“Yes.  You didn’t know that a machine could be put to any really righteous use, did you, boy?  But in this campaign it has gone in to knock out the crookedness, big and little.  Listen, son; you heard what I told McVickar.  After you’d sent me that wire from Boston last summer, saying you’d come, I lay awake nights projecting how I’d put you in training for a spell, and then help you into the saddle and make you the boss of the round-up, the same as I’d been.  Then it came over me, all of a sudden, that I’d been as crooked as a dog’s hind leg—­that we’d all been crooked.  Not that I’ve ever taken a dollar for my personal pocket, for I haven’t; but I’ve bought and sold and dickered and schemed with the best of ’em, and the worst of ’em.  On top of that, I began to ask myself how I’d like it to see you wallowing in the same old mud-hole, and—­well, Evan, boy, you may have a son of your own some day, and then you’ll know.  I let things rock along until you came; until that first day at Wartrace when you ripped out at me about hewing to the line.  Right then and there I made up my mind that I’d put the whole power of the ‘machine,’ as you call it, into one campaign for a clean election and a square deal.”

“Oh, good Lord!” ejaculated the son, “and I’ve been fighting you and your organization at every turn!”

“Oh, no, you haven’t,” was the quick rejoinder.

“You’ve been fighting graft and crookedness, and that’s what you thought you were hired to do.  As you know now, McVickar wasn’t playing quite fair with you.  Just the same, you’ve been in the hands of your friends, right from the start.  It’s the organization that’s been giving you all these chances to preach the gospel of the square deal; it was a shrewd little captain-general of the organization who pushed Hathaway up against you to let you know that the railroad people were running around in the same old circles—­hollering for justice, and doing everything under the sun to defeat the ends of justice—­muddying the spring because, they say, they don’t know what else to do.  And, by the way, it was that same little captain-general who put you up against the real thing to-night, without telling me or anybody else what she was going to do.”

The younger man left his chair to go to one of the windows where he stood for a moment or two looking down upon the street-lights.  When he turned, it was to say:  “I’m with you, dad, heart and soul.  But you won’t mind my saying that I’m still a little bit afraid that you and your kind are a menace to civilization and a free government.  You’ll let me hang on to that much of my prejudice, won’t you?”

“Sure!  Hang on to anything you like, son, and say anything you like.  Or, rather, let me say something first.  How about this ‘career’ business of Patricia’s?  Have you fixed that up yet?”

Blount shook his head.  “She’s going home with her father next week,” he said.  And then:  “Do you know what she did to-day, dad?  She ran the little red car into that pine-tree intentionally—­so I couldn’t get back here in time to give Judge Hemingway those affidavits, which we both supposed would incriminate you.”