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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And Hathaway? Will he be here?"

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

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

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

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

The small plotter nodded approval.

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



X

IN THE HERBARIUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, and he referred me to Gantry."

"And what did Mr. Gantry say?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XI

THE GREAT GAME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blount's smile was neither forgiving nor hostile.

"In a way, I had earned what was handed out to me afterward, Mr. Hathaway, and I'm not bearing malice," he said briefly. "I had no business to let you get away with the wrong impression, but you were so exceedingly anxious to identify me with the Forest Service that it seemed a pity to disappoint you. Since your scoundrels didn't kill me, we'll set one incident against the other and forget both. What can I do for you to-day?"

By this time the lumber lord was apparently recovering his breath and some measure of composure, though he had lost neither.

"Great Jehu!" he lamented. "If you had given me half a hint that you were Dave Blount's son—but you didn't, you know, and now I'm handicapped just when I oughtn't to be. I've come to talk business with you to-day, Mr. Blount, and here you've got me on the run the first crack out of the box!"

This time Blount's smile was entirely conciliatory.

"Don't let that little misfire in the Lost Mountain foot-hills embarrass you, Mr. Hathaway. I assure you I'm not at all vindictive."

"All right," said the visitor, only too willing to dismiss the Jack Barto incident and the forced awkwardness of the pretended surprise. "That being the case, I'll jump in on the other matter. But first I'd like to ask a sort of personal question: I've been given to understand that you are handling the political business for the railroad company in this campaign. Is that right?"

"It is and it isn't," was the prompt reply. "The railroad company isn't in politics in this campaign—as a political factor, I mean. What we are trying to do—and all we are trying to do—is to lay the entire matter plainly and fairly before the people of this State, with a frank appeal for the relief to which we are entitled."

"Ha—h'm—I guess I get you, Mr. Blount. That's the way to talk it; in public, anyway. But, just between us two—I guess we needn't beat the bushes in a little personal talk like this—we both know there are certain things that have to be done in every campaign; things you wouldn't want to publish in the newspapers."

Blount sat back in his chair and the conciliatory smile disappeared.

"What kind of things?" he asked abruptly.

"Oh, of course, I don't know all of 'em. But there was one little arrangement that was made two years ago with us, and it helped out both ways. I thought I'd come around and see if it couldn't be worked again."

"State the facts," said Blount shortly.

"It was like this. As you know, we've got a number of plants scattered around at different places in the State, and, one way and another, we employ a good many men. These men are residents of the State, but you couldn't call 'em citizens in the sense that they take any active interest in what's going on. They're here this year, and they may be up among the Oregon redwoods next year, and somewhere else the year after. When they vote at all they naturally ask us how we'd like to have 'em vote; and that's the way it was two years ago at election time."

"I see. But how does this concern the railroad company?"

"I'm coming to that, right now. Two years ago we found that our employees' vote was big enough to turn the scale in four of the legislative districts and to cut a pretty good-sized figure in a fifth. This vote was worth something to your people, and the fact was properly recognized. I don't know but what I'm telling you a lot of stale news, but—"

"Go on, Mr. Hathaway; if I wasn't greatly interested in the beginning, I am now. How was the fact recognized by the Transcontinental Railway Company?"

"It was just as easy as twice two. The Twin Buttes Lumber Company is practically the only heavy lumber-shipper in this inter-mountain territory, and it was given a preferential rate on its products; you might say that the amount of business we do entitles us to some special consideration, anyway. There wasn't any bargain and sale about it, you understand. It was just a sort of friendly recognition of our help in the election."

"This rate is lower than the rate made to other lumber-shippers?"

"Well, yes; but, after all, it isn't any big thing. If you were up on lumber rates, Mr. Blount—as I don't suppose you are—you'd know that the special tariff we get is all that enables us to live and do business."

Blount had opened his penknife and was absently sharpening a pencil.

"This special rate you refer to, Mr. Hathaway," he said, speaking slowly and quite distinctly—"am I right in inferring that it is not confined strictly to points within the State boundaries?"

At this the lumberman repeated a phrase which he had used in the anxious conference in the Weatherford herbarium.

"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you, Mr. Blount. But of course you do know. If you wasn't on the inside of all the insides you wouldn't be sitting here pulling the strings for McVickar. The rate is a blanket; it covers all shipments."

Blount nodded and his apparent coolness was no just measure of the inward fires the crooked lumber-king was kindling.

"You interest me greatly, Mr. Hathaway. I am a little new to these things—as you intimated a few moments ago. How is this matter handled—by rebates, I suppose?"

"N-not exactly," was the hesitating denial. "That would be too risky for both of us. But the Transcontinental Company is a heavy buyer—lumber and cross-ties and bridge timber, you know—and the biggest part of the difference between our special and the regular rate is taken up in our bills for material furnished to the railroad."

"Let me be quite clear upon that point," said Blount; and if Hathaway had had eyes to see, he would have observed that the young lawyer's attitude was becoming more judicial with every fresh questioning. "Let me be quite sure that I understand. You mean that you are allowed to charge the railroad company more than the market price on the material it buys?"

Hathaway nodded. "Yes, that's the way of it."

"And this preferential rate is still in force?"

"It is."

"You're sure you have had no notice of its withdrawal—say within the past few weeks?"

