Chapter IV: Part 4

Blount laid the second cigar aside and crossed the room to readjust a half-opened ventilating transom. Mr. McVickar had not defined the duties of the new counselship very clearly, but there had been a strong inference running through the private-car conference to the effect that the headship of the local legal department would carry with it some political responsibilities. At the moment the newly appointed placeman had been rather glad that such was the case. The vice-president had convinced him of the justice of the railroad company's contention--namely, that the present laws of the State, if rigidly administered, amounted to a practical confiscation of the company's property. While Mr. McVickar was talking, Blount had hoped that the new office which the vice-president was apparently creating for him would give him a free hand to place the company's point of view fairly before the people of the State, and to do this he knew he would have to enter the campaign in some sort as a political worker. Surely, his father must know this; and he went boldly upon the assumption that his father did know it.

"As I have said, I am to be chief of the legal department on this division, and as such it will be necessary for me to defend my client both in court and out of court," he said finally. "Since I am fairly committed, I shall try to stay on the job."

"Of course you will. You've got to be honest with yourself--and with McVickar. I don't mind telling you, son, that I'm flat-footed on the other side this time, and I had hoped you were going to be. But if you're not, why, that's the end of it. We won't quarrel about it."

Now this was not at all the paternal attitude as the young man had been prefiguring it. He had looked for opposition; finding it, he would have found it possible to say some of the things which were crying to be said and which still remained unsaid. But there was absolutely no loophole through which he could force the attack. If his late decision had been of no more importance than the breaking of a dinner engagement, his father could scarcely have dismissed it with less apparent concern. Balked and practically talked to a standstill in the business matter, Blount switched to other things.

"I missed you to-night at dinner," he said, beginning on the new tack. "Two of my Cambridge friends are here, and I wanted you to meet them."

The Honorable David looked up quickly.

"The fossil-digging professor and his daughter?" he queried shrewdly.

"Yes; how did you know? They came in on the Overland, and I find that the professor has made the long journey on the strength of what I once told him about the megatheriums and things. I guess it's up to me to make good in some way."

"Don't you worry a minute about that, Evan, boy," was the instant rejoinder. "Honoria's coming in from Wartrace to-morrow, and if you'll put us next, we'll take care of your friends--mighty good care of 'em." Then, almost wistfully Blount thought: "You won't mind letting Honoria do that much for you, will you, son?"

"I'd be a cad if I did. And you've taken a load off of my shoulders, I can assure you. If you can persuade Mrs. Blount into it, I'll arrange for a little dinner of five to-morrow evening in the _café_ where we can all get together. You'll like the professor, I know; and I hope you're going to like Patricia. She's New England, and at first you may think she's a bit chilly. But really she isn't anything of the kind."

The Honorable Senator got up and strolled to the window.

"You'd better go to bed, son," he advised. "It's getting to be mighty late, and you'll want to be surging around some with these friends of yours to-morrow. And, before I forget it, the big car is in Heffelfinger's garage. Order it out after breakfast and show the Cambridge folks a good time."

It was late the following evening, several hours after the informal little dinner for five in the Inter-Mountain _café_, when the senator had himself lifted from the lobby to the private-suite floor and made his way to the door of his own apartments. As was her custom when they were together, his wife was waiting up for him.

"Did you find out anything more?" she asked, without looking up from the tiny embroidery frame which was her leisure-filling companion at home or elsewhere.

"Not enough to hurt anything. McVickar has fixed things to suit himself. The boy's law-office job is to be pretty largely nominal; a sort of go-as-you-please and do-as-you-like proposition on the side, with Ackerton to do all the sure-enough court work and legal drudgery. Since Ackerton is a pretty clean fellow, and Evan stands up so straight that he leans over backward, this lay-out means that the bribing isn't going to be done by the legal department in the coming campaign."

"Is that all?"

"All but one little thing. Evan's job is to be more or less associated with the traffic department, and the word has been passed to Gantry and his crowd to see to it that the boy doesn't get to know too much."

"But they can't keep him from finding out about the underground work!" protested the small one.

"If it's an order from headquarters, they're going to try mighty hard. Evan wants to believe that everything is on the high moral plane, and when a man wants to believe a thing it isn't so awfully hard to fool him. It'll be a winning card for them if they can send the boy out to talk convincingly about the cleanness of the company's campaign. That sort of talk, handed out as Evan can hand it, if he is convinced of the truth of what he is saying, will capture the honest voter every time. I tell you, little woman, there's a thing we politicians are constantly losing sight of: that down at the bedrock bottom the American voter--'the man in the street,' as the newspapers call him--is a fair man and an honest man. Speaking broadly, you couldn't buy him with a clear title to a quarter-section in Paradise."

This little eulogy upon the American voter appeared to be wasted upon the small person in the wicker rocking-chair. "We must get him back," she remarked, referring, not to the American voter, but to the senator's son. "Have you thought of any plan?"

"No."

She smiled up at him sweetly. "You are like the good doctor who cannot prescribe for the members of his own family. If he were anybody else's son, you would know exactly what to do."

"Perhaps I should."

