AT SHONOHO INN
Evan Blount's interview with the venerable chief justice was not at all what he had imagined it would be. To begin with, he found it blankly impossible to take the attitude he had meant to take—namely, that of a conscientious member of the bar, rigorously ignoring all the little cross-currents of human sympathy and the affections.
Almost at once he found himself telling his story incident by incident to the kindly old man who was figuring rather as a father confessor than as a judge and a legal superior. When it was done, and the chief justice had gone thoughtfully over the mass of evidence, Blount saw no thunder-cloud of righteous indignation gathering upon the judicial brow. Nor was Judge Hemingway's comment in the least what he had expected it would be.
"I can not commend too highly your prudence and good judgment in bringing these papers to me, Mr. Blount," was the form the comment took. "Your position was a difficult one, and not one young man in a hundred would have been judicious enough to choose the conservative middle path you have chosen. The fanatic would have rushed into print, and the vast majority would have weakly compromised with conscience. It is a source of the deepest satisfaction to me, as your father's friend, to find that you have done neither."
"As my father's friend?" echoed Blount.
"Yes, just that, Mr. Blount. There is an appreciation which transcends the commonplace things of life, and I don't know which is worthier of the greater admiration, your courage in coming to me, or your father's single-heartedness in urging you to do it after he had learned the purport of these papers. Yet this is what I should have expected of David Blount as I know him. Men say of him that he has sometimes wielded his tremendous political power regardless of the law and of other men's rights. But in the field of pure ethics, in the exercise of the high and holy duty which is laid upon the man who has become a father, I should look to find your father doing precisely what he has done. I assure you that it is not without reason that many of his fellow citizens call him most affectionately the 'Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"
"But the consequences!" gasped the unwilling informer. "His name in those affidavits!"
The chief justice was nodding slowly.
"Without doubt a great crime has been committed, and a still greater one is contemplated. We shall take prompt action to defeat the contemplated crime at the polls next Tuesday, rest assured of that. But at the same time, let me say a word for your comfort: these papers came to you from the hands of a criminal, and that particular criminal had—as I am well informed—every reason to be vindictively enraged against your father. I am sure you are too good a lawyer to fail to see the point. If this man Gryson, in 'getting even,' as he expressed it to you, has added perjury to his other crimes—But we need not follow the suggestion any further at this time. Be hopeful, Mr. Blount, as I am. Leave these matters with me, and go and be as good a son as he deserves to my old friend David."
Evan Blount left the venerable presence in the judges' chambers of the Capitol with a heart strangely mellowed, and with a feeling of relief too great to be measured. At last, without compromise, and equally without the slightest concession to the natural human passion for vindication, the momentous step had been taken. Whatever might come of it, there would be no daggerings from an outraged conscience, no remorse for an unworthy passion impulsively yielded to. Also, with the rolling of the terrible burden to other and entirely competent shoulders there came a sense of freedom that was almost jubilant; and under the promptings of this new light-heartedness he was able to make a reasonably cheerful fourth at the café dinner-table a little later.
Oddly enough, as he thought, Patricia was also cheerful, though she vanished with Mrs. Honoria to the private suite shortly after the adjournment to the mezzanine lounge. Past this, after the father and son had smoked their cigars in man-like silence for a time, Mrs. Honoria, coated and hatted as if to go out, came back to sit near the balustrade, looking down upon the kindling lobby activities. Shortly after her coming the senator rose to go. Instantly his wife sprang up to walk with him to the head of the great stair.
"The time has come?" she asked quickly.
"I reckon it has, little woman."
"I wish I might be there to see," she said softly. And then, whipping a packet of papers from under her street-coat: "Take these. When you see what they are, you'll know why I haven't given them to you before this. As long as you didn't know anything about it, you could tell Evan the simple truth—that you didn't have them."
The Honorable David pocketed the papers without looking at them.
