to be meanly
+degrading, and he was beginning to long keenly for an opportunity to do
+some really worthy thing.
+
+Notwithstanding, his ideals were still unshaken. He still clung to the
+belief that the corporation, which was created by the law and could
+exist only under the protection of the law, must, of necessity, be a
+law-abiding entity. It was manifestly unfair to hold it responsible for
+the disreputable political methods of those whom it could never
+completely control--methods, too, which had been forced upon it by the
+necessity, or the fancied necessity, of meeting conditions as they were
+found.
+
+As if in answer to the wish that he might find the worthier task, it was
+on this day of Gryson's visit that Blount was given his first
+opportunity of entering the wider field. A letter from a local party
+chairman in a distant mining town brought an invitation of the kind for
+which he had been waiting and hoping. He was asked to participate in a
+joint debate at the campaign opening in the town in question, and he was
+so glad of the chance that he instantly wired his acceptance.
+
+That evening, at the Inter-Mountain _cafe_ dinner hour, he found his
+father dining alone and joined him. In a burst of confidence he told of
+the invitation.
+
+"That's good; that's the real thing this time, isn't it?" was the
+senator's even-toned comment. "Gives you a right nice little chance to
+shine the way you can shine best." Then: "That was one of the things
+McVickar wanted you for, wasn't it?--speech-making and the like?"
+
+"Why, yes; he intimated that there might be some public speaking,"
+admitted the younger man.
+
+"Well, what-all are you going to tell these Ophir fellows when you get
+over there, son?" asked the veteran quizzically. "Going to offer 'em all
+free passes anywhere they want to go if they'll promise to vote for the
+railroad candidates?"
+
+"Not this year," was the laughing reply. "As I told you a while back,
+we've stopped all that."
+
+"You have, eh? I reckon that will be mighty sorry news for a good many
+people in the old Sage-brush State--mighty sorry news. You really reckon
+you _have_ stopped it, do you, son?"
+
+"I not only believe it; I am in a position to assert it definitely."
+
+"McVickar has told you it was stopped?"
+
+The newly fledged political manager tried to be strictly truthful.
+
+"I have had but the one interview with Mr. McVickar, but in that talk he
+gave me to understand that my recommendations would be given due
+consideration. And I have said my say pretty emphatically."
+
+The senator's smile was not derisive; it was merely lenient.
+
+"Sat on 'em good and hard, did you? That's right, son; don't you ever
+be afraid to say what you mean, and to say it straight from the
+shoulder. That's the Blount way, and I reckon we've got to keep the
+family ball rolling--you and I. Don't forget that, when you're making
+your appeal to those horny-handed sons of toil over yonder at Ophir.
+Give 'em straight facts, and back up the facts with figures--if you
+happen to have the figures. When do you pull out for the mining-camp?"
+
+"To-night, at nine-thirty. I can't get there in time if I wait for the
+morning train." Then, dismissing the political topic abruptly: "What do
+you hear from Professor Anners?"
+
+"Oh, he's having the time of his life. I got him a State permit, and
+scraped him up a bunch of pick-and-shovel men, and he is digging out
+those fossil skeletons by the wagon-load."
+
+"And Miss Anners?" pursued Patricia's lover.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if she was having the time of her life, too. I've
+given her the little four-seated car to call her own while she is out
+here, and she and Honoria go careering around the country--breaking the
+speed limit every minute in the day, I reckon."
+
+"I'm glad you are giving her a good time," said Evan, and he looked
+glad. Then he added regretfully: "I wish I could get a chance to chase
+around a little with them. I have seen almost nothing of them since they
+came West. I should think Mrs. Blount might bring Patricia down to the
+city once in a while."
+
+"Well, now! perhaps the young woman doesn't want to come," laughed the
+senator. "You told me you hadn't got her tag, son, and I'm beginning to
+believe it's the sure-enough truth. What has she got against you,
+anyway?"
+
+"Nothing; nothing in the wide world, save that I don't fit into her
+scheme for her life-work."
+
+The senator was eating calmly through his dessert. "If you hadn't made
+up your mind so pointedly to dislike Honoria, you might be getting a few
+tips on that 'career' business along about now, son," he remarked, and
+Evan was silent--had to be silent. For, you see, he had been charging
+Patricia's continued absence from the capital to nothing less than
+spiteful design on the part of his father's wife.
+
+It was at the cigar smoking in the lobby, after the young man had made
+his preparations for the journey and was waiting for the train-caller's
+announcement, that the senator said quite casually: "It's too bad you're
+going out of town to-night, son. Honoria 'phoned me a little spell ago
+that she and Patricia would be driving down after their dinner to take
+in the Weatherford reception. You'll have to miss 'em, won't you?"
+
+The announcer was chanting the call for the night train west, and the
+joint-debater got up and thrust his hand-bag savagely into the hand of
+the nearest porter.
+
+"Isn't that just my infernal luck!" he lamented. Then: "Give them my
+love, and tell them I hope they will stay until I get back."
+
+The senator rose and shook hands with the departing debater. "Shall I
+say that to both of 'em?" he asked, with the quizzical smile which Evan
+was learning to expect.
+
+"Yes; to both of them, if you like--only I suppose Mrs. Blount will hold
+it against me. Good-night and good-by. I'll be back day after to-morrow,
+if the Ophir miners don't mob me."
+
+It was only a few minutes after Evan Blount's train had steamed
+Ophir-ward out of the Sierra Avenue station that a dust-covered
+touring-car drew up at the curb in front of the Inter-Mountain, and the
+same porter who had put Blount's hand-bag into the taxicab opened the
+tonneau door for two ladies in muffling motor-coats and heavy veils.
+
+The senator met the two late travellers in the vestibule, and while the
+three were waiting for an elevator a rapid fire of low-toned question
+and answer passed between husband and wife.
+
+"You got Evan out of the way?" whispered the wife.
+
+The husband nodded. "That was easy. I passed the word to Steuchfield,
+and he helped out on that--invited Evan to come to Ophir to speak in a
+joint debate. He left on the night train."
+
+"And Hathaway? Will he be here?"
+
+"He is here. Gantry has turned him down, according to instructions, and
+he is clawing about in the air, trying to get a fresh hold. I bluffed
+him; told him he'd have to make his peace with you for something, I
+didn't know what, before I could talk to him."
+
+Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal glow as the car descended,
+and the wife's voice sank to a still lower whisper.
+
+"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired eagerly.
+
+"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there."
+
+The small plotter nodded approval.
+
+"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready," she directed;
+and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to
+finish his cigar.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+IN THE HERBARIUM
+
+
+The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people, and so newly rich that
+the crisp bank-notes fairly crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them,
+kept their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like mansion in Mesa
+Circle, the most expensive, if not the most aristocratic,
+no-thoroughfare of the capital city. Weatherford, the father, egged on
+by Mrs. Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward a United
+States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province
+of the next legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with
+a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view
+carefully tucked away inside of it--an outlook upon life which was a
+survival from his hard-working past--would willingly have dodged, but
+Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable. There were two grown daughters and a
+growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.
+
+The reception for which the senator's wife and her guest had driven
+thirty miles through the dust of the sage-brush hills was one of the
+many moves in Mrs. Weatherford's private campaign. For the opening-gun
+occasion the great house in Mesa Circle was lighted from basement to
+turret--to all of the numerous turrets; an awning fringed with electric
+bulbs sheltered the carpeted walk from the street to the grand entrance,
+an army of lackeys paraded in the vestibule, and the wives and daughters
+of the bravest and best in the capital city's political contingent stood
+with Mrs. Weatherford in the long receiving-line.
+
+From room to room in the vast house a curiously assorted throng of the
+bidden ones worked its way as the jam and crush permitted. A firm
+believer in the maxim that in numbers there is strength, the hostess had
+made her invitation-list long and catholic. For the gossips there were
+the crowded drawing-rooms, for the hungry there were Lucullian tables,
+and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.
+
+It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that
+the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension
+of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a
+reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown
+palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted
+interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs.
+Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would
+have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was
+because no one had remembered to mention the name of it to her.
+
+Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably late at the function
+in Mesa Circle, but in the crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the
+hostess and her long line of receiving assistants were still on duty.
+Having successfully passed the line with her husband and Patricia,
+little Mrs. Blount looked about her, saw Mr. Richard Gantry, signalled
+to him with her eyes, and, with the traffic manager for her centre-rush
+to wedge a way through the crowded rooms, was presently lost to
+sight--at least from Miss Anners's point of view.
+
+Whether she knew it or not, from the moment of her appearance at the
+hostess's end of the long receiving-line, the senator's wife had been
+marked and followed in her slow progress through the rooms by a
+thin-faced man who seemed to be nervously trying to hunch himself into
+better relations with his ill-fitting dress-coat, an eager gentleman
+whose hawk-like eyes never lost sight of the little lady with her hand
+on Gantry's arm. Only the senator saw and remarked this bit of by-play,
+and he looked as if he were enjoying it, the shrewd gray eyes lighting
+humorously as he bent to hear what Patricia was saying.
+
+When his quarry stopped, as she did frequently to chat with one or
+another of the guests, the man with the hawk-like profile and the
+nervous hunch circled warily, and once or twice seemed about to make the
+opportunity which was so slow in making itself. But it was not until the
+little lady in the claret-colored party-gown had drifted, still with a
+hand on Gantry's arm, in among the palm and banana trees of the
+herbarium that the bird-of-prey person made his swoop. A moment later
+Gantry, taking a low-toned command from his companion, was disappearing
+in the direction of the refreshment-tables, and the lady looked up to
+say: "Dear me, Mr. Hathaway, you almost startled me!"
+
+"Did I?" said the lumber-king, rather grimly, if he meant the query to
+be apologetic. "I am sorry. I didn't mean to; but Mrs. Gordon said I
+would find you here, and so I took the liberty of following you. I'm
+needing a little straightening out, you know, and--ah--would you mind
+letting me talk business with you for a minute or two, Mrs. Blount?"
+
+She drew her gown aside, and made room for him on the carved rustic
+settee, which was exceedingly uncomfortable to sit in, but which was in
+perfect harmony with the background of gigantic palmettos. He nodded
+gratefully and took the place, and the manner of his sitting down was
+that of a man who wears evening-clothes only under compulsion.
+
+"Business?" she was saying. "Certainly not; if you can talk business in
+such a place as this"--giving him the coveted permission.
+
+"Perhaps it ain't what you'd call business--maybe it's only politics,"
+he resumed; then, with the abruptness of one whose dealings have been
+with men oftener than with women: "In the first place, I wish you'd tell
+me what I've been doing to get myself into your bad books."
+
+She laughed easily. "Who said you had been doing anything, Mr.
+Hathaway?" she asked.
+
+"The senator," he answered shortly, adding: "He told me I'd have to make
+my peace with you."
+
+She had developed a sudden interest in the quaint Japanese figures on
+the ivory sticks of her fan. "You want something, Mr. Hathaway; what is
+it?" she inquired.
+
+"I want to be put next in this pigs-in-clover railroad puzzle," was the
+blunt statement of the need. "Our freight contract with the
+Transcontinental is about to expire, and I'd like to get it renewed on
+the same terms as before."
+
+"Well," she said ingenuously, "why don't you do it?"
+
+"I can't," he blustered. "Everybody has suddenly grown mysterious or
+gone crazy--I don't know which. Kittredge, the general superintendent,
+don't seem to remember that we ever had any contract, and Gantry is just
+as bad. And when I go to the senator he tells me I must make my peace
+with you. I'm left out in the cold; I can't begin to _sabe_ what the
+senator and these railroad brass-collar men are driving at. I've got
+something to sell; something that the railroad company needs. Where the
+d---- I mean, where's the hitch?"
+
+The small person in the fetching party-gown reached up and pinched a
+leaf from a fragrant shrub fronting the settee.
+
+"Mr. Gantry has gone to fetch me an ice, and he will be back in a very
+few minutes," she suggested mildly. "Consider your peace made, Mr.
+Hathaway, and tell me what I can do for you."
+
+"You can put me next," said the lumber lord, going back to the only
+phrase that seemed to fit the exigencies of the case. "Why the--why
+can't we get our contract renewed?"
+
+The little lady was opening and shutting her fan slowly. "What was your
+contract?" she inquired innocently.
+
+"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you,"
+he said bluntly. "But you do know. It's the rebate lumber rate from our
+mills at Twin Buttes and elsewhere, and it was given us two years ago, a
+few days before election."
+
+"And the consideration?" she asked, looking up quickly.
+
+"You know that, too, Mrs. Blount. It was the swinging of the solid
+employees' vote of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company over to the railroad
+ticket."
+
+"And you wish to make the same arrangement again?"
+
+"Exactly. We've got to have that preferential rate or go out of
+business."
+
+"With whom did you make the contract two years ago?"
+
+"With Mr. McVickar, verbally. Of course, there wasn't anything put down
+in black and white, but the railroad folks did their part and we did
+ours."
+
+"I see--a gentleman's agreement," she murmured; and then: "You have
+tried Mr. McVickar again?"
+
+"Yes, and he referred me to Gantry."
+
+"And what did Mr. Gantry say?"
+
+"I couldn't get him to say anything with any sense in it," said the
+lumber magnate grittingly. "The most I could get out of him was that I
+would have to see the boss."
+
+"And instead of doing that you went to see the senator?" she asked.
+
+"Of course I did. Who else would Gantry mean by 'the boss'?" demanded
+the befogged one.
+
+"Possibly he meant the senator's son," she ventured, tapping a pretty
+cheek with the folded fan. "Have you been leaving Evan Blount out in all
+of this?"
+
+"I didn't know where to put him in. That's what brings me here to-night.
+The senator, or McVickar, or both of them together, have set the whole
+State to running around in circles with this appointment of young
+Blount. Some say it's a deal between the senator and McVickar, and some
+say it's a fight. Half of the professional spellbinders are walking in
+their sleep over it right now. I thought maybe you could tell me, Mrs.
+Blount."
+
+"I can't tell you anything that would help the people who are walking in
+their sleep," she returned, "but I might offer a suggestion in your
+personal affair. Mr. Evan Blount is your man."
+
+Hathaway pursed his thin lips and frowned. "I'm in bad there--right at
+the jump," he objected.
+
+"I know," she shot back quickly. "For some reason best known to
+yourself, you saw fit to have Mr. Evan waylaid and man-handled on the
+first night of his return to his native State. But you needn't worry
+about that. He won't hold it against you. I'm sure you'll find him
+entirely amenable to reason."
+
+The tyrant of "timber-jacks" frowned again. "H'm--reason, eh? How big a
+block of Twin Buttes stock shall I offer him?"
+
+Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.
+
+"You always figure in dollars and cents, don't you, Mr. Simon Peter
+Hathaway?" she mocked.
+
+"I have always found it the cheapest in the end."
+
+"Listen," she said, with the folded fan held up like a monitory finger.
+"Mr. Gantry may be back any minute, and I can give you only the tiniest
+hint. You must go to Mr. Evan Blount and appeal to him frankly, as one
+business man to another."
+
+"But I have heard--they say he's all kinds of a crank."
+
+"Never mind what you have heard. Tell him all the facts and ask him to
+help you, and for mercy's sake don't offer him a block of your stock.
+Put it where it will do the most good. Put it in the name of Professor
+William J. Anners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and show Mr. Blount how
+dreadfully disastrous the loss of the preferential freight rate would be
+to all the poor people in your list of stock-holders--including
+Professor Anners."
+
+Hathaway drew down his cuff and made a pencil memorandum of the name and
+address of the new beneficiary.
+
+"You'll notice that I'm not asking any foolish questions about who this
+Professor Anners is, or why I should be making him a present of a block
+of stock. If I don't, it's because what you say goes as it lies.
+Anything else?"
+
+"Yes; don't fail to be perfectly frank with Mr. Blount, and don't let
+him put you off. He may pretend to be very angry at first, but you won't
+mind that."
+
+"I won't mind anything if I can bring this business down to the
+every-day commonplace earth once more. You and the senator and Gantry
+and McVickar are playing some sort of a game, and you ain't showing me
+anything more than the back of the cards. That's all right. I guess I'm
+fly enough to play my hand blindfolded, if I've got to. I don't care,
+just so I win the odd trick."
+
+Gantry was coming down the avenue of banana-trees with the ice he had
+taken so much time to procure, and the lumber magnate rose reluctantly.
+There was time for only one more question, and he put it hastily.
+
+"When and where can I find Evan Blount?" he asked.
+
+"The day after to-morrow, at his office in Temple Court. He is out of
+the city now, but--" Here Gantry's coming put an end to the private
+conference, and the president of the Twin Buttes company went his way.
+
+Not until they had served out their full sentence at Mrs. Weatherford's
+crush, and were back in the private dining-room suite at the
+Inter-Mountain, with Miss Anners safely behind the closed door of her
+own apartment, did the small conspirator pass the word of good hope on
+to her husband.
+
+"It is working beautifully," she exulted. "He will go to see Evan day
+after to-morrow--and after that, the deluge."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE GREAT GAME
+
+
+If Evan Blount, as the representative of the unpopular railroad, had
+been anticipating an unfriendly reception at the great gold-camp in the
+Carnadine Hills, he was agreeably disappointed. A committee of citizens,
+headed by Jasper Steuchfield, the "Paramounter" chairman for Carnadine
+County, met him at the train, escorted him to the hotel, and, during the
+afternoon which was at his disposal, gave him joyously and hilariously
+the freedom of the camp.
+
+The political meeting, called for an early hour in the evening, was held
+in the Carnadine Mining Company's ore-shed, electric-lighted for the
+occasion. When the hour came the big shed was packed with an
+enthusiastic audience, and there were prolonged cheers and
+hand-clappings when the railroad advocate took his seat on the
+improvised platform as the guest of the local committee.
+
+Later, when Judge Crowley, candidate prospective on the popular ticket
+for the State Senate, opened the joint debate with a shrewd arraignment
+of the methods of the railroad company, not only in its dealings with
+the public as a common carrier, but also in the pertinacity with which
+it invaded the political field, there was tumultuous applause; but it
+was no heartier than that which greeted Blount when he rose to present
+the railroad side of the argument.
+
+During the journey from the capital, which had consumed the night and
+the greater portion of the forenoon, he had prepared his speech. His
+argument--the one unanswerable argument, as it appeared to him--was the
+absurdity and injustice of a law which presumed to limit the earning
+power of a corporation by fixing the maximum rates it might charge,
+without at the same time making a corresponding regulation fixing the
+price which the company should pay for its labor and material.
+
+Upon this foundation he was able to build a fair structure of oratory.
+The judge, his opponent, was a rather turgid man whose speech had
+abounded in flights of denunciation and whose appeal had been made
+frankly to prejudice and party rancor. Blount took his cue shrewdly.
+Touching lightly upon the public grievances, some of which he
+characterized as just and entirely defensible, he rang the changes
+calmly and logically upon the square deal, no less for the corporations
+than for the individual. "Take it to yourselves, you merchants," he
+urged. "Imagine a law on the statute-books fixing the prices at which
+you shall sell your goods, and that same law leaving you at the mercy of
+those from whom you must buy! Take it to yourselves, you miners. Suppose
+the legislature had enacted a law fixing the maximum price at which you
+shall sell your skill and your labor, and at the same time leaving it
+optional with every man from whom you buy, the butcher, the baker, the
+grocer, to charge you what he pleases or what he can get! That, my good
+friends, is the situation of the railroad company in this State
+to-day"--and he went on to analyze the hard situation, filling his hour
+very creditably and, if the frequent bursts of applause could be taken
+to mean anything, to the complete satisfaction of his hearers. Indeed,
+at the end of his argument he was given what the local paper of the
+following day was pleased to call "a spontaneous and pandemonious
+ovation."
+
+After the cheering and hand-shaking, Steuchfield and his
+fellow-committeemen went to the train with the visiting speaker, and no
+one in the throng of congratulators was more enthusiastic than the
+opposition chairman.
+
+"That was a cracking good speech--a great speech, Mr. Blount!" he said,
+as the branch train rattled in from the north. "If you can go all over
+the State making as good talks as the one we've just heard, you'll tie
+the whole shooting-match up in a hard knot for us fellows. But McVickar
+won't let you do it--not by a long shot!"
+
+The potential tier of hard knots laughed genially. "I don't blame you
+for wanting to be shown, Mr. Steuchfield. But I can assure you that the
+new policy has come to stay. I have the management behind me in this
+thing, and any day you'll come down to the capital I'll put my time
+against yours and try to show you that we are out for open publicity
+and a square deal for every man--including the railroad man."
+
+"All right," was the cordial reply. "I'll be down along some of these
+days, and if you can convince me that McVickar isn't going into politics
+any further than you've gone here to-night, I'll promise you to come
+back to Carnadine and tell the boys the jig's up."
+
+A few minutes later the branch train pulled out, and the chairman and
+his fellow-committeemen gave the departing joint-debater three cheers
+and another. After the red tail-lights of the train had disappeared
+around the first curve, Steuchfield turned to the others with a broad
+grin.
+
+"Well, boys," he said, "there goes a mighty nice young fellow, and I
+guess we did it up all right for him and accordin' to orders. I don't
+know any more'n a sheep what sort of a game Dave Sage-brush is playin'
+this time, but whatever he says goes as she lays, and I figure it that
+we gave the young chip o' the old block a right jubilant little whirl.
+Anyhow, he seemed to think so."
+
+Blount did not reach his office in the capital until the afternoon of
+the next day. There was an appalling accumulation of letters and
+telegrams waiting to be worked over, but he let the desk litter go
+untouched and called up the hotel, only to have a small disappointment
+sent in over the wire. His father, Mrs. Blount, and their guest had left
+for Wartrace Hall some time during the forenoon, and there had been
+nothing said in the clerk's hearing about their return to the city.
+Blount hung up the receiver, called it one more opportunity missed, and
+sat down to attack the desk litter.
+
+Almost the first thing his eye lighted upon was a stenographer's note
+stating that Mr. Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company,
+had been in several times, and was very anxious to obtain an interview.
+Blount pressed the desk button, and the stenographer came in promptly.
+
+"This man Hathaway; what did he want?" was the brusque question shot at
+the clerk.
+
+"I don't know. He said he was stopping at the Inter-Mountain, and he
+asked me to let him know when you got back."
+
+"Phone him and tell him I'm here," said Blount; and in due time the
+lumber magnate made his appearance.
+
+It was not at all in keeping with Mr. Simon Peter Hathaway's gifts and
+adroitness that he should begin by attempting a clumsy bit of acting.
+
+"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "So you're the senator's son, are
+you? If I'd known that, that day on the train when you were trying to
+make me believe you were one of Uncle Sam's men--"
+
+Blount's smile was neither forgiving nor hostile.
+
+"In a way, I had earned what was handed out to me afterward, Mr.
+Hathaway, and I'm not bearing malice," he said briefly. "I had no
+business to let you get away with the wrong impression, but you were so
+exceedingly anxious to identify me with the Forest Service that it
+seemed a pity to disappoint you. Since your scoundrels didn't kill me,
+we'll set one incident against the other and forget both. What can I do
+for you to-day?"
+
+By this time the lumber lord was apparently recovering his breath and
+some measure of composure, though he had lost neither.
+
+"Great Jehu!" he lamented. "If you had given me half a hint that you
+were Dave Blount's son--but you didn't, you know, and now I'm
+handicapped just when I oughtn't to be. I've come to talk business with
+you to-day, Mr. Blount, and here you've got me on the run the first
+crack out of the box!"
+
+This time Blount's smile was entirely conciliatory.
+
+"Don't let that little misfire in the Lost Mountain foot-hills embarrass
+you, Mr. Hathaway. I assure you I'm not at all vindictive."
+
+"All right," said the visitor, only too willing to dismiss the Jack
+Barto incident and the forced awkwardness of the pretended surprise.
+"That being the case, I'll jump in on the other matter. But first I'd
+like to ask a sort of personal question: I've been given to understand
+that you are handling the political business for the railroad company in
+this campaign. Is that right?"
+
+"It is and it isn't," was the prompt reply. "The railroad company isn't
+in politics in this campaign--as a political factor, I mean. What we are
+trying to do--and all we are trying to do--is to lay the entire matter
+plainly and fairly before the people of this State, with a frank appeal
+for the relief to which we are entitled."
+
+"Ha--h'm--I guess I get you, Mr. Blount. That's the way to talk it; in
+public, anyway. But, just between us two--I guess we needn't beat the
+bushes in a little personal talk like this--we both know there are
+certain things that have to be done in every campaign; things you
+wouldn't want to publish in the newspapers."
+
+Blount sat back in his chair and the conciliatory smile disappeared.
+
+"What kind of things?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"Oh, of course, I don't know all of 'em. But there was one little
+arrangement that was made two years ago with us, and it helped out both
+ways. I thought I'd come around and see if it couldn't be worked again."
+
+"State the facts," said Blount shortly.
+
+"It was like this. As you know, we've got a number of plants scattered
+around at different places in the State, and, one way and another, we
+employ a good many men. These men are residents of the State, but you
+couldn't call 'em citizens in the sense that they take any active
+interest in what's going on. They're here this year, and they may be up
+among the Oregon redwoods next year, and somewhere else the year after.
+When they vote at all they naturally ask us how we'd like to have 'em
+vote; and that's the way it was two years ago at election time."
+
+"I see. But how does this concern the railroad company?"
+
+"I'm coming to that, right now. Two years ago we found that our
+employees' vote was big enough to turn the scale in four of the
+legislative districts and to cut a pretty good-sized figure in a fifth.
+This vote was worth something to your people, and the fact was properly
+recognized. I don't know but what I'm telling you a lot of stale news,
+but--"
+
+"Go on, Mr. Hathaway; if I wasn't greatly interested in the beginning, I
+am now. How was the fact recognized by the Transcontinental Railway
+Company?"
+
+"It was just as easy as twice two. The Twin Buttes Lumber Company is
+practically the only heavy lumber-shipper in this inter-mountain
+territory, and it was given a preferential rate on its products; you
+might say that the amount of business we do entitles us to some special
+consideration, anyway. There wasn't any bargain and sale about it, you
+understand. It was just a sort of friendly recognition of our help in
+the election."
+
+"This rate is lower than the rate made to other lumber-shippers?"
+
+"Well, yes; but, after all, it isn't any big thing. If you were up on
+lumber rates, Mr. Blount--as I don't suppose you are--you'd know that
+the special tariff we get is all that enables us to live and do
+business."
+
+Blount had opened his penknife and was absently sharpening a pencil.
+
+"This special rate you refer to, Mr. Hathaway," he said, speaking
+slowly and quite distinctly--"am I right in inferring that it is not
+confined strictly to points within the State boundaries?"
+
+At this the lumberman repeated a phrase which he had used in the anxious
+conference in the Weatherford herbarium.
+
+"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you,
+Mr. Blount. But of course you do know. If you wasn't on the inside of
+all the insides you wouldn't be sitting here pulling the strings for
+McVickar. The rate is a blanket; it covers all shipments."
+
+Blount nodded and his apparent coolness was no just measure of the
+inward fires the crooked lumber-king was kindling.
+
+"You interest me greatly, Mr. Hathaway. I am a little new to these
+things--as you intimated a few moments ago. How is this matter
+handled--by rebates, I suppose?"
+
+"N-not exactly," was the hesitating denial. "That would be too risky for
+both of us. But the Transcontinental Company is a heavy buyer--lumber
+and cross-ties and bridge timber, you know--and the biggest part of the
+difference between our special and the regular rate is taken up in our
+bills for material furnished to the railroad."
+
+"Let me be quite clear upon that point," said Blount; and if Hathaway
+had had eyes to see, he would have observed that the young lawyer's
+attitude was becoming more judicial with every fresh questioning. "Let
+me be quite sure that I understand. You mean that you are allowed to
+charge the railroad company more than the market price on the material
+it buys?"
+
+Hathaway nodded. "Yes, that's the way of it."
+
+"And this preferential rate is still in force?"
+
+"It is."
+
+"You're sure you have had no notice of its withdrawal--say within the
+past few weeks?"
+
+It was at this point that the lumber lord began to fear that some one
+had slipped a cog in sending him to first one and then another, and
+finally to young Blount.
+
+"Of course, it hasn't been withdrawn!" he retorted. And then: "You seem
+to think there is something off color in the deal, Mr. Blount, and I
+don't know whether you're stringing me or whether you're too new in the
+railroad game to have the dope. If you're going into this political
+knock-down-and-drag-out, you ought to have the dope. There isn't a big
+interest in this State--ore-shippers, power people, irrigation
+companies, or any of 'em--that ain't getting a rake-off. I guess you
+_are_ stringing me; I guess you know all this a good deal better than I
+do. If you don't, I can tell you that it's a fact; not a 'has-been', but
+an 'is'! Ask Gantry; he'll tell you, if he tells the truth. We ain't
+asking or getting anything that other people ain't getting!"
+
+"I see," said Blount soberly. "What do you expect me to do, Mr.
+Hathaway?"
+
+"I want you to set the wheels in motion so that we can have our rate
+made good for another two years--on the same terms as before. You're
+going to need every vote you can get this year, and you can't afford to
+turn us down." Then the lumber-king shifted again to his own
+necessities. "It's the only way we can live and do business nowadays.
+Like every other large corporation, we've got an army of little
+investors to look out for: widows, orphans, charitable institutions, and
+trustees' accounts. I've got a list of our stockholders right here, and
+I'd like to have you look it over."
+
+Blount took the paper mechanically, and quite as mechanically ran his
+eye down the list of names. At the bottom of it, written in with a pen,
+was the name of Patricia's father, with his residence and occupation.
+While he was staring at the pen-written name, Hathaway went on,
+eloquently emphasizing the disastrous results which would fall upon the
+people for whom he was, in the larger sense, a guardian and a
+trustee--the disaster hinging upon the withdrawal of the preferential
+rate.
+
+Blount broke him abruptly in the midst of the special plea. "I see you
+have recently added one new name to this list: the name of Professor
+Anners. How--"
+
+"Yes," interrupted the Twin Buttes diplomatist hastily, fearing that
+this legal-minded young man would presently be asking questions too hard
+to be answered; "now there's a case in point: Mr. Anners is a good
+example of our smaller stockholders. Men like Anners, college
+professors, preachers, and so on, buy stocks, when they buy 'em at all,
+for an investment--for the income--and they pay for 'em out of their
+hard-earned savings."
+
+"I know," said Blount, and, since he was the last man in the world to be
+diverted from his purpose by any conversational dust-throwing, he
+pressed the question cut off by the hasty interruption. "What I was
+going to ask was how you happen to have added Professor Anners's name to
+your list--recently, it seems?"
+
+The lumberman was reduced to the necessity of inventing a ready lie. He
+had obeyed his instructions blindly, on the supposition that young
+Blount would know and understand.
+
+"Anners? Oh, he knows a good thing when he sees it; and I guess maybe
+your father put him on. He's a friend of the family, ain't he? Maybe the
+senator found a little chunk of 'Twin Buttes' that he didn't want
+himself, and passed it along."
+
+Blount's blood ran cold at the sight of the cracking walls and crumbling
+foundations on every hand. The proof that the railroad company's lawless
+attitude was still unchanged was too strong to be doubted; and now there
+was an added blow from the hand of his father. He wheeled short upon the
+lumber-king.
+
+"Who sent you to me, Mr. Hathaway?" he demanded.
+
+The hawk-faced man laughed. "I guess you know just as well or better
+than I do. But just to show you that I can keep my mouth shut, I ain't
+going to tell you. It's all right and straight--and you might say it's
+all in the family, counting the professor in on the side, as it were."
+
+"I see," Blount said, and this time he was only too sure that he did
+see. Then: "What is it you want me to do for you, Mr. Hathaway? You have
+told me once, but I'm afraid I didn't grasp it fully."
+
+"Fix it with Gantry, or somebody, so that we can put the company vote
+where it's most needed and get our rate continued. It's simple enough."
+
+"The simplicity is beyond question." Blount returned the list of
+stockholders and fell back upon the pencil-sharpening. "It is quite
+elementary, as you say; but there is another phase of the transaction
+which seems to have escaped you. Are you aware that the present
+arrangement which you have so accurately described, and the continuance
+of it which you are proposing, are crimes for which both parties
+involved may be called into court and punished?"
+
+Hathaway started as if the comfortable chair in which he was lounging
+had been suddenly electrified.
+
+"Say, Blount, are you working for the railroad, or not?" he demanded.
+"If you are, what in the name of Heaven are you driving at? I know the
+line of talk you've been handing out since McVickar gave you your job
+and set you up in business here, but that's for the dear public. You
+don't have to wear your halo when a man comes in to talk hard facts from
+the inside. It comes to just this: you do something for me, and I do
+something for you. You make it possible for us to live and sell lumber,
+and we do what we can to make it easy for your railroad to get its
+'square deal' from a pie-cutting legislature. That's the whole thing
+in a nutshell."
+
+"One more question," snapped Blount, striving to fix the roving gaze of
+the hawk-like eyes. "With whom did you make this arrangement two years
+ago?"
+
+"With your boss, if you want to know; with Mr. McVickar himself!"
+
+"And you think you can do it again?"
+
+"I know damned well I can; only I don't care to go over your head unless
+I have to. They tell me you're handling this end of it for the railroad
+company, and I'm not going around hunting a chance to make enemies.
+That's all I've got to say"--and he rose to go--"all but this: you've
+got a lot to learn about this something-for-something business, and the
+quicker you get at it, Mr. Blount, the sooner you'll arrive somewhere.
+About this little matter of ours, there's no special hurry. Take your
+own time to think it over; take it up with McVickar, if you want to.
+Then, when you get things fixed, wire me one word to Twin Buttes. Just
+say 'Yes,' and sign your name to it. That'll be enough."
+
+For a long half-hour after the president of the Twin Buttes Lumber
+Company and its allied corporations had closed the door of the private
+office behind him, Blount sat rocking gently in his pivot-chair. In the
+fulness of time the bitter thoughts wrought their way into words.
+
+"So this is what I was hired for!" he mused, "a fence; a wretched mask
+put up to hide the trickery and chicanery and criminality--the
+crookedness which has never been put aside; which nobody ever meant to
+put aside! My God! they've let me stultify myself in a thousand ways;
+let me sit here day after day with a lie in my mouth, saying things that
+nobody in this God-forsaken homeland of mine has believed for a single
+minute! After it's all over, every man who has listened to me will say
+that I _knew_--that all this talk about openness and fair dealing was
+simply that much dust-throwing to hide the workings of a corrupt and
+criminal machine grinding away in the background!"
+
+He turned to his desk and sat with his head propped in his hands,
+staring at the little photograph of Wartrace Hall which he had had
+mounted in a plate-glass paper-weight. The sight gave an added twist to
+the torture screw and he broke out again.
+
+"I've been nothing more than a bit of potter's clay, and the master
+potter--God help me!--is my own father! It's all plain enough now. He
+saw that I wasn't going to fall in with the attorney-general scheme; or
+perhaps he saw that I might be a stumbling-block if I should; so he
+planned this thing with McVickar--planned it deliberately! There is no
+fight, after all; it's merely one of the moves in the game that the
+'boss' and the railroad should seem to be fighting each other. Good God!
+I can't believe it, and yet I've got to believe it. That man Hathaway
+is a self-confessed criminal, but he was telling the truth about the
+law-breaking trickery that is going on; he wouldn't be idiotic enough to
+lie and then give me a chance to prove the lie. And he didn't come to me
+of his own volition; he was sent--sent to break me down, and sent by....
+Oh, dad, dad! how could you do it!"
+
+With his face hidden in the crook of his arm, he was groping in vain
+outreachings for something to lay hold of, for some clear-minded,
+clean-hearted adviser who could tell him what to do; how he should
+clamber out of this pit of humiliation into which nothing more culpable
+than an honest zeal for civic righteousness had precipitated him. In his
+despair he told himself that there was no one, and then suddenly he
+remembered--Patricia would know, and she would understand better than
+any one else in a populous world how to point the way out of the
+labyrinth. He must go to her and tell her. In the meantime....
+
+He got up and shut his desk with a slam. In the meantime there should be
+no more lies told--no more turns taken in the crooked path. Collins, the
+stenographer, heard the noise of the desk closing and came to the door
+of the private room, note-book and pencil in hand. "Anything to give me
+before you go out?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said Blount almost savagely. "Take a message to Mr. McVickar. Are
+you ready?"
+
+The stenographer nodded.
+
+Blount dictated curtly: "'Pending another interview with you in person,
+I shall close my offices in Temple Court and confine myself strictly to
+the routine legal business of the company. Meanwhile, my resignation is
+in your hands if you wish to appoint a new division counsel.' Have you
+got that, Collins? Very well; write it out and send it at once. I shall
+be at the Inter-Mountain for a little while, if you want to reach me
+between now and closing time."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT
+
+
+Going to the hotel, Blount shut himself into a telephone booth and
+tried, ineffectually, to get a long-distance connection with Wartrace
+Hall. When he finally grew exasperated at the central operator's
+oft-repeated "line's busy," he called up Gantry to ask if the traffic
+manager knew anything about the purposes and movements of his father.
+Gantry did not know, but he knew something else--a thing which proved
+the leakiness of the railroad telegraph department.
+
+"Come down here and tell me what you mean by sending incendiary
+telegrams to the vice-president," he commanded, with jesting severity.
+And with a hard word for the department which had gossiped, Blount went
+down to the general offices in the station building.
+
+Gantry was busy with the stenographer, but the business was immediately
+postponed and the clerk dismissed when Blount entered.
+
+"'Tell it out among the heathen,'" the traffic manager quoted jocosely,
+when the door closed behind the shorthand man.
+
+"There is nothing to tell--more than you seem to know already," snapped
+Blount morosely. "I have wired my resignation, that's all."
+
+"But why?" persisted Gantry.
+
+"Because I'm not going to be an accessory, either before or after the
+fact--not if I know it," was the curt rejoinder.
+
+"An accessory to what?"
+
+"To the criminal disregard for the laws of this State and the nation
+which seems to be the underlying motive actuating every move in this
+corrupt game of politics. Gantry, if you and some others had your just
+deserts, you would be breaking stone in the penitentiary this blessed
+minute!"
+
+"Suffering Moses!" gasped the traffic manager. "Somebody must have been
+hitting you pretty hard. Who was it; some more of the 'little
+brothers'?"
+
+At another time Blount might have been less angry, and, by consequence,
+more discreet.
+
+"No, it wasn't any of the 'little brothers'; it was Mr. Simon P.
+Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company."
+
+Gantry drew a long breath which ended in a low whistle.
+
+"So that's what you were let in for, was it?" he exclaimed, and then he
+checked himself abruptly and went back to the original contention. "But
+you're not going to throw down your tools and walk out, Evan. You can't
+afford to do that."
+
+"Why can't I?"
+
+"Because you have committed yourself right and left. No man can afford
+to drop out of the ranks on the eve of a battle. You are not stopping to
+consider the construction which will be put upon any such hasty action
+on your part."
+
+"I am not stopping to consider anything, Dick, save the fact that I was
+evidently expected to connive at a cynical and criminal disregard for
+the law of the land, the law which, as a member of the bar, I have sworn
+to uphold and defend. That is enough for me. I don't have to be knocked
+down and run over before I can realize that it's time to get out of the
+way."
+
+"You say it's enough for you; it won't be enough for Mr. McVickar,"
+Gantry interposed. "If you could afford to drop out--and I'm not
+admitting that you can--he couldn't afford to let you." Then, with
+sudden gravity: "Hadn't you better let me hold up that telegram of yours
+for a few hours, Evan, until you've had time to cool down and think it
+over?"
+
+Blount sprang from his chair in a white heat.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that you are already holding it up?" he
+demanded.
+
+"I took the liberty of holding it up--temporarily," confessed the
+traffic man coolly. "There is no harm done. Mr. McVickar is on his way
+West now, and he will be here in a day or two. Why not kill the message
+and have it out with him in person when he comes?"
+
+Blount was not to be so easily appeased.
+
+"I won't have my communications tampered with!" he exploded. "If you
+have given an order to have that telegram held out, you can give another
+to have it sent immediately!"
