first of the grades in the gulch-threading climb to the second mesa
level.
"No. When you come to the pine-tree, turn to the right up Shonoho
Canyon."
"We can't get anywhere on that road," he objected. "It's washed out and
posted. I tried to go up there the other day when I had Patricia out in
the little car."
"I think you will find it quite passable to-night," was all the answer
he got; and a little later, when they had turned out of the main road
and were ascending the small canyon, the prophecy came true. The brush
barricade had been thrown aside, and there were fresh wheel tracks in
the sand.
At sight of the wheel marks the senator's wife spoke again.
"You have been up here before?"
"Yes, once; in the middle of the summer."
"There is a small hotel at the head of the road."
"I know; but it is closed."
"It has been reopened--please throttle the motor so it won't make so
much noise--the hotel is occupied now, as I say, and that is where we
shall find your father. Are you still willing to do as I tell you to?"
"In all things reasonable."
"As if I'd ask you to do anything unreasonable!" she broke out
half-petulantly. "Listen; there is a lawn with a circular driveway in
front of the hotel. Drive to the outer edge, near the cliff, and stop
the car."
Five minutes later he had obeyed his instructions literally. Through
the groving of trees on the lawn he could see the lights in the lower
story of the inn. At the flicking of the motor-switch a man with a pair
of lineman's climbing spurs at his belt rose up out of the shadows and
touched his cap to the lady, saying: "The boss is here; he has just gone
in."
"I know," was the low-toned response. And then to Evan: "Help me out,
please."
When they stood together beside the car she spoke again to the lineman.
"Is it all right, Jackson? Can you do what I asked you to?"
"We can try it a whirl," said the man; and thereupon he led the way
across the lawn, around to the darkened end of the bungalow-built resort
house, and through a sheltering pergola to a side door. "I got hold of
the key, and it's open," he signified, meaning the door. "Can you find
your way in the dark on the inside?"
"Perfectly," was the whispered reply; and then the lineman guide got his
further orders: "Go back to the car and see that nobody interferes with
it, Jackson." Then, when the man had disappeared in the tree shadows,
the little lady turned short upon Blount. "I am going to take you where
you can see and hear, but you must promise me not to interfere unless it
becomes perfectly plain that your father needs you. Is it a bargain?"
"It is--if you'll allow me to be the judge of the need."
She laughed softly. "You are simply incorrigible, and I should think
there would be times when Patricia would be tempted to stick pins into
you," she mocked. Then: "Come on; we are wasting time," and, entering
the house, she took his hand and led him through a dark passage, up a
stair, through another passage into a long, low-pitched room, bare and
empty save for a great pyramid of dining-tables and chairs piled in the
middle of it, and lastly through a cautiously opened door which admitted
a flood of yellow lamp-light from below.
"The musicians' gallery," she whispered. "Go to the screen and look
down, but for Heaven's sake, don't make any noise!"
Blount obeyed mechanically. The orchestra gallery, screened on three
sides by an open fretwork of Moorish design, was built out from the wall
of the dining-room, and through the latticings of the fretwork he could
look down upon the oblong lobby of the resort hotel. There was a
table-desk with lamps on it drawn out in front of a cheerful wood-fire
burning in a great stone fireplace, and in front of the fire, standing
with his back to the blaze, Blount saw his father. From a lighted room
at the opposite end of the lobby space came a confused clattering of
telegraph instruments. Blount caught a glimpse of shirt-sleeved clerks
moving about in the room beyond, and then a door opened beneath him and
the vice-president of the Transcontinental Company strode out into the
firelight to shake hands with his visitor and to say: "I've been looking
for you; I thought you'd come in out of the wet before it was too late,
David. Sit down and tell me how much you're going to bleed us for, and
I'll make out the check."
With a cold hand gripping at his heart, Blount turned away, sick and
revolted, and there was a curse on his lips for the cruelty of the woman
who had brought him to be a witness to his father's shame. But when he
groped for the door of egress and found it, the knob refused to turn.
The door was locked and he could not retreat.
XXX
THE RECKONING
Evan Blount's first impulse when he found his retreat cut off by the
locked door of the musicians' gallery was to make his presence known
instantly to the two men standing before the fire in the lobby below.
