"But you are the quintessence of conventionality yourself!" he burst out.
"Am I? Perhaps that was a pa.s.sing phase, too. Quite probably the little things will remain--the dressing for dinner and the paying of party calls and all that. But one really big man has made many things seem petty and trifling--things that I used to think were of the greatest possible importance."
"My father, you mean?"
"Yes. If I should ever marry, Evan, I should be deliriously happy if I could find a man who promised to grow to the stature of your father."
There was manifestly no rejoinder to be made to this by David Blount"s son, though it pointed to another and still more painful involvement.
What would Patricia say when the _debacle_ came? Would she lose faith in his father, and in all masculinity, in the crash? Or would she borrow yet again from the primitive woman she had been half-acknowledging and still be loyal? In either case Blount saw his own finish, and he was rather relieved when she left the s.e.x argument indeterminate and began to talk of other things: of her father"s decision to go home at the end of the following week, of the good times she had been having, and of the regret with which she would turn her back upon the wide horizons and the freedom of it all.
"I brought my sh.e.l.l with me when I came," she confessed, laughing, "but I think it is broken into little pieces by now. You will know how small the pieces are when I tell you that "Tennessee Jim," your father"s horse wrangler, calls me "Miz" Pat," and it always makes me want to shake hands with him."
Blount made the afternoon last as he could, sending the little car over many miles of the mesa roads and encouraging the small confidences which were enabling him to postpone his own evil hour. When the sun was dipping toward the Carnadine Hills they returned over a trail which came into the main Quaretaro road at a point where the northern highway begins its descent to the lower mesa level. Half-way down the descending gulch they came to the mouth of a small lateral canyon breaking into the larger gorge from the eastward; a canyon dry for the greater part of the year, but in the rainy season affording an outlet for the flood-waters of the Little Shonoho.
"That is a road I have always wanted to explore," said Patricia, pointing to the fine driveway leading up the small canyon. "That is one of my weaknesses when I am driving; I am never able to pa.s.s a branch road without wanting to turn aside and explore it."
"Then we"ll explore this one, right now," said Blount, cutting the car to the left. He was more than willing to delay, even by littles, the moment when he should be obliged to resume the sorry business of waiting and dissembling.
Miss Anners glanced at the tiny watch pinned upon her shoulder.
"Shall we have time? It"s getting late."
"Plenty of time for all we shall be able to do or see up here," Blount returned. "The road ends at the canyon head, a mile above. There is a very small and very exclusive summer-resort hotel, called the Shonoho Inn, on the upper level. It has a six-weeks" season--like the Florida resorts--they tell me, and it is closed now."
It was within the next five hundred yards that the prediction that there would be nothing to see antic.i.p.ated its fulfilment. At a sudden turn in the narrow defile they came to a brush-built barricade posted with a sign:
ROAD WASHED OUT ABOVE NO Pa.s.sING FOR VEHICLES!
"That settles it," said Blount shortly, and he turned the car and let it roll back down the grade to the main gulch.
When they were once more speeding toward town Blount stole a glance at his companion, wondering if it were the small disappointment which made her silent.
"Are you tired?" he asked quickly.
"Oh, no," she rejoined, brightening again. "I have enjoyed every minute of it. I was just thinking of what I said a little while ago; of how it is going to break my heart to leave it all."
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she needn"t leave it.
But he remembered and caught himself sharply. When the dreadful Tuesday should have come and gone, she might be only too willing to go away; and, in any event, he would have to go. There would be no place in his own and his father"s State for him after Gryson returned, and the match had been touched to the hidden mine of high explosives. This was what was in his mind when he said rather tamely: "I suppose you will have to go. There isn"t any chance for social-settlement work out here yet."
"No," she responded half-absently; and thereupon he gave the little car still more spark and throttle and sent it flying over the final stretch of the fine road to the city.
The electric lights were showing like faint yellow stars against the sunset sky when Blount skilfully placed the small car at the Inter-Mountain curb and lifted his companion to the sidewalk.
"Are you going anywhere to-night?" he asked.
