fellows ask for money, or expect it. A free ride now and then in the
varnished cars is about all they look for."
"But you can't give them passes under the interstate law," protested the
purist.
"Not outside of the State, of course. But inside of the State boundaries
it's our own business."
"You mean it _was_ our own business, previous to the passage of the
State rate law two years ago," corrected Blount.
"It is our own business to this good day--in effect. That part of the
law has been a complete dead-letter from the day the governor signed it.
Why, bless your innocent heart, Evan, the very men who argued the
loudest and voted the most spitefully for it came to me for their return
tickets home at the end of the session. Of course, we kept the letter of
the law. It says that no 'free passes' shall be given. We didn't issue
passes; we merely gave them tickets out of the case and charged them up
to 'expense.'"
"Faugh!" said Blount, "you make me sick! Gantry, it's that same childish
whipping of the devil around the stump by the corporations--an expedient
that wouldn't deceive the most ignorant voter that ever cast a
ballot--it's that very thing that has stirred the whole nation up to
this unreasonable fight against corporate capital. Don't you see it?"
Gantry shrugged his shoulders.
"I guess I take the line of the least resistance--like the majority of
them," was the colorless reply. "When it comes down to practical
politics--"
"Don't say 'practical politics' to me, Dick!" rasped the reformer.
"We've got the strongest argument in the world in the fact that the
present law is an unfair one, needing modification or repeal. We mustn't
spoil that argument by becoming law-breakers ourselves and descending to
the methods of the grafters and the machine politicians the country
over. If you have been sending these pie-eaters to me, stop it--don't do
it any more. I have no earthly use for them; and they won't have any use
for me after I open up on them and tell them a few things they don't
seem to know, or to care to know."
"I don't believe I'd do anything brash," Gantry suggested mildly, and he
was still saying the same thing in diversified forms when Blount led the
way back to the crowded drawing-rooms.
Dating from this little heart-to-heart talk with the traffic manager,
Blount began to carry out the new policy--the starvation policy, as it
soon came to be known among the would-be henchmen. The result was not
altogether reassuring. The first few rebuffs he administered left him
with the feeling that he was winning Pyrrhic victories; it was as if he
were trying to handle a complicated mechanism with the working details
of which he was only theoretically familiar. There were wheels within
wheels, and the application of the brakes to the smallest of them led to
discordant janglings throughout the whole.
Many of the small grafters were on the pay-rolls of the railroad
company, and Blount was soon definitely assured of what he had before
only suspected--that they were merely nominal employees given a pay-roll
standing so that there might be an excuse for giving them free
transportation, and a retainer in the form of wages, if needful.
In many cases the ramifications of the petty graft were exasperatingly
intricate. For example: one Thomas Gryson, who was on the pay-rolls as a
machinist's helper in the repair shops, demanded free transportation
across the State for eight members of his "family." Questioned closely,
he admitted that the "family" was his only by a figure of speech; that
the relationship was entirely political. Blount promptly refused to
recommend the issuing of employees' passes for the eight, and the result
was an immediate call from Bentley, the division master mechanic.
"About that fellow Gryson," Bentley began; "can't you manage some way to
get him transportation for his Jonesboro crowd? He is going to make
trouble for us if you don't."
Blount was justly indignant. "Gryson is on your pay-roll," he retorted.
"Why don't you recommend the passes yourself, on account of the
motive-power department, if he is entitled to them?"
"I can't," admitted the master mechanic. "I am held down to the issuing
of passes to employees travelling on company business only. We can
stretch it a little sometimes, of course, but we can't make it cover the
whole earth."
"Neither can I!" Blount exploded. "Let it be understood, once for all,
Mr. Bentley, that I am not the scape-goat for all the other departments!
I have cut it off short; I am not recommending passes for anybody."
"But, suffering Scott, Mr. Blount, we've simply _got_ to take care of
Tom Gryson! He's the boss of his ward, and he has influence enough to
turn even our own employees against us!"
"Influence?" scoffed the young man from the East. "How does he acquire
his influence? It is merely another illustration of the vicious circle;
you put into his hands the club with which he proceeds to knock you
down. Let me tell you what I'm telling everybody; if we want a square
deal, we've got to set the example by being square. And, by Heavens, Mr.
