"There isn"t much to tell, d.i.c.k," he began half humorously, half in ill-concealed self-pity. "I"ve known her for a year, and I"ve loved her from the first day. That is Chapter One; and Chapter Two ends the story with one small word. She says "No.""
"The d.i.c.kens she does!" said Gantry, in hearty sympathy. Then: "But that"s a good sign, isn"t it? Haven"t I heard somewhere that they always say "No" at first?"
Blount laughed in spite of himself. Gantry, the d.i.c.k Gantry of the college period, had always been a man"s man, gay, light-hearted, and care-free to the outward eye, but in reality one who was carrying burdens of poverty and distress which might well have crushed an older and a stronger man. There had been no time for sentiment then, and Blount wondered if there had been in any later period.
"I am afraid I can"t get any comfort out of that suggestion," he returned. "When Miss Patricia Anners says "No," I am quite sure she means it."
"Think so?" said Gantry, still sympathetic. "Well, I suppose you are the best judge. Tough, isn"t it, old man? What"s the obstacle?--if you can tell it without tearing the bandages off and saying "Ouch!""
"It is Miss Anners"s career."
"H"m," was the doubtful comment; "I"m afraid you"ll have to elaborate that a little for me. I"m not up in the "career" cla.s.sification."
"She has been studying at home and abroad in preparation for social-settlement work in the large cities. Of course, I knew about it; but I thought--I hoped--"
"You hoped it was only a young woman"s fad--which it probably is,"
Gantry cut in.
"Y-yes; I"m afraid that was just what I did hope, d.i.c.k. But I couldn"t talk against it. Confound it all, you can"t go about smashing ideals for the people you love best!"
"Rich?" queried Gantry.
"Oh, no. Her father has the chair of paleontology, and never gets within speaking distance of the present century. The mother has been dead many years."
"And you say the girl has the Hull House ambition?"
"The social-betterment ambition. It"s an ideal, and I can"t smash it.
You wouldn"t smash it, either, d.i.c.k."
"No; I guess that"s so. If I were in your fix I should probably do what you are doing--say "Good-by, fond heart," and hie me away to the forgetful edge of things. And it"s simply astonishing how quickly the good old sage-brush hills will help a man to forget everything that ever happened to him before he ducked."
Blount winced a little at that. It was no part of his programme to forget Patricia. Indeed, for twenty-four hours, or the waking moiety of that period, he had been a.s.suring himself of the utter impossibility of anything remotely approaching forgetfulness. This thought made him instantly self-reproachful; regretful for having shown a sort of disloyalty by opening the door of the precious and sacred things, even to so good a friend as d.i.c.k Gantry; and from regretting to amending was never more than a step for Evan Blount. There were plenty of reminiscences to be threshed over, and Blount brought them forward so tactfully that Gantry hardly knew it when he was shouldered away from the open door of the acuter personalities.
It was quite late, and the talk had again drifted around to a one-sided discussion of practical politics in the Western definition of the term, when Gantry, pleading weariness on the score of his hard week"s work at the railroad meeting, went to bed. The summer night was at its perfect best, and Blount was still wakeful enough to refill his pipe and well-balanced enough to be thankful for a little solitude in which to set in order his plans for the newly struck-out future. In the later talk with Gantry he had learned many things about the political situation in his native State, things which were enlightening if not particularly encouraging. Trained in the ethics of a theoretical school, he knew only enough about practical politics to be very certain in his own mind that they were all wrong. And if Gantry"s account could be trusted, there were none but practical politics in the State where his father was reputed to be the dictator.
Hitherto his ambition had been to build up a modest business practice in some Eastern city, and, like other aspiring young lawyers, he had been filling out the perspective of the picture with the look ahead to a possible time when some great corporation should need his services in permanence. He was of the new generation, and he knew that the lawyer of the courts was slowly but surely giving place to the lawyer of business.
Without attempting to carry the modern business situation bodily over into the domain of pure ethics, he was still young enough and enthusiastic enough to lay down the general principle that a great corporation, being itself a creation of the law, must necessarily be law-abiding, and, if not entirely ethical in its dealings with the public, at least equitably just. Therefore his ideal in his own profession was the man who could successfully safeguard large interests, promote the beneficent outreachings of corporate capital, and be the adviser of the man or men to whom the greater America owes its place at the head of the civilized nations.
Oddly enough, though Gantry"s att.i.tude had been uncompromisingly partisan, Blount had failed to recognize in the railroad official a skilful pleader for the special interests--the interests of the few against those of the many. Hence he was preparing to go to the new field with a rather strong prepossession in favor of the defendant corporation. In their later conversation Gantry had intimated pretty broadly that there was room for an a.s.sistant corporation counsel for the railroad, with headquarters in the capital of the Sage-brush State.
Blount a.s.sumed that the requirements, in the present crisis at least, would be political rather than legal, and in his mind"s eye he saw himself in the prefigured perspective, standing firmly as the defender of legitimate business rights in a region where popular prejudice was capable of rising to anarchistic heights of denunciation and attack.
