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THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
[Illustration: "He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president]
THE HONORABLE
SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
BY
FRANCIS LYNDE
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK : : : : : 1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
* * * * *
Published September, 1913
[Illustration]
TO MR. GEORGE ADY
My Regius Professor in the School of Western Railroading, and
himself a keen observer, _in situ_, of the conditions which I have
herein sought to portray, this book is most affectionately
inscribed.
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO" 3
II. THE BOSS 26
III. A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES 40
IV. THE HIGHBINDERS 56
V. AT WARTRACE HALL 69
VI. ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS 86
VII. A BATTLE ROYAL 96
VIII. THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT 110
IX. THE RANK AND FILE 121
X. IN THE HERBARIUM 138
XI. THE GREAT GAME 148
XII. A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT 165
XIII. THE LIEGEMAN 178
XIV. BARRIERS INVISIBLE 193
XV. SWORD-PLAY 203
XVI. THE SAFE-BLOWER 213
XVII. ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS 230
XVIII. THE CHASM 241
XIX. A COG IN THE WHEEL 256
XX. A STONE FOR BREAD 264
XXI. THE UNDER-DOG 280
XXII. THE ICONOCLAST 293
XXIII. A CRY IN THE NIGHT 302
XXIV. FIELD HEADQUARTERS 320
XXV. BLOOD AND IRON 327
XXVI. APPLES OF GOLD 343
XXVII. IN WHICH PATRICIA DRIVES 356
XXVIII. THE GOSSIPING WIRES 367
XXIX. AT SHONOHO INN 379
XXX. THE RECKONING 390
XXXI. _À LA BONNE HEURE_ 407
THE HONORABLE SENATOR SAGE-BRUSH
I
BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO"
Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who
was a week-end guest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be
resentful. What right had a gay and frivolous world to come and thrust
its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia had said "No"? It was
like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had read
the single telegram which had come while he was at dinner he begged Mrs.
Beverley's indulgence and went out to find a chair in a corner of the
veranda where the frivolities had not as yet intruded.
It was a North Shore night like that in which Shakespeare has mingled
moon-shadows with the gossamer fantasies of the immortal "Dream." Though
the dance was in-doors, the trees on the lawn and the road-fronting
verandas of the club-house were hung with festoons of Chinese lanterns.
At the carriage-entrance smart automobiles were coming and going, and
one of them, with the dust of the Boston parkways on its running-gear,
brought the guests of honor--three daughters of a Western senator lately
home from their summer abroad.
Blount knew neither the honorers nor the honored ones, and had
resolutely refused the chance offered him by Mrs. Beverley to amend his
ignorance. For Patricia's "No" was not yet twenty-four hours old, and
since it had changed the stars in their courses for Patricia's lover,
the cataclysm was much too recent to postulate anything like a return of
the heavenly bodies to their normal orbits.
Not that Blount put it that way, either to Mrs. Beverley or to himself.
He was a level-eyed, square-shouldered young man of an up-to-date world,
and the stock from which he sprang was prosaic and practical rather than
poetic or sentimental. But the fact remained, and when he sat back in
his corner absently folding the lately received telegram into a narrow
spill and scowling moodily down upon the coming and going procession of
motor-cars he was unconsciously giving a very life-like imitation of the
disappointed lover the world over.
It was thus, and apparently by the merest chance, that Gantry found him;
a chance because the Winnebasset club-house is spacious and the dinner
dance minimized the hazards of a meeting between two unattached men who
were merely transient guests. But the railroad man at least was
unfeignedly glad.
"Doesn't it beat the dickens what a little world this is?" he exclaimed,
with a true bromidian disregard for the outworn and the axiomatic. "Of
course, I knew you were in or around Boston somewhere, but to run slap
up against you here, when there seemed to be nothing in it for me but to
be bored stiff--" He stopped short, finding it difficult to be shiftily
insincere with as old a friend as Evan Blount. But in the nature of
things it was baldly impossible to tell Blount that the meeting was not
accidental.
"Pull up a chair and sit down," said Blount, not too ungraciously,
considering his just cause to be more ungracious. "I was thinking of you
a little while ago, Dick. I saw your name in the list of
Transcontinental representatives to the traffic meeting in Boston,
and--well, at the present moment I'm not sure but you are the one man in
the world I wanted most to meet."
"Say! that sounds pretty good to me," laughed Gantry, settling himself
comfortably in a lazy-chair and feeling in his pockets for a cigar.
"I've been in Boston the full week, skating around over the chilly crust
of things and never able to get so much as one tenuous little social
claw-hold. Say, Evan, how many ice-plants does that impenetrable old
town keep going ever count 'em?"