It was at this point that the lumber lord began to fear that some one had slipped a cog in sending him to first one and then another, and finally to young Blount.

"Of course, it hasn't been withdrawn!" he retorted. And then: "You seem to think there is something off color in the deal, Mr. Blount, and I don't know whether you're stringing me or whether you're too new in the railroad game to have the dope. If you're going into this political knock-down-and-drag-out, you ought to have the dope. There isn't a big interest in this State—ore-shippers, power people, irrigation companies, or any of 'em—that ain't getting a rake-off. I guess you are stringing me; I guess you know all this a good deal better than I do. If you don't, I can tell you that it's a fact; not a 'has-been', but an 'is'! Ask Gantry; he'll tell you, if he tells the truth. We ain't asking or getting anything that other people ain't getting!"

"I see," said Blount soberly. "What do you expect me to do, Mr. Hathaway?"

"I want you to set the wheels in motion so that we can have our rate made good for another two years—on the same terms as before. You're going to need every vote you can get this year, and you can't afford to turn us down." Then the lumber-king shifted again to his own necessities. "It's the only way we can live and do business nowadays. Like every other large corporation, we've got an army of little investors to look out for: widows, orphans, charitable institutions, and trustees' accounts. I've got a list of our stockholders right here, and I'd like to have you look it over."

Blount took the paper mechanically, and quite as mechanically ran his eye down the list of names. At the bottom of it, written in with a pen, was the name of Patricia's father, with his residence and occupation. While he was staring at the pen-written name, Hathaway went on, eloquently emphasizing the disastrous results which would fall upon the people for whom he was, in the larger sense, a guardian and a trustee—the disaster hinging upon the withdrawal of the preferential rate.

Blount broke him abruptly in the midst of the special plea. "I see you have recently added one new name to this list: the name of Professor Anners. How—"

"Yes," interrupted the Twin Buttes diplomatist hastily, fearing that this legal-minded young man would presently be asking questions too hard to be answered; "now there's a case in point: Mr. Anners is a good example of our smaller stockholders. Men like Anners, college professors, preachers, and so on, buy stocks, when they buy 'em at all, for an investment—for the income—and they pay for 'em out of their hard-earned savings."

"I know," said Blount, and, since he was the last man in the world to be diverted from his purpose by any conversational dust-throwing, he pressed the question cut off by the hasty interruption. "What I was going to ask was how you happen to have added Professor Anners's name to your list—recently, it seems?"

The lumberman was reduced to the necessity of inventing a ready lie. He had obeyed his instructions blindly, on the supposition that young Blount would know and understand.

"Anners? Oh, he knows a good thing when he sees it; and I guess maybe your father put him on. He's a friend of the family, ain't he? Maybe the senator found a little chunk of 'Twin Buttes' that he didn't want himself, and passed it along."

Blount's blood ran cold at the sight of the cracking walls and crumbling foundations on every hand. The proof that the railroad company's lawless attitude was still unchanged was too strong to be doubted; and now there was an added blow from the hand of his father. He wheeled short upon the lumber-king.

"Who sent you to me, Mr. Hathaway?" he demanded.

The hawk-faced man laughed. "I guess you know just as well or better than I do. But just to show you that I can keep my mouth shut, I ain't going to tell you. It's all right and straight—and you might say it's all in the family, counting the professor in on the side, as it were."

"I see," Blount said, and this time he was only too sure that he did see. Then: "What is it you want me to do for you, Mr. Hathaway? You have told me once, but I'm afraid I didn't grasp it fully."

"Fix it with Gantry, or somebody, so that we can put the company vote where it's most needed and get our rate continued. It's simple enough."

"The simplicity is beyond question." Blount returned the list of stockholders and fell back upon the pencil-sharpening. "It is quite elementary, as you say; but there is another phase of the transaction which seems to have escaped you. Are you aware that the present arrangement which you have so accurately described, and the continuance of it which you are proposing, are crimes for which both parties involved may be called into court and punished?"

Hathaway started as if the comfortable chair in which he was lounging had been suddenly electrified.

"Say, Blount, are you working for the railroad, or not?" he demanded. "If you are, what in the name of Heaven are you driving at? I know the line of talk you've been handing out since McVickar gave you your job and set you up in business here, but that's for the dear public. You don't have to wear your halo when a man comes in to talk hard facts from the inside. It comes to just this: you do something for me, and I do something for you. You make it possible for us to live and sell lumber, and we do what we can to make it easy for your railroad to get its 'square deal' from a pie-cutting legislature. That's the whole thing in a nutshell."

"One more question," snapped Blount, striving to fix the roving gaze of the hawk-like eyes. "With whom did you make this arrangement two years ago?"

"With your boss, if you want to know; with Mr. McVickar himself!"

"And you think you can do it again?"

"I know damned well I can; only I don't care to go over your head unless I have to. They tell me you're handling this end of it for the railroad company, and I'm not going around hunting a chance to make enemies. That's all I've got to say"—and he rose to go—"all but this: you've got a lot to learn about this something-for-something business, and the quicker you get at it, Mr. Blount, the sooner you'll arrive somewhere. About this little matter of ours, there's no special hurry. Take your own time to think it over; take it up with McVickar, if you want to. Then, when you get things fixed, wire me one word to Twin Buttes. Just say 'Yes,' and sign your name to it. That'll be enough."