+
+"All right," said Gantry; "just as you say." And he made no effort to
+detain the enraged one who was turning his back and striding away. But
+after the self-discharged political manager was gone, the traffic man
+chuckled quietly and turned up a square of paper which had been lying on
+his desk during the short and belligerent interview.
+
+"It's a nice lay-out," he mused, reading the type-written lines over
+again, "but the little lady was too fly for you this time, Evan, my boy.
+She was just prophetess enough to guess where and how you would go off
+the handle, clever enough to pass me the word to watch the wires after a
+certain train should get in from Ophir to-day. Great little woman, that.
+I believe she figures out more than half of the fine moves in the
+Honorable Senator's game, though this particularly fine move of sending
+Hathaway to touch a match to Evan's little powder-keg is one that I
+don't begin to understand." And he folded the telegram and carefully put
+it away in his pocket-book.
+
+Evan Blount walked three squares beyond the Inter-Mountain Hotel before
+he had cooled down sufficiently to determine what to do next. As it
+chanced, the cooling-down process had led him to the door of the public
+garage patronized by his father. That thought of flying to Patricia for
+counsel and comfort was still with him, but it was over-shadowed by a
+more militant desire to fight somebody; to go to his father and tell him
+how completely and successfully he had plotted with the vice-president
+to humiliate a son whose only offence was a decent regard for honor and
+uprightness.
+
+Acting upon the impulse of the moment, he went in and asked if any of
+Senator Blount's cars were in the city. There was one--the big roadster;
+and Blount's decision was taken instantly. On that first day at Wartrace
+Hall his father had tried to give him one of the three motor-cars
+outright, and when he had refused to take it as a gift, a compromise had
+been made by which he was under promise to use any one of the machines
+he could get hold of when the need arose. Accordingly, a few minutes
+later he was behind the steering-wheel of the fast roadster, picking his
+way through the traffic-burdened city streets and pointing straight for
+the country road leading north to the sage-brush hills.
+
+Now, among its many attractions, motoring numbers--from the driver's
+point of view--this: that it effectually sweeps the brain of all other
+cares and distractions, sundry and several, since one may not drive a
+high-powered car at speed and successfully think of anything but the
+driving. Blount reached the entrance to the cottonwood-shaded avenue at
+Wartrace Hall just before the dinner hour; and he was so far recovered
+from the attack of righteous indignation that he was able to meet his
+father and the others with a fair degree of equanimity. In the back part
+of his mind, however, he held the fighting ultimatum in suspense. In
+the course of the evening he would make his opportunity and have it out,
+once for all, with the master plotter. So much he determined while he
+was dressing for dinner. But the course of events is sometimes a most
+unmalleable thing, as he was presently to learn.
+
+At the dinner-table it was the professor who monopolized the
+conversation, holding forth learnedly and dictatorially upon matters
+pertaining solely to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the talk
+to approach nearer than several million years to the twentieth century.
+And at the dispersal--only there was no dispersal--the senator took his
+turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room and persuading
+Patricia to go to the piano.
+
+The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his
+brain bided his time. He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and
+Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was
+still outweighing the lesser. Further along, when Miss Anners had played
+herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination. But, in
+spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the
+pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.
+
+The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the
+bamboo _portieres_ he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric
+discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should.
+Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and
+that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the
+long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But when his patience was
+finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo
+_portieres_ aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It was Patricia,
+and she was alone.
+
+"I thought perhaps I should find you here," she said, taking the easy
+chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was
+blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn. "Did we
+bore you to death with the Pliocenes?"
+
+"Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But since I hadn't remembered to
+have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to
+galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods."
+
+"Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for daddy's sake I do try to.
+But for us who are living to-day there are so many problems of
+critically vital importance--problems that the pterodactyls never knew
+anything about."
+
+"I know," returned the young man, half-absently. "I am up against one of
+them, right now, and I don't know how to solve it."
+
+"Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her
+tone was personal rather than conventional.
+
+"It will not only bear telling; it demands to be told to some one whose
+sense of right and wrong has not been drawn and quartered and flayed
+alive until it has no longer life or breath left with which to
+protest," and thereupon he told her circumstantially all that had
+befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the
+wrecked train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of the lumber
+magnate's attempt at corruption, of which he suppressed nothing but the
+fact that her father's name appeared in Mr. Hathaway's list of
+share-holders. When he had made an end, her eyes were shining, though
+whether with quickened sympathy or indignation he could not determine.
+
+"What did you do?" she asked, referring to the incident of the
+afternoon.
+
+"I didn't do half enough!" he fumed. "I'm afraid I let Hathaway escape
+without being told plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable
+scoundrel he is. When he edged out of the door, he was still telling me
+to take my time to think it over, and was indicating the way in which I
+might communicate my consent without committing anybody. I made a
+mistake in not firing him bodily!"
+
+Miss Anners was tapping one daintily shod foot on the tiled hearth.
+
+"You made your greatest mistake in the very beginning, Evan," she said
+decisively. "You should have made a confidant of your father."
+
+"I did try to," he protested. "Everything was all right until this
+political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I
+couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the
+corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr.
+McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I
+could really do something toward bringing about a better understanding."
+
+"And now you believe you can't?--that it is impossible?"
+
+"Not wholly impossible, I suppose. But the 'great game' seems to be
+everything in this benighted commonwealth, and everybody plays it--my
+father, his wife, the railroad officials, and the politicians. Surely
+you wouldn't say that I should have let father put me on the State
+ticket as a candidate, knowing--as I could not help knowing--that I
+would be expected to carry out the designs of the machine regardless of
+right and wrong?"
+
+"Certainly not," was the quick reply, "not if you were convinced that
+the motive--your father's motive--was unworthy. But if you have been
+telling me the truth, and all the truth, I should say that you didn't
+stop to inquire what his motive was."
+
+"What was the use of inquiring?" he demanded moodily. "He is the boss,
+and he would have used the machine to put me into office as
+attorney-general. In other words, I should have owed my election, not to
+the will and selection of the people, but to the will of one man, and
+that man my nearest kinsman; a man who is, beyond all question of doubt,
+working hand in glove with all the trickery and double-dealing practised
+by the corporations. Under such conditions, would it have been possible
+for me to accept and to administer the office without fear or favor?"
+
+"I don't know why not," she returned. "Notwithstanding your
+charge--which merely shows how angry you are--your 'nearest kinsman,' as
+you call him, would have been the last man in the world to interfere.
+Wasn't that the very reason he gave you for wanting to put you on the
+ticket?"
+
+"I know," said Blount, whose mind was beginning to cloud again. "But
+there are so many other mysteries. We'll say that my father honestly
+wanted me to stand for the candidacy. But right in the midst of things
+he conspires with Mr. McVickar to put me into my present unspeakable
+dilemma."
+
+Her smile was gently reproachful.
+
+"It is my poor opinion, Evan, that you don't half appreciate your
+father. Worse than that, you don't know him. But that is beside the
+present mark. What are you going to do?"
+
+"I have already done it. I have wired my resignation to Mr. McVickar,
+and he will doubtless accept it."
+
+She was looking him fairly in the eyes. "That is the second unwise thing
+you have done," she remarked. And then: "Evan, there are times when you
+are sadly in need of a balance-wheel. Don't you know that?"
+
+"I knew it a good while ago. I applied for one once, and it was refused
+when you said 'No'."
+
+For one who was supposed to be far above and beyond such emotional
+signallings, she blushed very prettily. Which merely proves that one may
+be a diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating the
+miseries of a sodden world, without having parted with the primitive sex
+impulse.
+
+"I am willing to try to help you now," she said, half hesitating; "if
+only you won't try to drag me over into the field of sentiment. It was
+just a bit of boyish rage--fine enough in its way, but foolish--your
+sending that telegram to Mr. McVickar. Can't you recall it?"
+
+"No; not now."
+
+"Then you must do the next best thing: tell him you have reconsidered."
+
+"But I haven't reconsidered; I can't and won't stand in with the
+corruption and bribery that is going on all around me!" he objected
+indignantly.
+
+"Of course you can't; and you mustn't. But the true reformer doesn't
+drop things and run away. You must stay in and fight--fight harder than
+you ever have before, Evan. If you can't do it for the sake of the
+larger right, then you must do it for your own sake. Can't you see the
+open door before you?"
+
+"I can see and hear and feel when the door is slammed in my face," was
+the qualifying rejoinder. "How can I go on preaching the gospel of
+cleanness and fair dealing, when I know that all this crooked work is
+going on behind my back? What will the people of this State say to me
+and about me when the crookedness comes to light?"
+
+"Ah!" she said; "that is just where you begin to grow one-sided. You
+must go on preaching the gospel, but that is only half of the battle.
+The other half is to be big enough and strong enough and insistent
+enough to make the thing itself agree with the gospel. I fully believe
+you lost your best helper when you refused to join hands with your
+father. You don't believe that, so we'll let it go. You have gone your
+own way, choosing what seemed to you to be the better opportunity. Evan,
+you can't turn back; you've simply _got_ to go on and wring success out
+of apparent failure!"
+
+Blount drew a deep breath and sat up in his chair. There was no
+mistaking the light in Patricia's eyes now; the pure flame of which it
+was the visible radiance is the torch which has kindled the beacon fires
+on all the heights since the world began.
+
+"If I had only my own people--the railroad people--to knock down and
+drag out," he was beginning, but she broke in warmly:
+
+"You think you have your father against you, too; I don't believe it,
+but you do. Very well; then you must compel him, as well as the others.
+Be a big man, Evan; be the biggest man in the State until you have
+proved that one man with a righteous cause is better than ten thousand
+without it."
+
+Blount got up and stood with his back to the dying embers of the tiny
+fire, and if he put his hands behind him it was because the passionate
+impulse to break down all the barriers was twitching in every fibre of
+him.
+
+"Patricia, girl, I wonder if you know what you have done to me? I drove
+out here this evening utterly discouraged and disheartened; bitter and
+angry, and ready to throw the whole thing up and go away. You've
+changed all that--you, you know; just you. Oh, girl, girl! if I could
+only have you beside me to give me my battle-word!"
+
+She had her slender fingers locked over one knee and her eyes were
+downcast.
+
+"Now you are tempting me," she said slowly; "and--and it isn't fair. You
+know my weakness and passion to help. You _mustn't_ tempt me, Evan."
+
+What he would have said, with what eager pleadings he would have pressed
+the advantage gained by his appeal for the larger help, is not to be
+here set down. For at that moment the bamboo door curtains parted to
+admit the small house-mistress.
+
+"You two!" she scolded with light-hearted austerity. And then to Evan:
+"Don't you know that we are keeping country hours here at Wartrace now?
+The professor will be up and calling for the car at six o'clock, and
+it's past midnight. Shame on you! Run away and get your beauty
+sleep--both of you!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE LIEGEMAN
+
+
+Evan Blount drove himself back to the capital in the swift roadster the
+following morning, and there was no opportunity for further confidential
+speech with Patricia before he left. But with the new day had arisen,
+full-grown, the determination born in the moment of midnight
+heart-warming and inspiration. To the best of his ability he would live
+up to the high standard set for him by the woman he loved, not only
+preaching the gospel of fair dealing, but doing his utmost to make it
+effective.
+
+With this high purpose singing its song of exaltation in his veins, he
+drove on past the garage and made an early call at the office of the
+traffic manager. Gantry was in the midst of his morning mail-opening,
+but he pushed the desk-load of papers aside when the door swung inward
+to admit the early visitor.
+
+"Hello, old man! Come back to jar me some more about that telegram?" was
+his greeting.
+
+Blount shook his head. "No; if you've sent it, well and good. If you
+haven't, you may pitch it into the waste-basket. I came to talk about
+something else."
+
+"Good, sound, sensible second thought!" Gantry commented, laughing. Then
+he took out his pocket-book and passed the suppressed telegram across to
+Blount. "Here it is; you can do the waste-basket act yourself. I
+couldn't let you commit _hara-kiri_ without at least trying to get the
+cutting tool out of your hands. What is the other thing you've got on
+your mind this early in the morning? It must be a nightmare of some
+sort, by the look in your eyes."
+
+"It may figure as a nightmare to you, Dick, before we're through with
+it. I'll make it short. You know what I have been doing--what I supposed
+I was hired to do--assuring everybody right and left that we were going
+into this campaign with clean hands?"
+
+"I know," admitted the traffic manager, developing a sudden interest in
+the figures of the rug at his feet.
+
+"I have been doing this in a business way at my office up-town, in
+season and out of season, and night before last, at Ophir, I did it
+publicly. As the campaign progresses, I shall doubtless put myself on
+record many times to the same effect."
+
+"Good man!" applauded Gantry, striving to drag the talk down to some
+less portentous altitude. "I'm sure we need all the whitewashing anybody
+can give us."
+
+"That is just the point I have come to make," Blount went on gravely.
+"It mustn't be merely a coat of whitewash, Dick; it has got to be the
+real thing, this time. I began by firing the 'little brothers,' as you
+called them, but I sha'n't stop at that; I mean to go higher up if I am
+compelled to. I am here this morning to ask you to give me your word as
+a gentleman and my friend that you will not, directly or indirectly, do
+or cause to be done anything that will make me stand forth as a
+self-convicted liar before the people of this State. I want you to
+promise me that you will cut out all the deals, all the briberies, all
+the bargainings, all the--"
+
+"Oh, say; see here!" protested the man under fire; "you've got the wrong
+pig by the ear, Evan. I'm not the Transcontinental Railway Company!"
+
+"I know you are not. But, to a greater degree than any other official in
+the local management, you have Mr. McVickar's confidence. If you don't
+feel competent to handle the thing on your own responsibility, of course
+it's your privilege to pass it up to those who have the authority. In
+that case, I wish to make one point clear: you're the man I'm going to
+hold up to the rack. I can't afford to spread myself over the entire
+management, and I don't mean to try. I'm going to look to you, Dick, for
+the backing of the clean sheet, and I warn you in all soberness that
+there must be no blots on it; no compromises; no whipping of the devil
+around the stump."
+
+"Great Scott!" murmured Gantry. "And you're on the pay-rolls, the same
+as the rest of us! But candidly, as man to man, Evan, the thing can't be
+done, you know. We've got to play the game; they'll eat us alive if we
+don't. You needn't figure in it at all; it was a mistake letting Sim
+Hathaway get to you, and I said so at the time. But your--er--the powers
+that be said it had to be that way, and I had to let him go and ball you
+all up. It sha'n't happen again; I can promise you that much, anyway."
+
+Blount caught quickly at the hesitant pause.
+
+"Who were 'the powers that be' in Hathaway's case, Dick?" he inquired.
+
+"I can't tell you that; honestly, I can't, Evan," was the anxious
+refusal. "Don't ask me."
+
+"All right; then I shall assume that Mr. McVickar was responsible," said
+Blount calmly, thus proving that he had not taken his degree in the law
+school for nothing.
+
+"Oh, hold on! You mustn't do that, either!" protested the man who was
+figuring most unwillingly as the occupant of the witness stand.
+
+"Thank you," returned the postgraduate, with the true Blount smile. "Now
+I know that it was my father. No; you needn't deny it; I suppose it was
+for some good reason that this man was sent to teach me how to play the
+game--as reasons go in practical politics. But we are side-stepping the
+real issue. I've asked you for a promise: will you give it?"
+
+"I--I can't give it, Evan, and hold my job; that's God's own truth!"
+
+"No; it isn't God's truth--it's the other kind. But that was about what
+I expected you to say. Now hear my side of it: if you don't clean
+house--you and the other officials of the company--I shall not only
+resign; I shall take the field on the other side and tell what I know
+and why I've thrown up my job. I've been telling everybody that this is
+to be a campaign of publicity, and by all that is good and great, I
+shall keep my word, Dick!"
+
+"Oh, for heaven's sake, you wouldn't do that!" ejaculated the traffic
+man, now thoroughly alarmed. "Land of glory, Evan! you know too much--a
+great deal too much!"
+
+The young man who knew too much got up and relighted his cigar with a
+match taken from Gantry's desk box.
+
+"It's up to you," he said, with his hand on the door-knob. "Get into
+communication with whatever 'powers that be' there are that can give the
+necessary orders; see to it that the orders are given, and that they are
+put in the way of being carried out. As God hears me, Dick, I mean what
+I say: it's a clean sheet, or an exposure that will make a lot of you
+wish you had never been born. If I have to put the screws on--as I hope
+and pray I sha'n't--you can bet they'll be put on lawyer-fashion; with
+evidence that will send a bunch of you to the penitentiary."
+
+"Hold on--one question before you go, Evan!" pleaded Gantry. "I haven't
+known half the time where I'm at in this latest muddle. Is this another
+little blind lead of the Honorable Sen--of your father's?"
+
+Blount's smile was as grim as any that Gantry had ever seen on the face
+of the Honorable David.
+
+"It's against nature for you to play the game straight, isn't it, Dick?"
+he said in mild reproach. "If you don't know that my father is still the
+head of the machine, and that the machine has always been for you in the
+past, I imagine you're the only man in the Sage-Brush State who needs
+enlightening. No, Gantry; you've got only one man to fight; but you
+mustn't forget that his name, also, is Blount. Go to it and send me
+word, and let the first word be that you have scotched the head of this
+lumber-company snake. That's all for to-day. Good-by."
+
+Notwithstanding the fact that his day's work was still ahead of him, the
+traffic manager did not attack it when he was left alone. An able man in
+his calling, and one who had fought his way rapidly by sheer merit and
+hard work from a clerkship to an official desk, Richard Gantry was still
+lacking, in a character admirable and most lovable in many ways, the
+iron that refuses to bend, and--though perhaps in lesser measure--the
+courage of his ultimate convictions. In addition to these basic
+weaknesses he owned another--the weakness of the cog which is
+constrained to turn with the great wheel of which it is a part.
+
+In his heart of hearts Richard Gantry knew that Blount was right; knew
+that the forlorn-hope fight into which his friend and college classmate
+had plunged was a struggle to call out all that was best and finest in
+friendly loyalty. But when he sprang from his chair and began to walk
+the floor of his private office with his head down and his hands deeply
+buried in his pockets, he was once more the true corporation liegeman,
+loyal to his salt, and anxious only to contrive means to an end.
+
+"Confound his picture!" he muttered, "why the devil can't he see that
+he's got everything to lose and nothing to gain? It's a thousand pities
+that such a royal good fellow has to turn himself into a wild-eyed,
+impossible crank! The Lord knows, I'd do anything in reason for him; but
+I can't let him turn anarchist and blow us all to kingdom come. He's got
+to be muzzled in some way, and I'll be hanged if I know how it's going
+to be done."
+
+The pacing monologue paused when the traffic manager stopped at the
+window and stood looking with unseeing eyes upon the morning bustle of
+Sierra Avenue. Then he broke out again.
+
+"It's a beautiful tangle--damn' beautiful! Evan says I know that we've
+got the machine with us; I wish to heaven I did know it, and could be
+sure of it. That would simplify matters a whole lot. But the
+vice-president won't say, and he's the one who has been doing all the
+dickering with the Honorable David. They quarrelled at first; I'd bet
+every dollar I've got on that. But I more than half-believe they've
+patched it up now, and I believe it was Mr. McVickar's quick swiping of
+Evan--jerking him out from under his father's thumb the way he did--that
+brought on the peace negotiations."
+
+He turned away from the window and resumed the floor-pacing, still
+wrestling with the deductions.
+
+"By George! I believe I've got hold of the end of the thread at last!
+The senator _is_ with us, working in the dark, as he always does. And
+that Hathaway business: that was one of his smooth little
+side-moves--his or Mrs. Honoria's. He didn't want Evan to get in too
+deep in the righteousness puddle, and he took that way of letting him
+get a peek at the real thing. It was overdone, though; horribly
+overdone. Confound it all! I wish Mr. McVickar would loosen up a little
+more with me! If he'd tell me a few of the things I ought to know--"
+
+The interruption was the entrance of the boy from the train-despatcher's
+office with a verbal message. The vice-president, moving westward, had
+changed his plans and cut out some of his stop-overs. Car "008" would be
+in on the noon train and would proceed westward, running special, at one
+o'clock. The despatcher had thought that Mr. Gantry might want to know.
+
+The traffic manager did want to know, and when the boy had ducked out,
+the knowledge was promptly utilized. A touch of a desk-button brought
+the stenographer, and Gantry dictated a message. "'Important that I
+should have conference with you on arrival. Will meet you at train at
+twelve-three.' Send that to Mr. McVickar over the despatcher's wire, and
+ask Gilkey to rush it," he directed, and the shorthand man went to do
+it.
+
+"Now, Mr. Evan Anarchist Blount!" said Gantry, apostrophizing the late
+disturber of his peace, "now we'll find out just where we're at and how
+big a rope it's going to take to snub you down," and thereupon the desk
+buzzer rattled again, and Mr. Richard Gantry squared himself for his
+forenoon's work.
+
+At the moment of his apostrophizing Blount was opening his mail in the
+Temple Court office, and lamenting, as a loyal friend might, the
+necessity for the recent clubbing into line of so fine a fellow as Dick
+Gantry. But the mail-opening plunged him once more into the political
+actualities. There were letters from all over the State, and among them
+three invitations from widely separated cities, all based upon the
+newspaper reports of his Ophir speech. It seemed to be plainly evident
+that the "campaign-of-education" idea was striking a popular chord, and
+the proponent of the idea saw what a miraculous opportunity was offering
+for the railroad if only the "powers" that Gantry had refused to name
+were broad enough and high-minded enough to seize it.
+
+After a day and an evening well filled with detail, Blount went to the
+station to take the nine-thirty west-bound, since the first of the three
+speaking engagements--all of which had been promptly accepted by
+wire--lay in that direction. On the platform, whither he went to
+consult the bulletin-board, he found Gantry.
+
+"Your train is half an hour late," said the traffic man, with a glance
+for the travelling-bag in Blount's hand. "Didn't they know enough at the
+hotel to tell you about it?"
+
+"They told me it was on time," said the putative traveller, and he was
+far enough from suspecting that Gantry himself had arranged to have the
+inaccurate information given across the counter at the Inter-Mountain,
+so that he might be sure of an uninterrupted half-hour with Blount
+before he should leave the city.
+
+"Ump!" said the traffic manager, "I've got to wait for it, too. One of
+my men is coming in on it. Let's go up to the office. It's pleasanter
+there."
+
+Together they climbed the stair to the second floor of the station
+building, and Gantry unlocked the door of his private room and turned on
+the lights.
+
+"Feeling any more humane than you did this morning?" he inquired
+genially, after he had opened his desk and found a box of cigars.
+
+"I haven't been feeling otherwise since--well, let's say since midnight
+last night," countered Blount laughing.
+
+"Why midnight?"
+
+"That was about the time when I made up my mind definitely to stay in
+the fight."
+
+"Then you are still meaning to go ahead on the lines you laid down this
+morning?"
+
+"If I wasn't, I shouldn't be here to take the train for the rally at
+Angora to-morrow night."
+
+Gantry smoked in silence for a little time. Then he said: "You can't do
+it, Evan. It's fine and glorious and heart-breaking, and all that; but
+you can't do it."
+
+"I can, and I will!"
+
+"I say you can't. I know a good bit more now than I knew this morning!"
+
+"Catalogue it," said Blount tersely.
+
+"Mr. McVickar came in on the noon train to-day, and I had an interview
+with him."
+
+"That doesn't tell me anything."
+
+Again the traffic manager took time to smoke and to reflect.
+
+"You made some pretty savage threats this morning, Evan; about shoving
+this thing to the point where the grand juries, Federal and State, could
+take hold of it. As a lawyer, you know even better than I do what that
+would mean."
+
+"I told you what it would mean. In the present state of public sentiment
+it would mean prison sentences for every man of you caught with the
+goods."
+
+"Yes, for every man of us," said Gantry slowly; "for the railroad man
+who has given, and for the other man who has taken. Evan, the jails of
+this State wouldn't be big enough to hold us all."
+
+"I can readily believe you. That is the full weight of the stick with
+which I am going to club you fellows into decency."
+
+"And you'll let the club fall wherever it may?"
+
+"I've got to do that, Dick; I can't do any less."
+
+For the third time Gantry paused. The train-waiting interval was half
+gone, and he had been feeling purposefully for the climaxing moment
+without finding it. But now he decided that it had come.
+
+"In the talk this morning there was some reference made to your father
+and his attitude in this fight, Evan. Do you remember what was said?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"Well, suppose I should tell you that I know now--what I didn't know
+certainly then--that when you hit out at us you hit him?"
+
+"You mean that he is with you in this scheme to hoodwink the people?"
+
+"Ask yourself," was the low-toned reply.
+
+"I have asked myself a hundred times, Dick; I've been hoping against
+hope. I'll be utterly frank with you, as man to man. We've kept pretty
+obstinately out of the political field, both of us, father and I, since
+the first day when I told him my views on machine-made government. But
+from a few little things he has said, I've gathered that he isn't with
+you; that there has been a quarrel of some kind between him and Mr.
+McVickar--"
+
+"There was a set-to--a battle royal," Gantry put in. "The last act of it
+was played to a finish that evening when Mr. McVickar took you down to
+his car and hired you. But there has been a meeting since. Ask yourself
+again, Evan. Haven't you had good and sufficient reasons for believing
+that you are bucking, not only the railroad company, but your own flesh
+and blood?"
+
+This time it was Blount who took time for reflection. The shot had gone
+home. He told himself that there were only too many reasons for
+believing that Gantry was stating the simple fact. None the less, he
+made a final effort to break down the conclusion that Gantry was
+relentlessly thrusting upon him.
+
+"In all our talks, Dick--there haven't been very many of them--my father
+has taken, or seemed to take, a different line. I don't recall anything
+specific just now, but he has given me the impression that he hasn't
+much in common with Mr. McVickar and his methods. To hear him talk--"
+
+Gantry smiled. "You know your father very superficially, Evan, if you'll
+permit me to say so. What the Honorable David Blount says in talk with
+you or me or anybody outside of the inner circle is a mighty poor
+foundation upon which to build any idea of what's going on in the back
+of his head. No--hold on; don't get mad. What I'm trying to tell you is
+what everybody in the sage-brush hills--save and excepting
+yourself--knows like a book, and that is that the big boss's moves are
+all made strictly in the dark. He doesn't let his own right hand know
+what the left is doing. That's the secret of his absolutely Czarish
+power, I think."
+
+The shriek of a distant locomotive whistle floated in through the open
+window at Blount's back and he got up stiffly.
+
+"That's my train coming," he said. And then: "Tell me plainly, Dick:
+you brought me up here to throw a final brick--a bigger one than you
+have yet thrown--and I know it. What did Mr. McVickar tell you to-day
+that will make my job harder than I am already finding it?"
+
+Gantry turned his head, refusing to meet the straightforward gaze of the
+questioner.
+
+"You intimated this morning that you would go at it lawyer-fashion,
+Evan," he said; "which means, I suppose, that you would get the evidence
+on us. You can do it; the Lord knows, there's plenty of it to be had.
+But when you pull out one set of props the whole thing will come down.
+We haven't any of us been careful enough about what we put in
+writing--_not even your father_."
+
+Blount staggered as if the words had been a blow.
+
+"You're trying to tell me that my father would be involved in the
+disclosures you fellows might drive me to make?" he demanded, and his
+voice was husky.
+
+Gantry was still looking away. "There always has to be an
+intermediary--you know that. We can't do business direct with
+these--with the people who have something to sell. You can draw your own
+inferences, Evan. I didn't send Hathaway to you; I sent him to your
+father."
+
+The train was thundering into the station and Blount picked up his
+hand-bag and went out, stumbling blindly in the unlighted passage at the
+stair-head. And in the private office behind him the traffic manager
+was crushing his dead cigar in his clenched hand and staring fixedly at
+the square of darkness framed by the open window.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+BARRIERS INVISIBLE
+
+
+During the three weeks following the night journey to Angora, a journey
+on which he once more fought the hard battle to a still sharper
+conclusion, Evan Blount scarcely saw his office in Temple Court for more
+than a brief hour or two at a time. One speaking appointment followed
+another in such rapid succession that he was constantly going or
+returning; and since there was everywhere a repetition of the welcome
+accorded him by the miners of the Carnadine district, there was no
+reason save physical weariness to make him wish to limit his
+opportunity.
+
+It was not until he was deep into the fourth week of the hurryings to
+and fro that he began to admit a suspicion which grew like a juggler's
+rose once he had given it place. Could it be possible that these
+numerous invitations, coming now from all parts of the State, were
+purely spontaneous? If not, if they were so many subtle moves in the
+great game, he could see no possible end to be subserved by them save
+one: they were effectually keeping him away from the capital, which was
+naturally the nucleus and centre of the campaign activities. Was there
+something going on at headquarters that "the powers" did not wish him
+to find out? Of one thing he was well assured. Gantry was dodging him,
+was apparently keeping an accurate record of his movements; for whenever
+the hurryings permitted a flying return to the capital the traffic
+manager was always out of town.
+
+These were small matters, but vital in their way. Failing to keep in
+touch with Gantry, Blount could never be sure that the policy of the
+railroad company had been reformed or changed in any respect. Moreover,
+his journeyings, which brought him in direct contact with the voters
+themselves, seemed to have the effect of isolating him curiously in the
+actual battle-field. That a hot political campaign was raging throughout
+the length and breadth of the State was not to be doubted; the
+newspapers were full of it, and in many districts the fight had become
+acrimonious and bitter. But although he was supposed to be in the thick
+of the fight, he knew that he was not; that some mysterious influence
+was shutting him out and holding him at arm's length.
+
+Everywhere he went the cordial reception, the attentive and hospitable
+committeemen, the packed house, and the generous applause were always
+awaiting him. It was as if his progress had been carefully prearranged,
+like a sort of triumphal procession. None the less, the invisible
+barrier--the barrier which was excluding him from a hand-to-hand grapple
+with the inner workings of the campaign--was always there, and he could
+neither surmount it nor push it aside.
+
+Notwithstanding the hard work and hard travelling, he did not allow the
+missionary effort and its curious isolation to obscure in any sense the
+sturdier purpose. By every means he could devise he was holding his
+principals up to the mirror of a vigilant watchfulness. Arguing that the
+opposition newspapers would be quick to seize upon any charge of
+corruption involving the railroad company, he read them faithfully. As
+yet there had been only innuendoes and a raking over of past misdeeds,
+though by this time many of the editors were openly claiming that the
+old alliance between the railroad and the machine had never been broken,
+and warning their readers accordingly.
+
+Blount winced when he read such editorials as these. Though he was going
+about, striving to do his part manfully, and even with enthusiasm, the
+burden of the cruel responsibility he had voluntarily shouldered was
+never less than crushing. His only hope lay in success. If he could make
+Gantry and his superiors come clean-handed to the election, there need
+be no exposure, no cataclysm involving both the railroad officials and
+his father.
+
+So ran the saving hope; and not content with mere watchfulness, Blount
+tried to get his finger upon the pulse of occasions whenever he could.
+On his brief stop-overs in the capital he kept his eyes and ears open
+for the earliest hint of any charge of chicanery, and though he was
+unable to get hold of Gantry personally, he kept up a steady fire of
+letters and telegrams, all pointing to the same end--absolute and utter
+good faith, and the upholding of his hands in the public plea for a
+square deal. To these the traffic manager always replied guardedly and
+optimistically. Everybody was delighted with the good work done, and
+doing, by the railroad company's field manager; public opinion was
+slowly but surely changing; let the good work go on--and much more to
+the same effect.
+
+Blount did let the good work go on; but as the critical pre-election
+weeks approached, he began to arm himself, reluctantly but resolutely. A
+little quiet investigation, which was made to dovetail cleverly with his
+speech-making journeys, revealed--as Gantry had confessed it
+would--convincing evidence of past corruption and present law-breaking.
+Hathaway had told the truth when he had asserted that his own
+involvement was only one of many similar bargains. Blount called upon
+the president of the Irrigation Alliance at Romero, in the heart of the
+agricultural district, upon the managers of several of the
+electric-power companies, and upon a number of influential mining
+men--all shippers, and all large employers of labor. It was the same
+story everywhere. Preferential freight rates had been given in return
+for votes controlled, and the rates were still in effect.
+
+The investigator turned sick at heart when these men talked quite freely
+to him, thus showing conclusively that they were cynically discounting
+his public utterances. McDarragh, owner and manager of the "Wire-Gold"
+properties in the Moscow district, winked slyly when Blount cautiously
+inserted the probe.
+
+"You're on, Mr. Blount. I sat up there in the Op'ry-house last night
+listening to your game, and says I to myself, 'Thim railroad
+shift-bosses know their trade.' 'Twas a gr-reat talk you gave us, and
+it'll make the swinging of the har-rd-rock vote as easy as twice two. Of
+course, we have a thin paring on the ore rate; you'll be knowing that as
+well as annybody in the game, I'm thinking. 'Tis well that we fellows at
+the top know how to make one hand wash the other. Come again, Mr.
+Blount, and give my regards to the sinator when ye see him. And ye might
+whisper in his ear that it's a waste of good wor-rk for him to be
+sinding his gum-shoe wire-pullers to be laboring with our min. We're
+safe as the clock up here in the Moscow."
+
+This was not the first hint that Blount had been given pointing to the
+underground work of the machine. That this work was being directed
+toward the subversion of the popular will, he made no doubt; and there
+were times when he was strongly tempted to carry the war boldly into the
+wider field of graft and bossism. That he postponed the bigger battle
+was due quite as much to the singleness of purpose which was his best
+gift as to the desire to spare his father. Telling himself resolutely
+that the reformation of the railroad company's political methods was his
+chief object, and the only one which warranted him in retaining his
+place on the Company's payrolls, he held aloof when his father's name
+was mentioned and bent himself to the task of providing the means for
+the subjugation of Gantry--and of Gantry's and his own superiors, if
+need be.
+
+The securing of evidence of the kind which would really give him the
+whip-hand promised to be a delicate undertaking. Men like McDarragh
+talked openly enough about the illegal special freight rates, but talk
+was not evidence. Curiously enough, while he was trying to devise some
+way of obtaining the tangible proof without using his semiofficial
+position in the company's service as a lever, the thing itself was
+thrown at him. From some mysterious source a rumor went out that the
+special rates were in jeopardy; and the very men with whom he had talked
+began to write him importunate letters begging him to deny the rumor.
+With a sheaf of these letters in his pocket, each one inculpating both
+parties to the illegal "deals," Blount grew gayly exultant. The natural
+inference was that Gantry and "the powers" had been finally forced to
+yield--that he had won his victory. But if he had not yet won it,
+chance, or something better, had placed in his hands the weapon with
+which he could compel a return to fair dealing and honesty.
+
+It was on a second speech-making visit to Ophir that Blount had his
+first face-to-face chance at Gantry. A meeting of the Mine-Owners'
+Association, moving for a readjustment of the classification on copper
+matte and bullion at a time when the railroad company might be supposed
+to be on the giving hand, brought Gantry to the gold camp in the
+Carnadine Hills, and the first man he met at the hotel was the stubborn
+dictator of new policies for the Transcontinental Company.
+
+"Hello, Dick! made a mistake, didn't you--coming while I was here?" said
+the reformer, with a very lifelike replica of his father's grim smile.
+"I suppose you have an immediate engagement to go somewhere else, or to
+do something that will give you a chance to dodge?"
+
+"No; I wish to the Lord I had!" was the hearty admission. "You're a
+fright, Evan; you are getting to be a perfect nightmare, with your
+letters and telegrams. You've got me so I'm afraid to open my desk."
+
+Blount nodded gravely. "I'm glad the letters and telegrams have had
+their effect at last," he rejoined.
+
+"Had their effect? Yes, they've had the effect of turning my hair gray,
+if that's what you mean."
+
+"I think you know what I mean, Dick."
+
+"I'll be hanged if I do. What are you driving at?"
+
+"At the fact that you have finally concluded to cancel the crooked deals
+with--wait, and I'll give you the names of the co-respondents"--and he
+drew a packet of neatly docketed letters from his pocket.
+
+"Hold on a minute," protested the traffic manager; "you're getting in
+rather too deep for me. Will you let me see those letters?"
+
+Blount put the letters back into his pocket and mechanically buttoned
+his light top-coat over them for additional safety.
+
+"Do you mean to say that you haven't passed the word to Hathaway and
+McDarragh and a dozen others I could name?" he asked.
+
+"Of course I haven't. You call yourself a lawyer, and yet you ask us to
+set aside promises that are, or ought to be, as binding as so many
+written contracts with penalties attached. You're crazy, Evan; it can't
+be done, and that's all there is to it."
+
+Blount was frowning thoughtfully. "'Can't' goes out of the window when
+'must' comes in at the door, Dick. You remember what I told you--that
+I'd get evidence, lawyer-fashion. I've got it; evidence of the sort that
+would turn the people of this State into a howling mob to tear up your
+tracks if I should publish it."
+
+"But I tell you we _can't_ withdraw the specials, you wild-eyed
+fanatic!"
+
+"All right; then level down the public's rates to fit them. And do it
+quickly, old man. The time is growing fearfully short, and my patience
+isn't what it used to be."
+
+"My Lord! anybody would think you owned the Transcontinental Company,
+lock, stock, and barrel! Where under heaven did you get your nerve,
+Evan? Blest if I don't believe you could out-bluff the old--er--your
+father, himself, if you once got the fool notion into your head that it
+was your duty to try!"
+
+"You are side-stepping again, Dick, and that won't go any longer. You've
+got to fish or cut bait, and do one or the other pretty soon."
+
+"I'd cut the bait all right, if I were Mr. McVickar, Evan. I'd fire you
+so blamed far that you wouldn't be able to find your way back in a month
+of Sundays."
+
+Blount tapped his pocket. "As long as I have these documents, Mr.
+McVickar doesn't dare to fire me. And if you and he don't come down
+within the next few days--yes, it's a matter of days, now--I'll fire
+myself and go over every foot of the ground again, telling what I know."
+
+Gantry's eyes darkened. He had graduated with honors from the particular
+department in railroading in which patience is more than a virtue. Yet
+there are limits.
+
+"You seem to have entirely forgotten that little talk we had in my
+office the night you were going to Angora," he said.
+
+"No; I haven't forgotten it--not for a single waking minute."
+
+"What I said to you then goes as it lies," was the threatening reminder.
+"If you pull the props out, there'll be more than one death in the
+family."
+
+"You mean that you, or Mr. McVickar, will make it a point to include my
+father; I've wrestled that out, too, Dick. I'm going to try to pull him
+out of it, but whether I succeed or fail, the consequences will be the
+same for you fellows. Come and hear me speak to-night, Dick--if you're
+stopping over that long. Then you'll know how much in earnest--how
+deadly in earnest--I am. You spoke of my father just now; I want to
+remind you again that I, too, bear the Blount name--a name that I have
+heard bandied about as a synonym for all that is worst in our political
+life. Don't you see that I've got to make good?"
+
+"Oh, great cats!--you and your high-strung notions of what you've got to
+do!" snorted the traffic manager, and he went away to his classification
+meeting.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+SWORD-PLAY
+
+
+It was during this hard-travelling period that Blount saw, with keen
+regret, the gradual widening of the breach between his father and
+himself. In their infrequent meetings there was never anything remotely
+approaching an open rupture; but in a thousand ways the younger man
+fancied he could see and feel the steady growth of the rift.
+
+That the long arm of the machine of which his father was the
+acknowledged head was reaching out into all corners of the State, was a
+fact no longer to be doubted, and that the influences thus set in motion
+were sinister, he took for granted. Therefore, when it came in his way,
+he scored the machine frankly, charging it with much of the mischief
+which had been wrought in the way of arousing public sentiment against
+the corporations. "The worst in politics joined with the worst elements
+in capitalized industry," was his platform characterization of the
+alliances of the past, and he usually added that he was fighting it as
+every honest man was in duty bound to fight it. But it is hard to fight
+in the dark. After all was said, he could not help admiring the
+subtlety of the master brain which was able to control and direct such a
+complicated piece of human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and
+cleverly that, though the name of the thing was in everybody's mouth,
+its workings were so carefully concealed that it was only by the merest
+chance that he stumbled upon them now and then.
