eyes it was with the fear that he should see her still bending over the
little embroidery frame at the window. Finding himself alone, he sat up
in bed and gave the broken head an opportunity to blot him out if it
could. For a little space the walls of the room became as the interior
of a hollow peg-top, spinning furiously with a noise like the rushing of
many waters. After the surroundings had resumed their normal figurings
he rose to his knees. There was another grapple with the whirling
peg-top, and again he mastered the dizzying confusion. Made bold by
success, he got his feet on the floor and stood up, clinging to the
brass foot-rail of the bed until the unstable encompassments had once
more come to rest.
By this time he was able to conquer all save the throbbing headache.
Shuffling first to one door and then to the other, he shot the bolts
against intrusion. Then he staggered across to the dressing-case and
took a look at himself in the glass. The bandaged head, with its
haggard, pain-distorted face grimacing back at him, extorted a grunt of
sardonic disapproval, but the mirror answered the query which had sent
him stumbling across to it. The bandage was comparatively small and
tightly drawn; a soft hat could be worn over it--the hat would cover and
decently hide it.
Next he found his clothes, those he had been wearing at the time of the
accident. Somebody had been thoughtful enough to have them cleaned and
pressed; from which he argued that the plunging fall on the wet asphalt
had been demoralizing in more ways than one. Continuing the experimental
venture, he walked back and forth and up and down until he could do it
without clutching at the bed-rails to save himself from falling. Then he
reshot the door-bolts and went back to bed to await developments.
The first of these came when Patricia brought his luncheon. He had been
wondering if she would be the one to come; wondering and hoping. With
the unfilial purpose driving him on, there were added twinges at the
thought of his father's wife going on piling the mountain of obligation
higher and still higher by waiting upon him, and thus reminding him at
every turn of the adder fable. With Patricia it was different.
"Good morning," he grimaced, when Patricia came in with the daintily
appointed server. "Getting a bit more of the first-aid practice, are
you?"
"I am obeying orders," she flashed back, when she had shaken up the
pillows and placed the appetizing meal within his reach. "Mrs. Blount
said I'd probably have a less disturbing influence upon you than she
would. Shall I feed you?"
"Good heavens, no! I'm not that near dead, I hope! If you don't believe
it, you may sit down and watch me eat--if you're not missing your own
luncheon."
"Nurses have no regular meal-times," she retorted. And then: "You are
feeling a great deal better, aren't you?"
"Much better--since you came. Did they tell you it was a dog?"
She nodded, and he went on.
"It was my unlucky night, I guess. Did the fire burn up my office? I
forgot to ask Mrs. Blount about that."
"No; it was a building across the street from the Temple Court."
"'Small favors thankfully received,'" he quoted, resolutely pushing a
fresh recurrence of the tomtom beatings into the background; "small
favors and larger ones in proportion--this broth, for example. It's
simply delicious. I hadn't realized how hungry I was."
"The broth ought to be good; I made it myself, you know."
"You did? Where, for pity's sake?"
"In the hotel kitchen. The _chef_ was furious at first. He twirled his
Napoleon-III mustaches and sputtered and swelled up like an angry old
turkey. But when I talked nice to him in his own beloved Bordelaise he
let me do anything I pleased."
Blount looked up quickly, and the movement brought the head-throbbings
back with disconcerting celerity.
"You are cruelly kind to me, Patricia; everybody is kind to me. And I'm
not needing kindness just now," he ended.
"Aren't you? I don't agree with you, and I'm sure your father and Mrs.
Blount wouldn't." Then she went on to tell him how they had all been up,
watching the progress of the fire from their windows, when the word came
that he had been hurt in the street. Also, she told how his father had
impatiently smashed the telephone because, the wires having been cut and
tangled in the fire, he could get no response, and how, thereupon, he
had turned the entire night force of the hotel out to go in search of a
doctor. "But with all that, he couldn't stand it to look on while the
doctor was taking the stitches," she added. "He turned his back and
tramped over here to the window; and I could hear him gritting his teeth
and--and swearing."