"Boston is all right when you know it--or, rather, when it comes to know
you," returned Blount, remembering that Boston or Cambridge--which is
Boston in the process of elucidation--was the birth and dwelling place
of Patricia.
Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.
"The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you,
hasn't it, Evan?--to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it
would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the
Harvard Law School. By the way, how much longer are you in for?"
"I am out of the Law School, if that is what you mean--out and admitted
to the bar," said Blount. "If you get into trouble with the Boston
police let me know, and I'll ask for a change of venue to the greasewood
hills and Judge Lynch's court."
"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who
curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and
pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I
believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were
Western-born."
"I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much
about going back," was Blount's rather enigmatic reply.
"But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the railroad man, waking up.
"That's good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young
lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular fellow you wanted to
meet?"
Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across
the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.
Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to
the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried
the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"--the capital of
the State--and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent
arrival. Below the date-line he read:
TO EVAN SHELBY BLOUNT,
Standish Apartments, Boston.
You have had everything that money could buy, and you owe me
nothing but an occasional sight of your face. If you are not tied
to some woman's apron-string, why can't you come West and grow up
with your native State?
DAVID BLOUNT.
It was characteristic of Richard Gantry, light-handed juggler of
friendly phrases, but none the less a careful and methodical official of
a great railway company, that he folded the telegram in the original
creases before he passed it back.
"Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.
"I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be
fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a
few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."
"He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed everybody knew it."
"_I_ didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may not realize it, but what
you don't tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it
were printed."
Blount's smile was altogether friendly.
"What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The world has plenty of
banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man's personal
contribution. Why should I bore you or anybody?"
"Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground," said the railroad traffic
manager. "Just the same, there's another side to it. In an unguarded
moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me
that you were Western-born. I always supposed afterward that you
regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me
any more."
"Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so little to tell. I had a
boyhood like other boys--or, no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I
was born on the 'Circle-Bar,' when the ranch was--as it still is, I
believe--a hard day's drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the
nearest shipping-corral on the railroad. At twelve I could 'ride line,'
'cut out,' and 'rope down' like any other healthy ranch-bred youngster,
and since the capital was at that time only in process of getting itself
surveyed and boomed into existence I had never seen a town bigger than
Painted Hat."
"And what happened when you were twelve?" queried Gantry. He was not
abnormally curious, but Blount's communicative mood was unusual enough
to warrant a quickening of interest.
"The greatest possible misfortune that can ever come to a half-grown
boy, Dick--my mother died."
Gantry's own boyhood was not so deeply buried in the past as to make
him forgetful of its joys and sorrows. "That was hard--mighty hard," he
assented. Then: "And pretty soon your father married again?"
"Not for some years," Blount qualified. "But for me the heavens were
fallen. I was sent away to school, to college, to Europe; then I came
here to the Law School. In all that time I've never seen the
'Circle-Bar' or my native State--in fact, I have never been west of
Chicago."
Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory phrase. As a
railroad man, continent-crossing travel was to him the merest matter of
course. Though he might Sunday-over at the Winnebasset Country Club on
the North Shore, it was well within the possibilities that the following
week-end might find him sweltering in New Orleans or buttoning his
overcoat against the raw evening fogs of San Francisco.
"Never been west of Chicago?" he echoed. "Never been--" He stopped
short, beginning to realize vaguely that there must be strong reasons;
reasons which might lie beyond the pale of a college friendship, and the
confidences begotten thereby, in the rendering of them.
"No," said Blount.
"Then the senator's--that is--er--your father's political life has never
touched you."
The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of Blount's steady gray
eyes, but this time it was shot through with a faint suggestion of the
Blount grimness.
"It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick. I saw a large-hearted,
open-handed old cattle-king wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream
of politics to gratify an ambition that wasn't at all his own--a woman's
ambition. In order that the woman might mix and mingle in Washington
society for a brief minute or two, he got himself elected to fill out an
unexpired term of two months in the United States Senate--bought the
election, some said. That was three years ago, wasn't it?--a long time,
as political incidents or accidents go. But Washington hasn't forgotten.
When I was down there last winter the five-o'clock-tea people were still
recalling Mrs. Blount's gowns and the wild-Western naïveté of 'The
Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"
Gantry was chuckling softly when the half-bitter admission had got
itself fully made.
"Land of love, Evan!" he said, "you may be an educated post-graduate all
right, with the proper Boston degree of culture laid on and rubbed down
to a hard-glaze finish, but you've got a lot to learn yet--about the
senator and his politics, I mean. Why, Great Snipes, man! he isn't in it
a little bit for the social frills and furbelows; he never was. Let me
intimate a few things: Politically speaking, David Blount is by long
odds the biggest man in his State to-day. He can have anything he wants,
from the head of the ticket down. You spoke rather contemptuously just
now of his two months in the Senate; you probably didn't know that he
might have gone back if he had wanted to; that he actually did a much
more difficult thing--named his successor."
