Blount was frowning thoughtfully. "'Can't' goes out of the window when 'must' comes in at the door, d.i.c.k. 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, d.i.c.k, 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 doc.u.ments, 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, d.i.c.k. 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, d.i.c.k--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?"

"Oh, great cats!--you and your high-strung notions of what you've got to do!" snorted the traffic manager, and he went away to his cla.s.sification meeting.

XV

SWORD-PLAY

It was during this hard-travelling period that Blount saw, with keen regret, the gradual widening of the breach between his father and himself. In their infrequent meetings there was never anything remotely approaching an open rupture; but in a thousand ways the younger man fancied he could see and feel the steady growth of the rift.

That the long arm of the machine of which his father was the acknowledged head was reaching out into all corners of the State, was a fact no longer to be doubted, and that the influences thus set in motion were sinister, he took for granted. Therefore, when it came in his way, he scored the machine frankly, charging it with much of the mischief which had been wrought in the way of arousing public sentiment against the corporations. "The worst in politics joined with the worst elements in capitalized industry," was his platform characterization of the alliances of the past, and he usually added that he was fighting it as every honest man was in duty bound to fight it. But it is hard to fight in the dark. After all was said, he could not help admiring the subtlety of the master brain which was able to control and direct such a complicated piece of human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and cleverly that, though the name of the thing was in everybody's mouth, its workings were so carefully concealed that it was only by the merest chance that he stumbled upon them now and then.

In more than one of the short stop-overs in the capital he had found his father still occupying the private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now and again there was a meal shared in the more or less crowded _cafe_. On such occasions the son leaned heavily upon the public character of the place and carefully steered the table-talk--or thought he did--into innocuous channels. But on a day shortly after the meeting with Gantry in Ophir this desultory programme was broken. Reaching the hotel in the evening after an all-day train journey from Lewiston, Blount found his father waiting for him in the lobby, and when he proposed a _cafe_ dinner the senator shook his head.

"No, son; not this evening," he said. "I've been feeling sort of set up and aristocratic to-day, and I've just ordered a dinner sent upstairs. I reckon you'll join me?"

The young man was willing enough; more than willing, since he was now ready to say a thing which must be said before he could be prepared to set a time limit upon Gantry--a limit beyond which lay the firing of the fuse and the blowing up of all things mundane.

"Certainly," he agreed. "Give me a few minutes to change my clothes--"

"You look good enough to me just as you are, boy," said the dinner-giver, and he took his son by the arm and walked him to the elevator.

In the private dining-room Blount found the table laid for two, much as if his coming had been pre-figured. He let that go, and for the time the talk was of the doings at Wartrace Hall: of the professor's enthusiastic digging for fossils, of Patricia's keen enjoyment of the life in the open, and--this put with gentle hesitation on the part of the news-bringer--of Mrs. Honoria's growing affection for the young woman whose ambitions reached out toward a sociological career.

"You say Patricia is learning to drive a car?" queried Patricia's lover.

"Best woman driver I ever saw," was the senator's praiseful rejoinder.

"Nothing feazes that little girl, and I'm telling you that she can turn the wheels just about as fast as you want to ride."

This was a new aspect of Miss Anners, even to one who knew her as well as Blount thought he knew her, and, lover-like, he found a grain of encouragement in it. Patricia had never cared for the out-of-door things save as they bore upon the hygienic condition of the poor in the great cities. If she had changed in one respect, she might change in another.

"I'm glad to know that," he commented. "She was needing an outlet on that side. There is a good bit of the Puritan in her--all work and no play, you know."

The senator looked out from beneath his s.h.a.ggy eyebrows. "Speaking of work; they're working you pretty hard these days, aren't they, son? If you belonged to my generation instead of your own, you wouldn't be cold-shouldering that young woman out yonder at Wartrace the way you do; not for all the politics that were ever hatched."

"I have my work to do, and Patricia Anners would be the last person in the world to put obstacles in the way of it," returned the son gravely.

Then he added: "I wish I could say as much for other people."

The boss shot another keen glance across the table. "Somebody been trying to block you, Evan, boy?" he asked.

Blount met the gaze of the shrewd gray eyes without flinching.

"I don't know of any good reason why we shouldn't be entirely frank with each other, dad," he said, using for the first time since his return to the homeland the old boyhood father-name. "You know, better than any one else, I think, what the stumbling-blocks are, and who is putting them in my way."

"Maybe so; maybe I do," was the even-toned answer. "It happens so, once in a while, that I know a heap of things I can't tell, son." Then: "Has McVickar been calling you down?"

"No one has called me down. But some one, or something, is keeping me out of the real fight. I don't mean that I'm not doing what I set out to do: I've got my own particular abomination by the neck, and I'm about to choke the life out of it. But that is, as you might say, a side issue.

The real struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in it or of it.

Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same predetermined enthusiasm. Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me."

The senator's chuckle was barely audible.

"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I were you, son," he suggested. "You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it won't break and let him down into the cold water. You'll get enough of the real thing by and by."

Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in precisely the right mood to construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in some mysterious way to insulate him--to make it impossible for him to get into the real tide of affairs. But he kept his temper, in a measure, at least.

"I guess it's no use for us to try to get together," he said with a tang of abruptness in his tone. "We are diametrically opposed to each other at every point, you and I, dad. I stand for democracy, the will of the people and its fullest and freest expression. You stand for--"

"Well, son, what do I stand for?" queried the father, and the question was put with a quizzical smile that brought the hot blood boyishly to Blount's cheeks.

"If I should say what all men say--what some of them are frank enough to say even to me--" he stopped short, and then went on with better self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."

"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured rejoinder. "Being on the railroad side, yourself, you can't help feeling sort of hostile at the rest of us, I reckon."

Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his chair.

"There it is again, you see. We can't get together even on a question of admitted fact! Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"

The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've found that out, too, have you?" he commented.

"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn't, dad.

There's a thing behind the alliance that cuts deeper than anything else I've had to face."