profanity. When he became coherent he told his story, or rather Blount
got it out of him piecemeal, of how he had been employed by the
"organization" to falsify the registration lists in certain districts;
of how, when the work was done, he had been denied the price and driven
out with cursings. In the accusation, which was shot through with
tremulous imprecations, the "organization" and the railroad company
were implicated as if they were one. In one breath the fugitive charged
the "double-crossing" to Kittredge, and in the next he accused the "big
boss" himself, of having passed the sentence of deportation.
"You say you were driven out? How could they drive you if you didn't
want to go?" queried the cross-examiner.
"That's on me: it was a job I pulled off two years ago in another
place--up north of this--and the night-watchman got in the way when I
was leavin'. They jerked that on me and showed me th' rope. They had me
by th' neck, with th' word passed to Chief Robertson. I'm back here now
wit' my life in my hand, but I'd chance it twice over to get square wit'
them welshers that have bawled me out!"
"Why have you come to me?" asked Blount briefly.
"Gawd knows; I took a chance again. I've heard your speeches, and says
I, 'There's your wan chance, cully,' and I'm here to grab f'r it. If
you've been meanin' the half of what you've been sayin', Mr. Blount--"
There was more of it, half pleadings and half mere rageful babblings of
a vengeful soul hampered by the tongue of inadequacy.
Blount left his chair and began to pace the floor, with Gryson watching
him furtively. At any time earlier in the struggle the thought of using
this wretched time-server as a means to any end, however desirable and
just, would have been nauseating. True, if there could be any such thing
as honor among thieves, the man had earned the price of his crooked
work among the registration clerks; but for another man to profit by the
broken bargain, and by the confessed criminal's rage and lust for
vengeance, was a thing to make even a hard-pressed loser in an unequal
battle hesitate.
The hesitation was only momentary. With a gesture which was more
expressive than many words, Blount turned short upon the furtive watcher
in the chair at the desk end.
"What do you want me to do?" he demanded.
"You're on before I could stall it f'r you. You've been swearin' you'd
back th' square deal to th' limit; it ain't square; it's crooked as
hell. Grab f'r this knife I'm handin' you and cut the heart out o' these
welshin' bosses that are givin' you th' double-cross the same as they're
givin' it to me. You're the on'y man that can do it; the on'y man on
Gawd's green earth they're afraid of. I know it damn' well. That's why
they handed my number to th' chief and passed th' word to have me
pinched. They was afraid I'd come here and squeal to you!"
Blount stopped him with an impatient gesture. "Let that part of it rest
and get down to business. What you have been telling me may be true, but
I can't do anything on your bare word--the word of a man who is dodging
the police. You've got to bring me proofs in black and white; lists of
the faked names, and a straight-out give-away of how they are to be
used; names and dates, and a written story of your bargainings with the
men higher up. This is Thursday; to be of any use, these documents
would have to be in my hands by Saturday noon, at the latest. You know
best whether the thing can be done in time--or done at all. What do you
say?"
For a little time Gryson said nothing. When he spoke it was evident that
the lust for vengeance and a guilty conscience were fighting an
even-handed battle.
"I could get the affidavits--maybe," he said. "There's a dozen 'r more
of the cullies down-along got their notice to fade away when I got mine,
and they'd jump at th' chance to get back at the bosses. But f'r Gawd's
sake, look at what it means to me! Anny minute I'm on the job I'd be
lookin' to see some bull with a star on 'im holdin' a gun on me; and
after that, it's this f'r mine"--with a jerk of the head and a
pantomimic gesture simulating the hangman's knot under his ear.
"That is your risk," said Blount coldly, making this small concession to
the expiring sense of uprightness. "You know how badly you want to 'get
square,' as you put it, and I am interested only in the results. If you
get caught, I sha'n't turn my hand over to help you--you can take that
straight. But if you show up here with the proofs, proofs that I can
use, any time before Saturday night, I'll undertake to see that you get
safely out of the State."
It was in the little pause which followed that some one in the corridor
rapped smartly on the locked door. At the sound, Gryson collapsed and
his face became an ashen mask of fear. Blount, the law-abiding, might
have hesitated, but this newer Blount had slain his scruples. Snatching
Gryson out of his chair, he thrust him silently through the half-open
door of the work-room, and a moment later he was answering the rap at
the corridor entrance, opening the door and calmly facing the two
policemen on the threshold.
