The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ great irrigation project in Quaretaro Canyon had put a thousand square miles of the fertile mesa under cultivation; how with the inpouring of the new population had come new blood, new methods, good roads, the telephone, the rural mail route, and other civilizing agencies.

      The young man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land; it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor Anners about them the other day, and he was immensely interested."

      "We're all fossils—we older folks of the cattle-raising times," laughed the man whom Richard Gantry had called the "biggest man in the State." "But there are some of the petrified bones left, too, I reckon. If the professor is a friend of yours, we'll get him a State permit to dig all he wants to."

      "Yes; Professor Anners is a friend of mine," was the younger Blount's half-absent rejoinder. But after the admission was made he qualified it. "Perhaps I ought to say that he is as much a friend as his daughter will permit him to be."

      The qualifying clause was not thrown away upon the senator.

      "What-all has the daughter got against you, son?" he asked mildly.

      "Nothing very serious," said Patricia's lover, with a laugh which was little better than a grimace. "It's merely that she is jealous of any one who tries to share her father with her. Next to her career—"

      "That's Boston, isn't it?" interrupted the ex-king of the cattle ranges. Then he added: "I'm right glad it hasn't come in your way to tie yourself up to one of those 'careers,' Evan, boy."

      Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar" ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief love-tale, hiding nothing—not even the hope that in the years to come Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should tell some one; and who better?

      David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to the aging years.

      "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?"

      The potential hewer of political chips which should lie as they might fall smiled at what seemed to be merely an expression of parental favoritism.

      "I'm not likely to get the chance very soon," he returned. "Just at present, you know, I am still a legal resident of the good old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a member of its bar—eligible to office there, and nowhere else."

      "You'd be a citizen of this State by the time you could get elected to an office in it," suggested the senator gravely.

      "I know; the required term of residence here is ridiculously short. But you are forgetting that I am as completely unknown in the sage-brush hills as you are well known. I couldn't get a nomination for the office of pound-keeper."

      David Blount was chuckling softly as he threw up the brim of the big sombrero he was wearing.

      "Sounds right funny to hear you talking that way, son," he commented. "Mighty near everybody this side of the Bad Lands will tell you that the slate hangs up behind the door at Wartrace Hall; and I don't know but what some people would say that old Sage-Brush Dave himself does most of the writing on it. Anyhow, there is one place on it that is still needing a name, and I reckon your name would fit it as well as anybody's."

      The young man who was so lately out of the well-balanced East was astounded.

      "Heavens!" he ejaculated. "You're not considering me as a possibility on the State ticket before I've been twenty-four hours inside of the State lines, are you?"

      "No; not exactly as a possibility, son; that isn't quite the word. We'll call it a sure thing, if you want it. It's this way: we're needing a sort of political house-cleaning right bad this year. We have good enough laws, but they're winked at any day in the week when somebody comes along with a fistful of yellow-backs. The fight is on between the people of this State and the corporations; it was begun two years ago, and the people got the laws all right, but they forgot to elect men who would carry them out. This time it looks as if the voters had got their knives sharpened. We've been a little slow catching step maybe, but the marching orders have gone out. We're aiming to clean house, and do it right, this fall."

      "Not if the slate hangs behind your door—or any man's, father," was the theorist's sober reminder. "Reform doesn't come in by that road."

      "Hold on, boy; steady-go-easy's the word. Reform comes in by any old trail it can find, mostly, and thanks its lucky stars if it doesn't run up against any bridges washed out or any mud-holes too deep to ford. We've got a good man for governor right now; not any too broad maybe, but good—church good. Nobody has ever said he'd take a bribe; but he isn't heavy enough to sit on the lid and hold it down. Alec Gordon, the man who is going to succeed him next fall, is all the different kinds of things that the present governor isn't, so that is fixed."

      "How 'fixed'?" queried the younger man, who, though he was not from Missouri, was beginning to fear that he would constantly have to be shown.

      "In СКАЧАТЬ