For a long half-hour after the president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company and its allied corporations had closed the door of the private office behind him, Blount sat rocking gently in his pivot-chair. In the fulness of time the bitter thoughts wrought their way into words.

"So this is what I was hired for!" he mused, "a fence; a wretched mask put up to hide the trickery and chicanery and criminality—the crookedness which has never been put aside; which nobody ever meant to put aside! My God! they've let me stultify myself in a thousand ways; let me sit here day after day with a lie in my mouth, saying things that nobody in this God-forsaken homeland of mine has believed for a single minute! After it's all over, every man who has listened to me will say that I knew—that all this talk about openness and fair dealing was simply that much dust-throwing to hide the workings of a corrupt and criminal machine grinding away in the background!"

He turned to his desk and sat with his head propped in his hands, staring at the little photograph of Wartrace Hall which he had had mounted in a plate-glass paper-weight. The sight gave an added twist to the torture screw and he broke out again.

"I've been nothing more than a bit of potter's clay, and the master potter—God help me!—is my own father! It's all plain enough now. He saw that I wasn't going to fall in with the attorney-general scheme; or perhaps he saw that I might be a stumbling-block if I should; so he planned this thing with McVickar—planned it deliberately! There is no fight, after all; it's merely one of the moves in the game that the 'boss' and the railroad should seem to be fighting each other. Good God! I can't believe it, and yet I've got to believe it. That man Hathaway is a self-confessed criminal, but he was telling the truth about the law-breaking trickery that is going on; he wouldn't be idiotic enough to lie and then give me a chance to prove the lie. And he didn't come to me of his own volition; he was sent—sent to break me down, and sent by.... Oh, dad, dad! how could you do it!"

With his face hidden in the crook of his arm, he was groping in vain outreachings for something to lay hold of, for some clear-minded, clean-hearted adviser who could tell him what to do; how he should clamber out of this pit of humiliation into which nothing more culpable than an honest zeal for civic righteousness had precipitated him. In his despair he told himself that there was no one, and then suddenly he remembered—Patricia would know, and she would understand better than any one else in a populous world how to point the way out of the labyrinth. He must go to her and tell her. In the meantime....

He got up and shut his desk with a slam. In the meantime there should be no more lies told—no more turns taken in the crooked path. Collins, the stenographer, heard the noise of the desk closing and came to the door of the private room, note-book and pencil in hand. "Anything to give me before you go out?" he asked.

"Yes," said Blount almost savagely. "Take a message to Mr. McVickar. Are you ready?"

The stenographer nodded.

Blount dictated curtly: "'Pending another interview with you in person, I shall close my offices in Temple Court and confine myself strictly to the routine legal business of the company. Meanwhile, my resignation is in your hands if you wish to appoint a new division counsel.' Have you got that, Collins? Very well; write it out and send it at once. I shall be at the Inter-Mountain for a little while, if you want to reach me between now and closing time."



XII

A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT

Going to the hotel, Blount shut himself into a telephone booth and tried, ineffectually, to get a long-distance connection with Wartrace Hall. When he finally grew exasperated at the central operator's oft-repeated "line's busy," he called up Gantry to ask if the traffic manager knew anything about the purposes and movements of his father. Gantry did not know, but he knew something else—a thing which proved the leakiness of the railroad telegraph department.

"Come down here and tell me what you mean by sending incendiary telegrams to the vice-president," he commanded, with jesting severity. And with a hard word for the department which had gossiped, Blount went down to the general offices in the station building.

Gantry was busy with the stenographer, but the business was immediately postponed and the clerk dismissed when Blount entered.

"'Tell it out among the heathen,'" the traffic manager quoted jocosely, when the door closed behind the shorthand man.

"There is nothing to tell—more than you seem to know already," snapped Blount morosely. "I have wired my resignation, that's all."

"But why?" persisted Gantry.

"Because I'm not going to be an accessory, either before or after the fact—not if I know it," was the curt rejoinder.

"An accessory to what?"

"To the criminal disregard for the laws of this State and the nation which seems to be the underlying motive actuating every move in this corrupt game of politics. Gantry, if you and some others had your just deserts, you would be breaking stone in the penitentiary this blessed minute!"

"Suffering Moses!" gasped the traffic manager. "Somebody must have been hitting you pretty hard. Who was it; some more of the 'little brothers'?"

At another time Blount might have been less angry, and, by consequence, more discreet.

"No, it wasn't any of the 'little brothers'; it was Mr. Simon P. Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company."

Gantry drew a long breath which ended in a low whistle.

"So that's what you were let in for, was it?" he exclaimed, and then he checked himself abruptly and went back to the original contention. "But you're not going to throw down your tools and walk out, Evan. You can't afford to do that."

"Why can't I?"

"Because you have committed yourself right and left. No man can afford to drop out of the ranks on the eve of a battle. You are not stopping to consider the construction which will be put upon any such hasty action on your part."

"I am not stopping to consider anything, Dick, save the fact that I was evidently expected to connive at a cynical and criminal disregard for the law of the land, the law which, as a member of the bar, I have sworn to uphold and defend. That is enough for me. I don't have to be knocked down and run over before I can realize that it's time to get out of the way."