If Evan Blount ate faster than a sick man should, it was because there
are limits to the finest fortitude. Patricia ran on cheerfully,
minimizing her own part in the first-aid incidents, and magnifying the
anxious and affectionate concern of the senator and his wife. He
listened because he could not help it; but when he had finished, and she
was inquiring if there was anything else she could do for him, he
dissembled, saying that he would try to sleep, and asking her to shut
out more of the daylight and to deny him to everybody until evening.
She promised; but naturally enough, with the dreadful responsibility
drawing nearer with every hour-striking of the tiny leather-cased
travelling-clock on the dresser, sleep was out of the question for him.
Hot-eyed and restless, he wore out the long afternoon in feverish
impatience, slipping now and then into the shadow land of delirium when
the pain was severest, but clinging always to the obsessing idea. At
whatever cost, the crisis must find him resolute to do his part. Gryson
must be met, the evidence of fraud must be secured, and the fraud itself
must be defeated.
The bright autumn day was fading to its twilight, and the shadows were
gathering around his bed, when Patricia tiptoed in to ask, first, if he
were awake, and, next, what he would like to have for his supper.
Exhausted by the waiting battle, he answered briefly: he was not hungry;
if he could be left alone again, with the assurance that no one would
come to disturb him, it was all he would ask. He tried to say it
crustily, with the irritable impatience of the convalescent--dissembling
again. But the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in view had
lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic intuition.
"You are not so well this evening," she said softly, laying a cool palm
on his forehead. "I think I'd better telephone Doctor Dillon."
Now the thing for Patricia's lover to do was obvious. With pity thus
trembling on the very crumbling brink of love, the opportunity which
months of patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand. It was a
fair measure of the mastery an obsession may obtain--the lover's ability
to thrust the gentler emotion into the background, to feign restless
irritation under the passion-stirring touch, and to say: "No; I don't
want Dillon or anybody; I want to be left alone. Please latch the door
when you go out, and tell father and his--and Mrs. Blount that I don't
want to be disturbed."
She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after she was gone Blount
sat up in bed and cursed himself fervently and painstakingly for the
little brutality. But the remorseful cursings took nothing from the grim
determination which had prompted the brutality. The dusk was thickening,
and the street electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway of
radiance. Blount got up, and with a disheartening renewal of the
splitting headache, began to dress, but there were many pauses in which
he had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the throbbing pain to
subside.
The next step was to reach his own room, two floors above, and he let
himself cautiously into the corridor and locked the door from the
outside. Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he dragged himself
up two flights of stairs and so came to his goal.
Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat drawn well over his eyes,
he compassed the escape from the upper floor by means of the remote
stair he had used in ascending, and so reached the ground-floor.
Fortunately, the lobby was crowded; and turning up the collar of the
rain-coat to hide the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the
revolving doors. More than once in the dodging progress he rubbed
shoulders with men whom he knew, and who knew him; but the shielding
hat-brim and the muffling rain-coat saved him.
Reaching the street, he did not attempt to walk to the Temple Court.
Instead, he crept around to a garage near the hotel and hired a
two-seated road-car. Quite naturally, the garage-keeper wanted to send
his own driver, and Blount counted it as an unavoidable misfortune that
he was obliged to give his name, and to hear the motor-liveryman say:
"Oh, sure! I didn't recognize you, Mr. Blount. I reckon Senator Dave's
son can have anything o' mine that he wants."
Blount drove the road-car all the way around the Capitol grounds to come
into his office street inconspicuously. Across from the Temple Court the
fire ruins were still smouldering, and there was an acrid odor of stale
smoke in the air. For a full third of the block the street was littered
with débris. Blount stopped his machine at the nearest corner and got
out to reconnoitre the office-building entrance. In the vestibule he
glanced up at the face of the illuminated wall-clock, making a hasty
calculation based upon the leaving time of the east-bound Overland.
There were fifty minutes to spare, and when he reached his office, and
had turned on the desk-light and dropped heavily into his chair, he
called up the railroad station to inquire about the train. The Overland
was reported ten minutes late. If Gryson should show up in time, this
earliest outgoing train must be made to serve as the means for his
flight.
