During the three weeks following the night journey to Angora, a journey on which he once more fought the hard battle to a still sharper conclusion, Evan Blount scarcely saw his office in Temple Court for more than a brief hour or two at a time. One speaking appointment followed another in such rapid succession that he was constantly going or returning; and since there was everywhere a repetition of the welcome accorded him by the miners of the Carnadine district, there was no reason save physical weariness to make him wish to limit his opportunity.
It was not until he was deep into the fourth week of the hurryings to and fro that he began to admit a suspicion which grew like a juggler's rose once he had given it place. Could it be possible that these numerous invitations, coming now from all parts of the State, were purely spontaneous? If not, if they were so many subtle moves in the great game, he could see no possible end to be subserved by them save one: they were effectually keeping him away from the capital, which was naturally the nucleus and centre of the campaign activities. Was there something going on at headquarters that "the powers" did not wish him to find out? Of one thing he was well assured. Gantry was dodging him, was apparently keeping an accurate record of his movements; for whenever the hurryings permitted a flying return to the capital the traffic manager was always out of town.
These were small matters, but vital in their way. Failing to keep in touch with Gantry, Blount could never be sure that the policy of the railroad company had been reformed or changed in any respect. Moreover, his journeyings, which brought him in direct contact with the voters themselves, seemed to have the effect of isolating him curiously in the actual battle-field. That a hot political campaign was raging throughout the length and breadth of the State was not to be doubted; the newspapers were full of it, and in many districts the fight had become acrimonious and bitter. But although he was supposed to be in the thick of the fight, he knew that he was not; that some mysterious influence was shutting him out and holding him at arm's length.
Everywhere he went the cordial reception, the attentive and hospitable committeemen, the packed house, and the generous applause were always awaiting him. It was as if his progress had been carefully prearranged, like a sort of triumphal procession. None the less, the invisible barrier—the barrier which was excluding him from a hand-to-hand grapple with the inner workings of the campaign—was always there, and he could neither surmount it nor push it aside.
Notwithstanding the hard work and hard travelling, he did not allow the missionary effort and its curious isolation to obscure in any sense the sturdier purpose. By every means he could devise he was holding his principals up to the mirror of a vigilant watchfulness. Arguing that the opposition newspapers would be quick to seize upon any charge of corruption involving the railroad company, he read them faithfully. As yet there had been only innuendoes and a raking over of past misdeeds, though by this time many of the editors were openly claiming that the old alliance between the railroad and the machine had never been broken, and warning their readers accordingly.
Blount winced when he read such editorials as these. Though he was going about, striving to do his part manfully, and even with enthusiasm, the burden of the cruel responsibility he had voluntarily shouldered was never less than crushing. His only hope lay in success. If he could make Gantry and his superiors come clean-handed to the election, there need be no exposure, no cataclysm involving both the railroad officials and his father.
So ran the saving hope; and not content with mere watchfulness, Blount tried to get his finger upon the pulse of occasions whenever he could. On his brief stop-overs in the capital he kept his eyes and ears open for the earliest hint of any charge of chicanery, and though he was unable to get hold of Gantry personally, he kept up a steady fire of letters and telegrams, all pointing to the same end—absolute and utter good faith, and the upholding of his hands in the public plea for a square deal. To these the traffic manager always replied guardedly and optimistically. Everybody was delighted with the good work done, and doing, by the railroad company's field manager; public opinion was slowly but surely changing; let the good work go on—and much more to the same effect.
Blount did let the good work go on; but as the critical pre-election weeks approached, he began to arm himself, reluctantly but resolutely. A little quiet investigation, which was made to dovetail cleverly with his speech-making journeys, revealed—as Gantry had confessed it would—convincing evidence of past corruption and present law-breaking. Hathaway had told the truth when he had asserted that his own involvement was only one of many similar bargains. Blount called upon the president of the Irrigation Alliance at Romero, in the heart of the agricultural district, upon the managers of several of the electric-power companies, and upon a number of influential mining men—all shippers, and all large employers of labor. It was the same story everywhere. Preferential freight rates had been given in return for votes controlled, and the rates were still in effect.
The investigator turned sick at heart when these men talked quite freely to him, thus showing conclusively that they were cynically discounting his public utterances. McDarragh, owner and manager of the "Wire-Gold" properties in the Moscow district, winked slyly when Blount cautiously inserted the probe.
"You're on, Mr. Blount. I sat up there in theOp'ry-house last night listening to your game, and says I to myself, 'Thim railroad shift-bosses know their trade.' 'Twas a gr-reat talk you gave us, and it'll make the swinging of the har-rd-rock vote as easy as twice two. Of course, we have a thin paring on the ore rate; you'll be knowing that as well as annybody in the game, I'm thinking. 'Tis well that we fellows at the top know how to make one hand wash the other. Come again, Mr. Blount, and give my regards to the sinator when ye see him. And ye might whisper in his ear that it's a waste of good wor-rk for him to be sinding his gum-shoe wire-pullers to be laboring with our min. We're safe as the clock up here in the Moscow."
This was not the first hint that Blount had been given pointing to the underground work of the machine. That this work was being directed toward the subversion of the popular will, he made no doubt; and there were times when he was strongly tempted to carry the war boldly into the wider field of graft and bossism. That he postponed the bigger battle was due quite as much to the singleness of purpose which was his best gift as to the desire to spare his father. Telling himself resolutely that the reformation of the railroad company's political methods was his chief object, and the only one which warranted him in retaining his place on the Company's payrolls, he held aloof when his father's name was mentioned and bent himself to the task of providing the means for the subjugation of Gantry—and of Gantry's and his own superiors, if need be.
The securing of evidence of the kind which would really give him the whip-hand promised to be a delicate undertaking. Men like McDarragh talked openly enough about the illegal special freight rates, but talk was not evidence. Curiously enough, while he was trying to devise some way of obtaining the tangible proof without using his semiofficial position in the company's service as a lever, the thing itself was thrown at him. From some mysterious source a rumor went out that the special rates were in jeopardy; and the very men with whom he had talked began to write him importunate letters begging him to deny the rumor. With a sheaf of these letters in his pocket, each one inculpating both parties to the illegal "deals," Blount grew gayly exultant. The natural inference was that Gantry and "the powers" had been finally forced to yield—that he had won his victory. But if he had not yet won it, chance, or something better, had placed in his hands the weapon with which he could compel a return to fair dealing and honesty.