"You say it's enough for you; it won't be enough for Mr. McVickar," Gantry interposed. "If you could afford to drop out—and I'm not admitting that you can—he couldn't afford to let you." Then, with sudden gravity: "Hadn't you better let me hold up that telegram of yours for a few hours, Evan, until you've had time to cool down and think it over?"

Blount sprang from his chair in a white heat.

"Do you mean to tell me that you are already holding it up?" he demanded.

"I took the liberty of holding it up—temporarily," confessed the traffic man coolly. "There is no harm done. Mr. McVickar is on his way West now, and he will be here in a day or two. Why not kill the message and have it out with him in person when he comes?"

Blount was not to be so easily appeased.

"I won't have my communications tampered with!" he exploded. "If you have given an order to have that telegram held out, you can give another to have it sent immediately!"

"All right," said Gantry; "just as you say." And he made no effort to detain the enraged one who was turning his back and striding away. But after the self-discharged political manager was gone, the traffic man chuckled quietly and turned up a square of paper which had been lying on his desk during the short and belligerent interview.

"It's a nice lay-out," he mused, reading the type-written lines over again, "but the little lady was too fly for you this time, Evan, my boy. She was just prophetess enough to guess where and how you would go off the handle, clever enough to pass me the word to watch the wires after a certain train should get in from Ophir to-day. Great little woman, that. I believe she figures out more than half of the fine moves in the Honorable Senator's game, though this particularly fine move of sending Hathaway to touch a match to Evan's little powder-keg is one that I don't begin to understand." And he folded the telegram and carefully put it away in his pocket-book.

Evan Blount walked three squares beyond the Inter-Mountain Hotel before he had cooled down sufficiently to determine what to do next. As it chanced, the cooling-down process had led him to the door of the public garage patronized by his father. That thought of flying to Patricia for counsel and comfort was still with him, but it was over-shadowed by a more militant desire to fight somebody; to go to his father and tell him how completely and successfully he had plotted with the vice-president to humiliate a son whose only offence was a decent regard for honor and uprightness.

Acting upon the impulse of the moment, he went in and asked if any of Senator Blount's cars were in the city. There was one—the big roadster; and Blount's decision was taken instantly. On that first day at Wartrace Hall his father had tried to give him one of the three motor-cars outright, and when he had refused to take it as a gift, a compromise had been made by which he was under promise to use any one of the machines he could get hold of when the need arose. Accordingly, a few minutes later he was behind the steering-wheel of the fast roadster, picking his way through the traffic-burdened city streets and pointing straight for the country road leading north to the sage-brush hills.

Now, among its many attractions, motoring numbers—from the driver's point of view—this: that it effectually sweeps the brain of all other cares and distractions, sundry and several, since one may not drive a high-powered car at speed and successfully think of anything but the driving. Blount reached the entrance to the cottonwood-shaded avenue at Wartrace Hall just before the dinner hour; and he was so far recovered from the attack of righteous indignation that he was able to meet his father and the others with a fair degree of equanimity. In the back part of his mind, however, he held the fighting ultimatum in suspense. In the course of the evening he would make his opportunity and have it out, once for all, with the master plotter. So much he determined while he was dressing for dinner. But the course of events is sometimes a most unmalleable thing, as he was presently to learn.

At the dinner-table it was the professor who monopolized the conversation, holding forth learnedly and dictatorially upon matters pertaining solely to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the talk to approach nearer than several million years to the twentieth century. And at the dispersal—only there was no dispersal—the senator took his turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room and persuading Patricia to go to the piano.

The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his brain bided his time. He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was still outweighing the lesser. Further along, when Miss Anners had played herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination. But, in spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.

The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the bamboo portieres he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should. Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But when his patience was finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo portieres aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It was Patricia, and she was alone.

"I thought perhaps I should find you here," she said, taking the easy chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn. "Did we bore you to death with the Pliocenes?"

"Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But since I hadn't remembered to have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods."

"Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for daddy's sake I do try to. But for us who are living to-day there are so many problems of critically vital importance—problems that the pterodactyls never knew anything about."

"I know," returned the young man, half-absently. "I am up against one of them, right now, and I don't know how to solve it."

"Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her tone was personal rather than conventional.

"It will not only bear telling; it demands to be told to some one whose sense of right and wrong has not been drawn and quartered and flayed alive until it has no longer life or breath left with which to protest," and thereupon he told her circumstantially all that had befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the wrecked train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of the lumber magnate's attempt at corruption, of which he suppressed nothing but the fact that her father's name appeared in Mr. Hathaway's list of share-holders. When he had made an end, her eyes were shining, though whether with quickened sympathy or indignation he could not determine.

"What did you do?" she asked, referring to the incident of the afternoon.

"I didn't do half enough!" he fumed. "I'm afraid I let Hathaway escape without being told plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable scoundrel he is. When he edged out of the door, he was still telling me to take my time to think it over, and was indicating the way in which I might communicate my consent without committing anybody. I made a mistake in not firing him bodily!"

Miss Anners was tapping one daintily shod foot on the tiled hearth.

"You made your greatest mistake in the very beginning, Evan," she said decisively. "You should have made a confidant of your father."

"I did try to," he protested. "Everything was all right until this political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr. McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I could really do something toward bringing about a better understanding."

"And now you believe you can't?—that it is impossible?"

