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

"All right; then I shall a.s.sume 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 G.o.d's own truth!"

"No; it isn't G.o.d'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, d.i.c.k!"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, you wouldn't do that!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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-k.n.o.b. "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 G.o.d hears me, d.i.c.k, 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, d.i.c.k?"

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 cla.s.smate 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--d.a.m.n' 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 d.i.c.kering 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-b.u.t.ton 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 d.i.c.k 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, d.i.c.k; 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 att.i.tude in this fight, Evan. Do you remember what was said?"