Still later in this same first day there were ambling gallops along the country roads, and the father explained how the transformation from cattle-raising to agriculture and fruit-growing had come about; how the great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square miles of the fertile mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.
The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land; it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."
"We're all fossils—we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State." "But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all he wants to."
"Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it. "Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will permit him to be."
The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.
"What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.
"Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career—"
"That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges. Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."
Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar" ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing—not even the hope that in the years to come Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should tell some one; and who better?
David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to the aging years.