Bentley, we're going to set the example!"
The master mechanic went away silenced, but by no means convinced; and a
week later Gryson, who in appearance was a typical tough, and who in
reality was a post-graduate of the hard school of violence and
ruffianage obtaining in the lawless mining-camps of the Carnadine Hills,
sauntered into Blount's office with his cigar at the belligerent angle
and an insolent taunt in his mouth.
"Well, pardner, we got them dickie-birds o' mine over to Jonesboro,
after so long a time, and no thanks to you, neither. I just blew in to
tell you that I'm goin' to hit you ag'in about day after to-morrow, and
if you don't come across there's goin' to be somethin' doin'; see?"
Blount sprang from his chair and forgot to be politic.
"You needn't come to me the day after to-morrow, or any other time," he
raged. "I'm through with you and your tribe. Get out!"
After Gryson, muttering threats, had gone, the young campaign manager
had an attack of moral nausea. It seemed such a prodigious waste of time
and energy to traffic and chaffer with these petty scoundrels. Thus far,
every phase of the actual political problem seemed to be meanly
degrading, and he was beginning to long keenly for an opportunity to do
some really worthy thing.
Notwithstanding, his ideals were still unshaken. He still clung to the
belief that the corporation, which was created by the law and could
exist only under the protection of the law, must, of necessity, be a
law-abiding entity. It was manifestly unfair to hold it responsible for
the disreputable political methods of those whom it could never
completely control--methods, too, which had been forced upon it by the
necessity, or the fancied necessity, of meeting conditions as they were
found.
As if in answer to the wish that he might find the worthier task, it was
on this day of Gryson's visit that Blount was given his first
opportunity of entering the wider field. A letter from a local party
chairman in a distant mining town brought an invitation of the kind for
which he had been waiting and hoping. He was asked to participate in a
joint debate at the campaign opening in the town in question, and he was
so glad of the chance that he instantly wired his acceptance.
That evening, at the Inter-Mountain _café_ dinner hour, he found his
father dining alone and joined him. In a burst of confidence he told of
the invitation.
"That's good; that's the real thing this time, isn't it?" was the
senator's even-toned comment. "Gives you a right nice little chance to
shine the way you can shine best." Then: "That was one of the things
McVickar wanted you for, wasn't it?--speech-making and the like?"
"Why, yes; he intimated that there might be some public speaking,"
admitted the younger man.
"Well, what-all are you going to tell these Ophir fellows when you get
over there, son?" asked the veteran quizzically. "Going to offer 'em all
free passes anywhere they want to go if they'll promise to vote for the
railroad candidates?"
"Not this year," was the laughing reply. "As I told you a while back,
we've stopped all that."
"You have, eh? I reckon that will be mighty sorry news for a good many
people in the old Sage-brush State--mighty sorry news. You really reckon
you _have_ stopped it, do you, son?"
"I not only believe it; I am in a position to assert it definitely."
"McVickar has told you it was stopped?"
The newly fledged political manager tried to be strictly truthful.
"I have had but the one interview with Mr. McVickar, but in that talk he
gave me to understand that my recommendations would be given due
consideration. And I have said my say pretty emphatically."
The senator's smile was not derisive; it was merely lenient.
"Sat on 'em good and hard, did you? That's right, son; don't you ever
be afraid to say what you mean, and to say it straight from the
shoulder. That's the Blount way, and I reckon we've got to keep the
family ball rolling--you and I. Don't forget that, when you're making
your appeal to those horny-handed sons of toil over yonder at Ophir.
Give 'em straight facts, and back up the facts with figures--if you
happen to have the figures. When do you pull out for the mining-camp?"
"To-night, at nine-thirty. I can't get there in time if I wait for the
morning train." Then, dismissing the political topic abruptly: "What do
you hear from Professor Anners?"
"Oh, he's having the time of his life. I got him a State permit, and
scraped him up a bunch of pick-and-shovel men, and he is digging out
those fossil skeletons by the wagon-load."
"And Miss Anners?" pursued Patricia's lover.
"I shouldn't wonder if she was having the time of her life, too. I've
given her the little four-seated car to call her own while she is out
here, and she and Honoria go careering around the country--breaking the
speed limit every minute in the day, I reckon."