Shame, vicarious shame for the father who would thus find himself
unmasked before his son, was all that made him hesitate; and in the
pausing moment he heard his father's reply to the vice-president's
challenging greeting.
"The same old song; always the same old song with you, isn't it,
Hardwick?" the senator was saying in jocose deprecation. "What money
can't buy, isn't worth having; that's about the way you fellows always
stack it up." Then, with sudden grimness: "Sit down, Hardwick. I've come
to say a few things to you that won't listen very good, but you've got
to take your medicine this time."
"What's that?" demanded the vice-president, dropping mechanically into
his desk-chair. And then: "It's no use, David. We've beat you at your
own game. We're going to roll up a majority next Tuesday that will wipe
you and your broken-down machine out of existence. Don't you believe
it?"
"Not yet--not quite yet" was the mild rejoinder.
"Well, you'd better believe it, because it's the truth. You are down and
out. I had you beat, David, that night last summer when you gave me your
'de-fi' and I came back by taking your son away from you. The young
gentleman you were going to spring on us for your next attorney-general
has done more than any other one man in the campaign to help our lame
dog over the stile."
"Yes," said the big man, sunning his back at the fire, "that is one of
the things we're going to flail out right here and now, Hardwick; about
the boy and what he's been doing. You told him to go out and preach the
good, clean gospel of the square deal, didn't you?"
It was at this point that the listener in the musicians' gallery, a prey
to tumultuous emotions which were making the freshly healing wound in
his head throb like a trip-hammer, lost all of his compunctions and drew
closer to the fretwork screen.
"He didn't need any special instructions," was the vice-president's
rejoinder, and his tone chimed in with the hard-bitted smile. "Now that
it is all over, I don't mind telling you that he mapped the thing out
for himself, and all we had to do was to sit tight and give him plenty
of rope. Candidly, David, I don't believe I'm hardened enough to play
the game as it ought to be played out here in the sage-brush hills. The
young fellow's sincerity came pretty near getting away with me when I
saw how ridiculously in earnest he was."
"Yet you let him go on, putting himself deeper and deeper in the hole
every time he stood up before an audience, and you never said a
word--never gave him a hint that you were not going to back him up in
everything he was saying?"
This time the hard-bitted smile broke into a laugh.
"Let's get down to business, David. You wouldn't expect us to throw the
game away when somebody was trying his best to put the winning card into
our hands. We needn't dig back into the campaign for something to jangle
over, you and I. We can come right down to the present moment. You're
cornered, but I don't deny that you've still got a few votes to dispose
of. How much do you want for them?"
Blount saw his father take a step forward, and for a flitting instant he
thought there would be violence. But apparently nothing was farther from
the senator's intention.
"I'm not selling to-night, Hardwick; I'm buying," he said, with the
good-natured smile wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. "I want to know
how much you'll take to clean up right where you are and make my boy's
word good to the people of this State."
Mr. McVickar turned to his table-desk and took up a sheaf of telegrams.
"I'm a pretty busy man this evening, David; and if you haven't anything
better than that to offer--"
"You've got a lot of crooked deals out--special rates and rebates and
such things; the boy believed you were going to call them all off and
be good, Hardwick."
The vice-president laid the telegrams aside and turned back again with
the air of a man determined to sweep away all the obstructions at one
shrewd push.
"You're wasting your time and mine; let's get down to business," he
snapped. "Some little time ago your son began to urge this same 'reform
measure,' as he termed it. I believe he even went so far as to threaten
Gantry and Kittredge with the publication of certain private letters
from our patrons, letters written to him in his capacity of field
campaigner for our company. I don't suppose he really meant to do any
such disloyal thing as that, but--"
"But to make sure he wouldn't, you had one of your hired shadow-men blow
up his safe and steal the letters," put in the senator mildly. "That was
prudent, Hardwick. I was a little scared up myself for fear Evan might
get real good and mad, and let the cat out of the bag; I was, for a
fact."
"Without admitting the safe-blowing, I may say that the letters were
destroyed, and our friends were advised to be a little more conservative
in their correspondence. That settles the 'reform measure' incident and
brings us down to the present argument. If you are not here to get in
line with us, what did you come for?"
