"I don't know how much or how little you know about what has taken place this afternoon, Mrs. Blount," he broke out hastily, "but I can tell you this much: I am my father's son now, whatever I have been in the past, and if he is in danger, my place is with him. Tell me where he has gone."

The little lady's eyes were demurely downcast. "I shouldn't dare tell you that, but--but perhaps I might show you. I didn't promise not to--not to follow him," she returned with exactly the proper shade of half-frightened reluctance.

"Is it far?" he asked.

"Y-yes; we should have to drive."

"Excuse me for a minute or two," he said abruptly, and, making a bolt for the elevator, he was back almost within the limit named with a top-coat for himself and a driving-wrap for his companion. "I broke into your suite and made Patricia give me the wrap," he explained. "If it isn't what you want, I'll try again."

"It will do nicely," she told him; and together they went down the broad marble stair to the ground-floor.

"Do we take a cab?" he asked, when they reached the sidewalk.

"No; it's only a short walk to the garage, and we can take the touring-car."

"I'm entirely in your hands," he rejoined; and then: "Perhaps you'd better take my arm. We can make quicker time that way."

The small plotter's eyes were dancing when she slipped her hand under his arm. In a career which had not been entirely devoid of excitement, Mrs. Honoria had rarely found men difficult. But this particular young man was proving himself to be the easiest among many.

At the garage Blount asked for the family touring-car, more than half-expecting to be told that his father had taken it. The garage man nodded and laughed. "You can have it, but you came within an ace of losing out," he said. "The senator was just here, and he was going to take it, but he changed his mind when I told him the big roadster was in."

Blount made no comment, and when the car was ready he asked his companion where she would ride.

"In front, with you," was the quick reply; and when they were placed she gave him his running orders. "Slip out of the city by the quietest streets you can find and take the Quaretaro road," she directed, and he obeyed in silence, holding the speed down until they had left the capital behind them and were bowling along under the stars on the fine boulevarded county road.

"Do we take it easy or the other way?" he asked, speaking for the first time since they had left the town garage.

"You may drive as fast as you like until we come to the hills," he was told; and with this permission Blount let the motor out and speedily put the fifteen miles of the straightaway road to the rear.

"Is it Wartrace?" he inquired, when the touring-car was breasting the first of the grades in the gulch-threading climb to the second mesa level.

"No. When you come to the pine-tree, turn to the right up Shonoho Canyon."

"We can't get anywhere on that road," he objected. "It's washed out and posted. I tried to go up there the other day when I had Patricia out in the little car."

"I think you will find it quite pa.s.sable to-night," was all the answer he got; and a little later, when they had turned out of the main road and were ascending the small canyon, the prophecy came true. The brush barricade had been thrown aside, and there were fresh wheel tracks in the sand.

At sight of the wheel marks the senator's wife spoke again.

"You have been up here before?"

"Yes, once; in the middle of the summer."

"There is a small hotel at the head of the road."

"I know; but it is closed."

"It has been reopened--please throttle the motor so it won't make so much noise--the hotel is occupied now, as I say, and that is where we shall find your father. Are you still willing to do as I tell you to?"

"In all things reasonable."

"As if I'd ask you to do anything unreasonable!" she broke out half-petulantly. "Listen; there is a lawn with a circular driveway in front of the hotel. Drive to the outer edge, near the cliff, and stop the car."

Five minutes later he had obeyed his instructions literally. Through the groving of trees on the lawn he could see the lights in the lower story of the inn. At the flicking of the motor-switch a man with a pair of lineman's climbing spurs at his belt rose up out of the shadows and touched his cap to the lady, saying: "The boss is here; he has just gone in."

"I know," was the low-toned response. And then to Evan: "Help me out, please."

When they stood together beside the car she spoke again to the lineman.

"Is it all right, Jackson? Can you do what I asked you to?"