"I'm glad you are giving her a good time," said Evan, and he looked
glad. Then he added regretfully: "I wish I could get a chance to chase
around a little with them. I have seen almost nothing of them since they
came West. I should think Mrs. Blount might bring Patricia down to the
city once in a while."
"Well, now! perhaps the young woman doesn't want to come," laughed the
senator. "You told me you hadn't got her tag, son, and I'm beginning to
believe it's the sure-enough truth. What has she got against you,
anyway?"
"Nothing; nothing in the wide world, save that I don't fit into her
scheme for her life-work."
The senator was eating calmly through his dessert. "If you hadn't made
up your mind so pointedly to dislike Honoria, you might be getting a few
tips on that 'career' business along about now, son," he remarked, and
Evan was silent--had to be silent. For, you see, he had been charging
Patricia's continued absence from the capital to nothing less than
spiteful design on the part of his father's wife.
It was at the cigar smoking in the lobby, after the young man had made
his preparations for the journey and was waiting for the train-caller's
announcement, that the senator said quite casually: "It's too bad you're
going out of town to-night, son. Honoria 'phoned me a little spell ago
that she and Patricia would be driving down after their dinner to take
in the Weatherford reception. You'll have to miss 'em, won't you?"
The announcer was chanting the call for the night train west, and the
joint-debater got up and thrust his hand-bag savagely into the hand of
the nearest porter.
"Isn't that just my infernal luck!" he lamented. Then: "Give them my
love, and tell them I hope they will stay until I get back."
The senator rose and shook hands with the departing debater. "Shall I
say that to both of 'em?" he asked, with the quizzical smile which Evan
was learning to expect.
"Yes; to both of them, if you like--only I suppose Mrs. Blount will hold
it against me. Good-night and good-by. I'll be back day after to-morrow,
if the Ophir miners don't mob me."
It was only a few minutes after Evan Blount's train had steamed
Ophir-ward out of the Sierra Avenue station that a dust-covered
touring-car drew up at the curb in front of the Inter-Mountain, and the
same porter who had put Blount's hand-bag into the taxicab opened the
tonneau door for two ladies in muffling motor-coats and heavy veils.
The senator met the two late travellers in the vestibule, and while the
three were waiting for an elevator a rapid fire of low-toned question
and answer passed between husband and wife.
"You got Evan out of the way?" whispered the wife.
The husband nodded. "That was easy. I passed the word to Steuchfield,
and he helped out on that--invited Evan to come to Ophir to speak in a
joint debate. He left on the night train."
"And Hathaway? Will he be here?"
"He is here. Gantry has turned him down, according to instructions, and
he is clawing about in the air, trying to get a fresh hold. I bluffed
him; told him he'd have to make his peace with you for something, I
didn't know what, before I could talk to him."
Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal glow as the car descended,
and the wife's voice sank to a still lower whisper.
"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired eagerly.
"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there."
The small plotter nodded approval.
"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready," she directed;
and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to
finish his cigar.
X
IN THE HERBARIUM
The Weatherfords, multimillionaire mine-people, and so newly rich that
the crisp bank-notes fairly crackled when Mrs. Weatherford spent them,
kept their lackeyed and liveried state in a castle-like mansion in Mesa
Circle, the most expensive, if not the most aristocratic,
no-thoroughfare of the capital city. Weatherford, the father, egged on
by Mrs. Weatherford, had political aspirations pointing toward a United
States senatorship, the election to which would fall within the province
of the next legislature. The mine-owner himself, a pudgy little man with
a bald spot on top of his head and a corner-grocery point of view
carefully tucked away inside of it--an outlook upon life which was a
survival from his hard-working past--would willingly have dodged, but
Mrs. Weatherford was inexorable. There were two grown daughters and a
growing son, and it was for these that she was socially ambitious.
The reception for which the senator's wife and her guest had driven
thirty miles through the dust of the sage-brush hills was one of the
many moves in Mrs. Weatherford's private campaign. For the opening-gun
occasion the great house in Mesa Circle was lighted from basement to
turret--to all of the numerous turrets; an awning fringed with electric
bulbs sheltered the carpeted walk from the street to the grand entrance,
an army of lackeys paraded in the vestibule, and the wives and daughters
of the bravest and best in the capital city's political contingent stood
with Mrs. Weatherford in the long receiving-line.
