Gantry, Gordon and his wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the
marriageable daughters, were at the _café_ door waiting for the
laggards. Being in no proper frame of mind to enjoy a theatre supper
with another Weatherford attack as the possible penalty, Blount
reluctantly surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses, and went
to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike and democratic lobby.
With Patricia in town the "silver-tongued spellbinder of Quaretaro
Mesa," as _The Daily Capital_ called the railroad company's campaign
field-officer, would have been glad to evade some of the speaking
appointments; but since his engagements had been made some days in
advance, he was obliged to go.
On his return to the capital he was delighted to find the party of three
still occupying the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain.
Arriving on a morning train, he was permitted to make the party of three
a party of four at the breakfast-table; and with Patricia sitting
opposite he was able to forget the strenuosities for a restful
half-hour.
Later, when he went to his offices in the Temple Court Building, the
strenuosities reasserted themselves with emphasis. Though he found his
desk closed, and was reasonably certain that he had in his pocket the
only key that would unlock it, he found his papers scattered in
confusion under the roll-top. A touch upon the electric button brought
the stenographer from the anteroom.
"Who's been into my desk, Collins?" he demanded, pointing to the
confusion and scrutinizing the face of the young man sharply for signs
of guilt.
"Goodness gracious! How could anybody get into it when you've got the
only key, Mr. Blount?" stammered the clerk. Then he went on,
parrot-like: "I've been putting the letters and telegrams through the
letter-slit, as you told me to, and I've kept the private office
locked."
"Nevertheless it is very evident that somebody has been here," said
Blount. Then he had a sudden shock and wheeled shortly upon the
stenographer. "Collins, what did you do with that packet of papers I
gave you last Monday--the one I told you to put away in the safe?"
"I did just what you told me to; put it in the inner cash-box, and put
the key of the cash-box on your desk. Didn't you get it?"
Blount felt in his pockets and found the key, which he handed to
Collins. "Go and get that packet and bring it to me," he directed. The
shock was beginning to subside a little by now, and he sat down to bring
something like order out of the confusion on the desk. At first, he had
thought that the sheaf of evidence letters which gave him the
strangle-hold upon Gantry and the lawbreakers had been left in a
pigeonhole of the desk. Then he remembered having given it to Collins to
put away.
A minute or two later it occurred to him that the stenographer was
taking a long time for a short errand. Rising silently, he crossed the
room and reached for the knob of the door of communication. In the act
he saw that the door was ajar, and through the crack he saw Collins
standing before the opened safe. The clerk was running his tongue along
the flap of a large envelope, preparatory to sealing it. Blount's first
impulse was to break in with a sharp command. Then he reconsidered and
went back to his desk; was still busy at it when Collins came in and
laid the freshly sealed envelope before him.
"That isn't the packet I gave you," said Blount curtly.
The clerk looked away. "You meant those letters, didn't you?" he
queried. "The rubber band broke and I put them in an envelope."
"When?" snapped Blount.
The young man faced around again and the innocence in his look disarmed
the questioner.
"When? Just now. That's what made me so long--I couldn't find an
envelope big enough."
Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the blade under the flap of
the envelope. If he had looked up at the stenographer then he would have
seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a face ashen with
terror. But whatever the shorthand man had to fear from the opening of
the lately sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of Ackerton,
the working head of the legal department, with a damage suit to discuss
with his chief. Blount thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened,
and later in the day, when he went around to his bank to put the
evidence letters into his safe-deposit box, the incident of the morning
had lost its significance so completely, or had been so deeply buried
under other and more important matters, that he deposited the packet
without examining it.
The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in
the ranchman candidate's big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa
Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there. She was
there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to
sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he
began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to
grow too large to be easily rolled aside.
"I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you
got one that you could lend me?"
She laughed lightly.
"You told me once that I had the New England conscience--which was the
same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass
around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?"