It was on a second speech-making visit to Ophir that Blount had his firstface-to-face chance at Gantry. A meeting of the Mine-Owners' Association, moving for a readjustment of the classification on copper matte and bullion at a time when the railroad company might be supposed to be on the giving hand, brought Gantry to the gold camp in the Carnadine Hills, and the first man he met at the hotel was the stubborn dictator of new policies for the Transcontinental Company.
"Hello, Dick! made a mistake, didn't you—coming while I was here?" said the reformer, with a very lifelike replica of his father's grim smile. "I suppose you have an immediate engagement to go somewhere else, or to do something that will give you a chance to dodge?"
"No; I wish to the Lord I had!" was the hearty admission. "You're a fright, Evan; you are getting to be a perfect nightmare, with your letters and telegrams. You've got me so I'm afraid to open my desk."
Blount nodded gravely. "I'm glad the letters and telegrams have had their effect at last," he rejoined.
"Had their effect? Yes, they've had the effect of turning my hair gray, if that's what you mean."
"I think you know what I mean, Dick."
"I'll be hanged if I do. What are you driving at?"
"At the fact that you have finally concluded to cancel the crooked deals with—wait, and I'llgive you the names of the co-respondents"—and he drew a packet of neatly docketed letters from his pocket.
"Hold on a minute," protested the traffic manager; "you're getting in rather too deep for me. Will you let me see those letters?"
Blount put the letters back into his pocket and mechanically buttoned his light top-coat over them for additional safety.
"Do you mean to say that you haven't passed the word to Hathaway and McDarragh and a dozen others I could name?" he asked.
"Of course I haven't. You call yourself a lawyer, and yet you ask us to set aside promises that are, or ought to be, as binding as so many written contracts with penalties attached. You're crazy, Evan; it can't be done, and that's all there is to it."
Blount was frowning thoughtfully. "'Can't' goes out of the window when 'must' comes in at the door, Dick. You remember what I told you—that I'd get evidence, lawyer-fashion. I've got it; evidence of the sort that would turn the people of this State into a howling mob to tear up your tracks if I should publish it."
"But I tell you wecan'twithdraw the specials,you wild-eyed fanatic!"
"All right; then level down the public's rates to fit them. And do it quickly, old man. The time is growing fearfully short, and my patience isn't what it used to be."
"My Lord! anybody would think you owned the Transcontinental Company, lock, stock, and barrel! Where under heaven did you get your nerve, Evan? Blest if I don't believe you could out-bluff the old—er—your father, himself, if you once got the fool notion into your head that it was your duty to try!"
"You are side-stepping again, Dick, and that won't go any longer. You've got to fish or cut bait, and do one or the other pretty soon."
"I'd cut the bait all right, if I were Mr. McVickar, Evan. I'd fire you so blamed far that you wouldn't be able to find your way back in a month of Sundays."
Blount tapped his pocket. "As long as I have these documents, Mr. McVickar doesn't dare to fire me. And if you and he don't come down within the next few days—yes, it's a matter of days, now—I'll fire myself and go over every foot of the ground again, telling what I know."
Gantry's eyes darkened. He had graduated with honors from the particular department in railroading in which patience is more than a virtue. Yet there are limits.
"You seem to have entirely forgotten that little talk we had in my office the night you were going to Angora," he said.
"No; I haven't forgotten it—not for a single waking minute."
"What I said to you then goes as it lies," was the threatening reminder. "If you pull the props out, there'll be more than one death in the family."
"You mean that you, or Mr. McVickar, will make it a point to include my father; I've wrestled that out, too, Dick. I'm going to try to pull him out of it, but whether I succeed or fail, the consequences will be the same for you fellows. Come and hear me speak to-night, Dick—if you're stopping over that long. Then you'll know how much in earnest—how deadly in earnest—I am. You spoke of my father just now; I want to remind you again that I, too, bear the Blount name—a name that I have heard bandied about as a synonym for all that is worst in our political life. Don't you see that I've got to make good?"
"Oh, great cats!—you and your high-strung notions of what you've got to do!" snorted the traffic manager, and he went away to his classification meeting.
It was during this hard-travelling period that Blount saw, with keen regret, the gradual widening of the breach between his father and himself. In their infrequent meetings there was never anything remotely approaching an open rupture; but in a thousand ways the younger man fancied he could see and feel the steady growth of the rift.
That the long arm of the machine of which his father was the acknowledged head was reaching out into all corners of the State, was a fact no longer to be doubted, and that the influences thus set in motion were sinister, he took for granted. Therefore, when it came in his way, he scored the machine frankly, charging it with much of the mischief which had been wrought in the way of arousing public sentiment against the corporations. "The worst in politics joined with the worst elements in capitalized industry," was his platform characterization of the alliances of the past, and he usually added that he was fighting it as every honest man was in duty bound to fight it. But it is hard to fight in the dark. After all was said, he could not help admiring the subtlety of the master brain which was able to control and direct such a complicated piece of human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and cleverly that, though the name of the thing was in everybody's mouth, its workings were so carefully concealed that it was only by the merest chance that he stumbled upon them now and then.
In more than one of the short stop-overs in the capital he had found his father still occupying the private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now and again there was a meal shared in the more or less crowdedcafé. On such occasions the son leaned heavily upon the public character of the place and carefully steered the table-talk—or thought he did—into innocuous channels. But on a day shortly after the meeting with Gantry in Ophir this desultory programme was broken. Reaching the hotel in the evening after an all-day train journey from Lewiston, Blount found his father waiting for him in the lobby, and when he proposed acafédinner the senator shook his head.
"No, son; not this evening," he said. "I've been feeling sort of set up and aristocratic to-day, and I've just ordered a dinner sent upstairs. I reckon you'll join me?"