From room to room in the vast house a curiously assorted throng of the
bidden ones worked its way as the jam and crush permitted. A firm
believer in the maxim that in numbers there is strength, the hostess had
made her invitation-list long and catholic. For the gossips there were
the crowded drawing-rooms, for the hungry there were Lucullian tables,
and for the sentimentalists there was the conservatory.
It was a mark of the unashamed newness of the Weatherford riches that
the conservatory, a glass-and-iron greenhouse, built out as an extension
of one of the drawing-rooms, was called "the herbarium." It was a
reproduction, on a generous scale, of a tropical garden. Half-grown
palms and banana-trees made a well-ordered jungle of the softly lighted
interior; and if, in the gathering of her floral treasures, Mrs.
Weatherford had omitted any precious bit of greenery whose cost would
have shed additional lustre upon the Weatherford resources, it was
because no one had remembered to mention the name of it to her.
Ex-Senator Blount's party of three was fashionably late at the function
in Mesa Circle, but in the crush filling the spacious drawing-rooms the
hostess and her long line of receiving assistants were still on duty.
Having successfully passed the line with her husband and Patricia,
little Mrs. Blount looked about her, saw Mr. Richard Gantry, signalled
to him with her eyes, and, with the traffic manager for her centre-rush
to wedge a way through the crowded rooms, was presently lost to
sight--at least from Miss Anners's point of view.
Whether she knew it or not, from the moment of her appearance at the
hostess's end of the long receiving-line, the senator's wife had been
marked and followed in her slow progress through the rooms by a
thin-faced man who seemed to be nervously trying to hunch himself into
better relations with his ill-fitting dress-coat, an eager gentleman
whose hawk-like eyes never lost sight of the little lady with her hand
on Gantry's arm. Only the senator saw and remarked this bit of by-play,
and he looked as if he were enjoying it, the shrewd gray eyes lighting
humorously as he bent to hear what Patricia was saying.
When his quarry stopped, as she did frequently to chat with one or
another of the guests, the man with the hawk-like profile and the
nervous hunch circled warily, and once or twice seemed about to make the
opportunity which was so slow in making itself. But it was not until the
little lady in the claret-colored party-gown had drifted, still with a
hand on Gantry's arm, in among the palm and banana trees of the
herbarium that the bird-of-prey person made his swoop. A moment later
Gantry, taking a low-toned command from his companion, was disappearing
in the direction of the refreshment-tables, and the lady looked up to
say: "Dear me, Mr. Hathaway, you almost startled me!"
"Did I?" said the lumber-king, rather grimly, if he meant the query to
be apologetic. "I am sorry. I didn't mean to; but Mrs. Gordon said I
would find you here, and so I took the liberty of following you. I'm
needing a little straightening out, you know, and--ah--would you mind
letting me talk business with you for a minute or two, Mrs. Blount?"
She drew her gown aside, and made room for him on the carved rustic
settee, which was exceedingly uncomfortable to sit in, but which was in
perfect harmony with the background of gigantic palmettos. He nodded
gratefully and took the place, and the manner of his sitting down was
that of a man who wears evening-clothes only under compulsion.
"Business?" she was saying. "Certainly not; if you can talk business in
such a place as this"--giving him the coveted permission.
"Perhaps it ain't what you'd call business--maybe it's only politics,"
he resumed; then, with the abruptness of one whose dealings have been
with men oftener than with women: "In the first place, I wish you'd tell
me what I've been doing to get myself into your bad books."
She laughed easily. "Who said you had been doing anything, Mr.
Hathaway?" she asked.
"The senator," he answered shortly, adding: "He told me I'd have to make
my peace with you."
She had developed a sudden interest in the quaint Japanese figures on
the ivory sticks of her fan. "You want something, Mr. Hathaway; what is
it?" she inquired.
"I want to be put next in this pigs-in-clover railroad puzzle," was the
blunt statement of the need. "Our freight contract with the
Transcontinental is about to expire, and I'd like to get it renewed on
the same terms as before."
"Well," she said ingenuously, "why don't you do it?"