"I have a plan," she went on quietly, bending again over her embroidery. "He may have to take a regular course of treatment, and it may make him very ill; would you mind that?"

David Blount leaned back in his chair and regarded her through half-closed eyelids. "You're a wonder, little woman," he said; and then: "I don't want to see the boy suffer any more than he has to."

"Neither do I," was the swift agreement. Then, with no apparent relevance: "What do you think of Miss Anners?"

The senator sat up at the question, with the slow smile wrinkling humorously at the corners of his eyes.

"I haven't thought much about her yet. She's the kind that won't let you get near enough in a single sitting to think much about her, isn't she?"

"She is a young woman with an exceedingly bright mind and a very high purpose," was the little lady's summing-up of Patricia. "But she isn't altogether a Boston iceberg. She thinks she is irrevocably in love with her chosen career; but, really, I believe she is very much in love with Evan. If we could manage to win her over to our side as an active ally--"

This time the senator's smile broadened into a laugh.

"You are away yonder out of my depth now," he chuckled. "Does your course of treatment for the boy include large doses of the young woman, administered frequently?"

"Oh, no," was the instant reply. "I was only wondering if it wouldn't be well to enroll her--enlist her sympathies, you know."

"Why not?--if you think best? You're the fine-haired little wire-puller, and it's all in your hands."

"Will you give me _carte-blanche_ to do as I please?" asked the small plotter.

"Sure!" said the Honorable David heartily, adding: "You can always outfigure me, two to one, when it comes to the real thing. You've made a fine art of it, Honoria, and I'll turn the steering-wheel over to you any day in the week."

When she looked up she was smiling in the way which had made Evan Blount wonder, in that midnight meeting at Wartrace Hall, how she could look so young and yet be so wise.

"You deal with people in the mass, David, and no one living can do it better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?"

"I don't know; any time when you will invite them to make Wartrace their headquarters, I reckon."

"Then I think it will be to-morrow," decided the confident mistress of policies. "It won't do to let Evan see too much of Patricia until after his course of treatment is well under way. Shall we make it to-morrow? And will you telephone Dawkins to bring down the biggest car? I have a notion wandering around in my head somewhere that Miss Patricia Anners will stand a little judicious impressing. She is exceedingly democratic, you know--in theory."

IX

THE RANK AND FILE

Considerably to his surprise, and no less to his satisfaction, the newly appointed "division counsel," as his title ran, was not required to take over the old legal department offices in the second story of the station building, where all the other offices of the company were located. Instead, he was directed to fit up a suite of rooms in Temple Court, the capital's most pretentious up-town sky-scraper, and there was something more than a hint that the item of first cost would not be too closely scrutinized.

It was the vice-president himself, writing from Chicago, who authorized the new departure and loosened the purse strings. "Don't be afraid of spending a little money," wrote the great man. "Make your up-town headquarters as attractive as may be, and arrange matters with Ackerton so that your office will not be burdened with too much of the routine legal work. A successful legal representative will be a good mixer--as I am sure you are--and will extend the circle of his acquaintance as rapidly and as far as possible. Your appointment will be fully justified when you have made your up-town office a place where the good citizens of the capital and the State can drop in for a cordial word with the company's spokesman."

Acting upon this suggestion, Blount opened the Temple Court headquarters at once and threw himself energetically into the indicated field. Ackerton, a technical expert with a needle-like mind and the State code at his fingers'-ends, was left in charge of the working offices in the railroad building, with instructions to apply to his chief only when he needed specific advice.

At the up-town headquarters, Blount gave himself wholly to the pleasant task of making friends. With a good store of introductions upon which to make a beginning, and with the open-handed, whole-souled _camaraderie_ of the West to help, the list of acquaintances grew with amazing rapidity. For the three or four weeks after Mrs. Blount had whisked the Annerses away to Wartrace Hall and the habitat of the Megalosauridæ, the newly appointed "social secretary" for the railroad, as Honoria had dubbed him, met all comers joyously and accepted all invitations, never inquiring whether they were extended to his father's son, to the railroad company's legal chief, or to Evan Blount in his proper person.

During this social interval he saw little of his father, though he was still occupying his share of the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain. Part of the time, as he knew, the Honorable Senator was at Wartrace Hall, looking after his mammoth ranch, and helping to entertain the visitors from Massachusetts. But now and again the father came and went; and occasionally there was a dinner _à deux_ in the hotel _café_, with a little good-natured raillery from the senator's side of the table.

"Got you chasing your feet right lively in the social merry-go-round these days, haven't they, son? Like it, as far as you've gone?" said the ex-cattle-king one evening when Evan had come down in evening clothes, ready to go to madam the governor's wife's strictly formal "informal" a little later on.

"It's all in the day's work," laughed the younger man. "I shall need all the 'pull' I can get a little later on, sha'n't I?"

"I shouldn't wonder if you did, son; I shouldn't wonder if you did. And I reckon you're doing pretty good work, too, mixing and mingling the way you do. Was it McVickar's idea, or your own--this sudden splash into the social water-hole?"

"I don't mind telling you that it is a part of the new policy," returned the social splasher, still smiling. "We are out to make friends this time; good, solid, open-eyed friends who will know just what we are doing and why we are doing it."

