A WELL-SPRING IN THE DESERT
Going to the hotel, Blount shut himself into a telephone booth and tried, ineffectually, to get a long-distance connection with Wartrace Hall. When he finally grew exasperated at the central operator's oft-repeated "line's busy," he called up Gantry to ask if the traffic manager knew anything about the purposes and movements of his father. Gantry did not know, but he knew something else—a thing which proved the leakiness of the railroad telegraph department.
"Come down here and tell me what you mean by sending incendiary telegrams to the vice-president," he commanded, with jesting severity. And with a hard word for the department which had gossiped, Blount went down to the general offices in the station building.
Gantry was busy with the stenographer, but the business was immediately postponed and the clerk dismissed when Blount entered.
"'Tell it out among the heathen,'" the traffic manager quoted jocosely, when the door closed behind the shorthand man.
"There is nothing to tell—more than you seem to know already," snapped Blount morosely. "I have wired my resignation, that's all."
"But why?" persisted Gantry.
"Because I'm not going to be an accessory, either before or after the fact—not if I know it," was the curt rejoinder.
"To the criminal disregard for the laws of this State and the nation which seems to be the underlying motive actuating every move in this corrupt game of politics. Gantry, if you and some others had your just deserts, you would be breaking stone in the penitentiary this blessed minute!"
"Suffering Moses!" gasped the traffic manager. "Somebody must have been hitting you pretty hard. Who was it; some more of the 'little brothers'?"
At another time Blount might have been less angry, and, by consequence, more discreet.
"No, it wasn't any of the 'little brothers'; it was Mr. Simon P. Hathaway, president of the Twin Buttes Lumber Company."
Gantry drew a long breath which ended in a low whistle.
"So that's what you were let in for, was it?" he exclaimed, and then he checked himself abruptly and went back to the original contention. "But you're not going to throw down your tools and walk out, Evan. You can't afford to do that."
"Why can't I?"
"Because you have committed yourself right and left. No man can afford to drop out of the ranks on the eve of a battle. You are not stopping to consider the construction which will be put upon any such hasty action on your part."
"I am not stopping to consider anything, Dick, save the fact that I was evidently expected to connive at a cynical and criminal disregard for the law of the land, the law which, as a member of the bar, I have sworn to uphold and defend. That is enough for me. I don't have to be knocked down and run over before I can realize that it's time to get out of the way."
"You say it's enough for you; it won't be enough for Mr. McVickar," Gantry interposed. "If you could afford to drop out—and I'm not admitting that you can—he couldn't afford to let you." Then, with sudden gravity: "Hadn't you better let me hold up that telegram of yours for a few hours, Evan, until you've had time to cool down and think it over?"
Blount sprang from his chair in a white heat.
"Do you mean to tell me that you are already holding it up?" he demanded.
"I took the liberty of holding it up—temporarily," confessed the traffic man coolly. "There is no harm done. Mr. McVickar is on his way West now, and he will be here in a day or two. Why not kill the message and have it out with him in person when he comes?"
Blount was not to be so easily appeased.
"I won't have my communications tampered with!" he exploded. "If you have given an order to have that telegram held out, you can give another to have it sent immediately!"
"All right," said Gantry; "just as you say." And he made no effort to detain the enraged one who was turning his back and striding away. But after the self-discharged political manager was gone, the traffic man chuckled quietly and turned up a square of paper which had been lying on his desk during the short and belligerent interview.
"It's a nice lay-out," he mused, reading the type-written lines over again, "but the little lady was too fly for you this time, Evan, my boy. She was just prophetess enough to guess where and how you would go off the handle, clever enough to pass me the word to watch the wires after a certain train should get in from Ophir to-day. Great little woman, that. I believe she figures out more than half of the fine moves in the Honorable Senator's game, though this particularly fine move of sending Hathaway to touch a match to Evan's little powder-keg is one that I don't begin to understand." And he folded the telegram and carefully put it away in his pocket-book.
Evan Blount walked three squares beyond the Inter-Mountain Hotel before he had cooled down sufficiently to determine what to do next. As it chanced, the cooling-down process had led him to the door of the public garage patronized by his father. That thought of flying to Patricia for counsel and comfort was still with him, but it was over-shadowed by a more militant desire to fight somebody; to go to his father and tell him how completely and successfully he had plotted with the vice-president to humiliate a son whose only offence was a decent regard for honor and uprightness.
