The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush Part 27

Blount crossed the room and sat down.

"d.i.c.k, we've come to the last round-up," he said gravely. "In the nature of things, I can't give you any more time. You've been playing with me all along, and your last move in the game was a very childish one--sending me what purported to be a copy of a new freight tariff notice to the public. Did you suppose for a moment that I wouldn't have sense enough to see that the thing wasn't official, that it had no signatures and lacked even the name of the railroad company? I'm here now to tell you that you've got to do some real thing, and do it quickly. Let's go up and see the editor of _The Capital_."

"What for?" demanded Gantry.

"It is the railroad paper, and I want you to give Brinkley, the editor, an interview to the effect that a revision of the freight rates is in process, and that shippers having grievances should present them at once. That will at least start the ball to rolling in the right direction."

"I should think it would!" scoffed the traffic manager. "What you don't know about the making of freight tariffs would sink a ship, Evan. These things can't be done while you wait!"

"But they must be, in this instance," Blount insisted. "If you won't withdraw the preferentials given to the corporations, you must do the other thing. Post your legal notice of a reduction of the rates on the commodities upon which you are now allowing rebates, and I'll fight straight through on the line I've been taking all along."

"And if we don't?" queried Gantry.

"What is the use of making me say it for the hundredth time, d.i.c.k? If you don't do one or the other, there will be an explosion, just as I've told you. Of course, you know that my safe was broken open last night--wrecked with dynamite?"

"Yes."

"Well, unluckily for you, the packet of papers which might otherwise have been taken or destroyed, didn't happen to be in the safe. The doc.u.ments are still where they can be used at an hour's notice. And, by heaven, d.i.c.k, I'll use them if you don't play fair!"

Gantry, long-suffering and patient to a fault in a business affair, was not altogether superhuman.

"Evan, you are a frost--a black frost! You harp on one string until you wear it to frazzles! Don't you know that the Transcontinental is big enough and strong enough to chivvy you from one end of this country to the other, if you turn traitor? I love a fighting man, but by G.o.d, I haven't any use for a fool!"

Blount laughed.

"If I have succeeded in making you angry, perhaps there is a chance that you will do something. You may curse me out all you want to, but the fact remains. I'm going to explode the bomb, and it will be touched off long enough before election to do the work, if you keep on refusing to make my word good to the people. That is all--_all_ the all. Now, will you go up to _The Capital_ office with me, and dictate that bit of information that I mentioned?"

"Not in a thousand years!" raged Gantry. "Not in ten thousand years!"

Nevertheless he rose, closed his desk, and prepared to accompany the importunate political manager. Half-way up the first square he said: "There is no use in our going to _The Capital_ office at this time of night. Brinkley doesn't get around to his desk much before eleven. Let's go up to the club."

At the Railway Club the traffic manager developed a keen desire to kill the intervening time in a game of billiards. Blount indulged him, beat him three games in succession, and consistently refused to drink with him. At the end of the third game, Gantry gave a terse definition, abusively worded, of a man who would force his friend to go and drink alone, and went to the buffet. Ten minutes later, when Blount went after him, he had disappeared, and the visit to the newspaper office was postponed, perforce.

On the following morning, Blount found a telegram on his desk. It bore the vice-president's name, and the date-line was Twin Canyons City. It directed him to go to a remote portion of the State beyond the Lost River Mountains to examine the papers in a right-of-way case which was coming up for trial at the next term of court. This was in Kittredge's department, and Blount called the superintendent on the phone. Kittredge was in his office, and he evidently knew about the vice-president's telegram. Also, he seemed anxious to have the division counsel go to Lewiston at once; so anxious that he offered his own service-car to be run as a special train.

Blount saw no way to evade a positive order from the vice-president, but he was more than suspicious that Gantry or Kittredge, or possibly both of them, had misrepresented the right-of-way case to Mr. McVickar, in an attempt to get him away from the city and so to postpone a reiteration of the demand for a new freight tariff. What he did not suspect was that Mr. McVickar's telegram might possibly have originated in Kittredge's office.

Asking the superintendent to have the service-car made ready immediately, he packed his handbag, left a note for Patricia, who was not yet visible, and another for Gantry, who was not in his office, and began the roundabout journey.

In all his travelling up and down the State he had never found anything to equal the slowness of the special train. The noon meal, served by Kittredge's cook in the open compartment, found the special less than fifty miles on its way, and comfortably waiting at that hour on a side-track among the sage-brush hills for the coming of a delayed train in the opposite direction. Four mortal hours were lost on the lonely siding. There was no station, and Blount could not telegraph. So far as he knew, the service-car might stay there for a day or a week. It was all to no purpose that he quarrelled with his conductor. The train crew had orders to wait for the west-bound time freight, and there was nothing to do but to keep on waiting.

Late in the afternoon the time freight, or some other train, came along, and the special was once more set in motion eastward, but at dinner-time it was again side-tracked, eighty-odd miles from its destination, and once more at a desert siding where there was no telegraph office. The car was still standing on the siding when Blount went to bed. But in the morning it was in motion again, jogging now on its leisurely way up the branch line.

