I shall close my offices in Temple Court and confine myself strictly to
the routine legal business of the company. Meanwhile, my resignation is
in your hands if you wish to appoint a new division counsel.' Have you
got that, Collins? Very well; write it out and send it at once. I shall
be at the Inter-Mountain for a little while, if you want to reach me
between now and closing time."
XII
A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT
Going to the hotel, Blount shut himself into a telephone booth and
tried, ineffectually, to get a long-distance connection with Wartrace
Hall. When he finally grew exasperated at the central operator's
oft-repeated "line's busy," he called up Gantry to ask if the traffic
manager knew anything about the purposes and movements of his father.
Gantry did not know, but he knew something else--a thing which proved
the leakiness of the railroad telegraph department.
"Come down here and tell me what you mean by sending incendiary
telegrams to the vice-president," he commanded, with jesting severity.
And with a hard word for the department which had gossiped, Blount went
down to the general offices in the station building.
Gantry was busy with the stenographer, but the business was immediately
postponed and the clerk dismissed when Blount entered.
"'Tell it out among the heathen,'" the traffic manager quoted jocosely,
when the door closed behind the shorthand man.
"There is nothing to tell--more than you seem to know already," snapped
Blount morosely. "I have wired my resignation, that's all."
"But why?" persisted Gantry.
"Because I'm not going to be an accessory, either before or after the
fact--not if I know it," was the curt rejoinder.
"An accessory to what?"
"To the criminal disregard for the laws of this State and the nation
which seems to be the underlying motive actuating every move in this
corrupt game of politics. Gantry, if you and some others had your just
deserts, you would be breaking stone in the penitentiary this blessed
minute!"
"Suffering Moses!" gasped the traffic manager. "Somebody must have been
hitting you pretty hard. Who was it; some more of the 'little
brothers'?"
At another time Blount might have been less angry, and, by consequence,
more discreet.
"No, it wasn't any of the 'little brothers'; it was Mr. Simon P.
Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company."
Gantry drew a long breath which ended in a low whistle.
"So that's what you were let in for, was it?" he exclaimed, and then he
checked himself abruptly and went back to the original contention. "But
you're not going to throw down your tools and walk out, Evan. You can't
afford to do that."
"Why can't I?"
"Because you have committed yourself right and left. No man can afford
to drop out of the ranks on the eve of a battle. You are not stopping to
consider the construction which will be put upon any such hasty action
on your part."
"I am not stopping to consider anything, Dick, save the fact that I was
evidently expected to connive at a cynical and criminal disregard for
the law of the land, the law which, as a member of the bar, I have sworn
to uphold and defend. That is enough for me. I don't have to be knocked
down and run over before I can realize that it's time to get out of the
way."
"You say it's enough for you; it won't be enough for Mr. McVickar,"
Gantry interposed. "If you could afford to drop out--and I'm not
admitting that you can--he couldn't afford to let you." Then, with
sudden gravity: "Hadn't you better let me hold up that telegram of yours
for a few hours, Evan, until you've had time to cool down and think it
over?"
Blount sprang from his chair in a white heat.
"Do you mean to tell me that you are already holding it up?" he
demanded.
"I took the liberty of holding it up--temporarily," confessed the
traffic man coolly. "There is no harm done. Mr. McVickar is on his way
West now, and he will be here in a day or two. Why not kill the message
and have it out with him in person when he comes?"
Blount was not to be so easily appeased.
"I won't have my communications tampered with!" he exploded. "If you
have given an order to have that telegram held out, you can give another
to have it sent immediately!"
"All right," said Gantry; "just as you say." And he made no effort to
detain the enraged one who was turning his back and striding away. But
after the self-discharged political manager was gone, the traffic man
chuckled quietly and turned up a square of paper which had been lying on
his desk during the short and belligerent interview.
"It's a nice lay-out," he mused, reading the type-written lines over
again, "but the little lady was too fly for you this time, Evan, my boy.