+
+In more than one of the short stop-overs in the capital he had found his
+father still occupying the private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now
+and again there was a meal shared in the more or less crowded _cafe_. On
+such occasions the son leaned heavily upon the public character of the
+place and carefully steered the table-talk--or thought he did--into
+innocuous channels. But on a day shortly after the meeting with Gantry
+in Ophir this desultory programme was broken. Reaching the hotel in the
+evening after an all-day train journey from Lewiston, Blount found his
+father waiting for him in the lobby, and when he proposed a _cafe_
+dinner the senator shook his head.
+
+"No, son; not this evening," he said. "I've been feeling sort of set up
+and aristocratic to-day, and I've just ordered a dinner sent upstairs. I
+reckon you'll join me?"
+
+The young man was willing enough; more than willing, since he was now
+ready to say a thing which must be said before he could be prepared to
+set a time limit upon Gantry--a limit beyond which lay the firing of the
+fuse and the blowing up of all things mundane.
+
+"Certainly," he agreed. "Give me a few minutes to change my clothes--"
+
+"You look good enough to me just as you are, boy," said the
+dinner-giver, and he took his son by the arm and walked him to the
+elevator.
+
+In the private dining-room Blount found the table laid for two, much as
+if his coming had been pre-figured. He let that go, and for the time the
+talk was of the doings at Wartrace Hall: of the professor's enthusiastic
+digging for fossils, of Patricia's keen enjoyment of the life in the
+open, and--this put with gentle hesitation on the part of the
+news-bringer--of Mrs. Honoria's growing affection for the young woman
+whose ambitions reached out toward a sociological career.
+
+"You say Patricia is learning to drive a car?" queried Patricia's lover.
+
+"Best woman driver I ever saw," was the senator's praiseful rejoinder.
+"Nothing feazes that little girl, and I'm telling you that she can turn
+the wheels just about as fast as you want to ride."
+
+This was a new aspect of Miss Anners, even to one who knew her as well
+as Blount thought he knew her, and, lover-like, he found a grain of
+encouragement in it. Patricia had never cared for the out-of-door things
+save as they bore upon the hygienic condition of the poor in the great
+cities. If she had changed in one respect, she might change in another.
+
+"I'm glad to know that," he commented. "She was needing an outlet on
+that side. There is a good bit of the Puritan in her--all work and no
+play, you know."
+
+The senator looked out from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "Speaking of
+work; they're working you pretty hard these days, aren't they, son? If
+you belonged to my generation instead of your own, you wouldn't be
+cold-shouldering that young woman out yonder at Wartrace the way you do;
+not for all the politics that were ever hatched."
+
+"I have my work to do, and Patricia Anners would be the last person in
+the world to put obstacles in the way of it," returned the son gravely.
+Then he added: "I wish I could say as much for other people."
+
+The boss shot another keen glance across the table. "Somebody been
+trying to block you, Evan, boy?" he asked.
+
+Blount met the gaze of the shrewd gray eyes without flinching.
+
+"I don't know of any good reason why we shouldn't be entirely frank with
+each other, dad," he said, using for the first time since his return to
+the homeland the old boyhood father-name. "You know, better than any one
+else, I think, what the stumbling-blocks are, and who is putting them in
+my way."
+
+"Maybe so; maybe I do," was the even-toned answer. "It happens so, once
+in a while, that I know a heap of things I can't tell, son." Then: "Has
+McVickar been calling you down?"
+
+"No one has called me down. But some one, or something, is keeping me
+out of the real fight. I don't mean that I'm not doing what I set out to
+do: I've got my own particular abomination by the neck, and I'm about to
+choke the life out of it. But that is, as you might say, a side issue.
+The real struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in it or of it.
+Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same
+predetermined enthusiasm. Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet
+have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me."
+
+The senator's chuckle was barely audible.
+
+"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I were you, son," he
+suggested. "You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating
+over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it
+won't break and let him down into the cold water. You'll get enough of
+the real thing by and by."
+
+Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in precisely the right mood to
+construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to
+make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in
+some mysterious way to insulate him--to make it impossible for him to
+get into the real tide of affairs. But he kept his temper, in a measure,
+at least.
+
+"I guess it's no use for us to try to get together," he said with a tang
+of abruptness in his tone. "We are diametrically opposed to each other
+at every point, you and I, dad. I stand for democracy, the will of the
+people and its fullest and freest expression. You stand for--"
+
+"Well, son, what do I stand for?" queried the father, and the question
+was put with a quizzical smile that brought the hot blood boyishly to
+Blount's cheeks.
+
+"If I should say what all men say--what some of them are frank enough to
+say even to me--" he stopped short, and then went on with better
+self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."
+
+"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured rejoinder. "Being on
+the railroad side, yourself, you can't help feeling sort of hostile at
+the rest of us, I reckon."
+
+Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his
+chair.
+
+"There it is again, you see. We can't get together even on a question of
+admitted fact! Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been
+going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding
+out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the
+railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"
+
+The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've found that out, too, have
+you?" he commented.
+
+"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn't, dad.
+There's a thing behind the alliance that cuts deeper than anything else
+I've had to face."
+
+Once more the deep-set eyes looked out from their bushy penthouses.
+"Reckon you could give it a name, son?"
+
+"Yes; when you found that I wasn't going to let you run me for the
+attorney-generalship, you arranged with Mr. McVickar to have me put on
+the railroad pay-roll. Isn't that the fact?"
+
+"Not exactly," said the senator, and a grim smile went with the
+qualified denial. "It was sort of the other way round. I reckon McVickar
+thought he was putting one across on me when he offered you the railroad
+job and got you to take it."
+
+"I know; that was at first. You and he couldn't come to terms because
+you--because the machine wanted more than he was willing to give. But
+afterward there was another meeting and you got together. That part of
+it was all right, if you see it that way. What broke my heart was the
+fact that you and he agreed to put me up as a fence behind which all the
+crookedness and rascality of a corrupt campaign could be screened."
+
+In the pause which followed, a deft waiter slipped in to change the
+courses. When the man was gone, Blount went on.
+
+"It came mighty near smashing me when I found it out, dad. It wasn't so
+much the thing itself as it was the thought that you'd do it--the
+thought that you had forgotten that I was a Blount, and your son."
+
+Again the older man nodded gravely. "How come you to find out, Evan,
+boy?" he asked.
+
+"It was when Hathaway had been given his chance at me. He opened the
+cesspool for me, as you meant he should when you sent him to me. From
+your point of view, I suppose it was necessary that I should be shown.
+You knew what I was saying and doing; how I was taking it for granted
+that the railroad was going in clean-handed, and the one ray of comfort
+in the whole miserable business is the fact that you cared enough to
+want to give me a glimpse of the real thing that was hiding behind all
+my brave talk. But I don't think you counted fully upon the effect it
+would have upon me."
+
+"What was the effect, son?"
+
+"At first, it made me want to throw up the fight and run away to the
+ends of the earth. It seemed as if I didn't have anybody to turn to. You
+were in it, and Gantry was in it--and Gantry's superiors and mine. That
+evening I borrowed one of your cars and drove out to Wartrace. I meant
+to have it out with you, and then to throw up my hands and quit."
+
+"But you didn't do either one," said the father tentatively.
+
+"No. Nothing went right that day, until just at the last. When I was
+about to give up and go to bed, Patricia came into the smoking-room. I
+had to talk to somebody, so I talked to her; told her where I had
+landed."
+
+"And she advised you to throw up your hands?"
+
+"You don't know Patricia. She put a heart into my body and blood into my
+veins. What she said to me that night is what has kept me going,
+dad--what has made me drive this fight for a clean election on the part
+of the railroad company home to the hilt. I have driven it home. There
+will be no crooked deals on the part of the railroad company this time."
+
+The senator looked up quickly. "That's a mighty good stout thing to
+say," he remarked, adding: "I reckon you're not saying it without having
+the right and proper club hid out somewhere where you can lay hands on
+it?"
+
+Blount tapped his coat-pocket. "I have the club right here--documentary
+evidence that will rip this State wide open and send a lot of people to
+the penitentiary. I've told Gantry to pass the word: a clean sheet, or I
+go over to the other side and tell what I know. And that brings me to
+the thing that I've got to say to you, dad--the thing that made me hope
+I'd find you here to-night. After I'd got my battle-word from Patricia,
+I had a jolt that was worse than the other. When I pulled the gun on
+Gantry, he told me that I couldn't shoot without killing you; that you
+were just as deeply involved as any one of the railroad officials. Is
+that the truth?"
+
+The senator had pushed his chair back and was burying his hands in his
+pockets.
+
+"You've come to try to haul me out of the fire?" he inquired, ignoring
+the direct question.
+
+"I've come to ask you, first, if it is possible for you to stand from
+under. Can you?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I reckon I could dodge, if I had to."
+
+"Then do it, and do it quickly, dad! As there is a God above us, I'm
+going to push this thing through to the bitter end. To-morrow morning I
+shall give Gantry his time limit. If the time goes by, leaving the
+house-cleaning still undone, I shall keep my promise to the letter. You
+know, and I know, what will happen after that."
+
+"Yes; I reckon I know," was the half-absent reply.
+
+Blount threw his napkin aside and glanced at his watch.
+
+"I've got to go back to the office and work a while," he said. And then:
+"I feel better for having had this talk with you, dad. I'm sorry you are
+finding it necessary to fight me, and a thousand times sorrier that I've
+got to fight you. But I can't give ground now, and still be a man and
+your son. Think it over and dodge. It'll break my heart a second time if
+I have to pull the other fellow's house down and bury you in the wreck."
+
+For some little time after his son had left the table and the private
+dining-room, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush sat absently toying with
+his dessert-spoon. When he rose to go out, the battle light in the gray
+eyes was the signal which not even his most faithful henchmen could
+always interpret; but it was a signal which all of them knew by sight,
+and one which many of them feared.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE SAFE-BLOWER
+
+
+About the time that Evan Blount was finishing the fourth week of the
+campaign of education, the senator's wife began to detect signs of
+country weariness in the eyes of Miss Patricia Anners.
+
+"When you are tired of the out-door bignesses, you have only to say the
+word," she told the professor's daughter one morning after they had
+driven to Lost River Canyon and back in the small car. "As you have
+doubtless discovered, the senator and I live either here or at the
+capital indifferently during the season, and we shall be only too glad
+to entertain you in town whenever you feel like going."
+
+To similar proposals made earlier Miss Anners had always returned prompt
+refusals. But for a week or more some impulse which she had not taken
+the trouble to analyze seemed to be drawing her toward the city. The
+mesa roads were just as inviting, and the free pleasures of motoring, in
+a country where speed restrictions were conspicuous only by their
+absence, were just as keen. But now Patricia confessed to a restless
+longing for the sight of city streets and the brabble of city noises.
+
+"Only you mustn't consider us, or me, so much as you do, Mrs. Blount,"
+she protested. "I have a dreadful suspicion that we have already
+interfered shamefully with your autumn plans. You are simply too kind
+and too hospitable to admit it."
+
+"You have interfered with nothing," was the ready assurance. "We were
+not going anywhere, or thinking of going anywhere. No inducement that
+was ever invented would take the senator away from his own State in a
+political year, and your coming has been a blessing. But for the good
+excuse to bring your father out here to the fossil-beds, we should have
+been mewed up in the Inter-Mountain Hotel from the firing of the opening
+gun to the day after election. But that isn't what I meant to say. You
+are tired of so much country; I can read the call of the city in your
+eyes--and they are very pretty eyes, my dear. Shall I telephone the
+senator that we are coming in this afternoon to stay a while?"
+
+"I shall be delighted," said Patricia, and the eyes, which were not only
+pretty but exceedingly apt to tell tales, confirmed the eager assent.
+Then she added: "Now that daddy has his box of books from the university
+library, I doubt if he will know that we are gone."
+
+On their first day in the capital Evan was away, but he returned the
+following morning and Mrs. Blount promptly captured him for a theatre
+box-party which she was inviting for the same evening. In Mrs. Honoria's
+orderly scheme Blount was predestined to go, though he was allowed to
+believe that his acceptance was of free will. Notwithstanding the lapse
+of time and Mrs. Honoria's uniform kindness, he was still unreasonably
+prejudiced, and with the prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin
+to jealousy. It was evident that Patricia's admiration for his father
+extended over to his father's wife; and meaning consistently to dislike
+Mrs. Honoria, he was irrational enough to want Patricia to dislike her,
+too.
+
+The box-party proved to be a more formal affair than he had anticipated,
+since it was large enough to fill two of the open dress-circle boxes.
+Gantry was included, and so were the Weatherfords--father, mother,
+daughters, and son. These, with the Gordons and a Denver man whose name
+of Critchett Blount was not quite sure that he caught in the
+introduction, filled Mrs. Honoria's list. In the seating Blount meant to
+make sure of having a measurably undisturbed evening with Patricia. But
+fate, or a designing hostess, intervened, and he found himself cornered
+between Mrs. Weatherford and her younger daughter, with the
+square-shouldered "Paramounter" candidate for governor strengthening the
+barrier which separated him from Miss Anners.
+
+Blount had met Gordon socially a number of times, and in the intervals
+allowed him by Mrs. Weatherford he was silently studying the face of the
+big man who, singularly enough, as the student thought, was thus
+identifying himself publicly as a friend of the boss. True, Blount did
+not forget his father's warm commendation of Gordon in that earliest
+political talk on the Quaretaro Canyon road, but that was before the
+lines had been drawn and the gage of battle thrown down by the allied
+forces of the machine and the railroad. Now, with the battle drawing to
+its close, Blount thought that nothing could be more certain than the
+fact that his father and his father's organization were joining hands
+with the railroad oligarchy to slaughter Gordon at the polls.
+
+Putting aside the wonder that Gordon should be accepting Mrs. Honoria's
+hospitality, Blount fell to contrasting the strong, large-featured face
+of the Mission Hills ranchman with that of Reynolds, the opposition
+candidate. Though he was himself on the corporation campaigning staff,
+Blount could not help admitting that the comparison was not favorable to
+Reynolds. His first impression of the round-faced, portly gentleman who
+was standing firmly upon what he was pleased to call a platform of law
+and order--a man who was Gordon's opposite in every feature and
+characteristic--had been unfavorable. He had been saying to himself,
+since, that Reynolds's face, in spite of its heavy jaw and prominent
+eyes, was the face of a time-server.
+
+Another point of difference between the two men counted for much.
+Reynolds wanted the office, and was spending money liberally to get it,
+while Gordon had accepted the nomination reluctantly. Throughout the hot
+campaign he had refused to stump the State for himself or his party, and
+was said to be holding steadfastly aloof in the bargaining and
+dickering. Weighing the two men one against the other--Reynolds was
+sitting in an adjacent box with Kittredge and Bentley and two other
+railroad officials--Blount admitted a twinge of regret that chance, or
+his convictions, had made him a partisan of the weaker.
+
+Having been lost in the shuffle, as he expressed it, Blount made the
+most of these reflective excursions during the period of the box-party
+captivity. From the rising of the curtain to the going down thereof the
+Weatherfords, mother and daughter, kept him from exchanging so much as a
+word with Patricia, whom Gantry was shamelessly monopolizing. But on the
+short return walk to the hotel, Blount asserted his rights and gave
+Patricia his arm.
+
+"I think you owe me an abject apology," was the way she began on him,
+when they had gained such privacy as the crowded sidewalk conferred.
+
+"Consider it made, and then tell me what for," he rejoined, striving,
+man-fashion, to catch step with her mood.
+
+"For making us leave that dear, delightful, out-of-date, and
+out-of-place Georgian mansion in the hills and come to town when we want
+to get a sight of your face."
+
+"If anybody else should say a thing like that, I'd blush and call it a
+compliment," he retorted. Her near presence seemed to lift the burden he
+was carrying, and it was good to be light-hearted again, if only for the
+passing moment.
+
+"It wasn't meant for a compliment," she returned, with the
+straightforward sincerity which Blount had always been fond of likening
+to a cup of cold water on a thirsty day. "Consider a moment. You come to
+me with a really harrowing story of your new experiences, and just as I
+am beginning to get interested we are interrupted. In the morning, at
+some perfectly impossible hour, off you go, and we hear no more of you
+for weeks and weeks. What have you been doing?"
+
+"I have been doing precisely what you told me to do; preaching the
+gospel of honesty and fair dealing, and trying my level best to make
+other people practise it."
+
+"You have been successful?" she asked quickly.
+
+"Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended solely upon me. As
+to the other, I don't know. Sometimes I'm credulous enough to believe
+that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they say they are, and
+at other times I'm afraid they are only putting up a bluff to mislead
+me. Some day, perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go into the
+'practical-politics' armory to get my weapons."
+
+There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy available, and she
+made what seemed to be the most necessary use of it.
+
+"And your father, Evan; are you coming to understand him any better?"
+
+He shook his head despondently. "No; or rather yes. I might say that I
+am coming to understand him--or his methods--only too well. The only
+way we can keep from quarrelling now is to banish politics when we are
+together."
+
+"I am sorry," she said, and the sorrow was emphatic in her tone. "As I
+have said before, you don't understand him. You are judging him by
+standards which, however just and true they may be, are peculiarly your
+own standards. I know you can be broad for others when you try. Can't
+you be broad for him?"
+
+It was good to hear her defend his father. It was what he would have
+wished his wife to do. Suddenly there arose within him a huge reluctance
+to lessen or to weaken in any way her trust in David Blount.
+
+"Let us say that the fault is mine," he interposed hastily. "God forbid
+that I should be the means of making you think less of him in any
+respect."
+
+"You couldn't do that, Evan. He is simply a grand old man--the first I
+have ever known for whom the hackneyed phrase seemed to have been made,"
+she asserted warmly. "If he has faults, I am sure they are nothing more
+than gigantic virtues--the faults of a man who is too strong and too
+magnanimous to be little in any respect."
+
+The final half-square lay behind them, and Mrs. Honoria and the senator,
+Gantry, Gordon and his wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the
+marriageable daughters, were at the _cafe_ door waiting for the
+laggards. Being in no proper frame of mind to enjoy a theatre supper
+with another Weatherford attack as the possible penalty, Blount
+reluctantly surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses, and went
+to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike and democratic lobby.
+
+With Patricia in town the "silver-tongued spellbinder of Quaretaro
+Mesa," as _The Daily Capital_ called the railroad company's campaign
+field-officer, would have been glad to evade some of the speaking
+appointments; but since his engagements had been made some days in
+advance, he was obliged to go.
+
+On his return to the capital he was delighted to find the party of three
+still occupying the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain.
+Arriving on a morning train, he was permitted to make the party of three
+a party of four at the breakfast-table; and with Patricia sitting
+opposite he was able to forget the strenuosities for a restful
+half-hour.
+
+Later, when he went to his offices in the Temple Court Building, the
+strenuosities reasserted themselves with emphasis. Though he found his
+desk closed, and was reasonably certain that he had in his pocket the
+only key that would unlock it, he found his papers scattered in
+confusion under the roll-top. A touch upon the electric button brought
+the stenographer from the anteroom.
+
+"Who's been into my desk, Collins?" he demanded, pointing to the
+confusion and scrutinizing the face of the young man sharply for signs
+of guilt.
+
+"Goodness gracious! How could anybody get into it when you've got the
+only key, Mr. Blount?" stammered the clerk. Then he went on,
+parrot-like: "I've been putting the letters and telegrams through the
+letter-slit, as you told me to, and I've kept the private office
+locked."
+
+"Nevertheless it is very evident that somebody has been here," said
+Blount. Then he had a sudden shock and wheeled shortly upon the
+stenographer. "Collins, what did you do with that packet of papers I
+gave you last Monday--the one I told you to put away in the safe?"
+
+"I did just what you told me to; put it in the inner cash-box, and put
+the key of the cash-box on your desk. Didn't you get it?"
+
+Blount felt in his pockets and found the key, which he handed to
+Collins. "Go and get that packet and bring it to me," he directed. The
+shock was beginning to subside a little by now, and he sat down to bring
+something like order out of the confusion on the desk. At first, he had
+thought that the sheaf of evidence letters which gave him the
+strangle-hold upon Gantry and the lawbreakers had been left in a
+pigeonhole of the desk. Then he remembered having given it to Collins to
+put away.
+
+A minute or two later it occurred to him that the stenographer was
+taking a long time for a short errand. Rising silently, he crossed the
+room and reached for the knob of the door of communication. In the act
+he saw that the door was ajar, and through the crack he saw Collins
+standing before the opened safe. The clerk was running his tongue along
+the flap of a large envelope, preparatory to sealing it. Blount's first
+impulse was to break in with a sharp command. Then he reconsidered and
+went back to his desk; was still busy at it when Collins came in and
+laid the freshly sealed envelope before him.
+
+"That isn't the packet I gave you," said Blount curtly.
+
+The clerk looked away. "You meant those letters, didn't you?" he
+queried. "The rubber band broke and I put them in an envelope."
+
+"When?" snapped Blount.
+
+The young man faced around again and the innocence in his look disarmed
+the questioner.
+
+"When? Just now. That's what made me so long--I couldn't find an
+envelope big enough."
+
+Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the blade under the flap of
+the envelope. If he had looked up at the stenographer then he would have
+seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a face ashen with
+terror. But whatever the shorthand man had to fear from the opening of
+the lately sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of Ackerton,
+the working head of the legal department, with a damage suit to discuss
+with his chief. Blount thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened,
+and later in the day, when he went around to his bank to put the
+evidence letters into his safe-deposit box, the incident of the morning
+had lost its significance so completely, or had been so deeply buried
+under other and more important matters, that he deposited the packet
+without examining it.
+
+The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in
+the ranchman candidate's big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa
+Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there. She was
+there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to
+sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he
+began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to
+grow too large to be easily rolled aside.
+
+"I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you
+got one that you could lend me?"
+
+She laughed lightly.
+
+"You told me once that I had the New England conscience--which was the
+same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass
+around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?"
+
+He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics' again. Suppose I say
+that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of
+the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a
+perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of
+people to jail?"
+
+"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down
+out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals
+and criminality?"
+
+"That is just what I'm trying to find out," he persisted. "At the
+present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some
+of them know what I'm doing, and some of them don't. Those who know
+have been told that they must be good or I'll publish the evidence, and
+they've promised to be good if I won't publish it. At the time I didn't
+question my right to make such a bargain, but--"
+
+"But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell
+what you know?"
+
+"Chaos," he replied briefly.
+
+"May I ask who is implicated?"
+
+"A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few
+outside of it."
+
+"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too big for me, Evan. I can
+only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do
+evil that good may come."
+
+"If you put it that way, I've made myself _particeps criminis_," he said
+gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals
+are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't help
+knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could
+make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob."
+
+She was shaking her head determinedly. "I can't help you this time,
+Evan; truly I can't." Then, in sudden appeal: "Why won't you go to your
+father? He could tell you what to do and how to do it, and his judgment
+would be too big and just to stumble over the tangling little
+moralities."
+
+Blount smiled.
+
+"What if I should tell you that my father is more or less involved,
+Patricia? I don't know precisely how much or how little, but I am
+assured, by those who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in the
+general wreck."
+
+"I can't believe it!" she protested, in generous loyalty. "These people,
+whoever they are, are deceiving you to shelter themselves. Have you ever
+spoken to your father about this?"
+
+"Yes, once; one evening when we were dining together I told him what I
+had, and what use I should make of it if all other means should fail.
+Also, I advised him to dodge."
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"That is the discouraging part of it. I was hoping against hope that he
+would tell me to go ahead; that he would say that he wasn't involved.
+But, as a matter of fact, he didn't say much of anything. I'm horribly
+afraid that his silence meant all that I've been trying to believe it
+didn't mean."
+
+She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if she were trying to
+gain time.
+
+"I can only tell you again what I told you at first," she said at
+length. "You must be bigger than all these hampering circumstances;
+bigger than the little moralities, if need be. You can be, Evan; you've
+given splendid proof of it thus far, and I'm proud--just as proud as I
+can be--"
+
+Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely without scruple, have
+brained young Gordon, to whom the next dance belonged, and who came just
+at this climaxing moment to claim Patricia. But there was no help for
+it, short of a cold-blooded and rather embarrassing deed of violence,
+and the hard-won confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.
+
+When he left the Gordon house, which was far out in the northeastern
+residence suburb, Blount meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed.
+He had been losing much sleep in the activities of the campaign, and the
+loss was beginning to tell upon him. But as the trolley-car was passing
+the Temple Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim light
+illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office. With all his
+suspicions of the morning reawakened, he dropped from the car, dashed
+into the building, and took the all-night elevator for his office floor.
+
+The sleepy elevator-man had to be shaken awake, and when he had set the
+car in motion he let it run past the designated floor. Blount swore
+impatiently, and instead of waiting to be carried back, darted out and
+ran to the stairway. When he reached the lower corridor and was hurrying
+toward his suite in the corner of the building, there was a dull crash,
+as of a muffled explosion, and two or three of the glass doors in the
+street-fronting suite were shattered. Blount quickened his pace to a
+run, let himself in by means of his latch-key, and, cautiously opening
+his desk, groped in an inner drawer for the revolver which Gantry had
+persuaded him to buy as a part of the office furnishings.
+
+With the weapon in hand, he pushed through the unlatched door into
+Collins's room. There was an acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air,
+and when he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases were
+stifling. His first act was to feel for the switch and cut in the
+electric lights. The third room, which had doors of communication with
+his own office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were broken open, and
+the safe-door had been blown from its hinges.
+
+Blount saw the figure of a small man with his cap pulled down over his
+ears bending over the wrecked cash-box. At the upblazing of the ceiling
+lights, the man sprang to his feet and fled, going out through the door
+by which Blount had just entered, and snapping the light-switch as he
+passed to leave the rooms in darkness.
+
+Blount was cursing his own lack of presence of mind when he turned to
+follow the escaping burglar. In the darkness he fell over a chair, and
+by the time he had disentangled himself and had reached the corridor the
+safe-blower was gone. Racing to the elevator, Blount rang the bell until
+the sleepy car-tender set the machinery in motion and lifted himself to
+the floor of happenings. Here the incident ended abruptly, so far as any
+helpful discoveries were concerned. The elevator-man had carried no one
+down, and he confessed shamefacedly that he had again been asleep, and
+could not say whether or not anybody had descended the stair which
+circled the elevator-shaft.
+
+Blount went back to his office, turned in a police alarm, and waited
+until a policeman came from the nearest station. Then he went to report
+the safe-blowing in person to the night captain on duty in the basement
+of the City Hall. A drowsy clerk took notes of the story, and the night
+captain contented himself with asking a single question.
+
+"Do you know how much you lost, Mr. Blount?"
+
+"Nothing of any great consequence, I imagine," said Blount, remembering,
+with an inward thrill of thankfulness, the morning impulse which had
+prompted him to transfer the one thing of inestimable consequence to the
+security of the bank safe-deposit box. Then he added: "There was a
+little money in the box, and some papers of no especial value to
+anybody. Just the same, captain, I want that man caught."
+
+"We'll catch him, come morning," was the assurance, and then Blount went
+away and carried out his original intention of going to the
+Inter-Mountain and to bed.
+
+To bed; but, for a long hour after the post-midnight quiet had settled
+down upon the great hostelry, not to sleep. If he had asked himself why
+he could not close his eyes and take the needed rest, the exciting
+incident in which he had lately been an actor would have offered a
+sufficient answer. But in reality the sharpened spur of wakefulness
+penetrated much more deeply. Beyond all doubt or shadow of doubt, it was
+the sinister, many-armed machine which had reached out to seize and
+destroy the evidence against its allies and fellow conspirators, the
+lawbreaking railroad company and the vote-selling corporations.
+
+And, again beyond doubt, he made sure, it was his own boast made to his
+father which had been passed on to tell the sham burglar where to look
+and what to look for.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS
+
+
+In the evening of the day following the safe-blowing in Blount's office,
+a one-car train, running as second section of the Overland, slipped
+unostentatiously into the capital railroad yard. With as little stir as
+it had made in its arrival, the single-car train took a siding below the
+freight station, where it would be concealed from the prying eyes of any
+chance prowler from the newspaper offices.
+
+Coincident with the side-tracking O'Brien, the vice-president's
+stenographer, dropped from the step of the car and went in search of a
+telephone. When O'Brien was safely out of the way, a small man,
+clean-shaven and alert in his movements, whipped out of the shadows of
+the nearest string of box-cars, pushed brusquely past the guarding
+porter, and presented himself at the desk in the roomy office
+compartment of the private car.
+
+The vice-president looked up and nodded. "How are you, Gibbert?" he
+said, and then: "You may condense your report. I have seen the
+newspapers. In passing I may say that it isn't much to your credit that
+you had to fall back upon the methods of the yeggmen."
+
+"There wasn't any other way," protested the small man. "The papers were
+locked up in the cash-box of the safe, and young Blount carried the only
+key."
+
+"It was crude; not at all worthy of a man of your ability, Gibbert. And
+if the newspapers tell it straight, you came near being caught. How did
+that happen?"
+
+"Blount went to a ball, and I shadowed him. His girl was there, and it
+looked like a safe bet that he'd stay to see the lights put out. But he
+didn't."
+
+"Well, never mind; you got the papers, I suppose?"
+
+The company detective drew a thick envelope from his pocket and laid it
+upon the desk. The vice-president tore it open and read rapidly through
+the file of letters it had enclosed, tearing them one by one from the
+hold of the brass fastener at the upper left-hand corner as he glanced
+them over. "The chuckle-headed fools!" he gritted, apostrophizing the
+writers of the letters. And then: "Gibbert, I'd like to go into this a
+little deeper, if we had time; I'd like to know why in hell every man in
+this State with whom we've had a private business arrangement found it
+necessary to spread the details out on paper and send them to young
+Blount! Here; burn these things as I hand them to you."
+
+The small man struck a match and, using the wide-mouthed metal cuspidor
+for an ash-pan, lighted the letters one at a time as they were given to
+him. When the cinder skeleton of the final sheet had been crushed into
+ashes, he rose from his knees and reached for his hat.
+
+"Any other orders?" he asked.
+
+"No; nothing more. You are reasonably sure that you haven't been
+recognized here by any of our local people?"
+
+"I've kept the 'make-up' on most of the time. I've been in Mr. Gantry's
+office a couple of times, and in Mr. Kittredge's once, and neither of
+them caught on to me."
+
+"That's good. You'd better go now. O'Brien has gone after Gantry and
+Kittredge, and I don't care to have them find you here. Better take the
+first train back to Chicago. These mutton-headed police here might
+possibly get on your track, and we don't want to have to explain
+anything to them."
+
+Five minutes after the small man had dropped from the step of the "008,"
+to disappear in the box-car shadows, Gantry and Kittredge came down the
+yard and entered the private car. Again the vice-president said, "How
+are you?" and nodded toward the nearest chairs. "Sit down; I'll be
+through in a minute," and he went on reading the file of papers taken up
+at the departure of the detective. At the end of the minute he shot a
+question at the two who were waiting.
+
+"You got my message?"
+
+Gantry answered for himself and the superintendent. "Yes. Your orders
+have been carried out. The yards are posted, and nobody, outside of a
+few of our own men, knows that your car is here."
+
+The vice-president took one of the long black cigars from the open box
+on the flat-topped desk, and passed the box to his two lieutenants.
+
+"Light up," he said tersely. "I'm due in Twin Canyons City to-morrow
+morning, and we've got to thresh this thing out in a hurry. Any change
+in the situation since your last report?"
+
+Gantry shook his head. "Nothing very important. Blount's up-town office
+was broken into last night and his safe ripped open with dynamite, as I
+suppose you have read in the papers. Who did it, or why it was done,
+nobody seems to know."
+
+"Well, what came of it?"
+
+"Nothing, so far as I can find out," returned the traffic manager.
+"Blount had been to the Gordon dance, and he saw the light in his office
+as he was coming down-town. When he went up to find out what was going
+on, he caught the safe-blower fairly in the act, but the fellow got
+away."
+
+"Did Blount lose anything?"
+
+"That's the queer part of it. Blount won't say much about it; and this
+morning he went around to police headquarters and told the chief to drop
+the matter, giving as his reason that he was too busy to prosecute the
+fellow even if he was caught."
+
+To a disinterested observer it might have seemed a little singular that
+the vice-president made no further comment upon the burglary. As a
+matter of fact, his next question completely ignored it.
+
+"What has Blount been doing this week?" he asked.
+
+"He has spoken twice; once at Arequipa and once at Hellersville. I
+understand he has engagements enough to keep him out of town right up to
+election day."
+
+"That is good," was the nodded approval. "He would only be in the way
+here at the capital." And then pointedly to Gantry: "Any more of that
+nonsense about putting a barrel of powder under us and blowing us all up
+if we don't build the freight tariffs over to suit his notion?"
+
+"A good bit more of it," Gantry admitted reluctantly. "The other day he
+went so far as to set a time limit; gave me three days of grace in which
+to file the public notice of the change in rates."
+
+"What did you do?"
+
+"I filed the notice--taking care that the only copy should be the one I
+sent to Blount's office."
+
+The vice-president looked coldly at his division traffic manager.
+
+"There are times, Gantry, when you seem to be losing your grip. Dave
+Blount's son isn't a school-boy, to be fooled by such a transparent
+trick as that! Don't you suppose he knows, as well as you do, that the
+public notice has to be filed in every station on the road?"
+
+"I had to take a chance--I've had to take a good many chances,"
+protested the traffic manager in his own defence; and Kittredge, a
+bearded giant who was fully the vice-president's match in heroic
+physique, removed his cigar to say: "That young fellow has been a
+frost. If he isn't a wild-eyed fanatic, as Gantry insists he is, he is
+deeper than the deep blue sea! I'd just about as soon have a box of
+dynamite kicking around underfoot as to have him messing in this
+campaign fight. I've been keeping cases on him, as you ordered, and he
+has worn out three of my best office men on the job."
+
+"You are prejudiced, Kittredge," was the vice-president's comment. "It
+was the best move in the entire campaign--putting him in the field.
+Apart from the public sentiment he has been turning our way, we mustn't
+lose sight of the fact that we got hold of him at a time when the
+Honorable Senator was getting ready to turn us down."
+
+"Speaking of the sentiment," Gantry put in, "I don't know whether it's
+all sentiment or not. There's a sort of mystery mixed up in this
+speech-making business of Blount's. At first I thought maybe his sudden
+popularity was due to some word sent out from your Chicago office; but
+when you told me it wasn't, I began to do a little speculating on my own
+account. I can't make up my mind yet whether it is pure popularity, or
+whether it's the assisted kind."
+
+"Assisted?" said the vice-president, with a lifting of the heavy
+eyebrows.
+
+"Yes. It has been too unanimous. I have a trustworthy man in Blount's
+up-town office, and he says the invitations have fluttered in like
+autumn leaves; more than Blount could accept if he travelled
+continuously. Kittredge's men report that the speech-making has been a
+triumphant progress all over the State; bands, receptions, committees,
+and banquets wherever Blount goes."
+
+Mr. McVickar grunted. "The speeches have been all that anybody could
+ask. I've been reading them."
+
+Kittredge shook his head.
+
+"Gantry says they are, but I say no," he contended. "There is such a
+thing as putting too much sugar in the coffee. Blount's overdoing it;
+he's putting the whitewash on so thick that any little handful of mud
+that happens to be thrown will stick and look bad."
+
+"Of course, we have to take chances on that," was the vice-president's
+qualifying clause. "Nevertheless, young Blount's talk has undoubtedly
+had its effect upon public sentiment. We must be careful not to let the
+opposition newspapers get hold of anything that would tend to nullify
+it."
+
+"They are moving heaven and earth to do it," said the superintendent.
+"The Honorable David is lying low, as he usually does, but I more than
+half believe he's getting ready to give us the double-cross. That is the
+explanation of this safe-blowing scrape, as I put it up."
+
+Again the vice-president failed to comment further on the burglary.
+"What I am most afraid of, now, is that our young man may be, as you
+say, Kittredge, a trifle over-zealous," he said musingly. "We have
+discovered that he is something of a fanatic."
+
+"He's more than that," Kittredge cut in quickly. "One of the men I've
+had following him--Farnsworth--is as good as any Pinkerton that ever
+walked. He says Blount isn't half so innocent as he looks and acts. The
+speech-making has taken him into every corner of the State, and
+Farnsworth says he has been doing a lot of quiet prying around and
+investigating on the side."
+
+"I've been thinking," Gantry added, "what a beautiful mix-up we should
+have if the senator and his son should both conclude to pull out and get
+together at the last moment."
+
+The master plotter shook his head. "You have no sense of perspective,
+Gantry. Young Blount is with us solely because he is too straightforward
+to countenance his father's political methods. On the other hand, if the
+Honorable Dave should turn upon us now, he would be obliged to do it at
+the expense of his son's reputation. Anything he could say against us
+would simply have the effect of holding his son up to public
+exprobration as a common campaign liar. I know David Blount pretty well;
+he won't do anything like that."
+
+Gantry bit his lip and a slow smile of respectful admiration crept up to
+the Irish eyes.
+
+"When it comes to the real fine-haired work, you have us all feeling for
+hand-holds, Mr. McVickar," he said. "Now I know why you made a place for
+Evan Blount, and why you have been giving him a free hand on the
+whitewashing. It's the biggest thing that has ever been pulled off in
+Western politics!"
+
+"It hasn't been pulled off yet," was the quick reply. "We are holding
+old David in a noose that may turn into a rope of sand at any minute;
+don't forget that. During the few days intervening before the election
+we must preserve the present status at any cost. Young Blount is the
+only man who may possibly disturb it. Keep him out of the way. If he
+doesn't have speaking invitations enough to busy him, see to it that he
+gets them. As long as you can keep him talking he won't have any time
+for side issues. Now about this Gryson business: you want to handle that
+yourselves, and I don't want any more telegrams like the one you sent me
+last night, Gantry. What's the condition?"
+
+Gantry outlined the Gryson "condition" briefly. The man Gryson, who had
+developed into a heeler of sorts, had been growing restive, wanting more
+money.
+
+"What can he swing?" was the curt question.
+
+"Six out of seven pretty close counties. I don't pretend to know how he
+has done it, but he has got the goods; I've taken the trouble to check
+up on him. With his pull, we can swing the vote of the capital itself."
+
+The vice-president frowned thoughtfully. "The old game of stuffing the
+registration lists, I suppose," he said. And then: "Young Blount hasn't
+got wind of this, has he?"
+
+Gantry laughed. "You may be sure he hasn't. He has it in for Gryson on
+general principles--made us take him off the shop pay-rolls. If he
+thought we were dickering with him now, he'd be down on us like a
+thousand of brick."
+
+"Well, why don't you fix Gryson, once for all, and have it over with?
+You oughtn't to expect me to come here and tell you what to do!"
+
+It was at this point that Kittredge broke in.
+
+"Gryson isn't safe. I have it straight that he is getting ready to sell
+us out. That's why he wants his pay in advance."
+
+The vice-president's heavy brows met in a frown, and the muscles of his
+square jaw hardened.
+
+"Put Gryson on the rack and show him what you've got on him in that
+Montana bank robbery. That will bring him to book. It will be time
+enough to talk about terms when he delivers the goods. Now another
+thing--that Shonoho Inn matter that I wired about--what has been done?"
+
+"It is all arranged," said the big superintendent. "The house was closed
+for the season last month, and we have taken a short lease. One of our
+dining-car managers will take charge of the service."
+
+"And the wires?"
+
+"We have made a cut-in from the old Shoshone Mine wire, which wasn't
+taken down when the mine was abandoned. That let us out very neatly, and
+no one outside of our own line-men know anything about the job. We have
+four instruments in the hotel writing-room; two on the commercial and
+two on the railroad wires. Will that be enough?"
+
+Mr. McVickar nodded and reached over to press the bell-push which
+signalled to his train conductor.
+
+"That is about all I have to say," he said, in dismissal of the two
+local officials. "Just nail Gryson up to the cross, where he belongs,
+and keep young Blount busy and out of town; I leave the details to you.
