THE RANK AND FILE
Considerably to his surprise, and no less to his satisfaction, the newly appointed "division counsel," as his title ran, was not required to take over the old legal department offices in the second story of the station building, where all the other offices of the company were located. Instead, he was directed to fit up a suite of rooms in Temple Court, the capital's most pretentious up-town sky-scraper, and there was something more than a hint that the item of first cost would not be too closely scrutinized.
It was the vice-president himself, writing from Chicago, who authorized the new departure and loosened the purse strings. "Don't be afraid of spending a little money," wrote the great man. "Make your up-town headquarters as attractive as may be, and arrange matters with Ackerton so that your office will not be burdened with too much of the routine legal work. A successful legal representative will be a good mixer—as I am sure you are—and will extend the circle of his acquaintance as rapidly and as far as possible. Your appointment will be fully justified when you have made your up-town office a place where the good citizens of the capital and the State can drop in for a cordial word with the company's spokesman."
Acting upon this suggestion, Blount opened the Temple Court headquarters at once and threw himself energetically into the indicated field. Ackerton, a technical expert with a needle-like mind and the State code at his fingers'-ends, was left in charge of the working offices in the railroad building, with instructions to apply to his chief only when he needed specific advice.
At the up-town headquarters, Blount gave himself wholly to the pleasant task of making friends. With a good store of introductions upon which to make a beginning, and with the open-handed, whole-souled camaraderie of the West to help, the list of acquaintances grew with amazing rapidity. For the three or four weeks after Mrs. Blount had whisked the Annerses away to Wartrace Hall and the habitat of the Megalosauridæ, the newly appointed "social secretary" for the railroad, as Honoria had dubbed him, met all comers joyously and accepted all invitations, never inquiring whether they were extended to his father's son, to the railroad company's legal chief, or to Evan Blount in his proper person.
During this social interval he saw little of his father, though he was still occupying his share of the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain. Part of the time, as he knew, the Honorable Senator was at Wartrace Hall, looking after his mammoth ranch, and helping to entertain the visitors from
Massachusetts. But now and again the father came and went; and occasionally there was a dinner à deux in the hotel café, with a little good-natured raillery from the senator's side of the table.
"Got you chasing your feet right lively in the social merry-go-round these days, haven't they, son? Like it, as far as you've gone?" said the ex-cattle-king one evening when Evan had come down in evening clothes, ready to go to madam the governor's wife's strictly formal "informal" a little later on.
"It's all in the day's work," laughed the younger man. "I shall need all the 'pull' I can get a little later on, sha'n't I?"
"I shouldn't wonder if you did, son; I shouldn't wonder if you did. And I reckon you're doing pretty good work, too, mixing and mingling the way you do. Was it McVickar's idea, or your own—this sudden splash into the social water-hole?"
"I don't mind telling you that it is a part of the new policy," returned the social splasher, still smiling. "We are out to make friends this time; good, solid, open-eyed friends who will know just what we are doing and why we are doing it."
"H'm," mused the senator, "so publicity's the new word, is it?"
"Yes; publicity is the word. The Gordon people say they are going to show us up; there won't be anything to show up when the time comes. We are going to beat them to the billboards."
The grizzled veteran of a goodly number of political battles put down his coffee-cup; he was still old-fashioned enough to drink his coffee in generous measure with the meat courses.
"You can't do the circus act—ride two horses at once and do the same stunt on both, son," he remarked gravely. "If you're really going to put the saddle and bridle on the publicity nag, you've got to turn the other one out of the corral and let it go back to the short-grass."
"It is already turned out," asserted the young man, not affecting to misunderstand. "We neither buy votes nor spend illegitimate money in this campaign."
The stout assertion was good as far as it went; the new division counsel made it and believed it. But on his way to the governor's mansion, a little later, he could not help wondering if he had been altogether candid in making it. The offices in the up-town sky-scraper were not exclusively a railroad social centre where the disinterested voter could come and have the facts ladled out to him without fear or favor on the part of the ladler. They had come to be also a rallying-point for a heterogeneous crowd of ward-workers, wire-pullers, and small politicians, most of whom were anxious to be employed or retained as henchmen. Some of these "stretcher men," as Blount contemptuously called them, had been employed in past campaigns; others were still the beneficiaries of the railroad, holding pay-roll places which Blount acutely suspected were chiefly sinecures.
Latterly, this contingent of strikers and heelers had been greatly augmented, and it was beginning to make its demands more emphatic. A dozen times a day Blount had the worn phrase, "nothing for nothing," dinned into his ears, and he was beginning to harbor a suspicion that his office had been made a dumping-ground for all the other departments.
