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.