"Boston is all right when you know it—or, rather, when it comes to know you," returned Blount, remembering that Boston or Cambridge—which is Boston in the process of elucidation—was the birth and dwelling place of Patricia.
Gantry grinned broadly and lighted his cigar.
"The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you, hasn't it, Evan?—to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the Harvard Law School. By the way, how much longer are you in for?"
"I am out of the Law School, if that is what you mean—out and admitted to the bar," said Blount. "If you get into trouble with the Boston police let me know, and I'll ask for a change of venue to the greasewood hills and Judge Lynch's court."
"The good old greasewood hills!" chanted Gantry, who was of those who curse their homeland to its face and praise it consistently and pugnaciously elsewhere. "Are you ever coming back to them, Blount? I believe you told me once, in the old college days, that you were Western-born."
"I told you the truth; and until to-night I have never thought much about going back," was Blount's rather enigmatic reply.
"But now you are thinking of it?" inquired the railroad man, waking up. "That's good; the old Sage-brush State is needing a few bright young lawyers mighty bad. Is that why I'm the particular fellow you wanted to meet?"
Blount passed the telegram which had come while he was at dinner across the interval between the two chairs. "Read that," he said.
Gantry smoothed the square of yellow paper carefully and held it up to the softened glow of the electric ceiling-globe. Its date-line carried the name of his own city in the "greasewood country"—the capital of the State—and the time-markings sufficiently indicated its recent arrival. Below the date-line he read: