There was the wisdom of the centuries in the gentle smile provoked by this unashamed disappointed lover's appeal.

"I wouldn't take it too hard--the career business--if I were you, son,"

said the wise man. "And as for the work, I reckon we can satisfy you, if your appet.i.te isn't too whaling big. How would a State office of some kind suit you?"

"Politics?" queried Blount, bringing his horse down to the walk for which his father had set the example. "I've thought a good bit about that, though I haven't had any special training that way. The schools of to-day are turning out business lawyers--men who know the commercial and industrial codes and are trained particularly in their application to the great business undertakings. That has been my ambition: to be a business adviser, and, perhaps, after a while to climb to the top of the ladder and be somebody's corporation counsel."

"But now you have changed your notion?"

"I don't know; sometimes I wonder if I haven't. There is another field that is exceedingly attractive to me, and you have just named it. No man can study the politics of America to-day without seeing the crying need for good men: men who will not let the big income they could command in private undertakings weigh against pure patriotism and a plain duty to their country and their fellow-men; strong men who would administer the affairs of the State or the nation absolutely without fear or favor; men who will hew to the line under any and all conditions. There's an awful dearth of that kind of material in our Government."

A quaint smile was playing under the drooping mustaches of that veteran politician the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.

"I reckon we do need a few men like that, Evan; need 'em mighty bad.

Think you could fill the bill as one of them if you had a right good chance?"

The potential hewer of political chips which should lie as they might fall smiled at what seemed to be merely an expression of parental favoritism.

"I'm not likely to get the chance very soon," he returned. "Just at present, you know, I am still a legal resident of the good old Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts, and a member of its bar--eligible to office there, and nowhere else."

"You'd be a citizen of this State by the time you could get elected to an office in it," suggested the senator gravely.

"I know; the required term of residence here is ridiculously short. But you are forgetting that I am as completely unknown in the sage-brush hills as you are well known. I couldn't get a nomination for the office of pound-keeper."

David Blount was chuckling softly as he threw up the brim of the big sombrero he was wearing.

"Sounds right funny to hear you talking that way, son," he commented.

"Mighty near everybody this side of the Bad Lands will tell you that the slate hangs up behind the door at Wartrace Hall; and I don't know but what some people would say that old Sage-Brush Dave himself does most of the writing on it. Anyhow, there is one place on it that is still needing a name, and I reckon your name would fit it as well as anybody's."

The young man who was so lately out of the well-balanced East was astounded.

"Heavens!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "You're not considering me as a possibility on the State ticket before I've been twenty-four hours inside of the State lines, are you?"

"No; not exactly as a possibility, son; that isn't quite the word. We'll call it a sure thing, if you want it. It's this way: we're needing a sort of political house-cleaning right bad this year. We have good enough laws, but they're winked at any day in the week when somebody comes along with a fistful of yellow-backs. The fight is on between the people of this State and the corporations; it was begun two years ago, and the people got the laws all right, but they forgot to elect men who would carry them out. This time it looks as if the voters had got their knives sharpened. We've been a little slow catching step maybe, but the marching orders have gone out. We're aiming to clean house, and do it right, this fall."

"Not if the slate hangs behind your door--or any man's, father," was the theorist's sober reminder. "Reform doesn't come in by that road."

"Hold on, boy; steady-go-easy's the word. Reform comes in by any old trail it can find, mostly, and thanks its lucky stars if it doesn't run up against any bridges washed out or any mud-holes too deep to ford.

We've got a good man for governor right now; not any too broad maybe, but good--church good. n.o.body has ever said he'd take a bribe; but he isn't heavy enough to sit on the lid and hold it down. Alec Gordon, the man who is going to succeed him next fall, is all the different kinds of things that the present governor isn't, so that is fixed."

"How 'fixed'?" queried the younger man, who, though he was not from Missouri, was beginning to fear that he would constantly have to be shown.

"In the same way that everything has to be fixed if we are going to get results," was the calm reply. "After the governor, the man upon whom the most depends is the attorney-general. The fellow who is in now, Dortscher, is one of the candidates, but we've crossed his name off. The next man we considered was Jim Rankin. In some ways he's fit; he's a hard fighter, and the man doesn't live who can bluff him. But Jim's poor, and he wants mighty bad to be rich, so I reckon that lets him out."

All of this was directly subversive of Evan Blount's ideas touching the manner in which the political affairs of a free country should be conducted, but he was willing to hear more.

"Well?" he said.

"What we want this time is one of your hew-to-the-line fellows, son.

Reckon you'd like to try it?"