The young man was willing enough; more than willing, since he was now ready to say a thing which must be said before he could be prepared to set a time limit upon Gantry—a limit beyond which lay the firing of the fuse and the blowing up of all things mundane.
"Certainly," he agreed. "Give me a few minutes to change my clothes—"
"You look good enough to me just as you are, boy," said the dinner-giver, and he took his son by the arm and walked him to the elevator.
In the private dining-room Blount found the table laid for two, much as if his coming had been pre-figured. He let that go, and for the time the talk was of the doings at Wartrace Hall: of the professor's enthusiastic digging for fossils, of Patricia's keen enjoyment of the life in the open, and—this put with gentle hesitation on the part of the news-bringer—of Mrs. Honoria's growing affection for the young woman whose ambitions reached out toward a sociological career.
"You say Patricia is learning to drive a car?" queried Patricia's lover.
"Best woman driver I ever saw," was the senator's praiseful rejoinder. "Nothing feazes that little girl, and I'm telling you that she can turn the wheels just about as fast as you want to ride."
This was a new aspect of Miss Anners, even to one who knew her as well as Blount thought heknew her, and, lover-like, he found a grain of encouragement in it. Patricia had never cared for the out-of-door things save as they bore upon the hygienic condition of the poor in the great cities. If she had changed in one respect, she might change in another.
"I'm glad to know that," he commented. "She was needing an outlet on that side. There is a good bit of the Puritan in her—all work and no play, you know."
The senator looked out from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "Speaking of work; they're working you pretty hard these days, aren't they, son? If you belonged to my generation instead of your own, you wouldn't be cold-shouldering that young woman out yonder at Wartrace the way you do; not for all the politics that were ever hatched."
"I have my work to do, and Patricia Anners would be the last person in the world to put obstacles in the way of it," returned the son gravely. Then he added: "I wish I could say as much for otherpeople."
The boss shot another keen glance across the table. "Somebody been trying to block you, Evan, boy?" he asked.
Blount met the gaze of the shrewd gray eyes without flinching.
"I don't know of any good reason why we shouldn't be entirely frank with each other, dad," he said, using for the first time since his return to the homeland the old boyhood father-name. "You know, better than any one else, I think, what the stumbling-blocks are, and who is putting them in my way."
"Maybe so; maybe I do," was the even-toned answer. "It happens so, once in a while, that I know a heap of things I can't tell, son." Then: "Has McVickar been calling you down?"
"No one has called me down. But some one, or something, is keeping me out of the real fight. I don't mean that I'm not doing what I set out to do: I've got my own particular abomination by the neck, and I'm about to choke the life out of it. But that is, as you might say, a side issue. The real struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in it or of it. Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same predetermined enthusiasm. Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me."
The senator's chuckle was barely audible.
"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I were you, son," he suggested. "You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it won't break and let him down into the cold water. You'll get enough of the real thing by and by."
Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in precisely the right mood to construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in some mysterious way to insulate him—to make it impossible for him to get into the real tide of affairs. But he kept his temper, in a measure, at least.
"I guess it's no use for us to try to get together," he said with a tang of abruptness in his tone. "We are diametrically opposed to each other at every point, you and I, dad. I stand for democracy, the will of the people and its fullest and freest expression. You stand for—"
"Well, son, what do I stand for?" queried the father, and the question was put with a quizzicalsmile that brought the hot blood boyishly to Blount's cheeks.
"If I should say what all men say—what some of them are frank enough to say even to me—" he stopped short, and then went on with better self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."
"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured rejoinder. "Being on the railroad side, yourself, you can't help feeling sort of hostile at the rest of us, I reckon."
Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his chair.
"There it is again, you see. We can't get together even on a question of admitted fact! Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"
The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've found that out, too, have you?" he commented.
"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn't, dad. There's a thing behind the alliance that cuts deeper than anything else I've had to face."
Once more the deep-set eyes looked out from their bushy penthouses. "Reckon you could give it a name, son?"
"Yes; when you found that I wasn't going to let you run me for the attorney-generalship, you arranged with Mr. McVickar to have me put on the railroad pay-roll. Isn't that the fact?"
"Not exactly," said the senator, and a grim smile went with the qualified denial. "It was sort of the other way round. I reckon McVickar thought he was putting one across on me when he offered you the railroad job and got you to take it."
"I know; that was at first. You and he couldn't come to terms because you—because the machine wanted more than he was willing to give. But afterward there was another meeting and you got together. That part of it was all right, if you see it that way. What broke my heart was the fact that you and he agreed to put me up as a fence behind which all the crookedness and rascality of a corrupt campaign could be screened."
In the pause which followed, a deft waiter slipped in to change the courses. When the man was gone, Blount went on.
"It came mighty near smashing me when I found it out, dad. It wasn't so much the thing itself as it was the thought that you'd do it—the thought that you had forgotten that I was a Blount, and your son."
Again the older man nodded gravely. "How come you to find out, Evan, boy?" he asked.
"It was when Hathaway had been given his chance at me. He opened the cesspool for me, as you meant he should when you sent him to me. From your point of view, I suppose it was necessary that I should be shown. You knew what I was saying and doing; how I was taking it for granted that the railroad was going in clean-handed, and the one ray of comfort in the whole miserable business is the fact that you cared enough to want to give me a glimpse of the real thing that was hiding behind all my brave talk. But I don't think you counted fully upon the effect it would have upon me."
"What was the effect, son?"
"At first, it made me want to throw up the fight and run away to the ends of the earth. It seemed as if I didn't have anybody to turn to. You were in it, and Gantry was in it—and Gantry's superiors and mine. That evening I borrowed one of your cars and drove out to Wartrace. I meant to have it out with you, and then to throw up my hands and quit."
"But you didn't do either one," said the fathertentatively.
"No. Nothing went right that day, until just at the last. When I was about to give up and go to bed, Patricia came into the smoking-room. I had to talk to somebody, so I talked to her; told her where I had landed."
"And she advised you to throw up your hands?"
