"You caught me fairly," he acknowledged. "I thought I still had the place to myself."
"But the chance?" persisted the big man, looking him over appraisively. "You don't look like a man who has had to hang round on the aidges hankerin' after things he couldn't get."
"I guess I haven't had to do that very often," was the reflective rejoinder. "But a mile or so back we passed a bunch of cattle, with the night man riding watch; I was just saying to myself that I'd like to change places with that night-herd—only there wasn't going to be any chance."
The bearded man's laugh was a deep-chested rumbling suggestive of rocks rolling down a declivity.
"Lordy gracious!" he chuckled. "If you was to get a leg over a bronc', and the bronc' should find it out—Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out on my place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears to have you try it; he shore would. You take my advice, and don't you go huntin' a job night-ridin' in the greasewood hills. Don't you do it!"
"I assure you I hadn't thought of doing it for a permanency. But just for a bit of adventure, if the chance should offer while I'm in the notion. I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony for fourteen years, but I don't believe I've lost the knack of it."
"Ho!" said the big man. "Then you ain't as much of a tenderfoot as you look to be. Shake!" and he held out a hand as huge as a bear's paw. Following the hand-grip he grew confidential. "'Long in the afternoon I stuck my head in at the door and saw you chewin' the rag with a thin-faced old nester that couldn't set still in his chair while he talked. Know him?"
"Not at all," said Blount promptly. "He has the section opposite mine, and he got on at Omaha."
"Well, I wouldn't want to know him if I was you," was the bearded man's comment. Then: "Tryin' to get you to invest in some o' his properties?"
"Oh, no."
"Well, he will, if he gets a chance. He'd go furder'n that; he'd nail you up to the cross and skin you alive if there was any money in it for him. His name's Simon Peter, and it ort to be Judas. I know him down to the ground!"
"Simon Peter?" said Blount inquiringly.
"Ya-as; Simon Peter Hathaway. And my name's Griggs; Griggs, of the Antelopes, back o' Carnadine—if anybody should ask you who give you your pointer on Simon Peter Judas. I don't blacklist no man in the dark, and I've said a heap more to that old ratter's face than I've ever said behind his back. Ump! him a-wrigglin' in that chair you're settin' in and tryin' to fix up some way to skin you! Don't tell me! I know blame' well what he was tryin' to do."
Blount listened and was interested, not so much in the bit of gossip as in the big, red-faced ranchman, who so evidently had a grudge to pay off.
"I am not likely to have any dealings with Mr. Hathaway," he rejoined. "And I must do him the bare justice of saying that he wasn't trying to sell me anything. The shoe was on the other foot. He seemed to be afraid he was in danger of losing out, and he was asking my advice."
"S.P. Hathaway lose out? Not on your life, my young friend! You say he was askin' for advice? You've done stirred up my curiosity a whole heap, and I reckon you'll have to tell me who you are before it'll ca'm down again."
Blount laughed. "Mr. Hathaway thinks I am a special agent for the Government, travelling on business for the Forest Service."
"The hell he does!" exploded the big man. Then he reached over and laid a swollen finger on Blount's knee. "Say, boy, before you or him ever gets off this train—Sufferin' Moses! what was that?"
The break came upon a thunderous crash transmitting itself from car to car, and the long, heavy train came to a juggling stop. The ranchman sprang to his feet with an alacrity surprising in sohuge a body and ducked to look out of the open window.
"Twin Buttes!" he gurgled. "And, say, it's a wreck! We've hit something right slap in the middle of the yard! Let's make a break for the scene of the confliggration till we see who's killed!"
Blount followed the ranchman's lead, but shortly lost sight of the burly figure in the crowd of curious passengers pouring from the hastily opened vestibules. Seen at closer range, the accident appeared to be disastrous only in a material sense. The heavy "Pacific-type" locomotive had stumbled over the tongue of a split switch, leaving the rails and making a blockading barrier of itself across the tracks. Nobody was hurt; but there would be a delay of some hours before the track could be cleared.
Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the derailed locomotive, Blount strolled on through the railroad yard to the station and the town. He remembered the place chiefly by its name. In his boyhood it had been the nearest railroad forwarding-point for the mines at Lewiston, thirty miles beyond the Lost Hills. Now, as it appeared, it had become a lumber-shipping station. To the left of the railroad there were numerous sawmills, each with its mountain of waste dominated by a black chimney, screen-capped. For the supply of logs an enormous flume led down from the slopes of the forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute out of which, though the working-day was ended, the great logs were still tumbling in an intermittent stream.
North of the town the valley broke away into a region of bare mesas dotted with rounded, butte-like hills, with the buttressing ranges on either side to lift the eastern and western horizons. The northern prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately, and the tide of remembrance swept strongly in upon him. Some forty-odd miles away to the northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser range, lay the "short-grass" region in which he had spent the happy boyhood. An hour's gallop through the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting sun would be playing upon the little station of Painted Hat, the one-time shipping-point for the home ranch. And half-way between Painted Hat and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands of the mountains, were the horse-corrals of oneDebbleby, a true hermit of the hills, and the boy Evan's earliest school-master in the great book of Nature.
Blount's one meliorating softness during the years of exile had manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby. He knew that the old horse-breeder was still alive, and that he was still herding his brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin. The young man, fresh from the well-calculated East, threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool breeze sweeping down from the northern hills. He was not given to impulsive plan-changing. On the contrary, he was slow to resolve and proportionately tenacious of the determination once made. But the stirring of boyish memories accounted for something; and in the sanest brain there are sleeping cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive at the touch of suggestion. What if he should—
He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out deliberately. Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring recollections? Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskinfoot-hills, smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become of the boy whom he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride. Blount estimated the distance as he remembered it. With a hired horse he might reach Debbleby's by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.
Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from the capital might be expected decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's office at the capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse, borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions. He would go and see Debbleby—drop in upon the old horse-breeder without warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless awaiting him at the real journey's end.
Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or cowboys.Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later, when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals to stop him. But this he missed.
There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single mile.
For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar in daylight, lost their remembered featurings. During the first few miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon. Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moonrise, the trail disappeared entirely; but so long as he was sure of the general direction, Blount held on and gave the tireless little bronco a loose rein. The Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills of the western range, with the broad gulch of the Pigskin cutting a plain highway through the mountains. If he could find one of the head-water streams of the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in thegulches of the mesa, there could be no danger of losing the way.
It was some little time after he had left the shoulderings of the eastern range behind that a singular thing happened. Far away on his right he heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the moon was nearly full and the treeless landscape was bare of any kind of cover, he could not make out the horseman who was evidently passing him and going in the same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making adétourto avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first, invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain, passed him at speed.
After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventurewhich might have discomforting consequences.
For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.
When the three men who had pulled him from his horse and tied him hand and foot had withdrawn to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to wrangle morosely over what should be done with him, Evan Blount found it simply impossible to realize that they were actually discussing, as one of the expedients, the propriety of knocking him on the head and flinging his body into the near-by canyon.
The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude grotesqueness of the thing that had happened. Five minutes earlier he had been riding peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed and the surprise had been complete; but the grotesquery remained.
Since his captors had as yet made no attempt to rob him, he could only surmise that some incredibly foolish mistake had been made. But when he remembered the three invisible horsemen who had passed him on the broad mesa he was not so certain about the mistake. Most naturally, his thoughts went back to the little episode on the hotel porch. The passing glance he had given to the three men with whom the fourth man, Hathaway, had been talking did not enable him to identify them withthe three who were sourly discussing his fate at the near-by fire; none the less, the conclusion was fairly obvious. Thus far he had been either too busy or too bewildered to break in; but when the more murderous of the expedients was apparently about to be adopted, he decided that it was high time to try to find out why he was to be effaced. Whereupon he called across to the group at the fire.
"Without wishing to interfere with any arrangements you gentlemen are making, I shall be obliged if you will tell me why you think you have found it necessary to murder me."
"You know mighty good and well why there's one too many of you on Lost River, jest at this stage o' the game," growled the hard-faced spokesman who had held the Winchester while his two accomplices were doing the unhorsing and the binding.