"H'm," mused the senator, "so publicity's the new word, is it?"

"Yes; publicity is the word. The Gordon people say they are going to show us up; there won't be anything to show up when the time comes. We are going to beat them to the billboards."

The grizzled veteran of a goodly number of political battles put down his coffee-cup; he was still old-fashioned enough to drink his coffee in generous measure with the meat courses.

"You can't do the circus act--ride two horses at once and do the same stunt on both, son," he remarked gravely. "If you're really going to put the saddle and bridle on the publicity nag, you've got to turn the other one out of the corral and let it go back to the short-grass."

"It is already turned out," asserted the young man, not affecting to misunderstand. "We neither buy votes nor spend illegitimate money in this campaign."

The stout assertion was good as far as it went; the new division counsel made it and believed it. But on his way to the governor's mansion, a little later, he could not help wondering if he had been altogether candid in making it. The offices in the up-town sky-scraper were not exclusively a railroad social centre where the disinterested voter could come and have the facts ladled out to him without fear or favor on the part of the ladler. They had come to be also a rallying-point for a heterogeneous crowd of ward-workers, wire-pullers, and small politicians, most of whom were anxious to be employed or retained as henchmen. Some of these "stretcher men," as Blount contemptuously called them, had been employed in past campaigns; others were still the beneficiaries of the railroad, holding pay-roll places which Blount acutely suspected were chiefly sinecures.

Latterly, this contingent of strikers and heelers had been greatly augmented, and it was beginning to make its demands more emphatic. A dozen times a day Blount had the worn phrase, "nothing for nothing," dinned into his ears, and he was beginning to harbor a suspicion that his office had been made a dumping-ground for all the other departments.

Seeing Gantry at madam the governor's lady's reception, Blount took an early opportunity of cornering the traffic manager in one of the otherwise deserted smoking-dens, and when he had made sure there were no eavesdroppers plunged at once into the middle of things.

"See here, Dick," he began, "you fellows downtown are making my office a cesspool, and I won't stand for it. Garrigan, that saloon-keeper in the second ward, came up to-day to ask for a free ticket to Worthington and return; and when I pinned him down he admitted that you'd sent him to me."

"I did," said Gantry, grinning. "Why otherwise have we got a post-graduate, double-certificated political manager, I'd like to know?"

Blount dropped into a chair and felt in his pockets for his cigar-case.

"I guess we may as well fight this thing to a finish right here and now, Dick," he said coolly. "I'm not chief vote buyer for the Transcontinental Company--I'm not any kind of a vote buyer."

"Who said you were?" retorted the traffic manager.

"It says itself, if I am supposed to cut the pie and hand out pieces of it to these grub-stakers that you and Carson and Bentley and Kittredge are continually sending to me."

This time Gantry's grin was playful, but behind it there was a shrewd flash of the Irish-blue eyes that Blount did not see.

"I guess the company would be plenty willing to furnish a few small pies for really hungry people, if you think you need them to go along with your Temple Court office fittings," he returned.

"Ah?" said Blount calmly, giving the exclamation the true Boston inflection. "You are either too shrewd or not quite shrewd enough, Dick. You covered that up with a laugh, so that I might take it as a joke if I happened to be too thin-skinned to take it in disreputable earnest. Let us understand each other; we are fighting squarely in the open in this campaign; publicity is the word--I have Mr. McVickar for my authority. Anybody who wants to know anything about the railroad company's business in this State can learn it for the asking, and at first-hand. Secrecy and all the various brands of political claptrap that have been admitted in the past are to be shown the door. This is the intimation that was made to me: wasn't it made to you?"

Gantry did not reply directly to the direct demand. On the other hand, he very carefully refrained from answering it in any degree whatsoever.

"You have your job to hold down and I have mine," he rejoined. "What you say goes as it lies, of course; but just the same, I shouldn't be too righteously hard on the little brothers, if I were you."

"If by the 'little brothers' you mean the pie-eaters, I'm going to fire them out, neck and crop, Richard. They make me excessively weary."

Gantry's playful mood fell away from him like a cast-off garment.

"I don't quite believe I'd do that, if I were you, Evan. There are pie-eaters on both sides in every political contest, and while they can't do any cause any great amount of good, they can often do a good bit of harm. I wouldn't be too hard on them, if I were you."

"What would you do?--or, rather, what did you do when you were managing the State campaign two years ago?" inquired Blount pointedly.

"I cut the pie," said the traffic manager simply.

"In other words, you let this riffraff blackmail you and, incidentally, put a big black mark against the company's good name."

"Oh, no; I wouldn't put it quite that strong. Not many of these little fellows ask for money, or expect it. A free ride now and then in the varnished cars is about all they look for."

"But you can't give them passes under the interstate law," protested the purist.

"Not outside of the State, of course. But inside of the State boundaries it's our own business."

"You mean it _was_ our own business, previous to the passage of the State rate law two years ago," corrected Blount.

