Blount obeyed mechanically.  The orchestra gallery, screened on three sides by an open fretwork of Moorish design, was built out from the wall of the dining-room, and through the latticings of the fretwork he could look down upon the oblong lobby of the resort hotel.  There was a table-desk with lamps on it drawn out in front of a cheerful wood-fire burning in a great stone fireplace, and in front of the fire, standing with his back to the blaze, Blount saw his father.  From a lighted room at the opposite end of the lobby space came a confused clattering of telegraph instruments.  Blount caught a glimpse of shirt-sleeved clerks moving about in the room beyond, and then a door opened beneath him and the vice-president of the Transcontinental Company strode out into the firelight to shake hands with his visitor and to say:  “I’ve been looking for you; I thought you’d come in out of the wet before it was too late, David.  Sit down and tell me how much you’re going to bleed us for, and I’ll make out the check.”

With a cold hand gripping at his heart, Blount turned away, sick and revolted, and there was a curse on his lips for the cruelty of the woman who had brought him to be a witness to his father’s shame.  But when he groped for the door of egress and found it, the knob refused to turn.  The door was locked and he could not retreat.

XXX

THE RECKONING

Evan Blount’s first impulse when he found his retreat cut off by the locked door of the musicians’ gallery was to make his presence known instantly to the two men standing before the fire in the lobby below.  Shame, vicarious shame for the father who would thus find himself unmasked before his son, was all that made him hesitate; and in the pausing moment he heard his father’s reply to the vice-president’s challenging greeting.

“The same old song; always the same old song with you, isn’t it, Hardwick?” the senator was saying in jocose deprecation.  “What money can’t buy, isn’t worth having; that’s about the way you fellows always stack it up.”  Then, with sudden grimness:  “Sit down, Hardwick.  I’ve come to say a few things to you that won’t listen very good, but you’ve got to take your medicine this time.”

“What’s that?” demanded the vice-president, dropping mechanically into his desk-chair.  And then:  “It’s no use, David.  We’ve beat you at your own game.  We’re going to roll up a majority next Tuesday that will wipe you and your broken-down machine out of existence.  Don’t you believe it?”

“Not yet—­not quite yet” was the mild rejoinder.

“Well, you’d better believe it, because it’s the truth.  You are down and out.  I had you beat, David, that night last summer when you gave me your ‘de-fi’ and I came back by taking your son away from you.  The young gentleman you were going to spring on us for your next attorney-general has done more than any other one man in the campaign to help our lame dog over the stile.”