Seeing Gantry at madam the governor's lady's reception, Blount took an early opportunity of cornering the traffic manager in one of the otherwise deserted smoking-dens, and when he had made sure there were no eavesdroppers plunged at once into the middle of things.
"See here, Dick," he began, "you fellows downtown are making my office a cesspool, and I won't stand for it. Garrigan, that saloon-keeper in the second ward, came up to-day to ask for a free ticket to Worthington and return; and when I pinned him down he admitted that you'd sent him to me."
"I did," said Gantry, grinning. "Why otherwise have we got a post-graduate, double-certificated political manager, I'd like to know?"
Blount dropped into a chair and felt in his pockets for his cigar-case.
"I guess we may as well fight this thing to a finish right here and now, Dick," he said coolly. "I'm not chief vote buyer for the Transcontinental Company—I'm not any kind of a vote buyer."
"Who said you were?" retorted the traffic manager.
"It says itself, if I am supposed to cut the pie and hand out pieces of it to these grub-stakers that you and Carson and Bentley and Kittredge are continually sending to me."
This time Gantry's grin was playful, but behind it there was a shrewd flash of the Irish-blue eyes that Blount did not see.
"I guess the company would be plenty willing to furnish a few small pies for really hungry people, if you think you need them to go along with your Temple Court office fittings," he returned.
"Ah?" said Blount calmly, giving the exclamation the true Boston inflection. "You are either too shrewd or not quite shrewd enough, Dick. You covered that up with a laugh, so that I might take it as a joke if I happened to be too thin-skinned to take it in disreputable earnest. Let us understand each other; we are fighting squarely in the open in this campaign; publicity is the word—I have Mr. McVickar for my authority. Anybody who wants to know anything about the railroad company's business in this State can learn it for the asking, and at first-hand. Secrecy and all the various brands of political claptrap that have been admitted in the past are to be shown the door. This is the intimation that was made to me: wasn't it made to you?"
Gantry did not reply directly to the direct demand. On the other hand, he very carefully refrained from answering it in any degree whatsoever.
"You have your job to hold down and I have mine," he rejoined. "What you say goes as it lies, of course; but just the same, I shouldn't be too righteously hard on the little brothers, if I were you."
"If by the 'little brothers' you mean the pie-eaters, I'm going to fire them out, neck and crop, Richard. They make me excessively weary."
Gantry's playful mood fell away from him like a cast-off garment.
"I don't quite believe I'd do that, if I were you, Evan. There are pie-eaters on both sides in every political contest, and while they can't do any cause any great amount of good, they can often do a good bit of harm. I wouldn't be too hard on them, if I were you."
"What would you do?—or, rather, what did you do when you were managing the State campaign two years ago?" inquired Blount pointedly.
"I cut the pie," said the traffic manager simply.
"In other words, you let this riffraff blackmail you and, incidentally, put a big black mark against the company's good name."
"Oh, no; I wouldn't put it quite that strong. Not many of these little fellows ask for money, or expect it. A free ride now and then in the varnished cars is about all they look for."
"But you can't give them passes under the interstate law," protested the purist.
"Not outside of the State, of course. But inside of the State boundaries it's our own business."
"You mean it was our own business, previous to the passage of the State rate law two years ago," corrected Blount.
"It is our own business to this good day—in effect. That part of the law has been a complete dead-letter from the day the governor signed it. Why, bless your innocent heart, Evan, the very men who argued the loudest and voted the most spitefully for it came to me for their return tickets home at the end of the session. Of course, we kept the letter of the law. It says that no 'free passes' shall be given. We didn't issue passes; we merely gave them tickets out of the case and charged them up to 'expense.'"
"Faugh!" said Blount, "you make me sick! Gantry, it's that same childish whipping of the devil around the stump by the corporations—an expedient that wouldn't deceive the most ignorant voter that ever cast a ballot—it's that very thing that has stirred the whole nation up to this unreasonable fight against corporate capital. Don't you see it?"
Gantry shrugged his shoulders.
"I guess I take the line of the least resistance—like the majority of them," was the colorless reply. "When it comes down to practical politics—"
"Don't say 'practical politics' to me, Dick!" rasped the reformer. "We've got the strongest argument in the world in the fact that the present law is an unfair one, needing modification or repeal. We mustn't spoil that argument by becoming law-breakers ourselves and descending to the methods of the grafters and the machine politicians the country over. If you have been sending these pie-eaters to me, stop it—don't do it any more. I have no earthly use for them; and they won't have any use for me after I open up on them and tell them a few things they don't seem to know, or to care to know."
"I don't believe I'd do anything brash," Gantry suggested mildly, and he was still saying the same thing in diversified forms when Blount led the way back to the crowded drawing-rooms.