+Get orders for me as you go up to your office, Kittredge, and have the
+despatcher let me out as soon as possible. I ought to be half-way to
+Alkali by this time."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE CHASM
+
+
+It was young Ranlett, a reporter for _The Plainsman_, who told Evan
+Blount of the arrival of the vice-president's car, running as second
+section of the Overland, and the scene of the telling was the lobby of
+the Inter-Mountain Hotel, where Blount was smoking a pipe of
+disappointment filled and lighted upon hearing that his father, Mrs.
+Honoria, and Patricia had gone out to dinner somewhere--place unknown to
+the obliging room clerk.
+
+Ranlett had tried ineffectually to get to the private car, having for
+his object the interviewing of the vice-president, but there had been
+curious obstructions. The lower yard was apparently carefully guarded,
+since the reporter had been turned back at three or four different
+points when he had attempted to cross the tracks. Blount thought it a
+little singular that the vice-president should come to the capital
+secretly, but he did not stop to speculate upon this.
+
+Having something more than a suspicion that Gantry had not properly
+passed the threat of exposure up to McVickar, he determined at once to
+seek an interview with the vice-president. Walking rapidly down to the
+Sierra Avenue station, he saw a light in Gantry's office, and meaning to
+be fair first and severe afterward, if needful, he ran up the stair and
+tried the door of the traffic manager's office. It opened under his
+hand, and he found Gantry sitting at his desk.
+
+"Ranlett tells me that Mr. McVickar is in town," he began abruptly.
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Ranlett is mistaken--about twenty minutes mistaken," was Gantry's
+reply. "Mr. McVickar passed through here a few minutes ago on his way to
+Twin Canyons City. His special has been gone some little time."
+
+"When is he coming back?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Did you take up with him the matter of issuing new tariffs to do away
+with the preferentials, or to level the public rates down to them?"
+
+Gantry shifted uneasily in his chair, and tried to evade. "There was
+very little time," he said. "Mr. McVickar was in a great hurry, and his
+special was held only a few minutes."
+
+Blount crossed the room and sat down.
+
+"Dick, we've come to the last round-up," he said gravely. "In the nature
+of things, I can't give you any more time. You've been playing with me
+all along, and your last move in the game was a very childish
+one--sending me what purported to be a copy of a new freight tariff
+notice to the public. Did you suppose for a moment that I wouldn't have
+sense enough to see that the thing wasn't official, that it had no
+signatures and lacked even the name of the railroad company? I'm here
+now to tell you that you've got to do some real thing, and do it
+quickly. Let's go up and see the editor of _The Capital_."
+
+"What for?" demanded Gantry.
+
+"It is the railroad paper, and I want you to give Brinkley, the editor,
+an interview to the effect that a revision of the freight rates is in
+process, and that shippers having grievances should present them at
+once. That will at least start the ball to rolling in the right
+direction."
+
+"I should think it would!" scoffed the traffic manager. "What you don't
+know about the making of freight tariffs would sink a ship, Evan. These
+things can't be done while you wait!"
+
+"But they must be, in this instance," Blount insisted. "If you won't
+withdraw the preferentials given to the corporations, you must do the
+other thing. Post your legal notice of a reduction of the rates on the
+commodities upon which you are now allowing rebates, and I'll fight
+straight through on the line I've been taking all along."
+
+"And if we don't?" queried Gantry.
+
+"What is the use of making me say it for the hundredth time, Dick? If
+you don't do one or the other, there will be an explosion, just as I've
+told you. Of course, you know that my safe was broken open last
+night--wrecked with dynamite?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, unluckily for you, the packet of papers which might otherwise
+have been taken or destroyed, didn't happen to be in the safe. The
+documents are still where they can be used at an hour's notice. And, by
+heaven, Dick, I'll use them if you don't play fair!"
+
+Gantry, long-suffering and patient to a fault in a business affair, was
+not altogether superhuman.
+
+"Evan, you are a frost--a black frost! You harp on one string until you
+wear it to frazzles! Don't you know that the Transcontinental is big
+enough and strong enough to chivvy you from one end of this country to
+the other, if you turn traitor? I love a fighting man, but by God, I
+haven't any use for a fool!"
+
+Blount laughed.
+
+"If I have succeeded in making you angry, perhaps there is a chance that
+you will do something. You may curse me out all you want to, but the
+fact remains. I'm going to explode the bomb, and it will be touched off
+long enough before election to do the work, if you keep on refusing to
+make my word good to the people. That is all--_all_ the all. Now, will
+you go up to _The Capital_ office with me, and dictate that bit of
+information that I mentioned?"
+
+"Not in a thousand years!" raged Gantry. "Not in ten thousand years!"
+Nevertheless he rose, closed his desk, and prepared to accompany the
+importunate political manager. Half-way up the first square he said:
+"There is no use in our going to _The Capital_ office at this time of
+night. Brinkley doesn't get around to his desk much before eleven. Let's
+go up to the club."
+
+At the Railway Club the traffic manager developed a keen desire to kill
+the intervening time in a game of billiards. Blount indulged him, beat
+him three games in succession, and consistently refused to drink with
+him. At the end of the third game, Gantry gave a terse definition,
+abusively worded, of a man who would force his friend to go and drink
+alone, and went to the buffet. Ten minutes later, when Blount went after
+him, he had disappeared, and the visit to the newspaper office was
+postponed, perforce.
+
+On the following morning, Blount found a telegram on his desk. It bore
+the vice-president's name, and the date-line was Twin Canyons City. It
+directed him to go to a remote portion of the State beyond the Lost
+River Mountains to examine the papers in a right-of-way case which was
+coming up for trial at the next term of court. This was in Kittredge's
+department, and Blount called the superintendent on the phone. Kittredge
+was in his office, and he evidently knew about the vice-president's
+telegram. Also, he seemed anxious to have the division counsel go to
+Lewiston at once; so anxious that he offered his own service-car to be
+run as a special train.
+
+Blount saw no way to evade a positive order from the vice-president, but
+he was more than suspicious that Gantry or Kittredge, or possibly both
+of them, had misrepresented the right-of-way case to Mr. McVickar, in an
+attempt to get him away from the city and so to postpone a reiteration
+of the demand for a new freight tariff. What he did not suspect was that
+Mr. McVickar's telegram might possibly have originated in Kittredge's
+office.
+
+Asking the superintendent to have the service-car made ready
+immediately, he packed his handbag, left a note for Patricia, who was
+not yet visible, and another for Gantry, who was not in his office, and
+began the roundabout journey.
+
+In all his travelling up and down the State he had never found anything
+to equal the slowness of the special train. The noon meal, served by
+Kittredge's cook in the open compartment, found the special less than
+fifty miles on its way, and comfortably waiting at that hour on a
+side-track among the sage-brush hills for the coming of a delayed train
+in the opposite direction. Four mortal hours were lost on the lonely
+siding. There was no station, and Blount could not telegraph. So far as
+he knew, the service-car might stay there for a day or a week. It was
+all to no purpose that he quarrelled with his conductor. The train crew
+had orders to wait for the west-bound time freight, and there was
+nothing to do but to keep on waiting.
+
+Late in the afternoon the time freight, or some other train, came along,
+and the special was once more set in motion eastward, but at dinner-time
+it was again side-tracked, eighty-odd miles from its destination, and
+once more at a desert siding where there was no telegraph office. The
+car was still standing on the siding when Blount went to bed. But in the
+morning it was in motion again, jogging now on its leisurely way up the
+branch line.
+
+At Lewiston, the town at the end of the branch where the right-of-way
+trouble had originated, Blount found more delay, carefully planned for,
+as he had now come firmly to believe. The plaintiffs in the right-of-way
+case were out of town, and their lawyers had gone to the capital. Blount
+saw that he might wait a week without accomplishing anything, hence he
+immediately instructed his conductor to get orders for the return.
+
+After having been gone a half-hour or more, the conductor came back to
+the service-car to say that the single telegraph-wire connecting
+Lewiston with the outer world was down, and that the orders for the
+return journey could not be obtained until the telegraph connection was
+restored. At that point Blount took matters into his own hands.
+
+There was a mining company having its headquarters in the isolated town,
+and Blount had met the manager once in the capital--met him in a social
+way, and had been able to show him some little attention. Hiring a
+buckboard at the one livery stable in the place, he drove out to the
+"Little Mary," and found Blatchford, the friendly manager, smoking a
+black clay cutty pipe in his shack office. It did not take Blount over a
+minute to renew the pleasant acquaintance, and to state his dilemma.
+
+"I'm hung up here with my special train, the wires are down and I can't
+get out," was his statement of the crude fact. "Didn't you tell me that
+you owned a motor-car?"
+
+"I did," was the prompt reply. "Want to borrow it?"
+
+"You beat me to it," said Blount, laughing. "That was precisely what I
+was going to beg for--the loan of your car. I believe you told me that
+you had driven it from here to the capital."
+
+"Oh, yes; several times, and the road is fairly good by way of Arequipa
+and Lost River Canyon. It's only about half as far across country as it
+is around by the railroad. You ought to make it in six hours and a half,
+or seven at the longest. Drive me down to the burg, and I'll put you in
+possession."
+
+Blount began to be audibly thankful, but the mine manager good-naturedly
+cut him short.
+
+"It's all in the day's work, Mr. Blount, and I'm glad to be of
+service--not because you are the Transcontinental's lawyer, nor
+altogether because you are the Honorable David's son. I haven't
+forgotten your kindness to me when I was in town three weeks ago. Let's
+go and get out the chug-wagon."
+
+A little later Blount found himself handling the wheel of a very
+serviceable knockabout car equipped for hard work on country roads. When
+he was ready to go, he drove down to the railroad yard and hunted up his
+conductor.
+
+"After you have had your vacation, you may get orders from Mr.
+Kittredge and take his car back to the capital," he told the man. "When
+you do, you may give him my compliments, and tell him I preferred to run
+my own special train."
+
+The conductor grinned and made no reply, and he was still grinning when
+he sauntered into the railroad telegraph office and spoke to the
+operator.
+
+"I dunno what's up," he said, "but whatever it was, the string's broke.
+Old Dave Sage-Brush's son has borrowed him an automobile, and gone back
+to town on his own hook. Guess you'd better call up the division
+despatcher and tell him the broken-wire gag didn't work. Get a move on.
+We hain't got nothin' to stay here for now."
+
+Blount had a very pleasant drive across country, with no mishap worse
+than a blown-out tire and a little carbureter trouble. Being a motorist
+of parts, neither the accident nor the needed readjustment detained him
+very long, and by the middle of the afternoon he was racing down the
+smooth northern road, with the spires and tall buildings of the capital
+fairly in sight.
+
+Not to let gratitude lag too far behind the service rendered, he drove
+Blatchford's car to the garage nearest the freight station, left
+instructions to have it shipped back to Lewiston by the first train, and
+promptly went in search of Gantry. The traffic manager was not in his
+office, but Blount found him at the Railway Club.
+
+"Just a word, Dick," he began, when he had overtaken his man pointing
+for the buffet. "Kittredge put up a job on me, and I think you helped
+him. I had to borrow an automobile to come back in from Lewiston. It's
+down at the Central Garage, and I have given Bankston, the garage man,
+orders to ship it back to Mr. Blatchford, of the 'Little Mary.' I wish
+you'd phone your freight agent to see that it is properly taken care of,
+and that the freight bill is sent to me."
+
+Gantry made no reply, but he went obediently to the house telephone and
+gave the necessary instructions. The thing done, he turned shortly upon
+Blount, scowling morosely.
+
+"Come on in and let's have a drink," he said.
+
+Blount marked the brittleness of tone and the half-quarrelsome light in
+the eyes which were a little bloodshot.
+
+"No, Dick; you've had one too many already," he objected firmly.
+
+Gantry put his back against the wall of the corridor.
+
+"No," he rasped; "I'm not drunk, but I'm ready to fight you to a finish,
+and for once in a way I'm going to get in the first lick. You've been
+bluffing me from the start, and you're going to try it again. It won't
+go this time; you've got to show me!"
+
+If Blount hesitated it was only because he was trying to determine
+whether or not the traffic manager was business-fit. Gantry comprehended
+perfectly, and his laugh was derisive and a trifle bitter.
+
+"You're sizing me up and asking yourself if I'm too far gone to be worth
+while," he jeered. "If I couldn't stand any more liquid grief than you
+can, I would have been down and out years ago. Show your hand, Evan--if
+you have any to show."
+
+Blount hesitated no longer. Taking Gantry's arm, he led him out of the
+club and around the block to the Sierra National Bank. It was after
+banking hours, but the side door giving access to the safe-deposit
+department was still open. With the traffic manager at his elbow, Blount
+asked the custodian for his private box, got it, and led the way to one
+of the cell-like retiring rooms. Gantry proved his capacity for
+transacting business by turning on the lights, locking the door, and
+squaring himself in a chair at one side of the tiny writing-table.
+
+Blount opened the japanned safety box, took out a bulky envelope and
+tossed it across to the traffic manager.
+
+"You can see for yourself whether I've been bluffing or not," he said
+quietly; and then he turned his back and interested himself in the
+lithograph of the latest Atlantic liner framed and hanging upon the
+mahogany end wall of the small room.
+
+For a little time there was a dead silence, broken only by the faint
+rustling of the papers as Gantry withdrew and unfolded them. When he had
+glanced at the last folded letter sheet, he snapped the rubber band upon
+the sheaf and sat back in his chair. Blount turned at the snap and found
+the traffic manager smiling curiously up at him.
+
+"Sit down, Evan," was the friendly invitation. And when Blount had
+dropped into the opposite chair: "We used to be pretty good friends in
+the old days, Ebee," Gantry went on, falling easily into the use of the
+college nickname. "I haven't forgotten the time when I would have had to
+break and go home if you hadn't stood by me like a brother and lent me
+money. For that reason, and for some others, I hate to see you bucking a
+dead wall out here in the greasewood hills."
+
+"It is you and your kind who are bucking the dead wall, Dick."
+
+"No, listen; I'm giving it to you straight, now. A few minutes ago you
+thought I was drunk--possibly too far gone to serve your purpose. I
+wasn't; I was merely sick and disgusted at the spectacle afforded by a
+crafty, crooked, double-dealing old world--the world we're living in.
+Once in a blue moon an honest man turns up, and when that happens he's
+got to be broken on the wheel--as you're going to be broken. Oh, yes; I
+came out with ideals, too, but they've been knocked out of me. We all
+have to keep the lock-step in business, and business is hell, Evan. I'm
+honest to my salt--which is to say that as yet I'm not using my job to
+line my own pockets, but that's the one decent thing that can be said of
+me. Don't let me bore you."
+
+"Go on," said Blount soberly. "I don't see the pointing of it yet,
+but--"
+
+"You will when I tell you that I've been lying to you; faking first one
+thing and then another. Do you get that?"
+
+"I hear you say it; yes."
+
+"It's so. I faked that story about your father's having made an
+underground deal with us. It was a lie out of whole cloth, because I
+didn't believe at that time that he had. There had been a falling out
+between him and Mr. McVickar; that was common talk on the division. But
+until yesterday I didn't know for certain that the trouble had been
+patched up; in fact, I had my own reasons for believing that it hadn't
+been patched up."
+
+"And you told me there was an alliance in order that I might believe
+that my father would be involved in an exposure of the railroad's
+double-dealing with the public?"
+
+"Just that. Self-preservation is the primal law--after you've dropped
+the ideals--and I thought I had invented a way to hold you down. I might
+have saved myself the trouble--and the lie. It comes down to this, Evan:
+you are one man against a crooked world, and you haven't had a ghost of
+a show from the first minute."
+
+"You'll have to make it plainer," was the even-toned rejoinder. "As
+matters stand now, I am pretty well assured that I can do what I set out
+to do. I'm going to be able to make my own employers come through with
+clean hands."
+
+Gantry was shaking his head slowly, and again the curious smile flitted
+across his keen, fine-featured face, lingering for an instant at the
+corners of the eyes.
+
+"You say I'll have to make it plainer, and I will. A little while ago
+you intimated that Kittredge and I were responsible for the telegram
+which sent you to Lewiston yesterday. It was a fake, but it didn't
+originate with Kittredge or with me."
+
+"With whom, then?"
+
+"I hate to tell you, Evan--it'll hit you hard. The frame-up was your
+father's. He got hold of Kittredge the night before, some time after we
+had left my office together to go up-town. He told Kittredge it was for
+the good of 'the cause,' and suggested that a wire purporting to come
+from Mr. McVickar would probably turn the trick. He didn't give his
+reason for wanting to get you out of the way at this time, and Kittredge
+didn't ask it."
+
+Blount was pinning the traffic manager down with an eyehold which was
+like a gripping hand, and the close air of the little mahogany bank cell
+became suddenly charged with the subtle effluence of antagonism. Blount
+was the first to break the painful silence.
+
+"You have told me nothing new, Dick, or at least nothing that I have not
+been taking for granted almost from the beginning. But let it be
+understood between us, once for all, that I discuss my father, his
+motives, or his acts, with no man living. We'll drop that phase of it;
+it's a side issue, and has no bearing upon the business that brought us
+here. You asked for the proof of my ability to compel your employers and
+mine to turn over the clean leaf. You have it there under your hand."
+
+For answer, Gantry pushed the rubber-banded file across the table to his
+companion. "Take another look, Evan, and see how helpless you are in
+the grip of a crooked world," he said, very gently.
+
+Blount caught up the file and ran it through. It was made up wholly of
+pieces of blank paper, cut to letter-size, and clipped at the corner
+with a brass fastener, as the originals had been.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+A COG IN THE WHEEL
+
+
+While Blount was staring abstractedly at the file of blank sheets which
+had been substituted for the incriminating letters of the vote-selling
+corporation managers, with Gantry sitting back, alert and watchful, to
+mark the first signs of the coming storm, there came a tap on the locked
+door of the little room, and a deprecatory voice said: "It's our closing
+time, gentlemen: if you are about through--"
+
+"In a minute," returned Gantry quickly, and then he took the blank dummy
+out of Blount's hands, pocketed it, shut the japanned safety box, and
+touched his companion's shoulder.
+
+"Let's get out of this, Evan," he said, still speaking as one speaks to
+a hurt child. "Conroy wants to close up."
+
+Blount suffered himself to be led away, and in the vault room he went
+mechanically through the motions of locking up the empty box. In the
+street Gantry once more took the lead, walking his silent charge around
+the block and into the Temple Court elevator. A little later, when the
+door of the private room in the up-town legal office had opened to admit
+them, and Blount had dropped heavily into his own desk chair, Gantry
+plunged promptly into the breach.
+
+"We've been friendly enemies in this thing right from the start, Evan,"
+he began, "and that's as it had to be. But blood--even the blood of a
+college brotherhood--is thicker than water. I know now what you're in
+for, and I'm going to stand by you, if it costs me my job. First, let's
+clear the way a bit. If I say that I haven't had anything to do, even by
+implication, with this jolt you've just been given, will you believe
+me?"
+
+Blount lifted a pair of heavy-lidded eyes and let them rest for an
+instant upon the face of the traffic manager. "If you say so, Dick, I'll
+believe it," he returned.
+
+"Good. Now we can dive into the thick of it. I won't insult you by
+doubting the premising fact. You had the evidence once?"
+
+"I did--enough of it to keep a grand jury busy for a month. It came to
+me in the shape of unsolicited letters from the men who are benefiting
+by the railroad company's evasion of the law, and who are, of course,
+equally criminal with the railroad officials. Why these letters were
+written to me I don't know, Gantry. I merely know that they were wholly
+unsolicited."
+
+"They were written to you because you are supposed to be the doctor in
+the present crisis."
+
+"But good God, Dick! Haven't I been shouting from every platform in the
+State that we were out for a clean campaign?"
+
+Gantry shook his head and his smile was commiserative. "I know; and
+every man who has had his fingers in the pitch-barrel has chuckled to
+himself, and when two of them would get together they'd pound each other
+on the back and swear that you were the smoothest spellbinder that Mr.
+McVickar has ever turned loose on this side of the big mountains. It
+grinds, Evan, but it's the fact. Not one of the men you are after has
+ever taken your speeches seriously."
+
+Blount's head sank lower.
+
+"I'm smashed, Dick!" he groaned; "utterly and irretrievably disgraced
+and discredited in my native State! There isn't a man in the sage-brush
+hills who would believe me under oath, after this."
+
+"It's hard, Evan--damned hard!" said the traffic manager, driven to
+repetition. "But grilling over it doesn't get us anywhere. What are you
+going to do"?
+
+"With the election only five days away, there is nothing that can be
+done. I had you down, Dick; I could have forced my point with the weapon
+I had. Isn't that so?"
+
+Gantry wagged his head dubiously. "I'm not the big boss, but I can tell
+you right now that, if you could have shown me what I was fully
+expecting to see, the wires between here and wherever Mr. McVickar's
+private car happens to be would have been kept pretty hot for a while."
+Then, upon second thought: "Yes; I guess you could have pulled it off.
+We couldn't stand for any such bill-boarding as you were threatening to
+give us."
+
+Blount turned to his desk, opened it, and began to arrange his papers.
+
+"You've been a good friend, after all, Dick," he said, talking as he
+worked. "I'm going to ask you to go one step farther and take charge of
+the funeral, if you will. Find Mr. McVickar and wire him that I've
+dropped out. I'll write him a resignation from somewhere, when I have
+time."
+
+Gantry left his chair and came to stand beside the quitter.
+
+"Honestly, Evan," he said slowly, "I thought you were a grown man.
+You'll forgive the mistake, won't you?"
+
+Blount turned upon his tormentor and swore pathetically. "What's the
+use--what in the devil is the use?" he rasped, when the outburst began
+to grow measurably articulate. "You know as well as I do what's been
+done to me, and who has done it. Can I lift my hand to strike back, even
+if I had a weapon to strike with?"
+
+"Perhaps you can't. But you owe it to yourself, and to a certain
+bright-minded young woman that I know of, not to fly off the handle
+without at least trying to see if you can't stay on. Wait a minute." The
+railroad man took a turn up and down the floor, head down and hands
+behind him. When he came back to the desk end he began again. "Evan,
+who's got those original papers?"
+
+"The man who blew up my safe, of course. You've said you didn't hire
+him, and that leaves only one alternative."
+
+Gantry took the dummy packet from his pocket and held one of the blank
+sheets up to the light of the window. It was growing dusk, and when he
+failed to discern what he was looking for, he turned on the electric
+lights and tried again. At this the script "T-C" water-mark was plainly
+visible, and he showed it to Blount.
+
+"That proves conclusively that the substitution was made here in your
+own office. Whom do you suspect?"
+
+In a flash Blount remembered: how he had sent Collins to get the packet
+out of the safe, the stenographer's delay, the hasty sealing of the
+envelope, and the suspicion which had been cut short by the incoming of
+Ackerton.
+
+"I know now who did it, and when it was done," he said. "The day before
+the office was broken into I told Collins to bring me the papers from
+the safe. What he brought me was that dummy--in a freshly sealed
+envelope. I was going to open the envelope, but just then Ackerton
+came in."
+
+"All clear so far," said Gantry; and then: "Where is Collins now?"
+
+"I don't know; he comes and goes pretty much as he pleases when I'm not
+in town."
+
+"Do you know anything about him personally?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I do. His father was a bank cashier, and he became a defaulter--of the
+easy-mark kind; the kind that is too good-natured to look too curiously
+at a friend's collateral. He would have gone over the road if your
+father hadn't pulled him out by main strength."
+
+"I see," said Blount cynically. "And the son has paid his father's debt
+to my father. But why the safe-blowing?"
+
+"Collins's face had to be saved in some way. He couldn't know that you
+meant to lock the dummy up in the safety vault," returned Gantry, and
+then, after a pause: "That's our one little ray of hope, Evan."
+
+"I don't see it."
+
+"Don't you? Then I'll make it a bit plainer. If some railroad burglar
+had cracked your safe, you could confidently assume that the original
+letters have been carefully cremated by this time, couldn't you?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"But if your father has them ... Evan, I don't know any more than the
+man in the moon what he wants them for, but the man in the street would
+grin and tell you that your father was merely getting ready to hold the
+railroad company up for something it didn't want to part with."
+
+"I'm letting you say it of my own flesh and blood, Dick; and it shows
+you how badly broken I am. After all, it doesn't lead anywhere."
+
+"Yes, it does. Let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that your
+father doesn't know how much those letters mean to you--I know it's a
+pretty hard thing to imagine, but we'll do it by main strength and
+awkwardness. Let us suppose again, that being the case, that you go to
+him frankly and show him in a few well-chosen words just where he has
+landed you; tell him you've got to have those letters--simply _got_ to
+have them--to save your face. I know your father, Evan, a good bit
+better than you do; he'd give you the earth with a fence around it if
+you should ask him for it."
+
+Evan Blount got slowly out of his chair, stood up, and put his hands
+upon the smaller man's shoulders.
+
+"Dick, do you realize what you are doing for yourself when you show me a
+possible way of getting my weapon back?" he demanded.
+
+Gantry's lips became a fine straight line and he nodded.
+
+"That's what made me walk the floor a few minutes ago; I was trying to
+find out if I were big enough. It's all right, Ebee; you go to it, and
+I'll throw up my job and run a foot-race with the sheriff, if I have to.
+Damn the job, anyway!" he finished petulantly. "I'm tired of being a
+robber for somebody else's pocket all the time!"
+
+Blount sat down again and put his face in his hands. After a time he
+looked up to say: "I can't let you outbid me in the open market, Dick.
+You can't set the friendship peg any higher than I can."
+
+Gantry crossed the room and recovered his top-coat and hat from the
+chair where he had thrown them.
+
+"Don't you be a fool," he advised curtly. "There's a railroad down in
+Peru that is going bankrupt for the lack of a wide-awake, up-to-date
+traffic man. I've had the offer on my desk for a month, and I'm going
+to cable to-night. That lets you out, whether you do or don't. But if
+you've got the sense of a wooden Indian, you'll do as I've said--and do
+it _pronto_. Your time's mighty short, anyway. So long."
+
+And before Blount could stop him he was gone.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+A STONE FOR BREAD
+
+
+Though he had eaten nothing since the early breakfast in the service-car
+on the way to Lewiston, Evan Blount let the dinner hour go by unnoted.
+For a long time after Gantry had left him he sat motionless, a prey to
+thoughts too bitter to find expression in words; the dismaying thoughts
+of the hard-pressed champion who has discovered that his foes are of his
+own household.
+
+Apart from the one great boyhood sorrow, a sorrow which had been allowed
+unduly to magnify itself with the passing years, he had never been
+brought face to face with any of the hardnesses which alone can make the
+soldier of life entirely intrepid in the shock of battle. In the
+backward glance he saw that his homeless youth had been, none the less,
+a sheltered youth; that his father's love and care had built and
+maintained invisible ramparts which had hitherto shielded him. It was
+most humiliating to find that the crumbling of the ramparts was leaving
+him naked and shivering; to find that he was so far out of touch with
+his pioneer lineage as to be unable to stand alone.
+
+But there are better things in the blood of the pioneers than a
+latter-day descendant of the continent-conquering fathers may be able to
+discern in the moment of defeat and disaster. Slowly, so slowly that he
+did not recognize the precise moment at which the tide of depression and
+wretchedness reached its lowest ebb and turned to sweep him back to a
+firmer footing, Blount found himself emerging from the bitter waters.
+Gantry, the Gantry whom he had been calling hard names, setting him down
+as at best a lovable but wholly unprincipled time-server, had pointed a
+possible way to retrieval, heroically effacing himself that the way
+might be unobstructed. With the warm blood leaping again, Blount
+straightened himself in his chair. He would go to his father, not as a
+son begging a boon, but as a man demanding his rights. The machine had
+seen fit to throw down the challenge by burglarizing his office and
+robbing him. Very good; there were five days remaining in which to
+strike back. He would lift the challenge, and if his reasonable demand
+should be refused, he would drop the railroad crusade and break into the
+wider field of bossism and machine-made majorities, ploughing and
+turning it up to the light as he could.
+
+The fiery resolution had scarcely been taken when he heard the door of
+Collins's outer room open and close, and a moment later the good-looking
+young stenographer came in, bringing a breath of the crisp autumn
+evening with him.
+
+"I didn't know you were back, Mr. Blount!" he exclaimed. "I saw the
+office lights from the street, and thought somebody had left them
+turned on. Is there anything I can do?"
+
+"Yes; sit down," said Blount crisply, and then: "Collins, what do you do
+with yourself when I am out of town?"
+
+"I stay here most of the time. I went out early this afternoon, but I
+don't often do it."
+
+"Were you here all day yesterday?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Was there anything unusual going on?"
+
+The young man looked away as if he expected to find his answer in the
+farther corner of the room.
+
+"I don't know as you'd call it unusual," he replied half-hesitantly.
+"There were a good many callers. Shall I bring you the list?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The stenographer went out to his desk and brought back a slip of paper
+with the names.
+
+"This man Gryson," said Blount, running his eye over the memorandum, "I
+see you've got him down four or five times. What did he want?"
+
+"He wouldn't tell me. But he was all kinds of anxious to see you. That
+was why I telegraphed you; I couldn't get rid of him any other way."
+
+"Let me see the copy of the message."
+
+Again Collins made a journey to his desk, returning with the
+telegraph-impression book open at the proper page. Blount glanced at the
+copy of the brief message: "Thomas Gryson wants to know when he can be
+sure of finding you here," and handed the book back.
+
+"How did you send that?" he asked.
+
+"I sent it down to the despatcher's office by Barney."
+
+Blount nodded. The message had not reached him; and its suppression was
+doubtless another move in the subtle game.
+
+"You say you couldn't find out what Gryson wanted?" he pressed.
+
+"He--he seemed to be all torn up about something; couldn't say three
+words without putting a cuss word in with them. The most I could get out
+of him was that somebody was trying to double-cross him."
+
+Blount took a cigar from his pocket and lighted it. He was faint for
+lack of food, but he absently mistook the hunger for the tobacco
+craving.
+
+"Collins," he said evenly, "you appear to forget at times that you are
+working for a man who has had some little experience with unwilling
+witnesses in the courts. You are not telling me the truth; or, at least,
+you're not telling me all of it. Let's have the part that you are
+keeping back."
+
+"The--the last time he was in, he--he did talk a little," faltered the
+young man. "He's got something to sell, and he's f-fighting mad at Mr.
+Kittredge. He said he was going to throw the gaff into somebody damn'
+quick if Mr. Kittredge didn't wipe off the slate and c-come across with
+the price."
+
+"That is better," was the brief comment. "Now, then, why did you lie to
+me in the first place?"
+
+The stenographer shut his eyes and shrunk lower in his chair, but he
+made no reply.
+
+"I'll tell you why you lied," Blount went on, less harshly. "It was
+because you were told to. Isn't that so?"
+
+Collins nodded.
+
+Reaching out quickly, Blount laid a hand on the young man's knee. "Fred,
+what do you think of a soldier who takes his pay from one side and
+fights on the other? That is what you've been doing, you know; it is
+what you did when you put a dozen sheets of blank paper into an envelope
+the other day--the day I sent you to get a file of letters marked
+'private' from the safe."
+
+The culprit drew away from the touch of the hand on his knee, and there
+was fear, and behind the fear the courage of desperation, in his eyes
+when he lifted them.
+
+"You can give me the third degree if you want to, Mr. Blount, but as
+long as I've got the breath to say no, I'll never tell you the next
+thing you're going to ask me!"
+
+Blount sprang up and went to stand at the window. There was a street
+arc-lamp swinging in its high sling some distance below the window
+level, its scintillant spark changing weirdly to blue and green and back
+to blinding orange, and he stared so steadily at it that his eyes were
+full of tears when he turned to look down upon the waiting culprit.
+
+"No, Collins; I'm not going to ask you the name of the other master for
+whom you have thrown me down," he said gravely; and then: "That's
+all--you may go now."
+
+The young man got up and groped for the hat which had fallen from his
+hands to the floor and rolled away out of reach.
+
+"You mean that I'm to get my time-check?" he asked.
+
+"No," he grated--the harshness returning suddenly. "You are disloyal,
+and I know it; your successor would probably be the same, and I
+shouldn't know it."
+
+Nerved to the strident pitch now by the new resolution, Blount hurriedly
+set his desk in order, slammed it shut, and followed the stenographer to
+the street level. In the avenue he hesitated for a moment, the thoughts
+shuttling swiftly. In a flash the inferences fell into place. Gantry had
+said that his father was responsible for the time-killing journey to
+Lewiston. Why had it been necessary? Was it to keep him out of Gryson's
+way? What did the ward-organizer have to communicate that made him so
+anxious to secure an interview? Was that anxiety the breach through
+which the wider field of corruption might be reached?
+
+Again swift decision came to its own and Blount faced to the right,
+walking rapidly until he turned in at the foot of the worn double flight
+of stairs leading to the editorial rooms of _The Plainsman_. Blenkinsop,
+the editor, a lean, haggard man with a sallow face, coarse black hair
+worn always a little longer than the prevailing cut, and deep-set,
+gloomy eyes, was at his desk.
+
+"Can you give me a few minutes of your time, Blenkinsop?" the caller
+asked shortly.
+
+"I can sell 'em to you, maybe," said the editor, and the lift of the
+gloomy eyes merely served to turn the jest into a bit of morbid sarcasm.
+Then he gave the sarcasm a half-bitter twist: "You railroad gentlemen
+are always willing to buy what you can't reach out and take."
+
+"I know that is what you believe," said Blount, drawing up a broken
+chair and planting himself carefully in it; "we are on opposite sides of
+the fence in this fight, if you are fighting the railroad merely because
+it is a railroad; otherwise, perhaps, we are not so far apart as we
+might be. I don't know whether or not you have listened to any of my
+speeches, but you've printed a good many of them."
+
+The editor nodded. "I've read 'em, and I'm willing to be the hundredth
+man and say that I believe you are individually honest. I hope you're
+not going to ask me to go any further than that."
+
+"I'm not; I came for quite another purpose. First, let me ask a frank
+question: Is _The Plainsman_ out for a square deal all around,
+regardless of who may be hit?"
+
+Blenkinsop took time to consider the question and his answer, chewing
+thoughtfully upon his extinct cigar while he reflected.
+
+"This is straight goods?" he asked finally. "You're not trying to pull
+me into an admission that can be used against us a little later on?"
+
+"At the present moment you are talking to Evan Blount, the man, and not
+to the Transcontinental company's lawyer, Blenkinsop."
+
+"All right; then I'll tell you flat that we are out for blood. We hold
+no brief for any living man. There are no strings tied to us, and we
+wear nobody's brass collar."
+
+"Then you are fighting the machine as well as the railroad?" Blount put
+in quickly.
+
+The editor sat back in his chair, and the two furrows which deepened
+upon either side of his hard-bitted mouth answered for a smile.
+
+"When you find a machine that hasn't got 'T-C.R.' lettered on it
+somewhere, you let us know about it," was his rather cryptic reply.
+
+"That is not the point," said Blount dryly. "Here is the question I
+wanted to ask: There are only five days intervening before the election.
+How wide a swath could you cut if the evidence of wholesale corruption
+could be placed in your hands within twenty-four hours?"
+
+Again the editor took time to consider. When he spoke it was to say: "I
+can't quite believe that you are going to be disloyal to your salt at
+this late stage of the game, Blount. Do you mean that you are going to
+show your own company up for what it really is?"
+
+"Never mind about that. I asked a question, and you haven't answered
+it."
+
+"It was a question of time, wasn't it? There's time enough to tip the
+skillet over and spill all the grease into the fire, if that's what you
+mean; always time enough, up to the last issue before the polls open."
+
+"And you'd do it--no matter who might happen to get in the way of the
+burning grease?"
+
+"We print the news, and we try to get all the news there is. But it
+would have to be straight goods, Blount; no 'ifs' and 'ands' about it.
+I'm not saying that you couldn't produce the goods, you know. If you
+could break into Gantry's and Kittredge's private files, the trick would
+be turned. But I know well enough you're not going to do that."
+
+Blount got up out of the broken chair and buttoned his coat.
+
+"I needn't take any more of your time just now," he said. "I merely
+wanted to know how far you'd go if somebody should happen along at the
+last moment and give you a plain map of the road."
+
+"We'll go as far, and drive as hard, as any newspaper this side of the
+Missouri River. But we've got to have the facts--don't forget that."
+
+Blount was turning to go, but he faced around again sharply.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me, Blenkinsop, that you don't know, as well as you
+know you're alive, that this campaign is honeycombed with deals and
+trades and dishonesty and trickery in every legislative district?" he
+demanded.
+
+Again the ghastly smile which was only a deepening of the natural
+furrows flitted across the editor's face.
+
+"Of course, I know it," he returned. "But you'll excuse me if I say
+that I scarcely expected to have the railroad company's field-manager
+come and tell me about it."
+
+Blount's grim smile was a match for the editorial face-wrinkling. "You
+are like a good many others, Blenkinsop; you see red when you hear the
+noise of a railroad train. Perhaps, a little later, I may be able to
+persuade you to see another color--yellow, for example. Let it go at
+that. Good-night."
+
+Once more in the avenue, Blount turned his steps toward the
+Inter-Mountain. Since the campaign was now in its final week, the clans
+were gathering in the capital, and the lobby of the great hotel was
+filled with groups of caucussing politicians. Blount was halted half a
+dozen times before he could make his way to the room-clerk's desk, and
+the pumping process to which he was subjected at each fresh stoppage
+would have amused him if the fiery resolution which was driving him on
+had not temporarily killed his sense of humor. It was evident that, in
+spite of all he had been saying and doing, a considerable majority of
+the caucussers were still regarding him as his father's lieutenant. He
+did not try very hard to remove the impression. It mattered little, in
+the present crisis, what the various party henchmen thought or believed.
+
+It was a sharp disappointment when the room-clerk told him that his
+father and Mrs. Honoria and their guest had gone to the theatre. He was
+keyed to the fighting-pitch, and he wanted to have the deciding word
+spoken while his blood was up and there was still time to act. A glance
+at the clock showed him that he had a full half-hour to wait; and, as
+much to escape the buzzing lobbyists as to satisfy his hunger, he went
+to the _cafe_ and ordered a belated dinner, choosing a table from which
+he could look out through the open doors and command the main entrance
+through which the theatre-goers would return.
+
+He was through with the dinner, and was slowly sipping his black coffee,
+when he saw them come in. Since it was no part of his plan to dull the
+edge of opportunity by holding it first upon the social grindstone, he
+let the party of three go on to the elevators, and a little later sent a
+card up-stairs asking his father to meet him in the lounge on the
+mezzanine floor.
+
+Having the advantage of time, he was first at the appointed
+meeting-place. He had drawn a chair to the balustrade, and was glooming
+thoughtfully down at the lobby gathering, upon which even the lateness
+of the hour appeared to have no dispersing effect, when a mellow voice
+behind him said: "Well, son, taking a quiet little squint at the
+menagerie?"
+
+Blount got up and gave the speaker his chair, dragging up another for
+himself. The senator sat down and stretched his great frame like a man
+wearied. "Ah, Lord!" he said. "The old man isn't as young as he used to
+be, Evan, boy. There was a time once when eleven o'clock didn't seem any
+later to me than it does now to you; but it's gone by, son, and I don't
+reckon it'll ever come back again."
+
+Blount drew his chair nearer. "I have a hard thing to say to you
+to-night, dad," he began, "and you mustn't make it harder by speaking of
+your--of the things that get near to me. I am a man grown, and a Blount,
+like yourself; I want you to give me back those papers which your
+dynamiter or somebody else in your pay took from my office safe three
+nights ago."
+
+The senator's eyes lighted with the gentle smile, and the tips of the
+great mustaches twitched slightly.
+
+"So McVickar's been telling tales out of school, has he?" he inquired
+half-jocularly.
+
+"I have had no communication with Mr. McVickar. It wasn't necessary, nor
+is it needful for us to go aside out of the straight road. I want those
+papers. They are mine, and they were stolen."
+
+The elder man smiled again. "What if I should say that I haven't got
+'em, son--what then?" he asked mildly.
+
+"I don't want you to say that. I want to believe that, however bitter
+this fight may grow, we shall still speak the truth to each other."
+
+There was silence for a little time, and then the father broke it to
+say: "Reckon I could ask you what papers you mean, without roiling the
+water any more than it's already been roiled, son?"