He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics' again. Suppose I say
that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of
the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a
perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of
people to jail?"
"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down
out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals
and criminality?"
"That is just what I'm trying to find out," he persisted. "At the
present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some
of them know what I'm doing, and some of them don't. Those who know
have been told that they must be good or I'll publish the evidence, and
they've promised to be good if I won't publish it. At the time I didn't
question my right to make such a bargain, but--"
"But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell
what you know?"
"Chaos," he replied briefly.
"May I ask who is implicated?"
"A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few
outside of it."
"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too big for me, Evan. I can
only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do
evil that good may come."
"If you put it that way, I've made myself _particeps criminis_," he said
gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals
are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't help
knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could
make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob."
She was shaking her head determinedly. "I can't help you this time,
Evan; truly I can't." Then, in sudden appeal: "Why won't you go to your
father? He could tell you what to do and how to do it, and his judgment
would be too big and just to stumble over the tangling little
moralities."
Blount smiled.
"What if I should tell you that my father is more or less involved,
Patricia? I don't know precisely how much or how little, but I am
assured, by those who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in the
general wreck."
"I can't believe it!" she protested, in generous loyalty. "These people,
whoever they are, are deceiving you to shelter themselves. Have you ever
spoken to your father about this?"
"Yes, once; one evening when we were dining together I told him what I
had, and what use I should make of it if all other means should fail.
Also, I advised him to dodge."
"What did he say?"
"That is the discouraging part of it. I was hoping against hope that he
would tell me to go ahead; that he would say that he wasn't involved.
But, as a matter of fact, he didn't say much of anything. I'm horribly
afraid that his silence meant all that I've been trying to believe it
didn't mean."
She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if she were trying to
gain time.
"I can only tell you again what I told you at first," she said at
length. "You must be bigger than all these hampering circumstances;
bigger than the little moralities, if need be. You can be, Evan; you've
given splendid proof of it thus far, and I'm proud--just as proud as I
can be--"
Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely without scruple, have
brained young Gordon, to whom the next dance belonged, and who came just
at this climaxing moment to claim Patricia. But there was no help for
it, short of a cold-blooded and rather embarrassing deed of violence,
and the hard-won confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.
When he left the Gordon house, which was far out in the northeastern
residence suburb, Blount meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed.
He had been losing much sleep in the activities of the campaign, and the
loss was beginning to tell upon him. But as the trolley-car was passing
the Temple Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim light
illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office. With all his
suspicions of the morning reawakened, he dropped from the car, dashed
into the building, and took the all-night elevator for his office floor.
The sleepy elevator-man had to be shaken awake, and when he had set the
car in motion he let it run past the designated floor. Blount swore
impatiently, and instead of waiting to be carried back, darted out and
ran to the stairway. When he reached the lower corridor and was hurrying
toward his suite in the corner of the building, there was a dull crash,
as of a muffled explosion, and two or three of the glass doors in the
street-fronting suite were shattered. Blount quickened his pace to a
run, let himself in by means of his latch-key, and, cautiously opening
his desk, groped in an inner drawer for the revolver which Gantry had
persuaded him to buy as a part of the office furnishings.
With the weapon in hand, he pushed through the unlatched door into
Collins's room. There was an acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air,
and when he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases were
stifling. His first act was to feel for the switch and cut in the
electric lights. The third room, which had doors of communication with
his own office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were broken open, and
the safe-door had been blown from its hinges.
Blount saw the figure of a small man with his cap pulled down over his
ears bending over the wrecked cash-box. At the upblazing of the ceiling
lights, the man sprang to his feet and fled, going out through the door
by which Blount had just entered, and snapping the light-switch as he
passed to leave the rooms in darkness.