"You don't know Patricia. She put a heart into my body and blood into my veins. What she said to me that night is what has kept me going, dad—what has made me drive this fight for a clean election on the part of the railroad company home to the hilt. I have driven it home. There will be no crooked deals on the part of the railroad company this time."
The senator looked up quickly. "That's a mighty good stout thing to say," he remarked, adding: "I reckon you're not saying it without having the right and proper club hid out somewhere where you can lay hands on it?"
Blount tapped his coat-pocket. "I have the club right here—documentary evidence that will ripthis State wide open and send a lot of people to the penitentiary. I've told Gantry to pass the word: a clean sheet, or I go over to the other side and tell what I know. And that brings me to the thing that I've got to say to you, dad—the thing that made me hope I'd find you here to-night. After I'd got my battle-word from Patricia, I had a jolt that was worse than the other. When I pulled the gun on Gantry, he told me that I couldn't shoot without killing you; that you were just as deeply involved as any one of the railroad officials. Is that the truth?"
The senator had pushed his chair back and was burying his hands in his pockets.
"You've come to try to haul me out of the fire?" he inquired, ignoring the direct question.
"I've come to ask you, first, if it is possible for you to stand from under. Can you?"
"Oh, yes; I reckon I could dodge, if I had to."
"Then do it, and do it quickly, dad! As there is a God above us, I'm going to push this thing through to the bitter end. To-morrow morning I shall give Gantry his time limit. If the time goes by, leaving the house-cleaning still undone, I shall keep my promise to the letter. You know, and I know, what will happen after that."
"Yes; I reckon I know," was the half-absent reply.
Blount threw his napkin aside and glanced at his watch.
"I've got to go back to the office and work a while," he said. And then: "I feel better for having had this talk with you, dad. I'm sorry you are finding it necessary to fight me, and a thousand times sorrier that I've got to fight you. But I can't give ground now, and still be a man and your son. Think it over and dodge. It'll break my heart a second time if I have to pull the other fellow's house down and bury you in the wreck."
For some little time after his son had left the table and the private dining-room, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush sat absently toying with his dessert-spoon. When he rose to go out, the battle light in the gray eyes was the signal which not even his most faithful henchmen could always interpret; but it was a signal which all of them knew by sight, and one which many of them feared.
About the time that Evan Blount was finishing the fourth week of the campaign of education, the senator's wife began to detect signs of country weariness in the eyes of Miss Patricia Anners.
"When you are tired of the out-door bignesses, you have only to say the word," she told the professor's daughter one morning after they had driven to Lost River Canyon and back in the small car. "As you have doubtless discovered, the senator and I live either here or at the capital indifferently during the season, and we shall be only too glad to entertain you in town whenever you feel like going."
To similar proposals made earlier Miss Anners had always returned prompt refusals. But for a week or more some impulse which she had not taken the trouble to analyze seemed to be drawing her toward the city. The mesa roads were just as inviting, and the free pleasures of motoring, in a country where speed restrictions were conspicuous only by their absence, were just as keen. But now Patricia confessed to a restless longing for the sight of city streets and the brabble of city noises.
"Only you mustn't consider us, or me, so much as you do, Mrs. Blount," she protested. "I have a dreadful suspicion that we have already interfered shamefully with your autumn plans. You are simply too kind and too hospitable to admit it."
"You have interfered with nothing," was the ready assurance. "We were not going anywhere, or thinking of going anywhere. No inducement that was ever invented would take the senator away from his own State in a political year, and your coming has been a blessing. But for the good excuse to bring your father out here to the fossil-beds, we should have been mewed up in the Inter-Mountain Hotel from the firing of the opening gun to the day after election. But that isn't what I meant to say. You are tired of so much country; I can read the call of the city in your eyes—and they are very pretty eyes, my dear. Shall I telephone the senator that we are coming in this afternoon to stay a while?"
"I shall be delighted," said Patricia, and the eyes, which were not only pretty but exceedingly apt totell tales, confirmed the eager assent. Then she added: "Now that daddy has his box of books from the university library, I doubt if he will know that we are gone."
On their first day in the capital Evan was away, but he returned the following morning and Mrs. Blount promptly captured him for a theatre box-party which she was inviting for the same evening. In Mrs. Honoria's orderly scheme Blount was predestined to go, though he was allowed to believe that his acceptance was of free will. Notwithstanding the lapse of time and Mrs. Honoria's uniform kindness, he was still unreasonably prejudiced, and with the prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin to jealousy. It was evident that Patricia's admiration for his father extended over to his father's wife; and meaning consistently to dislike Mrs. Honoria, he was irrational enough to want Patricia to dislike her, too.
The box-party proved to be a more formal affair than he had anticipated, since it was large enough to fill two of the open dress-circle boxes. Gantry was included, and so were the Weatherfords—father, mother, daughters, and son. These, with the Gordons and a Denver man whose name of Critchett Blount was not quite sure that he caught in the introduction, filled Mrs. Honoria's list. In the seating Blount meant to make sure of having a measurably undisturbed evening with Patricia. But fate,or a designing hostess, intervened, and he found himself cornered between Mrs. Weatherford and her younger daughter, with the square-shouldered "Paramounter" candidate for governor strengthening the barrier which separated him from Miss Anners.
Blount had met Gordon socially a number of times, and in the intervals allowed him by Mrs. Weatherford he was silently studying the face of the big man who, singularly enough, as the student thought, was thus identifying himself publicly as a friend of the boss. True, Blount did not forget his father's warm commendation of Gordon in that earliest political talk on the Quaretaro Canyon road, but that was before the lines had been drawn and the gage of battle thrown down by the allied forces of the machine and the railroad. Now, with the battle drawing to its close, Blount thought that nothing could be more certain than the fact that his father and his father's organization were joining hands with the railroad oligarchy to slaughter Gordon at the polls.