"I came to give you one more chance to be decent, Hardwick;
just--one--more--last--chance."
"David, there are times when you make me tired, and this is one of
them. For years you've held us up and dictated to us; but this time
we've got you by the neck. Did you ever happen to hear of a fellow named
Thomas Gryson?"
"Oh, yes; I've heard of him. I believe he has been on your pay-rolls for
a while--notwithstanding the fact that he is an escaped criminal," was
the shrewd counter-thrust.
"He's a scoundrel; we'll admit that. Just the same, your son hired him
to go out and get evidence in a certain matter of alleged crookedness in
the registration lists. He got it, and delivered the papers to your son
last night. Some of those affidavits incriminate you, David. If we
wanted to use them, we could send you to the penitentiary, right here in
your own State."
The senator drew up a mock-Sheraton arm-chair and lowered his huge frame
gently into it.
"In order to use those papers against me you'd first have to get hold of
them, wouldn't you, Hardwick?" he asked.
"We have them," was the terse assertion.
The Honorable David's chuckle rumbled deep in his capacious chest.
"Barto phoned you an hour or so ago that he had 'em, but, owing to
circumstances over which he had no control, he couldn't deliver 'em to
you until to-morrow morning. Isn't that about the way it shapes up?"
The vice-president's frown marked an added degree of irritation. "So
you have a cut-in on my telephone wire, have you?" he rasped.
The senator leaned forward and laid a forefinger on the
vice-presidential knee.
"Listen, Hardwick," he said. "I dictated that phone message to you, and
Barto repeated it word for word because he had to--I reckon maybe it was
because one of my men was holding a gun to his other ear while he talked
to you. The little hold-up that you planned this afternoon didn't come
off. Barto lost out bad, and when we get around to giving him the third
degree, I shouldn't wonder if he'd tell a whole lot of things that you
wouldn't want to see printed in the newspapers."
Mr. McVickar sprang out of his chair with an agility surprising in so
heavy a man, crossed to the open door of the room where his clerical
force was at work, and slammed it shut. When he returned, he was no
longer the confident tyrant of foregone conclusions.
"Where are those papers now, Blount?" he inquired.
"They are in the hands of Chief Justice Hemingway, for investigation and
such action as he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court bench see fit
to take."
"Good God! Your son did that, knowing that you are as deep in the mud as
we are in the mire?"
"I reckon he did, so. That boy is all wool and a yard wide. He thought
he was putting me in the hole, too, along with Kittredge and your
railroad crooks, and it came mighty near tearing him in two. But he did
it. You haven't been more than half-appreciating that boy, Hardwick."
"'He thought,' you say; isn't it the fact that you are in the hole,
David?"
The senator reached over, took one of the gigantic McVickar cigars from
the open box on the desk, and calmly lighted it.
"You're a pretty hard man to convince, Hardwick," he said slowly, when
the big cigar was filling the air of the lobby with its fragrance. "Away
along back at the beginning of this fight I told you what I was aiming
to do, and why. You wouldn't believe it then, and you don't want to
believe it now; but that's because you don't happen to have a son of
your own. When that boy of mine wired me that he was coming out here to
get into the harness, I began to turn over the leaves of the record and
look back a little. It was a mighty dirty record, McVickar. I don't know
that I'm any better man now than I was in the days when we made that
record--you and I--but when I looked it over, it struck me all in a heap
that I'd have to get out the bucket and scrubbing-brush if I didn't want
to make a clean-hearted, clean-minded boy plumb ashamed of his old
daddy."
"But, say--you haven't quit your scheming for a single minute, Blount!"
retorted the railroad tyrant. "You are just as much the boss of the
machine to-day as you've ever been!"
"I reckon, that's so, too," was the measured reply. "But there's just
this one little difference, Hardwick: a machine, in a factory or in
politics, is a mighty necessary thing, and we wouldn't get very far
nowadays without it. Here in America we're just coming to learn that
machine politics--which is sometimes only another name for intelligent
organization--needn't be bad politics unless we make 'em bad. To put it
another way, the machine will grind corn or clean up the streets and
alleys just as easily as it will grind up men and principles."
The vice-president made a gesture of impatience.
