THE SAFE-BLOWER
About the time that Evan Blount was finishing the fourth week of the campaign of education, the senator's wife began to detect signs of country weariness in the eyes of Miss Patricia Anners.
"When you are tired of the out-door bignesses, you have only to say the word," she told the professor's daughter one morning after they had driven to Lost River Canyon and back in the small car. "As you have doubtless discovered, the senator and I live either here or at the capital indifferently during the season, and we shall be only too glad to entertain you in town whenever you feel like going."
To similar proposals made earlier Miss Anners had always returned prompt refusals. But for a week or more some impulse which she had not taken the trouble to analyze seemed to be drawing her toward the city. The mesa roads were just as inviting, and the free pleasures of motoring, in a country where speed restrictions were conspicuous only by their absence, were just as keen. But now Patricia confessed to a restless longing for the sight of city streets and the brabble of city noises.
"Only you mustn't consider us, or me, so much as you do, Mrs. Blount," she protested. "I have a dreadful suspicion that we have already interfered shamefully with your autumn plans. You are simply too kind and too hospitable to admit it."
"You have interfered with nothing," was the ready assurance. "We were not going anywhere, or thinking of going anywhere. No inducement that was ever invented would take the senator away from his own State in a political year, and your coming has been a blessing. But for the good excuse to bring your father out here to the fossil-beds, we should have been mewed up in the Inter-Mountain Hotel from the firing of the opening gun to the day after election. But that isn't what I meant to say. You are tired of so much country; I can read the call of the city in your eyes—and they are very pretty eyes, my dear. Shall I telephone the senator that we are coming in this afternoon to stay a while?"
"I shall be delighted," said Patricia, and the eyes, which were not only pretty but exceedingly apt to tell tales, confirmed the eager assent. Then she added: "Now that daddy has his box of books from the university library, I doubt if he will know that we are gone."
On their first day in the capital Evan was away, but he returned the following morning and Mrs. Blount promptly captured him for a theatre box-party which she was inviting for the same evening. In Mrs. Honoria's orderly scheme Blount was predestined to go, though he was allowed to believe that his acceptance was of free will. Notwithstanding the lapse of time and Mrs. Honoria's uniform kindness, he was still unreasonably prejudiced, and with the prejudice he was now admitting a feeling akin to jealousy. It was evident that Patricia's admiration for his father extended over to his father's wife; and meaning consistently to dislike Mrs. Honoria, he was irrational enough to want Patricia to dislike her, too.
The box-party proved to be a more formal affair than he had anticipated, since it was large enough to fill two of the open dress-circle boxes. Gantry was included, and so were the Weatherfords—father, mother, daughters, and son. These, with the Gordons and a Denver man whose name of Critchett Blount was not quite sure that he caught in the introduction, filled Mrs. Honoria's list. In the seating Blount meant to make sure of having a measurably undisturbed evening with Patricia. But fate, or a designing hostess, intervened, and he found himself cornered between Mrs. Weatherford and her younger daughter, with the square-shouldered "Paramounter" candidate for governor strengthening the barrier which separated him from Miss Anners.
Blount had met Gordon socially a number of times, and in the intervals allowed him by Mrs. Weatherford he was silently studying the face of the big man who, singularly enough, as the student thought, was thus identifying himself publicly as a friend of the boss. True, Blount did not forget his father's warm commendation of Gordon in that earliest political talk on the Quaretaro Canyon road, but that was before the lines had been drawn and the gage of battle thrown down by the allied forces of the machine and the railroad. Now, with the battle drawing to its close, Blount thought that nothing could be more certain than the fact that his father and his father's organization were joining hands with the railroad oligarchy to slaughter Gordon at the polls.
Putting aside the wonder that Gordon should be accepting Mrs. Honoria's hospitality, Blount fell to contrasting the strong, large-featured face of the Mission Hills ranchman with that of Reynolds, the opposition candidate. Though he was himself on the corporation campaigning staff, Blount could not help admitting that the comparison was not favorable to Reynolds. His first impression of the round-faced, portly gentleman who was standing firmly upon what he was pleased to call a platform of law and order—a man who was Gordon's opposite in every feature and characteristic—had been unfavorable. He had been saying to himself, since, that Reynolds's face, in spite of its heavy jaw and prominent eyes, was the face of a time-server.
