“Let me know when your son is coming and I’ll try to make it possible to meet him here,” he said rather gratingly.

And thus, at the precise moment when Richard Gantry, some three thousand miles away to the eastward, was declaring his weariness and his intention of going to bed, the two-man conference in the Inter-Mountain private dining-room was closed.

III

A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES

As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that Evan Blount was not to have Gantry for a travelling companion beyond Chicago.  On the second day of westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose business followed him like an implacable Nemesis wherever he went, had wire instructions to stop and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois metropolis.  Hence, on the morning of the following day, Blount continued his journey alone.

Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate had crossed his Rubicon; in other words, his train had rolled through the majestic steel bridge spanning the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar—­which should have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had been wrought during his fourteen years of absence.

Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity.  The through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled, and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment.  But it was not until the second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment—­a man whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.

At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be, with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it.  The hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was directly opposite Blount’s, defined himself as a mine-owner whose property, vaguely located as somewhere “in the mountains,” was involved in litigation.

It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond the boundaries of the commonplaces.  Oddly enough, considering the fact that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law.  Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively helpful to the man who had apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.