Chapter III: Part 3

"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?"