"Not wholly impossible, I suppose. But the 'great game' seems to be everything in this benighted commonwealth, and everybody plays it—my father, his wife, the railroad officials, and the politicians. Surely you wouldn't say that I should have let father put me on the State ticket as a candidate, knowing—as I could not help knowing—that I would be expected to carry out the designs of the machine regardless of right and wrong?"

"Certainly not," was the quick reply, "not if you were convinced that the motive—your father's motive—was unworthy. But if you have been telling me the truth, and all the truth, I should say that you didn't stop to inquire what his motive was."

"What was the use of inquiring?" he demanded moodily. "He is the boss, and he would have used the machine to put me into office as attorney-general. In other words, I should have owed my election, not to the will and selection of the people, but to the will of one man, and that man my nearest kinsman; a man who is, beyond all question of doubt, working hand in glove with all the trickery and double-dealing practised by the corporations. Under such conditions, would it have been possible for me to accept and to administer the office without fear or favor?"

"I don't know why not," she returned. "Notwithstanding your charge—which merely shows how angry you are—your 'nearest kinsman,' as you call him, would have been the last man in the world to interfere. Wasn't that the very reason he gave you for wanting to put you on the ticket?"

"I know," said Blount, whose mind was beginning to cloud again. "But there are so many other mysteries. We'll say that my father honestly wanted me to stand for the candidacy. But right in the midst of things he conspires with Mr. McVickar to put me into my present unspeakable dilemma."

Her smile was gently reproachful.

"It is my poor opinion, Evan, that you don't half appreciate your father. Worse than that, you don't know him. But that is beside the present mark. What are you going to do?"

"I have already done it. I have wired my resignation to Mr. McVickar, and he will doubtless accept it."

She was looking him fairly in the eyes. "That is the second unwise thing you have done," she remarked. And then: "Evan, there are times when you are sadly in need of a balance-wheel. Don't you know that?"

"I knew it a good while ago. I applied for one once, and it was refused when you said 'No'."

For one who was supposed to be far above and beyond such emotional signallings, she blushed very prettily. Which merely proves that one may be a diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating the miseries of a sodden world, without having parted with the primitive sex impulse.

"I am willing to try to help you now," she said, half hesitating; "if only you won't try to drag me over into the field of sentiment. It was just a bit of boyish rage—fine enough in its way, but foolish—your sending that telegram to Mr. McVickar. Can't you recall it?"

"No; not now."

"Then you must do the next best thing: tell him you have reconsidered."

"But I haven't reconsidered; I can't and won't stand in with the corruption and bribery that is going on all around me!" he objected indignantly.

"Of course you can't; and you mustn't. But the true reformer doesn't drop things and run away. You must stay in and fight—fight harder than you ever have before, Evan. If you can't do it for the sake of the larger right, then you must do it for your own sake. Can't you see the open door before you?"

"I can see and hear and feel when the door is slammed in my face," was the qualifying rejoinder. "How can I go on preaching the gospel of cleanness and fair dealing, when I know that all this crooked work is going on behind my back? What will the people of this State say to me and about me when the crookedness comes to light?"

"Ah!" she said; "that is just where you begin to grow one-sided. You must go on preaching the gospel, but that is only half of the battle. The other half is to be big enough and strong enough and insistent enough to make the thing itself agree with the gospel. I fully believe you lost your best helper when you refused to join hands with your father. You don't believe that, so we'll let it go. You have gone your own way, choosing what seemed to you to be the better opportunity. Evan, you can't turn back; you've simply got to go on and wring success out of apparent failure!"

Blount drew a deep breath and sat up in his chair. There was no mistaking the light in Patricia's eyes now; the pure flame of which it was the visible radiance is the torch which has kindled the beacon fires on all the heights since the world began.

"If I had only my own people—the railroad people—to knock down and drag out," he was beginning, but she broke in warmly:

"You think you have your father against you, too; I don't believe it, but you do. Very well; then you must compel him, as well as the others. Be a big man, Evan; be the biggest man in the State until you have proved that one man with a righteous cause is better than ten thousand without it."

Blount got up and stood with his back to the dying embers of the tiny fire, and if he put his hands behind him it was because the passionate impulse to break down all the barriers was twitching in every fibre of him.

"Patricia, girl, I wonder if you know what you have done to me? I drove out here this evening utterly discouraged and disheartened; bitter and angry, and ready to throw the whole thing up and go away. You've changed all that—you, you know; just you. Oh, girl, girl! if I could only have you beside me to give me my battle-word!"

She had her slender fingers locked over one knee and her eyes were downcast.

"Now you are tempting me," she said slowly; "and—and it isn't fair. You know my weakness and passion to help. You mustn't tempt me, Evan."

What he would have said, with what eager pleadings he would have pressed the advantage gained by his appeal for the larger help, is not to be here set down. For at that moment the bamboo door curtains parted to admit the small house-mistress.

"You two!" she scolded with light-hearted austerity. And then to Evan: "Don't you know that we are keeping country hours here at Wartrace now? The professor will be up and calling for the car at six o'clock, and it's past midnight. Shame on you! Run away and get your beauty sleep—both of you!"