Putting aside the wonder that Gordon should beaccepting Mrs. Honoria's hospitality, Blount fell to contrasting the strong, large-featured face of the Mission Hills ranchman with that of Reynolds, the opposition candidate. Though he was himself on the corporation campaigning staff, Blount could not help admitting that the comparison was not favorable to Reynolds. His first impression of the round-faced, portly gentleman who was standing firmly upon what he was pleased to call a platform of law and order—a man who was Gordon's opposite in every feature and characteristic—had been unfavorable. He had been saying to himself, since, that Reynolds's face, in spite of its heavy jaw and prominent eyes, was the face of a time-server.
Another point of difference between the two men counted for much. Reynolds wanted the office, and was spending money liberally to get it, while Gordon had accepted the nomination reluctantly. Throughout the hot campaign he had refused to stump the State for himself or his party, and was said to be holding steadfastly aloof in the bargaining and dickering. Weighing the two men one against the other—Reynolds was sitting in an adjacent box with Kittredge and Bentley and two other railroad officials—Blount admitted a twinge of regret that chance, or his convictions, hadmade him a partisan of the weaker.
Having been lost in the shuffle, as he expressed it, Blount made the most of these reflective excursions during the period of the box-party captivity. From the rising of the curtain to the going down thereof the Weatherfords, mother and daughter, kept him from exchanging so much as a word with Patricia, whom Gantry was shamelessly monopolizing. But on the short return walk to the hotel, Blount asserted his rights and gave Patricia his arm.
"I think you owe me an abject apology," was the way she began on him, when they had gained such privacy as the crowded sidewalk conferred.
"Consider it made, and then tell me what for," he rejoined, striving, man-fashion, to catch step with her mood.
"For making us leave that dear, delightful, out-of-date, and out-of-place Georgian mansion in the hills and come to town when we want to get a sight of your face."
"If anybody else should say a thing like that, I'd blush and call it a compliment," he retorted.Her near presence seemed to lift the burden he was carrying, and it was good to be light-hearted again, if only for the passing moment.
"It wasn't meant for a compliment," she returned, with the straightforward sincerity which Blount had always been fond of likening to a cup of cold water on a thirsty day. "Consider a moment. You come to me with a really harrowing story of your new experiences, and just as I am beginning to get interested we are interrupted. In the morning, at some perfectly impossible hour, off you go, and we hear no more of you for weeks and weeks. What have you been doing?"
"I have been doing precisely what you told me to do; preaching the gospel of honesty and fair dealing, and trying my level best to make other people practise it."
"You have been successful?" she asked quickly.
"Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended solely upon me. As to the other, I don't know. Sometimes I'm credulous enough to believe that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they say they are, and at other times I'm afraid they are only putting up a bluff to mislead me. Some day,perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go into the 'practical-politics' armory to get my weapons."
There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy available, and she made what seemed to be the most necessary use of it.
"And your father, Evan; are you coming to understand him any better?"
He shook his head despondently. "No; or rather yes. I might say that I am coming to understand him—or his methods—only too well. The only way we can keep from quarrelling now is to banish politics when we are together."
"I am sorry," she said, and the sorrow was emphatic in her tone. "As I have said before, you don't understand him. You are judging him by standards which, however just and true they may be, are peculiarlyyour own standards. I know you can be broad for others when you try. Can't you be broad for him?"
It was good to hear her defend his father. It was what he would have wished his wife to do. Suddenly there arose within him a huge reluctance to lessen or to weaken in any way her trust in David Blount.
"Let us say that the fault is mine," he interposed hastily. "God forbid that I should be the means of making you think less of him in any respect."
"You couldn't do that, Evan. He is simply a grand old man—the first I have ever known for whom the hackneyed phrase seemed to have been made," she asserted warmly. "If he has faults, I am sure they are nothing more than gigantic virtues—the faults of a man who is too strong and too magnanimous to be little in any respect."
The final half-square lay behind them, and Mrs. Honoria and the senator, Gantry, Gordon and his wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the marriageable daughters, were at thecafédoor waiting for the laggards. Being in no proper frame ofmind to enjoy a theatre supper with another Weatherford attack as the possible penalty, Blount reluctantly surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses, and went to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike and democratic lobby.
With Patricia in town the "silver-tongued spellbinder of Quaretaro Mesa," asThe Daily Capitalcalled the railroad company's campaign field-officer, would have been glad to evade some of the speaking appointments; but since his engagements had been made some days in advance, he was obliged to go.
On his return to the capital he was delighted to find the party of three still occupying the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain. Arriving on a morning train, he was permitted to make the party of three a party of four at the breakfast-table; and with Patricia sitting opposite he was able to forget the strenuosities for a restful half-hour.
Later, when he went to his offices in the Temple Court Building, the strenuosities reasserted themselves with emphasis. Though he found his desk closed, and was reasonably certain that he had in his pocket the only key that would unlock it, he found his papers scattered in confusion under the roll-top. A touch upon the electric button brought the stenographer from the anteroom.
"Who's been into my desk, Collins?" he demanded, pointing to the confusion and scrutinizingthe face of the young man sharply for signs of guilt.
"Goodness gracious! How could anybody get into it when you've got the only key, Mr. Blount?" stammered the clerk. Then he went on, parrot-like: "I've been putting the letters and telegrams through the letter-slit, as you told me to, and I've kept the private office locked."
"Nevertheless it is very evident that somebody has been here," said Blount. Then he had a sudden shock and wheeled shortly upon the stenographer. "Collins, what did you do with that packet of papers I gave you last Monday—the one I told you to put away in the safe?"
"I did just what you told me to; put it in the inner cash-box, and put the key of the cash-box on your desk. Didn't you get it?"
Blount felt in his pockets and found the key, which he handed to Collins. "Go and get that packet and bring it to me," he directed. The shock was beginning to subside a little by now, and he sat down to bring something like order out of the confusion on the desk. At first, he had thought that the sheafof evidence letters which gave him the strangle-hold upon Gantry and the lawbreakers had been left in a pigeonhole of the desk. Then he remembered having given it to Collins to put away.