At Lewiston, the town at the end of the branch where the right-of-way trouble had originated, Blount found more delay, carefully planned for, as he had now come firmly to believe. The plaintiffs in the right-of-way case were out of town, and their lawyers had gone to the capital. Blount saw that he might wait a week without accomplishing anything, hence he immediately instructed his conductor to get orders for the return.

After having been gone a half-hour or more, the conductor came back to the service-car to say that the single telegraph-wire connecting Lewiston with the outer world was down, and that the orders for the return journey could not be obtained until the telegraph connection was restored. At that point Blount took matters into his own hands.

There was a mining company having its headquarters in the isolated town, and Blount had met the manager once in the capital--met him in a social way, and had been able to show him some little attention. Hiring a buckboard at the one livery stable in the place, he drove out to the "Little Mary," and found Blatchford, the friendly manager, smoking a black clay cutty pipe in his shack office. It did not take Blount over a minute to renew the pleasant acquaintance, and to state his dilemma.

"I'm hung up here with my special train, the wires are down and I can't get out," was his statement of the crude fact. "Didn't you tell me that you owned a motor-car?"

"I did," was the prompt reply. "Want to borrow it?"

"You beat me to it," said Blount, laughing. "That was precisely what I was going to beg for--the loan of your car. I believe you told me that you had driven it from here to the capital."

"Oh, yes; several times, and the road is fairly good by way of Arequipa and Lost River Canyon. It's only about half as far across country as it is around by the railroad. You ought to make it in six hours and a half, or seven at the longest. Drive me down to the burg, and I'll put you in possession."

Blount began to be audibly thankful, but the mine manager good-naturedly cut him short.

"It's all in the day's work, Mr. Blount, and I'm glad to be of service--not because you are the Transcontinental's lawyer, nor altogether because you are the Honorable David's son. I haven't forgotten your kindness to me when I was in town three weeks ago. Let's go and get out the chug-wagon."

A little later Blount found himself handling the wheel of a very serviceable knockabout car equipped for hard work on country roads. When he was ready to go, he drove down to the railroad yard and hunted up his conductor.

"After you have had your vacation, you may get orders from Mr.

Kittredge and take his car back to the capital," he told the man. "When you do, you may give him my compliments, and tell him I preferred to run my own special train."

The conductor grinned and made no reply, and he was still grinning when he sauntered into the railroad telegraph office and spoke to the operator.

"I dunno what's up," he said, "but whatever it was, the string's broke.

Old Dave Sage-Brush's son has borrowed him an automobile, and gone back to town on his own hook. Guess you'd better call up the division despatcher and tell him the broken-wire gag didn't work. Get a move on.

We hain't got nothin' to stay here for now."

Blount had a very pleasant drive across country, with no mishap worse than a blown-out tire and a little carbureter trouble. Being a motorist of parts, neither the accident nor the needed readjustment detained him very long, and by the middle of the afternoon he was racing down the smooth northern road, with the spires and tall buildings of the capital fairly in sight.

Not to let grat.i.tude lag too far behind the service rendered, he drove Blatchford's car to the garage nearest the freight station, left instructions to have it shipped back to Lewiston by the first train, and promptly went in search of Gantry. The traffic manager was not in his office, but Blount found him at the Railway Club.

"Just a word, d.i.c.k," he began, when he had overtaken his man pointing for the buffet. "Kittredge put up a job on me, and I think you helped him. I had to borrow an automobile to come back in from Lewiston. It's down at the Central Garage, and I have given Bankston, the garage man, orders to ship it back to Mr. Blatchford, of the 'Little Mary.' I wish you'd phone your freight agent to see that it is properly taken care of, and that the freight bill is sent to me."

Gantry made no reply, but he went obediently to the house telephone and gave the necessary instructions. The thing done, he turned shortly upon Blount, scowling morosely.

"Come on in and let's have a drink," he said.

Blount marked the brittleness of tone and the half-quarrelsome light in the eyes which were a little bloodshot.

"No, d.i.c.k; you've had one too many already," he objected firmly.

Gantry put his back against the wall of the corridor.

"No," he rasped; "I'm not drunk, but I'm ready to fight you to a finish, and for once in a way I'm going to get in the first lick. You've been bluffing me from the start, and you're going to try it again. It won't go this time; you've got to show me!"

If Blount hesitated it was only because he was trying to determine whether or not the traffic manager was business-fit. Gantry comprehended perfectly, and his laugh was derisive and a trifle bitter.

"You're sizing me up and asking yourself if I'm too far gone to be worth while," he jeered. "If I couldn't stand any more liquid grief than you can, I would have been down and out years ago. Show your hand, Evan--if you have any to show."

Blount hesitated no longer. Taking Gantry's arm, he led him out of the club and around the block to the Sierra National Bank. It was after banking hours, but the side door giving access to the safe-deposit department was still open. With the traffic manager at his elbow, Blount asked the custodian for his private box, got it, and led the way to one of the cell-like retiring rooms. Gantry proved his capacity for transacting business by turning on the lights, locking the door, and squaring himself in a chair at one side of the tiny writing-table.

Blount opened the j.a.panned safety box, took out a bulky envelope and tossed it across to the traffic manager.

"You can see for yourself whether I've been bluffing or not," he said quietly; and then he turned his back and interested himself in the lithograph of the latest Atlantic liner framed and hanging upon the mahogany end wall of the small room.