"It is our own business to this good day--in effect. That part of the law has been a complete dead-letter from the day the governor signed it. Why, bless your innocent heart, Evan, the very men who argued the loudest and voted the most spitefully for it came to me for their return tickets home at the end of the session. Of course, we kept the letter of the law. It says that no 'free passes' shall be given. We didn't issue passes; we merely gave them tickets out of the case and charged them up to 'expense.'"

"Faugh!" said Blount, "you make me sick! Gantry, it's that same childish whipping of the devil around the stump by the corporations--an expedient that wouldn't deceive the most ignorant voter that ever cast a ballot--it's that very thing that has stirred the whole nation up to this unreasonable fight against corporate capital. Don't you see it?"

Gantry shrugged his shoulders.

"I guess I take the line of the least resistance--like the majority of them," was the colorless reply. "When it comes down to practical politics--"

"Don't say 'practical politics' to me, Dick!" rasped the reformer. "We've got the strongest argument in the world in the fact that the present law is an unfair one, needing modification or repeal. We mustn't spoil that argument by becoming law-breakers ourselves and descending to the methods of the grafters and the machine politicians the country over. If you have been sending these pie-eaters to me, stop it--don't do it any more. I have no earthly use for them; and they won't have any use for me after I open up on them and tell them a few things they don't seem to know, or to care to know."

"I don't believe I'd do anything brash," Gantry suggested mildly, and he was still saying the same thing in diversified forms when Blount led the way back to the crowded drawing-rooms.

Dating from this little heart-to-heart talk with the traffic manager, Blount began to carry out the new policy--the starvation policy, as it soon came to be known among the would-be henchmen. The result was not altogether reassuring. The first few rebuffs he administered left him with the feeling that he was winning Pyrrhic victories; it was as if he were trying to handle a complicated mechanism with the working details of which he was only theoretically familiar. There were wheels within wheels, and the application of the brakes to the smallest of them led to discordant janglings throughout the whole.

Many of the small grafters were on the pay-rolls of the railroad company, and Blount was soon definitely assured of what he had before only suspected--that they were merely nominal employees given a pay-roll standing so that there might be an excuse for giving them free transportation, and a retainer in the form of wages, if needful.

In many cases the ramifications of the petty graft were exasperatingly intricate. For example: one Thomas Gryson, who was on the pay-rolls as a machinist's helper in the repair shops, demanded free transportation across the State for eight members of his "family." Questioned closely, he admitted that the "family" was his only by a figure of speech; that the relationship was entirely political. Blount promptly refused to recommend the issuing of employees' passes for the eight, and the result was an immediate call from Bentley, the division master mechanic.

"About that fellow Gryson," Bentley began; "can't you manage some way to get him transportation for his Jonesboro crowd? He is going to make trouble for us if you don't."

Blount was justly indignant. "Gryson is on your pay-roll," he retorted. "Why don't you recommend the passes yourself, on account of the motive-power department, if he is entitled to them?"

"I can't," admitted the master mechanic. "I am held down to the issuing of passes to employees travelling on company business only. We can stretch it a little sometimes, of course, but we can't make it cover the whole earth."

"Neither can I!" Blount exploded. "Let it be understood, once for all, Mr. Bentley, that I am not the scape-goat for all the other departments! I have cut it off short; I am not recommending passes for anybody."

"But, suffering Scott, Mr. Blount, we've simply _got_ to take care of Tom Gryson! He's the boss of his ward, and he has influence enough to turn even our own employees against us!"

"Influence?" scoffed the young man from the East. "How does he acquire his influence? It is merely another illustration of the vicious circle; you put into his hands the club with which he proceeds to knock you down. Let me tell you what I'm telling everybody; if we want a square deal, we've got to set the example by being square. And, by Heavens, Mr. Bentley, we're going to set the example!"

The master mechanic went away silenced, but by no means convinced; and a week later Gryson, who in appearance was a typical tough, and who in reality was a post-graduate of the hard school of violence and ruffianage obtaining in the lawless mining-camps of the Carnadine Hills, sauntered into Blount's office with his cigar at the belligerent angle and an insolent taunt in his mouth.

"Well, pardner, we got them dickie-birds o' mine over to Jonesboro, after so long a time, and no thanks to you, neither. I just blew in to tell you that I'm goin' to hit you ag'in about day after to-morrow, and if you don't come across there's goin' to be somethin' doin'; see?"

Blount sprang from his chair and forgot to be politic.

"You needn't come to me the day after to-morrow, or any other time," he raged. "I'm through with you and your tribe. Get out!"

After Gryson, muttering threats, had gone, the young campaign manager had an attack of moral nausea. It seemed such a prodigious waste of time and energy to traffic and chaffer with these petty scoundrels. Thus far, every phase of the actual political problem seemed to be meanly degrading, and he was beginning to long keenly for an opportunity to do some really worthy thing.

Notwithstanding, his ideals were still unshaken. He still clung to the belief that the corporation, which was created by the law and could exist only under the protection of the law, must, of necessity, be a law-abiding entity. It was manifestly unfair to hold it responsible for the disreputable political methods of those whom it could never completely control--methods, too, which had been forced upon it by the necessity, or the fancied necessity, of meeting conditions as they were found.

