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 b.u.t.tes 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, d.i.c.k, 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 pa.s.s 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 circ.u.mstantially all that had befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the wrecked train at Twin b.u.t.tes, 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."