A minute or two later it occurred to him that the stenographer was taking a long time for a short errand. Rising silently, he crossed the room and reached for the knob of the door of communication. In the act he saw that the door was ajar, and through the crack he saw Collins standing before the opened safe. The clerk was running his tongue along the flap of a large envelope, preparatory to sealing it. Blount's first impulse was to break in with a sharp command. Then he reconsidered and went back to his desk; was still busy at it when Collins came in and laid the freshly sealed envelope before him.
"That isn't the packet I gave you," said Blount curtly.
The clerk looked away. "You meant those letters, didn't you?" he queried. "The rubber band broke and I put them in an envelope."
"When?" snapped Blount.
The young man faced around again and the innocence in his look disarmed the questioner.
"When? Just now. That's what made me so long—I couldn't find an envelope big enough."
Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the blade under the flap of the envelope. If he had looked up at the stenographer then he would have seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a face ashen with terror. But whatever the shorthand man had to fear from the opening of the lately sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of Ackerton, the working head of the legal department, with a damage suit to discuss with his chief. Blount thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened, and later in the day, when he went around to his bank to put the evidence letters into his safe-deposit box, the incident of the morning had lost its significance so completely, or had been so deeply buried under other and more important matters, that he deposited the packet without examining it.
The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in the ranchman candidate's big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would bethere. She was there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to grow too large to be easily rolled aside.
"I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you got one that you could lend me?"
She laughed lightly.
"You told me once that I had the New England conscience—which was the same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?"
He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics' again. Suppose I say that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of people to jail?"
"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals and criminality?"
"That is just what I'm trying to find out," he persisted. "At the present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some of them know what I'm doing, and some of them don't. Those who know have been told that they must be good or I'll publish the evidence, and they've promised to be good if I won't publish it. At the time I didn't question my right to make such a bargain, but—"
"But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell what you know?"
"Chaos," he replied briefly.
"May I ask who is implicated?"
"A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few outside of it."
"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too big for me, Evan. I can only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do evil that good may come."
"If you put it that way, I've made myselfparticeps criminis," he said gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't help knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob."
She was shaking her head determinedly. "I can't help you this time, Evan; truly I can't." Then, in sudden appeal: "Why won't you go to your father? He could tell you what to do and how to do it, and his judgment would be too big and justto stumble over the tangling little moralities."
Blount smiled.
"What if I should tell you that my father is more or less involved, Patricia? I don't know precisely how much or how little, but I am assured, by those who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in the general wreck."
"I can't believe it!" she protested, in generous loyalty. "These people, whoever they are, are deceiving you to shelter themselves. Have you ever spoken to your father about this?"
"Yes, once; one evening when we were dining together I told him what I had, and what use I should make of it if all other means should fail. Also, I advised him to dodge."
"What did he say?"
"That is the discouraging part of it. I was hoping against hope that he would tell me to go ahead; that he would say that he wasn't involved. But, as a matter of fact, he didn't say much of anything. I'm horribly afraid that his silence meant all that I've been trying to believe it didn't mean."
She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if she were trying to gain time.
"I can only tell you again what I told you at first," she said at length. "You must be bigger than all these hampering circumstances; bigger than the little moralities, if need be. You can be, Evan; you've given splendid proof of it thus far, and I'm proud—just as proud as I can be—"
Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely without scruple, have brained young Gordon, to whom the next dance belonged, and who came just at this climaxing moment to claim Patricia. But there was no help for it, short of a cold-blooded and rather embarrassing deed of violence, and the hard-won confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.
When he left the Gordon house, which was far out in the northeastern residence suburb, Blount meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed. He had been losing much sleep in the activities of the campaign, and the loss was beginning to tell upon him. But as the trolley-car was passing the Temple Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim light illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office. With all his suspicions of the morning reawakened, he dropped from the car, dashed into the building, and took the all-night elevator for his office floor.
The sleepy elevator-man had to be shaken awake, and when he had set the car in motion he let it run past the designated floor. Blount swore impatiently, and instead of waiting to be carried back, darted out and ran to thestairway. When he reached the lower corridor and was hurrying toward his suite in the corner of the building, there was a dull crash, as of a muffled explosion, and two or three of the glass doors in the street-fronting suite were shattered. Blount quickened his pace to a run, let himself in by means of his latch-key, and, cautiously opening his desk, groped in an inner drawer for the revolver which Gantry had persuaded him to buy as a part of the office furnishings.
With the weapon in hand, he pushed through the unlatched door into Collins's room. There was an acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air, and when he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases were stifling. His first act was to feel for the switch and cut in the electric lights. The third room, which had doors of communication with his own office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were broken open, and the safe-door had been blown from its hinges.
Blount saw the figure of a small man with his cap pulled down over his ears bending over the wrecked cash-box. At the upblazing of the ceiling lights,the man sprang to his feet and fled, going out through the door by which Blount had just entered, and snapping the light-switch as he passed to leave the rooms in darkness.
Blount was cursing his own lack of presence of mind when he turned to follow the escaping burglar. In the darkness he fell over a chair, and by the time he had disentangled himself and had reached the corridor the safe-blower was gone. Racing to the elevator, Blount rang the bell until the sleepy car-tender set the machinery in motion and lifted himself to the floor of happenings. Here the incident ended abruptly, so far as any helpful discoveries were concerned. The elevator-man had carried no one down, and he confessed shamefacedly that he had again been asleep, and could not say whether or not anybody had descended the stair which circled the elevator-shaft.
Blount went back to his office, turned in a police alarm, and waited until a policeman came from the nearest station. Then he went to report the safe-blowing in person to the night captain on duty inthe basement of the City Hall. A drowsy clerk took notes of the story, and the night captain contented himself with asking a single question.
"Do you know how much you lost, Mr. Blount?"
"Nothing of any great consequence, I imagine," said Blount, remembering, with an inward thrill of thankfulness, the morning impulse which had prompted him to transfer the one thing of inestimable consequence to the security of the bank safe-deposit box. Then he added: "There was a little money in the box, and some papers of no especial value to anybody. Just the same, captain, I want that man caught."
"We'll catch him, come morning," was the assurance,and then Blount went away and carried out his original intention of going to the Inter-Mountain and to bed.
