Blount opened the japanned 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.

For a little time there was a dead silence, broken only by the faint rustling of the papers as Gantry withdrew and unfolded them.  When he had glanced at the last folded letter sheet, he snapped the rubber band upon the sheaf and sat back in his chair.  Blount turned at the snap and found the traffic manager smiling curiously up at him.

“Sit down, Evan,” was the friendly invitation.  And when Blount had dropped into the opposite chair:  “We used to be pretty good friends in the old days, Ebee,” Gantry went on, falling easily into the use of the college nickname.  “I haven’t forgotten the time when I would have had to break and go home if you hadn’t stood by me like a brother and lent me money.  For that reason, and for some others, I hate to see you bucking a dead wall out here in the greasewood hills.”

“It is you and your kind who are bucking the dead wall, Dick.”

“No, listen; I’m giving it to you straight, now.  A few minutes ago you thought I was drunk—­possibly too far gone to serve your purpose.  I wasn’t; I was merely sick and disgusted at the spectacle afforded by a crafty, crooked, double-dealing old world—­the world we’re living in.  Once in a blue moon an honest man turns up, and when that happens he’s got to be broken on the wheel—­as you’re going to be broken.  Oh, yes; I came out with ideals, too, but they’ve been knocked out of me.  We all have to keep the lock-step in business, and business is hell, Evan.  I’m honest to my salt—­which is to say that as yet I’m not using my job to line my own pockets, but that’s the one decent thing that can be said of me.  Don’t let me bore you.”

“Go on,” said Blount soberly.  “I don’t see the pointing of it yet, but—­”

“You will when I tell you that I’ve been lying to you; faking first one thing and then another.  Do you get that?”

“I hear you say it; yes.”

“It’s so.  I faked that story about your father’s having made an underground deal with us.  It was a lie out of whole cloth, because I didn’t believe at that time that he had.  There had been a falling out between him and Mr. McVickar; that was common talk on the division.  But until yesterday I didn’t know for certain that the trouble had been patched up; in fact, I had my own reasons for believing that it hadn’t been patched up.”

“And you told me there was an alliance in order that I might believe that my father would be involved in an exposure of the railroad’s double-dealing with the public?”

“Just that.  Self-preservation is the primal law—­after you’ve dropped the ideals—­and I thought I had invented a way to hold you down.  I might have saved myself the trouble—­and the lie.  It comes down to this, Evan:  you are one man against a crooked world, and you haven’t had a ghost of a show from the first minute.”