"I don"t know," was the reply. "There is a "crush" on at the Weatherfords", but I don"t know whether Mrs. Blount has accepted for us or not."
"Don"t go," he pleaded quickly. "Back out of it some way, and give me just this one evening to myself. Won"t you do that, Patricia?"
"I"ll try," she agreed. "But if Mrs. Blount has accepted--"
"Confound Mrs. Blount!" he growled. And then the newly aroused underman in him added: "You tell her that I want you to give me the evening, and let that settle it."
As it turned out a little later, Miss Anners found it unnecessary to be rude to her hostess. For some reason best known to herself, Mrs. Honoria had declined the invitation--engraved in the correctest shaded Old English and made to include the senator and Miss Anners--and was planning a free evening for herself and her guest.
After the _cafe_ dinner--a dinner at which Evan Blount, once more calling himself all the hard names in the hypocrite"s vocabulary, made the fourth--Mrs. Honoria proposed an adjournment to the hotel parlors, which were in the mezzanine lounge. Later, she found herself alone on the divan which had been drawn up to command a view of the spirited scene in the lobby below. The senator had gone down to mingle with the politicians, and she could see him--big, masterful, and smiling--moving about from group to group. On the opposite side of the mezzanine gallery, Evan and Patricia were "doing time," as the little lady musingly phrased it: walking up and down and talking quietly; a handsome couple, as the approving glances of more than one pa.s.sing guest testified.
To Mrs. Honoria, thus isolated, came at the appointed time the sober-eyed young traffic manager for the railroad company. Gantry had been under orders from the little lady for the better part of the afternoon, but the business of the day had given him no chance to report earlier.
"You got my note?" he asked, taking the place she made for him on the tete-a-tete divan.
"Yes; a little while before dinner. It came just in time to let me send frightfully late "regrets" to Mrs. Weatherford."
"I couldn"t come sooner. I"ve had the Hathaway crowd on my hands all afternoon. There is something in the wind, and those fellows are scared stiff. They say that Evan"s speech-making has stirred up the working men and the rank and file like a declaration of war with Mexico, and n.o.body can tell what is going to happen next Tuesday."
"Is that all?"
"No, not quite all. There is a mild panic on in at least three of the city wards over the disappearance of a fellow named Gryson, a sort of--er--wire-puller and all-around general-utility man. Some say he has been doing crooked work and had to disappear; others say that he has taken his pay for whatever job he was doing and has skipped out, leaving his journeymen strikers to hold the bag."
"Gryson," said the little lady, her eyes narrowing; "Gryson--the name is curiously familiar. He is what you call a ward-worker, isn"t he?"
Gantry nodded. "Something of the sort, yes. Evan calls him one of the "pie-eaters," and away along early in the game they had a set-to in Evan"s office and Evan fired him; told him if he ever came back he"d throw him out."
Again Mrs. Honoria"s fine eyes became reflective.
"Richard," she said softly, "I"d give anything in the world if I could know that Evan still feels that way about Thomas Gryson."
"Then you know the plug-ugly, do you?" said Gantry.
"I know of him. He is a criminal and a dangerous man."
"Well, he is out of it, I guess; he must be, if his own running-mates can"t find him."
"Isn"t Mr. Kittredge trying to find him, too?"
"Yes. And I think Kittredge played it rather low down on the poor beggar. They had a deal of some sort, and when Gryson put his price on the job--"
"I know," she interrupted. "Mr. Kittredge ought to have paid him and let him go."
Gantry"s smile was a tribute to superior genius.
"You"ve got me going," he said; "you always have me going. With the election only three days off, I can"t tell yet what you and the senator are trying to do."
"The senator, at least, has never made any secret of his object," she smiled back at him. "He has told everybody that he is out for a clean sweep."
"Exactly," said Gantry; "but no man living knows what he means by a "clean sweep." I"ll bet there are a hundred men down there in the lobby right now who would give the best year out of their lives to know. And they can"t guess--they can"t begin to guess!"
"Let us leave them to their guesses, while we go back to the certainties," she suggested. "Did you find out what I asked you to?"