The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush

by Francis Lynde

If Evan Blount ate faster than a sick man should, it was because there are limits to the finest fortitude. Patricia ran on cheerfully, minimizing her own part in the first-aid incidents, and magnifying the anxious and affectionate concern of the senator and his wife. He listened because he could not help it; but when he had finished, and she was inquiring if there was anything else she could do for him, he dissembled, saying that he would try to sleep, and asking her to shut out more of the daylight and to deny him to everybody until evening.

She promised; but naturally enough, with the dreadful responsibility drawing nearer with every hour-striking of the tiny leather-cased travelling-clock on the dresser, sleep was out of the question for him. Hot-eyed and restless, he wore out the long afternoon in feverish impatience, slipping now and then into the shadow land of delirium when the pain was severest, but clinging always to the obsessing idea. At whatever cost, the crisis must find him resolute to do his part. Gryson must be met, the evidence of fraud must be secured, and the fraud itself must be defeated.

The bright autumn day was fading to its twilight, and the shadows were gathering around his bed, when Patricia tiptoed in to ask, first, if he were awake, and, next, what he would like to have for his supper. Exhausted by the waiting battle, he answered briefly: he was not hungry; if he could be left alone again, with the assurance that no one would come to disturb him, it was all he would ask. He tried to say it crustily, with the irritable impatience of the convalescent—dissembling again. But the young woman with a self-sacrificial career in view had lost none of her womanly gift of sympathetic intuition.

"You are not so well this evening," she said softly, laying a cool palm on his forehead. "I think I'd better telephone Doctor Dillon."

Now the thing for Patricia's lover to do was obvious. With pity thus trembling on the very crumbling brink of love, the opportunity which months of patient wooing had not evoked lay ready to his hand. It was a fair measure of the mastery an obsession may obtain—the lover's ability to thrust the gentler emotion into the background, to feign restless irritation under the passion-stirring touch, and to say: "No; I don't want Dillon or anybody; I want to be left alone. Please latch the door when you go out, and tell father and his—and Mrs. Blount that I don't want to be disturbed."

She took the curt dismissal in silence, and after she was gone Blount sat up in bed and cursed himself fervently and painstakingly for the little brutality. But the remorseful cursings took nothing from the grim determination which had prompted the brutality. The dusk was thickening, and the street electrics were turning the avenue into a broad highway of radiance. Blount got up, and with a disheartening renewal of the splitting headache, began to dress, but there were many pauses in which he had to sit on the edge of the bed to wait for the throbbing pain to subside.

The next step was to reach his own room, two floors above, and he let himself cautiously into the corridor and locked the door from the outside. Making a long round to avoid the elevators, he dragged himself up two flights of stairs and so came to his goal.

Enveloped in a rain-coat, and with a soft hat drawn well over his eyes, he compassed the escape from the upper floor by means of the remote stair he had used in ascending, and so reached the ground-floor. Fortunately, the lobby was crowded; and turning up the collar of the rain-coat to hide the bandage, Blount worked his way toward the revolving doors. More than once in the dodging progress he rubbed shoulders with men whom he knew, and who knew him; but the shielding hat-brim and the muffling rain-coat saved him.

Reaching the street, he did not attempt to walk to the Temple Court. Instead, he crept around to a garage near the hotel and hired a two-seated road-car. Quite naturally, the garage-keeper wanted to send his own driver, and Blount counted it as an unavoidable misfortune that he was obliged to give his name, and to hear the motor-liveryman say: "Oh, sure! I didn't recognize you, Mr. Blount. I reckon Senator Dave's son can have anything o' mine that he wants."

Blount drove the road-car all the way around the Capitol grounds to come into his office street inconspicuously. Across from the Temple Court the fire ruins were still smouldering, and there was an acrid odor of stale smoke in the air. For a full third of the block the street was littered with débris. Blount stopped his machine at the nearest corner and got out to reconnoitre the office-building entrance. In the vestibule he glanced up at the face of the illuminated wall-clock, making a hasty calculation based upon the leaving time of the east-bound Overland. There were fifty minutes to spare, and when he reached his office, and had turned on the desk-light and dropped heavily into his chair, he called up the railroad station to inquire about the train. The Overland was reported ten minutes late. If Gryson should show up in time, this earliest outgoing train must be made to serve as the means for his flight.