David Blount's son stood up and put his shoulders against one of the
veranda pillars. From the new view-point he could look through the
reading-room windows and on into the assembly-room where the dancers
were keeping time to the measures of a two-step. But he was not thinking
of the dancers when he said:
"It's a sheer miracle, Dick, your dropping down here to-night like the
_deus ex machina_ of the old Greek plays. You've read this
telegram"--holding up the folded message--"it is just possible that you
can tell me what lies behind it. Why has my father sent it at this
particular time and in those words? He knows perfectly well that my
plans for settling here in Boston were definitely made more than a year
ago."
"I can tell you the situation out in the greasewood country, if that's
what you want to know," said Gantry after a thoughtful pause.
"Make it simple," was Blount's condition, adding: "What I don't know
about the business or the political situation in the West would fill a
much larger book than the one you were speaking of a few minutes ago."
"'Business or political,' you say; they are Siamese twins nowadays,"
returned the railroad man, with a short laugh. Then: "The outlook for
us out yonder in the greasewood hills is precisely what it is in a dozen
other States this year--east, west, north and south--everything
promising a renewal of the unreasoning, bull-headed legislative fight
against the railroads. I suppose our own case is typical. As everybody
knows, the Transcontinental Railway has practically created two-thirds
of the States through which it passes--made them out of whole cloth.
Where you left sage-brush and bare hills and unfenced cattle ranges a
dozen years ago you will now find irrigation, tilled farms, orchards,
rich mines--development everywhere, with a rapidly growing population to
help it along. To make all this possible, the railroad took a chance; it
was a mighty long chance, and somebody has to pay the bills."
"I know," smiled Blount; "the bill-paying is summed up in some railroad
man's clever phrase, 'all the tariff the traffic will stand.' I can
remember one year when my father rose up in his wrath and drove his beef
cattle one hundred and fifty miles across the Transcontinental tracks to
the Overland Central."
"That was in the old days," protested Gantry, who was loyal to his salt.
"As the State has filled up, we've tried to meet the situation half-way,
as a straight business proposition. Fares and tariffs have been lowered
from time to time, and--"
"You are not making it simple enough by half," warned Blount
quizzically. "You are getting further away from my telegram every
minute."
Gantry paused to relight his cigar.
"I don't know how your telegram figures in it specially, but I do know
this: the legislature to be elected this fall in our State will be
chosen entirely without regard to the old party lines. There is only one
issue before the people and that is the Transcontinental Railway. The
'Paramounters,' as they call themselves, taking the name from the
assumption that it is the paramount duty of the voter to pinch any
business interest bigger than his own, would like to legislate us out of
existence; as against that we shall beat the tomtom and do our level
best to stay on top of earth."
"Naturally," Blount agreed, then half-absently, and with his eyes still
resting upon the merrymakers twirling like paired automatons in the
distant assembly-room: "And my father--how does he stand?"
"The idea of your having to ask me how the senator stands in his own
State!" exclaimed Gantry. "But really, Evan, I'd give a good bit of hard
cash to be able to tell you in so many words just where he does stand.
There are a good many people in our neck of woods who would like mighty
well to know. It will make all the difference in the world when it comes
to a show-down."
"Why will it?"
"Because, apart from the railroad and the anti-railroad factions, there
is a very complete and smoothly running machine organization."
"And my father is identified with the machine?"
Again Gantry choked over the singular lack of information discovering
itself in Blount's question.
"Land of glory!" he ejaculated. "Where have you been burying yourself,
Evan? Didn't I just tell you that he is the biggest man in the State?
Oh, no"--with heavy irony--"he isn't identified with the machine--not at
all; he merely owns it and runs it. We may think we can swing a safe
majority in the legislature, and the 'antis' may be just as firmly
convinced that they can. But before either side can turn a wheel it will
have to walk up to the captain's office and get its orders."
"Ah," said Blount, and a little later: "Thank you, Dick, I am pretty
badly out of touch with the Western political situation, as you've
discovered." Then he changed the subject abruptly. "How long will your
traffic meeting last?"
"We practically finished to-day. An hour or two on Monday will wind it
up."
"After which you'll go West?"
"After which I shall go West by the Monday noon train if I can make it.
You couldn't hire me to stay in Boston an hour longer than I have to."
Silence for a time until Blount broke in upon Gantry's tapping of the
dance-music rhythm with: "If I can close up a few unfinished business
matters and get ready I may go with you, Dick. Would you mind?"
"Yes; I should mind so much that I'd willingly miss a train or so and
worry out a few more of the chilly Boston hours rather than lose the
chance of having you along."