Blount had scarcely formulated the condition when the office-door winged
noiselessly, and the man himself, hollow-eyed and haggard, stumbled in.
As once before, Blount got up and went to shut the door and lock it.
When he came back, Gryson had taken his seat in a chair at the desk-end,
where the light from the shaded working-lamp fell upon his sinister
face.
"Well, I've been all th' way t' hell and back ag'in," he announced in a
grating whisper. "They've put th' reward out, and three times since last
night some of me own pals 've tried to snitch on me." Then he drew a
carefully wrapped package from its hiding-place under his coat and laid
it on the desk. "It's all there," he went on in the same rasping
undertone. "Some of 'em give up to get square wit' th' bosses, and some
of 'em had to have a gun shoved in their faces. No matter; they've come
across--the last damn' wan of 'em; and th' affidavits are there,
too--when I c'd get next to a dub of a not'ry that'd make 'em."
Blount did not untie the package, nor did he cross-examine the traitor.
His head was throbbing again almost unbearably, and he was beginning to
fear that he might not last to carry out the plan of safe-conduct for
the informer. Slipping the precious package into an inner pocket of the
enveloping coat, he took a compact roll of bank-bills from a drawer in
the desk and gave it to Gryson, saying tersely: "That isn't a bribe, you
understand; it's merely to help you make your getaway. Can you manage to
ride on Transcontinental trains without being recognized offhand?"
Gryson pulled a false beard from his pocket and showed it. "Wit' that,
and me old hat, I've been keepin' most o' th' boys from tippin' me off,"
he said.
"All right; here's the lay-out. You have earned immunity, so far as this
latest raid on you is concerned, by turning State's evidence. But you've
got to move on, and keep moving. Do you get that?"
The fugitive nodded, and Blount got up to stagger across to the office
wardrobe, from which he took the extra rain-coat kept there for
emergencies.
"Here, get into this and go down-stairs. At the corner above, you'll
find a two-seated motor-car backed against the curb. Do you know enough
about machinery to start an auto-engine?"
Gryson nodded again. "I'd ought to, seein' that I've been a gang boss in
a shop that made 'em."
"Good enough; crank the motor, climb in, and wait. I'll do the rest."
Five minutes later, Blount had stumbled out of the elevator at the
ground-floor and was groping his way along the sidewalk toward the
corner--groping because the pain had become blinding again and the
street-lights were taking on many-colored and fantastic brilliancies.
When he finally found the car, it was mainly by the sense of hearing;
the motor was drumming softly under the hood, and there was a blur in
the mechanician's seat which answered for the crouching figure of the
ward-worker. By a supreme effort of will Blount swung himself up behind
the steering-wheel and let the clutch in. Luckily, the street was clear
of vehicles and he made the turn in safety; but fully realizing his
handicap, he steered straight away from the business district, and
making a wide circuit through the residence quarter, brought the car out
in the eastern suburb at the beginning of a road paralleling the
Transcontinental tracks.
With the lights of the city dropping away to the rear, and the drumming
motor quickened to racing speed, he told the fugitive from justice what
was to be done and the manner of its doing. Twenty-two miles out they
would reach the coal-mine station of Wardlaw, a few minutes ahead of the
Overland. Since all east-bound trains stopped at the coal-mines to coal
the engines, the way of escape would be open.
Something more than a wordless, space-devouring half-hour beyond this,
Blount applied the brakes and dropped his passenger at the rear of the
small iron-roofed building which served as the railroad station for the
coal-mines. Far to the rear on the twenty-two-mile tangent the headlight
of the coming train showed like a blazing star low on the western
horizon.
"Go and blacken your face and hands at one of the slack dumps and pass
yourself for a miner quitting his job," was Blount's parting suggestion;
but the hollow-eyed fugitive had a last word to say, too, and he said
it.
"I've been t' hell and back, as I told you, and 'twas f'r on'y th' wan
thing: give me your word, Evan Blount, that you'll chop th' damn' tree
down and let it lie where it falls! That's all I'm askin', this trip."