XIII

THE LIEGEMAN

Evan Blount drove himself back to the capital in the swift roadster the following morning, and there was no opportunity for further confidential speech with Patricia before he left. But with the new day had arisen, full-grown, the determination born in the moment of midnight heart-warming and inspiration. To the best of his ability he would live up to the high standard set for him by the woman he loved, not only preaching the gospel of fair dealing, but doing his utmost to make it effective.

With this high purpose singing its song of exaltation in his veins, he drove on past the garage and made an early call at the office of the traffic manager. Gantry was in the midst of his morning mail-opening, but he pushed the desk-load of papers aside when the door swung inward to admit the early visitor.

"Hello, old man! Come back to jar me some more about that telegram?" was his greeting.

Blount shook his head. "No; if you've sent it, well and good. If you haven't, you may pitch it into the waste-basket. I came to talk about something else."

"Good, sound, sensible second thought!" Gantry commented, laughing. Then he took out his pocket-book and passed the suppressed telegram across to Blount. "Here it is; you can do the waste-basket act yourself. I couldn't let you commit hara-kiri without at least trying to get the cutting tool out of your hands. What is the other thing you've got on your mind this early in the morning? It must be a nightmare of some sort, by the look in your eyes."

"It may figure as a nightmare to you, Dick, before we're through with it. I'll make it short. You know what I have been doing—what I supposed I was hired to do—assuring everybody right and left that we were going into this campaign with clean hands?"

"I know," admitted the traffic manager, developing a sudden interest in the figures of the rug at his feet.

"I have been doing this in a business way at my office up-town, in season and out of season, and night before last, at Ophir, I did it publicly. As the campaign progresses, I shall doubtless put myself on record many times to the same effect."

"Good man!" applauded Gantry, striving to drag the talk down to some less portentous altitude. "I'm sure we need all the whitewashing anybody can give us."

"That is just the point I have come to make," Blount went on gravely. "It mustn't be merely a coat of whitewash, Dick; it has got to be the real thing, this time. I began by firing the 'little brothers,' as you called them, but I sha'n't stop at that; I mean to go higher up if I am compelled to. I am here this morning to ask you to give me your word as a gentleman and my friend that you will not, directly or indirectly, do or cause to be done anything that will make me stand forth as a self-convicted liar before the people of this State. I want you to promise me that you will cut out all the deals, all the briberies, all the bargainings, all the—"

"Oh, say; see here!" protested the man under fire; "you've got the wrong pig by the ear, Evan. I'm not the Transcontinental Railway Company!"

"I know you are not. But, to a greater degree than any other official in the local management, you have Mr. McVickar's confidence. If you don't feel competent to handle the thing on your own responsibility, of course it's your privilege to pass it up to those who have the authority. In that case, I wish to make one point clear: you're the man I'm going to hold up to the rack. I can't afford to spread myself over the entire management, and I don't mean to try. I'm going to look to you, Dick, for the backing of the clean sheet, and I warn you in all soberness that there must be no blots on it; no compromises; no whipping of the devil around the stump."

"Great Scott!" murmured Gantry. "And you're on the pay-rolls, the same as the rest of us! But candidly, as man to man, Evan, the thing can't be done, you know. We've got to play the game; they'll eat us alive if we don't. You needn't figure in it at all; it was a mistake letting Sim Hathaway get to you, and I said so at the time. But your—er—the powers that be said it had to be that way, and I had to let him go and ball you all up. It sha'n't happen again; I can promise you that much, anyway."

Blount caught quickly at the hesitant pause.

"Who were 'the powers that be' in Hathaway's case, Dick?" he inquired.

"I can't tell you that; honestly, I can't, Evan," was the anxious refusal. "Don't ask me."

"All right; then I shall assume that Mr. McVickar was responsible," said Blount calmly, thus proving that he had not taken his degree in the law school for nothing.

"Oh, hold on! You mustn't do that, either!" protested the man who was figuring most unwillingly as the occupant of the witness stand.

"Thank you," returned the postgraduate, with the true Blount smile. "Now I know that it was my father. No; you needn't deny it; I suppose it was for some good reason that this man was sent to teach me how to play the game—as reasons go in practical politics. But we are side-stepping the real issue. I've asked you for a promise: will you give it?"

"I—I can't give it, Evan, and hold my job; that's God's own truth!"

"No; it isn't God's truth—it's the other kind. But that was about what I expected you to say. Now hear my side of it: if you don't clean house—you and the other officials of the company—I shall not only resign; I shall take the field on the other side and tell what I know and why I've thrown up my job. I've been telling everybody that this is to be a campaign of publicity, and by all that is good and great, I shall keep my word, Dick!"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, you wouldn't do that!" ejaculated the traffic man, now thoroughly alarmed. "Land of glory, Evan! you know too much—a great deal too much!"

The young man who knew too much got up and relighted his cigar with a match taken from Gantry's desk box.

"It's up to you," he said, with his hand on the door-knob. "Get into communication with whatever 'powers that be' there are that can give the necessary orders; see to it that the orders are given, and that they are put in the way of being carried out. As God hears me, Dick, I mean what I say: it's a clean sheet, or an exposure that will make a lot of you wish you had never been born. If I have to put the screws on—as I hope and pray I sha'n't—you can bet they'll be put on lawyer-fashion; with evidence that will send a bunch of you to the penitentiary."

"Hold on—one question before you go, Evan!" pleaded Gantry. "I haven't known half the time where I'm at in this latest muddle. Is this another little blind lead of the Honorable Sen—of your father's?"