Blount was cursing his own lack of presence of mind when he turned to
follow the escaping burglar. In the darkness he fell over a chair, and
by the time he had disentangled himself and had reached the corridor the
safe-blower was gone. Racing to the elevator, Blount rang the bell until
the sleepy car-tender set the machinery in motion and lifted himself to
the floor of happenings. Here the incident ended abruptly, so far as any
helpful discoveries were concerned. The elevator-man had carried no one
down, and he confessed shamefacedly that he had again been asleep, and
could not say whether or not anybody had descended the stair which
circled the elevator-shaft.
Blount went back to his office, turned in a police alarm, and waited
until a policeman came from the nearest station. Then he went to report
the safe-blowing in person to the night captain on duty in the basement
of the City Hall. A drowsy clerk took notes of the story, and the night
captain contented himself with asking a single question.
"Do you know how much you lost, Mr. Blount?"
"Nothing of any great consequence, I imagine," said Blount, remembering,
with an inward thrill of thankfulness, the morning impulse which had
prompted him to transfer the one thing of inestimable consequence to the
security of the bank safe-deposit box. Then he added: "There was a
little money in the box, and some papers of no especial value to
anybody. Just the same, captain, I want that man caught."
"We'll catch him, come morning," was the assurance, and then Blount went
away and carried out his original intention of going to the
Inter-Mountain and to bed.
To bed; but, for a long hour after the post-midnight quiet had settled
down upon the great hostelry, not to sleep. If he had asked himself why
he could not close his eyes and take the needed rest, the exciting
incident in which he had lately been an actor would have offered a
sufficient answer. But in reality the sharpened spur of wakefulness
penetrated much more deeply. Beyond all doubt or shadow of doubt, it was
the sinister, many-armed machine which had reached out to seize and
destroy the evidence against its allies and fellow conspirators, the
lawbreaking railroad company and the vote-selling corporations.
And, again beyond doubt, he made sure, it was his own boast made to his
father which had been passed on to tell the sham burglar where to look
and what to look for.
XVII
ON THE KNEES OF THE HIGH GODS
In the evening of the day following the safe-blowing in Blount's office,
a one-car train, running as second section of the Overland, slipped
unostentatiously into the capital railroad yard. With as little stir as
it had made in its arrival, the single-car train took a siding below the
freight station, where it would be concealed from the prying eyes of any
chance prowler from the newspaper offices.
Coincident with the side-tracking O'Brien, the vice-president's
stenographer, dropped from the step of the car and went in search of a
telephone. When O'Brien was safely out of the way, a small man,
clean-shaven and alert in his movements, whipped out of the shadows of
the nearest string of box-cars, pushed brusquely past the guarding
porter, and presented himself at the desk in the roomy office
compartment of the private car.
The vice-president looked up and nodded. "How are you, Gibbert?" he
said, and then: "You may condense your report. I have seen the
newspapers. In passing I may say that it isn't much to your credit that
you had to fall back upon the methods of the yeggmen."
"There wasn't any other way," protested the small man. "The papers were
locked up in the cash-box of the safe, and young Blount carried the only
key."
"It was crude; not at all worthy of a man of your ability, Gibbert. And
if the newspapers tell it straight, you came near being caught. How did
that happen?"
"Blount went to a ball, and I shadowed him. His girl was there, and it
looked like a safe bet that he'd stay to see the lights put out. But he
didn't."
"Well, never mind; you got the papers, I suppose?"
The company detective drew a thick envelope from his pocket and laid it
upon the desk. The vice-president tore it open and read rapidly through
the file of letters it had enclosed, tearing them one by one from the
hold of the brass fastener at the upper left-hand corner as he glanced
them over. "The chuckle-headed fools!" he gritted, apostrophizing the
writers of the letters. And then: "Gibbert, I'd like to go into this a
little deeper, if we had time; I'd like to know why in hell every man in
this State with whom we've had a private business arrangement found it
necessary to spread the details out on paper and send them to young
Blount! Here; burn these things as I hand them to you."