"We can try it a whirl," said the man; and thereupon he led the way across the lawn, around to the darkened end of the bungalow-built resort house, and through a sheltering pergola to a side door. "I got hold of the key, and it's open," he signified, meaning the door. "Can you find your way in the dark on the inside?"

"Perfectly," was the whispered reply; and then the lineman guide got his further orders: "Go back to the car and see that n.o.body interferes with it, Jackson." Then, when the man had disappeared in the tree shadows, the little lady turned short upon Blount. "I am going to take you where you can see and hear, but you must promise me not to interfere unless it becomes perfectly plain that your father needs you. Is it a bargain?"

"It is--if you'll allow me to be the judge of the need."

She laughed softly. "You are simply incorrigible, and I should think there would be times when Patricia would be tempted to stick pins into you," she mocked. Then: "Come on; we are wasting time," and, entering the house, she took his hand and led him through a dark pa.s.sage, up a stair, through another pa.s.sage into a long, low-pitched room, bare and empty save for a great pyramid of dining-tables and chairs piled in the middle of it, and lastly through a cautiously opened door which admitted a flood of yellow lamp-light from below.

"The musicians' gallery," she whispered. "Go to the screen and look down, but for Heaven's sake, don't make any noise!"

Blount obeyed mechanically. The orchestra gallery, screened on three sides by an open fretwork of Moorish design, was built out from the wall of the dining-room, and through the latticings of the fretwork he could look down upon the oblong lobby of the resort hotel. There was a table-desk with lamps on it drawn out in front of a cheerful wood-fire burning in a great stone fireplace, and in front of the fire, standing with his back to the blaze, Blount saw his father. From a lighted room at the opposite end of the lobby s.p.a.ce came a confused clattering of telegraph instruments. Blount caught a glimpse of shirt-sleeved clerks moving about in the room beyond, and then a door opened beneath him and the vice-president of the Transcontinental Company strode out into the firelight to shake hands with his visitor and to say: "I've been looking for you; I thought you'd come in out of the wet before it was too late, David. Sit down and tell me how much you're going to bleed us for, and I'll make out the check."

With a cold hand gripping at his heart, Blount turned away, sick and revolted, and there was a curse on his lips for the cruelty of the woman who had brought him to be a witness to his father's shame. But when he groped for the door of egress and found it, the k.n.o.b refused to turn.

The door was locked and he could not retreat.

x.x.x

THE RECKONING

Evan Blount's first impulse when he found his retreat cut off by the locked door of the musicians' gallery was to make his presence known instantly to the two men standing before the fire in the lobby below.

Shame, vicarious shame for the father who would thus find himself unmasked before his son, was all that made him hesitate; and in the pausing moment he heard his father's reply to the vice-president's challenging greeting.

"The same old song; always the same old song with you, isn't it, Hardwick?" the senator was saying in jocose deprecation. "What money can't buy, isn't worth having; that's about the way you fellows always stack it up." Then, with sudden grimness: "Sit down, Hardwick. I've come to say a few things to you that won't listen very good, but you've got to take your medicine this time."

"What's that?" demanded the vice-president, dropping mechanically into his desk-chair. And then: "It's no use, David. We've beat you at your own game. We're going to roll up a majority next Tuesday that will wipe you and your broken-down machine out of existence. Don't you believe it?"

"Not yet--not quite yet" was the mild rejoinder.

"Well, you'd better believe it, because it's the truth. You are down and out. I had you beat, David, that night last summer when you gave me your 'de-fi' and I came back by taking your son away from you. The young gentleman you were going to spring on us for your next attorney-general has done more than any other one man in the campaign to help our lame dog over the stile."

"Yes," said the big man, sunning his back at the fire, "that is one of the things we're going to flail out right here and now, Hardwick; about the boy and what he's been doing. You told him to go out and preach the good, clean gospel of the square deal, didn't you?"

It was at this point that the listener in the musicians' gallery, a prey to tumultuous emotions which were making the freshly healing wound in his head throb like a trip-hammer, lost all of his compunctions and drew closer to the fretwork screen.