Acting upon the impulse of the moment, he went in and asked if any of Senator Blount's cars were in the city. There was one—the big roadster; and Blount's decision was taken instantly. On that first day at Wartrace Hall his father had tried to give him one of the three motor-cars outright, and when he had refused to take it as a gift, a compromise had been made by which he was under promise to use any one of the machines he could get hold of when the need arose. Accordingly, a few minutes later he was behind the steering-wheel of the fast roadster, picking his way through the traffic-burdened city streets and pointing straight for the country road leading north to the sage-brush hills.
Now, among its many attractions, motoring numbers—from the driver's point of view—this: that it effectually sweeps the brain of all other cares and distractions, sundry and several, since one may not drive a high-powered car at speed and successfully think of anything but the driving. Blount reached the entrance to the cottonwood-shaded avenue at Wartrace Hall just before the dinner hour; and he was so far recovered from the attack of righteous indignation that he was able to meet his father and the others with a fair degree of equanimity. In the back part of his mind, however, he held the fighting ultimatum in suspense. In the course of the evening he would make his opportunity and have it out, once for all, with the master plotter. So much he determined while he was dressing for dinner. But the course of events is sometimes a most unmalleable thing, as he was presently to learn.
At the dinner-table it was the professor who monopolized the conversation, holding forth learnedly and dictatorially upon matters pertaining solely to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the talk to approach nearer than several million years to the twentieth century. And at the dispersal—only there was no dispersal—the senator took his turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room and persuading Patricia to go to the piano.
The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his brain bided his time. He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was still outweighing the lesser. Further along, when Miss Anners had played herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination. But, in spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.
The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the bamboo portières he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should. Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But when his patience was finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo portières aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It was Patricia, and she was alone.
"I thought perhaps I should find you here," she said, taking the easy chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn. "Did we bore you to death with the Pliocenes?"
"Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But since I hadn't remembered to have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods."
"Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for daddy's sake I do try to. But for us who are living to-day there are so many problems of critically vital importance—problems that the pterodactyls never knew anything about."
"I know," returned the young man, half-absently. "I am up against one of them, right now, and I don't know how to solve it."
"Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her tone was personal rather than conventional.
"It will not only bear telling; it demands to be told to some one whose sense of right and wrong has not been drawn and quartered and flayed alive until it has no longer life or breath left with which to protest," and thereupon he told her circumstantially all that had befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the wrecked train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of the lumber magnate's attempt at corruption, of which he suppressed nothing but the fact that her father's name appeared in Mr. Hathaway's list of share-holders. When he had made an end, her eyes were shining, though whether with quickened sympathy or indignation he could not determine.
"What did you do?" she asked, referring to the incident of the afternoon.
"I didn't do half enough!" he fumed. "I'm afraid I let Hathaway escape without being told plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable scoundrel he is. When he edged out of the door, he was still telling me to take my time to think it over, and was indicating the way in which I might communicate my consent without committing anybody. I made a mistake in not firing him bodily!"
Miss Anners was tapping one daintily shod foot on the tiled hearth.
"You made your greatest mistake in the very beginning, Evan," she said decisively. "You should have made a confidant of your father."
"I did try to," he protested. "Everything was all right until this political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr. McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I could really do something toward bringing about a better understanding."
"And now you believe you can't?—that it is impossible?"
"Not wholly impossible, I suppose. But the 'great game' seems to be everything in this benighted commonwealth, and everybody plays it—my father, his wife, the railroad officials, and the politicians. Surely you wouldn't say that I should have let father put me on the State ticket as a candidate, knowing—as I could not help knowing—that I would be expected to carry out the designs of the machine regardless of right and wrong?"
"Certainly not," was the quick reply, "not if you were convinced that the motive—your father's motive—was unworthy. But if you have been telling me the truth, and all the truth, I should say that you didn't stop to inquire what his motive was."
"What was the use of inquiring?" he demanded moodily. "He is the boss, and he would have used the machine to put me into office as attorney-general. In other words, I should have owed my election, not to the will and selection of the people, but to the will of one man, and that man my nearest kinsman; a man who is, beyond all question of doubt, working hand in glove with all the trickery and double-dealing practised by the corporations. Under such conditions, would it have been possible for me to accept and to administer the office without fear or favor?"