"That is good of you, I'm sure. I should bore myself to death if I had
to travel alone."
Blount's rejoinder might have passed for a mere friendly commonplace if
it had not been for the rather curiously worded telegram. But it was a
goodly portion of Gantry's business in life to put two and two together,
and that phrase in the senator's message about a woman's apron-string
interested him. Moreover, it was subtly suggestive.
"Ever meet your father's--er--the present Mrs. Blount, Evan?" he asked.
"No." Blount may have been Western-born, but the chilling discouragement
he could crowd into the two-letter negation spoke eloquently of his
Eastern training.
Gantry was rebuffed but not disheartened.
"She is a mighty fine woman," he ventured.
"So I have been given to understand." This time Blount's reply was icy.
But now Gantry's eyes were twinkling and he pressed his advantage.
"You'll have to reckon pretty definitely with her if you go out to the
greasewood country, Evan. Next to your father, she is the court of last
resort; indeed, there are a good many people who insist that she _is_
the court--the power behind the throne, you know."
There is one ditch out of which the most persistent and gladsome mocker
may not drive his victim, and that is the ditch of silence. Blount said
nothing. Nevertheless, Gantry tried once more.
"Not interested, Evan?"
Blount turned and looked his companion coldly in the eyes.
"Not in the slightest degree, Dick. Will you take that for your answer
now, and remember it hereafter?"
"Sure," laughed the railroad man. And then, to round out the forbidden
topic by adding worse to bad: "I didn't know it was a sore spot with
you. How should I know? But, as I say, you'll have to reckon with her
sooner or later, and--"
"Let's talk of something else," snapped Blount.
Gantry found a match and relighted his cigar. When he began again he was
still thinking of the "apron-string" clause in the senator's telegram.
"I can't understand how any man with Western blood in his veins could
ever be content to marry and settle down in this over-civilized neck of
woods," he remarked, looking down upon the parked automobiles and around
at the country-club evidences of the civilization.
"Can't you?" smiled Blount, with large lenience. One of the things the
civilization had done for him was to make him good-naturedly tolerant of
the crudeness of the outlander.
"No, I can't," asserted the Westerner. Then he added: "Of course, I
don't know the Eastern young woman even by sight. She may be all that is
lovely, desirable, and enticing--if a man could hope to live long
enough to get really well acquainted with her."
"She is," declared Blount, with the air of one who had lived quite long
enough to know.
Once more Gantry was putting two and two together. Blount's
determination to go West and grow up with the country--his father's
country--was apparently a very sudden one. Had the decision turned
entirely upon the senator's telegram? Gantry, wise in his generation,
thought not.
"You say that as if you'd been taking a few lessons," he laughed. Then,
with the friendly impudence which only a college comradeship could
excuse: "Is she here to-night?"
"No," said Blount, unguardedly making the response which admitted so
much more than it said.
"Tell me about her," Gantry begged. "I don't often read a love story,
but I like to hear 'em."
If it had been any one but Gantry, Blount would probably have had a
sharp attack of reticence, with outward symptoms unmistakable to the
dullest. But the time, the surroundings, and the exceeding newness of
Patricia's "No" combined to break down the barriers of reserve.
"There isn't much to tell, Dick," he began half humorously, half in
ill-concealed self-pity. "I've known her for a year, and I've loved her
from the first day. That is Chapter One; and Chapter Two ends the story
with one small word. She says 'No.'"
"The dickens she does!" said Gantry, in hearty sympathy. Then: "But
that's a good sign, isn't it? Haven't I heard somewhere that they always
say 'No' at first?"
Blount laughed in spite of himself. Gantry, the Dick Gantry of the
college period, had always been a man's man, gay, light-hearted, and
care-free to the outward eye, but in reality one who was carrying
burdens of poverty and distress which might well have crushed an older
and a stronger man. There had been no time for sentiment then, and
Blount wondered if there had been in any later period.
"I am afraid I can't get any comfort out of that suggestion," he
returned. "When Miss Patricia Anners says 'No,' I am quite sure she
means it."
"Think so?" said Gantry, still sympathetic. "Well, I suppose you are the
best judge. Tough, isn't it, old man? What's the obstacle?--if you can
tell it without tearing the bandages off and saying 'Ouch!'"
"It is Miss Anners's career."
"H'm," was the doubtful comment; "I'm afraid you'll have to elaborate
that a little for me. I'm not up in the 'career' classification."
"She has been studying at home and abroad in preparation for
social-settlement work in the large cities. Of course, I knew about it;
but I thought--I hoped--"
"You hoped it was only a young woman's fad--which it probably is,"
Gantry cut in.
