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 buttes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of an exclusive North Shore 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 Shore club-house one of them, at least, was ascribing to the good offices of the god 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 circumstances.  Like the younger