"Well?" he said brusquely.
One of the men touched his helmet.
"We're looking for a felly that ducked in below a couple of hours ago,
Mr. Blount. He's in the building, somewheres, and your office being
lighted, we thought maybe you'd--"
Blount threw the door wide.
"You can see for yourselves," he said. "Would you like to come in and
look around?"
"Sure not; your word's as good as the search, Mr. Blount. 'Twas only on
the chance that he might have faked an excuse and ducked in on you to be
out of reach."
Blount left the door open and went to get his coat and hat.
"Who is the man?" he asked, while the officers lingered.
"A felly named Gryson. He's been working in the railroad shops what
times he wasn't pullin' off something crooked in the p'litical line."
"What is he wanted for?" Blount was closing his desk and preparing to
leave the office.
"Croaking a bank watchman up in Montana afther he'd souped the vault
door for a kick-shot."
"In that case, perhaps I'm lucky that he didn't drop in and croak me,"
laughed Blount, turning off the lights and joining the two men in the
corridor. And then: "There is a back stair to the engine-room in the
basement in the other wing of the building: have you been watching
that?"
The bigger of the two policemen prodded the other in the ribs with his
night-stick. "That's on us, Jakey. He'll have been gone hours ago. Let's
be drilling. 'Tis a fine mind ye have, Mr. Blount, to be thinking of
thim back stairs right off the bat." And the pair went down in the
elevator with Blount, chuckling to themselves at their own discomfiture.
Having set his hand to the plough, Blount did nothing carelessly.
Sauntering slowly, and even pausing to light a cigar, he trailed the two
policemen until they were safely in another street. Then he turned back
to the great office building and once more had himself lifted to the
upper floor. In the office corridor he waited until the car had dropped
out of sight; waited still longer to give the drowsy night-boy time to
settle himself on his stool and go to sleep. Then he went swiftly to the
door of the private room and unlocked it.
Gryson was ready, and even in the dim light of the corridor Blount could
see that he was white-faced and trembling. In the silent faring to the
stair which wound down in a spiral around the freight elevator Blount
gripped the arm of trembling.
"You've got to get your nerve," he gritted savagely, "or you'll be
nipped before you've gone a block!" And then: "Here's the stair: follow
it down until you get to the basement. There's a coal entrance from the
alley, and the engineer will be with his boilers in the other wing--and
probably asleep. You've got it straight, have you? You're to bring the
papers to my office on or before Saturday night. I'll be looking out for
you, and if you bring me the evidence, you'll be taken care of. That's
all. Down with you, now, and go quietly. If you're caught, I drop you
like a hot nail; remember that."
Still puffing at the cigar which glowed redly in the darkness of the
wing corridor, Blount waited until his man had been given time to reach
the basement. Then he walked slowly back to the main corridor and
descended by the public stair without awakening the elevator boy, who
was sleeping soundly in his car on the ground level.
On the short walk to the hotel the full significance of the thing he had
done had its innings. Cynical criticism to the contrary notwithstanding,
there is now and then an honest lawyer who regards his oath of admission
to the bar--the oath which binds him to uphold the cause of justice and
fair dealing--as something more than a mere form of words. Beyond all
question, an honest man who has sworn to uphold the law may neither
connive at crime nor shield a criminal. Blount tried the shift of every
man who has ever stepped aside out of the plain path of rectitude; he
told himself morosely that he had nothing to do with Gryson's past; that
he had taken no retainer from the Montana authorities; that the criminal
was merely a cog in a wheel which was grinding toward a righteous end,
and as such should be permitted to serve his turn.
The well-worn argument is always specious to the beginner, and Blount
thought he had sufficiently justified himself by the time he was pushing
through the revolving doors into the Inter-Mountain lobby. But when he
saw his father quietly smoking his bed-time cigar in one of the big
leather-covered lounging-chairs, he realized that the first step had
been taken in an exceedingly thorny path; that whatever else might be
the outcome of the bargain with Thomas Gryson, a son was coldly plotting
to bring disgrace and humiliation upon a father.