"Y-yes; I'm afraid that was just what I did hope, Dick. But I couldn't
talk against it. Confound it all, you can't go about smashing ideals
for the people you love best!"
"Rich?" queried Gantry.
"Oh, no. Her father has the chair of paleontology, and never gets within
speaking distance of the present century. The mother has been dead many
years."
"And you say the girl has the Hull House ambition?"
"The social-betterment ambition. It's an ideal, and I can't smash it.
You wouldn't smash it, either, Dick."
"No; I guess that's so. If I were in your fix I should probably do what
you are doing--say 'Good-by, fond heart,' and hie me away to the
forgetful edge of things. And it's simply astonishing how quickly the
good old sage-brush hills will help a man to forget everything that ever
happened to him before he ducked."
Blount winced a little at that. It was no part of his programme to
forget Patricia. Indeed, for twenty-four hours, or the waking moiety of
that period, he had been assuring himself of the utter impossibility of
anything remotely approaching forgetfulness. This thought made him
instantly self-reproachful; regretful for having shown a sort of
disloyalty by opening the door of the precious and sacred things, even
to so good a friend as Dick Gantry; and from regretting to amending was
never more than a step for Evan Blount. There were plenty of
reminiscences to be threshed over, and Blount brought them forward so
tactfully that Gantry hardly knew it when he was shouldered away from
the open door of the acuter personalities.
It was quite late, and the talk had again drifted around to a one-sided
discussion of practical politics in the Western definition of the term,
when Gantry, pleading weariness on the score of his hard week's work at
the railroad meeting, went to bed. The summer night was at its perfect
best, and Blount was still wakeful enough to refill his pipe and
well-balanced enough to be thankful for a little solitude in which to
set in order his plans for the newly struck-out future. In the later
talk with Gantry he had learned many things about the political
situation in his native State, things which were enlightening if not
particularly encouraging. Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school,
he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his
own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry's account could be
trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his
father was reputed to be the dictator.
Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in
some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been
filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a
possible time when some great corporation should need his services in
permanence. He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of
the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business.
Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over
into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and
enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great
corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be
law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the
public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own
profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests,
promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, and be the
adviser of the man or men to whom the greater America owes its place at
the head of the civilized nations.
Oddly enough, though Gantry's attitude had been uncompromisingly
partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a
skilful pleader for the special interests--the interests of the few
against those of the many. Hence he was preparing to go to the new field
with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant
corporation. In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty
broadly that there was room for an assistant corporation counsel for the
railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State.
Blount assumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least,
would be political rather than legal, and in his mind's eye he saw
himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender
of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was
capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack.
The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant
of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had
been other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his
future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work
is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking
forward in eager anticipation to the moment when he could begin the
grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the new environment.
It was after the ashes had been knocked from the bedtime pipe that
Blount left his chair and the secluded corner of the veranda to go down
among the parked automobiles on the lawn. His one recreation--and it was
the only one in which he found the precious fillip of enthusiasm--was
motoring. There was a choice collection of fine cars in the grouping on
the lawn, and Blount had just awakened a sleepy chauffeur to ask him to
uncover and exhibit the engine of a freshly imported Italian machine,
when a stir at the veranda entrance told him that at least a few of the
dancing guests were leaving early.
Being more curious at the moment about the mechanism of the Italian
motor than he was about people, he did not realize that he was an
intruder until the chauffeur hastily replaced the engine bonnet and
began to get his car ready for the road. Blount stepped back when the
little group on the veranda came down the steps preceded by a club
footman who was calling the number of the car. And it was not until he
was turning away that he found himself face to face with a very
beautiful and very clear-eyed young woman who was buttoning an
automobile dust-coat up under her chin.
"Patricia!" he burst out. And then: "For Heaven's sake! you don't mean
to tell me that you have been here all evening?"
Her slow smile gave the impression, not quite of frigidity perhaps, but
of that quality of serene self-possession which strangers sometimes
mistook for coldness.
"Why shouldn't I be here?" she asked. "Didn't you know that the
Cranfords--the people who are entertaining--are old friends of ours?"
Blount shook his head. "No, I didn't know it; and because I didn't, I
have lost an entire evening."
"Oh, no; you shouldn't say that," she protested. "The evening was yours
to use as you chose. Mrs. Beverley told me you were here, and she added
that you had particularly requested not to be introduced to the
Cranfords or their guests. Besides, you know you don't care anything
about dancing."
The chauffeur had placed his other passengers in the tonneau, and was
trying to crank the motor. Blount was thankful that the new Italian
engine was refusing to take the spark. The delay was giving him an added
moment or two.
"No, I don't care much for dancing; and you know very well why I
couldn't, or wouldn't, be anybody's good company to-night," he said.