Dating from this little heart-to-heart talk with the traffic manager, Blount began to carry out the new policy—the starvation policy, as it soon came to be known among the would-be henchmen. The result was not altogether reassuring. The first few rebuffs he administered left him with the feeling that he was winning Pyrrhic victories; it was as if he were trying to handle a complicated mechanism with the working details of which he was only theoretically familiar. There were wheels within wheels, and the application of the brakes to the smallest of them led to discordant janglings throughout the whole.
Many of the small grafters were on the pay-rolls of the railroad company, and Blount was soon definitely assured of what he had before only suspected—that they were merely nominal employees given a pay-roll standing so that there might be an excuse for giving them free transportation, and a retainer in the form of wages, if needful.
In many cases the ramifications of the petty graft were exasperatingly intricate. For example: one Thomas Gryson, who was on the pay-rolls as a machinist's helper in the repair shops, demanded free transportation across the State for eight members of his "family." Questioned closely, he admitted that the "family" was his only by a figure of speech; that the relationship was entirely political. Blount promptly refused to recommend the issuing of employees' passes for the eight, and the result was an immediate call from Bentley, the division master mechanic.
"About that fellow Gryson," Bentley began; "can't you manage some way to get him transportation for his Jonesboro crowd? He is going to make trouble for us if you don't."
Blount was justly indignant. "Gryson is on your pay-roll," he retorted. "Why don't you recommend the passes yourself, on account of the motive-power department, if he is entitled to them?"
"I can't," admitted the master mechanic. "I am held down to the issuing of passes to employees travelling on company business only. We can stretch it a little sometimes, of course, but we can't make it cover the whole earth."
"Neither can I!" Blount exploded. "Let it be understood, once for all, Mr. Bentley, that I am not the scape-goat for all the other departments! I have cut it off short; I am not recommending passes for anybody."
"But, suffering Scott, Mr. Blount, we've simply got to take care of Tom Gryson! He's the boss of his ward, and he has influence enough to turn even our own employees against us!"
"Influence?" scoffed the young man from the East. "How does he acquire his influence? It is merely another illustration of the vicious circle; you put into his hands the club with which he proceeds to knock you down. Let me tell you what I'm telling everybody; if we want a square deal, we've got to set the example by being square. And, by Heavens, Mr. Bentley, we're going to set the example!"
The master mechanic went away silenced, but by no means convinced; and a week later Gryson, who in appearance was a typical tough, and who in reality was a post-graduate of the hard school of violence and ruffianage obtaining in the lawless mining-camps of the Carnadine Hills, sauntered into Blount's office with his cigar at the belligerent angle and an insolent taunt in his mouth.
"Well, pardner, we got them dickie-birds o' mine over to Jonesboro, after so long a time, and no thanks to you, neither. I just blew in to tell you that I'm goin' to hit you ag'in about day after to-morrow, and if you don't come across there's goin' to be somethin' doin'; see?"
Blount sprang from his chair and forgot to be politic.
"You needn't come to me the day after to-morrow, or any other time," he raged. "I'm through with you and your tribe. Get out!"
After Gryson, muttering threats, had gone, the young campaign manager had an attack of moral nausea. It seemed such a prodigious waste of time and energy to traffic and chaffer with these petty scoundrels. Thus far, every phase of the actual political problem seemed to be meanly degrading, and he was beginning to long keenly for an opportunity to do some really worthy thing.
Notwithstanding, his ideals were still unshaken. He still clung to the belief that the corporation, which was created by the law and could exist only under the protection of the law, must, of necessity, be a law-abiding entity. It was manifestly unfair to hold it responsible for the disreputable political methods of those whom it could never completely control—methods, too, which had been forced upon it by the necessity, or the fancied necessity, of meeting conditions as they were found.
As if in answer to the wish that he might find the worthier task, it was on this day of Gryson's visit that Blount was given his first opportunity of entering the wider field. A letter from a local party chairman in a distant mining town brought an invitation of the kind for which he had been waiting and hoping. He was asked to participate in a joint debate at the campaign opening in the town in question, and he was so glad of the chance that he instantly wired his acceptance.
That evening, at the Inter-Mountain café dinner hour, he found his father dining alone and joined him. In a burst of confidence he told of the invitation.
"That's good; that's the real thing this time, isn't it?" was the senator's even-toned comment. "Gives you a right nice little chance to shine the way you can shine best." Then: "That was one of the things McVickar wanted you for, wasn't it?—speech-making and the like?"
"Why, yes; he intimated that there might be some public speaking," admitted the younger man.
"Well, what-all are you going to tell these Ophir fellows when you get over there, son?" asked the veteran quizzically. "Going to offer 'em all free passes anywhere they want to go if they'll promise to vote for the railroad candidates?"