She was just prophetess enough to guess where and how you would go off
the handle, clever enough to pass me the word to watch the wires after a
certain train should get in from Ophir to-day. Great little woman, that.
I believe she figures out more than half of the fine moves in the
Honorable Senator's game, though this particularly fine move of sending
Hathaway to touch a match to Evan's little powder-keg is one that I
don't begin to understand." And he folded the telegram and carefully put
it away in his pocket-book.
Evan Blount walked three squares beyond the Inter-Mountain Hotel before
he had cooled down sufficiently to determine what to do next. As it
chanced, the cooling-down process had led him to the door of the public
garage patronized by his father. That thought of flying to Patricia for
counsel and comfort was still with him, but it was over-shadowed by a
more militant desire to fight somebody; to go to his father and tell him
how completely and successfully he had plotted with the vice-president
to humiliate a son whose only offence was a decent regard for honor and
uprightness.
Acting upon the impulse of the moment, he went in and asked if any of
Senator Blount's cars were in the city. There was one--the big roadster;
and Blount's decision was taken instantly. On that first day at Wartrace
Hall his father had tried to give him one of the three motor-cars
outright, and when he had refused to take it as a gift, a compromise had
been made by which he was under promise to use any one of the machines
he could get hold of when the need arose. Accordingly, a few minutes
later he was behind the steering-wheel of the fast roadster, picking his
way through the traffic-burdened city streets and pointing straight for
the country road leading north to the sage-brush hills.
Now, among its many attractions, motoring numbers--from the driver's
point of view--this: that it effectually sweeps the brain of all other
cares and distractions, sundry and several, since one may not drive a
high-powered car at speed and successfully think of anything but the
driving. Blount reached the entrance to the cottonwood-shaded avenue at
Wartrace Hall just before the dinner hour; and he was so far recovered
from the attack of righteous indignation that he was able to meet his
father and the others with a fair degree of equanimity. In the back part
of his mind, however, he held the fighting ultimatum in suspense. In
the course of the evening he would make his opportunity and have it out,
once for all, with the master plotter. So much he determined while he
was dressing for dinner. But the course of events is sometimes a most
unmalleable thing, as he was presently to learn.
At the dinner-table it was the professor who monopolized the
conversation, holding forth learnedly and dictatorially upon matters
pertaining solely to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the talk
to approach nearer than several million years to the twentieth century.
And at the dispersal--only there was no dispersal--the senator took his
turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room and persuading
Patricia to go to the piano.
The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his
brain bided his time. He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and
Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was
still outweighing the lesser. Further along, when Miss Anners had played
herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination. But, in
spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the
pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.
The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the
bamboo _portières_ he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric
discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should.
Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and
that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the
long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But when his patience was
finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo
_portières_ aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It was Patricia,
and she was alone.
"I thought perhaps I should find you here," she said, taking the easy
chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was
blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn. "Did we
bore you to death with the Pliocenes?"
"Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But since I hadn't remembered to
have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to
galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods."
"Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for daddy's sake I do try to.
But for us who are living to-day there are so many problems of
critically vital importance--problems that the pterodactyls never knew
anything about."
"I know," returned the young man, half-absently. "I am up against one of
them, right now, and I don't know how to solve it."
"Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her
tone was personal rather than conventional.
"It will not only bear telling; it demands to be told to some one whose
sense of right and wrong has not been drawn and quartered and flayed
alive until it has no longer life or breath left with which to
protest," and thereupon he told her circumstantially all that had
befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the
wrecked train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of the lumber
magnate's attempt at corruption, of which he suppressed nothing but the
fact that her father's name appeared in Mr. Hathaway's list of
share-holders. When he had made an end, her eyes were shining, though
whether with quickened sympathy or indignation he could not determine.
"What did you do?" she asked, referring to the incident of the
afternoon.