+
+"You may ask and I'll answer, if you'll let me say that it is hardly
+worth while for you to spar with me to gain time. I had certain
+documents--letters--which would have enabled me to come through clean
+with my own people--with the railroad management. You knew I had them;
+I was imprudent enough to boast of it one evening when we were dining
+together in your rooms. I know what I'm talking about, dad, when I make
+this demand of you. One of my clerks has been tampered with. Three days
+ago, when I asked him to bring me the letters from the safe, he brought
+me, instead, a packet of blank paper which he allowed me to go and lock
+up in my safety-box in the Sierra National. I don't know why you had the
+safe blown up, unless it was to save Collins's face."
+
+Again a silence intervened, and in the midst of it the senator sat up
+and began to feel half-absently in his pockets for a cigar. Blount
+offered his own pocket-case, following it with the tender of a lighted
+match. With the cigar going, the Honorable David settled back in the
+deep chair, chuckling thoughtfully.
+
+"They wrote me from back yonder on the Eastern edge of things that you
+had the makings of a mighty fine lawyer in you, boy, and I'll be
+switched if I don't believe they had it about right. The way you've
+trailed this thing out doesn't leave the old man a hole as big as a
+dog-burrow to crawl out of, does it, now? Reckon you've sure-enough got
+to have those papers back before you can go on, do you?"
+
+"You know I must. You know what I've been preaching and talking: I have
+meant every word of it in good faith, and when I began to doubt the good
+faith of those behind me, I was forced to cast about for a weapon. It
+was handed to me almost miraculously, and as long as I held it my good
+name before the people of the State was safe. As the matter stands now,
+I'm a broken man, dad. After the election I shall be billeted from one
+end of the State to the other as the most shameless liar that ever
+breathed!"
+
+The senator was rocking his great head slowly upon the chair-pillow.
+"That's bad; that's mighty bad, son. I reckon we'll have to fix some way
+to trail you out of that bog-hole, sure enough!"
+
+"I'm not asking for help; I'm asking for bare justice. Give me those
+papers and I'll fight myself clear."
+
+"And if I say I can't give 'em to you, Evan, boy, what then?"
+
+"Then, hard and unfilial as it may seem to you, I shall fight you and
+your machine to a finish. You think I can't do it? I'll show you. I've
+got five days, and they are all my own. This campaign has been rotten to
+the core from the very beginning. You have tried to keep me from finding
+it out, and you have partly succeeded. But I know a little, and inside
+of the next twenty-four hours I shall know more. That's my last word,
+dad, and it breaks my heart to have to say it. But, by the God who made
+us both, if you drive me to it, I shall stir up such a revolution in
+this State that the people will forget to curse me for the lies I have
+been allowed to tell them!"
+
+Blount was upon his feet when he finished, and the senator was rising
+stiffly from the depths of the big chair.
+
+"That's good, man-sized talk, son," he commented gently, "and I reckon I
+haven't a word to say against it. All I'm going to beg for is this:
+we're kin, boy--mighty close kin. Belt away as hard as you like in the
+big scrap; it does me good to see that all these little Eastern frills
+haven't made you any less a two-fisted, hard-hitting Blount; but don't
+let it make you turn your back when your old daddy comes into the room.
+That's all I ask. Now you'd better go to bed and sleep up some. There's
+another day coming, and if there isn't, none of these little things
+we've been haggling over is going to count for much to any of us."
+
+Three minutes later the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush was letting himself
+into the sitting-room of his suite on the private dining-room floor by
+means of his night-key. The small person whom Gantry and a few others
+were still calling the court of last resort was sitting up, and the tiny
+embroidery-frame on the table had evidently just been laid aside.
+
+"Well?" she said inquiringly.
+
+The senator shook his head in patient tolerance.
+
+"Whatever you've been doing, it's knocked the bottom clean out for the
+boy, Honoria. For a little spell he had me going, and I thought I'd just
+naturally have to turn loose and spill all the fat into the fire."
+
+"You mustn't do that," she returned quickly. "There are five days yet,
+and I need at least three of them. He was very angry?"
+
+"Fighting mad."
+
+"Of course," said the small one thoughtfully. "But we can't allow that
+to get in the way of the bigger things. It won't make any family break,
+will it? For Patricia's sake I shall be sorry if he is desperate enough
+to make the quarrel a personal one."
+
+"I did the best I could on that, little woman, and I reckon he's big
+enough to keep on telling us 'Howdy.' What comes next on the programme?"
+
+"To-morrow I'm going to try to get him to take Patricia driving. Beyond
+that I haven't planned, and anyway it doesn't matter, now that you have
+Gryson out of the way." Then she offered a bit of news. "Richard Gantry
+telephoned me a few minutes ago. He has sent in his resignation, and is
+going to Peru."
+
+The senator was opening the door to the adjoining bedroom and turning on
+the lights.
+
+"Oh, no, I reckon not," he rejoined, with a mellow laugh rumbling deep
+in his great body. "Dick only thinks he is going to Peru. We all think
+such things now and then."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+THE UNDER-DOG
+
+
+Blount's first move on the morning following the militant interview with
+his father was telegraphic; he wired the campaign chairmen in the three
+towns remaining on his list, cancelling his speaking-engagements. Beyond
+that he went forth to institute a painstaking search in the purlieus of
+the city, a quest having for its object the unearthing of the man Thomas
+Gryson. More and more he was coming to believe that this man was the key
+to a larger situation in the field of political corruption than any
+which had as yet developed. Wherefore he made the search thorough.
+
+Oddly enough, considering the man and his habits, the quest proved
+fruitless. Blount was too clean a man to be on familiar terms with the
+saloon men and dive-keepers of the capital-city underworld, or with the
+crooks and turnings of the underworld itself; but he found his way
+around easily enough in daylight, and had his labor for his pains. For
+when he went back to the hotel at the luncheon-hour he brought little
+with him save a stench in his nostrils and a slightly increased fund of
+mystification. Gryson had disappeared as completely as if the earth had
+opened and swallowed him. And Blount knew the disappearance was real,
+because the ward-heeler's own henchmen were searching for him.
+
+Daunted but not beaten, Blount meant to continue the quest in the
+afternoon. But man proposes, and a small _dea ex machina_ may dispose.
+At the _cafe_ family luncheon, at which Blount was careful to make his
+appearance, not only because Patricia was there, but also for the sake
+of keeping the kinsman peace his father had begged for, it transpired
+that Patricia had been promised an auto drive to Fort Parker, the
+military reservation sixteen miles to the westward, and that there were
+difficulties. The senator's wife took his arm and explained her dilemma
+at the table dispersal.
+
+"It is parade day at the Fort, you know, and Patricia has set her heart
+on going. I don't know how I came to be so absurdly thoughtless, but I
+promised her before I remembered that this is the Kismet Club election
+afternoon, and if I don't go, they'll make me president again in spite
+of everything," she said in low tones as they were leaving the _cafe_.
+"I simply _can't_ serve another year; and at the same time, I do so
+dislike to disappoint Patricia. She is such a dear girl!" Mrs. Honoria
+was strictly within the bounds of truth in claiming to have forgotten
+the date of the Kismet election of officers; but it was equally true
+that the club would re-elect her, present or absent, since she was its
+founder and chief patroness.
+
+Blount saw the pointing of all this with perfect clarity, and he had no
+need to assure himself that it had every ear-mark of another expedient
+to get him out of the way. But while he was with Mrs. Honoria and
+listening to her persuasive little appeals it was much harder to
+maintain the antagonistic attitude than it was when she figured--at a
+distance--merely as his father's second wife and his mother's
+supplanter. Foolish? Oh, yes; but at times when the star of impulse is
+in the ascendant every man hath a fool in his sleeve.
+
+"It _is_ too bad to disappoint her," he found himself saying, matching
+the little lady's low tone. "If I wasn't so terribly busy--"
+
+"I know; and just now, with the election so near, you must be busier
+than ever. I suppose I shall have to explain to Patricia, and it hurts
+me, when she is going home so soon."
+
+"Going home?" echoed the victim.
+
+"Yes; in a few days now. The professor has already overstayed his leave
+of absence, so he says."
+
+Blount clenched a figurative fist and shook it savagely at an unkind
+fate. Nevertheless, he fell.
+
+"If you can shift your responsibility to my shoulders, Mrs. Blount--" he
+began, but she would not let him finish.
+
+"Oh! that is _so_ good of you, Evan. Take the little car, and be sure to
+ask the garage man to put in new batteries. The magneto isn't working
+very well. And be here by half past one if you can. The parade is at
+half past two, you know."
+
+Under other conditions the railroad company's "social secretary," as
+the society editors of the capital were still calling him, might have
+had a joyous half-holiday. The autumn afternoon was picture-fine, the
+little car ran well, and Patricia's mood was tempered with the gayety
+which strives to extract the final thrill of enjoyment out of the
+closing days of a delightful vacation. Blount was grateful for the
+light-hearted mood. He felt that it would be next to impossible to tell
+Patricia how wretchedly he had failed in the single-handed crusade, and,
+as to the desperate alternative, there could be no confidences with one
+whose every reference to his father was shot through with loving and
+loyal admiration.
+
+At the military reservation there were fewer opportunities for the
+confidences, or rather fewer temptations to indulge in them. It was a
+gala day at the post, and there were a number of auto parties out from
+the city. Blount knew most of the officers and their wives, and Patricia
+was welcomed not less for her own sake than for the reason that she had
+figured in former visits as the _protegee_ of an ex-senator's wife.
+After the parade there was an impromptu game of baseball, with the broad
+verandas of the officers' quarters serving for the grandstand. Beyond
+the game there was tea, and the sunset gun had been fired before the
+young lieutenant, who had attached himself to Miss Anners at the
+earliest possible moment in the afternoon, reluctantly surrendered his
+prize and handed Patricia into the waiting runabout for the return to
+the capital.
+
+"We shall be late for dinner, if we don't hurry," was the young woman's
+comment when Blount steered the little car clear of the post settlement
+and took the road well in the wake of the Weatherford touring machine.
+Then she added: "We mustn't be; we are dining out this evening--at the
+Gordons."
+
+Blount was entirely willing to hurry. Half of one of the precious days
+of challenge had been wasted in the futile search for Gryson, and here
+was the other half worse than wasted, since the handsome young
+lieutenant had so brazenly monopolized Patricia.
+
+"I'll get you home in time for dinner, never fear," he returned, but
+apparently the little car was no party to the promise. A short mile from
+the reservation the motor began to miss, and a few minutes farther along
+it stopped altogether. Blount got out and began to investigate. There
+was plenty of gasolene, but the spark appeared to be dead.
+
+"I ought to have a leather medal!" he confided to Patricia, in great
+disgust. "Mrs. Blount told me that the batteries needed to be changed,
+and I had them changed, but neglected to have them tested. Sit still and
+let me spin it on the magneto a while."
+
+She let him do it until the perspiration was standing in fine little
+beads on his forehead and he was hot and desperate. Then she said
+sweetly: "I don't believe I'd wear myself out that way, if I were you,
+Evan. Something happened to the magneto two or three weeks ago, and it
+has never been fixed."
+
+Blount pushed his driving-cap back, mopped his face, and came around to
+dive once more into the wiring in the battery box. Dusk was coming on,
+and he had to light one of the side-lamps to serve as a lantern. By
+changing the wiring he was finally able to evoke a desultory response
+from the spark-coil, and a little later to start the motor after some
+limping fashion.
+
+"Oh, my poor dinner!" said Miss Anners, who was still in the
+light-hearted mood; this after Blount's careful nursing had resulted in
+a creeping resumption of the cityward progress. And then: "I hope you
+didn't have any engagement for this evening?"
+
+"I have but one ambition in life," he rejoined grimly, "and that is to
+get you back to the hotel in time for your engagement. Surely Mrs.
+Blount will wait for you."
+
+At the rate they were going the waiting promised to be long. But after
+another half-hour had been killed, the headlights of a westward-driven
+car appeared in the road ahead. Blount pulled quickly into the ditch and
+jumped out to flag the oncoming machine; did flag it, and was able to
+borrow a set of batteries. With the new equipment the remainder of the
+drive was accomplished swiftly, but not swiftly enough. At the
+Inter-Mountain they found that the senator and Mrs. Honoria had gone to
+keep their dinner engagement, and a note in the little lady's
+copperplate handwriting informed Blount that the invitation had been
+made to include him, and that he was to hurry and bring Patricia.
+
+Fully alive now to the time-killing purpose of the clever little
+machinator in arranging to have spent batteries given him, Blount,
+nevertheless, did his duty like a man, and the pair made a late descent
+upon the Gordon dinner-table. Though the dinner was informal, there were
+other guests besides the senator's party, and among them the traffic
+manager. Blount, sitting next to Patricia, made their tardiness an
+excuse and devoted himself to her, thus escaping the toils of the
+general table-talk, which was frankly political. But at the adjournment
+to the drawing-room he cornered Gantry.
+
+"I meant to hunt you up this afternoon," he began, "but I was otherwise
+spoken for. What have you done?"
+
+"I've cabled a conditional acceptance of the offer I was telling you
+about."
+
+"But you haven't resigned?"
+
+"No. Mr. McVickar will probably be here within a day or two, and I'll
+make it verbal."
+
+Yielding to the urgings of the younger Gordon, Patricia was going to the
+piano, and Blount snatched at his opportunity.
+
+"Give me a few minutes in the smoking-room," he said to the traffic
+manager, and when the privacy was secured: "You needn't resign, Dick.
+There isn't going to be any earthquake--of the kind you were fearing."
+
+"You don't mean that the Honorable Senator has turned you down, Evan?"
+
+"Just that."
+
+"I'm sorry," said the friend in need, feeling his way cautiously. Then
+he added: "You needn't tell me anything more than you want to, you
+know."
+
+"There isn't much to tell. I asked for bare justice, and it was
+refused."
+
+"Your father has the papers?"
+
+"He neither admitted nor denied."
+
+"But you didn't quarrel?"
+
+Blount's smile was mirthless. "We are here together, as you see. After
+all is said, we are still father and son."
+
+"Of course; that's as it should be, Evan. What are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know: go on fighting until I'm wiped out, I suppose. And that
+reminds me: have you seen that fellow Gryson within the last day or
+two?"
+
+Gantry dropped into the depths of a lounging-chair and lighted a
+cigarette. "So you're after Thomas Matthew, too, are you? Kittredge has
+been ransacking the town for him all day, and up to a couple of hours
+ago he hadn't found him. What's in the wind?"
+
+"I don't know, but I mean to find out. What can you tell me about
+Gryson--more than you have already told me?"
+
+"Not very much, I guess. He's a scalawag, of course, but unhappily for
+all of us he is a scalawag with a pull. Kittredge has been dickering
+with him--I don't mind telling you that now."
+
+"What is the nature of the pull?"
+
+"Votes," said Gantry succinctly.
+
+"Straight or crooked?"
+
+"You may search me. But knowing Tom Gryson a little, I should put my
+money on the marked card."
+
+"Naturally," said Blount dryly. "Still, I am needing to be shown. I've
+had two or three chances to size Gryson up, and he didn't impress me as
+a man with any ability beyond the requirements of a bully and the lowest
+type of a political heeler."
+
+"Tom is bigger than that; I don't know how much bigger, but some. He has
+votes to sell, and Kittredge, at least, seems to believe that he can
+deliver the goods. I don't know the inside of the deal. I'll tell you
+frankly that I tried to shove it over to you, neck and heels, at first.
+When that little notion failed, I pushed it along to Kittredge."
+
+Blount's eyebrows, which promised in time to be as portentous as the
+Honorable Senator's, met in a frown. "I'm going to find Gryson, dead or
+alive," he said.
+
+Gantry looked up quickly.
+
+"Which means that you know what has become of him?"
+
+"He has been put out of the way for a purpose, and the purpose is to
+keep me from finding out something that Gryson wants to tell me. That
+was the animus of the scheme to send me on a fool's errand to Lewiston.
+After you left me last night I found out that Gryson had been worrying
+Collins the day before; had been in the office a number of times and was
+sweatingly anxious about something."
+
+Gantry flung his cigarette away and lighted another. After a deep
+inhalation or two he said: "Let it alone, Evan. I have a hunch that
+you'll be happier if you don't try to drag the cover off of that
+particular cesspool."
+
+"Listen," said Blount shortly. "When my father turned me down last night
+I told him that I still had five days in which to--"
+
+"I know," Gantry nodded. "Just the same, you're not going to do it."
+
+"If I don't, it will be because I can't; because the time is too short."
+Then, with a sudden and impulsive gesture of appeal: "Dick, for Heaven's
+sake help me to find that man Gryson, if you know where he is! I shall
+blow up if I can't do something!"
+
+Gantry rose and tossed the second cigarette among the coals in the
+grate.
+
+"I've been afraid all along that they'd corner you and beat you to death
+with feather-dusters," he lamented. "And the only thing I can say will
+make matters worse instead of better. I have it pretty straight that
+Gryson has been fired--shooed out of town, and probably out of the
+State."
+
+"Who did it, Gantry?"
+
+"There is only one man in this bailiwick who can take the whip to a
+fellow like Tom Gryson. I guess I don't need to name him for you, Evan."
+
+Blount got out of his chair and stood with his back to the fire, and his
+face was white.
+
+"Good God! the rottenness of it, Dick!" he groaned. And then: "I've got
+to get out of this and begin all over again in some corner of the world
+where at least one man in ten hasn't forgotten the meaning of common
+honesty and decency and fair dealing. Heaven knows I'm no saint, but if
+I stay here this cursed crookedness will get into my blood and I'll be
+just as degraded as the worst of them. No, I'm not raving; there have
+been times when I've felt myself slipping--times when I've been tempted
+to get down and fight with the weapons that everybody fights with in
+this God-forsaken, law-breaking, graft-ridden commonwealth!"
+
+Gantry had risen and he was slowly shaking his head.
+
+"You're hot now--and with good enough cause, I guess. But that sort of a
+temperature makes a man near-sighted and color-blind. Human nature is
+pretty much the same the world over, Evan, and if you could see beyond
+the crookedness you'd find a lot of good people out here, averaging
+about the same as the decent majority anywhere. It's an inarticulate
+majority generally; it doesn't stand up on its hind legs and rear around
+and call attention to itself--couldn't if it should try. But it's here
+and there and everywhere in America, just the same. A railroad car with
+one drunken fool in it gives you the idea. You focus on him and say,
+'What a beastly shame!' and you entirely overlook the other fifty-odd
+people in the car who are quietly minding their own business."
+
+Blount's smile was for the man rather than for the theory.
+
+"You are an implacable optimist, Dick, and you always have been," he
+returned. "Your theory is good humanitarianism, and I wish I could
+accept it as applying to this abandoned community out here in my native
+hills; but I can't. Let's go back to the others. We've established a
+sort of family _modus vivendi_, my father and I, and I don't want him to
+think that I'm breaking it by plotting with you."
+
+It was while the evening was still measurably young that Blount made his
+excuses to his hostess and got away, fondly believing that he was
+escaping without attracting the attention of the small lady who was deep
+in a political discussion with candidate Gordon at the critical moment.
+He was mistaken, but the escape was not interrupted. At the curb the
+Blount touring-car was waiting, with two others, and for an instant
+Blount hesitated, half inclined to ask his father's chauffeur, to drive
+him down-town. On such inconsequent pivots fate, or accident, twirls the
+most momentous affairs of life. If Blount had taken the car he would
+have been driven directly to the hotel. As it was, he walked, and in
+passing the Temple Court Building he remembered that he had not seen his
+mail since early morning.
+
+Rousing the sleepy boy in charge of the all-night elevator, he had
+himself lifted to his office floor. The upper corridor was dimly
+lighted, and on leaving the car he went directly to the door of his
+private room, walking swiftly and neither seeing nor hearing a man who,
+materializing mysteriously out of the corridor shadows, followed him
+step by step.
+
+In the office Blount snapped the lights on and turned to unlock his
+desk. As the key clicked in the lock the sixth sense, which is perhaps
+only a mingling of the subtler essences of the other five, warned him
+sharply, and he wheeled to face the door which had been left on the
+latch. As he looked, the door opened silently and the materializing
+shadow, haggard of face and with bloodshot eyes mirroring blind rage and
+the terror of a cornered rat, slipped into the room and stood warily
+aside out of the direct light from the electric chandelier. Blount
+looked again and swore softly. The dodging intruder was the man Thomas
+Gryson.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+THE ICONOCLAST
+
+
+It is a threadbare saying that the environment moulds the man. Yet, much
+more than the philosophers have contended, there are chameleon
+tendencies in the strongest character, and one finely determining to
+coerce his surroundings is quite likely to end by realizing that the
+surroundings have appealed to unsuspected color-changings in himself.
+Thus it may chance that the fairest fighter, finding himself
+sufficiently kicked and cuffed in the rough-and-tumble, will discover
+how facilely easy it is to descend to the level of his antagonists, and
+from this discovery to the awakening of the remorseless passion for
+success at any price is but a step, long or short according to the
+exigencies of the struggle.
+
+Checked in his luggage, if not precisely pinned openly upon his sleeve,
+Blount had brought with him from the scholastic banks of the Charles a
+choice assortment of ideals, which are things precious only as they can
+be preserved inviolate. But for weeks, endless weeks as they seemed to
+him in the retrospect, he had been rubbing shoulders with a crude world
+which appeared to care little for ideals and less for the man who upheld
+them. Inevitably, as he had admitted to Gantry, the change was wrought,
+or working; the exclamation springing to his lips when he recognized
+Gryson evinced it, and when he beckoned the shifty intruder to the chair
+at the desk end the ruthless _zeitgeist_ had taken full possession of
+him, and the thought uppermost had grown suddenly indifferent to the
+means if by their employment the end might be gained.
+
+"Come over here and sit down," he commanded; then, seeing that Gryson
+hesitated and flung a glance over his shoulder at the door: "What are
+you afraid of?"
+
+"They've got my number," said the ward-heeler, in a convict whisper
+which was little more than a facial contortion. "There's a couple o'
+bulls waitin' f'r me down on the sidewalk."
+
+Blount crossed the room, shut the door and locked it. Then he went back
+to the self-confessed fugitive.
+
+"You're safe for the time being," he told the man. "Now talk fast and
+talk straight. What do you want this time?"
+
+Gryson hammered the arm of his chair with his fist and babbled
+profanity. When he became coherent he told his story, or rather Blount
+got it out of him piecemeal, of how he had been employed by the
+"organization" to falsify the registration lists in certain districts;
+of how, when the work was done, he had been denied the price and driven
+out with cursings. In the accusation, which was shot through with
+tremulous imprecations, the "organization" and the railroad company
+were implicated as if they were one. In one breath the fugitive charged
+the "double-crossing" to Kittredge, and in the next he accused the "big
+boss" himself, of having passed the sentence of deportation.
+
+"You say you were driven out? How could they drive you if you didn't
+want to go?" queried the cross-examiner.
+
+"That's on me: it was a job I pulled off two years ago in another
+place--up north of this--and the night-watchman got in the way when I
+was leavin'. They jerked that on me and showed me th' rope. They had me
+by th' neck, with th' word passed to Chief Robertson. I'm back here now
+wit' my life in my hand, but I'd chance it twice over to get square wit'
+them welshers that have bawled me out!"
+
+"Why have you come to me?" asked Blount briefly.
+
+"Gawd knows; I took a chance again. I've heard your speeches, and says
+I, 'There's your wan chance, cully,' and I'm here to grab f'r it. If
+you've been meanin' the half of what you've been sayin', Mr. Blount--"
+There was more of it, half pleadings and half mere rageful babblings of
+a vengeful soul hampered by the tongue of inadequacy.
+
+Blount left his chair and began to pace the floor, with Gryson watching
+him furtively. At any time earlier in the struggle the thought of using
+this wretched time-server as a means to any end, however desirable and
+just, would have been nauseating. True, if there could be any such thing
+as honor among thieves, the man had earned the price of his crooked
+work among the registration clerks; but for another man to profit by the
+broken bargain, and by the confessed criminal's rage and lust for
+vengeance, was a thing to make even a hard-pressed loser in an unequal
+battle hesitate.
+
+The hesitation was only momentary. With a gesture which was more
+expressive than many words, Blount turned short upon the furtive watcher
+in the chair at the desk end.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" he demanded.
+
+"You're on before I could stall it f'r you. You've been swearin' you'd
+back th' square deal to th' limit; it ain't square; it's crooked as
+hell. Grab f'r this knife I'm handin' you and cut the heart out o' these
+welshin' bosses that are givin' you th' double-cross the same as they're
+givin' it to me. You're the on'y man that can do it; the on'y man on
+Gawd's green earth they're afraid of. I know it damn' well. That's why
+they handed my number to th' chief and passed th' word to have me
+pinched. They was afraid I'd come here and squeal to you!"
+
+Blount stopped him with an impatient gesture. "Let that part of it rest
+and get down to business. What you have been telling me may be true, but
+I can't do anything on your bare word--the word of a man who is dodging
+the police. You've got to bring me proofs in black and white; lists of
+the faked names, and a straight-out give-away of how they are to be
+used; names and dates, and a written story of your bargainings with the
+men higher up. This is Thursday; to be of any use, these documents
+would have to be in my hands by Saturday noon, at the latest. You know
+best whether the thing can be done in time--or done at all. What do you
+say?"
+
+For a little time Gryson said nothing. When he spoke it was evident that
+the lust for vengeance and a guilty conscience were fighting an
+even-handed battle.
+
+"I could get the affidavits--maybe," he said. "There's a dozen 'r more
+of the cullies down-along got their notice to fade away when I got mine,
+and they'd jump at th' chance to get back at the bosses. But f'r Gawd's
+sake, look at what it means to me! Anny minute I'm on the job I'd be
+lookin' to see some bull with a star on 'im holdin' a gun on me; and
+after that, it's this f'r mine"--with a jerk of the head and a
+pantomimic gesture simulating the hangman's knot under his ear.
+
+"That is your risk," said Blount coldly, making this small concession to
+the expiring sense of uprightness. "You know how badly you want to 'get
+square,' as you put it, and I am interested only in the results. If you
+get caught, I sha'n't turn my hand over to help you--you can take that
+straight. But if you show up here with the proofs, proofs that I can
+use, any time before Saturday night, I'll undertake to see that you get
+safely out of the State."
+
+It was in the little pause which followed that some one in the corridor
+rapped smartly on the locked door. At the sound, Gryson collapsed and
+his face became an ashen mask of fear. Blount, the law-abiding, might
+have hesitated, but this newer Blount had slain his scruples. Snatching
+Gryson out of his chair, he thrust him silently through the half-open
+door of the work-room, and a moment later he was answering the rap at
+the corridor entrance, opening the door and calmly facing the two
+policemen on the threshold.
+
+"Well?" he said brusquely.
+
+One of the men touched his helmet.
+
+"We're looking for a felly that ducked in below a couple of hours ago,
+Mr. Blount. He's in the building, somewheres, and your office being
+lighted, we thought maybe you'd--"
+
+Blount threw the door wide.
+
+"You can see for yourselves," he said. "Would you like to come in and
+look around?"
+
+"Sure not; your word's as good as the search, Mr. Blount. 'Twas only on
+the chance that he might have faked an excuse and ducked in on you to be
+out of reach."
+
+Blount left the door open and went to get his coat and hat.
+
+"Who is the man?" he asked, while the officers lingered.
+
+"A felly named Gryson. He's been working in the railroad shops what
+times he wasn't pullin' off something crooked in the p'litical line."
+
+"What is he wanted for?" Blount was closing his desk and preparing to
+leave the office.
+
+"Croaking a bank watchman up in Montana afther he'd souped the vault
+door for a kick-shot."
+
+"In that case, perhaps I'm lucky that he didn't drop in and croak me,"
+laughed Blount, turning off the lights and joining the two men in the
+corridor. And then: "There is a back stair to the engine-room in the
+basement in the other wing of the building: have you been watching
+that?"
+
+The bigger of the two policemen prodded the other in the ribs with his
+night-stick. "That's on us, Jakey. He'll have been gone hours ago. Let's
+be drilling. 'Tis a fine mind ye have, Mr. Blount, to be thinking of
+thim back stairs right off the bat." And the pair went down in the
+elevator with Blount, chuckling to themselves at their own discomfiture.
+
+Having set his hand to the plough, Blount did nothing carelessly.
+Sauntering slowly, and even pausing to light a cigar, he trailed the two
+policemen until they were safely in another street. Then he turned back
+to the great office building and once more had himself lifted to the
+upper floor. In the office corridor he waited until the car had dropped
+out of sight; waited still longer to give the drowsy night-boy time to
+settle himself on his stool and go to sleep. Then he went swiftly to the
+door of the private room and unlocked it.
+
+Gryson was ready, and even in the dim light of the corridor Blount could
+see that he was white-faced and trembling. In the silent faring to the
+stair which wound down in a spiral around the freight elevator Blount
+gripped the arm of trembling.
+
+"You've got to get your nerve," he gritted savagely, "or you'll be
+nipped before you've gone a block!" And then: "Here's the stair: follow
+it down until you get to the basement. There's a coal entrance from the
+alley, and the engineer will be with his boilers in the other wing--and
+probably asleep. You've got it straight, have you? You're to bring the
+papers to my office on or before Saturday night. I'll be looking out for
+you, and if you bring me the evidence, you'll be taken care of. That's
+all. Down with you, now, and go quietly. If you're caught, I drop you
+like a hot nail; remember that."
+
+Still puffing at the cigar which glowed redly in the darkness of the
+wing corridor, Blount waited until his man had been given time to reach
+the basement. Then he walked slowly back to the main corridor and
+descended by the public stair without awakening the elevator boy, who
+was sleeping soundly in his car on the ground level.
+
+On the short walk to the hotel the full significance of the thing he had
+done had its innings. Cynical criticism to the contrary notwithstanding,
+there is now and then an honest lawyer who regards his oath of admission
+to the bar--the oath which binds him to uphold the cause of justice and
+fair dealing--as something more than a mere form of words. Beyond all
+question, an honest man who has sworn to uphold the law may neither
+connive at crime nor shield a criminal. Blount tried the shift of every
+man who has ever stepped aside out of the plain path of rectitude; he
+told himself morosely that he had nothing to do with Gryson's past; that
+he had taken no retainer from the Montana authorities; that the criminal
+was merely a cog in a wheel which was grinding toward a righteous end,
+and as such should be permitted to serve his turn.
+
+The well-worn argument is always specious to the beginner, and Blount
+thought he had sufficiently justified himself by the time he was pushing
+through the revolving doors into the Inter-Mountain lobby. But when he
+saw his father quietly smoking his bed-time cigar in one of the big
+leather-covered lounging-chairs, he realized that the first step had
+been taken in an exceedingly thorny path; that whatever else might be
+the outcome of the bargain with Thomas Gryson, a son was coldly plotting
+to bring disgrace and humiliation upon a father.
+
+For this reason, and because, when all is said, blood is much thicker
+than water, Blount made as if he did not see the beckoning hand-wave
+from the depths of the big chair in the smokers' alcove; ignored it, and
+with set lips and burning eyes made for the nearest elevator to take
+refuge in his room.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+A CRY IN THE NIGHT.
+
+
+With the critical election, a struggle which was to decide for another
+two-year period whether or not the people of the Sage-Brush State were
+to be the masters or the servants of chartered monopoly, only four days
+distant, the capital city took on the aspect of a stirring camp--two
+rival camps, in fact, since the State headquarters of the two chief
+parties were in the Inter-Mountain Hotel--and each incoming train
+brought fresh relays of henchmen and district spellbinders to swell the
+sidewalk throngs and to crowd the lobbies.
+
+On the Friday morning Blount awoke with the feeling that he had
+definitely cut himself off from all the commonplace activities of the
+campaign. There were two days of suspense to be outworn, and if he could
+have compassed it he would have been glad to efface himself completely.
+Since that was impossible, and since it seemed equally impossible that
+he should go on keeping up the farce of the _modus vivendi_ after he had
+taken the step which would presently blazon his name to the world as
+that of his father's accuser, he bought the morning papers hurriedly at
+the hotel news-stand and went down the avenue to get his breakfast at
+the railroad restaurant, where he would be measurably sure of isolation.
+
+After giving his order he ran hastily through the local news in the
+papers. There was no mention of the arrest of one Thomas Gryson in any
+of the police notes, and he breathed freer. But in _The Plainsman_ there
+was an editorial which was vaguely disturbing. Blenkinsop, who wrote his
+own leaders, hinted pointedly at coming disclosures which would change
+the political map of the State for all time. Blount, trying to determine
+how much or how little the editorial was based upon his talk with the
+editor on the Wednesday night, found his omelet tasteless. Ready enough,
+as he was persuaded, to fire the disrupting mine with his own hand, he
+was not ready to surrender the match to any one else. Manifestly he must
+see Blenkinsop and caution him.
+
+Breakfast over, he walked, by the longest way around, to his office in
+the Temple Court, hoping to find work which would help him through the
+forenoon. It was an idle hope. From a State-wide shower of political
+correspondence the daily mail had dropped suddenly to an inconsequential
+drizzle, and there were no callers. Here, again, he saw, or thought he
+saw, the all-powerful hand of the machine. He had been used for a
+purpose, the purpose of hoodwinking and deceiving the voters. That
+purpose having been served, he was to be dropped--was already dropped,
+as it seemed. By noon the sheer time-killing effort became blankly
+unbearable, and in desperation he broke with another of the ideals--the
+one labelled sincerity--and going boldly to the Inter-Mountain he waited
+in the lobby for the family party of three to come down to the
+one-o'clock luncheon in the public _cafe_.
+
+Joining the party when it came down, he found it difficult only in the
+inner sanctuaries to maintain the _status quo ante_ Gryson. There was no
+shadow of suspicion or coolness in his father's kindly smile and genial
+greeting, and Mrs. Honoria rallied him playfully upon the narrow margin
+by which he had held his own and Patricia's places at the Gordon
+dinner-table the night before. Only in Patricia's eyes he read a curious
+questioning, a hint that they were finding something in his eyes which
+was new and not wholly understandable. He knew well enough what it was
+that she saw; and though she was sitting opposite him at the table for
+four, he looked at her as seldom as possible, devoting himself, for once
+in a way, resolutely to his father's wife.
+
+After luncheon he again fell back upon the dogged boldness. Unable to
+contemplate a second plunge into the solitude of the Temple Court
+offices, he asked and was accorded permission to take Patricia for a
+country drive in the little car. When the city was left behind, and the
+small machine was purring steadily northwestward over a road which led
+to nowhere in particular, Blount put his finger accurately upon the
+thing which had been building little barriers of silence between them
+all the way out from town.
+
+"You knew me well enough yesterday to be reasonably certain of what I
+would do in given circumstances, didn't you, Patricia?" he began
+abruptly. "To-day you are not so sure about it. Why?"
+
+She laughed lightly, but there was a serious undernote in her voice when
+she said: "There are moments when you make me wonder if you haven't been
+dabbling in necromancy, Evan. I was at that very instant telling myself
+that it wasn't so."
+
+"But you know it is so," he persisted. "Why am I different?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Yet you recognize the fact?"
+
+"Is it a fact?" she queried.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"In what way are you different?"
+
+"I am not altogether certain that I know, myself. But I do know this:
+between yesterday and to-day there is a gulf so wide that it seems
+measureless. The scientists claim there are no cataclysms; no sudden and
+sweeping changes taking place either in the physical or the metaphysical
+field. If that be true, the changes must go on subconsciously for a long
+time before they are recognized. There is no other way of accounting for
+the gulfs."
+
+"You are talking miles over my head," she protested; and, though the
+assertion was not strictly true, it served its purpose.
+
+"I can make it a little plainer," he went on, slowing the motor until
+the small car was merely ambling. "You remember that night at Wartrace
+Hall, and what you told me? I went out from that talk resolved to do
+what you had shown me I ought to do, stubbornly refusing to consider the
+possibility of failure. None the less, I have failed."
+
+"Oh, no!" she exclaimed; "not that!"
+
+"Yes, just that. But the failure is not the worst thing that has
+befallen me. I have lost or gained something that pushes the yesterdays
+into a past which can never be recovered. Let me tell you, girl: I have
+been fighting in the open, against treachery and deceit fighting always
+under cover. I have been fighting bare-handed where others were armed.
+Day by day I have been finding out the baseness and the trickery; how my
+own side has used me as a screen behind which the old dishonorable
+expedients could be safely planned and carried out. I never knew until
+within the past two days what all this chicanery and double-dealing
+might be doing to me, but now I do know."
+
+"Will it bear telling?" she asked quietly.
+
+"I think not--to you," he returned, matching her low tone. "Let it be
+enough to say that I am no longer the man I was when I came out here.
+Patricia, I'm not fighting bare-handed any more; I'm smashing in with
+any weapon I can get hold of. There will be no such reform as the one
+you urged me to champion--as the era of fair-dealing and sincerity which
+I have been trying honestly and earnestly to inaugurate. Nevertheless,
+if my hand doesn't tremble too much at the critical moment, there will
+be, on the morning of next Tuesday, such a revolution as this
+commonwealth has never seen. Though they have robbed me and made a
+puppet of me, I can still bring it about."
+
+He had gone farther than he meant to, and he thought she would protest.
+He knew that her convictions of what should be and what should not be
+were clear-cut and definite. But a man, even though he be a lover, may
+know a woman's mind without knowing very much about the woman herself.
+There was no protest forthcoming. Quite the contrary, she answered him
+with a little shudder that was almost a caress, saying: "I think you
+have grown--bigger and stronger than I ever thought you could grow,
+Evan; and I'm sure your hand won't tremble. Is that what you want me to
+say?"
+
+Since there is no more contradictory being in a sentient world than a
+man in love, Blount was not quite sure that it was what he wanted her to
+say. By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures
+as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all
+that is high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard by which he
+can measure his own baser desires and ambitions and be shrived of them.
+At other times the straitly human has its innings, and the longing is
+for a comrade, a companion, a second self buried, lost, submerged in the
+loyalty which never questions. Having come slowly to maturity as a
+lover, Blount had been leaning toward the divinity definition of
+Patricia Anners. But now the iconoclastic change was breaking many
+images.
+
+"You are willing to believe that I haven't gone altogether backward?" he
+queried, after the little car had measured an additional stretch of the
+mesa road.
+
+"You are bigger and stronger," she repeated.
+
+"How do you know I am?"
+
+"I can tell; any woman could tell."
+
+"Is the acquirement of size and strength so great a thing that--"
+
+"I think it is--in a woman's eyes," she admitted fearlessly. "We are all
+more or less primitive and--and, well, 'Stone-Agey,' let us say, in the
+last analysis; at least, women are." And then: "You don't know women
+very well, Evan."
+
+"Don't I?"
+
+"No, you don't. You judge us by standards which have no existence
+outside of your own purely masculine deductions. For example: I suppose
+you wouldn't admit for a moment that a good woman might properly do
+things which would be entirely discreditable in a man?"
+
+He shook his head slowly and said: "Yesterday, or the day before, I
+might have said 'no,' with all the cocksureness of a boy of twenty.
+To-day I can only say: 'Who am I, that I should judge any man--or any
+woman?'" Then suddenly: "You are making excuses for my father's wife.
+You needn't, you know. She has fought me from the beginning, and I know
+it. Sometimes I think that she is solely responsible for my failure to
+accomplish the thing I had set my heart upon. Let it go; I don't bear
+malice. Just now I'm more interested in what you were saying about the
+sex differences and the woman's point of view. Have you been calling me
+a weak man, Patricia?"
+
+"No; only--a little--conventional," she returned half reluctantly.
+
+"But you are the quintessence of conventionality yourself!" he burst
+out.
+
+"Am I? Perhaps that was a passing phase, too. Quite probably the little
+things will remain--the dressing for dinner and the paying of party
+calls and all that. But one really big man has made many things seem
+petty and trifling--things that I used to think were of the greatest
+possible importance."
+
+"My father, you mean?"
+
+"Yes. If I should ever marry, Evan, I should be deliriously happy if I
+could find a man who promised to grow to the stature of your father."
+
+There was manifestly no rejoinder to be made to this by David Blount's
+son, though it pointed to another and still more painful involvement.
