ranch household had become a thing of the past; and though he charged the new order of things to the ambition of his father's wife, he could hardly cavil at it, since he was himself a sharer in the comforts and luxuries.

For the first few days after the father and son had gone into bachelor quarters at the Inter-Mountain, the returned exile was left almost wholly to his own devices. Beyond giving him a good many introductions, as the opportunities for them offered in the stirring life of the hotel, his father made few demands upon him, and they were together only at luncheon and dinner, the midday meal being usually served in their suite, while for the dinner they met by appointment in the hotel _cafe_.

Notwithstanding this hospitable neglect on the part of his father, Evan Blount suffered no lack of the social opportunities. Gantry was back, and, in addition to a most ready availability as a social sponsor, the traffic manager was both able and willing. Almost before he had time to realize it, Blount had been put in touch with the busy, breezy life of the Western city, was exchanging nods or hand-shakings with more people than he had ever known in Cambridge or Boston, and was receiving more invitations than he could possibly accept.

"Pretty good old town, isn't it?" laughed Gantry one day, when he had tolled Blount away from the Inter-Mountain luncheon to share a table with him in the Railway Club. "Getting so you feel a little more at home with us?"

"If I'm not, it isn't your fault, d.i.c.k, or the fault of your friends.

Naturally, I expected some sort of a welcome as ex-Senator David Blount's son; but that doesn't seem to cut any figure at all."

Gantry's smile was inscrutable.

"The people with whom it cuts the largest figure will never let you know anything about it. Just the same, your sonship is cutting a good bit of ice, if you care to know it. I've met a number of men in the past few days who have discovered that you are just about the brainiest thing that ever escaped from the effete East and the law schools."

"Tommy-rot!" derided the brainy one.

"It's a fact. And they are prophesying all sorts of a roseate and iridescent future for you. One might almost imagine that the prophets are inspired by that kind of grat.i.tude which is a lively sense of favors to come."

"Oh, piffle! You know that is all nonsense!"

"Is it?" queried the railroad man, stressing the first word meaningly.

Then, shifting the point of attack: "You're mighty innocent, aren't you, old man? But I think you might have told me. Goodness knows, I'm as safe as a brick wall."

"Might have told you what?"

"That you are going to run for attorney-general against Dortscher."

"I couldn't very well tell you what I didn't know myself, d.i.c.k," was the sober reply. "Who has been romancing to you?"

"It's all over town. Everybody's talking about it--talking a lot and guessing a good deal more. You've got 'em running around in circles and uttering loud and plaintive cries, especially Jim Rankin, who had--or thought he had--a lead-pipe cinch on the job. Dortscher is tickled half to death. He knew he wasn't going to be allowed to succeed himself, and he hates Rankin worse than poison."

Blount was balancing the spoon on the edge of his coffee-cup and scowling abstractedly. It was the first little discord in the filial harmony--this evidence that the powers were at work; almost a breach of confidence. There was no avoiding the distasteful conclusion. Without consulting his wishes, without waiting for his decision, his father had publicly committed him--taken "snap judgment" upon him was the way he phrased it.

"d.i.c.k, will you believe me if I say that I haven't authorized any such talk as this you've been hearing?" he asked, looking up quickly.

This time Gantry's smile was a grin of complete intelligence.

"Oh, that's the way of it, eh? The Honorable Senator took it out of your hands, did he? You'll understand that I'm not casting any aspersions when I say that it's exactly like him. If he has slated you, you are booked to run; and if he runs you, you'll be elected. Those are two of the things that practically speak right out and say themselves here in the old Sage-brush State."

Blount was indignant--justly indignant, he persuaded himself.

"If that is the case, Gantry, it is high time that some one should have nerve enough to break the charm. I haven't said that I would accept the nomination if it were tendered me, and I am not at all sure that I am going to say it. And if I don't say it, by all that's good and great, that settles it!"

Gantry was plainly shocked. "You're not trying to make me believe that you've got nerve enough to buck the old m--your father, I mean? Why, great cats, Evan! you don't know what that stands for in the greasewood hills!"

"And I don't care, d.i.c.k. Up to this present moment I am a free moral agent; I haven't surrendered any right of decision to my father, or to any one else, so far as I am aware."

Gantry's eyes dropped to his plate, and his rejoinder was not wholly free from guile.

"Will you authorize me to contradict the talk as I can?" he asked, without looking up.

Blount was still warm enough to be peremptory.

"Yes, you may contradict it. You may say that it is entirely unauthorized--that I have told you so myself." Then he remembered the claims of friendship. "I'll be frank with you, d.i.c.k; this thing has been mentioned to me once, but nothing was decided--absolutely nothing. I didn't even promise to take it under advis.e.m.e.nt."

Among those who knew him only externally, Mr. Richard Gantry had the reputation of owning a loose tongue. But none recognized more justly than the real Richard Gantry the precise instant at which to bridle the loose tongue or when to make it wag away from the subject which has reached its nicely calculated climax. While the flush of irritation was still making him ashamed that he had shown so much warmth, Blount found himself gossiping with his table companion over a social function two days old; and subsequently, when the waiter brought the cigars, Gantry was congratulating himself that the danger-point, if any there were, was safely past.