"But I don't," insisted Blount good-naturedly. "So far as I know, there is only one of me—on Lost River or anywhere else."
"That'll do for you; it ain't your put-in, nohow," was the gruff decision of the court; but Blount wastoo good a lawyer to be silenced thus easily.
"Perhaps you might not especially regret killing the wrong man, but in the present case I am very sure I should," he went on. And then: "Are you quite sure you've got the right man?"
"The boss knows who you are—that's enough for us."
"The boss?" questioned Blount.
"Yas, I said the boss; now hold your jaw!"
Blount caught at the word. In a flash the talk with Gantry on the veranda of the Winnebasset Club flicked into his mind.
"There is only one boss in this State," he countered coolly. "And I am very sure he hasn't given you orders to kill me."
"What's that?" demanded the spokesman.
Blount repeated his assertion, adding jocularly: "Perhaps you'd better call up headquarters andask your boss if he wants you to kill the son of his boss."
At this the gun-holder came around the fire to stand before his prisoner.
"Say, pal—this ain't my night for kiddin', and it hadn't ort to be your'n," he remarked grimly. "The boss didn't say you was to be rubbed out—they never do. But I reckon it would save a heap o' trouble if youwasrubbed out."
"On the contrary, I'm inclined to think it would make a heap of trouble—for you and your friends, and quite probably for the man or men who sent you to waylay me. But, apart from all that, you've got hold of the wrong man, as I told you a moment ago."
"No, by grapples! I hain't. I saw you in daylight. If there's been any fumblin' done, I hain't done it. So you see it ain't any o' my funeral."
"Think not?" said Blount.
"I know it ain't. Orders is orders, and youdon't git over into them woods on Upper Lost Creek with no papers to serve on nobody: see?"
It was just here that the light of complete understanding dawned upon Blount; and with it came the disconcerting chill of a conviction overthrown. As a theorist he had always scoffed at the idea that a corporation, which is a creature of the law, could afford to be an open law-breaker. But here was a very striking refutation of the charitable assumption. His smoking-room companion of the Pullman car was doubtless one of the timber-pillagers who had been cutting on the public domain. To such a man an agent of the National Forest Service was an enemy to be hoodwinked, if possible, or, in the last resort, to be disposed of as expeditiously as might be, and Blount saw that he had only himself to blame for his present predicament, since he had allowed the man to believe that he was a Government emissary. Having this clew to the mystery, his course was a little easier to steer.
"I have no papers of the kind you think I have, as you can readily determine by searching me," he said. "My name is Blount, and I am the son of ex-Senator David Blount, of this State. Now what are you going to do with me?"
"What's that you say?" grated the outlaw.
"You heard what I said. Go ahead and heave me into the canyon if you are willing to stand for it afterward."
The hard-faced man turned without replying and went back to the other two at the fire. Blount caught only a word now and again of the low-toned, wrangling argument that followed. But from the overheard word or two he gathered that there were still some leanings toward the sound old maxim which declares that "dead men tell no tales." When the decision was finally reached, he was left to guess its purport. Without any explanation the thongs were taken from his wrists and ankles, and he was helped upon his horse. After his captors were mounted, the new status was defined by the spokesman in curt phrase.
"You go along quiet with us, and you don't make no bad breaks, see? I more'n half believe you been lyin' to me, but I'm goin' to give you a chance to prove up. If you don't prove up, you pass out—that's all. Now git in line and hike out; and if you're countin' on makin' a break, jest ricollect that a chunk o' lead out of a Winchester kin travel a heap faster thern your cayuse."
If Blount had not already lost all sense of familiarity with his surroundings, the devious mountain trail taken by his captors would soon have convinced him that the boyhood memories were no longer to be trusted. Up and down, the trail zigzagged and climbed, always penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountains. At times Blount lost even the sense of direction; lost it so completely that the high-riding moon seemed to be in the wrong quarter of the heavens.
For the first few miles the trail was so difficult that speed was out of the question; but later, in crossing a high-lying valley, the horses were pushed. Beyond the valley there were more mountains, and half-way through this second range the trail plunged into a deep, cleft-like canyon with a brawling torrent for its pathfinder. Once more Blount lost the sense of direction, and when the canyon trail came out upon broad uplands and became a country road with bordering ranches watered by irrigation canals, into which the mountain torrent was diverted, there were no recognizable landmarks to tell him whither his captors were leading him.