+What would Patricia say when the _debacle_ came? Would she lose faith in
+his father, and in all masculinity, in the crash? Or would she borrow
+yet again from the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging and
+still be loyal? In either case Blount saw his own finish, and he was
+rather relieved when she left the sex argument indeterminate and began
+to talk of other things: of her father's decision to go home at the end
+of the following week, of the good times she had been having, and of the
+regret with which she would turn her back upon the wide horizons and the
+freedom of it all.
+
+"I brought my shell with me when I came," she confessed, laughing, "but
+I think it is broken into little pieces by now. You will know how small
+the pieces are when I tell you that 'Tennessee Jim,' your father's horse
+wrangler, calls me 'Miz' Pat,' and it always makes me want to shake
+hands with him."
+
+Blount made the afternoon last as he could, sending the little car over
+many miles of the mesa roads and encouraging the small confidences which
+were enabling him to postpone his own evil hour. When the sun was
+dipping toward the Carnadine Hills they returned over a trail which came
+into the main Quaretaro road at a point where the northern highway
+begins its descent to the lower mesa level. Half-way down the descending
+gulch they came to the mouth of a small lateral canyon breaking into the
+larger gorge from the eastward; a canyon dry for the greater part of the
+year, but in the rainy season affording an outlet for the flood-waters
+of the Little Shonoho.
+
+"That is a road I have always wanted to explore," said Patricia,
+pointing to the fine driveway leading up the small canyon. "That is one
+of my weaknesses when I am driving; I am never able to pass a branch
+road without wanting to turn aside and explore it."
+
+"Then we'll explore this one, right now," said Blount, cutting the car
+to the left. He was more than willing to delay, even by littles, the
+moment when he should be obliged to resume the sorry business of waiting
+and dissembling.
+
+Miss Anners glanced at the tiny watch pinned upon her shoulder.
+
+"Shall we have time? It's getting late."
+
+"Plenty of time for all we shall be able to do or see up here," Blount
+returned. "The road ends at the canyon head, a mile above. There is a
+very small and very exclusive summer-resort hotel, called the Shonoho
+Inn, on the upper level. It has a six-weeks' season--like the Florida
+resorts--they tell me, and it is closed now."
+
+It was within the next five hundred yards that the prediction that there
+would be nothing to see anticipated its fulfilment. At a sudden turn in
+the narrow defile they came to a brush-built barricade posted with a
+sign:
+
+ROAD WASHED OUT ABOVE
+NO PASSING FOR VEHICLES!
+
+"That settles it," said Blount shortly, and he turned the car and let it
+roll back down the grade to the main gulch.
+
+When they were once more speeding toward town Blount stole a glance at
+his companion, wondering if it were the small disappointment which made
+her silent.
+
+"Are you tired?" he asked quickly.
+
+"Oh, no," she rejoined, brightening again. "I have enjoyed every minute
+of it. I was just thinking of what I said a little while ago; of how it
+is going to break my heart to leave it all."
+
+It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she needn't leave it.
+But he remembered and caught himself sharply. When the dreadful Tuesday
+should have come and gone, she might be only too willing to go away;
+and, in any event, he would have to go. There would be no place in his
+own and his father's State for him after Gryson returned, and the match
+had been touched to the hidden mine of high explosives. This was what
+was in his mind when he said rather tamely: "I suppose you will have to
+go. There isn't any chance for social-settlement work out here yet."
+
+"No," she responded half-absently; and thereupon he gave the little car
+still more spark and throttle and sent it flying over the final stretch
+of the fine road to the city.
+
+The electric lights were showing like faint yellow stars against the
+sunset sky when Blount skilfully placed the small car at the
+Inter-Mountain curb and lifted his companion to the sidewalk.
+
+"Are you going anywhere to-night?" he asked.
+
+"I don't know," was the reply. "There is a 'crush' on at the
+Weatherfords', but I don't know whether Mrs. Blount has accepted for us
+or not."
+
+"Don't go," he pleaded quickly. "Back out of it some way, and give me
+just this one evening to myself. Won't you do that, Patricia?"
+
+"I'll try," she agreed. "But if Mrs. Blount has accepted--"
+
+"Confound Mrs. Blount!" he growled. And then the newly aroused underman
+in him added: "You tell her that I want you to give me the evening, and
+let that settle it."
+
+As it turned out a little later, Miss Anners found it unnecessary to be
+rude to her hostess. For some reason best known to herself, Mrs. Honoria
+had declined the invitation--engraved in the correctest shaded Old
+English and made to include the senator and Miss Anners--and was
+planning a free evening for herself and her guest.
+
+After the _cafe_ dinner--a dinner at which Evan Blount, once more
+calling himself all the hard names in the hypocrite's vocabulary, made
+the fourth--Mrs. Honoria proposed an adjournment to the hotel parlors,
+which were in the mezzanine lounge. Later, she found herself alone on
+the divan which had been drawn up to command a view of the spirited
+scene in the lobby below. The senator had gone down to mingle with the
+politicians, and she could see him--big, masterful, and smiling--moving
+about from group to group. On the opposite side of the mezzanine
+gallery, Evan and Patricia were "doing time," as the little lady
+musingly phrased it: walking up and down and talking quietly; a handsome
+couple, as the approving glances of more than one passing guest
+testified.
+
+To Mrs. Honoria, thus isolated, came at the appointed time the
+sober-eyed young traffic manager for the railroad company. Gantry had
+been under orders from the little lady for the better part of the
+afternoon, but the business of the day had given him no chance to report
+earlier.
+
+"You got my note?" he asked, taking the place she made for him on the
+tete-a-tete divan.
+
+"Yes; a little while before dinner. It came just in time to let me send
+frightfully late 'regrets' to Mrs. Weatherford."
+
+"I couldn't come sooner. I've had the Hathaway crowd on my hands all
+afternoon. There is something in the wind, and those fellows are scared
+stiff. They say that Evan's speech-making has stirred up the working men
+and the rank and file like a declaration of war with Mexico, and nobody
+can tell what is going to happen next Tuesday."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"No, not quite all. There is a mild panic on in at least three of the
+city wards over the disappearance of a fellow named Gryson, a sort
+of--er--wire-puller and all-around general-utility man. Some say he has
+been doing crooked work and had to disappear; others say that he has
+taken his pay for whatever job he was doing and has skipped out, leaving
+his journeymen strikers to hold the bag."
+
+"Gryson," said the little lady, her eyes narrowing; "Gryson--the name is
+curiously familiar. He is what you call a ward-worker, isn't he?"
+
+Gantry nodded. "Something of the sort, yes. Evan calls him one of the
+'pie-eaters,' and away along early in the game they had a set-to in
+Evan's office and Evan fired him; told him if he ever came back he'd
+throw him out."
+
+Again Mrs. Honoria's fine eyes became reflective.
+
+"Richard," she said softly, "I'd give anything in the world if I could
+know that Evan still feels that way about Thomas Gryson."
+
+"Then you know the plug-ugly, do you?" said Gantry.
+
+"I know of him. He is a criminal and a dangerous man."
+
+"Well, he is out of it, I guess; he must be, if his own running-mates
+can't find him."
+
+"Isn't Mr. Kittredge trying to find him, too?"
+
+"Yes. And I think Kittredge played it rather low down on the poor
+beggar. They had a deal of some sort, and when Gryson put his price on
+the job--"
+
+"I know," she interrupted. "Mr. Kittredge ought to have paid him and let
+him go."
+
+Gantry's smile was a tribute to superior genius.
+
+"You've got me going," he said; "you always have me going. With the
+election only three days off, I can't tell yet what you and the senator
+are trying to do."
+
+"The senator, at least, has never made any secret of his object," she
+smiled back at him. "He has told everybody that he is out for a clean
+sweep."
+
+"Exactly," said Gantry; "but no man living knows what he means by a
+'clean sweep.' I'll bet there are a hundred men down there in the lobby
+right now who would give the best year out of their lives to know. And
+they can't guess--they can't begin to guess!"
+
+"Let us leave them to their guesses, while we go back to the
+certainties," she suggested. "Did you find out what I asked you to?"
+
+"Yes; and I don't know whether I ought to tell you or not. I'm still
+drawing my salary from the railroad, you know."
+
+"And you are not sure that I am drawing mine?" she laughed. "Don't you
+remember when Mr. McVickar gave me this?" touching the little
+jewel-incrusted watch on her shoulder.
+
+"Yes, I remember; also I remember that this is the first time I have
+ever seen you wearing it." And then: "I'd never try to bribe you in the
+wide, wide world, Mrs. Blount."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"For two reasons: you are too much in love with your husband; and, if
+you took a notion to fly the track, a king's ransom wouldn't be big
+enough to make you stay bribed."
+
+"I am flattered, I'm sure; but I'm still in the dark about the thing you
+have come here to tell me," she reminded him.
+
+"I presume you may as well know it, though I can tell you that it has
+been kept the darkest kind of a secret. Mr. McVickar came west to-day
+from Bald Butte in a new gasolene unit-car which is supposed to be
+making a trial trip over the road. The car is supposed to have a bunch
+of the Chicago officials on board, though not half a dozen men on this
+division know that the vice-president is the only official, and that
+the others are clerks and telegraphers."
+
+"Go on," said the small person quickly.
+
+"That gasolene special is lost. No station west of Bald Butte has yet
+reported it. Strictly between us two, it left the main line at the old
+disused track leading out to the abandoned Shoshone mine workings. There
+were autos to meet it at the mine, and by this time Mr. McVickar is
+probably toasting his feet before an open wood-fire in the Shonoho Inn."
+
+Mrs. Honoria leaned her two round arms on the mezzanine rail, and looked
+long and earnestly down upon the caucussing lobby throng. When she
+looked up it was to say: "There are wires?"
+
+"A full set of cut-ins. You can trust the big boss for that. He is in
+touch with every corner of the State, just the same as he would be if he
+were here in his usual election headquarters in the hotel."
+
+The small plotter became silent again, and when she spoke she was
+smiling brightly.
+
+"You are a good boy, Richard, and you shall have your reward. And it is
+going to be something that will make you happy, this time. Run away,
+now, and let me have a little solitude. I want to think."
+
+It was a full hour after Gantry's disappearance that the senator came
+up-stairs, and Mrs. Honoria beckoned to the pair on the opposite side of
+the gallery.
+
+"It's bedtime," she said, when they came around to her divan. And then,
+with a malicious little grimace for Evan: "I've been counting, and I've
+seen Patricia stifle three distinct and separate yawns in the last five
+minutes. She has been up every night since we came to town, and--"
+
+Left to himself, Blount sat watching the crowd for a time, and then went
+to his room to read himself to sleep. One of the two crucial days of
+suspense was outworn, but there was another coming; and after he had
+read for an hour he went to bed, resolutely determined to get the rest
+necessary to carry him through the dreaded Saturday. Sleep came quickly
+when he had turned off the lights, but it was merely a transition to a
+troubled dreamland in which Patricia, Mrs. Honoria, Gryson, and Gantry
+were weirdly confused. In the thick of it he seemed to see the
+ward-heeler standing at his bedside and beating furiously upon a huge
+Chinese gong. When he sprang up and began to rub his eyes, the room was
+lighted by a red glare, and the dream-noise was translated into the
+rattling of wheels and the clanging of alarm-gongs and cries of "Fire!"
+in the avenue below.
+
+As a city dweller, Blount should have felt the wall of the room, and,
+finding it still cool, should have turned over and gone to sleep again.
+Instead, he slipped out of bed and went to the window. One glance showed
+him that the fire was in the business district, either in or near the
+Temple Court Building. That was enough to make him dress hurriedly and
+hasten to the street, where he found a handful of policemen trying
+ineffectually to keep a clear pavement for the racing fire-trucks.
+Watching his chance, Blount darted out to make the crossing. He was
+half-way to the opposite curb when an unwieldy hook-and-ladder truck,
+drawn by a pair of magnificent grays, came lurching and plunging down
+the side street upon which the hotel cornered.
+
+In front of the horses, and leaping and barking at their heads in a
+frenzy of excitement, was a spotted coach-dog--the truck squad's mascot.
+Blount was within a few feet of the farther sidewalk, and was well out
+of danger when the long truck slewed into the avenue. But at the passing
+instant the mascot dog, leaping and whirling like a four-footed dervish,
+sprang backward. Blount felt the catapulting shock of a yielding body
+between his shoulders, heard a yell from the truck-driver on his high
+seat, and went plunging headlong to the curb. After which he felt and
+heard no more.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+FIELD HEADQUARTERS
+
+
+In the great world-battles of yesterday, or the day before, the
+commanding general rode, with a few chosen officers of his staff, to
+some near-by hill-top, shell-swept and perilous, and with the help of a
+pair of field-glasses and a corps of hard-riding aides kept in touch as
+he could with the shifting fortunes of his divisions and brigades. It
+would be small credit to an up-to-date day of progress and
+invention if this were not all changed. The present-moment
+commander-in-chief--warring, industrial, or political--may sit, thanks
+to the Morses and the Edisons, comfortably in office-coat and slippers,
+far removed from the battle turmoil, directing his forces with the
+pressure of a finger upon the appropriate electric button, or in a few
+words dictated to the human ear of a clicking telegraph-instrument.
+
+By all these adventitious aids Vice-President McVickar was profiting on
+the Saturday morning following the mysterious disappearance on the
+Friday of the gasolene unit-car somewhere between Bald Butte and the
+capital. The small resort hotel at the head of Shonoho Canyon had been
+transformed into a field headquarters. The hotel manager's desk,
+wheeled out in front of a crackling wood-fire in the ornate little
+lobby, was studded with its row of electric call-buttons; a railroad
+dining-car crew had taken possession of the kitchen; and the spacious
+writing-and lounging-room, sacred, in the season, to the guests of the
+exclusive hotel, housed a ranking of glass-topped telegraph-tables and
+impromptu desks--a work-room manned by a dozen picked young men, with
+O'Brien, the vice-president's private secretary, acting as the chief.
+
+Though the momentous Tuesday was still three days in the future, Mr.
+McVickar was actively at work on the Saturday morning, gathering in the
+loose ends and strengthening the railroad company's defences. With his
+arm-chair drawn up to the borrowed desk he was running rapidly through
+the telegrams filtering in a steady shower from the crackling sounders
+in the writing-room. When the situation had begun to outline itself with
+something like coherence, he pressed a call-button for O'Brien.
+
+"How about that wire to Detwiler at Ophir--any reply yet?" was the
+rasping demand shot at the secretary.
+
+"Nothing yet; no, sir."
+
+"Go after him again! There's a screw loose among those miners! How about
+Hathaway? Did you phone Twin Buttes?"
+
+"Yes; and Grogan, the mill time-keeper, answered. He says Mr. Hathaway
+is in the capital and something has gone wrong--he doesn't know what."
+
+"Keep the wires hot until you can get hold of Hathaway himself, and
+when you nail him, switch him over to my phone. Any word from the
+irrigation people at Natcho?"
+
+"Yes. They say that the farmers under the High Line have been getting
+restive and forming associations. Daniels was the man who talked to me,
+and he says it's a Gordon movement, though the ranchmen are trying to
+keep it quiet."
+
+"Take a message to Daniels!" snapped the vice-president; and then,
+dictating: "'How would it do to let it be known quietly that Gordon's
+election means raise in price of water to High Line users?' Send that,
+and sign it 'Committee of Safety.' Now how about Kittredge? Did you get
+him?"
+
+"I did; he's driving out in his car, and he ought to be here in a few
+minutes."
+
+As if to make O'Brien's word good, the roar of an automobile came from
+the driveway, dominating for the moment the chattering of the
+telegraph-instruments, and a little later Kittredge came in, lifting his
+goggles and wiping the road dust from his closely clipped black beard.
+
+"That car of yours isn't what it might be, Kittredge," was the
+vice-president's crusty greeting. "You'd better get a faster one. Sit
+down, and let's have it. How are things shaping up in the city?"
+
+The big superintendent sat down and found a cigar in an inner pocket of
+his driving-coat.
+
+"We are holding our own, as far as anybody can see," he returned.
+
+"That 'as far as anybody can see' is just your weakness, Kittredge,"
+said the chief testily. "What we want--what we've got to have first,
+last, and all the time--is the _fact_. Now see if you can answer a few
+straight questions. What is the senator doing?"
+
+"His wife has a young girl visiting her, and if the Honorable Dave is
+doing anything more than to show the two women a good time, I can't find
+it out."
+
+"There you go again! You say 'if.' It's your business to know."
+
+Kittredge held his peace. Being designed by nature for a heavy-weight
+ring-fighter, there were times when he felt like taking off his coat to
+the vice-president.
+
+"Well?" prompted McVickar, when Kittredge remained obstinately silent.
+
+"If I knew what sort of a deal you have made with the senator--"
+
+"That cuts no figure. But let it go. What's young Blount doing?"
+
+"He's out of it, good and plenty. He started to go to the Sampson Block
+fire last night and was knocked down by a hook-and-ladder truck. It's a
+cracked skull, and Doc Dillon says he's safe to stay in bed for a week
+or so."
+
+"H'm," said the chief reflectively. "That is almost what you might call
+opportune, Kittredge. The young fellow has done his work well, but there
+was always the danger that he might overdo it. In fact, there was a
+time, a week or two ago, when I thought he would have to be called down
+and given a lesson. Now then, how about that Gryson business?"
+
+"It was just as you said: I had to take Tom by the neck and get rid of
+him."
+
+"He did his work all right?"
+
+"Yes, and came swaggering around for his pay. I sized it up one side and
+down the other. He had a pretty bad case of swelled head and tried to
+hold me up for a bonus, hinting around about what he could do if he
+wanted to throw the gaff into us. As I say, I sized it up, and took snap
+judgment on him--pulled the Montana racket and gave him twenty-four
+hours' start of the police."
+
+The vice-president frowned and shook his head. "You took a chance--a
+long chance, Kittredge! Twenty-four hours gave him all the time he
+needed to fall afoul of young Blount."
+
+The big superintendent grinned amiably.
+
+"The senator helped out on that," he explained.
+
+"The senator? How was that?"
+
+"It's the first time he has shown any part of his hand to me in the
+entire campaign. About an hour after I had shot Tom Gryson to pieces a
+note came down from the Inter-Mountain, asking me to come up. I didn't
+get to see the senator himself, but Mrs. Blount gave me the dope. As a
+result, young Blount got a hurry telegram from you, directing him to go
+to Lewiston at once in that right-of-way matter of Brodhead's. I gave
+him my car, and the trip cost him the better part of two whole days."
+
+Again the vice-president shook his head.
+
+"Your methods are always pretty crude, Kittredge," he commented. "You
+took another long chance when you forged my name to a telegram for as
+shrewd a young lawyer as Evan Blount. But go on. You got Blount out of
+the way--then what?"
+
+"Then I went after Gryson again. The little woman's hint hit the
+bull's-eye as true as a rifle bullet. Tom meant to give us away to
+Blount. He haunted Blount's up-town office the better part of the day;
+and finally, in sheer self-defence, I had to tip him off to the police,
+as I had threatened to. Another little mystery bobbed up there. Chief
+Robertson winked one eye at me and said: 'You're too late, Mr.
+Kittredge; your man has already been piped off and he's gone.'"
+
+"Who did it?" snapped McVickar.
+
+"I don't know, and Robertson wouldn't tell me. But I got him to promise
+to put out the reward quietly. If Gryson comes back he'll be nipped
+before he can talk."
+
+"With young Blount laid up, it won't make much difference," was the
+summing-up rejoinder. And then: "I think that is all--for this morning.
+Go around to the telephone-exchange when you get back to town and tell
+the manager that I want a special operator--a man, if he's got one--put
+on this long-distance wire. Have you sent your linemen out to guard the
+wires on the Shoshone mine track?"
+
+"Yes; all the way from the switch to the hills."
+
+"All right; that's all. Keep your finger on the pulse of things in town
+to-day, and arrange with your despatcher to give my operators here a
+clear wire in any direction whenever it's called for. Above all, keep me
+posted, Kittredge; don't let anything get by you, no matter how trivial
+it may seem."
+
+As the superintendent was climbing into his car, the railroad
+electrician who was in charge of the men guarding the telegraph-wires
+came up.
+
+"One minute, Mr. Kittredge. I've put the box in, according to orders--"
+
+"What box, and whose orders?"
+
+"The recording microphone in Mr. McVickar's office, in there; and by his
+orders, I guess--at least they came from one of his men. We're needing a
+couple more batteries, and I was just wondering if it'd be all right to
+take 'em from that gasolene unit-car. We could put 'em back afterwards."
+
+"Yes; take 'em wherever you can find 'em," said the superintendent, who
+was thinking pointedly of other things just then; and the permission
+given, he started his motor and drove away.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+BLOOD AND IRON
+
+
+Ten o'clock in the Saturday forenoon marked the time of Superintendent
+Kittredge's flying visit to his chief's headquarters-on-the-field at the
+head of Shonoho Canyon; and at that hour Evan Blount, blinking dizzily,
+and with his head bandaged and throbbing as if the premier company of
+all the African tom-tom symphonists were making free with it, was
+letting Mrs. Honoria beat up his pillows and prop him with them, so that
+the drum-beating clamor might be minimized to some bearable degree.
+
+"You are feeling better now?" suggested the volunteer nurse, going to
+adjust the window-curtains for the better comfort of the blinking and
+aching eyes.
+
+The victim of the hook-and-ladder squad's mascot answered qualitatively.
+
+"I feel as if I had been having an argument with a battering-ram and had
+come off second-best. I've been out of my head, haven't I?"
+
+"A little, yes; but that was to be expected. You were pretty badly
+hurt."
+
+"Have I been talking?"
+
+"Not very much--nothing intelligible." The little lady had drawn her
+chair to the window and was busying herself with the never-finished
+embroidery.
+
+"What hit me--was it the truck?"
+
+"No; some of the people in the street said it was a dog; a coach-dog
+running and jumping at the heads of the fire-horses. In falling you
+struck your head against the iron grating of a sewer inlet."
+
+"Umph!" said Blount, and the face-wrinkling which was meant to be a
+sardonic smile turned itself into a painful grin. "Shot to death by a
+dog! Blenkinsop or some of the others ought to have run that for a
+head-line." Then, with a twist of the hot eyeballs: "This isn't my room.
+Where am I?"
+
+"You are in the spare room of our suite. Your father had you brought
+here so that we could take care of you properly. But you mustn't talk
+too much; it's the doctor's orders."
+
+Blount lay for a long time watching her as she passed the needle in and
+out through the bit of snowy linen stretched upon the tiny
+embroidery-ring. She had fine eyes, he admitted; eyes with the little
+downward curve in brow and lid at the outer corners--the curve of
+allurement, he had heard it called. Also, her hands were shapely and
+pretty. He recalled the saying that a woman may keep her age out of her
+face, but her hands will betray her. Mrs. Honoria's hands were still
+young; they looked almost as young as Patricia's, he decided. At the
+comparison he broke over the rule of silence.
+
+"Does Patricia know?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly. She has been here nearly all morning. She wouldn't let
+anybody else hold your head while the doctor was sewing it up."
+
+"I know," he returned; "that is a part of her--of her special training:
+first aid to the injured, and all that. They teach it in the German
+sociological schools she attended last year."
+
+"Oh, yes; I see"--with a malicious little smile to accentuate the
+curving downdroop of the pretty eyelids. "You mean that she was just
+getting a bit of practice. I wondered why she was so willing; most young
+women are so silly about the sight of a little blood. Don't you think
+you'd better try to sleep for a while? Doctor Dillon said it would be
+good for you if you could."
+
+"Heavens and earth!" he chanted impatiently; "I'm not sick!" And then,
+with a sharp fear stabbing him: "What day is this, please?"
+
+She looked up with a smile. "Are you wondering if you have lost a day?
+You haven't. The fire was at three o'clock this morning, and this is
+Saturday."
+
+As if the naming of the day had been a spell to strike him dumb, Blount
+shut his eyes and groped helplessly for some hand-hold upon the suddenly
+rehabilitated responsibilities. Saturday--the day when Gryson would
+return with the proofs which, if they were to serve any good end, must
+be given the widest possible publicity in the two days remaining before
+the election. Blount recalled his carefully laid plans: he had intended
+giving Collins and the two record clerks a half-holiday, so that Gryson
+might come and go unnoticed. Also, he had meant to make a definite
+appointment with Blenkinsop and the representative of the United Press,
+to the end that there might be no delay in the firing of the mine.
+Lastly, Gryson must be shielded and gotten out of the city in safety; so
+much the traitor had a right to demand if he should risk his liberty and
+his life by returning with the evidence.
+
+It was a hideous tangle to owe itself to the joyous gambollings of the
+firemen's mascot dog. And there was more to it than the hopeless
+smashing of the Saturday's plans. Into the midst of the mordant
+reflections, and adding a sting which was all its own, came the thought
+of this newest obligation laid upon him by his father and his father's
+wife. They had taken him in and were loading him down with kinsman gifts
+of care and loving-kindness, while his purpose had been--must still
+be--to strike back like a merciless enemy. He remembered the old fable
+of the adder warmed to life in a man's bosom, and it left him sick and
+nerveless.
+
+None the less, the obsession of the indomitable purpose persisted,
+gripping him like the compelling hand of a giant in whose grasp he was
+powerless. For a time he sought to escape, not realizing that the
+obsession was the call of the blood passed on from the men of his race
+who, with axe and rifle, had hewn and fought their way in the primeval
+wilderness, and would not be denied. Neither did he suspect that the
+dominating passion driving him on was his best gift from the man
+against whom he was pitting his strength. What he did presently realize
+was that the giant grip of purpose was not to be broken; and thereupon a
+vast cunning came to possess him. He must have time and a chance to plan
+again: if he should feign sleep, perhaps the woman whose presence and
+personality were shackling the inventive thought would go away and leave
+him free to think.
+
+She did go after a while, though so noiselessly that when he opened his
+eyes it was with the fear that he should see her still bending over the
+little embroidery frame at the window. Finding himself alone, he sat up
+in bed and gave the broken head an opportunity to blot him out if it
+could. For a little space the walls of the room became as the interior
+of a hollow peg-top, spinning furiously with a noise like the rushing of
+many waters. After the surroundings had resumed their normal figurings
+he rose to his knees. There was another grapple with the whirling
+peg-top, and again he mastered the dizzying confusion. Made bold by
+success, he got his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the
+brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments had once
+more come to rest.
+
+By this time he was able to conquer all save the throbbing headache.
+Shuffling first to one door and then to the other, he shot the bolts
+against intrusion. Then he staggered across to the dressing-case and
+took a look at himself in the glass. The bandaged head, with its
+haggard, pain-distorted face grimacing back at him, extorted a grunt of
+sardonic disapproval, but the mirror answered the query which had sent
+him stumbling across to it. The bandage was comparatively small and
+tightly drawn; a soft hat could be worn over it--the hat would cover and
+decently hide it.
+
+Next he found his clothes, those he had been wearing at the time of the
+accident. Somebody had been thoughtful enough to have them cleaned and
+pressed; from which he argued that the plunging fall on the wet asphalt
+had been demoralizing in more ways than one. Continuing the experimental
+venture, he walked back and forth and up and down until he could do it
+without clutching at the bed-rails to save himself from falling. Then he
+reshot the door-bolts and went back to bed to await developments.
+
+The first of these came when Patricia brought his luncheon. He had been
+wondering if she would be the one to come; wondering and hoping. With
+the unfilial purpose driving him on, there were added twinges at the
+thought of his father's wife going on piling the mountain of obligation
+higher and still higher by waiting upon him, and thus reminding him at
+every turn of the adder fable. With Patricia it was different.
+
+"Good morning," he grimaced, when Patricia came in with the daintily
+appointed server. "Getting a bit more of the first-aid practice, are
+you?"
+
+"I am obeying orders," she flashed back, when she had shaken up the
+pillows and placed the appetizing meal within his reach. "Mrs. Blount
+said I'd probably have a less disturbing influence upon you than she
+would. Shall I feed you?"
+
+"Good heavens, no! I'm not that near dead, I hope! If you don't believe
+it, you may sit down and watch me eat--if you're not missing your own
+luncheon."
+
+"Nurses have no regular meal-times," she retorted. And then: "You are
+feeling a great deal better, aren't you?"
+
+"Much better--since you came. Did they tell you it was a dog?"
+
+She nodded, and he went on.
+
+"It was my unlucky night, I guess. Did the fire burn up my office? I
+forgot to ask Mrs. Blount about that."
+
+"No; it was a building across the street from the Temple Court."
+
+"'Small favors thankfully received,'" he quoted, resolutely pushing a
+fresh recurrence of the tomtom beatings into the background; "small
+favors and larger ones in proportion--this broth, for example. It's
+simply delicious. I hadn't realized how hungry I was."
+
+"The broth ought to be good; I made it myself, you know."
+
+"You did? Where, for pity's sake?"
+
+"In the hotel kitchen. The _chef_ was furious at first. He twirled his
+Napoleon-III mustaches and sputtered and swelled up like an angry old
+turkey. But when I talked nice to him in his own beloved Bordelaise he
+let me do anything I pleased."
+
+Blount looked up quickly, and the movement brought the head-throbbings
+back with disconcerting celerity.
+
+"You are cruelly kind to me, Patricia; everybody is kind to me. And I'm
+not needing kindness just now," he ended.
+
+"Aren't you? I don't agree with you, and I'm sure your father and Mrs.
+Blount wouldn't." Then she went on to tell him how they had all been up,
+watching the progress of the fire from their windows, when the word came
+that he had been hurt in the street. Also, she told how his father had
+impatiently smashed the telephone because, the wires having been cut and
+tangled in the fire, he could get no response, and how, thereupon, he
+had turned the entire night force of the hotel out to go in search of a
+doctor. "But with all that, he couldn't stand it to look on while the
+doctor was taking the stitches," she added. "He turned his back and
+tramped over here to the window; and I could hear him gritting his teeth
+and--and swearing."
+
+If Evan Blount ate faster than a sick man should, it was because there
+are limits to the finest fortitude. Patricia ran on cheerfully,
+minimizing her own part in the first-aid incidents, and magnifying the
+anxious and affectionate concern of the senator and his wife. He
+listened because he could not help it; but when he had finished, and she
+was inquiring if there was anything else she could do for him, he
+dissembled, saying that he would try to sleep, and asking her to shut
+out more of the daylight and to deny him to everybody until evening.
+
+She promised; but naturally enough, with the dreadful responsibility
+drawing nearer with every hour-striking of the tiny leather-cased
+travelling-clock on the dresser, sleep was out of the question for him.
+Hot-eyed and restless, he wore out the long afternoon in feverish
+impatience, slipping now and then into the shadow land of delirium when
+the pain was severest, but clinging always to the obsessing idea. At
+whatever cost, the crisis must find him resolute to do his part. Gryson
+must be met, the evidence of fraud must be secured, and the fraud itself
+must be defeated.
+
+The bright autumn day was fading to its twilight, and the shadows were
+gathering around his bed, when Patricia tiptoed in to ask, first, if he
+were awake, and, next, what he would like to have for his supper.
+Exhausted by the waiting battle, he answered briefly: he was not hungry;
+if he could be left alone again, with the assurance that no one would
+come to disturb him, it was all he would ask. He tried to say it
+crustily, with the irritable impatience of the convalescent--dissembling
+again. But the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in view had
+lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic intuition.
+
+"You are not so well this evening," she said softly, laying a cool palm
+on his forehead. "I think I'd better telephone Doctor Dillon."
+
+Now the thing for Patricia's lover to do was obvious. With pity thus
+trembling on the very crumbling brink of love, the opportunity which
+months of patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand. It was a
+fair measure of the mastery an obsession may obtain--the lover's ability
+to thrust the gentler emotion into the background, to feign restless
+irritation under the passion-stirring touch, and to say: "No; I don't
+want Dillon or anybody; I want to be left alone. Please latch the door
+when you go out, and tell father and his--and Mrs. Blount that I don't
+want to be disturbed."
+
+She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after she was gone Blount
+sat up in bed and cursed himself fervently and painstakingly for the
+little brutality. But the remorseful cursings took nothing from the grim
+determination which had prompted the brutality. The dusk was thickening,
+and the street electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway of
+radiance. Blount got up, and with a disheartening renewal of the
+splitting headache, began to dress, but there were many pauses in which
+he had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the throbbing pain to
+subside.
+
+The next step was to reach his own room, two floors above, and he let
+himself cautiously into the corridor and locked the door from the
+outside. Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he dragged himself
+up two flights of stairs and so came to his goal.
+
+Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat drawn well over his eyes,
+he compassed the escape from the upper floor by means of the remote
+stair he had used in ascending, and so reached the ground-floor.
+Fortunately, the lobby was crowded; and turning up the collar of the
+rain-coat to hide the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the
+revolving doors. More than once in the dodging progress he rubbed
+shoulders with men whom he knew, and who knew him; but the shielding
+hat-brim and the muffling rain-coat saved him.
+
+Reaching the street, he did not attempt to walk to the Temple Court.
+Instead, he crept around to a garage near the hotel and hired a
+two-seated road-car. Quite naturally, the garage-keeper wanted to send
+his own driver, and Blount counted it as an unavoidable misfortune that
+he was obliged to give his name, and to hear the motor-liveryman say:
+"Oh, sure! I didn't recognize you, Mr. Blount. I reckon Senator Dave's
+son can have anything o' mine that he wants."
+
+Blount drove the road-car all the way around the Capitol grounds to come
+into his office street inconspicuously. Across from the Temple Court the
+fire ruins were still smouldering, and there was an acrid odor of stale
+smoke in the air. For a full third of the block the street was littered
+with debris. Blount stopped his machine at the nearest corner and got
+out to reconnoitre the office-building entrance. In the vestibule he
+glanced up at the face of the illuminated wall-clock, making a hasty
+calculation based upon the leaving time of the east-bound Overland.
+There were fifty minutes to spare, and when he reached his office, and
+had turned on the desk-light and dropped heavily into his chair, he
+called up the railroad station to inquire about the train. The Overland
+was reported ten minutes late. If Gryson should show up in time, this
+earliest outgoing train must be made to serve as the means for his
+flight.
+
+Blount had scarcely formulated the condition when the office-door winged
+noiselessly, and the man himself, hollow-eyed and haggard, stumbled in.
+As once before, Blount got up and went to shut the door and lock it.
+When he came back, Gryson had taken his seat in a chair at the desk-end,
+where the light from the shaded working-lamp fell upon his sinister
+face.
+
+"Well, I've been all th' way t' hell and back ag'in," he announced in a
+grating whisper. "They've put th' reward out, and three times since last
+night some of me own pals 've tried to snitch on me." Then he drew a
+carefully wrapped package from its hiding-place under his coat and laid
+it on the desk. "It's all there," he went on in the same rasping
+undertone. "Some of 'em give up to get square wit' th' bosses, and some
+of 'em had to have a gun shoved in their faces. No matter; they've come
+across--the last damn' wan of 'em; and th' affidavits are there,
+too--when I c'd get next to a dub of a not'ry that'd make 'em."
+
+Blount did not untie the package, nor did he cross-examine the traitor.
+His head was throbbing again almost unbearably, and he was beginning to
+fear that he might not last to carry out the plan of safe-conduct for
+the informer. Slipping the precious package into an inner pocket of the
+enveloping coat, he took a compact roll of bank-bills from a drawer in
+the desk and gave it to Gryson, saying tersely: "That isn't a bribe, you
+understand; it's merely to help you make your getaway. Can you manage to
+ride on Transcontinental trains without being recognized offhand?"
+
+Gryson pulled a false beard from his pocket and showed it. "Wit' that,
+and me old hat, I've been keepin' most o' th' boys from tippin' me off,"
+he said.
+
+"All right; here's the lay-out. You have earned immunity, so far as this
+latest raid on you is concerned, by turning State's evidence. But you've
+got to move on, and keep moving. Do you get that?"
+
+The fugitive nodded, and Blount got up to stagger across to the office
+wardrobe, from which he took the extra rain-coat kept there for
+emergencies.
+
+"Here, get into this and go down-stairs. At the corner above, you'll
+find a two-seated motor-car backed against the curb. Do you know enough
+about machinery to start an auto-engine?"
+
+Gryson nodded again. "I'd ought to, seein' that I've been a gang boss in
+a shop that made 'em."
+
+"Good enough; crank the motor, climb in, and wait. I'll do the rest."
+
+Five minutes later, Blount had stumbled out of the elevator at the
+ground-floor and was groping his way along the sidewalk toward the
+corner--groping because the pain had become blinding again and the
+street-lights were taking on many-colored and fantastic brilliancies.
+
+When he finally found the car, it was mainly by the sense of hearing;
+the motor was drumming softly under the hood, and there was a blur in
+the mechanician's seat which answered for the crouching figure of the
+ward-worker. By a supreme effort of will Blount swung himself up behind
+the steering-wheel and let the clutch in. Luckily, the street was clear
+of vehicles and he made the turn in safety; but fully realizing his
+handicap, he steered straight away from the business district, and
+making a wide circuit through the residence quarter, brought the car out
+in the eastern suburb at the beginning of a road paralleling the
+Transcontinental tracks.
+
+With the lights of the city dropping away to the rear, and the drumming
+motor quickened to racing speed, he told the fugitive from justice what
+was to be done and the manner of its doing. Twenty-two miles out they
+would reach the coal-mine station of Wardlaw, a few minutes ahead of the
+Overland. Since all east-bound trains stopped at the coal-mines to coal
+the engines, the way of escape would be open.
+
+Something more than a wordless, space-devouring half-hour beyond this,
+Blount applied the brakes and dropped his passenger at the rear of the
+small iron-roofed building which served as the railroad station for the
+coal-mines. Far to the rear on the twenty-two-mile tangent the headlight
+of the coming train showed like a blazing star low on the western
+horizon.
+
+"Go and blacken your face and hands at one of the slack dumps and pass
+yourself for a miner quitting his job," was Blount's parting suggestion;
+but the hollow-eyed fugitive had a last word to say, too, and he said
+it.
+
+"I've been t' hell and back, as I told you, and 'twas f'r on'y th' wan
+thing: give me your word, Evan Blount, that you'll chop th' damn' tree
+down and let it lie where it falls! That's all I'm askin', this trip."
+
+"You needn't lose any sleep worrying about that," was the curt reply;
+and without waiting for the train arrival, Blount turned the car and
+sent it racing on the way back to the city.
+
+By all the tests he knew how to apply, he was little better than a dead
+man when he returned the hired auto to the side-street garage and made
+his halting way around to the hotel. He had long since given up the idea
+of trying to see Blenkinsop. He knew that the editor would not be in his
+office much before ten o'clock, and the two-hour wait was not to be
+endured.
+
+Clinging desperately to the single purpose of getting back to the
+deserted room before his absence should be discovered, and weighed down
+by a crushing sense of the immorality of the step he had just taken in
+bargaining with a hunted criminal and in conniving at his escape, he
+pressed on, pushing through the revolving doors and slipping once more
+into the Saturday evening lobby throng. Edging around to the stair, he
+took all the cautious steps in reverse; ascending first to his own room
+to leave the rain-coat and the hat, and afterward feeling his way down
+the servants' stair and through the lower corridor to the locked door in
+his father's private suite.
+
+Past this he had a hazy notion that part of him--the observing
+part--stood aside and looked on while the other part slowly and
+painfully struggled out of its clothes and into its pajamas. Also he saw
+the other part, after it had carefully secreted the wrapped package of
+papers under the mattress, beat the pillows feebly and bury its head in
+them. After that there was a great blank.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+APPLES OF GOLD
+
+
+Notwithstanding the pillow-muffled plunge which was almost a lapse into
+the coma of utter exhaustion, Evan Blount awoke early on the Sunday
+morning, refreshed and measurably free from pain. Since the sun was just
+beginning to gild the lofty finial on the dome of the Capitol opposite,
+there was no one stirring as yet in the adjoining rooms of the suite,
+and the streets were silent save for the chanting cries of the newsboys.