For this reason, and because, when all is said, blood is much thicker
than water, Blount made as if he did not see the beckoning hand-wave
from the depths of the big chair in the smokers' alcove; ignored it, and
with set lips and burning eyes made for the nearest elevator to take
refuge in his room.
XXIII
A CRY IN THE NIGHT.
With the critical election, a struggle which was to decide for another
two-year period whether or not the people of the Sage-Brush State were
to be the masters or the servants of chartered monopoly, only four days
distant, the capital city took on the aspect of a stirring camp--two
rival camps, in fact, since the State headquarters of the two chief
parties were in the Inter-Mountain Hotel--and each incoming train
brought fresh relays of henchmen and district spellbinders to swell the
sidewalk throngs and to crowd the lobbies.
On the Friday morning Blount awoke with the feeling that he had
definitely cut himself off from all the commonplace activities of the
campaign. There were two days of suspense to be outworn, and if he could
have compassed it he would have been glad to efface himself completely.
Since that was impossible, and since it seemed equally impossible that
he should go on keeping up the farce of the _modus vivendi_ after he had
taken the step which would presently blazon his name to the world as
that of his father's accuser, he bought the morning papers hurriedly at
the hotel news-stand and went down the avenue to get his breakfast at
the railroad restaurant, where he would be measurably sure of isolation.
After giving his order he ran hastily through the local news in the
papers. There was no mention of the arrest of one Thomas Gryson in any
of the police notes, and he breathed freer. But in _The Plainsman_ there
was an editorial which was vaguely disturbing. Blenkinsop, who wrote his
own leaders, hinted pointedly at coming disclosures which would change
the political map of the State for all time. Blount, trying to determine
how much or how little the editorial was based upon his talk with the
editor on the Wednesday night, found his omelet tasteless. Ready enough,
as he was persuaded, to fire the disrupting mine with his own hand, he
was not ready to surrender the match to any one else. Manifestly he must
see Blenkinsop and caution him.
Breakfast over, he walked, by the longest way around, to his office in
the Temple Court, hoping to find work which would help him through the
forenoon. It was an idle hope. From a State-wide shower of political
correspondence the daily mail had dropped suddenly to an inconsequential
drizzle, and there were no callers. Here, again, he saw, or thought he
saw, the all-powerful hand of the machine. He had been used for a
purpose, the purpose of hoodwinking and deceiving the voters. That
purpose having been served, he was to be dropped--was already dropped,
as it seemed. By noon the sheer time-killing effort became blankly
unbearable, and in desperation he broke with another of the ideals--the
one labelled sincerity--and going boldly to the Inter-Mountain he waited
in the lobby for the family party of three to come down to the
one-o'clock luncheon in the public _café_.
Joining the party when it came down, he found it difficult only in the
inner sanctuaries to maintain the _status quo ante_ Gryson. There was no
shadow of suspicion or coolness in his father's kindly smile and genial
greeting, and Mrs. Honoria rallied him playfully upon the narrow margin
by which he had held his own and Patricia's places at the Gordon
dinner-table the night before. Only in Patricia's eyes he read a curious
questioning, a hint that they were finding something in his eyes which
was new and not wholly understandable. He knew well enough what it was
that she saw; and though she was sitting opposite him at the table for
four, he looked at her as seldom as possible, devoting himself, for once
in a way, resolutely to his father's wife.
After luncheon he again fell back upon the dogged boldness. Unable to
contemplate a second plunge into the solitude of the Temple Court
offices, he asked and was accorded permission to take Patricia for a
country drive in the little car. When the city was left behind, and the
small machine was purring steadily northwestward over a road which led
to nowhere in particular, Blount put his finger accurately upon the
thing which had been building little barriers of silence between them
all the way out from town.
"You knew me well enough yesterday to be reasonably certain of what I
would do in given circumstances, didn't you, Patricia?" he began
abruptly. "To-day you are not so sure about it. Why?"
She laughed lightly, but there was a serious undernote in her voice when
she said: "There are moments when you make me wonder if you haven't been
dabbling in necromancy, Evan. I was at that very instant telling myself
that it wasn't so."