To bed; but, for a long hour after the post-midnight quiet had settled down upon the great hostelry, not to sleep. If he had asked himself why he could not close his eyes and take the needed rest, the exciting incident in which he had lately been an actor would have offered a sufficient answer. But in reality the sharpened spur of wakefulness penetrated much more deeply. Beyond all doubt or shadow of doubt, it was the sinister, many-armed machine which had reached out to seize and destroy the evidence against its allies and fellow conspirators, the lawbreaking railroad company and the vote-selling corporations.
And, again beyond doubt, he made sure, it was his own boast made to his father which had been passed on to tell the sham burglar where to look and what to look for.
In the evening of the day following the safe-blowing in Blount's office, a one-car train, running as second section of the Overland, slipped unostentatiously into the capital railroad yard. With as little stir as it had made in its arrival, the single-car train took a siding below the freight station, where it would be concealed from the prying eyes of any chance prowler from the newspaper offices.
Coincident with the side-tracking O'Brien, the vice-president's stenographer, dropped from the step of the car and went in search of a telephone. When O'Brien was safely out of the way, a small man, clean-shaven and alert in his movements, whipped out of the shadows of the nearest string of box-cars, pushed brusquely past the guarding porter, and presented himself at the desk in the roomy office compartment of the private car.
The vice-president looked up and nodded. "How are you, Gibbert?" he said, and then: "You may condense your report. I have seen the newspapers. In passing I may say that it isn't much to your credit that you had to fall back upon the methods of the yeggmen."
"There wasn't any other way," protested the small man. "The papers were locked up in the cash-box of the safe, and young Blount carried the only key."
"It was crude; not at all worthy of a man of your ability, Gibbert. And if the newspapers tell it straight, you came near being caught. How did that happen?"
"Blount went to a ball, and I shadowed him. His girl was there, and it looked like a safe bet that he'd stay to see the lights put out. But he didn't."
"Well, never mind; you got the papers, I suppose?"
The company detective drew a thick envelope from his pocket and laid it upon the desk. The vice-president tore it open and read rapidly through the file of letters it had enclosed, tearing them one by one from the hold of the brass fastener at the upper left-hand corner as he glanced them over. "The chuckle-headed fools!" he gritted, apostrophizing the writers of the letters. And then: "Gibbert, I'd like to go into this a little deeper, if we had time; I'd like to know why in hell every man in this State with whom we've had a private business arrangement found it necessary to spread the details out on paper and send them to young Blount! Here; burn these things as I hand them to you."
The small man struck a match and, using the wide-mouthed metal cuspidor for an ash-pan, lighted the letters one at a time as they were given to him. When the cinder skeleton of the final sheet had been crushed into ashes, he rose from his knees and reached for his hat.
"Any other orders?" he asked.
"No; nothing more. You are reasonably sure that you haven't been recognized here by any of our local people?"
"I've kept the 'make-up' on most of the time. I've been in Mr. Gantry's office a couple of times, and in Mr. Kittredge's once, and neither of them caught on to me."
"That's good. You'd better go now. O'Brien has gone after Gantry and Kittredge, and I don't care to have them find you here. Better take the first train back to Chicago. These mutton-headed police here might possibly get on your track, and we don't want to have to explain anything to them."
Five minutes after the small man had dropped from the step of the "008," to disappear in the box-car shadows, Gantry and Kittredge came down the yard and entered the private car. Again the vice-president said, "How are you?" and nodded toward the nearest chairs. "Sit down; I'll be through in a minute," and he went on reading the file of papers taken up at the departure of the detective. At the end of the minute he shot a question at the two who were waiting.
"You got my message?"
Gantry answered for himself and the superintendent. "Yes. Your orders have been carried out. The yards are posted, and nobody, outside of a few of our own men, knows that your car is here."
The vice-president took one of the long black cigars from the open box on the flat-topped desk, and passed the box to his two lieutenants.
"Light up," he said tersely. "I'm due in Twin Canyons City to-morrow morning, and we've got to thresh this thing out in a hurry. Any change in the situation since your last report?"
Gantry shook his head. "Nothing very important. Blount's up-town office was broken into last night and his safe ripped open with dynamite, as I suppose you have read in the papers. Who did it, or why it was done, nobody seems to know."
"Well, what came of it?"
"Nothing, so far as I can find out," returned the traffic manager. "Blount had been to the Gordon dance, and he saw the light in his office as he was coming down-town. When he went up to find out what was going on, he caught the safe-blower fairly in the act, but the fellow got away."
"Did Blount lose anything?"
"That's the queer part of it. Blount won't say much about it; and this morning he went around to police headquarters and told the chief to drop the matter, giving as his reason that he was too busy to prosecute the fellow even if he was caught."
To a disinterested observer it might have seemeda little singular that the vice-president made no further comment upon the burglary. As a matter of fact, his next question completely ignored it.
"What has Blount been doing this week?" he asked.
"He has spoken twice; once at Arequipa and once at Hellersville. I understand he has engagements enough to keep him out of town right up to election day."
"That is good," was the nodded approval. "He would only be in the way here at the capital." And then pointedly to Gantry: "Any more of that nonsense about putting a barrel of powder under us and blowing us all up if we don't build the freight tariffs over to suit his notion?"
"A good bit more of it," Gantry admitted reluctantly. "The other day he went so far as to set a time limit; gave me three days of grace in which to file the public notice of the change in rates."
"What did you do?"
"I filed the notice—taking care that the only copy should be the one I sent to Blount's office."
The vice-president looked coldly at his division traffic manager.
"There are times, Gantry, when you seem to be losing your grip. Dave Blount's son isn't a school-boy, to be fooled by such a transparent trick as that! Don't you suppose he knows, as well as you do, that the public notice has to be filed in every station on the road?"
"I had to take a chance—I've had to take a good many chances," protested the traffic manager in his own defence; and Kittredge, a bearded giant who was fully the vice-president's match in heroic physique, removed his cigar to say: "That young fellow has been a frost. If he isn't a wild-eyed fanatic, as Gantry insists he is, he is deeper than the deep blue sea! I'd just about as soon have a box of dynamite kicking around underfoot as to have him messing in this campaign fight. I've been keeping cases on him, as you ordered, and he has worn out three of my best office men on the job."