"I didn't do half enough!" he fumed. "I'm afraid I let Hathaway escape
without being told plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable
scoundrel he is. When he edged out of the door, he was still telling me
to take my time to think it over, and was indicating the way in which I
might communicate my consent without committing anybody. I made a
mistake in not firing him bodily!"
Miss Anners was tapping one daintily shod foot on the tiled hearth.
"You made your greatest mistake in the very beginning, Evan," she said
decisively. "You should have made a confidant of your father."
"I did try to," he protested. "Everything was all right until this
political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I
couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the
corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr.
McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I
could really do something toward bringing about a better understanding."
"And now you believe you can't?--that it is impossible?"
"Not wholly impossible, I suppose. But the 'great game' seems to be
everything in this benighted commonwealth, and everybody plays it--my
father, his wife, the railroad officials, and the politicians. Surely
you wouldn't say that I should have let father put me on the State
ticket as a candidate, knowing--as I could not help knowing--that I
would be expected to carry out the designs of the machine regardless of
right and wrong?"
"Certainly not," was the quick reply, "not if you were convinced that
the motive--your father's motive--was unworthy. But if you have been
telling me the truth, and all the truth, I should say that you didn't
stop to inquire what his motive was."
"What was the use of inquiring?" he demanded moodily. "He is the boss,
and he would have used the machine to put me into office as
attorney-general. In other words, I should have owed my election, not to
the will and selection of the people, but to the will of one man, and
that man my nearest kinsman; a man who is, beyond all question of doubt,
working hand in glove with all the trickery and double-dealing practised
by the corporations. Under such conditions, would it have been possible
for me to accept and to administer the office without fear or favor?"
"I don't know why not," she returned. "Notwithstanding your
charge--which merely shows how angry you are--your 'nearest kinsman,' as
you call him, would have been the last man in the world to interfere.
Wasn't that the very reason he gave you for wanting to put you on the
ticket?"
"I know," said Blount, whose mind was beginning to cloud again. "But
there are so many other mysteries. We'll say that my father honestly
wanted me to stand for the candidacy. But right in the midst of things
he conspires with Mr. McVickar to put me into my present unspeakable
dilemma."
Her smile was gently reproachful.
"It is my poor opinion, Evan, that you don't half appreciate your
father. Worse than that, you don't know him. But that is beside the
present mark. What are you going to do?"
"I have already done it. I have wired my resignation to Mr. McVickar,
and he will doubtless accept it."
She was looking him fairly in the eyes. "That is the second unwise thing
you have done," she remarked. And then: "Evan, there are times when you
are sadly in need of a balance-wheel. Don't you know that?"
"I knew it a good while ago. I applied for one once, and it was refused
when you said 'No'."
For one who was supposed to be far above and beyond such emotional
signallings, she blushed very prettily. Which merely proves that one may
be a diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating the
miseries of a sodden world, without having parted with the primitive sex
impulse.
"I am willing to try to help you now," she said, half hesitating; "if
only you won't try to drag me over into the field of sentiment. It was
just a bit of boyish rage--fine enough in its way, but foolish--your
sending that telegram to Mr. McVickar. Can't you recall it?"
"No; not now."
"Then you must do the next best thing: tell him you have reconsidered."
"But I haven't reconsidered; I can't and won't stand in with the
corruption and bribery that is going on all around me!" he objected
indignantly.
"Of course you can't; and you mustn't. But the true reformer doesn't
drop things and run away. You must stay in and fight--fight harder than
you ever have before, Evan. If you can't do it for the sake of the
larger right, then you must do it for your own sake. Can't you see the
open door before you?"
"I can see and hear and feel when the door is slammed in my face," was
the qualifying rejoinder. "How can I go on preaching the gospel of
cleanness and fair dealing, when I know that all this crooked work is
going on behind my back? What will the people of this State say to me
and about me when the crookedness comes to light?"
"Ah!" she said; "that is just where you begin to grow one-sided. You
must go on preaching the gospel, but that is only half of the battle.