The small man struck a match and, using the wide-mouthed metal cuspidor
for an ash-pan, lighted the letters one at a time as they were given to
him. When the cinder skeleton of the final sheet had been crushed into
ashes, he rose from his knees and reached for his hat.
"Any other orders?" he asked.
"No; nothing more. You are reasonably sure that you haven't been
recognized here by any of our local people?"
"I've kept the 'make-up' on most of the time. I've been in Mr. Gantry's
office a couple of times, and in Mr. Kittredge's once, and neither of
them caught on to me."
"That's good. You'd better go now. O'Brien has gone after Gantry and
Kittredge, and I don't care to have them find you here. Better take the
first train back to Chicago. These mutton-headed police here might
possibly get on your track, and we don't want to have to explain
anything to them."
Five minutes after the small man had dropped from the step of the "008,"
to disappear in the box-car shadows, Gantry and Kittredge came down the
yard and entered the private car. Again the vice-president said, "How
are you?" and nodded toward the nearest chairs. "Sit down; I'll be
through in a minute," and he went on reading the file of papers taken up
at the departure of the detective. At the end of the minute he shot a
question at the two who were waiting.
"You got my message?"
Gantry answered for himself and the superintendent. "Yes. Your orders
have been carried out. The yards are posted, and nobody, outside of a
few of our own men, knows that your car is here."
The vice-president took one of the long black cigars from the open box
on the flat-topped desk, and passed the box to his two lieutenants.
"Light up," he said tersely. "I'm due in Twin Canyons City to-morrow
morning, and we've got to thresh this thing out in a hurry. Any change
in the situation since your last report?"
Gantry shook his head. "Nothing very important. Blount's up-town office
was broken into last night and his safe ripped open with dynamite, as I
suppose you have read in the papers. Who did it, or why it was done,
nobody seems to know."
"Well, what came of it?"
"Nothing, so far as I can find out," returned the traffic manager.
"Blount had been to the Gordon dance, and he saw the light in his office
as he was coming down-town. When he went up to find out what was going
on, he caught the safe-blower fairly in the act, but the fellow got
away."
"Did Blount lose anything?"
"That's the queer part of it. Blount won't say much about it; and this
morning he went around to police headquarters and told the chief to drop
the matter, giving as his reason that he was too busy to prosecute the
fellow even if he was caught."
To a disinterested observer it might have seemed a little singular that
the vice-president made no further comment upon the burglary. As a
matter of fact, his next question completely ignored it.
"What has Blount been doing this week?" he asked.
"He has spoken twice; once at Arequipa and once at Hellersville. I
understand he has engagements enough to keep him out of town right up to
election day."
"That is good," was the nodded approval. "He would only be in the way
here at the capital." And then pointedly to Gantry: "Any more of that
nonsense about putting a barrel of powder under us and blowing us all up
if we don't build the freight tariffs over to suit his notion?"
"A good bit more of it," Gantry admitted reluctantly. "The other day he
went so far as to set a time limit; gave me three days of grace in which
to file the public notice of the change in rates."
"What did you do?"
"I filed the notice--taking care that the only copy should be the one I
sent to Blount's office."
The vice-president looked coldly at his division traffic manager.
"There are times, Gantry, when you seem to be losing your grip. Dave
Blount's son isn't a school-boy, to be fooled by such a transparent
trick as that! Don't you suppose he knows, as well as you do, that the
public notice has to be filed in every station on the road?"
"I had to take a chance--I've had to take a good many chances,"
protested the traffic manager in his own defence; and Kittredge, a
bearded giant who was fully the vice-president's match in heroic
physique, removed his cigar to say: "That young fellow has been a
frost. If he isn't a wild-eyed fanatic, as Gantry insists he is, he is
deeper than the deep blue sea! I'd just about as soon have a box of
dynamite kicking around underfoot as to have him messing in this
campaign fight. I've been keeping cases on him, as you ordered, and he
has worn out three of my best office men on the job."