"You needn't lose any sleep worrying about that," was the curt reply;
and without waiting for the train arrival, Blount turned the car and
sent it racing on the way back to the city.
By all the tests he knew how to apply, he was little better than a dead
man when he returned the hired auto to the side-street garage and made
his halting way around to the hotel. He had long since given up the idea
of trying to see Blenkinsop. He knew that the editor would not be in his
office much before ten o'clock, and the two-hour wait was not to be
endured.
Clinging desperately to the single purpose of getting back to the
deserted room before his absence should be discovered, and weighed down
by a crushing sense of the immorality of the step he had just taken in
bargaining with a hunted criminal and in conniving at his escape, he
pressed on, pushing through the revolving doors and slipping once more
into the Saturday evening lobby throng. Edging around to the stair, he
took all the cautious steps in reverse; ascending first to his own room
to leave the rain-coat and the hat, and afterward feeling his way down
the servants' stair and through the lower corridor to the locked door in
his father's private suite.
Past this he had a hazy notion that part of him--the observing
part--stood aside and looked on while the other part slowly and
painfully struggled out of its clothes and into its pajamas. Also he saw
the other part, after it had carefully secreted the wrapped package of
papers under the mattress, beat the pillows feebly and bury its head in
them. After that there was a great blank.
XXVI
APPLES OF GOLD
Notwithstanding the pillow-muffled plunge which was almost a lapse into
the coma of utter exhaustion, Evan Blount awoke early on the Sunday
morning, refreshed and measurably free from pain. Since the sun was just
beginning to gild the lofty finial on the dome of the Capitol opposite,
there was no one stirring as yet in the adjoining rooms of the suite,
and the streets were silent save for the chanting cries of the newsboys.
Slipping out of bed, Blount crossed to the window and threw it open. It
was good to be able to stand and walk without wincing; and a breath of
the sunrise breeze sweeping down from the eastern hills was like a
draught of invigorating wine. As he leaned out for an instant to make
sure that not even the height would bring a return of the vertigo, the
wail of the nearest newsboy became shrilly articulate: _"Here's yer
Morning Plainsman! All erbout the great election frauds!"_
Hardly crediting his ears, Blount listened again, and when the cry was
repeated he closed the window softly and sat down to grapple with this
newest development of his problem. Did the newsboy's selling-cry mean
that Blenkinsop had found out for himself, and independently, about the
falsified registration lists? If so, there would be no public
vindication for one Evan Blount; but also--thank God!--no need for a son
to blazon himself to the world as his father's accuser. A great wave of
thankfulness rolled over Blount's head, submerging him and turning the
exclamation which sprang to his lips into a pæan of rejoicing. Instantly
he saw himself throwing up his railroad connection and taking his
rightful place as his father's counsel and defender. Here, at last, was
a cause into which he could fling himself body and soul. True, people
would say that he had been in league with the corporations, the boss,
and the machine, from the first, but what did that matter?
But would his father need a defender? No shadow of doubt as to this was
admissible in the face of the accumulating evidence, he told himself.
From the opening day of the campaign the machine and the corporations
had been working hand in hand; Gryson and his fellow-crooks were the
sufficient proof; and besides.... Blount reached under the mattress and
drew out the wrapped package, untying the string with fingers that
trembled. A cursory examination of the affidavits sufficed. In Gryson's
sworn statement, and in two others, the "Big Boss" was inculpated
definitely and by name.
Blount glanced at the little clock on the dressing-case. The early
Sunday morning silence still prevailed in the great hotel, and his
resolve was quickly taken. Dressing hurriedly, he went up to his own
room, and after a shave, a bath, and a freshening change which included
the removal of the disfiguring bandage, he put on a close-fitting silk
travelling-cap under the soft hat and went down to the lobby.