Another point of difference between the two men counted for much. Reynolds wanted the office, and was spending money liberally to get it, while Gordon had accepted the nomination reluctantly. Throughout the hot campaign he had refused to stump the State for himself or his party, and was said to be holding steadfastly aloof in the bargaining and dickering. Weighing the two men one against the other—Reynolds was sitting in an adjacent box with Kittredge and Bentley and two other railroad officials—Blount admitted a twinge of regret that chance, or his convictions, had made him a partisan of the weaker.
Having been lost in the shuffle, as he expressed it, Blount made the most of these reflective excursions during the period of the box-party captivity. From the rising of the curtain to the going down thereof the Weatherfords, mother and daughter, kept him from exchanging so much as a word with Patricia, whom Gantry was shamelessly monopolizing. But on the short return walk to the hotel, Blount asserted his rights and gave Patricia his arm.
"I think you owe me an abject apology," was the way she began on him, when they had gained such privacy as the crowded sidewalk conferred.
"Consider it made, and then tell me what for," he rejoined, striving, man-fashion, to catch step with her mood.
"For making us leave that dear, delightful, out-of-date, and out-of-place Georgian mansion in the hills and come to town when we want to get a sight of your face."
"If anybody else should say a thing like that, I'd blush and call it a compliment," he retorted. Her near presence seemed to lift the burden he was carrying, and it was good to be light-hearted again, if only for the passing moment.
"It wasn't meant for a compliment," she returned, with the straightforward sincerity which Blount had always been fond of likening to a cup of cold water on a thirsty day. "Consider a moment. You come to me with a really harrowing story of your new experiences, and just as I am beginning to get interested we are interrupted. In the morning, at some perfectly impossible hour, off you go, and we hear no more of you for weeks and weeks. What have you been doing?"
"I have been doing precisely what you told me to do; preaching the gospel of honesty and fair dealing, and trying my level best to make other people practise it."
"You have been successful?" she asked quickly.
"Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended solely upon me. As to the other, I don't know. Sometimes I'm credulous enough to believe that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they say they are, and at other times I'm afraid they are only putting up a bluff to mislead me. Some day, perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go into the 'practical-politics' armory to get my weapons."
There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy available, and she made what seemed to be the most necessary use of it.
"And your father, Evan; are you coming to understand him any better?"
He shook his head despondently. "No; or rather yes. I might say that I am coming to understand him—or his methods—only too well. The only way we can keep from quarrelling now is to banish politics when we are together."
"I am sorry," she said, and the sorrow was emphatic in her tone. "As I have said before, you don't understand him. You are judging him by standards which, however just and true they may be, are peculiarly your own standards. I know you can be broad for others when you try. Can't you be broad for him?"
It was good to hear her defend his father. It was what he would have wished his wife to do. Suddenly there arose within him a huge reluctance to lessen or to weaken in any way her trust in David Blount.
"Let us say that the fault is mine," he interposed hastily. "God forbid that I should be the means of making you think less of him in any respect."
"You couldn't do that, Evan. He is simply a grand old man—the first I have ever known for whom the hackneyed phrase seemed to have been made," she asserted warmly. "If he has faults, I am sure they are nothing more than gigantic virtues—the faults of a man who is too strong and too magnanimous to be little in any respect."
The final half-square lay behind them, and Mrs. Honoria and the senator, Gantry, Gordon and his wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the marriageable daughters, were at the café door waiting for the laggards. Being in no proper frame of mind to enjoy a theatre supper with another Weatherford attack as the possible penalty, Blount reluctantly surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses, and went to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike and democratic lobby.
With Patricia in town the "silver-tongued spellbinder of Quaretaro Mesa," as The Daily Capital called the railroad company's campaign field-officer, would have been glad to evade some of the speaking appointments; but since his engagements had been made some days in advance, he was obliged to go.
On his return to the capital he was delighted to find the party of three still occupying the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain. Arriving on a morning train, he was permitted to make the party of three a party of four at the breakfast-table; and with Patricia sitting opposite he was able to forget the strenuosities for a restful half-hour.
