THE LIEGEMAN
Evan Blount drove himself back to the capital in the swift roadster the following morning, and there was no opportunity for further confidential speech with Patricia before he left. But with the new day had arisen, full-grown, the determination born in the moment of midnight heart-warming and inspiration. To the best of his ability he would live up to the high standard set for him by the woman he loved, not only preaching the gospel of fair dealing, but doing his utmost to make it effective.
With this high purpose singing its song of exaltation in his veins, he drove on past the garage and made an early call at the office of the traffic manager. Gantry was in the midst of his morning mail-opening, but he pushed the desk-load of papers aside when the door swung inward to admit the early visitor.
"Hello, old man! Come back to jar me some more about that telegram?" was his greeting.
Blount shook his head. "No; if you've sent it, well and good. If you haven't, you may pitch it into the waste-basket. I came to talk about something else."
"Good, sound, sensible second thought!" Gantry commented, laughing. Then he took out his pocket-book and passed the suppressed telegram across to Blount. "Here it is; you can do the waste-basket act yourself. I couldn't let you commit hara-kiri without at least trying to get the cutting tool out of your hands. What is the other thing you've got on your mind this early in the morning? It must be a nightmare of some sort, by the look in your eyes."
"It may figure as a nightmare to you, Dick, before we're through with it. I'll make it short. You know what I have been doing—what I supposed I was hired to do—assuring everybody right and left that we were going into this campaign with clean hands?"
"I know," admitted the traffic manager, developing a sudden interest in the figures of the rug at his feet.
"I have been doing this in a business way at my office up-town, in season and out of season, and night before last, at Ophir, I did it publicly. As the campaign progresses, I shall doubtless put myself on record many times to the same effect."
"Good man!" applauded Gantry, striving to drag the talk down to some less portentous altitude. "I'm sure we need all the whitewashing anybody can give us."
"That is just the point I have come to make," Blount went on gravely. "It mustn't be merely a coat of whitewash, Dick; it has got to be the real thing, this time. I began by firing the 'little brothers,' as you called them, but I sha'n't stop at that; I mean to go higher up if I am compelled to. I am here this morning to ask you to give me your word as a gentleman and my friend that you will not, directly or indirectly, do or cause to be done anything that will make me stand forth as a self-convicted liar before the people of this State. I want you to promise me that you will cut out all the deals, all the briberies, all the bargainings, all the—"
"Oh, say; see here!" protested the man under fire; "you've got the wrong pig by the ear, Evan. I'm not the Transcontinental Railway Company!"
"I know you are not. But, to a greater degree than any other official in the local management, you have Mr. McVickar's confidence. If you don't feel competent to handle the thing on your own responsibility, of course it's your privilege to pass it up to those who have the authority. In that case, I wish to make one point clear: you're the man I'm going to hold up to the rack. I can't afford to spread myself over the entire management, and I don't mean to try. I'm going to look to you, Dick, for the backing of the clean sheet, and I warn you in all soberness that there must be no blots on it; no compromises; no whipping of the devil around the stump."
"Great Scott!" murmured Gantry. "And you're on the pay-rolls, the same as the rest of us! But candidly, as man to man, Evan, the thing can't be done, you know. We've got to play the game; they'll eat us alive if we don't. You needn't figure in it at all; it was a mistake letting Sim Hathaway get to you, and I said so at the time. But your—er—the powers that be said it had to be that way, and I had to let him go and ball you all up. It sha'n't happen again; I can promise you that much, anyway."
Blount caught quickly at the hesitant pause.
"Who were 'the powers that be' in Hathaway's case, Dick?" he inquired.
"I can't tell you that; honestly, I can't, Evan," was the anxious refusal. "Don't ask me."
"All right; then I shall assume that Mr. McVickar was responsible," said Blount calmly, thus proving that he had not taken his degree in the law school for nothing.
"Oh, hold on! You mustn't do that, either!" protested the man who was figuring most unwillingly as the occupant of the witness stand.