It was after the club luncheon, and while the two young men were on their way to the smoking-room, that some one on business bent stopped Gantry in the corridor. Blount strolled on by himself, and, finding the smoking-room unoccupied, went to lounge in a lazy-chair standing in a little alcove lined with bookcases and half screened by the racks of the newspaper files. Notwithstanding the successful topic changing at table, he was still brooding over the false position in which his father's plans had placed him; wherefore he craved solitude and a chance to think things over fairly and without heat.

Shortly afterward Gantry looked in, and, apparently missing the half-concealed easy-chair and its occupant in the bookcase alcove, went his way. He had scarcely had time to get out of the building, one would say, before two men entered the smoking-room, coming down the corridor from the grill. Blount saw them, and he made sure that they saw him. But when they had taken chairs on the other side of the sheltering newspaper files he was suddenly a.s.sured that they had not seen him. They were talking quite freely of him and of his father.

"Well, the Honorable Dave has got McVickar dead to rights this time,"

remarked the older of the two, a hard-featured, round-bodied real-estate promoter to whom Blount had been introduced on his first day in the capital, but whose name he could not now recall. "This scheme of the senator's for shoving his son into the race for the attorney-generalship is just about the foxiest thing he has ever put across. You can bet the air was blue in the Transcontinental Chicago offices when the news got there."

"What do you suppose McVickar will do?" asked the other.

"He will do anything the senator wants him to--he's got to. Blount is land hungry, and I guess he'll take a few more sections of the railroad mesa-land under the Clearwater ditch. That was what he did two years ago when McVickar wanted the right of way for the branch through Carnadine County."

"Don't you believe he's going to take any little Christmas gift this time!" was the rasping reply. "He'll sell the railroad something, and take good hard money for it. It's a cinch. The railroad can't afford to have the courts against it, and McVickar will be made to sweat blood this heat. You watch the wheels go round when McVickar comes out here."

Evan Blount found himself growing strangely sick and faint. Could it be his father whom they were thus calmly accusing of graft and trickery and blackmailing methods too despicable to be imagined? His first impulse was to confront the two; to demand proofs; to do and say what a loyal son should. But the crushing conviction that they were discussing only well-known and well-a.s.sured facts unnerved him; and after that he was anxious for only one thing--that they might finish their cigars and go away without discovering him.

Fate was kind to him thus far. After a little further talk, in which the accepted point of view of the on looker at the great game was made still more painfully evident for the unwilling listener, the men went away.

For a long time after they had gone, Blount sat crumpled in the depths of the big chair, chewing his extinct cigar and staring absently at the row of books on a level with his eyes in the opposite case.

One clear thought, and one only, came out of the sorrowful confusion: not for any inducement that could now be offered would he lend himself to the furtherance of his father's plans. Beyond this he did not reason in the miserable hour wrought out in the quiet of the club smoking-room.

But when he got up to go, another prompting was forcing its way to the surface--a prompting to throw himself boldly into the scale against graft and chicanery; to redeem at any cost, and by whatsoever means might offer, the good old name which had been so shamefully dragged in the mire.

He did not know just how it was to be done, but he told himself that he would find a way. That the path would be full of thorns he could not doubt, since every step in it would widen the breach which must be opened between his father and himself. Possibly it might lead him to the bar of justice as that father's accuser, but even in that hard case he must not falter. He said to himself, in a fresh access of pa.s.sionate determination, that though he might have to blush for his father, Patricia should not be made ashamed for her lover.

Upon leaving the club, he paused long enough to remember that he was in no fit frame of mind to risk an immediate meeting with his father. To make even a chance meeting impossible, he crossed the street, and, pa.s.sing through the Capitol grounds, strolled aimlessly out one of the residence avenues until he came to the open country beyond the suburbs.

It was quite late in the afternoon when he re-entered the city by another street and boarded a trolley car for the down-town centre. The long afternoon tramp, and the conclusions it had bred, made it imperative for him to see Gantry before the traffic manager should leave his office for the day. His business with the railroad man was purely personal. He meant to ask Gantry a few pointed questions requiring such answers as friendship may demand. If Gantry's replies were such as he feared they would be, he would seek his father and come at once to a plain understanding with him.

The trolley car dropped him within a square of the railway station, on the second floor of which Gantry had his business office. The shortest way to the Sierra Avenue end of the station building was through the great train-shed. Half-way up the platform Blount met the west-bound Overland steaming in from the eastern yards. At the Sierra Avenue crossing the yard crew was cutting off a private car. Blount saw the number on the medallion, "008," and noted half absently the rich window-hangings and the polished bra.s.s platform railings. A car inspector in greasy overalls and jumper was tapping the wheels with his long-handled hammer.

"Whose car is this?" asked Blount.

"'Tis Misther McVickar's, sorr--the vice-prisidint av the coompany,"

said the man.

Blount turned away, saying something which the hammer-man mistook for a word of thanks. So the vice-president had come, hastening upon the wing of occasions, it seemed. And in the light of the overheard conversation in the club smoking-room, it was only too easy to guess his errand in the Sage-brush capital. He had come to make such terms as he could with the man who was going to hold him up.

VII

A BATTLE ROYAL