As if in answer to the wish that he might find the worthier task, it was on this day of Gryson's visit that Blount was given his first opportunity of entering the wider field. A letter from a local party chairman in a distant mining town brought an invitation of the kind for which he had been waiting and hoping. He was asked to participate in a joint debate at the campaign opening in the town in question, and he was so glad of the chance that he instantly wired his acceptance.

That evening, at the Inter-Mountain _café_ dinner hour, he found his father dining alone and joined him. In a burst of confidence he told of the invitation.

"That's good; that's the real thing this time, isn't it?" was the senator's even-toned comment. "Gives you a right nice little chance to shine the way you can shine best." Then: "That was one of the things McVickar wanted you for, wasn't it?--speech-making and the like?"

"Why, yes; he intimated that there might be some public speaking," admitted the younger man.

"Well, what-all are you going to tell these Ophir fellows when you get over there, son?" asked the veteran quizzically. "Going to offer 'em all free passes anywhere they want to go if they'll promise to vote for the railroad candidates?"

"Not this year," was the laughing reply. "As I told you a while back, we've stopped all that."

"You have, eh? I reckon that will be mighty sorry news for a good many people in the old Sage-brush State--mighty sorry news. You really reckon you _have_ stopped it, do you, son?"

"I not only believe it; I am in a position to assert it definitely."

"McVickar has told you it was stopped?"

The newly fledged political manager tried to be strictly truthful.

"I have had but the one interview with Mr. McVickar, but in that talk he gave me to understand that my recommendations would be given due consideration. And I have said my say pretty emphatically."

The senator's smile was not derisive; it was merely lenient.

"Sat on 'em good and hard, did you? That's right, son; don't you ever be afraid to say what you mean, and to say it straight from the shoulder. That's the Blount way, and I reckon we've got to keep the family ball rolling--you and I. Don't forget that, when you're making your appeal to those horny-handed sons of toil over yonder at Ophir. Give 'em straight facts, and back up the facts with figures--if you happen to have the figures. When do you pull out for the mining-camp?"

"To-night, at nine-thirty. I can't get there in time if I wait for the morning train." Then, dismissing the political topic abruptly: "What do you hear from Professor Anners?"

"Oh, he's having the time of his life. I got him a State permit, and scraped him up a bunch of pick-and-shovel men, and he is digging out those fossil skeletons by the wagon-load."

"And Miss Anners?" pursued Patricia's lover.

"I shouldn't wonder if she was having the time of her life, too. I've given her the little four-seated car to call her own while she is out here, and she and Honoria go careering around the country--breaking the speed limit every minute in the day, I reckon."

"I'm glad you are giving her a good time," said Evan, and he looked glad. Then he added regretfully: "I wish I could get a chance to chase around a little with them. I have seen almost nothing of them since they came West. I should think Mrs. Blount might bring Patricia down to the city once in a while."

"Well, now! perhaps the young woman doesn't want to come," laughed the senator. "You told me you hadn't got her tag, son, and I'm beginning to believe it's the sure-enough truth. What has she got against you, anyway?"

"Nothing; nothing in the wide world, save that I don't fit into her scheme for her life-work."

The senator was eating calmly through his dessert. "If you hadn't made up your mind so pointedly to dislike Honoria, you might be getting a few tips on that 'career' business along about now, son," he remarked, and Evan was silent--had to be silent. For, you see, he had been charging Patricia's continued absence from the capital to nothing less than spiteful design on the part of his father's wife.

It was at the cigar smoking in the lobby, after the young man had made his preparations for the journey and was waiting for the train-caller's announcement, that the senator said quite casually: "It's too bad you're going out of town to-night, son. Honoria 'phoned me a little spell ago that she and Patricia would be driving down after their dinner to take in the Weatherford reception. You'll have to miss 'em, won't you?"

The announcer was chanting the call for the night train west, and the joint-debater got up and thrust his hand-bag savagely into the hand of the nearest porter.

"Isn't that just my infernal luck!" he lamented. Then: "Give them my love, and tell them I hope they will stay until I get back."

The senator rose and shook hands with the departing debater. "Shall I say that to both of 'em?" he asked, with the quizzical smile which Evan was learning to expect.

"Yes; to both of them, if you like--only I suppose Mrs. Blount will hold it against me. Good-night and good-by. I'll be back day after to-morrow, if the Ophir miners don't mob me."

It was only a few minutes after Evan Blount's train had steamed Ophir-ward out of the Sierra Avenue station that a dust-covered touring-car drew up at the curb in front of the Inter-Mountain, and the same porter who had put Blount's hand-bag into the taxicab opened the tonneau door for two ladies in muffling motor-coats and heavy veils.

The senator met the two late travellers in the vestibule, and while the three were waiting for an elevator a rapid fire of low-toned question and answer passed between husband and wife.

"You got Evan out of the way?" whispered the wife.

The husband nodded. "That was easy. I passed the word to Steuchfield, and he helped out on that--invited Evan to come to Ophir to speak in a joint debate. He left on the night train."

"And Hathaway? Will he be here?"