There were but few guests stirring at that hour, and Blount had the
writing-room to himself when he bought a copy of _The Plainsman_ and
turned anxiously to the editorial page. After the first thrilling of
relief born of the newsboy's cry, an unnerving fear had crept in to
whisper that possibly the facts might not bear out the thankful
assumption. A rapid reading of Blenkinsop's editorial confirmed the
fear, and the reader's lips grew dry and his breath came quickly when he
realized that the submerging wave of thankfulness had risen only to be
driven back. Blenkinsop had no facts, no evidence; he was merely hitting
out blindly with a general accusation of fraud which he made no effort
to substantiate or prove!
Evan Blount saw the thorny path stretching away before him again, and he
rose up to walk in it like a man. As once before, he went down to the
railroad restaurant for his breakfast, seeking solitude, and the meal
had been half-absently eaten before he had readjusted himself,
sorrowfully but firmly, to the unchanged situation. His duty was as
clearly defined now as it had been the day previous, or at any time in
the past. There was nothing changed, nothing different, save that a new
complication had arisen in the crucial shortness of the interval for
action. Knowing human nature a little, he knew how difficult it is to
arouse an effective public sentiment on the eve of an election, no
matter how important the issues involved. In a hard school of experience
the voter has learned to discount the final-moment cry of fraud. Would
an exposure, however convincing, appearing only in the Monday and
Tuesday morning newspapers have the desired effect?
Blount walked by devious ways from the railroad station to the Temple
Court, and secluded himself behind the locked door of his office to have
a chance to think the problem out to some effective conclusion. What
should he do? Should he find Blenkinsop and get him and the United Press
representative together at once, laying before them the damning evidence
and telling them to use it as they could? Or was there some surer way of
firing the mine of protest and exposure?
There was one other way, at least, but the mere thought of it made him
sick and shaken. As an upright citizen and a member of the bar, was it
not his duty to lay the evidence, not before the public in the
newspapers, but before a competent court of justice? And in that event,
was there in this land of graft and corruption a judge sufficiently
fearless and incorruptible to act with the needful vigor and promptness?
When Blount asked himself this question, the answer came quickly. Though
it was the common accusation, well or ill founded, that the lower courts
of the State were the creatures of the corporations, the judges on the
supreme bench still commanded the respect of the people. Hemingway, the
chief justice, was peculiarly a man for a crisis; strong, honest, and
entirely fearless; a man who would not stop to haggle over nice
questions of precedent and jurisdiction where the public welfare
demanded prompt and effective action.
For a long half-hour Blount sat staring absently at the desk litter,
trying to decide between the two courses open to him. He knew that his
father and Judge Hemingway had been lifelong friends, and this added
another drop of bitterness to a cup which was already overflowing. None
the less, he was confident that the judge would do his duty as he saw
it. It was a merciless thing to do--to make this just judge the slayer
of the friend of his youth; but at the end Blount reached for the
telephone-book and began to search for the chief justice's residence
number. Before he could find it the phone bell rang.
"Well?" he answered shortly, putting the receiver to his ear.
It was Miss Anners who was at the other end of the wire, and he was
instantly aware of the note of anxiety in her voice.
"_Evan!_" she exclaimed; "you don't know what a fright you have given
us! What are you doing at your office when you ought to be here and in
bed?"
Blount drew the desk instrument closer and tried to put her off lightly.
"I'm all right again. I turned out early this morning to make up for
lost time. You wouldn't expect me to stay in bed for more than a day to
oblige a common, ordinary coach-dog, would you?"
"Yes, but see here--listen: Doctor Dillon has been here, and he is
perfectly shocked. He says there may be complications, and the very
least you can do is to be careful. Your father has had the hotel boys
looking everywhere for you. When are you coming back?"
Here was the direct question which Blount had been dreading. Now, if
never before, the wretched involvement had reached a point beyond which
it was impossible to follow his father's plea for a continuance of the
kinsman amenities.
"I think you had better leave me out of any plans you are making for the
day," he answered evasively. "I shall be pretty busy."
"No--listen," she insisted. "It's wrong to work on Sunday, but if you
will be obstinate, you must stop at luncheon-time. We are going to drive
out to Wartrace Hall this afternoon; Doctor Dillon says we positively
_must_ take you away from town and keep you quiet for a few days."