The picture pleased him; he would scarcely have been a true descendant of the fighting Blounts of Tennessee if the prospect of a conflict had been other than inspiring. If there were to be no Patricia in his future, ambition must be made to fill all the horizons; and since work is the best surcease for any sorrow, he found himself already looking forward in eager antic.i.p.ation to the moment when he could begin the grapple, man-wise and vigorously, in the new environment.
It was after the ashes had been knocked from the bedtime pipe that Blount left his chair and the secluded corner of the veranda to go down among the parked automobiles on the lawn. His one recreation--and it was the only one in which he found the precious fillip of enthusiasm--was motoring. There was a choice collection of fine cars in the grouping on the lawn, and Blount had just awakened a sleepy chauffeur to ask him to uncover and exhibit the engine of a freshly imported Italian machine, when a stir at the veranda entrance told him that at least a few of the dancing guests were leaving early.
Being more curious at the moment about the mechanism of the Italian motor than he was about people, he did not realize that he was an intruder until the chauffeur hastily replaced the engine bonnet and began to get his car ready for the road. Blount stepped back when the little group on the veranda came down the steps preceded by a club footman who was calling the number of the car. And it was not until he was turning away that he found himself face to face with a very beautiful and very clear-eyed young woman who was b.u.t.toning an automobile dust-coat up under her chin.
"Patricia!" he burst out. And then: "For Heaven"s sake! you don"t mean to tell me that you have been here all evening?"
Her slow smile gave the impression, not quite of frigidity perhaps, but of that quality of serene self-possession which strangers sometimes mistook for coldness.
"Why shouldn"t I be here?" she asked. "Didn"t you know that the Cranfords--the people who are entertaining--are old friends of ours?"
Blount shook his head. "No, I didn"t know it; and because I didn"t, I have lost an entire evening."
"Oh, no; you shouldn"t say that," she protested. "The evening was yours to use as you chose. Mrs. Beverley told me you were here, and she added that you had particularly requested not to be introduced to the Cranfords or their guests. Besides, you know you don"t care anything about dancing."
The chauffeur had placed his other pa.s.sengers in the tonneau, and was trying to crank the motor. Blount was thankful that the new Italian engine was refusing to take the spark. The delay was giving him an added moment or two.
"No, I don"t care much for dancing; and you know very well why I couldn"t, or wouldn"t, be anybody"s good company to-night," he said.
Then: "It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening by not letting me know that you were here."
""This last evening"?" she echoed. "Why "last"?"
"Because I am leaving Boston and New England to-morrow--or rather, Monday. It is the only thing to do."
"I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan," she deprecated, in the sisterly tone that always made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense of proportion."
"Sometimes I think you haven"t any sense of proportion, Patricia," he retorted half-morosely. "If you have, I am sure it is frightfully distorted."
The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary explosions, and a white-haired old gentleman in the tonneau was calling impatiently to Patricia to come and take her place so that he might close the door.
"It is you who have the distorted perspective, Evan," she countered.
"But I refused to quarrel with you last night, and I am refusing to quarrel with you now. It pleases you to believe that a woman"s place in this twentieth-century world is inevitably at the fireside--her own fireside. I don"t agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with you. Where are you going?"
"I am going West, Monday."
"How odd!" she commented. "We are going West, too--father and I--though not quite so soon as Monday."
"You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the West?"
She did not tell him where. The car motor was whirring smoothly now, the chauffeur was sliding into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the old gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently impatient.
"If we are both going in the same direction we needn"t say good-by," she said hastily, giving him her hand at parting. "Let it be _auf wiedersehen_." Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately that Blount had to spring nimbly aside to save himself from being run down.
II
THE BOSS
It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken mountain ranges, lone b.u.t.tes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of an exclusive North Sh.o.r.e club to a private dining-room in the Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico faces the Capitol grounds in the chief city of the Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows command a magnificent view of the Lost River Range, and from whose roof, on a clear day, one may see the snowy peaks of the Sierras notching the distant western horizon.
Allowing for the difference between Eastern and Mountain time, the dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda of the far-away North Sh.o.r.e club-house one of them, at least, was ascribing to the good offices of the G.o.d of chance.
On the guest-book of the Inter-Mountain one of the men at the table in the private dining-room had registered from Chicago. The name was illegible to the cursory eye, but since it was the signature of a notable empire-builder, it was sufficiently well known in all the vast region served by the Transcontinental Railway System. The owner of the name had finished his ice, and was sitting back to clip the end from a very long and very black cigar. He was a man past middle-age, large-framed and heavy, with the square, resolute face of a born master of circ.u.mstances. Like the younger generation, he was clean shaven; hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the region traversed by the great railway system the virile face with the ma.s.sive jaw was as familiar as the illegible signature on the Inter-Mountain"s guest-book. Though he figured only as the first vice-president of the Transcontinental Company, Hardwick McVickar was really the active head of its affairs and the dictator of its policies.