"But you know it is so," he persisted. "Why am I different?"
"I don't know."
"Yet you recognize the fact?"
"Is it a fact?" she queried.
"Yes."
"In what way are you different?"
"I am not altogether certain that I know, myself. But I do know this:
between yesterday and to-day there is a gulf so wide that it seems
measureless. The scientists claim there are no cataclysms; no sudden and
sweeping changes taking place either in the physical or the metaphysical
field. If that be true, the changes must go on subconsciously for a long
time before they are recognized. There is no other way of accounting for
the gulfs."
"You are talking miles over my head," she protested; and, though the
assertion was not strictly true, it served its purpose.
"I can make it a little plainer," he went on, slowing the motor until
the small car was merely ambling. "You remember that night at Wartrace
Hall, and what you told me? I went out from that talk resolved to do
what you had shown me I ought to do, stubbornly refusing to consider the
possibility of failure. None the less, I have failed."
"Oh, no!" she exclaimed; "not that!"
"Yes, just that. But the failure is not the worst thing that has
befallen me. I have lost or gained something that pushes the yesterdays
into a past which can never be recovered. Let me tell you, girl: I have
been fighting in the open, against treachery and deceit fighting always
under cover. I have been fighting bare-handed where others were armed.
Day by day I have been finding out the baseness and the trickery; how my
own side has used me as a screen behind which the old dishonorable
expedients could be safely planned and carried out. I never knew until
within the past two days what all this chicanery and double-dealing
might be doing to me, but now I do know."
"Will it bear telling?" she asked quietly.
"I think not--to you," he returned, matching her low tone. "Let it be
enough to say that I am no longer the man I was when I came out here.
Patricia, I'm not fighting bare-handed any more; I'm smashing in with
any weapon I can get hold of. There will be no such reform as the one
you urged me to champion--as the era of fair-dealing and sincerity which
I have been trying honestly and earnestly to inaugurate. Nevertheless,
if my hand doesn't tremble too much at the critical moment, there will
be, on the morning of next Tuesday, such a revolution as this
commonwealth has never seen. Though they have robbed me and made a
puppet of me, I can still bring it about."
He had gone farther than he meant to, and he thought she would protest.
He knew that her convictions of what should be and what should not be
were clear-cut and definite. But a man, even though he be a lover, may
know a woman's mind without knowing very much about the woman herself.
There was no protest forthcoming. Quite the contrary, she answered him
with a little shudder that was almost a caress, saying: "I think you
have grown--bigger and stronger than I ever thought you could grow,
Evan; and I'm sure your hand won't tremble. Is that what you want me to
say?"
Since there is no more contradictory being in a sentient world than a
man in love, Blount was not quite sure that it was what he wanted her to
say. By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures
as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all
that is high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard by which he
can measure his own baser desires and ambitions and be shrived of them.
At other times the straitly human has its innings, and the longing is
for a comrade, a companion, a second self buried, lost, submerged in the
loyalty which never questions. Having come slowly to maturity as a
lover, Blount had been leaning toward the divinity definition of
Patricia Anners. But now the iconoclastic change was breaking many
images.
"You are willing to believe that I haven't gone altogether backward?" he
queried, after the little car had measured an additional stretch of the
mesa road.
"You are bigger and stronger," she repeated.
"How do you know I am?"
"I can tell; any woman could tell."
"Is the acquirement of size and strength so great a thing that--"
"I think it is--in a woman's eyes," she admitted fearlessly. "We are all
more or less primitive and--and, well, 'Stone-Agey,' let us say, in the
last analysis; at least, women are." And then: "You don't know women
very well, Evan."
"Don't I?"
"No, you don't. You judge us by standards which have no existence
outside of your own purely masculine deductions. For example: I suppose
you wouldn't admit for a moment that a good woman might properly do
things which would be entirely discreditable in a man?"
He shook his head slowly and said: "Yesterday, or the day before, I
might have said 'no,' with all the cocksureness of a boy of twenty.
To-day I can only say: 'Who am I, that I should judge any man--or any
woman?'" Then suddenly: "You are making excuses for my father's wife.