"Thank you," returned the postgraduate, with the true Blount smile. "Now I know that it was my father. No; you needn't deny it; I suppose it was for some good reason that this man was sent to teach me how to play the game—as reasons go in practical politics. But we are side-stepping the real issue. I've asked you for a promise: will you give it?"
"I—I can't give it, Evan, and hold my job; that's God's own truth!"
"No; it isn't God's truth—it's the other kind. But that was about what I expected you to say. Now hear my side of it: if you don't clean house—you and the other officials of the company—I shall not only resign; I shall take the field on the other side and tell what I know and why I've thrown up my job. I've been telling everybody that this is to be a campaign of publicity, and by all that is good and great, I shall keep my word, Dick!"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, you wouldn't do that!" ejaculated the traffic man, now thoroughly alarmed. "Land of glory, Evan! you know too much—a great deal too much!"
The young man who knew too much got up and relighted his cigar with a match taken from Gantry's desk box.
"It's up to you," he said, with his hand on the door-knob. "Get into communication with whatever 'powers that be' there are that can give the necessary orders; see to it that the orders are given, and that they are put in the way of being carried out. As God hears me, Dick, I mean what I say: it's a clean sheet, or an exposure that will make a lot of you wish you had never been born. If I have to put the screws on—as I hope and pray I sha'n't—you can bet they'll be put on lawyer-fashion; with evidence that will send a bunch of you to the penitentiary."
"Hold on—one question before you go, Evan!" pleaded Gantry. "I haven't known half the time where I'm at in this latest muddle. Is this another little blind lead of the Honorable Sen—of your father's?"
Blount's smile was as grim as any that Gantry had ever seen on the face of the Honorable David.
"It's against nature for you to play the game straight, isn't it, Dick?" he said in mild reproach. "If you don't know that my father is still the head of the machine, and that the machine has always been for you in the past, I imagine you're the only man in the Sage-Brush State who needs enlightening. No, Gantry; you've got only one man to fight; but you mustn't forget that his name, also, is Blount. Go to it and send me word, and let the first word be that you have scotched the head of this lumber-company snake. That's all for to-day. Good-by."
Notwithstanding the fact that his day's work was still ahead of him, the traffic manager did not attack it when he was left alone. An able man in his calling, and one who had fought his way rapidly by sheer merit and hard work from a clerkship to an official desk, Richard Gantry was still lacking, in a character admirable and most lovable in many ways, the iron that refuses to bend, and—though perhaps in lesser measure—the courage of his ultimate convictions. In addition to these basic weaknesses he owned another—the weakness of the cog which is constrained to turn with the great wheel of which it is a part.
In his heart of hearts Richard Gantry knew that Blount was right; knew that the forlorn-hope fight into which his friend and college classmate had plunged was a struggle to call out all that was best and finest in friendly loyalty. But when he sprang from his chair and began to walk the floor of his private office with his head down and his hands deeply buried in his pockets, he was once more the true corporation liegeman, loyal to his salt, and anxious only to contrive means to an end.
"Confound his picture!" he muttered, "why the devil can't he see that he's got everything to lose and nothing to gain? It's a thousand pities that such a royal good fellow has to turn himself into a wild-eyed, impossible crank! The Lord knows, I'd do anything in reason for him; but I can't let him turn anarchist and blow us all to kingdom come. He's got to be muzzled in some way, and I'll be hanged if I know how it's going to be done."
The pacing monologue paused when the traffic manager stopped at the window and stood looking with unseeing eyes upon the morning bustle of Sierra Avenue. Then he broke out again.
"It's a beautiful tangle—damn' beautiful! Evan says I know that we've got the machine with us; I wish to heaven I did know it, and could be sure of it. That would simplify matters a whole lot. But the vice-president won't say, and he's the one who has been doing all the dickering with the Honorable David. They quarrelled at first; I'd bet every dollar I've got on that. But I more than half-believe they've patched it up now, and I believe it was Mr. McVickar's quick swiping of Evan—jerking him out from under his father's thumb the way he did—that brought on the peace negotiations."
