He turned to his desk and sat with his head propped in his hands, staring at the little photograph of Wartrace Hall which he had had mounted in a plateglass paper-weight. The sight gave an added twist to the torture screw and he broke out again.
"I've been nothing more than a bit of potter's clay, and the master potter—God help me!—is my own father! It's all plain enough now. He saw that I wasn't going to fall in with the attorney-general scheme; or perhaps he saw that I might be a stumbling-block if I should; so he planned this thing with McVickar—planned it deliberately! There is no fight, after all; it's merely one of the moves in the game that the 'boss' and the railroad should seem to be fighting each other. Good God! I can't believe it, and yet I've got to believe it. That man Hathaway is a self-confessed criminal, but he was telling the truth about the law-breaking trickery that is going on; he wouldn't be idiotic enough to lie and then give me a chance to prove the lie. And he didn't come to me of his own volition; he was sent—sent to break me down, and sent by.... Oh, dad, dad! how could you do it!"
With his face hidden in the crook of his arm, he was groping in vain outreachings for something to lay hold of, for some clear-minded, clean-hearted adviser who could tell him what to do; how he should clamber out of this pit of humiliation into which nothing more culpable than an honest zeal for civic righteousness had precipitated him. In his despair he told himself that there was no one, and then suddenly he remembered—Patricia would know, and she would understand better than any one else in a populous world how to point the way out of the labyrinth. He must go to her and tell her. In the meantime....
He got up and shut his desk with a slam. In the meantime there should be no more lies told—no more turns taken in the crooked path. Collins, the stenographer, heard the noise of the desk closing and came to the door of the private room, note-book and pencil in hand. "Anything to give me before you go out?" he asked.
"Yes," said Blount almost savagely. "Take a message to Mr. McVickar. Are you ready?"
The stenographer nodded.
Blount dictated curtly: "'Pending another interview with you in person, I shall close my offices in Temple Court and confine myself strictly to the routine legal business of the company. Meanwhile, my resignation is in your hands if you wish to appoint a new division counsel.' Have you got that, Collins? Very well; write it out and send it at once. I shall be at the Inter-Mountain for a little while, if you want to reach me between now and closing time."