The young man who was less than a week away from the atmosphere of the idealistic school and its theories was frankly aghast. That his father should be coolly proposing him for a high office in the State in which, notwithstanding the birthright, he was as new as the newest immigrant, seemed blankly incredible. But when the incredibility began to subside, the despotism of the machine methods which could propose and carry out such unheard-of things loomed maleficent.

"I'm afraid we are a good many miles apart in this matter of politics,"

he said, when the proposal had been given time to sink in. "America is supposed to be a free country, with a representative government elected by the suffrages of the people; do you mean to say that you and a few of your friends ignore the basic principles of democracy to such an extent that you nominate and elect anybody you please to any office in the State?"

The far-seeing eyes of the veteran were twinkling again.

"Oh, I don't know about our being so far apart," was the deprecatory protest. "You're just a little bit long on theory, that's all, son. When it comes down to the real thing--practical politics, as some folks call it--somebody has to head the stampede and turn it. And if we don't do it this coming fall, the other bunch will."

"What other bunch?"

"In this case it's the corporations: the timber people, the irrigation companies, and, most of all, the railroad."

"Gantry seems to think that the railroads--or his railroad, at least--are persecuted."

The senator pulled his horse down to a still slower walk. "Where did you see d.i.c.k Gantry?" he demanded.

Evan told of the meeting on the veranda of the Winneba.s.set Club, adding the further fact of the college friendship.

"Just happened so, did it?" queried the older man, "that getting together last Sat.u.r.day night?"

"Why--yes, I suppose so. d.i.c.k knew I was in Boston, and he said he had meant to look me up."

"I reckon he did," was the quiet comment; "yes, I reckon he did. And he filled you up plumb full of Hardwick McVickar's notions, _of_ course. I reckon that's about what he was told to do. But we won't fall apart on that, son. To-morrow we'll run down to the city, and you can look the ground over for yourself. I want you to draw your own conclusions, and then come and tell me what you'd like to do. Shall we leave it that way?"

Evan Blount acquiesced, quite without prejudice, to a firm conviction that his opinion, when formed, was going to be based on the larger merits of the case, upon a fair and judicial summing-up of the pros and cons--all of them. He felt that it would be a blow struck at the very root of the tree of good government if he should consent to be the candidate of the machine. But, on the other hand, he saw instantly what a power a fearless public prosecutor could be in a misguided commonwealth where the lack was not of good laws, but of men strong enough and courageous enough to administer them. He would see: if the good to be accomplished were great enough to over-balance the evil ...

it was a temptation to compromise--a sharp temptation; and he found himself longing for Patricia, for her clear-sighted comment which, he felt sure, would go straight to the heart of the tangle.

It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for her, that made him absent-minded at the Wartrace Hall dinner-table that evening; and the father, looking on, suspected that Evan's taciturnity was an expression of his prejudice against the woman who had taken his mother's place.

After dinner, when the son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his room, the senator's suspicion became a belief.

"You'll have to be right patient with the boy, little woman," he said to the small person whom Gantry had described as the court of last resort; this when Evan had disappeared and the long-stemmed pipe was alight. "I shouldn't wonder if Boston had put some mighty queer notions into his head."

The little lady looked up from her embroidery frame and a quaint smile was twitching at the corners of the pretty mouth. "He is a dear boy, and he is trying awfully hard to hate me," she said. "But I sha'n't let him, David."

VI

ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS

From the time when it was heralded in the mammoth New Year's edition of _The Plainsman_ as "the newest, the finest, and the most luxurious hostelry west of the Missouri River," the Inter-Mountain Hotel, in the Sage-brush capital, had been the acceptable gathering-place of the clans, industrial, promoting, or political.

Antic.i.p.ating this patronage, Clarkson, its bonanza-king builder and owner, had amended the architect's plans to make them include a convention-hall, committee-rooms, and a complete floor of suites with private dining-rooms. Past this, the amended plans doubled the floor s.p.a.ce of the lobby--debating-ground dear to the heart of the country delegate--and particular pains had been taken to make this semi-public forum, where the burning question of the moment could be caucussed and the shaky partisan resworn to fealty, attractive and home-like; the plainly tiled floor, leather-covered lounging-chairs, and numerous and convenient cuspidors lending an air of democratic comfort which was somehow missing in the resplendent, bemirrored, onyx-plated bar, blazing with its cut gla.s.s and polished mahogany.

After the solid costliness of Wartrace Hall and the thirty-mile spin in a high-powered gentleman's roadster, which was only one of the three high-priced motor-carriages in the Wartrace garage, Evan Blount was not surprised to learn that his father was registered in permanence for one of the private dining-room suites at the Inter-Mountain. It was amply evident that the simple life which had been the rule of the "Circle-Bar"