"You are prejudiced, Kittredge," was the vice-president's comment. "It
was the best move in the entire campaign--putting him in the field.
Apart from the public sentiment he has been turning our way, we mustn't
lose sight of the fact that we got hold of him at a time when the
Honorable Senator was getting ready to turn us down."
"Speaking of the sentiment," Gantry put in, "I don't know whether it's
all sentiment or not. There's a sort of mystery mixed up in this
speech-making business of Blount's. At first I thought maybe his sudden
popularity was due to some word sent out from your Chicago office; but
when you told me it wasn't, I began to do a little speculating on my own
account. I can't make up my mind yet whether it is pure popularity, or
whether it's the assisted kind."
"Assisted?" said the vice-president, with a lifting of the heavy
eyebrows.
"Yes. It has been too unanimous. I have a trustworthy man in Blount's
up-town office, and he says the invitations have fluttered in like
autumn leaves; more than Blount could accept if he travelled
continuously. Kittredge's men report that the speech-making has been a
triumphant progress all over the State; bands, receptions, committees,
and banquets wherever Blount goes."
Mr. McVickar grunted. "The speeches have been all that anybody could
ask. I've been reading them."
Kittredge shook his head.
"Gantry says they are, but I say no," he contended. "There is such a
thing as putting too much sugar in the coffee. Blount's overdoing it;
he's putting the whitewash on so thick that any little handful of mud
that happens to be thrown will stick and look bad."
"Of course, we have to take chances on that," was the vice-president's
qualifying clause. "Nevertheless, young Blount's talk has undoubtedly
had its effect upon public sentiment. We must be careful not to let the
opposition newspapers get hold of anything that would tend to nullify
it."
"They are moving heaven and earth to do it," said the superintendent.
"The Honorable David is lying low, as he usually does, but I more than
half believe he's getting ready to give us the double-cross. That is the
explanation of this safe-blowing scrape, as I put it up."
Again the vice-president failed to comment further on the burglary.
"What I am most afraid of, now, is that our young man may be, as you
say, Kittredge, a trifle over-zealous," he said musingly. "We have
discovered that he is something of a fanatic."
"He's more than that," Kittredge cut in quickly. "One of the men I've
had following him--Farnsworth--is as good as any Pinkerton that ever
walked. He says Blount isn't half so innocent as he looks and acts. The
speech-making has taken him into every corner of the State, and
Farnsworth says he has been doing a lot of quiet prying around and
investigating on the side."
"I've been thinking," Gantry added, "what a beautiful mix-up we should
have if the senator and his son should both conclude to pull out and get
together at the last moment."
The master plotter shook his head. "You have no sense of perspective,
Gantry. Young Blount is with us solely because he is too straightforward
to countenance his father's political methods. On the other hand, if the
Honorable Dave should turn upon us now, he would be obliged to do it at
the expense of his son's reputation. Anything he could say against us
would simply have the effect of holding his son up to public
exprobration as a common campaign liar. I know David Blount pretty well;
he won't do anything like that."
Gantry bit his lip and a slow smile of respectful admiration crept up to
the Irish eyes.
"When it comes to the real fine-haired work, you have us all feeling for
hand-holds, Mr. McVickar," he said. "Now I know why you made a place for
Evan Blount, and why you have been giving him a free hand on the
whitewashing. It's the biggest thing that has ever been pulled off in
Western politics!"
"It hasn't been pulled off yet," was the quick reply. "We are holding
old David in a noose that may turn into a rope of sand at any minute;
don't forget that. During the few days intervening before the election
we must preserve the present status at any cost. Young Blount is the
only man who may possibly disturb it. Keep him out of the way. If he
doesn't have speaking invitations enough to busy him, see to it that he
gets them. As long as you can keep him talking he won't have any time
for side issues. Now about this Gryson business: you want to handle that
yourselves, and I don't want any more telegrams like the one you sent me
last night, Gantry. What's the condition?"