“Don’t you be a fool,” he advised curtly.  “There’s a railroad down in Peru that is going bankrupt for the lack of a wide-awake, up-to-date traffic man.  I’ve had the offer on my desk for a month, and I’m going to cable to-night.  That lets you out, whether you do or don’t.  But if you’ve got the sense of a wooden Indian, you’ll do as I’ve said—­and do it pronto.  Your time’s mighty short, anyway.  So long.”

And before Blount could stop him he was gone.

XX

A STONE FOR BREAD

Though he had eaten nothing since the early breakfast in the service-car on the way to Lewiston, Evan Blount let the dinner hour go by unnoted.  For a long time after Gantry had left him he sat motionless, a prey to thoughts too bitter to find expression in words; the dismaying thoughts of the hard-pressed champion who has discovered that his foes are of his own household.

Apart from the one great boyhood sorrow, a sorrow which had been allowed unduly to magnify itself with the passing years, he had never been brought face to face with any of the hardnesses which alone can make the soldier of life entirely intrepid in the shock of battle.  In the backward glance he saw that his homeless youth had been, none the less, a sheltered youth; that his father’s love and care had built and maintained invisible ramparts which had hitherto shielded him.  It was most humiliating to find that the crumbling of the ramparts was leaving him naked and shivering; to find that he was so far out of touch with his pioneer lineage as to be unable to stand alone.

But there are better things in the blood of the pioneers than a latter-day descendant of the continent-conquering fathers may be able to discern in the moment of defeat and disaster.  Slowly, so slowly that he did not recognize the precise moment at which the tide of depression and wretchedness reached its lowest ebb and turned to sweep him back to a firmer footing, Blount found himself emerging from the bitter waters.  Gantry, the Gantry whom he had been calling hard names, setting him down as at best a lovable but wholly unprincipled time-server, had pointed a possible way to retrieval, heroically effacing himself that the way might be unobstructed.  With the warm blood leaping again, Blount straightened himself in his chair.  He would go to his father, not as a son begging a boon, but as a man demanding his rights.  The machine had seen fit to throw down the challenge by burglarizing his office and robbing him.  Very good; there were five days remaining in which to strike back.  He would lift the challenge, and if his reasonable demand should be refused, he would drop the railroad crusade and break into the wider field of bossism and machine-made majorities, ploughing and turning it up to the light as he could.

The fiery resolution had scarcely been taken when he heard the door of Collins’s outer room open and close, and a moment later the good-looking young stenographer came in, bringing a breath of the crisp autumn evening with him.