As he was able to determine by holding his watch, face up, to the moonlight, it was nearly midnight when the silent cavalcade of four turned aside from the main road into an avenue of spreading cottonwood trees. At its head the avenue becamea circular driveway; and fronting the driveway a stately house, with a massive Georgian facade and colonnaded portico, flung its shadow across the white gravel of the carriage approach.
There were lights in one wing of the house, and another appeared behind the fan-light in the entrance-hall when the leader of the three highbinders had tramped up the steps and touched the bell-push. Blount had a fleeting glimpse of a black head with a fringe of snowy wool when the door was opened, but he did not hear what was said. After the negro serving-man disappeared there was a little wait. At the end of the interval the door was opened wide, and Blount had a gruff order to dismount.
What he saw when he stood on the door-mat beside his captor merely added mystery to mystery. Just within the luxuriously furnished hall, where the light of the softly shaded hall lantern served to heighten the artistic effect of her red housegown, stood a woman—a lady, and evidently the mistress of the Georgian mansion. She was small and dark, with brown eyes that were almost childlike in their winsomeness; a woman who might be twenty, or thirty, or any age between. Beautiful she was not, Blount decided, comparing her instantly, as he did all women, with Patricia Anners; but—He was not given time to add the qualifying phrase or to prepare himself for what was coming.
"What is it, Barto?" the little lady asked, turning to the man with the gun.
The reply was direct and straight to the purpose.
"Excuseme; but I jest wanted to ask if you know this here young feller. He's been allowin' to me th't he is—"
"Of course," she said quickly, and stepping forward she gave her hand and a welcome to the dazed one. "Please come in; we have been expecting you." Then again to the man with the Winchester: "Thank you so much, Barto, for showing the gentleman the way to Wartrace Hall."
It was all done so quietly that Blount was still unconsciously holding the hand of welcoming while his late captors were riding away down the cottonwood-shaded avenue. When he realized what he was doing he was as nearly embarrassed as a selfcontained young lawyer could well be. But his impromptu hostess quickly set him at ease.
"You needn't make any explanations," she hastened to say, smiling up at him and gently disengaging the hand which he was only now remembering that he had forgotten to relinquish. "Naturally, I inferred that you were in trouble, and that your safety depended in some sense upon my answer. Were you in trouble?"
Blount perceived immediately how utterly impossible it would be to make her, or any one else, understand the boyish impulse which had prompted him to leave his train, or the curious difficulty into which the impulse had precipitated him. So his explanation scarcely explained.
"I was on my way to a ranch—that is, to the capital—when these men held me up," he stammered. "They—they mistook me for some one else, I think, and for reasons best known to themselves they brought me here. If you could direct me to some place where I can get a night's lodging—"
"There is nothing like a tavern within twenty miles of here," she broke in; "nor is there any house within that radius which would refuse you a night's shelter, Mr.—"
Blount made a quick dive for his card-case, found it, and hastened to introduce himself by name. She took the bit of pasteboard, and, since she scarcelyglanced at the engraved line on it, he found himself wholly unable to interpret her smile.
"The card is hardly necessary," she said; and then, to his complete bewilderment: "You are very much like your father, Mr. Blount."
"You know my father?" he exclaimed.
She laughed softly. "Every one knows the senator," she returned, "and I can assure you that his son is heartily welcome under this roof. Uncle Barnabas"—to the ancient serving-man who was still hovering in the background—"have Mr. Blount's horse put up and the blue room made ready."
Blount followed his still unnamed hostess obediently when she led the way to the lighted library
in the wing of the great house.
"Uncle Barnabas will come for you in a little while," she told him, playing the part of the gracious lady to the line and letter. "In the meantime you must let me make you a cup of tea. I am sure you must be needing it after having ridden so far. Take the easy-chair, and we can talk comfortably while the kettle is boiling. Are you new to the West, Mr. Blount, or is this only a return to your own? The senator is always talking aboutyou, you know; but he is so inordinately proud of you that he forgets to tell us all the really interesting things that we want to know."
The serving-man took his own time about coming back; so long a time that Blount forgot that it was past midnight, that he was a guest in a strange house, and that he still had not learned the name of his entertainer. For all this forgetfulness the little lady with the dark-brown eyes was directly responsible. Almost before he realized it, Blount found himself chatting with her as if he had always known her, making rapid strides on the way to confidence and finding her alertly responsive in whatever field the talk happened to fall. Apparently she knew the world—his world—better than he knew it himself: she had summered on the North Shore and wintered in Washington. She knew Paris, and when the conversation touched upon the Italian art-galleries he was led to wonder if he had gone through Italy with his eyes shut. At the next turn of the talk he was forced to admit that not even Patricia herself could speak more intelligently of the English social problem; and when it came to the vital questions of the American moment he gasped again and wondered if he were awake—if it couldbe possible that this out-of-place Georgian mansion and its charming mistress could be part and parcel of the West which had so far outgrown the boyhood memories.
Since all things mundane must have an end, the old butler with the white-fringed head came at last to show him the way to his luxurious lodgings on the second floor of the mansion. With a touch of hospitality which carried Blount back to his one winter in the South, the hostess went with him as far as the stair-foot, and her "Good-night" wasstill ringing musically in his ears when the old negro lighted the candles in the guest-room, put another stick of wood on the small fire that was crackling and snapping cheerfully on the hearth, and bobbed and bowed his way to the door. Blount saw his last chance for better information vanishing for the night, and once more broke with the traditions.
"Uncle Barnabas, before you go, suppose you tell me where I am," he suggested. "Whose house is this?"
The old man stopped on the threshold, chuckling gleefully. "A-ain't you know dat, sah?—a-ain't de mistis done tell you dat? You's at Wa'trace Hall—Mahsteh Majah's new country-house; yes, sah; dat's whah you is—kee-hee!"
"And who is 'Master Major'?" pressed Blount, whose bewilderment grew with every fresh attempt to dispel it.
"A-ain't she tell you dat?—kee-hee! Ev'body knows Mahsteh Majah; yes, sah. If de mistis ain't tell you, ol' Barnabas ain't gwine to—no, sah. Ah'll bring yo'-all's coffee in de mawnin'; yes, sah—good-night, sah—kee-hee!" And the door closed silently upon the wrinkled old face and the bobbing head.
Having nothing else to do, Blount went to bed, but sleep came reluctantly. Life is said to be full of paper walls thinly dividing the commonplace from the amazing; and he decided that he had surely burst through one of them when he had given place to the vagrant impulse prompting him to go horseback-riding when he should have gone comfortably to bed in his sleeper to wait for the track-clearing.
Whither had a curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall," and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at her tongue's end—who had held him so nearly spellbound over the teacups that he had entirely lost sight of everything but his hospitable welcome?
These and kindred speculations kept him awake for a long time after the door had closed behind the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar purring of a motor-car aroused him. There was a window at his bed's head, and he reached over and drew the curtain. The view gave upon the avenue of cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach. A touring-car, with its powerful head-lights paling the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up at the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man, swathed from head to heel in a dust-coat, descending from the tonneau.
"I suppose that will be 'Mahsteh Majah,'" he mused sleepily. "That's why the little lady was sitting up so late—she was waiting for him." Then to the thronging queries threatening to return and keep him awake: "Scat!—go away! call it a pipe-dream and let me go to sleep!"
In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.
When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular adventures, the sun was shining brightly in at the bed's-head window, a cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and his father, a little heavier, a little grayer, but with the same ruggedly strong face and kindly eyes, was standing at his bedside.
"Father!"—and "Evan, boy!" were the simple words of greeting; but the mighty hand-grip which went with them was for the younger man a confirmation of the filial hope and a heart-warming promise for the future. Following instantly, there came a rush of mingled emotions: of astoundment that he had recognized no familiar landmark in the midnight faring through the hills or on the approach to the home of his childhood; of something akin to keen regret that the old had given place so thoroughly and completely to the new; of a feeling bordering on chagrin that he had been surprised into accepting the hospitable advances of a woman whom he had been intending to avoid, and for whom he had hitherto cherished—and meant to cherish—a settled aversion.
