Then, almost wistfully Blount thought: "You won't mind letting Honoria do that much for you, will you, son?"

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

The Honorable Senator got up and strolled to the window.

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

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

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

"Not enough to hurt anything. McVickar has fixed things to suit himself.

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

"Is that all?"

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

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

protested the small one.

"If it's an order from headquarters, they're going to try mighty hard.

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

This little eulogy upon the American voter appeared to be wasted upon the small person in the wicker rocking-chair. "We must get him back,"

she remarked, referring, not to the American voter, but to the senator's son. "Have you thought of any plan?"

"No."

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

"Perhaps I should."

"I have a plan," she went on quietly, bending again over her embroidery.

"He may have to take a regular course of treatment, and it may make him very ill; would you mind that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then I think it will be to-morrow," decided the confident mistress of policies. "It won't do to let Evan see too much of Patricia until after his course of treatment is well under way. Shall we make it to-morrow?

And will you telephone Dawkins to bring down the biggest car? I have a notion wandering around in my head somewhere that Miss Patricia Anners will stand a little judicious impressing. She is exceedingly democratic, you know--in theory."

IX

THE RANK AND FILE

Considerably to his surprise, and no less to his satisfaction, the newly appointed "division counsel," as his t.i.tle ran, was not required to take over the old legal department offices in the second story of the station building, where all the other offices of the company were located.

Instead, he was directed to fit up a suite of rooms in Temple Court, the capital's most pretentious up-town sky-sc.r.a.per, and there was something more than a hint that the item of first cost would not be too closely scrutinized.

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

Acting upon this suggestion, Blount opened the Temple Court headquarters at once and threw himself energetically into the indicated field.

Ackerton, a technical expert with a needle-like mind and the State code at his fingers'-ends, was left in charge of the working offices in the railroad building, with instructions to apply to his chief only when he needed specific advice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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