"I suspected you—or, rather, young Collins—quite a little spell ago," he said with imperturbable good nature. "I couldn't have done it myself; I reckon no right-minded man could have done it, but—"
"—But women have no conscience," she finished for him. "I hadn't in this instance. There was too much at stake with a firebrand like Evan to deal with. Don't be too good-natured, David—to-night, I mean. You know that is your failing when you have a man down. But to-night you must make the man pay the price. That's all, I think. I'm going back to Evan now to see if I can't make him talk to me. That is the one thing I have seldom been able to do thus far."
If Blount was a little surprised when the small plotter came back to take the chair recently vacated by his father, he was generous enough not to show it. The huge sense of relief was still with him, and its mellowing influence made him smile leniently when she said: "I want to be reasoned with, Evan. I have just let your father persuade me that a certain thing he is about to do is perfectly safe, when I am afraid it isn't."
"Since he is undertaking to do it, it's safe enough, you may be sure," he replied at random.
"Then you know what it is?"
"Oh, no; he didn't tell me where he was going. But on general principles, you know, I think he can be trusted to take care of himself. He is a many-sided man, Mrs. Blount. You are his wife, but I have sometimes found myself wondering if, after all, you know him as he really is."
"Perhaps I don't," she agreed readily enough. "But I do know his absolute fearlessness, at least. That's why I'm a little nervous just now."
Blount took the alarm at once, as she hoped he would.
"You mean that he is really going into danger of some sort?" he demanded.
She nodded. "He is going to meet a man who is—well, he is a big man with many of the same qualities that your father has. But down at the very bottom of him there is a quality that even your father doesn't suspect. Have you ever seen a cornered rat, Evan?"
Blount had got upon his feet and was buttoning his coat.
"I don't know how much or how little you know about what has taken place this afternoon, Mrs. Blount," he broke out hastily, "but I can tell you this much: I am my father's son now, whatever I have been in the past, and if he is in danger, my place is with him. Tell me where he has gone."
The little lady's eyes were demurely downcast. "I shouldn't dare tell you that, but—but perhaps I might show you. I didn't promise not to—not to follow him," she returned with exactly the proper shade of half-frightened reluctance.
"Is it far?" he asked.
"Y-yes; we should have to drive."
"Excuse me for a minute or two," he said abruptly, and, making a bolt for the elevator, he was back almost within the limit named with a top-coat for himself and a driving-wrap for his companion. "I broke into your suite and made Patricia give me the wrap," he explained. "If it isn't what you want, I'll try again."
"It will do nicely," she told him; and together they went down the broad marble stair to the ground-floor.
"Do we take a cab?" he asked, when they reached the sidewalk.
"No; it's only a short walk to the garage, and we can take the touring-car."
"I'm entirely in your hands," he rejoined; and then: "Perhaps you'd better take my arm. We can make quicker time that way."
The small plotter's eyes were dancing when she slipped her hand under his arm. In a career which had not been entirely devoid of excitement, Mrs. Honoria had rarely found men difficult. But this particular young man was proving himself to be the easiest among many.
At the garage Blount asked for the family touring-car, more than half-expecting to be told that his father had taken it. The garage man nodded and laughed. "You can have it, but you came within an ace of losing out," he said. "The senator was just here, and he was going to take it, but he changed his mind when I told him the big roadster was in."
Blount made no comment, and when the car was ready he asked his companion where she would ride.
"In front, with you," was the quick reply; and when they were placed she gave him his running orders. "Slip out of the city by the quietest streets you can find and take the Quaretaro road," she directed, and he obeyed in silence, holding the speed down until they had left the capital behind them and were bowling along under the stars on the fine boulevarded county road.
"Do we take it easy or the other way?" he asked, speaking for the first time since they had left the town garage.
"You may drive as fast as you like until we come to the hills," he was told; and with this permission Blount let the motor out and speedily put the fifteen miles of the straightaway road to the rear.
"Is it Wartrace?" he inquired, when the touring-car was breasting the 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.