"I can't," he blustered. "Everybody has suddenly grown mysterious or
gone crazy--I don't know which. Kittredge, the general superintendent,
don't seem to remember that we ever had any contract, and Gantry is just
as bad. And when I go to the senator he tells me I must make my peace
with you. I'm left out in the cold; I can't begin to _sabe_ what the
senator and these railroad brass-collar men are driving at. I've got
something to sell; something that the railroad company needs. Where the
d---- I mean, where's the hitch?"
The small person in the fetching party-gown reached up and pinched a
leaf from a fragrant shrub fronting the settee.
"Mr. Gantry has gone to fetch me an ice, and he will be back in a very
few minutes," she suggested mildly. "Consider your peace made, Mr.
Hathaway, and tell me what I can do for you."
"You can put me next," said the lumber lord, going back to the only
phrase that seemed to fit the exigencies of the case. "Why the--why
can't we get our contract renewed?"
The little lady was opening and shutting her fan slowly. "What was your
contract?" she inquired innocently.
"If I thought you didn't know, I'd go a long time without telling you,"
he said bluntly. "But you do know. It's the rebate lumber rate from our
mills at Twin Buttes and elsewhere, and it was given us two years ago, a
few days before election."
"And the consideration?" she asked, looking up quickly.
"You know that, too, Mrs. Blount. It was the swinging of the solid
employees' vote of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company over to the railroad
ticket."
"And you wish to make the same arrangement again?"
"Exactly. We've got to have that preferential rate or go out of
business."
"With whom did you make the contract two years ago?"
"With Mr. McVickar, verbally. Of course, there wasn't anything put down
in black and white, but the railroad folks did their part and we did
ours."
"I see--a gentleman's agreement," she murmured; and then: "You have
tried Mr. McVickar again?"
"Yes, and he referred me to Gantry."
"And what did Mr. Gantry say?"
"I couldn't get him to say anything with any sense in it," said the
lumber magnate grittingly. "The most I could get out of him was that I
would have to see the boss."
"And instead of doing that you went to see the senator?" she asked.
"Of course I did. Who else would Gantry mean by 'the boss'?" demanded
the befogged one.
"Possibly he meant the senator's son," she ventured, tapping a pretty
cheek with the folded fan. "Have you been leaving Evan Blount out in all
of this?"
"I didn't know where to put him in. That's what brings me here to-night.
The senator, or McVickar, or both of them together, have set the whole
State to running around in circles with this appointment of young
Blount. Some say it's a deal between the senator and McVickar, and some
say it's a fight. Half of the professional spellbinders are walking in
their sleep over it right now. I thought maybe you could tell me, Mrs.
Blount."
"I can't tell you anything that would help the people who are walking in
their sleep," she returned, "but I might offer a suggestion in your
personal affair. Mr. Evan Blount is your man."
Hathaway pursed his thin lips and frowned. "I'm in bad there--right at
the jump," he objected.
"I know," she shot back quickly. "For some reason best known to
yourself, you saw fit to have Mr. Evan waylaid and man-handled on the
first night of his return to his native State. But you needn't worry
about that. He won't hold it against you. I'm sure you'll find him
entirely amenable to reason."
The tyrant of "timber-jacks" frowned again. "H'm--reason, eh? How big a
block of Twin Buttes stock shall I offer him?"
Her laugh was a silvery peal of derision.
"You always figure in dollars and cents, don't you, Mr. Simon Peter
Hathaway?" she mocked.
"I have always found it the cheapest in the end."
"Listen," she said, with the folded fan held up like a monitory finger.
"Mr. Gantry may be back any minute, and I can give you only the tiniest
hint. You must go to Mr. Evan Blount and appeal to him frankly, as one
business man to another."
"But I have heard--they say he's all kinds of a crank."
"Never mind what you have heard. Tell him all the facts and ask him to
help you, and for mercy's sake don't offer him a block of your stock.
Put it where it will do the most good. Put it in the name of Professor
William J. Anners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and show Mr. Blount how
dreadfully disastrous the loss of the preferential freight rate would be
to all the poor people in your list of stock-holders--including
Professor Anners."
Hathaway drew down his cuff and made a pencil memorandum of the name and
address of the new beneficiary.