"I don't know why not," she returned. "Notwithstanding your charge—which merely shows how angry you are—your 'nearest kinsman,' as you call him, would have been the last man in the world to interfere. Wasn't that the very reason he gave you for wanting to put you on the ticket?"
"I know," said Blount, whose mind was beginning to cloud again. "But there are so many other mysteries. We'll say that my father honestly wanted me to stand for the candidacy. But right in the midst of things he conspires with Mr. McVickar to put me into my present unspeakable dilemma."
Her smile was gently reproachful.
"It is my poor opinion, Evan, that you don't half appreciate your father. Worse than that, you don't know him. But that is beside the present mark. What are you going to do?"
"I have already done it. I have wired my resignation to Mr. McVickar, and he will doubtless accept it."
She was looking him fairly in the eyes. "That is the second unwise thing you have done," she remarked. And then: "Evan, there are times when you are sadly in need of a balance-wheel. Don't you know that?"
"I knew it a good while ago. I applied for one once, and it was refused when you said 'No'."
For one who was supposed to be far above and beyond such emotional signallings, she blushed very prettily. Which merely proves that one may be a diplomaed sociologist with a burning zeal for alleviating the miseries of a sodden world, without having parted with the primitive sex impulse.
"I am willing to try to help you now," she said, half hesitating; "if only you won't try to drag me over into the field of sentiment. It was just a bit of boyish rage—fine enough in its way, but foolish—your sending that telegram to Mr. McVickar. Can't you recall it?"
"No; not now."
"Then you must do the next best thing: tell him you have reconsidered."
"But I haven't reconsidered; I can't and won't stand in with the corruption and bribery that is going on all around me!" he objected indignantly.
"Of course you can't; and you mustn't. But the true reformer doesn't drop things and run away. You must stay in and fight—fight harder than you ever have before, Evan. If you can't do it for the sake of the larger right, then you must do it for your own sake. Can't you see the open door before you?"
"I can see and hear and feel when the door is slammed in my face," was the qualifying rejoinder. "How can I go on preaching the gospel of cleanness and fair dealing, when I know that all this crooked work is going on behind my back? What will the people of this State say to me and about me when the crookedness comes to light?"
"Ah!" she said; "that is just where you begin to grow one-sided. You must go on preaching the gospel, but that is only half of the battle. The other half is to be big enough and strong enough and insistent enough to make the thing itself agree with the gospel. I fully believe you lost your best helper when you refused to join hands with your father. You don't believe that, so we'll let it go. You have gone your own way, choosing what seemed to you to be the better opportunity. Evan, you can't turn back; you've simply got to go on and wring success out of apparent failure!"
Blount drew a deep breath and sat up in his chair. There was no mistaking the light in Patricia's eyes now; the pure flame of which it was the visible radiance is the torch which has kindled the beacon fires on all the heights since the world began.
"If I had only my own people—the railroad people—to knock down and drag out," he was beginning, but she broke in warmly:
"You think you have your father against you, too; I don't believe it, but you do. Very well; then you must compel him, as well as the others. Be a big man, Evan; be the biggest man in the State until you have proved that one man with a righteous cause is better than ten thousand without it."
Blount got up and stood with his back to the dying embers of the tiny fire, and if he put his hands behind him it was because the passionate impulse to break down all the barriers was twitching in every fibre of him.
"Patricia, girl, I wonder if you know what you have done to me? I drove out here this evening utterly discouraged and disheartened; bitter and angry, and ready to throw the whole thing up and go away. You've changed all that—you, you know; just you. Oh, girl, girl! if I could only have you beside me to give me my battle-word!"
She had her slender fingers locked over one knee and her eyes were downcast.
"Now you are tempting me," she said slowly; "and—and it isn't fair. You know my weakness and passion to help. You mustn't tempt me, Evan."
What he would have said, with what eager pleadings he would have pressed the advantage gained by his appeal for the larger help, is not to be here set down. For at that moment the bamboo door curtains parted to admit the small house-mistress.
"You two!" she scolded with light-hearted austerity. And then to Evan: "Don't you know that we are keeping country hours here at Wartrace now? The professor will be up and calling for the car at six o'clock, and it's past midnight. Shame on you! Run away and get your beauty sleep—both of you!"