Then: "It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening by not letting
me know that you were here."
"'This last evening'?" she echoed. "Why 'last'?"
"Because I am leaving Boston and New England to-morrow--or rather,
Monday. It is the only thing to do."
"I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan," she deprecated, in the
sisterly tone that always made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense
of proportion."
"Sometimes I think you haven't any sense of proportion, Patricia," he
retorted half-morosely. "If you have, I am sure it is frightfully
distorted."
The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary explosions, and a
white-haired old gentleman in the tonneau was calling impatiently to
Patricia to come and take her place so that he might close the door.
"It is you who have the distorted perspective, Evan," she countered.
"But I refused to quarrel with you last night, and I am refusing to
quarrel with you now. It pleases you to believe that a woman's place in
this twentieth-century world is inevitably at the fireside--her own
fireside. I don't agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with
you. Where are you going?"
"I am going West, Monday."
"How odd!" she commented. "We are going West, too--father and I--though
not quite so soon as Monday."
"You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the West?"
She did not tell him where. The car motor was whirring smoothly now,
the chauffeur was sliding into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the
old gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently impatient.
"If we are both going in the same direction we needn't say good-by," she
said hastily, giving him her hand at parting. "Let it be _auf
wiedersehen_." Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the
outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately that Blount had to
spring nimbly aside to save himself from being run down.
II
THE BOSS
It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken mountain ranges, lone
buttes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of
an exclusive North Shore club to a private dining-room in the
Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico faces the Capitol grounds
in the chief city of the Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows command
a magnificent view of the Lost River Range, and from whose roof, on a
clear day, one may see the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the
distant western horizon.
Allowing for the difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the
dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain
synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences
by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda
of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was
ascribing to the good offices of the god of chance.
On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of the men at the table in
the private dining-room had registered from Chicago. The name was
illegible to the cursory eye, but since it was the signature of a
notable empire-builder, it was sufficiently well known in all the vast
region served by the Transcontinental Railway System. The owner of the
name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to clip the end from a
very long and very black cigar. He was a man past middle-age,
large-framed and heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born master
of circumstances. Like the younger generation, he was clean shaven;
hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination
about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the
region traversed by the great railway system the virile face with the
massive jaw was as familiar as the illegible signature on the
Inter-Mountain's guest-book. Though he figured only as the first
vice-president of the Transcontinental Company, Hardwick McVickar was
really the active head of its affairs and the dictator of its policies.
Across the small round table sat the railway magnate's dinner-guest, a
man who was more than McVickar's match in big-boned, square-shouldered
physique, and whose half-century was written only in the thick, grizzled
hair and heavy, graying mustaches. Like McVickar, he had the lion-like
face of mastership, but the fine wrinkles at the corners of the wide-set
eyes postulated a sense of humor which was lacking in his table
companion. His mouth, half hidden by the drooping mustaches, needed the
relieving wrinkles at the corners of the eyes; it was a grim,
straight-lined inheritance from his pioneer ancestors--the mouth of a
man who may yield to persuasion but not easily to opposition.
"I wish I could convince you that it isn't worth while to hold me at
arm's-length, Senator," McVickar was saying, as he clipped the end from
his cigar. "You know as well as I do that under the present law in this
State we are practically bankrupt. We are not making enough to pay the
fixed charges. We do a losing business from the moment we cross your
State line."
"Yes; it seems to me I have heard something that sounded a good deal
like that before," was the noncommittal rejoinder.
"You have heard the simple truth, then. And it is a bald injustice, not
only to the railroad company, but to the people it serves. We can't give
adequate service when the cost exceeds the earnings. That is the
simplest possible proposition in any business undertaking."
"And you can't make out to convince the members of the State Railroad
Commission of the simpleness?" asked the man whom the vice-president
addressed as "Senator."
"You know well enough that we can't hope to convince a rabidly
anti-railroad commission," was the half-angry retort.
"Yet you are still running your railroad," suggested the other. "We
don't hear anything about your shutting down and tearing up the track."
"No; luckily, the Transcontinental System does not lie wholly within
your State boundaries. If it did, we might as well surrender our
charter and go out of business--shut down and tear up the track, as you
put it."
"All of which has come to be a pretty old and well-worn story with us,
McVickar," said the listener quietly. "I'm sure you didn't make me motor
thirty miles to hear you tell it all over again. What do you want?"
"We want a square deal," was the curt reply.
"So do the people of this State," asserted the man across the table.
"You bled us, Hardwick--bled us to the queen's taste--while you had the
chance; and the chance lasted a blamed long time. You are equitably, if
not legally, in debt to every man in this State who had ever shipped a
car-load of freight or paid a passenger fare over your line before the
present rate law went into effect. You can shuffle and side-step all you
want to, but that is the plain fact of the matter."