"He is here. Gantry has turned him down, according to instructions, and he is clawing about in the air, trying to get a fresh hold. I bluffed him; told him he'd have to make his peace with you for something, I didn't know what, before I could talk to him."

Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal glow as the car descended, and the wife's voice sank to a still lower whisper.

"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired eagerly.

"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there."

The small plotter nodded approval.

"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready," she directed; and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to finish his cigar.

X

IN THE HERBARIUM

The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people, and so newly rich that the crisp bank-notes fairly crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them, kept their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like mansion in Mesa Circle, the most expensive, if not the most aristocratic, no-thoroughfare of the capital city. Weatherford, the father, egged on by Mrs. Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward a United States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province of the next legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view carefully tucked away inside of it--an outlook upon life which was a survival from his hard-working past--would willingly have dodged, but Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable. There were two grown daughters and a growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.

The reception for which the senator's wife and her guest had driven thirty miles through the dust of the sage-brush hills was one of the many moves in Mrs. Weatherford's private campaign. For the opening-gun occasion the great house in Mesa Circle was lighted from basement to turret--to all of the numerous turrets; an awning fringed with electric bulbs sheltered the carpeted walk from the street to the grand entrance, an army of lackeys paraded in the vestibule, and the wives and daughters of the bravest and best in the capital city's political contingent stood with Mrs. Weatherford in the long receiving-line.

From room to room in the vast house a curiously assorted throng of the bidden ones worked its way as the jam and crush permitted. A firm believer in the maxim that in numbers there is strength, the hostess had made her invitation-list long and catholic. For the gossips there were the crowded drawing-rooms, for the hungry there were Lucullian tables, and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.

It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs. Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was because no one had remembered to mention the name of it to her.

Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably late at the function in Mesa Circle, but in the crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the hostess and her long line of receiving assistants were still on duty. Having successfully passed the line with her husband and Patricia, little Mrs. Blount looked about her, saw Mr. Richard Gantry, signalled to him with her eyes, and, with the traffic manager for her centre-rush to wedge a way through the crowded rooms, was presently lost to sight--at least from Miss Anners's point of view.

Whether she knew it or not, from the moment of her appearance at the hostess's end of the long receiving-line, the senator's wife had been marked and followed in her slow progress through the rooms by a thin-faced man who seemed to be nervously trying to hunch himself into better relations with his ill-fitting dress-coat, an eager gentleman whose hawk-like eyes never lost sight of the little lady with her hand on Gantry's arm. Only the senator saw and remarked this bit of by-play, and he looked as if he were enjoying it, the shrewd gray eyes lighting humorously as he bent to hear what Patricia was saying.

When his quarry stopped, as she did frequently to chat with one or another of the guests, the man with the hawk-like profile and the nervous hunch circled warily, and once or twice seemed about to make the opportunity which was so slow in making itself. But it was not until the little lady in the claret-colored party-gown had drifted, still with a hand on Gantry's arm, in among the palm and banana trees of the herbarium that the bird-of-prey person made his swoop. A moment later Gantry, taking a low-toned command from his companion, was disappearing in the direction of the refreshment-tables, and the lady looked up to say: "Dear me, Mr. Hathaway, you almost startled me!"

"Did I?" said the lumber-king, rather grimly, if he meant the query to be apologetic. "I am sorry. I didn't mean to; but Mrs. Gordon said I would find you here, and so I took the liberty of following you. I'm needing a little straightening out, you know, and--ah--would you mind letting me talk business with you for a minute or two, Mrs. Blount?"

She drew her gown aside, and made room for him on the carved rustic settee, which was exceedingly uncomfortable to sit in, but which was in perfect harmony with the background of gigantic palmettos. He nodded gratefully and took the place, and the manner of his sitting down was that of a man who wears evening-clothes only under compulsion.

"Business?" she was saying. "Certainly not; if you can talk business in such a place as this"--giving him the coveted permission.

"Perhaps it ain't what you'd call business--maybe it's only politics," he resumed; then, with the abruptness of one whose dealings have been with men oftener than with women: "In the first place, I wish you'd tell me what I've been doing to get myself into your bad books."

She laughed easily. "Who said you had been doing anything, Mr. Hathaway?" she asked.

"The senator," he answered shortly, adding: "He told me I'd have to make my peace with you."

She had developed a sudden interest in the quaint Japanese figures on the ivory sticks of her fan. "You want something, Mr. Hathaway; what is it?" she inquired.

"I want to be put next in this pigs-in-clover railroad puzzle," was the blunt statement of the need. "Our freight contract with the Transcontinental is about to expire, and I'd like to get it renewed on the same terms as before."

"Well," she said ingenuously, "why don't you do it?"

"I can't," he blustered. "Everybody has suddenly grown mysterious or gone crazy--I don't know which. Kittredge, the general superintendent, don't seem to remember that we ever had any contract, and Gantry is just as bad. And when I go to the senator he tells me I must make my peace with you. I'm left out in the cold; I can't begin to _sabe_ what the senator and these railroad brass-collar men are driving at. I've got something to sell; something that the railroad company needs. Where the d---- I mean, where's the hitch?"