Later, when he went to his offices in the Temple Court Building, the strenuosities reasserted themselves with emphasis. Though he found his desk closed, and was reasonably certain that he had in his pocket the only key that would unlock it, he found his papers scattered in confusion under the roll-top. A touch upon the electric button brought the stenographer from the anteroom.
"Who's been into my desk, Collins?" he demanded, pointing to the confusion and scrutinizing the face of the young man sharply for signs of guilt.
"Goodness gracious! How could anybody get into it when you've got the only key, Mr. Blount?" stammered the clerk. Then he went on, parrot-like: "I've been putting the letters and telegrams through the letter-slit, as you told me to, and I've kept the private office locked."
"Nevertheless it is very evident that somebody has been here," said Blount. Then he had a sudden shock and wheeled shortly upon the stenographer. "Collins, what did you do with that packet of papers I gave you last Monday—the one I told you to put away in the safe?"
"I did just what you told me to; put it in the inner cash-box, and put the key of the cash-box on your desk. Didn't you get it?"
Blount felt in his pockets and found the key, which he handed to Collins. "Go and get that packet and bring it to me," he directed. The shock was beginning to subside a little by now, and he sat down to bring something like order out of the confusion on the desk. At first, he had thought that the sheaf of evidence letters which gave him the strangle-hold upon Gantry and the lawbreakers had been left in a pigeonhole of the desk. Then he remembered having given it to Collins to put away.
A minute or two later it occurred to him that the stenographer was taking a long time for a short errand. Rising silently, he crossed the room and reached for the knob of the door of communication. In the act he saw that the door was ajar, and through the crack he saw Collins standing before the opened safe. The clerk was running his tongue along the flap of a large envelope, preparatory to sealing it. Blount's first impulse was to break in with a sharp command. Then he reconsidered and went back to his desk; was still busy at it when Collins came in and laid the freshly sealed envelope before him.
"That isn't the packet I gave you," said Blount curtly.
The clerk looked away. "You meant those letters, didn't you?" he queried. "The rubber band broke and I put them in an envelope."
"When?" snapped Blount.
The young man faced around again and the innocence in his look disarmed the questioner.
"When? Just now. That's what made me so long—I couldn't find an envelope big enough."
Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the blade under the flap of the envelope. If he had looked up at the stenographer then he would have seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a face ashen with terror. But whatever the shorthand man had to fear from the opening of the lately sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of Ackerton, the working head of the legal department, with a damage suit to discuss with his chief. Blount thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened, and later in the day, when he went around to his bank to put the evidence letters into his safe-deposit box, the incident of the morning had lost its significance so completely, or had been so deeply buried under other and more important matters, that he deposited the packet without examining it.
The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in the ranchman candidate's big house opposite the Weatherfords' in Mesa Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there. She was there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to grow too large to be easily rolled aside.
"I'm hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you got one that you could lend me?"
She laughed lightly.
"You told me once that I had the New England conscience—which was the same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pass around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?"
He made a wry face. "It's the 'practical politics' again. Suppose I say that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of people to jail?"
"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals and criminality?"
"That is just what I'm trying to find out," he persisted. "At the present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some of them know what I'm doing, and some of them don't. Those who know have been told that they must be good or I'll publish the evidence, and they've promised to be good if I won't publish it. At the time I didn't question my right to make such a bargain, but—"
"But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell what you know?"
"Chaos," he replied briefly.
"May I ask who is implicated?"
"A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few outside of it."
"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It's too big for me, Evan. I can only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do evil that good may come."
"If you put it that way, I've made myself particeps criminis," he said gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can't help knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob."
She was shaking her head determinedly. "I can't help you this time, Evan; truly I can't." Then, in sudden appeal: "Why won't you go to your father? He could tell you what to do and how to do it, and his judgment would be too big and just to stumble over the tangling little moralities."
Blount smiled.
"What if I should tell you that my father is more or less involved, Patricia? I don't know precisely how much or how little, but I am assured, by those who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in the general wreck."
"I can't believe it!" she protested, in generous loyalty. "These people, whoever they are, are deceiving you to shelter themselves. Have you ever spoken to your father about this?"
"Yes, once; one evening when we were dining together I told him what I had, and what use I should make of it if all other means should fail. Also, I advised him to dodge."
"What did he say?"
