"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.
"So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me realize that I couldn't hold my own against the 'career,'" was the young man's answer. Then he added: "I want work, father—that is what I am out here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I can put my heart into. Can you find it for me?"
There was the wisdom of the centuries in the gentle smile provoked by this unashamed disappointed lover's appeal.
"I wouldn't take it too hard—the career business—if I were you, son," said the wise man. "And as for the work, I reckon we can satisfy you, if your appetite isn't too whaling big. How would a State office of some kind suit you?"
"Politics?" queried Blount, bringing his horse down to the walk for which his father had set the example. "I've thought a good bit about that, though I haven't had any special training that way. The schools of to-day are turning out business lawyers—men who know the commercial and industrial codes and are trained particularly in their application to the great business undertakings. That has been my ambition: to be a business adviser, and, perhaps, after a while to climb to the top of the ladder and be somebody's corporation counsel."
"But now you have changed your notion?"
"I don't know; sometimes I wonder if I haven't. There is another field that is exceedingly attractive to me, and you have just named it. No man can study the politics of America to-day without seeing the crying need for good men: men who will not let the big income they could command in private undertakings weigh against pure patriotism and a plain duty to their country and their fellow-men; strong men who would administer the affairs of the State or the nation absolutely without fear or favor; men who will hew to the line under any and all conditions. There's an awful dearth of that kind of material in our Government."
A quaint smile was playing under the drooping mustaches of that veteran politician the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.
"I reckon we do need a few men like that, Evan; need 'em mighty bad. Think you could fill the bill as one of them if you had a right good chance?"