"You are prejudiced, Kittredge," was the vice-president's comment. "It was the best move in the entire campaign—putting him in the field. Apart from the public sentiment he has been turning our way, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that we got hold of him at a time when the Honorable Senator was getting ready to turn us down."
"Speaking of the sentiment," Gantry put in, "I don't know whether it's all sentiment or not. There's a sort of mystery mixed up in this speech-making business of Blount's. At first I thought maybe his sudden popularity was due to some word sent out from your Chicago office; but when you told me it wasn't, I began to do a little speculating on my own account. I can't make up my mind yet whether it is pure popularity, or whether it's the assisted kind."
"Assisted?" said the vice-president, with a lifting of the heavy eyebrows.
"Yes. It has been too unanimous. I have a trustworthy man in Blount's up-town office, and he says the invitations have fluttered in like autumnleaves; more than Blount could accept if he travelled continuously. Kittredge's men report that the speech-making has been a triumphant progress all over the State; bands, receptions, committees, and banquets wherever Blount goes."
Mr. McVickar grunted. "The speeches have been all that anybody could ask. I've been reading them."
Kittredge shook his head.
"Gantry says they are, but I say no," he contended. "There is such a thing as putting too much sugar in the coffee. Blount's overdoing it; he's putting the whitewash on so thick that any little handful of mud that happens to be thrown will stick and look bad."
"Of course, we have to take chances on that," was the vice-president's qualifying clause. "Nevertheless, young Blount's talk has undoubtedly hadits effect upon public sentiment. We must be careful not to let the opposition newspapers get hold of anything that would tend to nullify it."
"They are moving heaven and earth to do it," said the superintendent. "The Honorable David is lying low, as he usually does, but I more than half believe he's getting ready to give us the double-cross. That is the explanation of this safe-blowing scrape, as I put it up."
Again the vice-president failed to comment further on the burglary. "What I am most afraid of, now, is that our young man may be, as you say, Kittredge, a trifle over-zealous," he said musingly. "We have discovered that he is something of a fanatic."
"He's more than that," Kittredge cut in quickly. "One of the men I've had following him—Farnsworth—is as good as any Pinkerton that ever walked. He says Blount isn't half so innocent as he looks and acts. The speech-making has taken him into every corner of the State, and Farnsworth says he has been doing a lot of quiet prying around and investigating on the side."
"I've been thinking," Gantry added, "what a beautiful mix-up we should have if the senator and his son should both conclude to pull out and get together at the last moment."
The master plotter shook his head. "You have no sense of perspective, Gantry. Young Blount is with us solely because he is too straightforward to countenance his father's political methods. On the other hand, if the Honorable Dave should turn upon us now, he would be obliged to do it at the expense of his son's reputation. Anything he could say against us would simply have the effect of holding his son up to public exprobration as a common campaign liar. I know David Blount pretty well; he won't do anything like that."
Gantry bit his lip and a slow smile of respectful admiration crept up to the Irish eyes.
"When it comes to the real fine-haired work, you have us all feeling for hand-holds, Mr. McVickar," he said. "Now I know why you made a place for Evan Blount, and why you have been giving him a free hand on the whitewashing. It's the biggest thing that has ever been pulled off in Western politics!"
"It hasn't been pulled off yet," was the quick reply. "We are holding old David in a noose that may turn into a rope of sand at any minute; don't forget that. During the few days intervening before the election we must preserve the present status at any cost. Young Blount is the only man who may possibly disturb it. Keep him out of the way. If he doesn't have speaking invitations enough to busy him, see to it that he gets them. As long as you can keep him talking he won't have any time for side issues. Now about this Gryson business: you want to handle that yourselves, and I don't want any more telegrams like the one you sent me last night, Gantry. What's the condition?"
Gantry outlined the Gryson "condition" briefly. The man Gryson, who had developed into a heeler of sorts, had been growing restive, wanting more money.
"What can he swing?" was the curt question.
"Six out of seven pretty close counties. I don't pretend to know how he has done it, but he has got the goods; I've taken the trouble to check up on him. With his pull, we can swing the vote of the capital itself."
The vice-president frowned thoughtfully. "Theold game of stuffing the registration lists, I suppose," he said. And then:"Young Blount hasn't got wind of this, has he?"
Gantry laughed. "You may be sure he hasn't. He has it in for Gryson on general principles—made us take him off the shop pay-rolls. If he thought we were dickering with him now, he'd be down on us like a thousand of brick."
"Well, why don't you fix Gryson, once for all, and have it over with? You oughtn't to expect me to come here and tell you what to do!"
It was at this point that Kittredge broke in.
"Gryson isn't safe. I have it straight that he is getting ready to sell us out. That's why he wants his pay in advance."
The vice-president's heavy brows met in a frown, and the muscles of his square jaw hardened.
"Put Gryson on the rack and show him what you've got on him in that Montana bank robbery. That will bring him to book. It will be time enough to talk about terms when he delivers the goods. Now another thing—that Shonoho Inn matter that I wired about—what has been done?"
"It is all arranged," said the big superintendent. "The house was closed for the season last month, and we have taken a short lease. One of our dining-car managers will take charge of the service."
"And the wires?"
"We have made a cut-in from the old Shoshone Mine wire, which wasn't taken down when the mine was abandoned. That let us out very neatly, and no one outside of our own line-men know anything about the job. We have four instruments in the hotel writing-room; two on the commercial and two on the railroad wires. Will that be enough?"
Mr. McVickar nodded and reached over to press the bell-push which signalled to his train conductor.
"That is about all I have to say," he said, in dismissal of the two local officials. "Just nail Gryson up to the cross, where he belongs, and keep youngBlount busy and out of town; I leave the details to you. Get orders for me as you go up to your office, Kittredge, and have the despatcher let me out as soon as possible. I ought to be half-way to Alkali by this time."