The other half is to be big enough and strong enough and insistent
enough to make the thing itself agree with the gospel. I fully believe
you lost your best helper when you refused to join hands with your
father. You don't believe that, so we'll let it go. You have gone your
own way, choosing what seemed to you to be the better opportunity. Evan,
you can't turn back; you've simply _got_ to go on and wring success out
of apparent failure!"
Blount drew a deep breath and sat up in his chair. There was no
mistaking the light in Patricia's eyes now; the pure flame of which it
was the visible radiance is the torch which has kindled the beacon fires
on all the heights since the world began.
"If I had only my own people--the railroad people--to knock down and
drag out," he was beginning, but she broke in warmly:
"You think you have your father against you, too; I don't believe it,
but you do. Very well; then you must compel him, as well as the others.
Be a big man, Evan; be the biggest man in the State until you have
proved that one man with a righteous cause is better than ten thousand
without it."
Blount got up and stood with his back to the dying embers of the tiny
fire, and if he put his hands behind him it was because the passionate
impulse to break down all the barriers was twitching in every fibre of
him.
"Patricia, girl, I wonder if you know what you have done to me? I drove
out here this evening utterly discouraged and disheartened; bitter and
angry, and ready to throw the whole thing up and go away. You've
changed all that--you, you know; just you. Oh, girl, girl! if I could
only have you beside me to give me my battle-word!"
She had her slender fingers locked over one knee and her eyes were
downcast.
"Now you are tempting me," she said slowly; "and--and it isn't fair. You
know my weakness and passion to help. You _mustn't_ tempt me, Evan."
What he would have said, with what eager pleadings he would have pressed
the advantage gained by his appeal for the larger help, is not to be
here set down. For at that moment the bamboo door curtains parted to
admit the small house-mistress.
"You two!" she scolded with light-hearted austerity. And then to Evan:
"Don't you know that we are keeping country hours here at Wartrace now?
The professor will be up and calling for the car at six o'clock, and
it's past midnight. Shame on you! Run away and get your beauty
sleep--both of you!"
XIII
THE LIEGEMAN
Evan Blount drove himself back to the capital in the swift roadster the
following morning, and there was no opportunity for further confidential
speech with Patricia before he left. But with the new day had arisen,
full-grown, the determination born in the moment of midnight
heart-warming and inspiration. To the best of his ability he would live
up to the high standard set for him by the woman he loved, not only
preaching the gospel of fair dealing, but doing his utmost to make it
effective.
With this high purpose singing its song of exaltation in his veins, he
drove on past the garage and made an early call at the office of the
traffic manager. Gantry was in the midst of his morning mail-opening,
but he pushed the desk-load of papers aside when the door swung inward
to admit the early visitor.
"Hello, old man! Come back to jar me some more about that telegram?" was
his greeting.
Blount shook his head. "No; if you've sent it, well and good. If you
haven't, you may pitch it into the waste-basket. I came to talk about
something else."
"Good, sound, sensible second thought!" Gantry commented, laughing. Then
he took out his pocket-book and passed the suppressed telegram across to
Blount. "Here it is; you can do the waste-basket act yourself. I
couldn't let you commit _hara-kiri_ without at least trying to get the
cutting tool out of your hands. What is the other thing you've got on
your mind this early in the morning? It must be a nightmare of some
sort, by the look in your eyes."
"It may figure as a nightmare to you, Dick, before we're through with
it. I'll make it short. You know what I have been doing--what I supposed
I was hired to do--assuring everybody right and left that we were going
into this campaign with clean hands?"
"I know," admitted the traffic manager, developing a sudden interest in
the figures of the rug at his feet.
"I have been doing this in a business way at my office up-town, in
season and out of season, and night before last, at Ophir, I did it
publicly. As the campaign progresses, I shall doubtless put myself on
record many times to the same effect."
"Good man!" applauded Gantry, striving to drag the talk down to some
less portentous altitude. "I'm sure we need all the whitewashing anybody
can give us."
