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The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush

by Francis Lynde · English · Gutenberg #16573 · 569,354 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush

Author: Francis Lynde


        
Release date: August 21, 2005 [eBook #16573]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE 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

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