But at the hand-gripping moment there was no time for a nice weighing of emotions. He was in his father's house; the home-coming, some phases of which he had vaguely dreaded, was a fact accomplished,and the new life—the life which must be lived without Patricia—was fairly begun. Also, there were many arrears to be brought up.
"Intuition, on the manward side of it at least, doesn't go," he was saying with half-boyish candor. "I was awake last night when you drove home in the motor, and I looked out of the window and saw you as you came up the steps. According to the psychics, there ought to have been some inward stirrings of recognition, but there weren't—not a single thrill. Did the little—er—did Mrs. Blount tell you that I was here?"
"She did so; but she couldn't tell me much more. Say, son, how on top of earth did you happen to blow in at midnight, with Jack Barto for your herd leader?"
"It's a fairy tale, and you won't believe it—of a Blount," was the laughing reply. "I left Boston Monday, and should have reached the capital last night. But my train was laid out by a yard wreck at Twin Buttes just before dark, and I left it and took to the hills—horseback. Don't ask me why I did such a thing as that; I can only say that the smell of the sage-brush got into my blood and I simply had to do it."
The old cattle-king was standing with his feet planted wide apart and his hands deep in his pockets. "You hired a horse!" he chuckled, with the humorous wrinkles coming and going at the corners of the kindly eyes. "Did you have the nerve to think you were going to climb down from a three-legged stool in a Boston law office one day and ride the fifty miles from Twin Buttes to the capital the next?"
"Oh, no; I wasn't altogether daft. But knowing where I was, I did think I could ride out to Debbleby's. So I hired the bronco and set out—and that reminds me: the horse will have to be sent back to the liveryman in Twin Buttes, some way."
"Never mind the cayuse. Shackford would have made you a present of it outright if you had told him who you were. Go on with your story. It listens like a novel."
"I took the general direction all right on leaving Twin Buttes, and kept it until I got among the Lost River hogbacks. But after that I was pretty successfully lost. I'm ashamed to tell it, but about half of the time the moon didn't seem to be in the right place."
"Lost, were you? And Jack Barto found you?" queried the father.
"Barto hadn't lost me to any appreciable extent," was the half-humorous emendation. And then: "Who is this ubiquitous Barto who goes around playing the hold-up one minute and the good angel the next?"
"He is a sort of general utility man for Hathaway, the head pusher of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company. He is supposed to be a timber-cruiser and log-sealer, but I reckon he doesn't work very hard at his trade. Down in the lower wards of New York they'd call him a boss heeler, maybe. But you say 'hold-up'; you don't mean to tell me that Jack Barto robbed you, son!"
"Oh, no; he held me up with a gun while his helpers pulled me off the bronco and hog-tied me, and then fell to discussing with the other two the advisability of knocking me on the head and dropping me into Lost River Canyon—that's all. Of course, I knew they had stumbled upon the wrong man; and after a while I succeeded in making Barto accept that hypothesis; at least, he accepted it sufficiently to bring me here for identification. Since he wouldn't talk, and I didn't recognize the trailor the place, I hadn't the slightest notion of my whereabouts—not the least in the world; didn't know where he was taking me or where I had landed when we stopped here."
The big man was leaning against the foot-rail of the bed and frowning thoughtfully. "Talked about dropping you into Lost River, did they? H'm. I reckon we'll have to look into that a little. Who set them on, son? Got any idea of that?"
"I have a very clear idea: it was this man Hathaway you speak of—a big ranchman named Griggs told me his name. He came across in the Pullman with me from Omaha; middle-aged, tall, and slim, with a hatchet face and owlish eyes. Before I learned his name we had talked a bit—killing time in the smoking-room. He said he was interested in mines and timber. Along toward the last he got the notion into his head that I was a special agent of some kind, on a mission for the Bureau of Forestry, and I was foolish enough to let him escape with the impression uncorrected."
"That was Pete Hathaway, all right," was thesenator's comment. "His company has been cutting timber in the Lost River watershed reserves, and he probably thought you were aiming to get him. You say he sent Barto after you?"