The vice-president sat up and braced his arms on the edge of the table.
"You are too much for me, Blount--you hold out too many cards; and I'm
no apprentice at the game, either. In all these years we've been
dickering together you've always been a hard-bitted and consistent
fighter for your own hand. What's happened to you lately? Have you
acquired a new set of convictions? Or have you been figuring out a
different way of whipping the devil around the stump?"
"Oh, I don't know," returned the guest, with large good-nature. "We are
all growing older--and wiser, perhaps. You don't deny the debt you owe
us, do you?"
"Do we owe you anything, Blount?" asked the magnate pointedly, and with
a definite emphasis upon the personal pronoun. "If we do, we are willing
to pay it in spot cash, on demand."
The big man on the other side of the table was leaning back in his chair
with his hands in his pockets, and the smile wrinkling at the corners of
his eyes was half-genial, half-satirical.
"It's lucky we're alone, McVickar," he remarked. "A third fellow
standing around and hearing you talk might imagine that you are trying
to bribe me."
"That's all right, Blount; this is between us two, and we understand
each other. Nothing for nothing is the accepted rule the world over, and
we both recognize it. You are figuring on something; I know you are.
Name it. If it is anything less than a mortgage on the earth and one or
two of the planets I'll get it for you."
"I'm afraid we are a good deal more than a mile or two apart yet,
McVickar," said the man who was not smoking, after a long minute. "Let's
ride back to the beginning and get us a fresh start. I said that Gordon
is going to be the next governor of the State."
"I know you did; and I said--and I say it again--he isn't going to
be--not if we can help it," declared the railway magnate, with emphatic
determination.
"The methods you will take to defeat him will insure his election,
McVickar. You fellows are mighty slow to learn your lesson; mighty slow
and obstinate, Hardwick. You don't know anything but wire-pulling and
crookedness and bribery. The times have changed, and you haven't had the
common-sense or the courage or the business shrewdness to change with
them. I say Gordon will be the next governor."
Again there was a strained silence like that which follows the
hand-shake in the prize-ring when the two antagonists have drawn apart
and are warily watching each for his opening. After the pause the
vice-president said:
"If we had the safest kind of a majority in both houses of the
legislature, we couldn't be sure of accomplishing anything worth while
with Gordon in the governor's office; you know that, Blount. If Gordon
runs and is elected, his platform will be flatly anti-railroad."
"Oh, I don't know," was the calm rejoinder. "Gordon is a mighty square
fellow; an honest man and a fair one. If you could stay out of the fight
and go to him with clean hands--but you couldn't do that, McVickar;
you're too badly out of practice."
"We needn't go into that phase of it. We are so savagely handicapped in
this State that we can't afford to take a divided chance; can't afford
to pass our case up to a man who has been elected by an unfriendly
opposition. If we should wash our hands of the fight, as you suggest,
we might just as well throw up our franchises and quit, so far as any
prospect of earning a reasonable return upon our investment here is
concerned."
"I know; that is what you always say, and you have said it so often--you
and your fellow railroad string-pullers--that you have lost the
straightforward combination completely. If you ever knew how to make a
clean fight you've forgotten the moves, and it's your own fault."
Once more the man with the fierce eyes and the dominating jaw took time
to consider. Like others of his class, he was partisan only in the sense
of one fighting hardily for the side upon which he had happened to be
drawn in the great world battle. If he had not long ago parted with his
convictions, the heat and smoke of the battle had obscured them, and he
chose his weapons now with little regard for anything beyond their
possible efficacy.
"You are sparring with me, Blount," he said finally. "You are talking to
me as you might talk to a committee of the Good Government League--and
possibly for the same reason. Let's get together. You control the
political situation in your State, and we frankly recognize that fact.
It's a matter of business, and we can settle it on a business basis. I
have been outspoken and above-board with you and have told you what we
want. Meet me halfway and tell me what you want."
"I want a square deal all around, Hardwick; that's all. You've got to
take the same ground and make a clean fight if you want me with you. I
can't make it any plainer than that, can I?"
"I don't know yet what you are driving at," frowned the vice-president,
"nor just why you have taken this particular occasion to read me a
kindergarten lecture on political methods. In times past I suppose we
have both done some things that we would like to have decently buried
and forgotten, but--"
"But right there we break apart, McVickar," cut in the other, setting
his jaw with a peculiar hardening of the facial muscles that gave him
the appearance of a fierce old viking attacking at the head of his
squadrons. "I'm telling you over again that a new day has dawned in
American politics; I and my kind recognize it, and you and your kind
don't seem to be big enough to recognize it. That is the difference
between us. In the present instance it comes down to this: you are going
to fight for a railroad majority in the legislature, and you want
Reynolds for the head of the ticket because you know that you can depend
upon his veto if you don't get your majority in the House and Senate.