You needn't, you know. She has fought me from the beginning, and I know
it. Sometimes I think that she is solely responsible for my failure to
accomplish the thing I had set my heart upon. Let it go; I don't bear
malice. Just now I'm more interested in what you were saying about the
sex differences and the woman's point of view. Have you been calling me
a weak man, Patricia?"
"No; only--a little--conventional," she returned half reluctantly.
"But you are the quintessence of conventionality yourself!" he burst
out.
"Am I? Perhaps that was a passing phase, too. Quite probably the little
things will remain--the dressing for dinner and the paying of party
calls and all that. But one really big man has made many things seem
petty and trifling--things that I used to think were of the greatest
possible importance."
"My father, you mean?"
"Yes. If I should ever marry, Evan, I should be deliriously happy if I
could find a man who promised to grow to the stature of your father."
There was manifestly no rejoinder to be made to this by David Blount's
son, though it pointed to another and still more painful involvement.
What would Patricia say when the _débâcle_ came? Would she lose faith in
his father, and in all masculinity, in the crash? Or would she borrow
yet again from the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging and
still be loyal? In either case Blount saw his own finish, and he was
rather relieved when she left the sex argument indeterminate and began
to talk of other things: of her father's decision to go home at the end
of the following week, of the good times she had been having, and of the
regret with which she would turn her back upon the wide horizons and the
freedom of it all.
"I brought my shell with me when I came," she confessed, laughing, "but
I think it is broken into little pieces by now. You will know how small
the pieces are when I tell you that 'Tennessee Jim,' your father's horse
wrangler, calls me 'Miz' Pat,' and it always makes me want to shake
hands with him."
Blount made the afternoon last as he could, sending the little car over
many miles of the mesa roads and encouraging the small confidences which
were enabling him to postpone his own evil hour. When the sun was
dipping toward the Carnadine Hills they returned over a trail which came
into the main Quaretaro road at a point where the northern highway
begins its descent to the lower mesa level. Half-way down the descending
gulch they came to the mouth of a small lateral canyon breaking into the
larger gorge from the eastward; a canyon dry for the greater part of the
year, but in the rainy season affording an outlet for the flood-waters
of the Little Shonoho.
"That is a road I have always wanted to explore," said Patricia,
pointing to the fine driveway leading up the small canyon. "That is one
of my weaknesses when I am driving; I am never able to pass a branch
road without wanting to turn aside and explore it."
"Then we'll explore this one, right now," said Blount, cutting the car
to the left. He was more than willing to delay, even by littles, the
moment when he should be obliged to resume the sorry business of waiting
and dissembling.
Miss Anners glanced at the tiny watch pinned upon her shoulder.
"Shall we have time? It's getting late."
"Plenty of time for all we shall be able to do or see up here," Blount
returned. "The road ends at the canyon head, a mile above. There is a
very small and very exclusive summer-resort hotel, called the Shonoho
Inn, on the upper level. It has a six-weeks' season--like the Florida
resorts--they tell me, and it is closed now."
It was within the next five hundred yards that the prediction that there
would be nothing to see anticipated its fulfilment. At a sudden turn in
the narrow defile they came to a brush-built barricade posted with a
sign:
ROAD WASHED OUT ABOVE
NO PASSING FOR VEHICLES!
"That settles it," said Blount shortly, and he turned the car and let it
roll back down the grade to the main gulch.
When they were once more speeding toward town Blount stole a glance at
his companion, wondering if it were the small disappointment which made
her silent.
"Are you tired?" he asked quickly.
"Oh, no," she rejoined, brightening again. "I have enjoyed every minute
of it. I was just thinking of what I said a little while ago; of how it
is going to break my heart to leave it all."
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she needn't leave it.
But he remembered and caught himself sharply. When the dreadful Tuesday
should have come and gone, she might be only too willing to go away;
and, in any event, he would have to go. There would be no place in his
own and his father's State for him after Gryson returned, and the match
had been touched to the hidden mine of high explosives. This was what
was in his mind when he said rather tamely: "I suppose you will have to
go. There isn't any chance for social-settlement work out here yet."
"No," she responded half-absently; and thereupon he gave the little car
still more spark and throttle and sent it flying over the final stretch
of the fine road to the city.