Blount's smile was as grim as any that Gantry had ever seen on the face of the Honorable David.

"It's against nature for you to play the game straight, isn't it, Dick?" he said in mild reproach. "If you don't know that my father is still the head of the machine, and that the machine has always been for you in the past, I imagine you're the only man in the Sage-Brush State who needs enlightening. No, Gantry; you've got only one man to fight; but you mustn't forget that his name, also, is Blount. Go to it and send me word, and let the first word be that you have scotched the head of this lumber-company snake. That's all for to-day. Good-by."

Notwithstanding the fact that his day's work was still ahead of him, the traffic manager did not attack it when he was left alone. An able man in his calling, and one who had fought his way rapidly by sheer merit and hard work from a clerkship to an official desk, Richard Gantry was still lacking, in a character admirable and most lovable in many ways, the iron that refuses to bend, and—though perhaps in lesser measure—the courage of his ultimate convictions. In addition to these basic weaknesses he owned another—the weakness of the cog which is constrained to turn with the great wheel of which it is a part.

In his heart of hearts Richard Gantry knew that Blount was right; knew that the forlorn-hope fight into which his friend and college classmate had plunged was a struggle to call out all that was best and finest in friendly loyalty. But when he sprang from his chair and began to walk the floor of his private office with his head down and his hands deeply buried in his pockets, he was once more the true corporation liegeman, loyal to his salt, and anxious only to contrive means to an end.

"Confound his picture!" he muttered, "why the devil can't he see that he's got everything to lose and nothing to gain? It's a thousand pities that such a royal good fellow has to turn himself into a wild-eyed, impossible crank! The Lord knows, I'd do anything in reason for him; but I can't let him turn anarchist and blow us all to kingdom come. He's got to be muzzled in some way, and I'll be hanged if I know how it's going to be done."

The pacing monologue paused when the traffic manager stopped at the window and stood looking with unseeing eyes upon the morning bustle of Sierra Avenue. Then he broke out again.

"It's a beautiful tangle—damn' beautiful! Evan says I know that we've got the machine with us; I wish to heaven I did know it, and could be sure of it. That would simplify matters a whole lot. But the vice-president won't say, and he's the one who has been doing all the dickering with the Honorable David. They quarrelled at first; I'd bet every dollar I've got on that. But I more than half-believe they've patched it up now, and I believe it was Mr. McVickar's quick swiping of Evan—jerking him out from under his father's thumb the way he did—that brought on the peace negotiations."

He turned away from the window and resumed the floor-pacing, still wrestling with the deductions.

"By George! I believe I've got hold of the end of the thread at last! The senator is with us, working in the dark, as he always does. And that Hathaway business: that was one of his smooth little side-moves—his or Mrs. Honoria's. He didn't want Evan to get in too deep in the righteousness puddle, and he took that way of letting him get a peek at the real thing. It was overdone, though; horribly overdone. Confound it all! I wish Mr. McVickar would loosen up a little more with me! If he'd tell me a few of the things I ought to know—"

The interruption was the entrance of the boy from the train-despatcher's office with a verbal message. The vice-president, moving westward, had changed his plans and cut out some of his stop-overs. Car "008" would be in on the noon train and would proceed westward, running special, at one o'clock. The despatcher had thought that Mr. Gantry might want to know.

The traffic manager did want to know, and when the boy had ducked out, the knowledge was promptly utilized. A touch of a desk-button brought the stenographer, and Gantry dictated a message. "'Important that I should have conference with you on arrival. Will meet you at train at twelve-three.' Send that to Mr. McVickar over the despatcher's wire, and ask Gilkey to rush it," he directed, and the shorthand man went to do it.

"Now, Mr. Evan Anarchist Blount!" said Gantry, apostrophizing the late disturber of his peace, "now we'll find out just where we're at and how big a rope it's going to take to snub you down," and thereupon the desk buzzer rattled again, and Mr. Richard Gantry squared himself for his forenoon's work.

At the moment of his apostrophizing Blount was opening his mail in the Temple Court office, and lamenting, as a loyal friend might, the necessity for the recent clubbing into line of so fine a fellow as Dick Gantry. But the mail-opening plunged him once more into the political actualities. There were letters from all over the State, and among them three invitations from widely separated cities, all based upon the newspaper reports of his Ophir speech. It seemed to be plainly evident that the "campaign-of-education" idea was striking a popular chord, and the proponent of the idea saw what a miraculous opportunity was offering for the railroad if only the "powers" that Gantry had refused to name were broad enough and high-minded enough to seize it.

After a day and an evening well filled with detail, Blount went to the station to take the nine-thirty west-bound, since the first of the three speaking engagements—all of which had been promptly accepted by wire—lay in that direction. On the platform, whither he went to consult the bulletin-board, he found Gantry.

"Your train is half an hour late," said the traffic man, with a glance for the travelling-bag in Blount's hand. "Didn't they know enough at the hotel to tell you about it?"

"They told me it was on time," said the putative traveller, and he was far enough from suspecting that Gantry himself had arranged to have the inaccurate information given across the counter at the Inter-Mountain, so that he might be sure of an uninterrupted half-hour with Blount before he should leave the city.