"Come to the point," he urged. "Do you mean to tell me that you can face
an investigation by the Supreme Court?"
"For this one time, Hardwick, I can. For this one time in the history of
the Sage-Brush State, the slate--the machine slate--is as clean as the
back of your hand. When the court comes to investigate, it will find
that every crooked deal in this campaign has had a railroad man or a
corporation man at the back of it. Let me tell you what's due to happen.
Chief Justice Hemingway had luncheon with me to-day, and he came early
enough to give me a quiet hour before we went to table with the ladies.
There is going to be an investigation, and some sharp, shrewd young
lawyer is going to be appointed by the court to take evidence. When this
young man gets to work, every wheel in the machine is going to roll his
way. Every bribe you've offered and paid, every false name you've put on
the registration lists, every deal you've made with men like Pete
Hathaway and McDarragh, has had its witnesses, and by the gods,
Hardwick, they'll testify--every man of them!"
Again the vice-president sprang from his chair, but this time it was to
walk the floor with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets. The
listener in the musicians' gallery found a seat and sat down to let the
intoxicating, overwhelming joy of it all have its will of him. In the
fulness of time the tramping magnate who had been so crushingly
out-generalled in his own chosen field came to stand before the big man,
who was still quietly smoking in the sham-Sheraton arm-chair.
"You spoke of the appointment of a special prosecuting attorney, David,"
he said in a harsh monotone. "Who will it be?"
"You've guessed it already, I reckon. It'll be the boy, Hardwick.
Hemingway will appoint him if he is willing to serve."
"He's taken our retainer!" snapped the vice-president.
"Not much, he hasn't! you hired him for wages, and if he wants to
resign--he has resigned, by the way--and take another job, I reckon he
can do it without breaking any of the Ten Commandments."
"We can't stand for that--you know we can't."
"No; I don't think you can--not as a corporation. Besides the flock of
witnesses that we can drum up, he'll have those letters that we were
talking about a while back. You missed fire on that, too, Hardwick. What
your man dynamited out of Evan's office safe, and what you destroyed,
were only clever copies. The real letters were stolen by the boy's
friends, and little as you may believe it, the object of that theft was
to give you this last chance. The boy was mighty hot under the collar,
and we couldn't be sure that he wouldn't start the fireworks before the
band was ready to play. He would have started them, too, if his match
hadn't been taken away from him."
Mr. McVickar walked around the other end of the table-desk and sat down
heavily.
"You've spoken twice of a 'last chance' David," he said grittingly.
"What is it?"
"It's the chance I gave you in the beginning. First, let me tell you
what I reckon you're already admitting. You're whipped, Hardwick; your
slate's broken, and your man Reynolds hasn't a ghost of a show--he nor
any of the others on your string. You haven't made a move that we
haven't caught onto just about as soon as you put your fingers on the
piece you meant to move. For instance, that little box up there in the
beaming just over your head--the one that looks as if it were a part of
the house electric installation--is a microphone, and one of your own
men helped to put it up. We've got copies of every letter and telegram
you've dictated since you had this desk dragged out here a week ago
Saturday."
"I'm taking all that for granted," was the curt admission.
"Then we'll come down to the nib of the thing and put you out of your
misery. You've got two things to do--just two, Hardwick. One of 'em is
to clean house and make a good job of it, just like you let Evan believe
you were going to do when you sent him out to tell the people of this
State a lot of things that you didn't mean to have come true; cut out
all the deals, all the private tariffs, all the little preferentials and
palm-warmings. When you've done that, you'll find that the other thing
will mighty nearly do itself."
"Name it," rasped the magnate.
"It's just merely to take your railroad out of politics in this State,
and keep it out. We've had enough of you, McVickar, and more than
enough. Is it a bargain?"
"It's a damned one-sided bargain thus far, Blount. What do we get for
all this?"
Again the senator chuckled genially. "You may not believe it, but we're
going to let you down easy. You do these two things that I've mentioned,
and get rid of Kittredge and a few others that have been caught
red-handed, and the Supreme Court investigation won't touch your
railroad as a corporation--in other words, it'll go after individuals.
But you've got to play fair, you know--and bring forth fruits meet for
repentance, before the fact. How does that strike you?"
