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.
The electric lights were showing like faint yellow stars against the sunset sky when Blount skilfully placed the small car at the Inter-Mountain curb and lifted his companion to the sidewalk
"Are you going anywhere to-night?" he asked.
"I don't know," was the reply. "There is a 'crush' on at the Weatherfords', but I don't know whether Mrs. Blount has accepted for us or not."
"Don't go," he pleaded quickly. "Back out of it some way, and give me just this one evening to myself. Won't you do that, Patricia?"
"I'll try," she agreed. "But if Mrs. Blount has accepted—"
"Confound Mrs. Blount!" he growled. And then the newly aroused underman in him added: "You tell her that I want you to give me the evening, and let that settle it."
As it turned out a little later, Miss Anners found it unnecessary to be rude to her hostess. For some reason best known to herself, Mrs. Honoria had declined the invitation—engraved in the correctest shaded Old English and made to include the senator and Miss Anners—and was planning a free evening for herself and her guest.
After the café dinner—a dinner at which Evan Blount, once more calling himself all the hard names in the hypocrite's vocabulary, made the fourth—Mrs. Honoria proposed an adjournment to the hotel parlors, which were in the mezzanine lounge. Later, she found herself alone on the divan which had been drawn up to command a view of the spirited scene in the lobby below. The senator had gone down to mingle with the politicians, and she could see him—big, masterful, and smiling—moving about from group to group. On the opposite side of the mezzanine gallery, Evan and Patricia were "doing time," as the little lady musingly phrased it: walking up and down and talking quietly; a handsome couple, as the approving glances of more than one passing guest testified.
To Mrs. Honoria, thus isolated, came at the appointed time the sober-eyed young traffic manager for the railroad company. Gantry had been under orders from the little lady for the better part of the afternoon, but the business of the day had given him no chance to report earlier.
"You got my note?" he asked, taking the place she made for him on the tête-à-tête divan.
"Yes; a little while before dinner. It came just in time to let me send frightfully late 'regrets' to Mrs. Weatherford."
"I couldn't come sooner. I've had the Hathaway crowd on my hands all afternoon. There is something in the wind, and those fellows are scared stiff. They say that Evan's speech-making has stirred up the working men and the rank and file like a declaration of war with Mexico, and nobody can tell what is going to happen next Tuesday."
"Is that all?"
"No, not quite all. There is a mild panic on in at least three of the city wards over the disappearance of a fellow named Gryson, a sort of—er—wire-puller and all-around general-utility man. Some say he has been doing crooked work and had to disappear; others say that he has taken his pay for whatever job he was doing and has skipped out, leaving his journeymen strikers to hold the bag."
"Gryson," said the little lady, her eyes narrowing; "Gryson—the name is curiously familiar. He is what you call a ward-worker, isn't he?"
Gantry nodded. "Something of the sort, yes. Evan calls him one of the 'pie-eaters,' and away along early in the game they had a set-to in Evan's office and Evan fired him; told him if he ever came back he'd throw him out."
Again Mrs. Honoria's fine eyes became reflective.
"Richard," she said softly, "I'd give anything in the world if I could know that Evan still feels that way about Thomas Gryson."
"Then you know the plug-ugly, do you?" said Gantry.
"I know of him. He is a criminal and a dangerous man."
"Well, he is out of it, I guess; he must be, if his own running-mates can't find him."
"Isn't Mr. Kittredge trying to find him, too?"
"Yes. And I think Kittredge played it rather low down on the poor beggar. They had a deal of some sort, and when Gryson put his price on the job—"
"I know," she interrupted. "Mr. Kittredge ought to have paid him and let him go."
Gantry's smile was a tribute to superior genius.
"You've got me going," he said; "you always have me going. With the election only three days off, I can't tell yet what you and the senator are trying to do."
"The senator, at least, has never made any secret of his object," she smiled back at him. "He has told everybody that he is out for a clean sweep."
"Exactly," said Gantry; "but no man living knows what he means by a 'clean sweep.' I'll bet there are a hundred men down there in the lobby right now who would give the best year out of their lives to know. And they can't guess—they can't begin to guess!"
"Let us leave them to their guesses, while we go back to the certainties," she suggested. "Did you find out what I asked you to?"