The small person in the fetching party-gown reached up and pinched a leaf from a fragrant shrub fronting the settee.

"Mr. Gantry has gone to fetch me an ice, and he will be back in a very few minutes," she suggested mildly. "Consider your peace made, Mr. Hathaway, and tell me what I can do for you."

"You can put me next," said the lumber lord, going back to the only phrase that seemed to fit the exigencies of the case. "Why the--why can't we get our contract renewed?"

The little lady was opening and shutting her fan slowly. "What was your contract?" she inquired innocently.

"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you," he said bluntly. "But you do know. It's the rebate lumber rate from our mills at Twin Buttes and elsewhere, and it was given us two years ago, a few days before election."

"And the consideration?" she asked, looking up quickly.

"You know that, too, Mrs. Blount. It was the swinging of the solid employees' vote of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company over to the railroad ticket."

"And you wish to make the same arrangement again?"

"Exactly. We've got to have that preferential rate or go out of business."

"With whom did you make the contract two years ago?"

"With Mr. McVickar, verbally. Of course, there wasn't anything put down in black and white, but the railroad folks did their part and we did ours."

"I see--a gentleman's agreement," she murmured; and then: "You have tried Mr. McVickar again?"

"Yes, and he referred me to Gantry."

"And what did Mr. Gantry say?"

"I couldn't get him to say anything with any sense in it," said the lumber magnate grittingly. "The most I could get out of him was that I would have to see the boss."

"And instead of doing that you went to see the senator?" she asked.

"Of course I did. Who else would Gantry mean by 'the boss'?" demanded the befogged one.

"Possibly he meant the senator's son," she ventured, tapping a pretty cheek with the folded fan. "Have you been leaving Evan Blount out in all of this?"

"I didn't know where to put him in. That's what brings me here to-night. The senator, or McVickar, or both of them together, have set the whole State to running around in circles with this appointment of young Blount. Some say it's a deal between the senator and McVickar, and some say it's a fight. Half of the professional spellbinders are walking in their sleep over it right now. I thought maybe you could tell me, Mrs. Blount."

"I can't tell you anything that would help the people who are walking in their sleep," she returned, "but I might offer a suggestion in your personal affair. Mr. Evan Blount is your man."

Hathaway pursed his thin lips and frowned. "I'm in bad there--right at the jump," he objected.

"I know," she shot back quickly. "For some reason best known to yourself, you saw fit to have Mr. Evan waylaid and man-handled on the first night of his return to his native State. But you needn't worry about that. He won't hold it against you. I'm sure you'll find him entirely amenable to reason."

The tyrant of "timber-jacks" frowned again. "H'm--reason, eh? How big a block of Twin Buttes stock shall I offer him?"

Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.

"You always figure in dollars and cents, don't you, Mr. Simon Peter Hathaway?" she mocked.

"I have always found it the cheapest in the end."

"Listen," she said, with the folded fan held up like a monitory finger. "Mr. Gantry may be back any minute, and I can give you only the tiniest hint. You must go to Mr. Evan Blount and appeal to him frankly, as one business man to another."

"But I have heard--they say he's all kinds of a crank."

"Never mind what you have heard. Tell him all the facts and ask him to help you, and for mercy's sake don't offer him a block of your stock. Put it where it will do the most good. Put it in the name of Professor William J. Anners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and show Mr. Blount how dreadfully disastrous the loss of the preferential freight rate would be to all the poor people in your list of stock-holders--including Professor Anners."

Hathaway drew down his cuff and made a pencil memorandum of the name and address of the new beneficiary.

"You'll notice that I'm not asking any foolish questions about who this Professor Anners is, or why I should be making him a present of a block of stock. If I don't, it's because what you say goes as it lies. Anything else?"

"Yes; don't fail to be perfectly frank with Mr. Blount, and don't let him put you off. He may pretend to be very angry at first, but you won't mind that."

"I won't mind anything if I can bring this business down to the every-day commonplace earth once more. You and the senator and Gantry and McVickar are playing some sort of a game, and you ain't showing me anything more than the back of the cards. That's all right. I guess I'm fly enough to play my hand blindfolded, if I've got to. I don't care, just so I win the odd trick."

Gantry was coming down the avenue of banana-trees with the ice he had taken so much time to procure, and the lumber magnate rose reluctantly. There was time for only one more question, and he put it hastily.

"When and where can I find Evan Blount?" he asked.

"The day after to-morrow, at his office in Temple Court. He is out of the city now, but--" Here Gantry's coming put an end to the private conference, and the president of the Twin Buttes company went his way.

Not until they had served out their full sentence at Mrs. Weatherford's crush, and were back in the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain, with Miss Anners safely behind the closed door of her own apartment, did the small conspirator pass the word of good hope on to her husband.

"It is working beautifully," she exulted. "He will go to see Evan day after to-morrow--and after that, the deluge."

XI

THE GREAT GAME

If Evan Blount, as the representative of the unpopular railroad, had been anticipating an unfriendly reception at the great gold-camp in the Carnadine Hills, he was agreeably disappointed. A committee of citizens, headed by Jasper Steuchfield, the "Paramounter" chairman for Carnadine County, met him at the train, escorted him to the hotel, and, during the afternoon which was at his disposal, gave him joyously and hilariously the freedom of the camp.