Again the vice-president got up to walk the floor, but this time the
deliberative interval was shorter.
"What is the political programme, as you have it figured out, David?" he
asked presently.
"It'll be a landslide for us, as I have told you. Gordon will go in by
the biggest majority that has ever been rolled up in this State.
Dortscher will succeed himself as attorney-general; and by and by, after
things have quieted down, he will resign. That will give Gordon the
appointment of his successor, and I'm thinking it might be a pretty good
thing for you, as well as for the people of the State, if Alec should
happen to pick out a bright young fellow who knows your side of the
question as well as the people's, and who is square enough to give you a
fair show when it comes to framing up any new railroad legislation."
"That will be your son, I suppose?"
"If he'll take it," was the imperturbable rejoinder.
For the third time the vice-president, dying hard, as befitted him,
deliberated thoughtfully. At the end of the thoughtful interval he took
a cigar from the open box and clamped it between his teeth.
"We trade," he said shortly. And then: "How will you take it--in stock
or bonds?"
The Honorable David rose slowly and snapped the cigar ash into the fire.
"I'm right sorry, Hardwick, but this is one time when I reckon we'll
have to have what you might call the spot cash. Promises don't go.
You're too good a fighter to be allowed to get up merely because you've
hollered 'enough.' Come on into your telegraph-shop and let me hear you
dictate that string of 'come-off' orders. Then we'll drive to town in my
road-car, and you can tip off Kittredge and a few of the other
prominent victims by word of mouth, as you'll most likely want to."
For a full minute after the two had left the lobby together Evan Blount
sat motionless in the screened orchestra gallery. Then he got up and
groped once more for the door-knob. It yielded at his touch, and in the
semi-darkness beyond the opening he saw his father's wife with her arms
upstretched to him.
"Oh, Evan, dear--am I forgiven?" she asked softly.
"Little mother!" he said, and then he took her face between his hands
and kissed her.
* * * * *
When the Honorable David Blount reached the city an hour or more later,
and had dropped his passenger at the Railway Club, he found his son
waiting for him in the otherwise deserted sitting-room of the
Inter-Mountain private suite.
"I couldn't sleep without telling you first, dad," the waiting one broke
out. "I've been eavesdropping; I was a listener, unwilling at first, but
not afterward, to everything that was said an hour or so ago in the
lobby of the little hotel at the head of Shonoho. Do I need to tell you
in so many words how deep the plough has gone?"
"I reckon not," was the gentle reply. "Neither do you need to tell me
how you came to be out at Shonoho when I thought I'd left you tied hand
and foot right here in the hotel." Then, with the quizzical smile
wrinkling at the corners of the grave eyes: "How does the political
wrestle strike you by this time, son?"
"It strikes me that I haven't been in it; not even in the outer edges of
it. Isn't that about the size of it?"
"Oh, no; you've been doing good work, mighty good work. You've helped
out in the only way that help could come in this campaign; you've
stirred up a good, healthy public sentiment in favor of a square deal
for everybody. McVickar was fixing to tangle it all up--get the people
down on him until they'd simply legislate the life out of his railroad.
But he couldn't see that."
"He sees it now--the 'machine' has made him see it."
"Yes. You didn't know that a machine could be put to any really
righteous use, did you, boy? But in this campaign it has gone in to
knock out the crookedness, big _and_ little. Listen, son; you heard what
I told McVickar. After you'd sent me that wire from Boston last summer,
saying you'd come, I lay awake nights projecting how I'd put you in
training for a spell, and then help you into the saddle and make you the
boss of the round-up, the same as I'd been. Then it came over me, all of
a sudden, that I'd been as crooked as a dog's hind leg--that we'd all
been crooked. Not that I've ever taken a dollar for my personal pocket,
for I haven't; but I've bought and sold and dickered and schemed with
the best of 'em, and the worst of 'em. On top of that, I began to ask
myself how I'd like it to see you wallowing in the same old mud-hole,
and--well, Evan, boy, you may have a son of your own some day, and then
you'll know. I let things rock along until you came; until that first
day at Wartrace when you ripped out at me about hewing to the line.
Right then and there I made up my mind that I'd put the whole power of
the 'machine,' as you call it, into one campaign for a clean election
and a square deal."