"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.