“You won’t feel hurt if I remind you that you are inexperienced? New light may come to you, so that the opinions you now hold you may not hold a year from now.”
“That is true; but so long as I do hold them I must be honest about it.”
“It is the opinion of Uncle Philip that this annoyance of the settlers cannot last. He says there are only a few places where they can farm successfully. But in the meantime, while they are trying every place, they are making a vast amount of trouble, by thus spreading all over the country. You know, yourself, that some of them are taking land where water can never be got to it. The immediate result will be, Uncle Philip says, that the ranchmen will be almost ruined, by being forced to surrender land to them that can never be fit for anything but a cattle range. The settlers will find out by and by that the land cannot be farmed; but while they are finding it out, and bringing loss to themselves, they will bring the downfall of the cattlemen.”
“I have thought of all these things,” he said.
He looked at her earnestly. He was troubled.
“Lucy, I wish I only knew what I ought to do in this crisis! I must face it and do something. I have looked for your Uncle Philip, and intend to look for him again, and shall try to have a talk with him. He is my father, and when he knows that he is, and I ask him to advise me as a father would advise a son——.” He stopped, in hesitation. “Anyway, whatever I do—whatever I do—remember that I love you!”
As soon as she was gone, he began another search for his father, driven by the feeling that he must explain fully to Davison his views and motives, as well as hear Davison’s arguments and opinions, and so perhaps be able to stand erect in Philip Davison’s estimation, as well as in his own. This was an anxious, even a wild desire, and it pressed him hard.
Fogg, scenting a reconciliation, sent a messenger in hurried search of Davison. At the hotel, and at the state house, the lobbies were overflowing. Men began to come to. Justin not singly but in platoons. Somehow the word had gone round that he was weakening. But he was not ready to talk. To friends and enemies alike he was non-committal. He wanted to see his father; he wanted to place in his hands that memorandum book, and get an acknowledgment of their relationship. The interminable buzz of the anxious and excited politicians struck against deaf ears.
Philip Davison was out of town.
Fogg, with telegraph and telephone, was wildly trying to reach him. Sibyl Dudley had come to the state house in shivering expectancy. The jarring hum of the political machine rose ever higher and higher, yet Justin gave no indication of a changed or changing purpose.