The political meeting, called for an early hour in the evening, was held in the Carnadine Mining Company's ore-shed, electric-lighted for the occasion. When the hour came the big shed was packed with an enthusiastic audience, and there were prolonged cheers and hand-clappings when the railroad advocate took his seat on the improvised platform as the guest of the local committee.

Later, when Judge Crowley, candidate prospective on the popular ticket for the State Senate, opened the joint debate with a shrewd arraignment of the methods of the railroad company, not only in its dealings with the public as a common carrier, but also in the pertinacity with which it invaded the political field, there was tumultuous applause; but it was no heartier than that which greeted Blount when he rose to present the railroad side of the argument.

During the journey from the capital, which had consumed the night and the greater portion of the forenoon, he had prepared his speech. His argument--the one unanswerable argument, as it appeared to him--was the absurdity and injustice of a law which presumed to limit the earning power of a corporation by fixing the maximum rates it might charge, without at the same time making a corresponding regulation fixing the price which the company should pay for its labor and material.

Upon this foundation he was able to build a fair structure of oratory. The judge, his opponent, was a rather turgid man whose speech had abounded in flights of denunciation and whose appeal had been made frankly to prejudice and party rancor. Blount took his cue shrewdly. Touching lightly upon the public grievances, some of which he characterized as just and entirely defensible, he rang the changes calmly and logically upon the square deal, no less for the corporations than for the individual. "Take it to yourselves, you merchants," he urged. "Imagine a law on the statute-books fixing the prices at which you shall sell your goods, and that same law leaving you at the mercy of those from whom you must buy! Take it to yourselves, you miners. Suppose the legislature had enacted a law fixing the maximum price at which you shall sell your skill and your labor, and at the same time leaving it optional with every man from whom you buy, the butcher, the baker, the grocer, to charge you what he pleases or what he can get! That, my good friends, is the situation of the railroad company in this State to-day"--and he went on to analyze the hard situation, filling his hour very creditably and, if the frequent bursts of applause could be taken to mean anything, to the complete satisfaction of his hearers. Indeed, at the end of his argument he was given what the local paper of the following day was pleased to call "a spontaneous and pandemonious ovation."

After the cheering and hand-shaking, Steuchfield and his fellow-committeemen went to the train with the visiting speaker, and no one in the throng of congratulators was more enthusiastic than the opposition chairman.

"That was a cracking good speech--a great speech, Mr. Blount!" he said, as the branch train rattled in from the north. "If you can go all over the State making as good talks as the one we've just heard, you'll tie the whole shooting-match up in a hard knot for us fellows. But McVickar won't let you do it--not by a long shot!"

The potential tier of hard knots laughed genially. "I don't blame you for wanting to be shown, Mr. Steuchfield. But I can assure you that the new policy has come to stay. I have the management behind me in this thing, and any day you'll come down to the capital I'll put my time against yours and try to show you that we are out for open publicity and a square deal for every man--including the railroad man."

"All right," was the cordial reply. "I'll be down along some of these days, and if you can convince me that McVickar isn't going into politics any further than you've gone here to-night, I'll promise you to come back to Carnadine and tell the boys the jig's up."

A few minutes later the branch train pulled out, and the chairman and his fellow-committeemen gave the departing joint-debater three cheers and another. After the red tail-lights of the train had disappeared around the first curve, Steuchfield turned to the others with a broad grin.

"Well, boys," he said, "there goes a mighty nice young fellow, and I guess we did it up all right for him and accordin' to orders. I don't know any more'n a sheep what sort of a game Dave Sage-brush is playin' this time, but whatever he says goes as she lays, and I figure it that we gave the young chip o' the old block a right jubilant little whirl. Anyhow, he seemed to think so."

Blount did not reach his office in the capital until the afternoon of the next day. There was an appalling accumulation of letters and telegrams waiting to be worked over, but he let the desk litter go untouched and called up the hotel, only to have a small disappointment sent in over the wire. His father, Mrs. Blount, and their guest had left for Wartrace Hall some time during the forenoon, and there had been nothing said in the clerk's hearing about their return to the city. Blount hung up the receiver, called it one more opportunity missed, and sat down to attack the desk litter.

Almost the first thing his eye lighted upon was a stenographer's note stating that Mr. Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company, had been in several times, and was very anxious to obtain an interview. Blount pressed the desk button, and the stenographer came in promptly.

"This man Hathaway; what did he want?" was the brusque question shot at the clerk.

"I don't know. He said he was stopping at the Inter-Mountain, and he asked me to let him know when you got back."

"Phone him and tell him I'm here," said Blount; and in due time the lumber magnate made his appearance.

It was not at all in keeping with Mr. Simon Peter Hathaway's gifts and adroitness that he should begin by attempting a clumsy bit of acting.

"Well, I'll be shot!" he exclaimed. "So you're the senator's son, are you? If I'd known that, that day on the train when you were trying to make me believe you were one of Uncle Sam's men--"

Blount's smile was neither forgiving nor hostile.