"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 att.i.tude 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"Of course, it hasn't been withdrawn!"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 inst.i.tutions, 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 b.u.t.tes 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 b.u.t.tes' that he didn't want himself, and pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 nutsh.e.l.l."

"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 d.a.m.ned 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 b.u.t.tes. Just say 'Yes,' and sign your name to it. That'll be enough."

For a long half-hour after the president of the Twin b.u.t.tes 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 n.o.body ever meant to put aside! My G.o.d! 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 n.o.body in this G.o.d-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-gla.s.s 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--G.o.d 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 G.o.d!

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."