You are not going to get Reynolds, or the majority either, without the
help of the party organization."
"We can put it much more elementally than that," supplemented the
railroad man. "We get nothing without your say-so as the head of the
party organization. That is precisely why I have come a couple of
thousand miles to ask you to eat dinner with me here to-night."
"I reckon I ought to feel right much set up and biggitty over that,
Hardwick," smiled the veteran spoilsman, relapsing, as he did now and
then, into the speech of his Southern boyhood. And then
half-quizzically: "Are you tolerably well satisfied that you've got
around to the place where you are willing to tote fair with me? You
recollect, I gave you a straight pointer two years ago; you wouldn't
take it, and we did you up. Are you right certain you are ready now to
holler 'enough'?"
Once again the vice-president refused to be hurried into making a
capitulative admission. When he spoke, the militant second thought of
the fighting corporation commander chose the words.
"There is a limit to all things, Senator, and you are pushing us pretty
well up to it. I suppose you can crack the whip and swing the vote on
the legislature, and you can take it and be damned. But, by God, we'll
have our governor and our attorney-general!"
"You are betting confidently on that, are you?" said the veteran mildly.
"Is that your declaration of war?"
"Call it anything you like. We are not going to be legislated off the
map if we can help it. Strong as your machine is, you can't swing Gordon
in against Reynolds if we concede your bare majority in the legislature
and put up the right kind of a fight. And when it comes to Rankin, our
candidate for attorney-general, you simply haven't another man in the
party to put up against him. You'd have to run in a dummy, and even you
are not big enough to do that, Blount, and put it over."
"You've settled this definitely in your own mind, have you, Hardwick?"
was the placable rejoinder. "I'm sorry--right sorry. I've been hoping
that you had learned your lesson--you and your tribe. I came to town
this evening prepared to show you a decent way out of your troubles, so
far as this State is concerned; but since you have posted your 'de-fi,'
as we cow-punchers say, I reckon it isn't worth while to wade any deeper
into the creek."
Again the railroad magnate rested his arms on the table-edge. "What was
your 'decent way,' Senator?" he asked, fixing his gaze upon the shrewd
old eyes of the other, which, for the first time in the conference,
seemed to be losing a little of their grimly good-natured
aggressiveness.
"I don't mind telling you, though you will likely call it an old man's
foolishness. I have a grown son, McVickar. Did you know that?"
The vice-president nodded, and the big man opposite went on
half-reminiscently:
"He is a lawyer, and a mighty bright one, so they tell me. As I happen
to know, he is pretty well up on the corporation side of the argument,
and the one thing I've been afraid of is that he would marry and settle
down somewhere in the East, where the big corporations have their home
ranches. I'm getting old, Hardwick, and I'd like mighty well to have the
boy with me. Out of that notion grew another. I said to myself this:
Now, here's McVickar; if he could have a good, clean-cut young man in
this State representing his railroad--a man who not only knew his way
around in a court-room, but who might also know how to plead his
client's case before the public--if McVickar could have such a young
fellow as that for his corporation counsel, and would agree to make his
railroad company live somewhere within shouting distance of such a young
fellow's ideals, we might all be persuaded to bury the hatchet and live
together in peace and amity."
A slow smile was spreading itself over the strong face of the railway
magnate as he listened.
"Say, David," he retorted mildly, "it isn't much like you to go forty
miles around when there is a short way across. Why didn't you tell me
plainly in the beginning that you wanted a place for your boy?"
"Hold on; don't let's get too far along before we get started; I'm not
saying it now," was the sober protest. "You forget that you've just been
telling me that you don't intend to comply with the one hard-and-fast
condition to such an arrangement as the one I've been pipe-dreaming
about."
"What condition?"
"That you turn over a brand-new leaf and meet the people of this State
half-way on a proposition of fair play for everybody."
"There isn't any half-way point in a fight for life, David. You know
that as well, or better, than I do. But let that go. We'll give your son
the place you want him to have, and do it gladly."
The man who had once been his own foreman of round-ups straightened
himself in his chair and smote the table with his fist.
"No, by God, you won't--not in a thousand years, McVickar! Maybe you
could buy me--maybe you _have_ bought me in times past--but you can't
buy that boy! Listen, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I
telegraphed the boy this afternoon, telling him to throw up his job in
Boston and come out here. If he comes within a reasonable time he will
be legally a citizen of the State before election. You said we didn't
have anybody but Rankin to run for attorney-general. By Heavens,
Hardwick, I'll show you if we haven't!"