"Not this year," was the laughing reply. "As I told you a while back, we've stopped all that."
"You have, eh? I reckon that will be mighty sorry news for a good many people in the old Sage-brush State—mighty sorry news. You really reckon you have stopped it, do you, son?"
"I not only believe it; I am in a position to assert it definitely."
"McVickar has told you it was stopped?"
The newly fledged political manager tried to be strictly truthful.
"I have had but the one interview with Mr. McVickar, but in that talk he gave me to understand that my recommendations would be given due consideration. And I have said my say pretty emphatically."
The senator's smile was not derisive; it was merely lenient.
"Sat on 'em good and hard, did you? That's right, son; don't you ever be afraid to say what you mean, and to say it straight from the shoulder. That's the Blount way, and I reckon we've got to keep the family ball rolling—you and I. Don't forget that, when you're making your appeal to those horny-handed sons of toil over yonder at Ophir. Give 'em straight facts, and back up the facts with figures—if you happen to have the figures. When do you pull out for the mining-camp?"
"To-night, at nine-thirty. I can't get there in time if I wait for the morning train." Then, dismissing the political topic abruptly: "What do you hear from Professor Anners?"
"Oh, he's having the time of his life. I got him a State permit, and scraped him up a bunch of pick-and-shovel men, and he is digging out those fossil skeletons by the wagon-load."
"And Miss Anners?" pursued Patricia's lover.
"I shouldn't wonder if she was having the time of her life, too. I've given her the little four-seated car to call her own while she is out here, and she and Honoria go careering around the country—breaking the speed limit every minute in the day, I reckon."
"I'm glad you are giving her a good time," said Evan, and he looked glad. Then he added regretfully: "I wish I could get a chance to chase around a little with them. I have seen almost nothing of them since they came West. I should think Mrs. Blount might bring Patricia down to the city once in a while."
"Well, now! perhaps the young woman doesn't want to come," laughed the senator. "You told me you hadn't got her tag, son, and I'm beginning to believe it's the sure-enough truth. What has she got against you, anyway?"
"Nothing; nothing in the wide world, save that I don't fit into her scheme for her life-work."
The senator was eating calmly through his dessert. "If you hadn't made up your mind so pointedly to dislike Honoria, you might be getting a few tips on that 'career' business along about now, son," he remarked, and Evan was silent—had to be silent. For, you see, he had been charging Patricia's continued absence from the capital to nothing less than spiteful design on the part of his father's wife.
It was at the cigar smoking in the lobby, after the young man had made his preparations for the journey and was waiting for the train-caller's announcement, that the senator said quite casually: "It's too bad you're going out of town to-night, son. Honoria 'phoned me a little spell ago that she and Patricia would be driving down after their dinner to take in the Weatherford reception. You'll have to miss 'em, won't you?"
The announcer was chanting the call for the night train west, and the joint-debater got up and thrust his hand-bag savagely into the hand of the nearest porter.
"Isn't that just my infernal luck!" he lamented. Then: "Give them my love, and tell them I hope they will stay until I get back."
The senator rose and shook hands with the departing debater. "Shall I say that to both of 'em?" he asked, with the quizzical smile which Evan was learning to expect.
"Yes; to both of them, if you like—only I suppose Mrs. Blount will hold it against me. Good-night and good-by. I'll be back day after to-morrow, if the Ophir miners don't mob me."
It was only a few minutes after Evan Blount's train had steamed Ophir-ward out of the Sierra Avenue station that a dust-covered touring-car drew up at the curb in front of the Inter-Mountain, and the same porter who had put Blount's hand-bag into the taxicab opened the tonneau door for two ladies in muffling motor-coats and heavy veils.
The senator met the two late travellers in the vestibule, and while the three were waiting for an elevator a rapid fire of low-toned question and answer passed between husband and wife.
"You got Evan out of the way?" whispered the wife.
The husband nodded. "That was easy. I passed the word to Steuchfield, and he helped out on that—invited Evan to come to Ophir to speak in a joint debate. He left on the night train."
"And Hathaway? Will he be here?"
"He is here. Gantry has turned him down, according to instructions, and he is clawing about in the air, trying to get a fresh hold. I bluffed him; told him he'd have to make his peace with you for something, I didn't know what, before I could talk to him."
Miss Anners was watching the elevator signal glow as the car descended, and the wife's voice sank to a still lower whisper.
"He will be at the Weatherfords'?" she inquired eagerly.
"He is right sure to be; I told him you would be there."
The small plotter nodded approval.
"Give us half an hour to dress, and have the car ready," she directed; and then the senator put the two into the elevator and turned away to finish his cigar.