He turned away from the window and resumed the floor-pacing, still wrestling with the deductions.
"By George! I believe I've got hold of the end of the thread at last! The senator is with us, working in the dark, as he always does. And that Hathaway business: that was one of his smooth little side-moves—his or Mrs. Honoria's. He didn't want Evan to get in too deep in the righteousness puddle, and he took that way of letting him get a peek at the real thing. It was overdone, though; horribly overdone. Confound it all! I wish Mr. McVickar would loosen up a little more with me! If he'd tell me a few of the things I ought to know—"
The interruption was the entrance of the boy from the train-despatcher's office with a verbal message. The vice-president, moving westward, had changed his plans and cut out some of his stop-overs. Car "008" would be in on the noon train and would proceed westward, running special, at one o'clock. The despatcher had thought that Mr. Gantry might want to know.
The traffic manager did want to know, and when the boy had ducked out, the knowledge was promptly utilized. A touch of a desk-button brought the stenographer, and Gantry dictated a message. "'Important that I should have conference with you on arrival. Will meet you at train at twelve-three.' Send that to Mr. McVickar over the despatcher's wire, and ask Gilkey to rush it," he directed, and the shorthand man went to do it.
"Now, Mr. Evan Anarchist Blount!" said Gantry, apostrophizing the late disturber of his peace, "now we'll find out just where we're at and how big a rope it's going to take to snub you down," and thereupon the desk buzzer rattled again, and Mr. Richard Gantry squared himself for his forenoon's work.
At the moment of his apostrophizing Blount was opening his mail in the Temple Court office, and lamenting, as a loyal friend might, the necessity for the recent clubbing into line of so fine a fellow as Dick Gantry. But the mail-opening plunged him once more into the political actualities. There were letters from all over the State, and among them three invitations from widely separated cities, all based upon the newspaper reports of his Ophir speech. It seemed to be plainly evident that the "campaign-of-education" idea was striking a popular chord, and the proponent of the idea saw what a miraculous opportunity was offering for the railroad if only the "powers" that Gantry had refused to name were broad enough and high-minded enough to seize it.
After a day and an evening well filled with detail, Blount went to the station to take the nine-thirty west-bound, since the first of the three speaking engagements—all of which had been promptly accepted by wire—lay in that direction. On the platform, whither he went to consult the bulletin-board, he found Gantry.
"Your train is half an hour late," said the traffic man, with a glance for the travelling-bag in Blount's hand. "Didn't they know enough at the hotel to tell you about it?"
"They told me it was on time," said the putative traveller, and he was far enough from suspecting that Gantry himself had arranged to have the inaccurate information given across the counter at the Inter-Mountain, so that he might be sure of an uninterrupted half-hour with Blount before he should leave the city.
"Ump!" said the traffic manager, "I've got to wait for it, too. One of my men is coming in on it. Let's go up to the office. It's pleasanter there."
Together they climbed the stair to the second floor of the station building, and Gantry unlocked the door of his private room and turned on the lights.
"Feeling any more humane than you did this morning?" he inquired genially, after he had opened his desk and found a box of cigars.
"I haven't been feeling otherwise since—well, let's say since midnight last night," countered Blount laughing.
"Why midnight?"
"That was about the time when I made up my mind definitely to stay in the fight."
"Then you are still meaning to go ahead on the lines you laid down this morning?"
"If I wasn't, I shouldn't be here to take the train for the rally at Angora to-morrow night."
Gantry smoked in silence for a little time. Then he said: "You can't do it, Evan. It's fine and glorious and heart-breaking, and all that; but you can't do it."
"I can, and I will!"
"I say you can't. I know a good bit more now than I knew this morning!"
"Catalogue it," said Blount tersely.
"Mr. McVickar came in on the noon train to-day, and I had an interview with him."
"That doesn't tell me anything."
Again the traffic manager took time to smoke and to reflect.
"You made some pretty savage threats this morning, Evan; about shoving this thing to the point where the grand juries, Federal and State, could take hold of it. As a lawyer, you know even better than I do what that would mean."
