"Go on," said Blount soberly. "I don't see the pointing of it yet, but—"
"You will when I tell you that I've been lying to you; faking first one thing and then another. Do you get that?"
"I hear you say it; yes."
"It's so. I faked that story about your father's having made an underground deal with us. It was a lie out of whole cloth, because I didn't believe at that time that he had. There had been a falling out between him and Mr. McVickar; that was common talk on the division. But until yesterday I didn't know for certain that the trouble had been patched up; in fact, I had my own reasons for believing that it hadn't been patched up."
"And you told me there was an alliance in order that I might believe that my father would be involved in an exposure of the railroad's double-dealing with the public?"
"Just that. Self-preservation is the primal law—after you've dropped the ideals—and I thought I had invented a way to hold you down. I might have saved myself the trouble—and the lie. It comes down to this, Evan: you are one man against a crooked world, and you haven't had a ghost of a show from the first minute."
"You'll have to make it plainer," was the even-toned rejoinder. "As matters stand now, I am pretty well assured that I can do what I set out to do. I'm going to be able to make my own employers come through with clean hands."
Gantry was shaking his head slowly, and again the curious smile flitted across his keen, fine-featured face, lingering for an instant at the corners of the eyes.
"You say I'll have to make it plainer, and I will. A little while ago you intimated that Kittredge and I were responsible for the telegram which sent you to Lewiston yesterday. It was a fake, but it didn't originate with Kittredge or with me."