“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, Dick?  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 documents are still where they can be used at an hour’s notice.  And, by heaven, Dick, 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 God, 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.