"Yes; and I don't know whether I ought to tell you or not. I'm still drawing my salary from the railroad, you know."
"And you are not sure that I am drawing mine?" she laughed. "Don't you remember when Mr. McVickar gave me this?" touching the little jewel-incrusted watch on her shoulder.
"Yes, I remember; also I remember that this is the first time I have ever seen you wearing it." And then: "I'd never try to bribe you in the wide, wide world, Mrs. Blount."
"Why not?"
"For two reasons: you are too much in love with your husband; and, if you took a notion to fly the track, a king's ransom wouldn't be big enough to make you stay bribed."
"I am flattered, I'm sure; but I'm still in the dark about the thing you have come here to tell me," she reminded him.
"I presume you may as well know it, though I can tell you that it has been kept the darkest kind of a secret. Mr. McVickar came west to-day from Bald Butte in a new gasolene unit-car which is supposed to be making a trial trip over the road. The car is supposed to have a bunch of the Chicago officials on board, though not half a dozen men on this division know that the vice-president is the only official, and that the others are clerks and telegraphers."
"Go on," said the small person quickly.
"That gasolene special is lost. No station west of Bald Butte has yet reported it. Strictly between us two, it left the main line at the old disused track leading out to the abandoned Shoshone mine workings. There were autos to meet it at the mine, and by this time Mr. McVickar is probably toasting his feet before an open wood-fire in the Shonoho Inn."
Mrs. Honoria leaned her two round arms on the mezzanine rail, and looked long and earnestly down upon the caucussing lobby throng. When she looked up it was to say: "There are wires?"
"A full set of cut-ins. You can trust the big boss for that. He is in touch with every corner of the State, just the same as he would be if he were here in his usual election headquarters in the hotel."
The small plotter became silent again, and when she spoke she was smiling brightly.
"You are a good boy, Richard, and you shall have your reward. And it is going to be something that will make you happy, this time. Run away, now, and let me have a little solitude. I want to think."
It was a full hour after Gantry's disappearance that the senator came up-stairs, and Mrs. Honoria beckoned to the pair on the opposite side of the gallery.
"It's bedtime," she said, when they came around to her divan. And then, with a malicious little grimace for Evan: "I've been counting, and I've seen Patricia stifle three distinct and separate yawns in the last five minutes. She has been up every night since we came to town, and—"
Left to himself, Blount sat watching the crowd for a time, and then went to his room to read himself to sleep. One of the two crucial days of suspense was outworn, but there was another coming; and after he had read for an hour he went to bed, resolutely determined to get the rest necessary to carry him through the dreaded Saturday. Sleep came quickly when he had turned off the lights, but it was merely a transition to a troubled dreamland in which Patricia, Mrs. Honoria, Gryson, and Gantry were weirdly confused. In the thick of it he seemed to see the ward-heeler standing at his bedside and beating furiously upon a huge Chinese gong. When he sprang up and began to rub his eyes, the room was lighted by a red glare, and the dream-noise was translated into the rattling of wheels and the clanging of alarm-gongs and cries of "Fire!" in the avenue below.
As a city dweller, Blount should have felt the wall of the room, and, finding it still cool, should have turned over and gone to sleep again. Instead, he slipped out of bed and went to the window. One glance showed him that the fire was in the business district, either in or near the Temple Court Building. That was enough to make him dress hurriedly and hasten to the street, where he found a handful of policemen trying ineffectually to keep a clear pavement for the racing fire-trucks. Watching his chance, Blount darted out to make the crossing. He was half-way to the opposite curb when an unwieldy hook-and-ladder truck, drawn by a pair of magnificent grays, came lurching and plunging down the side street upon which the hotel cornered.
In front of the horses, and leaping and barking at their heads in a frenzy of excitement, was a spotted coach-dog—the truck squad's mascot. Blount was within a few feet of the farther sidewalk, and was well out of danger when the long truck slewed into the avenue. But at the passing instant the mascot dog, leaping and whirling like a four-footed dervish, sprang backward. Blount felt the catapulting shock of a yielding body between his shoulders, heard a yell from the truck-driver on his high seat, and went plunging headlong to the curb. After which he felt and heard no more.