SWORD-PLAY
It was during this hard-travelling period that Blount saw, with keen regret, the gradual widening of the breach between his father and himself. In their infrequent meetings there was never anything remotely approaching an open rupture; but in a thousand ways the younger man fancied he could see and feel the steady growth of the rift.
That the long arm of the machine of which his father was the acknowledged head was reaching out into all corners of the State, was a fact no longer to be doubted, and that the influences thus set in motion were sinister, he took for granted. Therefore, when it came in his way, he scored the machine frankly, charging it with much of the mischief which had been wrought in the way of arousing public sentiment against the corporations. "The worst in politics joined with the worst elements in capitalized industry," was his platform characterization of the alliances of the past, and he usually added that he was fighting it as every honest man was in duty bound to fight it. But it is hard to fight in the dark. After all was said, he could not help admiring the subtlety of the master brain which was able to control and direct such a complicated piece of human mechanism; direct it so skilfully and cleverly that, though the name of the thing was in everybody's mouth, its workings were so carefully concealed that it was only by the merest chance that he stumbled upon them now and then.
In more than one of the short stop-overs in the capital he had found his father still occupying the private suite at the Inter-Mountain, and now and again there was a meal shared in the more or less crowded café. On such occasions the son leaned heavily upon the public character of the place and carefully steered the table-talk—or thought he did—into innocuous channels. But on a day shortly after the meeting with Gantry in Ophir this desultory programme was broken. Reaching the hotel in the evening after an all-day train journey from Lewiston, Blount found his father waiting for him in the lobby, and when he proposed a café dinner the senator shook his head.
"No, son; not this evening," he said. "I've been feeling sort of set up and aristocratic to-day, and I've just ordered a dinner sent upstairs. I reckon you'll join me?"
The young man was willing enough; more than willing, since he was now ready to say a thing which must be said before he could be prepared to set a time limit upon Gantry—a limit beyond which lay the firing of the fuse and the blowing up of all things mundane.
"Certainly," he agreed. "Give me a few minutes to change my clothes—"
"You look good enough to me just as you are, boy," said the dinner-giver, and he took his son by the arm and walked him to the elevator.
In the private dining-room Blount found the table laid for two, much as if his coming had been pre-figured. He let that go, and for the time the talk was of the doings at Wartrace Hall: of the professor's enthusiastic digging for fossils, of Patricia's keen enjoyment of the life in the open, and—this put with gentle hesitation on the part of the news-bringer—of Mrs. Honoria's growing affection for the young woman whose ambitions reached out toward a sociological career.
"You say Patricia is learning to drive a car?" queried Patricia's lover.
"Best woman driver I ever saw," was the senator's praiseful rejoinder. "Nothing feazes that little girl, and I'm telling you that she can turn the wheels just about as fast as you want to ride."
This was a new aspect of Miss Anners, even to one who knew her as well as Blount thought he knew her, and, lover-like, he found a grain of encouragement in it. Patricia had never cared for the out-of-door things save as they bore upon the hygienic condition of the poor in the great cities. If she had changed in one respect, she might change in another.
"I'm glad to know that," he commented. "She was needing an outlet on that side. There is a good bit of the Puritan in her—all work and no play, you know."
The senator looked out from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "Speaking of work; they're working you pretty hard these days, aren't they, son? If you belonged to my generation instead of your own, you wouldn't be cold-shouldering that young woman out yonder at Wartrace the way you do; not for all the politics that were ever hatched."
"I have my work to do, and Patricia Anners would be the last person in the world to put obstacles in the way of it," returned the son gravely. Then he added: "I wish I could say as much for other people."
The boss shot another keen glance across the table. "Somebody been trying to block you, Evan, boy?" he asked.
Blount met the gaze of the shrewd gray eyes without flinching.
"I don't know of any good reason why we shouldn't be entirely frank with each other, dad," he said, using for the first time since his return to the homeland the old boyhood father-name. "You know, better than any one else, I think, what the stumbling-blocks are, and who is putting them in my way."
"Maybe so; maybe I do," was the even-toned answer. "It happens so, once in a while, that I know a heap of things I can't tell, son." Then: "Has McVickar been calling you down?"
"No one has called me down. But some one, or something, is keeping me out of the real fight. I don't mean that I'm not doing what I set out to do: I've got my own particular abomination by the neck, and I'm about to choke the life out of it. But that is, as you might say, a side issue. The real struggle is going on all around me, but I'm not in it or of it. Everywhere I go there is the same cut-and-dried welcome, the same predetermined enthusiasm. Sometimes it seems as if all the people I meet have been instructed to make things pleasant and easy for me."
The senator's chuckle was barely audible.
"Seems as if I wouldn't find fault with that, if I were you, son," he suggested. "You are like the boy who has found a good piece of skating over a sheet of fine, smooth ice, and takes to complaining because it won't break and let him down into the cold water. You'll get enough of the real thing by and by."
Evan Blount felt his anger rising. He was in precisely the right mood to construe the gentle jest into an admission that his father, failing to make him a cog in one of the wheels of the machine, had gone about in some mysterious way to insulate him—to make it impossible for him to get into the real tide of affairs. But he kept his temper, in a measure, at least.
"I guess it's no use for us to try to get together," he said with a tang of abruptness in his tone. "We are diametrically opposed to each other at every point, you and I, dad. I stand for democracy, the will of the people and its fullest and freest expression. You stand for—"
"Well, son, what do I stand for?" queried the father, and the question was put with a quizzical smile that brought the hot blood boyishly to Blount's cheeks.
"If I should say what all men say—what some of them are frank enough to say even to me—" he stopped short, and then went on with better self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."
"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured rejoinder. "Being on the railroad side, yourself, you can't help feeling sort of hostile at the rest of us, I reckon."
Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his chair.
"There it is again, you see. We can't get together even on a question of admitted fact! Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"
The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've found that out, too, have you?" he commented.
"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn't, dad. There's a thing behind the alliance that cuts deeper than anything else I've had to face."
Once more the deep-set eyes looked out from their bushy penthouses. "Reckon you could give it a name, son?"
"Yes; when you found that I wasn't going to let you run me for the attorney-generalship, you arranged with Mr. McVickar to have me put on the railroad pay-roll. Isn't that the fact?"
"Not exactly," said the senator, and a grim smile went with the qualified denial. "It was sort of the other way round. I reckon McVickar thought he was putting one across on me when he offered you the railroad job and got you to take it."
"I know; that was at first. You and he couldn't come to terms because you—because the machine wanted more than he was willing to give. But afterward there was another meeting and you got together. That part of it was all right, if you see it that way. What broke my heart was the fact that you and he agreed to put me up as a fence behind which all the crookedness and rascality of a corrupt campaign could be screened."
In the pause which followed, a deft waiter slipped in to change the courses. When the man was gone, Blount went on.
"It came mighty near smashing me when I found it out, dad. It wasn't so much the thing itself as it was the thought that you'd do it—the thought that you had forgotten that I was a Blount, and your son."
Again the older man nodded gravely. "How come you to find out, Evan, boy?" he asked.
"It was when Hathaway had been given his chance at me. He opened the cesspool for me, as you meant he should when you sent him to me. From your point of view, I suppose it was necessary that I should be shown. You knew what I was saying and doing; how I was taking it for granted that the railroad was going in clean-handed, and the one ray of comfort in the whole miserable business is the fact that you cared enough to want to give me a glimpse of the real thing that was hiding behind all my brave talk. But I don't think you counted fully upon the effect it would have upon me."
"What was the effect, son?"
"At first, it made me want to throw up the fight and run away to the ends of the earth. It seemed as if I didn't have anybody to turn to. You were in it, and Gantry was in it—and Gantry's superiors and mine. That evening I borrowed one of your cars and drove out to Wartrace. I meant to have it out with you, and then to throw up my hands and quit."
"But you didn't do either one," said the father tentatively.
"No. Nothing went right that day, until just at the last. When I was about to give up and go to bed, Patricia came into the smoking-room. I had to talk to somebody, so I talked to her; told her where I had landed."
"And she advised you to throw up your hands?"
"You don't know Patricia. She put a heart into my body and blood into my veins. What she said to me that night is what has kept me going, dad—what has made me drive this fight for a clean election on the part of the railroad company home to the hilt. I have driven it home. There will be no crooked deals on the part of the railroad company this time."
The senator looked up quickly. "That's a mighty good stout thing to say," he remarked, adding: "I reckon you're not saying it without having the right and proper club hid out somewhere where you can lay hands on it?"
Blount tapped his coat-pocket. "I have the club right here—documentary evidence that will rip this State wide open and send a lot of people to the penitentiary. I've told Gantry to pass the word: a clean sheet, or I go over to the other side and tell what I know. And that brings me to the thing that I've got to say to you, dad—the thing that made me hope I'd find you here to-night. After I'd got my battle-word from Patricia, I had a jolt that was worse than the other. When I pulled the gun on Gantry, he told me that I couldn't shoot without killing you; that you were just as deeply involved as any one of the railroad officials. Is that the truth?"
The senator had pushed his chair back and was burying his hands in his pockets.
"You've come to try to haul me out of the fire?" he inquired, ignoring the direct question.
"I've come to ask you, first, if it is possible for you to stand from under. Can you?"
"Oh, yes; I reckon I could dodge, if I had to."
"Then do it, and do it quickly, dad! As there is a God above us, I'm going to push this thing through to the bitter end. To-morrow morning I shall give Gantry his time limit. If the time goes by, leaving the house-cleaning still undone, I shall keep my promise to the letter. You know, and I know, what will happen after that."
"Yes; I reckon I know," was the half-absent reply.
Blount threw his napkin aside and glanced at his watch.
"I've got to go back to the office and work a while," he said. And then: "I feel better for having had this talk with you, dad. I'm sorry you are finding it necessary to fight me, and a thousand times sorrier that I've got to fight you. But I can't give ground now, and still be a man and your son. Think it over and dodge. It'll break my heart a second time if I have to pull the other fellow's house down and bury you in the wreck."
For some little time after his son had left the table and the private dining-room, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush sat absently toying with his dessert-spoon. When he rose to go out, the battle light in the gray eyes was the signal which not even his most faithful henchmen could always interpret; but it was a signal which all of them knew by sight, and one which many of them feared.