"Ump!" said the traffic manager, "I've got to wait for it, too. One of my men is coming in on it. Let's go up to the office. It's pleasanter there."

Together they climbed the stair to the second floor of the station building, and Gantry unlocked the door of his private room and turned on the lights.

"Feeling any more humane than you did this morning?" he inquired genially, after he had opened his desk and found a box of cigars.

"I haven't been feeling otherwise since—well, let's say since midnight last night," countered Blount laughing.

"Why midnight?"

"That was about the time when I made up my mind definitely to stay in the fight."

"Then you are still meaning to go ahead on the lines you laid down this morning?"

"If I wasn't, I shouldn't be here to take the train for the rally at Angora to-morrow night."

Gantry smoked in silence for a little time. Then he said: "You can't do it, Evan. It's fine and glorious and heart-breaking, and all that; but you can't do it."

"I can, and I will!"

"I say you can't. I know a good bit more now than I knew this morning!"

"Catalogue it," said Blount tersely.

"Mr. McVickar came in on the noon train to-day, and I had an interview with him."

"That doesn't tell me anything."

Again the traffic manager took time to smoke and to reflect.

"You made some pretty savage threats this morning, Evan; about shoving this thing to the point where the grand juries, Federal and State, could take hold of it. As a lawyer, you know even better than I do what that would mean."

"I told you what it would mean. In the present state of public sentiment it would mean prison sentences for every man of you caught with the goods."

"Yes, for every man of us," said Gantry slowly; "for the railroad man who has given, and for the other man who has taken. Evan, the jails of this State wouldn't be big enough to hold us all."

"I can readily believe you. That is the full weight of the stick with which I am going to club you fellows into decency."

"And you'll let the club fall wherever it may?"

"I've got to do that, Dick; I can't do any less."

For the third time Gantry paused. The train-waiting interval was half gone, and he had been feeling purposefully for the climaxing moment without finding it. But now he decided that it had come.

"In the talk this morning there was some reference made to your father and his attitude in this fight, Evan. Do you remember what was said?"

"Perfectly."

"Well, suppose I should tell you that I know now—what I didn't know certainly then—that when you hit out at us you hit him?"

"You mean that he is with you in this scheme to hoodwink the people?"

"Ask yourself," was the low-toned reply.

"I have asked myself a hundred times, Dick; I've been hoping against hope. I'll be utterly frank with you, as man to man. We've kept pretty obstinately out of the political field, both of us, father and I, since the first day when I told him my views on machine-made government. But from a few little things he has said, I've gathered that he isn't with you; that there has been a quarrel of some kind between him and Mr. McVickar—"

"There was a set-to—a battle royal," Gantry put in. "The last act of it was played to a finish that evening when Mr. McVickar took you down to his car and hired you. But there has been a meeting since. Ask yourself again, Evan. Haven't you had good and sufficient reasons for believing that you are bucking, not only the railroad company, but your own flesh and blood?"

This time it was Blount who took time for reflection. The shot had gone home. He told himself that there were only too many reasons for believing that Gantry was stating the simple fact. None the less, he made a final effort to break down the conclusion that Gantry was relentlessly thrusting upon him.

"In all our talks, Dick—there haven't been very many of them—my father has taken, or seemed to take, a different line. I don't recall anything specific just now, but he has given me the impression that he hasn't much in common with Mr. McVickar and his methods. To hear him talk—"

Gantry smiled. "You know your father very superficially, Evan, if you'll permit me to say so. What the Honorable David Blount says in talk with you or me or anybody outside of the inner circle is a mighty poor foundation upon which to build any idea of what's going on in the back of his head. No—hold on; don't get mad. What I'm trying to tell you is what everybody in the sage-brush hills—save and excepting yourself—knows like a book, and that is that the big boss's moves are all made strictly in the dark. He doesn't let his own right hand know what the left is doing. That's the secret of his absolutely Czarish power, I think."

The shriek of a distant locomotive whistle floated in through the open window at Blount's back and he got up stiffly.

"That's my train coming," he said. And then: "Tell me plainly, Dick: you brought me up here to throw a final brick—a bigger one than you have yet thrown—and I know it. What did Mr. McVickar tell you to-day that will make my job harder than I am already finding it?"

Gantry turned his head, refusing to meet the straightforward gaze of the questioner.

"You intimated this morning that you would go at it lawyer-fashion, Evan," he said; "which means, I suppose, that you would get the evidence on us. You can do it; the Lord knows, there's plenty of it to be had. But when you pull out one set of props the whole thing will come down. We haven't any of us been careful enough about what we put in writing—not even your father."

Blount staggered as if the words had been a blow.

"You're trying to tell me that my father would be involved in the disclosures you fellows might drive me to make?" he demanded, and his voice was husky.

Gantry was still looking away. "There always has to be an intermediary—you know that. We can't do business direct with these—with the people who have something to sell. You can draw your own inferences, Evan. I didn't send Hathaway to you; I sent him to your father."

The train was thundering into the station and Blount picked up his hand-bag and went out, stumbling blindly in the unlighted passage at the stair-head. And in the private office behind him the traffic manager was crushing his dead cigar in his clenched hand and staring fixedly at the square of darkness framed by the open window.



XIV

BARRIERS INVISIBLE

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 the Op'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 first face-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'll give 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 we can't withdraw 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?"