+
+Slipping out of bed, Blount crossed to the window and threw it open. It
+was good to be able to stand and walk without wincing; and a breath of
+the sunrise breeze sweeping down from the eastern hills was like a
+draught of invigorating wine. As he leaned out for an instant to make
+sure that not even the height would bring a return of the vertigo, the
+wail of the nearest newsboy became shrilly articulate: _"Here's yer
+Morning Plainsman! All erbout the great election frauds!"_
+
+Hardly crediting his ears, Blount listened again, and when the cry was
+repeated he closed the window softly and sat down to grapple with this
+newest development of his problem. Did the newsboy's selling-cry mean
+that Blenkinsop had found out for himself, and independently, about the
+falsified registration lists? If so, there would be no public
+vindication for one Evan Blount; but also--thank God!--no need for a son
+to blazon himself to the world as his father's accuser. A great wave of
+thankfulness rolled over Blount's head, submerging him and turning the
+exclamation which sprang to his lips into a paean of rejoicing. Instantly
+he saw himself throwing up his railroad connection and taking his
+rightful place as his father's counsel and defender. Here, at last, was
+a cause into which he could fling himself body and soul. True, people
+would say that he had been in league with the corporations, the boss,
+and the machine, from the first, but what did that matter?
+
+But would his father need a defender? No shadow of doubt as to this was
+admissible in the face of the accumulating evidence, he told himself.
+From the opening day of the campaign the machine and the corporations
+had been working hand in hand; Gryson and his fellow-crooks were the
+sufficient proof; and besides.... Blount reached under the mattress and
+drew out the wrapped package, untying the string with fingers that
+trembled. A cursory examination of the affidavits sufficed. In Gryson's
+sworn statement, and in two others, the "Big Boss" was inculpated
+definitely and by name.
+
+Blount glanced at the little clock on the dressing-case. The early
+Sunday morning silence still prevailed in the great hotel, and his
+resolve was quickly taken. Dressing hurriedly, he went up to his own
+room, and after a shave, a bath, and a freshening change which included
+the removal of the disfiguring bandage, he put on a close-fitting silk
+travelling-cap under the soft hat and went down to the lobby.
+
+There were but few guests stirring at that hour, and Blount had the
+writing-room to himself when he bought a copy of _The Plainsman_ and
+turned anxiously to the editorial page. After the first thrilling of
+relief born of the newsboy's cry, an unnerving fear had crept in to
+whisper that possibly the facts might not bear out the thankful
+assumption. A rapid reading of Blenkinsop's editorial confirmed the
+fear, and the reader's lips grew dry and his breath came quickly when he
+realized that the submerging wave of thankfulness had risen only to be
+driven back. Blenkinsop had no facts, no evidence; he was merely hitting
+out blindly with a general accusation of fraud which he made no effort
+to substantiate or prove!
+
+Evan Blount saw the thorny path stretching away before him again, and he
+rose up to walk in it like a man. As once before, he went down to the
+railroad restaurant for his breakfast, seeking solitude, and the meal
+had been half-absently eaten before he had readjusted himself,
+sorrowfully but firmly, to the unchanged situation. His duty was as
+clearly defined now as it had been the day previous, or at any time in
+the past. There was nothing changed, nothing different, save that a new
+complication had arisen in the crucial shortness of the interval for
+action. Knowing human nature a little, he knew how difficult it is to
+arouse an effective public sentiment on the eve of an election, no
+matter how important the issues involved. In a hard school of experience
+the voter has learned to discount the final-moment cry of fraud. Would
+an exposure, however convincing, appearing only in the Monday and
+Tuesday morning newspapers have the desired effect?
+
+Blount walked by devious ways from the railroad station to the Temple
+Court, and secluded himself behind the locked door of his office to have
+a chance to think the problem out to some effective conclusion. What
+should he do? Should he find Blenkinsop and get him and the United Press
+representative together at once, laying before them the damning evidence
+and telling them to use it as they could? Or was there some surer way of
+firing the mine of protest and exposure?
+
+There was one other way, at least, but the mere thought of it made him
+sick and shaken. As an upright citizen and a member of the bar, was it
+not his duty to lay the evidence, not before the public in the
+newspapers, but before a competent court of justice? And in that event,
+was there in this land of graft and corruption a judge sufficiently
+fearless and incorruptible to act with the needful vigor and promptness?
+
+When Blount asked himself this question, the answer came quickly. Though
+it was the common accusation, well or ill founded, that the lower courts
+of the State were the creatures of the corporations, the judges on the
+supreme bench still commanded the respect of the people. Hemingway, the
+chief justice, was peculiarly a man for a crisis; strong, honest, and
+entirely fearless; a man who would not stop to haggle over nice
+questions of precedent and jurisdiction where the public welfare
+demanded prompt and effective action.
+
+For a long half-hour Blount sat staring absently at the desk litter,
+trying to decide between the two courses open to him. He knew that his
+father and Judge Hemingway had been lifelong friends, and this added
+another drop of bitterness to a cup which was already overflowing. None
+the less, he was confident that the judge would do his duty as he saw
+it. It was a merciless thing to do--to make this just judge the slayer
+of the friend of his youth; but at the end Blount reached for the
+telephone-book and began to search for the chief justice's residence
+number. Before he could find it the phone bell rang.
+
+"Well?" he answered shortly, putting the receiver to his ear.
+
+It was Miss Anners who was at the other end of the wire, and he was
+instantly aware of the note of anxiety in her voice.
+
+"_Evan!_" she exclaimed; "you don't know what a fright you have given
+us! What are you doing at your office when you ought to be here and in
+bed?"
+
+Blount drew the desk instrument closer and tried to put her off lightly.
+
+"I'm all right again. I turned out early this morning to make up for
+lost time. You wouldn't expect me to stay in bed for more than a day to
+oblige a common, ordinary coach-dog, would you?"
+
+"Yes, but see here--listen: Doctor Dillon has been here, and he is
+perfectly shocked. He says there may be complications, and the very
+least you can do is to be careful. Your father has had the hotel boys
+looking everywhere for you. When are you coming back?"
+
+Here was the direct question which Blount had been dreading. Now, if
+never before, the wretched involvement had reached a point beyond which
+it was impossible to follow his father's plea for a continuance of the
+kinsman amenities.
+
+"I think you had better leave me out of any plans you are making for the
+day," he answered evasively. "I shall be pretty busy."
+
+"No--listen," she insisted. "It's wrong to work on Sunday, but if you
+will be obstinate, you must stop at luncheon-time. We are going to drive
+out to Wartrace Hall this afternoon; Doctor Dillon says we positively
+_must_ take you away from town and keep you quiet for a few days."
+
+"I can't go with you," he answered brusquely, adding: "And I'm not sure
+that I can join you at luncheon. There is so much to be done that I
+shall probably drop around to the club for a bite at one o'clock. Don't
+wait for me, and don't worry. Above all, please don't tell anybody where
+I am--not even Dick Gantry."
+
+He was considerably relieved when she said "Good-by" rather abruptly,
+and rang off. None the less, he thought it a little strange that his
+father should be planning to leave the capital on the very eve of the
+great struggle. Was he so sure that nothing could happen within the next
+twenty-four hours? Leaving the query answerless, he returned to the
+interrupted duty. Deliberately, with the open telephone-book before him,
+he sought and found Judge Hemingway's number; and a few seconds later he
+had the judge's house in Mesa Circle, with the judge himself answering
+his call. The wire conversation was brief and to the point. Cautiously,
+and in well-guarded phrase, Blount stated his case. By a series of
+correlated incidents which could be explained later, documentary
+evidence of a great conspiracy had fallen into his hands; would the
+judge step aside so far as to accord him a Sunday interview, taking his
+word for it that the emergency was most urgent, and that the time was
+too short to admit of the ordinary methods of procedure?
+
+The judge's answer was satisfactory, though Blount fancied it was rather
+reluctantly given. A family engagement--an accepted luncheon
+invitation--would intervene; but between four and five o'clock in the
+afternoon the chief justice would be in his chambers in the Capitol
+building, and would be glad to have the son of his old friend the
+senator come at that hour.
+
+With time on his hands, Blount squared himself at his desk and began to
+set his railroad house in order. Now that the dreadful step was
+practically taken, he was free to wind up the business of his office,
+leaving things in order for his successor. Once he had thought that he
+could not stay in the capital or in the West after the cataclysm. But
+now the manlier thought prevailed. A hard fate was making him his
+father's betrayer; but beyond the betrayal, with the bare duty done, he
+would take his place as his father's son, proving his love and loyalty
+by going down with him to any depth of infamy into which the cataclysm
+might drag him.
+
+Since there was much to be done in the winding-up task, the forenoon
+fled quickly, and the hands of the small paper-weight clock on the desk
+were pointing to a quarter of two when Blount snapped the rubber band
+upon the final file of referred papers. There were other odds and ends
+to be set in order, but he determined to let them wait until he had
+eaten. A scant half-hour in the club grill-room was all he allowed
+himself, and at a quarter past two he was back at his desk, preparing to
+make the cleaning-up task complete. Between four and five, Judge
+Hemingway had said; and Blount began on one of the odds and ends, which
+was the writing of his letter of resignation from the railroad service.
+
+He was enclosing the letter when there came a light tap at the
+office-door, and then the door itself opened to admit Patricia--a
+Patricia bright-eyed and determined, alluringly charming in her tightly
+veiled driving-hat, muffling motor-coat, and dainty gauntlets.
+
+"You?" said Blount not too hospitably. "I thought you said something
+about going to Wartrace?"
+
+"So I did, and so I am," she asserted, coming to sit in the chair last
+occupied by one Thomas Gryson.
+
+"And the others?" he queried.
+
+"They have just left; gone on ahead in the touring-car. I was deputed to
+bring you."
+
+"But I told you this morning that I couldn't go, and I can't!" he
+protested.
+
+She looked him squarely in the eye. "Evan, you don't dare tell me why
+you can't!"
+
+"Business," he pleaded.
+
+"That may be half of the truth, but it isn't any more than half." Then
+she made the direct appeal: "I wish you'd tell me, Evan. I know a
+little--just the little that Mrs. Blount has seen fit to tell me--and no
+more. There is trouble threatening; some dreadful trouble. I saw it
+yesterday when you were so miserable; I can see it in your eyes this
+minute."
+
+Blount got up and began to pace the floor so that she might not see his
+eyes. He was no more proof against such an appeal than any lover gladly
+ready to bare his soul to the woman chosen out of a world of women for
+his confidant and second self would be.
+
+"I want to tell you," he affirmed, wheeling abruptly to face her; "I
+wanted to tell you yesterday, only it was too horrible. You will know it
+all when I say that by this time to-morrow the whole State will be
+ringing with the story of David Blount's degradation and ruin; and
+I--his only son, Patricia--I shall be the one who will have betrayed him
+and brought it to pass!"
+
+She blanched a little at that, and there was a great horror in her
+eyes. But he noted at the moment, and remembered it afterward, that she
+did not push him into the harrowing details, as another woman might have
+done.
+
+"You are very sure, I suppose?" she said gently.
+
+He drew the packet of affidavits from his pocket.
+
+"This is the evidence: sworn statements incriminating my father and many
+others."
+
+"You had those papers yesterday?"
+
+"No. I got up last night to keep my appointment with the man who brought
+them. But you see now why I can't go to Wartrace with you."
+
+"I see that you are going to do something for which you will never,
+never be able to forgive yourself," she said gravely. "You are going to
+make use of those papers?"
+
+He sat down and stared gloomily at her. "Patricia, I have taken a solemn
+oath. The law which I have sworn to uphold is greater than--" He was
+going to say, "greater than any man's claim for immunity," but she
+finished the sentence otherwise for him.
+
+"Is greater than your love for your father. I suppose I ought to be able
+to understand that, but I am not. Evan, you can't do it--you mustn't do
+it; every drop of that father's blood in your veins ought to cry out
+against it."
+
+"Ah!" he exclaimed with a sudden indrawing of his breath. "You don't
+know what it is costing me!"
+
+"Truly, I don't," she asserted calmly. "Your father is a great and good
+man. If he had a daughter instead of a son, she would know and
+understand." Then, in a quick and generous upflash of feeling: "I wish
+he had a daughter--I wish I were she! I should try to show him that
+blood is thicker than water!"
+
+"You wish--you were--his daughter? Do you realize what you are saying?"
+Then he went on brokenly: "_Don't_, Patricia, girl--for God's sake don't
+tempt me to do evil that good may come! Can't you understand how I am
+driven to do this thing--how every fibre of me is rebelling against the
+savage necessity? God knows, I'd give anything I am or hope to be if the
+necessity could be wiped out!"
+
+Instantly she changed her attack.
+
+"But I say you can not do it. You are a brave man, Evan; I know, because
+I have seen you tried. You mustn't turn cowardly now."
+
+"Nor shall I!" he countered quickly. "But I don't understand."
+
+"Don't you? Isn't it cowardly to strike this cruel blow in the dark? You
+_can't_ do this thing without giving your father the warning that you
+would give your bitterest enemy--you simply can't, and still be the man
+I have known and l--liked for two whole years!"
+
+"Father's going to Wartrace this afternoon is merely an added twist of
+the thumb-screws," he protested in fresh wretchedness. "I should have
+gone to him first--I meant to go to him first. From what you said over
+the telephone this morning I gathered that the Wartrace trip was to be
+made on my account, and I hoped, I believed, it would be given up when I
+refused to go. Now I can not see him first; the time is too short. That
+which is to be done must be done to-day--this afternoon; otherwise it
+will be too late. Don't make it any harder for me, Patricia. Surely you
+can see how hard it is, in any case!"
+
+"As I said a moment ago, I can see that you are about to do something
+for which, in all the years to come, you will never be able to get your
+own forgiveness. Oh, I know," she went on bitterly. "You will tell me
+that I am a woman, with only a woman's standards, which are valueless
+when they get mixed up with the emotions. But I can tell you that I know
+your father better than you do--much better. And I believe in him,
+utterly, absolutely. Won't you give him a chance, Evan? Won't you show
+him those dreadful papers and ask him what he will do when you have
+betrayed him?"
+
+Blount winced painfully at the hard word, and then he remembered that he
+had been the first to apply it. But he answered her in the only way that
+seemed possible:
+
+"The time: I have promised to meet Chief Justice Hemingway at his
+chambers between four and five this afternoon."
+
+"Chief Justice Hemingway?" she queried. "Why, he--" she broke off
+suddenly and sprang from her chair. "I have the little car here in the
+street. It was Mrs. Blount's proposal; she said you would change your
+mind if I came after you and offered to drive you. Come! I'll promise to
+bring you back before five o'clock. I know the time is awfully short,
+but I can do it!"
+
+If Blount hesitated it was only because her beauty and her eagerness
+thrilled him until, for the moment, he could think of nothing else. Then
+he closed his desk quickly and struggled into his overcoat, saying: "It
+shall be as you wish. Let's go."
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES
+
+
+For fifteen miles north of the capital the Quaretaro road is a
+well-kept, level speedway, and Miss Anners amply proved the worth of her
+summer's training by showing herself a fearless driver. Half an hour
+after the small roadster had left the curb in front of the Temple Court
+Building it was among the hills and climbing to the upper mesa level.
+
+Nearing the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, they overtook and passed a horseman
+turning into the canyon road. The man's horse shied and threatened to
+bolt at sight of the storming car, but Patricia was looking straight
+ahead, and she made no movement to slacken speed. At the passing
+glimpse, Blount's mind went shuttling backward to the homecoming night
+in the Lost Hills, and he made sure he recognized the rider as
+Hathaway's morose henchman, the man Barto.
+
+He wondered vaguely what Barto could be doing at the turn in the
+obstructed side-canyon road, and the wonder went with him while the
+little car was covering the remaining distance and flying up the
+cottonwood-shaded avenue at Wartrace Hall. But a glance at his watch
+made him forget the Barto incident in a heart-warming thrill of
+admiration--the joy of a skilled motorist recognizing kindred skill in
+another. The thirty miles from the city had been made in something under
+fifty minutes.
+
+When she brought the roadster to a stand at the carriage entrance,
+Patricia spoke for the first time since she had taken the wheel for the
+record-breaking drive.
+
+"Find your father quickly and say to him what you have come to say. When
+you are ready to go back, I'll keep my promise and drive you."
+
+"That won't be at all necessary," he protested, getting out to stand
+with his hand on the dash. "I am perfectly well able to drive myself;
+and, besides, it would leave you at the wrong end of the road, and
+alone."
+
+"Don't stand there talking about it," she commanded. "Go and do what you
+have to do. I'll wait here."
+
+Blount turned away and found old Barnabas holding the door open for him.
+A word passed, and the old negro bobbed his head. "Yas, sah; Marsteh
+David's in de libra'y," was the answer to Blount's query, and, throwing
+his overcoat and soft hat aside, the bearer of burdens not his own
+walked quickly through the hall and let himself into the room of trial.
+
+The bright autumn day was cool--cool enough to warrant the crackling
+wood-fire on the library hearth. With his easy chair planted at the
+cosey corner of the fire and an open book on the table at his elbow,
+the senator sat smoking his long-stemmed pipe in the Sunday afternoon
+quiet. Mingled with the fire-snapping there were faint tappings, as if
+one of the cottonwoods, growing too near the house, were sending twig
+signals to the inmates.
+
+The senator moved the open book a little farther aside when his son made
+an abrupt entrance into the cheerful room.
+
+"Well, son, you made out to get here after so long a time, didn't you?"
+he said gently. And then: "How's the broken head to-day?"
+
+"Better," answered the son shortly, adding: "It's the least of my
+troubles just now."
+
+"That's good," was the hearty comment. Then, with the long stem of the
+pipe pointing to a Morris-chair: "Draw up and sit down. I reckon the
+drive has tired you some, even if you won't admit it. Where's the little
+girl?"
+
+Evan Blount saw instantly that he must be brief and pitiless.
+
+"Patricia is waiting in the car to drive me back to town," he explained,
+forcing himself to speak calmly. "I have an appointment with Chief
+Justice Hemingway which must be kept, and he will wait in his chambers
+in the Capitol only until five o'clock. Father, do you know why I have
+made that appointment?"
+
+The senator wagged his great head in a way which might mean anything or
+nothing, and said: "How should I know, son?"
+
+"I hoped you would know. It's not a very pleasant task for me to tell
+you," the younger man went on, ignoring the chair to which the
+long-stemmed pipe was still pointing. "A short time ago--yesterday, to
+be exact--evidence, legal evidence, of corruption and false registration
+in four of the city wards, and in a number of outlying districts in the
+State, was put into my hands. This evidence incriminates a group of
+ringleaders and a still larger number of election officers. You know
+what I've got to do with it."
+
+The older man nodded slowly.
+
+"Yes, I reckon I know, son; and I'm not saying a word. If you weren't a
+Blount, I might ask if you haven't learned that one of the first rules
+in the book of politics is the one that says we mustn't hang the dirty
+clothes out where everybody can see 'em, but I know better than to say
+anything like that to you."
+
+The young man's heart sank within him. It seemed evident that his father
+was still unsuspecting, still unconscious of the dreadful consequences
+to himself. Only utter frankness could avail now.
+
+"I can't discuss the question of expediency with you," he said hastily,
+"any further than to say that I'd cheerfully give ten years of my life
+to be able to consider it. Let me be perfectly plain: This evidence I am
+speaking of involves you personally. If the papers are put into Judge
+Hemingway's hands there will be a searching investigation, prompt
+indictments, criminal proceedings, and all the disgrace that the widest
+publicity can bring upon the men who are responsible for the present
+desperate state of affairs."
+
+The senator had laid his pipe aside and was staring soberly into the
+fire. "Go on, son," he said quietly; "let's have the rest of it."
+
+"You know what has led up to the present wretched involvement--my
+involvement," Blount went on. "When I took the railroad job, I did it in
+good faith and went about preaching the gospel of the square deal for
+everybody, including the corporations. But in a very short time I
+discovered that my own people were not keeping faith with me; had no
+intention of keeping it. Later on, a number of corporation officials and
+managers, men who had formerly made corrupt deals with the railroad
+company, and are to this day profiting by them, became frightened.
+Assuming that I was the chief broker for the railroad company in the
+present campaign, these men wrote me letters which were in the highest
+degree incriminating."
+
+The big man who was staring into the heart of the fire nodded
+thoughtfully.
+
+"I remember; you told me something about that before, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes, and we needn't go into the details again. I meant to use those
+letters as a club to hammer a little honesty into my own employers. Up
+to that time I had been trying to believe that the machine--your
+machine--and the railroad lawbreakers were not one and the same thing."
+
+"But you changed your mind about that?"
+
+"I had to, after I found out that you had corrupted one of my clerks and
+had sent one of your thugs to dynamite my safe. That is past and gone;
+but you can see where it left me. As you and everybody in the State
+know, I had been committing myself publicly everywhere, doing it with
+the assurance that when it came to the pinch I could bring Gantry and
+Kittredge and even Mr. McVickar himself to terms--the terms of honesty
+and fair dealing. With my weapon stolen, I was left helpless, facing the
+certainty that on the day after the election I should be pilloried in
+every hole and corner of my native State as the most shameless liar that
+ever breathed. Do you wonder that I was desperate?"
+
+"No, son; I reckon you wouldn't have been much of a Blount if you hadn't
+been."
+
+"I was desperate. I said to myself that I would find another weapon,
+even if I should have to take a leaf out of your own book, dad, to do
+it. I took the leaf, and I have the weapon. You drove Gryson away, but
+you made one small miscalculation. You didn't believe that his desire
+for revenge would be stronger than his fear of the gallows."
+
+Again the older man nodded thoughtfully.
+
+"Yes, son; I know. He came back twice: once when he found you in your
+office last Wednesday night; and again yesterday, or rather last
+evening, when you got out of your bed and went to help him make his
+getaway on the east-bound Overland."
+
+Evan Blount started back, and his exclamation was of pure astoundment.
+
+"You knew all this?" he gasped.
+
+"Oh, yes; I reckon there isn't much happening that such a double-dyed
+old villain as I am doesn't find out, Evan," was the sober rejoinder.
+
+"But, good heavens! if you know so much, you must know what Gryson came
+back for, and what he gave me!"
+
+"Yes; I know that, too. I reckon I might as well make a clean breast of
+it while I'm at it."
+
+"You knew it last night, and yet you didn't send somebody to hold me up
+and take the papers away from me?"
+
+The senator's chuckle rumbled deep in his mighty chest.
+
+"Maybe I was counting a little on the kinship, Evan, boy. Maybe I was
+saying to myself: 'No, I reckon the boy won't do it, after all--not when
+he reads what's set down in the papers; he just naturally couldn't do
+it.'"
+
+"Oh, my Lord, dad!" was the choking response. "Can't you see that you
+are killing me by inches? Can't you see that I've got to choose between
+being a man clear through, or a scoundrel as weak and shifty as any of
+those I have been denouncing? My God, it's terrible!"
+
+"I reckon you're going to choose straight," said the older man, still
+with eyes averted.
+
+"I have chosen," said the son brokenly; "or perhaps it would be truer to
+say that there never has been any choice since the moment when I set my
+foot in the path which has led me thus far on the way to hell. I can
+despise myself utterly for the means I took to secure the evidence, but
+that very lapse makes it all the more needful that I should atone as I
+can."
+
+David Blount rose and put his back to the fire.
+
+"Son, you are a man among a thousand--among ten thousand," he said
+quietly. "When it comes to a pure question of good, old-fashioned right
+and wrong, you can buck up just like your old great-gran'pap, the judge,
+did when he had to sentence one of his own sons for killing an Indian.
+You haven't said it in so many words, so I'll say it for you: you've got
+me, and maybe some others, right where you can shove us into the
+penitentiary. That's about what you're trying to tell me, isn't it?"
+
+"For God's sake, don't put it that way!" Blount protested. "I gave you
+fair warning almost at the first. I've got to fight for the right as I
+see it. If I don't, I shall be less than a man--less than your son.
+Can't you see that it is breaking my heart?"
+
+A silence electrically surcharged with possibilities settled down upon
+the isolated room, with the stillness broken only by the crackling of
+the fire and that other distant tapping as of tree-twigs on the roof. At
+the end of the pause the senator took a forward step and put a hand on
+his son's shoulder.
+
+"I haven't one word to say, Evan, boy," he began slowly. "As you told me
+that first day out here, son, it's your job to hew to the line and let
+the chips fall where they may. You go ahead and do just what seems
+right and law-abiding to you. I'd rather go to jail twice over than have
+you do any different. Is that what you're wanting me to say?"
+
+Blount dropped into a chair, as if the touch on his shoulder had crushed
+him, and covered his face with his hands. It was hard--harder than even
+his own prefigurings had forecast it. Fighting against the patent facts,
+he had been cherishing a lingering hope that his father might be able to
+brush away the cruel necessity at the last moment. But now the hope was
+dead.
+
+It was a long minute before he staggered to his feet and groped his way
+to the door, leaving his father standing before the fire and once more
+puffing absently at the long-stemmed pipe. When old Barnabas had helped
+him into his coat and had given him his hat, he found Patricia still
+sitting in the car, with the motor purring softly under the hood.
+
+"Must you go back?" she queried, when he had descended the steps to
+climb stiffly into the seat beside her.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Your duty is clear?"
+
+"Perfectly clear--now."
+
+"And the consequences?" she asked.
+
+"I can only guess," he muttered. "Ruin and disgrace for all of us, I
+suppose. Of course, you understand that I have resigned from the
+railroad service and shall stand with my father when--when the thing is
+done."
+
+She was backing the little roadster into the circling driveway to turn
+for the start. At the reversing moment she made her final plea.
+
+"Don't do it, Evan--_don't do it!_ I have no more than a woman's reason
+to offer, but I am sure you are opening the door to a lifelong sorrow
+for yourself and--and--for me!"
+
+It was the last two words that steeled him suddenly. Not even at her
+beseeching would he turn aside from the plain path of the oath-bound
+obligation. It struck him like a blow that the turning aside would make
+him forever unworthy of her.
+
+"Take me back to the city as quickly as you can!" he said. "Or, better
+still, stay here and let me have the car. That is my last word."
+
+"You're not fit to drive a car!" she snapped; and for further answer she
+threw the speed lever into the intermediate gear and released the
+clutch. Like a projectile hurled from a catapult, the swift little
+roadster shot away down the cottonwood avenue, and with a jerk of the
+lever into the "high" the second race against time was begun.
+
+For the first few miles Patricia's passenger had all he could do to keep
+his seat. On its upper mesa windings the Quaretaro road follows the
+course of the stream which has been robbed of its waters for the
+cultivated lands, and though the roadway was good the hazards were
+plentiful when taken at speed. More than once Blount caught himself in
+the act of reaching for the steering-wheel, but as often he desisted. As
+on the outward race, Patricia was staring straight ahead, and giving
+the little car every throb of speed there was in its machinery. None the
+less, he could see that she had it under perfect control.
+
+What finally happened came with the suddenness of the thunder-clap
+following a bolt which strikes near at hand. They were on the down-grade
+approach to the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, and they could not see beyond
+the gentle curve to the left, where the smaller gulch found its
+intersection with the main ravine. When they were within a hundred yards
+of the curve the stretch below came into view. Blount had a momentary
+glimpse of some barrier--a pine-tree, as it proved to be--lying across
+the main road. Seeing it, he realized at the same instant that Patricia
+was neither throttling the motor nor applying the brakes. After that he
+had barely time to snap the switch and to throw the heavy wind-shield
+down before the devastating crash came.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+THE GOSSIPING WIRES
+
+
+After his son had left him, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush remained
+standing before the library fire until he heard the machine-gun exhausts
+of the small roadster distance-diminishing down the driveway avenue.
+Then he stepped aside and pressed the bell-push ordinarily used to
+summon the old negro footman.
+
+In answer to the call a door opened beyond the chimney-jamb, and
+immediately the gentle twig-tapping sounds resolved themselves into the
+clickings of a pair of telegraph relays and the chatter of a typewriter.
+A good-looking young fellow, with his coat off, entered the library,
+carefully closing the door behind him.
+
+"Want to send something, senator?" he asked, whipping a note-book from
+his hip-pocket.
+
+"No, not just this minute. Anything new coming over the wires?"
+
+"Nothing startling. Steuchfield reports from Ophir that we swing the
+miners' vote almost to a man unless something unforeseen breaks loose.
+Hetchy gives us a good word from Twin Buttes; and Griggs, up in the
+Carnadines, wires from Alkire that he has just completed an auto
+canvass of the High Line district. The ranchmen up that way have had a
+pretty bad scare. There was a threat made that the price of water was
+going to be raised. But they're all right now."
+
+The boss nodded approvingly. Then: "How about those microphone notes?"
+
+"Crowell is writing them off," was the reply. "He'll have them in half
+an hour or so."
+
+The senator drew out his watch, a huge thick-crystalled time-piece
+dating back to the range-riding period.
+
+"As matters have turned out, I shall be going to the city before long,"
+he said. "If the notes are not ready before I leave, you can order out
+the speed-car and send them in by Gallagher any time before six o'clock.
+Don't slip up on that, Fred; tell Gallagher to deliver the notes to me,
+in person, at the Inter-Mountain. What's become of Professor Anners?"
+
+"He's staying over at Haworth's ranch, just to be near the fossil
+bone-field. They've made another plesio-something find, and Haworth
+telephones that the professor couldn't be dragged away with a derrick
+until those bones are safely out of the ground and boxed for shipment."
+
+The professor's host smiled indulgently, saying: "It's just as well, I
+reckon. The professor's about as blind as a bat when it comes to seeing
+anything this side of a million years ago, but if he were here he might
+wonder why we've set up a telegraph-office--wonder, and talk about it."
+
+The young man in his shirt-sleeves was turning to go. "I'll hustle
+Crowell on those notes," he promised: but as he was reaching for the
+door-knob the senator stopped him.
+
+"Hold on a minute, Fred; how is that contrivance of ours at the mouth of
+Shonoho working?"
+
+"It's working all right. Canby is on watch there now, and he says he can
+see everything that passes on both roads."
+
+"That's good. These little precautions are mighty necessary in a close
+fight. Those folks over at Shonoho Inn ought to have thought of this
+outer-guard business for themselves, but it seems they didn't. They'd be
+right awkwardly embarrassed if some fellow they don't want to see should
+slip in on 'em without notice. While I think of it, don't fail to keep
+me posted on what Canby sees after I go back to town. He thinks he's
+safe, does he?"
+
+"Perfectly. Nobody can see his dugout from the road, and his oil-heater
+doesn't make any smoke. That scheme of laying insulated wires on the
+ground works like a charm. You could walk all over them without noticing
+them." The young man was opening the door as he spoke, and he broke off
+suddenly to say: "That's his call ringing now. Would you like to come
+and talk to him?"
+
+"No; you can tell me what he says, if it's worth telling."
+
+The clerk disappeared into the room of the tapping noises, but he was
+back again almost immediately.
+
+"It was Canby," he said hurriedly. "He says two men on horseback have
+just dragged a good-sized pine-tree down the Shonoho road and are
+placing it across the county road. He can't see the men's faces very
+well, but he thinks the bigger of the two is Jack Barto."
+
+It was the senator's boast that he had never lost a tooth or had one
+filled, and his smile showed the double row, strong and evenly matched,
+under the drooping grayish mustaches.
+
+"That boy Canby is a mighty good guesser, Fred. I shouldn't be surprised
+if the fellow he has spotted _is_ Jack Barto, sure enough. If you didn't
+know beforehand what a good-natured, meechin' sort of rooster Jack is,
+you might think he was fixing to play some kind of a hold-up game on
+somebody."
+
+"That's what Canby thinks, and he asked me to hold the wire open."
+
+The big boss smiled again. "Then don't you reckon you'd better go and
+hold it?" he suggested mildly; and the young man in his shirt-sleeves
+vanished to do it.
+
+When he was left alone, the senator went to the house phone connecting
+the library with the remoter suites. A touch of the button brought an
+answering word, and he spoke softly into the transmitter.
+
+"The time is getting right ripe, and I thought you might want a minute
+or so to put on your things," he said, in answer to the low-toned
+"Well?" that came over the house wire. Then he added: "I don't know but
+what we may have to make a little bluff at somebody on the way in. When
+you order the car around, suppose you tell Rickert to put 'Tennessee'
+and Billy Shack in the tonneau, with a couple of shot-guns. We can drop
+'em if they look too warlike and conspicuous."
+
+He was hanging the ear-piece on its hook when the shirt-sleeved young
+man burst in again excitedly.
+
+"It _is_ a hold-up!" he declared breathlessly. "Miss Anners and Mr. Evan
+have slammed their car into the tree, and Canby says the two horseback
+men are watching them from the dry gulch just below him!"
+
+"All right," was the even-toned reply. "You go and tell Canby to keep
+his shirt on, Fred; and don't forget to send those papers in by
+Gallagher."
+
+While the senator was speaking, the door opened and the old negro came
+hobbling in with a driving-coat and the broad-brimmed planter's hat
+which made the Honorable David a marked man throughout the length and
+breadth of the Sage-Brush State.
+
+"De cyar's at de do', Marsteh David, and Mistis say she plumb ready when
+you is, yes-sah," stammered the serving-man, holding the coat for his
+master; and a moment later the senator was climbing to his place behind
+the big wheel of the touring-car, with Mrs. Honoria for his seat-mate on
+the mechanician's side, and the chauffeur, the horse wrangler, and Billy
+Shack comfortably filling the tonneau.
+
+While the touring-car, with its curiously assorted complement of
+passengers, was leaving Wartrace Hall, Evan Blount, having assured
+himself that Patricia was not hurt, was trying to estimate the extent
+of the damage done to the little red roadster by the collision with the
+tree. The inspection was brief. With the front axle bent and the
+radiator crushed, the car was safely out of commission.
+
+"We're definitely out of the fight," he reported shortly, helping his
+companion down from the driving-seat.
+
+Patricia was still trembling and pale.
+
+"You mean that we can't go on to the city?" she quavered.
+
+"Not unless we walk; and of course that is out of the question."
+
+"Then you--you can't keep your appointment with Judge Hemingway."
+
+Blount's smile was scornful. "I imagine it was no part of my father's
+plans that I should keep my appointment," he commented bitterly. "He
+took it for granted that I would drive out to Wartrace with you, and
+made his preparations accordingly. This tree wasn't here half an hour
+ago, and it is here now."
+
+"I can't believe it of him," she denied, and her lip quivered. And then
+she added: "Just think, Evan; we might have been killed--both of us!"
+
+Blount's teeth came together with a little clicking noise. "Politics, or
+what passes for politics in this God-forsaken region, seems to make no
+account of such a small thing as a human life or two," he said. And
+then: "I suppose we are due to wait until somebody comes along to pick
+us up. It's four miles or more back to the nearest ranch on the mesa."
+
+"It is all my fault!" lamented the young woman. "I--I might have
+stopped the car, don't you think?"
+
+"I wondered a little that you didn't at least try to stop it," he
+permitted himself to say; and at this she forgot the traditions,
+sociological or other, reverting to the type of the eternal feminine.
+
+"Say it all," she flashed out. "You are beginning to wonder if I didn't
+do it purposely. I _did_ do it purposely. All the way along I had been
+trying to muster up courage enough to smash the car in the ditch, and if
+I hadn't been such a coward I would have done it. Now hate me, if you
+want to!"
+
+Blount would have been less the lover than he was if he had not been
+moved to something much warmer than hatred.
+
+"Let us say that you are doing your level best to save my faith in human
+nature, Patricia, girl," he said soberly. "Do you know what you are? You
+are the one loyal person in a tricky world. I am still fair enough to
+say that it was fine--splendid! And I only wish my father were worthier
+of such superb loyalty and affection."
+
+She looked at him curiously for a moment. Then her mood changed in the
+twinkling of an eye, and she laughed and said: "Yes, I think women are
+more loyal than men; and I am sure they are vastly more discerning at
+times. Don't you think--"
+
+The interruption was the appearance of two horsemen pushing their
+animals out of a small gorge on the right. When they had gained the main
+road they came up, ambling easily, and Blount instantly recognized the
+leader of the pair. It was Barto again.
+
+"Howdy?" said the timber-looker, riding up to hang with one knee over
+the saddle while he grinned genially at the two castaways. "Lost out
+ag'in, ain't ye, Mr. Blount? Couldn't make out, nohow, to run yer
+chug-wagon over that there pine-tree, could ye?"
+
+"Did you put the tree in the road?" snapped Blount, his anger rising
+promptly, now that there was a man to quarrel with.
+
+"I reckon we did; and it was one Hades of a job, too," was the cool
+reply. "Had to drag the dern thing f'r more'n half a mile down the gulch
+with the hawss-ropes."
+
+Here was plenty of material for a wrathful explosion, but Blount
+controlled himself.
+
+"By whose orders did you do it?" he demanded.
+
+"Th' boss's."
+
+"Mr. Hathaway?"
+
+"Not on yer life; it was the big boss this time."
+
+Blount's quick glance aside at his companion was a wordless "I told you
+so!" and then to Barto: "Well, now that you have stopped us, what's
+next?"
+
+The outlaw grinned again and kicked his horse a little nearer.
+
+"I'm a-holdin' you up sure enough this time, Mr. Blount--jest like
+another little Billy th' Kid," he confided. "You're goin' to gimme them
+papers you've got in your pocket, and then me an' Kinky we rides away
+all peaceful and leaves you and the lady to set down quiet till
+somebuddy comes along to pick you up."
+
+Blount put his hand to his head. His wound was throbbing painfully
+again, and the pain may have been partly responsible for his answer.
+
+"When you get those papers you'll take them from a dead man, Barto. Do
+your instructions go that far?"
+
+The man of many trades swung straight in his saddle and fell into the
+attitude of one listening. Then the good-natured grin became a menacing
+scowl.
+
+"Shuck them papers out, and do it sudden!" he commanded.
+
+"No," said Blount crisply.
+
+Instantly the timber-looker's pistol was out.
+
+"Give 'em up!" he shouted; "shell 'em out, quick, 'r by the holy--"
+
+The interposition broke in stormily. Down the grade from the upper mesa
+level came a touring-car, with a big man at the wheel, a veiled woman
+beside him, and three men in the tonneau. "Holy smoke!" said the outlaw,
+and with his riding mate was slipping away up the Shonoho road when the
+touring-car, with brakes protesting, came to a stand at the tree
+barrier. Like a flash, two of the three men in the tonneau leaped out,
+and a charge of buckshot whistling over the heads of the two
+obstructionists halted them. Thereupon the Honorable David gave his
+orders tersely.
+
+"Tennessee, you go up yonder and argue with Jack Barto a spell," he
+directed. "Tell him and his partner that the Wartrace smoke-house is the
+safest place in Quaretaro County for a couple of club-witted bunglers
+like they are, and then you see to it that they get there. You, Billy,
+help Rickert get a tow-rope hitch on that road-car, and we'll see if we
+can't jerk it out of the way." After which he turned to his son as
+casually as if only the preconceived and preconcerted had come to pass:
+"Tried to wreck you, did they? Mighty near made a job of it, too, from
+the looks of Miss Patty's little car. Not hurt, are you? That's good.
+Climb in here, both of you, and when we get this windfall out of the
+road we'll go on to town."
+
+Blount put Patricia into the empty tonneau while Shack and the chauffeur
+were making the tow-rope hitch, but he was still angry enough to
+hesitate when it came his turn. A glance at his watch decided him. It
+was still only half past four. Had his father repented so far as to
+override the obstacle which he himself had interposed? Patricia was
+holding the tonneau-door open, and Blount got in and took his seat
+beside her.
+
+A small engineering feat, made possible by the power plant of the big
+car and the tow-rope, soon cleared the way of the wrecked roadster and
+the tree. Then the senator gave another order.
+
+"You and Billy stay here and see if you can't get that roadster so you
+can run it to town on its own power," he said to the chauffeur; and over
+his shoulder to the pair behind him: "If you'll change partners back
+there, and let Honoria ride on the cushions--"
+
+Though he could not remotely apprehend his father's reason for the
+rearrangement, Blount got out, helped Mrs. Honoria down and up again,
+and then climbed into the seat she had just vacated. At the click of the
+tonneau door-latch the big car rolled on down the grade, and for a good
+half of the straightaway fifteen miles to the city the younger man held
+his peace grimly. Finally he turned to his father and said:
+
+"I'm blaming you for the tree, and for Barto's attempt to get those
+papers away from me. Am I wrong?"
