"If I should say what all men say—what some of them are frank enough to say even to me—" he stopped short, and then went on with better self-control: "Let's keep the peace if we can, dad."
"Oh, I reckon we can do that," was the good-natured rejoinder. "Being on the railroad side, yourself, you can't help feeling sort of hostile at the rest of us, I reckon."
Blount put his knife and fork down and straightened himself in his chair.
"There it is again, you see. We can't get together even on a question of admitted fact! Do you suppose for a single minute, dad, that I've been going up and down, and around and about, all these weeks without finding out that the old alliance of the machine with the very element in the railroad policy that I am fighting is still in existence?"
The senator was nodding soberly. "So you've found that out, too, have you?" he commented.
"I have, and I wish that were the worst of it, but it isn't, dad. There's a thing behind the alliance that cuts deeper than anything else I've had to face."
Once more the deep-set eyes looked out from their bushy penthouses. "Reckon you could give it a name, son?"
"Yes; when you found that I wasn't going to let you run me for the attorney-generalship, you arranged with Mr. McVickar to have me put on the railroad pay-roll. Isn't that the fact?"
"Not exactly," said the senator, and a grim smile went with the qualified denial. "It was sort of the other way round. I reckon McVickar thought he was putting one across on me when he offered you the railroad job and got you to take it."
"I know; that was at first. You and he couldn't come to terms because you—because the machine wanted more than he was willing to give. But afterward there was another meeting and you got together. That part of it was all right, if you see it that way. What broke my heart was the fact that you and he agreed to put me up as a fence behind which all the crookedness and rascality of a corrupt campaign could be screened."