"I'm only guessing at that part of it. When I rode away from Twin Buttes he was standing on the porch of the tavern, talking to Barto and two others; and I'm pretty sure he pointed me out to them. An hour or so later, three horsemen passed me on the mesa, one after another. I couldn't see them, but I heard them. It might have been another hour or more past that when they potted me."
"You gave them your name?"
"Yes; and that seemed to tangle them a little. Barto said he believed I was lying, but, anyway, he'd give me a chance to 'prove up.' Then they brought me here, and your—er—Mrs. Blount kindly stepped into the breach for me."
"You didn't know Honoria when you saw her?" queried the father.
"No; I wasn't in the least expecting—that is, I—you may remember that I had never met her," stammered the young man, who had risen on his elbow among the pillows.
The older man walked to the window and stood looking out upon the distant mountains for a full minute before he faced about to say: "We might as well run the boundary lines on this thing one time as another, son. You don't like Honoria; you've made up your mind you're not going to let yourself like her. I don't mean to make it hard for either of you if I can dodge it. This is her home; but it is also yours, my boy. Do you reckon you could—"
Evan Blount made affectionate haste to stop the half-pathetic appeal.
"Don't let that trouble you for a minute," he interposed. "I—Mrs. Blount is a very different person from the woman I have been picturing her to be; and if she were not, I should still try to believe that we are both sufficiently civilized not to quarrel." Then: "Have you breakfasted yet—you and Mrs. Blount? But of course you have, long ago."
"Breakfasted?—without you? Not much, son! And that reminds me: I was to come up here and see if you were awake, and if you were, I was to send Barnabas up with your coffee."
"You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven't acquired the coffee-in-bed habit yet," laughed the lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be downpronto. There; doesn't that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush idiom? Great land! I haven't heard anybody sayprontosince I was knee-high to a hop-toad!"
Farther on, when he was no longer in the first lilting flush of the new impressions, Evan Blount was able to look back upon that first day at Wartrace Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the nature of things, it could never be lived over again. In all his forecastings he had never pictured a homecoming remotely resembling the fact. In each succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the old ranch buildings of the "Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the picture.
"I've kept it all just as it used to be, Evan," the father said gently. "I thought maybe you'd come back some day and be sure-enough disappointed if it were gone."
The younger man slipped from his saddle and went to look in at the open door of the old ranchhouse. Everything was precisely as he remembered it: the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed quirts over the high wooden mantel, his mother's rocking-chair ... that was the final touch; he sat down on the worn door-log and put his face in his hands. For now the gaping chasm of the years was quite closed and he was a boy again.
Still later in this same first day there were ambling gallops along the country roads, and the father explained how the transformation from cattle-raising to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about; how the great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square miles of the fertile mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of the new population had come new blood, new methods,good roads, the telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.
The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land; it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."
"We're all fossils—we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State." "But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all he wants to."
"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it. "Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will permit him to be."
The qualifying clause was not thrown away uponthe senator.
"What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.
"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career—"
"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges. Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."
Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar" ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing—not even the hope that in the years to come Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should tell some one; and who better?
David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to the aging years.
"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.
"So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me realize that I couldn't hold my own against the 'career,'" was the young man's answer. Then he added: "I want work, father—that is what I am out here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I can put my heart into. Can you find it for me?"
There was the wisdom of the centuries in the gentle smile provoked by this unashamed disappointed lover's appeal.
"I wouldn't take it too hard—the career business—if I were you, son," said the wise man. "And as for the work, I reckon we can satisfy you, if your appetite isn't too whaling big. How would a State office of some kind suit you?"
"Politics?" queried Blount, bringing his horse down to the walk for which his father had set the example. "I've thought a good bit about that, though I haven't had any special training that way. The schools of to-day are turning out business lawyers—menwho 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'sfit; 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 matterof 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,ofcourse. 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."
From the time when it was heralded in the mammoth New Year's edition ofThe Plainsmanas "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 ofthe 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 hotelcafé.
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 wasthe 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 tryingto 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 theright 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 boldlyinto 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.