"That is just the point I have come to make," Blount went on gravely.
"It mustn't be merely a coat of whitewash, Dick; it has got to be the
real thing, this time. I began by firing the 'little brothers,' as you
called them, but I sha'n't stop at that; I mean to go higher up if I am
compelled to. I am here this morning to ask you to give me your word as
a gentleman and my friend that you will not, directly or indirectly, do
or cause to be done anything that will make me stand forth as a
self-convicted liar before the people of this State. I want you to
promise me that you will cut out all the deals, all the briberies, all
the bargainings, all the--"
"Oh, say; see here!" protested the man under fire; "you've got the wrong
pig by the ear, Evan. I'm not the Transcontinental Railway Company!"
"I know you are not. But, to a greater degree than any other official in
the local management, you have Mr. McVickar's confidence. If you don't
feel competent to handle the thing on your own responsibility, of course
it's your privilege to pass it up to those who have the authority. In
that case, I wish to make one point clear: you're the man I'm going to
hold up to the rack. I can't afford to spread myself over the entire
management, and I don't mean to try. I'm going to look to you, Dick, for
the backing of the clean sheet, and I warn you in all soberness that
there must be no blots on it; no compromises; no whipping of the devil
around the stump."
"Great Scott!" murmured Gantry. "And you're on the pay-rolls, the same
as the rest of us! But candidly, as man to man, Evan, the thing can't be
done, you know. We've got to play the game; they'll eat us alive if we
don't. You needn't figure in it at all; it was a mistake letting Sim
Hathaway get to you, and I said so at the time. But your--er--the powers
that be said it had to be that way, and I had to let him go and ball you
all up. It sha'n't happen again; I can promise you that much, anyway."
Blount caught quickly at the hesitant pause.
"Who were 'the powers that be' in Hathaway's case, Dick?" he inquired.
"I can't tell you that; honestly, I can't, Evan," was the anxious
refusal. "Don't ask me."
"All right; then I shall assume that Mr. McVickar was responsible," said
Blount calmly, thus proving that he had not taken his degree in the law
school for nothing.
"Oh, hold on! You mustn't do that, either!" protested the man who was
figuring most unwillingly as the occupant of the witness stand.
"Thank you," returned the postgraduate, with the true Blount smile. "Now
I know that it was my father. No; you needn't deny it; I suppose it was
for some good reason that this man was sent to teach me how to play the
game--as reasons go in practical politics. But we are side-stepping the
real issue. I've asked you for a promise: will you give it?"
"I--I can't give it, Evan, and hold my job; that's God's own truth!"
"No; it isn't God's truth--it's the other kind. But that was about what
I expected you to say. Now hear my side of it: if you don't clean
house--you and the other officials of the company--I shall not only
resign; I shall take the field on the other side and tell what I know
and why I've thrown up my job. I've been telling everybody that this is
to be a campaign of publicity, and by all that is good and great, I
shall keep my word, Dick!"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, you wouldn't do that!" ejaculated the traffic
man, now thoroughly alarmed. "Land of glory, Evan! you know too much--a
great deal too much!"
The young man who knew too much got up and relighted his cigar with a
match taken from Gantry's desk box.
"It's up to you," he said, with his hand on the door-knob. "Get into
communication with whatever 'powers that be' there are that can give the
necessary orders; see to it that the orders are given, and that they are
put in the way of being carried out. As God hears me, Dick, I mean what
I say: it's a clean sheet, or an exposure that will make a lot of you
wish you had never been born. If I have to put the screws on--as I hope
and pray I sha'n't--you can bet they'll be put on lawyer-fashion; with
evidence that will send a bunch of you to the penitentiary."
"Hold on--one question before you go, Evan!" pleaded Gantry. "I haven't
known half the time where I'm at in this latest muddle. Is this another
little blind lead of the Honorable Sen--of your father's?"
Blount's smile was as grim as any that Gantry had ever seen on the face
of the Honorable David.