he was standing on the porch of the tavern, talking to Barto and two
others; and I'm pretty sure he pointed me out to them. An hour or so
later, three horsemen passed me on the mesa, one after another. I
couldn't see them, but I heard them. It might have been another hour or
more past that when they potted me."
"You gave them your name?"
"Yes; and that seemed to tangle them a little. Barto said he believed I
was lying, but, anyway, he'd give me a chance to 'prove up.' Then they
brought me here, and your--er--Mrs. Blount kindly stepped into the
breach for me."
"You didn't know Honoria when you saw her?" queried the father.
"No; I wasn't in the least expecting--that is, I--you may remember that
I had never met her," stammered the young man, who had risen on his
elbow among the pillows.
The older man walked to the window and stood looking out upon the
distant mountains for a full minute before he faced about to say: "We
might as well run the boundary lines on this thing one time as another,
son. You don't like Honoria; you've made up your mind you're not going
to let yourself like her. I don't mean to make it hard for either of you
if I can dodge it. This is her home; but it is also yours, my boy. Do
you reckon you could--"
Evan Blount made affectionate haste to stop the half-pathetic appeal.
"Don't let that trouble you for a minute," he interposed. "I--Mrs.
Blount is a very different person from the woman I have been picturing
her to be; and if she were not, I should still try to believe that we
are both sufficiently civilized not to quarrel." Then: "Have you
breakfasted yet--you and Mrs. Blount? But of course you have, long ago."
"Breakfasted?--without you? Not much, son! And that reminds me: I was to
come up here and see if you were awake, and if you were, I was to send
Barnabas up with your coffee."
"You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven't acquired the coffee-in-bed
habit yet," laughed the lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my
apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be down _pronto_. There;
doesn't that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush
idiom? Great land! I haven't heard anybody say _pronto_ since I was
knee-high to a hop-toad!"
Farther on, when he was no longer in the first lilting flush of the new
impressions, Evan Blount was able to look back upon that first day at
Wartrace Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the nature of
things, it could never be lived over again. In all his forecastings he
had never pictured a homecoming remotely resembling the fact. In each
succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the
years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put
him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a
corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single
small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him
through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the
old ranch buildings of the "Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his
heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the
picture.
"I've kept it all just as it used to be, Evan," the father said gently.
"I thought maybe you'd come back some day and be sure-enough
disappointed if it were gone."
The younger man slipped from his saddle and went to look in at the open
door of the old ranch-house. Everything was precisely as he remembered
it: the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed quirts over the
high wooden mantel, his mother's rocking-chair ... that was the final
touch; he sat down on the worn door-log and put his face in his hands.
For now the gaping chasm of the years was quite closed and he was a boy
again.
Still later in this same first day there were ambling gallops along the
country roads, and the father explained how the transformation from
cattle-raising to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about; how the
great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square
miles of the fertile mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of
the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the
telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.
The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land;
it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find
sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds
me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor
Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."
"We're all fossils--we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed
the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State."
"But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the
professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all
he wants to."
"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's
half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it.
"Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will
permit him to be."
The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.
"What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.
"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was
little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any
one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career--"
"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges.
Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie
yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."
Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and
when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar"
ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief
love-tale, hiding nothing--not even the hope that in the years to come
Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to
admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better
after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should
tell some one; and who better?
David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son
had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to
the aging years.
"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling
saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.
"So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me
realize that I couldn't hold my own against the 'career,'" was the young
man's answer. Then he added: "I want work, father--that is what I am out
here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I
can put my heart into. Can you find it for me?"
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 appetite 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 Massachusetts, 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 ejaculated. "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. Nobody 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 Dick Gantry?" he demanded.
Evan told of the meeting on the veranda of the Winnebasset Club, adding
the further fact of the college friendship.
"Just happened so, did it?" queried the older man, "that getting
together last Saturday night?"
"Why--yes, I suppose so. Dick 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.
Anticipating 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
space 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 glass 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"
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 _café_.
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, Dick, 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 gratitude 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, Dick," 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.
"Dick, 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, Dick. 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, Dick; this thing has been
mentioned to me once, but nothing was decided--absolutely nothing. I
didn't even promise to take it under advisement."
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.