The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush. Lynde Francis

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      "Well?" said Blount, when the pause had grown over-abundantly long.

      "I was just thinking," was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount was your father."

      "He was and is," was the quiet reply. "I supposed everybody knew it."

      "I didn't," Gantry denied, adding: "You may not realize it, but what you don't tell people about yourself would make a pretty big book if it were printed."

      Blount's smile was altogether friendly.

      "What's the use, Richard?" he asked. "The world has plenty of banalities and commonplaces without the adding of any man's personal contribution. Why should I bore you or anybody?"

      "Oh, of course, if you put it on that ground," said the railroad traffic manager. "Just the same, there's another side to it. In an unguarded moment, back in the college days, as I have said, you admitted to me that you were Western-born. I always supposed afterward that you regretted either the fact or the mention of it, since you never told me any more."

      "Perhaps I didn't tell more because there was so little to tell. I had a boyhood like other boys—or, no, possibly it wasn't quite the usual. I was born on the 'Circle-Bar,' when the ranch was—as it still is, I believe—a hard day's drive for a bunch of prime steers distant from the nearest shipping-corral on the railroad. At twelve I could 'ride line,' 'cut out,' and 'rope down' like any other healthy ranch-bred youngster, and since the capital was at that time only in process of getting itself surveyed and boomed into existence I had never seen a town bigger than Painted Hat."

      "And what happened when you were twelve?" queried Gantry. He was not abnormally curious, but Blount's communicative mood was unusual enough to warrant a quickening of interest.

      "The greatest possible misfortune that can ever come to a half-grown boy, Dick—my mother died."

      Gantry's own boyhood was not so deeply buried in the past as to make him forgetful of its joys and sorrows. "That was hard—mighty hard," he assented. Then: "And pretty soon your father married again?"

      "Not for some years," Blount qualified. "But for me the heavens were fallen. I was sent away to school, to college, to Europe; then I came here to the Law School. In all that time I've never seen the 'Circle-Bar' or my native State—in fact, I have never been west of Chicago."

      Gantry was astonished and he admitted it in exclamatory phrase. As a railroad man, continent-crossing travel was to him the merest matter of course. Though he might Sunday-over at the Winnebasset Country Club on the North Shore, it was well within the possibilities that the following week-end might find him sweltering in New Orleans or buttoning his overcoat against the raw evening fogs of San Francisco.

      "Never been west of Chicago?" he echoed. "Never been—" He stopped short, beginning to realize vaguely that there must be strong reasons; reasons which might lie beyond the pale of a college friendship, and the confidences begotten thereby, in the rendering of them.

      "No," said Blount.

      "Then the senator's—that is—er—your father's political life has never touched you."

      The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of Blount's steady gray eyes, but this time it was shot through with a faint suggestion of the Blount grimness.

      "It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick. I saw a large-hearted, open-handed old cattle-king wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream of politics to gratify an ambition that wasn't at all his own—a woman's ambition. In order that the woman might mix and mingle in Washington society for a brief minute or two, he got himself elected to fill out an unexpired term of two months in the United States Senate—bought the election, some said. That was three years ago, wasn't it?—a long time, as political incidents or accidents go. But Washington hasn't forgotten. When I was down there last winter the five-o'clock-tea people were still recalling Mrs. Blount's gowns and the wild-Western naïveté of 'The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush.'"

      Gantry was chuckling softly when the half-bitter admission had got itself fully made.

      "Land of love, Evan!" he said, "you may be an educated post-graduate all right, with the proper Boston degree of culture laid on and rubbed down to a hard-glaze finish, but you've got a lot to learn yet—about the senator and his politics, I mean. Why, Great Snipes, man! he isn't in it a little bit for the social frills and furbelows; he never was. Let me intimate a few things: Politically speaking, David Blount is by long odds the biggest man in his State to-day. He can have anything he wants, from the head of the ticket down. You spoke rather contemptuously just now of his two months in the Senate; you probably didn't know that he might have gone back if he had wanted to; that he actually did a much more difficult thing—named his successor."

      David Blount's son stood up and put his shoulders against one of the veranda pillars. From the new view-point he could look through the reading-room windows and on into the assembly-room where the dancers were keeping time to the measures of a two-step. But he was not thinking of the dancers when he said:

      "It's a sheer miracle, Dick, your dropping down here to-night like the deus ex machina of the old Greek plays. You've read this telegram"—holding up the folded message—"it is just possible that you can tell me what lies behind it. Why has my father sent it at this particular time and in those words? He knows perfectly well that my plans for settling here in Boston were definitely made more than a year ago."

      "I can tell you the situation out in the greasewood country, if that's what you want to know," said Gantry after a thoughtful pause.

      "Make it simple," was Blount's condition, adding: "What I don't know about the business or the political situation in the West would fill a much larger book than the one you were speaking of a few minutes ago."

      "'Business or political,' you say; they are Siamese twins nowadays," returned the railroad man, with a short laugh. Then: "The outlook for us out yonder in the greasewood hills is precisely what it is in a dozen other States this year—east, west, north and south—everything promising a renewal of the unreasoning, bull-headed legislative fight against the railroads. I suppose our own case is typical. As everybody knows, the Transcontinental Railway has practically created two-thirds of the States through which it passes—made them out of whole cloth. Where you left sage-brush and bare hills and unfenced cattle ranges a dozen years ago you will now find irrigation, tilled farms, orchards, rich mines—development everywhere, with a rapidly growing population to help it along. To make all this possible, the railroad took a chance; it was a mighty long chance, and somebody has to pay the bills."

      "I know," smiled Blount; "the bill-paying is summed up in some railroad man's clever phrase, 'all the tariff the traffic will stand.' I can remember one year when my father rose up in his wrath and drove his beef cattle one hundred and fifty miles across the Transcontinental tracks to the Overland Central."

      "That was in the old days," protested Gantry, who was loyal to his salt. "As the State has filled up, we've tried to meet the situation half-way, as a straight business proposition. Fares and tariffs have been lowered from time to time, and——"

      "You are not making it simple enough by half," warned Blount quizzically. "You are getting further away from my telegram every minute."

      Gantry paused to relight his cigar.

      "I don't know how your telegram СКАЧАТЬ