The Honorable Senator got up and strolled to the window.
"You'd better go to bed, son," he advised. "It's getting to be mighty late, and you'll want to be surging around some with these friends of yours to-morrow. And, before I forget it, the big car is in Heffelfinger's garage. Order it out after breakfast and show the Cambridge folks a good time."
It was late the following evening, several hours after the informal little dinner for five in the Inter-Mountain café, when the senator had himself lifted from the lobby to the private-suite floor and made his way to the door of his own apartments. As was her custom when they were together, his wife was waiting up for him.
"Did you find out anything more?" she asked, without looking up from the tiny embroidery frame which was her leisure-filling companion at home or elsewhere.
"Not enough to hurt anything. McVickar has fixed things to suit himself. The boy's law-office job is to be pretty largely nominal; a sort of go-as-you-please and do-as-you-like proposition on the side, with Ackerton to do all the sure-enough court work and legal drudgery. Since Ackerton is a pretty clean fellow, and Evan stands up so straight that he leans over backward, this lay-out means that the bribing isn't going to be done by the legal department in the coming campaign."
"Is that all?"
"All but one little thing. Evan's job is to be more or less associated with the traffic department, and the word has been passed to Gantry and his crowd to see to it that the boy doesn't get to know too much."
"But they can't keep him from finding out about the underground work!" protested the small one.
"If it's an order from headquarters, they're going to try mighty hard. Evan wants to believe that everything is on the high moral plane, and when a man wants to believe a thing it isn't so awfully hard to fool him. It'll be a winning card for them if they can send the boy out to talk convincingly about the cleanness of the company's campaign. That sort of talk, handed out as Evan can hand it, if he is convinced of the truth of what he is saying, will capture the honest voter every time. I tell you, little woman, there's a thing we politicians are constantly losing sight of: that down at the bedrock bottom the American voter—'the man in the street,' as the newspapers call him—is a fair man and an honest man. Speaking broadly, you couldn't buy him with a clear title to a quarter-section in Paradise."