"I told you what it would mean. In the present state of public sentiment it would mean prison sentences for every man of you caught with the goods."
"Yes, for every man of us," said Gantry slowly; "for the railroad man who has given, and for the other man who has taken. Evan, the jails of this State wouldn't be big enough to hold us all."
"I can readily believe you. That is the full weight of the stick with which I am going to club you fellows into decency."
"And you'll let the club fall wherever it may?"
"I've got to do that, Dick; I can't do any less."
For the third time Gantry paused. The train-waiting interval was half gone, and he had been feeling purposefully for the climaxing moment without finding it. But now he decided that it had come.
"In the talk this morning there was some reference made to your father and his attitude in this fight, Evan. Do you remember what was said?"
"Perfectly."
"Well, suppose I should tell you that I know now—what I didn't know certainly then—that when you hit out at us you hit him?"
"You mean that he is with you in this scheme to hoodwink the people?"
"Ask yourself," was the low-toned reply.
"I have asked myself a hundred times, Dick; I've been hoping against hope. I'll be utterly frank with you, as man to man. We've kept pretty obstinately out of the political field, both of us, father and I, since the first day when I told him my views on machine-made government. But from a few little things he has said, I've gathered that he isn't with you; that there has been a quarrel of some kind between him and Mr. McVickar——"
"There was a set-to—a battle royal," Gantry put in. "The last act of it was played to a finish that evening when Mr. McVickar took you down to his car and hired you. But there has been a meeting since. Ask yourself again, Evan. Haven't you had good and sufficient reasons for believing that you are bucking, not only the railroad company, but your own flesh and blood?"
This time it was Blount who took time for reflection. The shot had gone home. He told himself that there were only too many reasons for believing that Gantry was stating the simple fact. None the less, he made a final effort to break down the conclusion that Gantry was relentlessly thrusting upon him.
"In all our talks, Dick—there haven't been very many of them—my father has taken, or seemed to take, a different line. I don't recall anything specific just now, but he has given me the impression that he hasn't much in common with Mr. McVickar and his methods. To hear him talk—"
Gantry smiled. "You know your father very superficially, Evan, if you'll permit me to say so. What the Honorable David Blount says in talk with you or me or anybody outside of the inner circle is a mighty poor foundation upon which to build any idea of what's going on in the back of his head. No—hold on; don't get mad. What I'm trying to tell you is what everybody in the sage-brush hills—save and excepting yourself—knows like a book, and that is that the big boss's moves are all made strictly in the dark. He doesn't let his own right hand know what the left is doing. That's the secret of his absolutely Czarish power, I think."
The shriek of a distant locomotive whistle floated in through the open window at Blount's back and he got up stiffly.
"That's my train coming," he said. And then: "Tell me plainly, Dick: you brought me up here to throw a final brick—a bigger one than you have yet thrown—and I know it. What did Mr. McVickar tell you to-day that will make my job harder than I am already finding it?"
Gantry turned his head, refusing to meet the straightforward gaze of the questioner.
"You intimated this morning that you would go at it lawyer-fashion, Evan," he said; "which means, I suppose, that you would get the evidence on us. You can do it; the Lord knows, there's plenty of it to be had. But when you pull out one set of props the whole thing will come down. We haven't any of us been careful enough about what we put in writing—not even your father."
Blount staggered as if the words had been a blow.
"You're trying to tell me that my father would be involved in the disclosures you fellows might drive me to make?" he demanded, and his voice was husky.
Gantry was still looking away. "There always has to be an intermediary—you know that. We can't do business direct with these—with the people who have something to sell. You can draw your own inferences, Evan. I didn't send Hathaway to you; I sent him to your father."
The train was thundering into the station and Blount picked up his hand-bag and went out, stumbling blindly in the unlighted passage at the stair-head. And in the private office behind him the traffic manager was crushing his dead cigar in his clenched hand and staring fixedly at the square of darkness framed by the open window.