"That is the discouraging part of it. I was hoping against hope that he would tell me to go ahead; that he would say that he wasn't involved. But, as a matter of fact, he didn't say much of anything. I'm horribly afraid that his silence meant all that I've been trying to believe it didn't mean."
She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if she were trying to gain time.
"I can only tell you again what I told you at first," she said at length. "You must be bigger than all these hampering circumstances; bigger than the little moralities, if need be. You can be, Evan; you've given splendid proof of it thus far, and I'm proud—just as proud as I can be—"
Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely without scruple, have brained young Gordon, to whom the next dance belonged, and who came just at this climaxing moment to claim Patricia. But there was no help for it, short of a cold-blooded and rather embarrassing deed of violence, and the hard-won confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.
When he left the Gordon house, which was far out in the northeastern residence suburb, Blount meant to go directly to the hotel and to bed. He had been losing much sleep in the activities of the campaign, and the loss was beginning to tell upon him. But as the trolley-car was passing the Temple Court Building he made sure that he saw a dim light illuminating the windows of his upper-floor office. With all his suspicions of the morning reawakened, he dropped from the car, dashed into the building, and took the all-night elevator for his office floor.
The sleepy elevator-man had to be shaken awake, and when he had set the car in motion he let it run past the designated floor. Blount swore impatiently, and instead of waiting to be carried back, darted out and ran to the stairway. When he reached the lower corridor and was hurrying toward his suite in the corner of the building, there was a dull crash, as of a muffled explosion, and two or three of the glass doors in the street-fronting suite were shattered. Blount quickened his pace to a run, let himself in by means of his latch-key, and, cautiously opening his desk, groped in an inner drawer for the revolver which Gantry had persuaded him to buy as a part of the office furnishings.
With the weapon in hand, he pushed through the unlatched door into Collins's room. There was an acrid odor of dynamite fumes in the air, and when he pressed on to the third room of the suite the gases were stifling. His first act was to feel for the switch and cut in the electric lights. The third room, which had doors of communication with his own office and Collins's, was a wreck. Desks were broken open, and the safe-door had been blown from its hinges.
Blount saw the figure of a small man with his cap pulled down over his ears bending over the wrecked cash-box. At the upblazing of the ceiling lights, the man sprang to his feet and fled, going out through the door by which Blount had just entered, and snapping the light-switch as he passed to leave the rooms in darkness.
Blount was cursing his own lack of presence of mind when he turned to follow the escaping burglar. In the darkness he fell over a chair, and by the time he had disentangled himself and had reached the corridor the safe-blower was gone. Racing to the elevator, Blount rang the bell until the sleepy car-tender set the machinery in motion and lifted himself to the floor of happenings. Here the incident ended abruptly, so far as any helpful discoveries were concerned. The elevator-man had carried no one down, and he confessed shamefacedly that he had again been asleep, and could not say whether or not anybody had descended the stair which circled the elevator-shaft.
Blount went back to his office, turned in a police alarm, and waited until a policeman came from the nearest station. Then he went to report the safe-blowing in person to the night captain on duty in the basement of the City Hall. A drowsy clerk took notes of the story, and the night captain contented himself with asking a single question.
"Do you know how much you lost, Mr. Blount?"
"Nothing of any great consequence, I imagine," said Blount, remembering, with an inward thrill of thankfulness, the morning impulse which had prompted him to transfer the one thing of inestimable consequence to the security of the bank safe-deposit box. Then he added: "There was a little money in the box, and some papers of no especial value to anybody. Just the same, captain, I want that man caught."
"We'll catch him, come morning," was the assurance, and then Blount went away and carried out his original intention of going to the Inter-Mountain and to bed.
To bed; but, for a long hour after the post-midnight quiet had settled down upon the great hostelry, not to sleep. If he had asked himself why he could not close his eyes and take the needed rest, the exciting incident in which he had lately been an actor would have offered a sufficient answer. But in reality the sharpened spur of wakefulness penetrated much more deeply. Beyond all doubt or shadow of doubt, it was the sinister, many-armed machine which had reached out to seize and destroy the evidence against its allies and fellow conspirators, the lawbreaking railroad company and the vote-selling corporations.
And, again beyond doubt, he made sure, it was his own boast made to his father which had been passed on to tell the sham burglar where to look and what to look for.