"Yes, son; I know. He came back twice: once when he found you in your office last Wednesday night; and again yesterday, or rather last evening, when you got out of your bed and went to help him make his getaway on the east-bound Overland."
Evan Blount started back, and his exclamation was of pure astoundment.
"You knew all this?" he gasped.
"Oh, yes; I reckon there isn"t much happening that such a double-dyed old villain as I am doesn"t find out, Evan," was the sober rejoinder.
"But, good heavens! if you know so much, you must know what Gryson came back for, and what he gave me!"
"Yes; I know that, too. I reckon I might as well make a clean breast of it while I"m at it."
"You knew it last night, and yet you didn"t send somebody to hold me up and take the papers away from me?"
The senator"s chuckle rumbled deep in his mighty chest.
"Maybe I was counting a little on the kinship, Evan, boy. Maybe I was saying to myself: "No, I reckon the boy won"t do it, after all--not when he reads what"s set down in the papers; he just naturally couldn"t do it.""
"Oh, my Lord, dad!" was the choking response. "Can"t you see that you are killing me by inches? Can"t you see that I"ve got to choose between being a man clear through, or a scoundrel as weak and shifty as any of those I have been denouncing? My G.o.d, it"s terrible!"
"I reckon you"re going to choose straight," said the older man, still with eyes averted.
"I have chosen," said the son brokenly; "or perhaps it would be truer to say that there never has been any choice since the moment when I set my foot in the path which has led me thus far on the way to h.e.l.l. I can despise myself utterly for the means I took to secure the evidence, but that very lapse makes it all the more needful that I should atone as I can."
David Blount rose and put his back to the fire.
"Son, you are a man among a thousand--among ten thousand," he said quietly. "When it comes to a pure question of good, old-fashioned right and wrong, you can buck up just like your old great-gran"pap, the judge, did when he had to sentence one of his own sons for killing an Indian.
You haven"t said it in so many words, so I"ll say it for you: you"ve got me, and maybe some others, right where you can shove us into the penitentiary. That"s about what you"re trying to tell me, isn"t it?"
"For G.o.d"s sake, don"t put it that way!" Blount protested. "I gave you fair warning almost at the first. I"ve got to fight for the right as I see it. If I don"t, I shall be less than a man--less than your son.
Can"t you see that it is breaking my heart?"
A silence electrically surcharged with possibilities settled down upon the isolated room, with the stillness broken only by the crackling of the fire and that other distant tapping as of tree-twigs on the roof. At the end of the pause the senator took a forward step and put a hand on his son"s shoulder.
"I haven"t one word to say, Evan, boy," he began slowly. "As you told me that first day out here, son, it"s your job to hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may. You go ahead and do just what seems right and law-abiding to you. I"d rather go to jail twice over than have you do any different. Is that what you"re wanting me to say?"
Blount dropped into a chair, as if the touch on his shoulder had crushed him, and covered his face with his hands. It was hard--harder than even his own prefigurings had forecast it. Fighting against the patent facts, he had been cherishing a lingering hope that his father might be able to brush away the cruel necessity at the last moment. But now the hope was dead.
It was a long minute before he staggered to his feet and groped his way to the door, leaving his father standing before the fire and once more puffing absently at the long-stemmed pipe. When old Barnabas had helped him into his coat and had given him his hat, he found Patricia still sitting in the car, with the motor purring softly under the hood.
"Must you go back?" she queried, when he had descended the steps to climb stiffly into the seat beside her.
He nodded.
"Your duty is clear?"
"Perfectly clear--now."
"And the consequences?" she asked.
"I can only guess," he muttered. "Ruin and disgrace for all of us, I suppose. Of course, you understand that I have resigned from the railroad service and shall stand with my father when--when the thing is done."
She was backing the little roadster into the circling driveway to turn for the start. At the reversing moment she made her final plea.
"Don"t do it, Evan--_don"t do it!_ I have no more than a woman"s reason to offer, but I am sure you are opening the door to a lifelong sorrow for yourself and--and--for me!"
It was the last two words that steeled him suddenly. Not even at her beseeching would he turn aside from the plain path of the oath-bound obligation. It struck him like a blow that the turning aside would make him forever unworthy of her.
"Take me back to the city as quickly as you can!" he said. "Or, better still, stay here and let me have the car. That is my last word."
"You"re not fit to drive a car!" she snapped; and for further answer she threw the speed lever into the intermediate gear and released the clutch. Like a projectile hurled from a catapult, the swift little roadster shot away down the cottonwood avenue, and with a jerk of the lever into the "high" the second race against time was begun.
For the first few miles Patricia"s pa.s.senger had all he could do to keep his seat. On its upper mesa windings the Quaretaro road follows the course of the stream which has been robbed of its waters for the cultivated lands, and though the roadway was good the hazards were plentiful when taken at speed. More than once Blount caught himself in the act of reaching for the steering-wheel, but as often he desisted. As on the outward race, Patricia was staring straight ahead, and giving the little car every throb of speed there was in its machinery. None the less, he could see that she had it under perfect control.
What finally happened came with the suddenness of the thunder-clap following a bolt which strikes near at hand. They were on the down-grade approach to the mouth of Shonoho Canyon, and they could not see beyond the gentle curve to the left, where the smaller gulch found its intersection with the main ravine. When they were within a hundred yards of the curve the stretch below came into view. Blount had a momentary glimpse of some barrier--a pine-tree, as it proved to be--lying across the main road. Seeing it, he realized at the same instant that Patricia was neither throttling the motor nor applying the brakes. After that he had barely time to snap the switch and to throw the heavy wind-shield down before the devastating crash came.
XXVIII
THE GOSSIPING WIRES
After his son had left him, the Honorable Senator Sage-Brush remained standing before the library fire until he heard the machine-gun exhausts of the small roadster distance-diminishing down the driveway avenue.
Then he stepped aside and pressed the bell-push ordinarily used to summon the old negro footman.
In answer to the call a door opened beyond the chimney-jamb, and immediately the gentle twig-tapping sounds resolved themselves into the clickings of a pair of telegraph relays and the chatter of a typewriter.
A good-looking young fellow, with his coat off, entered the library, carefully closing the door behind him.
"Want to send something, senator?" he asked, whipping a note-book from his hip-pocket.
"No, not just this minute. Anything new coming over the wires?"
"Nothing startling. Steuchfield reports from Ophir that we swing the miners" vote almost to a man unless something unforeseen breaks loose.
Hetchy gives us a good word from Twin b.u.t.tes; and Griggs, up in the Carnadines, wires from Alkire that he has just completed an auto canva.s.s of the High Line district. The ranchmen up that way have had a pretty bad scare. There was a threat made that the price of water was going to be raised. But they"re all right now."
The boss nodded approvingly. Then: "How about those microphone notes?"
"Crowell is writing them off," was the reply. "He"ll have them in half an hour or so."
The senator drew out his watch, a huge thick-crystalled time-piece dating back to the range-riding period.
"As matters have turned out, I shall be going to the city before long,"
he said. "If the notes are not ready before I leave, you can order out the speed-car and send them in by Gallagher any time before six o"clock.
Don"t slip up on that, Fred; tell Gallagher to deliver the notes to me, in person, at the Inter-Mountain. What"s become of Professor Anners?"
"He"s staying over at Haworth"s ranch, just to be near the fossil bone-field. They"ve made another plesio-something find, and Haworth telephones that the professor couldn"t be dragged away with a derrick until those bones are safely out of the ground and boxed for shipment."