“That will be your son, I suppose?”

“If he’ll take it,” was the imperturbable rejoinder.

For the third time the vice-president, dying hard, as befitted him, deliberated thoughtfully.  At the end of the thoughtful interval he took a cigar from the open box and clamped it between his teeth.

“We trade,” he said shortly.  And then:  “How will you take it—­in stock or bonds?”

The Honorable David rose slowly and snapped the cigar ash into the fire.

“I’m right sorry, Hardwick, but this is one time when I reckon we’ll have to have what you might call the spot cash.  Promises don’t go.  You’re too good a fighter to be allowed to get up merely because you’ve hollered ‘enough.’  Come on into your telegraph-shop and let me hear you dictate that string of ‘come-off’ orders.  Then we’ll drive to town in my road-car, and you can tip off Kittredge and a few of the other prominent victims by word of mouth, as you’ll most likely want to.”

For a full minute after the two had left the lobby together Evan Blount sat motionless in the screened orchestra gallery.  Then he got up and groped once more for the door-knob.  It yielded at his touch, and in the semi-darkness beyond the opening he saw his father’s wife with her arms upstretched to him.

“Oh, Evan, dear—­am I forgiven?” she asked softly.

“Little mother!” he said, and then he took her face between his hands and kissed her.

* * * * *

When the Honorable David Blount reached the city an hour or more later, and had dropped his passenger at the Railway Club, he found his son waiting for him in the otherwise deserted sitting-room of the Inter-Mountain private suite.

“I couldn’t sleep without telling you first, dad,” the waiting one broke out.  “I’ve been eavesdropping; I was a listener, unwilling at first, but not afterward, to everything that was said an hour or so ago in the lobby of the little hotel at the head of Shonoho.  Do I need to tell you in so many words how deep the plough has gone?”

“I reckon not,” was the gentle reply.  “Neither do you need to tell me how you came to be out at Shonoho when I thought I’d left you tied hand and foot right here in the hotel.”  Then, with the quizzical smile wrinkling at the corners of the grave eyes:  “How does the political wrestle strike you by this time, son?”

“It strikes me that I haven’t been in it; not even in the outer edges of it.  Isn’t that about the size of it?”

“Oh, no; you’ve been doing good work, mighty good work.  You’ve helped out in the only way that help could come in this campaign; you’ve stirred up a good, healthy public sentiment in favor of a square deal for everybody.  McVickar was fixing to tangle it all up—­get the people down on him until they’d simply legislate the life out of his railroad.  But he couldn’t see that.”

“He sees it now—­the ‘machine’ has made him see it.”