+
+The Honorable David shook his head.
+
+"This close to an election you're mighty near safe in blaming anybody
+and everybody in sight, son," he returned gravely; and apart from this
+small break in the monotony, the second half of the fifteen miles went
+speechless.
+
+The clock in the Temple Court tower was pointing to five minutes of five
+when the senator, instead of taking the direct street to the
+Inter-Mountain, as his son expected him to, turned the car aside into
+the Capitol grounds and brought it to rest before the side entrance
+which led to the chambers of the Supreme Court justices.
+
+"You're still in time, Evan, boy," he intimated gently; "and I'm only
+going to ask one thing of you. When you get through with Hemingway, come
+around to the hotel and show your grit by taking dinner with the rest
+of us. Are you man enough to do that?"
+
+If the son hesitated, it was only for a fraction of a second. When he
+answered, it was to say: "If I were going up-stairs to put a noose
+around my own neck, it would be simpler and easier than the thing I've
+got to do. As to your one condition--dad, I'll be with you at dinner,
+and at all other times, after this thing is done. I've quit the
+railroad, and I did it so that I might be free to be your son and your
+lawyer when the smash comes. Can I say more?"
+
+"You don't need to say another blessed word, son," was the sober
+rejoinder; and when Evan Blount got out, the Honorable David drove away
+without a backward glance for the young man who was dragging himself up
+the granite steps of the Capitol entrance like a condemned criminal
+going to execution.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+AT SHONOHO INN
+
+
+Evan Blount's interview with the venerable chief justice was not at all
+what he had imagined it would be. To begin with, he found it blankly
+impossible to take the attitude he had meant to take--namely, that of a
+conscientious member of the bar, rigorously ignoring all the little
+cross-currents of human sympathy and the affections.
+
+Almost at once he found himself telling his story incident by incident
+to the kindly old man who was figuring rather as a father confessor than
+as a judge and a legal superior. When it was done, and the chief justice
+had gone thoughtfully over the mass of evidence, Blount saw no
+thunder-cloud of righteous indignation gathering upon the judicial brow.
+Nor was Judge Hemingway's comment in the least what he had expected it
+would be.
+
+"I can not commend too highly your prudence and good judgment in
+bringing these papers to me, Mr. Blount," was the form the comment took.
+"Your position was a difficult one, and not one young man in a hundred
+would have been judicious enough to choose the conservative middle path
+you have chosen. The fanatic would have rushed into print, and the vast
+majority would have weakly compromised with conscience. It is a source
+of the deepest satisfaction to me, as your father's friend, to find that
+you have done neither."
+
+"As my father's friend?" echoed Blount.
+
+"Yes, just that, Mr. Blount. There is an appreciation which transcends
+the commonplace things of life, and I don't know which is worthier of
+the greater admiration, your courage in coming to me, or your father's
+single-heartedness in urging you to do it after he had learned the
+purport of these papers. Yet this is what I should have expected of
+David Blount as I know him. Men say of him that he has sometimes wielded
+his tremendous political power regardless of the law and of other men's
+rights. But in the field of pure ethics, in the exercise of the high and
+holy duty which is laid upon the man who has become a father, I should
+look to find your father doing precisely what he has done. I assure you
+that it is not without reason that many of his fellow citizens call him
+most affectionately the 'Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"
+
+"But the consequences!" gasped the unwilling informer. "His name in
+those affidavits!"
+
+The chief justice was nodding slowly.
+
+"Without doubt a great crime has been committed, and a still greater one
+is contemplated. We shall take prompt action to defeat the contemplated
+crime at the polls next Tuesday, rest assured of that. But at the same
+time, let me say a word for your comfort: these papers came to you from
+the hands of a criminal, and that particular criminal had--as I am well
+informed--every reason to be vindictively enraged against your father. I
+am sure you are too good a lawyer to fail to see the point. If this man
+Gryson, in 'getting even,' as he expressed it to you, has added perjury
+to his other crimes--But we need not follow the suggestion any further
+at this time. Be hopeful, Mr. Blount, as I am. Leave these matters with
+me, and go and be as good a son as he deserves to my old friend David."
+
+Evan Blount left the venerable presence in the judges' chambers of the
+Capitol with a heart strangely mellowed, and with a feeling of relief
+too great to be measured. At last, without compromise, and equally
+without the slightest concession to the natural human passion for
+vindication, the momentous step had been taken. Whatever might come of
+it, there would be no daggerings from an outraged conscience, no remorse
+for an unworthy passion impulsively yielded to. Also, with the rolling
+of the terrible burden to other and entirely competent shoulders there
+came a sense of freedom that was almost jubilant; and under the
+promptings of this new light-heartedness he was able to make a
+reasonably cheerful fourth at the _cafe_ dinner-table a little later.
+
+Oddly enough, as he thought, Patricia was also cheerful, though she
+vanished with Mrs. Honoria to the private suite shortly after the
+adjournment to the mezzanine lounge. Past this, after the father and son
+had smoked their cigars in man-like silence for a time, Mrs. Honoria,
+coated and hatted as if to go out, came back to sit near the
+balustrade, looking down upon the kindling lobby activities. Shortly
+after her coming the senator rose to go. Instantly his wife sprang up to
+walk with him to the head of the great stair.
+
+"The time has come?" she asked quickly.
+
+"I reckon it has, little woman."
+
+"I wish I might be there to see," she said softly. And then, whipping a
+packet of papers from under her street-coat: "Take these. When you see
+what they are, you'll know why I haven't given them to you before this.
+As long as you didn't know anything about it, you could tell Evan the
+simple truth--that you didn't have them."
+
+The Honorable David pocketed the papers without looking at them.
+
+"I suspected you--or, rather, young Collins--quite a little spell ago,"
+he said with imperturbable good nature. "I couldn't have done it myself;
+I reckon no right-minded man could have done it, but--"
+
+"--But women have no conscience," she finished for him. "_I_ hadn't in
+this instance. There was too much at stake with a firebrand like Evan to
+deal with. Don't be too good-natured, David--to-night, I mean. You know
+that is your failing when you have a man down. But to-night you must
+make the man pay the price. That's all, I think. I'm going back to Evan
+now to see if I can't make him talk to me. That is the one thing I have
+seldom been able to do thus far."
+
+If Blount was a little surprised when the small plotter came back to
+take the chair recently vacated by his father, he was generous enough
+not to show it. The huge sense of relief was still with him, and its
+mellowing influence made him smile leniently when she said: "I want to
+be reasoned with, Evan. I have just let your father persuade me that a
+certain thing he is about to do is perfectly safe, when I am afraid it
+isn't."
+
+"Since he is undertaking to do it, it's safe enough, you may be sure,"
+he replied at random.
+
+"Then you know what it is?"
+
+"Oh, no; he didn't tell me where he was going. But on general
+principles, you know, I think he can be trusted to take care of himself.
+He is a many-sided man, Mrs. Blount. You are his wife, but I have
+sometimes found myself wondering if, after all, you know him as he
+really is."
+
+"Perhaps I don't," she agreed readily enough. "But I do know his
+absolute fearlessness, at least. That's why I'm a little nervous just
+now."
+
+Blount took the alarm at once, as she hoped he would.
+
+"You mean that he is really going into danger of some sort?" he
+demanded.
+
+She nodded. "He is going to meet a man who is--well, he is a big man
+with many of the same qualities that your father has. But down at the
+very bottom of him there is a quality that even your father doesn't
+suspect. Have you ever seen a cornered rat, Evan?"
+
+Blount had got upon his feet and was buttoning his coat.
+
+"I don't know how much or how little you know about what has taken place
+this afternoon, Mrs. Blount," he broke out hastily, "but I can tell you
+this much: I am my father's son now, whatever I have been in the past,
+and if he is in danger, my place is with him. Tell me where he has
+gone."
+
+The little lady's eyes were demurely downcast. "I shouldn't dare tell
+you that, but--but perhaps I might show you. I didn't promise not
+to--not to follow him," she returned with exactly the proper shade of
+half-frightened reluctance.
+
+"Is it far?" he asked.
+
+"Y-yes; we should have to drive."
+
+"Excuse me for a minute or two," he said abruptly, and, making a bolt
+for the elevator, he was back almost within the limit named with a
+top-coat for himself and a driving-wrap for his companion. "I broke into
+your suite and made Patricia give me the wrap," he explained. "If it
+isn't what you want, I'll try again."
+
+"It will do nicely," she told him; and together they went down the broad
+marble stair to the ground-floor.
+
+"Do we take a cab?" he asked, when they reached the sidewalk.
+
+"No; it's only a short walk to the garage, and we can take the
+touring-car."
+
+"I'm entirely in your hands," he rejoined; and then: "Perhaps you'd
+better take my arm. We can make quicker time that way."
+
+The small plotter's eyes were dancing when she slipped her hand under
+his arm. In a career which had not been entirely devoid of excitement,
+Mrs. Honoria had rarely found men difficult. But this particular young
+man was proving himself to be the easiest among many.
+
+At the garage Blount asked for the family touring-car, more than
+half-expecting to be told that his father had taken it. The garage man
+nodded and laughed. "You can have it, but you came within an ace of
+losing out," he said. "The senator was just here, and he was going to
+take it, but he changed his mind when I told him the big roadster was
+in."
+
+Blount made no comment, and when the car was ready he asked his
+companion where she would ride.
+
+"In front, with you," was the quick reply; and when they were placed she
+gave him his running orders. "Slip out of the city by the quietest
+streets you can find and take the Quaretaro road," she directed, and he
+obeyed in silence, holding the speed down until they had left the
+capital behind them and were bowling along under the stars on the fine
+boulevarded county road.
+
+"Do we take it easy or the other way?" he asked, speaking for the first
+time since they had left the town garage.
+
+"You may drive as fast as you like until we come to the hills," he was
+told; and with this permission Blount let the motor out and speedily put
+the fifteen miles of the straightaway road to the rear.
+
+"Is it Wartrace?" he inquired, when the touring-car was breasting the
+first of the grades in the gulch-threading climb to the second mesa
+level.
+
+"No. When you come to the pine-tree, turn to the right up Shonoho
+Canyon."
+
+"We can't get anywhere on that road," he objected. "It's washed out and
+posted. I tried to go up there the other day when I had Patricia out in
+the little car."
+
+"I think you will find it quite passable to-night," was all the answer
+he got; and a little later, when they had turned out of the main road
+and were ascending the small canyon, the prophecy came true. The brush
+barricade had been thrown aside, and there were fresh wheel tracks in
+the sand.
+
+At sight of the wheel marks the senator's wife spoke again.
+
+"You have been up here before?"
+
+"Yes, once; in the middle of the summer."
+
+"There is a small hotel at the head of the road."
+
+"I know; but it is closed."
+
+"It has been reopened--please throttle the motor so it won't make so
+much noise--the hotel is occupied now, as I say, and that is where we
+shall find your father. Are you still willing to do as I tell you to?"
+
+"In all things reasonable."
+
+"As if I'd ask you to do anything unreasonable!" she broke out
+half-petulantly. "Listen; there is a lawn with a circular driveway in
+front of the hotel. Drive to the outer edge, near the cliff, and stop
+the car."
+
+Five minutes later he had obeyed his instructions literally. Through
+the groving of trees on the lawn he could see the lights in the lower
+story of the inn. At the flicking of the motor-switch a man with a pair
+of lineman's climbing spurs at his belt rose up out of the shadows and
+touched his cap to the lady, saying: "The boss is here; he has just gone
+in."
+
+"I know," was the low-toned response. And then to Evan: "Help me out,
+please."
+
+When they stood together beside the car she spoke again to the lineman.
+
+"Is it all right, Jackson? Can you do what I asked you to?"
+
+"We can try it a whirl," said the man; and thereupon he led the way
+across the lawn, around to the darkened end of the bungalow-built resort
+house, and through a sheltering pergola to a side door. "I got hold of
+the key, and it's open," he signified, meaning the door. "Can you find
+your way in the dark on the inside?"
+
+"Perfectly," was the whispered reply; and then the lineman guide got his
+further orders: "Go back to the car and see that nobody interferes with
+it, Jackson." Then, when the man had disappeared in the tree shadows,
+the little lady turned short upon Blount. "I am going to take you where
+you can see and hear, but you must promise me not to interfere unless it
+becomes perfectly plain that your father needs you. Is it a bargain?"
+
+"It is--if you'll allow me to be the judge of the need."
+
+She laughed softly. "You are simply incorrigible, and I should think
+there would be times when Patricia would be tempted to stick pins into
+you," she mocked. Then: "Come on; we are wasting time," and, entering
+the house, she took his hand and led him through a dark passage, up a
+stair, through another passage into a long, low-pitched room, bare and
+empty save for a great pyramid of dining-tables and chairs piled in the
+middle of it, and lastly through a cautiously opened door which admitted
+a flood of yellow lamp-light from below.
+
+"The musicians' gallery," she whispered. "Go to the screen and look
+down, but for Heaven's sake, don't make any noise!"
+
+Blount obeyed mechanically. The orchestra gallery, screened on three
+sides by an open fretwork of Moorish design, was built out from the wall
+of the dining-room, and through the latticings of the fretwork he could
+look down upon the oblong lobby of the resort hotel. There was a
+table-desk with lamps on it drawn out in front of a cheerful wood-fire
+burning in a great stone fireplace, and in front of the fire, standing
+with his back to the blaze, Blount saw his father. From a lighted room
+at the opposite end of the lobby space came a confused clattering of
+telegraph instruments. Blount caught a glimpse of shirt-sleeved clerks
+moving about in the room beyond, and then a door opened beneath him and
+the vice-president of the Transcontinental Company strode out into the
+firelight to shake hands with his visitor and to say: "I've been looking
+for you; I thought you'd come in out of the wet before it was too late,
+David. Sit down and tell me how much you're going to bleed us for, and
+I'll make out the check."
+
+With a cold hand gripping at his heart, Blount turned away, sick and
+revolted, and there was a curse on his lips for the cruelty of the woman
+who had brought him to be a witness to his father's shame. But when he
+groped for the door of egress and found it, the knob refused to turn.
+The door was locked and he could not retreat.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+THE RECKONING
+
+
+Evan Blount's first impulse when he found his retreat cut off by the
+locked door of the musicians' gallery was to make his presence known
+instantly to the two men standing before the fire in the lobby below.
+Shame, vicarious shame for the father who would thus find himself
+unmasked before his son, was all that made him hesitate; and in the
+pausing moment he heard his father's reply to the vice-president's
+challenging greeting.
+
+"The same old song; always the same old song with you, isn't it,
+Hardwick?" the senator was saying in jocose deprecation. "What money
+can't buy, isn't worth having; that's about the way you fellows always
+stack it up." Then, with sudden grimness: "Sit down, Hardwick. I've come
+to say a few things to you that won't listen very good, but you've got
+to take your medicine this time."
+
+"What's that?" demanded the vice-president, dropping mechanically into
+his desk-chair. And then: "It's no use, David. We've beat you at your
+own game. We're going to roll up a majority next Tuesday that will wipe
+you and your broken-down machine out of existence. Don't you believe
+it?"
+
+"Not yet--not quite yet" was the mild rejoinder.
+
+"Well, you'd better believe it, because it's the truth. You are down and
+out. I had you beat, David, that night last summer when you gave me your
+'de-fi' and I came back by taking your son away from you. The young
+gentleman you were going to spring on us for your next attorney-general
+has done more than any other one man in the campaign to help our lame
+dog over the stile."
+
+"Yes," said the big man, sunning his back at the fire, "that is one of
+the things we're going to flail out right here and now, Hardwick; about
+the boy and what he's been doing. You told him to go out and preach the
+good, clean gospel of the square deal, didn't you?"
+
+It was at this point that the listener in the musicians' gallery, a prey
+to tumultuous emotions which were making the freshly healing wound in
+his head throb like a trip-hammer, lost all of his compunctions and drew
+closer to the fretwork screen.
+
+"He didn't need any special instructions," was the vice-president's
+rejoinder, and his tone chimed in with the hard-bitted smile. "Now that
+it is all over, I don't mind telling you that he mapped the thing out
+for himself, and all we had to do was to sit tight and give him plenty
+of rope. Candidly, David, I don't believe I'm hardened enough to play
+the game as it ought to be played out here in the sage-brush hills. The
+young fellow's sincerity came pretty near getting away with me when I
+saw how ridiculously in earnest he was."
+
+"Yet you let him go on, putting himself deeper and deeper in the hole
+every time he stood up before an audience, and you never said a
+word--never gave him a hint that you were not going to back him up in
+everything he was saying?"
+
+This time the hard-bitted smile broke into a laugh.
+
+"Let's get down to business, David. You wouldn't expect us to throw the
+game away when somebody was trying his best to put the winning card into
+our hands. We needn't dig back into the campaign for something to jangle
+over, you and I. We can come right down to the present moment. You're
+cornered, but I don't deny that you've still got a few votes to dispose
+of. How much do you want for them?"
+
+Blount saw his father take a step forward, and for a flitting instant he
+thought there would be violence. But apparently nothing was farther from
+the senator's intention.
+
+"I'm not selling to-night, Hardwick; I'm buying," he said, with the
+good-natured smile wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. "I want to know
+how much you'll take to clean up right where you are and make my boy's
+word good to the people of this State."
+
+Mr. McVickar turned to his table-desk and took up a sheaf of telegrams.
+
+"I'm a pretty busy man this evening, David; and if you haven't anything
+better than that to offer--"
+
+"You've got a lot of crooked deals out--special rates and rebates and
+such things; the boy believed you were going to call them all off and
+be good, Hardwick."
+
+The vice-president laid the telegrams aside and turned back again with
+the air of a man determined to sweep away all the obstructions at one
+shrewd push.
+
+"You're wasting your time and mine; let's get down to business," he
+snapped. "Some little time ago your son began to urge this same 'reform
+measure,' as he termed it. I believe he even went so far as to threaten
+Gantry and Kittredge with the publication of certain private letters
+from our patrons, letters written to him in his capacity of field
+campaigner for our company. I don't suppose he really meant to do any
+such disloyal thing as that, but--"
+
+"But to make sure he wouldn't, you had one of your hired shadow-men blow
+up his safe and steal the letters," put in the senator mildly. "That was
+prudent, Hardwick. I was a little scared up myself for fear Evan might
+get real good and mad, and let the cat out of the bag; I was, for a
+fact."
+
+"Without admitting the safe-blowing, I may say that the letters were
+destroyed, and our friends were advised to be a little more conservative
+in their correspondence. That settles the 'reform measure' incident and
+brings us down to the present argument. If you are not here to get in
+line with us, what did you come for?"
+
+"I came to give you one more chance to be decent, Hardwick;
+just--one--more--last--chance."
+
+"David, there are times when you make me tired, and this is one of
+them. For years you've held us up and dictated to us; but this time
+we've got you by the neck. Did you ever happen to hear of a fellow named
+Thomas Gryson?"
+
+"Oh, yes; I've heard of him. I believe he has been on your pay-rolls for
+a while--notwithstanding the fact that he is an escaped criminal," was
+the shrewd counter-thrust.
+
+"He's a scoundrel; we'll admit that. Just the same, your son hired him
+to go out and get evidence in a certain matter of alleged crookedness in
+the registration lists. He got it, and delivered the papers to your son
+last night. Some of those affidavits incriminate you, David. If we
+wanted to use them, we could send you to the penitentiary, right here in
+your own State."
+
+The senator drew up a mock-Sheraton arm-chair and lowered his huge frame
+gently into it.
+
+"In order to use those papers against me you'd first have to get hold of
+them, wouldn't you, Hardwick?" he asked.
+
+"We have them," was the terse assertion.
+
+The Honorable David's chuckle rumbled deep in his capacious chest.
+
+"Barto phoned you an hour or so ago that he had 'em, but, owing to
+circumstances over which he had no control, he couldn't deliver 'em to
+you until to-morrow morning. Isn't that about the way it shapes up?"
+
+The vice-president's frown marked an added degree of irritation. "So
+you have a cut-in on my telephone wire, have you?" he rasped.
+
+The senator leaned forward and laid a forefinger on the
+vice-presidential knee.
+
+"Listen, Hardwick," he said. "I dictated that phone message to you, and
+Barto repeated it word for word because he had to--I reckon maybe it was
+because one of my men was holding a gun to his other ear while he talked
+to you. The little hold-up that you planned this afternoon didn't come
+off. Barto lost out bad, and when we get around to giving him the third
+degree, I shouldn't wonder if he'd tell a whole lot of things that you
+wouldn't want to see printed in the newspapers."
+
+Mr. McVickar sprang out of his chair with an agility surprising in so
+heavy a man, crossed to the open door of the room where his clerical
+force was at work, and slammed it shut. When he returned, he was no
+longer the confident tyrant of foregone conclusions.
+
+"Where are those papers now, Blount?" he inquired.
+
+"They are in the hands of Chief Justice Hemingway, for investigation and
+such action as he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court bench see fit
+to take."
+
+"Good God! Your son did that, knowing that you are as deep in the mud as
+we are in the mire?"
+
+"I reckon he did, so. That boy is all wool and a yard wide. He thought
+he was putting me in the hole, too, along with Kittredge and your
+railroad crooks, and it came mighty near tearing him in two. But he did
+it. You haven't been more than half-appreciating that boy, Hardwick."
+
+"'He thought,' you say; isn't it the fact that you are in the hole,
+David?"
+
+The senator reached over, took one of the gigantic McVickar cigars from
+the open box on the desk, and calmly lighted it.
+
+"You're a pretty hard man to convince, Hardwick," he said slowly, when
+the big cigar was filling the air of the lobby with its fragrance. "Away
+along back at the beginning of this fight I told you what I was aiming
+to do, and why. You wouldn't believe it then, and you don't want to
+believe it now; but that's because you don't happen to have a son of
+your own. When that boy of mine wired me that he was coming out here to
+get into the harness, I began to turn over the leaves of the record and
+look back a little. It was a mighty dirty record, McVickar. I don't know
+that I'm any better man now than I was in the days when we made that
+record--you and I--but when I looked it over, it struck me all in a heap
+that I'd have to get out the bucket and scrubbing-brush if I didn't want
+to make a clean-hearted, clean-minded boy plumb ashamed of his old
+daddy."
+
+"But, say--you haven't quit your scheming for a single minute, Blount!"
+retorted the railroad tyrant. "You are just as much the boss of the
+machine to-day as you've ever been!"
+
+"I reckon, that's so, too," was the measured reply. "But there's just
+this one little difference, Hardwick: a machine, in a factory or in
+politics, is a mighty necessary thing, and we wouldn't get very far
+nowadays without it. Here in America we're just coming to learn that
+machine politics--which is sometimes only another name for intelligent
+organization--needn't be bad politics unless we make 'em bad. To put it
+another way, the machine will grind corn or clean up the streets and
+alleys just as easily as it will grind up men and principles."
+
+The vice-president made a gesture of impatience.
+
+"Come to the point," he urged. "Do you mean to tell me that you can face
+an investigation by the Supreme Court?"
+
+"For this one time, Hardwick, I can. For this one time in the history of
+the Sage-Brush State, the slate--the machine slate--is as clean as the
+back of your hand. When the court comes to investigate, it will find
+that every crooked deal in this campaign has had a railroad man or a
+corporation man at the back of it. Let me tell you what's due to happen.
+Chief Justice Hemingway had luncheon with me to-day, and he came early
+enough to give me a quiet hour before we went to table with the ladies.
+There is going to be an investigation, and some sharp, shrewd young
+lawyer is going to be appointed by the court to take evidence. When this
+young man gets to work, every wheel in the machine is going to roll his
+way. Every bribe you've offered and paid, every false name you've put on
+the registration lists, every deal you've made with men like Pete
+Hathaway and McDarragh, has had its witnesses, and by the gods,
+Hardwick, they'll testify--every man of them!"
+
+Again the vice-president sprang from his chair, but this time it was to
+walk the floor with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets. The
+listener in the musicians' gallery found a seat and sat down to let the
+intoxicating, overwhelming joy of it all have its will of him. In the
+fulness of time the tramping magnate who had been so crushingly
+out-generalled in his own chosen field came to stand before the big man,
+who was still quietly smoking in the sham-Sheraton arm-chair.
+
+"You spoke of the appointment of a special prosecuting attorney, David,"
+he said in a harsh monotone. "Who will it be?"
+
+"You've guessed it already, I reckon. It'll be the boy, Hardwick.
+Hemingway will appoint him if he is willing to serve."
+
+"He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president.
+
+"Not much, he hasn't! you hired him for wages, and if he wants to
+resign--he has resigned, by the way--and take another job, I reckon he
+can do it without breaking any of the Ten Commandments."
+
+"We can't stand for that--you know we can't."
+
+"No; I don't think you can--not as a corporation. Besides the flock of
+witnesses that we can drum up, he'll have those letters that we were
+talking about a while back. You missed fire on that, too, Hardwick. What
+your man dynamited out of Evan's office safe, and what you destroyed,
+were only clever copies. The real letters were stolen by the boy's
+friends, and little as you may believe it, the object of that theft was
+to give you this last chance. The boy was mighty hot under the collar,
+and we couldn't be sure that he wouldn't start the fireworks before the
+band was ready to play. He would have started them, too, if his match
+hadn't been taken away from him."
+
+Mr. McVickar walked around the other end of the table-desk and sat down
+heavily.
+
+"You've spoken twice of a 'last chance' David," he said grittingly.
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's the chance I gave you in the beginning. First, let me tell you
+what I reckon you're already admitting. You're whipped, Hardwick; your
+slate's broken, and your man Reynolds hasn't a ghost of a show--he nor
+any of the others on your string. You haven't made a move that we
+haven't caught onto just about as soon as you put your fingers on the
+piece you meant to move. For instance, that little box up there in the
+beaming just over your head--the one that looks as if it were a part of
+the house electric installation--is a microphone, and one of your own
+men helped to put it up. We've got copies of every letter and telegram
+you've dictated since you had this desk dragged out here a week ago
+Saturday."
+
+"I'm taking all that for granted," was the curt admission.
+
+"Then we'll come down to the nib of the thing and put you out of your
+misery. You've got two things to do--just two, Hardwick. One of 'em is
+to clean house and make a good job of it, just like you let Evan believe
+you were going to do when you sent him out to tell the people of this
+State a lot of things that you didn't mean to have come true; cut out
+all the deals, all the private tariffs, all the little preferentials and
+palm-warmings. When you've done that, you'll find that the other thing
+will mighty nearly do itself."
+
+"Name it," rasped the magnate.
+
+"It's just merely to take your railroad out of politics in this State,
+and keep it out. We've had enough of you, McVickar, and more than
+enough. Is it a bargain?"
+
+"It's a damned one-sided bargain thus far, Blount. What do we get for
+all this?"
+
+Again the senator chuckled genially. "You may not believe it, but we're
+going to let you down easy. You do these two things that I've mentioned,
+and get rid of Kittredge and a few others that have been caught
+red-handed, and the Supreme Court investigation won't touch your
+railroad as a corporation--in other words, it'll go after individuals.
+But you've got to play fair, you know--and bring forth fruits meet for
+repentance, before the fact. How does that strike you?"
+
+Again the vice-president got up to walk the floor, but this time the
+deliberative interval was shorter.
+
+"What is the political programme, as you have it figured out, David?" he
+asked presently.
+
+"It'll be a landslide for us, as I have told you. Gordon will go in by
+the biggest majority that has ever been rolled up in this State.
+Dortscher will succeed himself as attorney-general; and by and by, after
+things have quieted down, he will resign. That will give Gordon the
+appointment of his successor, and I'm thinking it might be a pretty good
+thing for you, as well as for the people of the State, if Alec should
+happen to pick out a bright young fellow who knows your side of the
+question as well as the people's, and who is square enough to give you a
+fair show when it comes to framing up any new railroad legislation."
+
+"That will be your son, I suppose?"
+
+"If he'll take it," was the imperturbable rejoinder.
+
+For the third time the vice-president, dying hard, as befitted him,
+deliberated thoughtfully. At the end of the thoughtful interval he took
+a cigar from the open box and clamped it between his teeth.
+
+"We trade," he said shortly. And then: "How will you take it--in stock
+or bonds?"
+
+The Honorable David rose slowly and snapped the cigar ash into the fire.
+
+"I'm right sorry, Hardwick, but this is one time when I reckon we'll
+have to have what you might call the spot cash. Promises don't go.
+You're too good a fighter to be allowed to get up merely because you've
+hollered 'enough.' Come on into your telegraph-shop and let me hear you
+dictate that string of 'come-off' orders. Then we'll drive to town in my
+road-car, and you can tip off Kittredge and a few of the other
+prominent victims by word of mouth, as you'll most likely want to."
+
+For a full minute after the two had left the lobby together Evan Blount
+sat motionless in the screened orchestra gallery. Then he got up and
+groped once more for the door-knob. It yielded at his touch, and in the
+semi-darkness beyond the opening he saw his father's wife with her arms
+upstretched to him.
+
+"Oh, Evan, dear--am I forgiven?" she asked softly.
+
+"Little mother!" he said, and then he took her face between his hands
+and kissed her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the Honorable David Blount reached the city an hour or more later,
+and had dropped his passenger at the Railway Club, he found his son
+waiting for him in the otherwise deserted sitting-room of the
+Inter-Mountain private suite.
+
+"I couldn't sleep without telling you first, dad," the waiting one broke
+out. "I've been eavesdropping; I was a listener, unwilling at first, but
+not afterward, to everything that was said an hour or so ago in the
+lobby of the little hotel at the head of Shonoho. Do I need to tell you
+in so many words how deep the plough has gone?"
+
+"I reckon not," was the gentle reply. "Neither do you need to tell me
+how you came to be out at Shonoho when I thought I'd left you tied hand
+and foot right here in the hotel." Then, with the quizzical smile
+wrinkling at the corners of the grave eyes: "How does the political
+wrestle strike you by this time, son?"
+
+"It strikes me that I haven't been in it; not even in the outer edges of
+it. Isn't that about the size of it?"
+
+"Oh, no; you've been doing good work, mighty good work. You've helped
+out in the only way that help could come in this campaign; you've
+stirred up a good, healthy public sentiment in favor of a square deal
+for everybody. McVickar was fixing to tangle it all up--get the people
+down on him until they'd simply legislate the life out of his railroad.
+But he couldn't see that."
+
+"He sees it now--the 'machine' has made him see it."
+
+"Yes. You didn't know that a machine could be put to any really
+righteous use, did you, boy? But in this campaign it has gone in to
+knock out the crookedness, big _and_ little. Listen, son; you heard what
+I told McVickar. After you'd sent me that wire from Boston last summer,
+saying you'd come, I lay awake nights projecting how I'd put you in
+training for a spell, and then help you into the saddle and make you the
+boss of the round-up, the same as I'd been. Then it came over me, all of
+a sudden, that I'd been as crooked as a dog's hind leg--that we'd all
+been crooked. Not that I've ever taken a dollar for my personal pocket,
+for I haven't; but I've bought and sold and dickered and schemed with
+the best of 'em, and the worst of 'em. On top of that, I began to ask
+myself how I'd like it to see you wallowing in the same old mud-hole,
+and--well, Evan, boy, you may have a son of your own some day, and then
+you'll know. I let things rock along until you came; until that first
+day at Wartrace when you ripped out at me about hewing to the line.
+Right then and there I made up my mind that I'd put the whole power of
+the 'machine,' as you call it, into one campaign for a clean election
+and a square deal."
+
+"Oh, good Lord!" ejaculated the son, "and I've been fighting you and
+your organization at every turn!"
+
+"Oh, no, you haven't," was the quick rejoinder.
+
+"You've been fighting graft and crookedness, and that's what you thought
+you were hired to do. As you know now, McVickar wasn't playing quite
+fair with you. Just the same, you've been in the hands of your friends,
+right from the start. It's the organization that's been giving you all
+these chances to preach the gospel of the square deal; it was a shrewd
+little captain-general of the organization who pushed Hathaway up
+against you to let you know that the railroad people were running around
+in the same old circles--hollering for justice, and doing everything
+under the sun to defeat the ends of justice--muddying the spring
+because, they say, they don't know what else to do. And, by the way, it
+was that same little captain-general who put you up against the real
+thing to-night, without telling me or anybody else what she was going to
+do."
+
+The younger man left his chair to go to one of the windows where he
+stood for a moment or two looking down upon the street-lights. When he
+turned, it was to say: "I'm with you, dad, heart and soul. But you won't
+mind my saying that I'm still a little bit afraid that you and your kind
+are a menace to civilization and a free government. You'll let me hang
+on to that much of my prejudice, won't you?"
+
+"Sure! Hang on to anything you like, son, and say anything you like. Or,
+rather, let me say something first. How about this 'career' business of
+Patricia's? Have you fixed that up yet?"
+
+Blount shook his head. "She's going home with her father next week," he
+said. And then: "Do you know what she did to-day, dad? She ran the
+little red car into that pine-tree intentionally--so I couldn't get back
+here in time to give Judge Hemingway those affidavits, which we both
+supposed would incriminate you."
+
+"Well, God bless her loyal little soul!" exclaimed the Honorable David,
+and the grave eyes were suspiciously bright. "I hadn't told her a word
+of what I was trying to do; but, Lord love you, Evan, she knew: you
+trust a good woman for knowing, every time, son. And now one more thing:
+Have you come to know Honoria any better in these last few days?"
+
+"Yes; much better, within the last few hours, dad."
+
+"That's good; that does my old heart a heap of good, son! Now then, you
+go straight off to bed and sleep up some. You've had a mighty hard day
+for a sick man. To-morrow morning we'll drive out to Wartrace and get
+ready to touch off the fireworks when the returns trickle in on Tuesday.
+I tell you, boy, Tuesday's election is going to be a regular
+old-fashioned, heave-'em-up and keep-'em-a-going land-slide! Good-night,
+and good dreams--if that cracked head doesn't go and roil 'em all up for
+you."
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+_A LA BONNE HEURE_
+
+
+By some law of contraries, whose workings not even the politically
+profound can fathom, the election proved the truth of the adage that all
+signs fail in a dry time by recording itself as one of the quietest and
+most orderly ever known in the Sage-Brush State. A few editors there
+were, like Blenkinsop, of _The Plainsman_, who maintained stoutly that
+it sounded the death-knell of the machine, but there was no gainsaying
+the result. The "Paramounters" ticket, with or without the help of the
+machine, was elected by sweeping majorities everywhere; and Gantry,
+roaming the corridors and lounging-rooms of the Railway Club and reading
+the bulletins as they were posted, shook his head despairingly over each
+fresh announcement.
+
+Late in the evening, finding that the senator's party had left the
+Inter-Mountain the day before to drive to Wartrace, the traffic manager
+called up the Quaretaro Mesa country-house and poured the news of the
+_debacle_ into Evan Blount's ear.
+
+"We've gone to the everlasting bow-wows, and Mr. McVickar has
+disappeared, and the end of the world has come," was the way he phrased
+it for the listening ear; but the word which came back must have been
+peculiarly heartening, since from that time on to an hour well past
+midnight Gantry figured hilariously as the self-constituted host of any
+and all who would be entertained.
+
+At Wartrace Hall there was also rejoicing, albeit of a quieter sort.
+Five people sat around the cheerful blaze in the library, and when
+Crowell, whose telegraph instrument was in the adjoining den, had
+brought the final report from the outlying wards of the capital, he was
+told to close his key and go to bed.
+
+After the young man had withdrawn, the Honorable David rose to stand
+with his back to the fire.
+
+"Well, Evan, boy, are all the tangles straightened out for you for
+keeps, now?" he asked jovially.
+
+"Just about all of them, dad," laughed the younger man. He had been
+spending a very happy evening, due less to the triumphant story which
+had been pouring in over the wires than to the fact that Patricia had
+been occupying the other half of the small sofa which he had dragged out
+to face the fire.
+
+"Don't feel sore because you didn't get the governor you thought you
+were going to get when you went around preaching the gospel?" said the
+father, still chuckling.
+
+"We've got a better man and a bigger one, I'm sure," was the quick
+reply. Then he added: "But I think I am still doubtful about the
+advisability of injecting the machine principle into politics."
+
+The senator laughed silently.
+
+"Call it 'the organization' instead of 'the machine,' son, and you've
+named the power that moves the civilized world to-day. Man, the
+individual, is just about as helpless as a new-born baby. If you want to
+reform anything, from an unjust poor-law to the tariff, your first move
+is to rustle up a following; after that, you've got to solidify your
+bunch of sympathizers into a working organization--in other words, into
+a machine. Isn't that so, Professor Anners?"
+
+The white-haired professor of palaeontology nodded sleepily. He had been
+dreaming of the Megalosauridae, and had not heard the question.
+
+"You've heard me called 'the boss' from the time Dick Gantry had his
+first talk with you back yonder in Massachusetts," the senator went on,
+turning again to his son. "Call me a man with friends enough to make me
+a sort of foreman of round-ups in the old home State, and you've got it
+about right. I don't say that I've always used the power as it ought to
+be used; the good Lord knows, I'm no more infallible than other folks.
+You've gone through a heap of trouble and worry because you thought,
+when you got ready to knock the wedge out of the log, my fingers were
+going to get caught in the split, along with a lot of others. That would
+have been true enough any other year but this, I reckon, so you didn't
+have your fight and your worry for nothing. I've bought and trafficked
+and bargained and compromised--I don't deny that--but only when it
+seemed as though the end justified the means. Maybe the end never does
+justify the means--I'm open to conviction on that. But sometimes it's
+mighty easy to persuade yourself that it does."
+
+It was just here that the professor awoke with a start and a snort,
+excused himself abruptly, and stumped off to bed. Mrs. Honoria, sitting
+under the drop-light and stitching patiently at her bit of stretched
+linen, laid the tiny embroidery-hoop aside, signalled to her husband,
+and vanished in her turn. A few minutes after she had gone, the senator
+crossed from his corner of the fireplace to stand before the two sitting
+on the little sofa.
+
+"Son," he said gravely, "you've got your work cut out for you from this
+on, and it's a good-sized job. You're going to have a string of hard
+fights, one after the other, and there'll be times when you'll long with
+all your soul for some good, clean-hearted, bright-minded little girl to
+go to for comfort and counsel. Of course, I know that Patricia, here,
+has another job, but--"
+
+The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush had been out of sight and hearing for
+five full minutes when Evan Blount reached over and possessed himself of
+the hand that was shading a pair of deep-welled eyes from the firelight.
+
+"Last Sunday afternoon, Patricia, when I had right and reason and logic
+on my side, your woman's intuition found the truer path," he said, in
+sober humility. "I know I am only one, and your poor people to whom you
+have been planning to give yourself are many; still, I am selfish enough
+to--"
+
+She looked up quickly and the deep-welled eyes were shining.
+
+"We can't learn everything all at once, Evan, dear," she interrupted,
+breaking in upon his pleading. "There was one moment in that Sunday
+afternoon when I learned the greatest thing of all; it was the moment
+when I saw the pine-tree lying across the road and knew what I should
+do, and for whom I should do it."
+
+"I know," he returned gently. "You learned that love is stronger than
+death or the fear of death; and that loyalty is greater than many
+ideals. You heard what my father said just now, and it is true--only he
+didn't put it half vitally enough; I can't walk in the way he has marked
+out for me without you, Patricia."
+
+With a swift little love impulse she lifted his hand and pressed it to
+her cheek.
+
+"You needn't, Evan, dear," she said simply.
+
+THE END
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Transcribers Note: This section was originally at the beginning of the
+text.]
+
+
+BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE
+
+Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.
+  12mo                          _net_ $1.30
+
+Scientific Sprague. Illus. 12mo _net_ $1.25
+
+The Price. 12mo                 _net_ $1.30
+
+The Taming of Red Butte Western.
+  Illus. 12mo                       $1.50
+
+The King of Arcadia. Illus. 12mo    $1.50
+
+A Romance in Transit. 16mo            .75
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush, by Francis Lynde
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16573.txt or 16573.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/5/7/16573/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
+
diff --git a/16573.zip b/16573.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1240b4f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16573.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1bb987a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #16573 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16573)